Demand for sand is killing rivers in Africa - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41123284 <comment><USER2> Demand for sand (for concrete) is killing rivers... _in Africa_

In the US, dredging rivers or land near a waterway is pretty restricted. Sand is typically mined from open pits, see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mining#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mining#United_States)

<comment><USER3> Isn't the river sand full of mud, in many cases? Can it really be washed that well?

<comment><USER4> Not only it can be washed perfectly but river sand (and gravel) tend to be much better for concrete when compared to "crushed" aggregates.

More or less the reason is that usually for a given size river ones are harder/more resistant, and have rounded edges (which also imply a bigger resistance) due to the cycles (wear, long time immersion, etc.) they were subjected to in the river.

And, as a final advantage, concrete made with rounded aggregates is usually easier to pump.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The New Yorker wrote a much better article about this months ago: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world- is-r...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-running- out-of-sand)

<comment><USER6> Also an article here on impact of sand mining on rivers in India:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/magazine/sand-mining- indi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/magazine/sand-mining-india-how-to- steal-a-river.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the French or German speakers here, there is an interesting 2013 Arte documentary on the subject:

French: [https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/046598-000-A/le-sable- enquete-...](https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/046598-000-A/le-sable-enquete-sur- une-disparition/)

German: [https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/046598-000-A/sand-die-neue- umw...](https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/046598-000-A/sand-die-neue- umweltzeitbombe/)

(I didn't find an English version or English subtitles for it, sorry...)

It's available until September 18.

</comment><comment><USER8> Industrial scale mining often has unintended consequences - there was a long running sand operation in California that caused erosion all around it on the coast unless you asked the company that was doing it. [http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/27/controversial- beachfro...](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/27/controversial-beachfront- sand-mining-operation-along-monterey-bay-to-close/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there an alternative to using riverbed sand in concrete? Or an alternative to concrete for big buildings?

<comment><USER10> Crushing rocks down to sand is common. Here's the machinery.[1] The trick is to bang the rocks together. China seems to be making lots of sand for concrete. There are many manufacturers in China making rock crushers and sand- making machines.[2] China has plenty of mountain rock suitable for rock crushing.

Here's a marketing paper on making sand, and what to make for making concrete.[3]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CpjRMICXNM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CpjRMICXNM) [2] [https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/vsi- crusher.html](https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/vsi-crusher.html) [3] [http://www.metso.com/showroom/construction/new-type-of- crush...](http://www.metso.com/showroom/construction/new-type-of-crushed-sand- to-replace-natural-sand-in-concrete-production/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is really crazy how much sand is needed for modern development. It is a key component in a ton of different things.

</comment><comment><USER12> Given that silicon's the second most abundant element on Earth, it seems like it should be trivial to mine without causing environmental damage.

<comment><USER13> Most of the sand is mined to make concrete (cement + sand + rocks + water = concrete). I think they use much smaller amounts of much higher purity sand for making silicon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What about the Sahara desert? Seems like Africa has plenty of sand--why are they taking it out of rivers? Expensive to transport?

<comment><USER15> A lot of desert sand can be compared to powder. So in most cases this cannot be used.

<comment><USER16> Here's an idea - why not require the companies to replace the river sand with desert sand after mining it? Have they tried to use desert sand in the river?

<comment><USER17> This is Africa you're talking about. As much as that sounds like noble and a good idea, convincing local communities and especially businesses here is not going to happen unfortunately.

It's a consequence of being in the third world and having a "catch up at all costs" mentality. Besides, conservation and environmentalism just isn't as in- grained in most African cultures as it is in the west.

Even if you convinced the local government of putting such a law on the books, the odds of them being able to track and enforce such a law is next to impossible. Maybe in more developed countries like South Africa or Namibia, but not in most of the others.

<comment><USER16> Well why not have whoever is concerned about this sand thing fund an operation to go and bring sahara sand and dump it all along the riverbed? And the operation would be funded by local taxes on the companies extracting the resources. Solved.

Unless you're saying these governments have no negotiating power about their own land and resources? In which case this is just straight-up PLUNDER.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh so Africa is building long lasting concrete buildings and making life easier for everyone... something that most of the western world and a huge part of the developing world has already been using for a long time in the same way? No, let us tell you something much more important: how the freaking rivers are "dying".

Environmentalism is anti-humanism.

<comment><USER19> Did you read the article?

They are discussing offshoring this sand to other countries that can afford it, not to build useful African structures. An argument from "The world has already been using this for a long time" could be used for any number of grotesque and terrible acts (and has) so I will ignore that part.

The main complaint about the "rivers dying" is that it has a outsized impact on the poor who use those rivers for food and water (which is no longer available and which is no longer captured, respectively.)

While some people truly believe in the preservation of nature over humans, most of us "Environmentalists" want to save the environment because of the direct and indirect human suffering inappropriate exploitation of our shared resources cause.

<comment><USER20> Theres a lot of domestic construction going on in African countries. That growth is all using modern methods, which means lots and lots of pumped concrete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh look, the 21st century looting of Africa for its resources. Just to think so many materials extracted from the continent and now sand.

This poor continent keeps getting jacked.

<comment><USER22> It's being used for local construction. Even if it wasn't, do you have the same sympathy for Australia which is a major source of many minerals? Continents aren't people. They don't have property rights. People do, and it's important for people to be able to exercise those rights to benefit their own lives.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did Facebook track me across device, ip, and browser? - <AUTHOR> The other day, I opened up incognito on my iphone connected to LTE, searched for a company on google, clicked on the first link. I then go to my laptop connected to a wifi network, refresh my FB newsfeed and see an ad for that company on my newsfeed.
Just to be 100% sure, I did it again with another company, refresh newsfeed, and see an ad for that company almost immediately.
How is Facebook tracking me? My thought process goes like this:
- can't tracking by IP because the devices were on different networks
- can't be cookies (or super cookies) because different devices (also incognito)
- unlikely based on location because not precise enough with LTE
which leaves:
1) browser fingerprinting on my mobile phone linking me to an identity and that data is fed into Facebook in real-time?
2) My cellular provider is funneling data to Facebook?
Am I missing something? <comment><USER2> They track your location by scanning for nearby wifi APs that they know the locations of.</comment>


1.1B taxi rides benchmarked on distributed GPU-powered MapD - <AUTHOR> http://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-rides-aws-ec2-p2-8xlarge-mapd.html <comment><USER2> 1.1B records = 500GB of raw CSV data. This fits into RAM quite easily on a machine like the P2.8xlarge, especially when compression is used (like MapD uses).

I'd like to see how well this performs on a dataset that doesn't fit in the RAM.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its honestly a pretty small dataset for us. MapD can easily do sub-100ms queries on 100B+ records with a single rack.

You can fit a lot of GPU + CPU memory on a small cluster. That RAM goes even further when you use compression like you mentioned.

We're fast at pulling data off of disk but we've never really aimed to be a traditional disk-based data warehouse. There are already great systems for that.

<comment><USER3> At what point do you think starts making sense cost-wise to use MapD (or GPU in general) instead of Redshift or BigQuery?

<comment><USER4> My guess is that it makes more sense when interactive query latency (hundreds of ms) is of the utmost concern.

<comment><USER3> Right, I agree with you.

I was just wondering what kind of companies (except from financial sector) would be willing to spend hundreds of thousands to get their latency from hundreds of ms to dozens of ms. I'm saying that because if you have a very well-tuned Redshift cluster, you can easily get dozens of ms for your queries, spending thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands.

<comment><AUTHOR> You might be surprised.

Telcos need to troubleshoot network problems in real time, automakers and insurance companies need to track cars in real-time, oil companies need to interactively query and visualize geological data, and the infosec industry needs real-time packet analysis. We have customers almost in every vertical, all united by their need for real-time analytics. Some want to use MapD us visualization, others for programatic querying for things like fraud detection, and others still to feed into machine learning algorithms.

I'm also curious how you envisage paying thousands of dollars per year to get queries in dozens of ms on datasets this size, much less 10-100X larger (which customers would often use MapD for). Mark benchmarked a 6-node ds2.8xlarge cluster of Redshift (> $40/hour) and found it up to 70X slower than MapD on this dataset. That's similar to our price on Amazon for this 2-node cluster.

Not saying Redshift isn't a great system, just that I don't buy the price/performance numbers you are quoting (for real workloads, not for some specific query that can be indexed well, etc)

<comment><USER3> Very clear, thanks so much for the detailed explanation.

I'm still curious about how much it would cost for scenario where you have 1 billion user and 200 billion events for a year of data and keep adding 10 billion monthly (a very real DMP or Telco scenario) and you have to make a query like this one below on top of all this data (200 billion records). I'm wondering how many MapD servers/infrastructure I would need to have in order to get results under 100-ms.

Count UNIQUE Users that from "San Francisco" OR "New York" AND accessed the pages "/sports" OR "/news" more than 3 times in the past 12 months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a bridge for using MapD with Spark interface or somehow combining them? This can be interesting for the clusters with a lot of GPUs and a lot of data to do data manipulations.

<comment><USER6> That actually sounds amazing, I would totally use that. I am actually hoping that they will create GDAL bindings for geospatial data.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually already can import geospatial formats via GDAL (shapefiles, geojson, kml). We can render points and polygon data. More geospatial abilities to come!

<comment><USER6> Awesome! Thanks for the update, super stoked for that. Can you also export through GDAL?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Found elsewhere on the internet: 'On a system with eight Tesla K80s, which might cost somewhere between $60,000 to $70,000, the license for the MapD stack would be "a small multiple" of this hardware cost.'

I guess I'm not playing with this anytime soon.

<comment><USER6> Still not cheap, but you could play with it on an p2.xlarge AWS instance for $4 an hour: [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B01M0ZY2OV](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B01M0ZY2OV)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazing to see the improvements that MapD has made over the past few years. I have been following them for a long time, and was excited to catch wind of 3.0 this morning. Then I get on here to see someone already benchmarking and working with it.

</comment><comment><USER8> the benchmark page [1] mark did a good summary of how various technologies compare.

[1] [http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html](http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Price comparison between Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, ElasticSearch and SlicingDice using the same dataset:

[https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-pricing-model- and-c...](https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-pricing-model-and- competitors-comparison-31f1c9f0f076)

<comment><USER9> Same dataset? Mind telling me the uncompressed byte count?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Problem with Firefox and SSL_ERROR_RX_MALFORMED_SERVER_HELLO? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed yesterday and today that various sites are not loading first attempt in Firefox with: SSL_ERROR_RX_MALFORMED_SERVER_HELLO
Refreshing the page makes it work again.
The only thing I've been able to find relating to it is: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1037501/firefox-fails-to-securely-connect-to-google-services-at-random-times-ubuntu-16
For instance, this one just did it for me: https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2018/05/18/network_roundup_17_may_2018/
Anyone else experiencing this? Trying to figure out if it is something network related/firefox related/ssl related <comment><USER2> Reload. It's a bug, but temporary. It happens when sites deploy TLS 1.3, but it only happens once. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1462303](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1462303)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah nice, thanks. That would explain the randomness then, as a few sites it has happened on have been using cloudfare - so I guess they are upgrading

<comment><USER3> One of our users was getting this and I had absolutely no idea why - but now we know. We're also on Cloudflare if that adds an additional data point to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Found this with the same error message, would be interested in others experiences. An old forum posts suggests malware: [https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/questions/1024043](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1024043) but I have done a complete scan with Malware Bytes with nothing found.

      * OS: Mac OS 10.13.4
      * Browser: Firefox 59.0.2
      * Network: Various from work, VPN, domestic internet in Switzerland

So far I haven't found any way to reproduce this error but it does happen sporadically and seemingly randomly - will try and keep a list of sites this appears on below:

      * news.ycombinator.com</comment>


A hands-on intro to building modern web applications with Elixir and Phoenix - <AUTHOR> http://phoenix.thefirehoseproject.com/

<comment><USER2> Note that this was written with Phoenix v0.8 and Ecto 0.2 [0]; Phoenix is currently in 0.13 and Ecto in 0.11.

[0] [http://phoenix.thefirehoseproject.com/3.html](http://phoenix.thefirehoseproject.com/3.html)</comment>


A Tale of Plagues: The Plague was not just a medieval illness - <AUTHOR> https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/tale-plagues <comment><USER2> A short but great book came out last year called _Black Death at the Golden Gate_ that explores the epidemic(s) of plague in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, and how epidemiological efforts to study and fight it were hamstrung by local press and government officials viciously opposed to every measure the proto-CDC health service tried to impose. It ends on an ominous note, noting the likelihood that the bacterium persists in East Bay rodents and could strike again without warning.

[https://www.amazon.com/Black-Death-Golden-Gate- America/dp/03...](https://www.amazon.com/Black-Death-Golden-Gate- America/dp/0393609456)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yersina pestis is endemic in rodent populations in the American Rocky Mountains. There are a few human cases every year, which are treatable with antibiotics if caught early enough.

<comment><USER4> ...as long as the antibiotics still work. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it very curious that the Spanish Influenza epidemic is almost completely forgotten; you have to look very hard to find anything that references it, despite it killing far more people than WW1, and being almost within living memory.

<comment><USER6> From Wikipedia: "To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States"

Maybe that's a reason for it

<comment><USER7> The wartime censorship was short-term and its only lasting impact was to give this particular influenza strain its name (Spain was neutral so did not have the same strict censorship, so they actually reported flu deaths and people heard about it first through these reports -- therefore the flu must have come from Spain they thought...)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Smart phone without Google? - <AUTHOR> Would like an option of a cell phone without Google  in order to protect my privacy. Require text capability and national coverage in USA. Does such a product exist? Thanks. <comment><USER2> Not yet AFAIK (but I'm not in the US, so maybe there're things I don't know). Look at the Purism 5, slated for delivery Jan 2019 -- if I had the cash I'd have pre-ordered one already. Choice of PureOS (Debian derivative) a Touch-KDE version thereof or Ubuntu Touch. Hardware kill switches for microphones and cameras. I think it's the first time I've ever seen a phone (admittedly still technically vapourware) that I actually would /like/ to acquire.

eta: Upon re-read I sound like a shill for Purism. I have nothing whatever to do with them, but their products do appeal to the inner tin-foil-hatter in me.</comment>


Daft Punk Fights Piracy By Streaming Entire Album Days Before Release - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/13/daft-punk-album-stream/

<comment><USER2> How does creating a 128 bit quality mp3 fight piracy? Flood the space with mediocre copies? It is all over the pirate bay.

<comment><USER3> I think releasing it on Spotify would have been better: satisify the people who want to listen to it early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ironically fighting my desire to buy it now, too. Just got done listening to it and found it to be really disappointing, even outside the hype.

<comment><USER5> doesn't matter, most artists have come to the conclusion that live concerts is where the money is at and are touring much more frequently.

<comment><USER4> Well sure, but being as I'm not interested in the new tracks - especially in a concert setting - I won't be seeing them live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get how this is 'hacker news'. Seems like a poor attempt to get _something_ Daft Punk related on the front page here.

</comment><comment><USER7> streaming the album before the release is pretty much the norm these days</comment>


Weaknesses in GCC, Clang and FreeBSD Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0487/ <comment><USER2> The range of responses to the various bug reports makes for interesting reading.</comment>


Auto-Keras: automated machine learning (AutoML) package based on Keras - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jhfjhfj1/autokeras <comment><USER2> Super cool! I want to access the docs but I am getting a certificate error (it might be me)? Does this also have transfer learning built in?

<comment><USER3> definitely interested in the transfer learning question & if so how the initial architecture to base model on is selected? Would also be keen to know about other factors relevant to iterating over models e.g. how early stopping is dealt with?</comment></comment>


Don't Use VPN Services - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29 <comment><USER2> No, just no.

First of all, however much you do or don't trust your VPN provider, it's almost certainly a million times more trustworthy than Comcast/CenturyLink/Verizon/whatever. Most consumers have one or perhaps two broadband providers, but there are countless VPN providers and many, especially the ones you pay an honest rate, have a far more honest business model than your ISP.

Second, the security threats of your local wifi network and the backend your VPN connects to are not the same. They both have threats, but very different ones and the trade-offs are not equal.

It's probably worth saying you should only use a VPN from a reputable company that derives income only from its paying users. It's true that they don't provide you total anonymity, but that was never the point.

Most of all, if you want network neutrality, use a VPN. Then all your traffic over your ISP is the same and they can't do any deep packet inspection.

</comment><comment><USER3> A VPN should only be ever used to:

1.) Route traffic over hostile connections like shady Starbucks wifi etc

2.) Spoof your geolocation to route around censorship imposed by an ISP. e.g: my residential IP wont allow me to connect to _thepiratebay.org_

And that's it. Many VPN services suggest you should use them for privacy, but remember $5.00 per month is enough to pay for a lawyer's cup of coffee and not his/her legal fees</comment>


The programming language that is fastest to implement features - <AUTHOR>

Slashdot said that programming has a political axis with conservative and liberal programmers. Liberal programmers worry about how fast you take to implement a feature. Liberal programmers need the answer to this question. (1)
Paul Graham said that his company could implement features faster than his competitors, because his company programmed in Common Lisp and Common Lisp makes you twice more productive as a programmer. (2)
Time passes, progress happens, Common Lisp was the fastest, a more modern programming language is the fastest, so today what programming language is the fastest to implement features? Why?
(1) http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=political+axis (2) http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html <comment><USER2> Must we use this 'liberal' vs. 'conservative' language for programming styles? The terms are already so ridiculously value-laden, you're at risk of letting your political leanings involuntarily bleed through and muddle up your programming decisions.

<comment><USER3> I think that's a reaction to there being a blog post about liberal and conservative programming languaged on the HN page a bit ago.

(And yes, we should absolutely not use them. )

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is no objective way to answer this. You are probably talking about rapid prototyping languages. The most popular ones in use today are Python and possibly Java (?). Dialects of Lisp have a strong tradition of being good rapid prototyping languages and there is potential in languages like Haskell. I'm obviously talking about general purpose languages here and therein lies the problem. Different languages have different resources, different communities and perform better at different tasks. It not possible to go in more detail. However this is not a question that you should be asking yourself because the answer will come naturally with time. Try to experience and learn as much and with time you'll have a preference for a language when you just want to hack something together. That's your answer.

</comment><comment><USER5> Productivity depends way more on the programmer and his/her knowledge of the common idioms, language features, and libraries for any particular platform than any specific language. The characteristics of languages that make it fast to implement features include dynamic typing, built-in collections, a large class library, availability of an interactive console, availability of a debugger that can easily be used on any host machine, JIT compiled or interpreted, no binaries or packages to build.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want a quick and dirty CRUD app, GeneXus is probably up there:

<http://www.genexus.com/global/home?en>

It's a code generation tool that's mainly popular in South America and is making some inroads in Japan and Europe.

It does generate some ugly code, and ugly-looking applications, but it generates all the backend code and can generate to iOS and Android too.

</comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like you might be asking about what's often called "rapid prototyping". That doesn't cover every possible case (e.g. adding a new feature to a large existing system is not usually covered by "rapid prototyping"), but I think it points to the languages that tend to emphasize ease-of-getting-something-out. Python and Ruby are often promoted in that category. Delphi used to be big, but is waning.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're new to common lisp, it will take you 10x longer to implement the feature you want than if you use technologies you're more familiar with.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ruby on Rails.</comment>


Ask HN: Am I addicted to HackerNews? - <AUTHOR> I keep checking hackernews every now and then be it at work or when I am at home. I come here at least 10-15 times a day. Is that normal ? <comment><USER2> Wikipedia defines addiction as "a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences"

I think it's important to realize that addiction is not just doing something often (e.g. we all drink water often, that's not addicition). It has to have a detrimental consequence in your life for to be addiction.

Is your checking of HN causing you some problems?

For me, I think, we all need to have a break every now and again, whether it's listening to music, going for a walk in the park, getting a coffee, whatever. I think looking at HN during your breaks is an entirely unproblematic way to spend your breaks.

So unless you are having some problems in your life due to checking HN, you are not addicted to HN, even if you check it often.

<comment><USER3> Everytime I compile and it takes longer than usual I check HN. Sometimes I forget to check the new build and 20 minutes have passed.

<comment><USER4> Is there no way to add a notification when the build is finished?

In my case, for python scripts that take a little more time to run, I add a `tput bel` at the end of the script. By doing this iTerm gives me a visual and a gentle sound notification that things are ready.

<comment><USER5> For a little more obvious notification, I like noti.

[https://github.com/variadico/noti](https://github.com/variadico/noti)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, you have a habit that you don't like but it isn't an addiction. You have developed a default response, any time your brain is bored the new default is "time to check HN".

Try and swap that for a new default, something that is more productive. I use it as an excuse to correct my posture, have a walk or get a drink of water. You could get the DuoLingo app and spend those minutes learning a language.

Don't get rid of your habit, just turn it into something positive.

<comment><USER7> This would imply HN is not positive. There are far worse habits.

<comment><USER6> I would say checking anything 15 times a day isn't a positive habit. HN is certainly not destructive but being here 15x a day isn't any more useful than just visiting 1-2x.

<comment><USER8> But if you would otherwise be checking reddit or your prefered news website it is better to check HN 15 times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You might not know, there are features on your profile page to help control this: enable "noprocast" and set a "maxvisit".

</comment><comment><USER10> I think that 10-15 times a day is quite normal for a large chunk of frequent visitors.

Instead of worrying about the frequency, perhaps try to turn it into a positive thing. Try to make it a rule that whenever you visit HN, you also add a constructive comment on a story.

Show/Ask HN submissions that don't have many comments can be a great place to do this. Try to thoughtfully answer someone's question, or check out the project they've shared with the world and offer your thoughts and some encouragement.

By turning your HN visits into HN contributions, you'd be both helping yourself grow and contributing to the community. When you go out of your way to write thoughtful responses, you'll often find that they serve as good starting points for blog posts, if blogging is your thing (or you've been meaning to start a blog for years and years, but feel like you never have any good ideas). Your HN responses can serve as great writing prompts.

</comment><comment><USER11> Dealing with the same issue and was thinking of deleting. I consume a lot of content and learn a lot from but I don't feel myself retaining the information. Maybe I am subconsciously? As such, I think it contributes more to anxiety which leads to stress etc. than being a benefit to my life. Do others feel the same? Does the vast amount of interesting content and curiousisty to want to consume it all make you anxious? I like the comment about retraining idle time, so instead of hackernews something else ... but I'm addicted.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've found it far rewarding to keep many ebooks and ecourses on my phone and whenever i feel the urge to read hn i open up that instead. I think browsing hn is our way to distract ourselves from whatever we're currently doing and after a while reading an ebook for 10 mins somewhat gives the same feeling but far less boring because there is an element of continuity involved.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does it matter if your behavior matches the definition of addiction? If this is causing you problems, consider a website-blocking program such at [https://selfcontrolapp.com/](https://selfcontrolapp.com/), [https://getcoldturkey.com/](https://getcoldturkey.com/), and [https://freedom.to/](https://freedom.to/)

If you feel ashamed of this, ask yourself: would you advise a trying-to-lose- weight person to keep a plate of cookies on their desk?

</comment><comment><USER14> I think you are confusing addiction with eagerness or interest to learn about things, your curiosity. At least that's the reason i typically visit HN, i don't have time to visit all the sourced pages that were once featured on HN because they had a nice article or other sort of information. But i do want to read about new things, explore, for this HN is a great source.

For social 'exploring'/learning or just simple entertainment 9gag.com is a nice website to spend your 'idle minutes' at, the minutes you want to spend on non technical things.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone willing to list additional summary tools for those hoping to reduce their time on the site?

minimum point threshold: [https://twitter.com/newsyc100](https://twitter.com/newsyc100)

daily: [http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn- daily/) | [http://www.hntoplinks.com/](http://www.hntoplinks.com/) (configurable duration)

weekly: [http://www.hackernewsletter.com/](http://www.hackernewsletter.com/) | [http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-show/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn- weekly-show/) | [http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly- ask/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/)

weekly, ultra-cynical edition: _self-censoring to avoid a "violation of the prime directive"_ (with 68 patrons!)

\--

[semi-obligatory self-promotional spam]

If there's enough interest, I will record an "Unofficial HN Audio Summary" commutecast and also link anyone else doing it.

[https://goo.gl/forms/554KT5a19xprN4Mx2](https://goo.gl/forms/554KT5a19xprN4Mx2)

</comment><comment><USER16> Same frequency here. But I still find it better than checking the news/tw/fb/yt.

<comment><USER17> I treat HN like nicotine patches. It's still addictive but much better than the alternatives.

I came across HN just because the HN bot on Twitter had the most interesting links in my feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You're addicted to HN but it's probably only part of a larger problem to do with the internet/devices in general.

If my own experiences are to go by anyway.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've found it's less addictive on my phone than on my laptop. I can dip in skim a couple of articles and dip back out.

On my laptop it's easier to up vote and comment so I get more involved. I also then spend more time reading the articles.

Somehow this manages to satiate my HN thirst and I don't feel the need to go via my laptop.

</comment><comment><USER19> Addiction normally requires:

 __* tolerance

 __* seeking

 __* preoccupation

 __* continuing even when you know it 's causing you harm

Your use of hackernews might meet one of those (preoccupation) and maybe meet another (seeking -- what would you do if it was taken away from you?) but I don't think it meets the tolerance or the continuing after harm requirements.

</comment><comment><USER20> In today's world, consuming interesting content on the Internet without ads or fancy UI's, just plain text... it's like taking a steam locomotive every day to go to work. Enjoy it before they take it away from us!

</comment><comment><USER21> If you use Google Chrome, try Waitblock ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/waitblock/kcnjfepp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/waitblock/kcnjfeppclpdinikcljfjigoongebpkh?hl=en)).

This will help shut down the neural pathway that you have built.

<comment><USER22> HN has this built in, with the "noprocrastination" setting

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you're asking the question then the answer is probably yes. You're asking this question for a reason.

Be 100% honest with yourself and ask "what would the optimal version of me be doing instead of reading HN".

If you're doing all these things and being the best version of yourself you won't feel bad going on HN 100 times a day.

</comment><comment><USER8> It is an addiction. But it is a good one, at least to me. Because otherwise I would be surfing around useless stuff on the internet, at least here I gain new insights everytime.

</comment><comment><USER24> Only 10-15?

<comment><USER25> I check it at least 90-100 times a day, and I don't know how to quit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> You are addicted, but there are worse things.

</comment><comment><USER27> Block it for a month as an experiment.

</comment><comment><USER28> I check HN every couple of hours. :P

</comment><comment><USER29> Me too.

I learn so much.

</comment><comment><USER30> better than addicting to facebook or twitter

</comment><comment><USER31> It is a case of FOMO, it is treatable.

<comment><USER32> I don't think it's FOMO, I visit frequently because I want to read interesting things. I'm not trying to catch every thing that might make the top page, rather I'm trying to fill each minute of boredom.

Anytime I'm unsure what to do or waiting on something to download/build/install/whatever, I reflexively hit "ne[Enter]" in my URL bar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Same goes for me, HN, Quora, Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER34> I check HN 3-4 times an hour. :P

</comment><comment><USER35> YES

</comment><comment><USER36> join the club</comment>


Report: Only a Fraction of Bitcoin Transactions Have Real Economic Value - <AUTHOR> https://thebitcoinmag.com/report-only-a-fraction-of-bticoin-transactions-have-real-economic-value/ <comment><USER2> Is 37/2 a fraction?</comment>


Effective use of Node.js and Socket.io for building a HTML5 Game - nodejs-news http://www.nodejs-news.com/nodejs-tech/Nodejs-Socketio-Building-HTML5-game <comment><AUTHOR> If you want to make this easy, use <https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream>. Great progress is being made on the 0.3 version and it makes pub/sub broadcasting and message pushing very easy. You wouldn't be the first person to make a live multiplayer HTML5 game with it: <https://github.com/alz/socketracer>.

</comment><comment><USER2> Buried source as a mediafire link? Author needs to learn about github.

Code itself is pretty difficult to read and quickly pasted together, but otherwise a decent example on how to tie the technologies involved together.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out now.js (<http://nowjs.com/>) as well, makes it really easy to make realtime apps

</comment><comment><USER4> To install socket.io you need only execute `npm install socket.io`

This installs socket.io from the npm registry (there is no need to download/extract the zip).

<comment><USER5> -g if you want to make it globally accessible.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but there is not much value in installing socket.io globally, as you can't require() it. It makes sense only for executables like coffee-script

[http://npmjs.org/doc/faq.html#I-installed-something- globally...](http://npmjs.org/doc/faq.html#I-installed-something-globally-but- I-can-t-require-it)

<comment><USER7> You can definitely require() modules after installing them globally.

<https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/lib/module.js></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stephen Wolfram: On Starting a Long-Term Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/talks/ycombinatorschool/

<comment><USER2> Wolfram gave a really great talk - you can hear the audio here: [http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator- StartupSchool/~3/...](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator- StartupSchool/~3/106570510/Stephen_Wolfram.mp3)

(For anyone new to the site, you can get all the available Startup School talk mp3's with this feed I put together awhile back: <http://feeds.feedburner.com/ycombinator-startupschool> )

Ask PG: Speaking of Startup School, could we get the official video/audio from the last Startup School? I used my own poor audio for the last Startup School in this podcast feed, but it'd be great to replace it with the official video that was taken. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the audio link! I didn't know it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "I remember, I'd just had my twentieth birthday. I'd just gotten my Ph.D. And it looked like my plan to "be a physicist" was going just great."

I had to stop reading there as I became ill. (23 year old that hasn't passed quals)

<comment><USER4> Maybe it was faster for truly smart people to get a Ph.D. back in the day. My father had his Ph.D. in computer science by the time he was 21. I tried to take one masters-level course when I was 22 and they laughed at me.

I think it is the education systems' fault, rather than your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obviously, Stephen Wolfram has accomplished a lot, but what is the deal. With the sentence fragments? This sort of thing. Can make an article. Really hard. To read. Am I. The only one. Who noticed. That? And if it's not a fragment, it's just a big, long run on sentence, with commas liberally sprinkled, throughout it. Usually I'm the last person to pick on grammar, but someone as smart as Wolfram should at least have a basic understanding of how to construct a complete sentence.

<comment><AUTHOR> The text is a direct transcript from audio, that's why. The link to the conference in mp3 is in some of the comments above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _But somehow when it comes to keeping the whole system coherent and unified, that ends up being something I have to do._

I've heard it is a horrible place to work due to an extreme level of micromanagement. If you can bend to his will, it might be ok.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow. tones.wolfram.com is bad. Really, really bad.

[edit: I love Wolfram's work, don't get me wrong. I mean specifically that the music generated is horrible. There is such a thing as objectively good music. Use tones.wolfram.com as a contrapositive proof.]

</comment><comment><USER7> I would upmod this twice if I could... once for the talk, and once for the WolframTones site.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why does the phrase 'my science' make me uneasy?

<comment><USER6> Because science is based on open, repeatable experimentation -- making it inherently community based. Wolfram often has a hard time making reasonable attributions -- a major criticism of "A New Kind of Science". But for a transcribed talk, it's reasonable.</comment></comment>


Attachment theory is having a breakout moment - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/yes-its-your-parents-fault.html <comment><USER2> You may find it interesting to read about attachment type correlations with certain countries/ cultures, from a developmental psychology textbook I have:

Perhaps surprisingly, the relative incidence of different attachment styles, as measured using Ainsworth's Strange Situation, varies dramatically across cultures (Thompson, 1998; Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988). Consider, for example, the substantial cultural differences shown in Table 6.2. The majority of German infants studied were measured as insecurely attached (mostly avoidant, or Type A). Japanese infants showed no avoidant attachments whatsoever, and they were almost three times as likely as their American counterparts to show anxious (Type C) attachments. Finally, one group of Israeli children showed almost 10 times as many anxious attachments as Swedish children. Because the procedure used in the Strange Situation is relatively straightforward, it does not seem that these variations can be explained by simple methodological discrepancies in how the assessments were conducted (Harwood et al., 1995; Thompson, 1998; Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988).

From "Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior", p. 236

</comment><comment><USER3> > By the end of our first year, we have stamped on our baby brains a pretty > indelible template of how we think relationships work, based on how our > parents or other primary caregivers treat us.

It seems that the article is stating that one's attachment system is developed primarily in their first year of life? If attachment theory is true, I would've guessed that the first ten or twelve years of life would all contribute.

> [many people] are insecurely attached because their early experiences were > suboptimal (their caregivers were distracted, overbearing, dismissive, > unreliable, absent or perhaps threatening)...

If the first year is the formative year for one's attachment disposition, the meaning of "overbearing" is much different than say, it would be for a ten year old or early teenager. I'm curious what period of life these studies were looking at.

<comment><USER4> This finding is also stressing me out. My son is 2 1/2 years old. Did I love him enough in his first year? Any way for me to tell? The article seems light on such details.

<comment><USER5> _> This finding is also stressing me out. My son is 2 1/2 years old. Did I love him enough in his first year? Any way for me to tell?_

(Educational scientist here, psychology was part of my studies. I'm not a psychologist, though.)

Don't stress yourself. If you're loving your kid and are able to physically show it, e.g. you're able to cuddle your son, hold him when something bad happened etc., then you have the first major factor in check. You should be the calm and readily available ressource for emotional warmth if the kid needs it.

The second factor is consistency: Identical child behaviour should produce identical parental reactions. E.g. "Look dad, I built something awesome!" shouldn't generate a "Oh great!" on day one and "I don't want to see that crap, I'm tired from work" on day two. The same goes for negative behavior. That makes it easier for the child to grasp the external actions as results of own behavior, thus easing the development of self-efficacy. It's perfectly fine to be stressed out from work, BTW! It should just be clear for the kid that this is not the kid's fault.

The difference with helicopter parents: It's perfectly fine for the kid to throw a tantrum if it's not getting that muffin just before lunch. If your reasoning is rational and _consistent_ , it's fine to enforce that calmly. And it's fine for the kid to be pissed. It's perfectly fine for the kid to do risky things on the playground. If the kid hurts itself, comfort it, and that's it.

<comment><USER4> Consistency is probably our biggest weakness. We try but we are not as disciplined as we should be. Thanks for the reality check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Parental genetics are far more important than parenting style in determining what kind of person you turn out to be.

And the "nurture" that matters is your peers, not your parents.

Skeptical? I highly recommend this book-length treatment of the research literature: [https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children- Revised-U...](https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised- Updated/dp/1439101655/)

Unless they are doing twin & adoption studies (hard!), attachment researchers are conflating parenting practices (these warm and loving parents had a warm & loving kid!) with genetics.

<comment><USER7> The nature vs nurture argument is not going to be settled by one book. I can see if you raised some shitty kids how the "it's mostly nature" theory would be attractive. I believe it's a combination of both nature and nurture.

<comment><USER8> However, nature feeds into nurture and not the other way around.

Is you tried raising a disabled child or one with extreme variant of personality you would know that such conditions tend to enact sets of behaviour in the environment and parents. Generally not conducive to proper upbringing one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone interested in a good overview of attachment theory, there was a Science Vs. episode recently on it:

[https://gimletmedia.com/episode/2-attachment- parenting/](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/2-attachment-parenting/)

the standout thing in there being the definition of 'well-attached'

<comment><USER10> Worth noting the difference between attachment theory and attachment parenting.

Attachment theory is a psychological model. It proposes that during early childhood, we learn how to respond "within relationships when hurt, separated from loved ones, or perceiving a threat." We learn this by modeling the behavior of our parents.

Attachment parenting is a parenting philosophy (not a consistent theory) invented and spread to a popular audience in the 90's by evangelical christian pediatrician William Sears. It proposes that mothers should maximize physical contact with her infant by wearing the baby during the day, co-sleeping at night, breastfeeding, and responding immediately (or pre-emptively) to all crying. The philosophy recommends women stay in the home to focus on child rearing in this way for the first three years. After that, motherhood should be their "supreme career." After the philosophy was formulated, Sears made an ex post connection to attachment theory, but is otherwise unrelated.

One of them is a respectable scientific theory; the other is a very lucrative fad of anti-woman, patriarchal bullshit with no basis in science.

<comment><USER9> Well put

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How do we guard against this when it is becoming increasingly the case that both parents work full-time?

It seems like parenthood is itself more than a full-time job...

<comment><USER2> From a childhood development textbook I once read, having a parent around during the day vs. a nanny apparently doesn't make much of a difference. A nanny, relative, or any caregiver giving regular attention typically has the same effects as if she/ he were a parent.

<comment><USER7> There's a parenting book out there that will tell you whatever it is you want to hear.

<comment><USER2> "parenting book" != childhood development / developmental psychology textbook that is the 101 textbook at many elite universities. I mention the book elsewhere in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Attachment parenting has some merits but is a bit over the top in my opinion. Do I want my kid to start screaming the minute I walk away or hand them to someone else? Absolutely not. I want them to be self confident and happy knowing that I would not leave them in a dangerous situation, give them to a bad person, and that I will come back for them. That is a truly "secure" child.

<comment><USER13> You're misunderstanding how attachment parenting works. In fact it's just as you'd like, that through this way of relating with your child/ren they become secure in their own sense of self. It is when the parents too early leave the child alone that they don't form a stable sense of self.

<comment><USER7> Actually, this is exactly how I've seen it work with some parents who subscribe to attachment parenting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The simplest explanation I've heard of attachment theory is kids should be attached to parents securely enough that they are comfortable transferring that attachment to friends and relationships later. Too far in one direction and the child never leaves the parents side or the parent never lets the child grow up. Too far in the other direction and the child never learns healthy bonding and trust.

</comment><comment><USER15> Alternate perspective:

"Rethinking the Transmission Gap: What Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology Mean for Attachment Theory", [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinkin...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinking_the_Transmission_Gap_What_Behavioral_Genetics_and_Evolutionary_Psychology_Mean_for_Attachment_Theory_A_Comment_on_Verhage_et_al_2016)

"Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics", [http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439)

I would really recommend reading the above (in particular finding 9 from the second survey). The media has a strong bias towards environmental theories of human traits.

<comment><USER16> Why not add to this list the following:

"Three Laws of Behavior Genetic and What They Mean", [http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf)

"Why Do People Believe that Birth Order Has Important Effects on Personality?", [http://judithrichharris.info/tna/birth- order/believe.htm](http://judithrichharris.info/tna/birth-order/believe.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anybody know if cognitive-behavioral therapists have methods for dealing with attachment problems?

</comment><comment><USER18> This seems like a specific case of Curriculum Learning from the machine learning literature.

</comment><comment><USER19> I honestly read that as "Attachment theory is having breakfast at the moment".

</comment><comment><USER20> A buddy of mine has a 2.5 year old daughter. They're not going full-tilt gender-neutral, but as engineers, they're also conscious of not just giving her dolls and whatnot.

Anyway, her mom from the get-go has had her wear both dresses, pants, snowsuits, a big variety of clothing.

The other day she refused to wear pants. "If I don't wear a dress, nobody will tell me I'm pretty!". A 2.5 year old. It's crazy how much kids pick up in such a tiny period of time.

<comment><USER21> I've heard an extremely similar story from a friend. First I thought "Wow, what are the chances?", but it turns out that the Internet's a small place.

Hi Harold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A lot of connections made in that article, with no data to back any of it.

<comment><USER23> This is the kind of shallow, uncharitable dismissal that we need less of on Hacker News. Obviously a popular news treatment isn't going to supply "data".

When it comes to the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, you could hardly be more wrong, since apart from everything else they were champions of empirical observation.

<comment><USER24> Maybe a little less paywall nytimes on HN as well. I dunno, but I find a lot of their journalism is just 90% padding. I suspect we see a lot of distrust in media isn't just that they're inaccurate, but they're often filled with non experts trying to sound like experts by padding nonsense speculation into their articles.

I mean, is this the same Kate Murphy that wrote "10 richest U.S. presidents before Trump takes top spot" I'm not saying she's bright. She's probably smarter there most and I'd love for her to comment in on HN. But I don't think she should be writing articles titled "Yes it's your parents fault"

<comment><USER23> The standard here is to judge each article on its own merit, and this is a good piece, certainly above the median. The title is beyond stupid, but reporters don't write those. We changed it to a representative phrase from the text, as usual with baity titles.

On the paywall thing please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> NYT seems to be the national hub for pop-science these days.

</comment><comment><USER26> Half (as mentioned in article) of soon-to-be parents are _not_ fit for the job, and a significant amount choose to defer the job via abortion or adoption. This begs the question -- should the state intervene in sexual reproduction?

Should more babies be given up to the state to be distributed to people who have earned the job title of "parent"? The amount of kids living in poverty, and/or having incompetent parents is not a trivial fraction. Should it be the duty of a civilization to engineer generations; to save these children? At what point does "a child" become the responsibility/property of everyone, and not just the responsibility/property of the biological parents?

These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about.

<comment><USER27> Or, perhaps we (the United States) as a society shouldn't be stressing out mothers in the critical first year by shoving them back to work after, what, three months (if you have good bennies)?

Or completely drain our social welfare system and establish a demand-starved economy with wealth inequality and a draconian health care system that leaves all families stressed and overworked?

Or we can go with your bullshit predetermined social darwinianism.

<comment><USER28> One of the reasons I'm glad I moved from the States to Canada. It's remarkable how once you get used to the idea of a year of parent leave (partly shareable between mother and father), business adjusts to it like any other constraint.</comment></comment></comment>


What was ABC thinking with this UI? - <AUTHOR> http://abc.go.com/watch

<comment><AUTHOR> UIKit for a web page... hmmm ok</comment>


Plotting hearts with Python and C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/susam/heart <comment><USER2> "Could I have that big red fluffy arse?" "Do you mean this plush heart?" "No. I'm a cardiologist, I've been operating on human hearts for the last 20 years, I know how a heart looks like, and I would very much like that red fluffy arse."

Seriously, though, it's a little heartwarming bouquet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Definitely reminds me of my highschool days. Except my gift was written in turbo pascal and could rotate around the Y axis without any flicker on a 486 DX. Drawing a heart on a TI-86 was too easy, so I had to up my game.

</comment><comment><USER4> Found a bug: [https://github.com/susam/heart/issues/1](https://github.com/susam/heart/issues/1)

</comment><comment><USER5> I was expecting it to be the same algorithm in two different languages, but the Python version is a mathematical description whereas the C version is RLE- compressed.

Relatedly, there is this video on how to procedurally generate a 3D heart:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNR4n0i2ZlM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNR4n0i2ZlM)

</comment><comment><USER6> The two functions from Python one: y = sqrt(1 - |x|) * sqrt(|x|), y = (-3/2) * sqrt(1 - sqrt(|x|)). How do they produce the desired output? Is there a way to construct such functions?

<comment><USER7> Here's some info that might be handy: [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cardioid.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cardioid.html)

</comment></comment><comment> ajay-d Here's a widget to play with: [https://love.imaginary.org/](https://love.imaginary.org/)

The time actually has a write up on the formula too [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/science/math-algorithm- va...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/science/math-algorithm- valentine.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> The Python graph uses two equations.

y = sqrt(1 - |x|) * sqrt(|x|)

y = (-3/2) * sqrt(1 - sqrt(|x|))

Why do these equations work and look like heart? How does one make such equations?

<comment><USER7> A brief math overview can be found here: [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cardioid.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cardioid.html)

<comment><USER9> A cardoid is a popular way of plotting a heart shaped curve. However, I mentioned in another comment in this thread that the heart plotted with Python and Matplotlib in this repository is not made of cardoid. Instead, it is made of semicircles and quartic curves. Here's the comment with more details: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19162360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19162360).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> cute.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ugh.

        for (i = 0; i < sizeof love / sizeof *love; i++)
            if (love[i] < 4)
                printf("%s", say[love[i]]);
            else
                for (j = 0; j < love[i] / 4; j++)
                    putchar(show[love[i] % 4]);

Yes, C doesn't force you to use braces here, but this is really overdoing it.

And I say this as someone who does like Python's indentation-based syntax. Doing the same in C is not idiomatic.

<comment><USER5> That's the same style in K&R, which is about as "idiomatic" as it gets. I don't see anything wrong with it.

<comment><USER12> What's wrong with it is that it's really really easy to make a mistake and introduce a subtle bug that will be hard to spot. Especially now since languages like python have been developed that have made people used to indentation-defined code.

It's the style in K&R? Ok, so the literal inventor of the language was certain he wouldn't make this kind of mistake, that still doesn't mean I trust myself not to.

<comment><USER13> Omitting braces for single statements is quite idiomatic in the C development world, whether we like it or not. If we don't trust ourselves that we wouldn't make this kind of mistake, use the right tooling: 'gcc -Wall' (since GCC 6) or 'clang-format' can easily detect misleading indentation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: my first ever coding project (7bks.com) - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN. I've just launched my very first webappp and would love your feedback.
http://www.7bks.com
It's a book list sharing website - kind of like playlists for bookworms.
The site is built on pyton/appengine - and I learned to code in under 4 weeks to build the site. There's more details on the background of the site here:
http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001
I've also published the full Python code for the site here:
https://gist.github.com/670034
Feedback is really important to me and I want to work hard to make the site better so any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated. Contact details are here: http://www.7bks.com/contact/
Or just leave a comment below :)
Thanks, Tom. <comment><USER3> I LOVE COMMENTS IN BIG TEXT. AND I LOVE SHARING COMMENTS IN BIG TEXT. SO I CREATED THIS COMMENT IN BIG TEXT AS A REMINDER THAT ANYONE CAN CREATE BEAUTIFUL COMMENTS IN BIG TEXT AND SHARE IT WITH OTHER PEOPLE WHO LIKE BIG TEXT.

Actually, I'm just curious: why is the text on your home page SO BIG?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I suck at design and I needed to fill the space :-p

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey Congratulations for launching Tom!

Did you want feedback on coding as well? If so I can pass some info along.

Other than that i like the layout and the visual of the site. it's simple and makes a ton of sense at quick glance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yes I definitely want feedback on the coding. I'm hungry to learn more and that's why I put the code on github. My email add is on the site - <USER2> let me know what I'm doing wrong :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> looks very nice.

1) When browsing lists I like the spacing and big font, but I would also like to see all books without having to scroll. Like an easy way to take the list in.

2) Add more ways to login, maybe including your own system.

3) This might be a cheesy idea, but is there anyway you can theme book lists based on their topic/category. For some reason I think the layout of scifi fiction list could/should be different than a list of Perl books. Btw, when I say theme I just mean general layout stuff, not like MySpace animated gif theme.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm totally adding animated gifs :-p

1) Hmm - I'm not sure how this would work but an interesting idea. I'll have a think about how to do this.

2) On my roadmap. See my comment below for more detail.

3) This is also on my roadmap! I'm going to run themed weeks where I get people to create lists on a specific topic (e.g. scifi) and then after the week aggregate all the lists on a special sci-fi page. Hopefully in time this will build a really good topic/genre resource while still having some editorial control to weed out poor lists.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty nice idea. I like it, though I'm not sure I want to sign in with google. Maybe a simple account system like HN?

(I understand the concepts of using google/fb/etc sign ons, but I don't like to have to log into them if I can avoid it. Paranoid they'll know every website I have an account on. sort of..)

I think it'd be better if the recent books took me to the user's book description first (like in the book lists). Then if I wanted to go to Amazon, I could use the link from there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, at some point I want to greatly improve the login system and offer both direct login but also twitter/google/facebook. Unfortunately it's a little beyond my coding abilities at the moment! Also, as soon as I start storing passwords I need to ensure they're secure and I'm not quite confident enough in my coding abilities for that yet. Still, I'm learning fast so hopefully soon :)

Yes - I'm going to completely change the homepage soon with a much stronger focus on featured/top lists rather than just recent ones. Also, that top books list is pretty rubbish at the moment, I should change it like you say to go to the list with the book on.

Thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Saw a comment about your site in another thread. Check it out:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1897615>

</comment><comment><USER8> Clickable: <http://www.7bks.com>

nice work, bro

Edit: also <https://gist.github.com/670034> And <http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001>

<comment><USER9> Wow that blog post is really inspiring. I just posted it - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891756>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For 4 weeks in, that is pretty good Python code. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a very nice site. Be good to have author's name and comments in normal text while keeping italics for the book title. Now to play with it some more!

</comment><comment><USER12> I like overall look and feel. Also appreciate the fact that this must be hard to grasp in limited time but as such I am not target user.

Good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

When you say you're not the target user - is that because you're not a big books fan or because the site puts you off somehow? Any feedback is always useful. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very inspiring. Great job!</comment>


Hosting git repositories on your VPS - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heapsource.com/post/54107424584/hosting-git-repositories-on-your-vps Today I'll show you how to setup a gitolite installation on a VPS with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. To save myself some typing I'll be using the following conventions:
A command prefixed by sysadmin$ is meant to be run in your local workstation.
A command prefixed by user@vpshost:path# is meant to be run in the vps under the specified user on the specified path. <comment><USER2> This is pretty good. I wrote a similar article last year[1] that goes more in depth on things like automatic mirrors and various types of hooks. It was fairly well received on HN[2].

[1]: [http://www.petekeen.com/hosting-private-git-repositories- wit...](http://www.petekeen.com/hosting-private-git-repositories-with- gitolite)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4707747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4707747)

</comment><comment><USER3> I used gitolite on a VPS previously and it worked well, but when Bitbucket introduced free unlimited private repositories I switched.

IMO there is no reason to use gitolite now for unless you have (a) sensitive repos (with your own server, not a VPS of course), or (b) lots of private repos with lots of collaborators and you have no money for a Github or Bitbucket monthly fee and you aren't a non-profit (I think non-profits can get a free Bitbucket account).

That said, I'm interested to hear about other gitolite use cases I haven't thought of.

<comment><USER4> You can still use bitbucket on your own hardware with [http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing](http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing)

(Not affiliated with Atlassian/Bitbucket in any way - but I love their software)

<comment><USER5> They might share similar look-and-feel now but I think they are not the same thing, i.e. Python vs Java (Stash).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We recently were at the same crossroads (choosing between "github" v/s "bitbucket" v/s own-hosted git repositories). I ran through the various options for own-hosted git repositories: (1) Gitlab, (2) Gitolite, and (3) Stash (10-user license for $10)

We ended up installing Stash as it seemed that it would reduce administration+maintenance by a tad bit (GUI + knowledgebase) and would be supported by a company responsible for bitbucket. Stash has been a pleasant experience so far.

<comment><USER7> You can also get paid support for GitLab from [http://www.gitlab.com](http://www.gitlab.com) (disclosure: I work for GitLab.com).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody know if there is something to seamlessly encrypt a git repository in case I don't trust the git server provider (say a VPS)?

<comment><USER9> LUKS/dm-crypt. Super easy to use. [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm- crypt_with_LUKS](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt_with_LUKS)

<comment><USER10> The walkthrough is rather overwhelming.

Was it super easy to understand & set-up?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, the reality is it's about 3 additional commands to get going (over any other normal volume)...and a very short chef cookbook to automate it.

        # create a key file
        dd if=/dev/urandom of=/etc/mykeyfile.key bs=512 count=1
        # create the luks container
        cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdf1 /etc/mykeyfile.key
        # open the luks container
        cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdf1 myluksvolume --key-file /etc/mykeyfile.key
        # format the volume
        mkfs.xfs /dev/mapper/myluksvolume
        # mount the disk
        mount /dev/mapper/myluksvolume /mnt/mymountpoint

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any particular reason why most of the examples uses "sudo" while already logged in as root?

Additionally, either you have some strange prompts set up somewhere, or made a few typos when copying and pasting; a couple of places you appear to be logged in as a someuser@<...>, but with a hash-prompt(#) -- usually reserved for indicating root/super user access.

edit: Personally, I actually found the official documentation more helpful, even if it is very brief:

[http://gitolite.com/gitolite/qi.html](http://gitolite.com/gitolite/qi.html)

In particular, it highlights that gitolite needs to run under a user, and needs a (your, the admin's) pubkey for setup -- but there's no need to generate a new one.

Behind the scenes, the pubkey used is added to the gitolite user's authorized_keys-file (and so is any other keys added, when users are added).

</comment><comment><USER12> One other option to gitolite is SCM-Manager[1]. It's written in Java and can be deployed to an application server or installed as a standalone version.

I've used it for a year and I've been quite happy with it.

[1]: [http://www.scm-manager.org/](http://www.scm-manager.org/)

</comment><comment><USER13> A nice alternative to gitolite is gitosis[0]. I've found it much easier to use (in terms of adding users to repos) and faster to spin up new repos.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitosis](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitosis)

<comment><USER14> Gitolite is actually better than Gitosis. With Gitolite, the owner of a repo can grant access privileges to that repo, it doesn't require the intervention of the Gitolite installation's administrator.

I've had some pushback on both of them from users because the command line fu necessary to use both of these projects is apparently just enough of a barrier that even developers find it annoying.

Gitlab is a bigger pain to administer and more resource-intensive, but much easier for users.

<comment><USER13> That's a good point. I'm normally the sole developer on projects, so I am my own Gitolite administrator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or, if you are a company and need some structure and ease of use, you can try contacting the guys at gitgear.com</comment>


Barnes and Noble is inviting Californians to join their affiliate program. - <AUTHOR>

The team here at Barnes & Noble would like to invite you to join our affiliate program.  Why should you sign up with us?  Here are a few reasons we believe you will find compelling. ·         Base commission of 6% on all orders
·         Wide variety of products for your users to choose from, access to dozens of site-wide seasonal sales, coupon offers, and special deals throughout the year.
o   Books: Top retailer in the book business
o   NOOK ™: "Best Dedicated eReader" according to the Associated Press
o   Electronics:  Cameras, laptops, audio/video, GPS, accessories, and more
o   Arts & Crafts:  Get access to the best in class brands such as Martha Stewart, Jonathan Adler, and more.
o   Toys: Lego, Barbie, Mattel, Melissa & Doug are only a few of the great brands we sell.
o   Textbooks:  We offer thousands of new, used, rental and digital textbook products.
o   Free shipping on orders of $25 or more. Members get free express shipping on all orders with no minimum purchase.
·         Nationally recognized brand
·         Strong site conversion rate creating more sales for you
Need more reasons?  The Barnes & Noble Affiliate program has been in business for many years and even with the recent tax legislation in California, we will be pushing even harder to make our affiliates successful.  When you win, we win, so join us today.
<comment></comment><comment>----- Seems like they are going DIRECTLY after past-Amazon affiliates. </comment><comment><USER2> Brilliant. Love this - thanks for posting it.</comment>


The Paper Planes of New York - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/project/portfolio/the-paper-airplane-collector?mbid=social_facebook <comment><USER2> Many of these appear to be from "The great international paper airplane book", which lists the top contestants from the first International Paper Airplane contest (1967?). It's a great book and I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER3> I was obsessed with this book in 1st through 3rd grade and must have checked it out from the school library 50 times.

Just picked up a used copy from Amazon 30 seconds ago; thanks for reminding me.

<comment><USER4> Wow that's the book I was thinking of when I mentioned Foghorn Leghorn. The little genius kid makes a plane from that book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some clearly well-built planes there, and some that definitely would only fly once. For some reason, I thought of Foghorn Leghorn. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDjDv- RGC1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDjDv-RGC1Q)</comment>


As Phoenix Heats Up, the Night Comes Alive - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/phoenix-heat.html <comment><USER2> Phoenix was the first place I visited over 45C and the feeling of sweat evaporating off your body was unbelievable.

I admire anyone who can adapt to life in that climate. I moved from the UK to Australia to escape the cold, but the oven is higher than I want to be.

<comment><USER3> Living in Phoenix amounts to becoming a desert animal of sorts-- you prefer to go outside at night. In the day, you sort of scurry from air conditioner to air conditioner.

The non-summer weather is why everyone stays.</comment></comment>


GoGrid Tries to Charge Cutomer $84.36 for One Hour Cloud Instance - <AUTHOR> http://benjaminkerensa.com/2012/03/19/gogrid-tries-to-charge-me-84-36-for-1-hour-30-minute-cloud-instance

<comment><USER2> I had a similar incident with them a couple of years ago (I think they launched with the same $100 coupon deal?).

As a result, I haven't considered them, or even went back to their site, ever since. So much for free hundred bucks.</comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything interesting with their exported Twitter data? - <AUTHOR> Grabbed the archive of all of my Twitter data today. I see it has all of my tweets, among other things.
Has experimented with converting the data into something that would be archived in a more readable way? Wordpress posts, PDFs, static HTML, etc. Any other interesting scripts to run on the data?
Pretty much anything I found via search involved connecting to an app that scraped the site. <comment><USER2> My apologies that this isn't quite what you are looking for, but reading your question reminded me of a previous discussion about using Facebook chat logs to create a chatbot where you can talk to yourself [1]. Since Twitter data typically isn't as conversational you would probably get a very different result.

Actually, there was something else a while back looking at VC Twitter feeds and making auto-generated text from those. [2]

Those might give some inspiration (I'm not affiliated with either).

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22128652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22128652)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21707285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21707285)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm working on a product that does that. Multiple sites. Twitter integration will be a month yet. I want a search engine for it first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat! Do you have something I could subscribe to for updates?</comment></comment>


WiFi Signals Caught on Camera - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/03/invisible-wi-fi-signals-caught-on-camera.html

<comment><USER2> Shouldn't the title be "WiFi strength visualized" instead of invisible signals caught on Camera?

Its a cool visualization nonetheless, but the title is a little misleading.

<comment><AUTHOR> The title of the original article is "Invisible WiFi Signals Caught on Camera." I thought "Invisible" was too Ripley's-Believe-It-Or-Not-sounding so I removed it while trying to keep as much of the original title as possible intact. Probably a better title would have been "WiFi Signal Strength Caught on Camera" or the one you proposed, but, whats done is done.

<comment><USER3> I think the title of the original was being criticized (righly), not the title you chose for the HN post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Supposedly at one point decades ago PARC had a wire in the ceiling that rotated and whose rotational speed was dependent on the amount of packets traveling in the internet cable strung above it.

(apocryphal?) (what is the truth of this?) (is it still there?)

I believe Facebook is supposed to have a restroom in which a white noise privacy background is generated from global friending/unfriending activity.

<comment><USER5> I understand that Twitter's reception desk had birdsong that played when people tweeted, but it became cacophonous at high tweets-per-second.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure the speakers were still there when we left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The full (and HD version) of the video can be found here: <http://vimeo.com/20412632>

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone else remember this being posted this time last year?

<comment><USER9> Yes, I actually saw it a while back as well. Still cool though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The artist in me wants to smile, but the RF guy inside says, "Hey, they recreated the radio signal coverage map with fewer dimensions and less useful information!" (chuckle...)

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting- wifi...](http://yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting-wifi/)

</comment><comment><USER12> discussion from 644 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270878>

</comment><comment><USER13> Wouldn't it be easier to assign signal strength to certain GPS-dots and visualize the gathered data on the computer?

<comment><USER14> Yes, but would be science. The submission is _art_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love the possibilities here. I want to see rows traced out! Make something that looks like a Joy Division album cover. Use a bullet-time array of cameras to make a video. Make an augmented reality layer so you can see it as you wander the area.

</comment><comment><USER16> Though this is really cool in itself, this has a horribly sensational and misleading title.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not as cool as the Magnetic Movie: <http://vimeo.com/1166968>

</comment><comment><USER18> Instead of vertical, I'd love to be able to see this horizontally overlaid on a map so I could find the weak spots in my house and work.

<comment><USER14> You can gather data with G-Mon on Android. Iirc it "only" gives you an estimated location and strength of each wifi radio though. Still fun to map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very old article.

</comment><comment><USER20> Darn it, I was working on this too! I guess my project will just have to be that much more original now.

</comment><comment><USER21> This could server as a mode of expression and art.

<comment><USER22> Typing "server" instead of "serve" happens to me extremely frequently too (it happened while typing this too), occupational hazard I guess :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What a simply beautiful idea!

</comment><comment><USER24> Can you please stop posting news of the previous years?

</comment><comment><USER25> Terrible idea, don't give those morons who think wifi is harmful any more ammunition</comment>


Poly – Browse, Discover and Download 3D Objects - <AUTHOR> https://poly.google.com/ <comment><USER2> There are lots of sites full of 3D models.

\- Thingiverse

\- 3D Content Central. [http://www.3dcontentcentral.com](http://www.3dcontentcentral.com)

\- GrabCAD. [https://grabcad.com/library](https://grabcad.com/library)

\- 3D Part Library. [http://www.3dpartlib.com/](http://www.3dpartlib.com/)

\- 3D Warehouse. [https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com](https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com)

The ones for CAD are more useful, because they usually have the dimensions right. You download those because you want the parts to fit. For competitive reasons, they tend to be good looking models, even though that's not strictly necessary.

<comment><USER3> Of course there is a huge varierty in types of '3d models' \- from stylised low-poly for games etc. (what this seems to be), to refined 3d art, accurate models of existing buildings, parametric architectural product models and shader effects (e.g. [https://www.shadertoy.com/](https://www.shadertoy.com/)).

As a side note the sketchup 3D warehouse used to be owned by Google in fact, and some of its best attributes (geolocated buildings) were lost in the google process (as part of their switch from using sketchup to populate 3d maps, to 3d city views from composite aerial photos and lidar).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A slice of cheese both on top of and under the patty. It feels like google is just trolling now.

[https://poly.google.com/view/eke7qcu_FR2](https://poly.google.com/view/eke7qcu_FR2)

[https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/924487551372615680](https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/924487551372615680)

<comment><USER5> And what about #borsch ? ;-)

[https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/925017390664048640](https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/925017390664048640)

<comment><USER5> ... and now #borscht on Mashable[1] :-D

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15605658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15605658)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sweet they use my SAO and limited depth blur shader:

[https://www.gstatic.com/external_hosted/threejs-r87/examples...](https://www.gstatic.com/external_hosted/threejs-r87/examples/js/shaders/ZandriaSAOShader.js)

[https://www.gstatic.com/external_hosted/threejs-r87/examples...](https://www.gstatic.com/external_hosted/threejs-r87/examples/js/shaders/DepthLimitedBlurShader.js)

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's the blog post announcing it: [https://blog.google/products/google- vr/poly-browse-discover-...](https://blog.google/products/google-vr/poly- browse-discover-and-download-3d-objects-and-scenes/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool, but I don't really get the intended audience, if there's any specific? Games? I guess VR/AR stuff, like Google cardboard.

I like that they have the C64: [https://poly.google.com/view/9Qc5EtYmJry](https://poly.google.com/view/9Qc5EtYmJry) although they call it "Keyboard (not combined)".

<comment><USER9> The other day I needed a simple coffee mug model to preview a design I was making in Adobe's new Dimensions CC app (basically easy way to add textures to models and envs for product pre-vis).

All the sites I found with quick googling had either unfitting models or weird file formats that Dimensions app didn't accept. But searching "mug" on Poly just now and importing the .obj worked just fine. Slap that design on there, render, review and order custom mug from a nearby printing shop with confidence that the design will fit fine.

Just one use case for free and quality models.

<comment><USER10> Did none of these work?:

[https://sketchfab.com/tags/mug](https://sketchfab.com/tags/mug)

I'd be surprised

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In hindsight, sketchup probably would've been a great asset for Google to still own

<comment> chroem- It's a shame they sold it. It still has the highest modelling capability / difficulty ratio of any 3D software I've seen. Also the 3D Warehouse was a load of fun.

<comment><USER12> I used to think this, but interestingly, after learning several other CAD platforms, you realize both how limited SketchUp is and how the usability is really not substantially different with the huge exception of the onboarding experience. (Not to even get in to what garbage geometry it barfs out.)

There is a traditional UI paradigm in the CAD world which is totally divorced from the desktop UI world that's become ubiquitous in the past few decades. SketchUp was succesful mostly because it rethought all that based on what laymen are familiar with. But Especially at it's absurd new price-point, I think the argument for SketchUp's existence would go away entirely if Rhino just added a waaaaay simplified default workspace, enabled a sensible set of snapping options and the gumball by default, and maybe added a handful of contextual cues for common manipulation tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Real important question is why is there no Stanford bunny in this database?

<comment><USER14> It has the Utah Teapot at least: [https://poly.google.com/view/3pxNWuQ- iii](https://poly.google.com/view/3pxNWuQ-iii)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Slight tangent, but does anyone here have recommendations for a good serialization format for 3D models for the web? Think for loading into Three.js. Ideally something that can be converted to/from Collada. It seems like a lot of the standard file formats are quite heavy.

Edit: glTF? Not sure how good tooling is for this yet, but looks promising.

<comment><USER16> Gtlf is where we are all headed but you're right, the tooling hasn't caught up yet. Google Draco[1] is also an important new development. Compressed meshes and point clouds! It works well and has three.js examples.

I have no idea why no one is talking about Draco anywhere. It's a hugely important new tool. MPEG for vectors!

I think FBX works well with three.js too.

[1] [http://www.github.com/google/draco](http://www.github.com/google/draco)

<comment><USER17> Shameless plug, the three.js fbx converter supports a number of formats including Collada: [https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/tree/dev/utils/converters...](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/tree/dev/utils/converters/fbx)

<comment><USER15> Thanks, this looks really useful too! I had no idea it was there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://www.remix3d.com/](https://www.remix3d.com/) competition

<comment><USER19> Can't see a single download button on the models there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be cool if this let you search the database based on topological properties similar to Thingi10K: [https://ten-thousand- models.appspot.com](https://ten-thousand-models.appspot.com)

This is super useful when finding models to test or benchmark algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the Sketchfab 3D viewer is superior to Poly.

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone read the book 'Ready Player One' ?

Stumbled across this piece that was inspired by it [https://poly.google.com/view/9M6BxvotJoD](https://poly.google.com/view/9M6BxvotJoD)

very cool

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone know what the poly-limit is for uploaded models?

Would really like to see them support GLtf from Khronos as an input/output(API) file format. That's one of the formats we're watching closely at [http://realityzero.one](http://realityzero.one)

I may just do a test upload of some of our scanned models later on. In fact have been scanning a load of Jurassic era fossils that will be part of the supporting cast for a late YC application submission :-) Might need to polyreduce but may still look good on Poly if poly-limit is not too low.

<comment><USER23> Interesting business. Model cost was killing me 10 years ago when I ran a virtual world company.

Do your company just handle static models right now? Animated ones are a whole new level of difficulty. How about generating levels of detail on the model? So many more things that are challenging! Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I miss Viewpoint Data Labs' online free archive of 3D models .. it was once the most extensive collection of diverse objects out there, back in the early days of the web, but with the (then-) rise of VRML and early VR hype, its owners decided it was a property with some commercial value, and they took it offline. And we've been trying to replace it ever since ..

</comment><comment><USER25> If you want a way to discover 3D printable stuff specifically, check out [http://stl.garden/](http://stl.garden/)

It's something I made a few weeks ago for fun to discover STL files on GitHub.

Let me know what you think :]

</comment><comment><USER26> Some of those Tilt Brush paintings, especially the ones by Elizabeth Edwards, are amazing.

</comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one who can't seem to view these properly on stable Firefox?

<comment><USER28> I'm running it in 56.0.2 without trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> With a 3D print category and multiple part uploads (for assemblies) this could have a shot at replacing Thingiverse. I think people are still eager to find an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER30> Would be nice to properly render flat shaded models, Im guessing there'll be a lot of lowpoly stuff here.

</comment><comment><USER31> Uploading works fine, I can see and rotate my model but there is no option to sell models so I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER32> There's been a lot of google posts on HR relating to google products. Are people just genuinely excited by what they are doing, or is there astroturfing going on?

<comment><USER33> Occam's razor. Google is a huge tech company that makes lots of cool stuff. HN is a forum with a strong interest in technology. It makes perfect sense that a new Google product would make it to the front page here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's like a poor ripoff of [https://sketchfab.com/](https://sketchfab.com/)

<comment><USER35> More competition drives innovation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Very similar to Sketchfab

</comment><comment><USER37> how do you actually download?

<comment><USER38> There's a 'Download' link under the 3D view. Gets you a zipped (OBJ) model and material definitions.

<comment><USER37> am i blind?

[https://i.imgur.com/NOjj7b2.png](https://i.imgur.com/NOjj7b2.png)

<comment><USER38> Hmm, strange. [https://vgy.me/cmUQQS.png](https://vgy.me/cmUQQS.png)

Maybe it's hidden under that "3 dots" button in a narrower window?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> OMG someone from the 90's called and wants their models back.</comment>


Facebook - Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos - <AUTHOR> http://beta.flowgram.com/f/p.html#2qi3k8eicrfgkv <comment><USER2> Flowgram really sucks. During my visit, whenever I clicked the forward button, it either redirected me to a page extraneous to the advertised presentation, or just didn't do anything at all.

Granted, this is my first experience with Flowgram.

<comment><USER3> I agree, but you have to support your statement a little more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After staring for 10 seconds at "Loading" thingie I gave up and hit "Back". I live in 2008 with dual core machine equipped with 3GB of RAM and hooked to the Internet via 8MBit fiber connection. I don't need to wait even a second for anything, let alone 10.

</comment><comment><USER5> i watched this all the way through (interesting stuff around slide 15) and the one question i have is how do they control sequential writing to a singular 'haystack' file that is being (artificially) capped at 10GB.

they are using offsets to seek in this large file to limit their exposure to unnecessary file metadata.</comment>


Twitter says politicians aren't "entirely" above the rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/15/20916264/twitter-trump-policies-public-figures-interest-moderation-speech <comment><USER2> Please boycot both Twitter and Facebook until they show ethical behavior.</comment>


Windows 8 Promo Code Gaffe Lets Anyone to Upgrade for $14.99 - <AUTHOR> http://techpp.com/2012/10/27/windows-8-promo-code/ <comment><USER2> And promo code is valid till Jan 31st?</comment>