The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/698452/f808dcfcaf34fddf/ <comment><USER3> Something that isn't transparent in this discussion is the fact that Linux is extremely corporate now.

By that I mean, the vast majority of contributions are sponsored by corporations.

Both Linus and Greg know that. They are keenly aware that if Linux takes a hardline GPL approach it will gain the reputation of being unfriendly to corporations. That perception will kill Linux in the long run.

When they say they "Care about Linux more than GPL" they are really saying they care about corporate Linux since non-corporate Linux virtually doesn't exist anymore.

I have nothing against that and honestly I think they have more clear opinions due to their positions as top-level maintainers. I just think the motivations and incentives behind their opinions should be clear to more people.

The people's Linux is virtually dead. People need to eat. An analysis of that phenomenon would be interesting as well but is beyond the scope of this discussion.

<comment><USER4> By that argument, every non-copyleft licensed codebase is "dead" with respect to the "people".

In reality, the opposite is true even though it burns up FSF folks. Linux is alive and well. You can download, read, edit and contribute back to the kernel for free. Maybe your patches won't be accepted, but the license doesn't guarantee that they will be anyway.

It is true that you may periodically experience a scofflaw that sells you a router that hides some kernel code, but this should only bother you on philosophical grounds. The vendor has no obligation to allow you to "repair" or modify the device. The vendor is under no obligation to accept a patch from you if you find a flaw. Putting linux in a device does not grant the end user any specific right to change the device's behavior. People seem to be confusing "hackable" with "has GPL code". A shitty router with linux code will probably remain a shitty router.

I can see why the FSF and SFC might be throwing a fit; Clang and LLVM can replace GCC, and Linus isn't at all militant about license enforcement. The effective power of the FSF is in rapid decline.

<comment><USER5> > In reality, the opposite is true even though it burns up FSF folks. Linux is > alive and well. You can download, read, edit and contribute back to the > kernel for free. Maybe your patches won't be accepted, but the license > doesn't guarantee that they will be anyway.

This isn't untrue, but it does not take away the main point: the community that drives the development agenda and dictates priorities is no longer a community of independent programmers (in the broad sense of the word; many contributions used to come from people who were hired by commercial entities, but they were still relatively small groups, and contributions were limited to small pieces that were specifically interesting for their small-ish employers: a driver for this or that network card, improvements in this routing protocol and so on).

This is no longer the case, and the development agenda of the Linux kernel is almost completely dictated by large players, at the expense of small ones and, to a large degree, individual users.

<comment><USER6> > at the expense of small ones and, to a large degree, individual users.

Is that a real expense at all though? I would argue that, empirically, it is zero. As in zero evidence of contributions to Linux detracting from my needs as a small player and user.

Every community is going to drive things in their "own" direction, and that direction is largely dictated by use by those developers. If it were a difference, an expense on the people, there would be a community with differing views of what the kernel should be doing. They could contribute code towards their ends, or fork. Given that there is practically zero interest in this, I would say that it's fairly clear that a so-called "corporate Linux," in the form of largely corporate code contributions, has come at zero expense to the "people."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot companies use Linux kernel and don't release any of the source. They are working on the backs of millions of hours of human labor. For example DJI uses linux on its drone and open wrt on its controller. I don't see any source code for that. LeTv and many other Chinese cellphone makers don't release source code for their kernels. They really have no alternate they could go to. I think it makes sense that kernel community would be more aggressive about making companies return the code with which their products couldn't really exist without.

<comment><USER8> The Linux kernel codebase is pretty flexible. Are there really changes that had to take place to put the kernel into a drone? If not, there's nothing for DJI to release.

Isn't there already a mechanism for handling binary-only kernel modules/drivers? Perhaps DJI's 'changes' can be expressed in such a binary- only module.

There seems to be a fairly large part of the tech community that is willfully ignorant of how these licenses work and how the kernel copyright holders have addressed violations in the past. These folks seem to think that because some corporation downloaded the Linux kernel source, that the company's entire codebase should be open source. As always, it's much more complex.

<comment><USER9> My understanding is that they have to provide clear instructions on where to get the source.

In general, bringing up Linux on a new platform does require extensive modifications. They often use u-boot too, things like switching on the system DDR, DDR timing etc require significant changes to u-boot (which is also gpl).

In my experience those changes rarely get released.

I've never heard anyone say a company should release everything just because they used the Linux kernel... But that's just me.

<comment><USER10> > My understanding is that they have to provide clear instructions on where to > get the source.

No. Only when they distributed their software to you (the Linux kernel under the GPL) then you can request the sourcecode for that under the GPL. If you never had any code being distributed by them to you, they have no obligation to you.

<comment><USER11> This is a common misunderstanding. You have two choices when distributing GPLv2 software commercially: you can either provide the source code alongside the binaries (section 3(a)), or you can provide a written offer to provide the source code on request to any third party (section 3(b)). Non-commercial distribution can forward on a 3(b) offer rather than making their own.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. Except that if you as third party do not receive the the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form, then you have no rights under section 3.

So a company that sells GPL'd software is only required to provide the source to any of their purchasers (however, those purchasers are not restricted in any way and can give the source to someone else). So the only way I could get the source code from that company is if I purchase their product.

<comment><USER13> > So a company that sells GPL'd software is only required to provide the > source to any of their purchasers (however, those purchasers are not > restricted in any way and can give the source to someone else). So the only > way I could get the source code from that company is if I purchase their > product.

That's not correct. The text of the license says:

> Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give > any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically > performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the > corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 > and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

It say _any_ third party. There is nothing in there that limits it to only those who purchased it from the company. If the company elects to go with the written offer approach and I buy a copy from them, and then I give you a copy, they are obligated to give you source code if you ask even though you did not purchase from them.

As explained in the GPLv2 FAQ:

> What does this "written offer valid for any third party" mean? Does that > mean everyone in the world can get the source to any GPL'ed program no > matter what?

> If you choose to provide source through a written offer, then anybody who > requests the source from you is entitled to receive it.

> If you commercially distribute binaries not accompanied with source code, > the GPL says you must provide a written offer to distribute the source code > later. When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received > from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. This means that > people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive > copies of the source code, along with the written offer.

> The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that > people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source > code from you.

Also relevant from the FAQ:

> My friend got a GPL-covered binary with an offer to supply source, and made > a copy for me. Can I use the offer myself to obtain the source?

> Yes, you can. The offer must be open to everyone who has a copy of the > binary that it accompanies. This is why the GPL says your friend must give > you a copy of the offer along with a copy of the binary—so you can take > advantage of it.

<comment><USER12> OK, I stand corrected. However, it sounds like technically you must possess a copy of the binary to request source code, although the GPL doesn't require you to furnish proof that you have such a binary. IE there must be a chain of transferring the written offer from company to purchaser to third party. Or in other words you must have a copy of that written offer in order to request the source code (and the text of the FAQ seems to support that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see this as a stealth attempt by the Software Conservancy to hijack the direction and tone of kernel development, dragging it more to FSF-style militancy.

Linus is right, there is no crisis in GPL violation. There will always be violators. Any law or contract or license will be violated. Becoming more militant about enforcement will simply cause most corporate partners to disengage. Most users comply with the license. Users have access to interesting and useful source code and have never been restricted from accessing the kernel. The kernel team is on good terms with most corporate users. Going after the 5% of violators will change how the kernel team interacts with the 95% of good partners.

The only thing Linus seems to be disingenuous about is his claim of support for the GPLv2. My guess is he secretly wishes he had chosen a different, non- copyleft license.

<comment><USER14> > Going after the 5% of violators will change how the kernel team interacts > with the 95% of good partners.

Why would it? If they are not violating the terms of the license, what would change?

<comment><USER15> > If they are not violating the terms of the license, what would change?

Increased vigilance in enforcement of _anything_ almost invariably means greater incidence of prosecuting non-violators, causing them to incur costs to establish that they are not in violation.

In the case of Linux, this increases the expected costs of using the kernel even in accord with the license.

<comment><USER16> Conservancy are only interested in compliance, not in increasing costs:

[https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft- compliance/principles.htm...](https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft- compliance/principles.html)

<comment><USER15> What the Conservancy is "interested in" is a different thing than what interaction with them causes.

Enforcers _often_ are (or claim to be) interested only in compliance. Their efforts to secure compliance where they believe compliance is lacking incur costs that would not otherwise exist, even where compliance already exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Linus/GregKH attitude might work _because it 's the Linux kernel_. It's almost irreplaceable for those who are using it, it has a huge developer community, it has many corporate sponsors to back up those developers, etc. It's not at all clear that the same approach would work for another project without those things. The way Linux kernel developers make such assumptions and pronouncements reminds me a lot of the way some people talk about social issues from a highly privileged position - utterly blind to the reality for those in different circumstances.

As I immediately reacted on Twitter, I think lawsuits are a lot like nukes. Using them might always be terrible, but their absence negates all leverage in any other kind of negotiation. That includes the kind of negotiation that Greg K-H talks about. In those negotiations, he still benefits from the kind of enforcement he himself eschews. Those who live under an umbrella shouldn't dump on the people holding it up IMO, as the LF stalwarts are doing in their attempts to defend their turf.

Disclosure: I work for Red Hat, which as a company and a community has probably held just about every possible position on this issue - <USER2> simultaneously.

<comment><USER16> Has RH ever assigned its lawyers to enforce the GPL?

<comment><USER17> I know of one case where Red Hat _countersued_ a patent troll over a GPL violation. It was a pretty good illustration of the "nuclear deterrent" effect that such litigation can have. I'm not aware of any cases where Red Hat has brought any _original_ suits of this nature, but then again I probably wouldn't be even if they did exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The whole discussion has been one of the best example of people violently agreeing with each other. Sadly, the article only mention the first few statements and not one of the later done by Greg, which makes it look like a bigger disagreement than it is.

 _Ok, I 'm not saying "never should legal action be taken", but what I am saying is the same thing that Linus said, "only under the most dire circumstances", the nuclear option._ \- ([https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit- discuss/...](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit- discuss/2016-August/003678.html))

 _" Lawsuits are always a last resort after nothing else works."_ \- ([https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit- discuss/...](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit- discuss/2016-August/003620.html))

That is a far cry from implied disagreement from the earlier quoted "I do [want companies to comply], but I don't ever think that suing them is the right way to do it". Maybe the Gregs comment is more colorful and has some slight implied differences, but so far I have see little in the discussion to specific when exactly those differences has an practical impact. Both sides seems to be in an agreement (or atleast, not in explicit disagreement) about the status of VMware, as none in the mailinglist (from what I can see) has said that the lawsuit should not exist.

What left is the last paragraph of the article, where at least there is direct conflict. Linus don't trust/like FSF and by extension, SFC. For that, one of the other developers described the situation perfectly. If developers went to SFC instead of the lawyers of LF, maybe Linus should ask why that happened in the first place.

<comment><USER17> > If developers went to SFC instead of the lawyers of LF, maybe Linus should > ask why that happened in the first place.

I think the answer to that is another question: why would LF bother, when they can reap all of the benefits while SFC bears the cost and takes the flak? They get to play godfather in this situation, pretending their hands are clean. The analogy only falls down because godfathers don't typically rat out their own triggermen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As mentioned in the article, forswearing lawsuits is a bad idea: then companies have no downside to not cooperating.

<comment><USER20> Yes they do. They have to maintain their own branch, which may be very costly when new versions of linux would arrive. Successful upstreaming mitigates that.

<comment><USER19> Maintain? These are hardware vendors. Once it's shipped they rarely care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting to note the tone of the comments when it comes to enforcing copyright law - Piracy vs GPL.

</comment><comment><USER22> > ... Bradley isn't the one making the decisions here. It's the developers

Gee, this debate seems to have given some large amount of power to the individual contributors to the kernel. Any _individual_ developer could defect from Linus' stance and work with the SFC on an infringement case. I'm curious to see if any of them are more dogmatic with respect to copyleft.

I _suppose_ it makes sense that features CONFIG_'d off shouldn't be considered for infringement, but for many binary distributions of the kernel it probably still catches a lot of developers.

I always thought it was baloney red tape to do copyright assignments but if it had taken place here it would be a very different debate. The developers would have effectively ceded all control over this discussion to the assignee (who probably would've been The Linux Foundation, if anywhere).

<comment><USER23> > Any individual developer could defect from Linus' stance and work with the > SFC on an infringement case.

I was looking for a source and was unable to find it quickly, but I'm pretty sure a significant number of kernel developers have joined some kind of SFC organization that allows the SFC to use their copyright in order to sue for compliance.

Edit: Thanks ashitlerferad, I missed the section on linux here: [https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft- compliance/](https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/). That's the source.

Edit2: Please read JoshTriplett's comment below for some clarifications on this subject.

<comment><USER24> As mentioned in the linked email thread, the kernel developers working with Conservancy do not typically assign their copyright to Conservancy, and do not cede their decision-making authority over legal matters to Conservancy.

(Also, they go by "Conservancy" or "Software Freedom Conservancy", not "SFC", to avoid acronym confusion.)

Some developers on various projects (including the kernel) have voluntarily signed over copyrights to Conservancy for various reasons, but their GPL compliance project does not require that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One thing that wasn't brought up (edit: ok, quickly glossed over) in the article — if you go to court, you can lose!

There are various legal arguments I can think of, that would essentially trash the GPL, and a company with 8 figures to spend on lawyers could make very convincing (I don't agree with these, but a judge and jury could easily):

1\. It's unclear whom the actual copyright holder or holders of Linux are, and who has standing to sue on their behalf.

2\. Since Linux is open-source, free-as-in-beer, etc, it's public-domain.

3\. Linux is a derivative work not entitled to copyright protection.

And so on. Again, when one side might have orders of magnitude more budget for lawyers, this kind of stuff will be very convincing. (Many corps will pony up money to protect _Linux_ , but they'll generally be on the opposite side when it comes to the GPL).

<comment><USER26> Going to court and losing, while not fun, should be instructive to the GPL community. A loss will either point out areas that need to be changed in the next GPL license version, or that a GPL-style license is not viable.

<comment><USER27> Yes, it could prove helpful to the GPL community, but it might prove harmful to the kernel community. For all intents and purposes, the Linux kernel is permanently stuck in GPLv2. If a disastrous court case somehow weakens GPLv2 and a new and improved GPLv4 which fixes that weakness comes out, the kernel will be stuck with the now weakened GPLv2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I agree on the analysis. You don't need enforce Linux in court, Linux will then keep getting more popular, to the point that those GPL-violation will gradually find that upstreaming/releasing their code is actually more beneficial than making the code closed. In the long run everybody wins.

Even Microsoft is embracing Linux as it pretty much has no other choices due to the ever increasing popularity of Linux.

</comment><comment><USER29> It looks like a simple issue that transformed into drama due to the attitudes on the lkml.

It is obvious that there will be cases that the GPL will have to be enforced. Was accepted by the other side in the end.

The SFLC will only undertake a case if they have the support of copyright owners, not on their own volition.

<comment><USER24> Note that there exists a different organization known as "SFLC", but the linked discussion occurred with the Software Freedom Conservancy (or just "Conservancy"), which specifically avoids using the acronym "SFC" to avoid confusion with SFLC.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for the clarification.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I developed this to make the best use of Mailchimp FREE tier plan. - <AUTHOR> https://unaudience.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello all,

I am the developer of Unaudience. Unaudience is a Mailchimp add on that automatically archives old and inactive subscribers to make room for new ones under the same plan. This helps to defer Mailchimp cost (e.g. for remain forever free OR for extra subscribers $15 per month per 500 contacts up and above current paid plan) for as long as possible until business is ready to scale and invest more.

I am looking for feedback from Mailchimp users and experts. Do you think this add-on will help save cost?

Thanks for reading.</comment>


New Product Launch - Is My Port Open - <AUTHOR> http://www.asdcore.com/?p=253

<comment><USER2> I think you mean to say "your Router _or_ Firewall" in the text. ismyportopen.com routes to another site; might want to make it go to the same place as www.ismyportopen.com. Also, it would be nice to have a visual indication when you click "Run It," since there's a pause until the scan comes up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for catching that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dude, I can make your system do an arbitrary port scan against any ip with only

<http://www.ismyportopen.com/cgi/results.py?ip=[target> ip]

You're gonna wanna fix that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crap in a hat! Thanks, man. I'll get that fixed.</comment></comment>


Polari, the Lost Gay English Dialect - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/07/28/polari_the_gay_dialect_can_be_heard_in_this_great_short_film_putting_on.html <comment><USER2> More on Polari [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari)

I grew up listening to recordings of "Round the Horne" in the UK, which included two characters Julian & Sandy that chatted a little in Polari during their sketches. A bunch of Polari words and phrases have migrated into general UK slang — so it's not really a case of dying out… more migrating and changing — as languages & dialects often do.

<comment> graham-miln You can listen to Round the Horne and The Navy Lark today on BBC iPlayer:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c7q4l/episodes/player](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c7q4l/episodes/player)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bfvkd/episodes/player](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bfvkd/episodes/player)

Liverpool's Maritime Museum has an insightful exhibit on gay life at sea; the exhibit includes a section on the polari:

[http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/visit/floor- plan...](http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/visit/floor-plan/life-at- sea/gaylife/index.aspx)

<comment><USER3> I'm always astonished as to hows fresh Round the Horne sounds even today, when many of the comedy programmes of that era sound distinctly dated. Still funny, worth a listen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Morrissey sings of this: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccadilly_Palare](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccadilly_Palare)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ian McDonald's Everness series has main characters speaking in Polari, and where I first encountered it as a thing. And the books, even though they're aimed at young adults are really good.

What surprised me is how many words I use regualrly had their origins in Polari. I don't know whether it's because they've made their way into mainstream language, or just a regional thing though.

<comment><USER6> There is a similar phenomenon in American English where a huge, huge number of words in the dominant dialects come directly from AAVE (Afro-American Vernacular English). I would not be surprised if many of those words have spread all throughout the anglophonic world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the fact that "trolling" has made the jump to regular usage, although the UK media has ruined the meaning [1] once more in due course.

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29678989](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29678989)

<comment><USER8> Trolling in Polari has a different origin from its usage in reference to the internet, where the term has its origin in alt.folklore.urban. The Polari term is still used in the gay scene (it refers to loitering around a known cottaging location hoping to meet someone).

<comment><USER9> I've always assumed both were derivatives of trawling, a fishing term.

<comment><USER10> Trawling and trolling are different fishing techniques. Trawling involves hanging a big net off the back of a boat to scoop up all the fish along a large swath of water, whereas trolling involves hanging one or more baited lines off the back of a boat, with the boat's slow movement enticing fish to bite.

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawling) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_(fishing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_\(fishing\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Url changed from [http://kottke.org/15/08/the-lost-language-of-gay-english- men](http://kottke.org/15/08/the-lost-language-of-gay-english-men), which points to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The circuses were dominated by Italian families, and probably some of the fairgrounds also, but what's the connection between circuses / fairgrounds and theaters?</comment>


How Data Made Me a Believer in New York City's Restaurant Grades - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-data-made-me-a-believer-in-new-york-citys-restaurant-grades/

<comment><USER2> A friend who runs a NYC restaurant, and who hates DOH inspections, nonetheless tells me that the A/B/C regime and stricter rules have made his restaurant cleaner. He's just not sure it's a good tradeoff.

And it's true: health departments have the ability to create a huge number of regulations without any concern for whether they make the public better off. I am told that in NYC, restaurants cannot allow dogs into outdoor cafe spaces. I don't have any idea what the food safety rationale for that regulation is, but I'm deeply skeptical that it makes people better off rather than allowing restaurant owners to manage it themselves.</comment>


Microsoft is working on a WebGL exporter for Unity - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/davrous/status/569906001442418688 <comment><AUTHOR> Once it's released, I'm curious how well it will fare against Unity's own exporter.</comment>


Ask HN: Address normalization API suggestions - <AUTHOR> I am looking into possibly improving the way we normalize street addresses. Would love to hear any suggestions for solutions that you have tried. Currently we are using a ruby wrapper around https://github.com/timbunce/Geo-StreetAddress-US. <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal/](https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal/) is great. Needs 2-3GB of RAM and a couple of seconds to start up.</comment>


A foundation course in reading German - <AUTHOR> https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/ <comment><USER3> Maybe I'm being too pedantic, but I found some errors on the first few pages and am wondering about the accuracy of the rest.

[https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/](https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/): "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996, i.e., since before much of this book's audience was born. "beeinflüssen" should be "beeinflussen".

[https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender- no...](https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender-nominative- case/): Not an error of German per se, but I find "memorizing the gender of every noun is not particularly important" and "It is recommended that, as you learn the nouns you choose to memorize, you learn each noun with its definite article" contradictory and confusing.

On the same page: "All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are feminine." Counterexamples I came up with in a minute or so: _der_ Brei, _das_ Allerlei, _das_ Benzin. The reason is that in these cases -ei and -in are not suffixes in the same sense as they are in the common case illustrated by the authors' examples, but a beginner would not be able to tell.

This feels like it could be a better resource with more attention to small details.

<comment><USER4> _Maybe I 'm being too pedantic,_

Nichts der Art.

 _" Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996,_

Which many adults I know continue to thumb their noses at, to this day (in personal communication, at least). In any case, arguably one needs to be aware of the pre-RSR spelling conventions to have a solid grip on the language as a whole. So I would prefer a reference that made us aware of _both_ variants, actually.

As to feminine nouns -- good call. It's a difficult task to put together reference materials that are both comprehensive (and approachable) _and_ obsessively accurate.

<comment><USER5> As someone who worked as a professional writer for many years I never understood why that reform was so inconsistent. After all it was supposed to simplify spelling. So why not go all the way and eradicate the 'ß' like they did in Switzerland. And this is just one of many examples.

<comment><USER6> How is it inconsistent? S, ss and ß all have distinct pronunciations.

<comment><USER7> In Standard German ss and ß don't have distinct pronunciations.

That was one of the goals of the spelling reform to make the use of ß more consistent and use simpler rules for it. Exactly because there is no difference in pronounciation between ss and ß.

<comment><USER6> You're right, they are pronounced the same. What I was actually thinking about was the different pronunciations of the vowel before the ss/ß. In the word "Schoß" for example the ß tells you the the vowel is long and not short as it would be in the word "schoss".

So what I'm trying to say is that s/ss/ß have distinct use cases which follow consistent rules.

<comment><USER8> This here to emphasise parent

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've found that the main difficulty in learning a new language is not so much in picking up structure, but vocabulary! This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second.

I happen to be learning German and Latvian right now. The way I'm approaching them is to find easy-level texts ([https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de](https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de) for German, children's books for Latvian), and reading a couple of paragraphs. Whenever I find a word I don't know, I use Google Translate, and add it to a custom Anki deck. Then I practice vocabulary every day.

This is a slightly more structured way of how I learned English back in the day (my English improved tremendously by playing Monkey Island, especially trying to understand the pirate insults).

<comment><USER10> I built a website (and soon an app) for learning German, that has a focus on both grammar and vocabulary. We have a frequency list with the top 5000 German words. And we are a video-driven site, so each word has a video. And most words also have sentences (also each with a video). This is good for getting a feel for the spoken language, and hearing the vocabulary used in context. You can check it out here: [http://www.seedlang.com](http://www.seedlang.com)

<comment><USER11> I started with German about a year and a half ago via Mango Languages. I love the app because it approaches languages via phrases and conversations instead of vocabulary (like Duolingo)

Your site looks really promising... I will definitely give it a shot!

What was your driver for creating it? Language is a very competitive space these days.

<comment><USER9> I used Duolingo for a couple of languages, got pretty far in Italian and tried some German. I found it either too slow, or too beginner-ish; I didn't feel like I was learning much, and it didn't help me read news websites / novels much. While I do like the approach - specifically, the use of words in context, and the variety in exercises - it didn't really do it for me (Severin, if you're reading this - sorry, man!)

<comment><USER12> Duolingo starts at the beginning. If you think a skill is too easy, try testing out of it to get to a higher level or advance faster.

Duolingo says they don't currently aim too teach beyond A2/B1, so you may already be past that.

Having learnt a few languages with and without duolingo, I think you will usually need 2000+ words in a language, and close to 90% of the grammar to read native texts well. Duolingo can get you quite close to, but not past that mark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to see this sort of thing in many languages. I have no interest in conversational language learning or being able to write in any language. My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern).

<comment><USER14> English language literature has had characters like Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication. Did this happen in other languages as well?

I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language.

<comment><USER15> > English language literature has had [...] Orson Welles

?????

Orson Welles was a movie director. Did you misspell Oscar Wilde?

<comment><USER14> You are right. I meant George Orwell!

<comment><USER16> >who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication

I hope you're not referring to NewSpeak from 1984 which was an invention by the party to limit people's expression so that they could not verbalize disloyalty, and therefore not even think it.

A horrible example of state control.

<comment><USER14> George Orwell - Politics and the English Language : [https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...](https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish German was the language of international communication (rather than English; I love English but I don't like it, and I am yet to meet a non-native speaker who wouldn't have a horrible accent and who wouldn't make a lot of mistakes). German is the modern Latin.

<comment><USER18> German was the language of science in Europe before it was supplanted by English.

It's unfair that English should be the international lingua franca. But we can't change two facts of history: the British Empire, and America.

I agree English is not a particularly logical or phonetic language. However it has two things going for it -- it's easy to speak badly and it is easy to extend. Its grammar is simpler than most Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages (that I'm aware of -- correct me if I'm wrong). And being a mongrel language, it's used to absorbing other languages.

Plus no need to come up with a grammatical gender for every neologism or loanword. Chai latte? Done. Twitter? Done. Whereas in German, is it "der Tic- tac" or "die Tic-tac"? Or default to "das Tic-tac" since we don't know the origin of the word? This matters because the endings in all four cases of German depend on the grammatical gender. For instance, in the dative case, if it's "die Tic-tac", then it's "mit der Tic-tac", otherwise it is "mit dem Tic- Tac". Or in accusative, if it's "der Tic-tac" then it's "fuer den Tic-Tac". And then you have to get everyone to agree (for instance, der Joghurt or das Joghurt? depends where you are.)

In practice it's not a big deal obviously (neologisms enter the German language all the time), but in English there's just less friction and fuss. English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular consensus (more or less -- there are still rules).

<comment><USER7> > English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the > "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular > consensus (more or less -- there are still rules).

Neither does German. If you refer to the "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung", this is as the name implies just a transnational organisation from the German speaking countries to keep the orthography (somewhat) consistent.

Which is something that English is dearly missing. A consistent orthography actually helps language learners a lot. This is one of the few points where English sucks as a lingua franca.

If you think about the "Duden" dictionary, this is also not true. The Duden has always been a descriptive dictionary, not a normative one.

There is no organization in German on the level of the Académie française.

There are some small private clubs fighting for the "purity" of the language (which of course is ridiculous for a language with so many imported Latin/Greek/French and now English words) but nothing with enough authority to dictate the evolution of the living language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > If you need help with English grammar while working through this textbook, > we recommend, for example, English Grammar for Students of German

I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish?

I'm a French native speaker trying to improve my Spanish at the moment. Should I brush up on French shenanigans (yes even native speakers make mistakes and need reference material) from a Romance language point of view?

<comment><USER20> There's a companion volume for Spanish learners, i.e. The publisher likely just tweaks a chapter or two for each specific target language, i.e. English Grammar for Students of $X.

The 'surprising specific' bit is in how concepts in German/Spanish map to their English equivalents. e.g. the German edition might try and show how English emulates declensions with prepositions, while the Spanish might explain how the auxilary verb 'have' has multiple uses covered by tener/haber.

I'm not a native Romance speaker but yes, knowing 'French shenanigans' would perhaps help understand the other - when I learned Catalan on duolingo (from Spanish), I made more blunders in my rusty Spanish than in mistakes in the Catalan I was trying to learn!

<comment><USER19> > how concepts in German/Spanish map to their English equivalents.

Yeah, if it has comparative grammar it's not that much surprising.

From the context of the paragraph I was assuming this would be a volume purely about English grammar. Since it's aimed at native speakers that already know the grammar of their own language, this would be an advanced text, for students looking to improve their knowledge of English architecture itself. And somehow improve this advanced knowledge in ways that are not generic, but specific to the fact that they are simultaneously learning X or Y language...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This technical approach is how I tried and failed to learn German. In the end what worked was exposure/absorption and getting a feel for what sounds right - the same way I learnt my native language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that you it would be very hard to know a language approaching it from a completely technical standpoint...

In sharing this link I'm not advocating a total technical approach!

As for exposure/absorption you are completely right, I have attempted to create a mini Germany head space.

What I'm doing and recommend to whoever interested:

\- I switched my Phone's language to Deutsch. When searching the web I end up with results in German that I try to comprehend if I have time: looking up the word on the translator (and less often on an online german dictionary - <USER2> i should be doing more)

-I started listening to songs in German (I came to like the first albums by Tocotronic)

-I have joined a discord server titled "German Learning And Discussion" (should anyone want to search for it) , if I have time at night I join a call with a couple of natives and learners.

-I check Duolingo's stories and exercises now and then, although not my favourite methodology.

<comment><USER22> Don't forget r/de on Reddit

<comment><USER23> The memes and comments there actually helped me a lot with learning expressions, idioms, and "shorthand" that modern German speakers use. Little everyday nuances I would have missed from just reading books.

<comment><USER24> Hmm, actually a lot of the memes there are parodies of the English ones you find on Reddit. Just saying that a lot of them are almost nonsensical to someone not familiar with Reddit's English language meme culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a native speaker I find it fascinating to read through the course.

OT: is there a good source for interlinear translations of texts on the Internet? In whatever languages? I've never come across such a source.

<comment><USER26> Two thoughts, oh wait, three thoughts ... The Holy Bible (bible.cc/gospelcom.com), patent documents (espacenet), and _maybe_ for a limited set of languages statutory documentation from countries with multiple languages (or eg the EU: perhaps europa.eu)?

Is that the sort of thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just as a tip to those who find the text somewhat light (too light grey, perhaps also a little thin): there are add-ons that can turn off CSS and make it easier on the eyes. For me, turning off CSS and making the browser window a little less wide makes the "book" (website) a lot nicer to read.

Screenshot without CSS: [https://snipboard.io/tkyu9Z.jpg](https://snipboard.io/tkyu9Z.jpg)

Add-on that I used: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css- toggler/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-toggler/)

<comment><USER26> "reader mode" works too (eg in Firefox).

<comment><USER27> True! That's a thing these days (I've been using this for longer than reader mode exists). Somehow I don't like it as much (I keep tweaking the settings and never find one that I like), but indeed I guess that is the more modern looking and easier way of doing this (no third party add-on needed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would recommend the Duolingo German from English course instead. It has an app, so you can practice wherever you are, it has grammar, audio, speech recognition, spaced repitition (how ever much you want of that) and gameification. Duolingo courses and exercises are also improved through data- based methods.

I have completed Spanish, Mandarin and Norwegian. The Spanish and Norwegian ones are very comprehensive, the Mandarin tops off at around 1000 words. German also seems to be one of their most polished languages, contrasted with courses in Hawaiian and Navajo.

<comment><USER28> Duolingo is really really bad at teaching you anything remotely useful. It tried it for both languages I know (Japanese, French) and another I don't know (Czech) and in both case the experience was terrible. It's basically just quizzes with no lesson on grammar whatsoever. Sentences are taken from corpora so they sometimes are really unnatural. Speech is TTS. It's a beautifully designed glorified vocabulary app that has low educational value.

<comment><USER12> The mobile apps don't have grammar, but the web site does, for most skills in most languages. Also, grammar is easy to get from other sites.

The sentences are not taken from corpora, but edited by Humans, mostly volunteers. The courses are improved using user data. Some of the courses are indeed not the best quality.

If TTS is used (many courses use natural speakers), it was OK for me, so far.

Duolingo isn't perfect but I think it's the most efficient way to learn a new language from nothing up to a certain level (A2, maybe B1). If used correctly. You need to decide yourself how much time you spend on repetition vs progress. And yes, you probably need something else for full grammar explanation or Chinese/Japanese Characters. Though they are reportedly working on better Character exercises.

<comment><USER28> > The mobile apps don't have grammar, but the web site does, for most skills > in most languages.

Ok, I've never been far enough on their website to see it (I mostly test the mobile app). I'll check it soon.

> Also, grammar is easy to get from other sites.

Which defeat using Duolingo in the first place. And no, some language have quite complicated grammar (Czech, Turkish, Finnish for instance) and somewhat lacking in ressources if your native language isn't English.

<comment><USER12> You won't be learning a language from a single source ever. Duolingo is the most efficient for what it does, including teaching grammar, actually.

Yes, it might help to have a more organized grammar reference, but Duolingo does make you practice grammar quite efficiently in my experience.

For those complaining about Duolingo: Are there better routes? The convenience of the app, integrating audio, grammar and vocabulary are really hard to beat in terms of learning efficiency, even if you might have an in-person course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd just like to point out that University of Wisconsin's German department has been putting out great German learning material for about 100 years now. If you're lucky enough to live in a university town with used book stores and a foreign language section, you may find old primers there. There's even a dialect of German called Wisconsin High German:

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

</comment><comment><USER30> I worry I will learn the wrong pronunciation if I don't sort that out first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both practice and theory should be part of learning, refer to an earlier comment of mine for how i'm handling that

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> interesting.. what is the value in learning German?

<comment><USER32> What is the value of learning any second language? Expanding cultural understanding, increasing the number of places you can travel and be at ease. German may not be as useful universally as Chinese or English, but there are about 90,000,000 speakers of it, so.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Long Term Impact of Widespread WFH Culture? - <AUTHOR> Now that companies are learning the hard way to WFH, and were seeing memes like "now we'll know which meetings could have been emails," does it concern you all that the next logical step is to double down on platforms facilitating a WFH culture during the inevitable recession?  The last recession in 2007 saw very slow job growth (compared to other recessions) simply because companies opted to adopt technology rather than train+hire expensive labor. I fear that the next leap will be widespread prioritization to set up satellite offices in India and other countries where labor is cheap.  If I were a Fortune 500 CEO, my top priority during the coming recession would be to offset the lack of H1Bs in the US and just go straight to the source- because I know every other CEO would be doing the same. I fear for my future prospects a year from now. <comment><USER2> I think the question you raise has the potential to be interesting really interesting, but not really the direction you took it.

My $.02: If the only thing that made you a better candidate than your competition in East Asia is that your company mandated working within an office, then you probably don't have a valuable skillset in the first place, right? There's some really smart people in those parts of the world, but the average candidate they're gonna get is just not gonna be even in the same ballpark. Now that being said, we all know that management is not perfectly rational (or for many of us, is almost pathologically irrational), so that doesn't mean a myopic suit might not erroneously decide that they might as well hire cheap labor overseas. Still though, it's really not something I spend any time worrying about.

What I do find interesting, and you alluded to this a bit, is the set of companies who do not allow work-from-home (or, allow work-from-home but do not allow truly remote employees - this seems to be so common these days), may collectively realize "wait a second, we all worked from home during this massive global pandemic and things didn't grind to a screeching halt, maybe remote work isn't something to be afraid of". That would be a really interesting development.

<comment><AUTHOR> > we all worked from home during this massive global pandemic and things > didn't grind to a screeching halt, maybe remote work isn't something to be > afraid of". That would be a really interesting development.

This serves as an ancillary move on the proverbial corporate chess board though. The next step sets them up to remove a large burden in allowing remote employees- but "remote" can mean anything, including overseas labor

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think that all companies will be able to get good productivity from their employees working from home. Success would require a combination of motivated, self-disciplined employees who are good at communicating efficiently, and managers who are able to manage such employees. This, unfortunately, is not universally available across all companies.

The companies that fail at their WFH experiments will not want to continue with remote work after it's no longer necessary.

> "now we'll know which meetings could have been emails"

Unfortunately, that's not what's happening where I work. We're having as many meetings as before (maybe even more, in the name of promoting company cohesion), but they're now being done via teleconferencing software.</comment>


Ask HN: Best remote desktop app for customer support? - <AUTHOR> Are there any better alternatives to TeamViewer? Which are known for good security? Would you advise NOT using remote desktop apps for customer support? <comment><USER2> We've tried some others but our customers are familiar with TeamViewer and often insist on it. I'm fact some ask for a team viewer session before we suggest remote help.

I'm not a big fan since we don't need it that often and it's pretty expensive per use when we have to pay by the year.

</comment><comment><USER3> We run a ConnectWise Control (formerly ScreenConnect) server, with several hundred client machines. Unfortunately they changed their pricing model drastically a fee years back, and if it wasn't for the fact that we are grandfathered in with our existing licenses, it wouldn't be even a remotely viable solution.

</comment><comment><USER4> Remote Dekstop Manager from Devolutions is really complete and as far as I know it's a good enterprise level remote desktop software. [https://remotedesktopmanager.com](https://remotedesktopmanager.com)

<comment><USER5> We use this as well, although I don't think this is what the op is looking for. It sounds like he's looking to be able to connect remotely to a users desktop over the internet, not RDP into a machine on their network/s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> TeamViewer is a popular option. Anydesk is another option. Remote desktop client from Microsoft might also fit the bill here.

</comment><comment><USER5> We use ISL Pronto for connecting to external connections over the internet to users desktops.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anydesk</comment>


The Ulam spiral: hidden structure among the prime numbers - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/ctkrohn/ulam/wiki/Home <comment><USER2> Every time I see that thing, I want to take a huge chunk of prime numbers and write code to visualize them in different ways as quickly as possible. How do they look if you put them in, say, a hexagonal grid instead of a square one? Do patterns emerge if you draw them on a Hilbert curve? A 3D Hilbert curve? 4D? Has anyone tried these? Am I crazy for wanting to? Why are the ducks watching me?

<comment><AUTHOR> No! Do it! Fork my trivial program and put up your results.

The square is a pretty interesting place to start, though, since we already know there's a relationship between quadratic polynomials over the naturals and the distribution of primes. These polynomials describe lines that (eventually) become straight.

This is definitely amateur math hour for me. I was a math major a few years ago, but I did not study any number theory.

<comment><USER2> I'm leaning towards making something in Ruby, as I'm more familiar with it. Then I can throw a few dozen (hundred?) million pre-calculated primes at it, and look for macro-scale patterns, without having to do much calculation at all. Just plotting points.

Maybe it's time to dive deeper into Objective C and / or OpenGL. I've got a few ideas that would be fun to try in real-time, but most of the more "fun" programming languages have poor / slow graphics libraries, and something low level lets you handle millions of entries without breaking a sweat.

<comment><USER3> Regarding diving deeper into Obj-C/OpenGL, you could also consider prototyping your ideas quickly using something like Quartz Composer. I don't know any specifics on whether it'd deal properly with a large data-set, but the learning curve is not steep at all and it might get you going quickly.

<comment><USER2> I've seen QC, poked at it a couple times, but never in depth. Any recommendations for resources?

Usually I'm struck by how _unbelievably awesome_ the UI is, and how scores of similar attempts have been incomprehensibly awful. Meanwhile, Apple comes out with QC, a fast, elegant, simple version that goes almost totally unnoticed. Weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Arthur C. Clarke described the prime spiral seven years before it was discovered by Ulam in his 1956 novel 'The City and the Stars': "Jeserac sat motionless within a whirlpool of numbers. The first thousand primes, expressed in the binary scale that had been used for all arithmetical operations since electronic computers were invented, marched in order before him. Endless ranks of 1's and 0's paraded past, bringing before Jeserac's eyes the complete sequences of all those numbers that possessed no factors except themselves and unity. There was a mystery about the primes that had always fascinated Man, and they held his imagination still. Jeserac was no mathematician, though sometimes he liked to believe he was. All he could do was to search among the infinite array of primes for special relationships and rules which more talented men might incorporate in general laws. He could find how numbers behaved, but he could not explain why. It was his pleasure to hack his way through the arithmetical jungle and sometimes he discovered wonders that more skilful explorers had missed.

He set up the matrix of all possible integers, and started his computer stringing the primes across its surface as beads might be arranged at the intersections of a mesh. Jeserac had done this a hundred times before and it had never taught him anything. But he was fascinated by the way in which the numbers he was studying were scattered, apparently according to no laws, across the spectrum of the integers. He knew the laws of distribution that had already been discovered, but always hoped to discover more."

<comment><USER5> I love the fact Clarke used the term "hack" in 1956.

<comment><USER6> I'd just like to double-check that you and others realise that there are multiple definitions for the word "hack," some originating from far before the 1950s ;)

 _chop: cut with a hacking tool_

 _cut away; "he hacked his way through the forest"_

 _a mediocre and disdained writer_

etc.

[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define:hack)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm one of those guys who didn't necessarily pay a lot of attention to maths in college - not that I don't see the value in it, but it is certainly not a core interest. However, I've been slowly getting more and more into maths and the science of primes. So this post (and the questions the Ulam spiral _asks_ ) strike me at the worst of times and the best of times.

If you're at least a bit like me (no deep knowledge of maths, but growing curiosity) I recommend checking out BBC's recent documentary on primes, called _'The Music of the Primes'_. It'll spark your interest, and it'll make you want to dig a little deeper.

<comment><USER7> if you've ever prepared for a standardized quant test like the GMAT it immediately becomes apparent how useful even a basic understanding of primes can be. being able to manipulate primes at even the superficial level required (to do well) by these exams gives great insight and appreciation for the power/beauty of prime numbers. it really opened my eyes to mathematics in general, and i wish it were an education/perspective i'd been given as a child rather than a young adult. (I realize the GMAT is likely anathema to this forum so i hesitate in mentioning it, but the result of my preparation was some surprisingly useful insight in these regards...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Vi Hart has a great video which takes the Ulam spiral as its starting point: <http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=Vihart#p/u/0/Yhlv5Aeuo_k>

If you don't know her work, you should. She's so much fun...

</comment><comment><USER9> Any time I see research or visualizations of primes, I get nervous. I fear that all of our online security is based on encryption and all of that is based on the one-way nature of prime functions.

Can you imagine a world where someone discovers a way to trivially decode every https or ssh session on the internet? I fear we are building a city on top of the fog.

<comment><USER10> Clearly number theory research is a prohibited circumvention activity and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

<comment><USER9> You laugh today…

<comment><USER11> Yea, but number theory also allows us to devise new crypto systems... for example take a look at curve 25519

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another interesting site concerning visualization of patterns in prime numbers:

<http://www.divisorplot.com/>

<http://www.divisorplot.com/6.html> \-- the Ulam spiral

</comment><comment><USER13> Sidenote: This is the same Ulam of "Ulam-Teller Design" fame, the basis for thermonuclear weapons.

<comment><USER14> On another sidenote; his autobiography "Adventures of a Mathematician", is really worth reading.

[http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Mathematician-S-M- Ulam/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Mathematician-S-M- Ulam/dp/0520071549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293638406&sr=1-1-catcorr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of my mathematics teachers used to regard prime numbers with considerable irritation. She tried to explain to the class why there was no simple formula to determine which numbers were primes. In the end, she gave up and moved on to the next part of the syllabus, leaving the question unanswered. I almost felt sorry for asking her in the first place. Almost.

If this mathematics teacher had had access to the diagram of the Ulam spiral, however, I imagine that this alone could have provided the impetus for at least one student - me - to have made an academic career out of mathematics. As it is, she committed many other crimes against education, including her infamous catchphrase "Don't bother studying any kind of pointless mathematics that you'll never need to use at work." A catchphrase whose validity has been refuted many times over the years, not the least with the discovery of this diagram.

</comment><comment><USER16> Something that's always struck me as odd is the "importance" of prime numbers. It seems so trivial that a number having only 1 and itself as common divisors would be useful or special. Nevertheless, they're important indeed.

In other words, I'm struck by the ability of mathematics to generate such apparent complexity from simple principles :)

<comment><USER17> .. and it's only with their (relatively recent) use in cryptography that prime numbers became "important". G.H. Hardy, one of the leading number theorist in his era claimed that none of his work was useful, and therefore never could be applied to good or evil. Makes you wonder what applications the future holds for what is considered purely theoretical today.

<comment><USER18> > .. and it's only with their (relatively recent) use in cryptography that > prime numbers became "important".

A pair of mechanical gears with relatively prime numbers of teeth have a longer service life: a given tooth rubs the same amount against every tooth in the partner gear. If they are not relatively prime, the hardest tooth would hit only a few teeth on the partner gear, wearing them out many times faster.

<comment><USER19> Nice example. Here's another: <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Magicicada>

[http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal- te.ms.cicada10may10,0,563814...](http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal- te.ms.cicada10may10,0,5638148.story)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "It is a visual representation of just how little we know about the structure of the primes"

Come on, really? It's an intriguing visualization, but the patterns (in so far as they are real, and not an artefact of the limited size of the spiral) can be explained with some high school math.

<comment><USER21> If you can explain them please enlighten us all. You will have to show that Hardy-Littlewood's Conjecture F is true. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%E2%80%93Horn_conjecture>

<comment><USER20> I'm not a mathematician, but I don't think you can deduce that conjecture from the Ulam Spiral. On the other hand, you don't need this conjecture to show e.g. 4x^2-2x+41 is rich in primes (within the limits of the picture). If I recall, you can show the clumping arises from rewriting the primes in base 6.

EDIT: To hurry along the conversation a bit - it's entirely possible I've been misled into thinking things are more simple than they really are. Wouldn't be the first time...

<comment><USER21> Sorry if I was a bit snarky in my first reply. As far as I understand this, you can't explain the structure of the Ulam spiral in a trivial way. You are correct that there is a trivial part to the spiral: diagonal lines alternate between odd and even numbers, therefore all the primes lie along diagonal lines. However, the structure is much richer than that.

The question is why certain lines have lots of primes and not others? why is a given polynomial so rich in primes, while other similar ones are not? That's what some of these conjectures are trying to prove.

<comment><USER22> _diagonal lines alternate between odd and even numbers, therefore all the primes lie along diagonal lines_

Huh? If you draw the Ulam spiral on a checkerboard, all odd numbers end up on squares of one color and all even numbers of squares of the other color, but that is neither necessary nor sufficient to get those diagonal streaks in the picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Similar visualizations here:

      http://blog.morphism.com/2010/05/building-numbers.html
      http://blog.morphism.com/2010/07/pdfs-from-building-numbers.html

That stuff was generated using Mathematica.

</comment><comment><USER24> What if prime numbers can actually plotted as a fractal, i.e. they have fractal geometry? I bet they do, since fractals showing up in more and more unexpected places in nature, physics, and math.</comment>


How important is a co-founder? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og_Hjw5rtnM

<comment><USER2> what is the fascination with the word "founder"? I think it puts unnecessary importance on the team that started the business. A company has different needs at different times in its life and a "founder" is always the best to carry out that change. "Partner" would be a more appropriate word and allow for additional "partners" as the company grew and needed other skillsets.</comment>


Fascism in America: Are We There Yet? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bidstrup.com/fascism.htm <comment><USER2> "believing the largely non-existent left in the United States is capable of such a thing."

I think the left does very much exist in the US - see the support that Sanders got on a more or less socialist platform. The issue is the economic left has no political power (unions in decline, the anaemic healthcare reform that Obama passed is being pushed back, etc.). The 'social' left, on the other hand, does have power (e.g. gay marriage is legal and widely accepted, and the extreme pushback to border control and enforcement of immigration law).

This contrasts with my own country (which shall remain unnamed), where on economic grounds, the left is strong (state funded education and healthcare, strong public transit and social safety nets), but, in some social areas at least, it's weak - the marriage equality referendum failed, and the very lukewarm, centrist party in power, put up a border wall within weeks of fearing we might need it, to little fanfare. Contrast that with Trump's loud threats of a wall, and the accompanying accusations of Nazism, which hasn't yet amounted to much.</comment>


Student Debt Is Dragging a Whole Generation Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/student-debt-college-public-service-loan-forgiveness <comment><USER2> Let the governments give grants, and let the market handle loans, with no government backing and no bankruptcy exceptions. Problem solved.</comment>


New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/end-of-the-rainbow-new-map-scale-is-more-readable-by-people-who-are-color-blind/ <comment><USER2> I am not colorblind, but work with data visualization in Matlab a lot. This hilarious SciPy2015 talk[1] convinced me to switch to the Parula color scheme. There's no way I'm going back to Jet.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU)

<comment><USER3> Shouldn't it have convinced you to switch to Viridis instead?

<comment><USER2> Yes, Viridis is quantifiably better than Parula, as the talk shows, but Parula comes with the standard Matlab, and the jump from Jet to Parula was of such a tremendous magnitude that I kind of fell in love with the Parula color scheme right away. Jump from Parula to Viridis would be less noticeable, I guess. The talk opened my eyes to the fact that there are much better ways to use color for information presentation. (Sorry for the late reply)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using Color Oracle [1] to simulate colour-blindness as part of my standard developer workflow recently. For such a common disability, it's shocking how little work most people put into ensuring accessibility for colour-blind people.

[1] [https://colororacle.org/](https://colororacle.org/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the link. Is the macOS version working for you? I can't get it to work on High Sierra.

<comment><USER6> Do you have Java installed? It works for me.

There's another app from a Japanese lab but can't remember the name.

<comment><USER5> I can see the app running - but doesn't change the display when I select a simulator option from the drop down menu. Will play around with it. Thanks!

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's working just fine but you're already colorblind ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am always pleased to see annoucements and discussions on colour blindness.

Forgive me for sharing again my writeup on this syndrome from my own experience, if you don't yourself have any such deficiencies you might find it interesting!

[https://mcconnellsoftware.github.io/colourblind-in- software-...](https://mcconnellsoftware.github.io/colourblind-in-software- driven-world/)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the write up - this was good to read. Someone close to me was just diagnosed with color blindness and this was very helpful.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! (If you ever see them in a super pale pink shirt, check if they believe it's white and may've been ruined in the laundry. Been there, done that)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> About 8% of all males are color-blind. If you are a scientist, and want to publish your work, there's a one in four chance that at least one of your three reviewers is color-blind.

Rainbow color schemes are ridiculously bad. One study showed that medical professionals who look at rainbow-themed plots every day, immediately made fewer errors if presented with a simple grayscale plot instead, despite not having any experience with the grayscale color scheme.

Add to that that human perception is much better at seeing high-frequency lightness contrast than color contrast. Color contrasts are better-suited for categorical data.

<comment><USER10> > there's a one in four chance

Closer to 1 in 7, because the reviewer might be female (who are rarely color blind).

<comment><USER11> Closer to 1 in 4, because sadly there are very few reviewers who are female.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of CubeHelix [0], which aims to create scales which degrade gracefully to grayscale, which also minimizes potential color-blindness issues.

[0] [https://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/](https://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/)

<comment><USER12> P.S.: Visual examples: [https://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/cubewedges.html](https://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/cubewedges.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://colorbrewer2.org](http://colorbrewer2.org)

"Color Advice for Maps"

Brewer has been on this for a while! Mike Bostock approved. Check "colorblind safe"

</comment><comment><USER14> With just two colours it's hard to see the intermediate values because our eyes tend to blur together colours; is that an intermediate value or sharp edge that I'm seeing fuzzily due to poor focus? With an intermediate tone, such issues are pushed down to lower resolutions - with yellow-red-blue I know for sure that if it's red it's an intermediate, but is the orange area a mix of lots of small yellow and red domains or is it a field of intermediate domains?

Rinse and repeat.

The article seems to say "this scale is better" whilst also describing how other scales can be better. The evidence they present says to me "choose scales according to the data, the desired use, and the observer", of you ship the data used to cover a visualisation along with that visualisation then people can use their own scale altered to the purposes (and disabilities) they have.

<comment><USER15> Any scale that only uses hue is terrible, no matter how many intermediate steps. Scales that only accidentally utilize luminance (due to human vision being most sensitive to green, then red, and by far the least sensitive to blue) are only marginally better. Indeed, the rainbow scale is atrocious also due to the perceptually most luminous color being somewhere in the middle of the range, so people with red-green deficiency cannot even easily use luminance cues to make sense of the data. Not even mentioning the fact that human vision is simply much better at distinguishing luminance differences than hue differences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This advice is also in Tufte'a first book. This bichromatic scale is given as an example. [http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/645/100/1600/834939/Tuf...](http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/645/100/1600/834939/Tufte%2005.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this almost the same as the viridis palette that has been around for ages? [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/intro- to-viridis.html)

<comment><USER18> I just skimmed the paper [1], and their conclusion starts:

> We identified one colormap in particular to be optimal for viewing by those > with or without CVD, which we name cividis (Figs 4 and 5), generated by > optimizing the viridis colormap and selecting the J' linearization that > maximizes the range of J'. We chose this map due to its wide range of > colors, resulting from a wide range of J0 values while still changing b0 > significantly, and overall sharpness when overlaid onto complex images.

So pretty closely related :)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1712/1712.01662.pdf](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1712/1712.01662.pdf)

<comment><USER19> I'm disappointed that they (in my opinion) managed to make a worse color scale. If you look at the CVD-Jet color bar you can see blocks that appears quite similar separated by too sharp transitions. This is a common problem in e.g. rainbow scales. They highlight them selves that yellow appears as highligt, yet the highest values get translated to black. How is black supposed to be interpreted as more luminescent/intense than yellow? It happens to be a color scale that makes the cells look good, but to me that is happenstance.

<comment><USER20> CVD-Jet is not the new color scale, it's a simulation of what Jet looks like for certain colorblind users.

To my eyes, cividis (which is the new scale) is good by the numbers, and there's a strong argument it's more robust for colorblind users, but viridis looks better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I added a basic React component that also has the values in RGB computed

[https://github.com/sbrichardson/react- cividis/blob/master/RE...](https://github.com/sbrichardson/react- cividis/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER22> Related: How Bad Is Your Colormap? (Or, Why People Hate Jet – and You Should Too): [https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/10/16/how-bad-is-your- co...](https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/10/16/how-bad-is-your-colormap/)

Also related: seaborn (a helper library on top of matplotlib) has a special case dedicated to rejecting requests for using jet

<comment><USER23> Why is it called jet? Can't find any definition/abbreviation for it beside that it's called jet in MATLAB.

[https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/jet.html](https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/jet.html)

<comment><USER24> From some of what seem to be the matlab docs

> The jet colormap is associated with an astrophysical fluid jet simulation > from the National Center for Supercomputer Applications. See the "Examples" > section

[http://matlab.izmiran.ru/help/techdoc/ref/colormap.html](http://matlab.izmiran.ru/help/techdoc/ref/colormap.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here are the RGB values converted from the Matlab color index format mentioned.

[https://github.com/sbrichardson/react- cividis/blob/master/sr...](https://github.com/sbrichardson/react- cividis/blob/master/src/Cividis/RGB_values_example.js)

</comment><comment><USER25> I wish the article would have provided the formula for cividis... that is, how to transform a range of values from 0 to 1.0 into standard RGB values.

<comment><USER26> The "S2 file" mentioned on the liked page gives a look-up table for the cividis scale: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?type=supplemen...](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?type=supplementary&id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0199239.s002)

Apart from the comment on line 1, that file contains 256 lines with a colour. I suppose to get a finer scale, you can interpolate with any reasonable function you like since the differences are so small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Matplotlib has some nice colormaps as well:

[http://medvis.org/2016/02/23/better-than-the-rainbow-the- mat...](http://medvis.org/2016/02/23/better-than-the-rainbow-the-matplotlib- alternative-colormaps/)

[http://bids.github.io/colormap/](http://bids.github.io/colormap/)

<comment><USER28> A plus is that you can easily import these into many programs (MATLAB, ParaView, QGIS, etc.) thus having a consistent look and feel in your plots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Semi-related tid-bit: You'd be shocked how many theatrical lighting designers over the age of 45 are color blind. Never used to be a workplace issue since there was only a limited number of gels to place over lights and even then they were all numbered / catalog.

With LEDs being able to project (nearly) any color the old-guard are facing some challenges.

</comment><comment> mark-r They claim that the new scale gives a continuum from dark to light, but if you look at the example it goes dark at both ends with the brightest colors in the exact middle. Why the discrepancy?

<comment><USER30> I don't think it does. The picture here: [https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/UPj...](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/UPjournal_pone_0199239_g001.png) is CVD-Jet, _not_ their new scale. The blue-and-yellow rightmost picture is described as "as a person with red-green color blindness sees the rainbow image [in the center]". This scale does put the brightest colors in the center.

Their proposed scale, cividis, does not have a brightness in the middle of the scale. It's the second image in the article: [https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/jou...](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/journal_pone_0199239_g005.png)

<comment><USER31> Correct, one of the links in the article shows a pretty clear comparison between rainbow scale, how that looks to someone with color deficiency (with the dark portions on the ends), and their proposed scale.

[https://www.comsol.com/blogs/a-simulation-color-table-for- en...](https://www.comsol.com/blogs/a-simulation-color-table-for-engineers- with-color-vision-deficiency) \- midway down the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Did I miss it, or are there zero example images in the article using the new color scale?

<comment><USER33> The yellowish/blueish diagrams _are_ the new scale. [https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/jou...](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/journal_pone_0199239_g005.png)

I always hated rainbow scales because I always see artificial boundaries where the colors change between 2 contrasting ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you are confused about _ve_ in the table:

+ve = positive

-ve = negative

</comment><comment><USER35> The image at the top of the page loads fine. But the rest an so encumbered with Javascript to load you literally have to reload the page at least 4 times (to load the JS domain, that loads the JS domain, that loads the JS domain) to see them.

I gave up and closed the tab.

<comment><USER36> Works for me with JavaScript disabled in Firefox. I'm not seeing anything in the source that would cause problems either.</comment></comment>


Show HN: jamcloud - turntable for video - <AUTHOR> http://jamcloud.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This was built by my buddies, including the author of the Gaia Flash framework. It showed up on lifehacker today so I figured it was as good a time as any to brag about it here. It's pretty damn cool. Yeah yeah, it uses Adobe AIR - logical choice given their expertise. Hope that's not too big a hurdle for y'all to give it a try. Thanks.

EDIT: changed "authors" to "including the author" - Steven built Gaia by his own bad self, really. Should clear that up :)</comment>


Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator - <AUTHOR> https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ <comment><USER3> I've been a long-time user of terminator on linux. I started playing around with tilix a couple of months ago, and really liked it.

Interestingly though, what I finally realized is there is a huge amount of value in ditching both and switching over to tmux. Tmux does everything that tilix does but is completely independent of the underlying terminal. What I finally realized is that tmux is not just about persistent sessions - <USER2> screen/pane management along with completely keyboard-based navigation and history/copy/paste commands just blows the tiling terminals away.

<comment><USER4> Highlights one of the big issues in (Linux) desktop: nested inconsistent ad- hoc window management. Consider that in somewhat typical situation you would have your WM/compositor at top managing windows, then something like tilix managing its own panes/tabs, then tmux/screen also managing windows, and finally maybe vim/emacs which also does its own window management. That is four completely independent layers of window management, each of which does mostly the same basic thing.

It is interesting to imagine alternative universe where we instead would have advanced enough OS level window management that would allow deeper integration to underlying applications. E.g. something like OS level tree style tab -like window-management might be neat, especially if combined with powerful tiling management.

<comment><USER5> The beauty in Linux is also the freedom to simplify your workflow as much as you want, and not use the tools you don't need.

I've decided to only use a tiling WM for all window/pane management, and stop using anything else, as much as possible.

So I abandoned Gnome3->Terminator->tmux in favor of bspwm->urxvt. I don't lose the functionality that I had before (tiling terminals), and I'm using much lighter-weight tools and less of them. I love it.

Oh, and as for editor tiling... Yeah, I still have to tile buffers in Vim/Emacs, but only because I prefer the editing workflow in that case (all my context / session / environment remains the same). I suppose I could have lightweight clients, but I haven't really looked into it.

<comment><USER6> Re: editors, sometimes you simply cannot get away with multiple windows in place of panes, unless someone decides to do insane amount of work just to make editor integrate-able(?) with screen/tmux/whatever WM you happen to use; vimdiff would be a great example, as it is basically impossible to use it without panes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool project!

Given that the whole point of the tool is that it's a tiling terminal app, I'd appreciate a few more screenshots on the page or in the readme showing the different ways it lets me organise my terminals.

I'm a big fan of Gnome's design with the unified title and toolbars. For a terminal app such as this, however, the fat title bar combined with the tab bar make for a fairly large and heavy looking header. I wish it was a little more compact.

<comment><USER8> I feel like people have been complaining about the massive GNOME 3 title bars for at least six years, but the GNOME design team seems incredibly stubborn and unwilling to listen to feedback.

<comment><USER9> You think so?

[https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design- saving-...](https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-you- space-since-2009-or-so/)

<comment><USER8> But this post compares against GNOME 2.x, which was equally awful about wasting space. It doesn't compare against Windows or OS X, which are much better with screen real estate and let you easily hide the taskbar or dock to recover more.

<comment><USER9> From the blog post:

> What's more, today's Nautilus compares favourably with file managers from > other operating systems/desktop environments. KDE's Dolphin uses 109 > vertical pixels of chrome compared with Nautilus's 48. Finder in the > upcoming OS X version seems to have around 75 pixels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is quite off-topic, but I'd like to point it out: please disable subpixel anti-aliasing of fonts in images you upload to webpages. Subpixel anti- aliasing only works when the image is displayed at 1:1 zoom on a display with the same RGB subpixel arrangement. It fails on high-dpi displays, pentile displays, rotated displays, etc. and produces very noticeable rainbow fringing on the letters.

</comment><comment><USER11> This fails the do one thing and one thing well test very badly. This entire this can be managed by a window manager already. Managing information frames should happen at the WM level, not the bastardized versions of it like this, or man IDEs, or mysqlworkbench, etc

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been using this for the last two years as a replacement for terminator. It's pretty damn good if you like splitting your terminals up and don't use tmux.

It used to be called something else, but a company with the same name made a copyright complaint.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you have to access the terminal frequently, a dropdown terminal emulator is the way to go. Press F12, the terminal comes down. Press F11 it goes to full screen. Press F12 again, it retracts. I use yakuake and can't imagine life without it.

<comment><USER14> Tilix supports this as well via a quake mode.

[https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix- web/manual/quake/](https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/manual/quake/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Apologies for the off-topic, but does anyone know a nice simple terminal emulator to use with tiling window managers such as i3? I'm using the xfce terminal right now, but that supports tabs which gets a little confusing since so does i3.

<comment><USER16> I just use gnome-terminal. It is fine. No chrome or trim. i3 and tmux to lay out terminals. If you don't like tmux, i3 is also very good at laying things out. Just turn off all the menus for something like gnome-terminal, which renders things like powerline fonts fine.

<comment><USER15> I'll check it out. Thanks. It does seem similar to xfce4-terminal with it also supporting tabs. Perhaps I should just unbind those shortcuts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If tiling terminals aren't your thing, I'd suggest giving guake a go. I've been using for a year now, and none of the other emulators have come close to making me switch.

Protip: Use the shortcuts wisely, it makes it much better to use. I personally use + and - on the keypad for new tab/close tab and End to hide/unhide.

<comment><USER18> Guake is pretty killer, I'm an avid user myself.

My one big issue is this bug ([https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/45](https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/45)) which has an air of the user being wrong and the terminal being fine.

There are a few other nitpicks like the lack of search (no clue if other terminals have search, but it is a feature I would kill for).

<comment><USER17> Search? What do you mean? Search inside the terminal?

<comment><USER18> Yeah, like Ctrl-F on output.

I work on website crawlers for fun and being able to search terminal output is something I'd die for. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems to me that terminals are one of those things that handles the most sensitive of details on a server. No offense to the project (which looks very nice), but shouldn't we prefer a terminal emulator that has been well audited for security issues?

<comment><USER20> What attack vector are you thinking of that makes a terminal emulator more vulnerable than any other piece of GUI software?

<comment><USER19> idk, perhaps passwords?

<comment><USER21> So which one (from those audited) do you recommend?

It's using fairly well known library (VTE), it's open source so it's not that easy to sneak something in. Situations when your terminal emulator (it's not a program facing Internet) can be compromised: 1\. you have something malicious on your computer, 2\. you have something malicious on you server. But imho in both situations you already have bigger problems than your terminal emulator...

<comment><USER19> You know, I am no security expert. I was posing a question.

I frequently see HN comments question security of a number of applications, none of which are as critical an interface with production servers as the lowly terminal. For example, a recent replacement for ls was highlighted on HN, and there were questions of whether one would want to install use an untested application due to security concerns. In the case a terminal, it seems to be even a bigger potential issue since it is what one frequently types passwords in for sudo. I am quite surprised at the tone of comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been using Tilix for months now, and I love it. Fast, pretty, and works.

</comment><comment><USER23> What's the advantage over Terminator [0] ?

[0] [https://gnometerminator.blogspot.nl/p/introduction.html](https://gnometerminator.blogspot.nl/p/introduction.html)?

<comment><USER24> Terminator has not been updated in 9 years, suggesting a lack of maintenance, and is stuck on GTK2, which means no native Wayland support. Tilix, on the other hand, is active, GTK3-based, and works natively on my Gnome Wayland desktop.

<comment><USER25> Not true. Terminator is still being actively development (albeit somewhat slowly). GTK3 support was completed earlier on in the year and I've personally been using it daily since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What's allowing the terminal to display the current git branch on the input line?

What's allowing the pretty path view instead of my ugly ascii "~/blah1/blah2$ ?

<comment><USER27> Most shells let you do some arbitrary work before/during the display of the prompt line (in Bash, you can use `PS1` and `PROMPT_COMMAND`). Some people then install special fonts that let them render these fancy "bar segment" things. [Powerline]([https://github.com/powerline/powerline](https://github.com/powerline/powerline)) is a notable package for this, but there's a lot of simpler alternatives out there nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I prefer to just open four xterm windows and arrange them 2x2.

</comment><comment><USER29> I just installed tilix-bin from AUR. It has a blinking cursor that cannot be unblunk in the preferences? In that case, tilix is not for me…

<comment><USER14> There is an option for the blink mode in the preferences under Profile (i.e. Default) since it can be configured on a per profile basis. You can set the blink mode to use the system setting, on or off.

<comment><USER29> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It seems ro lack multiple groups of terminals?

In Terminator you can create more than one group to broadcast input to, and it can be across multiple tabs.

<comment><USER14> That's correct, there is an issue open for it and if someone wants to implement it I'm happy to take a PR for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have been using this since it came out. Highly recommended. Great way to watch many different servers at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is there something like this but for mac?

<comment><USER33> iTerm2: [http://www.iterm2.com/features.html](http://www.iterm2.com/features.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So essentially this is terminator but a bit better looking?

<comment><USER21> And maintained :)</comment></comment>