Google I/O 2014 - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/events/io

<comment><USER2> After making it all the way to the exoplanets and back to the higgs I nearly gave up before finally realizing I could scroll down.

I hate this trend in web design.

<comment><USER3> If you were attentive, you could notice "continue to site" arrow on the very first screen.

<comment><USER4> If your UI requires that users "be attentive" just to discover the content _you 're trying to convey_, then your UI is awful and the user's failure to see it is entirely your fault.

<comment><USER5> Well said. I blame it partially on designer groupthink.

Of course design elements (color, typeface, white space, etc) are important...but visitors of your site are interested in consuming content NOW (not a few seconds form now). People are lazy.

<comment><USER6> Actually, I'm inclined to bet this was one designer's concept and not the work of many people reviewing prototypes and giving feedback.

Design-by-group tends to produce boring, cluttered, seen-it-before layouts with little innovation. This seems to be on the completely opposite end of the spectrum -- with no one saying, "Uh, wait -- I think you need to make it clear that you can scroll for more info."

(And also: "Uh, I'm not sure developers are going to take kindly to Google requesting access to their microphones so soon after the NSA revelations.")

<comment><USER7> That's not actually what "groupthink" means, so you aren't really disagreeing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Last summer I interned on Google+ Developer Relations so I got to go to IO for free and as staff, which is pretty rare even among Googlers.

IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you're into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it's impossible to see every tech talk that you want to. The real reason to shell out $900 + travel would be to go talk to Google DevRel and other people in your field to build your network.

If you're just going for the technical info, you're honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They're incredibly well organized and you can pause to think as you watch. I ended up watching all of the ones I went to live for a second time when I got home.

</comment><comment><USER9> The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn't feel it was developer focussed enough. It'll be interesting to see if there is a giveaway at all this year, since a large part of previous woes could be down to people attending just for that, and I'd cynically observe that for many attendees the long term value was actually just the giveaway.

The lottery is a definite step in the right direction, but the branding is just all kinds of terrible, and makes me wonder how much they've really learned.

If they can improve access to the same content and people at remote locations that might be a game changer (i.e. hangouts to allow remote participation in some of their sideshows), as most of the value of attending the main event is what goes on outside the main talks, thanks to YouTube being so effective for hosting those.

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly fail to see how the lottery improves things.

IMHO the best way is to just announce that there's no giveaway this year. Not the best promotion for the event though.

<comment><USER9> I believe the thinking is that the previous setup meant that most people there were the kind that would obsessively refresh windows in order to secure places. The lottery means there's no benefit to those possibly excessively enthused about the idea, and so the tone of the whole thing could be more balanced and professional.

They're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the announcement of winners will cause a surge.

<comment><USER10> > _They 're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the > announcement of winners will cause a surge._

Is this no different to selling out in minutes though? Besides, hotels already know a) the dates of Google IO, and b) how many people are attending, so you'd imagine they'd already have priced that into their rates. Unless you're talking about the actual booking systems going offline, but that seems unlikely as lots of people will use aggregators (Expedia, Kayak, etc) at scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In order to be allowed to buy a ticket they should have a simple dynamically- generated programming challenge so non-programmers can't search for the exact answer. Maybe some kind of dynamically generated boolean math problem to be implemented with if-else statements.

<comment><USER12> You should have to write a working Juniper configuration to establish a peering session at an exchange with YouTube.

Then non-network engineers wouldn't be grabbing up all the tickets.

<comment><USER13> Tech world's equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Even without attending it, I am looking forward to see if there are presentations about ART and improving the state of Java on Android.

Now with Java 8 out, it is pretty lame that one still needs to use a Java 6 fork to target the majority of Android devices.

<comment><USER15> SDK Tools, Revision 22.6 (March 2014) added support for Java 7 language features. You use Java 7 to build.

"features like multi-catch, try-with-resources, and the diamond operator. " \- [1]

[1] - [http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/tools- notes.html](http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/tools-notes.html)

<comment><USER14> Only works with Android 4.4!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Odd...

"This page has been blocked from accessing your microphone."

I don't have headphones on, and I see no other indication as to why they'd want to access my mic. Weird.

<comment><USER17> At the bottom right-hand corner of the page when it loads it tells me:

"Explore technology and its impact from small to large through tapping, spinning and making sound.

It seems that making noise causes the animation to do things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any big announcements rumored for this year's I/O, e.g. Android 5.0, Nexus 6 phone, 12" tablet, more offline services (Maps, Docs, etc.)?

I tried a couple of times to get in, failed, and resigned myself to watching the presentations and tutorials online for free. That's fine. Say what you will, Google gives away a lot of knowledge for free and I have benefited greatly.

Can't wait till June.

<comment><USER19> There won't be a Nexus phone, those are announced at the end of the year usually. No one is expecting 5.0, though they usually do release a partial update every six months (maybe another KitKat, like the three JellyBean releases).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmm, that website is extremely slow for me (on Firefox).

<comment><USER21> Straight up crashes it for me.

<comment><USER22> Yeah; me too.

<comment><USER23> WFM on FFox 29, albeit slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This page crashes my browser (FF 28 in Ubuntu). Ooops.

Anyone else experiencing this?

<comment><USER22> Yes; same thing. Weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Typically, they give presale access to repeat attendees ("Ions") before the general public gets access. As an Ion, there's incentive to go every year if only to maintain your ability to go next year (nevermind interacting with the Googlers who build the APIs you rely or the hardware seeding, clearly also benefits).

Wonder if they've scrapped that this year too.

<comment><USER26> That was only for people who have attended _every_ I/O.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Personally, I'm glad they switched to the lottery. I had the worst experience last year. Got a ticket after refreshing the page for a half hour, but then Google Wallet was broken so it wouldn't let me pay for it (cart expires in 5 minutes). Hopefully they can handle the server load spread out over 2 days this time.

<comment><USER28> I still don't think Lottery is the best possible solution but yes it it one step better than last year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The console logging going on is pretty dang funny...

<comment><USER30> The morse code (-... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--. / -... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--.) translates to "BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm fascinated by the dotted countdown clock at the bottom of the page. It took me a while to figure out exactly what it was, and I got lost in Wikipedia reading about how braille is represented in unicode, thinking it had something to do with that.

My guess is that the first set in dark blue is days remaining, followed by hours in purple, minutes in green, and seconds in light blue. Haven't quite wrapped my head around which dot represents what value, but it sure does look cool.

<comment><USER32> days do not have an upper bound; therefore you see 8bits on the most left position. Hours can be at most 24, so 7th bit is not present, minutes&seconds can be at most 60 so 8th bit is not present etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting they're doing a lottery for registration. I'm sure it'll reduce server load though.

Also, I love the binary countdown at the bottom of the page.

</comment><comment><USER34> Did anyone else notice the Doge messages in the console?

<comment><USER35> Some pretty silly lines in there:

Object {

boson1: "Reticulating Splines..."

boson2: "There's more Ajax in this loader than an epic greek poem"

boson3: "♬ Reunited and it feels so good"

boson4: "Are you there, Boson? It's me, Margaret."

boson5: "♬ Is he a dot, or is he a speck? When he's underwater does he get wet?"

exo1: ""Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." \- Carl Sagan"

exo2: "Call me V'Ger"

exo3: "As far as we know, the universe is not Tail Call optimized."

exo-argon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Argon"

exo-bleu: "Detecting: Class H Planet Bleu"

exo-cheddarwurst: "Discovered: Class D Planet Cheddarwurst"

exo-daytripper: "Located: Class M Planet Day Tripper"

exo-dunebuggy: "Detecting: Class D Planet Dune Buggy"

exo-emanthaler: "Located: Class D Planet Emmentaler"

exo-hoth: "Investigating: Class K Planet Hoth"

exo-izod: "Detecting: Class D Planet Golf"

exo-lacoste: "Discovered: Class D Planet Lines"

exo-meangreenie: "Investigating: Class J Planet Mean Greenie"

exo-measels: "Located: Class L Planet Measels"

exo-mumps: "Investigating: Class L Planet Mumps"

exo-neon: "Detecting: Class J Planet Neon"

exo-polo: "Discovered: Class D Planet Colors"

exo-purplehaze: "Discovered: Class D Planet Purple Haze"

exo-tatooine: "Located: Class M Planet Tatooine"

exo-xenon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Xenon"

exo-ziggystardust: "Located: Class L Planet Ziggy Stardust"

neural-banana: "Orange you glad I didn't say banana (╯°□°)╯"

neural-boom: "♬ All we hear is, radio ga ga"

neural-can: "It's got what plants crave: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbxq0IDqD04"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbxq0IDqD04")

neural-cat: "Cat Proximity: [https://xkcd.com/262/"](https://xkcd.com/262/")

neural-doge: "WONTFIX: Duplicate Doge joke"

neural-mona: "It's cool and all, but I'm more into his older stuff: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo_da_Vi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_\(Leonardo_da_Vinci\)")

neural-nes: "What's the fastest TAS you can complete for the I/O 2014 website?"

neural-pong: "Can _you_ do this? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8IVASo0umU"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8IVASo0umU")

neural-rhex: "Awwww, he's a cute little guy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISznqY3kESI"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISznqY3kESI")

neural-ufo: "Teach the controversy!"

neuralfail0: "Hint: The eyeball follows the correct diamonds"

neuralfail1: "ಠ_ಠ You _could_ scrape the code for patterns, but you should probably get back to work."

neuralfail2: "Hi HackerNews, I dare you not to complain about something involving Big O Notation."

planet1: "I think I can see my house from here."

planet2: "Our apologies to any visitors who suffer from Globophobia."

planet3: "TCP/IP is cool and all, but did I think "IP over Avian Carriers" would be way more fun: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers")

planet4: "-... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--. / -... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--."

silicon1: "Little known fact: Silicon looks _exactly_ like a beachball under a microscope"

silicon2: " wow↵ such structure↵ so crystalline↵ many atom↵ how connect"

silicon3: "FIXME: Remember to write a joke about silicon"

silicon4: "It's only a model."

}

<comment><USER36> The morse code is just 'beep boop beep boop'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was completely repelled to register on the first line itself in info about registration : [https://www.google.com/events/io/help#!/registration](https://www.google.com/events/io/help#!/registration)

"You will need to sign into Google+ to begin the registration application." #pushItUpTheirThroatsTillPeopleStartGagging

</comment><comment><USER38> Make sure to enter the "lottery" with a company or app publishing account email if possible. Just polling people in the industry last time, people with emails from popular press and media often had no trouble at all. A possible reason is a whitelist for certain email domains.

</comment><comment><USER39> The thing I first paid attention to was that there is no longer a mad dash to sign up in the first 10 seconds, but they pick people at random from those who apply in the first 2 days. I might actually make it for once!

</comment><comment><USER40> I predict we will now see greater adoption on google wallet, since having a bunch of google wallets with virtual credit card numbers effectively gives you more tickets to the lottery. Sneaky plot by google there.

</comment><comment><USER41> You could see that you can scroll down to page from the beginning but i somehow expected the animation to take me to those information below step by step. But instead animation started from the beginning again.

</comment><comment><USER42> The minigames remind me a lot about Year Walk's finale :) [http://youtu.be/tD6ZROIlZhU?t=16m11s](http://youtu.be/tD6ZROIlZhU?t=16m11s)

</comment><comment><USER43> In the countdown clock at the bottom, I hate when two decimal digits are displayed with two separate binary digits.

39(base 10) does not equal 011,1001

39 == 0100111

<comment><USER44> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary- coded_decimal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm guessing Apple will do the same lottery for WWDC this year, that's what they did for Tech Talks a few months ago.

<comment> k-mcgrady As far as I can remember the tech talks have always been a lottery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> How you are you guys, not from US, make it to these kind of events? Isn't obtaining visas and so on a problem?

<comment> rkuykendall-com Why would you need a visa to attend a conference? You don't need a visa to travel, and I think people travel for business all the time.

<comment><USER47> That's actually not true, it depends on what country you're from. By default, you need a visa to enter the US, even for short visits. However, if you're from one of the countries on this page, then the visa requirement is waived for visits < 90 days:

[http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/visit/visa- wai...](http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/visit/visa-waiver- program.html)

<comment><USER48> If you meet some additional criteria (mentioned on the page as well). Also many of the countries were added just recently (2008).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Lottery goes from April 8 - April 10th.

</comment><comment><USER50> Why do they need microphone access?

<comment><USER51> For the little interactive animation at the top of the page. Makes some things bounce around - the spinning satellite is one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Those animations and swags on the website are totally useless and anti- informatic!

</comment><comment><USER53> anyone know how much $$ required to attend if chosen by lottery system ?

<comment><USER54> The usual pricing: $900, $300 for students.

When you sign up you have to have a Google Wallet account so that your ticket is automatically purchased if you're chosen.

<comment><USER53> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I hope they will finally announce Chrome with built in Dart vm.

</comment><comment><USER56> Binary clock countdown to registration is pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER57> Let's hope that they release Glass in June 25.

<comment><USER58> I can't wait for Google's fleet of personal spy drones to violate my privacy even further.

<comment><USER59> You have no expectation of privacy while in public.

<comment><USER58> Actually I do expect a certain degree of privacy while in public. No everyone is comfortable with Google spying and data mining everything they can get their hands on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I wonder if anyone will talk about Android issues covered here: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456540](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456540)

</comment><comment><USER61> I am super impressed and amazed.

DOES ANYONE HERE KNOW HOW THEY MANAGED TO GET THE MOBILE PAGE TO APPEAR WITHOUT A TOOLBAR IN MOBILE SAFARI??? Wow. I have never seen this. I want to be able to do it also.

The screen starts off with the browser controls already minimized, even when the page hasn't scrolled yet.

Also when you scroll down, the bottom toolbar never appears, and it doesn't have the typical problem of showing the toolbar when you tap on the bottom part of the screen. How do they pull this off?

EDIT: I looked at the page. Is it this? <meta content="minimal-ui" name="viewport">

<comment><USER62> The minimal-ui thing was just added in iOS 7.1

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> i dont feel smart enough for this website

</comment><comment><USER60> How about covering this google: shame on developers for using the api that end users use: [https://twitter.com/duhroach/status/421678850049728512](https://twitter.com/duhroach/status/421678850049728512) We don't have choice, as you don't nuge updates.

Andorid is thew new IE!

</comment><comment><USER64> OK, I've scrolled all the way down, seen some nice colors and heard some nice music. But where's the info about Google I/O?

Seriously, I didn't even try to read the text on the page because its overall mood implies the text is not important at all.

This site simply looks like someone's homework rather than an info site for a conference.</comment>


25 Best Paying Cities for Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/25-best-paying-cities-software-engineers/ <comment><USER2> The data is _horribly_ presented. It took me a solid 5 minutes to figure out "+X% above national average cost of living" means that the cost of living in the place is X% higher than the national average. I thought they were talking about the salaries, and it didn't make any sense to me.</comment>


No One Makes it to Page 12 - <AUTHOR> http://jonsteinberg.com/2011/05/24/life-page-12/

<comment><USER2> Always put an email's most important point or call to action in the first short paragraph, preferably in the first sentence. I sometimes forget, but my results are better when I remember this. As, for example, this paragraph.</comment>


Berlin's Plan to Become a City for Cyclists - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/berlin-bike-revolution/548297/ <comment><USER3> I'm from around Ghent in Belgium and study in Ghent and last year the city introduced a plan where no cars except for taxis and some public transport is allowed inside of the city centre. It's absolutely awesome because Ghent is a student city and you can get anywhere in Ghent using the bike but you can also get anywhere by car by parking nearby in an underground parking lot and walking the rest of the way. But it has made it so much safer and easier for cyclists (and people on foot!) to just get around.

Antwerp also recently introduced a measure where only cars with a low amount of "exhaust gases" (can't really find the proper name as of writing this) are allowed in the city centre. I haven't been there since, but it's also something I truly admire going into the future.

I visited San Francisco last year and it was a true nightmare to get around in Mountain View by bike. I have never felt more unsafe on a bike in my entire life to be honest. I am driving on a bike without a biking lane next to cars that are going close to 100km/h. It's truly insane. Visiting other cities in the US as well have been awful from a cyclist's point of view compared to most of the European cities and cities from the Netherlands are amazing as well (something you don't hear very often from a Belgian).

So all in all, please just ban the car in most places in the city imo or do something like Antwerp that drives (pun intended) people towards electric cars faster.

<comment><USER4> How does Ghent's supply chain/delivery system function? In the US we have huge vans or semis to deliver inventory.

I was in Zermatt this Summer (no combustion-engine cars allowed) and everything /everyone is transported around in little electric golf cart type vehicles to reduce smog, which could block the town's view of the Matterhorn. Is it similar in Ghent?

<comment><USER5> Pedestrian-only town centres are getting pretty common.

I can't speak for Ghent but it's fairly normal to have periods, early morning or late evening, where goods vehicles are allowed access.

It's worth bearing in mind that the centres of a lot of European towns and cities are fairly small and not very vehicle friendly anyway. One of the advantages of being pre-industrial is that it can take less work to be pre- industrial again. I'd expect that, in general, doing this is the US will be harder than a lot of Europe as the towns just aren't built that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another important point often missed in these discussions is training. If you take a driving licence in Denmark, a big part of the training is how to deal with bicyclists. I have also taken a bus driving licence in Denmark, and there it becomes an even bigger thing.

Like counting bicyclists as you approach a junction you wish to turn right, placing the bus correctly, so you can see the bicyclists coming towards you in the right mirror.

Generally speaking, most other European countries don't have this extensive training on how to deal with bicyclists for drivers, so bicyclists are naturally told to watch out for cars on foreign plates (with the exception of Dutch plates, I suppose). And since their local environment don't usually have cyclists, drivers don't get to deal with it on a daily basis.

One thing is building the infrastructure, another is getting everyone else on board.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure about the explicit training, but drivers in Germany are generally pretty excellent when it comes to dealing with cyclists.

<comment><USER8> Ha! Good one! Maybe compared with other countries? But that doesn't stop them from ignoring your right of way, parking in the bike lane, pushing you to the side at red lights or pushing in front of you dangerously even when its not you who is blocking traffic, because obviously there is nothing worse than being stuck behind a cyclist.

Not to pile on to much on the drivers, because other cyclists are also often terrible in their behavior on the street, but they at least are less deadly to other cyclists. So while it could certainly be worse, there is a lot you have to deal with when sharing the road with drivers who either ignore or outright hate you.

<comment><USER7> Compared with other countries I've lived in, Germany is a dream for cyclists. Of course, I haven't cycled in very many countries even within Europe, so it may well be that Germany is not so great in the grand scheme of things - <USER2> couldn't tell you.

<comment><USER9> As a German having lived in the Netherlands for many years: the Dutch win in this discipline hands down. Bike lanes that seem like an Autobahn sometimes. Very aggressive policy to try to discourage cars at all in at least Amsterdam. Everyone knows cyclists kind of have the right of way (mostly because they seem to ignore the danger of playing chicken with a car).

I've lived in two major cities in NL and seen a few others. While Amsterdam clearly went further than others, even the Hague was better for cyclists than a university town in Germany.

<comment><USER10> And the Prime Minister of The Netherlands (Mark Rutte) goes to work in The Hague with..? A car? Nope, a bicycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "While a few decades ago, many Berlin streets seemed eerily traffic-free for such a major city"

Let's see, a few decades ago = at least 30 years = no later than 1987. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. At that time, West Berlin was an enclave of West Germany located inside of Easy Germany.

So, perhaps that had something to do with the traffic in Berlin?

</comment><comment><USER12> I was in Valencia (Spain) a few weeks back. This city is one of the most ideal cities I have been to for cycling; flat, perfect climate, riverbed running right through the middle of the city, spacious roads and high density. One of the inhabitants told me they dedicated cycling lanes a year back or so. That was visible: They had painted bicycle lanes right over roads & pedestrian areas. I guess when the Valencian people start to see how much fun cycling ones life makes, Valencia will become the cycling capital of the world soon enough.

Berlin has quite some traits for a good cycling city as well. A flat geography really helps here, along with a willing population.

<comment><USER13> If the cycling commute is flat, it has to be long to get decent exercise, because you have to apply a flat-out effort and you cover a lot of ground. If my bike commute were flat, I'd prefer to be some 14 miles from work rather than the current 7. Or else I would have to run it (more often).

To me, what would make an area ideal for cycling (if it has good roads and such) is: dry climate. No rain, no snow.

<comment><USER14> People often seem to miss this. In many ways, cycling is a terrible form of exercise precisely because it is such an efficient mode of transport.

<comment><USER15> As someone who gets repetitive strain injuries from running and isn't a great swimmer cycling is a God send. I can go biking 7 days a week. If i need a blow out then i push a harder gear without dropping cadence... Or i do tabata.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't being a bad (assuming you mean in the sense of inefficient) swimmer make it a good form of exercise?

<comment><USER15> Possibly, if i could get myself you swim more than 500m before giving up from boredom/dislike of drinking chlorine water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Berlin is a very bad place for cyclists right now.

The governing SPD is a car maker party, always was and always will be.

Working in Wedding near my work where the SPD governed since forever there is a bicycle lane on the pavement but unmarked for a decade with countless run ins with pedestrians.

After doing nothing for 50 years there was a referendum and the SPD did a 180 and painted themselves as a cyclist party.

Some - funny - images of the bike situation in Berlin

[http://www.tagesspiegel.de/mediacenter/fotostrecken/berlin/g...](http://www.tagesspiegel.de/mediacenter/fotostrecken/berlin/galerie- mit-leserbildern-abgefahren-ihre-unbeliebtesten-radstrecken/4031388.html)

<comment><USER18> I'm curious if you have seen more about the plans the article discusses? Talk of proper physical segregation of bike traffic using bollards sounds very nice. Copenhagen's concrete curb separating bike lanes from car lanes is the gold standard I hope to see more places adopt.

<comment><USER17> Copenhagen is a dream, whenever I'm there I admire the bicycle infrastructure.

Berlin often cites Copenhagen for their plans, but call me a pessimist, as this would mean taking away streets from cars, I can't see a lot of this happening. It was mostly to get the SPD voted into power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's crazy to think: you design a city for people, rather than cars, and the city becomes more livable.

<comment><USER20> Many European cities are a bit lucky in that regard, they are much older than US or Australian cities. The European cities are built on top of plans that were made for pedestrians and horse carriages, with city walls and small streets.

Muenster, for example, has a beautiful bike circle around the inner city because that's where the city walls used to be. US and Australian cities are much younger and don't have such 'restraints' to work with, so they become car heavy automatically.

<comment><USER21> That makes no sense... US cities are super lucky to have such wide streets.

If they WANTED to they could easily make dedicated bus and bike lanes that are safe.

It easy they have so much space. European cities have to almost ban cars, to make room for bikes...

This is a political issue, where Americans choose not to do something.

<comment><USER16> The US has plenty of space for bikes and pedestrians, but being a cyclist or pedestrian makes less sense there because the cities are so spread out. All the space taken up by those highways and parking lots mean that the places people actually want to go to are much further apart.

<comment><USER22> People who vote in municipal elections despise anything that looks like density. If it weren't for freeways and parking lots, there would still be massive lawns and open spaces dotted with sparsely packed low rise and mostly single family buildings.

Parking contributes, but it's mostly that American towns have at most a few blocks where European-level density (3-6 story buildings directly adjacent to each other) is permitted.

Good luck prying the detached house with a backyard out of the typical American family's hands. Good luck getting them to consent to a multi family structure next door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Berlin is, in my experience, an incredibly walkable city. Get a U-Bahn pass, and you can go almost anywhere in an hour; with their double ring and relatively dense stops, and Prussian train, and even bus scheduling, it's a breeze. Especially compared to the shitshow in American cities.

<comment><USER24> The U-Bahn is good but many of the lines are quite old and the connections often too sparse, specially compared to other european capitals like Paris or Madrid. There are often very close areas that take surprisingly long to travel between without a bike. I always find traveling between northern Neukölln to the middle of Friedrischain somewhat annoying unless you are very close the ring or just grab the bike and cut through Gorli. There are lots of examples like that.

Plus I find the U-Bahn rather expensive (esp. considering how little investment it seems to get) with very few buying options (only bulk-ticket is 4 rides which saves you very little) and the ticket machines seem to be broken half of the time and the ones that work are slow as hell (takes like 3 minutes to print the damn tickets).

The only plus I see (e.g. compared to Madrid) is that the stations are not very deep underground and often over the ground so it helps people that are mildly claustrophobic.

<comment><USER23> I'm coming from Boston, and wilder areas where mass transit is atrocious if available, so Berlin is amazing. My other experiences in Paris or Amsterdam are inferior to Berlin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Cyclists need to be trained as well.

I live in Berlin and too many times cyclists almost run me over and didn't even acknowledged the fact, just flipped the bird at me.

I have never been in a dangerous situation with cars, just with cyclists.

<comment><USER26> I hate when cyclists don't yield to people going in or out of a tram or a bus. They mostly ring at you when you cross the bike lane from bus stop to the bus. Cars would stop in the same situation as this is sanctified. It happens from all the places next to Hauptbahnhof and it infuriates me, because there are far more passengers than cyclists. I know that is because cyclists want to maintain inertia, but it's just rude.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm...would you simply walk across the busy street in front of the Haubptbahnhof and expect the cars to stop for you?

Or would you take the overpass, or wait at the traffic light?

Definitely someone is being rude in the scenario, I don't think it is the cyclists. (And no, you are not allowed to cross a street just because a bus stopped).

<comment><USER27> The bike lanes are often on the sidewalk, right where bus passengers exit. A stopped Tram legally requires the traffic in the lane to its right to stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Meanwhile, in São Paulo, the mayor is trying very hard to remove bike lanes already built, and are passing laws that make it a lot harder to build new ones.

<comment><USER29> Why on earth? An aunt who used to live there tells me the air pollution is quite bad -- one would think reducing emissions by encouraging cycling would be a priority.

<comment><USER30> The previous mayor was from PT, a kinda left-wing party that a good part of the middle class loves to hate (there are a few good reasons, but the hate at this point is insane), so the actual mayor won with promises to revert the policies.

Combine that with the fact that São Paulo is a city where people seems to love cars more than their relatives and have an upper class that oppose bike lanes in front of their houses because "people that ride bikes aren't the kind of people that we want in our neighborhood" and you have a recipe for disaster.

These people (the upper class, not the middle) are also against subway expansion because it would be easier for people from the poorer regions of the city to come to their neighborhoods.

It's a mix of car loving, a party hate and prejudice that makes São Paulo a complete chaotic city when we're talking about transport.

I love São Paulo, have a lot of friends there, but almost everything that is being done right now seems to be in the opposition of the public interest.

<comment><USER29> Interesting -- much as I have a chip on my shoulder about spandex cyclists who look down on bike commuters like me, maybe they have a valuable role to play. If you can't sell rich people on cycling as an exclusive, upscale activity, they're going to fight against it and win. The next time some twit blows through a stop sign and cuts me off while clipped into his $6500 bike, I'll have to remind myself of this conversation. I'd rather have rich jerks on bicycles than rich jerks in hummers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> While it would be great to see Berlin copy the UK cycling capital — Cambridge is brilliant in that regard — Berlin isn't particularly bad. I'm looking for work in Berlin at the moment, and Berlin is less _busy_ per square meter than any UK city I've been to (other than Ely, which shouldn't count as a city).

Berlin traffic isn't perfect, but on the other hand it is also more lawful than UK traffic, and less intimidating than CA traffic.

<comment><USER32> (Off topic but we're hiring in Berlin at Sauce Labs - email me if you want to know more!)

<comment><USER31> Thanks for letting me know, however I just checked your website and I'm not a fit for any of your openings. (I'm looking for iOS… and asking myself if I should change track again to find work).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The cities mentioned as being great for cyclists are Copenhagen and Amersterdam, and now Berlin is trying.

What is interesting is that the countries these cities are in Denmark, Netherlands, and Germany have fertility rates of 1.7, 1.7, 1.5 births/female [0].

In other words, people aren't having that many children. When transporting children, cars become a whole lot more convenient than bicycles. You don't have to worry about them getting too cold or hot or wet. You can easily transport 3 children in the back of a car without difficulty (try doing that on a bicycle). The car can easily carry all the diapers and baby food you need for an outing as well as changes of clothing for inevitable accidents kids make.

Bikes are awesome for adults without children, cars seem better for those with children, especially young children.

I wonder if this push to bike friendliness is driven in part by the changing demographics of more adults without children.

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate)

<comment><USER34> If that were the case you'd expect that families with children in those cities wouldn't be bike users. In Amsterdam at least they very much were. I lived next to a primary school where 90+% of parents would show up on bikes to pick up their kids. You can easily transport 3 kids in a bakfiets

<comment><USER35> That's not statistically valid reasoning. If biking vs driving makes some people not have kids, but not everyone, then in a city where driving is prohibitively expensive you'd still expect most parents to be on a bike. That's because the others didn't switch to cars, they didn't have kids, or they moved. I don't know what riding with one of those bike chariots is like, but being confined to a bike already sucks, I assume dragging a kid around behind you is even worse.

<comment><USER36> You're assuming the cycling is causing people to have less children. It would be nice to provide some statistically valid sources to explain why you think that's so.

I live in the Netherlands and your assumption is pretty strange one. Mostly because it's not one or the other. You can do loads of things by bike while also having a car. Further, especially now with electric bikes you can transport an insane amount of children via a bike easily. Meaning: I see people transporting 5 or 6 children by bike (PS: this is on some fixed schedule, so not a one off, it is around the same time Mon-Fri).

A bike is often more convenient than a car.

<comment><USER35> >You're assuming the cycling is causing people to have less children. It would be nice to provide some statistically valid sources to explain why you think that's so.

No, I'm providing alternate explanations for an observation that the previous poster claims shows that cycling does not cause people to have less children. I don't need to prove it happens, just show it's possible. Of course the "burden of proof" will always be assumed to fall on me because I disagree with popular opinion.

I hope you enjoy the Netherlands. I never want to live in the Netherlands, and I'm sick and tired of people trying to turn the places I like into the Netherlands.

Biking sucks. I do not want to ride a bike. Take your self-righteous crap and fuck off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I did about 5000km in Berlin traffic by bike in the last 2 1/2 years and i can't count how often car drivers would have hit me without me paying close attention and having good breaks. At least every second day someone will cut into the bike lane while turning, not pay enough attention when turning right on crossings or underestimate speeds. Granted, i am not moving slow, and i drive a car myself and know that it is sometimes really hard to see bikes coming from everywhere so i accept these risks as normal, but improvements to the infrastructure would be awesome, since in many places it really is not great or outright dangerous. I recently visited Copenhagen and the bike infrastructure was amazing to see, however the city is 1/5th of Berlins size and there just is not a lot of car traffic.

</comment><comment><USER38> There are plans for a "Radschnellweg" across the Ruhrgebiet (RS1, [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radschnellweg#Nordrhein- Westfa...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radschnellweg#Nordrhein- Westfalen:_Radschnellweg_Ruhr_\(RS1\)) )

Looks like it will take a while longer than anticipated, however.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have followed the debate for a while and am familiar with the situation. I wouldn't be overly optimistic yet.

Until now there have been a lot of bold announcements and very little changes.

Some of the things in the article paint a picture much more rosy than reality: "Meanwhile, the city's existing bike-lane network—already extensive, but not always well segregated from car traffic—will be more rigorously protected by bollards."

The fact is right now bike lanes are never segregated from car traffic in Berlin. There exist two kinds of bike ways in Berlin: Paintings on the street and cycleways on the pedestrian sidewalk. The bike lanes on the streets are often occupied by parking cars, and pedestrians usually walk on the other kind of cycleway like they don't exist.

</comment><comment><USER40> I would love to live in a biking city. It gives you a greater opportunity to live in community. A lot more freedom for the kids, old people, etc. Any chance any city in the USA to be become like that ?

</comment><comment><USER41> I live in Fort Collins, Colorado. It's supposedly the best bike city in the entire US. I STILL see people narrowly avoid accidents almost daily due to only about half of the roads having dedicated bike lanes and the insufficient size of the lanes that do exist. It's really a disappointment given that title. I'm glad I have a car.

Edit: On a little research, apparently that's a very outdated acendote. Good to know!

</comment><comment><USER42> I went looking for details on the new bike plan and found this interesting article on how hard a time Berlin has had hiring transportation engineers to develop the plan: [https://www.thelocal.de/20171215/over-a-dozen-engineers- urge...](https://www.thelocal.de/20171215/over-a-dozen-engineers-urgently- needed-for-bike-network-in-berlin)

</comment><comment><USER43> related: Paris redesign for the Place de la Bastille, with a lot less roads. [https://www.api- site.paris.fr/mairies/public/assets/2017%2F1...](https://www.api- site.paris.fr/mairies/public/assets/2017%2F11%2FDocument%20pr%C3%A9sentation%20RP%2018_12_2017.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER44> Very good news. Other city should do the same... France is a nightmare for cyclists.

<comment><USER45> Paris isn't too bad, the drivers are used to cyclists and mostly courteous, even the charles de gaulle roundabout is doable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Are they planning a dockless bicycle hire system like the very convenient Mobike system in China?

</comment><comment><USER47> I hope they install a lot of showers...

<comment><USER48> Stinking is actually a consequence of a sedentary lifestyle. With the right kind of cycling infrastructure, riding a bike in flat terrain is a low intensity exercise to which the body soon adapts. It can become quite relaxing and meditative. Exemplary video of cycling in the netherlands: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb0QjASuuqI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb0QjASuuqI)

<comment><USER49> > Stinking is actually a consequence of a sedentary lifestyle.

any source for this extraordinary claim?

<comment><USER50> I believe your parent is alluding to the fact that if you are regularly active & get exercise, biking at an easy pace on flat land in good weather won't even cause you to break a sweat, whereas if you sit on the couch all day it will. (Hopefully don't need a source for this)

<comment><USER51> I would certainly like a source. As far as I can see, the only way to sweat less over time would be to lose weight. A more-conditioned cyclist still does the same amount of work and thus produces the same amount of heat.

Source: from the Washington Post, "athletes tend to sweat sooner and more." [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/sweat- its-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/sweat-its-what- makes-athletes- cool/2015/08/18/9d502eac-41d2-11e5-8ab4-c73967a143d3_story.html?utm_term=.0215a7709370)

<comment><USER52> I've been bike commuting in Seattle for ten years and I don't sweat during my commute, except on my way home during the summer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Island to Oneself - <AUTHOR> http://www.janesoceania.com/suvarov_tom_neale/index.htm <comment><USER2> This reminds me of some awesome documentary footage of a man who built a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss)

Alone in the Wilderness - Dick Proenneke

The same dry commentary made riveting by insightful and sometimes whimsical observations, the same hardship usually effortlessly overcome, and of course the same solitary strength of a middle-aged man. Both stories make me a bit envious, and inspire me to create a little more with my hands.

<comment><USER3> Interesting - I was given that DVD years ago, but never watched it. Now I will make time to watch. Thanks for the recommendation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly OT, but Firefox's reading mode is a great help to consume that post...

<comment><USER5> Not off topic at all. (I came to post the same thing but you beat me to it).

It's a great read but hard on the eyes. Reader mode lays it out just beautifully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If he was completely alone on the Island, who took those beautifully composed pictures of him fishing, considering it was the 50s where there were no electronic cameras with timers and stuff? ex: [http://www.janesoceania.com/suvarov_tom_neale/fishing.jpg](http://www.janesoceania.com/suvarov_tom_neale/fishing.jpg)

Was it Tagi, the pearl diver? If yes, then he wasn't really alone, was he? What am I missing from this situation?

<comment><USER7> He lived the majority of the time alone with the occasional visitor who took photos. Thats what your missing.

<comment><USER8> I've found that in most of these stories, the people who have lived alone haven't been without human contact for any significant period of time. If that fact wasn't downplayed or outright omitted the story probably wouldn't sell as well. In this aspect, their stories are not that different from the tens or hundreds of thousands of lonely people whose apartment or house might as well be an island. It's probably also very difficult to live anywhere for years without eventually running into someone, never mind decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a long, but great read (i read it over the last 2 days.) Thanks to the original sharer on here.

It's interesting that the book mentions 2 of the times he stayed on the island, but doesn't mention the last, and longest (of 10 years). Nor does it mention that he had kids in between, which is mind boggling to me, how you could leave them.

<comment><USER10> That was because the book was written before the third time he went. (See Wikipedia.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple engineers here, please use this as a test case for Mobile Safari's reader mode. It cuts off after 2 paragraphs.</comment>


Yahoos Bristle at Mayer's QPR Ranking System and "Silent Layoffs" - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20131108/because-marissa-said-so-yahoos-bristle-at-mayers-new-qpr-ranking-system-and-silent-layoffs/

<comment><USER2> Hopefully the worst that most Yahoo employees will have to endure is being "bristled". The company is struggling; cutbacks have to be made; reducing workforce usually happens through a variety of means.

When people are being threatened they 'bristle', like a cat I suppose. But in this case the CEO is not likely to back off in fear. I suggest more pro-active methods: sharpen up your resume; work harder and produce more; hit your goals reliably.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe she's getting ready to apply to be CEO of Microsoft...</comment>


Pedobear @ Vancouver 2010 [jpg] - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/4oadu.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> This has nothing to do with intellectual curiosity, but I couldn't resist posting it :/</comment>


Interrobang - <AUTHOR> https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/interrobang/ <comment><USER2> I don't have a strong opinion on the interrobang either way, but let's imagine we wanted to start a campaign for it to go mainstream.

The most important thing that could happen would be for a popular auto-correct tool to start substituting it for '?!' and '!?'. MS Word would be ideal.

People would start to get familiar with it when reading other's works. And when authoring, people tend to treat auto-correct like an authority and learn from it. I suspect something similar happened with the ellipsis character in place of three periods.

I have a hunch it would catch on easier in the non-English markets, which may be slightly more accustomed to the inconvenience of using glyphs that aren't always available on every keyboard.

Next, it needs to be included in mobile keyboards. I don't know about iOS, but I can't find it in Gboard for Android.

We could start logging requests and submitting pull requests along those lines.

Now we may not want a viral event. No hashtag campaigns, lest we awaken a louder dissenting crowd. I think the Trojan Horse is a better strategy at first.

<comment><USER3> > substituting it for '?!' and '!?'

But these aren't the same!?

<comment><USER4> I think the interrobang or its alikes have different functions in written languages and spoken languages. In written languages they all are just a grab bag of mixed-mode reactions including surprise or rhetorical questions. In spoken languages (or corresponding transcripts), I found a distinction between !? and ?! is valuable because there is temporality not usually represented in written languages, and would avoid ‽ for the same reason. Likewise I argue that the number of dots in ellipses is meaningless in written languages (henceforth "standardized" to three dots) but can be actually meaningful in spoken languages.

<comment><USER5> How do you speak a 4-dotted ellipsis differently to a 3-dotted one?!

<comment><USER3> It's ...... longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My problem with the interrobang, besides the fact it's unnecessary ("?!" does just fine, the same way we don't need to replace "th" with "θ"), is that it's _so damned ugly_ and _hard to distinguish_.

The counter [1] -- the open space between the vertical bar and the question mark curve -- is just too cramped ("‽"), so it's aesthetically unbalanced at large sizes, and just looks like a question mark with an accidental smudge at small sizes. It just doesn't "fit in" with any of the other glyphs of the alphabet, it's badly designed.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_(typography)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_\(typography\))

<comment><USER7> FWIW, Replacing "th" with "θ" would really be a "re-placement": Theta and the "voiced dental fricative"[1] were smeared together in Old English long ago.[2]

I.e. "there" and "theater" are two different "th"'s.[3]

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_(digraph)#Voiced_fricative_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_\(digraph\)#Voiced_fricative_/%C3%B0/)

[3] English speakers: if you pay attention to how you speak those two words you'll notice that your tongue is doing different things to make those two "th" sounds. This is a weird "archaeo-linguistic" holdover in your "motor- culture". In a certain sense, "you" always knew this but didn't know you knew.

<comment><USER8> Similarly, there's no letter for the voiced palato-alveolar fricative in English (and as I recall it's actually one of the newest sounds that is part of English). It's the voiced version of the "sh" sound -- an example is the "si" part of "vision".

<comment><USER9> Cyrillic uses Ж

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Chess annotation symbols for moves [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols)

?? (Blunder)

? (Mistake)

?! (Dubious move)

!? (Interesting move)

! (Good move)

‼ (Brilliant move)

<comment><USER11> I was just thinking that combining them took away my ability to express different emotions depending on which came first, but my use is the opposite of those.

To me, the first one is the immediate response, so a dubious move might look exciting at first but then you realize its problematic aspect, so !? would be the sequence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe it was because he chose the ugliest of all possibilities. Some of the proposals were ingenious, the two marks combining into a new unity that still retains features of its two parents. But he just laid one mark over the other. It's muddled and mundane.

Anyway, we have a convenient convention that works with what we have: lay out the sentence as a question, but end it with the exclamation point. Isn't that a simple fix!

<comment><USER13> Why can't we just use two punctuation marks?!

<comment><USER14> iies indeed, vuhii can't vvue dgust use tvuo gliiphs for sounds that are "obvious" combinations of other sounds?

<comment><USER15> ies indeed vuhai can't vee just use tvoo gliphs

Is a much more readable example I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The second paragraph of TFA mentions "ox-turn" line breaking (alternating left-to-right and right-to-left lines), but unforgivably fails to mention every typographer's favorite vocabulary word for this: "boustrophedonic".

<comment><USER17> OMG, I just made the same comment!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=17504267](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=17504267)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _For thousands of years, in some written languages, there was no space > between words. People were expected figure out sentences and clauses while > reading aloud._

Really?!

Addingspacesbetweenwordsseemslikeanobviousthingtodo.

According to Wikipedia, spaces weren't added because:

(1) Free form of speech is so continuous, adding inaudible spaces to manuscripts would have been considered illogical.

(2) At a time when ink and papyrus were quite costly, adding spaces would be an unnecessary waste of such writing mediums.

(3) Typically, the reader of the text was a trained performer, who would have already memorized the content and breaks of the script, so the scroll acted as a cue sheet and did not require in-depth reading.

I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech. No matter how fast or continuous your speech when you say, "The dog jumped", everyone will agree that "dog" is a distinct thing, even if you're illiterate. It seems quite logical to separate "dog" from the words before and after when you write.

Reason #2 sounds barely believable. I'm thinking that #3 must have been the main reason. Anyone have more insight?

<comment><USER19> > I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech. No > matter how fast or continuous your speech when you say, "The dog jumped", > everyone will agree that "dog" is a distinct thing, even if you're > illiterate. It seems quite logical to separate "dog" from the words before > and after when you write.

Clearly you've never tried to learn a second language?

Word segmentation is a very difficult task for non-native speakers. Segmentation failure is a common error in children learning for the first time.

The word breaks are only obvious to you because you've had decades of daily practice parsing them. Look at a speech stream as a waveform or spectrogram, and they vanish: they are objectively not there.

<comment><USER18> Since several people made the same point about word segmentation, I obviously didn't express myself very well.

What I was trying to say is that, _assuming you speak the language_ , you will recognize "dog" a separate ' thing' in a sentence. If I point to a German Shepherd asking what that is, anyone who speaks English can reply "dog". It can't be shorter; it could be longer but then you're adding information ("big dog").

Even illiterate people know "dog" as a distinct ' thing'. Since even spoken words are distinct concepts, with a beginning and end, and having boundaries (even if the speech waveform looks continuous), it seems natural to show the boundaries (eg., by placing spaces) if you going to starting writing down the words.

Well, we know the spaces weren't added in early writing, by why not? Wikipedia's reason #1 is that adding inaudible spaces would be illogical. I'm not convinced that _that_ was the main reason. The other reasons seem more plausible.

<comment><USER20> Well, if showing the boundaries doesn't matter for native speakers in spoken language, why would it be natural to assume that it is needed in written language?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _Sometimes, this never-ending string of letters would execute what was > called an ox-turn, first reading left to right, then switching to read back > from right to left._

What a fail! Perfect opportunity missed to use the word "boustrophedon": and in the matching historic context, too.

<comment><USER21> Having long palindromes would be super helpful in these awful documents.

<comment><USER17> Could be. Note that the Greeks actually mirrored the individual letters in the lines going the other way. So there is no ambiguity, as long as a line contains some asymmetric characters; you know when your eyes have landed on a right-left line, regardless of palindromes and such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a daily user of the interrobang, I've just gotta say, how awesome is this‽

For any aspiring interrobangers, one thing that helps make them easier to use is to set up text replacements. I have replacements setup on my phone and computers to replace "?!" and "!?" with "‽" automatically.

<comment><USER23> Honestly it looks too bold (as in, font weight) than the rest of the text. Just realising I'm not a fan

<comment><USER24> Are you not a fan of the font, or of the character ?

<comment><USER25> The rendition of the character in a specific typeface, most likely.

<comment><USER23> Yes this - it just looks out of place in every font I've ever seen it in

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This would really make for a great exception operator, for one-liner exception handling.

      (alert(null) ‽ console.log(error));

Better than:

      (x === null ? console.log(error) : alert(x));

EDIT: hey downvotes, let's play _funny /not funny_.

<comment><USER27> I can't seem to find the ‽ key on my keyboard.

<comment><USER26> Well, obviously, the compiler could also interpret the consecutive use of each of the two distinct characters question mark (?) and exclamation point (!). But it would _have_ to tolerate both options to remain convenient (?! and !? have the same effect).

Meanwhile the interrobang (‽) would really be an Easter egg.

<comment><USER28> most languages wouldn't work properly with ?! as that could be already valid (unary ! operator meaning not, and ? being used for the ternay operator). So you can't distinguish between: foo ?!bar : baz and an interrobang like operator. !? on the otherhand is likely to already be invalid and be parseable as an interrobang since it wouldn't already be valid to have a ? immediately following a ! in many languages. Having both work might be nice, but is likely impracticle for backwards compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Heh. A few years ago one of the items on UChicago's Scavenger Hunt list was any UChicago library book containing an interrobang, used as intended, outside of a discussion of punctuation. I looked for a few hours. Never found one.

</comment><comment><USER30> ¡Why not go for the Spanish option? Indeed, there's an inverted variant: ⸘Do Spanish speakers actually use that‽

<comment><USER31> We do use inverted opening marks, but I've never seen mismatched opening and closing marks (until your comment!). Not sure if that's what you were asking, though.

<comment><USER32> Also, if I were to use mismatched opening and closing marks, I'd invert the order, question mark first and bang later

<comment><USER31> We do invert the order (I'd say "properly nest") of the symbols when we use both interrogation and exclamation together, e.g. _¿¡qué!?_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hervé Bazin , a French writer, proposed a few more:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Love_point"_and_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Love_point"_and_similar_marks)

<comment><USER34> Expressing sentiment succinctly in text. The precursors to emoticons and emojis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interrobang and Keming by Liz Crain:

[https://flic.kr/p/LTD9Cs](https://flic.kr/p/LTD9Cs)

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

</comment><comment><USER36> IT seems now, it's much easier to create lasting end marks, not exactly a symbol, but for example if I end a post on reddit with /s everyone knows I mean sarcasm (almost everyone).

</comment><comment><USER34> What would be the closest emoji to this? The face with one eyebrow raised? It's a bit hard to make out.

(Ah, HN strips emoji away from comments).

[https://emojipedia.org/face-with-one-eyebrow- raised/](https://emojipedia.org/face-with-one-eyebrow-raised/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Is there a distinction between ?! and !?

To me there is a subtle difference, emphasizing the punctuation that comes first.

If so, maybe we should just accept as standard using two punctuation and allow context or intent to determine ordering.

</comment><comment><USER38> All I want is a way to end a sentence sarcastically. "/s" is fine but it would be neat if there were a character for it.

</comment><comment><USER39> The same people who like this kind of thing usually also like portmanteaux (the lowest form of wordplay) and then offer it as evidence that they love language.

</comment><comment><USER40> Strange that this article didn't even once mention the only 20th century punctuation innovation that actually stuck :)

</comment><comment><USER41> Interrobang is such a suitable name, fun and slightly suggestive.

<comment><USER42> I liked the other proposed name: Exclamaquest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Drop the 'Interro' part if you want it to catch on. Just call it a 'Bang'.

<comment><USER44> There's already a bang, and it's quite popular!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can I use it‽

</comment><comment><USER46> Interesting article</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend book on Game Theory? - <AUTHOR> I was watching a documentary that prompted me to read John Nash's thesis, "Non-Coperative Games"[0]
I searched the web for applications of game theory in Architecture (my formal training) & found some research that interested me[1]
My background is mostly in design, is there a "go-to" book that you recommend which may be easier going on people
with  a less solid Math background like me?
[0]https://www.webcitation.org/6YloKPaFj?url=https://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf
[1]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319471290_Urban_Planning_a_Game_Theory_Application_for_the_Travel_Demand_Management <comment><USER2> I found the following two to be very helpful, but not related to architect (sorry)

The Teaching Company audiobook or video [https://www.amazon.com/Games-People- Play-Theory-Business/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-Theory- Business/dp/1598034839)

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life [https://www.amazon.com/Art-Strategy-Theorists-Success- Busine...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Strategy-Theorists-Success- Business/dp/0393337170)

The Art Of Strategy is co-authored by Barry J. Nalebuff who also has a great Coursera course on Negotiation (unrelated to your question) [https://www.coursera.org/learn/negotiation](https://www.coursera.org/learn/negotiation)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, the Moocs look resourceful</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get started with making a twitter app? - <AUTHOR>

I want to make an app that scans twitter for content, even based on their search. How do I go about that? I am a designer so I don't have much experience with engineering but I'm willing to learn I just don't know where to start.<p>If anyone is a programmer that has the time and wants to partner with me, hit me an email. I'm excited about the idea but I could really use help with executing it. It involves connecting people that express things with people that can provide solutions to them. <comment><USER2> It depends on how you want to work, user based or just in general.

You can get all tweets from a specific person (this would be handy for a website where you sign up for) with a certain keyword, or just get them all and scan server side.

On the other hand, you can for example scan for popular developers hashtags (like #ruby, #php, #linux, etc) or just request recent tweets and scan for what you need. These 2 solutions would be perfect for a general scan.

I'm currently working with the twitter api for a small personal project and it's pretty flexible, you have quite a lot of possibilities...

</comment><comment><USER3> In essence your trying to build a talent marketplace using twitter??? Something like an elance on twitter??? Sounds like an idea worth trying out.

I havent worked with the twitter API yet, but I guess you should read through the API documentation first. That should give you a foot in the door.</comment>


(x / 2) or (x >> 1)? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10681375/which-is-better-option-to-use-for-dividing-an-integer-number-by-2 <comment><USER2> In general, you're not smarter than your compiler[1].

Even if you're smarter than your compiler it's usually not worth the readability trade-off.

These sorts of optimisations only ever make sense if you're doing something incredibly intensive and you've tested it on real world data. This is rarely the case and the code suffers.

[1]: "Source Code Optimization" => [http://www.linux- kongress.org/2009/slides/compiler_survey_fe...](http://www.linux- kongress.org/2009/slides/compiler_survey_felix_von_leitner.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps thinking about it as an optimisation and not a standard operation is not the best way to look at it.

For example 99% of the time I want a binary shift and not a /2.In a dynamically typed language 201/2 will give you 100.5 when you'd prefer to keep it integer.

<comment><USER4> "In a dynamically typed language 201/2 will give you 100.5"

Not necessarily. Python gives 100, PHP gives 100.5, Perl gives 100.5, Ruby gives 100.

Edit: Versions are Python 2.7.3, PHP 5.3.10, Perl 5.14.2 and Ruby 1.8.7, all as shipped with Ubuntu Precise.

<comment><USER5> Python 3 gives 100.5. Python 2 gives 100 (or 100.5 if you use "from __future__ import division").

<comment><USER6> But using >> for division is still a bad idea. If you want integer division, use //.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not long ago, I was doing something that needed to be fast and I tried the old the "x>>1" trick and timed it compared to x/2. Much to my surprise "x/2" was faster (which is why you should always time things instead of assuming).

The takeaway is _not_ that "x/2 is faster than x>>1", instead it's that you shouldn't assume some code it faster - always time it.

<comment><USER8> Nobody would make this argument if, during testing, it transpired that reading files over a 100Mbit network connection was faster than reading files from the local SSD. Sure, one should always measure rather than pontificate. And yes, in this hypothetical case, one has measured, and it truly turns out it's quicker... to read over the network. But one should always consider: do the results make any sense whatsoever at all, or do they suggest that further investigation might be warranted?

And similarly, it would be an unusual CPU indeed - so unusual in fact that you'd probably already know that you were working on it, and would mention it as part of this crazy story of the time that divisions were faster than shifts - that managed to mess up single-bit shifts so badly that they were slower than an integer division.

Perhaps in a higher-level language, one might find that x>>1 were faster than x/2, for some reason unrelated to the relative speeds of the two operations. But if one is working in C or C++ (and I assume this is the case, if one is bothering with stuff like replacing divides with shifts), and yet the shift is still the slower, then this is most unexpected, and probably evidence that something has gone wrong.

(The division algorithm is inherently more complicated than a shift, and so divisions are always going to take more time than a shift. You can expect a shift to take 1 cycle on a modern CPU. A division would take more like 20. It will probably be the slowest integer instruction possible, and it might not be accessible from every pipeline. Sample division latencies for vaguely modern CPUs: 20+ cycles on x86, ~35 cycles on MIPS, ~20 cycles on POWER, ARM doesn't seem to have it. Shifts, on the other hand - always 1 cycle. ARM even gives them away for free.)

<comment><USER7> I just noticed your response. The machine I timed it on was an older Lenova laptop with some sort of dual core Intel processor - indeed not an "unusual" CPU.

In the end, it's results are what matter even if you (or I) don't understand why. For all I know, the compiler parallelized some of the code with divisions and didn't for the shift using code. The thing is, you can't just look at what "should" be fastest and my experience was a good reminder of that.

In the old days, one optimization technique we used was to "unroll loops" i.e. instead of:

for (int i=0; i<8; i++) a[i] += b[i];

We'd do this:

// Unrolled loop a[0] += b[0]; a[1] += b[1]; a[2] += b[2]; ... a[7] += b[7];

The unroll loop has less clock cycle according to the book. Great - unless the larger "faster" code no longer fits in the CPU cache, now it's actually slower. The only way to tell is to measure it.

Here is the code. Substitute ">>1" for the "/2" portions and compare.

// pBuffer contains a single horizontal line in a bitmap // destBuffer will contain the first derivative convolution i.e. if you graph it, it would look like peaks at the edges of things in the image

void Convolution1D_FastFirstDerivative(int* pBuffer, int sizeOfBuffer, int _destBuffer) { int lastPos = sizeOfBuffer - 1; int isum = 0;

// Special case start of buffer where filter "hangs off edge" isum = -pBuffer[0] / 2; // _ 0.5 //sum += pBuffer[0] * 0; // * 0 isum += pBuffer[1] / 2; destBuffer[0] = isum;

for (int i=1; i<sizeOfBuffer-1; i++) { isum = -pBuffer[i-1] / 2; // * -0.5 //sum += pBuffer[lastPos] * 0; // * 0 isum += pBuffer[i+1] / 2; // * 0.5 destBuffer[i] = isum; }

// Special case end of buffer where filter "hangs off edge" isum = -pBuffer[lastPos-1] / 2; // * -0.5 //sum += pBuffer[lastPos] * 0; // * 0 isum += pBuffer[lastPos] / 2; // * 0.5 destBuffer[lastPos] = isum;

}

Sorry, I wish I could fix the formatting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They don't have the same results if x is signed (-1 >> 1 gives you -1; -1 / 2 typically gives you 0). A compiler worth its salt will optimize x / 2 appropriately. For unsigned, it will emit the shift; for signed, it will generate (x + 1) >> 1.

<comment><USER10> (x+1)>>1 isn't equivalent to x/2. It gives the wrong result for positive numbers like (x=1).

Compilers actually generate (x+(x>>31))>>1 for signed division by 2. Which on x86 is three more instructions and requires an additional register.

Using x>>1 makes sense if you want floored division instead of truncating towards zero. Floored division is better if you want to reduce precision of the input or something like that and don't want to bias towards zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most disappointing was the fact that the top comment focused on x=x/2 vs x/=2, the latter of which I believe is more confusing than not. In any event, none of the three options ought to make a difference when you have the luxury of a compiler, which can choose the "best" way to do it.

When you're programming a microcontroller YOU are often the compiler and therefore need to know the relative clock times for each command. I remember one chip where the division command could take 100 cycles while a shift was 2. Big difference there, and you'd definitely pick the shift.

One of the later comments there focused on actually decompiling the resulting code. I was surprised that the compiler did not produce the same output.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's what I don't like about stackoverflow, this type of "viral" questions that get a lot of attention while the good ones often get lost in the noise.

<comment><USER13> Not only that, its also completely irrelevant for 99% of developers. My bet is that most of the (currently) 167 up votes did not have this specific problem.

<comment><USER14> The Shift vs Division question was also already asked many times on Stackoverflow in the past.

<comment><USER15> It's a bad question, though. Either you know the answer, or the peephole optimizer will do a better job than you will, and therefore you should use what's most readable. I agree with GP that these kinds of questions are unfortunate noise at stackoverflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many folks commented on the difference between

      x /=2;

and

      x = x / 2;

I object to the combined operator (x /= 2) because it is ill-conceived as a language feature. It only works for a half-dozen cases the language writer chose. I can't extend it to my operations. Why would I do that? Lets assume instead we define '@' as a symbol for 'LHS' (Left-Hand-Side). It now looks like this:

      x = @ / 2;

How does that add value? Imagine 'x' is ' _(int_ )(aRec[RecIndex(p->handle)]->itemCountRef)'

I know, could do that already with /= 2; But consider we wanted to do

      x = x / (x+1);

No help in C. But with '@' it becomes

      *(int*)(aRec[RecIndex(p->handle)]->itemCountRef) = @ / (@+1);

Much clearer than the alternative

      *(int*)(aRec[RecIndex(p->handle)]->itemCountRef) = *(int*)(aRec[RecIndex(p->handle)]->itemCountRef) / (*(int*)(aRec[RecIndex(p->handle)]->itemCountRef)+1);

Sure, you can add declarations of intermediate values in C now. But I'm not sure that adds clarity in the same way.

<comment><USER17> > How does that add value? Imagine 'x' is > '(int)(aRec[RecIndex(p->handle)]->itemCountRef)'

That's a gnarly code smell and a Law of Demeter[1] violation. I suspect you could find a better way to express that operation without requiring that a single line of your code know so much about so many different things (aRec, aRec members, the return value of RecIndex, p, aRec member -> itemCountRef).

1: <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LawOfDemeter>

<comment><USER18> I think you're missing the point.

<comment><USER17> Am I? The language doesn't need to make affordances for bad code, bad code needs to be refactored into better code.

<comment><USER16> Oh for heaven's sake, use some other complex reference then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Opening "Hacker's Delight", which you (as a C++ programmer) surely have in your collection next to "Code Complete 2", we find:

" _Apparently, many people have made the mistake of assuming that a shift right signed of k positions divides a number by 2^k_ "

Surprisingly, the top few answers do not give the correction for negative numbers, which in "Hacker's Delight", is to add 2^k-1 to negative numbers before shifting.

Obviously, this ignores optimization and readability arguments, which although important, are probably less important than correctness.

</comment><comment><USER20> I answered almost exactly the same question on Stack Overflow once, except the asker was comparing (x / 2) to (x * 0.5). Someone had previously advised him to use the latter, on the theory that multiplication is cheaper than division. I disassembled both to show that (x * 0.5) is absurdly less efficient: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/895574/what-are-some- good...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/895574/what-are-some-good-code- optimization-methods/1354688#1354688)

</comment><comment><USER21> In my work, it's generally better to optimize for clarity rather than performance. I suspect this is true more and more as compilers grow in sophistication. In this vein, use:

x = x / 2

To DIVIDE, use the DIVISION operator.

</comment><comment><USER22> It really depends on what you are doing. I do embedded work on a 40 MIPs PIC dsp. When i want to smooth A/D readings I collect 32 by adding them each time an interrupt is called, and when i reach a count of 32 I use: smooth_value =sum >>5

This is a case where shifting is worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER23> its 2012 dammit. x/2

</comment><comment><USER24> I often find myself using 1 << Y when I mean 2^Y, but just because it is faster to write and generally accepted in all languages than to find pow in the current language I am writing in...

Edit: fixed

<comment><USER25> You're computing 2^Y there.

pow is usually a floating point operation, that's why it's slow. Modern CPU's may actually be fast at a pow floating point operation, but it's still expensive to move integers from general purpose registers to floating point registers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I prefer x/2, the operator precedence is much clearer.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you're using floating point, x * 0.5 is faster

<comment><USER28> Given that the question indicates that bit-shifting x would result in a valid answer, I think we can rule out floating point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think this is the same these days, due to smarter compiler.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you be interested in this service? - <AUTHOR>

We are in the incubation stage of a business built to meaningfully connect potential startup co-founders.
The pitch is this: Finding the right individual to create a startup with is incredibly important, and should not be left to chance or a class roster. And those who haphazardly jump into business with friends or well-funded acquaintances, risk losing not only money and opportunity, but time as well.
Our hope is to create less of a traditional social network, and more of site with creative barriers to entry, i.e., closer to a dating site that doesn't suck than to LinkedIn.
Ambivalence or Indifference? <comment><USER2> I'm curious about your business model. By explaining that, you'd also be giving a better idea of how you expect potential customers to use your service, which would give us more information with which to form an opinion. Would you be able to elaborate on that a bit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. After much debate, we agreed on a subscription-based model over a Freemium one. Due to the potential for fraud, a free version would be unrealistic and inviting spam. To be blunt, this way, everyone has skin in the game from the get go.

I also think it's better for everyone involved if the structure is there to create a long-term relationship with the people we're bringing together. The longer we can offer supplemental resources in the early throes of the startup the better, which lends itself to a membership model.

The obvious challenge will be in creating price tiers that are easiest for our members to accept. Having said that, we intend to price ourselves to attract only those who are truly prepared for the leap.</comment></comment>


Why Voting in the United States Is Broken - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CodyEngel/why-voting-in-the-united-states-is-broken-3a4b60251db3 <comment><USER2> >The Electoral College was created to protect citizens from being manipulated by a tyrannical dictator.

No it wasn't. The Electoral College was created because the smaller states would never have consented to join a union with an electoral structure that made them a footnote at election time.</comment>


How I got excited about T-Mobile USA and disappointed right after that - <AUTHOR> http://martinweigert.com/how-i-got-excited-about-t-mobile-usa-and-disappointed-right-after-that/

<comment><USER2> Yeah. Typical for T-Mobile.

<comment><USER3> From my experience, this is a normal communication between pre-paid customer and phone company and isn't specific to T-mobile. I'd suggest if nothing is getting answered, send an email to one of the customer relations people. T-Mobile has seemed to do well responding to those.</comment></comment>


Netflix is down 37%  - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:NFLX

<comment><USER2> Sales up by 50%, subscribers down by 3%.

Not a bad deal, reputation damage aside.</comment>


Shanghai's Lie Huo arcade - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-12-inside-shanghais-hardcore-gaming-heartbeat <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but I have trouble feeling nostalgic for arcades. My memories involve dark and cavernous rooms where it was hard to see other people and easy to offend them, large machines with worn-out TVs and controls, and unfair gameplay that was almost always a waste of time.

What's the point of doing something if you can't do it long enough to enjoy it? The constant "coin grab" was irritating to me as a young boy, and annoying to have to constantly leave the arcade and find my parent where I could beg a few more quarters. And I always noticed that stuffed animals cost thousands of tokens, but barely tens of dollars at other stores.

For about the same price, I could rent a videogame for the home console, and I wouldn't have a parent nagging me that they were afraid of someone kidnapping me from the arcade.

<comment><USER3> This essay clearly explains the appeal of arcades: [http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/](http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/)

"Unfair" arcade games are very rare. I'm nowhere near as skilled as the Chinese gamers in the article, but I have a few 1CCs and I've enjoyed competing for local high scores. Arcade games strongly reward skill, and the arcade setting has a competitive atmosphere you can't replicate at home. I'll certainly miss arcades if they die out completely.

<comment><USER2> Having played the same games for console and arcade, they were definitely less fair in arcades. Some games had 2-3 _times_ as many pitfalls and other failure conditions to avoid as their console version. Unfairness was a business model.

This kind of rose-colored article underscores this concept - it was said about people who were trying to remake Starsiege:Tribes in the late 2000s: "They don't want Tribes back; they want 1999 back." For some inexplicable reason, everyone wants to return to their childhood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why should it be the end though? You can do almost everything in your own home now, thanks to the internet and technology.

Most office jobs can be converted to telecommute. Groceries and food can be delivered to your door. You can safely get wasted in your own home while video chatting with women you are whooing. You can watch a movie online. You can even get exercise with systems like Kinect or Wii etc.

If arcades are obsolete, so are most of the other public businesses.

</comment><comment><USER5> The(unescapable) end of a era.</comment>


Telidon: Early 1980s Net Artists - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-original-net-artists <comment><USER2> Sit through the video - it's absolutely fantastic - captivating quality content. Good job Vice, this is solid journalism.

Does anyone know where I can get the soundtrack for the video and is the audio of the video from the telidon network? I'm a blabbering idiot for idm, mid- era, and am overly passionate about it.

BTW, the quote at 9:23 works great context-free:

"I was just out of university; I wasn't worried about finding a job, I knew I was going to find a job. So I was just going to have fun exploring"

truncated there for effect. The interviewee goes on...

"[have fun exploring] technology and working with all these great artists and meeting all these neat people, it's fantastic. It was really fun."

If I could only seize that attitude every moment of my life ... a focus on learning, listening, collaboration, creation, and passion - pivoting on awareness and inward potential blossoming outward with anxiety told to take a back seat.

How can I make that enfold me?

<comment><USER3> > How can I make that enfold me? I've had these moments when money and paying > the rent was not a concern. You're free to think when you don't have > pressing issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, Telidon - I figured I was the only person who remembered that system. I would play with the Telidon kiosk at the local mall, and I think there was also a cable channel broadcasting weather data from Telidon. One problem was it was extremely slow, drawing images at literally 2 polygons per second, so you had to be really patient as it drew, say, a cloud on the weather report. Also, the content on the interactive terminal was pretty uninteresting, stuff like find out about your local government agencies and watch for 20 seconds as it draws their logo. There wasn't any cool art like the article describes. While the Telidon concept appealed to me, the actual system was kind of awful and I'd head down the mall to Radio Shack and hack on a TRS-80 instead.

As far as early interactive systems of the 70s/80s, does anyone remember PLATO? I only got to try it once, but it was a super-cool interactive plasma touch-screen system with awesome software. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_\(computer_system\))

</comment><comment><USER3> Look at 6:48 seconds into the first video to see the work of Nell Tenhaaf. That is a precursor to the interactive HTML5 media we have today!</comment>


Ask HN: Hack an Iphone using a power line communication? - <AUTHOR>

This is definitely a low level question.
Would it be possible to hack an iphone using a powerline adapter? I would assume no figuring it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to get passed the power source on most devises.  However, the iPhone power supply shares in input that has access to the local system. One would have to find a way around interference from the power cube or the computer that charges the device to easily test this, possibly by modifying a car charger or something.
If someone thinks it could be done i bet they could definitely gain a following on kick starter to fund the research.  I'm broke and i would send ten bucks. <comment><USER2> No.

You can't inject data in to a system using the power connector unless it is explicitly designed to do so because the first barrier you hit is the conditioning circuitry that will stabilize the voltage and will strip any data that you are trying to super-impose on top of the supply line in to the system. In other words you'd have to make a non-trivial modification to the iphone first. I'm using the words 'powerline' here in a bit of a weird way, because normally when you talk about powerline transmission you mean the household circuitry, not the lower voltage line in to the device, but strictly speaking that is also a 'power line'. More accurate would be the charging voltage or supply voltage.

And even if you got past that it would still be pretty much impossible to get a reliable effect from manipulating the input voltage to the various chips at a high rate, most likely if you managed to bypass the filtering circuitry all you'd manage to do by the time the voltage swing on the power line would be high enough would be to either damage or crash the phone.

'Real' powerline modems work by having a capacitive or inductive coupling with the powerline to retrieve the superimposed signal that was placed on the wire with a similar circuit, and will use a separate channel to transfer this information to some other device. You could integrate all that in to a single box but it would make it much harder to get approval for a device (because it would be connected to the mains voltage directly).

So if a device is not explicitly designed with this in mind you can't do it without modification.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, i guess I was begging the question to get a further understanding. Good work on your ability to share knowledge of the topic.

So what your saying is you could do it if your fucked with it enough, but it would be most likely impossible to play a quick trick on a friend by switching out his power source - the charing cube.

Let me ask another question, Now what about electricity through Googles proposed one gig high speed test networks, hooked up to smart houses, providing your internet and cable needs. How long 10-25 years? Would additional technology need to be created?

I am trying to write an MBA paper guessing googles long term strategy, 25 years out. I know they applied to be in the energy market but I'm not sure how they could fully use this ability other than transfer power from their data centers to consumers.

<comment><USER2> > So what your saying is you could do it if your fucked with it enough, but it > would be most likely impossible to play a quick trick on a friend by > switching out his power source - the charing cube.

That's one way of saying it. But you are seriously underestimating the specific value of 'fucked with it enough', without the required knowledge you're looking at a project that will cost you a few months to more than a year. This is not that easy. Electronics, modulation technology, isolation, SMD hacking with regular tools, it's all possible, but it's not that easy.

> Let me ask another question, Now what about electricity through Googles > proposed one gig high speed test networks, hooked up to smart houses, > providing your internet and cable needs. How long 10-25 years? Would > additional technology need to be created?

100mbit is available in some countries right now (Korea for instance) <http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2006/11/8195.ars> , 1G is definitely possible with todays tech but nobody would really know what to do with it. I'm a pretty heavy user on a 20Mbit broadband connection the only thing that I find limiting every now and then is that I 'only' have 5 Mbit up.

So additional tech would not need to be made at all, the bigger question is what you would do with it.

> I am trying to write an MBA paper guessing googles long term strategy, 25 > years out. I know they applied to be in the energy market but I'm not sure > how they could fully use this ability other than transfer power from their > data centers to consumers.

Trying to guess googles long term strategy, 25 years out is like trying to predict the information age from the moment of the invention of the Hollerith card. There really is so much happening in such a short timespan that you have no chance at all to do that.

Google started in '98, you're trying to make a stab at what they'll be doing over twice as long from today as they've been in business, I doubt google themselves looks that far ahead, so how could you try to guess what they themselves probably do not know ?

Google mostly applied to be in the energy market so they can power their datacenters and use the grid for transportation and to facilitate their solar experiments, I'm not at all aware of Google wanting to be a domestic provider of energy, do you have any pointers ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A person would have to have a good understanding of how Power Line Communication Works.

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

And of course knowing or being a guy that engineers powerline adapters wouldn't hurt.</comment>


Metasploit for Pentesters – VIDEOS for FREE - <AUTHOR> http://www.securitytube-training.com/online-courses/securitytube-metasploit-framework-expert/index.html Don't forget to donate:
http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget to donate:

[http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html)

Thanks!</comment>


Osx terminal colors - <AUTHOR> http://extrawurst.github.io/general/osx/2015/07/21/osx-terminal-colors.html

<comment><USER2> I like [https://github.com/milkbikis/powerline- shell](https://github.com/milkbikis/powerline-shell) a lot too. In special my Bazaar-enabled fork: [https://github.com/rbanffy/powerline- shell](https://github.com/rbanffy/powerline-shell)

<comment><AUTHOR> the powerline thing looks awesome, i gotta try that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish the -h option worked in a slightly different way - whilst it's nice to see unit suffixes, especially for large files, it does make comparing the sizes of a long list of files much more difficult. Even adding a space between the size and the unit would help; coloring according to the unit might be even better.

<comment><AUTHOR> adding the sort option to ls may help you there: $ ls -hS

<comment><USER3> Wow - now I feel foolish! :-) How many more years of unix use will it take before it sinks into my thick skull that, 99 times out of 100, the feature I want is never so obscure that it's not already catered for...

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not you, unix makes all of us feel like that :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Java's 25th Birthday - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.oracle.com/java/our-world-moved-by-java <comment><AUTHOR> Join us to celebrate Java's 25th Birthday and hear about it's bright future from open source leaders and Java Champions on May 20th. Details for Registration are in the blog.</comment>