I Quit Twitter and It Feels Great - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/opinion/quitting-twitter-lindy-west.html <comment><USER2> > You can call me oversensitive, but the truth is I got far better than any > human being should be at absorbing astonishing cruelty and feeling nothing.

> Well, here's what my new life is like: I don't wake up with a pit in my > stomach every day, dreading what horrors accrued in my phone overnight. I > don't get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys > about whether poor people deserve medical care, or whether putting nice guys > in the friend zone is a hate crime.

> I'm better equipped to fight for global culture change now that I'm not > locked in eternal whack-a-mole with a sea of angry boy-men, an unknown > percentage of which are probably robots.

It's amazing to me how a person can complain about toxic behavior and and then respond with their own belittling counterpunch. There are plenty of people who manage to be civil on Twitter despite all of the bile. If you choose to be caustic yourself, then you are just like the people you criticize, you're just doing it from a different political viewpoint (excepting the people who make actual threats of course, which is a different thing entirely).

<comment><USER3> If you are going to post constantly about political and social issues, and be a NYT columnist about such issues, you are going to get counter points of varying quality. Some may be offensive. Twitter is a 2 way platform. Qualifying opposition viewpoints as bots, teenage boys, and angry man-boys doesn't help, and shows in a way that the writer is as hard headed as them. I am sure some of them are in that category, but Twitter bans people for outright threatening actions.

I use Twitter to follow people that are in the software field or that I am otherwise interested in. I don't post non stop about social or political issues, and I don't follow anyone that does. I agree that it is a stressful and caustic environment, but you can't expect to be in it and not get the side effects.

She can go back to speaking to sympathetic people and disconnect from real feedback. That is just going to put her in a silo. Facebook does that to people by only offering "likes", calling your followers your "friends" and presenting all news you like. Twitter is the real world albeit more caustic as people are pseudo-anonymous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Over the past year or so, I have noticed these sort of "I quit social media" pieces popping up with increasing frequency in a growing number of websites, including HN.

At first, the pieces were highly personal blog posts by technologists and other early-adopter types who dared question whether social media was good for them, and concluded the answer was no. Now, the pieces are by op-ed writers whose columns appear regularly in major newspapers like the NY Times.

Meanwhile, FaceBook just announced that daily active users dropped by 1 million in the US and Canada -- the first drop ever.[a]

All of this is making me wonder if what we are seeing is the beginning of a wave of _dis-adoption_ of social media.

[a] [https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily- act...](https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-active-user- decline-us-canda-q4-earnings-2018)

\--

Edit: I just noticed someone flagged the OP. While I can understand why, I'm not sure I agree with the flagging. The OP may be indicative of a potentially important, larger trend.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with > the apocalypse. So, I left.

She followed shitty people.

Fellas I recommend the opposite: Quit Facebook and Instagram and start using Twitter.

I used to not use twitter until I started listening to more audiobooks and podcasts from economists. I realized that, living in semi-rural New Hampshire and several years out of college, its been a long time since I was able to surround myself with lots of really intelligent people.

I hopped on twitter and unfollowed nigh EVERYONE. All the joke tweeters, all the depressives, all the political whiners, and started following several people I thought were really smart. Then I followed several more who posted things I disagreed with, for good measure. I spent 2017 liberally following and unfollowing people until I liked the mix.

Then I did the opposite of this lady: I largely stopped using Facebook and Instagram, and only really look at Twitter.

Since the 280 char change, its loads better than other social networks. Interesting discussions, the ability to interact with far-away intellectuals. New avenues of curiosity and gratification and inspiration. Too many memes or political sobbing? Unfollow!

Facebook (which I loved 6 years ago) has devolved into a mess of acquaintances who share articles without actually reading them and posting idiotic memes and other low-effort content. Instagram is nice for seeing what my friends are actually doing with their lives, but the ego-ness of it can get to you.

Twitter is the only social network that still offers a lot of intellectual gratification, and even more so since the 280 char change, and I am super grateful for that.

</comment><comment><USER6> It truly sucks that the author faced the kind of harassment that made her shut down her account. But it does sound like time away from social media will be a good thing. I use Twitter daily. I don't understand why the people most upset by Trump are often the same ones who follow him and even tell Twitter to push tweets by him to their mobile notifications.

It goes beyond masochism, there's a bit of self-importance, as if seeing his Tweet as it happens in real time makes you any more informed about presidential affairs or prepared for the apocalypse. No, you're as helpless and ineffectual as anyone else who doesn't have a direct line to Trump, so why pretend that you need to get a real-time feed of his BS when it's just something that robs your attention and happiness?

I work in the media and am expected to stay informed of current events. "Trump" is on my list of terms to ban from my timeline. I still get plenty of news about him and his tweets when I visit the NYT or Wapo home pages, and I feel no disadvantage to reading about his Tweet outbursts a day later.

I think the author was right to delete her account for all the pain Twitter gave her. But, despite the headline about feeling great, it doesn't sound like she's quite over Twitter. It wasn't clear to me why she didn't try a period of time in which she set her account to private, which would still allow her to stay in touch with her friends while being mostly unreachable by trolls.

</comment><comment><USER7> Twitter is experiencing something of a resurgence these days, with user numbers growing since Trump. Basically, Twitter managed to squeeze growth out of its decision not to censor bigots, stalkers, and outright maniacs. Now they're reaping rewards for that decision.

<comment><USER8> I must admit that I like twitter for exactly that openness. The freedom of shitposting better represents the real world then any facebook-"funny"-video could do.

<comment><USER9> > The freedom of shitposting better represents the real world

Man, I hope I never have to live where you do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I probably agree with the author of this piece on many things, but this article felt a whole lot like the shouting that drove me off Twitter about the same time she left.

I was never the target of right-wing trolls, but I did see many people in my Twitter-sphere tweet non-stop about it with such vitriol that I'm not sure I was getting less aggregate exposure.

I think the problem is that Twitter is a platform for evolutionary selection of slogan-based-dialog. I kind of imagine two armies standing across a battlefield from one another carefully deciding which volley of pithy digs to throw at one another.

This article feels like a rehash of all that—generating, like Twitter, more heat than light.

</comment><comment><USER11> Attempting to follow the news in real time is what wears most Twitter users out.

I felt the same way, but then I unfollowed everyone who tweeted about current events and the stress is gone.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's great dude, congrats. Now you can read about what happens on twitter in the newspaper the next day.

<comment><USER13> You're aware that you don't need a Twitter account to read tweets yea?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Aaaaaalmost to "I don't own a TV" territory...

</comment><comment><USER15> I never joined, feels even better

</comment><comment><USER16> I quit the dating apps and sites. It feels fantastic. Technology has been terrible about helping with socialization.

</comment><comment><USER17> What self important drivel... who is upvoting this and why??

<comment><USER18> I didn't upvote, but you should remember the guidelines

* Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

* Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I never started any social media account, do I get to write an article in the NYT now? No? No offense but as much as I am pro people quitting their digital addictions articles like that are getting annoying. #nooffense #duh

<comment><USER19> No social media accounts, except this one.

<comment><USER13> an account on HN is as social as a one time visit to AA

<comment><USER19> And yet more social than many people's use of Twitter.

<comment><USER13> I'd dispute that HN counts as social media in the classic sense</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will Scientists Ever Move to Python 3? - <AUTHOR> http://jakevdp.github.com/blog/2013/01/03/will-scientists-ever-move-to-python-3/ <comment><USER3> I've observed the scientific community to be generally curmudgeonly about software issues overall, so I'd predict that they will be the _last_ group to move to Python 3. So once every other community has moved over (in this order: hobbyists, bleeding-edge startups, tech companies/startups in general, corporate environments), then it will be their turn, and they certainly will because the ecosystem will have completed moving over.

As far as 2to3/3to2, that entire process in my opinion will be going away; once you've pegged Python 2.6 as your bottom version, it's straightforward (though not without effort) to produce a codebase that runs in Python 2 and 3 without any changes. I've already done this for my template language Mako, where version 0.7.4 has been enhanced to support Python 2.4 all the way through the latest 3.3 without any 2to3/3to2 step.

<comment><USER4> OT, is there a good guide somewhere for writing software which works in both 2.6+ and in 3.x?

<comment><USER3> yes, check this out: <http://python3porting.com/noconv.html>

then read the source code (very short) to six: [https://bitbucket.org/gutworth/six/src/64891e65200f9853aa64d...](https://bitbucket.org/gutworth/six/src/64891e65200f9853aa64d370184de838deee249c/six.py?at=default)

I don't actually pull in six, I just include those functions which I need locally, usually with some tweaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why? One of the interesting things about science is that your results are _better_ if you don't change too much. So if you're using a python 2.4 to do your data analysis and now your re-creating your experiment from 5 years sgo, if you have a new Python and libraries and you get different results, then one of the things you will need to do is put everything back to 2.4 and see if your results changed because of the software or because of the experiment.

<comment><USER6> I'd add that for the bulk of people writing software to support science, programming practices are among the least of their concerns. A data analysis program supporting a particular research project is more akin to a mathematical formula than to a piece of software engineering. Upgrading it to Python 3 would be about as motivating as going back and updating your equations in a research paper because a new font became available.

Moving your current/new development to Python 3, to a scientist, sounds a lot like "So there's this new font. It sort of works like the old one. No it doesn't let you write any new equations, and it may or may not complain about being used near papers written in the older font. We know you don't particularly like fussing with typesetting, but how about you invest in this maybe-compatible thing instead of spending your time doing your science? We promise you, the professional typesetters have moved beyond that stodgy Yourfont2.7 you've been using to write your papers."

<comment><USER7> So maybe the best way to encourage adoption is to convince a researcher in the field to implement their new math algorithms in python 3. Anyone who wishes to use these new algorithms would be forced to upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully never. All the new changes might make Python better in the view of a computer language consistency fetishist (or maybe for web apps). But for practical purposes in data analysis things got worse not only because of the broken backward compatibility.

Letting major APIs return iterators or views instead of lists just introduces unnecessary complication. Most people doing data analysis don't even know what these structures are but they definitely know lists.

Scientists have to deal a lot with bytes or strings of bytes but never Unicode. Python3 treats Unicode as first class citizen as opposed to raw strings of bytes like in Python2.

Sometimes you have to convert a lot of clear text data formats and needing to use 'print(x, end=" ")' instead of a simple 'print x,' makes me cringe every time. Printing something is substantial why shouldn't be a statement.

Finally the loss of performance in Py3k is the straw to break the camel's back. I use numpy because it is usually faster than the stuff I wrote myself in C. I use python because I got the best performance without having to care much about programming.

I want to be able to reproduce results I or other people did 10 years ago. Maybe poeple in 100 years want to do that. A language that breaks backward compatibility for trivial consistency issues is definitely not suited for that. The easiest solution would be to stay with 2.x for ever or choose a more stable language.

<comment><USER9> I agree. "Python" to me means "Python 2.4" -- all the rest is just sugar. I have no reason to "upgrade".

However, one way to get people to upgrade is to have BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY. Yes, I know, Python developers consider backward compatibility some sort of noose, but it is the only thing that permits forward-going change without losing the existing user base. It would be easy, too: at the beginning of each file, have """Python 2.4""" (etc) and _everything_ would "just work". There would be no _need_ to wait for anybody to make libraries compatible with new versions.

The Python developers have done us all a huge disservice by ignoring full backward compatibility. And while I appreciate all of the time and effort they have donated to the community, I believe this one single issue, backward compatibility, matters most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unicode support may be a small thing for scientists, who are usually dealing with numbers rather than strings. But it's absolutely huge for the rest of us, and that alone will drive the big libraries to python3. It'll be slow going - I've essentially stopped work on my biggest personal project as I'm stuck in a mess of libraries that have moved to python3 and libraries that haven't - <USER2> unlike with perl6, I haven't seen any major libraries explicitly planning not to support python3.

So yeah, 2018 may be a lower bound for the point at which the scientific community moves to python3. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.

<comment><USER11> Well, it depends on what kind of research you do. My former team worked with different text corpora in multiple languages. Proper unicode support is/was very welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Speaking as a scientist: the reason for me is that there are lots of breaking compatibility changes in exchange for very little benefit. The only improvements I would care about -- fixes to the bad GC and broken concurrency system -- weren't and still aren't on the table.

<comment><USER13> I experienced the same deficencies using Python 2 and Python 3 for years in projects at work. If you're just even a bit like me, you should find much delight in the programming language Go.

<comment><USER12> Yes, there are lots of languages -- for example Go, Clojure, and even C++11 -- that are better languages in their own right and have also solved the concurrency problem well enough.

Unfortunately, scientific programming is highly dependent on libraries. So, in my field (bioinformatics), I'm basically constrained to Python or R. Python is the less shitty of the two. You can see how thrilled I am about this situation.

<comment><USER14> What about a way of calling out to Python and/or R libraries in Go? There's already such a beast for Calling to Python from Lua.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of scientists are working on poorly administered clusters where the installed Python is 2.5 or lower. I've even run into one 2.3 occasionally. Some have versions of libc so old that you can't always compile newer software (as I learned to my horror when I tried to install GHC on the VITAL-IT cluster in Lausanne -- libc on that system is now approaching ten years out of date).

<comment><USER16> Hopefully virtualenv has fixed that issue, do you think it could be implemented after the fact in clusters?

<comment><USER17> As great as virtualenv is, it won't help you with outdated versions of libc.

<comment><USER4> The traditional answer to outdated libraries on clusters is to install them in a non-standard location and use Environment Modules[0] to select which libraries to use. Modules are a common tool since clusters have big user bases with lots of different needs, so you almost always have to have multiple versions of some libraries available.

The classic example is keeping multiple MPI implementations around; but I know scientists who keep multiple versions of several libraries in their home directories depending on which apps they want to use, and just select the right module groups.

That said, I've never tried this with anything as fundamental as libc...

[0] <http://modules.sourceforge.net/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One thing that doesnt receive enough attention is the changes to the Python C-api. References :

1) <http://python3porting.com/cextensions.html>

2) [http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html#build-and-c- api...](http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html#build-and-c-api-changes)

In the scientific computing world C extensions are used everywhere and moving Python 2.x c extensions to Python 3 is a significant roadblock.

</comment><comment><USER19> As a note, it's really sad to see these kinds of articles. I do perhaps 90% of my home programming in Common Lisp, a language which is around 30 years old, but still has an active development community. _Without modifications_ , I can run code from 30 years ago on a modern computer and have it return correctly. I have no particular belief that this will be true for Python, Ruby, Perl 5, Perl 6, C++, and a variety of other popular languages developed _after_ Common Lisp was popularized and standardized. So much effort wasted upgrading your language instead of solving your problems[1].

It's something to think about with your software choice: every line is a legacy line for someone else to understand and compile/interpret/run. Can they do it in the future? Do you _care_? If so, think hard and- I recommend- choose a language which has a formal standard with multiple implementations.

[1] Obviously innovation is useful. But reinventing wheels into the same design isn't. Obviously Haskell and other research-y languages will change. I'm talking about production languages for production environments or for other things persisting over the 5-20+ year spans such as science.

<comment><USER20> > [...] Common Lisp, a language which is around 30 years old, but still has an > active development community.

OTOH many Common Lisp people lament the fact that the standardization stopped with the 1994 spec, saying it led to the fragmentation of the implementations with mutually incompatible extensions.

Do you think it would have hurt Common Lisp if there had been one dominant implementation that everyone followed and reused libraries from, like with Python?

<comment><USER19> > OTOH many Common Lisp people lament the fact that the standardization > stopped with the 1994 spec, saying it led to the fragmentation of the > implementations with mutually incompatible extensions.

There is room for an update, I think. Probably something to do with thread memory semantics. But the language _itself_ provides facility for a great deal of extension. E.g., the default threading API (bordeaux-threads) is be identical cross-implementation, although the exact Lisp system calls will vary.

You have to be careful to consider what exactly needs to be changed and what can simply be added by a macro & library function. Certain guarantees relating to memory will fall in that area.

Of course I do not think CL is perfect. For one thing, it could have used a respin post-CLOS to have a smoother type system and better interfaces.

> Do you think it would have hurt Common Lisp if there had been one dominant > implementation that everyone followed and reused libraries from, like with > Python?

Yes. There's only 1 python: python.org's python. Never mind Jython, IronPython, and PyPy. We all are tied to CPython. :-( It defines the situation, regardless of the docs. Really not ideal for the Python world.

Having a regularly evolving standard means that you have to port your code constantly to ensure you're up to date with the latest hotness... or even be able to interrelate with newer code. One of the great strengths of the POSIX standard & C is that C89 has stayed constant and available on *nix for the last two decades; C itself has stayed mostly constant for about three and a half. The cost of forcing regular change is enormous and may well destroy a community.

rachelbythebay, a blogger I follow, wrote a post I can't find right now, on the problems when you rely on this sort of situation. She does a lot of sysadmin work, usually (I guess) in C++, and was astounded when she learned that just upgrading your system might shatter your software in Perl or whathave you. I have that opinion (based on my experience) as well. Having to have had to contend with Python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7 all in the same company for the same codebase, I have this conclusion: do it right the first time, second if you can swing it. Common Lisp succeeds at that (n.b., before CL, lots of Lisp fragmentation existed). Python fails. C wins. Perl 5 is trying to have run-time machine switching based on specified version (may have details wrong there). Ruby fails. C++98 is "ok", C++11 may be a bear.

I do think that a language should be excruciatingly small and very effective, and libraries should be built around that language; this allows libraries to be evolved/replaced without having the core language altered. C got this right. Scheme from R1-R4 also went this road, but as it is an academically driven language, its been in the shadows by and large. I guess newer Schemes have bigger standards though.

<comment><USER18> I am very fond of lisp but even I find it amusing that you use Common Lisp on one hand and think that programming languages should be excruciatingly small on the other.

<comment><USER19> Yes. It's pretty ironic. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some of them will never stop using Fortran, ever, until they die. My old boss was trained with Fortran, and made a moderately successful career in particle physics never needing to learn new tools. The ideas he needed expressed were short, he was good at explaining them, and it was never too big an effort to turn them into something that could run in PAW, ROOT, Python, VHDL, whatever was needed. He did the thinking, and expressed it in the language he knew best. He had postdocs, graduate students, and sometimes undergrads to do the leg work. Would he have had a better career if he'd spent time learning new languages rather than thinking about solving physics problems? I doubt it; and he probably wouldn't have had as much fun.

<comment><USER22> _"Some of them will never stop using Fortran, ever, until they die."_

In my opinion, Fortran (meaning Fortran 90/95/03/08) gives both the ease of native array syntax, like matlab, and leaner than NumPy, and the speed of compiled language (like C, somewhat faster), and the safety of a typed language.

For numerical computing with lots of 2-, 3-, or 4-dimensional arrays, I don't really see any other language to be on par with Fortran.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Forgive the snark, but are we all moving to Python 3 now? Every time /I/ try to use Python 3, I look for code samples and libraries written in 3, but they're all sitting around version 2.7. Documentation searches bring up 2.7 docs for most things I want to do.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Python 3, and many of the changes seem fairly sensible, but I shouldn't have to fight against it to do something that works perfectly well with minimal effort in 2.7. I guess that makes me a curmudgeon, but I don't want to dick around with Python from a theoretical standpoint, or take a great deal of time exploring its features. Since I usually only use it for quick-and-dirty scripts, this is my ideal use case. I honestly don't care how much better iterators and GC are handled with it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Whatever tool is best for the job. I'm still using Fortran in some areas of my research (molecular dynamics stuff), but then I use CoffeeScript to post- process simulation results. Throw in some C when I need a good balance between speed and rapid development, and Haskell when I'm just messing around ;)

</comment><comment><USER25> I actually wonder, will startup developers ever move to Pyton 3? Or hobbyist programmers? Python 2.x is still widely used in the industry and many startups actually seem like they won't be able to make a radical change and move. What do you think of status of Python 3 in the industry?

<comment><USER26> I think once the web framework holdouts like Django and Flask move to Python 3 we will begin to see a broader adoption of Python 3 in the startup community. I don't expect to see a lot of apps being ported to 3.x, but I would think most new apps would probably be 3.x-based.

<comment><USER27> Django was recently ported, but South wasn't, and then there are the CMS packages - Mezzanine didn't even start, and I don't see how one can even discover the Django-CMS status.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I once held a position as a systems programming for a big data science research institute at a large state University. RHEL 5.x comes with Python 2.4 by default. Our Platform compute clusters ran RHEL. We would build Python 2.7.x from source and use that rather than the older 2.4. However, we never used Python 3, nor needed it. No one cared about it. It was not a topic of conversation even. Python 2 got the job done and lot's of research code was written in it, and still is.

I have nothing against Python 2 or 3. I'm just relaying my own experience. We used a lot of C++ and Java too. And the Java guys were fond of Groovy. I did mostly C++ and Python.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think this sums it up nicely: <http://codepad.org/H7quTJlE>

<comment><USER30> I couldn't agree more. If you're going to break compatibility, do it for a good reason. Type annotations, that would appeal to scientists(BTW, a lot of them are using Cython)...

<comment><USER31> Type annotations are included in Python 3:

<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/>

(More specifically, Python 3 includes generic "function annotations" that look a lot like type declarations do in other languages, but can be used for other purposes as well. The idea is to offload typechecking to a library, so you could eg. include type inference, dimensional analysis, preconditions or DBC, etc. as desired.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The article makes a cogent recommendation for robust 3-to-2 tooling as the key missing piece. Recommended.

<comment><USER33> If we want people to migrate _to_ version 3, wouldn't we want 2-to-3 tooling so people could migrate their old work? I assume I am misunderstanding the purpose or the meaning.

<comment><USER34> Read the article. 2to3 is pretty robust, but 3to2 is much less usable.

The argument is you need the major library authors to start primarily coding in Python3 and using 3to2 to backport to Python2. Until this happens, the quality of Python3 libraries will suffer and there will be disincentives to migrate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Stuck-version disease is a major problem for all these newer interpreted languages.

<comment><USER36> Python is over 20 years old. Where is the line for "new"?

<comment><USER37> Everything after (or perhaps including) the Bourne shell is new.

<comment><USER38> Whipper-snapper! You are probably using that new-fangled C language for all your high level work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I highly doubt it. There are a lot of scientists still clinging dearly to FORTRAN90. Many scientists think in terms of the next grant/paper, not the long-term goal. This results in short-sighted software decisions, which are exacerbated by the fact that most scientists are (very poorly) self-taught coders.

<comment><USER21> 1\. These folks live or die by the status of the next grant. Most of them are not motivated by money, but rather by keeping a lab open, with a steady stream of students flowing through it. Let's not forget that there is more than one goal in science (solve problems, feed family, train more scientists/engineers/technicians/etc).

2\. Their job is to solve scientific problems, not solve them in ways that make computing folk feel good.

3\. Arguably the scientist who wastes time fretting about the technical details of software rather than their research or their grant, is the short sighted one.

<comment><USER14> _> 2\. Their job is to solve scientific problems, not solve them in ways that make computing folk feel good._

Actually, it should be. Whole fields can and do suffer because of generally crappy software practices. (Medicine) It should be thought of as not pissing off your suppliers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> For me the two issues are:

1) Sage, which I use, is a huge project incorporating lots of other scientific software and using loads of Cython. It simply takes time to migrate all the dependencies and then Sage itself to Python 3, and it's not really a priority for anyone.

2) It's not really something that anybody seems to focus on a lot. Scientists mainly worry about science, minor differences in the programming language used are generally of little concern. Migrating to a different version is therefore not something most of them would spend time on, unless forced to by external circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER41> Something the author didn't mention is that a lot of science-related python code relies on third party libraries to support devices they use. SR Research's Eyelink device, for instance, is accessable through API's provided by SR themselves, which are provided in C and in a number of Py2.x flavors. They don't provide it in 3.x, and so the experiment cannot be written in 3.x either. The scientists have no control over this, because its not an open source project, it all relies on whether or not the company producing it wants to upgrade.

<comment><USER34> But if a native library is provided, scientists aren't powerless. Sure, they'd have to either call the libraries directly using cytpes or write thin C extension stubs, but it's quite easy unless the API is huge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Libraries and legacy code are an issue, but if the Julia ( <http://julialang.org/> ) folks manage to deliver most of their promises, Julia might cover a lot of the data processing needs (and is faster than Python), for which people use Python + NumPy at the moment.

And the main reason some scientist migrated to Python is probably that Matlab is non-free, and the language of Matlab sucks. Julia might attract both Python users and future Matlab refugees.

</comment><comment><USER42> As a scientist who teaches Python to other scientists in the summers, I wonder if what we instead need to do is just get a sufficient mass of _new_ Python 3 programmers, and let them drag the rest over. Many fields long ago accepted that programming is a vital skill, but that's only recently been true in biology (if it even is true yet), so there's a lot more people who will be learning in the next few years, as compared to, for instance, astrophysics.

<comment><USER4> Downside: those new Python 3 scientists will be unable to use the Python 2 libraries which already exist in their domains, so they'll all end up re- implemented poorly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmm.. they sound a lot more eager than the networking world. Django, Twisted and Gevent are all still lacking Python 3 support. Saying that the biggest scientific packages only got support in 2010-2011 sounds like a pretty good track record to me!

</comment><comment><USER9> It would help if the old "print" statement would be re-instated. And rename the new "print()" as "printf()".

<comment><USER34> I'm guessing you're just venting some bitter sarcasm, but if not...

I can (kind of) understand your complaining about the print statement going away, despite its inelegance. However, if the semantics haven't changed, why change the name?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> can someone explain why python has more scientific projects than ruby for example... why is it considered as better for that type of work?

<comment><USER44> Scipy and Numpy blow anything Ruby has completely out of the water.

<comment><USER45> Agreed, although just wanted to mention SciRuby for rubyists jealous of scipy and numpy. It's in development (led by a good friend of mine) and contributions are welcomed. <http://sciruby.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Once they saw my Anaconda v1, why switch to a more mature Python 3?

</comment><comment><USER47> tl;dr: no

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines>

<comment><USER29> Could easily be rewritten to say "will Scientists avoid moving to Python3</comment></comment>


Restricting User Access by Country using an IP Geolocation API - <AUTHOR> https://smartip.io <comment><AUTHOR> Using an IP geolocation API like [https://smartip.io](https://smartip.io) can help on restricting access to your website to users connecting from specific countries.</comment>


For Two Months, I Got My News from Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html?smid=tw-share <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16537718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16537718)

130+ comments</comment>


Folding fractions - <AUTHOR> http://plus.maths.org/content/folding-numbers <comment><USER2> There's an easier way to do this by the way:

Fold an arbitrary length perpendicular to the axis you want, then fold that length again... To X folds. Fold diagonally from top corner to the last fold then fold at the the intersections.

       ___    ___    ___    _____
      |   |  |___|  |__/|  |_|_|/|
      |   |  |___|  |_/_|  |_|/|_|
      |   |  |___|  |/__|  |/|_|_|
      |   |  |   |  |   |  | | | |
      |   |  |   |  |   |  | | | |
      |   |  |   |  |   |  | | | |
      |   |  |   |  |   |  | | | |
      |___|  |___|  |___|  |_|_|_|

</comment><comment><USER3> Folding a third is not nearly as impressive as angle trisection, which is impossible with a straight ruler and compass, but possible using origami.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_trisection#Using_origami](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_trisection#Using_origami)

<comment><USER4> > angle trisection, which is impossible with a straight ruler and compass

To be clearer: It is impossible to come up with a general algorithm to _exactly_ trisect an _arbitrary_ angle using only a straightedge (not a ruler) and a compass in a finite number of steps.

And the straightedge isn't a ruler because it can't be used to measure distances. Neither can the compass. This is an axiom system, and therefore the rules are absolute.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass-and- straightedge_constr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass-and- straightedge_construction)

<comment><USER3> Yes, I meant straight edge, sorry I had an ESL moment.

<comment><USER5> You're not wrong _per se_ \- a ruler usually has graduations but _could_ just be a straight-edge. However, as the GP says, "ruler" implies a straight-edged measuring stick (aka "measure" [n]).

Ruler derives, I gather, from Latin _regula_ which just means a straight stick or bar and in turn derives from terms referring to keeping straight (literally or figuratively).

tl;dr measuring stick ⊂ ruler.

<comment><USER3> My native tongue is French, where it is "règle et compas", I translated règle tu ruler, but added straight in front vaguely remembering that the English expression had the word "straight" in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really useful for origami, when you want to fold unusual splits into your paper.

You can also use it in the opposite direction, so instead of bringing the point up to a specific mark on the top edge going from left to right (e.g. 1/2 on top gets you 2/3 on the right that you divide in two to get 1/3), you plan it so that your right edge get's crossed at 2/n (e.g. fold the paper so that the y length is 1/2, then your point will hit the 1/3 mark at the top of the paper). This is useful when you want to go from an easy fraction like 1/8 to 1/7, as opposed to going from 1/4 through 1/5 and 1/6 to get to 1/7.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love using doing things like this.

Possibly somewhat off-topic, but the proof for the equation sin(A + B) = sin A.cos B + cos B.sin X is quite a nifty diagram that can be found here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trigonometric_identitie...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trigonometric_identities#mediaviewer/File:AngleAdditionDiagramSine.svg)

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems like the link to the book is broken.

Origamics: Mathematical Explorations Through Paper Folding [https://books.google.com/books?id=zJR2Rr_wuFQC](https://books.google.com/books?id=zJR2Rr_wuFQC)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is one of those interesting items that is truly deserving of the headline "Neat Trick."

It reminds me of a card trick that I learned as a child that appeared to work by magic, but instead worked every time because it involved something complex going on involving math.

<comment><USER10> Ruler Manufacturers Hate Him!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The is a delightfully entertaining article! Does anyone have a recommendation on the Kazuo Haga book, "Origamics"? vs David Mitchell's "Paper Crystals"? Origamics is a bit pricey... worth it?

<comment><USER8> For books of questionable worth, I like to go to my local library, and get an interlibrary loan. I find this indispensable for mathy books, where it can be hard to judge the necessary prerequisites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Always wondered how to do this and never figured out how. My solution was to roll up the paper into a circle and slowly crease at the right roll amount. Reminds me of my old compass and straight edge lessons...

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. But, it must be said that he was just lucky that the x^2 terms canceled :)</comment>


4-way HTML5 speed test: Firefox 3.7 faster than Internet Explorer 9 (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/06/24/4-way-html5-speed-test-firefox-3-7-faster-than-internet-explorer-opera-chrome/ <comment><USER2> This is getting silly. It's fantastic that we finally got canvas in Explorer, but people are putting too much weight to one demo designed to highlight one particularly well performing feature (HW accelerated image draw on canvas #).

This has as much significance as Chrome getting ridiculously better results in V8 benchmark [1] compared to all other browsers.

Please go to CanvasDemos [2] or ChromeExperiments [3] and try some third party canvas demos to see how well IE9 fares across wider variety of canvas use cases.

Spoiler alert: it's nowhere near so clear cut performance champion as it may seem from fish and asteroids demos.

\----

Edit: (#) in practical terms, the biggest benefit would go to use cases like the upcoming Aves JS game engine [4] and FreeCiv JS port [5].

\----

[1] [http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/current/run.htm...](http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/current/run.html)

[2] <http://www.canvasdemos.com/>

[3] <http://www.chromeexperiments.com/>

[4] <http://www.dextrose.com/en/projects/aves-engine>

[5] <http://www.freeciv.net/>

<comment><USER3> Chrome is not the fastest.

Sunspider benchmark (Win XP, dual core machine):

Opera (v10.53): 299.8ms +/- 1.0%

Safari (v5): 314.2ms +/- 1.7%

Chrome (v5.0.375.55): 326.6ms +/- 7.9%

Firefox (v3.6.3): 716.4ms +/- 1.7%

<comment><USER2> You didn't read carefully - not Sunspider, V8 benchmark:

      Firefox 3.6.4       494
      IE9                1200
      Safari 5           2644
      Opera 10.54        3393
      Chrome 6.0.437.3   5148

Saying that Chrome is 10x faster than Firefox on the basis of V8 benchmark would be as misleading as saying IE9 is "orders of magnitude" faster than Chrome on the basis of fishtank demo.

Though it certainly makes great headlines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a terrible test..

When the browsers tried to get to 1000 you could see them fluctuating as the os gave and took their resources (even slightly noticeable at 100 (mainly in opera)). They needed to be done one at a time at that point.

</comment><comment><USER5> On the same computer... at the same time? That seems a little unfair if one browser is choking up the disk access (as Firefox seems to do on me every few seconds).

<comment><USER6> Disk access? What? I/O has stunningly little to do with this.</comment></comment>


In Oracle's fight with open source, the good guys won -- this time - <AUTHOR> http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-04-2011/110421-techs-bottom-line.html <comment><USER3> It's an interesting take on it, but there's a lot of assumption here - <USER2> least of which is that Oracle somehow did this because it was the "right thing" or a "good" thing to do. Indeed that's founded on the assumption that Open Office is/was, to quote "a very viable and free alternative to Microsoft's bloated, way-too-expensive Microsoft Office". I'm not sure I buy that, for various reasons it hasn't been shown to be viable in the market. Even before Oracle pulled the plug-in stunt (which was shoddy, certainly) I don't think Open Office was gaining huge traction outside of occasional companies and people driven by ideology.

To me it seems more likely that Oracle couldn't figure out a way to make money out of it and got shot of it in such a way that caused least backlash and left the least possible blame attached or Oracle in future - now the community is solely to blame for any future failings.

Just my take of course, but I don't personally feel like "Open Source" has won any fight here - I don't think Oracle would even acknowledge there was a fight.

<comment><USER4> I agree. It seems that all that happened was that OpenOffice.org lost its largest contributor, which should normally not be a source of celebration.

It can still become a "win" if the remaining contributors are able to manage the project more efficiently than Sun or Oracle did, and attract enough new contributors to compensate for the loss. But that is far from given.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The lesson is: don't let your open source name and trademark get captured and held hostage by a third party organization. If a company open sources a project and it gains significant outside developer interest, the courteous thing to do would be to pledge the name as well to a community organization.

The actual code of the open source projects Oracle took over is almost unimportant. They acquired powerful brand names, then discarded the communities. In case of Open Office at least, the community value was greater than the brand name.

<comment><USER6> You're right, the code is unimportant. Oracle also acquired Sun's patents, which is IMHO the main reason they bought Sun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it a little illusionary to think in this good guy, bad guy fashion? It's all about money. It was the same for Sun. It's the same for Oracle. And if the "good guys" can't pay the bills for the Open Office Servers anymore, they will see, it's the same for them.

That Oracle gave up that project so fast, actually makes me think, that they just found another way to make money out of the situation.

</comment><comment><USER8> > a triumph of creativity over greed.

While I do support open source and think it's an excellent medium for exchanging new ideas/software, I am unable to see LibreOffice as anything beyond a facsimile of Microsoft's commercial offering.

<comment><USER9> What's your point? The hard part is writing the code, not saying, "I'd like a spreadsheet and word processor."</comment></comment>


Namesake Office Hours with Customer Development pro, Patrick Vlaskovits - <AUTHOR> http://namesake.com/conversation/vlaskovits/custdev-office-hours-on-namesake----lets-trade-custdev-hacks--tricks/?utm_source=sm&utm_medium=email&utm_term=vlaskovits&utm_campaign=live

<comment><USER2> Freakin' sweet. Namesake is the best lately, sets a new standard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting take on customer development...

<comment><AUTHOR> What's your take on Customer Development?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This guy really knows his stuff

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right! Him and Brant Cooper, his co-writer, are brilliant CustDev pros.</comment></comment>


North Korean missile explodes seconds after launch - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/north-korean-missile-explodes-seconds-after-launch/2017/03/22/6e55d36e-0ebc-11e7-b2bb-417e331877d9_story.html <comment><USER2> Possible continuing cyber-sabotage? See [https://nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea- missil...](https://nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile- program-sabotage.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nickel for every time that happened... ha.

But in all seriousness, we've all been there... ha.</comment>


Are Macs More Expensive? Let's Do the Math Once and For All - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2008/08/14/are-macs-more-expensive-lets-do-the-math-once-and-for-all/

<comment><USER2> Even if Macs were more expensive, I think OS X alone would justify the price difference. I'll leave Windows to my grand mother thank you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this so important? So many 'are macs expensive?' articles.

Why does this keep coming up?

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing some people need to justify expensive purchases by saying they are in fact getting more for their money besides just the cool factor. Me? I would pay for the design and operating system, so I'm happy to pay more for a mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Umm _once and for all_? Computer specs and prices change every week...

</comment><comment><USER6> In my opinion, he's measuring against the wrong product line. I don't think people say that iMacs and Macbooks are overly pricey. I think those statements come into play when you start talking about MacPros and Macbook Pros.</comment>


10 Brilliant Social Networks You Don't Know About - <AUTHOR> http://startupearth.com/2008/06/29/10-brilliant-social-networks-you-dont-know-about/ <comment><USER2> Each description is prefixed with "Membership: free". I was surprised that the author felt the need to mention this.

Are there any social networks with membership fees?

<comment><USER3> > Are there any social networks with membership fees?

Country clubs are very expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> add <http://noobindex.com> to that ;)</comment>


Ask HN: Any non-acquihire, less than $1M app/startup exits? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Here are some actual sales figures:

[http://feinternational.com/buy-a- website/#tabs-3](http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/#tabs-3)

[http://www.webrokr.com/soldsites.php](http://www.webrokr.com/soldsites.php)

For sites/apps with steady traffic & earnings, the general rule of thumb for calculating valuation has been multiples of monthly net profit:

* 2002-2004: 3 to 6 x monthly net

* 2005-2012: 10 x monthly net

* 2012-2014: 20 x monthly net

* 2014: 30 x monthly net

So to flip a site for > $200k, you need to be doing approx > $7k/month.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a few hundred live examples from 2013 in the Centurica website buyer reports - [http://www.centurica.com/website-buyers- report](http://www.centurica.com/website-buyers-report).

At time of writing (August is usually quiet) there are around 300 brokered,web-based businesses for sale between $20k and $2M.

Averages are severely deceiving but If you were to look at average multiples alone you would find a typical range between 1.8 and 3.7x annual net profit.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sure, it happens every day on places like Flippa, WebsiteBroker, and eBay.

It's not the sexiest process, or the highest valuations, but if you're looking to exit for 5-to-6 figures, you might be able to find a buyer there easily.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More interested to know about exits in the $200K - $1M range. It will be interesting to note exits at the lower end of the spectrum.</comment>


Flinger just about anything with a URL, from any screen to any screen. - <AUTHOR> http://flinger.co/

<comment><USER2> The website mentions Smart TVs, are only Google TVs supported or something like Samsung?

<comment><AUTHOR> Works on any screen with a modern browser. Designed with smart TVs in mind but I use it between my desktop and laptop computers myself. Allows you to fling YouTube and Vimeo videos really easily between screens.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> lol, title was supposed to be "Fling just about anything with a URL, from any screen to any screen."</comment>


The Microsoft/Nokia deal visualized - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ltm/status/374750282460061696 <comment><USER2> This is good point.

I'm sure that Samsung and others soon abandon Windows in Smartphone and Windows phone will be MS only.

MS must start sinking enormous amounts of cash if it wants to become big player. It can do it, but if the strategy fails, MS will take big hit.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is an interesting point. Microsoft has now became a direct competitor of Samsung and others on the Windows Phone marked.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Need help with promoting a startup... - <AUTHOR>

We recently launched a crowdfunding platform aimed at Muslim community. We chose this niche for various reasons..
We are now looking for some advice on how to get the word out to organizations & individuals -- who can post their campaign on our platform.
We are bootstrapped company so resources are low but we are willing to put in the effort (and money) for the right campaign.
Any advice from the HN community would be great. You can check us out at www.ummahhub.com -- we are currently working with two active campaigns and are in talks with 5 other organizations to bring their fundraising campaigns to UmmahHub. <comment><USER2> Organizations - cold emails, phone calls and meetings.

Individuals - cold emails and facebook marketing. Even something as little as $100 a week could get you many many eye balls.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a Islamic leadership centers in most cities. You should send them mail or call them up.</comment>


Elon Musk thinks universal income is answer to automation taking human jobs - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2016/11/05/elon-musk-universal-basic-income/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link#VfVfptagSmqG <comment><USER2> Pros and Cons to universal income

Pros

\- the average citizen isnt afraid to find out next meal

\- innovation can be more focused on convinience and love rather than people desperate to succeed

\- individuals or families burdened with loved ones unfit for work dont have to sacrifice in order to provide for them

\- homelessness becomes purely choice. Poverty is less of a motive for crime

\- small businesses can hire people who simply _want_ to work there without giving a competitive wage.

Cons

\- it will be hard to employ for difficult jobs such as mining.

\- the realestate or rental prices can all increase to just below universal income

\- cost of goods can increase knowing people can pay for them

\- the cost of US manufactured goods will increase since companies are now competing with the US gov to provide a competitive wage

\- may lead to a totalitarian gov if too much slowness occurs

My argument against communism has always been "who works?". I dont think that more dependence of gov is as important as decentralization. Of goods as many services as possible.

If your local community has a local greenhouse or robotics or etc you can take care, you have a job

So long as that service can support more people than have to work it, you can make money.

Making more time for innovation comes from an imbalance of supply/demand for jobs and who controls them. If you can survive and thrive locally, the more centralized entities will be more competitive with their offers. Rents will only increase enough that people wouldnt be willing to move elsewhere. With universal income, all rents would increase and companies arent competing with local work (where an individual can master their skills), they are competing with the US gov over peoples will to be a self starter.

Im not entirely sure the Universal Income is the answer

<comment><USER3> > Pros and Cons to universal income

Some criticism: > Pros

> \- homelessness becomes purely choice. Poverty is less of a motive for crime

Unless health insurance is included and we change how we treat mental illnesses, homelessness will still be a problem(albeit smaller)

> \- small businesses can hire people who simply want to work there without > giving a competitive wage.

But it will be much harder to find cheap labour if the job sucks

> Cons

> \- it will be hard to employ for difficult jobs such as mining.

Well, it will be hard to find cheap employees. Force of the market right?

> \- the realestate or rental prices can all increase to just below universal > income

We don't know this, if you can survive just on the income in some rural areas, whereas the remaining jobs will be left in the cities you will still have different markets, some of which might have above and some of which might have below ui prizes

> \- cost of goods can increase knowing people can pay for them

This is a bad thing? There will still be a market for stingy bastards...just like McDonalds has a market with stingy students

> \- the cost of US manufactured goods will increase since companies are now > competing with the US gov to provide a competitive wage

...good?

> \- may lead to a totalitarian gov if too much slowness occurs

As opposed to the current government trend which is the epitome of freedom and privacy

> My argument against communism has always been "who works?". I dont think > that more dependence of gov is as important as decentralization. Of goods as > many services as possible.

Those who want more money. This is not communism. This is finally decoupling humanistic society("we don't let people starve") from capitalistic free market economy("the government shouldn't control the economy"). An unconditional income means that you no longer need minimum wages, and even a staunch leftist like me would ease up on labour protection laws(where reasonable...health and safety still apply, but e.g. severance pay?gtfo) After all, it will truly be your choice to work there or not.

> If your local community has a local greenhouse or robotics or etc you can > take care, you have a job

Unless there is another guy who does that already.

> Making more time for innovation comes from an imbalance of supply/demand for > jobs and who controls them. If you can survive and thrive locally, the more > centralized entities will be more competitive with their offers. Rents will > only increase enough that people wouldnt be willing to move elsewhere. With > universal income, all rents would increase and companies arent competing > with local work (where an individual can master their skills), they are > competing with the US gov over peoples will to be a self starter.

I don't understand this one

> Im not entirely sure the Universal Income is the answer

Not the whole one, and not the last one but I think like our current system it will be good for 50-100ish years I think

<comment><USER4> Lots of talk in absolutes. Prices will go up - but not exactly as much as income goes up, because (lots of other economic pressures).

Its easy to play a game of FUD (fear; uncertainty; doubt) but the answer is None of the Above. A BI will change things sure. But so did pensions, and insurance, and retirement plans. They didn't bring the economy down in flames; neither will a BI.

Remember the spending of the poorest among us does not drive the entire economy. Wages will change, a little. Prices will change, a little.

<comment><USER2> The reason the poorest amoung us doesnt drive the economy is because they have no money to spend. Why would a business pwner accomadate for an individual that would cause sognificantly less profit margins.

However, when the value of USD is _considered_ the same. But I know that _every single_ person in american can buy muy product at current price and higher. I will certainly bump it up. High until I hit a maximum where profit margins dip then settle.

Health insurance is caused the Skrelli fiasco and epipen fiasco. Probably more to come.

Universal Income sounds like a great idea from a naive perspective. But the real issue is there arent other solutions for it to compete with.

<comment><USER4> Supply and demand determine price for many consumables. Neither changes when folks have more money in their pockets. It doesn't even begin to make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> saiya-jin UBI, the topic has been beaten to death. I like the idea, in theory and on the paper, but it will require complete restructuralization of whole society.

When I look how mankind struggles to get simple stuff right (no wars, +-democracy and freedom for all humans), this is Star Trek.

But then again, this guy seems very special. I wish all/most truly powerful people would be like him, not only doing charitable stuff for tax evasion purposes. His added value to mankind in long term seems to be immense, at least that's what I hope for.

<comment><USER5> The value he added is already immense - he had a big part in establishing e-vehicles as viable. I'd say he accelerated the transition by several years or more. Fear of him is the only thing driving BMW and co to tighten their e adoption schedules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be interested to hear how this very website's basic income trial is going: www.qz.com/696377/y-combinator-is-running-a-basic-income-experiment- with-100-oakland-families/

</comment><comment><USER7> That's only true as long as... automation actually takes human jobs for real instead of simply "displacing" jobs.

Looking at history, you as yourself where is the evidence for automation destroying human jobs...

... but Elon Musk is not a historian. He's a business man trying to increase the value of his automation and robotics ventures. It does not need to be true. It's just PR bullshit.

<comment><USER8> Malthusian theory was completely right about human history until just about the time it was written.

History is not always a predictor of the future because of technological changes. Many believe that we are upon such a technological change (and for good reason. Companies creating billions of dollars of value are generating a fraction of the jobs they once did. The jobs that are being generated tend to be part time instead of full time like they once used to be. Big data obviates a lot of thinking jobs as well. More precise automation makes a lot of skilled jobs easier to automate. There's just an order of magnitude between technology today that is easily replicable and intelligent in a way it never was, from the technologies of the past).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This planet has finite resources, and a population that went from 2.5 billion in 1950 to now 7.4 billion people, and counting.

By growing we have increased our consumption of fish, arable soil, oil, freshwater, lumber... everything. I think we will need to also get used to the idea that we will need to downsize our population to a level in which it is sustainable.

<comment><USER10> Downsizing has already started. Most of the population growth from now on is simply young people growing up and having their 2 children.

Further downsizing is not gonna happen without war, which is not something that will make any of the problems related to overpopulation any better.

Basically, what we have to do is make this planet work with 10 billion people (a stretch, but not impossible), and from there on it should only get better.

Unless we discover a way to revert aging.

This isn't all that relevant to UBI though.

<comment><USER9> Probably in select countries but not in all regions. It is still growing fast and we might hit 9 billion in a couple of decades.

Then, life expectancy and live births are growing, meaning people stay here longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is no one talking about the possibility of a privately backed universal income (or pensions)?

<comment><USER3> Because it probably won't happen. Just like the idea that "charity will step in", history gives us evidence against it</comment></comment>


Papers I like (part 2) - <AUTHOR> https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2017/08/14/papers-i-like-part-2/ <comment><USER2> Link to part 1: [https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/papers-i-like- part-...](https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/papers-i-like-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The author tweeted out much more: [https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/895422691963936768](https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/895422691963936768) [https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/895456126849826816](https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/895456126849826816)

My interest is for "Wilson, Johnstone, Neely, Boles - "Dynamic storage allocation: A survey and critical review" (1995)"

I'm curious what the state of the art is now, specifically wrt the many limitations in measuring the efficacy of solutions that this paper points out.</comment>


ROC, a Redis Object Collection for Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benlund/roc

<comment><USER2> <https://github.com/nateware/redis-objects> is clean, mature, and has worked very well for us in several production systems. What makes ROC better?

<comment><USER3> I actually started building ROC before redis-objects was released. But I stuck with using and developing ROC for a couple of reasons:

1\. TransientStore is really useful for testing and for re-using redis code in scenarios that don't require persistence

2\. As well as implementing the Redis commands, the ROC objects also perfectly mimic the APIs of their Ruby-core equivalents (except for a few destructive methods that are not possible to mimic).

In addition, there's now a third reason:

3\. I recently added eval/lua support, which I don't think redis-objects has yet.</comment></comment>


Paid maternity leave world maps for mothers and fathers - <AUTHOR> http://www.global-moms.com/tag/maternity-leave/ <comment><USER2> Paid leave is nice, but I'm much more concerned about daycare. I think it's a travesty as well as a remnant of patriarchy that you can deduct a steakhouse lunch as the "cost of doing business" but not deduct daycare as a cost of being able to work. I'm in envy of countries with functioning public daycare systems.

<comment><USER3> In the USA there is a child care tax credit; to be eligible, the child care expenses must have enabled the taxpayer to work or to look for work.

[http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc602.html](http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc602.html)

<comment><USER4> It's $3k for each working parent -- far, far short of typical expenses. In the end, it means that women in a 2-earner family often take a break in their career, which then further separates income difference between men/women.

<comment><USER2> I believe it's $3k per child, up to $6k max.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Out of date for Australia. Australia has had 18 weeks paid parental leave since 2011:

[http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink...](http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink/parental- leave-pay)

<comment><USER6> Which leaves: The United States†, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and Liberia.

† It appears as though CA, NJ, WA (DC?) have _some_ paid compensation for all workers. Still, it seems pretty paltry compared with nearly everywhere else in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Among the list of things about the United States that are incomprehensible to me (a Canadian), the absence of paid maternal (let alone parental) leave ranks pretty close to the top.

<comment><USER8> I find it incomprehensible why paid maternal leave would be mandatory.

Why should companies (in particular the ones who hire women) be forced to pay for the life choices of their employees? And why maternity specifically, as opposed to all sorts of other life choices?

<comment><USER9> So women have the opportunity to give birth and raise children in a safe, welcoming society, so you have a healthy population and grandkids around to pay for elderly social services? Is 'paying it forward' anathema?

<comment><USER8> Why should companies who hire a larger number of women bear a disproportionate portion of these costs?

<comment><USER10> You are aware that it's not the company that pays the wage compensation during the maternity leave?

At least here in Germany, you get 60% of your salary (up to an upper limit) for 12 months (14 if both parents take part of the leave) _from the state_.

These schemes are usually designed in such a way that they are either cost- neutral or beneficial to companies that employ women.

<comment><USER8> You are aware that there are still costs for keeping non-producing employees around, right?

For example, either their work goes undone, or else you need to hire someone who might become superfluous if they return. In the meantime their skills might atrophy or they may become unnecessary (but getting rid of them in this case is legally risky).

(The latter is not hypothetical - I know of a specific case, namely a large but shrinking company that is firing everyone who is either below average or has been pregnant recently. )

<comment><USER6> So you support firing someone who is pregnant?

There are costs for using humans to do your work. Sometimes they get sick, sometimes they get pregnant, sometimes they have a super-productive day and sometimes they don't.

<comment><USER8> I don't think companies should be obligated to give people the choice to vanish from the workforce and return a year later to an equal or better job.

I would also enjoy the option to take a year off and have a job when I return (for other life choices than having children), I just don't see why my employer should be obligated to hold my job open.

<comment><USER6> I'm not prescribing what the duration should be, surely there is some middle ground between _zero_ and a year.

Where I am currently living (NL) it is a few months (three I believe), happily paid for by the taxpayers. Where I lived before (US-CA) it was a few weeks of partially paid leave, paid by the employer.

I'm also not completely convinced that the weeks surrounding a childbirth are the most productive working weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The patriarchy says men can't take care of babies. Us feminists think men can take care of babies and should have the same leave / similar entitlement as women.

<comment><USER12> Really? Because it seems that feminists say men can't take care of children, particularly by so convincing the US judicial system that only women can care for children that it takes extraordinary circumstances for a father to get custody. Modern, vocal feminists have, by and large, become severely anti-men in many of their policies. From convincing the world that all men are rapists and manipulating definitions of rape to induce male perpetrators. To the lovely Tumble feministas /SJW who spread vile, hate-filled messages against men. To a court system and public that's been convinced by the feminist political machine that women need to be protected and there's no way they could possibly rape someone or lie about being raped.

There's no such thing as the patriarchy in modern culture. Feminists like using that word as a scapegoat and explanation for everything they do and don't like.

<comment><USER2> M-W defines "patriarchy" as: "a family, group, or government controlled by a man or a group of men."

90% of Congressmen, 95% of Fortune 500 CEO's, and 90% of Forbes 400 are men. The government and the most important corporations that people work for, along with the richest people in the country, are overwhelmingly controlled by men. That's the _literal definition_ of patriarchy.

<comment><USER13> There's a massive difference between high-status men and low-status men.

High-status men are almost certainly part of a patriarchy, but as you've probably noticed are loved and admired by millions of women.

Low-status men in contrast have very little power and wealth, but get almost all of the flak for the patriarchy and in contrast significantly less access to women.

This term patriarchy is rarely used by a woman against men that she respects or admires even if they are extremely privileged. Most of the time it's a rationalisation for why she hates the average man that is uninteresting to her sexually.

So, yes, there is a patriarchy, but it's an integral part of the sexual politics which forces men to aggressively shoot for the top or receive nothing; it's not something that you can get rid of without the macro desires of women changing considerably; we're all part of the same system - one which orders men and women around masculine elitism.

<comment><USER11> _There 's a massive difference between high-status men and low-status men._

This is called "intersectionality". Sometimes people have advantages from being one thing (e.g. male), but they also have disadvantages due to being other things (e.g. a low-status person). You could have a gay white low-status male. They're male, so they have some advantages there, they're low status, so they have some disadvantages, white, so they have some advantages, and gay, so they have some disadvantages. Not everyone who is male automatically is disadvantage free. It's the intersection of all these things that are important in different situtations.

You've discovered intersectionality, doesn't mean male priviliege and the patriarchy doesn't exist. It just means that for many people "It's complicated"

<comment><USER13> >> You've discovered intersectionality

I read about that years ago and I don't take kindly to others trying to humiliate me with condescending statements like that.

>> doesn't mean male priviliege and the patriarchy doesn't exist

That is why I said: "So, yes, there is a patriarchy."

But you miss the whole point as what I said has nothing to do with intersectionality. I'm trying to make the point that "men" even without some kind of obvious status disqualifiers are not always on the top of the status hierarchy. This is the case with almost all big groups. It's not so simple. I was also trying to point out that it's the lowest status men that get derided for being patriarchal as high status is attractive and untouchable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is it considered a _good_ thing when the government foists responsibility for the social safety net off on people's employers? Especially when it only applies to sufficiently large employers?

<comment><USER15> > Why is it considered a good thing when the government foists responsibility > for the social safety net off on people's employers?

Countries that mandate paid maternity leave often don't; the pay often comes from public funds, the mandate on the employer is, in that case, not to provide the social safety net but to not punish the employee for using it.

<comment><USER16> Putting who pays for the leave aside, employees will always be punished to some degree when they take a leave of absence. Employers are disadvantaged (again, to some degree) by the missing employee. For example, they have to invest in training a temporary replacement only to let the go when the leave ends. That disadvantage will, intentionally or not, affect the employee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The correct title for the map is "Countries where employers are fined or threatened with jail time for not providing maternity leave".

Despite what our 'enlightened' friends the world over think about the dark, backwards, USA, it is not, in fact, illegal to provide paid maternity leave in the US.

This map, and the comments in this thread, support mandatory, government- backed maternity leave in the amount and style which the government believes is appropriate. Honest differences in preferences or opinions are subject to government punishment.

In the USA, we are skeptical of the benefits of the government making it a law to do mothering the way the government wants you to. We ask "Why is it noble to force people to forgo higher wages and other benefits for an in-kind contribution to a particular type of maternal care?"

The argument against government-mandated benefits has been made elsewhere in great detail. Facts, evidence, history, and common sense indicate that forcing people to consume their wages the way the government wants, in the the style the government wants, decreases the success of the overall community. That's why every people who has ever had the chance to overthrow communism, has. And that's why the children of all these states in Europe find that jobs are very difficult to get, and many of them, particularly the entrepreneurial ones, come to America.

Fewer rules imposed on people lead to greater growth, which leads to greater health, happiness, wealth, and longevity.

Further, there is something immoral about threatening to throw people in jail, or fine them, if they don't do exactly what the government says on something as basic as raising your children.

To those who say that we should go ahead and follow "The Man" and be happy for these gifts, you have to realize that we are paying for the benefits, not the government, so forcing us to do it the way "they" want it, in a one-size-fits- all manner is not really a benefit to anybody.

You may say that it is only fair, or right, or just, that there be 3 months, or 12 months, or 24 months of paid maternity leave. 24/7/365 child care is bliss for many mothers — perhaps most. But for others, they may prefer to spend those dollars on better daycare, or weeklong breaks interspersed with work, or a 4-day week, or they may be just fine with working a full week and spending a more focused, quality time with their child on their days off.

Demanding that one size fits all, that the government has figured out the correct style of maternal care once and for all time, (when, it should be noted, every government legislature in the world is still majority male), and that those who disagree should be fined or thrown in jail, is not, in fact, a kind or compassionate policy, but a kind of abuse.

Incorrectly titled maps may be great for click bait, but they shouldn't pass for deep analysis here on HackerNews.

<comment><USER18> Your wrong on how maternity leaves work, at least in Canada. Employers do not pay for the maternity, they just can't fire you (& you don't have to take the leave, lol like they force you to do that...)

It's the society (government) that pays for leaves. In canada it looks like this: the parental benefit is 7 weeks at 70%, followed by 25 weeks at 55% from salary on a maximum of 50-60k salary

For me what you say is backwards, but I guess you are right, there is clearly no gain in life for a mother to take the time she need to adapt & connect with her children for a year.

Then again it is the poors that suffer that cannot in anyway take some time off from work. Or maybe it is the argument that you should not pay for others.

I guess you can keep being skeptical

<comment><USER19> >It's the society (government) that pays for leaves.

So the companies in Canada don't pay taxes? Sign me up!

<comment><USER20> Like most decisions that society makes as a group, the cost is spread over most of the group, over time, so that more people can benefit from the policy. It's the very nature of how government works. Yes, because it costs everyone, such policies should be given close scrutiny. But merely being paid by everyone through taxes is not reason enough to condemn a policy; the logical conclusion to that is no government at all, which comes with its own costs and benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm sure Somalia has a great time enforcing their maternity leave laws.</comment>


Show HN: Atlas – Interactively Visualizing the Loss Landscape of Neural Nets - <AUTHOR> https://atls.ml/ <comment><USER2> It would be nice to have a blog or something reviewing the data formats and how to put in something with more ML content. Would this even work for a usual tutorial like MNIST classification? what functions are available? I looked at the PDF "main.pdf" but it doesn't have much more info than the demo.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any example code we can put in?

<comment><USER4> There are some examples if you scroll down in the initial modal window. If you've closed it, click the smiley face in the top right to get it back.</comment></comment>


Show HN:  See lower prices in your cart - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buy-happy/amplgponnfkfhnbgojhehcaaiocgmpam

<comment><USER2> I use something similar, Invisible Hand. [http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/](http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/)

I haven't had a chance to check out Buy Happy yet, but it seems to me that displaying competing prices on product pages rather than when adding to cart might be a better experience. I use price as one of the deciding factors on whether to buy, and there have been a few times where the lower price that Invisible Hand found convinced me to actually buy a product.

Perhaps both approaches are useful.

<comment><USER3> I would sure like to see one of these extensions that doesn't use affiliate links. I often want to use specific affiliates to support organizations like the EFF or Child's Play charity.

Not trying to be trollish, but I genuinely dislike this sort of monetizing and wish these extensions were at least more upfront about it.

<comment><USER4> > I genuinely dislike this sort of monetizing and wish these extensions were > at least more upfront about it.

Do you have a reason for feeling this way, aside from not wanting someone else to earn money from your action?

They are providing you with a service that saves you money, so I don't understand the hesitation.

<comment><USER5> What other reason is needed? Some of us intentionally use affiliate links from a person or cause we care about, and would like to know when the affiliat- izing changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't checked the source code of the plugin, but I wonder if they add affiliate links when they link to the other prices that are lower? If they don't, I don't see why not, it seems like a nice & easy way to skim off the top of those transactions for providing a nice extension. I'll definitely try this out for a bit and gauge how good it works.

<comment><USER7> It looks like they're going to be monetizing by partnering with specific retailers. From the plugin description:

> Buy Happy retail partners will soon be giving you deals to share with > friends and family via social media. And we'll be adding more powerful > features to Buy Happy as well — while building a fun community along the > way. Isn't it time to add Buy Happy to your browser?

<comment><USER8> Also, don't forget the data they are harvesting. From their privacy policy, they are monitoring your shopping habits and what you do before/after you look at a product. So, that will let them "support our relationships with the operators of the retail websites from which we provide you with information about lower priced products"[1]

Basically, this is a data-farm.

[1] [http://buyhappyapp.com/privacy-policy/](http://buyhappyapp.com/privacy- policy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just for reference,

At the moment, the best price we've found on this product is on Best Buy. If you add it to your cart and view your cart, you should see a best price confirmation.

[http://www.bestbuy.com/site/radar-laser- detector/1470022.p?i...](http://www.bestbuy.com/site/radar-laser- detector/1470022.p?id=1219052238508&skuId=1470022&st=laser%20detector&cp=1&lp=1)

You only see a confirmation if we could find a match. Otherwise, we stay out of your way.

This Blu-ray player is cheaper elsewhere:

[http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Sony+-+Smart+Blu- ray+Player/7829...](http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Sony+-+Smart+Blu- ray+Player/7829257.p?skuId=7829257&productCategoryId=abcat0102003&id=1218861012727)

Add it to your cart and go to your cart and you'll see a better offer.

<comment><USER9> What do you mean you "stay out of your way"? I seem to get a confirmation pop up regardless if the price is higher or lower.

<comment><AUTHOR> You get a a dialog if we find a match (whether it's higher or lower). If we don't find a match, we don't show anything.

Updated the comment to be more clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks very nice!

Our Zinc Save [0] extension takes a slightly different approach. We add a button on at checkout that guarantees a fixed, better price. If you use it, we then do the price shopping for you and place the order on your behalf. If we don't get the price we promised, we keep or eat the difference.

[0] zincsave.com

</comment><comment><USER6> FYI OP, I had to remove the extension because it caused other extensions to break.

I get this error code in the console when the extension is turned on:

 _Denying load of chrome-extension: //amplgponnfkfhnbgojhehcaaiocgmpam/jquery.min.map. Resources must be listed in the web_accessible_resources manifest key in order to be loaded by pages outside the extension._

(I'm using Chrome Version 33.0.1750.146)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the report!

As far as we know, that error is harmless. It has never affected us negatively before.

Can you give more details about which extensions stopped working?

Thanks

<comment><USER6> It's another extension that's using jquery, I think. It's something custom I added awhile ago, so I don't actually have a direct link to it in the Chrome extension store or anything. :/ Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just a quick tip -- if you link directly to the extension, nobody except those using desktop Chrome can see anything about what it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a hard time believing this. I can see the chrome store in Firefox.

<comment><USER11> You can't see it in in Chrome on Android, and of course not in anything using the web component, such as Hacker News clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nicely done.

If you're not in the US, you can give a try to our extension Shoptimate [0]. It does not compare in your cart but at the product page.

[0] [http://www.shoptimate.com](http://www.shoptimate.com)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> By the way, extensions for Firefox and other browsers are coming soon.</comment>


Cirqoid – printed circuit board prototyping machine - <AUTHOR> http://cirqoid.com/ <comment><USER2> Now that is very nice. It does board milling, pick-and-place, and solder paste. It's the latter two operations that matter. ("In this world, you do not make your own PC boards." \- The Art of Electronics. Board houses do it better using photo-etching, are cheaper, give you plated through holes, and have fast turnaround.)

Here's a nice hobbyist pick-and-place machine: [http://briandorey.com/post/DIY-Pick-and-Place-V2-Project- Com...](http://briandorey.com/post/DIY-Pick-and-Place-V2-Project- Complete.aspx) This one has a vision system to get precision alignment. In the era of the $10 cell phone camera module, there's no reason to have one without a vision system. You design some fiducial marks on the board, and the vision system goes looking for them to get precision alignment. This makes up for small errors in the board position. When putting down a part, the vision system matches up the expected pattern of pads with what it sees and fine- tunes the position. This is easier than trying to hold everything so rigid that blind placement works. A vision system also lets you check that you picked up a part properly from the feeder, and that it's in place properly after placement.

Your little assembly line is then a pick and place machine, a solder-paste dispensing machine, and a reflow oven, which can be a toaster oven with precision temperature controls. There are many small shops in Shenzhen like that.

<comment><USER3> Or Joplin, Missouri, USA in the early '80s when my family was making C band LNBs for the home satellite reception market prior to today's K band Direct TV and Dish Network.

It's really not that difficult; I'm not sure they even had a pick and place machine when they got started, the LNBs didn't have all that many components.

<comment><USER4> Pretty different paradigm though. In the early 80's P&P machines cost a few arms and a firstborn and probably were automated with paper tape! Your family was almost certainly not using surface mount. Or at least, only for a handful of RF components.

The outfit I worked for after leaving college in the late 80's shipped hundreds of boards a month doing everything manually. By the time they folded, the only change was sending them out for wave soldering.

These days I can outperform them with a solder paste stencil and a toaster oven. Blows my mind.

<comment><USER3> Nah, I went to a Route 128 expo on this sort of technology in that period and pick and place machines were _way_ beyond paper tape.

And I did a lot of thru hole soldering when I was growing up in the '70s; the LNBs were surface mount (one of the reasons they asked me to go that expo). _Maybe_ there were some thru hold components I'm not remembering, but there was a definitely a lot of surface mounting (my intro to the concept, I think), and I e.g. remember seeing their reflow oven when I got a tour of the place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a popular space right now:

Voltera: [http://volterainc.com/](http://volterainc.com/) Voxel8 Tempo Automation: [http://tempoautomation.com/](http://tempoautomation.com/)

People are realizing that iterating on electronics is painful hence trying to fix it. The interesting part is the market size, unit costs etc. Also ability to do very small pitch ICs.

We got so desperate with pick and place that we literally 3D printed a 3D printer adapter combined with our vacuum pump and Pronterface. [https://twitter.com/flairvents](https://twitter.com/flairvents)

<comment><USER6> Woah, nice work with the UM2 pick and place! Do you have any write-ups, resources or even just a BOM?

<comment><USER5> Sure, I put the design up on thingiverse:

[http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:528114](http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:528114)

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GWGUR6/ref=oh_aui_detai...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GWGUR6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

Pronterface:

[https://github.com/kliment/Printrun](https://github.com/kliment/Printrun)

It should be noted that we only used this for the tiny pitch QFNs and other small components that we couldn't do by hand, the easier components we did with tweezers. Once we validated the design with a couple boards, we just had a bunch more assembled over in Freemont CA.

<comment><USER7> thanks for this! that amazon link is for a 50 pack -- is there any reason someone would need more than one? i've just been using tweezers up till now.

any chance you have a video of it in action?

<comment><USER5> not sure whats up with the 50 pack, but I see that on image as well. I'm pretty sure its just one. Didn't take a video - wish i had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. Add a camera to do pick-and-place alignment automatically, and I'll take one. P&P is pointless with that much manual intervention.

Another obvious improvement: offer a hot air nozzle tool, with a preheater in the base. It would be really neat to go from bare copper to an assembled PCB without moving the board.

Oh, and an automatic tool changer. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Not to be negative, but I am simply not impressed. I thought milling PCBs was over about 15 years ago when pcbexpress and the like of plot and go quick turn services came to the market. There is just no reason to mill your own boards anymore (and -ugh- manually fill your own vias) with services around like dirtypcb.

If you truly need a quick turnaround, pcbexpress can get you a slightly higher quality board tomorrow for less than $200. That's around 1/15th the cost of this device, and a better product (i.e. less likely to cause a problem which will waste a ton of your time)

The pick-n-place aspect is somewhat interesting, but HaD had a project for a $300 pnp machine; I expect to see something like it on kickstartr soon.

<comment><USER10> But I only need two boards. My next project needs one board. And the one after that one board. I could get some etchant and start cooking, or I can use a mill for my one-off projects.

<comment><USER11> What about vias? If your board is that simple then just use a breadboard.

Also you can get one off simple 2 layer boards for $25.

<comment><USER10> > Also you can get one off simple 2 layer boards for $25.

Where? I haven't really looked into outsourcing it. I assume like most things it's a hefty cost for the first one due to setup and tooling, and the rest are dirt cheap. I'm a hobbyist so a mill like that is interesting, but as a hobbyist I'm not really aware of all the options. It seems much better than messing with etchant. The designs that use SMD components aren't going to work with breadboard. No vias as they are single layer.

<comment><USER11> Cheap 2-4 layer PCBs in US: [http://www.pentalogix.com/us-prototype- pcbs-4-pack-p-602.htm...](http://www.pentalogix.com/us-prototype- pcbs-4-pack-p-602.html)

There are Chinese ones as well that ship to you within a week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Rapid prototyping circuit boards is still relatively expensive and limited compared to the options for purely physical objects. I don't believe we will unlock the value of 3D printers until banging out circuit boards is as quick and easy.

<comment><USER13> I just launched a company and our first product is exactly what you described:

[http://www.voxel8.co](http://www.voxel8.co)

We don't have the resolution to get what most board houses can do, but we can reliably hit pitches (pin to pin spacing) of 800 microns. This allows us to build fully embedded fully 3d circuits using many of the surface mount chips on the market today.

As we make our machine more accurate we will eventually be able to hit 500 micron pitch and then we will be able to integrate BGA packages. We'll be there soon!

<comment><USER14> Your website has SSL errors

<comment><USER13> Whoops, I did not mean to link to the HTTPS version. We had that set up previously but when we switched to Squarespace we could no longer use SSL. However my browser still autofills in the HTTPS version. I've updated the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing I've learned from using standard CNC mills to do this sort of thing over the years is that the V bit has to be _brutally_ sharp to avoid tearing up the fine traces as it cuts. A high quality cutting bit makes the difference.

Also be careful of the dust. Especially from the fiberglass substrates. Its nasty stuff.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, a vacuum attachment seems like a good optional add-on for this system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can it do 4 layer PCBs? Probably the most important thing missing.

</comment><comment><USER17> They conveniently omit how they do the plated-through holes.

<comment><USER18> Sure, if by "omit" you mean "cover in their FAQ" which says:

 _The most common and by far the least expensive is soldering a thin wire (or some TTH component 's lead) between layers. Depending on the number of vias on your board it can be as entertaining as watching grass grow, but quite often it's the fastest way to get them done.

Another possibility is to press copper rivets (sometimes called eyelets). Rivets can be pressed sufficiently flat, thus allowing to put them under ICs (which is impossible with soldering approach). Though they need more space (i.e. outside diameter of the via needs to be larger) and tend to be less reliable.

There are other possibilities, including the actual electroplating process, but these tend to be fairly sophisticated and expensive._

The FAQ is at [http://cirqoid.com/pages/faq](http://cirqoid.com/pages/faq), and of course linked in the tabs across the top of the page. Not very well hidden.</comment></comment>