Quake III Arena GPL Source Release (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena <comment><USER2> And it is still there: [https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III- Arena/blob/dbe4ddb1...](https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III- Arena/blob/dbe4ddb10315479fc00086f08e25d968b4b43c49/code/game/q_math.c#L552)

More info: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root)

<comment><USER3> How to get this good? :D

<comment><USER4> Know your math (and floating point hacks, and ...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was bummed that there were no contributions in the 6 years this was open sourced, but it turns out that active development is actually happening in a fork: [https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3](https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3)

<comment><USER6> It's the same story for Doom 3 engine / id-tech4. The most active fork I think is still Dhewm3, which includes some modern useful changes for compiling.

* [https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3](https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3)

* [https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3](https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3)

<comment><USER7> And Doom 1/2, which has which probably is the longest list of forks and ports of any software ever: [https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Source_port#List_of_source_ports](https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Source_port#List_of_source_ports)

<comment><USER8> Well, Doom and Quake 1 are kind of in the sweet spot where they are still small enough that one person has some hope of understanding the code base. As impressive as the later IdTech iterations are, and as awesome as it is that the code was released, they are daunting for a hobbyist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really like Quake 3's code. My favorite parts are:

\- The client/server network protocol and syncing state

\- The VM architecture (e.g. most of the game can be compiled by LCC into a custom byte code and interpreted. This was for safely (although I wouldn't be as sure these days) distributing mods iirc. I think the main game was shipped compiled to x86 though. The interface between the VM and the core stuff is via "syscalls" and its fun to see how that's wired up.)

\- The player physics/controls (i.e. walk/jump/collisions/etc.) (it's neat how fake first-person player physics always is. This isn't unique to quake 3 but quake 3 had notably good controls.)

It's a bit fun to trace what happens on 'w' keydown/keyup (when bound to walk forward.) When I first saw how that actually worked I was surprised (hint: it types commands invisibly into the command console ;) lots of string copies to do that.)

<comment><USER9> A random thing I just remembered:

[https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III- Arena/blob/dbe4ddb1...](https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III- Arena/blob/dbe4ddb10315479fc00086f08e25d968b4b43c49/code/qcommon/msg.c#L1709)

They implemented adaptive huffman coding but ironically only use it during static initialization, feeding it with static data (see the defn of msg_hData a few lines up.) Note that the only calls to Huff_addRef are in the init, and notice how it gets called - the loop over msg_hData[i]. I found that pretty funny. I'm guessing there was some plans to use it adaptively but it's not easy/obvious how to keep it in sync reliably...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Source review here: [http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/](http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/)

<comment><USER11> This is one of my favourite games of all time! It has great atmosphere, attitude, awesome mods and is well balanced. Thanks for this link it will be a good read :)

<comment> lionel- Are you talking about Half-Life? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like a good time to mention the open-source Quake map editor TrenchBroom[0] which is actively developed and supports Quake, Quake 2 and Hexen 2 (with Quake 3 support on the way). It's very easy to work with and heavily used in the Quake mapping scene today. Yes, there is a "Quake mapping scene" still![1] :)

[0] [http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom/](http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom/)

[1] [https://www.quaddicted.com/](https://www.quaddicted.com/) & [http://www.celephais.net/board/](http://www.celephais.net/board/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Well, as far as I remember that doesn't include the assets, so to play the actual game you still need the asset files.

Nevertheless, I appreciated the open source release very much back in 2005, as it allowed you to learn C programming in a friendly way. Not just that testing is like playing a game, but they have build a lot of platform independent functions to provide cross platform support.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but you ought to be able to use the assets from the demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> looking at code like this in github always reminds me why I prefer spaces over tabs, look at all that broken alignment:

[https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III- Arena/blob/master/c...](https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III- Arena/blob/master/code/ui/ui_players.c)

<comment><USER16> And the counter-argument remains that you can customize tabs to whatever length you want. Set "tab-size: 4;" in CSS.

<comment><USER17> That's the problem, though. People _do_ that, and then to indent 12 spaces, your guy who uses 4-space tabs will put three tabs, your girl who uses 8-space tabs will put a tab and four spaces, and your ace who uses only spaces will put twelve spaces. And after a year of sharing code doing this, your formatting will be farked and you'll spend half your time fixing other peoples' "broken" indentation.

I have no issue whatsoever with using tabs in an editor, as long as it saves them as spaces on disk.

<comment><USER18> You do not "indent 12 spaces", you have levels of indentation. If you indent code only using tabs it doesn't matter whether you set your tab width to 4, 8 or 20, it will always display properly. Feel free to change your tab width hourly, still no problem.

The only valid argument is that mixing spaces and tabs for indentation messes things up, but that argument works both ways so doesn't support either side in this never ending argument.

<comment><USER19> It is trivial both to ban tabs and to bulk convert tabs to spaces in a codebase or presubmit hook. The other direction seems impossible.

That means that if you want to avoid a mixed codebase it is far easier to get to and stay at spaces only than tabs-for-indent, spaces-for-alignment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I shouldn't be, but I am amazed that a tabs-vs-spaces war broke out on this particular story

</comment><comment><USER21> To be honest, I really wanted to see that one day, id Tech 5 and id Tech 6(66) be open source as a contester and competitor for UE4, CE5 and Xenko Engine.

</comment><comment><USER22> (2012)

<comment><USER23> And 958 forks !

<comment><USER24> 957 of them just empty meaningless forks as Github users like to do.

<comment><USER25> I wish there was a way to distinguish between real forks and forks that were created for the sake of creating a pull request.

<comment><USER24> Or just discard all of them without any edits whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> And if you need a tour guide to the Quake 3 source code (among others), Fabien Sangard's blog will walk you through his favourite bits.

[http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER27> On the subject of id engine open source releases, was tech 4(Doom 3) the last to get the GPL treatment?

<comment><USER28> The Doom 3: BFG sources have also been released, so _technically_ no. Doom 3: BFG is essentially a hybrid of id Tech 4 and id Tech 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is old news. Please add 2012 to the title.

<comment><USER13> Actually, it should be more like 2005: [https://games.slashdot.org/story/05/08/20/1329236/quake-3-ar...](https://games.slashdot.org/story/05/08/20/1329236/quake-3-arena- source-gpled)</comment></comment>


Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme – 64GM RAM and GTX 1050 in an Ultrabook - <AUTHOR> https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/ThinkPad-X1-Extreme/p/22TP2TXX1E1 <comment><USER2> Is there any in-depth dive into how well it runs Linux? I'm considering jumping off of MacOS with Mojave so something I can run fedora on comfortably with good battery life/stability would be great

<comment><USER3> nVidia automatically means hassle w current gen laptop hardware.

<comment><USER4> WTF, no it doesn't. Nvidia releases Linux drivers and updates regularly now, they get pulled into all the major distro repositories, and they generally work well.

If you're doing any sort of gpu accelerated machine learning, you're basically expected to use Ubuntu with Nvidia hardware and drivers.

<comment><USER5> I think the assertion was that having an iGPU and a dGPU in a Linux laptop means problems, not that NVIDIA parts alone do.

<comment><USER6> You can run that just fine too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only thing I dislike about this machine is the screen options. FHD is too low, and 4k is too high density for a 15" notebook. MacBooks have had a ~2k display for ages and it works great in my opinion. (Also, I _don 't_ want a touch screen display.)

Oh that and the repeated fiascos of Lenovo embedding spyware in their devices: [https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop- virus.html](https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html)

<comment><USER8> Recently tried to order directly through the website, since retailers only offer FHD but no 2K screens.

Education store didn't proceed after checkout, with a 1$ reservation on my visa account. Lenovo's solution via e-mail: just buy at normal price without education discount :-)

[not US, not X1. just mocking about the customer experience]

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why don't more hardware vendors see Linux as important? I know the first answer is they sell more windows laptops but we devs are willing to pay for high-end specs that normal people don't need, and aren't those more profitable? Maybe the relative numbers are just so much smaller for Linux it just doesn't matter.

<comment><USER10> Because Linux on the destkop is a usability nightmare and basically unusable for the average user. The Linux destkop platform is a mess. See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18113338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18113338)

<comment><USER9> Devs will live with that to some extent, like me. I spend way more on hardware than nondevs, I hope there are enough of us to make it an attractive market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems to be better than the current Macbook Pros on almost every level - specs, ports, weight. Only the screen is worse.

Too bad nVidia graphics aren't supported on macOS - otherwise would have been the Macbook of many dreams.

E: looks like I had missed the latest Macbook update; the specs are not that different.

<comment><USER12> NVIDIA does publish a graphics driver stack for macOS, it's not as great as the Radeon stack, but still performs admirably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how long the battery will hold out displaying its own advertising page? On a mid-2012 MBP on Safari, the page is using 17% CPU just sitting in the background behind Activity Monitor. Switch tabs, its fine, but as soon as that tab gets focus...

That said, given that I don't hold out hope for Apple to build a laptop any time soon that I care to purchase, if it would indeed run Linux it looks like $2300 gets what could be the 32GB/1TB laptop of my dreams. Or at least something that I can live with happily that's not six years old.

</comment><comment><USER14> I bought a Thinkpad Yoga X1 in 2016 and would buy a successor like the proposed one anytime again. It is really very lightweight and as I mainly do science/devops/programming on that machine, I enjoy the silence despite having access to a powerfull machine. The fans only start at load. Even the display improved compared to older Lenovo machines.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm currently on a x200 and would like to upgrade to a newer ThinkPad. Unfortunately this has a processor that has Intel ME. When will hardware companies start caring about user privacy?

</comment><comment><USER16> Probably runs *nix at 30% the speed of windows... very sad :(</comment>


Israeli Players Banned from World Chess Championship in Saudi Arabia - <AUTHOR> https://forward.com/fast-forward/390758/israeli-players-banned-from-world-chess-championship-in-saudi-arabia/ <comment><USER2> Ludicrous! Why the world keeps going back to Saudi Arabia for hosting secular events and donning UN leadership positions on it is a mystery. 2018 was supposed to bring us flying cars and AI manufacturing, not a fatwa bleeding into sports!

<comment><USER3> That is intentional most of the UN bodies are structured around the geographical groups for which each group would elect a member. Due to how the groups are structured you have effectively only a single group which is for the most part nearly purely democratic and western that is the Western group which includes NA Most of the EU/EEA, Australia and Turkey.

The Eastern region is basically Russia its newly formed vassal states and a few EU countries that got shafted they like Japan also want to move into the Western group.

Then you have Africa which gets its own region.

APAC which is the dominated by the Arab Peninsula, China and India and Pakistan and the Latin American region which shifts constantly from being ok to being quite loony.

The 5 region basically elect representatives to the various UN bodies like the human rights council since the elections are internal it's basically regional politics and rotation of the crazy for 3 out of the 5 regions.

This is how you get Syria on the Human Rights Council, China as the monitor of press freedom and Saudi Arabia as the champion of Women's right in the UN.

Israel was not a member of any group as the Arab states blocked its membership to the APAC and the African blocks, in 2013 if finally got to be a member of the western block which meant that it was the first time in 65 years it could send a representative to be elected to a UN position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why Saudi Arabia's privilege of hosting this competition was not revoked when they decided to prevent players from attending based on their country of origin. This is quite petty and stupid from a government which is attempting to re-brand itself these days.

<comment><USER5> You mean like the new immigration laws approved by the US government?

EDIT

To the downvoters: [https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us- canada-38785028](https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-38785028)

<comment><USER6> Allowing players from all over the world to attend one event is very different than allowing anyone to get permanent residency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> it shows how out of touch FIDE is as an organization, they're more about marketing and selling the product of chess than being stewards of the game.

FIDEs weakness also shines through by not pulling the tournament from Saudi Arabia. even an awful, corrupt organization like FIFA wouldn't allow say, Qatar to start banning teams from the World Cup.

<comment><USER5> But FIFA has allowed slavery like conditions in the run up.

We would better improve our own institutions instead of criticizing others.

<comment><USER8> being compared to FIFA... not a good thing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if anyone else bid to host this?

In 2015, they received no bids to host the rapid/blitz championship by the bid deadline. They had to extend the deadline, and finally were able to get one bid, from Berlin.

However, Berlin could only host if the date was moved, so FIDE had to accept that. The only date available in Berlin conflicted with the Millionaire Chess Open, which some top rapid/blitz players (such as Nakamura and So) had already committed to.

A similar thing happened with the 2017 Women's World Championship. No bids. FIDE rescheduled and tried again, getting one bid, from Iran. Because of Iran's restrictions on women many players declined to attend, including some who would have been favorites to win if they had attended.

It seems that it is getting harder and harder to find organizers interested in hosting these events.

</comment><comment><USER10> Plot twist, playing chess is considered as "haraam" (forbidden/degeneracy) according to most Sunni Islamic clerics.</comment>


Former Google boss launches scathing Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6245847/Former-Google-boss-urges-tech-giants-end-delusion-making-world-better-place.html <comment><USER2> > Former Google boss launches scathing Silicon Valley (dailymail.co.uk)

Can't help feel that the title is missing something.

> Former Google boss launches scathing Silicon Valley attack urging tech > giants to end the delusion that it's making the world a better place

</comment><comment> ur-whale Many people in charge at Google are starting to realize the size of the completely uncontrollable monster they've created and prefer to walk away before the rest of the world catches up.

When the eye of Sauron moves away from FB and starts to focus on Google, smart cookies like Powell will be long gone and the bag holders will have to face the music,

</comment><comment><USER3> 'you can target users down to the tiniest pixel'

What is this even supposed to mean?

<comment><USER4> It means that Google will soon present a Pixel [1] with a half-inch screen, to be worn as a ring around your finger.

It has some strange inscriptions around the inside which nobody has yet discovered the meaning of:

      Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul

     [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_(smartphone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Never thought I would see a link from Daily Mail on HN

<comment><USER6> That's easy to check—simply click on the domain name next to the title: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dailymail.co.uk](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dailymail.co.uk)

Some good articles show up occasionally: [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=dailymail.co.uk%20points%3E10).

On HN we care about article quality more than site quality. There are many low-quality sites that occasionally cough up a good story. (Not saying this submission was one of those.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not really scathing, Jessica Powell, former PR head, also launching a book about SV.

Seems well places article will boost sales.

</comment><comment><USER8> > 'It's very easy to forget that that's electoral interference, that's live- > streamed suicides, that's Myanmar. It's really horrific stuff.'

Looks like another attack on big tech that's at heart fueled by the belief that Trump only won because of it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there another source apart from the Daily Mail? They're a terrible rag with atrocious journalism quality and a history of bigotry.

<comment><USER10> Here's her original article:

[https://medium.com/s/the-big-disruption/why-i-left-my-big- fa...](https://medium.com/s/the-big-disruption/why-i-left-my-big-fancy-tech- job-and-wrote-a-book-b64c40484774)

It was posted on HN but didn't get much attention:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155961)</comment></comment>


Stalin: The greatest of all avant garde artists? - <AUTHOR> http://soviet.ie/index.php?/topic/2595-what-are-you-reading-at-the-moment/#entry11014

<comment><AUTHOR> Not directly hacker related but interesting definition of art as causing change, something many hackers strive for.</comment>


ShowHN: BillNode - invoicing for developers and designers - <AUTHOR> http://billnode.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just trying to gage interest from the community at this point. This is something I'd love to build out but would love some feedback and ideas for features to add that would make it interesting enough to sign up. What does the community think?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If DNS doesn't work, try [http://billnode.com.s3-website-us- east-1.amazonaws.com](http://billnode.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com)</comment>


The daily routines of famous creative people - <AUTHOR> https://podio.com/site/creative-routines

<comment><USER2> I suspect this may be derived from the book "Daily Rituals" which analysed a number of eminent people. I did an analysis from the book and my conclusions were:

I divided the people in the book "Daily Rituals" into eminent and not-so- eminent based on whether I could recall much about what they did.

I found that eminent people almost all had a strong daily routine. Eg Hemingway would start writing at 6:30am regardless of how hung-over he was (possibly the reason for his view that "all first drafts are rubbish").

Also they were very inclined to let nothing get in the way of their work. See below for some examples.

Quite a few took stimulants including tea coffee nicotine and even amphetamines in several cases. Eminent people were also more likely to take regular walks. Both the eminent and less eminent people had a pretty strong tendency to get working in the morning. The eminent people were also more likely to have regular systematic social relaxation activities.

Proust took caffeine tablets and then took strong sleeping tablets to get to sleep. Perhaps he could have saved himself some money and put himself to sleep by reading his books.

I only had 13 non-eminent people as I got bored reading about people I had not heard of so the results for them are probably rather rubbery.

At the end I have extracts of the agreement of Einstein with his wife, and a report of Richard Feynman's (Nobel physicist) divorce case as illustrations of "hard core" commitment/obsession to their work.

Einstein Agreement with wife (relevant extracts)

A. You will make sure…

 _... especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B. ... you will forego…

_my sitting at home with you;

 _my going out or traveling with you.

C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me…

_you will stop talking to me if I request it;

*you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

Feynman Divorce Testimony

>...the appointee's wife was granted a divorce from him because of appointee's constantly working calculus problems in his head as soon as awake, while driving car, sitting in living room, and so forth, and that his one hobby was playing his African drums. His ex-wife reportedly testified that on several occasions when she unwittingly disturbed either his calculus or his drums he flew into a violent rage, during which time he attacked her, threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture.

</comment><comment><USER3> The takeaway?

Creative people by and large don't have "day jobs".

<comment><USER4> It makes me think of how unfortunate it is that the 40-hour work week became so entrenched that it's considered a minimum, and many places "expect" their employees invest even larger proportions of their lives working on someone else's lives. Makes you wonder what people could accomplish if we could live more like Buckminster Fuller's ideals:

"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

<comment><USER5> What if make-work and consumption are inextricably connected? Retail therapy, Internet, and TV act as a release valve offering easy rewards, while an ever- ascending-and-more-difficult ladder exists for the more ambitious.

Meanwhile, culture modifies itself to reward consumption ("buy the expensive [read:right] things!") and ambition ("become powerful so you can buy the shiny things!"). I do believe we need to be productive, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've done my own, changing the colors/labels a bit. Now that the 'data' is there for me to stare at, I can contemplate alterations.

For better or worse: [http://i.imgur.com/TxYanPX.png](http://i.imgur.com/TxYanPX.png)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is very similar to this infographic: [http://infographwetrust.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/creative...](http://infographwetrust.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/creative- routines-edit3.png)

Source: [http://infowetrust.com/2014/03/26/creative- routines/](http://infowetrust.com/2014/03/26/creative-routines/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that there is no "parenting" category -- must be nice.

<comment><USER9> From what I hear, it is. It's a lifestyle choice; I'm surprised that the tone of your response seems to imply it is a necessity. It's not surprising that for this group of people who loved their work so much (see Einstein's relationship with his wife, Feynman's divorce, both detailed by another comment) that they had little interest in much else.

<comment><USER8> My tone is not intended imply necessity -- more that several of those figures ARE in fact parents. Darwin and Dickens both had 10 (10!!!) kids. I'm not interested in a discussion of good vs bad vs absent parents, I was trying to point out the kids and parenting are a significant time chunk.

I'm sure that we could go through the list of "creatives" here and enumerate the progeny for each one. In the way that the viz breaks down various other categories around "creative work", I jokingly suggested that a parenting vector is also warranted (though obviously impossible to produce) given that many of these figures had kids and in significant numbers.

<comment><USER9> Ah, very interesting perspective, thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice site! I think that it could also be a nice feature to sum the number of hours that a thinker did each type of activities. Did Voltaire sleep more than me? Do I exercise as much as Victor Hugo? These questions could be easily answered with this small addition.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not many painters or visual artists mentioned... mostly writers and composers. I've found that, as a painter, I get most of my work done late at night -- and so do many other artists I know. Just another 2c...

</comment><comment><USER12> Not many of them nap as often as I expected.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting how so many people didn't fit exercise into their daily routines.

<comment><USER14> Maybe they should classify as exercise throwing stuff around in a rage when you're interrupted.

<comment><USER15> Hmmm, I usually just curse a blue streak until the walls bleed, when I'm interrupted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The average life span of all the dead ones is almost 70. I think that's pretty good considering the time and lack of exercise. Even the benzedrine addict lived to be 66.

<comment><USER17> I wonder how sedentary their non-"exercise" activities were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very nicely done. I expected this to be just another attempt to hook into the buzz around Mason Currey's book, but the visual presentation of the data adds a lot.

</comment><comment><USER19> References needed. What is the source of the information?

<comment><USER20> There are source links on the page. At the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> More than anything, I'm surprised at how many of them do their creative work in the morning. Only a few did any real creating in the wee hours.

</comment><comment><USER22> There's a whole book about this and its boring as fuck: [http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists- Work/dp/0307...](http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists- Work/dp/0307273601)

Everyone in the book sleeps, eats, drinks wine, and finally works for a couple hours when they can be alone. Later a little bit of opium.</comment>


Show HN: FastSitePHP – New PHP Framework. Try the Online Playground - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastsitephp.com/en/ <comment><USER2> To save a few clicks, here's the source:

[https://github.com/fastsitephp/fastsitephp](https://github.com/fastsitephp/fastsitephp)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks lioeters!

Also to try it out online (no login required, no cookies, etc) anyone can create a site here and create and run PHP code directly on a sever. Sites last for 1 hour.

[https://www.fastsitephp.com/en/playground](https://www.fastsitephp.com/en/playground)</comment></comment>


Show HN: New Unique Wordpress Translation/Localization JS Plugin - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bablic.com/translate-your-wordpress-website-with-bablic/

<comment><AUTHOR> Bablic lets you translate any website within minutes, all by just adding one line of JS code onto your HEADER.

Just enter your URL into the homepage at Bablic.com - choose from machine or human translation.

You can then manually edit all elements (text, images, css) just by right- clicking on them through the user-friendly editor.

The Wordpress Plugin is finally out.</comment>


YouNoodle Startup Predictor now live to try it for yourself. - <AUTHOR> http://younoodle.com/predictor

<comment><USER2> "Give us your sensitive data, we'll make you feel good and optimistic"

Preying on the vulnerability/need for validation of most startup founders?

</comment><comment><USER3> I would be very cautious about giving a lot of this requested information (funding details, % ownership, etc) out to some random website...

<comment><USER4> It's not random. It's funded by Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin.

<comment><USER2> does that lend weight to, or subtract from, his warning?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anybody tried entering the details for a 1990s dot.com to see what kind of valuation you get?

</comment><comment><USER6> YN wants the data -- not sure they really care about making an (accurate) prediction. Foolhardy exercise to fill in the information.

<comment><AUTHOR> On a side note, and without wanting to be negative, at times I am not really sure they care about many things apart from growing really fast and getting momentum/exposure/traction (which is understandable).

You can gauge how much they (or anyone for that matter) care by the response you get when you try and engage with them. In this respect, my past experience has not been good (no response to emails/queries/etc), but maybe that is because I am not significant to them as an individual.

When I compare this to the engaging experiences I find with many YC start-ups (<http://www.socialbrowse.com> springs to mind) and others (e.g. <http://www.huddle.net> and <http://www.freshbooks.com>), the difference is night and day.

Maybe this is just my experience. Still, I'd be more likely to provide sensitive information to sites I trust and that seem to 'care'.

<comment><USER7> Babul - we aim to respond to every email and query, sorry to hear your experience. Feel free to email me: email@example.com with more details and if you think we didn't cover any particular issue properly. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for delay in response. Just saw this. We resolved what we needed to by other means, but thank you for the offer. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Considering that about 70% of startups fail, shouldn't this actually give you a negative valuation most of the time?

<comment><USER8> You can always sell the laptops back on eBay, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My unlaunched startup which I work on part-time will apparently be worth $10 million in 2011. maybe I should start working on it full time :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> Some feedback:

* The connections-drawing tool is somewhat broken: First it wouldn't show for me at all ("Loading..."), and then when I wanted to correct something, the eraser didn't remove the lines (although I think it did invalidate them, because I could draw new lines on top of the old ones)

* Entering team details is very tedious when every single question is on its own page. I got tired of clicking next, and would very nearly have quit the process there.

<comment><USER8> I can't figure out what's wrong with the flash not loading - several people have reported this now. Can one of you guys hack it and reply with the answer? I'll buy you a pizza (no seriously, I will)

<comment><USER11> Seriously, pizza? Please!

Cash!

<comment><USER11> It seems a little hypocritical to downmod me _and_ complain about business people taking advantage of hackers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I built the majority of the survey, so if you see any bugs or have feedback reply to this. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER12> "YouNoodle's model is based on rigorous quantitative analysis of historical data and the application of the latest relevant theory"

Brilliant generic tag line.

</comment><comment><USER13> My startup will apparently be worth $36 million in August 2011... total BS.

The entire YouNoodle process feels like a phishing scam.

</comment><comment><USER14> Apparently my startup (tarsnap, online backups for the truly paranoid) will be worth $3.71M in September 2009. Given that I'm a sole founder and tarsnap is pre-revenue, I can only guess that YouNoodle is giving me very high marks for (a) having a doctorate from Oxford, and (b) having started university when I was 13 years old.

Of course, I'd be happy if YouNoodle was correct in their assessment... but if someone offered to buy tarsnap for $3.71M right now -- or offered to buy any fraction of tarsnap for a corresponding fraction of that amount -- I'd have no hesitation in accepting the offer.

EDIT: Yes, I do realize that the assessed value is effective a year from now -- but I still think $3.71M would be a generous amount to pay for tarsnap. Of course, tarsnap might take off faster than I expect...

<comment><USER15> I understand where you are coming from. Some of those calculations might be based on, for a lack of a better term, VC math, meaning if you are in the process of raising a series A, the VC might value your company (pre-money) at say 4 million, give you a A round of 2 million and own 50% of the company.

BTW: When are you launching?

<comment><USER14> _BTW: When are you launching?_

Depends how you define "launching". I haven't got the accounting code written yet, so revenue is still a month or more away -- but if you mean in the sense of "providing a service which people want", tarsnap has been up and running for three months.

<comment><USER15> nice. good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> These tools are really only as good as the information they are provided or access, and without looking at failure rates/reasons in the model do seem fundamentally flawed to me.

As mentioned by others, the results provided do look very optimistic (at least from what I can tell based on the values it provides for things I am involved with) and with refinement once they get the datasets will probably go down significantly in most cases.

Time will be the real judge. It will be interesting is to see what they predict and what actually happens in the next years. Hopefully they will provide this information (semi-)publically, but it seems unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised no one else has asked what the valuation algorithm is yet.

Anyone ambitious enough to survey a set of Younoodle inputs and outputs so we can estimate the valuation formula?

</comment><comment><USER17> YouNoodle is busy...

We're experiencing lots of activity so we can't handle your request just yet. Please click the refresh button and try again.

scaling = fail

<comment><USER8> Appears to be a problem with our search index, we're on it ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So,this may be a minor grievance, but why is the last name field white unlike the first name and email field even though it is required?

</comment><comment><USER19> I feel super iffy about completing the form.

</comment><comment><USER20> Trying my start-up now. Does take a lot of time to fill out everything...

</comment><comment><USER21> My startup, InsideDesi (<http://www.insidedesi.com>), will apparently be worth 8 mill by 2011.</comment>


Author Correction: Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1602-8 <comment><USER2> This is a 2014 article and no, it doesn't threaten human nutrition. The macronutrient profiles (carbs vs protein) slightly shift (between 2 & 14% depending on the species of plant). Meanwhile yields increase under higher CO2, so it more than makes up for the macronutrient shift. This is why CO2 is pumped into greenhouses at 1200PPM, 3x the current atmospheric levels. The endless alarmism has got to stop.

<comment><USER3> Yield improvements are great for business, but this isn't a business question.

14% seems quite a large shift.

Separately, even if we assume that protein yield per acre is increasing, if calorie yield increases faster then eating the same foods processed in the same way make us gain weight when it previously didn't. If total calories per unit of protein goes up 1%, 2500 kcal per day with the correct level of protein becomes 2525 kcal per day, which isn't much on its own but it's _every day for your entire life_ and adds something like 18 kg/decade to your body weight. [0]

(This does make me wonder how we were supposed to self regulate body weight in the wild).

[0] assuming a 100g/500kcal bar of chocolate is a representative model of human fat cells.

<comment><USER2> The study showed 2-14% depending on the species, so don't cherry pick the extreme value. It's not a lot when we're talking about protein from wheat, rice, and peas. We don't get a lot of protein from those sources as it is. Wheat and rice are very carb heavy foods. Your 18kg per decade example is problematic. As mentioned, soybeans are unaffected. If you want more protein in your diet, eat more soybeans, meat, eggs, milk, or even protein powder of any form.

<comment><USER3> > The study showed 2-14% depending on the species, so don't cherry pick the > extreme value

That's why my calculations was based on a number smaller than the lower bound.

> If you want more protein in your diet, eat more soybeans, meat, eggs, milk, > or even protein powder of any form.

Irrelevant. Most people don't eat what's healthy (evidenced by the obesity epidemic), so people continuing to eat what they always used to eat resulting in them now being fatter than they expect is a problem regardless of the fact that "better" foods exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bollocks, the increase in atmospheric CO₂ has led to the planet becoming greener and harvests have increased, not decreased. Keep on pumping out more demonstrable nonsense like this and soon nobody will believe claims by scientists. They'll turn to their preacher (of any persuasion, religious or not) for their 'truths' and before you know it another part of the enlightenment has been undone.

</comment><comment><USER5> This submission seems to rely only on the title.

The original article was not linked but an author correction. The author correction seems to only add some missing references.</comment>


France bans plastic cups, plates and cutlery - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-bans-plastic-cups-plates-cutlery-energy-transition-for-green-growth-a7313076.html <comment><USER2> It would be nice if they told us the impact they expect from this. Considering this law may change an entire industry overnight - favouring the "green" box producers. Also why not a tax instead of a ban? I don't know, this smells like some political group wanted to make a stand on "green something".

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm always shocked at how many eateries give me expended polystyrene and plastic utensils when I'm in the US.

Aside from the ecological and economic levels, it cheapens the eating experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not a ban on plastic utensils, some plastics are biodegradable.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't get this hated against plastics. Does France not have garbage bins in public?

<comment><USER6> Paris, like Tokyo, has sealed off / removed all public bins. I think in both cases it was fear of terror that gave the city government a good excuse to safe some money. In Paris they solve it with lots of cleaning crews, while Japanese are so well behaved that they all bring their garbage home (or to the next convenience store).

<comment><USER7> What an awful idea, on several levels. How can it possibly be cheaper to pay cleaning crews to pick each piece of trash off the ground individually than to pay a similar cleaning crew to empty a bin? And what of all the trash they miss - plastic wrappers and the like that blow away? Not to mention the cultural damage from tacitly encouraging littering.

Oh well. At least they saved Paris from terrorist attacks /s

<comment><USER8> No, Paris happens to have cleanup crews, in addition to public garbage bins... which are contraptions which contain a clear plastic bag. They are not actually a bin/can format, and they are indeed everywhere.

The fact that people in Paris litter is unreltaed to the garbage "cans" being present. It is probably somewhat related to the fact there are cleanup crews to deal with it though. Hate to think how gross Paris would be if there were no cleanup crews (would probably smell more like NYC on garbage day).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Forget about promises, use harvests - <AUTHOR>

Harvests: From now is possible to call asynchronous functions in a declarative way and to get almost the same experience as with synchronous code.    https://github.com/salboaie/harvests <comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/salboaie/harvests](https://github.com/salboaie/harvests)

harvest.let('father', loadPenguin, 'MrPenguin'); harvest.let('mother', loadPenguin, 'MrsPenguin'); harvest.let('family', loadPenguinFamily, wait('father'), wait('mother'));

The above call do 3 calls without then or declaring ugly callbacks!</comment>


Scientists say sudden oak death epidemic is no longer stoppable - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/02/this-disease-has-killed-a-million-trees-in-california-and-scientists-say-its-basically-unstoppable/ <comment><AUTHOR> Five hundred years ago, Spaniards spread the seeds of european annual grasses as they traveled between missions in California. Within a century or two, a large part of the California landscape had changed. Annual grasses crowded out native perennial grasses, and we got our "golden hills." Nobody knows exactly what California looked like before the Spanish arrived or how many species may have gone extinct, but you can still see echoes of what happened. For example Mount Hamilton Jewelflower, now reduced to a few relict populations on serpentine soil where the annual grasses don't grow so high...

SOD is a disturbance of similar magnitude. It won't kill all the oaks. For example it only kills black oaks (coastal live oak, interior live oak, California black oak, ...) but not white oaks (blue oak, valley oak, ...). What it likely will do is over time dramatically change the makeup of the oak woodlands, especially along the coast and in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

<comment><USER2> Not plant related, but equally fascinating: There used to be a lake bigger than Lake Tahoe in California between Fresno and Bakersfield. It It was the largest fresh water lake west of the Great Lakes (by surface area). It was drained for agriculture.

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

<comment><USER3> For a good read on what happened to Lake Tulare, read "The King of California". The world's largest cotton plantation now sits in the lakebed and holds primary water rights. Pink sheet stock. Ticker BWEL.

<comment><USER4> I went to the library and browsed the book on your recommendation. It is indeed great. It includes a few photos and maps as well. I will have to find the time to read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This makes me wonder what role fire normally plays in the life-cycle of tree pathogens. Does this fungus survive heat well? Can it survive in the soil long enough to spread to a new host (presumably a new Oak tree)?

As a second point, this demonstrates the danger presented by monoculture. The industrialization of agriculture horticulture has been unquestionably beneficial for us as a species. However, we do an absolutely terrible job of managing existential risks in horticulture. When we grow crops, we grow millions of acres of the same crop. When we plant trees, we plant thousands of the same trees. City streets in the US used to be lined with Ash trees, as they were inexpensive and fast growing. Now there are areas where almost every tree has been cut down because of the Emerald Ash Borer.

I think the blame can be assigned as much to the consumer as it can with the individuals growing the plants. Consumers, (myself included) are extremely picky about what they will eat or buy. Varieties of crops are selected for their looks, and varieties of crops that are not consistently good looking fall by the wayside.

I don't think this will cause a famine in the first world in the near future, but the poor genetic diversity of our horticulture is definitely an area of concern.

<comment><USER6> The interaction between forest fires and tree pathogens is an area of active research - a friend of mine is studying exactly that in her ecology PhD program. [http://ucanr.edu/sites/rizzolab/Research_Projects/Big_Sur_Ec...](http://ucanr.edu/sites/rizzolab/Research_Projects/Big_Sur_Ecoregion/)

<comment><USER5> That is really cool, thanks! I've spend a lot of time conducting research and restoring Oak Savannas in the Upper Midwest, and I'd hate to see anything happen to few remaining areas we have left. The Oak Savanna exists because of fire, rather than in spite of it, and it would be really interesting to see if fire did more for oak trees beyond burning competing species.

In the course of writing this comment, I checked the Wikipedia page for Oak Savannas to see if it had any interesting insights. I didn't realize that California oaks formed oak savannas as well. Hopefully that means that research in the Midwest and Californian savannas can be shared and used to draw insights into one another.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >while there may once have been a chance to stop the spread of $ARTICLE_TOPIC — around the year $CURRENT_DATE_MINUS_FIFTEEN_YEARS — that opportunity has since passed. Forces didn't mobilize fast enough or spend enough money

FTA, with minor edits; I think we'll see a lot more language like this in the coming ten years. The consequence, which absolutely no one would be against ("what do you mean, there's 90% fewer oak trees?!"), always seems to logically follow the general disinterest in preventing the problem ("what do you mean, the _forestry service_ needs a 800% budget increase?!"). OTOH, it's generally clear what we should have done, in hindsight, but there's all kinds of stuff like this running around. The ever-eastward spread of the Asian long-horned beetle; what ocean acidification is going to do to corals and anything else that uses calcium carbonate to build its shell; etc

<comment><USER8> It looks like in 2002 California enacted a task force to control the spread of the disease. see "Sudden Oak Death Management Act of 2002". However, this was subject to appropriations in the California state budget. The author is implying the act was hampered by not having the budget to do the work (apparently $60 million a year according the article).

<comment><USER7> >The author is implying the act was hampered by not having the budget to do the work (apparently $60 million a year according the article)

There's always someone desperately trying to get The Powers That Be to notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if they'll find any hope with those trees left unscathed that are deemed "resistant."

Also, with something like this, how do they remove the trees without the disease spreading in the process? I know when I go to prune bits of my roses that have black spot or rust, it can spread just by contact in the course of removal which can be damn near impossible to avoid. I can only imagine how that scales at tree size.

<comment><USER10> I was thinking the same - eventually resistance develops.

<comment><USER11> Maybe, but we've seen some plant diseases pretty much eradicate the original species without them developing resistance. For example, the Panama disease (despite the massive resources of the banana industry) devastated the Gros Michel, and is now killing off the Cavendish.

Another example is phylloxera, which plagued Vitis vinifera (European grape) vines in the 1800s. And to this day, the only solution is to hybridize or graft them with American rootstock.

<comment><USER12> But that's because there is zero genetic diversity in the Gros Michel and Cavendish plants. None. They're all clones. You need some form of diversity to develop resistance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hawaii island is dealing with a fungal pathogen that impacts the most abundant native tree similarly: [http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html](http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html).

<comment><USER14> Don't worry, soon humans will have destroyed all habitats. We're working really hard, but we can't get to it all at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> On an unrelated note, the best comment reply ever:

"Why do you assume that the experts missed a plan that some random guy on the Internet came up with in 30 seconds?"

<comment><USER16> Different areas of specialization or...

"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The prevention to this type of problem is probably the same measure needed to fix many forestry problems.

Regular fires.

But now we have homes right up to the forest and no one wants to look at charred land for two decades. So I suppose it's still a no go. The thing about fire though is eventually it probably happens anyway.

<comment><USER18> For SOD, there's actually a fairly simple preventative step everyone could take that is poorly publicized.

It wasn't until I happened to be out with someone who does environmental impact studies for the army corp of engineers that I learned how easily SOD can be transported from place to place through the soil that collects on clothing. Most of us wash after a trip outside, but we should be bleaching our shoes. The pathogen is quite hardy and can survive the seasons without a plant host. Without a thorough wash, the next trip we take is likely to drop off a few spores, risking its introduction to plants we touch and the watershed.

That said, this is just one of many preventative steps, and one that's unlikely to be broadly adopted. We're likely too far down the road already for a lot of impacted forests.

<comment><USER19> This sounds very familiar. In New Zealand we have a lot of trouble with "didymo"[1], an invasive algae which thrives in cold freshwater environments, clogging up rivers with lots of green slime. It is very easily spread by humans doing recreational activities such as fishing and boating, inadvertently carrying it from one place to the next.

As such we've had intensive public education campaigns here, instructing people to carefully clean down things like boots and boat hulls with either hot water or bleach solution[2]. Its spread continues, though perhaps less quickly than without such a campaign.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata#/media/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata#/media/File:Didymo_signage_on_Waiau_river.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The disease is actually related to the pathogen that caused the Irish potato > famine in the 1800s

I was in Ireland a few months ago. Someone I met in Galway said this famine wasn't really a famine; that there were plenty of crops. The king simply withheld the potato supply, forcing the famine.

<comment><USER21> That's partly correct and partly incorrect. It's incorrect in the claim that the government withheld the potato supply. The potato crop massively failed due to potato blight. The government had nothing to do with the potato shortage. This was not just in Ireland, but also through Europe. It was more significant in Ireland, though, because something like 40% of the population depended on potatoes for most of their nutrition.

It is correct that there were plenty of crops, but these were grain crops, not potatoes, which were raised largely for export. In earlier famines the government had banned exports and made those non-potato crops go to feeding the Irish. That was very unpopular with businesses. In the Great Famine the government did not curb exports, and so even though Ireland was producing enough non-potato food to feed those who had been depending almost solely on potatoes, that food was exported instead. So in that sense, much of the blame for _results_ of the potato crop failures can be laid at the hands of the government.

Edit: there is an interesting song, written by Steven and Peter Jones, based on letters their great-great-grandfather in Ireland sent to their great- grandfather, who had immigrated to the United States. There are five verses, covering the contents of five of the letters, between 1860 and 1892. Although this is after the Great Famine, it provides an interesting look at what life was like in Ireland for ordinary farmers as they went through hardship and had family members leaving the country.

Here's a nice performance of it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRHQAtKbRTk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRHQAtKbRTk)

<comment><USER22> Similar to how the English colonial tyrants killed millions of Indians by exporting crops during a famine:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%937...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%9378)

<comment><USER23> Same tyrants. By the time of the potato famine Ireland was unified with Great Britain, "this was achieved through a considerable degree of bribery, with funding provided by the British Secret Service Office, and the awarding of peerages, places and honours to secure votes."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#Union_with_Great_Brita...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#Union_with_Great_Britain)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Years ago all of the oak trees in my area were cut down due to being killed by the Emerald Ash Borer, a beetle. Fines were imposed for exporting fire wood outside of the affected counties (a common thing to do in my state where people take their chopped logs up to their cabins for bonfires) but it did little to keep the bug from spreading further and further.

Many of these trees were in large forests, but it's most noticeable in my area due to the sudden change in suburbia from large oak trees planted when the homes were originally built (some a half-century or more ago) now having unusual looking, small maple trees adorning the front of their property. It's sad to see yet another pest attacking those same trees.

<comment><USER25> Something like this happened at my college, and one of my friends was in the forestry program.

He was so pissed because every time trees on campus got a disease, they'd cut them down and replace them all with a single species. So in 50 years when those trees got a disease, they had to cut them all down again.

So 50 years from now some maple disease will have your town cutting down all the trees all over again :/

<comment><USER24> That's a good point and bound to happen. In our area, the township covered the price of the removal of the tree provided you allowed them to take it when they chose to (otherwise you'd have to pay for the removal of a dead tree or get fined for not handling a dead tree on your property).

Since the various jurisdictions didn't pay for the replacement trees (but all had ordinances requiring a tree every "x" feet where the property meets the roadway), people were free to purchase any kind of tree they wished. The problem is that Maples were the most inexpensive tree that could be purchased at a reasonable size so nearly everyone planted a variety of Maple. So,... yup ... give it a few years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sadly, this isn't the only fungal pathogen attacking american oaks. Oak Wilt is dealing similar damage across the south and central plains states: [http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls/oakwilt/oakwilt.htm](http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls/oakwilt/oakwilt.htm)

</comment><comment><USER27> Besides the fungal pathogen _Phytophthora ramorum_ that kills oak trees, similar funguses are also killing other types of trees. Many avocado orchards in California have been wiped out by _Phytophthora cinnamomi_. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora)

</comment><comment><USER28> There's a great paper modeling risk of invasion by sudden oak death into California. Computing for science, done right: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full)

</comment><comment><USER29> On the coast we have sudden oak death. In the hills they have pine bark beetles. Bad years for (some) trees.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's disappointing to see serious reporting like this saddled with a clickbait title like "This disease has killed a million trees in California, and scientists say it's basically unstoppable."

<comment><USER31> After reading the article, that seems like a fair summary. What do you feel is wrong with it?

<comment><USER32> Obscuring the subject to force a click. "This disease" instead of "Sudden oak death". The idea is that person will read the scary part, want to find out which particular disease it is, and click through. It's headline SEO 101.

<comment><USER31> The odds aren't great that a given person knows what "sudden oak death" is, so that doesn't seem to add much except an extra expectation on the reader. I'm pretty sure this headline is not far from what it would been as a newspaper headline 30 years ago. It would have just been "Disease" rather than "This disease" since newspaper headlines favor brevity, but using common nouns in headlines for things that aren't super well-known is a pretty established practice (e.g. "Florida man" rather than "Robert Johnson").

I guess basically, it doesn't seem like the name of the disease is really the point of the article.

<comment><USER33> Yes. You either already know about the disease or you don't. The wording of "disease" vs. "sudden oak death" doesn't change how much I want to click at all.

It's not a situation where the title might obscure _which_ disease is causing the problem. There's one problem.

And "sudden oak death" is sort of a fake name anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is anyone aware of any pre-industrial epidemics of a similar scale?

<comment><USER35> The American Chestnut. It was pretty much wiped out by a disease that infects its cousin, the Chinese Chestnut, which has defenses against it.

"The American chestnut tree reigned over 200 million acres of eastern woodlands from Maine to Florida, and from the Piedmont plateau in the Carolinas west to the Ohio Valley, until succumbing to a lethal fungus infestation, known as the chestnut blight, during the first half of the 20th century. An estimated 4 billion American chestnuts, up to 1/4 of the hardwood tree population, grew within this range."

[http://www.acf.org/range_close.php](http://www.acf.org/range_close.php)

They're trying to reintroduce blight resistant strains by cross breading with Chinese trees.

[http://www.acf.org/r_r.php](http://www.acf.org/r_r.php)

<comment><USER36> The american chestnut has been successfully genetically engineered with an oxalate oxidase gene for blight resistance. testing and out-crossing with wild-type chestnuts is ongoing. Wider availability should be possible in the next few years.

[http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/](http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What can be done to deal with the death of trees, then? Mass planting of resistant species?

<comment><USER38> Nature abhors a monoculture. Forests with 'resistant' strains will end up causing more problems if they are only a few types of trees.

Maybe we should do nothing, and let trees that are more capable of surviving fill in the gaps left by the oaks.

<comment><USER39> Where I live (Sierra foothills), the Oaks are enjoying the space opened up by the Pine tree die-off thanks to bark beetle. People are paying thousands of dollars to cut down towering pines.

I have five enormous oaks and four full-size pines on my 1 acre lot. That adds up to a potential liability of $18,000 or more. Doing nothing does not sound appealing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> They could just as way say: "Scientists say the evolution of the natural landscape is no longer stoppable"

<comment><USER41> It's curious that so much 'evolution' is going on at the moment.

Interesting how the Great Barrier Reef and the oceans fisheries are currently 'evolving'

Rather remiscent of how the Western European population evolved in response to the plague.

<comment><USER42> That's the fun of natural selection, sometimes you get selected, sometimes you don't.

<comment><USER41> Natural selection only works as a driving force of evolution where there is sufficient variety in a population for the reproductively fit individuals to be selected.

Where environmental change is so rapid that none of the individuals are fit, you don;t get evolution, you get extinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm sorry but isn't this just Darwinism in play here? You get natural selection, and various species that are selected against become extinct.

But it's not like it's going to turn into some sort of desert, the area, after forest fires, will be replaced by another species that is presumably resistant to the fungus, and life moves on.

<comment><USER44> I don't think anyone is trying to blame someone for this.. Absolutely this is nature taking its course, but we happen to like oak trees so it might make sense that we would try and protect them.

<comment><USER43> But it no longer makes sense, since the scientists have already said that it's unstoppable. So dumping more money into trying to protect them seems like a waste of money, no?

<comment><USER15> Giving up is a very poor plan. Dead trees make wildfires much much worse. California wildfires are terrible as it is.

<comment><USER43> Forest fires are a natural part of the cycle. In fact, it's forest fire "prevention" that causes even bigger forest fires than normal. If they simply let fires burn, it would naturally cleanse the forests of brush and dead trees and create much smaller forest fires.

<comment><USER25> It's more that the specific type of forests that John Muir was so fond of were the result of intensive agroforestry by the tribes of California. They used fire as part of a fairly large toolbox, and you don't get that sort of forest without it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Freecol – open source colonization game - <AUTHOR> http://www.freecol.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting thread about the evolution of this project.

[http://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/141200/thread/19...](http://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/141200/thread/19a409c8/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I came to know the existence of this project because it listed it's translation messages on TranslateWiki.net, the platform where MediaWiki software (software that runs Wikipedia) got translated. But I never tried to go on and play the game. Maybe I shall try this out sometime.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different than Freeciv? ([http://www.freeciv.org/](http://www.freeciv.org/))

<comment><USER4> Well, for one it appears to be based on an entirely different game. Not sure where to go from here to continue answering your question.

<comment><USER5> The full name of the game Colonization is "Civilization IV: Colonization"

<comment><USER6> No, that was a later release. Colonization was a Micropose game in its own right designed by, imho, the real genius behind the series, Brian Reynolds who later designed Alpha Centauri.

<comment><USER7> Alpha Centauri is the only game of the whole genre I could get into. The SF setting, the faction leaders and their personalities, voiceovers, music, atmosphere... That game is basically my reason for installing wine and playonlinux.

<comment><USER8> There's actually a native Linux version of Alpha Centauri. One of the old Loki ports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not like civilization - - but is it like Seven Cities of Gold? Anyone remember that?

</comment><comment><USER10> Hosted on sourceforge ugh. Seems quite a few of these open source revivals have been written in Java (possible mild confirmation-bias here.)

<comment><USER11> There's a bunch of old, mature, projects that were started at a time when Sourceforge hosting made sense.

I agree that sourceforge is a scumbag company now, but what's the alternative for people who want a place to host binaries, source code, and user forums?

<comment><USER12> Github has binary/release hosting support now, but doesn't do user forums or mailing lists.</comment></comment></comment>


Google staff protest against plan for censored Chinese search engine - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/17/google-staff-protest-against-plan-for-censored-chinese-search-engine <comment><USER2> Big corporations are increasingly behaving like communist governments.

People there spend most of their time complaining and creating bureaucracy instead of working.</comment>


How to Stop Wasting Colleagues' Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-stop-wasting-colleagues-time-1417562658 <comment><USER2> I hope this gets more love than when I submitted it 5 days ago. That submission got exactly one up-vote and no comments.

This is doing better so far - good luck!</comment>


Seth Roberts has died - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/04/27/seth/ <comment><USER2> For those of us who don't know who Seth Roberts is, who is Seth Roberts?

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Roberts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Roberts)

He was well known for self experimentation and writing the book, "The Shangri- La Diet".

<comment><USER4> Forgive me, but I'm having trouble understanding why his death is significant for a crowd such as Hacker news? I didn't know about him, and I don't mean to talk ill of the dead, but from a quick google it would seem he's mostly just a dietary quack? Even if he wasn't a quack, I still don't really get his relevance.

<comment><USER5> I guess a lot of people around here subscribe to various "life extension" diet regimes. There are many related posts in any case. I think the OP may be a critic of Mr. Robert's regime posting in a moment of schadenfreude.

<comment><USER6> I think it's very bad form to hypothesize on the OP's motives, when it's entirely possible s/he is just someone who lost a friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seth Roberts: "The unreasonable effectiveness of my self-experimentation"

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964443/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964443/)

Seth Roberts: "The Growth of Personal Science: Implications for Statistics" (pdf)

[http://media.sethroberts.net/blog/pdf/2012-09-24-The- Growth-...](http://media.sethroberts.net/blog/pdf/2012-09-24-The-Growth-of- Personal-Science-Implications-For-Statistics.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> When I first met Seth he was an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. At the time he wrote all his code in APL, and couldn't figure out why anyone would use anything else. More recently he used R. To everyone calling him "not a hacker," he was hacking on code before a lot of you were born, though his code was mostly for his own purposes.

<comment><USER9> I'm a decent R user, have done many self-experiments myself, and read & commented on Roberts's blog for years; I have no idea about APL, but I think you overestimate how much hacking on R code Roberts was able to do - he had a lot of trouble programming the reaction-time code for his Buttermind experiments and I don't recall him ever reporting more complex analyses than a linear model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like the blog is down now, the linked to post says simply "Hello, this is Seth's sister, Amy, with the sad news that Seth died on Saturday, April 26, 2014. He collapsed while hiking near his home in Berkeley, CA. He had asked that any memorial gifts be made to Amnesty International. Thank you to all for following and sharing Seth's work."

\-- [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/04/27/seth/)

I had the pleasure of knowing Seth personally and am deeply saddened to hear this news.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was fortunate enough to publish Seth's final column this morning.

[http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column- butter...](http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column-butter-makes- me-smarter/)

<comment><USER12> You owe it to your readers to say that Seth's death is a warning to those who would flaunt conventional medical wisdom, as he clearly did.

Anyone who stakes their life on a single published meta-analysis is unwise. Anyone who puts faith in a single assessor of cardiac risk, coronary CT, is unwise. It is ironic that the most apt assessment of Seth's life and death comes from a margarine commercial popular in the 1970s: "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

<comment><USER13> > You owe it to your readers to say that Seth's death is a warning to those > who would flaunt conventional medical wisdom, as he clearly did.

Your comments in this thread are inappropriate and untimely. We do not yet know what caused Seth's collapse, and to jump to blame his experiments because you disagree with his methods is shortsighted.

<comment><USER12> They are completely appropriate and very timely. "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed. If you want, I can go into details, but with his butter and his omega habits, he was putting himself at risk for both, contradictory as that may sound.

<comment><USER14> > "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an > interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed.

or just due to plain old heatstroke and/or going beyond your physical limit (on that given day and for you given overall condition for that day). You should at least have mentioned whether you know this hills. I hike a lot in the East Bay, and if i remember the Sat was pretty sunny.

<comment><USER15> I met Seth a few times and I remember one time he asked to go hiking in a fairly unsafe area when it was getting dark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd be really interested in knowing his cause of death. He has had extremely high fat intake due to all his experimentation:

[http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/11/25/butter-and- arithmetic...](http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/11/25/butter-and-arithmetic- how-much-butter/)

<comment><USER17> Collapsing during strenuous activity is typically heart failure in my experience.

It happens all the time up here in Canada when people shovel snow.

<comment><USER12> Almost. I think you're confusing "heart failure" with "myocardial infarction." They are two different diseases. Collapse during exertion can happen in either one, but in Seth's case myocardial infarction is more likely, because people with heart failure generally don't go hiking (their exercise tolerance is too limited).

<comment><USER17> I may very well have confused the two as I am not an expert in the topic. Thank you for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> According to a Scientific American article [1], he was aged 54 in early 2008, so that puts him at roughly 60 years old, depending on his precise date of birth...

[1] [http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=self-experimenter- free-f...](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=self-experimenter-free-from- insomnia)

<comment><USER19> Any idea why his year of birth does not seem to be publicly known ?

<comment><USER20> Because no one posted that trivial detail, and he didn't share it on Facebook?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seth Roberts was an innovator, a teacher, an original thinker -- and he was an inspiration to me. I'm reminded of the Grateful Dead t-shirt that says, "They aren't the best at what they do. They're the only ones who do it".

I've been following his Shangri-La diet for over four years now. Here's a page about my results, although it's a bit out of date:

[http://www.astrocyte-design.com/shangri-la-diet/](http://www.astrocyte- design.com/shangri-la-diet/)

</comment><comment><USER22> One can't help but wonder if a man so dedicated to self-experimentation was a victim of his own studies. Beware extremes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Slightly offtopic - The logic around weight "set-points" seems plausible. Has anyone ever had any luck with the Shangri La Diet?

<comment><USER24> I lost about 20 lbs in 6 months doing it a few years ago. I did find that I had less inclination to snack or eat large meals.

Then I increased cardio, stopped the diet (why? I don't recall), and proceeded to gain it back (while doing 3+ hours/week of cardio). I've tried various things with limited success and been meaning to try Shangri La again.

Personal anecdote, post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.

<comment><USER23> Thanks. Always good to hear a first hand account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nassim Nicholas Taleb: _" We are considering a memorial a-la-Seth: A memorial one-day conference for all his friends and admirers, organized by his pals: John Durant, Tim Ferris, Tucker Max, Gary Taubes, and other members of that independent thinking clique who connected socially through Seth"_ [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015217680...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10152176803438375&id=13012333374&stream_ref=1)

</comment><comment><USER25> RIP.

I am sad to see this. I only recently learned of the site. I have done my own personal health experiments and had hoped to make contact and what not, but did not get around to it. I imagine a lot of people will say his experiments killed him or believe it even if they don't say it.

I increasingly think there is no point to trying to share such info. If you die under a doctor's care, they say your condition did you in. If you die doing alternative stuff, they say the alternative stuff did you in. It seems pretty no win, in that regard.

I never knew him, yet it feels like a personal loss for me.

<comment><USER26> I regret not introducing you two. I didn't know either of you but I liked your webpages. His offered some ideas that helped with issues that had been impervious to doctors; yours didn't directly matter to me beyond the encouragement of seeing someone tackling their problems themselves, but that's something. Thanks for sharing them.

<comment><USER25> Thank you for replying. I am curious why you say mine didn't matter to you. I mean why think it was not relevant to you at all.

I get a lot of feedback from people about all kinds of projects that my work is "too niche" and only serves a tiny population. I don't think that's true at all and I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong.

<comment><USER26> Your CF treatment didn't seem to have any direct bearing on my own health problems, but I was encouraged by the example. Possibly I was wrong and e.g. I should be more concerned about pH -- I've made this mistake before. (I ruled out a big effect of wheat on me because I hadn't given its removal enough of a chance.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is incredibly sad. Such a curious and bright mind.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seth Roberts wasn't a hacker, but he was friends with Aaron Swartz:

[http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/07/22/google-yes- wikipedia-...](http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/07/22/google-yes-wikipedia- yes-aaron-swartz-no/)

Swartz also wrote about Roberts' Shangri-La Diet on his blog, claiming that through it "losing weight has to be one of the easiest things I've ever done":

[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/losingweight](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/losingweight)

<comment><USER29> So that's at least N=2, the number of people on the Shangri La diet who have died prematurely.

I think Seth Roberts was the very definition of a hacker. Not computer hacker. Hacker.

I started the diet about 5 weeks ago. The oil drinking helped to make my cravings tolerable. I quit after 2 weeks because I didn't seem to need the oil any more. My cravings have been under control since without the oil. (I've lost about 3 inches of waist. I've not measured my weight because I don't care about that. I'm feeling lighter and better than I have in about 4 years.)

I think there's value to his theory of set-points, and to the use of unflavored oil as something that breaks the brain's flavor-calorie connection. Nevertheless, I'd be severely concerned by this news if I were still on the diet, or if I were on the diet long-term.

<comment> atom-morgan > So that's at least N=2, the number of people on the Shangri La diet who have > died prematurely.

I won't say that diet _can 't_ lead to suicide but...it was suicide for Swartz, right?

<comment><USER29> Correct. It was suicide.

I didn't mean to imply he died because of the diet (just like we shouldn't infer that Seth died because of the diet). Apologies if it seemed I implied that.

Nevertheless, it's possible that the diet messed with Aaron's brain.

Personally, I've benefited from the diet. So I'm firmly in Seth's camp. But his death does raise questions.

<comment> atom-morgan I didn't think so. I just wanted some clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Andrew Gelman posts a eulogy: [http://andrewgelman.com/2014/04/30/seth- roberts/](http://andrewgelman.com/2014/04/30/seth-roberts/)

</comment><comment><USER31> What happens to our blogs when we die? I've always thought about this and would like to keep my blog running even in death.

</comment><comment><USER32> He will be in a book by Mary Roach soon..

</comment><comment><USER33> Forget the part about chugging olive oil, how about that entire sub-category of his blog dedicated to the belief that pre-natal ultrasounds somehow cause autism? Or the hand-waving away the multiple studies that show that GFCF diets have no proven positive effect on autism symptoms? Or using the word "cure" offhand, based on an n=1 self-report of another diet?

 _nope.gif_

I don't even care about the weight loss and cardiac shit, I think I've seen enough here.

<comment><USER29> It's common for innovators to be mocked for their unconventional ideas.

<comment><USER33> It's not "innovation" if it's just crap you spew on a blog.

Double-blind peer-reviewed replicable studies or GTFO.

<comment><USER29> Yep, those double blind peer-reviewed studies sure worked out for the Wright Brothers.

<comment><USER34> You appear to be confused as to the difference between science and engineering.

<comment><USER29> You seem to be confused about the point I'm making, about innovation through self-experimentation.

<comment><USER34> No, you're still not grasping the difference between those situations. Double- blind trials are required in situations where the results are subtle enough to be colored by personal expectations and biases. Large-scale trials are required when reasonably different conditions (e.g., different human test subjects) could produce radically different results, when it's impossible to tell whether a single test subject is an average or an outlier.

Neither of these conditions apply to the question "Can this airplane fly or not?" There is no subtlety there, no biochemical variations. The plane either flies or it doesn't, and either result is perfectly clear to even the most ignorant layman.

As for peer review, the Wright Brothers had plenty of it: their peers showed up, looked at the plane in flight, and said "Yep, uh-huh, that's flying all right."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Tragic and shows that no matter how healthy your lifestyle, life can still end in unexpected ways much too early.

<comment><USER36> I can't tell if you're being serious or not, so I will note for other readers that there is a lot of irony in saying this about Seth. His most public experiments were the ingestion of large quantities of olive oil for appetite control and daily butter consumption to aid sleep. A more appropriate sentiment might be to salute Seth for his radical health experiments, and the great risks he assumed in performing them on himself.

<comment><USER37> The science is not overwhelming that fat is what kills you. The lipid hypothesis may not be correct. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18615352](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18615352)

<comment><USER38> On the other hand, there is little doubt that overwhelming ingestion of anything will kill you. I'm not sure if it is too much or how long he kept it up, but 60g of butter sounds a lot to me.

<comment><USER37> So the traditional wisdom from what I remember is 20% fat, 30% protein and 50% carbs. 1000 calories a day from carbs means 250 grams of carbs a day. That sounds like a lot too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> For a second I thought this was someone affiliated with Soylent...

</comment><comment><USER12> Collapsed while hiking. That is a cardiovascular death until proven otherwise. In a guy who ate a half a stick of butter every day ... quelle surprise.

Listen to a cardiologist trying to talk Seth out of his course, at around 11 minutes in this 2008 video:

[http://vimeo.com/14281896](http://vimeo.com/14281896)

<comment><USER40> Dr. Mel Siff was a famous scholar in sport science. He hosted a mailing list for a decade that everyone in the field subscribed to. He wrote a comprehensive text on the subject of sport science, Supertraining:

[http://www.amazon.com/Supertraining-Paperback-Yuri- Verkhosha...](http://www.amazon.com/Supertraining-Paperback-Yuri- Verkhoshansky/dp/8890403802)

A fitness buff throughout his life, so never straying far from a conventionally healthy diet in the first place, he famously doubled down on conventional wisdom and went on a low fat, vegetarian diet after suffering a heart attack at a young age. He did everything right, according to establishment wisdom. After a few years, at only 58, he died from a heart attack or stroke. Those of us who are skeptical of the diet-heart hypothesis were not surprised.

The point is, it's very easy to support a side with your favorite anecdote.

After decades of motivated science, the support for the diet-heart hypothesis is poor. Stephan Guyenet, a Ph.D. neurobiologist who studies obesity for a living, has a blog where he examines the evidence in detail. Here's a sample:

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/07/diet-heart- hyp...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/07/diet-heart-hypothesis- stuck-at-starting.html)

If you disagree, I'm sure Stephan would welcome you opening a dialogue with him in the comments on his blog. I'd be interested in that.

<comment><USER41> Mel Siff died in 2003. "Established wisdom" at that time did not recommend a low-fat diet at all. He apparently wrote in one of his books that "nutritional scientists" recommend a diet of 10% fat, but that was never the recommendation of major health organizations or "conventional wisdom". The IOM recommended in 2002 20-35% of calories from fat, for example. In 1990 the recommendation was 30% or less.

It seems that Mel Siff didn't follow a low fat vegetarian diet himself, based on his response to a critical article about him: (full response here: [http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6558](http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6558) )

 _Interestingly, I cannot recall anyone by the name of Glassman ever staying in the Siff household or studying me in the laboratory to examine my eating habits, so I am intrigued to know where he found this inside information. The abbreviated tale of my cardiac rehab programme ([http://www.worldfitness.org/drmelsiff.html](http://www.worldfitness.org/drmelsiff.html)) certainly said nothing about my specific breakdown of macronutrients in my diet.

Had he read a little more carefully what I wrote, he would have noticed that my diet comprises something like 50-60% lipids (no fried foods, no transfats, no animal fat, plenty of fish) and under 30% carbohydrates (no refined carbs) and hasn't deviated much from that sort of balance for many years - I have never been a lover of high carb diets and have eaten little or no sugar (other than about 1-2 tablespoons of honey or a few servings of fruit a day). Where on earth does he obtain that nonsense from about my diet? _

So, he says there he ate about 50-60% fat. It's strange though that he says "no animal fat" but plenty of fish, which is of course animal fat.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: PassMan – A Secure Password Manager Written in Bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JamesTheHacker/passman/blob/master/passman <comment><USER2> How does this differ from pass?

[https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't seen pass until after I write this script. The main reason I developed PassMan was mostly for learning and practice and to brush up on my bash scripting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [deleted]

<comment><USER4> seriously, post your own Show HN instead of hijacking someone elses :/

<comment><USER3> alright, sorry, will not hijack, that was a mistake indeed</comment></comment></comment>


Lazy Evaluation in Java - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/01/lazy-evaluation-in-java.html

<comment><USER2> I liked the article at first because it was pointing out the flawed hypocrisy in the education/job market, where you are expected to learn and show knowledge of something you're not likely to use. Moreover, I _want_ to be the lazy programmer. The lazy programmer does more with less lines of code in addition to using the IDE more effectively. One paragraph in particular that I agreed with was:

 _You were lazy. Now, laziness is said to be a virtue in a programmer. And if you want to be one of those super-smart programmers who can tell me why the only birds you need are Starlings and Kestrels, you might start a company that we buy for big bucks. But quite honestly, we don't appreciate laziness in someone we are hiring to toil away in the bowels of our enterprise application code._

I agree totally. Clearly the problem is that it is necessary to "toil away". Now the example used was recursion, and I totally understand the need to know recursion and data structures, but it could easily be extended to databases or networking protocols. To expect someone to know a skill which is not going to be needed on the job is unfair.

So what is my problem with the article? In the comments, the author is totally bashing this programmer. The failure does not lie with the programmer, but with the system.

<comment><AUTHOR> "To expect someone to know a skill which is not going to be needed on the job is unfair."

 _Complete rewrite_

I am going to respond on the post, this is a very good question that deserves the widest possible audience.

<comment><USER2> _Putting it in harsher terms, when a candidate puts a degree on their resume, they are making a claim. Are they claiming that they did just enough to obtain the required marks and no more, or are they claiming to know the material that was taught to them? If it is the latter, then as an employer I am being perfectly fair in testing their claims, whether or not the material has direct relevance to their initial job assignment._

Okay, but earlier in your post, you said:

 _I know that you learned your stuff in Java instead of in Scheme or--and this would make you instantly unemployable here at BigCo--in Haskell. But they still teach you about recursion._

Now to me, that's a big case-in-point of why the candidate would not really learn recursion. Recursion these days is a 2-week segment in an Intro to Programming sequence, typically taught with trivial examples like, "Take this iterative algorithm and rewrite it to be recursive." The only time recursion would actually _seem_ useful is when used to define a structure like a binary tree, but then again, that might be a lecture or two, followed by, "but all you really need to know is

      BinaryTree t();
      t.insert(foo);

[or whatever the syntax is] since Java defines a tree in its library."

In other words, the poor student who is taking 4 or 5 other classes in addition to this one receives maybe 2-3 weeks worth of exposure to recursion, learns enough to pass the test, and moves on to the next topic. You really expect this person to be able to whip out recursion at a moment's notice, when he believes that it is just another way to do the same thing?

This part in particular bothered me:

 _The reason we expect you to know these things is that they were subjects you claim to have studied when you got your Computer Science degree. Don't argue with me_

This is exactly the kind of conformist establishment thinking that makes corporate jobs dull and chases away the best minds. A Computer Science degree is largely a formality: perhaps two or three of my classes actually taught me something worthwhile, while most of what I actually learned I picked up on my own. The saying, "Those who can't do, teach," really is quite accurate in the CS field. At my college in particular, what I did in my classes is so far from anything I've done in the real world (i.e. full mathematical specs for every module, etc.) that I feel that most of my classes were basically worthless. The two main exceptions were my honors algorithms/data structures class and my Lisp class, and that was because I had great teachers who really taught me something new. So, as I was saying, getting that degree is largely just a formality for someone who wants to get a job programming. God forbid that student actually be someone who came in with an interest in programming, because multiple courses in Java (and nothing else, in some instances) followed by a corporate job is sure to kill any passion that was there.

So, considering that the degree is only a means to an end,

 _You tried to optimize your time to spend as little as possible on the things that you thought we wouldn't ask you to know._

and

 _We know you took shortcuts in school, you did just enough to get through without actually learning anything about the stuff you figured you didn't need to get a job here._

seem like the rational thing for a student these days to do. Someone who simply plods through the work without any thought at all to why may be the stereotypical corporate drone you're looking for, but that is also what makes it necessary to go out and acquire startups in the first place. You summed it up best yourself, though:

 _Quite honestly, we don't appreciate laziness in someone we are hiring to toil away in the bowels of our enterprise application code._

Count me as glad that I am not working that job. I'd much rather be lazy, write my higher-order code, be as productive as 5-10 of your drones, and reap the majority of the benefits, all while being able to take pride in my accomplishments. Ask for people who don't question the status quo and you're asking for the same people who will spend thoughtless hours writing the same code over and over instead of using abstraction, who will never use their IDEs properly, and who will never bring true innovation to your company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I thought that article was about the _other_ kind of lazy evaluation...

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe the coffee has not kicked in yet, but I don't get it.</comment>


Everything You Need to Know About the Apple MacBook Pro Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/3545723/apple-macbook-lawsuit/

<comment><USER2> Everything You Need to Know About the Apple MacBook Pro Lawsuit...

...if you can get the Time.com website to scroll.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange. It works okay for me.

<comment><USER2> No scroll bars whatsoever on 3 different browsers and scrolling with the mouse also doesn't work.</comment></comment></comment>


NZ school goes open source - cuts server requirements by a factor of almost 50 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cio.com.au/article/333686/nz_school_ditches_microsoft_goes_totally_open_source?fp=&fpid=&pf=1

<comment><USER2> Cut the uber-linkbait title. I'm no MS fan, but I was immediately skeptical of such a claim. And here's the relevant info:

 _In 2010, Albany SHS will move into new purpose-built premises, which include a dedicated server room. Brennan noted that the architects designed the space based on standard New Zealand school requirements, including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements._

Actually, it suggests absolutely nothing of the kind. The fact that some architect somewhere designed a room big enough to hold 192 servers hardly means that you've saved 50-fold because you're only using 4. The office I rented is big enough for six people to work in, so I'm apparently doing the work of six people!

</comment><comment><USER3> NZ school standards are crazy. It's a 230 pupil high school and they require - we'll assume when they say each rack can contain 48 servers they mean 48U, so that's 192U of space.

I'm struggling to see how a 230 pupil school needs that much rack space...</comment>


Interactive graphic of 10k music lyrics for body parts across genres - <AUTHOR> http://www.fleshmap.com/listen/music.html

<comment><USER2> I should've guessed it from the URL, but a NSFW tag would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Definately a different way to view things.. And yes - it probably should have a NSFW tag on it.

I must admit though - I am curious about the fact that "ass" is in 0.62% of GOSPEL songs..

<comment><USER4> _cues donkey puns_

<comment><USER3> True. Although I haven't heard all that many gospels congs that mention Balaam...

And so off to the Biblegateway.com I go... 0 results for ASS in the NIV. 76 results for ASS in the KJV

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> whoa! that was...unexpected.</comment>


Dell launches the Alienware M11x laptop  - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/games/dell-launches-the-alienware-m11x-laptop-2010022/

<comment><USER2> The CPU is benchmarked slightly slower than the 17" Lenovo I got for $500 last summer(974 vs 1154 on the Passmark CPU Mark comparison - 999 with the upgrade option), but with much better video, and DDR3. I consider that fairly impressive for a netbook, even a $799 one.

<comment><USER3> At 4.5 pounds, this is 50% over the weight of a typical netbook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would be a pretty nice laptop if it wasn't completely hideous

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't see the point. They go on and on about playing Modern Warfare 2 but surely you need a mouse to play that with any degree of success, rather diminishing the value of the netbook form factor. And nice comment about playing it as you fly from NYC to LA, as if that's something the teenagers who like Alienware computers do every second day - not that you'd have room for the mouse in economy anyway.

And is that a VGA out port I spied in the video? What on earth is that doing there? The only conceivable use of VGA out these days is for road warriors connecting to projectors and I can hardly imagine any salesperson wanting to bring this monstrosity into a presentation.

And those gaudy, useless LEDs can hardly be good for battery life. Who the hell buys this kind of thing?

<comment><USER3> I actually find the trackpoint on my Thinkpad to be quite good for gaming. Like a joystick, it allows infinite rotation without having to pause or otherwise adjust.

<comment><USER5> Maybe so, but this unit has a trackpad!</comment></comment></comment>