Boy or Girl paradox - <AUTHOR> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Boy_or_Girl

<comment><USER2> A similiar "paradox" is the infamous Monty Hall Problem:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_Problem>

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually had an argument with my statistics professor about this...

The question she gave was basically this: 'The king has one sibling, what is the probability that it is a boy?'

I actually took an opposing view to her initially and then came back the next day saying that it is ambiguous and depends on what we assume about the king, but she wouldn't even agree with me on that.

</comment><comment><USER4> The non-ssl version loads much faster: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl>

I'm curious as to why wikimedia is even offering all their content over ssl in the first place.

<comment><USER2> This might be useful in a country where the government censors certain topics.

<comment><USER5> The government would still know (if they were logging traffic) that you accessed the page. In this case, as it is publicly accessible, the encryption is fairly meaningless.

<comment><USER6> The HTTP request is also encrypted, so figuring out what page you accessed on a site with millions of pages isn't quite as easy as you make it sound...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Magic Leap Review Part 2 (Image Quality) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kguttag.com/2018/10/01/magic-leap-review-part-2-image-issues/ <comment><USER2> Discussion of part I: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109182)</comment>


Ask HN: Good online metronomes - <AUTHOR> Problem: I cannot find a website or app that allows me to play my music asynchronously w the metronome. I need the sound to come from one device because I want to listen while at the gym.<p>I have tried Mobile metronome and many others. And while mobile metronome does everything I want, the app constantly crashes. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Just to be clear, you are practicing a musical instrument while listening to unrelated music in a different tempo, all this while working out at the gym?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha no I'm not playing an instrument while at the gym.

Sorry for not being clear.

I am using the metronome as a way to get my repetitions consistently timed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup, Now Planner - <AUTHOR>

Video Link Here: http://www.thenowplanner.com
Often times the worst part of doing anything is getting started. And, it's made worse if you don't know where to begin. NOW is a planner that helps you get started on anything by having you share what you know and get advice on what you don't.
I think everyone is an expert at something. Maybe giving advice gives us a boost to move forward ourselves. I'd love to hear feedback. <comment><USER2> I am not sure you are solving a real problem. I don't 100% understand the point of interests in your app, but as far as tracking tasks and connecting with friends/family who want to accomplish goals I don't see why I wouldn't just use Google Calendar or notes on my iPhone along side with just texting or calling them. As for the video, it does showcase the product fairly well and the landing page seems great for trigger signups.

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably wasn't as clear as I thought. The problem I'm trying to solve is this: we often put of tasks because we don't know where to begin. But someone has likely figured it out already.

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER2> Absolutely, best of luck to you!</comment></comment></comment>


Zoe: A new CLI tool for Apache Kafka - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adevinta/zoe <comment><AUTHOR> Hi!

Within Adevinta, we are heavy users of Apache Kafka. We built our own tooling around it. Recently, we open sourced one of these tools called Zoe. It's a high level command line tool to easily interact with Kafka. We use it heavily and it significantly optimized our workflow.

* Checkout the repository at: [https://github.com/adevinta/zoe](https://github.com/adevinta/zoe) where you will find a screen cast that demo the tool. * And the documentation at:[https://adevinta.github.io/zoe/](https://adevinta.github.io/zoe/)

We will soon write an article about it.

Any feedback is welcome : )</comment>


Vega program - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program <comment><AUTHOR> Context: dropping this here because I've talked with an ESA guy yesterday who told me that the Russian mission that used balloons on Venus seems to not be widely known. This was brought up in context of NASA's proposed Venus airship idea.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, but there are many cool things not widely known from Soviet space program. Like first landing on Mars (Mars-3), Phobos program, Zond program, preparing a Mars launch during Cuban crisis, Buran program, BORs, hypersonic research in 1990-s...

<comment><AUTHOR> I know. Leaving that for others to post :).</comment></comment></comment>


Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2016/07/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto-day_31.html <comment><USER2> > If backspace is pressed on the keyboard, the Alto does a Ethernet boot

This sounds impressive. Was it common for machines of that era to be able to boot from the network?

Also, aren't those some awfully long wires to make high-frequency measurements with an oscilloscope? Some of that ringing and overshoot in the clock signals might not actually be in the circuit that is being probed, but caused by the long leads.

<comment><USER3> _" Was it common for machines of that era to be able to boot from the network?"_

What network? This was the first machine to _have_ a local area network.

A full Alto network included workstations, a file server, a laser printer, and a gateway to other Xerox networks using Parc Universal Protocol over 3Mb/s Ethernet. They had a complete all-Xerox vision.

<comment><USER4> _" This was the first machine to have a local area network."_

There were other networking implementations being developed around the same time as Ethernet (1973-74), for example:

\- DECnet (1974): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet)

\- Token Ring networks (1974): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_ring)

The earliest reference I could find to a LAN was the "Octopus" network from 1970, which predates Ethernet:

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

<comment><USER3> Octopus was what we would today call a "Storage Area Network". Around 1968, IBM built the IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System [1][2] for several of the big atomic energy labs. This was 1.2GB of storage. On microfilm. The whole thing was automatic, with hardware to write digital data on microfilm, develop the film, store and retrieve individual filmstrips, and read them. The film was directly written with an electron beam in vacuum. IBM electromechanical technology at its height. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has one of the seven units built.

Since this was a big, but slow, storage device, it had to be front-ended by a computer with disks, and made accessible to other computers. That's most of what Octopus did. It wasn't peer to peer, like Ethernet.

[1] [http://computer- history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.dir/...](http://computer- history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.dir/PhotostoreManual.pdf) [2] [http://computer- history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.dir/...](http://computer- history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.dir/index.html)

<comment><USER5> Surprising to see how sophisticated IBM hardware division was at the time compared to what it is to them now.

A PhotoStore "chip" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Jvd7lOjWA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Jvd7lOjWA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, that is a remarkable amount of stuff that is working. My experience with wirewrapped boards is pretty mixed, some are solid and some are just flaky as heck.

Really curious what they find out about the disk, nothing at all coming over the interface sounds like a big (and usually simple) issue, like card in the wrong slot or cable plugged in backwards or to the wrong connector.

<comment><USER7> I'm hoping for a problem that's easy to fix, but not something stupid :-)

To clarify the disk issue, we're seeing sector pulses coming from the disk drive, so the drive and cabling is working. The Alto isn't sending any read requests to the drive, so it seems most likely that the microcode isn't seeing any disk request block in memory.

A lot of things need to work correctly to get the request block into RAM. So it could be a problem with a chip on the ALU board, a bad memory chip, something wrong on the disk interface card, a corrupted bit somewhere, or anything. With the logic analyzer, we should be able to see at what point in the microcode things go wrong. The nice thing about the Alto is because it's all TTL chips, it's straightforward to see what's happening.

<comment><USER8> I noticed that 3101 SRAMs have the same pinout as the later 7400-series 7489 16x4 SRAMs; I'm not 100% sure that they are fully electrically/timing compatible, but this could end up being a way of testing using known good parts...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those interested in this computer, there is a working Alto at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle that attendees are free to use.

<comment><USER10> I got to play with this a few weeks ago and it was really cool. Some friends and I created and formatted a document.

The whole museum is great and I highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in Seattle. There's something intensely satisfying about writing, compiling, and running Hello World on a teletype (paper roll!) hooked up to a PDP-7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> this is an excellent project that's great fun to watch the progress of. keep up the great work.

i have no experience with altos but i have been wondering -- on day one of the restore, it was noted the alto in question had some modifications from stock issue[1], could the booting issues be related to the microcode or wiring changes necessary to support those modifications? is it trying to boot off of the now missing trident drive?

[1] from [http://www.righto.com/2016/06/restoring-y-combinators- xerox-...](http://www.righto.com/2016/06/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto- day.html) "I suspect that the Y Combinator Alto originally had both a Trident drive and a Diablo drive (as well as four Orbit boards to drive a laser printer)"

<comment><USER7> That's an interesting question. From reading the documentation [1], the Trident disk should co-exist with the standard disk. It uses different microcode tasks (3 and 15), requiring additional microcode. No wiring change is mentioned (or discussion of booting off the Trident disk).

It seems like the Trident drive shouldn't be causing us any problems, but it's possible there's a wiring change or different PROMs. I guess we'll find out...

[1] [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/ifs_trident/TriconDoc.pd...](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/ifs_trident/TriconDoc.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is one of my favorite ongoing stories in HN. It's like a peek into a team building a time machine, and for all intents and purposes, this IS a time machine -- one that opens a window to the past.</comment>


World's Worst Tablet Computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o8MDCIlOEk <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be about the Acer A200s that 1saleaday sold, which Acer disabled from OTA updates. It can't even run Play store, so you can't update any curated apps either.

I spent a good 10+ hours trying to root and flash mine, and it's the only thing I've ever bricked.

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy's enthusiasm is contagious. I laughed throughout. Thank you for sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what would happen if somebody does something similar with a piece of software (open or closed source).

I mean, I wonder what the legal consequences would be.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love this guys videos, he is always finding new funny things, that he tears down :)</comment>


Ask HN: Review my webapp - <AUTHOR> http://sanbit.com

<comment><USER2> "But I will, and I found that is very excited to eat icecream in winter."

There needs to be some kind of quality control. I don't want to be the Hungarian in Monty Python's dirty phrasebook sketch.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no idea what this means, what is wrong?

<comment><USER2> This is the beginning of one of the essays:

"I love icecream very much. Normally people wuld like to eat icecream in summer, few people were seen eating icecream in winter. But I will, and I found that is very excited to eat icecream in winter."

There are grammatical errors and misspellings all over this.

Here's the Monty Python sketch I'm referring to: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao>

Maybe the problem is that people are writing essays in the language they are learning instead of in their native language like it suggests on the home page. If that's that case, then this could be a good tool for essay writers to get feedback on their work. It needs to be clear, though, whether people should write essays in their native language or in the language they're learning. Maybe there could be different sections for each type of essay? Then you could also read essays in your native language written by students of the language and give them feedback, or you could read essays written by native speakers of the language you're learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> ObieJazz, the way I planned to combat that was to display next to the essay, the level of the person learning that language, so you could distinguish from practicing a language and contributing by writing in your native language.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a good plan. Are people going to set their own level? And/or people could rate (or vote up) the essays and then a person would build karma in a particular language? Or maybe I'm just imagining that anything could benefit from being more like HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> ui is a bit messy and hard to navigate, but overall awesome. I could see this useful for foreign language classes.</comment>


MIT Wristband Could Make Air Conditioning Obsolete - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/design/2013/10/an-ingenious-wristband-that-keeps-your-body-at-the-perfect-temperature-no-ac-required/ <comment><USER3> I live in a small "flat" in India. Without A/C in the summer (only at night), our consumption is ~200 KWhr per month. With A/C only in one room for something like 4-5 hours per day, it shoots up to ~500 KWhr per month. Indians switching to A/C on a big scale will be a disaster for the world.

I believe that the answer lies in architecture, not in more energy-intensive devices which may or may not actually work (this one fools the body - <USER2> could be catastrophic, increasing chances for a heat stroke). India was always hot - but older buildings used to be built (1) with high ceilings (2) with cross-ventilation.

[http://www.architecture.com/SustainabilityHub/Designstrategi...](http://www.architecture.com/SustainabilityHub/Designstrategies/Air/1-2-1-3-naturalventilation- crossventilation.aspx)

This contrasts with buildings in cold countries, where buildings are insulated against winter. In the name of "better" buildings, Indians are switching to sealed buildings working with Central A/C. Blind imitation.

On the other hand, there were builders committed to "environment-friendly", low cost buildings (not the modern scam of "green buildings", which are actually _more_ expensive.) Laurie Baker in South India was one - a real unsung, and now forgotten hero:

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

[http://www.hindu.com/folio/fo9908/99080300.htm](http://www.hindu.com/folio/fo9908/99080300.htm)

<comment><USER4> What's particularly sad is how the vernacular architectural features, which have evolved over thousands of years to deal with these issues, have been largely abandoned over the 20th century. Only to be replaced by ugly concrete buildings and AC units. These include the Malqafs[1] (windcatchers) once found all over Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia. Also the use of underground streams[2] to cool buildings. And generally not building huge south-facing glass windows when you live in a place that reaches 45°C in the summer...

Also, a personal architect-hero of mine is Hassan Fathy[3]. This man inspired generations of environment-friendly architects.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_tower](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_tower) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling) [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Fathy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Fathy)

<comment><USER5> It's sadly part of a growing faddishness with "Western" technology and developments. I find it quite sad because the local solutions are often quite elegant.

In Korea for example, they have clever traditional windows that open like normal windows, but also draw up completely and hang from the ceiling, turning your house or other structure into a pavilion. Large roofs provide lots of shade.

In the winter, you literally light a fire under the floor of the building and radiant heat warms the entire structure.

Some of these things carried over into the modern age, but many sadly did not. They're remarkably comfortable and energy efficient dwellings.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ21SchGpsQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ21SchGpsQ)

<comment><USER6> > In the winter, you literally light a fire under the floor of the building > and radiant heat warms the entire structure.

Yeah, and occasionally die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22948168](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22948168)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I live in Las Vegas. Deaths occur in homes here every summer due to AC system failures (usually among the elderly and children that cannot easily leave and go to a cooler place). Many more do not die because they realize it is getting too hot and do whatever they have to do to get to a cooler place. A device like this that changes your perception of whether it is hot or cold would likely do more harm than good here and in other extreme climates. I can see huge product liability lawsuits in their future.

<comment><USER8> I don't mean any disrepect, but this comments seems a lot like the comments on the recent "Show HN: Dropbox" page from 2007, you are trying to think of a way this would fail, rather than potential uses.

Solving the issue of access to air conditioning or heating for the poor is a completely seperate issue than providing a solution to help lower our use of A/C or heating.

<comment><USER9> So tempted to go meta on how your comment seems like a lot of comments ever since the recent re-discussion of the "Show HN: Dropbox"... where were the nay-nay-sayers before 2 weeks ago?

Feedback such as the OP is beneficial to product development as a reminder to cover every aspect of potential improvement and protection from liability.

<comment><USER8> Feel free to go meta, don't hold back. Real feedback related to improvement and liability protection would stem from improving on the leads into the device to prevent electrocution or something similar.

OP's comment could be said of fans not doing enough to prevent deaths during extreme heat waves as well since the fan helps you feel cooler, but it may not be enough to overcome ambient temperature.

<comment><USER10> A fan doesn't help you _feel_ cooler, it actually helps cool your body by increasing air circulation and thus improving the rate of heat exchange. This device, OTOH, is explicitly intended to trick your body, potentially compromising its internal defenses against overheating.

OP's comment wasn't about being negative or knocking someone else's hard work; [s]he's simply pointing out what appears to be a very real safety concern in the system that needs to be addressed. Your suggestion that preventing electrocution on a device presumably powered by batteries is more safety- critical than this seemingly very real health risk that affects large parts of the world is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how changing the perception actually impacts the body's thermostat. I would gladly sweat and let my body do its thing than have a heatstroke while being tricked into thinking that it is relatively cool outside.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. I'm very wary about the affects of "tricking" a vital system of my body for long periods of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like drinking a coffee every day.

<comment><USER13> There's been a bit of a precedent for that though, so we know how it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I originally read this as "Alternating Current" and I thought "Oh Gee, not this shit again."

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

<comment><USER15> I read the headline as "alternating current" also. Usually, engineers in the United States abbreviate "air conditioning" as "A/C," where the slash, used contrary to the usual usage of slashes, distinguishes one familiar abbreviation from another. I'm surprised the Wired editor didn't catch the ambiguity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> At first I thought MIT had made AC Power Currents obsolete. An audible "no way!" followed shortly after.

<comment><USER17> I had the same thought, then wondered, upon seeing the title image, why anyone would want to pass AC current through their wrist in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like the idea of cooling people as opposed to whole buildings, but I don't like that this isn't actually decreasing your body's temperature, it just 'tricks' you into thinking it's colder/hotter outside. Perhaps it'll pave the way for clothes that can become cool or hot, depending on the temperature outside. I'd be very interested in those.

<comment><USER19> We're warm blooded. If you want to decrease your body's temperature, death is probably the way to go.

We don't feel warm because our core temperature is above 98.6, we feel warm SL that we are aware that we're having to work harder (typically through sweat) to stay at 98.6.

Likewise, it seems like you could make this safe if you could measure or estimate the user's core temperature. Should it deviate significantly from normal, shut the device off.

<comment><USER20> It's considerably more complicated than body temperature and sweating.

The body has ways of generating heat. If they do not turn off fast enough when the A/C fails, you get hot. It is entirely possible that this device could help elderly people in A/C failure, by forcing their bodies to adapt to variability instead of constant cool air.

Likewise, sudden heat will cause the skin to flush and draw a great deal of blood[1]. This imposes a greater workload on the heart and results in shock if the heart cannot keep up. Constant exposure to heat, as with this device, should force the heart to gradually strengthen as the hot season builds, increasing heat tolerance. Likewise, variability should strengthen the heart.

[1]If you ever have to enter a machine room with failed A/C, where the heat index is above body temperature, bundle up in heavy winter clothes over your whole body. Otherwise a runaway flushing response will draw heat into your body and kill you.

<comment><USER21> As someone who doesn't want to die, could you elaborate? What temperatures are you talking about that would cause that?

<comment><USER20> I am not an expert.

This page[1] says " If the dry bulb temperature is higher than 35°C (95°F), the hot air passing over the skin can actually make the worker hotter. When the temperature is more than 35°C and the air is dry, evaporative cooling may be improved by air movement, although this improvement will be offset by the convective heat. When the temperature exceeds 35°C and the relative humidity is 100%, air movement will make the worker hotter. Increases in air speed have no effect on the body temperature of workers wearing vapor-barrier clothing. ".

[1] [https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/otm_iii/otm_iii_4.html](https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/otm_iii/otm_iii_4.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> No it couldnt. Air Conditioning is not just about temperature but also humidity, which this doesn't address. I think room fans would still be necessary to keep the air moving as well. Plus, could tricking your body into thinking its cooler than it actually is be dangerous? Make sure people don't wear it while doing vigorous physical activity in the summer heat.

<comment><USER23> I believe the idea is not that it's a nervous system trick, but by heating or cooling a part of the body with high blood flow which occurs near the surface of the skin, you're actually going to impart a meaningful change on overall body temperature. Hospitals already do this for patients with hypo/hyperthermia. This could be monitored/regulated with a second band worn on the upper arm near the armpit which measures body temperature directly.

The question is more one of how much of an actual change can they impart (and under what circumstances?) given the size limitations of something like a wrist strap. My hunch is that this would need to be a fairly large system (including its power source) to have a meaningful impact outside of sedentary activity in an environment which is mildly under/over temperature. So good news for people who get chilly working long hours in their cold offices (which is a completely viable market), but not for runners looking to shed gear. Maybe there's something there for cyclists though, but only if they're willing to put up with a wheel generator.

Also, humidity impacts comfort largely because of its impact evaporation rates. Reducing body temperature reduces the rate of perspiration, in turn reducing the impact of humidity. You're right that it won't eliminate the effects of very high humidity, but it would reduce them.

<comment><USER24> >I believe the idea is not that it's a nervous system trick, but by heating or cooling a part of the body with high blood flow which occurs near the surface of the skin, you're actually going to impart a meaningful change on overall body temperature.

From the article i understand that it is a nervous system trick: "The research suggested that anything with a temperature change greater than 0.1 degree Celsius per second would produce the effect".

<comment><USER23> Ah... I just reread, and you're correct. Apparently I shouldn't post to HN while groggy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My body naturally gets very warm, very quickly, with very little exercise. If they can make this work, I might actually be able to wear a suit all day! Luckily I don't need to but that's beside the point.

Assuming they can get the size and look sorted so the average consumer doesn't become a social pariah by wearing one (calculator watches come to mind), I wonder how this is powered? And more importantly, would it last for 8-12 hours on a charge?

<comment><USER26> Isn't this related to fitness? If you're physically fit you don't get hot so quickly.

<comment><USER27> I haven't looked into any research about this, but anecdotally I find this to not be true. Having peaked at 215 lbs. and ~12% body fat at 5' 11", (I'm now closer to 195 lbs. and ~10% body fat) I'd say that I'm in the top 1% in terms of muscle mass. I am often very hot. My theory is that because of the added muscle mass (which requires much higher food intake), I'm metabolizing food at a higher rate and thus generating more heat. I don't know if this is actually the case, but it's my theory.

This may not be the case for people who are fit in a more cardiovascular sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting article - awfull title

The device can make you feel a bit better but it can NOT replace an AC.

It was never designed to replace an AC.

If this was up for purchase i would get one especialy because it is portable and maybe it can be coupled with additional technology (measure blood preasure , acceleration, rfid access tags,...). People have been wearing wrist bands for ages (and even used them as currency) so it seems a good position for a gadget.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Interesting article - awfull title_

Unfortunately it's the modern media's job to give things catchy titles so they do well on the social media rounds. A lot of excellent stuff fails to do well on HN because it hasn't got the right title (I'm an HN firehose dweller so I get to enjoy a lot of the hidden gems :-)).

Indeed, I'm pretty sure there's room for an "off HN" type site that solely focuses on the best HN submissions that didn't make it for whatever reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thank you MIT for this opportunity to be found frozen to death and smiling happily

</comment><comment><USER30> Heh, I tackled the same problem a few years back in college, but with robotics and computer vision. I prefer this approach.

<comment><USER31> You made a robot that followed you around and fanned you?! Very impressive, is the source on GitHub? ;-)

<comment><USER30> It actually detected any life forms in a room with medical grade temp sensors coupled with a kinect and then found 'hot spots'.

It wouldn't follow you (although that could be done); it was stationary and one of the big requirements was safety (don't want a robot arm slapping you in the face while coding).

Unfortunately no, the source isn't on github, although I should put it up there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Peltier heat pumps are inefficient; typically wanting a whole bunch of watts for achieving a small temperature gradient. So I'm wondering about the practicalities of powering this thing such that it could be worn as a personal item.

<comment><USER33> That doesn't seem to be much of a problem as the point is not to _actually_ cool you, but to apply a temperature change of a fraction of a degree to a tiny part of skin to trick you into _feeling_ colder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is interesting, and in my opinion definitely deserving of the prize they got for it.

But I think it's real value (in contrast to "replacing A/C") is in developing markets, where a little wristband could really improve quality of life (in the sense that one isn't sweating to death in their shanty-town hut). Not only could it improve QoL, but it would also be much cheaper to install than a central air unit, and also much more feasible: everyone has a wrist, not everyone has an insulated home with consistent electrical service that could provide the power for a central air unit. Cool stuff!

<comment><USER35> But that wristband doesn't actually reduce your body temperature, sweating does. Unless I'm missing something obvious here??

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think the article gets it wrong. Sorry.

Having your body think that it is comfortable, especially when the environment is hazardous, would be a lose. Like filtering out the sound of smoke detectors so you can sleep easier.

That said, this would be quite useful in office situations like ours where some people whine that 75 is too hot and other complain that at 70 they need mukluks. In that situation where the office is actually at a livable temperature, if we could adjust individual perceptions to be comfortable then it would be quite useful.

</comment><comment><USER37> On a tech front, it's an interesting use of a peltier junction device. They are horribly inefficient yet really interesting. It is, effectively, a heat pump. It will make one side colder than the other. And that part is key. You must take away energy on the hot side or the entire thing will get hotter and hotter. Without heat removal on the hot side it would get hot enough to burn you very quickly. The article says they are using pulsed heat which might presumably deal with this issue.

As others mentioned already, tricking the body like this could have negative consequences. I wonder if any studies exist on this (ice bags on the wrists or some such thing).

It brought back memories of going sculling at the peak of winter. Due to the danger of falling into extremely cold water [0] I experimented with wearing a kayaker's dry suit. It worked reasonably well. A surprising find was that wearing a wool head-cap made me overheat. It was really amazing how quickly this would happen too.

I can see this MIT gizmo having some effect because our skin is sensitive to heat flow, not absolute temperature. Not sure I'd like to trick my body that way though. What are the consequences of messing with the mechanism that maintains proper thermal balance?

[0] There have been many incidents of rowers drowning in cold water within swimming distance of the shore. Swimming in cold water while wearing thin clothes and your heart pumping hard due to the physical exertion of rowing is extremely dangerous because hypothermic effects can be greatly accelerated. Even accomplished swimmers can drown fifty feet from shore.

</comment><comment><USER38> Hopelessly naive. An air conditioning system is used to cool spaces yes. But where I live, it is just as important to lower the humidity. This device will not help with that.

<comment><USER39> Naive? This is a proof of concept, and it makes people feel cooler. Dehumidifiers use _significantly_ less power than cooling. The peltier they're using with a 30% duty cycle would require about 30W per person.

Dehumidify a typical room: 500W Cooling a typical room: 2000W

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is like a placebo, intended to trick you into perceiving cold or less- cold when it isn't there. But when there's a real matter at hand placebos only work very temporarily – then eventually reality catches up to you. So if it's actually hot, and my body needs to react to that to regulate my temperature, this doesn't change that. But I suppose it would let you turn the temperature up a couple degrees.

<comment><USER41> I don't think it's that much like a placebo. A placebo literally has no effect. This device actually has a cooling/heating effect that your body just perceives as being greater than it actually is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Am I the only person who is skeptical about this? I don't see any published research. It sounds like their device just temporarily distracts you from noticing the heat or cold, in the same way that poking needles into random parts of your body distracts you from pain (aka acupuncture). I would like to see a placebo-controlled study where they having people sitting in a 35C room all day.

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting idea. I though it was going to be more like the 'cooling glove' [1] which actually cools you down, rather than just making you think you're cooler. Hairless skin on the hands and face has blood vessels close to the surface, and cooling those parts is proposed to quickly cool your blood and core temperature.

It looks like the energy and space requirements for such cooling glove are too large to make it portable, however, and it also doesn't work much better than simply holding an ice pack! So, for portable devices, it seems like at most we can only trick ourselves into thinking we're cool.

[1][http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/09/avacore_technologies_magic_cooling_glove_from_stanford_won_t_transform_your_workout_.2.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> At first I thought this thing hooked into your blood flow to actively cool down your blood, like watercooling does for computers, it would've been a much cooler idea (no pun intended)

EDIT: fixed autocomplete phone typo

</comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me a little of this, though this uses a constant fan rather than a pulsing schedule of cooling jolts. I've used one before, and it works surprisingly well for such a low-tech contraption.

[http://www.sharperimage.com/si/view/product/CoolWare- Persona...](http://www.sharperimage.com/si/view/product/CoolWare-Personal- Cooling-System/100849)

</comment><comment><USER46> Unless my high school biology teachers lied to me, feeling hot or cold is not a mere perception; it's homeostasis, a complex mix of body temperature control, early warning system and pre-emptive shutdown all rolled into one. I don't see how useful tricking this system is, and I also fear it is dangerous to do it, if at all it's possible to successfully do it.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'd say the biggest market now or at least 10 years later will be China. They don't use them just for cooling but also for heating because the southern half of China has no public heating system. But that's just my instinct. Might be completely off and people in Brazil might actually use them much more.

</comment><comment><USER24> Body temperature comfort is subtle. Is not the same 24ºC with an AC than by the sea shore, under a tree shadow with warm, slow wind.

For some reason i don't think a heat sink tricking my physical feelings will do for my quality standards regarding temperature control. I already detest AC, as in, I can't stand in ACed places.

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't imagine this making AC obsolete. It might marginally reduce demand for AC, especially in cooler climates where AC might only be used occasionally if installed.

If made in to a product, I expect it to be popular for outdoor use. I find it appealing enough for that use case that I'm contemplating building one.

</comment><comment><USER49> How does fooling the body into thinking the temperature is higher / lower affect the real temperature of the body? The article fails to explain that.

This is like putting a frog in gradually boiling water. The frog cannot sense the increasing temperature, so it stays in the water until its dead.

<comment><USER50> Snopes says the frog jumps out:

[http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp](http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Yeah, I definitely don't see this as making AC "obsolete" so much as perhaps raising the threshold of when you turn on the AC. As a resident of the Deep South, this could potentially make sitting outside during the height of the summer a more pleasant experience.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is not news. Sharper ımage already has a product like that in the market for years.

[http://www.sharperimage.com/si/view/product/CoolWare- Persona...](http://www.sharperimage.com/si/view/product/CoolWare-Personal- Cooling-System/100849)

</comment><comment><USER53> So it's a trick? I'd rather see a thermal device that makes contact with a larger surface of one or more of my body's high-blood-flow areas and actually cool or heat it.

I've found it efficient to cool or heat myself by letting cold or warm water run over my hands.

<comment><USER54> There's a similar technology already being tested on athletes:

[http://corecontrolcooling.com/](http://corecontrolcooling.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Cool idea. If you attached a wristwatch to the outside face, I think that'd help it take off.

</comment><comment><USER56> Don't make AC obsolete, make it as efficient as you can and then power it from solar. The kind of people who will wear a heat pump on their wrist to try and save electricity, are not the people who run the most AC units.

</comment><comment><USER57> Anyone had experience with Phase Change Material (PCM) clothing? Here is one supplier: [http://www.outlast.com/en/technology/](http://www.outlast.com/en/technology/)

</comment><comment><USER58> I think it is the concept "anything with a temperature change greater than 0.1 degree Celsius per second would produce the effect" is very interesting. Building a device to do that is not a big deal..

</comment><comment><USER59> I have nothing against all the energy efficiency development however many articles display a tone that everything was going well before but now due to emerging countries we are facing this havoc. Pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER60> Hasn't there been one of these in SharperImage and Skymall for years?

</comment><comment><USER61> This may not replace AC, but I wonder if (in colder countries) it would help with dieting. Want to lose weight, just turn your thermostat down by a degree and use this device to help you adapt to it.

<comment><USER62> Are there any indications that turning thermostats down (or up) impacts weight?

<comment><USER63> Maintaining body temperature takes energy, so being in a cooler environment would help, but it would be minimal, I'm fairly sure. Air has a much lower specific heat than water, and I remember reading a reddit discussion about drinking ice water all day to lose weight versus room temperature water. I don't remember what the result was, but it didn't take as many calories to heat the water as you'd think.

<comment><USER64> Well a calorie is the amount of energy to raise a gram of water by one degree Celsius, so if you're drinking 2 litres of water a day and it's 0 degrees vs 20 degrees, you'll burn around 20,000 calories a day from the difference.

Note though that that's calories, and not kilocalories, which is what we generally talk about for dietary purposes. So ~20kcal a day, which would represent about a 1% change for the average person. Not a huge gain.

<comment><USER62> Also, people might just eat a spoonful of more food, if they need 20kcal more per day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> How about a solar powered thermoelectric mesh woven into a short that cools my body off? Can I have a wired article if I build one, even when it doesn't work?

</comment><comment><USER66> If the MIT team had just printed their device on a 3D printer, their article would have knocked the Nexus 5 release off the front page.

</comment><comment><USER67> I read this as MIT wristband would make 'Atlantic City' obsolete. Perhaps some kind of card counting helper. ;)

<comment><USER68> MIT has worked on that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> If your body continually feels like you are jumping into cold or hot water, wouldn't that induce stress?

<comment><USER70> I think that was a layman way of explaining the technology rather then how you actually feel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> It could kill people. If you dont thermoregulate properly then you will die of hyperthermia.

</comment><comment><USER72> Those wires are going to cramp some people's style, though.

</comment><comment><USER73> Can't wait for the FDA trials.

<comment><USER74> Why would their be FDA trials for this?

<comment><USER73> It could be classified as a medical device under FDA regulations:[http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...](http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/Overview/ClassifyYourDevice/ucm051512.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> so if I have such a copper heat dispenser I got from taking a laptop apart, I can feel cool ?

<comment><USER76> It's not just a heat dispenser, it's a peltier [1] a device that can produce cold from electricity.

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

<comment><USER77> Well, it can transfer heat when electric current is applied. They used these for processor coolers in the 90s, I remember my father had one and it broke one day and so his processor let out the blue smoke.

<comment><USER76> I had one as well. Same experience with a brand new AMD Athlon XP 1800+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I invented this exact concept 2 months ago. Heat sink on a wrist band. I did nothing with it, good luck to these guys.</comment>


Failure to communicate in the brain may be behind indifference to music - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/reward-centers-dont-hear-the-auditory-system-in-people-who-dont-like-music/ <comment><USER2> fascinating how music enjoyment could be nothing more than a reward system.</comment>


Startups: Do It Yourself PR : East Coast Blogging - <AUTHOR> http://eastcoastblogging.com/2008/09/05/startups-do-it-yourself-pr/ <comment><USER2> This post from eastcoastblogging looks like a summary of this great article from jason calacanis on pr: [http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/8/jason- calacanis-on-how-to...](http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/8/jason-calacanis-on- how-to-get-pr-for-your-startup-fire-your-pr-company)</comment>


I just built this website auditing tool - <AUTHOR> I'm a web developer and just built a website auditing tool to help with building a better website.  It runs Google Lighthouse behind the scene but I added some features to make it easy to audit and track progress over period of time.  You can create teams and audit/track multiple websites from a single dashboard.  I plan to add more audit categories in future including security and advanced SEO.  Just wanted to share with the tech community.  Please feel free to check it out and let me know if you have any feedback or questions -  my email is firstname.lastname@example.com.  You can use BETA15OFF to upgrade your plan to manage up to 5 websites. <comment><USER2> i can test your tool just write me in telegram @muhamed_kanapiya</comment>


Google Web/Search History Disable Does Nothing (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/google-search-history-disable-does-nothing <comment><USER2> Not that I'm a fan of big brother, but I think there's a genuine difference between logging all requests and logging _and attaching to your user profile_ all requests? I know that they could infer pretty reliably back to you with just the request information, but I'm not sure that "does nothing" is strictly true here.

<comment><USER3> Anecdotally, I've gotten curious and messed with this setting. I'm pretty confident (>80%) that I could see a difference in what ads I was served, with logging-disabled searches not influencing my Google ads they way logged searches did.

Honestly, this article felt a bit FUD to me. Google's privacy text never led me to believe they would purge all record of no-log searches, just that they wouldn't attach them to my primary profile. As far as I can tell that's still what they're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I periodically delete my history ([https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/465?co=GENIE.Pla...](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/465?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en)) but wonder how true of a delete that is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Previously discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7809055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7809055).

</comment><comment><USER6> So let's say you're logged into google's services using Firefox. You visit a page and it downloads a bunch of google owned JavaScript and a few fonts and image assets. How do they connect it back to your account? Does that JavaScript have access to the google cookie, or does that get blocked by cross-origin restrictions? If it's blocked, then what are some other mechanisms to connect you back to your google account?

</comment><comment><USER7> One question? What's the painless alternative? I'm as much paranoid as anyone who is greatly concerned of privacy and specially all information going to one big brother. Seriously, what's an alternative majority of population can follow?

</comment><comment><USER8> > As an aside, if I were in law enforcement I would be paying special > attention to those searches done by people who have the 'history' feature > disabled.

spreading fear to use something that possibly ads at least some additional privacy. Great

<comment><USER2> Nevertheless quite possibly true. You hear people discuss VPN users in the same way

<comment><USER8> And Tor users, and people who Google proxy. Sure, as soon as we managed to spread enough fear that only criminals would ever do that "they" reached what they wanted.

This whole shit is based on the mysterious "lists", which as far as we know are just filters which are used with other filters to identify possible criminals. Even if there are lists its not relevant as long as there are enough people on it.

I see your point, but i think saying things like this is dangerious.

<comment><USER3> I do wonder about the effects of privacy-paranoia, but at a certain point it feels dishonest _not_ to say this. We already know that people searching for Tails are fingerprinted on that basis. (And, confusingly, that Tor searches outside Five Eyes territory are fingerprinted, but Tails searches anywhere count.)

Of course, it's also worth pointing out that the cure for this _isn 't_ avoiding security and privacy tools. First because that doesn't help (someone knowing you use encryption still beats someone seeing what you didn't encrypt). And second, because normalizing these tools is a _really good thing_. Using browser privacy tools, and Signal, and whatever else you see fit isn't going to get an upstanding American in trouble, and it does help protect journalists and Turkish dissidents and all kinds of other people who benefit from these tools.

So yeah, it's a tricky question, partly because you need something quick-and- readable to say. I agree with you that statements about tracking privacy seekers should generally come with an addendum of "but it's still good and won't get you in trouble on its own".

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/nsa_targets_p...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/nsa_targets_pri.html)

<comment><USER8> We dont know that they are fingerprinted like this no. At least not generally as in "people". The whole XKeystore thing is blown up by reporters who barely have a idea what they are talking about.

What we know is that XKeystore offers filters for this kind of stuff. This could also just mean that if they look for a german hacker actively that they throw a few of those filters in. There is no reason to believe from the data we have that these filters are actively used against the general population.

Dont get me wrong, i hate the NSA and actually the whole bullshit system the USA builds on. Also i am at least as paranoid as any other geek. But this topic is simply based on assumptions.

Edit:// To further clearify, if this actually means that these filters are always used with other more concrete filters it does mean that _the general population_ (who uses Tails, Tor, Proxies) never ever showed up in any of those "lists" people seem to care so much about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It probably segments you into a more valuable advertising group if you click it. Your attempt to opt out is another signal that Google can use to target you.

<comment><USER3> I've always had the general sense that "uses uBlock" is a hugely useful advertising signal. On one hand, it means you hate ads and are unlikely to respond to the average crappy banner ad (or phishing attempt). On the other, it means that you're tech savvy and potentially high-income. That's some great info.

(Given all that, why are so many under-ad-space texts so bad? It seems like if you're going to target ad blockers under your display ads you could do better with it.)</comment></comment>


Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html

<comment><USER2> This is fantastic. Can you download his course materials for free?</comment>


Show HN: C++11 inline object definitions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/matt-42/iod

<comment><USER3> Note that something like this is actually part of C99 (but not of C++ - <USER2> C++ grammar was apparently too tortured to support this):

        struct example_t {
            int foo, bar, baz;
        } example = {
            .foo = 1,
            .bar = 42,
        };
        /* unnamed members are implicitly set to 0 / NULL */
        assert(example.baz == 0);

combined with compound literals, you can do stuff like

       example = (struct example_t){
          .foo = 2,
          .baz = 1
       };
       assert(example_cmp(&example,
          &(struct example_t){ .foo = 2 }) == 0);

It's one of C99's neater features, I think. I can imagine C++ programmers liking something like iod.

</comment><comment><USER4> actually: auto obj = [ x=1, y="foo" ]{};

<comment><USER5> This just declares a lambda with two parameters with default values. You can't do obj.x, you can't declare "objects" inside of obj, you can't return obj in the parent scope.

Why would you ever do:

      [x=1, y="foo"]{
        // use x, y
      }();

When you can just do:

      auto x = 1;
      auto y = "foo";
      // use x, y

    ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is in the C++14 standard:

For every init-capture a non-static data member named by the identifier of the init-capture is declared in the closure type. This member is not a bit-field and not mutable. [http://isocpp.org/files/papers/N3648.html](http://isocpp.org/files/papers/N3648.html)

<comment><USER6> Actually the member can still be declared `private:` and the `obj.a.name` would not be portable. It appears GCC's implementation to make these members `public:` is conforming to c++11 but do not rely on this behavior.

I've been told in ##C++ that the current C++14 draft says: `An init-capture behaves as if it declares and explicitly captures a variable of the form "auto init-capture ;" whose declarative region is the lambda-expression's compound- statement`

This change would make the named member access non-conforming

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is interesting, but I can't help but wonder at the wisdom of writing C++ in this fashion. What's the use case for this? I perhaps naively think that the problem domains for C++ and Javascript are very different, and that this sort of thing may make sense in the domains where C++ doesn't make sense.

I think I'd be frustrated if I was working on someone's C++ code and I found objects springing up out of nowhere like that.

<comment><USER8> That is a laughably narrow worldview. It's even sadder that instead of reasoning out why some domains don't make sense, you direct a burden on the community to persuade you. After matt-42 took the time to create this, present it and share it, you're scoffing at him and challenging everyone else to open up your closed mind. I'm content to leave you confused in the corner, but you've sprayed your little pee on the beautiful garden where I walk each day so I'll give you a tip merely so it smells better to me and the rest my colleagues.

My tip isn't about iod. It's this: Try re-approaching your evaluation of iod with the worldview that IS useful and sketch out some scenarios. If you can show that it doesn't make sense, you'll engage someone intelligent in a conversation. If you won't invest that time in yourself, don't expect anyone else to invest their time in you.

> I think I'd be frustrated if I was working on someone's C++ code and I found > objects springing up out of nowhere like that.

That sounds like a personal problem having to do with self-control. You should get a blog.

Speaking of which, the website listed in your profile, c10n.net, is down.

<comment><USER7> I find your vitriol unwelcome and inappropriate for a discussion that could be and ought to be constructive. I could spend some time explaining my position and defending my previous comment to you, but you haven't earned that.

I will note, however, that questions like the one I posed are in general useful to open up discussion about something new like this. Instead of viewing it as an attack, see it as initiating some exposition on specific cases where this would be useful.

<comment><USER8> > vitriol > Instead of viewing it as an attack, see it as initiating some > exposition on specific cases

And you aren't you taking your own advice because why?

If your comment is supposed to initiate some exposition, _then fucking expose away_ or buzz off and fix c10n.net. All you did was throw up your arms and say "oh, I don't know if this is that great," without even trying it or pointing out why and expect others to fall in line below you and do all the work for you...

And you can see the line of commenters telling you why iod /IS/ a good idea. You could have figured this out on your own, but instead you chose to spend your time getting others to give you the answers.

Ever wonder why they call this website Hacker News and not Manager News?

Asking others to figure out everything for you and report back is unwelcome and inappropriate. Commenting "I don't think this is a good idea, but I'm not going to say why" is unwelcome and inappropriate. You say "I could spend some time explaining my position and defending my previous comment to you" Bullshit. You don't have anything valuable to share except a regrettable knee- jerk reaction after you saw a little JSON in C++.

You even admitted to "perhaps thinking naive." Own up to it. You just tried to cast doubt on something you know nothing about and you're getting called out on it in a more direct way than anyone has ever given you feedback before.

And I don't care if you find me unwelcome. I am, in fact, brutal and I dislike you because you're a lazy bitch who doesn't contribute and can't keep your website running. And I DO have something to say about iod which is more than you have:

I think iod is a brilliant effort. I will enjoy making C++ programs with inline-defined JSON to connect to my server and run it through all kinds of configurations. I don't want to touch Javascript to do that because I think Javascript is shit. Thank you matt-42.

p.s. It didn't compile for me under cygwin with the command line "g++ -std=c++11 example.cc" because the symbol "iod_extend" is missing. I commented out line 42 and it built and ran fine.

How many other fucking people in this thread even TRIED the code? They would have found the same bug as me if they had.

<comment><USER7> You've managed to break the first two rules in the commenting guidelines [1]; it seems you're in no position to advise anyone on appropriate commenting on HN. Profanity, insults, and personal attacks simply don't belong here. Aside from your childish outbursts, we've had a productive conversation in this thread.

[1] [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER8> Where the rule says "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation," you imagine I would not use profanity in a face-to-face conversation.

I will _gleefully_ reiterate everything I've said here in a face-to-face conversation.

I note that you have changed your tune toward the author ("I probably should have started out my initial comment by saying thanks") suggesting you're learning submitters' feelings outrank commenters'. There is hope for you yet.

<comment><USER9> Please don't make any more personally aggressive comments on Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's surprisingly concise and not _too_ hackish, especially compared to some other techniques I've seen for adding basic reflection to your C++ classes.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is thanks to the C++11 variadic templates that symplifies (a lot) the writting of such abstractions. The object model is only 100 lines of C++11: [https://github.com/matt-42/iod/blob/master/iod.hh](https://github.com/matt-42/iod/blob/master/iod.hh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is awesome! I was just thinking of porting some JavaScript based stuff to C++ and not looking forward to dealing with all my adhoc JSON stuff and having to write classes for everyone of them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very cool. Anonymous types can be really handy in C#, especially when dealing with LINQ to objects code. This looks like it could be a similar fit.</comment>


Show HN: I just submitted my first game, Steredenn, on Steam - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/app/347160

<comment><USER2> "It's a roguelike."

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

<comment><AUTHOR> (dev here) Well, that's true. It's not a rogue-like but this is the term most player will understand directly, thanks to games like FTL, Binding of Isaac or Nuclear Throne.

So it is a way for us to explain permadeath and replayability in a single word. :)

<comment><USER2> (I am in love with the pixel art)

<comment><AUTHOR> ( Me too :) It's made by a friend, Plus, you may have a look at his tumblr: [http://pluspixels.tumblr.com](http://pluspixels.tumblr.com) )</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In Google's Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/technology/in-googles-inner-circle-a-falling-number-of-women.html?hp&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> The last few paragraphs are insightful, paraphrased below.

"..women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.

.. women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women.

A result: More women are being hired.

.. employees nominate themselves for promotions, but the data revealed that women were less likely to do so. So senior women at Google now host workshops to encourage women to nominate themselves, and they are promoted proportionally to men

The attrition rate for postpartum women was twice that for other employees. In response, Google lengthened maternity leave to five months from three and changed it from partial pay to full pay. Attrition decreased by 50 percent."

</comment><comment><USER3> The article describes a lot of good practices being rolled out by Google.

Not sure how the leave really works in practice though. 5 months off is a lot for someone on executive track, a lot can happen in the tech field in five months for a critical person and if the person is not that critical they probably shouldn't be executive level.

However, I certainly wouldn't say no to 5 months full paid time off for paternity leave myself and a guarantee it wouldn't affect my chances of promotion at all. I'm not sure how that could really be guaranteed though. Some men and women might have several children during their 20s and 30s, that could amount to a lot of time off for them. Surely it would affect their jobs if they, as many do, had one child a year for a streak, and took 5 months per year off.

This assumes of course that men and women are treated equally and there is 5 months leave for both parents. The article isn't clear about this, but I assume paternity and maternity leaves are treated equally.

<comment><USER4> The article stated that paternity leave at Google is up to 7 weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gender is a don't care.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't and won't speak to any supposed trends, but Marissa got "side-lined" because she was despised by nearly everybody.

She mistreated everyone who answered to her or met with her in a meeting for years on end, the upper-ups' patience for that understandably evaporated. They gave her the best they could manage at the time, which was to shelve her so she wouldn't keep pissing people off.

<comment><USER7> That's completely understandable if true, but it's something we only have your word on. Makes her Yahoo! role more interesting, if nothing else.

<comment><USER8> fyi [http://www.quora.com/Marissa-Mayer-Named-Yahoo-CEO- July-2012...](http://www.quora.com/Marissa-Mayer-Named-Yahoo-CEO- July-2012/How-was-Marissa-Mayer-viewed-within-Google)

<comment><USER7> Reading through those responses, the answer seems to generally be "HN is wrong: she was not especially rude."

<comment><USER6> The Quora response to the general subject that usually gets quoted is excusing her egregious inability to play nice with others by leaning on her putative intellect.

That's not a rejection of the picture painted of what it was like to work with her by (multiple) others.

I've worked with smart people who were unable to listen or otherwise interact with others. It was pure hell.

If she was like that, I'm confident most Googlers who had any skin in the game (meaning, they weren't her peer or superior to whom she was pleasant and respectful, but someone who answered to her at some level) were happy to see her go.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The World's Finest Panama Hat - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/08/08/340682706/hes-just-woven-the-worlds-finest-panama-hat-but-who-will-buy-it <comment><USER2> In 1999 I met an English professor on a Navy frigate. He had made friends with a reservist of Chinese decent. When we arrived in Manta, Ecuador, there was a transportation strike; the whole city smelled of tuna. We went to a Chinese restaurant and the chinamen struck a deal: we would help load the restauraunteur's pick-up with frozen shrimp from a warehouse in the mountains; he would take us to Montecristi to buy some hats.

I sat in the back, with no seat (he had taken the seat out to haul more shrimp). We drove up the mountain dirt roads for an hour to the warehouse. It was guarded by men with automatic rifles. We loaded 20 sacks of frozen shrimp and drove another hour, deeper, to Montecristi.

The villagers were quite happy to meet us, as no one was coming to visit due to the strike in town. I bought three hats: a gorgeous open weave hat for my wife, a fino for my brother, and a veri fino for myself. I had the villagers block mine as a fedora, but it would take some time to get made. The man brought it to me the next day, at the pier, having riden his bicycle all the way from Montecristi. I paid $50 for that hat, including delivery. 25 strands per inch, or 625 weaves per inch. Outside of Brent Black's shop in Honolulu, I have never seen a finer hat.

Brent Black quoted me, sight-unseen, that hat would fetch in the ballpark of $400 in his shop.

I still wear it now and again. I have sewn in inner and outer bands of 1.5" black ribbon. The professor, Whiskey Charlie, bought himself a hat, as did the chinaman. And we drove two hours back to town, with those slowly thawing shrimp bouncing around with us.

Manta was the first place I saw a whale breach.

<comment><USER3> "Chinamen" is kind of racist. I, being chinese, am not personally offended, nor do I really care, but "chinaman" is generally considered to not be a nice word.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_(term)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_\(term\))

I'm only bringing it up in case you are unaware, cracker.

<comment><USER4> I think it would be good for the language if we try to "de-escalate" the usage of neutral-looking words that are currently considered offensive. Carefully re-introducing them when the tone is clearly not racist—like here—might be a good way to do that.

"Chinaman" feels like an excellent renaturalisation target, given it is borderline.

<comment><USER3> Any man with a resume has a history, just like a word. You can't change history, but you can certainly falsify the resume.

<comment><USER5> That's a queer claim to make.

<comment><USER3> i see wut you did there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh, wow -- it's crazy to see an article on Hacker News about Pile (the village that the weaver in the article is from). I have a house 4 minutes from Pile and have some good friends from there.

I spent the past 7 years in those exact villages on the coast, including Pile: El Aromo, Liguiqui, San Lorenzo, Las Piñas, El Abra, Santa Rosa, San Pedro 6, and finally Pile (in order of their distance from Manta along the highway).

The article is correct that the finest Panama hats are not made in Montecristi, but in Pile (although there were a good number of weavers in El Aromo as well, more picked-over by the dealers).

One thing the article doesn't mention are the occasional abortive attempts to collectivize, and to wrest some degree of control away from the dealers and towards the hat producers. Pile, for instance, recently built a pretty little hat museum, and tours of mostly European/US tourists are brought through from time to time to take pictures and see where the hats are made.

But the gulf between the dealers and the weavers is enormous. Most weavers, when they move upwards ... move out of weaving. For instance, the coastal fishing economy is going through really hard times at the moment, but even so a fisherman can make 2 or 3x what a weaver does. Even someone doing machete work will probably net more per month than a weaver. Which is why most of the weavers in terms of volume are probably women; little old ladies with sunken chests from leaning on the rounded stone that holds the work in place.

</comment><comment><USER7> In 2007, he was already known as the best weaver alive, he made $20 per month according to this documentary:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZ4DoIdSwA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZ4DoIdSwA)

He does not own a panama hat, he could never afford to keep something he works on for months.

Not making a point or anything, just interesting to see such a big wealth divide between the maker and the buyer.

<comment><USER8> That makes me wonder why something like the Internet doesn't change this guy's financial situation. So you could, with a camera phone and something like an international version of Stripe, have this guy finish a hat, upload a picture of it to the web, sell it, and then hand it off to a person he pays to take it into town and to ship it.

<comment><USER9> This is the site of ecuatorian women cooperative. As you may imagine the site is not very up to date nor useful, but it has an email and telephone number. It's so unupdated that seems genuine to me. I think I'll try it. [http://www.unioncañari.com/index.php/home](http://www.unioncañari.com/index.php/home)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had the privilege of trying out a $15,000 Panama hat. There is a qualitative difference between a $100 Panama hat and a $15,000 dollar one, but still, paying $15,000 or more for a hat is quite a luxury acquisition.

A finer weave makes them a lot smoother, lighter, and more flexible, which is useful in really hot and humid climates. The guy in the shop said that the daily progress for such a hat is adding about a centimeter to the hat each day.

<comment><USER11> I think it's like watches, once you go above $100 dollars you are out of "I want a practical accessory" and into "I want to own something rare and/or unique".

I guess if you have the money it looks like a good deal, I can't imagine spending $15,000 on a hat but then I can't imagine spending it on much of anything (a car perhaps).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting that there are still products (hats, watches, cars, ...) for which the finest examples are made by craftsmen with enormous skill, and not by machine.

<comment><USER12> I'm having trouble thinking of many things where that is _not_ the case. Computer chips are one obvious example, but what else?

<comment><USER13> Cellphones, laptops, ball-bearings, tires, ....

<comment><USER14> There's still a luxury brand that hand-builds cell phones: Vertu, out of England. Though obviously the components are still made by machine (chips, etc).

[http://www.vertu.com/us/en/home](http://www.vertu.com/us/en/home)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSAC43Ydrf8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSAC43Ydrf8)

<comment><USER13> They're pretty, in a way. But are they the finest examples of a cellphone? That was the question I was replying to. Are they actually better than an iPhone, or my HTC?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Brent Black, the hat dealer mentioned in the article, has a problem that is itching for a solution:

> Manually counting the rows of weave is a tedious task.

> If there are any inventors out there, the ideal scanner would be about the > size of the handheld scanners I've seen used at the checkout register in > some stores. The scanner would have a one inch by one inch reading window > that would be placed against the surface of the hat. The user would push a > button or pull a "trigger" and the scanner would scan the rows of weave both > horizontally and vertically. The LED readout would report that the hat is > 23-27-621.

> Call me when you have my scanner ready.

[http://www.brentblack.com/pages/panamahatgrades2.html](http://www.brentblack.com/pages/panamahatgrades2.html)

<comment><USER16> Shouldn't be that hard, right? Pocket microscopes already exists and as far as computer vision algorithms go, it's not a very complex problem.

<comment><USER17> could the optics in an iphone or decent android phone scan/capture high enough resolution to count the strands?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You kids may not be old enough to remember, but back in the day ICs were hand carved by artisans. We'd sit for days with a microscope and a nano blade etching the traces bit by bit into the wafer.

</comment><comment><USER13> The author, Roff Smith, seems to be a talented guy. Not only is this good to read, the photographs, by Smith, are excellent.

</comment><comment><USER18> My father wrote essentially this article for Connoisseur Magazine in 1983; you can see the cover, with a zoomable photo of the hat that was made for him then in the hinterlands of Ecuador, here:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B004MKRY30](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B004MKRY30)

The crown of that hat is about 6.5 inches across. Can you count the weaves in one inch? The NPR article claims 4000 weaves per square inch, or about 63 in each direction - I think Dad's has at least that!

I'll try to dig up the text of Dad's article, it was pretty interesting.</comment>