Mapping 50 Years of Melting Ice in Glacier National Park - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/24/climate/mapping-50-years-of-ice-loss-in-glacier-national-park.html <comment><USER2> Glacier National Park is one of the few US Government organizations that hasn't backed down to political pressure about climate change. There are multiple signs in the park that say something along the lines of "See that glacier over there on the hill? Given the rate of increasing temperatures due to climate change, we expect that glacier to disappear within 20 years. Climate change is caused by humans releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere which trap heat." It made me really thankful I got to visit last year before they are all gone.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/news- blog/2017/jan/25...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/news- blog/2017/jan/25/national-parks-service-goes-rogue-in-response-to-trump- twitter-ban)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I forget where I read it, but the Rockies' glaciers fare much worse than those in the Coast Range under global warming. If you want a shocking example, visit the Athabasca Glacier between Banff and Jasper [1]. It stretched all the way to the current highway when white men first passed through in the mid-18th century, and there are concrete pylons showing where its snout was at various points in the 20th century. That sad little side-glacier on the left connected to the main one when people first climbed the mountain on the left (Mount Andromeda). See it while you can.

EDIT: On an unrelated note, the photographer, John Scurlock, has some amazing aerial photos of other mountains: [http://www.pbase.com/nolock/](http://www.pbase.com/nolock/)

[1] [http://media-cache- ec0.pinimg.com/736x/b2/58/eb/b258ebc35c2d...](http://media-cache- ec0.pinimg.com/736x/b2/58/eb/b258ebc35c2d787394855d20a776d0fa.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER5> buried a couple links down, the real data:

[https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/58af7022e4b01ccd54f...](https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/58af7022e4b01ccd54f9f542)

</comment><comment><USER6> Glaciers carved the landscape there, which is why it's called "Glacier National Park". Sad the glaciers are melting so quickly, but they've been melting for thousands of years.

<comment><USER7> The issue is the scale and speed.

To get an idea, have a look at [https://xkcd.com/1732/](https://xkcd.com/1732/) and take your time scrolling to the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We need to measure the average temperature of the earth starting with accurate thermometers and not pictures of polar bears, ice bergs, glaciers, patterns of ice in late summer in the Arctic, coral reefs, the snows on Mount Killimanjaro, etc.

This NYT story is one more example of why I refuse to consider the NYT for anything, why it's "dead to me", on paper can't compete with Charmin and on the Web is useless for wrapping dead fish heads.

<comment><USER9> The human mind is tuned to story. Stories help us make sense of facts and give them meaning. That's probably different from person to person - possibly you believe you're on the fact end of the spectrum.

This is a small part of the overall climate story, but it's actually what you're arguing for I think - it's a factual account of how glacier ice has changed in the park. The same has happened in the Juneau Icefields, Mount Rainier and elsewhere.

Stories are also a useful way to summarize the facts and can be misused to support things that are not factual - I understand that's what you're saying here.

I'm not aware of the story you allude to around accurate or inaccurate thermometers - the one you believe to be the truth.

<comment><USER8> This is yet again the NYT talking about climate. Their goal is to create and push a never ending sequence of stories about climate, to create a lasting audience for such stories, and, then, to continue to feed the audience.

The stories all have a foundation -- the sky is falling, in this case, the earth is warming, growing warmer, and the cause is sin, human sin from human greed and corruption, for human activities that release CO2 which is warming the planet dangerously, melting glaciers, ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, making the oceans acid and killing the coral reefs, killing off food for the whales, making the lobsters move farther north, raising sea levels, flooding low lands, killing the polar bears, etc.

IMHO all this NYT stuff is just totally cooked-up, made-up, stirred-up, gang- up, pile on, nonsense, fake stories to get eyeballs for ad revenue and otherwise from junk down to a dangerous effort to sabotage the economies of the world.

Well, then, let's start at the beginning: Warmer. How much warmer, since when, measured how, by whom, reviewed where, published where, when? On this basic, foundation issue, IMHO, the NYT should put up or shut up. Since they won't, and are free to publish their scare sewage, the NYT is dead to me but I am willing occasionally to call them out on their dangerous nonsense.

For this foundation, we just need the data, temperature, in degrees F, C, or K.

But the NYT doesn't want to do this.

Similarly stories at _Nova_ want to say "If temperatures keep increasing ..." Well, from all I've seen, there is no significant evidence that temperatures have increased significantly for 20 or so years. Moreover, I see no significant evidence that so far human activity has had any significant effect on temperature at all. Moreover, I have seen lots of evidence that CO2, from humans, volcanoes, out gassing from the oceans, rotting plant life, etc. has never had any significant effect on temperature for at least 800,000 years. I've seen lots of evidence of significant temperature changes but where CO2 could not have been the cause -- there must be other causes. Basically, over the past 800,000 years, temperature has changed significantly often, up and down, but CO2 could not have been the main cause or hardly ever or even once a significant cause.

Why? Never, but never, not even once, in the whole 800,000 years was significantly lower temperature closely preceded by significantly lower CO2 concentration. So, CO2 had nothing to do with the change, and there must be other causes. For higher temperatures, the story is nearly the same. The evidence is clear: It's just ain't CO2, guys. Sorry 'bout that -- the causes are elsewhere. The Medieval warm period, closely preceded by higher CO2? Nope. The Little Ice Age, closely preceded by less CO2? Nope. The cooling from 1940 to 1970 from lower CO2? Nope -- if anything, higher CO2.

It's over, guys: The CO2 scare is a scam.

So, this OP is just again the NYT flogging their fake story. Sure, the NYT used to have scare stories about global warming, but somehow they got the memo and changed over to scare stories about "climate change" \-- well, that's somewhat safe since we can be sure the climate will keep changing.

Then, sure, we get lots of stories about why we must fight climate change -- how the heck to do that? Like the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock so that the sun would keep moving across the sky and, thus, avoid climate change if the sun stopped?

What the NYT is doing is essentially the same as the Mayan charlatans killing people. And if the NYT had their way, many people would be killed. Indeed, many are being killed in Africa because of attempts to avoid releasing CO2. The NYT is up to dirty business, very dirty business.

So, i'm calling them out on it. Simple.

<comment><USER10> It has been proven without question that it is hotter now than it has been in 1000 years.

Link to government website. [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global- warming](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming)

The new climate denier stance is that you can't prove 100% without a doubt that it's human activity. The past decade has ended the "Is the temperature really increasing" debate.

 _The stories all have a foundation -- the sky is falling, in this case, the earth is warming, growing warmer, and the cause is sin, human sin from human greed and corruption, for human activities that release CO2 which is warming the planet dangerously, melting glaciers, ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, making the oceans acid and killing the coral reefs, killing off food for the whales, making the lobsters move farther north, raising sea levels, flooding low lands, killing the polar bears, etc._

This article did not mention CO2, sin, greed, or corruption. There is a lot of FUD being thrown around in the public these days, but I didn't find any of it in this article. Maybe I missed it, so feel free to pull out some choice quotes.

More than 50% is caused by CO2, which mostly comes from powering our homes and cars (burning fossil fuels). You can be sinful using green energy as well.

Global warming doesn't cause acidic oceans. You're thinking of acid rain. You don't hear about it as much any more because congress passed The Clean Air Act. Since then there's been reduction of acid rain. I'm old enough to remember when acid rain was a "naturally occurring phenomena and not provably linked to industrial byproducts"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#History_of_acid_rain...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#History_of_acid_rain_in_the_United_States)

The temperature has been very stable for the last 10K years. It's only been very recent that we've had such an uptick. Scientist are able to discern the temperatures of the past through core samples. Those samples also show dramatically higher CO2.

NASA site: [https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Paleoclimatology_...](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Paleoclimatology_Evidence/paleoclimatology_evidence_2.php)

You chose to highlight the years from 1940-1970. This isn't a discussion about the natural oscillations in weather. This about the proven sharp increase in temperatures as it compares to on a paleo scale. *

1\. The earth is warming at an accelerating rate

2\. High levels of CO2 have been linked with paleo level rising temperatures in the past

3\. Our current CO2 levels are orders of magnitude higher than anything found in the past.

4\. If the temperatures continue to rise the sea levels will rise, storms will become stronger, and we'll have both more floods and more droughts (depending on where you are). There are a host of other ecological impacts.

Our options are:

a) work with the rest of the planet to alleviate the likely causes as currently determined by analysis of the data and research of >95% of the science community. At the same time we can continue to research and refine our understanding.

b) We can assert that none of this is true and hope that it will magically get better on it's own.

The earth is going to be fine. We can kill everything, including ourselves, and the planet will just keep turning. There's other planets in the solar system that are also fine, we just can't live on them.

The goal isn't to save the earth. The goal is to make sure we aren't turning the only planet we have into something either uninhabitable, or a nightmare.

P.S.

 _Then, sure, we get lots of stories about why we must fight climate change -- how the heck to do that? Like the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock so that the sun would keep moving across the sky and, thus, avoid climate change if the sun stopped?_

This is a bullshit statement.

<comment><USER8> > It has been proven without question that it is hotter now than it has been > in 1000 years.

That's right and what I explained and what is in the NAS report I quoted.

Point: The current temperature is not unusual, and there are causes of a temperature this high that have nothing to do with CO2. So, that the current temperature, and the increase since the coldest of the Little Ice Age, are from CO2 are suspect.

So, there were climate models that tried to predict the effects of CO2. Well, as in the graph I showed, nearly all the models predicted temperatures way too high.

Point: The modelling efforts flopped.

First-cut Conclusion: We are really short on evidence that CO2 is the cause of any significant temperature increases, now or any time in the past 800,000 years of the Antarctica ice core data.

> This is a bullshit statement.

It's a perfectly solid statement: It's totally clear that temperature can go up without higher CO2. So, there are other causes. The leading candidate, over the short term, not the earth passing through some part of the galaxy over some many millions of years or some such, is sun spots. So, how to do something about sun spots? Hopeless. That was my point and is perfectly okay.

> The goal is to make sure we aren't turning the only planet we have into > something either uninhabitable, or a nightmare.

There's not much chance of that, and there's essentially not even a clue that we are on the way to that. The energy in this debate is wild, irrational emotions, much like what drove the Myans to pour blood on a rock and have driven superstition and sacrifices for many thousands of years, those emotions now driven by quite a lot of US Federal money, money Trump is about to chop off.

By the way, the Mayan stuff is from

[http://books.google.com/books?id=DgqLplWtGPgC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA...](http://books.google.com/books?id=DgqLplWtGPgC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=Mayan+blood+sun+moving+sacrifice&source=web&ots=Do6njWN5M9&sig=FxTeclIiqggqIH5Ws_oENCek1uI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA76,M1)

from page 76 of

Susan Milbrath, _Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)_ , ISBN-13 978-0292752269, University of Texas Press, 2000.

with

"Indeed, blood sacrifice is required for the sun to move, according to Aztec cosmology (Durian 1971:179; Sahaguin 1950 \- 1982, 7:8)."

> If the temperatures continue to rise

Since when? That was my original point. Apparently for the past 20 years, temperatures have not risen, although CO2 has, at least the alarmists seem to say so. Maybe they are correct; maybe they just got their data from Hawaii with that data now corrupted by the volcano. Maybe the warmer surface temperatures of the Pacific around Hawaii caused out gassing of CO2 -- warmer water absorbs less CO2.

> Our current CO2 levels are orders of magnitude higher than anything found in > the past.

An "order of magnitude" is a factor of 10. Your claim is tough to believe. IIRC we long were at about 280 parts per million of CO2 and, IIRC, from the alarmists, now are at about 400. That's not even a factor of 2. Moreover, we have no solid evidence that 400 ppm CO2 is actually warming the planet. E.g., the planet was this warm in the year 1000 when CO2 was not unusually high -- so, there are causes of warming other than CO2, and there's darned little reason to believe that CO2 is responsible for any warming now. Indeed, in the last 20 years, CO2 has been increasing but temperature has not. Indeed, from 1940 to 1970, CO2 increased but temperature declined a little showing that higher CO2 does not always lead to higher temperatures.

Net, the evidence is that CO2 has had little or nothing to do with the planet getting warmer, ever in the past 800,000 years of the Antarctica ice core data.

> High levels of CO2 have been linked with paleo level rising temperatures in > the past

No, not really: From the 800,000 year data, none of the significantly higher temperatures were preceded by significantly higher CO2. Yes, after temperatures went up from whatever causes, not CO2, about 800 years later CO2 went up -- presumably from more biological activity from higher temperatures. That's your "linked".

> The earth is warming at an accelerating rate

What rates? Since when? Compared with what? As in the NAS reference I gave, the temperature now is not unusually high, is about the same as in the year 1000, is cooler than in the Medieval Warm Period, and has not increased at all in the past 20 years. I see no "accleration".

> You chose to highlight the years from 1940-1970. This isn't a discussion > about the natural oscillations in weather. This about the proven sharp > increase in temperatures as it compares to on a paleo scale.

Right, there are, call it, "natural oscillations," and maybe count the cooling from 1940 to 1970 as part of that. So, we get two conclusions: (A) Then CO2 was higher than before (due to WWII, etc.) but the higher CO2 did not cause warming. (B) There are causes of cooling other than lower CO2; CO2 is not the only cause of temperature changes; so, we are not at all sure that the temperature now is from CO2.

> paleo scale

Huh? The usual claim is that higher CO2 now is driving temperatures higher now, and we need to cut back on human sources of CO2 now. Paleo is not part of that argument. And, to shoot down that argument, CO2 levels seem (the alarmists claim) to be at about 400 parts per million now and maybe increasing, but we're not seeing higher temperatures and have not for 20 years. So, where are the higher temperatures now from the higher CO2 now? My conclusion: CO2 has next to nothing to do with temperature, and we can forget about CO2.

> This article did not mention CO2, sin, greed, or corruption.

That's what the article is really about; the article is a manipulation, trying to sell band instruments and uniforms because of the threat of a pool table in town. So, the Music Man mentioned only the pool table. Well, what he was really interested in was selling some band stuff, taking the money, and getting out of town.

Trust me: The article is about CO2 and then reducing CO2 and then emphasizing renewables and then wind and solar and then batteries and then the money -- big subsidies. In the end it's about the money, e.g., the $1 B or so a year in research grants, the $1 B or so to Musk, forcing utility companies to accept unstable wind and solar power they very much do not want, etc. It's now a Green Glob, a big industry, all based on US Federal money from scaring the taxpayers.

> Global warming doesn't cause acidic oceans.

The claim is that CO2 in the water makes the water more acidic, causes acidic oceans.

> Maybe I missed it, so feel free to pull out some choice quotes.

The whole article is FUD in the sense that it's propaganda pushing the claim that CO2 from human activities is about to ruin the planet -- the sky is falling.

> The new climate denier stance is that you can't prove 100% without a doubt > that it's human activity. The past decade has ended the "Is the temperature > really increasing" debate.

Again, the temperature hasn't been increasing for 20 years, and now it's just where is was in year 1000 and, thus, not new or unusual and need not have been caused by CO2 since the temperature in year 1000 wasn't.

> denier stance

I don't know what that is; I'm just explaining what's totally clear. I'm not part of any group on climate; I'm certainly not being paid. Here I'm just trying to push back against propaganda.

I've here, now done my best to slap down the NYT propaganda and need to get back to my startup.

<comment><USER11> "It's now a Green Glob, a big industry, all based on US Federal money from scaring the taxpayers."

You're willing to credulously state this kind of wild conspiracy theory -- as if a "Green Glob" of deceptive scientists is a simple explanation for everything we observe -- CO2, glaciers, temperatures, ocean changes -- but also willing to ignore the very solid science in, for example, the IPCC AR5 report? And to spend many paragraphs denouncing an NYT story for being the kind of fluffy stuff ("polar bears") that you can't be bothered to take seriously?

The serious stuff is out there if you cared to look.

<comment><USER12> Its funny, several years ago when climate deniers were generally still in the full denial stage - ie saying the earth wasn't warming - I remember thinking how the evidence was going to become undeniable at some point even by first hand observation (I understand that that is actually not possible, but that it can drive perception and openness to the idea that the earth is warming) and how deniers would have to retreat ever further to state that humans are not the cause, I never thought that would happen so fast.

Is there a word for this, when a point of view is continually challenged and disproved but rather than accepting another point of view, the holders of this position just adapt their reasoning and continue on as if they always held their current position? It reminds me of so many types of arguments but I feel the need to have a specific term to describe it. It reminds me of contrived inductive arguments attempting to hold doggedly onto the geocentric model of the solar system[1].

I think you could sum it up as this situation: When you have to evolve your position over and over in the light of overwhelming evidence that makes you no longer able to persuade any others to your way of thinking, but with each new iteration of your position you hold it with absolute confidence despite having been proven wrong again and again.

This is distinct from a rational view where you allow evidence and reasoning to inform your decision because people who do this don't change their actual position, they just cherry-pick their rational, and it has nothing to do with being disproved but instead the perception of others and your ability to persuade them. If they could continue to make the argument that the world is not warming they would never bother to change it. They only evolve as a means of the survival of their position.

It reminds me of how the catholic church "evolves", subsequent generations of clergy might hold some truths to be unquestionable while choosing to disregard the truths of their predecessors as the perceptions of their followers change as a means of survival. Demonizing homosexuals is just not sustainable and the church will evolve so as to not alienate their customers, but then still demand to be taken seriously on any number of other topics with seemingly no awareness of the contradiction.

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

<comment><USER13> Not quite what you are asking, but related, is the idea of evaporative cooling of beliefs, a selection effect where over time the more objective and rational holders of a belief are persuaded by the evidence that their belief is incorrect, and those who continue to cling to the belief become a progressively smaller group who are increasingly uninterested in rational argument or scientific evidence. This results in the group arguments becoming progressively more shrill and incoherent.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/)

<comment><USER12> Interesting, maybe not the same effect but maybe one that works in concert.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hangouts for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/id643496868?mt=8

<comment><USER2> Not a great first experience on the iPad for me.

1\. Launch app in landscape. Oh, I guess they don't support landscape orientation for signing it. That's annoying.

2\. Change orientation to portrait and sign in.

3\. A dialog requesting to send push notifications appears — in landscape orientation (<http://cl.ly/image/2t2P0X3f2H2Z>) — but I'm still holding it in portrait and the rest of the UI is in portrait as well.

4\. I have to step through a bunch of screens that I just went through when I signed in on my iPhone. These are not related to local settings, but to my Google account. Why do I have to go through these again?

<comment><USER3> That screenshot you show would surely be an iOS issue, not an app-specific one?

<comment><USER2> I think their app isn't handling orientation changes properly. I signed out and tried it again and I can consistently reproduce the bug.

If I am signed out, the app will never launch in landscape orientation. If I am already in landscape orientation, I can sign out and see the login screen in landscape as I should. However as soon as I rotate to portrait, I can no longer get back to landscape.

As an iOS developer, this definitely seems like a problem with the app itself and I've not experienced this elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like most new Google things, it doesn't seem to be enabled for my Google Apps account. There's no clear indication of how to do this (if it's possible at this point).

Say what you want about Apple, but onboarding for iMessages and Facetime did not require navigating a byzantine admin panel. I understand that Google Apps is a different beast, but there's something to be said for a chat service _just working_ in the way that iMessages does: you put in someone's phone number (or email) and if they are registered it works.

I recently tried to use my non-Google Jabber account with a friend who's on Gmail. Apparently Google no longer allows invites from non-Google Jabber accounts in the chat built into Gmail. Getting chat to work with a new contact even just between Gmail accounts would sometimes require some pretty opaque incantations -- and with external Jabber accounts it's even worse! There's no indication that your invite didn't go through to them, and I was never able to get his invite to come through to me.

tl;dr Based on my prior experience with Google and their IM products, I'm not convinced this could be an iMessage/Kik/WhatsApp replacement. Will my mom be able to use it?

<comment><USER5> You are comparing a company launching on its own platform to a company launching on someone else's closed platform.

<comment><USER4> I understand this; that's what I meant by "I understand that Google Apps is a different beast".

Regardless, to the average end user this distinction doesn't matter. I think users will gravitate to what works well and what their friends use.

I really hope this is Google Hangouts instead of Facebook Messages (ugggh).

iMessages has problems of its own (TERRIBLE sync between devices), but it has the huge advantage of working for everyone with an iDevice.

What I really want:

1) a service that works seamlessly between any device (like iMessages is supposed to for iOS and OS X)

2) this service should be platform-agnostic, working on any computer or mobile device

3) it should be federated like Jabber so we don't have to depend on one company

4) comparable features with the existing services: read receipts, group chat, push notifications

I hope Google Hangouts is exactly this, and that they let me enable it for my Google Apps account.

<comment><USER6> Other than number 3, this seems to match hangouts, assuming it works as they say (in a way iMessage doesn't seem to for you). The killer missing feature for me is SMS though, a vast majority of people cannot use Hangouts for the vast majority of their conversations because of the Google+ requirement.

<comment><USER4> You're saying you'd like SMS integration? So if you add your friend with a dumb phone to your Hangout, they can participate via SMS?

That would be awesome. I have a few friends with dumb phones that are constantly left out of iMessage conversations. I feel bad about it, but not bad enough to inconvenience myself (or pay for an SMS plan; yes I'm a terrible person).

Edit: The federation thing is probably a pipe dream. No one has an incentive for supporting a federated protocol -- at this point it's either existing platforms going for lock-in (the iOS lock-in caused by iMessages is huge; it's the biggest reason I don't consider Android). I guess what I really want is iMessages that works on Android and over SMS, and doesn't suck at syncing between devices.

<comment><USER6> Sure, that's one use of it. But also friends with smartphones but not Google+, those I communicate with by SMS or WhatsApp primarily at the moment, the majority of my contacts. It's not even that I want rid of my SMS plan, although I can definitely see the benefit of that too.

We basically want the same thing - iMessages that works on Android, iOS and desktop, including SMS. Google are brilliant at sync and I have no doubts that'll work great (especially now with synced notifications). If they added SMS and starting a conversation by phone number (selecting from contacts obviously), it'd be the perfect messaging app in my opinion.

EDIT: Hangouts on web only work with Chrome, so that rules out a lot of devices I thought were supported. Not a big deal for me, but I guess it could break your requirements depending.

<comment><USER7> Hangouts on web should work on other browsers too, obviously some better than others, but work nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm getting "Hangouts has not been enabled for your account". I'm guessing this is because my work account has Google+ disabled. So are you going to have to be on Google+ to use their messaging product now? Will they shut off Google Talk for regular gmail users?

<comment><USER8> Tried it with a few more accounts - if you try to use it with a regular gmail account it says "Authentication error: Google+ is required".

It's a little off that Larry Page was complaining about Microsoft not using open standards but then they go and introduce a totally new closed system within their closed social network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can we talk about the icon. I am not a designer but quotes inside of a word balloon? Don't word balloons and quotes have the same purpose?

<comment><USER10> It's a conversation within a conversation. /s

<comment><USER11> Conception...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kinda a non sequitur, but is this the flat design that everyone wants? Im not impressed.

<comment><USER13> Have to agree. It is surprisingly ugly.

What happened to the consistent design we have seen with Google Now, Gmail etc ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's the difference between this and Hangouts in the Plus app?

<comment><USER3> This is something that I hope Google work on and clear up- on Android it's the same, in that I have both the Messenger app, Google+ app (that links to Messenger) and the new Hangouts app. There clearly only needs to be one.

I also haven't got the new Hangout-style chat in Gmail- only on G+. I hope they are intending on porting over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand why they only have video and no voice only. I use voice a lot, almost never video.

<comment><USER16> I agree. Voice was very handy, especially from the desktop versions...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those unable to find it in the iOS App Store: Search for a Google app (i.e. Google+) and click "Related". You'll find Hangouts in the See All list.

<comment><USER18> Ran into this and solved by searching for just "hangouts".

<comment><USER19> I could not seem to find it through both methods. I ended up going to the Top Charts and found it as #9 in the Free section.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So there's no presence/status notifications? I'll miss that when this hits GMail.

<comment><USER21> Online users are shown with a green bar under their photo.

Inside the conversation, if someone is faded out then they are not there, but an unfaded image shows when they are currently in the conversation.

<comment><USER20> Online isn't the same as "available". A green dot in GChat means actively saying "you can interrupt me". A red dot means "this better be important". Currently about 2/3 of my GChat list is "away".

There's a whole world of etiquette here that they're throwing away.

<comment><USER21> I think they are trying to move more towards the long-lived conversations, where it shows you if the person is there and willing to be interrupted (the green bar), or they simply are not necessarily there to answer right now (because they are away from their computer, or they are in do-not-disturb mode). I realize that this is missing the middle "busy" state, but I don't really think that's a big loss. It used to be that when you sent offline messages it would end up as an email to them. Now when you send messages and they aren't in the online mode you can just assume that they'll see the message at the time of their choosing and respond then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not supported on iPhone 3GS: no front-facing camera. I didn't expect that given "ALL your friends can use Hangouts" and "and no one gets left out".

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there a relation to Google Talk for those outside of Android/Gmail web? I was under the impression that every XMPP app on iOS just stopped working properly a year or so ago. (In fact, this was a primary reason my sister went from iPhone 4 -> GSIII last year, since she uses Talk extensively with her friends.)

<comment><USER8> I still use Trillian on iOS for Google Talk and it works fine.

<comment><USER24> I'm trying to find out info on how long that will be true.

Having trouble finding a crediable source, but various news outlets are saying Nikhyl Singhal says xmpp is going away. That will screw over Trillian as well as several other clients.

Edit: Removing info that isn't accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems like this was cobbled together for Google I/O. The experience is lacking.

</comment><comment><USER26> I know this is a nit-picky thing but why does this app require 6.1 or later? Thats a funny move. 6.0 I can understand.

What functionality could they have in 6.1 that made them have to require it?

<comment><USER27> They might have just targeted the 6.1 sdk and decided not to deal with the 6.0 issues. For new things it is actually a good idea as 6.1 is quite a bit better than 6.0 in things like core data.

<comment><USER28> The only changes made were in MapKit and UIKit.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/Genera...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/General/iOS61APIDiffs/index.html)

<comment><USER27> Doesn't mean there weren't any.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15550861/nssortdescriptor...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15550861/nssortdescriptor- to-sort-by-number-of-items-in-core-data-to-many-relationships)

I find random differences far too often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not really sure this works. My colleague apparently messaged me last night, I didn't get any notifications. So this morning I started a new Hangout (text-only) and he got nothing either.

<comment><USER11> Aha! Finally had an email, over 10 hours after he first sent the message. It took an hour after I created a new Hangout with him for the message to even get to him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Google's answer to Facebook Messenger… I'm surprised, I would've expected that they start out in this category by buying WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER30> If I use Adium on my Desktop and Hangouts on my phone will I see the group chats / google hangouts?

<comment><USER31> So far it's syncing the messages sent and received via Adium. They show up in google+, although they're not automatically marked as read (though I've not yet received the google+ update). Images and hangout invites are not synced. I have yet to attempt a group chat.

UPDATE: Photos will show in the messenger, or send you a link to a google+ page if you're on gchat.

<comment><USER32> You're right for single messages, but I'm not seeing group messages in Adium.

<comment><USER31> "I have yet to attempt a group chat."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> hangouts was cool at 1st. Now it's kinda cool in that you can hang out w/ your favorite computer science academics but that is about it...

</comment><comment><USER34> nifty, it pushes notifications to pebble watch.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's not even available on the Play store yet, that or it isn't available for my modern top of the line device :(

EDIT: It's live now, it's a direct replacement for the talk app: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.talk)

<comment><USER36> I assumed that they were rolling out an update to Google+ that will have hangouts as a component of it. They talked about it under the context of Google+ with the statement "adds another icon". They do rolling updates for things like that so I would expect to it sometime this evening.

<comment><USER37> I don't think so. It gives this error "We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server." when you go here: <http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/>

Plus, they'd include it in the iOS Google+ app, too, if they did that for Android.

EDIT: It's working on Android now.

<comment><USER36> _Plus, they'd include it in the iOS Google+ app, too, if they did that for Android._

Not necessarily. A single Android app can have multiple launcher icons with multiple activity entry points. Not sure if that is true for iOS apps, or whether Apple would approve such a design.

Good catch on the URL, however the package name in the URL (com.google.android.talk) is actually for Google Talk, which is actually a part of....heck I don't even know -- it's just on newer devices as the base services.

<comment><USER38> You're correct. An iOS app has only a single icon and a single entry point. It makes total sense for Google to release this as a separate app.

Not to mention iOS has been through the "kitchen sink" app design phase before, and it's too soon to revisit it. "Kitchen sink" apps tend to have overly deep, cumbersome UIs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603366/mathematical-model-reveals-the-patterns-of-how-innovations-arise/ <comment><AUTHOR> The corresponding paper is at [https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00994](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00994) : Dynamics on expanding spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties</comment>


Trophy Kids: Entitled to a Fair Assessment - <AUTHOR> http://findthepulse.com/blog/2008/10/23/trophy-kids-entitled-to-a-fair-assessment/

<comment><USER2> Where a fair assessment is apparently they're awesome and going to change the world.

I wonder if these self-identifying trophy kids ever considered the fact that maybe they have been given fair assessments and have been found wanting?

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose my writing really only addressed the upper echelon of my peer group. To be sure, there are examples of Gen Y'ers who carry an air of entitlement with them and are not justified to do so. I think every generation of people probably has a sect of people who could be described this way. What was so offensive about the article in the Journal was how it characterized all Millenials as entitled, spoiled kids. I think most readers in this community (of all generations) are probably hard-working, entrepreneurial, get-things- done type of people and that's why the "Trophy Kids" article didn't resonate well here.

<comment><USER2> The "upper echelon" of any group is going to be like that though. Using the exceptional few to excuse the vast majority does no one any favors.

However, the millenials are defined by their entitlement. It is the one trait everyone notices. The readers here may not fit the mold, but you are using a self-selected group of people posting to a VC news site as a counter-point. That doesn't resonate well either.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is there no bookmark notifications API in browsers? - <AUTHOR>

I've often wondered this. For site/app owners how can you track how many bookmarks you've received? It's the most basic social signal since the beginning of the web yet it's still the largest black hole out there in metrics.<p>Simple JavaScript API to detect when user bookmarks site, while on the site. I'd love to know if my site receives bookmarks, I'm sure others would too.
Why is there no API for this in HTML5? <comment><USER2> Bookmarks are a meaningless statistic unless the people who bookmarked it visit your site. I have plenty of bookmarks I don't actually visit, but are more of a "for later" thing (which sometimes turns into a "sometime 3 years from now" thing).

If they visit the site frequently, Google Analytics can help sort that data based on unique/recurring visitors.</comment>


Ask HN: Interested in a hacker newser poker meetup in the Bay Area? - <AUTHOR>

I think this would be a good way to meet other hacker newsers, share ideas, and play some poker.
I'd be happy to host and order food, and hopefully we'll get a few more hosts in a rotation for an ongoing game.
See the link in my comment below to sign up. <comment><AUTHOR> [https://spreadsheets0.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=...](https://spreadsheets0.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDd4MjAzOGZIaE1UeHdLVG5VRnpab2c6MQ#gid=0)</comment>


Edward Snowden TED 2014 – How to Take Back the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBEt-swe5zU

<comment><USER2> Is this what he means by taking back the internet? [http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/russia-media-black-out- ahead-...](http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/russia-media-black-out-ahead- disputed-crimea-referendum-2014-03-14)</comment>


From cosmism to deism: AI makes deities plausible - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/from-cosmism-to-deism <comment><USER2> "as humans, with our puny human brains, trying to imagine what an artilect would think about is like a mouse trying to imagine what humans think about, using its puny mouse brain.... Deism I am open to, whereas I find theism ridiculous."

There's a disconnect there, and I've seen it for a long time. The reason theism is called ridiculous is that the author imagines what their millions/billions/trillions/more-times intelligent entity would do in our universe, looks out and observes this is not what is happening, then declares that there is no Theity (to coin a word). But there's a major fault in the logic, which is that one can be so confident about what that entity would do that the imagination step has any meaning. Researchers like Kurzweil who otherwise would never _dream_ of claiming they can read the Theity's mind will, on this one point, declare that they can.

I can't prove the conclusion false any more than the next guy, but I can say this argument is fallacious.

I also remind you I'm not defending any particular Theity; consider the Riverworld scenario, for instance: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld> Perhaps the Theity only cares about the eventual creation of achilects and is indeed interested in us, but only to the extent that we eventually produce one. Maybe archilects inevitably resurrect [1] their creator races and the pain and suffering to get to this point is but a passing dream, and perhaps that pain and suffering itself has further impacts on the ultimate form of the archilect in some important way (a being with no concept of the perils of "evil", for lack of a better word, should probably not be trusted to build Utopia). Perhaps there's a theity that is interested in silicon-based life and doesn't care about us, but still cares about other individuals in exactly the way that Kurzweil declares impossible. Any number of possible scenarios. My point is simply that you do not have exceptional insight into these being's minds on this particular point; you are uniformly ignorant about them.

I really don't know what the truth is, even as I've put my markers down, but I am increasingly sure that it is weirder than any of us really can imagine. I only hope it is for the better.

[1]: Which in this context isn't mystical, either; "resurrection" is "merely" somehow obtaining a copy of the mental state of a being with sufficient detail to once again begin simulating or embodying that being again. If we're seriously talking creating universes, there's a number of possible avenues for this to take; an as-yet unknown way of reading the past state of the universe directly, simulation of the race up to that point with this level of detail (which need not be atomically accurate, just human-scale accurate), or most likely some approach we can't even imagine.

<comment><USER3> I'm inferring a distinction that Kurzweil doesn't make explicit, but I'd guess he regards "theism" as a claim that the creator possesses specific (highly anthopomorphic) traits, eg. love, or personal interest in our lives. I doubt he would recognize much difference between the unknowable theity that you describe and his own "artilect." (quoted because I think it's a stupid word). For theists, the concept of God necessarily carries the baggage of what God is like.

The Problem of Evil, philosophically, has never been a refutation of the existence of God. It's a refutation of the existence of a particular kind of God.

As an aside, one of the most common answers to the Problem of Evil is that God's justice is beyond human comprehension. I think it's interesting that this dovetails the debate of philosophy into semantics. That is, if God is just, but not in a way recognizable to humans, is it even semantically meaningful to call Him just?

<comment><USER2> I think your description probably does match the actual baggage of the term in his mind, but he in fact _did_ make something explicit, right in the previous sentence to one of the two I quoted: "Theism is the belief in a deity that also cares about the welfare of individual humans. "

You do not and can not know _how_ what I was calling a Theity cares. It is itself a very primitive idea that the caring must manifest as heavyweight, visibly-obvious intervention into everyday life. I do not deny that this is certainly how many or most conceive of it but it should be pointed out that not all religions that contain Theities have this idea actually deeply embedded into them (as opposed to deeply embedded into the minds of the bulk of practitioners), but actually can still work with a relatively subtle Theity using the power of incomprehensibly vast intelligence to accomplish their goals through the smallest of possible changes, an elegant approach.

(Actually Kurzweil's characterization of religion is rather paper-thin, too: "Presumably, millions of those killed were theists, believing that their "theity" would "look out" for their welfare." I know that's not intended as an explanation of The Totality of Religion in one sentence, but I still shouldn't even have to describe how this does not match up with the contents of many religions, particularly including Christianity which _promises_ persecution, explicitly, several times. I think many religions and many actual expressions of religious are rather more subtle than he is willing to give credit for.)

<comment><USER3> _You do not and can not know how what I was calling a Theity cares. It is itself a very primitive idea that the caring must manifest as heavyweight, visibly-obvious intervention into everyday life._

It turns out my aside _does_ address this. If a theity is said to "care about the welfare of individual humans", the caring must actually be something that humans would _actually recognize as caring_. Otherwise, you're using the word to connote something that it doesn't, in order to piggyback on the emotional resonance of what it actually does.

Saying God may be caring but we don't know what that looks like is exactly equivalent to saying we don't know anything about God. The entire point of theism is to claim that you _do_ know something about God.

<comment><USER2> Ah, in this case I simply mean caring in the weak sense of "interested in", which I think is the most generous way to read Kurzweil's point. If you really get technical, no words have any particular meaning about any entity of this intelligence, but it would be at least reasonable to define some sense of "interested in" us as more than just an incidental detail of running a universe. From what I've seen Deists-but-not-Theists tend to mean an entity that literally does not care about us, may not even know we exist, would not care to know about the ignorance, and sometimes I even get a whiff of the self-loathing-human sense of "and if it did know we existed it wouldn't like it". Again, not necessarily always spelled out but I think it's pretty much as fair as your previous assessment of Theism, which is to say, a decent working definition of what is already out there.

Your side point I actually deliberately left addressed because it goes down a rabbit hole. A fun one, but not one I was trying to go down. :)

It is not a new idea in theology that we don't really know the mind of God and that the words and concepts we use are merely approximations. It does rapidly deteriorate into something unprovable. Unfortunately, where in science we can discard the unprovable and justifiably consider ourselves wise, I think the undisprovability and/or unprovability of all these questions is actually fundamental and unavoidable, inasmuch that observing that certain statements are unprovable doesn't affect their truth value.

You could define a concept of "human justice as the considered timespan approaches infinity", for instance, which may still be vague but is at least getting somewhere, sort of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The SAP states that the values of the constants of the laws of physics are so fantastically, improbably finely tuned to allow the existence of matter and life, that it seems highly likely that these values were predesigned._

Even if you accept this (and it's worth noting that only the tiniest sliver of our universe is hospitable to our kind of intelligent life), it just pushes the question back one level. If our universe was created, then whoever created it must have also grown up in a universe that could spawn intelligent life. Would that universe need to have had its variables tuned as well?

This is just a repackaging of a standard argument that adds complexity while explaining nothing.

<comment><USER5> > You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, > on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you > won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can > you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was > the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!

\-- Richard Feynman

<comment><USER6> The best kind of quote- entertaining and instructive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "There are now thousands of AI scientists around the world (concentrated largely in the English-speaking countries) who feel that humanity will be able to build massively intelligent machines this century that will be hugely smarter than human beings."

I'm someone skeptical about this claim, certainly it's a while since I worked in AI research, but from what I recall after the AI Winter researchers were generally pretty guarded about making claims for there being any clear route to building general intelligences.

<comment><USER8> That sounds reasonable, I would certainly be quite careful with such statements if I was in that field.

I'm slightly skeptical towards the opening part, are there really "thousands of AI scientists" in the English-speaking parts of the world? I'm surprised, but I have really no insight into the world of AI science.

<comment><USER6> Though Kurzweil is well respected I find myself unconvinced of most of his assertions.

<comment><USER9> Your not the only one - [http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php). I personally think he's completely ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Theism is the belief in a deity that also cares about the welfare of individual humans. Deism I am open to, whereas I find theism ridiculous. The evidence against it is enormous. For example, last century, about 200-300 million people were killed for "political reasons," e.g., wars, genocides, purges, ethnic cleansings, etc. It was the bloodiest century in history."

Unless that creator with a brain that makes yours look like that of a mouse's cares about the welfare of _you_. Made sure all those wars and killing occurred in just the right way just so that you could be here writing this article. If your brain is just a tiny mouse brain how could you possibly know?

</comment><comment><USER11> No. AI only makes deities plausible if you subscribe to a very narrow and particular Singularitarian school of thought on what AI is and where it's heading. The megaphone diplomacy of these people tends to detract from the credibility of AI research in general, by associating it with very unrealistic views and fallacious thought experiments which as far as I'm aware originate from the opinions of Terrance McKenna.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8v8mgwuubU>

</comment><comment><USER12> Regarding Kurtzweil's "mathematical principle," our mathematics is a reflection of the universe we live in. Mathematics is based on axioms, which make sense to us only because we observe them to be always true in our universe. For example, one of Peano's axioms of arithmetic states that "1 is a natural number" (here I am using the base one axiomatic), and another axiom states that "no natural number has 1 as its successor." One could imagine (though not necessarily describe in detail) a strange universe where there is a natural number larger than 1 that has 1 as its successor (i.e. the way modular arithmetic works).

To summarize, I do not see why the "mathematical principle" has to be postulated separately from the "anthropic principle," which we all know has an alternative deity-free explanation mentioned by Kurtzweil himself: there could be "a zillion universes, each with a different set of physical laws, and we just happen to live in one that is compatible with life."

<comment><USER13> _Regarding Kurtzweil's "mathematical principle," our mathematics is a reflection of the universe we live in. Mathematics is based on axioms, which make sense to us only because we observe them to be always true in our universe._

How about: Our mathematics is a reflection of the universe _we can perceive_.

<comment><USER12> That is correct, except that it puts unnecessary emphasis on perception relativism. We use mathematics especially extensively in areas where our perception is limited (particle physics, climate modeling etc.) In other words, we use mathematics to "augment" and to "test" our perception so as to prevent any kind of perceptual illusions misguiding us in our observation.

<comment><USER13> _That is correct, except that it puts unnecessary emphasis on perception relativism._

Well, in your mind. :) I didn't mean that in support of a relativistic viewpoint. Perhaps I should have said _that we can comprehend_. Perception just determines our starting point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You might compare author Hugo de Garis's position on deism with the Simulation Argument - i.e. our present projections of technological progress shape the expected chance that we live within a reality manufactured by beings very much like our own descendants.

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

de Garis' works are well worth reading, though like many AI-focused futurists - such as those associated with the Singularity Insitute - I think he gives too little weight to comparative advantage when projecting future interactions between beings of vastly different capabilities.

<comment><USER15> You might give it too much weight--remember, comparitive advantage says humans have something to offer AIs; it doesn't say whether that something is worth more than our care and feeding or constituent atoms.

It's easy for the income level guaranteed by comparitive advantage to fall below subsistence income; it happened to most horses a century ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Personally, I think if science could come to the conclusion that there is/was a deity that created the universe, then that would be wonderful for science. It would open up a vast new arena for science to play in."

No, it would not. If science could "play in that arena," science will have solved the halting problem.

And have defined an algorithm for determining any possible busy beaver number. Which, of course, is related to the previous.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here are some temporary mirrors, the main site is slow to respond:

<http://pastebin.com/szE6pQXW>

<http://pastie.org/1473616>

<http://yourpaste.net/6425/>

Ok, from the talk,

 _21 Century A.I.-enabling technologies_

 _a) Moore's Law

b) 1bit/atom by 2020

c) Femto-Second Switching

d) Reversible Computing

e) Nanotech

f) Artyficial Embryology

g) (Topological) Quantum Computing

h) Nanotech Impact on Brain Science

j) Artificial Brains_

</comment><comment><USER18> "The rise of artilects (artificial intellects, i.e., godlike massively intelligent machines with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of times above the human level) in this century makes the existence of a deity (a massively intelligent entity capable of creating a universe) seem much more plausible."

Um...where exactly are these artilects? Haven't heard of any recently. Pretty sure we would have noticed. Unless of course he's saying that they _will_ arise in the next few decades, in which case - more of the same old gee-whiz- the-singularity wankage.

<comment><USER19> I think he's saying that they will rise over the next 100 years (well, 89 actually). Not completely unreasonable if you think of the advances in technology over the last 100 years.

<comment><USER18> Sure, if you assume that everything will continue on the same trajectory in perpetuity. This is a fairly large assumption with little evidence to back it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Mini-universes or not, the first society on Earth to create and to use artilects – even ones only a magnitude intelligent than humans – will use strategic superiority to expand and to dominate most parts of the earth, in much the same way that Western society came to dominate North and South America and Australia during the Age of Imperialism.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is definitely going to help with the accusations of religiosity and crackpottery.</comment>


Pterosaur: Full power of Vim in each Firefox text field - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur <comment><USER2> I've really enjoyed the "It's All Text" extension that allows you to use whatever editor you like to edit text fields.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all- text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, It's All Text is great.

A note for anyone using Firefox with Electrolysis (a.k.a e10s or content processes) enabled, e.g. Nightly users: It's All Text is partially busted in that case. E.g. see [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042965#c2](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042965#c2). It's still usable, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While awesome in theory, it seems pretty easy in generic pentadactyl to focus a text field, hit ctrl+i, and have an instance of vim where after you :wq the contents of the buffer will be the contents of the text field.

Also compared to a real vim window this lags terribly.

<comment><USER5> An extension called It's All Text! provides the same feature without Pentadactyl's total UI overhaul.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all- text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/)

<comment><USER6> "It's All Text!" plugin is great for editing wiki pages, or anything with a large amount of text in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems odd this doesn't use neovim. Wouldn't it be much easier to use neovim rather than raw vim to achieve this kind of result ?

<comment><USER8> It should be straightforward to do something similar with neovim. Instead of vim's +clientserver support, communication would be based on neovim's msgpack- rpc api[1].

[1] [http://neovim.org/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html](http://neovim.org/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh my goodness, this is amazing. I'm writing this comment using pterosaur. I'm also very happy that it works well with pentadactyl. Great job! Very helpful thing! Before I was using pentadactyl's functionality to open input content in an external editor, but this is so much better.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't have any substantive other than to say, great job! This looks really cool. I want to check it out!

Any chance you'll bring it to Chrome?

<comment><USER11> [https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur/issues/38](https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur/issues/38)

Looks like it's in the work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> At first I thought its just another vim emulation extensions/plugins that don't really work and are almost useless because you're so used to your customizations.

But then I noticed it mentioning that it can use my vimrc!

Wow! Now you have my attention!

<comment><USER13> Well I'll be... an improvement on "it's all text" (but those trapped in lesser (eh, I mean prefer other) editors might still want to check it out.

Shame that modern content-editable widgets (wysiwyg google docs, Facebook etc) will probably break this (too - they break text input in general).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm one of those people that cannot use a browser without vim bindings, so thank you so much for posting this. I'm going to give it a try.

Generally I find that if it's just a standard html form, I actually prefer to have it get piped into urxvt because if I don't want to post it right away, I can simply ':w ~/aaa' and come back later without any worries. Can I do that easily with this?

I also like whenever I come across someone doing something messy in javascript (that isn't being blocked by umatrix), and making me fight them, it's nice to just be able to say, "hey, I'm gonna strip anything I've already typed out of the DOM, give it to me, and I'll give it back when you learn to play nice. No jsoup for you."

So yeah. I like how it is for me. Of course, everyone does. [https://xkcd.com/1172/](https://xkcd.com/1172/)

<comment><USER15> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all- text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/)

This lets you edit text fields in a real text editor of your choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have been looking for better text editing when using iPython/juPyter notebooks. This looks like a really cool solution!

<comment><USER17> You might want to look at vimception[1], an iPython plugin to use CodeMirror's vim mode inside iPython cells. It yet hasn't been updated to work with iPython 3.0.

[1] [https://github.com/ivanov/ipython- vimception](https://github.com/ivanov/ipython-vimception)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's interesting to me that this uses your native vim installation. I was expecting vim compiled to asm.js!

</comment><comment><USER19> As someone who cannot understand the attraction of Vim (and emacs) I can only say oh god why... Otherwise, brilliant use of integration between two usually very seperate programs, nice! This is something I wouldn't have thought posssible

</comment><comment><USER4> Its also worth mentioning that its totally broken if you use vim-startify [https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify](https://github.com/mhinz/vim- startify).

</comment><comment><USER20> it doesn't work in FF 27.x, but it's a good idea though, integration must be quite good. In the meantime and if integration is not an issue, you could try vim-anywhere which is a more general way to get vim well anywhere =)

[https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere](https://github.com/cknadler/vim- anywhere)

[http://sprunge.us/hiFY](http://sprunge.us/hiFY) (personal revision, posix sh)

<comment><USER21> Did you really mean 27 or meant 37? Because 27 is more than a year old and not one of the long term support releases, so if you're using 27, you're exposing yourself to all sorts of exploits. If you really meant 27, then I can only guess you're trying to avoid the new theme (which started in 29, so you could have been using 28), and that's a poor reason to stay with an old unsupported browser. Upgrade to 36 and use [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/classicthemerestore...](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/) instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And plugin is no longer officially maintained :(

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there something like this for emacs?

</comment><comment><USER23> anyone else noticing the window server process taking up a lot of cpu usage?</comment>


Notch's Minicraft Ludum Dare's 48-hour Compo Entry + Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=398

<comment><USER2> Could anyone explain the icon.png file? How is he extracting out the individual pieces into the game?

Also, it's really interesting watching someone else live code. Get to see how they think and the order in which they write their code. Schools should do more of this kind of stuff.

<comment><USER2> Nevermind I got it</comment></comment>


Intel CEO cashed in on shareholding after becoming aware of chip flaws - <AUTHOR> https://app.newsoveraudio.com/article/3153 <comment><USER2> How long after the news breaks do you have to wait to avoid insider trading?

<comment><USER3> Vangaurd has a good guide on this [http://www.american- vanguard.com/Governance](http://www.american-vanguard.com/Governance)

The standard rule is 3 trading days after news is disclosed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055851)

</comment><comment><USER5> This has been discussed couple of times already as pointed by another poster:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16067322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16067322)

This kind of reporting is based on a big "if". We don't know yet "if" it was due to contractual obligation or something else.</comment>


My beautiful wife, Apple - <AUTHOR> http://peternixey.com/post/37988283331/my-beautiful-wife-apple

<comment><USER2> There's a lot to be said for low maintenance.</comment>


Ask HN: IQ Tests for Job Interviews? - <AUTHOR> I am a software engineer with about 5 years of experience doing mostly JavaScript fullstack. I've now had 2 of what I would call IQ tests, basic pattern recognition kinds of things. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this even legal?
It feels incredibly invasive and I cannot see how it has any relevance to the jobs I am applying for.
For context I am a US citizen working in the US. <comment><USER3> It's illegal.

relevant case information here: [https://www.bungie.net/en- US/Forums/Post/208397364?sort=0&pa...](https://www.bungie.net/en- US/Forums/Post/208397364?sort=0&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER4> Very useful metric, whenever you're asked to do one you know your potential employer is an idiot, so walk away.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think that it's illegal in the US if it is specifically an IQ test. Otherwise, if it's basically an IQ test but not called an IQ test then it's not illegal. Eg a logic type test or a mental maths test.

IQ is very interesting on the first order and very flawed on the second order, and makes for a super interesting read. Read these for contrast:

Bell Curve

Mismeasure of man

Or if you're lazy find each author speak about it on YouTube.

The central issue with testing like this is that:

1\. It works to some extent especially if you don't know anything else about a candidate.

2\. It's misused as a synonym for general intelligence.

3\. The false negative rate is high. I.e. scoring less than some other candidate means nothing a very large portion of the time.

4\. Results are often strongly correlated to notional race.

5\. An actual IQ test (eg WAIS IV) is hard to administer. All other tests claim legitimacy by being merely correlated to them.

<comment><USER6> I was interested in finding out my personality type last weekend. I suspected for a while I was INTP, and the test confirmed this. I did a little Googling interested in which groups have the highest intelligence and are most successful, etc. Apparently INTP's have the highest IQs of all personality types yet for some reason we seem to be the bottom earners. I can only speak for myself, but I know my introverted, aloof demeanour isn't well suited for most work places, certainly not for leadership roles.

Perhaps someone with a high IQ is more able to solve a given task on their own, but often it's more important you can work well with others and communicate clearly. I know personally I'd swap my 130~ IQ for 100 if I had good communication skills any day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is not an IQ test but a subordination test. The point of the test is to test if you are willing to jump through arbitrary hoops in order to serve your employer. I.e refusing to submit to their test but instead referring to a verified score of 130 on WAIS will put your application, not on the top, but on the bottom of the pile.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's basically what every white-boarding coding exercise is - <USER2> recognition based on computer science trivia. It's not illegal - every tech company does it.

<comment><USER9> Strict IQ tests will select for a certain subset of the population, that's usually divided by socio-economic lines which highly correlate with race. That's not to say that certain races have intelligence correlations, but that IQ tests test for knowledge that is diffused along socio-economic lines.

You can look at white boarding as proxy IQ tests or aptitude tests, the latter of which are customized for the role in question. I'm on the fence when it comes to deciding which bucket white boarding falls into.</comment></comment>


Let's get serious about ES6 generator functions - <AUTHOR> http://facebook.github.io/regenerator/ <comment><USER2> Good stuff. This will come in handy if node.js 0.12 takes much longer.

Watching the use of generators in JavaScript and especially node.js is going to be very exciting over the coming years. We're excited at LinkedIn because we write a lot of node.js, and control flow is always being discussed: step, async, stepup, promises, and async generators look to solve a lot of that.

Also, checkout the AGen formal spec[1] for asynchronous generators. Raynos and I put it together recently to encourage interoperability between async generator solutions, and we're both using it in personal projects.[2]

[1] [https://github.com/AsynchronousGenerators/agen- spec](https://github.com/AsynchronousGenerators/agen-spec)

[2] [https://github.com/Raynos/gens](https://github.com/Raynos/gens)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the links! I hope regenerator can make those projects work in environments beyond node.js.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Primary author here. Ask me anything!

<comment><USER4> Why is there not a like button, send button, or facebook comments anywhere on the announcement page?

<comment><USER3> Done! Thanks! [https://github.com/facebook/regenerator/commit/fe42c74a486fb...](https://github.com/facebook/regenerator/commit/fe42c74a486fbe7fa1aac73d41a9d852939083a1)

<comment><USER4> Awwww shucks. I was being cheeky and now your response has disarmed my cynicism. I'm naked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should make a browserify transform ([https://github.com/substack/node- browserify](https://github.com/substack/node-browserify)) so that it can easily be put into a pipeline to convert generator code to es5 code. Folks using browserify will be able to use it very easily.

<comment><USER3> Great idea. Issue filed: [https://github.com/facebook/regenerator/issues/20](https://github.com/facebook/regenerator/issues/20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank you! This is so exciting. I've been wanting to try things like go style concurrency ([http://swannodette.github.io/2013/08/24/es6-generators- and-c...](http://swannodette.github.io/2013/08/24/es6-generators-and-csp/)) in the browser, and this seems like it will help us get there. Granted, haven't tried it yet, and really understand nothing about any of this, but ... Anyway, hooray :)

<comment><USER6> Okay, tried it, and actually worked with the demo from that article! Yay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is similar to my asyncscript pet project[1] (that was met with much resistance on the Node.js mailing list as it was Yet Another CPS Framework). It drew inspiration from the way that C# creates the state machines for "yield" and "await". The project is dead (it only dealt with async calls and I never got round to "enumeration generators"), but if you are wondering how regenerator works I have a nice explanation at the bottom of readme.md.

[1]: [https://github.com/jcdickinson/asyncscript](https://github.com/jcdickinson/asyncscript)

</comment><comment><USER8> I couldn't find information why generator functions in JS require '*' in the syntax (ES6 spec/wiki just states this as a fact, but no rationale). Does anybody know?

Python manages to work fine without ugly wart in the syntax, and it seems to me that presence of `yield` keyword in body is enough at syntactical level to tell compiler that the function is a generator.

<comment><USER3> It means you can have generator functions that contain no yield statements, which is not as crazy as it sounds. I've had to do `if False: yield` before in Python to trick the language into treating a function as a generator. An unyielding generator behaves so differently from a similar-looking non- generator function that the extra syntax seems more than appropriate to me.

The asterisk also makes it trivial (using regular expressions) to tell whether a string of code contains any generator functions.

"Explicit is better than implicit" is a rule of thumb that Python supposedly values, but neglects to follow here!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to find a website buyer? - <AUTHOR>

I've sold two websites in the past, but in both cases a potential buyer contacted me.  Now I'm looking to sell a website that I no longer have time to maintain, but that I think has a lot of potential.  Are there good places other than Flippa for finding buyers? <comment><USER2> I'm also interested to know. I am thinking about selling my site also :-)</comment>


'My degree is next to worthless' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/education-33984756

<comment><USER2> A key point here is that surveying the job market before embarking on your degree is not sufficient: there's a four year lag. The guy with the master's in town planning is an obvious victim of this.

A more subtle point is that the more specific the degree is the more vulnerable it is to obsolescence or changing market conditions.

People keep saying "we need more STEM graduates", but without being more specific about exactly what degrees people should do it's just going to result in more of this kind of problem.

<comment><USER3> The data is not always that good. For example, the BBC ranked Computer Science as one of the worst degrees to have when looking for a job:

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7549106.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7549106.stm)

I've also seen it on the top 10:

[http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are- the-10-best-...](http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-10-best- degree-subjects-for-landing-a-job-after-university--ekxmpyJMZZ)

Although there's a 5 year difference.

<comment><USER4> I interview CS graduates from time to time. Most of them have nothing up on GitHub, a mobile phone or tablet with nothing they've written running on it to show off, not even a Stack Overflow account. When I graduated in 1990 all my friends were doing CS because we loved it, we'd been programming since we were teenagers. Just as personal fun side projects I have stuff in GitHub, scripts I can show off on my iPhone and a few thousand points in SO. If a kid wants to be a programmer, nobody is stopping them. They'd don't have to get permission from anyone. My advice to kids doing CS is that if you want to be a programmer, then be one. Make that what you are. But most of them have no real passion or interest in the subject except as a means to a pay check.[/grumpyoldman]

<comment><USER5> This right here. You either have useful work experience or a portfolio of your work, or i'm trashing your resume.

It's also amazing how many CS majors waste their 3-4 years addicted to video games (LOL seems to be the big one right now). Those 1000's of hours are better spent building that portfolio that will net you $100k day 1 out of your degree.

Video game addiction is serious. Google for solutions, it can be fixed. It does not improve your resume to mention your lol rank.

<comment><USER6> I haven't gamed seriously in about 5 years, because I have been busy finishing up my undergraduate degree. Now that I've graduated and I'm employed I've started building a gaming rig, with hopes of getting back into the hobby. Now that I've read this I'm wondering if I should even bother. Perhaps I should focus on building my portfolio more. I find video games help me unwind so that I don't have a restless feeling when I'm focusing on what really matters. In adequate amounts I think video games are alright. I'm wondering what your threshold for "addiction" is though ...

<comment><USER7> Do you want to spend your life gaining work experience and building a portfolio to ensure maximum salary, or do you want to spend your life doing what you want do? Some people program as a hobby and convince themselves that anyone who has different hobbies is a worthless programmer, but that is nonsense. Build that gaming rig.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We need to stop thinking about an undergraduate university degree as job training, because it's not. Those years are supposed to expose the student to many different topics they wouldn't otherwise encounter. The best thing I learned in undergrad was how to study in a meaningful way and to synthesize concepts from various fields.

What people really are looking for is vocational education, which is not what an undergraduate institution is good at doing.

<comment><USER9> I believe the price of an undergraduate degree is only justified if we assume some sort of real return (i.e., jobs that pay money) on the substantial investment of time and money.

Middle-class people don't typically spend years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars on structured self-betterment activities.

<comment><USER10> That's patently false. Skiing, painting, home woodshop, hobby farms, gardening...

Many people believe that an education is a good thing in its own right. Its a sad view of life that you're own betterment isn't worth any price. I guess its all for hedonistic pleasures then? Video games, movies, fancy car - those are the meaning of life?

<comment><USER9> I think you missed a couple words there:

      * middle class
      * structured

The children of public school teachers don't go into debt to spend five (or six!) figures on all-inclusive ski tour packages (complete with certificate!) as part of a pursuit for abstract self-betterment.

Also, if it were all for self-betterment, why have degrees at all? Why not just take classes that seemed worthwhile? Why have grades for that matter?

<comment><USER10> Over a period of 4 or 6 years? Sure they do. Personally, I've gone to Scout meetings for 2 decades, and spent a fortune on structured outings, uniforms, materials and supplies. Its something I enjoy and has a good result.

We have degrees to satisfy the need for some for closure, to recognize accomplishment, and to get old students out of there and make room for new ones. That a degree has been fastened onto as a job-training certificate is just unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting:

> A majority of graduates in the UK are getting jobs where they do not need a > degree, according to a report.

But I have to say the three examples are not. Two of the three degrees are jobless anyway, and the one that isn't ("town planning") is extremely specific, and as the article said the dude just got unlucky.

Please list off what jobs are available for "conservation biology" and "politics and philosophy" which ARE degree specific.

If it is true that the "majority of graduates" aren't getting jobs where their degree applies, that is genuinely interesting, and something worth discussing. The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!"

<comment><USER12> >Two of the three degrees are jobless anyway

>The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!"

This is interesting in itself. Why do people spend so much time and money on something like that?

The town planner was unlucky. Not much can be done about that.

The 'politics and philosophy guy' says he was misled. He does not say his age, but I bet he was young and immature when he chose his mayor.

The conservation biologist says she wanted to work in something that helps people and not just make money. If she had given half of the money she used to study biology to whichever organization she hoped would hire her, she would have saved money, time, and would have helped more.

The article doesn't really give an answer, but it raises an important question.

<comment><USER2> Note that UK degrees don't have "majors": you pick a subject at about 17 before you're doing your final "high school"-level exams.

The whole thing is probably fallout from the Blairite changes to the system. It used to be that degrees were free and scarce - limited by academic admissions criteria. They have been changed to widespread and loan-based. People expect them to have the door-opening prestige of the old system and haven't really adapted to them becoming an expensive trade school for the middle class.

<comment><USER13> The problem isn't so much that they are no longer door-opening, it's rather that not having a degree has become door-closing.

<comment><USER12> I wonder if that's really true.

I understand that nobody wants to do the experiment with their own lives, but if you can realize that there are competent people who aren't getting hired because they lack college degrees, surely employers will realize that too.

Would they leave money on the table like that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There needs to be a distinction between "my degree is as if I hadn't done a degree at all" and "my specific degree could have been any other degree".

Especially in the UK, your ordinary desk job can be a guy who studied anything, as long as he studied something.

</comment><comment><USER15> College/University has been a glorified and lengthy job prep center so that HR managers can quickly filter/find candidates to fill another seat. Big institutions like universities don't change fast so the current higher education system we are seeing now is probably one best suited for the business and economic environment of 15 to 20 (or longer) years ago.

</comment><comment><USER16> Book idea: "Worthless: The Young Person's Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major" [http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-Young-Persons- Indispensable-...](http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-Young-Persons- Indispensable-Choosing/dp/1467978302)

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe things are changing, but in average, this is not true.

OECD Education Indicators in Focus: What are the returns on higher education for individuals and countries?

[http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond- school/Education%20Ind...](http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond- school/Education%20Indicators%20in%20Focus%206%20June%202012.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's one job that might be open: Photographer for the BBC. Article features one corny stock image + 3 webcam myspace shots?

<comment><USER19> Maybe this is exactly because the job is _not_ open, and isn't going to be? Everyone need to cut costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One conclusion from this is that okay, since degrees don't seem to help with job prospects then just do an apprenticeship or other program straight to industry. I kind of like that idea but I am worried that people are still looking for people who get their degree as a signal that they could do all the things required to get that degree.</comment>


Beating C with Dyalog APL - <AUTHOR> https://ummaycoc.github.io/wc.apl/ <comment><USER2> Dyalog implementor here. The hot loops in this function are running my code!

I'm not surprised at all about this result, although I certainly wouldn't use it to make a pronouncement about Dyalog or C as a whole. But there are some places where interpreted array languages have a major advantage over typical compiled languages.

One of the advantages seen in this wc function is our use of bit booleans rather than byte booleans. Packing 8 bits in a byte uses eight times less space, and can lead to drastic speed improvements: 2-8 times faster than even code which uses short ints.

On that note, the function

      words←{(~(¯1)↑⍵)++/1=(1↓⍵)-(¯1)↓⍵}

can be improved by keeping the data boolean. 1=(1↓⍵)-(¯1)↓⍵ is equivalent to the windowed reduction 2</⍵ which identifies places where the boolean argument increased in value. We get:

      words←{(~¯1↑⍵)++/2</⍵}

Since this function doesn't produce a 1-byte int result from subtraction, it's many times faster. I discuss some similar functions to 2</ in a blog post at [https://www.dyalog.com/blog/2018/06/expanding-bits-in- shrink...](https://www.dyalog.com/blog/2018/06/expanding-bits-in-shrinking- time/).

Another big improvement is coming next year in Dyalog 18.0. The computations data∊nl data∊sp will use vectorised search methods similar to Intel's hyperscan ([https://github.com/intel/hyperscan](https://github.com/intel/hyperscan)). The character lookups here are changed to be lookups from a 256-bit table, or two SSE registers, and searched using branchless SSSE3 instructions. I didn't go through this specific algorithm but explained many of our new search techniques at last year's user meeting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paxIkKBzqBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paxIkKBzqBU).

By my measurements, each improvement (changing the word boundary computation and switching to the unreleased Dyalog 18.0) knocks of about a third from the total time. With both, this code is three times faster than it was before!

<comment><USER3> I really liked your sub-nanosecond searching talk, for my taste it felt like a great blend of explaining exactly what you do at the low levels, without dragging me through the weeds of _exactly_ what you do at the low levels. A great piece of optimization.

On the subject of Dyalog APL performance, one of your other talks about a proposal for thunking / lazy execution, IIRC there was a slide of "all high level patterns the interpreter recognises and special-cases", and I was surprised how few there are. About a dozen, or so.

Given how often people voice that "there's potential for an APL interpreter to recognise this slow prime number generator and special-case it", I assumed a lot of the work of speeding up an APL interpreter would be years of building up a vast array of special case pattern handlers, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Is it much harder than it seems? Do the same code patterns not come up often enough to bother with?

<comment><USER2> Just having a well-chosen and fast set of primitives goes a long way. If you write a three-primitive combination and the interpreter doesn't recognise it but all three primitives are fast, how bad is it, really? You're losing a factor of three at worst (which is still in faster-than-C territory much of the time), and probably more like 1.5 or 2 since the special combination would be more complicated. Sometimes you actually gain by splitting an algorithm into multiple passes: I remember an instance where I hand-wrote some nice branchless AVX2 code to find the index of the minimum of a numeric vector (it's (⊃⍋) but don't expect that to be fast yet). Then I wrote a better vectorised minimum and tried out (x⍳⌊/x), which just gets the overall minimum and searches the vector for it. Worst case that algorithm was 25% slower. In the best case, when the minimum was near the end and it could stop early, it was twice as fast!

That said, we still do a lot of work on recognising patterns. The list of idioms from my presentations are patterns that are recognised as a sequence of tokens in parsing, but we can also recognise particular derived functions (the results of operators, or function trains). An obvious example is the sum +/ and there are some pretty complicated ones involving Rank or Key. There are probably about a hundred cases like this in total although many of these cases handle several different combinations. Much of what I do is not to try to identify more special cases to handle with a custom algorithm but to make the algorithms more general and to use them in more places. I tend to develop engines (say, a column permuter using vector shuffles) and then write a bunch of code to recognise when I can use the engines for particular cases within a primitive or combination (indexing, reverse, rotate, take/drop, and transpose on trailing axes).

The most important work is on short patterns because the longer ones just don't show up often enough, or they show up in too many different permutations. Thunks are a way to recognise short patterns flexibly: it doesn't depend on the way the pattern is written, just the functions used. They also offer flexibility in that different operations can sometimes emit the same thunk with a parameter, allowing other functions to just handle that type of thunk as a whole. We've run into some trouble with our internal architecture that's holding thunks up (should be cleared up by the 18.0 release so we can start implementing them for 19.0), but I think recognising special combinations will be very different, and much easier, once they're working. And I can finally get the aforementioned (⊃⍋) running fast. And 1↑⍋. And ⊣/⍋...

<comment><USER3> Thinking on this for a while, it makes more sense to spend optimization effort on a few widely useful engines which will improve many people's code in many situations, than on hundreds of narrow improvements which might improve some code in some situations and will add a lot more integration risk and maintenance overhead.

Turning +/iota into a constant time formula feels like a great idea APL is in a position to benefit from, and that mathematicians could see endless places where that kind of thing might be possible - but if that's true, APL users could find them when they need them. They can't find vectorised pick of grade up, ever.

This is so interesting, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps not a fair comparison until you account for the C library's string comparison behaviors. If your default is LANG=C.UTF-8, your wc may be a bunch slower than LANG=C. I think OSX is still using gnu wc, yes? Maybe the Dialog race should be repeated with this controlled for.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1sxpgp/make_gr...](https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1sxpgp/make_grep_50x_faster/)

Edit. Still true in Linux today.

        $ LANG=C time -p wc /tmp/foo 2>&1 >/dev/null
        real 0.29
        user 0.28
        sys 0.01

        $ LANG=C.UTF-8 time -p wc /tmp/foo 2>&1 >/dev/null
        real 0.86
        user 0.86
        sys 0.00

<comment><USER5> It's a FreeBSD derivative: [https://opensource.apple.com/source/text_cmds/text_cmds-99/w...](https://opensource.apple.com/source/text_cmds/text_cmds-99/wc/wc.c.auto.html)

<comment><USER4> Looks like they have the same problem. They're using LC_CTYPE to hint mbrtowc(). In fact, if you web search "mbrtowc slow" you'll get a bunch of hits about "Why is wc so slow"!! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not heavily invested in speed benchmarks, but I am a big fan of APL/J/K, and I am always glad to see how others write code with them. I like that I can handwrite a J or APL solution, while thinking it through before getting to my phone or computer to actually test it. It's my version of doing a crossword puzzle or a math problem. I still love C too, since it was my third language after Basic on my Commodore PET, and machine language assembly on my VIC-20. The Programming the VIC book in 1984 cost me $24.95 at the time.

</comment><comment><USER7> In the HN thread for the original article, geocar posted one line of q that does the job as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21267923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21267923)

<comment><USER8> Beating benchmarks is always fun, but I think the ergonomics of the solution matter a great deal.

That is to say the words we use matter: I'm excited that Haskell, and OCaml (and so on) have efficient solutions, but I'm extremely disappointed that the best implementations look nothing like the "obvious" approach.

Maybe that's to be expected, after all an "obvious" implementation in C that pumps getchar() all day will be pretty slow, and experienced C programmers will do their own buffering and threading to win -- and _that_ doesn't look like the "obvious" one either.

And yet, in k/q the "obvious" implementation is the fast one. That's cool, and way more cool than you might realise as long as you think coding is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Just like Chris Penner's original article, I'm comparing against the OSX > version of wc that shipped with my machine. Just like in the original > article, I admit that there are likely faster versions of wc–I'm just > comparing what I got.

Could someone on OSX post a benchmark of their system wc vs. one compiled manually from source using gcc or clang with -O3?

Last time around I did this for Ubuntu and found a 2x difference: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271951)

So if this article ends up beating their system wc by 2x, that might not say anything about "beating C".

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow this is a bizarre esolang.

<comment><USER11> It's not an esolang. It has a long history of actual real production use.

<comment><USER12> Production use these days is more likely to be J, which you can actually type on a normal keyboard.

<comment><USER13> It is different to look at, but the editing modes let you type the APL characters without too much difficulty. I spent about 3 months doing a deep- dive into APL last year, it took about two weeks to become proficient typing it (already a touch typist, though). I still remember most of the character positions (the worst part for me was that I use Dvorak, so the visualized keymap is useless since most assume QWERTY layouts). I mostly used emacs, I think the default prefix character was `, but switched it to . . Typing iota: .i. Typing rho: .r.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> but being faster than c is actually trivial and obvious even in the general case...

here is something i crapped out 6 years ago to prove the point: [https://github.com/semiessessi/CP1](https://github.com/semiessessi/CP1)

<comment><USER9> \--verbose please, before we breathlessly run out to install Visual Studio so we can run code we know nothing about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty sure the words function can be simplified to {⍴(~⍵∊⍺)⊆⍵} (and it also handles empty strings).

<comment><USER16> How nice of you to copy/paste my reddit comment!

<comment><USER17> Relevant comment parent mentions here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dku13a/beating...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dku13a/beating_c_with_dyalog_apl_wc/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> C is a low bar. It has always been slower than Fortran. It has been slower than C++ ever since reasonable optimization was implemented. Anything _not_ faster than C, today, is a slow language, practically by definition.

<comment><USER19> > It has been slower than C++ ever since reasonable optimization was > implemented.

Which compilers? Which platforms? Optimized for speed or space (because "faster" is only one dimension of optimization)?

Many C / C++ compiler implementations share the same front ends, back ends and runtime libraries, so it's hard to see how the code generation for C would be much different than that of C++. (In fact, C++ will be harder to optimize if features like exceptions and RTTI are used).

Given the many different commercially and freely available toolchains, this statement is difficult to back up.

<comment><USER20> The one area where C++ can be a lot faster than C is in places where C uses a function pointer where C++ uses a function template.

The standard example is sorting. Say you're sorting an array of integers. Then, C's _sort_ has to (1) call the comparison function passed as an argument, whereas C++'s _std::sort_ can inline the comparisons into a single instruction.

(1) if the source of the function passed in is visible from the compilation unit, I think the C standard allows the compiler to compile a specialized version of sort in the same way C++ can, but I'm not aware of any compiler that does that

<comment><USER19> Right, inlines are hard to beat, and they are not part of the C standard (which is kind of mind boggling, I mean . . . honestly, what year is it?).

Still, the benefit of inlines diminishes as the size of the inlined functions increases (you start paying penalties for extra cache lines full of code, and the percentage of time in function call overhead gets small in a hurry).

The linker can get into the inlining game, too, by the way, if the win is sufficiently big. I have scars to prove it. :-)

<comment><USER21> What do you mean by "inlines are not part of the C standard"?

The standard talks about visible behaviour of programs, never the concrete implementation.

<comment><USER19> You're correct about C99. I cut my teeth on K&R; C99 has inline declarations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 1st comment. Ever. Yes, here in the 23rd century APL has returned to its righteous glory and C is just a few bytes of late 20th century IT(to use your language) history</comment>