I started an online subscription business from Malaysia - <AUTHOR> https://www.starterstory.com/start-online-business-malaysia <comment><USER3> Here I am, a 40 something very mediocre webdev with 2 kids and a mortgage, taking home 30K / year struggling to learn the framework-du-jour my boss thinks I should be using, unable to find another job cause I'm too expensive, wondering what the hell to do with my life.

And then there's a kid in Malaysia of all places selling frigging vapers, taking home every month what I take home per year.

<comment><USER4> You're comparing apples to oranges. He's not a developer, he's an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER5> > You're comparing apples to oranges. He's not a developer, he's an > entrepreneur.

True. But still depressing...

<comment><USER4> Bear in mind that the 60k/month figure is turnover. Not profit. He employes 8 people, has to pay for inventory and packaging, postal, logistics, accounting and whatnot.

Also, judging from the archive.org records it's a 4 year old business. It's not an overnight success.

<comment><USER6> > Also, judging from the archive.org records it's a 4 year old business. It's > not an overnight success.

This is key, obviously. A lot of people will read something like this and assume it's some kind of overnight success. For that, I give kudos to this guy for what is a business built most likely around long nights and days and determination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
       >I coded the web app from the ground up using what
        I've learned from the coding bootcamp and launched the
        service on the 22nd of September 2019.

Something doesn't add up here. Ahrefs shows rankings going back as far as September of 2016 with the first archive.org snapshot on September 14 2015 showing a landing page for a subscription box.

<comment><USER8> It's a tobacco and nicotin business without regulatory oversight in MY, neighbouring Singapore just made it illegal. So there is nothing innovative in it except the product itself is responsible for selling itself like cigarettes, just with icing of no regulatory oversight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm all for marketing, but there must be some honesty.

This is a lesson on how to lie your way to success. Which is an option, but any idiot with no morals can do that. Of course, large companies do this all the time with no repercussions, so I get why he went this route.

<comment><USER10> I assume you're referring to building out a store with no inventory to test the market? This is a pretty common tactic spread by books such as "The 4-Hour Work Week" so it's not surprising to see it in use for a site like this.

Honestly, I don't really have a problem with it. A more honest approach would be ideal, but if I had to choose between doing that and bootstrapping an entire business with stock before getting my first sale I would choose the "dishonest" method. It's a little inconvenient for the user, but presumably they want the product, so in the end they just end up waiting a bit for it.

People don't want to help you test your idea, so presenting it in any other way without rewarding them is unlikely to result in sales.

<comment><USER11> I think it's referring to the part where the web page says "that we've "sold out" due to "overwhelming demand"" when obviously there is no overwhelming demand at first. If you say there is huge demand for your product even though there isn't any, that's going a bit further than just "we're sold out". But since in the end the demand does pick up I get the argument that it's a grey area.

<comment><USER12> If you are selling nothing and have zero inventory any demand is technically overwhelming.

It's still a lie though like almost all of his ways of getting a customer. But I find it refreshing how clear it is.

Advertisers mostly pretend they are not lying which shapes wrong impression that advertisement can be honest. No, it can't if it is to be successful. Honest advertisement is just information and that's almost worthless for a seller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There may be some dubious/shady aspects of this enterprise or at least the way it's been presented. I just look at it as an eye-opener. With the view of challenging my thinking about where I am now, where I want to be and what paths might be available to get me there. For instance, e-commerce hadn't come to me as an option. Looking at this account makes me at the very least think about whether or not it is worth pursuing. It could be a different product, market, etc. It may well be that it wouldn't work for me. But the exploration of the basic idea is worth my while.

<comment><USER3> There's a huge rabbit hole you can go down :) Finding products (either reselling existing ones, having your own made, ...). Many people do this successfully on Amazon (as many benefits as caveats)

Launching something on your own e-commerce platform is pretty hard, requiring either an extremely attractive product that spreads with word of mouth, or you need to invest heavily in "social" or SEO. Otherwise you just won't stand out anymore.

<comment><USER13> The last company I worked at was geared at optimizing recommended items to customers on a storefront. Working there I kind of realized how saturated e-commerce has become. There will always be room for new ideas and tricks to squeeze money out of the space, but I can't help think you're not really providing a lot of value add most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Leaves me very uncomfortable, this combination of honesty as a humblebrag with ethically-dubious practices.

What lesson does this teach me, an unemployed program manager with plenty of experience and principles?

<comment><USER15> A practical one. Your principles may not be conducive to creating wealth and if wealth is your goal you should adjust them.

<comment><USER16> That's backwards. This shows that it's possible to have a successful business without the principles the OP adheres to. It does not say anything about whether or not it's possible to be successful with the principles, or if there is a need to adjust them. It's completely possible the principles the OP adheres to make success more likely, or is likely to make any success larger. Or the opposite may be true, but this one story does not tell you anything about that.

<comment><USER15> I like you. I see the logic but now I wonder whether the article hints at the possibility that the principles aren't helpful. Following your logic it sounds like the only way to be sure is to wait until OP passes away or we have a large sample size of people who have similar principles.

What about the opposite though? We have numerous examples where people who some could argue don't have the best principles but have been very successful. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Carly Fiorina, Marissa Mayer, Henry Nicholas III, Elon Musk, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and more. Putting it bluntly, they just do what's needed to further their goals - <USER2> everyone else be damned if it's not helpful to their goals to help them out. If you go past the puff pieces and dig a bit you see the net effect of their principles is to let them win.

Maybe lack of evidence about the effectiveness of OP's principles is not evidence but it's reasonable to consider following in the winner's example.

<comment><USER13> This is a really elaborate way of saying that you can sell things better if you lie to people. I think most of us know that.

<comment><USER15> That's part of it. More like, just play the game within the written rules instead of the unwritten rules.

<comment><USER13> Sure, ethics be damned right? I know a few pyramid schemes that are technically all within the rules as well.

<comment><USER15> And I know of a few ponzi schemes that are technically within the rules. There are reasons laws exist. Follow them and soothe your misplaced guilt by spending your money on good causes. That's what Elon and Gates are doing. I don't see a problem with this line of thinking.

<comment><USER13> I know we're speaking broadly here and there's a lot of nuance to what constitutes right or wrong, but I think its pretty reasonable to say that if you're gaining money from being unethical, you are part of the problem - that's the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Love how candid this is, real insight into the shady world of e-commerce.

<comment><USER18> The worst part is the more you know it the more unbelievable it becomes to you and you start to think to yourself "yeah right nobody would believe that."

Then you do a split test and bullshit like this (fake scarcity, benefits not features, forced optins, etc) show a conversion rate of 8% whereas your honest to goodness page is at 0.5% you understand that it's not your customers who are ignorant, it's you and your understanding of how the world works :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "To put things into perspective, the median average household income in Malaysia is USD1,215. Not too bad for a single unmarried 28 year old chap eh?"

Maybe he should just leave this part out.

</comment><comment><USER20> Lying about being sold out and asking to share the link is not something I'd be comfortable with doing myself.. but then again, his business has gained success through it and I don't have a business :D

Apart from the ethical issues, I do think it was a smart idea. Kudos to him.

</comment><comment><USER12> Some of us may think that he's ways of getting customers are dishonest. Please treat it as a reminder to yourself that there's no such thing as honest advertisement. If you are seeing advertisemnt you are being lied to. It might be hard to spot because the parts of your brain that the advertisement lies to might be far from your conciousness. But you are lied to nontheless.

Honest advertisement is just information and that's almost worthless for any seller.

There's a great movie documentary "Czech dream" created by two film students opening fake Wallmart type store.

Especially wonderful is the scene in marketing agency that is to prepare large marketing campaign mimicking campaigns of other similar stores. They are in on the joke and are completely fine with decieving the public, except for one employee that feels strongly about "you won't go home emptyhanded" line on the advert because there is no store and "you can't lie in advertisement!"

He calms down after students promise that if anyone shows up to the fake store opening they'll give them baloon so they won't go home emptyhanded.

Your successful advertisement is always a lie. Regardless of whether you can massage yourself into believing it is not.

</comment><comment><USER21> Launched September 22, 2019, is that a typo?

<comment><USER22> He also bootstrapped a time machine, but since vaping is all the rage these days, that's where the story is.</comment></comment>


The igraph library for complex network research [GPL] - <AUTHOR> http://igraph.sourceforge.net/index.html

<comment><USER2> I had a great experience at work, where networkx was too slow to work on the graph that I was working on, and igraph handled it perfectly, quickly, in python, and with just as simple an API.

Worth the pain to get it installed (IIRC, was a while ago, may have changed, etc.)

<comment><USER3> They now have a PPA Debian/Ubuntu archive for igraph and python-igraph:

      http://launchpad.net/~igraph/+archive/ppa

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> igraph is also a must-have for network analysis in R. Great for data analysts familiar with the environment.</comment>


Google Chrome for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac <comment><USER2> Note that all though this is "actual" Chrome instead of yet another Chromium build, it still has all the same limitations that the Chromium builds have, i.e. no flash, no changing default search, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm running it now. Notable that the window was up, cold start, in _zero_ bounces. Better than safari, way better than FF.

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny that I'm getting news about it here. I signed up for updates about it a while back, and haven't seen anything.

I don't check the spam folder on my gmail account, but it'd be funny if that's where they're going.

</comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't seem to work for me with pages protected with .htpasswd. The page is blank, no prompt to enter a password. Anybody else having that problem?

<comment><USER6> Having it with the Chromium builds on Linux, so I'd imagine it's the same on Chrome. Also the occasional GMail crash if I play around with attachments too much, but overall I'm already annoyed when I have to open Firefox to do Flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't work with 10.4.11</comment>


Why numbering should start at zero (1982) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html <comment><USER3> I always like to point to the Julia package TwoBasedIndexing ([https://github.com/simonster/TwoBasedIndexing.jl/](https://github.com/simonster/TwoBasedIndexing.jl/)) which is IMHO provides the very best way to index an array. Yes, Julia defaults to 1-based indexing, and allows zero-based indexing ([https://github.com/JuliaArrays/OffsetArrays.jl](https://github.com/JuliaArrays/OffsetArrays.jl)) or indeed whatever sort of indexing you want, yet I think the world is going to eventually come around to _THE ONE TRUE_ indexing scheme of being two- based.

:-)

<comment><USER4> I remember reading a funny quote that the obvious compromise between 1- and 0-based indexing was 0.5, and that it was dismissed without proper consideration. Unfortunately, I do not remember where I read that or who wrote/said it. :(

<comment><USER5> Stan Kelly-Bootle: [https://www.azquotes.com/author/27328-Stan_Kelly_Bootle](https://www.azquotes.com/author/27328-Stan_Kelly_Bootle)

<comment><USER4> Thank you! Sad to see he passed away, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The discussion of how to denote the bounds of a sequence may be missing one consideration: Intuition from language. When speaking we articulate a range by stating the first and last permissible value. E.g. "Pick a number between one and ten". My point is understanding the length of the sequence is rarely as important as quickly grasping its bounds.

<comment><USER7> But when we say "between 1 and 10", the bounds are 1 and 10, but the length of the sequence is - as far as I can count my fingers - also 10.

<comment><USER8> I seem to remember using this in early versions of Visual Basic:

        Dim myArray(1 to 10) As Integer

Don't know if it still works, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I was learning QBasic some billion years ago I recall that I was happy with arrays generally starting at 1 (even though this is user specified in Basic). When I learned C I initially wasn't thrilled about re-learning arrays, but eventually grew to only like 0-based arrays.

I'm thinking this is like people who drink coffee will cite studies saying it is good for you, and people who hate it will cite opposite studies.

<comment><USER10>
      my @arr = (1, 2, 3);

      for my $i ($[...$#arr) {
         ...
      }

It is however, advised not to change $[.

<comment><USER10> And of course, there's Ada where you can use 'First and 'Last.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Starting at 1 is more intuitive, and therefore IMO better.

Regarding some of the advantages of zero-based:

      - Indexing backwards from the "end". Your language can always add an `end` keyword like Matlab does, and this stops
     being an advantage.
      - Indexing cyclically using modular arithmetic. Yes, this is an advantage. Albeit a rare one for me.

I commit less off-by-one errors with 1-based, and I don't have to double-check as much -- so on balance, I prefer it.

[edit]

The amount of karma this comment is getting is undergoing something like Brownian motion.

<comment><USER12> > Starting at 1 is more intuitive, and therefore IMO better.

This is totally subjective. Starting at 0 is more intuitive to me.

My intuition is very simple. `x` is the name of some memory location. `x[k]` is the location `k` spaces away from `x`.

<comment><USER13> I can agree that's intuitive, but I'd like to point out that's not quite the same thing as numbering a sequence.

If we have a sequence a_1, a_2, a3, ... we can talk about a_3 by calling it the third term. If we have a sequence a_0, a_1, a_2, ..., the third term is actually a_2.

Whether or not we should index starting at 0 or 1 is probably dependent not only on intuition, but the application at hand. For most analytic purposes it's generally more useful to talk about the nth term, and we don't need to know a specific number to reason about the distance between any two indices. For other purposes, such as programmatic ones, it is useful to know e.g. the traversal distance between two items in a list.

In my opinion it's best to first consider whether you're working in more of a mathematical or programmatic context, and then secondarily who will have to read it later on.

<comment><USER12> You don't have to talk about memory locations, or computers at all, for the intuition to work. `a_2` is two spaces away from the beginning of the list.

The fact that our ordinal numbers are closely connected with the off-by-one cardinal numbers (e.g., "third", meaning the element of a sequence in position 2, is closely etymologically related to the word "three") is an unfortunate defect of language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As usual, let me point out that Dijkstra's handwriting is a treat if you haven't seen it before. Here's the handwritten version of this note:

[https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF)

<comment><USER15> Is that his real handwriting??? That's not a fancy font?

Wow, it really IS a treat. I've always heard people say how much a person's handwriting can tell you about that person. Mine is a mangled mess, and I'm pretty disorganized in most areas of my life.

<comment><USER16> It's real, but if you'd like to emulate it, there's a TTF font floating around out there:

[http://lucacardelli.name/indexartifacts.html](http://lucacardelli.name/indexartifacts.html) (go to Artifacts > Fonts tab).

Or, [https://www.google.com/search?q=dijkstra+ttf+font](https://www.google.com/search?q=dijkstra+ttf+font)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Programmers seem in general to know that 0-based works best, but mathematicians (and mathematical and statistical programming languages) seem to prefer 1-based, and I don't understand why that is? Isn't mathematics also easier with 0-based?

E.g. if you divide a matrix of 100 columns into 20 vertical bands of width 5 each.

Mathematicians use 1-based indexing for both the element index and the band index, so there band n would start at coordinate "(n - 1) * 100 / 20 + 1"

For a programmer, band n would start at "n * 100 / 20"

That's two correction terms that you need to add in math which programmers don't!

I had to use Matlab for microphone arrays once and it was full of + 1's and - 1's everywhere due to that.

Another example of mathematics and off by one errors: a polynomial. They call it "degree n" if the highest power is n, except I see n+1 coefficients in there and need to allocate an n+1 sized array to contain its coefficients, so why not call its degree the amount of terms, including the "x^0" one. The powers themselves in the polynomial are already hinting at 0-based indexing in this case.

Mathematicians, please use coordinate "0,0" for the top left element of a matrix :)

<comment><USER18> Interesting that you mention polynomials, as the constant term in them is gennerally given the subscript 0. In fact, it sounds like you want some form of 1 based indexing, where constant polynomials are degree 1, linear degree 2, etc.

<comment><USER17> No, I don't want form of 1 based indexing at all :)

an array with elements at index 0,1,2,3 has size 4

<comment><USER18> And the degree on a polynomial means the highest index of a non-0 coefficient.

I don't see how you can view calling a linear polynomial degree 2 an example of 0 based index.

<comment><USER19> Easy: the constant part of the polynomial is x^0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The initial sentence has always bothered me

> To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the > pernicious three dots

What's so pernicious about them? I don't see it. It seems like a clear and intuitive way to communicate a sequence to me. I even wrote a little range generator in JS to explore parsing declarations like that. [https://github.com/chrisbroski/iterize](https://github.com/chrisbroski/iterize) It seems to work fine.

<comment><USER12> That notation is ambiguous. It doesn't cause a problem for humans since we can infer the correct meaning from the context, but it would for computers.

For example, does 3, 5, ... 11 mean the odd numbers between 3 and 11 inclusive, or the primes between 3 and 11 inclusive?

<comment><USER21> No, it is ambiguous for humans too as evidenced by the gazillions of problems of the form "N1, N2, N3, what number comes next?".

Just decide on some rule for how decide and let people make their own standard if they don't like it.

<comment><USER22> Of course the answer is N1 - 3 N2 + 3 N3, since that naturally completes the cubic interpolating polynomial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The part of his argument I find most convincing is his first remark that in practice convention (a) has the fewest programming errors.

Aside, Antony Jay cowrote of _Yes Minister_ and _Yes, Prime Minister_.

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

I'm familiar with the shows but didn't recognize his name.

</comment><comment><USER24> Once upon a time when I was young and foolish, I was doing something [1] in C++, which has 0-based arrays. There were a lot of places in the code where 1-based arrays would have made the code quite a bit clearer, but a lot of places where 1-based arrays would have made it much less clearer.

I wanted the best of both worlds, and so overloaded the () operator so that if arr is an array, then arr(i) = arr[i-1].

This worked reasonably well, especially for arrays where it was always clearer to go 1-based, or arrays where it was always clearer to go 0-based, so that the array was always accessed with the same operator.

The only places it was questionable whether or not it made the code clearer was where I used both in the same section of code. E.g., something like b = a[i] + a(i) is arguably less clear than b = a[i] + a[i-1] or b = a(i+1) + a(i).

[1] I think it was implementing an arbitrary precision integer library using algorithms from TAOCP, but I don't remember for sure.

</comment><comment><USER25> There's one important use case for Dijkstra's alternative (c), that is, an interval closed at both ends. That is when your set has a maximum element and you want to be able to express an interval including the maximum. This is, of course, important in any programming language whose basic integer types have a bounded range. For instance, the following loop in C never halts:

        for(uint8_t i = 0; i < 256; i++) { ... }

What's even worse, the following loop has undefined behavior because signed integer overflow is not defined:

        for(int8_t i = 0; i < 128; i++) { ... }

<comment><USER26> I don't quite understand what you're saying. If you change the code to

        for(uint8_t i = 0; i <= 255; i++) { ... }

then it still doesn't halt.

<comment><USER25> You're right, of course. Apparently my brain doesn't work well today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are cases where zero-based indexing is more natural than one-based indexing. An example is naming the centuries: It would be nicer if this were called the twentieth _an_ century instead of the twenty-first. When people talk about the fifteenth century, I have to think for a bit to understand what they mean. As such, I propose adding a suffix "an" to the end of any ordinal number to indicate a zero-based convention is being used -- this century would then be the twentiethan century [twεntiθən] as well as the twenty-first. A bit like degrees vs radians.

</comment><comment><USER27> In another thread last week, someone mentioned that 1-based indexing is more common in numerical analysis, so it has appeal for languages that are "math focused". Anyone have insight on that?

As far as I can recall, I've seen both 0 and 1-based indexing in statistics.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe indexing should be considered harmful. We're living in the age of really smart compilers anyways. It's time to move on. Elixir sets the example - <USER2> everything with TCR, provide an Enumerable interface, and beyond that use map/reduce.

<comment><USER29> Fits perfectly with Dana Scott's suggestion "a trend towards the removal of explicit parameters."

[https://github.com/hypotext/notation#mathematical- notation-p...](https://github.com/hypotext/notation#mathematical-notation- past-and-future-by-stephen-wolfram-2000)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So random question because I know I would get this wrong in an interview, but would a 0 based indexing system have fewer assembly language instructions to calculate a memory offset than a 1 based system?

<comment><USER30> Nope, not in most architectures. In a 0-based indexing system, the base pointer points to the first element of the array. In a 1-based indexing system, the base pointer points to the slot in memory that isone spot behind the first element in the array. This is how Julia (and Ada) does arbitrary indexing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Stan Kelly-Bootle's famous bon mot on the subject: "Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration."

<comment><USER32> That's a genius way to avoid fence post errors ([http://www.dsm.fordham.edu/~moniot/Opinions/fencepost- error-...](http://www.dsm.fordham.edu/~moniot/Opinions/fencepost-error- history.shtml)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I see now

<comment><USER12> No it doesn't. Let's define the natural numbers to start with 42. Then the left side of the sequence 42, 43, 44 being represented as 41 < x is unnatural, since 41 is not a natural number.

It's clear that the author structured his essay carefully to avoid this exact assumption. He explicitly avoids considering whether the natural numbers start at 0 or at 1 until after he has chosen "a)".</comment></comment>


Sonic the Hedgehog for the Atari 2600 - <AUTHOR> http://1morecastle.com/2013/09/the-homebrew-corner-sonic-the-hedgehog-for-the-atari-2600/

<comment> T-hawk The article doesn't give any information on the technical detail. As a 2600 programmer, I can make some assumptions.

Looks like the major constraint is sprite inventory. There's only ever one other object on screen besides Sonic/Zippy. This covers enemies, springs, powerups, rings (which are done with a hardware register that repeats copies of a sprite.) So the levels look and feel really sparse.

The 2600 has only two hardware sprites, so that's not unexpected. To get more on screen, you have to reposition a hardware sprite in the middle of each TV frame while the electron beam is drawing it. The 2600 literally uses the phosphor on the TV screen as the frame buffer. So the 2600 can draw many sprites that march in vertical lockstep (Space Invaders, River Raid) but it's hard-to-impossible to draw sprites with full freedom of movement (famously Pac-man's flickery ghosts, which are each drawn only once every four frames.) It's possible with smart sharing algorithms - do reposition and reuse a sprite whenever it's possible, otherwise flicker when you must when sprites overlap. But doing that along with the fairly complicated playfield manipulation will run out of cycles very quickly. You only get 76 machine cycles per scanline -- just 20-some instructions in 6502 assembly.

<comment><USER2> I always wondered, would it be possible to design a custom cartridge with its own CPU/memory and only use the Atari for drawing on the screen and therefore have more complex screens? In other words, use the special hardware to calculate the frame and then use the Atari to control the beam to color the screen the way you want. So the classical interface between the cartridge and the Atari is only handling turning the beam on and off and with what color.

I know that the Atari has a certain pixel size due to how fast it can turn the beam on and off, but working with that constraint it seems with the above method you could still produce much more complicated games that rival the interactivity of say the SNES.

<comment> T-hawk The Atari can't control the color of the beam with much precision. The CPU doesn't directly control the beam. It writes to the TIA chip's graphics registers, which are things like the 8 monochrome bits of a sprite or 8 bits worth of playfield background. The TIA then produces the beam, still limited to its natural resources of a one-dimensional single-scanline world containing the 40 monochrome playfield pixels and two hardware sprites.

All this method could do is continually feed the 6507 a stream of instructions to write those registers. It would be like if you had enough ROM space to unroll every possible loop and inline every lookup. The cartridge still couldn't write to the TIA any faster than the 6507 CPU can. It couldn't hit a register any more often than every 18 pixels, which is how long it takes for a basic load/store pair of instructions.

The SNES Starfox chip works by drawing polygons into its own RAM then using DMA to copy them to the console's video memory. The Atari 2600 has no video memory beyond the TIA's registers, and no DMA to hit them any faster.

Unless... I don't know enough about the electrical side, but is it possible for a cartridge to disable or halt the 6507 CPU and directly drive the bus to the TIA? Then you could at least write to the TIA every cycle, yielding resolution of every three pixels. The Atari cartridge slot pinout is pretty plain though, just the 13 address and 8 data lines. Nothing fancy like a CPU halt or reset line or even a clock, and actually not even a read/write line that would be necessary to write to the TIA. It would require some motherboard hardware hacking, and by that point you're pretty much implementing an entirely new game console with an arbitrary CPU coupled to the 2600's TIA graphics chip.

(TIA is Television Interface Adaptor: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very impressive given that the developer has 128 bytes of RAM (just four AVX registers) to work with.</comment>


Dan Kaminsky responds (at length) to DJB's 27C3 DNSSEC presentation - <AUTHOR> http://dankaminsky.com/2011/01/05/djb-ccc/

<comment><USER2> Three of Kaminsky's seven arguments in favor of DNSSEC rely on "Phreebird", a strange thousand-line proxy he wrote and is pushing heavily. Before relying on any property of Phreebird for the purposes of argument, Kaminsky ought to disclose the extremely poor quality of that code.

I don't mean "bad" in the sense of "probably riddled with exploitable vulnerabilities", although Kaminsky himself acknowledged a double-free a few days ago on Twitter.

I mean more basic things, like, line 455 of phreebird.c which reads an NBO integer off the wire and feeds it directly to calloc() and read() as if it was HBO, or "bad" in the sense of "will fail if a request ever gets split between two TCP segments", or any other number of badnesses.

It's not a crime to publish bad code (it is, in fact, very good thing to do so), but it's irresponsible to urge its immediate adoption or to use it to settle an argument without pointing out that "this really works only in a lab setting".

Unfortunately, Kaminsky posted the most spirited defense of DNSSEC in recent memory on the exact day of our all-hands meeting. I call shenanigans! DNSSEC is evil and Dan hasn't vindicated it; instead, he's taken a small issue (that of online signing) and blown it up _way_ out of proportion. Suffice it to say that online signing isn't the biggest problem with DNSSEC.

<comment><USER3> Phreebird isn't production code. I've been telling people to use it for internal testing only -- and I've even got that into various articles.

What it does do is show what DNSSEC is capable of -- it's a way to separate fundamental limitations of the protocol (which do exist) from implementation faults (like the horrifying things you have to do to maintain DNSSEC with two year old DNSSEC code).

DJB's talk argues that a whole bunch of things are fundamental limitations of DNSSEC. It implies that it must be a offline signer. This is patently false. Actually, any system that supports offline signing can be an online signer, and Phreebird is an example of one.

I'd love to hear more about what you think the biggest problems with DNSSEC are. Perhaps this could inspire new features for Phreebird!

<comment><USER2> Ok. Here's one. It's a very common C function that appears in some way/shape/form in most client software deployed on the Internet:

      int
      connect_host(const char *host, u_int16_t port) {
        int sock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
        if(sock >= 0) {
          struct sockaddr_in si;
          memset(&si, 0, sizeof(si));
          si.sin_family = AF_INET;
          si.sin_port = htons(port);
          si.sin_addr.s_addr == inet_addr(host);
          if(si.sin_addr.s_addr == INADDR_NONE) {
            struct hostent *hp = gethostbyname(host);
            if(hp) {
              memcpy(&(si.sin_addr.s_addr), hp->h_addr, 4);
            }
          }

          if(si.sin_addr.s_addr != INADDR_NONE) {
            if(connect(sock,
                      (struct sockaddr*)&si, sizeof(si)) >= 0) {
              return(sock);
            }
          }
          close(sock);
        }
        return(-1);
      }

Tell me something. In the world we live in now, with 10's of well-known mainstream CA's, I see an SSL certificate warning on an otherwise totally OK site about once a month. DNSSEC supposes a world in which everyone runs their own CA; in other words, a world in which there are tens of thousands of CA's.

Where, in that function, do I (a) detect a DNSSEC failure, (b) propose to the user the untrustworthy - but - probably - totally - valid address we got instead, and (c) pop up a dialog to the user to allow them to decide whether to connect? Or, instead, does all this deployed code fail in _exactly the same fashion as if the host didn't exist_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _If there's one truly strange argument in DJB's presentation, it's on Page 39. Here, he complains that in DNSSEC, .org being signed doesn't sign all the records underneath .org, like wikipedia.org._

I'm not sure this is an argument against DNSSEC, it's more of an argument against DNSSEC's marketing. The DNSSEC folks like to say that DNSSEC is deployed to .org. Well, that's technically true, but since no .org domains are signed themselves, this claim is useless. DNSSEC provides no real security currently.

I watched DJB's talk and I thought the first half was mostly for entertainment, rather than detailed discussion of the weaknesses of DNSSEC.

<comment><USER5> I think Kaminsky is misleading when he says "Wikipedia.org is a delegation, an unsigned one at that" and "Wikipedia's IP addresses are not actually hosted by the .org server." The IP addresses of Wikipedia's nameservers are actually hosted by the .org server in the form of glue records. In this particular case, at least, wikipedia.org is not just a delegation, so there would be some benefit from the .org servers signing that information.

(I know that glueless delegations are common, I even use them myself. But Wikipedia's delegation is not glueless. DJB does not like them: <http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/notes.html>)

      ; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> @a0.org.afilias-nst.info. wikipedia.org. ns +norecurs
      ; (1 server found)
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 51490
      ;; flags: qr; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3

      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;wikipedia.org.			IN	NS

      ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
      wikipedia.org.		86400	IN	NS	ns2.wikimedia.org.
      wikipedia.org.		86400	IN	NS	ns0.wikimedia.org.
      wikipedia.org.		86400	IN	NS	ns1.wikimedia.org.

      ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
      ns0.wikimedia.org.	86400	IN	A	22.214.171.124
      ns1.wikimedia.org.	86400	IN	A	220.127.116.11
      ns2.wikimedia.org.	86400	IN	A	18.104.22.168

      ;; Query time: 46 msec
      ;; SERVER: 22.214.171.124#53(22.214.171.124)
      ;; WHEN: Thu Jan  6 10:05:40 2011
      ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 143

<comment><USER3> If you'll notice, that's glue for ns0, ns1, and ns2. This information from the parent is just there to say "here's where to go to resolve information from the child".

It's not the actual IP addresses for all the child data, like www.wikimedia.org.

DJB's basically saying "how can you say .org is signed when not every child in .org is signed". No delegated solution could ever offer that feature. If DJBCurve doesn't support signed and unsigned children, it's a thoroughly irrelevant technology that should be laughed out of the room.

Bashing DNSSEC for supporting a basic reality of delegated trust is flat out unfair.

<comment><USER5> Here's what I think DJB is saying: It's the IP addresses for ns0, ns1, ns2, and it's published by the .org servers. Why not sign that information, even if the Wikipedia folks haven't implemented DNSSEC themselves? I don't think he expects the .org servers to sign information not published by them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell A thouroughly good read. You should watch the talk that he's referering to before reading this first though:

<http://www.vimeo.com/18417770>

</comment><comment><USER6> DJB > Kaminsky

DJB has some of the best cryptographic implementations out there while Kaminsky's only interesting work is actually someone else's (CVE-1999-0024).

<comment><USER7> DJB's sha1 code won the Engineyard sha1 contest back in 2009. His code was 14 times faster than OpenSSL's sha1. They were testing 3,079,431,974 hashes/second.

<http://cr.yp.to/nearsha.html>

<http://www.win.tue.nl/cccc/sha-1-challenge.html>

<comment><USER2> That's far from the only speed record he's set; among other things, he's also held the record for the fastest AES implementation and the fastest FFT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you have any interest at all in encryption, authentication, security and/or DNS then this is one hell of a read.

</comment><comment><USER9> The point about the uncacheability of DNSCurve seems correct and a huge concern (<http://dankaminsky.com/2011/01/05/djb-ccc/#caching>).

<comment><USER2> On the one hand, DNSCurve's cacheing impact is a big deal... on the other hand, every endpoint is going to run a full validating DNSSEC stack?

<comment><USER3> Man, it's 2011, not 1983. If a device can run TLS, it can run DNSSEC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where can I find more DJB publications / activities? His cr.yp.to website doesn't seem to have been updated in ages.

<comment><USER9> Recent talks (often with PDF slides) of DJB @ <http://cr.yp.to/talks.html> (scroll to end of page for latest).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cybersquatting a startup domain, how to protect? - <AUTHOR>

I'm the founder of a small Italian startup. In 2010 we developed a simple web app called http://urli.st/, in 2011 we got founded and we established a company (an italian SRL, similar to an American LLC). We worked a lot on the new webapp and we are almost ready to deploy it.
In 2010 the guy who owns urlist.com wrote me to "put the two together in some manner" (his domain was empty), I answered "no", he published on his domain a fake urlist page with our "about" in it. Now urlist.com il just a redirect to his "personal" delicious page.
It would be great for us to have the urlist.com domain but I don't know how much the guy will charge us. We do not have much money. I just do not want urlist.com to redirect to a delicious page.
Is there anything we can do to protect us? <comment><USER2> You can either buy the .com or not worry about it.

By starting your company with a .st domain, you were making an implied statement that you weren't concerned with being mistaken for the .com version of your site. You were always going to leak a substantial portion of your traffic to urlist.com because that's the first thing anybody would think to type in to their browser when they heard your name. That's the world you set up for yourself.

Until this guy wrote you, you were (presumably) perfectly happy with that situation. Why then is it a concern today? That is, why is it suddenly worrying you that you don't control urlist.com, when it was never your intention to control it?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, I get your point.

The thing is that at the beginning we were just three friends trying to develop a simple webapp. The domain hack (.st) was to keep our URLs short. The .com domain was parked. As you wrote, "I _was_ happy with that situation". Well, I was not happy but I though it was not _so_ important. Now we are a company and things are different.

My fault was to not act directly against it. The urlist.com guy did a fake landing page with our contents before, now he is linking to a webapp related to bookmarking: he know what he is doing.

I was wondering if anyone has ever experienced a problem like this one, and what he/she have done to solve it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly speaking I don't know how far this bookmarking idea will go - I don't mean to sound negative - it's just you're in a cowded space.

I'd go with what you've got now, and if your site takes off then you'll have the funds to get it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Buy it or sue (or don't worry).

<comment><USER5> IANAL, but I wouldn't give you good odds in a squatting suit if the guy owned the domain before you owned the trademark.

<comment><USER6> That's true, but even temporarily copying the about page and not otherwise using the domain may be slightly more substantial in appealing to ICANN directly.

<comment><USER5> I really doubt it. ICANN doesn't tend to involve itself in this kind of thing AFAIK. From all I've ever heard of people's dealings with them, it's clear-cut squatting on womebody's rights, they don't care, and the URL _currently_ points to the owner's Delicious page, which doesn't qualify.

<comment><USER6> You're right, I mixed it up a little bit. They won't personally hear it but have rules related to domain name disputes: <http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/udrp.htm></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GitHub Takes Down Satirical 'C Plus Equality' Language - <AUTHOR> http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/14/1618239/github-takes-down-satirical-c-plus-equality-language

<comment> vezzy-fnord It seems this is turning into a more serious project. They're implementing more code samples, refining their macro list, have a joke IDE and an IRC channel.

I look forward to more reactions. There's already at least one emotionally charged feminist blog entry I'm aware of which criticizes this.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you wish AWS Cloudwatch was smarter? - <AUTHOR> I am building a simple integration with AWS cloudwatch that basically scrapes metrics from cloudwatch and does the following:
1. learns what is normal from past behaviour and alerts on abnormalities. Thus no need to set and maintain alert conditions on hundreds of metrics (at least not on the low level non-SLA metrics).
2. auto clusters the above into incidents. Example - if 100 EBS volumes have a unusual write activity alerts, and all are attached to EC2 instances which are within an ELB target group, they will be clubbed together.
Is this something you find useful? What other intelligent features you wish cloudwatch had ? <comment><USER2> You can try Stackdriver (owned by Google Cloud, but has AWS integration). Stackdriver allows you to aggregate multiple distinct metrics into one timeline, and you can set alerts on the aggregate, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, I do not wish that.

<comment><AUTHOR> To make your comment useful [0], I would suggest explaining why and giving some context. For example, you could start with the size of your AWS infra, which other tools are you using other than CloudWatch etc.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Mailrecipe limits the number of emails you send to a user to 1 per day - <AUTHOR> Last week, I spammed my users with emails by mistake. I had written an idempotent method to do a transaction and send a confirmation email. I didn't realize the email call is not idempotent. So, when the transaction failed, it retried again and again and spammed the entire user base with emails. I was so embarrassed and wrote an API layer on top of my email delivery service (SendGrid) to ensure that my users won't get more than 1 email per day, irrespective of my architecture or mistakes. I am publishing it as a public API, in case anyone else needs it:
https://rapidapi.com/mailrecipe/api/mailrecipe
Have you run into this problem? How did you solve it? <comment><USER2> Wow! I have to check this out. This is a common mistake, especially when you don't know what the system does if you are new or if you are testing, last week I receive 100 emails from my ex-companye, a new employer run a script on some old staging database, 10.000 emails were sent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yes. That's a common mistake too. Like security, people understand the magnitude of this problem after the fact. All it takes is a dry run or try/catch block by a new member in the team :)</comment></comment>


Inside the Dynomak: A Fusion Technology Cheaper Than Coal - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a-fusion-technology-cheaper-than-coal <comment><USER2> The important word in the article is "experiment": As of now, most of the cost estimates and even the viability of this new type of fusion reactor are based on calculations only. It's of course great that new types of reactors get researched, it's just a pity that the press always seems to overreact and sell these experiments as production-ready systems to the world. This is probably the main cause for the public skepticism towards fusion energy: Too often early prototypes have been sold as working reactors.

BTW, there have been numerous proposed improvements over the Tokamak reactor type over the years, such as the "Stellarator" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator)), most of them have proven too complex to be of practical use though.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, mankind will feed from simple Soviet designs that just works for decades. Tokamak is a just a fascinating example. Think lasers for example -- the USSR tech of the 60-es ;-)

<comment><USER4> All that fascinating technology, yet they're still afraid of gay people.

<comment><USER5> what ? Gay marriage is still not legalized in most of the united states. and gay in russia means paedophiles included, its something putin has conjured up.

Saying Russians are scared of gays is like saying americans are all fat and lazy.

<comment><USER4> You facts are wrong, and even if you were right, your argument doesn't hold any water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From an outsider's perspective, it kind of seems like fusion research is picking up recently, especially in terms of the diversity of approaches by relatively credible teams. Before it seemed like the credible effort was the tokamak and everything else was the domain of crackpots. If so, this seems like a good thing to me, even if most of these approaches might be doomed to failure. Should have been happening years ago.

I'm curious if that's just some kind of perception filter thing, though, or if not what's causing it.

<comment><USER7> Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment here, something I picked up on a similar fusion story here on HN a while ago: there have recently been a lot of news stories that _may_ be interpreted as being aimed at bringing down the oil price. Not sure if I buy it, but if it is the case, it seems to be working.

<comment><USER8> Fusion energy doesn't replace oil. It doesn't substantially reduce dependence on it - oil fired power plants are uncommon compared to the quantity of coal ones, and we have _a lot_ of coal to go through (well, not so much I guess - Australia has 400 years worth, but that's what, 5-6 generations + blasting our country into an uninhabitable wasteland?)

Fusion energy replaces coal powerplants, and probably fuel bunkers on container ships/air craft carriers. No concept is small enough or dense enough to replace oil, although _cheap_ fusion energy would make all sorts of crazy synthetic hydrocarbon schemes viable.

<comment><USER9> Actually it can replace oil. _Making_ long chain hydrocarbons through a process like the Fischer-Tropsch one is fairly straight forward if you have the energy. You would still have a refinery but sitting on the ocean with your fusion power plant your refinery would never need to have an oil tanker offload, instead your fusion plant would be supplying the energy to pull CO2 out of the air, hydrogen and oxygen out of the water and converting them into what the base for what ever the refinery needed.

<comment><USER10> A technology I've only recently learned of, though the concept dates back 50 years.

It was first pursued by Meyer Steinberg, a nuclear physicist working at Brookhaven National Labs. The US Navy's picked it up on the basis that they 1) have a great deal of nuclear experience and 2) consume large volumes of fossil fuel.

Check my recent post history for more on the topic, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665101)

<comment><USER9> That is an excellent summary. One of the more interesting developments here has been the development of zeolites for CO processing that you run through a concentrated solar facility for heat. (Zeolites suck up CO2 while cold, you ferry them to the focal point of the CSP, they outgas the CO2 which is collected, and get returned to the pile below.)

<comment><USER10> Thanks. The advantage of seawater extraction is that the carbon concentrations are ~140x those of the atmosphere by volume. Oh, and for those who are curious, freshwater _doesn 't_ have the same concentrations -- this really is a seawater method, not a "water-based" method.

I'll look for information on the zeolite processes.

Of all places, the West Virginia Coal Association has a wealth of information on carbon sequestration research. I suspect it's because the industry's counting on this for its future lease on life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One reason that allowed us to quickly develop fission power is that the physics is mostly linear meaning building a 1GW plant wasn't so much more difficult once you mastered the small experimental reactors.

Now I worked on nuclear plants and not on fusion research but I heard that the main issue with fusion power is the non-linearity that comes along when scaling up small experiments. Things like not being really able to predict plasma behavior at industrial scale even if it works fine in the lab. Could anyone with a better understanding of the physics expand on this ?

<comment><USER12> I'm definitely not an expert, but building new fission plants to modern standards seems to be substantially more difficult than previously thought.

The only new fission plant being built in Western Europe, Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, was supposed to go online in 2010 but is still unfinished: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3)

Estimates suggest it may not be done until 2020, and the budget has overrun to about $10.6 billion USD versus the original cost estimate of about $3.75B USD. (This reactor is now more expensive than the Large Hadron Collider!)

When a fission plant costs $10B+ today, I wonder how much the first working fusion plant will cost -- if we ever get that far.

<comment><USER13> You forgot Flamanville 3 in France: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvil...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_\(nuclear_reactor\)#Flamanville_3_.28EDF.27s_first_plant.29). Same problems though (huge delay, budget increase, ...)

<comment><USER14> And Hinkley C in Somerset, UK [http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/hinkley- poin...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/hinkley-point-c- nuclear-plant-boss-nigel-cann) (again, delays etc - currently only earthworks are going on)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dr. Bussard gave a very interesting talk on his design for "inertial electrostatic confinement" fusion reactor: [http://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8](http://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8)

<comment><USER16> See [http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php](http://www.talk- polywell.org/bb/index.php) for info on his design, and other fusion news.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a bit skeptical about the claim "it doesn't produce dangerous, long-term toxic waste." I'm no expert but I've read that fusion reactors will be producing massive amounts of neutron radiation (like the neutron bomb, AKA the "real estate bomb," heh!) which ends up absorbed by the cladding of the reactor chamber and converts it to partly radioactive isotopes.

A consequence is that the reaction chamber walls lose their physical integrity, i.e. become brittle, so leaving them in place is not an option. Thus, when operating a fusion reactor, you're constantly forced to replace crunchy, fusion-baked, radioactive reactor wall debris with newly built wall plates.

I admit to having no idea about which isotopes would be produced and what their half-life would be. If anyone can shed some light or correct me, I'd be indebted.

<comment><USER18> Here's an article that quotes a fusion researcher saying there'd be much less waste from fusion, and it would stop being significantly radioactive after 50 to 100 years: [http://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2012/safer,-more- efficient,-f...](http://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2012/safer,-more- efficient,-fusion-generated-electricity-is-on-the-horizon123.php)

That's a researcher working in mainstream fusion, so that would be for deuterium-tritium fuel, which is the easiest but produces very high-energy neutrons. More advanced fuels are mostly aneutronic. Helion is attempting D-D/D-He3, which would release only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation. Tri-Alpha and LPP are attempting boron fusion, for which neutron radiation is only 1% of the released energy.

<comment><USER17> The "state of the art" looks a bit chaotic to people looking in from the outside, what with the variety of approaches being tested. But this is exactly how progress is made in science!

I'm glad to see that neutron blasting is being taken into consideration. I suppose not wasting most of your energy output as destructive radiation makes excellent sense economically, too.

Thanks!

<comment><USER18> With D-T the neutrons do heat a fluid, so it's not like the energy is wasted. For example, General Fusion would use them to heat a mixture of molten lead and lithium (the latter for breeding more tritium), which would heat water for a steam turbine. But aneutronic fuels put most of their energy into fast- moving charged particles, which lets you extract electric power without using a turbine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article lists several other fusion approaches that are also in development. Does anyone have a real sense of the likelihood of any of these actually working? I'm optimistic, but also naïve about the engineering challenges.

<comment><USER20> There are a lot of fascinating engineering issues with projects like ITER - which are starting to scale up towards a commercial scale fusion plant. For example the ITER cryostat is apparently the largest high-vacuum chamber ever built:

[http://www.iter.org/newsline/294/1792](http://www.iter.org/newsline/294/1792)

<comment><USER21> The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER, which wasn't even built yet. I'm not sure what wound up happening. I visited the one at MIT and got to see it fire live from inside the control room, but the postdocs were all sad that we were canning working primary research for what seemed like a complicated construction boondoggle. I hope they found another way to fund the research!

<comment><USER22> I don't understand what you mean by "The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER". ITER is a tokamak, the world's largest (if/when it's completed), so funding for tokamaks is not a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Do i understand this right that with the HIT-SI3 they have already built a working dynomak that can generate a surplus of energy, albeit at a small scale, and the challenge is to make a bigger one that still works?

<comment><USER24> Looking at the linked abstract[1] of a paper about their experimental device it seems like they're running their prototype with a helium plasma, which can't produce energy (He-4 fusion processes require a lot more activation energy than various hydrogen processes). So they're mostly testing the plasma physics and rely on projections for the energy yield if actual fusion were to happen.

[1] [http://absimage.aps.org/image/DPP14/MWS_DPP14-2014-000198.pd...](http://absimage.aps.org/image/DPP14/MWS_DPP14-2014-000198.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Like the Lockheed announcement, the goal seems to raise more funds to create more advanced prototype, so obviously the perspective sounds optimistic.

</comment><comment><USER26> "The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn't exist"

I'd bet on thermal solar, that is proven to work. Also smart energy management with wind and solar are all proven to work. Electric cars have big batteries which are proven to work as energy storage.

<comment><USER27> I know, there are several viable alternatives that would cost much less than the equivalent in fusion. Simply putting solar on most rooftops at about $20K per install would probably create a huge surplus in existing electric generation.

That said, I favor the continued R&D and I hope one of these approaches pans out. Research is rarely wasted.

<comment><USER28> Photostatic already produces a surplus at some hours, but produce nothing at other hours. That's a big big problem.

<comment><USER29> This problem is already solved from a technical perspective: It is now possible to buy durable and reliable >10kWh battery packs to install in residential solar setups. The only remaining issue is volume production and cost.

We'll see what happens once Tesla's new battery plant is up and running in a few years, my money is on this being a game-changer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So, from what I understand, they are blowing a charged smoke-ring of plasma and then coupling it inductively as one half of a motor, so they can keep it sustained, and the more electric you feed in, the hotter and tighter and faster it goes. I want one.

</comment><comment><USER31> > The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of > work, it still doesn't exist.

I thought it did exist but wasn't efficient (i.e., energy in > energy out)?

<comment><USER17> You're correct. Fusion is routinely achieved already, but without approaching a positive energy balance.

When people talk about "doing" fusion, it's usually implied to mean "in a commercially viable way."

<comment><USER32> A positive energy balance was achieved in 2013.

[http://www.nature.com/news/laser-fusion-experiment- extracts-...](http://www.nature.com/news/laser-fusion-experiment-extracts-net- energy-from-fuel-1.14710)

For only a hundredth of a second, and not even remotely economically viable yet. But it's a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER17> I stand corrected, thanks! I guess I'd need to add "sustained" to my shopping list of implied necessary criteria.

<comment><USER33> Add in 'with a practical mass budget' as well. Right now the best known way to produce power from fusion is to build a star, and put solar panels around it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There seems to be a flurry of "fusion/energy breakthrough" press items recently. On the one hand it's extremely exciting, but on the other, I wonder if there's a more sinister motive behind all the press. Cui Bono?</comment>


US newspapers run more photos of school shooting suspects than victims (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/newspaper-photos-shooting-suspects-victims/ <comment><USER3> The sad thing about the news industry is that the more extreme stories they run, the more money they make.

<comment><USER4> This graphic has become a recently popular meme on social media, showing how excessive coverage of extreme black swan-type events has influenced the public conciousness: [https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of- death-i...](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-in-USA- vs.-media-coverage.png)

<comment><USER5> Seems reasonable to me that there's more coverage of terrorism than heart disease. It's less predictable, more diverse, less within my personal control, etc. I'm more interested in the one murder in my town this year than in the hundred deaths from heart disease.

<comment><USER5> Having said that I personally would prefer more coverage of new ideas, research discoveries and other more thought provoking topics that also sent so depressing.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to turn a profit. One only has to look at the click bait that's included everywhere these days to see what sells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this a relevant metric? Why do we want to show pictures of victims? If I got killed in a shooting I don't think I would want my picture thrown all over the news, nor do I think it would be particularly good for my family.

<comment><USER7> People have a knee-jerk reaction that publishing photos glorifies said person. So to many, the journalists are glorifying the killer and not the victims.

<comment><USER8> How is it a 'knee-jerk reaction' exactly? It seems to me it is well known that many of the perpetrators indeed do it in the hope of being glorified and being talked about.

<comment><USER9> Well they are definitely talked about. But that's not what glorified means.

They are villified (rightfully so). But perhaps being famous for any reason is their goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yesterday, a Virginia Beach city employee killed 12 people at his workplace. I've seen no pictures of him, I looked at several sources and it seems he's ignored for the most part.

CNN is running pics of the victims [https://imgur.com/a/U6A5oCb](https://imgur.com/a/U6A5oCb)

Personally I want to know about the murderer. I don't want this hidden from the public.

<comment><USER11> > _Personally I want to know about the murderer. I don 't want this hidden > from the public._

I want to understand what the murderer's motivation was, to the extent that we can. On the other hand, I'd be happy to know that without knowing their name. I don't know if that's practical, but keeping the name out of most news reporting might measurably reduce the murderer's notoriety. I don't know if that would reduce mass shootings in the future, but it seems unlikely that it would hurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I will leave this great Tweet series by Justin Owings here:

[https://twitter.com/justinowings/status/1134423782314192897](https://twitter.com/justinowings/status/1134423782314192897)

<comment><USER13> "The press may not be successful most of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fact is that shooters and serial killers are idolized by the press and Hollywood. Every time there's a school shooting (every other week) the press shows images of the shooter and a bunch of teenagers is inspired to do the same. We make movies & TV series about serial killers. Scroll through Netflix and every other thumbnail has a gun. It's constantly reinforced in our minds.

</comment><comment><USER15> Should people be surprised by that? Turn on any major news channel and you will instantly see evidence that bad news sells better than good news.

Newspapers are businesses and most have a simple equation in mind when deciding what content to use: use x s.t. x maximizes profit

Hopefully younger people will start to move away from traditional news sources as they realize how it skews ones world view towards negativity.

<comment><USER16> IMO they are. I teach k12 esl(pre:edit, kindergarten to year 12 English as a second language), my highest levels - free conversation we tried a spot where students would tell us about an interesting news story they had seen, heard or read about in the last week. We have dropped that idea. 30 students over a month we're regularly admitting to not actually knowing any real news outside of their immediate circle.

Note that these students arnt known for slacking off when it comes to homework, we deliberately didn't set a goal, it was something we planned to ask in class without notice.

Small sample, absolutely. But it was eye opening for the 4 teachers in this.

Not sure if this will help the conversation, but a little anecdote doesn't hurt every now and then :-)

<comment> frosted-flakes Personally, I've actively avoided reading the news lately. It just seems so pointless--what do I gain by reading about President Trump's latest antics or how bad the housing market is? I used to read my small city's local newspaper (hard copy) because it was news that actually applied to me, but it got shut down a year or two ago (unfortunately).

The only time I'll read the news is during an election, because I want to be at least somewhat informed.

Otherwise, I might hear about it from others or if it shows up on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To the degree that we're talking about actual newsPAPERS (and the use of the term "front page" leads me to believe she is), this is probably a simple question of space. If one guy shoots another, you can probably run photos of both. But if one guy shoots 10, a photo of one shooter takes up a lot fewer column-inches than photos of 10 victims. If you're really intent on running photos of all 10 victims, you'll probably scale them down, maybe arrange them 5 x 2 in one panel that's collectively larger than one shooter-photo but smaller individually.

In other words, mass-shooting victims are pictured less often, and smaller, for the simple reason that there are more of them. Maybe not the best reason, but that's precisely my point; no editor _decides_ like "Hey the shooter is way more important and awesome, let's run his photo up front, and fuck the victims amirite!?"

This comment certified Hanlon's Razor compliant.

</comment><comment><USER18> Showing victims vs suspects is a con. It's not a secret how to responsibly cover shootings in the news, and hasn't been for 30 years.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4)

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't that true of any notorious criminal act in any country? It doesn't seem like a diversion of what "news" is and what people are interested in reading about.

</comment><comment><USER20> Could it simply be because they want people to be aware of the suspect and report sightings, in the cases where the suspect hasn't been caught yet?

Victims are harmless. If not caught, the suspect isn't. Hence the latter gets far more attention.

</comment><comment><USER21> Isn't it a common practice to not identify minors in the news?

</comment><comment><USER22> The upsetting part isn't the presence or absence in media reports of particular actors in school shootings.

It's the fact that the 23 people killed in school shootings in 2018 - <USER2> as these deaths are - have managed to take away all the attention from the over 3,000 children killed by motor vehicles that year. I can't help but notice that the media of the US is very reluctant to shine a light on an epidemic whose solution invariably involves cutting into the profits of its oil and automobile sponsors.

I understand that we have a desire to handle both problems, but to the degree that this these are public policy problems, we also need to remember that opportunity cost (for example, in the form of hearing agendas in legislative committee scheduling) is very real - every bit of attention on one problem is indeed a lack of attention on another.

The number of committee meetings in US legislatures (including both houses of congress) over ridiculous cosmetic gun control laws is absurd, while at the same time these bodies barely say a word about the extreme petronormative policies that dominate infrastructure planning and invariably lead to death and permanent disability for more young children than any other cause.

<comment><USER23> Do you have some actionable ideas on how to prevent automotive deaths? Honest question.

<comment><USER22> Indeed I do.

1) Cease all forms of oil and automobile subsidy.

2) (At the federal level) change the structure of infrastructure aid to states to incentivize pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure over automobiles.

3) Ensure the schools are accessible by pedestrians and cyclists and that they are located in areas which are surrounded by traffic-calming infrastructure.

4) (at the local level) build more curb-extensions, greenways, chicanes, diverters, and other structures to get cars away from schools, playgrounds, and other areas where kids play.

There are sound, scientifically-backed tactics for doing this, but most of them require getting a place on the agendas of several legislative committees who are probably too busy talking about banning a particular color rifle or some other asinine thing.

<comment><USER24> Bikes and walking don't replace cars. Can you imagine the commute of someone in a suburban or rural area, in winter, on a _bike_?

Sure, if you can afford to live in SF or wherever there is enough infrastructure to support that kind of lifestyle, people have an alternative. Your proposed solution does nothing for the rest of the population. It would just make driving more annoying and expensive for them.

<comment><USER25> _Can you imagine the commute of someone in a suburban or rural area, in winter, on a bike?_

Yeah, I just did it all last winter.

 _It would just make driving more annoying and expensive for them._

Where does the money for these subsidies come? Taxes. What if cutting oil & gas subsidies came with a proportional (averaged) reduction in taxes?

<comment><USER24> > Yeah, I just did it all last winter.

Good for you.

> What if cutting oil & gas subsidies came with a proportional (averaged) > reduction in taxes?

You can't "cut" subsidies, because there are no direct oil and gas subsidies. There are favorable conditions (e.g. _lack_ of taxation) that are sometimes construed as a subsidy and there are externalities (like carbon emissions) that aren't priced in.

You would have to raise taxes in one place (e.g. carbon/gasoline tax) and then lower them in another place (income tax?).

However, I thought the point of the parent was to raise taxes to make _less people drive cars_. My point is that if you do that, most people will still drive cars, they will simply pay more for it.

<comment><USER25> A carbon tax plus a carbon dividend to the public (just for example) would leave average drivers paying the same, above average drivers paying more, and everyone incentivized to drive less, or electric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Welcome to America

<comment><USER27> Could you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN? You've done quite a bit of that already, and it's against the site rules and we ban accounts that do it.

If you'd review [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and use HN as intended, we'd be grateful.

You might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of the site:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can't wait until we get to the point where news broadcasts are basically "bad things happened, but we think it would be best to not get into the ugly specifics. In the meantime here are some photographs of people who could use your prayers."

<comment><USER29> That's a far cry from "just the facts" reporting. Is that sort of editorializing in reporting really a step in the right direction?

<comment><USER28> I guess I needed to put a /s since it wasn't clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It really depends on the suspect. If the suspect is a white supremacist, it's all over the news immediately. If it doesn't fit the current narrative, we might see the suspect 3 days later.

I've been recently paying attention to this and one of the latest shootings involved a trans student in the process of transitioning. It had barely any coverage.

There really is a bias in the media that is now bordering on censorship.

<comment><USER31> Not disagreeing that shooters who do t fit the narrative get less coverage, but I'd also point out that the shooting you're describing in Colorado had a (thankfully) very low body count</comment></comment>


Show HN: Alexical - Project management meets bookmarking - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexical.com

<comment><AUTHOR> A few weeks ago, I noticed the difficulties my wife was having as a freelance writer managing all of her projects and organizing the research for each of them.

I created Alexical as a gift to her to help reduce her stress. Unfortunately, we found products like Evernote to require too much self-organization and products like Trello to be too complex for the average joe. Alexical hopes to sit somewhere in between.

I'm showing it to you all to gather whether there's broader public interest for it.

B</comment>


Tennis, Unlike Baseball, Has No Set Way for Keeping Score - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/sports/tennis/tennis-unlike-baseball-has-no-set-way-for-keeping-score.html?_r=1&emc=rss&partner=rss

<comment><USER2> This isn't about keeping score, but about tracking detailed statistical information about every play. Tennis scoring is quite standardized, as any player will tell you.[0]

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis#Scoring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis#Scoring)

<comment><USER3> There's a standard for scoring, but not _keeping_ score. There's no standardized notation for recording a game of tennis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Starting in the 1980s, I used to score baseball games obsessively, taking great care to produce a beautiful and informative document. Somewhere along the line, with more and more information about the game becoming available in real time, it became clear that continuing to do so was pointless. The sad part is realizing that maybe it was already pointless before that.

<comment><USER5> It wasn't pointless.

I used to do the same thing when I was a kid with soccer and hockey games (growing up in Europe). It made me better at a lot of things that were useful to me in a career in technology - attention to detail, presentation skills, learning to extrapolate and summarize (i.e. I would try to see who scored more goals, or what time period were the most goals scored, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an outsider, baseball appears to be a very rigid game. (Not sure if rigid is the right word.) What I mean is that almost everything that can happen on the field is possible to keep track of statistically, that is, everything happens within a given set of actions (and usually in more-or-less distinct order).

This easily leads to agreement about what is important to keep track of. The example for baseball could be described in three lines of text.

The example for tennis, otoh, seem mostly to describe that there is little agreement on what is important (or on which level to keep notes). Some are happy to basically keep the score (the actual game score) by hand, while others describes details about each point (or even stroke).

It also seems like the big four American sports are much more obsessed with statistics than "European" sports, that might also have something to do with it.

<comment><USER7> I think that the existant baseball score-keeping leaves out some important information as well; it's not uncommon to see people extend the basic notation.

A fly-out to 4 is very different if there is a major defensive shift on, for example.

(Certain hitters favor hitting to one side of the field or another, and when they are particularly dominant hitters, the defense will move highly out-of- position; moving the defense from the standard position in general is called a "shift").

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> there are many derivative uses of sports statistics, but i think the value of stats ultimately stems from (1) an athlete's desire to compete and excel and (2) an expression of the athlete's identity.

so what stats you take should be useful in one of those two contexts, e.g., how many aces, faults, breaks, etc. do you have? does that mean you have a power game or a finesse game?

the first order of tennis stats comes from the open vision system described in the article: where the players and the ball are on winning shots. higher order stats come from understanding strategy and tactics (e.g., how each shot placement affects the outcome of each point, each game, each set, etc.)

(i'm working on a system to capture real-time stats for amateur sports)

</comment><comment><USER9> Beauty of a sport is in playing...and not so much in keeping score. When you are really playing(in the zone), you don't look up at the score.

<comment><USER7> When talking about keeping score, we are discussing spectators, not players.</comment></comment>


How to Get Good at Chess, Fast (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gautamnarula.com/how-to-get-good-at-chess-fast/ <comment><USER2> How to get good at anything (cribbed from the excellent Talent is overratted)

1) Practice just above your level (enough to be difficult and stretch, but not demoralizingly hard). Get a coach to help you find this range. Do this as many hours per day as you can tolerate, and the number you can tolerate should go up over time.

To quote the book, practice:

"It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it's highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports;"

2) Be clear about your goals and motivations. These will help you get through the difficult hours in 1)

The book is excellent and lays out the basics about getting good at anything. (Notice that I'm not saying anyone can be world chess champion. The book argues that it would be highly unlikely that any chess champion would get that way without applying these principles.)

A lot of what is discussed here is the what and how to practice. These are very valuable questions that I gloss over by saying, find a coach. Presumably a coach would know this. Knowing what to practice, and designing practice is a skill in itself.

<comment><USER3> _Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else Kindle Edition_

by Geoff Colvin

[http://amzn.com/B001HD8NZ8](http://amzn.com/B001HD8NZ8)

$13.99 Kindle

an expansion of this article:

 _What it takes to be great_

[http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...](http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391794/index.htm)

<comment><USER2> Someone posted a pdf here: [https://analizamatematicampt.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/tal...](https://analizamatematicampt.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/talent- is_overrated-what-really-separates-world-class-performers-from-everybody- else.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stuck in the mid 2100s. The main difference I see when I play 1800s, and most levels beneath that, is still tactics. A 1200 lets you fork their king and queen. An 1800 goes into a variation that lets you fork their king and queen 3 moves in.

I make the same kinds of mistakes, allow positional concessions or just straight-up blunder because I overlook tricks in the lines I thought were safe.

Building up that mental repertoire of tactical and positional patterns by solving puzzles and reviewing well played games is essential, no matter what level. It's like building a huge in-memory cache of correct answers so you quickly solve problems at the board.

<comment><USER5> Interesting, I am myself stuck in the mids 1900 (used to be 2000+), and I feel that my tactics are quite good but it's my positional understanding that keeps me under 2100.

<comment><USER6> My experience is that tactics is a spectrum. You can always improve your tactics, no matter who you are. There is no player who never makes tactical mistakes.

Whenever you feel like it's positional understanding that holds you back, that just means that your tactics are at a higher level than your positional understanding, so your opponents are less able to exploit tactical mistakes in the games you play. Once you improve your positional understanding, your rating will rise until you are facing opponents who are once again able to take advantage of you tactically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're someone who enjoys intense strategy games like Chess (and Dominion and other modern euro board games), but you're disappointed in Chess for some reason or another, I've got a game for you--- Go. Here are some chess players speaking about Go:

 _" While the Baroque rules of chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play go."_ \-- Edward Lasker, chess grandmaster

 _" Chess has only two outcomes: draw and checkmate. The objective of the game . . . is total victory or defeat – and the battle is conducted head-on, in the center of the board. The aim of go is relative advantage; the game is played all over the board, and the objective is to increase one's options and reduce those of the adversary. The goal is less victory than persistent strategic progress."_ \-- Dr. Henry Kissinger, quoted in Newsweek, 11/8/04

 _" What's happening with chess is that it's gradually losing its place as the par excellence of intellectual activity. Smart people in search of a challenging board game might try a game called go."_ \-- former Wold Correspondence Chess Champion Hans Berliner, The New York Times, Feb 6, 2003

Learn to play: [http://www.usgo.org/learn-play](http://www.usgo.org/learn- play)

The Seattle Go Center has events multiple times a week: [http://www.seattlego.org/](http://www.seattlego.org/)

<comment><USER8> I think you lose a lot of potentials by comparing to (or outright bashing) Chess too much... That said I have come around to seeing Go as the better game after a coworker taught it to me, but it took Hikaru no Go and realizing that playing mirror moves is punishable before I decided to get into it more with books and try to reach my equivalent former chess level of 10 years ago, which I think roughly matches somewhere in the single-digit kyu range.

I've been to a few lectures at the Seattle Go Center, and can confirm it's pretty great. Unfortunately I live in south Renton and work from home so I don't make it up there much.

<comment><USER9> I, too, watched Hikaru no Go and then took up the game myself. Wound up playing a few games with guys at work, it's a lot of fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've played chess casually for years, and my main observation is that no one actually wins if both players are reasonably well matched. The balance tips when a player makes a mistake that leads to them losing. Consequently, the only thing you really need to do to not lose is to make sure you don't make daft blunders, and to recognise when your opponent has. I'm pretty sure it's different at higher levels where people don't make those errors nearly so much, but if you're just starting out, rather than trying to win just remember to not screw up.

<comment><USER11> "The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake."

<comment> V-2 Tartakower

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I started playing chess at a fairly young age (5-6) and moved into competitive chess vs adults at age 8 and playing near national level at around age 12. In all that time I never read a single book about how to play chess, or try memorize openings. What I did do is play a lot of competitive chess and discuss strategy / tactics at every opportunity with strong players, both in terms of my own games and also in general.

The original article pretty much nails it as a guide, in my opinion. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER13> The massive discussion from two years ago is interesting:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6791742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6791742)

</comment><comment><USER14> He only mentions it indirectly but two things are crucial to your game as well, and you should spend significant amount on that:

1) Get good ressources. He mentions a few books, but they may not be best suited for you. There are also a lot of other tools, like training websites, programs, video guides, classes. Reason is: Instead of experimenting out the best path through some ideas, you can read about them and get that realisation much faster. Having better ressources and knowing how to use them may cut 80% of your time to achieve a certain goal.

2) Find the right better players. Not everyone that plays better can also transfer some of that to you. And some people are simply just not right for you.

Where books etc are the way to learning the right thing (instead of everything), the right teacher is about giving you better feedback. You can only see your own lacks and mistakes so far. A lot of your stupidest mistakes you simply don't even see as a mistake. For instance, one of my major problems in hitting (kung fu training) was that I slightly lean back while stepping forward. How could you even realise that without a teacher/experienced friend?

Find good resources, find good teacher, learn from the mistakes/experiments of others what is the right path, then do it a lot, then get feedback from the right person, then continue exercise and feedback sessions for a few years. Recipe to learn anything.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Chess and Programming - You have to be smart enough to understand it and dumb enough to think it matters."

</comment><comment><USER16> If you want to revive Chess you should play Chess960.

It was such a bummer for me to explain to my son that you don't really have a choice of moves in the opening...

A little study of openings definitely improves your games, but in ordinary Chess the opening is about as interesting as bowling or watching golf on TV.

<comment><USER17> 1) Chess 960 is cool, but really misses a lot of the interesting parts of chess. Also completely ridiculous to talk about "reviving" chess since chess is at near peak popularity. Unclear what goal you're suggesting could be achieved. Chess on TV? Chess a mainstream activity? I think there are lots of reasons why this is really difficult starting with chess is very very complex due to the availability of perfect information and several hundred years of people studying it. It's still more popular to watch videos of people playing chess than it would be of people doing biomedical research.

2) Openings are not as dead as you think. There are certain lines that are more well studied than others, but until you're 2650 FIDE (don't worry, 99.99% of players won't get there) you can deviate and have just fine results.

3) I think your thoughts about the opening are probably mis-informed. Look at the games from the recent london chess classic here:

[https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-tournaments/london- chess-c...](https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-tournaments/london-chess- classic-2015/3/1/5)

In round 3 Vachier-Lagrave already spent 9 minutes as white on a single move at move 9 in a open sicilian (maybe not as few choices as you're suggesting).

Again in round 4 he spent 5 minutes on move 9 in a sicilian and then 12 minutes on move 11.

<comment><USER18> I have a feeling that the kid's frustration has less to do with deviating on move 11 in an open Sicilian than with not getting to play 1. a4, 2. Ra3, for example.

<comment><USER17> Chess 960 isn't going to change that. Plus I bet a player would have only a minor effect on his rating (the improvement might be slower) from playing 1. a4 any except 1.. e5 or 1.. e6, 2. Ra3 every game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 I'm rather mediocre (1700ish on Lichess), but I feel one can't really improve without playing long games. Blitz is addictive and doesn't require cutting a committing chunk of time out of the schedule - but it remains a game of chance, I believe it even develops some bad habits such as guessing, or gambling moves (bet he won't notice that...). What do you think?

</comment><comment><USER19> Started playing at a young age. Got really obsessed again for a few years in college when online play was first coming out (Yahoo! Games, FTW), but it's not something I've played for awhile. The advice is sound, especially the "just study one set of openings and know it really well".

However, Chess is less fun than alot of other options because it does take more practice to get really good and it's less social than board games (e.g. Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, etc.), card games (Poker, Hearts, Bridge), or online video games.

The plus side is the logical planning and longer term strategy boost from study. The downside is that it's not going to help social interactions as much and alot of what it teaches is contrary to alot of what you need to pick up now, which is how to navigate among many different groups some of whom may be working for or against you. In many ways, running a raid in an MMO teaches you more useful skills than what it takes to get a really good ELO rating.

</comment><comment><USER20> What would be a right way if I just wanted to play very aggressively, you know, to impress or scare friends? :-) Lots and lots of tactics/puzzles? (SFMBE)

<comment><USER21> This wouldn't make you "good at chess", but you can learn a bunch of opening traps and mate patterns like the Scholar's Mate and the Légal Trap. Some traps are wicked simple (ie, e4 e5, nf3 nf6, nxe5 nxe4, qe2. If black moves their knight to safety, nc6+ sacrifice wins the queen.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone have an estimate for how much time "50 puzzles a day" takes? Surely if the puzzles are actually stretching you, they'll take a few minutes each? Is 50 realistic for an amateur player?

</comment><comment><USER23> Tangential, but:

1) best app for Mac (once upon a time I'd care if it was pretty, but not so much now) for computer chess? 2) best communities for 'beginner-enthusiast' and online games?

</comment><comment><USER24> I would like to know how to get from 1800 to 2100, fast. I'm stuck at 1800 level for many years(I'm not an active player though).

<comment><USER13> From the article:

        To improve quickly you
        need to play often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have no idea why this article is so popular. It claims to show the way to get better at chess by the doing the following: 1. Study the opening, 2. Study the middlegame, 3. Study the endgame, 4. Study your own games, 5. Study master games, 6. Play OTB, 7. Study tactics, 8. Use "psychology," meaning, don't be afraid and never give up. Along the way a few books and other recommendations are thrown in.

This is all rather trivial stuff.

While, I don't disagree with everything that the author says, I think that it should be acknowledged that his claim is pretty much unfounded. There are those who have not done any (or all, or much) of these things and their rating is above 1800, and there are those who have done all of these things and their rating never comes close to 1800.

Beyond that the author does not seem to be aware of the well-known debate on this subject.

There are at least, broadly, two views on chess improvement. One side, as represented by Silman and Aagaard, argues that chess "meta-knowledge" is key. A player must first look at the characteristics of the positions (e.g., understand Silman's imbalances), and with this understanding, and only then, can a suitable move be found. This group usually advocates a "thinking process" as well. The other side, as represented by Watson and Hendriks, argues that it is only the moves themselves that are important, and the correct move in many cases contradicts the "rules" of strategic analysis. For this group, only "concrete analysis" of a position (i.e., looking at the moves without prejudice) has any possibility of leading to a good move. In this "concrete analysis" group, at least Hendriks (if I understand him correctly) argues that in a tournament situation where there are significant time restrictions, and experimentally moving the pieces is not allowed, only knowing the position itself, or similar types of positions, can help the player find the correct move.

So, we have the "meta-knowledge" group advocating the learning of strategic and tactical ideas, and then applying that knowledge to a given position with proper thinking technique. Accordingly, this group believes that if you want to improve your chess, you need to learn more strategic and tactical ideas, applied with an improved thinking technique.

And we have the "concrete analysis" group advocating the learning of the correct move in specific positions. Accordingly, this group believes that if you want to get better at chess, then you must learn many hundreds, even thousands, of positions.

The truth is probably somewhere between the two extremes. My own experience is that as far as tournament OTB play is concerned, I have benefited more from the concrete analysis approach than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well the biggest obstacle to getting good at chess is finding a solid reason why it's worth pursuing, as opposed to getting good at something else (or doing nothing).

<comment><USER27> This is very relevant. In the past, Chess was _the_ highbrow game in the Western world--the one played and esteemed by those who believed themselves to be above the median. Becoming good at Chess was therefore a means to impress those people, and in turn everyone impressed by the opinions of those people. If you were good at Chess, you had at least one socially redeeming quality.

There was a brief period where the ultra-intelligent switched to the highbrow game of the Eastern world, Go, likely due to its greater difficulty at grandmaster levels, and its well-established handicapping system that allowed for entertaining games between people of different skill levels.

Now, there are thousands of games played by elites, and none of them have such a clear advantage that anyone would put their leaderboard position on their resume. I already know how to play Chess well enough to let my boss win (without making it obvious that I threw the game), and I have plenty of other games that I can play when I actually want to have fun.

So why would I spend any more time practicing just that one game? I could try to improve my Go ranking, or play Hive, or build a new M:tG deck, or get better at Risk.

Many of the reasons people had in the past to play Chess well are no longer applicable _exclusively_ to Chess.

<comment><USER28> >esteemed by those who believed themselves to be above the median

An interesting counter point to this idea:

[https://medium.com/message/why-chess-will-destroy-your- mind-...](https://medium.com/message/why-chess-will-destroy-your- mind-78ad1034521f)

<comment><USER27> That 1859 article-writer is lucky he lived before computers were invented.

His head would have exploded in moral outrage, from all the people engaged in non-productive amusements, to the general detriment of society.

Those who attempt to make other people ashamed of having fun are just the worst. I catch myself being judgmental and snarky sometimes, but in keeping with the nerd code, I have never intentionally tried to make someone else feel bad about themselves for liking something I don't like. My personal niche obsession might be infinitely superior to yours in all possible ways (in my opinion), but that doesn't make you a bad person. It just means you're from a different nerd tribe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>