Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/04/wsl-2-general-availability/ <comment><USER2> In WSL1, running "wsl git status" on a moderately sized repo on an NTFS (Windows side) drive or SMB file share is nearly instantaneous.

In WSL2, running the same command takes over 30 seconds. WSL2 is a _massive_ hit to the seemless experience between the two operating systems with filesystem performance from Linux to Windows files orders of magnitude worse. Yes, unzipping tarballs or manipulating and stat syscalls are cheaper now on the Linux side. The downside performance loss is, however, staggering for the files I had in C:\

Don't even get me started on how long an npm install took.

One of the truly wonderous things about WSL1 was the ability to do something like this in a PowerShell window:

C:\some-code-dir\> wsl grep -R "something" | Some-PowerShell | ForEach-Item { }

Now performance across the OS boundary is so bad, I wouldn't even think of using "wsl grep" in my C drive. Or "wsl npm install" or "wsl npm run test" or any of that.

It's very depressing because WSL1 is so, so promising and is so close to feature parity. WSL2 should definitely stick around and has use cases, for Docker it's unparalleled. But for daily driver mixed OS use, WSL2 has made me very unhappy. I think I'll be deconverting my various WSL distributions because the performance hit was too much, it just was absolutely unbearable to even run simple commands in my Windows side.

<comment><USER3> Clearly the best solution is for Microsoft to (a) write a proper ext4 driver for Windows and (b) find some way of embedding SIDs into ext4, then you could just format the drive as ext4, boot off it, and have the improved performance.

(This is mostly a joke, but the performance of NTFS for certain operations has always been abysmal, and having a virus scanner injecting itself into all the operations only makes it worse.)

<comment><USER4> AFAIK the main problem is that Unix's file permissions do not cover Windows' permission model. That would be tolerable on a data partition, but a system partition is going to use all kinds of very particular permission setups on system binaries etc.

You might be able to model that stuff as xattr, but then it could be problematic to mount that ext4 partition into Linux because applications might be copying files without respecting the xattrs.

<comment><USER5> >AFAIK the main problem is that Unix's file permissions do not cover Windows' permission model.

Well, since Microsoft has been borrowing more and more ideas from the Linux ecosystem, it would not surprise me that a Windows 10 successor would include some kind of compatibility layers for different file systems.

We can dream...

<comment><USER6> Why don't they just replace Windows with their own Linux distro? :D WSL2 cannibalizes Windows from the inside out, and all that's left is Sphere. Seems like the most efficient solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am giving up.

WSL1 was a great invention but Microsoft gave up on it, either because of the filesystem performance problems or because of the debuggers. [https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028](https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028) (lldb, rr, delve all affected). This looks like a dreaded case of the first 90% is easy, it's the second 90% that is hard. Imagine implementing a translator for a vast majority of Linux syscalls just to find certain flavors of ptrace are just not doable. I do not have insider knowledge to ascertain this happened but this would be my educated guess.

WSL2 is a VM like any other VM with an uncertain promise for better networking experience and even less certain promise for cross OS file performance which is much, much worse than WSL1 which was already abominable. [https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197#issuecomment-60...](https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197#issuecomment-604592340)

It was a very nice dream, pity it didn't work out.

Because I am using an eGPU Windows 10 needs to stay as the primary OS on the laptop. I bought a little fanless machine from Aliexpress (with laptop-like hardware) for <$300 USD it'll be my home Linux server. What can one do?

I guess [https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/am10z3/success_thunde...](https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/am10z3/success_thunderbolt_egpu_passthrough_on_dell_9560/) could be a solution if I wanted to go back to Linux primary but I really badly don't want to. Constant hardware headaches were par for the course -- I was solely Linux 2004-2017. I don't want to be again. If there would be a cheap remote sysadmin service... but it doesn't exist. QuadraNet will sysop a server for $39 a month, that'd be awesome for a laptop... but I have never seen anyone doing that.

<comment><USER8> WSL was very cool from a pure tech standpoint, but I've never been clear what the actual use case for it was. WSL2 seems to be more along the lines of coLinux, which I felt the same way about when it was new.

<comment><USER7> Well, if you want to use multimedia and do web development on the same machine, what are you going to do? Linux support is somewhere between nonexistent and utterly broken for the first one and the same can be said for the second on Windows. So your choices are, 1. run Linux primary, put Windows in a VM 2. run Windows primary and put Linux in a VM 3. Give up and just run a separate Linux server.

<comment><USER9> The Linux multimedia story improves significantly if you avoid Nvidia GPU hardware. My work desktop (AMD Radeon) and laptop (Intel HD Graphics) work fine, and perform as the hardware should.

<comment><USER7> Sound and bluetooth , like , works now? That wasn't my experience back then. Both of them were entire stacks of spaghetti.

<comment><USER10> This seems like comment from early 2000s. I don't remember last time I head problems with BT or sound, and I went through dozen of installations in last 3 years (for me and others). I had to give up on Nvidia drivers but Intel graphics serves me great.

<comment><USER7> Bluetooth broke on me:

[https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=204875](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=204875) 2015 November

[https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032) 2015 December

[https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=210685](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=210685) 2016 March.

And these were times when I needed community help, most of the time I could get it working by pairing again or some such nonsense. It never worked reliably, in general.

Note I switched to Windows as my daily driver in 2018 January.

It seems sound is still a gigantic mess of PulseAudio and ALSA [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio)

<comment><USER11> If you things to just keep on working Arch might not be the distro for you. Have you tried something like ubuntu?

<comment><USER12> Canonical broke wlan and OpenGL for many of us when they decided to replace fully working closed source drivers, with work in progress open source replacements.

So even Ubuntu isn't necessarily a guarantee of stability.

<comment><USER11> Sigh - I hear you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > He further mentions that unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance > increase.

Boy, do I love unzipping tarbars! On a more serious note, it's great that WSL has gotten much faster, although it's a little disappointing that they threw out the older, more interesting architecture to get it and just used a VM.

<comment><USER14> I agree wholeheartedly. I know it was probably a fool's errand especially in a world where Docker for Windows was doing the same thing WSL2 does but worse, but WSL1's design just satisfied me in a way that Hyper-V will not. Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software. Hope the integration is impressive at least, to hopefully make up for it. I admittedly don't run Windows these days but WSL is definitely one of the highlights of modern Windows and it's hard to not follow its progress.

I also wonder how integration changes with sockets/networking, hardware access, Windows Firewall, etc. Last I checked, relations with Windows Firewall were strained by the lack of proper support for picoprocesses.

<comment><USER15> Stop blaming Hyper-V for "crippling other VM software". You ever tried to run VBox and KVM together? It's a limitation of the processor's virtualization extension.

<comment><USER16> Problem is once Hyper-V is installed and enabled, no other VM can even be started regardless of no Hyper-V VMs actually running. This limitation does not exist on linux afaik. I have run libvirt based VMs and VirtualBox VMs at the same time on linux just fine in the past.

<comment><USER17> That's not what's happening. Hyper-v is a type-1 hypervisor. When it's running, even your Windows instance is running within hyper-v. Windows 10 has the hypervisor platform that lets other vm developers hook into the hyper-v host architecture, that's how you can get android emulators and virtualbox running under hyper-v. It all works fine but is a little unintuitive to set up.

<comment><USER18> If both VirtualBox and VMware give up on Hyper-V coexistence, it must be a bit worse than "unintuitive".

<comment><USER19> They haven't given up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> VMWare [0] will also support the Hypervisor Platform Api [1] allowing it to run besides WSL2 which uses Hyper-V. VirtualBox is still struggling and runs slow if at all with WSL2 and Hyper-V [2]

This of course has implications on how you setup Docker on a Windows machine, each way having pros and cons.

[0] [https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2020/01/vmware- workstat...](https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2020/01/vmware-workstation- tech-preview-20h1.html)

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/api/hypervis...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/api/hypervisor-platform/hypervisor-platform)

[2] [https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=473538](https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=473538)

<comment><USER21> This is a worrisome development. We seem to be heading toward a future where hypervisor drivers can only be provided by Microsoft, and you're out of luck if they don't do the job.

Hypervisors that need more capability are going to have to do some crazy stuff to stay compatible. One option is to save and restore the whole hypervisor state whenever it runs. Another option is to be some sort of boot loader, seizing the hypervisor capability before Windows can get to it.

That'll be some tough code to debug.

<comment><USER22> Type 2 hypervisors are going to be in an interesting state. The Windows bootloader already has a flag you can easily toggle (without removing the Hyper-V role or config) but the problem is more features are starting to depend on Hyper-V being there one layer up (it's a type 1 hypervisor). I'm surprised nested virtualization can't be used for the type 2 hypervisor since Hyper-V picked this feature up a few years back and it seems like that would have solved all of the problems.

<comment><USER21> Nested virtualization only works when the outer hypervisor supports all the features that the inner hypervisor needs. If the outer hypervisor is Hyper-V, then that limits the inner hypervisor to the features that Hyper-V bothered to implement.

In other words, you can't implement a hypervisor more advanced than Hyper-V.

If you instead want to be on the outside, with Hyper-V on the inside, then you can't just write a driver. You have to implement a boot loader. You also have to implement nested virtualization, even if you otherwise had no need to do so.

<comment><USER22> Hyper-V is able to nest ESXi and KVM (and Hyper-V of course) and vice versa ESXi and KVM are able to nest Hyper-V. I'm not sure what would be limited.

Yeah that's the difference between a type 1 and type 2 hypervisor. A type 1 runs on the bare metal, a type 2 runs via drivers underneath an existing OS. Since Hyper-V is a type 1 (like ESXi) you can't use a type 2 hypervisor on the root VM to escape being under Hyper-V you either have to do some sort of nesting or disable Hyper-V from loading and reboot.

<comment><USER21> Heh, it's funny that I'm actually a hypervisor developer and I don't use that terminology. The whole team doesn't. I actually had to look up "type 1" and "type 2" to remind myself which was which. Those are terribly non-descriptive. Our terminology is "bare metal" or "OS" or "boot loader", and "VMX driver". Anyway...

Our hypervisor is far more demanding than ESXi, KVM, and Hyper-V. It needs to interact with low-level Intel processor details in a way that is not supported by any other hypervisor. It won't run correctly if nested inside any other hypervisor. If we supported running under another hypervisor, we would lose important functionality.

If it becomes impossible or impractical to disable Hyper-V, we'll need to do something strange and annoying. Perhaps we could load the driver very early in boot, before Hyper-V loads. Booting as an OS ("type 1", ugh) is an option too, but maintaining that and using it is a real pain. Probably we'd drop Windows host support before we did that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I switched to WSL2 a month ago and it's been great. With WSL1 I'd regularly run into subtle compatibility problems but haven't seen anything like that with 2. Despite a handful of annoyances, the Win10+WSL2+Visual Studio Code Dev environment has been a lot more pleasant than OSX.

<comment><USER24> I never thought I'd say it but because of this exact setup with VS Code I've actually stopped using my MBP at home in favor of my desktop, which was really only built with gaming in mind. I've now gotten used to having all the extra computing power at hand and would struggle to go back to a laptop as my primary development machine.

<comment><USER25> But why could not you do the same before? Even before WSL there was MSYS, which IMO is great, unless you need to compile a C program, that directly uses Linux headers.

<comment><USER24> It's possible I could have and I just wasn't sufficiently in the know about which tools to use. I hadn't used MSYS. I've taken my current workflow so far as to even use nix as my primary package manager. Would this have been easily possible before? I ask in earnest. My setup right now is such that even mildly arcane things like that just seem to work for the most part.

<comment><USER25> Turns out "nix" is hard to search due to engines matching "*nix" to it.

Nix is probably not supported on MSYS, but YMMW. I'd love to have something like it on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Question -- from what I understand, WSL2 is closer to Linux running in a VM, whereas WSL1 was like a Windows kernel level version of Cygwin. Is that mostly correct?

Regarding that, remember a number of years ago, prior to VMs there was a patch set for the Linux kernel porting it to user space -- so you could run Linux as a user process, which ended up functioning similar to running it in a VM. Would WSL2 be closer to this model, or is it really running Linux under a stripped down Hyper V?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Question -- from what I understand, WSL2 is closer to Linux running in a VM, > whereas WSL1 was like a Windows kernel level version of Cygwin. Is that > mostly correct?

Yes, that's essentially correct. You could also think of it as WINE in reverse; one big difference from cygwin is that it runs unmodified binaries rather than needing to recompile.

> prior to VMs there was a patch set for the Linux kernel porting it to user > space -- so you could run Linux as a user process

User Mode Linux (UML; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User- mode_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-mode_Linux)), which I _think_ is still a thing, although not super popular.

> Would WSL2 be closer to this model, or is it really running Linux under a > stripped down Hyper V?

Not even stripped down; it's running Hyper V. (This is one of the big problems with WSL2; if you use it, you can't use non-HyperV virtualization.)

<comment><USER27> Did WSL1 not use the same binaries as a regular distro? IIRC it will download regular x86-64 .deb packages straight from e.g. Ubuntu's APT repositories.

<comment><USER28> I think you read it backwards. It's cygwin that doesn't. WSL1 did.

<comment><USER27> Ah. My bad :) Should've known better than to comment here before I had my coffee.

<comment><USER28> Hah, no worries, it took me 2-3 reads to parse that correctly too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> On a Win10 host, I want to edit code in sublime and have the runtime environment in linux. I want fast code search and fast build times.

I've found no way to accomplish the above.

Code in Windows + Windows Sublime means build in WSL will be slow because cross-os i/o

Code in Linux + Windows Sublime means code search will be slow because cross- os i/o

Code in Linux + Linux Sublime + Winodws Xserver means interface is laggy because, well, Xserver

VSCode gets around this by running in a client/server model with client on Windows and Server in Linux... but then I'm stuck with an Electron based editor instead of Sublime.

<comment><USER30> What Electron-related problems have you had with VSCode? I've been using it as my primary for a few years now and it's been nothing but stellar. And that integration sounds incredibly cool.

<comment><USER31> Font rendering is a bit blurry.

<comment><USER30> I haven't experienced this, but I mostly use it on a Mac. What OS are you on?

<comment><USER32> Technically, on Macs, all font rendering is blurry. :) [https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/](https://pandasauce.org/post/linux- fonts/)

<comment><USER33> Technically, there should be more HiDPI monitors on the market. I'm using now 24" monitor with 4k resolution, scaled 200%, and fonts are perfect :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Am I the only one who thinks this was named backwards? Like, it should been: _Linux Subsystem for Windows_ , or maybe _Windows ' Subsystem for Linux_

<comment><USER35> Totally agree. Feels like a "windows has to be first" type of thing.

<comment><USER36> There was a MS employee on twitter the other day (sorry, I forgot who) saying it was because there were legal issues with naming something with a title that has someone else's trademark as the first word.

<comment><USER37> That completely makes sense in my mind just because my favorite reddit app is called slide for reddit. I think reddit forced everyone to use x for Reddit in their name as opposed to Reddit X.

<comment><USER38> Reddit did exactly that, like five or six years ago. A bunch of apps had to change their names, which is how you end up with apps like "rif is fun for Reddit," where the first part stands for "Reddit is Fun."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> For those of you who will be running Docker Desktop on WSL2 - which allows to "transparently" use the "docker" command on your other Linux that runs in WSL2. And allows to use your WSL2 "other Linux" filesystem to share volumes with Docker containers! ..

Anyway, you need to know that when this stupid Docker and/or WSL2 VM is taking up all your Windows 10 memory - not all is lost.

Using these two commands, you can force WSL2 to give back the memory it is holding prisoner!

        echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
        echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/compact_memory

Especially if the one doing the mess is the "VM" of Docker.

Now that Docker Desktop is using WSL2 instead of its own VM, you can't see the bastard in Hyper-V console at all... apparently the whole WSL2 VM is not seen in Hyper-V console, even though it IS a damn VM. But it does appear in Task Manager as "Vmmem" and taking up gigabytes of your memory.

</comment><comment><USER40> While this is generally a large improvement, there is still a glaring issue with accessing files between the WSL and Windows [https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197](https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197)

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been running this in the insider branch for the last 3 months and it's been amazing. You can even recompile your own kernel if you want.

Your essentially getting the "real thing" with pretty seamless integration to the rest of windows. I'd never want to go back to WSL1.

</comment><comment><USER42> WSL2 with Docker Desktop is amazing. I switched over last week and the performance is amazing. Further, you don't have to reserve CPUs or RAM anymore.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm holding out for the Linux subsystem for Windows.

<comment><USER13> You mean Wine?

<comment><USER44> They mean MS replacing the Windows kernel with Linux kernel. Which doesn't sound as crazy as it did just a couple of years ago. Just put all the Windows crap in a VM, similar to WSL2.

<comment><USER45> "Just put all the Windows crap in a VM" \- if Windows such a crap why even mention it? Just put Linux on your PC and be happy.

<comment><USER13> There's a lot of Windows-only software out there that will exist regardless of how you feel about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I would really, really love to go back to using Linux natively but sadly the hardware on this laptop is not supported well enough. So I eventually gave up and installed Windows while using WSL2 extensively.

Performance is on par with running Linux natively. I compiled my own kernel with ext4 encryption support, and it works quite well. I use it for 90% of my files. Combined with the new Windows Terminal and VSCode support for WSL, there is little friction left. (Also, to address some comments, you _can_ view Windows files from Linux and Linux files from Windows, with some reduced performance.)

</comment><comment><USER47> Is there a shell+terminal+font combo that folks really like for WSL? I've tried the new terminal beta with zsh and--for reasons I can't quite articulate right now--it feels "off" and I invariably proceed to boot up virtualbox for my debian, i3, kitty, fira code setup to get work done. Maybe it's the break in filesystems and $HOME?

Edit: learning that WSL2 does away with the syscall-translating tech and mandates Hyper-V, the question of whether to look into this further becomes thornier!

<comment><USER48> Windows Terminal is made by the same guys working on WSL and works pretty well: [https://github.com/microsoft/terminal](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal)

You can get it via the Microsoft Store and it comes with support for connecting to WSL, Powershell, and cmd.exe out of the box.

<comment><USER49> Seconding Windows Terminal. I happen to also really like the font that comes with it -- Cascadia Code. But I'm a sucker for ligatures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> A great step. but I feel I have to repeat my "ceterum censeo" of saying that wsl would really benefit, if Microsoft would add a native Wayland support so that the Windows Deskop would appear as a Wayland server for the Linux VM. This would allow any Wayland-compatible Linux application to run seamlessly on the Windows desktop and fully utilizing the native graphics drivers.

</comment><comment><USER51> I recently wanted to run some linux apps on windows (simple stuff like ls, ssh-keygen, etc) and found that most instructions were actually pointing me to install a ubuntu VM rather than use the native subsystem stuff touted a couple years ago.

I was a little disappointed in this. Running a VM is a lot more hassle than just running the apps natively.

Feels like a step backwards than a step forward.

</comment><comment><USER52> What's the energy consumption of WSL2, I understand it's a Virtual Machine now, isn't that heavier than what WSL1 is?

</comment><comment><USER53> I've been using WSL1 for a long time now and I am very happy with it.

The way I use it is to have all my files and project on windows FS and I code using windows software (VSCode, Eclipse) but when I build and test, I use WSL1, and I didn't feel that the performance was that bad since I have an SSD and I don't mind waiting for few more minutes to rebuild a project.

But the most important thing for me was that I didn't care about managing another file system. All my files are still on windows where I used to keep them, file sync and backups are working as expected, and I easily browse and edit these files on the Windows side.

For docker, I installed docker on Windows and hooked Docker CLI on WSL1 to it using some configurations. and I was happy with it.

The question is, for the way I use WSL1, will WSL2 be an improvement or a drawback for me? and should someone like me switch to WSL2?

</comment><comment><USER25> Original announcement: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl2-will- be-gene...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl2-will-be-generally- available-in-windows-10-version-2004/)

</comment><comment><USER54> But how the VM implementation is faster then "native" call translations?

<comment><USER12> There is no need to catch up with ongoing implementations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I would love to use Windows WSL full time, along with docker containers, for general web development.

There is one thing though that no one talks about.. the fonts!!! The font smoothing is awful on Windows... will this ever change?

The new terminal looks alright, the default font is nice; but most other programs I like look awful in Windows: Sublime Text, VSCode, gVIM, ... I just can't find a monospace font that looks "thick" enough for readability and have smooth edges -- especially with dark text on light background.

</comment><comment><USER56> > WSL extension allows for the VS Code UI to run on the Windows side with a VS > Code Server running within the WSL VM

This was why I have finally switched away from developing on windows, there's something about the VS remote code server setup that will spawn tons of processes and eventually slow WSL to a crawl. Possibly my fault, I haven't gone through all my extensions and settings carefully, but also not an issue when running VS code on unix without the server.

</comment><comment><USER57> Does anyone know if WSL2 supports utf8 characters in filenames, such as ":" and "<>" etc?

WSL had a limitation that it couldn't display such characters when I accessed a Linux parition through Samba. I know there is a Samba workaround for name mangling, but I prefer to access the actual filenames as created by org-mode.

Edit: Samba was running in an Alpine VM that mounted a ZFS partition. The network folder was mounted through Windows.

</comment><comment><USER58> Slightly off topic but, I've been a mac user for some 6 years now and was recently forced to switch to either linux or windows for a deep learning desktop experience. I'm wondering how complete the windows experience will feel as a long-time unix user? Windows seems to have everything these days with WSL, great programming, gaming, media/rendering environments as well as super stable. What's bad?

<comment><USER59> WSL1 has some unimplemented features, but overall it's not a bad experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I have a MacBook Pro that I wanted to turn into a Windows laptop.

Unfortunately if you install Windows from scratch, without going through Bootcamp to install it side by side with MacOS, Hyper-V support is disabled.

This means that I cannot use WSL2. Or Windows, since without a working Linux environment it's useless to me and I don't want to invest in WSL v1. Might as well go for Ubuntu 20.04.

<comment><USER61> I found a way to run Windows from scratch and have Hyper-V enabled. Just install rEFInd boot manager and use 'enable_and_lock_vmx true' in the config.

<comment><USER60> Hi, any article on the subject I could read?

This is the first time I hear of rEFInd.

<comment><USER61> This is a good article:

[https://dea.nbird.com.au/2017/02/24/enabling-vt-x-on-mac- boo...](https://dea.nbird.com.au/2017/02/24/enabling-vt-x-on-mac-book-air-in- bootcamp/)

<comment><USER60> Thanks ´・ᴗ・`

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I really hope apple implements something similar, would much prefer to have a well integrated linux vm than the not-quite-linux of macos

<comment><USER14> This is an interesting take considering Linux is Unix-like and macOS is technically a BSD derivative. I don't think macOS will ever have a Linux syscall translation layer/subsystem (WSL1) nor a lightweight VM with special integration (WSL2) but you can do sort of similar things in third party software, I think. Docker for Mac is using the native VM framework and includes a filesystem integration called osxfs, but despite mentioning the source code in documentation it does not appear to be open source at this time?

<comment><USER62> doesn't macOS put a BSD translation of some sort in their kernel? Theres a microkernel, a driver api (device kit) and then 'bsd'

<comment><USER62> random wikipedia image that somewhat supports what I was thinking [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#/med...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_\(operating_system\)#/media/File:Diagram_of_Mac_OS_X_architecture.svg)

<comment><USER13> The actual API layers are nowhere near that clean ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> So WSL2 is supported on windows 10 Home as well, which is great. Does that mean Home also gets official Hyper V support?

<comment><USER64> I don't see any mention that it'll be on Home, "General Availability" just means that it's no longer part of the insider preview

<comment><USER63> According to FAQ [1] it will be.

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq#does-w...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq#does-wsl-2-use-hyper-v-will-it-be-available-on- windows-10-home)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Out of curiosity, what do most people use this for?

(I tried rewording this question a few times to not sound snarky, but failed.)

<comment><USER66> Web development primarily

<comment><USER12> Web development with node and ruby it seems.

Java and .NET Web development has been perfectly fine the last decades.

<comment><USER66> Node, PHP, anything Docker all seem to work better under WSL2 than windows itself.

<comment><USER12> Node and PHP has been running in Windows just fine for years everytime I have to deal with them.

Also node is not going to stop downloading the whole Internet regardless of the host OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I just used VirtualBox by Oracle with Linux Mint. Seems less buggier and I can share files with Dropbox, etc.

</comment><comment><USER44> Have they figured out how to pass through the GPU yet? Would be cool to use this for e.g. PyTorch.

<comment><USER68> Unfortunately no. This would have been a very useful feature to me since currently I use a Windows laptop to write code to run on a linux gpu server under my desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> This is great news. Looks like I neither need a separate Linux VM or dual booting Ubuntu desktop install anymore for testing my software given it will also run on WSL2 on general availability.

Another clever move from Microsoft and the Windows Teams.

</comment><comment><USER70> WSL2 is a fantastic product. The ability to debug python code on ubuntu and alt-tab to Steam is unparalleled.

However there is a fundamental issue - Microsoft is treating this as a toy project. The number 1 problem is that the file system inside an Ubuntu shell/wsl2-container is sitting inside a hidden file system.

It is is not exposed to the rest of windows and neither to backup tools like Dropbox, etc. So you have a huge chance of losing important documents inside a WSL2 container. Now, you can "Cd /c/Documents" and do your work - but this filesystem is unimaginably slow. Not sure if it is because of file mounts, etc. The performance is incredibly bad.

If there are WSL2 devs here - please make the working container filesystem as a first class directory inside the rest of windows. I'll live with performance issues for a while...but this is a blocker.

<comment><USER71> I think this is not correct.

You can go to \\\wsl$\ and it shows each wsl install as a network drive.

<comment><USER70> yes - however those paths are not available to any backup system. if you want to switch from ubuntu to fedora, there is no easy way to do it. If you accidentally uninstall ubuntu, you will lose that partition (and all your work). this has happened to me once already.

In linux, you just have a separate /home partition . You can have a dozen operating systems, merrily using the same home partition. you can trash your OS, but your home directory doesnt get trashed.

i have a pending request to offer the concept of a "home directory". the filesystem on which i work inside wsl2 should not be opaque to the rest of the operating system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Back in the 80's wasn't there some issue with Microsoft having to pay AT&T royalties for Xenix and in order to get out of that agreement, they had to agree to stop doing anything related to Unix?

</comment><comment><USER73> _" unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance increase"_

Took me several reads to figure out that "tarbars" was a typo for "tarballs". Thought I'd missed some new archive format.

</comment><comment><USER74> Would be nice if it had GPU support so I could use it for deep learning prototyping. I might use Windows instead of Ubuntu then. I can't use macos now that they dropped Nvidia.

<comment><USER75> I did ML stuff under Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I always laugh when I think about this. Microsoft's tools are so bad that they had to ship an entire other OS in their own OS just so that programmers can be productive.

</comment><comment><USER77> I am super excited about this. WSL1 is great. WSL2 will allow me to run docker images without struggling with vagrantfiles so that's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER75> Great! Now I can run Tux Racer on Windows properly!

</comment><comment><USER78> How does this work with IDEs like IntelliJ? I believe WSL 1 had issues with having Windows IntelliJ and the source code being in WSL?

<comment><USER64> Works just fine, but FS is slow-ish. Your paths look like:

\\\wsl$\Ubuntu-18.04\home\username

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> We need a Linux subsystem for Windows...

Though Wine is quite good.

<comment><USER80> While similar in concept, Wine is better than WSL1 in a lot of ways due to supporting sound, graphics, and GPU acceleration.

I've always been suspicious of WSL because it follows a narrative that benefits Microsoft - that Linux is primarily a command-line/server environment, and the graphical and audio applications for Linux are not worthwhile. It doesn't have to be like this. WSL1 was based on an Android environment for Windows Phone called Project Astoria, which did support graphics.

<comment><USER81> The graphical and audio applications for linux _aren 't_ worthwhile, or at least they're not competitive with the top proprietary offerings. It's not really about the theoretical capacity of of linux to support audio and graphics. The low market share of desktop linux makes it not economically worthwhile for top proprietary software companies to port to linux. That's just an unfortunate fact. I don't really want to edit graphics with Gimp when Photoshop exists, and I don't really want to produce music in Ardour when Ableton Live exists.

I think the only real way to fix this is to change the economic incentives by increasing desktop Linux market share, which is a long and uphill battle.

<comment><USER79> Blender is competitive in the industry and definitely "worthwhile". Not the market-leader, but being used increasingly in professional settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> the performance on /mnt issue is not yet fixed [https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197](https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197)

</comment><comment><USER83> honestly, i use WSL to ssh into servers in a pinch and get things taken care of... my experience actually trying to develop things (python/django/node) has been poor otherwise.

<comment><USER84> If it's just ssh, what's the benefit over using it on WSL compared to using the native ssh in Windows?

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I seem to perhaps be in the minority here, but I got onto the slow ring just for WSL2 and it has been excellent so far. I am primarily a Ruby developer and things _just work_.

</comment><comment><USER86> Windows seems to be gradually trending toward an OSX-style desktop experience riding on top of a Linux kernel.

<comment><USER12> Except it isn't, that Linux kernel runs on top of a Hyper-V instance, alongside the NT kernel which is managing the whole show.

More z/OS and less UNIX.

<comment><USER86> For now.

<comment><USER12> Even if Microsoft was willing to throw away what makes Windows have the desktop market that Linux will never have, and go back to its Xenix roots, Linux would probably get as much back as it has been getting from all those Android OEM contributions.

So not really a reason to cheer what would be yet another pyrrhic victory in the desktop/mobile space.

<comment><USER86> > Microsoft was willing to throw away what makes Windows have the desktop > market

I certainly neither said, implied, or agreed with that concept, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> As they are different there should be option to do both 1 and 2

<comment><USER88> There is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Back to Cygwin?

</comment><comment><USER90> Y.

</comment><comment><USER91> I've been a happy user of WSL2 since 2 months, and I absolutely love it. After switching to it, I completely stopped using Mac Mini and Linux.

It has made my life so easier. All the Linux stuff + development work gets done inside Windows Terminal + WSL2 + NeoVim, and I still get to keep Windows for Gaming, Designing, Office work, other random programs etc.

<comment><USER92> I've been a happy user of running a Linux VM (without X) besides Windows since 6 years ago (first VirtualBox, then Hyper-V after switching to Win10) :p

Congrats to WSL2 team, they introduced this pattern to a much wider audience.

<comment><USER93> Yep, using VirtualBox and it works fine for me. I don't use Hyper-V because it's buggy with my build for some reason (Nvidia driver crashes, BSODs). I don't really get this WSL 2 hype.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> In genuine amazement at a lot of the comments here - why not just dual boot Linux instead of using it in a VM? Productivity on a Linux machine can be so far ahead of Windows, especially if you've got a terminal-based workflow an maybe a tiling WM

<comment><USER95> My workflow is mostly terminal based, and I used to use tiling WMs, yet I am now back to Windows + WSL.

Why? Because GPU driver compatibility is still so bad on Linux that I can't get any of the popular distros to work properly on my setup (laptop with hybrid Intel/nVidia GPU setup, thunderbolt dock, external display with different scaling than laptop display).

And yes, if I spend a weekend fiddling with Nouveau drivers I might get it to run somewhat decently, but really I don't want to spend that time on my work setup. Window + WSL works out of the box, so I'll use that.

<comment><USER96> I have been on Manjaro with XFCE for the past couple of years and it's a dream. Haven't had one driver problem. Zoom, Slack and Beyond Compare all work without issue as does VS Code. Installing and updating all software via the package manager UI is so much better than Windows that I'll never go back. Furthermore, I think that XFCE provides a better Windows experience for developers than Windows does - at least I don't have to find, download and install 7+ taskbar tweaker or hack the system configuration registry to get the features I want out of it.

Mixing business and gaming on the same machine caused problems for me even when I was fully on Windows, so I've always kept separate machines for that.</comment></comment></comment>


SparkyLinux GameOver Is a Winning Work-Play Combo - <AUTHOR> http://technewsworld.com/story/SparkyLinux-GameOver-Is-a-Winning-Work-Play-Combo-80923.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _Bottom Line

If you are into serious gaming and do not want to leave Linux behind, the GameOver 3.4 Edition of SparkyLinux is definitely a winning combination. It gives you all of the game playing software platforms and the emulators to run them.

Even if you are a recreational game player, this distro will let you play games at your own pace and do all of your everyday computing tasks from the same place. This is a win-win proposition._</comment>


Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/opinion/digital-nazi-hunter-trump.html <comment><USER2> This is now an internet classic.

Here's an article from 2014 where critics of Vietnam's government were hit with "report abuse" spam to silence them. [https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/2/6083647/facebook-s- report-...](https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/2/6083647/facebook-s-report-abuse- button-has-become-a-tool-of-global-oppression)

Or perhaps you've heard of "Youtube Heroes"? [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2016/09/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2016/09/23/new-youtube-offensive-on-offensiveness-offends-so-many-it- disables-comments/)

All you need is an appropriate mob to target politics it doesn't like to shut it down with these automated social media systems. And it can always be abused by your enemies.

</comment><comment><USER3> "A large number of people have blocked you in response to high volumes of untargeted, unsolicited, or duplicative content or engagements from your account," we were informed. This was true; Impostor Buster had been blocked by many neo-Nazis. "A large number of spam complaints have been filed against you." Yes, by neo-Nazis. "You send large numbers of unsolicited replies or mentions." Yes, to neo-Nazis.

What are the accuracy metrics of the bot? Is he really sure that the bot is only sending stuff to neo-Nazis? Are you allowed to spam someone because they hold a morally reprehensible position?

<comment><USER4> It wasn't simply the _morally reprehensible position_. It was also the act of impersonation. The bot identified impersonation.

<comment><USER3> Ok, so does impersonation allow you to be spammed? It seems like impersonation is non-consequential, or at least hard to measure. Especially on such an ephemeral platform.

<comment><USER5> Your sympathies are very telling.

<comment><USER6> Are you seriously insinuating this user is a neo-Nazi because he's trying to have a polite conversation about what is and is not ethical? That's shameful.

<comment><USER5> Of course not. Why would you jump to that conclusion? When you see someone with a "Thin Blue Line" decal on their car, do you assume that he/she is a police officer who murders minorities? No, but you know where their allegiance rests.

As CalChris said:

>If you are going to dismiss impersonation on such an ephemeral platform, why do you care about spamming?

Maybe you didn't read enough of the replies to understand the context. I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Couldn't the bot just report the imposter accounts instead of engage them? Pretty sure it's against TOS to impersonate someone without declaring it a parody account.

<comment> GuB-42 The problem is that the bot has only a single voice against a whole community.

Twitter trusts the numbers, in a sense, it is very democratic. Trolls are simply very good at strategic voting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >I'd received the second-most abuse of any Jewish journalist on Twitter during the campaign cycle. [...] As a result, I've become something of an unintentional expert on alt-right trolls and their tactics.

Red flag: Blind man about to describe elephant.

Not to be hasty, I didn't stop reading there.

I stopped reading once I found out the author thinks he's moving the needle by ineptly fighting a blatantly-obvious disinformation campaign. On Twitter.

<comment><USER9> > I'd received the second-most abuse of any Jewish journalist on Twitter > during the campaign cycle. [...] As a result, I've become something of an > unintentional expert on alt-right trolls and their tactics.

> Red flag: Blind man about to describe elephant.

Must one be an alt-right troll to describe one? But not to be hasty I'll skip that point for now...

> I stopped reading once I found out the author thinks he's moving the needle > by ineptly fighting a blatantly-obvious disinformation campaign. On Twitter.

... how is this blatantly obvious to the average user? It's simply not.

The article describes duplicating a Twitter account by picture, name, and bio. Pic, bio and subject matter is about as deep as most people would go to identify a Twitter account as belonging to a given person.

I wager that even a large portion of the busy people _on this site_ wouldn't do any further due diligence to determine whether or not the targeted Twitter account was fake, or real, and thus would have horrible opinions of the author of this article.

<comment><USER8> >Must one be an alt-right troll to describe one?

No, but this smells like the journos that in 2016, lurked /pol/ for a few hours and tried to work backwards to form a grand unified theory of Trump's win. Granted, that's more time than I've spent on /pol/, but it strikes me as what Matt Taibbi once called (paraphrasing) the lazy-sportswriter approach to political reporting.

>how is this blatantly obvious to the average user? It's simply not

It's obvious by the standards of internet propaganda campaigns. I'll admit that's not something typical users are even on guard against...

>Pic, bio and subject matter is about as deep as most people would go to identify a Twitter account as belonging to a given person.

Yeah, but the amount of stock people already put into Twitter users has never made any sense, either. I know there is a hypothetical ideal where a Twitter user you don't already know personally can be seen as less suspicious than "random Internet person," but that's not the world we live in. Even verified twitter users doesn't verify anything more than precisely which moron a set of brain-droppings came from. That doesn't make them right, or even make Twitter a useful way to take the temperature of society.

Twitter perpetrates the lie that the platform can be modified to deliver the platform it can never realistically be. Both in the practices of the business named Twitter, and the actions of mass of users that have some of their professional value and/or fame tied to the idea of Twitter managing to find the mythical usefulness and trustworthiness among strangers long assumed to be impossible in large scale (online or IRL).

This is all a meandering tangent about Twitter's place in society, but informs my previous statements about this article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Should Twitter also freeze Trump parody accounts?

Maybe saying parody on the profile makes it OK. Those anti-Semitic impostor accounts are probably still effective under that rule, since most people will not check a users profile.

<comment><USER11> Parody accounts are generally satirical, often humorous, and fairly open about their deception.

Pretending to be jewish, to say unpleasant things and trick unsuspecting people into believing this is the view of a 'Jewish person' (quotes because the whole concept is very reductive at both ends of the interaction) is neither.

I would also say the issue almost certainly isn't limited to Jew-impersonators either, but since that's what the article is about I used that example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Compare & contrast to "fellow white people".

</comment><comment><USER13> This seems like a legitimate use case for the DMCA. Why not just use the bot to issue DMCA notices? These accounts are clearly violating copyright.

<comment><USER13> Alternatively, Grass Roots the posting. Twitter's problem is that the bot is posting, so set up a third party site that identifies tweets and ask legitimate users to respond to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So it's okay to spam people if you don't like what they do?

<comment><USER15> If what they do is actively and solely intendedto be hostile to you (without provocation), yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mods, can you look into why this and the Obama articles were flagged?

<comment><USER16> A bunch of users flagged it and a bunch of other users vouched for it. These were legit users so I assume it is a legit difference of opinion about whether the articles belong on HN.

In case anyone is wondering, moderators didn't penalize either of the articles. We did ban the garden-variety trolls that showed up in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why was this article flagged?

<comment><USER18> HN has a surprisingly strong alt-right contingent, they're just more subtle about it than Reddit.

<comment><USER19> "Alt-right" is a surprisingly polite term for "Nazi sympathizer"

<comment><USER18> I'm using it mostly as a catch all from "actually a fucking Nazi" all the way to "trolling 4chan type college kid"

But yeah, I know exactly what you mean.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Man hacks Tesla firmware, finds new model, has car remotely downgraded - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/03/man-hacks-tesla-firmware-finds-new-model-has-car-remotely-downgraded/ <comment><USER2> Punitive downgrades are worrisome. Good to see that Musk disagrees with what happened, but some at Tesla seem to think this sort of thing is okay.</comment>


Register for hack.summit() 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://hacksummit.org/2016event <comment><USER2> HN members can bypass the registration and attend for FREE using code HACKERNEWS.

Speaker list:

•David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails) •Joel Spolsky (co-founder and CEO of StackOverflow, founder of Trello) •Thomas Kurian (EVP at Oracle. Oversees all 3000+ of Oracle software products) •Rebecca Parsons (CTO of Thoughtworks) •Kent Beck (Created Extreme Programming, created TDD, co-created Agile, authored 9 books) •Bob Martin (created the Software Craftsmanship Movement) •Tom Chi (co-created Google Glass) •Yehuda Katz (Ember.js, JQuery, Rails Core committer. Created HandleBars) •Jocelyn Goldfein (recent Engineer Director, Facebook) •Qi Lu (Executive Vice President at Microsoft. Oversees R&D for Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Lync, Skype, Bing, Bing Apps, MSN, and more) •Ed Roman (founder of TheServerSide.com, Java book author) •Aaron Skonnard (CEO of Pluralsight) •Brian Fox (created the GNU Bash Shell, Emacs maintainer) •Chris Richardson (Java Champion, created the original Cloud Foundry) •Orion Henry (founder of Heroku) •Hampton Catlin (Created SaSS, HAML, m.wikipedia.org, and book author) •Jon Skeet (#1 answerer on StackOverflow) •Dries Buyataert (created the Drupal programming language) •Janet Weiner (Engineering at Facebook, big data expert) •Floyd Marinescu (CEO, InfoQ) •Nathan Marz (creator of Apache Storm) •Rod Vagg (Node.js Technical Chair and Core Committer) •Sarah Allen (Co-creator of After Effects, Flash video, recent Presidential Innovation Fellow)

<comment><USER3> Is there going to be an area onsite for the hackathon?

</comment></comment><comment> linux-modder Looks to be a lovely 'virtual' conference aka you can be anywhere, no plane or bus fare needed, Just need yourself, interest in a topic (or a few) and a data connection be it mobile, ethernet or wifi...

</comment><comment><USER4> It'd be great if they showed us an example of the medium that the talks/communication would happen at a virtual summit like this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Amazing initiative. Looking forward to it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks awesome. Looking forward to it!

</comment><comment><USER7> Great!!! I will attend this!

</comment><comment><USER8> Great list of speakers!

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice!

</comment><comment><USER10> Great!</comment>


AudioWorklet (available on Chrome behind the experimental flag) - <AUTHOR> https://googlechromelabs.github.io/web-audio-samples/audio-worklet/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is exciting because it addresses one of the main complaints in the recent blog post [http://blog.mecheye.net/2017/09/i-dont-know-who-the-web- audi...](http://blog.mecheye.net/2017/09/i-dont-know-who-the-web-audio-api-is- designed-for/), which is that there's no way in WebAudio to just fill a buffer with numbers (samples) and have it play them back in real time (or to do the same, but processing an input buffer).

AudioWorklet ([https://webaudio.github.io/web-audio- api/#AudioWorklet](https://webaudio.github.io/web-audio-api/#AudioWorklet)) allows you to create "processor" nodes, which have a "process" method which is called once per buffer, with any audio input to the node passed in as a parameter, and an output buffer to fill.

This should allow much more interesting and professional level audio generation and effects using WebAudio, and much easier porting of existing audio algorithms (as this is how most audio code, e.g. VST/AudioUnit plugins work), though I've not looked at the spec in detail yet or played with it, so the devil as always is in the details!.</comment>


Zapier (YC S12), The IFTTT For Business Users, Launches Developer Platform - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/01/yc-backed-zapier-the-ifttt-for-business-users-launches-developer-platform/

<comment><USER2> Here's a direct link to the docs <https://zapier.com/developer/> as well as the announcement blog post [https://zapier.com/blog/2012/08/01/announcing- zapier-develop...](https://zapier.com/blog/2012/08/01/announcing-zapier- developer-platform-join-hubspot-podio-and-12-others/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very, very excited this is going live today. We're looking forward to the awesome things developers can do with this. We've already been extremely surprised by the creativity of our end-users and are expecting a similar story from our developers.

A few quick ideas:

1\. hook your own SaaS app up to Zapier so all of our users (and your customers!) can use it

2\. write an integration for a SaaS app you don't own but want to integrate with

3\. connect your in-house tools to external SaaS apps through Zapier

</comment><comment><USER4> Not to be overlooked is how simple they've made the process of integration as a developer. You don't need to write _any_ code to integrate with Zapier.

I originally had a skype chat with Mike thinking that integrating with them would be a back-and-forth dealing with our APIs. Nope. We had Ronin integrated within 15 minutes via a web UI. All you have to do is drag and drop stuff around and fill out a few forms. I think this is the coolest part of what they've built.

<comment><USER3> Interestingly enough we were split on this decision. We had a few people who thought we should go a straight scripting/API route and our own intuition saying we should add structure through our interface.

In the end we've tried to support the best of both world. You can add your endpoints using our interface and drop down to a scripting API (Javascript) to have fine-grained control over how we prepare requests/responses to and from your server. This gives you a lot of flexibility if you want it but it's not required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this company. Similar to Stripe it's one of those things that when you see it, you're just like "finally someone took away this pain and makes something that makes sense!"

<comment><USER6> Exactly! The way they're targeting business related processes with their business specific channels enables all sorts of possibilities in terms of automating tasks and such.

LOVE it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The first time my cofounder tried Zapier, she turned around and said: "Did you see these guys? They are going to be huge!"

Good luck guys! Good job so far.

</comment><comment><USER8> Funny how I said this was an IFTTT clone a few days back and got downvoted to hell...

<comment><USER9> Most likely because it is not a direct clone and they interpreted it as if your comment was pejorative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congrats guys. We've been using the service for over a month now and absolutely love it. You've given us integrations we'd never have time to do ourselves as a young scrappy startup with entirely too much work to do.

<comment><USER11> Can you give some examples of what you have been able to accomplish with this?

<comment><USER3> You might check out a few of our highlights: <https://zapier.com/zapbook/reviews/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Differences between this and IFTTT? This costs money, but has a ton more "triggers." Wondering what else there is that sets them apart.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is great! Always wondered when IFTTT or someone else would start focusing on businesses more. Looking forward to adding our apps!

Small nitpick: there seem to be some "undefined"'s in the "spinning list" of data-triggers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we noticed that too. Working on a fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're writing an API for your app/product/startup, you can build an integration with Zapier's developer platform and kick-start your API program with 60+ integrations right out of the gate.

</comment><comment><USER14> Anybody here use both IFTTT and Zapier? Been loving IFTTT for being texted filtered road traffic info from Twitter feeds.

<comment><USER15> That sounds like a really interesting Recipe. Have you shared it?

<comment><USER14> Not that exact one but it's a modification of another recipe: it's the "text me tweets from this twitter account that satisfy these search terms" recipe, with a local news radio Twitter feed for the traffic and my favourite highways and words like "collision", "blocked", and "reopened" as the search terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The only thing that I didn't like about Zapier, in the trial that I did, was that I got a TON of emails from Wade Foster. I realize that you want to be connected to your customers, but an email every few days was a bit overkill. June 22, 24, 28, July 1 and 4. Too much spammy email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Daniel,

We got a lot of feedback about that and reduced the number of emails we send now. Really sorry about that.

Wade

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Zapier front page keeps loading in latest Opera. Otherwise, can't wait to plug in my apps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Might try another browser real quick. Still working out some kinks in Opera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how they deal with triggers which cause loops...

<comment><USER3> Most things only happen once every [polling period] so the loop would occur relatively slowly.

<comment><USER17> lets just hope it doesn't trigger two events on each iteration

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> yes!</comment>


Amazon's growth is a systemic risk to Seattle - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2015/commentary-amazons-unprecedented-growth-is-too-risky-for-seattle/

<comment><USER2> Interesting, and I think Seattle is at least vaguely aware of this. It's worth noting that in recent years tons of other companies have been setting up shop in the area.

I know Facebook's second largest office is here, Palantir just opened an office, and it seems every week or so I hear of another SV company opening a satellite. That's not to say this isn't a real problem, but Amazon's success (and how frickin' awesome Seattle is) is attracting other people to cushion the blow.

An important note here is that the revenue sources and the markets for these are very diverse. The 5-10 notable companies with notable presence have probably 5-10 mostly discrete markets driving their growth.

Silicon Valley, on the other hand, has hundreds of companies but 90%+ are entirely dependent on ads (or the ad bubble, depending on which side of that fence you're on).

Any thoughts on how this plays into the risk calculus?

<comment><USER3> Amazon has 24,000 workers in Seattle and is building office space for 70,000 more. Why?

      * Are they relocating 70,000 workers from other areas?

What areas? Why would they relocate these workers?

      * Are they adding 70,000 new jobs?

It's possible that Amazon is planning to expand. I have no idea.

      * Are they building office space without intending on using it?

Amazon would have to have a very good reason for doing this. Maybe they plan on starting up a lot of business units and doing a lot of churn-y startup-y things? Maybe they plan on renting it out? Maybe they're just sinking money into Real Estate to retain their no-profit image?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This brings up an interesting question: how should city planners make decisions about long term infrastructure if their populations are unstable?

Will the trend of working for many companies for shorter periods of time, and therefore perhaps moving more often, make certain city populations less stable than others?</comment>


Elasticsearch (now Elastic) acquires Found - <AUTHOR> https://www.elastic.co/blog/welcome-found

<comment><USER2> Hopefully they can add high availability clusters in regions other than US East (which is the only region which has high availability clusters right now).

<comment><USER3> Hi,

Found-founder here. You can pick HA in eu-west-1 as well, and we've been battle testing a solution for other regions for some time now, and it'll soon be generally available.

The issue is that a lot of regions only have two availability zones, and having a third is important to prevent split brain scenarios. (Our solution to that involves using ZooKeeper.)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply! I'll look out for it. Need it for the southeast datacenter (Singapore)

<comment><USER3> If you reach out to support, we can get you settled right away. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/technology/googles-autonomous-vehicles-draw-skepticism-at-legal-symposium.html

<comment><USER2> I think society is ready for it. The technology will prove itself over time, but people will adopt it quickly if given the opportunity. I wonder how many cars they would need to test this on to see if it made driving safer. That would be the ultimate test for it, because if it makes driving safer, it's worth the few bugs that it will have. Also, they should mandate that all of the cars have a manual override that still works in case the computer crashes or detects a hazard that it can't handle.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this has some worrying implications, For example, could someone hack into your car and make it crash while making it look like an innocent accident?

</comment><comment><USER4> How can the children be allowed to ride in non-self-driving cars?</comment>


Facebook and Google want China, but China doesn't want them - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/facebook-googles-long-road-china <comment><USER2> My suspicion is that its very unlikely that Google and FB are going to be able to establish the government relationships that would allow them to operate successfully in China.Google collects massive amounts of citizen data and it has close relations with the US military / security institutions. The combination means Google will never be a trusted operator in China. Facebook is in a worse position. In addition to being a data collection platform with US government connections, it is a communications platform not under the direct control of China, located in the US.And these US communications platforms have a history now of being associated with movements of anti- government dissent around the world.

More generally, I dont see how US tech companies are going to be able to have it both ways -- be both willing partners in US government policy and also non threatening to Chinese sovereignty.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how Chinese tech companies are going to be able to have it both ways either if they ever actually want to leave China. This is one market (the world) vs. another market (China), and they are increasingly becoming separated at the Internet level.

Also, if China decides the only way it can keep competing is by blocking their competition, then the rest of the world will just wag their finger at them when they complain about export markets for their cultural products. If the Chinese government were smart, they would find a way to let Facebook and Google in while maintaining control over censorship AND keeping its anointed tech companies with majority market shares.

<comment><USER2> Yes, strict separation will probably be the norm where there are sovereignty issues. And it will be enforced both ways. So for example,I will make the claim that if Alipay expanded into the US it would own the entire payments market in one year. Alipay is just that much better than anything else available in the US. Plausible or not, Alipay will never operate successfully in the US because the US will not cede sovereignty over part of its financial infrastructure to China.

I can not say if that is smart or not. That question is outside of my technical sphere of competence. But I believe it's an accurate evaluation of how states will operate, as soon as these systems start being used to project power.

<comment><USER4> This is a good point. You can do things with your smartphone in China that not even advanced markets in Europe have figured out. The US tech sector isn't the only player anymore.

<comment><USER3> Again, it's not that they haven't figured it out, it's that there is no need to do it. I've seen how payments happen with the phone by exhanging QR codes, it's a nice trick, but how could anyone claim that is better than the chip, swipe, and tap infrastructure already pervasive in the west? China basically skipped credit and debit cards, the West didn't.

<comment><USER4> The only thing that is pervasive in the US are creditcards and the less said about those the better.

<comment><USER3> That really isn't true at all. Ya, they have a high-ish merchant charge, but you don't see that as a consumer.

You can also go with debit cards if you want to, the only extra step is entering a PIN sometimes (for some purchases over some amount).

In Australia, they have it even better by having much more pervasive tap to pay in place. Why would anyone choose Alipay over tap to pay? You would have to be nuts.

<comment><USER5> There are some other issues, but I'm not sure they're fixable by technology alone:

* Getting from zero to accepting payments is long and complicated. Some of this can be streamlined, but how much of it is limited by anti-money-laundering regulations?

* The concept of "you can initiate a charge as long as you have about 40 bits of information, and can do so for 2-5 years or until the card is revoked" is a model doomed to fraud problems.

* There's no legal requirement that all potential legal merchants get serviced or at fair rates. See the recent discussions about payments for the porn industry; plenty of processors will not want to work with gun dealers.

* There's no solid standardization, so you can't shop around providers freely because changing who you buy from may mean you have to replace your swipe machines or rebuild your cart to talk to the new vendor's gateway of choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best thing both of them can do (and every other tech giant that is not Chinese) is to put up a moat around China and contain all the competing Chinese tech companies to only China. This means putting extra effort into every country that borders China and every country with whom China has a strong economic relationship.

This isn't too different to how Facebook conquered universities where it was #2 to some other social network. Instead of trying to replace the social network at that university (A) with Facebook, it focused on all the universities (B, C, D, etc.) around that university (A) so that there would be a strong social network composed of the secondary universities (B, C, D, etc.) and that would lead students at the first university (A) to join Facebook when they made friends with students at the secondary universities (B, C, D, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER7> Facebook and Google want that 1 billion of possible users to comply with the thirst of the stock market that has been accustomed to user growth metrics as a signal for sustainable tech company. They have already expanded on where they can and you can smell the desperation. Specially with projects like Free Basics, Internet.org, Aquila, Loon and Skybender which are not charity, they just want more users with internet to adopt there platforms to keep with the growth metrics. It's going to be an interesting next 10 years for Google and Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you were China, would you want these American companies having such visibility into and influence over your people's lives?

Just look at how FB was abused in the last election, of course China doesn't want a third party running the show.

</comment><comment><USER9> Of course China want Google and Facebook, but only the "obedient and compliant" Google and Facebook.

<comment><USER10> No, China does not want Google just like South Korea does not want Google. Everybody uses Naver here. China and South Korea do not want Google because local alternatives are superior.

<comment><USER11> Ok then, let China have access to regular Google and Facebook and then everyone can make up their own minds, how about that?

Because my bet is that there are 100's of millions of Chinese who wouldn't mind access to Facebook or Google.

<comment><USER10> Yes, that would be lovely. My bet is that Google will be #2 lagging Baidu a lot. You can look at South Korean search market for a preview.

<comment><USER11> If Google is allowed in 'unrestricted' obviously they will be #1 by a wide margin. But all things being equal, sure, maybe Baidu may be #1 ... but in either case it's absurd to say 'China doesn't want Google' to the point of being almost propagandistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the type thing that makes me support President Trump. The Chinese have very unfair business practices and they require a strong President to deal with them.

<comment><USER13> Trump's rhetoric was intriguing in this area at one point. The actions not so much.

As he cracks about "shithole" countries, China is building the infrastructure to exploit their resources. As allies in the Pacific look for leadership to contain China, we're insulting NATO nations, who are for all intents US military vassal states.

<comment><USER12> > China is building the infrastructure to exploit their resources

This is even worse. China will eat up the world in a similar way in which they ate up Sri-Lanka's port. Build a ton of infra for the developing world and then once they're unable to pay for it, they camp in your country forcibly.

The debt is mounting in most countries where China has 'invested' in infrastructure. For instance in Kenya, each Kenyan is estimated to already owe the Chinese roughly $100 and counting. May not mean much in the west but certainly is a lot of debt out of the total $1000 every Kenyan owes. Even the IMF is freakishly worried about Kenya's debt for crying out loud.

The Chinese will use unethical/unfair business practices to earn wealth from the west and then use it to recolonize developing countries while screwing over every other western country. Luckily, GEOTUS Trump will be able to stop this!

<comment><USER14> > This is even worse. China will eat up the world in a similar way in which > they ate up Sri-Lanka's port. Build a ton of infra for the developing world > and then once they're unable to pay for it, they camp in your country > forcibly.

The US did exactly the same, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan).

<comment><USER13> Are you referring to the concessions made by Germany & Italy for military basing, extraterritorial rights, etc?

I don't think that was contingent on Marshall Plan aid. Those things are more to do with the victor taking the spoils. US policy here was more nuanced and recognized that an impoverished and devastated europe was ultimately a threat to peace.

<comment><USER15> > Are you referring to the concessions made by Germany & Italy for military > basing, extraterritorial rights, etc?

If he's thinking of stuff like that, I think those had more to do with countries like West Germany not wanting to become countries like East Germany, due to a Soviet invasion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Panic Status Board - <AUTHOR> http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/

<comment><USER2> You should have an internal dashboard, even if you're not absurdly artsy Mac developers who can afford a flatscreen monitor to showcase it to anybody in the office. You can have v1.0 ground out in an hour or two -- take your MVC framework of choice, make a single page behind authentication, set that as your homepage or etc -- and it will pay dividends for the rest of your business' life.

It is absolutely absurd how much extra value-producing work you'll get done if tasks which routinely take you 10 minutes take 5 minutes and tasks which routinely take you 2 minutes just don't happen.

If you need some inspiration on what to put on it, I have an article on the topic somewhere... Here we go. [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard- design-for-met...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard-design-for- metrics-savvy-software-companies/)

<comment><USER3> I generally prefer to get my reports by e-mail because I already have a filtering system in place for critical/urgent/useful/noise. It stops me sitting there hitting refresh on a web page to check my stats every 45 seconds.

If you are using Django you can get your daily/hourly reports that way pretty easily - set up a cron job to call something based on this...

#!/usr/bin/python

from django.core.management import setup_environ

from datasvcs import settings

setup_environ(settings)

from django.core.mail import send_mail

from django.contrib.auth.models import User,Group

from yourapp import models

# Do model query magic here - compile report as a string.

send_mail('Daily report',report- text,'email@example.com',['firstname.lastname@example.com'])

<comment><USER2> _It stops me sitting there hitting refresh on a web page to check my stats every 45 seconds._

Smart man. Aside from customer support information, everything on my dashboard is cached for 24 hours. I do this specifically because I used to waste far, far too much time sitting on Google Analytics mashing refresh. Mashing refresh on the dashboard just shows me the same thing I saw that morning. (I have a URL available which forcibly purges the cache, but it requires me to type in something like i-have-nothing-more-important-to-do-than-this in my URL bar. I think I've used it maybe twice.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Panic's blog is just so beautifully designed. Scroll down to the comment form.

<comment><USER5> And scrolling very slow in Opera (linux&nvidia), probably thanks to CSS transparency overload and/or very thin gradient images.

<comment><USER6> 10.50 on windows no slow down here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea of having a big number to represent your "score."

Once I was on a team using Flyspray and one of our developers hacked it to display a real-time score. He had some convoluted algorithm that took into account percent completed, criticals, and priority. Everybody started working the number, trying to get it higher. It was great and become quite competitive. We'd even talk about our score with marketing and clients. The only problem followed a beta test when the client opened a ton of fixes. The number sank like stone. Not a big problem though. The developer tweaked his algorithm and bingo. . . our score was soon back where it belonged.

<comment><USER8> If I understand that correctly: your score dropped, so you hacked the scoring algorithm to display a number you liked better?

Shouldn't you have instead started a new round of the "game" and worked to fix the bugs -- thus improving your score legitimately?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, you're right. And the number lost some of its luster after the hack. Eventually we stopped using it. So lesson learned. Don't undermine your own tracking system.

We had two problems. One, the developer who wrote the algorithm was the sort of guy who needed to constantly tweak the system. He was a great coder, but he also couldn't produce unless he played a few tricks or hid an easter eggs. So, he kept screwing with the score, making it blink red or suddenly drop and return to normal. We joked that he needed to sell his algorithm to Google. It was fun, but doomed.

The second problem was that marketing started taking the number seriously. They love the numbers, don't they? We were a web shop and at constant war over real estate and advertising. The unwritten law was, anything that marketing took seriously, needed to be screwed with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Last.fm has (or had) something similar and quite sexy as well: <http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control>

<comment> brown9-2 Their idea of hooking up an analog meter to measure the average website response time is really nice.

<comment><USER10> Those are my gauges (although I no longer work for last.fm) - the code and design notes for them are up on Github:

<http://github.com/russss/arduino-gauges>

I also helped out with the analogue tweet-o-meter from a couple of weeks ago:

<http://vimeo.com/9352631>

<comment> brown9-2 thanks for sharing the code!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice attention to detail: note how the censored text is pixelated _in perspective_ ;)

<comment><USER12> Good eye!

I have to say that I'm slightly confused by this picture. On one hand, the post, the pixelation of the numbers and the support guy story make it sound like it's a real picture, but there's definitely something off, no? It looks like a mock-up to me, but I can't decide if it's just a clean design on a nice display…

<comment><USER13> Knowing the Panic guys I am sure it's real. With the attention to detail Cabel usually has, I'm sure he spend the time to make the photo look exactly like he wanted it to: perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That is a $2500 monitor. If you were wondering.

<comment><USER2> $2,500 for the machine, $7,500 for the fully loaded cost of the developer who spent three weeks getting the CSS exactly right. (Ahh, Mac developers. "The world needs all kinds.")

Still, even at $10k it is absurdly cheap relative to the value generated.

<comment><USER15>
      spent three weeks getting the CSS exactly right

two days tops.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but that's the difference between you and Panic.

You'd probably knock something very similar to that out in two days, probably that functionally served the same purpose.

Panic and Co. would rather spend a LOT more time on it to make it beautiful and captivating to look at, then spend a chunk of change on a fantastic monitor to display it on.

This is why people pay for Panic apps.

<comment><USER15> I am sure you don't know neither how I work nor how does Panic. And under "getting the CSS exactly" right I understand slightly different things from "getting the design right"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We made an internal one early January, 2010.

Here's a mockup of it:

<http://www.massiveblue.com/clients/carbonmade/pulse/>

Note: The figures are bogus.

<comment><USER18> The "Management Information" pull down is a brilliant touch. Not something I had ever considered as a UI element.

<comment><USER17> We have it set up so only the three founders can see that tab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The guys at Robocat (developed Outside for the iPhone) have a similar tool for tracking sales. They developed an internal only iPhone app that you shake to update the total sales of Outside - clever play on Shake your money maker.

I'm always interested to get glimpses into these internal status pages / apps,

</comment><comment><USER20> In a similar vein but meant to be public: <http://culturedcode.com/status/>

<comment><USER21> The big "statuses" are inconsistent (and therefore useless) compared to the actual status in the details. This means I have to actually read the details since I can't get any useful info just from scanning the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Eston Bond did something similar with the dashboard for this home automation system called Sarai: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/eston/3805310805/>

Very nice all in one interface with time, appointments, news, and weather. I really like this idea...

</comment><comment><USER23> The Open Source Lab has been working on the 2nd revision of our dashboard software that we use within our network operations center, and outside our server room.

<http://trac.osuosl.org/touchscreen>

</comment><comment><USER24> The bigco I work for has three monitors showing primary sales and login numbers in real time. In the scale of thousands of employees, the simple metrics serve to keep a basic level of group connectivity to the top-level objectives.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is really interesting. I'm about 1 month into my public beta now and I find myself constantly remoting into my servers and manually checking if everything still works. Already it's a notable drain on my productivity.

</comment><comment><USER26> I love everything about this. The bus times, the little icons of every employee but especially the ticker of twitter updates about Panic. Definitely inspiring for the developers.

<comment><USER13> The twitter updates are cool, although I can see why they chose vertical orientation for the screen, I think the twitter part would have worked better in horizontal orientation (without seeing it in person, so I'm probably talking out my ass).

What I really like about the developer icons, is that even in an image that size, I can still see quite quickly who is on what projects. Very cool indeed.

The thing, however, that I really love, is the simplicity.</comment></comment>


TrendMicro starts a server in ur machine and that allowed remote code execution - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=693# <comment><AUTHOR> It would be a great irony if someone was already using this to infect machines that don't have a firewall. If the user has a firewall, the vulnerable port is probably hidden from the world anyway.</comment>


Sun seeks 1-for-4 reverse stock split - <AUTHOR> http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1700AP_Sun_Microsystems_Stock.html

<comment><AUTHOR> With this and changing the ticker symbol to JAVA someone is really driving hard in the Sun PR department.</comment>


Lisp, Jazz, Aikido - <AUTHOR> http://programming-journal.org/2018/2/10/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. I program for a living, love Lisp and my hobbies are playing Jazz guitar and training in Tae Kwon Do (the art, not the sport) where I'm a 2nd Dan. I never considered the similarities between the three things. What's really interesting is the concept of _transgression._ In the end you don't learn Lisp, Jazz or Tae Kwon Do. You learn techniques and then learn how to create your own art. I've watched many students struggle with that concept through the years with Jazz and Tae Kwon Do. Never thought about that applying to Lisp as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Jazz has lots of parentheses: changing to another key, doing your little ii- V-I or whatever, then popping back to where you were.

</comment><comment><USER4> The title reminds me of the book "Goedel, Escher, Bach" (Douglas Hofstadter).

<comment><USER5> Except that Goedel, Escher, Bach is not as pretentious...

<comment><USER6> I found Goedel, Escher, Bach just as pretentious and ridiculous as this paper. As an undergrad, I wrote a paper that was almost that pretentious, and I'm embarrassed about it every time I think of it. How do these things make it past, in GED's case, editors, and in this case, both referees and editors? Someone has to point out the Emperor's unfortunate nudity.

<comment><USER7> I certainly disagree that GEB was pretentious. For beings that can understand information, surely computation is the highest possible goal. To that end, a certain seriousness and prestige is available when referring to CS.

We all have our opinions.

Did you find GEB to be a helpful reference? What kind of science were you studying?

Not to invade your privacy, I was just curious.

<comment><USER8> > For beings that can understand information, surely computation is the > highest possible goal.

That sounds almost like a statement of religion. I am a being that understands information; "computation" is not even remotely close to my highest goals.

<comment><USER7> Maybe not as an individual, but as a society or as a species, there are few absolutes for us to pursue. History and Math are the only absolutes we really have.

What I'm meaning to say is its a righteous goal compared to pursuing art or literature, because it's universal in nature.

I think Turing will be remembered as one of the few people who changed the course of human thought in its entirety.

I understand what you're saying, and sure, my goal right now this weekend is to get some plane tickets and an airbnb booked, there's no computing mysticism there.

But as a whole, I think we humans have an objective to find four the most information possible and to do the most computing as possible. That's essentially what the singularity is about, a human creation coming to a point of autonomy. That's the next step for humans, I think, abandoning flesh and spreading autonomous machines throughout the cosmos.

I guess it IS my religion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> reminds me of: "How jazz musicians improvise" (P.N.Johnson-Laird) [http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/papers/2002improvisation.p...](http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/papers/2002improvisation.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> It is expression-based, provides extensive control structures, is machine- independent, can solve problems fast avoiding side effects and comes with a convenient boken system (Not to mention looping fabulous in elegant male skirts).

But It lacks a decent debug system in real time.

 _Your first grab failed, what do you want to do?:

:R1 TRY AGAIN

:R2 ABORT

:R3 EXIT THE BAR AND RETURN TO YOUR DESKTOP_

</comment><comment><USER11> From the very start I have to object strongly to his definition of Art as being _" what we don't understand"_, and science being _" what we do"_.

An "Artifice" is a subject of human creativity. Science is such an artifice. The actual effective practice of science is "an art" and one that many people simply don't get.

Science is the art of developing a better understanding of that which we don't know by applying that which we do ...

<comment><USER12> My personal definition (Coming from a more philosophy discipline.

Art is aesthetics with elements of intellect - Science is an intellectual pursuit which can contain beauty.

[https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article- abstract/30/1/...](https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article- abstract/30/1/24/160514?redirectedFrom=PDF)

<comment><USER11> For me, science goes back to the root of the word. It originally goes back to the scalpel, which was used to divide living tissue from dead tissue. That which is objective vs that which is subjective.

Also, I wouldn't confine art to the purely aesthetic.

But that's just me!

<comment><USER13> >For me, science goes back to the root of the word. It originally goes back to the scalpel, which was used to divide living tissue from dead tissue. That which is objective vs that which is subjective.

The word "shit" has the same origin, btw.

<comment><USER11> Yes, in German it's more closely resembling as _scheisse_

It's also present in "Schism"

<comment><USER11> And slice

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like a contest for the most prententious paper ever written.

<comment><USER15> I don't know why you are downvoted. This is an excerpt of the abstract:

> By introspecting my personal aesthetic sensitivities, I eventually realized > that my tastes in the scientific, artistic, and physical domains are all > motivated by the same driving forces, hence unifying Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido > as three expressions of a single essence, not so different after all. Lisp, > Jazz, and Aikido are governed by a limited set of rules which remain simple > and unobtrusive. Conforming to them is a pleasure. Because Lisp, Jazz, and > Aikido are inherently introspective disciplines, they also invite you to > transgress the rules in order to find your own. Breaking the rules is fun. > Finally, if Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido unify so many paradigms, styles, or > techniques, it is not by mere accumulation but because they live at the > meta-level and let you reinvent them. Working at the meta-level is an > enlightening experience

I am hesitant to criticize the author, because I find the text so absurd that I must clearly be missing something. It looks like satire written for /r/iamverysmart.

I'd honestly appreciate being given more context from fellow HNers which upvoted this story and found it interesting.

<comment><USER16> This is a pretty par-for-course academic paper written on the philosophy of Aesthetics. The writer is using themselves as a subject via introspection, which is perfectly allowed, and attempting to highlight the aesthetic comparison between three of their favorite hobbies.

This isn't supposed to be a hard sciences paper. Aesthetics can, validly, be introspected on a personal level. If reading the paper makes you feel insecure, then you should probably engage in some self-introspection as well.

<comment><USER5> > If reading the paper makes you feel insecure

Nice projecting. He said nothing about him feeling insecure. He (rightfully, imho) said that the entire paper was incredibly pretentious.

<comment><USER16> > that the entire paper was incredibly pretentious

Is it pretentious in it's writing style or it's topic?

Writing style wise it's a perfectly par-for-the-course humanities paper. It's not a blog entry, nor a letter to a friend. It's a formal academic humanities paper.

Topic wise, it's discussing aesthetics. There are plenty of places for criticizing the authors aesthetic arguments (in a formal manner), but in terms of writing about the topics and their relation to aesthetics the author does a perfectly fine job touching on the usual points.

So I'm confused as to how the paper could be pretentious. He isn't making the claim that the only way to achieve aesthetic pleasure is to partake in his particular hobbies, or to argue for some idealized version of these hobbies. He's not glorifying programming, jazz or martial arts as being anything other than rule based frameworks with room for exceptions and growth. He isn't making strong exclusionary arguments in regards to other languages. Nor does he make any claim that he is special, or that his introspection is special or unique.

So if reading a perfectly standard academic humanities paper leads you to think it's incredibly pretentious, then that says something of the beholder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Aikido is that fantasy martial arts. The kind that only works when the opponents are in on the ruse.

Blockchain is like the Aikido of technology.

<comment><USER18> > Aikido is that fantasy martial arts. The kind that only works when the > opponents are in on the ruse.

This is the biggest fallacy people spout when evaluating Akido because they only see it being used in practise situations.

Your partner has to be 'in on the ruse' so they don't get hurt! Aikido is full of extremely damaging techniques and if your partner doesn't go where you're leading them or if they don't flip and fall as you want, they would end up with a broken wrist or neck.

Find your nearest dojo, have a go and see.

<comment><USER19> Studied Aikido for many years.

Can confirm it is "that fantasy martial art".

Your partner has to be in on it because otherwise you'd never have the opportunity to apply the technique; no one's going to let you e.g. just grab a wristlock off of their punch.

This is all down to how it is trained, training with no resistance leads to fantasy land bullshit.

Watch black belt level Aikido randori. Contrast with judo, wrestling, bjj sparring. The difference is obvious, one group is dancing in response to choreographed zombie attacks, the other is learning how to really apply techniques against resisting opponents.

<comment><USER20> Have done judo, and it's just as fictitious. It just operates by a different contrived set of rules.

And yes, of course aikido is choreographed. That choreography is hard as hell. On the other hand I'm pretty fearless about getting thrown. I've been to judo dojos and traditional jujitsu dojos where my training partners had breakthroughs because I was willing to commit completely to my attack rather than hedge my attack for fear of "losing."

Aikido is metal, because the curriculum is sprawling and deep, the ukemi is far and away the hardest part of the practice (harder than applying the techniques), and the psychology of the practice is often inscrutable to people who are fixated on an incompatible model of instrumental utility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated.

Thanks, but no thanks.</comment>


Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Site: Which Approach Works Best? - <AUTHOR> http://room4debate.com/debate/responsive-web-design-vs-mobile-site

<comment><USER2> There are 3 options: 1) Two sites, "mobile" and "desktop", both responsive; 2) One site, responsive; 3) Desktop site and mobile site.

Option 1 is the best and most expensive to implement, 3 is worst and almost same expensive. So "optimal" is 2, when best is 1.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing this. Totally agree with:

"To sum it up, it is cheaper and more modern, and many times better performance-wise, to build sites that are responsive."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. A lot of businesses today will try to avoid going responsive thinking that they are not a technology company. Many media companies will bring up that excuse. But the reality is that it's far cheaper and strategically better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is this still a question? Responsive. Next question.

</comment><comment><USER5> or a blank page.</comment>