Unexpected discovery leads to a better battery - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4269 <comment><USER2> The specs read a little oddly: "... operating voltage of 1.44 V, a capacity of 285 mAh g−1 (MnO2), and capacity retention of 92% over 5,000 cycles"

That looks like it is (410Wh/kg) roughly 3x the capacity by weight of the best available currently lipos. Am I reading that correctly?

<comment><USER3> The nominal voltage of a LiFePO battery is 3.2V (or 3.6V for other types).

MnO2 -> 1.44V * 0.285mAh/g = 0.41Wh/g

LiFePO -> 3.2V * 0.170mAh/g (from what I could find online) = 0.533Wh/g

<comment><USER2> I could be wrong, but I think production lipos (and variants) are closer to .15Wh/g, and not much higher than 0.25 for anything that isn't entirely theoretical.</comment></comment></comment>


Domino's Is Using A.I. Surveillance to Manage Store Performance - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/dominos-is-using-a-i-surveillance-to-manage-store-performance-d578204c5af4 <comment><USER2> Gasp. The managers are using technology to monitor their workers productivity? Where will this abuse of power end?</comment>


Show HN: Twerkify.js - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/jacopotarantino/b1d568404aa9e44cf791 <comment><USER2> Why don't you provide an example? Don't want to run it.

<comment><USER3> It can run on browser's console, You can try on 9gag.</comment></comment>


HN: here's my first living will. What would you add? - <AUTHOR>

I will of course be adding the bit about pacemakers (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.html), but what other end-game scenarios have you witnessed that could be headed off at the pass?<p>Edit: living will here: http://nielsolson.us/LivingWill <comment><USER2> Do you think you might have pets? Would a mention of them be necessary? How would you want them handled? I see you covered Locked-In Syndrome, which is one of my own fears (I read the book and saw the movie ... and aren't there better technical ways than that today?). You should, of course, amend it if, say, you are in some sort of catastrophic accident of some sort and really hover on the edge of life and death. Would you want a chance to heal and come out of coma? Maybe that's covered in a section with some of the medical jargon I can't fully comprehend.

Edit: Also, I don't know what country you're in, despite the American framing. What about medical expense? How extreme a cost would you expect others -- or yourself -- to bear? Do you have items you would want sold -- say, rare collectibles -- to cover medical costs beyond that you can imagine?

</comment><comment><USER3> Live link: <http://nielsolson.us/LivingWill></comment>


We should all be eating insects - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/84127/five-reasons-we-should-all-be-eating-insects/

<comment><USER2> Except food is already so cheap in America that there is no incentive to eat bugs. The raw fish example doesn't work because raw fish is a delicacy.

<comment><USER3> Soooo, make crickets a delicacy, get some good pr up and running to make it socially acceptable, and charge health-conscious yuppies $40/lb for em, and it'll sell. It's all about presentation, appearances, and marketing.

<comment><USER4> Can you really see that happening though? The negative associations attached to insect eating are too great. I think it would take more than marketing to change such social norms.

<comment><USER5> Don't be so sure. How many untraveled Americans would consider raw fish a delicacy 50 years ago? Marketing has already created and changed more social norms than we'd like to admit.

<comment><USER6> On the same note, not many Americans at raw (rare, rather) beef 50 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with this article, unfortunately many of us are so psychologically averse to the thought, that it would be very difficult and require a cultural shift. I can't imagine eating them (even when ground up, or even if they had a "better name"), but maybe my children or grandchildren will (or must).

<comment><USER8> Are you sure you don't already? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine>

<comment><USER9> I believe there's also an allocated % of accidental bug material that is allowed in food by the FDA because it can't always be avoided. If you've ever had ketchup, you've most certainly had a little bit of additional protein in there with it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there anyone who grew up in a non-insecting-eating society who has acquired a taste for them? If so it'd be interesting to hear how they made the switch. I'm not talking about eating bugs just to know that they're like, but someone who actually enjoys them.

<comment><USER3> I grew up in a big college town. Every year the university would have an "insect fair", where among other things, they had a big tent with all sorts of insect food. I remember eating millworm soup, some type of bugs in pasta, chocolate covered crickets, and probably some other stuff too. I thought it was pretty tasty, and now I consider myself very willing to eat insects as food every now and then or at a fancy restaurant. Then again, I also consider myself much more open to new experiences and tastes than most of my peers. So in short, yes, I enjoy them, but I don't eat them on a regular basis, or necessarily seek them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In many places people have no trouble eating them; some are even considered a delicacy.

From the ones I've tried, some are actually pretty tasty. The best are: bamboo worm, barbecued silk worm, fried spider, water roach, and fried crickets.

If anybody is curious, I can comment more on these and others. :)

<comment><USER12> Spiders and crickets seem like they would be mostly exoskeleton. Which bits do you eat, and how do you avoid getting all that chitin in your teeth?

<comment><USER13> Don't know about spiders, but as for grasshoppers, crickets and locusts, gently swat with clothes to kill, remove anteannae, wings and leg spurs. Roasting is the best as it kills potential parasites and they taste best that way (as well as helping to easier powderize all that chitin).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Chickens and other poultry eat insects if they are raised on pasture. They directly convert this abundant food source for us. Chickens taste better and are easy enough for anyone to raise.

<comment><USER11> I disagree that chickens taste better than most insects. My experience is quite the opposite.

Chicken is usually more bland, I guess. While insects vary a lot. Some can be pretty tasty, others quite awful.

<comment> guard-of-terra In my opinion, chickens' white meat is the tastiest meat out there.

WRT "bland", that's why you cook your food. Throw in some spices and soy sauce and combine with greens or pasta.

<comment><USER11> The cooking and spices comment applies to insects too. I didn't say you have to eat insects by themselves. I still prefer them over chicken.

If we're talking about not using much seasoning/condiments/side dishes, then nothing beats nice beef.

And, in my opinion, chicken's dark meat is much better than the white.

<comment><USER14> You have never actually tasted a truly "pastured" chicken if you still think it tastes "bland". Read everything you can from Joel Salatin. :-)

The chickens we raised on pasture had the deepest flavor of anything we ever experienced and our birds were some of the healthiest I've ever seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was a very interesting documentary by Stefan Gates on this very subject a month ago on BBC4.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01599yk>

</comment><comment><USER16> Why does the food supply need to double to feed an extra 2 billion people?

<comment><USER17> I believe the theory is that we are currently on an unsustainable path that is drawing down our existing inventories of global food faster than we are replenishing them (ex. overfishing of oceans), so to feed 1) our first-world selves, 2) our third-world friends who are becoming first-word (i.e. eating more food), _and_ 3) an additional 2/7 population... that will require a growth in the food supply. I think some of those on the more doom-mongering side tend to underestimate the general agricultural innovations of both past and future, and the market forces that drive them, but there are some compelling arguments that this may not be enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've long believed this to be true, so it's interesting to see this article.

I grew up in a traditional Hindu family where nearly everyone was vegetarian. When I came to the US, many of us started eating meat. 15-20 years ago, this horrified many of my cousins who stayed in India and remained vegetarian.

Fast forward to today, many of those same cousins have started eating meat in India. I read an article the other day saying the traditional Hindu vegetarian diet is falling by the wayside, and poultry consumption in the subcontinent has skyrocketed. In another generation, I expect to see a large rise in red meat consumption where the natural resource needs are much higher.

This got me thinking, can the planet really sustain another 1 billion, full- time meat eaters? If humans have such high protein requirements that can't be satisfied by a plant-based diet, isn't eating bugs the only ecologically sustainable choice?

<comment><USER19>
        If humans have such high protein requirements that
        can't be satisfied by a plant-based diet

Do we have such requirements? Beans, lentils, quinoa, etc. aren't enough?

<comment><USER18> Clearly not. We domesticated those plants thousands of years ago and they weren't enough to replace meat in most diets.

Maybe it's more a question of taste than health, but for whatever reason, animal protein has and always will be a major part of the human diet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps indirectly. I've been researching raising Black Soldier Flies as fish food -- there are some interesting possibilities there: they feed on waste and "self harvest" (when larvae are ready to pupate they climb up, and if a ramp is set up for that they go up the ramp and drop into a container.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am totally up for eating insects. I've had them before in Korea. I wish there were a place to get them in the US.

</comment><comment><USER22> What about that soylent diet?

There's other reasons we eat than just nutrition. If it was just nutriment we were looking for I'm sure we could do it easier than eating bugs.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I try to do everything to avoid eating invertebrates.

The only reasonable exception is shrimp and alike.

</comment><comment><USER23> Excellent quote from a famed Japanese microbiologist: "During the war, when I worked at the research center, I was assigned to determine what insects in Southeast Asia could be eaten. When I investigated this matter, I was amazed to discover that almost any insect is edible. For example, no one would think that lice or fleas could be of any use at all, but lice, ground up and eaten with winter grain, are a 'remedy for epilepsy, and fleas are a medicine for frostbite. All insect larvae are quite edible, but they must be alive. Poring over the old texts, I found stories having to do with "delicacies" prepared from maggots from the outhouse, and the flavor of the familiar silkworm was said to be exquisite." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka></comment>


A rant-y personal opinion: I hate when people say "Product Guy." - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/02/27/a-rant-y-personal-opinion-i-hate-when-people-say-product-guy/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=Anuj+Adhiya&utm_campaign=Anuj+Adhiya <comment><USER2> Really, really good points, especially about "guy" and its corresponding lack of a casual, female equivalent. Unfortunately, "girl" conveys a sort of latent, sexist diminution, such that the phrase "Product Girl" is dismissive. As a man, I'd cringe if another man described a female coworker as "Product Girl," in much the same way I cringed in the Entertainment business whenever a female creative exec was referred to as "Development Girl" (or its even more diminutive form, "D-Girl").

"Gal" feels hokey and anachronistic to me, and I'm sure it falls tinny on a lot of this readership's ears. For whatever it's worth, though, I've been noticing that the word is making a steady comeback. I have no personal n-gram analyzer in my daily life (and I wish I did!), but I could swear I have heard "gal" more times in the last two years than I had in the preceding 20. I've heard it from men (and the first time I did, it struck me as weird and Mad Men-esque), and I've heard it from women (most typically, women currently in their late '20s to mid '30s).

In a weird way, I'm almost rooting for it. Our language needs a casual term for women that is not latently diminutive and, thus, a micro-aggressive power play the way "girl" often is (whether its user intends it to be or not).

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel awkward having correctly guessed that the bulk of the post would be a complaint about the gender in the informal "guy." Surely there's more interesting things to complain about.

<comment><USER4> So instead of seeing it as personally disinteresting and moving on you painted the issue as not interesting, or not worth talking about, which is an age old silencing tactic[1], and add no critical points of your own.

[1][http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/This_is_boring](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/This_is_boring)

It may not be interesting to you, no one is tell you it has to be, but silencing other people's issues because they're boring to you is really, really lame.

<comment><USER3> It's not a silencing tactic, good lord, stop suspecting people have hidden agendas about trivial garbage like this.

Like the blog author, stop attempting to control what people say. Someone saying "I'm a product guy" is in no way a slight or a problem in the world. "I'm a product expert." There, solved.

<comment><USER4> I'm not trying to control what you say. I am critiquing what you said. I also didn't assume you had a hidden agenda. Again I just pointed out that your response is a common trope used to discredit people's opinions.

> Someone saying "I'm a product guy" is in no way a slight or a problem in the > world.

In your world. Is it so inconceivable to you that other people might feel different things are problematic in their lives? Who are you to decide what is and isn't a problem when someone has just expressed that they are conflicted about something.

<comment><USER3> >In your world. Is it so inconceivable to you that other people might feel different things are problematic in their lives?

It's not inconceivable, but I find it absurd that this is topic that a rational actor would feel is worth getting frustrated over.

>Who are you to decide what is and isn't a problem when someone has just expressed that they are conflicted about something.

Here's the thing: when you say "yeah, the thing you said is a tactic that is commonly used by jerks," the other party is going to take offense. Especially when it comes to feminism, in which being a chicken little just ends up trivializing the problem domain.

<comment><USER4> Just because you were offended doesn't mean the criticism isn't on point. Nice dig at all of feminism though, again implying the small issues aren't important.

<comment><USER3> >Nice dig at all of feminism though, again implying the small issues aren't important.

No part of that was a criticism feminism. If anything, I was defending it from you.

<comment><USER5> If you think that blogs like this are a threat to feminism, I don't think we're working with the same definition of feminism. Can you please explain how you are defending feminism right now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have "product guy" in my profile :) so just a counter-point:

> Working on "Product" could mean you're a PM, a designer, an engineer, or a > bunch of other things I'm probably forgetting right now.

All of this is exactly what I did when I started my company, so I'm not sure how else to convey what it is I'm actually good at. Now, I was not the best at any of these, and we subsequently hired people who are to replace me in all of those roles, but for many months I had end-to-end responsibility for our product: the feature-set, design, engineering, QA, etc.

I do think that being a "jack of all trades, master of none" is a unique skill set as well. For example, I'm not a good designer, but I was good enough to build a decent looking MVP, and also to identify and hire a designer who _is_ actually great. Same goes for engineering, QA, etc.

And the "guy vs. gal" thing... well, "product person" just sounds awkward, and "jack of all trades" sounds arrogant, so I'm not sure what else to use.

<comment><USER7> Yeah very true! For that, I tend to say "I'm building X" vs. attributing it as "I am an X."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> hello! First time I've been on HN (thanks for sharing it). FWIW - this isn't one of my favorite things I've written. It's just something that annoys me personally, so I wrote it down.

</comment><comment><USER8> To avoid this, I often say "I really like product", which has the added bonus of neatly sidestepping most of what I _do_ (engineering) and focusing on what I like to do.

The lack of a casual, neutral way to refer to women is a long-standing problem. I don't know what the solution is, but there's a group of women who argue that "lady" is the best term. I think it depends on the context whether "lady" is seen as being casual or formal; xojane often uses it casually: [http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/where-the-hell-are- our-c...](http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/where-the-hell-are-our-comedy- groupies)

</comment><comment><USER9> In point one the OP complains that the term "Product Guy" is too vague and generic (which I agree with), then in point two she complains that people using the term makes her uncomfortable because there isn't an informal female equivalent.

If "Product Guy" is such a vague, generic term that myself, OP, and others feel it is, is it really a big deal that there isn't a similarly vague and generic female equivalent?

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, I totally agree. And it's not like you could say "gal" either. That's just nerdy.</comment>


Stop producing mediocre work - <AUTHOR> http://whatdoudo.net/?p=158

<comment><USER2> It seems logical to believe that one will produce a lot of mediocre work while on the (most likely long and arduous) journey to become a passionate "master".

Consistently mediocre work -- now that would be a crushing shame indeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. The key is to figure out if you are really passionate about the work and if you have a natural aptitude to be able to last the journey. If not, the result will likely be consistently mediocre work.</comment></comment>


X86 Oddities - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/x86oddities <comment><USER2> YMMV on this because different models of chips differ, but I found years ago just playing around that many of the more obscure x86 opcodes are actually very slow to execute.

My hypothesis is that because they are obscure and rarely used by compilers, they are implemented via some kind of alternate "cruft path" using micro-ops that requires extra decode steps, pipeline flush, etc. that slows the processor down.

So if you think about using obscure x86 opcodes, benchmark them first. They might be slower than just implementing the algorithm using standard mainstream opcodes.

<comment><USER3> _they are implemented via some kind of alternate "cruft path" using micro-ops that requires extra decode steps, pipeline flush, etc. that slows the processor down._

This is exactly the case.

Just a few minutes ago I was implementing a parse tree data structure my thesis advisor commonly uses. It encodes the number of types of children of each node as a pair of bits, ordered from least-significant to most- significant. If the nth child is a leaf node, it's encoded as `10`, and if it's an internal node, it's `11`. I implement the "number of children" function as a loop, shifting this pattern right by 2 until the value is zero.

Naturally, x86 has a useful opcode for this: BSR, bit-scan right. It tells you the index of the first set (1) bit scanning from most-significant to least- significant. It returns the index from 0=LSB, 31=MSB. In theory, this takes my O(n) solution and makes it O(1). I just BSR the pattern, shift right 1, add 1. I know it's a micro-optimization anyway, but I want to have some fun on labor day, so I give it a shot.

In practice, since the number of children is always 8 or fewer (this is for Ruby's grammar), the loop is always very short. Even while running 10,000,000 iterations to get the total time up to a few seconds, and even while using `rand` to try to trick the branch predictor (to make the looping case less predictable), I couldn't get a discernable difference to show up between O(1) and O(n). The O(n) case was definitely executing at least 3-4 times as many instructions in the test I was running, so I can only conclude BSR is deoptimized.

Edit: DarkShikari says that the deoptimization may be because I'm on an Athlon 64 processor and that this is not the case on intel processors.

<comment><USER4> _Naturally, x86 has a useful opcode for this: BSR, bit-scan right. It tells you the index of the first set (1) bit scanning from most-significant to least-significant. It returns the index from 0=LSB, 31=MSB._

BSR/BSF are the equivalents of CLZ/CTZ on ARM and other CPUs; it isn't a "crufty" or "redundant" instruction in the same way as LOOP, etc. Most modern x86 CPUs implement it in 1 or 2 cycles, with the exception of Athlon 64 and Atom. Check Agner's list of instruction latencies; don't guess.

BSF/BSR are extraordinarily useful instructions for a wide variety of uses, the most common being integer log2 (useful for parsing variable-length codes).

<comment><USER5> Here's a link to Agner's optimization manuals, for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with them: <http://www.agner.org/optimize/#manuals>

In short they contain what is probably the best x86 instruction latency reference, based on actual empirical measurements on various Intel/AMD/VIA chips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. There's no need to debate on what's fast and what's slow. Figure out what architecture you're talking about and get the numbers. Intel:

[http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectu...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectures- software-developer-manuals.html)

(Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Optimization Reference Manual and read appendix C).

Similar manuals exist for most platforms, although sometimes the embedded vendors get a bit shy. Agner's stuff is good too, and he isn't prone towards leaving empty bits in latency tables due to forgetfulness or embarrassment, unlike Intel.

2\. If you are futzing around with Athlon 64s and Pentium Ms and so on you are retrocomputing. Good for you, but please don't tell us that some microoperations are 'slow' in general. The facts are available in mind-numbing detail; go acquaint yourself with them.

3\. Modern x86 - Core 2 and onwards:

The 'slowness' of individual operations - as long as you stay away from really nasty fiascos like INC and DEC and XLATB and integer divide and so on - is NOT necessarily all that important. Even in the unlikely event that you are l337 enough to avoid branch mispredicts, cache misses, etc. - the important thing is to be able to keep your pipeline full. You can issue and retire 4 uops per cycle; 3 ALU ops and 1 load/store.

Frankly, it just doesn't matter whether a instruction is 3 cycles or one cycle if you've got good reciprocal throughput and a full pipeline. The instructions to stay away from are the ones with both large latency and large reciprocal throughput - these will tie up a port for a startling length of time (like the SSE4.2 string match instructions, which are botched and appear to be getting slower, not quicker).

Keeping your pipeline full has far, far more to do with having a lot of independent work to do than it does with instruction selection. Variable shift vs fixed shift is a second-order (third?) compared to the difference between issuing one instruction per cycle vs. 4 (the latter is unlikely but doable in some loops).

Aspire to data-parallelism, even in single-threaded CPU code. That long sequential dependency is what's killing you. Even a Level 1 cache hit is 4 cycles on a Nehalem or Sandy Bridge; if your algorithm has nothing useful to do for those cycles you're going to be twiddling your thumbs on 3 alu ports and 1-2 load/store ports for 4 cycles.

4\. Yes, most of the really obscure instructions suck. Read the forgotten Optimization Reference Manual and find out which and why.

</comment><comment><USER7> If the OP happens to read this, the CRC32 instruction was designed to calculate the version of CRC32 used in iSCSI so that CRC checks on big iron iSCSI servers could be accelerated.

<comment><USER8> Do you mean just SCSI? I'm sure x86 predates iSCSI.

<comment><USER9> crc32 was introduced with SSE 4.2 on the i7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One clarification:

lock cmpxchg8b combination didn't crash the CPU, but lock followed by invalid encoding of instruction that would do two memory accesses did (canonical case was cmpxchg8b between two registers, which is obvious nonsense). More importantly, cmpxchg8b is essentially useless without lock prefix.

<comment><USER11> > More importantly, cmpxchg8b is essentially useless without lock prefix.

I haven't looked at this for a while but I'm pretty sure cmpxchg8b nowadays has an implicit lock prefix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> any reasons to NOT using x86_64 and forget about ia32? Netbooks? They're obsolete. ARM/Android will be everywhere next year. ^_^

<comment><USER13> X86_64 is also bizarre, with mode switch as partt of jump, register aliasing, etc.

<comment><USER14> There is nothing bizarre about implementing mode switching as part of a jump instruction. Every CPU I know of with more than one mode implements switching with some kind of jump instruction.

<comment><USER11> I agree it isn't bizarre. But...

> Every CPU I know of with more than one mode implements switching with some > kind of jump instruction.

So you don't know x86? You enter protected mode by manipulating the cr0 register.

<comment><USER14> So what jwatte said is wrong? I don't know such details about x86. I was thinking mainly of ARM and MIPS.

<comment><USER11> No, he was referring to the 32-bit to 64-bit mode switch. I was talking about entering 32-bit protected mode from real mode for the first time, typically right after boot-up. As another posted mentioned, once you're in protected mode, you can go back to "fake" real mode (e.g. an MS DOS program running on Windows) with a segment descriptor based jump, which is consistent with the manner of x64's mode switching.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NayuOS – Chromebooks without Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.nexedi.com/blog/NXD-Document.Blog.Nayu.Os.Introduction <comment><USER2> I'm curious to see what this fork is doing to differentiate itself from Chromium OS.

Nonetheless, the more forks, the better. I think Chromebooks are great.

<comment><USER3> It looks as if they are just removing all the connections to Google services and making the chromebooks developer friendly with things such as git and npm preinstalled.

<comment><USER4> You're right in a sense.

On Chromium OS derivatives, there is a "guest" mode, which is not linked to any Google account and is like a browser "Private Browsing" (Firefox) or "Incognito mode" (Chrom*). We want to use it daily, and are doing this and by using/developing JavaScript applications, and by adding our favorite packages to NayuOS.

There is no way to add custom packages on Chrome OS (and we don't want to use Chrome OS because of privacy issue anyway).

We also share the binary images for some Chromebooks (not all right now, sorry). This is not the case for Chromium OS, that you have to build yourself.

(By the way, npm is not available right now).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been playing around with Freon on ChromiumOS - it's really a nice solution to pushing pixels fast and I prefer its simplicity to that of Wayland or Mir. The performance I get out of an ARM GPU is very good.

Only problem I have with my Chromebook is the screen stinks.

<comment><USER6> How have you been playing with Freon, if you don't mind my asking? Specifically wondering, does it expose some GLES context that you can work in, is that passed through, or is that reserved for the compositor... if you have anything at all to share I'd be interested in that.

My tale of woe, which is really OT in this thread, is that I've been trying to get an Enlightenment WM to operate in accelerated mode on my Samsung Exynos- based chromebook that has a Mali T-604 graphics chip.

Enlightenment says it can support accelerated mode with either an OpenGL or GLES driver, so my impression is this should be technically possible (even if it can never be done in an X server running alongside Freon). I have got free- standing Xorg to run very fast on ALARM Arch Linux, using framebuffer driver, and Arch which provides a decently recent Enlightenment... but damned if I'm able to get the two to talk together and let the WM acknowledge the graphics capabilities of the hardware.

I know this has nothing to do with Freon but I am curious what you're doing with it nonetheless, and I saw an opportunity and thought I might be able to corner someone with more knowledge and get some answers at the same time.

<comment><USER7> I have a similar tale of woe as you. I bought my Samsung xe303 specifically as a kind of budget Macbook Air to run desktop Linux on (I currently use an EeePC which is roughly half as powerful). I haven't tried Enlightenment, have to give that a go; the only window manager I could find that supported GLES was KWin, which actually runs but is quite unstable. I've also experimented with various OpenGL wrappers, with varying success.

It's a pain because it's a really nice bit of kit but I haven't managed to make it practical as a desktop machine. I also would be interested in what it's possible with Freon.

I am _really_ surprised there isn't a "just works" prebuilt image for ARM Chromebooks. Its absence suggests to me that nobody has figured this out, yet.

<comment><USER6> I know some of the Enlightenment core guys, and of course some of them work for Samsung; I've brought it up to them and it's safe to say that this is not a priority business case for them. They are all great folks, but with Samsung driving the train, I think this is no longer exclusively a volunteer project or necessarily strictly a labor of love for everyone anymore.

That being said, it should work. I've successfully installed the dev kit from ARM-MALI support which provides Ubuntu + Mali T604 drivers on an SD card or USB (this was a herculean effort, despite the instructions in question being made specifically for the specific device I have).

I haven't repeated this experiment, but I'd like to try again. I'd feel the chances it would work would be higher on Arch, where software is kept more up- to-date than on the ancient kernel and OS that ARM documentation suggested (it's Ubuntu, but not the current release, or even the current LTS release.)

You probably already found this page[1] -- r6p0 seems to be newer than when I tried last, maybe you also saw this one[2] -- the best "from-scratch" resource I've found that results in a working graphics driver, but good luck getting a modern release of E20 to compile on that... perhaps it could be upgraded without breaking everything.

This thread[3] I haven't visited for a while, but that chronicles my journey pretty well, at least prior to the point where I was trying ALARM or Arch Linux for ARM.

The arch install guide[4] is probably your best bet for what you wanted. I was able to get framebuffer driver installed and hosting the fastest yet (non- accelerated) enlightenment version 20 without compiling anything, and without any really complicated setup steps. I haven't found anyone who is using the accelerated drivers on Arch, the reason might be that they are closed-source and compiled for a specific (obsolete) kernel version.

There are scripts for compiling enlightenment, if you were going to set out to compile it from git head for yourself, by the way[5]. Don't worry they're called "e-nineteen" \-- the latest git head is in fact e-twenty. They should work on any recent Ubuntu or Debian release, don't know about Arch, but you will at least need to take out the line that checks for a specific Ubuntu release to get that to work. May need some specific compile-time flags for efl or enlightenment also. I read something about sun-xi the Open-Source GLES driver for Mali, but it seems to be intended for other chipsets than the T604.

I would thereby hazard a guess that you're right, and in fact nobody has figured this out yet.

[1]: [http://malideveloper.arm.com/resources/drivers/arm-mali- midg...](http://malideveloper.arm.com/resources/drivers/arm-mali-midgard-gpu- user-space-drivers/)

[2]: [http://malideveloper.arm.com/documentation/developer- guides/...](http://malideveloper.arm.com/documentation/developer- guides/graphics-and-compute-development-on-samsung-chromebook/)

[3]: [https://community.arm.com/thread/6477](https://community.arm.com/thread/6477)

[4]: [http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung- chro...](http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chromebook)

[5]: [http://gitlab.metrixmatrix.com/kingdonb/e-nineteen](http://gitlab.metrixmatrix.com/kingdonb/e-nineteen)

<comment><USER6> The doc I linked on [2] looks like it's been updated within the last 2 months, this seems to be where they are keeping the most current notes. Probably updated for the new r6p0 driver. I'd start there, if I was working on this right now.

It also looks like they moved on to 14.04, or my memory about which LTS release was used was incorrect; in any case, there is at least a ghost chance that the current Enlightenment will compile in this context, and at worst these docs will help show you which kernel you need to use in order to make the graphics drivers work.

Maybe these instructions and kernel drivers can be adapted to a current release of Arch for ARM?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > We gave our fork of Chromium OS a new and fitting name: "NayuOS".

Huh? What's a "Nayu"? How is that a fitting name?

<comment><USER4> NayuOS is related to the chinese word "Nayu" which implicitely means "Open the Universe". Nayu is also the name of Nexedi subsidiary in China, in Shanghai Free Trade zone.

<comment><USER9> That's awesome, that there's a word for an action that from a logical perspective is a no-op.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it is a combination of "na" (inspire/open/...) and "yu" (universe/world).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always wondered why I saw many dozens of references to the Wayland project (from writers who think it might be a good idea to replace X) and no references, until today, to the idea of turning ChromeOS into something more like a regular Linux-based desktop/laptop OS.

(ChromeOS does not rely on X but rather has its own windowing system developed by Google.)

Writers hopeful about Wayland love to talk about how Gnome or KDE already supports of will soon support Wayland, despite the fact that for a desktop/laptop OS, support from one of the major browsers is much more important than support from Gnome or KDE. (Yes, I know that Gnome _includes_ a web browser: that browser will not work however with all or even most of the sites a typical user needs to visit.) And it is far from certain whether any of the major browsers will ever run on Wayland (without XWayland or some other large X-compatibility library that relies on X) whereas of course one of the major open-source browsers already runs reliably on the windowing system and low-level graphical libraries in ChromeOS.

<comment><USER11> Firefox works on Wayland _now_. So, unless you have redefined Firefox as a non-major browser, "is far from certain whether any of the major browsers will ever run on Wayland" is flatly wrong. Also: [https://github.com/01org/ozone- wayland](https://github.com/01org/ozone-wayland)

And the obvious point is that turning ChromeOS into a full linux distribution defeats the point of ChromeOS itself: to have very few "moving parts", and only those necessary to launch Chrome. Also, the bulk of the work "for wayland" is not wayland itself: it is KMS/Mesa/glamor/libinput, which are already used by ChromeOS (except for libinput, I think).

<comment><USER10> Can I run Firefox on Wayland _without_ X, i.e., without XWayland or some other compatibility layer which includes most of X's source code files?

If so, do you know where I can download it?

>turning ChromeOS into a full linux distribution defeats the point of ChromeOS itself: to have very few "moving parts".

Just because that is why Google created ChromeOS does not mean that those of us uninterested in Google's vision cannot bend it or parts of it to other purposes. It is after all distributed under open-source licenses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Making it targeted only for Chromebooks makes it really inaccessible for masses. I would prefer to use my Thinkpad anyway, and not to throw another few hundred bucks on a Chromebook that is technically inept. Why couldn't you provide a generic image with Linux firmwares added? Like ArnoldTheBat does (and Neverware for its CloudReady, but its a closed product) with his build: [http://arnoldthebat.co.uk/wordpress/chromiumos-special- build...](http://arnoldthebat.co.uk/wordpress/chromiumos-special-builds/) Things like "It was not reliable because of problems due to unsupported hardware (such as trackpad issues, ...)" will fly away and you will get a new blood of users and devs to your project. Probably you could also tweak kernel config for better hardware compatibility or set of kernel features, since all in all its a fork and you have total control over it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thank you for doing this - it makes Chromebooks seem much more appealing as a hardware platform.

Do I understand correctly that this removes the need to hold down a special key combination every time you boot?

<comment><USER14> I have Ubuntu on my Acer C720 and it boots straight into it without any key combination - the Arch Wiki is where I found how to do that

<comment><USER15> I also have an acer c720; I totally de-chromed mine, and installed xubuntu 14.04, sounds like you may have done the same? I've been very happy with it, however the other day I was contemplating upgrading to 16.06 when it comes out, but the thought of going thru all the steps again (to reinstall the os) and the prospect of getting something wrong is a strong deterrent imo. Although most steps are documented, it's still a distraction from what I want to be doing, ie developing software.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I agree that getting it all to work nicely can be a big distraction, though unfortunately I've had similar experience with Linux on most hardware

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice project, congrats!

More than pre-installing packages I think it would be great to have a (working) package manager by default. That way users are able to choose whatever floats their boat.

I've been using Linuxbrew[1] (a Homebrew clone for Linux) on a Chromebook for a while, and it's _the_ reason why I can actually use it for something else than browsing. It's a perfect fit if you need to install development tools or libraries.

[1] [http://linuxbrew.sh/](http://linuxbrew.sh/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Sweet its cool to see people building off of the Chromebook idea. This says its geared towards developers, however I can't find what exactly that means?

<comment><USER6> On the face, it looks like it comes with some important tools like git, npm, nodejs, ... preinstalled. Some tools for handling detachable crypto filesystems also might come in handy.

The Chromebook is actually a very developer-friendly platform, with a few notable exceptions; one of these is the dearth of software and difficulty of installing things in the developer-mode user's Crosh root shell.

This one neatly sidesteps that (from what I can tell) by installing a few tools you will probably need, and making every user logon happen in Guest mode. Therefore you'll have to get accustomed to connecting your external (possibly encrypted) user files if you want to do development work.

Basically take the popular paradigm of doing all of your "overhead/setup" work on vagrant hosts with chef scripts, and flip it over on its head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a bit strange. Usually Chinese companies don't play well with open source. And now this ? is there place for suspicion?

<comment><USER4> Nexedi is an international company with offices in France, Germany, Japan and China ([http://www.nexedi.com/contact](http://www.nexedi.com/contact)), and NayuOS is made with much Free Software love. :)

<comment><USER18> Thanks. Good to know. And cheers for your product , very good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can you install this without opening up your Chromebook and flashing new firmware? Last time I looked into running anything but ChromeOS it seems you have to desolder a hardware write protection.

And if this works without that, do other non-google OSes work as well? My device is a Asus C300 without the SeaBIOS legacy emulation or anything like that.

<comment><USER20> Since NayuOS is still based on Chromium OS you should only need dev mode enabled to run it. It'll boot the same way that Chromium OS does. Legacy boot is only necessary for a traditional Linux distro that isn't using the Chrome OS format for kernel images.

For the record, the write protect is just a screw on Chrome OS devices and doesn't need to be desoldered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice idea. No idea if it's even remotely realistic but if you can add Docker then you can run pretty much everything. There are some ways of adding Docker to Chromebooks but then you lose all security benefits at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER22> ChromeOS and ChromiumOS are both Gentoo-derivatives.

I just installed Gentoo on my fleet of chromebooks. One install image, takes about 5-10 minutes to modify/flash/partition/image a device. A lot less headaches, and runs screamingly fast. I have 12 users, all with the same stock image, running KDE Plasma 5.5 with Libreoffice and JACK running transparently in the background (A Poettering-free[0] experience).

Unless you're _really_ new to linux, and _really_ afraid of building a kernel, Gentoo is a powerful way to learn an operating system, and you'll end up with a stronger and more personal distribution than anything Redhat or Canonical could offer.

0\. [http://www.bloodbathsoftworks.com/xylemon/xlennart.php](http://www.bloodbathsoftworks.com/xylemon/xlennart.php)

</comment><comment><USER23> > We gave our fork of Chromium OS a new and fitting name: "NayuOS".

Can anyone explain why this name is fitting?

<comment><USER24> A rep answered this earlier in this thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996267)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks very neat. Anyone know if this will this run on the original CR-48?

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, only a few devices that are supported right now, and the CR-48 is not one of them.</comment></comment>


Would I do this for 10 years? - <AUTHOR> http://danshipper.com/would-i-do-this-for-10-years <comment><USER2> Asking a 20 year old what they want to do for the next ten years is pretty silly, but I don't think it's as silly to ask the same question of someone older. My experience is that my ability to predict who I'll be at some point in the future scales as some fixed fraction of my age. Personal development seems to be logarithmic, at least for me.

<comment><USER3> They may not have an immediate answer, but it's not silly to ask - the sooner they begin thinking about this question, the sooner they arrive at that answer.

<comment><USER4> I see no reason why this would be true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Instead, it's more helpful to ask yourself questions whose answers don't > depend so entirely on how things have been going that day. For me, the most > helpful one was this:

> Am I learning? Importantly, am I learning what I want to learn?

This was the key takeaway from the post for me. It's something I ask myself regularly as well.

If you are a curious enough person, there are so many thing you would be happy learning though. I've found it much harder to assess: "Is this _the thing_ I want to be learning more than any other things _right now_?

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the "No" answer to this question will quickly weed out anyone who isn't incredibly driven by the task at hand, whereas a "Yes" answer is obviously not considered any type of guarantee that someone _will_ actually spend 10 years on it. It's a filter, and like most filters it's rather imperfect.

<comment><USER7> If you're using it to filter out employees or companies to invest in, it may be helpful. But if it's advice for people trying to figure out what to do, I think it falls quite short, in the same camp as "do something you're passionate about".

I have 2 successful companies (one consulting/services and another subscription business) and neither one is attractive to me for 10 years. I'm in about year 5 for both. I went into both knowing that they wouldn't excite me for 10 years.

They both excited me to build though. Entrepreneurs often like the challenge and the process of the build. So having a shorter time frame or commitment is not necessarily a bad thing. Some people are good at, and enjoy, incubating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A better question for a VC to ask would be:

"Can you stick with _anything_ for 10 years?" or "What else have you done that demonstrates long term perseverance against adversity?".

The real question is whether the person has the ability to persevere in adversity.

No matter what you are starting, your activities will be quite different far sooner than 10 years.

Passion for a particular mission is helpful, but you must be able to handle the drudgery and adversity -- even the most exciting and pleasant pursuits include many tasks that quickly turn to drudgery, and things will go against you often.

It is not passion that gets you through the drudgery and adversity, it is the perseverance. Many passionate people quit when things get tough, while many people with perseverance have made a success of projects with merely "worthwhile" goals.

[edit: clarity/punctuation]

<comment><USER9> I have managed to procrastinate for 10+ years without much trouble :P

<comment><USER8> Ha!

... but, just curious, is your procrastination the same in year 10 as in year 1?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "I think it's a bad question because we're just not good enough at predicting our desires over the long term to be able to answer it. We're capricious animals. We're generally fickle and impulsive. We're maddeningly mercurial"

The conclusion is — motivation is complex. It's hard to understand what makes people stick and no set of objective questions can possibly answer if people will be resilient if things fall apart (which usually do in a startup). Gabriel Weinberg worked for more than five years on DuckDuckGo before getting the first taste of real traction[1]. Some may have worked on a similar scale without even getting any significant success.

Although, humans are fickle by design, it seems some motivation is sticky. That's probably the difference between doing Supply Chain Management and building a Google competitor. The former seems to be an impulsive idea triggered by recently gained facts but the latter seems to be working on something you actually believe in.

[1]: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/motivation-being-cusp- somethi...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/motivation-being-cusp-something- big-gabriel-weinberg)

<comment><USER11> Here is a pretty good article about people who persevere for decades to end up with nothing [https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and his advice to his kids (paraphrased): I don't care what you do, as long as you do it every day for the rest of your life.

I think one of the main thing this advice misses is that if you're doing a "lean startup" then you could very well end up doing something different than what you started. It's hard to know what exactly the continuation will be in what you do.

<comment><USER13> An equally 'deep' advice could be: I don't care what you do, as long as you don't do it for the rest of your life.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, there are two ways to find value in your life's work. One is to continually perfect your craft (Jiro), which means dedicating yourself to primarily one skill/career/industry. The other is to continually diversify your skill set by trying new things and experiencing the breadth of activities life has to offer. I don't think you can say one is more meaningful than the other, but it does seem that they are mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER15> One could argue that some paths are impossible to reach without diversification of skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've worked for mobile gaming and fintech. Would I voluntarily do either of those? Hell no. But I love the experiences, the learning, and my awesome coworkers. I got insights into problem solving methods I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. I got an appreciation for new problem spaces. In short, I had a great time and wouldn't change a thing.

I'd work on my current engagement for as long as they'll have me because it's an intersection of the life interests I keep coming back to. I love going to work every day. But wow, am I ever glad I played those other "2 years, tops" roles.

</comment><comment><USER17> The author states that people are too mercurial to know their own long-term desires. This is true for many young people - it was true for me - but you can and should define long-term goals for yourself. I spent enormous time in the last few years thinking about what I really wanted, and it was an enormously valuable activity. Tracking your thinking in writing is also highly recommended - writing clarifies and objectifies your own thoughts, and once you've accumulated a few years worth of properly-written notes-to-self, you have an incredible resource for self-analysis.

The secret is to rationally analyse your own values, identify why you value what you value, and try to define what unites the different tasks that you have found meaningful in the past.

This post contains some hints of the framework I used: [http://aristotleadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/what-is- cen...](http://aristotleadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/what-is-central- purpose-in-life.html?m=1)

</comment><comment><USER18> Early stage investing is largely about investing in the people, and their ability to execute, and less about the idea, assuming a reasonable business plan. VCs want to determine how steadfast and committed you will be to the company when the going gets tough. VC's ask this question if they cannot infer this from your background, employment history, or accomplishments. For early 20-somethings, there usually isn't a lot of history there to tell them, so they have to ask probing questions.

Once your time spent at a single company with high stress, multiple people, and fast growth is measured in years and not months, VCs stop asking you this question.

<comment><USER19> The best question that I was asked by a 50-something when I was a 20-something was about my team:

"Do you want to be bailing out a sinking boat with them for the next 10 years?"

Now that I am nearly a 50-something myself, I still think its the most important question to ask!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Both of these approaches seem to be looking in the wrong direction.

How does what you are working on now build on what you were working on before?

Steer toward hard and long-term problems, but keep the momentum you have already built.

</comment><comment><USER21> The problem with this argument (and why it comes across as somewhat reductionist) is that it fails to acknowledge the sharp dichotomy between employment and entrepreneurship.

The question of working on something for 10 years is less relevant in entrepreneurship, because your role and the nature of what you're working on should be highly dynamic and therefore unpredictable.

One should question the mindset instead. Here's what I now tell anyone getting into entrepreneurship to consider: when what you're working on flatlines in 1 to 2 years, do you have the resources and the courage to keep going? I've seen untold numbers of very capable people try their hand at it and then give up after a year or two. That's a waste. And more to the point, it's also a good way to squander much of the value of what you may have learned in the process.

</comment><comment><USER22> One thing that really surprised me was when I did the math on how long Steve Jobs was at NeXT.

<comment><USER23> To save everyone from looking this up themselves: 1985 - 1997.

<comment><USER24> 1997 - 1985 = 12

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The question "would I do this for 10 years" or "Do I see myself doing this in 10 years" allows for the possibility that they don't see themselves continuing for that duration and it allows the person to not look that forward into the future realistically. Rather an answer of "YES!" really shows enthusiasm and passion that they currently have in the present day.

The question is about the future, but the answer is about the present.

A better question, therefore should reflect this reality. Something like: "Do you feel like your current interest and enthusiasm for this would keep you going for years here?" (or better worded...).</comment>


!!Con 2020 Livestream [video] - <AUTHOR> http://bangbangcon.com/livestream <comment><AUTHOR> !!Con (pronounced "bang bang con") 2020 is two days of ten-minute talks (with lots of breaks, of course!) to celebrate the joyous, exciting, and surprising moments in computing.

This is our 7th year and our first time running it virtually. Happy to answer any questions about the conference. We'll also be publishing our notes about how we ran a virtual conference afterward.

Hope you enjoy!

<comment><USER2> Is the Discord channel invite-only? The speakers mention it a lot but I didn't see a link anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, sorry! We sold tickets to that earlier this year.

If you're interested in attending future !!Cons, sign up for our mailing list (on our website) and we'll let you know when tickets go on sale.

<comment><USER3> You're sold out of virtual tickets?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, we limited the number of people in the discord so we could make sure that we could keep up with moderation and tshirts and stuff. But the livestream was available online for free :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The coolest thing about !!Con (other than the amazing talks) is the blinded talk submission process. Talks are purely evaluated on content, not speaker nor the speaker's attributes in any way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! If I may link my own blog, we have a writeup of our selection process here: [https://organicdonut.com/2018/03/the-con-talk- anonymization-...](https://organicdonut.com/2018/03/the-con-talk- anonymization-and-selection-process/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that link. I have not had an opportunity to read the detail on this (only that it _was_ anonymized). I hope this becomes a model for all conferences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Will there be recordings of the lifestream somewhere to dl later?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! :)

They're on the Confreaks youtube channel, and we'll release individual talk videos a few weeks from now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting content, NNs trained for poetry was interesting, would love to see it for rap music and near rhymes

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We've had Allison Parrish on a few times, here's her talk from last year on spelling words using NNs: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bykvo3Ww_1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bykvo3Ww_1k)

<comment><USER7> Yeah her work is awesome, even her github repo's work plug & play out of the box!</comment></comment></comment>


The misconceptions surrounding mainframe security - <AUTHOR> https://techerati.com/features-hub/opinions/mainframe-security-guide-best-practices/ <comment><USER2> I consulted to IBM in Poughkeepsie when they were secretively porting Linux. The one thing I found most difficult was getting them to understand buffer overflows. Every time I mentioned it, one of the mainframers would say "But with the mainframe, when a buffer overflows, we just kill and start a new process."

It took some quick thinking and a bit of dumb luck that the Linux distro they were basing the prototypes off of had a known buffer overflow that I was able to demonstrate to much amazement of the group that gave me what I needed to run getmvs (even though I had zero idea what to do from there...).

Yup, buffers don't mean quite the same thing they were used to. Format string exploits in general were quite entertaining to them as well.</comment>


Show HN: Parseur - Automated email parser with some machine learning inside - <AUTHOR> https://parseur.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> And, as discussed here [1] it's not the deep neural network kind of machine learning.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599074)</comment>


Cubes Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://cubeschallenge.com/?game=optical&diffculty=hard

<comment><USER2> I'd love to see a demo on the homepage.

</comment><comment><USER3> So addictive! I wish there was a guide on how to play. Pretty straight forward though.

<comment><USER4> Sockpuppets and astroturfing are not ok on Hacker News.</comment></comment>


A brief history of SSH and remote access - <AUTHOR> https://servercheck.in/blog/brief-history-ssh-and-remote-access

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured I'd post this on the blog in addition to Ansible for DevOps[1], since I spent a bit of time researching the history of remote administration in preparation for a chapter on security and Ansible.

Especially in light of the Heartbleed incident, I think it's a good idea for all admins to at least have some understanding of the history and thought behind the systems and protocols they use every day in their jobs.

Additionally, it's interesting to note that OpenSSH really gained steam after the OpenBSD project picked it up and refined it—could a similar thing be happening with OpenSSL[2]?

[1] [https://leanpub.com/ansible-for-devops](https://leanpub.com/ansible-for- devops)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589943)</comment>


Hetzner down in multiple locations - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=hetzner <comment><USER2> Very painful. Servers in multiple datacenters (inside hetzner) didn't help :/

I've been about 5 years with them now and never before something as serious as this have happened. There was single datacenter outage some time ago, but other than that it was unthinkable to me.

edit: [http://www.hetzner-status.de/en.html](http://www.hetzner- status.de/en.html) Backbone connection fault</comment>


Best Universities for Comp Sci in Europe - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to study abroad as a CS major in college and was looking for suggestions of universities in Europe that I should be checking out. Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> I'm almost finished with a Masters at Cambridge. It's a fantastic department with some really interesting research going on in areas from Comp Sci theory to photonic networks. Everyone's really approachable and are really passionate about their fields.

The city is great too with a long standing digital background: ARM, MS Research etc.

It's definitely worth checking out, and good luck.

<comment><USER3> whats your masters in? if you're a software engineer my buddy is hiring in cambridge.

<comment><USER2> Advanced Computer Science, I think I know who you mean...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm very biased as this is my own home town university, but over the years I've heard good things about University of Aarhus' Comp. Sci. department. (<http://cs.au.dk/>)

Points worth noting include a local Google research/dev. office (does Chrome's V8), and the "birth university" of Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame.

The department has research groups in the following areas:

Algorithms and Data Structures, Bioinformatics, Mathematical Computer Science, Computer Graphics and Scientific Computing, Cryptography and Security, Data- Intensive Systems, Human Computer Interaction, Modelling and Validation of Distributed Systems, Object-Oriented Software Systems, and Programming Languages

Feel free to contact me if there's anything I can help you with :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You make a very good pitch! =) Do you know if they happen to have an established exchange program? (I haven't looked on their site yet but I will!) Thanks, this is definitely on my radar now.

<comment><USER4> Haha, why thank you very much ;)

They do have a good deal of exchange programs. But if you're not applying through one of the big networks (ERASMUS, etc.), then it's probably down to the individual university.

There are tons of exchange students from all over the world, both Master's and PhDs, so it shouldn't be a problem at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Edinburgh is pretty good and has nice new building in a central location in a wonderful city:

<http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/informatics/>

<comment><USER6> I've never quite understood why so much focus is put on evaluating departments by the newness of their buildings (I've seen quite a lot of universities boast on that subject).

<comment><USER5> The old building was pretty shabby and not in the center of town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any specific field?

CS is quite broad and it might be wise to choose a university that has a strong research tradition in the field(s) that you're interested in.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm only a sophomore, so I'm just now starting to try to figure out what direction I want to go in within CS. So the abroad experience would really be to experience teachings of computer science in a different fashion than is custom here. Whether that will actually happen... No idea.

<comment><USER7> Well, I know from personal experience the universities in the Netherlands are pretty decent when it comes to CS. Added bonus is that practically everybody can speak English (and don't mind doing so).

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't have expected that. Any University in particular? Thanks!

<comment><USER7> I'm a msc-student in Groningen. I hear the CS programmes at Delft, Utrecht and Twente are nice as well. The cultures/approaches are all different though, have a look at their websites and see if anything resonates with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are you going to do it as an Erasmus student?

<comment><AUTHOR> I admittedly am a newbie to studying abroad, but I don't think I can do Erasmus as I am from the US.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Bugrpt.com – report bugs you find in websites or apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.bugrpt.com <comment><AUTHOR> Bugs are bad and nobody likes them.

Unfortunately, they happen all the time. They exist in every software product, and annoy users mildly, or exceedingly.

And reporting these bugs is not fun. You've got to look for the right support channel, perhaps dodge some irrelevant screener questions, and finally compose your email or fill out whatever form is given to you. Too often, reporting a bug is a horrible, painful experience that just compounds the issue.

And so naturally, lots of bugs go unreported, which is also bad for everyone. The person using the software is annoyed, and the company remains oblivious to the issue.

There's got to be a better way to get these bugs through to these companies...

bugrpt.com is probably not the solution to this problem. It's just a website you visit to submit bug reports for any website or app. Maybe I'll make the bug list public. And maybe engineers will check the list and discover some bugs and fix them. But most likely not, and submitting a bug report here will most likely lead to nothing. Enjoy!</comment>


Ask HN: How to fund the correct open-source organizations? - <AUTHOR> It's the time of the year where I do my 1% donations to open-source. I guess I should donate to the software of my stack: Debian, Postgres, Nginx, Ansible, Dropwizard...
How do you find the "right" organizations to fund?
- I'm worried about donating to the "wrong" people of a project. The typical example would be the difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin (they're not open-source but it's an example). Are there any similar schisms in open-source projects, where the programmers have basically split away from the people who maintain the ".org" website?
- Should I donate to country-level organizations (example: Debian France, who only organize Debian conferences in France) or to the american organization?
- How to avoid another OpenSSL fiasco, by donating to the right people? Should I just give it all to the FSF, and they take care of trickling the money? Is there an org in charge of spreading the money to the right people?
Thank you, I hope you've all met those interrogations about donating. <comment><USER2> There is no onesize solution. If you fund the fsf then little capital flows to bsd and vice versa. Some divides can't be papered over and one person's worthy cause is another's anathema. I dislike Theo de Raadts public image enough to find funding openbsd distasteful and linus' statements have the same problem but both undeniably do more good than bad and deserve funding. Even stallman deserves funding.

I think more orgs need Patreon and like giving channels but I worry the channel nickel and dime waters down the give. I used btc to pay a bsd charity and it was hugely painful so don't believe the hype of frictionless payment in crypto either.

</comment><comment><USER3> >The typical example would be the difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin (they're not open-source but it's an example).

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)</comment>


Nix Language Primer - <AUTHOR> http://www.binaryphile.com/nix/2018/07/22/nix-language-primer.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone know the rationale for creating Nixlang? Guix's use of Scheme proves there isn't a novel feature unavailable elsewhere, so it seems like a lot of wasted effort to implement a language that will likely only ever be used for one suite of programs. (And tooling; though almost none exists now, making the choice even more expensive.) I've tried to find one, but "nix" is a difficult thing to google for given the couple decades people have used it as a catchall term for unix and unix-like operating systems.

<comment><USER3> Nobody wants an arbitrary complex program for describing some trivial build steps. A programming language here is an anti-feature.

Ideal would be some DSL that isn't even Turing complete, but that's not practical at the moment. Maybe we'll get there some day.

<comment><USER4> Really what no one wants is a build step that takes forever. I'm more upset about how long nix-env -i takes than what the computational complexity of the programming language is

<comment><USER5> nix-env -i is slow because it has to evaluate every package definition. nix- env -iA is way faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few correction on the otherwise good article:

* Nix 2.0 includes the repl. Just run `nix repl`

* The URL literal returns a string

* It would be good to explain how the `<...>` notation resolves paths from the NIX_PATH. For example `<nixpkgs>` looks for the `nixpkgs` key in `NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=/path/to/channel`

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips. We're still running on 1.11 because of problems with the recent glibc updates not matching the kernels in our deployment environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I switched all of my machines to NixOS for a few months. It was a wonderful experience being able to keep all my environments in sync. Nix the language is one reason I reverted to Ubuntu a few weeks ago. It just didn't mesh well with me....so when the inevitable problem occurred, it was a pain to deal with.

Other pain points:

\- the NixOS learning curve is steep. There are two many tools with too many obscure options with sometimes overlapping features.

\- small group of maintainers with no real documented security process...just an assurance that they path as quickly as possible

\- many packages are old if they're not mainstream

I would love to see the concept of Nix reimplemented in a non-niche language without the fsf zealotry... I'd switch my company to something like this in a heartbeat. I think there's a real business opportunity for someone willing to take that on.

<comment><USER8> Imagine if all the right ideas from nix were taken out and combined with supervision trees, we would have super reliable distros and PaaS style one click infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand why any languages exist for describing packages, its a layer above describing real dependencies like with make, ninja, etc. Just have an os written in something like premake but with a nicer DSL.

<comment><USER6> It allows to have some guarantees around the evaluation. The Nix expression language enforces things like not allowing arbitrary network access during evaluation. This is hard to do in a general-purpose language where network and file access are usually backed in.

<comment><USER9> This is easily done by chain-loading and system()

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is also [https://jsonnet.org/](https://jsonnet.org/)

<comment><USER11> Yep they're pretty similar in goals, (and syntax?) except for that nix has built in support for derivations as a language feature. Nix is a language for derivations first a language for configurations second. Jsonnet is only a configuration language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why the need for another new language? Why not just use Guile or Scheme instead?

<comment><USER13> Probably the same reason why Guile or Scheme didn't get as wide-spread as other languages in general.

<comment><USER14> Because nobody want to program in (((( Guile )))), to the point that even GDB disable its support as extension language.

<comment><USER12> However undesirable it appears at first, it does prevent the creation of an infinite number of new, incompatible languages. Config languages tend toward turing completeness and just become turing tarpits. That's why I'm asking about using a Lisp which is extendable to its problem domain.

Source on gdb disabling it? Just writing `gr` in gdb enters the guile repl.

<comment><USER14> It has been disable by default and is not even compiled-in anymore on all major linux distributions ( RHEL, Debian, ubuntu ).

>(gdb) gr Guile scripting is not supported in this copy of GDB.

<comment><USER12> What's your version? I'm on 8.2

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've had the displeasure of being forced to use nix and to me it seems like an overengineered piece of garbage. I don't see why anyone should use this vs competitors

<comment><USER16> Why would anyone use it versus its competitors? Here's why:

1\. You can uninstall a thing and it will no longer affect your computer.

2\. Your environment will work the same way on your colleague's computer.

3\. Your environment will work the same way years down the line.

4\. Your environment will probably work the same way years down the line, even after you've applied security updates. If it doesn't, it will probably be clear what's broken/different.

5\. You can install many different environments on the same machine, and they will probably all work. On the rare occasions where they don't, it will be because they interact with system services or limited system resources, and it will be clearly defined how that happens.

6\. All this is true across most programming languages, system services, and all sorts of tools.

7\. You can combine this with direnv (or direnv-mode for Emacs) to make it so that you can just cd into a directory and magically get all the dependencies.

8\. You can put the recipe for your environment in Git.

Other than Nix and Guix, I don't know of any tool where these things are true. Docker and Virtual Machines get sort of half way, but tend to rot over time.

But yes, it's difficult to learn and in many cases the usability is poor.

Final bonus point:

9\. Nix is so good that it can even make Autotools work correctly.

<comment><USER15> I don't care about those features, I just wanted to download the packages and it's dependencies and in the end it never did that.

Nix is probably good for many things, but it's not simple and to me it's trying to do too many things.

<comment><USER17> The reason you can "download a package and its dependencies" with other package management systems, is not because they are technically superior, but because they've had countless man-hours of contributors making sure that their central repository contains packages which work well together.

As soon as any assumption changes, like for example, adding a third-party application repository, then you need to concern yourself with all of the issues mentioned above, or you'll end up wasting your days on manually building and installing packages locally.

The point of Nix is to do this once only. If you build and it runs, it should do the same for everyone, regardless of what other repositories they use. Package management becomes completely modular and does not depend on some centralized state like a central software repository, or the state of your machine at time of install.

Nix isn't trying to do too many things. It's actually much, much simpler than using a bunch of semi-compatible tools which all attempt to do similar things in ad-hoc ways. Nix is just a dependency management system where dependencies are specified by their content hash. Your machine contains a content- addressable store of objects which can be _precisely_ referenced by any other object. It takes the guesswork out of dependency management. Other dependency managers effectively run a search engine to try and find an appropriate dependency from some search terms.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


There's plenty of toilet paper in the US – so why are people hoarding it? - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/theres-plenty-of-toilet-paper-in-the-us-so-why-are-people-hoarding-it-133300 <comment><USER2> The three sea shells isn't cultural yet much the same way Taco Bell hasn't won the franchise wars yet. So people don't want to risk their lives buying tp next month.

<comment><USER3> I still love that movie....</comment></comment>


Why Kodak failed - <AUTHOR> http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2935

<comment><USER2> Kodak was once the most successful company in the US but when the digital era came, their business flank and many employees lost their jobs. I agree with that innovation is not enough, adaptability is also important. Another vital thing in a company is that they should know their focus because it will serve as their guiding star along the way.

When a company has focus, they know where they are going and when changes come, they know how to innovate and to adapt.

I hope Kodak will have another chance.</comment>


SXSW in Vegas - <AUTHOR> http://sxsw.com/music-film-interactive/news/announcing-sxsw-v2v

<comment><USER2> For those who are bugged by mystery abbreviations, V2V means Version 2: Vegas.

<http://sxswv2v.com/schedule>

Looks like it's Sunday through Wednesday, so there will be plenty of available hotel rooms.

</comment><comment><USER3> as a native-born Las Vegan, my only comment is this:

"Who the fuck thought that Las Vegas in mid-August was a good idea?"

<comment><USER4> I actually think the weather isn't the largest challenge they are going to have here. All of Las Vegas is air conditioned, and it was probably an affordable time when the city is trying to get large groups in.

The problem is, that deals don't get closed during summer months because people are on summer holidays. You can't get the right people together, so how many of these people are going to organize their summer holidays around this event.

The only plus I see is that it's right before Burning Man, so maybe they'll get a caravan travelling from one event to the other.

<comment><USER5> > The only plus I see is that it's right before Burning Man, so maybe they'll > get a caravan travelling from one event to the other.

That's a helluva caravan if you are driving. It's about seven hours from Vegas to Reno and another two to three hours out to the blackrock desert from Reno. That doesn't include any stops which you'll have to do twice for fuel at the least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Me thinks SXSW is suffering from overreach.

      * SXSW music
      * SXSW film
      * SXSW interactive
      * SXSW Eco (just a couple of weeks ago in Austin)
      * SXSW V2V (sounds like a shampoo)

How long before they launch a Vodka, a water, and a shoe?

SXSW is an idea that has metastasized into a cancer on Austin and the industries it attaches itself to.

<comment><USER7> "It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great venue. And flights are cheaper than Austin too.

</comment><comment><USER9> The SIA (snow sports) conference used to be in Vegas until they realized everyone spent too much time partying to actually get any deals put together. The conference is in Denver now and while there is still some good partying, they also get a little bit of work done.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, yet another reason to drink and party at SXSW. Oh wait, that's the only reason to go to SXSW.

<comment><USER11> I don't even buy the conference tickets anymore</comment></comment>


Ask HN: what are your most invaluable productivity tools? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> git</comment>


The Short History of GCC Development (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_development.shtml <comment><USER2> > He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at > the time when his programming abilities started to decline.

Citation needed. Even accepting the results of various studies that show age- correlated decline in some measures of programming ability, one cannot take those results and conclude that a specific programmer's ability began to decline at 30. Also, AFAIR the studies don't agree on a specific age and report increasing variance which makes it even less reasonable to make the conclusion the author made.

<comment><USER3> Maybe he is talking about Stallman specifically.

<comment><USER4> Whatever his change in programming ability, I would guess that his change in typing ability from carpal tunnel problems overshadowed it.

There's also the change in programming ability due to switching from Lisp to C. (And then having to dictate C code to a typist).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article is full of misrepresentations. First off, GCC was written from scratch (because the pastel compiler had some design issues), which is evidenced _in the quote the author provides_. However, the whole thing reads as a "we'd be better off without Stallman" piece, using words like "tired", *exhausted" and claiming that because Richard didn't write any papers on compilers that he must've not done many new things while writing GCC.

I'm not sure why the author seems to have a grudge against Stallman, but I'd invite them to reconsider.

</comment><comment><USER6> >> Hoping to avoid the need to write the whole compiler myself, I obtained the source code for the Pastel compiler, which was a multi-platform compiler developed at Lawrence Livermore Lab. It supported, and was written in, an extended version of Pascal...

I'm curious if the Pastel source code is available somewhere on the net...

</comment><comment><USER7> "Compilers take a long time to mature. The first more or less stable release seems to be 1.17 (January 9, 1988) That was pure luck as in 1989 the Emacs/Xemacs split started that consumed all his energy. "

That's a generous spin on it.</comment>


Tech Company Publishes Every Employee's Salary - <AUTHOR> http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/12/28/2319252/tech-startup-buffer-publishes-every-employees-salary-right-up-to-the-ceo

<comment><AUTHOR> Publicly disclosing every employee's salary is an interesting concept, do you think it's effective in curtailing workplace curiosity?</comment>


The Competitive World of AOL Disc Collecting - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/inside-the-weird-world-of-aol-disc-collecting-511 <comment><USER2> The accounting fraud's[1] the best part of the AOL CD lore.

      For fiscal years 1995 and 1996, AOL capitalized most of the costs
      of acquiring new subscribers as "deferred membership acquisition
      costs" ("DMAC") -- including the costs associated with sending disks
      to potential customers and the fees paid to computer equipment
      manufacturers who bundled AOL software onto their equipment -- and
      reported those costs as an asset on its balance sheet, instead of
      expensing those costs as incurred.

The financial impact?

      Had these costs been properly expensed as incurred, AOL's 1995 reported
      pretax loss would have been increased from $21 million to $98 million
      (including the write-off of DMAC that existed as of the end of fiscal
      year 1994), and AOL's 1996 reported pretax income of $62 million
      would have been decreased to a pretax loss of $175 million.

[1][https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/34-42781.htm](https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/34-42781.htm)

<comment><USER3> cool, interesting. can you comment on why they did that?

<comment><USER4> Not the parent, but I think the reason is simply making your numbers look better. If you report the numbers this way, you look like you lost less money by writing off the disks as an asset instead of a marketing spend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny that at one point AOL made fun of themselves for sending out so many discs: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB3OJ9epr_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB3OJ9epr_0)

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know if all the releases of AOL software are archived or there is something like bitsavers for these software releases? I wonder out of 4000 unique disks how many unique software releases there were. 10-20 or 1000s?

<comment><USER7> This guy wants to archive all of them: [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish I had known. I just threw away an AOL 3.5 inch floppy disk. Before there were aol cds, they used floppies.

Odd what people collect.

<comment><USER9> There's some 9 or 10 shoeboxes full of 3.5" floppy disks in my parent's basement. Probably 3 of those are just AOL disks.

<comment><USER10> Jason Scott put up a post asking for them, you can ship them off if you want them archived. [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My family mostly started gluing felt to the back of them and using them as coasters.

</comment><comment><USER12> Warning, this story is a tad graphic.

I had a friend, a very big guy, who kept a few hundred AOL CDs in the trunk of his car. He would put one in his pocket when he went to friend's houses. When he used the bathroom, his poop was often too big to go down the toilet so he would use the CDs to cut up the poop first.

True story.

</comment><comment><USER13> Obligatory Absurd Notions: [http://www.absurdnotions.org/page93.html](http://www.absurdnotions.org/page93.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> And I thought I was special with my AOL 1.1 floppy disk.

</comment><comment><USER15> Obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1095/](https://xkcd.com/1095/)</comment>


DataRPM raises $250,000, launches natural language data service - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/01/datarpm-raises-250000-as-it-launches-natural-language-data-service-for-businesses/?fromcat=all

<comment><USER2> Presumably this is built on top of something like Solr - it'd be interesting to know how much they built themselves.</comment>


Naval Charts - <AUTHOR> http://map.openseamap.org/ <comment><USER2> It is hard to check if you don't have a map to check against, but in the waters I used to sail in Norway, all lighthouses seems to be there, but no rocks or areas with shallow water are marked, which makes the map useless for navigation there. This may come, but before it is there, it's not safe to navigate using these maps.

I also dislike that the line extending from the lighthouse sectors are not drawn, as that is very useful when navigating at night. They do have the intervals of the light houses, which is good. They also have a download function, which is important at sea, since you cannot expect to be online at all times at sea, but I did not get it to work. Since I've always used paper maps on sea, I can't tell if they have the right download formats if it should work.

All in all it is a nice testbed for testing out concepts, but still not ready for prime time. A sea map has much more stringent requirements for accuracy than street maps, and this still below the bar.

<comment><USER3> Even for the data that is there, the presentation could be improved: you have to zoom in a _lot_ before light signatures are displayed, for example.

Edit: It would be useful if you could see these by clicking on the corresponding light, without needing to zoom in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be honest, this isn't any more detailed for the waters where I sail (NY/CT/MA) than Google Maps. I.e. not detailed at all.

There are free official NOAA chart available online: [http://www.charts.noaa.gov/](http://www.charts.noaa.gov/)

<comment><USER5> for US-waters there are free charts. For other waters one has to pay dearly! e.g. maps for Mallorca, Ibiza, Menorca, Formentera 55€

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a bit confused. I was excited to click the link, but they look nothing like the admiralty charts that I grew up with sailing. In fact the water areas seem to have no detail at all. I enabled all layers.

This is what a chart used for navigation in sailing looks like today:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/NOAA_char...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/NOAA_chart_25664_1976.png)

Notice specifically the depths throughout.

<comment><USER7> It's a really great start. I have looked for an initiative like this one for a long time. I'm a french sailor and were I live marine charts are not free like in America with NOAA. In fact in most countries in the world charts are not free.

Concerning the depth, it's indeed a very important aspect of the chart but in my opinion it's by far the most difficult to obtain with crowdsourcing. The guys at Openseamap seem to have made a piece of hardware just for that purpose ([http://www.ak-modul-bus.de/cgi- bin/iboshop.cgi?show1100,5708...](http://www.ak-modul-bus.de/cgi- bin/iboshop.cgi?show1100,570851478021211)).

Keep on the good work guys, we need an open source solution for naval charts. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While it's a good project, it's far from being usable speaking as a skipper. I use Navionics on my Ipad for a chartplotter. I'm trying to get started with OpenCPN on my macbook air, but getting navigational charts which are compatible for Europe is proving troublesome.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a nice mapping site, but how do these qualify as charts? Am I missing something? I didn't see any depth or current information, aids to navigation, etc.

<comment><USER9> Ah sorry, missed the toolbar. Looks like depth marks, at least are appearing over land and not over water. They're labeled 'beta' so I can't throw stones. Anyway, I am all for access to good charts, but until these can be used for actual navigation they aren't really charts. More like maps based on chart data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not a sea captain or anything, but I find it interesting that there is little reference or comparison to S-57/S-63 data (vector-based nautical chart standard maintained by the International Hydrographic Association) in either scope or in terms of future goals. The site is loading slow for me so I didn't get a chance to extensively navigate, from the couple of tile I managed to see I couldn't see any depth information (sounding data). In theory, there is some potential here because the S-57 is an old format ill-suited for the web or desktop-based systems for that matter. They are in the process or revamping the format (S-101), but we all know how well top-down committee based formats are designed. Any bottom-up format that spreads and proves itself in the field would be exciting...But it'll be interesting what the open source data movement could do to in this area that could disrupt the vast network of national hydrographic associations that update the depth values of the world's oceans on a weekly and monthly basis and sell them to sea vessels the world over.

</comment><comment><USER11> I recommend moving to openlayers 3 ([http://openlayers.org](http://openlayers.org)) - it's not backward compatible with OL2, but the improvement in user interaction and tile display is worth it, especially on mobile targets.

(not affiliated, but use it heavily for my own projects)

<comment><USER12> I'd be interested in how you're using OL3 in your projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I looked at some Great Lakes areas I haven't sailed on in 30 years, brings back some memories.

I can imagine market fragmentation. Much as google maps is not likely to put either aviation or topo map makers out of business, there is probably some market for "sailors just screwing around". There is space for something other than "on board ship naval chart replacement" yet more "maritime" focused than google maps.

</comment><comment><USER14> I just wanted to point out the "Marine Traffic" layer, which appearantly shows real-time positions of vessels. For example, off the coast of NJ I spotted this tug: [http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/details/ships/368468000/ves...](http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/details/ships/368468000/vessel:LOIS_ANN_L_MORAN)

<comment><USER15> You might like [https://www.marinetraffic.com/](https://www.marinetraffic.com/) itself ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very nice. Hopefully they'll fix the attribution (you _must_ include the credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors").

</comment><comment><USER17> If you look around the site a little bit, you find that this is actually just a maritime-oriented rendering of data from OpenStreetMap. Not as usable as professional, commercial maps, but still not too bad.

Hopefully this encourages more mapping of features not on land for OpenStreetMap, just as OpenCycleMap has helped the availability of cycling data.

</comment><comment><USER18> Really nice, although the site seems to load somewhat slow for me...

</comment><comment><USER19> What is naval about these charts? They look like maritime or sea charts to me. (Naval is the adjective form of navy, the oceangoing arm of a military.)</comment>


Software freedom crusader Richard Stallman on European lecture tour  - <AUTHOR> http://www.politics.co.uk/opinion-formers/press-releases/business-and-industry/software-freedom-crusader-richard-stallman-on-european-tour-$21387077$21384356.htm

<comment><USER2> I admire Stallman for his strong will, the guy will do anything to live at the height of his ideal.

Even if you do not share his philosophy you still can learn a lot from the man.</comment>


Is Code Coverage Irrelevant? - <AUTHOR> http://ronjeffries.com/articles/015-11/coverage/ <comment><USER2> Coverage testing is one of the more maligned techniques out there. It's one of my go-to tools. Once I have a test suite I think is robust, I'll go through the code again with a coverage tool, which will usually identify error paths I didn't exercise and keep me honest. For examples, a code refactor might have introduced new error cases which weren't needed in the old code, and some code - like cleanup handling around ^C handling - is not worth fully automating; code coverage will help spot where manual tests are needed.

But I really wanted to comment about one of the comments described in this essay:

> One respondent seemed to conclude that the team who had 95% coverage [vs. > 45%] clearly didn't understand TDD and therefore they'd look in that program > for defects.

The original TDD proponents were very enthusiastic that TDD would lead to high coverage. For example, Beck wrote "TDD followed religiously should result in 100% statement coverage." I think it's safe to say that Beck understands TDD.</comment>


Stimulus Watch.org - <AUTHOR> http://www.stimuluswatch.org/project/view/1194 Vote up and down on individual projects, make arguments for or against, or just least leave a rant or a rave comment... Well organized and informative. <comment><USER2> Great idea. Unfortunately it's too late to stop it.

<comment><USER3> That's sort of where I am.

I'm not against the site. I think it's great that someone thought to do it. I have nothing but praise for the people who put it up.

But I have no interest.

The question I have about the Stimulus Bill is "Will it Stimulate the Economy?" If it does than I can bring myself to accept the pork. If not than it's failure is the bigger issue to me.

Bottom Line: There is Pork in every bill out of Congress and it's a problem. This site just draws my attention to a problem which I already know exists and which I would already fix if I could.

<comment><USER2> "Will it Stimulate the Economy?"

Keynes ideas didn't work in the 30's, aren't going to work now. Actually the government tends to get about .50 on the dollar compared to private investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anybody on the world can vote. Is that a good idea? Isn't it about US taxpayer's money.

</comment><comment><USER5> Part of me thinks this site is like showing people a slaughterhouse video and then saying "Hey, still want to eat meat?"

Admittedly, I'm a vegetarian.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you go to the FAQ, where you can download an excel copy. If you're interested, there are 18750 projects asking for 150 Billion of YOUR tax dollars.

Also, according to the FAQ, this list is not exhaustive, the mayors can still pile on more projects.</comment>