Nuxt.js over Vue.js: when should you use it and why - <AUTHOR> https://www.bornfight.com/blog/nuxt-js-over-vue-js-when-should-you-use-it-and-why/ <comment><USER2> In my humble opinion, you lose a lot when you go fully static. One particular case that becomes a pain in the ass is redirections. Nuxt has some redirect modules but they feel super half baked.

Also routing is a mess. Really no way to set up routing in a decent, understandable way.

So in my opinion just use Nuxt when you are sure your website is not going to need any complex functionality that is easily achievable with a server middleware. Pretty sure that there are other ways to achieve good SEO and in general Search Engine indexation without giving up so much.

<comment><USER3> I feel as though if you just want a static website, you're better to use one of the more mature frameworks designed for that purpose, like Ruby on Rails or Asp.net Core etc.

I worked on a project built with Nuxt about a about a year ago and I really didn't like it. Everything felt like a chore.

<comment><USER4> Am I missing something or did the definition of static website change? AFAIK a static site is one that has no backend and you can throw on S3 or whatever. An ASP.NET project is pretty much the absolute furthest you can get from a static website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We use Nuxt on a fairly large project. One of the biggest problems we're having is that there's no routes file you define yourself, you structure it by putting views in folders. This is a nightmare once you have more than a few models. It also leads to highly confusing page names, and if you have more than one variable in a route, completely screws everything up. We've ended up grouping things together in folders just to make it easier to manage, but that directly effects the URL.

<comment><USER6> Does extendRoutes ([https://nuxtjs.org/api/configuration- router#extendroutes](https://nuxtjs.org/api/configuration- router#extendroutes)) not work for y'all? I haven't had to use it (yet) but I was happy to see an escape hatch, though I could imagine it not scaling very well...

<comment><USER5> My understanding was that it just added to the existing generated list, I can't work out how you'd tell it to ignore all your current pages and then manually write them all out?

<comment><USER7> you can use router-module if you want to do everything yourself ([https://github.com/nuxt-community/router-module](https://github.com/nuxt- community/router-module))

<comment><USER5> Ah that's perfect, I don't know why I haven't found it before. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> NuxtJS

NextJS

NestJS

why all these frameworks have very similar names? it is very confusing every time I read a news about one of them I wonder which one is which.

<comment><USER9> probably because there are so many js "frameworks" that they are running out names

<comment><USER10> Sort of makes me bummed out that the Dart project failed.

If there was one time when we could have escaped the client side hell that is JavaScript it would have been then, when chrome had astonishing market share, and Dart could compile down to JS to ease the transition until native support became standardized.

But nope, here we are with anotherone.js every week.

<comment><USER11> what makes you say it failed? Flutter is growing strong.

<comment><USER12> Is there a way around the nested mess in Flutter widgets? I took a stab at a small app but it was basically a new div hell. Besides that however, it was quite neat.

<comment><USER11> haha idk im just going off of what others say, i dont use it myself

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> this title and entire premise of the essay is the definition of false dichotomy. when you use nuxt.js you use vue.js. its very clear to webdevs what the metaframework does more than the framework, and you need both.

<comment><USER13> > this title and entire premise of the essay is the definition of false > dichotomy

The article's very first words are: _Nuxt.js is a frontend framework built upon Vue.js_ so I think it's more of a semantics thing on what he meant by "over" (i.e. on top of vs. replaces).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've used Nuxt.js when I started rewriting a membership site from WordPress to Vue.js. But at that time, the routing options were limited so I opted for a hand crafted Vue.js + server side rendering setup. Maybe today, I would try out Nuxt.js again. Or maybe not, the drawbacks are another layer of abstraction on top of Vue.js. That being said, their community is great and the development is very active. When I did a project in React, and tried Next.js, I expected to find much more info and plugins for this combination, but found this to not be the case.

</comment><comment><USER15> So the point is to improve SEO of Vue apps

Perhaps useful to some sites. Assuming Google has issues with Vue. Not useful for someone doing content behind a sign-in that isn't going to ever be SEOed anyway?

<comment><USER16> > So the point is to improve SEO of Vue apps

There are other points in favor of doing SSR + hydration besides SEO:

1) Reducing the amount of JS you are sending to the client.

2) Not making a SPA and keep the native functionality of back/forward behavior (scroll behavior, cached pages, forms are filled when going back).

3) Simplifying development. You don't need to manage central state anymore as you're dealing with one page at a time. You might not need an API as you're rendering the page from the server. Etc.

I've been making SPAs for years and for my current project I'm doing SSR + hydration (not using Vue) and loving it.

<comment><USER17> Out of interest, what are you using instead of Vue?

<comment><USER16> Svelte.

It reduces the JavaScript sent to each page even further because it doesn't have a runtime per se. Basically each component is "compiled" to a set of imperative DOM instructions with some helper functions.

<comment><USER2> I wanted to like Svelte so bad, but the lack of tooling made it pretty hard to debug.

Hopefully they will get there one day but so far it gives me the feeling that I could hit a dead-end with it at any time.

<comment><USER16> It's not perfect but I'm willing to accept all its shortcomings because of everything I get in return.

Sometimes I hit a little bump on the road which would be faster/easier to solve in React/Vue/etc but even including those slowdowns I save so much net dev time it's crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always use Nuxt by default for new projects, and it's a correct decision every time. People who choose to do Client Side Rendering (SPA) finally struggling on SEO and other tasks.

1\. Nuxt can runs in SPA mode just like using Vue CLI. The opposite is not true

2\. SEO is the winning feature of Nuxt, no doubt.

3\. Real server status code: especially useful for redirections and 404 pages. For example if you do `curl -I /some-page-that-does-not-exist`, you will get back 404 status code, which is critical for sitemaps and uptime tools. (Instead in SPA you always get 200 for all the pages).

4\. Pages written in Nuxt seems to display faster, because the HTML is sent immediately. I say "display" here, not necessarily "load" faster.

5\. Real Express middleware helps a lot when doing route validations and authorizations. You can also make calls to private API without exposing them on the client side.

6\. Can adjust the amount of HTML sent to client by wrapping client-side-only components in a <client-only> component. Which means that on the server you don't need to generate giant HTML for a simple datepicker, and let the browser does that

</comment><comment><USER19> I admit I don't know the space that well, but I find it interesting that you get static site generators for SPA frameworks, and the companies behind them get really significant VC funding.

Naively it seems a trivial problem, but I guess that SEO for SPA is not as trivial as I imagine?

<comment><USER18> Why are people slapping Static Site Generators to all the problems?

Imagine you build an e-commerce website that has ten thousands of products, that can be accessed by example.com/products/{product-slug}. Now what is making more sense: 1\. Generating ten thousands of .html file for each products in the DB 2\. Use routing in Nuxt like this "/products/$productSlug" and query for $productSlug in the database

To me the (2) approach is a clear winner here. And the performance only depends on how fast your API can query a single product from the database, which is pretty fast 99% of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Your web browser (Safari 13) is out of date. Update your browser for more > security, speed and the best experience on this site.

Going to the website it wants me to install .. Safari 13.

<comment><USER21> neat

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As others pointed out nuxt can be very restrictive when you're trying to build something that doesn't fit their mould. What I end up using is vanilla vue.js and a cli plugin to statically generate the pages that need to be SEO friendly during build. Best of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty happy with Nuxt. I built a project with a custom SSR server based on Vue's guide ([https://ssr.vuejs.org/](https://ssr.vuejs.org/)), and maintaining it/tweaking it wasn't too bad, but moving all that complexity to Nuxt was nice. If you'd like to see a realistic codebase, warts and all, it's here: [https://github.com/thomasboyt/jam- buds/tree/master/app](https://github.com/thomasboyt/jam-buds/tree/master/app) (powers the jambuds.club frontend).

They do have a kind of weird plugin/module system that I worry is an overly complicated layer of abstraction - basically, stuff that would normally be manually hooked up in your server or client entry point script now gets called automatically by Nuxt at various points. Still, it is useful for setting up things like authentication (e.g. parse cookies on server and set auth headers in Axios).

They're also still iterating on the public API, though they've been pretty careful to deprecate without breaking things. Like, the fetch() hook that used to be used to load data at a page level (e.g. "before transitioning to this route, load this set of data") was totally overhauled to now be "load data for this component," with no "pre-transition await" available anymore ([https://nuxtjs.org/blog/understanding-how-fetch-works-in- nux...](https://nuxtjs.org/blog/understanding-how-fetch-works-in-nuxt-2-12)). This is a _good_ change, but an example of the complex problems that come up in these SSR frameworks, and why they end up being a lot more complex than just simple wrappers around the ecosystem. You really have to buy in when you use a framework like this, more than just buying into Vue itself.

I did see that they just raised a seed round ([https://nuxtjs.org/blog/seed- round](https://nuxtjs.org/blog/seed-round)), which is surprising to me. I don't see a lot in that announcement about how they're going to make money, which is a bit scary. Over in React-land, of course, Next.js is nominally owned by Vercel (formerly Zeit), which is also venture-backed, but Next is related to their primary revenue stream while not being at all the main focus of the company, which is probably the right spot for this sort of thing.

Moving to Vue 3 will be a problem for Nuxt, I think, because of the abstractions they've built on top of Vue.

(also, glad this post came up because while double-checking to see how big Nuxt is in my app, I realized I was failing to gzip my client assets because I misconfigured Caddy, gah!)

</comment><comment><USER23> Alternatively, if you want to get the same result in terms of SEO. You can use seo4ajax.com. In 5 minutes it's integrated and ready to use. Disclosure: I am the founder of the service.

</comment><comment><USER24> There are people over on reddit who say that EVERY project should use nuxt. from the lowly todo app, to huge erp projects...

Yet, especially for ERP projects, most of those features are problematic. Like SEO. I don't want a search engine to ever see my content. In fact, my robots.txt says not to index it. SSR is a non starter, since everything would vary based on the user, we're just shifting the rendering back to the server, for no real gain other than the round trips on the api. The routes can be a problem as well. My routes have different navigation guards depending on permissions and state for the user, i haven't checked but i doubt auto generated guards based on folder structure wouldn't handle our weird business logic. COmbined with the difficulty of dealing with errors server side, nuxt.js isn't going to work in these kinds of cases.

TL;DR Nuxt.js does not work for everyone, even if people say it does.

<comment><USER4> In an enterprise context, round trips (on the intranet) are cheap.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. Even across the internet, it's not bad.

Most of the ssr for performance is around how a couple extra milliseconds will increase your bounce rate. For some of us, if our users bounce, they get fired, because the site is the tool they use to do their job. (but we should always endeavour to be performant, because we don't want to make their job more miserable) So things like bounce rate doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I only use SSR for `bot` or for `?ssr=true` in dev mode. My setup is that, SSG most of the time, with fallback to SSR for bot/crawlers, else return the spa.html which is just a SPA.

</comment><comment><USER26> My biggest thing with Nuxt is that only the first page load is server side rendered. Everything else is client side. So doing complex search and re- render is done client side.

<comment><USER27> If you use query params, the search and render can be done server side..

<comment><USER28> Which should be done because it helps the user very much.

Sharing filtered links or storing filtered links in your favorites becomes impossible when the query parameters don't change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Warning that Nuxt.js is almost 100k out of the box, making it unsuitable for mobile usage.

<comment><USER30> Depending on what you're building, I don't find 100k to be that much .

<comment><USER28> It's not only filesize it's also what the browser must parse. Parsing huge files is not a great experience on mobile.

<comment><USER31> I'm trying to imagine what browser is so outdated that it struggles to parse 100kb of javascript

<comment><USER29> It's not the browser, it's the processor that's in most non-iPhones.

<comment><USER32> Samsung phones and Pixels aren't that bad either. I am not saying it to be proud, but I tested our 3mb internal app with a 5 year old android phone, and worked.

The only time it was slow is if the browser itself was old (e.g. Chrome 44).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh good, another .js. Throw it in the pile.

The quagmire of subtly different JavaScript frameworks is definitely the leading reason I avoid front end work like the plague.

<comment><USER31> If you just said the first two sentences and we could have inferred that you don't work in frontend. Every technology has tradeoffs, and frankly I'd like to hear about this mystical backend panacea you're implying.

<comment><USER10> I generally work in go, where the standard library covers the vast majority of use cases. If you have some crazy specific performance needs there are frameworks for that, but generally vanilla go will get you where you need to go.

I'd love to see a "modern" web app built in pure JavaScript without a framework.

<comment><USER31> That's _most_ modern web apps. React is a library, not a framework. jQuery is also a library. That covers probably about 95% of the web today.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Looking for a developer for a startup - <AUTHOR> http://desmoines.craigslist.org/web/2761798369.html

<comment><USER2> I believe that people who are not surrounded by software development genuinely don't realize how many times a day a person that writes software sees an opportunity of a piece of software that does not exist. Because they may have one or two ideas about an app that scratches their itch over a longer period, I think they perceive the value of an idea as being higher than what a software developer does, because for them an app innovation idea is a larger logical leap than for people in the industry. I am not trying to imply an elitist point position in developers vantage point, rather I do believe that there is a lack of realization and understanding of the perceived value on part of the other party.

<comment><AUTHOR> bingo!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Best part...

"I have about 6 apps that I am looking to build but can't seem to find anyone willing to build them for a percentage ownership. Let's take on zynga together and make millions in the process."

<comment><USER3> Yeah, i dont like being mean but i would suggest your first problem is you have 6 apps. Pick one, kill it...move on if you still think the others are a good idea.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin at $2000 - <AUTHOR> https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-breached-2000-pundits-coin-flip-what-comes-next <comment><USER2> For those of you experiencing cryptocurrency FOMO or regret, some perspective: every single day, there are stocks which see increases in value of over 50%[0]. Don't kick yourself just because this opportunity was more visible to you than the others.

[0] [https://finance.yahoo.com/gainers](https://finance.yahoo.com/gainers)

<comment><USER3> I have a ton of Bitcoin FOMO. I have two friends who are holding ~5000 coins each. They bought in the $15 range. I can't think of anything that's gone up 125x

<comment><USER4> 5000 coins @ $15 cost the $75000 to buy. Think about it this way, even if you had known about bitcoin back then, would you have been willing to gamble what probably amounts to the average persons life savings into some barely heard of internet fad. Sure, it's easy to look back and see bitcoin as the sure bet, but when it was $15 it was small and nobody knew where it would go.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you invested $10 in April 2010 (BTC at $0.003) it would be worth $7 million today.

Far, far greater returns than any stock in history in a period of 7 years.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but in 2010, bitcoin was a barely heard of crypto paper with no exchanges. To get in you would either have to mine it yourself (probably using command line tools with a bunch of manual steps) or find someone to buy from in person or on a mailing list. That's a lot of effort for something that at the time just looked like a cool 3rd year project.

For every person that picked bitcoin and made a gamble, there are 1000 people regretting that they invested in some other idea that just quietly didn't go anywhere. Investing that early is not much different to gambling. You probably have better odds of winning the lottery that picking the next bitcoin.

<comment><AUTHOR> There were at least 2 exchanges in 2010: BitcoinMarket.com (opened in April) and MtGox (July).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is some discussion in this thread that bitcoin is possibly a bubble because it does not really serve a purpose.

But maybe its more like investing in gold ? Gold does not have much purpose for the average person either. But the supply is limited and it serves as an alternative for investing in stocks or putting money in a bank account.

And it seems Bitcoin is here to stay.

Our current currencies also only have value because we trust them. Otherwise those are just as worthless.

Trust is probably the most important ingredient in finance.

So conversion of other currencies into bitcoin could also be seen as a conversion of trust. A case could also be made for more and more people loosing trust in governements.

[Edit: added text on trust]

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are looking for a pretty cool technical stack on a coin, ETH seems to be the most promising.

<comment><USER7> ETH is scam and a marketing program. It's interesting that even the educated developer community of HN cannot see this and how effective flash marketing can be

<comment><USER6> Really? Why is that? I would genuinely like to know.

<comment><USER7> It can be a little difficult to pin them down. As everything is surrounded in more flash sounded tech that doesn't deliver. It's like trying to say if Amway, the multi level marketing company is a scam or not.

First it's the pre sale of tokens. Very problematic way of raising money. Nearly all pre sales token campaigns follow the same story. Build flashy website and run a slick marketing campaign. Make grand world saving claims for this software you are going to build by really you aren't. Raise a lot of money (10M USD or more). Then after the sale fail to deliver of the claims and shameless move onto the next crowd sale.

There is also the past of etherium founder. VB tried to do another crowd funded scam before etherium that was a lot more blatant. VB also puts his name on many ICOs (initial coin offering) which all end in scams. The founders take the large amount money and then the product in vaporware.

A post on why their tech is not that good [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1427885.msg14601127#...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1427885.msg14601127#msg14601127)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I got in at under a dollar, then at $5, then at $15. At one point I was holding 20k worth with a cost basis of $12. I rode it up to $1136 on the second bubble. I am not sad or feel like I missed out on this wave. The price is simply unjustified. The Bitcoin ecosystem was a lot more stable a year ago. I have lost faith in Bitcoin's future, the market lost faith too, it is just the bag holders that are getting ready to dump after their lucrative pump.

<comment><USER9> Cryptocurrency isn't going anywhere. Being the first mover, Bitcoin has a significant advantage. People will pump and dump in he short term, but I think the price will continue to trend upward in the future, especially in relation to perpetually inflating fiat currencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just spent a half hour or so figuring this out because I have several old laptops/computer laying around:

you will not make more than a few cents per month in bitcoin as a miner unless you have specialized equipment. Setting up your home computer to mine when you are not using it is literally worth zero bitcoin unless you have top of the line graphics cards, and even then it is worth very little.

<comment><USER11> Bitcoin can't be mined even with graphic cards any more. You need specialized hardware (ASICs). The current total hash rate of Bitcoin is over 10^18 hashes per second which is insanely high. However, it's still profitable and relatively easy to mine on other public blockchains with graphic cards because the hashing algorithm is ASIC resistant (like Ethereum).

You could make a couple hundred bucks a month with 6 graphic cards. Check out [https://whattomine.com/](https://whattomine.com/)

<comment><USER12> I've been poking around the last couple of days trying to figure out how likely one is to at least break even on a ~$1500 "investment" for the 6 GPUs and barebones components required to run them. My conclusion is: who the hell knows, but it'd probably be a lot easier to just put $1500 into Ether. It seems like mining is riskier without much potential extra reward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does depend where you get your figures from. Bitstamp, a popular European exchange is listing a daily high of $1989, and it's actually dropped back a little from that.

[https://www.bitstamp.net/](https://www.bitstamp.net/)

</comment><comment><USER13> am I the only one questioning sanity of the bitcoin market?

<comment><USER14> Rare is any sane market. High speed trading isn't sane at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just wondering what the liquidity is like for BTC. I'm not familiar with it at all but should 1000 BTCs try to convert to USDs, would there be enough bids to maintain the price within a certain acceptable level?

<comment><USER16> [https://www.gdax.com/trade/BTC-USD](https://www.gdax.com/trade/BTC-USD)

14,000 bitcoin traded in last 24 hours

<comment><USER17> And it's only one exchange out of many.</comment></comment></comment>


Gotcha Ways I've screwed up CSS and how to avoid them - <AUTHOR> https://css.christmas/2019/19 <comment><AUTHOR> Author here! What are some of your CSS "what the hell" moments?</comment>


Creating Languages in Racket (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/1/144809-creating-languages-in-racket/fulltext <comment><USER2> If this subject interests you, I strongly recommend this book: [https://beautifulracket.com/introduction.html](https://beautifulracket.com/introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is Racket mostly for teaching and academia, or is it also used in production? If so, are there any particular areas it is strong in?

Typed Racket seems like a more cohesive language than Typescript while retaining the dynamic typing escape hatch, so I've been eyeing it for a while.

<comment><USER4> Racket is an excellent language for DSL's, compilers, and interpreters. I'm not aware of any other language that has as sophisticated and powerful tooling as Racket in this regard.

It's also really good for creating GUI's.

As I wrote in a previous HN thread about Racket, I think Racket's strong suit is developing internal company tooling that is run locally on an individual machine. Great as tooling for analysts, data scientists, etc.

I wouldn't recommend Racket for a server unless it was serving relatively few requests. The JVM would probably be a better choice.

From just a quality stand point (documentation, libraries, design) Racket is undoubtedly the best and most advanced lisp on the market. From a practical standpoint, clojure might be better in many cases.

Edit: PS: Typed Racket is really quite nice, though I found it to be too restrictive to use all the time. In a language like Haskell you don't really feel constrained by the type system since the language is designed around it. In Racket this isn't the case so you quickly discover that the subset of correct programs with static typing is much much smaller than the subset of correct programs with dynamic typing.

Fortunately as you mentioned you can use gradual typing and everything works fine. My workflow when I used to use Racket for work was to write a module, putting the types as comments. Afterwards, I would attempt to make those types real, skipping over any functions in which it was too onerous.

Also, Racket has runtime contracts that can provide similiar (or more powerful) guarantees as static typing. Though you have to turn them off for production because they absolutely destroy performance (orders of magnitudes slower).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3225718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3225718)

<comment><USER6> I take it the "(2012)" in the title is wrong since your post is from 2011?

<comment><USER7> The publication date is January 2012. It was likely released in December.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Might be my unreliable mobile browser, but this page isn't loading.

<comment><USER9> It's there.

Here's a copy that's in the Wayback Machine (aka archive.org).

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190113223131/https://cacm.acm....](https://web.archive.org/web/20190113223131/https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/1/144809-creating- languages-in-racket/fulltext)</comment></comment>


A Web Developer's First Impressions of Firefox Developer Edition - <AUTHOR> http://arc.applause.com/2014/11/11/firefox-developer-edition-first-impressions/

<comment><USER2> Interesting - makes me want to use Firefox again.</comment>


Tennessee Gov Passes Bill 1622 Recognizing Blockchain's Legal Legitimacy - <AUTHOR> https://altcoinreport.co/tennessee-passes-1622/ <comment><AUTHOR> The bill itself can be found here: [http://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/110/Bill/SB1662.pdf](http://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/110/Bill/SB1662.pdf)</comment>


HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format - <AUTHOR> https://nokiatech.github.io/heif/ <comment> TD-Linux The license in the provided implementation seems to be a custom, non- commercial, non-OSI-approved license [1]. It also includes a patent grant, but excludes codec patents, making it even more useless (Nokia can't license other people's HEVC patents, of course). It's based on the LGPL-licensed libde265 library.

[1] [https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT](https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT)

<comment><USER2> License notwithstanding, has anyone tried to create a HEIF file? There are a few samples on this site, but even given the code they've provided on GitHub I can't seem to create a HEIF image from another image format. Their code seems to take an H265 HEVC bytestream as input, which is fine, but I can't find anything that will build an HEVC bytestream for an image rather than a video...

<comment><USER3> You can easily turn an image into a video, or into HEVC, with ffmpeg.

<comment><USER2> Haha thanks - I didn't think it supported H265 but it looks like I just have to build it from source ([https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265)). Suppose that's still fairly "easily" ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems conceptually most similar to Fabrice Bellard's proposal 'BPG' [1], which was essentially a lightweight wrapper around an HEVC I-frame. The format got small amounts of attention in encoding circles, but didn't pick up mainstream traction.

The image encoding layer of HEIF is the same HEVC, but the container is MPEG-4 Part 12 (the Quicktime-descendant ISO Base Media Format; the core behind .mp4, .3gp, etc.), which theoretically gives it wide support. In this structure, HEIF supports image sequences, which will help it compete with animated GIF, GIFV (which is really just a short MPEG-4 Part 14 file containing usually an H.264 video track), animated WebP (who uses these?), and WebM.

This format doesn't really blaze new ground _(EDIT: it does in the sense that it defines a container format to express image-y constructs like still images and sequences of images in an ISO media container, but see my other comment that asks how this is similar but different to video [3])_ , but if this repackaging and the resulting code donation and political clout helps it gain traction, we still would gain a lot.

The problem, of course, is always with backwards-compatibility. WebP was aggressively promoted by Google the same way Microsoft used to promote its quirky Windows Media formats back in the early 2000s, but the WebP and non- WebP camps are still largely separate. This is unfortunate, because WebP in my opinion really isn't very good, and a backwards-compatible compressor on top of JPEG, such as Dropbox's Lepton [2] achieves similar results. Any HEVC-based image compressor is necessarily incompatible with JPEG; so broad buy-in would be required from makers of software and hardware products, from operating systems, file managers, image viewers, image editors, cameras, and the like, to really enjoy its improved compression rates, vs. being just another incompatible format that only functions inside controlled ecosystems.

The video codec AV1 currently in development was supposed to be a grand alliance of disparate companies to agree on a common format for the future, and rectify the WebM vs. non-WebM split, but continuing to promulgate sophisticated formats based on work outside of this scope (such as MPEG- or ITU-derived custom formats) just muddies this further.

[1] [https://bellard.org/bpg/](https://bellard.org/bpg/) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230805](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230805) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490734)

<comment><USER5> At last for the web (which is what WebP targets mostly, right?) you don't need broad support. We have the new <picture> element where the UA selects the most appropriate image from a list of options. So Chrome will prefer webp, other browsers will pick jpeg, png or whatever else they support at the moment.

<comment><USER6> If possible, I'd much prefer having a single format that is widely supported, hardware accelerated, and with a state-of-the-art codec. Making content authors create multiple different files in different formats—some with deficient feature support—sounds like a pain in the butt for everyone.

If we can get everyone to agree on a format that handles layers, exposure bracketing, transparency, animation, high bit depth, different color models, both lossy and lossless compression, every common type of metadata, etc., that would be great.

<comment><USER3> If your format handles everything it isn't a format, it just is everything. (The one you want is TIFF though.)

<comment><USER6> The point is that you want support for those features (certainly the core codecs, etc.) in the spec, so if you send someone a file you can be sure they can read it.

TIFF is not useful if you want to use a state-of-the-art lossy codec and get hardware-accelerated decoding on an arbitrary mobile device, or if you want to display an animated image with transparency on a web page.

<comment><USER3> But can you actually get people to implement it if you make it that complicated? Images are pretty hard, hardware support is /actually/ really hard.

That's why it's best to accept whatever format is already out there and author to it - the only thing that matters is that it actually works when it's out there.

Actually I'm surprised there's still no good way to do animations with transparency, but maybe nobody wants to use it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It makes a lot of sense for Apple to use H.265 as a base for the format. It's much more efficient than all the other JPEG-killers (easily beats WebP by a wide margin). Apple already pays for the patents, and has invested in H.265 hardware and software for H.265 video.

However, the HEIF wrapper for H.265 strikes me as quite complex. It brings baggage of ISO wrapper formats and tries to support everything ever crammed into any image-ish format. That, in addition to patent licensing, may be another difficulty in widespread support for the format. It will be hard to implement robust, secure and fully-featured players.

<comment><USER8> While the full standard text and machinery can get quite complex, you can still construct relatively simple files housing a single image, thumbnail, and Exif that isn't that much more complex than a typical JPEG file. Compared to JPEG, where you need to define quantization tables, Huffman tables, etc. in marker segments, much of the codec-related complexity in HEIF is layered within the compressed image payload (e.g. HEVC NAL units).

Besides the coding efficiency, JPEG really hit the big time because of the readily available libjpeg cross-platform implementation. In this case, HEIF can leverage existing implementations of the ISO Base Media File Format box model; it builds heavily on that standard.

Nokia is doing the right thing by releasing their format handling library, though perhaps they could loosen up their license to include commercial use. ;-) Hopefully there are some developers amongst us inspired enough to start a new open project that, like libjpeg, brings HEIF to the masses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nokia owns several HEVC patents, in fact I think they're currently suing apple about it. This is a veiled attempt to get everyone to use their patented tech so we can relive the mp3/mp4 clusterfuck. You would be a fool to use this for anything.

What's so bad about WebP? It's not the best thing in the universe but it beats JPEG and PNG and has a wide support base. With a shim it has native support in most browsers anyways since WebP is a just a single frame of video. And as a bonus you don't have to worry about someone suing you for royalties down the road.

<comment><USER7> > What's so bad about WebP?

WebP is based on VP8, which is now obsolete. It was meant to be a H.264 competitor, a generation behind H.265 and VP9/VP10. WebP compression efficiency is much closer to JPEG than H.265.

This format beats WebP by a margin wider than WebP was smaller than JPEG.

<comment><USER9> Most devices still encode and decode far more H264 and JPEG than newer generations. We shouldn't be stuck with the horse and buggy because we're waiting for cars to be autonomous. WebP is superior to JPEG and the most widely available alternative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how it compares to FLIF, which looks like it has a formal release finally. [http://flif.info/](http://flif.info/)

<comment><USER11> It looks like FLIF doesn't really support lossy well (its sort of fake lossy).

 _" FLIF does not have a lossy mode, but interlaced files can be decoded progressively so we can simply use something like dd if=lossless.flif of=lossy.flif bs=1024 count=5"_

You can see this in the examples where BPG does well in stream loading: [https://nokiatech.github.io/heif/technical.html](https://nokiatech.github.io/heif/technical.html)

HEIF would probably be similar to BPG in performance.

Still FLIF looks pretty darn interesting.

<comment><USER12> > It looks like FLIF doesn't really support lossy well

I don't know what you mean by well. As far as I'm concerned lossy FLIF beats JPEG easily. Here is a comparision:

[http://flif.info/lossy-artifacts.html](http://flif.info/lossy-artifacts.html)

<comment><USER11> Whoops looks like I pasted the wrong link.

Here is the correct link: [http://flif.info/example.html](http://flif.info/example.html)

And yes "well" is relative and what I meant by that is that its not readily easy for a normal user to do it.

BTW I think Flif is damn good particularly progressive decoding. Its unclear how good HEIF progressive decoding is.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, even on that fair; jpg-unfriendly example jpeg still clearly beats flif above 22kb. And below 22kb - sure, FLIF is _less_ bad, but it's still unusable. Also, the examples below 22kb are a little unfair to most codecs in practice, since you'd get far better results by downscaling first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's based on HEVC. I wonder how bad the patent situation is.

<comment><USER15> It would seem the Nokia open source implementation is what's limited by the patent rider. I don't think that applies to the format at large.

<comment><USER16> Nokia and Apple just recently resolved their differences on patents it seems

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While the basic idea of using HVEC for still image compression is good, I'm somewhat concerned on how complex the whole format, especially the container, for HEIF is. It is kinda cute and from one viewpoint pragmatic to reuse existing container format, but I'm afraid the flexibility might have unforeseen and undesirable side-effects. And of course there is the problem of different implementations supporting different subsets and extensions of the format.

<comment> TD-Linux They've already specified three different codec mappings - JPEG, AVC, and HEVC - so to open all HEIF files, you presumably need to implement all of the decoders.

Worse, there is a financial incentive to implement only a subset of the decoders - HEVC is more expensive than AVC which is more expensive than JPEG. Even things like 4:4:4 color are more expensive than 4:2:0 color for HEVC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems pretty similar to BPG: [https://bellard.org/bpg/](https://bellard.org/bpg/)

<comment><USER19> The core idea does, but according to the comparison table HEIF seems to go quite a bit beyond BPG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's really sad that Apple decided to support the proprietary H.265 and this image format instead of the royalty-free WebP and WebM.

<comment><USER21> I think you're confused. WebM is a container not a codec.

And either way VP9 and AV1 are simply inferior codecs to H.265 in almost every way. And as for royalty free well that's because MPEG-LA has't ever sued but they did give a royalty free license to Google for patents infringed by VP9. And since Google accepted it does indicate that AV1 is likely to also be patent encumbered.

We would all like a royalty free codec but it isn't happening anytime soon. And so failing that I would prefer to go with the codec with the best support which by far is H.265.

<comment><USER22> > And either way VP9 and AV1 are simply inferior codecs to H.265 in almost > every way.

Source?

AV1 is already beating HEVC in compression and it's not even finalized yet: [https://youtu.be/lzPaldsmJbk?t=2416](https://youtu.be/lzPaldsmJbk?t=2416)

<comment><USER21> VP9 versus H.265: [http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured- Ar...](http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured- Articles/Netflix-Finds-x265-20-More-Efficient-than-VP9-113346.aspx)

Also the link you posted is using x265 which as the article suggests was ranked 4th out the 6 available encoders: [http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/MSU_H...](http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/MSU_HEVC_comparison_2016_free.pdf)

And whilst AV1 and H.265 are pretty close in PSNR where it is inferior is in vendor support. There are TVs for example available today that natively support H.265 whereas AV1 is still in development. Not to mention all of the terrestrial broadcast providers all using H.265.

<comment><USER22> > the link you posted is using x265 which as the article suggests was ranked > 4th out the 6 available encoders

The other encoders there are commercial or not publicly available as far as I can tell, so it's hard to use them as a comparison. Plus according to that PDF, the best encoder is 0.85x x265, which is about the same as AV1 in its present state in the video I linked. And again, AV1 isn't even finalized yet, so I actually find it somewhat impressive that it can already compete against these highly tuned encoders with years of development put into them.

> where it is inferior is in vendor support

Of course there's no vendor support _now_ , the codec isn't even finalized yet. However the codec is backed by Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, NVIDIA, Adobe, Netflix and the BBC, i.e. all but 1 of the major browser and OS vendors, every major mobile, server and desktop processor company and the 2 most widely used video streaming companies.

<comment><USER21> H.265 is already in shipping hardware from Sony, LG, Samsung, Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia etc. As I listed above there are at least 100+ more companies supporting H.265 than AoM. Including the most important of all the broadcast standard for terrestrial TV which is still hugely popular in many countries.

Also without Apple it's over. YouTube and Netflix will be forced to support H.265 or give up on iOS/OSX users (350 million users).

<comment><USER22> > As I listed above there are at least 100+ more companies supporting H.265 > than AoM.

AV1 _isn 't finalized yet_. Of course HEVC is being shipped in more stuff, it's being shipped at all. I'm not debating this, there's no debate. At present HEVC has more support than a codec that isn't yet finished. H.264 had more support when VP9 was being developed too, that doesn't make VP9 inferior to H.264.

> broadcast standard for terrestrial TV which is still hugely popular in many > countries

Broadcast TV is a different world to the web and has very different concerns.

> Also without Apple it's over. YouTube and Netflix will be forced to support > H.265 or give up on iOS/OSX users (350 million users).

This is demonstrably not true as YouTube and Netflix both currently and successfully utilize VP9, which Apple doesn't support. Apple users just get the inferior H.264 codec.

The question is really whether the browser and other OS vendors are going to start supporting HEVC and given the current patent situation, that seems impossible, so we're going to end up in a fragmented world where for web streaming, most users get AV1 while Apple users and anyone else who doesn't support AV1 gets H.264.

<comment><USER23> > AV1 isn't finalized yet.

You keep saying that as if it solves anything.

Released > Unreleased.

Is that a criticism of the format's _potential_? No! But it _may as well not exist_ until it is finalized... so it can't be a competitor to a format that _has been_.

<comment><USER22> > VP9 and AV1 are simply inferior codecs to H.265 in almost every way.

This was your claim.

Let me sum up the entirety of my position so we're on the same page:

\- In terms of compression, AV1 is competitive with or beats HEVC, despite not being finalized.

\- AV1 has support from everyone but of import save Apple when it comes to the web.

\- Apple's support is not necessary for a codec to be successful (see VP9).

\- AV1 is not finalized. There's more work to do. Particularly, I don't expect the present encoder/decoder implementations to be competitive with the HEVC encoders when it comes to CPU efficiency.

\- HEVC has solid adoption in some areas (the more "traditional" areas like video cameras, TVs, broadcast) but has zero adoption when it comes to the web and this is extremely unlikely to change due to the patent mess.

\- As members of the AoM, it's near certain that Microsoft, Google and Mozilla will add AV1 support to their browsers, which, depending on the particular source you look at, cover roughly 70% of the total browser market.

\- Due to AoM support and HEVC not being an option, AV1 will be the primary successor to H.264/VP9 on the web.

\- Due to its likely widespread availability from streaming services on the web and support from hardware vendors, AV1 will be prolific in other kinds of hardware.

\- Due to the support of Apple and the broadcast industry, HEVC will likely not go away anytime soon.

\- I agree that HEVC is not _currently_ a viable alternative to HEVC, it not being finalized yet and all, however despite that, there are already aspects in which it is already superior, namely compression and likelihood of being supported on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why don't we store a url to the decoder inside images and other compressed files for maximum flexibility? I mean, looking at WASM, sandbox technology is sufficiently strong. And performance and availability aren't really an issue either, because for specific cases we can fall back to what we are doing now.

<comment><USER19> > Why don't we store a url to the decoder inside images and other compressed > files for maximum flexibility?

Image formats are already some of the biggest attack surface of modern systems, "executable" image formats (hello PDF) have an absolutely ghastly track record there.

And not being able to open an image if you don't have an internet connection sounds dreadful.

<comment><USER24> But, as I already implied, if we can safely run arbitrary "binary" code of the internet (see WASM), why can't we run arbitrary code of a decoder?

<comment><USER25> The things that make it safe to run that code will significantly negatively impact image decoding speed right now. That's not necessarily a fundamental problem with the universe, but it's a true statement at the moment.

And that's accepting that WASM is safe, which I do not axiomatically accept. History suggests that I am very safe in claiming that most implementations will end up with some catastrophic-level security vulnerabilities in them before all's said and done.

<comment><USER26> What's your threshold for significance on image decoding speed? I bet making it 4x slower would be negligible in the vast majority of cases.

The computational power you need for image decoding is extremely narrow and easy to make safe. You need some mathematical operations and some loops. You don't need any APIs or data structures. Mask off all the pointers and you can have have a provably safe interpeter/compiler that runs pretty fast.

<comment><USER3> Remember that 4x slower means (at least) 4x worse battery drain on a phone. In the modern internet there basically is never any excuse to waste resources.

<comment><USER26> But it's also on a phone where saving data transfer can give you huge battery benefits. And it's not intentional waste; having this fallback doesn't stop browsers from adding native decoders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So HEIF is for HEVC what WebP is for VP9.

<comment><USER4> Roughly, BPG [1] is for HEVC as what WebP is for VP8 or VP9, in the sense that you take an I-frame out of a video format and stuff it into an established, classic image container.

Compared to this, HEIF is a different way of packaging HEVC frames; namely into ISOBMFF (MPEG-4 Part 12), the most basic level of MPEG container. This comes with benefits [2] that come along with using that particular container, but also drawbacks, because with some of the advanced features of HEIF you're essentially describing a sequence of frames -- which is almost like video -- but you're doing it in a way incompatible with the way you'd describe video. I'd be curious if the two "representations" are losslessly convertible, for example.

[1] [https://bellard.org/bpg/](https://bellard.org/bpg/) [2] [https://nokiatech.github.io/heif/technical.html](https://nokiatech.github.io/heif/technical.html)

<comment><USER8> > I'd be curious if the two "representations" are losslessly convertible, for > example.

They are: you could just extract the HEVC NAL units, and re-write them into a MP4 or QuickTime container, making sure to properly place the codec configuration box, etc.

HEIF also goes beyond a sequence of frames, in that it can describe alpha planes, depth maps, tiling, etc. In that case there might not be an analog with a standard video. If you really wanted to decompose a HEIF container, you might choose to extract the raw media into elementary streams (for HEVC or AVC; or if you're using the JPEG codec, just plain JPEG files) adjacent to any metadata like Exif, etc. This is essentially what Nokia's conformance files are [1].

[1] [https://github.com/nokiatech/heif_conformance/tree/master/bi...](https://github.com/nokiatech/heif_conformance/tree/master/bitstreams)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Have you got a 'heef' file of that photo please?"

Could have been branded better if I'm honest. I know engineers generally don't care about stuff like this but some of us will have to say this term many times a day if takes off.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can somebody please ELI5. Assuming I have iOS 11 on my iPhone and I take a bunch of pictures. Will I have to convert the pictures to JPG/JPEG/etc. myself when I decide to import them to my Mac/Windows machine?

</comment><comment><USER30> What's the support for popular image process libs?

</comment><comment><USER31> What benefits does this have over PNG, farbfeld, etc. ?

<comment><USER19> PNG is a lossless format, it's pretty much pointless for photos. IDK about farbfelt but it seems like a TIFF competitor more than anything else.

This is an (significant) improvement over JPEG.

<comment><USER31> > a lossless format [is] pretty much pointless for photos

Why is that? Every edit you make to that photo means that the photo will degrade in quality. I always thought JPEG artifacts and compression lossage was a bad thing for photos, not a good thing?

<comment><USER19> > I always thought JPEG artifacts and compression lossage was a bad thing for > photos, not a good thing?

Sure JPEG artefacts are bad, but that can be mitigated (stop compressing so much). Your photos being an order of magnitude larger is worse, and inherent to the way PNG works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If Apple started to support natively this in Safari, which one would succeed: HEIF or WebP?

<comment><USER33> Just look at Chrome (and everything Chromium based) vs Safari market share…

[https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp](https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Agree

</comment><comment><USER35> iOS11 now takes photos in HEIF instead of JPEG by default. I think that's why it's posted here.

<comment><USER36> Wonder how this will work with random websites' photo upload features. Will all other browsers break because they are serving HEVC user-uploaded content? Or will iOS transcode to JPEG on upload (triggering double lossy encoding?)

<comment><USER37> How many websites don't already re-encode most of the JPEGs they're handed? Facebook does- Flickr does, though sometimes you can request the original file specifically. Imgur probably does.

<comment><USER38> Imgur very much does, with a visible loss of quality.

<comment><USER39> This can be disabled in account settings though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If I could give unsolicited advice: focus on graceful progressive enhancements. Galleries, tiles, etc should be left to JavaScript.</comment>


Test Your Knowledge of American Incarceration - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/21/opinion/first-step-american-incarceration.html <comment><USER2> The point that less than 10% of inmates are Federal is important. Reforms would also be much more beneficial in state and county facilities. The conditions there are much worse, and the environment much more dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER3> The graph-dragging interface is very difficult for me to use on mobile (Firefox on Android; most of the times I tried to grab a point to move it up or down, it just added a new point between two existing ones and moved that instead. I definitely can understand that it's hard to make an interface to allow a user to draw an arbitrary curve, but I feel like this could be solved by just limiting the granularity of the points the user can select further; I really don't feel like the experience is improved by being able to select eight or so different points that all have to fit horizontally on the right half of my phone screen.

<comment><USER4> Had the same issue trying to "move points I had placed" but that doesn't seem to be how it was designed. Moving from left to right, drawing the line in one continuous motion worked great.

Correcting a guess means drawing over from any point moving right.

The interface seemed really well done even for mobile. Tested it on chrome and Firefox for Android. I'm Really impressed. NY times does some great interactive and visualization work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know of a list of not for profits or organizations who are trying to improve our justice system?

I have donated to FAMM in the past, but want to put together a list and try to figure out the most effective group to donate to.

<comment><USER6> I might start with the ACLU and Amnesty International.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the interactivity of the news story. It increases enfagement and encourages real thought.</comment>


Japan issues tsunami warning after magnitude 7.3 earthquake - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38059371 <comment><USER2> This is a good opportunity so I'm gonna post what I, a native-born Japanese, have been always thinking: This country is literally shaped by earthquakes. This is true not only in a geological sense but it also applies to the culture. Earthquakes affect how all the buildings here are made, the way of transportation, and virtually every aspect of our daily life. We always fear them and talk about them, but we're kinda resigned to accept the fate. This concept of resignation is seen in many ways in the Japanese culture. But it's also earthquakes that make us truly united. I realized this when the big quake hit the country five years ago. As much as we hate them, we are defined by earthquakes.

<comment><USER3> I am planning a trip to Japan for a month next year and I wonder, if such a quake would hit, what do I do and how dangerous is it?

When my ass hit the chair the vibration is probably larger than the largest quake that have ever hit Sweden. ;)

<comment><USER4> Read this:

[http://www.pref.aichi.jp/global/en/living/prevention/](http://www.pref.aichi.jp/global/en/living/prevention/)

Something that's missing there: don't use elevators during or immediately after a quake.

IMO the single most important thing is: when you're at the beach or close to the coast at sea level make sure you know where the nearest evacuation area is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Accroding to the USGS's page (linked to by civilian), the earthquake was a strike-slip earthquake, where two blocks of crust slide laterally relative to eachother on a vertical fault, with no real uplift of subsidence of the seafloor. It's unlikely that there will be a major tsunami, as these are caused by rapid displacement of lots of water by the seafloor. However, given the right topography along the fault, it is possible.

<comment><USER6> Authorities are warning of at most 1m above high tide levels.

[http://ptwc.weather.gov/ptwc/text.php?id=pacific.TSUPAC.2016...](http://ptwc.weather.gov/ptwc/text.php?id=pacific.TSUPAC.2016.11.21.2129)

<comment><USER7> For reference, the tsunami from the Tohoku earthquake from 2011 (which caused the Fukushima disaster) was as high as 40m.

<comment><USER8> I was going to ask for a source for that 40m figure, but I just found it.

That is absolutely terrifying.

Edit: To put in context, even if your were at the top of a ten story building, the wave (and ensuing mass of water) would still reach you.

<comment><USER9> And if you were at the top of an eleven story building, you'd find yourself without 10 stories to support you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was in Tokyo at my hotel when it happened. I thought maybe I had a Japanese vibrating bed for an alarm clock before realizing what was happening. I was on the 7th floor of a hotel and there was a slight sway for about 45 seconds. Given the duration I assumed it was fairly sizeabke but far away.

<comment><USER11> _Japanese_ vibrating bed?

Motels in America have had those since the 60's.

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

 _John Joseph Houghtaling (pronounced HUFF-tay-ling;[1] November 14, 1916 – June 17, 2009[1]) was an American entrepreneur and inventor who in 1958 invented the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed, a common feature in mid-priced hotels and motels from the 1960s to the early 1980s._

(Well, maybe they _are_ Japanese, _now_ , haha).

The Japanese invented massage chairs some years before this, though, and a vibrating bed might be regarded as a derivative thereof:

 _Robotic massage chairs were first brought to market in 1954 by the Family Fujiryoki company._

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

Anyway, cheers to lucky you to be in Japan, even if shaken up!

<comment><USER12> It's funny how our attitudes change depending on the location. In Japan a vibrating bed is seen as technological sophistication, in America it's old and tacky.

<comment><USER13> > In Japan a vibrating bed is seen as technological sophistication

What makes you think that?

<comment><USER14> Japanese electronics (especially in the boom years of the 80's and early 90's) have a certain 'Technology for Technology's Sake' design sensibility among them.

<comment><USER15> Exhibit A: my 20 button Tokyo toilet

*Not exaggerating, I just counted the buttons

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apparently not a threat to Hawaii - Tsunami threat for Japan:

[http://ptwc.weather.gov/text.php?id=hawaii.TIBHWX.2016.11.21...](http://ptwc.weather.gov/text.php?id=hawaii.TIBHWX.2016.11.21.2109)

"THE PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER HAS ISSUED A TSUNAMI THREAT MESSAGE FOR OTHER PARTS OF THE PACIFIC LOCATED CLOSER TO THE EARTHQUAKE. HOWEVER... BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA THERE IS NO TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII."

<comment><USER17> If I read your link correctly, that announcement is saying the earthquake is not a threat to Hawaii.

<comment><USER18> It also says that there are warnings for places closer to the earthquake. (ie Japan)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Live stream: [http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live/](http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live/)

<comment><USER20> I have been watching this (through their great Apple TV fourth gen app) for the past hour.

They have been excellent at doing live-translations of the primary NHK domestic broadcast. About 45 minutes ago the tone of the japanese language speaker in the background was really, really emotional, loud and fast. Reports of tsunami sightings at various distances from the seaside, factory fires etc were coming in by the minute.

They are warning people of returning to the seaside too early; now warning of a possible ~90 cm tsunami that might still be very strong.

Edit: Prime minister Abe made a brief, live speech to the nation.. and the NHK put him in a small picture-in-picture box in the lower left part of the screen so that they could still show the live view of the seaside. That was special.

<comment><USER21> Was that Abe, I thought it was one of his cabinet ministers?

<comment><USER20> Oops, may have been. I wasn't paying full attention to the TV at the time, just heard the english translator say "something something prime minister Abe something live statement something something" and then saw a small box with a Japanese man of approximately the right age speaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> USGS map: [http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10007b88#...](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10007b88#map)

//edit Any idea when the tsunami will hit? The original news happened at 20:59 UTC (1pm PST), but I'm not sure how fast tsunamis travel.

A sister comment referenced tsunami.gov, which is for US dwellers, but this NOAA website has more information for people living outside the US: [http://ptwc.weather.gov/?region=1&id=pacific.TSUPAC.2016.11....](http://ptwc.weather.gov/?region=1&id=pacific.TSUPAC.2016.11.21.2129)

text: [http://ptwc.weather.gov/text.php?id=pacific.TSUPAC.2016.11.2...](http://ptwc.weather.gov/text.php?id=pacific.TSUPAC.2016.11.21.2129)

      ESTIMATED TIMES OF ARRIVAL
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

      * ESTIMATED TIMES OF ARRIVAL -ETA- OF THE INITIAL TSUNAMI WAVE
        FOR PLACES WITHIN THREATENED REGIONS ARE GIVEN BELOW. ACTUAL
        ARRIVAL TIMES MAY DIFFER AND THE INITIAL WAVE MAY NOT BE THE
        LARGEST. A TSUNAMI IS A SERIES OF WAVES AND THE TIME BETWEEN
        WAVES CAN BE FIVE MINUTES TO ONE HOUR.

        LOCATION         REGION             COORDINATES    ETA(UTC)
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
        KATSUURA         JAPAN             35.1N 140.3E   2150 11/21
        KUSHIRO          JAPAN             42.9N 144.3E   2217 11/21
        HACHINOHE        JAPAN             40.5N 141.5E   2236 11/21
        SHIMIZU          JAPAN             32.8N 133.0E   2312 11/21
        NOBEOKA          JAPAN             32.5N 131.8E   2319 11/21

So, Katsuura was just hit, and the other cities will be hit soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> (Edit) Japan Meteorological Agency has updated the earthquake to 7.4 magnitude.

<comment><USER23> It has been upgraded to 7.4 according to NHK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Worryingly, TEPCO is reporting that the cooling system for the 3rd reactor at Fukushima Daiichi has stopped (via the NHK live TV stream)... Supposedly there is enough water in the pool that it will not be dangerous for quite awhile, but this needs to get fixed soon.

<comment><USER20> A week, they just said, I think. That seems manageable. The cooling system stopped operating because of the odd water movements, but wasn't reported to be damaged.

"TEPCO expects the cooling system to operate normally in 1-2 hours from now."

<comment><USER12> TEPCO doesn't have the most trustworthy track record.

<comment><USER25> It's already back up and running according to ABC Aus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The livestream is talking about how 2 methods of water cooling at the Fukushima power plant, but there's no immediate danger because of some third system. Anybody have more details on this?

"Right now the water temperature is 27 degrees and the water temperature will not rise to dangerous levels... for a while."

</comment><comment><USER27> I have a Japanese friend who said whenever a quake in NZ hits, the whole of Japan is on edge for the next month because Japan quakes often follow NZ quakes after a couple of weeks.

It seems to have happened again. I wonder why you don't hear anything in scientific circles about this.

<comment><USER28> It might be that the scientific circles have more data (that is, those of us in Japan only really notice the big ones and the local ones) that show that there isn't really a correlation at all due to the frequency of quakes in both areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 10km depth [http://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/20161122055...](http://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/20161122055958.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Everytime something important happens I notice reddit is a better source of getting an aggregate of information than twitter or (sometimes) news outlets.

Relevant reddit thread for this incident.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5e6jzt/73_magnit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5e6jzt/73_magnitude_earthquake_hits_fukushima_japan_3/)

Also, /u/TheEarthquakeGuy should be posting soon.

<comment><USER31> Except for that time they framed someone completely innocent for the Boston bombing. We did it Reddit!

<comment><USER32> Good for news and raw info - REALLY bad at analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was woken up by the quake this morning. Pretty strong feeling; it shook for a good few minutes. As far as I can tell everyone's safe in Tokyo, though the trains are a bit delayed and the elevators in my building weren't running.

Stronger by far than any quake I've ever felt in 8 years in San Francisco.

</comment><comment><USER2> Tsunami alerts/forecasts: [http://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/tsunami/](http://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/tsunami/)

They should really provide an English version of this page. Come on, Yahoo Japan.

<comment><USER34> [http://www.jma.go.jp/en/tsunami/](http://www.jma.go.jp/en/tsunami/) The Japanese Meteorological Agency provides a greater source of info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reading the news article, it says that the waves are about 1m in height, some are about 60cm in height. How do they distinguish that these waves are caused by the earthquake and not waves created by other causes (ocean currents, wind etc)?

</comment><comment><USER36> Was there this morning the shake was pretty long, several minutes. Its rare.

</comment><comment><USER37> Out of curiosity... why is this on Hacker News?

<comment><USER38> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

This fits "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

 _Major_ world events are pretty much always on topic. We just don't need minor regular news events here.

<comment><USER39> > "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." "anything that > gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

So that can literally be anything...

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This caveats it nicely. This is certainly off-topic for HN.

<comment><USER40> > _probably_ off-topic

Probably !== certainly. The only people who can really speak to something being _certainly_ off-topic are the moderators.

<comment><USER12> Javascript or PHP?

<comment><USER40> Heh, didn't even realize it, but JS (well, Typescript.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


40 billionaires pledge to donate half their wealth - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38556042/ns/us_news-giving/ <comment><USER2> "If the individuals on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans pledged half their net worth to charity, that would amount to $600 billion"

Perspective: The US national debt is increasing by over $4b per day. If the $600b was used just to keep the debt from increasing it would last less then 5 months.

<http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/>

<comment><USER3> Another perspective:

What a $100 billion can do - [http://www.visualeconomics.com/what-bp-could- have-bought-wit...](http://www.visualeconomics.com/what-bp-could-have-bought- with-all-the-money-they-lost/)

<comment><USER4> So this is how one defines Opportunity Cost...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Teach a man to fish....

I'd MUCH rather that they pledge to donating half of their wealth to economic development. We are in desperate need of investment capital here at home. Wouldn't that $600B be better spent investing in alternative-energy and other high growth fields?

We've given these folks huge tax breaks with the idea that they'd reinvest that money in our economy. The article is somewhat light on details about where this money ultimately ends up, but I firmly believe that it's best spent helping tomorrows billionaires (all over the world) get their start.

<comment><USER6> Interesting point.

Is money better spent feeding/clothing a bunch of Africans and preventing aids _or_ on research, bio-engineering, space/ocean exploration, education etc. here at home?

Which one is short term and which one is long term?

<comment><USER7> As a Kenyan who falls under the OP's definition of "a bunch of Africans" I do not want American philanthropy to "feed or cloth" Africa.

Most African economies are agricultural and it is therefore alarming that the EU uses 40% of it's budget(about 48B Euros annually) on agricultural subsidies. The US uses about $20B every year on the same.Ending these subsidies would enable Africa to export more, buy more products from the US and Europe as well as form the basis for industrialization.

We need more trade and less aid. Is that asking for too much?

More info;

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy>

<http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies>

[http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978963,00.ht...](http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978963,00.html)

<comment><USER8> This sounds great in principal, and ending American and European food subsidies would be great for Africa. Additionally, food subsidies distort the market by, for example, making corn syrup cheaper than sugar in the US.

The problem is that many Americans (I don't know as much about Europe) aren't actually that wealthy. Without food subsidies, our food quality would probably increase, but so would our costs. Poor Americans are overweight today because the distorted food costs make it cheaper to eat processed food (that is more expensive to make overall) than to eat basic fruits and veggies and grains. Without subsidies, they would be starving, or at least calorie deficient.

Nixon put in our current system of subsidies because "food should never be an issue in a presidential race". And since then, it hasn't. America may be wealthy, but the wealth is very unevenly distributed. Without social programs, many of our people would be starving as well.

<comment><USER7> I respectfully disagree. The same prophesies of doom were advanced when in 1984 New Zealand's Labor government took the dramatic step of ending all farm subsidies.

Productivity and efficiency have increased much faster than when subsidies were in place.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3747430.stm)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/business/worldbusiness/02f...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/business/worldbusiness/02farm.html?_r=1)

<http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3411>

<comment><USER9> And one result of those subsidies being cut is the US erecting trade barriers to protect US dairy farmers from the now hyper-competitive NZ dairy farmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had always had more respect for Bill Gates than anybody because of his contributions for welfare of humanity. Now, I have 39 more in the list. This is just awesome. I hope there were more people like them and you don't have to be a billionaire to give back to the world. Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER11> I too agree to donate half of my net worth to charity.

United Way: Please send a check for $25K to Sallie Mae on my behalf, and we'll call it settled.

<comment><USER12> While 25K is nothing compared to what these billionaires might donate, it's still a lot of money and the United Way would be happy to accept your funds.

It also opens up the discussion of what burden 'normal' folks assume when their most basic needs are taken care of. How many HN readers donate at least 10% of their earnings?

<comment><USER13> I believe the joke is that he has a negetive net worth due to student loans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was slightly disappointed that the article made no mention of the fact that where you give your money is probably _more_ important than how much you give, that the current charity market has multiple orders of magnitude differences in return on investment -- ie in how much human suffering can be alleviated per marginal dollar.

I'm sure Gates and Buffet already understand this well, and have said so, but I wish it were making it into the coverage.

</comment><comment><USER15> Conspicuously missing from the list, Mr. Jobs, Mr. Woz, Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin.

Even Larry Ellison is in the list.

<comment><USER16> I don't think Steve Woz. has anywhere near a billion dollars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Say that the value of money holds and that this goes forward without corruption or inefficiency. You still are looking at a situation where a huge amount of money needs to be invested in a such a way as to return more than it originally was. If it takes me 40 years to build $1B in wealth, what makes me think I can efficiently or intelligently deploy that amount back into "society" or "the community" in far less time? If I band together with other $1B people, doesn't that bring even more competition to the give-it-all-away party and make my job even harder?

<comment><USER18> Not sure I understand your point.

> what makes me think I can efficiently or intelligently deploy that amount > back into "society" or "the community" in far less time

It's simple to invest billions of dollars with the intention of increasing your wealth: you hire people at some well-respected financial institutions and pay them a good amount to do it for you. (let's overlook recent history here)

In the same way, there are many excellent charitable and non-profit institutions that have the infrastructure and knowledge in place to turn monetary investments into social good.

<comment><USER19> Becoming wealthier often involves making other people wealthy absolutely by providing better goods and services.

It might be more cost-efficient to make everything cheaper to make it easier to help Africans in poverty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Warren Buffetts letter is absolutely brilliant.

<comment><USER21> For those who want a direct link to his letter:

<http://givingpledge.org/#warren_buffett>

<comment><USER22> To me the essential point was:

Some material things make my life more enjoyable; many, however, would not. I like having an expensive private plane, but owning a half-dozen homes would be a burden. Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner. The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends.

Nothing to say on top of that.

<comment><USER23> "The things you own, end up owning you." - Tyler Durden (fight club)

<comment><USER24> My favorite is from Larry Ellison, who basically says "Warren Buffet told me to write this, so I did." That's what I inferred from his message, which is pure Ellison.

<comment><USER25> For those who's getting the impression that Ellison is an ass, please read his whole letter (just a paragraph).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whoa. Larry Ellison is on this list. I honestly did not expect that whatsoever.

<comment><USER27> AFAIK, he's been quoted a number of times in the past saying things to the effect of "I don't want to leave _that_ much to my kids" i.e., most of it will go to charity anyway.

<comment><USER26> Sorry, I don't keep myself posted on his life happenings. With his reputation, I expected him not to be this type of person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice PR for the billionaires involved, but I doubt this project changed any of their plans. The article states:

 _"The pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract. It does not involve pooling money or supporting one cause or organization. It's up to each person who signs the pledge how to divvy up their wealth."_

Also, reading the pledge letters, it becomes clear that these folks won't be giving away their fortunes today or tomorrow, it's about what happens to the remainder of the funds after they die. For all we know, they could've spent it all on hookers by then.

</comment><comment><USER29> None of this money will go towards empowering people. It will be used to reinforce the status quo. A lot of people will get suckered by the publicity, and they will buy into how this kind of movement can change the world. Meanwhile, they will continue to be rice pickers serving their billionaire overlords.

I don't buy any of this. What charities are going to handle this kind of money without the majority of it being misappropriated? This sounds more like a set up for a giant scam and huge distraction than anything that might actually be useful to other human beings.

<comment><USER30> The Rockefeller foundation funded the argonomists behind the green revolution, which has hugely improved world nutrition and has been credited with saving more than a billion lives.

Philanthropy has worked in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I hope they'll give some of it away while they're still alive, along with a significant effort in time and effort to ensure it's well applied. And with an open enough mind to identify and recognize the value in things outside of "mainstream business" (e.g. "pure" R&D as well as the public domain and public property (e.g. libraries, as an an old school example)) -- something I assume they mostly have or they would not have achieved such levels of success.

We need enabled intellectual prowess as much as outright cash.

</comment><comment><USER32> The bottom line is what the money actually does in the end. It is much more difficult than most people assume to help people or solve problems with money.

Pulling that much money from where it is invested now means less money for startups, etc. It could easily be a net loss to society to have that funding diverted to charities unless they were some pretty awesome / above average charities.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is admirable, but I'm a bit worried that a lot of donated money will fall into some black hole. Money matters, yes, still I would much prefer successful people donating their smarts to the world instead of their money.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like how some of them state what kinds of charities they will help in their letters.

I mean there are charities and then there are self-serving charities

(ie. the Dominos pizza billionaire literally built his own catholic city).

</comment><comment><USER35> With $600 billion floating around in private, generally unmonitored hands...

Shouldn't we be keeping an eye on charities? That sounds like it'd be ripe for exploitation.

</comment><comment><USER29> They should give the money to Louis C.K.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95fNgx8aCS8>

</comment><comment><USER36> Ralph Nader recently wrote a book on this topic: <http://onlythesuperrich.org/>

</comment><comment><USER37> that really gives hope. We are at a tipping point of selflessness. At the infinite limit Selfessness is our best self interest (I help people so that one day when I would need help other do the same)... for the moment, it is still an asymptote which requires a leap of faith.

</comment><comment><USER38> So I have a question - doesn't this effectively take billions of dollars that was (via investment) essentially going to capital expenditures to increase productivity overall and make it go instead to consumer expenditures? Doesn't that make the country worse off overall, despite helping a few people in the short run?

</comment><comment><USER39> I used to paint all the rich with the same brush. When reading the Forbe's list and the astronomical numbers I would be at first amazed, then jealous and then think of them as thief's and cheats.

Although I still think that the wealthy have a vastly disproportionate influence over government and at times to the expense of the greater public and that many of the super rich would short the public to increase their bottom line, reading the letters written on <http://givingpledge.org> has entirely reformulated my perception. I am now much more likely to give any rich person the benefit of the doubt and even perhaps view them slightly favourably rather than default to their status being illegitimate.

I have been inspired and it is absolutely amazing to see what the captains of industry are doing with their wealth. There were many of them committing 90%, 99% of their wealth, even to die broke. Not only so but committing their time and experience too. Some of the most experienced and I would think of intelligence individuals dedicating themselves to such great causes as Socratic methods of teaching, many scholarships, medical research, clean water, libraries, homeless, social programmes for the young... I think is very inspiring and motivating to become rich.

What is inspiring also is reading things such as Greek immigrant, orphanage, all our worth at the back of a Ford's car, an average American.

There is much that can be improved with the working of democracy, but with people like these I have faith in that country and trust much to be good.

I can now once more view them as role models. They are great people doing great things and I am inspired to become as great if not more.

</comment><comment><USER40> well good night Ireeene :)

</comment><comment><USER41> They OWN the f __g charities. This is more consolidation of power in the hands of the same people while also giving them great PR. They are having a laugh at you.

</comment><comment><USER42> That's one way to keep from paying taxes.

</comment><comment><USER43> Good stuff. Could we immediately stop taking taxes from anyone who takes this pledge? Considering the high percentage of the government that's full of corrupt and incompetent bunglers running questionable programs, I have immensely more faith in talented and driven people deploying their resources better to improve the world. The idea that $300M would go into the U.S. government sending "aid money" directly to a dictator's government in Africa instead of Gates deploying it to wipe out malaria is no good, for instance.

<comment><USER20> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/oct/31/usnews>

Buffett says the rich should pay more taxes

<comment><USER43> > Buffett says the rich should pay more taxes

Easy to say for a guy who built his wealth starting with an insurance company, which uses government regulation to make most of its money. Wealthy people put their money into the insurance company because life insurance payouts aren't taxable but estate taxes are. Then Buffet's insurance company gets to invest that money in low risk bonds to get basically free money before paying it out. This only exists because of insurance company lobbying - it only adds friction to the system and wastes time and resources, while insurance companies get rich extracting money from the system. This is how Buffet built much of his starting capital.

Then he keeps most of his earnings in the holdings company, and only occasionally pays capital gains. The guy's gamed huge loopholes in the U.S. tax system his whole life, and then has the audacity to say that "the rich" should pay more taxes? Physician, heal thyself.

Edit: Reply instead of downvoting? There's a bunch of not commonly known facts in this comment and it's getting some downs, a non-fact progressive viewpoint is getting some ups... that's got to be the most disappointing thing about HN lately, the trend towards up/downvoting based on politics and not content in a comment.

<comment><USER44> And what should he do? He plays the system that's there. At least he's honest enough to say the system that's there is tilted in his favor. But, I do ask the question seriously? Run for government? Fund progressive candidates who would raise tax on higher incomes?

<comment><USER43> > And what should he do?

Stick to business and stay out of trying to be a folk hero? Or pay higher tax rates voluntarily to set an example? Campaigning for a tax increase when a lot of his money came from helping people use a tax loophole created by his industry doesn't seem particularly righteous.

<comment><USER45> That does nothing to solve the overall problem, though. It would give us back Buffett's taxes, but they pale in comparison to the aggregate taxes being avoided by the thousands of other super rich.

As a businessman, he's required to exploit these loopholes, much like a lawyer is required to defend a client they know to be in the wrong. What makes Buffett special is that he, unlike so many other super rich, is choosing to publicly draw attention to the system they all know to be broken.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IntelliJ IDEA 14 EAP 138.1029 is out with a built-in Java decompiler - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2014/07/intellij-idea-14-eap-138-1029-is-out/

<comment><AUTHOR> What is _really_ interesting about this announcement is that the decompiler is part of the "community edition", and thus open source under the Apache license: [https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij- community/tree/master/...](https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij- community/tree/master/plugins/java-decompiler)

I doubt it will run easily outside of IntelliJ but it does a very nice job and thus I hope other projects will be able to benefit and vice versa (where licensing is compatible, of course).</comment>


RIAA calls online piracy a threat to national security - <AUTHOR> http://riaa.com/blog.php?content_selector=riaa-news-blog&content_selector=riaa-news-blog&blog_selector=Case-For-Closing-OPEN-&news_month_filter=1&news_year_filter=2012

<comment><USER2> A company bribing the government to make policy damaging one of the most powerful innovation tools on the planet is a threat to national security. If the US doesn't stay the innovation leader of the world then national security is compramised.

riaa is the threat to national security when it tries to shape the infrastructure of the entire planet to suit a 100 year old business model.</comment>


Redefining 'undefined' in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://designpepper.com/blog/drips/redefining-undefined <comment><USER2> An interesting exposition, one that avoids mentioning that a person who tries to assign a value to "undefined" needs psychological help.

<comment><AUTHOR> While this is undoubtedly true, there is also the case of accidental assignment.

For example:

if (undefined = "something") {}

This is merely a case of stupidity, not madness. :-)

<comment><USER2> > if (undefined = "something") {}

Seasoned programmers avoid the possibility of inadvertent assignment by reversing the order of the arguments as a matter of habit:

if ("something" = undefined) {}

If (42 = secret_of_the_universe) {}

Also, they try to avoid languages that use "=" as an equality test as well as an assignment operator. Early BASIC was infamous for this.

> This is merely a case of stupidity, not madness.

Must agree there. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Never Use $_GET Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.phparch.com/2010/07/08/never-use-_get-again/

<comment><USER2> This is part of the reason I don't like working in PHP anymore -- this reads to me like a clear case of an overengineered solution. For example, see the list of sanitiziation filters: <http://www.php.net/manual/en/filter.filters.sanitize.php>

Who wants to wade through that when (for most cases) regular expressions are easily available? Not to mention the lack of any whitelisting support, which is by and far the best validation technique in a developer's toolbox.</comment>


The Problem With Identi.ca Is That It Is Not Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/04/the-problem-with-identica-is-that-it-is-not-twitter/

<comment><USER2> The problem with Twitter is that it's centralized. It's silly to get locked into a vendor and then be surprised when they can't meet your needs. Blogs aren't all hosted by one startup and neither should microblogs.</comment>


Neovim Plugin UI architecture  - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Plugin-UI-architecture

<comment><USER2> Question from the uninitiated: in the 'old days', you'd write or expose a C library. Most languages support C APIs without too much work and you don't need to serialize/deserialize data structures.

Although the described approach has some advantages (a plugin is separate from the Neovim process, can run across a network, etc.), I wonder if in some situations this doesn't give to much overhead. E.g. if someone is scrolling fast, do you really want to communicate with all plugins over a named pipe or socket, doing messagepack serialization/deserialization?

<comment><USER3> Vi was designed to work over a 300 baud modem. The throughput needed for a text editor is minimal (and still is). A C API would avoid the extra overhead, but no one is interested in writing cross platform unicode/binary safe plugins in the language. Also consider that buggy plugins that live in other processes won't crash the editor.

<comment><USER4> By the way: 300 bps, not 300 baud. Baud is something different and you can transfer a lot more bits per second with 300 baud than just 300.

<comment><USER5> No, _300 baud_. This comes from a direct quote by Bill Joy[0]:

 _" No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem."_

[0] [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_g...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope this works out well for Windows users who run 20+ plugins -- no zombies or anything when neovim crashes.

<comment><USER7> I'm thinking that it won't be necessary to split out all plugins into separate processes. One could just as well use one host per scripting language and combine all plugins that use the same scripting language.

<comment><USER8> Exactly, only the host process needs to implement the event loop described in the wiki.

The host can also implement custom discovery/loading of plugins in a way that makes usage of the subscribe/unsubscribe API completely transparent

<comment><USER9> Still, IMHO, nice to split them out -- so they don't stomp on each other or do other silly things. Same reason it is nice (but not memory efficient) that Chrome does this... individual processes are safe and sane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Neovim looks promising. Not to derail the thread but is there a similar reimplementation effort on the Emacs side?</comment>


Toyota will sell a fuel-cell car around the world in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/6/5278884/toyota-will-sell-a-fuel-cell-car-around-the-world-in-2015

<comment><AUTHOR> If this is true this casts a weird light on Elons Musks statements about what he called "fools cells".

Granted, hydrogen production is still pretty energy inefficient but at least the technology in the cars seems to have matured a lot more than what his earlier statements have indicated possible.</comment>


We need to focus - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/311993204557877249 <comment><AUTHOR> This made me laugh out loud.</comment>


Fact: There Is Room for Your Big Software Idea - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/why-you-should-think-big-14d878a48f55 <comment><USER2> Who's to say software won't turn out like oil/energy. Before tech companies took the mantle of "highest market cap", Exxon & friends ruled the roost. [Google, Apple, Microsoft] look a lot like Exxon today, with their biggest defensive moat being scale.

Upstarts prove a new market (Pebble, Roku, etc.) only to have entrenched players take over and dominate. Or, you have to relegate yourself to very small SMBs differentiating yourself with support-costs:revenue ratios that bigger players simply aren't interested in

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the author's arguments don't support his conclusion of "go build something awesome".

He points out the gas turbine was invented in 1791 and software in 1948. It seems to imply that software is in an equivalent state today to what the internal combustion engine was in the 1860s. This is ridiculous. Engines weren't used by the majority of the world every day.

What's to say that software today isn't in the state that the automobile industry was in the 1950s: the future will generally be dominated by the large incumbents.

I have no doubt that there's room in the future for my software idea. But is the room for _me_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hear a lot from people say "all the low hanging fruit have been taken" or "all the big ideas are already done" with regards to tech businesses. Definitely lacks both foresight and hindsight.

<comment><USER5> It's not that everything has been done. It's that the economics are not conducive to further baby steps, despite this still being the beginning of the beginning, technologically.

Doesn't matter how low the fruit is if the monopolistic glass ceiling is even lower.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree with those statements, I just hear it a fair bit and it irritates me.

<comment><USER5> You don't have to agree with it, just don't conflate it with the technical nativity you mentioned above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Computers arent getting much faster though, and software can only get so far without faster computers. The horizontal expansion with the cloud is no solution, it's like adding more wheels to a car. Machine learning is already challenging the limits of circuits and it has to scale up enormously for real AI. As long as Big Corp keeps hoovering the blood of everyone else , whatever value is created requires more effort for less return. And there are other things that are very important such as payments, which are just as slow/bad as before the 'net. just some counterpoints

</comment><comment><USER7> There's also room for your small, niche software idea. You don't need to be the next Facebook/Twitter to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's no space for nuance in this pep talk. Users will not decide to use your software because of your perception of the maturity of the tech world as a whole! Users will decide on features they expect in the moment, ones they can grasp quickly enough.

The growth-at-all-costs mantra proves that all of big tech believes they are playing a winner takes all game. I'm inclined to believe them considering how much they value user habituation and abhor competing visions that liberate.

They used to say a customer needs to buy from you 5 times to establish brand loyalty. Now I wonder if these monopolies think they need 2 or 3 generations of offspring acting on impulse to achieve world domination.</comment>


Undercover: Twitter Ready to Give Trump's Private DMs to DOJ - <AUTHOR> https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/09/undercover-video-sr-network-security-engineer-reveals-twitter-ready-to-give-trumps-private-dms-to-doj/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't Twitter be compelled to hand over this data if subpoenaed anyway?

According to the article - apart from saying how much he disliked the president, which seems to be the bulk of the content - this chap described how he wouldn't look at Trump's DMs, and would rely on the legal system to sort that out if the DoJ wanted them, and additionally that the President's tweeting was discussed at Twitter, which was a given.

All sounds fairly... normal?

So the only revelation is that James O'Keefe is still doing this sort of thing, and felt that this was newsworthy. I mean seriously, how lame must the other 'dirt' he's dug up have been if _THIS_ was his undercover expose?

Is O'Keefe still banned from Twitter?</comment>


CV researcher quits due to ethical concerns - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/pjreddie/status/1230523827446091776 <comment><USER2> It's too late. Google, et al have opened the metaphorical Pandora's Jar long ago. The race to the top - especially between countries and with different views - will not stop anyone. It's in everyone's interest to get there and stay there.

I pity future generations.

Suffering comes through one dataset at a time.</comment>