A Huge Mistake Startups Make - we are the x of/for the y - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/huge-mistake-startup-pitches <comment><USER2> I'd argue that Opzi is actually better off describing themselves that way than trying to explain what they are without references to existing things. Yes, sure, explaining yourself by comparison to existing things raises questions. No one would claim you're done explaining at that point. But you're now only those questions away from being done. Whereas if you give people a long description that attempts to convey all the nuances of what you're doing, you just lose them entirely. Especially in a noisy environment like a conference where lots of other startups are presenting.

In an algorithm for calculating answers by successive approximations, it's fine if the initial approximation is bad, so long as the process converges rapidly.

<comment><USER3> The problem with analogies is picking one that doesn't break down too quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> sometimes "we're x for y" is an easy summary. sometimes it's a thought process.

the first is ok, the second is usually bad.

i see a lot of startups like this. "we're foursquare for lipstick! women's cosmetics is a $47 billion industry, if we could get just 1% of the market we'd be huge. we're two stanford MBAs, our development is outsourced, and we have no actual women on our team."

</comment><comment><USER5> Strongly disagree with this (and I've seen my fair share of pitches). I'd much rather hear you're the "x of y" followed by an explanation of your key differences than listen to you reinvent the wheel.

<comment><USER6> You just described the exact difference between innovation, and following a trend. People generally do not like to hear about innovation (new ideas), they want buzz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the Quora example does give off a bad vibe.

a) We are a Quora for the enterprise

b) We are Youtube for audio

Quora for the enterprise sounds like a superset. Quora, plus enterprisey features. Quora could compete, their core competency is in that set.

Youtube for audio sounds like disjoint sets. OK, I know what Youtube does. They do video well. I could see a good audio site that does it similarly, allows user submissions, etc. Youtube isn't a competitor, it is a model.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. The key here is recognizing that the "model" approach is fundamentally different than the "superset" approach. Too often these get blended together.

Portraying your idea as the sum of several individual models can be a very effective technique. Saying something like "you can send your friends fake gifts, just like you can on Facebook" and "you have a live chat window like JustinTV" is more likely to promote understanding and less likely to raise questions than saying "Imagine if Facebook was better..."

(Yesterday, I actually saw a presenter get grilled for 20 minutes about features completely unrelated to their program, due largely to the fact that they took this "Imagine If.." approach.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not a fan of this approach, or the "we're like x meets y meets z" (mashup of services), but I can see the value in giving unfamiliar listeners familiar reference points. As long as you can easily field the followup questions -- you can differentiate yourself or describe competitive advantage -- I think you're fine.

edit: Another problem I've seen with using this approach is that sometimes they use existing services to describe their service, and it actually undercuts their value. For example, someone builds service to capitalize on the networking, information sharing, and shared knowledge base of pet owners but sells as "facebook for pet owners." Well, pet owners use Facebook, so the value proposition is lost in the analogy without further reinforcement.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't have a problem with this description. Us humans think in symbols, and this is a high compression method to convey a complex idea.

Besides, even if they described it another way, astute observers would be asking the same question: Why won't Quora, or [include social platform] compete with you? This is a good question for the founders to know the answer to, regardless of how they want to frame the description of their company.

</comment><comment><USER11> I disagree. For every startup that can easily and succinctly communicate their purpose and value, there's ten that stumble over vague, non-descriptive utterances. If you can say "We're like Facebook for pets", that has value and we can immediately hone-in on what specifically differentiates you.

</comment><comment><USER12> It depends on the X and Y. If you say - You are the "successful company" of X industry for the Y industry, then there is no issue of X overlapping Y, since X and Y are distinct enough. For Opzi, they are just targeting another segment in the same industry, and that is too close for comfort.

</comment><comment><USER13> Any one know how they answered the question ?

</comment><comment><USER14> Unless you stop trying to be someone else, and start trying to the best "you" you can be, you're not a novel opportunity.

<comment><USER2> This isn't about what startups are, merely how they describe what they are.

<comment><USER14> What I meant with that last comment was that in a setting like Disrupt, you are exactly what your audience thinks you are during a pitch, and an "x of y" description can leave the incorrect first impression that you are "me too" opportunity, which Opzi and many other startups are not. In non-SV areas, that thinking is a paradigm that cannot be unshifted. I've seen a great deal of cool and creative ideas come out of places like OKC that get brushed aside with the "x of y" description. Arguably, it's one of the more intangible benefits of SV.</comment></comment></comment>


Learning Quantum Mechanics: Machines vs. Humans [video] - <AUTHOR> https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/6109-learning-quantum-mechanics-machines-versus-humans

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a lot of hype surrounding Deep Neural Networks which seem to be able to solve extremely challenging machine learning problems with almost no human tuning of parameters.

This is an informal talk at the big-O meetup in London discussing the application of machine learning to quantum mechanical simulations of atoms and molecules. This is a particularly demanding application of machine learning techniques. The requirements for regression accuracy are very high, and in addition a number of physical laws need to be obeyed by the learning algorithm. The point of the talk is to invite discussion about the relative merits of domain expertise _versus_ general-purpose algorithms for high- performance machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow, this is interesting. I came up with an idea similar to this about two years ago, but never really worked on it. I guess I should have! Within the past year this kind of thing has _really_ taken off. This concept is also being used in molecular dynamics. The LAMMPS developers have recently added a new "SNAP" potential that performs a Gaussian approximation of the bispectrum of common atom neighborhood configurations (force field generation on the fly). See [http://lammps.sandia.gov/doc/pair_snap.html](http://lammps.sandia.gov/doc/pair_snap.html). The paper on their implementation is available online, but it isn't even published yet. In 2014 alone, the number of papers on machine learning for QM and MD tasks has increased by a HUGE number. I get the impression this kind of thing has turned into a race.

I believe this is the paper that started it all: Bartók 2010 [http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104...](http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.136403)

The goal was to remove translational, rotational, and permutative degrees of freedom (DOF) from a collection of atoms, something I had been attempting unsuccessfully on my own for a while. The radial distribution function has traditionally been used a lot in MD, but it only captures a small portion of the total degrees of freedom for a collection of atoms (which is also the reason it's difficult to develop structural molecular models from neutron scattering data alone). The bispectrum on the other hand captures almost all of the DOF in a way that removes the angular dependence. It's ingenious really. It describes the probability distribution of atoms as a projection onto the surface of a 4D sphere, and the locations of the atoms are given by 4D spherical harmonic basis functions. New configurations are then smoothly interpolated from DFT calculations. This even includes the effect of electron correlation in MD! (Well, so far as the functional used in DFT is successful at that task).

The funny thing is that the concept of the bispectrum has been around for a very long time. The Bartók paper cites a 1991 paper on its usage for signal processing. It's always interesting to me how useful cross-discipline research is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if I would agree with categorising the field as a race. I absolutely agree that the number of people using Machine Learning within the atomistic simulation community is skyrocketing. But everyone is just exploring the range of possibilities and trying to see what the essential elements are for it to be successful. I think having more people working on it is a great thing!

Regarding LAMMPS, actually the GAP code is now also easily usable there with this plugin : [https://github.com/libAtoms/QUIPforLAMMPS](https://github.com/libAtoms/QUIPforLAMMPS)

The bispectrum is indeed a very powerful tool, but is not the ideal feature vector for representing the atomic environment. You should have a read of Bartok's more recent paper on this: [http://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.87.184...](http://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.87.184115) . One of the issues is that the bispectrum starts with an approximation of the neighbourhood atomic density as a sum of delta functions. Trying to represent such sharp features in a basis set expansion is actually very slowly converging. So the idea behind SOAP is to build a covariance kernel by directly comparing a smooth measure of the similarity of environments, which is also invariant to all physically relevant symmetry operations.

I would also like to add that in addition to GAP and SNAP, there are people like Jörg Behler doing this with Neural Networks and Francesco Paesani/Greg Medders with a different regression schemes. But in addition to making potential energy surfaces there are people like Paul Popelier `learning' atomic charges for building force fields and people in Vijay Pande's group doing machine learning on MD trajectories, which is something that excites me a great deal and I would love to understand in more detail.

It's a very exciting time to be in this field!

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply! This is very useful, particularly the paper you linked. With my research right now, I'm trying to come up with a visual representation of a "characteristic" atomic neighborhood around ions at different energy levels. More specifically, how the distribution of atoms surrounding a high vs low energy ion are different. But visually, there is no easily discernible difference, even though the radial distribution functions are very different for each energy level. That's why I'm studying other forms of distribution representations. Are you a member of one of the groups you listed, or just learning about it for your own research?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm part of the GAP research group (with Albert Bartok Partay and Gabor Csanyi). Representing environments is definitely still an ongoing research project. Other things I've played with in the past include identifying crystal structures at finite temperature (i.e. a classification rather than regression task), or differentiating between amorphous phases (since e.g. water has two amorphous solid phases with a 1st order transition in between, but there is no way in hell you would be able to tell one from the other visually.

We're currently working on a really ambitious new way to represent environments, but it's really preliminary at the moment.

Regarding your ion issue, what about the angular components? The radial functions really only tell you so much...

But more fundamentally, what do you mean by ion energy levels? I'm presuming you mean a metallic nucleus+core electrons, in a condensed phase at finite temperature. But of course that `atomic energy' -insofar as it exists- is a continuous function of position and not quantised, so I'm unsure what you mean by energy levels in this context.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like really exciting research. I guess the ultimate goal in representing environments would be to construct a function that captures all the statistically relevant information of a particular "type" of atomic neighborhood. It would reduce the degrees of freedom to the bare minimum necessary to recreate a similar environment that correctly reproduces any property of interest (kind of like data compression for materials). Would that be right?

The deal with the ions is that we are studying the transport and storage of lithium in a new type of carbon anode. The anode consists of small crystalline domains distributed throughout an amorphous carbon matrix. In order to capture all of the features of this material, we end up with a system of almost a million atoms. At the end of an equilibration run, the lithium ions can be found at different locations within the carbon matrix. It turns out that the potential energy of the lithium ions (as computed from the reactive potential the simulation was performed with) has a wide range of values. So we can sort these ions into bins of a histogram (this is what I meant by "energy levels"). And because there are so many samples, the radial distribution functions (RDFs) can be computed for all Li-C pairs in each separate energy bin. (The computed RDFs are useful because the results can be compared to the experimental RDFs obtained from neutron scattering.)

However, zooming in on ions of different potential energies reveals very little _visual_ difference in the local environment. Yet we know there is definitely a difference in the structure because of the RDFs, but we cannot get a good understanding of it or provide a good representation of it. So that's when I discovered the 2010 paper by Bartók. As you mentioned, I want to figure out how the _entire_ local atomic neighborhood affects the energy (as opposed to only the radial component), and I also want to create a 3D graphic that provides a good visualization of the differences between the atomic neighborhoods. In that sense, I need something that would compare the atomic neighborhoods without regard to translation, rotation, reflection, or permutation of identical atoms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has this video been restricted lately? It keeps showing the message: Sorry Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here.

<comment><USER4> Hey, it should be OK. You have to sign up as a Skills Matter member, it's free.

<comment><USER3> Thank you theoengland. I registered with skillsmatter now, but the message keeps showing. I'll take it to SM in order not to waste HN. Thank you for your help.</comment></comment></comment>


The 'art' of good programming - <AUTHOR> http://jaxenter.com/programming-art-and-software-craftsmanship-112123.html

<comment><USER2> I strenuously disagree with this article. In my opinion, programming is better compared to writing prose than plumbing.</comment>


The Macroeconomics of Information and Attention: How People Make Decisions - <AUTHOR> http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/12/17/the-macroeconomics-of-information-and-attention-how-people-make-decisions/

<comment><USER2> I was always was wondering how much user attention data companies are sitting on without any real use! If they release that data lot's of interesting stuff might pop up. Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Myspace/Facebook have a lot of these - they should give people access to it, so hackers can start thinking of ways to use it. Both sides win!

For example twitter/friendfeed stream from Amazon browsing and you can share that stream with your friends or public. Bought items, considered items, wished items, reviewed items, songs/books etc. Privacy put aside - it will be a lot of fun to explore some of this data. And yes, you should have the right to sell this data to interested parties.

</comment><comment><USER3> All of these folks have a lot of such data, but they're hardly just sitting on it. Amazon uses it to push product; Google uses it to measure and improve both organic results and paid advertising; etc.

It would be great to have broader access to this data, and I believe the privacy concerns can be addressed. But it would be asking a lot of these folks to share what may be their most valuable intellectual property: what they've learned from their users.

</comment><comment><USER3> This post is part of a series that goes through the ten principles from Mankiw's Brief Principles of Macroeconomics ([http://www.amazon.com/Brief- Principles-Macroeconomics-Gregor...](http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Principles- Macroeconomics-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/0324236972/)) and uses them as a jumping off point to analyze information and attention markets. The last of these do try to apply the notion of inflation to these markets.

</comment><comment><USER4> Where's with the macroeconomics? There is a generally accepted, narrow definition of macroeconomics, and this isn't it.

None of the four basic principles in this post are exclusive to macroeconomics, which deals with the economies of nations at a (you guessed it) macro level, eg. GDP, inflation, unemployment, etc. What macro-level indicators are there in information and attention?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not trained as an economist, but I understand microeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of individuals and macroeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of the economy as a whole. The first 4 of the 10 principles are micro, but the later ones are certainly macro.

</comment><comment><USER5> actually isnt that supposed to be "micro" rather than "macro" economics?</comment>


Ask HN: Can you help me find an old post? - <AUTHOR>

I'll describe it to the best of my ability, as Google/Algolia etc are all failing me:<p>- It was a Sign Up button that I believe was a Jquery plugin, and when the signup button was pressed it would just send your (the site admin's) email address a note saying that the user had signed up and it contained the form fields<p>(The purpose being for people who are building prototypes/MVPs of their apps, so that they don't need to build a user auth system yet) <comment><USER2> I think I found it. Is this it?

[http://forms.brace.io/](http://forms.brace.io/)

I found this with a Google search for "email form without backend site:news.ycombinator.com"

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thank you! Not sure if this was it specifically, but this is exactly what I'm after.

<comment><AUTHOR> And with your search keywords, for anyone else interested, check out:

[http://getsimpleform.com/](http://getsimpleform.com/)

[https://formend.com/](https://formend.com/)

As well.

edit:

And

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


Watership Down author Richard Adams: I just can't do humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/04/richard-adams-watership-down-interview

<comment><USER2> This is the most astounding part for me:

"It was meant to be just a story, and it remains that. A story, a jolly good story I must admit, but it remains a story. It's not meant to be a parable."

Because as much as it works as simply a jolly good story, I've come back to it dozens of times to find takes on adult life (a typical full-time job sure gives a new perspective on the warren of the snares), politics, religion, friendship, and teamwork.

I also think it's fantastic that his writing career started so late in life: 52 years old. 30 isn't necessarily the deadline to put out something that can impact the lives of millions. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I read Watership Down when I was 14 or 15. It was assigned reading for school, and I was pissed. What 14 yo wants to read about rabbits!

Then I read it. And then went and read every single Richard Adams book I could get.

</comment><comment><USER4> I grew up watching the animated movie, my son has now done the same.</comment>


U.S. Lawmaker Defends Imprisoning Hostile Bloggers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/lawmaker-defends-imprisoning-hostile-bloggers/

<comment><USER2> The news story linked to in the article is worth a read, if you're not familiar with it.

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/prosecutors-seek- th...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/prosecutors-seek-three-years- in-prison-for-lori-drew/)

Even though the jury did not find her guilty of the charges filed against her, they claim there's a legal precedent to sentence her anyway. The argument is that the jury's decision only means that there is "doubt" as to their guilt. But the constitution expressly says that someone has to be proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" in order to be convicted (Ammendments V and XIV).

Both the prosecutors in that case and the proponents of this bill are on some very thin legal ice. As good as their explanation of why this bill is necessary to prevent cyber-bullying is, I fail to see the difference between the bill itself and Nazi Germany burning books. Blogging has become one of the most crucial forms of communication in our society.

<comment><USER3> I'm tired of these overwrwought comparisons. The legislation certainly needs work (which is the point of committee and congressional votes), but there is a qualitative difference between writing '(public figure) is a doofus!' and '(private individual) is an evil person who strangles kittens' and conducting a campaign of character assassination.

At present, one can leverage the internet for unfounded personal attacks to a far greater extent than the law provides remedies to defend against them. Our libel and slander laws are written for a simpler age where publication carried an implication of editorial control. You're probably not going to find civil remedies adequate if someone has already falsely identified you as a child molestor for the lulz, say.

<comment><USER4> You're right, but the solution is to fix the laws so that they are applicable to the Internet age. If the OP is right, this law would have the effect of removing the "beyond a reasonable doubt" clause, at least for these types of alleged crimes. You seriously don't want things to go that far because this would be far easier to misuse.

In the end, you have to decide whether not letting someone get away with libel is worth potentially putting innocent people in prison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Aside from the substitution of editorial viewpoint for any actual reportage (eg, quoting some lawyers who specialize in first Amendment cases on what the implications might be), this article and others seems to depend on ignoring the first paragraph of the proposed legislation:

"(a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, _with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress_ to a person, using electronic means to support _severe, repeated and hostile behavior_ , shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

There are legal thresholds for intent and severity which would have to be met before any criminal case would stick. Everyone keeps focusing on the 'electronic means' as if the act of closing a circuit is the focus of the legislation, rather than a sustained campaign of personal attack which a jury would find intolerable.

Those bleating that Sanchez doesn't understand the internet seem to have an extremely poor grasp of the legislative process and the scope and history of the first amendment, which is not invalidated by any given piece of legislation.

<comment><USER2> >>which a jury would find intolerable.

My point in the other comment was that in the case this legislation is named after, the jury DID find it introlerable, and found the defendant not guilty. However, she was still convicted by a judge, due to arguments that directly contradict the Bill of Rights.

I agree that there's a big difference between true harassment / slander and your average blog, but they're taking way too much power with this legislation. If you think that problems like this don't backfire, I'd refer you to the legal history behind the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. The Commerce Clause of the constitution was used to argue that Congress couldn't make it illegal to take a gun into a public school. Yes, practically everybody agrees kids shouldn't take guns to school. So doesn't it scare you that lawyers and judges took such a broad interpretation to contradict the obvious, and it worked?

<comment><USER5> ... because all the school shooting in recent years were done by upstanding adults carrying concealed weapons permits.

Banning guns in schools works, now we just need to tell the young psychopaths that they must take their violence elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I enjoyed the point made at the bottom of the article about how the legislation itself is emotionally distressing to journalists and that the authors of the bill should be the first one's prosecuted under the new law, should it be adopted.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I think you don't have to be very bright to be one of the most powerful people in the world.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> >> with the intent to ... cause substantial emotional distress...

That's almost every satire ever written.

We already have laws that prevent libel. What changes just because it's published on a website rather than a newspaper or in, say, the collected works of Moliere?</comment>


How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined.html

<comment><USER2> Another perspective, not so flattering of the author:

[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2003_04...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2003_04/000953.php)

<comment><USER3> Interesting; but while that article reveals that the OP didn't handle things the best way (and left out the OP's own transgressions), it actually confirms pretty much everything from the OP. This link, with so little detail, almost feels like an ad hom . . .

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Given the situation described, I'd be inclined to install a security camera in the classroom. Then if one kid punches another or starts walking around the room there'd be a video record of what happened that you could show a parent or court - it wouldn't depend so much on subjective testimony and would keep both the teachers and the students more honest. Is there some reason this can't be done?

<comment><USER5> My thoughts as well in regards to CYA'ing. Every state and school district have their laws but I imagine recording in any fashion is illegal as it violates the privacy of the student(s). Frankly, I disbelieve the author's assertion that D.C. law preventing teachers from interviening in student fights. No matter the district, schools are still responsible for the well being of their students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Corporal punishment is still legal (and used) in 19 US States. Something like 250,000 kids a year are legally beaten by educators.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-adams/223190-kids- lega...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-adams/223190-kids-legally- beate_b_559428.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> FYI this article is dated 2003.

<comment><USER8> haha, you can tell from the 637 width tabled page :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And I thought my middle school math teacher had it bad. His name was Dick Working.

</comment><comment><USER10> ...Too long to read.</comment>


Game Programming Patterns – Bytecode - <AUTHOR> http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/bytecode.html <comment><USER2> In summary: Why create a game when you can design and implement a new programming language?

<comment><USER3> Corollary: Why create a game when you can implement cool new engine tech?

<comment><USER4> Depends on what you can actually finish I suppose.

I have several game maker projects which are long dead and gone because I got bogged down trying to write nifty engines and crap for them. In one case, I spent probably weeks working on my own custom (and, to be fair, only barely passable) physics engine for a game which can now be accomplished in a few lines now that game maker studio comes with a physics engine.

I can only imagine how deep the rabbithole would go if I ever started to learn game design in C++ or something (which, of course, I plan to) and then added language design on top of that. Would probably be really fun though.

<comment><USER3> In line with the other commenter, I have spent many years tinkering with just game engines in my spare time, and indeed it is a rabbit hole.

For that reason I think things like indie game jams (Global Game Jam & Ludum dare) are a good idea because you will write crappy code, but you will actually make a game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GreenspunsTenthRuleOfProgramming](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GreenspunsTenthRuleOfProgramming)

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp"

<comment><USER6> Are there any good real-world examples for this?

<comment><USER7> The browser.

<comment><USER8> Well, it's pretty formally specified now. (Also pretty fast.)

<comment><USER9> It's kinda sorta specified in English prose. I wouldn't call that _formal_ , though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In what situation would "just embed python/lua/js/etc." not be the appropriate solution to this problem?

<comment><USER11> You saw them a lot in old games (the kind likely to be written in assembly), because not even C, let alone a general-purpose scripting language, was acceptable for performance reasons for quite some time, yet there has always been a need for greater abstraction and expressive power. Look at any Japanese RPG of the 80s and 90s, for instance, and there's probably a simple bytecode VM (or state machine, if you prefer) for scripts that move characters around during story sequences, one for displaying text in menus and dialogs, and so on. Look in an arcade shooter, and there's probably one for defining enemy movement patterns, etc. Tiny bytecode DSLs not only boosted expressive power for programmers, they also allowed non-programmers to script behavior. 6502 assembly might be out of reach for non-programmers, but `SETANIM PLAYER1 PLAYER_WALK_TICK; WAIT 20; SETANIM PLAYER1 PLAYER_WALK_TOCK; WAIT 20; LOOP;` is not. If you only have to remember a few simple rules to get the behavior you want, even learning to hand-assemble bytecode is not out of the question for a dedicated professional.

Nowadays, you'd probably be better served by embedding a general-purpose dynamic language in most of these scenarios, but hand-rolled bytecode can still win in certain situations that _need_ high performance and/or low latency. Imagine, for instance, one of those fancy "danmaku" shooters with hundreds or even thousands of bullets on screen moving in intricate patterns. You just might want a language more dynamically manipulable than C to script the behavior of those bullets, but using a dynamic language that furiously generates garbage and demands collection pauses for something that _must_ happen 60 frames per second on so many objects is probably going to cause hitches eventually that _will_ get your player killed (in the game, at least). You'll then be subject to a very harsh but valid criticism: "I played games like this on my PlayStation back in the day with no slowdown, this guy must be a crappy programmer if his 2D game stutters on my monster PC." Sure, it's great that you don't need to break out the optimized assembly to do a Breakout clone anymore, but at the same time, _you should feel bad_ if a 1Mhz 6502 provides a considerably more reliable experience than your game on a modern x86.

A certain popular 2D shooter series made by an ex-Taito arcade game programmer uses a bytecode DSL for its intricate bullet patterns for this reason. It was probably an easier decision to make when the series started in the late 90s, but today it lets the author be productive without adding wildly variable latency into the mix that would kill the gameplay. People should not forget that running smoothly even on poor hardware is a real feature. Even in 2014, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there still using Pentium 4s and Windows XP. If you make the only new games/apps/whatever that run well on these computers, you have a captive audience.

At the same time, I think you could extract 99% of the performance benefits of the bytecode approach if your language had a well-defined heapless, stackless "tasklet/microthread" subset that centered around mutating existing objects and making certain limited kinds of allocations (allocating from a memory pool and manually "freeing" by marking the object as unused later). Knowing that a piece of code will never generate garbage and that a garbage collection cycle will never happen during its execution makes a huge difference.

<comment><USER12> > Even in 2014, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there still using > Pentium 4s and Windows XP.

Don't forget low-end mobile devices.

<comment><USER13> Eh, angry birds runs on Lua. Your point was?

<comment><USER11> Angry Birds is not a terribly involved or demanding game, and the hard part, 2D physics simulation, is handled in C by the Box2D library anyway. It requires no real-time control, you just aim the bird and watch the reaction. You could half or quarter the framerate and add enormous interframe jitter and the game would play exactly the same. If you tried to do the same thing with an demanding twitch action game, it would quickly become unplayable.

<comment><USER14> Lua's been fast enough to do what you describe for years on gear much slower than even bottom-end smartphones, but if that's too iffy for you, AngelScript is a sub-megabyte runtime when run on Android via the NDK. It's historically been performant enough for use on the PS2 (with its ballin' 300MHz MIPS CPU and 32MB of RAM). It's statically typed, has a very well-defined garbage collector you can pretty easily avoid ever invoking once, and as a simple transform language generates very little (possibly even no? I don't remember) heap allocations. It will also take literally ten minutes to set up for the sort of use case we're talking about here. (If you want to bind a big honking C++ library to it, then things get interesting, but we aren't talking about that.)

You still write your perf-sensitive code in C++, of course. Just like if you embed Lua. Because you _aren 't dumb_.

munificent hit on the one use case where this makes a ton of sense to me--when you're a basically-embedded environment, he was talking about a platform with four megabytes of RAM--but that hasn't been a serious use case in games on popular platforms for a _while_ now. Which is why I'm confused why it's in a book that seems to basically be for novices, at least without some "you should rethink doing this unless" asterisks.

<comment><USER11> AngelScript seems relevant to my interests, I'll have to check it out.

I'm sure Lua is "good enough" for a lot of tasks in most games on most hardware, I was just trying to hint at scenarios where the GC overhead could be painful enough to warrant a custom approach.

>but that hasn't been a serious use case in games on popular platforms for a while now.

The DS with its 4 megabytes of RAM was still a relevant platform not that long ago. The 3DS doesn't have a whole lot of breathing room either; 128 megabytes of RAM, who knows how much of which is available to the game and not reserved for the OS.

>Which is why I'm confused why it's in a book that seems to basically be for novices, at least without some "you should rethink doing this unless" asterisks.

I haven't read too much of this book, but I got the impression that it was for programmers of other disciplines that wanted the skinny on game development practices, not for total novices. Somewhere between "Game Programming for Teens" and "Game Engine Architecture." This chapter doesn't seem that out of place to me.

<comment><USER14> _> 128 megabytes of RAM, who knows how much of which is available to the game and not reserved for the OS_

The OS reserves 32MB for itself, which leaves you with a bigger working set than a bottom-shelf Android phone. =) I get what you're saying, but I don't think anybody's going back to the halcyon days of fewer megabytes than I've got fingers.

 _> I got the impression that it was for programmers of other disciplines_

It felt like something I'd recommend to a CS student, tbh. Maybe that's just me.

<comment><USER11> >The OS reserves 32MB for itself, which leaves you with a bigger working set than a bottom-shelf Android phone. =) I get what you're saying, but I don't think anybody's going back to the halcyon days of fewer megabytes than I've got fingers.

Ok, 96 megabytes. When you set aside RAM for everything else in a 3D game (the main binary, sound/mesh/texture caches, etc) there's not a whole lot of space left for a scripting language's heap, especially when you consider that most garbage collectors require that the heap be significantly larger than the working set in order to achieve reasonable performance. Again, not saying Lua wouldn't work just fine (any 3DS devs in the audience that would care to comment?), just that it's by no means impossible to bump against that limit. For comparison, here are the slides to a 2010 presentation that demonstrates how devs were having real performance problems with (PUC-Rio, not Mike Pall) Lua _on the 360 and PS3_ :

[http://www.slideshare.net/hughreynolds/optimizing-lua-for- co...](http://www.slideshare.net/hughreynolds/optimizing-lua-for-consoles- allen-murphy-microsoft)

>It felt like something I'd recommend to a CS student, tbh. Maybe that's just me.

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if the average programmer is actually working below the level of what we expect a CS student to know _/ me ducks_

<comment><USER14> I think--not sure, I haven't tried--that I'd be a lot less worried about that RAM budget on that phone, actually. That phone almost certainly doesn't have the GPU for a game rolling with nontrivial models/textures. Like, just as an example, I don't think you're running even a downscaled, super-optimized, everything-in-C++ version of the Angry Bots demo that comes with Unity (it's on Google Play if you want to check it out) without stripping out actual _functionality_ to the point where I think you sort of miss the point of the game because I think the GPU would give up the ghost. So I feel like on this low-end hardware you're basically talking about fairly lightweight 2D games because it _can 't push better_, so I'm not sure I'd really worry about big honkin' meshes or textures. Is that unfair? (My own libgdx game doesn't use more than 60MB of textures at its peak, and I'm doing a lot more stuff in my JRPG than I'd think almost anybody would _try_ to do on that sort of bottom- of-the-barrel hardware.)

Also, yeah, maybe I'm overshooting the average programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think a lot of people misunderstand what is being proposed here. He's not saying to write a whole new language, he's saying to write a byte code interpreter. You can implement one of those in about an hour.

<comment><USER2> Ah yes, I'm sure designers will just love to write their scripts in raw bytecode.

This section is somewhat important: [http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/bytecode.html#how-is- the-...](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/bytecode.html#how-is-the-bytecode- generated)

While you're at it, you'll probably want to write some debugging tools since your designers are bound to dream up some complicated scripts you never imagined your system needing to handle...

<comment><USER15> They will write them in FORTH and they will like it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're interested in this, check out Fabien Sanglard's code review of Another World[1], which is one of the more notable VM based games, managing to target a multitude of different platforms with some impressive vector graphics for it's time.

Also very interesting is the Emscripten port of ioquake3, which includes a custom compiler for Quake 3 VMs to Javascript.

[1] [http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/](http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/)

[2] [http://www.inolen.com/articles/compiling-quake-3-virtual- mac...](http://www.inolen.com/articles/compiling-quake-3-virtual-machines-to- javascript/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been keeping track of this book as it's developing and I must say, it's an excellent, well thought out, high level primer.

<comment><USER12> Thank you! I'm almost done! Only one more chapter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Everything about this website makes me happy and I read it regularly.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Console manufacturers and app marketplace gatekeepers have stringent quality requirements, and a single crash bug can prevent your game from shipping". Not in my experience, usually when the hard ship date comes it goes out the door.

<comment><USER12> There's a bit of give and take, but when I was at EA, certification was serious business. During beta when we had a final candidate build and the console manufacturers were testing it, we basically sat there with our fingers crossed hoping they didn't come back with an issue.

<comment><USER5> My friend scored his dream job "game tester" for Rockstar. The fun turned into tests like "Run to edge of gameworld, fire 25 rockets, run back, swap rocket gun for pistol, run to edge of gameworld, fire 25 shots, run back, repeat"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like he is reaching for an Entity-component-system - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system)

<comment><USER12> I wrote a chapter on that too!

[http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/component.html](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/component.html)

<comment><USER21> You might want to look at how people are approaching components now. Instead of components containing logic, components only contain data.

You then have systems that operate on the components. This solves the problem of needing components to interact with each other, since a system can look at as many components as it wants.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system) [http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/11/11/entity-systems- are...](http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/11/11/entity-systems-are-the- future-of-mmog-development-part-2/) [http://piemaster.net/2011/07/entity- component-artemis/](http://piemaster.net/2011/07/entity-component-artemis/)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I'm aware of that approach too (all of those links are already gray for me!), but I wrote the chapter before that became as popular as it seems to be now.

I say seems to be because while ECS is clearly being talked about a lot, I'm not sure how many shipped games are actually architected around it. The blogosphere doesn't always accurately reflect reality.

I've looked at a few ECS implementations and many of the ones I saw had such bizarre implementations that they more than nullified the performance benefits of components.

I do see the advantage of systems that work on multiple components, but I think some proponents are starting to cargo cult this model. That happens frequently in games because you have so many amateurs that want to know the "best" way to do things, and the constraints are challenging.

Hmm, this ended up sounding overly negative which I didn't intend. I think ECS is interesting, but I'll be interested to see how it matures over time. Right now it feels a bit like the OOP fads of the 90s to me. There's good ideas in it, but any good idea can be taken too far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm patiently waiting to see if Rust can solve two of the three points in the "when to use it" section without sacrificing significant performance.

</comment><comment><USER5> Should have used Forth from the start

<comment><USER23> What is a good embeddable Forth for a game?

<comment><USER5> Not embeddable, from the start

<comment><USER23> Is this a viable suggestion, though? Correct me if I'm wrong but I imagine that developing the entirety of your video game in Forth for anything but desktop operating systems would mean writing your own tooling and API bindings, if not your own Forth compiler.

<comment><USER5> It is pushing the the machine model to where it is most appropriate, on the iron. No different from choosing Javascript because it is cross platform, just someone has already done lots of the base work.

Forth has strengths and weaknesses, lack of wide use on modern platforms is definitely a weakness. There is still plenty of Win waiting in there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wall Street Loves Its HP 12c Calculators - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/05/04/wall-street-loves-its-hp-12c-calculators

<comment><USER2> Here at HP in Corvallis there are still a lot of engineers that worked on the 12c and other calculators and some of the spirit remains, despite the trials and tribulations we've gone through.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool to hear that. Those were outstanding designs.

The HP-85 was the first desktop computer I touched. To this day I want one (I have a fairly extensive collection of vintage computers). I'd settle for an 87, but finding one in working condition is just too much luck to ask for.</comment></comment>


WeeW.ee – Save time uploading and sending files - <AUTHOR> http://weew.ee

<comment><AUTHOR> We are online on Betali.st! More than 900 on the Waiting List. Hope you like it!</comment>


Inbox.com announces it will end its free email service - <AUTHOR> https://proveitwithaunittest.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/inbox-com-announces-it-will-end-its-free-email-service/ <comment><USER2> Does this mean their toolbars and stuff will stop being installed on people's PCs without their permission, since they're no longer serving free "customers"?</comment>


Ask HN: How can I convince people that UX improvements are valuable? - <AUTHOR> I'm a product designer, so it boggles my mind on a daily basis that engineers and businesspeople don't seem to see much value in a UX improvement (whether graphic design, or better interactions, or what) if the "functionality" is the same as what preceded it.  To them, UX is an irrelevant "fashion" that merely covers the "real" value of the product.<p>How can I convince them that all those little "superficial" improvements add up to potentially big gains?  What are some huge success stories that will wake them up? <comment><USER2> Have you considered the possibility that they're right?

Technical people tend to have a lot of Golden Hammer syndrome in their thinking, and don't always see the big picture. As a designer, you think UX, so you see UX as the most valuable aspect, and probably exaggerate its importance in your mind.

Developers see architecture. I'm sure if you asked them about their concerns rather than telling them yours, they'd talk about this or that broken thing that's causing or will cause problems, and how vital it is to fix that, and how _nobody listens to them_.

Talk to the business people. Ask what concerns them, rather than telling them what concerns you. They'll talk about features that could sell more product, bugs that customers complain about, etc. They'll be very upset about resources being wasted on things that don't provide value to customers.

If you want to sell your ideas about UX, you don't need to convince them you're right - you need to convince them that _they_ are right, and UX is how to solve the problems _they_ care about.

</comment><comment><USER3> A/B testing and measuring specific goals. If the goal is to frustrate people less measure how much time they spend on things. If the goal is revenue measure if the ux change converts better or worse, etc.

But it is hard to get people to listen when it's just one opinion or the other. Arm yourself with data.

<comment><USER4> and if you don't have the data to make your case, start getting the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Highlight videos of before & after user tests.

</comment><comment><USER6> Be able to show, with data, that the improvements will benefit the business or product.</comment>


The Curious Case of Bryan Colangelo and the Secret Twitter Account - <AUTHOR> https://www.theringer.com/nba/2018/5/29/17406750/bryan-colangelo-philadelphia-76ers-twitter-joel-embiid-anonymous-markelle-fultz <comment><USER2> This is a great story.

Just wondering if they can this analysis on other famous executives and see if somebody else engages in such activities.

At the same time, we are all human and have emotions and anonymity is a great way to let them out. Feel bad that he was outed.

<comment><USER3> Is it a great story?

Last GM:

The Source

Our source, whose identity is still unknown, contacted me via anonymous "egg" accounts on both Instagram and Twitter, claiming that they had a scoop. The source explained that they worked in artificial intelligence and, after noticing a "bunch of weird tweets" directed at Sixers writers, used an open- source data analysis tool to link five accounts through commonalities including similarities in who the accounts followed and linguistic quirks.

"They all have a pattern of likes, follows, and tweets which are EXTRAORDINARILY similar," the source wrote in a direct message on Twitter. For example, the source explained, all five follow accounts tied to Sixers players, members of the Philly front office, and beat reporters who cover the team; Toronto Raptors writers; Canadian high school basketball; and University of Chicago basketball. They discuss the same topics, use strikingly similar phrasing, and, at times, have tweeted out identical media images. Some of those shared attributes were odd, such as a distaste for beards and "unknown sources." According to the source's findings, the three newest accounts followed 75 accounts in common—roughly half of their total respective follows—with another 52 accounts followed by two of the three. (The Ringer was unable to verify those numbers, but they seem to track with our analysis.)

[https://www.theringer.com/nba/2018/5/29/17406750/bryan- colan...](https://www.theringer.com/nba/2018/5/29/17406750/bryan-colangelo- philadelphia-76ers-twitter-joel-embiid-anonymous-markelle-fultz)

And Hinkie? Is he sad? Angry? Vindicated? No, he says, he is happy. Happy for Embiid. Happy for all the people in the Sixers' organization.

He's not terribly interested in talking about it, though. Hinkie has long espoused having "the longest view in the room," and he's currently focused on the future. Machine learning. Artificial intelligence. The cross-pollination of different industries. On a noncompete until the end of the season, he's viewing this "gap year" (his phrase) as an opportunity to reassess, reinvest in himself and shed his old persona.

[https://www.si.com/nba/2016/11/30/sam-hinkie-after-the- proce...](https://www.si.com/nba/2016/11/30/sam-hinkie-after-the-process- philadelphia-76ers)

\</comment></comment><comment>

Not sure that makes him the source, hard to see how benefits in any way that's not petty and low payoff.

Seems like if he's the source, he's tipping off his hand in a manner that's extremely low payout from what's possible.

\</comment><comment>-----

Lets say you're Daryl Morey, and you have to make decisions on whether to clear out cap room to try and make a run at signing LeBron James,

how useful would it be to know which sock puppet twitter accounts are James'?

which are people in his inner circle (I hear he's touchy about the term 'posse')?

which are all the accounts for all the other GMs who might be interested in signing James?

\</comment><comment>-

this information is potentially wildly useful

it's even more useful if other people don't know you have this capacity.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>- \</comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Let's say you don't have an NBA owners ear,

Let's say you just want to accurately price stocks,

What are you placing the odds at the some number of publically traded CEO have a few sock puppet social media accounts that they use to manage their public reputations?

How profitable would it be to be able to ID those sock puppet accounts?</comment>


JavaScript Call Stack/Event Loop Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://latentflip.com/loupe/ <comment><USER2> Great tool for educational purposes. However, it looks like that sometimes timeouts are not always executed in the right order[1].

[1] [http://latentflip.com/loupe/?code=c2V0VGltZW91dChmdW5jdGlvbi...](http://latentflip.com/loupe/?code=c2V0VGltZW91dChmdW5jdGlvbiB0aW1lb3V0KCkgewogICAgY29uc29sZS5sb2coIkNsaWNrIHRoZSBidXR0b24hIDEiKTsKfSwgMTApOwpzZXRUaW1lb3V0KGZ1bmN0aW9uIHRpbWVvdXQoKSB7CiAgICBjb25zb2xlLmxvZygiQ2xpY2sgdGhlIGJ1dHRvbiEgMiIpOwp9LCA1KTsKc2V0VGltZW91dChmdW5jdGlvbiB0aW1lb3V0KCkgewogICAgY29uc29sZS5sb2coIkNsaWNrIHRoZSBidXR0b24hIDMiKTsKfSwgMSk7!!!PGJ1dHRvbj5DbGljayBtZSE8L2J1dHRvbj4%3D)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just wondering if people would be interested in a call back / data flow visualization for their entire application ? Would it be helpful ? Are there people looking for something like that ?

<comment><USER4> Not sure what you are thinking of exactly, but for monitoring etc Concurix[1] provided deep details about the execution of the whole application.

[1]: [http://concurix.com/#tutorial-transaction- history](http://concurix.com/#tutorial-transaction-history)

<comment><USER3> I was not aware of Concurix . Thank you for the link. I am aware of such monitoring tools though. They seem to be aimed at a different audience though ( monitoring I guess is the key word here ). I was wondering more about the day to day developer who is trying to acquaint himself with a new codebase ? Wondering if a visually shown callgraph / data flow etc would be much easier to digest than a wall of text ( the actual code base )?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i cannot believe i didn't have the mental model outlined in this video (the intro video to the site) after developing for the web for so long. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ) ...a great, very simple explanation.</comment>


Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603502/two-infants-treated-with-universal-immune-cells-have-their-cancer-vanish/ <comment><USER2> > Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers > said that because the London team also gave the children standard > chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the > kids.

Could someone explain what the process for proving it would be in this case? I presume some kind of animal testing?

Seems pretty immoral to give someone a wildcard treatment and not back it up with something known to work. Not disparaging this treatment but given we don't know if it works yet (and how aggressive cancer can be) it seems totally fair to administer it alongside chemo.

<comment><USER3> Standard approach would likely be to choose a population of patients, randomize them between "chemo" and "chemo+immune" treatment groups, and then test for a significant difference in the metric of choice such as response rate or progression-free survival. The graphical analysis of these data is often done using Kaplan-Meier curves ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimator))

<comment><USER4> So, can't simple take some (or all) other children who are going through "just chemo" in any other hospital, or even in the same hospital? I think there are plenty of children in the world that are doing (suffering?) chemo everyday.

<comment><USER5> You'd want to eliminate as many potential confounding variables as possible. If they took the control group from another hospital, maybe that other hospital does something that improves or hurts their chances. Even if you pull from the same hospital, just being in the study might change the treatment they get in subtle ways.

There's also the issue of blinding. If the control group is some outside group, then you know that everyone in the study group is receiving the new treatment. It would be much better if everyone involved didn't know whether any given patient was getting the new treatment or not until after all the results were in. For that, you need to recruit patients into the study, then randomly assign them to the new treatment or the conventional sort.

<comment><USER6> With something like cancer which has a wide geographical coverage, and more or less standardised treatments, couldn't you get a good result from including everyone in hospital X in a treatment and comparing to the general public?

<comment><USER7> No, cancer does not have standardized treatments. The remission rates vary greatly depending on the hospital and even on the doctor.

<comment><USER8> Huh...? There are standard treatment protocols.

<comment><USER9> Speaking from very recent experience, some things are obviously standard, like "take these pills twice a day" but cancer often comes with lots of ancillary issues, and most treatments come with side effects.

There was a lot of variance in how doctors and nurses treated the side effects, how they spoke to the patient, what other resources they provided, the quality of bedside manner, their attentiveness to lab results and patient health over time, whether they consistently washed their hands, etc.

People don't really die "of cancer" they die of things like blood loss, toxic build up from renal failure, blood clots, or infections acquired in the hospital that attack a weakened immune system, to name a few.

<comment><USER8> Sure. Anyone with cancer should go to a high volume academic and designated cancer center. The hospital should also rate high in us news and reports and score top marks in nurses, safety and cleanliness. But you can't deviate from FDA guidelines except in very exceptional cases.

<comment><USER9> That was my experience of variability for a family member treated _within_ a particular high volume academic hospital and designated cancer center.

But my point is in response to the original parent comment. If you give treatment Y at one top hospital and your control group is everyone getting treatment X at all the other top hospitals, you still have basically anecdotal data.

If I'm very sick and the standard treatments aren't working, would I want to try a protocol that was anecdotally very successful in some clinic? Absolutely. Just because it's not scientifically proven to work doesn't mean it doesn't work.

<comment><USER8> They do run multi center clinical trials... but yes if your current treatment doesn't work or is likely out of date then you should seek another treatment option (usually a phase 1 or 2 trial)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Happy babies! As a point of interest, this type of engineered T-cell treatment has its roots in research at the Weizmann Institute in Tel Aviv. They demonstrated the use of CARs modified T-cells in curing leukemic disease in rats and mice several years ago.

Their research was expanded to human trials at Univ. of Penn. where 27 of 29 patients with incurable leukemia and most of whom had a prognosis of death within a few months went into remission and showed no sign of the disease.

This modality may work with other forms of cancer; engineered T-cells that can enter every capillary in the body could potentially wipe out entire colonies of cancer cells. The potential is enormous, as are the challenges; cancers can be very difficult to differentiate from healthy tissue.

[1][http://www.timesofisrael.com/breakthrough-cancer-cure-has- de...](http://www.timesofisrael.com/breakthrough-cancer-cure-has-deep-israeli- roots/)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the extra info - very interesting. I'm always curious about whether these trials were followed later on as well. I mean those 27 of 29 patients, what is their state now? Still healthy? And how long ago did this trial occur?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "We estimate the cost to manufacture a dose would be about $4,000," she > says. That's compared to a cost of around $50,000 to alter a patient's cells > and return them.

> Either type of treatment is likely to cost insurers half a million dollars > or more if they reach the market.

Can someone more familiar with the pharmaceutical industry explain this?

<comment><USER13> I can explain the first quote.

In a universal donor scenario, the T-cells are engineered, error corrected and tested once. From there, they can be multiplied pretty cheaply. Most of the cost is in the initial engineering.

In a patient cell scenario, each individual patient's cells must be engineered, tested and delivered. This is obviously much more expensive.

A very crude computer science analogy would be the difference between scaling up a load balanced application relative to adding a new server from bare metal without automated scripts.

Why the treatment would cost half a millions dollars at the market is outside of my purview, so I'm eager to get an explanation as well.

<comment><USER14> Private insurers are too fragmented and small to negotiate a reasonable price for treatment. They lack the leverage that something like a national single- payer system would have.

<comment><USER15> The largest insurer in the US covers more people than the NHS. The second and third largest insurers rival other continental health services.

<comment><USER14> Please offer an alternative rationale for why they aren't as effective. I'm trying to understand why US healthcare is so broken.

<comment><USER16> It's easy. The UK can say "no" to paying for certain drugs. They take some political flak for it, but overall they've been able to keep spending down.

Even mention not paying for something in the US and holy hell happens. Even Medicare and Medicaid can't say no for the most part.

If American's want cheaper healthcare they are going to have to get used to having less of it and not get all the fancy new technology right away.

<comment><USER14> >It's easy.

No, clearly it's not.

I work for a startup that's delivering health services. Insurance companies have a very high bar for what they cover.

They are very conservative about covering new therapies. There's a lot of snake oil in medicine (acupuncture, homeopathy) and they don't want to pay for what doesn't keep their members healthy.

<comment><USER16> It's not easy to execute, but it's easy to figure out one of the key drivers of increased costs in the US.

Compare drug coverage in the US vs. Canada or the UK. New drugs are often covered immediately post-FDA approval in the US. Heck, look at Exondys 51 for Duchenne's. The FDA _barely_ approved it and pretty much every US insurer is paying for it. That doesn't happen in other countries.

A great example is the diabetes drug called Jardiance. It has better efficacy than older drugs and every US insurer covers it. It's not covered in many Canadian provinces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone here know which companies are looking for software engineers to help with this kind of stuff?

<comment><USER17> There are lots of companies in the immunotherapy space. Don't limit yourself to industry, though - lots of academic labs working on this that are in desperate need of good coders and data scientists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >And I guarantee you even if things were equal, which they are not, you would want your own stuff, not someone else's cells.

This sounds like wishful thinking from VC who just put a lot of money into the Bespoke solution. The idea of immunotherapy is that your injecting cells that can attack the cancer. What does it matter it it's your own cells especially when the cost is an order of magnitude bigger.

<comment><USER19> Yep. In medicine "other people's stuff" is used quite often...blood transfusions...sperm donors...organ transplants...etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> 'Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers said that because the London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. "There is a hint of efficacy but no proof," says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who collaborates with Novartis. "It would be great if it works, but that just hasn't been shown yet."'

So the title is basically click-bait, as the treatment is unconfirmed.

<comment><USER10> Point taken, but the title doesn't actually say the universal immune cells cured the disease.

<comment><USER5> Most clickbait isn't outright false, just highly suggestive in a misleading way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is some scrutiny.

Abstract: The London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. "There is a hint of efficacy but no proof," says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who collaborates with Novartis. "It would be great if it works, but that just hasn't been shown yet."

<comment><USER22> The odd thing: does standard chemo ever totally cure anybody? If not, then what did cure them, if not the new treatment?

<comment><USER23> Yes, chemotherapy can and has cured cancer.

<comment><USER22> Not like this as I understand it - remission isn't the same thing as "zero cancer cells detectable" \- total eradication of the disease.

<comment><USER23> It can completely cure the cancer

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy#Efficacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy#Efficacy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Rights to the London treatment were sold to the biotech company Cellectis, and the treatment is now being further developed by the drug companies Servier and Pfizer."

And that's when it will get sunk into an abyss of bureaucratic processes and this treatment probably won't see sunlight for another ten years.

<comment><USER25> In fairness, that is mostly the fault of the world's various regulatory agencies. I mean, I understand that it's easy, when asked "How many people should die yearly of insufficiently tested medicine?" to answer "zero!", but that's kind of how medicine became so stale.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra It's hard to cure cancer definitely because cancer cells will always be trying to out-evolve any treatment. Anything that quickly kills 99% of cells, unfortunately, lets them select for survival traits really fast.

<comment> guard-of-terra However, given that cancer cells do not evolve between individuals (as opposed to bacteria and virii), if we are to find a efficient immunological treatment it's going to stay efficient. If anything, we will evolve for our cancers to respond better to it.

<comment><USER26> Somehow it is strange that cancer cells do not try to propage to other organisms, given they try hard to invade their host? Is there any known reason for that (absence of) behavior?

<comment><USER27> See Retric's comment and link. Short answer is, can.

A more common transmission mechanism is itself a virus ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncovirus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncovirus)) .

But, remember unlike bacteria or a virus, cancer isn't typically "invading" and you aren't "hosting". It's a malfunction of your own cells resulting in unregulated growth. For the most part it isn't really something you "get", so much as a failure mode of you as a system.

We do use the terminology "invasive" but not because it came from outside the body, rather that it is leaving one organ or tissue and entering another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Children saved from deadly illness by using T-cells(virus?)... I think we all know where this is going...

</comment><comment><USER29> "The ready-made approach could pose a challenge to companies including Juno Therapeutics and Novartis, each of which has spent tens of millions of dollars pioneering treatments that require collecting a patient's own blood cells, engineering them, and then re-infusing them."

Is author serious with this statement? Two kids lives were saved with a potentially inexpensive technique and the author think's this point is relevant? If 500 companies go bankrupt because cancer is cured, that is a monstrous win.

<comment><USER30> I hardly think a treatment costing $4000/dose to manufacture is inexpensive.

<comment><USER31> To cure cancer and live? Seems pretty cheap to me.

<comment><USER32> Some people don't have $4000 so it's not a matter of deciding whether parting with that much money is worthwhile.

And the status of a lot of people's health insurance is suddenly up in the air.

<comment><USER33> First result on Googling the normal cost of cancer treatments

> Newly approved cancer drugs cost an average of $10,000 per month, with some > therapies topping $30,000 per month, according to ASCO, which discussed the > costs of cancer care at a recent meeting. Just a decade ago, the average > cost per month of new drugs was about $4,500.

It seems $4,000 is rather a small fee in comparison.

<comment><USER34> Nitpick: it's $4000 per dose, and you're comparing to the monthly cost

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Isn't this how 'I Am Legend' started?</comment>


US oil prices turn negative as demand dries up - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52350082 <comment><USER2> dupe.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22923025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22923025)

</comment><comment><USER3> So they start off the article with this statement:

"That means oil producers are paying buyers to take the commodity off their hands over fears that storage capacity could run out in May."

This statement is actually totally false. Producers already got paid for this production a long time ago when they initially sold the futures contract. What has actually happened is that as the expiry of the May futures contracts arrives, the traders who bought those contracts are now trying to unload them at all costs. This is because if they're stuck holding the contract at expiry, they have to take physical delivery (each futures contract represents 1000 barrels of oil), and the cost of storing that oil is getting really high since the storage facilities are nearly full.

Later they kind of explain this in the article:

"The severe drop on Monday was driven in part by a technicality of the global oil market. Oil is traded on its future price and May futures contracts are due to expire on Tuesday. Traders were keen to offload those holdings to avoid having to take delivery of the oil and incur storage costs."

But I think it's pretty irresponsible journalism to kick off the article the way they did, and imply that producers are paying you to take their oil today.

<comment><USER4> > cost of storing that oil is getting really high

If anything, this is a wild understatement. Each contract represents 1000 barrels of toxic waste. You can't just have that stored in a shed or something. And all the commercial regulation compliant storage is gone. I'd be willing to bet you will have a hard time even finding a tanker truck to take it to a buyer, since the tanker owners themselves are going to be using those trailers as temporary storage facilities. Anyone stuck taking delivery of barrels right now is in for a world of hurt. The legal fees alone are going to be ruinous.

<comment><USER5> Forgive me if this is a stupid question but they can't hold a gun to your head to force you to take the oil, right? Can't you just refuse the delivery if you have nowhere to store it? Is there language in the contract for this kind of situation?

<comment><USER4> That's not a stupid question it's an excellent one. If you don't take delivery you're in breach of contract. The penalties for that are going to depend on how the judicial process works out.

This has never happened before, so I don't know how it will play out other than that it's going to be wildly messy. Probably far messier than anyone, myself included, is imagining.

<comment><USER6> At the risk of sounding stupid, I have to ask...

Would it be possible to simply pump the oil back into the ground wherever the closest oil field is?

<comment><USER7> Doesn't the oil just come out of the oil well from its own pressure? Which would make pumping oil back in the oil field complicated

<comment><USER8> There's lots of empty oil fields out there though. Many of them could hopefully be refilled just using gravity?

<comment><USER9> The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is stored underground, surely they could build a similar reservoir

<comment><USER10> You could. Though it'd cost billions of dollars and would not be done by the time the contracts expire and deliver needs to be taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since oil is making the front page here, if you're interested in the history of American oil industry, "The History of the Standard Oil Company" by Ida Tarbell is a fantastic read. It's also a great example of investigative journalism.

In early chapters of the book she covers the initial rush to pump oil in the Oil Regions and the history of pipelines and storage facilities as it all ties into business practices of Rockefeller.

Oil storage facilities were an interesting startup idea back then, in the beginning producers would pump the oil into open pits where it would seep back into the ground if it wasn't transferred fast enough, then of course new ways of storing and transporting the oil were experimented with. It also goes into how much supply/demand were at odds in the beginning leading to several collapses in the price of oil when there wasn't such a diverse market. Again some of the issues we still see where land locked areas of producers struggled to get their product out of the region and how local economies caused drastic prices differences that we're seeing right now.

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

<comment><USER12> Ida Tarbell's father was an oilman who was ruined by Rockefeller and Standard Oil while she was a girl, which is important to keep in mind when contextualizing her work. She lived her life in part as a crusade against Standard Oil and Rockefeller. Obviously she was heavily biased, this being instilled in her early on.

For a less biased look at the history of the American oil industry by way of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, I strongly recommend Titan by Ron Chernow - author of Hamilton - which is an excellent account of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, both the good and the bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> More specifically, West Texas Intermediate Crude futures for early May delivery are sub-zero. Late-May delivery is more expensive.

This is in part a reflection of the fact that the oil producers have already been paid for the output and are contractually obligated to deliver it, but no one actually really has a use for it once it is there, and it will cost money to transport or store it.

<comment><USER14> It can't just be producers being contractually obligated to deliver it, can it? If that was the case, couldn't they close out their obligation by buying back some of these futures (at a profit), and "delivering" it to themselves by reducing production? So it must be that reducing production itself is not possible or too expensive for this to make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you owned an oil ship, what stops you from getting paid $25 a barrel to fill your ship up with oil, sailing to international waters, dumping it all in the sea, then go right back to port and do it again and again getting paid $25 a barrel each time?

<comment><USER16> These are only the prices of the "futures contracts". i.e. oil that hasn't been produced yet, as far as I understand. Actual physical oil still has a price > 0\. (Spot price)

Here is a page that includes some spot prices [https://oilprice.com/oil-price- charts](https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Matt Levine's explainer [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-20/there-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-20/there- s-nowhere-to-put-the-oil)

</comment><comment><USER18> Although this is largely a paper phenomenon, the thing to pay attention to now is ripple effects.

A few weeks ago, Capital One was granted a regulatory waiver from the CFTC over its oil derivatives positions - a waiver it since declined to use:

> The registration is related to Capital One's commercial lending to the oil > and gas industry, a relatively small part of its overall business. The bank > enters into commodity swaps with energy clients to help them mitigate the > risk of energy price swings and the related borrowing risks.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- capita...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-capitalone- cftc/capital-one-says-it-wont-use-cftc-waiver-related-to-oil-lending- idUSKBN21M0TS)

Most people don't immediately think of Cap One as an oil futures player. But its lending business caused it to enter the market to hedge some of its loan portfolio.

Given the highly unusual nature of what happened today, it wouldn't be surprising to see future announcements of banks or other financial institutions getting into trouble over commodities derivatives bets going pear-shaped.

</comment><comment><USER19> Relevant: That Time I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/that- time...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/that-time-i-tried- to-buy-some-crude-oil)

</comment><comment><USER20> In one of the articles, it quoted someone from, I think, the CME, that said they were fully prepared in their trading systems to handle these negative prices with no hiccups.

What I immediately thought, that I haven't seen anyone else mention yet, is that _there_ are some admirable programmers!

<comment><USER21> As someone who worked on trading software, I'd reserve the praise for the PMs - who would explain to the programmers why all this stuff is important.

<comment><USER22> Ex-trader at GS/MS here. PMs in this case are traders, requirements about trading systems come from traders b/c they have to dog-food it. Usually there is no separate PM in the tech world sense at banks, though there are project managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There seems to be lots of confusion on how this could have happened. Long story short — it may be because of the USO ETF:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2020/04/20/the-us- oi...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2020/04/20/the-us-oil-etf-uso- is-the-culprit-behind-oils-massive-plunge/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Futures prices are significantly higher than $0. This is less noteworthy than it seems.

[https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/crude%20oil%20-...](https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/crude%20oil%20-%20electronic)

<comment><USER24> Just because the situation is complex doesn't mean it isn't newsworthy. This is certainly an unprecedented and significant event.

<comment><USER25> It still appears more significant by the way futures trading works and the way it all bulked up to the last trading day, since there was no buyers after a certain point - because (certain) buyers were incentivized to wait until the last minute to submit orders, to get the cheapest price.

In a "real" market with physical oil wells + storage, wouldn't that decline in consumption -> storage normally happen far more gradually over time? (A drop over a week is less exciting than a down spike within 24hrs) I know it's less efficient that way and all of that, but this seems to make it appear like this drop in the market happened all at once.

A lot of non-experts will see the news this way regardless - it's _slightly_ less exciting in context but still historic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Could you just take it and they pay you to take it and dump it into dry wells in Texas and Oklahoma, seems like a reasonable gamble ?

Shrug....

<comment><USER27> Oil deposits are permeable rock with a mix of oil and water in the pores. Pumping oil down into such a formation would be slow and expensive. It would also take different equipment from that which is there at the wellheads now, so you couldn't get started right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It should really be "US WTI front month futures negative for the first time"

There's a big distinction between that and "oil prices"

</comment><comment><USER29> So, where are all the arguments now about why speculators should be required take delivery? I mean, really, the oil producers got paid and consumers shall have copious supplies of oil.

Nobody out looking to find excuses to further regulate commodities markets when all the traders are losing their asses.

</comment><comment><USER30> Oil costs $ to store. Due to the economic collapse, oil isn't being used much. So all the storage facilities are filled up. So nobody who can store it will buy it from you. If you want to get rid of oil, you have to pay someone.

</comment><comment><USER31> How long would it take to build new storage tanks?

<comment><USER13> With regulatory approvals? Probably years.

The smart equivalent is to get a tanker ship and just float it out at sea until someone wants the oil (usually just west of Africa, where you can easily dispatch it to whoever ends up needing it.) Not sure if it works quite as well with WTI instead of Brent crude, though.

<comment> core-questions It is probably a fair and terrible assumption that others have thought of this already and that, in fact, tanker ships are filling up all over the place right now. Statistically, this means we're more likely for a spill, somewhere.

<comment><USER13> The Wall Street Journal writes today:

"Lease rates have soared for very large crude carriers, the 2-million-barrel high-seas behemoths known as VLCCs. The average day rate for a VLCC on a six- month contract is about $100,000, up from $29,000 a year ago, according to Jefferies analyst Randy Giveans. Yearlong contracts are about $72,500 a day, compared with $30,500 a year ago. Spot charter rates have risen sixfold, to nearly $150,000 a day.

Day rates rise as the spread between oil-futures contracts widens. The basic math is that every dollar in the six-month spread equates to an additional $10,000 a day that can be paid for a VLCC over that time without wiping out all the oil-price gains, Mr. Giveans said."

But there's plenty of Saudi oil going in as well.

I'm not sure that they're materially more at risk of a major spill than during normal operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I might be in minority, but I think this is great for the clean energy sector and environment. The oil is not being used and thus not being consumed and converted into toxic products (carbon dioxide, and various other vehicle emissions) which are leaked into the environment.

I hope these oil companies dissolve over this unprecedented event.

<comment><USER33> Lots of silver linings from COVID (oil demand destruction, air pollution reduction, natural work from home experiment at scale).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's getting more likely that the fallout from the response will be worse than the virus would have been.

For perspective, 800 000 people die every year in the world from suicide alone.

Depression/anxiety/hopelessness has real consequences.

<comment><USER35> On the other hand, there's some potential good that could come of it. Some people who've felt trapped in dead end jobs are getting new opportunities. Who knows if the good changes that result will outweigh the bad, though.

<comment><USER34> True, it was cool to see how much solar production has spiked in Germany because of smog reduction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> anybody know how many barrels were actually sold at that price? $0 is one thing, but I'm shocked at the minus $38. It could not have been large.

<comment><USER37> You can look up the volume: [https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/cl.1/charts](https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/cl.1/charts) \-- between 2:20-2:25, EST, for example, volume was 748 contracts (748,000 barrels) at -$37.11.

<comment><USER5> Could be short covering

<comment><USER38> Long covering, actually. (Here is the long who is forced to sell at a negative price to get rid of their long position.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> There should be a meme: 75 year old baby boomer: I remember when gas was less than a dollar a gallon 45 year old son: me too! 15 year old grandson: me three!!</comment>


The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters - <AUTHOR> http://www.urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2009/05/why_the_arduino_matters.html <comment><USER2> As one of the creators of Arduino (and currently its lead software developer), I'm happy to see such a lively discussion of the platform. I'd also love to hear any suggestions you might have for improving it.

I should note that we've done very little promotion ourselves, apart from teaching lots of people to use it in various workshops. Of course, we're happy that Make is such a fan.

One interesting feature of the platform that hasn't been mentioned here is the fact that the whole thing (hardware and software) is open-source. We've had lots of people take the Eagle (CAD) files and design their own custom variants, which creates a vibrant ecosystem.

Finally, if anyone wants to get involved and help make Arduino better, check out our developer pages at: <http://code.google.com/p/arduino/>

<comment><USER3> There's two things you've (plural) done here then I'm very grateful for: USB and OSX software.

I've a birthday coming up soon, so I've just been showing my wife these ;) Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Way_ oversold. The Arduino is a nifty AVR microcontroller board, no more and no less. It's distinguished from other such things that have appeared over the years (anyone remember the BASIC Stamp?) only by price (cheaper, but not much cheaper) and integration (it has a USB device plug and a reasonably attractive IDE).

It's not breaking any ground that hasn't been a four-lane highway for the last two decades. But it's cute and cheap, and if you're interested in playing with embedded stuff or hardware control, I'm sure it's a lot of fun.

But "the next Altair?". Please.

<comment><USER5> In their defense, it's not claiming to "break ground" any more than the PC broke ground over the mainframes at the time.

But as a software hacker wanting to move to meatspace, what do you suggest as better?

<comment><USER6> I feel the Arduino is little overhyped. It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. I find the BeagleBoard to be a lot more promising/interesting given the amount of raw processing power you get on a tiny 3"x3" board.

<comment><USER7> "It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. "

Actually, it is. People who are 'starting hacking' dont know how to hack, so they dont clock, power or wire their chips correctly. They don't have a scope so its impossible to debug, especially when there are multiple unknowns (power, clock, wiring, programmer, progammer driver, programming software, compiler, code)

"I find the BeagleBoard to be a lot more promising/interesting given the amount of raw processing power you get on a tiny 3"x3" board."

I like the BB too. But am puzzled as to why people compare it to Arduino. They are completely different things (computer vs microcontroller dev board) I can't think of any projects that really intersect between the two. BB can't do even the most basic things that an Arduino does, like blink LEDs or drive a servo. And of course, an Arduino cant do real time video processing

<comment><AUTHOR> Ladyada, I think the reason that people compare it to Arduino is not so much because it's in the same category (which it's obviously not), but because it seems to be bringing the "Arduino philosophy" to the low-level ARM/embedded Linux sphere. As someone who went from zero embedded device hacking to some fluency because of Arduino, the Beagle Board seems exciting because it has the chance of opening up that related space to me as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In comparison: <http://www.xgamestation.com/>

Build your own video game system, run atari-esqe games on there. More avenues for fun in my book.

<comment><USER9> yes, and I highly recommend reading André LaMothe's books (xgamestation's sole creator) and his posts on the xgamestation forum (user necron). He's an highly skilled hacker and entrepreneur.

<comment><USER10> The xgamestation products seem good, but the website is awful. I've been there on and off several times over the years and never purchased anything because I've given up. There's now quite a few different products, but not a good overview of the differences. And the faux game look and feel is tedious and hard to read. View -> Page Style -> No Style helps somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> agreed, the arduino is oversold in and of itself. However it does remove the need for a separate programmer board/aparatus and a simple language. The ease of just using USB is a win along with a mixed community of experts, amateurs and kids. The synergy and accessibility is the main point of the article IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> You got it exactly. I'm not arguing that the Arduino is going to be sitting on office desks or pants pockets everywhere, but that whoever invents the thing that is will have cut their teeth and learned what works on an Arduino.

<comment><USER12> Arduino is the Python of dev boards in that Python has an explicit goal of "batteries included" -- to include everything you need to be productive right away. Ironically, in the case of Arduino, batteries are technically _not_ included, but that's because you get power directly from USB. :-) But metaphorically, Arduino is as "batteries included" as Python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No, the New Altair is Lego Mindstorms [http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4494799-Mindstorms- NXT/dp/B000E4F...](http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4494799-Mindstorms- NXT/dp/B000E4FDAE/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t)

Expensive? Yes. Underpowered? Yes. Thriving community? Yes. Read the reviews (there's a few hundred of them) and see the number of kids for whom this is their first intro into programming. It's an awesome piece of kit</comment>


Wikimedia Ubuntu migration FAQ - <AUTHOR> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Ubuntu_migration_FAQ

<comment><USER2> I've deployed ubuntu server edition for my website. It is stable indeed and the update process is convenience. But, still, it lack of hardware support. The RAID board I use do not provide .deb packaged driver and I have to patch it myself. When I was trying to connect the disk array to server, ubuntu can not recognize that. Well, as far as I use, ubuntu release is stable. But the driver problem is painful, too.</comment>