58 Bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://jrl.ninja/etc/1 <comment><USER2> Author mentions this took a long time to arrive at.

I recommend "Web Design in 4 Minutes" from the CSS guru behind Bulma:

[https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/](https://jgthms.com/web-design- in-4-minutes/)

<comment> ainar-g Disclaimer: I am not a graphic designer. I am merely a programmer with an interest in well-crafted, understandable, and readable text. So, read this as an outsider rant rather than an informed opinion.

      Black text on a white background can be harsh on the eyes.

I have to disagree about the problem here. Black text has been fine since the first printing press. And if you do want to make a page less in-your-face with regards to contrast, then it would be much better to dim the background. After all, the paper we read is mostly this grey-ish, yellow-ish colour.

      The accent color can be complemented with more subtle shades, to be used on
      borders, backgrounds, or even the body text.

The colours they've used in the syntax highlighting just made everything a confetti explosion. I am not against syntax highlighting, but it shouldn't be this colourful, unless you give every identifier a computable colour to make misprints more noticeable.

      Since text is the main content of a webpage, using a custom font gives the
      page even more noticeable identity.

Not a big fan of @font-face. Another host to visit. Another asset to download. My fonts are fine. If I have the font you like, then great! If I don't, please make it look reasonable with system defaults.

      Let's enhance our header with a nice background image from Unsplash.

Let's _not._ Massive headers are nothing but a waste of space.

Again, this is a rant. I am just very tired of "designers" doing "pretty" stuff instead of solving a problem. And that problem is an aesthetically pleasing, not-eye-hurting, reasonably dense text.

<comment><USER3> You don't need to visit another host just because you're using @font-face! The fonts can be stored locally. If you visit my home page, coyotetracks.org, it loads five fonts (bold and italic Concourse, and regular, bold, and italic Equity) for an extra 82.18K -- which, unless you're taking steps to prevent it, your browser is going to cache from that point on. (If you visit another page, you'll probably get the regular version of Concourse, too, for an extra 11.45K.)

I just don't get the HN hatred for downloadable fonts _in and of themselves._ If you're talking about an extra megabyte or two of JavaScript and unoptimized fonts, okay, but that's a problem of implementation. Why this cranky "it's just the text that matters, stop trying to make it look pretty" mindset?

<comment><USER4> What is the username in this image? [ [https://i.vgy.me/faxIj4.png](https://i.vgy.me/faxIj4.png) ]

Many people select fonts where there isn't ambiguity between similar characters like o/O/0 and I/l/1\. Reading the home page for the font [ [https://concoursefont.com/](https://concoursefont.com/) ] gives me a headache personally. The lowercase 't' and 'f' fight one another. The 'f' with its flowing curve and the 't' in its rigid straightness makes the text fail to flow well.

My favorite font is guilty of having ambiguous characters as well - and while I'm not _personally_ very bothered by it - I can understand and empathize with the annoyance other people have towards issues like this.

I use Stylus to inject my own stylesheets and force every website to use my chosen fonts - their design be damned. But I also eventually write my own CSS for the site myself if I use it frequently so my opinion is likely invalid as 99.9999999% of users would never do that.

<comment><USER3> I suppose, as selfish as it might be, that I would like people to at least _try_ to see if they can bear to use a web site the way I designed it, perhaps for the same reason a conscientious chef would very likely prefer you to at least _try_ her food before immediately reaching for the salt and pepper.

As an aside: I don't use Concourse as a body font; it's not something that strikes me as particularly suitable for long stretches of text. But I think it's fine in headlines. It also has multiple letter variations you can use, and my web site uses the "British" stylistic set, which has a different "f" and "t" (and "l" and a few other characters) from the default used on most of its site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a cool little snippet but it's nothing more than three run-of-the-mill CSS declarations. The maximum width is specified, a small padding is applied and the margins around the element are set to automatic so it centers itself horizontally.

All the other styles applied on this pages are not part of the snippet. The weight of the titles, the spacing under the paragraphs, etc., are all specified on the page's CSS file but not described in the blogpost itself. [0]

I was expecting something akin to normalize.css[1] which normalize the default styles of your page[2].

There are multiple very lightweight CSS "frameworks" that you should carry around instead of the snippet shown here. We are talking ~5KB. See [https://github.com/troxler/awesome-css-frameworks#very- light](https://github.com/troxler/awesome-css-frameworks#very-light) for a great list.

[0] [https://jrl.ninja/etc/post.css](https://jrl.ninja/etc/post.css)

[1] [http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize- css/](http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/)

[2] Normalize CSS aims to make built-in browser styling consistent across browsers. Elements like H1-6 will appear bold, larger et cetera in a consistent way across browsers. You're then supposed to add only the difference in decoration your design needs.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's 61 bytes because you're using two spaces instead of tabs! :^)

You can shave off 2 more bytes by using em instead of rem. In your use case they are functionally the same. Rem is em relative to the root element. Your <main> pretty much is the root element.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely considered this! But rem feels more predictable and straightforward. I have seen debates on em vs. rem, and there is certainly value with em in websites that have lots of nested and/or discrete responsive components, but for a very simple site, I quite like rem.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure you don't have the meanings reversed? REM is the one that ignores nesting. EM doesn't, so on a simple site it's easier to use correctly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure. For that reason (ignoring nesting), I think rem is easier to use correctly. I think what you're getting at is that simple sites have little nesting, therefore em, but I'm thinking about in terms of em being great for say, css framework developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author actually loads 10x that much CSS (546 bytes) into the example page! [1]

Granted that is still not much but here I've augmented the 546 byte example to render nearly the same results with only 155 bytes. [2]

I've removed rem units as it's easier for all to understand without them. Pixel units scale just fine across the browsers available these days so there's no need for the mental hurdles and explained calculations. I've left them in the source HTML all the same for the sake of testing. The real feature making sites look good across a ever widening array of pixel densities today is this meta tag that was also used in the example HTML: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> [3]

Setting a font-family generically on the body tag gives the shortest path to consistent, doesn't-look-like-times-new-roman, font styling possible.

I left the unmentioned line-height in because it's a good default. It adds a little basic spacing between wrapping lines of text.

Styling elements that are children of the article to only have bottom margins gives consistent spacing to all content, and since top margins collapse [4] we can avoid dealing with them all together.

[1]: [https://jrl.ninja/etc/post.css](https://jrl.ninja/etc/post.css)

[2]: [https://jsfiddle.net/gb0ojdsL/8/](https://jsfiddle.net/gb0ojdsL/8/)

[3]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/View...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag)

[4]: [https://css-tricks.com/what-you-should-know-about- collapsing...](https://css-tricks.com/what-you-should-know-about-collapsing- margins/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha yes, I mean 58 bytes for layout, not layout + styling.

Anyways, what you've written here is good, and definitely encompasses some things I thought about. Two notes for you:

1\. I explicitly preferred Arial and Helvetica over the generic sans-serif is because I found some other popular web safe fonts didn't look nearly as good, for example, Open Sans, mainly due to the large x-height.

2\. I don't think rem incurs much cognitive overhead over px, and the main reason is that it scales with the user-adjustable font size. Try changing your browser's font size from 16 to say, 20. You'll notice that with px max-width, # chars per line will decrease a lot, affecting readability. in contrast, rem max-width will scale nicely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's more CSS on the page than that though.

And it _doesn 't_ look great everywhere. At 375px-wide the line-length of the text is ~35 characters, optimal would be 50--70.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. By looking great nearly everywhere, I mean the layout of the elements on most devices. What device do you have that is 375px wide?

w.r.t line-length, there's another suggestion ITT that said to relax the padding a bit to get a bit more line-length, which I will probably be doing.

<comment><USER8> > What device do you have that is 375px wide?

iPhone 6/7/8 users still drives a non-negligible amount of conversion on our site. We don't target devices, 375px is a general target for the smallest screen size we'd be likely to encounter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh, I just found out the very rectangular Galaxy S9/S9+ viewport is 360x740. Just wanted to let you know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ObMFW:

[https://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/](https://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/) [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

[https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/](https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/)

[https://bestmotherfucking.website/](https://bestmotherfucking.website/)

[https://thebestmotherfucking.website/](https://thebestmotherfucking.website/)

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

[https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB](https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB)

The OP's 58 bytes _are_ a very good start.

</comment><comment><USER10> > main {

Why not target <body> instead? <main> should not have content that is shown on other pages, like headers, footers, and sidebars, but it makes sense to have this CSS affect those areas.

<comment><USER11> Yep, I think the priorities should be <html> and <body>. Here's mine, which centers the content both horizontally and vertically via flexbox:

        html {
          display: flex;
          align-items: center;
          justify-content: center;
          min-height: 100%;
        }

        @media screen {
          body {
            max-width: 40rem;
            margin: 1rem;
          }
        }

It's not perfect, but it works well for simple websites (e.g. [https://colorclock.hashbase.io/](https://colorclock.hashbase.io/)).

<comment><USER12> IIRC, the way browsers interpret margins and widths on the <body> element isn't consistent; and they may not support overriding block properties on the <html> element at all. Or maybe they do now, but that certainly wasn't cross- browser-friendly until very recently.

<comment><USER13> >IIRC, the way browsers interpret margins and widths on the <body> element isn't consistent

I know IE5.5 doesn't allow resizing of the body, but it was fixed in IE6.

If you're using flexbox it's probably not your chief concern anyway.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I should mention that this is only for browsers that support flexbox ([https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox](https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox)) with little regard for browsers that are behind on their updates. Thanks for pointing this out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me, then, that hates the "narrow strip of text down the middle of my large monitor" school of web design?

I don't understand why I'm being forced to scroll when there's all this blank space to the sides.

Even on my laptop, this looks strange to me, a huge wide expanse of nothing, and this little strip of text down the middle of the page.

What's the reasoning behind this?

<comment><USER15> > What's the reasoning behind this?

Lack of multi-column text support on the Web. Optimal readability is around 64 characters per line - more than that hurts quite a bit, especially for long- form text where accurate scanning is more important.

<comment><USER16> [https://caniuse.com/#feat=multicolumn](https://caniuse.com/#feat=multicolumn)

Even IE10, mobile safari, and the gingerbread android browser support it

<comment><USER17> Support is still bad. There's no easy way to fill columns left to right that works well on both short articles and very long ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think because so many of the people here are programmers, there will be some incentive to talk about the code, but the design is lovely.

It feels very easy to read. So much clutter has been taken away.

There's nothing pulling at the edges of your attention and ruining the experience. I quite like it.

<comment><USER19> After seeing Gwern's website[0], I immediately knew what design I wanted for my personal site [1]. Tufte's CSS package is much heavier than these three rules, but it achieves the same result: Content designed to maximize readability by removing distracting elements and respecting known typography rules.

Because I write with an overly-large number of asides, I fell in love with the Tufte-styled side/margin notes. The resulting text is much easier to read, since I'm not littering the paragraphs with em-dashes and lengthy parentheticals.

I hope more people rebel against the Medium-looking websites with massive images and huge blocknotes in 30px fonts that may or may not just be a line from the next paragraph or an important point to keep in mind when reading the next paragraph.

#longformrebellion #endthelisticle

[0] [https://www.gwern.net/About](https://www.gwern.net/About)

[1] [https://lawler.io](https://lawler.io)

<comment><USER20> Lovely, but if you're making a big deal about quotes and pull-aways in your format, might I encourage you to use proper quotation marks — eg. "The" vs. "The"?

<comment><USER19> Thanks for pointing that out. I was under the impression that Pelican's Markdown parser automatically used typographic quotes vs straight quotes, but that's apparently not the case.

Edit: Ah, it's an extension to Python-Markdown that is not enabled by default: [https://python-markdown.github.io/extensions/smarty/](https://python- markdown.github.io/extensions/smarty/)

<comment><USER20> Ah, much more developed than I — I maintain a site that has a font similar to yours and I need to manually amend each and every typographic conceit. Not smart!

<comment><USER19> No worries! There's always room for improvement. Though my site now automatically swaps in [0] the correct typographic quotes (thanks again!), I still have to manually add <section>s and the HTML for the sidenotes, instead of using some kind of Markdown conceit that gets automatically translated when the site is compiled. :)

[0] [https://github.com/Eiriksmal/lawler-dot- io/commit/593d3471e6...](https://github.com/Eiriksmal/lawler-dot- io/commit/593d3471e66d3f5818f4c37f6e836d5c2daf3d76)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Doesn't look "great" on mobile. 2rem margins are way too big for a phone screen. Too much wasted space.

<comment><USER22> 2vw would be a reasonable substitution, as it creates a dynamic margin, based on the screen's "view width". Smaller screens → smaller margins.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for bringing vw to my attention, it sounds great! I tried it out and the main problem is 2vw looks much more reasonable on many mobile displays, but puts a lot of top margin on wide screens (laptops/monitors). I still want to retain the same size margins for top/bottom and left/right, so a happier medium would be to vw for mobile and rem for tablets/laptops/monitors, but then that's too much trouble for diminishing returns in my opinion.

<comment><USER21> Just use 1rem everywhere. There is no reason for the hideously large 2rem margin. Another person said it's just opinion, but I'm sure 9 out of 10 users would tell you 1rem is the better looking option overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Still wastes 60% of my display's width.

Sorry, if you are into minimalist design I keep getting back there, with 58 bytes less of CSS: [https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

<comment><USER24> From that website:

>Yes, this is fucking satire, you fuck

> I'm not actually saying your shitty site should look like this.

<comment><USER23> > Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and > accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I notice that the author doesn't use capitals either and I'm not sure if visually I like that or not. It makes it feel more casual which is nice, but I think it does get harder to parse the sentences.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am going for the casual feel, although I am aware for some people it does hurt readability. But I quite like it, and want to indulge a little on my own site :)

<comment><USER26> There is a CSS rule for everything lower case. If Google gets a snippet of your page and puts it in the less casual results it looks silly in lower case. The content needs to be written with capital letters and punctuation and styled to be casual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Putting Arial _before_ Helvetica :(

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got to save browser CPU cycles! /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can say I love the choice of background color.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'm going for a pastel-like palette individual to each top level directory, if you poke around a bit. Website is still in early stages, so colors aren't fully thought out yet, but I'm very glad to hear you like it.

<comment><USER29> how would you go about choosing a color palette? do you use tools to generate a palette[1] or is there some secret recipe or common rule set that graphic designers follow to come to a final combination that makes sense?

[1] [https://github.com/dylanaraps/pywal](https://github.com/dylanaraps/pywal) <\- just discovered this yesterday during a weekend effort to improve the color combination used by my window manager, ...

<comment> frosted-flakes In my experience, automated color palette generation tools look cool, but don't work that well. Most applications or websites need far more colours than people think, even if those colours are used sparingly. This example chapter from the Refactoring UI book called "Building Your Color Palette"[0] was quite helpful, even though I didn't buy the book.

[0] [https://refactoringui.com/previews/building-your-color- palet...](https://refactoringui.com/previews/building-your-color-palette/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find it interesting that this snippet is used:

::selection { background-color: #ff0; }

Because when f.lux raises the color temperature for the evening it makes it so I can barely see if anything is selected while the normal color works perfectly no matter the temperature I set. At first, I thought it was one of those JS scripts that prevent selection.

<comment><USER31> f.lux makes many websites (and indeed apps in general) harder to read, or just look awful. Not sure it's reasonable to expect an arbitrary website to be "f.lux compatible".

<comment><USER30> Never had any problems with sites being hard to read. But I also don't really visit overstyled sites.

Not to mention that you actually have to do the effort to make it incompatible :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My favorite resource about minimalist CSS : [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

And at least it uses its own recommendations, whereas the OP isn't (it ships way more CSS than the mere 58bytes it talks about)

</comment><comment><USER33> > it took me a surprising number of iterations to arrive at this point. > perhaps that speaks to the fact that i know nothing about "modern" web > development, or [..] just how hard it is to keep it simple in a world of > complication.

It's the latter. Being both simple and good is not easy.

</comment><comment><USER4> I recognize some of those scrots. Funny to see another /g/ent with a minimalist setup and website.

I have about twice the amount of CSS, but most of it was to match my personal setup of colors/fonts: [https://nadyanay.me/assets/css/style.css](https://nadyanay.me/assets/css/style.css)

361 characters (yours) vs 615 characters (mine)

Remove the font family and .fav classes and some of the unnecessary border overrides and mine comes out to a more equivalent 319 characters, while still retaining the spacing and color scheme.

</comment><comment><USER34> Looks great even without CSS. The only exception is a very wide viewport.

1024x768: [https://i.imgur.com/NEAenbY.png](https://i.imgur.com/NEAenbY.png)

320x568: [https://i.imgur.com/TdVjnKR.png](https://i.imgur.com/TdVjnKR.png)

3480x1600: [https://i.imgur.com/MfhxmRD.png](https://i.imgur.com/MfhxmRD.png)

<comment><USER35> Why would you want to disable the CSS?

<comment><USER36> I think the point is that, aside from max-width, this does very little that the browser's default stylesheet doesn't already provide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Please don't do this with max-width it makes printing a huge mess, I regularly have to edit max-width on sites that set it so I don't have to print double or triple the number of pages, at least set max-width to be a relative unit for print.

<comment><USER38> Max-width is the correct setting for the desktop, where windows are resized to enable proper reflow. Printing web pages should be quite rare, no?

<comment><USER39> either way:

        @media print {
          …
        }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> That text area is way too narrow. It inhibits scanning to be unable to see very much of the text at once, because it forces you to scroll see more than about a paragraph at a time.

Readability isn't the concern. Show me a book with margins that gigantic.

</comment><comment><USER41> Cool! For my personal taste a little bit too much padding for my Galaxy S9 though. 1.25rem or 1.5rem would be sufficient and gives another 1-2 characters per line. But that's mostly personal taste.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you mind taking the time to provide a screenshot? What you suggested sounds like a good idea to me!

<comment><USER41> Here you go [https://imgur.com/a/BzMdUtQ](https://imgur.com/a/BzMdUtQ)

I think I can't edit the styles in Chrome on Android though. (no dev tools)

This [https://imgur.com/a/I3CHas1](https://imgur.com/a/I3CHas1) is for comparison a screenshot of the mobile HN padding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks! It's 1.5rem now if you hard refresh :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> long-lazuli I would suggest you to always put a `color` when you define a `background-*`. Now that website can support darkmode, it would be a shame to see a white text on this yellowish background...

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm definitely going to steal your website design (please don't sue me). But I don't like sans-serif fonts. What serif fonts do you recommend to use instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't care and am instead flattered :) Would appreciate a mention in the comments if you indeed do, though.

As for serif fonts, I would recommend doing what the other comment suggests. To expand on that, if you find that a particular safe web font [1] looks better for your site, you can explicitly prioritize it. For example, I did Arial -> Helvetica -> sans-serif.

[1]: [http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/fonts.html](http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/fonts.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm an outsider to this world so please forgive the basic question: what is "main"?

Does its use depend on any particular markup in the HTML?

And how far back does it go as a CSS feature?

<comment><USER44> "main" is not CSS, it's an HTML element introduced as part of HTML5. All modern browsers support it, Firefox since 2013. No version of Internet Explorer supports it but all versions of Microsoft Edge do. Browsers ignore elements they don't recognize (they don't ignore what's within them) which does mean they will ignore CSS statements that only uses "main" a selector.

Modern browsers that support the element will present it as a "main" landmark to assistive technologies. Landmarks (header/banner, footer, main, navigation, etc.) are a useful way for people who use assistive technologies (mostly screen readers for the visually impaired) to get a sense of a page's layout and to move around within a page's contents.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ma...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/main)

<comment><USER43> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is definitely better than nothing.

I personally prefer a bit more so that It looks good on my old crappy phone with far fewer than 600px wide. water.css is great.

</comment><comment><USER46> > it appears that the default font size for most browsers is 16px, so 38rem is > 608px

What does px mean in CSS? I thought it was pixels but clearly not...

<comment><USER5> "The px unit is the magic unit of CSS. It is not related to the current font and usually not related to physical centimeters or inches either. The px unit is defined to be small but visible, and such that a horizontal 1px wide line can be displayed with sharp edges (no anti-aliasing). What is sharp, small and visible depends on the device and the way it is used: do you hold it close to your eyes, like a mobile phone, at arms length, like a computer monitor, or somewhere in between, like an e-book reader? The px is thus not defined as a constant length, but as something that depends on the type of device and its typical use."

[https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html](https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html)

<comment><USER46> > What is sharp, small and visible depends on the device and the way it is > used

How can you use this vague definition to do anything useful?

I would imagine they simply mean 'it's a pixel, or something as physically large as pixels used to be until we got retina screens' but they can't say that as it doesn't sound technical enough!

<comment><USER5> Pretty much, yes. Screens changed and evolved so now it doesn't mean much and most people will attempt to skip using them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Sorry OP, but it doesn't look good everywhere. You're only using the middle 1/3 of the screen on desktops.

</comment><comment><USER9> Three more:

        body { font-size: medium; }
        main, article, content { font-size: 1rem;}
        p, li, dd, dt, blockquote { font-size: 1em; }

Give the user their default font size, _not_ some px-defined kludge.

Em vs rem: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19608806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19608806)

</comment><comment><USER48> Interesting.

I'd recommend Water.css for a more through out-of-the box experience that looks great anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER49> Assuming that JoshuaRLi is Josh:

I really like your site. A minimalist website is surprisingly hard to achieve.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I've indeed sunk a surprising amount of effort and time to make this. I have like, 5 directories of past iterations that didn't "feel like the one" spanning a bit more than a year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Looks like crap on high resolution monitors >.>

</comment><comment><USER51> Then the page is ruined by the disastrous Arial font.

</comment><comment><USER52> As someone else who is not versed in CSS this is epic

</comment><comment><USER53> Love this! 58 bytes of css... and it's typographically better than Wikipedia and many other "styled" websites!

</comment><comment><USER54> I dig it! Good job!

</comment><comment><USER55> This is beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER56> > that speaks to the fact that i know nothing about "modern" web development

I thoroughly agree with his statement and just wanted to post this to help emphasize the fact.

</comment><comment><USER57> > max-width: 38rem

> supporting 600px displays at a minimum seems reasonable.

Max-width is just that: maximum width. That CSS is not "supporting 600px displays at a minimum".

</comment><comment><USER58> Another good resource for this "minimal" approach is:

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

.. and it's followup:

[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

(Both are SFW sites except for the use of expletives in the URL/title).

<comment><USER59> There's also [https://bestmotherfucking.website/](https://bestmotherfucking.website/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: iPad app to store web articles offline - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gleaner/id931947453?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

<comment><AUTHOR> A project late last year, which almost be forgotten until days ago when I read a thread on Hacker News says most of the early bookmarked web pages are disappeared.

There are some app's videos on [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ9EDe3TWbll_2Y256yXpLw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ9EDe3TWbll_2Y256yXpLw/videos)</comment>


Billions of Dollars U.S. Economy Loses to Occupational Licensing - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2018/12/03/study-reveals-the-billions-of-dollars-u-s-consumers-and-the-economy-lose-to-occupational-licensing/#7965acfb39b6 <comment><USER2> Don't bother: this is entirely one-sided. How much is lost to licensing is all that it covers. How much do we save by having licensed electricians, mechanics, etc that don't screw things isn't considered, as near as I can tell. Also, the author discloses his affiliation with the "Institute for Justice", which I was surprised to find out is a Libertarian public interest law firm, not a superhero organization like I'd hoped. It's not really a Forbes article, it's sort of an infomercial. If it was journalism, it would be hopelessly one-sided, not even an attempt at he said/she said malpractice.</comment>


There are no decent alternatives to YouTube. - <AUTHOR> I freely admit that it's somewhat irrational, but I really hate Google, and I really don't like the YouTube ecosystem.  But I've been persuaded to embark on a "short math videos" project, and there's no way my own website can host more than the first 10 or 20.
I've been investigating other options, but they're all ... sub-optimal.  Vimeo?  PeerTube?  Nothing has the features that YouTube offers.
If you made a video and wanted to avoid YouTube ... what would you use? <comment><USER2> I saw this posted on HN yesterday. I know nothing about it (and I try to avoid anything that mentions blockchain), but it might be of interest for a self- contained project.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22785644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22785644)

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Code is the ultimate form of data compression. 1080p is an inefficient way to display four lines of LaTeX on a screen for fifteen seconds. Javascript to decode LaTex only has to be downloaded once and sent to cache. Your talking head can be in the corner. The InfoQ aesthetic is small live video, big slides, and good audio.

To put it another way, hosting your own video is a mathematical problem. Other than good audio tools, you probably have everything you need to make something excellent. Get good audio tools. Please.

</comment><comment><USER4> bit out of the box, but you could probably be successful with twitch.tv, getting them on there take some extra time tho

</comment><comment><USER5> You can upload video to a video CDN and display it on your own web page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had no luck in trying to make sense of the video CDN infrastructure and ecosystem. They seem designed for something completely different to what I've trying to do, and inappropriate. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, or reading the wrong things, but people say "Just use a video CDN" and it just all looks irrelevant, inappropriate, or unusable.

Maybe I'm expecting it to be too simple and straight-forward, and everyone has to go through the same gazillion steps. No wonder YouTube is winning.

Quick example, fastly.com[0]

First 10 TB, $0.12. Sounds brilliant. Minimum per month, $50. Less brilliant.

Complete mis-match with my use case.

[0] [https://www.fastly.com/pricing](https://www.fastly.com/pricing)

<comment><USER5> Fast.ly has great marketing but I don't see where the value comes from.

I have tested this service from AWS

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/on- demand-streaming-video.html)

with friends n' family but haven't used it for production. It looks pretty complicated, but I think you could find a script somewhere that packs up your video properly and uploads it, you could get it down to one step and probably make it easier to upload than Youtube in the long term.

I think the biggest reason why Youtube wins is being free, plus also being a big community with a lot of discovery. AWS does not have a minimum so it is better than fast.ly in that respect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I'll check that out.

I've also had PeerTube recommended.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blood Test That Spots Tumor-Derived DNA in Early-Stage Cancers - <AUTHOR> http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/scientists_develop_blood_test_that_spots_tumor_derived_dna_in_people_with_early_stage_cancers <comment><USER2> I work for another player Guardant Health. We are the Liquid Biopsy market leaders right now. We just raised $360M Series E from SoftBank.

If you find this type of thing interesting and want to be part of it, we are hiring _lots_ of folks. My team is looking for bioinformaticians, Python hackers, and machine learning people. Please reach out to me if you want to know more firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER3> Guardant Health is a member of the Blood Profiling Atlas for Cancer ([https://www.bloodpac.org/members/](https://www.bloodpac.org/members/)) too with a commitment to opening up data for faster discovery. So they're good people!

Now you have to wonder why John Hopkins isn't party to it...

<comment><USER4> Hate to be that guy, but as an alum I have to correct this. It's Johns* Hopkins.

<comment><USER5> Interesting. I always heard it as "John Hopkins", and I guess every time I read it I also auto-corrected it to "John" in my head. It's actually his great-grandmother's maiden name[1]

[1][http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/history/history1.html](http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/history/history1.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All fair enough. The two big immediate challenges in the field are i) that the tumor-derived fraction of total cfDNA can be as low as 1:10000 (stage I) and ii) that it is difficult to make Illumina sequencing more accurate than 1 error in 1000 sequenced bases (in which case the 1:10000 signal is drowned out). This paper uses some clever statistical tricks to reduce Illimina sequencing error; one of these tricks is to leverage population information, i.e. the more samples you sequence the better your understanding of (non- cancer-associated) systematic errors. This follows a long tradition in statistical genetics of using multi-sample panels to improve analysis of individual samples. There are also biochemical approaches like SafeSeq or Duplex Sequencing to reduce sequencing error.

Not-so-obvious point #1 is that the presence of cancer-associated mutations in blood != cancer. You find cancer-associated mutations in the skin of older probands, and assumedly many of the sampling sites would never turn into melanomas. A more subtle point is that cfDNA is likely generated by dying cells, i.e. a weak cancer signature in blood might also be indicative of the immune system doing its job.

Point #2 is that it's not necessarily about individual mutations, which are, due to the signal-to-noise ratio alluded to above, difficult to pick up. One can also look at the total representation of certain genes in cfDNA (many cancers have gene amplifications or deletions, which are easier to pick up because they affect thousands of bases at the same time), and the positioning of individual sequenced molecules relative to the reference genome. It seems that these positions are correlated with gene activities (transcription) in the cells that the cfDNA comes from, and cancer cells have distinct patterns if gene activity.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is also Freenome, which raised a $65m Series A to bring something similar to market:

> Last year, we raised $5.5 million to prove out the potential of this > technology. Now, it's time to make sure that it's safe and ready for the > broader population.

[https://medium.com/freenome-stories/freenome- raises-65m-in-s...](https://medium.com/freenome-stories/freenome- raises-65m-in-series-a-from-andreessen-horowitz-gv-and-others-1c64c4302f71)

<comment><USER8> There's a bunch of companies doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I haven't read the referenced study, but I'm sure this is using the same (or very similar) cell free DNA (cfDNA) sequencing techniques currently used clinically for Non Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) to screen for genetic defects such as trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome).

NIPT is a non-invasive blood screening test that is quickly becoming the clinical standard of care. Many insurance companies now cover the entire cost of NIPT screening for for at-risk pregnancies (e.g. women of "Advanced Maternal Age" (35yo+)). The debate is moving to whether it should be utilized/covered for average-risk pregnancies as well.

[1] [http://capsprenatal.com/about-nipt/](http://capsprenatal.com/about-nipt/)

[2] [https://www.genomeweb.com/molecular-diagnostics/aetna- wont-c...](https://www.genomeweb.com/molecular-diagnostics/aetna-wont-cover- noninvasive-prenatal-testing-average-risk-pregnancies)

<comment><USER9> As the linked article doesn't name the paper, here's a link to it:

Title: Direct detection of early-stage cancers using circulating tumor DNA

Link (no paywall): [http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/403/eaan2415](http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/403/eaan2415)

<comment><USER9> My super-quick skim of the paper shows that they are indeed using cfDNA. The novelty presented lies in the creation and application of a technique they dub "targeted error correction sequencing" (TEC-Seq).

Figure 2 shows the sequencing error rate reduced from around 1e-4 using conventional NGS to 1e-6 using TEC-Seq.

This increased sensitivity allows for discovery of early cancer at levels that are undetectable using existing cfDNA testing techniques.

<comment><USER10> It's "funny" how they take all their high quality enzymatic reagents from the company NEB and do this error-repair step (which something NEB has claimed and shown that people should be doing with their NGS sample), and whole they use a high fidelity polymerase (Phusion), they don't use the highest fidelity (e.g. NEB Q5 or Kapa HIFI). Also, NEB makes a specific kit to repair NGS samples (i.e. Called pre-CR). Combined this would have translated into a 10-fold lower error rate (so regular NGS 10^-4, this paper 10^-6, then 10^-7 with even better enzymes).

Targeted capture using Agilent's SureSelect is pretty common in the cancer field. Their custom implementation allows for oversampling (30,000x) which, along the enzymatic error correction, allows them a high confidence in the target they chose to evaluate.

Overall, I think this is neat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Slowly but surely. This isn't even close to a real diagnostic, but it's a hopeful proof of concept.

I really do wish detection studies would publish a ROC curve, though, or at least d'.

<comment><USER12> Yeah false positive vs negative is really critical when you tell people they might have cancer... people will do crazy stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Possibly a silly question, but is it possible for a 'healthy' person who doesn't have any cancer risk factors to get a test like this done?

<comment><USER14> It's not a silly question, it's an interesting one to ask.

The short answer is: probably not, but maybe!, as some of these tests and assays are sometimes run on "healthy" people as part of testing and validation. So you might be able to convince some of these labs or companies to "test" you. But my spouse, who is one of the authors of the OP paper, ran into this issue when one of the lab members tested "positive" for a cancer- associated mutation during early-phase development of some of the assays. (They were running the stuff on their own blood.) The team was kind of stumped: the tests at that point were intended for characterizing cancer, with only inklings of ideas that it could be used for screening for cancer in seemingly-healthy people. It highlights the challenge: then what?

The outstanding question in this space is indeed: then what? We're getting to the point where we can detect tumor DNA with extremely high sensitivity. But if you are found to have DNA in your blood that could be from cancer, then what?

Whole-body CT scan? PET scan? MRI? And you find a node, a nodule, a mass... then what? Biopsy it? And then what? Cut it out? Chemotherapy? Watch it?

Each step is fraught with cost and worry and risk and potential morbidity, eg CT scans irradiate you... which can cause cancer.

We have no idea what to do with the information at this point. In fact, in some cases (as mentioned in other threads) even when we KNOW you have a specific cancer, it turns out to be better to watch and wait rather than do anything, because it can be expensive and harmful and risky to go hunting, when the cancer turns out to be slow and predictable. But it took us decades to figure that out, and to figure out which this was the case for.

So I would advise _not_ getting such a test anytime soon, even if you could. There's nothing to do with information at the moment. As for the lab member, they ended up not doing anything about that result.

But it is still a good question, because the only way we begin to find out what to do with this kind of information is to begin collecting it.

<comment><USER15> If I am diagnose as early cancer, it could be a good motivation to switch to a more healthy lifestyle: more sleep, less food, ...

<comment><USER16> But if you don't, it's not worth it ? Everyone could benefit from a healthier lifestyle. I have a hard time believing that would be a wake up call for a significant percentage of people (see smokers, obesity, ...).

<comment><USER17> I recently discussed this very question with a colleague, and we both agreed that it probably would be a "wake up call". Currently, we really lack quality heath data, and so the loudest pundit or charlatan is who people listen to. And what they mostly present are anecdotes. Having high-fidelity health data about me as an individual and as part of various cohort study groups would allow my doctor to say "This is you now. These are the various future you's if you pursue these different lifestyles".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> According to Craig Venter, early detection is what we need to eliminate cancer:

[https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s](https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s)

I guess most are treatable if caught early?

<comment><USER19> Yes and no. With some cancers like prostate cancers, we're finding and treating cancers which would never kill the patient. And the deadliest cancers are the ones that grow quickly, quickly enough that early detection is extremely difficult.

For other kinds of cancers, like cervical cancer, which grows extremely slowly, early detection is already proven to be a lifesaver.

<comment><USER20> Something tied to what you said that is often not appreciated by people is that early detection can actually cause harm. In the example you gave of slow growing prostate cancers, in many cases people will now undergo treatment due to the early detection and the treatment winds up being far worse than the cancer itself would ever have been.

As the technology improves it's getting better at making predictions on the severity of the cancer and that can be used to guide treatment, or lack thereof. It's still far from perfect however.

<comment><USER21> > early detection can actually cause harm. In the example you gave of slow > growing prostate cancers, in many cases people will now undergo treatment > due to the early detection and the treatment winds up being far worse than > the cancer itself would ever have been.

I have never quite bought this argument. ISTM it's not the early detection that causes harm -- it's the inappropriate treatment of early detected cancer that causes harm.

<comment><USER20> Yes, that's exactly what it is. Thus the argument is that indirectly early detection causes harm. As I mentioned later on in my post a lot of current research is going into determining if and when treatment must be done instead of the more common behavior of just diving in wholeheartedly.

<comment><USER22> "Early detecting causes harm" sounds absurd. That's akin to saying that "eating food" (and not dying from hunger) leads to harm from cancer treatment.

<comment> xxXXxx- We also have a case study of over diagnosis from Korea:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2017/05/09/52756929...](http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2017/05/09/527569291/dont-screen-for-thyroid-cancer-task-force-says)

"South Korea is the poster child for the problem of overdiagnosis" of thyroid cancer, Welch says. About 15 years ago, doctors there started a mass campaign to screen for thyroid cancer. That vastly increased the rate of thyroid cancer, to the point that it exceeded cases of breast cancer and other common malignancies.

Yet Welch notes that the mortality rate from this cancer didn't change at all. "So all these extra cases were cases of thyroid cancer that weren't destined to bother people," he said. Instead, that rash of overdiagnosis sent people into needless surgery.

Harmless thyroid tumors are surprisingly common. Decades ago, pathologists in Finland noticed that more than a third of the people they saw in autopsy had thyroid tumors, but the cancers had no negative consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Didn't Grail raise a billion dollars to do just this?

<comment><USER8> Yes but grail is doing deep sequencing I believe.

<comment><USER24> That's exactly what they did in the OP: "the sequencing method is based on deep sequencing"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > They found none of the cancer-derived mutations among blood samples of 44 > healthy individuals.

Is 98% specificity adequate for a cancer test?

<comment><USER26> Certainly not for a general screen, but then we just know that the specificity is in the range of (98%, 100%) now, not the exact specificity. And we don't know what other refinements might improve upon what they did here.

But their data is too valuable to hold back until they had the final result of a test that could be taken to the FDA and approved for general use. This is valuable science, that impacts the directions that others are taking with their research.

I'm not saying you're doing this, but it's a common trend on HN and for other non-scientist technical people to forget that scientific journals show the process of science, not completed science. A journal is not a textbook that one can pick up and read a complete, final story, where all the false starts and uninteresting tangents are skipped. Journals are a way for scientists to communicate about their current progress, and that's an essential part of the scientific process. There has to be room to say: "here's where we are." Especially when they are able to get to the point of where they are right now.

Also, this was published in a very high profile journal, on a highly competitive topic, so take it all with a huge grain of salt. The senior author of this paper does good work, and many people are talking about similar preliminary results, but it takes time to prove these things.

<comment><USER25> > I'm not saying you're doing this, but it's a common trend on HN and for > other non-scientist technical people to forget that scientific journals show > the process of science, not completed science

How much would it have cost them to increase the number of controls? How did they choose 44?

<comment><USER14> It costs a lot, unfortunately. Sequencing is still fairly expensive, and the methods in OP are fairly complex on top of that.

There's also the interesting question of: if the test came back positive in a seemingly-healthy control, how would you know if that was a true positive or a false positive? It's still early in the game as to how to work up a cancer detected only in blood. The gold standard is tissue biopsy, but how far are you willing to go to hunt that down? It's a tough one.

Source: My spouse is one of the authors of the study in question.

<comment><USER25> > if the test came back positive in a seemingly-healthy control, how would you > know if that was a true positive or a false positive?

You can estimate the likelihood from cancer prevalance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When this test has a near 100% success rate, how does it help the patients? Can it really prevent cancer?

<comment><USER28> > Can it really prevent cancer?

No.

What this is, is a test to detect cancer. The cool thing is that it should detect various cancers early (even before symptoms are showing).

The earlier cancer is detected the sooner a patient can start treatment. And the earlier treatment starts the better the odds of surviving.

And as a blood test this could end up being a standard part of an annual checkup. Especially for patients at greater risk (eg. men over N years, smokers, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Tangent: I'm invested in a small cap stock, Sophoris Bio, that's in a P2B study for prostrate cancer with a drug developed out of Johns Hopkins called PRX302 (Topsalysin).

That and the article about blood tests shows there's a lot they're working on for noninvasive or minimally invasive procedures to help prevent cancer early on.</comment>


Fuck-That Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/f-ck-that-money/ <comment><USER2> This essay is spot on. I'm a big believer in having "fuck that" money. When I have less than that, I feel trapped for obvious reasons. When I have more than that, then the money itself brings additional headaches and pains that also grind me down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks John!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Agree, though it's kind of an odd way to express the idea. Looking at it another way, make sure your expenses always remain so low that you can simply walk away from any job. That's the only way to remain free.</comment>


OmNomNomify It Cookie Monster Bookmarklet - <AUTHOR> http://www.omnomnomify.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems to only work on HTTP pages. Make sure to inspect the code of bookmarklets like this. It could be slurping cookies and sending it to a remote server.</comment>


The Hidden FM Radio Inside Your Pocket, and Why You Can't Use It - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/04/16/400178385/the-hidden-fm-radio-inside-your-pocket-and-why-you-cant-use-it

<comment><USER2> The radio coupled with internet access is the fastest way to obtain/disseminate information. Contrary to some of the comments already made, the radio is absolutely essentially for emergency situations given the ubiquity of emitters and receivers as well as the fragile nature of cell technology. It is sad that posters' dislike for NPR as an organization leads them to dislike the concept of connectivity.</comment>


Why We Need Web 3.0 - <AUTHOR> https://breakermag.com/why-we-need-web-3-0/ <comment><USER3> He begins by claiming to have coined the term "Web 3.0". Reminds me of when some other guy recently claimed to have coined the phrase, "priming the pump".

When I see a statement like this, one which seems clearly absurd, I have a hard time taking whatever follows seriously.

<comment><USER4> I just coined the term Web 4.0, you heard it here first.

<comment><USER5> 36 minutes too late, better quickly coin Web 5.0: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918120)

<comment><USER4> Oh damn! I'm coining Web 6.0 just to be safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah, Ethereum.

Web 1.0's idealism was focused on liberal, unilateral sharing of information. People just put things up without any real commercialisation, until the dotcom era of the very late 90s. Not all the internet was the web: there was a decentralised censorship-resistant messageboard system known as USENET, and people tended to access email with local clients.

Web 2.0 was the commercialisation and polishing of the above; everything became a web app. The downside of this was everything being infested by advertising.

Web 3.0 likes to claim it's a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing, but if it's built on cryptocurrency it will inherit its flaws: appalling waste of energy, fundamental capacity limitations, and a tendency to collapse in fraud.

<comment><USER7> > a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing

Jaron Lanier often makes the point that the goals of free information didn't turn out quite the way they intended

> The internet was built on a socialist model that everything should be free > and accessible to all. But it also celebrated visionary tech entrepreneurs > who made it big with their world-changing ideas. "How do you celebrate > entrepreneurship when everything is free?" he mused. Tech companies looked > to advertising to fund their operations, and that's where all the corruption > began.

Ads powered by algorithms that perform behavior-modification on it's subjects is the only model left when all that "information" is free.

> A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of > information sharing—and a strong middle class must be able to outspend the > elite tip of an economy for democracy to endure,"

[https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix- the-i...](https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix-the-internet- we-have-to-start-paying-for-google-and-facebook/)

[https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it- sounds-...](https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-will- enslave-us-all/)

<comment><USER6> Certainly, but we know what the likely alternatives were at the time: telco walled gardens (Minitel) or dialup services (AOL).

I maintain that building the internet _without_ an integrated billing system was its most impressively radical choice. If a telco had been involved they'd have built the billing first then worked out what limited range of services they felt like selling, on which they would try to keep as much of the margin as possible rather than letting third parties profit.

The economy of monetized information would be much smaller, since you would need to "buy in"; no Wikipedia, no Stackexchange, no free courses, no free software, no free maps.

> A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class

This very much depends on whether information is a form of labour or a form of capital. What's the information equivalent of "r > g"?

<comment><USER7> > The economy of monetized information would be much smaller

There is plenty of evidence that that is not a guaranteed outcome:

> HBO and Netflix's paid subscription models have resulted in "peak TV."

Micropayments might be a way to allow everyone to participate.

> Lanier suggested exploring other business models as well, including a > scenario where individuals would be compensated for uploading quality > content.

<comment><USER8> > Micropayments might be a way to allow everyone to participate.

. . . only if the scale of that "micro" is truly "micro" in relation to our "micro" incomes, as consumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's hoping Web 3.0 goes back to minimalism. Unless you're building a fully interactive web application, let's get back to server side rendering, optimized images, and minimal web requests. Now that everyone is getting faster and faster internet speeds, the web has turned into the old sloppy coding practices, where CPU speeds were doubling year after year. Just give me the information we need without all of the magical fluff around it.

<comment><USER10> I honestly don't think I would want to keep working with webdev if I had to go back to relying on server side rendering for everything, the workflow is just _so_ much worse (to me).

<comment><USER11> I'd like to hear more about your experience. I was in a technical presentation yesterday in which a web developer working on a Rails codebase that has been transitioning from backbone to React over the past couple of years talked about her experience trying to add a single page to the app. In the end, it required 14 steps, and I couldn't help but wonder whether all the scaffolding, code generation, and wiring to enable both dynamic and static rendering to work correctly (static for search engines) really provides a better experience for anyone. I get why companies like Google and Facebook developed these frameworks, but for a site of moderate size (say, a million monthly uniques), is it really a win? I look at sites like [https://pinboard.in/](https://pinboard.in/) and feel like they really hit the sweet spot on utility, user experience, performance, and development workflow. But most of my experience is on the backend. What am I missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not that I give any of these two any chance of succeeding, but the fediverse seems to me like it has much higher chances of short term success than Web 3.0.

Small (and a pretty ignorant) comparison:

Fediverse: Fair amount of clients, some users, utilizes existing technologies and creates decentralized versions of already existing paradigms based on the W3C recommendations.

Web 3.0: Uses blockchain, can't access it from your browser, has barely any users but apparently a lot of clients, inherits probably the worst aspect of .onion services (inability to just type in the URL).

However, looking purely at the financial level, Web 3.0 seems to be winning. It's where money is funneled through, because there's a small chance that it will offer something grandiose in return. Meanwhile, fediverse operates on pennies donated by the users to approachable sysadmins with some spare resources.

One of them can afford a summit in San Francisco (sponsored by a few foundations), and the second one will probably never have a summit anywhere.

<comment><USER13> > (inability to just type in the URL)

You could still put all domains of an alternate domain system behind a X.web3.org that loads the whole system client side, and then connects to peers via WebRTC to load the domain X via webtorrents or ipfs or zeronet or whatever. That way it's (mostly) backwards compatible to normal websites and you can remove the "root domain" trust point later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _What precisely is wrong with the web today? In short, it's a big baby. It has grown old without growing up._

That's exactly what I think about most of the cryptocurrenciy ecosystem today.

<comment><USER15> Ethereum is only 3 years old.

<comment><USER16> It had the lessons of Bitcoin and hundreds of dead alt coins.

Every time ETH gets used for an app, it takes down/log jams the network.

I dont think it will be possible to use blockchain to power the web. Slow, unreliable, and expensive.

<comment><USER15> There were hardly a dozen alt-coins before Ethereum. I mentioned specifically Ethereum because it was Ethereum that introduced a Turing complete virtual machine that allowed people to execute code in Blockchain. Before Ethereum came into the picture people used Blockchain only for storing value. So Ethereum was a game changer and it is only 3 years old.

Ethereum developers are currently working hard on making Ethereum more scalable. It cant definitely power the web anytime soon but its getting better and better. Read about Sharding, Plasma, Raiden etc if you are interested.

<comment><USER16> There were hundreds of alt coins before ETH, they were bitcoin copypastes and no one cared.

When you start talking about offchain ETH solutions or using multiple ETH systems to scale, you are removing the only thing that provides value from Blockchain - Trust.

When an ETH sidechain can get 51% attacked or the entire system is verified through a few centralized locations, you remove the only reason you should use blockchain.

I used to drink the ETH koolaid, I now realize blockchain shouldnt be used for apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to be much more positive about decentralization. I even wrote this little decentralized side project[0] that did well on HN a few years ago.

But lately, I've become more cynical about it. I fear it just doesn't map that well to the real world. From an abstract/logical architecture it makes a ton of sense, and would be beyond amazing to have a decentralized, unstoppable, computing platform that anyone can hop on, like Ethereum promises.

But there's real computation happening in physical machines somewhere, real fiber connections between servers, real electricity costs, real national borders, real laws, etc.

These days I'm much more enthused, I think, by federation, as that seems to map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the ownership and costs and responsibilities on those who control the hardware. I was extremely excited, for example, by sandstorm.io, but it seems like it's winding down lately. I haven't really seen an equivalent that's caught my eye, but maybe I'm missing some.

I really do support the "Web 3.0" vision as defined here, and best of luck to them. If they can get that "killer app" that makes everyone want to join, and provide a little defense against detractors trying to use physical means to shut down the logical decentralization, then it would be a revolution for sure. But it looks hard to get there from here, to me.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265)

<comment><USER18> > [federation] seems to map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the > ownership and costs and responsibilities on those who control the hardware.

This is both the biggest strength of federation and its biggest weakness. How do those who control the hardware profit from federating open and free services? Federation will be a contender when (if?) somebody figures that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm old enough to remember when Web 3.0 was another name for The Semantic Web[1]. I'm sure Gavin Wood is a clever person but the opening of this article made him come off as a dotcom boom era huckster.

[1] [https://archive.fo/jUSh#selection-627.0-627.56](https://archive.fo/jUSh#selection-627.0-627.56)

</comment><comment><USER20> I kept on waiting for the part where he actually tells me what "web 3.0" involves. I guess it's "something something blockchain".

</comment><comment><USER21> I experimented with Beaker Browser[1] and explored some dat:// pages. It reminded me when I first used the Tor Browser. Most of the pages looked like they were Geocities pages, and the same goes for dat:// pages - they are like something from the late nineties web. So much for the term 'Web 3.0'

[1] [https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

<comment><USER22> _" dat:// websites work just like any other webpage. They're a collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that come together to form a webpage"_

So there's nothing technical driving that dated look and feel...

<comment><USER21> Yeah but I think it's the _type_ of users creating the webpages. They sloppily throw together some HTML & CSS and it leads to this dated Geocities look and feel. (No jQuery powered single page application which hogs memory and heats up your CPU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd rather keep using non-corporate internet such as IRC, forums, and whatnot, it's sad to see what's happening with this.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe I'm looking at this blockchain thing all wrong.

Perhaps it's a lesser evil, whereby the foolish money is vacuumed up and held in a relatively innocuous form before it is dispersed all around where it would cause greater mischief and misery.

What can I say, I'm an optimist.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Ethereum—the platform I helped found—would allow people to interact in > mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each other.

Asking from ignorance here. Is everyone who uses ethereum subject to the ethereum developers when updates are made?

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess web 3.0 is blockchain, eh

> "the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary > authority of the despot."

\- brought to you by a humble impartial observer who maintains the blockchain protocols

</comment><comment><USER25> Web 3.0 will be the browser as universal VM, with everyone directly targeting WebAssembly, re-inventing the UI stack via WebGL or WebGPU.

</comment><comment><USER26> If "Web 2.0" was already coined, can you really coin something so derivative as "Web 3.0"?

</comment><comment><USER27> If we get fully cryptographic computation (I don't know if I'm using the term correctly, but basically no one knows what you're doing with their cycles), why would we need decentralization? Couldn't Isis run their irc server on AWS if it was impossible to know who is doing what?

This is an honest question btw

<comment><USER28> Computation is just a small part of the system. Payment is a big one - <USER2> account can still be flagged and taken down if they ban your credit card or equivalent. Another is public services: if you're serving a publicly accessible site, for example, at some point the data must be encrypted to be shown to the user. If they can trace that back to the AWS machine, the account can still be taken down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Proof of work doesn't provide a sufficient number of transactions per second to support ideas of this magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER30> >[...] We see wealth, power and influence placed in the hands of the greedy, the megalomaniacs, or the plain malicious. [...] the same old dynamics.

Insanity is running the same program over and over again and expecting different results. You can tweak the configs a bit and change the running environment; but until we start editing the sourcecode (our DNA) you may expect the crooked wood of humankind to always act like humans always have.

</comment><comment><USER15> I always thought web 3.0 was the decentralised web and not necessarily blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER31> > _It was over four years ago that I coined the term "Web 3.0." Back then, it > was clear to me: Ethereum—the platform I helped found—would allow people to > interact in mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each > other._

Well, I'd rather we have a web of people trusting each other...

</comment><comment><USER32> "It was over four years ago that I coined the term "Web 3.0.""

Pay heed, as today I the great Numberwang coin the term "Web 4.0"

<comment><USER33> I couldn't get past that first sentence.</comment></comment>


Why I picked AngularJS? - <AUTHOR> https://markwillcollins.silvrback.com/why-i-picked-angularjs-backing-the-google-horse

<comment><USER2> I have no idea how close the chrome/chromium and the angular dev teams are but this is clearly a great synergy.

This is an interesting time for the browser / web framework duo, I wonder what would happen if chrome/angular become really faster but anotherBrowser/angular ends up having poor performance due to chrome specific features. Will developers turn to a more evenly supported framework to avoid performance issue or will the other browsers be forced to ensure good performance to avoid being considered as "slow" because of angular apps ?</comment>


Do you guys hear music when you mouse click? - <AUTHOR>

I seem to hear a distinct sounds for the left click and right click. Am sure they sound the same actually and it's my Brain imagining the distinct sounds. But sometimes even just clicking the left button on three different places seem to induce the feeling of three differently pitched clicks. Thereby enabling me to imagine a rhythm of beats by just left clicking at different places. For example three links pointing nowhere. Just wanted to check if it happens for others here as well? <comment><USER2> Right. It's due to interference, particularly with your monitor. Some configurations of hardware are worse than others, however.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh wow, yeah whether it's only in my head or not I do hear a difference after paying attention to it. I'm using the buttons on my Lenovo T60 laptop closest to the spacebar FWIW.</comment>


Covid-19 no longer a high consequence infectious disease in the UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19 <comment><USER2> Like to UK government site...

[https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious- dise...](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases- hcid)

>As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.

The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.

The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.

<comment><USER2> Sorry thought this was a different link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pointless rules lawyering.

It's delisted because it doesn't

>typically has a high case-fatality rate

But they don't have a criterion for "massive case rate"

So they are ignoring half the product "case fatality rate * case incident rate" and ignoring the effect of overwhelming medical resources causing increasing fatality rate.</comment>


Pirates Frustrated After TV Release Groups Swap .MP4 for .MKV - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-frustrated-after-tv-release-groups-swap-mp4-for-mkv-160408/ <comment><USER2> Are people really bothered by this? Matroska is hardly new and is well- supported in modern media players. It is also free open-source software, and technologically equivalent or even superior to MP4.

MP4 on the other hand is patent-encumbered, and supports DRM — not things people who take a radically different stance on intellectual property tend to appreciate.

But all that has nothing to do with the actual encoding of video. Matroska is a container format, so if you have an MP4 and a MKV video file encoded with the same audio and video codecs, you get the same quality. From what I understand from Matroska, it has better support and flexibility for including additional resources such as subtitles.

So what kind of ancient media player are people using that makes this switch relevant to them at all?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does somebody know why they changed from mp4 to mkv?</comment>


Yes, You Can Iterate Quickly In The App Store - <AUTHOR> http://famicode.tumblr.com/post/1238395932/yes-you-can-iterate-quickly-in-the-app-store

<comment><USER2> Somewhat misleading title. You can iterate quickly in the App Store if you're not actually using the App Store to distribute changes.

<comment><USER3> To clarify that a little bit:

You can change the responses from your API without recoding your app, if you design it correctly.

However, Apple will catch on to this eventually, so it won't be a free ride forever. They'll eventually want to approve API changes that your app accesses, and I'd bet they'd yank your app if you change the API (and thus the app) without their approval.

And if your app suddenly starts violating their terms because you changed your API, I'm sure they'll yank it.</comment></comment>


Tenacity Versus Failing Early (and Often) - <AUTHOR> http://continuations.com/post/286354045/tenacity-versus-failing-early-and-often <comment><USER2> A great perspective on a series of great articles by Mark. My own experience is that there is no sure way of knowing when to stick and to kick. The key is not to over-compensate. It is similar to riding a bike. Just because you fell on the left last time doesn't mean you will fall on the left again. Sometimes entrepreneurs over-compensate by learning their mistakes all too well. If they failed because they had too much money, they will try to do the next one bootstrapping. If they failed because there wasn't enough understanding of the market, they will try to do the next one with a bunch of salesmen. We need to learn from our past but we need to keep in mind that every opportunity is different. Time does not stand still and the rest of the world does not wait. Don't be a victim of your own experience.</comment>


Paris' Problem with the Dead - <AUTHOR> https://www.historytoday.com/reviews/paris-problem-dead-0 <comment><USER2> ", at least in advanced capitalist nations such as the UK and the US, where the processes of secularisation have recently been distinctly uneven, we don't quite know how to behave in places that, in Erin-Marie Legacey's phrase, make space for the dead. I can remember provoking a similar morally outraged reaction when, a decade ago, I took my small children to the local cemetery for a picnic"

I... what?

Atheist, raised by atheist parents in France, being respectful in a cemetery is not about religious education. It is about empathy and not being an asshole.

People who go there are most likely mourning. That's the last place where it is appropriate to bring kids playing.

And that author, talking about "advanced capitalist nations" like UK was one and France was stuck, like he seems to be, in the 19th century...

A lot of things happened in France between the revolution (1789) and the first stable republic (1871). A lot of it had to do with religion and monarchism, which were highly political. Secularism would really reign triumphantly only at the very beginning of the 20th century with the 1905 law of separation between the church and the state and this has been a very crucial turning point.

Talking about 19th century religious sentiment in France won't be relevant if you ignore the secularization process that has happened during the 20th century.

Something, dare I say, the "advanced nation of UK", with its official religion and archbishops having a voice in legislative matters, has never gone through.

<comment><USER3> > Atheist, raised by atheist parents in France, being respectful in a cemetery > is not about religious education.

Doesn't the burial itself have religious roots even when it's no longer administered by a church? Anecdotally, there has been a recent trend away from cemeteries altogether now that the religious reasoning isn't there, with people having there ashes scattered somewhere meaningful or kept with family.

> People who go there are most likely mourning. That's the last place where it > is appropriate to bring kids playing.

The last "funeral" I went to was an ashes scattering at the beach, which is basically a huge playground with kids running around everywhere. It didn't detract from the mourning.

<comment><USER2> I am not talking about funerals, which are weird one-off social events. I am talking about the typical crowd going to a cemetery. When you "have something to do" there it usually involves mourning and a trip to memory lane. You want some peace and a meditative atmosphere.

It is not about the deceased, it is not about the magical fluff around the funerals, it is about the living and their grief.

Bringing kids to play in the middle of cemetery is to me like bringing them in the middle of a library with a lot of people deep into their books.

If you do that, you are an asshole. It is not about religion. It could be about culture, but I want to believe that what I am saying is pretty obvious to most Americans as well.

<comment><USER4> This is going to vary across cultures. I have seen cemetery picnics in South American cities, the UK, France and here in New Zealand. There were many many families at weekends at cemeteries in Chile.

It seems that family picnics at the cemetery used to be common in the US too.

It wouldn't be appropriate during a funeral, but why is it not ok outside that time if it isn't disrespecting graves or mourners? [https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.atlasobscura.com/articles...](https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/picnic- in-cemeteries-america.amp)

<comment><USER2> "if it isn't disrespecting graves or mourners?"

Kids shouting are not compatible with typical mourning, sorry. Would you let your kids play in the middle of a reading room or a meditation session?

Sure, some people do that in all cultures. And across all cultures, we use different expression to convey the sentiment "they are being assholes".

<comment><USER5> > _Kids shouting are not compatible with typical mourning, sorry_

That's like your opinion.

To quote a famous playwright: "Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

<comment><USER2> Well, we are in front of two different cultural habits then: one that requires quietness and one that does not. The second one is incompatible with the first one.

You can't claim to be respectful of other's cultural habits if you insist on using yours knowing they are incompatible.

And I'd like to point out that the author of the article presents (what I believe to be) the French typically accepted attitude of quietness in cemetery as the result of being a "less advanced capitalist society" where secularism is less developed. Which is a laughable claim done by someone who obviously does not know the history of secularism is France after the 19th century or the demographics of religions there.

And gosh, I do have a young kid and I know how noisy he can get without him meaning any harm. And I do see other parents oblivious to the noise of their own kids. Seriously, that's not about cultural differences. That's about understanding that not everyone developed the tolerance to your kids behavior that you develop during the first years.

Imposing your kids to other people, especially when they want to focus on something else, is an asshole thing to do. That's the case in France, and that's the case in any culture that does not elevate kids-breeding to a cult that needs to be protected at any cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ultimately the dead cannot have a permanent resting place on this earth. There are 100 billion people who have died, if it takes 25 square feet to bury one, the space occupied by the dead will eclipse that occupied by the living.

After 100 years or so burial plots should be recycled.

<comment><USER7> Burial is something that humanity should be able to let go as a whole. It pollutes. It wastes resources and space. We need to find other ways to mourn, remember and symbolize. Ways that will let us treat the body as compost would be ideal, but hard to sell to the general population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a relatively recent novel set during the removal of Les Innocents to the new catacombs (Pure, by Andrew Miller). A good read, and like many discussions of these events, it makes the obvious connection to the moribund Ancien Regime.</comment>


There Probably Have Been Aliens - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/yes-there-have-been-aliens.html?WT.mc_id=2016-KWP-MOBILE-AUD_DEV&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=MOBILEFULLPAGE&kwp_0=298359&kwp_4=1145468&kwp_1=525833&_r=0&referer= <comment><USER2> > Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a > habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are > not the first.

1 in 10 billion trillion at first seems like such an incomprehensibly low probability that our first gut reaction is, "Well then of course there's no way it could be the case."

But then we must bear in mind that abiogenesis (the creation of life from non- life) might consist of a series of independent events, each of which is improbable. And guess how you figure out the probability of all of those events occurring:

P(A and B) = P(A) * P(B)

So, what's 1 in 10 billion trillion? 10^-22?

Well, if you have a mere eight improbable things that must all occur, and each has a probability of 1 in 1,000, the total probability is now at 10^-24.

Hmm, 10^-22 doesn't seem quite as incomprehensibly low anymore, does it?

Aside from that, we really have to think hard about what probability means in the context of the snippet quoted above.

As statistician to the stars William M. Briggs points out, "There just is no such thing as unconditional probability, or probability without respect to any evidence."

Because we have insufficient evidence to establish what the frequency of abiogenesis is, the quoted snippet basically could be rephrased:

For all we know, the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable- zone planet could be 10^-22 or 10^-222 or 10^-2222, and if it's less than 10^-22 then we are not the first.

Isn't it strange that in a certain sense, the probability of each of those probabilities being correct is essentially the same, given our current insufficient level of evidence?

<comment><USER3> One good example is that as far as we can tell multi-cellular life only evolved on Earth once. And while life started up on Earth pretty quickly it took about 600 million years for that life to become multicelluar. It's possible that we'll someday discover life is relatively common but never meet anything but amoebas.

<comment><USER4> Totally. Not only did multicellular life only evolve once, but eukaryotes themselves seem to have evolved only once. And they are 1000x more complex than their prokaryote predecessors. [edit: without any real evidence of anything convincingly between prokaryote and eukaryote]

It's one thing to say there might have been abiogenesis elsewhere that created something like the simple self-reproducing energy machines that bacteria and archaea are. It's another to claim that there is some inevitable progression from that to complex multicellular life. In my opinion this is a very teleological, very 'progressivist' notion of evolution that implies that one inevitably follows from another, and it is not borne out in the reality of what we know so far about happened on earth and what follows from first principles.

There may be a lot of complex, self-reproducing systems in the universe. It's arrogant to assume that any of them have to look anything like what we call "life" unless by life we mean the simplest single cell organisms. [edit: In fact it looks like simple prokaryotes evolved _twice_ on earth a "short" distance in time apart].

<comment><USER5> Multi cellular life has evolved several times. There are several distinct cases of single called organisms promoting conditions which aid others of it's species. Causing a colony to form, and then spawn new colonies.

Now, highly complex multicellular life seems to share common descent. But that likely has more to do with predation than anything else. Further single called organisms preform horizontal gene transfer to both other single called life and multicellular life, making things impossible to trace back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I reading this wrong, or is it basically just making a restatement of the Drake equation with updated numbers in place? [Edit: and ignoring some terms to allow for time irrelevance]. I was hoping for something addressing the Fermi paradox or something more than just a refined probabilistic estimate with such a definitive title.

<comment><USER7> No, that's exactly it. Those numbers will just keep on getting more precise as time goes on, though - we'll never know from the Drake equation alone, but it's the best guideline we have right now.

<comment><USER6> I suppose, but having more precise terms in the first half doesn't seem to really do much for us given that the terms dealing with the probability of life forming can't even really be estimated. This article is basically saying "surely it's more than 1 in 10^22", but I don't see any hint of why that would be, other than 'it's such a small chance that it had to be written in italics'.

<comment><USER8> Right. What's happened with the Drake Equation is that the terms related to possibly habitable planets have largely moved to the "almost certainly lots" realm.

But, as you say, with respect to life (or at least complex multi-cellular life), we just don't know. But the Drake Equation encourages thinking like, even it's it's a 1 in a trillion chance _effectively zero!_ , we'd have all these aliens running around. Because 1 in a trillion = 0 is pretty much what we're informed by day-to-day usage and intuition.

<comment><USER9> > _Because 1 in a trillion = 0 is pretty much what we 're informed by day-to- > day usage and intuition_

Avogadro's constant is 6.022 x 10^23 [1]. There are a hundred billion sets of a trillion constituent particles in ever mol of anything. A reaction that happens to water once in a trillion years would occur 20,000 times a second for each 18 mL of water.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant)

<comment><USER8> You're being an engineer :-) Yes, I am aware of those things but those sorts of numbers do not correspond to day-to-day usage and intuition of most people (as I said).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm kind of tired of these sorts of calculations that essentially boil down to "The universe is big and old". The idea that maybe millions of years ago another civilization existed in another galaxy just doesn't seem that important. And while actually encountering an alien species, especially a technology using one, would have a huge impact on our culture, philosophy, and religion one existing in theory doesn't. If you think the only reason that humans exist is because God created us then it doesn't matter how many stars are out there because the probability of life evolving on any of them is 0.

<comment><USER10> There's the possibility that God created life on Earth but it has evolved naturally elsewhere through the same processes by which our created version of life mutates. I haven't seen this argument much, but I could imagine it becoming more popular with the discovery of alien life. This is just a report on our most recent astronomical data, but the existence in life in theory could have a large effect on how much effort we put into searching for it.

<comment><USER11> If one must attempt to salvage the idea of divine creation in such desultory fashion, why not assume that the aliens are the intentional created creatures of the divine, and _we_ are just the random evolutionary accidents?

<comment><USER12> That seems as weird as the other way round. Wouldn't it be the simplest explanation to just say God created life on various planets but didn't tell anyone about each other?

<comment><USER11> Haha I wasn't seriously advocating such a bizarre aition. Rather I was encouraging a reconsideration of parent's proposal, which as you say is "as weird". Perhaps my encouragement was too obliquely ironical, as is often the case.

<comment><USER13> Today I learned that "aition" was not merely a typo, but rather a new (to me) word! (cool!)

Aition: a tale devised to explain the origin of a religious observance

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We can use similar logic to "prove" that in fact we are just living in a computer simulation.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living- in-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a- computer-simulation/)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160901-we-might-live- in-a...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160901-we-might-live-in-a- computer-program-but-it-may-not-matter)

</comment><comment><USER15> One of the (to me) most mind-bending arguments about the absence of alien civilizations is the apparent absence of self-replicating interstellar probes. It wouldn't take much more of a tech civilization than we have to launch such a thing, and it would take only one launch event in all of galactic history to quickly and permanently permeate the galaxy with them. So where are they?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Bracewell/Von Neuman probes[0]. You create an AI in a probe that can communicate in a variety of ways and replicate itself and send it off into space. IIRC it would conservatively take about a million years for a civilization to blanket the galaxy in them.

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

<comment><USER15> Communication seems to be optional.

<comment><USER11> It isn't obvious that communication by such "probes" would take place on a medium that we can currently sense. Which may be what you meant?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something has always confused me about the Drake equation.

The explanation I have heard repeatedly goes something like:

"This equation shows that there should be [massive number] of alien civilizations in the universe. But where are they?"

This seems to assume that, given the density of civilizations throughout the galaxy we can determine from [massive number], we should be able to observe other advanced civilizations. But is that true? If there was a civilization as advanced as we are somewhere in e.g. Alpha Centauri, would we be able to detect them?

<comment><USER17> You are describing the Fermi Paradox: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) \- there is a lot of interesting reading on that Wiki page.

The usual response I think is that the timescales and distances involved are simply still too big / spread out that we're still searching for the metaphorical needle in the haystack.

<comment><USER7> It's also perfectly conceivable that we do just happen to be the first. Looking less likely with every advance in astronomy, but still possible nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > we now have enough information to conclude that they almost certainly > existed at some point in cosmic history

Is there a term in the Drake Equation for our level of certainty that the Drake Equation isn't missing some terms?

<comment><USER19> One other proposed factor: the laws of physics may vary across the universe, so stars in faraway galaxies may not be eligible. But there's a lot of evidence that the laws of physics are the same as far away as we can see, so this seems unlikely to me.

There are good reasons to believe that intelligent civilizations are short lived (compared to cosmological time scales). So the absence of radio signals from nearby planets doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to send a probe there to see if there are ruins or something.

<comment><USER20> "So the absence of radio signals from nearby planets"

Whoa there... The SETI people whom are only occasionally telecom engineers have a thing about scanning for the simplest carrier waves and that's it.

Note that we only broadcast vestigial sideband amplitude modulated video signals which had a lovely strong stable carrier for oh maybe 50 years and we don't broadcast analog TV anymore. Lets be honest that the future for broadcast radio/TV doesn't look particularly bright so even if the aliens had the bright idea to use 8VSB modulation when the USA is in view or OFDM when the euros are in view then they still would see total radio silence from us in "a couple years". Terrestrial broadcasting is pretty much done.

You need to add a term to the SETI equation that your average civilization is only going to broadcast "SETI@HOME" compatible radio signals for maybe a century, probably less.

There's a section of Kraus classic radio astronomy textbook indicating that detecting Earth during the peak of the analog TV era would still have been pretty tricky if the aliens used our own "SETI@HOME" modulation.

You feed a baseband thru the wrong demod and you just get distorted noise.

Broadcast seems kinda dead as a concept in a packet switched social media era. The aliens and us are not going to understand each other on some rather fundamental levels making USA 2050 compared to USA 1950 look fairly trivial. Wait... you still use radio waves for communication instead of high frequency short range gravitic waves? You broadcast to a significant fraction of your unified population instead of social media via low power point to point systems? How... retro.

<comment><USER19> Good point: a moderately advanced civilization is likely to have no high-power baseband communication. Only intentional alien interstellar transmissions are likely to be powerful enough and decodable.

Earth has made several intentional transmissions ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI)) but it's unclear if we'll send any more, because they might attract hostile aliens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If an alien civilization existed, but we can never find any evidence of it existing, does it still count?

The speculation is moot as long as the record of evidence cannot support within a reasonable confidence interval that only one or more alien civilizations could have produced it.

Guessing with the Drake equation only helps to determine just how much time and funding you would like to provide to projects like SETI, that actually watch for and listen for evidence that would refute the null hypothesis (viz. no civilizations anywhere outside of Sol System).

All the article really says is that if SETI has enough resources to watch the entire sky at maximum resolution for an infinite timespan, it will eventually find something. But I'm certainly not going to sink that much time and money into it. I'd rather put that money into generation ships, sleeper ships, robotic seed ships, permanent space habitats, or some combination thereof.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's nice to see this sort of sentiment expressed more scientifically than "well come on, this place is huge and old, so... yeah, probably".

But I think it stands to reason and always has. After all, this place is old and huge, so...

</comment><comment><USER22> Please add "(2016)" to the title as this article is from last June.

</comment><comment><USER23> > _Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a > habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are > not the first._

Obviously, astronomy theories don't know much about these things, as the sheer number of stars with planets, and planets in the habitable zones, have come as a big surprise to everyone.

But still, can we say or guess anything about the age distribution of these stars and planets, compared to our earth and sun? Is our sun among the oldest or youngest of those stars which have earth-like planets?

</comment><comment><USER24> Envision civilizations tombstone: A automated observatory, which searches for green-zone planets and sends short laser-burst-encoded "Here lies"\- messages to the probable locations of tomorrow civilizations.

On some far away planet, a circle of far-travelled pulsing light razes with 30 km/s over the clouds, and is interpreted as a answer to the "Where is everybody?" question, missing the grammatically correct point of a decent interstellar conversation. The Question is.. "Where was everybody (when we where around?)"

</comment><comment><USER25> tl;dr The rough estimates of the number of habitable planets in the universe just went from 20 trillion to 100 trillion based on the fact that it looks like almost all stars have planets.

</comment><comment><USER26> Paraphrasing Sagan: "Great claims, need great evidence". Real evidence is always lacking for aliens.

<comment><USER27> Evidence isn't really the issue here. We're not trying to answer a definitive question here of whether or not there have been advanced civilizations. We're trying to reason our way into a statement of probability. Just because it isn't currently provable doesn't mean it isn't a question worth investigating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Pull the other one, it exists with probability 10^-22.

</comment><comment><USER29> > In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital > positions of the galaxy's planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt > the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial > civilization borders on the irrational.

AKA "Yes, there _might_ have been aliens". Interesting article, sensationalist headline.

<comment><USER30> It doesn't seem sensationalized to me. Saying that you'd almost have to be irrational to doubt something seems as close as a scientist can get to confirming that thing.</comment></comment>