Trying out Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> I'm new to bitcoin and want to learn it.  Can someone help me by donating a very low amount of bitcoin so I can experiment with ?
I have included my public key for bitcoin to be sent.
https://blockchain.info/address/1N9TJaSBe3ihQX5okTD8BytrJYb2QmKJRG <comment><USER2> If you want to experiment, you should just check out the testnet: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet)

it's a separate testing bitcoin blockchain. you can get test coins from bitcoin testnet faucets (see link above).

If you want to try out Ethereum and write a smart contract, you want to test it for free so not on the real ethereum chain. Same principle, you can just try your smart contract on the Ethereum testnet (ropsten I think but whatever) for which you can get test ether from ethereum testnet faucets (faucet being the keyword you want to get free test coins for various blockchains)

cheers

<comment><AUTHOR> Asking for amounts such as 5 cents or a penny to test I believe is not asking for much.

I dont believe Testnet does not give you a complete way to test</comment></comment>


Why Are Taxpayers Subsidizing Facebook, and the Next Bubble? - <AUTHOR> http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/why-are-taxpayers-subsidizing-facebook-and-the-next-bubble/?src=tptw

<comment><USER4> All posters, except thrill, seem to have fundamentally misread the article. It isn't about Facebook or GS for that matter. Its concern is that several banks including GS have a "too big to fail" subsidy. That subsidy is an implied insurance against failure. Let's say you are GS management and you have two possible investment choices: 1) A safe boring sure thing financed with little leverage that will bring in somewhere between 5% and 10% yearly return, or 2) A speculative leveraged investment that would bankrupt the company if it failed, but would make 50% a year if it succeeds. Which would you do? If 2 fails, the taxpayers pick up the bill and you can try again, if it succeeds you get substantially richer. This isn't capitalism in the sense that you learned in school. It's crony capitalism of the sort that the US has always rightly criticized in "other" countries. It doesn't make it right when it's practiced in the US.

<comment><USER5> I would argue that the consolidation of (fiscal) power into a few large centralized institutions can be a natural outcome of capitalism, since an increase in the size of an institution (either through growth or acquisition) can offer more profit opportunities. Now if you view a corporation through the traditional lens of being sociopathically focused on profits, then it is natural for it to seek a position where its failure would catastrophically affect too many people for responsible governments to allow, as a sort of insurance. It's not "crony capitalism", it's _unbridled_ capitalism. On the other hand, placing oligopoly restrictions to prevent the growth of corporations beyond a certain size and impact isn't (in a very strict sense) "capitalism". We already think that monopolies are bad, but where do you draw the line with oligopolies? 3 large banks? 5? 20? GS subsidizing FB, and the taxpayer subsidizing GS seem to be very natural outcomes of an unrestricted business environment and a mandate to generate profits.

NOTE: not trying to take a left or right stance here, just viewing matters through the fun lens of mathematical optimization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are two things that make this particular case so interesting.

(1) Facebook is still technically a < 500 shareholder company, subject to a "special case" set of rules for reporting. _In 1964, regulators started requiring companies with more than 499 shareholders to publicly report their financial results._ (source: [http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/the-500-investor- thre...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/the-500-investor-threshold- debated-for-its-47-year-history/) ) Facebook isn't there, but if EVER there were a case where this old-fashioned rule should not apply, it would be here. Goldman-Sachs IS (indirectly) benefiting from a "free" pool of money that comes from taxpayers. It's no longer a private-company issue.

(2) _employee-owned shares typically do not count toward the 500-investor limit. But once those shares are sold on a private exchange — often after employees leave the company — they are no longer exempt._ This is interesting because Facebook has "1700+" employees, which is _far_ more than the kind of small "we need protection" private companies that the 1964 rule set out to protect.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think a better title would be: why are we pumping up the next bubble with debt rather than equity?

I don't really worry about Goldman Sachs or Facebook. They are both best of breed and they handle themselves very well. The real danger here is that we are entering an era where risk capital is being financed through the debt, rather than the equity, markets. This is entirely inappropriate as most risk capital is lost and the 10% or so that does return is supposed to make up for the other 90%. Can you imagine how bad the current financial crisis would be if 90% of real estate was not just underwater but completely worthless?

<comment><USER8> Most risk capital is lost? We hold risk capital for a 7bp event (99.93% chance the situation will be better than this). Then we have prudent margins. Why the fuck would we burn through 90% of our risk capital most of the time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Couldnt we apply this argument to ANY company goldman invests in? So what is the call to action here? Goldman should not play bank and thus not lend money?

</comment><comment><USER10> This editorial is a not-entirely-successful attempt to conflate two different topics of discussion: FB's valuation (and Goldman's market-making involvement therein), and the dangers of leverage in the financial sector.

It's quite likely that Goldman would have made this play with FB regardless of its current special access to federal dollars, thus making the two topics incidentally and not fundamentally related.

<comment><USER7> I would say that it is very likely Goldman would have made this play regardless of it's federal guarantees. The difference - and the author's point - is that there is less systemic risk in this scenario because Goldman would get the $450M through the equity markets rather than through the debt markets.

The author's point is that we have created a system where risk capital is being financed through debt rather than equity.

<comment><USER11> ...or more specifically, risk capital is being financed through taxpayer dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Even if Facebook's valuation isn't a bubble valuation (as I've argued previously) it is certainly the case that money lent at excessively low interest rates will create bubble valuations.

What can you do about it? You could stop accepting dollars, I suppose.

<comment><USER13> Buy gold:

<http://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au1825nyb.html>

<comment><USER12> If you can buy gold with dollars lent to you at excessively low interest rates while the taxpayers shoulder the risk that gold prices might crash, that would be a viable way to take advantage of the situation.

But I was asking how to _improve_ the situation. Does buying gold improve the situation in some way that is not obvious to me?

<comment><USER13> As gold supply is relatively fixed, it's harder to manipulate than valuations of internet companies. Spending dollars on gold rather than stocks will reduce the stock bubble risk and reduce price for dollars (measured in gold / $), so reducing your vulnerability to dollar bubbles caused by government policies.

It's not perfect but it's a form of insurance. Based on recent gold prices, it looks like many people are taking that insurance.

Essentially I'm agreeing with you - stop accepting dollars, use gold instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Short version: Anything Goldman invests in is being subsidized, so Facebook is being subsidized. _Yawn_

<comment><USER7> Accurate version: Goldman finances its operations through debt rather than equity because of it's explicit federal backing. The risk capital it is investing in Facebook is therefor debt rather than equity. Facebook is so hot right now that it is probably overvalued. This leads to a debt bubble - <USER2> than an equity bubble - which is much more painful for the economy.

<comment><USER14> By definition any investment that is subsidized is overvaluing the base asset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There have been a whole run of nytimes stories that have the same second half of the text about "the obama administration" and goldman sachs getting access to cheap government money.

With a different - what they have done this time - first paragraph. It seems like somebody at the NYT doesn't like either GS or the Obama adminsitration.

In this case GS are doing something naughty - but they aren't borrowing government money to do it, and since they aren't even investing their own money it's hard to see why they would need to

<comment><USER16> GS (and other favored companies) doesn't need to actually borrow - they gain advantage by having access as needed to 'government money', better defined as coercively (you know - prison if you don't give it) acquired taxpayer money. Merely having that access is the advantage - they can take greater risks - <USER3> reap greater rewards - than others because of it.

<comment><USER17> Laissez-faire capitalism at work! No really, can somebody explain why institutions like this are allowed to have such advantages over their competition? This seems like it would be an easy political target FROM ALL SIDES of the aisle. "Big government" messes with the "free market" and the "rich get richer".

::EDIT::

Since I can't respond to my sub comments at this point, the first sentence, is, in fact, sarcasm.

<comment><USER18> _Laissez-faire capitalism at work!_

No. Please use wikipedia to look up unfamiliar terms before using them in a sentence.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire>

[edit: my apologies. Didn't detect the sarcasm.]

<comment><USER17> My first sentence was sarcasm. I indeed did look it up to verify its meaning and to determine that it was what I wanted to say, even though the term was not unfamiliar to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Subsidizing the social networking bubble? Email was totally monetized by companies like RIM and now large hardware firms that sell the email server stuff. However social network is being monetized in the direction of at the very least advertising, putting real money behind the valuations of these companies like Facebook. Sure advertising is a fickle beast, but the majority of companies(i.e. everyone but Twitter) have more than vaporware making up their business models.

<comment><USER20> whereas Twitter has... ??</comment></comment>


Nintendo 64 Vulkan Low-Level emulator – paraLLel – pre-alpha release - <AUTHOR> http://www.libretro.com/index.php/nintendo-64-vulkan-low-level-emulator-parallel-pre-alpha-release/ <comment><USER2> Should probably make an effortpost on this to explain what "low-level emulation" is. That said, I don't support the libretro effort.

The Nintendo 64 is an architecture composed of a 64-bit MIPS CPU, 4MB of memory, and, two chips for the GPU: the Reality Signal Processor (RSP), and the Reality Display Processor (RDP). The codename for the N64 was "Reality", and the system was co-developed by Nintendo and a small team at SGI.

The RSP is a programmable unit, while the RDP is a fixed-function unit that does rasterization, perspective texture mapping, and basic glTexEnv-style multitexturing.

When N64 emulators talk about "high-level" vs. "low-level", they're pretty exclusively talking about how the RSP is implemented. The RSP is programmable in that you can upload your own microcodes and provide your own instruction set in return. When an RSP emulator interprets these microcodes directly, it's "low-level". When an emulator author studies these microcodes, and then reimplements them in C/C++, this is "high-level".

There are around 15 microcodes in existence, the most common one being F3DEX2, which was the standard Nintendo-provided microcode which appeared a year after the system was released. You can see the instruction set of F3DEX2 here: [http://wiki.cloudmodding.com/oot/F3DZEX](http://wiki.cloudmodding.com/oot/F3DZEX)

Very few developers wrote their own microcodes -- pretty much only Rareware and Factor 5 did their own thing. This is one reason why Rareware and Factor 5 games are harder to emulate.

Most emulators only implement low-level mode for compatibility and testing purposes, since it tends to be pretty slow. paraLLel uses Vulkan and Compute Shaders to run the RSP microcode on the GPU. I'm not convinced that's a good approach, but good on them for trying.

<comment><USER3> why don't you support it?

<comment><USER2> The technical reason is that the microcode isn't designed to be run in parallel -- it does DMA transfers between main memory and texture memory, and such. I don't understand why running it on the GPU would help anybody.

For personal / drama reasons, the main author of libretro (squarepusher / twinaphex) has a bad track record in the emulation community, but this isn't the time or place to talk about it. Just know that not a lot of people in the scene hold a very high opinion of him.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sweet Alerts - <AUTHOR> http://t4t5.github.io/sweetalert/ <comment><USER2> Looks good!

Noticed a few weird things though:

\- `overflow: hidden` on body makes the page content jump as the scrollbar (dis)appears. There's an issue for that [0]

\- `sweet-overlay` div has a different opacity on each open for some reason? I've seen 1.01 through 1.05, so they are all effectively 1, but it just seems weird to me… It probably has something to do with the `fadeIn` function [1]. Was there any reason not to use CSS transitions for fading?

There's a fork called sweetalert2 [2] with more active development [3]. It has these two things (and probably many others) fixed.

\--

[0] [https://github.com/t4t5/sweetalert/issues/590](https://github.com/t4t5/sweetalert/issues/590)

[1] [https://github.com/t4t5/sweetalert/blob/master/dev/modules/h...](https://github.com/t4t5/sweetalert/blob/master/dev/modules/handle- dom.js#L83)

[2] [https://limonte.github.io/sweetalert2/](https://limonte.github.io/sweetalert2/)

[3] [https://github.com/limonte/sweetalert2/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/limonte/sweetalert2/graphs/contributors)</comment>


Doctor 'used silicone fingers' to sign in for colleagues - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-21756709

<comment><USER2> From the article: "A council spokesman has told BBC Brasil that among those believed to be those "ghost employees" - as Brazilians call informally those who receive regular wages without actually showing up for work - are public workers in the areas of health, education and security."

Yes. Education especially. The fraud is not always so high-tech. In many places in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, schoolteachers can be on the taxpayer-subsidized payroll while regularly failing to show up for class on school days. School pupils can't count on teachers being in the building when they show up for school, so sometimes the pupils don't show up for school either. A similar pattern of schoolteacher union takeover of the state education system led to such widespread fraud in Mexico that the president of the schoolteacher union was recently arrested

[http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn- mexican-...](http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-mexican- teachers-union-chief-20130227,0,5980836.story)

[http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130227/mexico- te...](http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130227/mexico-teachers- union-boss-arrested-corruption)

as part of a corruption conspiracy investigation.

<comment><USER3> Unions. Corruption. Surely you jest.

<comment><USER4> The post speaks for itself - the snark is not required here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This kind of thing is extremely common here in Brazil. Another very common example is the mandatory classes a citizen has to take in order to get his driving permit, if you fail to show on a class you can easily bribe an attendant of the licensed driving school to change the time on the clock of the biometrics computer so you can register your fingerprint on the correct time.

Unfortunately this kind of issue is a cultural problem here in Brazil. This is what we call 'jeitinho brasileiro' (Brazilian way), the belief that one must always take advantage of others or find ways to bend the rules.

<comment><USER6> True, I know a guy who just bought his driver license. He paid some cash ( If I remember correctly something around 3000 BRL ), they took his picture and information, made a similar silicone finger from the described in the article and after some time he received the permit. No classes, no tests, no physical and psychological exams, just like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the most interesting point about this story is the existence of "ghost employees" per se. One has to think of remote Yahoo workers ;).

The fraud involved biometrics, but I think it is a non-issue. Of course you can trick every system, and a finger-print system is arguably harder to trick than punching card systems that might have been used before. You cannot expect to log in with silicon fingers for a long time before someone will notice ...

<comment><USER8> The term "ghost employee" is a standard English term used by auditors. Any sufficiently large organization must periodically reconcile the payroll system with managers and/or a timecard system. It is usually as simple as just sending a email to managers asking them to certify that a list of employees are working for them. There are often a bunch of edge case that must be worked out, like the people that don't have managers in the HR system, or people on leave where the paperwork didn't get processed correctly.

Unfortunately, audits aren't really designed to uncover fraud with collusion. This is why any fraud that is found should be criminally prosecuted, which the Brazilians are doing correctly here. They need to also prosecute the employees that were receiving benefits without working as well.

<comment><USER9> The one edge case I typically run into with IT systems is when the chairman of the board, who is not the CEO, wishes to have an office at the company. Where do you put him on the Org Chart? Every other person I can assign a manager that ultimately flows up to the CEO - but the politics of hierarchy between the CEO (who answers to the board) - and the chairman (who most certainly does _not_ answer to the CEO) are tricky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While having "ghost employees" is troubling and lowers work ethics for other people, it could have been worse. The doctor could have been using the "silicone fingers" to sign drugs out of the drug cabinet. If biometrics were the only protection there, the patsy doctors would have very little recourse to defend themselves.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fooling fingerprint readers isn't really that hard. YouTube is full of videos explaining how to do it with nothing more than a bottle cap, super glue, some duct tape, and a regular laser printer.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's quite easy to fool most high-end fingerprint scanners, at least older ones. If you're persistent, you can do so with a bit of gelatin and a laser printer.

[http://vast.uccs.edu/~tboult/tmp/fingerprint-boult-koaa- medi...](http://vast.uccs.edu/~tboult/tmp/fingerprint-boult-koaa-medium.mpeg)

There are some scanners that try and look for eg. the motion of the blood pulsing through the veins with infrared, but I'm not familiar with them.

This issue is called "spoofing / liveness detection," if you want to go learn more. It's quite a popular topic at conferences like ICB, IJCB, and BTAS.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is not very surprising. Brazilians have a very fluid concept of time, such that being a few hours late or not showing at all is considered normal behavior. However, you do not keep someone more important than you waiting. That's just rude.

<comment><USER14> yet, they still want to be paid for that time they don't care about.

<comment><USER13> Yes, because this new "checking in" system goes against their established cultures and norms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The lesson here is that fingerprint biometrics are not generally reliable, i.e., they assume the user will not volunteer their credentials to others. The same is true of passwords.

Cost notwithstanding, would retina biometrics be more reliable? Is there a cheap and reliable solution?

<comment><USER12> It should be possible to fool a retina scanner with a designer's contact lens, but it's quite easy to simple break it (ie. force a nonmatch) with a regular contact lens.

What will be really interesting is when someone commits a crime with a fake fingerprint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Haha, who said no-show jobs were only in construction?

</comment><comment><USER17> This is very Gattica... Kind of find it amusing that we have finally caught up with the movies...

<comment><USER18> That's GATTACA, it's made of the letters used to describe DNA bases: G, C, A, T.</comment></comment>


Internet troll "weev" sentenced to 41 months for AT&T/iPad hack - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/auernheimer-aka-weev-sentenced-to-41-months-for-attipad-hack/ <comment><USER2> As much as this guy deserves some kind of punishment for the horrible way he has treated people over the years, he doesn't deserve 4 years for being a class-a asshole to people. What he did wasn't a hack, heck he didn't even write the script that apparently scraped the data from the URL. A 12 year old kid with an introduction to PHP book could even write a PHP script that did what Weev did, it's not a hack it's a cheap exploit (I've done this with sites like Google & Yahoo for scraping search results before). AT&T are somewhat to blame for failing to protect the privacy of their customers in this instance, a company has a duty of responsibility to ensure it takes reasonable measures to protect customer data.

If I were the judge, I would have sentenced him to maybe 1 year (for releasing the info publicly), maybe made him serve 6 months of the sentence and given him a 3 year good behaviour bond with some conditions on getting some counselling for his obvious narcissism problem. The justice system really needs to get with the times, because these computer related hacking/cracking/exploiting incidents are only going to continue being a more common occurrence. The justice system is riddled with judges in their mid to late 60's who were raised in a non-Internet world and thus cannot truly understand the depth cases like these have or comprehend the extent as to how these defendants should be prosecuted.

<comment><USER3> Considering he used absolutely no violence against anyone, I don't think he deserves any violence to be used against him (including, obviously, imprisonment).

<comment><USER4> Is there a way to enforce laws that doesn't require violence or the threat of it?

<comment><USER5> Yes. Garnish his wages.

Consider something like $10,000 over 10 years. Enough to notice, but it's not going to make a software engineer homeless. (I think that's too much in this case, but consider non-violent criminals in general.)

<comment><USER4> To be fair, this is a threat of violence against his employer if they do not comply. Also, another way to look at it is forced taking, which is also violent.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but most employers err on the side of caution, reducing the likelihood of violence. There will never be no violence until every individual on Earth always acts in society's best interest without any persuasion whatsoever. I think we can all agree that's not going to happen ever, so in order to maintain order, we do need to threaten violence in the right circumstances.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Your rationale and mine align, but are in opposition to the person I originally responded to, who suggested a blanked prohibition on violent punishment against non-violent offenders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes hes a terrible person. This news article should still be about AT&T being fined a bazillion dollars for not safeguarding that data (of course that never happened).

Any technical person of course understands that what AT&T did is akin to dumping money on the sidewalk, but you would never know from the cloud of uncertainty and ignorance that permeates these articles. We can't get more specific laws if the understanding of journalists can't rise above the word "hacking".

<comment><USER7> AT&T has a very important role in national defense to fill. This criminal is luckily he didn't get lined up and shot for treason.

Sure, we can say that AT&T is a telecommunications company that should try to protect the customers that pay for their service, but we all know that AT&T is actually a government intelligence agency with all the expected bureaucracy of a military sect. Protecting their customers is #1, and their customer is US Gov.

<comment><USER8> >Protecting their customers is #1

If AT&T gave a single fuck about its customers, Weev wouldn't have been able to access another user's account by incrementing a number in the URL.

If AT&T gave a fuck about its customers, they wouldn't have destroyed any chance of having a white hat point out security flaws to them in the future, before the black hats find them.

If AT&T gave a fuck about its customers, they wouldn't charge customers $20 a month for texting capabilities that cost them a nickel to provide, or $40 a month for $2 worth of bandwidth.

Should I continue? There are a million other reasons why your statement makes no sense whatsoever.

If they cared about customers, they would be open to criticism when security experts are ready to offer it behind closed doors.

<comment><USER9> While I may not necessarily agree with it, you're missing his point. Kind of like "if you're not paying for it you're not the customer", his argument is that because telecos handle communications from every organization and entity in the US, it's inevitable that they become a de facto intelligence agency for the federal government. (That is, their number one customer is their government interests.)

It's sort of a corollary to the idea that all of these convictions are intended to set the precedent that all Internet users are criminals.[0] If the primary purpose of telecos is to serve the US government, and the US government wants to criminalize Internet use, then it would make sense for them to serve "hackers" with hefty sentences in cooperation with the department of justice.

[0]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5393561>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And a $73K fine. AT&T, meanwhile, helps the US state spy on its citizens.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/opinion/17mon2.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> It's really bothering me that all of the newspaper stories about this are defining this as a "hack". That has a very negative connotation and is coloring peoples' opinion about this case.

As far as I understand it, the data was publicly accessible and merely visiting the URL output the data he found. I don't view that as hacking.

<comment><USER12> No, not really. Even I don't support his arrest and imprisonment, but what he did was really a hack - He did something that normal people wouldn't do and extracted those emails. Of course, AT&T was assholish enough to have him convicted, but still, this guy was at wrong..He deserved a nice whack maybe, but 3 years of his life is too much to pay for. Heck, even rapists and murderers spend less than that, sometimes.

<comment><USER11> I'm harping on this word choice because most non-technical people do not understand what technical people mean when they say "hack", yet every newspaper article on this is using the word "hack" or "hacker" in the title and coloring peoples' perceptions about this case in a negative and unfair fashion.

If you use the word "hack" in front of normal people, they would probably view it as some neckbeard breaking passwords and bypassing electronic safeguards in a dangerous fashion. They would view it as equivalent to that scene from Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise is dangling from wires to break into the CIA or that scene in Terminator 2 where young John Connor gets easy money from the ATM. I use those popular references because that's what most people think is involved when you use the word "hack" when that's not the case here.

This case, if I understand it correctly, literally involved somebody visiting a URL. Whether he did so by typing it into his browser or using an automated program or not doesn't change the nature of the action to me.

<comment><USER13> I don't think you really mean that. If your bank were open to an XSS attack that "only" required crafting a particular URL to allow access sufficient to transfer funds, I don't think you'd be consoled that the "hack" that drained your account was, at heart, only a matter of visiting some URLs.

Obviously this "hack" was simpler, and AT&T's security was lousy. But the simplicity of an attack is not an excuse for mounting it.

<comment><USER14> In this "attack" the URL was incremented by one.

I've written a lot of loops, and incremented a lot of numbers, and none of them have ever become properly escaped XSS exploits, or malformed YAML, etc. If your bar for "hack" is so low that we're training pre-schoolers to accomplish it, it may lack all descriptive power.

URLs are by design human readable and human editable. Simple discovered usage of these resources is not hacking, it is intended.

Imagine you're reading a story at example.com/stories/bears-part_1_of_3.html and just as it gets good, it's done. Without so much as a "The End".

Do you sit dumbfounded, or do you hack the bejeezus out of the website?

See how silly that sounds. So lets just say you "went to the next page".

<comment><USER15> Call it "Crafting a URL for $INTENT" and save all this talking past each other.

<comment><USER14> Gotta make it seem scary somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> unix-dude Absolutely ridiculous. From what I've read about "weev", he wasn't really the nicest guy on the 'net. I don't know specifics, but really, I don't think they matter.

Here we have a person accessing publicly available data on a public server. Its analogous to ATT posting customer information in a public alleyway (maybe not intended for public viewing, but within the legal possibility of the public to view), and having someone take a picture of the information.

No violence, no trespassing. Disseminating information left sitting around == Jail. This kind of crap needs to stop.

<comment><USER16> So if I peep in your home window and photo you naked and photo your documents and post it all online, not illegal?

<comment><USER17> If those documents you take a photo of are "an email address" and posting it online is "giving it to a journalist who redacts information before taking a screenshot and doesn't release a dump of the data" then I would suggest that, while I wouldn't be too happy with you taking photos through my window, I wouldn't expect you to go to jail for it.

<comment><USER18> I'm amazed by the hoops people will jump through to protect this rat. He already admitted that his ultimate goal was to "harass and embarrass" "rich people".

<comment><USER17> I'm pretty indifferent towards him, he does seem like a moron and an asshole, but this is pretty much the first time I'm hearing anything about him (before I recall hearing "weev" and a few details about the AT&T stuff, nothing about who he is).

Him being an asshole doesn't mean he deserves jail time for what he did.

How about rather than deciding he deserves punishment because you don't like him, and then getting upset when anyone disagrees with you, judge his "crime" and decide whether it deserves jailtime. After that, feel free to separately to judge him as a person and decide you won't lose any sleep over his punishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm afraid the message the DOJ is sending with this sort of thing (Aaron Swartz in mind as well) is "in for a penny, in for a pound". If you're going to do the hack, _f#ck them up_ , because they're going to sentence you as if you had in any case.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. The prosecution industry thrives on crime, not on preventing crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Although I do think the sentence was ridiculous this is a good life lesson. When a man or group of men hold the fate of your life in their hands, take the moment seriously. Those smart comments will seem like a waste of time once you're behind bars trust me. Anyone that's been to jail can tell you only one thing - do anything you can in your power to avoid going there. At the point of sentencing the gears are in motion. Don't apply oil by being an open- mouthed fool.

<comment><USER21> The law is unconstitutional and it will be thrown out on appeal. It doesn't matter if he gets 40 months or 4000.

Knowing that, why not do it like he did?

<comment><USER20> Because then he could get out and be free sooner? If you don't see the value in that then I don't know what else to say.

<comment><USER21> He would not have been out any sooner. Perhaps you misunderstand me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fuck AT&T and the Judge who granted them, and Verizon et al, immunity for their cooperation in the unconstitutional domestic surveillance program.

The corporations and government can get away with what amounts to murder, yet this troll gets locked up for harming no one?

Where is the victim? Where is the harm?

Does the punishment fit the crime?

</comment><comment><USER23> Last night's discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5393367>

<comment><USER24> And another one: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5395112>

Looks like every article on the net about it will get separate topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Hack" used lightly.</comment>


Multics Intro Course (1978) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_honeywellmroCourseOct78_20488346 <comment><USER2> From this page: [https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_honeywellmroCourseOct7...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_honeywellmroCourseOct78_20488346/page/n401)

"Linus...is a powerful and easy-to-use facility for accessing databases from a remote terminal."

</comment><comment><USER3> More Multics resources here: [https://www.multicians.org/biblio.html](https://www.multicians.org/biblio.html)

<comment><USER4> Specially worthwhile to read is how Multics security model compares to UNIX.

[https://multicians.org/b2.html](https://multicians.org/b2.html)

And how much safer PL/I was, even when compared against C17.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From page 17:

> ON MOST LARGE SCALE HONEYWELL EQUIPMENT, A BYTE EQUALS 9 BITS

Wait, 9 bits?

<comment><USER6> Yes and it wasn't alone, I've programmed on several machines that didn't have 8-bit organization. The DEC PDP-9 and some others had 18 bit words and the big CDC 6600 series had 60 bit words with 10 chars per word, not exactly Unicode.</comment></comment>


The Rat Tribe of Beijing - <AUTHOR> http://projects.aljazeera.com/2015/01/underground-beijing/ <comment><USER2> It's been posted a million times before, but if you missed it Hong Kong's walled city was amazing:

[http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/10/28/detailed-cross- sectio...](http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/10/28/detailed-cross-section-of- the-kowloon-walled-city-created-by-japanese-researchers/)

[http://www.mascontext.com/issues/19-trace-fall-13/kowloon- wa...](http://www.mascontext.com/issues/19-trace-fall-13/kowloon-walled-city- heterotopia-in-a-space-of-disappearance/)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139914/A-rare- insig...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139914/A-rare-insight- Kowloon-Walled-City.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8580136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8580136)

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember 5 years ago, some of my musician friends were living in a condo out on the edge of the city too. They used to do rehearsal late at night and neighbors always came the next day to complain. Actually not Beijing, most large cities in China have people like these. One of my best friends is now a designer in Tsingtao (yes, the brand of the beer). He used to hang out with a group of painters, who graduated from top art schools in China, but decided to paint, so they rent a very large room by the street, those kind of room people would think of as a forever 21 shop or GNC shop. And they each have their own tent to sleep in, their paintings were hanging all over the wall. They had boxes of beers, cokes, and cigarettes. Some of their paintings are fantastic, but some are just commercial paint for sale. The point is, some of these guys will make it and create cool stuff out there, some will fail and become a nobody. That's the beauty and the cruelty of the real world...

IIRC, of all these artists I know, only one Beijinger is still trying to make art now, others are all busy making money, because I guess in China, surviving is the most important thing in people's life.

</comment><comment><USER4> Many migrant workers live in the catacombs beneath my apartment building. It is an upscale place, so the contrast is very strange; also these rooms lack windows and are technically illegal (they would never be considered livable in the west, it is like living in a car garage).

<comment><USER5> What happens during the 1-2 days per year when there's heavy rain and flooding? I remember a couple of years ago walking in Beijing almost knee-deep in water (near nanluoguxiang). Is the drainage better near you?

<comment><USER4> Honestly, I just assume they find somewhere else to live until the water table goes back down. A temporary inconvenience. It always smells moldy down there anyways; that can't be healthy.

Plenty of people live in the shops/restaurants they work at, which is why they put makeshift blinds over their windows at night. A lot of dodgy things like that going on in the 'jing.

<comment><USER6> > A lot of dodgy things like that going on in the 'jing.

Indeed, like Gutter oil [0].

I really wish I had read that article prior to my trip to China.

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

<comment><USER7> So if I want to be a first time tourist, how do I avoid it?

<comment><USER8> Don't eat oily food and eat in buddhist vegetarian restaurants.

Even expensive hot pot restaurants got temp closed for using oil from questionable sources, so just paying more is not a guarantee for better quality ingredients, although eating fried food from makeshift street restaurants is almost a swill oil guarantee.

<comment><USER4> Sunshine kitchen and bellagio's are probably all right. It is probably the only time to prefer chain resteraunts, especially ones that aren't franchised. Element fresh is pretty safe, and...well, just remember you get what you pay for.

<comment><USER8> Had the runs from Bellagio once, not sure if it was due to the ever present unsanitary food handling everywhere or due to the food itself.

I have never heard of sunshine kitchen, but I don't live in BJ, so that might be why.

Western countries have their own questionable oil though:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/fake-olive- oil-2012-1?IR=T&op...](http://www.businessinsider.com/fake-olive- oil-2012-1?IR=T&op=1)

[http://kellythekitchenkop.com/the-olive-oil-mafia-be- aware-o...](http://kellythekitchenkop.com/the-olive-oil-mafia-be-aware-of-the- extensive-lies-and-corruption-yes-there-is-a-solution.html)

<comment><USER6> Cutting olive oil with cheaper vegetable oils is much more acceptable in my books then boiling down rancid sewage grease and selling it as new cooking oil.

But you're right, capitalism causes cost-cutting measures all over the world. However dangerous. Not just in Asia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to rent a two-room "suite" on the top floor of a shop house. On the middle floor were three bedrooms, each half the size of my own. One had a waitress in it, one had two guys who used to work opposite shifts at a car factory, and the third one had two sisters, their mother, their brother, and the brother's girlfriend living in it. This was in Oxford, England, and all the rest of the inhabitants were Polish.

A great article, definitely, but I'm sure people can find cramped immigrants closer to home if they look...

<comment><USER4> Not windowless beneath ground, it typically isn't allowed by western building codes.

My dad (who lives in the states) was renovating his basement and had a sink a few windows just to pass inspection.

<comment><USER10> That's right, in all US states as I understand it. Windowless underground warrens are firetraps.

<comment><USER11> One time when I was house-hunting I came across a place in SF where the ground floor had been converted into 18 individual rooms of 36-60 square feet each.The real estate agent was extremely evasive; my wife is still convinced someone had died there and she's probably right.

<comment><USER12> See also?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes#Chicago_and_the_.2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes#Chicago_and_the_.22Murder_Castle.22)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Content aside, I really like the presentation of this article. The cross- linking makes me feel like I'm leafing through a magazine, while the map and individual dossiers make the article so much more tangible.

Also — wow, $4,800 a month and living in a room like that! That's about how much my first Silicon Valley job paid. Kudos to that guy for being so money- conscious.

<comment><USER14> Based on official Chinese data, the average wage(after tax) in Beijing is less than 600 USD per month.

Another Story: My friend Li works for Alibaba,the largest internet company in China. Li is a software engineer with 8+ years working experience, and his salary is less than 3000 USD per month.

But Beijing's House price is much higher than Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What struck me about this article is how much dignity each of those people had. They are all working incredibly hard to better themselves, in situations far more difficult than I've ever had to deal with, while still remaining proud.

They are amazing people, and the writer of the piece did a great job telling their stories without being condescending.

</comment><comment><USER8> In stark contrast to the rat tribe, there is the pigeon tribe aka the rats of the skies.

These people live in illegal make shift buildings on top of apartment buildings, which are usually invisible to anyone that doesn't live in a building that is at least as high as the apartment building in question.

These people are usually poor, however there are also better off people doing this:

[http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/13/world/asia/china-rock- vill...](http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/13/world/asia/china-rock- villa/index.html)

<comment><USER16> Although a cool thought. CNN never came through with the story of poor people living on the rooftops. So I'm dubious.

They also link this rich person story as well.

[http://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/news/illegally- built...](http://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/news/illegally-built- corridor-bridges-high-rise-apartme)

<comment><USER8> Its just my observation from living in second tier cities in China (not in Beijing). I'm not sure who gets the money in the end, but it's a popular option for poorer workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember being a teenager and reading stuff like this in near-future scifi stories...

</comment><comment><USER18> Funny to see he's wearing Dolce and Gabbana sneakers. Most likely knockoffs or maybe pilfered from the factory.</comment>


Amazon to employees: Quit your job, we'll help you start a delivery business - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/amazon-to-employees-quit-your-job-well-help-you-start-a-delivery-business/ <comment><USER2> A bunch of delivery companies did this in Germany around 10-15 years ago, basically helping people to start their own companies and then hiring them back via an exclusive business partnership to do deliveries for them. By doing that they conveniently transferred all the risk and hidden costs like depreciation of the delivery vehicle, maintenance, sick & holiday pay as well as social security & retirement fees to their "business partners", which were often not able to properly understand what they got themselves into.

This practice also spread to other industries like cleaning and building maintenance and became so abusive that a new law was introduced to counteract it, giving rise to a new legal term: Scheinselbständigkeit (false self- employment). The law basically states that if you are a one-man business that operates exclusively for a single client over an extended period of time you will gain the status of an employee of that company.

Hence I'm not surprised Amazon is trying to pull this off as well, I don't think they'll have much success with it though, at least in Europe (I hope).

<comment><USER3> This is known as IR35 in the UK and is currently being implemented in the public sector. Will be enforced in the private sector too shortly, especially if companies like Amazon try to pull of things like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always wonder if people take into full consideration this gig-economy reskin of commercial driving or not. I maintain a CDL for work I perform at a large truck service center and its involved. Do "amazon drivers" or "uber drivers" even have a commercial drivers license or insurance?

\- do they receive regular CDL related physicals that are required by DOT?

\- do they receive an automatic drug screen after an accident?

\- do they perform the pre-flight check on their vehicles before getting underway?

\- are their vehicle logbooks and inspections current? can they produce them if pulled over?

\- do they maintain acccurate weight, and accurate logs of vehicle maintenance?

being a commercial driver is much, much more than just clicking "yes" on amazon and hoping for the best.

<comment><USER5> I think the government should change the regulation (less regulation) to make it easier for people to be commercial driver.

<comment><USER6> I'd rather the government make it more difficult for big companies like Amazon to exploit their workers, as opposed to making it easier for workers to be exploited.

Forcing a full-time driver into a contract role is pure exploitation, given that it absolves Amazon of a certain level of civic responsibility (now the contracting driver isn't paying himself enough... and Amazon sees a nice reduction on the payroll).

<comment><USER5> So you want the government to actually care about its citizen well being ? Then do something like basic income instead.

<comment><USER7> Basic income does not address the fact that many of these regulations are required for the safety of the driver as well as other drivers on the road. Removing those to make the job cheaper to perform and thus more profitable doesn't make it better for society, regardless of who reaps the profits.

<comment><USER5> I'm addressing your comment of worker being exploited (not being paid enough).

<comment><USER7> This was my first comment, but the heart of the exploitation here is that the regulatory burden being placed on the worker IS the exploitation, because the related cost is hidden. Removing the regulatory burden is not the right solution to the exploitation.

<comment><USER5> If your concern is safety then one of solution is to impose high penalty/punishment for reckless driving.

<comment><USER7> Amazingly, people often fail to respond to negative incentives, because they think they will be lucky enough to avoid them. See: \- heart attacks \- lung disease \- saving for retirement \- vehicle emissions \- etc.

And, even if you can't afford the punishment for killing another human being, you might still be able to afford to take the risk to do so. It's a sort of lessor version of a free-rider problem.

Even there, this is assuming that people that take on this level of personal liability are even _aware_ that they are taking that risk.

<comment><USER5> negative incentives works otherwise we wouldn't have it. Does it work perfectly ? no. The goal is to reduce. To eliminate completely maybe impossible.

<comment><USER7> Preventative medicine is the most effective treatment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems like a terrible career move. You have one big customer who has full power over you. Soon they'll get squeezed left and right. The only way I could see this work would be if they could deliver for other companies like Walmart.

<comment><USER9> Uber doesn't work. Lyft doesn't work. Airbnb doesn't work.

Why would it work for delivery?

<comment><USER8> It works great for these companies and it will work great for Amazon.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. It's disgusting. Totally unethical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is most certainly a trap.

They're going to start their business, and then Amazon is going to drop the prices they pay them, and the employees will be trapped because of investment of their own money and sunk costs.

DO NOT DO THIS!

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting, I wonder if this could be used to dodge the "employee vs contractor" problem that companies like Uber have.

Instead of having 100k contractors that might be employees, convert 100k contractors into 40k small transportation businesses with an average of 2.5 employees each.

<comment><USER12> Does FedEx not do this already?

<comment><USER13> FedEx Express / Freight is traditional (union) employees.

FedEx Ground are nonunion independent contractors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's an interesting anti-union strategy.

<comment><USER15> And in a few years we'll get to see why unions came to existence, yay. Hooray for forgetting about history.

<comment><USER16> Honestly, do people not learn about labor history somewhere in school?

<comment><USER17> In public schools in the US? No, not really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The picture from someone who's done doesn't look so good.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazo...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazon- flex-workers/563444/)

</comment><comment><USER5> In the future everyone should be a contractor anyway. Health care should be decoupled from employer.

<comment><USER19> That future is not here and it's naive to think full-time and contract employees should be the ones leading the charge :).

<comment><USER5> Future is created by what one is doing now.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for being a trailblazer and not using any employee sponsored health insurance.

<comment><USER5> Thanks to amazon for accelerating the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Amazon once again being a corporate tool and trying to squeeze everyone else involved: this time their employees and the USPS.

</comment><comment><USER21> There is a great idea present here, which is simply this: Caching items to be delivered locally, but in whatever facilities a local delivery partner would provide (small home, small office, etc.).

I used to think that large retail store partners were the solution to this problem (that is, scaling deliveries beyond centralized warehouses, no matter how large).

But, this is clearly a much better solution because it opens a slew of additional storage/delivery possibilities to be determined by the local delivery providers...

It's sort of like taking a grand problem and outsourcing it to thousands of individuals or small businesses who then solve a small piece of that grand problem in whatever creative ways they can. (Also virtuous in this solution: Autonomy -- authority is presumably pushed downwards to the local providers for various package types, rather than being all centralized at Amazon's warehouses...)

So, brilliant Amazon, absolutely brilliant!

<comment><USER22> There's nothing in there about eliminating the local warehouses in favor of storing a smattering of items locally in the partners houses/where ever. All this is is replacing the swarms of Amazon vans (and the costs and depreciation of those vans) with their new 'partners' vans. They're basically having people start tiny UPSs or DHLs for a (hopefully for their sake) very small area.

<comment><USER21> I apologize for asking, but how was it inferred from my comment that local or other warehouses would be eliminated? To imply that they would was not my intention. Amazon has a variety of Amazon-owned store/ship locations, that includes Amazon's warehouses. Local partner store/ship or even just local partner ship locations do not detract from that in any way, although, Amazon could, at its discretion, choose a subset of products to cache at partner's locations, IF the partners had storage space and were willing and amenable to that arrangement...

<comment><USER22> What I should have said is they're not talking about the distributed warehouse model where all these small partner companies would be storing little bits of inventory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like Amazon is making the smart business move and outsourcing one of the hardest parts of its logistics chain to contractors. The $10,000 looks like an attempt to bootstrap the market. I think this is Amazon saying last mile delivery is a huge concern for the company.

</comment><comment> peter-m80 In Spain we call this "fake freelancer".</comment>


Evaluate Clojure in Google Wave - <AUTHOR> http://markfayngersh.com/post/333326632/clojure-bot-is-a-google-wave-robot-that-evaluates

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool! However, I wonder: are there privacy implications here? If I bring a clojure-bot into a wave with a human, will it be able to 'see' the rest of the conversation?

<comment><USER3> If other members of the wave can see it, clojure-bot can see it too. Don't say bad things in front of clojure-cot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where's the source? How else can one trust this?

<comment><AUTHOR> updated post with source</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tribes – bombard each other until you go to the gym - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tribes-build-habits-friends/id1110368803?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN!

This is my third app, Tribes. I launched a habit tracker app around 2 years ago here. 80,000 + habits were created since then. I now present to you Tribes. Another shot at tackling the "I should exercise/read/write more" problem.

The whole concept is based around accountability. You make a Tribe, invite like-minded people to join your Tribe and then bombard each other with motivation (push notifications) until you actually get it done.

Would love some feedback - Thanks!</comment>


Firefox Reality - <AUTHOR> https://mixedreality.mozilla.org/firefox-reality/ <comment><USER2> Firefox Reality is a version of Firefox targeted at VR headsets. You can install it from the store of the Oculus Quest (the headset I own, I imagine others are supported). It's not meant to run on a regular workstation.

The interesting feature of this browser is navigating VR ready websites that provide an immersive experience (aka. webvr). You can also browse the regular web from your headsets, of course, but that's not particularly exciting.

<comment><USER3> It is very odd how vague their product description page is. Naming a product Firefox Reality seems like good marketing: what could be a better brand than all of Reality? However _in_ reality, their site doesn't say exactly what parent says: Firefox Reality is a browser built for (standalone) XR devices.

<comment><USER4> I'm assuming that's a typo and you meant VR, given that I've never heard of XR, and thus wouldn't really be an improvement in terms of vagueness...

<comment><USER5> No, XR is a thing now. It's a general name for VR, AR and MR (mixed reality).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Reality_(XR)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Reality_\(XR\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Enter a New Dimension"... of what? I didn't advance beyond the opening screen. Is this going to educate me (mmm), seduce me (eww), stimulate me (eww/mmm?), or just going to advertise to me?

The problem with all of these virtual-X or augmented-X is that they don't provide enough value to me -- as a consumer -- they're just "grand ideas" without any real value.

I'm sure the gimmick effect has some value in and of itself, but c'mon.

<comment><USER7> I also didn't quite understand the landing page. Enter a new dimension can be applied to anything. Scrolling further we find some VR brands, but the title made that clear already. Then your eyes are drawn to the moving game covers. So are they making an app store? Scrolling further, we find "Designed from the Virtual Ground Up". Ha-ha I see what they did there. And then comes the footer.

Only now that I go back through it more slowly to write it up, I find this small text just before the end: "designed to tackle all of the new opportunities (and challenges) that come with browsing in VR". _Oh it 's a browser!_ Only after typing the comment about how I scrolled through the whole page and didn't find a meaningful statement, I noticed a line of text hidden between headlines and moving pictures that should have been the title.

<comment><USER8> Yeah the page wasn't clear what it was until I saw the video on the Oculus page.

Thought they were releasing a headset or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure what the situation is for tabbed browsing in this.

"Viewing multiple pages concurrently" issue repeatedly mentions tabs as something that needs to be designed [https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/issues/635](https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/issues/635), in May saying "Will keep this issue open for designing Tabs. Feel free to make changes to track the design + engineering."

But then in June it's "Closing this in favor of new meta bug #1319"

And #1319 does not mention tabs anywhere. [https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/issues/1319](https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/issues/1319)

Maybe tabs have been implicitly bundled into "multiwindow" when they're talking about that? Can't check myself because the Quest version doesn't have any multiwindow support, it looks like they're working on a crash issue for it.

I tried a dev build sideloaded last week on the Quest and being in a single- window no-tab environment where you can only have one page open at a time is very limiting. But as soon as that's worked out, I'll be switching to this as the main browser.

I wonder if it will be possible for someone to patch Oculus Home so that the Browser button opens this instead.

<comment><USER10> Hi! As we mentioned in the recent Quest release blog post, [https://blog.mozvr.com/firefox-reality-for-oculus- quest/](https://blog.mozvr.com/firefox-reality-for-oculus-quest/), we have some designs for multi-window support and synchronization of content between platforms. We're still working on options around tabs / additional content beyond the number of windows you have open, alongside our really awesome Seattle-based design partners, Podipo: [http://podipo.com/](http://podipo.com/)

Once we have some concrete designs, we'll have issues open and on our public roadmap for comment and we often have early builds available in our releases page for sideloading if people are interested in testing and giving feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mozilla has really gone off the rails. They have deprioritized html 5 compliance and keep chasing spectres like VR and mobile. I really wish they'd just stick to making sure there's a solid, viable alternative to chrome, instead of getting distracted like this.

<comment><USER12> I noticed a few months back that the Servo engine (upon which I was building a play/experimental browser) development had shifted significantly in the direction of Mixed Reality (it shifted more than a few months back, but I was not paying that close of attention). At that point I gave up on my browser project.

Some execs at Mozilla think MR is the wave of the future. I think it's mostly a party trick with a very niche market and will always only be a niche market, and wasting top talent on MR seriously detracts from a project that is a hundred-fold more important. But maybe that's just me.

<comment><USER13> > MR seriously detracts from a project that is a hundred-fold more important

I have mixed feeling about this. I'm inclined to agree with you however if it did take off it could mean the difference between Firefox dying and becoming the market leader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any particular reason they can't offer a damn .exe so I can try this out with my Index? I'm sure the copy on Viveport would work, but I don't want to install Viveport. :(

Edit: Their Github page has releases, but they're all APK's? [https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/releases](https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/releases)

Edit2: Oh, it's for "standalone" headsets. Never mind I guess...

<comment><USER15> Any reason iOS is excluded? Last I checked they still have a good share of the mobile user bases out there.

<comment><USER16> Firefox IOS uses the safari browser because Apple's walled garden is off limits for browsers that are not based on that. So, that makes shipping a VR browser without the Firefox internals impossible/impractical. In this case, it's not only a browser but a content store that is not iTunes, which complicates things further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A bit off topic - but does anyone remember VRML? Did it die out?

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

<comment><USER18> Absolutely. When I was a kid I did not have any internet access, and most of the software was from CDs from magazines. One of them had a VRML world+editor that I still remember fondly.

I should try to see if the CD is still readable...

<comment><USER19> You should check on cd.textfiles.com. They have the content of a bunch of those old CDs that would come with magazines. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit download content from textfiles.com and reminiscing of the pre- ubiquitous-internet world :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My problem with the whole VR world, Firefox Reality included, is that it requires me to use stores, open accounts, and do all kind of stuff that seems to me unnecessary.

Do I get it wrong?

<comment><USER20> Firefox Reality includes support for WebVR, so you can use web based VR applications through the browser.

Part of the reason you might choose to install Firefox Reality on your VR headset is because it's important to you that developers of VR apps always have an option to use the web to share their apps, which will avoid forcing their users in the way you mention.

We've built a social VR application called Hubs (hubs.mozilla.com) to showcase the potential of web based VR applications.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I swear if I get a client that says their site isn't Oculus ready, I'm going to be upset.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seems a little bit weird to call this "Reality" \- the word "Virtual" is not incidental the meaning of the phrase "Virtual Reality", taking it away completely reverses the meaning. It's almost like this is an April Fool's joke.

<comment><USER23> Branding doesn't need to be literal, just evocative. The word reality is often mentioned in trippy or philosophical contexts, which is the connotation that the term "virtual reality" is trying to evoke. The brand strategy didn't work for you, but I don't think it's a particularly unreasonable one, and I think plenty of people will tap into the connotations they were going for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've noticed it's very common for VR marketing material to show young children using the devices. Is stuffing a headset onto your kid going to be the new 'give them a tablet to shut them up' in the future? going to have some very interesting repercussions.

<comment><USER25> i hope not. long term effects of a heavy constricting belt on a still- developing cranium must be severe.

<comment><USER26> People have been doing that intentionally since prehistoric times. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation)

<comment><USER25> that ... doesnt look healthy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious if Firefox has considered a GSuite competitor. Their IOT/home- router offering looks great, and a similarly privacy-first GSuite might get a lot of cross sell.

<comment><USER28> That would be cool but a beast of a project and a hard sell to big business. Maybe start with email/calendar/etc. first

<comment><USER29> I think you've just come full-circle to Mozilla Thunderbird which has been around since 2003.

\- [https://www.thunderbird.net/](https://www.thunderbird.net/)

\- [https://www.thunderbird.net/calendar/](https://www.thunderbird.net/calendar/)

<comment><USER27> I was thinking some version of privacy centric webmail + suite (yes, I get the issue). The market for Thunderbird is just too niche.

<comment><USER30> Mozilla should partner with Libreoffice to make their web version a polished competitor to GSuite.

<comment><USER27> Web Libreoffice plus a decent integrated webmail implementation seems like it would do well. Several companies are charging $5+/month/user for less, and are doing well, right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think this is Servo? Is there any progress with Servo outside of VR/AR? Really looking forward to a browser with parallel layout.

<comment><USER32> Yes! There's an active Servo Layout 2.0 project going on right now, which is a revamp of layout to make it production-quality. Anthony developed some Rust iterator magic to allow us to write sequential-looking code that actually runs in parallel, which is a major improvement in maintainability over what we had before.

Most of the work is currently going on out-of-tree in Simon's victor project, if you're interested: [https://github.com/SimonSapin/victor](https://github.com/SimonSapin/victor)

<comment><USER33> Java added fairly seamless parallel iterators via streams but there is a huge amount of overhead there and often it is slower than normal iterators, depending on the work being done at each iteration. Hopefully Rust is able to avoid that sort of downside.

<comment><USER32> The parallelism in Servo layout is powered by Rayon, which is extensively optimized and shipping in Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Sad that the daydream version on a Moto Z in Google Play gives me a "Your device isn't compatible with this version" for me even though I can run Daydream and other daydream apps

<comment><USER35> It is meant only for standalone Daydream headsets. Why this is the case, I cannot fathom.

<comment><USER36> Even standalone headsets seem to be a crapshoot. It "runs" on my Lenovo Mirage, for example, but (last I checked) it's pretty crashy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm looking forward to Firefox supporting OpenXR, which will open it up to all the headsets supported on GNU/Linux by OpenHMD via Monado.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe this is a stupid question but how would you click on something like this ? With your eyes or your hands ?

<comment><USER39> Clicking in VR is usually done with your controller. The controller shines a virtual laser pointer making it easy to aim and click.

Doing it with your eyes may be preferable long-term, but eye tracking isn't in consumer headsets yet.

<comment><USER40> "Easy" to aim and click may be a stretch... I have only ever tried the Vive's implementation before but it felt a lot like holding a laser pointer - basically impossible to get any precision because your hand vibrates so much in ways you don't realize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have a hard time believing browsing the Internet will ever be in a form like this unless we find an easier way to input information than typing on a keyboard. It's just too much energy.

</comment><comment><USER42> EDIT:

I took a quick look at the codebase for the browser ([https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality](https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality)), and it isn't what I was expecting (once you dive to app/src) - definitions for the main three supported systems are each at this root level, and I didn't see any kind of "template" or "empty" definition file or anything to guide someone wanting to make one themselves - but maybe that's not possible.

It appears that these files are wrappers around the APIs used for those other products (?). So your only hope would be to base your wrapper on these existing ones, which while feasible (working with the API docs too), isn't what I would call "ideal". Plus, there doesn't seem to be a separation of concerns when it comes to input vs output.

I mean, what if I wanted to use my hacked powerglove with my Rift HMD? Or what if I wanted to use my Vive controllers with my Virtuality Pro?

I understand that the supported systems are nominally "all-in-one" solutions, but the parts (HMDs, controllers, tracking) are available separately (at least in some of the cases) - so mixing and matching might be something someone would want to do. It would definitely be that case for those implementing their own "mixed setup", where they might have an old VPL datasuit and glove, plus some other old pro-level HMD that they like to play with.

As it is, it seems like each setup would have to be a custom "all-in-one" for that setup, so if you had two different systems that used two different HMDs and tracking, but both used the same Powerglove Minelli interface - the code couldn't be "shared" in a reasonable manner (yes, I know with the right symlinking and other buggery it could be accomplished within the current structure, but it isn't ideal).

I was hoping the structure would be more like /plugins, with /input /output, and under those /controller /glove /wand and /hmd /motionplatform /cave, then under each /occulus /vive /google /example

Or something like that. Am I wrong here?

\---

Ok - I know this is likely open source and thus can be changed, but I honestly wish that things like this offered (and marketed) a means - via plugins or something (and maybe this does - hence, marketed) - the ability to expand on what i/o devices are allowed.

Sure - should the "main players" be featured? Of course. But what about those of us who might like to - oh, I don't know - throw on an old Forte VFX-1 and a Powerglove and go at it? Maybe we want to recreate the experience of using REND386?

Or what if you have access to a Polhemus or Ascension magnetic tracking system (or any number of other "pro-level" tracking)? Or HMDs? Or other input devices? Or motion platforms?

Maybe you're a developer of something completely new, and want to play in this same environment and make it compatible...

Again - I haven't dug into the code, and maybe it's designed to accommodate these kinds of use cases. I'd just love to see that availability, if it exists, to be advertised more. I guess its because I get the same feeling around software released for my OS of choice, where Windows and Mac are prominently advertised, and Linux is at best, if it's offered at all, the classic step-child stuffed in a closet.

As an aside, I never can figure out the argument that "we don't offer support for Linux because the market is so small, it isn't worth it for us" \- well, if everyone keeps saying and doing that, what do you think will ultimately occur? Do you think that market will grow, stay the same, or shrink?

<comment><USER43> > Forte VFX-1

Man I remember seeing those in copies of PC Gamer as a kid. You can find modern reviews online. They had a lot of issues; mostly due to low resolution leading to motion sickness.

There were attempts at 3D web standards in the past. Who remembers VRML?!

<comment><USER44> VRML contained the technology to crash both Netscape Navigator and your entire X display, frequently under a minute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How about making Firefox work on mac without having to put it in low-res mode?

</comment><comment><USER46> Wind power really needs something to level demand—either a battery scheme such as Tesla is selling or pumped storage (where you pump water uphill when the wind is blowing and let it flow downhill when it isn't) it's

<comment><USER47> I think you commented on the wrong thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Oh man, I miss VRML :)

<comment><USER42> In my collection of VR documents and software "artifacts" \- I have a collection of QuickBasic 4.5 programs (source code) that this French team built (circa late 1990s IIRC) to generate various VRML models and "worlds" using code. I don't recall how abstracted it was, but I thought it unique enough to save it for my archive. I should really go through that collection and release it in some manner - I have tons of interesting stuff, much of which has disappeared from the web. Maybe an upload to archive.org would be in order...

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Will it work for Oculus Quest?

<comment><USER50> Yes, just announced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Is this for Oculus Quest yet?

<comment><USER52> Yep

[https://www.oculus.com/experiences/app/2180252408763702](https://www.oculus.com/experiences/app/2180252408763702)

<comment><USER9> Note that multi-window support isn't released on Quest yet, but should come once they get to the bottom of this: [https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/issues/1459](https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/issues/1459)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> What _is_ it? A new headset? A new browser? What?

<comment><USER43> A application for existing 3D headsets. I've had this on my Oculus Go for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Viveport, eww.

<comment><USER55> yeah, really. Why not put it on Steam?

<comment><USER56> I love Viveport, personally. It's great to just pay once and play any game.

I imagine Firefox will make tons of money this way since devs get paid by the amount of minutes the software runs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Until Mozilla fixes Firefox and stops treating users like children, I will continue to use other browser options. What a slow sad death :(

</comment><comment><USER58> A little off topic, but what a world we live in when a prominent browser maker is advertising a new browser with a webpage that doesn't properly display its main tagline on small devices (iPhone SE) [https://i.imgur.com/WkqsUEZ_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&f...](https://i.imgur.com/WkqsUEZ_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium)

If they can't get it right, what does that say about the state of the web as a platform?

<comment><USER59> If its like the analytics for the 45MM users I get on the sites I manage the SE traffic is less than 0.5%.

And to be clear, its not broken, the alignment is slightly off: [https://imgur.com/a/GBLe5Jt](https://imgur.com/a/GBLe5Jt) I would totally let this pass QA for such a minority view.

<comment><USER58> 1) I didn't say broken, I said 'doesn't properly display'.

2) How many other smaller phones exist on the market? It's disingenuous to say it's .5%.

This is not some complex item- it should simply not look like this. If the simple stuff is misaligned, what can you expect the rest of the page and more complex items to work like?</comment></comment></comment>


Customizable Tiny Linux OS for Your Development Needs Optimized for Chromebooks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/HUSKI3/FireOS <comment><USER2> The name 'FireOS' is a risky name for a OSS Linux project for Chromebooks that is likely to be trademarked by Amazon Inc. 'Fire' is trademarked but not 'FireOS'.

I wouldn't risk getting this project ruined by their patent and trademark lawyers if your project becomes successful, so brace yourselves for a rename.

<comment><USER3> Hey look! An hour ago it was changed to IgniteOS

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare to GaliumOS? Ive been using that on <$150 chromebooks with great pleasure: [https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility](https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility)

<comment><USER5> I'm thinking about getting something along these lines. What chrome book did you get?

<comment><USER4> I use Gallium on the super cheap Acer Chromebook 11. If I were to upgrade I would get something with more pixels, and perhaps more built in storage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've had pretty decent success getting Linux to run directly on Chromebooks. Does this have anything in particular that makes it a better choice than a standard distribution?

</comment><comment><USER7> "FireOS" overlaps awfully much with Amazon's Fire Stick platform.

<comment><USER8> It's literally the name of Amazon's Android fork for Fire tablets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks interesting — would be cool if the author called out what hardware this was tested on specifically since they mention drivers to support various things like Chromebooks and microboards.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is the appeal of a Chromebook over, say, a GPD Win or Pocket or something?

<comment><USER11> I don't know why others use them, but the main thing for me is price. I got a Toshiba Chromebook 2 at 13 inches and 1080p for < $100. It's 3lbs and if it dies in a fire I can get a replacement no problem. I take it on trips. Most of the heavy computational lifting I do these days on servers anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Runs Live and does not effect main drives

Not the best choice, especially from Chromebooks. Not all flash drives are fast & reliable.</comment>


Twenty Five Years in Chinese Jazz - <AUTHOR> http://theanthill.org/jazz <comment><USER2> Thank you China, at least jazz is growing somewhere for... "Jazz Has Become The Least-Popular Genre In The U.S."

"...In 2011, a total of 11 million jazz albums (CD, cassette, vinyl, & digital) were sold, according to BusinessWeek. This represents 2.8% of all music sold in that year. However, just a year later, in 2012, that percentage fell to 2.2%. It rose slightly to 2.3% in 2013 before falling once again to just 2% in 2014.

That 2% represents just 5.2 million albums sold by all jazz artists in 2014. In comparison, the best-selling artist of 2014, Taylor Swift, sold 3.7 million copies of her latest album '1989' in the last 2 months of 2014 alone. ..."

[http://thejazzline.com/news/2015/03/jazz-least-popular- music...](http://thejazzline.com/news/2015/03/jazz-least-popular-music-genre/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cheers, very interesting. I know some of the early people in the Chinese music scene but have never spent much time in Beijing and had not read of such an early foreign involvement. If you visit Yunnan hit me up.

</comment><comment><USER4> That is very nicely written, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> thanks for posting!</comment>


Show HN: Z80 Compiler Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://8bitworkshop.com/viz.html <comment><USER3> It would be nice to have a superoptimizer for Z80 in a form of web tool. You provide a C expression to it and the tool will return in turn the shortest code sequence. Demosceners would love it.

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

I found this long abandoned project which is described in non-English, see the examples on the bottom of the page: [http://www.ricbit.com/mundobizarro/superopt.php](http://www.ricbit.com/mundobizarro/superopt.php)

<comment><USER4> Us firmware developers would also love it! Something like that could easily save real money. 8-bit C-compilers are pretty bad.

For example Keil C51 compiler produces binaries about 2x too large and 2-4x too slow, even with maximum level optimizations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice, but I wouldn't call it a visualization. More like a "live preview" or "instant compiler" or something.

Also, why is it so laggy? It feels like it's being sent to a server for compilation, but it looks like it's all in JavaScript. (And V8 is honking fast, should be nearly instant.)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all done in a worker running asm.js modules. I've found it to be fastest on Firefox. Would love to speed it up; haven't found the magic emscripten flags yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I'd like to try WebAssembly, but I keep getting "TypeError: Module.asm.__GLOBAL__I_000101 is undefined" errors when trying to run it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This brings back a lot of memories. I remember in high school printing out a sheet of Z80 opcodes (at size 6 font), writing a program on a sheet of paper, and then manually compiling that program and typing in the hex codes (using the AsmPrgm instruction to prefix the program). It was great for boring classes as long as you sat far enough in the back. As a prank, we started grabbing people's calculators and turning off the LCD display using some sequence of assembly. Restarting the calculator wouldn't fix it, so you either had to memorize the button sequences to re-enable the display or remove the batteries and let it sit for a while.

<comment><USER7> How on earth did you work out how to program assembly through button presses on a calculator? Sounds like a stunning prank though.

<comment><USER6> The TI graphing calculators have a mode for writing your own programs. Typically this is done using TI-BASIC, but if you prefix the program with the AsmPrgm symbol, it will allow you to directly write Z80 opcodes as hex values. Combined with a TI-provided guide for making bcalls (calls into common routines that have already been written, like changing LCD settings or multiplying floats), it's not too difficult to write a short ASM program by hand.

<comment><USER8> Fun times. I did the same hand compiling back in middle school on a couple long plane flights where I didn't have access to a full compiler. Shame this never shipped: [http://www.detachedsolutions.com/main/oldnews.php?item=58](http://www.detachedsolutions.com/main/oldnews.php?item=58)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Code generation is probably missing somewhat trivial optimizations. Here's one example:

      int func(int x) {
          return x * 1;
      }

...still produces unnecessary stack manipulation:

       0000 C1            [10]   56 	pop	bc
       0001 E1            [10]   57 	pop	hl
       0002 E5            [11]   58 	push	hl
       0003 C5            [11]   59 	push	bc
       0004 C9            [10]   60 	ret

Plain "ret" would have been enough.

<comment><USER9> Depends on how it expects the parameter and the result.

If the parameter is the second item down on the stack and the compiler wants the result in hl with the stack unchanged.

        pop bc
        pop hl
        push hl
        push bc

isn't redundant stack manipulation. it's moving stack values to bc and hl while keeping the stack unchanged.

Of course at another level a compiler should be able to inline x=>x*1 but that depends on the build architecture. If it's a linkable function then the contents may be opaque to the code that calls it.

<comment><USER4> Ok, seems like you're right.

In SDCC function params are always passed on stack, but return value in HL. So pop hl/push hl moves function parameter to return value register HL. (pop/push bc is of course just used to get past return address value in stack.)

Seems odd compiler doesn't pass parameters in registers in a relatively register rich z80 arch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is amazing.

It's particularly neat to watch how it handles things like "x * 16 + 500000" by splitting integers and using bit rotation.

<comment><USER11> at the time Z80 was popular ('87 ish) there were few/no tools outside of Hisoft Devpac ([http://www.secarica.ro/images/zx/genp351.gif](http://www.secarica.ro/images/zx/genp351.gif)) neither was there any internet / forums etc. to learn how others were solving things - like that bit rotation example

when I found out people were moving the stack pointer register to the screen memory base address and using stack pushes (instead of mov) to move data - <USER2> save a clock cycle or two each byte move - it blew my mind - hacks like that would be common knowledge in minutes now

<comment><USER4> > when I found out people were moving the stack pointer register to the screen > memory base address and using stack pushes (instead of mov) to move data - > to save a clock cycle or two each byte move ...

So the user might occasionally see interrupt stack frame on screen?

<comment><USER11> memory is hazy, but using SP to move the memory was fast enough you could blit most (not all) of a screen in one refresh cycle - which is, I think, why games like Uridium ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvULd4zHz8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvULd4zHz8Y)) were running the main gameplay in a smaller area

also, on that Uridium vid - notice how they are using the standard font but spacing it out vertically (so they could save memory)

<comment><USER4> Also no level destruction scene. Intra-level minigame was also completely missing.

Leaving those out must have saved some memory too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ahh. I remember doing lots of TI82/83 calculator programming in Z80 and never considering using a C to Z80 compiler since it was so suboptimal. C was considered slow and a memory hog. Most of these (other than the sprite routine) aren't that bad. Every byte counted when you only had 26KB free.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really like stuff like this. This tool is amazing for C++: [https://godbolt.org/](https://godbolt.org/) It's really handy for popular architectures and it's nice that it has "real" compilers (GCC vs. clang vs. ICC.) I find it fun to compare small pieces of code between the different compilers.

\----

Shameless plug for an abandoned project of mine: (note: these demos appear to work in the latest Chrome on a wide monitor - YMMV; I didn't know what I was doing.)

Back in 2012 I wanted to learn JS and had some ideas about a UI for teaching C programming with good visualizations. I was interested in building tools that would allow you to visualize in-memory data structures and step through the code (so you could watch a sorting algorithm, or tree manipulation, that kinda stuff.)

Anyway the full thing never panned out but I've got some lower-level demos:

Here's a UI for running MIPS-like assembly: [http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc3/mip...](http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc3/mips/)

(Hit "run" and click "faster" a few times) It started off as straight-MIPS but I realized emulating a real machine wasn't necessary for the overall goal (teaching C and the C abstract machine) so I started adding convenient op- codes. All words (I think) of memory had tags to specify if the memory was initialized (maintained by the VM) stack/heap (maintained theoretically by the C runtime) or code/data. The goal was to make a C machine that was maximally friendly for education.

Here's a C REPL that compiles to that assembly and runs it on the VM: [http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc/](http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc/) it compiles on keyup (I had vague goals of very quick feedback) and there is a line-edit below the source code that you can put C expressions into (e.g. type "fib(12)" without the quotes and hit enter - it should print 233 if you haven't modified the code.)

The parser is mostly-complete C99 (typedefs were an issue - the first parser used a YACC-like generator which is known to have troubles here - the next version used a hand-rolled recursive descent parser. That one didn't get finished but also had way better error messages, as expected.) The compiler (semantic analysis + codegen) didn't support much of the language though, e.g. it doesn't know how to code-gen for > but it knows <. So, the compiler is not at a very usable state.

I also had a V2 of the VM with an insane fixed 8-bit instruction set (with 200+ instructions) for a stack-based (not register) machine with a 32 bit address space. It would generate (with a poorly written bash script) the VM from the LaTeX documentation for the CPU which was weird. Here's the PDF: [http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc2/vm/...](http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc2/vm/docs/cpu.pdf) the .tex file (in the same directory) has the impl of the instructions (not rendered to the PDF - that was the intent though) and it generates this: [http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc2/vm/...](http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc2/vm/vm.js) It never did get finished but it had some promise.

\---

It was a fun short project that got abandoned. I still think there would be value in an educational implementation of C, something that conforms to the spec but is in no way performant--instead, UB sanitizers everywhere and special hooks inside the runtime to aid in visualization and debugging (e.g. I want to look at memory and see all the allocations with links back to what line of code allocated this word of memory, etc.)

Source code (it's all really bad):

\- VM: [https://github.com/j3parker/mipsjs/blob/master/mips.js](https://github.com/j3parker/mipsjs/blob/master/mips.js)

\- Jison grammar/parser: [https://github.com/j3parker/jcc/blob/master/c.jison](https://github.com/j3parker/jcc/blob/master/c.jison)

\- Better, but incomplete recursive-descent parser: [http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc2/par...](http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~j3parker/things/evalc/evalc2/parser.js)

\- Compiler: [https://github.com/j3parker/jcc/blob/master/jcc.js](https://github.com/j3parker/jcc/blob/master/jcc.js)

<comment><USER14> Thank you very much, it is very interesting! I started with a weird VM with 16-bit opcodes for variable-length instructions (VLIW) and now I'm trying to write a compiler for it. At the beginning I considered a stack-based CPU so I could use less bits per opcode, and implement Forth-like VLIW stuff, but I discarded it for a register-based VLIW VM, so I could write a C compiler easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to love the zilog z80, so super happy to see this Used to use it for automation and running FORTH...

</comment><comment><USER14> Still not being very efficient generating Z80 code, the SDCC is amazing! :-)

P.S. SDCC mirror in GitHub: [https://github.com/svn2github/sdcc](https://github.com/svn2github/sdcc)

</comment><comment><USER16> Given that Z80 is super easy to learn assembly language, this is a great introduction on how C code would internally. I would suggest give the option for 8085 too as the its so much similar.

<comment><USER17> Z80 isn't actually that easy. It's a quirky little chip, I'd much sooner recommend the 6502 for an assembly beginner.

<comment><USER18> As luck would have it, the very same site under discussion also happens to host a neat online "IDE" for learning all about the 6502-based Atari 2600¹.

It is a companion to the book, "Making Games for the Atari 2600". A wonderfully clear and concise primer that I thoroughly enjoyed, even though I had no interest in the Atari 2600 per se. The NES was my first console -- and naturally the one I'd always wanted to program. Since it shares the same 6502 processor, I used this book as an introductory text before diving into the murkier waters of NES development wikis and forums.

¹ [http://8bitworkshop.com](http://8bitworkshop.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> uh! Adding a number to itself for multiplication by 2 instead of one quick shift to the left?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Z80 has no 16-bit shift instruction, but has 16-bit add/subtract :)

</comment></comment><comment> Digit-Al Ah. Good old Z80. For some reason, C9 has become indelibly burned into my brain.</comment>


4.5M tweets shows falsehoods are 70 percent more likely to get shared - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/twitter-fake-news-truth <comment><USER2> My perception of Twitter as a communication medium has changed widely over time. First I totally dismissed it as just a tool for celebrities and young people to share banalities, which it is OK but hardly transformative.

Later I started to understand the very useful cases: Subject authorities making interesting quips and citing sources, real-time updates of local journalists on trending issues in an easily consumable format, a very public and expedite channel to report serious issues to government entities and so on and so forth .I became convinced and opened an account to create my lists of people to follow.It was great and still it is but somehow I have become tired for several reasons:

1) Sturgeon's law and not only applicable to people tweets in general but to the tweets of a particular person.Few people kept a consistent quality(this is subjective I know).

2)Twitter insane way to present the feed.

3)Lately and sadly the extremely pugnacious political battle in the US. I know everybody has the right the publish to publish what they consider interesting and important but now sometimes reading twitter I feel I have a cable subscription to 100 CNN instead of the diversity I was used to.

These are still interesting time to the medium, let's see how it evolves.</comment>


The Story behind DokuWiki's new Template (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.selfthinker.org/2012/10/20/the-story-behind-dokuwikis-new-template/ <comment><USER2> Random bit of dw love: I use this software* every day and am quite pleased at its looks. I was introduced to it by a company that used it as the IT wiki for all 17 properties located around the USA and international properties.

I now run a private one of my own on the internet, a tiny one on a USB stick, and am trying to get an older version working on my old Windows 98 testing box.

* Don't want to trip the F5 bot which is how I found this post.</comment>


Facebook experiment boosts US voter turnout (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/facebook-experiment-boosts-us-voter-turnout-1.11401

<comment><USER2> Was facebook the only influence in those people to vote? I understand there was a study behind it, but what would have happened if facebook didn't display the message.

Here is an example, I worked on a website where we redesigned a page. All of the sudden we got an increase in traffic.

I insisted that the reason for the traffic increase had nothing to do with the redesign. More page views could have been a result of another website linking to us. (the real reason was the website appeared on TV) But at the time the business team did not know that, so they just said it's the redesign.

My point is, there are lots of factors that can influence the vote, and with the very little detail it is hard to say that Facebook was the cause.

<comment><USER3> The important detail is that the findings were based on comparing 3 different groups in a multivariate test. In theory, that controls for the sorts of things you mentioned :)</comment></comment>