Huge Commercial Cave in the Ozarks for Sale - <AUTHOR> http://arkhaven.org/Huge_cavern_system.htm <comment><USER2> "15,000 CAVE VISITORS A YEAR

GROSSING $200,000 A YEAR

NETTING $75,000 A YEAR

$500,000 FOR CAVE AND 27 ACRES

$725,000 FOR CAVE AND 70 ACRES that also has an undeveloped cave on it" [http://arkhaven.org/arkansas_real_estate.htm](http://arkhaven.org/arkansas_real_estate.htm)

$75K / year net on a $500k property isn't bad at all (~15%). With a bit of work the property could have even more potential.

<comment><USER3> ... no mention of how much liability insurance would cost.

<comment><USER4> The net profit should already account for all costs including liability insurance.

<comment><USER5> emphasis on should

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I visited this cave a few times growing up. The neatest thing about the cave is after the section where you can squeeze through (if dressed appropriately and you want to) a tiny opening, in the large cavern beyond there is a tree stump in the middle of the room. I don't know who moved it there or how they moved it there, but it always was amazing to me as a child. See the pictures of the people covered in red clay to get an idea of how tiny the opening is.

I grew up about 40 miles away from this cave.

<comment><USER7> I grew up in Missouri; my dad was amember of the Missouri Speleological Society, and we spent a lot of weekends wandering into unlit holes in the earth.

Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee are built on limestone and have a lot of subterranean water moving around - meaning there are a lot of caves. Like, a kind of stupid number of caves. When I was a kid, Missouri had more caves than any other state, but it lost the title to Tennessee at some point, as more and more caves were found to be connected to one another. And a few of these caves have been commercialized for a very long time, like the one in the posting. The caves are a pretty magical feature of an otherwise (IMO) pretty bland part of the country.

<comment><USER8> Bland? The Ozark region in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri is absolutely gorgeous with rolling Green hills in the summer and beautiful foliage in the fall.

Not to mention the unique dialects and culture that was cultivated in somewhat of a vacuum for a few hundred years due to the relatively difficult terrain that kept accessibility low.

Go farther north or west, and yes, I agree the views get pretty repetitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This land should be bought for preservation by the state, feds, or a nonprofit. There are always unique species and history in places like this.

</comment><comment><USER10> The caves look cool but the Prepper links on that page make me very wary of the kinds of neighbors you'd have there!

<comment><USER11> Why? Prepping is a common hobby among the rich: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday- prep-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the- super-rich)

<comment><USER12> How does the fact that the preppers are rich argue against being wary of them?

<comment><USER11> Well there's a general perception of preppers as being paranoid, gun-toting, aggressive hillbillies, and the fact that it's often done by the top 1% shows that it's kind of an inaccurate stereotype.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure where you got that perception, it's certainly not the general one in my opinion. Breaking it down... Paranoid, yes. Gun-toting, usually. Aggressive, sometimes. Hillbillies is where I have to call it though. I'd argue there's as many rich as there are anything else, if not more. I don't know about you, but I'd be a little wary of folks preparing for a doomsday. Not saying I'd never consider it, but generally they are going to be a bunch uneasy with others, hence I'm going to be cautious around them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you think this is interesting, checkout [http://www.caveland.us/](http://www.caveland.us/) \- it's a quarried cave that was a roller-rink in the 50s/60s, abandoned and then converted into a residence.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you're Lex Luther, this would be ideal for your HQ2.

<comment><USER15> Would suit a range of supervillains or brooding hero's, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would someone mind calling and getting the price for us?

<comment><USER17> $5000 in earnest money is fairly low for the size of lot. I'm not going to call, but I'd put money on it being <$1M

<comment><USER11> <$1M for 186 acres plus a massive cave with tons of commercial infrastructure within it? No, it's almost surely over a million, especially if a good chunk of that 186 acres is farmable.

<comment><USER18> Here's a lead on it:

[http://marionrecord.com/direct/this_man_cave_is_not_metaphor...](http://marionrecord.com/direct/this_man_cave_is_not_metaphorical+4746cave+54686973206d616e2063617665206973206e6f74206d65746170686f726963616c)

Here we go, recently listed at $400,000:

[http://www.mossyoakproperties.com/land/23324](http://www.mossyoakproperties.com/land/23324)

So unless a lot of work was put into it, probably still around there. The website is still up:

[http://www.hurricanerivercaverns.com/](http://www.hurricanerivercaverns.com/)

<comment><USER19> A lot of work has been put into it. The owners facebook page shows 18 months of he and his family rebuilding stairs, walkways, improving the exterior, re- doing lights, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Genuinly nice and efficient (fast to load and scroll) website design.

Of course looking at the HTML code removes the illusion of sleek hand coding, instead a now dated proprietery program seems to have been used.

But still better than a slow page involving 100 JS frameworks to display a single article :)

<comment><USER21> The page weighs in at almost 9 megabytes. How is that efficient and fast to load? Lazy loading images would be a small and needed improvement - but of course it would require the horrible jaava skript to be used, which must be avoided at all costs.

<comment><USER22> I don't understand how lazy loading could help here. The images are all behind hyperlinks, and their display sizes are all hardcoded into the HTML. There is nothing preventing the browser from completing the page layout immediately and backfilling the images as the load.

That is not to say the page is well-designed or pretty - it is hideous. But lazy loading would make it strictly worse by adding js parse+eval latency on top of the loading time for the images.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a roadside attraction, it's not likely to be worth the trouble as a business Someone rich will buy this as a vacation retreat / emergency shelter.

</comment><comment><USER24> Quote from the root page:

"God is calling multitudes of CHRISTIAN PREPPERS to the Ozarks to prepare for this time of social, economic, and spiritual breakdown of American society... in these end-times. Learn spiritual lessons on why and how to prepare. The "where to prepare" is the Ozarks, and the "when to prepare" is now… last year!"

Wow.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if using the caves could be used to hold a small datacenter with minimal cooling costs. (Maybe a geothermal cooling loop?)

<comment><USER26> There's some precedent for this. Kansas City, MO has a large network of man- made caves[1]. I remember back in the '90s at least one ISP (Tyrell?) had a data center there. A quick search shows that some companies still host there[2].

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubTropolis
      [2] https://stckc.com/

<comment><USER27> Springfield, Missouri (in the Ozarks) has the Springfield Underground, an impressive and huge underground commercial space used for warehousing and data centers.

[http://springfieldunderground.com/](http://springfieldunderground.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Solar Delivers Far More Than Renewable Energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/shout-it-from-the-rooftops-solar-delivers-far-more-than-renewable-energy <comment><USER2> Some media (not greentech which is pretty good) have a hard time explaining the problem from the utility side. There are valid utility side issues much as I hate the electric company as much as everyone else.

This piece missed an opportunity to deal with these utility-side problems. How to pay for the grid side modernization that's needed to prevent grid destabilization as intermittent producers start to exceed the 5% figure most utility people find is the point where grid instability becomes a real problem.

Forward-looking states like California and Hawaii, particularly California by way of Rule 21 [0], seem to have found the proper technical balance by requiring new producers to install equipment that provides "grid support" power intelligently with constant 2 way communications rather than looser "grid interactive" standards where if the grid is on frequency and the voltage is within tolerance it's like an open spigot.

What remains are problems to solve at the utility side. Who'll pick up the tab for the utility-side communications and dispatch enhancements needed effect use of the grid support features? How to incentivize the utilities to quicken adoption of these enhancements, given that utilities never plan on timelines shorter than 10 years?

[0] for ex [https://www.gosolarcalifornia.ca.gov/equipment/inverters.php](https://www.gosolarcalifornia.ca.gov/equipment/inverters.php)</comment>


Will Rubinius be an acceptable Lisp? - <AUTHOR> http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/2007/01/will-rubinius-be-acceptable-lisp.html

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article's comments:

      Ruby is a language designed in the following steps:

      * take a simple Lisp language
      * remove macros, s-expression
      * add simple object system (simpler than CLOS)
      * add blocks, inspired by higher order functions
      * add methods found in Smalltalk
      * add functionality found in Perl (in OO way)

In my opinion, Ruby is already a Lisp modulo macros. But sometimes, macros and more parens/less syntax are really nice to have.

<comment><USER2>
        - Take a simple Lisp language.
        - Remove macros, s-expression.
        - Add a bunch of shit that could be trivially added if you still had macros.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      Add a bunch of shit that could be trivially added if you still had macros.

... only now, they're standard, first-class citizens across all code using the language.

<comment><USER2> None of the Lisp OO systems make objects feel second-class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see - maybe one year I'll have both the time and expertise to put work towards it - a Common Lisp that can be retargeted to different vms in a straightforward fashion: JVM, .NET, Rubinious, llvm, etc.

While it's awesome to make yet another Lisp, I think it's far more awesome to have a well-defined Lisp that can run on multiple places.

<comment><USER4> > a Common Lisp that can be retargeted to different vms in a straightforward > fashion: JVM, .NET, Rubinious, llvm, etc. [...] awesome to have a well- > defined Lisp that can run on multiple places

But it wouldn't. A Lisp that ran on the JVM would be able to use JVM libraries, one that ran on .NET would be able to use .NET libraries, one that ran on Rubinious would be able to use Ruby libraries.

Sure, the core Lisp language might be the same, but as soon as you started doing real work connecting it to outside code/services/devices etc, it'd rapidly become non-portable.

That doesn't mean it would be useless: being able to think in one language over multiple platforms would reduce cognitive load for developers.

<comment><USER3> well, yes. But what would be able to happen in A Perfect World is for the intersection of features to have an abstraction layer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI this is from 2007, though I have to imagine doing this would be even easier now that Rubinius is much more robust and stable (I mean there's an entire bootstrapped language for Rubinius now, Fancy: <http://www.fancy- lang.org/>)

Interesting quote from Ola though: "Ola: You can count on a JRuby-based Rubinius. It will happen. And making a Lispinius possible on JRuby would be a major reason for it." I can see this thought process getting all sorts of meta. Rubinius built again upon JRuby-Rubinius using JRLisp? Well maybe not but it's fun to fantasize.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      FYI this is from 2007, though I have to imagine doing this
      would be even easier now that Rubinius is much more robust
      and stable (I mean there's an entire bootstrapped language
      for Rubinius now, Fancy: http://www.fancy-lang.org/)

That was exactly my thought process when I submitted. I would love to have a legit Lisp that jives with the Ruby ecosystem. I feel like the ecosystem can make or break a language and, while I love Clojure, dealing with all that Java (especially package structure and package management) makes me want a Ruby- friendly Lisp.

<comment><USER6> I've been working on a port of Atomo (<http://atomo-lang.org/> ) to the Rubinius VM, dubbed Quanto for now. It's similar to Fancy (though they were both designed/developed separately), but one of the main differences is that it has macros (and pattern-matching everywhere).

Example code: <http://toogeneric.com/dump/pretty.atomo.html>

"data", "class", "module", "=", and ":=" are all Lisp-style macros. It doesn't have Lisp syntax, but it's very close to it conceptually - in fact Atomo has Lisp's condition system, and a similar string formatting system, and dynamic environment. All of which I plan to port. Fun times ahead!

<comment><USER7> interesting, how do you model multiple dispatch in an efficient way over a vm that (I believe) wasn't designed for it?

<comment><USER6> Via pattern-matching at the moment:

        X foo: Y := ...
        X foo: Z := ...

Both of these are inserted on X, which is used as `self` in the method body (so instance variables, etc. work as expected too). It's one method, `foo:`, which pattern-matches on its arguments to determine which branch to evaluate.

<comment><USER7> I see, but does this play well with the jit? What I mean is: wouldn't multimethods with many variants cause exponentially bigger thunks to inline, thus causing the JIT to not perform inlining at all?

Thanks for your answer anyway, it looks like a really fun project.

<comment><USER8> Looking at the bytecode, the JIT handles it fine. atomo pattern matching is the equivalent of using a case;when in the body. And because it's scoped to a certain class and name, I doubt it would have the overflow problem that lisp multimethods have, where you only have the name to bind functionality to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No.</comment>


Twitter eats its Babies - <AUTHOR> http://wewillraakyou.com/2011/06/twitter-steals-devnest/

<comment><USER2> I think Jon Markwell's comment on Twitter sums it up really: "Something that's been on my mind for a while: Feels like the values of Twitter the company have moved away from those of the product we love" (<http://twitter.com/#!/jot/status/81434698773049345>)

Twitter-the-product is friendly, sociable and open. Twitter-the-company is increasingly evil - is the recent shift away from being developer-friendly with loose T&Cs to locking everything down something specific to twitter or is it endemic to a company of their size and a product of their growth?

</comment><comment><USER3> As a semi-regular attendee at devnest since near it's inception I'm frankly quite shocked and appalled that Twitter would do this. It's great and very much welcomed that they participate, in fact it's one of the best reasons. But to want to take over the devnest seems very hostile. I'm scared that the devnest will turn corporate and dry, one of the reasons I dont like the Facebook developer garages.

</comment><comment><USER4> They did consult with me (@nuxnix) first to be fair to them. I was in favour of the idea because a)they told me in clear terms that they were going to run developer outreach events worldwide anyway including in London and b)I felt we had a shot at better influence and ultimately better governance from the inside. I was very positive about it to them, gave my agreement, and suggested they speak to @jot. I had to make an instant decision and I did. I stand by it.

(This article in full over at wewillraakyou.com) Angus

</comment><comment><USER5> Excessive load from HN? Or something else?

        The following error was encountered while trying
        to retrieve the URL:

             http://wewillraakyou.com/2011/06/twitter-steals-devnest/

        Connection to 22.214.171.124 failed.

        The system returned: (111) Connection refused

Can anyone provide a summary?

<comment><USER6> Summary: Twitter unilaterally decide to host their own #devnest meetup around the world using the same hashtag and name as an existing, very popular, London-based twitter meetup without consulting them first. They plan to take said event to London as well as a number of other locations worldwide.

<comment><USER7> They could have use #chirp which was their event's name last year.

<comment><USER6> Was just summarising the article as they put it, didn't intend it to be a statement of fact/my opinion :-)

<comment><USER7> I know. It was just convenient to reply to a summary :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google "Reading Level" filter - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1095407

<comment><USER2> You can estimate the literacy of a forum by choosing "annotate results with reading levels", then doing a search for site:example.com. It gives a breakdown of the fraction of pages at each reading level. Far from perfect, but interesting nevertheless.

      site:news.ycombinator.com: 39/55/4
      site:mathworld.wolfram.com: <1/3/96
      site:stackoverflow.com: 5/88/5
      site:lesswrong.com: 12/67/20

<comment><USER3> Site:reddit.com 80/19/1

All sites I've searched seem to have at least 1% advanced.

<comment> m-photonic site:4chan.org - 38/59/2

Huh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh YES. This makes me very, very happy. Now, can I have it as an option in the search settings, or at least readily accessible from the left-hand gutter, please?

Pretty please? I'll be your best friend, heroic anonymous Google search engineers!

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be awesome if they could integrate that with a translation feature, such that content in high reading level (perhaps dense with technical jargon, etc.) could be translated into a simpler, yet semantically correct version.

<comment><USER6> And then run it across Wikipedia and add the subsequent results as edits/additions to <http://simple.wikipedia.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Searching for "xsd" (xml schema document), the actual specs only come up at the _advanced_ level, which is pretty accurate if you've ever suffered through them. Wikipedia entries appear here too. [http://www.google.com.au/search?tbs=rl%3A1%2Crls%3A2&q=x...](http://www.google.com.au/search?tbs=rl%3A1%2Crls%3A2&q=xsd)

 _intermediate_ gives you tutes and tools.

 _basic_ has news, forums posts, youtube (comments?) and (apparently) random- ish lists

You can also use it to filter HN, for the _advanced_ "interesting" comments: [http://www.google.com.au/search?tbs=rl:1,rls:2&q=site:ne...](http://www.google.com.au/search?tbs=rl:1,rls:2&q=site:news.ycombinator.com+interesting)

</comment><comment><USER8> I got to thinking, how would America's universities compare? It's an interesting thought: The best universities should have the most advanced reading level.

I've published my findings, a complete ranking, and source code: [http://log.largevoid.com/2010/12/ranking-colleges-by- reading...](http://log.largevoid.com/2010/12/ranking-colleges-by-reading- level/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised I can't yet find a service that rates the reading level of books so as to guide selection by early readers (typically children, but also learners of foreign languages). Amazon? Startup?

</comment><comment><USER3> Not available from the mobile site. Make sure to switch to full site if you're using your phone.

Edit: Doesn't even seem to be there when I switch to classic. Using Droid 2.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious if they'll ever supplement machine learning data with structured data, e.g. something like dct:educationLevel expressed in rdfa.

<comment><USER11> Who do you mean by "they"? This is something that only site owners might be expected to do, definitely not Google. But even assuming there is a standard way of describing that, I doubt that anybody would care enough to include such meta-data. Algorithmic approach is so much more effective in this case.

<comment><USER10> I suppose I should have said "supplemented the search results". I disagree that people don't care (many people already do care about educational metadata).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know of a technical overview of this? I'm curious as to whether they're assigning every word in some lexicon a reading level.

<comment><USER13> There are multiple ways of doing it, here's one:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test)

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know what level-estimator they're using?

Game: find the 1-word query that has the largest percentage of 'basic' or 'advanced' results.

My starting entry after about 5 tries: 'doctoral' -- 51% advanced.

Update: 'enzyme' -- 94% advanced.

Update2: 'iatrogenic' -- 95% advanced. And no more entries from me.

<comment><USER15> theorem:97%

Theoretical: 60%

Theory: 41%

<comment><USER16> Theorem made me try lemma: 99% advanced, <1% basic, <1% intermediate.

<comment><USER15> nice.

A new challenge for HN: Find a pair or series of words that are synonymous but have the largest variance in Advanced readers. Bonus points if you can provide a progression of words from basic to advanced.

<comment><USER17> "black hole": 57/37/5

"gravitational singularity": 4/7/88

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Search for [Donkey].

Advance results bring the _Equus africanus asinus_ from Wikipedia first. Good. Basic results bring _Donkey (Shrek)_ from Wikipedia second. Google might be onto something here .... but wait.... what is it there at number one for the basic reader... humm... "YouTube - Donkey Rapes Man". Hummm... who are our "basic" readers? ... gota think about this feature a little more.... ;) Meanwhile, a classic: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRm8okHhapU>

<comment><USER19> This is actually a reasonably good search. It does highlight the clashes decently well.

I would like it if Google expanded this to allow you to prioritize. Prioritizing advanced reading level documents seems like it would be of value to me.

It's worth nothing that, yes, effective communication means that the document should be readable by anyone, but it doesn't seem that Google is tagging pompous, impenetrable documents as "advanced". For example, the [donkey] search comes up with "All About DONKEYS!" [1] as an "advanced" text. It doesn't seem to be difficult to read, it is just information-rich.

The search for [cheese], however, doesn't sort the wheat from the chaff like [donkey]. Gnome's Cheese project, for example, is classified as "Basic reading level", and so is filtered out from the "advanced" search.

[1] <http://www.lovelongears.com/about_donkeys2.html></comment></comment>


Opera Unite reinvents the Web: a Web server on the Web browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2009/06/16/

<comment><USER3> This is a huge development IMHO. If executed correctly, this has the potential to change how we look at the web. This is something that can be the starting point of web 3.0.

[EDIT: I agree. The example applications given are not that appealing.]

I have an opinion that instead of some crappy and difficult to use address like unite://mymac.chrismills.operaunite.com/ they should register a TLD (I guess it is possible. Isn't it?) like .OP or something and start using that. So my address will be simply niyaz.op

I think, (as always) someone else will come along and do it better than Opera does and opera will be forgotten again. Sad, but true.

Anyway I love the Opera for these innovations. They are the pioneers in many cool things in the web. Kudos guys!

<comment><USER4> This doesn't change how hackers look at the web. There's a reason we use servers -- 24x7 availability with network redundancies, backup power, etc, etc. Most hackers I know can run servers off their local box by using either static IPs from their provider or a proxy service. But many don't because of the reasons above. And now that there are so many great (mostly free) turnkey hosting services like App Engine and Heroku, it's never been simpler to offload all the server issues to a cloud.

The main target audience for this would be users who can't use any of the cloud hosting and also don't need high availability. My folks live by a lake with satellite broadband -- bad latency, frequent dropouts due to weather, and a host of other issues, like simply not wanting to keep their computer on all day, every day. They couldn't use this service. Other users would likely confront at least one of the issues. I've just browsed the Opera material, but I don't see a database/datastore -- maybe submitted data is supposed to go to disk? (The blog example has submitted forms going to memory!)

So why is this a huge development?

<comment><USER3> This is not about reliability. We are not talking about traditional servers and applications.

This is a huge development because when everyone can host applications for free in their own browser we will soon start seeing new paradigms in the way how we use the internet and how applications are served.

I am not smart enough to forecast HOW this will be done, but I have a gut feeling that this will lead us to something really game-changing.

<comment><USER4> What kinds of apps is this supposed to unleash? If the application is sufficiently complex to require programming or a database, which is true of just about any non-trivial app, then the user is savvy enough to host apps for free in several cloud hosting services with very easy deployment. If we're just talking about file or photo sharing, then there are other services like Dropbox that work well and don't require constant connectivity and compute power on the client side.

I'm typically a fan boy of new tech, but other than a nice proxy service, I don't see why this is revolutionary or game changing. Time will tell, but if there really is a market for something like this, it'll be served by a really cool and simple app development tool which autosyncs to a cloud. Building the app in a brain-dead way is the chokepoint for people coming up with personal apps, not the server infrastructure (at least now in 2009). Why bother with client-side computers for a web-facing personal presence?

<comment><USER4> OK, I'm willing to take downvotes here, because I'm going to slap HN a little. Why are many people upvoting niyazpk's comments (+14/4 vs other +1 comments before I head to sleep)? To sum up his arguments: it's cool and he's got a gut feeling that it's a web game changer. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of more critical comments that point out Opera's insignificant examples and reasons why the developers that can most use this technology would be better to use more reliable cloud hosting. And these comments get some ups then get pushed back to 1 point. Aren't we supposed to be more analytical here? If you're going to upvote something, make sure there some substance behind the comment rather than what's tantamount to a "that's cool, Opera rox."

<comment><USER3> Don't think more about the votes. Votes does not mean anything.

It just means that people agree with what I say, but that does not mean what I say is right.

And then there is the fact that people usually just read the root comment and do not bother reading the replies.

peace....

[EDIT: I am re-posting my comment from this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=659822>

We are missing the point.

Turning a browser into a web server is not a big leap in technology. That is not a hard problem.

Why I am excited about Opera Unite and not about this firefox extension is that Opera themselves thinks that this will change the face of internet applications. They are excited about it and they will persue this to the end. That is the whole point.

It is not about technology. It is about how you push it and persue it. It is all about your vision. ]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My hunch: Opera Unite is going to be used mainly for file sharing. It's not a reinvention of the Web, but a reinvention of DC++

<comment><USER6> I think that file (not only mp3s) sharing is the ultimate goal of the internet. The current state when we have big servers to which clients connect is just a coincidence and is temporary. The future is fully distributed :)

<comment><USER7> The idea of making a web browser that is also a web server makes a lot more sense than the current trend of cloud computing. The privately owned data center concept is unsustainable, and defeats the concept the internet, which is distributed data.

<comment><USER8> Eben Moglen, I believe, made some great points about the huge increase in distributed computing power (ie, the power of the laptops in the audience) in this talk:

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/08/my-tonguelashing-from- eben-...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/08/my-tonguelashing-from-eben- mog.html)

Data centers get a lot of press, and it is warranted, but regular old desktops and laptops (and smartphones, etc!) are incredibly powerful and underutilized. The internet doesn't have to be cable tv, it can be the telephone game with checksums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Opera Unite API might be the other salient feature what everyone here is missing. Their India-evangelist pointed me to it on twitter. Opera is likely counting on 3rd party developers on making the cool/killer apps. Things like setting up a photo gallery of kids now doesn't require you to sign up for any 3rd party service anymore. This is the anti-cloud in the sense that you can own your data. (pending a security audit of their n-tier architecture) Disclaimer: I'm not at my desk and haven't tried the new release yet. I may be way off base with respect to the API's capabilities.

<comment><USER10> _Opera is likely counting on 3rd party developers on making the cool/killer apps. Things like setting up a photo gallery of kids now doesn't require you to sign up for any 3rd party service anymore._

Indeed, but I believe Opera could get more mileage out of Unite if it targeted office/corporate workers. Apps would be more profitable for developers, and non-technical people at work could definitely use easier and more versatile collaboration tools. There is potential there.

<comment><USER11> This would be an extremely hard sell. Getting IT to install a non-supported web browser? Just so random employees can set up random servers on the local network? This sounds like a nightmare to the people who have to support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't like that Opera is trying to fit in everything into the browser. I prefer apps per tasks, don't want a OS in a browser, nor browser with the OS.

Was expecting more of Opera, I don't find this very innovative.

However, great job on the publicity :D

<comment><USER13> Agreed, I wee the things coming out of MozLabs a lot more innovative - "the future of the internet", if it can be predicted, seems to be along the lines of Moz JetPack, not Opera Unite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this will just be another one of those forgotten features that Opera has. There are LOTS of those, by the way.

Edit: Even diehard Opera fans have to admit there are a lot of cool features barely anyone uses. Opera Widgets? Opera's BitTorrent client?

<comment><USER15> I use Opera's bittorrent client. Why do you have to go through a second program to download torrents?

<comment><USER16> Because it's faster. You can download torrents with Gnome-do without having to even look at torrent sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Actually, P2P communication inside _any_ browser has been possible since the release of Adobe Flash Player 10. Two Flash 10 clients can directly communicate with each other over most NATs and firewalls (in contrast to Opera, Flash 10 supports NAT punching).

Just over two weeks ago I've launched a web-based service that uses these capabilities of Flash 10. The service enables users to send files directly between each other. No software to download. If interested, you can check it at <http://www.FilesOverMiles.com>

Feedback on the service would be appreciated :)

</comment><comment><USER18> How do they deal with firewalls? Could make p2p chatting difficult.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have UPnP enabled, all traffic is direct. Otherwise, it's proxied through Opera's servers.

<http://unite.opera.com/support/#tech_location>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are reasons we don't run web servers on our laptops. Putting the server inside the browser instance just makes these reasons more acute.

(Hey guys, I found this awesome site earlier today -- it has 16 hours of downtime a day, but scheduled irregularly, and any given session might be terminated at any time if the owner gets kicked out of the coffee shop where he is getting Wifi or quits out of Opera while playing WoW. Aside from that, yeah, awesome site.)

And they want to write web _applications_ on this? Oh, THAT is going to be fun.

<comment><USER20> _> There are reasons we don't run web servers on our laptops._

Ehrm, I do. It's great for developing on localhost and some quick sharing with someone near me.

 _> And they want to write web applications on this? Oh, THAT is going to be fun._

I don't think they're aiming to "host" the next Google... From the site I gather that they want to run applications that are for the user of the browser to enjoy by doing something together with his/her buddies.

<comment><USER21> _"Ehrm, I do. It's great for developing on localhost..."_

Yeah, we all do; this is HN. That's not what he's referring to, and that's not what Opera Unite is for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is no mention of security in the PR article.

Wondering how easy or difficult it would be for someone to hack into my local opera web server? Possibly the answer is as much as they can hack into your normal web server.

I would guess a bulk of internet users would fear to use this service. They would continue to upload than share local directories online.

<comment><USER23> One thing I REALLY trust Opera with - is the security. I've been using browser for ages and never had I security breach through Opera.

<comment><USER24> There are a whole range of fundamental differences between securing a client application and securing a server application.

I'm not saying that the Opera browser will de facto become insecure, but it's just opened itself up to a potentially huge range of unknown exploits - <USER2> servers or software services require some knowledge and configuration to make them secure.

I wish them well, but I foresee this causing a lot of security problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow! Blog in 60 lines of JavaScript. [http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-unite-developer- pri...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-unite-developer-primer/)

<comment><USER25> "For now, entries are stored in a simple array, so will be lost when the service is restarted, but it wouldn't be so hard to extend the example to provide a means of retaining the blog entries."

Oooof... that hurts. It looks like they want you to do File I/O and create your own storage layer. Opera really needs to implement client-side SQL: [http://dev.w3.org/html5/webstorage/#asynchronous-database- ap...](http://dev.w3.org/html5/webstorage/#asynchronous-database-api)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This could be huge combined with webhooks and a JS asynchrounous DOM modification capability. Think about a web-chat app that does asynchronous true push chat. No Comet and heavy JS.

It would work like this : you would connect to the web chat. Your browser would give the server an URL on its internal server where the server can post updates. Just like a webhook. The internal server would run a JS callback each time it got something posted to update the page. BAM! True bidirectional push!

<comment><USER26> A pity that it would need to be standardized by the W3C to have a wide userbase and thus be a viable option. And standardization would take how long ? 20 years ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Didn't Windows Home Server do this a long time ago? They also had easy file sharing and gave you your own subdomain with a web interface to get at your content. Although Unite is a lot easier to configure/start and you don't need a dedicated device, I still don't think the core audience is the average user.

It's a little awkward if you need to leave your laptop on 24/7 for your friends to access...For the average user, an internet service is more than enough.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think that internet based services are so great because they free users from technical details like "files", "sharing", "web servers" etc and let them focus on features - "communicating", "editing". That's why it's strange to see Opera promoting the old all-in-one idiom leaving user with a bunch of files on his personal computer again. Maybe I just don't get all the details and will gladly accept counter-arguments.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone here actually USE opera?

<comment><USER30> I use Opera. Have been since version 4.x, and haven't ever changed. I only keep Firefox around for Firebug and Flash (nice place for Linux Flash to crash in a closeable sandbox).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looks a lot like Tonido, with the hassle of having to keep the browser open.

</comment><comment><USER32> 2 inital thoughts occur.

Firstly if this takes off it will make my job insanely difficult (nigh impossible) because identifying where content came from will probably be even harder (aka impossible).

Secondly it will make my job even busier because it's a hot bed for virus distribution, cracking and intrusion... they better damn well secure this! :D

From my perspective I suspect this will be another Google Hello episode :(

</comment><comment><USER33> Holy crap, Kas Thomas got it right. (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656107>)

</comment><comment><USER34> Don't get me wrong, the perspective behind this really interests me. I think, however, that it's a infrastructure question.

Following the Google Gears argument I would agree that it is much more interesting to keep your private data localy than to serve local directories.

I'm expecting a free Opera Client-Side App Hosting (that auto-syncs with you browser :) to emerge from Opera if this catches on...

</comment><comment><USER35> With the direction of broadband ISPs being going to bandwidth caps, 'hosting' on personal PCs is not something I'd be looking at getting into at this point. It's kind of like why I would choose using Vimeo or Youtube to host a video instead of my own web server, bandwidth is not going to be free. I never see this getting beyond a miniscule niche.

</comment><comment><USER36> A nice use for this would be peer to peer in the browser. EDIT: I mean distributed p2p, since this is already p2p by itself.

<comment><USER23> Opera had P2P (bittorrent) client for ages (even though it's implementation was(probably still is) really disappointing).

Edit: "Distributed P2P"?? You need to clarify that, since this sounds like like "Database-ready MySQL". (P2P is "distributed" by design)

<comment><USER37> BitTorrent is for file transfer. P2P HTTP is for _anything_ , e.g. chat or games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Now I have to worry about browser uptime? People don't need a server in their browser, they want reliable services that are easy to use. This could easily have been a nice user interface to a "launchd" and some services. Server side JS might be nice, but there is no benefit to it being coupled to a browser.

</comment><comment><USER39> I had this idea in 2002, except searching of this network via the Gnutella network. I called it the Transient Web.

I came to the conclusion that this would just create fractured webpages, and a site one week could be gone the next. This is really bad for things like Archive.org to keep track of.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's a different approach, but to the third-party developer (and the end-user) it definitely has some overlap with Google Wave. Interesting to see the two different approaches to web-based collaboration, and it'll be even more interesting to see how they compete and/or combine.

</comment><comment><USER41> I doubt anyone will remember this, but way back around the .com bubble ICQ actually had a feature built in where you could host a website off of your computer using it and your contact list could access it. I don't think I really used it, but it was a neat feature.

</comment><comment><USER42> The EXE installed all the text with its localisation IDs instead of the actual text it is supposed to be localising (eg. D_SERVICE_INSTALL_INTRO). Does this happen for anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER43> This is great!

Now when someone asks me what the phrase "jumping the shark" means, I will have an example to give them.

EDIT: A second look at Opera Unite tells me this is a neat idea, but only if it ships as a separate product and not as part of the browser. Imagine a one- click webserver you can use to share music, files and photos from your PC without having to put them "in the cloud". Opera could have _charged_ for this service, and people would have paid gladly.

Putting this in the browser is, IMO, stupidity on a whole new level.

<comment><USER23> I'm looking at it right now and it IS actually a button "Enable Opera Unite", with two-click enabling/disabling.

<comment><USER43> What I meant to say was that this should not be part of the browser. That just bloats it up. A separate app would have been much better.

Opera's target audience consists mostly of geeks, anyway. Downloading and installing a separate app would not have been a problem for these people.

<comment><USER44> Downloading an external webserver or ftp is not a problem for most geeks. But it takes configuring, knowing what you're doing, etc. The goal of Opera Unite is rather to bring this possibility, to another audience, to have easily such services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Nice work for sure. Kudos to Opera devs.

Anyway I was using

$python -m SimpleHTTPServer

in some use cases of Unite.

</comment><comment><USER46> So could you create a p2p cache program or website? Where users share .mp3s .avis and other media files via their cache?

</comment><comment><USER47> this is actually really interesting. I can see a lot of new apps coming from this. I just installed it and tried it and so far I like it. The fridge app is a good idea but needs some design work. Photo sharing worked, its not just a file enumeration, they make pretty web galleries and there's an interesting chat app too.

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish for the day where my internet connection can keep up with these services. Where is 100/100mbit when i need it?

</comment><comment><USER49> Can't wait for Apple to steal this idea and make it better ;)

</comment><comment><USER50> I think I'll stick with dropbox for my filesharing.

</comment><comment><USER51> Is it too hard to fix opera.com/unite ?

</comment><comment><USER52> opera unite = web browser over p2p?

</comment><comment><USER53> _cough_ <http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_localserver.html>

<comment><USER54> What does this have to do with Opera Unite? It has the word "server" in the API name. Does that mean I can link to Apache and say that they beat Opera to the idea? Opera's not saying they came up with the first local server; they're just giving the end-user the ability to serve their own content easily and without relying on the cloud.

<comment><USER23> I think implied was the fact that content serving from browser has been available through Gears (which a lot of people have installed), but it hasn't quite caught on. The difference (as I see it) is that Opera makes it REALLY easy (I can start playing with Opera right away, whereas Gears API looks scary at first sight).

<comment><USER40> Opera Unite and Gears LocalServer are completely different. (I'm using the LocalServer API for the application I'm writing at work.)

LocalServer saves a set of static files (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images) from the web. When the browser requests those files later, they will be served from the LocalServer disk cache instead of the remote server. So the pages will load faster and can be available offline (if the pages are designed to run without accessing any other network resources). It's like a browser cache on steroids. For an example application, see the latest version of WordPress, which has an option to load the admin UI into a LocalServer cache.

LocalServer lets you serve requests from disk to browser on a single computer, while Unite lets you serve requests from one computer to another over the internet. LocalServer is useful for offline work, while Unite is useful for communicating on a network.

If you used Unite for a single-user application (where the client and server are all on one machine) then it might provide some of the functionality of Gears LocalServer. But I suspect that the use of a central proxy server in Unite would eliminate both the performance benefits and offline features for this scenario.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linus Pauling Research Notebooks - <AUTHOR> http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/rnb/index.html <comment><USER2> I love things like this. Sad to say I doubt the future will be quite so open.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately you may be right (unless we change it ofc!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome, but I wish this was searchable...</comment>


Catering Point of Sale (POS),Tablemanagement in Python, PyQt5 and PosgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Catering <comment><AUTHOR> Python, PyQt5 and database PostgreSQL.

The target of the project is a point of sale (POS) for catering purposes as a open source project, including tablemanagement for 100 seats, 20 tables with 2 places and 15 tables with 4 places. Splitting and combining of tables and seats. Programmable buttons for 10 maingroups of producttypes and 5 subgroups with 18 choices, so 900 products in total.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> link project information: [https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Catering/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Catering/blob/master/README.md)</comment>


The Deep Space Window Manager - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dss-project/dswm

<comment><USER2> I like the idea of aggressively supporting keyboard input. I like the idea of being able to do literally everything with the keyboad _if I choose_.

But therein lies the problem: I sometimes choose to use the mouse, and not having mouse support in my wm would be too much of a productivity killer for me to adopt such a thing.</comment>


Amazon's Constellation of 3,236 Satellites Has Astronomers Freaked Out - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/amazon-satellite-constellation-astronomers-freaked-out <comment><USER2> I have real issues with the current economic system not accounting for external cost of pollution. It's clear that lots of satellite has a cost in that it's disturbing astronomers work. For satellite providers there is no cost for disturbing observations.

Other examples of not accounting external cost: There is no cost of fishing all the fish in the ocean. There is no cost of polluting the oceans. There is no cost of cutting down rain forest Space junk something that will eventually have a cost

There is an environmental flaw of external cost in the current capitalism economic system which we cannot afford to ignore.

Thus I argue in current capitalism system we do not pay for pollution it's "free" but there is a real cost for others. Thus the system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be fixed! Ops engineer comment.

</comment><comment><USER3> They'll be arranged in the amazon smile one day, so we cant look at the night sky and get a sense of our own place in the universe, just a sense of our place as amazon users.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can we just flag these stories since there's only two opposing things to say

1\. Little African Johnnie who's sister just died of dysentery because they couldn't call around for help from lack of infrastructure doesn't care that rich astronomers can't take pictures.

2\. Capitalism is once again polluting our society.

<comment><USER5> > because they couldn't call around for help from lack of infrastructure

there are other places than low earth orbit for infrastructure

<comment><USER4> So you've been so busy curing dysentery and tuberculosis that you haven't done it yet, but you were coincidentally going to start this week so Elon and Bezos can stop now?

If people find their humanity and build the alternative infrastructure the satellites will just fall out of the sky pretty quick due to their short lifespan and low orbit.

You've just done 2. and I replied 1. in a pointless conversation. QED

<comment><USER6> This is a fair point, once there is no longer a need for these satellites they will fall out of orbit, self-immolate in the atmosphere, and we can simply not replace them.

It's a worthwhile tradeoff, in my opinion, to inconvenience a branch of science that's unlikely in the near term to produce research that immediately benefits humanity. Conversely, projects like Starlink solve an immediate problem (access to communication infrastructure in underdeveloped areas) and are sufficiently designed to account for the eventuality of their purpose expiring. These satellites were never meant to be permanent fixtures in the sky.

Astronomers complaining about streaks in the sky seems a bit like a retiree complaining that the new hospital they're building across the lake ruins the view from his kitchen window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Site is garbage. Got my iPhone screen wrapped around in a banner can't read shit.</comment>


Zed Shaw is teaching two four-week Python classes (online) - <AUTHOR> http://codelesson.com/python <comment><USER2> I'd -love- to take a Python course from Zed but this site makes me uneasy about following through. Not enough information and the site simply doesn't look professional enough to be sending in payments of $200+. The 404 on the follow up course is a big red flag too.

\-- "Find courses you're interested in from our course list. After you've selected a course, we'll send you more information about our Web-based learning system. "

I kinda want to know before signing up, selecting, and/or paying what your Web-based learning system is about. From what I can see on the site, there will be some directed readings, evaluated assignments, and a place to do Q&A. Those are nice benefits but I'm looking for a quality teacher to pay that premium. I'd like to know if there is audio/video lectures, what the required texts are, etc. Unfortunately there is no FAQ and the only obvious way to ask is the "Contact Us" link which takes you to a generic feedback page.

<comment><USER3> There is a FAQ, actually:

<http://codelesson.com/faq>

<comment><USER4> No audio/video lectures or screencasts?

It's unclear from FAQ what's "instructor-led" actually means.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I responded to your question in the wrong point in the thread. See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724883>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I have no professional/ financial affiliation with Codelesson, though I am friends with one of its founders.

Posted this since I've seen so much praise for Zed's Python book here on HN.

<comment><USER5> Zed's python book: <http://sheddingbikes.com/LearnPythonTheHardWay.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> Doh! Thanks. I should have linked to that :D (Everybody, check out this amazing, constantly updated (!) book that Zed wrote.)

<comment><USER6> The grandparent comment links version 0.1 of the book, get the current version (0.5 as of now) from the book's website at <http://learnpythonthehardway.org/>

(I found that out in the process of attempting to report an error in version 0.1 - it's already fixed in 0.5, and 0.5 is 4x longer.)

<comment><USER7> Hmmm, I should probably put up a pdf that says "there's a new version" at that URL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's up with this being an introductory course to Python? Shouldn't the experts be giving expert level instruction?

I understand the desire of programmers to start from ground zero, but come on. The internet is full of easy beginner tutorials. Bookstores are full of intermediate materials.

But there is a shortage of expert advice from experienced professionals. Let's see some of that!

<comment><USER3> You assume every experience professional knows everything. :) There's no shame in taking an introductory course, even if you're a super genius in some other area.

One thing that surprised us about our first CodeLesson course is that it was populated by a few startup CEOs, some of whom had coded in college, others who were learning to code for the first time.

<comment><USER8> While I agree, in general, with your statements/sentiments, such logic will keep us perpetually in a loop of beginner's mechanics. You advance knowledge and skill by challenging yourself - you don't do it by repeating beginner's materials.

<comment><USER9> i disagree. i've been coding for quite a while now, and am now just picking up emacs. the only way for me to begin is to start with basic/simple tutorials (e.g. peepcode, emacs starter kit, etc.). for an experienced programmer trying to learn python, i'd imagine zed would be an amazing fit since he could possibly customize/direct his vast knowledge specific to the user.

though i agree with the idea that there are very few resources geared toward expert/advanced users. i'm not sure how flexible the course material would be in this case tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to take a Mongrel2 class from Zed. Codelesson is new to me - I must explore...

<comment><USER7> Well damn, maybe I'll do one. Hell I'd get together with people in SF or wherever for free and show them how to do stuff. It'd be an awesome bad ass way for me to get feedback on what needs to happen to make Mongrel2 awesome.

<comment><USER11> I'd definitely be interested in attending that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's pretty cool; and I didn't know about codelesson - if I ever had the time to put together a decent class, I'd try this out for sure.

Grats to Zed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone knows about a similar site offering (or someone willing to offer through codelesson.com) a good software engineering course? I'll be up for that.

<comment><USER3> You can propose a course here:

<http://codelesson.com/courses/suggest>

What topics would you like to see covered in a software engineering course? What kind of person would you like to see teach it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Little can be inferred from the link, but I am 100% sure that Zed makes an awesome teacher for anyone who's considering taking the class. Just hit him up on Twitter or e-mail, and I'm sure he'll oblige.

</comment><comment><USER15> FYI, I'm getting a 404 for the link to the Part B follow-up lesson.

<comment><USER3> I think I fixed the bad link; thanks for letting us know.

<comment><USER16> Still there here [http://codelesson.com/view/introduction-to-programming-in- py...](http://codelesson.com/view/introduction-to-programming-in-python- part-b)

<comment><USER17> That's not the right URL.

Go here instead: [http://codelesson.com/courses/view/introduction-to- programmi...](http://codelesson.com/courses/view/introduction-to-programming- in-python-part-b)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Making the first lesson available for free would answer a lot of questions and address a lot of anxieties as well as probably lure in more students.

<comment><USER7> Well, the entire course is technically already online:

<http://learnpythonthehardway.org/>

Basically, I'll be setting up the first 26 lessons for class A, then the remaining 26 for class B. The purpose of the course is that you get my time to help you through the book and grade you on your progress.

It's actually pretty simple and should be a ton of fun.

<comment><USER19> This course is a great idea. Will you do a ruby class next? In saying that, I am mostly joking. However a C class would be pretty sweet, especially since it's hard to learn how to write C correctly, efficiently and securely.

<comment><USER3> We have a Ruby course listed on the site already:

[http://codelesson.com/courses/view/the-ruby-programming- lang...](http://codelesson.com/courses/view/the-ruby-programming-language)

<comment><USER9> i think he was asking if zed would be teaching a course on ruby.

if so, what about mongrel too? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i'm curious as to what sort of pedagogical approach zed will be taking with this course. i know zed's personal preference is to pick up a book and just go thru all the exercises in it (e.g. mickey baker's jazz guitar).

will he be doing anything different from traditional student/instructor methods? curious as to what zed's personal take on this is as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think there is a much better way to invest your time:

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming- fall-2008/lecture-videos/)

Seem like everyone on HN is either a teacher or a prophet nowadays. ^_^

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm really not into taking "courses" online when there's already lots of free non-interactive textual/reference/tutorial content already online, and offline in the form of books. And for a really great interactive resource, there's this thing called the Python REPL.

That said, I do think people should do what they love, and try to monetize the doing of what they love, so more power to him in this endeavor.

<comment><USER7> Same here, but then people like me and you are rare in the real world. Other folks, for lack of confidence or direction, need someone to point them in in the right way so they get started.

<comment><USER21> fair point</comment></comment></comment>


How to build a good EMR - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Jae-Won-Joh/How-to-build-a-good-EMR-part-1

<comment><USER3> I am an MD, and I'll offer my 2¢ on the EMRs I have used:

1\. They seem to be sold to hospital administrators, who hold the wallet but don't have to use them.

2\. This flows from point 1. Given the target buyer, they seem to be made for the purpose of billing, and not for the purpose of facilitating patient care.

3\. Doctors are all over the map with regard to tech savvy. Some are truly awful. Most of the EMR solutions I have seen are focused on slavishly re- creating a paper chart. Which is dumb.

There is a lot of room for innovation here.

<comment><USER4> As an MD I'd like to hear your opinion on some of the EMRs you've used. Particularly Greenway, which I've heard from a consultant, not a physician, is good, or at least a good company. Or Epic, which I've heard is both okay and awful, and lastly Amazing Charts.

<comment><USER5> Epic has potential, I used it on the trauma service at Norfolk General, and my wife uses it at Rady Children's in San Diego, but their custom markup language to create note templates, and how all that gets rendered, sucks. What should be a smart 1 page ICU note becomes a 4 page cluster.

It's about the notes. Screw the trendlines and all that tarted up crap. We want the same thought process no matter what tool we use to write and record it. And that thought process puts maximum information in the eyespan, and should flow well. Yeah, we might be doing it at 5 am, and you can ridicule our handwriting, or the mis-spelling after we get sick of fighting a spell-checker that doesn't recognize "leptospirosis" but the cognitive dissonance of wrestling with the machine at 5 am with a sick patient and some other cranky doctors just sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The EMR/EHR market is actually a collection of different markets.

The institutional one is a lost cause -- you are not going to get Kaiser to back out of its $5B investment in Epic. These are enterprise systems with ancient cores who are largely sold on the golf course, under cover of RFPs and checklists so buyers can compare "apples to apples". No usability or modern technology considerations apply. You will take your Citrix and love it. Like most enterprise apps they have to do it all (billing, HR, compliance, security, and on yeah, some sort of medical charting) simply to be competitive, and as developers we know how that works out.

The small-practice market is where a lot of innovation is happening -- PracticeFusion, DrChrono, athenaHealth, eClinicalWorks, etc. It's competitive but the dollar amounts tend to be fairly low and the small-practice market is drying up as doctors ally themselves with hospital groups in advance of the freight train that is health reform.

The really bloody (and interesting) battle is in specialty EHRs, as others have mentioned. Generic records just don't fit for optometrists and dentists and therapists and the like. There's huge opportunity here for competition and the markets can be small and cozy enough that UX, SaaS, good service, etc becomes a big differentiator.

Jae doesn't get into constraints against ground-up reinvention too much, which are almost comically enormous. For example HIPAA (and "Son of HIPAA" from ARRA) is married to a wide variety of state-specific privacy regulations that go above and beyond the Federal regulations. The biggest constraint of them all is something called "Meaningful Use" (ONC-ATCB EHR Certification), which determines if your software makes you (the doctor) eligible for federal incentive dollars. It's the primary driver of EHR sales at the moment and creates a bunch of onerous and potentially user-unfriendly requirements on the part of the vendors who have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to comply, taking R&D budget away from actual innovation. Just to give one example, Jae says "Your EMR does not need to have every single drug and its dosages installed in its database, with an automatic checker to make sure there are no negative drug reactions" -- as a matter of fact ONC EHR Certification (which, again, is driving the industry) calls for exactly that.

While I certainly agree with almost every one of Jae's suggestions, it's difficult to see them getting adopted under todays' market incentives. Clinicians don't buy EHRs. Administrators aren't interested the things he lists. And even when clinicians do purchase the systems, the game is heavily rigged towards large, legacy vendors pushing shitty, ugly software with their huge sales forces who can spend money complying with complicated regulations.

In closing, it's all sort of a clusterfuck.

<comment><USER7> Here is some detailed information about ONC certification requirements. [http://www.cchit.org/get_certified/ONC-ATCB- Certified-2011-2...](http://www.cchit.org/get_certified/ONC-ATCB- Certified-2011-2012) Any EHR which isn't certified isn't likely to get many sales.

As for drug dosages and reaction / interaction checking, all of the EHR vendors license their drug databases from just a couple of data vendors. <http://www.medi-span.com/master-drug-database.aspx> <http://www.firstdatabank.com/Products.aspx> So if you're going to include any of that drug data it's just as easy to include the entire set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who's spent over a decade building systems for clinicians, I'm thrilled that there finally seems to be an awakening brewing, and that clinical users are beginning to demand more from their tools (and realize that more is possible!).

Also, semi-shameless plug but we're working really, really hard to build a much better EMR and much of what Jae says in this post is exactly why we started working on it. If you're interested in joining us, we'd love to hear from you! <http://elationemr.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> EMR = Electronic Medical Record

I thought this article was going to be about MapReduce.

<comment><USER10> In New Zealand we call these PMSs, or Patient Management Systems. This is not confused with Pre-Menstrual Syndrome here as we use the acronym PMT, or Pre- Menstrual Tension instead. When speaking to colleagues in the US however, I always have to remember to use EMR/EHR!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The EMR is dead." - Lyle Berkowitz, MD [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSVIAG11OXM&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSVIAG11OXM&feature=player_embedded)

EMRs were originally built for data legibility, ordering, patient continuity of data (OK, we still dont have this), and better financial tracking. The large EMR vendors have largely already created this functionality, but to an interesting conclusion - the realized value was not nearly as great as the perceived value. As a result, the opportunity for startups is NOT to built a better mousetrap! For the foreseable future docs are going to be stuck with Epic, like it or not. The perceived value of a "better" EMR is not strong enough for institutions to adopt your software. You can only sell on that failed promise once.

The opportunity IMHO lies in small applications that solve the problems of docs (or nurses). Pick a niche market (primary care, ortho, peds, nursing, etc.), talk to them, find their pain points, and build software that makes it easier.

</comment><comment><USER12> For those in Ontario (Canada), our province actually outlines exactly what an EMR should do, the format the input and outputs should be, and defines how data must be imported & exported. It's actually not bad as far as specs go. There are about 16 or so certified EMRs in Ontario that have to meet the requirements to be sold to hospitals and docs.

[https://www.ontariomd.ca/portal/server.pt?space=CommunityPag...](https://www.ontariomd.ca/portal/server.pt?space=CommunityPage&cached=true&parentname=CommunityPage&parentid=4&in_hi_userid=2&control=SetCommunity&CommunityID=553&PageID=1763#specification)

For aspiring devs out there who want to build an EMR and aren't sure where to start, implement this spec. I'm sure it'll overlap with many requirements that US health agencies might need. Except for complex billing with an array of insurance companies, but that's for another thread :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Jae is thinking in exactly the right direction. The challenge I feel is not building a better EMR - but rather its convincing hospitals that their EMRs really really suck and the $MMs they spent on "Traditional EMR" was all a waste.

I think in this industry its all about understanding the environment of current medical practice and re-engineering it piece by piece.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was just talking to an ex-HIPAA software manager the other day.

The complexities are ridiculous. For example, who can edit a patient record, when can they update it, why should they be able to edit it. Who can add information about drugs a patient is taking, which departments are allowed to update certain sections of a patient record...

<comment><USER15> Congratulations! You've found a problem that can't be solved in a weekend spent hacking! Despite the intricacies, it is still almost entirely a CRUD app, though: which means you have the skill set to implement it. No PhD in machine learning necessary!

Just because it can't be solved by one person in 72 hours doesn't mean it's impossible, as your comment seems to be implying (or at least, Very Difficult). That should say "defensible" to you, not "too hard, won't bother.". As far as technology goes, EMR is easy. It's the product design and enterprise sales that will kill you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> EMR's are just one part of healthcare, What we need is for all EMR's to follow standards which would make extracting/reusing information from them straightforward.

on a related note: <http://challenge.gov/HHS/134-smart-apps-for-health>

</comment><comment><USER17> I discovered last year that this is still a field where good honest money can be made since everyone is bitching about the fact that there is not a good solution.

I just wanted to keep my MRI and digital X-ray scans. I wanted to send them to the doctors to get their opinions on them and pay them for the time.

I still haven't done much on this myself, but lately I did use <http://www.webpax.com> to send some scans to several doctors. Their ideas saved me from a "recommended" operation by a previous doctor. Uploading DICOM could be easier, but still at least there is someplace on the web that enables it for me.

</comment><comment><USER18> A hospital when implementing an EMR is looking for some cost benefit in doing so. One obvious one is reducing medical errors. The other is reducing staff size. If the physician has to do all the work in entering the medication (drug, dosage, start/stop time, a reason, etc.), someone in the pharmacy department of the hospital is probably not doing it - reduced staff size = more profit for the hospital.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am a healthcare systems designer -- I design various technology aspects used in a hospital from the physical cable plant, the way technologies interact and information is displayed and consult on how data is accessed and consumed. I designed technology systems for both El Camino Hospital [1] and San Francisco General Hospital.

I was also co-founder of Contineo [2], with which we applied to YC in 2009 and were rejected.

Contineo was an attempt to answer many of these issues - and we had a hell of a time trying to get traction.

This post is good - but there are a lot of other factors that are at play in an organization which result in their deployment of whichever EMR they are on.

My answer was - and still is - an HL-7 Compliant, back-end agnostic client which can be deployed on iOS and Android devices.

We built this client and a demo for El Camino on top of both MedSphere's Open Vista EMR (We needed a schema to demo against) and we did a demo on El Camino Hospital's (ECH) implementation of Microsoft Amalga.

We built this as an iPod Touch application for a range of reasons but the two main ones at the time were the iPad didnt exist yet - though we were expecting it and the iPod touch is wifi and cheap. A $200 device for the use made good sense.

After having no traction or interest from YC or angels who all told us we needed paid pilots, and having a fallout with my co-founder it died...

But the idea is still valid, as are the main challenges.

Ill discuss each point in here - and again while this is a good post - it is actually made by someone who really isn't too familiar with how healthcare organizations are run, especially from an IT perspective and even more so from an EMR perspective.

There is an eternal battle between medical staff trying to always bring in some technology that will help them in their care and the IT organizations who are expected to manage and maintain all systems that peoples lives depend on.

This is further complicated by the fact that hospitals, and their staff ARE NOT IT ORGANIZATIONS and they most often outsource their IT operations to companies like Eclipsys, Perot systems (dell), and others.

This is the biggest issue. Because of this fact - orgs that outsource to Eclipsys get the Eclipsys EMR, Perot uses Epic, Others use Siemens etc...

And guess what -- these IT organizations are under strict contracts and WORK FOR A PROFIT so they have ZERO incentive to make changes, be fluid, "design for the web" or any other nice things we all take for obvious and granted.

The EMRs that are in place represent MILLIONS of dollars of inertial entrenchment behind such systems.

In this article he makes the following claims:

Build for the web

Build for ipad

Simple design

Design for small screen

Dream big

Leave it open ended

\---

Build for the web: THESE SYSTEMS ARE NOT ON THE WEB. They are either run in house - or via the IT providers datacenter through PPP tunnel. Every hospital has a number of BSA IT Folks on staff FULL TIME to manage the EMR for JUST THAT SITE. So to simply say that an EMR should be "on the web" is not thinking about the long term support of that EMR - and the organizations individual workflows that are built around two things: their staff and the physical layout of their facility.

Workflows account for the actual environment within the hospital and how that effects their ability to perform their duties.

\---

Build for the ipad:

The ipad is a beautiful luxurious device. Docctors make lots of money. Doctors are smart. Doctors like to buy luxurious things with their money. The ipad fits into this really really well. What it does not fit nicely into is a close-minded IT organizations view of a critical device that i easily maintained, managed and supported.

The ipad's environment is OWNED by APPLE. Apple takes a cut of the profit (30%) of your app. The case is not rugged, it is not hermetically sealed. And the device does not have a good multi-device charging station. The device cannot take external peripherals.

I love the iPad -- and I do think it is the future of medicine - but until Apple stops douching about with their iron grip on the thing, and make some concessions for enterprise, it is still hard for the iPad to be the device we all want it to.

The IT organizations in a hospital don't feel they can manage the iPad - <USER2> having years of experience in IT, the mantra will always be the same when an IT org is operating in fear mode "We don't have the resources" -- they will always say this. They don't like change.

And to the parent company, the IT org in each hospital is minimal staff to perform the requirements of the contract -- they are not there for anything else.

(Personally, I am working on a project (alternate YC application project to what I applied for) which is a medical information content management platform, but based on Android. The issue is that hospitals spend millions on hardware: computers, carts, tablets, televisions etc.. there is yet a single platform that can work for both patients (patient entertainment and education in-room) and staff (role based access to medical systems. I think that this is achievable through android.)

\---

Make it simple:

I agree with this, however just because it takes 6 hours to learn an application does not make one suck at making software... Autodesk makes AMAZING software that takes a lot more than 6 hours.

The issue here is that every organization has individualized workflows. You need to spend a lot of time boiling them down to their essence. Certain aspects should be able to be made simple and consistent - like medication administration.

Design for the small screen: This was actually the biggest push back! There are almost 3 million registered nurses in the US. At El Camino alone they had more than 900 ON SHIFT at any given moment - with an employee population nearing 6000.

The AVERAGE age of their nursing staff was 47 years old. They did NOT want a small screen.

Even with all the reasons why the iPod touch was a great device, even the typical 15" screens in the facility were too small for them.

This is correct - you must design for a small screen - but what this means is that you need to really understand the workflow so you can only put the UI elements on screen that must be there for each step - big buttons.

Dream Big: Every big EMR player out there is going to try and stop you. We were asked by Thrasys (who makes sorian med suite for Siemens) if we would OEM our product to them, they had us come in and meet with them, review our capabilities etc... under the guise of them wanting to OEM - but really they were phishing for ideas to steal.

Epic didn't want to work with us because they dont want any agnostic clients touching their system.

Eclipsys is barely technically capable. They don't even fully implement HL-7 making it difficult to get the interactions you need.

\---

Leave it open ended:

You will need to be able to make custom workflows for any client. Every client will be different.

The EMR really needs to be addressed - but with the current state of EMRs, the closed minded stance that their creators have and the incentive to defend like mad their territory -- there are other ways to make in-roads into the healthcare space that might work a bit easier. This is why I am going after the patient entertainment space -- the patient room is where you can really make headway in this battle - because the EMR folks wont see you coming. But it is at the bedside, the experience that the patient has and the affect you can have on staff, that one can start to take on the big players.

All the other EMR apps built on iPad are really targeted to the small practice physicians. Dr Chrono is doing well at this angle.

\--

[1] <http://www.popsci.com/bown/2009/product/el-camino-hospital> [2] [http://medsphere.org/community/project/ovid/blog/2009/11/25/...](http://medsphere.org/community/project/ovid/blog/2009/11/25/announcing- openvista-rest)</comment>


How to say no to a Facebook recruiter (and have it mean something) - <AUTHOR> I sent this reply to a Facebook recruiter. It's equally fitting for Twitter. If you care about democracy, you might send something similar:
Thank you for reaching out, but for ethical reasons I have never worked for defense contractors.
Given how Russia uses Facebook to undermine democracy in the US, promote Brexit in England, and support right-wing extremists in Germany, France and elsewhere, working at Facebook is like working for a Russian defense contractor at a time of open hostility with the US. I don't know how any thinking person could do that.
If you have a channel for sending this message to people who could change that situation, please forward it.
Sincerely,
Larry <comment><USER2> Your own country undermines Democracy all around the world on a much larger scale, and has been doing so since its inception. It even undermines Democracy inside of itself. This is hypocritical and seriously narrow minded.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're arguing that Facebook and Twitter aren't being used to push extremism you're wrong. If you're saying it doesn't matter because the US (and others) are flawed, you're wrong.

<comment><USER2> >If you're arguing that Facebook and Twitter aren't being used to push extremism you're wrong.

I never said any of that.

>If you're saying it doesn't matter because the US (and others) are flawed, you're wrong.

It really doesn't matter. Russia's involvement is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. $100,000 in Russian ads, vs $6,800,000,000 spent by the campaigns, corporations, relentless Trump media coverage, and large donors, come on.

What country _hasn 't_ the USA interrupted a democratic process? Is it OK as long as we do it?</comment></comment></comment>


Why Apple Could Win Big With Tesla's Giant New Battery Factory - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2014/02/teslas-giant-battery-factory-save-apple/ <comment><USER2> This is bigger than any Apple deal.  THINK BIGGER.

Apple might or might not invest in the Gigafactory to reduce the cost of their lithium battery component of their hardware by 30%, but tesla is thinking bigger.

I first thought that Apple should buy Tesla, but my thought process has changed and I think this discussion between Apple and Tesla is short sighted, it's a means to an end.

Don't think of Tesla as only a car company. 35GW of battery production per year is a huge amount of electricity storage potential.

The USA uses ~1,000GWh of electricity per year, much of this is baseline power needs, but more of this is peak power caused by time of use and heat spikes. We build 1GW power plants all the time to take care of these peaks in power demand. When the price of electricity hits a certain real-time price these natural gas plants turn on, produce the high value electricity and then turn off when the price falls back down.

But why is the electric motor so much better than a combustion motor? Time. Torque is instant.

Elon thinks BIG, REALLY BIG!

This is a Distributed Peak Production Play. If I am correct then each year that the Gigafactory can produce an additional 35GW of storage potential, or 3.5% of the USA's generation capacity.

Each Tesla automobile is an internet connected, transportable, 85kW distributed instant peak power plant and when you put 500,000 new powerplants on the road each year for 10 years you have just cut peak power and completely disrupted the Global Energy Industry by creating 350GW, 35% of the USA's annual demand, and its distributed redundant energy system.

Elon loves redundant distributed systems, Falcon9 has 9 Merlin engines, Tesla's battery packs, Solar City's distributed solar, etc.

Don't believe me? Just wait 10 years.

<comment><USER3> > The USA uses ~1,000GWh of electricity per year

That's off by several orders of magnitude. Wikipedia says ~4100 TWh/year, Wolfram Alpha ~3900 TWh/year. It's also 35 GWh of battery production, not 35 GW (which seems obvious in retrospect but I just spent 10 minutes trying to wrap my head around how the 35 GW figure could fit in). A 1 GW power plant -- which incidentally is quite large -- generates (if run at capacity) 365 * 24 = 8760 GWh per year.

So, not 3.5%, but roughly 0.001%.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=electrical+energy+used+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=electrical+energy+used+in+us+in+GWh%2Fyear)

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

<comment><USER4> I grew up in a small country of 400K people, which in 2012 generated 2.2GWh of power. [1] This is very easy to calculate, since the country has only 2 power plants, and the electricity grid is completely isolated. [2]

I was astonished to realize that the battery output of 4 weeks from the gigafactory would power my native country entirely from batteries for a full year!

[1] Page 2: [http://www.nso.gov.mt/statdoc/document_file.aspx?id=3743](http://www.nso.gov.mt/statdoc/document_file.aspx?id=3743)

[2] [https://www.enemalta.com.mt/index.aspx?cat=2&art=5](https://www.enemalta.com.mt/index.aspx?cat=2&art=5)

<comment><USER3> That document refers to 2 296 296 MWh = 2 296 GWh = 2.2 TWh.

<comment><USER4> Obviously I was too sleepy when I looked at this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To me, it seems much more likely that an Apple/Tesla meeting revolved around Apple wanting Tesla to offer an iOS powered in-car computer, as they've just done with the other carmakers.

Apple could also be buying Tesla, of course, but I can't imagine Apple not at least trying to get Tesla onto iOS. Though I also can't imagine a world where Tesla would agree!

<comment><USER6> There is zero chance of Apple buying Tesla. It's either (a) iOS in the car as you said or (b) co-investment, patent sharing or technology sharing between the two companies.

<comment><USER7> Given the battery 'advances' Apple likes to tout, I wouldn't be surprised if it's both :)

The reoccurring thought for me though: "FINALLY we're getting somewhere!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >But Koslowski says those old batteries could also become part of a robust secondary market. They could, for instance, store energy generated by home solar grids, which can make use of less-than-full strength cells because they don't have to go anywhere.

Is that how the degradation curve of LiIon batteries goes? My experience with them in consumer electronics has been that they seem to drop capacity about linearly for a while, and then suddenly there's a massive drop-off and the battery becomes more of a brick than anything.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is not as if Lithium is a abundant reserve that is available whenever you need.

Yes there are enough Lithium reserve even for the next 100s years even if EV were suddenly replacing all cars today. And it is much like oil, there are still HUGE amount of reserve.

But the problem is extraction. Or more precisely the cost of extraction. If some of these reserve cost 10x more to extract then no one will invest into extracting it. Example would be if US didn't perfected Fracking Natural Gas wouldn't be so much cheaper today.

Then there is the technology side of Battery. Telsa are NO expert in Battery Chemistry and Technology. They have currently zero expertise and experience with it. Compared to Panasonic or Other who have been perfecting the battery tech for decades.

The problem with today's battery isn't production capacity. Heck China could ramp up production of battery faster then you could even imagine and have a world of over supply issues within a year. The problem is with battery tech itself which requires innovation or even a leap forward.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems like a bit of a reach?

<comment><USER11> Particularly since the batteries the Gigafactory will produce are not fit for use in consumer gear, at least not without heavy modification. Tesla uses them in temperature and load controlled battery packs, so they have stripped away all of the protective circuits that nomally protect LiIon cells from overload and even removed the outer metal casing thats supposed to stop them from shorting out.

<comment><USER12> The design of the current Tesla battery would have been significantly driven by the nature of existing capital investments in battery manufacturing processes. There's no indication that batteries would necessarily be in that form in a process you build from scratch. The Gigafactory could very well plan for variations around their core production process. And, based on the production volume that Apple could consume, Apple certainly has the investment capital to make that variation worthwhile.

<comment><USER11> Actually, Panasonic built a new plant. But thats besides the point. As you move to the kind of battery you would want mass-manufactured and used in Tesla battery-packs, the level of protection and isolation by each cell will only get less, not more. And you certainly don't want to deal with the pouch form- factor that is needed in devices like the iPad.

<comment><USER12> I see your point - but Panasonic's plant may still be constrained by current market demands. A new plant, and new Tesla car battery design can be driven by whatever constraints will bring down total price in the Gigafactory + Tesla consumption. I would think that getting to that goal could encompass a battery design with a structural enclosure with intra-cell and outer-wall protection for pouch batteries. Vs cylindrical cells with no outer wall protection it just doesn't seem like that large of an engineering jump - more of a repeat of the previous engineering design processes at a different design point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like this might be a step towards Tesla working with Apple to make their (Tesla's) batteries consumer ready/enabled. Apple obviously has good experience and knowledge on that front that could create an interesting partnership where Apple consumer products all have Tesla batteries.

Hey that be one cool footnote to have on the back of your iPhone.. "Designed by Apple in California and Powered by Tesla" ;-)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is the limitation in making faster/better/cheaper batteries a bigger battery factory? Or is it the raw materials to make LiIon batteries?

What is the world's capacity for lithium hexafluorophosphate? Japan currently makes the bulk of the supply.

<comment><USER15> The limitation on making better batteries is research, having a NA factory isn't going to help that. As per increasing the rate and reducing the cost, I don't have a good answer for that, Li-Ion battery production is already incredibly automated I'm not sure how much they can improve the rates. I would be surprised if Tesla hasn't figured out the supply chain management for all the materials they require.

I'm still sort of skeptical about this factory. There have been very few battery manufacturing plants ever built in North America over the years and they have pretty much all shut down (A123, E-One Moli, and Delphi are the three that come to mind) as they don't make money.</comment></comment>


Daily Science Fiction - <AUTHOR> https://dailysciencefiction.com/ <comment><USER2> My favorite story from this site is a fantasy advice column--Sophie Wereley's "Unconventional Advice for the Discerning Reader": [https://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/modern- fantasy/sophi...](https://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/modern- fantasy/sophie-wereley/unconventional-advice-for-the-discerning-reader)

I also liked barry charman's robot love story, "Upgrades": [https://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/robots- and-c...](https://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/robots-and- computers/barry-charman/upgrades)

And Shae Davidson's "10 Reasons Aliens Just Can't Get Enough of This Small West Virginia Town": [https://dailysciencefiction.com/science- fiction/aliens/shae-...](https://dailysciencefiction.com/science- fiction/aliens/shae-davidson/10-reasons-aliens-just-cant-get-enough-of-this- small-west-virginia-town)

</comment><comment><USER3> A couple more in a similar vein:

[https://365tomorrows.com/](https://365tomorrows.com/)

[https://everydayfiction.com/](https://everydayfiction.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I love these short stories. Fits much better into my life (with kids) nowadays. Recently I went to download and subscribe to Analog Science Fiction and Fact on my iPad, but boy what a setback that was. Can't set the font smaller/bigger, the landscape view makes the pages way too small and the app doesn't assume the light/dark theme of the iPad. Basically it's an image or PDF viewer, and not a great one.

Anyone tips in this regard?

<comment><USER2> I can't help with Analog, but we're in a golden age of free SF online. My vague feeling is Clarkesworld[0] may be most similar to Analog's editorial POV, and RocketStackRank[1] provides an overview of what several other SFWA- qualifying venues are publishing. Compelling[2] comes to mind as a (currently) non-qualifying market probably aiming at an audience like Analog's.

[0]: [http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/](http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/)

[1]: [http://www.rocketstackrank.com/search/label/Monthly](http://www.rocketstackrank.com/search/label/Monthly)

[2]: [http://compellingsciencefiction.com/](http://compellingsciencefiction.com/)

<comment><USER4> Great resources, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sold my first story to them almost a decade ago when they were just getting started. Nice to see them still going!</comment>


Ask HN: Best resources to learn linux terminal - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering how you guys learn to navigate around the linux terminal environment or bash(?). I would like to become comfortable in the linux environment. (total noob atm). <comment><USER2> Are you familiar with DOS batches? If so, you can try starting writing some automation on DOS and then translating them into shell scripts. It was the way I started.

If not, you can try writing some basic automation scripts. Look for all of the repetitive tasks (copies, opening programs, clearing temps) and try to automate them. You will, unavoidably, start feeling comfortable and knowing all of the tools.

</comment><comment><USER3> The basics are simple. Do a search for a cheatsheet, do a quick look over on it and practice some of the commands. Use the command line a little every day until you get the hang of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool. will try it out. thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> read the manpages. Seriously. That, and do stuff that requires you to use the linux terminal.

For example, instead of clicking and using the GUI to extract tar files, try using `wget` and `tar`. then when you are more comfortable, try to do this in a pipeline.</comment>