Epsilon Programmer's Editor - <AUTHOR> http://www.lugaru.com/ <comment><USER2> The GNU Emacs website does a better sales job...which is interesting because unlike this product, GNU does not even need to sell anything. When looking through the website I see Windows 95-ish screenshots, pages that say they have not been updated in over five years, and little description of what it does beyond saying it's like EMACS. No clue at all about why I should use this rather than one of the other free-beer editors out there. And now I read these comments and see it costs $250? Why??

<comment><USER3> > little description of what it does beyond saying it's like EMACS.

If you'd bother to read, instead of expecting a virtual salesman to spoonfeed you make-believe thrash, you'd notice that a summary of "what it does" ( [http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html](http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html) ) and _the damn manual_ , where you can find _everything_ it does, not just "a little description" ( [http://www.lugaru.com/pdf.html](http://www.lugaru.com/pdf.html) , [http://www.lugaru.com/epsilon-manual.html](http://www.lugaru.com/epsilon- manual.html) ), are linked right on the frontpage.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but that's just nonsense. If you want to actually sell something, I would expect to have at least a summary of main selling points right there, at the front page.

Expecting the potential buyer to dig through the manual to even learn what the software actually is beyond the "emacs like editor" is ridiculous. For me it just means it is yet another editor for obscure OSes (OS/2 ?), one of thousands on the market, and that I am not going to consider spending money on it when the authors can't be even bothered to tell me why should I do so. The product could be technically superior than everything else and the best thing since sliced bread, but it means little if you don't tell people about it. That's marketing 101.

Compare with e.g. SublimeText website - the key stuff is right there, even animated (!): [https://www.sublimetext.com/](https://www.sublimetext.com/)

Or Atom: [https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)

Or even Emacs: [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/)

Even Vim's web site starts with a short summary: [http://www.vim.org/](http://www.vim.org/)

Unfortunately, many project websites (both open source and commercial) are like that - front page filled with jargon and random stuff but you won't find a short paragraph summarizing what the software actually is for and its main features for people not already familiar with it.

<comment><USER3> > If you want to actually sell something

Perhaps its authors want to achieve other objectives than just sell something, or think it's more appropriate for their users and target public.

There's certainly the possibility that they aren't really sure how selling things on the Internet works. However, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that the guys who've been selling this for 32 years know what works for them better than someone who just found out about their editor.

And frankly, design aside, I like Epsilon's website a lot more than SublimeText's. The front page doesn't offer any useful information about the "key stuff" for a programmer's editor (is it _properly_ extensible, through an extension language? is it easy to interface with other programs? maybe has some added goodies, like a hex editing mode?).

Besides, it's entirely devoid of any useful information besides these 7 features and 6 animations. There seems to be no way for me to find out if ST has any features for e.g. remote editing or VCS integration other than downloading the evaluation version. Where's the manual? Where's at least a longer list of supported features?

I equally don't understand the fixation for animation. It takes less time to find the Epsilon manual on their website and skim it than it takes to watch the six (confusing, since there's no on-screen keyboard!) animations that take up the whole screen. I understand its value as an enhanced form of illustration, but I'd appreciate it more if it would _enhance_ the written, precise information, rather than replace it.

<comment><USER5> > or think it's more appropriate for their users and target public.

I wonder who would that be. Mind you, programmers who shop for an editor are usually very knowledgeable about what they want. They know how to extend Eclipse or Emacs or Atom or VS Code or whatever they have ever laid their hands on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a 20+ year daily gnu/x emacs user and purchased a copy of Epsilon in July after demoing it for a couple weeks. Since then I've been coding in Epsilon daily (Linux/C++):

What I love about it: 1) it's VERY fast, 2) the documentation is phenomenal, 3) the defaults are sane, and the configurable options are well thought out, 4) rock-solid stable.

It's a beautiful piece of software and I've really enjoyed using it. No regrets on the purchase. To me it was worth the $250.

</comment><comment><USER7> For some reason, I find it gratifying that this operation has been in business (more or less) for 32 years.

I can feel a strong sense of pride in the application he's built and still seeing it out there. Whatever few orders he gets is essentially keeping the site running and providing online support to those few still using his wares.

Each order gets you copies for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OS/2 and DOS versions. Must be fun to have a long-standing project that you can go to that keeps you in touch with both newer and older OSes too.

</comment><comment><USER8> The order form has this line "Note: As of 19 February 2016, CDs are temporarily out of stock. If you need a CD please email us for estimated availability.", which might imply that someone bought themselves a CD copy of this editor back in February.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes programmers need to look at unusual files: binary files, very big files, odd data files. Epsilon was designed without the limits of other editors, so it can handle these kinds of jobs, as well as ordinary files. For example, with Epsilon, lines can be as long as you like.

This text editor gets it. Such a contrast to some of the editors we have today where anything over a few megabytes is an edge case not worth fixing.

<comment><USER10> Really? I loaded a 1.2GB ISO in the demo and it used… 1.2GB of RAM. (At least it worked though, _cough_ Atom _cough_.) And more importantly it has _no_ unicode support whatsoever as far as I can tell (any non-ASCII characters I typed showed up as ?).

<comment><USER11> > I loaded a 1.2GB ISO in the demo and it used… 1.2GB of RAM.

And what you expect here? Other editors usually take 2x to 3x of file size.

<comment><USER12> mmap'd files.

<comment><USER11> mmap doesn't help much if you do syntax highlighting or other formatting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll stick with Emacs for now. $250 is a bit heavy for those of us with little disposable income.

In addition, I fail to see the advantage of this over Emacs: Emacs already has pretty much all of Epsilon's features, and a larger community. Furthermore, I highly doubt that its extensibility features are as extensive.

It's kinda cool, though.

Sidenote: why do I always see the HN headlines up to a day ahead in the previous headlines? Is this just thing everybody sees? Or am I just really lucky picking my threads?

<comment><USER14> Epsilon is very fast, like coming up in a second. Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute. You start Emacs and hope to never shut it down. With epsilon you can start it on a file quickly and move on.

<comment><USER15> > _Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute._

I need to seriously rethink my Emacs configuration. I thought I had _a lot_ of packages and elisp scripts loaded at startup, but I don't think I ever hit the 5-second mark. Emacs starting up a _whole minute_? What great packages am I missing?

<comment><USER13> Me neither, and you'll most often run through emacsclient anyways, so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In Epsilon 2.0 (1985) for MS-DOS, you could Cntl-X Cntl-M to get a buffer that had a real, live shell in it, where you could start up background compiles and such, and still be able to edit your other buffers live. This was a miracle! (DOS could barely run a single process, with certainly no preemptive scheduling; and even if you dreamed of multi-tasking, there was a maximum of 640k of memory, with nothing virtual about it).

</comment><comment><USER17> I think "ϵpsilon" was my first programmer's editor, although I think I had previously written programs in EDT, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, QBASIC, GW-BASIC, ZBASIC, IBM Basic, Applesoft Basic, WordStar, and a thing called Video Scribe for HDOS. It was _so much_ better than nearly all of the alternatives, even though I didn't use its IDE features.

It was super helpful to me to have used ϵpsilon when I got my first Unix account in 1993, because I already knew how to use Emacs, almost. Some of the basic keybindings (like exiting and changing windows) were different enough to be an obstacle.

And then I never looked back. From then on I used my 286 to run Procomm+ and Vernon Buerg's LIST.COM, not to write programs on. Sorry, ϵpsilon. Emacs is an entire universe.

(Since then I've also programmed in vim, IDEA, Eclipse, some prototype editors I've written, Arduino, XCode, Notepad, OpenSCAD, and browsers, mostly in order to collaborate with other people and occasionally because they are better integrated with one or another more or less shitty system than Emacs is. But Emacs is pretty much the most convenient way to program for me.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Still being sold for $250 != still being bought for $250, as a lot of people who try selling things on eBay find out to their dismay.

<comment><USER19> Our volume is zero, but we make up for it with large margins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Been using Epsilon daily since 1989. I've been disillusioned lately that it's not been updated for quite some time. The developer is still quite responsive though, and even though I use it less than I used to, I still use it every day. I was hoping to see a native Mac version rather than the version that depends on X.

<comment><USER21> +1 for better Mac support. I don't know if the author has any inclination to do an update, but I would definitely re-buy the editor if the Mac version didn't depend on X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I used epsilon for all my programming work until I discovered vi in '93\. It ran on dos, and OS/2\. United had something similar in uemacs. I used EEL the extension language to write a log of all I did to help refreshing my memory when I filled by time sheet. It was a great editor with a built in shell, windowing and whatnot. Both on DOS and OS/2 I ran the MKS Toolkit to emulate a Unix environment and it fit right in. Happy user. No idea it was still on sale.

</comment><comment><USER23> I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project.

They listed 3 main advantages:

"The first immediate advantage is that Elisp will execute faster, because Guile uses a compiler tower with many optimization passes and ultimately compiles to Guile VM bytecode, which is more efficient than current Elisp bytecode. In the future, Guile is likely to implement some forms of native JIT as well as AOT compilation as well.

A second advantage is that it will be easier to implement some additional language features for Elisp which the Guile compiler tower and VM are capable of, like a full numeric tower (infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.), record types (like an improved defstruct), CLOS-like OOP, an FFI, composable continuations, a module system, hygienic macros, multiple-value returns, and threads.

A third advantage is all Guile APIs/libraries becoming available to Elisp code, no matter what language they're implemented in, because different languages on the Guile VM can inter-operate quite well, especially if they're both a Lisp. C-implemented functions ("subrs" in Elisp terminology), Elisp functions, Scheme procedures, etc. all compile to the same "procedure" data type, which may appear in Elisp symbols' function-slots, be bound to Scheme variables, and are otherwise first-class objects in both environments which can be funcalled or applied explicitly or by the language's normal syntactic way of calling functions. Similarly, other data types are unified between the languages; Elisp integers and exact Scheme integers, inexact Scheme numbers and Elisp floats, Elisp cons cells and Scheme pairs, symbols, etc. are the same data type across the languages. (Strings are an exception though; see below.) Therefore one can generally use a library written in another language as if it were written in the same language."

And looks like there is some progress still: [2]

Here is the current TODO list [3], if someone wants to help.

[1] [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs)

[2] [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile- devel/2016-03/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile- devel/2016-03/msg00028.html)

[3] [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo)

<comment><USER24> > I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project.

I really _really_ hope they don't and use Common Lisp to achieve the same end. Running emacs in a Common Lisp like SBCL implementation means that it will be natively compiled, with an _extremely_ intelligent compiler.

> A second advantage is that it will be easier to implement some additional > language features for Elisp which the Guile compiler tower and VM are > capable of, like a full numeric tower (infinite-sized integers, exact > rational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.), record types (like an improved > defstruct), CLOS-like OOP, an FFI, composable continuations, a module > system, hygienic macros, multiple-value returns, and threads.

Common Lisp has infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers and imaginary numbers. It has DEFSTRUCT. It has CLOS (obviously). Every Unix Lisp I'm aware of has an FFI. Continuations are actually a problem when it comes to e.g. UNWIND-PROTECT. Common Lisp has packages and an excellent module system in ASDF3. It has hygienic macro libraries, and natively supports the more- powerful DEFMACRO. It supports multiple-value returns. BORDEAUX-THREADS is an excellent portable thread library.

> A third advantage is all Guile APIs/libraries becoming available to Elisp > code, no matter what language they're implemented in, because different > languages on the Guile VM can inter-operate quite well, especially if > they're both a Lisp.

Common Lisp has many excellent libraries available via Quicklisp.

Scheme is IMHO a broken language: distinguishing NIL and #f; only have one namespace; continuations; not allowing (cdr nil); not having a native object system; not having a rich type and class library; not having read macros. It was an interesting experiment, but the effort spent on Schemes would have been better spent improving Lisp.

Lisp is far closer to elisp, and is a better language to boot.

<comment><USER25> The idea of GuileEmacs is not to move away from the elisp language. The idea is to use an elisp implementation based on the Guile virtual machine.

Elisp will not go away. So any arguments for lisp and against scheme are void in this context.

<comment><USER24> > The idea of GuileEmacs is not to move away from the elisp language. The idea > is to use an elisp implementation based on the Guile virtual machine.

> Elisp will not go away. So any arguments for lisp and against scheme are > void in this context.

If the goal is not to mingle elisp & Scheme, then what's the point of using the Guile VM? Why not just implement an interpreter for elisp in Lisp?

There is absolutely no reason to mingle Scheme with elisp. Scheme's not a bad language for those places it's well-suited, but production software is not one of those places. For that there is Common Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Lugaru is from the french word 'Loup-Garou' which means Werewolf. I wonder where he got the idea to name the software company as such? Also it speaks volumes that no one has yet commented on appearance of the website, I guess the target audience is not the 'get the latest hip named thing' kinda crowd.

<comment><USER27> From the site ([http://www.lugaru.com/why- lugaru.html](http://www.lugaru.com/why-lugaru.html)):

'Sometimes people ask what our company name, Lugaru, means. It's actually a phonetic spelling of the French word for werewolf, "loup-garou". One day in 1984, after finally turning off the computers and noticing the sun had come up, we decided this might be an appropriate name for our new company.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very happy to see someone keep an editor going as a commercial product for so many years. I think this is a good example of 'craft'. There are a few gems out there that once you stumble over them, they become part of your toolbox and are just so much better than anything else for the work that you do, that you stick with them. This looks to me to be an example of that.

Not all IDEs suit all people. Apart from feature set one also has to consider style and operations. Im most happy when i find the features+style+operations match to the job at hand. And that is why i turn to Notepad++ when i have to ferret around in files of different types, awk when i have to mess with text/log files. I turn to VS only when i have to code something in C#, use PyCharm for python things.

Bottom line when an IDE 'just clicks' for you then its a wonderfully productive tool.

</comment><comment><USER29> Because of all the positive comments I decided to try the editor. For all of you evangalizing this editor, why do keybindings like "F9, Ctrl-X U" make sense for common tasks like undo?

Press F9, release and then quickly press ctrl-x, release and then press u. Even during my short time with emacs did I not hurt my fingers this much

<comment><USER30> Just to point out, the binding for undo in emacs is C-X u.

<comment><USER31> Actually, the primary binding is 'C-/', with 'C-x u' and 'C-_' as alaises. The 'C-x u' alias exists because it's easier for new users to remember and the 'C-_' alias exists because that's what some terminals send when you press 'C-/'.

<comment><USER32> cough M-x cua-mode cough...

<comment><USER33> Makes a good set of training wheels, sure. I used it for a couple of years.

I did end up with undo still on C-z after turning off cua-mode, because I use graphical frames and never want to suspend anyway. But it's not really a help: the C-/ C-? pair is much more convenient, and for nontrivial undoing I'm navigating a state tree anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I almost want to buy a copy just to give the guy kudos for keeping with it for all these years. Pretty impressive array of platforms and features for something with that old a history!

</comment><comment><USER35> I've heard of Epsilon, but never used it.

Back in the days when I actually paid for text editors, my favorite was Multi- Edit ([http://multieditsoftware.com/](http://multieditsoftware.com/)). I remember UltraEdit ([http://www.ultraedit.com/](http://www.ultraedit.com/)) being pretty popular too.

Nowadays, whatever work I'm not doing in Visual Studio is being done in Notepad++.

<comment><USER36> Speaking of bygone editors, I still have (very) fond memories of using QEdit (later TSE (The Semware Editor)) in my DOS-centric early '90s larval hacking days.

Looks like they still sell it for $45 a pop, I don't think the website ([http://www.semware.com](http://www.semware.com)) has changed much in the intervening 20 years though. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been using Epsilon for 25+ years. It's great, and well worth the money I have spent on the updates over the past few decades. It's my go-to editor. I can get along in vanilla Emacs, but Epsilon is a lot friendlier on a Windows box.

There's not much I would change on the Windows version (better multiple monitor support might be interesting0. I _would_ pay dear money for better MacOS support.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, it looks way better than vanilla emacs on the Windows version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The OSX deployment not being a "verified developer" shuts down anyone in an enterprise environment. That's too bad, I wanted to try it at work.

<comment><USER17> That's interesting, and fairly dystopian — you're not allowed to run any software on your computer that isn't signed by Apple? Can you install, say, VirtualBox?

<comment><USER15> Leaving aside the "signed by Apple" angle, I find it ironic in modern companies that many of them spend a lot of money finding people to work for them, then they spend money paying those people, and then they spend _more_ money making it as hard as humanly possible for those people to do their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> (Perhaps a bit off-topic) Another non-free editor that's been around for a while is BBEdit. It's always been Mac-only, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER40> How many licenses are still being sold? I see that the last update was in May 2006.

<comment><USER41> > 4 August 2016 New Evaluation Version of Epsilon 13.12 Available.

> 19 September 2011 Epsilon 13.12 update available, compatible with OS X 10.7 > Lion.

Those aren't updates?

<comment><USER20> Not really. They put an eval version up which expires. They then upload a new build that pushes the expiration out. Repeat every few months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I love how there is a prominent link explaining Year 2000 issues.

</comment><comment><USER43> We changed the title from "A mighty editor still being sold after 30 years for $250", which breaks the HN guidelines for editorializing.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER44> And now the headline provides absolutely no indication of why it's an interesting link. Sigh.

Why not just strike "mighty" and leave it as "An editor still being sold after 30 years for $250"?

<comment><USER43> From the guidelines:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or > linkbait.

The long-standing policy is to represent the submitted content as accurately as possible and let readers pick out what's interesting to them, not what the submitter found interesting. The comment thread is the place to express one's opinion on the content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Its extension language looks very interesting. It looks very powerful while having domain-specific features (I've noticed 'user', 'command', and 'save_var' keywords). See e.g. [http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/cmake.e](http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/cmake.e) [http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/lispmode.e](http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/lispmode.e)

Also, the demo is extremely snappy. Shame it doesn't seem to have vi emulation (unless I missed it?) or org-mode, both of which are killer features of emacs for me.

<comment><USER45> as text editor extension languages go, i really liked aurora's [old dos-era editor with an emacs-like core + soft layer architecture]. it was pascal-like, and really pleasant to work with.

[http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/amacs.html](http://www- personal.umich.edu/~knassen/amacs.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Epsilon is great. Let me offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It's a secret weapon, an unfair advantage we have, those of us in the know.

I was so happy to come upon it as a sadly ex-Symbolics-ZMacs user (and ex-MIT- TECO-Emacs user) when first confronted with a 286 system, and I have have been using it ever since. I buy a few copies every few years, typically for team members who wonder what's that magic I keep using. At my present company, I fought (and won) a three-month battle with the Software Standards Committee to be allowed to install it.

As a Windows developer I routinely do all editing in Epsilon, switching to Visual Studio only to compile and debug. To draft this very message, I switched away from my web browser to Epsilon. Steven Doerfler provides great customer service on the very rare occasion that I need to turn to him.

If you have any emacs in your soul, buy Epsilon. Now.

<comment><USER10> Why do you prefer it over regular Emacs? How is it better enough to make up for the much larger collection of extensions for Emacs?

The demo for me just felt like a snappier Emacs clone.

<comment><USER46> Well, the first N specific things that come to mind have already been expressed pretty well by previous comments here (including your own "snappier"). The next 10*N things are already expressed pretty well in the 2009-format-but-still-valid-content marketroid material on lugaru.com. As it happens, I haven't found a need to explore a universe of community extensions because right out of the "box" Epsilon does nearly everything I need, and my few personal extensions take care of the rest. Beyond that, I no longer care to engage in yet another emacs religious war, and emacs does not need any bad- mouthing from me.

<comment><USER47> I can understand and respect that you're reluctant to write an endorsement of Epsilon and/or a comparison with Emacs. But I'd like to let you know that while starting to read your comment I was looking forward to just that, and now find myself a bit disappointed that you're not sharing some reasons for your enthusiasm.

I was a big fan of Epsilon back in the days when it was an alternative to WordStar and I think I still own an original (paid) copy on floppy disks, but I'm not familiar enough (any more) with its feature set to meaningfully answer the question of what qualifies it above Emacs.

Personally, I'm considering paying $250 just for the nostalgia value. And I love fast editors with an uncluttered surface. The ability to edit arbitrarily long lines and binaries is certainly a plus. But I would appreciate, if you'd reconsider, hearing more arguments to knock me off the fence.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How to Launch Your Next Tech Product for Free (Almost) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/launch-next-tech-product-free-almost/ <comment><USER2> great article, thank you so much for this</comment>


Harvard University Announcement: No tuition and no student loans - <AUTHOR> http://harlemworldmag.com/2013/09/20/harvard-university-announcement-no-tuition-and-no-student-loans/ <comment><USER2> I am of the opinion that these sorts of programs can be dangerous for two reasons:

1\. It provides an disincentive for Harvard to accept marginal students from low-income families, if Harvard isn't completely sure that the student will be successful academically.

2\. It discourages the student (and their family) from taking opportunities that might increase their gross annual income, such as a summer internship at a company like Google or Facebook.

My parents have an AGI of about $20k CAD; I've only been able to pay for my undergrad because of paid internships and a very generous grant from an external donor (which was, at the time, issued partially on a needs basis, but whose renewal was only contingent on my grades).

Granted, I haven't seen the full T&Cs, but it's just something to think about.</comment>


I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/11/30/i_quit_miseries_of_an_uber_driver/ <comment><USER3> The one time I ordered an Uber, we spent 25 minutes waiting while the driver drove around a similarly (but still quite distinctly) named street on the other side of town. After several phone calls, she ended up using her own GPS navigator to find us.

So I can corroborate what this article is saying: Uber has absolutely no clue where you are even given both an address and map co-ordinates. Presumably they rely on a terrible reverse geocoding implementation and discard the other information. That's surprising, because years ago I used to work on firmware for navigation devices and I don't recall reverse geocoding ever causing major issues (there were always minor inaccuracies when you round-tripped the data, but you never ended up on the wrong side of town) - I thought it was a solved problem.

For the record, neither Google Maps nor Apple Maps have ever had trouble distinguishing between those two locations (though humans sometimes do), so they broke it all by themselves.

<comment><USER4> Author here - very interesting to find that someone else had the same strange experience. Street names have no place in GPS navigation! The instance I spoke about was a time when there had been a concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, and I am sure that all available UBER drivers were busy driving people home - hence, even though I was 20 minutes away, I might still have been the closest driver. But the estimation of "3 minutes" combined the GPS path showing me leaving from Piedmont Ave. in Berkeley - when I was on the same-named street in Oakland - makes you doubt their app works at all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > After waiting 20 minutes, I called the driver, who did not speak any version > of English I am familiar with. He claimed to be relatively near my house but > was unable to tell me how he was going to get there. I canceled and tried > again. This time I got a young woman who also apparently didn't speak > English well.

As someone whose parents speak English with accents, it really makes me cringe when some Americans complain about non-native English speakers in service level jobs. I would hate to have one of my parents deemed less worthy of a job due to their accents. I understand that some jobs benefit greatly from employees that speak English fluently, but I don't think a driver is one of those positions and I doubt many would pay a premium to have a native speaker as a driver.

Maybe I'm overreacting but statements like the one quoted above always come off as slightly xenophobic. It almost makes me throw out the rest of the authors arguments as a rant.

<comment><USER6> It's not xenophobic to want not to have so much difficulty that it interferes with the service. When you have a hard time communicating directions, it's a problem. Which is what this person experienced. Xenophobia is disliking of people, not disliking the inability to share directions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Also, considering the company's huge profits, Uber owes it to the little guys doing their driving to provide much better software..."

Is it typical for reporters to confuse profits with revenue? None of the decks I've seen show profits, I've always assumed that my rides are subsidized by VC money.

<comment><USER8> > Is it typical for reporters to confuse profits with revenue?

The author isn't a reporter (or, at the very least, she's new to it). _Claire Callahan Goodman is a Bay Area native from a large family, whose careers have included Classical Musician, Software Engineer and Mom._ [1]

[1] [http://www.salon.com/writer/claire_callahan_goodman/](http://www.salon.com/writer/claire_callahan_goodman/)

<comment><USER4> Author here - no, I am not a reporter, but I know the difference between profits, net, VC, and the difference between a privately and publicly-held company. That said, since UBER is privately held, no one can say what they are "worth" (a term which also has many interpretations).

The article published in Salon was a draft I sent them and they ran with it. Once I knew they were interested, I did a lot more research and number crunching, assuming they would want more facts and detail. They didn't change a thing! They published the article in their "Life" section. I think this section is reserved for non-reporters writing about life experiences and that's why they didn't require expert fact-checking. I do agree that no one knows who gets paid what in the upper-echelons of UBER - but I would guess it's a LOT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let me add an slightly alternate (may be off topic) perspective!

In India, the maps are (surprisingly) accurate on the Uber app. The ETA is close to expected and everything's fine. BUT, the driver has no idea on how to use them! It results in the driver calling multiple times to locate where you are. I think Uber must provide a little bit of training to the drivers on the use of navigation system on their app.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've used Uber since they showed up in Seattle, and was a big proponent of it. Lately, I've been seeing a lot of issues with the estimated eta being off by 20 minutes or so, which has led me to start using other services (Lyft, sidecar, & crown car), all of which seem to do a better job of giving me an ETA which is within a couple of minutes of them showing up.

<comment><USER11> I have also seen the GPS estimates degrade over time -- which begs the question: shouldn't those estimate be improving over time, unless something shady is going on?

<comment><USER12> I would guess that GPS experiences like the article mentions are either driver app errors or scaling problems. That is, it sounds like the server is calculating the ETA of the driver based on a stale location. The location would be stale either because the driver app is not updating it correctly or because even when it is updating location correctly, the server is (sometimes) using an older location, probably due to an eventually consistent data store.

When I worked for Flywheel (Uber competitor, same general needs of "figure out the closest driver and provide an ETA"), we'd occasionally see drivers whose phones seemed to get "stuck" in a location, essentially because the location service crashed in the O/S and would stop updating the app (though this was on Android phones and not iOS, and I'd be slightly surprised to see it happen in iOS).

But I think that the scaling issue is the most likely. Location updates come fast and furious, and must be queried quickly. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Uber is using some kind of big scalable highly available database that could in the event of fairly routine network partitions report stale driver locations some of the time, and/or a cache in front of their underlying store that sometimes fails to get invalidated. That seems like it's consistent with the experience of the driver that the problem tends to happen on particular nights (when they're having some kind of underlying problem with, say, communication between components of their data store cluster), and why you might see it getting worse over time (as they scale).

<comment><USER13> Why can't they just serve the client's location to the driver's device and then have the drivers device handle the estimate?

<comment><USER14> That would lose scale-dependent ways to improve estimates like current traffic data from other cars, historical traffic and trip-time records, etc

Also won't help with stale GPS location on the phone (which anecdotally has been happening on my N5 more since upgrade to L as well)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've had incredibly mixed experiences using Uber in NYC and DC. It used to be great. Now, it seems that every other driver has no idea how to get both to me and then my destination. In DC, the drivers routinely go ten to twenty minutes out of the way. Almost every trip I have to submit a refund request which is always granted, but it's still a pain. In NYC, drivers have yet to figure out one way streets and watching them go up the wrong avenue and circle around my apartment three times has become a past time of mine. After reading this article, it seems like the GPS might be to blame.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure how her back to back drives add up to only $10/hr. I drive Uber/Lyft in San Diego, routinely don't get back-to-back rides and have some long stretches of downtime, and usually make $1000 on a 50 hour on-call week (~30h of actual drive time). So that's about $20/hour. If you minus gas (~150/wk) that's a little bit less; I drive a honda insight, which gets slightly worse gas mileage than the prius, and the per hour and per mile in SF is higher than than in San Diego.

<comment><USER17> > and usually make $1000 on a 50 hour on-call week (~30h of actual drive > time). So that's about $20/hour.

Now subtract car payments, insurance, wear and tear, etc.

Here's an example of how this breaks down:

You work 215 hours per month on average (50 * 4.3 weeks) and make $4,300 revenue during that time (or $51,600/year).

\- Subtract self-employment tax 15.3% - ~$7900

\- Taxable income 37,650 - ~$5,300 in taxes so subtract that

\- You put about 70k miles per year on your car assuming an average speed of about 45mph (30 hours * 45mph * 4.3 weeks * 12) - IRS says that's $.56 per mile - ~$39k or basically your entire car + a bit more in one year. This includes the cost of gas.

\- The Prius is about a $23k car, financed completely at 3% for 5 years brings you payments to about $400/mo or about $4,800/year

So 51,600 - 7,900 - 5,300 - 39,000 - 4,800 = -5,400 ouch

Most of your cost is in car wear and tear, so let's waive a magic wand and make that go away, it's a Toyota after all. But we can't get rid of gas costs, so let's substitute that in.

A prius gets about 51mpg in the city. It looks like I can get gas for about $2.80/gal in San Diego right now. You'll need about 1.4k gallons per year. Assuming gas prices stay the same, about $3.8k per year in gas. _edit_ I see I'm estimating about half the gas pricing you are, so just double my figure here.

So 51,600 - 7,900 - 5,300 - 4,800 - 3,800 = $29,800 in take home pay

 _edit_ or $26k take home when using your gas figures which makes it an even $10/hr

At your self described work hours of 50hr/wk or 2600hr/year, that's $11.50/hr

I assume you wash your car and keep it clean because of passengers, so subtract that out also. I'm going to guess that your take-home pay ends up at around $10/hr if we assume your car takes no wear and tear of any sort driving 70,000 miles a year.

 _edit_ I'm not even counting commercial car insurance, which I'm sure you have, or state taxes, inspections, licensing costs, etc. or any other expenses.

 _edit_ Taxi insurance appears to run around $7-10k per year.

 _edit_ so let's use the new gas figures, you end up with about $21k take home when you subtract $7k of taxi insurance. Or about $8/hr.

Once you deduct state taxes, property taxes etc. I'm sure there's other expenses I'm missing, I have a feeling your take home pay is about on par with California minimum wage.

<comment><USER18> You should be using pre tax numbers for expenses.

<comment><USER3> He should be using pre-tax numbers for _everything_ \- not only is he not deducting any expenses, he's comparing the final after-tax number with the before-tax minimum wage.

Still, assuming his research is accurate at best it comes out at like ~$12 per hour before tax, unless you play russian roulette on the insurance. This of course assumes that it's your full-time job, otherwise the car payments will further reduce the hourly rate.

<comment><USER18> Sorry, your wrong.

Self employment tax is higher than just social security tax so you need to look at after tax earrings to compare a 1099 job to a w-2 job. Also, more expences can be deducted as an uber driver than a wage slave ex: a percentage of your cell phone bill and car depreciation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Regarding ETA times - They were really, really good on the Peninsula in the bay area - over 50 or so rides, and ETA of 5-15 minutes would usually be within 2 minutes of the correct time.

Here in Dubai - they are ludicrously incorrect. I'll see a "8 minute ETA" that turns out to be 35 minutes, more often than not.

This _seems_ to be a very solvable problem. During certain hours, traffic is very slow. I've only been here a month, but I can tell you at 3:30 - 4:30, you need to add about 15-20 minutes if you are going near the interchange at Wafi Mall - That's without even taking into account the various traffic flow indicators that I'm sure Uber has access to.

<comment><USER20> Consider that Dubai might have different cultural norms as well, which could affect drivers' hurry/accuracy factor.

<comment><USER19> That's not it - I've taken UberX here about 15 or so times - and the drivers have all been courteous, professional and timely. A lot of them are black car drivers as well, so it's hit and miss when you summon an UberX vehicle, you might just end up with a Lexus a professional driver.

When I see where the cars are, and where I am, I can usually make a guess as to how long they will be based on a months worth of local knowledge - <USER2> example is traffic flows to/from Sharjah, the emirate next to Dubai. In the morning all the traffic comes _from_ Sharjah, and in the evening it all goes the return direction. The Exact same trip from Business Bay in Dubai to Al Qusais might take 15 minutes or 60 minutes - but the time is entirely predicable - Uber just doesn't seem to do it here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Uber drvers I speak to have generally have had a much more positive experience.

One difference may be point-of-reference. A software engineer has much higher expectations for income, treatment, etc. than blue collar or unskilled workers do. The Radio Shack article a few weeks back is much closer to what happens to most people in the US.

When you talk to taxi drivers, the experience is much, much worse. They have to lease a medallion. The rates vary by market, but typical price might be $150 per day. Because they lease the medallion, they're generally forced to work insane hours. An 8 hour shift is a guaranteed money-losing proposition. Still, if they make less than $150 -- which happens on a bad day, they come out behind. If they have a good day, they'll make a bit over minimum wage. The income is incredibly variable -- a fixed $150/day cost, combined with variable revenue, guarantees that. That makes financial management tough.

It's a really tough, really bad business.

Compared to that, Uber and similar services are a breath of fresh air.

</comment><comment><USER22> I can see the issue here. Someone says, "Why is this so hard on me when the company shuffling paper is making all the money?" I could see Lyft or Uber having a competitive advantage if they gave equity or something like equity to drivers. Pre-IPO equity may be difficult for regulatory reasons around # of shareholders, but perhaps bonuses based on valuation?

<comment><USER23> I think these companies want to avoid making the drivers look any more like employees than they already do.

Frankly, it seems to me that they are in fact employees, over which Uber exerts enormous control, to the point of spying on them, monitoring what they post on social media, what they say to customers about the company, supplying talking points, directing them to disregard certain local transportation regulations.

<comment><USER22> True - it benefits Uber immensely from a tax perspective (and benefits?) for them to be independent consultants. It's also harder for independent consultants to unionize.

<comment><USER24> Its going to be brutal on Uber (and Lyft) when the IRS recategroizes all of those drivers as employees, and both companies need to cough up the employment taxes they should've been paying. It happened to Fedex (their Ground division) [1].

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/08/27/fedex- misc...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/08/27/fedex- misclassified-drivers-as-independent-contractors-rules-ninth-circuit/)

<comment><USER22> I'm not a lawyer - is this a done deal? With FedEx they were working full time, right? If someone is driving for both Uber and Lyft, isn't it hard to say they should be an employee of one or the other?

<comment><USER24> It's a done deal:

[http://www.woodllp.com/Publications/Articles/pdf/AlexandervF...](http://www.woodllp.com/Publications/Articles/pdf/AlexandervFedEx.pdf)

Also, it wasn't the time required from contractors that put them into employee status, but the requirements they were required to follow.

<comment><USER22> I meant is it a done deal for Uber and Lyft?

<comment><USER24> Ahh! No no, not at all. It hasn't even come up yet with a court or the IRS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm surprised she complains about the directions. I was under the impression that it used Google Maps. I'm not an Uber driver but I have used the Google Maps app for driving directions and always found it to be pretty good.

<comment><USER26> This probably depends on where you live? I use Google Maps and when I was living in California it was completely awesome. However, having moved to Seattle recently, it definitely is not as reliable as it used to be. This might have to do with the roads here being much more complicated though.

<comment><USER27> I've noticed that in downtown Seattle, the GPS has some difficulties maintaining a tight fix on your location. Couple that with how close together some of the roads are and you may find yourself teleporting from one avenue to the other as you move toward your destination.

It works great in suburbia, as expected.

<comment><USER28> It's been explained to me that tall buildings play merry havoc with the GPS, but I haven't been able to test that out at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not so sure about the "lousy GPS". In an UberX ride I had the other week, the driver & I were joking about how dodgy GPS can be, and we both agreed to ignore its suggestions... Uber was suggesting we take a tunnel that would take us away from our destination, and it's a tunnel no regular taxi driver has ever used with me when driving to that destination before.

Well, after dealing with evening crowds & inner city construction work that night, we had to take a number of detours to get to the destination. And near the end of our lengthy detour, there was that tunnel that we'd opted not to take. We probably would have saved 10 minutes. The driver immediately apologized: "Maybe the Uber GPS was right after all."

<comment><USER30> You mean its Navigation Software? I'd hate for GPS to become a synonym for route planning.

<comment><USER31> It's been a synonym now for a long time.

<comment><USER32> That does not mean one can't protest it ;). You need a way to refer to an actual lousy GPS as well (long fix time, inaccurate). Lumping everything together makes it hard to be precise (like using 'begging the question' wrongly somewhere else in these comments ;)).

<comment><USER33> "protest _against_ it"

Sorry. I'm still fighting a rearguard action against you crazy Americans' perversion of our language a "long time" ago.

(I know. I know. Someone will be along in a minute to tell me that "protest it" was original authentic British English centuries ago.)

<comment><USER32> _" protest _against_ it"_

Good point :). As a non-native speaker, I sometimes mess up prepositions... And of course, have a carte blanche to make errors :p.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just uninstalled the Uber app this morning. Never used it, and, given the way they treat their employees and their customers, I see there's absolutely no reason to start.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Having accepted a rider, the driver has no idea of the destination.

Only if you don't enter your destination in the app, which you can totally do.

<comment><USER35> This is not true, at least according to my limited experience in Prague. The driver will see the destination I put in only after he STARTS the ride, ie after I get in the car (as opposed to seeing it before or after he accepts the ride).

<comment><USER36> In the US, at least, entering the destination is optional.

<comment><USER35> Here too, but the driver doesnt see it either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've had only awesome experiences as an Uber rider (in the Boston area and Bay Area) and all the drivers I talked to seem pretty happy (especially ex-taxi drivers). I agree the software is a bit shotty, but I'd bet they are aware of and working out all the kinks.

<comment><USER38> My understanding is that Uber drivers are always happy about being uber drivers when talking to customers because there is a "secret shopper" program that considers complaining about the company to be a bad thing.

<comment><USER39> I understand why the company does it, but that's horrific. There was a sandwhich chain (mostly based in the UK) that even had a collective punishment thing - if someone at a shop was found to be insufficiently cheerful, everyone lost on the weekly bonus.

[http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112204/pret-manger- when-c...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112204/pret-manger-when- corporations-enforce-happiness)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does Uber use Apple Maps for its drivers? I would assume so, if they are on iOS. That could certainly explain why several comments in this thread mention Uber's direction finding services getting worse. My rather subjective experience with Apple Maps is that they haven't caught up with Google yet.

<comment><USER41> I remember reading somewhere that they use the Foursquare API for something.

<comment><USER14> They might use Foursquare API for geolocating points of interest? Citymapper uses that and I assume it's for a reason (cheaper than Google?)</comment></comment></comment>


Porn Site Feud Spawns New DNS Attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.csoonline.com/article/print/479169

<comment><USER2> Very clever type of DDOS attack, this "DNS Amplification."

Hacker's computers ping DNS servers with a small packet, like 17 bytes, and through spoofing, and some sort of Foobar protocol or glitch in the DNS server, get it to send a 500byte packet to the victim of their choice. The result is the computers the hackers control produce 25x the amount of traffic on the victim as they are sending out, and the traffic to the victim appears to be coming from legit DNS servers!

<comment><AUTHOR> The 2k attacker machines --> 750k DNS server ratio is scary. There's a configuration to makes this possiblity go away... it's just not set by anyone apparently.

(see [https://www.dns-oarc.net/oarc/articles/upward-referrals- cons...](https://www.dns-oarc.net/oarc/articles/upward-referrals-considered- harmful) )</comment></comment>


What Gravitational Waves Can Say About Dark Matter - <AUTHOR> https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-gravitational-waves-can-say-about-dark-matter <comment><USER2> _Dark matter seems to interact with normal matter only through gravity, but, based on the way known particles interact, theorists think it's possible that dark matter might also interact with itself._

If dark matter were to interact with itself (as regular matter does), wouldn't we expect it to clump together and form the same structures as regular matter does, especially given that there's supposed to be much more dark matter to interact together than the regular stuff? AIUI one of the defining features of dark matter is that it _doesn 't_ clump together.

<comment><USER3> Actually dark matter clumps, e.g. so called dark matter halo of a galaxy[1]. It is seen from rotational curves of galaxies and can be also checked with with strong and weak lensing effects [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter_halo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter_halo)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens)

<comment><USER4> No, dark matter will form halos even if it's interactions are solely gravitational. "Clumping" refers to much stronger concentrations from non- gravitational interactions.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is correct that clumping can be solely gravitational effect, though so far we have pretty vague idea about the density in those clumps and halos, which are mostly derived from N-body simulation, which are obviously model dependent, e.g. NFW profile [1]. If dark matter interacts with itself one can expect deviations from purely gravitational description due to dark matter analogues of pressure, temperature, viscosity, etc.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navarro%E2%80%93Frenk%E2%80%93...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navarro%E2%80%93Frenk%E2%80%93White_profile)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps tangential, but is there a frequency of a gravity wave high enough to "cusp" due to one of the quantization limits?

<comment><USER6> In even the classic theory, when the Swartzchild radius of the gravitational wavelet exceeds its width, wouldn't it naturally form a black hole and end up a cusp?

Like a gravity Kugelblitz.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think by definition it wouldn't form a black hole, it would _be_ a black hole. Gravitational waves are propagating disturbances through spacetime, so the kind of wave you're describing would begin as a singularity. I don't think (but am not sure) that the math allows for the emission of such a thing. It sounds non-physical, and I'd suspect that if you do the math you'd discover that you'd need to have giant black holes merging to generate such a wave, or FTL. In the former case I'd bet that it turns out the wave would form within the event horizon of the hole, and that's a good as saying it would never form.

<comment><USER7> >In the former case I'd bet that it turns out the wave would form within the event horizon of the hole, and that's a good as saying it would never form.

Sorry if this is a bit naive and tangential, but I've always stumbled at the thought of how does gravity-information about the interior of a black hole propagate out of the event horizon? ...Gravitons/gravity waves travel at, c?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a bit of a tricky question, because it's math-heavy. The best way to describe it is to think of the event horizon as the black hole, and forget that there is even an interior. The black hole can be fully described by the conditions at the event horizon after all, and everything else is cut off from the surrounding universe completely. In that sense there is no propagation from the interior at all, which is good because if information could escape then theories describing black holes would be broken.

Instead the black hole has mass, charge, and momentum (three kinds of momentum actually, but that's not important). Whatever is going on beyond the event horizon, whatever that might be, has no effect that anyone can detect. Matter is accreted "onto" the event horizon which then expands in proportion to the mass of the volume of the hole. Maybe it's destroyed beyond that point, or maybe it goes to another universe, but we can never know. The event horizon can also shrink if the surroundings are sufficiently cold (really really really cold) and the horizon is sufficiently hot.

Still, all of this is surface phenomena, like dropping a bowling ball into a tub of water. The water only "knows" about the surface of the ball, which which gets properties from the whole ball without exposing the center. A bowling ball in water creates waves, but the interior isn't interacting with the water anymore than the black hole interior interacts with space (assuming an idealized perfectly rigid bowling ball). In the same way gravity waves or fractions would be a function of how the space _just_ beyond the event horizon is warped.

Does that help?

<comment><USER8> I have some naive questions too. This is basically just me rephrasing the question I understood wallace_f to be asking:

\- The event horizon is a two-dimensional sphere and, being two-dimensional, has zero mass and cannot exert any gravitational force.

\- The black hole within the horizon is a three-dimensional massy object and can and does exert a lot of gravitational force.

\- Assume at equilibrium our black hole is somehow exerting gravitational forces on its surroundings which are what you would predict if you accurately knew the black hole's actual mass.

\- Assume the black hole moves, e.g. because of inertia.

\- Now it should be exerting more force than previously on one half of the universe (the half it moved toward), and less force on the other half.

\- Say it moved toward you. After a speed-of-light delay, you should actually perceive more force on yourself towards the black hole. But this can't be because a messenger particle was transmitted from the black hole to you. How can it be?

Assuming this shows that black holes cannot move seems unsatisfactory, given the recession of galaxies from one another, observations believed to show black holes colliding, etc. Where are my mistakes?

Followup: one black hole collides with another black hole of roughly ten times its size. Is it necessarily the case that the center of mass of the new, combined black hole ends up at the point that was the center of mass of the small-hole/big-hole system just as the small hole crossed the big hole's event horizon?

<comment><USER9> > \- The event horizon is a two-dimensional sphere and, being two-dimensional, > has zero mass and cannot exert any gravitational force.

Stop right there. A two dimensional surface can have mass if it has infinite density. And infinite density makes as much sense as any other sort of singularity...

<comment><USER8> Where's the singularity that occurs if we assume it's just a region of space with nothing in it? I didn't call the black hole a zero-dimensional point.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't know, and may have no way of knowing. There are conjectures that the event horizon is it, that inside the event horizon is a quantum fuzz ball, or strings, or 1D points, or a whole universe. We don't know, and may well never know. What we do know is that it seems a 2D horizon can encode the information required to describe a 3D volume, and that goes for event horizons, as well certain classes of cosmic horizons in some models. This weirdness is the core of the holographic principle conjecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tangential, and possibly revealing ignorance here. I definitely don't get why clouds of dark matter surrounding galaxies don't fall into the black hole at the center. Dark matter is there to explain why the outer stars of a galaxy rotate faster than expected, but why is dark matter not distributed roughly in the same density distribution as visible matter?

<comment><USER11> It is presumed that the dark matter also rotates about the galactic center. It can't fall in, any more than the stars in the galaxy can, because it collectively can't dump its angular momentum. However, there is controversy whether dark matter can dissipate momentum that is parallel to the rotational axis either by self interaction or by interaction with ordinary matter. If it can, then the distribution of dark matter could resemble a disk, as opposed to a spherical distribution.

Lisa Randall has written a provocative book about this which will answer your question in depth: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TFA doesn't mention recent evidence that primordial black holes are rare. It also doesn't address issues around condensation of dark matter. That is, two dark-matter objects can't collide, because they'll just pass through each other.

<comment><USER13> They can still get rid of momentum in N-body interactions via gravitational waves (N>=2) or by transferring to it to another body (N>2). The question is whether those mechanisms are significant enough to lead to compact bodies.

<comment><USER12> Thanks.

Is it generally accepted that the large-scale structure of the universe (presumably including dark matter) reflects quantum-scale structure before inflation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They say, in a whisper, "Don't get a degree in particle physics! It's oversaturated, and the field can't even justify building another particle accelerator because it doesn't know what to look for!"

<comment><USER15> If you did a PhD (Emphasis on PhD because an undergraduate degree isn't close to enough) on particle physics solely with career prospects in mind then you probably have bigger issues

<comment><USER14> Exactly what I was getting at!</comment></comment></comment>


New Chips Loaded With Dummy Parts - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/new-chips-loaded-with-dummy-parts/0 <comment><USER2> This is an interesting case of the relationship between abundant and scarce resources. It used to be that transistors were scarce, so using the silicon in order to pack them well was the optimization goal. Nowadays, transistors reached a point of zero cost, but yield and the process nodes to make them are incredibly expensive, therefore, you get "wasted" silicon.

In programming, this is akin to programming in assembly, when no cycle can be spared, versus programming in the highest available language, when the programmer's attention and productivity is scarce.

<comment><USER3> What about compilers that stick in NOPs to keep pipelines in sync?

<comment><USER4> Less "to keep pipelines in sync" and more "to align jump targets to cache- friendly boundaries". But yes.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, didn't think about that one. Good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Intel improved the resolution of its lithography with a technique called dipole illumination, a process that splits light into two beams, sends them through reduction lenses, and projects features from different angles.

That's so cool that someone had to figure out how to shrink LIGHT so that one can watch cats doing cute things on YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER6> This technique has been used in PCBs for many decades. You fill in unused parts of the PCB layers with stripes, partly to improve the manufacturing yield, and partly (in ground planes) to "debounce" the circuitry.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. Kind of the junk DNA of chips.

<comment><USER8> Not really. The dummy features have a practical purpose to help the silicon deal with stress. Its similar to the ridges and lines that car manufacturers are putting on the panels of new cars. The metal is so thin on these panels that they have to put ridges to stop them from bending. The same thing has happened with processors. We have reached a point where the chips are so small that similar ridges have to incorporated to even out stress within the chip.

<comment><USER9> You might be dismissing the point too soon. To the lay-person, junk DNA looks like as useless a feature as a ridge in a door panel, or dummy pathways on a chip. To an expert auto-maker, the purpose of the panel ridges is obvious, structural rigidity. To an expert chip-maker, the purpose of dummy pathway is obvious. To Our Holy Creator Who Art in Heaven (or whomever you wish to credit our creation), it is possible that our junk DNA has a very obvious purpose that we have yet to divine.

<comment><USER10> Greg Bear's _Darwin's Radio_ is an interesting scifi take on the idea that some junk DNA could be just one evolutionary step away from being activated.

<comment><USER11> Darwins Radio was a great read but I don't find the idea of ready made features for future use in our DNA very plausible.

He spins an amazing yarn around it though, and plenty of the social consequences are very believable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wooooosh ... sound over the head of a software guy reading this.</comment>


Show HN: Covet.tv – Shop the Fashion of Your Favourite Shows - <AUTHOR> https://covet.tv <comment><USER2> This is great. I didn't think I'd be into something like this, and yet I've already found some items I might actually be interested in buying.

Is there a way you can tag the products with the characters that wore them? So if I click through to a pair of boots, I can see "As worn by: Grant Ward on Agents Of SHIELD". That isn't clear if I've clicked through via a "more items" recommendation.

I'm seeing quite a few bugs - the description on the "James Lug Lace Up" looks scraped/copied due to the bad formatting, and on the SHIELD characters page you've somehow missed including Daisy, even though she's already in your database. (How could you miss Daisy?! ;) )

Lastly, the design on the character pages made me think the site was broken at first. On my MacBook Pro, there are no products shown above the fold, there's just a couple of tag links & sharing buttons, and I thought the entire page was blank until I realized I had to scroll down to see the clothes:

[https://covet.tv/coulson/look?id=tyNWr8MMRWhahcC5R](https://covet.tv/coulson/look?id=tyNWr8MMRWhahcC5R)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice-- a beautiful, responsive website. What does the underlying stack look like?

Now all that remains is to fill it with content, which may be somewhat difficult since contributing users would presumably have to be fairly knowledgable about fashion[1]. Perhaps there's an opportunity to employ machine learning here, or maybe some sort of listing that's available online (or upon request from the showrunners).

\---

1\. Which leads me to think there might be a market for crowdsourcing tasks to particular demographics-- in this case, underemployed experts on haute couture. Maybe "Artisanal Turk"? Or maybe "hipster.io"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

Right now we're working directly with the Costume Designers for these shows, so it is in a way "Artisanal Turk" except that the people who add content to our site actually worked on these shows. At the moment we're partnered with costume designers for The Mindy Projects, Madmen, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and many others.

Stack is mostly Meteor + React + Semantic UI + TypeScript, with certain custom backend parts.

<comment><USER3> How do you motivate designers to "flesh out" the full wardrobe/back catalogue?

If the workflow for adding new clothing sets is as slick as the frontend, I can see how it'd be easy to keep things up to date, but it's something else entirely having to go back through multiple seasons trying to remember which items composed an ensemble.

And (not knowing much about the fashion/clothing business) is it reasonably easy to swap out some items for similar looking ones if the original is not available (or too expensive), or do you face a problem where sometimes they just stop manufacturing things and there's no good substitutes?

<comment><USER4> I work on something similar and from my perspective, the swapping for similar things is the fun part of the problem, and the figuring out what is available is the nasty part, given retailers' diverse and frequently bad ways of revealing that info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this, it's well done. Incidentally, it's very similar to how ASOS started (As Seen On Screen). I remember being able to pick outfits similar to those in films (Fight Club, for instance).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it! The thing that sets us apart is that we are working directly with costume designers for these shows, which allows us to both promote their craft and get the most relevant items possible.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py awesome -- assuming there's a commission model here, this is smart. Giving creatives (in this case wardrobe designers) ways to self-monetize is the opposite of ad-tech and really cool.

</comment><comment><USER6> looks cool. kinda like www.pradux.com

</comment><comment><USER7> No Walking Dead? WTH.</comment>


Which monospaced font do you use? - <AUTHOR>

Everybody here is a coder. So what monospaced font do you prefer and why ? At which point/size do you use it ? <comment><USER2> I had my phase of looking for _the_ coder's font. I spend some time spent looking at various monospaced fonts advertised as God's gift to coders. That time was, in retrospective, wasted. No font will provide anything more than maybe a few minutes of "yeah, this looks nice" feeling.

Nowadays I'm going with the defaults provided by IDEs, text editors, terminal emulators, etc. Choice of font is totally unimportant.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Consolas on Windows and Inconsolata on Linux, somewhere around the 9-10 pt size. Basically small enough so that I can get two 120-column+ editor windows side-by-side on a 1920px wide (24") display while big enough to not hurt the eyes over the course of a work day.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 10px on a 22" 1680x1050 - It's clean and crisp. Seems to be the only font I'm happy with on both Windows and Mac.

[http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream- vera/1....](http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/)

<comment><USER5> My eyes prefer it at a slightly larger point size, but this is my choice as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was using inconsolata at 12 but last week I moved to Menlo and I think I have a new favorite.

Menlo it's really similar to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

</comment><comment><USER7> Inconsolata, with varying sizes depending on my mental state. It's free, pretty and legible.

Get it here: <http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> I use Pragmata 11pt. Yes, it costs money, but given the years I've looked at this font, I think it works out to be pretty cheap :-)

<http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm>

</comment><comment><USER9> Ubuntu's "Monospace" at 12 on a Dell 27" 2560x1440 monitor. I love it. I've tried just about every free monospaced font but still prefer this one.

</comment><comment><USER10> NotCourierSans Bold 14pt. <http://kernest.com/fonts/notcouriersans-bold>

</comment><comment><USER11> Consolas / Lucida Console (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas>)

</comment><comment><USER12> 9x15.

I wish I could find this for OS X, but it's a bitmap font, and doesn't translate to a scalable font very easily.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm still pretty happy with Monaco, and on Windows I usually install Proggy when I install Vim.

</comment><comment><USER14> peep font: <http://zevv.nl/play/code/zevv-peep/>

If anybody has ported this to OSX, please share!

</comment><comment><USER15> If it's monospaced, it's fine. The emperor is naked.</comment>


Ask HN: How should I establish myself as a freelance developer? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a part-time, freelance programmer/web developer. For a few years, I've been doing mostly WordPress work. Obviously this is low on the programming totem pole, in terms of both sophistication and remuneration.
I want to move up that totem pole, on both fronts. I plan to spend the next few months improving my programming skills, learning a new technology, and attempting to become a full-time contract programmer or to land a programming job.
The two paths I can see most clearly are (a) Rails-based web development, and (b) iOS/OS X application development. At the moment my understanding of each of those fields is introductory-level: I've built trivial things but nothing substantial.
My plan is to choose one path, then build either a web app or a Mac/iPhone app -- both to learn the material and to have something to show potential clients/employers/collaborators. I have an idea for each one. Neither idea is likely to turn into a business, and neither would be especially technically groundbreaking, but I'd get a kick out of working on either one.
Some data points that you may or may not find relevant: -- I'm in my late 30s, which among other things means I can't put in college-type hours anymore.
-- I don't have any formal training in programming. -- I'm pretty smart and good at learning things, but I'm not a genius and I don't expect to get hired at Google. -- I can communicate clearly in both written and spoken English. -- My visual design chops are better than most programmers'. -- I live in Brooklyn. -- As a user, I love Mac and iPhone applications more than I love web applications.
Let me know how you think I should proceed. Take into account the amount of work available, differences in pay, the difficulty of becoming competent, the ease of getting hired without credentials, etc. etc. Any other thoughts or advice appreciated. <comment><USER2> The freelance market for iOS/OS X is still hot. I recommend subcontracting through established design firms, so you don't waste time dealing with client management issues.

You don't need education (most won't even ask), but you need examples of your experience and skills. Create a beautiful app that doesn't crash and you'll be ahead of the game. Use an API that people have heard of (Instagram, Flickr, etc.). Create a few apps and you'll be seen as an established developer.

Most importantly, deliver your first projects on schedule and they'll likely hire you for many projects down the road.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this helpful and encouraging answer. Forgive my ignorance, but what's the best way to find and connect with these 'estabilshed design firms'?

<comment><USER2> These are the main feeds that I keep in my RSS reader. I scan for iOS-related posts, even when I'm not actively seeking work. If the post looks decent, then I check out the posting company's website and it's usually obvious whether or not they're a good design firm. If I find a good one, I'll email just to connect for future potential work.

* Stack Overflow - <http://careers.stackoverflow.com/>

* GitHub - <http://jobs.github.com/>

* Get Apps Done - <http://www.getappsdone.com/>

* Authentic Jobs - <http://www.authenticjobs.com/>

* CrunchBoard - <http://www.crunchboard.com/jobs/>

* Mashable Jobs - <http://mashable.jobamatic.com/a/jbb/find-jobs>

It might take some time, but just a couple firms can keep you busy for years!

<comment><AUTHOR> Much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A lot depends on your goals and your location. For instance, here in N. Texas you could make 1/3 more money programming Java then a cool language like ruby or python.

Also to be a well paid Java developer here you don't need amazing skills or more than 2 years of experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is your understanding of PHP/Java? I live in Brooklyn and am looking for a a freelance programmer for a site I'm working on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's discuss. Do you mind putting an email address in your profile or here?

<comment><USER4> sure. send to firstname.lastname@example.com. look forward to hearing from you.</comment></comment></comment>


Challenge: Implement CLI interface like that? - <AUTHOR> http://challenge.docopt.org/

<comment><USER3> Imho this is a bad pitch. It took me a moment to realize that you have already _solved_ the problem that you're proposing (and the "challenge" is only meant to pitch the solution).

Given the elegance of that very solution I think this marketing stunt is entirely unneeded and actually harmful; it's confusing and you miss out on getting a descriptive headline such as "Generate OptParser from code comment!".

That said... Brilliant idea!

I'm definitely trying out docopt for my next project.

And I have a counter-challenge for you:

How about making docopt work with nested commands? I.e. multiple methods could have a docopt-style comment and they would smartly merge to enable usages such as "mygit remote show --help", where 'show' is a subcommand of 'remote', with its own set of parameters and a matching help-page.

If you can work that one out then docopt could become the defacto standard for generating even complex OptParsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW, about bad pitch: _maybe_ :-)

I wanted to improve on presentation, since my last post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=halst>

<comment><USER4> For me, your new presentation worked brilliantly. The short while it took me to get what was going on, was exactly what caused me to keep reading. Granted, it is a bit of a bait and switch, but a pleasant one.

Great idea, great presentation!

<comment><USER5> I too think the pitch is brilliant - specially when you think about the target audience - folks who get turned on by the word "Challenge", er developers, and most of them must have felt the need for something like this at some point of their life("Some day I'll have to write clean & DRY way ...").

Only thing different might be instead of giving the solution on that page itself - a hyperlink to the solution which takes you to docopt.org landing page

<comment><USER6> I agree. I thought, interesting challenge, although not interesting enough for me to actually try it. I wonder if he has any example solutions that I could look through. Huh? Ooooh.

If I had just seen it presented straight out as, "Parse arguments based on docstrings," I doubt it would have been nearly as memorable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The docopt documentation suggests that a lone "--", signifying the end of the command-line flags, is only supported if "[--]" is added explicitly to the syntax string. In my opinion this is a mistake, and may even break POSIX XBD §12 [1]. I would seriously recommend the authors support it by default.

[1]: [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009604499/basedefs/xbd_...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009604499/basedefs/xbd_chap12.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the link. Your suggestion will probably make into next version of docopt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _How many LOC_

Exactly one. Unless, of course, it's in some funny language that mixes syntax with presentation ;)

<comment><USER9> You don't need a funny language:

        import zlib;exec zlib.decompress("x\x9cmQ\xb1n\xc20\x10\xdd\xfd\x15\xd7t\x80HuB;\xa2\x90\xa9\xea\xd6v\xa8:!\x14\xb9\xe4\x82-\x92\xb3e\x9bP$>\xbe1&\xa5Ex\xf1\xbb{\xef\x9e\xee\xe9\xee\xef \xdf9\x9b\x7f)\xca\x91z0\x07/5\xb1$I\xdeD/Zx\x11\x1e3\xc6>\x9d\xd8\xe0\x9c\x01P\xe8V\xcd\xd0\x05'\x95\x01\xc2=\x14$:,\xb3,\xbb\xc1G\x0e:\xdd#\x14\xdf%\x14\x87\x12\x96\x9c;\x83X/\x8a-\x95\xab\x1bCNj\xedG\xf9\x7f\xbeS\x840u\xe8\x8f\x16\x83i\xfa\xd7\xb5\xd3\xdab}\xe4\xbc\xb6\xaa\xf1\x8a6W\xe6\\\xc2\x118\x97\xd8\x9a+\x82\xf7h\x9d\x1a\x82\xb3w\xe3\x87\xdf\x85\xac\x83<\x8a!\xbc\x0f\xa9\xf7\xe0\xa5r\xe0\xd6\x16\x91B\xda\xdf\xb9\x8b\xe2\xdc\x88\xec%\xe6\xc0\x06\x0c\x8a`K\xda;X\xd6\xd8\x88]\xeb\xe7\xf08[Eu\\\xffd\x05\xaf\x11O\x05\xade@\xe9)y\xd4\x8d\xe9\x82\xeey\xc4\x91\x0e\x87c\x8d\xd5\x1d\xd4z\xad\x8d\x07\xd5\x19m\xfd\xb9b\xccXEc5\xad\xaa\x01T\xd5\xc3\xb8\xf3br\xb99<e\xb3I\xfa\x03y\x8e\xad\x94")

All those numbers are the encoded Python solution... Do I win? :P

Never used much of the docopt module, maybe I should spend a couple hours with it. Last time I saw it, it didn't appealed to me for some reason...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ouch, and I implemented <https://github.com/andreyvit/dreamopt.js> only a few months ago. Similar idea, but yours is better. (Not sure how you deal with type coercion and the like, but I guess it's not too hard to figure out.)

<comment><AUTHOR> docopt will maybe borrow a few ideas from dreamopts.js :-) Would you like to join forces on [docopt.coffee](<https://github.com/docopt/docopt.coffee>)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> this seems analogous to the old Getopt::Declare in perl[0], maybe you can et some ideas from that

[http://search.cpan.org/~fangly/Getopt- Declare-1.14/lib/Getop...](http://search.cpan.org/~fangly/Getopt- Declare-1.14/lib/Getopt/Declare.pm)

<comment><AUTHOR> Getopt::Euclid from CPAN is also very similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of apenwarr's option parsing in _bup_.

<http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201111>

Had you seen that before?

Also, I love it; it's taking DRY to its necessary conclusion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Quite similar approach. But I think usage-pattern matching is where docopt shines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've found Plac[1] to be a suitably terse and DRY method of building command- line interfaces. Basically, you write a Python function where each argument to the function becomes either an option, flag, or positional argument on the command line. It's one "line" to define the function's arguments (which might be split on multiple lines due to length, but it's just the function's argument list), plus one "line" to annotate each argument with a type, single- letter abbreviation, docstring, etc. (which might be longer than one line if the docstring is extra long). The "type" of an argument is any function that takes a string and returns anything, so you can for example have a function that parses and returns a comma-separated list of numbers as a Python list of floats. I think Plac supports subcommands, but I haven't used it that way.

If you want to see some examples of real-world usage of Plac, here are some examples from my own projects:

[https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/intemp/blob/master/inte...](https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/intemp/blob/master/intemp.py#L90)

[https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/mergesam/blob/master/me...](https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/mergesam/blob/master/mergesam.py#L316)

[https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/splitloci/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/splitloci/blob/master/splitloci.py#L46)

[https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/fastqident/blob/master/...](https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/fastqident/blob/master/fastqident/main.py#L19)

[1] <http://plac.googlecode.com/hg/doc/plac.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> Docopt looks like a useful library, but I'd be interested to see how intelligent the "help" parsing is when faced with slight variations in the format.

Using Commons-CLI in Java actually goes the opposite direction and if can be reasonably terse (one line per parameter or option) but it's also got to be wrapped in a class and have the rest of the Java boilerplate (a main method to execute, etc).

Perhaps I'll try it on my next NodeJS project.

<comment><AUTHOR> When the DSL (<http://docopt.org/>) was designed, the main goal was just to formalise that pattern-language used for _decades_ in man pages and `--help` screens. So variations that are conventional (such as `UPPER-CASE` for arguments or `<angular-brackets>` for arguments) are supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The question, of course, is whether it will scale to more complex cases with more elaborate option documentation (i.e., multiple paragraphs, formatting, short version for usage, extended version for man/html, etc).

For C++ there is the CLI compiler that implements a similar idea (i.e., uses a DSL) but instead of using the usage itself as a specification, it is based on the class-with-members abstraction. While the result is not as terse, it is quite a bit more flexible. Plus it allows you to specify option type (i.e., int, double, string, etc).

From a single interface specification CLI will generate C++ parsers, usage printing code, man pages, and html pages. Here is an example of a real-world interface that is handled with CLI:

<http://codesynthesis.com/products/odb/doc/odb.xhtml>

The project page is here:

<http://codesynthesis.com/projects/cli/>

</comment><comment><USER16> One nitpick:

Note that there is a conflict between the subcommands in the example:

        naval_fate ship new <name>...
        naval_fate ship <name> move <x> <y> [--speed=<kn>]
        naval_fate ship shoot <x> <y>

Users can't name their ships 'new' or 'shoot' and you can't safely add more 'ship something' commands in new versions as you risk colliding with some user's ship name.

You could try to warn of such conflicts, but that sounds like a lot of work... :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can just change the second line to:

        naval_fate ship move <name> <x> <y> [--speed=<kn>]

to eliminate all the problems you named. Those problems are about specific interface, not docopt.

<comment><USER16> As I said I was nitpicking. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very nice! And especially clever that the DSL is the usage help we all know and love. I'm never happy about the amount of code normally required to write these.

One nitpick is that there is still some repetition: "naval_fate", and well as the long options are repeated. Granted, there might be ways around that which I haven't discovered yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> About long options repeated: you can either specify "[options]" shortcut in a pattern in order not to put all options in that pattern, or you can have all options listed in the pattern--then you can avoid having them in option description.

About repeating program's name (say "naval_fate"), you can do:

        """Usage: prog <bla> ...
                  prog <bla> --bla
        """
        args = docopt(__doc__.replace('prog', 'naval_fate'))

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you are looking for something like this for .NET, "synoptic" can generate cli-usage help in a similar format based on your methods/classes complete with defaults, examples etc: <https://github.com/bitdiff/synoptic> (disclaimer: it's my companies' project)

</comment><comment><USER19> For Ruby people wanting something similar, check out <https://github.com/delano/drydock>

I've been looking for an excuse to use it.

<comment><USER20> There is already a Ruby port at <https://github.com/docopt/docopt.rb>

<comment><AUTHOR> But I must warn you: Ruby port (as of now) implements only a small subset of docopt language, but we're working on it.

<comment><USER21> I'm back from holiday now and should have some time to work on this - <USER2>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> On Python I'm a fan of Opster: <https://github.com/piranha/opster>

</comment><comment><USER23> Could this technically be ported to bash ?

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the early versions of docopt (0.1) was ported to bash: <https://github.com/colinta/bocopsh>

It should be relatively easy to update it to work with 0.4; if you can make it work with 0.4 it would be great if you make a pull request to the project above.

<comment><USER23> I will try and we'll see if I have the skills then :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any plans to add Ruby and other programming languages?

<comment><USER25> See clap for an implementation, <https://github.com/soveran/clap>

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Clap is _good_. But you can't beat the readability and succinctness of a DSL (docopt).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> seems like per #1 & 2 you could either write a dsl or line-processing library and get it done in 1 line

<comment><AUTHOR> That exactly what [docopt](<http://docopt.org/>) is—DSL that allows implement almost any interface in one line (having formal interface description).

<comment><USER26> ahh, cool. suppose I should have read past the rules</comment></comment></comment>


Why Silicon Valley's Work Culture Is Killing Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.content-loop.com/why-silicon-valleys-work-culture-is-killing-us/#!

<comment><USER2> Working long hours as a matter of course is really bad for you, and your company.

There's of course the personal cost you carry, being stressed and overworked constantly affects your health and happyness adversely.

Productivity also suffers, intraday productivity drops off sharply after more than 4 hours, and you should really stop after more than 8, especially if you're a knowledge worker. Over long periods of working long hours, your productivity becomes permanently depressed, where you might start your day already with only 1/3rd of the productivity a non overworked, rested you would have, which is basically worse then what it would be if a rested and non overworked you would do after a single 12 hour day.

If you let your employees work long hours continously, you are basically accepting that for the price you hired them, you will only get about half to a quarter of an employee. That's heck of an expensive way to run a business.</comment>


Dropbox Will Only Support the Ext4 File System in Linux in November - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dropbox-will-only-support-the-ext4-file-system-in-linux-in-november/ <comment><USER2> If xattrs is the only reason, then they should support any FS that has xattrs.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's just standard Corporate/Capitalist economics.

Fewer filesystems supported -> lower support costs.

Lower support costs -> bigger profit.</comment>


Another free course: Model Thinking - <AUTHOR> http://www.modelthinker-class.org/

<comment><USER2> What are some more... unconventional classes HNers would be interested in taking?

Internet marketing?

Better thinking? Something like this: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3285535>

Optimizing communications with the opposite sex if male?

Language hacking? Aka learning languages faster/smarter.

Study hacking? Ie optimizing college, or autodidactic pursuits.

Give me some tips on stuff you would like to learn via an online class.

<comment><USER3> I'd like a class on how to pick which online classes I should take.

Actually, I'm only partially joking. I am guessing that there's just going to be an explosion of these opportunities in a couple of years. I believe in lifelong learning, but this is ridiculous, there's only so many hours in the day.

A class dedicated to teaching people how to plot their own course through all of the educational opportunities that are becoming available would actually be quite valuable.

For example, which courses you take and in which sequence is hard to figure out. Some inputs might be your learning style, your existing knowledge base, your IQ, your available time, whether you're a thinker or a doer, etc, etc.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like you need a course on goal-setting.

I'm all for making an informed decision, but sometimes you just have to go on a whim based on an "I always wanted to take a class like that."

Case in point: Years ago, I was a technical bureaucrat and it was the first job where I had a little extra money. I took a jazz-singing class, primarily because it was close to the office and I liked jazz but didn't know how to play an instrument. I learned how to perform comfortably in front of an audience (if you can scat, you can certainly do a 30-min work presentation.) Best of all, I met my wife in the class.

Two years later I was married and giving presentations/teaching for a living. Not much more money, but much happier.

<comment><USER2> Crazy idea: a course site that is also a dating site.

Oh, and earmuffs made out of hamburgers.

<comment><USER4> >a course site that is also a dating site.

It's called college.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clearly, this is a plot to prevent me from getting _anything_ done.

</comment><comment><USER6> For the future, it would be really cool if those courses would feature one preview lecture and a schedule to decide if one wants to get into it or not - now that it's getting so broad.

<comment><USER7> I just sign up for all of them and decide which ones I'll keep watching once they start.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The instructor is actually from University of Michigan, so it appears that this phenomenon is spreading.

<comment><USER8> Similarly, SAAS Class is taught by instructors from UC Berkeley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Time for a HN spreadsheet for all the classes?

<comment><USER10> I built this over the Thanksgiving weekend to keep a track of all the classes: <http://www.class-central.com/>

<comment><USER11> That's really nice, I think it deserves its own submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just spent several hours today digging through Poor Charlie's Almanack trying to build a more complete understanding of his mental models. You always hear references to them, but I have yet to find a list of them in one place. Not unlike the Colonel's eleven herbs and spices. What great timing.

<comment><USER12> Here you go... <http://thinkmentalmodels.com/page67/page67.html>

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that keeps popping up, but the summaries on the rest of the site seem to be of poor quality, and it felt a bit scammy. $3 isn't much, but I don't want to support these "scrape together a bunch of blog posts and sell it as an ebook" types. I'll just wait for the class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Scott Page who is the guy who is giving this class wrote an excellent book called "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies": <http://tinyurl.com/cbv2pm9>

Certain types of mental models are covered in the book, but not in a concentrated way. The book was also highly recommend in one of Nassim Taleb's books (I think it was "The Black Swan").</comment>


Where Do the Rich Get Their Money, Again? - <AUTHOR> http://slackwire.blogspot.com/2013/03/where-do-rich-get-their-money-again.html <comment><USER2> I think you're mixing two things up: the rich start out just like us... they went to college, got a job worked their way up and then instead of doing a lot private sector spending they went out and put that money in bonds and other securities, which over time matured and provided rich dividends and returns which were again used to buy more stock/bonds after a little more time if they played it right, most of their money is coming from "Capital Gains" and their income is secondary.

All it takes is a little restraint and elbow grease.

Edit: I'm not saying that this will work 100% of the time or even 95% so any anecdotes about how you saved and ended up poorer aren't interesting. they're just stories of your own personal failure that if examined properly would probably shine a light on some of your more profound errors.

<comment><USER3> > _I think you're mixing two things up: the rich start out just like us... > they went to college, got a job worked their way up_

No, they didn't. Some famous outliers did it, but the idea of the rich starting from the bottom like everybody else is more myth and "American dream" than reality.

Most of the super rich had money for several generations. You also don't much get to hear a lot about them, as they don't run companies personally.

<comment><USER4> And what is more difficult? Making 10 millions a month from 5 millions a month or making 10000 a.m. from 1000 a.m.? Considering the starting amount also contributes to the bread and butter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The rich get all their money from tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans, which they steal from important benefits paid to poor defenseless old ladies and lazy people.</comment>


Swift: Mint Founder's New Project - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/04/mint-founder-maglev-vehicles-swift/

<comment><USER2> For companies like Mint, it'd be helpful if the article would explain _which_ Mint they're talking about. There are multiple companies with the same name.

<comment><USER3> It is "mint" as in the personal finance tool mint.</comment></comment>


Show HN: GlobeDrop – Travel Meaningfully - <AUTHOR> https://www.globedrop.org/?hn

<comment><USER2> This looks pretty great. Will be in Myanmar in a week and would like to try it out.

I'm also the NA operations director for CDO Nepal and think there could be an opportunity to work together. We should connect. Shoot me an email when you get the chance.

Graham

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, thank you very much. Will definitely do.</comment></comment>


The Hacker News Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/06/hacker-news-experiment.html <comment><USER2> _What does it take to write the ultimate newsworthy article?_

Stick the words "Hacker News" in the post title and you're well on your way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point.

I didn't even think about that. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the moral here is pretty simple, if you want points here just write about current hot button topics.

If you could make a tutorial for programming an iPhone app that searches for Tweets about Michael Jackson you'd get 100 points easy.

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess you just found that the oddest of articles can prove popular. I submitted a couple of my own pieces that I found really interesting and they just, well, died instantly :) And a recent off-hand analysis of modern cyber security brought in 1500 views...

One thing I do think is obiovus: unlike reddit and slashdot et all HN doesnt care if it is a self-submission. I avoid self-submitting elsewhere but deliberately take time to do so here. If it's not a popular article it will die quietly but no one will bitch about the factyou submitted it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point.

On Hacker News you can submit your own articles simply because the community really does take the time to judge whether or not the article is any good.

I've received some really helpful feedback and suggestions from Hacker News members, and that is what I like most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this post was a experiment in recursion -

"will an article work, that talks about what makes a article work"? hmmmm - now how about 3x an article about this article that is of course about his 2 other articles. Fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point. You are the first one to figure it out. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This might be more aptly titled "The Hacker News Linkbait Experiment".

<comment><USER7> Why? What did he do that was so linkbait-y?

From what I can understand, his aim was to create an article interesting to read for the community around Hacker News. This article itself was an observation about what the community finds interesting, as well as a note about an anomaly he observed. Is there something wrong with that?

<comment><USER8> We don't even know who the authors of that site are. Just having an about me section on the site would make the site more credible.</comment></comment></comment>


More Evidence That Cars Will Never Be Sexy Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/learning-to-live-without-cars/502373/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> OP needs to get out of the echo chamber and do some research.

The two cities used as example--SF and NY--are the two of very few major cities in the world where owning a car is not considered that sexy.

In most cities (other than SF or NY) of the world, people think of owning an expensive car as a status symbol. Sure, self driving cars may introduce some changes, but that's never going to make owning an expensive car "unsexy". Instead, the car brands will evolve and adapt.

These idiots who talk about how self driving cars will make owning a car obsolete are only thinking of cars as something that gets them from A to B. The car companies who think of themselves that way will probably die off, and the ones who survive will be the ones who think of themselves as a "third space".</comment>