Ask HN: How would you design a social network today? - <AUTHOR> Interested in hearing what people would do differently today if they had to design a social network. <comment><USER2> ++ Have it focused primarily on creating quality communication/collaboration in clustered social webs, organized between in common skills, occupations, hobbies, social morals and ideas.

++ These clusters control their own data and at random are introduced to different clusters.

++ Growing your network too quickly should be limited. It becomes way too much of a numbers game when that happens.

++ Sometimes inflection means more than the words used, so communication breakdowns and misunderstanding due to individual writing styles and the inability to express more accurately what users mean. To bring clarity and meaning to messages there should be styles to text and an overall agreement to an overarching communication styling for things like sarcasm and moods, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to have a version of facebook where I just saw original content instead of random stuff people share.

I want to see photos that my friends took, stories that my friends wrote, songs that my friends performed, etc.

Everytime I open Facebook, all I see is "Your friend liked this alarming news article" and I go and immediately close it again.

I want a network that lets me catch up with my friends rather than waste time clicking on videos produced by content farms.

</comment><comment><USER4> paid network user owned data fixes most problems</comment>


Android Application Permissions? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mypermissions.com/mypermissions-state-of-android-risk-privacy-q3-2014/

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we worked crazy hard accumulating the data and this is a sample of over 1.5 million apps. The stuff you see apps ask for is so over the top.

</comment><comment><USER2> Insane! Words with friends is insane!

</comment><comment><USER3> :)</comment>


Be Curious, Read Widely, Try New Things - A Polymath's Manifesto - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/how-to-be-a-polymath/1587bd659b99

<comment><AUTHOR> I've created a Medium collection to see how people treat learning and cross subject studies, I would love to hear people's thoughts and ideas.

<https://medium.com/how-to-be-a-polymath></comment>


Next Gates or Zuckerberg should stay in classroom - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b31e3756-9cb4-11e4-a730-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> The problem with this article is that they went and asked MBA colleges, not computer science colleges.</comment>


Artistically shaped magnets may make stellarators easier to manage than ITER - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/wibbly-wobbly-magnetic-fusion-stuff-the-return-of-the-stellarator/ <comment><USER3> I was just reading about stellarators in the book "A Piece of the Sun" [1] about the history of fusion. I find it fascinating (and a bit worrying) they are still basically attempting to optimize the same two approaches that were developed in the 50s/60s, tokamak and stellarator.

I respect the scientists who continue to work on this. Many people have spent their whole careers on it and have died without making significant progress. It's inherently challenging because it's super expensive and working at super high temperatures. But the potential of the end goal might be enough to keep people working on it perpetually.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1468304933/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1468304933/)

<comment><USER4> > I find it fascinating (and a bit worrying) they are still basically > attempting to optimize the same two approaches that were developed in the > 50s/60s, tokamak and stellarator.

This would be a bit like worrying that aerospace engineers are still optimizing wings. Like wings, tokomaks/stellarators are the best tools for the job, as dictated by the underlying physics of the systems in question. Basically, donut-shaped magnetically-confined plasmas "leak" into themselves, rather than out into the world.

> Many people have spent their whole careers on it and have died without > making significant progress.

This is a popular view that is entirely wrong. The figure of merit, which is the triple product of confinement time, density, and temperature, outpaced Moore's law right up until a gain of about 0.95, when the magnetic technology of the day caused the necessary size increase to put ITER in the realm of international cooperation. ITER absolutely will produce more power than it consumes. The plasma physics are just that well understood. The problem is size.

MIT have recently worked out that a new breed of superconducting magnets can more than double the available field strength, resulting in a 16-fold reduction in reactor size (due to a 4th power gain in confinement strength as a function of field strength). They hope to achieve a gain of about 2 with a university-scale reactor _before ITER, designed with the magnets available at the time, is complete_.

Most, if not all, of the above comes from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk). ARC and SPARC, the MIT reactor concepts, are the most exciting thing I've heard about in...gosh, I guess my whole life. They could pull it off. If they do, we could save the planet with fusion-powered CO2 scrubbing. We could avert disaster.

<comment><USER5> You know, I had a sad thought about fusion-powered CO_2 and that was once it will be built, the energy is likely to be used not for CO_2 scrubbing but instead to mine Bitcoin.

<comment><USER6> "Cheap energy means cheap air conditioning. We don't have to change a thing!"

<comment><USER7> That's how it worked ever since, including coal and oil. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >"Let me make it very clear: fusion is, if you simply look at the carbon dioxide goals we have, fusion would be too late to bring those carbon dioxide emissions down at the rate that we need. If renewables do the job, fusion could become part of a network of dispatchable power generation units. However, if renewables don't do the job, fusion will be too late to prevent serious damage. In that scenario, we would find ourselves in a bad situation for a period of time that extends beyond when the first fusion reactors come on line."

This quote is so telling on the limits of technology. So many people think of fusion as a technological miracle that can save the world. Here we have a man telling the world that we're fucked if we just sit on our asses waiting for this miracle.

<comment><USER9> Couldn't you just pump co2 out of the atmosphere if you had sufficient energy/money ?

<comment><USER8> pump it where?

<comment><USER10> Several options: pump it back down the oil wells it came from, use fast- growing juvenile trees to "pump" it into house frames and libraries, use algae to "pump" it into useful plastics, or, if you have infinite money, bottle it and shoot it at Mars to thicken the atmosphere.

<comment><USER11> You also forgot synthesizing diamonds, which, pulling it out of my butt, I imagine is on similar energy budget with dumping it on Mars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I watched this video called "MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - <USER2> Hartwig" which I thought was interesting (and which I submitted here two days ago but went unnoticed as it's the faith of many interesting HN submissions).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk)

There Zach gives a quick overview (well hour long) of the current state of fusion and what its future is going to be. He didn't talk too much about stellarators but I feel I have now a better overall understanding of fusion physics thanks to him.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you speak German, this podcast is fantastic: [https://alternativlos.org/36/](https://alternativlos.org/36/). The sheer number of technological challenges in a fusion reactor is just crazy. Besides plasma physics you have to invent welding techniques, materials and a lot of other stuff. Everything is on or over the limit of what we can do now.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I thought there was also one in English. I may confused it with one of those: [http://omegataupodcast.net/tag/fusion/](http://omegataupodcast.net/tag/fusion/)

<comment><USER13> This one is good too but it's about ITER.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was a previous article on HN about the WX-7. It's an incredible piece of mechanical engineering. It's more symmetrical than it looks at first.

The thing has the thermal management problem from hell. The magnet coils are superconductors and have to be maintained down near liquid helium temperatures. The plasma is at a few million degrees. These are inches apart.

3D printing might help when the next one is built. Rocket engines have some of the same problems - they're plumbing parts filled with cooling hollows. Those take way too many joints and welds to build. The Space-X Dragon spacecraft has 3D printed engines, which gets the part count down.

If we ever get room temperature superconductors, these things will be much simpler. If we ever got high temperature superconductors, so that the whole thing could run hot, like a boiler, that might make it economically feasible.

<comment><USER16> If they have to keep the temperature down near liquid helium they must be using (and need) type I superconductors. If we get room temperature superconductors any time in the near future it will almost certainly be type II.

<comment><USER17> What's the difference between them? When would you need one or the other?

<comment><USER16> Turns out I was wrong. These applications use niobium-titanium or niobium-tin, both of which are type II superconductors. They do have relatively low Tc -- 10-20 kelvins versus >80 kelvin for the best HTSC, and are cooled even lower to maximize the critical field and current (i.e. maximum they can withstand before losing superconductivity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's like Frank Gehry designed a reactor.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if you could make it in the form of a tree, where you took the leaves and wrapped them around to join the roots, like an inside out donut.

So in the middle you'd have your conjoined mega stream, and then that would flow upward, be separated out into filaments which then curl around in all directions down to the roots where they are re-merged into the megastream.

Probably too much turbulence at the branches, but maybe they can use vibration and learning to find beneficial harmonics. I would hire sound engineers.

I just have an intuition that a single stream will never have adequate confinement and you'll need redundancy in the geometry to get good concentration.

<comment><USER20> You should build your design and tell us if it works. Or even better, patent it and maybe make millions from licensing it to a conglomerate.

<comment><USER19> Why would I build it? You have to model this stuff computationally before you even have a whiff of an idea whether it would work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is what real engineering looks like.

</comment><comment><USER22> I kept waiting for the artistic magnets. Sadly the opening image the best you get.

<comment><USER23> There's a bunch of pictures of them in the article's slideshows.</comment></comment>


CryptoKitties sales plummet in popularity - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/cryptokitties-blockchain-beanie-babies-transactions-plummet-2018-6?op=1 <comment><USER2> I'm more wondering why would legit investors pour 12 mil into something that it obviously a short-lived gimmick. There are plenty of similar examples that perfectly illustrate how fast people get bored with something like this (e.g. flappy bird, pokemon go, fidget spinners) and yet the round got successfully closed [0]. I just don't understand what needs to be happening inside an investor's head to put their own money into something like this.

[0] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cryptokitties#sectio...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cryptokitties#section- funding-rounds)

<comment><USER3> Greed.

Someone who bought cryptokitty early on sold it for 100x returns easily.

Everyone on the hype train was reselling kitties to next bigger fool.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that essentially what's happening to Crypto in general?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the biggest scam in bitcoin is using the motte-and-bailey argument that "blockchains have real-world use", and "already existing bitcoins are worth tens of thousands each".

The only things you can do with already mined blockchain blocks are selling them, or hoarding them. Their immutability is their biggest selling point, after all.

<comment><USER6> Are you certain you understand blockchains and cryptocurrencies?

Ex: _The only things you can do with already mined blockchain blocks are selling them, or hoarding them._

You don't actually do anything with blocks. Blocks contain transaction data for the network, confirmed by miners who play hash games for block rewards. I think you mean the actual coins that come as block rewards, aka Satoshis / Bitcoin.

Are you familiar with decentralization and developing apps on things like Ethereum? Or IPFS?

<comment><USER7> Cryptocurrencies are really not that hard to understand. Without a doubt, they are better understood on average among HN readers than among cryptocurrency owners, and yet, it is the only subject where expressing doubt over it's worth always gets you hit with _" Well maybe you're just not enlightened enough??"_

<comment><USER8> > expressing doubt over it's worth always gets you hit with "Well maybe you're > just not enlightened enough??"

I also doubt that blockchains contribute anything of value for most applications that are currently being tried out, but I also felt that "selling blockchain blocks" was an odd way to phrase it.

It's a bit like someone claiming that a perpetuum mobile is impossible because "movement consumes energy and eventually it will run out". You can't tell whether they have the correct idea about conservation of energy and momentum or whether they actually believe that moving at a constant speed would constantly require energy even without friction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What i understood of this 12M investment was that it invested in its team, not CruyptoKitties, to explore this type of gamification using blockchains.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interestingly, cryptokitties is behind the effort for standardizing the concept of asset or non-fungible tokens (where tokens, here kitties, have different prices). It's called ERC-721 (similar to RFCs) and it's quite controversial: see [https://blog.citymayor.co/posts/why-the-standardization- of-e...](https://blog.citymayor.co/posts/why-the-standardization-of- erc-721-is-a-bad-idea/)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's the Beanie Babies of cryptocurrency. Of course it's going to plummet in popularity.

<comment><USER12> Better, the "Pet rock"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _pop_ goes the bubble!

<comment><USER14> That is an an underestimation of the technical, financial and social value of distributed ledger technology if Cryptokitties sales is your bubble barometer.

Let's see what's going to happen to _finance_. The fiat-crypto infrastructure that has been and is continuing to be laid out by multiple varied parties is an indicator for the recurrence of another bull market, especially when the current market cap is compared to the the cash, stocks and commodities that are out there, each kind of which crypto assets are identical to.

The best thing we can hope for is the next bull run to be based on actual use, working products that add benefit and value to market society. And who knows, maybe it'll all even become _transformative_.

<comment><USER15> Please enlighten us: what are real-world applications of blockchain technology that provide a benefit to anyone in any sector?

Please remember that there are over 7 billion people in the world that want to potentially use it, so Bitcoin (or similar) are not working as a payment system.

<comment><USER16> Bitcoin as a settlement system would work just fine at that scale.

<comment><USER17> Bitcoin is every day making absolutely sure it scales less, costs more, is more dependent on centralization and alienates more people.

It's not even funny. Go for ETH, BCH, Dash, or whatever, Bitcoin is proud to continually shoot themselves in the foot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I assume most of the demand/volume was secretly subsidized by the company.</comment>


Show HN: dokibox – an open source music player for OS X - <AUTHOR> https://dokibox.github.io/?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=showhn

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Been working on this on and off for about 3 years now as a side project and it's my first 'large-ish' OSX app. Would love comments or suggestions! Thanks.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a need for anonymous cloud service? - <AUTHOR> Out of curiosity, is there a need for anonymous cloud service which trades bitcoin for usage like AWS? <comment><USER2> I like this idea, although I don't see how it would solve the problem of providers ejecting content they disagree with. All I think it would do is allow people to shield their real identities. Sites like the Daily Stormer (which I personally find disgusting) could still be shut down by a cloud provider who disagrees with the message.

What might be really interesting is a cloud service that allows anonymous accounts, and also has a free-speech-absolutist policy (and sticks to it even when it's hard).

<comment><USER3> Like NearlyFreeSpeech.net [0]?

[0]: [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net)

<comment><USER2> Interesting, thanks for the link. Their website loaded really slow for me tho, which makes me nervous when evaluating a hosting provider :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sure, but it's going to be quickly abused out of existence.</comment>


The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines - <AUTHOR> http://inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something (probably fond memories and press) but it just sounds like a company that got too much money, spent it poorly, got additional subsidy from DARPA, then fell apart when the gravy train stopped.

It's interesting to think what Hillis and the others could have done if it was run as a well funded research project for a fraction of the money they spent on expensive leases and gourmet chefs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading this made me wonder about the eventual fate of Thinking Machines. Wikipedia says most of it was bought by Sun, the rest by... Oracle!

Now we know why Oracle is really buying Sun.

</comment><comment><USER4> As I recall ENIAC had more than one processor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm. I read a long article about recently and it only mentioned one thing we'd recognize as a proto-ALU operating at 5 KHz. Nowhere did I get any hint of it being multi processor, do you have a reference for that ?

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC>

_The ENIAC was a modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions. Twenty of these modules were accumulators, which could not only add and subtract but hold a ten-digit decimal number in memory. Numbers were passed between these units across a number of general-purpose buses, or trays, as they were called. In order to achieve its high speed, the panels had to send and receive numbers, compute, save the answer, and trigger the next operation — all without any moving parts. Key to its versatility was the ability to branch; it could trigger different operations that depended on the sign of a computed result._

It really has little to do with the design and evolution of the modern desktop. But, it's still a cool design IMO.

 _ENIAC used ten-position ring counters to store digits; each digit used 36 vacuum tubes, 10 of which were the dual triodes making up the flip-flops of the ring counter. Arithmetic was performed by "counting" pulses with the ring counters and generating carry pulses if the counter "wrapped around", the idea being to emulate in electronics the operation of the digit wheels of a mechanical adding machine. ENIAC had twenty ten-digit signed accumulators which used ten's complement representation and could perform 5,000 simple addition or subtraction operations between any of them and a source (e.g., another accumulator, or a constant transmitter) every second._

<comment><AUTHOR> ok I see what you mean. I read 'accumulator' to mean 'register', the fact that they can add and subtract as well gives them limited processing ability, which is where the 'accumulation' part comes in.

Sort of like the 'a' register in a 65xx series chip.

(it's named the 'a' register to stand in for accumulator).

But a binary adder is not exactly a processor!

And a cpu with multiple accumulators is not multi-core.

<comment><USER4> I see what you mean. _It was possible to connect several accumulators to run simultaneously, so the peak speed of operation was potentially much higher due to parallel operation._ Modern CPU's can do similar things, but that's normally hidden from the coder. IMO, they are a little more capable than a pure accumulator as they can do IO operations with any other node of the system.

I guess the real distinction is if each node could do conditional branch operations. Honestly, I am fuzzy on how a system without RAM could do branch operations anyway. _It was first demonstrated as a stored-program computer on September 16, 1948, running a program by Adele Goldstine for John von Neumann. This modification reduced the speed of ENIAC by a factor of six and eliminated the ability of parallel computation, but as it also reduced the reprogramming time to hours instead of days, it was considered well worth the loss of performance._

So, I think they where having the same problem. I think the original design was much closer to a modern GPU with stream processors than a CPU, and they use the term processor even if they are fairly limited.

PS: Still, it was approximately a ~32bit machine (10^10 > 2^32) which is cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it could do branching at all, the 'if' or its equivalent was not yet invented. One way to get around this is to skip instructions based on status bits.

It was equipped with a FOR like instruction.

<http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/eniac.html>

I think one of the best ways to describe the ENIACs parallel use of the accumulators is to think of it as SIMD, each accumulators could be slaved in order to run the same operation in parallel on multiple data items.

Your stream processor analogy is pretty good, that's essentially what it did.

EDIT: found this on the branching:

"ome time during the ENIAC's development, the project's engineers and mathematicians (possibly including its female programmers) discovered that with some minor modifications they could perform what would be considered a conditional branch--the IF-THEN statement in modern programming languages. Those associated with the ENIAC had called this "magnitude discrimination." Partly by chance, the control signals on the ENIAC were essentially identical to the data signals, both of which typically were 2 usec pulses placed at ten usec intervals. By connecting one of the data lines of an accumulator into the control line of another, the ENIAC's operations could, in principle, be controlled based on the content of its data (technically known as data- sensitive operations). Certain aspects in the machine's design made necessary a slightly more complicated implementation. Nevertheless, the ENIAC was probably the first electronic machine to support the conditional branch instruction."

From: [http://oldsite.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwm...](http://oldsite.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwm8b.html)

EDIT#2: just posted a pdf on a java simulator of the ENIAC, it comes with lots of details on the guts of the ENIAC:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743743>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> seriously, how many times does this article has to be posted in HN?

<comment><USER6> Well, this is the first time I saw it, so I don't mind.

<comment><USER5> <http://searchyc.com/The+Rise+and+Fall+of+Thinking+Machines>

and that's just with the same title. I can swear there were more times where this was posted under some different title.

considering that HN is very "link-oriented", maybe pg could bump an original thread when someone is posting a dupe?</comment></comment></comment>


You Should Waste 50% of Your Time - <AUTHOR> http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2010/01/you-should-waste-50-of-your-time.html

<comment><USER2> I thought this was going t be about productivity gains through idle time. It's actually about spending half your time self promoting. It's directed toward researchers, but it applies equally to anyone producing output. The point: do good work, but also promote it or it'll never see the light of day.

<comment><USER3> You are right about the main point.

When I first started looking into this topic, I thought it was that simple. "You just have to tell the world about your work," I told myself.

Then my friend Ross laid the smack down on me: [http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2009/12/build- brands-w...](http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2009/12/build-brands-with- luck-and-persistence.html)

If you read through Hamming's statements, and my reflections on them, you can see that it is not as simple as just promoting - it is specific recipes about how to do so effectively, and how to avoid certain mistakes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would say it is better to spend all your time productively in what ever you do best. You can get someone else to do the promoting. As a result you spend 100% of your time doing what you do best, programming for example, and someone else spends 100% of their time promoting, which they perhaps do best.

<comment><USER5> It's not always possible. PR firms are expensive. They also can't promote to a mostly technical audience. That's why you should give talks about your research/development, blog/tweet, post on sites like this. I've found that especially with open source projects, once you get the word out others will be more than happy to be your projects' "technical evangelists" because they love using them.

That being said, if you're a company, _can_ afford a PR firm and you have produced something worth promoting, it usually makes sense to pay others do promote. The Submarine article by Paul Graham really opened my eyes on this: <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html> (ever wonder where feature stories in mainstream magazines about start-ups, showing happy hackers solving technical puzzles on white boards come from?)

However, I've also seen companies suffer because they've hired sales, marketing and PR staff on "easy" VC/parent company money _before_ they had a working product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You Should Waste 90% of Your Time

"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." -Alan Kay

I think therefore that the expected value of the ratio of time wasted to total time should be x, where x >= .90

<comment><USER7> The Alan Kay quote does _not_ say you should _waste_ 90% of your time, Kay says you should _fail_ 90% of the time. It is only wasted time if you don't learn from your failures.

Further, the quote in the original post from Hamming is that "at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation." Hamming does _not_ call preparation and presentation "waste". Reading the Hamming quotes, I find nothing that indicates he thought being friendly, conforming, making, or giving presentations was wasted time.

On the contrary, Hamming spent quite a bit of time criticizing his contemporaries for _wasted effort_ (his words) by ineffectively swinging their egos rather than working within the system (or judiciously bypassing the system).

<comment><USER3> @gvb the use of the word waste stems from the fact that many technical people (previously including myself) make the mistake of thinking that the time Hamming is talking about spending on presenting your ideas is waste.

Clearly, I am arguing against that in this piece.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great references to books and talks, thanks!</comment>


How aqua regia saved Nobel Prize medals from the Nazis - <AUTHOR> http://www.aschoonerofscience.com/?p=1710 <comment><USER2> The page is fiction, but it documents fact at the bottom:

 _This be fiction based on a true story. George de Hevesy is credited with dissolving two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia and storing them during the second world war, where they remained unnoticed despite careful searching by the Nazis. The gold was later recovered and recoined, and presented back to the two owners. George de Hevesy won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radioactive isotopes._

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting set of events. But the artificial dramatization really reeks of a cheap B grade pulp. I am sure the fictionalization could have been done more tastefully. It evokes Sam Spade or Tracer Bullet more than a working chemist.

      ...taking gold out of Germany was almost a capital offense,
      carrying a punishment not to be sneezed at. George was
      certainly not sneezing, but his palms were sweating as if
      he had a fever and his heart was pounding like a drum....

      Perhaps in the near future he would be holding a Nobel
      Prize of his own.

      But for now, these two Prizes were all he had, and they
      were getting smaller.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a neat story, and of course by the time the Germans were almost there, disposing of the gold was the only option. But it's a strange interpretation of the word "saved" (or perhaps "medals") in the title that makes the claim that this process actually saved the medals themselves, since they had to be recoined later.

</comment><comment><USER5> A more factual account of the medals:

<http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/about/medals/>

The relevant excerpt:

Professor Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen had been a refuge for German Jewish physists since 1933. Max von Laue and James Franck had deposited their medals there to keep them from being confiscated by the German authorities. After the occupation of Denmark in April 1940, the medals were Bohr's first concern, according to the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy (also of Jewish origin and a 1943 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry), who worked at the institute. In Hitler's Germany it was almost a capital offense to send gold out of the country. Since the names of the Laureates were engraved on the medals, their discovery by the invading forces would have had very serious consequences. To quote George de Hevesy (Adventures in Radioisotope Research, Vol. 1, p. 27, Pergamon, New York, 1962), who talks about von Laue's medal: "I suggested that we should bury the medal, but Bohr did not like this idea as the medal might be unearthed. I decided to dissolve it. While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving Laue's and also James Franck's medals. After the war, the gold was recovered and the Nobel Foundation generously presented Laue and Frank with new Nobel medals." de Hevesy wrote to von Laue after the war that the task of dissolving the medals had not been easy, as gold is "exceedingly unreactive and difficult to dissolve." The Nazis occupied Bohr's institute and searched it very carefully but they did not find anything. The medals quietly waited out the war in a solution of aqua regia.</comment>


RubyJS: A JavaScript standard library based on the Ruby core-lib - <AUTHOR> http://rubyjs.org/ <comment><USER3> If you're after a standard library for Javascript, you could do worse than including es5-shim. Which has the advantage of being a library that (partially) implements a standard: Ecmascript 5.

        > es5-shim.js and es5-shim.min.js monkey-patch a
        > JavaScript context to contain all EcmaScript 5
        > methods that can be faithfully emulated with a
        > legacy JavaScript engine.

It provides Array::map, Array::filter, Array::reduce as defined in Ecmascript 5 along with String::trim and others, as well as replacing buggy implementations.

Previous versions of es5-shim included shims for things that cannot be correctly or completely shimmed in ES3 but those have since been separated and I now recommend including es5-shim in basically all web projects to get closer to a modern javascript in most browsers.

<comment><USER4> Sure. You could do worse than RubyJS as well. This project is implementing the standard set by the reference implementation of Ruby and its standard library. And having used Ruby a bit, I've come to find its standard library quite good, as dynamic languages go. So it doesn't much matter that ES5 features are "more native"—here and now, it's still a matter of preference.

<comment><USER5> I don't really see why RubyJS would be better than PHP.js.

And I'm definitely not saying that PHP.js should be used.

[edit] To be more specific, I really don't see the point of using a third- party library when the native methods are available. IMHO, if you choose a language, you should stick with it.

<comment><USER6> RubyJS creator here. I was just missing so many (native) methods in javascript. i liked the standard library of javascript and there is an extensive public ruby testsuite that i could use to test my implementation against. Plus i liked the idea of taking something that already works elsewhere and translate it JS, instead of coming up with my own API. IMO it's the same as using underscore/lodash, stringjs, etc, just all in the same library with the same coding standards and interoperability between classes.

<comment><USER7> What is the license currently? It says Affero in the presentation, but github shows MIT license?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I laughed so hard about the testimonial on the page:

      If I had to code JavaScript I would use RubyJS.
      Yukihiro (Matz) Matsumoto, creator of Ruby

Of course, the best authority for writing ruby-like JS is Matz, who else would be better? ;-D

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not a rubyist, and I can see how this can be nice for ruby developers, but IMHO, if you need javascript - use javascript.

Why add another layer of complexity and error proneness? What happens when a different js programmer needs to review your code? Or when you need to write some Node.js code and forgot all about syntax?

"The main motive is to have a decent standard library for JavaScript" - <USER2> works just fine.

<comment><USER10> Prototype, Underscore, jQuery, Coffescript, .... RubyJS - nobody love pure JS, when you've got a chance to write nice code(short and descriptive) - why don't use this ability? And about "different js programmer needs to review your code" - if you don't know smth then you need to study it. That's a fundament of programming world(probably not only programming))

<comment><USER5> Untrue. The ES5 standard contains most of the features required for any application (my main issue being the Date prototype which could easily be improved).

jQuery, Prototype and afaik Underscore helper functions have been wrote when the standard wasn't ready. Now that it is, developers should start using them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> James Coglan did a lot of this with his excelent JS.Class[1]

[1] <http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> How are callbacks handled in this library? I prefer js anonymous functions to Procs & lambdas in Ruby.

<comment><USER13> I do as we'll. After working in node for a bit I have come to appreciate how nice the call backs work, but I hate the fact I have to use them every where. Plus ruby has a few ways to implement callbacks which can be confusing.

<comment><USER14> Yes, as someone who really likes Ruby, this is probably my least favourite thing about it — the messy profusion of subtly-different functiony things (Procs, blocks, methods, ...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those who haven't already looked, the implementation of the standard library (in CoffeeScript) is pretty interesting: <https://github.com/rubyjs/core-lib/blob/master/ruby.coffee>

</comment><comment><USER16> Is Underscore.js not good enough for you guys? Really?

<comment><USER17> I'm not a fan of RubyJS, but I dislike underscore for the same reason: it encourages people to use implementation specific versions fo existing ES5 standard methods [1].

I use ES5 shim instead. That way when I ditch support for IE8, I don't have to fix anything.

[1] Obviously Underscore doesn't have methods, it has utility functions attached to punctuation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Shades of <http://phpjs.org/functions/>?

</comment><comment><USER19> I think this is really awesome. I know I can use ES5 and I don't even have to worry about old browsers because my app requires the latest to work, but I think this is more a preference thing.

Hell, I could even use JQuery for a lot of this stuff, but I really like ruby standard library and it's cleaness.

</comment><comment><USER20> I did a quick check of the implementation, am I wrong in thinking every primitive type is boxed ?

If it is the case, i expect the performance to be pretty abysmal. Do you have some data on that ?

<comment><USER6> Yes. Primitives are boxed. However method arguments are only boxed when needed, which makes it as fast as normal. In the methods internally are all using JS primitives (there are some left-overs where that's not the case yet). Wrapper objects are similarly fast as extending native JS types.

<comment><USER20> Ok thanks !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is just a library. There's nothing "standard" about it.

</comment><comment><USER6> RubyJS creator here.

Here's the launch presentation at jscamp.asia: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T0PJbJaMwA>

</comment><comment><USER22> Love to see a comparison with this to SugarJS

</comment><comment><USER23> why</comment>


Apple launches vintage repair pilot program - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/01/apple-launches-vintage-repair-pilot-program-to-fix-aging-iphones-macbooks-and-more/ <comment><USER2> fuck off apple, we want the right to repair our devices. It goes beyond just having them fixed now.</comment>


Show HN: Maximise your Holiday – UK - <AUTHOR> I built a website (https://maximiseyourannualleave.co.uk) that helps to plan 2018 annual leave in the UK.
For example, if you want to book 15 days, you have: - 10 different dates to have 26 days off - 16 different dates to have 25 days off - 31 different dates to have 24 days off
Is that useful for someone? <comment><USER2> Pretty handy. Fast. Nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Global helium shortage in prospect as US reservoir in line to close next month - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/19/helium-shortage-us-reservoir-texas <comment><USER2> Been a looming problem for years:

[http://www.metafilter.com/94959/We-Are-Running-Out-Of- Helium...](http://www.metafilter.com/94959/We-Are-Running-Out-Of-Helium-and- Its-Worse-Than-You-Think)

The Helium Privatisation Act required the reserve to sell enough helium to pay off its debts by a given deadline, then close. The resulting glut has kept the price low.

[http://phys.org/news201853523.html](http://phys.org/news201853523.html)

I don't know why they didn't instead just sell the reserve in its entirety for the amount of the debt, or for more. If the goal was to get the government out of the helium business (a dubious aim, if it's really as strategic an asset as all that) that would have done the job immediately and eliminated years of market distortion. But I guess any upheaval that resulted would be easily tied to the government officials who were around at the time.

 _Helium is a byproduct of natural gas production ... Demand for helium has risen, driven particularly by Asia 's booming manufacturing industry._

A cynic might wonder if a closing date known 19 years in advance was designed partly to ensure that American petrochemical industry had time to develop the infrastructure required to take maximum advantage of any price shock.

<comment><USER3> While there may be corruption afoot, part of the reason they couldn't move the entire supply at once is because it's so hard to store. Helium can seep through a steel tank without difficulty. The US government keeps its helium in an old mine dug out of very dense rock. Apparently it is one of few facilities capable of long term helium storage.

<comment><USER4> Why not sell the whole hole?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this is true, why we continue to allow helium to be used for something as frivolous as party balloons baffles me. Clearly the true market price of helium is not being charged? Or is the reality of 'peak helium', and the availability of new sources, harder to understand? (e.g. here in Australia we have significant natural/coal seam gas resources, presumably an 'abundant' source of helium?)

Also, if helium is the most abundant element in the universe, is there a practical, economical way to harvest this from space; I'm envisioning some sort of solar-sail powered scoop sucking up helium for return to earth in a heat-shielded flask parachuted into the oceans.

<comment><USER6> From what I've heard, party balloons often use nitrogen nowadays. Helium has become too expensive and the consumer won't notice the difference until a few days after the sale (if at all).

<comment><USER7> Pure nitrogen basically has the same density as air (Composing 80% of it). So a party balloon filled with nitrogen wouldn't float.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that's what happened. Party City had a whole sign apologizing for the switch to nitrogen about the same time we were having trouble getting dewars to refill our scanner and I talked to the owner about it so I don't think it was confusing the floating balloons with the other balloons.

But you're right it makes little sense in terms of buoyancy and that hadn't occurred to me at the time. Maybe it was actually a switch to a helium/nitrogen blend.

I can also see replacing helium completely for those balloons that get tied into shapes (animals etc), but that's a tiny sliver of the balloon market I'd assume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To be honest a secret part of me hopes it'll happen so airship technologies will be forced to use hydrogen rather than helium.

I've always considered the false safety issues with hydrogen and the fact you can instead use, safer but expensive helium have held it back.

No facts of figures to support my reasoning though.

<comment><USER9> False safety issues with hydrogen? That's a pretty extraordinary claim in the light of ample chemical and historical evidence of the dangers of hydrogen gas.

<comment><USER8> As compared to petrol dangers?

Something lay people (And children in many states) handle all the time and sit on top a huge tank of every time they go driving.

Just saying hydrogen dangers are way over rated and it's hurt progress, and part of that is because there is a safer replacement, even though it's very expensive.

<comment><USER9> The dangers of petrol are a total non sequitur in this case, and have no bearing whatsoever on the well-documented and well understood dangers of hydrogen gas. Cholesterol is likewise highly dangerous, but saying "far more people die of heart disease than hydrogen gas accidents" has very little import in a discussion on airships and helium.

There are good reasons we don't use hydrogen anymore in airships and use helium instead. There are other good reasons not to use helium, but those reasons don't trump the dangers of hydrogen, unless you knew of specific development which would mitigate the dangers that pressurized hydrogen gas presents, which I'm guessing you do not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Considering the state of the US government, it's either incompetence or fraud. I wouldn't be surprised if Goldman Sachs had warehouses full of dewars of helium...

</comment><comment><USER11> > A $1.4bn (£900m) debt is due to finish being repaid to the US treasury by > the end of this month and under current law, federal funding will then stop, > terminating operations.

It sounds like the facility in Texas would shut down due to lack of funding, not a lack of material? If that is the case, the helium at the facility doesn't magically disappear overnight. Though it may slowly leak...

</comment><comment><USER12> I still can't figure out why it was all sold off in the first place. It seems like an incredibly shortsighted decision.

<comment><USER13> The reserve was running a big cash deficit.

Of course, it seems to me like the _right_ action would be to try to increase the market price. It is clearly more valuable than its current price, and the US reserve was providing more than half the world's helium for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think the reporting on this is properly emphasizing the fact that there is actually an impending helium shortage. What I've read so far makes it seem like a bureaucratic error of some kind.

</comment><comment><USER15> FTA: "the spot price of liquid helium had jumped to $25-30 a litre from $8 last year."

Still way cheaper than printer ink, at over $5,000 per litre!

</comment><comment><USER16> It's a shame that Americans of the future will miss out on the childhood pastime of making your voice sound really, really funny.

<comment><USER17> Maybe they'll just have to switch to Sulfur Hexafluoride.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-XbjFn3aqE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-XbjFn3aqE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Energy dependent. Helium dependent. We might have to export more democracy to make up this deficit.

<comment><USER4> Thanks to shale oil and shale gas, there's not much left of US outside energy dependency.

<comment><USER18> We still import 36%. Not saying that isn't impressive...

[http://science.time.com/2013/09/05/americas-oil-boom-wont- ma...](http://science.time.com/2013/09/05/americas-oil-boom-wont-make-it- energy-independent-from-mideast-madness/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if they can harvest Helium from spent nuclear fuel in any great quantity to combat this.

<comment><USER20> The article says it results also in the production of natural gas. A more efficient (due to ubiquity) solution seems to be ensuring its capture at gas production sites.

<comment><USER6> MR folklore that I've never bothered to corroborate says:

We like helium because it doesn't react with anything. That also means we can't easily extract it from anything--you have to extract everything else until only helium remains. This is a ridiculously expensive process.

The large underground domes that trapped natural gas in Texas also trapped the helium that resulted from millennia of radioactive decay within the Earth. Getting helium from that sort of a deposit is comparatively inexpensive.

In the early 20st century, we believed helium airships were going to become important military weapons, and we started to stock pile helium as a strategic reserve--Texas natural gas producers were mandated to extract the helium and give it to the government for storage and eventual military use rather than vent it into the atmosphere.

Later we got airplanes, and airships became a thing of the past like dodos. And since we had a large store of helium, it was available for research and science and balloons. Cool things developed. For MR this meant high-fields generated by superconducting magnets.

But of course maintaining a large stockpile of helium is also expensive. And what does the public know about helium? Why are we wasting our money on balloons and funny voices and besides if scientists say it's important, then it must be the devil's plaything.

So along came the Gingrich-era House and the Contract with America. Congress stopped the economically-crushing over-bearing regulatory burden of helium trapping that was crushing Texas's natural gas competitiveness.

Congress also decided to simultaneously make a few bucks by selling of the helium reserve at cut rate prices, killing any chance of economic incentives developing a secondary market for helium. You can't simultaneously cut funding for science and jack up the prices of helium, that would be one straw too far! Thus the large US reserve was to be sold off at very low prices.

Texas natural gas producers thereby had little incentive to catch the helium themselves as they plowed through the easy natural gas supply, so it was vented. And the Texas dome natural gas was extremely easy to mine, so production skyrocketed after being freed from the shackles of government regulations.

Now that we've moved through the domed natural gas, we're going after the harder to reach natural gas via fracking.

<comment><USER21> > In the early 21st century Pedantic, but I assume you meant "early 20th > century."

<comment><USER6> Thanks, fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So What? The US is a supplier of helium. The US may get out of the market. Prices will rise until other suppliers expand output. Overall, in the long term, the helium market will work fine just like the other markets we dont need the US government to supply.

<comment><USER13> Firstly, helium don't grow on trees. There's a limited supply on Earth.

Secondly, allowing the market price of helium to shoot up for foolish bureaucratic reasons is short-sighted, selfish, and doesn't really do anyone any good.</comment></comment>


DataCleaner 3.6.1 – open source Data Quality toolkit for any datastore - <AUTHOR> http://datacleaner.org/newsitem/datacleaner-3.6.1-released

<comment><AUTHOR> So much stuff in here ... Support for relational databases, CSV files, Excel and even NoSQL databases like MongoDB, CouchDB etc... You can use it for analysis, profiling, deduplication and even as a kind of lightweight ETL tool.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone know the history behind the xitami server, where it went? - <AUTHOR> Reading about Hintjens following his passing, and came across it for the first time. Wikipedia has little info. Looks like there was a reboot in 2009, but got no traction? What happened to it? Why did it languish? <comment><USER2> Well, the original product survived until it was really more work than I could deal with. This was before the days of github.

In 2009 I wrote a new HTTP core using the tools we'd developed for OpenAMQ, and called it X5. It's in the openamq repo on github, somewhere. Nice fast clean core yet not mature enough for real use.

When we killed OpenAMQ to focus on ZeroMQ, we killed all the technologies it comprised. Including X5.

The git history is complete I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw mention of the 2009 rewrite, but couldn't figure out what happened after that. I appreciate your perspective, and the context regarding OpenAMQ to ZeroMQ.

You have really contributed an incredible amount to the world. I am not really a hacker, but I am a technophile. I am humbled to be a beneficiary of your open source code, have access to your thoughts via your blog, and overall to try to be a better person by following your example.

Thank you.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some good programming exercises? - <AUTHOR>

I made a sudoku solver, and it was a great learning experience. Now I'm looking for other exercises. Please share if you have any, thanks! <comment><USER2> If you're into algorithms try [https://projecteuler.net/](https://projecteuler.net/)</comment>


Reversed Aging Almost A Reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.drspiegel.com/2010/12/reversed-aging-almost-a-reality/

<comment><USER2> As previously discussed, this is less impressive than it initially appears since the researchers were just undoing the age-related damage that they had artificially inflicted. But I'm glad they're getting attention; once enough people come to understand that aging can in principle be cured, we should see much more effort in that direction.</comment>


BusinessInsider: "…tech experts agree that net neutrality is a really bad idea." - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-apple-is-silent-on-net-neutrality-2014-5

<comment><AUTHOR> It's fairly clear from reading the linked article that Business Insider has no idea what net neutrality even means, though they are happy to write about it, and somehow use it to disparage Apple's reasonable plans to construct a CDN.</comment>


Opinion: Hacking vs. rape: Which is a crime more deserving of jail time? - <AUTHOR> http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/rights/opinion-hacking-vs-rape-which-crime-more-deserving-jail-time

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the Weev sentencing has major implications for not only white hat hackers (although it hits them pretty hard), but anyone using the internet. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the courts interpretation are to blame. CFAA was written in 1984 and it's so vague that it's can turn anyone working in security and potentially _anyone_ on the internet into a criminal with one click.

The courts are saying here that unauthorized access to a computer occurs whenever the computer owner says so, _and the Department of Justice has enforced this point of view_. __Someone can violate the law even where there is no notice and where no password was hacked. __All that is required is that a person, corporate or natural, subsequently says you don't belong. This is an incredibly dangerous ruling that can criminalize trivial things like google searches.

People should be _mad_ about this, but I fear most do not understand this ruling or the law enough to make sense of it.

</comment><comment><USER2> This makes the justice system seem totally fucked. Yes, they are different cases, but they are intimately tied together. The justice system is punishing the same people that want to expose heinous crimes. It is punishing the same people that want to expose heinous and systematic crimes. No wonder they feel threatened.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are increasingly seeing the frictions of a power shift between governmental bodies and the collective action of individuals on the internet. I imagine that it will only get worse before it gets better. We need to protect the freedom of the internet, because at this point it is the only real weapon we have against (at worst) organized corruption and (at best) an inefficient government.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apples-to-oranges comparison. Convicted rapists don't get nearly enough jail time as it is (then again, I'm one of those people who believes that rape should carry the death penalty). But this doesn't have any bearing on what amount of jail time, if any, computer criminals deserve.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just comparing two cases that reached a verdict in the same day, sure the cases are different, but the results are very telling. It is a worse offense to access a website without the owners permission than it is to rape someone if you're under 18.

<comment><USER3> In this case, I think the "if you're under 18" thing is something of a red herring. I agree that they should have been tried as adults, but I don't know how much that would actually have changed the outcome. The minimum sentences set by the judge are, sad to say, actually comparable to what many adults convicted of rape eventually serve.</comment></comment></comment>


SpaceX makes history by completing first private capsule mission - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/spacex-makes-history-by-completing-first-private-crew-capsule-mission/ <comment><AUTHOR> I watched the re-entry and recovery this morning and was just as impressed with this as I am in awe of the import of being able to do this by a company.

Think about this for a moment, SpaceX is on the verge of having a capsule that they can send into orbit for _days_ and then return to Earth. The same company has rockets capable of putting tons of material into every orbit level (Low, mid, and geo-stationary). The same company is nearing completion of their own launch facility in Texas.

Put all those things together and SpaceX can do space 'tourism' with a design parameter of "Go up into orbit, spend the day doing micro-gravity kinds of things, and then come back for BBQ." They have the capability to launch one of Bigelow's inflatable habitats and leave it up there as a rendezvous target for Dragon in an orbit that could support monthly launch windows. Using a launch facility where they control the scheduling so none of the wrangling with a dozen different groups every time they fly. That is a _mind boggling_ capability for a company to have today.</comment>


Engineering Large Projects in a Functional Language - <AUTHOR> http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/engineering-large-projects-in-a-functional-language/

<comment><USER2> I like the slides and I'm glad there is more advice being produced on working with Haskell on a serious scale.

Still it would seem hard to try and get an existing (imperative programming) engineering team to take up Haskell without having to shuffle a lot of people in and out. I know I wouldn't bother writing any production Haskell in the teams I've worked with because I would be the only one who could maintain it, and that's not good. Trying to skill up existing developers might be worth it in the long run but would be a costly slow down of operations for a fair while I imagine.

I really do love Haskell though :)</comment>


Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/business/energy-environment/lego-plastic-denmark-environment-toys.html <comment><USER2> Sounds noble, but how much of a difference does it make? 1 million tons of co2/yr is not that much. That's about the equivalent of a town of 60,000 Americans. Put in carbon credit terms, that's about $5-10 million bucks worth of carbon for a company making about $1.5 billion in profit per year.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the company to just plant trees or do environmental work or something? I imagine researching and eventually switching to an entirely different material will be on the order of (at least) a half a billion dollars for a company with six billion bucks a year in revenue, probably more.

[edit] I agree with the general sentiment of the comments below, and trust me I'm as concerned about climate change as the rest, but LEGO has so far invested about $200 million into something with an environmental cost of around $5-10 million - and they haven't even gotten close with the solutions they've found so far. $200 million spent in the right places can do a massive amount of good, far more IMHO than a more sustainable LEGO.

To put things in perspective: each LEGO brick is 47 grams of co2. One transatlantic flight is about 3 tons of co2. So one transatlantic flight is equivalent to nearly 60,000 LEGO pieces.

I agree that changes have to come from everywhere to effectively fight global warming, but I think that there's a limit. At what point do you just not bother? There's got to be a cutoff. And couldn't 200 million bucks be used so much more effectively against climate change?

<comment><USER3> It's not about the enviroment. It's about virtue-signaling strongly enough to protect their business interests. You won't see "Lego Buys Carbon Credits" as a headline on HN.

<comment><USER4> It's far simpler and less cynical than that.

The majority of people in this world want the world to be clean and free of the effects of climate change. Companies are comprised of these people. Hence there will always be internal struggles to "do your part" from employees. Especially since that often ends up making products that are more sustainable not just environmentally friendly. And so win-win for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Lego emits about a million tons of carbon dioxide each year

That's about 214133 passenger vehicles driven for one year, or 107980 homes' energy use for one year according to this:

[https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies- calc...](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator)

Just like the plastic straw ban, it's basically meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but obviously very important for their brand.

It would probably be much better to invest that money for example in less polluting ocean shipments, which are a huge problem, but that doesn't have the "feel good" factor about it.

<comment><USER6> Stop treating every improvement as "if it's not a silver bullet, then it's not worth doing."

Consider for a split second that we may have to make lots of little incremental improvements to have a large gain...

<comment><USER7> I don't believe that's what the original poster was saying at all. It was that when "going green" the marketing department seems to be one deciding what they do first rather than the engineering team.

<comment><USER8> This point seems to imply moral imperatives should be ignored if they don't originate from the engineering department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is yet another story that shows a complete disregard for the crime that lies at the heart of the Lego empire: the original design for the bricks was taken from a company called Kiddicraft, see:

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

And for an encore, Lego only acquired the Kiddicraft assets to wipe out this 'inconvenient truth' before suing another company for patent infringement.

Lego is a great toy, but any story about the origin of the bricks should at least reference the true origins of the brick rather than the Lego white- washed version.

<comment><USER10> It was a very direct and blatant rip off too. See [0]. Lego completely redesigned what they were intending to produce after seeing Page's product.

Page committed suicide after the business failed in the 50s.

[0] [http://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875...](http://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Image_Lego%20copies%20of%20Kiddicraft%20Elements.jpg)

<comment><USER11> Wow, I had no idea. That's very disappointing.

> Page was never aware of this, and his daughter has stated that she "was > relieved that my father never knew about Lego before he died."

This leaves me with a different impression of the circumstances surrounding his death than the initial one I got from your comment, however.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I could have put that more clearly. Kiddicraft were like a UK Fisher Price of the 40s and 50s - they produced a massive range of toys, not just bricks. I think they failed and resurrected a couple of times with new owners keeping the brand name around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is noble but seems a little misguided. Legos seem like they'd have by far one of the lowest carbon to utility ratios of any toy you can buy. I used the ones I had as a kid for hours almost every day. I've passed them down to my kid who uses them daily. More than 99% are in perfect shape and I see no reason we won't one day pass them onto another generation.

When you're discarding the plastic junk some family member got for your kid just last Christmas, there probably aren't any Legos in there.

In the worst case, they're high quality ABS so they're more recyclable than most packaging you bother to sort.

<comment><USER13> wouldn't be surprised if they went to something that was unusable after 3 years and said 'its for the environment'

<comment><USER14> Thats the case for apple chargers. I have seen that macbook chargers fail after about 6 months use because they switched to a plastic that was less toxic. Conveniently the side of the cable that always fails is the one you can't remove from the brick so you have to buy a new $100 charger at least once a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand the negative comments.

Let's suppose for a moment that we lived in a fully environment-friendly world. If a company decided to use coal or non recycled plastic, we would be now bashing them. If the same happens in the opposite direction, we think "well, it's not gonna change anything".

It's the equivalent of 200000 cars, a 60000 people town,.. Who cares. It's nice, and ethically it's the right thing to do.

<comment><USER16> > I don't understand the negative comments.

Yeah, if Lego wants to fund the search for a greener alternative to ABS, we should all be happy.

If they ever find one, then other companies and the environment could benefit too.

This is especially true since if the new material satisfies lego's stringent requirements, then it should be good enough for everybody else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think my new motto in life is "Every bucket of water starts with a drop"

This applies to so many things in life. Voting, bad habits, and companies doing things to make the environment better.

</comment><comment><USER18> Biggest benefit I can see is that this'll probably lead to a fair bit more research into recyclable/renewable plastics. That tends to help industry as a whole eventually, as knowledge spreads.

<comment><USER19> Absolutely. A bunch of people in here are suggesting that the effort is wasteful considering Lego's current emissions, but this is R&D work that could have impacts far beyond their current facilities. Given Lego's quality and durability standards, I'd imagine that anything they're satisfied with will have a wide range of applications in other industries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> To all the negativity: isn't the root of the carbon problem that there's no single big thing that can make a difference? Vehicles need to change one by one. Power plants need to change one by one. Cattle farms need to change one by one. Here we have LEGO doing its part, which is all that one entity can really be expected to do.

Everybody needs to do their part. What is an ocean if not a multitude of drops?

<comment><USER21> This is why I think the only real long term solution is carbon taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hopefully they have the honesty to stick with ABS if they can't find an alternative that is actually better for the environment. One fears that, if they do find an alternative, they'll switch for the sake of public perception even though it's actually _worse_ in terms of pollution, energy use, etc..

</comment><comment><USER23> I want Lego to make Technic that's light and strong enough for people to create actual flying drones.

<comment><USER24> Once you are satisfied with the assembly use glue, epoxy, wax, or chewing gum...[seriously]

<comment><USER23> Technic doesn't connect with studs if that's what you meant - the life size Chiron, for example, doesn't use glue: [https://www.lego.com/en- gb/themes/technic/bugatti-chiron/bui...](https://www.lego.com/en- gb/themes/technic/bugatti-chiron/build-for-real)

<comment><USER24> i was assuming you were concerned with the assembly coming apart when used, but now i see your concern, using the technic material itself is similar to making an airplane out of concrete~yes?

<comment><USER23> Yep I was thinking weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Last week, I went to my childhood home in France and found a perfectly preserved 40 year old set of Lego Technic from my childhood, and gave them to my daughter to play with. It's going to be well-nigh impossible for Lego to test the longevity of a plant-based replacement, accelerated simulated testing only provides an upper bound.

The only viable option for them would be to find a process to produce ABS using plant-based feedstocks, a process that will likely be an order of magnitude more expensive than petroleum-based ABS, at least to start with.

The article mentions PLA (shudder). It's well known filament material for low- end 3D printing hobbyists, and far inferior to ABS in its physical properties, not to mention that little problem of being water-soluble. The fact they even considered that garbage does not augur well of the judgment of whoever is responsible for the project.

</comment><comment><USER26> Rather than trying to re-invent plastics they should just be making the base stocks directly. In theory you can suck in carbon dioxide and build your own carbon chains to make anything you want.

Or they could just keep making them as they've always done. Not everything needs to change, just most things.

<comment><USER27> I think right now any way you cut that kind of carbon sequestration it's going to be more effective and less polluting to use the energy you'd put into that process another way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Somewhat unrelated, but I'm really not a fan of that single hard flash look in the two photos of the Lego staff. Looks like they were going for something grungy and gritty, but it didn't get executed that well.

</comment><comment><USER29> Im a real cynic when it comes to lego. it has increasingly become a product that is sold to parents and then foisted upon children. I know a few parents who claim their kids love lego but empirical evidence seems to be far from that. We bought lego for our kids but they were (briefly) only really interested in the characters and we built a few things but minecraft is a way more interesting way of doing the same thing. Secondly isnt Lego just a business that becomes obsolete because of technology and 3d printers. How long before you can just print the thing you want - plastic or not. It seems to me lego is destined to only have made sense during the late 20th and early 21st century. we should all get over it... maybe they should have bought minecraft?

<comment><USER30> I loved lego as a kid, and I had access to a PC by 8.

The key, for me, to keep lego interesting was to have a lot of _generic_ legos. In my mind, lego has done a disservice to the power of their own invention by focusing more on the lego minifigures and things like bionicles -- which you use to build that one set piece and then don't use much beyond that.

If you focus on the bigger sets and sets of just the standard bricks, the limit is your imagination. In my mind, if you're using instructions, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER31> I think there's a nice middle ground in there. You can make the pirate ship, or the TIE fighter or whatever... And then make a pirate tie fighter, with wings and a sail! What I never got was the "make a set and then glue it all up and put it on the mantelpiece" attitude. That's doing it wrong to me.

<comment><USER32> IIRC sets used to have instructions for multiple models you could make, which helped to support the idea of making different things. My kids want to make the model and put it on the shelf - they're deaf to my protestations.

<comment><USER30> That's why you gotta ignore the instructions from the get go.

<comment><USER33> The instructions are good at teaching you a variety of ways the bricks can be used, help understand how to make larger structures from them, etc. And hell, following the instructions is fun, too.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


All the things I hate about Python - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@natemurthy/all-the-things-i-hate-about-python-5c5ff5fda95e <comment><USER2> Nothing new here.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, 82 comments from 2 years ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17484096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17484096)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> can we have 2018 in the title?

also wondering what the author thinks of the progress made since as far as optional typing in python 3.</comment>


EU to launch counter-tariffs against US on Friday - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44549712 <comment><USER2> Rather than encouraging a trade war, how about reducing tariffs on US imports? This would be a welcome treat for poorer Europeans who have to pay for a high level of European protectionism. Not much chance of that given that corporate interests trump those of consumers when it comes to lobbying the EU. What's the point in spending all that money if you don't get results?

[https://lobbyfacts.eu/reports/lobby- costs/all](https://lobbyfacts.eu/reports/lobby-costs/all)</comment>


ZoomX – Android Tool to log all network calls in a suitable format - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/district0/ZoomX <comment><AUTHOR> It's a debugging tool for Android like Flex of iOS

[https://github.com/Flipboard/FLEX](https://github.com/Flipboard/FLEX)</comment>


Software resilience: The 500 test - <AUTHOR> https://brandur.org/fragments/the-500-test <comment><USER2> I've been struggling with transactional consistency across the network in, of all things, Second Life. Yes, Second Life, the virtual world.

The classical web is mostly stateless, although that's changing with fancier web sites. Second Life has always been very much a persistent state system. Technically, this makes it an alternate universe to the classical web. So it hit these problems long ago.

Second Life's world is divided into regions 256 meters on a side. The viewer displays a seamless world, but internally, the seams are very real. Each region is maintained by a separate process, a "sim", loosely coupled to neighboring sims and the viewer.

Avatars and vehicles can cross region boundaries. Often badly. For over a dozen years, region crossing behavior in SL has been fragile. Objects sink through the ground or fly off into space at region crossings. Vehicles and avatars become separated. Avatars with elaborate clothing and attachments can even be damaged so badly that the user has to do extensive repair work. The Second Life community, and the developers of Second Life, were convinced this was un-fixable.

I became interested in this problem as a SL user and started to work on it. The viewer is open source, and the message formats are known. Within the Second Life world, objects are scriptable. So, even without access to the internals of the server, much can be done from the outside.

My goal was to make fast vehicles cross regions properly in Second Life. The first step was to fix some problems in the viewer. The viewer tries to hide the delay at a region crossing handoff with extrapolation from the last position and velocity. The extrapolation amplifies noise from the physics simulator, and can result in errors so bad that vehicles appear to roll over, fly into the air, or sink into the ground. I managed to limit extrapolation enough to restore movement sanity.

Once that was under control, it was clear there were several different remaining problems. They now looked different visually, and could be attacked separately. There were several race conditions. I couldn't fix them completely from the outside, but I was able to detect them and prevent most of them from the scripting language code which controls vehicles. This got the mean time between failures up to about 30-40 minutes for a user driving a fast vehicle. When I started, that number was around 5-10.

The remaining problems were intermittent. I discovered that overloading the network connection to the viewer tended to induce this failure. So I used network test features in Linux to introduce errors, delays, and packet reordering. It turned out that adding 1 second of network delay, with no errors or reordering, would consistently break region crossings. This provided, for the first time, a repeatable test case for the bug.

I couldn't fix it, but I could provide a repeatable test case to the vendor, Linden Labs. With some publicity, upper management was made aware of the bug, and effort is now being applied to solving it. It turns out that the network retransmission code has problems. (Second Life uses its own UDP-based protocol.) Fixing that may help, but it's not clear that it's the entire problem.

The underlying problem is that, during a region crossing, both region manager programs ("sims") and the viewer all have state machines which must make certain state transitions in a coordinated way. The error cases do not seem to have been thoroughly worked out. It's possible to get stuck out of sync. Second Life is supposed to be a consistent-eventually system, but that wasn't achieved.

This is roughly the same problem as the "500 test" in the parent article. If you have communication problems, both ends must automatically resolved to a valid consistent state when communication resumes. Distributed database systems have to do this. It's not easy.

Network-connected state machines are a pain to analyze. If the number of states at each end is not too large, examining all possible combinations by hand is feasible. That's what the 2 volumes of "TCP/IP Illustrated" do for TCP. If you create your own network connected state machines, you face a similar task. If you don't do it, your system will break.

<comment><USER3> Right. The article is actually quite bad and doesn't show much understanding of the problem. Fault tolerance and consistency are very well known and very well researched problems in distributed systems.

Without proper distributed algorithms a fault can leave both ends in an inconsistent state. One end might think the operation was successful, but the other end never saw it succeed and timed out. It doesn't know whether it was successful or not. If there are users most will assume failure in this case and try again, leading to two state mutations where there should be only one.

To solve this you can try to achieve consensus between both ends and if there are users force them to wait an unbounded time, which is unrealistic of course, so only helps somewhat. The other choice is eventual consistency, preferably strong eventual consistency, where write operations never fail, never force anyone to wait, just get delayed and resynced later sometimes.

<comment><USER2> For webcrap, it's probably best to avoid this problem entirely. Don't design systems that need tight consistency between client and server. You'll get it wrong.

Maybe only one side needs to be stateful. Consider a map display application, where the map is downloaded as tiles of various resolutions. The user can pan and scroll. The goal is to give the user a seamless experience. This may require loading low-rez tiles first, loading ahead in the direction of movement, and canceling requests for tiles that are not in yet and are no longer needed. It needs to be eventually consistent - whatever the user does, the map needs to settle into validity after a while.

But the server side can just blindly serve tiles as individual files. You can do all the stateful stuff on the client. No need for synchronization.

So don't go there unless you absolutely have to.

<comment><USER4> > For webcrap, it's probably best to avoid this problem entirely. Don't design > systems that need tight consistency between client and server. You'll get it > wrong.

> So don't go there unless you absolutely have to.

Couldn't agree more. It is possible to build feature-rich clients with few syncing calls as long as you are willing to replicate business logic on the client-side and always transfer state unidirectionally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We have faced this in a perverse form with some of our Python web apps behind Apache HTTPD and mod_wsgi. Apache itself will generate a 500 sporadically due to its internal TSL or HTTP/2 proxy code tripping over itself. If we capture one of these responses, it has the default Apache error page HTML structure, instead of the error page our own web framework would generate for a 500 if an uncaught exception leaked out.

This 500 response to the client can occur before or after our service has been invoked, and our service logic doesn't know anything went wrong. Our service might even log successful processing, meaning that it made its own ACID commit and started to generate a success response. For very small responses like "204 No Content", we might never know there was a problem. For larger responses, the WSGI layer may produce errors when we cannot generate a whole response before the connection is lost.

In our AJAX apps in front of this service, we have had to resort to treating 500 the same as a lost response, doing backoff and retry without assuming we know whether the first request succeeded or failed.

</comment><comment><USER6> From time supporting a real estate website host - I call it 'debugging by error' \- the error code tells you which part of the stack is broken.

400 - URL/client side.

401 - Permissions. If you have IIS, maybe the web agent service account password is expired.

402 - Pay your bill.

403 - Permissions, or a deeper error.

404 - Missing file.

500 - Code error.

502 - Load balancer has no good hosts to service request. Or, if you have IIS, this is the Windows kernel saying no worker processes are working.

503 - Database overloaded or down.

504 - Server or load balancer not responding.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lots of wisdom here but much of this is easier said than done.

That said a lot of the Erlang ethos covers this(things _will_ fail at scale so do something reasonable).

</comment><comment><USER8> My point may seem facetious, but wouldn't ensuring (through proper catches and guards) that a 500 doesn't happen at all inside your own systems be the best resiliency? And when you experience one, it's a red alert and you harden that component to whatever failed immediately? I guess that's just the school of thought I've operated under.

<comment><USER9> Those approaches don't need to be mutually exclusive. However, the main assumption of the post is that these events will occur regardless of how hard you try to prevent them:

> ...there will always be some number off in the tail lost to an accidental > bug, a bad deploy, an external service that fails to respond, or a database > failure or timeout.

It's just advocating the same approach that's the norm for distributed systems: operate under the assumption that some components of the system will fail. This is assumed to be the case in an area such as modern database design, but is rarely considered when it comes to behavior of a generic web service.

That said, IMO there's tons of cases where if your data is inconsistent for a few records you honestly just don't need to care, and so the idea of devoting attention and engineering resources to something that's both rare and low impact just doesn't make sense. There is a disclaimer in the post that this is only advised for critical services, but I think that's being ignored in the discussion.

<comment><USER4> > there's tons of cases where if your data is inconsistent for a few records > you honestly just don't need to care

Enterprise applications can be data-sparse, but every incorrect record field has disproportionately high downstream impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> ACIDity is an annoyingly missing feature in WordPress. For software that's used on something like 20% of all websites, it doesn't use the InnoDB MySQL table format by default, and therefore doesn't support MySQL transactions out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER11> > In the event of any internal fault (500), your service should be left in a > state that's consistent, ...

What if the software enters a non-terminating loop?

</comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting. Have you implemented this in services before? How have you handled continued failure for specific requests?

<comment><USER13> I recommend reading his pieces on transactional state machines that is linked in the article. I believe that a lot of it is adopted at stripe currently.

<comment><USER12> I'll check it out, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Apple CEO Tim Cook on Virtual Reality: "There's No Substitute for Human Contact" - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-ceo-tim-cook-on-virtual-reality-theres-no-substitute-f <comment> o0-0o This past weekend I was at Desert Trip in California, and I got the chance to talk to neighbors from Austral-Asia, Europe, and the US. This was a diverse group to say the least, ad we were all camping next to another on 408th and Broadway. The conversation got onto VR, and we all agreed, without a doubt that their is no substitute for human contact and that the whole term Virtual Reality was a contradiction and a not very slick marketing term. No one wanted anything to do with VR. In fact, the conversation about VR was so disgusting to all of us, we all had to just drop it. NO ONE wanted VR, and any company betting on it is betting against the house and the players at the same time. We all thought the big bets could be used for much better causes. Just some info.

<comment><USER2> Countless technologies, including the internet and social media, have become augments and indeed sometimes substitutes for human contact. Some of the biggest companies in the world have been built on those technologies.

Why does VR need to be solitary and why does it need to be any different?

<comment> o0-0o I was referring strictly to virtual reality and not augmented reality.

<comment><USER2> So was I. VR can be social in the same way Facebook can be social.

You might be able to argue that Facebook-style interaction replacing face-to- face meeting is a bad thing, but you can't argue it's something nobody wants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> AR and VR excel in different areas. AR is a natural fit for most social contexts because it brings elements of the digital world into the physical world without completely enveloping the senses. VR isolates the senses, which provides deeper immersion. A virtual environment can be similar to the real world or completely removed from it. The rules of the physical world don't apply in VR.

I agree with Cook that AR will likely be more popular in terms of daily/casual usage by the average person, but VR will be just as "huge" in terms of societal impact. And some of his comments about the socially-isolating nature of VR are a bit short-sighted. Facebook (and others) are already doing a lot of work on getting people into shared spaces with high-fidelity avatars that really do give a sense of being with someone who's not physically there.

And with 360° photo/video, volumetric 3D video, 3D scanning/printing, photogrammetry, etc-- we're quickly moving toward a "mixed" reality world where the line between AR/VR is blurred anyway.</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't HN open links in a new tab - <AUTHOR> All the other platforms do it.  Kind of makes me wonder if there's a specific reason...<p>It gets especially annoying when I start browsing that link's website, after a bit realize where I came from, and now that page is gone. <comment><USER2> I don't want that behaviour.

If you want it, cool, use middle button click or whatever works on your system. But don't take my preferred behaviour away without any remedy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Opening in the same tab is the default behaviour of links in most browsers. If you want to, you can probably configure yours to always open links in new tabs, or like Tomte said, middle click on them. I don't like websites altering default behavior either, especially since it's usually so easy to open in a new tab anyway when you want to.

</comment><comment><USER4> You could email them and suggest it. Since they don't specify a doctype in the page and browsers are using quirks mode, it should support a target [1] without issue.

[1] - [https://html.com/attributes/a-target/](https://html.com/attributes/a-target/)

Their email is:

        email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Email sent. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Ferroelectric RAM - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM <comment><AUTHOR> Basically a hybrid of DRAM and core memory! I never knew this existed until I noticed it used as the non-volatile program memory for an industrial controller.</comment>


GitHub is blocked in India - <AUTHOR> http://www.fizerkhan.com/blog/posts/GitHub-is-blocked-in-India.html <comment><USER2> Sites like GitHub are more important to free speech than the actual speech itself: code isn't just saying something, its the actual act of expressing your ideals itself. When you write code, and someone runs your code, your words /do/ something, your words /are/ action.

India is basically telling their own people they're not allowed to do anything of importance, and they should just go back to their shitty third world lives and that what they do doesn't matter, will never matter, and their lives will amount to nothing.

Does Github work properly though Tor? Is that a solution?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using the Google DNS server for a while now - so Github worked just fine for me. However, gists went down for a couple of days.

Gists, pastebin and imgur are still down for me every once in a while. Refreshing it ~4-5 times seems to make it work. This seems to suggest there's something more than just DNS at play here.

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems to be working for without any dns changes.Which all ISPs have you checked out?</comment>


Poll: Snowden should be prosecuted for NSA leaks - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/17/americans-say-snowden-should-be-prosecuted-for-nsa-leaks-in-usa-today-poll/2430583/

<comment><USER2> The people have a lot of contradictions around what they want. We need leaks, but the people that leak should be prosecuted (Wait, what?), for example.

</comment><comment><USER3> The public is fundamentally confused.</comment>


Facebook Hires Former Deputy PM Sir Nick Clegg - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45913587 <comment><USER2> Ex-deputy Prime Minister of Britain to work for Facebook. What could be wrong with that?</comment>