Ask HN: Matrix or Tox? - <AUTHOR> Which platform should I use to communicate with family back home? I tried matrix but it is not very user friendly for non-technical folks. Also, I was never able to get voice or video chat working.<p>Anyone used Tox? What is your experience? Will it be easy for people who don't have technical know-how? <comment><USER2> You haven't given us any information about what you are trying to achieve: Voice calls? Video? Surveillance proof?

You haven't given us any information about what they have access to: Phones? Laptops? Desktops?

You haven't given us any information about what software they run: Android? MacOS? Linux? Windows?

You haven't given us any information about what you've considered and rejected: WhatsApp? Zoom? Facebook Rooms? Messenger?

What are your constraints?

I don't have an answer, but information like this seems an absolute minimum to let people help you.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You haven't given us any information about what you are trying to achieve: > Voice calls? Video? Surveillance proof?

Voice, Video, Screen Sharing

Preference is for P2P and lightweight clientside native app.

> You haven't given us any information about what they have access to: Phones? > Laptops? Desktops?

Phones and Laptops

> You haven't given us any information about what software they run: Android? > MacOS? Linux? Windows?

Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android and iPhone

> You haven't given us any information about what you've considered and > rejected: WhatsApp? Zoom? Facebook Rooms? Messenger?

Whatsapp, Zoom, Facebook, Google, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Jitsi, Rocket.

<comment><USER2> This is like trying to get blood from a stone ...

 _Why_ have you rejected these? What is wrong with them? Why are they unsuitable for your needs?

Why are you making it so hard for people to try to help you?

Can I suggest you write a proper blog post about what you've tried, why it's unsuitable, how these things have failed to meet your needs, and explain what you really need that is not provided by the things you've tried. Then post a link to that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I asked a simple question on Matrix and Tox and you asked me to compare all the other chat applications under the roof. My requirements are simple: Lightweight client for both desktop and mobile; audio, video and screensharing; P2P; privacy focused and not controlled by single entity, does not limit features and does not force other communities onto the users by default.

Most of the chat apps I listed previously do not meet one or the other requirement. Matrix is the one that I found very good. Unfortunately I was not able to get the voice and video feature working. Hence I looked at Tox which also ticks all the boxes but the clients are not as good as Matrix.

<comment><USER2> I apologise ... you've caught me at a time when I'd love to help, but I personally don't have the specific knowledge you want. As a result the only way I can potentially help is to tease out from you your specific requirements s that others with more technical knowledge might be able to provide more in- depth information.

My point is that people will be frustrated if they suggest something only then for you to say you've already tried it and rejected it for reasons you haven't yet mentioned. That's why I'm trying to get you to be more complete about your particular context and circumstances.

I hope you don't mind, but I've re-written and submitted your question here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526263)

Maybe that will get a response.

Meanwhile, let me explain more ... this will sound brusque, but when I'm in "technical" mode I tend to deal with what's in front of me, and not wrap it in "soft language". Being in "Manager Mode" is possible for me, but an effort, and incompatible with the technical work I'm buried in at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

> _Well, I asked a simple question on Matrix and Tox and you asked me to > compare all the other chat applications under the roof._

No, you didn't ask about Matrix and Tox, you said:

> _Which platform should I use to communicate with family back home?_

You then said that Matrix isn't very friendly for non-tech people, and that you couldn't get voice or video chat working. Fair enough, that's why Matrix is no good for you.

Then you asked if anyone had used Tox. Fair enough, you've suggested something else. But your initial question remains:

> _Which platform should I use to communicate with family back home?_

So my training is to understand where someone's question is coming from before trying to answer it. I was asking about the limitations, the requirements, and then asking about what you've tried so people could get a sense of your experiences so far, and in what way they don't meet your needs. I could have just said: Why not use Facebook?

So now you've said:

> _My requirements are simple: Lightweight client for both desktop and mobile; > audio, video and screensharing; P2P; privacy focused and not controlled by > single entity, does not limit features and does not force other communities > onto the users by default._

Those are not simple requirements, and my bet is that nothing currently meets them.

I get the sense that you feel I'm being unreasonable in my replies, so I'll just finish by answering your original post "as is":

> _Which platform should I use to communicate with family back home?_

I don't know, it depends.

> _Anyone used Tox?_

I've never used Tox ... sorry.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try [https://app.trember.com](https://app.trember.com) It's free, no registration or installation, super easy to use from any device.</comment>


Researchers Who Exposed VW Gain Little Reward from Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/business/vw-wvu-diesel-volkswagen-west-virginia.html <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12158221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12158221)</comment>


Stealing encryption keys through the power of touch - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/08/stealing-encryption-keys-through-the-power-of-touch/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29

<comment><AUTHOR> More detailed report from the researchers: [http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/handsoff-20140731.pdf](http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/handsoff-20140731.pdf)</comment>


That Digital Textbook? Your College Has Billed You for It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/your-money/college-digital-textbooks.html <comment><USER2> I was confused the first few times I heard companies bragging about their student-friendly "inclusive textbook" programs. I thought they were congratulating themselves for finally making textbook platforms that are inclusive of people with disabilities, [1] and that's why they were calling them "inclusive textbooks." But that's not it at all. It has nothing to do with inclusion — these are mostly-mandatory (you're supposed to be able to opt-out) programs.

And if you look at the PR release from Pearson, which is linked in the article, you can see that's it's not designed to be good for students, but rather for the publishers' bottom-line:

> _Our digital first model lowers prices for students and, over time, > increases our revenues._

1: digital textbooks are infamous for having very few, if any, accessibility features. Some of the largest platforms have used image-based PDFs, which are terrible for people with low vision, or anyone who wants to read their textbook on their phone.</comment>


If Chatroulette Had Facebook Connect, People Would Keep Their Pants On - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/09/gary-v-chatroulette-would-have-worked-with-facebook-connect-because-the-penises-would-have-names/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> "If Chatroulette Had Facebook Connect, People Would Keep Their Pants On."

They also wouldn't use it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does TechCrunch act as if the random penises are a problem for ChatRoulette?

That's what made the site super popular, got it referenced on mainstream television repeatedly, and made it ridiculously hysterical to use. I'm a straight guy and I don't like seeing naked men. But ChatRoulette in its prime was probably the funniest experience I've ever had on the internet because of the element of surprise.

TechCrunch shouldn't act as if ChatRoulette making itself a family friendly site was their number one priority.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've seen that argument made several times.

Given the fact that facebook has been loath to do anything with video one can't help but wonder what it is that they know that we don't know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gary Vaynerchuk just used it as the most known example. Lots of sites, apps, and games use Facebook Connect purely for verification purposes, as opposed to email verification, because it does end up being better. We've got throwaway email addresses, but not really throwaway Facebooks.

<comment><USER5> Is there something that works against creating throwaway facebook accounts?

<comment><USER6> Their TOS explicitly forbids being anyone other than the real you on facebook.

However much that would stop you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know it's in violation of FB terms, but what's _really_ there to stop people from making fake accounts?

It might work, but as others have pointed out, it probably was what it was because it provided instant gratification anonymously.

I'm sure someone can build quick little app that would take two facebook/google/twitter accounts and connect them to one of the many video chat services, but, on nothing more than a hunch, I doubt it'll be as successful.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you could log in with your linkedin profile then it might actually be fruitful.

</comment><comment><USER9> If Facebook Had Video Chat, People Would Use It. (expect it soon)

<comment><USER10> they should fix their im first before aiming for video chat

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not for those of us who don't have an FB account.</comment>


The Richest Capitalist in China Is a Member of the Communist Party of China - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/news/alibabas-jack-ma-communist-party-member-china-state-035802914--finance.html <comment><USER2> I don't know why anyone would be surprised by this. _Of course_ he's a member of the party. He very likely wouldn't have been able to build Alibaba had he not been a member.</comment>


Show HN: Send data to Google Sheets, in 2 seconds - <AUTHOR> https://community.bearer.sh/pushtogsheet/# <comment><USER2> Could save me ton of money next time i want to push data to Gsheet !

</comment><comment><USER3> Good stuff. Have to try it with some web scraping.

</comment><comment><USER4> What would be a good use case for this?

</comment><comment><USER5> So slick!</comment>


Can You Find the German Snipers and Experts in Camouflage Hiding in These Photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2015/01/20/simon_menner_camouflage_is_a_conceptual_look_at_snipers_in_germany_photos.html

<comment><USER2> About the author: David Rosenberg is the editor of Slate's Behold blog. He has worked as a photo editor for 15 years and is a tennis junkie. Follow him on Twitter.

With "photo editor" being the relevant part.

</comment><comment><USER3> was on wired they are recycling content</comment>


Are the American people obsolete? - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/07/27/american_people_obsolete

<comment><USER2> Some interesting observations, but I think the title is poor (I'm not American, I'm not saying this because I feel threatened or insulted). Something reflecting that fact that the US domestic market is waning in importance would be more accurate (but less provocative from an editor's POV).

The EU, taken as a single market, is the largest global market in terms of sheer spending power - it has a bigger population than the US (half a billion plus, vs. 307 million in the US). China is growing rapidly, but is still a very poor country currently. Of course, you cannot treat the EU as a single market in practical terms, because of language differences (even within the same country e.g. Switzerland), different laws and customs. The US, by comparison, is a far more homogenous unit (easier to sell into from a startups' perspective, European startups probably have to go international from day one, which is a big drawback from doing a startup in Europe).

I certainly don't think the American people are becoming obsolete - the world is still very US-centric, for better or worse. Just think, if an article like this came out before the crash of 2008, the author would be branded as an unpatriotic commie.

EDIT: I just read down to the end of the article, and it's mostly bullshit speculation with no supporting evidence for the author's fanciful claims.

</comment><comment><USER3> _In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority._

In return for generating an disproportionate amount of the wealth, you mean. The rest of the article is similar economically-illiterate gibberish.

 _its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy_

It's clear where the sympathies of the author lie.

<comment><USER4> Many of the people who've done best since Reagan have been rent seekers like dentists, doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives.

So far as business creators and owners are concerned, it's fair to say that the issue of who "created" the wealth of a company like Wal _Mart is a political question. Certainly some of that wealth was created by Sam Walton, but certainly some was created by his workers. It's obviously wrong if Sam gets 0% of the value of Wal_ Mart and also wrong if he gets 100% of the value of Wal*Mart -- there's no objectively right answer, only the issue of what different people can "get".

In the current climate, I think wealth is more likely to "trickle up" than trickle down. If Joe Sixpack can afford some beer, I see how that helps the guys at the brewery have jobs and the owner of the brewery make a profit. Now, give the owner of a brewery some cash, and he ~might~ hire a worker, or he ~might~ buy a new Ferrari (creating jobs) or maybe he'll buy an old painting (bid up asset prices), buy real property (bid up asset prices, causing inflation) or buy stocks (bidding up asset prices.) This circle jerk might nominally transfer money to some other rich guy, but it doesn't create jobs, innovation or anything worthwhile.

And jeeze, don't get started on the "taxes discourage the rich from hiring new workers" -- because you can write off anything you pay workers as a business expense.

At the moment I'm thinking about what to do with a lifestyle business -- do I want to hire some new people? Personally, I see higher taxes on my income pushing me towards hiring somebody, growing equity, and pushing any possible taxes I might pay into the future.

<comment><USER3> _because you can write off anything you pay workers as a business expense_

That makes no sense - you still need to pay, and the money comes from the payroll budget.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/budget/7847...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/budget/7847889/Budget-2010-Lower- salaries-avoid-jobs-tax.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As I've seen since the 70's, if you get enough people in the US pissed off, they elect different kinds of people. Given this, it's more likely that the rich (being mobile) will emigrate rather than dealing with the hassle. They can afford the lawyers and other "fees" required to do so.</comment>


Police Seize Jason Chen's Computers - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5524843/

<comment><USER2> Gizmodo points out that the warrant was invalid because it violated section 1524(g) of the California State Penal Code:

(g) No warrant shall issue for any item or items described in Section 1070 of the Evidence Code.

Section 1070 of the Evidence Code reads:

(a) A publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, or by a press association or wire service, or any person who has been so connected or employed, cannot be adjudged in contempt by a judicial, legislative, administrative body, or any other body having the power to issue subpoenas, for refusing to disclose, in any proceeding as defined in Section 901, the source of any information procured while so connected or employed for publication in a newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication, or for refusing to disclose any unpublished information obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public.

(b) Nor can a radio or television news reporter or other person connected with or employed by a radio or television station, or any person who has been so connected or employed, be so adjudged in contempt for refusing to disclose the source of any information procured while so connected or employed for news or news commentary purposes on radio or television, or for refusing to disclose any unpublished information obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public.

(c) As used in this section, "unpublished information" includes information not disseminated to the public by the person from whom disclosure is sought, whether or not related information has been disseminated and includes, but is not limited to, all notes, outtakes, photographs, tapes or other data of whatever sort not itself disseminated to the public through a medium of communication, whether or not published information based upon or related to such material has been disseminated.

I am not a lawyer, but I would point out that even though the description of evidence to be seized was extremely vague, the cops can seize the items on it, since the warrant was not specifically for the items mentioned in 1070. If the computer media contains such items, they are not admissible as evidence in a trial. Other data, such as proof of a felony (the reason for the warrant), should be, IMO.

<comment><USER3> That seems to apply to undisclosed information or refusing to disclose sources. Neither of those apply to this case, presumably since it is about stolen goods or disclosure of trade secrets. Gizmodo is grasping for straws here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's pretty unfair how the cops can take all of the tools you need for work without ever charging you with a crime. Jason's lucky in that he can easily loan another computer/camera, but many hackers would be in a serious trouble if all their computers were seized.

<comment><USER5> It's annoying but you should at least have an offsite backup in case of fire, seizure, or other type of loss/theft if you depend on your data.

This is making think of pulling the trigger on using truecrypt or the like to encrypt my on-disk data as well.

<comment><USER6> In many states, you can be held in contempt FOREVER. The issue with truecrypt type things is you can never _prove_ it is gone, therefore you can get stuck in contempt with no way to stop it.

If you Google enough, you'll see a guy in jail for contempt for 10 years because the judge didn't believe there aren't hidden foreign assets in a divorce case...

<comment><USER7> I believe this is only true for civil cases, as indicated in your last sentence regarding the divorce. I found this definition on criminal contempt:

 _In a criminal contempt charge, which is aimed at punishing bad behavior, a defendant is afforded the due-process safeguards of the criminal system, including a possible jury trial._

I'm not a lawyer, but I would suspect that if Chen is under suspicion for a felony, the above definition might apply.

<comment><USER6> If they're going after Chen instead of after Chen's source. Then I doubt Chen has protection under contempt laws. I bet he does under the journalist shield laws though

<comment><USER8> Not if he committed a crime (like receiving stolen property) because if it did, all criminal hackers would get press cards, or stash their data on computers owned by journalists and be able to conceal evidence of their crimes that way.

edited for specificity.

<comment><USER9> crackers?

Maybe i misunderstood this site's title.

<comment><USER8> > crackers?

If you're going to be pedantic about it, sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just have to republish this tech crunch comment, made me laugh so hard I scared my dog:

From [http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/26/the-iphone-leak-gets- ugly-p...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/26/the-iphone-leak-gets-ugly-police- raid-gizmodo-editors-house-confiscate-computers/#ixzz0mFB1tQFt)

\--

Shan - April 26th, 2010 at 1:51 pm UTC

How it's[sic] stolen property?

If you found a property which is unclaimed what you will do?

Since Gizmodo was unable to find owner of that iPhone.. they published on their blog with various features so the owner would come and get it from them..

\--

</comment><comment><USER10> The only one I really feel sorry for here is Chen's wife. He at least gets to be the guy who broke this story. She gets to make wife-face at him for the next 4 months.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems a bit overkill? JUST for a moment, forget about the your bias on Gizmodo or Apple...

When's the last time you or someone you know reported something stolen, knew who took it and possibly had just as much evidence of who has possession, and there was no search warrant and raid done on your behalf?

I experienced several examples where there was video evidence of the theft, the value of the goods were anywhere between $1000 to $5000, there was identification of the person and there was nothing remotely as swift or stern taken here to recover.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but in those instances was the person who received the stolen goods loudly boasting about it to tens of millions of people?

<comment><USER11> How is that relevant or matter? (I mean that in the most polite way for arguments sake)

Action is action. Theft is theft. Evidence is evidence. I can understand if you mean because the iPhone became "high profile", but that shouldn't make a difference in how our system works my friend.

<comment><USER13> As has been observed by many, it's not simple theft. If this was about an expensive cashmere sweater belonging to Steve Jobs, I would agree with you completely.

But there is a strong argument that the acquisition and subsequent publicity in this case infringed heavily on state and federal laws which protect trade secrets. You might or might not agree whether those laws apply here, but enough qualified people think they do that it explains the intensity and speed of the investigation.

<comment><USER14> It seems like that just begs the question. It doesn't really explain why police action is so swift to protect trade secrets but so slow to protect actual property rights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised that nobody's commented on Gawker's legal response to the search, in which they point out that the search warrant (or, at least, the scanned copy on Gizmodo's web site) clearly shows that a "night search" was unauthorized, whereas the search of Chen's home just as clearly took place at night. Does that mean that the search was unlawful?

<comment><USER16> According to <http://law.onecle.com/california/penal/1533.html>:

"Upon a showing of good cause, the magistrate may, in his or her discretion, insert a direction in a search warrant that it may be served at any time of the day or night. In the absence of such a direction, the warrant shall be served only between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m."

<comment><USER15> Huh. Well, I guess that answers that... thanks (to both repliers) for looking into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nick Denton, the Gawker Media CEO tweeted an interesting question:

 _Do bloggers count as journalists? I guess we'll find out. Police raid Gizmodo editor's home:<http://gizmodo.com/5524843/*>

<http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/12902208226>

<comment><USER17> The question's not whether or not bloggers count as journalists for the purposes of the shield laws, it's whether or not the shield laws apply when _the journalists themselves_ are under suspicion of committing a crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The warrant states that the search and seizure was to acquire evidence of a felony. It seems like there are worse things that could happen to him than having his computers seized. (Like getting convicted of a felony)

</comment><comment><USER19> At least it was the real police and not the Apple secret police.

<comment><USER20> for those who don't know what he is talking about:

<http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/22/on-the-apple-suicide/>

<comment><USER19> Not really. I was thinking about this article from some months back on Gizmodo: [http://gizmodo.com/5427058/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts- dow...](http://gizmodo.com/5427058/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts-down-leaks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> isn't this a bit excessive over something that would have been out in ~3 months anyway?

An engineer leaves phone in a bar. Gizmodo purchases phone, does their expose, then returns phone. Cops seize all of authors computers, phones, etc.

<comment><USER22> They purchased known stolen property and used it to make some money before returning it. That's illegal and I don't see why they shouldn't be held responsible for what they did.

<comment><USER23> No. They purchased a phone "found at a bar". They acted in good faith that it had been lost. When asked to return the property, they did. There are exceptions for good faith actions in most "receiving stolen goods" type laws for a reason.

<comment><USER24> Disassembling the phone and posting pictures on the Web for profit then returning the phone counts as good faith?

<comment><USER23> Buying an item that is not blatantly restricted (e.g. is not marijuana), on claims of the seller that it is legit, is good faith. Further, upon request from the original owner, it was returned. This is also good faith... aka "oops my bad". What they did in between is called "I do stuff to my property", and perfectly ok.

Note: this was my thinking before I found out CA has weird laws about this (see other replies in this thread).

<comment><USER24> There's no way to legitimately acquire a 4G iPhone prototype. So if the seller said "I've got a 4G iPhone here" then it sounds like he was basically admitting at least theft of trade secrets.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Are People Afraid of Clowns? - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/56066-why-people-afraid-of-clowns.html <comment><USER2> Personally, I'm pretty sure it's because I stumbled onto a showing of either IT or Killer Klowns from Outer Space[1] on the TV when I was a small child. Ruined Bozo[2] for me...

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095444/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095444/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_the_Clown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_the_Clown)</comment>


Skype and the Incredible Power of Persistent Group Chats - <AUTHOR> http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2010/12/skype-and-the-incredible-power-of-persistent-group-chats.html

<comment><USER2> I agree with the skype praise in general. We use it in similar ways and it indeed does a a nice job most of the time.

What this article fails to mention, though, is Skype's absolutely _atrocious_ handling of multiple concurrent clients (e.g. Desktop, Laptop and Phone, in parallel).

Once a second client is connected it's effectively undefined when and if portions of chat-histories and missed messages will be (re)sent. "Unreliable" would be an understatement here, as messages will come in at random times and in random order - and sometimes not at all.

I really wonder why the supposed #1 Business-Messenger is not fixing such a _fundamental_ issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> I tend to use PartyChapp in a similar way, but with GTalk.

<http://partychapp.appspot.com>

It's pretty great. It creates persistant rooms for Jabber/Google Talk. I'm a big fan.

</comment><comment><USER4> skype's p2p keeps you current even after you come back from online. with a dose of encryption.</comment>


How to record your desktop on Debian using Gnome - <AUTHOR> http://blog.giuseppeurso.net/how-to-record-your-desktop-on-debian-using-gnome/index.html <comment><USER2> Nice and easy with Gnome</comment>


EU vote to 'ban on all forms of pornography' - to 'eliminate gender stereotypes' - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9917189/MEPs-to-vote-on-EU-ban-on-all-forms-of-pornography.html

<comment><USER2> With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently left-wing policy is indistinguishable from a right-wing policy. The reverse is also true.</comment>


Ask VentureHacks: Is the VC Industry Doomed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/vc-industry-doomed

<comment><USER2> A more methodical approach: <http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html>

<comment><USER3> Thanks Paul. I added this to the article:

"A limited partner can tell you who _was_ the best VC with fund performance data from institutions like Cambridge Associates. He may also question whether past performance predicts future performance in venture capital; see Don't Bet the Farm on Serial Persistence.

"But entrepreneurs shouldn't select their investors based on how much money they have made for their limited partners."</comment></comment>


Skateboards, Wine, and Stuffed Animals: 10 Things Print On Demand can do now. - <AUTHOR> http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2008/11/skateboards-wine-and-stuffed-animals-10-things-print-on-demand-can-do-now/

<comment><USER2> Okay, the first 3 posts were interesting, but why are we suddenly being spammed by all these 3D printer articles?

<comment><USER3> My thoughts exactly!

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't call the spate of articles on 3D printing and mass customization Spam. I wrote 2 of the five that have shown up recently and they were efforts to help share info on manufacturing technologies with a group of hacker with the hope of fostering some new ideas. While some items on the list may be old news I took care to highlight many that are currently flying under the Radar (Spoonflower & Xoddo) to name two.

There were other posts highlighting the RepRap project and an honest question about what one would do with these technologies. They stayed on the board because people were interested in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too bad the custom shoes are only for women and children - I'd like to put a picture of a PCB on shoes.</comment>


U.S. House of Representatives votes to ban TikTok on federal devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/20/house-tiktok-federal-phones-374315 <comment><USER2> Are they going to vote on each apps? That might take a while.

<comment><USER3> They vote on the first one and the next bill will be a generalized regulation that allows some member of the executive branch to determine which apps will be banned from federal devices.

Then a follow up bill will allow that same bureaucrat to decide which devices are allowed to be federally owned devices.</comment></comment>


Sneaks API: An API for sneaker heads - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/druv5319/Sneaks-API <comment><AUTHOR> The Sneaks App is a [website]([https://sneaks-app.com](https://sneaks- app.com)) that allows users to search sneakers, get product information and compare prices from StockX, Flight Club, Goat and Stadium Goods through the [Sneaks API]([https://github.com/druv5319/Sneaks- API](https://github.com/druv5319/Sneaks-API))

The reason I built this API is so developers are able to create sneaker based programs and websites without having to fumble with scrapping information on all 4 resell websites.

Here's a [demo]([https://sneaks-app.com](https://sneaks-app.com)) of the Sneaks App using the [Sneaks API]([https://github.com/druv5319/Sneaks- API](https://github.com/druv5319/Sneaks-API))

I'd love to see what projects you guys can come up with this API! I always looking for improvements within the API so feel free to fork, edit, then submit a pull request. If you have any issues, submit an issue through the github</comment>


Video on Startup HR by Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid - <AUTHOR> http://founderinstitute.com/posts/318

<comment><USER2> Excellent video with some real nuggets of wisdom - don't miss this!

</comment><comment><USER3> +1 Good points on clarity and communication.</comment>


Daniel Weinreb: Fundamental problems with the Common Lisp language - <AUTHOR> http://ilc2009.scheming.org/node/7?

<comment><USER2> Dan Weinreb is a smart guy, but too many of these points seem like straw men, at least if the point of identifying problems with CL is to investigate the apparent lack of mainstream adoption. Let's see:

 _Too many concepts; irregular_

Yes, but unless you're implementing the language you can really almost ignore the concepts you don't like. If you prefer property lists, then forget about alists if you want. But really, a lisp in which you _couldn't_ make an alist would seem awkward and irregular to me.

 _Hard to compile efficiently_

I benchmark. SBCL is _fast_. It's much faster than it needs to be for mainstream adoption. It knocks the socks off of perl, python, and ruby, for example. For years it destroyed the JVM in performance, though I presume that the JVM has caught up somewhat by now.

And really, _any_ language is hard to compile efficiently. GCC has received tens of thousands of hours of optimization. A naive C implementation would likely be slower than SBCL for real-world code.

At this point in history, we've even figured out how to implement ECMA JavaScript efficiently.

 _Too much memory_

OK, I can agree with this. All of us would like an implementation with a tree- shaker, for example. But for production applications this isn't too much of a problem. In 2009 you shouldn't still be using CGI calls.

 _Not portable_

Java is 'portable' because there is one widely used implementation of the language. Trying to port code from the JVM to GCJ is not straightforward. Porting CL code that runs on Linux to BSD requires no work. Porting from Linux to Windows requires no more work than would be expected in Perl, and probably less because CL makes an attempt at handling the pathname issues.

 _Archaic naming_

Is this really a problem? People who don't speak English seem able to learn programming languages in which all of the symbol name choices would seem meaningless initially. And plenty of common English-like names don't actually map to their English equivalents: 'for' in C has almost no relation to 'for' in English, and even 'or', which in programming languages is always inclusive, is usually used exclusively in English.

 _Not uniformly object-oriented_

On the rare occasion that I want to implement something like a new type of sequence, or arbitrary precision floating point numbers, I care about this. The most common case though, is wanting to implement a new type of stream, which has already been fully handled by gray-streams, widely implemented on all CL implementations you would actually want to use.

<comment><USER3> "Yes, but unless you're implementing the language you can really almost ignore the concepts you don't like."

Or unless you are reading other people's code.

<comment><USER2> Yes, hence " _almost_." Of course, this is true regardless of the language. In C, for example, even though the language does not include linked links, I've parsed through lots of programs using linked list in C (with the added treat that each program is reimplementing the concept differently).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Daniel is right, and splitlist is wrong. Irregularity is clearly harmful. It is _much_ more difficult to produce new parsers and VMs for Ruby than it is for Lisp, Smalltalk, and even Python. This has clearly had an impact on the Ruby community.

It should be possible to produce a "mainstream" language with the attractive qualities of PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Python, but with a more elegant design. (Ruby itself was implemented as a way of getting the power of Perl, but with cleaner OO.)

I suspect that Stallman had it right when he came up with his grand unification plan through GUILE. Modulo the cultural expectations of the programming mainstream Lisp makes a better compiler target than a language.

Now, before the Lispers get all up in arms -- this would make a Lisp the "one language to rule them all."

</comment><comment><USER5> This is an even better post than the previous. I think Weinreb hits the spot and demonstrates that he is pretty well oriented about what's going on at the grass roots.

Now, all the community need to figure out is what to do about these problems. Because the diagnosis is sound, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2009-04-07-135246_cl_hard_...](http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2009-04-07-135246_cl_hard_to_compile_efficiently.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> (You know, something's always (bugged me) with Common Lisp (and other Lisps (for that matter)) but I can't seem (to remember what it was))

Allright, Lispers -- take the joke...

<comment><USER8> 1950 called. They want their _hilarious_ joke back.</comment></comment>


Programmers and "productivity" - <AUTHOR> http://clipperhouse.com/blog/post/Programmers-and-productivity.aspx

<comment><USER3> The article makes a number of major mistakes that discredit its whole thesis.

1\. My source for the productivity figure is _Peopleware_. They cite a set of "coding war games" that found a repeatedly measured 10x variation between the best and the worst programmers in their work environment. The productivity difference showed up under a variety of different measurements. There is no vagueness about the measurement techniques or doubt about the figure.

2\. The 10x figure was from best to worst, from best to median was (IIRC) 2.6 times.

3\. A significant portion of the figure they measured was correlated with environment, and the strongest predictor of performance was the performance of your coworkers. That said their study technique couldn't tell the difference between whether environment attracted the best people, or whether environment caused people to become more productive. (From the point of view of a smart employer there isn't too much difference between those hypotheses.)

4\. People accept compensation in many ways, and not all of them involve money. I believe that the better a programmer is, the more apt they are to be willing to trade salary for better work environment, more interesting co- workers, more interesting problems, etc. As a concrete example I have heard anecdotes from many people claiming that people are willing to accept sometimes substantial pay cuts for the privilege of working at Google.

5\. Whatever the cause, in the _Peopleware_ study the difference in pay between the top and bottom half of programmers was less than 10%. Furthermore productivity was basically uncorrelated with various factors people look at in the hiring process such as years of experience. That is direct evidence that it is a bad idea to measure productivity by salary.

When you put all of these factors together, you simply can't point to market forces then salaries to discount real performance differences between working programmers.

<comment><USER4> Ah,

2.6 "Best to median" sounds like a much more plausible figure. The x10 figure is usually quoted in such a way that it seems like it is "best to median".

<comment><USER5> Numbers I cannot disclose to you from a major Japanese multinational which actually tracks programmer productivity (grumble grumble why is this rare grumble grumble) cause me to not have major plausibility problems with the x10 best to median.

<comment><USER6> Can you talk about the metric(s) by which they measure productivity? I would appreciate it.

<comment><USER5> We're essentially a large consultancy who bills by the kousuu -- "unit of engineering labor", somewhat arbitrarily defined as "what we think one engineer should be able to do in a day". Projects are successful if we bill more than N * K * the average labor cost of producing one kousuu, where K is the number of kousuu and N is a constant representing overhead, profit, and the cost of sale.

Projects are sized based on a negotiation between us and the customer. It is then broken into parts, which are given their own kousuu value, via guesstimation by a senior engineer on the team. (You'll notice this process involves an awful lot of guesstimation. This tends to converge on reasonable numbers because guesstimation is happening among multiple actors who don't have an incentive to collude -- kinda-sorta like a market of players with imperfect knowledge can converge staggeringly quickly on a good guess of the intrinsic value of something.)

We then measure how many kousuu of work you complete for a particular project per day you report you are working on the project. That is currently our primary productivity measure, although we also track customer satisfaction, "claims" (a backchannel by which customers here get free work done to fix issues in the deliverable which are determined to be due to our mistakes), subjective quality assessments from the engineers, follow-on business from the same customer, and any value we can extract from the project for the company. (For example, in a 10 kousuu project if we manage to extract 2 kousuu worth of functionality that the customer paid for into our internal framework, then deploy that to seven customers and charge them each for it, we make out like bandits.)

Anyhow, we keep obsessive records of who does what and how long it took, so figuring out productivity is "just" a matter of dividing. (We only figured out the dividing trick recently. Hard to move a large organization from the way it typically does things, you know?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The expectation of market clearing for programmer wages is completely implausible here.

Going independent requires additional skills beyond the programming productivity that we're supposedly trying to measure, is perceived as riskier (and it's generally understood that most people are irrationally risk-averse), and may involve additional practical complications, such as if our hypothetical programmer relies on salaried employment to provide health insurance for a family. So "would this programmer make more independently" is pretty much an irrelevant question.

As for moving between "regular" jobs, there's little evidence that most hiring processes can distinguish programmers by productivity, nor that most organizations measure the productivity of employed programmers in a useful way. Switching jobs also has practical obstacles, such as the disruption of relocating, and avoiding the perception of "job hopping". So as far as we can tell, salaries have little relationship with productivity, which is kind of the whole point.

Fundamentally, the article makes the mistake of taking principles that are _simplifying assumptions_ in economics and then arguing as if they're universally correct. This is roughly akin to an argument like "Things tend to fall down, so it's a fallacy to ask why helium balloons float."

Of course, you can simply define someone's productivity as the market value of their time and thus "prove" that order of magnitude differences in productivity between programmers don't generally exist, but proof-by- redefining-the-terms doesn't really make for a persuasive argument.

</comment><comment><USER8> "If our newly-independent programmer does not make 10x the money, we must admit that she is not the 10x programmer we thought she was." Not a good metric. The signal is at least polluted by social skills and geography - <USER2> some areas of the midwest, the social construct of the traditional company is much more entrenched than in some places in CA. Also, I'm 29 and I have no family - I could work totally different places and locations than a family man with roots, which opens up my possibilities much more. imho, conflating the concept of profitability and productivity is not a good idea.

<comment><USER4> Yes,

I'm actually a skeptic on the generic x10 programmer-productive claim but the claim "Markets tend to clear" when applied anything and everything is more of a justifying fiction than a useful measure. Alan Greenspan and friends used it repeated to justify the housing bubble. And yet this kind of reasoning is still here.

Sigh...

<comment><USER9> _I'm actually a skeptic on the generic x10 programmer-productive claim_

Why? There have been many studies of this and their findings are consistent. IIRC the numbers range from 5-to-1 to 100-to-1 with the median in the order- of-magnitude range.

Pages 14-15 of Robert Glass' _Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering_ cover this topic.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz- UJzZN0C&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz- UJzZN0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=facts+and+fallacies+of+software+engineering&cd=1#v=onepage&q=individual%20differences)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with the other commenters: the author rather trivially assumes his conclusion by taking for granted that the market is rational. It isn't. One can argue about why. I tend to believe it's because we're still early in the history of the software: the closest analogy we have is the Industrial Revolution, and Ford and Taylor don't appear until well over a century into that.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that an irrational market represents major opportunity for anyone who figures out how to exploit it. So we all should stop complaining and start exploiting. Hopefully the hacker renaissance and startup wave of the last few years are the start of such a process, but it's too early to know for sure.

</comment><comment><USER10> Article appears to be deleted. Cannot find anything with similar title in recent archives either.

<comment><USER11> It's working fine for me - maybe my ISP is caching it or something??

I uploaded a copy (temporarily) to my site, feel free to grab it (PDF format): <http://mqudsi.com/junk/Programmers_and_Productivity.pdf>

<comment><USER12> You are a nice guy.</comment></comment></comment>


Programming Languages – Application and Interpretation (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/2007-04-26/

<comment><USER2> I see why you might link to the page you did since it has some additional information, and even provides a link to the more recent edition, but be aware that this is an old version of PLAI that has been updated as recently as 2012 [0].

Furthermore, the cs173 class at Brown now uses a different book, Programming and Programming Languages [1], that was updated as recently as 2014. It's very much in the same spirit, but uses Pyret instead of plai-typed.

Another thing to note is that cs173 had a MOOC-like online offering in 2012, and the videos are still available [2].

[0] [http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/](http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/)

[1] [http://papl.cs.brown.edu/2014/](http://papl.cs.brown.edu/2014/)

[2] [http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/](http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for mentioning Pyret, I've searched for it and it made me laugh discovering the extension of the files is .arr (some would say I'm really easily amused).

An interesting language.

<comment><USER4> I've been watching the videos from 2012, and the professor sprinkles that humor throughout the lectures, and done well in that its not annoying (to me at least).

Update: seems the author talks about Pyret/Racket in this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6702563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6702563)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the rationale for writing this book: [http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk- tea...](http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-teach-pl- post-linnaean/paper.pdf)

And here's the pdf: [http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/book.pdf](http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/book.pdf)

Looking at the table of contents, I like the ordering of the topics.

</comment><comment><USER6> Still have this linked. Thought it'd be a fun way to learn Racket.

One of those things I'll get to when I have time, which almost never happens. Always something more directly applicable to learn.</comment>


Fun with Morse Code - <AUTHOR> http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/fun-with-morse-code.html?better

<comment><USER2> Decoding Morse Code seems like a fun exercise in making algorithms. This site definitely opens the door to some critical thinkings.

Good lesson for people that want to learn the beginnings of writing algorithms for a simple process that actually turns out more complex than first thought.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gosh that's involved.

I'd just turn dot into '0', dash into '1', building a binary string; then when space comes along, use the binary as a pointer into an array.

Luckily, all Morse characters fit in 8 bits. Baudot too.</comment>


Karateka in the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/12/karateka-in-the-app-store/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the OP. Thought it also good to add the other (preceding) blog post on the "making of" - very nice:

[http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/12/making-and-remaking- ka...](http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/12/making-and-remaking-karateka/)</comment>


Finding the Smartphone Inside Motorola - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/technology/companies/29moto.html <comment><USER2> The smartphone market is increasingly looking like it'll end up as a fight between Android and iPhone. Droid looks like an incredibly compelling phone, and Verizon will probably sell millions of them.

RIM is going to be able to hang on for a while, but if third-party developers were going to flock to the BlackBerry platform, they would have done so by now. The same goes for Symbian.

I still hold out some hope for Palm, but they'll probably be confined to a small niche for the foreseeable future.</comment>


Err – The Pluggable Chatbot - <AUTHOR> http://errbot.net/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting, curious about the motivation for creating it and the differences / advantages over hubot? (other than the obvious different choice of language).

Perhaps I missed it, because there's plenty of documentation, which is great of course, but I somehow felt a bit overwhelmed with detail so couldn't really see the wood for the trees.

EDIT: a few key differences as far as I could spot (although not sure what's the most fundamental difference):

* plugins can be dynamically loaded (e.g. from a git url), even via the chat interface itself.

* more focus on security / permissions to administer (I'm guessing that's also partially connected to the dynamic nature of plugins, because without security it's very easy to mess things up)

* plugin eco-system seems a bit thin(?) could only find a strange list to github repos[1]

* built-in per-plugin persistence (not sure how it is actually stored though)

[1] [https://github.com/gbin/err/blob/master/errbot/repos.py](https://github.com/gbin/err/blob/master/errbot/repos.py)

<comment><USER3> To add to your list here are few slides I presented at the last chatops meetup in SFO about errbot with some more emphasis on plugin development: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YnQaz5bMr5PJNYEJzjKm...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YnQaz5bMr5PJNYEJzjKmmr5w9OqjKLCMg- VLf5q6tYE/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice. I've been working on a Slack specific alternate to Hubot called Jeev. Although it's not 100% ready yet, and there are still some bugs. We use it on our company slack for quite a few things:

[https://github.com/jhgg/jeev](https://github.com/jhgg/jeev)

Here's an example of one of the more intricate modules we've open sourced:

[https://github.com/jhgg/jeev-jiracache](https://github.com/jhgg/jeev- jiracache)

</comment><comment><USER5> Guillaume, the author of Err, gave a presentation on it at the last ChatOps meetup in San Francisco: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_HDq14oI8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_HDq14oI8Q)

</comment><comment><USER6> For those who is new to Chatops word, here is pretty energetic 20min talk about ChatOps benefits from real experience in GitHub.

"ChatOps: Technology and Philosophy" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhzxnY7FIvg1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhzxnY7FIvg1)</comment>


Only successful people can afford a CV of failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/01/only-successful-people-can-afford-cv-of-failure <comment><USER2> "I've had much luck in my life: being born into a middle-class family and having any natural ability nurtured by my parents and then by the education system"

This might be lucky on the part of the individual, but parents that sacrifice their own time, money, and life for their child's future definitely isn't luck. It's a choice. If more people saw it this way, we might have parents that actually cared about their child's education and less people in abject poverty.

..and 'nurtured by the education system' is kind of a joke in the US. The K-12 education system is terrible for everyone.

"Yet there is a dearth of thinking about how we can make these jobs more fulfilling, better paid and more respected"

The problem is that low-skilled jobs will always be low-paid in a capitalist system because pretty much anyone can do them. The only way to counter this is to artificially limit the amount of people that can actually do the job by limiting the supply or create some sort of union to force higher wages. Both bad ideas for the long-term.

"and to increase the relationship between effort and success."

Effort has never equaled success. You might put all the effort in the world into something and it you will still fail. You can always learn from your failures. I failed job interviews, businesses, and many other things before I succeeded. We should be stressing to our youth that you aren't entitled to success. You need to earn it.

"it is not uncommon to find graduates working in a bar on a zero hours contract"

What was their major? STEM majors have little problems finding work. Liberal arts? many can't find a job. We should be encouraging students to pick a major that at least has chance of being able to get a job that pays well enough to pay off their debt. Otherwise, it's just a gamble. They might as well start their own business and skip college altogether.

We should be talking about the trades. I know people that are carpenters and electricians and they can't get enough young people even interested enough to apply for the job.

Mostly because they don't want to start out from the bottom and work their way up. Many feel like they should be making $100K right away.</comment>


Design Principles vs. Engineering "Principles" (2011) - vezzy-fnord http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2011/06/design-principles-vs-engineering.html <comment><AUTHOR> This article makes more sense if you substitute "system architect" and "architecture" for "designer" and "design".

Also then makes it clear that most people calling themselves architect, aren't.

</comment><comment><USER2> How is this not a troll article....

<comment><USER3> I see your point, definitely. However, he touches on some very, very evident points about engineers increasingly grabbing design work, employers being OK with it and the results being sh*t.

<comment><USER4> Im pretty sure it's the other way around It's "design" stuffing its empty head into everything - webpages that are dozens of MB while effectively being a text document Applications that are flashy and showy and DONT FUCKING WORK RIGHT Google maps pretty much have no usability left - i used to be able to use it to navigate across europe,now its a chore to get across town (no options,no waypoints,no route planning - its either do as we say or fuck off)

Id rather have something that isnt shiny but actually does it goddamn job.

And doing more carbon copies of current fad is neither creative or intellectual. Solving problem is,though

<comment><USER3> I think you're confusing design with decoration. Which is what most engineers do, and why they should keep their hands of it, as well as the Dribbble pixel- pushers which do - as you say - "flashy and showy".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NYC Sports Startup Competition - <AUTHOR> http://www.ondeckconference.com/innovators

<comment><USER2> I saw Alexis Ohanian judge a startup competition once (I think it ironically may have __been __TC Disrupt) and he did an outstanding job. Articulate and critical yet kind.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excuse my ignorance, but the prices for this event range from 340.00 - 525.00. Is this typical pricing?

<comment><USER4> Most major existing industry events in sports & technology have registration costs at or above $1000 per attendee:

<http://goo.gl/HoLTJ>

<http://goo.gl/iQIWL>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this only for sports startups?

<comment><USER4> The pitch contest is for startups that are working on products that enhance the sports fan experience--broadly defined.

E.g., a pure-play video startup who has a product that could be applied in the sports vertical would certainly be eligible</comment></comment>


From math to machine: translating a function to machine code - <AUTHOR> https://briansteffens.github.io/2017/02/20/from-math-to-machine.html <comment><USER2> I wonder: since there are only thirteen factorials that fit into int32, and thus only 13 possible valid inputs, is it faster or slower to use a very small lookup table? [https://godbolt.org/g/9ii0S0](https://godbolt.org/g/9ii0S0) It seems like this is the sort of thing a good compiler can figure out on its own, but I don't fully understand what clang is doing with this loop: [https://godbolt.org/g/ze5ycb](https://godbolt.org/g/ze5ycb)

</comment><comment><USER3> People wanting to go from math to machine might like a work that starts with formal specs.

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mom22/miniml/hol2miniml.pdf](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mom22/miniml/hol2miniml.pdf)

The resulting ML can be compiled to assembly by verified, CakeML compiler.

[https://cakeml.org](https://cakeml.org)

<comment><USER4> It's only Monday and that paper lead me to L3 and the UNSW course[1] notes. There goes my next weekend or four. Thanks, ya son of a gun ;)

[1] [https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs4161/lect.html](https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs4161/lect.html)

<comment><USER3> Glad you found something fun. If it's L3 for CPU's you mean, then one project of value nobody has done is put in specs for VAMP processor. It was mathematically verified in PVS as part of Verisoft project. They did OS and C subset for it. Adding it to L3 and Myreen et al's toolkit for doing machine code in Isabelle/HOL would let their spec-to-machine-code verifications run on a verified processor.

Just throwing that out there for you or anyone interested in lengthening the chain of verification. VAMP doesn't get enough attention. On HW side, someone could do a verified front-end for RISC-V on top of the VAMP components to get a mostly-verified RISC-V. Lots of low-hanging fruit out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What calling convention passes the first integer argument in rax and the return value in rdi? Thats exactly backwards from what I usually see.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was neat. I enjoyed reading it. It wouldn't take much more to add the level below the machine code to this write up showing how the bits in the in the opcode generate control signals to carry out the micro-ops that make up the function.

<comment><USER3> I used to have a visual example of how it works. Couldn't find it in a quick search. Anyway, here's a text example for PDP-11 to illustrate what it looks like along with a detailed paper on concepts and some tooling.

[http://www.cdf.toronto.edu/~ajr/258/notes/micro/microcode.ht...](http://www.cdf.toronto.edu/~ajr/258/notes/micro/microcode.html)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472.666&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

<comment><USER6> Oh sure, I know. I was just staying it would be a nice addition, since the post is pretty original and novel. By the way was this the link you were thinking of?

[https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi13/cse141-b/slides/05-Sing...](https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi13/cse141-b/slides/05-SingleCycleCPU.pdf)

By the they way second link is a nice read. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the author is reading this thread, would you please comment on how math expressions are rendered in your blog? The factorial definition near the beginning looks absolutely perfect. I'd like to learn how to do this in Jekyll.

<comment><USER8> Not the author, but their page is using the client-side javascript MathJax renderer [https://www.mathjax.org/](https://www.mathjax.org/) which renders the mathematical subset of LaTeX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> out of interest, can somebody check how GHC compiles the factorial function as defined in the blogpost?

<comment><USER10> [https://gist.github.com/b097fded87a2b16863947acd3a975b2a](https://gist.github.com/b097fded87a2b16863947acd3a975b2a)

This is code produced by GHC 8.0.2 for the program

        module Test where
        factorial :: Int -> Int
        factorial n = product [1 .. n]

The module thing is necessary to produce the object file without a "main" function.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Gender Neutral (or non-brogrammer) hacknight activities - <AUTHOR>

I'm involved in helping run a hacknight. In the past the hacknight has been successful but the activities have included energy drink chugging, halo tournaments, bb-gun shooting and things like that. It's been a lot of fun, but now that I am helping to plan it, I'd really like to introduce some activities and games that appeal to everyone. Basically just want everyone to feel involved/included/interested. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Trivia is a great activity. I like it when you have a ton of mini-rounds of 2-3 questions under some category- you can leave plenty of time in-between questions so people can come up with an answer and then still have time to chat and get to know each other. For your goal specifically, I would just try to avoid topics that are kinda gendered and stick to stuff that isn't. Biology, history, music, pop culture, literature are all great topics. Throw in some oddball questions, and keep a really broad scope so you can learn which of your new teammates is really into Bill Murray and knows what language he learned, what instrument he learned to play and what art form he practiced in Groundhog Day, or what is the common name for Amorphophallus titanum, the Sumatran flower that is the largest flower in the world and arguably the smelliest.

Trivia is cool because it gets your brain going in a lot of different directions in a short period of time, it can spur some ideas for the rest of your hacking. It is also competitive while still being fun, and unlike a tournament, you get to play the whole time whether you're in first place or last. If you have a Final Jeopardy style final question, you can totally come up from behind and win if you're the only team that knows it, so it's never pointless to keep going. Giving out prizes for various special rounds is great for that too, like a round where you have to identify songs based on a 15 second clip, or brands or celebrities based on a picture. Think about how you want teams to form, and what size works best for your group.

Rock on with being mindful about the culture you're creating. Lots of devs love competition and violence like that, and lots of devs don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would say each of those are easily transformable to be attractive for females while still remaining relevant for males - perhaps beer pong, Mario Kart, and trivia?

<comment><USER4> Beer pong may alienate a lot of other people. My office plays a lot of Mario Kart and trivia/card games and those both seem to interest everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your first step is to figure out what elements exclude people. Personally, I think your current activities have strong elements of competition & machismo. There's also a large skill-based component to some of them (it's hard for someone new to computer games to have fun while joining a bunch of experienced gamers playing Halo). So your new activities should favour things that prioritise other elements: non-competitive, accessible to beginners, and not so bro-like. Here's some concrete suggestions:

\- Handicrafts. Get some supplies that let people make something. Sculpey, for instance, sell kits that come with clay & instructions ([http://www.sculpey.com/product_category/kids- kits/](http://www.sculpey.com/product_category/kids-kits/)). Creative types can freestyle it; beginners can follow the instructions. Plus everyone gets something they can take home or keep on their desk afterwards as a memento. It doesn't have to be clay - there's many other options like pipe cleaners & fuzzballs, felt cut-outs, picture beads, and origami.

\- Learn a skill. If you've got a budget you can hire an outside expert, but you can probably find someone inside the company with a good party trick. Get a magician to teach some basic sleight-of-hand, a juggler to teach juggling, or an entertainer to teach some balloon animals. There's also cookery, improv, flower arranging, astronomy, and many more.

\- Play with toys. Find some unusual/expensive items that your attendees can play with throughout the night. An Oculus Rift, a 3D printer, a unicycle, an Apple watch, Google Glass, a photo booth, a double-necked guitar, a Segway, a candyfloss machine, etc.

\- Engineering games. Given 1 roll of stickytape and unlimited straws, what's the tallest tower you can build? Given half a pack of blu-tack and unlimited paperclips, what's the widest gap you can span? Given 10 sheets of cardboard & a craft knife, how many coke cans can your structure support?

\- Movie night. If you've got a projector, a stereo, and some comfy chairs in your office you're in for a treat.

</comment><comment><USER6> Rock Band. Watching nerdy TV shows/movies with strong female characters (firefly, DS9, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Though the best way is probably to find female attendees and ask them what they want, or invite them to be part of the planning and to choose activities.</comment>


Chrome dropping h.264, from Adobe's perspective - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2011/01/video-debate-cutting-to-the-chase.html

<comment><USER2> So now any browser on any system that doesn't have Flash installed is non- standard?</comment>


Ask HN: Examples of young people who did hard things? - <AUTHOR> Looking to do some research on the common traits, attitudes, struggles, techniques etc that very young people had throughout history.<p>Could be historic, scientific, personal etc. Anything which makes you reflect about the unlikeliness of you being able to do it yourself fits the bill. <comment><USER2> Most people's lives through history was super hard. Just read some novels on XIX century or earlier (but not on lives of elites) and you'll see impressive young people being able to cope with conditions that would cause typical western XXI century person to crush under depression.

For example, even my grandmother, during German occupation of Poland, was able to take care of her younger siblings and bedridden mother, while being 14-16 years old. And, by "taking care of" I mean plowing the (small) fields they had, feeding the cow, making sure the siblings aren't starving, fending off Germans and their random executions of Polish commonpeople etc. By today's standards it's absolutely extraordinary, but it wasn't really uncommon back then.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out galios, laid the foundations for two a whole fields of math and then died at age 20 in a duel.

<comment><USER4> *Galois

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of the Founding Fathers were pretty young. Doesn't get much harder than building a new country from scratch.

 _Some were older, like Thomas Jefferson who was 33, John Hancock who was 39, or Benjamin Franklin who was 70. Others were shockingly young — even teenagers. James Monroe, for example, was 18 and Alexander Hamilton was 21. Madison was 25._

</comment><comment><USER6> Hmm Steve Jobs was young when he started things?

<comment><USER7> Woz had something to do with the creation of Apple too. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak)

<comment><USER6> Good point, Woz was a germane contributor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's young?</comment>


Producing an indie film is like running a bootstrapped startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shoutt.me/post/44511439369/producing-an-indie-film-is-like-running-a-bootstrapped

<comment><USER2> There is lot of overlap in how the film industry and the tech industries work - and startups and indie films are a great analogy!

<comment><USER3> I think the analogy is actually pretty weak. The film industry enjoys a strong monopoly over distribution and talent. The Internet offers startups a much more level playing field. That's a really good thing. SV isn't Hollywood and startups aren't like creating a film and we shouldn't restrict ourselves to such simplistic comparisons.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not really making a comparison between the industries. I'm talking about how the process and work involved as a producer/COO has an overlap and how my experience making a film can be translated in some ways to my startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> we're a startup that results in shorter post-production and editing times during video review. we're all about supporting fellow "startups" too. check us out - <http://firstcutpro.com> \- use reddit promo code - "allhailcats" for more video credits.

hope this can help save some costs for you guys and good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks taylorhou. We're done with post production, though your startup looks pretty neat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good read !!</comment>


A 9y.o kid explains net neutrality in a way that you can finally understand - <AUTHOR> http://news.distractify.com/dennis-diclaudio/kids-explain-the-darndest-things/

<comment><USER2> It's not that people don't understand. It's that they don't want to alter their views and would rather have tiny cognitive seizures than admit that they were wrong about something. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has resorted to outright lying about the issue, selectively editing or misattributing statements from the EFF and Netflix executives to make it seem as if they've changed their mind about the whole thing and are now opposed to the FCC's regulatory proposals.</comment>


Münster's iconic 'waste of space' photo keeps on giving - <AUTHOR> http://www.bikehub.co.uk/news/sustainability/iconic-waste-of-space-photo-keeps-on-giving/ <comment><USER2> I use primarily bike and public transit ... but given that, if you were to measure flow, that is to say, how many people traverse a given unit distance per unit time, how would the numbers change?

I think cars may be given a more favorable score in a metric of transport as opposed to what amounts to a metric of occupancy.

But then there's parking ... and that's why I'm usually on the bike; with casual non-crazy, follow-all-the-laws riding, in the inner city, I'll beat my motorist friends by 5-10 minute margins. I often start to worry that they got in an accident or got lost because it takes them so long. It's really remarkable.

<comment><USER3> Trains might well win in that case, especially metro trains in cities. You can move at least 500 people every 3-4 minutes, less if you try especially hard.

Cars in London average 19mph (30km/h) on "major roads" and 9mph (14km/h) in Central London.

<comment><USER2> 9mph? Might as well lace up a decent pair of shoes and get the heart rate up; you'd get a pace better than that down in a couple of months without worry.

<comment><USER4> Hardly. Average speed for the Paris marathon is about 6mins/km or 10kph. And that's people fit enough to be able to actually run a marathon, most of whom have substantially trained for the event, so not the average joker off the street that prepped for "a couple of months".

The _fastest_ female runners are running at 18kph. That's Olympic standard. The average female marathon runner runs at about 9.3kph.

Only competitive male runners would be capable of beating that pace.

Edit: Disclosure - female, and I run a half marathon in two hours That's 10 minutes faster than the average woman and around about average for the entire field. To achieve that time I play an active sport, and train for longer running events (I'm the fastest long distance runner in my sports club). In kph I manage a bit less than 11, which is a long way off 14kph.

<comment><USER5> Yet all those people can easily do 20kph+ on a bike.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely! With an electric bike, even the unfittest person can roll along at 25kph. And you don't even have to break a sweat if you don't want to!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a cyclist, rarely use buses or cars and sometimes find it stressful dealing with the unpredictability of cyclists, but if I had to choose the best of the three images it's the one with bikes. A bus moves along a single route so it's inflexible. It might be able to carry all of the cyclists, but only if they're all taking the same route.

If we break it down to range vs flexibility, while the bus is long range its delivery capability depends on the proximity of stops to destinations. The shoe, certainly the most flexible delivery mechanism, has a very low range for most people. A bicycle has a good blend of range and flexibility. Cars have excellent range yet space to park them comes at a premium, sometimes eliminating any temporal advantages that they offer as you search for a spot and then travel to your intended destination by foot.

Looking at latency - as in time to start moving, of course if you're living in a regional area or the outer suburbs with a long commute the car is king. Buses can be few and far between in these areas and while shoes and bikes have low latency, range is the major limitation.

<comment><USER7> A bike isn't flexible in that I can't work while using it, I can't use it whilst intoxicated, I have to find somewhere to secure it. I have to be fit to use it. I can't use it when I'm sick or too told.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> man, i really hate cars. i use my bikes everday and i just wonder about the inefficiency and wastefulness of cars.

i understand that certain groups of people really depend on cars workwise, but for the average joe a personal car is just silly.

whole rivers of cars trolling down the streets with only one person in it and i wonder - car sharing - no, why, it's my personal right and as long as I can afford it, fu*k it ...

a hyperbole of the idea of freedom, questionable whether a force for prosperity.

<comment><USER9> From my personal perspective - taking a bus to work would take at least an hour each way, usually more depending on the traffic. Add standing at unheated bus stops in winter = no thank you. By car I get to work in 15-20 minutes. At the temperature I like, listening to music I like. That easily saves me a good few hours each week for other activities - learning, relaxing, family time.

I could cycle, like I did while I was at uni - but that leaves a problem of getting sweaty, can't really cycle in a shirt, and cycling in winter is miserable.

Am I an "avarage joe" going to work from 9-5, or am I being wasteful? You tell me. I know what I'm going to continue doing :-)

<comment><USER10> _but that leaves a problem of getting sweaty_

which usually could be solved in at least two ways. In a better world your employer would supply showers so you could at least clean yourself. Secondly, unless you have some condition or your way to work exists solely of tour-de- france-like cols, it should be possibly to commute that without or with a minimum of sweating. Key is training and cycling below the threshold you start sweating. What I ususally do is ride to work at an easy pace (about 5km/h slower on average than what I usually do) which results in no or a just a little bit of sweating, while when riding home again I ride at my usual pace or faster if I feel like it - that is the training part.

For the rest: yes cycling in winter can be a quite unpleasant experience and sbarre's comment is very well put

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Transport For London had a similar poster back in the 60s, advocating the uses of buses: [http://www.planetizen.com/node/68574](http://www.planetizen.com/node/68574)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm thinking of a possible regulated solution to this... What would be the inconvenients of banning car circulation inside cities? EDIT: Well, it would be much harder to carry "big" amounts of personal property. Maybe only allow a taxi-like van service? Or taxis.

<comment><USER13> > What would be the inconvenients of banning car circulation inside cities?

Depends how the city is setup. Most major metropolis and almost all US ones are designed mostly if not solely for cars, banning cars requires significant improvements to the transportation infrastructure in general, both adding public transport and making existing ways more walkable and cyclable. Even in non-US cities the transition tends to be rocky (e.g. I believe Paris is progressively making the inner city less drivable and further improving public transport, the transition phase is no fun as driving becomes very tough but not-driving is not a great option).

You also have to figure out stuff like deliveries and garbage collection, which generally require trucks going through.

But some cities are planning it, Hamburg is trying to become car-free within 20 years for instance. Freiburg also has the "pilot" district of Vauban which was laid out with peripheral car parks (owners must buy a parking spot or sign a declaration of no car ownership) and following filtered permeability (the further in you go the less convenient cars become, and the more convenient walking or cycling). There are also no parking spot inside the neighbourhood. Cars are not outright forbidden (they're allowed "at walking pace" for pickup or delivery) their absence is mostly a consequence of social consensus.

<comment><USER14> Paris is gradually phasing cars out, in several ways, but even today most Parisians are non-drivers, especially the younger ones, and not-driving is a great choice. Of course people who live in the suburbs need a car but even there, public transportation is slowly catching up.

There is an ongoing general effort to make cars painful to use, that had been unfolding year after year over the last decade. I think that's a great strategy to kick the cars out of the city.

\- Remove parking spots. Every year, hundreds to thousands of parking spots are removed throughout the city. (Shared bikes and cars have been great for this as they took an astonishing amount of space from regular parking and made use of it instead of just forbidding parking)

\- Add bus and bike lines at the expense of regular car lanes.

\- Regularly hike parking prices. This year parking went up 15%, and residential parking went up 200%.

\- Hike fines for parking infringement Today fines are 17/33€, there are talks to increase them to 60/135 next year.

\- Slow down cars overall. 90% of the city is to be limited to 30kph soon (regular city limit is 50). Many areas are limited to 20kph.

\- Add speed traps and red-light traps all over.

\- Entire districts are planned to go car-free in the next few years.

Taken together, these changes really do add up and, as we already have good public transportation, there are fewer and fewer reasons to own a car in Paris. I think the good approach here is to start by removing cars in the city center, then gradually kick them out of the outer boroughs as infrastructure allows it.

<comment><USER13> Yes you're right my comment comes across as way overly negative with respect to the liveability of not driving in Paris, even though I almost never drove there (and hated every second of driving I had to do). Thank you for the expansion and details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love how these threads are always full of people who spend 3 hours a day commuting and treat the fact that they chose to live 90 minutes from work as other people's problem.

<comment><USER16> For many people, that's not really a "choice". It's what they can afford.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hate to say it but sadly a bike is almost impossible to integrate into my normal routine. I live almost 1.5hr from my workplace by car on a motorway, riding is simply impossible. Sadly, the majority of the Sydney work force is in the same boat, living out west and driving in every day, such a waste but public transport is a joke. I ride a motorbike whenever possible but some days theres just too much stuff to carry in with me, laptops, samples etc. to make it practical full time.

<comment><USER18> You Australians brought it on yourself, living in a big ring around the edge of your continent! Has to be the most difficult public transportation situation possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Whether intended or not, these images and their derivatives are a daft oversimplification of a complex problem.

What's the problem we're trying to solve here? Is it that our city streets are too narrow for cars? I guess not, I'm assuming that the problem is the more general one: how best to organise transportation, particularly commuting. The picture seems to imply "cars are big, and therefore bad", which is facile, because it looks at a single parameter in isolation within a very complex problem.

Here's some other factors that need to be considered: routes (Do people originate from the same points? Do they head to the same destination?), city planning (we can shape the commutes that people have to make), government policy, the need to be present in the workplace, the time of working shifts, the relative economic cost of oil, environmental issues, transport subsidy, investment, political ideology, cultural norms, social cohesion, the education system, weather, inequality, health, physical geography (hilly? wet? cramped?), population density, network effects, communication between commuters, mechanisms for sharing public spaces...and so much more.

I use public transit all the time, but for the love of god let this meme die.

<comment><USER18> Did you list 'speed' in there? Because that's the biggest fallacy. Its not just about square feet; multiply that by how long the space is occupied per journey. Bicycles can be 1/3 to 1/10 the speed of a car.

Then add in the congestion factor. Bicycles on the road impede cars. We like to ignore that, bicyclist can be militant about their right to use roads. But the sad fact is, they get in the way of cars. Which reduces cars to the speed of bikes in city driving. That's just a tremendous waste.

I know, everybody should be on bikes. But in the mean time, the most efficient vehicles in terms of road use Min(sq ft X time spent on the road) are being squandered. I mean cars.

<comment><USER20> There's a caveat here: in urban journeys, the average speed of just about everything is 'teen mph. The speed argument applies when traffic is free- flowing, but not during congestion.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely. But as bicycle use increases we hit, not a sweet spot, but a 'crap spot' where nobody wins. Need a transition plan. Separate bicycle lanes might work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For me this is very nice to see. I'm moving to the Netherlands at the end of the month and am excited to be moving to a city where cyclists own the roads rather than cars. This is a stark contrast to London where cars rule and I cycle in constant fear of being hit by a bus or an overzealous taxi driver. I think city planners have a duty to make cycling and public transport first class while deemphasising cars.

<comment> the-dude A little bit of nuance : cyclists do not own the roads. Motorists, cyclists and pedestrians share the roads.

Every motorist also drives his bicycle every now and then and so he knows what it is like and will accommodate.

Which city BTW?

<comment><USER22> my limited experience, but corroborated by discussion with other people, is that in the Netherlands (and Belgium) cyclists actually own the road, i.e. they always seem to get right of way and give little crap about pedestrians/cars/motorbikes.

<comment><USER23> Do not mistake Amsterdam city center with the rest of the Netherlands.

In the overcrowded center of Amsterdam, the locals know and understand "the dance" (the last thing a cyclist wants to do is come to a full stop every 20 meters, because it is much more "expensive" for a cyclists than it is for a pedestrian or driver, so instead of playing by the rules of right of way we do the dance of give and take), with the exception of tourists (who don't know the dance and give off confusing and confused body language) and cars (usually from out of town) stupid enough to drive in the city center in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The analogy could go from car:bike:bus to another photo of [miles of single family houses]:[a handful of apartment buildings]:[one high rise apartment with a park around it]. Perhaps in an ad campaign for SF redevelopment?

</comment><comment><USER25> The cyclists make sense, but where I live you can picture the bus with one guy on it.

<comment><USER26> > The cyclists make sense, but where I live you can picture the bus with one > guy on it.

That was my city around 7 years ago. Public transit was very underutilised and the general mental image people had of it was that it was for children, old and poor people. Then the city councils in the area got together and started to really put money into improving the routes and service. It was hard to justify politically because of the existing attitudes, but seven years later, almost all of the buses I see have >50% occupancy with mostly regular middle- class people, even outside of rush hour. During rush hours have to send extra buses as they fill up fast.

So I think part of it is to break out of the cycle of public transit providing shitty service, people not using public transit because of shitty service, and the service getting shittier because there's even less political will to put money into it with fewer passengers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to see this picture redone with dumptrucks and semis. My commute each day forces me onto a road clogged with shipping routes and truckers with little regard for a tiny 2-door Honda. They take excessive space, excessively pollute, and contribute excessively to congestion and it's only getting worse [0]. They're unfortunately necessary, but I'm hoping that in the future the driverless truck will be programmed to stay out of the left lane.

[0][http://www.tstc.org/reports/thetrucksarecoming.pdf](http://www.tstc.org/reports/thetrucksarecoming.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER28> The biggest problem with this is quiet often public transport is poor quality and expensive and bike lanes non existent. I'm lucky enough to cycle to work which takes 15 minutes, due to where I live taking a bus would mean doing a massive V across the city taking over an hour to a job I could walk to in 30/40 minutes, there is no incentive for me to use public transport at all and I see that mirrored a lot where I live. 10 mile journeys that would take hours by public transport but 20 minutes in a car, can I then judge people for driving, of course not.

<comment><USER19> Cycling can also be very dangerous in big cities. It's much more dangerous to cycle than to take a train in London, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Each mode of transport is just optimised to a different metric. Nobody ever claimed cars were the most space efficient mode of transport, so this argument is very much a strawman. They are however much faster, easier and have longer range than bikes and walking, and have more spatial and temporal freedom than public transport. This is why they are so popular.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yup, the man / car / space requirement relation is completely insane. Sadly, this won't stop car traffic. Human psychology dictates that we'd rather be in control presiding over our own demise in dire traffic accidents than be much safer with other transportation means but less in control and more exposed to unwanted company.

<comment><USER29> You say that like its a bad thing; I make that tradeoff consciously.

<comment><USER30> It's a bad thing if you wanted to minimise environmental impact (and space requirement is a part of that) or maximise transport security. You are free to make any tradeoff you want, but in this case the environment has to suffer the consequences of your choice. Externalising costs doesn't make them go away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Although I love cars the noise, smell, and space they take are pretty significant. This month in staying in a small town with no cars (they stop about half a mile outside) and the peacefulness is very pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER32> Electric bicycles and petrol scooters are sadly missing from the discussion.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes, and industrial chicken farms are also space efficient.</comment>


Dan Kaminsky just killed OpenID with unveiling of his attack suite during Blackhat conference - <AUTHOR> http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-07/bh-usa-07-speakers.html#Kaminsky

<comment><USER2> That link above no longer works, for anyone wanting to check this out its a good read:

Google cache:

[http://188.8.131.52/search?q=cache:V_HlOsNVc8UJ:www.doxpar...](http://18.104.22.168/search?q=cache:V_HlOsNVc8UJ:www.doxpara.com/DMK_BO2K7_Web.ppt+http://www.doxpara.com/DMK_BO2K7_Web.ppt&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

</comment><comment> mark-t Slides are available online, in some strange proprietary format: <http://www.doxpara.com/?q=node/1149> .

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Yeah, it's pretty nasty what he accomplished :( Now things are gonna get just a lot more complex.</comment></comment>


Functional Geekery Episode 48 – Matthias Felleisen [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://www.functionalgeekery.com/episode-48-matthias-felleisen/ <comment><USER2> Proctor does great interviews. He's talked to most of the PLT folks, as well as Matthew Butterick. It was the Butterick interview that first made me aware of Racket.

<comment><USER3> While I listen to Functional Geekery on the regular and do enjoy it, I would say Proctor has great guests but the interviewing style definitely has some room for improvement. The thing that comes to mind is explaining for every guest "and... I became aware of you through <some mundane details>" but there is a lot more to what makes me feel the interviews are a bit lacking in energy sometimes.

This one with Mathias Felleisen is an old interview from 2016 by the way, not sure why it's popping up here now.

<comment><USER2> I'll admit, Proctor is no Terry Gross, but Terry Gross isn't interviewing Scott Wlaschin or Nikhil Swamy. I've learned about some really fascinating topics by listening.</comment></comment></comment>


Caltech creates 1um resolution microscope cheap enough for home use. - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21147/

<comment><USER2> Yes, cheap enough for home use, but not necessarily _suitable_ for home use.

The idea is that instead of using lenses to get a magnified image of something at a distance, you arrange for your sample to go really close to a digital- camera-style sensor without any lenses. You get multiple images by sending the sample past several bits of your sensor. Then you do some computation (the article doesn't say what for, but I guess the idea is to increase the effective resolution by having those multiple images, and maybe also to remove diffraction artefacts).

All very neat, but only suitable for capturing images of things you can actually do this to. The idea of the system described in the article is that you can do it to cells suspended in fluid (water? something else? I don't know) if you're clever about controlling how they move over your sensor.

But if what you want is a greatly magnified image of a fly's wing or a bit of paper or an integrated circuit, or (I'm guessing here) even something that is (as per the design) suspended in fluid but that might have things larger than cells that could block the channels through which the fluid moves, then you're out of luck.

I'm sure it can be generalized somewhat, but there are some limitations that seem really hard to overcome. You absolutely have to get the sample very close to the sensor. You absolutely have to illuminate it transmissively rather than reflectively. (At least, that's how it seems to me.)

</comment><comment><USER3> In this New Yorker article: [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all) , there's a discussion about a novel cancer therapy for which this microscope is well-suited. The idea is that, when cancer metastasizes, that each of the cancer cells circulate in your bloodstream thousands or tens of thousands of times, so you've got plenty of time to nix them, if you can find them. If you could design a device that would shunt some of the blood out of and then back into a blood vessel, check for cancer cells in between (if you could develop a recognizer, which is apparently feasible), and remove the cells one at a time, you might be able to slow the disease long enough for other treatments to run their course.

</comment><comment><USER4> Something's wrong with this story's comments here. What's going on?

<comment><USER5> On HN, when you have an interesting topic about which there is very little to say, you find topics voted to near the top with no comments. On Reddit, a popular topic with no comments gets garnished with one-liners. On HN, contentless one-liners get downvoted. Hence the comment pattern on this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Links to real info:

<http://www.biophot.caltech.edu/research/ofm/ofm.html>

[edit, more better:]

[http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArtic...](http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=LC&Year=2006&ManuscriptID=b604676b&Iss=10)

</comment><comment><USER7> Can it fill a house with popcorn?

</comment><comment><USER8> i heard iDealsChina already has leaked pics of an iphone with this embedded

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, I have material for at least six months' worth of small penis jokes now.</comment>


A ride through San Francisco…in 1906 - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/04/05/a-ride-through-san-francisco-in-1906-video/

<comment><USER2> One of the most culturally different aspects was how blasé people were about cutting in front of a moving train. Seeing cars weave between one of the oncoming trains and the one the camera is on would be shocking today, at least in SF

</comment><comment><USER3> Wasn't this video posted to Hacker News just a few weeks ago?

<comment><USER4> More than a few weeks ago and if I remember it was one of two such film clips--- still worth looking at, repeat or no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An amazing find ineed.</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't imdb sell movies? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering aloud, imdb is my goto point whenever i want to know something about a movie. Anybody who looks up a movie definitely has at least a slight intent to watch the movie. Why don't they get into selling movie (dvds) or a partnership with netflix to stream movies.
So why don't they? <comment><USER2> Most amazing part of IMDB is that it predates http, and obviously, wikipedia. It started as a series of text files on usenet sent between various movie buffs, each adding their own contributions.

One of the IMDB contingents for sale to Amazon was keeping it quite autonomous, and open. The database is still being exported to the same formatting as when it was traded on usenet; which is why one still gets files specific for Amiga and OS/2. <http://www.imdb.com/interfaces>

Kind regards

</comment><comment><USER3> IMO, that's not the problem they are solving. They are usually 'the professional' database of movies, people and such. Streaming movies is not what they set out to do. Documenting about them is what they aim at. But they surely are an influence on some people's choices.

It's sort of asking - Why 'The New York Times' doesn't sell books. It does affect the choice but they don't set out to sell books. That is, sort of, what gives them authority. I might not trust the list as much if they were setting out to sell more and earn more.

<comment><USER4> Tl;dr; they wouldn't seem independent and unbiased.

<comment><USER5> Uhm. Someone should tell them that.

If I go to, say:

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096928/>

there is a "watch now on Amazon Video On Demand" link to the right of the page, rent from Blockbusters, buy from Amazon, etc etc. Even pre-acquisition they had "buy" links to the right, which I assumed were Amazon affiliate links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> isn't imdb owned by Amazon?

<comment><USER7> Not only that... <http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/amazon.png></comment></comment>


Autism's First Child - <AUTHOR> http://http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/10/autism-8217-s-first-child/8227/

<comment><USER2> [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/10/autism-821...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/10/autism-8217-s-first- child/8227/)

he missed the colon in the <http://> and it the site added a new one for him

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know what this is. In Opera, I get Illegal URL.</comment>