Bret Victor's favourite books - <AUTHOR> http://worrydream.com/#!/Links <comment><USER2> I really like "Reading Tip #1" in the "Links 2013" page, reproduced below:

It's tempting to judge what you read:

 _I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those._

However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It's almost certainly the case that you don't fully understand their statements.

Instead, you can say:

 _I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent._

And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don't have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it's needed.

<comment><USER3> > _I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those._

I find both of these reactions to be equally subversive. Whenever I find myself _agreeing_ with something, I'm unwilling to poke around for holes in arguments or question the accuracy of facts presented. Similarly, whenever I _disagree_ with something, I'm unwilling to concede the strong points of an argument or approach the problem from the presented perspective.

To minimize the effects of these emotional reactions, it helps making my judgments as granual as possible. (Don't judge the person: judge each individual action separately. Don't judge actions, judge consequence and intention separately, etc.)

Furthermore, to minimize the polarizing effects of true-false dichotomies, I instead assign ratings (1-6) for a statement's probability of being true.

For opening myself to contradicting world views, it helps to ask _what would have to change in the world for this statement to be true?_. Instead of forward-reasoning, where you admit your world view and reason forwards to correct conclusions, this mental trick fixes the conclusion and makes you reason backwards towards hypothetical worlds and asks you to identify their properties. It's then easier to diff your view against the proposed worlds and shift your beliefs accordingly.

<comment><USER4> Tha reasoning backward trick sounds very interesting. Certainly a cool idea I have to try!

Also, it sounds you might be interested in LessWrong.com - if you haven't stumbled upon it yourself already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought Godel, Escher, Bach was a total snooze. It was like 800 pages of Hofstadter trying to prove he was clever.

<comment> al-king If you're not into his style, GEB can be a bit perverse, but Hofstadter is genuinely excited by the ideas (and the games and wordplay he uses to convey them). If you look at the sum of his work, its tone comes across as pretty humble - humble for himself, that is; not apologetic for the ideas.

His latest with Emmanuel Sander, "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking", is comparatively much more straightforward and less obfuscated, and still fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is a good pick unless you are already very well versed in history (and many other subjects) and know what to ignore. While an interesting read he takes a strongly biased point of view and many of its claims have not stood the test of time (e.g. Rosenberg's atomic spying). So you may learn may things but many of them will be false.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you. I thought I was buying that book to read about US history, but it's more of an alternate US history for those who already know US history pretty well. His writing style also annoyed me very much as he'd jump from timeframe to timeframe which makes it hard for you to follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Undoubtedly these excellent books call for a unique presentation. I, however, would like to see simple text-only list companion to go along with it. Turns out, this is not just a matter of grep'ing through the source: the only actual "text" are the link URLs.

I wrote a script[0] to create the list for amazon links at least:

        # Script redacted - I think HN isn't happy
        # with my scraping.  Fair enough.

The list contains 44 entries -- to much to post here, I'm afraid.

[0] Using the `mojo` cli tool for ad-hoc HTML parsing from [http://mojolicio.us/](http://mojolicio.us/)

<comment><USER9> Here's the beginning of the list[0] ('Design' and 'Engineering') in plain text (Markdown), using the "I can just type it out faster than I can try to parse it" approach. I'll do more later, maybe.

The 'unique presentation' also seems to mean no alt-text (bad) and no title- text (disappointing)...

[0]: [http://pastebin.com/9NKtqJSw](http://pastebin.com/9NKtqJSw)

Edit: Added a little more[1]. Maybe someone else will add some while I go write an exam :)

[1]: [http://pastebin.com/J0vi5uvJ](http://pastebin.com/J0vi5uvJ)

<comment><USER8> While by no means as well-formatted, the following list contains the output of my now-redacted script: [http://pastebin.com/NT2TKRTM](http://pastebin.com/NT2TKRTM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hamming's "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" is available online as a series of video lectures:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30)

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't there some book about not displaying all of your website's text in images?

<comment><USER12> Could never view that site on my iPhone (4S/iOS7.1). Mobile Safari crashes within a few seconds! Bad design from _my_ 'user' perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In July 2012, it was announced that active development on Fortress would cease after a brief winding-down period, citing complications with using Fortress's type system on existing virtual machines.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_\(programming_language\))

[https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/](https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/)

[https://java.net/downloads/projectfortress/reference.pdf](https://java.net/downloads/projectfortress/reference.pdf)

I'm just putting this here as Bret Victor's link no longer works.

</comment><comment><USER14> This should be on this list [http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-It-Modern- Heuristics/dp/3540...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-It-Modern- Heuristics/dp/3540224947) single best technical book I have ever read.

Also, if you ever need to give a gift, [http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Turing- Omnibus-Excursions/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Turing-Omnibus- Excursions/dp/0805071660)

</comment><comment><USER15> Literature is notably absent...

<comment><USER16> Yeah, for some reason it is culturally unacceptable in our society to claim that fiction literature is unimportant.

We live in a society where it's fine to make shocking arguments about just about anything, but if anyone were to dare argue "What Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare had to say is pretty irrelevant and uninteresting at this point" they are a social pariah.

<comment><USER17> You've touched on something incredibly deep here.

Fact and fiction are one and the same in storytelling, that is, in the conveying of ideas from one person to another.

A mathematical system of symbolic logic is just a strange loop. It is a fiction. It is rooted in nature, in the world that we observe, but so is a poem.

There's been a trend since the Enlightenment to split the world in to RATIONAL SCIENCE and OTHER THINGS. The goal was mainly to finally remove all of the religious mumbo-jumbo and superstition from the realms of science. In the process however, we ignored our qualities of perception and language. Not only is the majority of what is important and true in our lives expressed through words and feelings but it also colors every aspect of mathematics and science. It basically took those fields eating their own tails to realize the ultimate folly of their philosophical pursuits.

Thoughts like these are often misinterpreted as attacks on reason and rationality. They are merely illustrations of the limitation of pure reason, a topic that has been broached by the great thinkers time and again. The lessons never seem to sit. Language and metaphor are constantly shifting yet our written records are set in stone, destined for misinterpretation.

But life without folly, without mystery, what life is that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> $13,000 for used copy of Art of Doing Science and Engineering

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/9056995006/ref=tmm_hr...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/9056995006/ref=tmm_hrd_used_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=used&sr=8-1&qid=1397381213)

<comment><USER7> Or $25 for a Kindle edition: [http://www.amazon.com/Art-Doing-Science- Engineering-ebook/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering- ebook/dp/B000P2XFPA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Aside from the comics, no fiction. That makes me sad.

</comment><comment><USER20> In case someone is looking for Hamming's Art of Science and Engineering book:

[http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming- TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...](http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming- TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEngineering.pdf)

And the entire series of lectures is on youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30)

</comment><comment><USER21> he would likely enjoy Lawvere's conceptual mathematics.

<comment><USER22> This is a very interesting book, but I'm curious as to why you make such statement?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Outside of the comics section, this includes virtually nothing written by women. May be that there's lots of good and important stuff out there Bret is missing.

</comment><comment><USER24> I really enjoy Bret Victor's work, but I found the UX of the favorite books site really hard to navigate and enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER25> This looks like something for the bookmarks, and that's exactly where I've put it now, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER26> Bret Victor is a wonderful man.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why is he using links to Amazon? Any reason why Amazon is preferred over other book stores? Is he getting an money from Amazon?

How about supporting smaller local book stores, instead of making billionaires richer?

<comment><USER28> >> Any reason why Amazon is preferred over other book stores?

Personally, for the reviews, the price and the very fast workflow from "What's this book about, is it good?" to "It's on its way".

>> Is he getting an money from Amazon?

Hopefully.. why not?

>> How about supporting smaller local book stores, instead of making billionaires richer?

In _my_ book stores, there are unfortunately very few books about business and technology. I don't buy from amazon "to make the billionaire richer" but just because they're great at what they do.

<comment><USER27> There are community sites for reviews.

I have several books stores in my town where I can order these books. Even online.

No need to support ONE particular book store.

<comment><USER29> Do these several book stores in your town send books overseas? Are their prices (including packaging and shipping cost) reasonable? Do they provide a site where i can find reviews about books i am interested in while ordering?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Hacker Cup Finals: A Champion is Crowned - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150106829298920

<comment><USER2> Unsurprisingly, the guy who consistently dominates TopCoder is the champion.

[http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=10574...](http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=10574855)

<comment><USER3> Interesting he's also a Googler: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/g2y8n/googler_p...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/g2y8n/googler_petr_mitrichev_wins_facebook_hackathon_5/)</comment></comment>


Interactive Sierpinski Triangles - <AUTHOR> http://lambdafunk.com/2017-03-30-Interactive-Sierpinski-Triangle/ <comment><USER2> I first started coding because I wanted to create fractals (Julia sets, Mandlebrots, Sierpinski gaskets).

Fractint ([https://fractint.org](https://fractint.org)) is brilliant for exploring these things of mathematical beauty.

<comment><USER3> My lord fractint still exists?! THANK YOU KINDLY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Always nice to see some clojure code, even more so when to code is interactive. However, I would not have coded it that way. Call it premature abstraction if you will, but I think, especially in a language guiding you toward purity and immutability like Clojure, that one should avoid "doing" things until the last moment. So instead of drawing triangle, I'd compute them, and only draw the computed triangles as as sequence of polylines. The added benefit it that you can them compose any other transformation on the resulting triangles.

I have not found the time yet to actually write the blog post, but my take would be more like :

[https://scientific- coder.github.io/Playground/2017-03-20-fra...](https://scientific- coder.github.io/Playground/2017-03-20-fractals.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I did something similar, but took it a little further and used Minecraft to render the pyramids. [1]

It was a lot of fun.

[1] [http://taoofcode.net/on-triangles/](http://taoofcode.net/on-triangles/)

</comment><comment><USER6> My favourite Sierpinski triangle page:

[http://www.oftenpaper.net/sierpinski.htm](http://www.oftenpaper.net/sierpinski.htm)

It shows many ways of constructing one, including links to Pascal's triangle.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty neat. The code for this and the older submissions looks pretty clean & elegant to me despite my novice level skills with Clojure and Lisp in general.

<comment><USER8> Here is another interactive blog post with the Sierpinski triangle and other fractals - inspired by the Logo turtle [http://exupero.org/hazard/post/fractals/](http://exupero.org/hazard/post/fractals/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Before uni (15+ years ago) I made a tetrahedron Sierpinski Gasket - it was very fun but crashed the graphics cards of the day with few divisions.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was hoping it would be in Racket. Nonetheless great!</comment>


Show HN: Simple interactive SQL exploration with IPython/Pandas - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/boydgreenfield/query/

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. This was just a little module that I found very useful in quickly exploring large, unfamiliar SQL databases and their associated business logic.

It's fairly rudimentary feature-wise, but has worked well for me. Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER2> There are neat things on your roadmap but I'm actually more curious about the stuff you aren't interested in doing with this. Can you say more about the anti-feature set?</comment></comment>


Thunderbird in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2019/01/thunderbird-in-2019/ <comment><USER2> I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...)

Things I'd like to see improved:

\- Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars).

\- Native PGP.

\- Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fuzzy search and partial contact completion).

\- A bit of UX work, some preferences are just a nightmare to find.

\- Automation (auto tags, auto threading (for example, I get an order confirmation from webshop X, and a while after a shipping confirmation from webshop X, I want those to be grouped)).

\- Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders.

\- Critical bugd being fixed, like "imap"->"local folder" messages vanishing.

<comment><USER3> Native PGP is something I'd be very happy to see. Enigmail is needlessly complex with long setup wizards that frequently fail and a lot of legacy code supported for old distros. Services such as ProtonMail show that focusing on modern conventions and picking the right defaults can really bring encryption to normal users.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried the latest version of Enigmail with P≡P and Autocrypt integration?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it makes a real mess. It generates random numbers of key pairs for each user, breaks subject line encryption randomly, and just generally sucks. I hope it gets better, but it's definitely not something you want to enable at this time, I regret doing it. At this point it's easier to have one person help 50 people manually generate and exchange keys in an office setting.

<comment><USER6> I agree wholeheartedly! It's interesting that trying to make to process easier actually made it hard for both novices and experts.

Too bad it's enabled by default and plagued by issues: [https://pep.foundation/blog/enigmailpep-current- update-1024-...](https://pep.foundation/blog/enigmailpep-current- update-1024-fixes-bug-under-windows/index.html)

<comment><USER5> I really, really want it to work. I'm hopeful it will get better. I don't like PGP keyservers, they aren't very reliable, I wish I could remove all the old keys I've lost. And I don't like publishing my email address like that. Plus, the most of my GPG email use is with keys from people I know that we've sent each other directly. Overall I'm pretty satisfied with Enigmail running in the old PEP-free mode.

<comment><USER3> I'm also running PeP-free mode and I'm satisfied with it. I'm thinking that maybe after initial configuration it just works so the problem is largely setup.

As for keyservers even GnuPG is diminishing their role. Web Key Directory is promoted as a replacement for discovery and updates of keys. Coincidentally Enigmail will automatically fetch recipients keys using WKD when composing an email. For example kernel is using it ([https://www.kernel.org/category/signatures.html#using-the- we...](https://www.kernel.org/category/signatures.html#using-the-web-key- directory)) so does ProtonMail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard).

This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019.

I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email client option out there. But geeze... what a muddled mess of messaging and pivots from this organization.

<comment><USER8> The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it.

What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example).

Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd probably help out.

Edit: Jeeze! You guys sure hate Electron. Just because a tool is misused so often, doesn't mean it's a bad tool.

<comment><USER9> Electron apps are usually pretty terrible.

They have issues with:

1\. Memory usage and cpu usage (you're running a browser to run your application)

2\. Platform look and feel (doesn't exist in javascript)

3\. Platform and windowing behaviors.

I agree with the other commented to you.. if it changed to electronic, I would drop it as well.

<comment><USER8> Hence the spin-off app. A ground-up, UX focused app which does not have to meet feature parity, would attract users who are already confused by email clients.

This is a different target audience to the people who typically use Thunderbird at this time.

For some people Apple Mail is enough.

<comment><USER10> TBH, anyone I interact with who is tech savvy doesn't use email, so I really don't need those features.

<comment><USER11> > anyone I interact with who is tech savvy doesn't use email

You live in a strange bubble.

<comment><USER10> We're not corresponding via email... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Between github, SMS, social media, IRC & slack, video-conferencing, blogs, RSS, etc., email has become the medium of last resort. I still get a lot of email, but it's mostly automated notifications, and I usually have to log in somewhere to actually recieve a document because email is insecure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thunderbird still has a critical bug open that literally deletes your email. I have been bitten by it once and lost hundreds of email permanently. Not fun. I am subscribed to the ticket and every month or so someone posts an outraged "me too".

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156)

<comment><USER13> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141): "This bug has lasted this long because there is no reproducible test case, so thus no way for an engineer to diagnose the problem and test a patch."

I sympathize, but I'm not sure what you expect the team to do. The bug seems highly intermittent even when it does occur and there doesn't seem to be anything in common between the systems that are affected.

<comment><USER10> Normal troubleshooting for intermittent issues is to add logging and diagnostics around possible areas it's happening and have users send in traces when it bites them again.

<comment><USER13> Sure, if you have some idea what the set of "possible areas" are. If you read the comments, it's possible there are several multiple overlapping bugs. And I don't see a whole lot of traces from those afflicted.

I agree such bugs are at best obnoxious and at worst cataclysmic. But having been on the receiving end of such nebulous intermittent reports myself, I'm not going to simply conclude the team is incompetent or uninterested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recently discovered this add-on:

* [https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsyn...](https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/)

* [https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4...](https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4-tbsync/)

An actual working atcivesync support for calendar and contacts.

With Exchange being still very pervasive in corporate environments, it's quite useful.

<comment><USER15> Oh thank you! I really wish Thunderbird would support EAS/MAPI over HTTP/EWS. They're so widely used and it's irritating to have to use the memory hog that is Evolution.

<comment><USER15> Update: works really well, shame it doesn't do email at the same time, but I guess it's a WIP. Cheers!

<comment><USER16> As an aside, if using IMAP for the exchange account (as @shmerl suggests) doesn't work for you, you might have better luck with DavMail [1]. I've used it in the past before my workplace enabled IMAP access for exchange mailboxes.

[1] [http://davmail.sourceforge.net/](http://davmail.sourceforge.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thunderbird is, hands down, my most used desktop app, if we're not counting IDEs and editors. Definitely would recommend; Thunderbird is awesome.

<comment><USER18> Not counting browsers?

<comment><USER19> Maybe they don't surf the web all day at work.

<comment><USER18> Reference; research; testing and debugging web sites in the 5 major desktop browsers; communication and data entry apps required for work that have a horrible desktop client, or no desktop client at all; etc. There's a lot of useful, work related things browsers provide access to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Glad to see UX on that list. Under the hood Thunderbird is incredibly powerfull, but actually using it beyond the most basic workflows is mildly painful. With competition from highly polished webmail clients with autolabeling features I find it hard to actually recommend Thunderbird to anyone unless they _need_ PGP (which is even more painful in Thunderbird, but PGP in the cloud is a different threat model).

</comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for this great news for people hungry for good desktop alternatives for the abundant webmails. Please spend part of the effort on Lightning (the calendar add-on).

</comment><comment><USER22> As a daily user my personal preference almost align with their goals. I look forward very much to the day that I can stop using mail-notification in Gnome. The Thunderbird built-in system has seemingly broken polling feature (not sure if it does anything when running minimized), and has no option to specify folders that you want fast notification when a new mail arrives. I always miss Gnome mail-notification when I am using Windows, and sometimes have my laptop running Gnome next to the Windows computer just for this purpose.

The second feature I would very much like them to work on is search. It is horrifically slow, seems to miss some mail (html only maybe?) and the result window has terrible UI. You can't preview why the search found something so either you run a more narrow search or manually go through each email it found. There is also no threading in the result window so you lose a lot of context.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. I love Thunderbird, and gave it a shot last year as my work email client (exchange). Loved almost everything, but ultimately the search and lack of threading sent me back to outlook web access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> IMO the _real_ revolution might be a decision to integrate notmuch so to move from a '90s-like UI/workflow to a modern era one so powerful that can easily outshine webmails.

Also, with a proper maildir cloning support (mbsync like for instance) it may give to the casual users the opportunity to have locally their messages.

Otherwise anything Mozilla can do can at maximum keep a zombie alive simply because of lack of less ugly widespread and generic alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's good to hear that Thunderbird is getting more resources. One UI bug that I didn't see mentioned in the post though, and that shouldn't exist in 2019, is that Thunderbird loses the scroll position of a tab when changing tabs. I hope this will get fixed soon.

<comment><USER26> Lol, Thunderbird seemingly has plenty of major loss-of-data bugs (I lost all my archives recently; synced up to the server -- that bug seems to be several years old (but rare)).

I'd almost guarantee that your tab-scroll-position bug is fixed first. It seems to be the way of things.

Thunderbird seems incredibly janky to me (unstable and easy to break, rough around the edges). Maybe my experience is rare ... would love to see it become solid and fast.

<comment><USER27> You lost everything and it was totally gone? Or did you have a backup and restored?

<comment><USER26> Well I had a backup of sorts, domestic environment, but did lose data (yes I shouldn't have trusted it).

Still haven't managed to debug so can't use Thunderbird properly yet; changing app is a major upheaval after a decade or more [not quite continuous use, tried Kmail, Opera, and a few others like Sylpheed, Mutt(!), in the interim -- after Pine, proprietary apps TB was my first desktop MUA].

So, I need to audition new MUAs (family friendly), then recover what I can.

<comment><USER28> Mailspring? [1] Its FOSS.

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

<comment><USER29> Only part of it is FOSS (the UI basically), the sync engine is closed source and using Mailspring requires creating a Mailspring account FWIW.

<comment><USER30> I wonder what's in their privacy policy. I don't mind paying but wish everyone didn't use the same semi-copy pasted privacy policies for liability reasons.

Edit: typical 'your pii is an asset we transfer when we get acquired' clause

Information Shared with Third Parties. We may share aggregated information and non-identifying information with third parties for industry research and analysis, demographic profiling and other similar purposes.

Information Disclosed in Connection with Business Transactions. Information that we collect from our users, including PII, is considered to be a business asset. Thus, if we are acquired by a third party as a result of a transaction such as a merger, acquisition or asset sale or if our assets are acquired by a third party in the event we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, some or all of our assets, including your PII, may be disclosed or transferred to a third party acquirer in connection with the transaction

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's good to hear that people are interested in actually getting something set up to track performance metrics, but I won't believe it until I actually see it.

One thing I would add to performance metrics is that tests for very large folders (of about 1M) should be added. I was talking with someone last night who was complaining about how long it took to delete 200K messages from his inbox, so it's not a wholly implausible metric. I just worry that people are going to focus on metrics that go "oh, there's no issue with a 1K message folder since it's all within the 16ms budget" without looking to see their impact on 10K or 100K folders, which is where people really complain about performance.

<comment><USER32> Issues with large (as in message count) mailboxes is a common thing nowadays. Don't know about client side as I've been working on the server side for past few years (see [https://wildduck.email/](https://wildduck.email/)). Clients with large mailboxes cause a lot of issues both server implementation wise and operation wise. For example some widely used IMAP server software dies if an IMAP client tries to SELECT a maildir folder with >320k messages (every message in the folder yields in some file system calls while SELECTing, it takes some time and then the process that handles the client connection just crashes due to some overflow or whatever). Also there's older versions of Outlook (eg. 2010) that tend to sync state by FETCHing FLAGS of all messages in all folders every X minute and causing huge amounts of traffic and so on.

<comment><USER31> I'm not terribly surprised. It's easy to forget that mailboxes are actually databases, and at the scale of GB databases, you're going to start stealing ideas from the database community on how to manage databases rather than relying on the filesystem to act as a database for you.

Thunderbird itself does a nastily poor job of scaling to massive folders, since it assumes that it can do UI-thread-synchronous operations like "get a list of every message in the database." (And fixing it is _hard_... as I have way too much experience with).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Really good to see Thunderbird getting some attention and a dedicated development team. I have to use Microsoft Exchange at work and Thunderbird (i'm on version 60) with a couple of plugins, has been the client that has worked best for me on linux.

</comment><comment><USER33> I use Thunderbird pretty much just for FiltaQuilla extension, which runs shell commands when email matching some filter arrives. It would be nice to have this functionality built-in and extended (e.g. email data could be passed to stdin).

The biggest drawbacks is overall slowness (especially when syncing with server) and search UI (which really needs to be condensed). BTW it would be nice to have option to search for all mails involving some address by just right-clicking the address, like in Mailspring.

</comment><comment><USER34> First of all I'm very happy to see a community-driven Thunderbird that's still alive and kicking. I used Thunderbird before and I can see myself returning to it.

Now I'm on MacOS and I use MailMate, see: [https://freron.com/](https://freron.com/)

I wish Thunderbird would be more like it. It's simple, fast, uses Markdown in its editor, has nice keyboard shortcuts, plays well with Gmail's labels, has smart filters and works well with multiple accounts and aliases.

Seeing some of the comments, I'm surprised to see people putting emphasis on Thunderbird's calendar or missing CardDav support. Well, MailMate provides no such support.

I.e. for calendars I simply use Apple's Calendar, for contacts I use Apple's Contacts. I don't need my email client to handle these.

That Thunderbird can do it, that's cool, but I think Thunderbird has problems in handling email that should be fixed first. And I'm glad to see them invest in better Gmail support. I don't even use Gmail as my personal account, but in this day and age it's a must and the features (like labels) will prove handy for other email providers too.

</comment><comment><USER35> I just switched away from Thunderbird after I found out about a long standing bug where the search index may not be updated sometimes, resulting in some emails not being discoverable with search.

Not able to find emails in my email client is a 100% deal breaker.

Back to Outlook I go. It's search isn't perfect, but at least emails show up eventually.

<comment><USER36> Not really a good reason for switching. Make sure you regularly rebuild your search indexes in Outlook because I have several helpdesk calls that were fixed that way (partial results, last seen in OL 2016) ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if Mozilla evaluates hiring teams in areas with lower avg income but still reasonable quality of CS education like Eastern Europe, Russia, etc. to get faster product development for the same donations.

</comment><comment><USER38> I actually like Thunderbird since when I discovered MRC Compose extension[0] which provides a UI similar to Outlook in the To, CC and BCC fields. Having to input one by one the email addresses is troublesome in my use case (lots of addresses to manipulate when replying). It's a pity it isn't a default behaviour.

[0] [https://addons.thunderbird.net/en- US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-c...](https://addons.thunderbird.net/en- US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-compose/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Every time I am excited to try Thunderbird I am sent packing because of all the features that are barely implemented or don't work well.

The practice of having plugins do core functionality is just not a good idea. Things that 90% of the users use should ship in the product.

For instance, cloud Exchange support is lacking. I couldn't even login to my work account, while other clients (Windows Mail, iOS, Outlook, etc...) have no issues whatsoever.

The calendar is just awful. The contacts is completely bare bones.

Here is hoping the new folks breathe some life into it.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is anyone successfully using Thunderbird with Google calendar? I gave up on it a couple years ago and just use the website, but I'd love to use it again if possible. I honestly can't remember what issues I had, but I do remember near the end I was using it as a view only feature, but for actually stating hangouts or creating new meetings I still had to use the website anyway.

<comment><USER41> It's working OK for me (via the Provider for Google Calendar add-on), though I haven't tried starting hangouts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> An email client that doesn't have a mobile companion app is an immediate thumbs down for me. I want a consistent experience for something as important as email, whether I'm on a laptop or on my phone.

Sigh. That probably means Thunderbird mobile is going to take till... 2021? 2022?

<comment><USER43> Could you say more about why that is?

For me it's like a Swiss Army knife versus my full kitchen. I use a basic email client on my phone for on-the-go stuff (seeing what has come in, making quick replies). But for doing anything serious, I want a full keyboard and reasonable screen real estate. I don't think it's possible to have a particularly consistent experience, so I'm fine with using a different client on my phone.

<comment><USER42> I like special features of AirMail, for instance, where you can snooze certain emails. If they only had a desktop client, then I can't snooze on the go on my phone. And now I have to context switch and remember to delay certain tasks to when I get to my laptop.

Email clients also sometimes impose some level of formatting, and I'd like that to be consistent across mobile/web as well

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm still on Thunderbird 52 because the upgrade to 60 ruined my calendar. I hope the next ESR version works better. :-/

I don't even use Thunderbird for email anymore, so I guess what I really want is a standalone calendaring application that I can migrate to.

</comment><comment><USER45> I have a couple family members that were heavy Thunderbird users. They recently switched off it because it was chewing up CPU when in the backgound, and the spam filtering doesn't really work. Glad to hear they are getting some more engineers.

</comment><comment><USER46> Amazing how they are working on speed when thunderbird is about 20x faster than gmail

</comment><comment><USER47> one thing I'm really hoping for is more support for calendars. I see no way to view / change the color of events. while I can add them to categories, it is much easier for me to color code them.</comment>


Show HN: A system for freelancers to get paid on time - <AUTHOR> https://www.freelancerprotocol.com/?hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hackers! It's 2020 and yet getting paid (especially on time) is still a _major_ issue for freelancers.

In the UK where I'm based, freelancers spend 7.5% of their time chasing payments, and roughly another 7.5% doing work they won't end up getting paid for. That's 1.5 hours a day wasted if you work 10-hour days!

I've come up with a process for freelancers to get paid on time, every time. Freelancer Protocol ([https://www.freelancerprotocol.com/](https://www.freelancerprotocol.com/)) is the web app I've built around it, enabling any freelancers and their clients to use that process.

Here's how it works:

1\. Projects are broken down into intermediary steps - we call them milestones. A milestone has a deliverable and a price, as well as a start and end date.

2\. We (a third party) charge the client when each milestone starts and pay the freelancer when it ends, given the deliverable is marked as delivered by the deadline.

It's brand new so I'd love to hear your feedback on both the landing page and the actual product.

Thanks for checking it out!

Elliot

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there a recomended length for the milestones inside the site? (I think the best option is 1 or 2 weeks.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen it work best when it's at least a couple of days!</comment></comment>


Survey: Most Developers Now Prefer HTML5 For Cross-Platform Development - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/survey-most-developers-now-prefer-html5-for-cross-platform-development/

<comment><USER2> Telerik is a .NET company. So the most interesting platform ranking is a little biased.

But I think cache-manifest support is growing just as reading device sensors in Javascript. So HTML5 cross-platform development is indeed becoming important.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think is skewed because those particular developers don't code for those platforms. I think there are just generally more web programmers (the bar is much lower).</comment>


RFC: Improving license and patent issues in the LLVM community - <AUTHOR> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-October/091536.html <comment><USER2> The Apache license isn't compatible with GPLv2.

Isn't it possible to take a standard patent clause and add it to their UIUC/MIT licenses? Google has done something similar with Go, using BSD + their own patent grant.[1]

[1] [https://golang.org/PATENTS](https://golang.org/PATENTS)

<comment><USER3> GPLv2 incompatibility does seem like a possible issue. Moving to Apache would make it impossible to ever embed LLVM in the Linux kernel, for example. That might seem unnecessary now, but perhaps someday there will be a use for a JIT in the kernel, that we can't foresee.

The same problem might exist with other patent clauses, though - is the Go one compatible with GPLv2?

<comment><USER4> "Moving to Apache would make it impossible to ever embed LLVM in the Linux kernel, for example"

Because the kernel is GPLv2 only, you also can't embed the GCC JIT, as it's GPLv3.

So essentially, you are screwed along multiple axes

"but perhaps someday there will be a use for a JIT in the kernel, that we can't foresee."

Maybe, but you can't solve every use case on one side.

(IE it may be that the kernel may have to have some licensing movement as well)

<comment><USER3> Yes, multiple axes, but this would be a regression for LLVM.

In any case, there are other compilers which would remain license compatible with the GPL2, so should the kernel ever need one it could still have one, I guess it just wouldn't be LLVM or GCC.

<comment><USER4> "but this would be a regression for LLVM"

Surely, but as you can imagine, the LLVM community needs to figure out whether this is a use case they care about (it was raised in that discussion, and i think the consensus so far has been "not really")

<comment><USER3> Yes, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure why this got posted, but the gist of it is:

LLVM has reasonable reasons to want to move to either a CLA or straight Apache license (which has a CLA built in).

Then the discussion bifurcates into both a ton of armchair lawyering, and an IMHO reasonable discussion of the merits of each option.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Not sure why this got posted"

Just figured people might like to know a piece of software a lot of us use might change its license. That change might have positive / negative effects on current activities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be pretty sad if they go the Apache route, permissive licensing is a longer term benefit IMHO.

<comment><USER6> Usually when people speak of 'permissive' open source licenses they mean noncopyleft ones including the Apache License 2.0. Do you define 'permissive' as meaning 'textually simple noncopyleft licenses'? (I sometimes use 'simple permissive' for this category.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is lifting Linux FS drivers to user-space possible? - <AUTHOR> The current state of linux FS drivers for Mac is not good. I was wondering how difficult it would be to lift the exististing file system drivers from kernel space to user space. Would one of the following approaches be feasible?<p>• write a wrapper, which would provide the kernel API ?
 • reuse the code as much as possible by stripping it's dependency to the kernel ?<p>What are the possible problems? I suppose that if it was straight-forward, it would have been already done. <comment><USER2> It's called FUSE.

<comment><USER3> See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace)

<comment><AUTHOR> Guys I know FUSE. But I want to take the currently implemented BTRFS and other drivers, written exclusively for the kernel and use them from the user space.

I kind of hoped it was clear from the description.</comment></comment></comment>


Impact of Daylight Saving Time on the Clinical Laboratory - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6047237/ <comment><USER2> Hah! As a pathologist running a clinical lab, nice to see something from my world on HN besides than Theranos. The ports and protocols to interface a lot of lab instruments is indeed fairly byzantine and I wouldn't be surprised if some middleware upgrade between years was ill-prepared for DST, but I had never thought of it myself.</comment>


Show HN: 15 Machine learning ebooks for $15 - <AUTHOR> https://www.humblebundle.com/books/machine-learning-books <comment><AUTHOR> In addition, I'm matching up people who want this but can't afford it with people who want to buy an extra one for someone in need. If you want to offer (it's $15), let me know.</comment>


C# Edit and Continue and Make Object ID Improvements in CTP 6 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/csharpfaq/archive/2015/02/23/edit-and-continue-and-make-object-id-improvements-in-ctp-6.aspx <comment><USER2> One of the utility killers of edit and continue in web development is that when you stop debugging, it always stops the webserver. Which means you have to start debugging again just to test tiny code changes where a quicker build would suffice.

If they haven't fixed that, to me anything the do to edit and continue is fairly moot.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused, the whole point of EaC is to _not_ have to stop the debugger? I would hazard a guess you're not debugging on iis, as detaching a debugger certainly doesn't stop the webserver.

<comment><USER2> It certainly does on IIS Express. You have to disable edit & continue to get it to work. I'm not imagining this, it's a highly upvoted SO question:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19568762/how-can-i- preven...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19568762/how-can-i-prevent- visual-studio-2013-from-closing-my-iis-express-app-when-i-end)

There's a whole list of things you still _can 't_ do while EaC is running. So you're going to have to stop it a lot, EaC might help when debugging or tweaking, but for new code you're going to have it off.

They even confirm this stupid behaviour in this blog post:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2013/07/11/enable- edi...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2013/07/11/enable-edit-and- continue-debugging-option-is-now-on-by-default-for-new-web-applications-in- vs2013-preview.aspx)

<comment><USER3> That does sound annoying, IIS (non-express) seems to not have this issue though. Agree with debugging and tweaking though, my largest complaint is that you can't edit methods that contain lambda expressions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >The following types of edits are not supported: Deletion of members, types, or entire method bodies

Can't they just pretend that they don't exist anymore without changing anything?</comment>


Through the Warp Zone: Hacking Super Mario Brothers to unlock new worlds - <AUTHOR> https://emily.st/p/AUg

<comment><USER2> Exploiting glitches in-game on real hardware is always cool, but not always ... convenient. ;)

This sorta reminds me of a story about Intellivision's hit game "ASTROSMASH!" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrosmash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrosmash)).

The game was originally meant to be a clone of Asteroids called "Meteor!", but Mattel cancelled the clone due to legal concerns. But there was still room on the cart, which the developer had been using to develop his own unique game called "Avalanche". This is what eventually became ASTROSMASH (my favorite game as an 8 yearold who never got that NES...)

The legend was that the code for the original Asteroids clone was still on the cart; people claimed that pressing the reset button on the console rapidly would cause the game to glitch into Meteor instead of Astrosmash, but I could never make it work as a kid.

Years later, I got my hands on an intellivision emulator that had really nice disassembler/assembler included ([http://spatula- city.org/~im14u2c/intv/](http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/intv/)). By then I had also read online that the developer simply put a JMP instruction at the beginning of the cart to skip over the original "Meteor" code.

Sure enough, I found a ROM for ASTROSMASH, disassembled it, found the JMP in question and modified the assembly, reassembled, and suddenly I was playing "Meteor!"

Either way, it's a good thing that Mattel trashed the Asteroids clone; ASTROSMASH turned out to be a much better game!

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're interested in doing this yourself, you don't need a separate hex editor; FCEUX has one built in:

[http://www.fceux.com/web/home.html](http://www.fceux.com/web/home.html)

Hex value watching and editing is a valued tool in the time attack community. If you advance frame by frame and watch certain values, you can see patterns showing when an enemy will attack, an item will drop, etc. Time attackers use it to minimize the time spent waiting for enemies, or finding which character actions affect level or enemy patterns.

[http://tasvideos.org/Glossary.html#HexEdit](http://tasvideos.org/Glossary.html#HexEdit)

[http://tasvideos.org/InputFileEditing.html](http://tasvideos.org/InputFileEditing.html)

<comment><USER4> emacs also has a hex editor built in called hexl mode. To use it just use C-x C-f to open a file and then use M-x hexl-mode.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ed...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Editing- Binary-Files.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone dying to know what world 9 is like, found this on youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcDfPXsgqQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcDfPXsgqQ0)

Looks like someone game genie'd it back in 2008

<comment><USER6> That's crazy.

I'm so confused as to how an invalid level value would generate a level with all sorts of bizarre, invalid combinations... yet still be completely playable, without crashing or anything.

<comment><USER7> In 2011 I wrote an emulator for the LatticeMico32 processor [1]. After it was written, I decided to play the chaos monkey game and change some instructions, like reversing "less than" and "greater than", just for kicks. So the code I was actually running would be the equivalent of taking a program and replacing all > with < (and vice-versa). Much to my surprise, some emulated code still worked. It mostly did the wrong thing, but the fact that the code worked, printing stuff in the screen and all, still baffles me.

[1] [http://www.ubercomp.com/jslm32/src/](http://www.ubercomp.com/jslm32/src/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course, back then, in the 1980's, there was no publically available internet.

Knowledge of minus world was spread purely through word of mouth. We used our meat based networking protocols.

What barbaric times those were.

<comment><USER9> Well, there were magazines. Nintendo Power started pretty late in the 80s, but it was also I think the first place I heard about the minus worlds.

<comment><USER8> I heard about it _before_ nintendo power existed.

<comment><USER9> Ok. To be clear, there were video game magazines before Nintendo Power (C&VG, for eg. Also, more obscure, but Nintendo's own predecessor the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter) and they played a significant role in spreading this info. The kid with the magazine sub was king of the playground, basically.

I was just stating my experience there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Coincidentally also on the front page right now - realtime hex editing with NES hardware:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700990)

</comment><comment><USER11> The Japanese Famicom didn't have a CIC lockout chip, which let you hotswap games and then soft reset, preserving all of the RAM (a power cycle doesn't decay all RAM instantly, but it deteriorates rapidly.)

People would play Mario, then swap in certain games (mostly Tennis), then swap back to Mario, and then try the trick where you hold select or whatever to resume at the level you last died at.

Depending upon the contents of RAM based on what the other game wrote there, it would warp you to all of these corrupted worlds.

</comment><comment><USER12> Love that people are still hacking NES. There are numerous other glitches in the original NES, such as being able to jump on the turtle in 3-2 (or 3-1 I forget) to get 99 lives (go over 100 and you die.

Also at this point, can't someone from Nintendo just open source the code for nostalgic purposes :)

<comment><USER13> What you get from disassembling a NES ROM (or, really, software for any 8-bit computer) is not much different from what went in originally, except (maybe) there were some comments.

It's very unlikely that the original assembly source exists anymore, or even that it was kept much later than the game's release. It's not until very, very recently that game companies started to think that the original source and assets for a game would have enough value to be worth the cost of archiving. Even games from the PlayStation 2 era routinely have to be rewritten from scratch with new assets when re-released on later consoles.

In my experience, most of the game source code that survived from the early years of personal computing is for games written in BASIC, which would have been distributed as source. There's a few exceptions like for Jordan Mechner's games, but that just goes hand-in-hand with his famously detailed records of his development process.

<comment><USER14> While I agree that the original source code for the game is probably long gone, I think we can settle for having a disassembled version of it. As you pointed out, the game was most likely in handwritten assembly, so the assembly output probably isn't much different. The most useful part would have been the comments, which it turns out there were some very dedicated people that went through the entire disassembly and annotated the source code like this one by doppleganger [http://www.romhacking.net/documents/344/](http://www.romhacking.net/documents/344/) and this one where movax tried to make the assembly more natural [http://www.romhacking.net/documents/635/](http://www.romhacking.net/documents/635/)

There are several really cool things you can find on here about older games including a detailed explaination of the minus one world [http://www.romhacking.net/documents/343/](http://www.romhacking.net/documents/343/) where doppelganger covers exactly why the game does what it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This was really sweet. A somewhat inconsequential hack but incredibly touching writing about it. I love this kind of video game writing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very awesome. Thanks for that. I really want to get this running on my big tele and start exploring!

</comment><comment><USER17> That font is honestly nearly unreadable on Firefox. Font is too thin.

<comment><USER18> I can believe it, but reading on a retina iPad mini, I was actually struck by how nice it looked!

I think now that A-grade browsers are generally equal in most basic respects, we often forget to test things that might seem inconsequential and not worth testing, like font-weights.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually did a bit of testing, including grabbing VMs of various versions of Windows to see how things looked on XP, 7, and 8.1. It remained quite readable in my testing.

<comment><USER18> Now that I'm back on a desktop computer, I'm looking and it does look pretty good to my eyes, but I could see how it might be too thin for some people.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tweaked the weights a bit. Hopefully it's a little easier now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-supply-chains-china-46d82a0f-9f52-4229-840a-936822ddef41.html <comment><USER2> This has happened to my company and a few others I know. We have about $15K of packaging stuck in China.

If this is doing anything (to me personally), it's making me reconsider shifting more of the supply-chain to the US. In many cases, the prices aren't really that different.

<comment><USER3> > it's making me reconsider shifting more of the supply-chain to the US. In > many cases, the prices aren't really that different.

If the prices weren't really that different then why did those parts of the supply chain go to China in the first place?

<comment><USER4> The price differences were much, much larger 5-10 years ago, but they have been rapidly shrinking as the wages for China workers have grown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "It's better to be in a bad deal with good people, then a good deal with bad people"

China MFG was/is not a deal with the Chinese people. It's a deal with the CCP. Those of us who always understood this aren't surprised by any of this. We never expected China to be able to manage domestic risk well and we watched helplessly as they exported that risk abroad in the form of pollution, SARS, contaminated products and more. You may not be a citizen of China, but you're almost as impacted by their decisions. This is worth pondering.

<comment><USER6> > We never expected China to be able to manage domestic risk well

Well, they have seemingly largely recovered and move their way back to normalcy, as other countries started catching fire.

I think a lot of people's takeways will be different than yours: China's ability to control crisis like this scale is going to be valuable assets to global investors.

<comment><USER7> > China's ability to control crisis like this scale is going to be valuable > assets to global investors.

Their ability to control the crisis is useful from a public health perspective, but they're doing it by shutting down production. Look at how the markets have responded. Are you claiming investors wouldn't have been better off if these companies had invested in a more diversified supply chain?

For that matter, having a more diversified supply chain makes it easier to implement these kinds of public health measures in general. Shutting down production is much less costly when there is another region capable of quickly picking up the slack. And making it less expensive to implement measures to contain a contagion makes it more likely they'll be properly implemented, which helps everybody, investors included.

<comment><USER6> There is a critical flaw in this thinking.

Other countries will catch the virus at some point too.

Without stringent measures, it will take more time for other countries to come back from it. In other words, China becomes safer after this.

<comment><USER7> But that's exactly why diversification works. If you have manufacturing only in China and China shuts down, you lose. If you have manufacturing in both China and Mexico and China shuts down, you manufacture in Mexico. If six months later China is back online and Mexico is in quarantine, you manufacture in China.

Having presence in multiple regions lets you keep going the whole time. Having presence in only one region doesn't.

<comment><USER6> Diversification looks great, but is not easy. It is not like software where it can be easily replicated across continent.

Manufacturing requires logistics, capability of water/electricity and skilled labour. Those are not easily scalable across the globe. And manufactures do concentrate, it is easy to source parts to make stuff from the same region.

So in a way, expanding physical manufacturing is very hard and expensive. And in case of COVID-19, it is not the answer even, since, the disruption is almost simultaneously happening globe wise, capacity planning and shifting can't be that agile to adjust, let alone the demand will be hampered too.

So, I think unless it is for megacorp that has that much of money to burn, diversification on globe scale is just a dream.

But for key industry, like medical supplies, I think that is where the state should come and play, to incentivize a domestic capacity that could chime in handily when disruption happens.

<comment><USER7> > Manufacturing requires logistics, capability of water/electricity and > skilled labour. Those are not easily scalable across the globe.

You don't need fully-distributed manufacturing where everything is literally made everywhere. Go ahead and cross off every place without water, electricity and skilled labor, you're still left with dozens of countries. Now pick one in Asia, one in Europe and one in America. You're now on three continents. There are three more available if you ever feel like expanding.

> And manufactures do concentrate, it is easy to source parts to make stuff > from the same region.

Which is fine, so do that, somewhere on each continent. Not in only one place in the world. Obvious strong candidates are China, the US and Germany.

> And in case of COVID-19, it is not the answer even, since, the disruption is > almost simultaneously happening globe wise, capacity planning and shifting > can't be that agile to adjust, let alone the demand will be hampered too.

It isn't really happening everywhere at once, though. It's happening everywhere at different times. We may get to the point where some countries have to use the same measures as China, but by then China may have succeeded in containing it and be ready to reopen. Even if it hasn't, you've still reduced the period you've been offline by the several months in between, and in the meantime have had notice allowing you to run 24 hour shifts in every other facility to build up a surplus in preparation for what may come there soon.

There are also implications to the countermeasures. The US just suspended travel with Europe. If you had a factory in Germany and one in the US, you're still in business in both places, making products for US customers in the US factory and for European customers in the European factory.

> But for key industry, like medical supplies, I think that is where the state > should come and play, to incentivize a domestic capacity that could chime in > handily when disruption happens.

The problem is, nearly everything is in that category. Nobody cares about where toilet paper comes from until you can't get any for six months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the bright side, a disruption in supply may teach us what we really need, and what we don't need. Maybe after this breakout we'll realize the importance of slowing down, consuming less, and resting more.

<comment><USER9> Which will lead to massive layoffs, starting with the most vulnerable (small businesses, hourly workers, etc)

<comment> core-questions Which will lead to an explosion of available labour, ready for hiring when things pick back up.

The issue is whether governments will step in to provide sufficient unemployment / welfare benefits to bridge the gap.

<comment><USER9> Ahh yes, the benefits of mass unemployment and businesses shuttering!

Always look on the bright side of life!

[https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M](https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M)

<comment><USER8> There's the other extreme as well - being a cynic in all circumstances will leave you consistently feeling burnt out.

<comment><USER10> Cynicism is the most authentic character that one can take in these circumstances

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had a phone stolen a couple of weeks ago, and initially I was trying to buy a new phone outright (ended up filing a claim and having my new one overnighted, but lack of SMS access would have prevented me from doing my job, hence the urgency). None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain), but Best Buy did.

<comment><USER12> >None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain)

That may be true...but it may be just as likely they are minimizing their own inventory to keep their own costs down/cash on hand, which is not something they would freely tell their own employees or customers.

<comment><USER13> I've heard that new Apple employees aren't getting any equipment because they don't have any to give.

I ordered an Apple watch on March 3rd and it won't arrive until March 24th.

I'm pretty sure they are having serious supply chain issues.

<comment><USER14> Everybody has. There is Chinese New Year, always surprising companies exporting from China every year like Christmas, and than at the same time Corona. Now there is a huge backlog of produced goods in Chinese ports, a huge order backlog at Chinese manufacturers amyd not enough shipping and production capacity. Ultimately things will revert to normal, so. That Corona is now hitting the destinations of these backlogs doesn't help, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to be a globalist myself, which I still am, but I think globalization needs its urgent refactoring.

Not all industries need to be fully globalized, and it is better every country keep some share of production to itself to account for emergency situation like this virus.

Globalization had trade off robustness for efficiency, it is time to scale that back.

<comment><USER15> "Centralize production/operations in China" is the opposite of globalization.

<comment><USER6> I think globalization doesn't mean equally distribution.

Globalization as how it operates, it means to assign the job to whichever country that is most cost-efficient for that part of the production.

<comment><USER16> I once took a college course based entirely on answering the question 'What is globalization' Globalization can be just about any interaction between two entities...

Moving production to China? Globalization

Moving production back to the US? Globalization

...

Anti-globalization movement? Globalization

Or maybe my professor was just nuts, I feel crazy typing this out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yesterday I had this couple who do pool servicing out to look at some issues with our swimming pool. They told me their usual salt supplier has run out of salt. The salt supplier usually imports salt from China (to Australia), but the supplier has a shipping container full of salt they've ordered stuck in China and not sure when it will actually make it to Australia.

(They explained domestic Australian-made salt is still available, but it is 30% more expensive than the Chinese import salt.)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is the cruel and predictable result of a society that has meticulously and senselessly offshored/outsourced most its industrial capacity. If your country can't manufacture, _from raw materials_ , all the electrical/electronic/mechanical components, the tooling, the equipment, and the chemicals (industrial and pharmaceutical alike) it needs to keep everything running, you're dependent on these hyper-fragile and convoluted supply chains that are optimized for cost above everything.

This isn't a "China vs US" thing; i bear zero ill will towards China and their massive gain of industrial capacity, my ire is _solely_ focused towards those in power (government and industry alike) who presided over the suicidal deindustrialization of the United States and Europe.

The net result is that it's China who's able to send medical aid (ventilators, masks, respirators, test kits, etc) to Italy, and not the US, if only because the US is incapable of meeting its own needs: [https://twitter.com/VKJudit/status/1237448125800988675](https://twitter.com/VKJudit/status/1237448125800988675)

<comment><USER19> The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history.

They were created not by some mysterious force, but by individuals making rational choices about how they want to allocate their time, their energy and their resources.

The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices that you happen to disagree with. They didn't want a $400 locally knitted sweater, made from neighborhood sheep. They wanted a $40 sweater that was made as efficiently as possible, and $360 of change.

Please don't mistake your belief that you could design a better society for an actual analysis of reality.

<comment><USER20> And I honestly do want a $400 sweater if we have a prospering manufacturing business. How many people stuff their house with clothes that they wear only once? How many people buy toys that their kids play only a few times? How many people hav a whole closet of shoes? Why do we have twice as large of closet room compared with people living in the 50s? Why do people just have to buy clothes every quarter, every month, every week? People around the world seem have been consumed by modern consumerism.

If people around me can get decent jobs because of local manufacturing, if US can keep developing talents in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and material engineering, hell yeah, bring me the $400 sweater.

<comment><USER21> A lot of people can't afford a $400 sweater. What are they supposed to do?

Local manufacturing is for rich people who can afford it.

<comment><USER22> A lot of now-developed countries had 100% domestic textile production 60-70 years ago and yet nobody went naked (OK not 0% obviously but very few). People owned fewer pieces of clothing overall, but everyone could still afford to be clothed.

If textile manufacturing became 100% local again, local wages would also rise by a similar amount. $400 wouldn't seem unaffordable for a sweater. Or the sweater would cost correspondingly less.

<comment><USER21> If local wages rise, wouldn't that include the wages of the people who work at the local cotton producers, textile workers, and clothing retailers? Thereby making the manufactured goods more expensive, rather than less?

If we could have cheap manufactured goods and also pay living wages to the workers who produce them, we would not have outsourced.

You can produce cheap goods with cheap labor (or robots), or expensive goods with expensive labor.

<comment><USER22> I think there will be an equilibrium. Again refer to the argument in my previous post: production used to be 100% local and everyone could afford clothes. Not as many as now, but enough. The only thing that's changed is we now have more automation, so domestic production should be even more efficient than before.

Maybe sweaters will be $200 and wages will rise enough to be able to afford one every year. But we won't have $3 sweaters on Alibaba. From an environmental perspective, having more clothes than we need at dirt-cheap prices isn't all that great.

Some people may call this a reduced standard of living, and they are right from a reductive viewpoint where less stuff = lower standards. But isn't there more to quality of life than filling your closets with cheap shit you don't really need?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here in Canada we had nation-wide disruptions for weeks due to rail service being blocked by First Nations (American Indian) people protesting a pipeline. The covid-19 virus just compounded that problem. I'm in an isolated rural town and even Walmart has bare shelves.

</comment><comment><USER24> I hope it doesn't screw up our food supply too much. We get a surprising amount of crops from China and the rest of the world.

<comment><USER25> The US exports a massive amount of crops to China, not vice versa.

US Agriculture Exports to China = $25B US Agriculture Imports from China = $5B

Source: [https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/inline- files...](https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/inline- files/profilechina.pdf)

<comment><USER26> 5b is a lot.

A large quantity of imports will be used to make US domestic food as well.

The exported good is not the same as the imported one.

<comment><USER27> Anecdote: Our caterer in silicon valley said there was a supply issue for tofu.

<comment><USER28> So I guess they import the beans, manufacture the tofu, then ship it back to us? Sounds inefficient, though I'm not sure how much demand there is for a large-scale domestic tofu manufacturing industry in the US.

<comment><USER29> US Tofu is by and large for animal feed or oil, not tofu.

<comment><USER28> Soy, you mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Apparently cheap has a price...

</comment><comment><USER31> I can't be the only one that isn't even worried about getting sick, but is worried the economic damage could be bad enough to impact my job.

</comment><comment><USER32> China is back online. It was just a bump in the road.

</comment><comment><USER10> Finally we can discuss politics on HN!</comment>


I, Cringely: Azure Blues - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081030_005501.html

<comment><USER2> It is all about political will. Germany has shown the world that it is possible. And it is made possible via a so-called feed-in tariff scheme. 14% of Germany's energy originates from renewable energy sources (mainly wind power). And Germany will reach 20% by 2013 and will reach 30% by 2030. Germany is now the largest producer of PV panels and among the largest producers of wind turbines. Gemany's alternative energy plan created a huge industry. So, less dependency on foreign energy, less CO2 emission and the creation of a lot of jobs. Sounds to me like a winning strategy. See: [http://www.hermannscheer.de/en/index.php?option=com_content&...](http://www.hermannscheer.de/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=212&Itemid=13) and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany>

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know if his analysis of solar panel economies is at all plausible?

A lot of debate in the comments on this article: [http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081030_0055...](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081030_005501_comments.html)

<comment><USER4> I'd love to see a graph similar to this: <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/PVeff>(rev110707)d.png but for PV cost _per Watt_. Anyone have a link?

<comment><USER4> This report indicates solar prices of $0.15-0.10/kWh by 2010: [http://www.photonconsulting.com/the_true_cost_of_solar_power...](http://www.photonconsulting.com/the_true_cost_of_solar_power.php)</comment></comment></comment>


So you want to build a remote company? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.viktorpetersson.com/remote-work/2019/07/14/so-you-want-to-build-a-remote-company.html <comment><USER2> In terms of remote work, only one thing matters — work! This is amazing because the ordinary question "What have you done today?" replaces many others such as: "What time did you come?", "Why are you late?", "What did you do today?", and so on. Teamwork becomes result oriented, not process oriented.</comment>


Chinese coal consumption just fell for first time this century - <AUTHOR> http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/chinese-coal-consumption-just-fell-first-time-century-49062 <comment><USER2> It's not just coal. China is frankly the future as far as energy consumption goes.

They produce and consume most of the world's solar equipment, produce extensive hydropower, and lead the world in the deployment of rechargeable electric vehicles (primary scooters) by an extremely long way.

To be clear, Australia, the nominal location of the source of the article, supplies much of China's natural gas and coal so has a strong economic interest in limiting such developments.

A new solar technology developed at Australia's University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, was famously ready for commercialization but when prompted the university turned down the opportunity. A smart ethnic Chinese researcher, aghast at the unthinkable degree of risk aversion of the university in the face of demonstrated efficiency gains, promptly returned to China, raised a few million, and became the world's largest solar producer virtually overnight.

<comment><USER3> While I dearly hope this is the result of China emerging from a very short industrial revolution analog, there's lots of reason to believe that this is merely a leading indicator for an economic downturn.

<comment><USER2> _China emerging from a very short industrial revolution analog_

You could rephrase that as _China rapidly refactoring the lion 's share of global industrial production and doubling down the profits to realise the true potential of modern infrastructure_ with arguably greater accuracy and outlook. Arguably... but definitely there's some truth to it in areas such as energy sustainability.

That said, the economic challenges in China are real, but they do have the best possible toolset: centralized governance with a capable medium term planning capacity that is unencumbered by election terms, technical prowess, a population and capital base that make extremely large projects and investments feasible, and a population that has endured great hardship in living memory but emerged with concrete benefits such as mass literacy and for the most part improved material wealth. Those factors alone give them a tremendous degree of options.

I'm not an apologist: they certainly do put a foot wrong pretty often, and people do get sidelined and mistreated. Overall, however, the job they are doing is an extremely difficult one and the outcomes insanely impressive. It is a country that - at least to me - is in modern times one of the greatest wonders in human history.

<comment><USER4> > [...] and a population that has endured great hardship in living memory but > emerged with concrete benefits such as mass literacy and for the most part > improved material wealth.

Sort-of. The concrete benefits came when they stopped the greatest self- inflicted hardships.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, there was definitely a lot of needless suffering. Most places go through that at some point though... look at America's war against drugs, pharmaceutical industry out of control and gun laws for instance. Or the great depression. The communist period was China's way out of what had in some measurable senses degenerated in to a highly insular and corrupt feudal aristocracy punctuated by armed, roving wardlord bands and extreme religious groups declaring the nth coming of the lord... so you could look at it as an extended great depression for the average Joe, not really too far from more familiar experiences in America, without being too far off the mark. Much of China was something a lot more like poorer parts of like India a hundred years ago... people dying on the street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Or maybe Chinese economy is short of breath after years of debt stimuli.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. This is like a press release from the department of not-getting-the- joke.

It is known that China "misstates" GDP and a variety of economic metrics on a regular basis. Don't take my word for it - thank WikiLeaks:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/06/us-china- economy-w...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/06/us-china-economy- wikileaks-idUSTRE6B527D20101206)

China's economy is slowing and the electricity consumption is the best un- manipulated evidence we have. As the above commenter references, this slowdown is likely the result of the credit spigot getting turned off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anecdotally, I have to be very cynical that an uptake in "green energy" technology is the cause. I live in Fuzhou and almost never see solar panels in use anywhere, and electric bikes are being replaced by cars owing to increasing wealth and government policies discouraging their use. China is investing in green technology so it can be no1 producer, not as no1 user.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bizarre they bring up hydropower not accounting for it, but don't mention nuclear power at all. Where other countries ran from nuclear power, China embraces it: [http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country- Profiles/Countries...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country- Profiles/Countries-A-F/China--Nuclear-Power/)

20 reactors now, 28 in construction, 58 by 2020, 150 by 2030. Seems like a poorly researched article.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading the article, it's interesting that it doesn't seem to match up well with the Economist article from last year: [http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21583245-china- worlds...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21583245-china-worlds-worst- polluter-largest-investor-green-energy-its-rise-will-have) TheEconomist seems to show CO2 (and coal consumption) tripling and rising steadily over a period where the article shows it slowing down in 2007-11. I don't know which is correct, but now I don't particularly trust either of these.

</comment><comment><USER10> Do not underestimate advanced renewables in the medium to long term, but the only thing that can scale fast enough to displace coal in an energy market as gigantic as China is nuclear.

China might be able to simply import nuclear technology. But it is also possible that China's nuclear power program will fund the development of new safer, less-expensive reactor designs. That could help the world even more than cheap solar panels.

</comment><comment><USER11> How trustworthy are the sources for these statistics? I don't know anything about how reliable numbers from the China National Coal Association are, but I was under the impression that data from the China National Bureau of Statistics should generally be treated as suspect. Is there a way to independently verify that consumption actually fell?

</comment><comment><USER12> Using "this century" to describe the last fourteen years isn't incorrect, but sure feels a bit baitey.

<comment><USER13> There was a small dip in the mid 1990's, but this is indeed significant if true:

[http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/0...](http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/08/Coal-Consumption.png?00cfb7)

<comment><USER14> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis)</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft VP runs to office daily - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008581864_commute02m.html

<comment><USER2> Hey, what a coincidence. I run _from_ Microsoft Office daily.</comment>


Mozilla does not revoke trust in Dutch State Certificate Authority - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408647 <comment><USER2> And rightfully so.

The original reporter abused the bug tracking process to make a political point.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally think if the certs are signed by the government, it's for government service. And they can eaves drop at application level (decrypted) anyway...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> that is a shame, with the new privacy raping laws that area coming.</comment>


Battle to Block a New Apartment Building Shows Why San Francisco Is So Expensive - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/reasontv/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-housing-crisis <comment><USER2> I remember seeing signs taped to lamp posts near this laundromat urging people to go to the hearing and complain about the shadow on the playground. I guess people went!</comment>


Apple is rejecting apps that use emoji in their UI - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/02/02/apple-rejecting-apps-with-emoji/ <comment><USER2> This is a terrible decision. How many apps are they going to have to pull down?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand. Does this mean if you include a unicode character in a program that ios renders as an emoji your app will be banned or just if you include the actual image file?</comment>


Verizon Said to Approach AOL About Possible Takeover - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-05/verizon-said-to-approach-aol-about-possible-takeover-or-venture.html

<comment><USER2> "Verizon hasn't made a formal proposal to AOL, and no agreement is imminent, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private."

I'm calling bullshit.

<comment><USER3> The leak and its timing is curious, but Bloomberg didn't invent this story. It's coming from one of those companies.

<comment><USER4> Or from an associated bank, law firm, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this were so, the single biggest champion of net neutrality in monetary terms would be silenced by one of its biggest villains.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wasn't there previously a famous takeover of a media company by a communications company that didn't go so well?

<comment><USER7> You mean this one?[1]

I think it worked out pretty well for them.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_by...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_by_Comcast)

<comment><USER8> Obliquely, the AOL/ Time-Warner merger...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So Verizon is becoming a content company as well, just like Comcast.

<comment><USER10> ...or they see the business of folks not bothering to cancel their AOL dialup account as complementary to folks not bothering to cancel their landline POTS.

<comment><USER11> And now you can combine them onto one AOLrizon bill!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well they are more or less right down the road from each other.</comment>


Endangered Animal Species in CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.species-in-pieces.com/#

<comment><USER2> I'm really struggling to think of another creative interactive thing(?) that I've been more impressed by, and the fact that all of this was done by one person is astounding.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there an "autoplay" tag that could be added to this? I tend to open a large number of tabs from hackernews at once, then work my way through them, so it's particularly irritating to be surprised by one that suddenly plays music to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some small errors spotted,

num 24 lynx: is myxomatosis, not myxomotosis

num 20: somali ostrich: scientific name is Struthio molybdophanes.

"Strutio camelus molybdophanes" can not be used still to name this new species because this is the format used for naming subspecies.

</comment><comment><USER5> Really impressive work on a looming subject of great importance... Nice integration of sources and targets for support as well. Thank you Bryan.

</comment><comment><USER6> Before clicking, I half expected to see stupid click bait. But it is actually awesome.

Does anyone know how I can learn to make css art?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is weenie boss.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is f*cking beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very, very nice, indeed.

</comment><comment><USER10> this is amazingly beautiful</comment>


Video streaming is a total disaster for C02 emissions - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muBTIVjS8sA <comment><USER2> Meta: this is video, in French, and there's an annoying typo in the title: it is (probably ...) about CO2 (the greenhouse gas), but it has a zero instead of the letter 'O'.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Today, video uses 80% of the total bandwidth. Netflix alone uses 13% of the > world's internet bandwidth. Netflix is an absolute disaster in terms of > greenhouse gases

It's fine to say video uses 80% of bandwidth but doesn't make sense to single out Netflix. You could soilt that 13% thirteen ways and it would still be the same. If anything Neflix _saves_ bandwidth by installing media catalog devices closer to end users.

</comment><comment><USER4> Transcription text in English would be much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not everyone understand French.

</comment><comment><USER6> Rough transcript, sorry for the typos/grammatical errors:

Title: "Why do you pollute when you're on the internet?"

"Netflix alone uses 13% of the world's internet bandwidth. Netflix is an absolute disaster in terms of greenhouse gases"

Jean Marc Jancovici, engineer and essayist, explains digital pollution in simple terms

What is digital pollution ?

"What we call digital pollution is just all the kinds of pollution that are due to the fact that we have a digital system. So when we talk about the green house gases emitted by our digital systems, today that's the same amount as the entirety of the emissions of all the trucks worldwide. It grows by 10% every year. On top of that there are other kind of pollutions, such as the one caused by the minerals and hydrocarbon extraction. There are between 40 and 60 different metals in a smartphone or a computer, which means that between 40 and 60 times we've had to dig a hole in the soil, refine metals ie metallurgy, and all of that is part of industrial process which will always be generating pollution"

The green house gases emissions, where do they come from ?

" \- keeping the data centers up, that's 20%

\- the manufacturing of all the terminals (smartphone, computer) and networking gear is roughly 50%

\- using those terminals is roughly 1/3 "

What consumes the most on the internet?

"Today, video uses 80% of the total bandwidth. Netflix alone uses 13% of the world's internet bandwidth. Netflix is an absolute disaster in terms of greenhouse gases"

At my scale, what can I do?

The first useful thing you can do, save for stopping watching videos, so starting now you can switch the flip and stop listening to me -- but otherwise use a resolution as low as possible, because the higher the resolution, the more you need to send a high quantity of information so the video can be correctly displayed.

Second thing we can do is to not watch too many, we can avoid sending the video of our youngest child to the whole world, who generally doesn't care. If you have a netflix account you can also terminate it, that's also something that is part of digital soberness"

Digital soberness?

"If you're like, I don't limit my usages, so after I buy one screen I buy a bigger one, and then after having one screen at home I buy a second one then three then four, and after a smartphone I get a second one etc, we can ask engineers to make miracles, they will never catch up to the speed at which the increase in usage is. If we want to limit digital pollution there is only one way, it's to limit the usages: no, the connected dog collar I don't need, the connected watch I don't need, the connected fridge I don't need"

At a bigger scale, what can we do ?

We do should _not_ deploy 5G. That's a policy, it's solely in the hands of the public authorities to say "we're not doing 5G" or "we won't do autonomous vehicles" which probably is, in terms of data bandwidth, not compatible with digital soberness"

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorry, but due to the concern for CO2 emisdions, I cannot watch this video.

<comment><USER8> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I'll curb my snark. Is it however not a valid concern that that posting an anti-streaming message on a streaming site is kind of undermining the message?

<comment><USER6> If the video makes the message more accessible, then it can be worth it. That is the same question as "is it worth flying hundreds or thousands of people from around the world in a single place so they can agree on large scale changes to enact to curb climate change?" If the net result is better, then the initial reaction to the supposed pollution is not looking far enough</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anybody want this stuff? - <AUTHOR>

In the process of looking for a particular router that I knew I had somewhere around here, I've uncovered a few pieces of hardware that I'm not going to be using anytime soon.
If anyone can make use of this stuff, let me know and I'll send it to you (ideally as 1 kit, I just want to put it to a good home):
Clearpath 1201 Network firewall (basically a mini-itx box with a 256MB CF card to boot off of.
Mini ITX chassis with 4 Ethernet, USB, VGA.
(2) Fairly standard Mini ITX MB's and cases.
Large box of random bits: couple of uninstalled P4 processors (they were supposed to fit on of the mini-itx boards, but didn't).  Collection of 2GB ECC RAM chips).  New mini itx system board (that is confirmed to NOT accept the P4 processors :))
USB composite video capture dongles (3)
Bluetooth GPS module with charging cable
PIC Programmer that connects to a parallel port, should work with almost any PIC.
Other random related things along these lines.
Not 100% sure of the status of anything, everything should have been in working order, but no guarantees. <comment><USER2> Yes! Been looking for some hardware for some hacking projects with my kids. How much would it cost to ship to ZIP 01588?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure it would be cheap. I'm on 03031. Send me an email with your ship-to address and I'll get it on it's way to you.

I'm not worried about covering the shipping costs. Do something for someone else some day.</comment></comment>


Nike's plan to prevent counterfeiting by securing products using blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastscience.tv/summary/nikes-plan-prevent-counterfeiting-securing-products-using-cryptographic-tokens <comment><USER2> I may have missed something, but how does this prevent counterfeiting? It seems more so like it prevents counterfeits from being sold as real shoes, but does nothing to the number of counterfeits being produced.

</comment><comment><USER3> As other commenters have pointed out, this only prevents counterfeit shoes being sold as real.

If that's the intention, it would be much simpler to just make a database and print a code on each shoe (probably already done to some extent). Therefore when a user wants to know if a shoe is real or counterfeit, they could use the code on a website to find out if it was the genuine article.

That seems like it would have far more uptake and use than a cryptographic model requiring wallets.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you read the use cases, a lot of their ideas revolve around marketplace. So it should have more to do with resale or transfer of digital asset. So when you are selling on a marketplace like EBay etc., having a valid digital token is a proof that you are trying to sell valid Nikes.

IMO they are tracking ownership of each pair with the help of these tokens and once the real shoe is sold the token is transferred to someone else's digital wallet.

Putting a QR code on shoe is not really effective as it can copied/pasted on a different shoe etc.

<comment><USER4> They are tracking ownership, but why does this need to be decentralized?

what advantage does Nike gain for it being decentralized vs everything getting a QR code and you can verify with Nike that the person you are buying it from is the registered owner of said QR code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because blockchains are great for exchange of value/transactions. Tokens can be easily transferred and hard to re-create and safe. They can be re-generated after each transaction and stored in a wallet.

Associating one QR code with one shoe is simply not the same thing. Nike doesn't have to make the whole ledger public through give the nature of blockchain, it can be assured that it has not been altered.

<comment><USER5> They don't have to with QR codes either, unless you're willing to enumerate all possible codes in their verifier.

Also the thing is not stopping anyone from providing a wrong code. Unless every transaction concerning their shoes is recorded on the block chain, which it won't, and which brings privacy issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Despite the explanatory comment that was added below the line on the article, this doesn't really seem to be a good use for Blockchain per se.

1/ as long as the translation of the physical asset to a digital asset is vulnerable to attack, blockchain doesn't really add anything above a centralised database. The only time this is not true is if the underlying asset is itself cryptographic in nature.

2/ You could easily scan a QR code which looks the shoe up with Nike, and shows you the provenance. Blockchain doesn't add anything here, and it doesn't prevent you from owning the underlying asset (unless there's some weird licencing contract when you buy a pair of shoes, which I doubt).

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding point 1 : [https://www.forbes.com/sites/samantharadocchia/2018/07/05/ho...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/samantharadocchia/2018/07/05/how- non-fungible-tokens-from-physical-collectibles-are-strengthening-asset-backed- securities/#1376468c1b2e)

Regarding point 2: I have never heard anyone tokenizing physical assets using conventional databases. Reason is multiple people may hold part of the value/asset, no one wants to trust anyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nike's authorized suppliers in China will subcontract work out to non- authorized suppliers who do not meet Nike's labor standards. I'm afraid blockchain isn't more that a database.

</comment><comment><USER8> How exactly is this preventing that fakes are being sold as authentic ?

The people who want to fake a certain shoe would just need to acquire an authentic one, then fake the shoe AND copy the QR / NFC data attached to the authentic one.

So if i buy this shoe and I want to check its authenticity i would scan the tag and the system would tell me: Jordan 5 Chinese New Year, size 11, owner: John Doe

Am I missing something ?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you make a purchase, you unlock the digital asset associated with that shoe. When you sell it forward, the digital asset will be transferred forward, provided the transactions happen on blockchain.

So you can technically sell a fake of physical, but you have to give up the ownership of the shoe (virtual). And therefore, can't sell a fake twice.

It's a shoe version of Cryptokitties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's some fun stuff in there - but can't see any part that requires/uses block-chain (and couldn't just be Nike's db)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For people asking why is blockchain needed in this scenario, I have added a comment below the article explaining why it would be far more robust than using a QR code etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps they can hook-up with Vechain and learn a thing or two on how to combat counterfeiting goods on the blockchain.Just a thought though.</comment>