Sex, Steroids, and Arnold: The Story of the Gym That Shaped America - <AUTHOR> https://deadspin.com/sex-steroids-and-arnold-the-gym-that-shaped-america-1828228786 <comment><USER2> This slid off the front page pretty damn quick - the culture so deftly portrayed is probably almost as alien here as anything short of martians ...

This bit in the middle is striking:

 _Charles Gaines (author of Stay Hungry and co-author of Pumping Iron): Among other things that's not widely understood about bodybuilders, I think, is how good they feel. Working out they have these endorphins cascading their bodies. They're eating enough meat for a male lion every day, and lying in the sun and screwing whoever they want to screw. It was a kind of paradise. They're always tanned and they're in great shape. That sense of physical well-being and pure physical pleasure was a big part of that scene.

Drasin: We'd go to the Marina on Friday and Saturday nights to pick up women. Donkin's Inn, Charlie Brown's, Captain's Wharf, The Warehouse. They'd go crazy over us. They'd never seen anything like it.

Bill Pettis (bodybuilder): I had like 10 girlfriends. I said, "Jane, you're Tuesday. Sally, you're Wednesday." We were broke, but we lived like kings._

What follows is more sordid, but still recalls gladiators, minus the bleeding ...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A surprisingly large amount of commentary on business and being at the right place at the right time, too:

 _Joe Weider was an excellent promoter. Hoffman wasn't. That made the difference. Weider began to create more romance—he had a sharp eye for photography—and he was a better businessman than Hoffman. The one thing I respected about Joe Weider was, he gave everybody an opportunity to do something with themselves. He gave us exposure. It was up to you to take advantage of it and do something with it. Many bodybuilders expected money to fall to them. That ain't the way it happens. You gotta get out and hustle your ass off. The ones who've prospered the most were guys who took advantage of the publicity and let that spill over to other aspects of their life._

</comment><comment><USER3> I love the fact that these guys were so dedicated to their craft in the face of zero money and all the ridicule. I always enjoy seeing that kind of extreme motivation.

</comment><comment><USER4> A good read, it gives insight into a specific period of time.

One quote that didn't make it comes from Marlon Darton, another giant of the day. Asked if he took steroids, Darton is said to have replied "Yes, I do. But so does everybody else."

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh, that place. There was a restaurant across the street, on Speedway, that served ostrich. Bodybuilders were into that.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was an awesome read. I watched Pumping Iron some years back, but this makes me want to watch it once more!</comment>


The Mundane Existence - <AUTHOR> http://www.bootstrappingindependence.com/modernism/the-mundane-existence/

<comment><USER2> Only around 30 and feeling this mundane? Although I loved the technology I was working on, my last job became five work-days filled with meetings too. I can tell you that it turned what could have been my hobby (the technology) into a similarly mundane existence.

A day full of meetings poses three problems:

1) Poorly run meetings consume too much time without accomplishing anything.

2) Having a full day of meetings almost eliminates the possibility of getting real work done while you're fresh.

3) The meetings are often so dull (probably the small ratio of useful content to blather), that you'll be tired sooner.

I became quite a contrarian ... refusing meetings when there wasn't a clear- cut agenda and goals and in general trying to take back some of the time for actual work. It didn't work, but it did earn me some black marks with my managers.

Finally, I started a venture with two other guys and the three of us have clear-cut roles. Since we trust that the others are capable and willing to do their parts, we have only three calls a week, each scheduled to be 15 minutes (but generally they're closer to 30). Now we're starting to demo to customers and those meetings are exciting ... validation of some of our ideas, new ideas and occasional criticism that keeps us on the right track can be invigorating.

I hope you're able to find that kind of excitement soon ... I've rediscovered the adventure in my life!

<comment><USER3> > Poorly run meetings consume too much time without accomplishing anything.

Agreed that more often than not this is the case - however I am seeing a clear awareness now a days at my workplace - people are at least a bit conflicted about wasting time. I personally always try to politely steer the meeting to get something meaningful agreed to or done - even if I am not the organizer. My experience is that depending on how cleverly I am able to converse it either goes well or people don't respond and I have to retry.

Things like saying "Hmm. So looks like at this point without having person X in the room and without having data Y we can't really sort this out in <em> this </em> meeting." - it works well if you insert them infrequently with right tone and timing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems so familiar. I just started to face this problem and I already hate the idea of spending the rest of my life like this. There must be some way out of here...

As a little side-point: on HN we often discuss the values of startup life, or various different alternatives to 'day job'. I can understand why many hate the idea of spending most of one's life as a nine-to-five worker doing things one doesn't exactly care about. I hate this idea too. But, if we applied this attitude on the scale of the whole society, would it not collapse? If every shop clerk, Starbucks barista, bus driver, electrician or other professional realized that there must be a better way of working, what would happen? Do we need to _force_ people to have jobs (so that they can eat) for modern civilization to work?

<comment><USER5> The key might be variety. I'd hate "spending the rest of my life programming in front of a screen" as much as "spending the rest of my life making coffee" or "spending the rest of my life on a potato field". But trying your hands at various jobs for a few months or years? Sounds much more refreshing, doesn't it!

<comment><USER6> That would be great.

However, I'm afraid in this age we're condemned to our specific specialization for life. For every job, to get a job at all, years of experience ('XX years of YY specific recent buzzword experience') is generally required. Even for things a flexible, intelligent person could easily learn on the job given some time and hard work.

You could probably switch career once with a lot of hassle, but 'trying your hands at various jobs for a few months or years' sounds very optimistic...

<comment><USER5> For every job? Doubt it. There are always demand/supply imbalances somewhere in the caleidoscope of "all possible jobs" at any given moment and place. In a demand/supply imbalance you may not be the "perfect choice" but the second- best and totally-acceptable if you demonstrate that "I'll learn on the job and I have the basic core soft skills of enthusiasm sane-humility big-picture-view hands-on-brain" in your interview.

Well you just tell them "pay me 80-90% instead of 100% of your usual salaries for 1-2 months, then decide whether to keep me for another year or not. I always learn on the job and I always get good at it, fast."

Only if it's the truth of course.

(Of course, that's for "simpleton" jobs, not for programming. You better had been building stuff privately or at uni for at least a year, obviously.)

Can-do or can't? "It's your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude!" ;))

<comment><USER6> Right, that might have been true ten years ago, and was even more true if you go back further. These days it's hard to get a job even for people that have a lot of experience in some area (at least if it isn't computer-related... we're the lucky ones for now, but that's another story).

I mean, if you aim for the simpleton jobs, you'll be competing with more experienced people that'd happily take the 80%/90% offer just to get a job at all (if it isn't below subsistence level).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not ready to say a lot about how I solved this problem other than:

I quit.

My job was killing me. If you looked at it from the outside, you would have said I should be perfectly happy: great pay, bonuses, respect at work. But seriously: I was unhappy with the endless meetings, bureaucracy, and a culture that didn't value creativity and passion for building really good software.

I'm still working all this out. I'm independent and learning a lot of great stuff that I've wanted to learn for years. I'm building some products that I hope will take off. But even if those fail in the sense that I don't make enough to live on, I know I will succeed in a bigger sense: I will find a place to work that has great people and values building really good software that makes people's lives better.

Why am I so confident about that? For the first time in years, I feel alive and full of curiosity and interest in the world.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel this myself and see it in others at work (large fortune 500 company)

The 3 paths that I've identified for myself are as follows:

1\. Suck it up, stick with the job/career you've got. It pays well, there is "relative" job security and an upwards path. Enjoy your free time with your family, hobbies, etc. 2\. Same as #1, except some part of your free time to bootstrap something that will give you financial freedom. 3\. Throw caution to the wind and join a startup.

Per #1, it appears that some are able to partition their lives- e.g., they drag themselves through work to enable them and their families to live a certain lifestyle- I'm not sure this is sustainable longer term, but can be done if one adopts a certain mental attitude towards work. #3 isn't a good fit for me because I'm not ready to force my family to change their lifestyle to accommodate my wishes. So that leaves #2 for me.

Ideally, if I could sustain myself and my family at our current lifestyle or better through a side boot-strapped project, that'd be great. However, I wonder if I would be happier trading in my 1 boss for tens?, hundreds?, of customers of whatever it is that I would be selling or making, assuming that I could even get to that point. Even if my bootstrapped project is successful for a year or two, it is unlikely to succeed for a much longer term (10-20 years), whereas I could see myself easily employed in my current role over that longer time-frame.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is horrible. Seriously, this will eat you alive, you must impose yourself to your environment, not the other way around or you'll be crushed.

You think this meeting is useless? Tell others, and don't attend it.

You have more work than you can reasonably do? simply say no. You won't get any advantage from working too much, anyway, you'll just be squeezed some more.

When others leave, leave too. You're not supposed to spend 12 hours a day at work. Will someone die if you don't finish this document/program/web page? Heck no.

Your boss is unhappy with your new attitude? Explain the situation. Tell that you won't be this nice guy that get exploited to death any more. Either you're respected or you're better be elsewhere.

<comment><USER2> exploited nice guy ...

That's another interesting side conversation. If you start out with the attitude that it's just a job and you leave when your time has been put in, it's far better than starting out as the nice guy (read that as dedicated) and then changing. You'll be massacred for changing your attitude.

<comment><USER9> Massacred? Certainly not. Either they take it or they fire him; he can't really lose.

<comment><USER2> I meant that you're better off setting those boundaries when you start your employment than after people have become accustomed to your behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. - Henry David Thoreau

But less depressingly : I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. - (also) Henry David Thoreau

</comment><comment><USER11> unfortunately, this reminds me a little much of how my life used to seem. hopefully the author can find succeed with their startup.

<comment><USER12> "used to"? Mind sharing what changed? Did you achieve what the OP tries to, did it happen by itself?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _I walk around all day with a frown on my face, worrying about one thing or another for no good reason._

There is a good reason - you practised worrying so you got good at it, so it became a tool you use frequently because you can, even when it doesn't help.

The answer is to not do that. It's an introspective answer, it's difficult to do, but the secret to it is that it's not stupid advice it's actually pretty good advice.</comment>


Wizard proposes turning map of the universe inside-out - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20020814124648/http://www.wizard.gen.nz/Articles/inside-out.html <comment><USER2> I love this kind of thing. I often wonder how densities would map under such a transformation. What would the density be of the "core" of the inside out earth? What is the density of the universe sphere-reflected about the geospheric surface of the earth? How does this change as you reflect about different layers of the earth? How about sphere reflecting the universe about the surface of a star? Or a black hole?

If anyone is curious, I made some experiments years ago to play with this kind of perspective shifts. Make sure you check out the horse:

[https://hyperspectives.wondering.xyz](https://hyperspectives.wondering.xyz)

I also made a blender modifier that does Moebius transformations... There is a patch on the hyperspectives page. But also this fork:

[https://github.com/micahscopes/Hyperspectives/tree/hyperblen...](https://github.com/micahscopes/Hyperspectives/tree/hyperblender)

Lately I've gotten into using Clifford algebra (conformal geometric algebra) to do the same stuff. I'm slowly building tools for this... Stay tuned!

</comment><comment><USER3> If an unambiguous centre point _did_ exist, then flipping the coordinate system from (distance to centre point, point on a n-1 dimensional hypersphere) to (1 / distance to centre point, point on a n-1 dimensional hypersphere) would be a trivial and uninteresting transformation. In other words, turning the universe inside out does nothing to decrease (or increase) the difficulty of choosing a centre point.

This transformation is its own inverse. Applying it to the coordinate system in the article we find that the author has chosen the centre of the planet Earth as their centre point; that is what makes their coordinate system possible. This is totally arbitrary and does not solve any deep mysteries. The stuff about turning the universe inside out is just waffle on top of that.</comment>


Ask HN: What monitoring/management tools do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I am a system administrator who has been working at my first and only job for the past 3 years. I manage 9 live servers and 25-30 internally. We use LAMP for live/staging and CentOS or Redhat everywhere.
This being my one and only job I've had to rely on a lot of reading around the internet to find the best management and monitoring tools. I like mmonit/monit for health checking running services which alert me via sms, email and xmpp when there are failures. I use chef for automated deployment of new software, Anthill for code releases and a whole lot of bash scripting for backups.
I was wondering what management/monitoring tools you guys use to manage large clusters of servers? And if you knew of what the big players like google, twitter, amazon and ebay use. It would be interesting to see the difference between tools used to manage 10 servers vs 1000.
Thanks HN <comment><USER2> I work for a web development firm and we handle a lot of large intranets for big internationals. Most of the systems are built using combinations (pick two) of PHP, JSP, Ruby, Perl, MySQL and Oracle.

The servers (total around 60) tend to be spread across different continents and it always helps to have as much information as possible.

We were originally using Nagios, but found that it was lacking some of the tools that we required. Instead we switched over to Zabbix and have hooked into it using a custom PHP/Python application.

This custom app just provides a worldwide view of traffic, points out specific spike times and most importantly: shows the nearest commits to the master repos when spikes occur.

The main reason for switching over to Zabbix was the documentation and API. It made creating our own tools a lot easier.

Info that might be useful:

\- Running on CentOS

\- Apache webservers with nginx front-ends

\- Database servers work in teams of 3, with master-master replication and then a slave.

</comment><comment><USER3> For our java infrastructure we use Introscope. I dont know if they have version for LAMP architecture. <http://www.ca.com/us/application- management.aspx></comment>


LiteDB – A .NET NoSQL Document Store in a Single Data File - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB#litedb---a-net-nosql-document-store-in-a-single-data-file <comment><USER2> Great to see another NoSQL DB on .NET landscape. In my UWP days I had to port LevelDB ([https://github.com/maxpert/LevelDBWinRT](https://github.com/maxpert/LevelDBWinRT) shameless plug, it's available as nuget package too). But it only works on UWP this seems more robust and it can work on Xamarin.

<comment><USER3> I really wish this had existed back when I still coded apps in .NET.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course I would opt for Sqlite, however if I really need NoSQL type of data I always would recommend LiteDB.

The API is similar to MongoDB which is great because I consider MongoDB drivers the best DB drivers for C# except for maybe EF.

<comment><USER5> can you elaborate on opting for Sqllite?

<comment><USER6> Sqlite is one of the simplest RDBMSs that you can run on a client, which is really useful for deploying apps that need their own data store

<comment><USER4> Also Sqlite has native EF drivers which makes it first-class .NET citizen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool! You can also test-drive it online using their shell (has some restrictions according to their docs)

[http://www.litedb.org/#shell](http://www.litedb.org/#shell)

I wonder how 'production ready' this is.

A very valid use case is for use in MVPs and side-projects that would be hosted on Azure. I built an MVP using .Net and SQL Server for the database (db was needed only once a day for 30 mins to do batch jobs and save data), only to find out upon deployment that you have to pay about $50/ month minimum to have your 1 SQL Server database up and running, and also that you can't 'switch it off' ever and save $ [1].

So I ended up rewriting parts of the data layer to use SQL Lite and an embedded .DB data file.

[1] Source: Stopping SQL Azure DB when not in use [https://stackoverflow.com/a/42063293/325521](https://stackoverflow.com/a/42063293/325521)

<comment><USER8> Azure's cheapest SQL Server as-a-service offering is only $5/mo.

<comment><USER7> I did not know this. Recent addition? Just googled it and you are right, single database with 2 GB storage is $4.9.. / months.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql- databa...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-database/)

Thanks!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > One database per account/user data store

This is very interesting to me. I am writing a multi-tenant app with a single RDBMS schema right now and balancing all of my needs (scaling/sharding, partitioning tables, normalizing vs denormalizing) has been challenging.

I've never written a system with a whole database per account. Does anyone have any good reading or examples on this general tactic?

<comment><USER10> It has it's plusses and minuses. The plusses are that everything is isolated and the data doesn't get too big. It becomes problematic when you need to access multiple clients at the same time (and you probably will at some point). Deployment is harder since you have to do it more. Keeping schema versioning straight is also a pain. Data isolation is inherent in single tenant though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> LiteDB is pretty neat. Side note, RavenDB is another .NET document-style full stack database that just hit 4.0 today: [https://ravendb.net/](https://ravendb.net/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty cool. If it has low enough overhead, I wonder if this could be used to replace the current format of ODT (Open Document) files, which right now are basically just zipped up XML documents and image assets

<comment><USER13> Looking at the file format limitations [1], it doesn't seem like a good fit for an alternative to ODT files. (A cursory judgment based solely on this wiki page has me wondering if they are using the best data structure for an Index, but again, very cursory.)

A question is why you would want to replace the current ODT format? "Just" a zipped up file tree of XML documents and image assets is a pretty robust format choice. There are unzip programs on almost every platform. XML isn't always everyone's favorite markup language, but it's well supported by almost every language ecosystem, and still roughly okay to humanly eyeball if needed. The relative inefficiencies of the textual encoding and verbosity of XML are directly suited for compression efficiency of a Zip file. For most trade-offs of a document file, it's a somewhat resilient option, with likely a long shelf life (both zip and XML technologies have lasted enough decades, and are reasonably well standardized enough, that you can imagine they will continue to be unzippable/readable decades from now).

[1] [https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB/wiki/How-LiteDB- Works](https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB/wiki/How-LiteDB-Works)

<comment><USER14> Well suited? Zip?

I've tested some hacks to get a file below email server file size limitations. Unzipping an excel file, then tarballing it into a .tar.xz archive can cut the size by 30%, say. The only issue is that the receiver might not know what on earth to do with it!

<comment><USER15> Another trick is you can repack modern MS Office files with advzip from advancecomp. With -z4 It will use Zopfli to pack them. Further gains can be had with more rounds, (such as -i50). The resulting files can be quite a bit smaller and Office will open them without complaint.

Yet another trick is you can save as binary format files. In Excel this is XLSB. Supposedly those are less compatible across Office versions however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why would I want to use that over BDB or TokyoCabinet?

<comment><USER17> I revisited these databases recently while researching if any serverless redis options are available.

BDB is under Oracle. Some people may not want to navigate the white papers and pricing questions to get to the database.

TokyoCabinet appears to be dormant seven years.

Anyway, I assume LiteDB has better C# integration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Benchmarks? (R/W ops per second, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER19> What is the advantage over SQLite?

<comment><USER20> It's native and NoSQL.

<comment><USER21> NoSQL is not a feature, it is the lack of a feature.

<comment><USER10> This car is a NoTires car! You don't have to go through the hassle of replacing your tires! :)

<comment><USER22> Any day, if someone invents wheels for the twentyfirst century. The rubber- rings are a kludge, not a fundamental condition of life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We've our own dot net based InMemory Columnstore at InMemory.Net

</comment><comment><USER24> is there a library like this in c++?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's called EJDB. [https://github.com/Softmotions/ejdb](https://github.com/Softmotions/ejdb)

<comment><USER24> Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


It Is 2019. Update Your Footer - <AUTHOR> http://updateyourfooter.com/ <comment><USER2> Why have a year there at all, if it's not the actual production date of the content?

</comment><comment><USER3> Terrible advice. I see a lot of sites which haven't been updated since the previous millennium, but JS still reports "(c) " \+ (new Date()).getYear(); or somesuch.</comment>


A Russian satellite appears to be shadowing an American spy satellite - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32031/a-russian-inspector-spacecraft-now-appears-to-be-shadowing-an-american-spy-satellite <comment><USER2> I don't understand what's surprising about this? The satellite they are spying on is itself a spy satellite!

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds like the start of an Orson Scott Card or Isaac Asimov Novel.

It's beyond bizarre to think that we all live in a time period in human history where it is feasible for mere mortals to potentially venture (with appropriate protection) into the vacuum.

Let's hope our governments will keep it pleasant so that we may all have a chance to experience the great void.

</comment><comment><USER4> How much data can you get from 150-300km away?

<comment><USER5> Considering USA 245 is gathering data on targets that are 42,000km away I'd be willing to venture that they can gather a lot at 300km. Perhaps they can use this for signals intelligence as well.

<comment><USER6> USA 245 is an Earth observation satellite, its apogee is only about 1000 km. 42,000km would be for a geostationary satellite.

But yes, 300km is pretty close in space. Since you have no issue with atmospheric distortion, the optics become a lot more simple.

This is quite a small satellite - "mini fridge" someone said, which does limit what you can put in it. 300km is a fair distance away and you'd need an enormous focal length to resolve small features on the other spacecraft. It's possible they just want to test how well they can track another satellite. For a Hubble class telescope (~50k mm focal length) you'd get around 20cm resolution for a 4MP sensor.

A more general way, since we don't know what sensor is onboard, would be to calculate the diffraction limit for the largest mirror you could put on the satellite (sibling comment suggested 1 m, which is about 1 arcsecond at 540nm). That works out to 20cm at 300km, or about 1cm at 20km. Of course you still need the focal length and sensor to make this useful.

I guess you could compare Trump's images of the Iranian launch site which were taken at a similar distance, but with a much larger satellite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Russia needs to tread very carefully here: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost)

<comment><USER8> Non-mobile: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like a job for the space force.

<comment><USER10> This is going to be a bit of a rant, but I hope not too off-topic.

I am a huge fan of space exploration, however I was really disappointed by the online space community's lack of objections at the further militarization of space.

Maybe it is still not entirely inevitable and there is a precedent of global agreement on no weapons in space[0]. I know that most folks have industry ties and maybe that is the cause of their acquiesce.

I have an argument which I believe to be an entirely non-political and objective reason as to why we need to continue down the evolutionary path of becoming a nearly non-violent species. We also need to do that in relatively short order. I was really hoping that space exploration was going to be that shiny leading example of non-violence. If anyone wants to talk about that further, then please give a reply.

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

<comment><USER11> I am for non-violence and against the militarization of space, but I'm at a loss as to how to convince others of this.

Most non-violent movements are religious at their core, and if people don't already believe in non-violence and don't believe in a religion which tells them not to be violent, they are not likely to be convinced to change their ways and adopt non-violence.

It's possible, though currently unlikley, that leaders of religions who interpret their scriptures as calling for non-violence as a core value become more influential in society. Unfortunately, the world seems to be heading in the opposite direction right now, and as we saw with the assassinations of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, such leaders are vulnerable to being eliminated by people who have no problems with violence.

To ultimately be successful there has to be a grassroots, widespread, decentralized change in consciousness among the masses, and we are very far from that.

The one distant ray of hope that I see is more widespread use of psychedelics, which have the potential to increase empathy and a feeling of connection to and unity with the world and others. This is a pretty long-term hope, however, and it still has the potential to be squashed if there's another backlash from the powers that be.

<comment><USER12> I'm also for non-violence and am against militarization, but, sadly, violence and military conflict are inevitably not going to go away starting from 2020 onward.

[Insert rant about coordination problems / game theory / tragedy of the commons / Moloch] means the US needs to be there to counter other nations that are going to try to militarize it. In an ideal world, such a military force would only act defensively, not offensively or imperially (e.g. colonizing planets, moons, and rocks purely in the name of the United States), but I guess that's not too likely in the long-term.

When cyberwarfare started to become a real possibility and not just sci-fi, would you have argued that the US creating cyberwarfare divisions is wrong and shouldn't be done, even as just about every other major country was doing the same?

If you were president of the US right now, what would you do if you vetoed a space force and then a few months later, Russia and China simultaneously announced the creation of their own space forces? Given the current state of the world, I believe adding additional military capabilities is just necessary, even though I'm also an idealist who detests violence, war, and death of all kinds, targeted at any being.

If we lived in the year 2520 and all militaries have been disbanded for centuries and every country has been living in peace with one another for the same length of time, then, yes, I'd agree that breaking that precedent with the creation of a space force would be wrong. But unfortunately, we're not there yet, and it's possible we may not be even in 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 years from now. (Yes, I know there's a chicken-and-egg logic there, but I can only refer back to the implied coordination problem rant.)

<comment><USER11> There are actions we can take that lead to escalation or deescalation.

The US used to lead, at least in some ways, towards a more peaceful world. Together with the Soviet Union, the US got rid of thousands of nuclear weapons. Now we are headed back in the other direction. The US still leads, but it's leading towards more conflict.

Over and over again you see countries following the US as it, for example, starts to justify assassinations, wars, and torture in the name of fighting terrorism. The US unilaterally withdraws from nuclear non-proliferation agreements and nuclear proliferation heats up. As you yourself point out, the US starts militarizing space and other nations follow suit. Just today it was announced that the US is reversing course on a ban against use of land mines.

A major nuclear conflict is likely to result in hundreds of millions if not billions of deaths. We have to pull back from the brink rather than always edging closer and closer to it, and this won't be achieved through more militarization.. especially not in a more multi-polar world where the US is daily losing more and more of its technological edge.

Achieving a non-violent world isn't going to happen overnight, and it likely won't happen without setbacks, but the US could take the lead and steer towards peace instead of towards war.

<comment><USER12> >As you yourself point out, the US starts militarizing space and other nations follow suit.

Yes, but you can substitute "US" for almost any other country. Russia starts militarizing space: US and Britain follow suit. Someone is inevitably going to be the first one to do it.

The land mines, I agree with. The nuclear situation is a little more complicated, since some believe nuclear MAD has actually (so far...) saved far more lives in total than if it weren't there, but I agree cutting back is probably a good idea.

I think these things are different from having a military presence in space. I think it's like creating an air or cyber force. It's a vacuum that's inevitably going to be filled with a host of entities, so you might as well be first.

<comment><USER11> _" you can substitute "US" for almost any other country. Russia starts militarizing space: US and Britain follow suit. Someone is inevitably going to be the first one to do it."_

This argument would be more convincing if Russia was the first to escalate, but they weren't. Yet again the US took the lead.

Even if Russia had been the first to escalate, the US could respond in all sorts of non-military ways before resorting to a military solution.

This also ties back in to many other aggressive actions the US has taken, arguably since WW2. If it didn't keep squandering its political and moral capital, it would be much more persuasive to the world at large in leading the way to peace. Instead, its self-serving aggression is resulting in ever more polarization, paranoia, and enemy-making. It would be bad enough if the US was simply digging its own grave, but it seems to be intent on digging a grave for everyone.

This is truly madness, and I don't see it ending in anything but a global fireball, especially if everyone keeps insisting on throwing more gasoline on the fire.

<comment><USER12> I would bet a large percentage of my savings that a country other than the US would've created such a military force within the next 20 years if the US hadn't (probably the next 10). Creating a military presence in a new domain doesn't necessarily imply any sort of aggression. It can be a buffer, an incentive not to attack America, etc.

The world isn't currently in a state of peace and harmony, or anywhere near it. If it were, then I'd agree that this would be a disgusting and peace- threatening precedent set by America. But this is not the world we live in, even though I hope it will be the world at some point within the next few millennia.

To be clear, I'm not supporting or defending any other actions taken by the US since WWII. I empathize with the citizens of countries that our government has abused, exploited, and killed. I just see nothing wrong with creating a space force. If we have an air force, why shouldn't we have an above-air force? If your argument were "we shouldn't have an air force _or_ an above-air force", then I'd be much more inclined to agree (though with caveats, given all the game theory coordination stuff I alluded to).

If we're going to have a military, why would you half-ass it? I think you should either have nothing but a token military like Switzerland, or one that tries to be capable of engaging in combat in every domain. Having a "just mostly pretty sort of capable" military doesn't make any sense. Shit or get off the pot. Again, I'd love it if everyone in the world only had a token military, or no military.

Actual peace-threatening, provocative actions are things like cancelling the Iran deal, assassinating Soleimani, invading Iraq, Bay of Pigs; the list goes on for pages. I don't see the parallel between those and this. Now, if the government had announced our space force is going to colonize half of Mars in the name of the US, then I'd fully agree with you. That's a thing that could happen, and I certainly don't want it to. Trying to establish a true, fair one world government might be the only way to create lasting peace, but, again, sadly I don't think that'll be possible in our world for a very long time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brooklyn artist takeshi miyakawa arrested for 'planting false bombs' - <AUTHOR> http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/21274/brooklyn-artist-takeshi-miyakawa-arrested-for-planting-false-bombs.html

<comment><USER2> Is "mental health detainment" in this case an involuntary psychiatric commitment? Is there law for this being used punitively to effectively put someone in jail for 30 days without regard to the criminal charges? Or is his detainment for "mental evaluation" somehow actually legitimate in the context of the charges placed against him? This has shades of the old Soviet Union practice of declaring political dissidents insane and holding them indefinitely in locked-down psychiatric hospitals without any criminal charges. Someone assuage my fears.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me a lot of what happened with the signs for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. Although it seems that the judge in this case is taking this way too far as the lamp doesn't even look remotely like a bomb. He'll likely be released and hopefully he won't be charged for the bomb squad investigation.</comment>


RIM showing first demo of its Android compatibility layer for Playbook - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRriABMed7M

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently it needs re-compilation in order to work. One more hassle (but makes sense nonetheless).

This is a controlled demo environment, yet RIM fails to show the interesting things: how will Intents ("Share This") integrate, how about apps relying on Google APIs (Maps, CD2M) ? There's also no demo of 3D Apps, NDK apps, Video- playing, Accelerometer and Camera. Or the more os-integrated features like contacts sync adapters, SMS, widgets, live wallpapers. Even the pervasive notifications are left out.

I hope RIM still has tricks up its sleeve or this compatibility layer will sink into oblivion before it's even released. It will be stuck in the niche for small apps and compete with HTML-based solutions like Appcelerator Titanium.</comment>


Tesla Plans to Acquire Maxwell Technologies in Deal Valued at $218M - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2019/02/04/tesla-maxwell-technologies/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm hopeful that this means Tesla will Open Source Maxwell's patients - [https://patents.justia.com/assignee/maxwell-technologies- inc](https://patents.justia.com/assignee/maxwell-technologies-inc)</comment>


Supreme Court says generic domains like booking.com can be trademarked - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/supreme-court-says-generic-domains-like-booking-com-can-be-trademarked/ <comment><USER2> Seems reasonable. I do share this concern:

>Breyer argued that what's really at stake in this case is the ability to register domains that are similar but not identical to booking.com. Thanks to today's ruling, booking.com could "threaten trademark lawsuits against competitors using domains such as bookings.com, eBooking.com, booker.com, or bookit.com," Breyer wrote.

Without even buying similar domains, a company can prevent them from being used via trademark law.

<comment><USER3> This seems like a clear test case for whether law is pro-business in the special interest case of one or a few companies or as the reinforcement of efficient and competitive markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is like trademarking 221B Baker Street or some other physical address. Doesn't this make it hazardous to purchase domain names now, since some trademark troll may have grabbed it in the past? Currently there is something extremely refreshing about being able to buy a domain that you find available - no need to worry about getting sued for some random nonsense</comment>


I built a search engine for startup jobs in 2wks. - <AUTHOR> http://www.amplifyinvestin.me

<comment><USER2> kudos to effort and building things.</comment>


Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129112147 <comment><USER2> For years I'd heard this and thought it was similar to being "in the zone". I've done various martial arts since I was a kid and found "the zone" to be an absolutely awesome state of mind to be in, it's like your brain is running in super fast mode and solutions to complex problems seem obvious and come immediately...but that state of mind doesn't seem to actually be the same as Slow-Mo.

I discovered this after unfortunately finding myself on the periphery of a very heavy fire fight in Baghdad in 2006 as an unarmed contractor without my body armor handy. A co-worker and I headed for cover about 500 ft. behind a wall to wait it out when _BAM_ a bullet penetrated the wall in front of us, flew past us and struck a wall next to our heads.

I remember this clearly because as soon as the bullet broke through the wall everything went super slow-mo. I mean, like 10,000 frames per second Slow-mo (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt6eyDYeJr0>). The bullet had obviously slowed down and had started tumbling because it sounded like the most pissed- off bee as it headed our way. More interestingly, and without any control of my body, my eyes immediately went into tracking mode and I was able to follow the bullet all the way across the space we were in -- about 500 ft. I honestly have no idea how long it took to travel that distance, but it felt like a full 10 minutes even though it couldn't have been more than a fraction of a second.

The overwhelming memory though was how my body felt like it was stuck in molasses as my brain desperately tried to tell me to hit the deck and I simply couldn't move as fast as my brain seemed to be working. I remember being absolutely frustrated with this little fact.

As soon as the round hit the wall with an appropriate _ping!_ sound, time went back to normal and the adrenaline hit like a rocket and we high tailed it out of there to better cover.

I also remember just being mentally tired the rest of the day after that. Could have been the adrenaline rush but I think it's from the slow-mo effect.

<comment><USER3> Interesting that you point out the delay between your brain giving an order and your body responding. I've had similar experiences where initially there seems to be plenty of time for your mind to assess the situation & make decisions. In my experience the slow-mo effect stopped immediately after I started _reacting_ to the danger. I guess your mind gets in a kind of detached mental state in order to build a window of opportunity to make the right decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The slow-motion effect may be the result of the mind mapping the experience to a single timeline afterwards.

I was at the Enschede fireworks disaster (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster>) ten years ago and experienced what the article calls turbo perception. It is not like overclocking a single processor by pressing a turbo switch. A better metaphor may be temporarily having access to more processors than normal that operate in parallel. In a short time frame you make a lot more observations and decisions than normal to improve your situation, apparently some simultaneously. Because it is difficult for the mind to deal with parallel timelines of observations it maps the observations to a single timeline which results in the slow-motion effect that people recall afterwards.

<comment><USER2> When it happened to me, afterwards, I remember my mind uncontrollably playing back the event over and over again from different points, all in slow motion for a day or two. It was exhausting and I couldn't get anything else done that required any kind of thinking. It finally settled down like ripples in a pond.

Did you experience the same thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember as a kid, I found a big, sloped tree stump in town that if I ran and used it as a ramp, I could get enough height in a jump to be pushing my landing abilities near their limit. I wasn't a big time thrill seeker, but that became a habit for the wonderful free fall feeling and time effect. It didn't happen every time, but the slow-down effect was common enough that I got curious and wondered how it worked... was it just a trick of memory afterward or was it something in the moment?

I realize it isn't really good science, as I have only the subjective experience of the tests (so be it, I guess), but I did what I could on the repeatability front (sprained ankles and scratches paid with the kind of childhood zeal unhampered by considering possible consequences). When in that moment, I had enough mental time to think "no, not just a memory effect, this is really going on right now... and yeah, still going on, and still falling" several times before landing.

As an aspiring rational empiricist, I will force myself to give up this belief if need be, but a few tests aren't enough to do that. There are plenty of i's and t's to dot and cross in the experimental construction and interpretation first.

<comment><USER6> Jumping from playground swings is another good way to experience falling and associated slow-down effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of my numerous brushes with death, this has only happened once or twice for me. The most memorable was when I was kite-mountainboarding. I had jumped around 12ft in the air but a line had wrapped around my harness - instead of acting like a parachute, the large kite was below me and pulled me violently into the ground. Time slowed enough for me to reason about the situation and realise that I had to absorb some of the impact with my legs if this was to turn out well. I didn't get it quite right (should have taken more impact with my legs) and I broke my back, but I've recovered now.

However, what I remember as much as the slowing of time is how calm I felt during it all. Reasoning and decision-making were the only things in my mind in a really dangerous situation. It was really nice feeling! When time slows in these situations, I wonder if anyone ever panics. I guess it would be rather counter-productive.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've heard this is why time seems to pass faster as we age as well. Not because we experience time as passing faster, just that fewer things are novel as we have more experiences.

In other words, fewer memorable things happen to a 40 year old than to a 10 year old... unless that 40 year old is about to be hit by a bus.

<comment><USER9> Time really pass faster when you get older, subjectively speaking; When you are 2 years old, the last year amounted to 50% of your whole life. The year between 40 to 41 is 2% and from 80 to 81 only 1%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This paper is from 2007, and has been written up many times since.

Including an alleged debunking from Feb 2008:

[http://express-press- release.net/46/Eagleman%20%60Time%20Slo...](http://express-press- release.net/46/Eagleman%20%60Time%20Slowing%60%20Experiment%20Invalidated.php)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've heard this from so many people and so many reputable sources that I feel as if I'm the only person that has never experienced this phenomenon. In fact, when I've been in an instance where I've feared for my life (and there have been several) it seems to me that time speeds up and things happen so quickly I only have time to react and not to think. I only seem to recognize something happened after the fact.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a major difference between 'doing' and 'experiencing'. I know e.g. that in a skydiving emergency my actions have always been automatic & fast, but the experience of the situation made it seem like it lasted for ages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've always thought most of this effect was in the second stage of memory where it gets solidified into medium or long term memory instead of the few seconds of real time memory that we use for executing all our daily tasks. The reason I think this is that sometimes when this effect has triggered for me I have remembered great detail about the few seconds _before_ the event actually occurred.

For example, a few years ago my wife fell off a balcony while holding our baby. At first I didn't know what was wrong, I only heard her call out and wandered out curiously to see what she wanted. While wandering out I had no idea how serious it was - but I have the "Slow Mo" effect for that precursor time as well.

<comment><USER13> What happened?! Was she okay? Did she protect the baby?

<comment><USER12> Yes - thank goodness - they both had some superficial scratches and the wife had bad bruises but she completely protected the baby (it wasn't a second story balcony, more like a deck that protrudes over a steep decline). Of course, we didn't know either of them were really ok until 8 hours in emergency ward and scans were taken of spine etc. etc. One of the worst days of my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I heard this in the morning, and I'm glad it got on HN, because Radiolab is so great. If you liked this at all, you should really check out their long shows, they are almost all gold. Their style works a little better in a long form I think.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm.. Makes me wonder, why we do the opposite in video games - slo-mo is in effect when an enemy is about to die... But in fact it should be the opposite.

My father had exactly the same experience - he was in the car my grandfather was driving along with my mother, something happened and they were nearly going to crash, when everything turned slo-mo for my father and he was able to pull the manual brake (it was in the middle of the car for the russian Lada model, unlike my current Toyta Venza).

</comment><comment><USER16> bad title. article doesn't answer why. discusses two failed attempts to find out how it works.

<comment><USER17> An interesting article nonetheless. The "failed" attempts at least suggest that the perceived slowdown is not simply a matter of your brain processing information faster -- that it instead stores more superfluous information than normal.

So if we intentionally trigger "bullet time", it wouldn't allow us to perform superhuman feats, but it might give us superhuman recollection of details.

<comment><USER18> I thought that was the explanation. Your brain has a normal data per unit time ratio, and in these stressful situation it ends up recording much more than normal. Since you're used to a certain data/time ratio, it feels like everything happened in slow-motion.

<comment><USER19> It also works on a larger time scale. When I was working 9-to-6, weeks passed like days. Now that I'm on my own, time passes much slower because there's so much different stuff you have to do and learn every day.

<comment><USER20> Sitting in a dentists chair makes minutes seem like hours, sitting on a couch chatting with an attractive member of the opposite sex makes hours seem like minutes.

Mortgages make months shorter and years longer.

Time is pretty weird, our perception of it changes all the time depending on the circumstances, it shouldn't be a surprise that extreme circumstances change our perception of time in an extreme way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I want the switch that allows me to turn this on at will.

<comment><USER22> I wonder if this ability is just a function of increased adrenaline in the system or the sudden increase of adrenaline. If it is, it would be easy to make a switch, but would probably be harmful for extended periods of time.

<comment> DifE-Q I have often wondered why people would attribute this and other events where one has super human strength or super perception (where time slows down) to adrenaline. This is becasue it is a hormone that is released from the adrenal gland..it would take some time to get to the parts of the body where it would make things function this way would it not..at least longer than the times we are considering would allow. So if I am right, what else could be the "switch" to switch these functions on?

<comment><USER22> First off, thank you for making me look this up, as I now learned something new :)

If I understand this correctly, the immediate fight-or-flight response is triggered by noradrenaline, which is very similar to adrenaline but released by nerve cells directly to places all over the body, increasing blood flow and pressure, alertness, etc (but not affecting muscles). Adrenaline gets released into the blood via stimulation by the sympathetic system, but its effects last longer.

So it seems noradrenaline, by the fact that it's released directly from nerve cells, basically dictates how fast a person processes immediate external stimuli, and could possibly explain "super perception"

<comment> DifE-Q This is fascinating. Thanks for looking it up. I too have now learned something new!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> During moments of danger, the mind (which is normally active and thinking all kinds of thought of past and future) stops. Thus there is a silent alertness, a clarity of vision and other senses. For such a person, it is _as though_ time has stopped.

This is something which is quite common in the meditative practice of remaining in the present moment. Eckhart Tolle talks about this in "The Power of Now". The Buddhists (incl Zen) talk about being in the Now, too.

No, the brain does not speed up, and no, you do not start remembering each and every detail of what you see and hear. However, the clarity of the senses is remarkable. Its like one has been looking from behind a dirty window all one's life, and now someone has washed the window.

</comment><comment><USER24> Maybe unrelated, but I give a vote for the brain perceiving things in a hyper- active state. When I go high-speed go karting, my brain needs to work incredibly fast to keep up with every little thing going on. In between sessions, if I play games on my iPhone, it is literally like the game is being played in slow motion. Alternatively, if I wake up in the morning all drowsy and I play those same games, it's as if the games are in fast forward and I can't keep up. So it's obvious my brain is in different states of awareness in these two scenarios, so it would make sense that in a near death experience, the brain jumps into that hyperactive state and things appear slower. Just my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER25> You will love Nicholson Baker's book "The Mezzanine", and Ian McEwan's book "The Child in Time". Both capture this phenomenon of the relativity of perceived time wonderfully.

McEwan's book will just eat at your heart. If you haven't read it I implore you to at least read the first chapter.

Of Baker's book, Wikipedia says: "On the surface it deals with a man's trip up an escalator in the mezzanine of his office building during a lunch-time sojourn from his building. In reality, it deals with all the thoughts that run through our minds in any given few moments – if we were given the time to think them through to their conclusions"

</comment><comment><USER26> I've had this happen to me, falling roughly the distance of the article's subject.

Over the years I really thought time slowed down, but I guess I can see what he's saying. Still, I doubt we'll ever definitively know until we have some way of measuring thought.

This does bring the interesting follow up question of why we're remembering so much more? To avoid the same fate in future (seems a little late, in a Darwinian argument).

Or are we perceptually processing so much more in order to try and find a way out of imminent death (which does suggest faster brain processing and is actually the opposite of what he is suggesting).

It seems to me his interpretation of the data could be wrong, there are more than one way to read his results. We may not be processing more 'frames per second' in order to read the watch but we may be consciously assessing more items in our vision than normal in order to try find an escape route.

Instinct hasn't worked and now the brain is trying higher order conscious brain power to find an escape route from imminent death? Now _that_ you could easily argue from a Darwinian perspective.

I'm just guessing here.

<comment><USER27> Actually, this might be a result of natural selection. The beings that can be in 'the zone' have a higher probability of surviving and so they did.

Regarding the 'frames per second', I think just because your brain just hit nitro, it doesn't mean your eyes will 'see' faster. It just increases the information gathering ability of each 'frame' you see.

<comment><USER28> Higher than those who try and avoid life/death situations though?

<comment><USER27> No plan survives contact with the enemy. No matter how much you try you can't avoid life/death situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wouldn't finding that the watch was still a 'blur' lead one to conclude that brushes with death don't speed up the Human Visual System?

</comment><comment><USER30> Si if I read a book with a gun to my head, I might actually retain more knowledge...

<comment><USER31> Yes. But not quite for that reason. A gun next to your head will make it stressful, and stress in general improves memory (even more than other emotions, thanks to the amygdala's dual role in memory and stress responses). But maybe instead of doing that, you should put your feet in ice-water or something.

<comment><USER32> Short term stress responses improve cognitive function (including memory). Long term, chronic stress reduces it. Cortisol is a hell of a drug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Put it simple - in a very stressful situation your brain use less deletion and distortion, or even more simple - the internal spam filtering turns off. ^_^

</comment><comment><USER34> I could have told him that 10 years ago from years of experience in cramming just a few hours before tests and exams.</comment>


Ask HN:  Why would MtGox delete all their tweets if things are going to be okay? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to think of reasons why they would delete their tweets under the assumption that everything will be fine.  Why would they do it, knowing that they'll eventually re-enable withdraws?  I'm looking for the most convincing argument.  Because if the most convincing argument isn't very convincing, then I'm going to sell my goxcoins on bitcoinbuilder. <comment><USER2> You're in denial. Get out, quick, you were silly to use a cryptocurrency as a speculative investment in the first place. The tulip bulbs are collapsing, maybe you can actually produce something worthwhile instead of putting all your energy into stressing out about a guessing game.

<comment><USER3> Stop making blaming statements based on your own guess based assumptions. Cryptocurrencies are not silly, but the software people write at times that use them can be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lawsuits. Lots of money is at stake. They will be sued.</comment>


Chrome Extensions To Use Less System Resources - <AUTHOR> http://www.browsomatic.com/2012/06/chrome-extensions-to-use-less-system.html

<comment><USER2> The title might be clearer as _"will_ use less resources." I expected to see, say, Flashblock, which would be an extension that helps use less memory.

</comment><comment><USER3> So will they be eventually killing off background pages? Background html page is very important for certain types of apps. A media player for example which uses the page to play background music even if the app tab is closed.

<comment><USER4> I want such an app to stop when I close the tab.

<comment><USER3> Chrome has an option to disable that. But that's not the point. What i am trying to say is that there are valid reasons for html background page instead of just a script.

<comment><USER5> This is similar to webOS background apps. You have the main app card, but you can also launch a dashboard, where the app will live in the notification area and you can pull up a little bar at the bottom of the screen with restricted functionality. The dashboard would be like a background page, and music apps often too advantage of the dashboard to display player controls in the notification area. You could throw away the main app card, but your music will still be running in the dashboard, and you can pull up the dashboard to quickly and easily play, pause, and change songs.

This is certainly a use case for music apps on Chrome as well, so I do hope they keep background pages, while encouraging use of event pages when appropriate. For example, I've been thinking about using a background page to check for updates every five minutes and notify users whenever a feed has new articles in their Google Reader. But now, I can use Event Pages instead. Chrome is giving me a more efficient way of checking for updates, but I do hope they keep background pages for the use cases they would be needed.

Incidentally, webOS also had functionality like Event Pages, where you could register a few different kinds of events, such as launch to search or timers, and webOS would call a designated script to respond to the event. The script can do ajax requests and either launch a dashboard (background page), launch the main app, or do nothing and webOS will then kill the script, just like Chrome will kill the event page if it is idle for a few seconds.

<comment><USER3> I am the author of an app that does exactly what you said. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fddboknafkepdchido...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fddboknafkepdchidokknkeidnaejnkh)

If chrome eventually drops background html page then my app won't be half as functional as it is today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While this is a great thing to do, a large portion of Chrome extension memory usage is due to the JavaScript that gets embedded into every open tab. [i.e. O(1) vs. O(n)]</comment>


Google acquires neural network startup that may help it hone speech recognition - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/13/google-acquires-neural-network-startup-dnnresearch/

<comment><USER2> I think we are at a tipping point for machine learning. Deep learning is just getting ramped up and the results are extremely impressive. [1]

How far this could go is hard to say right now but things like this [2] (10 million images, 1 week training, 16,000 cores) are bringing enormous processing power to bear for the first time on these kind of problems.

Is anyone able to comment on what moving to custom hardware will mean for performance on these kind of tasks?

[1] <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/imagenet.pdf>

[2] [http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/large_deep_networks_nips2012.pdf)

<comment><USER3> It's my understanding that deep learning networks have to be tuned almost perfectly to perform well. Not my area ef expertise, but I'm not convinced just yet.

<comment><USER4> It's true that Deep Belief Networks take a lot of work compared to, say, Random Forests, but they make good Neural Networks much easier.

Before Deep Learning, Neural Networks required a lot of hand tuning. Without that kind of tuning, Neural Networks with more than 1 or 2 hidden layers tended to perform very badly, because they would get stuck in plateaus or poor local optima.

In contrast, (one facet of) Deep Learning focuses on using unsupervised learning to better initialize NNs, which in turn allows for much higher levels of accuracy. In essence, Deep Learning helps pick the NN parameters automatically. So it's actually _decreasing_ the amount of hand tuning needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I took Geoff Hinton's Intro to Neural Networks course a few years back. After class he would have optional Q&A sessions where he would answer anything about anything. They were amazing. I think we even asked him once about his views on Margaret Thatcher.

After we covered deep belief nets, RBMs, and autoencoders, I asked him if anyone was using deep belief nets in the real world. He said "no, but these results are too impressive to deny. Within a few years, they will be."

Looks like he was right. Congrats, Geoff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hopefully he will be able to continue teaching the Neural Networks course on Coursera <https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets>

</comment><comment><USER7> I took Geoff Hinton's Coursera NN class last year - excellent.

I am glad that he is remaining part time at his university.

I share other people's opinions on the importance of deep learning. At first, when it was introduced in class, I thought that it was a nice hack - but it is much better than that.

I was on a DARPA NN advisory panel in the late 1980s and did a fairly successful commercial NN product. Lots of advancements in the fields in the last 20 years!

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats to Prof. Hinton, Alex, and Ilya, I have worked some with these techniques and they are so powerful. I'm sure being part of the Google team will give them the access to the processing power and the raw data to make some really cool stuff.</comment>


Monads for JavaScript Developers - <AUTHOR> https://bypaulshen.com/posts/monads-for-javascript-developers/ <comment><USER2> Monads always remind me of von Neuman, "young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." I still can barely explain a monad in plain English. But with some experience I can tell you all of their laws and show you how to make them work. Confusion is stupidity leaving the mind.</comment>


Good judgments do not require complex cognition - <AUTHOR> http://mpib5006.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/users/hardingcenter/images/stories/artikel_und_pressemeldungen/cognprocess-good_judgments.pdf

<comment><USER2> This line of research is extremely interesting.

The final author, Gerd Gigerenzer is a legend (in my eyes anyway) for both his writings on the abuse of statistics, and heuristic decision making. In fact, in one of his papers, he talks about the use of complex models to predict customer retention (pareto/negative binomial models) and how these types of strategies were outperformed by a simple heuristic, the hiatus heuristic which states that if a customer has purchased in the last X months (the example of 9 was given) they are active, otherwise inactive.</comment>


Tell HN: Aaron Swartz's website is offline - <AUTHOR> Growing up Aaron Swartz's blog post series Raw Nerve was one of the most influential readings for me, the website that hosted them is now down: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve<p>Here is the archived version of it: http://archive.is/8uu5x or http://archive.fo/8uu5x <comment><USER2> Knowing that this would happen eventually, I created an archival copy on GitHub soon after his death: [https://github.com/jdjkelly/www.aaronsw.com](https://github.com/jdjkelly/www.aaronsw.com)

I can hardly believe this was six years ago.

<comment><USER3> Cool. Nevertheless I feel like this should be upgraded to the 100%-offline- readable level (i.e. at least qblog.aaronsw.com should be mirrored too, so should be Twitter and Pinboard accounts preferably), converted to the epub format and distributed among commercial (for free or for charity), free and pirate ebook libraries. I'm actually surprised nobody has done this yet.

<comment><USER4> I made an epub out of his blog 2 years ago.

It is not sorted or edited in any way though.

[https://github.com/C0rby/aaronsw- weblogToEpub](https://github.com/C0rby/aaronsw-weblogToEpub)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> His post _" I hate the news"_(0) was(is) very influential for me personally.

It was seminal in what become a rather significant change in my habits and view of the world. I am now very conscious that news are entertainment, purely and simply. With the goods and bads of any other entertainment form.

From time to time, while explaining my position to others (often seen as kind of radical), I refer this post. I hope it continues to be available.

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

<comment><USER7> What is a good source of information? By that I mean:

\- not about daily information (which are usually as fast as possible and don't take the time to really understand the situation)

\- not biased

\- not about juicy news, but world topics that are ~objectively important

I feel like there should be a subreddit for that.

<comment><USER8> Every source of information will be biased, and you have to take that into account by being critical.

I found that the best source for me is The Economist: once per week, written by smart people, with good summaries of anything that is important. Delivered digitally (with an excellent audio version, too).

It is "biased" in the sense that the editors hold a set of opinions and you have to be aware of it. I do not agree with all of their opinions, but I am aware of them. The news useful even if you disagree with their interpretation or recommendations.

Surprisingly, it is the _only_ intelligent and non-sensational news source that I have found.

<comment><USER9> I went from The Economist to Foreign Affairs few years ago when Eco became unbearably filled with an agenda. You might want to check FA out.

<comment><USER10> Can you describe their agenda, or point to a description of it?

It's conspicuously centrist and pro-global-capitalism (see: articles essentially saying "human lives on earth has definitely gotten better under capitalism" (and not explicitly saying "world-average QoL is the correct metric by which to measure progress", nor addressing counterfactual hypotheses), + anti-trump + pretty skeptical of brexit. These are sort of acceptable, manageable biases to my eye: is there more I'm missing?

<comment><USER11> Everyone has a different level of "acceptable, manageable biases"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll try to figure this out today

<comment><USER12> It seems to be back up, but I didn't do anything. I'm still going to find out what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Thanks for posting this. I probably wouldn't have noticed until January.

Edit: it turned out to be a problem with the server. Thanks again for the heads up and for everyone's kind words.

<comment><USER13> When Aaron died, I cried. First and only time I've cried for anyone's passing.

The world lost a great one that day. Thanks for helping us remember him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here you go, an IPFS copy:

[https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmbABUy4jr8432sfAV97Vicyzu9kmpt...](https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmbABUy4jr8432sfAV97Vicyzu9kmptJ5pDGyLkefP1FXq/)

Now it's permanent (please pin the hash to help).

</comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for posting this, I have passed a message to a friend of Aaron's dad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome :) Hope this gets solved soon as I think it's important to keep Aaron's thoughts alive

<comment><USER15> Np, he would have noticed this thread sooner or later anyway, maybe this makes it happen a bit sooner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Correction: His weblog is (back) online.

And I think his friends and family take great care in making sure his legacy stays online and make sure everyone still alive can keep reading some of the most provocative posts from one of the brightest minds of our generation published on the internet.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the update, I was about to post this myself. Glad to see it's back online!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm interested to know how others are preserving websites. Due to incomplete snapshots, broken links and spam companies taking over expired domains, it's often difficult to browse or get a complete image of a website using the Wayback machine. So lately I've been using tools like Wayback Machine Downloader to grab as much as I can, then fix up the archive (using relative links, removing unnecessary Javascript, etc.) and finally republish everything as a Github repo using gh-pages. There must be a better way?

<comment><USER19> Making a better archiving tool would be a great open source project.

Wayback machine's archiver appears to be open source: [https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback](https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> aaronsw.com ought to be declared a heritage site.

He is one of a kind.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wayback: [https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve)

</comment><comment><USER22> As of 11:18AM EST I can access everything just fine. Seems to either be back or it's an isolated problem.

</comment><comment><USER23> I noticed a Bitcoin address was added to his website, it looks like in 2016 [1]. It would be nice to know who controls it and what it's for.

1\. [https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1AaronhQN1sfV24364mne...](https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1AaronhQN1sfV24364mneNmVYvyzrZrEPh)

<comment><USER24> Are those custom? Or is it a total coincidence it starts with 1Aaron?

<comment><USER23> [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I new Aaron well but didn't interact with him as much as I would like. I think it's one of those things where you expect that there's always going to be time ...

I think I'm going to go back and read some of his blog posts since I haven't read most of them.

Should bring back some good memories.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have several of his pages and posts saved in my personal Bookmark Archiver archive as well:

[https://archive.sweeting.me/archive/1528683804/aaronsw.com/i...](https://archive.sweeting.me/archive/1528683804/aaronsw.com/index.html)

Including his list of saved articles on Pinboard:

[https://archive.sweeting.me/archive/1528683819/pinboard.in/u...](https://archive.sweeting.me/archive/1528683819/pinboard.in/u%3Aaaronsw.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> "Origin DNS Error" on the archive link.

<comment><USER28> Let me guess, you're using Cloudflare DNS (188.8.131.52)?

Archive.is blocks Cloudflare DNS. You should switch to another DNS server if you want to use it.

<comment><USER29> Why?

<comment><USER30> > [...] Nameservers responsible for archive.is (ben.archive.is, > anna.archive.is) are returning answers tailored to the IP address of the > requestor [...]

From this thread [https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is- error-1001/182...](https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is- error-1001/18227)

<comment><USER31> That's "how" not "why". Most major services tailor queries based on the source IP, for some reason when archive.is does it to cloudflare queries it's either broken or purposefully broken. At first I thought it might be something to do with 188.8.131.52 in the archive.is network but then I noticed cloudflare queries on behalf of clients don't even source from that IP.

<comment><USER32> See here: [https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aarchiveis%20cloudflare&s...](https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aarchiveis%20cloudflare&src=typd&lang=en&lang=en)

Archive.is intentionally returns bad results to Cloudflare DNS, because Cloudflare don't send them the EDNS Client Subnet Header. Archive.is haven't said much about why, but what they have said appears to accord with this blog post: [https://www.sajalkayan.com/post/cloudflare-1dot1dot1dot1.htm...](https://www.sajalkayan.com/post/cloudflare-1dot1dot1dot1.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> jottit.com (aaronsw project) is also down, because of an expired certificate

</comment><comment><USER34> It looks like his domain name expired and was squatted. Someone should try to buy it back and rehost the original site. If someone trustworthy undertook that project I'd contribute like $50

</comment><comment><USER35> It seems to be back online now. Thanks for letting us know.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's up again

</comment><comment><USER37> I was able to see all pages except for "3\. Look at yourself objectively"

<comment><USER38> You can read that post if you navigate to the main blog page and then scroll down to that particular post.

<comment><USER37> Found it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> can someone find a key Aaron's family member and pay for 10 years of hosting and domain renewals? That's nothing to thousands of his fans

<comment><USER40> His brother is literally in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Seems to be back online.

</comment><comment><USER42> a young man was killed for web scraping a passworded site. Only in murica

<comment><USER43> He wasn't killed, they were ("only") going to imprison him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I doubt his kind of "dangerous" thinking will be allowed to be spread for much longer in our corporate dystopian internet. It's just a matter of time before speech daring to criticize the corporations will be considered a security threat or whatever and immediately deleted.

<comment><USER45> Based on which precedent did you arrive at this conclusion?

<comment><USER46> Right now there is an addition to the next budget bill in the US senate that is about to outlaw the ability for federal or local government agencies doing business with any company or individual involved in the BDS movement.

If you are going to penalize my freedom to NOT buy products the originate from a specific location, it is a slippery slope to see what other forms of protest might be curtailed in order to alter markets.

Edit: Downvote me all you want, doesn't make it less true.

[0] [https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/30/rand-paul- israel-m...](https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/30/rand-paul-israel- military-aid-congress-senate-1036943)

<comment><USER47> >Edit: Downvote me all you want, doesn't make it less true.

I suspect you're being downvoted because you're off topic and not contributing to the discussion in a constructive way. On the other hand, HN and reddit users have a habit of downvoting comments they disagree with.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


100 Vim commands every programmer should know - <AUTHOR> http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/web-development/100-vim-commands-every-programmer-should-know-11 <comment><USER2> I'm shocked that this doesn't cover keyboard macro recording.

If you press q and then some letter, then do something, and press q again, it will record that as an action. For instance, qadWElpbq ("Start recording this in register a: cut next word, move to end of next word, forward char, paste, backward to beginning of that word. Done recording.". Basically, move the word under the cursor ahead one word.) under a (the qa) at the beginning, and then to repeat it you can just type @a. This is frequently straightforward for things that would be awkward with regex find-and-replace.

This works with the numeric prefixes, too; you could then type 10@a to shift a word ahead ten words, or double-space the next 200 lines, or what have you. Note, though, that vim's . repeat operator doesn't see the macro as one unit, so to repeat it you have to specify quantity.

Once your fingers learn this, you will use it _all the time_.

You can do this in basic vi, but as far as I know you have to manually stuff the macro into the character register* by writing it out and deleting it into a register, e.g. "ad$ (that's "a for into-register a, d$ for delete-to end-of- line). This feels more awkward than just hitting q (register) to start recording, but it's still useful. (* In BSD's nvi, at least.)

(The same thing in Emacs is C-x ( to start recording, C-x ) to stop recording, and C-x e to execute the last macro. There are commands to name and save your keyboard macros in a more permanent fashion, but I don't remember what they're called. Anything that isn't a throwaway macro I tend to just write in elisp anyway.)

<comment><USER3> > I'm shocked that this doesn't contain keyboard macro recording.

Yes. And maps (e.g. :map <F12> :w<cr> to save with F12). And block mode (Ctrl-V) and text objects (e.g. ci" deletes the inside of parentheses and goes to insert mode) and a slew of others.

I find the idea that there are 100 vim commands every programmer should know a but ludicrous though.

<comment><USER4> _ci" deletes the inside of parentheses_

I think you mean inside quotes, by the way.

 _I find the idea that there are 100 vim commands every programmer should know a but ludicrous though._

Especially considering that the "100" commands were all compositions of simpler vim commands anyways. I don't think this is actually that great a submission, for this reason. How many ways are there to rehash some really specific example -- say, counting both ":set syntax [on|off]"? Vim is so much more general than that. It seems inaccurate -- even discourteous -- to treat this as some laundry list of commands in your bag of tricks (except in the case of, say, muscle memory). From my experience, you don't memorize some long string of letters as a command; you think of what each tiny bit does in and of itself, then compose that into whatever you want to accomplish. Rather than commit the string "ggguG" to your brain, vim users think of it as "go to the beginning of the file (gg), then uppercase (gu) to the end of the the file (G)". Granted, vim gets more complicated as you delve into the realm of motions, .vimrc level configurations, ex command line, etc.

Also, it seems that vim users would be the real ones who need to know such things, not every programmer altogether. The title feels cheap / sensationalized that way.

If there were some REAL list of vim commands "every programmer should know" (well, vim-user), I'd at least start by recommending the alphabet...

<comment><USER5> Well, I found the list to be very useful. I did not know about "/jo[ha]n", for example.

<comment><USER6> That's basic regular expression syntax. Learning that will go a long way in helping you learn a lot of tools in Unix, including grep, sed, vim, emacs, perl (which generally has a slightly different syntax, but one that matches in this case), bash programming in general, and more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't a patch on <http://rayninfo.co.uk/vimtips.html>. Looks like most of it has been taken from here anyway. Is it really necessary for a programmer to rot13 his code??

</comment><comment><USER8> Why should every programmer know these ? Sensationalistic blogging ?

</comment><comment><USER9> The one I keep forgetting is ":q!" (really!). I think it's some kind of brain defect on my part.

<comment><USER10> as an emacs user, that's the only one I'm required to know. :)

Actually I'm competent in vi, so I can pair with others, but man I don't like it.

<comment><USER6> I started off using Xemacs during my undergrad, but I never really learned how to use it efficiently. When I later returned to Unix, I picked up vim and started using it for everything. When I later returned to emacs, even having learned some keybindings (thanks to GNU readline in gnome-terminal), I just felt handcuffed in my movement abilities.

The thing that makes vim great is the many (confusing for initial users, perhaps) different ways of moving around in the file, entering Insert mode, etc. Once you get the hang of that, you'll find yourself cursing any editor that doesn't have an easy way to move to the end of the 3rd word from the current location.

That said, I think I'll eventually find myself using emacs in viper-mode, especially if I ever get around to migrating to Lisp (from mainly Python).

<comment><USER10> "Once you get the hang of that, you'll find yourself cursing any editor that doesn't have an easy way to move to the end of the 3rd word from the current location."

I find myself cursing any editor that is moded. Moded editing is simply wrong. That said, I doubt there is any movement command in vi that is missing from emacs. The editors are the same in basic text-editing functionality. They differ drastically in philosophy and extended functionality.

<comment><USER6> Ok... well here is something that especially bothers me when working at my shell prompt. In vim, I press W to skip to the first character of the next word, where the only word delimiter is whitespace. In emacs, M-f moves forward to the next word, but any punctuation (including underscores, strangely) is considered to be a separator. So how do I perform this movement in emacs?

In vim, I press l to move to the right one character. In emacs, it's C-f or I have to reach for the right arrow. Do you really think the movement commands in emacs are just as convenient as vim?

I think moded editors mirror the desired functionality perfectly. In some cases, I just want to be typing a lot of stuff, and when I'm doing that, I'm in Insert mode. In other cases, I want to move around the file and make various minor edits, and for this I'm in Normal mode. How is that "simply wrong"? It's basically similar to when a user of a point-and-click IDE would switch from typing stuff to pointing-and-clicking on stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And they say emacs is complex ...

</comment><comment><USER12> I hope that 100 is in base 2...

</comment><comment><USER13> This is nice and all but where are the commands for macros?

</comment><comment><USER14> Zl snibevgr vf ttITt?

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess I am simply too lazy for Vim.

<comment><USER6> So because you're lazy, you'd rather use more keystrokes to accomplish the same task? (I voted you up because I didn't see any need for you to get -1 karma for that comment.)

<comment><USER15> Not sure, many of the tasks never really seem to come up. When I used emacs, I used the macro recording facility a lot, for example to change larger chunks of code.

Eventually I had to switch to Eclipse, and didn't really need the Macros anymore, because of the refactoring functionality that comes with Eclipse. For example, in Emacs I used a macro to quickly generate getters and setters for my class variables (Java - I know...). Eclipse has a Source->Generate Getters and Setters Menu item, so I don't need to fumble around with Macros anymore.

Not saying that Eclipse is better, but I simply don't seem to be the kind of person who can remember 100 key combinations. I couldn't for emacs, either, even though sometimes I tried to learn new Emacs tricks.

I didn't learn that many keyboard shortcuts for Eclipse, either, even though I keep telling myself that I should. But I can only remember the most important ones, and I learn them because the menu items display a keyboard shortcut.

By the way, I seem to remember a quote by some Apple employee who said that in experiments using the GUI was actually faster than keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcut people thought they were faster, but they weren't. Not sure if it is true - hard to believe, but still.

<comment><USER6> I want to first state for the record that my above comment was intended as a joke (I should have winked), but I think you knew that.

That said, the beauty of vim (and I'm assuming emacs as well) is that with the macro facilities, _you are basically writing small programs to manipulate your source code_ , interactively. Let's say I want to convert some markdown into HTML using vim. Let's create the following source code (using whatever method you want):

      * List item 1
      * List item 2
      * List item 3
      * List item 4

We want to transform it to:

List item 1

List item 2

List item 3

List item 4

(Let's ignore the fact that the trailing
 is unnecessary.) Open up the initial file in vim, and press the following keys (note that <ESC> indicates the Escape key, but all other key presses are literal, including the two spaces before
):

      ggO
<ESC>qqj^2s
<ESC>A
<ESC>q3@qo
<ESC>

gg - start from the top (not necessary if we're already there)

O - enter a new line above current line and enter Insert mode

<ESC> \- enter some text

qq - begin recording all keystrokes into register "q" (here is the "writing small program" part that I mentioned)

j^ - move down and to the beginning of the next line

2s - erase two characters, entering insert mode

<SPACE><SPACE>
<ESC> \- enter some more text

A - move to the end of the current line and enter insert mode

<ESC> \- enter some more text

q - stop recording

3@q - perform the keystrokes recorded in register "q" 3 times (run our "small program" 3 times). This step always makes me smile, because seeing such complex changes to a large piece of code with just a few keystrokes seems almost magical

o - enter Insert mode after the current (last) line

<ESC> \- enter some more text. Note: you may need to press Ctrl-d before typing
 if you have autoindent turned on, in order to decrease the indent

Task completed. That is a somewhat trivial example, but it's a small taste of something that no editor without keyboard macros -- and the power to control everything with keystrokes -- could ever accomplish.

It also showcases 4 different methods (O, s, A, o) for entering Insert mode (none of them being the typical i), all of them useful in their own right. These are the types of things I miss when using emacs (without viper-mode).

<comment><USER15> I didn't follow your example exactly, but I think it is similar to what I'd do with Emacs macros. I would record things like "move cursor to end of word", "skip two words", "capitalize word" and so on, which were all available as keyboard shortcuts, and then just press "repeat macro five times", done.

I enjoyed working like that, also because one feels rather clever doing such things, but as I said, it didn't come up that much anymore with Eclipse. I am also not sure if I was really that much faster, because I often had to look up stuff like how to skip a word and so on.

However, I am very curious about vim and Emacs, as I am currently considering to switch back. Mostly I would really like an editor that allows me to extend it myself quickly. One can write Eclipse plugins, but I don't know how complicated it is. Maybe not that complicated - but it certainly would have to be in Java, which I'd like to get away from.

Probably I'll switch back to Emacs, as I already know it a little bit. I am worried that Emacs LISP is too messy to be worthwhile to learn, though (I am more of a Scheme person, I guess).

I never knew Vim was so extendible, it certainly sounds very interesting. I am not much of a Unix shell wizard, though - although I wouldn't mind becoming better at that, either (I've read that extending Vim draws on shell commands?).

Btw., what made me switch to Eclipse was a project that Emacs couldn't handle. It was J2ME programming, and back then as much code as possible had to go into one file. So I had a 10000 lines code file, and Emacs would just crash or not do much. It was also impossible to navigate without the "abstract code view" (which let's you click on methods and jump to their position in the code). My colleagues were using Eclipse and laughing about me... There are other niceties about Eclipse, like the local history or good svn integration.

It certainly seems a bit of a drag to set up Emacs for coding again (Ruby on Rails would be my next target). It can do a lot of things, like jumping to code snippets and so on, but first you have to set it up, somehow. As I said, I am lazy, I'd rather have an Editor or IDE that is configured properly out of the box.

I wasn't so impressed with Netbeans for RoR, though. Didn't look at it for long, but it didn't even help you fill in the parameters for the code generators - it merely provided some buttons to run them. If I could extend my editor easily, I would make something better (hopefully I will).

<comment><USER6> _I am also not sure if I was really that much faster, because I often had to look up stuff like how to skip a word and so on._

But that is the reason that I love it in vim. Because of the lack of mouse support and the powerful ways to move around in Normal mode, learning the different movement commands is a must. Then, when you go to build macros, you're using the same commands you always do.

<comment><USER15> How long do you reckon would it take learn the commands? I wouldn't mind being good at that...

Edit: I am suddenly intrigued to learn Vim. Is there a mode for editing MZScheme? Or what is the best way to program MZScheme with Vim? Ruby on Rails would also be of interest. JavaScript?

<comment><USER6> I'm still learning more commands, actually. h j k l w b { and } are some good ones to start with, and then once you find yourself using those all the time, you can pull out a vim cheat sheat and learn some more, like e ( ) # and *, and so on...

I have not yet found a language that doesn't have a vim mode, at least in my Gentoo installation. This includes HTML, CSS, Lisp, C, Python, Xorg.conf, various Gentoo system files, httpd.conf, and anything else I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> :q!

<comment><USER17> :q!

 _heal wounds_

emacs &</comment></comment>


Limitations and Caveats of Scikit-Learn (+ Solutions) - <AUTHOR> https://www.dotlayer.org/en/blog/2020-03-04-what-is-wrong-with-sklearn/neat-machine-learning-pipelines/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: How could things work to allow us to do what's in the above list with the Pipe and Filter design pattern / architectural style that is particular of Scikit-Learn? The API must be redesigned to include broader functionalities, such as allowing the definition of hyperparameter spaces, and allowing a more comprehensive object lifecycle & data flow functionalities in the steps of a pipeline.</comment>