Show HN: Swiss Army Knife for Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rgcr/m-cli <comment><USER2> The last one of these that popped up on HN replaced a lot of the common UNIX commands, and a lot of people here rightly asked 'why would I run "mac tar:extract" when I could just run "tar xf"?'

This one seems to get the balance a lot more right, with a lot of things that the average OS X admin wouldn't know off the top of their head.

\- 'm lock': That's a lot better than whichever arcane key combination does it by default (my laptop stays closed most of the time, so the power button isn't an option).

\- 'm nosleep': I would have to look that one up.

\- 'm finder showhiddenfiles': It beats Googling for the proper 'defaults write' invocation.

<comment><USER3> The basic command for keeping the machine awake is `caffeinate`, and has a few other nice options like changing what kind of sleep is prevented (disk, display, system) and also waiting on a PID (looks like that was added in 10.10).

Related to that is `pmset -g assertions` which will list all the various things that are keeping your machine from sleeping.

<comment><USER4> strange, I always used `pmset noidle` instead of `caffeinate`. But seems it does the same. I somehow assumed `caffeinate` is the same as this app store thing called Caffeine.

<comment><USER3> Using `pmset noidle` is now deprecated in favor of `caffeinate` according to the pmset man page.

<comment><USER4> Good to know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a more popular but similar project. [https://github.com/guarinogabriel/mac- cli](https://github.com/guarinogabriel/mac-cli) Has anyone used both?

<comment><USER6> It literally says on the github page of OP submission, that Mac-CLI was inspiration.

HNews discussion about it 3 weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11977162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11977162)

But I too wonder why I should use this instead of Mac-CLI?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think @koenigdavidmj has the answer :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like how each function is contained in an individual plugin file. I can install (create a local script) which plugins I want without needing to install them all. Even if you do not want to install any of the code, it shows you the command line needed in OS X.

The volume plugin has a more fine-grained control for adjusting the volume. The keyboard based function keys will increase/decrease the volume by 6/7\. Now I can increase by smaller increments. Excellent.

<comment><USER8> You can use Alt+Shift+VolumeUp/Down to change volume by quarters of an increment.

<comment><USER9> Karabiner allows you to change the default behavior of the volume keys to use quarter steps with the "Fine grained volume controls" option (it simply adds the alt+shift for you). Very useful with headphones that are too sensitive. [https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/](https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That something like this exists shows some problems with the unix shell: No standardized commands exist for many common actions (sleep, wifi, etc). The syntax is different across commands even on a single system.

It's really nice, but I'd like to see something like that as a standard in shells.

<comment><USER11> I don't know, CLI commands in os x are much worse than in linux, want to display wifi info?

$/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -I

lots of useful commands like that are not in your path by default, that said, at least os x lets you modify almost any part of the system with shell commands.

<comment> SG- which airport

/usr/local/bin/airport

<comment><USER12> Tried that on my Mac

$ which airport

airport not found

<comment><USER13> It's not linked by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like it! I wish it had some features for making a screenshot, taking a photo, and recording video or sound for n seconds. A packet capture for n seconds might be nice, too (although that would certainly be more involved). Might as well add keyboard/mouse logging for n seconds. :)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not really clean, how it asks for /usr/local/m-cli to be added to $PATH but then litters that directory with other scripts.

<comment><USER16> It does mention that you can put it elsewhere:

        INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/.m-cli sh <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rgcr/m-cli/master/install.sh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does it need to be ran as root?

 _Downloading m-cli from git to /usr/local _fatal: could not create work tree dir '/usr/local/m-cli': _Permission denied_ Failed to clone => [https://github.com/rgcr/m-cli.git](https://github.com/rgcr/m-cli.git)

Off course it won't be able to access the /usr/local/

<comment><USER18> Most people using this probably have homebrew installed, which makes /usr/local writable for the main user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As opposed to alias in bashrc for the commands you use most often?

This and the other one that was on HN a short while back, I just don't get the point. Learn the command line, already. Yes, some are hard to remember, but that's why history exists. And if you rarely use one, keep it in a simple, greppable text file.

</comment><comment><USER20> Not sure I like the install method. I'm nervous of anything that asks me to pipe curl to shell.

<comment><USER21> Are you less nervous running a binary installer?

<comment><USER22> i'm not. all of it makes me nervous. even package managers with supposedly cryptographically secure verification make me nervous.

but, you gotta do what you gotta do to actually do stuff.

i sure as hell ain't going back to the days of compiling everything from source.

<comment><USER23> > i'm not. all of it makes me nervous. even package managers with supposedly > cryptographically secure verification make me nervous.

Android and Chrome for example are really ahead of this in my opinion. Apps are sandboxed and you know uninstall clears up traces of them. Obviously it's not perfect but it's miles ahead of installation scripts and binary installers which can do anything they want with your system and might be hard to get rid of.

<comment><USER24> > Apps are sandboxed and you know uninstall clears up traces of them.

Not in all versions of Android, if they write stuff on the SD card.

<comment><USER23> They might be able to write some files that sit around but not code that runs on startup and spies on you for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> m dir tree returns:

/usr/local/m-cli/plugins/dir: line 3: /lib/functions.sh: No such file or directory

</comment><comment><USER26> Thanks for crafting and sharing this.

I must admit to flagging this particular submission, as it is the fifth time it has been posted in as many days, with no other contributions (whether of comments or stories) to speak of. Forgive me if this seems harsh, but just to keep submitting the same item over and over without any other activity (including responding to comments made in the prior submissions) does not seem in alignment with HN.

<comment><USER27> I read HN every day and this is the first time I've seen this submission...

<comment><USER26> Here are the previous submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rgcr](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rgcr)

<comment><USER28> Super curious as to why you're getting downvotes... :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I"m curious about why it's written in sh, given that it's OS X only and OS X includes by default many languages significantly less crappy than Borne Shell.

<comment><USER30> Presumably because most of the commands are just shortcuts for other shell commands. Probably the right tool for the job in this case.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, fair enough. Not everybody hates the shell as much as I do.</comment></comment></comment>


How the web makes a real life Breaking Bad possible--and legal. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/19f753fb15e0 Designing your own narcotics online isn't just easy—it can be legal too. How do we know? We did it. <comment><USER2> This was fascinating. Just one more example of how the internet, by driving communications costs near to zero, is changing everything. (Though the emergence of China as a manufacturing superpower is a major factor as well.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The original title of the article is much better.</comment>


Ask HN: What is some great fiction you've read? - <AUTHOR>

Read Labyrinths by Borges, and found it to be fantastic, the kind of stuff that leaves you a different person. So, HN, any good fiction you've read of late that I may have missed? <comment><USER2> Yukikaze. I wouldn't go so far as saying it left me a different person, but I certainly felt like one while I was reading it. I think it captures a feeling of alienation, of being a human doing something normal people can't comprehend that's intimately caught up with machines that are slowly taking over, that's very relevant to the tech industry.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fight Club and Children of Men are two books that I truly enjoyed.</comment>


Hitchens examines the, like, unstoppable onslaught of "like." - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/01/hitchens-like-201001 <comment><USER2> 'This.'

That is my current annoyance. I don't know where it started, but since a few weeks 'this' seems to be turning up in more and more places. I really can't parse it, but I think it means agreement with the previous comment, sort of like an upvote.

It bugs the hell out of me.

Random example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875816>

<comment><USER3> Basically: <http://qcjeph.livejournal.com/110229.html>

Best I can figure, people just saying "This" mean "I agree with your above point, and I would like to see it expressed more often. Let me lend my support to you in spreading your ideas."

<comment><USER4> "I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter".

Honestly it doesn't bother me. It's just a modernization of the "hear, hear" sentiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not really seeing the point of this article. I had already noticed that people are saying "like" a lot, and Hitchens doesn't do anything beyond making this observation. And he really _can't_ do anything beyond that because he doesn't know anything about language, language change or syntax. (Although to be fair, these are not normally considered necessary qualifications for writing on this subject.)

Anyone who's actually interested in the grammar of "like" would be better off reading something by someone who knows what they are talking about. E.g. this: <http://www.jstor.org/stable/454820>

<comment><USER6> _Hitchens doesn't do anything beyond making this observation_

I don't think that's fair. He wove a lot of observations into the piece.

Hitchens is a man of letters, not an academic linguist. He carries on that tradition as well as anyone, and while I disagree with him about a lot of things (who, besides him, doesn't?), boy oh boy can he write.

<comment><USER5> >He wove a lot of observations into the piece.

In what sense were they "observations"? I did see a lot of assertions about people's use of language that weren't backed up by any data, but I didn't see any observations.

>Hitchens is a man of letters, not an academic linguist.

I guess my question would be whether you'd be equally happy if he wrote in the same style about (say) physics, geology or programming. Is there something special about language that makes it unnecessary for commentators to know anything about their subject?

And really, the article is about _like_ , for goodness sake. There are literally thousands of grumpy, contentless articles of this sort written over the past couple decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Grampa wants you to, like, get off his lawn.

Also:

> The restoration of the word 'as,' which isn't that hard a word to master, > along with 'such as,' would also be a help in varying the national lingo.

Instantly reminded me of this:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww>

> Everywhere, like, such as.

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing is: I submitted a bunch of interesting (to me) links this morning and this is the one to get front-page attention. I don't understand the difference. Indeed, this seemed to me to be the most superficial among them. But with my wife and I recently wondering how "like" entered our own speech patterns, it interested me.

<comment><USER7> I can't comment on the collective voting pattern on HN, but my objection to Hitchens' piece is that he buries what might have been an interesting etymology of "like" under a mountain of prescriptive humbug.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. But that is Hitchens. You didn't have to click the link to know that's his MO.

<comment><USER7> Ah, Hitchens. The right wing can have him. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know that it's been a full decade since the 90's, but you can't just pull out an old article and recycle it like that.

What next? The danger of hippies? The threat of rock'n'roll?

</comment><comment><USER9> Overheard in Pompei (Italy), one american teens describing the scene of the ruins to another: "It's like like like like."

(Yes, I am serious, and so was he)

<comment><USER10> Somehow this reminds me of "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)) which I also can't wrap my head around :)

<comment><USER4> Is that that that that you were talking about?

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put two hyphens between the words Fish and And, and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, and also after Chips?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of this spoken word piece from Def Poetry Jam. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLE2bliXCI></comment>


JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/ <comment><USER2> Due to shitty academic job market, I was forced to take a job part of which could be described as "semantic web evangelist". If you read some incredibly optimistic article about the semantic web and how it solves all life's problems, there's a non-negligible chance that I wrote it.

The semantic web is a colossal waste of time and money. It does more harm than good. Unless you're a savvy PI (probably in a European country) who has used it to lasso a big fat grant from clueless committees who think in terms of buzzwords.

Every successful project which is linked in any way to semantic web, would have been successful without the semantic web.

The only original thing to come out of semantic web, RDF, causes more harm than good. Anyone who has had to deal with encoding sequences in RDF, or any other kind of nontrivial structured data, which is only possible with incredibly asinine "blank node" trickery, either knows this or is deceiving themselves.

Semantic reasoners are either limited to EL ontologies, which defeats the whole purpose of OWL's expressiveness; or else take dozens of gigabytes of RAM to reason over any ontology more complicated than "the pizza ontology". Utterly, thoroughly irrelevant in today's VPS-based world.

The semantic web "community" is about 75% made up of invalid URLs because all these academic geniuses are too busy theorizing about ontologies to realize that all the links into their department webpage are going to stop working when their one-year postdoc expires. Various URL-standardizing services try to address this, unfortunately the number of these services is approximately 1 per semantic web researcher, and in the long run they're no more stable than the department webpages.

The semantic web is a horrific waste of (mostly EU) grant funds that could be used on far more worthy research. The world would be a better place if the whole idea had never been invented.

<comment><USER3> I strongly disagree. Mostly because the semantic web is very, very useful in the life sciences. And over the next 5 years will save more money being wasted in this field than was ever spend on grants for the semantic web tech. Not just on the academic side but also on the big pharma side.

For the rest I would say this holds true for to much of any CS research e.g.: Grid, Cloud, P2P and GPU compute. Looking at the vast sums spend on this the practical benefits are from outside the academic labs. I.e. all those other buzzwords that are used to justify grants.

OWL reasoning at least standardised the format of many logical constructs and allowed for competitive improvements. Now you can at least change your prover while maintaining your axioms. So you get something like StarDog which is vastly better than the Pellet you are probably familiar with.

<comment><USER2> I work directly in the life sciences side of it. When the microphone is off, other peoples' interaction with me is basically: "Oh great, we have this data which would be pretty straightforward to store and transmit as JSON, but we have to work with this fucker to turn it into some sort of triple format or something." (Can you tell I don't like my job?)

If you pry beneath the surface the life science ontologies are garbage. Full of subtle errors, disagreement between different ontologies, incorrect changing of namespaces which causes backward incompatibility. You have to have 100% knowledge of the ontology's idiosyncrasies in order to use it with confidence (i.e.: you can't).

Funny you mention StarDog. Semantic web is supposedly this great open data thing that's going to unite the world. Except it's such a miserable community there aren't even any decent non-proprietary tools to satisfactorily fulfill the most basic premises of semantic web, after all these years.

<comment><USER4> That's just wrong if you're "in the field". Have a look at Fuseki, or HDT, or Virtuoso (hell even Oracle supports RDF). The tools are very mature at this point so I had enough with people saying the Semantic Web never lived up to its expectations because the tools are never mature enough.

<comment><USER2> StarDog/Pellet are referred to here for their reasoning capabilities, not their "neo4j except more obtuse" capabilities. Fuseki/HDT aren't reasoners, Virtuoso is a partial reasoner but not complete. Don't know about Oracle, they're certainly not non-proprietary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really wish that, in addition to two videos, he linked some regular text telling us what JSON-LD is and why it matters. Videos, for me, have a much lower information density than text, and are much less amenable to skimming to see if I'm interested enough to go further.

<comment><USER6> The reply to the very first comment has a link to the JSON-LD spec:

[http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/](http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meh... Semantic Web is a field... it's like hating natural language processing or distributed systems for not having achieved much over the past 10 years. But the fact is they provide strong theoretical foundations for us to develop killer apps on top of.

<comment><USER7> What strong theoretical foundations do they provide? (this is a genuine question)

<comment><USER8> CSS/HTML, and its syntax validators, DOM, RDF, HTTP, MathML, PNG, heck here is a full list:

[http://www.w3.org/TR/](http://www.w3.org/TR/)

<comment><USER9> W3 != Semantic Web.

<comment><USER8> The question was "What strong theoretical foundations do they provide? (this is genuine question)" which "they" I assumed referred to the W3C.

[http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/](http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/)

<comment><USER7> I should have said "it" not "they". I was referring to the academic field. I guess I was thinking about people in the field when I wrote "they".

The parent post said "they provide" but it was referring to multiple fields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems silly to see so much stuff being recast as JSON, both formally (standards like this one) and informally.

Growing up in the 80s, I was mostly too young to remember the rise of XML. (Or more: too young to care much about work around a data format.) Presumably a similar thing happened then? I.e. there were existing formal and ad-hoc standards for representing a variety of concepts, and entirely new formal and ad-hoc standards were created to represent the same concepts in XML?

Why not create standards around abstract representations of things, and then create standards for serializing those into concrete formats?! So then we'd already have e.g. Abstract-LD and XML-LD; and JSON-LD would be new. That seems less wasteful than throwing everything out when a different data representation format becomes the new hotness.

(Certainly we learn things about the abstract representations as time goes on. That could be handled by versioning. So maybe there'd be XML-LD 1.0 and 2.0, but JSON-LD would only exist in 2.0 form because nobody was interesting in doing the work to define the JSON serialization of Abstract-LD 1.0...)

<comment><USER3> Funnily that's what the s semantic web stack achieved. JSON-LD, RDF/XML, turtle, n3 etc etc all different serialisations for the same knowledge. Choose the serialisation on the use case but no need to remodel your data evertime.

<comment><USER11> Not 100%.. N3 and Turtle don't have the same expressiveness. Then there is XML...

Semantic web is quite easy when it comes to Linked Data (and RDF/S subset), but is becoming painful when more expressiveness is necessary.

Unfortunately, in many cases using only RDF/S is not enough, and some more heavyweight reasoning is required. This is both hard and not scalable for bigger sets of data. Then there is the Open World Assumpltion, which is somehow contrary to what a typical person would expect. You can't easily validate your data for some missing property, because of what OWA assumes: we don't know so we can't tell if it's false...

Anyway Semantic Web has left a nice and mature technology stack, that is great for many tasks. Most of knowledge modelling use cases can be done with RDF and with multiple tools that supports it's creation, editing, reasoning, querying, visualisation, etc.

<comment><USER3> You are right meant to write NTriples not N3 but editing on the phone is such a disaster. N3 adds a rule language next to the data description over RDF. XML disallows a few things that are possible in turtle but in practical terms there are very few cases where that could make a possible difference, e.g. who has a \beep code point in their normal text.

OWL is powerfull but hard like all description logics, they ar e tools that very very few developers really master. Yet can be used for very interesting things.

Validation is not the goal of OWL and is therefore not well supported. ShACL or whatever comes out of W3C for schema descriptions and constraints will be easier and more performant for this use case.

On the last para: yes, yes and yes. Very mature stack with a lot of competition and innovation.

Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hating the Semantic Web is like shooting fish in a barrel ever since Clay Shirky wrote an essay that lays bare the goals as being irrelevant and immaterial.

[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_s...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_syllogism.html)

<comment><USER13> That essay isn't very convincing. All of his examples of logical failures would only work with the most poorly defined ontology and the most brain dead reasoner, which is probably why he described everything using the term "syllogism". For example:

      US citizens are people
      The First Amendment covers the rights of US citizens
      Nike is protected by the First Amendment

He then goes on to say that one would conclude that Nike, being a person, has kidneys according to some medical database. First, the ontology: why would you join a medical ontology on "person", instead of something more rational like "human" (you know you're going to have medical data for animals as well)? Second, logical failure: the second statement is not one of exclusivity, you cannot actually link the third statement to the prior two.

I'm sure this guy is very clever, and has plenty of great qualities - but he has built his argument around the failure of logic, when it is clear that he doesn't know very much about it. The use of very poorly defined terms makes it look like he is aware of this...

<comment><USER11> Spot on. That given example neither convinces me. The second sentence is actually false/incomplete and would mislead not only a reasoner, but a human too.

The problem with author's thesis is that he want's semantic web to universally describe the whole world. This is impossible because the world is changing and sometimes contradictory.

OWL for instance doesn't cover such assumptions, and in general most knowledge representation frameworks are monotonic, so it's impossible for instance to withdraw some fact by adding a new one. That what might be a real limitation of the Semantic Web as we know it.

<comment><USER12> The second sentence is something being debated as a result of the Citizen's United ruling, so his essay seems oddly prescient.

> the world is changing and sometimes contradictory

If you think ontologies don't change and will not require constant maintenance I have a bridge to sell you.

<comment><USER9> Not particularly prescient; the issue didn't appear with Citizen's United. Back then, there was already a law proposal (the McCain-Feingold bill) to limit spending by corporations and other groups on political ads.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McConnell_v._FEC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McConnell_v._FEC)

<comment><USER12> McCain-Feingold is about _limiting_ corporations behaving like citizens. Citizens United is the _expansion_ thereby making the conclusion much more logical today than when it was first written in 2003.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but I linked to McConnell v. FEC, which was a challenge to McCain- Feingold much like Citizens United v. FEC. The issue was already on the table, the decision just happen to go the other way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been thinking about how to format meta data for my creative files - JSON- LD with my personal @context spec is an interesting idea.

<comment><USER15> There is more than likely an ontology already defined for the creative meta data, if so you should look at using that rather than inventing your own.

<comment><USER16> [http://schema.org/](http://schema.org/) is probably the best choice to go with already established standards. I think there are (even today) some SEO benefits here and for the future maybe some more exciting things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'll be honest: "the alter of pedantic technical accuracy" made me snigger a little.

<comment><USER10> Have you read the essay "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" by Cory Doctorow? You may enjoy it: [http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm](http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm)

My favorite expression from it: "the lab-coated guardians of epistemology".

More fully: "In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas..."

<comment><USER17> I was actually poking fun at the misspelling of "altar" \- seemed quite amusing given the context!

<comment><USER10> Ah, yes. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> JSON-LD is certainly valuable, but I don't understand how to use SPARQL, RDFS or OWL reasoners, etc. with it. Would a client ingest JSON-LD and store it locally in an RDF data store?

There is a ton of great work in knowledge engineering using RDFS and OWL, and tossing that seems like a bad idea.

<comment><USER19> I think the author's point was that JSON-LD isn't primarily intended for existing users of RDF, SPARQL etc. Most developers already work with JSON on a regular basis (not so much RDF), and JSON-LD is a model for merging and combine data sources, in JSON.

It's good that conversion from and to RDF is now standardized, but it's probably not something that your average dev is going to be taking advantage of. They'll likely continue to ingest, process and store the data in JSON.

<comment><USER18> That is a good point.

I am still trying to wrap my head around using JSON-LD. One advantage of RDFS (or OWL) is being able to integrate different data sources using different schemas. That probably is just not a typical JSON-LD use case. BTW, I have written a couple books on the semantic web, so that shows my prejudices :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This was posted before ...

<comment><USER20> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><USER15> meh .. yes i know you can repost, but I thought it would be helpful to inform people of this, because they could then see the previous set of comments ... don't know why i bother sometimes.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Disguise webpage text to appear as though you are in Visual Studio - <AUTHOR> http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://mocko.org.uk/b/2011/01/02/how-to-survive-a-slashdotting-on-a-small-apache-server/&format=visualstudio2010

<comment><USER2> Ah, the return of the good old boss key. I remember being baffled by its presence in Battle Chess as a young child.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll be adding more themes. Contact me if you'd like a specific one.

<comment><USER3> Some Linux (Vim) themes would be helpful. I somehow doubt my boss would fall for the Visual Studio one. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll be working on those. Can you send me a screenshot of your environment? I'll take the SS and turn it into a usable theme.

<comment><USER3> My Vim is highly customized so it won't be of much use to anyone else. It would be really cool if we could submit our own themes but it's probably be easier to write a plugin that opens web pages directly in Vim.

Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/6Tm9q.png>

Vim color scheme: [https://github.com/ElbertF/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/colors/...](https://github.com/ElbertF/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/colors/custom_mono.vim)

Perhaps you can add a simple terminal theme (white monospace text on a black background)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice, but wouldn't fool anybody...now if you made it show a fixed-width font with some fake syntax highlighting...</comment>


Greenland and Antarctica ice loss accelerating - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51846468 <comment><USER2> I think the combination of climate change news and Coronavirus news demonstrate so well how poorly humans respond to non-immediate versus immediate threats. Even when the non-immediate threat is potentially huge.

<comment><USER3> While I agree with you, there is also the thing that the powers-that-be are not all that threatened by climate change.

<comment><USER4> Spot on!

I'd even go as far as to argue that it's even worse.

[WARNING! Unpopular opinion ahead]

Even those who realise the dangers of climate change and the destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity fall victim to cults of personality and blind (almost Victorian era-) faith in technology.

Instead of reducing consumption and dialling back on wasting valuable resources, they honestly think that driving a luxury sedan will safe the world as long as it's powered by batteries... Always reminds me of this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnFAAdOBB1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnFAAdOBB1c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very conservative.

If you really want to look at the risks, see Eric Rignot [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWlsizBRG5w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWlsizBRG5w)

Multi-meter rise by 2100 is possible. Glacier melting could be very nonlinear.

</comment><comment><USER6> I simply fail to understand how, despite the rising mountain of evidence, some people still are able to deny the reality of the climate crisis we're facing.

Even if you have ideological or economical reasons for wanting to believe the climate crisis to be a hoax - at one point or another the drive for self- preservation simply has to kick in, doesn't it?

Ever and ever again when I see some new dire study about how our predatory exploitation of our ecological support system is degrading its capability to actually support us, I think to myself: "This is it. Now they just have to finally start supporting measures to stop killing ourselves." But I always get disappointed - there are still way too many people that absolutely fail to grasp how terminal a situation we're rushing into.

The human capability for self-deception is truly amazing.

<comment><USER7> It's really pretty simple - the prognosticators of doom have a very poor track record. I posted this elsewhere in the thread, so apologize for the spam for any readers who saw it twice:

[https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco- pocalyp...](https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco-pocalyptic- predictions)

Personally, I don't believe climate change is a hoax. There's ample evidence indicating climate change is real. But I am certainly convinced climate _crisis_ is mostly nonsense. And I believe most "solutions" proposed are an antithesis to individual liberty.

And thus, statements like this one you made, from my point-of-view, are mostly hysterical:

 _Ever and ever again when I see some new dire study about how our predatory exploitation of our ecological support system is degrading its capability to actually support us, I think to myself: "This is it. Now they just have to finally start supporting measures to stop killing ourselves." But I always get disappointed - there are still way too many people that absolutely fail to grasp how terminal a situation we're rushing into._

<comment><USER8> > And I believe most "solutions" proposed are an antithesis to individual > liberty.

I think this is the most telling answer any of us, who stand mouth agape at the inaction, will ever receive: rather than join together in any semblance of community to overcome a common problem, we have to walk headfirst into knowable horrors, so that some can continue with their myth of individual liberty.

All I can think of is the past few weeks where posters here on HN quickly wrote off any mention of covid-19 being anything worse than the common flu that no one ought to worry too much about it.

<comment><USER9> Authoritarian/collectivist governments have killed around 100M people in the past century; a number comparable to the predictions of climate crises over the next century.

There's a reason people insist on societies based around individual liberty and citizen empowerment — they work! They're what has led to the greatest increase in human well-being the world has ever seen.

Suggesting authoritarianism in response to climate change is simply creating a second problem — and one that's unlikely to solve the first.

So yes, people resist you trying a repeatedly failed idea _again_ , just so you can be seen to be doing something.

<comment><USER8> I don't know why people see the only way to collective struggle being through an authoritarian battering ram. I think this says far more about you than you realize: the only way in which you could possibly imagine yourself working with another person is at the barrel of a gun.

<comment><USER7> And your plans for those who won't work with you (for whatever reason) to address the _collective struggle_ are...?

<comment><USER8> I'm in favor of any solution that even so much as attempts to price-in externalities into the market. Examples are carbon taxes and tariffs.

Now what's your solution that doesn't tread on my individual liberty?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good news keeps on coming. Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Will be interesting to see if Coronavirus helps at all with climate change.

I assume there will be a lot less flights, cars on the road etc. when cities start getting shut down.

<comment><USER12> I doubt it. If and when the virus passes, people will revert to their previous patterns. This is seen as a temporary inconvenience by the general population. Why change their behaviour moving forward?

<comment><USER13> Well, if the world moves to a global recession for some period, then one would expect reusing and recycling to increase, and useless crap production and recreational travel to decrease. That could reduce emissions for a period of time.

It's not something to be gleeful about, but could be a silver lining in case of a recession.

<comment><USER14> The 2008 crisis saw no significant decline in human CO2 emissions. A global recession would alter some aspects of consumer spending, but all in all I would expect CO2 output to remain problematic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With Siberia melting viruses from before the ice age will start getting out. Pandemics might become the new normal every few years in the future.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's going to be the flood that follows fire, disease and presumably famine when crops start failing.

Thumbs up for the 21st century what a corker.

<comment><USER6> Why the downvotes? Seems like the appropriate sentiment for these kinds of news. No need to sugarcoat it.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, so...

Why the downvotes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meanwhile, the ice in the arctic is increasing against all doomer predictions.

[https://i1.wp.com/ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/osisaf_...](https://i1.wp.com/ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/osisaf_nh_iceextent_daily_5years_en.png)

<comment><USER18> In winter, water freezes. Well done! Fantastic observation!

<comment><USER17> The plot lines cover the entire year and YoY there is more ice than in the past couple of years.

<comment><USER6> You notice that in the graph you provided the link for, the lines for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 are way below the mean value of 1981 to 2000?

For the years from 2016 to 2020 there's an about sigma 4 deviation to the mean of 1981 to 2000 Do you know how unlikely this makes this curves to just be random variation?

There's an about 11% degradation in surface area, in just about 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" If that holds true it would put 400 million people at risk of annual coastal flooding by 2100," said Prof Shepherd._

At least the prognosticators are getting smart enough to make sure their predictions can't be assessed until after they're gone. Means no egg on your face like all the doomsayers of times past...

[https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco- pocalyp...](https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco-pocalyptic- predictions)

And the lede, "give more money to programs I think are important", is buried:

 _His particular concern is to see successors to the European Space Agency 's CryoSat-2 satellite and the American space agency's IceSat-2 platform.

These models observe more of the ice sheets than other satellites because they fly orbits that go very close to the north and south poles.

"I fear we will soon be back to the situation of the early 2000s when we had to make do with missions that were not really designed to look at polar regions. We'll be doing our best despite the absence of the data we really require - unfortunately. But we've been there before."_

 __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

My reflexive skepticism at the climate panic du jour aside, if you 're convinced disaster is certain if we don't _do something_ and if that _something_ necessarily reduces the quality of life of everyone around you, you will fail. I, and _billions_ of others, will refuse to go along.

All reasonable, sensible, attainable solutions are technological.

<comment><USER6> You know who's not propagating climate crisis hysteria just to secure a lifetime paycheck? The Exxon climate scientists of the 1970s.

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

> In July 1977, a senior scientist of Exxon James Black reported to company's > executives that there was a general scientific agreement at that time that > the burning of fossil fuels was the most likely manner in which mankind was > influencing global climate change

Take it from the horse's mouth; these guys had no reason to propagate some kind of hoax, quite the opposite. We've known that since the 1970s that climate change is the likely outcome.

And you know what; climate change has arrived and - surprise! - it's a climate crisis!

According to IPCC 2018, we're CURRENTLY between +0.75 and +1.25°C, with the very real possibility of reaching +2°C by the 2040. These are undeniable facts.

So, the people that have been warning us for 50 years were .. actually correct. Who would have thought that science could work!

<comment><USER7> _So, the people that have been warning us for 50 years were .. actually correct._

No, they weren't. We didn't end up in a mini ice-age. The glaciers in Glacier National Park did not disappear. The polar ice caps did not melt. Widespread famine did not occur. Widespread destruction did not occur.

Instead, humanity has experience it's greatest period of prosperity in the same period prophets like Ehrlich assured us of our impending doom.

Doom is _always_ right around the corner.

 _Who would have thought that science could work!_

Science always works. But scientists get things wrong frequently.

<comment><USER6> Let's try to pick some of your claims.

Let's start with Global Cooling. Although popularized by the media, this theory was very fringe and not accepted scientific consensus. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling))

The glaciers in Glacier National Park; they are melting. And melting fast ([https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate- change.htm](https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm))

The polar ice caps are melting. We've had a 11% reduction in are in about 20 years. ([https://i1.wp.com/ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/osisaf_...](https://i1.wp.com/ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/osisaf_nh_iceextent_daily_5years_en.png))

If we continue like that, widespread famine and destruction are just around the corner. We're currently running into that, head first, full speed ahead.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What do you think about smart home and smart city? - <AUTHOR> What is your opinion about IoT powered - smart home and smart city?
What kind of smart solution would you like to have?
For me personally, allowing thermostat to adjust room temperature based on my body temperature and air quality would be beneficial. <comment><USER2> I think what I have seen is a god damn joke.

But the ideal holds a lot of potential.

I would like three criteria for my home. In order of difficulty.

1\. A magic mirror portal for IoT. The If This Then That website gives some concept of how that would work.

Magic mirrors are easy to create now and open source ones using natural language recognition have landed on HN before.

2\. The entire network is isolated. Updates take place by the user plugging a wire into the magic mirror but there is no route for information to be transmitted from the magic mirror to an external network. You can't fuck that up.

Some convenience is lost but there isn't a great deal of loss since software agents can communicate to the user or other people as go-between.

3\. The magic mirror will possess a spirit or demon, like all magic mirrors in the stories. In this case it's your household assistant, a software agent. I think this is the important and difficult part. It works for you and only you. Appointment scheduling, advice. It operates in the people world by having the ability to make telephone calls and talking to people on your behalf.

Cameras in cabinets can infer a lot about your activities in the same way the supermarkets have a bead on their customer behaviour. A clever assistant might examine inputs (food) and outputs (sensor in a toilet) and then ruminate on health and lifestyle issues. It might even have the courage to tell you to knock off the sugar before you become diabetic. It ought to be possible to understand mood, when the owner is forgetful or stressed and as it is isolated from third parties it should be able to rely on a record of common area conversations.

It's going to be much harder to disentangle multiple people cohabiting. The incentives are against a prohibition on uploading but without a firm stance in a world of shit security the owner's device becomes a telescreen. Remember the exercise trainer in 1984?

> For me personally, allowing thermostat to adjust room temperature based on > my body temperature and air quality would be beneficial.

We could use a laser to take many temperature readings of the entire body (just before entering the shower). Variability in body temperature can be used to diagnosis disease, possibly other characteristics. The Qualified Self movement probably offers many other ideas here.

People can justify buying into the concept because it offers legitimate and measurable lifestyle improvements.</comment>


U.S. and Russia Announce Online Piracy Crackdown Agreement - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-and-russia-announce-online-piracy-crackdown-agreement-121222

<comment><USER2> This must yet part of another one of those "free" trade agreements.</comment>


My Own Dog Food Never Tasted Better - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/libhive-blog/my-own-dog-food-never-tasted-better-9a762c2ae228#.rx1nu5yci <comment><USER2> Great story and really nice project. Good luck with that.</comment>


Breakthrough in deciphering birth of supermassive black holes - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-breakthrough-deciphering-birth-supermassive-black.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Revealing the intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy NGC 404 with sub-parsec resolution ALMA observations

[https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/496/4/4061/5870560](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/496/4/4061/5870560)</comment>


C++ Parser in Forth? - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.forth/WoXu5N67S6I <comment><USER2> Somewhat related:

6 minute WTF video on the C++ grammar

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsG95Y-C14k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsG95Y-C14k)

<comment><USER3> Yeah this is a good one. I've been programming C++ for a long time and it does give you a sense of how hopeless this task is :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The unholy union of all my favourite programming nightmares. I wish this adventurer luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was toying around with a C++ parser in python (using the earley parser spark.py) a while back and it wasn't all that difficult, couple conflicts that can't be solved without knowing the type of something in the lexer which can be sorted out in later stages (methinks?) and (IIRC from looking at the code) a shift/reduce conflict in declarator-id, but all in all I got it to pass all the tests I found from some advanced compiler course.

Never went past getting it into a AST because I tend to find some other shiny thing to play with before I finish things but I'd imagine the implementation language wouldn't be a serious impediment...saying as someone never having written a single line of Forth.

\--edit--

C++11 I should say since C++14 added things like >> conflict between the shift operator and nested templates that I didn't even get around to trying to solve.

</comment><comment><USER6> C++ is a little like the English language: a bunch of different pieces gathered together over a period of time, new features added to replace/fix old. I like it.

<comment><USER7> It also dropped some letters (æ, þ) and pronouns (thou, thee). Most of what was added was vocabulary, to be comparable to C++ one would probably have to add all the Finnish cases, Japanese gendered language and all the Vietnamese accents.

And then have some people who mostly communicate by yodeling or Mongolian throat singing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What? Did this item change url and title? Earlier it was an article about initialization in c++?

<comment><USER9> Are you sure you're not thinking about this?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18832311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18832311)

<comment><USER8> That's what I thought this article was... Maybe I opened both of them, read the other one and closed it, then came back surprised to find this one.</comment></comment></comment>


AirSign.app: modify, resign and share iOS Apps for testing - <AUTHOR> https://www.airsignapp.com

<comment><USER2> A must have mac app for iOS developer!</comment>


Ask HN: How are you dealing with VATMOSS? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to start an open discussion on HN related to VATMOSS and how US-based tech companies have been dealing with it since its release on Jan. 1 of this year.
Did you roll your own solution? Use a 3rd party provider? Find some obscure loophole to get out of it?
Did your implementation to collect VATMOSS impact your PCI compliance?
Really, I'm just looking for any stories, solutions, or problems related to how your company incorporated VAT collection.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I would love to get an answer from someone on this for sure!</comment>


Incubator BoomStartup unleashes its first class of Utah startups - <AUTHOR> http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/09/02/incubator-boomstartup-unleashes-its-first-class-of-utah-startups/

<comment><USER2> I am Jon Bradshaw and I am one of the co-founders of BoomStartup. If you have any questions please feel free to ask me anything that you'd like.

</comment><comment><USER3> Utah seems to be one of those great places to start a tech company outside of the Bay Area. Great to see a full-fledged program like BoomStartup there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very cool for TaleSpring to be a part of BoomStartup! It's been an awesome summer and we're looking forward to sharing our progress on the 10th.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Exciting times for Utah Startups!

It's definitely exciting to see IActionable.com up there.

</comment><comment><USER5> IActionable FTW!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Well thanks :)</comment></comment>


Gramio is a simple Instagram photo browser for web - <AUTHOR> http://gram.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> I originally put this together as a way to show my mom my Instagram photos without UI clutter or other things that might confuse her. I found browsing tags and locations in this format so fun that I decided to build a bit more functionality around it, while still attempting to keep things simple.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great job. Been looking for this forever - super, simple and to the point! So many other web instagram apps wanna be full-on 'clients'.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beautifully simple. Really nice work Dom. I love the animation on the close button after clicking the "G" logo.

</comment><comment><USER4> I LOVE THIS........ SO CLEAN AND IM IN LOVE</comment>


Repetitive pop songs 'more likely to be hits' - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11314624/Repetitive-pop-songs-more-likely-to-be-hits.html

<comment><USER2> Relevant: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795150)</comment>


A faster sub-string search algorithm (strstr()) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RaphaelJ/fast_strstr

<comment><USER2> Hi Raphael. It's an interesting approach, and thanks for making it available. I just tried running your benchmark on an Intel Sandy Bridge system (E5-1620) and got results similarly disappointing results to those that you found on Haswell. I posted the numbers as an issue on Github.</comment>


Ask HN: File browsing with xmonad in Ubuntu? - <AUTHOR>

Greetings! Thanks to a recent post in HN, I learned about xmonad. It is impressive, but I still have this basic question: Is it possible to do basic, drag-and-drop file browsing with xmonad? I'm using Ubuntu 9.10.<p>Thanks. <comment><USER2> I just use Nautilus (the default Ubuntu/GNOME file browser) and it works fine with xmonad. Are you having a specific problems browsing files?

Actually, it would be better to post this on Ubuntu Forums or on an xmonad list:

<http://xmonad.org/community.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I tried Nautilus, but then my (Ubuntu) desktop shows up, but all other windows are gone and cannot be recovered with the typical keystrokes. Launching a new terminal doesn't work either. Further, if I double click a folder on the desktop nothing happens.

Not that I plan to do much mouse-based file browsing under xmonad, but it would be nice to have it handy.

Finally, yeah there are other forums, but HN just rocks!

<comment><USER3> try this:

nautilus --no-desktop --browser

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You could use Thunar, it's lightweight and fast.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you generate rewarding leads? - <AUTHOR> For some of you, this may amount to a sort of secret sauce, but I'm wondering: How can I generate fulfilling leads?
I find that the best jobs either just sort of fall on me when I least expect it or are the result of an incredibly time-consuming (and sometimes fraught with emotional uncertainty) campaign of lead-generation.
I feel confident about my work, excited to help people, and capable of taking on zany, bizarre, opaque challenges on a self-starting basis.
Yet, most of the jobs that I come across are either 1) insufficiently challenging (and thus below a budget that I can comfortably consider) or 2) a logistical mismatch (ie, looking for full-time).
How can I generate leads that are fulfilling and a good match for me?  Without spending weeks and weeks doing it? <comment><AUTHOR> This post doesn't seem to appear on the 'ask' section...?</comment>


Achieving a 10,000+ Lifespan - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8RnDRlGAOo

<comment><USER2> I could be the only one, but I don't actually desire to live for 1,000 years, let alone 10,000 or more.</comment>


The Next Big Thing: thoughts from the Dublin Web Summit - <AUTHOR> http://www.rookieoven.com/2012/10/24/the-next-big-thing-thoughts-from-the-dublin-web-summit/

<comment><USER2> Please get rid of that floating share panel. When I zoom in to read, it covers up the first few words on half of the left side of the screen. Having it follow my viewport like a puppy makes me think less of your UX abilities.

</comment><comment><USER3> My though about the DWS. I would have loved to attend but:

\- It was ridiculously expensive

\- It was on weekdays. So you could only go if it was your job to be there (either watching or presenting)</comment>


Why don't MacBooks come with cellular networking? - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/02/26/why-no-4g-macbooks <comment><USER2> And this is an area that Windows wins at. In Windows 8 on my tablet, it shows a Mobile Broadband connection. All the Windows Update, Outlook application, etc are aware of this - Outlook says "You may be on a metered connection" and prompts for desired behavior.

On my laptop, I can even flag a given Wireless (or indeed any) connection as metered and get the same result.

<comment><USER3> Windows 8 also has a nice API for it so that apps are aware of it and can prompt for big downloads or disable automatic syncing.

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/apps/hh75031...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/apps/hh750310.aspx)

I think it makes sense that Apple is not very interested in making new features for OS X. They make only a tiny fraction of their profits from it and Mac sales have been down close to 20% from last year. To use Jobs' post-PC analogy, Why invest in making better trucks if you think the world is moving towards cars?

Meanwhile, Windows is Microsoft's bread and butter.

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that Office is Microsoft's bread and butter. Check the Operating Income figures from the last quarter -- $3.565B for Office compared to $3.296B for Windows:

[https://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Ear...](https://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY13/Q2/default.aspx)

<comment><USER3> If people switch to Chromebooks or iPads, Office revenue will also suffer along with Windows.

<comment><USER4> They are _trying_ to get into the mobile game:

<https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/>

However, these are strictly inferior to the desktop versions (for example, web Excel doesn't support array formulae)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _To start, Apple could just put cellular-connection detection and repsonsible- usage logic into iTunes and Software Update._

… and Xcode documentation downloader, and PhotoStream sharing in iPhoto, and TimeMachine if I have a VPN running, and Mail because sometimes it decides to redownload every email I've ever received on GMail…

I don't think a sloppy solution is going to cut it when you are talking hundred and thousand dollar ambush fees from the telcos.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hate it when you are stuck using a MiFi instead, because then it really isn't clear to your Mac that it's on an expensive network, and stuff like backups, iTunes downloads, etc. continue running in the background. There really needs to be some way to communicate cost to the OS (maybe configurable as profiles) for various networks.

<comment><USER7> Assuming the OS does/does not do this in the future, it would be great if applications that are data intensive considered this in the interim.

Apps like Backblaze, Dropbox, Spotify etc. should be "aware" of the type of network they are operating on and the user able to specify the desired behavior such as only sync files smaller than x, don't do anything on this network etc.

<comment><USER6> The only way I could think of doing it is having a profile manager which ran separately and killed or changed settings of various specific programs based on the network you're on. I remember there being such things under XP, and bundled with various PC-Card cellular adapters, but it never working very well.

<comment><USER8> Apps could do a reverse DNS lookup on your public IP address and then use that to determine if you're on a wireless carrier's network. Though they'd have to hardcode some list of TLDs that correspond to wireless carriers, but it'd be one possible solution to get around the fact that to the computer it just looks like wifi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not like it's never occurred to them. In fact, Apple had a 3G MacBook Pro prototype a few years ago that someone snapped up on Craigslist: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20099494-248/apple- wants-i...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20099494-248/apple-wants- its-3g-macbook-prototype-back/)

A magnetically attached antenna is an interesting choice. I feel like I'd lose mine within a few days if it went to production like that.

<comment><USER10> I always thought the space bar would provide an adequate window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sure would make a great feature for a Mac OS X release named Lynx, right? Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER12> I tether my MacBook to my iPhone often and it would be a tough sell. ~$150 more on hardware plus another data plan? Even with data plan sharing its too much. You could say the same about the cellular iPad but the way these devices are used is just a lot different. Most of the MacBooks are just too big to use this way. You have to stop somewhere, take it out of a bag and sit it down. At that point is turning on tethering, activating a wifi cellular AP, or even plugging in a USB modem all that much of an extra burden? It's already not so practical. The iPad though can be carried outside of a bag and used standing or even walking. I would at least consider the cellular iPad but so far have not opted to get one for some of the same reasons. Turning on tethering isn't very hard and it works great. Both the iPad and MacBook are distant seconds for me in cellular data usage and would continue to be even with integrated cellular. The iPhone just covers my needs for that stuff. So my guess is Apple hasn't done it because there's just not a big enough market. I would be surprised if even 10% of MacBook owners use cellular data and of that 10% a lot are probably like me and content using tethering. That leaves a tiny fraction of a fraction to sell a cellular MacBook too. For Apple that's maybe even too niche.

</comment><comment><USER13> Usually my phone is plugged into my Macbook for power, and my Macbook is using my phone for Internet (rooted android wifi tether). The word symbiosis always comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER14> Based on their sales history with iPads, it doesn't make sense. Dropping in a modem also requires a lot of engineering from software drivers to the custom hardware to the compliance testing with any carrier network the device would be operating on. Apple has made the right choices in the past by focusing on the important problems. Unfortunately, carrier pricing makes the demand for LTE on all our devices weaker and the challenge not worth it.

[http://gigaom.com/2012/03/20/sorry-carriers-9-out- of-10-tabl...](http://gigaom.com/2012/03/20/sorry-carriers-9-out- of-10-tablets-sold-are-wi-fi/)

</comment><comment><USER15> "OS X isn't designed to behave differently while on different types of networks"

Funny. This was exactly one of the justifications for writing launchd. "daemons" would be signaled on state change, like a network state transition. This behavior would isolate applications/developers from explicit dependency management.

Also, mobile radio prototypes are built all the time. And as noted a lot of hardware ends up on ebay/craigslist. Ironically that's all dvt hardware, not actual proto builds.

</comment><comment><USER16> With as small as Apple is pushing their newest MacBooks, I doubt they have the real estate on the logic board for the chip, not to mention the associated antenna in the case.

Anyone that needs cellular networking (and can't find wifi) probably can tether their iDevice or has a USB stick (I assume there are Mac compatible ones).

It would be nice though to have an API that helps differentiate network classes to stop thing like Dropbox from syncing over cellular.

</comment><comment><USER17> They should at least launch an OS with first-class support for iPhone tethering.

<comment><USER18> What do you mean? On 10.8, I plug my iPhone in and it "just works".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do whatever, just push 4G dataplans to bigger caps, I would drop cable for that.

</comment><comment><USER20> What about all the countries that have reasonable data plan pricing? In some African countries cellular data is actually quite often the only thing resembling broadband because wired endpoints are just way too expensive.

I am not exaggerating when I say that north Americans are probably paying 2-3 times more than they ought to.

</comment><comment><USER21> My experience is that, if you're in a place where you want to work on a laptop, that place will probably have wifi. Sure, in the park, on the street, your chances are lower -- but that's where you'd be pulling out your phone or tablet instead of your laptop.

<comment><USER10> You take laptops to where wi-fi is. I'd rather go to Balboa Park or the Black Mountain Preserve.

<comment><USER22> Are you coding from these places?

<comment><USER10> Well, coding is a hobby for me, (GP physician by trade), so yes, I catch where catch can. At the park while my kids play is a common use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't say I care much about having cellular networking in my MacBook but what I want to know is why they're still being sold with internal DVD drives and no hybrid SSD/HDD drive combination. Apple doesn't sell a laptop with a SSD large enough to fit my photos/video clips so my only option is a relatively slow HDD. They should be offering the best of both worlds by providing a combination of the two. Other PC manufacturers are doing this but not Apple. Somehow Apple seems to be fixated on display and battery technology and is failing to address storage issues and appear to be just waiting for SSD prices to fall. All I can say is it's not happening quickly enough...

</comment><comment><USER18> They at least considered it at some point: [http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/14/photos-of-a-prototype- ma...](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/14/photos-of-a-prototype-macbook-pro- with-integrated-3g-cellular-data/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Is this becoming a common need for people? I just bought a Chromebook the other day and adding cellular network support wasn't much more, but I opted against it. I find if I'm on a laptop then wifi is pretty much always available.

<comment><USER25> I tether my macbook almost every weekday while commuting 45 minutes by train. It also comes in handy at places where the wifi isn't free like some airports or coffee shops for instance. Also the 4G speed where I life is just as fast as DSL (only option in my building), so if there weren't bandwidth caps I would gladly ditch DSL and go with 4G all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Almost everyone who is rich enough to own a high-end MacBook also owns a fast phone with a data plan, which can be used for tethering. How many cellular radios do I need to carry with me at once, anyway?

Note that this is in contrast to the iPad, where the owner cannot be presumed to have a fast phone data plan, simply because they may be too poor to own both an iPad and a fancy iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER10> My brother and I started a bet on this in November 2011. At that time, I'd already had a Cr-48 with 3G for a year. As of Superbowl 46, someone everyone here would recognize thought that Apple would roll out cellular in what proved to be the retina MacBooks. The bet comes due in April 2013. So far, I'm still losing. Anyone got a Campagnolo chain they want to send me? :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> My recent trip to Bestbuy convinced me that the future of computer lies in touch screen devices both mobile and desktop. No wonder Windows 8, Gnome, Unity, etc. are so eager to grab the touch screen market. Like several of the other Apple products, there is a strong resistance in Apple to accept new realities that originate in non-Apple camps.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why don't people use an USB data dongle instead of tethering their phones? Data only plans are cheaper and having it on an USB makes it portable across multiple devices. There are cellular data devices which act as mini-wifi radios as well. That frees up the USB slot and allows multiple devices to simultaneously share the same connection.

<comment><USER29> most argue here, OSX hinders that, as it disregards metered connecions and overuses that with e,g. background updates and so forth.

I couldn't live without 3G at my eeepc

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As an alternative solution carriers could collectively remove their heads from their asses on bandwidth fees and rate plans.

</comment><comment><USER31> Do you have a different broadband conenction for your xbox and your pc? No, you have one for the house and then share it. Likewise you only need one portable network connection (your cell phone) and all your other devices share it. If you own and cell phone and have data enabled devices (tablet, laptop etc) you're doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER4> In a few years, I speculate that _99%_ of people using macbooks will find themselves in areas with some sort of wifi access, and if that's not acceptable I find Clearwire's service to be excellent in the NYC metro area. The cellular networking would not have the same impact that it would have had 3 or 5 years ago.

<comment><USER32> I think people have been saying exactly this for over a decade.

<comment><USER4> Panera introduced free wifi in 2005. Starbucks introduced free wifi in 2010. Nowadays pretty much every coffeeshop _IN THE US_ offers free wifi. There's demonstrable progress and the pace is picking up.

EDIT: added clarification that I was referring to the US.

<comment><USER33> There's progress, but we're a _very, very_ long way from ubiquitous WiFi. With more and more users moving towards cellular usage anyways (tablets and phones), and away from laptops, the pressure to get WiFi everywhere is slackening.

When I was visiting family in Vancouver over Xmas - a modern, large city by any measure - I had no data plan (I'm US-based), and for the first time in a long time found myself looking for WiFi everywhere I went. Let's just say that the availability of WiFi in public spaces is still _very_ limited.

<comment><USER4> "... Vancouver ..."

I intended to make the claim for the United States, forgetting that not everyone here is based in the US :/ Updated parent reply to reflect that I intended to mean United States.

<comment><USER33> I've lived in Seattle, SF, and NYC, and the same can be said for all of them. WiFi is not at all ubiquitous. There are destinations with reliable(ish) WiFi, but it is a ludicrously long way from having something handy wherever you might decide to plop your butt down for a few minutes.

And it's not getting better - not when connectivity has been moving heavily towards cellular rather than WiFi. The pressure for coffee shops, restaurants, and public spaces to get WiFi was largely fueled by an explosion in laptop usage - that usage has, and continues to, rapidly disappear into phones.

FYI, Vancouver is pretty like any American city. Speaks English, has tall buildings, has a subway system, has running water, and a conspicuous absence of igloos ;) Please don't take "not in the US" to mean "underdeveloped".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you could buy a MacBook with cellular service you wouldn't need to buy an iPhone.

<comment><USER35> Uhhh.... why?

Laptops and phones have totally different use cases.

You could make a much better argument saying that an iPad with cellular means you wouldn't need an iPhone.

<comment><USER36> That still wouldn't be right. My huge iPad doesn't fit in my pocket. And I will feel silly holding said huge iPad to my face when I want to make a call.

<comment><USER37> <http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sidetalking-n-gage>

Everything old is new again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've always said my perfect laptop is an 11" macbook air + retina display + integrated LTE. My understanding is that the LTE thing happens because the networks aren't ready for it...

<comment><USER39> Lenovo offers several notebooks with integrated LTE modems that are just as portable as the MacbookAir.

[http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=...](http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS029028)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Their plan is to transition people to cellular enabled devices rather than transitioning non-cellular devices to cellular devices.

<comment><USER41> Net result: Apple gains clout with cellular carriers, end user privacy suffers.</comment></comment>


Why Sorted Array Are Processed Faster Than Unsorted Array? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mayankjain.me/articles/Sorted-Array-Operation/

<comment><USER2> EDIT: What I wrote here is entirely wrong. I misread the use of 'sorted', and that colored my interpretation of the paragraph. My apologies.

"Well, this is due to something called as Branch Prediction. Branch Prediction is a strategy used in processors to decide if the branch would be taken or not."

Emphatically false. Python's sort is based on timsort. Timsort makes the observation that most real-world lists are partially sorted; either forward or reverse. This can help sorting go faster. The observed timing difference is nearly all to do with that, and not with branch prediction.

Consider the Shell sort. It's O(n*n) for an unsorted list and O(n) for a sorted list. Again, nothing to do with branch prediction and everything to do with how well the data fits the algorithm's expectations.

<comment><AUTHOR> How sorting came into picture here?

I am just looping onto a list how is this related to complexity of sorting etc..

Sorry, but I didn't understood you properly.

<comment><USER2> My apologies. I misread the code and what it did, because of the use of the word 'sorted' and my belief that branch prediction should not affect this code.

I still don't believe it's due to branch prediction. I believe it's due to cache coherency.

Here's a more extensive example, where I shuffle the last N elements:

        import time
        from random import shuffle

        x = [i for i in range(1000000)]
        tick=time.clock()
        sum1=0
        for i in x:
            sum1=sum1+i
        toc=time.clock()
        print "ref", toc-tick, sum1

        for N in (0, 250000, 500000, 750000, 1000000):
            y1 = range(0, N)
            y2 = range(N, 1000000)
            shuffle(y2)
            y = y1 + y2
            tick=time.clock()
            sum1=0
            for i in y:
                sum1=sum1+i
            toc=time.clock()
            print "shuffle last %d: %f %d" % (len(x)-N, toc-tick, sum1)

        assert x == y, "These should be identical when N==1000000"

        print "== Two summations of the same array =="

        tick=time.clock()
        sum1=0
        for i in x:
            sum1=sum1+i
        toc=time.clock()
        print "ref (again)", toc-tick, sum1

        tick=time.clock()
        sum1=0
        for i in y:
            sum1=sum1+i
        toc=time.clock()
        print "final range (again)", toc-tick, sum1

When I run the above, the output is:

        ref 0.158759 499999500000
        shuffle last 1000000: 0.254425 499999500000
        shuffle last 750000: 0.228932 499999500000
        shuffle last 500000: 0.252207 499999500000
        shuffle last 250000: 0.224307 499999500000
        shuffle last 0: 0.255656 499999500000
        == Two summations of the same array ==
        ref (again) 0.158914 499999500000
        final range (again) 0.250253 499999500000

As you can see, the last two tests use arrays x and y where x == y == range(1000000), but their timing numbers are quite different. Branch prediction shouldn't cause that difference. Poor cache behavior might.

Here's an attempt to double-check my view. I use an array.array(), which stores the numbers sequentially both for the sorted and random versions:

        import array
        import time
        from random import shuffle

        x = [i for i in range(1000000)]
        x = array.array("i", x)
        tick=time.clock()
        sum1=0
        for i in x:
            sum1=sum1+i
        toc=time.clock()
        print "sorted", toc-tick, sum1

        x = [i for i in range(1000000)]
        shuffle(x)
        x = array.array("i", x)
        tick=time.clock()
        sum1=0
        for i in x:
            sum1=sum1+i
        toc=time.clock()
        print "unsorted", toc-tick, sum1

When I run the above, I find that both timings are essentially identical:

        sorted 0.159446 499999500000
        unsorted 0.161541 499999500000

This gives very strong evidence (unless I made another mistake) that branch prediction does not play a role, while cache prediction should be the actual suspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> That link now says "Page Not Found". What happened to it?</comment>


The Mandalorian uses "fake" HDR - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/disneys-the-mandalorian-joins-a-long-list-of-fake-hdr-content-analysis-finds/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. I turned off HDR on my AppleTV last week specifically because The Mandalorian appeared too dim. I had no idea this was the reason why. Now it makes sense.</comment>


Two researchers hope to develop privacy safeguards for datasets used in research - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/2987050/data-privacy/are-datasets-truly-anonymized-two-well-suited-researchers-are-going-to-find-out.html <comment><USER2> Knowing both of these researchers, they are a top-notch team tackling a very interesting problem. Adam is an expert in the area of differential privacy and Vitaly is an expert at finding subtle attacks that unexpectedly leak private information.</comment>


Why do women study computer science? Same reasons men do - <AUTHOR> http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/women+study+computer+science+Same+reasons/8342441/story.html

<comment><USER2> Well that took an odd turn at the end. I've been in the industry for about 8 years, and I think 80% of the older-than-college guys I've worked with and 100% of the women would make a joke like that. This actually happened in a college math class once and the girls made worse jokes than the guys.

I understand how she feels objectified and "othered" in general, but focusing on this incident actually weakens her case a bit.</comment>


Startups of Puerto Rico's first hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://hackpr.eventbrite.com/

<comment><USER2> Would this event be streaming anywhere? Would love to watch or read what gets worked on.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are going to publish a blog post (elweb.co) after the event. I don't know about video streaming. Follow the twitter account (@startupsofpr), if we do video it will be posted there.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are tech stocks down today? - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/finance?catid=TRBC%3A57&ei=r-c6WcG4AsfQjAGkoY7IBg<p>Technology sector is down ~2.5% while everything else is mostly flat. It looks like all major tech companies are down ~3-6%. Anyone know what's going on? My searches only bring up articles pointing out the drop but no speculation as to why. Could this be a result of the Comey testimony or the recent UK voting? <comment><USER2> [https://seekingalpha.com/article/4080394-goldmans-big- fang-c...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4080394-goldmans-big-fang-call- mispriced-factormageddon-looms)</comment>


Elon Musk's high-speed Hyperloop train makes more sense for Mars than California - <AUTHOR> http://thetrigger.io/share/trends/55a3b1b6d2b47ffd74622f8a

<comment><USER2> As I understand it, the idea was put out there because of how incredibly underwhelming the high-speed train plans were for California. Musk noted that even after a decade of work they wouldn't have one of the fastest trains in the world, but instead a mediocre-at-best train with enormous expense. Then something happened and the "nudge" became more real when the press started asking Musk about it and taking it much more seriously. So now they're doing the correct thing and building a space track.

>This idea is not new; it has existed for decades. But while a vactrain sounds like a good concept, it's relatively unfeasible to actually build.

>This idea is not new; it has existed for decades. But while an electric car sounds like a good concept, it's relatively unfeasible to actually build.

>This idea is not new; it has existed for decades. But while a commercial space company sounds like a good concept, it's relatively unfeasible to actually build.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everytime I read of Mars settlements and I think of eventual childs born there, I feel there is something wrong. It's a strange feeling. Nonetheless, the chance of visiting Mars is super cool and I'd take it!</comment>


Nitro: A Quick And Simple Profiler For Golang - <AUTHOR> http://spf13.com/project/nitro

<comment><USER2> What are the benefits over the built in pprof?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not at all a replacement. If you've used the built in pprof it's very detailed. All trees if you will.

Nitro provides the forest. Using this along with pprof helps narrow down where to focus your attention.

<comment><USER2> I've used it a bit and found top and -cum very useful. Nitro seems to combine memory and CPU(?) but besides that I don't understand the benefit.

Edit: The author expanded here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6022679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6022679)

Nitro seems quite nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dave Cheney also just released a profiling wrapper, would you mind elaborating on the differences?

<comment><AUTHOR> Dave's and pprof are both similar in that they run the application and poll randomly which routine the execution is currently in.

The output of pprof and Dave's (which uses pprof) would look like:

           2  13.3%  13.3%        2  13.3% go/scanner.(*Scanner).next
           2  13.3%  26.7%        2  13.3% path.Clean
           1   6.7%  33.3%        3  20.0% go/scanner.(*Scanner).Scan
           1   6.7%  40.0%        1   6.7% main.hasPathPrefix
           1   6.7%  46.7%        3  20.0% main.mountedFS.translate
           1   6.7%  53.3%        1   6.7% path.Dir
           1   6.7%  60.0%        1   6.7% path/filepath.(*lazybuf).append
           1   6.7%  66.7%        1   6.7% runtime.findfunc
           1   6.7%  73.3%        2  13.3% runtime.makeslice
           1   6.7%  80.0%        2  13.3% runtime.mallocgc

They are telling you what percent of the time the polling was in that routine.

Nitro is very different. You put breaks at major sections in your application where you want to measure and label those breaks.

For instance if you wrote an application to take markdown files and convert them to html you may split that up into 3 sections and see the following output.

        import markdown files:
          4.664481ms (5.887625ms)         0.43 MB     4583 Allocs
        convert to html:
          65.196788ms (71.107809ms)      17.13 MB     70151 Allocs
        write html files:
          1.823434ms (72.960713ms)        0.12 MB     3720 Allocs

Hopefully the difference is clear. If you wanted to break it up further you can.

Perhaps you don't find it usable, that's fine. It's not for you.

Personally I find this high level really valuable. When I make changes... say tweaking a process or adding a new feature, it's great to see the difference between execution times, memory use & allocations. Using pprof it is rather hard to get that kind of information.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Better bus predictions (a lot better) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/mbta-tech/better-bus-predictions-a-lot-better-64169f1edeee <comment><USER3> In my city there is a system like this (all buses have gps, you can look where they are at any time [http://www.sip.ztm.lublin.eu/Default.aspx?lang=EN](http://www.sip.ztm.lublin.eu/Default.aspx?lang=EN) ), and on bus stops there are these dynamic timetables [http://rpw.ztm.lublin.eu/typo3temp/_processed_/csm_01_01_594...](http://rpw.ztm.lublin.eu/typo3temp/_processed_/csm_01_01_594179becd.jpg)

It's working pretty well, the key thing is the point 4 in the article - <USER2> timetables show "in X min" if they know how long it will take for the bus to get here, or just "at XX:XX" if they don't know for some reason (transmitter or bus broke, whatever) so they just show the scheduled arrival.

So you can be pretty sure that if it says it's coming in 4 minutes you won't be waiting 30 minutes.

Clearly marking how sure you are of your prediction is IMHO more important than making very good predictions. I don't care if I have to wait 3 minutes or 6 minutes, I do care if I skip another bus waiting for a more convenient one in 3 minutes that never arrives.

<comment><USER4> Seattle has GPS on most busses that integrates into apps like Transit. Transit is also crowdsourced if people leave it running when they're on the bus. Some bus stops also have screen timetables that update live information regarding arrival time.

I know I have to leave my condo when Transit says 3 minutes and it has the "this bus is reporting" logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome! I fully believe that government procurement needs serious reform, which this article and effort is clearly attempting to address. So, props to David Block-Schachter (the CTO).

There are far too many large, bloated consultancies that specialize not in delivering quality products and services, but rather in "surviving" the government procurement process.

Props as well to the Swiftly team - I had a change to take a peak at some of the APIs they expose to their customers and it's quite valuable. In particular, they roll up stop-pair segment performance on routes by time of day, which allows someone to query for bus performance by discrete route- schedule-segments.

Gathering this type of data is quite labor intensive and a significant technical lift (I was once part of a project doing this with GTFS-RT data from the NYC MTA). This type of information, and the broader ecosystem of performance related API services they provide to their users (based off the limited amount I have seen), can enable operators to extract highly articulated performance statistics about their fleet, on their own.

</comment><comment><USER6> Having developed similar systems in the past, I would like to advice against arbitrary boundaries on accuracy.

We used a couple of metrics to assess the quality of the predictions. The first one is sMAPE (Scaled Mean Absolute Precision Error), which tells us quickly where and how our predictions fail. We plot this with the precision on the y-axis and the minutes till arrival on x. Also plotted is bias, which is important, especially since you want to be slightly biased towards being too early. Similar axes.

Other metrics we used are MAE (Mean Absolute Error), RSE (Root Square Error) and 2D kernel density plots.

In the end, for a contract, I would take into account the density of use of these predictions. It's nice that you can predict perfectly during the middle of the night, but if that line is not used, it is next to useless. So something like sMAPE * passengers or sth like that.

Also, even though I cannot relay this one-to-one to the passengers, a confidence interval on predictions is gold.

</comment><comment><USER7> In case anyone else was wondering, it appears that MBTA here refers to a Boston transit agency.

<comment><USER8> That's correct. It has the reputation of being one of the worst commuter systems in existence. [http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2017/10/data...](http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2017/10/data_mbta_service_worst_among_carriers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just skimmed the article, so apologies if this was covered.

The article suggests people will use these predictions to spend more time at home before leaving their bus stop. If that is the case, what happens if the prediction says their bus will be, say, 10 minutes later, but then that bus catches some lucky breaks with lights, heavy traffic unexpectedly clears up, etc., and the bus makes up 5 minutes of that?

People who relied on the prediction could miss their bus.

Is there a mechanism to address this?

The only one that I can think of offhand that would cover almost all cases would be if the predicted arrival times are also sent to the buses, and if the buses arrive ahead of the prediction they wait until the predicted time before leaving.

You wouldn't want to do that for all predictions, though. Maybe only predictions made within 10 minutes of the original scheduled arrival time are binding, or maybe only predictions made when the bus is within three stops of the stop in questions, or something like that.

<comment><USER10> It explicitly talks about this in the article where he talks about how they try to predict the bus will arrive earlier rather than later. In the 12-30 minute bucket, "12% of weekday predictions were up to 4 minutes early, 71% were up to 6 minutes late, and 17% were outside both of those windows".

<comment><USER9> So they are weighting it to under-predict lateness, which will reduce the chances someone misses the bus by arriving at the stop at the predicted time, it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tell me where the bus _IS_ , dammit. Why is this rolling out _after_ prediction instead of _before_?

Why are we "predicting" at all?

Why doesn't every bus have a tracker that tells you exactly where it is _at all times_?

This is 2018. GPS with refinement isn't rocket science anymore.

Tell me where the bus is and I'll do my own prediction thanks.

<comment><USER12> I think you may be presuming that every UI that consumes this data is able to display a map showing the bus's location. We do make real-time bus lat/lng available through our API and lots of clients use that data. But there are other applications where a time prediction is still helpful. For example in many of our stations that serve bus routes, we don't have the infrastructure (yet) to display a live map but we do have digital signs that tell when the next bus is expected to arrive.

<comment><USER13> A map isn't necessary to show a location. The digital sign could just display the name of the last intersection the bus was at. (I'm not convinced that's any better than a reasonably good prediction though.)

<comment><USER14> Each approach has its own tradeoffs.

\- Time. Time has the advantage of brevity ("15 min" takes up a grand total of five characters) and indisputable meaning. It's also the hardest to predict, and people get pretty upset about incorrect predictions.

\- Intersection. On a signboard, intersection names can get quite long. You would also need familiarity with where exactly the intersection is located, how the bus gets from there to your stop, etc. Boston is famously non-gridded, and has no real consistent rhyme or reason to its street layout, so that would be very confusing.

\- Miles/stops away. New York's BusTime uses this. This is a pretty indisputable metric, and if you have GPS or a working odometer is trivial to confirm. But this runs into the same problem as intersections; you need context. The bus is two stops away, but how long does it take to make those two stops? A mile passing through Times Square is very different from a mile through the leafy, quiet suburbs of Queens.

You can pick between meaning and certainty, but it's very hard to have both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome. I hope SFMTA can learn from this. They are taking proposals to replace Nextbus currently [1]. When I last measured Nextbus reliability, the first prediction for a bus was weakly correlated with arrival, and the second and third predictions were totally free of information. One of the main problems around here seems to be buses with the route and destination sign set to the wrong thing (e.g. the bus says it is headed to downtown, it's actually going the other way) which apparently throws a huge wrench in Nextbus.

1: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Muni-looks-to- re...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Muni-looks-to-replace- aging-NextBus-system-with-13204933.php)

</comment><comment><USER16> Dear MBTA CTO, why isn't this on the MBTA website instead of Medium?

<comment><USER17> I work as a software for the MBTA but don't speak for the organization.

There are pages on the main site about this project, for example: [https://www.mbta.com/projects/better-bus- project](https://www.mbta.com/projects/better-bus-project)

I think the Medium blog was set up for posts intended for a more tech-savvy audience than the broader audience that visits MBTA.com to check schedules, plan trips, view alerts, etc. Maybe at some point it will be merged in.

The website was relaunched ~year ago as an Elixir / Phoenix application and there are still quite a few features and content being added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In theory, one should be able to use information about the stop lights to improve the prediction.

Anyway, I really would like to see a histogram of the predicted distribution of arrival times. Sometimes I 1-sigma need to make the bus and sometimes I 3-sigma need to make the bus...

<comment><USER19> Even better, give buses priority at stop lights when they are behind schedule, or intentionally delay them when they are ahead of schedule. This is being done in a few countries and it seems to work quite well. Why predict when you can control it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My apologies for being such an opportunist, BUT, we are hiring for various engineering and product roles at the moment: [https://jobs.lever.co/mbta](https://jobs.lever.co/mbta)

<comment><USER20> Just curious if you're finding it challenging to hire for Erlang? Have you generally hired people with some experience, or do you typically expect new devs to pick it up upon hiring?

<comment><USER12> I also work in the customer tech department for the MBTA. We use Elixir and all of our web interfaces use Phoenix on top of that. We don't require anyone to have experience with elixir or erlang; most of our developers have learned on the job. We look for solid general programming skills and a willingness to learn. We've had a lot of success with that strategy so far!</comment></comment></comment>


App Engine SDK 1.3.0 Released Including Support for Larger User Uploads - <AUTHOR> http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/12/app-engine-sdk-130-released-including.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GoogleAppEngineBlog+%28Google+App+Engine+Blog%29 <comment><USER2> "For example, we've sped up many reflective operations by up to 10x resulting in improvements on the order of 10% for applications based on dynamic languages"

More than the Blobstore API - i am more excited about this. Clojure/Scala on GAE.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious why you prefer functional languages that excel at concurrency for the GAE. As far as I know you can only write sequential apps on the Google AppEngine.

<comment><USER2> Admittedly those languages excel at concurrency but i am more interested in trying out those languages on the GAE for the increase in Speed of Development., so the sequential bit is not very relevant to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now if only they would lift the limit of 1MB for the Imaging API. What use is the uploaded profile picture if I can not resize it.

<comment><USER5> >"The new Blobstore API is now available in both App Engine SDKs for local development. At this time it can only be used by applications that have enabled billing."

I'm not sure on this yet, but do billing enabled accounts not have those 1MB limits as they can be easily billed right??

<comment><USER4> the documentation does not differentiate between billing enabled or not, so I assume the limit is for all accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> But there is no way to access or manipulate the blogs from app engine code (unless you url.fetch them!). Rather underwhelming.</comment>


Reddit is hiring - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/thank-you-mr-nast-may-we-have-another.html

<comment><USER2> What does having some sort of puzzle actually do for Reddit? I get that its supposed to help filter out people who may not be that interesting in the job, but the questions they asked seemed more like trivia than anything else.

<comment><USER3> Not only trivia, but indeterminable trivia. An olympic-sized swimming pool has no maximum depth and therefore no maximum weight if filled with gold. I'd bet they're accepting /apply/* (type anything in and you get a log in screen with "really, it was that easy? only one way to find out")

<comment><USER4> From the article:

        ... how much an Olympic-sized swimming pool of the minimum depth would weigh ...

It says minimum depth, not maximum, and I'd be very surprised if Olympic-sized swimming pools didn't have a minimum depth. They may have edited it since you read it, of course.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I probably just missed it.

Here's the relevant info from FINA:

FR 2.3 Depth - A minimum depth of 1.35 metes, extending from 1.0 metre to at least 6.0 metres from the end wall is required for pools with starting blocks. A minimum depth of 1.0 metre is required elsewhere.

[http://www.fina.org/project/index.php?option=com_content&...](http://www.fina.org/project/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=51&Itemid=119)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks Reddit, because now I know that a sydharb is a unit of measurement equivalent to 200,000 Olympic swimming pools. Or the volume of the Sydney Harbor.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement#Volume)

<comment><USER6> Distance Measurement Tool on google maps has a long list of units of measurements for distances. Really geeky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> is it bad that I solved this just for the hell of it? I was tempted to send in a doc that just said i am not looking for a job, however your puzzle was a fun waste of 11 minutes so i just wanted to say thanks!

</comment><comment><USER8> It would actually depend on the construction materials used in the pool itself since they ask how much the pool would weigh vs the actual content of said pool. :)

Do I get the job? :)

</comment><comment><USER9> If only real-world puzzles were this easy to step through...

</comment><comment><USER10> If you make a mistake in any of the answers, are you automatically disqualified?

<comment><USER11> "On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'"</comment></comment>


Diploid: k8s-native CI/CD for people who hate needless complexity with passion - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/seeekr/diploid <comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently working on this tool as part of moving a set of semi-legacy services from what my client calls "puppet hell" to a well-structured, easily manageable k8s deployment. The goal is for the client, not being a k8s nut themselves though having decent devOps experience, to be able to understand and manage all relevant aspects of the setup completely themselves.

For our current uses the tool is almost sufficient, and generally works, but it is nowhere close to being fininshed in terms of what I envision for it.

The state of documentation is very rough (ie. basically nonexistent for all practical purposes), but if there's interest AMA and I'll respond and write up more documentation. Just not sure how much interest there is for that at this given point in time.</comment>