Germany's solar power suppliers are destabilizing big power companies. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/alternative_energy/2013/03/solar_power_in_germany_how_a_cloudy_country_became_the_world_leader_in_solar.html

<comment><USER2> > Until researchers can find a way to store energy at a large scale, coal and > nuclear plants—which can't simply be switched on and off at will—must be > kept running to guarantee a steady stream of electricity when the sun isn't > shining.

This is simply wrong – natural gas plants can already be switched off and on in a matter of minutes to secure appropriate supplies in case the sun isn't shining anywhere AND there is no wind whatsoever. There is absolutely no need for nuclear or even coal plants as a 'steady stream of electricity' (though fusion is still pretty cool :)).

<comment><USER3> > _natural gas plants can already be switched off and on_

They can be, but unless the government steps in to subsidize them, it's not very profitable. Due to low gas prices, a lot of European gas plants are being shut down.

[http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-12/europe-gas- carna...](http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-12/europe-gas-carnage- shown-by-eon-closing-3-year-old-plant-energy.html)

<comment><USER4> This is really confusing. I'm constantly told that prices for gas[1] are high (partly because of various shenanigans in Europe and Russia) and that there's a dash for gas.

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-21913374>)

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21903837>)

[1] Natural gas, not petrol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SMA, a big German inverter company, shows the daily amount of PV generated in the country. Today, they hit nearly 18 GW. I'll bet they have at least one 30 GW day this year, once the sun finally comes out.

[http://www.sma.de/en/company/pv-electricity-produced-in- germ...](http://www.sma.de/en/company/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> The real problem is the battery. It is not improving as fast as everything else...

</comment><comment><USER7> If this is really such a large problem for the companies, they should switch to setting rates based on real-time availability rather than traditional peak hours.

</comment><comment><USER8> Who cares? That's what disruptive innovations do. They destabilize and mostly eliminate the incumbents. The future is everyone having their own energy source at home, fully decentralized, without the need for "power companies". I'm thinking even beyond solar here, although solar will definitely be the majority of this in the next few decades.

</comment><comment><USER9> German energy prices are like 2$ KW/h or one of the most expensive in the world. Its not hard to disrupt that when put in context

<comment><USER10> The price is around 0.30E/kWh or less for consumers...

<comment><USER2> 0.30 €/kWh already? Does that include only green energy? Three years ago I paid about 0.17-21€/kWh, though the supplier included nuclear as well as fossil energy.

<comment><USER10> That was only a rough number, more like a reasonable (upper) limit. As you probably know prices vary depending on volume, energy "source", supplier etc.

<comment><USER2> Well, $2/kWh is also an upper limit ;) - I simply didn't expect anything remotely in this region, for me, a kWh is still about 20 cents or roughly 1/3 less than this upper limit.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Computer Algorithms Shape the Way We Behave - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/15/how-computer-algorithms-secretly-shape-the-way-we-behave/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. A submission from yesterday:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928145>

This is from the Guardian in the UK, and is word-for-word identical:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/16/networker-a...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/16/networker- algorithms-john-naughton)

And yes, same credited author, different publication, copyright mark is for the Guardian.

So it's on the "Raw Story" web site, they say:

        By John Naughton, The Observer
        Saturday, December 15, 2012 23:55 EST

        ...

        © Guardian News and Media 2012

On the Guardian web site version they say:

        John Naughton
        The Observer, Sunday 16 December 2012

If you want more information than these provide, try this search:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Kevin+Slavi...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Kevin+Slavin%3A+How+algorithms+shape+our+world)</comment>


Ecuador cancels US trade deal & donates $23MM to US for "human rights education" - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/americas/308167-ecuador-nixes-trade-deal-offers-to-educate-us-on-human-rights-in-showdown-over-snowden

<comment><USER2> This whole thing is such a farce. Ecuador doesn't care about human rights, and the US doesn't care that its enemies know that it's spying on them. It's diplomacy in the service of directing embarrassment.

<comment><USER3> I am withholding judgement as I don't know what to think after watching Oliver Stone's "documentary" South of the Border (free on YouTube) which constrasts directly with the content of Human Rights Watch: [http://www.hrw.org/americas/ecuador](http://www.hrw.org/americas/ecuador)

(I spent two months in Ecuador this year)

<comment><USER4> If you are interested in the South American situation just let me recommend you "Our brand is crisis". Might give you some further context for the situation and the role of Morales and it is a fascinating case study on steering public opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reaffirms my belief that the US chasing Snowden is a bad idea solely because it demonstrates the lack of soft & hard power the US has on the international stage these days.

While people may not notice this small act I feel it's kinda what the US deserves in this instance.

<comment><USER6> America has spent too much hard power to have that much soft power left.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, although they're not mutually exclusive. Just happens the way America has exercised it's hard power has diminished its soft power. We've been a hammer since World War II but nobody else has even been using nails.

<comment><USER7> I recall there were quite a lot of nails in postwar USSR.

<comment><USER5> Fair. I guess my statement was way too generalized, but was meant to be reflective about a slower shift over time. There's still nails around today but also many other moving parts & sometimes it feels like the approach hasn't fully adapted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If Assange or Snowden were Ecuadorian and would have exposed ecuadorian secrets, they would be in jail. Our government does not pratice what it preaches!!! Granting asylum to people like Assange and Snowden is just good publicity for them and distracts attention from what really is going on here.

</comment><comment><USER9> Previous discussion

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5952176](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5952176)

</comment><comment><USER10> Title is misleading: Ecuador merely _offers_ to donate $23M.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fun fact: Ecuador is one of the few Latin American countries to use the US dollar as their standard currency.</comment>


Things I've Stopped Saying - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@beaugunderson/things-i-ve-stopped-saying-fa7dea0bf317

<comment><USER2> This is a good step in the right direction, but this piece is still incredibly insensitive. Using words at all is literacy privilege. The author really needs to start thinking about people who either can't speak, or have lost the ability to speak. Not to mention the fact that there are millions of infants and mentally disabled people on this planet who can't even read, let alone speak. Sorry if I have offended you with this harsh response, but I'm still feeling extremely triggered by the brash insensitivity on display in this post.

<comment><USER3> I had never thought of this before, but now that my eyes have been opened and I have spent a good fifteen minutes absorbing my new reality, I shall go forth to lecture the great unwashed masses about what bigoted jerks they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've stopped saying "It works for me," because if it worked for you, you wouldn't be complaining about it. It therefore behooves me to accept your statement at face value and see if we can determine why it is not working for you -- whether said failure is my fault or not. Maybe it's user error, maybe it's a bug. Either way, I should identify the cause of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've stopped using the word pop in favor of soda. Soda sounds more professional.

<comment><USER6> soda goes the weasel</comment></comment>


Show HN: Can we predict if your next flight will be delayed or cancelled? - <AUTHOR> https://content.gozenner.com/free-flight-assessment.html <comment><USER2> If it's a late night flight with not enough people filling the plane, you can bet your fucking ass Delta will cancel that shit and say "see you at 6am!!!"</comment>


The Most Important Concept in Systems Design - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/2011/06/most-important-concept-systems-design.html

<comment><USER2> Counter-post : [http://antirez.com/post/take-advantage-of-redis-adding-it- to...](http://antirez.com/post/take-advantage-of-redis-adding-it-to-your- stack.html)</comment>


Home Free? Giving the Homeless Homes - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free

<comment><USER2> I think major cities should provide Japanese style capsule hotels to serve the needs of the homeless.

The plan would be to have the homeless run the hotels to pay for their stay until they find a stable employer.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel)

<comment><USER3> There are already hotels for the homeless which provide cramped and spartan accommodations. They're called "homeless shelters", and generally speaking they don't solve any of the problems the article discussed.

People need actual homes. Even if it's a modest efficiency apartment, we all need a place we can call our own - where we can keep our stuff, manage it how we choose, be alone or with only the people we chose, feel safe, and be assured that in the future all of that will still be true.

There's plenty of housing around - it's one of the big things our economy produces. It's not that hard or expensive to just provide homeless people with the same housing everyone else has. There's no reason to come up with elaborate or convoluted plans for "how to handle the homeless problem" when the answer is facepalm straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The justification here reminds me somewhat of those for universal basic income.</comment>


Help me with my idea  - <AUTHOR>

me and my friend always get requests from people we know to get them them some stuff from ebay and then they pay us since they don't have any money online so we decided to launch a website where you submit a link to an intem in ebay and give us your mobile number when it's shipped we call the user to give him the item.we add 5% to the original price : so to test the market I created just one form that submit data to the db.On the first day I got a lot of messages from people wanting to ship stuff right away.My problem is that my friend want the users to pay in advance and he thinks that 5% is really low so : 1 - what do you think about users paying in advance ? 2 - what do you thin about the 5% ? 3 - do you think the buisness model is broken in anway ? PS : this service is limited to my country ! <comment><USER2> > 1 - what do you think about users paying in advance?

I guess it depends on your attitude to risk and the sort of service you think people will pay for. If you don't you presumably need more working capital, which has a cost, and you're taking on the risk that people won't pay but you're stuck with the goods. You're basically getting into traditional retail.

> 2 - what do you thin about the 5%?

I wouldn't pay it, but I don't have a problem paying for things online. You need to figure out what your target market will pay.

> 3 - do you think the buisness model is broken in anway?

It sounds like something which will need careful risk management, and may require a lot of capital. (Edit: Basically this isn't anything new - you're proposing becoming a retailer of 'stuff from ebay' as far as I can tell.)

</comment><comment><USER3> > 1 - what do you think about users paying in advance?

 _You_ have to pay in advance. Right? So _of course_ you'll have to get paid in advance.

<comment><AUTHOR> how will users trust me for not stealing their money ?

<comment><USER4> The worse of two problems would be people not paying you.</comment></comment></comment>


The future of work looks like staying out of the office - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/employers-should-expand-not-cut-telework-into-the-future/ <comment><USER2> Nice article with trends and data references!</comment>


Honeymoon in a mobile world may last for 5 days - <AUTHOR> http://blog.count.ly/post/32614167086/honeymoon-in-a-mobile-world-may-last-for-5-days

<comment><USER2> Would it be possible to qualify the specific actions that would help growth in usage? I.e. correlating this dataset with specific "marketing" patterns such as use of push notifications, share buttons, etc.

How much does the app quality (ratings) correlate with usage patterns? If we assume that most apps aren't very high quality or don't bring much value to user, these findings would be kind of obvious; users find out that app isn't worth it and stop using it.

Overall, it would be interesting to know which apps break this pattern and why.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correlating the data with marketing efforts would be nice and definitely provide more value but the apps we analyzed have little to no marketing budget (although there are some popular ones). This analysis actually shows the importance of marketing and promotion efforts since without them this is how an app ends up.

We will be doing similar analysis in the following weeks and hopefully will provide more detailed insights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some interesting stats.

Is this just in the Apple app store? If so do Android versions of the apps in question also see similar trends?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah its just App Store. We didn't really have a chance to bundle such stats for Android apps yet but I'm pretty sure the results will be pretty similar.</comment></comment>


Researcher's trick transforms conservatives into liberals ahead of election - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/magic-trick-transforms-conservatives-into-liberals-1.12778

<comment><USER2> I guess it makes sense, if you think about it. I mean, why on earth would people vote democrat if they weren't tricked into it in some way?

<comment><USER3> That could be said the other way around as well. ;)

Now seriously, there's an infinite amount of shades of gray between black and white. I wonder why most people always fall for these dichotomising old tricks.

Anyway, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - the trick worked both ways>> "on the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time."</comment></comment></comment>


HSA targets native parallel execution in Java VMs by 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcentral.ie/22495/hsa-targets-native-parallel-execution-in-java-vms-by-2015?

<comment><USER2> HSA, by the way, stands for "Heterogeneous System Architecture".

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, now I'm starting to see why Google chose a VM for its OS. I couldn't care less about support for x86 and even MIPS, as ARM was already dominating the mobile chip market, and it has plenty of competition above the ISA level - _much_ more than x86 ever had.

But if a VM can enable things like HSA, and who knows, maybe even quantum computers in the future, that make the same Dalvik apps run on it, then I'm all for it.</comment>


Highlights from Git 2.23 - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2019-08-16-highlights-from-git-2-23/ <comment><USER2> I really need some kind of "modern git" tutorial. A lot of what we're doing day to day stems from the earlier days of the software (and SO posts from that time), and I bet there's plenty of new options that would make something easier or even enable different workflows. I just recently learned about "git worktree", for example.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm wary about git restore --staged. It seems backwards to have a destructive (worktree-modifying) command become non-destructive by adding a flag. To me, this appears more footgun-prone than git reset, which defaults to non- destructive behaviour and requires the ominous --hard flag in order to become destructive.

So I will probably avoid both git restore --staged and git reset --hard (and suggest to others to do the same). I hope git status will keep the hint to use git reset to unstage, even after git-restore becomes stable.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's mirroring the behavior of "git checkout -- myfile" which also does destructive changes without warning.

These new commands were hatched in response to a blog post from a couple of years ago pointing out the confusion. [https://redfin.engineering/two-commits- that-wrecked-the-user...](https://redfin.engineering/two-commits-that-wrecked- the-user-experience-of-git-f0075b77eab1)

A good conversation on HN followed. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712269)

I've long wished git checkout (and now, git restore) would save the contents of blown-away worktree files somewhere (e.g. a throwaway stash) so that they could be retrieved from the reflog or something.

In my mind's eye, the command would be something like "git trash" and it would throw your changes into a trash can, where you could fetch them back out again later, until the GC erased them in ~30 days or so.

<comment><USER5> > have the contents of blown-away worktree files somewhere

This would be an _amazing_ feature for nearly all git commands that affect the worktree. Many times I've done `git checkout ./src` to blow away "unrelated" files forgetting that the file I was just working on was in that directory. Whenever I teach git to a new-hire I always talk about wanting revision- control for revision-control.

<comment><USER6> I think people trip on these potential foot guns in part because a lot of git commands are long and annoying to type, so you end up working more based on your mental model of the state of the working copy and less based on the actual state of it.

I am not so fond of analogies but I would like to offer up an analogy here anyway. I think for a lot of people, the way that they are using git is akin to utilizing a sharp knife with your hands while your hands are obstructed from your view. You have a certain amount of feeling for what is going on but you are bound to cut yourself now and then if your view of what you are doing is obstructed. In this analogy, your reliance on your mental model of the state of the working copy is obstructing your view of the reality of the state that it is in.

Several years ago I defined a few two-letter shell aliases for the git commands that I use the most.

Maintaining my .bashrc across different systems became a drag though, so I simplified my setup even more.

I wrote two-letter "shell scripts" that just wrap the commands, and just put those in my ~/bin/. This makes it very fast and simple to get up and running on a new laptop, desktop or server.

[https://github.com/ctsrc/shell-command- aliases](https://github.com/ctsrc/shell-command-aliases)

Said two-letter shell scripts can be found in that repo. There's a README too, which tells you what each of them do.

My git workflow is simple, efficient and ensures that my view of what I am doing is not obstructed.

I can proudly say that the last time I did something unintended with git that resulted in lost work was long ago that I can't even remember when. And it all boils down to these two-letter aliases.

When there is friction, identify the friction and remove it. That is what I have done here. Hopefully it might be of use to others too.

Here are some consecutive entries from my bash history that are representative of how I use my aliases while working on something.

        mv ~/tmp/index.htm dimensions.htm
        st
        ls
        dp
        git checkout -- src/
        st
        mv dimensions.htm src/
        st
        mv src/dimensions.htm src/draft.htm
        di
        st
        aa
        cm "Draft."
        le
        le
        vim src/draft.htm
        st
        vim src/draft.htm
        aa
        di
        cm "Mirrored, dark/light."
        vim src/draft.htm
        aa
        di
        vim src/draft.htm
        aa
        di
        cm "Remove unneccessary declaration."
        vim src/draft.htm
        aa
        di
        cm "Organize and restructure classes in draft."
        vim src/draft.htm
        aa
        di
        cm "Increase height of placeholder."
        pu
        le
        st
        st
        dp
        vim src/draft.htm

I keep a few terminal windows open when I work on a project, and often use one or two of them for git operations, and smaller edits to some files, while also having my IDE open, web browser, etc.

Notably, these two-letter commands make it very fast to remind myself of what the current state of the repository is whenever I've looked something up on the Internet for example, or after I have run tests in another terminal or made multiple different edits in different files in the IDE window, etc.

And I always check the diff before I commit. It's amazing how often you think you are about to commit just one change but when you look at the diff you realize that there are some other smaller changes that you made as well. By always reviewing your diff before you commit, you ensure that you don't commit something that would be better committed separately, and that your commit messages accurately describe the actual changes that you are committing.

<comment><USER7> I do something similar, though I use git's built-in aliasing so that I keep everything namespaced under "git". Mine are, for example, "git st" (status), "git ci" (commit), "git co" (checkout), "git dfc" (diff --cached), etc.

That said, my best advice for folks new to git, or folks who find themselves doing destructive actions often, is to embrace WIP commits. I "checkpoint" work somewhat frequently with "git add -A; git ci -m wip". They can be cleaned up later with soft resets, rebases, or similar. Once a commit is created, it's in the reflog, and it's quite rare to lose that set of work, even if a rebase or reset goes "wrong".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is still far from ideal. "git switch" and "git checkout" should not be able to create a new branch. It clearly should be the "git branch" subcommand's responsibility, because "You want to do something with a branch". It would be two commands to create and checkout a new branch, but less confusion. You can use your git alias anyway. But a shortcut for "git branch -c" would be better if you want to keep the "create and switch" shortcut IMO.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. I found git checkout -b very convenient an intuitive way to say "create and checkout this branch".

For git branch -c one could say that the "branch" command should not do checkout-business.

<comment><USER10> I should be a separate cmd. It's such a common operation, and it's a huge noob trap.

<comment><USER3> The reason it's a noob trap isn't that the two operations should be separate.

The issue is that "-b" (mnemonic for "branch") in no way suggests that it creates a _new_ branch. Since checkout does so many different things, it would be reasonable to guess that -b limits the command to perform the "branch" action (i.e. switch to a branch). Git-switch doesn't have this issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's nice to hear that there appears to be progress being made in making git's tooling nicer and more consistent. Git's model itself is pretty simple, but the command line tools for working with it aren't and I feel that this fuels most of the "Git is hard" complaints.

</comment><comment><USER12> On the one hand I'm happy on the new "switch" and "restore" commands. On the other hand I wonder if they truly add any value other than the semantic distinction of functions otherwise present in "checkout".

I tend to prefer smaller vocabularies tools: less to remember if you know what you are doing.

<comment><USER13> I would argue that it's not really increasing the vocabulary. The fact that one word has (say) seven meanings doesn't mean the vocabulary you must learn is one word. It's still seven words, which happen to be spelt and pronounced the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Similar to GUI apps that work on top of git binary, does anyone know a user friendlier CLI app?

It can have new commands:

\- `gitlite create` vs `git init`

\- `gitlite branch create feature-dom` vs `git checkout -b feature-dom`

\- `gitlite time-travel cfae736` vs `git checkout cfae736`.

\- `gitlite undo cfae736` vs `git reset cfae736 --hard`

\- gitlite release create v4.2` vs `git tag v4.2`.

Each command will call the translated `git` command, and perhaps improve upon the output from the command.</comment>


Graphene becomes superconductive - <AUTHOR> https://www.tohoku.ac.jp/en/news/research/graphene_becomes_superconductive.html <comment><USER2> So far, most of the comments are lamenting that the superconducting temperature of 4 K is uselessly low. That's true, but beside the point.

The point of superconducting graphene is _not_ to use it as a general purpose superconductor where the goal is to have the highest Tc possible. The point of superconducting graphene is that graphene's electrons flow in a way that's very different from most materials.

In most materials, if you apply a voltage, the electrons will speed up (F=MA, Newton's second law). This how a voltage drives electrons into your computer.

However, because of its crystal structure, graphene is different. In graphene, electrons always travel at a constant speed, no slower and no faster. This feature of graphene is also why its electrons are sometimes called massless (despite not being truly massless). Their motion is analogous to photons, which always travel at a constant speed. And because these electrons travel like photons instead of electrons, it has a bunch of consequences in solid state physics and electronics.

The importance of superconducting graphene is that we now have a new variety of superconducting electrons to study.

<comment><USER3> Does this mean that the electrons experience infinite acceleration? I know very little about graphene, but this seems to violate some basic laws of physics. Do the electrons actually behave this way? Or is this description of constant velocity electrons simply a close approximation/good analogy for what is actually happening?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone would like to read the journal article, it can be downloaded from library genesis.

[http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php?s=10.1021%2Facsnano.5b0784...](http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php?s=10.1021%2Facsnano.5b07848&journalid=&v=&i=&p=&redirect=1)

<comment><USER5> Well... fortunately we have arXiv for open access e-print repository. This is what you should quote:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.07079](http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.07079)

I don't know if you are aware of this but there are many scientists out there that do need the site you've mentioned in order to function. This kind of exposure is going to kill their chances sooner than expected. The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.

<comment><USER4> I must disagree. Unlike it's predecessors, such as textz, gigapedia, and library.nu, (these are from before my time, so correct me if I'm wrong), library genesis is healthily mirrored, and everything is torrented. Any attempt to assail it will simply ensure its resilience in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 4K is not very useful, but it is progress non the less.

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

<comment><USER7> Highest listed there 39K [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_diboride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_diboride) Doesn't mention others at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- temperature_superconducti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- temperature_superconductivity) like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide) More at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room- temperature_superconducto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room- temperature_superconductor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do we know enough about physics at the atomic level to be able to predict and simulate these combinations of materials? Or do we still have no clue and it's left to experiment to be able to validate material design?

<comment><USER9> Well, we know a lot about the crystal structures of several high-temperature superconducting compounds. You could always make an educated guess of a new one based on these and then test it for the Meissner effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> At a low enough temperature (< 4K) ...

<comment><USER11> I thought there were already demonstrations of superconductivity in graphene at higher temperatures with other dopants (I think water IIRC).

<comment><USER12> Well, this effect was discovered last year [http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/10/single-layer-graphene- su...](http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/10/single-layer-graphene- superconductor/) (at ~5K). The new breakthrough seems to be in manufacturing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even Lead is superconductive at 7.2K.

<comment><USER14> Someone explain this to me like I'm an undergraduate in Physics, why is this significant then, just because it is Graphene?

<comment><USER15> Metal just conducts while a semiconductor is like a switch that you can turn on and off. Since graphene is a semiconductor it is more useful for creating faster devices such as transistors.

<comment><USER2> A fair number of semiconductors superconduct too (such as SrTiO3). The notable thing about graphene superconductivity is graphene's electrons, not its ability to semiconduct. Because of graphene's crystal structure, electrons propelled by a voltage will travel at constant speed, rather than accelerating. In this sense, the electrons are 'massless' (photons are massless, so they always travel at the speed of light and cannot be accelerated).

<comment><USER14> >electrons propelled by a voltage will travel at constant speed

You mean like Ohm's law with a constant electric field?

<comment><USER2> No, not like that. When electrons travel in a regular conductor, they have a distribution of speeds. Ohm's law just describes their average behavior.

Just in case I misunderstood your question, I will say a few more things:

Ohm's law applies to both graphene and regular conductors.

In graphene, electrons have only one speed, but they can still move in any direction. In a regular conductor, electrons have many speeds and move in any direction.

In either case, with no electric field applied, the average velocity of electrons will be zero. But with an electric field applied, the average velocity of electrons will be non-zero. And in both cases, the average velocity is proportional to the applied electric field, meaning that the material can be described by concepts like resistance and electron mobility.

The key difference is that graphene has electrons with one speed and a distribution of directions, whereas regular conductors have electrons with a distribution of speeds and a distribution of directions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Psh, Jan Hendrik Schön showed in 2001 that carbon is superconducting at high temperatures. Just kidding; he was a fraud, but it's a fascinating story: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal)

<comment><USER17> Totally fabricated and the other authors suffered no consequences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ignorant question but could this be useful for companies like D-wave who are trying to build quantum machines? They're cooled to well below the superconducting temperature as it is.. I guess I'm not sure what function the graphene semiconductors serve.

</comment><comment><USER19> When I read the title I thought at first it was new marketing speak for a startup cashing a humongous funding round.

</comment><comment><USER20> The temperature of deep space is 2.7K, so could these low temperature superconductors have easier application there?

</comment><comment><USER21> Can someone please Explain This Like I'm 5 - The potential Graphene has when compared to the Lithium batteries we have in the market today, and if Graphene is going to make it's way into our batteries any time in the near future?

Thanks

\-- EDIT --

Pardon my ignorance! It seems I was very confused about the topic in question, and mistakenly asked about super capacitors. Thanks for pointing it out!

<comment><USER22> I think this is not linked with battery storage. Superconductivity allows a material to conduct electrons without any resistance, thus losing less energy and generating less heat. I could be wrong though, I am no expert.

<comment><USER23> You can use superconductors for energy storage. An inductor stores energy, but can not be used for long-term energy storage due to resistance. A superconducting inductor can be used to store energy, as there is no loss due to resistance.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My prediction for the year 2100: many more articles about graphene, little to no real world usage growth.</comment>


Brazil crisis: Rousseff impeachment vote 'annulled' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36248925 <comment><USER2> Great News.

<comment><USER3> Maybe for her and the rest of the parasites in her party. Luckily for Brazilians this was just a nonsense invalid call by the buffoon that currently leads the house.

<comment><USER2> Eduardo Cunha?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: is there still a place for a consulting company? - <AUTHOR>

There are many 'hobby' ones, but few professional-grade.
How to differentiate? How to  paint ourselves out of the corner?
Edit: word clutter <comment><USER2> I don't see the "Consulting Company" being in any way a prominent force in the software industry any more, but on the other side "Individual Consultants" (the good ones) will probably continue to thrive and make big bucks as long as they keep the appearance of being a force to be reckoned on their specific niche.</comment>


Google to shut down 'Neighbourly' app - <AUTHOR> https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/google-to-shut-down-neighbourly-app-5101511.html <comment><USER2> Google announcement on closure here: [https://support.google.com/neighbourly/answer/9756228?hl=en&...](https://support.google.com/neighbourly/answer/9756228?hl=en&ref_topic=9757368)

It includes this exhortation: "If you want to keep sharing your local knowledge with your neighbours, we encourage you to become a Google Maps Local Guide."

<comment><AUTHOR> _> But the app hasn't grown like we had hoped._

It really looked like they made the app and just sat tight and kept their fingers crossed. There were no promotions, no cross app integrations, no call for partnerships (for example with gated community), etc.

Google Product Management is something I always wonder about - I have experience working with the ones in Microsoft and Amazon, and I suspect PM culture in these places are vastly different than in Google.</comment></comment>


WebFaction: app memory quota upgraded to 256MB for everyone - <AUTHOR> http://blog.webfaction.com/

<comment><USER2> This is a good and necessary move for the WebFaction guys. I had a basic shared hosting account with them, and with 80MB of memory, you will run out of memory quite quickly if you run an app framework like Ruby on Rails.</comment>


Boring Boston Tech Companies That Are Actually Interesting - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2011/03/03/you-snooze-you-lose-10-boring-boston-area-tech-companies-that-are-actually-interesting/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> A company that I think many consider less than interesting on HN is "ITA Software," who is solving the age-old O(n) problem of a million ways to purchase a ticket and have made traditional travel agents obsolete (e.g there are 400 x 400 different combinations for BOS to SFO round trip, so 160,000 different ways to fly a round trip ticket, plus 10,000 for fare conditions and booking classes, resulting in 1.6 billion possible combinations). They're the people that power Orbitz, United, Continental, Southwest, Air Canada, and so forth. And they also power HN beloved Hipmunk.

<comment><USER3> I hear they also write much of their software in LISP

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's with the sudden surge of Boston tech scene cheerleading articles on HN? I'm new to Cambridge (just moved here a few months ago), and so far have nothing but love for the area (even compared to 8 years in Bay Area). But it's starting to feel like there is ugly duckling syndrome in the air.

Winter's almost over. Hold it together people. We're almost there.

j/k

<comment><USER3> Vivek Wadhwa dissed Boston when speaking at an MIT event and that sparked the topic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281824> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281966>

And FWIW my startup is in Cambridge too and I really like it here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My company fits that description.

Ostensibly, we make medical devices that serve the diabetic population.

Realistically we've developed the first FDA cleared medical device that works with iOS and have a pipeline of awesome "mHealth" products.

[http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662351/blood-glucose-monitor- fo...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662351/blood-glucose-monitor-for-the- iphone)

Boring? Perhaps, but we are hiring 50 people. There is something to "Unsexy" markets. Everyone wants to work on the next great music startup, but if you can grit your teeth and handle medical software there is huge opportunity to make cool stuff and serve BIG markets.

<comment><USER6> Dude! Your product sustains at least 4 buzzwords in a single sentence and has a nifty design - it's definitely NOT boring :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Title has nothing to do with article--- fix it.</comment>


No, Facebook's AI wasn't shut down because it got out of hand - <AUTHOR> https://code.likeagirl.io/no-facebooks-ai-wasn-t-shut-down-because-it-got-out-of-hand-c81da870e910 <comment><USER2> Wow, who would've thought! It was shut down because it was a piece of shit.</comment>


Texas shooting: Devin Kelley's locked cell phone thwarts FBI - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/11/08/fbi-has-devin-kelleys-cell-phone-but-cant-unlock-it-obscuring-clues-texas-shooter/844694001/ <comment><USER2> I'm sure there is a trove of useful and important crap on that phone.</comment>


ARMageddon: How Your Smartphone CPU Breaks Software-Level Security and Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5g5brq/armaged...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5g5brq/armageddon_how_your_smartphone_cpu_breaks/)

[https://cyber.wtf/2016/06/16/cache-side-channel-attacks- cpu-...](https://cyber.wtf/2016/06/16/cache-side-channel-attacks-cpu-design- as-a-security-problem/)

[https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/980.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/980.pdf)

[https://github.com/IAIK/armageddon/tree/master/libflush](https://github.com/IAIK/armageddon/tree/master/libflush)</comment>


How Top U.S. Law Firms Get Away with Paying Women Less - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-05/how-america-s-top-law-firms-get-away-with-paying-women-less <comment><USER2> The article omits a key point. Compensation at Chadbourne was based on a point allocation, which was supposed to be tied to revenue generation. Campbell alleges that she was awarded less compensation points despite being a top revenue generator at the firm. Moreover, she was compared unfavorably with men who brought in less revenue than her but were, essentially, better at playing up their _potential_ to being in revenue in the future.

<comment><USER3> I have a little familiarity with such systems. Revenue generation is defined not only as the revenue the individual lawyer collects from their clients, which is relatively straightforward to calculate, but more significantly as the business the lawyer generates for the firm - by being a 'rainmaker'. Calculating who gets how much credit for a new client is much harder, and much more prone to biases both unconscious and intentional.

A lawyer, like an IT professional, has only 2000 hours per year to bill; you can't increase that number more than marginally. But you can generate far more billable hours for your firm by bringing in new business; a large corporate client could keep many lawyers busy for their entire careers. I know of lawyers who were poor at practicing law but they were highly paid partners and it was well-earned: They brought in far more than 2000 hours for their firm.

<comment><USER4> Isn't this usually still quantified and shared though? I doubt her 2 million in revenue from the article is just what she personally billed.

<comment><USER3> > I doubt her 2 million in revenue from the article is just what she > personally billed.

I've heard of top lawyers billing $1,000 per hour or more, so $2m is within reach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano The article doesn't answer the question they pose. If the Women could get paid more at a different firm, presumably they would switch. Presumably, if a $300k Woman provides as much value as a $1M man, a different greedy firm will offer a price between $300k and $1M, and pocket the savings.

Are they suggesting there is collusion between firms to drive Womens salaries down?

If the women do as good of a job at 1/3 the price, why don't they setup a cut- rate shop that does the work for 2/3 the price, doubling their compensation and providing customers a discount?

<comment><USER5> A recent study showed that people stick to their biases even if it costs them monetarily (don't have a link right now). You don't need collusion when there is widespread bias.

<comment><USER6> Was the study experimental and awarded participants millions of dollars for acting rationally (i.e. against their biases)?

<comment><USER7> It sounds like every study shows this from this article, but this might be the most recent one. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146124-we-ignore- what-...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146124-we-ignore-what-doesnt- fit-with-our-biases-even-if-it-costs-us/)

[http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005684)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If for the same amount and quality of work the law firms has to pay 40% more for men, shouldn't they hire women exclusively?

<comment> tuna-piano Or why don't the women band together and setup their own firm? They can charge 20% less and still earn double.

Discrimination exists, but markets are usually pretty good at squeezing it out and punishing it.

<comment><USER9> The entirety of human history puts lie to this false assertion, and the continued necessity of laws to prohibit such behavior shows that nothing has changed. The market is more than willing to put up with a gross inefficiency if it reinforces the dominant narrative and market participants have shown themselves ready to collectively make less if it means that members of disfavored groups make much, much less.

<comment><USER10> The free market usually fails to discriminate, because people are more greedy than they are bigots. This is why government help is enlisted to enforce bigotry - often in the form of required licensing, limiting the number of people entering a career, etc.

<comment><USER11> The free market discriminated against black people in the US very effectively, even after the government attempted to enforce non-discrimination (see redlining).

<comment><USER10> Jim Crow made discrimination legally mandatory, because greed kept undermining voluntary discrimination.

See "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" by Woodward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > A 2016 survey of the 350 largest U.S. law firms found female partners on > average received $659,000 in annual pay. Male partners, meanwhile, averaged > $949,000, or 44 percent more.

> "Studies find that male lawyers are two to five times more likely to become > partner than female lawyers," [Professor Deborah] Rhode [director of > Stanford Law School's Center on the Legal Profession] says. "I think a lot > of women lawyers are fed up."

For almost 20 years, around half of law school graduates have been women.[0] At least in IT, part of the problem (certainly not the whole thing) is that there are few women in the pipeline. What excuse does the legal industry have?

The cite has some other interesting information. For example, "In 2015, white men represented about 74% of all partners." Remember that white males are only 33% of the U.S. population.

[0] [http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-law-canada-and- us](http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-law-canada-and-us)

<comment><USER2> Lawyers have a long shelf life. Peak-career partners probably started law school more like 30 years ago. The number of women in _new_ partner cohorts is over 1/3 (similar for new Fortune 500 general counsel).

In my view, you've got the causation backwards. Having a 25%-33% chance your boss or client will be a woman creates the kind of culture necessary to attract a gender-balanced pipeline. A woman going into law hoping to make partner is signing up to be in a (large) minority, but the ratio is nothing like a woman going into tech hoping to become a Senior Engineer faces.

Of course, challenges remain, as shown in this article.

<comment><USER3> The link in the GP says that 120 of Fortune 500 general counsels - not the equivalents of partners but of the heads of firms - are women, which I'm guessing is a far higher proportion than their major law firm equivalents. I always assumed that was because there is less discrimination in the Fortune 500 general counsel offices. I know a woman who is an attorney in a U.S. federal court; a large majority of her co-workers are women; is that because they face less discrimination than in firms?

(Note that on HN we often have to speculate about the experiences of women; there are so few here who can talk about it. I expect to find male attorneys on this thread, but I would be happily surprised if a female attorney appeared to share an on-the-ground perspective with us.)

It reminds me of Justice Ginsburg (obviously from a different era) who said she was a judge mostly because, despite her elite law school credentials and talent, she couldn't get a desirable job in a law firm.

EDIT:

> Having a 25%-33% chance your boss or client will be a woman creates the kind > of culture necessary to attract a gender-balanced pipeline. A woman going > into law hoping to make partner is signing up to be in a (large) minority, > but the ratio is nothing like a woman going into tech hoping to become a > Senior Engineer faces.

That culture isn't working well (as you said, 'challenges remain'). Per the link in the GP, over 80% of equity partners are male.

But I agree, it's still nothing like tech.

<comment><USER12> On your point about less discrimination in federal courts, I think it's less than 30% of federal judges that are women. I don't know the staff composition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know multiple paralegals who are some of the best in the field. Fuck the female partners, I want more outrage about the suppression of the wages of the people doing 3/4ths the work but getting 1/10 the pay. For example, I found out firms were calling other firms to artificially keep paralegal salaries low.

<comment><USER12> If your example is true, the subject paralegals know exactly why they have standing to sue.

Law firms tend to avoid breaking the law pretty well, though.

<comment><USER14> This assuming that "standing to sue" is equal to justice, which it isn't

<comment><USER12> My real point is that the chances of law firms breaking the law over paralegal compensation is basically nil. Paralegal salaries make up an itty bitty fraction of the money that moves around these firms.

<comment><USER15> Wasn't that the point?

Also, the wage suppression is related to the fact that the paralegals produce far more value than they are paid, not a legal issue. You might say, hey that's a common feature of the economy. You'd be right.

<comment><USER12> The issue I was discussing was the allegation that firms were calling around in a wage suppression conspiracy. Like Google/Apple/etc got caught doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So from this story, we now know that:

1\. A woman at a law firm earned less points for _reasons_ and thus got paid less.

2\. The firm claims this was commensurate with her performance.

3\. She says it was not.

4\. Other women at the same firm disagreed with her.

5\. Therefore all female partners at all law firms in the US are being paid less? Or is the title of this article just click-bait?

Also in this case, lets not forget she has had six kids. Regardless of how PC you want to be you cannot possibly argue that this HASN'T had at least SOME practical impact to her career and ability to perform her in her role. To be fair, it's probably had a similar impact on her husband as well - kids take up a lot of your thoughts and time it's totally normal.

<comment><USER17> > Also in this case, lets not forget she has had six kids

Elon Musk has six kids. What's your point?

<comment><USER16> He's also been divorced twice, what's your point?

<comment><USER4> His point is that the argument about children competing with career priorities is an argument used almost exclusively against women. As it says in the article, she has a husband who doesn't work.

<comment><USER16> It's an argument used "against" women with good reason, I'm sure the stay at home father in the article wasn't the one carrying the children and giving birth?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "...Two retired women partners at the firm have joined her lawsuit, but a _larger_ number of current women partners have actually condemned it."

So it's not "law firms vs. women", more women actually support the law firm in this case. Of course that's not proof of anything, but it does suggest it could simply be a normal case of people disagreeing about compensation. In these sorts of cases, you tend to go for any "weapon" you can, and "discrimination" is a pretty powerful one, even if there's nothing to it.

Of course the stats don't look good, but we all should know that correlation ≠ causation. Jordan Peterson, who apparently works with law firms, gives a very different reason:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q)

TL;DW: Law firms try their darnedest to keep women, but most women just aren't as mono-maniacal as the few men who make it to the very top.

</comment><comment><USER19> From the article: "It took me a lot longer than it's supposed to to reach equity partner," Campbell says. "Part of that was due to choices I made, putting a priority on raising my kids, for a lot of years as a single mom."

So the usual fuss about nothing, looking at meaningless income averages, neglecting the individual choices and circumstances that actually explain things.</comment>


Mathematical explanation of music and white/black notes in a piano - <AUTHOR> http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/11669/mathematical-difference-between-white-and-black-notes-in-a-piano <comment><USER2> The short answer is: the diatonic scale in a given key consists of notes whose frequencies are those of the keynote times certain simple rational numbers; the white notes on the piano are those that belong to the diatonic scale based on C.

What's special about those simple rational-number ratios? Answer: on most musical instruments, notes whose frequencies are in simple rational ratios sound nice together. This turns out (surprisingly, at least to me) to be a fact about the instrument and not merely about the notes; when you play a given note on a given instrument, you get (kinda) sine waves whose frequencies are those of the given note, plus some higher frequencies; exactly what the higher frequencies are and how much of each you get depends on the instrument. For most instruments, the higher frequencies are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, and that turns out to mean that the good-sounding combinations of notes are ones with simple rational frequency ratios; but there are instruments that behave differently (e.g., a tuned circular drum; or you can make a synthesized instrument that does anything you like) and _different chords will sound good on them_.

For much more on this, see William Sethares's book "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale" and his web pages at <http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/ttss.html> where you can find, e.g., some music in unorthodox scales performed on (synthetic) instruments designed to make the harmony sound good.

For instance: listen to <http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/mp3s/tenfingersX.mp3> and hear how out-of-tune it sounds. Now try <http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/mp3s/Ten_Fingers.mp3> which has exactly the same notes but played on a synthetic instrument designed to make the harmonies work.

</comment><comment><USER3> The top answer on stackexchange is a _superb_ explanation of musical science that most of the finest musicians in history could not give you. They just don't teach you these things in music class.

Musical culture seems to resist illumination, perhaps fearing that the "magic" will somehow be broken. The irony is that music _is_ , in a sense, a mathematical illusion, but revealing the trick only makes it more fascinating.

I will add one important point that hasn't really been made: The purpose of equal temperament may have _originally_ been to "change keys without retuning", but it also essentially allows you to play in 12 different keys _at the same time_. This has been exploited to great lengths as source of musical novelty and is absolutely fundamental to modern music.

<comment><USER4> _Musical culture seems to resist illumination, perhaps fearing that the "magic" will somehow be broken. The irony is that music is, in a sense, a mathematical illusion, but revealing the trick only makes it more fascinating._

This is true, but I think the answer is far more mundane. Musicians operate at a couple of levels of abstraction above that SO answer, so such details become irrelevant to them.

Imagine if the standard introduction to programming was a course on Java or PHP. Pretty soon you'd have a plethora of programmers who didn't know a thing about pointers or any of the old tricks programmers used to do with assembly. Wait... that's already happened :)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I understand. Your argument for why musicians _should_ start at a higher level of abstraction is that starting programmers at a higher level of abstract works out poorly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad folks are finding this interesting. However, this is pretty much common knowledge to anyone who has taken music theory. It's usually not given a great deal of attention as most musicians using the standard 12 tone don't care much about what's going on under the hood. They're a bit like programmers who use a high level language and an IDE and don't know how a compiler or assembly works.

Just a bit funny to come across it here, it'd be a bit like finding out musicians were talking on a forum going 'wow, computer programs are written using structured text files!' or something of the like. Not trying to be rude..

</comment><comment><USER7> The piano to me feels like an iPhone, it does a lot of things well, and it hides many details from you. I don't know if real pianos are tunable/adjustable, but the electronic one we have at home certainly isn't (except in its ability to sounds as different instruments).

I recently bought a Oud[1], a classical stringed middle eastern instrument, it's not fretted, it's portable, and adjustable. To me, when I compare it to the piano, the Oud feels like the Unix of musical instruments. It's a bit hard to get used to at first, but it's designed to be lite-weight (portable) and adjustable, allowing power users to be very creative and expressive. Most other users will stick to a standard tuning and placement of fingers.

I'm not super-bothered by the way the piano is layed out, to me it's just a simplified instrument that works for 95% of the cases.

What I don't understand is why do all the middle eastern scales (maqam[2]) have 7 tones. The fact the western C major scale also has 7 tones is just another example of yet another scale with 7 tones (and it happens to correspond to the Ajam maqam[3]).

There are some middle eastern scales not really playable on a piano, like the Rast[4], unless the piano is somehow adjustable.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oud>

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_maqam>

[3]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajam_(maqam)>

[4]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rast_(maqam)>

<comment><USER8> > _I don't know if real pianos are tunable/adjustable, but the electronic one > we have at home certainly isn't (except in its ability to sounds as > different instruments)._

An acoustic piano cannot be easily tuned (it takes a couple of hours to a trained specialist, because there are more than 200 strings to adjust). However "serious" electronic keyboards have been fine-tunable for more than 20 years. Many of them can play any microtonal scale you may imagine, and many different classic temperaments are pre-programmed.

<comment><USER7> Yea I've seen a Youtube video of someone adjusting a Yamaha keyboard to play notes on middle eastern scales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Years ago I watched a British documentary called _Howard Goodall's Big Bangs_. It's well worth watching. It explains how music theory developed from Pythagoras's (matching the 12 keys on the piano). It's an interesting exercise to "prove" these 12 steps based on this simple ratio.

What came much later was equal temperament. The 12 steps don't match up exactly. Equal temperament changes the notes slightly by changing the ratio slightly (to factors of the 12th root of 2). I believe it was Bach who first discovered this.

Not all cultures use equal temperament but it is overwhelmingly dominant in the West.

The series also explains chords, keys and so on. For someone like me who is more mathematically inclined it was fascinating. Give it a look if you can.

Oh also it wasn't the BBC as you might expect. It was Channel 4.

</comment><comment><USER10> 12 tones is not the only possibility. there is also a 19 tone scale:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament>

there are also some mp3 files using 19 tone scale: e.g. [http://www.harrington.lunarpages.com/mp3/Jeff- Harrington_Pre...](http://www.harrington.lunarpages.com/mp3/Jeff- Harrington_Prelude_3_for_19ET_Piano.mp3)

<comment><USER8> Sounds great, thanks for the music link :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think there are different answers at different levels.

On one level, the white notes are the notes of the C major scale, and the black notes are the semitones which are left over. Why not put all the semitones in one row? That would be much harder to play. Why split it into "C major" and "leftovers"? A bunch of semi-arbitrary decisions made by early harpsichord manufacturers, I guess, which happen to make the instrument easier to play than most alternatives.

If you're looking for an explanation of why the notes of the major scale sound good together whereas most alternative modes sound weird, that's a more difficult question.

<comment><USER12> Supposedly there is a mathematical reason for the 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 spacing of the major scale. If you take all possible pairs of notes in the diatonic scale, you get a richer distribution of intervals than you can produce with any other seven-note selection from the twelve note scale. Similarly, the classic pentatonic scale provides the best set of intervals for any five-note selection from the twelve. A better set of intervals might lead to a better choice of chords too.

This is my somewhat fuzzy recollection from a paper I read a long time ago. Someone out there can check with three lines of R, right?

<comment><USER13> If you start with the 12 chromatic tones and start addding notes to a scale going up a circle of fifths, there are two natural stopping points where you have spanned the octave with a complete-sounding set of notes with relatively equal spacing and no gaps: five notes, which gives whole-step and minor-third intervals; and seven notes, which gives whole-step and half-step intervals. These two scales correspond to the spacing of the black notes and the white notes, which are mirror images of each other around the circle of fifths. Any other choice of scale size would have gaps, I believe.

<comment><USER12> The drawback to this explanation is that the diatonic scale is 10,000 years older than the "circle of fifths". So it presumably had some appeal to musicians as well as to music theorists.

<comment><USER14> Where do you find 10,000 year old music?

<comment><USER12> You infer it from the existence of 10,000 year old musical instruments.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale#Prehistory> \- which also says that the circle of fifths was described much earlier than I thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've recently read _How Music Works_.

      http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Music-Works-listener%C2%92s-harmony/dp/1846143152/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290710570&sr=8-1

Covers the physics of sound and harmonics as well. Recommend.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can highly recommend this lecture, Notes and Neurons, from the 2009 World Science Festival. It features a panel of neuroscientists discussing the possible physiological encodings of the various mathematical structures discussed here. It also includes some amazing participative musical performances from Bobby McFerrin.

<http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/video/notes-neurons-full>

</comment><comment><USER17> If you missed it, there's a link to a _free_ ebook called "Music: a Mathematical Offering" -<http://www.maths.abdn.ac.uk/~bensondj/html/maths- music.html>

Haven't read it, but it looks good.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you're just after a listen, there are lots of examples of alternative systems on youtube. Here's 19-tone, equal temperament (as opposed to the usual 12 TET): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EP0KvbxW8o>

I like the above example because it always starts by sounding "off" to me but seems okay by the end of the piece. It's a matter of what you're used to.

</comment><comment><USER19> For anyone interested in that kind of stuff: read "Musimathics", volume I especially.

</comment><comment><USER20> kinda-off-topic: I am very often baffled by the sheer mathematical and general complexity of music. Each music-related wikipedia article is the stub of a link-tree that quickly ends up in confounding complexity.

The highly emotional associations I get of rock musicians and metal concerts when thinking about music could not be further from the science of music.

</comment><comment><USER21> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths></comment>


How to trigger races reliably in the Linux kernel - <AUTHOR> https://people.kernel.org/metan/how-to-trigger-races-reliably <comment><USER2> In the FreeBSD kernel, we've got fail(9) for this exact use (since 2009).

Check out the EXAMPLES section of the manual page. You can use the mechanisms to inject delay on some percentage of executions, and more generally some integer value can be injected, which can be used to simulate device failures (EIO) or whatever.

It's very powerful for creating reliable reproducers for all kinds of failures, including race conditions. And the KPI is not quite as verbose as the one presented in TFA.

[https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fail&sektion=9](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fail&sektion=9)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Race condition, in terms of a computer programming, is a bug where two > pieces of code cause an error if executed concurrently.

This article makes the common mistake of saying that a race condition is inherently a bug.

A race condition just means that observable program behaviour is dependent on the interleaving of two tasks. A race condition is only a bug if you don't want one of the possible interleavings.

You can often find great performance optimisations by working out how to work with race conditions rather than disallowing them.

<comment><USER4> is there any situation where a _data race_ might be useful or accommodatable?

<comment><USER3> For example, some profilers that count the number of times something is run will update a counter without any synchronisation. This risks lost updates, but since you really just need to know if the counter is very low or very high a few lost updates here or there don't really matter.

But I think from some accepted definitions (such as Padua et al) a data race specifically is a bug, so this data interleaving if we're happy with it isn't a data race because it isn't a bug.

<comment><USER5> > a few lost updates here or there don't really matter

jerf disagrees in last sentence of other comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23079788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23079788)

<comment><USER3> Well I don't know what to tell you except this is how real production compilers written by experts work in practice.

[https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/4553ea71f15c9e4721565e9...](https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/4553ea71f15c9e4721565e94e838214a1b1274b1/compiler/src/org.graalvm.compiler.truffle.runtime/src/org/graalvm/compiler/truffle/runtime/OptimizedCallTarget.java#L816-L818)

You can argue this is a bug and they shouldn't write like this, but they don't consider it a bug and they do write like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you manage to reproduce a race, is there some way to capture exactly what the scheduler did and force it to do that again?

<comment><USER7> For debugging purposes, for example? You might be interested in [https://rr- project.org](https://rr-project.org).

<comment><USER8> rr isn't going to work on a kernel.

<comment><USER9> I'm inclined to say that it will work on User Mode Linux, and it looks like QEMU does have record/replay functionality.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it works as long as you don't have any real devices that cannot be captured in a reverse-debugger's state history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> there is a gsoc project regarding race conditions in Linux [https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#65400635565015...](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#6540063556501504)</comment>


uoou.info: the weirdest website you'll see this year - <AUTHOR> http://uoou.info/

<comment><USER2> It looks fantastic. Would love to see the source code.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get what the links are. Do people upload them or does the site owner upload them? This is the weirdest thing I have seen</comment>


Audacity 2.1.2 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.audacityteam.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> This was on Jan 20th, 2016: Audacity 2.1.2 Released, but I just found out.</comment>


New ML Challenge for Good: Mapping Disaster Risk from Aerial Imagery($10k Prize) - <AUTHOR> https://www.drivendata.org/competitions/58/disaster-response-roof-type/ <comment><AUTHOR> Excited to launch a new machine learning competition! The goal is to be able to a better job creating disaster response plans based on detailed maps of communities. In order to do this, we need to understand the risk to structures, which we can do by understanding what kind of roof a building has.

Come use your machine learning skills for a good cause! Plus it's got interesting geo data, novel imagery, and the opportunity to develop new methods.</comment>


Ask HN: How badly has Facebook screwed Rapleaf? - <AUTHOR>

What does it mean for Rapleaf, and other companies that operate in the same domain? <comment><USER2> context?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1866122/rapleaf-agrees- lea...](http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1866122/rapleaf-agrees-leave- facebook)

rapleaf seems to be imposed with heavy restrictions from Facebook.. what exactly is the issue..is unclear though....</comment></comment>


ProtoThreads: Lightweight, Stackless Threads in C - <AUTHOR> http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/ <comment><USER2> the catch:

> Because protothreads do not save the stack context across a blocking call, > local variables are not preserved when the protothread blocks. This means > that local variables should be used with utmost care - if in doubt, do not > use local variables inside a protothread!

<comment><USER3> That's literally what "stackless" implies though. I don't know if it's so much of a catch as it is a difference between stackful and stackless routines.

<comment><USER4> > That's literally what "stackless" implies though

You could have threads with enough memory for the base levels local variables. It would mean you wouldn't need global variables to keep state, but it would still be stackless as you can't pause execution within a function call.

<comment><USER5> >for the base levels local variables.

what does that even mean? Sure you could calculate what stacksize your exact programm would need at maximum, if you unroll everything, but you could not define a fixed "base level" of a stacksize for every single programm out there, could you?

<comment><USER6> > what does that even mean?

The topmost stack frame. That's what "stackless" generally implies: it doesn't preserve the stack itself, that doesn't mean it preserves _nothing_.

That's what you see with most async/await systems (as opposed to more integrated "lightweight thread" systems like Erlang or Go), yield points blow the stack (though it may be relinked for debugging purposes), but they don't break local variables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discussion from a few months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907229)

And 5 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7854571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7854571)

</comment><comment><USER8> > _Protothreads can be used with or without an underlying operating system to > provide blocking event-handlers. Protothreads provide sequential flow of > control without complex state machines or full multi-threading._

So if it's still single-threaded, then this is basically a cumbersome _async /await_ right?

<comment><USER9> Actually, it is a way to represent state machines as 'code'. It is a way of seperating the data from the functions, such that the functions can be 'stopped' and 'continued' in the middle (turning them into coroutines). Each stop point (often hidden in an await) is a state of the state machine represented by the function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> All I know is the Contiki OS running on a Commodore 64 is(was?) quite capable and used Protothreads a fair bit.

[http://contiki.sourceforge.net/docs/2.6/a01802.html](http://contiki.sourceforge.net/docs/2.6/a01802.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> is this like an implementation of Go in the C language?

<comment><USER12> No. Go uses _stackful_ coroutines. This is more like an implementation of async/await in C.

<comment><USER13> The catch is brutal. This looks like an implementation of goto in C.

<comment><USER3> How so? The decision between a stackful and a stackless coroutine is precisely that, a decision. The tradeoff is that storing all registers/stack variables and processor state before a yield and restoring it after a resume is a non- trivial cost. For some applications, that cost may not matter, but for others, it may be critical.

Also, this is less like a goto, and more like a setjmp/longjmp.

<comment><USER13> A stack is an over approximation of the closure of the continuation.

You want something to create a union of all the relevant local variables of each state. Doing this efficiently is non compositional and so requires language support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nitpicks aside... if you're considering this: Why aren't you using a language that better supports your use case?

(Don't get me wrong, this may be technically interesting, but... choose your tools with care.)

<comment><USER15> Because if you're using this, you're likely using an embedded device with limited memory and C or assembly are your only real options.

<comment><USER14> I realize it's been a while and you won't get any notification, but there _are_ high-level languages that can compile to C code. Like e.g. [https://ivorylang.org/](https://ivorylang.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So many poorly implemented hacks, why not just use libdispatch instead, you get C blocks and it makes threading much more easy: dispatch_async(main_q, ^{ printf("Hello %s!\n", argv[i]); });

[https://apple.github.io/swift-corelibs- libdispatch/tutorial/](https://apple.github.io/swift-corelibs- libdispatch/tutorial/)

<comment><USER17> From the first sentence of the article:

> Protothreads are extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for > severely memory constrained systems, such as small embedded systems or > wireless sensor network nodes. Protothreads provide linear code execution > for event-driven systems implemented in C. Protothreads can be used with or > without an underlying operating system to provide blocking event-handlers. > Protothreads provide sequential flow of control without complex state > machines or full multi-threading.

libdispatch has none of the features listed above. You're right that libdispatch is a better choice for typical PC software -- but this is designed for devices like an 8-bit microcontroller with a kilobyte of RAM.

<comment><USER16> Any numbers on task creation/switching for protothreads? GCD tasks are extremely lightweight: > Tasks in GCD are lightweight to create and queue; Apple states that 15 instructions are required to queue up a work

Linear code execution can be done using a serial queue.

<comment> Const-me GCD is just a convenience wrapper around thread pool. Probably inspired by Windows thread pool API introduced in Vista few years before GCD, adding API functions like SubmitThreadpoolWork.

Even on PCs with tons of resources, thread pools and coroutines are not always interchangeable.

One reason is performance, accessing a cache line shared across cores is even more expensive than cache miss.

Besides performance, writing same data from multiple threads, or doing in parallel what must be running sequentially, is a common source of bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As explained here [1], it uses a variation of Duff's device. So the claim that _Protothreads were invented by Adam Dunkels with support from Oliver Schmidt_ is slightly misleading IMHO.

But fair play for turning it into a working library.

[1] [http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/expansion.html](http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/expansion.html)

<comment><USER19> Don't be mean like that.

Duff's device to ProtoThreads is what a paintbrush is to a painting.

One is a construct for conditional loop unrolling, but it takes a stroke of genius to apply it in an absolutely orthogonal way to implement a functional cooperative multithreading with just a handful of macros. Duff's device was nowhere close to be meant for that, so your condescending pat on a back for "turning it into a working library" is completely inappropriate.

<comment><USER20> ProtoThreads can use Duff's device to implement its "local continuations", but it's not the only implementation.

There's an alternate one that uses the "labels as values" feature supported by GCC and Clang, which is much more elegant. In particular, it allows you to have a 'switch' statement inside the protothread.

<comment><USER21> I've tried that, but unfortunately, at least on GCC, taking the address of a label suppresses inlining of the containing function (which is important of you are trying to implement generators, less critical for async functions), so it often generate worst code than the switch statement implementation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does it cost only ~$12 to fly from Hamburg to Brussels on Ryanair? - <AUTHOR> See:<p>https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#search;f=HAM,ZMB;t=BRU,CRL,ZYR;d=2017-07-17;r=2017-07-21 <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: [https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#search;f=HAM,ZMB;t=BRU,C...](https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#search;f=HAM,ZMB;t=BRU,CRL,ZYR;d=2017-07-17;r=2017-07-21)</comment>


Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fommil/open-letter-to-the-emacs-maintainers-226cb67a961f#.1pq4ienoh <comment><USER3> > the _vast majority_ of modern software developers do not want to use email > as their communication channel

Wait. What? I must be old school then, with my ~12 years of experience, because I think email is much more approachable than some of the modern communication methods. I create text and send it in an email. I get an email back. Repeat until complete.

Or do people really think it's better to go out and sign up for yet another account with Slack (or is that Github? Or Discourse? Or HipChat? Or BitBucket? or...), verify my email (ironic, no?), get into a chat room, try and get a dev's attention in the rolling spam of giffy links... Or perhaps I'll create yet another gitlab issue and pull request, so they can get lost in the thousands of others, due to the lack of organization capability present in most email clients. Yeah, I prefer email, personally.

> the Old Guard and the Next Generation

An excellent way to alienate the people you're trying to get help from.

> put a Code of Conduct in place for all communications on gitlab.

Sigh. This again?

> If Emacs could move onto gitlab and use a pull request workflow

What real benefits does this offer, over an email patch?

If this is the "New Guard", perhaps it's best they are scared away by email.

<comment><USER4> Regarding the "code of conduct" fad/trend, I don't understand where it came from or what problem it's trying to solve. I suspect that I might be sympathetic to their goals, if the "code of conduct" people did a better job of explaining them, but they just seem to take the necessity of this practice for granted. I therefore assume that the cultural conversation which produced the idea must have taken place in some venue unknown to me, and the "code of conduct" therefore largely functions as a shibboleth - these are clearly not my people, whoever they are, because they clearly don't consider me to be one of theirs.

Also, I hate the pull request workflow; it's a big barrier to entry for people dipping their toes in with small changes. If you're trying to recruit more participants, or encourage an open-source project to open itself up to more participants, why on earth would you adopt a workflow which requires more up- front folderol on the part of the patch submitter? Just let people send in their patches and be gracious about accepting them. You can gently suggest that they start jumping through git branching hoops and other project-specific processes later, when they're already on board and committed to participation.

<comment><USER5> Are you serious or arguing insincerely? I can't tell.

Codes of conduct are a direct response to ongoing harassment and stalking against various contributors of various open-source projects, followed by inaction on the part of the project maintainers or the excuse of "that just can't handle criticism".

What is so offensive about saying "make it about the code, not about the person" and "don't stalk, dox, or harass people"?

A code of conduct is a signal that juvenile behavior won't be tolerated and that if your code reviewer starts sending you dick pics they'll get banned from the project. It doesn't do anything by itself - if the project maintainers don't follow through it is worthless but like security lights and door locks the signaling value has an effect on people's behavior.

And for the record it protects while males too.

<comment><USER6> He's quite sincere, and there are others of us who agree. Codes of conduct are a flavor of the month, and they don't achieve anything. I don't need to pre- announce that I will not accept patches from murderers or pedophiles, I can simply do it. The same is true for the types of offenses typical of a code of conduct.

Perhaps it is generational, and the new guard will eventually win this battle one funeral at a time. But as a politically liberal curmudgeon, 'codes of conduct' feel like the beta release of 'safe spaces'.

please go back to Pokemon Go-ing on my lawn... quietly. Daddy has to focus on writing code.

<comment><USER7> >Codes of conduct are a flavor of the month, and they don't achieve anything

In other words you've never felt harassed. That's a good thing but it doesn't mean your situation is all encompassing.

>The same is true for the types of offenses typical of a code of conduct.

Also a good thing. How many times have you rejected a patch because someone was harassing another member of your community?

<comment><USER8> I support codes of conduct, for multiple reasons stated and not in this thread.

I _do not_ support putting words into someone else's mouth, particularly on socially explosive (hence the discussion in the first place) or ideologically driven issues.

 _Asking_ if someone's ever been harassed is one thing. Stating point blank that they haven't, crosses a line. Your interlocutor knows their personal history. You don't. Don't presume. It's a cheap shot, often derailing.

<comment><USER7> You're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It sounds like the author wants basically everything about how Emacs is developed to change in order to better fit their ideas about what open source looks like.

There are plenty of established projects that don't use a "pull request" workflow, Emacs only recently migrated to Git; I don't have the discussion from ESR around migrating Emacs to Git handy, but it was a pretty slow process to "bring Emacs into the 21st century" and encourage contributions from new devs. There is simply no way the entire development workflow would change based on this critique. Never mind the fact that Emacs is RMS' baby, the suggestions are so far-fetched as to be laughable.

 _> the vast majority of modern software developers do not want to use email as their communication channel_

This sounds more like "the vast majority of software developers like me" and I'm not sure how much value there is in debating something like that. Mark me down for "disagree". I have, in the past, skipped over projects when the only means of contribution or discussion is "sign up for our Slack/Gitter/etc. channel".

<comment><USER10> Can anyone explain slack to me? It just seems like a shitty reinvention of IRC.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't require an IRC client, looks slick, has rich text, and integrations with other platforms. Biggest thing is that it doesn't need an IRC server. It could have been made with IRC underneath, but you'd want an intermediate layer to retain messages and so on.

<comment><USER10> There are web based IRC clients. IRC can integrate with other platforms pretty easily. IRC doesn't require setting up your own server.

Being able to setup your own server is a benefit, not a negative. Much like twitter it seems to be another regressions from an open internet to corporate control.

The only positive I can see is rich text, but that has extremely limited value in a chat program. History is nice too but IME too painful to use (scroll, load, scroll, load, scroll, load) to be of any practical benefit.

<comment><USER11> I'd love to agree. But with IRC you've no guarantee, for instance, that an offline user will receive notifications when they sign in (plus multi client handling).

Slack has search for history, which is huge. No more "eh we talked about it".

Onprem is great. But it's a hindrance for quick adoption.

I'd love if an open system would win. I've no love for Slack and don't use it. (Have used hipchat; what a UI mess like all of their products.) But I guess no one stepped up with an IRC-based platform that could compete.

<comment><USER10> > I'd love to agree. But with IRC you've no guarantee, for instance, that an > offline user will receive notifications when they sign in (plus multi client > handling). > Slack has search for history, which is huge. No more "eh we > talked about it".

For functionality like that it sounds like a mailing list would fit the use case better.

> Onprem is great. But it's a hindrance for quick adoption.

It's not either/or. Think of git, you can use a hosted server or a private one. The ability to host your own server doesn't hinder anyone.

<comment><USER12> > For functionality like that it sounds like a mailing list would fit the use > case better.

Then you're looking at an email with the visual noise of recipients and whitespace and signatures, and if the UI is really bad (mailing list websites, for example), every message is viewed in isolation without the responses.

<comment><USER10> I totally agree on the UI disaster that a lot of those mailing lists are. But it seems like the solution to that would be a better mailing list ui, not to throw the whole lot out and start from scratch.

<comment><USER12> I don't know how we'd find a nice, automated solution to removing people's wordy signatures.

<comment><USER10> Doesn't gmail handle this really well? It doesn't change often, so it should be too hard to build a filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll leave my two cents here.

My two cents come from two experiences: submitting a patch to an open source GNU project on GNU Savannah, and asking for directions to the emacs-devel mailing list in order to read the GNU Emacs codebase (because I want to do weird/neat/crazy/nasty stuff with Emacs buffers).

So:

1) Gnu Savannah. It's okay. It's a bit weird but it does everything it should do. Most open source development happens on GitHub nowadays, and this basically means that savannah is weird to work with. Imho it should just be more documented, possibly in a "visual way" (ie, video).

2) The emacs-devel mailing list. It just works. The access barrier is low (can you receive emails? can you send emails? then you can come hack with us) and it really is that simple. I really don't understand what people don't get about mailing lists.

For short, most of the article says that emacs development has not enough colours and and buzzwords.

p.s: GNU Emacs the whole GNU project had a "code of conduct" way before this was the "cool" thing: it's the GNU Manifesto.

</comment><comment><USER14> tl;dr: githubbing open sourcers face culture shock because they haven't realized that people have been doing opensource/free stuff for a lot longer than the world of pull-requests and slack. and rather than think that there may be value in the existing ways they just brand everything as old fashioned and wrong.

I thought the cliche was meant to be that old developers don't know new tech and don't want to know.

Now it seems that there are even more new developers that don't want to know old tech.

</comment><comment><USER15> As an emacs user, and someone who follows the emacs development lists, here is my two-cents.

You're argument is predicated on the idea that because the "new guard" don't need to rely on IRC and email anymore that the "old guard" who have been doing this since the only way to contribute to projects WAS IRC and email need to change their ways to accommodate others.

That isn't a bad thing at all, in fact most people (myself included) think it would be a good idea, but you have to remember that the FSF isn't just a software organization, but it is also more or less a political organization as well, and their processes will reflect the values of those whose interests align. While Emacs indeed does have new leadership under John Wiegley, as a whole, the project cannot change without the blessing of the GNU elders.

I feel your point might loose a bit of steam when your main argument for moving towards a pull-request model is based on "this is how they do it on Github", given that as you acknowledged, it is a non-free project that the FSF looks unfavorably on.

<comment><USER16> >While Emacs indeed does have new leadership under John Wiegley, as a whole, the project cannot change without the blessing of the GNU elders.

This isn't true. It's just that the GNU elders are elders for a reason - <USER2> opinion is respected, explicitly sought out, and generally correct.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The OP is talking hard facts, ENSIME _do_ have a low barrier for contributing. I have been witness of the continuous effort to make it more so. He is sharing what has worked for them. Are solutions "fads" now? Aren't we engineers and problem solvers? What's all this nonsense of "respecting tradition" and "elders"?

I'm not saying that experience is worthless, I'll be the first in defending it, but I also know, first hand, that as we get a little older, we get too used to our ways, even if there are others more efficient, that require change.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hi,

I would suggest reconsidering the suggestion to use proprietary software and fad approaches. Consider digging a bit deeper before criticizing.

Just because something isn't up to date with the latest bling doesn't mean it's bad, wrong, or unwise.

I _agree_ that email is not a VCS, but it's worked relatively well for 30 years. I would carefully consider where the actual problem is.

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree with (most) everything here[0]. However based on the byzantine (to me, anyway) meta discussions about free/libre/gnu that seem to evolve out of every proposed major change to the emacs development process, it seems extraordinarily unlikely to happen. But man would that be cool.

[0] A code of conduct seems unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER19> > At ENSIME the vast majority of communication is through popular channels: > github.com (non-free), gitter.im (non-free), meet.jit.si (libre) and > twitter.com (non-free)

How does one know which of those four channels to use? Are people expected to follow all four of them if they want to keep informed about the project?

Wouldn't it be easier to have just one channel that is universally available? Email would be the obvious choice, and since you have to provide an email address to sign up at Github, you are already implicitly requiring your contributors to have email.

</comment><comment><USER20> So there ought to be a new generation of leadership in the Emacs maintainer community. Ironically, he is a Haskeller. I thought this was covered on HN before, because people were enthusiastic or concerned depending on how you look at it.

[http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat- john...](http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat-john-wiegley- maintaining-emacs-can-help/)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udNb4E4smbM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udNb4E4smbM)

To the consternation of many, I love Emacs. I even eschewed tmux for multi- term, trying to move to notmuch.el for Gmail-esque email, and even consider moving away from a dedicated PDF reader and consider doc-mode if not for its lagginess (it is doing impressive stuff).

But how do I contribute to Emacs?

I like the Old Guard, I do, but I think there is something to be said for a few orgs _philosophy_ , not implementation, such as Fedora, Mozilla, and their attempts to onboard volunteer effort.

They have good wiki material, they have the badge process to show hip ways to contribute. I too find the latter kind of off-putting, but my point is they try to signal to novices like me what to do and what of those things can be valued and by whom. I recently set up an account with Fedora and will try to work on the project not because I particularly fond of the distro (I prefer Debian, which I also want to start pitching in on), but as a culture I want to understand them and leverage their community handling tactics and use it later. They seem to know something, I want to know how they got there, why, and immitate it elsewhere needed.

Traditional projects have far less material on this. I appreciate a good static page/wiki/doc system more in the post-JS monstrosity that is the web (again, scary is the number of sites weekly I cannot visit with JS blocking to READ DOCUMENTATION; Emacs is thankfully one, or any GNU project, I worry about in this regard), but we find no good information about how to get involved with Emacs.

I have intended to email John about this. Can we consider this post to mean I am not the only one at a loss?

And a smile gripe: I have started to use ensime for a Scala Coursera course, and if the author of that post is here, I find your docs polished but confusing. Basic concepts (I need to really focus on sbt-mode to get interactive, ensime does not help with that and other stuff, you need to set up SBT first for ensime integration and the server) is there, but is linked to GH issue tracking and other stuff. You insist on reading the FAQ section that links to that, but I ended very tired one night going in circles. Resting AND trying again next day I got what you guys did, but you will lose idiots like me every time.</comment>


A "joke" in the glibc manual - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/770966/ <comment><USER2> There's clearly a psychological war going on, with attacks whose purpose is to make people lost time on futile stuff. The joke is funny. Go program something, don't discuss it!

This is sabotage 101! [http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/oss-manual-sabotage- product...](http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/oss-manual-sabotage- productivity-2015-11)

<comment><USER3> Who exactly is performing the "sabotage" here? The CIA? Microsoft? SJWs?</comment></comment>


VC portfolio & entrepreneurs - a scientific analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com/How-VCs-earn-their-keep/2030-1069_3-5202178.html

<comment><AUTHOR> An old article - proves what is very well known. but an interesting statistical backing.

How VCs earn their keep

A research paper suggests some venture capital firms offer intangibles, such as experience and contacts, that are worth their weight in gold.

Offers from more-reputable venture capitalists are three times more likely to be accepted by entrepreneurial companies.</comment>


Show HN: An SVG Graph Generator for Git, Built in POSIX Awk - <AUTHOR> https://grawkit.deuill.org <comment><USER2> This looks good (visually) but I don't see the point? Wouldn't you be better served by something that produces the graph from some form of git log output, rather than the commands?</comment>


Bug in bounds check in EAP code of pppd - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/paulusmack/ppp/commit/8d7970b8f3db727fe798b65f3377fe6787575426 <comment><USER2> Might want to resubmit with a title yelling a bit louder about this enabling a remote code exploit. (See [http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a0b08d9a](http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a0b08d9a) )</comment>


Hick's law - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law <comment><USER2> Thanks for this link. Terms that are backed by research are very important for people to communicate effectively without resorting to opinion bashing.</comment>


Xen as kernel module (like KVM) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2009/03/06/hosted-xen-project/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great because it will mean distributions/admins can integrate Xen faster and with less steps and pitfalls.

I've been professionally tied up with Xen for about five years and while I don't have any problems dealing with it, it is still a pain for many people to get started. And much more than just "a pain" if their nodes are using technologies sensitive to kernel changes (which is often the case in HPC).</comment>


I Made a Dating App for Remote Workers and Travelers - <AUTHOR> https://stories.fairytrail.app/dating-app-for-travelers-and-remote-workers/ <comment><USER2> First thought... <chuckles>... [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=happy%20trai...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=happy%20trail)</comment>


Thanos.sh: if you are Thanos, this command could delete half your files randomly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hotvulcan/Thanos.sh <comment><USER2> I don't think the files Thanos deleted actually belonged to him.</comment>