Notes from Facebook's Developer Infrastructure at Scale F8 Talk - <AUTHOR> http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2015/03/28/notes-from-facebook%27s-developer-infrastructure-at-scale-f8-talk/ <comment><USER2> The most interesting part for me was

        > They appear to use code coverage to determine what tests
        > to run. "We're not going to run a test unless your diff
        > might actually have broken it."

This seems like such an obvious optimization in hindsight, I'm surprised it's not more common. Does anybody know of other CIs that can do this?

<comment><USER3> I'd be hesitant to rely 100% on this approach (and from the notes it sounds like FB still runs the other tests - just less frequently in some cases), especially where the code coverage tools aren't guaranteed to account for unintended interactions between seemingly unrelated pieces of code. In theory, well-written code/tests shouldn't have those kinds of problems in the first place, but larger projects often don't deserve that level of trust (in my opinion).

Still, I think it's a great idea for giving quick, "preliminary" feedback to developers - as long as the full test suite is still run periodically.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, absolutely. You'd want to run your full test suite (which probably includes heavier integration tests as well) before deploying, but I think in a lot of cases it's valuable to provide, say, 95% accurate feedback quickly.

<comment><USER4> Another way to put it would be I will happily only take 95% if the other option is we don't do anything and people can even commit stuff that doesn't even build let alone pass tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This talk and my experiences at Microsoft are why I tend to try to steer our projects at Mozilla Research to partner with external offerings rather than doing too much building of our own. It's hard to imagine a world where we build _and continue to improve_ a source control / issue tracking system better than GitHub; a continuous integration solution better than Travis CI; a build system; etc.

Even if we can imagine building a better product today, the ongoing maintenance and extension of those services quickly become full-time multi- person investments with many hundreds of dedicated machines, neither of which even our core infra teams have, much less the little tiny research org.

<comment><USER6> It's not hard to imagine a world in which someone builds or continues to improve an issue tracking system better than GitHub, because GitHub seems to be actively uninterested in improving its issue tracking system in various dimensions that matter to a lot of issue tracking system users (ability to attach testcases, dependency tracking, and release management are the big ones for me personally). It's not just that GitHub is lacking in those areas; they've repeatedly rejected suggestions for improving them.

<comment><USER5> > they've repeatedly rejected suggestions for improving them.

I certainly agree that it's easy to imagine better issue management or patch review than GitHub has today - like many other projects we use other systems. When I've talked with GitHub engineers, all of our issues are well understood and they have plans to address them.

My skepticism is around the strategy of building and supporting our own things vs. partnering with places like GitHub that make a living building and supporting such software. In the Mozilla-specific case, they have proven open to working with us in the past, by pony-trading enhancements to Firefox for enhancements to GitHub, and the inability to deliver has been more on our side :-/

<comment><USER6> Interesting. I haven't seen any requests for enhancements to Firefox (or more precisely Gecko) from GitHub, and I watch all incoming Gecko bug reports... Were they asking for these enhancements from Firefox itself, not Gecko, or through some sort of opaque channels or something?

Past that, partnering with people makes sense to me if they're flexible enough to add things when we need them. My point is simply that historically GitHub has not been adding the things we need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On the topic of having one IDE that just works for multiple languages/platforms, you should check out srclib ([https://srclib.org](https://srclib.org)), an open-source language analysis tool (I'm one of the creators) that abstracts away the language-specific parts of IDE support so that IDEs/editor plugins can hook into one API and automatically get support for a bunch of different languages. This way, you don't have to build MxN plugins (M editors, N languages) to support all combos of editors/languages people might want to use.

The currently supported languages are Go, Java, Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, so this wouldn't work yet for iOS, but Objective-C and Swift are high on our priority list. Editor plugins exist for Emacs, Sublime, and Atom. Would love to hear anyone's feedback from trying it out.

<comment><USER8> This sounds a lot like Steve Yegge's Grok:

[http://bsumm.net/2012/08/11/steve-yegge-and- grok.html](http://bsumm.net/2012/08/11/steve-yegge-and-grok.html)

It's unlikely that his version will ever be open sourced or usable outside of Google though.

<comment><USER9> IIRC [http://kythe.io](http://kythe.io) is at least related by heritage to grok.

<comment><USER7> Yep, Kythe is the open-source version of grok. It's awesome, and the srclib team is in touch with the Kythe team at Google to build on top of their analysis libs (for C++ and Java).

Long term vision is to get rid of the "my editor X doesn't support language Y" problem as well as build a lot of other multi-language analysis tools on top of it. Shameless plug: if you care about developer productivity, join us!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "We made mercurial up to 50x faster than git, more than 2000 improvements" on big repos with lot of history.

This would be their blog post about this: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling- merc...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at- facebook/) and the code at [http://selenic.com/repo/hg/shortlog/](http://selenic.com/repo/hg/shortlog/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting info about XCode and the FB app. I wonder if Apple is collaborating with FB on this or if it's mostly deaf ears...

"So they built their own IDE. Set of plugins on top of ATOM. Not a fork. They like hackable and web-y nature of ATOM.

The demo showing iOS development looks very nice! "

Seems that they have the right idea about "optimizing for Developers"

<comment><USER12> Although I don't really like XCode but use it all the time, what the hell takes 5 minutes to open a project????? The FB app isn't that big. Maybe it includes downloading an entire repo or something? I've worked on big iOS apps and this was never an issue.

<comment><USER13> Facebook has a 54 GB monolithic repo (as of almost a year ago, April 2014).

Primary source: [https://twitter.com/feross/status/459259593630433280](https://twitter.com/feross/status/459259593630433280)

HN article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7648237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7648237)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A lot of nice summaries and points, but one caught my eye - the mention about building Nuclide on top of Atom. My experience with Atom is that it gets painfully slow quickly, with me experiencing a crash every few days.

I would like to hear more thoughts from FB folks on their experiences.

<comment><USER15> Java desktop applications have shown that with enough resources thrown at the problem, slow and flaky things can become fast and stable. JavaScript desktop applications seem to be at the "slow and flaky but has tons of resources being thrown at them" stage.

The VM, as with Java ten years ago, is also seeing remarkable improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Push-pull-rebase bottleneck: if you rebase and push and someone beats you to it, you have to pull, rebase, and try again. This gets worse as commit rate increases and people do needless legwork. Facebook has moved to server-side rebasing on push to mostly eliminate this pain point. (This is part of a still-experimental feature in Mercurial, which should hopefully lose its experimental flag soon.)"

What if there are merge conflicts? I don't know about Mercurial, but in Git there are tons of cases where rebasing cannot happen automatically.

<comment><USER17> The process is optimistic. You submit your commit and it runs async in the background with success or failure sent to you via email and SMS. You still run into merge conflicts, especially if you are touching a frequently tweaked bit of core, but not having to babysit the process is almost always a win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Although I love reading how big companies solve developmental problems I am also glad I don't work there. Programming at FB seems more like working in a salt mine.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone have a .torrent of all the videos from F8? It's a shame that they are self-hosting otherwise it would be possible to youtube-dl it :-)

<comment><USER19> The engineering sessions are in this playlist: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb0IAmt7-GS1_7FcSupSJ...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb0IAmt7-GS1_7FcSupSJoUe21tF12eu8)

<comment><USER18> Thankyou.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone have a mirror? Getting gateway timeouts.

<comment><USER21> The site is hosted via GitHub pages. Maybe it's not available to you due to the lingering GitHub DoS. If you care to read HTML and can manage to get through to GitHub: [https://github.com/indygreg/indygreg.github.com/blob/master/...](https://github.com/indygreg/indygreg.github.com/blob/master/blog/2015/03/28/notes- from-facebook%27s-developer-infrastructure-at-scale-f8-talk/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> * Yep, another "better than ever"/"last one you'll ever need" IDE. Thank you facebook. (see you soon for the next one)

* A DVCS that rely on a central server for merging (sandcastle) is no longer.. distributed... (and you cannot have distributed team work here, this is wrong in multiple way)

* I think i'll never let a centralized, monolithic repository to be set up in my company. All great stuffs/talent i ever learned came from differents sources, differents independant projets (from git, hg or SVN). Loose that and i think i'll get narrow minded.

* All those fancy stuffs make facebookers better "facebook developers" but less prone to share with others (we don't share the same language, culture or tools anymore, even the design of the monolithic repo cannot help here)

* This is more a lesson on "how we made X thousands lambda devs work together" than actual tools i might need to use someday.

* I'll bet that facebook "infra" developers are less likely to use the tools they describe, and that is ironic. Those tools mostly apply to some hidden mass (100k commit / week.. ) of uniform developers that I'll never meet.

<comment><USER23> "A DVCS that rely on a central server for merging (sandcastle) is no longer.. distributed... (and you cannot have distributed team work here, this is wrong in multiple way)"

Yet doing things like rebasing or merging pull requests properly, requires you have an up-to-date master, making it a centralized operation.

People seem quite happy with this.

<comment><USER24> >Yet doing things like rebasing or merging pull requests properly

Rebasing is a smell of bad source code management. Merging pull requests is fine whether or not you are up to date. I don't know what you mean by 'properly'.

<comment><USER21> It is much easier to bisect linear history than history with merges.

<comment><USER24> How is it any different? I do it all of the time with no problems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LinkedIn claims $3B valuation in IPO pricing - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/09/linkedin-3b-valuation-ipo/

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have a clue about Linkedin's business model or if it would be good investment. I don't like the site itself so much - it suffers from a bad case of feature creep.

However this IPO will probably be a pretty big indicator of whether or not the big social media websites will be popular investments.</comment>


Commenting threads: good, bad, or not at all - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/2013/01/28/commenting-threads-good-bad-or-not-at-all/

<comment><USER2> And here I was expecting the debate to be about threaded versus flat. :)

I wonder if there is a way to quantify the amount of engagement difference between the two groups. (I confess to skimming this article, so I may have missed this.) Basically, was the second group more polarized in beliefs, or simply more engaged? I saw that engaging by the author helps keep things civil. I did not see anything about whether there were more folks involved if that happened.

<comment><USER3> I've definitely soured on the idea of having threaded discussion in blogs. Or unmoderated discussion, for that matter. On the other hand, I think threaded discussion is great on sites like Hacker News which are divorced from the original content.

If I were to create a new blog in this day and age, I would only permit pre- moderated flat discussion on my blog, so I could publish interesting feedback and reactions - like an inline "Letters to the Editor" section. That way you give readers an effective way to "react" to the post on the page without opening yourself up to comment-to-comment discussion, spam, trolling and flame wars.

Knowing that the comment won't be published unless it is insightful will lead to fewer comments, but those who do comment will probably put extra effort into making the comment worthy of being seen. And really, the point of a blog post is the post itself, not the comments. Hacker news, in my opinion, is a way better format for real discussion sparked by a post, rather than reactions meant for the author of it.

<comment><USER4> _I've definitely soured on the idea of having threaded discussion in blogs._

Why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious if a "blind" comment system would be useful, where you could comment on an article for a period of time, but not read comments.

After the elapsed time, commenting would be disabled and become visible. This way people could only comment on the article and not each other.

Obviously not applicable to discussion sites.

<comment><USER6> The NY Times does this to some extent. Comments are moderated in batches. Comments within the first batch are about the article itself. Subsequent comments are made both on the article and in response to thoughtful comments that made it past the initial moderation filter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Comments are broken by design. This includes HN, by the way. The problem is that commentators can receive approval and social validation for contributing nothing but middlebrow dismissals, tangential hobbyhorses, rehashes of the same damn Internet arguments waged since time immemorial, and in the worst cases, bad jokes and vicious flamewars. Maybe one out of ten, or one out of a hundred comments even approaches the depth of a decent article. And fluff articles are given refuge as host to these sticky but often useless discussions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like to think that _some_ form of commenting must work, since commenting is just textual conversation, and I hope that conversation isn't fundamentally broken. I'll admit that a lot of conversation (even in person) is made of rehashes. I also agree comments attached to news articles are pretty broken.

I find commenting most rewarding in groups that have a medium-sized, long-term membership, so the community has some familiarity and shared ethos. A few mailing lists and web forums I'm on feel close to that.

<comment><USER7> Mailing lists can approach a higher level, but a lot of the great dialogues of history happened when people would write full-out letters and essays of their own in response to each other.

The closest thing I've seen to this online is when bloggers disable comments but keep trackbacks turned on. If you disagree with someone's blog post, write your own blog post and use a trackback to link it so there's still a conversation. This raises the bar for a few reasons. First, no one is going to keep a blog that has nothing but middlebrow dismissals or bad jokes, and if they do, no one will read it. Second, blogs have more of an identity and a reputation, so the author has stakes in the game greater than that of a disposable HN or Reddit account. Third, you can selectively follow a network of bloggers and if someone's a bozo, you just stop reading their blog instead of having to wade through their comments. Fourth, your responses on your own blog are more likely to be substantive because you have to make it worthwhile to your own blog's audience as well--introducing an issue and expressing your dissenting take on it can be worthwhile, but your standard drive by comment is not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I sometimes like blog-reply conversations, but I find them more disjointed and harder to follow. Often it feels like three people are each standing on street corners with megaphones, vaguely gesturing in each others' directions but really, mainly talking to their own audiences, not engaging in direct conversation.

It's the direction I've gone myself, but partly for selfish reasons: I want to "own" my more interesting essays by posting them on my own website, rather than on someone else's. I don't really monetize it, but I think that's another motivator leading people to withdraw their good writing to self-publish on a blog: 15 years ago you might've posted something on Usenet, a mailing list, or Kuro5hin, but today you want to publish it under your own personal brand, and collect the traffic.

I think there are positive aspects to that, but the discussions and communities often feel less coherent as a result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to love this site called Newsvine, because it had a lot of people who differed greatly in opinion, but were very civil.

But, than it was directly attached to MSNBC after it got bought out, and soon enough, each article had 300+ YouTube-quality comments and every article, no matter the topic, was just vicious political crap.

There's an obvious desire to expand audiences, especially when money is involved, but that's a pretty easy way to destroy the community if you do it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER9> One of several reasons why I love tumblr... Comments disabled by default.</comment>


A Christmas Message From Edward Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWLFwif-BrY

<comment><USER2> It's a wonderful message but I fear it will fall on deaf ears and closed minds.</comment>


XY Combinator: Y Combinator for Dating - <AUTHOR> http://www.xycombinator.com XY Combinator was created to help geek men working at startups get dates. <comment><USER2> I find this insulting and generally reinforcing of crappy stereotypes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does XY Combinator take 6% equity in the relationship? Does this include part- ownership of any potential offspring?

</comment><comment><USER4> What is one of these time strapped guys supposed to do once he meets one of these girls? I thought he had no time...

</comment><comment><USER5> Its Y Combinator for dating only if you're a guy..

<comment><USER6> No, it just works differently for women.

<comment><USER5> Not really. What if I don't want to meet a guy. Its super heteronormative and more about finding men a women to date rather than helping anybody find their match.</comment></comment></comment>


Fake LinkedIn Recruiter Message Generator - <AUTHOR> https://duberste.in/linkedin_generator/ <comment><USER2> Brilliant! Might also be worth asking for 20 years experience in a technology that has only been out for 2 and a PHD for a salary of $45,000 a year.</comment>


Staying creative - <AUTHOR> http://mattgemmell.com/staying-creative/

<comment><USER2> I started writing tech articles last year. I was in a career rut because I'd stopped being the tech at work and was now a manager. I convinced myself I didn't have time anymore to be technical. After I started writing, I realized I had to immerse myself in the tech I wrote about before composing my articles. Now, I learn a new technology (or a deeper aspect of one I know) every week. Strangely, I find more time to write code, build applications and test features than I ever had. This got me a new role, no longer managing but as an application admin, doing technical work every day. Bottom line, writing about tech got me thinking differently, reminded me what I love about technology and why I thrive in technical environments. Staying creative touches on many levels, so I'd say learn, learn, learn - read and find out what is going on in the world you love, and after you've learned something new, tell someone about it.</comment>


Ask HN: my Mac app is part of a bundle What do I do now? - <AUTHOR>

Heya, gang; I'm a relative Cocoa newbie, but after months of working away in my spare time, I finally got an app together that I'm truly proud of — DragonDrop. About a month ago, it got fireballed, and I got to talk about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3946404 It was an amazing thread.
A few weeks ago, I read the Dropzone developer's account of their* day in the Two Dollar Tuesday deal ( http://aptonic.com/blog/my-sales-from-two-dollar-tuesday/), and it inspired my fiancée and I to try to get DragonDrop in, to.
The fun news: we're in today's bundle! http://twodollartues.com/deals/dragondrop/
But, so many questions! How do we promote it? How does the copy look on the TwoDollarTuesday web site? What do you gals & guys think? We're just stumbling around indie software publishing in the dark.
I'd love to hear what you think, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. Plus, if anyone is interested in stats, let me know — I'd be happy to publish results here once the promotion is over.
* Using the grammatically incorrect "their" in favour of randomly picking a gender pronoun, since I can't seem the find the author's name on the Aptonic Software web site. <comment><USER2> > Using the grammatically incorrect "their" in favour of randomly picking a > gender pronoun

Talk to Jane Austin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carrol, The King James Bible, and Shakespeare if someone convinced you "They" isn't a valid singular pronoun for indeterminate sex. It is. Some stupid Latin-based grammar school teachers do not get to re-design our language by looking at Latin (where the odd anti-They crowd came from) and making us say He/She everywhere or sound like sexist assholes.

"They" is a valid third person singular, just like "you" is a valid second person singular.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did something similar with ShoveBox in a MacHeist bundle a couple years ago. See post here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=932338>

Definitely take advantage of the mailing list if they give you access.

Copy looks great, and so does your app!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, reading now! MacHeist is the only other bundle I've really had much interest in so far. I love the goofy narrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I love the app and recommended in on HN earlier this week. It is great for moving things into Xcode projects and Skype, two of my most common, screen hogging destinations.

I'd promote it then in European business users forums, and to iOS developers, as both of those people use the app a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point on Xcode as a good use case: I use DragonDrop all the time when I'm working on other projects, and miss it like crazy when I'm working on DragonDrop itself. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice idea. Good to hear the app makes you money. I enjoyed the the way you could move cut&paste and drops to the side on a Newton, then change apps etc and move it back. Like storing it on the side lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone on Twitter once described DragonDrop as a "wormhole", which I found pretty delightful. :)

<comment><USER4> Hehe, yes :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey mark - slight off topic, but why do you have to run through them, why not just offer it for 1.99 in the app store every day?

<comment><USER6> To add to @tinylittlefish's reply here, it might also have to do with perceived value. To the user, it feels like she will be getting an app within the quality range usually associated with $5 apps, but is able to get it for only 2 bucks. Something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. Plus, the benefit of the impulse purchase is that you may gain a very vocal fan who never would've tried the app for $5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good luck with sale! Looking forward to reading the results (and those from the Fireballing!)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: Aptonic Software is headed by @JohnWinter.</comment>


Making a Plug-in for Atlas (the Cappuccino IDE from 280 North) - <AUTHOR> http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/05/05/introducing-the-atlas-plugin-api-and-mapkit/

<comment><USER2> Atlas (and Cappuccino) is going to make developing quality RIAs very quick, very easy. While a RIA isn't something that is necessary for everything on the web, these types of frameworks are going to support true killer apps that will replace desktop equivalents.

</comment><comment><USER3> This kind of reminds me of the Optimus keyboard by Art Lebedev, but not in the vapour-ware sense. More in the way that any time they post a new screenshot or video I get overly excited, regardless of when they finally have a non-beta release. For now, I'm quite content just looking at the pretty thing.

Keep up the good work Ross and the rest!

<comment><AUTHOR> I remember being so excited about the Optimus. The final product was such a disappointment. We won't make the same mistake :).</comment></comment>


Parallel programming in Haskell: a reading list - <AUTHOR> http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/parallel-programming-in-haskell-a-reading-list/

<comment><USER2> I have a four-day weekend coming up. I just lost it.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you conduct technical interviews if you don't have experience? - <AUTHOR>

Two months ago I started working at a pre-seed stage startup. We've been growing exponentially and this week we actually had to cut back our operations because our 5 person team couldn't handle the workload. So I've been tasked with hiring 1-2 new employees ASAP.<p>I have never conducted any interviews before. Nor do I have any experience with iOS development, which is one of the two positions I will be hiring for. Are there any techniques you could suggest for being able to judge a candidates level of expertise without actually having any personal experience? <comment><USER2> Find someone you can reasonably expect to be an expert. The author of a well reviewed iOS book, app, library, toolkit, framework, whatever. Have them review code samples or even interview candidates over Skype. It shouldn't cost more than an expensive recruiter. And still cheaper than hiring the wrong person.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am assuming you are technical yourself but have no iOS skills. In my experience, you should interview candidate based on the basic CS principles and algorithms. Start with some classical textbook problem and based on candidates response, build around it. While the interview, focus on the thought process more than the end results. I have been doing this for a few years now and even have built tools for interviewing.

Check [https://codepad.remoteinterview.io](https://codepad.remoteinterview.io)

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Ask them:

How do they ensure that the code they deliver to their teammates is of high quality?

Regardless of domain, the principles are the same -- answers that can be understood even by a non-technical person include "peer review of my work" and "assume good faith when a person provides feedback on your design and results". If you do have a technical background, then the technical answers provided should apply to all types of software development and technical operations. You don't need to specifically have iOS experience.

<comment><USER5> Regarding this specific case, if no other engineers in the team are good at iOS programming and the candidate is aware of that, most probably the candidate would not give answers like that. If the candidate does say things like that in this situation, I would feel negative about it. It doesn't sound an engineer speaking.

As for OP's question, I haven't figured out a good way, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my experience, there's little reason to do it alone.

Handle whatever you can (the non tech stuff), you'll be able to narrow down a lot based on non-technical factors (like years of experience, projects in their portfolio, etc). When you're ready for the tech screen, call in a favor from someone you trust. Ask them to spend an afternoon grilling your candidates.</comment>


The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design - <AUTHOR> https://www.priestmangoode.com/project/new-intercity-and-nightjet/ <comment><USER3> I recently took a train from Seattle to Portland with my family. One difference compared to flying that it took me a while to realize was how amazingly _quiet_ it is.

On a plane, the engines are _right there_ out on the wing screaming and conducting that sound directly into the airframe next to you. With a train, the engine is _way_ up front, hundreds of yards a way, separated by several linkages.

The end result is that a train car is as quiet as a coffee shop. I love it.

<comment><USER4> Love that route. Also, on a train the ride is so much smoother - no starts or stop or dealing with traffic.

The pricing is nuts, though. A one way train ticket for that route is $36. The same trip via car takes about the same amount of time and $20 in gas. The train is a nice luxury for one person, but for the whole family it becomes very expensive.

Passenger rail in the US is absurd.

<comment><USER5> > A one way train ticket for that route is $36. The same trip via car takes > about the same amount of time and $20 in gas.

Don't forget wear and tear on the car, though.

The IRS sets mileage at 58 cents/mile. That's $100 for Seattle to Portland.

<comment><USER6> Most of the costs of a car are fixed once you own it. Wear and tears per mile is actually small. Insurance is the same for a car driven 7000 miles a year as one driven 30,000. there is a small discount for less than 7000 miles/year, but it is still fixed. Likewise the car payment doesn't change at all.

The IRS has to come up with a fair number that translates all those fixed costs into per/mile. It is a good financial number, but worthless for this discussion.

<comment><USER7> It's only worthless to this discussion if you hold the basic assumption that everyone should own a car.

<comment><USER8> We've hit peak car in North America. This new generation will see car ownership go down.

Less car ownership on the horizon; 1)Cities are congested 2)The congestion in the suburbs is even worse than driving in downtown 3)For years the solution was to build more highways, but land for doing so is running out 4)Car ownership is no longer cool 5)Ride sharing and renting is become easier (GPS, Internet, Smartphones) 6)Cars have become safer, but the joy or riding in them has been killed. It's like being trapped in an egg carton.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This design is wonderful and it reminds me a of 21st century version of this: [https://www.belmond.com/trains/europe/venice-simplon- orient-...](https://www.belmond.com/trains/europe/venice-simplon-orient- express/)

Train travel can be absolutely luxurious in a way that a plane or self-driving car could never be. You don't even need to book a $3,000 historical reenactment to get a taste. On a whim, I once booked a 1st class AVE train in Spain for an extra $10 and ended up with bottomless wine/champagne and a several course dinner for 3 hours. Would I ride a chicken bus for 7 hours through Honduras? Sure, but there are points for style too.

<comment><USER10> The information displays built into the viewing window frames are very nice, but you already know those will be the first things to get thrown out for cost and/or complexity.

<comment><USER11> Or the first place where they will start blasting you with adverts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Österreichische Bundesbahnen (ÖBB) took over all remaining sleepers run by Deutsche Bahn (DB) some years ago. One downside of this was the dropping of the Amsterdam–Munich sleeper — ÖBB's nexus lies in Vienna. The Netherlands currently has no sleeper trains, which is rather unfortunate, because the sleeper train appears to gaining in popularity after a period of decline.

Increasingly, people want to avoid flying if reasonably possible. A sleeper train is ideal, because you spend most of the trip asleep, and end up in Munich, Paris, Vienna, etc. early in the morning, in the middle of the city.

Sure, it's not as comfortable as a hotel, but it beats the torture of flying (I'm 200cm tall), and train stations are just a lot more pleasant to be in than airports.

These trains looks really nice.

<comment><USER13> Then problem of price still remains before wide popularity for sleepers or even just long daytrips. I'd love to use trains more often, but I'm not willing to pay through the nose. A trip in Central Europe I recently booked would've been over twice the price with a train, with maybe a couple of hours longer travel time when accounting for airport trips and waiting. Second class, just a daytime journey without sleeping.

Timewise this would've been fine, but price is not competitive. I'm not sure if the problem is too cheap flights, or too expensive trains.

<comment><USER14> The EU should force a carbon tax on plane fuel for intra-EU flights and subsidize rail with the money.

<comment><USER15> The saddest part of this statement is that the European rail system is MASSIVELY subsidized even at the price points that the person you responded to described as "paying out the nose", which of course is a somewhat subjective position for a European to say, because their already lower salaries are massively taxed and to pay for the subsidized rail systems the gleeful Americans can gush about being so cheap when they return to the USA and demand socialism.

I'll take Austin's local light rail train as an example to illustrate what I mean. I once looked into the finances and financing sources to get the system stood up, and I worked out that it would be around a $30-$35 trip from one end in the middle of the city to the outskirts of Austin's Leander township if the actual cost of the system were paid for by the rider.

It is immensely deceptive and rather dumb that these realities are simply ignored, especially by seemingly otherwise rather intelligent people that congregate here.

At the very least, there should not only be the direct cost per ticket if it were not heavily subsidized by taxes of Europeans, which non-Europeans should have to pay, and the price that is subsidized that Europeans pay. It is really rather immensely immoral to ride on the train at a cost that is heavily subsidized by wildly immoral tax levels (e.g., 100% on gasoline, 20% on sales of goods, ~35% of income that is also 70% of what it is in places like the USA).

<comment><USER16> Air travel is massively subsidized too (airport construction, airline and manufacturer bailouts); as is highway travel (automaker bailouts, free trade supply chain, environmental externalities, health costs associated with driving and sprawl, plus gas taxes which cover only a small proportion of actual construction and maintenance costs).

It's difficult to do a true apples to apples comparison, especially when highways are also justified in part as a national security asset. But it's a little much to clutch pearls about subsidies for rail ("immoral", really?) without acknowledging how subsidized the alternatives are as well.

<comment><USER17> >free trade supply chain

free trade is hardly a subsidy.

<comment><USER16> That really depends on your perspective. A "conventional" subsidy can be understood as a reverse tax— instead of paying money into the general pot for the privilege of engaging in some harmful/productive/profitable activity, you are paid money _out_ of the general pot as a benefit for engaging in some activity seen by the government as desirable or beneficial.

Cutting taxes in any form is a subsidy relative to what went before, whether or not the end state is above, at, or below the zero point.

More concretely, if an automaker previously bought widgets from a local supplier for $10, but now buys them from overseas for $8 because of free trade, that's effectively a $2-per-widget subsidy. You can argue that it's a market efficiency and that most of the benefits are passed to the end consumer anyway so whatever, but when you get far enough down that path, then there are no widgets being made locally any more, which is the real cost of having subsidized the import of them by cutting taxes to zero.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sleeper trains make so much sense for travel over land. They are often competitively priced with air travel, they pollute a lot less and the time saved can be huge when you consider that you spend time travelling when you would otherwise be asleep (although this is sometimes true for air travel, many/most people find it difficult to get quality sleep in economy class).

The London - Edinburgh sleeper train (Caledonian Express) has been running pretty much since 1873 and is an amazing way to get between the two cities. You arrive at the station in London between 10-12pm, depending on if you want to have a few snacks or glasses of wine, then wake up in Edinburgh around 8am the next day.

<comment><USER12> The Caledonian Express is definitely on my list of trains to travel by some day. Pretty soon (when the customs part is sorted out on the Amsterdam end) it will be possible to travel from Amsterdam to London directly on the Eurostar without transferring in Brussels, so that helps too for me as a Dutchman.

<comment><USER19> I've been on a fair amount of sleeper trains and the Caledonian has been the most comfortable so far.

For the opposite, the most uncomfortable one to sleep in was the Hong Kong to Shanghai one. I paid extra for the Deluxe option, can't even imagine how hard the bed would have been on the lower classes. Still, was a pretty cool journey.

<comment><USER20> I think that's just an (northeast) Asian bed thing. Preferences trend firm for mattresses and you can see this in traditional or luxury places that don't cater to Westerners. The most deluxe ryokans in Japan still have relatively thin mats on the floor, business hotels in China and Japan often have former mattresses, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One high-level design choice that they made is to entirely skip any kind of in-seat entertainment and screens and instead of plan around people showing up with their own tablets and phones (to which they provide power). This makes immense sense to me and I'm sure simplifies things on their side.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. Southwest Airlines does this in the US, with "free" wifi access to their entertainment app/portal. I much prefer it to the often terrible seat- back screens on some other carriers.

<comment><USER23> I have even seen on some airlines (Alaska) that are doing away with seat backs screens on newer flights you can pay to rent a tablet if you don't already have one, want an extra one, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There's been talk for a while about autonomous cars driving people throughout the night across countries/states for meetings the next day. Sleeper trains already do this. Sleeper trains are making a comeback as we become more aware of the impact of flying to the environment.

<comment><USER25> Nevertheless, the number of people taking the plane isn't going down, while that should be the real aim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a regular train traveller here in Austria and I'm very curious how this turns out.

Currently the Intercity/RailJet trains are more like a downgrade to what was available before. They look nicer, but provide quite uncomfortable seating and offer no possibility to change the seating inclination; due to the air condition it's very noisy; there's no place to put your feet in an elevated position; there's no compartments, the whole car is one big room; and the only option for children is an open place with a TV, you have a lot of fun chasing your small children through the train.

<comment><USER27> I'm sure I couldn't sleep in the upper bed here:

[https://www.priestmangoode.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/Pr...](https://www.priestmangoode.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/PriestmanGoode-OBB-Night-Train-First-Class.jpg)

Enclosing beds to make them a kind of cradle is bad. The good design would add space not stuff. There's a reason older trains didn't have that.

Typical design made on computer that nobody tried to use (or not enough users to say how bad it is).

I've also traveled in the newer trains in Europe that were significantly worse than the older, again for having less space everywhere. It's a bad trend.

<comment><USER28> It looks fine to me? What's wrong with it? Many people are worried about falling out of the upper bed in sleeper cars. There's often a rail there. The "half cradle" offers the same protection against falling, while making it easier to get in from the foot end. It provides protection against light, noise and drafts.

The foot end is a bit narrower than the overall bed, which is also a smart use of space and, again, makes getting into the bed easier.

This is also the first sleeper cabin I've seen where the window seems to be parallel beside the bed as opposed to orthogonal at one end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What I wouldn't give for even the slightest interested in the development of public transit infrastructure in the US :(

<comment><USER30> Amtrak runs extensive sleeper service around the US. I've taken San Francisco to Chicago - it's quite nice, if you're willing to burn some vacation days.

<comment><USER29> I am, and I plan to :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Having travelled a couple of times on overnight trains from Austria to other European cities, these sleeping pods look marginally a larger improvement.

\- Tempeature: Having slept in a cabin where the aircon blasts from the bottom into those sleeping there, they inevitably have to turn it off to sleep, leaving those on the top bunks at temperatures of over 40C in the summer.

\- Noise/Privacy: In the 4-bunk cabins, I don't want to hear anyone either. Why wouldn't they include the soundproofing curtains in those too.

\- Space: There's a tiny gap between the beds currently. Look closely and this is also the case. It's impossible having more than 1 person do anything inbetween the beds and stepping out of your own pretty much puts you about 1foot away from the other person's face/legs.

Maybe someone can tell me why they can't just make lightweight carriages, and put a lot of them on the back of a train car (more than now). By having more carriages you can make the accommodation more spacious and comfortable. This is what stops me considering it as a viable option for European travel currently. Even if they couldn't fit in the station, what's to stop them letting half the carriages off first, followed by the second half?

<comment> em-bee trains longer than the station would double the time at each stop. that's not acceptable. but also, most stations are not designed to have trains longer than the station. a station usually has more platforms than the two rails that feed it. an overlong train would frequently block other trains coming in at other platforms.

the only thing that would work is to have two trains on the same route in a short delay from each other. say half an hour.

however, for all of this the real problem is cost. i believe germany dropped all overnight trains because they weren't getting used enough compared to high-speed trains. it's interesting that austria bought them, but i guess with austrias lack of high-speed trains, overnight trains are still useful.

<comment><USER31> Two trains would suit me just fine. Or three. As long as they are serving customers I don't see the problem.

I'd guess people weren't using them because they are so cramped and uncomfortable. I would bet they could be economical and comfortable when the whole process is designed from scratch. I don't think this exercise feels like that.

<comment><USER32> You should think that the cost is basically per floor area. The cars are already as light as they are willing to go (for crash safety etc). The minimum acceptable space gets you to a price that a trainload of people per day can afford.

The beds with their own screens look nicer than the ones in trains I've taken (and at comparable density) and far far nicer than anything in the air I've ever had. (Also nicer than the airport lounges I've slept in between flights...) There are also private cabins which I'm sure cost double.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The images are computer generated graphics, not real photographs taken with a camera.

<comment><USER34> Expect vandalism to take place in such trains in no time when they get to operate.

<comment><USER35> OeBB takes great care of their trains. If they get sprayed they are removed from service and cleaned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wish we actually invested in domestic infrastructure in the US.

</comment><comment><USER37> What a great design. I like the simplicity and the lightness of it all.

One thing I don't understand is the private berths.

> Private berths are fitted in both First and Standard Class carriages and can > be booked for business passengers or families travelling together.

They are completely transparent, nice for the lightness. But bad for privacy. I can see many reasons why a business meeting would not want prying eyes.

For me it has been a common issue in the past to be traveling while working on private files. But having a person sitting next to you doesn't allow for enough privacy... So usually I just stopped working, while that could be a big plus of train travel.

<comment><USER38> If you often do this there are privacy films for your computer screen that drastically reduce horizontal viewing angles and greatly improve privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Given how bad domestic plane travel has become in the US, I suspect that many business trips may not be much slower even at Amtrak speeds.

<comment><USER40> I've certainly found that to be the case when traveling to NYC. From where I live, a plane ride takes about an hour, and Amtrak takes about 6.5 hours...except that really, the total trip time ends up being about five hours for the plane and seven hours for the train. Flying involves driving twenty minutes to the airport, arriving early due to uncertain security wait times, going through security, waiting to board, boarding, taxiing, flying, taxiing, disembarking from the plane, and then even after all that you have to walk a long way through the airport, take the AirTrain to a different station, then get on yet another train to make it into Manhattan.

The train, by contrast, involves leaving from downtown near where I live, sitting on the train, and arriving in Manhattan a few blocks from my office. It's so much simpler and more relaxing, and much easier to actually get work done during the trip, so oftentimes it's worth the extra couple of hours the trip takes. If we could invest in high-speed rail and make the whole train trip even, say, 30% faster, there would be no contest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Compare the 20th Century Limited, 1930s version.[1]

[1] [https://s.hdnux.com/photos/77/13/43/16562379/3/1024x1024.jpg](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/77/13/43/16562379/3/1024x1024.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER42> Looks very nice, but I don't like the table design. The extensions that pull out look like they don't provide a continuous level surface, which would just be a pain to use. Amtrak (at least the cars on the Acela Express) has a much better design where each side of the table flips up when you want to enter or exit the seat. It doesn't look quite as nice when folded up, but it is much more functional.

[https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...](https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/images/TextwithImage- Horizontal/RS1000_business_handicapped.jpg/_jcr_content/renditions/cq5dam.web.506.380.jpeg)

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder if digitally linked convoys of cars and vehicles could replicate the smoother and quieter experience of trains, even on busy highways? The idea would be to use several "buffer cars" in front of the convoy of passenger busses. The entire convoy would be inter-linked and centrally controlled, so the "buffer cars" could accordion closer together and farther apart, so the passenger busses could use lighter braking acceleration. Build the busses with lots of sound damping and actively damped suspensions, and the experience could come close to that of a train.

The buffer cars would take up some additional highway area, but the passenger density of the convoy as a whole could still exceed private passenger cars.

</comment><comment><USER34> 2x2 facing seats in standard class? What an horrible idea - I have never understood why this was a standard in about every wagon since most of the time when you get this seat you get to share it with strangers, and lack leg space to feel comfortable.

<comment><USER44> It's good for groups and families. I'd expect not all seats are arranged that way.

<comment><USER34> It's not, but my point still stands: by far and large there are way too many seats in that configuration compared to the planned utility for it. You end up with regular passengers having to fit such seats and having a miserable experience. It never happens on a flight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I slept on a fair number of sleeper trains during multiple trips to China. It's basically the most popular way to get around the country. A few years ago, Xuzhou-Xi'an, a 10 hour trip, was priced at 315¥ (around $50 USD) for each "soft bed" (four soft beds to a room), which was perfect for a travelling family.

Recently, the high-speed rail lines have started to shift things in favor of daytime trips between large cities (Beijing-Xuzhou used to be 7 hours by sleeper train, but it's now 2.5 hours by bullet train). But, the train remains the best way to travel within the country. It's smooth, quite cheap (esp. for an American traveler), and increasingly comfortable.

</comment><comment><USER46> If only the US had trains this nice... One can dream. This really looks spectacular.

<comment><USER47> The new Acela Express trains don't look too shabby.

<comment><USER48> Of only we could get the tracks to take advantage of them. Oh, and cut several stops off it as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Those trains look nice, but at the same time pretty cramped and uncomfortable to me. I wonder if its just the photos, but the seats look to straight with not much legroom and the sleeper compartments seem really tiny.

<comment><USER31> And the photos attached are primarily first-class seats too. I found it odd having two seats next to each other without an armrest or gap in-between. I would not want a stranger next to me without that space/divider.

<comment><USER47> There are arm rests between the seats if you look closely in the first few pictures. It seems like you have to pull them up from the seat bottom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> As a side note recently traveled from US to Austria. I was blown away by how clean, beautiful and affordable the country is. But we can't have the things they have over there cuz "who is gonna pay for it"?

</comment><comment><USER51> One of the things that doesn't appear to have any real innovation is luggage space and the speed of loading. Get on any long-distance train or Eurostar service and you can wait minutes for people to drag 4 suitcases, trying to find space. Even on the Eurostar where you would expect most people to have a lot of luggage, there is often not much room at all.

We used to have luggage vans back in the olden days!

</comment><comment><USER19> Slightly off-topic, but couldn't help but notice on the Projects list a really cool version of the London tube. Unfortunately it seems it's from 2014 (there's even some quote from Boris as Mayor), so probably scrapped by now?

Makes me wonder if these Austrian train designs are already set in stone or just a proposal that might or might not happen.

<comment><USER52> That design is extremely close to the new design of train in use on the circle line. The seating arrangement is a little different and they use monochrome LED signboards rather than LCD (for sensible reasons), but the continuous unobstructed design is there, along with actual aircon.

It's an impressive sight to look from one end of the interior to the other when it's not full of people (and going straight).

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I've seen those, but they are slightly different and have been available for a few years already (I believe before 2014, the date of this project, but I could be wrong).

I'm glad to see on the other reply that the plan hasn't been scrapped. Some of the lines could really use new trains (with proper air ventilation/filtering, especially).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Those landscape images bear a striking resemblance to Albert Bierstadt's paintings of the American West[1], but I don't want to go pointing fingers...

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

</comment><comment><USER54> Finally I see someone realizing the "hovering" seats in a train. Anytime I sit in a train, I wonder why they have not done so for the last 30 years or so.

While they state its for luggage and design purposes, I just think: Its so much easier to clean. Even automatically ;)

<comment><USER55> > Anytime I sit in a train, I wonder why they have not done so for the last 30 > years or so.

My guess: Ease of installation and for stability reasons. Bolting the seats to the outer frame probably requires much more consideration than simply bolting them to the floor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Really enjoyed a recent European rail trip but quickly discovered mixing flight and rail is problematic if the links between airport and train station suck

<comment><USER57> The French tried: both Paris CDG and Lyon airports have TGV stations in them. There was a time the trains were even code-shared and you could book them as regular connections.

It was very convenient when it worked, for example from the US to other cities or ski resorts in France. But that was 10 years ago, and I haven't looked into it recently, so I'm not sure if they developed it or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Those chairs do not look comfortable. No lumbar support!

</comment><comment><USER59> In the US I would take a sleeper train from Seattle to Chicago instead of a plane provided the sleeper train runs 180 mph on average. That would put me in Chicago in about 10-12 hours, meaning I could get to Union Station in Seattle, get on the train, sleep a full night, wake up, eat breakfast, and disembark in Chicago.

The red-eye to Chicago, which is a comparable trip, really sucks because you only get about 3 hours of sleep in the most uncomfortable position imaginable. This means that you arrive in the city groggy and discombobulated.

I would even pay airfare-level prices for that kind of service. And extra if there's a way to segregate families with small children from my cabin so I don't have to try to remain asleep while a toddler is screaming for 3 hours in the same cabin.

<comment><USER60> _In the US I would take a sleeper train from Seattle to Chicago instead of a plane provided the sleeper train runs 180 mph on average._

Not really doable for a lot of Austria and generally the Alpine regions.

There are not many high speed tracks in Austria and Switzerland, the reason being that the countries are relatively small and that building high speed tracks through the alps is insanely expensive.

Switzerland built two base tunnels through the alps: The Lötschberg[1] - <USER2> Gotthard[2] base tunnels, which are geared to a top speed of 250 km/h (ca. 155 miles/h) and a normal travel speed of 200 km/h (125).

That's why it takes roughly 10 hours to get from Zurich to Vienna, but only 4 to get from Zurich to Paris (after Mulhouse the whole track is high speed capable and trains run with up to 320 kmh (200 m) on that track.

Edited to add: Of course night trains make a lot of sense on that route.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6tschberg_Base_Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6tschberg_Base_Tunnel)

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

<comment><USER61> TBF the Rockies are no easy passage either. Amtrak runs on the Hi-Line year round, over 2200 miles.

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

<comment><USER59> This is a good 3-4 days of constant train travel to get to the destination. The thing I'm complaining about is that the plane is almost too fast for what I want to use it for, while the train is incredibly slow.

It would be cool if there were a way for me to leave Seattle on Sunday night and arrive in Chicago on Monday morning having gotten a full night of sleep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Elegant, comfortable travel across Europe *

* For people exact height of 160cm

<comment><USER14> The beds are surely at least 2m? What makes it uncomfortable for someone over 160?

<comment><USER63> Why are they 'surely' at least 2m? The beds on the Caledonian aren't that long. A standard (not King) bed is only 190 cm in most countries. You're not going to get a King-length bed on a train - that's not a reasonable expectation.

<comment><USER14> Im 180 and never felt a difference in length from my home bed to the sleeper train beds. They may be shorter but not so much that it bothered me. That's why I assumed they were the same as home beds (standard length in Europe is 200).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Benchmarking parallel vector libraries - <AUTHOR> http://arrayfire.com/benchmarking-parallel-vector-libraries/

<comment><USER2> Get out of here, proprietary propaganda.

<comment><AUTHOR> Every library benchmarked in there is open source.

\- [https://github.com/arrayfire/arrayfire](https://github.com/arrayfire/arrayfire)

\- [https://github.com/thrust/thrust](https://github.com/thrust/thrust)

\- [https://github.com/boostorg/compute](https://github.com/boostorg/compute)

\- [https://github.com/HSA-Libraries/Bolt](https://github.com/HSA- Libraries/Bolt)

\- [https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/download](https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/download)

Which library did you think is proprietary?</comment></comment>


Jim Tcl version 0.78 - <AUTHOR> http://jim.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/www/www/news/ <comment><USER2> I started this project many years ago, and later abandoned it. Fortunately the project found another gentle and capable father that developed it for years and put it into a useful niche: embedded systems. However Jim Tcl is still, for me, a milestone of my programming life. It was the first time that, inspired by the Tcl internals, I started to realize how to write clean C code using better abstractions. It's awesome to see the project still alive, thank you Steve.

<comment><USER3> For the Tcl internals, was this John Ousterhout's code or some other codebase? Have you read his new (ish) book on Software Design? [1]

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Design-John- Ouste...](https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Design-John- Ousterhout/dp/1732102201)

<comment><USER2> Yep it was the original JO code base, but I think that when I read it (it was already Tcl 8) a lot of other people had rewritten major parts, but the standard and quality were set I guess, and also the core team was composed of people that knew how to write code. About the new book: ordered it via Amazon, but Amazon Italy for some time now for small things use the local postal service, that always fails, so it returned back... to Amazon. I'll have to purchase it again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I heard many times about tcl or tcl/tk. Never paid attention until today. I really liked the language but looks like kind of dead to me. Last tclkit version is 8 years old. I tried to compile a tcl/tk application to an executable file and most of the websites explaining the process pointed to broken links (other docs, executables, etc).

Is tcl/tk still alive?

<comment><USER5> Tcl/Tk is very much alive, and actively maintained. See the check-in history at [https://core.tcl.tk/tcl/timeline](https://core.tcl.tk/tcl/timeline) (Tcl) and [https://core.tcl.tk/tk/timeline](https://core.tcl.tk/tk/timeline) (Tk). There are annual conferences for developers and users - one in Munich this year ([http://www.eurotcl.eu/](http://www.eurotcl.eu/)) and another in Houston ([https://www.tcl.tk/community/tcl2018/index.html](https://www.tcl.tk/community/tcl2018/index.html)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember packaging and developing for the Tcl interpreter within Tivo boxes and set top boxes a while ago. The footprint was small back then, 10k is amazing. Great work.</comment>


T-Mobile G1 Unboxing Pictures - <AUTHOR> http://phandroid.com/2008/10/03/t-mobile-g1-unboxing-pictures/

<comment><USER2> the person who snapped the photos erased the serial numbers but didn't erase the barcodes. oops.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> that sounds funny</comment>


'Gnosis' Explains The Method And Reasoning Behind Gawker Media Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.mediaite.com/online/exclusive-gawker-hacker-gnosis-explains-method-and-reasoning-behind-his-actions/

<comment><USER2> Oh damn, I am dying to know how they did it. They talked about gawker having outdated kernels. I can understand a compromised staff password, a sql injection, some other weak link in the chain. But a kernel exploit would be crazy. For complete security we have to worry about our kernels too??

<comment><USER3> Nine times out of ten with a targeted compromise like this the trail will lead back to a successful spear phishing campaign. Blanket the staff with a malicious pdf, an exclusive first look at a new popular executable, or an older browser exploit. Once you've compromised a client machine (essentially inevitable as long as you have a few dozen or more staff), use that to discover CMS/FTP/SSH credentials, or impersonate the user to request new ones. Once you have a user login on the server, as noted the old kernel reference was undoubtedly connected to a privilege escalation.

Directly exploiting remote flaws in an OS on a major website is usually going to be pretty hard - they focus security efforts there and if there were any existing flaws they'd likely already have been compromised by them (and since fixed it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good article. But, if the article says right away that Gnosis has nothing to do with Anonymous, what is the Anonymous logo doing there? Why not the Gnosis ASCII-banner logo?

Are journalist really that lame?

<comment><USER5> Tonight, on CNN a security expert said that the attacks from Anonymous were carried out by a bot net of billions of computers.

So, yeah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The release at <http://pastebin.com/9rRmf6W5> contains this gem:

> Gawker uses a really outdated hashing algorithm known as DES (Data > Encryption Standard). Because DES has a maximum of 8chars using a password > like "abcdefgh1234" only the first 8 characters "abcdefgh" are encrypted and > stored in the database.

That doesn't make me think the hacks were very sophisticated.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Of these users one is registered under a .gov email address, 3 are from a > .mil addres and 52 are from .edu addresses.

Hope they were just throw away accounts.

<comment><USER8> Now I wish I had my password as "password," as a matter of fact, because now I have to go do some password changing (I know, my fault).

Also, I'm pretty sure they meant to write "qwerty," not "querty."</comment></comment>


Should fat people on airplanes be treated like tall people? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2245115/

<comment><USER2> The real problem is that most airplane seats are inappropriately sized and uncomfortable for adults of average size. I'm not particularly tall, less than 6ft., and I can't recall ever having adequate leg room on any flight except when I happen to be seated in an exit row where there is no seat in front of me. If the seats were appropriately sized for average adults, a large person (whether fat, tall, or both) would be no more uncomfortable than what an average size person is now and would not require any special accommodation from anyone in an adjacent seat.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would not consider it any great loss if reclining was disabled in all seats. I'm not especially tall (6'), so it doesn't hurt my legs (usually) when the guy in front of me reclines, but it does destroy any possibility of using the tray table. No room for my netbook, can't put a book in there, can't really even have a glass of soda. Even when the seat is up, I'm uneasy using my netbook because the seat in front of me could recline suddenly, catch my screen, and break it.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to completely disagree, on a crowded long flight it's very hard to sleep without being able to recline the seat. The problem is that there isn't enough room between the seats.

<comment><USER3> I don't know about that, I almost always sleep on the flight sitting fully upright. It helps if the headrests do that thing where the sides can bend inward to surround your head more.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: hdlss.io: web page to image and pdf in the cloud using headless chrome - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hdlss/hdlss <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN friends,

I've built a little tool [1] that makes it easy to create screenshots and PDFs of your own websites/webapps. It's a use case I've found in a friend's web project, decided to SaaS-ify it for them in order to lower the operational burden of yet another service that they would otherwise need to run. I decided to keep it completely CLI-only in terms of its interaction model from a user's perspective, even though I could have made a website and a login and some kind of dashboard etc -- intentionally keeping it lean and focused, trying to make the UX as simple, automation and gitops-friendly as possible, excited to see how that's going to go.

Please give the service a try if it's something you think might be useful to you. Your feedback will be highly appreciated!

[1] [https://github.com/hdlss/hdlss](https://github.com/hdlss/hdlss)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is "hdlss" so named as to remind of headless?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct :) The release of headless mode for Chrome is what inspired the whole service, which the name aims to reflect.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Startup Advice for College Students - <AUTHOR>

Dear Hacker News,
I am currently a student at Northeastern University. Lately (last three or four months), I have thought more and more about founding a company. The next questions becomes; what is the best way to prepare myself to do that? Of course, everyone says "nothing can prepare you for it." I am sure that is true. But just because I cannot fully prepare for it before-hand does not mean I should not try to be as prepared as I can.
I know smart and talented, dedicated, programmers. I have plenty of time to learn about anything that interests me (which I do). But I'd like to do more.
So my question to you is: What are things you wish you had been told while you were in college? Things that would have prepared you better to found a startup, or at least seriously maim the status-quo. <comment><USER2> I'm 19 - business/design (basically creating shit) is more important to me than uni. I've been too 3/4 lectures and no classes this term, and i don't regret it.

Just do it, you shouldn't even have to think about it, and find somebody just as ambitious, doing it on your own gets lonely.

Phase into it, even when im in a lecture im sketching something, you'll find out whats really important (your degree or creating your own company) to you as soon as you start.

</comment><comment><USER3> Learn Excel/MySQL/Another programming language, find out where you can get small grants for start-ups just to build a prototype and just get people using the product.

I'd recommend joining a start-up as well. Currently I'm employed at a hot start-up and every single day I am being given several projects which are essentially building/architecture projects using excel, mysql and other programming software/languages to make things useful to the business that people can use.

building is what it is about.

</comment><comment><USER4> ...I'm 18 going to University of Minnesota Duluth

...I'm scratching my head thinking "Why don't you just do it?"

You have the wrong angle.

Probably my favorite influence leading to startups would be these videos from huge silicon valley companies: <http://ecorner.stanford.edu/popularVideos.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> From one college student to another, if you can find any internships for start ups in your area do it. If you can't then get involve into any business our entrepreneurial clubs. The people in those organizations are usually are looking to engage themselves in business oriented projects. Be willing to learn as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish I took the leap and dropped out of college when I was attending. That's perhaps the biggest mistake I've made in my life. My best advice to you is that if you're a business guy and you're street-smart, drop out and pursue your dreams early. There's nothing comparable to learning while doing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Try asking this question on Quora - if you haven't already. You might get more replies.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just do it.

</comment><comment><USER9> start.</comment>


See all of the offensive things you've ever said on Facebook in one click - <AUTHOR> http://www.yourdirtymouth.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love for some of you guys to try it out and let me know what you think</comment>


Areyouhuman: A Great Capcha Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://areyouahuman.com/demo

<comment><USER2> One of the main points of reCAPTCHA is to help digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Everytime you use reCAPTCHA, you're helping in this effort. I agree this is a nice alternative if it works for people not using reCAPTCHA but it'd be nice if more people would also use reCAPTCHA on their sites. Yes, it's free.

<http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore>

<http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha>

<comment><USER3> I agree that reCAPTCHA's mission is a noble one. That being said, it is REALLY annoying sometimes. I think even solutions that contribute to a noble cause will fall to easier and more intuitive ones (if they exist of course). Not that I necessarily think this is the answer, but a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I can agree its 'noble'. Are the resulting digitisations going to be free to access for everyone? Is the OCR algorithm that I am helping to create? No.

While it may use your time to 'do something useful' - which is nice, that something is also to Google's competitive advantage - so its really more good business sense than noble (to me at least)....

<comment><USER2> Yes, the resulting digitizations are free to everyone, they are old newspapers like old NYT issues and books whose copyright has expired and are now in the public domain. How do you think you are able to search for so many old books pre-digital age on Google Books and read digital versions of old NYT news articles?

<comment><USER4> If this is true, why don't they say it on their website? why is there no link to the material created?

The only digitised versions of the NYT articles I can find on the web are on the NYT website, and you have to pay for them (at least, if you want the first paragraph)...

Can you provide me with some proof of what you say (links to free versions of the NYT for example)? Because I'm afraid I'm having a hard time believing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This won't work. The puzzle possibilities are limited.

This is about as effective as asking a random question, it stops bots because they don't know how to deal with it. It wouldn't have a chance against a targeted spam campaign/attack.

It's cute though.

<comment><USER6> Could you please go into more detail?

I'm curious because if you're saying a bot would be stopped at this solution, but not a human, then wouldn't that also apply to recaptcha as well?

Or are you saying one could automate a solution around this over that being impossible with recaptcha?

Would like to hear you thoughts.

<comment><USER5> A bot would only be stopped by this because of novelty. Recaptcha can easily be bypassed by using human solvers, which are available for $1.50/1000 captchas last time I checked.

In my opinion, it would be easier to automate this than recaptcha because this uses common elements that don't have nearly enough difference between them to make it a challenge. A solve rate of <5% is effective for spammers. How is this going to stop anything when a spammer can simply cycle through to a game they know how to beat, and fake the mouse movements and timing?

Recaptcha is difficult to beat with OCR because it is designed to withstand attacks by OCR considered 'state of the art'. It is impossible to beat with off the shelf solutions. On the other hand, this would be rather simple to automate using pixel matching. The shapes and colors don't change (Take the pancake example, for instance).

<comment><USER6> Thanks. I'm definitely rethinking implementing this in anything important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This may not be such a great alternative — it allows far too many attempts which make it susceptible to cracking. (a video showing this being beaten by a bot [1] was posted on HN [2] last week)

[1] [http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman- capt...](http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-captcha/)

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791>

</comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately I automatically associate this with "punch the monkey" banner ads and the like; if I saw it on a registration page I think I might skip it without thinking.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here is a youtube video showing that some of the puzzles can be beaten pretty quickly through brute force. <http://youtu.be/Ahu3fvW2H0E>

</comment><comment><USER10> First one I got was American-style pancakes, where I was supposed to put syrup and butter on it. Now due to partaking in way too much pop culture, I knew what to do. But while pancakes are pretty common, not everyone eats small, thick ones, stacked to incredible heights and thus is able to recognize them. Never mind the syrup, which is basically as international as a PB&J sandwich.

That's the problem with iconography in general. Easily outdated or subject to i18n goofs.

<comment><USER11> This is off-topic, but are PB&J sandwiches really not a common thing outside of the US? I've never heard this before.

<comment><USER12> They are not common outside of the US. Whenever I see people eat them in films and TV Shows I think "Ewww". Surprise, not everywhere is the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some critical limitations:

\- Limited puzzle possibilities, making it possible to manually code a simple solver for each specific problem

\- culture-specific puzzles (I got "how to make pancakes") will cause some confusion among non-US users

\- more time-wasting & confusing (and therefore more annoying) than Captcha

\- relatively heavy to load

<comment><USER14> I wrote out basically the exact same points (including the pancakes) and then thought to check the rest of the thread..

The one you didn't mention is that it's not great people with older browsers or impaired / older people in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> First of all, technically this is a CAPTCHA still.

Second of all, you can eliminate the vast majority (or sometimes all) of your spam using honeypots much simpler CAPTCHAS like "what is four + 2?".

</comment><comment><USER16> Ineffective at preventing bots and also ineffective at letting humans through reliably:

Good luck to those with accessibility needs (elderly, blind, etc) in catching those moving glyphs... No more vegetarians visiting your site (after all if they don't put pepperoni on their pizzas they must be robots...)

The bot-writers meanwhile can write code for each puzzle (the puzzles, requiring art assets, are expensive enough to generate that the many spammers can out-muscle the few areyouhuman puzzle-setters)

</comment><comment><USER17> The solution to captcha annoyance is not more annoyance in the form of a spammy-looking game. You can get to 99% of the use cases using some simple javascript logic and a hidden form element that is invisible to the user and catch the rest using a solid spam-detection algorithm on the server. The solution to spam is not to annoy your users. At least reCAPTCHA helps transcribe books…

</comment><comment><USER18> I have mixed feelings about captchas.

As someone who works in tech, I realize it's a somewhat effective solution to a very difficult problem, but as a user, I just hate them.

Captchas are like the "customs check" you have to pass to leave a Best Buy. Because of a few bad apples, everyone's customer experience suffers a little.

<comment><USER6> I agree. After looking at all of these comments, it's safe to say this isn't ready to be a recaptcha alternative, but I do appreciate the attempt at making it a better process for the average user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting idea of challenging people/bots to complete higher-level tasks to prove they are human. This just needs keyboard accessibility (I couldn't tab to the start button or handicap symbol link).

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like the "accessibility" alternative is the weakest link here --- easily defeated with simple voice recognition technology.

<comment><USER21> I am so glad that I don't have to solve audio CAPTCHAs. That was traumatic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It costs less than $0.01 to pay a real human to solve a capcha. Capcha's don't solve the underlying problem.</comment>


Intel won't touch Vista - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/06/23/intel-dumps-vista <comment><USER2> Must say that I don't know a single person who uses Vista, not one.

<comment><USER3> I know a few people who installed it, but I don't know anyone who's still running it. I have it on my own computer, but I only need to use it for Cubase. The last version of Windows I had a license for was 2000 (a great release in my opinion) and Vista (OEM license) was much cheaper than XP. I really only use Vista for a single task so my experience may be limited, but it doesn't seem any worse than any other Windows release.

The problem is that Windows hasn't really gone anywhere in the past 8 years either. XP was really only Windows 2000 with a little polish and marketed for the home users. I'm not sure what Vista is, but it certainly doesn't appear to be an improvement over what was previously available. If you think about the tremendous strides Linux and OS X have made in the same timeframe Windows appears to have come grinding to a halt in comparison.

On the Linux front we have much improved hardware support, an array of very useable desktop environments to choose from and widespread adoption of advanced package managers just to name a few. The package managers alone are huge leap in usability. Installing software on Windows seems primitive in comparison.

On the Mac front, we've seen the move from OS 9 to OS X, five revisions to OS X with each being more polished than the one before, support for two CPU architectures, a transition to 64 bit without any headaches and too many major features to even name. What's really interesting is that many of Apple's new features - Time Machine and Spotlight to name a couple - aren't really new innovations. Apple has just been the first to deliver them to average users in an easy to use package. That's a space in the market that was traditionally occupied by Microsoft.

I wonder if what's happening here is that people are finally getting wise to the fact that Windows has basically been stagnating for the better part of a decade while the competition has been making steady and consistent progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A somewhat misleading article, in that _most_ businesses are putting off deploying Vista internally; the fact that Intel has access to the source code has little bearing on the situation, since they aren't going to waste resources trying to fix integration problems that Microsoft couldn't.

The main problem is that Vista tried to do too much, too quickly, for too many special interests -- including Intel, who only benefits from an OS that needs the latest, most expensive CPUs. What businesses wanted was an incremental improvement on XP; what they got was an attempt to out-Hollywood Apple's UI. It's not surprising that businesses are sitting out this round.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would like to see more collaboration betwen Intel and Apple. Thier recent joint offers have been far more usable than the Wintel products I have used lately.

</comment><comment><USER6> Since when is Apple super loyal to Intel?

<comment><USER7> It's the Inq, what do you expect? Microsoft has long been Intel's greatest ally (Wintel, anyone?) and they're still best friends despite whatever "Charlie Demerjian" may think. Vista is broken, no doubt about it, but that's a _very_ far cry from "Intel is abandoning Microsoft."</comment></comment>


Slate - window management for hackers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jigish/slate

<comment><USER2> Is it possible to get a video demo?</comment>


iOS6 Safari Caching $.ajax Results - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12506897/ios6-safari-caching-ajax-results/ <comment><USER2> I would like to defend Safari's behaviour.

To me this problem reads "I was doing something wrong, but it has worked, it should keep on working". In this case, if there has always been a working proper way, I think that it is OK to break the bad behaviour and force people to use the proper one.

As other have pointed out, the spec says: "POST responses should not be cached, unless you use a Cache-Control header. In that case do whatever Cache- Control says."

Now, "Cache-Control: max-age=0" may have been working fine up to now, but what its meaning is "this content is cacheable; please retain it only for 0 second". The first part of the sentence explicitly says that the content is cacheable, the second part is used by the browser as part of its cache policy. Please note that you _explicitly_ declared the content as cacheable. Do you want to _explicitly_ declare your content as not cacheable? Use "Content- Control: no-cache". Or just do not set Cache-Control and rely on the default non-cacheable status of POST responses.

The only problem here is that Safari is caching POST responses that have no Cache-Control header set. Yes that is a bug. But one cannot complain about the fact that a browser cached a response that has explicitly been said by its producer to be cacheable.

<comment><USER3> > Please note that you _explicitly_ declared the content as cacheable.

You also declared that it instantly becomes stale, so the browser _must_ revalidate the entry before returning it. Safari returning a resource with Cache-Control: max-age=0 without contacting the server beforehand is an incorrect behavior, goes against the spec and is _not_ defensible.

> But one cannot complain about the fact that a browser cached a response that > has explicitly been said by its producer to be cacheable.

Yes one can, and the problem is not that it was cached but that _it was returned_. A stale cached response returned without validation is an incorrect behavior unless the response also included staleness specifications (which I can't remember ever seeing in the wild). Revalidating is _not_ optional: [http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13...](http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.1.1) [http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13...](http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.3)

<comment><USER2> Revalidating is optional. A browser MAY not revalidate if it likes so, unless you use `must-revalidate`:

<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.9.3>

> A cache MAY be configured to return stale responses without validation, but > only if this does not conflict with any "MUST"-level requirements concerning > cache validation (e.g., a "must-revalidate" cache-control directive).

<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.9.4>

> must-revalidate

> Because a cache MAY be configured to ignore a server's specified expiration > time, and because a client request MAY include a max-stale directive (which > has a similar effect), the protocol also includes a mechanism for the origin > server to require revalidation of a cache entry on any subsequent use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Must be in Apple's haste to make iOS 6 zip along impressively they got too happy with the cache settings._

As a developer, this is one of the most irritating things to see in a bug report: a smirky uninformed assumption about why the bug exists.

<comment><USER5> Irritating as it maybe, users are doing you a favor by even filing a bug, something we devs often forget. Bug reports are a gift allowing you to improve your project, and keep on deving, vs, say, waiting tables.

A friend once worked in a company, where "snark" was considered a valid reason to mark a bug "wontfix". The company didn't last long. It did sound like fun while it lasted though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This particular issue is probably lurking in code that I've written. The gist of the fix is to ensure that Cache-Control: no-cache is explicitly set on anything you don't want cached.

<comment><USER6> Also consider max-age=0

<comment><USER7> The stackoverflow post says that max-age=0 doesn't work for this particular case, but no-cache does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apple has the power to change the web on a whim. If this isn't fixed it could cause almost every web-service to actually send a `Cache-Control: no-cache` header on it's POST responses. A long shot, but maybe they are doing this deliberately (like they did with <video> vs flash) for some reason?

<comment><USER3> Pretty unlikely, especially undocumented anywhere. I'd ascribe that to stupidity rather than malice and would guess they tried to change something in the caching subsystem (e.g. cache POST with an explicit cache-control spec — makes sense for a mobile phone) and they broke the default case.

This would be supported by max-age: 0 failing to make resources "uncacheable".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Duplicate of : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550441></comment>


San Francisco's Secret DC Grid - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/san-franciscos-secret-dc-grid <comment><USER2> Should be marked 2012, this is an old article that I think has been on HN before. Nonetheless, very interesting.

High voltage DC transmission is somewhat scary. It's really easy to create and sustain arcs at much lower voltage than AC, and there are risks from things like electromigration relating to the current always flowing in one direction. Nonetheless, it's a neat curiosity, sort of like the cable car of the electric utility world.

</comment><comment><USER3> DC is now used for undersea and long distance cables too, making sort of a comeback. Large scale wind power generation facilitates it. Also connecting grids which are not frequency locked.

<comment><USER2> Wind power doesn't deliver DC. The windmills either generate AC at a variable frequency that is then converted to 60Hz through an inverter, or they have variable speed drive trains that output 60 Hz directly (more common these days).

Rotating generators don't make DC.

Edit: to add, using DC for underwater transmission makes sense because the capacitive coupling loss to water is much larger than for cables in air. If you mean using DC cables to collect power from _offshore_ wind farms, then yes that makes sense.

<comment><USER3> And also because the power is intermittent / can not be planned, you need long distance transmission lines.

If you have just coal and natural gas plants, you can throttle them according to usage patterns. If you produce a large portion by wind, it might make sense to build a transmission cable to a nearby country with mountains and hydropower.

And there DC is more efficient.</comment></comment></comment>