The Strange Brain of the World's Greatest Solo Climber (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/61/coordinates/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-solo-climber-rp <comment><USER2> Weird to see this article doing the rounds again. I've spent a fair amount of time with Alex (climbing, doing jigsaw puzzles, etc). He's totally normal, just strong, motivated, and disciplined. Nautilus publishes a lot of pseudoscience that wouldn't be accepted in a peer-reviewed journal, and this is perfect example. A claim of reading personality based on fMRI study of a single person's brain, which shows slightly different bloodflow amounts in a particular place. NB: I haven't talked to him about this article so don't know what his opinion is on it.

<comment><USER3> I know personally my body has (seemingly) felt fear independent of my mind, and I have heard other drivers talk about this too. Typically this happens when you (think you) know you can execute a corner flat out, yet your foot lifts off the throttle just a bit all by itself; is one example that springs to mind.

I wonder how climbers overcome this?

<comment><USER4> I'm not generally afraid of snakes, but while hiking at dusk one time I jumped in the air, and THEN realized there was a snake in the path.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_detection_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_detection_theory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Alex has always been a bit... well, Alex. I'm not surprised that there is something different about his neural anatomy.

Case-in-point: many, many moons ago, he hobbled into the climbing gym with approximately 50% of his limbs interred in plaster casts. Apparently, he had some sort of skiing accident, and had broken... well, lots of things.

Including most of one of his hands -- only the last two fingers poked out.

He then proceeded to train and climb pretty much as normal, flashing routes that I never actually managed to complete. And he wasn't showing off, either. It was just a sort of normal day of training.

I can't imagine most... really, any other athlete I know doing anything like that.

He's just... Alex.

<comment><USER2> By "approximately 50% of his limbs," do you mean "one limb" or "two limbs"? I'm pretty sure he has four...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >> He might insist that he feels fear (he describes standing on Thank God Ledge as "surprisingly scary"), but he has become a paramount symbol of fearlessness.

So, this is how to not do science: "This man has no fear. How does he do it? We scanned his brain and found he has no fear!".

It's not like you should automatically discard any experiment that justifies cultural expectations. But you should be really, really suspicious of any such result.

On a side note (and more controversially) modern neuroscience, with its fMRI conjectures, is starting to look a lot like craniometry.

<comment><USER8> Isn't it just an outworking of monism - the brain is a machine, a part of that machine must be responsible for a particular function.

People who injure specific regions lose specific abilities. Magnetic stimulation of particular regions leads to different feelings, etc..

It doesn't seem that misguided as a first approximation?

<comment><USER7> The problem is with collecting evidence for what you take to be the truth in the first place. It's called confirmation bias and it has nothing to do with methodology, instruments, or techniques. What goes wrong is in the space between the experiment and the interpretation of the experiment: if you set out to prove something you already hold to be the truth, you're very likely to "prove" it regardless of what your data, or your results, actually say.

It might sound strange, but the right way to conduct a study is not to start with a hypothesis and gather evidence to support it. Instead, what you're supposed to do (but nobody ever does) is to first collect some observations, then come up with an hypothesis to explain them, then collect more, _new_ evidence and test whether _this new evidence_ supports the hypothesis.

Otherwise, you risk collecting only the evidence that supports your hypothesis- or interpreting it in a way that supports it. Not that doing things "the right way" keeps you safe, either. In practice, everyone will have preconceptions and already-formed ideas about what is true and what is not and no amount of good practice will completely protect you from drawing the conclusions you prefer from whatever data you collect.

So, when you see a study that starts out with the premise that "this man is fearless" concluding that "this man's brain can feel no fear" it should ring all the alarm bells and raise all the red flags. Especially so if the study (or at least the article reporting it) stresses the subject's fearlessness continuously.

In short, this study seems to have found exactly what the researchers expected to find. That's as bad as it gets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bet the truth is, when it comes to static imagery, Alex Honnold just registers as excitable about different subject matter.

It sounds like they tried a largely negative gore-oriented image set (injuries and depictions of people in distress) to induce what could probably more accurately be interpretted as an unpleasant state of mind. For regular people of middling intellect who live sheltered lives, being subjected to strange viewing habits in a clinical setting probably registers as extremely odd. Alex, on the other hand approached the experiment after reaching a degree of celebrity that puts him beyond the possibility of an assessment that restricts him from acting freely.

He didn't submit to the experiment, until his career was sufficiently rewarding enough to be innately recognized as highly skilled, and thus beyond the reach of ordinary doctors adjucating him as a threat to himself or others, and thus preventing him from doing what he loves.

Therefore, nothing about the experimental setting was threatening, and he felt no pressure to masquerade with a "normal" response deceptively, or else attract psychiatric scrutiny, perhaps warranting medication and inviting pressure from family members and see other facets of his support network turn against him. With broad fame, he effectively deflects any ordinary institutional authority, and he has social proof of success, no matter what the machine records and reveals unexpectedly.

So then, take other conceptual image sets, and see what _does_ catch a rise out of Alex Honnold, and I bet you'll find he's as human as any of us.

Show him sprawling incredible mountain vistas looking at the sun rise over a himalayan cloud deck, rivaling or far surpassing anything you could hope to see from the top of a tall building and I bet something jumps out from deeper within, than showing him images of a train wreck, because it has to be something real to him. Then the measurements will start showing numbers in keeping with other people's reaction to visual stimuli.

In psychology subject matter specific to the individual counts, and Alex has different tastes.

<comment><USER10> Or perhaps a rope, dangling 20ft too short, would trigger him. I think you're right. His "mental armor" technique is noteworthy, though. People often overlook the very significant training he undertook.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, and honestly, I'm willing to bet that just " _showing someone pictures_ " on some level simply doesn't work on a significant number of people.

Within a certain threshold, simply looking at an image will register an amount of activity in anybody's brain, but I think the context of the viewing situation, combined with the power differential of the individual controlling the slide show, obviously plays more heavily on the mind than the subject matter of the image itself.

For example, a kidnapper asking for a million dollars, and showing you a picture of your own child tied to a chair, while cocking a pistol and pointing it at you, is going to stress you a lot more as a credible threat, than a grad student in a doctor's office asking you to "think about things," while showing you a picture of some random crying child, while an MRI clicks and hums around you.

But for some people (probably many people), the grad student with the clipboard and the MRI, is actually kind of scary in it's own strange way.

<comment><USER11> These days it is not hard to come across a variety of shocking images and I can imagine that exposure to those could be correlated with the sensation seeking thing, making the images much more ordinary and leaving other considerations as stronger effects.

For some of us, the images themselves would be quite disturbing; just the description of them (that I have heard before) was enough to provoke a fairly strong reaction for me. I might have a somewhat unusually strong reaction, but I would have guessed that it was a fairly small percentage of people who would have little or no reaction. OTOH, a lot of things would make more sense if that percentage was quite a bit higher than I would think.

Also, fMRI descriptions always make it sound like the brain is at rest until it is being activated, but that is not how it works. Obviously the imaging tries to take into account how it actually works, but there can still be a number of issues. I don't know enough to have any idea how likely it is that there are technical issues here, but functional imaging is an area where major issues have gone undetected for surprisingly long periods of time so it should always be considered a plausable theory that the imaging isn't actually showing what we would like it to be showing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> wu-ikkyu Reading this reminded me of S.M., thr woman who literally cannot physically feel fear

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._\(patient\))

</comment><comment><USER12> I've always been in awe of Alex and thought, like the others in the "peanut gallery", that there must be something different about the way his brain functions. Very interesting to find out what that is!

</comment><comment><USER13> He's not the first to come along to receive this kind of attention and even accolades from the general public, and naturally from other climbers who sometimes do this, or would like to...including, I suppose, me.

Most of the ones that did receive a degree of fame from this activity, and got filmed, on TV, and whatnot are now dead.

As a climber myself who sometimes freesolos even up to 400 meters "off the deck" I don't see it as bad. What is stupid as fuck, however, is doing this 'on demand' for TV and film crews, and otherwise making a thing out of it at all.

Sure, go out and do your thing quietly, why not? But the only way he can continue to garner publicity (and let's be clear: money) is to push the limits more and more each time. There is only one way that can go...

Will National Geographic put that on TV, when he 'craters' (as we say) and blood, brains, and chips of bone splatter across the rocks? If they are responsible they will, because by doing this stuff on TV he and they are publicizing only the "glory" side of it, never mind all the people, some quite famous, that did fucking crater...

So, while I do think he has achieved some great feats, I don't like what he is doing for the reasons I just spelled out. And I don't think he will last long. Those "chewing gum" edges do snap off, bats and birds do shit slimy shits on required small edges, thunderstorms and hail storms and even snowstorms in the middle of the summer can come out of the blue sky in minutes in the mountains, and many other things can go wrong, including human error...and needless to say, human error is very frequently preceded by ego and pride....it would be very hard for someone to stay absolutely humble when the whole world is cheering him on and calling him "World's Greatest"....

<comment><USER14> As a former big wall climber I would add that articles like this forget to mention the difficulty factor. For some people a 5.10 is like walking on a sidewalk. People who would be killed by falling off a sidewalk or down a set of stairs (old people etc) rarely use harnesses. Risk is inversely related to skill and ability.

At least a rock climber's fate is largely in their control. The well-traveled Yosemite stuff isn't going to shift under you. Death zone, or ice climbers, are the real crazies. They role the dice. Skill and ability means nothing when the mountain decides to collapse underneath you. And such climbers tend to die in groups, their fate linked to whoever else is on the rope. Free soloists die alone.

<comment><USER15> > The well-traveled Yosemite stuff isn't going to shift under you.

Except when there are accidents. Like recently on El Capitan: [https://www.climbing.com/news/eye-witnesses-recount- tragic-a...](https://www.climbing.com/news/eye-witnesses-recount-tragic- accident-on-el-caps-freeblast/)

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know what went wrong there yet, exactly? Just insufficient pro and unexpected fall?

<comment><USER14> Looks like the pair were simulclimbing and might not have had any pro between them at a bad moment.

<comment><USER2> In which case, gkanai is wrong -- the rock didn't "shift." This was almost certainly human error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sorry for the stupid question but how does he get back down?

<comment><USER17> There are walk-offs for almost all of the routes he free solos. For any others, he would have stashed some gear/ropes up top to rappel.

<comment><USER18> He does a fair bit of down climbing too, he has described it as the most important skill for free soloing before

<comment><USER19> There seems to be plenty of routes where down is impossible though, you just have to continue

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Studies like this are always interesting to me in that they tread the line between neuroscience and philosophy. They show that a persons philosophical outlook and thinking controls a great deal of how we process and respond to the world. It's unfortunate that our societies usual reaction to attempting to help those who have experienced trauma by getting them to deal with it and move past it is to decry that as somehow 'victim blaming' or minimizing the trauma. Our brains are amazingly adaptable. We can be trained to be utterly fragile, or amazingly resilient. When shown an image like those shown to Alex to elicit arousal, a person can either identify with the subjects in the photo (an act which actually takes a great deal of mental effort, since images are so profoundly different from reality), or recognize it as an image and deal with it solely as it actually is. Whether you do one or another has substantial consequences for you subjectively. And of course no one but yourself can make that kind of choice.

</comment><comment><USER21> That's an interesting quote to me:

"But it could be the case that he has such a well-honed regulatory system that he can say, 'OK, I'm feeling all this stuff, my amygdala is going off,' but his frontal cortex is just so powerful that it can calm him down."

I didn't know that the frontal cortex can calm one down. Is that what happens in "normal people" who are very stress resistant?

<comment><USER22> Is this similar to the kind of control that Wim Hoff has been seen to exert when in cold situations, I wonder?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm an online fan of his after watching many videos on yt. What surprises me is that he (and all the climbers I've seen) aren't "ripped". For being able to pull himself straight up half dome, I would expect the body to layer on a lot more muscle.

Also, I hope he stops free soloing. It's amazing he can do that, but it's not fair to all his fans who would be devastated if we lost him.

<comment><USER24> That's a paradoxical thing to say, since you probably discovered him through his free soloing. You might not have been his fan had he not free solo'd.

<comment><USER23> That is true, the free soloing is the eye catcher. But he has a very likeable and relatable personality too. I would be really sad if something happened to him.

<comment><USER25> People frequently dying doing roped climbing too, even the most experience and skilled climbers; and often of stupid mistakes or random hazards.

But more importantly, it's probably better to let people do the things they love as long as they're not directly hurting others. Surely the feelings of fans shouldn't override the preferences of the object of their fanaticism.

<comment><USER23> And people doing roped climbing often fall and recover just fine, which is impossible to do when you...dont have a rope.

I agree that nobody should be prevented from doing risky things. But when they become "famous" I believe it reckless to disregard the feelings of their fans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are there any links to actual data or a peer-reviewed article?

<comment><USER2> No, Nautilus is a beautiful and interesting publication, but it's a pseudo- journal where people publish stuff they can't get into a real journal.

<comment><USER25> What evidence are you aware of that indicates that they're even trying to come across as a scientific journal? I'm pretty sure they're just a standard Science! publication, like Popular Science.

<comment><USER2> Popular Science, Newscientist, and their ilk generally report about research that's published elsewhere, or write about engineers and scientists. Nautilus, instead, publishes original research, written by engineers and scientists themselves. I am not trying to say that Nautilus is intentionally defrauding the public, but they are pioneering a new grey zone between journal and magazine.

<comment><USER25> You're just repeating the claim for which I requested evidence. What's the basis for believing that they're publishing 'original research', instead of regular journalism? What's the basis for your claim that their writers are engineers and scientists?

And why is this 'grey'-er than scientists or engineers writing anything other than scientific journal articles, e.g. books, magazine articles, essays, like they've always done?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> a lot like a raccoon's apparently.

</comment><comment><USER28> The idea that honnold is the world's greatest climber is patently absurd and false, he's just the only dude willing to do the crazy solos without a harness -- aka the world's most risk taking climber. But "greatest climber?" Lol give me a break lolololol

<comment><USER29> In your haste to be derisive you missed the adjective "solo" in the title. While I would agree Alex is probably not in the running for greatest climber, I think one could make the case that he is the greatest solo climber, and or at least the greatest living solo climber.

<comment><USER28> I did not miss the word "solo." Honnold is not the worlds greatest solo climber by a Longshot. He's the greatest "free solo" climber. A ton of solo climbers are way better than him, they just use ropes

<comment><USER30> You're getting caught up in technical terminology whereas this article is written for non-climbers. Those of us that have done the activity know the difference between solo and free solo, but in the same way that you can't expect articles for non-climbers to get the distinction between sport and trad right (climbing is a sport, so it's all sport climbing, right?), You can't expect them to get the solo/free-solo thing right either.

<comment><USER31> To be fair, my first guess from the title was Reinhold Messner. Different kind of solo. (And perhaps a better candidate for having strange biology?)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Aviary releases Raven, The First Vector Graphics Editor For The Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/06/aviary-encroaches-on-adobe-illustrator-with-raven-the-first-vector-graphics-editor-for-the-web/ <comment><USER2> Cumulate Labs (cumulatelabs.com) was probably the first vector graphics app. It was purchased by autodesk and is now project draw (<http://draw.labs.autodesk.com>).

</comment><comment><USER3> Raven's been out for a while - this isn't a new release, it's just been in limited beta. It's a neat tool, though.</comment>


Two Monitors for Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.devlanding.com/?p=110 <comment><USER2> It's working wonders for designers!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great for designers! especially when you edit a photo on the left screen, and see the original image on the right screen.</comment></comment>


Lisp Operating System (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://metamodular.com/Common-Lisp/lispos.html <comment><USER3> Summary:

\- We don't need separate processes if the language we use is inherently safe (e.g., modern Common Lisp).

\- Without process isolation, it is possible to share large, complicated and possibly mutable data structures (graphs, arrays, user-defined objects) system-wide.

\- Once it is possible to cheaply share and communicate arbitrary data structures, it is pointless to maintain designated 'file system'.

\- Not having a file system raises the question of what data should be persistent and what shouldn't. But on a modern computer, it is feasible to just treat all data as persistent (maybe excluding the youngest GC generation).

The best news is that the author is actually working hard to implement this operating system. The first part - the Lisp implementation - is already in a pretty good shape and could be finished within the next two years: [https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL](https://github.com/robert- strandh/SICL)

<comment><USER4> > We don't need separate processes if the language we use is inherently safe > (e.g., modern Common Lisp).

I note the year of the article, which was before Spectre and friends showed that this is not a reasonable assumption these days[1].

So does this mean LispOS is doomed?

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178)

<comment><USER5> If you have a single address space you don't need Spectre to be able to discover any aspect of the running system.

<comment><USER6> Only if you're given raw memory access, which you are not in Lisp.

<comment><USER7> Without raw memory access, good luck supporting anything than basic hardware. Even some USB features requires it.

<comment><USER8> It's entirely possible to write a system where application code only gets sanitized handles and OS code inside the implementation gets raw memory pointers at least some of the time. All running in one address space doesn't mean all running in one security context, necessarily.

Really, address spaces are just a hardware implementation of a more general concept: Namespace-based security. Application code wouldn't even be able to know the names of privileged objects, and if someone told that code the right names, it wouldn't be able to use them, because resolution of names to things is, itself, privileged.

In a simple example, assuming a Common Lisp-like system: Everything which handles raw pointers is in the SYSTEM package. Application code can't inspect the SYSTEM package, and, even if you told an application that the function SYSTEM:WRITE-DATA-TO-DISK was a thing, it couldn't call that function because the real evaluation code, which _can_ see into the SYSTEM namespace, knows not to let application code call anything in SYSTEM; only the functions in SYSTEM and SYSCALL can do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the incremental development the author describes, you can do that atop any GNU/Linux host platform on which your CL implementation runs.

To play with a bootable user experience, before you've replaced the host kernel and device support, you can strip down something like Debian Live. I previously did this for a Racket-based living room appliance project. A simpler example, without Racketisms, that uses only 2 shell scripts (you only need 1; the other is to play partition table tricks), is my earlier Debian Live variant: [https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/)

I'm also a fan of a variation on the author's approach: have your better/different language get a foothold on a working GNU/Linux system, _alongside traditional apps_ , in a system the user could use as their daily driver, and incrementally replace all of userland. This was my plan for PostmarketOS (though I've suspended my open source work on "non-employable" things): [https://www.neilvandyke.org/postmarketos/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/postmarketos/)

The author's approach also seems valid, and worth playing with.

<comment><USER10> > _I 'm also a fan of a variation on the author's approach: have your > better/different language get a foothold on a working GNU/Linux system, > alongside traditional apps, in a system the user could use as their daily > driver, and incrementally replace all of userland._

That's incidentally what Emacs is to many of its users (myself included).

<comment><USER9> I used to do this with Emacs, too (VM, Gnus, w3m, and more besides all the programming tools), and some of my Emacs packages are in support of that: [https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/)

For a (mostly) single host process, without preemptive multitasking/threading, Emacs as an operating system works surprisingly well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm all for thinking outside the box but many of the complaints described in that are blamed on UNIX when in fact they were also adopted by a multitude of other non-UNIX platforms and reason they became common was because it simply made more sense for general computing.

For example their "file system" (for want a better description) approach was tried on an IBM mainframe and it proved more cumbersome to maintain than the typical file system approach we have currently.

Also when talking about address spaces he acknowledges traditional memory management exists for security reasons then says that's not needed in his OS without actually proving how his method either prevents the same attacks nor new ones that effectively result in the same kind of vulnerability (I could think of a few very easy attacks against his OS design).

Similarly the way he combines physical storage and system memory into one device completely overlooks technical limitations of the hardware, the risk of data loss if you don't manage things correctly, the vastly different storage capacities between the two, nor the fact that basically every OS does this to some extent already via caching.

While it's nice to go back to the drawing board and rethink certain idioms, this felt more like a half baked rant at UNIX than an objective look at the past and current OS designs.

<comment><USER12> That was my take away as well. Some interesting ideas - most of which aren't new - but the ideology felt very biased. To a fault even. I would still love to see a working version of this. Or even just a more traditional general computing OS but one which used FP (not necessarily LISP) as its primitive.

<comment><USER13> This article I read yesterday has one interesting take on what an OS designed on modern programming principles could look like. It has a loose treatment of technical FP terms, but the insights behind it are at least thought-provoking.

[https://medium.com/@reinman/monoids-to- groupoids-492c3510511...](https://medium.com/@reinman/monoids-to- groupoids-492c35105113)

I believe we're in for a redesign of OS architectures, now that the 50's assumption of a single machine with a single OS kernel running all programs (or the 60's equivalent of several few mainframes communicating through a slow network) is no longer the main paradigm.

<comment><USER14> The article reminds me of what Erlang is meant to do. With pure message passing wouldn't the need for some foo() calling some bar() be down to shooting off a message?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great write-up and I agree with many points. I don't think the 'Lisp language' is the key point here though, but the other OS properties like a single level store and composition methods richer than byte arrays.

Would be nice if the author referenced historical systems that overlap these ideas.

One is the Symbolics Genera system with 'data level integration' so apps shared rich data structures instead of uninterpreted bits. [https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics- info/gene...](https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics- info/genera/genera.html)

Another is Appolo Domain/OS which had a single level store: [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/014962-A00_Domain_OS_Design_...](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/014962-A00_Domain_OS_Design_Principles_Jan89.pdf)

<comment><USER16> Yes, absolutely astounding that this article doesn't mention Genera.

If we're going to proceed to list every single address space operating system we've ever heard of, i'll mention SPIN, written in Modula 3 (although i don't know if it did anything clever about sharing data between applications):

[http://www-spin.cs.washington.edu/external/overview.html](http://www- spin.cs.washington.edu/external/overview.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whilst difference is good, I am not sure many of the "attack" on the process etc is right. Whilst you can bring anything on old hardware (car and cdr come to mind and those strange intel register format), some gem can be argued instead of rubbish. Process is an isolation, small address is easier to debug if you do not need 64bit address etc. And driver issue ... lisp driver.

Really not sure the whole game.

</comment><comment><USER18> Makes me think of loper os: [http://www.loper-os.org/?p=4](http://www.loper- os.org/?p=4)

</comment><comment><USER19> The criticisms may or may not be correct, but I fail to see why a Lisp (and not another language) would be the answer to all of the issues here.

<comment><USER3> The points for Common Lisp are:

1\. It is ANSI standardized and mature.

2\. Common Lisp programs are safe. Some implementations violate safety for performance reasons, but this one certainly won't.

3\. Common Lisp has the best error handling mechanism that I know of (Conditions, handlers and restarts).

4\. The language is programmable, both at the syntax level (Macros) and at the object level (CLOS with the metaobject protocol). So new ideas from other programming languages can often just be ported.

5\. The language has been designed for interactivity and safe incremental redefinition.

6\. Lisp has already been used very successfully for operating system development ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine)).

This makes it pretty much the ideal choice for such a project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This document talks a lot about deficiencies of the unix way, yet fails to give any concrete examples of advantage of the proposed new way where everything runs in the same address space, uses object storage, and is allowing users to run (!) _" only code that has been produced from the high- level notation of the language"_.

I agree that there are technical problems with interoperability of programs and partially this may be due to the unix way. But the article does not analyze this and it is not clear that such a radical change is a good way to solve those problems. Even if theoretically yes, there are practical things to consider, such as the insane amount of work needed to switch. Perhaps the author just likes Lisp and has a solution in need of a problem.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone remember the TI Explorer? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_Explorer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_Explorer)). They were sold in the 1980s, I first saw one in person in 1993. It was astonishing back then that it had an optical mouse and an optical cable connecting the keyboard to the rest of the unit. My understanding is that it was a full stack LISP machine, down to CAR/CDR support in hardware.

</comment><comment><USER22> How does failure-recovery (software bugs, hardware, or otherwise) or resilience-engineering more generally work on a system that demurs isolation and redundancy (honest question)?

</comment><comment><USER23> They spelt emacs wrong

<comment><USER24> They didn't name anything, they just provided a description.

<comment><USER12> I assumed his comment was a reference to the old "joke":

> _" Emacs is a great OS, but it lacks a decent text editor."_

The comment presumably made because emacs is extended with LISP.

<comment><USER25> Emacs is written in Emacs LISP, which is its own language. The really performance-critical stuff is written in C, as is the interpreter, but that's it.

<comment><USER12> That's ostensibly what I said wasn't it? Sorry but I can't tell if you were agreeing or disagreeing with me.

<comment><USER25> I interpreted your comment to mean something like "Emacs is configurable with third-party LISP code", in much the same way as Vim is configurable with third-party Vimscript.

But Vim is written in C, Vimscript being just a bolt on, whereas Emacs LISP is its own language entirely, a distinct variant of LISP, and much of Emacs implemented in it.

<comment><USER12> LISP is a family of languages (much like BASIC). So Emacs Lisp is still a LISP.

I don't even know why you're bring Vim into the discussion when it has nothing to do with the topic being discussed. It doesn't invalidate the statement I made; I just makes your reply look a little snobby because you seem concerned that someone might compare Emacs and Emacs Lisp to Vim and Vim Script (I clearly wasn't given the complete lack of reference to Vim in my post).

To be honest I thought we had gotten past those tedious flamewars in the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I literally stalled on the first sentence where he asserts without any rationale that an OS written in Lisp "would be a good thing in itself".

WHY

WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK THIS MATTERS

<comment><USER27> Conversely, why would anyone think that because a thing doesn't matter to them, it shouldn't matter to anyone else either?

<comment><USER28> I think that if you were to poll the users of an OS about what matters to them, the language it was implemented in would be at the absolute bottom of the list.

It may matter to the author of the article. That's fine. To the users? I'm pretty sure that hardtoreason correctly reflects their attitude.

And if you're writing an OS, but don't care about the users? Well, write it however matters to you, because you aren't likely to have users who care, because you aren't likely to have users at all.

<comment><USER29> > And if you're writing an OS, but don't care about the users? Well, write it > however matters to you, because you aren't likely to have users who care, > because you aren't likely to have users at all.

Counterpoint: Windows 10.

<comment><USER28> Touche. (Though even with Windows 10, my larger point still stands - <USER2> cared what language it was written in.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should Rich Kids Be Grounded From Social Networking? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/08/13/should-rich-kids-be-grounded-from-social-networking/

<comment><USER2> There might be a startup opportunity here.

How hard would it be to make an interface to FB / Twitter that lets a third party audit your tweets and posts before they're published?</comment>


Read color hex codes - <AUTHOR> https://www.dotconferences.com/2018/11/david-desandro-read-color-hex-codes <comment><USER2> I can read color hex codes just fine. In fact, while writing my CSS, I often have a shade of color in mine and I just go ahead and type out its hex code by guesswork and then fine tune it by changing the R, G, and B values. I am not colorblind. I never thought this is a special skill! It's just basic understanding of hexadecimal, the RGB color model, and additive color mixing.

The nice thing this video helps me with is to give a name to every RGB color code. This is something I had always found difficult even though I knew what each RGB color code would look like. Giving a name to every RGB code makes it easy to communicate colors to others.

<comment><USER3> Me too. I thought all web developers did this?

<comment><USER4> No, hex color mixing theory doesn't sound like a sound UI development pattern.

<comment><USER5> What? If you're a web developer and don't know how to use them, then you're not a very good one.

<comment><USER6> That is harsh and somewhat elitist. I'm guessing people could probably say pretty much anything to sound skilled by replacing X here: "What? If you're a web developer and don't know how to use X, then you're not a very good one."

I understand RGB, base-16 and HSL yet this isn't instinctive for me. I might be a below average dev (although my clients and colleagues seem to think otherwise), but I'd prefer a color picker any day before thinking about translation of color codes.

<comment><USER5> The value that pops out of the color picker shouldn't be a mystery to you.

<comment><USER6> Ah, agreed. But your comment didn't actually say that - you took something kinda small and leveraged it too far as it would define the web dev skills.

<comment><USER5> I'm well aware of what I said, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to trivialize the article's ruminations above and beyond the simple mechanical understanding of hex codes – but once you have the basics of hex and color mixtures, a fun practical way to practice them is with one of various "guess the color for a hex code" games; e.g., [http://yizzle.com/whatthehex/](http://yizzle.com/whatthehex/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Learning to interpret base 16 numbers is easy. But the problem is that RGB values are only indirectly related to the perceptual attributes of a color. (Which is why knowing the HSL or HSV coordinates is also not very informative.)

Much easier and more useful (for a human reader) would be to first convert to Munsell coordinates, or even CIELAB LCh.

<comment><USER9> True, it's hard to visualize a color in much detail without going to another model, but for a rough guesstimate this does fine and despite the long explanation it's pretty easy to do in your head almost instantly.

Due to childhood hours spent programming the TI-99/4A I can look at hex numbers and see bitmaps which is also not a particularly useful skill but trivial with a little practice. (unlike what they said in the Matrix, I doubt anyone would ever prefer it that way though)

<comment><USER8> It's not so much that it's "hard to visualize" the colors. The problem is that comparing the results numerically is grossly misleading, because RGB are not perceptually relevant color dimensions.

For example, this article says _"D is the highest value, 2 is the lowest. D is high. 2 is low. That 's a wide range, but not completely wide. So our color has moderate saturation, thus making it a washed color."_

But you can make a wide variety of colors where 34/255 is the lowest sRGB coordinate and 221/255 is the highest sRGB coordinate, including some which are extremely intense (e.g. #d2d) and others which are more moderate (e.g. #da2).

The article says, _"the values are both high and low, so it has middle lightness,"_ again based on the example #d92. But try comparing the lightness of #92d and #9d2. While HSL or HSV "L" or "V" will be the same between the two, one is a light yellowish green color, the other is dark purple.

These heuristics are grossly misleading and should not be relied on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first few paragraphs just explain what the hex codes mean literally, but the article gets a lot more interesting after that. As another poster mentioned, his heuristics aren't perfect, but they're pretty handy. I've memorized a bunch of hex codes and the general "shape" of colors over the years, but this more disciplined approach is really interesting!

</comment><comment><USER11> > You're likely already familiar and have seen #FFF for white and #000 for > black. The actual value of a shorthand code is made by duplicating the digit > for each channel. So #D92 is technically #DD9922.

Huh, I had always thought that they added a zero, so #D92 would become #D09020. TIL.

<comment><USER12> I think I always knew that it doubled the values, but I only recently realized that #888 isn't 50%, which would be #808080 (rounded).

<comment><USER13> Conversely, the shorthand scale _does_ divide into perfect thirds (#555, #AAA) or fifths (#333, #666, #999, #CCC).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That was really helpful with regards to understanding how to get saturation and brightness from hex. I hadn't seen that explained before.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, I would have never guessed David was colorblind. In fact his websites and logo designs make remarkable use of color.

</comment><comment><USER16> The explanations breaking down the constituents of hex codes reminded me of CSS colour module level 4 and how 4 (#rgba) and 8 (#rrggbbaa) digit codes might see support.

I wonder if there's still intuition for visualising colours when involving opacity in the mix.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is really amazing!

I wonder how many other things in our world are there right in front of our eyes but we can't see them because of our mental blocks.

</comment><comment><USER18> Vastly better than the "Make some colors by shuffling the hex numbers around" from yesterday.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you talk out-loud to yourself when you program? - <AUTHOR> I remember in the late 90s when I got my first job as a web programmer at my University.  I walked in to this basement-cave with several of out of central casting uber-nerds sitting deep in thought in front of their monitors.  I remember getting myself set up and being really surprised at the cacophony of mutterings, celebrations, and chuckles that these guys emitted for no-one in particular.
I worked there for several years, but never really joined in with this behavior, maybe I didn't see myself as being uber enough to warrant this (what I thought of at the time as) autistic-like behavior.
Fast forward almost 20 years, and I do this all of the time (though admittedly not in the company of others).  I'm not sure when I got into the habit of it, I think it's been the thousands of hours of development I've done by myself, where it seems to serve as a way to keep myself motivated, on-task, and in flow.
Is this something you do, and is this a unique behavior trait to developers?  I can't think of any other profession where it would be socially acceptable.. <comment><USER2> Yes, I constantly talk to myself when I'm programming. If you want you could buy a rubber duck and try this debugging technique [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging) .

<comment><USER3> > Many programmers have had the experience of explaining a programming problem > to someone else, possibly even to someone who knows nothing about > programming, and then hitting upon the solution in the process of explaining > the problem.

I've definitely experienced this countless times either in trying to describe the problem to a person or in writing a question for Stack Overflow.

<comment><USER4> It works! You make so many assumptions with your internal thought dialogue, it just becomes clear what you missed when you try to verbalize it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's actually plenty of research on the relationship between self-talk and performance in a variety of domains.

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=self- talk+performance&b...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=self- talk+performance&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5)

</comment><comment><USER6> At home, yes, often. At work (in an open office) absolutely not, it would be exceptionally rude and distracting for my coworkers.

</comment><comment><USER7> I curse a lot at the computer when things aren't working the way I want...

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, and lately I've found myself even narrating everyday tasks a little. I do catch myself, and try to keep my inner-dialogue in my head.

I think spending hours on computers isolated daily is probably not good for long term mental health.

</comment><comment><USER9> No, for some reason people talking to themselves is irritating to me, generally speaking.

I've also had roommates and people that do it loudly and constantly so I'm a bit more sensitive to it.

</comment><comment><USER10> No, I talk to my cat.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes I will talk to myself as I write code allowed, but more often, I listen to music and I rock back and forth. It calms me and keeps me focused. Probably weird to everyone around me and may be a form of autism, but I was never diagnosed, and function even better when I'm rocking in my chair to the music.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yep, I do it all the time. And that's true whether or not I'm in the company of others. But then again, I also talk to myself while changing brake pads on my car, wiring circuits on breadboards at the hackerspace, cooking, etc.

At least the list doesn't (yet) include "posting on HN".

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't think this is in any way peculiar to programmers. I am not a programmer. I used to spend a lot of time on gifted discussion lists and a phrase I used a lot back then was something like "I don't know what I think until I run it through my mouth."

</comment><comment><USER14> Not a programmer but I write plenty of puppet DSL and scripts and if I'm on a roll I find myself regularly talking through elements / relationships within the code all the time, I think I sound like a madman to those near by.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yeah, I too do most of the times.. Stumbling the problem or the code flow in mind may be a difficult one but it becomes a lot easier when we narrate it orally!

</comment><comment><USER16> Of course I talk to my computer, there is no one else to talk to around here.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes, if I'm alone. Definitely helps with flow, sometimes.

It's one of the bigger factors in my hatred of open offices.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes. And it is not unique to developers. Mathematicians do it all the time too.

</comment><comment><USER19> I talk to an inanimate object or the bird on the window.</comment>


Descendants of Newfoundland's "extinct" Beothuk Live on in Iceland (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.canoe.com/parker/news/descendants-of-newfoundlands-extinct-beothuk-live-on-in-iceland/ <comment><USER2> Somewhat off topic but about the section describing the viking arrival in Greenland and North America, it's astounding the impact on history that a tiny number of people taking big risks can have.

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate on what impact they had? The vikings reaching North America early is pretty neat, but doesn't seem to have changed the course of history much. Their colonies West of Greenland were pretty much failures, as they were systematically unable to compete with natives for resources. They were eventually pushed back east by skirmishes with the Thule and harsh, underprovisioned winters.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some evidence that Christopher Columbus ventured to the New World based on Norsemen knowledge of Vinland that had reached the Catholic Church.

Catholic historian mentioning Vinland:

[https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adam-of- Bremen#ref19170...](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adam-of- Bremen#ref191702)

There is some evidence Columbus visited Iceland in 1477 where there would have been more knowledge of the North American territories.

<comment><USER4> There were many stories about islands or land to the west.

Saint Brendan's Isle would have been on many maps in Columbus's time, with Irish legends about it. Some of the other phantom islands from that era include Hy-Brasil, the Isle of Mam, Royllo, Satanazes, and Antillia.

While there may have been some influence from the Norse sagas, I think Antillia played a much larger role in his decision making. Quoting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia#Medieval_beliefs_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia#Medieval_beliefs_and_the_Age_of_Discovery) :

> under the Spanish flag of Ferdinand and Isabella, Christopher Columbus set > out on his historic journey to Asia, citing the island as the perfect > halfway house by the authority of Paul Toscanelli.[45] Columbus had > supposedly gained charts and descriptions from a Spanish navigator, who had > "sojourned... and died also" at Columbus's home in Madeira, after having > made landfall on Antillia.[46]

I am not saying that there could not have been influence from the Norse sagas, only that other (incorrect) geographical descriptions appear to have had a stronger and more documented influence on his decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fascinating, thanks for the link. Just to provide a little more support for the admittedly weaker argument I made earlier: the knowledge of the lands discovered by the Norse was extensively recorded by Catholic priests, and their works were read for centuries in Europe.

[https://books.google.ca/books?id=SaXuAgAAQBAJ&pg=PR8&lpg=PR8...](https://books.google.ca/books?id=SaXuAgAAQBAJ&pg=PR8&lpg=PR8&dq=vinland+catholic+book&source=bl&ots=V5L0qUwcMa&sig=BfsvBlmFWd6xn-4dL8PP9xcpcRY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjEytrAg77PAhUPzGMKHZKxAEwQ6AEIIzAE#v=onepage&q&f=false)

and Christopher Columbus, as a literate Catholic, could conveivably have had access to this knowledge. The Catholic Church may very well have had an interest in these lands as potential places to spread its faith to. The Church even had a bishop in the Norse colonies in Finland.

But yes, clearly the legends you mention were much more prominent in the public consciousness of the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> That should be: in the Norse colonies in Greenland, not Finland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-no-n Check out more history of natives' genocides in the Americas:

====

"A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies"

\- Paperback [https://amzn.to/2dnhEhE](https://amzn.to/2dnhEhE)

\- Kindle [https://amzn.to/2dngoLi](https://amzn.to/2dngoLi)

\----

"The Conquest of New Spain"

\- Hardcover [https://amzn.to/2duUoKt](https://amzn.to/2duUoKt)

\- Kindle [https://amzn.to/2d1NWyU](https://amzn.to/2d1NWyU)</comment>


Perl 6.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.12.md <comment><USER2> I'm getting really bored with all the JS frameworks. Is it time to get back into perl?

Cassette tapes are hip again, why not perl. :-)

<comment><USER3> When you put it like that, it kind of makes sense. BTW, it is vinyl records. My best friend got obsessed with them, I have to buy them as gifts all the time.

<comment><USER4> No, it's cassettes too. Reel to reel has "better sound" than vinyl for some people. I'm sure there's some metric or science to back up the argument.

And other enjoy the nostalgia of cassettes and eight tracks. You can hardly walk down my block without seeing someone listening to a 30 year old walkman. That's probably more of a style thing.

<comment><USER5> As someone who uses tapes on a regular basis, I have doubts that there is any metric or science to back up the argument that cassette tapes have 'better sound' than vinvyl record or digital audio for that matter.

Part of what I enjoy about listening to tapes _is_ in fact its subpar quality. The main reason I listen to tapes is because my two cars both take cassette tapes, so it's more a reason to have something to listen to while driving. But in a car, the small distortions on a tape are easily missed compared to listening at home. So it works great for me.

(Plus the silence at the end of each side is a great break every 40 minutes or so.)

<comment><USER4> I'm not talking about cassettes, I'm talking about the reel to reels that they used to use to record masters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I, for one, was too young for the original Perl craze.

But somehow I had a pocket reference to Perl 5 that my mom put on my desk, because it was in the house and she assumed it was mine -- I must have picked it up somewhere and forgot about it.

I'm taking this as a sign to learn Perl 6.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats to all the people who have worked on this important project over the years!

I look forward to experimenting with Perl6 soon.

</comment><comment><USER8> The bulleted description sounds almost exactly like a description of Ruby, and I don't mean this sarcastically.

<comment><USER9> Quite a bit of Ruby was borrowed from Perl. It shouldn't be surprising that they share some characteristics. But, it's silly to say Perl 6 "sounds almost exactly" like Ruby. There's a huge variety of stuff Perl 6 has that Ruby does not, at least not as a core part of the language.

<comment><USER8> Except that Ruby's translation into English was literally the cause of Perl's decline.

Perl was intended to be a highly concise shell-like language that excelled at text processing. Partly in order to achieve such concision, the syntax overloaded various symbols to mean completely different things in different syntactic contexts, which made it very difficult for humans to parse quickly unless they worked in it very frequently (I recall the authors of either the llama or camel book estimating five times a week as the minimum). As Perl grew in popularity, objects were added on, and the whole language felt cobbled together. Perl users mainly used it as a shell replacement or for CGI scripts. Larger projects tended to be the domain of Python (or Java if concision was no longer a requirement).

And then came Ruby with syntax that was friendlier to Perl programmers than Perl itself, yet was semantically consistent, had built-in object support, and could rival Python for projects of any size, while surpassing it for the "quick and dirty scripts" that Perl excelled at. The conversation stopped being about Perl vs. Python and became Ruby vs. Python. People stopped using Perl 5.

So Perl 6 might very well be a lot more similar to Ruby (and even to Python if we exclude syntax) than it is to Perl 5.

<comment><USER9> _" So Perl 6 might very well be a lot more similar to Ruby (and even to Python if we exclude syntax) than it is to Perl 5."_

On that, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.

<comment><USER8> Oh, I'm not asserting that it _is_ , just that it sounds like it _might_ be, based on the description in the Github README. If you're actually familiar with Perl 6 and don't view that to be true, I'd trust your assessment over my hypothesis!

<comment><USER9> I'd recommend you take a look. It's certainly got some of the features of Ruby that had to be bolted on to Perl 5 (objects, for example), but it's still recognizably Perl, and it has a number of features built-in nicely that feel bolted-on or just downright ornery in Ruby (Unicode, concurrency, to mention two big ones). OOP in Perl 6 is beyond anything I've used anywhere else, except maybe Moose on Perl 5 (which is bolted-on).

I think the most accurate thing to say is that there has been a lot of cross- pollination between Perl and Ruby, it goes both ways, and it has been going on for the entire life of Ruby and Perl 6. But, Ruby is Ruby and Perl 6 is recognizably a Perl variant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And it only took a decade of promises. On to Perl 7.

<comment><USER9> Perl 6 was actually more than a decade coming. It was first conceived around 2000. And, Perl 6 is likely to last as long as Perl 5, which is to say, 20+ years (so far, for Perl 5, but it's got at least another 5-10 years in it as a maintenance language for millions of lines of code in the wild). Though, since Perl 5 maintained compatibility with Perl 4 and earlier, and continues to do so today (mostly), one could probably categorize all of Perl <6 as one entity, and Perl 6 as another language.

And, while we're speaking of promises, I believe that was a feature that came relatively late in the development of Perl 6, but it is a nice implementation from what I can tell. Here's the docs: [http://doc.perl6.org/type/Promise](http://doc.perl6.org/type/Promise)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a clickbait and deceptive title. It should read "Rakudo Perl 6.0 Support Added" or at best "Rakudo Perl 6.0 Released".

<comment><USER12> What? I'm fairly certain you are mistaken on quite a lot of details. Larry Wall is behind this release, and even though this is one implementation of Perl 6, that's an intentional difference between Perl 5 and Perl 6. There is no _one_ implementation, just a set of specs and few projects aiming to implement those specs. Rakudo is at this time the most mature implementation, and the specs have been finalized so that a "1.0" version of Perl 6 can be released with an implementation that works.

<comment><USER11> I wasn't aware that Perl 6 was going to be projects aiming to implement a spec. Nonetheless, I find the title to be misleading, it can be phrased better and more specific. As Larry Wall says in the tweets below, it'd be more exact to say "A Perl 6 Compiler and Test Suite Released".</comment></comment></comment>


Apple WWDC 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/index.html <comment><USER2> I was at the first one (though not named WWDC yet) in 1986. In the old days this was the funnest week of the year, as you got to talk with everyone and you learned a lot from the random discussions. I went two years ago and everyone sat/stood in long lines using various devices and no one talked anymore. I think watching the videos is enough now.

That first one BTW had 300 people representing virtually all the Mac developers in the entire world, meeting in a single ballroom at the Fairmont. Nowadays you have 5500 people that barely fit into Moscone West.

<comment><USER3> All of you make me wish I wasn't 5 years old at that time :).

<comment><USER4> There is plenty of stuff going on now that you have a chance to be a part of and contribute to in a big way. One day you'll be able to tell your own "back in my day" stories.

<comment><USER3> So true. I feel like now is an extremely exciting time in technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would encourage any student (full-time, part-time, university, high-school) who has enough of a grasp of making a half-decent/basic iOS app to try and get a scholarship for WWDC.

Being lucky enough to go twice as a student and have the ticket (but not flights unfortunately) paid for, gave me access to a wealth of like-minded young people and events that provided me with insight and opportunity that I would not have otherwise been able to get.

Please give it a shot if you can, and are eligible.

<comment><USER6> I think to be able to apply for scholarship you need to be member of one of the listed STEM organizations. All of the listed STEM organizations seems to be only for women, black and hispanic. What about normal people from normal school?

<comment><USER7> I would recommend rephrasing as "What about everybody else from all the other schools?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is admittedly reaching a bit, but: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CCj9F0gUAAAkio-.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CCj9F0gUAAAkio-.jpg:large)

In all seriousness, this could well be Apple essentially approaching Microsoft's original Xbox One strategy from the other end: Expanding from a video-on-demand streaming box into home gaming, along with a foray into live TV. And this is where it really gets interesting: By most accounts, Microsoft largely failed with their one-box-to-rule-them-all living room play because an HDMI pass-through and an IR blaster just weren't an elegant solution. But Apple, with their reported TV deals in the works, could offer the vertically- integrated cable experience Microsoft could only hack together. This could be a very interesting WWDC for the cable industry.

<comment><USER9> Most Apple watchers are pretty much in agreement that an AppleTV refresh is the most likely event at WWDC. The current ATV model was knocked down to $69 a short while ago.

<comment><USER3> Do you now if there is any speculation as to whether or not the new AppleTV will also serve as the HomeKit hub?

<comment><USER10> Yes. But "it's complicated" [http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/8/7510647/first- homekit-devic...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/8/7510647/first-homekit- devices-confirm-apple-tvs-role-in-home-automation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While the whole WWDC site is set in Myriad Set, the WWDC15 logo uses (probably) a rounded version of San Francisco font (from Apple Watch). I haven't seen this rounded version of SF font before or anywhere in Apple Watch UI yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> I predict an iOS based home hub with integrated Apple TV, Games capable, App Store, iTunes library, HomeKit, Siri. The epicenter of your home, hence the event title.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure a home 'hub' is necessary, why can't HomeKit be a distributed service across all you devices? so your watch could still be a remote for the tv, or the lights, or the front door, or the toaster …

<comment><USER14> I would like to be able to query device status and issue commands from across the internet. So some other device in my home _will_ be acting as a 'hub'. So direct access sounds redundant at best, and more likely just a nightmare to configure and maintain.

(Change your wifi network or password? Have fun updating a dozen devices. Get a new phone or watch? Have fun pairing to a dozen devices.)

Beyond that, from a security standpoint, I'd rather smart devices _didn 't_ all have direct IP access. There are enough security concerns with the Internet-of-Things. Mitigating large swaths of those concerns appeals to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would love to go again, but that $1600 is just too much to pay these days given it's all streamed live.

<comment><USER16> you're not going for the keynote.

you go to get hands on with the new technology, speak to the people developing solutions and meet other apple technology developers.

my friend went last year when they introduced Swift, the knowledge he gained from talking to the language developers is unparalleled.

<comment><USER17> Sure. but I'd wager the average developer wouldn't benefit to talking to the creators of Swift to the tune of $1600. If you have some very specific requirements and questions, it might be worth it. Otherwise, the video streams will likely suffice.

<comment><USER18> I guess it depends on your ability to manage/focus. The same Cisco CCNP training course (almost to the word) that you can get online from Udemy for $50, costs $6200 in an 11 day onsite format with Unitek.

There's a reason why Unitek continues to sell out their classes - and it's not because companies (which is who mostly pays for these classes) don't know about the video courses, but because they realized spending $6200 and having their employee 100% focused for 11 days on learning about network engineering has real value.

Presumably, the same thing applies to going to WWDC - you go there for the 100% focus, and you also go to (re)establish relationship, and for the social events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Version control for everyone.

"Change Epicenter for Mac. Never lose a file, ever again."

<comment><USER20> Isn't that what Timemachine already does?

<comment><USER21> Nope. Your hard drive crashes for any reason, Time Machine data is lost.

Think "Photos" for _all_ your files. Think "Time Machine -> Preferences -> Use iCloud".

<comment><USER22> Time Machine goes on a separate hard drive. Your data isn't lost unless you lose both drives at the same time.

That said, cloud backups would be great to have.

<comment><USER21> One word: fire.

<comment><USER22> Certainly. I'm fond of saying that data that isn't backed up doesn't exist, and data that isn't off site isn't backed up. But just the same, Time Machine isn't vulnerable to the more mundane sort of hard drive failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm hoping that dark, rounded square in the middle represents Apple TV!

</comment><comment><USER24> If they open up the Apple TV app store and build a first-party controller, I think it could be amazing for indie games! We might even start seeing some genuine AAA-quality titles.

</comment><comment><USER25> Any thoughts on what we'll see come out of WWDC this year? Or at least what you hope to see?

<comment><USER26> As a developer, I hope for a replacement for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. A solid, fast, safe framework collection for both iOS and OS X based on Swift. It sounds like "Core OS" could be just that.

While Apple did a remarkable job by making all the Cocoa stuff available in Swift, a lot of Swift's strength only shines when used with frameworks that are built for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Epicenter of change? HFS+ has been the epicenter of unintentional change, right? Finally they'll start rolling out a next-generation file system: block level checksumming, snapshots, copy-on-write, ...

HFS+ should just go away and die...

<comment><USER28> Whenever there is a thread about Apple development someone pipes up and says that HFS+ is horrible. Can you explain why it's so problematic? I never once thought to myself that the filesystem needed an update. Ok maybe the .DStore files piss me off but I'm not even sure a filesystem change could change that.

<comment><USER29> > _Whenever there is a thread about Apple development someone pipes up and > says that HFS+ is horrible. Can you explain why it 's so problematic?_

It's because of herd mentality.

Other people say it, so they must indulge too.

Besides they've heard about this ZFS and how awesome it is, so it should be used everywhere, even in laptops where it has no real business purpose (as an enterprise FS), and will consume CPU and thus battery life and eat into the valuabe SSD space.

It's like when fresh CS students learn about this assembly thing and how it's the lowest and faster layer, and then want to have whole OSes written in hand- rolled assembly because that will be the "fastest OS ever".

<comment><USER30> To be honest, HFS+ _does suck_ , and I'd like to see OS X default to something better. I'm a big fan of ZFS (it backs all of our production machines), but it does seem like overkill for a desktop OS. Something like HAMMER or btrfs might be a better fit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And the list of sessions mentions "Core OS"... Let's speculate?

<comment><USER32> Wouldn't that refer to the things common between OS X and iOS?

<comment><USER31> Definitely, the question is how deep those "common things" go into the OS, as the title states "Core OS" not "Core frameworks".

<comment><USER33> "Core OS" has been a WWDC track as long as I can remember, possibly even pre- dating the iPhone. It's likely not called Core Frameworks because the two _do_ share an OS, just not the user-facing pieces.

<comment><USER31> Ohh, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> New graphics. New possible changes in UI for iOS?

</comment><comment><USER35> "The Epicenter of Change". Really?

I know that HN is full of Apple fanboys, but even they have to think that arrogance is a little over the top.

<comment><USER36> Biggest, most influential tech company ob the planet. I'd say its pretty accurate.

<comment><USER37> Biggest in what way? Number of employees? Sure. Revenue? Samsung has got them beat [1]. Also, influential is very difficult to prove definitively. I find that word to be very subjective. [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_information_technology_companies)

<comment><USER38> The iPod (MP3 players revolution - everybody got one) The iPhone (mobile phone/internet always-connected mobile phones became a standard) The iPad (literally created a new industry sector...)

<comment><USER39> The ipad hasn't had that big of an influence - sure it's a huge industry and it's good fun, but people would have done almost the same things using large phones pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Man, just as I'm about to consider buying a new macbook, another WWDC gets announced. I just have to resign myself to the fact that having paid full price for the previous generation of a laptop isn't a ripoff :-)

edit: Wow! I didn't think this'd gather such a strong reaction - it isn't really a criticism, I guess it's just that to me even things that aren't close to being obsolete feel obsolete when a new version is released, and it's a challenge to convince myself otherwise. That's how a lot of companies make money!

<comment><USER41> The DC stands for developers conference, they don't announce new hardware.

<comment><USER42> They announced new laptops at two of the last three WWDCs: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Worldwide_Developers_Conf...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Worldwide_Developers_Conference#2010s)

<comment><USER43> The redesigned Mac Pro was announced at WWDC too. Generally the higher-end developer-targeted things get announced there, and only the mass market products get their own announcements.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unpaid and abused: Moderators speak out against Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/31/reddit-moderators-speak-out/ <comment><USER2> I would have liked to know why these mods don't just stop doing this free work if they're getting abuse for it.

Without understanding their true incentives to remain mods of these large sub communities it's hard to assess this issue in a more balanced way. Can anyone else shed more light on this?

<comment><USER3> People like finding little niches where they have power; makes them feel important and in control. They'll flock to power positions, even if the job is objectively pretty terrible.

Or if you're being charitable, it's because they want to have a positive impact, and benefit the community. Take your pick. Either way a site as big as reddit will probably never have problems finding mods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article goes above and beyond to make it look like Reddit owes stuff to the moderators who are not their employees and there is no contractual relationship between the two parties.

The moderators aren't forced to be moderators, they can stop being mods or just move to a different online community.

What's happening here is that the moderators are seeking more control over the platform.</comment>


An Application Security Reading List - <AUTHOR> http://amzn.com/lm/R2EN4JTQOCHNBA

<comment><AUTHOR> Any book you would add or remove from this Security Reading List made by Thomas Ptacek?</comment>


Startup idea list - <AUTHOR> Post novel startup ideas as comments and see how many karma points it receives. Who knows, one might be developed and you can take credit for thinking of the idea first. <comment><USER2> Uber for generating startup ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> Uber for ghost writing novels.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I work for free? - <AUTHOR> I own several companies but I've some interest in programming and design. I am looking to apply some stuff which I've learned working at my own company. So, is there any website where requirements are clearly posted and I can choose a gig and start working on it? <comment><USER2> Have you considered contributing to an open source project?

</comment><comment><USER3> I know it's not free, but you could do something on Fiverr. If you offer a lot of value for a small price, i'm sure people would love to have you help out.

</comment><comment><USER4> Open source projects would definitely be the way to go... what are your skills?

</comment><comment><USER5> Definitely agree with the other comments: it sounds like you're looking to contribute to open source projects. [https://opensource.guide/how-to- contribute/](https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/) provides 'testimonials' from professionals who have contributed to open source projects - If you feel comfortable doing so, I'd encourage you to reach out to them for project recommendations, and pick something that matches your skill set + interests. Good luck!</comment>


Universal Basic Income – A Report for Unions [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.world-psi.org/sites/default/files/documents/research/en_ubi_full_report_2019.pdf <comment><USER2> Where is the evidence that people need a "compelled purpose" ? Many people struggling to survive are not gaining meaning from being threatened by the constant insecurity of poverty, homelessness, poor nutrition and general stress from fear that someone else more desperate will try to take from you something you need. If this stress is removed from people's lives the thought is they'd have a better chance to actually figure out what they want to do and pursue higher goals than simply survival in a hostile environment. But seriously I've known quite affluent people who chose to work jobs because they wanted something to do not because they needed money and I think that people in general would probably be more engaged with whatever activity they actively chose vs. the ones they we're compelled to do. I also think that there is a general idea that certain people have that they are somehow better than other people and while they might be able to choose a higher goal the "poor" would just be lazy and do nothing with their lives. I tend to believe that a lot of the reasons people are "lazy" is because they understand or believe that the game is rigged. Any way you look at it our economic system does tend to highly favor those who were born into situations where they didn't have to worry about money constantly and so I tend to believe removing that worry one way or another should be a basic goal of humanity in general.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's clear from the cover letter that this report is written by people biased in favor of waged labor. I think that the economic pressure to work is a terrible thing that limits most people's potential in ways big and small. The sooner we can be rid of it, the better. There are other ways to make meaning, than to be running from poverty.

<comment><USER4> What is _your_ solution to scarcity, then?

<comment><USER5> First step: confirming actual scarcity.

Tell me, what basic human necessity or resource for individuals is in actual global scarcity right now? Food? Housing? Schooling? Internet/knowledge access? Sanitation?

There is hoarding, rent-seeking, market-controlling of these things, but not actual scarcity, except _maybe_ sanitation, and possibly healthcare if you count that as a resource rather than a process.

Pure capitalism as the vehicle of resource distribution has been proven as a failure to distribute existing resources to the lower echelons of society, even after multiple generations. Any solution that requires more than 2 generations to "solve" what it was designed to solve, I think we can safely call a failure.

It's time to try something else.

<comment><USER6> There's a scarcity of oxygen, real estate, food, and fresh water.

We can't just keep expanding the population, and we have already started a mass extinction event with the few billion we have now. What's the world going to be like when we hit 11 billion in a couple of decades?

In Australia we have overconsumed fresh water to the point that our largest cities treat desalination as "water supply" rather than "environmental disaster". When the fresh water availanlemis not enough to sustain your population, it's not the water supply that's the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> they just canceled the universal income project in my province early because of p̶o̶l̶i̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ the budget, _before_ any research was concluded. so there is no evidence one way or the other about its effects :(

</comment><comment><USER8> You think the opiod epidemic is bad now?

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who grew up in the post-Clinton "new left" exposure to some of the "old left" helps me understand the right a lot better. They're afraid of socialism because folks like trade unionists actually espoused socialism. Not like Scandinavian market socialism, but like "quoting Marx on the first page" socialism.

<comment><USER10> Cf. Labour's old Clause Four

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I didn't know about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hacker News should model UBI. Just give every member 10 'upvotes' a week or so.

</comment><comment><USER12> The arguments against chapter doesn't mention what seems to me to be the killer reason - that people are very bad at enjoying life without a compelled purpose. Doing work gives us the motivation to pursue our hobbies. Being useful keeps people sane. Having a lifetime of free food, shelter, and consumption of entertainment would be torture. That's the sort of lifestyle that leads to drug addiction, suicide, crime.

If there really are going to be a lot of unemployed in the future, that itself is the problem, not their lack of income.

<comment><USER13> This argument works only if you consider those of us lucky enough to have interesting jobs, which we had some hand in choosing. Do you honestly believe that the person who cleans the toilets at your work thinks that this labor gives his life meaning?

<comment><USER14> Yet those jobs still need to be done.

<comment><USER13> That's the other thing- they still _would_ get done. All the jobs we really need would stick around under UBI and we would have people working them. We would just have to pay them more, since their other option wouldn't be starvation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The False Science of Cryonics: What the nervous system of the roundworm tells us - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/541311/the-false-science-of-cryonics/ <comment><USER2> I actually agree with much of what is said in this article but I don't see how it amounts to an argument against cryonics.

While there's no proof that freezing preserves sufficient information to reconstruct a mind/brain there's also no proof that it doesn't. In fact I don't think there's any proof that cremation doesn't preserve enough information to reconstruct a mind/brain (as far as I know the 2nd law of thermodynamics basically says that the universe as a whole never loses information). Nonetheless it seems obvious that reconstruction from a cryonically preserved brain would be easier/more probable than from a cremated one.

As for the question of whether a reconstructed brain would be "you", I'm not sure of that either but here's the way I look at it. I know that "I" occurred once, therefore my existence is mathematically possible. Since I have no reason to think that reality is bounded in space or time (sure this universe might be finite but how do we know another one won't arise in the future ?) it seems reasonable to think that "I" might occur again, since an event of any non-zero probability should occur given infinite time. I don't know how or when this might happen because I don't know what the set of sufficient causal factors for my existence is. Nonetheless it doesn't seem completely unreasonable to think that reconstructing a functional version of my brain that preserves all or most of the information it contained at the moment of my death would have a higher probability of providing those sufficient causal factors as any other event I can easily imagine.

Hence I don't see anything inherently irrational about the practice of cryonics for those who would like to increase the probability that their existence will be preserved or recovered after death.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this article, not because I think it was well done, but rather because it exemplifies how even academics within closely related fields are maddeningly ignorant about cryonics.

For example, as far as I can tell, the author conflates the concepts of uploading, cryopreservation, and reanimation. The fact that we don't currently have the ability to scan preserved brains with enough precision to capture all of the relevant data does not in any way mean that the data is lost during crypreservation. And even if making an external copy of the data stored within the cryopreserved brain is infeasible, it does not follow that reanimation of the brain itself will be impossible.

One of the frustrating aspects of being a cryonics advocate is that even very smart people do not seem to easily grok the idea that cryonics is intended as a bridge to future technology, so the shortcomings in the modern state of the art are of little relevance. And no serious cryonicists think that success is guaranteed. Cryonics is basically an experiment, and all we know is that everyone in the control group is definitely not coming back. So I'd rather take my chances with the experimental group.

The discussion of "copies" and identities is particularly unpersuasive. First, reanimation may not involve a copy in any meaningful sense, if the original biological substrate is simply repaired. Second, intuitions about consciousness and identity are notoriously fallible.

In a sense, this is the ultimate manifestation of the product of induction: Our sense of "self" is an illusion reified by our daily experience of a singular self. But when technology allows us to be duplicated, perhaps the idea of branching versions of ourselves will feel more intuitive.

The pattern theory of mind is really the only defensible position once you realize that over the course of your life, there is almost complete turnover in terms of the specific atoms that compose you. And on a deeper level, we know that particles are fungible: an electron is an electron is an electron. Unless they are concealing little miniature souls inside, the only reasonable conclusion is that consciousness and identity are properties that emerge from the relative positions of the interchangeable subatomic components.</comment>


BlackBerry Thunder, the touchscreen BlackBerry we've all been waiting for - <AUTHOR> http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/05/13/blackberry-thunder-the-touchscreen-blackberry-weve-all-been-waiting-for/ <comment><USER2> And it's Verizon, which means we'll get a custom OS that's completely unusable, unhackable, has annoying logos and cross-promotions everywhere that can't be turned off, makes you pay extra monthly for most "features", gets upgraded without your consent, and is ugly and red.

Yay for Verizon!</comment>


Electric race cars that look like Formula 1, but are eerily quiet - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/657578/these-electric-race-cars-look-just-like-formula-1-but-are-eerily-quiet/ <comment><USER3> I think this has a lot of promise, but I think they haven't quite dialed in the format.

I think they should focus on battery swapping as the way to deal with limited energy capacity. It makes for a nice spectacle watching pit crews do their thing. Swapping out an entire car and driver is just boring. Likewise the constraint to be able to swap the battery packs quickly will necessarily lead to the cars looking a bit different than F1. I think that also would be an improvement and help them differentiate as more than just "like F1 but more quiet and slow."

The ability to run events almost anywhere is a huge opportunity. It could make for some really compelling video footage in some awesome locations, if they can negotiate it.

Courses should focus on short sections and tight turns. Acceleration is where electric motors are most exciting, and keeping top speeds below the 200mph+ of F1 would let them run smaller events with less safety buffer space. Let people get up close and see the cars rocket out of each corner.

</comment><comment><USER4> I went to the Formula E Grandprix in Berlin last year. I am a pretty big F1 fan, watching most of the races and know whats going on but Forumla-E was actually pretty bland and boring, i believe mostly due to missing any kind of engine noise. It kind of feels like very fast soapboxes racing around (not nearly as fast as F1 though).

<comment><USER5> Just wondering, have you ever attended a F1 race in person? I ask because after watching WTCC for a long time, when I attended my first live race I found it pretty boring as well. Watching on TV allows me to follow the race, and I missed that a lot when attending live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is in response to the video saying that the fans love the cars since they are almost quiet.

When I went to my first F1 grand prix, I could hear the sound of the cars from the parking lot. As a huge fan, that gave me goosebumps and got me excited. The sound is a huge plus, and all fans I know love it. Yeah you need to plug your ears when you are in the stands, but I would take that over the sound of these electric cars.

</comment><comment><USER7> I went to the last season's final race in London. They are indeed significantly quieter than Formula 1 cars, but they're by no means silent. It's more of a not-uncomfortably-loud whining noise as the cars pass you.

Formula E has been pretty exciting to me since I first heard about it 2 years ago. I wonder if it will really ever become a mainstream event though - <USER2> Formula 1 and similar gradually involve more EV elements

Due to the relative quietness of the cars, the Formula E events usually involve background music, sometimes live from a DJ, usually electronic style music.

<comment><USER8> I watched the Battersea Park race on TV and I can't see it becoming popular - the mid-race car change (which admittedly may well disappear as technology evolves) was laughable and the whole "fan boost"[1] thing made even some of Bernie's more ridiculous suggestions seem sane.

[1] Fans vote on a driver who gets an extra speed boost in a race. Because Reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the old horse days in Europe (and presumably everywhere else too) lots of very nice houses were built next to roads. Nowadays as I drive past I pity them and the ugly sound-deflecting fencing and berms they have to invest in to make them habitable. I look forward to quieter cars rejuvenating these old houses.

UPDATE: so my hopes are dashed :(

<comment><USER10> This is a common misconception about roadway noise pollution.

Electric Vehicles will still generate a fair amount of road noise pollution. There will be important improvements for city quality of life, mostly in reductions in the sub 35kmh acceleration/deceleration moments. But for highway speeds the reductions will not be that big.

Check this interesting wikipedia article for reference.

Linking to the part that lists the basic variables that affect Roadway Noise:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadway_noise#Description_of_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadway_noise#Description_of_basic_variables)

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's entirely a misconception. Yes, some people mistakenly think that an all-EV world will be totally silent, and it won't, but the noise reduction is still huge. In most situations, the average is much less important than the maximum, so the fact that typical noise from modern cars is mostly tires and air is irrelevant. Trucks, motorcycles, and performance cars are what make up the bulk of the annoying noise, and EV versions of those would help a _lot_.

<comment><USER10> True, it would help a lot in city centers where tipically cars have to accelerate from a stop at lights, but not on highway style roads.

<comment><USER11> Even there, the constant drone of tires is far more tolerable than the occasional blatttt of sports bikes or the rumble of a tractor trailer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> These cars just look like some kind of Formula cars but there are some of important differences: \- first for now all cars are more or less the same (there's no research competition behind motors or aerodynamics like in WEC or F1) \- the race rules are not so meaningful to me: changing cars in the middle of the race doesn't add to the fun, why not doing 2 shorter races? I see it as a minor low budget futurist racing series to exploit the "electric motors" trend in automotive.

Real investments go to WEC for technology or to F1 for PR and brand strength.

Things might change when teams will have the chance to customize their cars more (mainly motor, batteries)

Edit: they race in very nice locations anyway, that's the only cool thing about the series :p

<comment><USER13> This was true in the first season, but in season two the motor regulations opened up. Teams are now allowed to choose their own motor and gearbox, and there are (I think) about six variations in use. Packaging differences between the motors has led to some variation in rear suspension as well.

Aero, battery, and tires remain standard for all the teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tangential, but I keep thinking that the moment EVs have finally "made" it will be when they can compete in endurance races like 24 Hours of Le Mans against IC vehicles.

The fact these Formula E races are considered quite enough to be run in populated areas is pretty sweet though. I've never attended a Motorsport event before, partly because I'd have to make a big effort to go out of town to watch any, instead of just staying local.

<comment><USER15> Any excuse to get better battery performance is good enough to me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> To answer the supposition at the end of the article, they're already working on driverless racecars. [http://selfracingcars.com/](http://selfracingcars.com/)

<comment><USER17> At what point will we be discussing humanless humanity ?

<comment><USER18> Wait, isn't that what we are working on anyway?

<comment><USER17> Funny paradox isn't it ? should we stop before it's too late ? or maybe we plan to rely on a climate catastrophe to set progress back to the Jurassic era.

<comment><USER18> Maybe these robots will be smart enough to understand how great humanity was and teach us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I couldn't really tell if that first kid liked cars or not. He certainly doesn't look that interested.

Here's how you get a kid to get interested in this kind of event. First, buy good earphones. Super important - it's incredibly loud. Next, go to a top fuel event.

If you are grown and haven't been to a top fuel drag race, I HIGHLY recommend you try it once. Once is enough to figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER20> Are Formula E cars geared? Electric engines can deliver the same optimal torque throughout the RPM range, so is shifting involved? That's obviously an important part of the F1 drivers' skillset (especially during starts) so I'm curious if they just have work the brake and accelerator or also worry about gear changes.

<comment> TD-Linux Electric motors are usually torque limited (especially modern inverter driven ones), so they have a constant maximum torque throughout their speed range. However, this means that at higher speeds, they are able to deliver more power, so gearing is actually beneficial. Formula E cars have 5 gears.

There is a lot of work done to change the performance - ideally you'd actually not want flat torque, but high torque at low speed and lower at high speed to reduce the need for switchable gears. This is done with techniques like flux weakening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I watched Formula E in Florida and it sounded like a race of blenders :)

I also watched Formula 1 and I loved the sound of the engines. You can tell by the sound what the top engines are. It is just a whole other experience. You hear the car coming before you see it and that gets you excited.

I'm probably biased, being a Formula 1 fan for over 25 years.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cars are limited to just 200hp during races, and FIA has blocked the teams from innovating much. It's almost as if it pains them to have electric racers that they made them bad on purpose. These things accelerate slower than a tesla family SUV.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Quiet is not a great selling point. One of the big complaints in F1 right now is that the current spec engines are too quiet. The noise contributes hugely to the atmosphere and sense of speed.

<comment><USER23> Great selling point, except when you happen to live within earshot of a racetrack. Which is literally a radius of miles, easily enough to house half a million when you put the track in a densely populated area (which is increasingly rare, but still exists).

<comment><USER24> except most of those are 1 weekend a year (Temp Street Courses). the only exception I can think of for that is Imola.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be interesting to see this done with drag races. Those cars are loud!

</comment><comment><USER26> I would call it refreshingly quiet. I am not a fan of loud ICE engines in any vehicle. I do worry about the quietness of these vehicles and sight impaired pedestrians and distracted pedestrians. I wonder if there will be an adjustment period where car-pedestrian impacts increase until cars are autonomous enough to stop for those who step in front of a car, and/ or pedestrians realized they cannot rely on their hearing to monitor traffic at crosswalks.

<comment><USER27> > or pedestrians realized they cannot rely on their hearing to monitor traffic > at crosswalks.

It's time enough. Unless you are blind, you should look both way before crossing. You shouldn't jaywalk anyway.

<comment><USER28> You have that the wrong way around.

The car driver should be looking before proceeding, and should be driving slow enough to stop before any pedestrian.

Yes, that may mean driving through a residential area at 15 km/h. (Or even 10km/h: [1])

[1] [https://collegegreensharedspace.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/...](https://collegegreensharedspace.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/home- zone-02.jpg)

<comment><USER11> You both have it wrong. Both cars and pedestrians must remain alert and look carefully for the other. Anything less than that gets people killed unnecessarily. Trying to pin it on one or the other is just arguing over who should pay for the headstone.

<comment><USER28> Children can't look as well as adults can, and adults make mistakes.

The responsibility lies with the one vastly increasing the danger.

<comment><USER11> I'm not talking about responsibility, I'm talking about what people need to do in order to increase the odds that everybody involved can die in bed. Responsibility is just the question of who pays for the funeral.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Make Your Own Programming Language (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ppelgren.se/2015-01-03/DIY-Make-Your-Own-Programming-language/ <comment><USER2> in case you are interested I made a step by step repo creating a programming language for the erlang vm here:

[https://github.com/marianoguerra/otl/commits/master](https://github.com/marianoguerra/otl/commits/master)

follow each commit in reverse order to get the step by step creation.

it was part of 2 talks I gave but I think you can follow it just by reading the commits.

here are the slides: [http://marianoguerra.org/talks/elixir-karlsruhe- meetup/](http://marianoguerra.org/talks/elixir-karlsruhe-meetup/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a relevant book in the works that everyone should keep their eye on. [http://beautifulracket.com/](http://beautifulracket.com/)

It'll be interesting to compare how "making your own language" is achieved in both guides. Although, the racket situation may be super different, the basic steps seem to be similar.

</comment><comment><USER4> This reminded me of something that helped me learn C a while ago:

[http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/contents](http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/contents)

Seems like even attempting to make your own language will teach you a lot.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find it interesting there is no mention of Backus-Naur Form (BNF) in here. It's the formal language to describe the syntax of programming languages.

Nor of there a mention of Flex/Bison or Lex/Yacc. I know those tools aren't cool... being decades old and all. But they are very battle hardened and make development much faster.

I don't know the background of the author or if they have a computer science degree. And I am most definitely not one to do something one way just because that is the way it has always been done. But articles like this seem to fly in the face of decades of computer science advancement. As a fun project where you learn a lot, great, I just hope someone doesn't try to use this to make anything that isn't a toy language.

</comment><comment><USER6> This brings back so many memories from my compilers class back in school. Lexers to generate tokens, tokens to parsed from grammar, then translated to intermediate code... And those pesky ASTs...

</comment><comment><USER7> Really funny how the inspiration is python and haskell but there are 0 features from haskell.

<comment> Pirate-of-SV Type declarations are similar to Haskell's. Haskell is also whitespace dependent.

<comment><USER7> That's not what makes Haskell what it is. It's not the type declaration syntax or the white space awareness. In fact those things are so superficial that they might as well not be mentioned.

<comment><USER8> While this is true, the post lists 9 specific examples of features directly below that quote, of which 5 are found in haskell. He never said he tried to capture the essence of Haskell, simply that features in his language were inspired (in part) by Haskell.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


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