I guess I'll never get to that novel - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/writers-on-writing/b0a787c32244

<comment> alan-crowe Alaric might have down better to read a biography of Hemingway instead of reading Hemingway's novels. Then Alaric could have been inspired to have his own adventures instead of spending too much time reading.

Sure, read Hemingway, but then what? Write imitation Hemingway based on reading about adventures? Write the kinds of novel that emerges from a quiet, bookish life, whose only adventures are vicarious?

One vision of the novelist has him leading a full, rich, and busy life. He leads it fast, leaving time before its end to write great novels, full of wisdom about the human condition, based on his immersion in it.

A rival vision of the novelist sees him closer to being a historian. A great novel sees life in the round. Just as a historian gains perspective on events with time and non-participation, a novelist's youthful reading gives him many lifetimes of (vicarious) experience to draw on.

I wonder if Alaric fell between two stools, unclear on which vision of novel writing he was pursuing?

</comment><comment><USER2> I have always had a eye for drawing and painting, but it took me over 13 years of practice to churn out half-decent sketches. I guess persistence is the key. As for writing - re-reading books and rewriting sentences can help. Each sentence should have enough spring to propel you and the reader to the next sentence. Of course, easier said than done and all that.

<comment><USER3> This is certainly true. For myself, I suppose I just had more patience to fail at programming for whatever reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> why is it so often assumed that the novel is the highest form of writing?

<comment><USER5> among my friends they think movies are the highest form of 'writing', and we aren't even in California

<comment><USER3> Kind of what I'm touching on. Movies were always the highest art form for me.

Now I'm starting to feel like apps can be an art. But I may just be telling myself that because it's what I do best.</comment></comment></comment>


IKEA is finally selling a sit/stand desk in the US for less than $500 - <AUTHOR> http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S99022526/

<comment><USER2> Portable adjustable standing desk: [http://zestdesk.com/](http://zestdesk.com/)</comment>


Fabrice Bellard - <AUTHOR> https://bellard.org/ <comment><USER2> Bellard is a well-known software superhero, but I'm not sure there's much to discuss here.

<comment><USER3> Yep, and several of these articles have had solid exposure and discussion here in recent months/years, including in the past 24 hours:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bellard.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bellard.org)

HN discussions are generally much better when there's a specific topic to discuss, rather than a list of articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fabrice's work is gold!

</comment><comment><USER5> i propose the unit "bellard" as an asymptotic unit of developer productivity

<comment><USER2> I propose the _millibellard_ as a convenient unit.

<comment><USER5> amendment accepted, although picobellard might be more useful in my case</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do non-English speakers learn programming? - <AUTHOR>

A lot of the syntax and "grammar" of programming is based on English words and convention. Lots of commands, abbreviations, etc. are also English based.<p>How do non-English speakers learn programming? Is it harder for them? Does it matter at all? <comment><USER2> To use English seemed to be easier than to use native language. First you know your native language. Then you need to learn programming. Programming uses symbols which don't make sense - except as concepts in programming. So you just learn that "while" is a loop with condition, and "print" makes letters appear on the screen. "While" doesn't, for example, associate with time, only with condition; "print" doesn't evoke images of a printing machines, newspapers or anything else. No semantic confusion whatsoever; to the contrary, if that would be written in the native language, it would immediately bring associations, which may be unwanted.

A few comments to above. Some words are already used in the language, so, knowing how a certain combination of English letters is pronounced, one still gets some associations. "Function" is a rather international word, for example (brought into English from another language?). Next, learning first some programming helps with learning later English itself. For many words first associations remain related to computers; e.g., "performance" (though not widely used in programming languages, but it is used in technical manuals) is first for a processor, not for an actor on the scene.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the reasons I roll my eyes whenever my fellow Americans tell me that the United States school system is doing just fine. People in the United States are all too insulated from the reality of people in many other countries having to learn everything we do, including literacy in a native language, to make a living, AND having to learn English to a good standard of literacy besides. Yes, people in other countries often take university-level classes in a variety of subjects with the same English-language textbooks used by American students at the best American universities. (There is, of course, a thriving business in those countries of cram books of those subjects and digests of those textbooks in the local language, and also many excellent textbooks in the local language in many countries.) Moreover, a lot of people in a lot of parts of the world converse in their parents in some historically traditional language of their country, but do business and make jokes with business colleagues in conversational English.

I'm an American who spent several years of my life learning Chinese, among other languages, and who has lived in non-English-speaking places for about six years of my life and worked for quite a few years in the United States in translation and interpreting. It never stops amazing me how much people in much of the rest of the world just roll up their sleeves and learn English, after learning two or more other languages beforehand, to pursue their personal goals.

</comment><comment><USER4> It does not matter. I do not think English has anything to do with the ability of programming. Not all native English speaker can code, similarly there are many non-english speakers who are great programmers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but your reply doesn't really help to answer the question, "How do non- English speakers learn programming?".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I learned English mostly by being a teen programmer. It helped a lot, gave me a reason to become proficient in English as the whole ecosystem is obviously in English as it's lingua franca.

</comment><comment><USER6> We learn English first.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think you'll find this link very interesting, "Symbology, APL, and Chinese Python" [http://clouddbs.blogspot.com/2010/09/symbology-apl-and- chine...](http://clouddbs.blogspot.com/2010/09/symbology-apl-and-chinese- python.html)</comment>


Airbnb for Airbnbs. - <AUTHOR> http://outpostp2p.com/?

<comment><USER2> I think I get what this is, but Airbnb for Airbnbs doesn't make sense to me.</comment>


Ask HN: FPGA/ASIC Designers: What Are Your Thoughts on Chisel? - <AUTHOR> Chisel came up on HN yesterday.  It's a Scala based DSL for generating HDL.  I've looked at it briefly a couple times, and I don't see the value prospect.  Perhaps it is because I don't know Scala, and the idea of learning Scala to write in a Scala DSL to generate HDL does not seem worth while.
Don't get me wrong, I feel the pain of chip design very strongly, but mostly on the verification side of the fence.  The design side of HDL, especially in systemverilog, just isn't a big deal.  Verification, on the other hand, has a lot of room for improvement.
If you have used chisel "in anger," what's the big win for you? <comment><USER2> This is a surprisingly difficult concept to express... I've taken a stab at it before on StackOverflow [1].

One angle is that Chisel (or some hardware DSL) gives you the ability to access software engineering constructs that Verilog/SystemVerilog/VHDL do not have. E.g., with Chisel or similar, you can use object oriented programming to describe hardware. No synthesis vendor supports object oriented programming in SystemVerilog as far as I'm aware, _even though the language has it_. Unfortunately, this explanation of "language power" is exactly what Paul Graham describes as "The Blub Paradox" in his "Beating the Averages" essay that shows up on HN frequently [2]. Summarily, a standard C programmer understands they can be more effective in C than assembly, but don't have the requisite knowledge to see that C++ has advantages over C. A good Verilog engineer likely has no exposure to Haskell and there's a huge skills gap necessary for them to grok the utility of functional programming.

Relatedly, Chisel (or similar) is trying to describe highly parameterized hardware generators _NOT_ one design point. If you want to hit one design point and one design point only, then the advantage of using something that supports a lot of parameterization may not be as beneficial.

Another angle is that Chisel and it's hardware IR FIRRTL forms a hardware compiler stack. This let's you automate difficult processes that shouldn't be hard, but are. One example is adding state snapshotting to a hardware design. FireSim [3] lets you do this automatically because you can add transforms to the FIRRTL compiler just like you can add transforms to the LLVM compiler. If you want to do this with Perl and RegEx on Verilog it's intractable.

On verification... yes, this is a hard problem. A common criticism of hardware DSLs is that they're solving the wrong problem of design and not verification. However, most of the Chisel devs think that the verification problem may get easier with the right software abstractions and a hackable hardware compiler. Improvements to verification are a work-in-progress and the Chisel developers are starting a working group related to this.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53007782/what- benefits-d...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53007782/what-benefits- does-chisel-offer-over-classic-hardware-description-languages)

[2] [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

[3] [https://fires.im/](https://fires.im/)</comment>


What's All This T-Coil Stuff, Anyhow? - <AUTHOR> https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/what-s-all-t-coil-stuff-anyhow <comment><USER2> pdf at [https://www.electronicdesign.com/sites/electronicdesign.com/...](https://www.electronicdesign.com/sites/electronicdesign.com/files/RakoTcoil.pdf)

very interesting</comment>


Charliecloud: Unprivileged Containers for User-Defined Software Stacks in HPC [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/containers_scientific/attachments/paper/2411/export/events/attachments/containers_scientific/paper/2411/charliecloud.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I have no affiliation to this project, just thought some of the features and implementation is very interesting, and might be of interest to the community.

See also: [https://hpc.github.io/charliecloud/](https://hpc.github.io/charliecloud/)</comment>


Show HN: CSSBattle–CSS Code Golfing Platform - <AUTHOR> https://cssbattle.dev/ <comment><USER2> Interesting concept! Please nominate your project for "Project Of The Month" award at [https://www.gyrocode.com/articles/project-of-the- month-2019-...](https://www.gyrocode.com/articles/project-of-the- month-2019-04/) to get more exposure.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to get everyone excited. Players are replicating image targets with mere 57 characters of CSS code!!</comment>


Show HN: Cuda-bootstrap.com – One liner to install CUDA on Linux based machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.cuda-bootstrap.com <comment><USER2> s!Linux!Ubuntu

FWIW: [https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/cuda/](https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/cuda/)</comment>


Tell HN: Looking to pass on the ownership of two open source projects - <AUTHOR> I have two open source websites/services that are semi-popular. I'm looking to pass on the ownership and domain names of these products to someone who I can trust to run them. If you're interested in running one or both of them please let me know! My email is in my profile, or you can reply to this thread.
1) Hipster Domain Finder 2.0
https://github.com/bramgg/hipster-domain-finder
Uses Python 3 and Flask. Find short & sweet single word domain hacks with Hipster Domain Finder. All domains listed should be available for registration. HDF has been used by hundreds of thousands of domain searchers. The website went down a few days ago, and I've received emails from people asking if it will go back up. Note: HDF uses Domainr's old API, and needs to be updated to their new API (free).
2) 99 Haskell
https://github.com/bramgg/99haskell
Solve live Haskell coding problems based on H-99 in the browser to strengthen your understanding of the language. 99 Haskell is made entirely in Haskell, including Haskell based pre-processors for the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I've never put analytics on 99 Haskell, but I'm certain it's had a significant amount of users. It's one of the first results for people searching for Haskell problems on Google. Note that like HDF, 99 Haskell is down now but you can see a gif of it in action on the GitHub README. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable

[https://github.com/bramgg/hipster-domain- finder](https://github.com/bramgg/hipster-domain-finder)

[https://github.com/bramgg/99haskell](https://github.com/bramgg/99haskell)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'd be interested. Are you still looking for someone to take over HDF?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't handed it over to anyone yet. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> But you didn't explain why you want to do that

<comment><AUTHOR> Normally if I get tired of maintaining and paying for monthly hosting of something I just let it die. In this case there are too many users of these services for me to comfortably do that.

<comment><USER4> And about how much per month was each one?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know, I had them running on EC2 instances with a million other things.

Hipster Domain Finder could probably run for $10 a month on DO, and 99 Haskell for $20 a month.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the FDA Reviews Proposed Drug Names [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/DrugSafety/MedicationErrors/ucm080867.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Of potential interest, you can actually request a copy of the source code for the program they use for name analysis.</comment>


Should High-Frequency Trading Be Banned?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/03/28/should-high-frequency-trading-be-banned-one-nobel-winner-thinks-so/

<comment><USER2> A while ago someone made the interesting point that the costs of HFT are not being accounted for, from a free-market perspective. Exchanges typically charge for completed trades, not for orders, so traders can flood exchanges with very large amounts of orders. In practice, traders that flood exchanges will face penalties--but that only slows the arms race.

The natural economic question is: if HFT traders are making more orders than is efficient, who loses? The answer almost certainly has to be the exchange, and those traders who are losing the time race to HFT's order-spamming advantage. But when Joe the Consumer places an order on the exchange, he always get the best price--it's hard to imagine a way Joe, or even Joe's Mutual Fund, can anything but benefit from HFT.

<comment><USER3> So they should have a very small fee for orders as well, proportional to its actual cost, but not high enough to dissuade people experimenting with pricing as long as they don't cost other people anything.

<comment><USER4> Typically there is a (very low) order fee - off the top of my head, I'm not sure if it's levied by the broker or matching engine.

There is also a limit on the number of orders one can place. Your broker will typically demand fill rates of at least 0.5-1% and will impose limits on the number of orders you can place in a rolling window.

<comment><USER5> Not in my experience. Most HFT shops only pay if an order fills; and if they are adding liquidity to stocks, they get a rebate.

If your messages/fills ratio gets REALLY wacky, the exchange might complain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely, and all traders should be required to use rotary dial phones to even the playing field further. While we're at it, speaking into the phone at faster than 200 words per minute should also be banned.

<comment><USER7> I'm leery of HFT, but not out of concern of a level playing field. Consider a market for some commodity. Start with the simplest market--people who produce the commodity sell directly to those who use it. Let's also assume external factors that affect the supply and demand for the commodity are stable over a long period of time.

After a number of transactions have been done, and the information about these has spread among the buyers and sellers, the market should converge on some price for that commodity, which will then be stable.

When some real world event happens that affects supply (a late snow wipes out newly planted crops, for instance) or demand (Justin Bieber turns vegetarian causing millions of teen girls to give up meat), the market will adjust to a new price.

A key thing to note here is that the price depends on real world events and the knowledge the actual produces and consumers of the good have of those events.

Now introduce intermediaries who trade in the commodity, but do not product it or consume it. They speed up the rate of transactions, and help the flow of price information, and so arguable help the market settle on the correct and stable price--basically the price you'd have in the direct market adjusted to take into account the increased transaction cost of having an intermediary.

Since the correct price economically ultimately depends on the factors that affect supply and demand (the weather, Justin Bieber, and so on), my concern is that if trading by intermediaries becomes too fast you can get to a point where the price is not being driven by the real world factors, but rather by traders reacting to other traders.

In other words, could HFT make the feedback loops that allows a market to set prices too strong? Feedback as a control mechanism in general is a good and useful thing, but too much feedback and it can become self sustaining, and the output of the system depends less on external inputs than it should (or even not at all).

Until there's solid analysis showing that HFT can't lead to the bad kind of feedback, I'd rather see it approached cautiously.

<comment><USER6> I think your argument is essentially an argument against speculation. All of the fears you cite apply equally to any form of speculation.

The problem is, many things count as speculation -- a farmer who produces a commodity buying insurance against a poor crop is ultimately a futures contract.

The way I think of HFT is that it's like increasing the fidelity of a recording from 11 kilohertz to 44.1 kilohertz. There are a lot more intermediate data points, but the underlying rationality (or irrationality) of pricing trends will be the same.

Before HFT, it was more likely that a bid/ask spread would be higher ... reflecting the risk aversion of the market making firm... With HFT, that spread decreases b/c the liquidity is offered as part of a small timeframe strategy which may or may not pay off.

If you weren't concerned with that short timeframe, then it makes no difference to you whether your order was filled by one party (a traditional market maker) or 100 parties (each a different HFT algorithm).

I think to assuage your fear I'd probably just say that it's very difficult to move large numbers of shares at a price that's all that different from the previous price... So any HFT algorithm will necessarily be dealing either with largely uncontroversial prices or very small share volumes.

Considering that, I think the overall risk of rogue algorithms leading to a harmful feedback loop is not significantly increased by HFT, and HFT was mostly a scapegoat in the recent crash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why can the banks have high-frequency trading, yet still not have instant transfers between accounts?

<comment><USER9> One creates directly attributable profits with little, if any, ongoing exposure. The other creates little, if any directly attributable profits.

Furthermore, if the transfer is from one bank to another, the sender wants to hold onto the funds for as long as possible to earn more interest.

Lastly, most retail banks probably still run ancient code that is not as conducive to innovation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Or a $.001 tax per transaction.

</comment><comment><USER11> Let me begin by saying that I likely do not understand even half of what HFT is.

For me, they key part that I fail to understand is exactly what value HFT adds to non speculative market participants. The only explanation I've heard so far is that HFT adds "liquidity" to the market, but I don't get how. Let V be the value HFT adds to non speculative players.

If V is above zero, then allow HFT to continue. If V is zero or negative, my proposal would be not to ban HFT, but to restrict it to transactions made between HFT players. Then let them play in their casino all they want until one player is left. If this suggestion cannot be implemented because HFT needs the rest of the market to make profits, then I highly suspect that V is less or below zero and that HFT is really one of the Casino owners.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it. If the flash crash brought down the market drastically for 20 minutes, only to pull it back up, this only points to an opportunity for a more intelligent algorithm to be allowed to correct that and make money in the process. I can understand this as being an example of the state of the art being pretty dumb/gullible to multiplying its own noise, but I don't understand why this would be bad. Didn't the algos selling during the low and buying stocks later lose money?

<comment><USER4> _Didn't the algos selling during the low and buying stocks later lose money?_

Not necessarily, many trades were broken (mostly trades near the low).

If you sold low and bought halfway to the high, you probably made money since your sale was broken (but not the buy).

<comment><USER3> So the problem was that the trades were broken, not HFT per se.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My main annoyance with HFT is that it clearly is a "game". A few times algorithms have misbehaved badly, whole blocks of trades have been rolled back.

<comment><USER3> Well, if the algos can make money they should also be allowed to lose money. How else would you have efficiency?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about a tax on capital gains that is inversely proportional to the time the financial instrument is held?

The biggest cost HFT imposes on the world is the brain drain - there are so many super intelligent people working in the arms race that is electronic trading. Imagine if all of those smart people were doing something productive instead of helping people buy and sell options 1 microsecond faster.

<comment><USER14> I find the "talented people not fulfilling their potential" argument terrible. That's often cited as one of the costs of HFT, but its really true of a lot of human pursuits.

It just so happens that the prevailing sentiment is that finance, and HFT in particular are particularly immmoral, so its a popular notion; I find it as "bad" that hordes of talented engineers work on optimizing ad revenue for Google.

Humans will always be underemployed from some perspective ("Oh but she could be doing X"). Penalizing them for not operating in a way that is consistent with your (or anyone's) world view is far more sinister.

<comment><USER15> The fact that smart people's time is also wasted on other types of work doesn't mean there is no such thing as wasting time.

Do you really believe it's meaningless to talk about time being misspent? Would you call it sinister for example to criticize someone for spending their time murdering people at random?

<comment><USER16> I imagine he would call the murdering part sinister, as opposed to the time spent doing something other than what is optimal.

I agree with the GP that the opportunity cost argument is so wholly dependent on the judgment of the debated activity that it doesn't really pertain one way or the other.

That said, HFT doesn't strike me as something that adds value to the economy.

<comment><USER15> Baberuth and I are talking about whether it's sinister for A to criticize B's actions, not whether B's actions are sinister.

<comment><USER16> "Would you call it sinister for example to criticize someone for spending their time murdering people at random?"

I'm saying it depends on what A is criticizing about B. It is not sinister for A to criticize B's action. I'm not sure if it's sinister for A to criticize B's misallocation of time spent. It's a weird thing to think about. I think it's weird to think about because, as was my point earlier, the judgment of whether the time was misspent is wholly dependent on the judgment of the way the time was spent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How about turned based trading? Once an hour, on the hour, results published at half past...

<comment><USER18> Something I've favored considering. Put the exchange on a stepped clock. Randomize order processing within each step.

I don't care if a lot of people lose their financial jobs. Through their own actions as much as resulting events, they've demonstrated themselves to be harmful parasites.

Modern society depends upon a degree of stability and predictability. Current market evolution has been heading in the opposite direction. Time to reign it in to its role as tool, not goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Depends on how you define 'High-Frequency Trading'</comment>


Ask HN: Multi Dimensional Spreadsheet to visualize data about your business? - <AUTHOR>

Our startup accounting sucks, I have no idea where money is going to and coming from (and don't let me start about time...). Accounting is just an example, this can be applied to many problems.
So today I was playing with Excel trying to understand something in my business... but boy was it a mess, took me 10 minutes to understand I wasn't going to have something that made sense on it.
Yes Excel/OpenOffice calc etc can be used as multidimensional with pages but seeing data spread accross pages really becomes a mess.
I have four main dimensions:
1) The date in which a passage of money happened
2) Which client or provider the income/expense is relative to
3) Where will the money go/be taken (paypal, bank account, credit card...)
4) How much taxes (VAT or work related ones for example) applies to that amount (optionally this one can go with the third dimension)
Those are "full" dimensions as I call them because I will need to do calculations on all of them.
I was hoping in not having to use a database and a programming language for this but if there was some piece of software similar to a multidimensional spreadsheet that did the trick. What are business analysts using these days?
I have no formal math training so I'm not looking for an enterprise solution that I think will come in handy for really a lot of things for us "metric visualization" nerds
I also know there might but since i'm a metric visualization nerd I want to learn to use a multidimensional spreadsheet (and you should too) since it will be often useful for startups and gaining insight into how a business works. <comment><USER2> Dump Excel, it's useless for this kind of analysis.

A TRUE multi-dimensional spreadsheet was Lotus Improv (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv>). Brilliant software, easy to use, but killed by corporate stupidity - Lotus was afraid that it might interfere with their sales of 1-2-3...

Quantrix Modeler (<http://www.quantrix.com/>) is the modern replacement, definitely deserves wider recognition.

Incidentally, Improv came with a demonstration animation explaining its concept and advantages; you get one of those rare 'aha!' moments while watching it! It really was a revolutionary, next-generation product.

Contact me if you're not sure where to obtain Improv... ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> How exactly do I contact you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Excel is probably the right answer because it is cheap, universal, and good enough. You certainly can do multidimenional analysis.

Another tool to consider, although I haven't used it personally is Tableau Desktop (<http://www.tableausoftware.com/>). It is especially good at helping you understand your data if you are more of a visual person.

</comment><comment><USER4> back in the day i used something called Essbase to do financial modelling for $megacorp it was/is a multidimensional solution, and would seem to fit your needs.

i'm not sure what the current status of it is, but it could be a good starting point to research some more modern options.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> I second pivot tables. But there are also calculations like VLOOKUP and SUMIF that help.

</comment><comment><USER6> Two words: pivot tables</comment>


The Future of Ecommerce in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyOIqzkAzgc <comment><USER2> The future of E-commerce will be good in 2020. As more people are now going online for their products rather than having a physical shop. Because people want to sit at the comforts of their home and fulfill their needs. Their is a great opportunity for startups in India after the new budget 2020 [https://www.taxolawgy.com/budget-2020-for- startups/](https://www.taxolawgy.com/budget-2020-for-startups/).</comment>


Thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate" - <AUTHOR> https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/10/totalitarian-physics-moral-threshing <comment><USER2> One of his other books "A Writer at War : a Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945" is an excellent, if censored description of WW2 from an eyewitness on the Soviet side.

Its description of the liberation of Treblinka [0] was used at the Nuremberg Trials.

[0] [https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-human- behavior/hell-...](https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-human- behavior/hell-of-treblinka-vasily-grossman)

<comment><USER3> I'll toss in my two cents in support of this recommendation. It provides a great narrative history of the Eastern Front. Somehow Grossman is on the periphery of every major event of the Eastern Front.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a wonderful book. The title is a clear play on Tolstoy's masterpiece about the previous invasion of Russia, but so what? I was introduced to it by a dear friend whose father was purged by Stalin so it's doubly poignant.

<comment><USER5> I still don't understand how a single person could have created a convincing and compassionate portrait for such a wide range of characters. I think this range is much larger than what you have in "War and Peace". An awe-inspiring book...

(I read the book as series of publications in a soviet literary journal some thirty years ago, time moves fast if you come to think of it)

<comment><USER6> I haven't read this but that's really high praise considering how war and peace is impressive in exactly that way

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > 'Life and Fate' depicts Communism and Fascism as ideological mirror-images, > two quarreling heads on one great monster.

I'm really worried that Grossman's definition is pretty unpopular now, because ignoring that may lead to similar monstrosities in the future.

<comment><USER8> That's nonsense, it's not his definition at all.</comment></comment>


The Computer Language Benchmarks Game - <AUTHOR> http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/index.html <comment><USER2> Now the website is focused on the needs of the vast majority who only make one or two comparisons -- the choices they never used are no longer in their way.

If you're one of the minuscule number who desperately need some arbitrary comparison then:

\- click the desired language implementations on the home page

\- if those do not show the comparison you need, mouse-over some of the program links and you'll see the required URL parameters

\- plug the required URL parameters into the address-bar

For example: lang=typescript&lang2=swift

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=typescript&lang2=swift)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This used to be a site where you could compare how two different language implementations performed on some problem. Now it seems to restrict which languages can be directly compared. It might be a good project for someone to bring back some of the old functionality.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, the site has lost focus.</comment></comment>


FreeDOS's Linux Roots - <AUTHOR> https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/freedoss-linux-roots <comment><USER2> What can I do that is moderately interesting with freedos? I've downloaded it a couple of times, but I never found anything useful to do with it. I'm sure I could play some games, or something. I really want to actually learn it.

<comment><USER3> Unless you want to work specifically with FreeDOS, you might look at DOSBox instead. It's a MS-DOS emulator that runs in user space, rather than running as the OS, thus a lower barrier to entry.

<comment><USER4> The utilities provided by FreeDOS are generally more complete than those provided by DOSBox. You can copy them into your DOSBox installation for the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos](https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos) may also be interesting

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shouldn't it say GNU roots? I expected to read they borrowed code from Linux for their kernel and was curious what exactly the similarities would be between Linux and FreeDOS's kernel given that DOS doesn't even do multi- tasking, but the article only talks about them reimplementing GNU.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the comments on the article proper makes me so sad. It basically says "What a monumental waste of effort. You should have spent your time improving Linux and not recreating DOS."

It's fine if you don't get the allure of this project. But to presume to tell someone how they should spend their own time is ridiculous to me. The creator of FreeDOS set out to do something, succeeded, and enjoyed their time doing it. And this person is telling them they're wrong.

</comment><comment><USER7> How does freedos handle newer hardware? I remember giving up on my super DOS boot disc about a decade+ ago when it wouldn't boot anymore. If memory serves it was around the end of IDE drives, but I could be wrong. Maybe it had to do with EFI.

<comment><USER8> FreeDOS, like MSDOS, relies on BIOS calls to control the hardware. Most PCs aren't pure EFI-only and can still boot with some BIOS compatibility, but of course not all of the BIOS implementations are bug-free.

When legacy BIOS compatibility is truly dead, I guess DOS will die with it.

<comment><USER9> I suspect that when we get computers that are pure EFI and completely free of legacy BIOS, it will be possible to use something like SeaBIOS to continue to add back BIOS compatibility for use with tools like FreeDOS.

<comment><USER10> I've tried booting FreeDOS on my Chromebook with SeaBIOS installed, and it just does not handle it well. The system will completely lock up when running most programs or even just by hitting the Tab key. FreeDOS doesn't even boot unless I have it skip loading AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS on startup.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for posting that. Sounds like SeaBIOS or FreeDOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Curious. How exactly does one build embedded applications for FreeDOS? What languages/compiles can I use?

<comment><USER12> [http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc- stuff/freedos/files/dist...](http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc- stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/group-devel.html)

<comment><USER13> Rexx! Loved that on OS/2, pretty happy to see that it has a home on FreeDOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought freedos was written in fasm

</comment><comment><USER15> You know, the fact that their tools were originally Linux explains why the tools are so bloated and slow compared to the MS-DOS utilities I still use like EDIT, TREE, and MORE. It also explains why FreeDOS won't install on PCs I have which install and run DR-DOS and MS-DOS just fine.

<comment><USER16> Thats linux. Not UNIX. I think tool suites from companies now dead made tiny-c and the like, and had tractably small memory model, split i+d stuff in the c compiler toolchain. Not much work on them. Why not?

Well.. targeting 8086, 80286 was somehow off the radar for a bunch of people. I think because a lot of flight ready milspec stuff ran on 6502 or 6800, and especially the latter was a classic gordon-moore model simple register==memory model, a lot more ports went into 6800(x)

Interesting to think if IBM had selected a motorola CPU like this instead of an Intel, or if Intel had been in a mood to adopt a PDP11 instruction set... what the world would be like.

As a DEC-10 and PDP11 and Vax person, I used CP/M, it was ok. I could survive. MS-DOS blind-sided me. I had no idea what was coming down the pipe. talk about walking into a room of razors with closed eyes.</comment></comment>


Color e-paper will be the big new e-reader trend - <AUTHOR> https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/what-is-next-for-ereaders-in-2020 <comment><USER2> I just want an e-reader device that's A4 sized, suitable for technical documentation and other non-fiction lit, supports open sourced software (and isn't locked up in some kind of walled garden), and doesn't cost like a thousand euros.

<comment><USER3> Exactly! I want to scroll an A4 page smoothly and quickly, and navigate the whole document easily; it's been nearly a decade since the Kindle DX, but those basics are still absent from the standard size devices too - it doesn't bode well for the current technological choice for screens.

I'm a huge fan of eReaders for fiction and normal reading, but they are still frustrating to the point of useless for tech docs and the like where pictures and non-sequential reading are the norm.</comment></comment>


Archive Fever: a love letter to the post real-time web - <AUTHOR> http://mattogle.com/archivefever/

<comment><USER2> The main-point is: To really do something useful with all the data we produce on the web daily, we need to have public APIs that allow to access old data.

In my opinion better than all Facebook of the world are things like HTML5, truly open standards that allow for simpler data-retrieval (even if its just web-scraping).

But if everyone (Twitter, FB, Tumblr, etc.) opened their APIs completely and released their data into the wild, who would profit then?

See sites like efreedom and other (basically) spammers: They make money with StackOverflow's contents.

Will Matthew's idea remain wishful thinking?

<comment><USER3> I see this as part of the challenge - being able to access archives while maintaining and controlling a hierarchy of usefulness/meaningfulness. I think the author would agree with you on the issues you bring up, but worrying about spam is part of building tools where you still get to choose who accesses your 'memories', as much as we choose who comes into our house and into our lives. Open standards for controlling access to data is needed alongside any building of memory aggregation tools.</comment></comment>


Fancy Dorms Aren't the Main Reason Tuition Is Skyrocketing - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/ <comment><USER2> The trick here is calling state appropriations "cuts" per student. Quick googling gives me a Temple enrollment of ~28k in 2000[0], and ~38k now.

[0]: Calculated out of [http://articles.philly.com/2004-03-17/news/25385870_1_latino...](http://articles.philly.com/2004-03-17/news/25385870_1_latino- students-minority-students-minority-numbers)

<comment><USER3> My impression was that states were essentially holding overall funding flat at the same time a higher proportion of the population is trying to get a college degree. I haven't been able to find a really good source to back that up, but it's certainly true that the percent of the population with college degrees has been rising over time. (See the chart at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Educational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png) for example.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > but by far the single biggest driver of rising tuitions for public colleges > has been declining state funding for higher education

Nonsense. The single biggest factor in rising tuition is that student debt cannot be discharged. Which means there's lots more money chasing student debt than would be otherwise. Which means schools can charge more. These effects can also be seen in rising tradeschool tuitions and the rise of other for profit education like University of Phoenix.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ok, so are the states spending more on other things? Or is it states are getting less tax dollars? Are states taxing less? Or are fewer people making significant amounts of money and those that are, are better at hiding/investing it in low tax shelters?</comment>


Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled?t=1599932392400 <comment><USER3> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979)

<comment><USER4> It was on the frontpage since yesterday. And the minute it drops off the frontpage, it gets spammed to the frontpage again. Unbelievable. Not only that another NPR story got spammed to the frontpage at the same time. Now that's interesting.

Edit: Looks like I touched a nerve.

<comment><USER5> How can a frontpage based on user votes contain spam? Seems like you're implying something nefarious going on in order to explain a huge + impactful story's presence here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is always a little surprising how naive people are when it comes to recycling. The majority of the cost and difficulty comes in sorting. Back in the good old days most US municipalities used to require people to sort their recycling by type, but over the years we have switched to a more wasteful system.

For aluminum cans the material is valuable and relatively easy to sort. For plastic the material is cheap and sorting is hard (if you can't tell what the plastic container you threw in the bin is made out of (HDPE?) in a second then it is trash).

FWIW this is also a relatively easy problem to fix. We could look to the brief but successful history of recycling in Taiwan as a good example to copy. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_Taiwan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_Taiwan))

<comment><USER7> No, plastic degrades each time it is recycled. They knew that, every materials scientist knew that, and it is just not possible to fully reclaim recycled plastic.

What really pisses me off is the use of the recycling number as marketing. Which is still ongoing and being modernized. Leave a complaint card any time you see compostable plastic being used in a city that doesn't have specialized industrial composting plants, that stuff is worse than trash because it's also misleading about how to dispose of it and makes the store look green when it's really just making things worse.

In almost all locations, PLA, "compostable plastic" (often labeled number 7 or 0 for marketing) is not only not recyclable but actively contaminates compost and recycling plants. I see all these places using "compostable plastic" because they think it's more environmentally friendly. It's a noble goal, it makes me so sad to see.

The stores that pick those containers do so because they want to project an environmentally conscious image, and the "eco" marketing on this utter trash gets them to pay top dollar for those containers instead of just using paper. I feel so bad for these stores, it takes a PhD to dispose of this misleading and dangerous material properly.

As a normal consumer, if I saw that logo and "compostable plastic" guess where I'd throw it. Compost? Recycling? Probably one or the other right? Wrong, if I put it in the compost I make the compost produced from the food scraps contaminated and unsafe for use. If I put it in the recycling it gets melted in with other polymers and contaminates them, degrading the other plastic even faster if the whole batch doesn't need to be thrown away outright.

Edit: The one saving grace is that I _know_ that where I live trash is incinerated. So at least I feel less bad throwing this stuff in the trash. It was just oil that made a temporary detour as a container before being burned for electricity. Still, I'd rather they just use unadulterated paper (no little plastic spouts glued on), glass, and aluminum which are all easily recycled or burn clean.

<comment><USER8> It depends if fully reclaiming it _as plastic_ is the goal. That's the current model, but there are other routes available. Two options that don't quite work yet (but have moderately promising potential) are either to break the plastic down to useful precursors with enzymes, or pyrolise it down to biochar.

To my knowledge, the enzyme approach has shown a modicum of promise in labs but is still impractical, while making biochar is really, really easy. We just need a market for it. Unfortunately, the very group of people who could make the biggest use of it (and are most likely to) are blocked by policy: you can't have an Organic label on your farm produce if you put biochar in the soil.

<comment><USER9> Huh, I've always considered organics as biochar inputs. Thanks for pointing out that plastics can be used that way. Have you seen any work done about addressing release of toxins when burning plastic?

<comment><USER10> It's obviously not biochar though. It might be similarly useful, but the bio in bio char is about the material coming from plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not just touted, but actively pushed legislative requirements that lied to consumers.

> Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, > starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to > lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — > even if there was no way to economically recycle it.

<comment><USER12> The blame is always shifted to the consumers, the logic being that consumers would make more sustainable decisions if they really cared about it, totally ignoring that it's either prohibitively expensive for many or almost impossible to judge the sustainability for many products.

<comment><USER13> If consumers were compensated for recycling materials they would be much more inclined to sort properly. Recycling centers that take materials that cost too much to recycle likely have a government contract to "take care of it". They dont have a lot of incentive to be efficient. They get paid to make it disappear.

<comment><USER14> I don't know about where you live, but in California, we have a "bottle deposit" on both glass bottles and aluminum cans (~$0.10 per item), which gets returned to you if you bring it to a recycling center. The only people I see actually bothering to sort and return these are very low income people and homeless people that go through public trash cans.

<comment><USER15> In Denmark its 1-3kr, or 15-50¢, depending on the size and material of the container.

Plenty of cans are collected by homeless / lowest income people, but it's also just about enough that average people will collect them too.

If I have a huge bag after a party, I return them. When I normally only have 0-2 bottles in a typical week, I take them outside and put them on the little shelf on the bin for someone to collect without needing to rummage: [https://www.magasinetkbh.dk/sites/default/files/public/style...](https://www.magasinetkbh.dk/sites/default/files/public/styles/975x600_manual_crop/public/migrated/nyheder/field_artikler_stort_billede/pantholder- dsc_0013.jpg?itok=7MWZoupy)

New food packaging can only use recycled material collected in this way. The general household recycling is considered too dirty.

<comment><USER16> This mirrors my experience in Germany. We would often save up a dozen or so bottles and bring them all to the grocery store where they could be returned. If we had a beer on the way to the bars we would typically just set the empty next to a garbage bin for someone to collect and return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you go to Switzerland it opens your eyes a bit - there's no plastic recycling, there's only PET plastic recycling. If the bottle/whatever is not PET, it's not recycleble and you have to buy special, taxed bag that's used for "everything else" that gets burned/whatever. PET plastic can be recycled to lower grade plastic used for outdoor mats etc.

<comment><USER18> Same in Japan.

<comment><USER19> On the other hand, packaging (and thus plastic waste) in Japan is next-level ridiculous. A fancier food present will be often wrapped in at least 3 layers, and I've counted u to 5: bag, present paper, normal box, group package, individual package.

<comment><USER20> On the other foot, Japan is next-level clean and don't think I've ever seen trash there on the streets, especially not like in South America. So more plastic in packaging but more goes into bins, wonder if it equalizes out on harm-done compared to Japan?

<comment><USER21> > So more plastic in packaging but more goes into bins, wonder if it equalizes > out on harm-done compared to Japan?

in japan, most trash is incinerated... ive never looked into it, but i suspect that some amount of that turns into fine-grained soot (e.g not very healthy)

<comment><USER19> They have these very fancy incineration towers distributed around Tokyo, I suspect they do filter _a lot_ of the stuff being burned since I have never even seen them throw smoke nor smelled any burning:

[https://www.tokyotimes.com/mysterious-tower-in- tokyo/](https://www.tokyotimes.com/mysterious-tower-in-tokyo/)

<comment><USER21> thats good to know, i wonder if there are some differences between older and newer inceneration facilities...

when i lived near the ocean in kawasaki there was always some black fine- grained soot that would slowly build up over the year on a veranda, and wondered if it wasnt the nearby incinerators...

<comment><USER22> Hm, harbour, ships? And in general dust from the tires and brakes of cars and trucks? In 2014 one container giant coming into the port here had a little mishap, burning heavy bunker oil which is only allowed at high seas. Turned on the fire alarms in a hospital 1 km away from the river, and several others too :-)

[https://www.fotocommunity.de/photo/schwefelpilz-ms-yang- ming...](https://www.fotocommunity.de/photo/schwefelpilz-ms-yang-ming-utmost- loest-ulrich-zunke/34812441)

[https://www.mopo.de/action/mopo/23044568/search?query=yang+m...](https://www.mopo.de/action/mopo/23044568/search?query=yang+ming+utmost)

<comment><USER21> > Hm, harbour, ships? And in general dust from the tires and brakes of cars > and trucks?

hmmm that probably makes more sense, yea

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's another one about paper recycling that I read in a book once. Surprisingly it's not discussed very much at all and its hard for me to judge how accurate it is.

"Recycling paper is not worth it. The paper we use is grown specifically to be harvested and used in paper. The act of growing and using this paper is a form of carbon sequestration. When we recycle paper, we lose out in an opportunity to sequester more carbon from the air. Landfills prevent the carbon in paper from re-entering the carbon cycle."

I think the most convincing argument against this is that the tree farms take up land that could be used for other purposes.

</comment><comment><USER24> Reduce, reuse, recycle - meaning recycling is the last option.

It's better to not consume plastic in the first place, but if you must, find additional uses for it.

It takes more of a lifestyle change though than to simply put your cans in a different barrel. Which is probably why few people are willing to try it.

<comment><USER25> I feel Americans tend to over-consume and undervalue reuse. I always get made fun of for selling my used things on ebay and also buying used instead of new.

<comment><USER26> I've heard that sentiment many decades ago too. I suspect it's because things cost the same price everywhere due to international trade but labor for repairing is cheaper in most other countries because they have lower incomes than America. So it may just be a rational economic decision, not the wrong amount of consumption and reuse.

<comment><USER25> There's a lot of friction when it comes to buying used (no warranty, no guarantees). Used doesn't necessarily mean it requires repair, but people often don't bother to re-sell things they aren't using and manufacturers have policies that try to destroy the used market (non transferrable warranties, planned obsolescence, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd love to see a class action lawsuit keeping the people who lied accountable for the amount of additional waste in effort, resources that are used to separate and collect these separate streams.

Stuff like this (h/t @neltnerb): >>In almost all locations, PLA, "compostable plastic" (often labeled number 7 or 0 for marketing) is not only not recyclable but actively contaminates compost and recycling plants. I see all these places using "compostable plastic" because they think it's more environmentally friendly. It's a noble goal, it makes me so sad to see.

So many groups would have standing to sue here...

<comment><USER28> > I'd love to see a class action lawsuit keeping the people who lied > accountable for the amount of additional waste in effort, resources that are > used to separate and collect these separate streams.

The minuscule punishment that can be visited on the people involved in things like this won't clean up a molecule of the damage done, and won't be a deterrent for people who would do it in future (or who are doing similar things now.)

Revenge isn't a cure, executing murderers never brings people back to life. The problem is a system that gives a small number of people the power to cause such widespread damage for a relatively tiny amount of personal benefit. The amount of damage that has been done for a $10K bribe, or to keep a $150K/yr job, etc. is immeasurable. It's not scalable to track down or filter out people who will put their personal security or comfort ahead of yours, or your entire town's. We have to accept that the way that power is distributed is dangerously uneven, and consciously prevent that.

Also, let's not kid ourselves. This story will fade and be forgotten, and the practices will continue. The ability to stop powerful people from doing what they want to do isn't dependent on the consequences of what they do, but on the power that you have to stop them. Power comes from solidarity. They have it, through their command structure, and we don't. The American mind has retreated into various competing fantasies and myths; there's no chance for solidarity among the victims of these types of material harms.

<comment><USER27> Its (obviously) not about the renumeration of any individual, but about accountability of the source. There are several examples - Tabacco, Asbestos, Bopal, Oil, Medication, ... where billions of dollars of fines assessed against the sources, not exactly small numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have difficulties to understand if that's US specific or also a problem in Europe and the rest of the world.

For example, I'm reading this article from 2011 that mentions that 77% of Japan's plastic is recycled: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/29/japan- le...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/29/japan-leads-field- plastic-recycling)

Is that complete bullshit too, or is something possible to actually achieve, just not in the US?

<comment><USER30> I suspect "recycling" there means something like "separated and sent to Thailand to fuel cement kilns".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I see the solution as just a better recycling symbol that a machine can easily recognize. Instead of the 7 broad categories, have 1000 highly specific categories and tag each piece in such a way that a machine can read the tag and sort it accordingly.

Number 1 plastic with water and number 1 plastic with yoghurt should have different tags because one may be contaminated and one not. The former might still be #1. The latter would be #278.

Solving the sorting problem would make recycling a lot more economical as that is where a lot of the costs are.

<comment><USER10> With single stream everything is contaminated.

And then many of the categories simply aren't worth anything, sorted or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It doesn't help when progressive cities like Seattle provide giant recycling bins to houses with no charge for pickup, while charging regressive high prices for small regular garbage bins. It's a huge incentive just to throw excess plastic and foam bits into the recycling - people do not like getting charged another $5 for a one-time extra garbage bag pickup.

<comment><USER33> I think it is also just a huge incentive to simply throw anything into recycling bins. Just glancing inside the one at my complex reveals it is used as a normal trash bin by many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> When I first heard that in the US they just throw all "recycling" in the same bin it sounded insane. I'm used to sorting into colored glass, clear glass, paper, cardboard, metal, compost, batteries, plastic and "general".

I'm pretty sure the metal and plastic (if it actually is ever recycled) categories could benefit from better segmentation too.

<comment><USER7> Metal and plastic are super easy to separate by density or by electrical conductivity. Batteries are considered hazardous waste and have to be disposed of separately, similarly for old electronics or CFL bulbs that contain mercury.

But commingled recycling was one of the most predictably stupid moves in the area of environmentalism I've seen in a long time (well, prior to 2016 anyway), when I heard my city was moving to commingled recycling I knew they were no longer actually recycling it, I guarantee almost all of it ends up in the landfill because of contamination. It's so frustrating.

At least corn ethanol wasn't obviously quite so stupid upfront, it was always theoretically possible that it would make sense even if it was kind of obvious it wouldn't actually work.

<comment><USER34> > Metal and plastic are super easy to separate by density or by electrical > conductivity

Yeah, what I meant by better segmentation is not to separate them from each other (we do that) but rather by type. Some plastics are easier to recycle than others and I don't know if metals can be easily and automatically sorted from each other.

<comment><USER7> Plastic separation is tricky, they tend to have similar physical properties so you end up relying on small density differences or optical properties or computer vision which is obviously not so great. I think most places it's still more cost effective to do it by hand.

Metals are easy to separate from one another, they tend to have substantially different densities and electrical properties. Aluminum for instance is not magnetic while steel cans are, but aluminum is conductive so if it passes through a magnetic field it will still get slowed down.

Those are the two big ones in any case. Then you could get to things like nickel (magnetic but intermediate conductivity) or tin (light but non magnetic) or maybe zinc/magnesium, but basically the densities are more different and the properties are more different so it's easier to tell them apart. And for some things that it can't figure out it makes sense to just landfill it.

Plastics though, absolutely vastly harder. You can use density but it only varies by a few percent. You can use diffraction gratings and cameras to see crystals and maybe sort a bit by that. But really it's just very hard, especially since the same polymer has different molecular weights and crystallinity. Your milk jug is milky while the same molecule processed differently is clear.

But even that's a mess -- you can't generally "depolymerize" these things very easily, you are really melting them back together and reusing the melt. When you start from monomers you can control the molecular weight (chain length) which controls things like crystallinity and stiffness, so the quality is higher. If you melt a variety of different molecular weights back together even if they're the same exact molecule the physical properties will just by worse. It's just the nature of the beast, and it sucks.

Even if you recycle by perfectly melting all the PET with perfect sorting and no food residue you'll be guaranteed to increase the variability in the physical properties of the output. It's just chemistry, unless you can convert it back to monomers it'll never be as good even in the best case.

For metals at least you can count on a fairly full recovery if you invest in it, it's not like polymers where it's just not possible. Even with alloys like steel you can at least in principle go back to the raw materials if you wanted, even if they are quite tricky.

<comment><USER34> So what you're saying is that separating glass, cardboard, paper, compost, metal (which we can separate from one another if it is just metal by the methods you described) is valuable, but the all plastic can go in the "general" type, right?

Glass, cardboard, paper and compost are either recyclable or reusable, metal is recyclable when sorted correctly, and plastics are pretty much a no-go as the parent article suggests, right?

<comment><USER7> Except by burning it as fuel, yes, that's basically what I'm saying. I don't think this would be news to a material scientist trained since the 90s, but marketing is strong.

<comment><USER34> I think some people take the "plastic recycling is not viable" to mean that all recycling is not a thing, so I wanted to make sure I didn't misunderstand you about things like glass, cardboard, paper, metal and so on.

I think it's even harder to separate those concepts if you throw all recycling in the same bin.

<comment><USER7> I think the point of the NPR piece is that the recycling symbols started intentionally and have continued to be for marketing.

I don't think it's viable to recycle paper products meaningfully, but they're also made from farmed trees and burn so I don't object overmuch to them. Worst case they sequester carbon...

Glass is tricky and probably cheaper to make fresh right now but it's not that big a difference to recycle it. You'd only need a marginal incentive, or for sand to somehow become more expensive.

Metal is really worth recycling economically, energetically, and technically. Glass is worth keeping separate since it can be recycled pretty easily. Paper products frankly just burn em as biofuels.

Plastics... well... I just kind of wish they didn't exist except for special applications where their unique properties were necessary. They are space age, high performance, specialty materials and we use them like they're paper cups. Use PTFE for specialty tubing, great. Use rubber tires for cars, great.

Use plastics where the properties matter. Don't use it for cups... it's just so sad...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I discovered this last year when our city posted on FB that you couldn't put berry and salad clamshell containers in recycling because if these were found then the entire batch would go to the landfill. After some clarification basically only water and coke bottles are eligible here.

<comment><USER7> I have called up the waste disposal departments now in three different cities I've lived in (Somerville, Boulder, Oakland) and in none of the cases did the people working there have a clue about how recycling works. They just didn't know anything about plastic.

I'd be like "can I recycle polystyrene (number 6) here" and they'd answer with "put any rigid plastic in the recycling" and I'm just like... that is not how it works...

Surprise -- none of those three cities can recycle polystyrene. That's what those clamshells are usually made of. Same material as packing peanuts, potentially my least favorite invention of the modern shipping industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is there maybe an opportunity to use machine learning and vision here to perhaps create a business ? Anyone working on this ?

<comment><USER37> [https://www.youtube.com/c/Bulkhandlingsystems/videos](https://www.youtube.com/c/Bulkhandlingsystems/videos) has demos of automatic sorting machines.

<comment><USER36> From the looks of those machines (size) it looks to be a big business already

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm in Chicago. Literally every time I see a garbage truck, it's dumping the recyclables in with the trash. This doesn't surprise me at all.

<comment><USER39> That's a common urban myth. The trucks have several compartments.

<comment><USER22> Not where I live, at least not for glass. I can see down into them from above and it all goes into the same bin. No separation at all.

<comment><USER39> Which doesn't make sense, since glass is relatively easy and economical to recycle. (I'm not saying what you say is untrue, there's a lot of things in the world that doesn't make sense.)

<comment><USER22> I know. Just wanted to say: "I can confirm this so called urban myth."

It's not that I'd been that interested in it, just read about it, and looked into it afterwards. And it happens. Again and again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Just thought I would share an album I made from a trip to a Bay Area recycling facility. I shot a bunch of slow mo of recycling machinery.

It's pretty crazy that they can't sort black plastic because the machine relies on IR light to sense plastic type. We've got all these machine learning engineers in the area and probably not so many of them are working on real practical solutions to problems like trash sorting.

[https://imgur.com/gallery/IK5zKkO](https://imgur.com/gallery/IK5zKkO)

</comment><comment><USER41> Non-aluminium recycling doesn't make a whole lot of sense in North America.

For plastics, you can make some case for PET recycling, but little else is at all practical.

Paper recycling is doable, but basically pointless when we have such high volumes of farmed pulp trees, and new pulp is more efficient than ever.

The one thing I could see working well is a subsidized glass reuse program. I know a lot of people who prefer to get things in glass anyhow, and cleaning/sanitizing glass at an industrial scale is an existing capability.

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too, since that can be easily separated from the waste stream magnetically.

Glass, I don't think makes sense, except for downcycling to aggregate.

<comment><USER41> > _I 'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too_

Oh, sure, forgot that. Though steel and iron are not that common in household waste where I'm from.

I specifically point to glass _reuse_ rather than glass _recycling_. As soon as you have to process glass, the energy costs are massive.

<comment><USER42> The recycling rate for gold also asymptotically approaches 100%. There's plenty of money in recycling catalytic converters too. There's probably some clever economic law waiting for someone to name it after himself about recycling of metals and their market value.

Also we've all heard stories of, let's call it aggressive proactive copper recycling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Corporations lying to ensure revenue? No, I don't believe it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Food waste in landfills is arguably a much bigger problem than plastics being dumped into landfills. The acid produced from the decomposing organics eats away plastics and metals, creating a toxic leachate. Landfills try to contain that, but it is not contained 100%. That stuff leaks out into soil, potentially into aquifers. Furthermore the methane gases can build up in the landfill with potentially explosive consequences. Many landfills add vertical pipes to vent it, but it isn't captured for later use, contributing to greenhouse gases.

Contrast that with being able to process food waste onsite (or at least the neighborhood level) using the carbon cycle -- vermicomposting and conventional composting. They feed the plant, and unlike oil-based fertilizers, they help build up soil fertility long-term.

There are many more actions an individual can take that contributes towards the health of the ecology. I think a lot of people latch onto recycling because it is one of the few things people know how to do that they think contributes towards a better ecology. But there are so many more impactful things individuals and communities can do, that does not depend upon forcing large megacorps to do the right thing.

</comment><comment><USER44> I can't count the amount of flack I got for telling people about this years ago.

</comment><comment><USER45> > Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to > China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the > U.S. for buyers.

So isn't a part of the article only relevant to the US, and other countries which were exporting plastic trash rather than actually recycling/using for derivative products?

> Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, > but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive.

> Recycling plastic is "costly,"

By now, we should be well enough educated to say: "What do you mean by expensive or costly?"

Does it mean...

* Costs a lot of money in the current socio-economic order?

* Requires a lot of human effort?

* Requires a lot of electricity / other form of energy?

* Has a high carbon footprint (by some complex figuring)?

* Involves a process emitting pollutants?

If it's just the monetary cost, then in a sense - that doesn't matter. Just rearrange society so that either this is funded (or a non-monetary economy). If it's energy use - maybe it's worth it and it could be arranged to be done using solar collectors in the desert or whatever. And so on.

</comment><comment><USER46> Well China did buy it for recycling, but since that is changing, the corporate narrative needs to change too.

[https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/why-china-import- half-w...](https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/why-china-import-half-world- used-plastic.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> I wonder what the world would look like now if there never was any oil. We'd have missed out on a lot of industrialising. Would we have had as many wars? I guess we could still have got into space using methane. Will all the positive stuff oil's given us be undone by just how bad the climate gets? Interesting thought experiment!

<comment><USER47> Just realised it would probably just be a world filled with coal smoke, but at least less plastic pollution!

<comment><USER48> A jump from coal straight to nuclear and renewables would have been possible.

That said, there are an innumerable number of side effects from cheap fossil fuels that would change present reality as we know it were they removed.

Removing cheap fossil fuel energy could have drastically slowed down emigration from cities to the burbs, so it's also fun to imagine a different present where there's dozens of New York Cities spread around the nation, connected by mass transport, and separated by vast swaths of mostly empty land. As EV tech and internet became widespread, it's likely that the development of suburbia would only just begin to be happening now. Or not. Like you say though, fun thought experiment.

<comment><USER47> It's weird to think if we hadn't had fossil fuels at all how badly it would have hampered human development. Could we have even got to modern development level without so much free power? It doesn't seem likely. Perhaps the challenge would have forced us to come up with more imaginative solutions - <USER2> mean there's oceans full of hydrogen for starters. And the sun would still be shining and the oceans still full of waves!

<comment><USER49> > Could we have even got to modern development level without so much free > power?

It's only free if you don't consider externalities to be a cost.

<comment><USER47> Yeah of course, we know that now. I just mean could we have got to where we are now without it. How could we have done it differently?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Almost all the plastic trash I see is due to food takeout. If we simply were to require that food take out use reusable containers (special bins in public spaces, deliver people transport back to restaurant for home deliver) I think NYC could cut its waste by a huge portion.

<comment><USER51> I am sick of people saying problems are easy to fix by just enacting new laws or regulations. It is so naive. Reusable containers are relatively heavy and take up space in delivery vehicles. It will cost the restaurants time and money to do this. People won't spend the time to take the containers back so they will end up in the trash or people will find use for them. So all you've done is drive up food costs for low income folks and created more wasteful containers. How dumb is that?

<comment><USER22> While there may be some truth to this, another truth would be that as it is now we massively externalize the true costs by making it other peoples problems by shady schemes.

<comment><USER50> Yeah GP is presuming I want the regulation _and_ I expect the restaurant business to otherwise function the same. Of course I don't. We're finally accounting for the externalities, and if this makes some restaurants unprofitable so be it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> IIRC it's been a lie for quite a while where I live. It used to be that PNW "recyclables" were just shipped to China where I strongly suspect they were promptly landfilled after payment was collected. But China stopped taking our trash years ago, so now they are landfilled in the US. Ironically, it's likely less harmful to the environment overall, since you don't have to ship it first, and the US is likely to have more rigorous environmental standards for landfills.

</comment><comment><USER53> When you recycle near me you're mostly just enriching China our local recycle facility does not usually recycle. Only when the recycle machinehas got capacity do we actually take the recycling to any type of recycle facility. Most of the time just gets thrown in the trash dump or it gets shipped overseas so that somebody else can sort through it. Along the way a lot of it mysteriously ends up in the ocean.

</comment><comment><USER54> Who cares? Burn the plastic trash!

You get the plastic item use out of it, and you get almost all the energy from it as if you had burned the oil directly.

<comment><USER55> I think that will require a large number of new technologies to make such burning environmentally sustainable and cost competitive with other energy producing technologies. I don't have enough science, engineering, or economic knowledge to even take a wild guess at the feasibility of such technology.

Maybe that would be a better challenge for Mr. Musk and various other privateers and governments than running away to Mars to escape the mess we're making of our own planet.

<comment><USER54> Plenty of countries have excellent trash burning plants already, all the technology exists. You _only_ need to compete with peak oil burner plants, not the entire power producing chain. Same co2 emissions, a bit less electricity, but the trash doesn't go on horrible polluting landfills. Win-win.

<comment><USER51> Modern landfills don't pollute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I remember hearing some time ago that sorting at the facility was going to be more efficient than pre-sorting at home because we can't trust everyone to sort properly so sorting at the facility was required anyway. Is this not the case anymore? I see many other comments saying that comingled recycling is bad.

</comment><comment><USER57> Um, what's the deal with editing the headline? The original asserts a statement. It may or may not be true. But why would it benefit HN readers to turn this assertion into a question?

<comment><AUTHOR> no _deal_ \- the submission bookmarklet JS[1] automatically fills in the title from the html meta:

        <title>Is Plastic Recycling A Lie? Oil Companies Touted  Recycling To Sell More Plastic : NPR</title>

[1] javascript:window.location=%22[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURICompo...](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent\(document.location\)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent\(document.title\))

<comment><USER57> Ah thanks, that explains it. So it's partly NPR's fault for using a title tag different from the headline. I guess I was also confused because I think I had also seen the duplicate submission that used the headline, not the title tag, so I though this one was changed.

But that bookmarklet is also at fault, since _at the minimum_ submissions are required to strip out the site's name if it occurs in the title, so leaving in the ": NPR" bit is a bug in this automated approach. So some amount of human post-processing will always be needed. And while submissions are expected to keep the original title, there is also a rule that egregious clickbait like the question in the title tag should be removed (which has now been done!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I remember plenty of ads, 20 or 30 years back, showing how they would be able to easily & cheaply break down & reuse plastic (they compared it to un- & re- zipping a zipper). Was that vision / promise simply abandoned, put on hold, or not true in the first place? (I'd put my money on #3, but the idea was cool).

<comment><USER59> It's #3 because there's too many molecular types of consumer plastic (so melting it isn't good enough to reuse), food contamination is a problem, and it's usually cheaper to make new plastic than move it and recycle it.

In addition, at least in North America, there is no consumer recycling - it's all landfilled unless a private contractor is paid vast sums to recycle it, or a local city council lucks into a good deal.

(I read newspapers until recently, and about once a year there's a short article on the inability to find a recycling partner, so off to the landfill it all goes. Doesn't matter what city. I have seen video of New York using a recycling barge that looks legit for at least some streams.)

The best you can do is burn plastic for electricity today, unless you redesign everything with a sane master recycling plan tomorrow.

The only benefit of consumer recycling in NA is that we've trained people on awareness and how to separate trash, kinda. There was a time when even that was unknown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Great. Can we also discuss now how recycling paper _hurts_ climate?

Modern landfills are airtight, so buried paper is sequestered carbon. Less buried paper - less sequestration.

<comment><USER61> isn't sequestering carbon a good thing?

<comment><USER62> I think that's what he tried to say, if you recycle paper the carbon gets somehow released. But, in theory, the recycled paper will still come out as paper, thus carbon will still be there.

<comment><USER60> > in theory, the recycled paper will still come out as paper, thus carbon will > still be there.

If paper never gets recycled it will continue accumulating in the landfill at a fast pace, so more carbon gets trapped over time.

If paper gets recycled the amount of captured carbon will be that trapped in the paper currently circulating. Even if some paper gets eventually trashed, it will not be at the same rate.

Recycling paper harms climate.

<comment><USER62> But what about the trees cut down to make new paper? As more new paper is needed if less is recycled.

<comment><USER60> That's the whole point of carbon sequestration: grow a tree, cut it down, bury it, grow a new tree in the same place.

<comment><USER62> Assuming that new trees will indeed be planted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Same with batteries, far as I'm aware.

Can't actually be recycled. Just gathered and put in very large warehouses and nothing is done with it.

That's what our chemist teacher told us about 10 years back, anyway. So for me that remains in the "no idea what's actually true" camp.</comment>


Create an Instagram clone using Parse - <AUTHOR> https://parse.com/tutorials/anypic

<comment><USER2> How come this doesn't have more points / comments?, this is super awesome...</comment>


Doom on GLium, in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TjWba0CR9RHFm47rvW1nFUlmouaR55Xt235aHyLPf9U/edit#slide=id.p <comment><USER2> Are my perceptions clouded from being inside the Hacker News echo chamber, or is Rust really picking up steam really fast?

It seems to have more libraries and the ones it has are more advanced than what would be expected from a language this young.

<comment><USER3> [http://arewewebyet.com/](http://arewewebyet.com/)

I always look for a SQL driver, and _then_ if it has connection pool support. If a language passes this second test, the language is ready ;)

<comment><USER4> So, rust is ready? There are multiple database drivers and there is at least one crate for connection pools (r2d2) that also works with diesel (query builder).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Same user (tomaka) also wrote Rust bindings for Vulcan API - vulcano[1], which obviously can be used for creating modern games.

[1] [https://github.com/tomaka/vulkano](https://github.com/tomaka/vulkano)

</comment><comment><USER6> God, Google Docs is really horrible for non-documents. They literally just scroll me way too fast through content when I try to go to the next slide, and worse, they hack my back button so that each slide is a new page, meaning I basically have to open a new tab.

It's also bad for images; for some reason they thought the scroll wheel should zoom in and out instead of scroll, and the only way to scroll is to click and drag. It's like their UI devs are on crack.

<comment><USER7> I don't have this issue in Chrome, but you can always use the arrow keys if your mouse is having issues. As for the back button - works fine for me and takes me to the previous slide. You can even download it as a PDF or Powerpoint if you like.

<comment><USER8> Ugh, the last thing I want is for my browser back button to be hijacked by a slideshow presentation. Help, I'm stuck in a powerpoint.

<comment><USER9> If you think of each slide as a separate page, as some do, it makes sense.

<comment><USER8> I just wish there was a way to opt-in to it first.

My instinct when I hit the site was to use my mousewheel to scroll down, because I didn't immediately realize it was a slide deck. So my mousewheel advanced the deck about a dozen slides and wrecked my back button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> +1 on glium as I've previously mentioned here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11620852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11620852)

As someone who spends a lot of time in OpenGL it's a really solid, rusty API that's quite a joy to work with.

</comment><comment><USER11> It says "Glium: Multi-threading... Send + Sync + Context Management (means it can be done)".

Can someone explain a bit about this? I'm not familiar with Rust, but with C you have to run GL calls from one and the same thread or you're gonna have a bad day.

Bonus question: Anyone that was/is C programmer (not C++) with opinions on Rust?

<comment><USER10> There's more details in the presenter notes:

>I won't get into much detail about threading, but imagine how the OpenGL skynet-state-machine interacts with multiple threads. GLium ensures only a thread-specific OpenGL context is used on any particular thread.

>By making everything neither Send nor Sync, it prevents you from using resources created by one thread in another, enforcing OpenGL semantics at compile-time.

Basically any type without Send+Sync traits will not work with existing threading APIs(since they require combinations of Send+Sync based on threading semantics) forcing API calls to be done on the right thread.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I was in presentation mode, for some reason, and didn't see the notes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's more info and links in the speaker notes (on the options menu).

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't get why slides are popular. We're missing 50% of the actual content of the talk here.

<comment><USER13> I agree, but this one has the speaker notes

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Right after slide 1 appearing, this redirects to [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32050](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32050) for me in Firefox.

<comment><USER15> Fine for me?

<comment><USER14> It works in an unrestricted Chrome instance. I wonder if there's a Google docs downloader script that directly gives me the PDF without dealing with the wonky website.

<comment><USER16> <rant> Google, take your browser team of the loony pills for FIVE SECONDS! Chrome isn't the only browser in the world. Having your website crash and burn one one of the most popular browsers out there that isn't yours is beyond unacceptable. Especially if you push web standards and make recommendations to other developers and sites to make their sites support all browsers. </rant></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you pair users together? - <AUTHOR>

I am working on a mobile web app that needs to pair random users together.
For example, user 1 will let the app know they are looking for someone to be matched up with, and when user 2 goes to look for someone they should be matched.
What is this process referred to as, and where can I read more information? :)
Thank you for taking the time to read this! <comment><USER2> So I'm pretty sure you're not going to find some paper discussing the problem as you've stated it here... I think I kind of get what you're looking for, but with no interesting metric to constrain matching, it sounds like you're just trying to arbitrarily pair people together. If that is the case, then you there's no interesting name for the process, it's just "pairing".

As in: one person signs up, put their name in the database, another person signs up, check for anyone in the database, pick some random person or the first person or whatever, and make that pair. Of course, this gets interesting in realtime systems... but that wasn't even in your question

</comment><comment><USER3> Modern apps are calling it (in general, not just for pairs) "user discovery." However, your approach to the problem would differ based on the criteria used to match people. Matching by closest distance could be a different problem than matching by interests, for example. You may also consider starting off by matching in a relatively "dumb" manner if you have few users and want to quickly validate a concept.</comment>


Ask YC: IDE debugging for web programming - a dream or a reality? - <AUTHOR>

So I've done a lot of java + eclipse and C++ + Visual Studio (that + looks awkward..) development in my life and find that the debugging IDE tools in eclipse/VS were absolutely key to my adoption and performance in using those languages. Most importantly, I like that they allow you to step into and out of function calls, view the call stack and variable values real-time at any line of code as the code progresses. This was a key learning tool for me.
Has anybody successfully done this in with any web programming languages + frameworks? I'm a cakePHP developer, for example, and I'd like to see the sequence of calls from the time the dispatcher is instantiated to the time that the views are echo'd and sent to the browser.
Just curious if anybody has done this successfully in PHP, Symfony, CakePHP, Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, whatever it may be... I've been doing web development for a few years now and have resorted to elaborate print statements and variable dumps for my debugging needs, I need more!
If you've lived the debugging dream, or have any debugging tips to offer, please post the tools you've used and any resources you may know of to help me (and our readers) set it up.
I've recently installed Eclipse PDT with Zend Debugger in an attempt to do this and had luck in simple scripts with include statements, but once mod_rewrite gets involved, everything goes straight to hell.
I'm curious if I should keep trying or if it's nothing but a dream... <comment><USER2> So I haven't reallly looked into this until you mentioned it, but there is XDebug and there is an eclipse client called PDT that supports XDebug.

This lets you do gdb style things like put watches on variables, halt execution, change the value of variables at runtime etc. This might be in line with what you are talking about.

I don't know how many languages XDebug supports but if I had to come up with a solution from scratch, I believe you would need to hack the respective interpreters for your languages to get the functionality you are suggesting.

Once you get the ability to externally inform the interpreter of how you want it to behave (other than just executing the program it normally does) you can get watches, breakpoints and changes variables on the fly.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you use Smalltalk Server Pages in VisualWorks, you can debug through your pages as they render. All the HTML segments are in an array, and the <% ... %> tags are just normal function calls. You can do this to any SSP server, provided you load some additional remote debugging tools if you're running your server headless. It's rock solid. As a bonus, SSP is pretty freaking fast. The HTML page is actually compiled into a Smalltalk method, which is JIT-ed as machine code. (Which is how we get the page render debugging "for free." It's just normal debugger operations!)

(My understanding is that VisualWorks is now going to concentrate on supporting Seaside. You should be able to see many of the same benefits there.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you taken a look at Aptana? It is quite good and mostly compatible with most of eclipse plugins as well.

And since you already have experience with eclipse, you should be quite comfortable using Aptana</comment>


Men prefer websites designed by men - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6049070/Men-prefer-websites-designed-by-men.html

<comment><USER2> The article contains a couple claims I'd never heard before. I did a quick search:

– The linked article is all I could find about men having better stereoscopic vision.

– All women being able to see a fourth primary color is not at all agreed on, but there may be some who can: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy>

I don't see how either trait necessarily correlates with being a better hunter or gardner. Are people who see a fourth primary color better at picking the ripe tomatoes? Maybe. But _it makes sense_ isn't science.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty skeptical about the idea that men have wider eye spacing because it makes us better hunters. If eye spacing had any significant effect on hunting ability I'm pretty sure we'd find ourselves with eyes spaced as far apart as possible, but instead we find there's actually a fair bit of room on either side. Widely-spaced eyes are a pretty "cheap" evolutionary adaptation.

<comment><USER4> As I recall, having eyes fairly close together (not on seperate sides of the face) is something which tends to be associated with predators/carnivores, while herbavores tend to have their eyes very far apart to increase the area which they can locate things - like predators - in.

In other words, if you want to see everything around you, your eyes should be far apart, but if you want to be very good at focusing on something you're hunting, they should be closer together.

Though I don't remember where I heard this, and hence cannot provide a citation.

<comment><USER3> It sounds pretty likely... though I think tree-dwelling creatures (like many of our recent-ish ancestors) tend to have eyes on the front of their head even if herbivorous -- examples include possums, sloths, koalas, monkeys. I'd guess depth perception is pretty important when you're climbing a tree.

Anyway, I'm certainly not arguing that binocular vision isn't good for hunting, I'm just saying that the extra few millimeters distinguishing men from women probably doesn't help much. I'm pretty sure men have more widely- spaced eyes than women cuz we're just plain bigger than women (a fact which _does_ actually help with hunting).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A pretty useful article though the heading for here might be more compelling if framed in context of what interface aspects appeal more to men versus women or something along those lines. Money quote for me here:

"They also prefer sites with moving objects, machines, tall buildings, violent themes, male figures and caricatures. Women prefer rounded lines, more colour and detail, unusual typography, static objects, low rise buildings, female figures and smiling faces."

And also why this matters:

"She said: "Organisations can either 'turn on' or 'turn off' their male and female customers. Studies show that if a customer perceives something as beautiful the are likely to pay up to 66 per cent more for the product.""

<comment><USER6> It was really interesting,now when I look at both Men/Women specific sites I will notice these elements more.</comment></comment>