BART slows rollout of new trains as it contends with more repairs than expected - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/BART-slows-rollout-of-new-trains-as-it-contends-13837200.php?psid=exR3U <comment><USER2> About 20 to 25 years ago, I took a trip from the US (where I'd lived most of my life) to travel around Europe by train, and I was immensely impressed by its far superior train system. The best trains of all the countries I visited were in Sweden, which had trains which were so modern that they seemed like something out of the future, even compared to the best trains I'd seen in the US by that time, Amtrak trains.

The new BART trains that are only now rolling out remind me a lot of the Swedish trains I saw more than 20 years ago, except that the BART trains have flat panel screens in them that I doubt those Swedish trains had back then, but the Swedish trains had doors that would silently and easily slide open when you held your hands up to them -- that was something that had greatly impressed me back then, because all the trains I'd been to before had really heavy doors that you'd have to struggle with to open by hand, while on the Swedish trains you just held your hand up and the doors would glide open like on the spacecraft on Star Trek.

The whole experience had left me embarrassed for the US, which I'd seen as a technological leader up to that point. I came away from that trip with an impression that the US was very backwards in many ways. The train system and train differences were just one glaring example, but also politically and in many other ways the US was very backwards.

Now finally these new BART trains rolling out, some NYC trains were also modernizing some about a decade ago, but I haven't been to Sweden or much of the rest of Europe in a long time, and I wonder how much further they've progressed.

<comment><USER3> It's not really a fair comparison. In terms of where people actually live (the upper two thirds of Sweden is almost empty) its roughly comparable to Ohio: about ten million people clustered in 4 or 5 major cities within a few hours drive distance from each other. Of course it will be easier to provide superior rail service there. This is not so say that Ohio has its act together as far as public transit is concerned (ha), but getting that level of service to the US as a whole would be a totally different beast.

<comment><USER4> Is there any Ohio-sized area in the US that has a system comparable to the Swedish one?

<comment><USER5> Funnily enough, the Midwest is pretty much a spoke and hub of medium sized metro areas focused around Chicago.

There's the Northeast corridor (and its cousin the Southeast corridor going down to Atlanta).

The PNW cities also are clustered like this but have difficult geography.

California and the Central Valley with the Bay and LA also meet this criteria, but CAHSR is run by a mix of incompetents and constrained by the wording of the ballot initiative that got it approved.

<comment><USER6> > The PNW cities also are clustered like this but have difficult geography.

Not really. It's pretty flat here in the Willamette valley, where the majority of Oregon's population lives, and relatively flat going north into Washington to Seattle... But the best we've got for long distance trains is Amtrak which shares the tracks with commercial traffic, where Amtrak gets basically the lowest priority on the tracks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "I don't know everything these new trains can do — they probably have > artificial intelligence or something — but I know they're better than these > buckets of steel we're sitting in," said Board President Bevan Dufty.

Maybe this guy shouldn't be president of the BART board? I mean, lots of other people quoted in the article seem to know what they do.

<comment><USER8> The role of a President is NOT to set strategy or even understand it. That's a CEO.

The role of President is to gladhand and otherwise maintain relationships necessary for the partners to feel safe continuing their contracts.

That kind of "aw, shucks" mentality is very useful for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Change Control for trains is fun, because there's lots of safety testing it can take a lot of time for a change which is either purely cosmetic or fixes something that has a well-understood workaround to actually make it to production.

Several years ago the main type of train I use, Class 444 Desiro got a firmware upgrade to teach it Selective Door Operation. Meaning now it knows this platform is 8 carriages long, this is a ten carriage train, so disable the doors in the rear two carriages and make an announcement automatically. Nice. But the firmware upgrade messed up the clock. So for example maybe it's about lunch time, the train displays 12:05 but is it actually 12:05? Nah, might be 13:20 or 11:50. After several months they fixed the clock, but now it is only shown intermittently. So when it says 12:05 that's definitely 12:05 but it might not remember to show the time for five minutes which is little help.

They took months to ship firmware with a fixed clock.

The SDO change also resulted in the computer becoming convinced in certain places that, as it annunciates, ""There is a fault with the door system, this is being attended to. Please do not operate any emergency equipment". There isn't a fault. But since "Ignore spurious door message" is a workaround there is no hurry to qualify a new firmware release that fixes it.

<comment><USER10> The Los Angeles Metro solved the clock problem by showing the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, …) in a large font, with the time hidden away in a tiny font [1]. The time is usually wrong, but nobody can read it anyway. It's been like this for years; that photo is from 2016. Since the trains don't run on a schedule, I guess it doesn't matter.

[1] See the top photo here [https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/design-and- architecture/e...](https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/design-and- architecture/everything-you-need-to-know-to-ride-the-expo-line)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > BART gets to withhold the last 5 percent payment for the $2.5 billion fleet > until both sets of cars hit their maintenance targets

Is it just me or does 5% not seem like nearly a large enough percent? If I only had to hit 20% of my expected performance in exchange for 95% of my pay... I would have a lot more hobbies.

<comment><USER12> Most of these large capital contracts leave very little money for profit upfront. That comes from long term maintenance. If they are the lowest bidder they are probably losing money even at 95% payout.

<comment><USER13> While true, once you reach a certain point, that's all water under the bridge, and the only question that remains is how motivating it is to pursue that last 5%.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure about civil projects. I'm mildly familiar with commercial construction projects. Those have milestones and due dates built in. And if those are missed the GC doesn't get paid until they are met. If dates are missed they can incur penalties. This is done to ensure the GC doesn't pull resources off to another project.

<comment><USER13> I guess it would all depend on the rules or how the contract is written. Certainly taking care to have the right incentives in place is a good idea, though I'm not sure it's always practiced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Swiss national train company has their own share of issues with trains built by Bombardier. After years of delays, what was finally delivered is horribly unreliable and passengers also don't like the shaking feeling when they do run.

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBB_RABe_502](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBB_RABe_502)

Two examples doesn't make a trend, but seeing how similar the issues are, maybe there is some systemic issue plaguing them.

<comment><USER15> Kind of off-topic, but Bombardier was running a really terrible ad on TV in Canada a few years back.

It featured a couple of tourists in Europe asking a lady to take a photo for them. She purposefully waited until a train blocked the shot, so they got a photo of the train instead of the view they wanted. She then shows them the sabotaged photo and says something like, "I made that train! It's Bombardier."

I think the point of the ad was that they're an important exporter that creates good jobs and that earns international recognition. It was clearly designed for strengthening political support from the provincial and federal governments, not for selling trains. To me, though, it just made them seem like selfish assholes.

I wish I could find the ad, but Google just returns a mountain of news reports and marketing videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most of BART's challenges stem from 180 software packages and 30 microprocessors that make up each Bombardier vehicle. Each is a complex symphony of systems that communicate over an Ethernet backbone. A bug in one line of code could shut the whole thing down, requiring a rigorous safety review process that may take months before engineers can reinstall the software."

<comment><USER17> Not that this makes the Bombardier problem trivial, but that seems fairly simple compared to most cars on the road today, which have over 100 micros. Software can be done well in complicated systems if you have the expertise, design, time and money to get it right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Of course, these "unexpected" delays were expected by everyone with any experience in Bay Area public projects.

</comment><comment><USER19> Manchester's Metrolink uses Bombardier M5000's ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_M5000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_M5000) ) that seem to have worked OK. But I do wonder - is there anyone other than Bombardier who makes tram/underground vehicles these days?

<comment><USER12> > is there anyone other than Bombardier who makes tram/underground vehicles > these days?

Siemens, Alstom, and Mitsubishi off the top of my head. There probably is some Chinese companies but I'm not familiar with them.

<comment><USER20> Also Hyundai Rotem [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Rotem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Rotem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why are they buying new trains instead of fixing the tracks? There are many places on the BART system where the track have not been replaced in so long that trains have to slow to a crawl for safety reasons. New trains don't solve that.

<comment><USER22> "In 2018, we replaced 22 miles of track, reprofiled 231.6 miles of track to reduce railway noise, overhauled a critical track section near the West Oakland and 12th Street Stations, and replaced five miles of 34.5 kV electrical cable system in downtown Oakland to provide reliable power for trains. All these improvements will collectively create a more reliable, quieter, smoother and safer experience for our riders."

[https://www.bart.gov/better-bart](https://www.bart.gov/better-bart)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is anyone else concerned about the surveillance in the new BART trains?

It looks like there are 7-9 small CCTV cameras in each car. This means that there is nowhere inside the vehicle where you have private space to enter a password, or check your work email, or pull out a laptop to do some programming.

For people who spend 60 minutes (or more) commuting, this is obnoxious.

Also, this is another step toward pervasive surveillance in the public sphere. Default-on all-angles video recording normalizes what infrastructure operators (and their third-party contractors) are allowed to learn about you, your work, and your life.

<comment><USER24> 1) Unless you're going from end-to-end, you're unlikely to do a 60 minute commute on a BART

2) It turned out a lot of BART cameras were fake. [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier- ross/article/Repl...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier- ross/article/Replacing-BART-s-fake-cameras-with-real-ones-13102017.php)

3) If they got rid of cameras you'd still not be able to use your computer during your commute because you'd almost certainly be robbed within the year if you were to use it every day on the BART for a year. In fact, even with cameras this will be true.

<comment><USER25> That's complete hogwash. It is very common to commute 60 minutes, for example looks like half the workforce at Salesforce lives in Fremont. In the morning the train fills up right at warm springs and gets empty at embarcadero. This legend that Bart is mostly for short rides is just that, a legend. Most people using Bart have pretty long commute from Concord, Dublin and Fremont into the city.

<comment><USER26> I don't know if that is true or not but rider enter/exit flows are open data provided by BART in their web site, in case anyone wants to settle the debate.

I will say that Warm Springs is one of the least-used stations so I somewhat doubt this story of full trains departing. It only has 4400 pax/day.

<comment><USER25> at warm springs you get about 70% of the seats filled on an old style train and it's rapidly increasing week over week as more people start using it. At Fremont you have every single seat occupied and several people standing. By the time the train leaves Union City most cars are what you would consider at capacity. After that it gets more and more uncomfortable until the pressure is released at Embarcadero.

I also don't believe Bart's stats, the incompetence of the people running it is so massive that everything they do is suspect in my eyes. An example: [https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/BART-escalator- repairs-...](https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/BART-escalator-repairs- delayed-pigeon-14114828.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've noticed Siemens' trains out of London have quiet electric motors, whereas even the other new electric trains have noisy humming motors.

I believe the AC motor wave forms maybe smoothed out, I was very impressed by it. To the UK train companies just not value it? To me it was an impressive quality improvement. It is a detriment to all the other trains I travel on.

</comment><comment><USER28> I really hate the new cars. Yay more standing room but now everywhere you stand you are awkwardly in the way. So happy I'm moving out of the bay and won't have to ride them more than once or twice a year anymore.

</comment><comment><USER29> I thought BaRT had technology from either Siemens or Daimler but that was wrong. Their rolling stock has been provided by a variety of manufacturers[1]. One thing that makes things expensive for BaRT is the choice of non-standard gauge they are bound by. That's not going to change.

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_rolli...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_rolling_stock)

<comment><USER30> Daimler's rail division was acquired by Bombardier IIRC

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The one I rode the other day felt wobbly. If that's the trade-off for not squealing it's worth it though.

</comment><comment><USER18> (Article is from May 11)

</comment><comment><USER31> Man, i wish they had included isb power or power outlets on the new cars.

<comment><USER32> If they did, those spots on the cars would be constantly occupied by homeless people.

<comment><USER31> They should have the entire window bank's row of sill filled with countless usb ports. A fucking ford f150 has like 6.

A bart train car (an electric train) should have like 50 - in Silicon fucking Valley) - and/or a giant induction charger in the middle.

Dont give me crap about the homeless - give that to the city.

We are silicon freaking valley and if you hVe never been to any other country with public transport we look like freaking idiots.

Sweden, japan, Singapore, china, all have severely more advanced transport systems than we.

Bart is a pos embarrassment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think there's a general feeling (propaganda?) that the US is a technological leader, but... there's nothing to support that, especially when it comes to infrastructure. The US is really far behind other developed countries in a lot of ways but few people in the US notice because most Americans rarely ever look outside their culture bubble or see another country.

There are big-ass tech companies, of course, but the country itself is not exactly a paragon of progress.

<comment><USER34> I think you are oversimplifying the issue. There are cultural differences that influence things like that too. As priorities shift things can change. So in US you have people living in large houses driving large cars and on average having crappy public transport infra. In Europe you have people living in much more modest size houses mostly driving tiny cars and often having good public transport infra. For me European option is better cause I do not drive my wife much prefers the US option.

<comment><USER35> I find it scandalous the perception that anything that is not a SUV is tiny.

One of the most sold cars in Europe is the Volkswagen Golf; I don't see how that is tiny.

Interestingly, I see that mid and large size classes (mid-size being a "large family car") originated in USA, which makes me wonder if that's a typical American perception.

I'd even argue that 1400+ kg for moving around an average of 1.5 person/120 kg (I think an average of 2 people is too generous), during a time of ecological crisis, is tragic, and in my opinion, describes perfectly how there's no hope.

<comment><USER36> The Golf has been a compact car in the USA since the day it was delivered to our shores in the 70's.

Are compact cars tiny? That is debatable. Compared to a 1961 Lincon Continental with suicide doors it is very tiny.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


50 years PARC there is a metaphysical hack? - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance#/media/File:Resonance.PNG <comment><USER2> Maybe an account created less than an hour ago should not be able to post submissions, or else they should not be able to make front page.</comment>


The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women - <AUTHOR> http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-unsafety-net-how-social-media-turned-against-women/381261/# <comment><USER2> > A report, "Misogyny on Twitter," released by the research and policy > organization Demos this June, found more than 6 million instances of the > word "slut" or "whore" used in English on Twitter between December 26, 2013, > and February 9, 2014.

It's worth clicking through to the actual report [1]. For the several words they look at, they don't just count them. They break them down by gender of the tweeter, by comments (tweets about the word itself) and conversations (tweets where the word was used as part of the conversation), and how the word was used (non-offensive, colloquial, misogynistic, and so on).

For "slut" and "whore" in conversation, there is a really strong periodic component. The graph looks like a triangle waveform, with a big spike at the peak of the peak. It's probably a 24 hour period, but I can't really read it well because (for no reason that I can discern) they have used a spacing for the time grid lines of 1 day, 3 hours, 47 minutes?! See figure 5.

Figure 6 shows "slut" and "whore" in conversation tweets by gender. The graphs for males and females are nearly identical. They mention this in their "Key findings" section:

       Women are as almost as likely as men to use the
       terms 'slut' and 'whore' on Twitter. Not only are
       women using these words, they are directing them at
       each other, both casually and offensively; women are
       increasingly more inclined to engage in discourses
       using the same language that has been, and continues
       to be, used as derogatory against them.

Is it misogynistic for a woman to call another women, with offensive intent, a slut or whore? Or is she simply being a jerk?

[1] [http://www.demos.co.uk/files/MISOGYNY_ON_TWITTER.pdf?1399567...](http://www.demos.co.uk/files/MISOGYNY_ON_TWITTER.pdf?1399567516)

</comment><comment><USER3> > As Hess herself put it, "Policing misogyny is fabulous in theory. In > practice, it's a bitch."

It's interesting, but this seems to be very true. Creating rules to behaviour seem to have the primary effect of spurring people to find ways to circumvent the rules. Any attempt at enforcing the spirit of the rules and not the letter leads to long diatribes on the nature of free speech coupled with some incredible persecution complex.

The interesting part is that the culture of a community is so incredibly fragile. They do not require a majority of bad actors, because beyond a very small number, these bad actors will quickly cause the original members of the community to leave and soon the ratio becomes more and more unbalanced spiraling until the community is no longer what it started out as.

Despite my aversion to overlords in real life, I find that online communities are most effective when strongly policed with unproductive dissent silenced outright. Not all dissent, just that which is unproductive.

My personal hypothesis is that while we see public places as public, and private places as private in real life, these distinctions are less clear online. Couple that with the problem where you don't know if a person is undesirable until after you've let him in and things quickly become hard to control.

I don't know if there is a solution.

<comment><USER4> > Not all dissent, just that which is unproductive.

And who gets to pick what's productive or not?

That's always the hitch in these schemes: is criticizing decisions about what to police productive? is criticizing the beliefs of the owners productive? is not agreeing with the norm of the community productive?

The person making these calls has a vested interested in not seeing certain kinds of criticism and in accruing more power for themselves, so there's an inherent conflict of interest that tends to go wrong.

<comment><USER5> That's certainly a problem in politics, which is why in democratic countries free speech protections are usually broad enough to encompass everything short of incitement to criminal activity.

But on private online platforms the owner/operator is in effect a dictatorship, and users can participate or not as they see fit. While free speech laws prevent official censorship, nobody is owed a platform for the expression of their views; so if some trolls are discomfited by being unwelcome at many social sites, so what? Why should their putative right to say obnoxious things take precedence over others' perfectly reasonable desires not to be harassed, and the site operators' (typical) choice to cater to the larger demographic?

<comment><USER4> My point is that site policing rarely stops at trolls: it usually creeps out to extend first to people who criticize the policing of trolls, because who thinks trolls deserve defending? and then it creeps out a little more to silence fringe views, because what are they really adding to the conversation? and then it creeps out a little more to silence people who don't share the majority view, because who wants to be in a community where we constantly have to deal with people who don't agree with the obvious rightness of our opinions?

It's not like it hasn't been tried before, it's just that policing ideas so rarely stops with just the trolls I'm skeptical of the whole premise.

<comment><USER5> That's all true, but if an online community becomes unwelcoming the cost of leaving is virtually zero - I've abandoned several because I had begun to find them toxic for one reason or another. I do think moderation works better when it's unilateral and there's a clear demarcation between administration and membership so you don't end up with social capture, ie a clear understanding that Forum X is not a democracy or even a polity.

It's an imperfect situation, but if you want to run a structured forum (eg the typical case of one that's dedicated to particular topics of mutual interest), then it's better than just establishing it and walking away, because without any sort of moderation at all the evidence is that it will quickly turn into a toxic shithole and be useless for its original purpose. Usenet's alt tree was the best example of a benign self-regulating anarchy but even that buckled in the wake of Eternal September and never really recovered IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's stop pretending that this is just caused by a small minority. I've more or less abandoned Reddit because misogynist crap is no longer limited to obscure subs but gets upvoted to the front page via mainstream subs.

I used to think the anonymity of the internet was an outlet for a small minority of psychopaths, but aggressive online behavior towards women seems to become increasingly normal.

<comment><USER7> People have said in the past that HN is just as bad as Reddit in this regard, but I've found discussion here to be quite reasonable over the past year. (Caveat: I could be totally wrong about this as I don't follow all the discussion.) I wonder what changed? After all, HN uses a voting system just like Reddit. I don't think it's the audience: Slashdot covers a similar demographic and discussion there is horrible. The only other public site I know of that does it well is Metafilter, and that's on account of heavy moderation and community policing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article uses some fairly disingenuous constructions to make online words resonate emotionally, such as intercutting with stories of rape. I understand what they're going for but I find the technique slimy.

</comment><comment><USER9> I read about #jadapose -- people tweeting pictures of themselves in the same pose as a 16 year old drugged and raped at a party -- and decided I need to use the internet less. For fucks sake.

edit: s/them/themselves/

</comment><comment> sr-ix "As Hess herself put it, 'Policing misogyny is fabulous in theory. In practice, it's a bitch.'"

This woman's word choice is particularly revealing of the pervasiveness of misogyny in (our) human culture.

<comment><USER3> I think that was the intent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Her article seems to be about what could be done to stop anonymous trolls from terrorizing and threatening women. How about prosecuting them, since terroristic threats is already a crime? Unfortunately, as Hess discovers, the police don 't care much about online stalking, which is consistent since they don't care about IRL stalking either. But never mind, it's not the problem: misogyny is the problem, amplified 1000x by online anonymity. Anonymity makes the internet mean and gives trolls= men too much power. This is the subtle shift: what starts out as "misogyny is bad" becomes "anonymity facilitates misogyny."_

 _Keeping in mind that actual stalking has never been dealt with in any significant way ever, the desire of a few female writers to curb online anonymity wouldn 't be enough to get an @ mention, except that this happens to coincide with what the media wants, and now we have the two vectors summing to form a public health crisis. "Cyberbullying is a huge problem!" Yes, but not because it is hurtful, HA! no one cares about your feelings-- but because criticism makes women want to be more private-- and the privacy of the women is bad. The women have to be online, they do most of the clicking and receive most of the clicks. Anonymous cyberbullying is a barrier to increasing consumption, it's gotta go._

 _..._

 _If you 're a guy, you probably don't realize the awesome pressure on women to let themselves get looked at: to reveal themselves online, to post a pic, to give everyone your attention, to stop what you're doing and give the other your self, even if they want to yell at you. "Hey lady, I hate you!" And yet that same pressure tells women they are valueless unless they are public. Madness._

 _The system is illogical, the things you want cannot actually coexist, but you dare not attack the system that promises everything, therefore something else must be blamed. As a basic example, Hess probably wants all the benefits of socialism and all the brand products of capitalism. When she can 't have it, obviously the problem is misogyny._

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have read more article's in the last month that feature Anita Sarkeesian in them than I previously thought I would have in my entire life.

<comment><USER12> There are 5700 words in this article. Exactly 72 of those words refer - directly or indirectly - to Sarkeesian.

Before even mentioning Sarkeesian the article reports on the threats and abuse suffered by 4 other women. Directly after mentioning Sarkeesian it details stories of 5 more women who have been harassed, violently attacked, or threatened.

So... Sarkeesian is the part that you latch onto here?

<comment><USER11> I know its a monster of an article I was commenting that when I got to that spot it registered as another data point in a the number of times I have read that name over a huge assortment of publications. I kinda of understand the downvoting I am getting for pointing it out as it seems to be a charged topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Downvote away, but "meh" from me. This read to me like just another SJW alarmist, wringing their fists and crying "because social media". Women, like every other group, need to engage with the internet on it's own terms. The lights are out - so of course people are going to act based on their id. Hence the IDiots making all the rape jokes.

If people are making legitimate threats, then it should be a serious matter. Otherwise,accept there are sad morons out there who don't get to say this stuff IRL, and don't let it get to you. Sorry ladies, but creeps will always exist. So some sad Redpill fucks are making comments about some chick tied up? Yes, it sickens me, but "do as thou will" until you actually harm another human.

Full disclosure: white middle class male.</comment>


Linux Uptake Is Getting Serious; Windows Struggles To Keep Up - <AUTHOR> http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-is-uptake-getting-serious-windows.html Looks like the days of assuming Windows is the major platform have well the truly gone! <comment><USER2> I worked for a company that was building a low-latency real-time platform for applications like financial trading. We shipped on both Linux and Windows. As I recall, our latency on Linux was fairly reliably under 1 ms, while on Windows it was often more like 15ms. In short, the Windows scheduler was nowhere near adequate for real time work.

<comment><USER3> As someone who has worked with Windows or Supervised people who worked with Windows for most of the last decade I can confirm this type of behavior.

What I've noticed about Windows is that certain bugs just seem to linger. I can list about 30 bugs that have been around since Windows 2000 and which are still in Windows 7 today.

So clearly what Microsoft is doing much of the time is just layering on more and more features without doing much to the base functions of the Operating System. That's why these basic bugs persist because no one's touched that code in years (at least that's my theory).

And that's also why you get such bottlenecks.

Linux is less prone to feature-itis because the companies doing the real work on it aren't interested in meaningless features as much as they're interested in stability and performance. So you get a situation where the Windows code is constantly getting more verbose while the Linux code is constantly becoming more optimized.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is a philosophy thing was well. Latency and network speed are key Unix heratige features which carry over to Linux. Windows has always considered this as something we should do, but not core.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One point I would make is that being a Linux developer is harder than being a Windows developer. Giving Developers neat new tools to expedite development is something Microsoft does well.

So while the figure about them being paid more is probably true the Skill Level-To-Pay ratio is probably more attractive on the Windows side.

</comment><comment><USER4> _I wonder if Linux developers have better sex lives as well?_

Yes.

<comment><USER5> We do? o_O</comment></comment>


Grievance Studies Goes After the Scientific Method - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@heyingh/grievance-studies-goes-after-the-scientific-method-63b6cfd9c913 <comment><USER2> Maybe we should treat GS as a religion instead of a science.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone know of an open source PHP project? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for an open source project in need of (and looking for) some help that has a primary language in PHP. I have searched on GitHub for Repositories but nothing jumps out as needing/looking for help. <comment><USER2> The PHP core itself suffers from a serious lack of docs, if you have some time left...

<comment><USER3> Is php core a php project or a c project?

<comment><USER2> With this, I mean the source code of the PHP interpreter itself. Large parts are written in C, but you do not really have to know C for helping out with the docs - a solid knowledge of PHP is more than enough. Many functions, especially PECL extensions and PEAR projects, need documentation, and the existing documentation in PHP _badly_ requires assistance. Bonus points if you speak another language - the translations are in every state between not done, incomplete, outdated, usable and excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> MediaWiki uses PHP. You'll have to check with them if they need help.</comment>


IKEA invests 200M euro to become climate positive by 2030 - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.inter.ikea.com/news/all/ikea-invests-200-million-euros-to-speed-up-action-to-become-climate-positive-by-2030/s/c3181331-23d9-473e-9d56-20e0c3db7c66 <comment><USER2> Ikea: now that we have carved up the budget, how can we disseminate the message so that it makes a) employees feel good and b) ensure customers believe we are doing our best. Ideally how are we going to deflect from all our past and ongoing crimes[0][1][2][3]?

Sven Samenström: Oh I know, we just say it's to combat climate change and put a timeline on it so far into the future that nobody will remember this PR piece, and nobody will hold us accountable.

Talk is cheap!

[0] Spies and Racism at Ikea? [https://abcnews.go.com/International/ikea-fire- book-executiv...](https://abcnews.go.com/International/ikea-fire-book- executive/story?id=9072719)

[1] How Ikea And Harvard Got Tangled In A Corrupt Romanian Land Deal [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/harvard-ikea-corruption- roman...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/harvard-ikea-corruption- romania_n_56d86cbbe4b0000de4039509)

[2] Swedish group IKEA starts exploiting its forests in Romania [https://www.romania-insider.com/swedish-group-ikea-starts- ex...](https://www.romania-insider.com/swedish-group-ikea-starts-exploiting- forests-romania)

[3] IKEA's Flat-Pack Tax Scheme: a Corporate Structure Designed to Facilitate Profit-shifting and Tax Avoidance [https://medium.com/@jurgeng/ikeas-tax- scheme-a-corporate-str...](https://medium.com/@jurgeng/ikeas-tax-scheme-a- corporate-structure-designed-to-facilitate-profit-shifting-and-tax- avoidance-798caf842fb6)

<comment><USER3> I thought I was cynical, but this is exactly how I see it. Biggest corporations pay no or near to nothing taxes and then they give a small handouts to communities and we suppose to kiss their feet for being so generous.

Same happened with starbucks recently where they offer to supplement budget with once off donation instead of paying their fair share.

<comment><USER4> The biggest corporations pay lots of "taxes".

It's interesting how corporations "aren't people" until taxes come up :)

<comment><USER5> _> The biggest corporations pay lots of "taxes"._

what does putting taxes in quotation marks signify here? do you think they pay taxes under some other name?

 _> It's interesting how corporations "aren't people" until taxes come up :)_

what's the argument here? are you saying that only natural people should be taxed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is what I would like from IKEA if they truly want to embrace the climate.

I would like them to move towards durable quality furniture that last 100 years instead of furniture as a fashion business where you redecorate every season.

I would like them to stop creating mazes designed to maximize impulse purchasing.

<comment><USER7> IKEA furniture is durable and has a decent second hand marketplace on ebay, gumtree etc.

<comment><USER8> Can you provide some examples? Currently sold furniture is basically junk made from paper. It would not stand 2nd or 3rd relocation. Heck, it gets broken during first assembly!

Old second hand pieces are good quality, but one needs to look for at least decade old things. They were made from wood back then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In Sweden, the land of a billion trees, Ikea wooden spoons are made in China and transported to Sweden. ANY company that does this and claims to be green is blowing smoke up your ass.

<comment><USER10> Wouldn't they be transported around the world? Surely IKEA doesn't manufacture abroad, bring everything to Sweden, and then ship out from there! Perhaps China is a reasonably central point to transport from?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Admirable - considering the size of IKEA as a business this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they reach carbon neutral sooner than 2030 before pushing on to carbon positive. My only concern is that planting trees isn't necessarily accurate measured as a carbon sink, with the amount of carbon captured often overestimated. However to reiterate, this can only be a good thing.

<comment><USER12> There's a lot of talk about planting trees now with TeamTrees and other similar things. I'm wondering what we will do with all the trees then when they have stopped growing and thus mostly stop sequestering CO₂. Trees don't live forever and when they die and rot, they will release the CO₂ back.

We could build things out of the trees and those would last maybe 50 to 100 years more. Or we could encase them in concrete and bury them to prevent rotting. But I don't really know a good solution and I was wondering what people have already thought of it. Or is the plan that we will come up with a solution to that in the next 50 years when the trees grow?

<comment><USER13> Growing them to restore grazing or otherwise degraded land works, though.

<comment><USER12> Hmm so when a forest grows, it sequesters a certain amount. When the trees start dying, they will start releasing it. But when the trees die, new trees will start growing in their stead and sequester the CO₂ released from the dying trees. Is the point to capture CO₂ into these cycles? So as only part of the trees are dying at any given stage, only a part of the CO₂ is "available" in the air at any given moment.

Is that how it works?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe that IKEA is climate negative by design: it's H&M / Primark of furniture world. Because just like fast fashion, _fast furniture_ encourages extreme levels of production and consumption of short-lasting goods, which are later often thrown away, rather than being resold and reused.

<comment><USER15> In my experience, IKEA furniture is handed down multiple times.

I myself have IKEA CD racks that I bought, gave my parents when I moved, they gave them to my sister when she moved and needed them, and after fifteen years or so they are back in my current apartment.

(OT: why the hell did they discontinue this absolutely classic line? Just because it didn't really work for Blu-rays?)

Actually, my apartment looks quite eclectic, since I have lots and lots of IKEA furniture from my student days mingled with "solid" furniture bought later and a few high-end furniture pieces bought much later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a feeling that, gradually, the most visible businesses and products will become greener, with nearly everything else remaining massively polluting.

IKEA might become carbon neutral, while companies supplying furniture to furnished apartments, office buildings, etc. won't do anything. Nobody will know if "Franklin Property Management" or whatnot is or isn't green.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'll be amazed if that's enough.

</comment><comment><USER18> A good thing, but too late. 2030 is too late.

<comment><USER5> it really may be.

it may be too late to do anything short of dramatic geo-engineering to avert catastrophic climate change.

but there is still value in even marginal improvements to the climate change outcome. you have to compound the contribution over the entire remaining history of life on this planet.

this is a horrifying situation. no one should deny how badly humanity has screwed up.

<comment><USER19> > but there is still value in even marginal improvements to the climate change > outcome.

Especially because even modest impacts slightly increase the chance to not hit the next tipping point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Excellent, the EU should be a leader in this

</comment><comment><USER21> It's an awful awful waste of money in a world with a billion people living on less than $2 a day just to comfort some rich brats.

But then they spend $444 million a year on advertising, so it's not like we don't live in a world were large amounts are $ are ploughed into the ground. Planting trees will at least have some benefit going forward.

<comment><USER22> Seriously? Those living on $2 a day do so just to comfort some rich brats?

<comment><USER5> no, the parent is saying IKEAs efforts are just a matter of comforting "some rich brats", and that these efforts are "a billion people living on less than $2 a day"</comment></comment></comment>


Sony website leaks personal information - <AUTHOR>

1. Go to sony store
(http://store.sony.com/a7r-full-frame-mirrorless-camera-zid27-ILCE7R/B/cat-27-catid-All-Alpha-a7-Cameras?_t=pfm%3Dcategory)
2. add Sony a7r for 199 dollars
3. Try to check out
Good chance is you see others persons personal information instead of yours. Session ids are mixing up and changing. Also the price of the camera is 199 instead of 1999. Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> I don't have an account and don't feel like signing up to check this out (doesn't help that the site is running awfully slow right now) but it's funny to see this now after we just hired one of the team that made this site. Going to have some words with him! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> You didn't need account. Just placing an order, going to pay through paypal for example and you will see another persons address etc. Reports of seeing other peoples credit card numbers also.

I managed to order one, received order cancellation notification couple of hours later...

<comment><USER3> Item is no longer for sale either.</comment></comment></comment>


Massive bank cyberattack planned - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/13/technology/security/bank-cyberattack-blitzkrieg/ <comment><USER2> Waiting on someone with expertise in the area to come in here and explain why this is typical sensationalist FUD to make an otherwise boring article about Yet Another "Scary" Botnet exciting.

Is there any point to this article other than highlighting the necessity of constant security auditing, educating the user about safe computing practices, and possibly implementing two-factor authentication?</comment>


Building Games for HTML5, Not with HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://clay.io/blog/building-games-for-html5-not-with-html5/

<comment><USER2> I completely agree with this. Building HTML5 games - and you can get competitive levels of graphics and so on - is a great way to be able to target the Apple, Android and even the Chrome store. You can easily make a shim that launches a WebView window.

It also allows for playing online as said.

WebWorkers, however annoying to debug, raise an interesting speed-bump to cheating too. Here's a WebWorker wrapper script that lets you run (a single) WebWorker in-process instead, for debuggability: [https://github.com/williame/ludum_dare_27_snowden/blob/gh- pa...](https://github.com/williame/ludum_dare_27_snowden/blob/gh- pages/web_worker.js)

With the new Audio API and webRTC, plus the WebSockets, things are bright.

<comment><USER3> How do people use Web Workers to prevent cheating? I would love to read more about it.

<comment><USER2> Browsers run web workers in sandboxes and even normal debuggers built into browsers have no visibility into them; this means fiddling around at the JavaScript console is blind of any state you have in them e.g. a procedurally generated world.

A determined attacker can debug the browser itself, or try and rewrite your app to not use web workers, of course... Its just a speedbump. Its still client side.

I use them - and try and work out how to debug them - for performance smoothness reasons though. They are worth more for that imo and anti cheating is very much a secondary thing.

Me getting down voted elsewhere for this opinion this week: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1lnnvm/making_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1lnnvm/making_an_indie_desktop_game_part_i/cc10og6)

<comment><USER4> I wonder if Firebug & other tools will eventually support debugging web workers, making this usefulness against cheating a temporary thing.

<comment><USER2> Yeah they soon will. Chrome is slightly ahead already.

I wish I hadn't said it noe; it was on the top of my mind, was all.

The much maligned web sockets are actually useful for keeping the game loop light; I even generate meshes in them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Why write an iOS version of a game in Objective C, and the PC version in C? Performance would be the only reason, but that's becoming more and more of a moot point."

Why indeed, when there is a multi-paradigm C# and MonoGame that give you a combination of an actual modern language, decent performance and multi- platform access.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Your game doesn't need to be in the iOS App Store or Google Play to be played on mobile devices. That is a huge benefit. Sure, it's good to have it in both of those stores (and is easy enough to achieve), but the fact that it can be played without requiring an install and the extra bulk of the stores is a big opportunity."

I don't know if this is true though. Consumers expect the games to be in the appstores. I don't know anyone who even knows they can play games on the phone browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point I'm trying to make there is consumers can still find your game through those apps like WeChat, and through shared links on Facebook, Twitter, etc... The same way people typically find and consume other forms of content.

What needs some work is making those games stickier in the sense that the person will play it again. That requires saving it to the home screen which probably not enough people are familiar with - and is a bit of a pain on Android.

I like the approach Firefox OS has taken with saving/installing apps and hopefully Apple and Google follow suit. As is, I think iOS's "Add to Home Screen" is fine. Android's like I said, could be improved.

The other thing that needs a bit of work is HTML5 performance in the webview. On iOS at least, game's don't perform as well as when they are played in Safari (since the webview doesn't use the Nitro JS engine) - hopefully that changes soon.

<comment><USER7> How would you feel about a "web games gallery" app in the store? It would just be a catalog and launch the native browser to play games.

Do you think that would be a good idea for someone who wanted to evangelize HTML as a games dev platform?

I'm not sure if it exists or if it would Apple's terms of service.

<comment><USER8> or if it would ever be in Apple's interest to encourage the growth of cross- platform ecosystems with no iOS lock-in.

(it's probably not)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where's the pricing information. I hate it when a site hides it's pricing. My immediate reaction is that it's too high. Then contact with the company to find out is going to be fraught with listening to justification before I can get prices and immediately rule them out as too high a percentage of expected revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> This comment is a bit off topic as the post isn't about Clay.io, rather games in general.

However, to answer your question, we take a 20% cut on any transactions made through selling games or our in-game payments API. If you're using our Advertising API we take 10-30% (depending on where the game is being played). Everything else (leaderboards, achievements, etc...) is free to use. This info is displayed here: [http://clay.io/docs](http://clay.io/docs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shameless plug - if you're looking to quickly prototype a 2D canvas-based game, you might be interested in trying out my open source game engine.

[https://github.com/superjoe30/chem/](https://github.com/superjoe30/chem/)

</comment><comment><USER11> good article. haven't seen it mentioned before, so props to the author for noticing that html5 is a distinct platform.</comment>


Edit /etc/hosts without becoming root on os/x - <AUTHOR> http://niggazpullintriggaz.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-i-managed-to-edit-etchosts-without.html

<comment><USER2> Although expected, I think his experience is a good example of the short comings of the app store. (Whereby many useful apps require root/admin access, something which is not allowable on the app store, e.g. imagine apps surreptitiously adding extra entries to the hosts file along side your legitimate entries.)

It can also be argued here that an app should never have access to your hosts file, as this trivialises man in the middle attacks.

With the scare mongering aside, overall the prefpane is really useful and well written and I recommend it for anyone who does frequent changes/additions to the hosts file. (It lets you just click on/off hosts and is updated automatically, apple really need something like this in their own system tools.)

</comment><comment><USER3> How does this author things that anyone should take him seriously with a blog named like that? Horrible.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. only root can write to /etc/hosts (it's root-owned, 644, with no ACLs)

2\. authopen(1) grants privileges for a particular action

If gaining a right you did not have before is not privilege escalation, I don't know what "privilege escalation" could possibly mean. So using authopen(1) to write to /etc/hosts qualifies as "escalation to root privileges".

The rule states:

 _> 2.27 Apps that request escalation to root privileges [...] will be rejected_

Therefore the app is non-conformant.

Besides, the author is extrapolating intent behind the rule to risks taken by an application takeover:

 _> "As they stated, it does not matter that none of the code I wrote ever runs as root, thereby neutralizing any security risk"_

An example from the top of my head: adding an entry for say, google.com and MITM'ing stuff.</comment>


What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civilization? - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/what-books-could-be-used-to-rebuild-civilization-lists-by-brian-eno-stewart-brand-kevin-kelly-other-forward-thinking-minds.html <comment><USER2> Depressing lack of books on animal husbandry, crop management, basic mechanics and machining, and math/physics/chemistry text books and field manuals.

Philosophy is good and important, but much easier to carry verbally (out re- invent) than the thousands of years of trial and error of "what's this red stuff in the dirt and what can I do with it?"

Then again, assuming that we'll lose civilization but terrain the ability to read written English is somewhat hard to justify, too...

<comment><USER3> I would put De re metallica [1] on the list.

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

<comment><USER4> Then the whole Gingery series: [http://gingerybookstore.com/](http://gingerybookstore.com/) (from furnace to machine shop!). Although his designs are based on scrap aluminium, you can also use cast iron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> None. The books are printed on cheap paper that will rot.

Furthermore, our civilization is unrebuildable.

In the mid-1800s, oil was so shallow that it bubbled out of the ground. It was possible to pump it with mid-1800s technology. Call that "level A".

Soon though, that oil was gone, people wanted more. It took "level B" technology to drill for that... but we were at level B by then, thanks to the level A oil.

Today, we drill for oil through 3 miles of water, and a mile of rock below that. That's "level Z" oil.

If they need oil to get from level A to level B technology, but all the oil requires level Z to drill for it, then you don't get to rebuild civilization. It's not just oil, this is true for every resource we use.

If our civilization stumbles, it dies.

<comment><USER6> Trees. You forgot trees. There isn't enough high-energy carbon there to sustain an industrial revolution, but there's definitely enough to get a pocket of civilization back on its feet.

<comment><USER5> No.

We deforested entire continents getting our industrial revolution going. There aren't enough left to do it a second time. And if what I read is correct, it will take between 750,000 and 2 million years for reforestation to occur naturally.

> but there's definitely enough to get a pocket of civilization back on its > feet.

What's "back on its feet"? You've watched too many movies.

The only metal such a people would ever use would be salvaged... no new iron works. No electricity, no internal combustion engines.

If civilization stumbles, it dies.

<comment><USER6> No.

> There aren't enough left to do it a second time.

Why do you think it would take an amount of resources comparable to the first time? We know what we're doing now so there will be much less fumbling around AND we would have an abundance of high-grade feedstock left over from the pre- fall civilization.

> What's "back on its feet"?

"Back on its feet" = a level of sophistication in resource extraction capable of facilitating resource use beyond recycling, i.e. the ability to avoid the exact scenario you described.

To make things more concrete, let's call it the level of sophistication required to build and fuel primitive fission reactors. I think that even you will agree that by that point fears of energy scarcity would be bunk.

> You've watched too many movies.

If you can't imagine "shortcuts" to take on the path to re-industrialization I would hazard a bet that you don't have training in the relevant industrial chemistry. Here's a fizz-buzz level self assessment to check if you're going all Dunning-Kruger: name one or more plausible post-apocalyptic alternatives that would be used in place of the WSGR and Haber processes.

> The only metal such a people would ever use would be salvaged... no new iron > works.

Why do you think that salvaged metal could not suffice for bootstrap purposes?

Hell, you don't even need to make your own mining / refining / manufacturing equipment, you just need to patch up the stuff that got broken in the commotion.

<comment><USER5> > We know what we're doing now

Yeh. We. Now.

Post-collapse? No, _they_ won't. If everything was intact (including unwritten, institutional knowledge), then there won't have been a collapse in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Procedures in Experimental Physics - [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0917914562](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0917914562)

While it sounds high tech, it covers the basics of manufacturing lab equipment, from iron casting, to making your own glassware, lenses, photographic plates, Geiger counters and so on.

<comment><USER8> Thank you! I have been looking for this book, I thumbed through a copy in a lab I visited.

Another excellent book in the same vein is, "Building Scientific Apparatus" \- [http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scientific-Apparatus-John- Moo...](http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scientific-Apparatus-John- Moore/dp/0521878586) the second edition can be had for a song.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related to this subject, I'm currently enjoying the audiobook of "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch." ( [http://the- knowledge.org/en-gb/](http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/) ) I like its emphasis on potential alternate paths of doing a rapid reboot of civilization, where a rebuilt society would not need to go along the same lines that our did to get to this point.

<comment><USER10> The Knowledge is the book that every library and "End of the World" kit should have in it.

<comment><USER11> Agree. An excellent book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york The Magna Carta.

Civilisation is not a working air-con and LTE. Saudi Arabia has those, and it is not a 'civilisation'.

Civilisation is primarily a political order built on liberal tolerance of multiple sources of value, and the rule of law. Roman civilisation, at least up till Constantine 1, was a civilisation.

<comment><USER12> Why not the Constitution rather than Magna Carta (no article is properly necessary)?

[http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/al-qaeda-vs-magna- ca...](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/al-qaeda-vs-magna-carta)

<comment> noir-york For the same reason that the Origin of Species and Darwin are credited with discovering evolution even though Origin doesn't get evolution really right. Or Greek democracy - not a true democracy in the modern sense - suffrage was limited for free men.

The key point of the Magna Carta is that it codified the principle of the rule of law, even if it was a limited to aristocrats. The side-effect is that it implied that a different source of value - human reason in the shape of laws - was legitimate, and not the absolute rule of the king.

<comment><USER13> In what way did On the Origin of Species not "get it right"? It necessarily has holes as Darwin was unaware of DNA or horizontal gene transfer, but he nailed the basic mechanism, and anticipated and addressed many of the criticisms that would be leveled.

<comment> noir-york Right, Darwin nailed the principle of evolution but Origin is now primarily a (very important) historical document, not the field book of modern evolutionary biologists, for some of the reasons that you give, DNA, punctuated equilibrium, etc.

Likewise with Magna Carta - its an important historical document which laid down the principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Foxfire books were a school project in 1960s rural Georgia to capture the dying knowledge of homesteaders - cabin building, soap rendering, animal husbandry, etc.

They were used by the 1970s commune movement as instruction manuals for self- sufficiency/"back to the land" living so they have a track record of usability.

They're a great history lesson, and contain the building blocks that any civilization needs to solve (shelter, heat, food) before it can worry about higher order things (philosophy, politics, smartphone reception).

</comment><comment><USER15> This lists seems focused on culture, not on survival or technology.

Instead: [http://rebuildingcivilization.com/](http://rebuildingcivilization.com/)

<comment><USER16> If I were to redesign school, this would be the spirit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought about this for some time and I think that in worst case we need only two books, that probably doesn't exist today. One book must describe how to create metal, iron and steel - what kind of rock formations can contain iron ore and other ores, how to manufacture it starting from zero, without any instruments, how to create steel using iron instruments etc. Second book must describe electricity - what is it and how to create it in maximum possible ways. Chemical, mechanical etc. Books should be either etched on rust resistant metal plates or maybe on some plastic polymer sheets, pages bound together with a variation of spring binding. Also wherever possible any single page should be self-contained and if used separately from the book contain at least some useful information.

Everything else probably can be lost.

<comment><USER18> At the time of rebuilding civilization, knowing about minerals in rocks probably wouldn't be useful. Even today you have to mine very deep. Nearly all of the worlds resources are now to be found at surface levels.

<comment><USER19> This. If "civilisation" (as we know it) had to be rebuilt, it would not be possible. All the easily extractable resources have been used. The equipment needed to get out the remaining would not be possible starting from stone age technology.

Any rebuilt civilisation would not be technological. The "best" we could "hope" for would be agrarian based, with 0% unemployment, people living in cohesive communities, with active fulfilling lives....

wait a minute.........

<comment><USER20> If civilisation ended all the materials we mined would be on the surface except the things we burnt.

Gigatonnes of metals even the completely rusted out remains would be far easier to refine.

Not to mention all the other stuff.

Hardest problem would be energy as we have consumed easily available fossil fuels but that's not intractable, we in the west of built our way of life on profligate fossil fuel consumption, there are other ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Way Things Work by David Macaulay. Especially if we still had mammoths. [http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David- Macaulay/dp/1405...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David- Macaulay/dp/1405302380)

</comment><comment><USER22> >Where we once delighted in imagining the turns civilization would take hundreds and even thousands of years ahead..."

So dramatic. For most of humanity people have worried about tomorrow's food. For the most part fanciful imagination was nurtured by the enlightenment and the scientific method, but before that, I think, we just thought about food and how to better defeat threats --enemies, wild animals, nature.

PS. Wikipedia, is probably a good start.

<comment><USER23> > PS. Wikipedia, is probably a good start.

It's just an offhand remark by you, but I think it's a very good idea. Wikipedia is quite hit-or-miss, but right now it's at least the equal of any traditional encyclopedia we had in the old days.

But if there's no power and no technology, how do you view your offline copy? At least books have the potential of surviving for hundreds of years w/o too much degradation.

<comment><USER24> I've always thought a Kindle and a solar phone charger would be a good doomsday survival device. Obviously it isn't quite as durable as a book, but a lot easier to fit in a rucksack and can contain a lot more content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The question of "what would we do if everything went to hell?" is what makes me motivated to study things like chemistry, physics, electricity, and machinery—topics I would ordinarily have no need for as a software developer.

Like, hmm, if you can't refine oil anymore, how would you set up large-scale ethanol production so that you can run engines? How would you modify the engines to run on 100% ethanol? Where do you find ore and how do you smelt it? If you want to make gunpowder, where in the world do you get saltpeter and sulfur? How do you make gunpowder, or even just charcoal, without blowing yourself up? Can you make hormonal birth control, or even condoms? How about antibiotics? I've had some very good wikiwalks starting from questions like these.

<comment><USER26> You'd probably want to study farming, animal husbandry, woodcraft, etc., instead. I.e. you're going to need to learn how to grow food really fast!

<comment><USER27> I'm actually far more interested in learning how to create firearms and ammo... As sad as it sounds, that's probably a more pragmatic plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Back to Basics - [http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American- Skill...](http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American- Skills/dp/0895770865/)

A Reverence for Wood - [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0486433943/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0486433943/)

and maybe something by Ray Mears, but I don't think any of his books really capture what his TV shows do - aboriginal cultures and their skills that are about to vanish.

</comment><comment><USER29> Kevin Dunn's "Caveman Chemistry"[1] is a fun book.

Instructions for tinkerers "for making bronze from metal ores; glass from sand, ashes, and limestone; paper from grass or straw; soap from fat; alcohol from honey; photographs from egg whites; chlorine from salt water and celluloid from cotton."[2] among other things.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation- Pr...](http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation- Production/dp/1581125666)

[2] [http://www.cavemanchemistry.com/](http://www.cavemanchemistry.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> As a biologist I'd put "Molecular Biology of the Cell" on the list ([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/)). This book was basically my M.Sc. exam in molecular biology. It is very rich in helpful illustrations. I'd think even someone with enough interest but no background in biology can extract a lot of information from it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I would throw The Human Past, Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers, and US Army Survival guide into the mix. I also think there should be more of a focus on construction/architecture and agriculture/horticulture. A book containing some facts about earth science and especially on the unique geographic features of each region of the world would be necessary. I would also add a book on common plants and their uses and a book on human health/nutrition.

I think people are focusing too much on the luxuries of complex civilization. If you're at the point where you have to rebuild civilization it would be more necessary to focus on building a good foundation i.e focusing on improving your food, water, shelter, medicine, and social systems. I think the book Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers would be a good enough foundation to get started on physics, mechanics, and math.

<comment><USER32> >US Army Survival

I got one for christmas. Whatever that books says, sharks CANNOT be scared away by splashing.

The version I got was probably a little dated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Civilization" implies something more than basic survival.

No doubt this will be downvoted, but I would go with some basic legal texts. The law has been part of civilization from the beginning (Hammurabi). Something like Blacks Law Dictionary would be vitally important in setting up a reliable system post-zombie.

<comment><USER33> I'd make sure to leave those books out (religious texts as well)...

Other civilizations have got by just fine without them, and maybe without tainting influences, the survivors will do better next time.

<comment><USER32> Take a look at Blacks. Legal dictionaries are not moral works. The language of a legal system does not dictate how that system is used. It doesn't define what is legal or not, or set punishments. All it does is provide a framework, a common starting point for building upon.

<comment><USER34> There is a lot of implicit baggage there still, for example in saying that punishments are a thing courts can do, and that they are a response to crimes.

The paints 'civilized law' as authoritarian, vengance based, and using primitive means to try to alter behavior.

<comment><USER35> Your logic is off. Punishments are a response to crimes as part of the definition of "crime".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If we're starting over: Vol. 1 of Charles Singer's _History of Technology_ , [http://www.amazon.com/History-Technology-Volume-Ancient- Empi...](http://www.amazon.com/History-Technology-Volume-Ancient- Empires/dp/019858105X) covers the period up to 500 BC.

</comment><comment><USER37> [http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumb...](http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumber=7398)

Probably one of the better collections.

</comment><comment><USER38> In Germany, there is an engineering bible that contains /everything/ on over 1500 pages and is regularly updated since 150 years.

That book alone would give any civilization a running start into the 21st century.

Here's the table of contents: [http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddoc...](http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783642228490-t1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1381128-p174536437)

\- Advanced Mathematics and Statistics

\- Physics

\- Chemistry

\- Materials and Materials Processing

\- Mechanics

\- Thermodynamics

\- Electronics

\- Measurement Theory

\- Control Theory

\- Informatics

\- Design and Development in Engineering

\- Manufacturing

\- Management

\- Standardisation

\- Law

\- Patents

</comment><comment><USER39> I think that we should instead have books that should be self contained and possible to read without any prior knowledge. For example a book about mathematics should start from very basic concepts illustrated such way that any motivated human could finally understand it without no prior knowledge about any math.

The same for other fields and also for a language.

<comment><USER40> I disagree. Many advanced books on any subject would end up being huge volumes with 90% of the pages serving as introduction to the core idea discussed by the book.

Not every book about programming needs to begin with detailed description and examples of what the conditional statement or for loop is. You can arrange books in series with prerequisites and this is how people learn new subjects.

Your idea seems comparable to demanding that all C/C++ programs expand all their includes inline or that all Java programs that need a HashMap implement one rather than importing java.util.HashMap.

Perhaps a better solution is for books to suggest prerequisites to read or at least enumerate their assumptions about reader's prior knowledge. Some books actually do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's not at the level of animal husbandry or first aid, but I'd hate to think of the Feynman Lectures being lost.

</comment><comment><USER42> The Village Construction set sounds like something that would be useful : [http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/](http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/) . Of course, you would have to fork it in order to adapt its plans to a technological reboot.

</comment><comment><USER43> Antifragile - To help keep civilization from needing to rebuild itself a 3rd time. [http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder- Incer...](http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder- Incerto/dp/0812979680)

<comment><USER44> What were the first two times?

<comment><USER45> He's saying it hypothetically:present time of 1 time, after proposed catastrophe and civilization collapse, this is second time. Antifragile is intended to prevent breakdown of the second build up. So that a third rebuild is not necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. It's basically a manual of useful constants, plus tables of equations, plus other information.

The data is replicated online in various places but if the networks are destroyed it could be useful to have the constants.

</comment><comment><USER47> "The Knowledge", by Lewis Dartnell, is a book which purports to tell you how to re-bootstrap civilization.

[http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/](http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/)

</comment><comment><USER48> A book that explains how to go from a water wheel to a hydroelectric dam that will provide energy for the next industrial revolution.

I believe electricity is the greatest discovery of all.

<comment><USER49> I'm inclined to suggest electromagenetism, but I'm essentially agreeing with you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Perhaps it would be more productive and realistic to focus on books that could help prevent our demise? Our current position is not a loop that one can comment out.

</comment><comment><USER51> Came to suggest "The Knowledge - how to rebuild society from scratch". It's an excellent trot through the whys and wherefores of how we got here.

</comment><comment><USER52> No Das Kapital?

<comment><USER53> Yes, if this happens, please get this book and also another which describe all the atrocities that it lead to, so nobody in the new civilization ever tries to pull this shit off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck.

</comment><comment><USER55> The books which won't eventually be recreated are things like religious texts, philosophical works, legal books (laws, constitutions, court cases), and fiction (including poetry). Therefore, unless we preserve _those_ , they and everything they contain _will_ be lost forever, even if we do eventually make it back to multi-core CPUs and string theory.

<comment><USER56> I'm okay with most of this as they are solely products of a specific time. Most of these will disappear with time, anyway, even if civilization doesn't collapse. How many people have the ability to read Shakespeare let alone the Magna Carta? And, even if you gave someone the Magna Carta or the US Constitution, their value is in more how we _don 't_ obey the letter of those documents.

What needs to be preserved are the fundamentals. The world has order and obeys rules even if you don't understand them right now. The world is made up of very small things that give the world it's order. Noise that comes out of your mouth can be copied to rock/clay/papyrus and given to other people over long distances. The nature of a hypothesis and a test is vitally important for moving forward instead of in circles.

<comment><USER53> Socrates, Aristotle and Plato's work has been relevant for 2000 years and I don't see it becoming irrelevant any time soon. Same with Descarte, Kant and many, many more.

Mankind's greatest goal and challenge is building a society. Building space rockets might help that, but they might not. One might argue that ancient Greece and Rome had better societies or at least equal to what we have today.

<comment><USER57> "One might argue that ancient Greece and Rome had better societies or at least equal to what we have today"

In both Greece and Rome, slavery was legal and women had next to no rights.

Any society in the West today, with all its imperfections, is _way_ better than anything in ancient Greece or Rome

<comment><USER53> Yeah, I guess if your slaves are a million miles away and you don't see them, it will make you sleep better. Even pretend they don't exist.

<comment><USER58> [http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html](http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Gosh, the "ABC" should be the No. 1 in this list.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Why not use wikipedia?

</comment><comment><USER60> 50 Shades of Grey</comment>


Ask HN:switching careers from Supply Chain to SAP consulting? - <AUTHOR>

I am thinking getting away for the supply chain workforce and take some certification on SAP, on a friend advice, do you think is a good idea? I like coding as a hobby (PHP), is true that there is a big market for SAP consulting? <comment><USER2> Now is a bad time to switch careers into SAP consulting. Due to credit crisis, companies are postponing/canceling SAP related projects. So demand for SAP consultants (and consulting rates) are down. Most of consulting companies in North East have lot of ERP people on bench.

As supply chain functional consultant, there is very little coding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks dude</comment></comment>


I Never Should Have Followed My Dreams - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/09/01/i_never_should_have_followed_my_dreams/

<comment><USER2> I think the idea of "following your dreams" is incredibly oversold to people, especially the young, but reading this it seems like this particular guy's problem wasn't that he followed his dreams, but rather that he followed his dreams while recklessly failing to do any sort of planning at all.

Of course you cannot easily collect unemployment if you resign (though he eventually did via suing, which despite my leftist leanings rubs me the wrong way). Of course finding an entry level position in a new field in which you have no experience and little to show in the way of a portfolio is going to be rough at 42.

If you really, really want to follow you dreams, go for it, but don't be an idiot about it. Research what you want to do and then _do_ what you want to do while keeping the old day job going. While there are some careers where this isn't an option (eg. being a doctor, which is obviously going to require a huge educational commitment), there's no reason that I see why this guy couldn't have attempted to get into advertising this way. If working essentially two jobs is really not an option for some reason, live cheaply and save enough to last you 6 months to a year, and _then_ follow your dream. If it really is your dreams. If what you are jumping off into is really your dream career then surely it can wait a bit and is worth living frugally for a while.</comment>


Algorithms course material - <AUTHOR> http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/teaching/algorithms/

<comment><USER2> In case you didn't make the connection, this material is by the professor who wrote the recently posted article: "Getting into a PhD program with a low GPA". His undergraduate GPA was a 2.4/4.0, according to his website.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072923>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I stumbled upon this today... The page has a link to everything.pdf ([http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/teaching/algorithms/every...](http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/teaching/algorithms/everything.pdf)) which is an 765 page pdf & covers all the material from the course. It can also be a good reference/text book for a self-taught algorithms course.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good link - I had Jeff for algorithms a couple years ago and he's a dedicated and passionate teacher.

<comment><USER4> +1

<comment><USER4> To wit, I also had Jeff for algorithms a couple years ago and he is indeed a dedicated and passionate teacher. But thank you for your support, fellow HNers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Am I writing a textbook? No. All textbooks suck. (Partly that's because of the unethical rapacious profitable business practices of (most) textbook publishers—these notes will always be freely available."

excellent!

</comment><comment><USER6> Much inadvertent wisdom in this: _If you're a student, you will (usually) learn more from trying to solve a problem and failing than by reading the answer._

<comment><USER7> Inadvertent?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is a good book for learning about this subject? Knuth's? Any other recommendations?

<comment><USER9> _Introduction to Algorithms_ (aka "CLRS") [http://www.amazon.com/Introduction- Algorithms-Third-Thomas-C...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms- Third-Thomas-Cormen/dp/0262033844)

<comment><AUTHOR> CLRS is the classic textbook for Algorithms... For some topics Klienberg and Tardos is good, I will suggest to read the CLRS text and keep K&T for topics you want to read more on, also the K&T problems are much harder (usually) than CLRS.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Google/AWS/Azure's bandwidth is 10x more expensive than competition? - <AUTHOR> Cloud provider bandwidth pricing:

  Google Cloud [1]: $0.105/GB (max) - $0.06/GB (min)
  AWS [2]: $0.09/GB (max) - $0.05/GB (min)
  Azure [3]: $0.087/GB (max) - $0.05/GB (min)

  Linode [4]: $0.02/GB
  DigitalOcean [5]: $0.01/GiB
  Cloudflare [6]: Freemium (but they can suspend you without warning)
 In comparison, I pay ~60$/Month for 1Gbit/s up/down internet at home, which means ~$0.0002/GB, which is 300x cheaper than Google Cloud's bandwidth.
How is this possible? Is it purely because of the top trio's market dominance? Or competitors are just taking the loss to get attract customers?

  [1] https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/pricing
  [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
  [3] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/
  [4] https://www.linode.com/community/questions/11427/bandwidth-charging
  [5] https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/accounts/billing/bandwidth/
  [6] https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/88659/how-can-cloudflare-offer-a-free-cdn-with-unlimited-bandwidth
 <comment><AUTHOR> There has been some fruitful discussion at r/devops: [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/eo43oz/why_googleaw...](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/eo43oz/why_googleawsazures_bandwidth_is_10x_more/)</comment>


Mouseless Browsing in Firefox with Pentadactyl - <AUTHOR> http://mshared.tumblr.com/post/2856324781/pentadactyl

<comment><USER2> Vimium for Chrome is great: [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgn...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb)

<comment><USER3> up until 3 days ago, i would have agreed. but after using pentadactyl since then, there pretty much is no comparison. the whole browser is pretty much accessible and configurable. it feels a hella lot more liberating.

being able to search your bookmarks, history, and even your files on you hard drive QUICKLY and from within the browser is just a completely different world.

and that's just one example....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some activity in the vimperator project (even if it's a fork) is great. I've been using it for years, but some annoying bugs (that I've learned to live with) continue to persist, such as the state reverting on page load. On most sites, this is _after_ you're able to interact with the page. You could be typing something in a form, then the state resets, and you press r only to have it reload the entire page.

Edit: Just installed Pentadactyl, it's also much faster.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there anything like this but with Emacs bindings, for Chrome or FF?

Yes, I know of Conkeror, but leaving behind every other extension I depend on (or wasting my time supporting hacks to make them work) just doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER3> keysnail <https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki>

firemacs <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firemacs/>

i'm an emacs user, but i still recommend pentadactyl. you don't need that many keyboard chords for browsing the porn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone who's moved from Vimperator to Pentadactyl comment on how hard it is to port your .vimperatorrc to a corresponding .pentadactylrc? I've got a bunch of bookmarklets set up in my .vimperatorrc with custom shortcuts (Readability, QR code generator, add to InstaPaper, etc.), plus a lot of custom shortcuts.

One of the big things I like about Vimium is that it allows for lettered hinting, which I prefer to numbered hinting (which is the only option in Vimperator). Also, very annoyingly, you can't use "[" or "]" as shortcuts in Vimperator - I'd like to use them to switch tabs to the left & right, but I'm stuck using "{" and "}" instead. This is just a bug, but the low activity level in Vimperator means there's no one around to fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll rarely run into any errors from the switch but if you do, go ahead and ask about it in the IRC channel (#pentadactyl on irc.oftc.net)

Also - if you'd like lettered keys, try setting the following option in your .pentadactylrc:

set hintkeys='ASDFGHJLK;"

You'll lose the ability to type the hints' text to hit them.

<comment><USER7> Actually, any key that you don't use as a hintkey can still be used to narrow down the hints. I use lowercase hint keys, and I can hold shift and type the link text (as the matching is case-insensitive, but the labels are not). It works very well.

For aesthetic reasons I like to render the hint labels in uppercase. It can be done by adding text-transform: uppercase; to the Hint selector with :highlight

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So this article prompted me to upggrade to Firefox 4 and from Vimperator to this. I've noticed one annoying bug:

If I start typing the first few letters of a site I want to visit then hit tab to complete it the highlight jumps to the first item in the list just before the tab completion kicks in. So the site I want to visit is highlighted, but the command line at the bottom shows a different site (the top entry if I tab complete from nothing) so it keeps sending me to the wrong site. Am I doing something wrong?

</comment><comment><USER9> I tried this and was very impressed. However, I'm primarily an emacs user and switching back and forth is jarring. Can anyone recommend a similar Firefox add-on patterned after emacs?

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice. However I much prefer LOL (<http://elder-gods.org/lol/>) which brings up numbers next to all links. Pentadactyl does this too and much more.

Never got a hang of VIM but there's been a lot of writing about it lately. Perhaps I should give it a try soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suggest you start with vimtutor. It's a great introduction.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My .pentadactylrc file is linked at the bottom of the post but if you missed it - [https://github.com/mattsacks/dotfiles/blob/master/pentadacty...](https://github.com/mattsacks/dotfiles/blob/master/pentadactylrc)

<comment><USER11> Just curious about that Shortcuts section in there - what's that for?

It almost looks like it's doing the same thing as the quickmarks (:he quickmarks).

<comment><USER3> where? the "command...." entries? those are basically javascript bookmarklets that are typically installed in your bookmarklets bar, but have now been assigned their own command. e.g., just type

:postToPinboard

when you want to bookmark the current page.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, should have been more specific. In your .pentadactylrc, under the Shortcuts section, where the first line is `map <Leader>r :o read<CR>`.

It looks like this is so that when you type <Leader>r, you go to google reader or something. Is that right?

With quickmarks, you press `Mr` or `M<buffer>` while you're on a page to set it, then `mr` or `m<buffer>` to go back there. It's pretty sweet :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you are using Pentadactyl on OS X, my pentadactyl-files (<https://github.com/remiprev/pentadactyl-files>) include a "feline" colorscheme which is more Mac-like.

<comment><USER13> How does this extension behave with Gmail shortcuts? I love keyboard navigation in Gmail and would hate to lose it.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you read the post, I detail how to allow keyboard shortcuts per website to pass through the addon and go to the website.

Look for ":set passkeys"

<comment><USER13> Whoops. Read right over it. Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Firefox extension "Mouseless Browsing" should really be mentioned here! <http://www.mouseless.de/index.php?/content/view/14/26/>

<comment><USER3> it is mentioned.

"pentadactyl".

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great alternative to vimperator, just switched to pentadactyl and really like numbered hinting.

<comment><USER8> I'm planning to switch from Vimperator to this when I install Firefox 4, however, I already have numbered hinting when I hit _f_. Is it different in some way?

<comment><USER16> It's still f. It just looks a lot nicer.

<comment><USER17> …It looks pretty much exactly the same.

I had continuous problems with Vimperator on FF4, thus far Pentadactyl's been a bit more stable although occasionally it seems to get deactivated altogether and I need to restart the browser.

<comment><USER16> Actually, I just realized that the nicer look is only is in the nightlies right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've found that binding J and K to switching tabs makes things much easier.

<comment><USER19> That's one of the few things Safari actually does (somewhat) well. ⌘-] , while not single key, makes tabbing fairly easy.

<comment><USER18> I actually find that to be more awkward than ctrl+tab, which is Firefox's default. I just find J and K to be less of stretch for my pinky.

<comment><USER19> Actually, I tried it and ctrl+tab is on by default in Safari as well.

However, thanks for letting me know it exists in FF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Like vimperator, too slow to feel usable. The delay in hitting F to getting links is way too deep into human perceptibility to be anything other than irritating.

The highlighting drives me mad too, and no I don't care if it can be shut off. The slowness already killed my enthusiasm.

Is there something about how Firefox interacts with plugins that vimperator and now Pentadactyl can't seem to get the performance down?

<comment><USER3> are you using something else that is faster (for comparison)?

are you on a netbook? low on RAM? everything feels fairly responsive on my end.

<comment><USER20> I've got a macbook pro with 4 gb of ram, a linux laptop with quad-core + 6gb of ram, and a CR-48.

On the mac and the linux machine, it was too slow to be usable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would have gone with the default gamer movement keys (w,s,a,d) for scrolling up, down, left and right; respectively.

<comment><USER22> Vimperator and Pentadactyl are inspired by Vim, so that wouldn't make any sense. (w is move forward by a word, s is delete char under point and enter insert mode, a is insert after point, and d is the delete action)

<comment><USER21> I did say _I_ rather then _They_. I wasn't attempting to criticize; just giving my opinion is all fella.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your favorite technical document writing application - <AUTHOR> Hey HN, I'm looking for an application(or website) that lets me easily create technical documents. e.g Documenting a current feature behavior for managers(\w graphs & charts).<p>OSX applications preferable, but feel free to recommend apps for other OSs for fellow HN readers :) <comment><USER2> I've heard good things about this: [https://ia.net/writer/](https://ia.net/writer/) It does things Ted-Nelson- style with transclusions. It's android/iOS, so I won't touch it, but people say nice things.

Personally, I like GitHub flavored markdown and a text editor. There are programs in all of the popular languages to convert that to HTML.

We tried MS Word years ago. The zipped 2007+ format makes the git repository blow up, so we dropped it.

</comment><comment><USER3> pages, free, clear, easy to build block/diagrams

</comment><comment> git-pull Documentation Utilities (aka Docutils): [http://docutils.sourceforge.net/](http://docutils.sourceforge.net/). Allows reStructuredText markup, programming of custom "roles" and "directives", HTML and PDF creation

Sphinx Doc: [http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/](http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/). Builds on top of Docutils. Allows API documentation ([http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/ext/autodoc.html](http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/ext/autodoc.html)) and cross-documentation linking via intersphinx ([http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/ext/intersphinx.html](http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/ext/intersphinx.html)). epub, PDF, and html output.

I've created mini technical manuals at previous workplaces using sphinx.

More clickables:

For graphs, grab aafig: [https://pythonhosted.org/sphinxcontrib- aafig/](https://pythonhosted.org/sphinxcontrib-aafig/) or graphviz [http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/ext/graphviz.html](http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/ext/graphviz.html)

For enhanced python documentation (numpy and google style api docs) [http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/ext/napoleon.html](http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/ext/napoleon.html)

For creating your own API docs outside of python use sphinx "domains" ([http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/domains.html](http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/domains.html)):

\- HTTP: [https://github.com/deceze/Sphinx-HTTP- domain](https://github.com/deceze/Sphinx-HTTP-domain)

\- .NET: [https://github.com/rtfd/sphinxcontrib- dotnetdomain](https://github.com/rtfd/sphinxcontrib-dotnetdomain)

\- JS: [http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/domains.html#the- javascr...](http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/domains.html#the-javascript- domain)

\- C++: [http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/domains.html#id2](http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/domains.html#id2)

\- C: [http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/domains.html#the-c- domai...](http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/domains.html#the-c-domain)

\- Scala: [https://pythonhosted.org/sphinxcontrib- scaladomain/](https://pythonhosted.org/sphinxcontrib-scaladomain/)

\- golang: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sphinxcontrib- golangdomain](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sphinxcontrib-golangdomain)

</comment><comment><USER4> google keep :)</comment>