Update on New Zealand - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/03/update-on-new-zealand/ <comment><USER2> I haven't actually seen the video in question, but on a general level I'm confused why everyone is so up in arms here. Do we _really_ want Facebook to be even more aggressive in censorship of its content? Do we want them to use realtime ML to automatically determine if a livestreem video is bad? [1] They removed the video promptly after receiving reports about it. They also proactively block people from uploading copies. What more do we want? Maybe we are misdirecting our anger about the violence?

[1] "Bad" is a very loose term that changes over time. When advocating for this kind of tech and strict content rules, we are also codifying a set of moral standards to define "bad", so we should tread carefully. Not everything is as clearcut bad as this video, and it's not a huge jump to apply this to other "objectionable" media, which is not the world I want to be pushing for.

<comment><USER3> Facebook built a monster it cannot control.

Their monster is out of the cage and it's making frightening changes to society, rapidly and globally.

I have an extremely strong bias in favor of free expression, but Facebook altered the playing field.

Do we _really_ want ISIS beheading videos and terrorist recruitment to circulate freely, amplified and accelerated by Facebook's social graph? [0]

Do we _really_ want disinformation fanned out instantly to friends of friends that incites mob violence? [1]

No, I don't want to live in a world where a faceless ML automatically censors everything I do. But if that's the only way to control the monster Facebook created, then maybe it's better to switch off the monster entirely.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/facebook- modera...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/facebook-moderator- guidelines-extreme-content-analysis)

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/facebook-to- re...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/facebook-to-remove- misinformation-that-leads-to-violence.html)

<comment><USER4> I sometimes wonder if people asked the same questions when postal services and telephones were invented. People are writing letters to each other and conspiring about things, and no one can even track it! People are calling each other on the telephone and plotting crimes with no one the wiser!

I suppose in at least one way they did, because mail fraud is a crime with special extra penalties. But overall, it seems like we've accepted the idea that humans are humans, some do good things and some do bad things, and greater communication amplifies their ability to do both.

Are we now saying that we've amplified as much as we want to, and we should stop? Or maybe we're saying that, because this is all taking place on a computer, we now think it should be a solvable problem, when it wasn't before with a telephone.

<comment><USER5> There is an important quantitative difference compared with post and phone though.

If I want to start an alt newsletter and post it out, or conspire via phone, I am _very_ limited in reach. A mailshot in the thousands could take days to stuff, address and stamp, and the costs escalate quickly. Few aside from fellow nutters and conspiracy theorists will know my little alt postal newsletter even exists.

Social gives unlimited reach if it goes viral. Thus the overriding aim of every alt and conspiracy group is to go viral and achieve global notoriety. Few knew or cared and certainly didn't have access to what a plane hijackers side of the story was in the 1980s and earlier. Or their propaganda. There might be _short_ extracts in follow up reports. Giving them the oxygen of publicity was almost universally considered a bad thing. I _entirely_ share the view of the NZ Prime Minister in refusing to use his name. Then the US services showed up.

Yes we should stop as we've amplified too far. What many Americans call outrageous censorship, often conveniently ignoring it being a private service rather than speaking against a government, much of the rest of the world might call reasonable moderation. If FB can't moderate and block it, or find a way for users to moderate it, perhaps it's time to limit, restrict and censure.

It's certain that if FB won't find a way to do it reasonably and fairly, and soon, governments will start to compel them and others. Each event and atrocity makes it that little more certain.

<comment><USER6> This, too, is a "problem" encountered in the past. Back then, it was the printing press that made communication "too easy":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662)

For some reason, most free societies seem to have, over time, accepted the free press is a good thing.

<comment><USER5> Hardly surprising really, two years after the Restoration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I take the viewing metrics they provided with a huge grain of salt, given their history for playing fast and loose with the truth.

Maybe I'm just down on Facebook, but this deflects pretty hard on the main point of this whole terrible story: given a free platform to broadcast live video, there's just no feasible way (at the moment) to prevent someone from using said platform to broadcast horrific events.

Content moderation has always, always, always been an afterthought, and these major platforms don't really seem to have an interest in truly solving this problem. Massive teams of poorly-paid contractors supplemented with ML tools seems like an overly optimistic solution to a much harder problem.

<comment><USER8> Before everyone brings their torch and pitchfork, do we know how much harm is being done on open sharing platforms vs the value they bring to society?

I see people quickly jumping on the "stop the internet open sharing platforms" bandwagon when events like these happen, because the platform may be associated with the current "cultural villain" but just as we don't ban knives when they are used to murder people and are being produced by despicable companies I don't think we should ban the possibility of having open sharing platforms until we have determined they do more bad than good.

Food for thought: in administrative decisions on improving car infrastructure/safety of intersections there is an actual value assigned human life. If the cost to build the improvements is less than the human life valuation of the lives that would be saved by the improvements then the project is not done. It's terrible to think of human lives as numbers but it is a requirement to do so for deciding policy in a world of inherent costs to anything being done. So before we think about advancing policy changes with far ranging impact, we should perform such an analysis. We may also realize at that point that alternative solutions may prove far cheaper than banning open sharing platforms or regulating them to the point where business is so expensive nobody cares to do so.

<comment><USER9> I think your comparison is a bit disingenuous. Knives are a necessity. Live Facebook broadcasts are not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It should be noted that this video has been rated the video as 'objectionable', a technical term making it illegal to share, possess or distribute.

Note that NZ law is written so that this means it was always in this state from its creation (not just from the point of classification).

People found doing so could face up to 14 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine, there's already one person in jail for doing this.

NZ ISPs are blocking the IP addresses of websites that are hosting this video.

<comment><USER11> > there's already one person in jail for doing this.

I'm a little conflicted about this. As a NZ'er the chief censor[1] has always done a decent job, we've never had to debate the issue of censorship in NZ much before. In this case the ability to retroactively label something criminal, and someone to face charges for it feels unjust.

On the other hand, and details are light at this point, this one person who is being charged allegedly mirrored the live stream during the event, cheered it on in his comments, and may have posted inciting materials prior to the attack (a picture of the mosque captioned "target acquired", but it's not clear based on the public information yet if this was posted before or on the day of the event).

[1] The idea of a chief censor may seem really appalling to many reading this, I encourage you to actually research what they do and the legislation they operate under before casting an opinion on it. Essentially the role is to provide ratings on media items, and rarely outright censor things. In the past day to day shit for them meant watching DVDs of rape videos and crap like that coming through the physical borders.

<comment><USER12> > this one person who is being charged allegedly mirrored the live stream > during the event, cheered it on in his comments, and may have posted > inciting materials prior to the attack

Why does that factor in? New Zealand has (or had?) pretty strong protection for freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

<comment><USER13> It seems like the guy was arrested for more than just posting the video, potentially a lot more. Particularly this part:

> A second charge alleges that between the 8th and the 15th of March, he > showed a photograph of the Deans Avenue mosque with the message "target > acquired" and further chat messaging around inciting extreme violence > constituting one of the offences.[1]

The 15th is the day of the attack, so as the grandparent comment said, it's unclear if he posted the image in advance of the attack, but it all sounds pretty dodgy.

[1] [https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/03/18yo- in-c...](https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/03/18yo-in-court- over-sharing-footage-of-christchurch-terror-attack.html)

<comment><USER12> He was only charged with uploading the video, though.

<comment><USER13> Oh, do you have a source for that? The article I linked says he was arrested on two separate charges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > No users reported the video during the live broadcast.

I don't mean to be pedantic, but why do you need to state that. It's not the users jobs to report the videos. They aren't getting paid.

I might be reading this too much but somehow this sentence stands out as a sore thumb for me.

<comment><USER15> It may not be a users' job, but responsible users should report it. Like responsible person should report a crime. Police doesn't know if someone robed your house. Officer can not live in your house and watch it 24/7, because "they are getting paid".

<comment><USER16> Responsible people did report it to the proper authorities, which is not Facebook. Reporting it to Facebook so they can take it down and prevent people from knowing what is happening is not responsible.

<comment><USER17> Funny you should have this reply. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435955) where someone makes the case that it _isn't_ the police job to notify Facebook.

Facebook doesn't seem to be able to win here

<comment><USER3> _> Facebook doesn't seem to be able to win here_

I own a store that has power tools that could hurt people. As a business owner, it's my responsibility to keep my property secure, and to ensure people on my property don't use my tools to hurt themselves or others.

I install security cameras and I hire guards. I closely supervise customers when they use my power tools.

If I didn't do these things and someone used my tools to hurt people, I would be liable. If I thought a crime had been committed, I would call the police.

But it's not the responsibility of the police to patrol my store. The police aren't responsible to supervise my customers on my property while they use my tools.

That's my responsibility.

If someone uses my power tools in my store to hurt someone, I don't say "pat me on the back, I cut the power to the tools within minutes of the police notifying me".

If I did that, I'd be guilty of gross negligence and reckless disregard for human life, because I could reasonably anticipate my tools could be used this way and I did nothing to stop it.

In many jurisdictions that's a criminal charge sometimes known as involuntary manslaughter.

<comment><USER18> > If someone uses my power tools in my store to hurt someone,

I think you are unable to separate your dislike of facebook from logic. Let's not pretend that facebook was the cause of hurt, and give the shooter a free pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast. No > users reported the video during the live broadcast. Including the views > during the live broadcast, the video was viewed about 4000 times in total > before being removed from Facebook.

> The first user report on the original video came in 29 minutes after the > video started, and 12 minutes after the live broadcast ended.

How long did it take them to react to that initial report and remove the video? It's notable that they included so many statistics, but left that one out.

<comment><USER13> It sounds like they didn't respond to the reports on the original video at all:

> We removed the attacker's video within minutes of [the New Zealand Police's] > outreach to us.

They don't say how long it was until NZ police contacted them though, it could have been right after the reports came though.

<comment><USER3> _> They don't say how long it was until NZ police contacted them_

This is Facebook's deceptive spin.

It's not the responsibility of NZ police to control Facebook's platform, yet Facebook acts as if they have zero responsibility until they're notified.

The important numbers here are:

(1) how many minutes from the beginning of the livestream until the last re- uploaded copy was removed?

(2) how many Facebook users viewed even part of the livestream or any of the re-uploaded copies?

The answers are likely (1) thousands of minutes and (2) millions of views.

Naturally these two numbers are not to be found anywhere in Facebook's deceptive explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Whats missing from this facebook statement is -

Why would you not ban/tempban/"deplatform" users for sharing/replicating/liking this on Facebook?

This is pretty directly against the "public interest" just like child pornography.

This isn't a grey area, it was the murder of 50+ people.

Why would you not just flat ban and forward the accounts of anyone forwarding this video, again just like child pornography?

<comment><USER21> There's nothing illegal about sharing this, unlike child pornography.

<comment><USER22> This content was classified as illegal in NZ and so Facebook needs to comply with NZ law if they wish to continue operating here.

<comment><USER12> Classified as illegal after the fact. You can't punish users for sharing a video that was retroactively declared illegal by a country they don't live in.

<comment><USER19> > Classified as illegal after the fact. You can't punish users for sharing a > video that was retroactively declared illegal by a country they don't live > in.

This comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435419)), states that according to NZ law, the video was "born illegal." [1]

[1] term inspired by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret)

<comment><USER12> That's why I said "retroactively declared illegal".

<comment><USER19> I took the comment to mean that there's a set of criteria that makes all matching videos illegal from when they're created, not just from when an authority declares the video matches the criteria (which could just be viewed as confirmation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > In the first 24 hours, we removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack > globally. More than 1.2 million of those videos were blocked at upload, and > were therefore prevented from being seen on our services.

Would this be bots uploading the video or are there 1.5 million individuals trying to re-upload the video to FB? If so are they also having their accounts banned for praising / supporting terror attacks?

<comment><USER24> _> are they also having their accounts banned for praising / supporting terror attacks?_

doubt it was just bots.

I followed the topic as it was trending on twitter and many of the accounts that re-uploaded it were accounts with Muslim names - often accompanied by a message such as (paraphrasing) "let the world see what terrors are inflicted by white man". They wanted to ensure the world sees what white man are capable of. For many it was a moment of "look at what they are doing to our brothers and sisters". I think they felt it was an injustice that the information is removed in this case (yet when the attacks were carried out by Islamist's nobody cared).

There was also a lot of outrage because some MSM's were not immediately calling it a terrorist act. I can understand quite well why they wanted this to be seen in all its gory detail. If my family were among the dead I too would wanted to make sure people know the truth. In fact my pain would be so big that I would want to show everyone in the hope that maybe somebody gets radicalized enough and hits back by blowing up a place where such types hang out. I'm not glorifying revenge or violence, but if you feel yourself into that kind of situation (that pain), it would take a lot of strength not wanting to retaliate (or shout out to those who might).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What makes this video so special? Is it because of NZ law? Forget the dark web or BT, you can find lots of videos of violent terrorist attacks on the mainstream web (YouTube, Twitter, et al).

<comment><USER25> It's a first-person video of someone slaughtering dozens of unarmed civilians for fun, and it was streamed live.

There is no other video like this one in the world. There's plenty of gory videos out there, but this one crosses a line nothing else I have ever seen has.

<comment><USER26> There are videos of mass executions (similar to this, in that the guns are used) recorded by the perps. I mean yeah, shooting people is horrible, but it's pretty tame to what other stuff is out there, that I've seen and just couldn't finish watching. And I'm pretty desensitized by now. I've seen some Shabiha torture videos, and those are much much worse on the emotions.

<comment><USER27> Both the government forces and terrorist forces (al-shabab, etc) of lower Somalia live-stream/broadcast/record their executions on Twitter from time to time. Though I've not seen it done on Twitch, I'd be very surprised if that hasn't been done yet. Typically this is by firing squad.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+kismayo+city+executi...](https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+kismayo+city+execution&oq=twitter+kismayo+city+execution&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.10747j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) (it should be the first link, I'd rather not directly link to the images out of courtesy to others)

Look, I'm not going to get into the issues around the death penalty, but the fact remains that a lot of governments and semi-governments use SV tech just as they would use any radio/TV station/newspaper that is under their jurisdiction. Death is horrible, no question. But it's not like these events are being hidden away on sketchy websites that you have to hunt for. In many parts of the world, such types of death are celebrated and proudly posted to as many 'legitimate' news sites as possible by 'official' semi/governmental agencies.

It's been less than 100 years since the US has had 'strange fruit' herself. I mean, we literally sold postcards with the results on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have no desire to search for or watch this particular video, but I'm guessing the Streisand Effect is out in full force already.

<comment><USER29> It was promptly shared on horrible sites like 8chan and KiwiFarms, and then a Torrent was shared to alleviate the bandwidth pressure on those websites.

It was in full force before I even heard about the shooting.

<comment><USER30> It truly horrifies me when I learned there are groups who celebrate mass murder by posting video to Internet. They go out of their way to mutate their posting in order to evade Internet service's detecting. Who are these people? I never know this dark side of humanity exist and it horrifies me.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/18/inside-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/18/inside- youtubes-struggles-shut-down-video-new-zealand-shooting-humans-who-outsmarted- its-systems/?utm_term=.54c5e0ad55af&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1)

<comment><USER29> > Who are these people? I never know this dark side of humanity exist and it > horrifies me.

Here you go: [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the- webs-...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest- community-of-stalkers.html)

They're terrible people who largely manage to avoid doing illegal (merely unethical) things as a _hobby_.

<comment><USER10> BTW Kiwi-farms has NOTHING to do with New Zealand, the name is a sick pun by sick people

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm wondering if there's any way to know how many people are involved in uploading this millions of times. (Apparently this also happened on YouTube.)

Is this like a denial-of-service attack where a few people have lots of automation? Are there "booter" services? Maybe Krebs will write about it someday.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nothing in that statement takes responsibility for Facebook being a fermenting ground for hate, disinformation and isolation of perspectives that promotes extremism. And other social media sites are equally to blame.

</comment><comment><USER33> I didlike Facebook immensely but this isn't their fault. They are a huge victim in this case. If the shooter had set ten open-source video stream boxes around the globe instead (seems possible) who would we be getting mad at then? The powers that be are rushing to look like they're doing something, and apparently 4chan and 8chan are now blocked in Australia. Same day that Vladimir Putin introduced sweeping internet cencorship laws in Russia...

</comment><comment><USER34> >No users reported the video during the live broadcast.

This line would be suspect coming from YouTube or Snapchat, but Facebook has lied so many times that it's become impossible to believe them.

<comment><USER35> I'm predicting "Whoops! Someone reported it, but our ML service detected it as a false flag so no human was able to review the report. Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, and we will make an effort in the future to prevent this from happening again."

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Email and Usenet include metadata, and no one really complains about an infringement of their liberty. Social media networks are more anonymous than either, harder to police, and they are far larger in scale than any other websites. Some form of metadata may curb anonymous abuse. In the case of repressive countries, it could be masked.

And before anyone talks about VPN and Tor...try posting to HN from a Tor browser and see what happens to your post...blacklists exist. And the average shitposter isn't going to go to the trouble.

The Arab Spring is widely seen as a triumph of social media over repression, but its effects were short-lived and those who posted were often tracked down and persecuted.</comment>


The Two Types of Knowledge: The Max Planck/Chauffeur Test (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/09/two-types-of-knowledge/ <comment><USER2> >"True experts recognize the limits of what they know and what they do not know. If they find themselves outside their circle of competence, they keep quiet or simply say, "I don't know." This they utter unapologetically, even with a certain pride. From chauffeurs, we hear every line except this."

I'm not sure if I would call myself an "expert" at anything really, but this hits home. I take a certain kind of self righteous pride in admitting precisely the limits of my own knowledge. I feel like vocalizing it helps to internalize the fact that you do not know something, and then creates that impetus to dig deeper and truly learn, rather than just accepting the mentally lazy hand wavy "oh yeah I kinda get that" train of thought.

<comment><USER3> I've found that being quick to say "I don't know", "I haven't heard of that before", etc. in environments where people are often afraid to say as such, tends to pleasantly surprise people, and actually earns quite a bit of respect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article reminds me of experiences I have with job applicant candidates.

There will be some folks who can talk really really well - talk a big game and throw out buzzwords, but when it comes to probing into depth, they crack and fizzle.

Others have a hard time explaining things because their vernacular varies. But they can do.

And then, the intersection of the two - is ideal. But the second category can be great too.

</comment><comment><USER5> I also found that knowing something pretty much equals to being able to explain it to someone. I thought I knew many things until I tried to explain them. Or, in other words, there is a sort of "internal" knowledge that seems to heuristically cut corners and generates or fosters the illusion of knowing. True knowledge does not cut corners. Which is what some of the posters have expressed as well.

<comment><USER6> >I also found that knowing something pretty much equals to being able to explain it to someone.

That can't be right, because that would logically imply that there is literally nobody on Earth who knows functional programming -- including the writers of functional compilers -- since no one is able to easily explain it. (No, really, no one is.)

But this is clearly not true: clearly, people do know functional programming (after all, how could they write a compiler for it otherwise, how could people program in it otherwise), _despite_ their inability to explain it.

Therefore, this proves that knowing something does not equal being able to explain it.

Note that I do not go as far as to say it's inexplicable - sometime, somewhere, someone will explain it clearly and in a way that resonates with people that have not programmed in a functional paradigm, so that anyone immediately "gets" all aspects of it. Like a meme, that explanation will reverberate through the Internet, academia, language design, like a wildfire that enlightens everyone who meets it.

But it has not happened. That does not mean "nobody knows functional programming." People know it, although they can't explain it.

EDIT - this was downvoted, but I stand by it. My assertion is pretty easily falsifiable, but note that no reply does so with a link. Of course, I have not reviewed the entirety of the Internet so it is possible that I missed one. But I notice that nobody seems to be showing one. This is a challenge to do so, if you disagree with my example.

<comment><USER7> Not to be glib, but maybe you're reading the wrong books. Someone _did_ explain it clearly and in a way that resonates with people that have not programmed in a functional paradigm. As an example, the link below [1] (which has been posted here to death), explains things very clearly, provided one has the patience to read it carefully _and do the exercises_.

It's true, though, that one will not necessarily, as you put it, 'immediately "get" all aspects of it'. Many things worth learning, this one included, require a bit more diligence. As Euclid famously explained, there is no royal road to functional programming.

[1] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-4.html](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html)

<comment><USER6> I find your reference (which I had not seen, though you state it has been posted to death) superlative.

It requires patience but I think I will work through it.

Although it serves as a counterexample (so that the strictest form of my argument, that some people know fp but nobody has explained it, _therefore_ it is not true that to know something is to be able to explain it ... this strict argument does not work as it has a counterexample), still, other similar forms of my argument could stand. After all, not _everone_ who knows fp can write such a resource.

Anyway, it really does seem to be far and away better than others that are posted or offered, usually. I have not completely read it but my subjective opinion of it is very good. Thanks for the link!

<comment><USER8> Any progammer, certainly anyone with a CS degree, really ought to be aware of, if not familiar with SICP. And yes, it's mentioned on HN almost daily:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sicp&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sicp&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article would have been much better if it didn't suggest people fall into one of these two categories. It seems much more likely this is a spectrum with people distributed throughout depending on topics and contexts as opposed to just a binary this person has planck knowledge or not.

However, the linked article was a nice tidbit [https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/05/elon-musk-lying- exp...](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/05/elon-musk-lying-experience/) and rings really true to me. You never forget those problems you spent so much time solving - I'm thinking of you IE6.

<comment><USER10> We all know various things to a greater or lesser extent, but I suspect there is more constancy in the personality trait; the extent to which a person may attempt to pass off chauffeur knowledge as Planck knowledge. Then there is the divide between the people who know they are doing it, and those who do not realize that there is a difference (shades of Dunning-Kruger.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing is, facts weigh more than opinions. So people have an incentive to peddle opinion as facts just to make it more credible. And by people I mean me. I caught myself doing this years ago and the worst part was it didn't change just because I realized I was doing it.

But on the other hand, trying to limit yourself to only talk about things you know for sure is impossible. It's often a journey from expressing an opinion (that you might believe is a fact) to being corrected by peers and reevaluating your model. As long as I have to energy to adjust my model when someone points out the shortcomings, I feel like I am doing okay.

(This is why I like HN, i feel like I am at the bottom of the barrel and I can learn from people who are much more knowledgeable than me. I'd rather be a fool among smart people than smart among fools.)

<comment><USER12> I have an adjacent problem. I'm always worried I'm coming across more forceful and authoritative than I mean, so I sometimes feel compelled to follow statements or short conversations with "at least, that's what I think/assume is going on, or is the only thing that makes sense to me" to make sure people are aware they are getting my opinion or educated guess. I like to pontificate and work through solutions out loud with the person asking (a habit that runs in my family) when a question is asked that I don't know the answer to, and I suspect my thoughts in verbal form may be taken as assertions of fact when that's not the purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have to say this was a fantastic short read.

Is the chauffeur story true? (I'm almost afraid to ask)

<comment><USER14> Not according to the article: _I frequently tell the apocryphal story_

<comment><USER13> Sorry. My chauffer just told me I knew that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way." \-- Marvin Minsky

</comment><comment><USER16> > [N] people visited Farnam Street last month to expand their knowledge and > improve their thinking.

Sounds ghastly.</comment>


How to Scale Wordpress on Shared Hosting to Survive a Traffic Surge - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14143952/how-to-scale-wordpress-on-shared-hosting-to-survive-a-traffic-surge

<comment><USER2> I am a big believer in caching. I put all of my sites behind Amazon Cloudfront. Not only is your content cached, it is also served from a server close to the user. Cloudfront now has support for cookies, query strings, and behaviors based on url pattern. It's a pretty robust offering for the price.</comment>


The Rise and Future of the New York Startup Ecosystem - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Where is the story? No link</comment>


Why Physics has made no Progress in 50 Years - <AUTHOR> https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292 <comment><USER2> Oh no, it's Hossenfelder again.

What about superconductivity at progressively higher temps through the decades ?

What about 2D, like graphene ?

What about Weyl semimetals and topological insulators

[https://phys.org/news/2019-03-chirality-yields-colossal- phot...](https://phys.org/news/2019-03-chirality-yields-colossal- photocurrent.html)</comment>


Jenkins-autojobs: create jenkins jobs from git/svn/hg branches - <AUTHOR> http://gvalkov.github.com/jenkins-autojobs/

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here! Make sure you check out the previous discussion[1] about a very similar tool. For those of you who checked the docs and saw right through my false advertisement - mercurial support will be added soon.

[1]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4104069></comment>


Why AI Is Simple and Biological Neural Networks Are Not - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wlFJtuBgnVkWm1nflKtJAy3bWCuvBAZDH-GlgadCTCc

<comment><USER2> Not insightful. Offers a 60 year old argument about symbol systems and the need for more computational power (alone).

I suggest reading Andy Clark's Mindware for a critical view of various approaches to this problem.</comment>


Next step in the Chrome OS journey - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/next-step-in-chrome-os-journey.html <comment><USER2> The Google Chromebook is an interesting product to watch. I've been using them since the Cr-48 days. In fact, two Chromebook laptops were in service in our household until just a few weeks ago when the Samsung Chromebook broke (although I hope to repair it soon).

These laptops sit next to our couch in a stack as a set of floater laptops we use for random surfing. If any of us are just looking for a quick bite of information, we generally pull out the Chromebook rather than walking over to the Macbook that sits on our kitchen counter. The Chromebook is also great for our son to use when building LEGO from PDF instructions.

Browsing is far better on the Chromebook than it is on any Android or Apple device I've used, hands down. I find the browsing experience to be frustrating on an iPad or my Galaxy 10", while the Chromebook experience is flawless. The device is basically ready-to-use for browsing as soon as you lift the lid, in contrast to the fair amount of time it takes to get logged into the Macbook (especially if another user has a few applications open in their session).

The hardware itself in the early models was slightly underpowered, but that doesn't really seem to matter much unless you're playing a particularly intensive Flash video or HTML5 game. Scrolling is fairly slow on complex sites like Google+ as well. For what we use it for, the hardware is pretty decent. The touchpads have also been hit-and-miss in the early models.

What makes these devices a hard sell is the price point. The cheapest Chromebook experience you can get today is the Acer (@ $300). Considering the fact that you are buying a piece of hardware that effectively does less than a laptop, I would find it hard to justify spending that amount if I were looking at hardware today. Even though I prefer to use the Chromebook when surfing over the tablets or the full laptop, I feel like the cost is just too much for a single-purpose device like this.

For Chromebooks to really take off in the home market, I think that a device with the equivalent power to the Samsung Chromebook 5 needs to be on the market at a $199 price point. I could see myself buying them at that price. I don't see the Chromebox being popular in households ever - I believe that we'll see the decline of the non-portable computer going forward at home. Alternatively, if we saw some sort of Android hybrid integration with the Chromebook, I think that this could radically change the equation and add significant perceived value to the device.

Now, if I were running a business where a large subset of employees could get by with just web access, I would definitely consider rolling these out. The Chromebox looks like it could be a real game changer for business.

<comment><USER3> > Browsing is far better on the Chromebook than it is on any Android or Apple > device I've used, hands down. The device is basically ready-to-use for > browsing as soon as you lift the lid, in contrast to the fair amount of time > it takes to get logged into the Macbook (especially if another user has a > few applications open in their session).

FWIW, this is not a property of the ChromeBook, but a property of how you choose to use it (which may in turn be a property of its relative cost if anything). My 11" MacBook Air runs two apps (Chrome and iTerm) and I do not leave it locked or logged out. At worst I have to apple-tab to Chrome from iTerm once I open it before I can use it to browse.

<comment><USER2> Apologies, that was a typo on my part - I should have said "iOS device" rather than "Apple device", indicating that the browsing experience was as good as on a desktop.

<comment><USER3> Interesting... I was looking at the word "Macbook".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I originally thought that chrome OS was a ridiculous idea , but the more I think about the more I see this as being what more traditional desktop/laptop systems will look like in a few years time.

The key here I think is an operating system UI built on the understanding that modern applications have both client and server components that are equally important and need to blend together seamlessly.

For example , about 50% of the applications I use are on the web/internet yet my browser is just an application like any other on my launch bar.

</comment><comment><USER5> What seems to be needed is a retail channel that can explain what/why and why of Chrome book? Something like Samsungs Galaxy S3 Popups stores. Google's staff at the Chrome OS booths in Aiports did a great job of this but you couldn't purchase a Chromebook there.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand what crosses a company's mind when they make a booth where they explain a product but don't allow you to buy it. Nintendo took over a good part of the third (?) floor of the mall here in SF last Christmas where you could play the new 3DS and a bunch of their latest titles (all released). I asked to purchase one and they then proceeded to think out loud about the closest gamestop where I "might" find it -- because this booth was for demos only, not for actually buying anything.

<comment><USER7> It's because you need to secure business license to sell.

<comment><USER6> If some no-name iPhone case stand can secure this at the mall, then surely Nintendo can too? Why go through the outrageous cost of setting up an elaborate "Nintendo Winter World" or whatever they called it -- and stop just short of being able to make any actual sales?

<comment><USER8> The real problem is Nintendo's retail partners will get upset.

At that point just setting up a kiosk can either lead to "we just won't do sales" or spirals into "lets get our partners involved too" which gives you a kiosk designed by committee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is Chrome OS a stepping stone from Android as a 'stretched-out' OS, or more in the way of Android trying transitioning bigger screen formats, such as: [http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product- and...](http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and- Services/DROID-Bionic-Accessories-page/DROID-Bionic-Accessories) I know they're obvious differences, but I'm focusing in the similarities...does anyone see my point? Would love to know other's opinions.

<comment><USER10> I don't know, but why Google and Asus don't release a Transformer that dual boots Android and Chrome OS is beyond me. Yes, Flash already has ARM ports working anyway.

<comment><USER11> They are working on an arm port for an unnamed device but it seems like it's still under heavy development. One reason you likely won't see something like the transformer running chromeos is their upstream first policy, which suggests that they won't ship chrome on devices that don't have their driver base included in the base linux kernel. There are exceptions, but I get the feeling they aren't interested in core drivers like graphics being one of them.

<comment><USER10> Ugh. That makes an unfortunate amount of sense, I hadn't even thought through the embedded device drivers problem. Extremely frustrating across devices and OSes. :[

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I dunno about the Chromebox. I can't see many of my friends setting up a monitor, mouse and keyboard for a computer that only runs Chrome OS.

It's interesting, though.

<comment><USER13> What's really curious is that in a way it's up against Raspberry Pi, but literally an order of magnitude more expensive. Obviously it's more powerful, but . . .

They really need to get the cost of the Chrome devices way down from where they are.

<comment><USER14> The Raspberry Pi is pretty neat but good luck using it as a general purpose HTML5-display box. Way too slow for that.

I agree that the cost of Chrome devices needs to be lower, but they need to be priced closer to midrange Android tablets (~250-300$) than Raspberry Pis.

<comment><USER15> It does have an h264 chip which might make HTML5 video usable.

<comment><USER16> RPi is good for video, but I think he meant overall browsing performance. RPi will be pretty slow at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> ARM versions for half the price, please (preferably based on the latest Cortex A15 CPU and Mali GPU).

<comment><USER17> The cheapest option is $350 (a Cedar Trail board, the $450 one says "Intel Core" which probably means Sandy Bridge). What makes you think you can build an ARM board (with a core that doesn't even exist in the market yet!) for $175, much less sell it for that? The only device in the market that even comes close is the Kindle, and that's heavily subsidized by content revenue.

<comment><USER16> I meant half the price compared to the latest Chromebook from Samsung which is $450. They need at least a few models in the $200-$250 range, even if they have to make them "lower-end". But I think Cortex A15 will be a great match for that, unless they totally messed up the cross-platform optimization, and ChromeOS will be slower on ARM than on a similar-performance x86 chip. Plus, you'll get at least double the battery life - which is kind of necessary for a Web-only/mobility device.

<comment><USER17> OK, where are you going to find a $225 non-subsidized ARM box? Same logic applies. I see nothing even close to that range. A tablet or smartphone with these specs is going to run you $500+.

And you need to check (or better, run) a few benchmarks before making pronouncements like that. Per-clock, SNB beats the A9 in my OMAP4 phone by about 2x on stuff that fits in the L1 cache, and a bunch more on things that spill out (the phone SoC has absolutely nothing like the L3 cache on SNB).

<comment><USER18> <http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/smartbook> $200.

It's not very good when you're running Ubuntu, but then again even my nice i7 laptop can really suck under Linux sometimes. ChromeOS might help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The CPU on the Chromebox is listed as 1.9 GHz Celeron B840. Can this play 1080p MKV? If so, this could my WD Live, Patriot Box Office, etc. Add a BT mouse/keyboard and I'm set.

</comment><comment><USER20> Will it ever be distributed like a linux distro?

<comment><USER21> You can download Chromium OS builds [1]. There are a few differences compared to ChromeOS [2].

[1] <http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/> [2] [http://www.chromium.org/chromium- os/chromium-os-faq#TOC-What...](http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromium- os-faq#TOC-What-s-the-difference-between-Chromium-OS-and-Google-Chrome-OS-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wonder how the box would work as a set-top (goodbye Google TV?)

</comment><comment> n-gauge Can a Chromebook / box run webGL?

<comment><USER16> It's probably using a very old/low-end integrated graphics chip from Intel, so it might run WebGL, but probably not the most advanced demos.

<comment><USER23> It seems to use Intel HD 3000 [1] and runs WebGL surprisingly well [2][3] (actually better than Macbook Pro with the same GPU [4]).

[1] <http://www.chromestory.com/2012/05/samsung-chromebox-price/>

[2] <http://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/207604697073324032>

[3] <http://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/207607126716198914>

[4] <http://twitter.com/thespite/status/207618510443134977>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Where are the ARM based Chrome books ?

<comment><USER9> Maybe they're trying to focus on a single architecture...so NOW they're worried about avoiding fragmentation, jeez.

<comment><USER16> Why would there be any fragmentation? You're running the web on it...the web is architecture agnostic. This is why it never really made sense for me why they went with Intel and x86, when they could've started from day one on ARM. They are not bound by legacy software on a specific architecture, like Windows is with x86.</comment></comment></comment>


Live coding a vi for CP/M from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://cowlark.com/2019-06-28-cpm-vi/ <comment> david-given Hello, author here.

Eeeaggh. Yes, this took a while. I started after lunch and finished sometime after midnight (look at the clock in the bottom right hand corner of the screen). I'm still kicking myself at some of the dead ends I went through.

The result (even after I cleaned it up after the stream) is still a bit slow. The biggest issue is that it redraws the entire line every time you press a key in insert mode; fixing this is moderately straightforward, as I have all the information to know where the first modified character is, but it'll require some refactoring.

The biggest think I want next is a yank buffer, but the only realistic option is to store it on disk, which would be painfully slow. Being able to do repeated inserts would be nice, too.

I actually know Bram Moolenaar; maybe I should ask how he did it...

<comment><USER2> Bravo! You should be super proud! On a 9600 baud terminal, a whole line is 77 milliseconds, so it's going to feel a bit slow even if you only redraw half the line, and at 2400 baud it would be painful. Insert-character escape sequences are going to make a big difference.

I'm no expert, but I think the Kaypro doesn't have a real serial port between the terminal and the computer the way a lot of CP/M machines did (Altair and IMSAI usually, H-8 and H-88 and H-89 always, while the Osborne used a memory- mapped screen like the Apple). I don't know how fast it can repaint the screen.

I don't think firing the loud solenoids on the floppy drive and waiting a second or two every time you delete something (or (p)ut it) is going to be a good user experience; the yank buffer probably needs to be in RAM to be usable. You could maybe prompt the user whether to discard the deletion if the text being deleted is over a threshold of size.

<comment><USER3> Altairs and IMSAIs didn't have standard terminals. You could add an S-100 video board with video output and keyboard input (usually something that would output ASCII) or you could attach a real terminal over a serial line on an S-100 board (which is kind of nice if you want to be far from the computer but not that useful for a desktop). Many CP/M desktops used the "bus attached" terminal (because it saves components). A common arrangement (and not only for CP/M machines) would be a CRT controller managing its own memory where the program/OS would address the video memory through the microprocessor's IO channels. This was slow compared to having video driven from main memory (like the Apple II) but CRTCs did a lot the hardware designer wouldn't need to worry about, it was many orders of magnitude faster than a 9600 bps serial terminal, and allowed moving terminal emulation to software/BIOS.

The Apple II had a couple "terminal" boards more or less like what I described that allowed it to display 80 and 132-column video. Their memory and registers would be manipulated through memory access as the 6502 didn't have dedicated IO functions. One very common was the Videx Videoterm, that used a 6845 just like the IBM CGA and MDA boards (but with a much nicer VT-100-like font). The Microsoft CP/M SoftCard emulates a SOROQ IQ-120 terminal in software.

<comment><USER4> Thank you, I worked on the Videx gadget. We used to put the font ROM in VT52 terminals because it looked so much better than what they had. (These were also sold as Zenith and even Heathkit brands.)

<comment><USER2> What Heathkit model was a rebadged VT52? The H9 was crudely similar to a VT50 but in many ways less capable (it didn't even have a character like the AMD-3A's ^K to move the cursor up, as far as I can tell), and though its successor the H19 supported VT52 sequences, it also supported extensions like ESC E and also an ANSI mode. Or do you mean Heathkit made a Videx-based terminal (presumably not the H9)?

<comment><USER4> It's been a long time, but H19 rings a bell. It feels like it was the same as the Zenith terminal I used with an LSI-11 running BSD 2.8 Unix (which was Vax Unix implausibly backported; imagine virtual memory with address space for only two swappable 8k pages!), and only emulated the VT-52.

Anyway the bit layout in the 2708 EPROM it used was identical to the Videx card's. I think the fonts we used were a late development, and that for most of its life the Videx font ROM was as bad as the original terminals'. We came to realize that the verticals really needed to be two pixels wide.

Probably if we had the good sense to use an emitter follower output stage, we could have got good sharp verticals.

I need to make clear that the only connections between the terminal and card were that both used a 6845 display driver and a 2708 character ROM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This guy has some incredible hacks, such as the mandelbrot for BBC Micro (in 6502 assembly) that uses a lookup table for squares of numbers, and takes advantage of the connectedness of the colours:

"It turns out that Mandelbrot and Julia sets have the property that any area which is completely bounded by a colour contains only that colour. (Because it's simply connected.) (No, I don't understand a word of that paper.) So the program recursively traces out the bounds of boxes, and if all sides of the box are the same colour it fills it and doesn't recurse in."

[http://cowlark.com/2018-05-26-bogomandel/index.html](http://cowlark.com/2018-05-26-bogomandel/index.html)

Also a bootloader for the GPU of the rasperry Pi: [http://cowlark.com/piface/](http://cowlark.com/piface/)

<comment> david-given Thanks very much! But someone else worked out the maths and the base kernel --- I just did the implementation (and loads of other people chimed in on microoptimisations). I _do_ think it may be the fastest 8-bit Mandelbrot in the world, although some of the stuff the C64 people have done is completely insane, so I'd want to check there first.

This is all mine, though: [http://cowlark.com/2013-10-19-insane- make](http://cowlark.com/2013-10-19-insane-make)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The source is very straightforward and readable. I suspect part of the reason why is because live-coding forces you to eschew additional complexity/abstraction in favour of the simplest solution.

That said, I'm not sure if the additional complexity of a gap buffer is worth it --- a lot of editors in the early days of DOS used a single buffer, effectively memmove()'ing the tail part when you inserted characters, and there was no real noticeable lag even when entering characters at the beginning of a "large" (i.e. >100KB) file. On a CP/M system with 64K of total address space at most, it just doesn't take all that long to go through all of memory. As an advantage, cursor movement code is greatly simplified and doesn't involve modifying the buffers.

<comment><USER2> I don't know the 8080 instruction set, but the memcpy in [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8080#Example_code](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8080#Example_code) has 7 instructions in its inner loop and copies 2 bytes per iteration, which is probably about 20 microseconds at 2MHz and thus 640 milliseconds to copy 64K. That's a really long time to handle a keystroke, since they may be coming in every 100 ms or less. You can probably unroll the loop productively to some extent but you probably can't speed it up by the necessary order of magnitude.

Gap buffers, by contrast, should keep everything under a millisecond except search and moving the gap a long distance.

Many gap-buffer editors don't move the gap whenever the cursor moves; they wait until you modify something. But that does seem like it would be more complicated. I'm not sure how much simpler it can get than the gap-buffer case.

<comment><USER7> Even a Z80 would struggle to keep up: you're looking at something like 17-18 T-states/byte for a useful memcpy, which is ~215 KBytes/sec at 4 MHz.

Suppose your document is 32 KBytes, and you're inserting chars at the start. It's going to take 0.2 seconds per keypress! You'd notice.

(0.2 seconds per keypress = 300 keypresses per second. Assume 6 keypresses per word (5 letters and a space), and that's 50 wpm. You probably type faster than that.)

<comment><USER8> _"Suppose your document is 32 KBytes, and you 're inserting chars at the start."_

Who has such enormous documents, and who inserts chars at the start :-) ?

Given the 64kB limit for (program+data), you'll soon need some way to keep things on disk (most likely by having a master document that lists the names of the files storing each 'chapter' in the complete document, and requiring the user to manually switch from file to file)

Therefore, I would implement that, search/replace and a yank buffer before I started worrying about such relatively edgy performance issues.

For comparison, the original MacWrite on a 128k Macintosh handled only 2 to 3 pages of text, and also soon got slower than that 0.2s per key press. It was smart enough to skip updates if typing was relatively fast, though. _that_ is a feature you might want to add (e.g. by peeking into the keyboard buffer before refreshing the screen), as the best way to speed up code is by doing less.

<comment><USER2> These are good points, but a thing to keep in mind is that we were discussing how to update the internal buffer data structure, not refreshing the screen. However, you could imagine peeking into the keyboard buffer so as to do a batch-insert if several keystrokes happened while you were doing the memmove(), so that the next memmove() would insert two or three bytes instead of just one — then at least it wouldn't progressively fall further behind your keystrokes.

All else being equal, though, I think a source-code editor that can comfortably handle a 48-kibibyte source file is considerably superior to one that can only handle, say, 10 or 20 kilobytes before it starts getting sluggish. Searching works better, refactoring is easier, you need less header files in C, and you can split and join source files a lot less often. Note that qe.c itself is (barely) over 20 kilobytes, and that's using TAB characters for compression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nine straight hours. Holy crap. I'm sure we've all had marathon sessions from time to time, but maintaining enough composure to keep the livestream going for that long (without breaks?) sounds extremely challenging.

<comment><USER10> > _Nine straight hours. Holy crap._

Day in the life of a full-time software dev.

<comment><USER11> Six of those hours (on a good day) would be spent in meetings, answering emails, helping interns, giving code reviews for colleagues, writing documents, reviewing documents, getting lunch/snacks/coffee, waiting in line for the bathroom or elevator, and attempting to recover focus when you return to your desk after any of the above.

<comment><USER10> Then there are days when you really do code.

<comment> david-given Those are _good_ days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't like watching videos, but the list of milestones and timestamps is great. Text editors are one of those things that would be nice to know how to implement, but that never was high enough on my priority list. Looking at this, I feel like I've significantly overestimated how hard it is to write the UI layer. Granted, I'm going to be maybe much slower, but still this seems like a doable project even if I don't have that much time.

Why don't we have a list of nice hacker projects somewhere? With an estimate of skill and effort required, relative to other projects?

</comment><comment><USER13> Recording yourself for YouTube has to help, but I'm really interested in what the author used to stay focused and productive for an entire nine hours. I can barely make it a half hour before getting distracted by something.

<comment><USER14> He did take a dinner and a tea break, so he wasn't working completely straight

<comment> david-given There are a couple of short (a few seconds only) edits where I just zoned out thinking about something, but the big breaks are clearly labelled. Also, check out the clock at the bottom right corner!

I started this at about 14:00 and finished at about 01:30, so about eleven to twelve hours wall clock time. And yes, if I hadn't been doing the recording I'd have given up and gone to bed. Also I, er, had to get up at 07:00 the next morning to go hiking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hey, I wrapped + annotated the video to make your timestamps clickable: [https://use.mindstamp.io/video/QUqevzIz?notes=1](https://use.mindstamp.io/video/QUqevzIz?notes=1)

</comment><comment><USER16> Probably a noob question, but why not just compile vi on a CP/M C compiler? After a quick search, I found this being discussed on comp.os.cpm just last year: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.cpm/lfuEr0hR...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.cpm/lfuEr0hRcrM)

It's hosted here: [https://github.com/udo-munk/s](https://github.com/udo- munk/s)

<comment> david-given There are plenty of CP/M C compilers (I'm planning on including BDS C into cpmish at some point: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDS_C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDS_C) It's written in hand-tooled assembly!) but with the exception of Hitech C they're all Small C or K&R C. Hitech C works fine, but it's extremely slow and somewhat quirky. CP/M's really a bit small for an ANSI C compiler. (Also Hitech C only targets Z80, not 8080.)

The main reasons for doing this cross-compiled were: that's what I had; life was too short; I wanted something for the cpmish cross-compilation environment _anyway_.

Making cpmish self-hosted would be awesome, though.

Hitech C used to be a free-as-in-beer download from htsoft's website, but it vanished about twelve years ago. I wonder if they'd be open to open sourcing it...

<comment><USER17> HiTech not was bought by Microchip ?

<comment> david-given So they were. That explains why the only compilers on their web site are Microchip ones... oh well, worth an email to them asking what happened; maybe they'd be willing to open source the CP/M compiler!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This type of content is why I come to Hacker News, brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER19> Speaking of live coding, does anyone remember a certain longhaired Russian guy (I think he works/worked for Yandex?) who used to do live-coding streams?

<comment><USER20> Maybe you are referring to this guy? [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJAVLOqT6Mgn_YD5lAxxkUA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJAVLOqT6Mgn_YD5lAxxkUA)

<comment><USER19> Yep, that was the guy! Seems to have stopped, alas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hi,

So — why not Wordgrinder?

</comment><comment><USER22> But Why... I know the answer and the site gives a good explanation. But still, practically speaking? Who cares about CP/M, perhaps because it's the only useful OS running on 8 bit processors? Does CP/M have something DOS doesn't have? Or is it impossible to run DOS on the Z80?

<comment><USER23> I think that is a large part of it, yes. There's been a good few kit computers in the last few years - the rc2014 being my favourite (not because it's particularly amazing, but because it's designed to be understandable and digestable), and cp/m is the most approachable (roughly dos-like) OS available for them. (There's also Fuzix, which seems like a monster accomplishment in itself - but I haven't tried it myself. I rather suspect that running a unix- like on an 8bit just ends up feeling like a very slow unix, rather than anything special)

(and no, msdos doesn't run on most 8bits. The Intel 8080 was 8bit. The Z80 expanded on that with additional instructions, and cp/m lives in this branch of the family tree. The 8086 gained 16bit instructions, and branches off in an entirely different direction birthing the x86 family tree, which is where you'll find msdos & most variants)

<comment> david-given Fuzix is amazing. I did a port to the MSP430, a Texas Instruments single-board computer with 66kB of RAM; it feels just like a Unix, despite having no MMU and no multitasking... [http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix](http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix)

I find CP/M interesting because it's provably the minimum viable product for an operating system. It was the personal computer desktop operating system that really worked. It came with full documentation, a full development systems (an assembler and a debugger), and a full set of tooling to allow you to port CP/M to new systems. It was portable, too, and you could run the same program unmodified on nearly any hardware which supported CP/M. So it was this great open-ended system, cheap enough to get into the hands of ordinary people, simple enough that you could understand it all, and yet sophisticated enough that, with enough time, you could achieve _anything_ on it...

The CP/M kernel is 3.5kB of 8080 machine code. I think each frame of that video consumed more space than that.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some examples of really well designed websites? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> It goes without saying, but good design does not equal good UX. A problem I have with places like Awwwards is that the sites they highlight look good from the screenshot, but navigating them and getting to the core intent isn't as easy as it should be. Most of these 'design inspiration' sites are really just people picking submissions from agencies and freelancers, rather than aggregating an honestly good list of sites that do their job.

Your best bet is to go through these types of sites and familiarize yourself with patterns that make it easy for you to understand what is going on. In addition to the siteinspire link posted by athesyn, I visit these every day (in order of how original the content is):

<http://www.siiimple.com/> <http://www.designfridge.co.uk/> <http://www.colorgorize.com/> <http://www.verynicesites.com/> <http://www.webcreme.com/> <http://bm.straightline.jp/> <http://cssremix.com/> <http://www.webdesign-inspiration.com/> <http://land-book.com/>

You'll see a lot of overlap, but again, that doesn't necessarily mean the site is well-designed. It generally just means that that designer was savvy enough to push the link out to all of these sites and it was passable enough to put on display.

<comment><USER3> Those are a great set of links. I'm not a web designer but I do appreciate good design/UX when I see it. These links will help a lot with inspiration for learning.

Edit: grammar

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well designed for what? Design accomplishes a purpose, if there's a mismatch between the purpose and the design then the website can look nice but be poorly designed.

What do you want to accomplish?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well designed for what the website does. I'm a developer that is trying to get educated in design, so I'm trying to find examples of well designed sites. I want to look at these sites and figure out what it is about the design that makes the site work well. I just feel like understanding why something is well designed will help with my understanding of how to design.

<comment><USER5> This was on HN a few weeks back. I must say that I haven't gone through all of the lessons yet, but from what I have seen, it will help you grasp what makes good design.

<http://hackdesign.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been working through this, and so far it has been very good. I just wanted some examples to help see what is out there and start to kind of get a taste of what things seem to work and not work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://siteinspire.com> has a fairly decent collection of beautiful, clean, well-designed sites.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the way <http://mcmaster.com> has the online store set up.

</comment><comment><USER8> I honestly think facebook is really well designed, shock horror but its true

<comment><USER2> Design is about trust and being able to do what you want to do without thinking. Facebook doesn't help users navigate to the places they don't want them to go to.</comment></comment>


Swimming with Sharks: Navy Physician Remembers the Indianapolis Disaster - <AUTHOR> http://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/9206 <comment><USER2> This is the second in a series of three articles. The first and third parts are [http://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/9200](http://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/9200) and [http://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/9242](http://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/9242) They are all worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how many people were introduced to this story from that scene in "Jaws"...

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it ... from the intro it seems the shark took away living human down in the water. From the conclusion, it seems the shark only bite the dead humans floating with the living human. Not even "taking them" ... a weird read.

<comment><USER5> It makes sense, humans are not normal food for sharks. However once you're dead you're just floating meat in the water, the shark can take you without risking any injury to itself. Sharks are more intelligent than we generally assume, most shark attacks are not to eat people, they take a chunk out of a person by mistake.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure that it is quite that clear-cut - if you are vaguely seal-shaped, and furthermore not moving with the speed and agility of a healthy seal, you might push a big shark's 'looks like food' button.

Staying together in a big, tight group might have been key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recommend the following book that details the U.S.S. Indianapolis.

In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors by Doug Stanton (Mass Market Paperback)

</comment><comment><USER8> A truly disturbing yet essential read.

Sounds like the reports of shark attacks on the living were greatly exaggerated, but its no wonder if men were hallucinating from dehydration and fever.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sharks or no, it still had to be pretty terrifying to be floating in the ocean without knowing when or if you were going to be rescued. But, like most stories taken from actual events, there always seems to be a person or persons who step up to help others without regard to their own well-being. I hope Capt. Haynes received recognition for his efforts in keeping so many alive.

</comment><comment><USER10> A word of mouth documentary:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M0ULKCM](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M0ULKCM)

Also this survivor has a website of the event

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

</comment><comment><USER11> I read recently that Steven Spielberg wanted to make Jaws 2 about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, but the studio took the series in another direction so he quit.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't suppose there's any way to listen to the audio of these? Is it public? Or online? All of the "oral history" links are 404s.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow. Unimagineable.

I hope we never have such a war again.

<comment><USER14> We won't. If any new conflict actually escalates to the proportions of a world war it'll be much much worse than the world wars of the past, it'll be a thermonuclear holocaust, an extinction scale event. Apparently, we as a species, have learned nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dear god, the scrolling is breakneck due to some stupid JS plugin or something</comment>


GDPR-compliant organisations don't use blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/lukOlejnik/status/1178712684080062465 <comment><USER2> The title is wrong.

It should be "GDPR-compliant organisations don't use blockchain *for data protection or privacy". They might be using it for something else.

I think a lot of big companies are experimenting with those technologies.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really understand how blockchains are compatible with the GDPR's right to be forgotten. Even a website that lets people buy bitcoin, how is that legal in Europe? They can't remove the record of your transactions if you ask them to.

<comment><USER4> They can remove the records from all their systems and argue that the public Blockchain is outside their control.

Or maybe they argue that transactions are not personal data because they are from wallets not linkable to an individual after the company has deleted the information required to link a wallet to a person.</comment></comment>


DemocracyOS: An online space for deliberation and voting on political proposals - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app <comment><USER2> How does this compares to Agora Voting[0], already used by 2 of the top 5 spanish political parties? I'm specially concerned about the security/encryption of the system... Agora is a very powerful tool in this regard.

[0] [https://github.com/agoravoting/agora- ciudadana](https://github.com/agoravoting/agora-ciudadana)

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It might need some UX love, but there are hundreds of person-hours from intelligent folks that have gone into the technical underpinnings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The name was confusing, expected to see something about an Operating System? Does OS stand for Online Space?

<comment><USER5> I agree. I was very confused at first, and almost did not click on the link because I don't see the need for whatever a democracy "OS" could be.

However, this seems like a really neat organization management solution. Voting and discussing formal proposals has never been a sexy proposition; and this is the first tool that I've seen that attempts to improve that.

Now, it's going to require some much more serious security guarantee to be used to govern any important organizations (governments, public corporations, etc.). But as a way to manage smaller communities (e.g. online communities, clubs, anything with smaller-scale voting, even potentially smaller municipalities), I see great potential.

<comment><USER6> > Now, it's going to require some much more serious security guarantee to be > used to govern any important organizations (governments, public > corporations, etc.).

I don't think that's the real hurdle for scaling up. The issue for large-scale democracy has always been that, because an individual's time is limited, it's very hard for them to make a reasonable appraisal of everyone else's opinion. If these comment threads were merely thousands of posts long, could you read through more than one of them and still have a life? And that's only thousands; the voting population of the US is a bit over 200 million.

I'm really, really looking for the tool that lets you successfully absorb thousands of opinions around an issue within a reasonable time frame, without intermediaries. That's the killer app for democracy.

<comment><USER7> One first step might be to filter out all opinions that are contrary to a set of known facts.

<comment><USER8> Who controls the facts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the Contributing doc:

> "Do not make a pull request withouth having run the app on your own. This > means, you have to manually test (at least) that everything works."

Lack of automated testing for large projects makes it difficult for others to contribute and it slows the development process down if manual testing is required. I don't even see a document that outlines specifically what "everything" is. How would you know what to test?

<comment><USER10> I think that may have been referring to formatting that is correctly formatted to be visually appealing. I may be wrong though..

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is some "delegation" implementation inside, ala "liquid democracy". This is a nice mix of "direct" & "representative" democracy, a mix that I believe is very promising to avoid corruption with representatives and lack of participation with direct voting. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy)

<comment><USER12> Yes, that is the key in many ways. It allows for a dynamic configuration of preferences that the current system doesn't. It is on the roadmap but we haven't developed it yet. Suggestions are naturally more than welcome.

<comment><USER11> If an "example" is a "suggestion", you may want to have look at my Kudocracy attempt: [https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy](https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds ok, but the lack of a secret ballot could be a problem. Having your name associated with a particular vote for a particular decision or party can have repercussions if you do not belong to a privileged group.

<comment><USER11> OTOH corruption & fraud is much easier with anonymity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Browser support

>We support real browsers and IE10+

Had to laugh at this

<comment><USER15> Ironically, for all their efforts to make government decisions inclusive, they're choosing to marginalize those who don't meet their tech standards - and being kind of dickish about it. "Sorry Grandma, but you don't use a 'real' browser or a smartypants-phone so bye." "Oh hey José, they only have IE8 at the public library? Tough."

<comment><USER8> If you'd let your grandma use IE then you're a terrible grandchild.</comment></comment></comment>


0day exploit on ES File explorer - <AUTHOR> https://threader.app/thread/1085460755313508352 <comment><USER2> see also [https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/android-app-es-file- explor...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/android-app-es-file-explorer- expose-data/)

1\. What about the timeline?

2\. What about IPv6?</comment>


PATH Down? Wife is getting a butt load of emails - <AUTHOR>

Woke up this morning to my wife getting around 250 emails from PATH. Looks like she is getting even more too. Went to the site and got a 504 Gateway Time-out. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://i.imgur.com/OqEwh.png></comment>


Go 1.5.3 to be released on Wednesday, with security fix - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-announce/MLaPAPFlCNY <comment><AUTHOR> Any idea what the security bugs are? I heard murmurings of TLS-related stuff...</comment>