How Exercise Boosts Your Brain - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/08/05/exercise-boosts-your-brain-%e2%80%93-here%e2%80%99s-how/

<comment><USER2> _So the next time you sit down to watch television, or, um, surf the internet, remember: your BMP count might be getting into dangerous territory._

Try to imagine that same sentence with "to read a book" substituted for "to watch television, or, um, surf the internet". Hard, isn't it?

This is anti-technology bigotry. Pretty surprising at singularityhub.com, huh? That's how pervasive it is.

<comment><USER3> I would assume they picked the examples _because_ it's singularityhub. Most of their readers are likely to be technology/gadget centric and a message about more tech centric activities was probably expected to resonate better than a message about something as "old fashioned" as reading a book.

Beside, be honest. What percentage of the population do you think actually spends _more_ time reading books than watching TV and surfing the internet?

BTW: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, watching TV accounted for more than half the total leisure time for Americans 15 years and older. (<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm>)

<comment><USER4> I used to. I don't watch TV, but I probably spend too much time on the computer. Just a few years ago I would read more than any other activity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I must have seen a million of these "benefits of exercise" posts by now - everybody seems to think that exercise is a good thing, but making another post isn't going to change anything, people are still not going to exercise; making a drug that simulates the effects of exercise would change everything.

So why aren't people working on that?

<comment><USER6> _So why aren't people working on that?_

I would hope they are. Of course if something like that actually comes out there will be lots of pushback from those with overdeveloped Protestant work ethics. No pain no gain, it's "cheating" to just take a pill, etc.

<comment><USER7> Oh, but the situation is even worse than that-- the Protestant work ethic already caught you (or us, or many people, whatever).

I'm talking about the assumption that exercise is some sort of pain for gain tradeoff that you would suffer through in exchange for a later reward, but is itself unpleasant or undesirable without the health benefits. This insiduous paradigm seems to be everywhere in (at least) American culture.

And so the magic pill already exists! And there's no patent. No copay. No HMO can deny you it. And it's fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heart health is brain health. Simple as that.

<comment><USER9> Well, as a brief mention said in the article, any exercise benefit to the brain used to be thought of mainly as an increased blood flow and oxygen uptake.

But more recent research is focused on the hippocampus and neurogenesis, actually growing new neurons by exercising. Unfortunately, there's no test that can actually prove the new cells are responsible for new learning.

This happens to be the focus of my current research paper. :-)

<comment><USER10> Cool. So might the new neurons be more for motor control than say, mathematics?

<comment><USER9> Well, the hippocampus is related to long term memory and not motor control, as I understand it. So it's doubtful.

I'm having a hard time finding studies that adequately control for fitness level though. Most tend to focus on acute exercise. They run people for a while then immediately sit them down for a cognition test.

I'm more interested in the influence of long-term fitness level. That's not as often studied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _We all know exercise is your best shot at having a healthy heart, a strong immune system, and maybe even a 100th birthday party._

Wasn't this just recently proved false (here on HN)? The sentence may as well read "We all know the sun orbits the Earth" or "We all know that you have to write real programs in C".

Or rather, if you spend most of your day sitting behind a computer, then it doesn't matter how much you exercise, you'll likely be dead by eighty. (Which is quite a liberating viewpoint if you simply accept it.)

<comment><USER12> In the context of the benefits of exercise, i'd imagine we need to be careful not to conflate health and longevity before we debate things being 'proved false'.

Also, obligatory [Citation required]

<comment><USER11> _Proved_ was the wrong choice. _Implicated_ is probably more accurate.

But really, there was some article very recently that made all the same points.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another theory is that low calorie diet leads to longevity. Too many theories. :)

<comment><USER14> It's good that we have a lot of observed correlations between various activities (exercise, low-calorie diets, etc.) and longevity. That way we can figure out what's going on biologically, and try to find easier and more effective ways of living longer, healthier lives. Science!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A book or course on novel writing basics - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I think you might have more luck here: [http://writers.stackexchange.com/](http://writers.stackexchange.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So many to choose from... your bookstore or library has an entire shelf devoted to this topic.

A few that I've read John Gardner's -- On Fiction How to Write a Blockbuster Novel Story (more about screenwriting, but very useful to novelists) Bird by Bird

None of these are particularly focused at the novice novel writer. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Stephen King has a good book on writing.

Read a lot of novels that are bestsellers and some that are complete crap.

</comment><comment><USER5> "How not to write a novel" may be a good first read [https://www.amazon.com/Write-Novel-Them-Misstep- Misstep/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Write-Novel-Them-Misstep- Misstep/dp/0061357952)

</comment><comment><USER6> Some good suggestions in the thread, but I hope you are an avid reader of the genre you wish to work in? Good writers _have_ to be keen, discerning readers.</comment>


Go Huffman compression - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BenedictEggers/huffman

<comment><AUTHOR> Also--this is my first non-trivial project in Go, so if you see anything that could be better, please let me know!</comment>


The Cure To Our Economic Problems / The Best Equity is Sweat Equity - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2008/10/23/the-cure-to-our-economic-problems/

<comment><USER2> I understand all the admiration of the US enterpreneurial spirit, and I agree that all the measures offered are conscious populism by the candidates.

It is remarkable however, how little he offers in the way of actual measures a potential president could take. 'encourage enterpreneurs'? Those same enterpreneurs that don't care about tax rates and recessions are going to care about 'encouragement'? Would he fund someone who says 'after our new president's encouragement, I decided to start a business'?

As it stands, I get very little other than populistic statement of the obvious by this blog post.

<comment><USER3> I thought the same thing. Cuban's outlook on America seems a little too focused on money imo. I think there are more things to consider than merely your pocketbook. Granted, he is worth 5 billion times more than I am, and the financial crisis is a hot topic right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I stopped reading after the first few paragraphs. The author displays a stunning lack of economic sophistication, boiling down current economic problems to the U.S. budget deficit. Currently the chief economic problem facing the US is that American consumer spending (and significantly, growing consumer spending) has been fueling the economy for decades, while working class and middle class wages have been stagnant. The resulting massive consumer debt was masked somewhat, or at least prevented from exploding into crisis, by policies which inflated house values and encouraged homeowners to borrow massively against home equity.

Decreasing government spending or raising taxes in order to rein in the deficit is, indeed, precisely the wrong thing to do in the budding recession. "Entrepreneurial spirit" alone isn't going to do shit. Needed are massive Keynesian government expenditures on infrastructure, boosting wages and employment, and keeping the economy going during a recession. Even deficit hawks are admitting this these days.

(Clearly there are several other problems: the budget deficits, current account deficits, and trade deficits which the U.S. is running are all obscenely high. The U.S. "defense" budget is a giant sinkhole which causes massive harm worldwide for arguably very little benefit, except to a shrinking number of specific very large corporations and (above all) their executives. U.S. dependency on oil imports is extremely costly and ultimately unsustainable, and the American government would do well to massively invest in alternative energy research. Etc.)</comment>


Ask HN: How do I make a link clickable on HN? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to make www.investopad.com clickable in a comment elsewhere.<p>Is it a karma thing? <comment><USER2> For comments you have to just type the url, no text or tags.

<http://google.com/>

For submissions you can submit a url _or_ text but not both, and URLs in the text don't get parsed.

</comment><comment><USER3> What you could do is submit a post describing the website and why HN readers should be interested in it. Then immediately post a comment with a clickable link to the URL.

</comment><comment><USER4> To make a link clickable in a comment, you need to prefix it with "<http://>.

</comment><comment><USER5> Urls don't become links in the text of the submission. They do become links in comments.

</comment><comment><USER6> btw how much karma is required to submit a startup for review?</comment>


Joinable: Join strings with built in control flow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rkotze/joinable <comment><AUTHOR> A library to join strings together without the need to check if a value is a falsy.

Features:

\- If else built using array

\- prefix valid joinable strings

\- Change the separator from default of space

\- Performance focused (using benchmark)

See the read me for more detailed examples.</comment>


A W3Schools Intervention - <AUTHOR> http://w3fools.com

<comment><USER2> Unforgivable is the example code for "PHP MySQL Insert Into" without even mentioning the risk of SQL injections. This should be among the first things to be explained in every tutorial, article or book on "How to connect to a database with PHP and do something." If there is something like Worst Practices, this is one of them.

There is also code diplaying unsanitized $_GET variables, opening up all possibilities for cross-site scripting attacks. No creativity is required for exploiting sites that use code from these examples, it's the low hanging fruit :-(</comment>


Ask HN: Which good software documentation solution would you suggest? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
Lately I am looking for a good software for API documentation.
There are a lots of solutions out there and I cannot set up my mind to anyone, neither I have used any software documentation before so I am not experienced in this field.
Any suggestion? Even paid one are okay! Thanks :)!
Sid
p.s. My apologies if there are any english errors as it's not my mother-tongue. <comment><USER2> Isn't it obvious? Use the one for your language. If you write in Java, JavaDoc, for C or C++ there's Doxygen, Erlang has its EDoc, Perl commonly uses POD, Python usually is documented with its native docstrings extracted by Sphinx. This way your API and documentation sources for it resides in the same place.

Also, much depends on what you expect from the tool, as there are approaches that decouple documentation from code.</comment>


Web Typography that people will read. - <AUTHOR> http://brolik.com/blog/web-typography-that-people-will-read/

<comment><USER2> The recommendations seem to be sound but this piece is unreadable!

Between the tiny font, wide single column text and having to scroll before seeing a hint of content I can't say that I'm impressed with Brolik's design.

Sorry for the uninformed rant but if you're going to write on good web design first get your ducks in a row.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would tend to agree, and that's why we're in the middle of a site-wide redesign. Check back in a few weeks. Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment>


Microsoft can beat Google, but only by letting go of a cow  - <AUTHOR> http://www.iijiij.com/2011/03/30/microsoft-can-beat-google-but-only-by-letting-go-of-a-cow-08261# <comment><USER2> That's brilliant! I wholeheartedly agree. Given that developers are going to develop Android no matter what, reduce their obstacle to building WP7 apps will result in lots of goodwill from many Android developers and the opportunity to ride the developer curve. This is truly the "Developer! Developer! Developer!" strategy (though not one Steve B. has in mind).

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I guess we'll see how this works out for RIM. They've already announced their "not BlackBerry" tablet OS will allow the sources for at least vanilla Android apps to be easily built as RIM-tablet apps as well (though the packaging will be different; IIRC, you won't be able to just give them a .APK).

</comment><comment><USER4> This almost exists, it's FOSS and is called PhoneGap. Windows phone support is reportedly "coming soon".</comment>


Show HN: Keep track of cheeses you've tried with the CheeseWzard - <AUTHOR> https://www.cheesewiz.app <comment><AUTHOR> In an ongoing attempt to keep my programming skills current I've created a cheese-tracking PWA I've called the CheeseWizard. It's intended to be used to keep track of cheeses that you've tried and liked. If it somehow got enough regular users I'd like to add stuff like recommendations, popular cheeses, and public lists that you can share. You don't need to create an account to tool around but you will need one if you decide to make updates or keep track of your favorites.

This is strictly a resume-boosting project and I have no plans on monetizing it. I'm a back-end engineer and the UI is a bit ugly but I think it's usable. I'll be updating it as I learn CSS and the like. If/when I support uploading pictures new users will need to submit a verified email address but who knows if that'll ever happen.

It's currently parked on the cheapest AWS server available so it may get hugged to death by HN. I hope you find it useful!</comment>


Advice for aspiring data scientists and other FAQs - <AUTHOR> https://yanirseroussi.com/2017/10/15/advice-for-aspiring-data-scientists-and-other-faqs/ <comment><USER2> Counting things IS hard! The mascot of my data science team is Count Von Count. I keep him on my desk.</comment>


A Possible Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis from Sir Michael Atiyah - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/HLForum/status/1042793378629541889 <comment><AUTHOR> Apparently Sir Michael Atiyah is presenting a proof of the Riemann hypothesis on Monday using "a radically new approach based on the work of von Neumann, Dirac, and Hirzebruch"</comment>


Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/09/eric-gill-the-body-ditchling-exhibition-rachel-cooke <comment><AUTHOR> It's not mentioned in the article, but Eric Gill was also the designer of the fonts Gill Sans and Perpetua, raising even more questions - is using a font designed by a child abuser somehow different from viewing that person's art?

An excellent article from 2009 by Fiona MacCarthy, the author of the mentioned biography, can be found here:

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/17/eric-gill- exhi...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/17/eric-gill-exhibition- fiona-maccarthy)</comment>


Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs? - <AUTHOR> I got started programming a couple of years ago because I like problem solving. The harder, the better. I know I'm not alone in feeling that way. I've gotten a bachelor's degree and learned a bit of ruby, rails, and other frameworks/languages, but I'm running into a problem. It seems like all jobs are just simple CRUD apps. I look at 99 percent of the software out there and know that I could do it if I had the time.
My question is how do you get to work on the hard/fun stuff? A quintessential example for me would be self driving cars. It's challenging and would have a real impact on the world.
I'm looking into becoming a data scientist because it's newer and seems to have more challenges. I also have a theory that any challenging computer science problem requires a lot of math. Do you need a PhD to work on these hard problems? Can anyone give advice on how to avoid a career of working on simple CRUD apps? (CRUD is a metaphor for simple problems in this case) <comment><USER2> Your attitude is common, but mistaken. It's another version of "the grass is always greener". Whether you're working on a self-driving car or implementing Microsoft Word 2014, the fundamentally hard parts are actually the same.

The self-driving car might sound sexier if you've never done something like that, but once you've learned the basics of how control loops work and the quirks of realtime operating systems, that's about it for novelty. What you'll actually spend your time on is the same old stuff: managing complexity. Debugging, testing, designing APIs, designing user interfaces, integrating disparate module, etc. You may actually find that it's more soul-crushing than a basic CRUD app, because in a safety critical project you'll probably have less autonomy, more oversight/bureaucracy, and a much slower pace.

The fundamentally hard part of any software project is complexity. It's easy to let even the simplest project spiral into unmanageable complexity, and it's deeply challenging work to prevent that. That's the meat of what any good software engineer does.

There's a better way to word your original question: in what kind of organization should I be writing software? That has a far bigger impact than the problem domain on your happiness, level of challenge, and autonomy.

<comment><USER3> I think there is an exception to this for people that work on programming languages -- there the best programs written.

In my spare time I have never had more fun programming then writing interpreters for scheme, prolog, and smalltalk. It would be amazing to get paid to work on tomorrows languages!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not the only way but a PhD will certainly open a lot more doors at the "high end" research end of things. That said, even Microsoft Research will hire "Research Software Development Engineers" who work with researchers to _implement_ cutting edge stuff as well as migrate it into regular Microsoft products, and only a bachelor's is required: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/jobs/fulltime/technical....](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/jobs/fulltime/technical.aspx) .. these sort of roles can blossom into more challenging and more research oriented work over long periods of time.

This is a rather crude generalization, but PhDs are often demanded at high end research positions not to prove you know your stuff, but to guarantee you have the mettle to do research and bounce back from failure after failure.. a must if you're working on someone else's dime. Of course, if you can find another way to support yourself, you can do (almost) any research you like in your own time without strings attached ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> If I had money and free time, then I'd love to do research on my own. Thing is, I need a job to pay the bills :( I'm thinking of getting into freelancing and using that to float me as I get to do more and more research.

<comment><USER5> This is the strategy I'm currently implementing. I've been doing freelance work while working on research with physiological sensors as computer input.

You'll need two things to get started doing this sort of thing: standing out as a member of your community so people come to you, and an understanding of business needs.

If you really want to make the switch, shoot me an email. I'll give you some tips on making the transition.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, I can't find your email. I checked your profile and your blog. I can follow you on twitter or whatever you like, but your advice would be extremely valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Im channeling Peter Thiel here: there is little connection between hard and valuable. The goal of most companies is to create value, and do it without expanding too much effort.

If you really want to challenge yourself give yourself a goal like:

1\. Decode the genome 2\. Find the correlation between all aspects of someones lifestyle, diet, and their health. 3\. Solve poverty - maybe there is an economic solution.

The world is full of hard problems, but you have to take the lead if you want to work on them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think employers will be interested in hiring you for such projects only if you have demonstrated knowledge and experience in the field. If your work experience primarily consists of RoR web development, most employers will pass. It's not that it's implied that if you do RoR, you won't know about algorithms and AI, but there is a high correlation, and sorting through a ton of RoR resumes to find a worthwhile candidate is too much work.

You can work on hard projects on your own. Once you have made substantial contributions, you will have credentials to interest the employers. Most of the open, hard projects have very few full time developers. PyPy has only 3 I believe. If you have something to contribute, people will be more than happy to have you on-board.

</comment><comment><USER8> Follow the advice in [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for- programmers...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for- programmers.html) and _learn math_. Once you have the skills to do the interesting stuff, you start to see opportunities to do it in the oddest of places. For instance I've been paid to do things like statistics and machine learning on "simple CRUD apps".

Maybe you won't be that lucky. But if you don't have the required skills, then you _definitely_ won't be that lucky.

Incidentally a fun place to test the intersection between math and programming is <http://projecteuler.net/>. Besides, it is fun.

<comment><USER9> Most machine learning work is the CRUD of math. It is plug-and-chug in standard toolkits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hard problems are everywhere. Every company, every app, every product has unique and difficult problems to solve.

Sometimes those problems are with product design and UX. Sometimes those problems are mathematical. If you are successful, often they have to do with scalability and reliability. If you work with great people there are always hard problems in enabling productivity and building great tools. Many companies have serious and significant challenges around security and may not even know it. If most companies are solving simple problems, then why aren't most companies automatically successful?

If you broaden your definitions of "hard" you might find that there are many things that qualify. If what you mean is "hard mathematical problems" then yes, you will have to learn some math.

</comment><comment><USER11> Try looking for bioinformatics jobs. It involves big data where the amount of data to be analyzed is growing exponentially every year, a lack of knowledge on what to research to provide meaningful results, and huge benefit when people come up with novel ways to interpret data successfully.

It will involve acquiring some domain specific knowledge to be truly successful (what hard problem doesn't?), but you will be able to dive in straight away and make huge contributions just by making current analysis more efficient!

<comment><USER12> I'm slightly hijacking the thread here, but does HN have any recommendations on CS-heavy bioinformatics grad programs (not just US based)?

<comment><USER9> Threadjacking? This question should be a front page discussion, instead of gossipy crap.

I would love to know as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Try the games industry!

The pay sucks compared to other development, and work hours are crap, but you will be able to work on AI, gameplay, Graphics, physics (whatever your experience is).

But in all honesty, if you started programming a _couple_ years ago, and learned _a bit_ of rails/ruby, you have a lot to learn in various languages and systems (try C, embedded, iOS/Android, learn Haskell, big data, etc)

</comment><comment><USER14> It sounds like going to a Disney Land and complaining that all rides are easy. If you want tough and challenging rides go to SixFlags.

If you want to tackle tough challenges may be ruby/rails is not the ideal place. Perhaps learn C,C++ and implement faster ruby or javascript interpreter or implement a distributed filesystem in ruby or java. You can also contribute to the rails framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've learned that ruby/rails is not the place to go for tough challenges. Agreed. My question now is where do I go from here?

<comment><USER14> If you like computer graphics, there are also tons of interesting problems in that field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lets consider Maths, as an example to answer that. Well, up till college, we are taught to solve problems that are already solved, towards our PhD, we come across problems that haven't been solved, they are hard, but they are not the end of it, beyond that lies a sanctum, where you must find a problem and fix it. Thats what entrepreneurs do, it may sound easy, but do not be fooled by it, because being an entrepreneur it seems easy when you have found a problem and its solution, or as Steve Jobs said " looking back, the dots connect but 20 years ago, looking forward, they did not"

Billions of people around the globe haven't even noticed many a problems, yet a handful of entrepreneurs did, wasn't that the first part of problem solving, and if you haven't probably noticed, you are here after all, so you might unconsciously know the answer lays somewhere around here.

So from my eyes, whether its programming or maths, the hardest problems that exist are the problems no one has noticed yet.

For your case, you might want to find a problem of programming, if you have programmed for that many years, you will surely run into one, that no one has noticed. If you haven't, as Steve Jobs also said "Keep Looking"

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm with you. I really like solving problems or finding a good algorithm to solve the problem. What I can say for you is try to find a company with lots of R&D going. I think there are many companies out there, especially startups that are having some R&D to improve their product and beat their competition. I think startups like Prismatic (<http://getprismatic.com>) and Diffbot (<http://www.diffbot.com>) have a heavy NLP and machine learning research going in the background to improve their product. I'm interested in joining those companies I mentioned and contribute to their reaserch and development.

I think game companies also have an R&D to improve their AI, path finding, rendering algorithms, etc.

That's it. Just find an R&D job.

</comment><comment><USER17> Game engines are hard. Working on CryEngine, UnrealEngine, idTech7, or something equivalent sounds very challenging. Games involve AI, physics simulation, concurrency, high performance, and more. The salaries is not that great in the game industry though.

</comment><comment><USER18> "CRUD" is hard. That's why there are so many bad CRUD applications out there. Write a good "CRUD" application and I take my hat off to you.

</comment><comment><USER19> Defense sector is full of hard problems. A PhD helps, but even with a BS you can be working on very challenging things. When I worked at a defense startup we were designing protocols, writing VHDL and drivers for logic implemented in FPGA's, doing formal analysis of algorithms, doing data visualization, etc. Different people were doing different things, obviously, but even the junior folks were tackling problems that required reaching into their CS toolbox.

Its not an industry that has a great reputation, but what it does have is phenomenal engineers working on complex multidisciplinary problems.

<comment><USER20> I would like to strongly discourage anyone from working in the so-called "defense sector", which should be (at least in the US) more properly called the "war sector".

Working to enable the more efficient murder of ever more people is highly unethical. Unfortunately, there are plenty of unethical people willing to do this bloody work. But hopefully you are not one of them.

<comment><USER19> We're living in the Pax Americana, the most peaceful time in human history, enabled in no small part by total American military technological superiority.

Not to mention we're posting all this over a network created for the American war machine, using protocols created by a company that is a key part of the military industrial complex (BBN), which was founded by people from a university (MIT) that was then and is now one of the largest non-profit defense contractors in the country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Have you been in a "CRUD" job for at least a year? I can assure you, what often seems like a "CRUD" will teach you a lot about architecture, design, requirements analysis, etc. It's actually a good way to teach yourself skills that cannot be obtain via university schooling. Spend a year mastering a framework or two (in a paid project), face some support issues, etc. When the job is boring and you complete your tasks very well, ask for a raise and/or start looking for a new job.

</comment><comment><USER22> 1: the "99%" you're looking at are jobs on a specific niche that uses technology to bounce information from one place to another and display them, mostly known as IT jobs.

2: Hard problems are everywhere. Literally. Even in those "99%" jobs you mentioned -- "doing" such software may not be full of mysteries, but make it evolve without break and respond to constraints are examples of real hard challenges. It's a matter of seeing them and putting it on perspective.

3: there are many ways of framing a problem, making it hard or easier. The harder you frame it, the more instruments you will be required to have to tackle it. Those may involve research skills and fluency in an array of fields that would help understand the phenomena. It mostly depend on where in the spectrum of the problem you want to work, and that's up to you to figure it out.

4: advice to avoid a career working on crud apps: interview the interviewer and find out if the problems of the hiring company are the ones that you value.

5: questions like "where to work on hard/fun stuff" are very hard to give satisfying answers. I suggest you take the time to survey problems you are interested, try talking to people working on them...many problems are tackled by teams, often with people with different background and specialties dealing with different aspects of the problem.

</comment><comment> __--__ I used to feel this way too. My first job was writing a web app to replace a paper approval/overview process at an engineering firm. Aside from some email notifications, it was entirely CRUD and, to cap it off, I was forced to use classic ASP (in 2005 - asp .net 2.0 had come out by then, making classic ASP 3 generations old).

After 6 months of adding more and more approval flows, I had enough of the tedium, so I started writing libraries to make classic ASP easier to use, including a hash table library. Then I focused on how to write CRUD apps faster, with less code. Then I focused on making it more interactive and wrote an AJAX library. And if you want real difficulty, try making a classic ASP rest endpoint running on decade old hardware over a horribly designed MsSQL database _performant_.

I guess the point of that story is anything that bugs you on a daily basis can become an interesting and difficult problem to solve. Constraints make simple things more difficult, but you did say the harder the better. :)

</comment><comment><USER23> If you want to work on hard problems, strive not to have to solve the same problem twice, to try a new approach or a new tool every time you get a "CRUD" task (however you define it). You'll find that if you continuously push yourself, you'll keep growing and will never feel that the task at hand is boring or too familiar. You'll need to take risks, but without risk there's no reward. Regard every programming task, however simple, as a chance to learn something new.

Corollary: if you find that your job doesn't let you learn (e.g. your boss just wants you to churn out as many web apps in as little time as possible), leave immediately (or better, try talking to the boss first :) ).

However, as ef4 and others have pointed out, the real question for you might be "what are the problems I'd want to spend my life on?" Not all important problems are hard - some may even seem too unsexy to be worth working on, but the impact can be huge.

</comment><comment><USER24> Unfortunately just learning ruby, rails or any other programming languages doesn't prepare you at all for type of challenges you are talking about. I've been working on search, machine learning, prediction models, computer vision and so on and these are absolute cream of the challenging problems out there that I highly enjoy. Other my favorite areas are compilers, kernels, audio and image processing but I'm not actively working in it currently. But to even understand current state of art in these areas, let alone contribute to it, you will need solid foundation build on math (especially linear algebra, probability & stats, calculus), machine learning, distributed computing, graph algorithms, probabilistic data strutures and other CS areas. It takes years to build this theory foundation and perhaps more if you are not already enrolled in to any degree programming. Programming is actually the most trivial part of working in these areas.

Employers who do have these kind of challenging work are never looking for just Ruby or Java guy who knows all syntax, framework and how to code. They would need your experience and academic background to convince them that you do have necessary math and CS foundation to tackle their challenges. The best way to start out for "plain vanilla" programmers is to get in to open competitions like at <http://www.kaggle.com/competitions>. Also keep an eye out for any companies sponsoring such competitions like Netflix did years ago. The reason this is good way to start is because here would typically be discussion groups around this where experts discuss their approaches for real problem and real solutions and you can learn a lot from this. Once you select such a challenge to work on, give it all to it. Devour every piece of research, CS and math that comes in your way to understand what's going on. If you keep at it for 2-3 years, you would be in might be in good position to demonstrate future employers your work and worth to work on these challenging problems.

</comment><comment><USER25> try Google, if you are really good and have passion to develop tough stuff like machine learning languages, dealing with large data. By the way have you tried any problem given in <http://www.topcoder.com/>, if you like that stuff and also can do, Google is worth trying.

</comment><comment><USER26> It depends on what kind of "hard" you're looking for. I've worked on games (Crash Bandicoot), search (ITA Software), and email (<http://inky.com>) and all have been hard, though in different ways.

Games are hard in that you're always trying to squeeze more into severely constrained resources, so you end up having to produce convincing but fake approximations of algorithms that would be far too expensive to run in their "real" forms.

Travel search was algorithmically very hard (see the few papers by de Marcken about this for a glimpse into this world).

Email is hard because it combines many disparate skills (design, UX, back-end scaling, protocol details) and because the MVP is incredibly complex.

All involved tremendous amounts of slogging.

</comment><comment><USER27> Writing a distributed database is pretty challenging. That's part of the reason I started a NoSQL company some time ago. Unfortunately it failed due to lack of funding, but if you're interested, here's a technical write-up:

<http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.3860>

</comment><comment><USER28> I can think of a lot of scientific "big data" applications that would be very challenging problems. There are many domains that need to create & automate better systems that Collect > Organize > Parse > Visualize data. Weather, climate, ecology/species, traffic systems, etc. To do these right would be very challenging and would have a big impact on the world.

Now some self-promotion: I'm looking for a full-time partner to help me with Atlastory, an app that visualizes all of history on a map. This fits with the idea above. It's a simple concept, but there's huge engineering & design challenges involved: imagine all the geographic data involved in Google Maps, now multiply that by 1,000, and figure out the easiest way to obtain/retrieve/display that data.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a good question. I've worked in a lot of different domains and can tell you that:

1\. They all have boring parts

2\. They all have interesting parts.

3\. Doing the interesting parts _well_ can be very challenging.

CRUD is only boring because of the generally repetitious nature of talking to the database, but repetition usually means that it can be generated. Whenever possible, I write code generators for that sort of thing. This is not only more interesting and gives me time to solve the more interesting problems but also allows me to produce more and better code than I could just typing it all out.

You could get a PhD, I suppose, but hard problems generally require the insight to see them and the willingness and ability to work on them. Sometimes _ability_ requires a PhD, but that's not a given.

</comment><comment><USER30> Try systems companies (e.g. storage, networking) - you get to build products that leverage core CS concepts - algorithms, distributed systems etc. You also get a chance to use your investigative skills to debug problems like race conditions, memory leaks etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm running into the same problem. I am tired of CRUD apps, I just don't see myself doing anything new or exciting with them . Last year I was approved in one of the top tech Universities in Brazil and started learning C and C++ and this year I'll engage in programming competitions.

By the way, I've already failed 2 math disciplines in my University and I'm doing them again. But I'm good at programming and I'm becoming way better at Math. Someday after I graduate, I'll try to work for Google or Facebook, do you know if they'll turn me down for the fact that I have failed some math classes (even if I later was approved on them)?

Thanks everyone.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have a hard and interesting job. I do navigation & autonomous control systems for large mining vehicles. A couple of notes...

1\. You want to do R&D. Developing new things is fun; maintaining existing things is boring. However, "getting in" to R&D positions is difficult without #2:

2\. Domain knowledge. We almost never hire based on programming skill alone. Programming is a prerequisite, but specific expertise (guidance, navigation & control systems in my case) is the real value you need to bring. Graduate degrees are one way (but not the only way) to move in this direction.

</comment><comment><USER33> Here are a couple of CS-y but not too math-y suggestions.

Consumer-facing interactive native apps are typically low on CRUD and some of them require non-obvious solutions. You could try to get a job (or just create a product on your own) on mobile or in games.

Another option is working on tools instead of apps. If you manage to get some non-trivial gcc/clang/kernel patches accepted you can try to find a company that works on those.

(I've worked on Google Maps for Mobile and am now building a robotic waste recycler - no CRUD for me since 2002 unless I've decided to build some for my own needs).

</comment><comment><USER34> I got lucky and transitioned (in the same company) to a search project from CRUD - which I find vastly more interesting.

But my advice is to pick hard problems yourself and try to solve them. You need to start somewhere! Sure its expensive to get your hands on driving car hardware, but there are plenty of hard problems out there that need solving and can be done using opensource and your personal computer.

If you are able to get yourself through a really tough problem, you will come out better on the other side - even if it takes you years to solve.

</comment><comment><USER35> One place to find hard open problems is at the end of technical papers (e.g. in math, science or engineering). Many of them will have a section talking about issues, future work, ideas remaining to explore, etc.

There are infinitely many hard problems out there. If you want to stay motivated, work on stuff that matters.

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that- matters-...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters- fir.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't know how you feel about working for the military-industrial-tech- surveillance-state but companies or universities that get DARPA or IARPA money work on stuff like flying and/or self driving cars, autonomous systems etc (Lockheed, Honeywell, Carnegie-Mellon, Raytheon, for examples). Of course these things will ultimately be used to crush humanity's soul, but they're interesting software and technical challenges.

<comment><USER37> I work in this industry, and have spent a number of years in R&D. In my experience, the vast majority of software R&D projects are not weapons/military related, and include things such as cyber security, healthcare, big data, cloud computing, etc. A lot of it is aimed at developing innovative approaches to reduce costs in various government/military processes both through automation and doing things more smartly and efficiently.

<comment><USER29> Sorry, but I don't think there's a distinction to be made, other than one of degree unless the implication is that improving government/military processes is not aligned with the long term goals of the military.

<comment><USER37> Good point, but I think the average person who has reservations about some military functions isn't necessarily wholesale opposed to all functions of the military.

<comment><USER36> I was in this business for a while too and did some really cool stuff. But in the end this system transfers public money to enrich these companies; and the DOD basically pays these companies to learn how to develop technology that the company can then make huge profits on. It's a racket. I'm torn about it; philosophically, morally, politically I'm opposed to war and using technology to control people. But the skills I got and the smart people in the industry were great. Plus the projects are cool from like a 13 year old boy perspective, but if you stop to think that big data, autonomous vehicles etc will be used for death and increasing the powerful people's ability to control us, it's might not be worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This sounds like a variant of the meme "I could build stackoverflow in a weekend".

If you think you can build 99% of the apps out there, go out and try to build a moderately complex app. Make it better. You'll see there are all types of challenges from the technical, to the social to the political in small and large companies. Being a software developer is about solving all sorts of challenges, and not all of them are technical.

<comment><USER39> I don't think thats its a variant of the meme "I could build stackoverflow in a weekend." It doesn't have the _in a weekend_ part.

The OP seems to consider getting a PhD an acceptable route. He's asking for directions, not a shortcut.

<comment><USER38> Twitter, Facebook, Stackoverflow are all really just CRUD apps. They face social and scaling challenges everyday among other technical challenges. I don't think he's giving CRUD apps enough credit. There's also security challenges, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Pretty much every single company out there has boring programming work to do that would be redundant if they could solve some harder problems (which they may or may not be aware of). Competent programmers will notice the bigger picture and attempt to solve the hard problems. If you want to be hired specifically for hard problems, try academia or some research insititute / R&D department.

</comment><comment><USER41> To be blunt, the simple problems are hard.

Concurrency. Locking. Cache invalidation. CAP Theorem for determining truth in distributed datasets. Feel free to solve any of them.

For the record, "I could do it if I had the time". Do it. It'll be awesome.

Reinventing the wheel is a great excercise, as long as you accept that your wheel will probably be inferior to the existing one. Or maybe it won't and it'll be the next big thing.

TL;DR, go write some code.

</comment><comment><USER42> relevant HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968452>

</comment><comment><USER43> Interdisciplinary projects have a lot of potential to be challenging and rewarding. Bioinformatics, Computational Neuroscience, etc. - these are your phd jobs. Another cross disciplinary project is entrepreneurship (you have to do everything - marketing, finance, product development, etc.) and this doesn't require a phd.

</comment><comment><USER44> Certainly I'm biased, but I think working at a place like <http://istrategylabs.com> is a place to do this.

We have to invent new things everyday, and due to our focus on hacking the digital and physical worlds there's so many possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER45> We work on hard stuff (<http://vicarious.com/>) and we're always looking for exceptional people

</comment><comment><USER46> Get into digital signal processing / digital communications. They are awesome fields that are challenging and rewarding.

</comment><comment><USER47> What is your topcoder ranking?

</comment><comment><USER48> You do realize that CRUD hasn't even really been solved yet, right?

</comment><comment><USER9> Get a PhD, or get a high paying job and do interesting stuff of weekends, or do your "self-directed" work as a pauper with option to do a startup or open source project that gets you a job later.

</comment><comment><USER9> Get a job at a big web company that has distributed systems.

But one day you will learn that even "exciting/Challenging" work is 99% perspiration.

</comment><comment><USER49> I happen to enjoy easy jobs. It allows me to use all of my mental energy toward my own startup :-)</comment>


Weighted Decision Matrix Free Template - <AUTHOR> http://hello.ducalis.io/weighted-decision-matrix-free-template-with-jira-to-google-sheets-integration-via-zapier <comment><AUTHOR> This guide tells how to prioritize with a Google Sheet Prioritization template. How to customize the template to fit your team. Evaluate issues in the template. Create Jira to Google Sheets integration via Zapier.</comment>


Sugar industry sponsored studies linking sucrose to hyperlipidemia and cancer - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003460 <comment><USER2> Wouldn't the animal's own digestive system metabolise the sugar before it got to gut microbes?

</comment><comment><USER3> > An historical analysis of internal documents

Let's lose "an historical". Nobody talks like this.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Be a Good Technical Lead? - <AUTHOR> This question had been asked over a year ago[0]. I would like to ask the same question for this year.<p>[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13426896 <comment><USER2> Assuming you're the head of your ragtag vessel o' maties, I think it's important to have camaraderie high and communication amongst developers. You can use your code and the language set you're using as a unified force to help your team better support one another. I think it's fine and actually quite beneficial to tell your team mates that they can positively root one another on in their sequestered pursuits of the same code poetry in their fragment of the greater project.

I also think that you can have impromptu "Hey let's learn some new or existing feature." and do simple hang-outs where you all discuss some part of your language-of-choice-for-this-project. Some method name, something that might be very well known, something that is pretty groovy and unknown..etc.

Mainly, you want to empower your (fellow) developers and so sharing with them how to understand or track down something will be of great value. Assuming you are more experienced than the rest of your team, try and have everyone do paired sessions every once in a while (either just making an environment conducive to that or actually exercising it as a time+place). Sometimes you learn the coolest and most brilliant things just watching another person's workflow.

Be patient and let your team members flourish in a space for creativity, and also a deepening of meaningful human contact.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Requirement. Try to give clear requirement since changing requirement leads to frustration. In real world, requirement keeps changing. Try to explain the change and reasons behind it and it will help developer understand the big picture.

2\. Verify Implementation. Test code and help developer to find bugs as soon as possible. If there is any issue, you want to find it earlier. This is good for your teammate and yourself.

3\. Try not to micromanage. Open to new solutions and leave details to developers as long as the deliverable meets requirements.

4\. Try to have less meeting.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think you posted the wrong link. I'm assuming you meant [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395046](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395046)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. Too bad I'm not able to edit anymore. Thanks for pointing out.</comment></comment>


Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10305200-245.html

<comment><USER2> _"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,"_

I never would have heard of this guy were it not for this DDoS attack that attempted to silence him. Streisand effect strikes again. When will people learn.

<comment><USER3> Maybe Cyxymu orchestrated it him- or herself to gain some notoriety. :)

<comment><USER4> If the attacks against Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal were actually directed at his account, that he did it himself is the only thing that would make sense to me. The DoS couldn't just last forever and why would one bring 3 websites down rather than just do something to his internet connection?

When you manage to do what happened today, I suppose it's not really much harder to do that instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a load of s*%&$. Was he the only pro Georgian blogger out there? Why go through all this to target him when I am sure there are thousands of pro Georgian websites and blogs all over the place. For example, why not attack the white house website:

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Vice-President-Biden- Reaffirm...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Vice-President-Biden-Reaffirms- Support-for-Georgia/)

Or any of the major US news websites which are all quite pro-Georgian.

So by going through all this trouble to silence this particular blogger the evil FSB is not removing much pro Georgian info from the net at all, as there are many much more popular sources of pro Georgian information that are still online. Also, what the hell were the evil FSB trying to acomplish anyways. I mean, they know those websites will resume in a couple of hours after the attacks. Was it so important to silence that guy for several hours?

Oh, and let's not pretend that having an accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal and Google blogs is something unique, I guarantee you thousands of people have all these accounts.

But don't mind this - when in doubt blame the FSB. Now it is no surprise that that particular blogger has floated the FSB theory, he just wants to be famous. Maybe he is paranoid enough to believe this story but that does not mean we should. But it is rather amazing how quickly any bizarre and paranoid evil-russia-behind-the-scenes theory gets picked up by major newspapers.

<comment><USER6> My point exactly! It is plain ludicrous to think that the imperialistic ambitions-driven Russian government would flood Livejournal, Twitter and Facebook just to silence that one guy. I mean, in the end, these are the same media that Russian bloggers use to state their anti-Georgian opinions. It was either a lets-see-what-will-happen DDoS or this guy indeed orchestrated it to gain some popularity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not "Cyxymu", it's Sukhumi. Someone at CNET couldn't be bothered to notice that the article is in Cyrillic.

<comment><USER8> No, actually, the livejournal account is literally "cyxymu". The word is best written as Sukhumi (the Georgian city), but the cnet article refers to the "account name" and so is completely accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So who is this Cyxymu and what are his (or her) political goals? That seems to be the key to finding out who might be behind it.

<comment><USER9> From this article [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/07/twitter_attack_theor...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/07/twitter_attack_theory/)

 _"a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia."_

I just submitted the article which also has a possible explanation as to ow the attack was carried out.

<comment> brown9-2 _"This was not like a botnet-style DDoS," Woodcock told The Register. "This was a joejob where people were just clicking on links in email and the people clicking on the links were not malefactors. They were just the sort of idiots that click on links in email without knowing what they are." Joejobs are spam messages that are designed not to push Viagra but to induce someone to click on a link in the hopes of harming the site being linked to._

Seriously, people following links in spam messages could cause enough traffic to flood Facebook and/or Twitter? That sounds a little hard to believe that THAT much traffic could be generated by people suckered by spam, let alone that the level of traffic would be sustainable.

<comment><USER10> 4chan and other popular social sites sometimes manage to organize such 'manual' DDOS attacks

<comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Internet_attacks>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Chinese Twitter users who viewed as dissents also experienced false complaint and attacks similar to this lately, possibly by Chinese crackers hired by the gov.</comment>


Show HN: FillyShapey – a small, fun iOS game - <AUTHOR> https://fillyshapey.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey - figured I'd put this up here in case people found it interesting.

The app is quite simple, and took me a total of 3 months to build, from conception to release (mainly grabbing an hour here and there when possible), with a real-dev-time of probably a week or so

 _edit_ I've been told that the instructions are .. lacking .. so incase anyone is tempted to try it out:

\- touch the shape to fill it

\- hold until the shape is filled

\- rinse/repeat

Enjoy! :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Perhaps a brief gameplay vid for those of us who don't have iThings?</comment>


Free Isn't Cheap Enough – The Blog of Palmer Luckey - <AUTHOR> http://palmerluckey.com/free-isnt-cheap-enough/ <comment><USER2> "VR Sculpting / CAD" is probably the best actual use for the tech as it seems to be so far, nifty as that is (for me)... Many people have never _wanted_ to design something, so making it easier doesn't mean much to them.

Immersive VR porn that involves fluids and smells, that could sell well enough that people might make a career of content creation of it. Queasy feeling video games, not so much.

The "Cyberspace" notion that arose after "Neuromancer" came out is so captivating that it draws people to think that's the thing we need. Take the display technology: 3d "retina resolution" FPS world... We keep seeing hardware that comes as close as possible to that given current manufacturing, and it's never good enough. it's always the hardware's fault, or there wasn't enough appealing content...

No one really wants that kind of display, though. Nintendo's efforts were a good enough effort to show what that can do. Autodesk's version made years earlier and costing several limbs and organs more, was pretty much the same thing.

"Ready Player One" shows a really cool VR world but... it's still the same basic vision, the same basic thing, it's been since 1990 or so. However many more boom and bust cycles VR goes through, it's still going to be the limited use and limited appeal thing it has been because it isn't what anyone actually needs.

So I'm a curmudgeon: I'm typing on a 1992 Model M and just replaced my 1996 Microsoft Trackball because a decent alternative has become available, (finally! blessings on Elecom). I use these input tools because they are the best I have found... And judging by the $500+ price on the MS Trackballs that are still sold, and the large Model M / Mechanical keyboard fanbase, I'm not alone in that opinion.

How is it possible that none of the VR research has yet managed to improve on these input tools enough to dethrone them? Is there truly no real concept of a 300WPM keyboard equivalent that everyday users can use? Is it that we have to ensure users upstream bandwidth can't exceed 1/10th of their downstream (shades of "sit and consume like a good citizen!") I won't even mention voice recognition because many people do not talk as fast as they wish to communicate already.

Haptics would be nice, right? What could we do today, right now, with bubble wrap suits with individual air pressure control of each bubble. Make the bugs crawl all over you, tele-massage... There's potential there. Does anybody want it? "I don't want to be touched" would have been a weirder thing to say in public in 1990 than today. I don't think our culture is about to celebrate skin as a sense organ anytime soon.

I'm just a bit cynical about "VR". Perhaps someday some of the VR work will become widely useful, probably be under a different name, like "bio- interfaces" or something, just because the VR meme has so much suction.

<comment><USER3> The fact that we don't have good force-feedback technology yet is basically why we don't have great VR input devices. Being able to make fast, precise, confident movements _depends_ on having resistance and collision to take the brain's motion control from open-loop to closed-loop. Even supposedly feedbackless touchscreens have the benefit of screen friction and a defined rigid plane.

And people have been trying with force-feedback; it's just _really hard_ to make it work with something that allows for wide range of motion, isn't massively cumbersome, and costs less than a new car.

<comment><USER4> I think the previous poster makes a good point touting sculpting and design apps as better applications as they don't need such force feedback devices.

These VR devices are already as expensive as game consoles and all you get is a single player experience that a companion can't even watch as you play. The force feedback devices may improve individual experience but wouldn't help the price point.

<comment><USER3> Even sculpting and design apps would _strongly_ benefit from force feedback. In fact, those are some of the specific things I was thinking of where the kind of precise movements that closed-loop control enables are critical!

When you're drawing, for instance, the pressure and friction of the pencil against the page is pretty critical for accurately feeling and controlling your movement. You _cannot_ just wave your finger in the air with the same precision or control you can draw a line with a pencil.

Likewise for sculpting - your hands are far more sensitive to precise shape than your eyes are, and being able to feel the material resist against you lets you use precise amounts of pressure to judge how you are deforming it.

As long as VR inputs involve waving your hands in the air unsupported, they will _never_ be able to achieve the same level of precision input and utility for serious tasks as a mouse or a drawing tablet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


First Stanford code poetry slam reveals the literary side of computer code - bra-ket http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/december/code-poetry-slam-122013.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Stanford, while i applaud the effort, you're not revealing anything. Code poetry has existed LONG before anyone in your halls had the idea for such an event. Here's an example from 1990: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl)

Have some humility.</comment>


Modern multicore Intel 64-bit CPUs lacking vPro - <AUTHOR> https://www.orwell1984.today/no_vpro_for_me.html <comment><AUTHOR> I saw this elsewhere. Expert commentary would be wonderful.

<comment><USER2> I am not an expert.

I suspect that Intel produces such processors to meet the requirements of institutional customers engaged in areas like national security and other matters related to nation states, i.e. customers who need laptops and are sophisticated enough to write procurement requirements down to the CPU level when soliciting bids.

It's basically the same logic that produces chips with vPRO; there are a set of important customers who want to be able to manage CPU's remotely. Because that group buys many more chips, the default is to include vPRO. The volume that those customers buy produces the economies of scale that let vPRO chips dominate the consumer market.

But I could be wrong.</comment></comment>


Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker - <AUTHOR> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThePICO8VirtualFantasyConsoleIsAnIdealizedConstrainedModernDayGameMaker.aspx <comment><USER2> I'd love a PICO-16: a fantasy console almost-but-not-quite like a GBA, extended in some ways (e.g. resolution, sound channels) and reduced in others (e.g. palette, maximum ROM size.)

There are tons of these little "retro console" devices lately—the Bittboy, LDK-game, etc.—that people just treat as emulation devices, when they actually have hidden potential for running _native_ game software as well, with more power than you can get out of them through an emulator. (They're actually usually as powerful as the original PSP, but only have the GPU capabilities of the GBA, making these consoles into a sort of unique alternate-history blend of 2001-2004 era gaming.)

But no games are being written _directly_ for these devices, because they're all slightly-differently specced: different screen-sizes; different amounts of RAM; etc.

A hypothetical PICO-16 "platform", in my mind, would basically be an abstraction over the cross-section of native capabilities of these devices (with maybe some additional tasteful constraints on top), while still allowing to take advantage of the full hardware in a way you can't by just e.g. writing SNES or GBA homebrew.

Maybe the "platform" could even come in a few separate "profiles", where games could be either targeted to a specific minimum profile, or could respec themselves to the highest profile supported (sort of like how Z-Machine games work in detecting the VM's multimedia capabilities.) Take it far enough and PICO-8 could just be the base PICO-16 profile!

<comment><USER3> I'm working on something like this, but as time has gone on I've made technical constraint less of a priority and focused more and more on the I/O and "bus" model itself, because that's where the ultimate bottlenecks lie. If you have all the processing power in the world but only a 256x256 space to draw in and a limited number of commands to draw with, you still have an interesting constraint.

One of the things I found myself doing with PICO-8's setup was prematurely optimizing code for size, which presented a new kind of puzzle(how to express things in fewer Lua tokens) but didn't feel good in terms of authoring finished work(I made a nice 3D maze wireframe renderer - and then stopped there). So with my own fantasy console I'm prioritizing other things beyond size/retro aesthetic, while still thinking about limitations. "Diversity" has become one of those things: you will have some ability to swap out graphics and sound cores, and use a variety of programming languages. The fixed spec approach makes it harder to make each part really distinctive and not just another "tiles and sprites and chiptunes" doddle.

Since I made the foolish decision to support 3D cores it's taken a while to get a renderer going, though, and I finally decided to speed things up by releasing with 2D first and adding more later.

<comment><USER2> Very cool! Have a page or repo up to follow your work?

<comment><USER3> I have a little landing page on itch.io which can be followed if you have an account (but the content is getting embarassingly out of date): [https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos](https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos)

Current release plan is to get some builds out late August/early September, both free and paid(paid simply gets the updates faster). Then later on, I can think about plans to open up development. PICO-8 took about two years from conception to release and I'm getting to around the end of year one of mine, and just about everything has had multiple iterations, but the first release will be a basic "run at the command line, code in your text editor, store assets in the file system" kind of environment. Releasing means I think the basic design is mostly settled, so after that all the UI and IDE functions will become possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is one of my most favorite inventions within the past 5 years that still sticks out. I think it's ingenious and a great gateway to game development for anyone, be it a hobbyist or professional.

I've spent a ton of time trying to get into game development only to get stuck in researching the many frameworks, programs, and even the idea of making my own engine. Pico-8 just packs everything you need in it including code editor, mapper, pixel editor, sound editor, etc. so you can focus on making the game instead of figuring out your tech stack. Highly recommend it and well worth the money ($15)

</comment><comment><USER5> I love the idea of using Pico-8 as a platform for prototyping simple games. It forces you to simplify your code and focus on perfecting the limited functionality you can support.

Celeste is a great game. If I remember correctly you can actually play the pico-8 version within the newer version.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're into the idea of a portable linux gaming handheld check out the community at [https://sudomod.com](https://sudomod.com)

The Discord server and Forums are very active and friendly.

Specifically, Helder's Minty Pi[0], or various incarnations of the Game Boy Zero: Kite's Circuit Sword CM3+ AIO PCB[1], RenegadeLab's Game Boy Zero AIO PCB[2], and the always out of stock (but can be found on ebay with a markup) Retroflag GPi Case[3].

[0] [https://heldergametech.com/shop/mintypi/mintypi-v3-pcb- kit/](https://heldergametech.com/shop/mintypi/mintypi-v3-pcb-kit/)

[1] [https://sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8488](https://sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8488)

[2] [https://www.renegadelabs.net/product/gameboy-zero-aio-pro- pc...](https://www.renegadelabs.net/product/gameboy-zero-aio-pro-pcb-kit/)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Retroflag-CASE-Raspberry-Zero- Shutdow...](https://www.amazon.com/Retroflag-CASE-Raspberry-Zero- Shutdown/dp/B07RT9VGS4)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a huge Pico-8 fan and suggest that anyone that is interested in Pico-8 watch Joseph White's (the creator) Practice (NYU game designer conference) talk about the design philosophy of Pico-8. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw). The TLDW of the talk is that he explicitly tried to built a "cozy" game development environment with enough constraints in place to encourage creativity without the stress of starting from a completely blank canvas.

At the end Scott Hanselman has a footnote about building or buying a physical Pico-8 console. One thing that is missing is most Pico-8 consoles focus on the play aspect of Pico-8, not the creation aspect of Pico-8 which is just as important to me if not more so. I own a PocketCHIP and the device is a decent handheld computer, but there are many aspects of it that make it painful to use, not due to the form factor but due to the quality of various components. The keyboard is bad although there are a variety of solutions, including 3D printed covers ([https://www.thingiverse.com/glitchpudding/collections/pocket...](https://www.thingiverse.com/glitchpudding/collections/pocketchip)) or rubber feet ([https://androidarts.com/Amiga/PRBOOM.jpg](https://androidarts.com/Amiga/PRBOOM.jpg)). The quality of the screen and touch is also not great, so it was hard for me to draw pixel art on the device.

I'd like to build a custom handheld computer primarily for Pico-8 development built around this display [https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hyperpixel-4-square](https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hyperpixel-4-square), probably using a Raspberry Pi Zero. One of my issues with Pocketchip was that the entire system felt kind of slow\high latency and more compute might be one of the only fixes for that, so rpi zero might not cut it. I'd probably have to print my own case and I still haven't found a great keyboard solution. The best option I've seen is Teensy Thumb keyboard ([https://www.pjrc.com/handheld-tactile-switch- keyboard/](https://www.pjrc.com/handheld-tactile-switch-keyboard/)), but I might go with a standard bluetooth thumb keyboard. If anyone on HN has built a handheld computer or has good resources I'd love to hear about it. My goal is to get something that feels like a Nintendo handheld (Switch, DS, GB) with good feeling physical thumb keyboard and can also be used to draw pixel art.

</comment><comment><USER8> David Murray (The 8-bit Guy) and others are building an expandable, C64ish computer with sourceable parts and modern I/O connectivity (eg. VGA). They're calling it Commander X16. It's very early, but it looks promising as a retro gaming/educational platform. Due to hardware limitations (eg 6502-based CPU), it will probably be fairly limited to Basic and assembly programming and w/o networking capability. But, it will be expandable, so who knows. I think they will eventually have a Kickstarter. Should be a lot of fun!

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ayh0qebfD2g](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ayh0qebfD2g)

</comment><comment><USER9> here are some other fantasy consoles: [https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy](https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy)

<comment><USER10> Seems to be missing the original virtual console, CHIP-8: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8)

<comment><USER11> I have an ETI-660 that I built in the early 1980's around here somewhere. Possibly it even still works, though I'd need to find an old CRT TV to try. (probably need to replace the capacitors too). Coding in CHIP-8 was my intro to programming.

<comment><USER10> I designed and maintain an IDE for CHIP-8 development ([http://octo- ide.com](http://octo-ide.com)) which you might find enjoyable. If you wanted to run your programs on an ETI-660 I could easily make the assembler's base address configurable to suit that machine's memory map.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the offer, but I'm not even sure if any of my code from that era survives. I'll have a look sometime.

Cool project btw!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've made a game with PICO-8 with my 6-year-old watching along with me and telling me what to put into it. It was a great experience.

I do think it's very nearly almost too constrained, specifically in the code editor. But, it did it's job. A QBASIC-like interface would be appreciated.

<comment><USER13> I wish you could configure your constraints. I understand why you can't. But I just want unlimited tiles and map sizes. :)

<comment><USER14> When I was looking around the fantasy computers, I found one that was configurable. It had presets for different popular machines. I saved the link and closed the rest but when I was about to start I realised I saved the wrong one and I haven't been able to find it again. Did I just dream it? The one I started on instead was tic-80.

<comment><USER7> PixelVision8:

[https://www.pixelvision8.com/](https://www.pixelvision8.com/)

Found it via this list [https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy](https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that it's just an "8-bit look" but not really "8-bit". Code is written in Lua which will be either 32- or 64- bit depending on what platform the Lua interpreter is compiled on.

(From the name, I went to read the docs, because I thought they emulated an "ideal" 8-bit processor, too.)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, it's all on the Lua VM. It does behave kinda like an 8-bit computer in that you can go poking around in the RAM to create various effects or glitches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Actually, considering I'm learning C and pretty much enjoy the process, I'm thinking about doing some game dev for some of the retros. NES and SNES are pretty fun platforms, I'll probably use Assembly for NES but maybe I can use C for SNES?

It's always fun to do some low level stuffs in these days.

</comment><comment><USER18> Quadplay is cool too [https://github.com/morgan3d/quadplay?fbclid=IwAR0T92CL6D90Ob...](https://github.com/morgan3d/quadplay?fbclid=IwAR0T92CL6D90ObL3ao1mpKP3UeHhwrGZakq8rDJWYCK1PiqZRpX7aSTVEFs)

</comment><comment><USER19> this might be childish wishful thinking, but I'd love to make something like that but with a physical console also. Share the software created between the physical console and the fantasy console, maybe allow alternate software evolutions (imagine an internet that diverges with something other than html).

It's a fun little daydream at least

<comment><USER20> Have you seen [http://makenesgames.com/](http://makenesgames.com/) ?</comment></comment>


Falling lithium-ion battery prices to drive rapid storage uptake - <AUTHOR> https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2017/08/03/falling-lithium-ion-battery-prices-to-drive-rapid-storage-uptake/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how much of this is simply the Gigafactory coming online at full production + others trying to keep their factories running.

If you look at Tesla's plan to be making 10,000 model 3's a week, with a nominal 90 kWh battery in each that is 900 MWh a week of capacity or 46 GWh capacity a year. But it is all tied up in cars of course[1].

The power companies have been screwing around with rate plans to keep grid- tied solar from being as economic as it could be and so I do see a lot of people such as myself moving to a whole house storage system at some point.

[1] I fully expect a TV show to have a scene where they need more power and the 'genius' hero looks out the window and sees a row of electric cars charging and "hacks the system to feed the car's energy into the power grid for the extra energy needed to save the day" along with the gratuitous cars exploding as they are being drained too quickly but reaching the minimum level of power at just the right time to save the world.

<comment><USER3> Utilities are actually planning on using parked electric cars for storage.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to- grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid)

<comment><USER4> Hell no!

As soon as someone departs for a long trip and the battery isn't charged, there will be a huge class action lawsuit.

The lemon law attorneys will also have a field day!

This is a really dumb idea.

<comment><USER5> I'm ignorant as to existing implementations but the system I heard of to solve this is:

Your car or charger module has electricity spot prices available to it and you can select a strategy for it to automatically follow.

E.g.

* Rapid charge (charge battery, ignore price)

* Economise (charge battery at low price)

* Make money (charge/discharge according to price to profit from the difference)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest metal element).

Now, it seems the development effort devoted to lithium-ion has paid off so well that they are the best OVERALL battery solution. The single-minded effort we put into cell phones and cars is so strong that it now reaches all the way to homes and the grid.

To me, this suggests that all sorts of cool technologies might be possible if we as a society could concentrate on making them work.

<comment><USER7> In the last three decades battery technology was mostly about powering small, lightweight gadgets. Now that there's massive amounts of money to be made with car batteries and grid-level storage, I certainly expect some great battery technologies that focus on that in the next decade or two.

That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium: nobody is going to power the world on lithium, it's just the cheapest method _right now_ because of the massive amounts of research money already dumped into it, and great economies of scale. Other technologies will catch up as their use-cases become more valuable.

<comment><USER8> > That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having > enough lithium

Who is afraid of that? Take a look at this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust)

Lithium is #33, estimated at 20 ppm of the crust. We presently mine 64000 tons per year. It is more common than lead, which is #37 and only 14 ppm. Yet we mine 4.8 million tons of lead per year. Now examine boron. #41, 10 ppm and 9.4 million tons per year. Are these unsustainable? Are we on the verge of peak boron and peak lead? Probably not. We have twice as much lithium so we probably aren't going to run out of lithium even if demand increases by a hundred-fold.

I am not a geologist, so maybe much of this lithium is more inaccessible than I'm assuming. But everyone who says we are going to run out of lithium have been only looking at the known deposits and are ignoring the possibility that more mines will open to meet demand.

<comment><USER9> Lithium has gone up in price about six fold in the last 15 years and is currently about 4 times as expensive as lead per metric tonne.

I suggest that something is wrong with your assessment.

<comment><USER10> Why is there anything wrong with his assessment. Availability affects price, sure, but demand does equally so. Pretty sure lithium has higher demand than lead.

<comment><USER11> Lithium is a lot harder to produce than lead. That's certainly most of the price difference, regardless of abundance in the crust.

But statements like this should really be talking about the "economically extractable ore", and it needs to include economic thresholds. There's a price curve there, and I suspect that for lithium it is a steep one because of how complicated its manufacturing is relative to lead.

I don't know if we're near the limit though. I don't really buy it personally, I'm much more worried about rare earths.

<comment><USER12> Production of lithium from hard rock isn't very different from lead, and lithium production from brine is far easier.

Hard rock lithium is most commonly extracted in the form of spodumene which is about 6-7%[1] (8% when totally pure) lithium oxide. Rich lead ore may have 3-8% lead content. Obviously comparing the two is difficult since lead is about 20x denser, but they're on the same order of magnitude. As a ratio of rock in to metal out by volume there is probably a bit more lithium, but by mass lead ore is probably 2-3x more concentrated.

For both lead and spodumene, the ore is crushed, separated by density, ground, counditioned (treated with acid to remove organics/slime), froth float separated, cleaned, filtered and dried[2]. That gives you metal that is ready to be reduced in a furnace (or electrolytically or chemically, for lithium). Both processes use the exact same machinery and chemicals (sulfuric and hydroflouric acid, and NaOH). Both processes are almost identical except that the lithium is collected at the low-density end and lead is collected at the high-density end.

Brine production is much easier and involves a well, a pump, a bulldozer and a bunch of sodium carbonate (water softener)[3]. It is _significantly_ cheaper than any other metal production method, as well as low-energy, low-waste and low-impact. The only downside is there is a lot of water loss to evaporation. It's a relatively small amount of water, especially compared to a farm of the same size, but brine mines exist exclusively in places without much water to start with (otherwise the brine would have washed into the ocean already). It's a tradeoff.

Regardless, the difficulty in producing lithium is most certainly _not_ most of the price difference. First, annual global lithium production is ~36,000 tonnes vs 5 million tonnes for lead, a 140x difference. Lithium's lower density could account for a 2-3x price per tonne difference, but it is vastly more likely that economies of scale are the culprit.

Not only that, but the current lithium price surge is entirely due to market contraction. It takes 2-3 years to build a mine, and longer to decide to build one. Tesla _wrecked_ the battery market in less than two years, becoming the largest battery consumer. There simply hasn't been time to open new mines yet. The prices will drop as soon as they catch up.

Finally, the majority of lead is produced by recycling. That 5 million tonnes mined each year is less than 50% of all lead. The recycling industry obviously drops the price of lead immensely, and lithium will take advantage of recycling too, when and if it ever needs to.

>But statements like this should really be talking about the "economically extractable ore"

There is no such thing, really. Not even for oil. The content of the ground is not mapped that well. As soon as people go looking for lithium, the reserves will skyrocket just like they did with oil. Trust the crustal content more than the global reserves. Lithium is so cheap and ubiquitous that nobody has gone looking for it since the 50s- Seriously, that's the last time the USGS did a survey of US lithium supplies.

>I'm much more worried about rare earths.

Don't be. They're only used in hybrid cars (neodymium) and even then they aren't needed. You don't need magnets to make a motor, just steel and copper. The other green use for rare earths (tellurium) is in thin-film solar panels, which make up 5% of all solar panel production. Rare earth elements aren't even the first choice for these technologies, and a contraction in supply will push them out of favor entirely. Seriously, the only reason we use thin-film solar is because it's _cheap_ , even though it's less efficient. If it's not cheap, then we won't use it at all. Good riddance.

[1]: [http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Lithium+Ores](http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Lithium+Ores)

[2]: [https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/froth-flotation- spodume...](https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/froth-flotation-spodumene- processing-lithium-extraction#roughing_and_cleaning) [3]: [https://www.thebalance.com/lithium- production-2340123](https://www.thebalance.com/lithium-production-2340123)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the fantastic post!

My rare earth worries are based on this DOE report:

[https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/news/documents/criti...](https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/news/documents/criticalmaterialsstrategy.pdf)

It actually calls out dysprosium as the biggest problem, with neodymium, terbium, europium, yttrium, and indium as the next biggest worries.

This is fairly old though, I read it back in 2010. I've read about a number of breakthroughs on higher strength-to-weight magnetic materials and I'm sure solar has responded to this report accordingly as well. It's comforting to know that things seem to have worked out seven years later!

I think a lot of the stress in 2010 was because China was limiting exports and it became clear that the USA was at a strategic disadvantage because of vulnerability to Chinese actions. Glad that Obama took it so seriously by supporting funding to develop those new technologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> $200/kWh by 2019.

Assuming that households consume between 30 kWh and 15 kWh electricity daily on average and you want to have storage capacity for 1/3 of daily electricity consumption to get wind or solar energy work, you need 10-5 kWh per household. That's $2000 - $1000 per household. If that battery lasts 10 years, its $200 - $100 per year.

It's workable and scales if we are able to reuse lithium. When does that happen? (recycling is not reuse)

<comment><USER14> That wouldn't work for much of the South where summer usage for a house can easily hit 100 kWh/day for air conditioning. The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours. Plus you'll want massive overcapacity of your batteries as deep discharges drastically reduce their useful lifespan.

<comment><USER15> Wow - that's a crazy amount of energy. As a Brit who's never been the south of the US, is that figure really true? 100kWh is about 300 miles in a Tesla, or boiling a kettle constantly for about 30 hours.

If that's really accurate, then I'm staggered at how much energy folks must be using to keep cool, and makes my efforts at saving energy seem paltry in comparison.

<comment><USER16> Remember, the south of the US is in the subtropics, roughly level with the north of Africa. Imagine living in Egypt and not running the AC constantly.

<comment><USER17> I spent much of last year in Southeast Asia within ten degrees of the equator and rarely had A/C. It wasn't a problem for me, though my computer was often unhappy.

I went to Egypt as a teenager and remember the temperature in Sharm el Sheikh cracking 50C. We would literally sprint from the A/C in the hotel across the beach to the water because the sand was too hot to walk.

Equivalent latitude doesn't mean equivalent climate. As an example, which of these cities is further north, Buffalo, NY, USA or Cannes, France? Hint: it's the one known for topless sunbathing, not the one known for sub-zero outdoor football games.

<comment><USER16> According to WolframAlpha, the hottest temp on record in Cairo is 118°F, while Phoenix, AZ has hit 123°F. Even the average high is 5°F higher in Phoenix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > By 2025, the world's base of cumulative installed storage capacity will > reach 52 GW, IHS Markit says, up from around 4 GW today. Last year, 1.3 GW > of grid-connected storage was deployed globally, and this rate is poised to > accelerate to 4.7 GW a year by 2020, and 8.8 GW annually by 2025.

GW is not a unity of energy storage capacity. It's a unit of power.

<comment><USER19> GW is, however, a characteristic of an energy storage system, and just a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores.

<comment><USER20> > _GW is, however, a characteristic of an energy storage system, and just a > valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores._

Wrong.

The watt is a measure of power, not of stored energy. These are different physical notions. So, yes, you could say that some storage facility can output up to so many GW, but that's actually a measure of how much energy _per second_ can exit the system when it's being used.

The proper unit for measuring an amount of energy that's stored in the system is the Wh (or its multiple the GWh), which has the same dimension as the joule, which is the standard unit of energy.

GW is like how many liters of water per second can exit the storage tank when it's being emptied. GWh is like how many liters of water total are stored in the full tank. And yes, both are important when designing a battery system. But saying _" GW is [...] a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores"_ would fail you high school physics.

GWh is static energy (or simply - energy). GW is energy moving from point A to point B, which is power.

Here's a brief introduction to the basic meaning of these terms:

[https://cleantechnica.com/2015/02/02/power-vs-energy- explana...](https://cleantechnica.com/2015/02/02/power-vs-energy-explanation/)

<comment><USER21> GW is a very important characteristic of an energy storage system, especially as a ratio of GWh. A technology could store 100TWh, but if it can only release 1kW, I'm not interested.

The comment you replied to said "just a valid and important measurement _as_ the amount of energy it stores". The comment didn't say power was the same thing as energy, it says that the power is as important as the energy. I don't think this would fail high school physics.

<comment><USER20> Let me quote that thing for you again. Parse is again, more slowly this time, and see for yourself:

> _GW is [...] a valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it > stores_

There's no way to sugarcoat it. This is like saying km/h is a measurement of distance.

<comment><USER22> Once you fix the obvious typo there, it says "GW is [...] _as_ valid and important measurement as the amount of energy it stores"

Which is entirely true... Both the overall capacity, and the rate at which it can deliver power are critical metrics for an energy storage system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I paid $354/kWh last month for 24kWh of batteries (inc 20% tax), and I got a free car that goes around it

<comment><USER24> What kind of electric car costs $8500? Used Leaf?

<comment><USER25> I heard from a friend that the Leaf's battery pack had a major redesign of the cooling system in recent models, that might have driven down the value of used older versions with worse anticipated battery wear.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, that's why I got the 2014 version. Turns out it also had the 6.6kW charger, even though it wasn't advertised as such, that was nice. You'd think the Nissan dealer would know something about the cars they were selling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hah, I misinterpreted "storage" here, and thought this was going to be about Li-ion cells getting cheap enough to replace the capacitors in the Power Loss Protection circuits in hard drives/SSDs/NVMe boards.

Which doesn't make sense, after giving it a second's thought—batteries wear out after just a few years, while capacitors (very nearly) don't, so it'd put a hard lifetime on drives. (Though, for server use-cases with constant workloads, they have hard lifetimes _anyway_...)

But it's an interesting question! If—rather than UPSes as specialized enterprise-level hardware—we instead had Li-ion cells on computer motherboards (picture a big brother to the CR-2032 CMOS battery) that kept the disks alive for up to, say, 30 minutes after power loss—could we architect our storage subsystems differently?

(Sorry if that's a complete tangent from the topic at hand, but I'm not sure where I'd post this otherwise!)

<comment><USER7> Keeping the disks alive is certainly doable. At a rough estimate of 10W per drive, even storage servers would only need very moderate batteries. But what would you gain by that?

More interesting (in my eyes) would be to power down spinning disks and processors, but keep caches and ram alive. Then once power is restored, you could basically supply power and continue where you left off, without any reboots etc.

Then again, power loss should be fairly infrequent, and you have to architect against connection cuts or physical disruptions anyway.

<comment><USER27> Congratulations, you just invented the ACPI S3 power state. Also known as standby or suspend to ram. I've been pretty happy with it since ~1998 when I started returning hardware that didn't support it properly. Although these days even linux on a laptop tends to work properly with S3 and S4 (hibernate, or suspend to disk). That said the concept was also part of the earlier APM standard which was a lot more hit/miss.

Anyway, its great, I used it today to ride out a nearly hour long power outage with a couple of fairly trivial UPSs connected to my NAS, desktop, etc. The desktop was already in standby because that is its default state after being idle for 30 mins. But the NAS went into that mode when the UPS indicated 70% battery life.

The problem of course is that UPSs/etc have miserable power conversion efficiencies when supplying just a couple watts of power, like 10-30% efficiency, so they tend to have max run-times less than 2 hours even when completely unloaded.

More on point, for servers, if your server is lightly loaded, or loaded for only parts of the day, using WOL to wake it and going into standby after a few minutes can save a fair amount of power. With SSDs, the resume times are generally less than a second unless you have bad cards/drivers that take forever to reinit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >IHS Markit expects li-ion battery prices to fall below $200/kWh by 2019

In that article they claim the digit of $200, while you can buy an assembled 1kw/h battery pack in China in retail quantities for around $120 today.

<comment><USER19> Is that NCA or NMC?

Typically grid storage batteries are rated to 10+ years or ~5000 cycles or something on that order of magnitude.

One way to get your cells to last that long is to lessen the discharge depth; that may account for some of the price difference.

<comment><USER28> Most likely consumer grade LiCo with carbon anode. LiFePo modules are twice as expensive, demand for them certainly exceeds supply

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Any medium-to-large commercial campus with time-of-use-billing and large electrical bills may likely benefit from building a 500 kWhr - 3MWhr li-ion battery bank, 480VAC inverter, transfer and switchgear to buy electricity off- peak to use at-peak. The costs for lightly-used inverters and LFP module packs make it compelling to evaluate. For example, Jehu Garcia (@jag35) is involved in a 1 MWhr bank for a manufacturing customer in SoCal that looks really P&L sensible.</comment>


Instinct - A new way to learn guitar - <AUTHOR> http://getinstinct.com/

<comment><USER2> is there a walkthrough or vid? I'm at work, needless to say, I don't have a guitar hanging around to try it all out. :(</comment>


Ask HN: Can we set apart upvote and downvote buttons? - <AUTHOR> A small request/suggestion/discussion: Upvote and downvote buttons are so close to each other that you can't know which one you've pressed (especially on mobile).<p>Can we have them separated a bit or have the "unvote" button (appears after voting) renamed to "cancel {upvote, downvote}" or similar? <comment><USER2> The cancel button is already "unvote" vs "undown".

Not that we mightn't want to improve the UI.

</comment><comment><USER3> I mash the wrong one probably 25% of the time. And then I just feel awful.</comment>