Musk's Hyperloop math doesn't add up - <AUTHOR> http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19848/musks-hyperloop-math-doesnt-add-up/

<comment><USER3> >The Hyperloop pods will travel[...] about 30 seconds apart in the tube. They will have a maximum deceleration of 0.5 gs [...] it will take a pod 68.4 seconds to come to a full stop.

>That's a pretty significant issue because safe vehicle operation means never getting closer to the vehicle ahead than the distance it will take you to stop. [...] That means that the minimum separation between pods is probably closer to 80 seconds or more.

Two flawed assumptions in here:

1\. 0.5 g is the maximum deceleration under normal conditions (see p. 58 in Musk's PDF). Emergency braking would obviously be capable of more. The linear accelerators themselves are spec'd to be capable of 1g, and there's an onboard emergency braking system on top of that.

2\. A vehicle that crashes doesn't stop immediately, but continues on its direction of motion due to inertia. That's why the two second rule is plenty safe on highways [1], even though expected vehicle stopping times are six seconds or more [2].

Furthermore, the article is basically an attack on maximum capacity, but that's not a real issue. The system is economically viable if it can get passengers from point A to point B at comfort and cost levels (including recouping investment) that compare favorably with other means of transportation; Musk cites $20 per ticket, which the article doesn't dispute Maximum capacity can always be expanded if the economics work otherwise.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two- second_rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule)

[2] [http://www.csgnetwork.com/stopdistinfo.html](http://www.csgnetwork.com/stopdistinfo.html)

<comment><USER4> Isn't that $20 estimate _prima facie_ incredible? It's based on the capex costs of the system but not opex, right? It presumes that once you build the system, it runs itself for free.

<comment><USER5> What I don't fully understand is how this is any better than conventional HSR. What are the advantages? Cost, but that remains to be seen. Absolute speed, which yes, but where are the time estimates from Hayward to the Transbay Terminal in SF, and from Sylmar to Union Station in LA?

This whole thing reads to me as purest wind.

EDIT: At least on a conventional train, I can ride from somewhere that's not at one of the endpoints to somewhere else that isn't; and, of course, I can go to the bathroom.

<comment><USER6> > where are the time estimates from Hayward to the Transbay Terminal in SF, > and from Sylmar to Union Station in LA?

How can they know where the track would run? You want an actual train schedule already?

If it is unacceptable not to have a bathroom, then cars are also unacceptable. Somehow it works for many people anyway.

I wonder whether existing HSR plans had to meet requirements this stringent.

<comment><USER5> Cars don't have bathrooms -- that is correct. However, cars _can take unscheduled stops_ without triggering an emergency response.

And pitching this fluff as SF -> LA without tackling the last mile -- perhaps the hardest part -- is all a reasonable person needs to know to know it's just waffle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aren't we arguing about the wrong things here? The hyperloop is actually something worth having as it will get you from SF to LA in 30 mins. Even if it costs more and takes less people than HSR, it's still far better than HSR for actually getting you between the two cities in the kind of time people would like. If you could set up these 30 min hops between cities all over the world, you will _improve humanity as a whole_. That's something worth attempting.

If capacity becomes an issue, you could just add more tracks. If the cost is wrong (and it no doubt is), why is nobody coming up with the real cost so we can compare this properly? Hand waving about 'too low!' is only useful for arguing, not for finding a solution. Are there other ways that the cost could be brought down?

<comment><USER8> >The hyperloop is actually something worth having as it will get you from SF to LA in 30 mins. Even if it costs more and takes less people than HSR, it's still far better than HSR for actually getting you between the two cities in the kind of time people would like.

Not necessarily. It depends on demand.

Think of travel time as latency, and volume as bandwidth. If the system is unsaturated, then the 30 minute travel time is great. You show up, get on, and ~30 minutes later you're at your destination.

But if the system is saturated (which seems likely at $20/ticket), then latency becomes more or less irrelevant because you're limited by bandwidth. Sure, once you get on the car, you'll arrive in half an hour. But you will have to wait in line, and that wait will be determined by the volume limitations of the hyperloop. If the hyperloop attempts to serve the same demand as the proposed HSR, a passenger's total travel time will be four times as long.

The solution is to charge more for a ticket. The actual price needs to be calculated in terms of a point where you don't end up with more than 3000 passengers per hour (at which point you break even).

However, even if you do that, it doesn't as effectively solve other problems that the HSR will help with, like total car traffic.

<comment><USER9> Why would we create one of the most sophisticated transit systems in history and then use _standing in a line_ as the method of reserving a space?

Web-based reservation systems are not hard. Last-minute tickets could be sold at higher price for those that need and can afford them as well.

<comment><USER4> You're not waiting in line for a ticket. You're waiting in line to get through security and to board the capsule. This is one of SWA's core optimization problems, and door-to-door times for SWA are still swamped by human-factor airport issues.

You can't wave a web browser around as a magic wand to solve these problems.

<comment><USER9> >and that wait will be determined by the volume limitations of the hyperloop

This is what led me to believe he was talking about standing in line for a place in a capsule.

Why is the wait for security determined by the volume limitations of the Hyperloop? Isn't that a function of demand, security lanes, and space to fill with waiting passengers?

<comment><USER4> Fly a lot? How much time do you give yourself to get through the lines?

<comment><USER9> I print my boarding passes at home (or use Passbook) and never check luggage, so the only line I deal with is security.

Passing through the checkpoint itself takes ~90 seconds. The other 20-90 minutes is waiting for the queue in front of me to be processed by 1-2 lanes working in parallel. If the airport had a wide enough hallway and a big enough payroll, why couldn't it run 10-20 lanes and cut down the wait by an order of magnitude?

Obviously the federal government doesn't choose to spend money that way, but it could - regardless of the seating capacity of the aircraft. In fact low- bandwidth aircraft make the problem _easier_ because fewer people need to depart at once.

I trust that you know what you're talking about when it comes to security, but I don't see it. Why does Hyperloop's low bandwidth make the security line problem worse than HSR?

<comment><USER4> The HSR plan doesn't involve TSA-style security checkpoints. The Musk plan explicitly does. HSR trains have derailed in the past with minimal fatalities. The expectation is that the same scenario on Musk's trains would be catastrophic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So his point about spacing may be true for loading and unloading, but it is not for emergency stops. You can exceed .5g's in am emergency. With appropriate restraints, 4 or 5g's would be possible.

The larger problem is: if you can build a hyper loop track at 10% of the cost, you can build an ultra light conventional "train" on the same pylons and with lighter weight,cheaper, track. It would run at maybe 200 or 250pm and hence with reduced capacity. At best Musk's cost claims are a capacity/cost trade off. At worst, they are suspect. I think they are suspect, especially given the extreme tolerances of the tube

<comment><USER11> I think one advantage of the hyperloop is that it would probably be quieter (they claim the compressor uses <150 HP) so that would make putting it on a pylon simpler and would reduce the need for noise barriers. Also the separation between tubes could be much lower than the separation between tracks. I'm not sure how much this would affect the feasibility of putting a more normal HSR train on small, lightweight pylons, but it wouldn't help.

<comment><USER11> Also, it has a large enough speed advantage that it doesn't have to go straight to the city center to have a time advantage over air travel, and that would be a big part of reducing the cost while keeping it viable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Comparing the theoretical capacity of the Hyperloop vs the High Speed Rail is only one fact to consider. Musk correctly points out the High Speed Rail is in theory way more dangerous. And, possibly more significantly, it is just too slow. To expect travel consumers to opt to max-out the so-called High Speed Rail capacity is wishful thinking. The real "high speed" capability of the Hyperloop make it more likely consumers would opt to max out its capacity, at which point more capacity can be added (by adding a parallel loop), and it is still cheaper than the High Speed Rail.

</comment><comment><USER13> In the engineering field, I've found there's an issue with a subset of engineers where they get some kind of enjoyment out of saying why something _can 't_ be done without providing any suggestions or improvements to make it possible. They just feel the need to be negative and list reasons why something won't work. It's unfortunately common, it's unproductive, and it really gets kind of annoying after a while.

<comment><USER4> There's already an alternative plan on the table that does SF to LA, city centers in both, in 2 hours 28 minutes.

To mount the argument that engineers and critics should be focusing on rehabilitating Musk's proposal rather than shooting it down, one of the following needs to be plausible:

(a) that door-door transit times on Musk's system will be significantly better than the HSR plan

(b) that construction and operation of Musk's plan will be significantly cheaper than HSR

(c) some X factor makes Musk's plan more attractive

There are compelling arguments against (a) and (b):

(a) because Musk's system can't reuse existing urban rights of way, it terminates far from either city center. It gets a "~30 minute" estimate, which message boards are eager to latch onto, by waving a magic wand and turning Hayward into San Francisco and Sylmar into Downtown LA. If that was a viable strategy, SWA would still be relying on Islip to service NYC.

(b) Musk's estimated tunneling and el track costs are so low that, were they viable, they'd revolutionize all of the rest of urban planning. For instance, Musk proposes to lower the cost of running viaduct by an entire order of magnitude. No comparable tunnel has been built for anything like what Musk proposes his tunneling costs will be. And the expenses he lays out make optimistic assumptions about the routes he'll be able to use, especially through the mountains.

It's gotta handily beat 2hrs 28min for the route people actually care about, OR be substantially cheaper. These aren't nits: they're the entire motivation for the proposal.

<comment><USER14> You must realize you're posting on "I could build that in a weekend" central. When viewed through HN goggles, a train that goes 80% of the distance between sf and la is identical to a train that connects downtown.

Facts, like tweets, have a size limit. "Hyperloop will connect areas relatively near to sf and la" is too long. "Hyperloop will connect sf and la" is a shorter, and therefore better, fact.

<comment><USER4> It's true, but I love the threads that make me go look things up. I could really give a rat's ass about the Hyperbloop, but what other than a Hyperbloop thread could motivate me to go read up on the per-mile cost of mountain tunneling, or the amount of traffic in Sylmar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There may be some valid points in there, but I don't consider it very productive to get this kind of info from this source. I'm not sure what their agenda is, but it clearly doesn't have anything to do with economics or transportation. From the authors recent articles, I have my doubts he would approve of anything that isn't initiated by government. Consider this article [http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19330/supreme- court...](http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19330/supreme-court-limits- communities-control-over-their-growth/)

Since I lack the expertise to know myself whether the numbers are plausible or will work out, I need to rely on the expertise of others. And one of my ways of evaluating the expertise of others is if they appear to be guided by facts or by an agenda.

<comment><USER16> To be honest, it reads like a standard paid-for FUD piece.

<comment><USER17> Both projects are impractical fantasies regardless.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, imagine high speed rail going down tubes. Next thing you know, they'll be proposing to put one under the English Channel. Those crazy engineers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Part of the problem is that HSR is fast, technically feasible, heavily used, and economically viable in France, Germany, China, Japan, and other places.

So, the most useful analysis would be:

1\. What factors are preventing HSR from being fast, technically feasible, heavily used, and economically viable in the United States? (More concretely, why does California's HSR suck so much when it's been demonstrated that HSR doesn't necessarily have to suck?) Demographics (e.g. population density and layout)? Political and legal constraints? Terrain? Culture?

2\. How does the Hyperloop mitigate or sidestep these problems, due to its superior specifications or design differences from HSR?

3\. For additional insight, what would California's HSR have had to do differently to mitigate or bypass these issues, and would it even have been possible?

<comment><USER17> Americans prefer cars. It's that simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> People have largely missed the salient points of Elon's proposal:

1) If America cannot understand the potential and purpose of innovative technology, it is doomed to slide into socio-economic, scientific, and technological poverty. The point is that building a slow and expensive HSR is stupid, and people have approved it solely because they are, similarly, too stupid to envision what is possible. The primary point of building the Hyperloop is not to move people physically, but to move them intellectually.

2) the Hyperloop, as designed by Elon, has zero emissions. We should do it for that reason alone, otherwise we are genuinely too stupid to exist, which fact says more about us than any debate. If we do not begin building zero-emissions systems, the debate will not matter because we will be gone.

3) Capacity problems are not an issue. Elon has intelligently anticipated a diminishing requirement to physically move people because of the improvement of telepresence technology. If you still need to travel as much as you did ten years ago, you are an idiot. This trend will only increase. Elon is too savvy to mention this explicitly, but he no doubt understands that the need to move people physically is declining. The HSR will be mostly empty if it opens in 2024 with the capacity required in 2014.

4) Our entrenched institutions have failed us, not because of anything specific that they have done wrong, but simply because they are entrenched. We should build the Hyperloop for no other reason than a little revolution being a good thing, now and again.

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems some people don't quite understand what the big deal is about not terminating outside the major population centers.

For people from the east coast, imagine a train system that claimed to connect New York and DC, but actually terminated in Manville, NJ and Bowie, MD.

<comment><USER21> Ryanair (budget European airline) does this.

EG: They fly you to Paris, not CDG or Orly, but to Paris Beauvais.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The most important issue in terms of long-term cost-effectiveness is how much it will actually be used, and how much of the time it is actually full. High Speed Rails or any trains for that matter, are plagued by the inefficiency of having to run at a set schedule regardless of how many tickets are sold, and they ultimately don't justify their own existence in most of America. The hyperloop, aside from attracting new people who otherwise wouldn't have considered rail travel, also has the benefit of having smaller capacity and being able to adapt to demand more quickly. With no stops between SF and LA, if there are no passengers at a certain time, you just don't send the vehicle -its that simple.

<comment><USER23> Or you _do_ send them, because it costs so little, and the hyperloop will be mainly self-powered, instead of having them wait half an hour for others to take the ride with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The capacity constraint accusation on the grounds of spacing and max G is pretty bogus. Firstly, there's nothing wrong with running at far more than 0.5g in an emergency. You think a plane stays below 0.5g when it crash lands? You just have to make sure people aren't badly injured, not pamper them - <USER2> make sure such emergencies are very rare.

Where the author really gets it wrong though is in saying "Maybe he can resolve that by using larger pods. But of course, a larger pod will weigh more. And that will probably mean using stronger steel for the tubes, which means that the cost will go up". That would be true, but if you're happy to resolve the issue with larger pods then you should be equally happy to resolve it with groups of smaller pods travelling at smaller separations. A 737-800 seats around 150 people. Hyperloop passenger capsules seat 30. So no one should have any conceptual issue with running 5 hyperloop capsules in convoy with separation of a couple of seconds. This 'couple of seconds' still means almost 1km, so they're certainly not sharing the same segments of tube, so you don't need to scale the tube design at all. It's still dirt cheap, and you have plenty of capacity, and it's still MUCH safer than a plane because if one capsule has a fault the others following can still likely stop in time (given they're all decelerating at roughly the same speed).

</comment><comment><USER25> Isn't it incorrect to simply compare the capacity of the Hyperloop vs. the High Speed Rail. Shouldn't the transport time also be taken into account?

I mean, simplifying of course, if the Hyperloop can carry ~3,000 from A to B in 30 minutes, and the High Speed Rail can carry ~12,000 from A to B in 2 hours, which is better? In this scenario wouldn't they be equal?

<comment><USER10> The measure is capacity per unit time. The hyperloop's capacity is much smaller.

<comment><USER26> Well I'm from the east coast so I'm not the most familiar with SF/LA but how many people per hour actually travel between those two cities? Would it really exceed the 1,260? If not then the reduced travel time would certainly be a huge benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Even if he is right and the math does not add up, I do not think that Musk is likely go to all this trouble to try and boost Tesla sales in California in 2026, which is the earliest that HSR is planned to get anywhere close to connecting LA and San Francisco, and even then it actually only gets as far as San Jose, the San Francisco bit is scheduled to open in 2029.

I can't see a plan involving the idea that in 2029 Tesla would be so dependent on Californian sales rather than global, that it would seek to stop a local rail network from progressing. Especially a plan so convoluted as to involve actually taking time out from running a rocketship business, car company and solar power company, in order to design a rail network that according to the theory, you do not want built.

<comment><USER4> He hasn't taken time away from his car company to do this.

<comment><USER16> He has taken time to do this, while being involved in running three other concerns. This may not have taken time out of running any of those concerns admittedly, perhaps he gave up reading for a bit, I don't know. But he must have spent some time on it.

He says he was pulling all-nighters to get it ready for the press, and also said _"I wish I had not mentioned it, I still have to run SpaceX and Tesla, and it's fucking hard."_ , which seems to indicate that it was squeezing his time.

Unless he has quite a lot of free time, which it doesn't sound like, I can't see how this could have taken no time away from Tesla, especially given what he has stated. It might not have taken that much, but it will have taken some.

<comment><USER4> He had a white paper written. He didn't build a hyperloop. Let's make sure we're talking about the same thing.

<comment><USER16> You know perfectly well that we are talking about the same thing. You directly replied to a point that was talking about the effort involved in designing a system, saying that he didn't take any time out from Telsa to do that.

All I am saying is that it seems likely that it must have taken some time out from his other activities, especially if he is talking about pulling all nighters just to work on the thing.

This seems so patently obvious that I am not entirely sure why you would even contest the point, let alone then resort to rhetoric above sound argument to try and win it.

<comment><USER4> You wrote "a plan so convoluted as to involve actually taking time out from running a rocketship business, car company and solar power company". I'm pointing out that he took time out to write a paper; he hasn't taken time out to build anything.

The question of his motives --- which is a sideshow --- would be easier to dispense with if he had _actually invested in the proposal_.

<comment><USER16> You stripped the context of _" , in order to design a rail network"_ from that quote.

He has to design the thing to then write a paper on the design. You are saying that he took time out to do that as though it is not what I am saying, however it is in complete agreement with what I stated in the first instance.

All I ever said was that he took time out to design the thing, and the paper on the design is obviously the public part of designing the thing.

You keep coming up with this build nonsense, which I never implied at any point and which you know is a non-point as anyone who has been following this in the slightest, obviously knows that it hasn't been built yet.

And he has invested in the thing, he has invested the time it took to design the thing to the level required to then write the published paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Plus since oil pipelines constantly leak, how are they going to make pressurized tubes for miles that don't leak and trap pods?</comment>


Widespread Google packet loss observed today - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18064

<comment><USER2> I understand Twitter now. It's really dumb in a lot of ways and everything it does could be done without the poorly-built centrally-controlled Twitter (tm) service.

Here's the power: Google and ATT both addressed the problems and did so succinctly, quickly, in the same place, and in an easy-to-understand manner. Superb.

<comment><USER3> I still don't get twitter. But it seems like it's turning into something large public entities _have to_ have a presence on. And the character limitation keeps it from turning to a complicated public image/branding/market problem which could keep companies from participating.

But I'm still not sure what the value for John Q. Public is in twittering or tweeting or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looking at the last update, I always chuckle when a tweet notifies about something being offline. Gets kinda ironic :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Apps Status Dashboard has some info <http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm:0/di:8/do:1/ddo:1>

</comment><comment><USER6> Funny coincidence, because I was setting up a wireless network card and kept pinging Google to test it and it dropped out a lot!

Damn you, Google ping!

</comment><comment><USER7> The submitted article suggests the failure is an AT&T failure.

</comment><comment><USER8> Apparently those poor packets were on a slow boat from China: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/this-is-your-pilot- sp...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/this-is-your-pilot-speaking-now- about.html)</comment>


Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11M Concurrent Users - <AUTHOR> https://blog.discordapp.com/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-million-concurrent-users-c6f19fc029d3 <comment><USER2> A previous post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238221)</comment>


Emergence - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

<comment><USER2> Hah, I was just wiki-ing Emergence this morning after listening to Russ Olsen's great talk from Ancient City Ruby[1] on the topic. Creepy.

1 - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQp1CFJxgs0&feature=youtu.be](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQp1CFJxgs0&feature=youtu.be)</comment>


28.5% of Android devices are now running 4.x - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/01/google-releases-octobers-android-platform-distribution-numbersjelly-bean-at-2-7-gingerbread-still-hanging-on-at-54/ <comment><USER2> Let's see a measure of improvement: how many phones are kept up-to-date versus time.</comment>


VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment - <AUTHOR> https://vtm.netxs.online/ <comment><USER2> Related: The MGR Window System [https://hack.org/mc/mgr/](https://hack.org/mc/mgr/)

"MGR provides each client window with: curses-like terminal control functions, graphics primitives such as line and circle drawing; facilities for manipulating bitmaps, fonts, icons, and pop-up menus; commands to reshape and position windows; and a message passing facility enabling client programs to rendezvous and exchange messages."

Essentially, each window was a souped up ASCII terminal with extra escape sequences which implemented primitive graphics. It competed with X-Windows on low-end workstations during the 1980s.

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18742611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18742611)

<comment><USER3> Love it! I have a strange desire to try to make that work in WASM over HTTP/2 and hack in MGR server hyperlinks.

<comment><USER4> +1

SVG over HTTP/2 in Wasm with WebGL1 (for compat)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The width of the display used in the screenshot appears to be less than 150 characters. Why would you add the clutter and distraction of _transparent_ windows with frame decorations in such a limited environment? 30% of the real estate is consumed by elements that don't present any information to the user.

On a modern display, this could far more productively be replaced with (1) any number of tiling WMs with console terminals in the panes (I use stumpwm for this), or---and you don't even need a GUI/WM for these---tmux or screen, or even emacs -nw, which give you a much more configurable and robust text-only environment. My normal working environment is a pretty heavily customized tmux (including powerline and full 256-color/unicode support) running on a machine that doesn't even have a GUI installed. (I do cheat a bit by using kmscon---or fbcon in the past---to get colour and font support on linux vttys.).

<comment><USER6> The demo video ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLumnSctakY&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLumnSctakY&feature=youtu.be)) reveals that this is not just a traditional window manager for a static screen, it's got a much larger virtual canvas that the display can scroll around in. So there's a LOT more space to make an aesthetic decision for big, character-wide window frames.

Seriously go watch the video, this thing feels like it's got a foot in the realm of UI roads not taken like Raskin's zoomable UI, text-mode is maybe more just a way to keep their focus on thinking about the interactions without having to worry about drawing a bunch of pretty widgets.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I see it. I just don't get it. There's an awful lot of UX work being done to preserve an illusion that you have a bunch of fixed-size consoles that are arbitrarily arranged in a 2d space. Which, I guess, is the defining metaphor of GUI interfaces, but if that's what is desired, why create a console-only (if only in appearance) GUI? Text buffers in emacs or panes in screen or tmux can be made to have arbitrary size and dimension if you want to turn off wrapping and keep a longish scrollback. You can have as many buffers as you want, as many as your screen can accomodate visible at once and easily navigate them as you like. All you have to give up is the conceit that windows have independent physical size and location and embrace one that holds that you can have an arbitrary number of text buffers available to arrange, swap, hide, show, etc. Not trying to be nasty, but this feels like a bit of a cargo cult: someone stuck in the windows GUI metaphor trying to create a version of CLI metaphor they don't fully grasp. Of course, the fact that those of us who prefer the CLI metaphor are rapidly dying off is relevant here---but seizing all of the disadvantages of an all-text environment without any of the advantages seems ill-advised. That said, no one needs my approval. If this works for you (and I'll readily admit it's kind of cool), what do you care that I don't get it.

<comment><USER7> Typing text into a terminal/buffer is easy. But remembering all the shortcuts or cammands to resize and move windows in termux et.al is hard. Resizing and dragging with a mouse is easier (or fingers on a touch screen/interface)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like a modern version of twin [https://github.com/cosmos72/twin](https://github.com/cosmos72/twin)

<comment><USER9> Ha, you beat me by a minute :D I agree!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been thinking about such text-based DE for custom Raspberry Pi nano based smartphone. Reason being, common mobile apps are not going to arrive for Linux and Nano is not powerful enough to run web browsers anyways; So why not a text-based DE or even just a console which enables basic communication features and Lynx for browsing?

It would be great if we could get some GPU juice from Pi for text rendering in such environment like how iTerm2 does on macOS.

<comment><USER11> Are you talking about a Pi Zero? That can totally run a desktop environment and browser. Especially something light like XFCE or Enlightenment.

<comment><USER10> >Pi Zero?

Correct, sorry brain fart.

>That can totally run a desktop environment and browser. Especially something light like XFCE or Enlightenment

Even regular sized Pi struggle with web browsing on a standard browser (Firefox/Chromium), I know that it largely has to do with the web pages themselves being memory hogs, but then again a similar specced Chromebook x86 doesn't hang while browsing(Same web page/Same no of Tabs); I think it largely has to do with browsers not getting optimised for ARM architecture on Linux.

I had the same issue with XFCE i.e. browsers hang after sometime, as for Enlightenment 3rd party apps didn't work last time I tried with Pi3[1] has the situation changed now?

[1][https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop- experien...](https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop-experience- on-raspberry-pi/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tip: If you want to escape from any ssh session you can press this sequence:

1\. <Enter> Press Enter.

2\. ~ Press Tilde.

3\. . Press dot.

This disconnects from the remote host.

If you want more: `man ssh` and look for "ESCAPE CHARACTERS"

<comment><USER13> I think the sequence is "<Enter>~.". I use it often.

<comment><USER14> why not use the logout shortcurt ^d ? this abort sequence is so much move involved vs just ^c ^d -ing

<comment><USER15> This shortcut works even if the remote side isn't responding to ^c and/or ^d. It's handled by the local client. The two primary use cases I've found it useful are when I accidentally wedge the remote box by using up all of some resource or when some other event causes my network connection to hang and I don't want to wait for a timeout.

<comment><USER14> yeah, i was specifically confused about him having to use it often. it is sometimes useful, like when you're connected to the demo site and cba to figure out how to disconnect.

but such situation are so rare that i was confused about the remark how often he uses it.

<comment><USER15> I use it pretty often because I have SSH sessions that get messed up from (dis)connecting my VPN and I'm impatient.

<comment> Ignacy-s If you do the first connection with mosh instead of ssh, it will survive vpn/wifi/4g roaming and even system hibernation. Assuming that first hop is a vps in the cloud with a stable connection, you can literally wake your pc from hibernation and once you get any Internet access, mosh will happily restore your "ssh" session for you.

mosh.org: >Mosh will log the user in via SSH, then start a connection on a UDP port between 60000 and 61000.

Needs at least a couple of ports in that range open, because old sessions tend to block ports until they are cleaned.

<comment><USER15> I use mosh for personal stuff. My work does not allow mosh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_(windowing_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_\(windowing_system\)), [https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/](https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/)

</comment><comment><USER16> It looks like DESQView for MS-DOS.

<comment><USER17> I really liked DESQView, too bad the industry had to move to GUIs :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just ssh-ed in, there are multiple users, its crazy!

<comment><USER19> same, but I will come back later to actually try it. Right now it's displaying a bunch of colors and strobing really hard. Not sure what's happening.

<comment><USER20> Try a different terminal. It does that for me in URxvt, but works fine in xterm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Along with DESQView and IBM's TopView as already mentioned, this reminded me of the first version of PC Smalltalk put out by Digitalk that was called "Smalltalk Methods". It was a character based windowed Smalltalk.

This was quickly followed with the full bit mapped windowed Smalltalk/V. I believe all of this was when MS Windows still only had tiled windows without overlap.

</comment><comment><USER22> I came here expecting an article about my beloved Emacs ;)

<comment><USER23> serious question about exwm, how do you deal with a broken .emacs, and what about when you hang emacs?

<comment><USER24> I would suggest keeping around some versions :) I use git for this very reason locally when I'm futzing with settings, it's immeasurably handy for experimenters and config file junkies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Glad to see someone made this to save me the time! I've wondered if a TUI could replace some desktops for low end or embedded systems, or something to use on remoting into a datacenter etc.

<comment><USER7> Drawing text is the most expensive in a GUI.

<comment><USER26> That's only true for TrueType Fonts in graphical mode.

In text-mode, characters are "drawn" by simply writing their ASCII code point into VRAM and writing another byte (two 4-bit values really) in an additional "attribute" buffer to set the foreground and background colour.

Programmers can swap out the default character set to provide their own typeface and graphical characters for use as window borders, shadows, etc.

(S)VGA text-mode is as cheap as it gets in terms of computational complexity.

<comment><USER27> Come on. We had long past the ASCII only era.

<comment><USER28> ASCII is eternal

<comment><USER29> Tell that to the French, Germans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Spanish, Norwegians, etc. pp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Emulating stacked translucency in a terminal is pretty interesting.

<comment><USER31> notcurses takes this to its logical extreme: [https://nick- black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses#Transpar...](https://nick- black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses#Transparency.2FContrasting)

check it out in notcurses-demo -- pretty crazy stuff

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This reminds me of the DOS menuing system we used to install on clients' computers several decades ago. Cannot remember the name, may have to dig out my old 5 1/4" floppy collection binder I used to always carry with me if not remembering starts to drive me crazy...

That system remapped the function keys to launch batch files or call up sub- menus... Easiest way (at the time) to "customize" peoples' computers for them...

<comment><USER33> Could you be thinking of DesqView? That was a whole multitasking OS that sat on top of DOS.

<comment><USER32> Although I played with DesqView, that was not the menuing system I used to use - It had some monumental name for the day, like SuperMenu or MenuGold 2000 or some such... Internet search not getting any hits that match. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is amazing. Has there been anything like this before?

<comment><USER35> Oh yeah. I'm going to date myself here, but I was just going to say this reminds me a lot of Borland Turbo C++ way back in the day. They had this thing called Turbo Vision for building text UIs. It seemed super cool back then.

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

<comment><USER36> It definitely was super cool. The windows had types, could be resized, had titles, dropdown menus, and form controls. The editor had syntax highlighting. And most importantly (at least for me at the time), there was a language reference included with the help system which had hyperlinking, so you could click through pages about the supported syntax and various topics, gleaning a wealth of information. All on DOS!

<comment><USER37> Hypertext integrated help has been available earlier than turbo vision even. It has been available from turbo pascal 3 at least. For a young like me who ... copied it on two disks, it was awesome what you could learn.

<comment><USER38> Turbo Pascal 3 didn't have integrated help (hypertext or not), it was introduced in Turbo Pascal 4 (which itself was AFAIK in general a big rewrite of the compiler and IDE).

Though the integrated help really improved with version 6 (when Turbo Vision was also introduced) since you could move a cursor freely inside the help window as if it was an editor, select and copy text, the help text was much more detailed and more organized and every function/procedure also had a small example showing its use (version 5.5 also had examples but the overall help was much more terse).

<comment><USER37> Ah, maybe version 4. 5.5 was my favourite with objects. Later ones with turbo vision swapped on my 640k 8086.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I love things like this. Is it not released yet? A glance at the repo from my phone looks like there is no code yet.

Does anyone remember Tandy Deskmate?

<comment><USER40> Here is a nice quick tour of Deskmate: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYHtojsaRkY&t=9m47s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYHtojsaRkY&t=9m47s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Reminds me of the first edition of MS Windows.

A lot of firmware systems still do their "windowing" like this.

</comment><comment><USER42> This looks quite cool, but I don't think it's open source? I can't find any source code in the repository, there's just a single file called not_ready_yet.

<comment><USER43> It is probably not ready yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I once built something like this. There's a Perl library[1] that lets you control windows, dialogues, etc. My grasp on concepts like asynchronous programming, callbacks, process IO, etc. was nascent at best, so naturally this UI that I built was pretty terrible. I learned a ton though!

[1]: [https://metacpan.org/pod/Curses::UI](https://metacpan.org/pod/Curses::UI)

<comment><USER45> Not just Perl. Curses is what most TUIs on *nix are built in. It's a C library with a few different implementations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I love the lines connecting all the windows to a single point. Helps with the spatial relationships.

</comment><comment><USER47> The source code is just a file named "not ready yet". How is this open source?

<comment><USER48> Pretty sure that MIT doesn't mean that they have to put the code in a repo. Have you tried emailing them?

Edit: Presumably they plan to put the code in a repo, but it's not ready yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Tried to connect with Juice SSH on mobile and it looked quite ... abstract.

<comment><USER50> Also with Terminal.app from macOS...very..er..."colorful".

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/q52w26jsyv086hn/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/q52w26jsyv086hn/Screen%20Shot%202020-08-22%20at%2015.17.28.png)

<comment><USER51> Looks fun like that on iOS Prompt, too.

Must be looking for ANSI instead of VT100.

Mismatched emulator modes reminds me of BBS days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's funny when Microsoft comes to the Linux world it feels the urge to make it windowy, rather than learning the Linux text CLI paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER53> Just note that VTM is the main commercial TV station in Belgium, and the name is most likely trademarked there as well.

</comment><comment><USER54> I like that, a lot. For the low bandwidth only.

<comment><USER9> > _" total sent: 56 878 123 bytes"_

:/

<comment><USER54> aka one gif video on imgur

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Ah, this reminds me of Turbo Pascal days :)

</comment><comment><USER56> The demo doesn't seemt to work on putty

<comment><USER57> Worked fine for me in PuTTY.

<comment><USER58> What settings? Mines more like an abstract color art piece but not so much a desktop environment.

<comment><USER59> Same on urxvt. Probably requires true color support. I had the same issue with browsh, a text front-end to Firefox.

<comment><USER60> Oh, if only there were a way to solve this problem which was well-tested and widely-deployed!

[https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/](https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/)

<comment><USER61> That gained 24-bit RGB colour support in version 6.1, released in 2018. It's not quite as widely deployed as you may have thought.

* [https://stackoverflow.com/a/36163656/340790](https://stackoverflow.com/a/36163656/340790)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Floating windows are worse than tiling imho

<comment><USER63> Until you want to work with media/creative apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> What's the point of overlapping windows in text? Seems that tmux already fits the bill for this use case.

<comment><USER65> Its good to see experiments like this. Maybe this project won't be the next big thing, but maybe it will give someone an idea of what the next big thing should be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Insane.

Well done brother ;)

</comment><comment><USER67> Isn't it similar to the rio windowing system from Plan 9?.

<comment><USER59> rio is a graphical interface so not really. It is more like acme itself but with floating windows and translucency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Is this running on top of Windows and just replaces the GUI?

<comment><USER69> Nope, I guess this is a Linux or at least platform-independent command line interface program.

You are probably confused by the powershell which seems to be available for multiple platforms nowadays, see [https://aka.ms/pscore6](https://aka.ms/pscore6)

<comment><USER57> There's also a window claiming to be Windows' CMD. As I can't figure out how to enter text in any of these windows (I'm assuming it's disabled, otherwise CHAOS) I can't tell if it's just a vestigial window of if it's a true output.

The topics on the Github repo list both Linux and Windows. The Readme calls itself "aka Monotty Desktop". That makes me think they may have written the code for the Mono runtime, so I'm expecting it's C#.

I had played around with a similar idea in C# some months back, though I was targeting only Windows because it took P-Invoking into some Win32 APIs to get most of the functionality.

<comment><USER70> Powershell. But Microsoft ported Powershell to run on UNIX/Linux, so ...

<comment><USER57> I know the difference between PowerShell and CMD. And I know Microsoft ported PowerShell to Linux. You're not paying attention. Command Prompt is _also_ on display: [https://dice.netxs.online/cloud/vtm/mde_banner.png](https://dice.netxs.online/cloud/vtm/mde_banner.png)

<comment><USER68> Yep, I'm in the same boat as you. Part of it just looked like Linux running Powershell, but CMD threw me off.

<comment><USER57> When PowerShell runs on Linux, it doesn't show a "C:/" prompt. This is clearly running on Windows with WSL or Cygwin for the Unix tools.

<comment><USER68> My first thought as well, but I didn't think you could not use the GUI in WIN10

<comment><USER57> There would be no need to kill the default desktop manager to run anything we've seen here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I am curious, how does it render images/videos?

<comment><USER72> Yes it does have some support, though the resolution is low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> It's very cool!

</comment><comment><USER74> Emacs</comment>


How Industrial-Scale Tar Production Powered the Viking Age - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/how-industrial-scale-tar-production-powered-the-viking-1830022086 <comment><USER2> "There were two kinds of Tar Pits: Mounds with ducts and underground funnel- shapes with container in bottom": [https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tervahauta](https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tervahauta)

But then again the Uppland area was populated with Finnish people pre 1000AD.

Swedish scientist make these amazing discoveries frequently. One was rune- scroll with "magical language of unknown origin". When read phonetically at some convention, some random visitor from Finland recognized the language.</comment>


"Men Are Scum": Inside Facebook's War on Hate Speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/men-are-scum-inside-facebook-war-on-hate-speech <comment><USER2> >That means statements like "black people are monkeys" and "Koreans are the scum of the earth" are subject to removal. But then, so is "men are trash."

>See the problem? If you remove dehumanizing attacks against gender, you may block speech designed to draw attention to a social movement like #MeToo. If you allow dehumanizing attacks against gender, well, you're allowing dehumanizing attacks against gender. And if you do that, how do you defend other "protected" groups from similar attacks?

I'm not sure if the author is taking a pretty objective approach to the problem and therefore considering all possibilities, or if they really unironically believe what's stated in the second paragraph, but in any case, especially the latter, I am shocked about this line of thinking.

The dissonance between how you would like to treat men, and how you would like to treat women and how you believe all genders should be treated the same versus the second paragraph should be the end of the argument.

The fact that a conversation like this even takes place is absurd. It's lawyering a way apply restrictions on one group while making another group exempt from the rule. The motivations are clear, how can a company even entertain these ideas, let alone implement them.

</comment><comment><USER3> No private corporation should have this much power. It just seems bonkers to me that some people in a board meeting in Menlo Park or whatever are trying to determine whether a post by some gal on the internet saying "men are scum" should be considered hate speech or not.

This is NOT the "world wide" web I signed up for.

#DeleteFacebook</comment>


Can a Supernova Cause Mass Extinction? - <AUTHOR> https://daily.jstor.org/can-a-supernova-cause-mass-extinction/ <comment><USER2> All the ways extinction is possible helps to answer Fermi's paradox. Asteroids, nuclear war, disease, supernova, etc. I was just reading that NASA is getting closer to its [asteroid defense system]([https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart](https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart)). It's like civilizations are in a race to get technologically advanced enough to protect against all the ways they can be extinguished. I imagine we would one day catalog all of the potential supernovas near us to a high degree of certainty. Hopefully, if we found an imminent one, we would be advanced enough to take mitigating steps or just leave the planet.

<comment><USER3> Only if the mass extinctions happen fast/regularly enough.

We don't really know how long it takes for intelligence to evolve, or how long a interstellar civilisation to develop, since we only have one example of the former and zero of the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's nice to read an article like this that doesn't try to invent some controversy. It looks like a supernova could cause a disruption large enough to cause an extinction. No, there's not enough evidence to say it actually. Yes, it is an interesting idea and if anyone has anything to add go for it.

A good story has some fight in it. Not every theory does and that's ok.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this one of those things that's obviously true?

For one thing, supernovae can release gamma ray bursts, which could easily sterilize a region of space. For another, the ejection of material itself could directly affect nearby systems.

Personally I think the more interesting aspects is how, in a certain way, supernovae are _needed_ for complex life as this largely seems to be the source for elements heavier than iron.

Isn't it kind of amazing that there's a bunch of material on earth that only exists because of supernovae and even the merger of neutron stars?

<comment><USER6> I think the title of the article is rather poor.

It should have been called something like, "Could Past Supernovae Have Caused Historic Mass Extinctions?", Which is really what the article is concerned with.

Granted, not nearly so catchy and not nearly so evocative of pending events....

<comment><USER7> Interesting fact: We can tell the headline is inaccurate without looking at the article because it violates Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To be honest, my first thought before reading the article was: Well...yeah...I'd assume if your sun went supernova you'd probably go extinct.

The article was a nice read though. I've read a few thing claiming similar theories, but it was usually amongst a bunch of fairly unscientific ummm...stuff...to put it nicely....

It was nice to see the idea explained in a logical scientific way that made sense.

<comment><USER9> No one disputes that one, if the Sun turned into a super nova it would definitely take out the Earth :-). And we know that a star going nova in the Large Magellanic Cluster (nearest galaxy to the Milkyway) would not cause one[1], so we've got a set of boundary conditions to start with. Next step is to iterate between those extremes to come up with a more accurate answer.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> q: could this affect the Drake equation, i.e. if supernovae happen every X years could this partly account for the absence of life?

</comment><comment><USER11> One of those rare scientific questions where I hope we never have a definitive answer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Mutations? Perhaps this is the way humans came about?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the single most effective thing you do for exercise and health? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Exercise: Walking.

Health: No sugar, almost no processed foods, low carbs, misc supplements to lower sugar, boost autophagy and HGH. Intermittent-intermittent fasting (not a typo).

<comment><USER3> Also: Sleep 8 hours, on schedule, in a fully dark, cool room.

I am still unsure on fasting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unsure about its effectiveness? Check out Jason Fung's Complete Guide to Intermittent Fasting. He's a nephrologist that has put together a very well researched and footnoted book.

<comment><USER3> Looks like people are recommending his other book - something, something Obesity and say the one you recommended is just marketing material for some fitness coach, which I am inclined to believe.

Any sources on fasting causing autophagy in excess of what working out gets you?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Obesity Code is a good primer on weight loss being a hormonal imbalance rather than caloric imbalance, the things that cause this imbalance and how to resolve it. Fasting is a chapter that he expands upon in The Complete Guide to Intermittent Fasting ("CGIF")

My first reaction to your statement about it being "just marketing material for some fitness coach" was "that's absurd" but then as I reflected a bit more I can see how some people may have taken it to be him trying to pitch his clinic in Toronto, but I don't think this is the right interpretation. He is a practicing nephrologist who refers in his book (like many books written by doctors) to many case studies. I didn't at any point think "Gee, I should fly to Toronto and get into this program" but rather thought the case studies lent some context to his claims.

I suggest reading the book and forming your own opinion. I was fasting before I read the book, but the book helped me understand some of the science, pitfalls, and protocols.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing that I do that I think really helps both physically and mentally is to exercise literally right after waking up. Like, my eyes are still closed but I'll roll out of bed into a push up position. It helps wake me up and also starts the day off on the right foot.

</comment><comment><USER5> I used to do aikido. It gets a bad rap in martial arts circles, but at the time the group and style I started doing it in was a pretty good fit for me. The combination of physical and social activity, mental focus, and something of a challenge to myself were the bee's knees. I was fairly fit too. Not hugely muscular, but probably in significantly better shape than most around my age.

It kinda stopped feeling good for personal reasons, but it was great both physically and mentally while it did. Probably goes for other martial arts as well.

<comment><USER3> Tai Chi and Qi Qong (however you want to spell it, Chi Kung) are the health/fitness portions of Tai Chi. Not being a smartass, just if you want to look into in in the future. I found them lacking, but I think the problem is finding a good instructor.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, thanks. I know about those as well, although I haven't tried them except for a quick trial. I could see them as complementary to other exercise, but I don't think I could personally find the focus or motivation to do them as a primary thing.

The kind of aikido I did was actually fairly physical. While it's no MMA, and even something like wrestling or judo are intense in a pretty different way, it was both physically and mentally more than just a health workout for me. For me tai chi or qi gong don't fit the same slot, but for some others they might of course be the thing.

I just wanted to mention the martial arts thing because I found it to be good for general fitness and mental well-being. Venues and instructors, and their styles, vary a _lot_ though, so YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For exercise, focus on turning up, at least when I'm (re-)starting out.

When I'm in a regular routine, I enjoy exercising and it feels good, and turning up isn't an issue.

At some point though I inevitably lapse. When I try to start again, I can't do what I used to do, so I push myself to try, but it doesn't feel good and it makes me less motivated to continue.

During these periods I've found it helpful to focus on turning up, rather than trying to push myself. Slowly I start to improve and start enjoying it again, and improvement follows.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Showing Up" is probably the most important concept in health / fitness IMO. When setting a new habit I try to do it every single day, in small amounts, until it becomes my life. I did this with yoga and now after more than 300 days straight it is simply a part of my life I couldn't imagine not doing daily.

<comment><USER7> Same here. I started running for 5 minutes a day for a week. Then I increased to 10-15 min for about a month. After that the habit was there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stretch. When I maintain flexibility, I can always jump back into whatever physical activity I'm interested in (running, biking, hiking/climbing, kayaking, swimming). When I've lost my flexibility it's much harder to get back into any of these activities. Also, taking the time to stretch makes me think about how to get back into these activities when I've gotten too busy to do them regularly.

</comment><comment><USER9> Breathe. Not trolling. Deep breathing for a minute clears my head so I can prioritize the right things such as taking care of my body instead of finishing that line of code. It also reduces stress.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have an active high energy blue healer pup. He lets me know every day when it's time for a walk in bad weather or a mtb ride in good weather.

</comment><comment><USER11> Health: 16/8 intermittent fasting

Exercise: Yoga or walking

</comment><comment><USER12> keep moving. Don't spend too much time sitting or laying down.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lift. Starting strength.

</comment><comment><USER14> Kettlebell.

</comment><comment><USER15> Get good sleep

Go vegan

Avoid shitty fats

</comment><comment><USER16> Walk.</comment>


Fisker to Sell Assets in Bankruptcy at $139 Million Loss - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-22/fisker-to-sell-assets-in-bankruptcy-at-139-million-loss.html

<comment><USER2> I guess that's what happens when you try to steal Tesla designs and found a competitor. Without the engineering, you ultimately fail</comment>


AWS Eu-Central-1 Was Down and Our Customers Didn't Even Know - <AUTHOR> https://redislabs.com/blog/aws-eu-central-outage/ <comment><USER2> > Furthermore, hundreds of auto-failover events went smoothly without any data > loss (of course)

Wait... I thought Redis failover do not guarantee consistency? What does it mean when they say "no data loss (of course)"?</comment>


Stanza: A New Optionally-Typed General Purpose Language from UC Berkeley - <AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News!
We're happy to announce the first public release of the Stanza programming language! Stanza is a new optionally-typed general purpose programming language from the University of California, Berkeley. It was designed to help programmers tackle the complexity of architecting large programs and significantly increase the productivity of application programmers across the entire software development life cycle. You can check out the website here:
http://www.lbstanza.org
Here are three really cool things about Stanza:
1. It is both statically and dynamically typed. If you give no type annotations, Stanza behaves like a scripting language. The more type annotations you give, the more errors Stanza will catch upfront.
2. It has a class-less object system. We believe in both object oriented programming and functional programming, and designed Stanza's object system to seamlessly incorporate both styles.
3. It has a really powerful coroutine system called targetable coroutines. It's a general control flow construct that can be used for fine control over concurrency, and is useful for things like video games and webservers.
We've already been using Stanza internally for about two years now. Using Stanza, we've designed a hardware language called FIRRTL, designed a teaching language called Feeny for teaching a graduate course on virtual machines, wrote a tool for automatically generating circuit boards for robotics, and (as upstanding computer scientists) wrote the entire Stanza compiler in Stanza itself.
Now, Stanza is stable and mature enough for us to feel confident to share it with everyone. We hope you'll check it out!

   - The Stanza Team
 <comment><USER2> "Stanza compiles directly to native code and runs faster than any scripting language because it does not suffer any interpretive overhead."

Show us your benchmarks.

<comment><AUTHOR> A comprehensive benchmark suite is in the works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _L.B. Stanza stands for "Li Bai's Stanza". Li Bai was an acclaimed Chinese poet who lived from year 701 to 762. He was known particularly for his mastery of "regulated verse", the most rigorous verse form of his time. [...]_

Maybe you meant "Du Fu's Stanza"? Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, Li Bai is renowned particularly for his mastery of _unregulated_ old- style ( _gushi_ 古詩) forms instead... Du Fu, on the other hand, was an indisputable master of regulated verse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Li Bai was no slouch in the lushi form either. And I'm just a big fan myself.

<comment><USER4> gushi?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What was the problem you were trying to solve when you decided to create Stanza?

Google Go's story was that they wanted a lowest-common-denominator language for use by their mixed-skill-level development pool. C was written so that some games could be ported to minicomputer... And so on.

<comment><AUTHOR> First and foremost, Stanza was designed for myself, to solve the problems that I repeatedly face in my own programming.

I mostly write software that is end-user-facing and interactive, with requirements that aren't known at the beginning of the project. Software that my mother would use, is how I typically describe them. e.g. Word processors, games, calendars, photo albums, spreadsheets, maps, movie players, etc.

And what I saw repeatedly, for all of my projects, was that progress comes a lot faster in the beginning than near the end. Eventually, I pinpointed the problem to one of software architecture. It is easy to see the required architecture for the start of a project, and making progress is easy. As you pile on demands and features, you realize that the architecture that you started off with is wrong, and progress slows. This is especially true if the requirements of your program are not known in advance. I expect people that mostly program well-known and stable algorithms don't have as much difficulty with this. E.g. numerical linear algebra, schedulers, image filters, etc. That is not what I write.

Once you realize that your architecture is wrong, you have two choices. You can either plow ahead with a sub-optimal architecture, and take a small but continual productivity hit. Or you can try to refactor and correct the architecture, and take a large one-time productivity hit. Neither approach is satisfactory. Small continual productivity hits eventually add up to the point that forward progress is seriously impeded. Refactoring also costs a lot of time, and eventually the cost of refactoring becomes too great to be worth it, and you're stuck with the last good enough architecture that existed.

So Stanza was designed to make it possible for me to : 1\. Experiment easily without specifying upfront the class inheritance tree in the program. 2\. Delay committing to a specific architecture for as long as possible. 3\. Refactor the underlying architecture of a program through small local changes.

And for the programs that I write, I sincerely believe that I succeeded. I've been programming exclusively in Stanza for about three years now, and I haven't yet ran into the dreaded "refactor-or-abort" situations that arise often in Java/C++ programming. Radical changes to the underlying architecture of a program are possible by applying a series of small staged local changes. And the optional type system allows me to get a lot of features working without having to commit to an architecture, so that when I finally sit down to properly design the architecture it is much more likely to be correct.

So my ultimate goal with Stanza is to help you achieve a linear rate of progress across the project timeline. You should feel as productive near the end of the project as you did in the beginning of the project.

<comment><USER4> But I had the opposite experience - slow in the beginning of the project and productive near the end of the project. I had this pattern even back in my university assignments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The colons are not necessary here, and not in python, either. It was blindly copied from the ABC language (designed in the 70s for complete novices), where it made a little more sense because all keywords were in all caps and thus harder to read.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks quite nice. Initial impression is julia + python whitespace + zero indexing. The type system seems more fleshed out than julia's.

<comment><USER8> I thought the same, although there appears to be some white-space rules that I think would quickly become a nuisance to me, I'm referring here mainly to the mandatory space before certain semicolons, after the brackets in main etc. although I suspect there are more.

e.g.

      defn main () :

[http://lbstanza.org/chapter2.html#anchor6](http://lbstanza.org/chapter2.html#anchor6)

<comment><AUTHOR> The only whitespace rule that users really need to know is that "f(x)" is a syntactically different thing than "f (x)". Similar to how "fg" is a syntactically different thing than "f g" in other languages.

<comment><USER8> Don't get me wrong, I see the reasoning, my comment was just me musing on how I'd have to break the habits I've learnt from other languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool on it being self-hosting. I watched Chisel with cautious interest pretty closely, so FIRRTL looks pretty interesting to me. You guys mention you've taped out ~10 IC designs - does that mean a total of 10 revisions of say, 2 or 3 base designs? From the docs I've skimmed it the projects goal is purely to target Verilog, right? How extensive is the LVS (you mention "weak equivalence testing" so I presume that's not LVS-as-defined-by-graph-isomorphism and you still need to use Cadence/Mentor/whatever?). Which fab and process did y'all use and ultimately how much time do you think you saved compared to the standard 'take the building blocks that TMSC gives you' route ?

edit: This was in reference to FIRRTL's FAQ[1] which mentions the 10 tape outs, and such. Do you guys have open-source netlists or whatnot?

[1] [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-9....](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-9.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> I (and Adam Izraelevitz) designed FIRRTL together, but for questions about Chisel, the authors frequenting the Chisel GitHub page would have far better answers than us. Please check it out! They did awesome work!

</comment></comment><comment> david-given It might be worth adding to the summary that this compiles into native machine code. Using its own code generator, by the looks of it --- that's hard core! But it doesn't look like there's an optimiser yet.

Plus it's fully self-hosting, too; the sign of a properly grown up language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Self-hosting was a pretty hard choice to make early on, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever made. It forced many semantic issues to the surface, gave us a gigantic test-suite for free, and, most importantly, forced us to use our own language. We ended up cutting a lot of features that turned out not to be very helpful from the experience of writing the hosted compiler.

<comment><USER10> They do say that when you go self-hosted quickly, you end up with a language that's good at writing compilers :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We merged most of the comments from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722126) and re-upped this post, which was actually posted three days ago. We did that because (a) this one was posted by the project creator and (b) the discussion here had higher initial quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious if you ran into any performance issues with partiality typed programs as described in [1]?

[1] [http://blog.acolyer.org/2016/02/05/is-sound-gradual- typing-d...](http://blog.acolyer.org/2016/02/05/is-sound-gradual-typing-dead/)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're still working on a paper on comprehensive performance measurements, but we don't expect to see the same slowdown.

Very intentionally, we called Stanza an "optionally-typed" language instead of a "gradually-typed" language. The moniker "gradual typing" was coined by Jeremy Siek and implies a very specific semantics and implementation style. One of the drawbacks of gradual typing is that obtaining good performance can be tricky.

Stanza does not use the same system, and we are not seeing the same problems. But the experiments and paper are still in progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am liking the look of this language. It looks very modern, and neither a retread nor outlandishly experimental or hacky.

What it would need to start feeling viable:

More documentation about implementation details, e.g. runtime environment, memory allocation model. "Ground-up" engineering info.

Some key libraries for a target application domain - web, gaming, etc. The "best option for X" approach.

Ability to deploy Stanza into other environments: Source to source, an easily implemented bytecode format, etc. The "parasitic" approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking a look. We also believe in a "batteries-included" approach and are, in order of priority, writing interfaces from Stanza to:

1) The QT gui library.

2) The GLFW OpenGL and input events library.

3) Some networking library.

4) Some regex library.

The current compiler generates x86-64 assembly code, but we're working on refactoring that and abstracting it to make it easier to write more backends. We are aiming particularly for a Javascript backend for webapps and an ARM backend for mobile apps.

<comment><USER4> There seems still a long way to go. Write some deeper documentation on language philosophy, implementation and interesting examples to show its strength in solving a particular problem. Get the language features stablized and then allow other contributors to develop libraries as Go and Nodejs went. Choose a niche market to create a community.

Get working regex and networking libraries out first, GUI/3D later.

I expect to see it first useful in scientific and engineering domain. I wish to see an example for easily solving constraint optimization such as hospital staff scheduling. If it can demonstrate easy problem solving in AI/machine learning/data science, then it would be a good start to attract followers..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://lbstanza.org/](http://lbstanza.org/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Well done, looking into it now.

Edit: holy mother of god the philosophy page is so scarily close to my thoughts, very happy to see this happen, I kept them in my head you have implemented it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. The philosophy statement is not just fluff, it was the driving force behind all of Stanza's design. We hope you check it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks great. I'm not sure if the optional type system is particularly novel, TypeScript[0] introduced optional typing a few years ago, although it compiles down to JavaScript.

I'm still excited to see it being a feature of a brand new language, and everything else about this language seems very exciting to me!

[0] [http://www.typescriptlang.org/](http://www.typescriptlang.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> TypeScript, Dart, and Stanza all started attacking optional typing at around the same time.

Our approaches differ though. Stanza believes fundamentally in nominal typing as opposed to structural typing, and also views types as contracts on its behaviour rather than on its structure.

Only time will tell which approach is the best one. But we are very happy with how our design choices have panned out.

<comment><USER17> Stanza looks very interesting. I'll have to check it out. Thanks!

Shen allows you to turn the type checker on or off:

(tc +)

(tc -)

You can leave your type signatures in the code when you turn them off, and when tc is on you only need a type in the top level of your function.

It has a fully functional Prolog engine built in, and it supports optional lazy evaluation too.

Great talk by Aditya Siram Sept 2014 Strange Loop talk introducing Shen [2]. Shen has been ported to many languages, since it only requires porting the 46 primitive instruction set, called Klambda. Shen has been ported to CL (SBCL), Ruby, JavaScript, Haskell and even Emacs Lisp.

[1] [http://shenlanguage.org/](http://shenlanguage.org/) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMcRBdSdO_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMcRBdSdO_U)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks great. Does it support parallelism? What does the standard library provide beyond collections and built-in functions?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a very powerful concurrency mechanism but no support for physical parallelism yet. What this means is that it is easy to write programs containing many things that seem like they're happening simultaneously (eg. video games and multi-user web servers), but you don't get a speed boost for having multiple processors yet.

The standard library currently only provides basic IO, primitive types and collections. We will be attaching a gui library, opengl library, networking library, and regex library soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Under the documentation section for "Ambiguous Methods"[0], why does the example compile? I would expect it to barf at compile time, not runtime.

[0] [http://lbstanza.org/chapter4.html#anchor52](http://lbstanza.org/chapter4.html#anchor52)

<comment><USER20> In julia we switched to making method ambiguities a runtime error because you often end up with situations where even though there are ambiguous methods, you don't ever really want to call them (because they don't make much sense semantically or because they came from different packages, etc). Stanza looks a little more static than julia in this regard, so perhaps they do want to make it a compile-time error (or at least make calling it a compile-time error if types are declared).

<comment><AUTHOR> We are planning to add a static method ambiguity check in Stanza.

There are just some theoretical hurdles to solve in order to detect them properly in the presence of parametric types. That's been recently solved (though not by us) so we'll be implementing their solution soon.

<comment><USER21> Hi Patrick, can you point to a paper / resource that describes this recent work?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. The paper is called "Type Checking Modular Multiple Dispatch with Parametric Polymorphism and Multiple Inheritance" by Allen, Hilburn, et al.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love it.

I grabbed and tested it out on OSX and Linux Mint.

Its design is eerily close to that of my own hobby language, but better developed. Maybe I should abandon the hobby and just use Stanza.

Didn't see a repl, though, or an emacs mode. I'm gonna need those.

</comment><comment><USER23> How is this language different to these languages:

\- [http://nim-lang.org/](http://nim-lang.org/)

\- [http://crystal-lang.org/](http://crystal-lang.org/)

\- [http://elixir-lang.org/](http://elixir-lang.org/)

These other 3 are also small languages doing interesting things, and although Elixir is obviously much different (being more functional than the others), just like Stanza, these seem to be in the same/similar domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> The immediate difference is that Stanza is optionally-typed while those three are all purely statically-typed. A dynamically-typed language behaves very differently than a statically-typed language with type inference. For example, Scheme is a very different language than OCaml, even though type annotations are not required for either. In this sense, Stanza is designed to compete against both Python/Ruby as well as Nim/Crystal/etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cool, downloaded it and successfully ran the sample programs. Going through the book now, maybe it's be but might be good to also point out that indents are three spaces and if you just press tab, it doesn't compile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying it out. We'll make a note to point out the restrictions on tab characters earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This seems like a next gen language.

<comment><USER26> joke?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've created an (unoffical) IRC channel #lbstanza on freenode if anyone is interested [http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=lbstanza&nick=](http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=lbstanza&nick=)

<comment><AUTHOR> Now it's official. I'll add an announcement to #lbstanza on the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there any package manager / distribution system a la pypi / npm currently or in the works?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's in the works. We recognize that it is an important part of a modern language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does it do word-wrap?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is the rationale behind this?

 _don 't use tabs. Stanza won't let you. We don't like tabs._

<comment><AUTHOR> From our experience using Python, structure through indentation when coupled with the ability to mix tabs and spaces creates many troubles. Getting rid of tabs was a small price to pay to eliminate these issues.

<comment><USER24> Okay! Makes sense, thanks. I can't quite place it but I do feel there is something big here! Congrats guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm eagerly awaiting for someone to add Stanza to the myriad languages at [https://learnxinyminutes.com/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/). Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER20> Hi Patrick, this looks great! I'm glad there are more people exploring this design space. Language design is tough business, but it's also amazingly fun ;).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Keno! Congratulations on Julia Computing LLC as well. In a past life, I studied machine learning, and often wished there was a better alternative to Matlab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can you please make code examples show up in monotype font on the web page?

On my browser (Chrome on Ubuntu), it shows as a non-monotyped font which is much harder to parse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. We just realized that as well. We're currently using a font called Menlo that isn't on every platform. We'll be replacing it with more widely available font.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This looks very nice. Is there any editor support yet (Emacs, vim)? Or do you currently just edit Stanza files in text mode?

<comment><AUTHOR> James Martin wrote a VIM Stanza syntax highlighter. It's not on the webpage yet, but a quick google search will give you it.

Writing modes in Emacs lisp is a little more daunting and we have yet to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A link would have been nice.

<comment><USER11> We can make the post use the URL, but then the introductory text that patricksli posted would be lost.

patricksli, if you want to post your text as a comment, we can swap the URL later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> No windows support? Shame.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working very very hard on that right now. It'll be out in a few weeks.

<comment><USER33> Glad to hear it, if you're targeting gamedev(which I see a note about) that's where the majority of your users will be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations Patrick, very impressive!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would have preferred the name 'Costanza.'

<comment><USER35> cant-stand-ya</comment></comment>


Grouplite - a web app from the ashes of startup failure. - <AUTHOR> http://www.grouplite.com/gl_history.html

<comment><USER2> Neat technology (took 23 seconds to load your home page)... From a marketing perspective, I think you should ponder what value you provide. The home page emphasizes features.

May be cliche, but when people buy a drill they don't want a drill-- they want a HOLE. When people sign up for your product they have a problem that they want to solve... What's that problem? I'd simplify your home page, focus on value statements, screenshots, and examples.

(just my 2 cents)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

The home page slowness is fixed.

You're right about the lack of intelligent marketing on the homepage. Frankly, this was a problem with the earlier startup as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Its interesting that at this very moment, we're finishing up connecting contacts between users for collaboration with our startup. (The trick was to allow users to be able to own their own contact lists and information within a secure zone (for example, a company needs to own a version of an employee's personal contact info even if the person leaves), but then be able to create a link to the people or companies represented. At any point in the identity graph, information can be deemed private and only available to owners, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks good. Doesn't work in Safari 3 on OS X 10.4.11, but it works great in Firefox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, it should work with Safari 3. This was tested in OS X 10.4 and 10.5. (Note - it definitely does _not_ work with Safari 2)

The initial load time in Safari is significantly longer than firefox (although refresh loads are much more speedy). You might have to wait 10-20 seconds.

<comment><USER4> I just tried on Leopard as well. No dice. I'm able to add people, but no fields. Then, I refresh and I can add a field, but then can't add another person. It's one or the other and then it fails. I feel like I'm publically criticizing you, but am in no way trying too. Contact me if you want apgwoz at the big google mail.com

<comment><AUTHOR> No offense taken - the alternative to public criticism is lonely obscurity :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this post, but not for the usual reasons. I'm not sure I understand your app or why I'd put in on my page. But I love your style, your story, and the whole idea of something rising from the ashes. I bet I'm not the only one here inspired to look at my own scrap heap and see what I can resurrect and put into one of my modern apps. Thanks for the curveball!</comment>


The Trance of Dysfunction: Why Trolls Have Come to Dominate Discourse - <AUTHOR> https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/07/10/the-trance-of-dysfunction-why-trolls-have-come-to-dominate-discourse/ <comment><USER2> I have noticed posts on Facebook now, finally, asking people not to feed the trolls by responding to their messages.

I think that social media companies have been irresponsible in their passing the buck on moderating conversations in the name of avoiding censorship.

I am more concerned, however, that people my age and younger (gen x) never had civics in school. There used to be an assumption that the world is chaotic, and that all we have is each other, which meant that the best society has to offer is its culture. Being uncultured was seen as so uncouth that people wouldn't stand for it. Today it's everywhere.

I see people questioning other people's patriotism every day. I see conspiracy theories given the same benefit of the doubt as science. I see lies told on the news without retraction or accountability.

Without a mass movement to educate and inform people about how to think critically and treat one another with dignity, technology will be of little help.

That said, I'm still hopeful that the tech community can help leapfrog this ugliness. Or at least, quantify the problem and begin working towards solutions.

<comment><USER3> I agree, particularly with your point about thinking critically and treating others with dignity, but at the risk of sounding overly pessimistic, why are you hopeful that the broader tech community can help, or even wants to help, leapfrog all this ugliness? As a somewhat outsider looking in, most of what passes for the tech community from what I can observe seems primarily focused with tracking users so that these users can be targeted with advertising to "aid" them in future purchasing decisions. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that this is the community that's going to instill positive change.

<comment><USER2> You know, maybe this is one of those junctures where if it can't help, then I question what it is we're all working towards. I thought when the internet came out that free access to all the world's information would enlighten people. Unfortunately, it seems to have had the opposite effect for a great many of us. There is so much ignorance in the face of such vast knowledge.

It might be time for us to ask ourselves if we really want our best and brightest to be chasing ad dollars anymore. Is this really the future we were envisioning in the 80s and 90s? It feels like so much rat racing and scrambling for a piece of the pie and playing zero-sum games. That loss of meaning could be part of what's at the heart of the discontent at large. Why can't we be inventing things that free people from labor and give people back a basic standard of living, the loss of which is what's driving so much of these feelings of disenfranchisement in the first place?

Sorry I don't have much of an answer, I'm kind of at a loss too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As far as I can tell, trolls thrive on a narrow Overton Window.

<comment><USER5> That's a pretty interesting though, never thought of it that way. Makes sense that the more things you can talk about, the less shock value they can extract from it.

<comment><USER6> From another perspective you could say they're lowering the bar overall, and you're saying the only way to deal with them is that you de-sensitize yourself to them. Nietzsche springs to mind, about gazing into abysses and battling monsters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Trolls have always dominated discourse once the discourse gets into the public arena. The noticeable difference today is that is tends to be more real time for more people.

The first problem is that the biggest trolls we have are our politicians (of every stripe and level), including any position that requires a public vote to enter.

Critical thinking is not taught today in education system and hence, we see less and less people able to refute or deal with trolls in any significant way.

I notice that Techdirt.com has a very usable means of dealing with trolls by the general reading community.

The second problem is that the label "troll" often gets applied to anyone who has a viewpoint that is different to prevailing group's viewpoint. So, someone who has a relatively left POV will be labelled a troll on a site that is relatively right, whereas someone who is relatively right will be labelled a troll on a site that is relatively left. There are all sorts of opposing viewpoints that have some level of validity which will be labelled as trollish by the opposing camp.

This is where critical thinking comes in handy, to be able to see the level of validity of an opposing viewpoint without heading down the ad hominen path of rebuttal.

Thirdly, there are those who have the goal of simply stirring up the general group by making comments that exist for the sole purpose of causing contention.

This is where critical thinking come in so that one can recognised such and apply the required filters and not get caught up in responding to those comments. In other words, Don't Feed The Trolls.

Finally, the term NAZI applies to a specific viewpoint and when you look into this viewpoint, there is nothing positive about it. Many who have been labelled nazi are no more NAZI than those who have applied that label to them.

It is a particularly pernicious POV and thoroughly debilitating to the well- being of society. Mind you, there are any number of other viewpoints that are just as bad for society both from the left and the right.

</comment><comment><USER8> I reject the premise. The internet seems to have proven that medium shapes dialogue.

Wikipedia = encyclopedia quality product using only input from internet people

Reddit = Consistently entertaining jokes on news using only input from internet people

HN = A readable online discussion with points worth considering using only input from internet people

<comment><USER9> That's an pretry glass-half-full perspective. I would counter with this:

Wikipedia = stable, but mostly because a cabal of senior editors is firmly in charge. For all practical purposes, "anyone" can't edit Wikipedia anymore; try it, your edits will be reverted by somebody citing WP:WTFBBQ. It keeps trolling down, but at the cost of enforcing the party line.

Reddit = when it isn't trolls and miscreants, it's the same unfunny jokes upvoted ad nauseum

HN = good, but mostly because we're a self-selecting subset of the general population and there are legitimate grounds for banning any "off-topic" speech. This approach doesn't scale to the wider world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If this article said anything, I missed it. Some novel approaches are being tried, such as crowdsourcing editing.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _by exploiting our tendency to believe that others we disagree with are > merely misguided and can be educated_

There's such a tendency? From my experience, it's much more likely that people believe that the other side is full of idiots.

</comment><comment><USER12> I mean this week seems to have seen a very public and significant pushback against alt reich/gamergate/neonazi/MAGA idiots. It's been one of the worst weeks to be a white supremacist or racist in the US for quite some time.

So there are limits. Even Ted Cruz will eventually stand up and say: you know what, this is too fucking far. STOP.

They key to moving the Overton window is to do it gradually. Charlottesville was a massive overreach, and it backfired.

<comment><USER13> You're seriously lumping gamergate into that?

The one thing I can't stand, and think is unfair, is when a few bad apples ruin a decentralized movement for everyone. BLM had the exact same problem, idiots delegitimizing a movement fighting a very legitimate problem, and then those scattered incidents being collected to allow organized detractors to mischaracterize them.

Now we're seeing that happen with the rightwing protests as well. Don't get me wrong, I hate nazis and also do not at all agree with Trump supporters / people that want to keep the confederate status, but they're not _all_ nazis.

<comment><USER14> Wow, I didn't know people were still talking about gamergate like it was a controversy worth caring about. And what does it have to do with legitimate conservative causes? You're as bad as the president. "Not all the white men carrying torches and chanting 'Jews will not replace us' are bad people"

<comment><USER13> Not really, just don't like backhanded character assassination.

Also, not all the people protesting were chanting "Jews will not replace us". Oddly, some of the white nationalists that helped organize the protest were Jewish. And I also personally know many conservative people in favor of the statues that aren't nazis either (and at least for some, it's because they personally are Jewish, so it would make no sense).

Calling all conservatives white nationalists is the equivalent of calling all BLM protesters black nationalists, or all counter protesters antifa. It's just easy namecalling and almost always ends up just being very heavily cherrypicked images and such used to construct a narrative.

<comment><USER14> I completely agree with the statement 'not all conservatives are Nazis.' Just the people who show up at white nationalist rallies and decide to go with the mob. Why can't conservationism be about cutting taxes again? The repubs have a serious image problem turning a blind eye to this insane fringe and if they want to fix it they need to stomp it out and focus on economics or something less divisive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The lost art of using your brain - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tabini.ca/2011/03/the-lost-art-of-using-your-brain/

<comment><USER2> Much more important than any particular tool/methodology/technique is how well a particular person understands and uses/implements these.

It doesn't matter nearly as much if they are doing X vs. Y. The important question is: are they doing X well or in a half-ass manner? Are they trying to do X because it's the hip new thing, but they don't really understand X in any deep way? Do they energetically talk the talk, while they hobble the walk?

The two questions at the heart of the matter: do they get stuff done while using X? How much technical debt do they incur while getting stuff done using X?

</comment><comment><USER3> You're conflating dogmatism for a lack of critical thinking.

It's more important to recognize that a given tool or process is made to solve a set of problems.

If you don't have those problems or have a better way of addressing them, you don't need that tool or process.

The goal is to have an intelligent conversation from first principles, while still avoiding re-inventing the wheel.</comment>


Here's How Rap Genius Should Be Building Links - <AUTHOR>

The first thing I would do is ask webmasters to remove all unnatural links, and any link that doesn't drive referral traffic. Than I would disavow any links that can't be removed. I would than submit a reconsideration request as they will certainly be penalized for their spamming the search index.
Than, I would FOCUS ALL MY ENERGY AND ATTENTION AT GETTING BACKLINKS FROM THE ARTISTS THAT YOU CLAIM USE YOUR SITE.
I would figure out how your content is useful to artists and their fans, and I would create widgets that the artists would love to add to their sites to share the annotated lyrics.
I would than focus on the media, everytime TMZ breaks a story, I would try to find a way to mine that artists lyrics to add meaning to the event. Hopefully media outlets will pick up your insights from artists songs to spruce up their stories.
Than, I would focus on the fans. I would spin an elaborate web of the interwoven meanings, hidden messages, and other clever things you can mine from your content about artists, and I would become a publisher of crazy content about artists.
Than, I would focus on growing social sharing. Adding meaningful lyrics to tweet out on every page, or tweet this line, etc... I would turn meaningful lyrics into ecards you can send your friends or loved ones.
You are sitting on a goldmine of content, why not start mining it for infotainment. Entertain us, and well link back to you, share you, etc...
When you reach a point where journalists are asking artists on the red carpet if the rapgenius meaning is accurate, than you are really in business!!! <comment><USER2> Than != then.</comment>


Portable Allegroserve Enhanced Version for SBCL (LISP) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cliki.net/Portable%20Allegroserve%20Enhanced%20Version%20for%20SBCL <comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone used this version of Allegroserve? (If not, and you're interested, we'll post our progress with it)</comment>