The Multi-Armed Bandit Problem and Its Solutions (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://lilianweng.github.io/lil-log/2018/01/23/the-multi-armed-bandit-problem-and-its-solutions.html <comment><USER2> Practical take: Thompson sampling is great. Use it if your main focus is getting things done. I found that most literature about MABs concentrates on various (mostly not too useful) approaches to MABs instead of on getting stuff done. Which is of course fine if your intent is to study MABs.

Thompson sampling is easy to implement, predictable, stable, and you can leave your experiments running forever without supervision. It has very few drawbacks.

With a combination of two HyperLogLogs and a Bloom filter, you can also have a really nice scalable distributed implementation (HLLs and BFs combine in an idempotent manner, so updates are lock-free), albeit at the cost of low precision early on as the number of samples is low.

Don't use a library. Thompson sampling itself is not difficult (specifically, 6 lines, as I'm looking at my Clojure code), you will need to understand it very well anyway, and most libraries will include lots of superfluous garbage. Most of the work is not with Thompson sampling, but with processing your events, and that is something which is application-specific anyway and can't be abstracted well.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I did some research out of curiosity in the past about multi-armed bandits. The optimal solution is quite involved, and not worth the effort of studying in my opinion.

Thompson sampling, on the other hand... I'm in love. Clean, simple, straight- forward, and so close to the optimal solution that you will never notice the difference. If you don't understand how to implement it, the stuff that you need to learn (mostly about the beta distribution) is generally useful and well worth studying. Though, after several years now, I'm still looking for an excuse to apply it somewhere. I can't get this method out of my head.

<comment><USER4> I'm a bit confused, as far as I know, Thompson Sampling is optimal (insofar as it minimizes regret in expectation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of my touchstones for improvement in science being a real thing is that "I will run a multi-armed bandit study with the following 'arms' for the bandit, and the following procedure for developing more 'arms': ..." becomes an acceptable study to run.

(There are some very degenerate cases that are allowed; medical trials can fail and succeed so spectacularly that they can skip to the end of the given phase, for instance, which is sort of a degenerate case of a multi-armed bandit approach. But it's a rare exception.)

We've suffered a lot from the phrase "the scientific method" because of the article "the". The name of the game is to increase and decrease confidence in hypotheses by any legitimate statistical method, not to follow "the" method. Science suffers immensely as a result of the extreme requirement to "call your shots" in advance, which contributes to all sorts of problems. The current system almost entirely forbids any sort of exploration; it is sort of snuck in the side door, rather than officially supported.

(It's very analogous to the problems with waterfall design in our industry; the absolute worst times to estimate how expensive a problem is, how likely the solution is to solve it, how the solution will integrate with the rest of the world, and all of the other interesting engineering issues is at the very beginning of the project, when you know the least. One of the virtues of an iterative process is your ability to react to what you learn; waterfall is such a problem because you still inevitably learn these things but the process forbids you from exploiting that knowledge.)

<comment><USER6> > Science suffers immensely as a result of the extreme requirement to "call > your shots" in advance, which contributes to all sorts of problems.

Science is currently suffering a 50+% replication failure crisis as a result of not following "the" method. Studies forced to preregister have shown a dramatic reduction in false positives.

<comment><USER5> A non-trivial component of the replication failure is the _extreme_ incentives to cheat, p-hacking and friends, because if you call your shot, and reality says "you're wrong", the _real_ current system, the one that actually determines who gets promotions and more grant money, says that scientist fails.

Sure, the pretend system says this scientist has done noble and laudable work by showing some hypothesis was wrong, but who cares what the pretend system says? Certainly not anyone who wants promotions (or even just job security) and grant money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If this reading is too dense and you want a quick primer on multi-armed- bandit:

Imagine four slot machines. Each time you play, you choose one with a weighted probability, and the weight is how many times it won in the past.

So on your first play, you randomly select a machine. Now imagine that machine wins. It now has a probability of 1 vs the other three with 0. So you play it again. Now it loses. It now has a .5 probability, and the other ones have 0. Your next play will be a 50% chance of the same machine, and 50% chance of one of the others. You keep going this way and eventually you will pick the one that wins the most often most of the time, but sometimes you'll pick one of the others, just to make sure your probabilities are still correct.

How is this useful to a programmer? It's _great_ for A/B tests. For example you come up with four different home pages, and then define success as clicking on the signup link. At first you randomly show a homepage to each visitor, but as you progress, you'll get one homepage that converts better than the others. You'll show that one most often, but sometimes show the other ones to give them a chance to "catch up", just in case your initial traffic happened to be biased.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, but I think rather than clearing things up, your post causes more confusion. First of all, you're not giving a quick primer on the multi-armed bandit _problem_ , but an attempt at describing of one specific _algorithm_ for it. That distinction is important, because there are several algorithms with different trade-offs, hence the linked post. Second, your description isn't very coherent: probabilities have to add up to 1, and the probability to pick a machine in step two can't simultaneously be both 0% and 50%.

FWIW, the article already contains a very accessible description of what the problem is about: "Imagine you are in a casino facing multiple slot machines and each is configured with an unknown probability of how likely you can get a reward at one play. The question is: What is the best strategy to achieve highest long-term rewards?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those who are interested in multi-armed bandits, you can have a look at this paper for the budget limited version: [https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/270806/1/LTT_AAAI2010_Bandit.pdf](https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/270806/1/LTT_AAAI2010_Bandit.pdf)

extension of that paper: [https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI12/paper/viewFil...](https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI12/paper/viewFile/4865/5532)

</comment><comment><USER10> Tangential, why haven't we all standardized our mathematical notation yet?

This author uses K as the infinite bound count variable in the tuple - yet n is used in literature more frequently for uncounted variables of any unbounded set including Tuples.

<comment><USER11> Differences in notation between different fields abound. It used to be (probably still is) the math department didn't talk to the engineering department, so people would reinvent basically the same solution in different contexts. Now people maintain the notation for internal consistency, instead of switching to "universally standard notation".

Basically, historical consistency trumps cross-disciplinary consistency.

<comment><USER10> I mean in RL we use n consistently. It's all over the Sutton and Barto book. I'm looking at it now.</comment></comment></comment>


TrueOS Pico – FreeBSD ARM/RPi Thin Clients - <AUTHOR> https://www.trueos.org/trueos-pico/ <comment><USER2> Our company has been running LSTP on commodity hardware since 2013 for a development team, and I am truly happy with the result.

For a long time, a 2013 i7 CPU with 32 GiB RAM running LTSP over ESXi was more than enough for intensive use of 5 thin clients.

We've recently switched to a more powerful server (refurbished 48 AMD cores / 256 GB RAM) running Proxmox and despite some issues that still needs minor tweaking, I am very happy with it.

The only gray area, and the reason I am always looking for alternatives to LTSP (NX2Go is the strongest candidate), is the huge bandwidth used by LTSP: 8 Thin clients needs a sustained 600 Mbps. I'm afraid scaling over 10 / 15 workstations will require expensive network equipment but graphic user experience is near native in all aspects.

I highly recommend to anyone that is in doubt of using LTSP or any other thin client setup in production, give it a try because it actually worth it in all aspects.

<comment><USER3> I remember using XDMCP ~20 years ago for this (underpowered machine as thin- client to beefy server, with graphical login). Does LTSP have additional features or better performance?

<comment><USER2> LTSP 4 uses XDMCP as Login manager and GUI export.

LTSP Clients boot with PXE and get the root filesystem via NFS, then it uses XDMCP login screen.

AFAIK, LTSP 5 uses LDM instead of XDCMP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think [http://www.virtualgl.org/About/Introduction](http://www.virtualgl.org/About/Introduction) (used in this product) is actually more interesting - has anyone used it?

<comment><USER5> VirtualGL is/was used in Bumblebee, the support software for Optimus cards on Linux: [https://github.com/Bumblebee- Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ#how-...](https://github.com/Bumblebee- Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ#how-it-works)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would be nice if there was a video demonstrating the thin client capabilities of this. I for one would like to see the OpenGL in action (yes, show me games!).

Plus, which Pi is this made for? I am assuming the Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 (ARMv7). I have all 3 model B's so I'll check this out.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google cached page : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.trueos.org/trueos- pico/)

</comment><comment><USER8> What protocol is being used between the clients and the server?

rPI's aren't too far off sunrays which worked very well, but I think ALP is prop?

I've not had a play with Spice, shurely this isn't just X forwarding over SSH?

<comment><USER9> It says right on the page. X11 over SSH with optional VirtualGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway. But while, we're here, why is Pico limited to 5 clients?

<comment><USER11> Seems like it's for commercial differentiation:

"TrueOS Pico™ is currently in beta status. The client has experimental support for VirtualGL, and limited sound-forwarding availability. Additionally, there is a limit of 5 concurrent sessions on the server side. Licensing options will be announced at a later date."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Link requires a trailing slash: [https://www.trueos.org/trueos- pico/](https://www.trueos.org/trueos-pico/)

<comment><USER12> could some mod fix the link as the trailing slash works

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to see a demo of this so that we could gauge performance and software support.

</comment><comment><USER14> As the site seems to be down, here's an alternative: [http://www.raspbsd.org/](http://www.raspbsd.org/)

<comment><USER4> That's not really an alternative. The posted project is a thin client/server setup that just happens to target Raspberry Pi computers.

The Linux equivalent would be something like LTSP ([http://www.ltsp.org/](http://www.ltsp.org/))

<comment><USER14> Oh, I see what you mean. Page finally loaded, thankfully.</comment></comment></comment>


Eclipse Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blakemcbride/eclipse-lisp

<comment><USER2> Here is the original Eclipse release announcement from almost 19 years ago: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/eclipse$20common$20...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/eclipse$20common$20lisp/comp.lang.lisp/HPTArQ8GFpY/lDoNX2z0QTEJ)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to hear the story how it turned up on github. This is a pretty good lisp from 1998 which compiles to C.

I know Elwood from my former background in the automotive industry, and I read they also created and produced a successful micro computer, the Mini Micro III.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty cool seeing yet another CL implementation popping up from the past. In my opinion its absolutely essential for a programming language to have as many implementations as possible. Its really the only way to truly put the language standard to test.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see Clojure described as a Lisp.

What advantage would I gain learning Commons Lisp over Clojure? Clojure seems to be fairly well respected, has tooling and libraries available. I have no real idea about the situation for Common Lisp

<comment><USER4> > What advantage would I gain learning Commons Lisp over Clojure?

You'd get to learn a standardized language with good support on many platforms (including the JVM, see ABCL) that has stood the test of time very well. I'd argue you'd get a bigger picture of the Lisp world than Clojure can offer, which is rather a specialized offshoot that breaks with many traditions.

Common Lisp is also a rather nonopinionated, it supports almost all programming styles out of the box, and new paradigms can be implemented on top gracefully. It doesn't push you into one way of doing a certain thing, unlike Clojure which has some strong preferences.

Clojure will bring you an opinionated concept of parallelism/concurrency, and a standard library geared very specifically to its conceptual design. Some problems will already be solved for you, but in turn you miss out on many Lisp-ism that didn't make it into Clojure.

I'd imagine Common Lisp is fairly well respected, too. :) I have always considered it the mother of all programming languages since 1990. From my experience (1 year ago) CL tooling is much better established than Clojure tooling. CL has tons of libraries available through Quicklisp. The quality of libraries is generally very high, but I can not really compare it to the Clojure landscape.</comment></comment>


Political ideology of US company boards.  Surprise, tech is strongly Democratic - <AUTHOR> http://ideologicalcartography.com/2010/07/12/citizens-united-and-the-myth-of-a-conservative-corporate-america/

<comment><AUTHOR> Analysis done by an old friend of mine - he uses R to crunch campaign contributions and other indicators in order to understand the US political landscape. Pretty cool stuff if you are a geek and enjoy reading about politics.</comment>


Finnish trains have on-board play-areas for children - <AUTHOR> https://www.vr.fi/cs/vr/en/families-and-children <comment><AUTHOR> Submitted because people seem to love Finland, and when I posted to twitter about it there a few people messaged me with suprise

[https://twitter.com/Stolen_Souls/status/999229475828195329](https://twitter.com/Stolen_Souls/status/999229475828195329)</comment>


With Artificial Photosynthesis, A Bottle of Water Could Power A House - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/video-artificial-photosynthesis-produces-enough-energy-power-house-one-bottle-water <comment><USER2> I find it hard to believe that the solar radiation falling on a moderate area for a moderate number of hours per day is more than the power a single house uses. According to Wikipedia it's about 1kW/m^2 at sea level. Four hours of cloud-free sunlight per day is an over-estimate for most places. Is 4kW enough to power a house? That assumes 100% efficiency.</comment>


Larry Page and Wall Street: Who needs who? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/17/us-google-page-idUSTRE73G1GZ20110417 <comment><USER2> This somewhat reminds me of a few articles I've read of Jim Sinegal (CEO of Costco). There's a particular good read here: [http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/130/thinking-outside- the...](http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/130/thinking-outside-the-big- box.html)

Choice quote:

"the people in that business [wall street] are trying to make money between now and next Thursday. We're trying to build a company that's going to be here 50 and 60 years from now."

This makes me want to work at Google now.

<comment><USER3> "This makes me want to work at Google now." !!

I do to think this is the way!

<comment><USER4> Is there any way to parse this comment that makes sense? I suspect a typo but I can't figure out what it is.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like "I do too think this is the way!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why should Larry Page (a billionaire many times over) have to answer the questions of some loser $100K analysts? I commend Google for not estimating their earnings, offering "guidance", or any of the other bullshit that these analysts need to justify their useless jobs.

<comment><USER7> This criticism seems unnecessarily harsh and focused on income.

There are real issues here regarding the role of a CEO in working with or talking to analysts and investors. You could make an argument that it serves Google's long-term interest to withhold this information from analysts and their shareholders. Or you could argue that Larry Page should answer to people who own part of his company. I'm not saying one is more right than the other, you just aren't contributing to the discussion by trashing someone based on their income.

This isn't about Larry Page vs some "loser $100k analysts" it's about the CEO of a major public tech company and their relationship with their investors.

<comment><USER8> I had to upvote and add to this comment to emphasize your point. I haven't looked through Google's SEC filings for what Larry's actual comments are, but he does need to remember that it's not "his" company anymore and he is partially a billionaire _because_ Google went public (in exchange for getting public money and boosting the value of his own net worth, Google has been able to use that public funding for its continued growth). He likely would've been rich had Google not gone public, but it did and it'd be hard to argue against the positive boost it has given him.

He may not owe it to public investors to give bullshit earnings guidance, but he does owe it to them to answer their questions on how he intends on managing the company and transitively the investor's money.

<comment><USER9> _he does owe it to them to answer their questions on how he intends on managing the company and transitively the investor's money._

I disagree. You chose to invest in a company based on your belief that it will grow as an asset. If you want to have guarantees of certain information beyond what the SEC requires, you need to enter into a separate contract with the corporation.

Page is a founder and CEO in good standing with the board. He doesn't owe shareholders squat.

<comment><USER10> That's all true except your very last sentence.

 _He doesn't owe shareholders squat._

That's an unnecessary hyperbolic statement that doesn't accomplish anything good.

It's because shareholders buy in that Google's share price doesn't totally collapse. If Page doesn't owe them squat, he's free to act irresponsibly and stupidly. Take all of Google's cash and go spend it buying up professional sports teams.

Fortunately, Page isn't that stupid and is working to build something big long-term. If he pulls it off, shareholders will be rewarded. If shareholders don't "get" his strategy right now, and Page thinks "whatever you guys, I'm doing what I need to do", that's no reason to state that Page "owes them squat." Page is still acting in the shareholder's long-term interest, whether shareholders agree with his strategy or not. But let's not say he "owes them squat."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Stock price only starts to matter when a company needs access to more cash than it can generate through sales.

Google is currently in a position where they cannot easily continue to increase sales by spending their (enormous) cash reserves.

Letting the stock tank a little now reduces the perceptual gap between stock valuation and actual earnings.

If that gap is not reduced stock continues to climb while sales growth remains stagnant with the result that, even when engineering investment starts to reflect in sales, unrealistic growth expectations becomes more and more difficult to maintain.

I wouldn't be surprised if Larry Page becomes more communicative when/if he can pull off a Steve Jobs and get Google's product development pipeline to the point where the company can reliably maintain sales growth.

Right now, boosting investor confidence can only work against him in the long run.

<comment><USER12> > Stock price only starts to matter when a company needs access to more cash

I used to think that too, but it's not true. Stock price matters for the existing shareholders, including founders and employees, who may need to cash out for personal reasons. The stock price is an instrument to align the interests of many.

<comment><USER11>
       The stock price is an instrument to align the interests of many.

I like this definition very much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Page may justifiably dislike Wall Street and their short-term orientation, but he probably does need to detail his vision for shareholders esp the long-term type of investor.

Because if that type of shareholder loses faith in the company's direction and Page's leadership and start voting by not buying Google's stock, that will have deleterious impacts. Most obviously, given the talent wars in the Valley, a dropping stock price will not help Google attract top talent vs. pre-IPO companies where the value of options and stock is uncertain and the upside seems and may be higher.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. First of all, share prices are always going to be tied to the fundamental values of a company to some extent. No matter how much an analyst hates a company, if it's generating 50 billion in profits each year, it's clearly worth a market cap of at least a few hundred billion. If Page is right, and is in the process of growing his company to that level over the next ten years, even an analyst who _hated_ the company would be compelled to give it triple, more likely 5-6 times its current valuation.

Furthermore, since Google is highly profitable and has no need to ask the market for more investment, it's not beholden to short term share prices. If the stock price were brutally and irrationally hammered, the logical reaction would be to just spend some of their billions in cash to buy back outstanding shares at the irrationally low price. This would concentrate the ownership of all current share holders, thus giving them a both an immediate increase in value per share and an indefinitely larger chunk of whatever profit is being generated. One way or another, the either the valuation will be sufficiently close to reality or the company will just start paying a dividend of which none of the irrational sellers get any.

Obviously no established company can compete with the potential upside of a small company which is offering a large stake to early employees and just _might_ make it huge. But a one time fluctuation to share price won't matter in the long run. Remember it's a linear adjustment and growth rates of investments are calculated by taking a geometric mean, not an arithmetic mean.

<comment><USER13> I think your comment on share buy backs is not steeped in reality. Moreoever, share price is not always tied to fundamental value of a company. For value stocks, it is. But for tech companies (growth stocks), it is often tied to implied or expected growth. And if Page can't articulate where that growth will come from, the stock price can get hurt.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but the GP's point was that Google's growth as a company is independent of it's stock price. I almost hope that Wall Street doesn't look favourably on Google for a while - it means that the stock will be a (relative) bargain (if Page is able to execute on his un-articulated long-term vision).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the article's tone, it sounds like Wall St is miffed Larry doesn't need it as much as it would like.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't see how the vanity of a some analysts affects Google's underlying business. This is exactly the bipolar behavior of the market which has netted people like Buffett a fortune.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's the good old hill-climbing: to get out from local optimum to a better condition you inevitably have to descend a bit before you get on the rise again.

<comment><USER19> Can't have put it better.

Of course, the obvious caveat is that you may or may not reach a better optimum with this approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> it certainly sends a clear message to employees and other stockholders that Larry doesn't see it as important to keep the stock price up.

<comment><USER21> ...in the short term.

<comment><USER22> I wonder what the odds are this is a planned suppression of their stock price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think it's fairly telling that the analysts appeared to treat the decline in stock price as a punitive measure, rather than offering any kind of explanation for why Page's silence means the company is worth less than it was last week.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can someone give me a good reason why Google should care what Wall Street guys think and how much they value casino chips that Google gave them to play with?

</comment><comment><USER25> Does google give employees options or just restricted stock?

It is a bit demoralizing to have your company's stock tank right after annual bonus options are priced.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Stock price down 8% in a single session based on short-term emotion and reaction?

Sounds like a good time to buy.

</comment><comment><USER26> 4 year olds on Wall Street.

</comment><comment><USER27> The message from this article seems a little flawed. Your stock price doesn't go up because you pampered Wall Street analysts, treated them nicely, etc. Your price goes up when you earn billions of dollars more than people expected. It's all about the money, not what you say. Perform well, and investors will care little whether you insulted them.

And to be honest, the fact this matters.. what does this say about Wall Street???? It's just a game of impressing people, and not based on what really matters - which is profit?

</comment><comment><USER28> It's really starting to look like Google has jumped the shark with making Larry CEO.

Google has serious strategic problems going forward, and it seems the best Larry can do is make 25% of employee bonuses tied to chasing Facebook and ignoring investor questions.

Making a rags to riches die hard engineer CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation may seem like a cute idea, but this won't end well.

<comment><USER29> Can you justify your declarations?

<comment><USER28> No.</comment></comment></comment>


SparkBuy acquired by Google - <AUTHOR> http://sparkbuy.com/?purchased_by=Google <comment><USER2> Certainly sold quickly - our startup <http://www.happybuy.com/> is in a similar space (innovating on top of e-commerce sites for price tracking, price prediction and recommendations) so in a way its good to see there is one less competitor.

Sounds more like this was a talent acquisition as the technology from SparkBuy is something that Google could have replicated relatively quickly if they wanted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like if you take a retail vertical, use some solr/lucene to give you faceted search, you'll be golden.

I know it's not that simple, but the tech is very accessible right now to do just that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is the service discontinued? The site itself is just background image now.

<comment><USER5> "And while we won't be offering services at sparkbuy.com any more, stay tuned for truckloads of new awesome from our team at Google."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's an article with more info:

[http://www.geekwire.com/2011/google-buys-sparkbuy-search- eng...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/google-buys-sparkbuy-search-engine- laptops-tvs)

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats!

How much?

<comment><USER8> Companies don't have to reveal if it's less than $50M, so, unfortunately, the only answer you'll absolutely get is "< that $50M" :/

<comment><USER9> They had investors and (with their investment being so recent) they certainly had $ in the bank, so you can also rule out the "nice signing bonus" outcome. With $1M on a $3M pre-money (guess), they'd have to sell for north of $4 for the investors to get a return on their investment.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Emvi – Knowledge management platform for companies and teams - <AUTHOR> https://emvi.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN, co-founder of Emvi here!

Emvi is our approach to a real-time knowledge base and we finally opened registrations for public Beta. We found that existing tools structure content in a tree-like hierarchy which tends to limit reach and scalability.

For Emvi we implemented a concept that is closer to pages like Wikipedia or Medium - articles are linked internally, curated to lists and grouped by tags. Our goal is to make it accessible for both technical and non-technical users and to keep the content maintainable for the long term.

Some features we already include:

* Powerful search with filters and sorting options

* Activity feed and notifications

* WYSIWYG-editor with real-time collaboration

* @-mention any element (articles, lists, users, groups or tags)

* Full article change history

* Fine-grained rights management for users and groups

* Multiple translations for articles and list titles

We are currently working on comments and embeds and an early API is available on GitHub[1].

Feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments.

Cheers,

Daniel

[1] [https://github.com/emvi](https://github.com/emvi)

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi there! If you'd like to know more about our plans for 2020 and beyond, you can read about it on our blog[1]!

Cheers, Marvin

[1] [https://emvi.com/blog](https://emvi.com/blog)</comment>


A 19 year old's thoughts on existence - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/justfuckingcur1/status/999312588856061952 <comment><USER2> Belongs in r/iamverysmart</comment>


Why Online Education Works (2012) - barry-cotter https://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/11/12/alex-tabarrok/why-online-education-works <comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't. The author's is a bizarrely outdated view.

Disciplined high-achievers -/ folks who somehow already learned excellent skills — might avail themselves of online education. Kids, in general, not so much.

[http://www.insidehighered.com/digital- learning/article/2019/...](http://www.insidehighered.com/digital- learning/article/2019/01/16/study-offers-data-show-moocs-didnt-achieve-their- goals)

<comment><USER2> [https://youtu.be/zxJgPHM5NYI](https://youtu.be/zxJgPHM5NYI) [https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1071280.pdf](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1071280.pdf)

Khan academy's findings point in the other direction. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm really seeing completion rates being argued as why moocs failed, and I don't agree with it being the indicator of measuring effectiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a former middle school teacher - I feel like I've seen the writing on the wall since the early 2000s, and yet for some reason manual education is very sticky in our society. I suspect that there will be a sudden tipping point where schools remain physical but students are all doing most learning on individualized learning plans, but I'm unsure when that will be. I would've guessed 10 years ago, but here we are.

I suspect teachers unions play a big part.

<comment><USER4> Schools already do a lot of online edtech education at daycare (school).

The larger barrier to personalized education is that it leads to less equal outcomes, as healthy rich kids with supportive parents tend to excel while hungry poor people from broken homes do not. That gets a lot of pushback from "equity and access" activists in the school administration who believe that no one deserves a great education (certainly not publicly funded one) until systemic socioeconomic inequalities are fixed first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is a big part of the hold out that parents need someone to watch their kid while they are at work?

<comment><USER6> That's certainly a big factor for primary school, but using the same "education as daycare" model for high school students feels very wrong.

<comment><USER5> Point taken. However, how many parents currently want/trust their teenagers at home for online education?</comment></comment></comment>


Three arrests fail to solve mystery of drones flying over French nuclear plants - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/06/arrests-myster-drones-flying-french-nuclear-plants <comment><USER2> The absurdity of nuclear plant safety: The risk of a disasters is "completely negligible", but fly a model plane or drone above a plant and all hell breaks loose.

You can't have it both ways: _Either_ scenarios with attackers flying Cessnas full of fertilizer into your facility etc. are a safety danger and the plants need to be reinforced immediately _or_ drones above your plant are completely harmless and should not be prosecuted anymore than drones flying above the house of a celebrity. And if these plants are not safe, then shooting drones from the sky and imprisoning drone pilots will not change that fact.

 _Edit_ : I've added quotes around "completely negligible" to make clear I was citing public opinion rather than presenting my own (@quonn).

<comment><USER3> Actually, the risk of disasters is not negligible at all, in particular if there is a sufficient number of power plants (431 worldwide currently).

In the last 30 years, we have already seen two incidents that were above the "maximum credible accident", that is the probability of them happening was considered to be negligible.

With that number of plants running, I would expect a major incident _somewhere_ every 20 years and historically we have seen more than that.

Here [0] is a quite recent study by probably the most important german research institute that predicts one incident every 10 to 20 years, based on the number of plants running and data of historical incidents. There is also a nice summary in German [1].

[0] [http://www.atmos-chem- phys.net/12/4245/2012/acp-12-4245-2012...](http://www.atmos-chem- phys.net/12/4245/2012/acp-12-4245-2012.html)

[1] [http://www.mpic.de/index.php?id=34298&type=0](http://www.mpic.de/index.php?id=34298&type=0)

<comment><USER4> What does that have to do with drones flying over powerplants?

I agree in general, but here the response to what is essentially a toy flying over a concrete several meters thick bunker is just crazy.

<comment><USER3> Nothing, my comment was not about the drones. - I was responding to the parent commenter, before he or she put "completely negligible" in quotes.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for those articles, btw. They provide interesting data points in the (somewhat endless) safety debate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just shoot them down?

Its an unauthorized vehicle over key infrastructure. Wouldn't even result in a loss of lives. So shoot it down & wait for the owner to start bitching (or not).

<comment><USER6> What goes up, must come down. [1]

You could make sure your security forces understand exactly where they can shoot, but still, is it worth the risk to have bullets falling somewhere in a nuclear facility?

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire)

<comment><USER4> My point is disproportionate response. A drone is nowhere near a security risk that would require a shooting response.

Same as we're not using SAM sites to shoot down Cessnas that accidentaly blunder into no-fly zones over airports, powerplants and other bases just because they MIGHT (and in 99.9999999999999999999999+% cases they're not) cause some damage.

I'm very very concerned just how the terrorist scare is trying to turn our countries into police states ruled by fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't even need a real firearm or explosive to threaten a power plant.

A 32 mm² copper wire with ~3m length is enough to cause a short in the high- voltage section. Two or three RC aircraft at the same time and you can potentially cause something like Fukushima by totally separating the plant from the grid and hoping that its UPS is broken...

edit: every HV installation and even most middle-level (5-50 kV) installation can also be targeted by this. Left-wing radicals are already burning cable trenches of the train service in order to protest against nuclear power (I'm serious, this happened yesterday in East Germany), it's only a matter of time unless one of these fools tries a cable-equipped UAV against a HV distribution station...

<comment><USER8> I take issue with the statement that depriving a plant of line power and having a UPS failure will "cause something like Fukushima". An important factor in the Fukushima accident was the infeasibility of quickly (within a day or so) providing equipment to the plant due to the catastrophe everywhere around.

<comment><USER7> If coordinated enough, a sudden and unexpected total load drop on the whole power station may cause total mayhem due to turbine runaway; combined with a total loss of grid energy due to every grid HV connection being blown I am not sure if plant ops may be able to keep cooling up.

These things are very rarely tested in production (esp. turbine containments). Right now we're just sitting there and pretend there are no terrorists or political extremists. We're rather like sitting ducks waiting for potshots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worry more about the general safety of French (Swiss, German, ...) nuclear plants than these "drones". I guess it's some environmental group flying quadrocopters with sensors over the plants to make independent measurements.

<comment><USER10> Why just French, Swiss and German? RC aircraft can be flown over anything, I doubt the US or UK have any better protection from RC Aircraft than the French, Swiss or Germans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For the french : [http://nos-medias.fr/video/drones-l-hypothese- inquietante-d-...](http://nos-medias.fr/video/drones-l-hypothese-inquietante- d-un-expert-en-energie-nucleaire)

He explain that they may want to target transformer station and could shutdown all electric network in europe, yes that's scary

Edit: i put the right link... the first one was just a report of the incident (sorry)

<comment><USER8> This is not a new idea: the British[1] tried using balloons with trailing wires during World War II (in the hope they'll short power lines). As far as I can recall (I can't find a source right now) the Japanese put lots of copper wires in their fire balloons[2] too, to hopefully cause a short when they explode.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outward](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outward) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe security UAVs could be an answer?

If an unknown drone appears over a nuclear power plant, the plant could launch a UAV to follow it about until it goes home, watch who picks it up after it lands, and then just send in the police.

<comment><USER13> It is somewhat unclear why they have failed to follow them with helicopters, did they just lose them? It is unclear if these are day or night flights though.

<comment><USER14> This was a silly, unprepared answer anyway, just like the order to shoot them down. They've probably setup radio scanners and possibly jammers in order to intercept the video/command stream.

<comment><USER15> This is one I fail to understand.

With radio triangulation that should be able to pinpoint the controller. I know most of the newer control equipment is using spread spectrum and frequency hopping, but I imagine that is a solvable issue.

<comment><USER8> And they have to proceed to that point quickly enough to find the fellow operating it still there. Also, if I wished to avoid detection, I'd set up a transceiver linked to a data GSM connection and leave it in a random place in the middle of nowhere. Maybe even I'd have a few of those to confuse direction finding attempts (not sure how feasible that is).

<comment><USER15> Well, I would hope every nuclear power station has a rapid reaction security force on hand 24/7 the could respond to these 'threats'.

As for the misdirection, using cellular relay devices is something most wouldn't do and even if they did it would provide a lead that could be followed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These RC Aircraft will be almost impossible to track if set up correctly. Using Jamming devices would be stupid as it would block out mobile phone frequencys and you would need a strong enough jammer to block high flying aircraft. Even if the vehicle was jammed it would just fly home, but who says that home is where the controllers are, some of these aircraft can do 80km+ flights...It's not an easy issue to fix.

</comment><comment><USER16> How much damage could you do by loading a drone with aluminium foil stripes and dropping this onto the electrical equipment? Would it just evaporate before causing much harm? Are the distances you have to short to large for bringing the needed material with drones? Of course this is neither limited to nuclear plants nor to drones.

</comment><comment><USER17> "But ... I don't even own a drone!"

</comment><comment><USER18> The solution is anti-drone drones!

</comment><comment><USER19> This is scary! What if the drone carried an explosive, landed on the nuclear plants and detonated? I shudder at the thought. There should be a camera with 360 vision that constantly monitors the surrounding area for incoming projectiles and drones and shoot laser or bullets at it.

<comment><USER20> On the other hand, this has been possible for decades using RC planes (let alone regular planes).

<comment><USER21> The new electric quadcopters are like the first iPhone - people think it's an all new invention, when in fact we've had marvelous gas-powered RC helicopters for a long time.

<comment><USER15> Quadcopters seem to be the platform that drove the highly advanced flight computers that allow anyone to fly the things. When I take my FCs out of acro mode even my 4 year old can fly them and not crash. They are being used on more platforms now, but the quads seems to be in the news as the front runners.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMP Is Joining the OpenJS Foundation Incubation Program – The AMP Blog - <AUTHOR> https://blog.amp.dev/2019/10/10/amp-is-joining-the-openjs-foundation-incubation-program/ <comment><USER2> Eh. Firefox mobile has a "reader mode" that does what AMP is supposed to do... but better. Took me a bit to switch, but I finally did, and it's _so_ worth it.</comment>


Line of Sight: live visualization of satellites in the line of sight above us - <AUTHOR> http://patriciogonzalezvivo.github.io/LineOfSight/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see that even with the proliferation of satellites these days, there are only about a dozen above the continental United States right now, with all the categories selected.

<comment><USER3> Makes sense - the contiguous US is only 1.58% of the earth's surface area. 1.58% of 2271 satellites in orbit = 35 satellites, and considering how many orbits are equatorial, 12 feels well within the expected variance to me.</comment></comment>


WireGuard for Windows Pre-Alpha - <AUTHOR> https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-May/004126.html <comment><USER2> How did I miss this? Very exciting!</comment>


We Did It - What some hackers did on election night. - <AUTHOR> http://wedidit.us/

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about being vague. On the election day a small group of us (my fellow co-founders and a good friend) got together a for an election party. Around 8 PM as Barack Obama had enough lead to be the president, Scott(@cscotta) mentioned sorryeverybody.com. It was a website setup to so people could apologize to the rest of the world about George Bush. Since things have change for the better (hopefully) So.. "Following the disappointment of the 2000 and 2004 elections, it seems we've learned from our mistakes. We think that's a victory worth celebrating" We wanted to have a little fun and give back to the community.

PS. This is not a startup, of course. Just something that a few guys did for fun in a few hours.

</comment><comment><USER2> Odds that domain once belonged to the first literary erotica + social networking site?

</comment><comment><USER3> What'd we do exactly?</comment>


The sad state of font rendering on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ <comment><USER2> I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts _exactly_ as they'd appear on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things being slightly off as they'd appear in print.

Ultimately, different strokes for different folks. While you're not wrong that Cleartype is empirically better for most people for text content, it is objectively worse, by design, for those for whom positional precision matters.

> This occurs because Apple didn't dare go near any ClearType patents that > Microsoft got for their rendering techniques. For decades OS X remained a > very ugly baby, until in 2015 they just gave us courage HiDPI in form of > Retina. This was a bid to make all hinting technology obsolete and put > everyone else to shame.

Is just wrong. Apple intentionally chooses to display fonts the way they do. This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise known for design would not focus on their fonts.

With regard to the freetype font size rendering. You claim that freetype doesn't scale the fonts smoothly, but then you also claim Windows does it correctly. Just FYI, Windows most certainly does not scale fonts linearly. OS X does of course, given its focus on publishing. Windows cleartype actually changes the font size in order to make text readable. If linearity of font scaling is a metric by which you measure font engines, then cleartype is a failure.

In case anyone doesn't believe the claim above, this article ([https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering- philosoph...](https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies- of-windows-and-mac-os-x)) goes into it in depth.

<comment><USER3> Fonts are _never_ scaled "linearly." A 5 point font magnified to twice its size will look different than the same font at 10 points. See [https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future- of...](https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future-of- responsive-typography) for a discussion. (And look in Knuth's "Metafont")

Windows handles fonts correctly. And Cleartype is an option you can turn on and off. It makes fonts look "more correct" on many types of displays. Are you saying it's better not to have that option available at all?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what "more correct" means in this context. Coming from a MacOS background, it is my opinion that ClearType makes fonts look worse.

Regardless of my personal opinion, it's clear that other people share this opinon. For instance, Word doesn't use ClearType; they had problems with text on different colored backgrounds.[0][1]

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType#cite_note- Word-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType#cite_note-Word-3)

[1]: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2014/05/31/crisp- te...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2014/05/31/crisp-text- display/)

<comment><USER3> Mac on the left, Windows with cleartype on the right. Adobe InDesign

[https://imgoat.com/uploads/74ad4786c3/203900.png](https://imgoat.com/uploads/74ad4786c3/203900.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "What they didn't account for is that an overwhelming majority of legacy software had 96 DPI hardcoded into it, as well as the problem of mixed use of HiDPI and non-HiDPI displays where you need to somehow scale the entire UI back-and-forth when moved between displays. Since Windows never had the font rendering problems that Apple did, majority of the computer market share didn't back the ultra-expensive 4K screens even to this day (2018). Software maintainers too didn't buy into the idea of massive code rewrites and UI tinkering to support DPIs other than 96. As of today, 4K experience is still a mixed bag that solves one simple problem for Apple, but introduces multiple complex problems for everyone else."

Uhmmm.... [citation needed]?

I don't have a single Mac app that assumes anything about 96 dpi and pretty much the entire Internet is 2x now.

Windows on the other hand... yes. That's a clusterf __k in HiDPI.

<comment><USER6> Why was this downvoted? This paragraph was one of the worst in the article.

> Since Windows never had the font rendering problems that Apple did

Uhm I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling. It's not as bad as linux, but it's still very bad.

> Software maintainers too didn't buy into the idea of massive code rewrites > and UI tinkering to support DPIs other than 96

(on Windows)

<comment><USER7> > Uhm I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling. It's not as bad > as linux, but it's still very bad.

That seems like a massive overexaggeration. While there are still rough edges, running Windows on my MacBooks retina screen has been just fine for majority of popular apps. Including mixed HiDPI/normal DPI use cases.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't that just reiterate my point? "While there are still rough edges" == "I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling"

Take QGIS for example. It doesn't properly scale. On Windows you get an miniscule interface, on mac it's the same size as all other apps, just blurry. I'll take that any day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering. It does not use > hinting at all and relies only on grayscale anti-aliasing. This makes > everything appear very bold and blurry._

This almost reads like satire.

It's well-known that Windows prefers to distort letterforms for the sake of crispness, while Macs preserve letterforms for the sake of fidelity.

Saying that one is better than the other is _entirely_ subjective -- there are many, many articles on the subject. There's absolutely nothing objective about it.

If it were so "objective", then it seems quite odd that Macs would be the predominant choice of graphic designs and type designers, who would be expected to care about this the most...

<comment><USER9> Steve Jobs took type-faces and font rendering more seriously than anyone else in the computer industry except for maybe Donald Knuth. He discovered calligraphy while at Reed College and it changed him forever.

<aside> I am still amazed at how crappy MS Word at typesetting. I write these beautiful papers in LaTeX with incredible math type setting and then sometimes I am asked to convert to Word -- it almost makes me cry to ruin my "art" to convert it to Word. </aside>

It it an affront to my aesthetic taste to look at a Windows UI.

<comment><USER10> Not defending Windows, but I find the common latex font clumsy and hard to read.

<comment><USER11> Computer Modern is very thin. I personally prefer Computer Concrete, in a similar vein, because it is simpler and easier to read on low-DPI displays. Although I'm not sure about this, it feels as though Computer Modern was designed to take into account a bit of bleed, which is why it looks better as a high-resolution inkjet print.

Regardless of which font you use, TeX will produce a much higher quality document (esp. math) than Word, at the expense of an upfront time investment in learning to use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As others have noted this is a hilariously bad post, because in practice Windows (which is so enthusiastically praised here) is incredibly inconsistent in font rendering program by program, and on most non-hidpi screens looks like trash. Especially when using scaled displays (such as 1.25 or 1.5x scaling on a 4k screen), where half of software turns into a blurry, unreadable mess.

<comment><USER13> As seen even in Windows itself, including but not limited to various places in the Control Panel. The situation is even worse if you are a laptop user that sometimes connects to external displays with a different pixel densities. Things will often either get upscaled or downscaled depending upon the display used at the point that the application was opened, sometimes requiring the application to be closed and re-opened to render at the correct resolution or - worse still - requiring you to log out of Windows and back in again! Trying to use high-DPI displays on Windows is an unmitigated nightmare.

<comment><USER14> My big question about this is Why?

Why is Windows such a mess about this and how did Apple manage to pull it off with virtually no fanfare?

For a while was connecting a Retina MBP to two non-Retina monitors. Sometimes, when dragging a window from the laptop display to a non-Retina monitor I'd see a flash of everything scaled up. Other than that, I've seen none of the problems that seem to still plague Windows 10.

I'm sure the answer has to do with the history of Windows - I'd love to see someone like Raymond Chen dig deep into this.

<comment><USER15> The why has to do with how Windows and macOS approached scaling.

On macOS, to get anything above 100%, you render the whole interface at 200% (including layout), and the OS scales the resulting pixel output to the display's scale.

On Windows, every application has to detect the scale of the monitor it is being displayed on and do layout at the exact scale. (Actually, that isn't entirely true, if you wrote an app before the high dpi additions, you always render at 100% and Window scales it up for you, which results in a blurry mess.) It is very easy for layouts at 125% to have gaps and varying width lines depending on where on the device pixels the coordinates land.

Adding _mixed_ high DPI support to Sublime Text for Mac was very simple compared to adding it for Windows. On Mac the OS tells us when to render at 200%, and everything in regards to layout is then doubled. On Windows we have to re-layout and snap dimensions to device pixel boundaries to get something that looks crisp when moving a window from one display to another. The code changes were far more invasive for Windows.

We support high dpi on Linux, but haven't added mixed high DPI support yet. Gnome limits users to integer scales (1.0, 2.0, 3.0), but with tweak tools it is possible to get fractional scaling. All of those are fine, it is just when you need to re-layout in fractional scales on the fly that you have to expose the scale of the current display to the entire UI library, or sometimes have gaps and overlaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This guy has some pretty weird opinions. Not only do I much prefer macOS's accurate font rendering aesthetically, the entire issue of sub pixel aliasing is moot with high-DPI screens anyway.

<comment><USER17> I look forward to the day when I can drop in a high-DPI screen to my home office setup that works just like my current non high-DPI screen, but with a higher pixel density.

(5K ultrawides to replace my 34" monitor simply don't exist yet, and the current 12" MacBook can't drive a regular 5K monitor.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Some users even disable all ClearType rendering and anti-aliasing, claiming > that it reduces eyestrain and that anti-aliasing damages eyesight. It's kind > of like anti-vaxxing (hello from 2019 if you are reading this in the > future).

I hope the anti-vaxxing comparison is only for the "eyesight damage" part, otherwise this paragraph is bullshit in its entirety. From my own personal experience, i _vastly_ prefer antialising disabled, _assuming that there fonts used have hinting available that support it_. Or even better, bitmap fonts made to be clean and crisp (as opposed to just being rasterized versions of vector fonts). Of course if you try to use fonts that disregard hinting and aren't compatible (or even tested at all) with antialiasing disabled, like the font the author's site uses which looks like total crap on my PC, then, yeah, compared to that i prefer AA with CT.

I find annoying that you need to mess with the registry to disable antialiasing in Windows 10, but at least the option is still there.

<comment><USER19> SPR absolutely gives me eyestrain, though I can't blind test it because on a 1920x1200 display I can easily see the fringing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised there was hardly any mention of pixel grid fitting, or even just accuracy. My favorite article on font rendering is one from Antigrain Geometry[1] that goes a fair bit further in improving subpixel rendering imo.

Nonetheless their use of the word objective is very annoying since I greatly prefer grayscale with no hinting even on Linux at 96 DPI. It's a bit blurry, but it consistently looks right. No kerning issues.

Also, it is laughable to suggest that Windows never had issues with font rendering. Just look at Microsoft Word struggling to balance between accurately displaying documents and rendering the fonts with Cleartype as shown in the AGG article.

[1]: [http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/](http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/)

</comment><comment><USER21> _> The traditional way of [installing the Windows core Web fonts] is through installing ttf-mscorefonts-installer or msttcorefonts. The msttcorefonts package looks like some Shenzhen basement knockoff that renders poorly and doesn't support Unicode. I suspect that these fonts have gone through multiple iterations in every Windows release and that the versions available through the repositories must be from around Windows 95 days._

That does seem to be the case. Per Wiki ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web)):

 _> The latest font-versions that were available from Microsoft's Core fonts for the Web project were 2.x (e.g. 2.82 for Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New for MS Windows), published in 2000. Later versions (such as version 3 or version 5 with many new characters) were not available from this project. A Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open source community "will have to find different sources for updated fonts."_

So while Windows and MacOS both have up-to-date versions of these fonts (Windows because Microsoft owns them, and MacOS because Apple licenses them from MS), the best Linux distributors can do is to package the last versions released before the 2002 re-licensing. (Or at least, that's the best they can do without paying Microsoft.)

</comment><comment><USER22> There's not enough resolution at 96dpi to render fonts correctly. You have to make compromises one way or another. Windows snaps to pixel boundaries more strongly, while Mac does no hinting to keep shapes correct.

The author, while his opinion should be taken lightly, is trying to get subpixel positioning into Chrome and GTK. This is something positive, and something Windows and MacOS already have. Qt can do it, too, but as of a few years ago KDE/Plasma was actively disabling it because of inconsistencies in Xlib and image rendering backends.

</comment><comment><USER23> I actually do prefer font rendering on Linux to Windows. It strikes a good balance between Mac and Windows rendering.

</comment><comment><USER24> He lost me at

> OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering.

<comment><USER25> "Do a controlled reading speed experiment against Windows."

Nobody will do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> s/font rendering/wifi

s/font rendering/bluetooth

s/font rendering/sleep mode

s/font rendering/battery life

I've been using Linux for 15 years now (started on Mandrake), but those issues haven't been fixed in a decade.

I really want to support free software, so I keep using it, reporting bugs and donating again and again. Many do. We hope that like with Firefox, if we support it consistently, it will eventually overcome the situation.

But damn it's hard sometimes.

<comment><USER27> I don't use BT so I can't speak to it, but I've been dual Linux/Mac for ~20 yrs, and the linux laptop situation is spectacularly good if you use thinkpads. At least it has been for me. Dell ships some good ones too, but I haven't tried them.

On non-thinkpad/xps machines (which I'm not saying you're using or talking about, I'm just gonna assume), it's a crapshoot. But I think it's no better than running macos on a pc laptop or windows on a mac laptop (at least the last time I tried years ago, via their dual-boot thing).

<comment><USER26> Like the others, jumping around shooting "it's fine" is not going to help.

I'm writting this from an Ubuntu 16.04 on an XPS 13. Sometime it wakes up from sleep modes with no wifi or bluetooth, and I have to force a reboot. Bluetooth doesn't work out of the box, I have to use blueman just to have a working mouse. But even with these, headphones won't work.

I had a XPS 15 before. It was not better.

<comment><USER28> I have the 2018 XPS 13, running Ubuntu. It worked pretty well on 16.04, until I upgraded past kernel 4.15. Now there's a bug where it either won't stay asleep, or when it wakes up the WiFi and Bluetooth devices are non-functional (even reloading the modules does nothing). I have recently discovered that disabling BT+WiFi via the keyboard function key before suspending avoids the problem, but it's annoying. I think it's also related to Intel making firmware changes for a Windows sleep mode that stays connected to WiFi.

I think this bug report is tracking the issue: [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799988](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799988)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I used to use Windows and Linux for a very, very, very long time. Never even thought "hey, those fonts don't look quite as good as they could". Then one day I tried Mac. Period.

Oh boy, ever since I just _can 't_ use anything else because of the fonts. It visually hurts my eyes.

<comment><USER30> Font rendering is one of a handful of things that keep my Mac as my daily driver, and my PC is just for gaming (and occasional experiments with Windows dev, just to learn new things).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering- gener...](https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-general.html)

> It turns out that font rendering in the Linux ecosystem has been wrong since > scalable fonts were introduced to it. Text must be rendered with linear > alpha blending and gamma correction, which no toolkit or rendering library > does by default on X11, even though Qt5 and Skia (as used by Google Chrome > and other browsers) can do it.

The primary effect of no gamma correction is that light-on-dark text is too thin (and dark-on-light is thick but readable).

</comment><comment><USER32> I used to care a great deal about font rendering, but when I got eyeglasses I had trouble learning to focus with them. To make it easier, I disabled anti- aliasing, giving the fonts maximum sharpness, and making it obvious if I was focusing correctly.

Surprisingly, I got used to this and never switched back. The most legible font is the one you're most used to, but if there's any objective measure of quality, it has to be sharpness. No anti-aliasing = maximum sharpness. It might look ugly at first, but you get used to it quickly. I recommend trying it.

</comment><comment><USER33> My subjective take on font rendering, based on tweaking and hinting web fonts, is that MacOS has the best font rendering (since their laptops have been using retina displays, with the exception of the Macbook Air; even here the font rendering may look a little blurry but the fonts look quite good and are readable); Linux has quite good font rendering (they may make the letters look bigger on low resolution displays, but things are nice and readable); and Windows font rendering is very uneven.

Most browsers have their own take of Clear type font rendering when rendering web fonts. While some make web fonts look quite good (Firefox, Internet Explorer/Edge), Chrome has had issues with using settings which make fonts harder to read; I had to increase the weight of the font I use some to compensate for this. Clear Type, on the default settings Chrome used for a long time, is really great, if you're rendering a Windows font like Calibri or Cambria. For anything else, the results are uneven. (I think Chrome finally started tweaking things in Windows to look better)

In terms of the linked webpage, his comparison is unfair: He is comparing how Arial, a Microsoft font, looks in Linux compared to how it looks in Windows. Liberation Sans has the same metrics as Arial, so is not a good comparison font; he should had used something more OS-agnostic, such as Bitstream Vera Sans (DejaVu Sans if you want more languages).

</comment><comment><USER34> _OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering. It does not use hinting at all and relies only on grayscale anti-aliasing._

And yet OS X's font rendering being by far the best _for me_ is a key thing that has kept me on the Mac despite all the other warts. I find text elsewhere horribly blocky. It's all very subjective, it seems. Also, I think the grayscale antialiasing is a new thing, it certainly didn't used to be the case, but maybe they switched how it worked once retina screens became the norm.

</comment><comment><USER35> For everyone criticizing his views on MacOS X, try using an external display with a lower PPI. It's not obvious on native laptop screens with 220+ppi.

On my Dell U3415W (109ppi) the issues he pointed out are very obvious. An equal sign (=) for example has a much thicker and blurrier bottom bar than the top. The rendering of the H in "History" is different than the H in "Help" in the menu bar.

</comment><comment><USER36> Personally, the font rendering in a Windows terminal looks abysmal to me. I hugely prefer my linux terminals (out of the box).

Just my 2c

<comment><USER10> That's not a terminal, but a console, and uses ancient GDI graphics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Weird. I just opened a PDF on my linux PC, everything displayed perfectly. I haven't done anything with fonts, everything is default Fedora install.

Linux seems to have a lot of detractors around these parts. This person obviously cares more about fonts than freedom, privacy, and respect for the end user.

<comment><USER38> I absolutely can reproduce the main issue he is describing at the end. Open [https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/](https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/) and look at "Willing". Compare with [https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation- browser.pn...](https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.png). On my linux system - where I spent considerable time making the fonts look acceptable after moving to it from Ubuntu - there is also the kerning issue in that word. That's a shame.

There might be inaccuracies and subjectivity in the article, but if really all engines have that issue that's a real problem.

<comment><USER37> If I look at 'willing' closely on that page, there is what I perceive to be about a 20% increase of spacing between the the second 'l' and the second 'i' character.

I didn't notice it at first, I had to look at it very closely.

<comment><USER38> That's horrible, isn't it? The author does have a valid bug there that really is a big issue if you care about this sort of thing (some people just don't care how fonts look and can't notice kerning issues), but the whole comment thread is discussing very subjective rendering differences between Windows, Linux and OSX, where Linux isn't even bad. Though I think the author did himself no favor with not leading with that bug.

<comment><USER37> Meh. Not a huge deal, like I said, didn't even notice it. If I zoom to 110% or more, the spacing is fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm probably less picky than the author of the article, but issues I do notice are (in Linux, but since I only use it I don't know if they exist in other OSes too):

-some websites render with a very strange font, that includes quote symbols '"' being very tiny, which I'm not sure if actually intended like that or a problem in linux specifically, and sometimes all letters being rendered in such ugly way to be hard to read

-symbols in mathematical formulas (some types of arrow, ...) rendered as colored emoji, even if they shouldn't in that situation since it's not a chat program according to the unicode spec

-sometimes unicode chars becoming a square box, even if having tons of fonts installed

<comment><USER40> > according to the unicode spec

Does the Unicode specification cover how glyphs should look and what colour they should be?

<comment><USER41> > Does the Unicode specification cover how glyphs should look and what colour > they should be?

Umm... yes? Unicode includes "reference glyphs" in its character charts. They're called "reference" for a reason: implementations of those glyphs should appear substantially similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I recently moved to nixos with sway for my desktop and after trying Firefox with wayland there I realized I had never seen text in linux so sharp.

I read the whole post but could not tell if what he mentions implicates both xorg as well as wayland?

</comment><comment><USER43> This article is "OBJECTIVELY" bad.

</comment><comment><USER44> Really interesting read on how fonts render on different systems. However a huge reason why I went from Win to macOS are the incredibly frustrating scaling issues. At work I gave up and just set my laptop display to 100% since I'd rather deal with the occasional tiny text than always having incredibly blurry fonts in certain crucial apps like Outlook.

I do agree that macOS fonts are nearly unreadable without a Retina/4K display. However I've never noticed any scaling issues on macOS.

</comment><comment><USER45> There is a way to restore Infinality-like font rendering on freetype2, which improves text readability. Linux users may find these instructions helpful:

[https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5...](https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5671)

Skip the "Removing the infinality-bundle" section if you don't currently use Infinality.

</comment><comment><USER46> I honestly think freetype on Linux looks much better than windows (too thin and sharp) and mac (too muddy).

</comment><comment><USER47> A related article from AGG talking about some of the subtleties of font rasterization: [http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/](http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/)

</comment><comment><USER48> "The sad state of <minor desktop feature> on Linux"

Linux on the desktop is death by a thousand cuts.

<comment><USER49> Yep.

I just tried a three month experiment with using Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. That experiment came to an end last week, and I'm back to macOS.

What killed me was:

\- wake-on-open working about 33% of the time. The other 66% of the time required a reboot.

\- substantially worse battery life

\- clunky handling of Exchange calendars. The major Linux applications are fine for personal use, but they really struggle in an enterprise environment.

\- buggy rendering of Word docs (both OpenOffice and Abiword, but the bugs were different)

\- no easy way to change screen resolution over VNC. This turns out to be important if you actually try to use screen sharing to get stuff done, and use two or more different platforms as the client.

\- the straw that broke the camel's back: my linux email client worked well (for emails - not calendars, etc) for almost the entire three month experiment, until last Friday it somehow decided that my password was different from what it actually was, and insisted on interrogating the enterprise email server several times a second using the bad password. The Exchange server here is configured to lock an account after N incorrect passwords. So effectively the client auto-locked my account every time I fired it up. I still have no idea why it's using an incorrect password, and debugging it wold require my sysadmin to essentially stay on the phone with me and keep hitting the "unlock account" button, or whatever he has to do. My relationship with him would not survive this, and using Linux isn't worth pissing him off.

So, back to the Mac for me. I'll try again in another five years and see if anything's improved. It wasn't any one big thing. It was a lot of little things. Bugs that probably were work-around-able, but not worth it. Little bits of friction in the office applications interfaces that made using them just a little more painful. Multiply by a thousand, and you have a substantially worse productivity environment (unless you're a software developer 100% of the time, which I'm not).

<comment><USER7> Considering the problems... were you actually trying to run Linux on a MacBook, which is pretty much a full proprietary, non-documented platform with bunch of Apple proprietary and undocumented power management controllers?

<comment><USER49> No. Dell XPS 15.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I quite like the fonts on linux with my 4k monitors, subpixel smoothing, and slight hinting. Mac and Windows are also fine on a ~200 dpi monitor. Believe this is a solved problem for those who do not obsess about fonts.

</comment><comment><USER50> The bad part is that you need to do a s/objective/subjective/g on it. Once you realize it's subjective, it's a fun fine informative _rant_

</comment><comment><USER25> macOS had subpixel rendering until the most recent version (Mojave), where it's disabled by default.

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't know...turn on subpixel with slight hinting, disable autohinter, enable lcdfilter and the result is pretty damn good. For monospace truetype fonts I use grayscale instead of subpixel, which I think is cleaner in the terminal... unless of course I'm using a bitmapped font. It took me quite a while to get it looking good, but ultimately I guess it's a matter of taste. Do you want to preserve the look of the font? Do you want to smash it into the grid? Do you want colors on the fringes? With Linux I can choose.

<comment><USER52> > Do you want to preserve the look of the font? Do you want to smash it into > the grid? Do you want colors on the fringes? With Linux I can choose.

I have no idea. I want it to look good. With macOS I don't have to choose.

<comment><USER18> The idea is that "look good" is subjective, case in point: you apparently think the font rendering on macOS looks good, whereas the author of the linked article thinks that font rendering on macOS looks bad and instead likes the font rendering on Windows 7.

<comment><USER11> I am of the same opinion as the author of the article. Mac fonts look blurry compared to ClearType. I usually use bitmapped fonts in Emacs and xterm, however, to sidestep the issue altogether. Fontconfig is always an option if needed. On the other hand, I really can't tell the difference on an HiDPI display, even though I don't use one (or want one, for that matter).

Whatever the defaults are in Firefox on OpenBSD look superb on my monitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I came here to bitch about the fact that Mac has "objectively" the worst fonts, when I've preferred it over Windows or Linux for years. Glad to see everybody has my back.

</comment><comment><USER54> Funny how you singled out Linux, a free/open source OS.

Because just a few days ago I read that fonts, as well as UI elements in general, are a complete mess in both Mac and Windows, two paid/closed-source OSes, when you try to use them with Hi DPI displays.</comment>