Half of the Great Barrier Reef Is Dead - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/08/explore-atlas-great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching-map-climate-change <comment><USER2> Yes it's worrying and sad. But there are some signs of recovery, and there's at least a little cause for a little optimism - and important reasons to maintain at least some optimism - according to this recent report:

[http://coralseafoundation.net/coral-sea-news--- vol-3-2018.ph...](http://coralseafoundation.net/coral-sea-news--- vol-3-2018.php)

From that report:

 _While it is important that mainstream media is used to make the public aware of large scale disturbances such as bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, it is concerning to me that our young people and many millions of others are viewing those media reports and concluding that the GBR is "dead" or "dying" and hardly worth visiting. Contemporary journalism that neglects to mention the different susceptibilities of corals to bleaching stress, or the ecological adaptation of the reef to disturbance and its inherent recovery potential, are not helping to present an accurate picture of the current situation and they present an obvious risk of instilling a sense of hopelessness in our younger generations, right at the time when we need that generation to be inspired to take action to help protect ecosystems such as coral reefs._

<comment><USER3> > and concluding that the GBR is "dead" or "dying" and hardly worth visiting.

Isn't that a good thing? A while ago, the death of the coral reef was blamed on damage by tourists.

<comment><USER2> I don't think the right approach is to pretend it's more dead than it is just to keep the tourists away. That kind of dishonesty doesn't pay off.

That aside, damage due to tourism is minor compared to bleaching and is easily abated through government supervision, and the fact that tourism operators have a commercial incentive to prevent damage in order to stay in business long term. That system has always worked well on the GBR, which is why it has continued to be an international tourism destination for decades and not sustained serious harm.

Every time i've visited the reef (and I've done it a few times), clear instructions are given on how to behave to avoid damaging the coral (not standing on it etc), and everyone there, being nature lovers in the first place, is most willing to oblige.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a set of articles in the newspaper yesterday in this aftermath of a month of tropical heat in temperate Europe. Climate scientists are now more inclined to publicly link this extreme weather type (and many other structural changes in the weather) to climate change. Good, because for a lot of people it stopped being some abstract thing.

But a painful observation made in the op/ed pages is that the general feeling is that this is just how it is; we can't do anything about it. That sense of being able to tackle problems and shape the world and society in a way that benefits us — it is gone.

Many people just submit to the notion that they can't do anything about it. Usually because 'doing something about it' on a personal level means sacrificing luxuries (consume less, buy less, stop flying half way around the world for a holiday twice a year, reduce your energy footprint). Climate change is an inconvenient truth, and a lot of folk seem quite content to just give up — consequences be damned, or rather, ignored.

Some flee into convenient falsehoods. Claiming that, yes, climate change is happening, but _we_ don't have any influence on that, and did you know that _[insert denialist trope]_.

A lot of people do continue to do what they reasonably can — balancing their modern comfortable lifestyle with genuine attempts at affecting change. Even if it means just lowering their own personal footprint and voting for the politicians are at least willing to explore solutions. But it's not enough, and that risks making one feel that all efforts are pointless.

We're clever and resourceful enough as a race to deal with this problem. We're also too self-centred (on a national, tribal, and personal level) to actually do more than take the absolute bare minimum of measures; and even those attempts are watered down time and time again by the leaders of the world's nations. Because either they don't understand the problem, or because they do and don't care.

It's all so very sad.

<comment> ux-app > Usually because 'doing something about it' on a personal level means > sacrificing luxuries

Yes and the sooner we accept that this is a part of human nature the better. Fighting what is clearly innate is futile. We have not evolved the ability to ever be satisfied. We a stupid apes who want more, more, more at all costs.

We need to accept this reality instead of shaking our heads at one another in faux reproach (probably over dinner, made from 20 ingredients shipped from all across the globe).

The only way to make actions against climate change a reality is to make it profitable. If we can work out how to make it so that people make gobs of money by reversing climate change then things will be peachy.

If we can't figure out a way to turn a buck from fixing climate change then we are all, collectively, fucked.

<comment><USER5> > The only way to make actions against climate change a reality is to make it > profitable. If we can work out how to make it so that people make gobs of > money by reversing climate change then things will be peachy.

> If we can't figure out a way to turn a buck from fixing climate change then > we are all, collectively, fucked.

Well, that old world is fucked. But if you look at the lifestyles of, e.g. American Indians, they lasted 10,000 years in North America in a much more sustainable fashion. Granted, it wasn't perfect. Humans caused the extinction of megafauna in North America as elsewhere, but organized agriculture never really took off there, and because of that, that continent was relatively unspoiled until Columbus.

<comment><USER6> > e.g. American Indians, they lasted 10,000 years in North America in a much > more sustainable fashion.

Sure! And why did they change their lifestyle as soon as they could? Before it was MUCH more comfortable!

Cheap energy has revolutionized the world. It is unfortunate that, for the moment, we can only find cheap energy in polluting fossil fuels but, short of discovering a less polluting cheap energy source (if it ever exists), there is no going back! You'll never be able to convince billions of people to give up their car and air conditioning to go back ploughing the fields.

Climate change will get irreversible if we don't drastically lower our quality life? OK, let it be! Let's accept it already and start doing what we can do to adapt. But don't talk about going back: nobody will listen to you.

<comment><USER7> Quite a few Native Americans did not willingly give up their lifestyle as soon as they could. They were herded into reservations that were way too small to continue their lifestyle. Change was forced upon them. This was especially true when the buffalo herds died off. I'm thinking in particular of the Great Plains Indians.

Overall though your point stands. It's not like billions of people are going to willingly give up the comforts that we have. Though in part this is because it is no longer feasible to live off the land as people did thousands of years ago. The only way to go back, as you call it, is for the population of the world to decline. This would mean a drastic reduction in the birth rate. There is a number for the size of the population of the world such that if everyone of those people lived like Americans pollution wouldn't be large enough to be a problem.

<comment><USER8> "when the buffalo herds died off" \-- when they were slaughtered almost to extinction, in large part to decimate the Indians who relied on them for food.

Check out the size of this pile of buffalo skulls, to get a sense of the scale of destruction we did:

[https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/bison-skulls-pile-used- fert...](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/bison-skulls-pile-used- fertilizer-1870/)

<comment><USER9> >we

I did nothing of the sort, thank you very much.

<comment><USER5> See this a lot. Well if you really take it as a personal affront that many frontiersmen did this...please also refrain from taking credit for any collective positive accomplishment of humanity, like the US constitution, ending slavery, or more generally Science, computers, jeans, or bubble gum. If you wanna stick to the things that you _personally_ did, by all means.

<comment><USER9> Why would I claim a hand in the creation of any of that? Using things others have built is not 'taking credit'. It's perfectly possible to acknowledge the evils of our ancestors without having to personally feel bad for it because _none of us did it and have no reason to feel guilt for it_. Kindly fuck off with your guilt complex.

<comment><USER5> > Kindly fuck off with your guilt complex.

This just not what anyone wants to see here at HN. No one personally attacked you, yet you feel compelled to spew anger. That's just not our culture. There are other places for shitposting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great steps are taken in the reef tank hobby and professional world. We now have much more insight on how to keep corals and animals alive in a tank.

It's sad that progression in the reef tank world almost feels like an ark project now that coral dies in the sea.

</comment><comment><USER11> The worst thing about this is the timing. There is a political storm in Australia over what is being seen to be done to save the reef. In a nutshell the Prime Minister just gave away 444 million dollars of taxpayer money to an organisation of 6 people without any due diligence. Turns out they are all ex bankers and oil company people.

The organisation didn't even apply for the grant.

Sadly this has become a highly political thing and because of the current state of politics in Australia where your team must do the opposite of the other team (little bipartisan action in the last 10 years with fallout being carbon taxes, welfare, NBN) nothing is likely to be done until the current government is voted out. Even then with another change its likely to start all over again.

It's a horrible state of affairs and sadly while a lot of Australian's are outraged our politicians are beholden to other interests so nothing will be done.

If you want more background reading I'd suggest a quick look through the Australia subreddit, keeping in mind that the majority on there are very left leaning.

Some links of interest [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-09/barrier-reef- foundatio...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-09/barrier-reef-foundation- grant-shocking-myer-former-board-member/10090780) [https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics- display/t...](https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics- display/turnbull-reefgate-and-rupert,11772) [https://www.2gb.com/ben-fordham- takes-environment-minister-t...](https://www.2gb.com/ben-fordham-takes- environment-minister-to-task-over-mysterious-444-million-reef-grant/)

</comment><comment><USER12> What saddens me about this story when it first cropped up back in 2016 is how powerless I feel to be able to do anything directly.

Rising sea temperatures is not (as far as I'm aware) something we're "directly" doing, but rather the net result of collective actions by humanity world wide. We can't point to one person/orgainsation/political party/etc and get them to fix this.

The whitening of the Great Barrier Reef, along with the natural damage caused by immense hectares of open mines dug up across Australia is too abstract a concept for most city-dwelling Aussies to really care about since it doesn't impact on our day to day lives.

I wish there was something more we could do besides donating more to environmental charity x.

/rant

<comment><USER13> collect samples from the remaining reef (all over the place) and cultivate them artificially until the situation is sorted out?

That's something we might be able to do on a smaller scale.

<comment><USER14> It's not just the reefs. It's the whole ecosystem that surrounds them, which is much harder to replicate as a whole in captivity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> i watched blue planet 2 and its stunning visuals are not enough to make up for the bludgeoning message it delivers about what we've done to the oceans to feel good afterwards. couple that with a record summer and the outlook isn't pretty.

</comment><comment><USER16> Remains of Huge, Ancient Coral Reef Discovered 2010

[https://www.livescience.com/29667-ancient-coral-reef- discove...](https://www.livescience.com/29667-ancient-coral-reef- discovered.html)

<comment><USER17> > Because the fossil remains were found in deep waters where coral typically > can't survive, the researchers suspect that the reef drowned due to rising > sea levels leaving behind the newly discovered fossil structure and a small > section of living coral, which was able to stay in shallow water.

Not related to the mechanism that is killing the Great Barrier Reef, which has survived sea level changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Based on how people talk about it I actually thought it was a lot more.

</comment><comment><USER19> at which point will it have a negative on human life? (hopefully just humans)

<comment><USER20> Humans are the most adaptable invasive species. The whole ocean can turn to jelly mush before we care. We will say "oh dear", switch our fast food order to fried chicken instead of fish and carry on as usual.

<comment><USER21> We're adaptable, sure. But we're not some collective. There are hundreds of millions of peoples lives that are tied up in the ocean. There are entire cultures. Those things don't adapt easily. Turn the ocean into plastic mush, and while I in my literal New York ivory tower will be fine, the fishermen will starve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seeing this from another perspective. Why does a person who can't even afford to travel give a shit about Barrier reef. Sure collectively, we as humans have messed it up. But what are the actions of one person gonna make a difference? Most people have bigger problems to worry about. Like ... staying alive, being able to hold a job and pay rent.

I also think that it's wishful thinking that suddenly we as humans will suddenly change our livestyles. Cheap energy makes our lives confortable and arguably makes us happy.

Add this to the capitalist landscape of most countries where govts bend to accommodate corporates, why would anyone implement a policy that's harmful for their economy? May be Australia since the Barrier reef is in their country but even their govt really doesn't give a shit to be honest.

In terms of game theory, it makes sense why they behave the way they do.

I feel the only way to get out of this is rewarding strong innovation. I.e making it so that solar/wind/nuclear is wayyy cheaper than coal so it doesn't make sense for any business to run a coal plant. Just the way we stopped burning wood and candles.

Same with cars, it's too expensive to buy a Tesla / leaf compared to a good ol reliable Toyota. Prius is fugly. Gimme an affordable electric car that beats the pants off gasoline car in range, style, and long term maintenance costs and everyone will shift.

Incentivize Apple, Google, Microsoft, Hedge funds etc to spend their billions of fat cash in energy revolution and we'll get the returns.

The truth is the economy rewards profits and right now, not being green is profitable.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, good news I guess, I thought it was already killed.

<comment><USER24> Yes, why only last year 95% of it was dead. This is actually an improvement.

<comment><USER25> Really?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Culturejoy – Get cultured in 10 minutes a week - <AUTHOR> http://www.culturejoy.com <comment><AUTHOR> OP here, would love your thoughts!

<comment><USER2> When you opened with a Kardashian reference, you lost me immediately.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sad to hear that - though that's the point :) There's so much pop culture around, deeper culture isn't appreciated as much. Check out our weekly archives: [http://www.culturejoy.com/archives/](http://www.culturejoy.com/archives/) :)</comment></comment></comment>


Is Amazon not selling Kindle versions of Macmillan books a strong arm tactic? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/01/30/is-amazon-refusing-to-sell-kindle-versions-of-macmillan-books-as-a-strong-arm-tactic/

<comment><USER2> This is the archetype of a story without content. To answer the question in the title: maybe.</comment>


The Library in the Lobby at Andreessen Horowitz - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/09/marc-andreessens-book-collection-explains-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> This is obviously a planted PR piece. Also will note that those books look like they are in remarkably good condition as a group. They don't look like they were abused cover to cover by many people at all. It's almost ironically like some kind of a movie prop setup but lacking the key review that would ensure accuracy and realism in the final product.

Separate issue is that as we can see from HN comments [1] not everything that is written is accurate but it's often interesting and makes a compelling read.

[1] One of the reason that I read less books is that any book that I used to read (non fiction, business or history let's say) is always the point of view of only the writer.

<comment><USER3> I feel your discontent about non-fiction. I have a saying about fiction, "at least you know for sure the author is lying."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't surprise me that Andreessen takes such an interest in Hollywood considering that VCs are today's talent agents. Betting on future stars, dealing with big egos, building businesses which promise their customers similar things (fame, wealth, respect)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hard-copy books may in reality be just as ephemeral as the endless streams of bits and bytes that flow around us these days but, to me, there is always something that just projects a sense of a well-ordered mind and an all-is- well-with-the-universe feel when I see finely-bound versions of such books arranged on shelves with a purpose as they are in the pictures shown here. This is a real throwback, but a nice one. The article itself is fluff but for me, as a long time book buff, this part was intriguing. Not fine-library stuff, just a nice way to convey a feel of real interest for a lobby entrance that would normally be utterly prosaic. It just has a stamp of individuality about it, and I like that.

</comment><comment><USER6> When I was there, I spent more time looking at the books than pitching, and they practically had to throw me out LOL.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Voice Acting for Dummies." Perfect.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like the 3rd or 4th time this has been posted.

<comment><USER9> But without significant discussion, which makes a repost ok.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> related: anyone know why (and how) did he delete his 100k tweets?

<comment><USER11> He was tweeting and retweeting so much.

<comment><USER12> But why deleting the old ones? I mean, it's his right to do whatever he wants with content he created, but seems a radical measure.

<comment><USER13> Probably a carefully calculated PR play for A16Z.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tl;dr ....(nothing)</comment>


How to Clear/Flush the DNS Cache in Google Chrome? - <AUTHOR> https://superuser.com/questions/203674/how-to-clear-flush-the-dns-cache-in-google-chrome <comment><USER2> It used to, but very recently, Chrome removed nearly all options from there. Only a single "Clear host cache" remains.

It was a really useful place to get info about why Chrome was behaving the way it did sometimes. I think it was a bad move by the Chrome product team.</comment>


What Dive Watch Depth Ratings Really Mean (And Whether You Can Trust Them) - <AUTHOR> https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/what-dive-watch-depth-ratings-really-mean-and-whether-you-can-trust-them <comment><USER2> Unsurprisingly this article doesn't highlight a big issue (for those of us who aren't minted!) If you have a proofed watch and need to get the battery changed you need to send it off to the factory and shell out a painful sum. Or, have the seal breached and be gutted when it corrodes a couple of years later.</comment>


Blocking Windows 7, 8.1 updates for Kaby Lake, Ryzen chips appears imminent - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/microsoft-is-getting-ready-to-block-windows-updates-for-old-windows-on-new-chips/ <comment><USER2> It appears Microsoft has two factions: the open-by-default tool creation for developers (VS Code, .net core, Posix subsystem, etc) and the walled garden Windows environment (Windows 10, Windows Store, UWP, etc).

This makes some sense to me. MS wants to be kind to devs, to make Windows popular again so devs make their UWP apps. MS wants to give devs good tools on their platform so they buy Surfaces, use Azure, etc.

Seems like a smart plan, but with the failure of Windows Phone, I'm not sure where MS is going with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883064)</comment>


Ask HN: Custom code for sales/marketing site or CMS? - <AUTHOR>

Those of you building the front sales/marketing/brochure sites for your startups, what are you using to build these sites? We are in the process of designing our marketing site and since it is mostly content, there is some temptation to use a CMS. However, I wonder if this can be a disadvantage when trying to track things like conversion rates, heat maps, etc. We'll also need a blog and I have no issues rolling in something like Wordpress for that. But since it can easily be used as a CMS, there's temptation to do the rest of the content as Wordpress pages too. Simple custom code using something like Sinatra would be a cinch, but carries some overhead of running a Ruby interpreter compared to a simple PHP site. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated! <comment><USER2> I would go with something like Nesta, it's a simple CMS built on Sinatra that makes it easy to do very custom things (like you might need to for conversion rates, etc).

<http://effectif.com/nesta>

I am re-doing a couple of my marketing sites to run on Nesta after trying Wordpress and just plain old Sinatra and not being completely happy with either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wordpress would be a good choice. Its pretty easy to extent compared to Joomla and drupal. I strongly suggest avoiding Joomla. Don't reinvent the wheel there are hundreds of CMS out there, find one that meets your needs which in this case sounds like Wordpress.

</comment><comment><USER4> Go with whatever is fastest to deploy and easiest to maintain. Most tracking and A/B testing stuff can be added via javascript (your CMS should allow you to create "nodes" and other similar content segments; I know Drupal does.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wordpress with a cute ThemeForest Theme if you are bootstrapping is a good option ! You even have some plugin to install heatmap on wordpress and you can track your conversions rates with Google Analytics easily.

My 2cents

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool, thank you all for the info! Good to know that most of the Google Analytics stuff is good enough for tracking conversion rates via Javascript.</comment></comment>


Helloday.tv: I had to share this, simply awesome - <AUTHOR> http://helloday.tv

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I can't believe nobody cares about this. This is the best that I've seen on the internets for a while. And with very nice presentation.

</comment><comment><USER2> what is this ? just random music player ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's Pandora of music videos. You select music "styles" you like, and they get played non-stop.</comment></comment>


Show HN: All Gutenberg Project books, sorted by their sizes - <AUTHOR> https://alhur.es/books/ <comment><AUTHOR> The source code used to fetch, calculate and display the data is here: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/gutenberg-book- sizes](https://github.com/fiatjaf/gutenberg-book-sizes)

Is there a canonical way of displaying the source-code powering a webpage? Like a <meta> tag or something like that? If not, there should be!</comment>


Automating Customer Support Using NLP and Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.floydhub.com/automate-customer-support-part-two/ <comment><USER2> Hi, my name is Cathal and I am the author of this post. Sentence embedding is still a relatively new technology and I wanted to explore it a bit to try and understand how it could be used in a typical business scenario. I still think there is alot more to discover about sentence embeddings and other ways they can be used. So I am happy to answer any questions about the post or sentence embeddings in general.</comment>


Teaching Business People How To Hack - <AUTHOR>

I work in a team of financial analysts in a large company. My team came to the conclusion, that adhering to enterprise "solutions" for our results is really unproductive. So a lot of stuff we do is now solved by lightweight home-hacked implementations.
Being the designated "tech savvy" person, I now have the task to teach people the tech skills required for this. Most of them handle SQL on a daily basis and know a bit of VBA. My goal is to teach them a programming language (probably Python), some lightweight OOP concepts and most importantly the methods and the habits of a good software developer, i.e. version control, writing code for long-term readability, fast iteration development and just general care for their workflow.
Could you guys recommend any good resources (i.e. podcasts, articles, whatever), that you, personally, find extraordinarily good? The kind of succinct explanation of the above concepts, that made you personally fall in love with the thing being explained? <comment><USER2> Python is the way to go. This is exactly how I got into Python: I worked as a Financial Analyst, automating giant reports with VBA. I quickly found out just how much easier Python was, compared to VBA, and I could then hook directly up to the Quickbooks API to grab data.

New Boston [http://thenewboston.org/list.php?cat=36](http://thenewboston.org/list.php?cat=36) is a good place to start. People can get their feet wet. Learn Python the Hard Way [http://learnpythonthehardway.org/](http://learnpythonthehardway.org/) is one of the best beginner tutorials. The problem, though, is that the examples are a bit boring because the focus is not so much on the examples, but on repetition - for learning the syntax. Most have to power through this. I would highly recommend it.

I am also the author/co-founder of a Python training series called Real Python [http://www.realpython.com](http://www.realpython.com). We start with the syntax, then move into web development.

The first course would be great for your team. It's got excellent examples, many of which are relevant to your field.

Additionally, I have been training people in Python for a number of years now, so I can create custom training material as well, specifically or your needs. Since my background is in analytics, I understand what is needed to take someone from that Excel/SQL level and get them going with just enough Python to automate much of their jobs. From there, they can take their Python learning to the next level.

Feel free to contact me at michael (at) realpython (dot) com.

Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, awesome! I'll check that out. Thank you very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi there, i recommend to you [http://thenewboston.org](http://thenewboston.org) it has a dosen of video tutorials about programming languages. for example this is the Python course link [http://thenewboston.org/list.php?cat=36](http://thenewboston.org/list.php?cat=36) best of luck (y)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, very cool. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Microsoft Hoist by its Own Anti-Anti-Competitive Petard - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2817&blogid=14 <comment><USER2> But since the ruling showed Microsoft that they were wrong, maybe they've just come around... ;-)

<comment><USER3> Doubtful. But there's some logic to arguing, "Hey, we don't quite agree with the DOJ's ruling about us, but given how that went it seems it would also apply to Google."

If a court of law finds you guilty of dong something you think should be allowed, and later you see a competitor doing more or less the same thing, why not argue that such judgments should be applied equally?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> has google been making the same mistake of not making enough _ahem_ political contributions?

</comment><comment><USER5> "which is largely why the GNU/Linux desktop just can't get a foothold, despite its quality"

lol

<comment><USER6> Care to explain why is it funny?

If you remove network effects from the equation, do you still believe Windows would have its current market share?

I believe quite the contrary - if network effects played no role in the availability and usefulness of a computer, we would have a far more diverse ecosystem than we have now. I am not talking Unix-like OSs (subject to their own network effects) but really wild things all the way from the Ataris and Amigas and Smalltalk-as-the-OS machines to desktop Connection Machines (I would love to have one) and Plan 9 desktops.

It would be a far more interesting world.

<comment><USER7> Major software vendors would never have had a platform to standardize on, so they would have to try and pick a winner and loser. Consumers wouldn't know which platform to buy to run program X, and when that platform goes away, how will they keep mission critical program Y.

Two or three major OSes is more than enough of a headache for software companies and consumers alike. The world may be more interesting, but I have a feeling we would be at least 10-20 years behind where we are now with computing.

<comment><USER6> I distinctively remember customers in the mid-80's knew what software was available to the computer platform they chose to use. They used to base their choices on that.

Machine-readable data exchange was not as important as it is today, but market pressures would, probably, influence software writers to both write more portable software (in order to sell to larger markets) and to use interchangeable data formats (something educated customers would see as added value).

The whole idea of "major software vendors" would also be very different, as the market would be much more fragmented.

And no. We wouldn't be behind what we have today. We still have files in folders, windows and mice. The coolest OSs available today are flavors of Unix and a rehash of VMS with roots on a rehash of CP/M. Most Windows users still believe files must have a 3-letter suffix. Windows users still endure drive letters. Unix users frequently endure differences between local and remote files. Most computers have two processors and most programs can't figure out what to do with one of them.

No. We have had pretty little progress during this period. We had more of the same - faster boxes with more storage, more colors, more pixels and more GFLOPS doing more or less what we used to do in the mid-80's and 90's. It's really hard to imagine an environment that would result in even less progress.

<comment><USER7> Consumers of computers in the mid-80s didn't consist of nearly the range and variety of consumers as it does now. The people who had computers in the 80s were computer geeks and engineers.

What we have accomplished in the last 20 years is the mainstream acceptance of computers. We have managed to get users familiar enough with them that they are comfortable doing things.

My grandparents no longer feel that they have to call me when they go to the store and buy a computer. They can get their email working without having to call me. They can upload their pictures and edit the documents without many issues.

Yes, there are still files and folders--but honestly: what is wrong with that? It fits how most people think. I can't name a single person I know who has a problem understanding the concept of folders and files on their computer. People don't -need- their desktop machines to do much more than they did in the 80s. And what people actually do has been streamlined and made easier. (And one could argue significant progress has been made, for example: entire airplanes are designed on computer before ever being built now. That was impossible in the 80s.)

The other stuff such as suffixes, drive letters, etc: I agree.

<comment><USER6> > The people who had computers in the 80s were computer geeks and engineers

Computer geeks are not super-smart. It's wrong to assume they can master something other people can't. Most people didn't have computers not because they were too complicated but because they weren't useful enough. A diverse ecosystem of useful computers would attract as a diverse user base as we have now, perhaps more, if we accounted for a more diverse set of available computer platforms.

What's wrong with files? What's wrong with clicking a button with a floppy on it to save a document to a network-mounted disk array? My son never used a floppy to store his data on. He never owned a floppy. And he's 14.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Macron just changed cyber security forever - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/analyzing-a-counter-intelligence-cyber-operation-how-macron-just-changed-cyber-security-forever-22553abb038b <comment><USER2> The main takeaway from the article:

 _Macron learned the lessons of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and immediately took control of the messaging and PR: Literally at the 11th hour, before the blackout would silence it, the Macron campaign issued a statement saying it had been hacked and many of the documents that were dumped on the American 4Chan site and re-posted by Wikileaks were fakes._

<comment><USER3> Actually for me the main takeaway is he ran a sophisticated counterintelligence campaign. Maybe.

The article defends the hypothesis that Macron's cybersec team deliberately seeded the Russians with false information so three could discredit it when it was released.

<comment><USER4> It was pretty hilarous that some of the fake PDFs were so sloppily done that they left the Photoshop layers in. [https://twitter.com/luxphoton/status/860471510821109760](https://twitter.com/luxphoton/status/860471510821109760)

<comment><USER2> What was going on on 4chan was even more hilarious:

(sorry for buzzfeed link)

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/heres-how-far- right-t...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/heres-how-far-right-trolls- are-spreading-hoaxes-about)

<comment><USER5> So he's gay and sleeping with his wife's 30 year old daughter? Sounds like a can do guy to me!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacks Raise Fear Over N.S.A.'s Hold on Cyberweapons - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/technology/ransomware-nsa-hacking-tools.html <comment><USER2> This is merely a taste of what is to come.

When President Obama stated in December[0] that we will deliver a "proportional response" to Russian hacking at the "time and place of our own choosing", it seemed that most of the country was proud, almost gleeful at the thought that we would be striking back. I for one was mortified.

We should not be escalating cyberwar, even if we do have proof of who attacked us. People are going to die. We can see from this article that hacking can cause serious real-world problems.

When we strike back, does Russia then strike back again? What does it look like after four or five volleys? Will entire power grids be down for days or weeks? Will the stock market crash?

It's time for the American people to demand that the N.S.A. become a defensive organization, not an offensive one. And it's time for us to demand peace in general. Cyberwar is war.

[0] [http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/15/politics/obama-russia- hacking-...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/15/politics/obama-russia-hacking- election/index.html)

<comment><USER3> I don't want the NSA to become a defensive organization. I like that Iran's nuclear program is being delayed. That's not a defensive action.

You don't seem to be proposing that the NSA become defensive, either. If Russia attacks us and we don't respond, that's not even defensive. That's dismantling.

<comment><USER4> so you want to live in a world where both countries don't have any power? Sounds Utopian.

Defence is only card in this game worth playing especially when it comes to infrastructure attacks.

<comment><USER5> Defense may be the only game worth playing, but how will that work? Unlike the real military where civilians simply don't own the hardware, in computer security they do.

NSA isn't a hardware or software vendor, and the corporations that are don't have much of a profit motive to heavily invest in security. They aren't actually liable for problems unlike say a car manufacturer that releases a faulty product, which leaves what exactly... reputation that takes a hit? But every vendor has bugs and security issues and the market isn't really punishing anyone.

Is the future effectively an enormous government subsidy to profitable corporations (i.e. NSA and other US government agencies basically become extensions of corporate America's QA department)? Is the future heavy regulations to create the proper financial incentives and/or penalties so corporations start seriously spending on security?

It's easy to say "the government should do something!!" but what exactly will that look like?

<comment><USER4> Regulate operating systems. Fund programs and research to work out how to create operating systems for our infrastructure that contain less zero days. Ensure we're the ones that find the zero days first.

The reason we're vulnerable is because we're unwilling to pay the cost of finding the exploits but people in developing nations ARE because they work for "less".

Right now our economies and systems reward those that fly by their pants and don't care for security. That is the problem. The free buffet of infinite growth from technology startups is the very thing that also gives us this pain and we need to learn to eat less.

<comment><USER6> This would take an extraordinary departure from our current politics. Government intruding on software would (rightly) cause cries from the most stalwart Free Software advocates and from proprietary software companies.

Can you imagine the outcry if a new Linux fork had to seek government approval in order to post their distribution?

Can you expect Google or Oracle to fail to lobby the government to make sure they don't have to get each major revision certified?

<comment><USER7> Not in order to post their distribution! Approval for usage in _critical infrastructure_.

Critical infrastructure, IMO, should:

\- not use general purpose operating systems

\- maybe not use general purpose computers (just build custom FPGA logic to control power grids and stuff)

\- not use internet connected computers

\- maybe not use computers at all when possible

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've never liked the term 'cyberweapon'. It is subtly misleading and gives the non-technical masses misconceptions about how exploits actually work. Cyberweapon implies that exploits are created by governments and let loose on the world, when in reality exploits are existing flaws that were simply discovered by governments or individuals. Exploits are like a serious manufacturing defect in a lock that was only discovered after the fact. I think this misconception has real implications. If you compare exploits to Nuclear weapons, the public reaction will be we need more secrecy and more weapons to protect us from hostile nations. If however you changed the analogy to something like a defective lock, it become obvious that what we really need is openness so exploits can be fixed.

<comment><USER9> While I understand where you're coming from, and I agree with you to some extent, it's not really that simple.

While the majority of exploits we currently see in the wild are things I think the "defective lock" analogy works well for, there's a subset of attacks that would be equivalent to cutting the lock with bolt cutters.

In those cases, there are specially crafted tools that aren't exploiting a defective lock, they're destroying the basic premise that let the lock work.

I'd say that RowHammer fits that description pretty aptly. It's a cyberweapon. It's not an exploit.

It's so much of a weapon that (as far as I know, someone please correct me if I'm out of date!) there's still no known mitigation strategy that completely solves the problem. We have lots of partial mitigations, but nothing surefire yet.

So... it's both. We certainly have lots of defective locks, but we also have some very nasty tools that exploit some fundamental premises of our tech in clearly malicious ways, and were _absolutely_ designed and implemented to do exactly that.

<comment><USER10> In this case we're talking about the recent NSA exploits leaked by Shadow Brokers and then utilized by WannaCry and the Petya attack. Both of those had a "weapon" (the ransomware itself) that spread by way of an exploit found by NSA (a defect in Windows that people failed to patch).

In this case, I feel that blaming NSA for the exploit and calling those "cyberweapons" is wrong. The entity who put the ransomware on top of them and deployed them built a weapon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not trying to claim whataboutism, but I think there's an elephant in the room. The end result of the NSA saying "ok, as of today we've completely disarmed our cyberweapon stockpile and released patches for all vulnerabilities to the appropriate software companies" wouldn't be the end of cyberattacks. It would just be someone else doing them. I don't know what the real solution is. Maybe there is none.

<comment><USER12> The point is that there would be fewer cyber attacks, both because the NSA itself would no longer be adding to the number of hacks and because the NSA would use their sizeable budget to discover and disclose vulnerabilities, presumably making all of us safer.

<comment><USER5> Their budget is sizeable but less than the annual profits of Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. And NSA pays for tons of stuff that those corporations don't have to deal with like having thousands of linguists.

Where is the responsibility of corporations in all of this? They have a cash pile that dwarfs the entire intel budget and ought to be the FIRST entities that invest in fixing their OWN products, right?

<comment><USER13> > Where is the responsibility of corporations in all of this?

Somewhere around here :-

> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary > depends upon his not understanding it!"

Sorry shareholders, you'll be getting a tiny dividend this year because we are spending a huge part of our 'profit' on backfixing all the shit we let slide said no CEO ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > White House officials have deflected many questions, and responded to others > by arguing that the focus should be on the attackers themselves, not the > manufacturer of their weapons.

Am i to understand that if somebody would manage to steal nuclear warheads and launch them we don't hold the people who failed to protect them responsible?

<comment><USER15> A nuclear weapon is a little different than a patched SMB exploit.

<comment><USER16> How's that different in terms of responsibility?

<comment><USER15> One kills millions.

<comment><USER17> SMB attacks can be used against medical facilities. I would reframe this as "both can kill".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> With the initial vector being some widely used Ukranian tax software, and the network vector as psexec/wmic mimikatz harvested credentials, the actual usage of 'NSA cyberweapons' was just a backup.

I suspect this attack would have had a similar number of victims without EtBl/DoPu and EtRo.

The existence of 'nation state' offensive tools has little baring on exploitability for poorly configured enterprise network, when most victims were exploited by open source offensive tools, even when patched.

<comment><USER19> You are correct regarding the most recent ransomware not actually needing EternalBlue and just adding it if needed (As proof of concept code is widely available for it).

I think concerns include things like WannaCry too though, which did indeed rely primarily on use of EternalBlue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cyberwar hasn't necessarily led to the massive loss of life associated with nuclear or chemical weapons. Until that happens (or like with nuclear weapons, we can culturally show how much of a zero-sum game it is), ordinary people won't have an incentive to take action. Technically minded people may carry capital, but we're vastly outnumbered by the dwindling working class politically.

<comment><USER21> The only way a nuclear system could be compromised is if there was some idiot surfing the internet on it, or if someone intricately familiar with the systems and network tailored an exploit to target it. If we have teams of people targeting specific systems like this, and just hovering over the execution button, then I'd say this is a huge problem. Nothing in this article really described the nature of the threat these weapons pose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If history has told us anything, it's that this won't be fixed until we wake up one day and the majority of the computers in the world are bricked. Then the government will act. Not before.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hopefully these issues will also put a stop to government's requesting software backdoor access.

<comment><USER24> Five Eyes are meeting this week to develop a backdoor plan...There should definitely be a big backlash against it, especially in light of recent events.

Backdoors in US infrastructure = invitation to Russia and China to go right through it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Prediction: as this becomes more frequent, the only thing that will substantively change is the frequency at which newspapers report that fear is raised.

</comment><comment><USER26> Closed source vs open source. Why are such exploits not so evident on mac, linux, bsd etc? Is it only because microsoft dominates the desktop market? Edward snowden clearly showed MS relation to the NSA. I do not believe at all such exploits are ${Discovered} by the NSA. But the exploits are backdoors that MS provides. That is why they are now blaming the NSA and putting on a marketing campain to show how much they care about everyone ${Security}. So what if this is the case? To me its pretty obvious who created this mess.

<comment><USER27> For all his quirks, RMS has made points in the past that I'm kicking myself for not taking seriously. I just wish that the FSF wasn't so tied up in minutiae -- it turns people off.

It's a sad fact that the face of proprietary tech is that of a handsome young generic "disruptor", while Open Source / Free Software / Libre / GNU//blah is less-cheerful Steve Wozniak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This does NOT bode well for the future of humanity. It seems that war is only war when people on your side are dying. Once everything is sufficiently automated it will be possible to wage war without risking any of your humans. I don't want to know where that leads

<comment><USER29> > Once everything is sufficiently automated it will be possible to wage war > without risking any of your humans.

i don't see how that could possibly work. just because people won't die directly from a weapon anymore doesn't mean they aren't negatively impacted in this hypothetical scenario. i'm thinking of attacks crippling key infrastructure which could lead to large scale supply shortages

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Related thread by Rob Graham:

[https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/880536274913771521](https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/880536274913771521)

</comment><comment><USER31> How does one protect themselves, or loved ones? I feel this may come across as a silly question, but if escalation continues, I believe I won't be the only one asking this question.

<comment><USER30> Frequent offline backups, software updates, disabling software features you don't need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> i'd speculate that nsa might be working on some hardware solution to secure their tools, ie purpose built chips/compilers

</comment><comment><USER33> For what it's worth, NSA is not the only agency with a stockpile of 0days. I figure they should give 'em up only when everyone else does.

</comment><comment><USER34> Terrorism is a problem of technology.

</comment><comment><USER21> Two questions

1\. Why do they not simply take the weapons of a network? Maybe store it on some physical media, or a computer not networked unless it's time to take a Kim down a notch?

2\. Are these "weapons" really that dastardly? Most of these common ransom- ware and viruses are easily avoided, and only succeed because of naive users. Backdoors aren't a weapon, they're there on purpose. Sniffing, spying, and logging can potentially cause some chaos. But are these really some kind of Zero-cool level hyrda's that they can sink oil-tankers with?

<comment><USER35> > Most of these common ransom-ware and viruses are easily avoided, and only > succeed because of naive users.

The problem is that the large majority of the users is naive.

<comment><USER21> So you think this stockpile is mostly viruses/trojans that would target random users and hope it spreads to important systems, or hope there's important systems manned by naive people? These kind of exploits are everywhere, and I'd say the NSA is hardly the biggest threat in that arena.

<comment><USER36> It's probably not a stockpile of viruses/trojans.

It's more likely a list of exploits across different devices that give you various levels of access to do as you wish with. Some are probably nothing to worry about, some might be something that gives you the ability to get into the machine and encrypt whole sections.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


You can zip open Google's homepage today. - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com.au

<comment><USER2> A simple summary of what I think is going on here:

There is a bit of slight of hand here that makes this look like a CSS3 animation but I'm pretty sure it's not.

Upon initial page load there is a canvas that takes up the background that has the zipper, logo, split input's and buttons on it. On top of that they have real DOM input and buttons.

When you touch the zipper they hide the DOM elements and reveal the underlying canvas. The background page is loaded and the canvas animation proceeds and reveals the background page.

<comment><USER3> I believe this is all the code for it: <https://gist.github.com/2476246>. Line 343 (the $ function declaration) initialized the script and line 363 initialized the canvas element. You're right, not CSS3.

The two image sprites are <http://www.google.com.au/logos/2012/sundback12-hp-l.jpg> and <http://www.google.com.au/logos/2012/sundback12-hp-s.png>.

<comment><USER4> But when i checked in Firebug i am only able to see the following img (top half) <https://www.google.com/logos/2012/sundback12-hp.jpg>

<comment><USER3> At some point they hide the image and create the canvas. If you right-click the zipper and click inspect, it selects the canvas for me right away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite is still the Les Paul doodle (<http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html>), closely followed by the Jules Verne doodle (<http://www.google.com/logos/verne.html>).

<comment><USER6> The interactive Sanislaw Lem doodle (<http://www.google.com/logos/lem/>) is up there as well.

<comment><USER7> I'm just seeing this for the first time. I wonder how this doodle affected people's productivity. And considering the height, where was the search field placed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It looks like a neat feat, but it is not really interactive, I think. When I pull it somewhat down and then all the way up again, all while keeping mouse1 pressed, it will still unzip.

<comment><USER9> It zips up and down following the mouse as one would expect for me.

<comment><USER8> What Browser are you on? I tried FF12. For me, once I clicked the thing, not matter what I do, it will unzip, even if pulled up all the way again.

<comment><USER9> I was on Chrome and never tried with Fx.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't work in Chrome Beta for ICS. That's a shame, because this doodle screams for touch interaction.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great, now i can't zip it back.

<comment><USER12> I got my ... pointer stuck in the zipper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would love to read something about how this works.

</comment><comment><USER14> Two observations.

Doesn't do anything on an iOS device.

I would never have navigated to the Google homepage if it wasn't linked here.

</comment><comment><USER15> Read on Twitter: something is wrong if you have to search after you unzip!

</comment><comment><USER16> This may be my favorite Google doodle so far.

</comment><comment><USER17> Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not sure how I feel about Google asking me to take its pants off.

<comment><USER19> Hacker News has been a little bit reddish lately. I don't really like it.</comment></comment>


Things Not to Do in PHP 7 - <AUTHOR> https://kinsta.com/blog/10-things-not-to-do-in-php-7/ <comment><USER2> Most of the tips are not related to php 7 at all. I.e. "Do Not Trust User Input" When is it a good idea for any programming language? pretty much never.</comment>


I am the fold - <AUTHOR> http://www.iamthefold.com

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the share guys! I am the creator of the site.

I had some issues to begin with, where some fine folks were abusing the site. I think they're all pretty much tied up now though.

I've got some ideas about posts I could write about this project (from technical details to how the data stacks up) — is there anything in particular you guys think I should write about?

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. There are several clusters: 360, 650, 960, 1555. If it only shows unique heights, without information on how common it is, how is it possible that there are so many variations around a single value? Are there so many devices with different size? I would have expected to see fewer lines.

<comment><USER4> Well the data sent is "window.innerHeight" so if 1920x1080 is a popular screen resolution, some people will be using windows XP which will have 30 px taskbar size, and some people will be using 40 px taskbars with windows 7. Then some people will have browsers "not maximized" so they will be missing a few pixels too, and so on.

So from single height value, we have many variations differing by few pixels. Then, I think, we can gather some popularity info from this, if there is many variation around 1080 and less around 1200, this would mean the former is more popular.

So we don't need devices with different sizes but just a few different software choices.

or so I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why "the fold" should never be a hard number. You can still design for a larger portion of the initial viewport with percentage based "folds" (along with content).

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it meant to be headache-inducing? [http://i.imgur.com/9nJ8cRR.png](http://i.imgur.com/9nJ8cRR.png)

<comment><USER7> That is not what it is supposed to look like. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER6> Both Firefox 35.0.1 and IE 11. Windows 8.1

<comment><USER8> And Chrome 40.0 on Windows 8.1 for me

<comment><USER9> Same for Chrome 40 on OS X

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Before this went down, the highest recorded fold was at 987654px. Somebody had fun with the experiment or has a nice 1755K screen :)

</comment><comment><USER11> What happens when you are surfing at a zoom-level unequal to 100%?

<comment><USER12> If you zoom in, it becomes a much smaller number. So, you are right that the zoom level affects the values recorded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like one of those *x4512 screens, please.

<comment><USER14> Portrait oriented screens?</comment></comment>


Education without loans: How income-share agreements can reshape education - <AUTHOR> https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2020/q1/feature1 <comment><USER2> This dystopian idea was predicted in a pretty good book called "The Unincorporated Man" by the Kollin brothers in 2009.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man)</comment>


Ask HN: What web server do you use? - <AUTHOR>

What web server are you currently using? Apache, Nginx, lighttpd, Cherokee, IIS, Custom, Other? Are you happy with your current setup or do you plan on switching to a different web server for your next project? <comment><AUTHOR> For most of my career I have used Apache. Just recently I choose to run Nginx for a new project and I cant see myself going back to Apache. Just today I came across the Cherokee web server and that looked pretty slick. Does anyone have any experience with Cherokee?

</comment><comment><USER2> At work: custom web server hiding behind a lighttpd reverse proxy. I'm not entirely happy with either part of this, although it's more the fault of the back end and all its legacy c++ issues. I'd consider switching to nginx on the front end if I could be sure it wasn't going to interfere with our e-mail setup.

Personal server: thttpd. It could log cgi scripts better. Otherwise I'm happy with it.

Laptops: thttpd, sending all requests for localhost to a cgi script. If I could persuade it to log cgi errors, it would be perfect.

</comment><comment><USER3> For personal projects I use Apache, not because of its performance characteristics, but because it's the most common and thus when I want to do something crazy I am most likely to find that someone else who uses it has already written up an explanation of how to do it. For development I also use the Django default/debug webserver a lot.

For work I use GWS but I suspect that is not helpful to you ;-)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm especially interested in how/if you use one tool for load- balancing/proxy/reverse proxy, and another for more traditional page serving.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have heard a lot of talk about using Nginx in conjunction with HaProxy, but I don't have any experience myself with that setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote my own. I built on top of NanoHTTPD and added the stuff to properly support caching and other features I needed.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nginx, with apache as backend with mod_wsgi. still learning how to tweak nginx

</comment><comment><USER7> I've used a bunch, but right now it's all about Nginx, and sometimes Lighttpd

</comment><comment><USER8> nginx. love it. no plans to switch. we have a crazy tricked out setup.

apache for running mod perl but that is being replaced within a year.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nginx and Passenger (for running Ruby apps)

</comment><comment><USER10> IIS - .Net all the way!

</comment><comment><USER11> nginx passenger</comment>


Periodic Table of Google APIs - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/more/table/

<comment><USER3> Whenever I see "Periodic table of", I remember of this blog post by Rob Pike: [http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2010/08/know-your- science....](http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2010/08/know-your-science.html)

 _"Another sort of abuse is comedy periodic tables: periodic tables of the vegetables, period table of the desserts, periodic table of the presidents, and on and on. There are zillions of them. I believe the vegetables one was the first widely distributed example.

What's wrong with them? Again, they miss the point about the one true periodic table, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. In fact, to put things with no structure into a periodic table not only misses the point of the periodic table, it misses the profound idea that some things have periods."_

<comment><USER4> This is entirely true, _but_ I would like to point out the existence of a Periodic Table of Desserts that does not omit the _periodic_ nature of the table:

<http://eblong.com/zarf/periodic/>

<comment><USER5> I really like the dessert "structures" - highly informative in a "Good Eats" kind of way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My tips for Internet fame:

\- Open up the Google API table. Close your eyes and click randomly on the page until two or more new windows appear.

\- Using these APIs, create a mash-up with Bing Maps.

\- Go to Domainr and search for an applicably douche-y domain to ship your new app under.

\- Wait for the venture capital funding to flood in.

<comment><USER7> That's the plan! Except for the VC part

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> FYI, if you are interested in a straight list of the APIs, you can browse them here: <http://code.google.com/more/>

I believe the periodic table data is based on or generated from that list.

We do have quite a few APIs over overlapping areas, so the periodic table is a nice alternative way to get a feel for them.

</comment><comment><USER9> OK, it may not be an appropriate metaphor for science purists but it is extremely useful to have links to all APIs in one place, grouped visually by topics. I had enough trouble keeping up with the myriad APIs that Google provides and wasn't even aware of many of the ones linked to, so I applaud the effort.

<comment><USER3> Seriously, is the specific and quite "strange" disposition of the periodic table really adapted here? Why not a simple table-based layout, with no useless holes?

Here on FF 3.6 on a 1280x1024 display, some of the labels are truncated...

<comment><USER10> Why are you sperging about this so much? It's just a cutesy geeky reference. I don't think anyone is under the impression that it actually leverages the layout of the periodic table in a useful way. What a curmudgeon.

<comment><USER11> Because it's cargo culting. The periodic table looks the way it does because it's about the _relationships_ between the different elements organized spatially on the page. Because of that, it also lets us _predict_ elements we haven't discovered yet! Amazing!

There's really no reason that the relationship between typography, dessert, vegetables, google apis look anything like the relationship between the elements. If it did, we'd really be on to something!

But! If the relationships between google apis isn't at all like the elements, what would it look like? And even more interesting, if there are missing spaces, that means there are google apis not yet written that we can look forward to!

<http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/>

Is an example where someone did a periodic table that tried to use space as a way to convey information about the relationship between the perl operators. Notice how it looks nothing like the PTofE. It has its own structure because the relationship between perl operators is different than the relationship between the elements.

Those of us that are sticklers about this feel so, probably because we find the beauty of the actual meaning behind the structure of the periodic table much much more interesting and beautiful than any joke you can make from it.

Sometimes, jokes are funny because they're the truth that no one wants to say. Like when Chris Rock says, "[When listening to your woman], you've always got to throw in 'told you that bitch crazy', because every woman has another woman at their work, that they can't stand"

Other times, jokes are funny because one doesn't know any better. Like when Chris Rock says, "If they can send a space shuttle to the moon, why can't they make an El Dorado with a bumper that doesn't fall off?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Visualization is not Periodic, Period!" [http://eagereyes.org/blog/2009/visualization-is-not- periodic...](http://eagereyes.org/blog/2009/visualization-is-not- periodic.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> No Shared Spaces API: <http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/p/api>

although, that API is here: [http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory/1?company=Goog...](http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory/1?company=Google)

Why don't they just offer a straight search API?

<comment><USER14> If I remember correctly, they used to have one (until about 2 years ago?) but it was discontinued, presumably because there was no way to serve ads through it.

Edit: The Google Web Search API (<http://code.google.com/apis/websearch/>) was only deprecated in November of last year and should still be usable for a while, although the documentation appears to be gone.

<comment><USER13> They should just offer a search api and and adwords api together. The publisher can get a cut of the adwords revenue, and there should be some sort of checking that search is being served with adwords - just by looking at comparative bandwith from the one ip.

If Google don't have social in their dna (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyOqNE7H9Ng/>), then they should work with those that do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm rather saddened that Chromium doesn't overlap with where Chromium should be.

</comment><comment><USER16> The table is a bit misleading; lots of these entries aren't web APIs - <USER2> TV optimisation guide, V8 source repository, Java developer tools.

<comment><USER8> The more accurate name (that we use sometimes) would be "Google Developer Products", but that just doesn't slip off the tongue as nicely.

When I started at Google, all of our APIs were true APIs, and my title was "API support engineer." Then we started developing these not-quite-API tools and platforms, and my titled changed to "Developer Programs Engineer". Also doesn't quite slip off the tongue. I do miss those simple days when we only had APIs... Alas!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is neat! rafaelc, where did you find this?

</comment><comment><USER18> and yet not a single one for web search...</comment>


Show HN: Metro – What if users generated their own data? - <AUTHOR> https://getmetro.co <comment><USER2> Hmm, how much trust and control can I have over the data I am generating?

This sounds like it could open huge possibilities in a lot of industries, provided there's transparency.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have full control. Data generation is opt-in, on a per-project basis, and you can pause data generation whenever you want.

The data is generated by plugins called DataSources, which are community-made and open-source. Since the community owns the data generation code, there is less of an incentive to make something untrustworthy, and it's a lot more difficult since the code is open source.

Transparency is key here. I think that once we have a transparent and fair foundation for sharing user-generated data, we can build some really cool stuff with data that was never possible before.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Approaches to storing data from multiple/disparate RDBMS data sources - <AUTHOR>

I was looking at a few SaaS analytics products and was wondering as to how these companies were storing data from their customers/clients.
For e.g., Company A has PostgreSQL and Company B has MySQL as their databases. The SaaS product company is able to store data of both Company A and Company B and provide analytics. Even in the case where Company B has PostgreSQL as its database and the schemas are not the same, still the SaaS product company is able to provide analytics.
My question is - How does one (a) source (b) store and (c) analyze data coming from diverse companies/businesses having different/disparate/dissimilar databases in a scalable and reliable manner? What would be the methodology to follow? <comment><USER2> one approach would be modeling with RDF - [http://workingontologist.org/](http://workingontologist.org/)</comment>


Actix Web – Project Future - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1289 <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion for context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22075076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22075076)

<comment><USER3> How many `unsafe` blocks of code are there and how many of them can be refactored? What's a t-shirt size estimate on the level of effort to convert the code?

<comment><USER4> Unsafe blocks are not _per se_ a bad thing — think of them more of a "trust me here and give me manual control"-override.

Figuring out whether an author's trust is earned or if they just used _unsafe_ to stop the borrow checker from nagging is non-trivial for precisely that reason.

So you question is very likely impossible to answer even by the author himself. If you are really eager to know, dig yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm certainly glad that given a bit of time, cooler heads have prevailed. I completely understand the shear frustration one must endure when managing any open source library/framework. There is a huge sense of entitlement among consumers... but this should not translate to any responsibility on the part of the author. Throughout this process, I've seen comments about how simply forking the repo would be considered hostile... yet, I always felt that was part of the beauty of open source. Use what is available, and "stand on the shoulders of giants" when you wish to see something go in a different direction. Instead of viewing it as, "what you built is terrible, here, let me fix that for you". We should strive to see it as a tree that has much potential, some branches may be more favored. Some may collapse. Alliances may be formed. But it's all in the name of building cool stuff. I get how some may consider that nothing would ever get finished using that model... but, therein is again, the beauty of open source. If someone wants to "finish" something, they are free to do so.

<comment><USER6> I am in exactly this situation now. I want to be able to have a method to load the content of the partial for mustache.ra; wrote in their repo looking for feedback - but if no none - absolutely going to fork, and hopefully no hard feelings on either side....

<comment><USER7> I maintain a handful of forks of node.js libraries that the original authors were unresponsive or uninterested in maintaining. Some people did the same to some Ruby gems I wrote ten years ago.

There was absolutely no drama involved. As long as you credit the original authors and isn't passive aggressive about forking, all is good.

In fact, one of the authors of a library I forked noticed the attention my fork was getting and wanted me to merge back. Everyone won in the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So glad I don't maintain open source for some viral scale fanciness. Seems like a lot of work for generally no pay. I know a lot is company supported but a lot more isn't. Then there's those people demanding support for free. And other's demands for you to review their code and apply it 5 seconds from when they send it in.

Seems like I'd take a few days off one week and a twitter storm would brew and then a doxing campaign would fire up and there would be lynchmobs and angry pitchforks outside the building where I work. Obligatory comparison to Hitler or such and then I'd shrug and say, "its a tetris clone, people, calm down!"

I'm hoping that is all an exaggeration. But from what I have seen recently its _not that far off_ in terms of online hate that can appear.

Is there a guide for maintainers of such things so deal with the generic overhead that must come from having a "community" around some popular tech software?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm always a bit horrified when I see folks show up on github making demands / insults are thrown at someone offering their code for your use.

For whatever reason I sort of assume that there was a barrier on github where users who bother to read the code also code and would have some level of understanding that coding is hard, not every bit of code everyone writes is the way they want it ... and that would add to some level of understanding and civility.

It seems like I was wrong.

<comment><USER10> In this case, you really need to go back and look at the issue trackers. It wasn't just people making demands; people had submitted patches that fixed safety issues. Some of them were merged in, but some were ignored, one was called "boring" and it then mean things started being said. Entire issues were deleted.

I don't agree with the mean things. Yet I can understand the frustration: here is a new patch that works and fixes something that could lead to a security issue? No one wants to fork the entire project and start their own version.

Honestly, the maintainer seemed kinda arrogant to boot. It might have just been a language barrier too, so who knows. I think if you took enough time to really look at all of it, it's a much more complex situation that what everyone is simplifying it too.

<comment><USER11> Looking back, it seems to me that the maintainer was/is in dire need of a vacation. It's easy to become dismissive when you're stressed and burnt out. There even is an issue filed in August where he recognized that he needs help with the project.

The mistake seems to have been that no effective countermeasures were taken before things boiled over, but at least now the whole mess has ended on a positive note.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, what happened? I just went through a local Rust meetup in NYC and learned that Actix is one of fastest web frameworks across all languages and the huge popularity in IoT space. Can some one explain any concerns for this project's future like splits between ffmpeg / libav?

<comment><USER13> The author prioritised benchmarks and "creativity" in code rather than making sure the library was safe. That's fine, it was their code after all.

However, many people saw that this was a caviller attitude to take, especially as it wasn't signposted, and gave the author grief for this.

The problem was, though, that the cumulative effect of these "unsafe is bad, therefore you are bad" comments (which shouldn't have been made) was that the author was dismissive towards reports of _actual_ unsafe behaviour in their library which could have caused security issues.

The author got frustrated and moved the repos to his own personal account and left a patronising message in its place.

Bare in mind that Atix had been built up as one of (if not _the_ ) best Rust libraries for HTTP servers, partly off the back of the benchmarks (for which safety had been sacrificed) and partly from the fact it ran on stable (non- nightly) Rust.

<comment><USER6> I tried to make sense of it and it didn't seem to be _that_ much more convenient compared to running iron + appropriate middleware packages (session storage; multipart; etc). They seem a bit "stale" but work absolutely fine. Source: 33KLOC stable rust web project.

<comment><USER14> Where is rust being used for 33kLOC projects?

<comment><USER15> 33kloc is pretty small; rustc is over a million lines of code, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Humans gonna human. Glad to see this is working itself out.

<comment><USER17> maybe the new maintainer will be more open to vetting & accepting `unsafe`-reducing patches? that would be a great outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This whole situation reminds me that team management of open source projects is very helpful. Not just for when maintainers have issues but for those time when you have to go through issues as a maintainer. Having someone to talk with and sharing the burden is incredibly helpful.

<comment><USER19> That is a trade-off, as the team typically needs a common vision that might not be easy to distribute (or even extract out of your mind).

I had a similar problem with Chrono [1], the most popular Rust date & time library at the moment (though now rivalled by time-rs [2] ;-), where I was struggling with personal issues and yet (thus?) unable to sufficiently materialize my vision. Eventually I gave up and passed a torch to other interested people, one of which is now the primary maintainer, but no major API design and stabilization that would lead to the 1.0 is not happening as far as I concern.

[1] [https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/](https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/)

[2] [https://github.com/time-rs/time](https://github.com/time-rs/time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Have to say, this whole drama put me off Rust a bit, more so than I expected. Its the taint of proselyting extremism among the worshipers of 'security', I think. Like finding a worm at the bottom of your tin of peaches.

<comment><USER21> Honestly, it put me off Actix; not Rust. Mind you, I haven't really explored the language that much, but I'd like to be able to pick a well supported framework that has some solid guarantees if I enter the web space with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I want to take a moment to appreciate the participation of the whole community on this. I've been following the story since it started and I'm very pleased to see how people (HN, Reddit, Github, etc.) came together to support the author and promote a more friendly Rust community.

There is a lot of criticism in the Software Engineering community in general but the Actix story made me feel way more welcome and open. I'm very happy to see that!

</comment><comment><USER23> Great news, I hope the project has a healthy future ahead.

</comment><comment><USER24> Would anybody care to shed some light on the situation? It seems that various commenters have a level of context not present in the linked post.

<comment><USER22> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22075076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22075076)

you'll find all the references there

<comment><USER24> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice to see a (relatively) happy ending!

</comment><comment><USER26> This is not a duplicate, this is an update with meaningfully new information, and should not be hidden. @dang ?

</comment><comment><USER27> My heart skipped a beat when I saw the new maintainer went by the name John Titor. Apparently just a reference to the original though.

<comment><USER28> So, John Titor came to save the _future_ of Actix.

<comment><USER29> A more lore-correct reason would be John Titor returns to learn how Rust actually works as people in the future can no longer figure it out.

<comment><USER30> I'm reminded of this classic comment: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/67x46l/announcing_rus...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/67x46l/announcing_rust_117/dgu8tgb/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How long would it take to create a Windows 1.0 capable machine from scratch? - <AUTHOR> https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54976/how-long-would-it-take-to-create-a-windows-1-0-capable-machine-from-complete-scr <comment><USER2> I think the only real answer to this is "never". 20 people is well below the minimum viable number required to create a large population, and since the first step in building a CPU is "create a large industrial civilization", it can't ever happen.

<comment><USER3> I agree. If you have ever read the book Crystal Fire, about the work done at Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950-70s, it took the best and brightest decades to solve the chemistry and engineering challenges present in building transistors and ICs. Even with 20 skilled PHDs as a starting point, I don't think you could overcome the practical manufacturing challenges in any reasonable amount of time.

<comment><USER4> one of the caveats of the question though is the people who are put there already know exactly what they need to build and how to build it; so you don't need 20 phd's to re-solve the chemistry and engineering challenges. It's almost purely a (still not solvable with 20 people) manufacturing problem.

<comment><USER5> These are 20 people who live infinitely long, never age, and can work 12 hour productive days.

As long as there is no single step that requires more than 20 simultaneous workers, I don't see why it's not solvable with these 20 people.

<comment><USER6> It will just take a long time, though…

<comment><USER5> Naturally, but the original question was _how_ long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The hardest technological barrier to overcome is production and casting of high grade metals at scale. All the primitive tech guys on youtube have an easy time with everything until it gets to making a furnace capable of smelting iron. That's difficult as all hell and then building all the parts and the ore supply chain to scale that up is a very long process. Once scalable metals production gets going, one can progress to chemicals and then to electricity and to optics to semiconductors eventually.

<comment><USER8> One of the points everyone ignores is agriculture.

If you're going to have a bunch of humans in a small area (civilization), it's going to be a requirement. Until you have mechanized/highly productive agriculture, more than half of your population's job will be food production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 300 years later: "Shit, we forgot to bring the license key."

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the laugh :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't really know. But if you decide to do so, please make a video series about it. I really enjoyed the series Ben Eater has produced making his 8 bit computer. [1]

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM&list=PLowKtXNTBy...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM&list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU)

</comment><comment><USER12> On the next episode of Primitive Technology. On a more serious note, IT MIGHT be doable for a 20-ish DIYers with current technology and some resources. Setting a limitation, of course, to not have them use any of the PCB workshops or foundries. PCBs are doable at home, ICs still aren't-ish. I expect a revolution on home-made ICs in the next few decades.

<comment><USER7> ICs need very difficult to handle chemicals like hydrofluroric acid to manufacture though. That kind of stuff will never be DIY.

<comment><USER13> From the premise of the question on SO:

> For convenience, we assume that the humans would not age or die during their > participation in this experiment.

Not dying will come in very handy when handling the chemicals.

<comment><USER14> They'll realize not dying or aging is more useful than running Windows 1.0 and drag out the process forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _island that contains all necessary resources as they would appear in a natural environment_

This is the problem, if civilisation collapsed it's never coming back because all those easy to access resources we relied on in the past are gone. It all requires advanced technology to access now.

<comment><USER16> There will be so much stuff left over from our civilization that it should be pretty easy to scrounge and scrape together stuff, Mad Max-style. Access to a landfill, steel, copper, other metals and some working electric motors/generators, and you're off and running. Heck, to make a generator all you need is a permanent magnet, some copper wire, and some mechanical energy, like maybe hydro or a bike crank.

<comment><USER15> You won't have much luck extracting shale oil with a couple of bike chains and an old washing machine motor :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminded me of this:

Indistinguishable From Magic Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4)

</comment><comment><USER18> I forget the name of the paradox, but the gist is: we cannot recreate our current technology from scratch with our current technology. Because many intermediate layers have between removed and made obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of WaitButWhy's iPhone thought experiment[0], where the entire world reverts to a pre-human state and humans have to construct a functioning iPhone to break the spell. There's some interesting discussion on how long that would take, or if it would ever happen.

[0]: [https://waitbutwhy.com/table/iphone-thought- experiment](https://waitbutwhy.com/table/iphone-thought-experiment)

</comment><comment><USER20> A human brain can be used as a general purpose computing device. Invent and produce low tech stuff like paper, pencils and an eraser and use your humans to execute instructions and check each other for errors. Alternatively use sticks and sand. The computer would run very slowly but it would run. 8 bit assembler for windows 1 code is not that difficult to get your head around, its just tedious. I recon you could do this inside a year.

<comment> cup-of-tea Develop mentat skills.

<comment><USER21> I see a fallout reference, I upvote

<comment><USER22> A Dune reference originally :)

<comment> cup-of-tea Indeed. I've never played Fallout. Are there many Dune concepts used in other works?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's important to consider that the workers wouldn't have to replicate the tech tree of the past. With access to all industrial expertise, as assumed in the question, what could be done more efficiently, or what could be done to better suit the ergonomics of a 20 person team?

I think the inverse question is also interesting. What technology have we lost, because our current infrastructure has negated our need for it?

</comment><comment><USER23> Wouldn't it be better to build a machine capable of useful work?

</comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of Riverworld. (Working from memory here - it's been a while since I read it) In the civilization that Sam Clemens created/participated in, they basically did this - recreated an industrial society which had basic, but workable computers.

<comment><USER25> One of my favorite series! Grab your grail!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is why I say the first people on mars will need local copies of wikipedia. It's hard enough to bootstrap civilization without having to relearn everything and have enough people to have experts in all areas.

<comment><USER27> Wikipedia doesn't contain nearly enough knowledge. It tells you what a CPU is, not how to build one. It tells you some of the chemical properties of certain common chemicals, but not the millions of reactions, or thousands of entries in databases giving their exact physical and chemical properties, etc. Wikipedia would be a useful tool for bootstrapping, but is clearly a tiny, tiny fraction of human knowledge. It's short on a lot of technical details which fill the shelves and databases scientists, engineers, etc. depend on. It's also missing the living knowledge, that is passed from generation to generation as we teach people how to do the thousands of jobs that are necessary to keep modern society running.

<comment><USER26> >> Wikipedia would be a useful tool for bootstrapping, but is clearly a tiny, tiny fraction of human knowledge.

I completely agree with you. Wikipedia would be just a start. Having an electronic library with high quality texts (and videos) from all areas would be even better. Whatever information they bring, it will be best if it's free to anyone and everyone there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Mildly interesting literary reference: In Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (light spoiler), in the orbital world, they never, after 5,000 years, get to refined microelectronics. It's not an important plot device, so I wonder how gamed out that idea is, but it's remarked by Kath that their computers are nowhere as refined as those they had before the hard rain.

<comment><USER29> It's very plausible. Most answers are concerned with the technical side, but the _real_ difficulty is achieving a stable society with a continued interest in science and research. Organized civilizations have existed for millennia but war, religious zealotry and social uprisings have been resetting scientific advances every so often.

The unknown Greek engineer who built/programmed the Antikythera Mechanism in the 2nd century BC could have worked with Babbage in his 19th century Difference Engine. Add the steam-powered Aeolipile of 1st century AD and the basic technical ingredients for the industrial revolution were already present in classical Greece. However, the proper social factors that allowed the exponential growth in science and research that resulted in the development of microelectronics and the information society are extremely difficult to achieve, more so than the merely technical ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Mildly related, I was reading this day about busy-beaver function. It jumps suddenly from n=7 because 7 states seems to be enough to do exponentiation.

Apparently it is claimed that no person today knows all the steps required to build a pencil from scratch. It's overwhelming to think further to a Win 1 capable machine.

</comment><comment><USER31> This reminds me of Thomas Thwaites The Toaster project. A great read and very crazy project.

[http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster- project/](http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting thought experiment, although, as others have pointed out, a huge section of industrial civilization would be required to get to the point of producing CPUs.

A more interesting question would be how many volumes the build instructions would comprise.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is it possible that there could exist a tool such that would make this task possible? What would it need to be capable of? Very precise manipulation of matter?

</comment><comment><USER33> If anyone actually goes to the trouble of doing all this, please make it use \n for line endings instead of \r\n.

Future generations will thank you.

<comment><USER34> Nah, fuck 8 bit code pages in general.

have it use Unicode line endings (or, if Unicode has to be recreated, do IT right, and have it use 28 bits for codepoints and 2 bits describing the format).

<comment><USER35> "describing the format"?

<comment><USER34> the code unit size, byte order, and how many code units are in that codepoint.

you can fit all of that information into 4 bits when you just care about minimizing the size of that mini header.

I know that, because I got bored and made up a quick proposal on it, not that I expect anyone else to even look at it.

<comment><USER35> If you don't know code unit size and byte order up front, how do you even find the header?

But I'm not really seeing the value. This is a variable-length format that isn't self-synchronizing, right? And if the header is fixed-length, then won't Latin letters require at least two bytes?

It seems like it just loses to UTF-8 (which can support 31 bit code points, too).

<comment><USER34> because it's the top 4 bits... you read that as a byte, then read X bits more to get the rest of the code unit.

yup and yup.

UTF-8 is capped at 21 bits, theoretically it can support up to 6, but it's not allowed to because of UTF-16.

This format would allow 28 bits to be encoded as 8, 16, and 32 bit code units.

There would be no surrogate pair nonsense, simply write all the non-leading- zero bits into as many code units you need as well as the 4 bit header, and you're good.

I'm not saying it'll ever happen, I know it won't, but if we could go back in time...

<comment><USER35> If there's unknown byte order, then bytes might go 21436587 and you won't know if you're actually reading the byte that has the header.

If we could go back in time, the important thing would be killing UCS-2, and the false idea of all code points fitting into 16 bits. The encodings with 8 bit and 32 bit code units are just fine, and don't encourage terrible assumptions.

I'd definitely suggest a variable-width header, though. If you remove the extra bits that UTF-8 uses to be self-synchronizing, then your header is a fixed 1/8 overhead, which means you can fit 28-bit code points into four bytes while also fitting ASCII characters into one byte.

<comment><USER34> That's precisely what I meant with your UCS-2 comment.

What do you mean by variable width? the 4 bit header would be limited to the first code unit, the following ones would just be pure codepoint values.

and that's a good point, I as picturing it as the top 4 bits that describe the format, so the header's byte order would be field, but the actual codepoint value would be encoded with whatever byte and bit order the header indicated.

<comment><USER35> Oh, so it's a BOM? Why integrate it into the code unit if you're only going to have one of them?

<comment><USER34> > Oh, so it's a BOM?

Kinda? It isn't limited to just the byte order tho, but I can see it.

> Why integrate it into the code unit if you're only going to have one of > them?

There would be multiple code units, just 1 of the mini headers/BOM.

With that comment I was trying to contrast it to UTF-8 which has those 2 leading bits of the continuation code units set to `0b10`, it wouldn't have that.

<comment><USER35> Oh, the first code unit of each code point, not the first code unit of the text. That's how I had originally understood you until I got confused by the talk of byte order.

I have to say I really don't see the value of being byte-order flexible, but always requiring the header be in the "first" byte, because that makes it so big-endian and little-endian formats are packed completely differently. 2 and 4 byte code units will be misaligned all the time too, might as well just use a series of bytes in fixed order.

> What do you mean by variable width?

Make the first byte be like UTF-8 (so a prefix of 0, 10, 110, or 1110), and the following bytes be raw data. It compacts a lot better than a fixed-length header, with roughly the same level of complexity.

But now that I think about it a continuation bit is probably the best option here because it regains some ability to self-synchronize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> That's a lot of bugs to recreate. Maybe blockchain AI can help generate the needed bugs :-)

</comment><comment><USER37> Great idea for a TV show.</comment>


The Venture Capital Math Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/the-venture-capital-math-problem.html

<comment><USER2> My comment on the blog repeated here:

"You correctly assume that the distribution follows a power-law, but you apply an arbitrary constraint on the maximum ($5bn). You constrained the maximum and then concluded that the distribution is not scalable!

Even if historically VCs haven't had a larger than $5bn exit, there is no reason it won't happen in the future. Unless VCs have some sort of self- imposed upper-bound on exits, this asset class is perfectly scalable as long as VCs have the intestinal fortitude to hang on to some hits for longer than they have in the past. (Also they need to invest in earlier stage startups and diversify more than they think they need to, to benefit even more from scalability). "

</comment><comment><USER3> "If $100bn per year in exits is a steady state number"

This is the mistake. Why should this be constant?

<comment><USER4> How (and using what number) would you phrase it then?

<comment><USER3> The limit on the value of exits is the amount of wealth that can be created. If there is a limit on that, it's in the realm of science fiction.

<comment><USER5> I think FW's mathematical approach probably is flawed, but I think underlying it there might be something of interest. I read it as: _the creation of wealth by new ventures requires resources, which can be split into two types: funds, and everything else. The two resources need to be present at a certain (range of) ratio(s). There is a finite supply of the 'everything else' (e.g. people who thrive in a start-up environment, consumer willingness to adopt new things, etc), therefore the demand for funds is finite, i.e. VC is not a (infinitely) scalable asset class._ That's a theoretical argument, and you might well say, "fine in theory, but in practice we're nowhere near hitting the limit of supply of everything else". Implicitly he seems to be suggesting that we are (via his assertion that total exit values is fixed) - that seem like the wrong way to address the 'limit of supply question' (because it looks at outputs, not inputs), but I think the limit question is still a valid one to ask. Personally, I really don't know whether we're anywhere near the 'limit of supply of everything else', but I hope not. Would love to hear what others think on this question..

<comment><USER6> it's not probably flawed. it is flawed.

most of the posts i write are designed to stimulate discussion, debate, highlight an issue i think is worth talking about, etc

the comments on this post have been fantastic. i am already thinking about the problem differently, but i still think the VC asset class doesn't scale and that we have too much money under management right now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>