Tony Buzan, Inventor of the "Mind Map", Has Died - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Buzan <comment><USER2> I am curious how other people have found mind mapping useful.

I only find it useful if the edges mean something logical, like cause/effect, or hierarchical like "A is the boss of B". But when it's merely drawing lines that imply some sort of fuzzy "is related" relationship, or "A makes me think of B", it only leads to a bunch of nodes and lines that are a jumble.

<comment><USER3> Mind maps are useful when you don't know what the structure is before hand. For instance, when I start a new job, I tend to mind map everything. I really have no idea how to organize concepts, names, computers/servers, etc. But, a mind map makes it very easy to reorganize as I gain more clarity. Eventually, I drop the map once I understand innately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> His books sounds like snake oil to me. Never found mnenmonics useful , only tricks to impress teachers and friends.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love mind maps and still use them regularly. I find them particularly good for marshalling my ideas at the start of a project when it's just important to get things written down somewhere and bash them into a sensble order and heirarchy. I also use them as quick single page summaries for revision of topics.

RIP Tony.

</comment><comment><USER6> Takes me back to my first year at university in 1979/80 when I used mind maps to take lecture notes. A valuable contribution to learning technology.

</comment><comment><USER7> Aw man. I've used them all through school. We were taught to, since like 2nd grade? Cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> Had completely forgotten about mind maps until the recent reference in Sex Education.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rest in peace, sir.

Shameless tribute plug: my mind map project - jumproot.com

<comment><USER10> That's more of an outlining tool than a mind map. An inner node should be able to connect back to any outer node to fully define a thought space.

<comment><USER9> Yes but I want to keep the tree view. Been trying to brainstorm ways to do a graph in a tree view (or something with similar attributes).

And believe me, I use this as a mind map daily.</comment></comment></comment>


IE9 being advertised as "Fast and Fluid" using Flash animations - <AUTHOR> http://ec.atdmt.com/ds/NMMRTSMGUINX/120629_FY13/INX_IE9_STND_Fast_Tomato_TN_FY13_300x600.swf?ver=1&amp

<comment><USER2> Kind of misleading to use the quotes from a year and a half ago, when it's no longer the case since IE9 doesn't get updated the way Chrome and FF do.</comment>


Repetition and Learning – misconceptions about effective studying - <AUTHOR> https://theeffortfuleducator.com/2020/06/08/repetition-and-learning/ <comment><USER2> I teach Sanskrit to adult enthusiasts. It is mind boggling how people think that they can learn a language by being a passive consumer - that I need to do all the talking while they just sit and listen and take notes. I repeatedly tell them you need to be a producer and not a mere consumer. Creating your own sentences forces you to actively recall what you have learnt and is going to be far more productive than reading what is written. (Though reading is important too in learning a new language.) Being a producer and "active recall" require both effort and time and people give up quickly. Only the tenacious ones remain and they are the ones who learn.

<comment><USER3> This is how I have learnt various languages - by speaking while learning. However, Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis expounds that language acquisition occurs only during exposure to new language and not while speaking. Do people who give up learning a language still understand what is being spoken by the other person in that lang, even if they themselves may not be able to construct a sentence?

<comment><USER4> > However, Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis expounds that language > acquisition occurs only during exposure to new language and not while > speaking.

I think exposure and actively speaking are the wrong categories - your learn a language by using it to participate in a common experience with another human being. For this, you both have to use the same protocol, and at the beginning, you have to figure out this protocol using a simpler fallback feedback protocol. This is something I am currently realizing as a father of a one-year old. This _involves_ of course exposure and speaking, but I strongly doubt that you could learn a language just by listening to it and re-producing the words. I expect this would only result in text/speech resembling GPT-2.

I also think that you can have a common experience _without_ actively producing text or speech, for example by watching a movie / TV show were you want to follow the story and participate in the lives of the actors. In fact, I know many people who effortlessly learned a second language by watching foreign movies and TV shows for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author doesn't seem to differentiate the different types of learning as they are defined in educational science: associative learning (think Pavlovs dogs salivating if the bell rings), instrumental learning (Skinners rats learning labyrinths for snacks), cognitive learning (grasping abstract concepts, like a "comment form", or "democracy"), and know-how, knowledge about processes, like driving a car, or successfully talking to a bank manager, or approaching a programming problem.

Rote repetition is indeed important for the first (and to a lesser degree the second) type of learning. These types of learning are what the famous forgetting curve experiments dealt with: aquiring non-sensical knowledge. It is mostly unneeded for cognitive learning, which usually happens by having those lightbulb moments when exposed to the concept. And learning about processes is done through practicing (which is different to rote repetition because it involves _meaning_ , i.e. the topic _makes sense_ ).

<comment><USER6> _It is mostly unneeded for cognitive learning, which usually happens by having those lightbulb moments when exposed to the concept._

Meaning? Spaced repetition still work there.

<comment><USER5> Let's use the concept "3D printer". Imagine time travelling 50 years into the past and wanting to get people to learn what that thing is. You would essentially show a single time how the plastic goes in, gets heated, and flows out in molten state, according to a pre-defined program.

Almost every human observer would have an instant lightbulb moment and would probably not forget this for years. The observing people would have instantly formed a mental model - the concept.

<comment><USER7> That works for the right level of novel concepts. But just because I understand the Taylor expansion of cosine doesn't mean I will remember it.

<comment><USER8> taylor of e goes something like 1 + x + x^/2! + x^3/3!...

Well if we look at cos and sin, we know that these correspond to e^x if x = i x So then it's easy to plug that in to the expression for e and get e^{i x} = 1 + ix - x^2/2! - i x^3/3! ... Taking the imaginary part gives us sin, and taking the real gives us cos.

So all we have to remember really is the pattern for e and to put ix instead of x. e^(ix) = sum((1/n!) * (ix)^n)

This was the Aha! that I got from a professor in my bachelors. Of course there's still like two or three things to remember, but it's a whole lot easier to unpack from there than to memorize the expansion of cos

<comment><USER7> Oh, I don't have problems deriving the Taylor expansion of anything. It's just that when I need it my main focus is on something else. My productivity has increased a lot since I started putting those often used things in Anki so I used could use them without having to look them up or derive them every time.

<comment><USER8> Of course. Yeah, what I was trying to illustrate is that with enough contextual knowledge the amount of things one has to memorize becomes comparatively smaller. Basically if one learns and remembers Euler's Identity and the expansion of e^x = (x^n)/(n!), then you don't really need to memorize the trigonometric expansions.

Reading over it I guess that may have been your initial point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Repetition can be incredibly useful. I can't imagine memorizing vocabulary or simple facts (when was FOO born?) without repetition. Of course, actually using the facts (or vocab) makes them stick better. But use is also repetition.

Just last night, I needed skk a bit but I couldn't remember how it works. I open the tutorial, see a familiar pair of kanji, type にゅうりょく into my dictionary, and get the pair (入力) back. I don't speak Japanese but I memorized some words sometime over a decade ago. I'm pretty sure I've never used this information anywhere and I only remember due to repetition.

Of course, tfa makes a distinction between repetition and retrieval practice, but to me they are pretty much the same thing -- they go hand in hand. Does anyone actually ever just read a thing over and over again hoping that it sticks? Without (say) closing ones eyes or stopping before a sentence to test if you remember the answer before you spoil it? I don't know if I've ever studied anything that way! And I don't think that people who claim repetition is key to remembering are talking about passive repetition with zero effort to recall. They're talking about active repetition, practice, and it goes hand in hand with recall.

<comment><USER10> > Repetition can be incredibly useful. I can't imagine memorizing vocabulary > or simple facts (when was FOO born?) without repetition. Of course, actually > using the facts (or vocab) makes them stick better. But use is also > repetition.

What exactly do you mean by repetition? If I'm memorizing vocabulary, repetition to me means recalling and writing the words down in some way (often according to some prompt or quiz). The repetition with this method works because of 1) recall strengthens the memory and 2) muscle memory of writing helps solidify it. But repetition by repeatedly reading? That simply doesn't work for me (and going by studies, it's a very poor strategy compared to retrieval/recall practice). Nobody who recommends retrieval practice says repetition by recall and producing it on paper (or however else) is a bad idea. Spaced repetition is also just a form of repetition. He doesn't demonize these forms of repetition.

Let's go back to what he said:

> One of these false beliefs is that repetition is the key to remembering; the > more someone encounters material, the better the likelihood of retaining the > information long-term. I can still remember, after receiving a test grade > that I wasn't thrilled with, believing that I would've done better if I'd > just gone over the material more times.

Key words are "the more someone encounters material" (note the passiveness) and he emphasizes it with his own experience of thinking how he should've "gone over the material more often". It's really not that uncommon. I knew plenty of people in school and even in university whose only conception of learning was reading, re-reading and highlighting and maybe making notes. It was sub-optimal in so many ways. So to pretend that nobody does it ("Does anyone actually ever just read a thing over and over again hoping that it sticks?") seems a bit ignorant to me of how many people simply never learn good studying strategies.

<comment><USER10> Btw, found this while I was looking at research

[https://www.apa.org/images/2016-06-psa-karpicke- fig2_tcm7-20...](https://www.apa.org/images/2016-06-psa-karpicke- fig2_tcm7-203617_w1024_n.jpg) (Source: [https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/06/learning- memor...](https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/06/learning-memory))

> An emphasis on getting knowledge in memory shows up on surveys of students' > learning strategies. In one survey (Karpicke, Butler & Roediger, 2009), > college students were asked to list the strategies they use while studying > and to rank-order the strategies. The results, shown in Figure 2, indicate > that students' most frequent study strategy, by far, is repetitive reading > of notes or textbooks. Active retrieval practice lagged far behind > repetitive reading and other strategies (for a review of several learning > strategies, see Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham, 2013). A > wealth of research has shown that passive repetitive reading produces little > or no benefit for learning (Callender & McDaniel, 2009). Yet not only was > repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy, it was also the > strategy most often listed as students' number one choice, by a large > margin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While the thesis is interesting and while there is probably some truth to it, the argument doesn't seem fair to me...

Sure if you repeat endlessly a task which is not related to the objective, it may fail to prove successful (without much surprise). However, if I repetitively compare images of one correct coin and one incorrect coin, I am pretty sure that I would improve in some way, without putting so much effort in the process. If every day someone recalls me the position of the nearest fire extinguisher, I will certainly learn this information at some point, once again without much effort.

And this type of wrong arguments can be reversed against the author thesis. Try to learn a new programming language while doing a one armed handstand, the difficulty will be way higher, however I doubt that it will generally improve your learning pace. Does that mean that difficulty is not a key to remembering? Nope, only that it is not per se a sufficient condition to remembering.

<comment><USER12> This is difficult to express, but that difficulty inherent to my process of describing my perspective to you is a motivator for me doing so. And that's where difficulty/challenge as a component of knowledge acquisition is important.

We memorize and recall within the limbic system. That's the same system that also facilitates our emotional and physical responses to stimuli. And as I see it (keep in mind I'm not a neuroscientist), increasing emotional activity alongside the task increases the overall allocation of physical energy to the limbic system. I believe this is the physical component that defines "flow", or the ability to be so immersed in an activity or series of activities that, as I am at this point in my writing, we forget time. (I need to go stir tea on the stove. One moment...)

Alright. Um, our ability to sustain enough engagement in something to optimize our retention of that activity is, I believe, critically dependent on emotion. Think of reading a law book. Now, think of reading a law book on accounting. Now, think of reading a law book on accounting while referencing the IRS.gov web site for available white papers. The further we venture into emotional detachment from the activity, the more willpower we need to engage, the more energy we deplete through continuous activation and reactivation as we doze off and have to return and restart a portion of the activity.

I agree though that the challenge has to be enjoyable. I'm not interested in learning a new programming language while doing a handstand. I am, however, interested in learning a new programming language if a boy I like also likes it and likes to talk about it, and I want a reason to talk to him more often. (I had a stint learning C++ for that reason. And it's still one of the best things I've done because it expanded my understanding of paradigms and language capabilities.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Repeatedly reading/hearing/etc something doesn't help you produce it, but the misconception isn't really the repetition, it's the reading. Repeatedly producing something does help with production. What's more interesting is that spaced repetition shows that increased frequency of repetition isn't actually better for long term memory, either.

The article would also benefit from a clear distinction between recognition and production of facts (memorization) and understanding concepts.

</comment><comment><USER14> In my experience this is not only true for memorizing theoretical knowledge but for physical skills too. For example, if you learn the piano simply playing pieces you know won't make you a better piano player. To get better practicing really has to be difficult. This can be achieved either by learning new pieces or by making the pieces you know more difficult to play (e.g. play them faster, try to play them in a different style etc.)

<comment><USER15> The same for dancing. And actually the situation with (casual) dance lessons is much much worse.

For musical arts we have vast instructions on fingering/stopping. But we have almost nothing for dancing. Dance teacher often can't explain in words what he/she expecting from the student and how exactly specific move must be performed. As a result 90% of casual dance students leave the field because of that faulty teaching process.

<comment><USER12> It's not a faulty teaching process. I'm white, and I can dance. Dance, at its super basic foundation, is about physical awareness. The same way you teach someone how to use a piece of gym equipment, hold a yoga pose, or even ride a bike.

What I think is difficult to describe in dance is how to communicate emotion through your body, not just your face. For me, the hardest thing to overcome there is this fear that someone will make fun of me for taking it too seriously. I don't know why I have this fear about becoming so immersed in something that other people think I'm cringeworthy. If it wasn't an issue, I'd pull every muscle in my body just to nail a routine to Celine's "My Heart Will Go On".

Maybe the fear of humiliation is the culprit winning out more often than most people will admit?

I now need to think about this. Like, that's a damn good song to me. And given that it's my life, my time given to a performance of it, why in the world am I concerned about a few assholes who think they're cooler than me in that moment?

<comment><USER2> >> I'm white, and I can dance.

Confused by this statement. What has your ethnicity got to do with dancing?

<comment><USER16> At least in the US it's a joke/stereotype that the white man can't dance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would argue that spaced repetition does work and it is based on repetition. That you can do that wrong by just 'browsing' over your learning material again and again, okay but i would still connect good learning with repetition.

</comment><comment><USER18> As someone very interested in this topic I don't get this article at all.

I've been studying Japanese for 10 years. That means learning and retaining thousands of characters, terms, pitch accents, multiple readings (about 2-10 per character), stroke orders, components of characters, example sentences, levels of politeness, etc.

He says one shouldn't just repeatedly look at the information, but quiz oneself. Even in school, as inefficient as our education system is, I wasn't told to just reportedly read the information. Instead, one should cover one part and guess it, so to speak. The whole spaced repetition aspect seems to be missing in this article however, and it also was missing in school, since you'd mostly be able to forget about things after the exam.

Looking at the penny example he seems to suggest that I should study the character 犬 by putting 太 next to it and ask "which one means dog?". I think this will only make you better at multiple choice tests and confuse you because you conflate unrelated knowledge with each other.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure you read the article with good faith.

After the penny example, he goes on to talk about how important retrieval and exertion is to solidifying memories.

> Quizzing/testing/assessing one's knowledge via answering recognition or > recall questions, for example, is more difficult than simply rereading > notes.

He then quotes:

> "Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We're easily > seduced into believing that learning is better when it's easier, but the > research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks > better." (5)

Going by what he says, I would suggest that his preferred learning strategy would be to, if you know you're going to be quizzed on what a penny looks like, try to recall what it looks like from memory. Then compare it to the actual penny, note what you got wrong, then try to recall it again. That's the kind of repetition and retrieval practice he's recommending in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Look at the image below and see if you can pick out the penny that is correct: It's quite difficult to do, right? And, surely, you've encountered the penny hundreds, if not thousands of times

Yes, but I don't _study_ the exact details of the penny. I was immediately able to identify any one of the images as "penny", which is what I would expect with the thousands of passing encounters I've had with it. I'm not sure this example gets the desired point across.

It might be more on point to have one group of students study several facts simply by reading them repeatedly, while a second group studies by recalling and using the facts in sentences. Then compare ability to recall the facts.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd argue that association is what drives memory. I can review something a million times and still forget it.

It's when I sit down, focus, and "feel" the meaning of the thing that I remember it thereafter.

<comment><USER21> It is incredibly difficult to remember something that you don't understand. In fact, your memory often elides things that you don't understand to the point where you will swear that something never happened when, in fact, it did. Statistically speaking, repetition is required for learning, but _understanding_ is at least as important. In fact, sometimes if you can find no meaning for something, it helps to make up a meaning (for example the use of mnemonics).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wondered why nobody has mentioned 'deliberative practice' yet when the article emphasizes some of its basic elements such as the importance of cognitive effort for learning.

</comment><comment><USER23> The article is 100% about passive vs active studying and approximately 0% about repetition. Repetition is briefly touched on by pointing out that if you're 100% passively receiving information, then repetition doesn't help. The effect of repetition on active study is never brought up.</comment>


A Google Nexus Tablet for $199 - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57406321-94/a-google-nexus-tablet-bad-news-for-android-partners/ Is it really that bad decision for Google? <comment><USER2> I don't think the Nexus tablet is a bad idea at all. In fact I think it was a bad idea _not_ to do it before the Kindle Fire arrived, and before the Touchpad firesale. Instead they started out with the Motorola Xoom, a $800 tablet (at launch). Big mistake. Then the $300 set top box, and then the $450 Chromebook. It's like there's a pattern here, with Google not really getting what's the right price for an initial launch of a new product - and always going too high. But this $199 Nexus tablet shows that they are learning.

Besides doing this a little late, my other complaint is that this 7" tablet will do almost nothing to bring more tablet-optimized apps to the Android tablet ecosystem - unless Google is specifically asking developers to make "tablet apps" for that 7" tablet.

But other than that, this is very welcome, even if their partners might not be thrilled about it - but in the end, the Nexus line has always been about _pushing_ their partners and setting new standards. Most of them still refuse to make such low-priced tablets, so if anything it's their fault for not doing it earlier.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I buy? Macbook Air or Dell XPS 13? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a Linux (well, Unix based) laptop for programming. XPS 13 is too tempting. How does it compare with Macbook Air in terms of performance (mainly SSD)? Also, would you recommend getting XPS 13 and installing Linux? or get the XPS 13 Developer Edition?
I have not used Mac yet and am not a fanboy of Apple (yet!). Anyone who has used both?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> At the risk of sounding like a Carlsberg advert, XPS13 is probably the best laptop I have ever used (if not the best computer).

Still has windows 10 on it (my only windows machine) since I need occasionally to use the latest versions of office, and I use eclipse for the odd bit of programming I need to do away from my main dev machine (common workspace with linux is awesome).

Macbook Air was good, in 2008. couple of the staff use them.

Be aware, unlike the Macs the different versions of the XPS13 over the years are very different machines. Only this years model has the 14 hour battery life for example. But many stores (such as Amazon) stock old models.

I was actually commenting to collegues last week that Dell appear to have become the world leader in "real" computing - laptop, desktop and server. They have a lot of skeletons to shake though before they are perceived that way.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am also looking for a computer to buy. Looks like the 13 Mac book pro with retina display is a better value for the money.

I found the dell xps 13 very expensive and heard some people with wi-fi issues.

Both Mac book pro and air seem to be close to change so it might be worth to wait for their next version.

I don't know other brands that people use with Linux.

At the moment I am using a Toshiba that I bought very cheap with i3 and 8gb of ram running Ubuntu 16 and everything just works... Damn marketing/consumer instinct making me want to buy a more powerful machine.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you have a Microsoft Store and Apple Store nearby, just go check them out in person and decide for yourself. I have both and prefer the XPS 13 hardware, mainly the high resolution display with almost no bezel, but both are great.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have an rMBP13 (2015) and have been given a new XPS 13 at work. I'm an Apple fan, and prefer my macbook but I'd go for the XPS 13 - I think the MBA is a bad buy at this point. The XPS 13 has great hardware (it looks so small compared to my rMBP and has a 13" screen still), that display is fantastic and performs great. I can't give anything non-subjective about the SSD but it feels as fast as my rMBP unless Windows is doing something stupid. I don't use the built in keyboard much because it's usually docked at work, but when I've used it it feels good - I haven't used it enough to compare to Apple though. The trackpad is good, and gestures work, which is more than I've ever seen from a non-Apple laptop. I haven't tested the battery at all, obviously MBA's is amazing in practice.

All my complaints are with software (Windows specifically), so just make sure your Linux distro behaves sensibly with a 3200x1800 screen and whatever external monitors you want (Windows doesn't).

</comment><comment><USER6> I recommend going for the thinkpad carbon x1, it's the same form factor of Mac air, looks better in my opinion and has one of the best keyboards on a laptop that size, not to mention it's developer friendly (has actual page up/down, home/end keys). I'm running Ubuntu on mine (3rd gen) without problems. The 4th gen ones can take 16gb ram as well.

<comment><USER7> Just a quick question !

How would you put ubuntu on it ? I have tried changing the boot partition to GRUB and somehow windows still ends up loading !

like how is that even possible ??

<comment><USER8> I guess you need to do a boot repair. All you need is the same bootable flash drive and follow instructions online as to how to repair GRUB. This kind is think l thing happens a lot, happened with me too. If the problem persists, contact me, I'll mail the steps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It depends on what kind of programming do you do, to be honest. I am using an X230 since ~ 10 months, specs maxed (16 GiB RAM, 256 GiB SSD, i5, Intel Graphics Card).

Well, I can:

\- run many VMs

\- browsing using this monster of RAM named Chromium

\- have as many terminals as I wish

\- work on frontend projects (React.js, jQuery, Browserify, Webpack)

\- work on backend projects (NGINX, uWSGI, Node.js, Gunicorn)

As for the battery, it depends on how do you use it and what do you install on it. I run on i3, and with my average workload, it can survive ~ 3 - 4 hours. A friend can survive ~ 8 hours, but he has _different_ way to work (no Chromium process, etc…).

The key is what do you want to do? Machine learning? Native programming? Mobile programming?

For example, it makes sense to get a Mac to do React Native / iOS development.

But, the other way: it makes sense to get a ThinkPad / UNIX-friendly machine to do Linux kernel development IMHO.

Anyway! Good luck with your hunt! :)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is going to sound overdramatic, but looking at that Dell logo staring back at me for 10+ hours per day would be unbearable. I would give surprisingly more consideration to the machine if they removed branding on the inside (like Apple does).

</comment><comment><USER11> I used Dell XPS 13 Late 2013 model (with Ubuntu installed), and now I'm using rMBP13. Main difference for me was noise: I was surprised how silent macbook pro is compared to Dell XPS . For XPS it was enough to run something even slightly more CPU hungry even for couple of seconds and you already hear quite loud CPU fan noise. I got used to it, but when moved to rMBP13, I was pleasantly surprised how silent this machine is, even considering that CPU was way more powerful on rMBP laptop. so I highly recommend checking CPU fan on new Dell XPS 13, just to make sure you will not be annoyed by loud fans.

</comment><comment><USER12> I got an HP Spectre 360 .. loving it. Get a USB docking station, an external keyboard and mouse. Awesome dev setup. Oh .. I was an avid Mac user before. Was in the same situation as you. I also thought the only alternatives were Mac or Dell XPS. I then had to waste an hour at a best buy and spent time with all the machines they had in stock. Liked the HP one the best. It has a finicky touchpad but I was able to adjust the trackpad settings to make it usable. Finally ... I recommend Windows Signature edition so you don't have to deal with too much third party bloat.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have you considered ThinkPad X1? I got one and I'm really happy with it.

<comment><USER14> I'm don't think anyone should buy from IBM after they bundled malware with that one laptop

<comment><USER15> This is like switching cable company and expecting to get better service ;(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Have an XPS13 Dev edition. Really solid and great hardware, especially considering the price you pay for it. As many have said the MBA is overpriced and have old hardware, definitely not worth.

</comment><comment><USER17> We have a Dell XPS 13 (9343) (originally came with Windows) at work. I used Ubuntu on it and couldn't get the display set up so that menus on IDEs etc. was a readable size. Attaching an external display was a disaster. Then a colleague took it over and put Windows 10 on it. Exact same issue. Anyone else experience this?

</comment><comment><USER18> If you are in the US and decide on the XPS 13 Costco has the i7 version with 16GB and a 512GB SSD for $1399.99 through today. And after that it is $1599.99 which is still hundreds less than buying through Dell. If you join Costco just for the deal you end up way ahead. Costco also doubles the warranty to 2 years. If you are already a member or know one you don't need to go to a Costco the deal is available on their website. $14.95 for shipping.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm in a similar situation to yours and been reading some positive reviews about this [https://slimbook.es/](https://slimbook.es/)

They seem to be very responsive in terms of doubts, questions, etc. but as most small companies their main disadvantage is brand awareness when compared to Dell or Apple. But of course this is greatly compensated by a cheaper price.

<comment><USER20> That looks like a MacBook Air clone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would always recommend a MacBook. I used to always stick with various non- Macbook laptops (Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, etc). I switched to a MBP a few years ago and don't think I can go back. Have bought 5-6 different MacBooks since.

<comment><USER22> For the MBP I think there is no argument. The OP is asking about the MBA though, and then it gets trickier because Apple is still shipping it with that godawful 1440x900 screen. Computers like the XPS 13 have really leapfrogged Apple in that respect. There are still a lot of pluses in the MBA's column but having used high-DPI screens, I couldn't go back to that one. Don't forget that Dell ships the "Developer Edition" with reasonably robust driver support out of the box.

<comment><USER23> > because Apple is still shipping it with that godawful 1440x900 screen

This. The MBA is fine for most things I do; in fact I prefer a slower CPU if it gives me more battery life. But the screen is so bad I regret getting the MBA anytime I look at a different screen, including phones.

edit: however, I recommend the MBP. I've only had bad experiences with Linux on laptops, which I have to use for work. HiDPI sucks on Linux. You'll get conflicting advice, most of which is useless because maybe the person telling you <Linux dist> is the best" really likes tweaking <Linux dist>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yeah these days if you want a linux laptop you're going to have a better experience either installing linux under bootcamp on a macbook, or getting a laptop with linux pre-installed, or getting a chromebook and running ubuntu under crouton. The dual boot days are basically over. If you have windows often its boot load locked into windows10. You can run bash ubuntu under windows 10 now, but you still have the overhead of running windows10 itself compared to the speed and efficiency of running a linux desktop like xfce.

<comment><USER25> Highly recommend the Asus zenbook. Was able to run Ubuntu right out of the box with everything working aside from having to rebind the screen brightness keys.

<comment><USER26> +1 for the Zenbook. I've got a UX31A (which uses the same body as the Air) and I've been running Ubuntu pretty much stock for 3 years on it. Best ultra- portable I've had (had a couple of the older XPS 13's but not the newest)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The main reason for going Mac IMHO is the OS which feels like 2016 compared to Linux. If that's not what you want go for the XPS

<comment><USER28> And I see it totally reversed. I see OS X as a pile of junk that has not been updated since 10.1.

<comment><USER29> > OS X ... has not been updated since 10.1

That is false. If you decide to take an extreme position to attract attention or vent, at least say something intelligent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> you could also install linux on a mac ( macbook pro ), last time I looked at a mac it was possible.

</comment><comment><USER31> Dell should you buy-out

</comment><comment><USER32> Dell should you buy thanx</comment>


There's a lot to learn about how blue light affects our eyes - <AUTHOR> https://www.popsci.com/screens-killing-eyes-blue-light <comment><USER2> (f.lux author here): the initial part of this press cycle was effectively scare-mongering, and was later mostly retracted by Karunarathne. See [https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/17/17724658/screen-time- blue...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/17/17724658/screen-time-blue-light- blindness-science)

This (older) article says: "we don't spend that much time staring at the sun". But just seeing the blue sky gives your retina about 50x the dose of blue light (hazard) as a normal LED display.

Blue light hazard is generally considered to be "reciprocal" which means for most doses, you can measure total energy (power * time). So it is easy to argue that one hour spent outdoors ( _not_ staring at the sun, just doing normal stuff) gives you more dose than 12 hours at a computer. So for light seen during the day, nobody has yet shown that seeing a computer is harmful, and the risk should be lower than spending an hour outdoors.

At night, it's another story, and there is not clear evidence here. The retina experiences daily circadian rhythms, and so risks to your eye may be enhanced by bright light seen at night. Less light at night is good for your circadian clock, and it is almost certainly good for your eyes too.

<comment><USER3> OT: I used flux ages ago. You seem still to be active since you intro'd yourself als the flux guy. Out of curiosity, why should anyone still use flux nowadays when all OSes have time-based red-shifting built-in?

<comment><USER4> A greater deal of blue filtering was available on f.lux last time I used it. Unfortunately since it did not allow for setting hours other than the local sunrise and sunset times, it wasn't useful to someone like me that suffers light exposure insomnia during the months with longer daylight hours. Even though my home has been setup to accommodate this, f.lux, at least last time I used it, would not. The built in feature in my OS happily lets me choose for myself when to filter blue instead of denying me that choice.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like you've moved on so this likely isn't useful, but f.lux lets you override the GPS coordinates, so you could likely just negate your latitude to shift to your location's winter schedule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lots more information about this in Richard Feynman's Color Vision lecture:

[http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_35.html](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_35.html)

<comment><USER7> Wow, I just read the first section (four or five paragraphs) and learned two new things already. Is this representative of Feynman's writings? The level of both clarity and information is impressive.

<comment><USER8> If you haven't yet read Feynman, you're in for a treat. It's not common at all to find someone with both great domain knowledge and great communication skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Android 9, and maybe 8 but I never checked, offers an opacity setting.

I leave the filter on, and the setting to a point where I see an overall display color temp close to the old NTSC value: 6,500k. Being an 80's kid, values centered on 6,500 were common. I remember the shift upward becoming more common. It was intense!

For people who were viewing during the cooler periods, warmer displays are something one can feel. It is a lot like the feeling one gets when stepping outside after a long, device free, period indoors.

A 6,500 ish display temp presents an orange tint when compared to most device defaults seen today. For me, this is almost unnoticeable after a brief time. I adapt quickly and basically become unaware.

A nice, darker phone theme helps.

I really like the warmer settings, but they do have an impact on me. Sleep and eye fatigue. For most things I find I just do not care and will save a really warm session for a movie, or other special time.

</comment><comment><USER10> I bought a monitor with a "Low Blue Light" feature built-in. At first I didn't use it, but after reading up on it I decided to give it shot. I have three monitors on my desk so I reduced the blue on the other two manually.

It was a bit hard to get used to at first, it seemed to make things a bit more green to me, but after about a week I switched it off and it only took a few minutes to notice the difference. My eyes felt a lot more strained with it turned off.

If I were doing graphic work I suppose I'd have to turn it off, but I'm not so I don't worry much about how it effects the little bit of UI work I do.

<comment><USER11> Do these monitor features have any advantage over f.lux, Windows/Apple Night Light, or similar software implementations that work on any monitor?

<comment><USER12> Well, for one thing they (at least in ASUS's case) appear to do the opposite of Night Light / flux by subtracting the blue channel rather than increasing the red channel. This means at first the image looks a tad green/yellow-er, but you get used to it much more than Night Light's red tint. I've had it for a year now, mostly on the highest level (certified as "70% blue light reduction") and I still sometimes check that it's on. (But once you see the onscreen UI in a blue-ish white it's very obvious)

My eyes also get a lot less fatigued with it on compared to OS features/flux, even after tuning my monitor & room brightness accordingly with a colorimeter.

A lot of it might come down to certification and blue light reduction methods at the monitor level. In ASUS's case they claim to be certified by TUV Rheinland[1].

[1] [https://www.asus.com/Microsite/display/eye_care_technology/](https://www.asus.com/Microsite/display/eye_care_technology/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mentioning Flux - a free blue light reducing app that is beautiful and functional - as I'm always surprised how many people haven't heard of it.

Takes exactly 5 mins to get used to it and after working with flux on I'm amazed how overwhelming default monitor settings feel.

[https://justgetflux.com/](https://justgetflux.com/)

<comment><USER14> On Windows the pointer remains white so once you get used to the rest of the screen (a few minutes the first time, and pretty much instantaneous thereafter), the pointer appears to take on this very potent blue. Switching flux off at this point is damn near blinding, so it is definitely having a profound effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "But ophthalmologists aren't worried. The blue light emanating from the sun drastically overpowers any rays coming from your screen. And so far, all of the research on how real human eyes react to blue light has failed to link screens to permanent damage of any kind. Blue light's most concerning effects still seems limited to sleeplessness."

OK, so what else is there to learn?

</comment><comment><USER16> My normal glasses have the blue light filter, not my sunglasses though.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you us any Hacker News extesions? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Nope but I want one for Firefox mobile to make certain things more thumb friendly like upvoting or collapsing threads

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I had added a text to the `url` field when creating this post, but it appears it's not included. Let me paste it below.

I have started to follow Hacker News more than ever, and a few challenges that I have are: no dark mode, when creating a discussion, there is no easy way to add new lines (no multi-line input field), hard to identify OP's comments in a thread, etc. In other words, I am generally wondering if there are extensions out there to improve the default HN experience.

<comment><USER3> > when creating a discussion, there is no easy way to add new lines (no multi- > line input field)

What do you mean? The text field on [https://news.ycombinator.com/submit](https://news.ycombinator.com/submit) is five lines and scrolls if you add more lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, thanks! I was using the bookmarklet to create text posts. The submit link that you shared does seem to have a multi-line input.</comment></comment></comment>


Physics is stuck - <AUTHOR> https://www.salon.com/2020/09/06/physics-is-stuck--and-needs-another-einstein-to-revolutionize-it-physicist-avi-loeb-says/ <comment><USER2> Whenever I see headlines like this, I'm reminded that physics has a communication problem where the public thinks that high energy physics is the only type (or the only worthy type) of physics out there. There's a lot more to the field than the next theory of everything, and those other fields aren't stuck

For instance, in just this decade human kind turned on the first x-ray free electron laser and increased the state of the art in the brightness of x-ray sources by 10 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE!!! I'm not sure I can fully explain how transformational that level of improvement was because I work on the accelerator side, not the user side. But, at least understand that there are entire subfields that now exist which didn't before. Not just physics, but in biology, chemistry, materials science, and numerous other fields. It's an instrument so powerful that every other scientifically advanced nation is now building their own. That instrument was developed by physicists and not high energy physicists.

I feel that this also gets at a sort of toxic notion that I've noticed some high energy physicists in my own department have (not all, but you probably know the people that I'm talking about). The notion is that if you aren't working on 12 dimensional quantum theories of gravity or the holographic principle and black hole physics, then you aren't a real physicist. Somehow they think that if your work has a real world impact, then it's tainted in some way. I'm not sure how it's gotten this way, but I've actually been told as much by another grad student that my field should be moved to the engineering department because we aren't doing real physics.

<comment><USER3> So... why is the XFEL _not_ "just" an achievement in engineering? Is there a (new) physics somewhere in it? (Genuinely curious.)

<comment><USER2> I forget who said it, but there is a quote in physics along the lines of "we already have a theory of practically everything, but it is so complicated that we can use it to predict almost nothing."

All of basic principles that underlie our everyday experiences don't need quarks and gluons. They're governed by standard quantum mechanics which was fleshed out in the 20's. However, just because we have Newton's laws of the subatomic world doesn't mean we can answer interesting scientific questions with them. I'd even say that people that call something like the standard model a "theory of everything" are a little naive since you can never use to it make predictions outside of the most simple systems.

That area (pushing ahead away from model systems) is the complexity frontier of physics and is where I'm most excited for advancements. It's where we can write out the equation that describes high-TC superconductors, but it has so many dimensions that we can't solve it and make one that works at room temperature. Is that engineering or physics? I'd call the scientific problem of figuring out the laws that emerge from quantum mechanics for these complicated systems physics.

In a similar vein, Maxwell "discovered" the free electron laser in the 1800s. He wrote down the laws of E&M and then everything in the world was solved. That's clearly a dumb way to think of it though, and the new physics that was discovered were the emergent laws that fall out of it when you apply those laws to a system of relativistic particles.

In particular, the emergent phenomena that had to be discovered for the free electron laser (FEL) was the micro-bunching instability. It's a subtle interaction between relativistic particles and a field of photons that will feedback and cause them to bunch together while dumping their energy into the field of light producing the coherent laser radiation. It was that phenomena and the realization that it could be used to create a powerful laser that are the new physics here.

On the other side, the advancement of the FEL to the point that it could make x-rays requires a lot of other new physics to create the machine. This is where there is a bit of a blurred line between physics and engineering. However, I'd still call what we're doing (developing new laws of physics that govern complex systems) physics. Just because we use them to build a machine doesn't make them engineering any more than a solid state physicist discovering a new phenomena in semiconductors and then Intel taking advantage of it in their next generation of processors.

In order to REALLY understand our physical world, we can't write down reductionist laws and say that we're done. It's also notable that the two developers of the free electron laser are rumored to be in the running for the Nobel prize in physics, so it's not just me who thinks that they are physicists, not engineers.

Edit: BTW, here is a great paper that reviews the physics that makes a free electron laser work if anyone is interested.

Huang, Z., & Kim, K.-J. (2007). Review of x-ray free-electron laser theory. Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams, 10(3), 034801. [https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.10.034801](https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.10.034801)

<comment><USER4> > I forget who said it

Paul Dirac. The quote is:

"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Physics doesn't need another Einstein. Einstein explained Brownian motion, the Photoelectric effect, created special relativity and general relativity, the cosmological constant, helped found quantum mechanics, served as an invaluable critic of quantum mechanics. Then he foundered. Einstein never accepted particle physics, refused to follow new developments and became a dinosaur. This sadly is what most "physicists" are doing today, the followed in Einstein's footsteps, mostly the dinosaur part.

What does physics need? The world doesn't know. Nobody knows but someone will do it, someday in a manner no one else thought possible or could really anticipate. In fact, that's not entirely true but new developments will happen and only a handful of people will be in the loop. Lorenz, Poincare etc. e.g. laid some vital groundwork for relativity.

My own two cents on the matter is that we really don't understand our theories well enough and are badly in need of a firmer foundation. The situation is analogous to calculus before Weierstrass, Cauchy, Dedekind and Cantor.

Of course, mathematics wasn't completely stuck just because calculus wasn't fully developed. Probability and non-Euclidean geometry were stunning developments which predated a truer understanding of real numbers.

So it is with physics right now. Unification, strings, etc. isn't working out so well right now. Quantum computing is now a thing and Quantum mechanics is enjoying a second revolution not unlike the General Relativity Renaissance led by Penrose, et. al.

We can't predict the future. We don't know the sequence things we need to take the next step in AI or even if there is one. Will some form of deep learning be all we need? Probably not but possibly yes.

Physics is right where it should be. Frustration is part of the process. We're feeling some pain because our approach isn't working. Instead of having answers to everything maybe we should focus on better questions.

<comment><USER6> I'm not a physicist or even a researcher of anything but I sometimes watch youtube videos of people experimenting with material sciences and chemistry and a trend I have seen is that even things that we consider to be very basic have a huge lack of good quality information available.

One youtuber I saw spends time looking at new research papers for ideas and has found that they are just impossible to reproduce. Following the steps exactly as well as every possible variation doesn't produce anything close to the results described in the paper. In another video [0] he attempts to make glass and finds that almost all of the information available on the internet about making glass is not enough to actually make glass since they contain only enough information to register a patent but not enough to make from scratch.

I wonder if we will see huge gains by just making complete and unobfiscated information available to the public since it looks like even the foundations of society are secret company internal information.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcUy7SqdS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcUy7SqdS0)

<comment><USER7> The world should have a "crafting" wiki, which explains how to build anything from scratch.

From how to make glass from sand to how to build a quantum computer.

<comment><USER8> Would the crafting wiki contain instructions for crafting the wiki itself?

(An attempt at humour referencing the "set of all sets" paradox. That is all, as you were.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://cns.physics.gatech.edu/ChaosBook/extras/CNYang.html](http://cns.physics.gatech.edu/ChaosBook/extras/CNYang.html)

"In the next ten years, the most important discovery in high-energy physics is that 'the party's over'."

<comment><USER10> Can you explain for a layman what that means?

<comment><AUTHOR> Experiments needed to confirm "fundamental" physics predictions (eg. large accelerators a la CERN) too costly to be pragmatic, or at least to continue the tradition of timely theory-experiment interplay.

Bear in mind though that the comment was made in the 1980s; people on both sides will debate how prescient he was.

Some background and counterpoints in the context of the proposed Chinese super-collider:

[http://ias.ust.hk/ias/files/pdf/1508403651_b2.pdf](http://ias.ust.hk/ias/files/pdf/1508403651_b2.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let's finish working on our current experiments first, and _then_ declare that we're stuck. We have particle accelerators, gravitational-wave telescopes, solar probes, and planetary probes which we're either still building or still operating, and we haven't finished falsifying-or-verifying all of our predictions.

It's certainly wrong to imagine that we need a Great Man in order to come and fix everything. Perhaps we need a Great Insight, but also perhaps the insight has already been published and it simply hasn't been well-adopted yet. After all, people are still today fighting against basic century-old quantum mechanics, hoping that reality is more material and determined than it actually is.

<comment><USER12> It is hard to believe how entrenched locality and realism are in physics. A semester of philosophy should bury them for good. A more modern concern is Boltzmann brains, but those too should offer no barrier to a philosophically aware mind. Perhaps a mere PhD or decade of contemplation would enlighten them to mysteries of the anthropic principle.

<comment><USER13> The anthropic principle is one thing, but Boltzmann brains is so close to solipsism that it's worthless for scientific inquiry. While some philosophy background should be mandatory for physicists, I don't see why they should waste so much of their time on Boltzmann brains ?

<comment><USER12> It is a decent model for ontology, and ontology is good training for observing cause and effect. We grow up to make a lot of erroneous assumptions so we need to train to become good observers. Basically wrestling with the idea lets you observe some of your own biases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of Philip Anderson's testimony against the funding of superconducting super collider.

(need to register to read the article) [https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion- old/the-case-against-t...](https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-old/the-case- against-the-ssc-63734)

Incentives in academia seems to be directed towards bringing in grant money. I like Barto and Sutton's discussion of 'nomadic' researchers (8:54, but the entire video is great):

[https://www.coursera.org/lecture/sample-based-learning- metho...](https://www.coursera.org/lecture/sample-based-learning-methods/andy- barto-and-rich-sutton-more-on-the-history-of-rl-1riMx)

I don't know if this is a positive or negative for scientific progress, but, those are just two links that add perspective to academic research/funding.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have read that in the 1800s the upper crust were being told to not allow their children to pursue a career in Physics. The commonly held view was that Newton had uncovered all the good bits and there was really nothing left to discover.

Then someone asked "What are those blue sparks I see when I take off my jumper (sweater) in a dark bedroom?"

We just need to find the next sparks. :)

<comment><USER16> This is an anecdote usually told about Max Planck (and may have originally been recounted by Planck!) and his adviser, Philipp von Jolly. Some decent sourcing here:

[https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2129/who-said- that-e...](https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2129/who-said-that- essentially-everything-in-theoretical-physics-had-already-been-dis)

Electricity was a subject of intense study throughout the 19th century and before (think of the people we've named units and effects after - Galvano, Volta, Ampere, Ohm, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a PhD in physics but work on sustainability -- what I consider the most important role for someone who understands nature today. I constantly meet people who are surprised to find that turning on a light in their homes causes fossil fuels to be burned. Their ignorance is their business, but the greenhouse gases become everyone's.

<comment><USER18> Can I ask what you're working on specifically? As a lapsed graduate-level physicist turned entrepreneur, problems related to climate change have been making me frantically search for a place where I can make meaningful contributions.

<comment><USER17> Nearly everyone says we know what to do, we just lack the will to do it. We lack leadership -- not telling people facts, figures, doom, gloom, and instructions. That's management, which is important, but leadership -- helping people do what they want to but haven't figured out how. No leaders or people with authority understand nature and I think it's easier for scientists to learn leadership than leaders to learn science.

I support more science, but it's overwhelmingly clear. We don't need more science to create a vision and strategy. People need to feel meaning and purpose, to have an expectation of success. That comes from what leaders work on -- stories, images, role models, systems, emotions, and culture.

So I focus on leadership -- bringing what people like Mandela, Eisenhower, Ali, and Deming brought but I don't see anyone doing today. My TEDx talks [https://joshuaspodek.com/tedx](https://joshuaspodek.com/tedx) and podcast illustrate what I'm working on, though I've advanced a lot since then.

Here are podcast episodes describing my strategy:

\- [https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the- environment/episod...](https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the- environment/episodes/224-clarifying-my-strategy)

\- [https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the- environment/episo...](https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the- environment/episodes/301-does-it-scale-my-modified-tesla-strategy)

\- [https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the- environment/episod...](https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the- environment/episodes/260-creating-the-muhammad-ali-of-the-environment)

\- [https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the- environment/episo...](https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the- environment/episodes/310-the-start-and-end-of-any-serious-conversation-on-the- env)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems to me that the idea of supersymmetry will have the same fate as the idea of an aether. But physics wasn't stuck at the heydays of the aether theory and it is also not stuck now. There is much more to physics than just supersymmetry:

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

But maybe some fresh ideas from other fields of physics are necessary for particle physics. The problem it seems to me is that the people working in high energy physics and string theory are often very narrow minded and are ignoring important developments outside of their own field.

</comment><comment><USER8> The time for another Einstein will only be after there has been another Michelson–Morley experiment.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, Einstein did not know about (or even had a need in) the Michelson- Morley experiment when he created SR.

<comment><USER20> That's unclear—Einstein himself made contradictory remarks on this. See [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1974Obs....94...81J](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1974Obs....94...81J)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've always been amaZed by the collaboration and synthesis of ideas that happened during Einstein's time. Consider how important and contributive the following were to the famous relativity theories and the other names involved -

\- Mach's principle

\- Michelson - Morley experiment

\- Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism

\- minkowsky space-time

\- Lorentz transformations

\- Riemann's geometry

\- Ricci curvature tensor

\- Christoffel's connection symbols

\- Newton's observation and attempt to account for the perihelion precession of mercury's orbit (not to mention his motion and gravity laws in the first place)

\- Schwarzschild's solution to the field equations

\- Kerr metric and solutions

\- .. and amongst all that we have the Einstein field equations

<comment><USER22> Yes. It seems that folks forget that Einstein didn't invent all this things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> See also the (now decade old) book The trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin.

<comment><USER24> I prefer Woit's _Not Even Wrong,_ which has a lot of interesting historical detail and personal anecdote, in addition to the headline polemic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here is a similar article on powerful members of a scientific community seizing control of the mainstream view and inhibiting scientific progress:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225)

</comment><comment><USER26> Around when Einstein started there were only a few unsolved problems in physics. One gave up quantum mechanics, another relativity. That was basically chance.

Maybe dark matter research will just find dark matter and yield neither more questions nor useful applications. Maybe it will yield a whole new area of enquiry with 1001 useful applications.

We just don't know. No one should assume that X Hours/Dollars/Papers in physics represents an actual amount of "discovery".

</comment><comment><USER27> Physics needs more data, this is not a single person effort. Actually i'm those who believe this a golden edge for Physics and the constraint is not having another single brilliant guy but resources that could help us validate even further or break what its already known.

</comment><comment><USER28> Shout out to the sophons from Trisolaris interfering with research.

<comment><USER29> I always thought it interesting that Liu was tacitly saying that new breakthroughs in physics can only be done in places like CERN with a LHC-like project. Humans couldn't make theoretical breakthroughs anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In some sense, the modern institute of science is somewhat like an orthodox church: a few pre-approved lines of thinking with a swift punishment for heretics.

This is the biggest strength of science: this rigidness of thought is what protects it from clever charlatans. But this is also its biggest weakness because this risk-averse behavior, when scientists can't risk saying unapproved things without torpedoing their own reputation, is why science makes only tiny steps. Right now physics has reached a rather big obstacle on its way and the usual risk-averse-one-tiny-step-at-a-time tactics won't work.

<comment><USER31> Wasn't it always like that? If someone actually believes in non-orthodox ideas will simply face the backlash, follow the path anyway and later be recognized for the extraordinary accomplishments if these ideas turn out to be worth the salt.

It's much better to give a hard time to dedicated people than to risk giving an easy time to charlatans.

Since you can't really judge novel ideas, you can make the process just hard enough that charlatans drop out to some area where they can get fame and money for cheaper.

<comment><USER8> One of the challenges with unorthodox ideas is that occasionally some of them lead to great new understandings, but it's a very low signal-to-niose ratio. The orthodoxy can perhaps be excused for their reluctance for entertainment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Fluff 'science' from Salon is not exactly a resounding endorsement for the article's content.

</comment><comment><USER33> We need a research satellite around Mars to better understand long range forces. The immediate problem is being bound to Earth distance experiments, including astronomy from two long range reference points. Also need a Venus or Sol orbit solar satellite with a massive capacitor on it for doing obscenely high power experiments.

<comment><USER34> What would you want studied with that satellite? Which forces?

afaik gravity is pretty well studied by predicting the planets

<comment><USER35> Gravity is poorly tested at the smallest scales: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3588.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3588.pdf) . Perhaps space based experiments could help. I also think astronomy would greatly improve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Physics is stuck

I agree.

> needs another Einstein to revolutionize it

Nope. The smartest minds today need to work on two topics: AI/AGI, and anti- aging/longevity

Once these two problems are cracked, we'd be on a smoother transition path towards Type-1 Kardashev civilization.

Then the smartest (long-living) minds can sit down with their favorite AGI collaborators in their ivory towers and have all the fun they want to have.

<comment><USER37> Although another 'Einstein' making breakthroughs is totally possible, AGI gives me a lot of solace as a sort of back-up plan.

If we have indeed hit some type of human wall, AGI at least gives us some long term option to potentially leap it.

I'm not sure how much longevity research would help on that front, given the age distribution of scientists making breakthroughs, but it's nice in its own right.

<comment><USER36> The longevity is really healthful and youthful longevity, not longevity for its own sake.

I recommend looking into longevity forums, SENS foundation, Aubrey de Grey talks, etc, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff - <AUTHOR> http://lewsblog.newrelic.com/2010/07/29/how-to-support-5000-customers-with-no-support-staff/

<comment><USER2> 32 people is not a small company any more, and if every engineer you've got is also a support person on call for your customers you can't really say you don't have support staff, just that you don't have dedicated customer support employees.

The article does make a very good point though, the best way to reduce customer support is to improve product quality.

Customer support is one of the few areas in a virtual enterprise that does not scale, the costs can very quickly eat up your revenues.

<comment><USER3> i came here to say basically the same thing. "no support staff" is not the same as using engineers as support staff.

i was expecting more of an article on a startup of 2 cofounders who are managing things themselves.

<comment><USER4> So was I. But technically "No Support Staff" means no one, on staff, doing any support. Thus the customers would have to use a stack exchange or some other type of self-sufficient system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because of its searchable Knowledge Base for customer self-help, we also chose to use Tender (the SaaS platform used by New Relic).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't overstate how awesome it is having tech savvy customers. Support requests for S3stat (one of my businesses) more often than not come with implementation suggestions. Everybody who signs up has to at least gotten as far as to get Amazon S3 working for their site, so my userbase is essentially pre-screened for smartness. They just plain figure things out on their own, so if they contact you it's because something is actually broken. It rocks.

Compare that to the consumer-facing site I run where the biggest tech support request I get is from people who can't tell the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org, followed closely by people who sign up for an account, never do anything with it, then demand to have their account deleted.

My next project will be another one targeted at tech-savvy users. I'm already looking forward to the first bug reports with patches included.

</comment><comment><USER6> We have about the same number of customers (maybe a bit more). We have 2 full- time support staff plus another that does support half-time.

This article makes some good points (about product quality and fixing bugs), but I would counter the article with:

1\. Just because you support X customers with 0 full-time staff doesn't mean you do it well. I like to think of our support staff as a sales channel. When you have a great support staff, it builds a reputation for your company and results in a lot of referral sales.

2\. A product like NewRelic is for developers/sysadmins. That makes it a lot easier to have engineers support it since they're usually talking to other engineers. I doubt it would be as effective for Saas apps for Joe the Plumber.

</comment><comment><USER7> Your product makes a huge difference. I'm a company of 1 working after hours and I'm supporting 9,000 users with little more than email.</comment>


Go Back In Time: How 10 Big Websites Looked 15 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/time-10-big-websites-looked-15-years/ <comment><USER2> It seems like every 6-12 months, a tech blog will punt with some screenshots from The Wayback Machine and a "look at the old web" article.

I'd be very interested in an article that used original screenshots from the time, and some real historical context and insight into the technologies powering the sites and the way people used them. Just going to Archive.org and taking some screenshots is, well, lazy.

<comment><USER3> It would be quite interesting to see them in the browsers of the time. AFAIK there were very big rendering differences you'd be able to see in, say, IE4 on Windows vs Netscape 4 on Mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually miss old-fashioned web design. These old pages look like text, and not much else. But most of what I want to do online is text; I want to read and write. The simplicity is actually an aid to clarity.

<comment><USER5> I use a very plain style for my personal Web site as its aimed at teachers (educational institutions don't always have recent computers) and students (they tend to use phones for Web browsing).

I suspect there is considerable peer pressure on any small company or computer professional to have a Web site that looks 'designed'. Shame really.

<comment><USER6> And the problem with those designs is that they constantly evolve to become worse UX-wise. The web is very much gullible to fashion change and, unlike fashion in clothes, there seems to be no safe middle ground (like denim, for example) that would always be relatively the same and never out of fashion.

And the low-contrast-looks-beautiful fashion is just plain crazy. Whenever I happen to visit a pretentiously designed web site, I cringe in anticipation of hard to read text and my browser getting jerky when trying to scroll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's not the original AltaVista page - as mentioned by the disclaimer in the screengrab, altavista.com was not related to DEC or the AltaVista search engine.

At least when it first opened, it was altavista.digital.com. And that confused people; I'd tell them to go search AltaVista for something and they'd come back confused because they wound up on some e-card site instead.

After Compaq bought DEC and retired the Digital brand, they finally took over altavista.com.

<comment><USER8> It looks like altavista.digital.com and babelfish have "been excluded from the Wayback Machine" so we can't see what they looked like back then unless anyone has kept a screenshot for 15 years or has a book or newspaper with a screenshot in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazon looks essentially the same. In fact, about a year or two ago it looked almost exactly the same.

This feels interesting. I wonder why that is ...

<comment><USER10> Hah - came here to same the same.

Bezos and Amazon are among the four super-powers of the internet for good reason. I imagine they've run cost/benefit analysis and found the ROI of investing and focusing on any their new frontiers (AWS, Kindle, etc...) to outweigh the ROI of a redesign at this point.

But funny all the same :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "the only reason Google started with such a simple design is because they didn't have a webmaster or anyone that knew HTML."

Can anyone verify this? Sounds a bit far-fetched, to be honest - a company of engineers couldn't figure out HTML enough to put together a decent website? Isn't it more likely that they just put a MVP up and then iterated from there, and since Google was a highly functional search engine, they never felt the need to expand the homepage to include superfluous items?

<comment><USER12> Page 29 of Levy's GooglePlex... "The minimalism is that we didn't have a webmaster and had to do it ourselves" - Larry Page

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Older Amazon.com screengrabs can be found here: [http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom- logo-...](http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo- timeline.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> The one that jumped at me is Amazon. It's the one that has changed least.

<comment><USER15> And, to my mind, looked best of the lot. They had a decent and consistent color scheme whereas most of the rest were all over the map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember snobbishly (but silently) deriding the designs of Geocities (and later Myspace) sites.

Now I dearly miss the messy and delightful variety of all that amateur self expression.

</comment><comment><USER17> It bugs me that the writer opines amazon looks quite modern after using a 1999 page. A lot of the sites listed looked a lot more modern in 1999 than they did in 1997.

</comment><comment><USER18> _Microsoft was actually trying – and they would keep developing IE until they released version 6, after which they stopped development, leaving the Web to stagnate._

Uhh, apparently I just dreamed that IE7-10 existed. I must have been dreaming that Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari existed to keep the web from stagnating. It's a shame that whole web thing isn't around anymore, I'd love to see some foolish commentary on it.

<comment><USER19> Microsoft waited 5 years (Aug 2001 to Oct 2006) to release IE7. Having defeated Netscape, they basically rested on their laurels and did nothing. Only with the spectre of Firefox did they start even trying again, and only in the last year or so have those efforts even been worthwhile.

<comment><USER18> But the claim that the web stagnated because Microsoft stopped developing IE is just wrong. Firefox picked up their slack and put forth some pretty great efforts, far beyond what Microsoft was ever willing to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I still remember my geocities URI: <http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/3664> I typed it so many times before I understand relative and absolute locations... :(

</comment><comment><USER21> If only I had a time machine and a thumb drive filled with a modern web stack. :) for some reason my memory was much more kind to these sites than the reality, except GeoCities.. I remember thinking it looked terrible "back in the day"

</comment><comment><USER22> The point about "someday we will look back and laugh" is an interesting one, and I'm not sure how true it is. I think the maturity of web design as a field must be a curve, and I find it hard to believe that website will change in such a jump.

Is there any layout or designer that a designer wants that they can't create on the modern web? Because there were many they couldn't back then, through the limitations of the browsers, and internet speeds.

The next big move, I think, will be to web applications, but I would imagine they will look fairly similar to the desktop (or perhaps iPad) applications we have today.

<comment><USER23> I think the argument is that looking back and laughing is a fundamental issue of design trends. To put it differently, do you think that people won't look back in twenty years and laugh at today's fashion trends? Fashion design has had a few millenia to mature and we still haven't got it right. It's a little unfair to hold web design to a higher standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone else appreciate the irony of the lone Google ads appearing between the description and screenshot of Google's page?

</comment><comment><USER25> I think these examples show us how much have internet technologies changed and improved.

<comment><USER26> I agree with this - but I'd say the technologies that came later (aka flash) were actually a step backwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Actually, there was a Google site in 1997, at google.stanford.edu.

</comment><comment><USER28> Haha. Thank you for this post. They look all pretty shitty :-)</comment>


Going Serverless: Migrating an Express App to AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/going-serverless-migrating-an-express-application-to-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-lambda/ <comment><USER3> Serverless via Lambda has been, frankly, a disappointment so far. The benefit is that I'm supposed to not have to manage servers anymore, yet I find myself, well, managing servers.

I have to build and assign IAM roles, subnets, set up application configuration files in fixed external services (since you can't do things like set environment variables), configure the endpoints in nginx^h^h^h^h^h API Gateway, suffer through cold starts, fight against arcane packaging issues with site directories and .pth files (though this is probably just be a Python thing), fight concurrency throttling, external timeouts, manage out-of-band database connections, logging which requires even more IAM permissions...

This doesn't even consider how many times I've had to tear down and re-create an API Gateway setup because it got "stuck" and would stop working.

Finally, WTF is up with not being able to test API Gateway -> S3 integrations if the S3 bucket is in the same region as the gateway instance? It's a two plus year old bug by now, and a real pain (especially when coupled with other AWS services which require the bucket to be in the same region as the rest of a service - such as CodePipeline).

Perhaps it's just because I'm familiar with setting up and provisioning servers, but for basic web services and periodic tasks, Lambda is much harder to work with most of the time. Its biggest benefit so far has been the low cost.

<comment><USER4> > Perhaps it's just because I'm familiar with setting up and provisioning > servers

I'd be inclined to say that may be the case. Our codebase leans heavily on Lambda, primarily as a wide stage in our data pipeline. And I love it.

Using a configuration file in S3 - or any other means of dropping a text file on AWS - is barely more complicated than open("file.txt"). The true frustration is when you need to work with files beyond your memory limits, but even that can be mitigated by divide and conquer approaches.

That said, the API Gateway is annoying in that it makes complex things impossible and simple things more configuration than they need. Yet, I'd still take it over actually standing up a server.

<comment><USER3> > is barely more complicated than open("file.txt")

Well, that depends. First, you have to set up the IAM roles to access the bucket which owns file.txt. Then you have to ensure that "file.txt" is properly shared between accounts if you separate production from staging from development. Then there's three lines of code to set up a client, pull the file, and read the contents. If it's an encrypted file, you also get to do a bit more setup work to ensure that you're using the v4 signature in the library, since it defaults to v3 signatures. There's also the additional error handling and points of failure to account for.

The requests are far from instantaneous as well, so you need to set up an out- of-band cache for the contents of the file if you plan to use it with every call of the lambda function.

Is it obtusely hard? Of course not. Is it as simple as `open("file.txt")` (or more appropriately `os.environ["FOO"]`)? Not by a long shot.

I have a feeling that our differences in opinion have more to do with the environment in which we run our lambda functions than what the lambda functions are doing. Once you move beyond a single region on a single account, things get a lot harder.

<comment><USER4> I may be overly simplifying working with a file, but I'd still argue you're over-complicating it :P You're hitting on a good point with Lambda though, namely the stateless aspect. To get the most out of Lambda, you have to adopt a more Functional-based programming model.

> Once you move beyond a single region on a single account, things get a lot > harder.

I could see that.

I'm working in IoT, primarily connecting lots of dumb devices to small translation layers with minute data massaging along the way. In this type of low-intensity environment, the flexibility Lambda (AWS in general) gives you is tremendous.

The second performance(/latency) becomes a primary concern, it's easy to see that trade-off become untenable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> @hobofan, take a look at our recent API Gateway features and see if the greedy paths and pass-through settings provide what you're looking for (they're also supported by CloudFormation). We tried to simplify the "configure every route" problem, but always looking for additional suggestions to make API config easier.

@jomamaxx (& others): Reducing latency (and latency variability) is a critical goal for our team. We've improved p99 variability in API Gateway-related latency over the last few months, and will be addressing some of the Lambda- related latency that occurs when we refresh containers in the coming months. Additional latency optimizations coming at all levels of the stack, including networking.

A clarification on the discussions about "managed hosting": Lambda is not classic web hosting; in fact, we _block_ Lambda functions from calling socket.listen. In the Lambda model (whatever you prefer to call the broader category), the cloud service sees every request in order to perform scaling and load balancing on the function's behalf.

Happy to chat offline with anyone who has additional questions or feedback: DM me on twitter @timallenwagner

<comment><USER6> Tim, when are we getting Python 3 support on Lambda?

Being stuck on 2.7 has been the greatest source of issues and the #1 problem we have with Lambda. If Google/Microsoft came out _today_ with Python 3 support in their Lambda competitor, we'd move in an instant.

<comment><USER4> I'm in the same boat. We're developing a new product with no real reason to stay on Python 2, besides Lambda. Python 3 support would make my life so much easier.

<comment><USER5> Yep, I hear about the lack of Python3 all the time, and I know our Python users are waiting for it. On the roadmap, and partially complete, but competing with some other language work at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm always surprised at the lack of discussion around database connection reuse with AWS Lambda.

It's a pretty big deal that every single API call requires a new database connection. The only solutions I've seen so far are to run a separate app to interface with the database, or moving the connection outside of the handler (which still has issues).

Am I missing something or is everyone just really happy to use DynamoDB?

<comment><USER8> DynamoDB is not immune from that problem. There is no way out: if the container is terminated the connection goes down. The key is not making Lambda stop and rm the container (in docker terms). If there are enough requests the container is reused and the connection stays up, but you must initialize it outside the function. An example with DynamoDB

        const AWS = require("aws-sdk");
        const docClient = new AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient();
        module.exports.theFunction = (event, context, callback) => {
          var params = {
            TableName: "table",
            Item: {
                "attribute": "value"
            }
          };
          docClient.put(params, function (err, data) {
            ...
          });
          callback(null, {...});
        };

I didn't try but it should work with any other db.

However, is Lambda cost effective for services with the amount of requests required to have their containers almost never terminated?

<comment><USER9> If there are enough requests to keep your container up all the time, why are you using lambda??

<comment><USER8> Exactly what I was asking but I didn't do the math.

Maybe it's OK for burst shaped traffic. The first request pays a toll, the others are quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anyone's interested in doing the math about the costs involved, I have two quick notes: first, the API Gateway, at $3.50 per million requests, is typically more expensive than the Lambda functions themselves (and comes with no permanent free tier, unlike Lambda); second, the 128MB minimum memory for a Lambda function can be on the tight side for an Express app, so you might want to base your calculations on more memory.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've recently deployed a small Flask based micro-service for an internal tool leveraging Zappa[0] to deploy it to Lambda/API Gateway. Overall it's been a really smooth experience. I'm looking forward to using it again.

[0] [https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa](https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa)

<comment><USER12> Is there a big overhead in terms of latency? If I understand correctly you essentially have to start a server for each request.

<comment><USER13> Not the case - it runs with all dependencies cached if its called multiple times. Inconsistent calls will incur the delay though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, Apigee had this exact service. They did something pretty cool, it seems they implemented nearly all (!) of the Nodejs APIs in a JVM variant, then designed them to run on demand [0].

I actually ported an Express app to Apigee's service, to run webhooks and ETL. It worked flawlessly. The one downside was that they kept their own internal registry of compatible packages and there was no way they could keep up with the Nodejs ecosystem even with few holes in their API.

I still have a ton of hope that Google does something smart with this, I actually wanted to pay Apigee for their service, but their pricing started at an Enterprise tier and none of my projects made it that far.... yet.

Something to think about.

[0]: [http://docs.apigee.com/api-services/content/overview- nodejs-...](http://docs.apigee.com/api-services/content/overview-nodejs- apigee-edge)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wherein "serverless" basically means more computers in more places just doing different tasks.

<comment><USER16> Yep. It's good old fashioned webhosting. Drop your files in the amazon equivalent of ~/public-html/ . If it serves your needs, it's not a bad thing, but it's hardly revolutionary.

<comment><USER8> Webhosting usually have a flat monthly fee so maybe Lambda it's more like old fashioned mainframe timesharing, billed per resource usage. Not that I was there in its heydays but the two concepts seem very similar.

A consequence is that you really want to terminate quickly and use little RAM. If your JS function terminates in 110 ms and get billed for two 100 ms units you might be tempted to switch to a faster language (or ASM what you can) to save half the bill. Webhosting doesn't have that dynamic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A little of a shameless plug, but I am the author of effe GitHub.com/siscia/effe A microservice framework.

If you are worried about latency or you want lambda on your own servers it may be worth to take a look.

Feedback welcome

</comment><comment><USER18> One significant problem with the API Gateway / Lambda integration is that the protocol they use to communicate is JSON. JSON is a _text-only_ encoding, i.e. anything that isn't valid UTF8 isn't valid JSON, and so if you need to pass something binary to/from the Lambda (e.g. an image), you need to base64 encode it, which I'm actually not even sure is at all possible with the API/GW templates. There are other issues, but this alone is a huge headache if you ever have to work around it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I hate the term serverless. It involves a server. AWS Lambda is a service bound to a port therefore a server. It runs user defined functions, true. But it is a server.

<comment><USER20> It would help if people referred to this technological concept as _Function as a Service_. That is a lot less ambiguous and buzzwordish than 'serverless'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am currently using AWS API Gateway + Lambda for the serverless backend of a social traveling startup. It is absolutely awesome: we are few people in IT and it is amazingly simple to manage the whole stuff. Moreover imho they are mature services at this time, they are flexible enough with enough configuration properties to fulfill a nearly full control of the development experience.

<comment><USER22> How much does it end up costing you? Any ideas how much a 'traditional' setup would be in comparison?

<comment><USER23> We reduced our service server costs to 1/6th by moving from Heroku to Lambda. And that's not even considering the main benefit of a big computational request not blocking other requests (which is why we moved to it in the first place).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can you achieve competitive latency for web pages using API Gateway and Lambda?

<comment><USER25> I was curious about the same thing and setup a jvm lambda to test. The setup was served through API gateway, connected to a postgres RDS, selected a couple records from a single database table and returned them as json, and deployed in us-west.

From the west coast, I'm getting between 150ms and 300ms response times for most requests, but it does jump around quite a bit, with occasional requests taking 500ms-800ms to complete.

A lot of the variability seems to be coming from execution time of the lambda itself, which would probably be because of the connection to RDS? I'm using HikariCP so the connection is pooled but maybe something like dynamo would be better.

So latency is all over the place, but generally under half a second.

<comment><USER13> Connection would only be pooled on a per-instance basis, which can be cached but sometimes are not for many parallel running processes (to my understanding).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How does this work, if at all, for local development? Is there a pseudo-Lambda server that runs locally?

If not, this introduces yet another environment variable or it requires changes to be pushed constantly to Lamba for test.

<comment><USER27> Check out our example on github [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless- express/tree/maste...](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless- express/tree/master/example). The lambda wrapper is very thin (4 LOC). So you have two options: run/test your express app locally as you always would, or use the provided `npm run local` command which simulates the API Gateway+Lambda part (you can modify the `api-gateway-event.json` to change the "request" from API Gateway). This is primarily an example and starting point, and there is much more you could do to improve this process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have just recently got through a migration from express to a lambda based stack. In the end, performance is pretty good (once the lambdas are warm), but there were a few tricky parts, but nothing impossible.

Serving backend requests is easy with Lambda, but the code for managing the backend can get quite large, quickly. If you are loading up data and it's going to take more than 5 minutes to perform a task, you need to build a queueing system from AWS primitives.

</comment><comment><USER29> I hope they solve the latency issues for a basic function that returns text (a basic callback(null, 'hello world') with the api gateway that is running 'hot' with the container model and yet still has so much latency.

</comment><comment><USER30> What is the benefit of AWS Lambda vs getting a cheap VPS or a dedicated server with much better specs and bandwidth, setting it up and adding auto-update? And how does one prevent going bankrupt if a Lambda app is DDOSed?

<comment><USER3> The cost is stupidly low. You would really have to work hard to go bankrupt.

That said, there is a concurrency limit, which would help prevent your server time going to exponential limits.

<comment><USER30> Article doesn't mention any numbers. OVH VPS is $3.50 for a 2GB RAM and 100mbs (about 14TB a month assuming 50% utilization). That is about 14mln pages with 1MB size vs 1mln requests for API Gateway at $3.50, not including Lambda costs or bandwidth costs.

<comment><USER3> I don't have exact numbers, but we have dozens of lambda functions written in Python which are parsing and acting on Kinesis log streams (at volumes that cause problems for the Splunk ingest), and regularly hit the 100 process concurrency limit... but our bill is well under $10 a year (yes, year, not month. Hence my use of the adjectives "ridiculously" and "stupidly").

Luck? Hidden discounts? Don't know. Just know that our bill is ridiculously low for everything we're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> i hope they upgrade to node 6 soon. i can't use fancy destructuring and some other es2015 functionality!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use Babel for server side code too which would get you what you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I love lambda's, but api gateway was far from mature the last time I used it (6 months ago).

Unless they have made serious updates to the deployment workflow, feature set, and documentation I would not recommend building your products on it.

<comment><USER33> The "0 to 1" workflow right out of AWS could not be easier, they have an in- browser code editor with a hello world already written for you.

But that workflow doesn't make sense for real dev teams. So there's [https://github.com/serverless/serverless](https://github.com/serverless/serverless) . It's driven by a yaml file and is intuitive.

The only thing I'm bothered by is lack of environment variables (have to hard code them) and terrible API Gateway latency - <USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12681926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12681926) further down the page

<comment><USER32> Serverless was nowhere near ready the last time I looked.

Are they still requiring sn unrestricted iam profile? That is a non starter for most orgs.

Also, I found working with serverless to be pretty unintuitive. You are relying entirely on large config files and it was very difficult and time consuming for me to test and rollback several different configs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Listen folks - it's still a fantasy. Latency is still 5s on many requests = no deal.

This has been going on for years.

Would someone form AMZ please stand up?

I suggest that the latency is 5s for the 'first call', then, subsequent calls are fast - and if you don't use your lambda for a minute or so, it goes back to having latency.

I suggest maybe this has something to do with loading it into memory when it's used?

There must be a way to keep the lambdas 'hot' or else it will never really get used for anything but background tasks.

<comment><USER35> You break the entire model of an oversubscribed multi-tenant container system if you want every lambda hot all the time.

If that's what you need...you need a server.

<comment><USER34> "If that's what you need...you need a server."

We want micro-services that are available as we need them, at any scale, and we never want to deal with a 'server' again.

"You break the entire model of an oversubscribed multi-tenant container system" \- we don't care that much about how it's implemented, or what underlying model is used, as long as it is secure, robust, and reliable.

<comment><USER35> > We want micro-services that are available as we need them, at any scale, and > we never want to deal with a 'server' again.

I'm going to argue that's currently unrealistic, but if you want someone to build something, tell them its impossible.

Clearly its not easy to build a system that'll run code on demand as fast as bare metal; accept the trade offs with the understanding why you're making them.

<comment><USER34> What I'm asking for is definitely within grasp of Amazon's team :) they just need to get there.

Moreover, it's a rather fundamental opportunity for them: Lambda's are a form of 'container' and they are exactly what so many of us want. The deal-breaker for us was the latency issue.

Amazon is a pretty smart company, and it's a big opportunity, I'll bet they eventually get this sorted out.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Dissertation So Good It Might Be Classified - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2004/01/a-dissertation-so-good-it-might-be-classified/ <comment><USER2> This needs a "(2004)" in the title. The thesis was published (it's listed in bibliograpic databases [1], and ProQuest has the PDF [2]), and was then essentially re-published as a book [3] (here's a review in a journal [4]).

[1]: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1023236](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1023236)

[2]: [http://search.proquest.com/docview/305049527/EF824BE251BA493...](http://search.proquest.com/docview/305049527/EF824BE251BA4935PQ/1?accountid=13042)

[3]: [https://www.amazon.com/Networks-Security-Complexity- Infrastr...](https://www.amazon.com/Networks-Security-Complexity- Infrastructure-Protection)

[4]: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2257.2008....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2257.2008.00439.x/abstract)</comment>