Sun's Star7: Touchscreen Tablet of 1992 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/10/star7/

<comment><USER2> Another interesting early tablet story: Go Corp.

[http://www.guidebookgallery.org/books/thepowerofpenpoint/cha...](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/books/thepowerofpenpoint/chapter1)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GO_Corp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GO_Corp).

[http://www.amazon.com/Startup-A-Silicon-Valley- Adventure/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Startup-A-Silicon-Valley- Adventure/dp/0140257314)

</comment><comment><USER3> And it would burn your hand if you held it too long :-). It really was pretty amazing cramming what was essentially a SPARCStation II+ into something that small. When the group showed the cable companies the environment they could have it got good reviews but it ran on a SPARCStation 10. They said they _might_ spend $150 on the settop box hardware that year. (think Z80s + CRTC chip). Now, 22 years later, $150 actually gets you something with similar capability to the SS10 which could no doubt run the demo app just fine.

<comment><USER4> I have to imagine that $150 blows the SS10 away massively (yesterday's Nexus Player is $99 with Bay Trail silicon with a solid GPU...) -- the speed of commoditization of hardware this cycle has been pretty amazing.

The SGI guys had a similar experience when Nintendo bulk produced the N64 and sold it for $200. It was most of a $5000 workstation with better graphics hardware!

<comment><USER5> > I have to imagine that $150 blows the SS10 away massively

No doubt. Remember that the base model of a SS10 had a 0.033 GHz CPU. A raspberry pi would run circles around it.

That's not even counting a modern GPU. A SPARCstation would usually be equipped with a dumb framebuffer like a CG3 card.

Computers these days are _FAST_

<comment><USER3> Actually the Raspberry Pi does _not_ run circles around it because it has to do so much of its work through the USB bus. The Pi makes a good case study for system architecture in that regard. The trick is to compare channel bandwidth, memory, I/O, and cache to see see how those parts interact.

<comment><USER5> Sure, let's compare. I don't have every number at hand, but:

I/O: * SS10 -- Fast SCSI: 80 Mbit/sec theoretical max * Rpi -- USB2 480 Mbit/sec. Now there are certainly complaints about poor USB performance, but it's not so bad that the SS10 would beat it

Cache: * SS10 -- 32K in the base model (although later ones had more) * Rpi -- 256K

RAM: * SS10 -- depends on configuration; most machines of the era tended to have 32MB or so. I actually had an SS10 with an exotic 128MB, but half of the ram was actually on an SBus card. * Rpi -- 256MB in the lowest configuration you can buy. True, that is shared with the GPU whereas the SS10's CG3 card had its own memory if I remember right.

You are correct that the Rpi is bus and I/O crippled compared to most modern hardware. That's why I chose it as an example: even the cheapest hardware you can buy today is so much faster than a SS10. It's really astounding to think about.

<comment><USER6> Usable USB2 bandwidth is about 40 MBytes/sec (you can squeeze out more, but you're talking custom devices and carefully crafted protocols).

80 MBit/sec SCSI is 8 bits wide, with pretty good utilization (depends on the drive), so it's going to do pretty well in comparison. I don't know if 1992-era drives could do (say) 100 MBytes/sec, maybe on the outer rims?

<comment><USER5> > 80 MBit/sec SCSI is 8 bits wide

No, I converted both of the speeds to MBit to make them easier to compare. The SCSI on a SS10 was 10MB/sec, so 80Mb/sec.

The bus utilization on SCSI was high, and the USB2 on a Rpi is slow but not nearly enough to make up for a 6x gap in raw bus speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny how everyone was doing the General Magic-style UI (where you had to navigate down the street to the post office to send email) back then.

<comment><USER7> That and the incredible role of sound in the UI, so annoying for today's standards. It seems they were communicating to the users of consoles and arcade machines.

Maybe both techniques were inevitable at that stage of the general public training to technology. Both were abandoned a few years later when Windows 95 and then the web made the PC really mainstream. Their language was totally different and we all got used to it quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What struck me was the jarring use of both "Australian" and "Traditional" scrolling styles on the same device. The selection widgets moved along with your finger, but the room panning moved counter to your finger. That would drive me batty.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking the same thing. I wonder if they had both scrolling methods on the device for testing purposes.

The noise while drawing around the room (and outside) was horrid. Nails on chalkboard type horrid. I'd have thought the visual movement was enough to convey the idea that you were navigating. But testing again I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Didn't watch the whole video, but I think that's the same device Gosling demoed 'gravity' pull on. The relationship between so-called progress and memory loss (or the lack of knowledge in that case) tickles my mind everytime.

</comment><comment><USER11> Appeared recently on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411846). Since there wasn't much discussion, we won't call the current thread a duplicate.</comment>


Twitter flight invite page is built in  ColdFusion - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitterflight.com/index.cfm

<comment><USER2> Apple's Investor Relations website is also built with ColdFusion - [http://investor.apple.com/sec.cfm](http://investor.apple.com/sec.cfm) \- which is mostly likely not built by a consulting service.

I'd bet that neither site uses Adobe ColdFusion, but rather the Railo open source engine - [http://www.getrailo.org/](http://www.getrailo.org/)

The perception is that most developers that have built applications in CF have moved on to other languages and frameworks like Go, Clojure, Ruby on Rails, Django, Python, and Node.js.

While app development in CF has been on the decline for several years, there is still a very solid CMS on the platform (Mura) and is used by Intel, Nationwide Insurance and few other high profile companies and colleges.

What I found the most interesting was the use of "fuseaction" in the url - [https://www.twitterflight.com/?fuseaction=reg.Apply](https://www.twitterflight.com/?fuseaction=reg.Apply)

This is a convention that was used by the Fusebox framework, which has been defunct for quite a long time.

<comment><USER3> Mura... solid? I think not. More like convenient. It's one of two free CMS built on CFML. The second one being ContentBox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is not that interesting. Marketing pages like these are usually outsourced to agencies. This doesn't suggest that Twitter itself will be moving their main stack to ColdFusion.

<comment><AUTHOR> humorous/ironic is probably the better word. The application server on this site is pretty much irrelevant, they could've just used a google form to collect the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> FYI. Just because it's a CFM extension, doesn't mean that they are using ColdFusion (which is Adobe's CFML engine). They could very well be using Railo ([http://www.getrailo.org/](http://www.getrailo.org/)) or OpenBD ([http://openbd.org/](http://openbd.org/)). Both of which are free, open sourced and magnitudes faster then ColdFusion.

<comment><AUTHOR> good call ... maybe better to say using CFML

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As a longtime ColdFusion user, and maybe one of the 3 of us who is remaining, I found this to be interesting.

<comment><USER5> As an April Fools joke a few years ago we changed our dev server to use all .cfm extensions (it was a node.js app) and convinced everybody that we were switching to ColdFusion

<comment><USER6> It was a node.js app. You didn't need to add .cfm to the paths to make it a joke.

/me ducks

<comment><USER7> node.js or how I stopped worrying and learned to love spaghetti code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is the agency behind the site - [http://www.webeventsglobal.com](http://www.webeventsglobal.com)</comment>


Scott Alexander Reviews Thiel's Zero to One - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-one/ <comment><USER2> > Nowadays people get told that if they think they've figured out something > about gravity, they're probably a crackpot. Instead, they should wait for > very large government-funded programs full of well-credentialled people to > make incremental advances.

Maybe we approach limit of human cognitive abilities and another Newton is not possible for current problems? Maybe to find a cure for cancer you need to spend 10k hours studying biology, 10k studying chemistry, 10k studying machine learning and then spend 100k hours on the problem, which it's not possible for a human being.

<comment><USER3> Possibly. But then, we've always been good in solving problems with tools. Could we reduce the necessary "10k" learning by building better tools for accessing knowledge?

Right now, scientific papers are a shitshow, and even refined and systematized knowledge in textbooks isn't as accessible as it could be in the digital age. Could we encode knowledge in more powerful tools allowing us to explore through free-form simulations?

The goal here would be to make discovery of promising solutions more time- and effort-efficient.

Related, I feel we need to figure out a way to systematize information in scientific papers to make mining them for cross-cutting insights possible. I suspect there are lots of discoveries hiding in plain sight, if one knew which particular papers from which disciplines touch on the same underlying phenomenon or concept.

<comment><USER4> _Related, I feel we need to figure out a way to systematize information in scientific papers to make mining them for cross-cutting insights possible. I suspect there are lots of discoveries hiding in plain sight, if one knew which particular papers from which disciplines touch on the same underlying phenomenon or concept._

This is interesting problem, unfortunately it's really, really hard.

I'm most familiar with mathematics, so I'll use it as an example, but this is not limited to mathematics.

If you take any new paper on research mathematics, in a hot field like algebraic geometry or partial differential equations, then unless you're an expert in that field, it will almost always be literally impossible for you to understand -- not simply hard to follow the arguments, but simply impossible to understand even what it's about. Look, I just grabbed random example from recent posts on arXiv[1]: try reading an abstract and explaining it back to me. For 99.99% English speakers, this will be indistinguishable from random gibberish in a paper written by recurrent neural network trained on arXiv papers.

However, 0.01% of people will understand something, and for probably 1% of these, the abstract will make perfect sense. However, if you ask these people to explain it, you'll either spend an hour or two on getting some very superficial understanding of what's at stake here, which won't be very useful to you -- you still won't be able to actually read and follow the paper, and use the insights for your own purposes. Alternatively, and if you're intelligent enough, they can spend _a year or two_ teaching you required background. Then you can see the insight for yourself.

The problem here is that you need literally _years_ of background studies to appreciate the insight. There likely is no quick and easy way around it, otherwise some of the extremely smart people involved would already have had figured it out -- assuming otherwise is hubris. This doesn't mean that the system cannot be improved upon: there's tons of ways to make things simpler, clearer, more digestible. However, you'll still be left with hard problems of hard things being hard.

[1] - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.09846.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.09846.pdf)

<comment><USER5> OK, let's check your numbers. There are about 1.5 billion people who speak English, and you are telling us that only .0001 * 1.5 billion = 150,000 of them will get anything out of the abstract? And that only .01 * 150,000 = 1,500 of those will find it to make perfect sense? That doesn't seem right.

 _Abstract. Using elliptically fibered Kummer surfaces of Picard rank 17, we construct an explicit model for a three-parameter bielliptic plane genus-three curve whose associated Prym variety is two-isogenous to the Jacobian variety of the general three-parameter hyperelliptic genus-two curve in Rosenhain normal form. Our model provides explicit expressions for all coefficients in terms of modular forms._

Oh. Oh my. Checks list of Sokal Squared spoof papers, nope. "Indistinguishable from random gibberish in a paper written by a recurrent neural network" it is then. Rather than being conservative, now I see that you were wildly optimistic in your estimate. There can't possibly be over 1,000 people in the world to whom this would make perfect sense, can there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jim-greer > You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today > it's just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic > curiosities.

The Bay Model is well worth visiting. While the Reber Plan to dam up the bay would have been an environmental disaster, the model is really cool. It was actually used for many years after the plan was abandoned. It was only the rise of fluid dynamics simulators that made it obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER6> _" Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel's class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each lecture. They became a minor sensation. Thiel asked if he wanted to make them into a book together. He did."_

That's an interesting origin story.

I was curious to see the notes in question. Found them here, for anyone else interested: [http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels- cs183-startup](http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup)

</comment><comment><USER7> The Amazon example is interesting. Amazon gained a monopoly on books _in the US_ and exploited that to become a monopoly in everything. Meanwhile in 1980s Germany you could order books through your local bookseller of choice who would go through one of two wholesellers who had most books in stock for next- day delivery. But neither Libri nor KNV chose to exploit their position to become Amazon before Amazon. That, or time wasn't yet ready.

<comment><USER8> Some additional factors:

Ordering via a web catalog. Visiting a local bookseller takes a bigger commitment than opening a web browser.

Price competition. Amazon typically had a better price on any given book (and later, on most items) than any local store.

Delivery to home or office. Now you need to schedule a second visit to your local bookstore.

<comment><USER9> And a US-specific aspect of your second item: the weird way US sales tax is set up meant that Amazon didn't have to pay any for a long time, giving it an automatic ~5% price advantage in most states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Zero to One is my favorite "startup" book, Thiel has a lot of interesting insights and I wish he was a bit more public with his thoughts. Trying to search for Thiel talks online that don't take place during his book tour has been tough for me.

<comment><USER11> I'm actually glad he isn't going on a self-congratulatory speaking tour, gives me the impression he does indeed have important things to think about and work on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This might be an unpopular opinion, but the Amazon example is bad. Bezos didn't get "richer than God" by making a _bookstore_ \-- this is just grossly misleading. AWS and Prime (both criticized upon release; Prime lost money for years) are the two main reasons Amazon took over the world. Amazon is a master class in pivoting and trial and error. Sometimes it loses (Fire Phone), but when it wins, it wins big.

<comment><USER13> Just as "make a bookstore" isn't the key to success, I don't believe you can say "pivot a lot" or "trial and error" is the key to success either. Plenty of startups pivot and run out of runway.

So what then is the secret sauce?

<comment><USER14> My current thinking is that a big piece of success is taking risks and _being able to absorb the losses_.

Generally big payouts don't come from a sure thing; you have to take multiple risks that could potentially have big payouts and survive long enough for one or more of them to pan-out.

Edit: for formatting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> as a graduate student in CS (ML and theory) all these comments about people not believing in their own ability to invent things via their own reasoning runs 100% opposite to my own experience. weird. maybe i've just found a good local optimum in my life choices and starting place (birth/white privilege etc).

</comment><comment><USER16> _Zero to One_ is a great book: [https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to- one-peter-thiel-a...](https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter- thiel-and-blake-masters/) and you should read it if you've not already.

</comment><comment><USER17> > _Google X wants to be the modern version of [Bell Labs and PARC], though I > don't know how much success they've had so far._

Google X is a startup incubator, not blue-sky research[1] in the way we imagine Bell Labs and PARC to be.

[1] yes, Loon, I get it. Har har

</comment><comment><USER18> Asking honestly - who is Scott Alexander? I read the about page on the submission, and it's even more confusing why he's reviewing this book.

<comment><USER19> He's a California based psychiatrist who also happens to write rational fiction (reddit.com/r/rational) and has interesting blog posts. I don't think he has any special qualifications or status that would make his review any more authoritative than anyone else's, but I really enjoy his writing style.

<comment><USER18> Thanks, the reddit link is useful. Appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> He has a very interesting weekly discussion thread about the Culture War: [https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/akk8nc/cult...](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/akk8nc/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_28/)

<comment><USER21> I like /r/slatestarcodex, and I like the culture war thread.

But it's worth emphasizing Scott doesn't participate in that thread, and he doesn't necessarily like it either. In fact, from what I can tell he's not a huge fan of lots of the conversations that go on there, and the topics discussed.

If anyone were to judge him on comments, please only do it based on the curated comments on his website, where he deletes and bans people who are uncivil.

<comment><USER22> From the latest thread:

        ----

As I'm sure everyone has noticed, the culture war thread has essentially grown to devour all of /r/SlateStarCodex. Also, we talk about really weird stuff here. That's intended, and it's something I like about this community; however, given the weirdness, Scott Alexander no longer wants it on /r/SlateStarCodex. We're moving this thread to another subreddit, and after some internal discussion, we've realized that only a subset of our moderators want to be responsible for the new culture-war-specific subreddit.

        ----

So it's definitely _not_ Scott's discussion.

<comment><USER20> So, basically an attempt at image clean-up. His audience created a regular discussion based on the terminology of his original content, but he's trying to become more popular to a broader audience. If people new to him were to search, he'd be able to put some distance, should this separation be effective. That's the gist of what I'm getting from reading the latest discussion.

<comment><USER22> _but he 's trying to become more popular to a broader audience_

Not so much that, but to avoid repercussions in his real life. There are topics being discussed that are real sacred cows, and even if his conclusions are "correct", sometimes one is considered evil just for daring to question the conventional values. (indeed, that's much of what the "culture war" thread is _about_ )

Since his writing is just a hobby, he doesn't want fallout from that to impact his real professional career.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, understood. Personally, I commend him. I sure as hell wouldn't put my name to controversial topics (even if said discussion itself should, ideally, NOT be controversial). In today's social climate that takes some serious courage, and it's not really worth it unless you can be employed regardless of opinion. I'm guessing in his sphere that's not permitted, which is unsettling.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Notetaking Cold War - <AUTHOR> https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/the-notetaking-cold-war-c7d <comment><USER2> This particular author paywalls his content _partway through_ , and unless you scroll down first, you don't see it coming. Maybe that strategy doesn't alienate everyone, but it sure alienated me.

He also resubmits a given article of his many times, sometimes multiple times a day [0]. I find this off-putting as well.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dshipper](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dshipper)</comment>


Confirmed: Microsoft To Kill Windows Live Messenger in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/11/06/confirmed-microsoft-to-kill-windows-live-messenger-in-2013/

<comment><USER2> Do people still use msn? I use adium with multiple accounts from different networks (including msn). Guessing this is more for hotmail interface aka gmail video chat.

My msn contacts are never online.. more frustrating that it's going to clutter my existing skype contact list with friends or associates from years past that I never want to see or talk to.

<comment><USER3> If you never want to see them nor speak with them, and they're never online, why are they on your contacts list?

<comment><USER2> Why would I spend time managing contacts on a network/service that I rarely use.

IE - some people use myspace to communicate with select people, but would never spend time to update a friend list on a service they rarely use. Imagine if they just imported all of your friends from myspace to fb.. disaster</comment></comment></comment>


3-6% equity in return for a place to stay. Bubblicious or just plain grim? - <AUTHOR> http://cribb.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is lacking in any real detail, which is always a massive red flag. Also the amount of equity they want teams to give away is insane.</comment>


Wikipedia Zero and Net Neutrality: Protecting the Internet as a Public Space - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutrality-protecting-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> Net neutrality is a very confused idea. Once one tries to define a testable law, it becomes a lot less desirable.

Since I started paying attention, the definition has changed from "QoS on the last mile" to "slowing certain protocols" to "blocking competitive services" to "blocking any services" to "not building enough capacity" to "fast lanes that aren't CDNs" to "throttling any user" to "paying for interconnect".

In the Wikipedia case above, it's clearly a violation of NN and it's clearly good for consumers. It's a very progressive policy, I support it – and it's not neutral.

The justification Wikimedia offers here is that they are serving the community and are not exchanging $$ with the ISP. Is this part of the definition now? And if so, do we want to start defining which sites we feel serve the community?

<comment><USER3> The argument that QoS would violate net neutrality is FUD from net neutrality opponents. The only time I've seen proponents call it that was because ISPs would block bittorrent for "quality of service" reasons, which of course isn't QoS at all.

<comment><USER4> I am pro-net neutrality, and I think that particular packets getting QoS guarantees is exactly what I'm against - and pretty much completely describes what I'm against.

I don't know what net neutrality with QoS guarantees even means. Unless QoS is a promise that the ISPs will be making to me, guaranteeing that I will always have a particular amount of bandwidth - but I don't want any of the packets that I am sending or receiving to get favorable treatment of any other packets that I'm sending or receiving.

I'd even like to see law about the variables that upstream caching algorithms can use, and I think that situations like the Netflix appliance could absolutely legitimately be declared a no-no. Packet throughput should be fungible, and it is before people start slipping each other cash.

<comment><USER5> QoS is a highly desirable feature of a network, _iff_ you, the end user, control the QoS selection. If I'm playing a fast-paced online game, talking to a group of friends with VoIP, and downloading a movie from one of the online stores to watch later, I'd like to place the priority of the movie's packets below the game and voice packets. But if the ISP does that for me, gives me no choice in the matter, and/or prioritizes my minimum guaranteed allotment movie packets above or below the voice packets of other customers, that's not okay.

I've mentioned this strategy a few times before on HN, starting ~4 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049784)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860164)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860180)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7711264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7711264)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7911677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7911677)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8058319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8058319)

<comment><USER6> Yes; QOS has no place crossing the boundaries of a network segment - It should allow me to control the ingress and egress of my network, but be stripped before it gets to a network "trunk" like an ISP.

Further on that; If bandwidth on a segment is constrained, the ISP should divide it as fairly as possible, while also trying to maximize throughput. Each user should get an equal share, and if they're using less than that, the remainder should be apportioned to the other users evenly.

<comment><USER5> It seems to me that some level of either user-controlled QoS or congestion notification is desirable at the ISP level, since your software (e.g. Netflix, VoIP) might not know that the ISP network is congested, but you'd still prefer to tell your ISP's routers to prioritize the VoIP over the Netflix (within your allotted share of bandwidth, of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is absolutely non NetNeutral.

There are billions of websites out there and each one of them is some kind of information. Giving wikipedia free access but charging others may seem to be innocent. But I believe on the contrary, it is opening one door that should not be used.

There are thousands (millions?) of wikipedia articles and all have some kind of linked citation. How will you draw the line? Wikipedia is open information but these citations are not?

In my country we have operator giving twitter and facebook free access. And I always thought that was another nail on net neutralities coffin. Wikipedia is nailing one more too.

<comment><USER8> Public benefit organizations like Wikipedia already operate by a somewhat different set of tax laws than traditional for profit corporations. This is precisely because governments around the world believe there is high value in organizations other than governments that serve the people with a public good or service.

Why can you not imagine similar carve-outs for non-profits when it comes to communications regulations on the Internet.

<comment><USER7> This is not regulation.

Also I'm not against free wikipedia access. I'm against using connection provider power to limit access to any where.

If an ISP starts with free wikipedia where would it land then? I believe "You can freely connect wikipedia but you can't use whatsapp or you must reimburse us for the lost sms revenue" is only one step ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just because it's Wikimedia doing it, doesn't mean that all of the sudden I'm all for it. I believe it's still discriminatory against small organization/websites and against net neutrality principles.

</comment><comment><USER10> >Wikipedia Zero cannot be sold as part of a bundle. Access > to the Wikimedia sites through Wikipedia Zero cannot be >sold through limited service bundles.

Sounds to me like it is ONLY available in some sort of bundles.

This is a brilliant display of the good that non-NN can bring to the world while showing the potential sliding slope. Interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a difficult choice. On one hand I believe that Wikipedia should be FREE in all senses of the word. On the other hand making one exception will create more exceptions. Why not make facebook and Gmail free to access so that people can communicate? I want this exception for Wikipedia. But I am worried.

<comment><USER11> I am from India. Bandwidth is costly here. Internet enabled devices have surprisingly have become cheaper. Making some access 'Free' could change the world of many people.

I agree where there is food and shelter in short, giving Internet free may not help to fight these. But it will help to fight corruption and bureaucracy. Many important government services are online nowadays. In West-Bengal, government stopped online college admission just to keep bureaucratic system going. They fear free Internet, it is a killer for corruption here.

<comment><USER12> Allowing certain organizations to bypass data caps or data rates and not others is an incredible opportunity for corruption.

It's like the "licenses Raj" days all over again. Nehru might have had good intentions, but it just created a massively corruption system of extortion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe we can make an exception for non-profit organizations that don't pay the ISPs or get paid?

Although since the NFL is a non-profit, maybe not...

<comment><USER14> I think these rules have it covered: "No exchange of payment." "Wikipedia Zero cannot be sold as part of a bundle"

If the NFL wants to provide free football games to all cable subscribers, I think we should let them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> >Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Wikipedia can _never_ be the sum of all human knowledge and anyone who thinks so is seriously deluded. The web in its entirety still doesn't include even a fraction of all knowledge. To think that one website -- a poorly designed one, with terrible software, design, media handling, policies and leadership -- is claiming this is simply laughable.

That goes for Wikipedia "protecting the internet". Protecting it from who exactly?

Wikipedia's leadership and its acolytes constantly use false utopian goals to justify their expansion into areas that they are ill-equipped to deal with (see: dangerous and incorrect medical data). It seems they are trying to use the same lofty ideals to carve out market protection in Africa.

<comment><USER16> Could you provide any arguments, instead of just bashing Wikipedia?

<comment><USER17> I'm not the OP, but Deletionism [0] is a serious detriment to the idea of "sum of all human knowledge."

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia)</comment></comment></comment>


Move over mod_python, here comes mod_wsgi. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.micropledge.com/2007/09/the-up-and-coming-mod_wsgi/

<comment><USER2> I've recently used nginx to reverse-proxy and load balance to both paste and mongrel. Much easier setup. If you're doing a custom app I tend to think this is better than running a big Apache up front.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using mod_wsgi for some time (I think trac recommended it). Interesting that this blog post is getting so much attention.

For apache (and I'm a fan of apache) it doesn't get any better.

<comment><USER4> I use mod_proxy to reverse-proxy to paste.httpserver. Much better, IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> or instead use lighttpd with FastCGI and web.py. something like this... <http://webpy.org/recommended_setup>

<comment><USER6> Even reddit, the developers of web.py, aren't using it anymore.

<comment><USER7> How do you know it? Http header viewer shows Reddit use lighttpd/1.4.13.

<comment><USER8> He is referring to: <http://reddit.com/info/29qac/comments/c29rpx>

Summary if you don't know the story: aaronsw wrote web.py, founded Infogami (yc funded) and merged with Reddit. Then he had a falling out with spez and kn0thing (original founders of Reddit). When Reddit was rewritten, web.py was not used.

I personally like web.py. Any of you using it for your startup/projects? (May be we can swap tips) If you are not using web.py for a particular reason, can you please share that too?

<comment><USER9> Steve is too lazy (in the good sense) to have ditched web.py for anything except legitimate technical reasons.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. This is exactly what I was wondering about and wanted to know from someone in the know.

<comment><USER10> Spez had mentioned, off-handedly, that there tend to be painful bugs in the main web.py distributions:

<http://programming.reddit.com/info/14v8a/comments/c14y1i>

<comment><USER8> Thanks nos`. Are you still using Pylons? And templates? Would you recommend MochiKit for js lib?

<comment><USER10> Actually, I went with web.py after all. I blame temporary insanity. That, and web.py was easily understandable without a whole lot of docs to go through, and I wanted to get _something_ up quickly. We may yet rewrite in Pylons, but it's low priority, as web.py is working for us. (We also have practically zero traffic though.)

For templates, we use Mako after having previously used Cheetah, same as the rewritten Reddit. Mako is a very well-done, well-thought-out library. There were some things that Cheetah had a lot of trouble with (like unicode support and fragment libraries) that Mako handles without breaking a sweat.

For JS lib, we eventually settled on jQuery after having tried out Prototype, YUI, and Mootools (never used Mochikit, sorry). This was largely because that seems to be where the momentum is these days. Also, jQuery has a very elegant selector + plugin architecture and a growing collection of plugins. And it's the first JavaScript library I've seen that's intimately aware of namespace issues and tries to balance ease-of-use (no silly YAHOO.widgets.slider.SliderThumb chains here) and not-breaking-anything. This has been a major issue at my day job - we use several Prototype-dependent libraries and they _all_ seem to be incompatible with each other, along with any other JS libraries.

On the downside, jQuery is still fairly immature, so you may have to write some widgets yourself that are provided with other libraries. That's changing quickly though, since many people are writing plugins now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone just settle Apache vs Lighthttpd for me :-)</comment>


Susan Wojcicki on the Secrets of Google's Success - <AUTHOR> http://spacejockeys.blogs.com/christine/2006/05/susan_wojcicki_.html

<comment><USER2> "though the founders didn't know a lot about marketing and advertising, they did know how to build a product that customers would use."

<comment><USER3> Google's choices:

build something because you can

build something because you want to

people will use it because it's there

people will use it because they want to

people will use it because they need to

\- Google maybe hit all 5, last one being the key.

<comment><USER4> > people will use it because they need to

I don't know what I would do without google to spelunk into technical problems. Hasta la Altavista?

<comment><USER5> You might be surprised at how good www.live.com actually is...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GHC 6.12 released Dramatic parallel performance tuning, dynamic linking... - <AUTHOR> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17678

<comment> old-gregg Dynamic linking feature is _huge_. One of the reasons C simply cannot go away is because it's the only fully portable medium for implementing algorithms and generic libraries: everybody loves talking to C libs. (zlib, cairo, libcurl, high-perf drivers for databases and so on)

Dynamic linking allows Haskell to graduate from the ranks of "glue languages" into a truly universal medium to develop libraries in. I just hope that Haskell-generated .so files can automatically initialize their runtimes (is there a Linux version of Windows DllMain?)

</comment><comment><USER2> So, estimated release date for 6.14?

(I kid, I kid. This is great. and dynamic linking is wonderful indeed. old- gregg - it's not too hard to hack it in, I'm doing it in Hubris.)</comment>


Relying too much on e-mail bad for business, study says - <AUTHOR> http://news.illinois.edu/news/10/0616comm.html <comment><USER2> I agree that there's a lot of value in face-to-face interactions. Whenever I meet with clients or partners, I always try to do the meetings in person, because it's easier to reach a desirable outcome that way.

For particularly difficult discussions, such as delivering bad news, face-to- face is the only way to go, IMO.

It's interesting to note that even a distributed company like Automattic, which has gained some fame for having employees all over the globe, realizes the need to meet face-to-face once in a while:

"Probably the biggest disadvantage to being distributed is the lack of social interaction. Online tools help make up for some of this, but most people like to spend some time together to make their work experience more enjoyable. The good news is that there are ways to compensate for this. We took inspiration from the MySQL team and started having in person meetups for the whole company every 6 months."

[http://toni.org/2010/03/08/5-reasons-why-your-company- should...](http://toni.org/2010/03/08/5-reasons-why-your-company-should-be- distributed/)</comment>


Dismaland – Bemusement Park - <AUTHOR> http://dismaland.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> Previously discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10093074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10093074)

</comment><comment><USER3> It should be noted (a lot of people have missed this) that not all the works there are from Banksy himself but rather a large range of artists.

        nearly 60 artists including Banksy are exhibiting work

[http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/aug/21/banksy-d...](http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/aug/21/banksy- dismaland-graffiti-art-market-capitalism-creativity)

<comment><USER4> The piece on the events page[1] is Josh Keyes[2]. Another artist that hasn't done anything new in years. It makes me chuckle when artists that claim to be so anti-corporate practice exactly the same techniques of brand management to inflate their bank accounts.

[1] [http://dismaland.co.uk/events/](http://dismaland.co.uk/events/) [2] [http://www.joshkeyes.net/](http://www.joshkeyes.net/)

PS. I'm not calling them out on hypocrisy, but instead on spending the latter 2/3rds of their careers cashing in as opposed to taking a risk and pushing their work forward.

EDIT: I do not recall much of Josh Keyes' work being anti-corporate in case the wording above appears to sound like I'm saying that. With him is just the typical unoriginal sameness over the last 10 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not that I know many artists, but Banksy shows over and over that he's the best living artist.

His work is funny, poignant, expressive, imaginative, and shows up in the most incredible places, from Gaza to a big installation a couple blocks from my home once.

Sometimes I see articles on ads, privacy, debates between public and private use of spaces, surveillance, and such, and, as fond as I am of clear, precise language, I find Banksy's artistic statements are more clear and meaningful that what I read in mainstream media.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Banksy's now ubiquitous anti-consumerist and anti-authoritarian tropes are fully exhausted in this most recent packaging and Dismaland is, quite literally, art about nothing. Consumerism is bad, Disney is evil, advertising is dishonest — we got it."

[http://www.businessinsider.com/banksys-dismaland-is-bad- and-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/banksys-dismaland-is-bad-and- boring-2015-8#ixzz3jpTFmyxr)

He's getting mocked pretty bad on Tumblr too, which is notable considering how popular pictures of his work have been on there in the past.

<comment><USER7> Well of course BI are mocking it - their audience is the target of his ire.

<comment><USER8> The author's "his overwrought images continue to be rooted in the same, familiar liberal values that people are all too eager to agree with" kind of implies he's going to be anti anything a bit lefty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The small print made me laugh

      The following are strictly prohibited in the Park – spray
      paint, marker pens, knives and legal representatives of the
      Walt Disney Corporation.

(although there is an argument of hypocrisy against their ban on spray paint)

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of this old yarn

If you are affiliated with any government, anti-piracy group or any other related group, or were formally a worker of one you CANNOT enter this Hotline server, and cannot access any of its files. If you enter this server you are not agreeing to these terms and you are violating code 431.322.12 of the Internet Privacy Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1995 and that means that you CANNOT threaten our ISP(s) or any person(s) or company storing these files, and cannot prosecute any person(s) affiliated with this page which includes family, friends or individuals who run or enter this server.

<comment><USER11> The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!

<comment><USER12> "[the] goatse.cx lawyer"

what a title...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I went yesterday.. here's my Tweet review:

[https://twitter.com/jgumbley/status/635895637503025152](https://twitter.com/jgumbley/status/635895637503025152)

Recommend, especially for the Gallery.

My favourite part was most people there were "normal" people and absolutely loved it. I've been to i.e. Damian Hurst / White Cube / Rothko etc. etc. London poseurs everywhere.

Art that connects.

<comment><USER14> >My favourite part was most people there were "normal" people and absolutely loved it.

Why wouldn't they? In your tweet you praise the project as "inclusive" but that is exactly how I would condemn it. Banksy seem to me to be an artist who through iteration has arrived at a near-perfect way of packaging 1960s-inspired rebellion for the summer blockbuster audience. The average summer blockbuster makes you feel exhilarated while you watch it but doesn't have a serious takeaway. For Banksy "exhilarated" is replaced with "clever" and "righteous" but the end result is the equally empty.

There is a wide gap between the poles that are poseur-inviting nihilism of Hurst and Banksy's Upworthy-like quality. I think good art should not stand too close to either of them.

<comment><USER13> By the way there is a whole tent full of Hurst's work at Dismaland.

Perhaps see it for yourself, if you can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Kids Enclosure

Strictly for the little ones – an area that combines soft play and loan shop._

This is fantastic. I wish I were in the UK for its 5 week run.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ticket sales are now available again: [http://dismaland.seetickets.com/tour/dismaland](http://dismaland.seetickets.com/tour/dismaland)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd be there for the music and maybe to see the art if I lived in the area.

Suggest providing good beer, wine, mixed drinks, and food trucks or similar food merchants along with some affordable art and t-shirts, since it is an art festival of sorts.

The logo, similarity of the name, and Cinderella's castle spell trouble with Disney folks. It'd be one thing if it were local, but since it got press, that's just asking for it.

Economist article: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/08/anti- establi...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/08/anti- establishment-art)

CNN style article with video of the inside: [http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/20/arts/banksy-dismaland- art-...](http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/20/arts/banksy-dismaland-art- exhibition/index.html)

Many more photos tweeted with #Dismaland here: [https://twitter.com/hashtag/Dismaland?src=hash](https://twitter.com/hashtag/Dismaland?src=hash)

The castle there looks amazing, and so does some of the other art.

Good luck!

<comment><USER18> > Suggest providing good beer, wine, mixed drinks, and food trucks or similar > food merchants

I think you are missing the point.

<comment><USER17> Allow people to BYOB then? You should have alcohol available at an event like this, if you can. And, if you have alcohol, there must be food.

<comment><USER19> Why must everything these days be about consuming alcohol?

<comment><USER20> These days? The hell you on about? As far as we can tell the order of human inventions went: fire, wheel, beer. Humanity consumes far _less_ alcohol today than in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like a good exhibition - I'd go if I could get over to Weston-Super-Mare easily...I never liked the big hype around Banksy but did like seeing his work when it appeared. And there are other really good artists there too (ones I prefer to Banksy).

PS. Mike Nudelman clearly doesn't get it

</comment><comment><USER22> webhosting dismal too, takes about 2 minutes to load. Hopefully deliberate!

<comment><USER23> The initial online ticket booking was (apparently) deliberately broken for the first few days...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> how much does one have to pay banksy to hear the anti-corporate message?

<comment><USER25> £3

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems a lot of effort for very little in the way of amusement or indeed much else.

<comment><USER27> "Bemusement"</comment></comment>


100-year-old physics problem has been solved - <AUTHOR> https://m.phys.org/news/2017-06-year-old-physics-problem.html <comment><USER2> Apparently the same scientist published the description of these materials 10 years ago in Nature:

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kosmas_Tsakmakidis2/pub...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kosmas_Tsakmakidis2/publication/5843358_Nature_Trapped_Rainbow_Storage_of_Light_in_Metamaterials/links/541054f70cf2df04e75d2438/Nature- Trapped-Rainbow-Storage-of-Light-in-Metamaterials.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I haven't studied both the original link and your link in detail, but at a quick look: They are different things.

Metamaterials usually are periodic combinations that exhibit interesting properties. So-called "photonic bandgap materials" are an example. The paper you linked shows that strange things can happen to the group velocities in these types of materials.

The phys.org link (based on a Science paper [1]) is about a cavity utilizing non-reciprocal materials. Normally systems involving Maxwell's equations are reciprocal; you can switch the input and output and expect the same behavior. For a basic example, if you look through a tube and see me at the other end, then I will be able to see you as well.

In a non-reciprocal system, this property breaks down. Microwave circulators are a good example: A device with three ports A, B, and C can have

energy coming from A going to B,

energy coming from B going to C,

energy coming from C going to A.

This device is handy if you don't want reflected E&M power from your antenna coming back into your generating circuit. It was well known to guys working on radar, for example.

The real miracle in this paper is that no one put it together sooner: Non- reciprocal devices have been around forever, and resonators more so, but that the combination might be useful has not occurred to anyone? Quite amazing. They probably blew all kinds of time researching through old literature to make sure this hasn't already been mentioned by the radar guys in the 40s.

[1] [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6344/1260](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6344/1260)

<comment><USER4> > That was the very centre of his genius - he invented things that anyone > could have thought of, and men who can invent things that anyone could have > thought of are very rare men.

\- Terry Pratchett[1]

1: [https://libquotes.com/terry- pratchett/quote/lbd3a3k](https://libquotes.com/terry-pratchett/quote/lbd3a3k)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ho. Lee. Shit. I'm in the satellite telecoms domain - this is incredible and will have far reaching consequences after a decade. Unfortunate that R&D and hardware lead times are so long in this industry.

<comment><USER6> Could you explain it like I'm 5? How will this have huge far reaching consequences?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" For more than 100 hundred years, these systems were held back by a limitation that was considered to be fundamental ... But that limitation is now a thing of the past."_

We should bear breakthroughs like this in mind every time someone appeals to fundamental limitations of physics (or any other field).

So many times I hear people object that something can't be done because of some fundamental limit. But research like this proves that limits that are considered fundamental sometimes aren't, and we can't know ahead of time which of these limits really are fundamental and which only appear so.

<comment><USER8> > these systems were held back by a limitation that was considered to be > fundamental

This is the key distinction: -proven- fundamental is very different from -considered- fundamental.

Overturning Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would shatter physics as we know it.

Overturning a misconception is far more mundane.

<comment><USER9> How do you ever prove something in an empirical science?

<comment><USER10> There are various levels of how rigorous evidence is. Apparently, the law in question was made based on assumptions about the materials involved, and as someone else pointed out there was a ten year gap between the mathematical explanation and actual implementation, so I guess these materials are quite complex.

Also, this does not invalidate the previous law necessarily; we still use Newton's laws because its assumptions hold under most circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't the time-bandwidth reciprocity fall out of the same math as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? Does this work have implications for HUP "workarounds"?

<comment><USER12> If you read the paper, the answer is yes, but you can work around it by basically breaking the symmetry between the "output" of a system and the "input"[0]. For the output and input, they will satisfy basic fourier uncertainty relations, but independently of each other.

[0] I've scanned the paper a couple of times and it's still a little murky for me. I have other things to do, unfortunately. For a clue, see figure 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "Other potential applications include ... broadband light harvesting and > energy storage, and broadband optical camouflaging ("invisibility > cloaking")."

Obviously these sorts of announcements often have hype in them - and that's fine - but could someone really invent a cloaking device with this advancement?

<comment><USER14> Don't worry, it's a click-bait term for being invisible to low-frequency wavelengths, so not visible light.

The US military has been working on _microwave_ -invisible materials for a while and they've gotten very close. But microwaves have wavelengths on the order of a few cm (10^-2), meanwhile visible light is on ther order of 100's on nm (10^-7).

As the wavelength gets shorter it gets much harder to make "negative- refractive-index" materials - the material that enables to bend light around an object.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting - reminds me of superconductors. Some quantity which normally cannot be escaped (ie, everything has some amount of resistance, or the Q factor is a finite number) that under certain special conditions can actually hit its singularity. Special conditions which necessitate exotic new theory.

Also, call me cynical but it seems like the natural application is pulsed laser weapons. Now instead of spending infinity dollars on a portable megawatt laser that can gimbal to attack a target, you have a kilowatt laser that charges a waveguide until it has equivalent energy to the megawatt laser and then discharges it as necessary.

<comment><USER16> This type of laser already exists, they're called solid state lasers. [1].

(Note that these lasers are distinct from semiconductor lasers, which are more colloquially called "diode lasers".)

EDIT: Q-switched laser may be closer to this. [2]

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid- state_laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_laser)

2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-switching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-switching)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "The reported breakthrough is completely fundamental —we're giving > researchers a new tool. And the number of applications is limited only by > one's imagination," sums up Tsakmakidis.

I like the idea of having a new tool available, but don't know why everything has to be sooo revolutionary and unlimited.

<comment><USER18> Yeah. You can tell the article writer isn't a scientist when they say "the number of potential applications is close to infinite".

<comment><USER10> > And the number of applications is limited only by one's imagination," sums > up Tsakmakidis.

That's the scientist behind the publication

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> non-mobile link: [https://phys.org/news/2017-06-year-old-physics- problem.html](https://phys.org/news/2017-06-year-old-physics-problem.html)</comment>


Bootstrap 3 released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2013/08/19/bootstrap-3-released/ <comment><USER2> > _" With v3, we've gone flat. Don't call it a trend—it's all about > customization, folks."_

I hope everyone catches that part of the post. It's very important, I think, based on the previous HN thread comments.

I've been quite surprised at how many people are in an uproar about v3 being flat. People have been saying things like "it's a dumb trend", "horrible UX", "so ugly", etc. For a skeleton starter template like this, flat is good. Having the design flat encourages you to build on it or theme it to your OWN style so all of the sites using Bootstrap don't end up looking the same (like they have in past versions). It was also annoying in past versions when you had to declare no gradients, or reverse engineer things to lose the "default theme". Making it flat now allows you to build up, where past versions made you go backwards first, then build the theme the way you wanted. I hope more people realize that rational now they have specifically called it out.

With that said, well done everyone that helped on the project! Great work! :)

<comment><USER3> > Having the design flat encourages you to build on it or theme it to your OWN > style so all of the sites using Bootstrap don't end up looking the same

I don't want to build on it. My customers don't care that it looks like other sites, they just want something that looks professional and is easy to use, something which Bootstrap 2 does _way_ better than I could do alone, and for which I am eternally grateful.

My customers range from a little to _really_ non technical, so I think that "making them think" about what might be a button and what might be a label is a regression.

So if I want to upgrade, it's not just "encouragement" to customize, it's a necessity, and I consider it added work since I did not have to do it with the previous version of Bootstrap.

Hopefully, the theme mentioned in the article will suit my needs.

> With that said, well done everyone that helped on the project! Great work! > :)

I can agree with that! I am very thankful for Bootstrap.

<comment><USER2> I completely understand what you are saying, and they have already solved your problem. You can still easily grab the V2 theme to lay on top of V3 to generate all those pre-done styles. The beauty is that it's no longer forced in V3 for people that do want to build up, like it was in V2. It's a win-win! ;)

As tsurantino said in another comment, see here: [http://getbootstrap.com/examples/theme/](http://getbootstrap.com/examples/theme/)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's probably good enough, although it still seems kind of flat-ish:

[http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/base- css.html#buttons](http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/base-css.html#buttons) compared to [http://getbootstrap.com/examples/theme/](http://getbootstrap.com/examples/theme/)

It was kind of them to make the extra effort though, for those of us who are happier with the older look and feel. Just a bit more like actual _buttons_ , and it'd be perfect.

<comment><USER4> The button gradients are toned down a little, but they're still there. It's still closer to the v2 style than it is to flat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can't actually see all the left-menu items on [http://getbootstrap.com/components/](http://getbootstrap.com/components/) on a 13inch screen.

<comment><USER6> I can't see all of them on a 1080p screen at 125% zoom, either.

<comment><USER7> If you scroll to the bottom of the page the sidebar will eventually scroll down and show them. Still an error though, and the irony, given the context, makes it a bit comical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Edit: Oh. I have just found out by another HN post that I did not understand the new grid system... Here is a link that explains it very well: [http://www.helloerik.com/bootstrap-3-grid- introduction](http://www.helloerik.com/bootstrap-3-grid-introduction)

I have used the release candidates for my own personal website and it has been a pretty good experience. However I liked the result I got with Bootstrap 2 more.

To say it upfront: I am not a web developer. I am doing something completely different professionally. But maybe that makes my experience with Bootstrap kinda interesting… :)

I had the main problem with the mobile first grid system. It changed quite a lot when compared to Bootstrap 2. I made a product page for my new app and I wanted to show thumbnails. When using the built in thumbnail class wierd things happen when you resize the window: The actual size of the thumbnail changes and it gets distorted as a result.

Also the new grid system has the effect - at least in my case - that when resizing the window, the overall width of the columns that contain my text expand even though I made the window smaller. And then when I make the window even smaller the columns containing my text are becoming less wide. I think this is because of the fluid layout.

Personally I do not like fluid websites at all. Maybe I should not have used bootstrap then but I had some experience with it… What I liked about the non fluid grid system in Bootstrap 2 was that your website looked more or less the same on desktop and on mobile. On mobile the first thing you would see is a scaled down version of your website with the structure in tact. If you wanted to see the details you would have to zoom in. Now Bootstrap tries to be smart and transforms columns to rows… This is obviously good if you want a fluid website.

When I had to do it again I would not use bootstrap again. Instead I would look for something that has a grid system like boostrap 2.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a question: what's the difference between this icon font, and font awesome, which for a time looked to be the 'go to' way of doing icons? I have no horse in that race, and they both look good to me.

<comment><USER9> I just tried to swap in the new font-based glyphicon icons over the top of the old image based ones.

First of all it's not a clean swap, because the class name structure has changed. Secondly, the font glyphs seem to have totally random positioning, so depending on how you use them you'll need to tweak the css for each one (or certainly groups of them) so they align properly with the text/button/whatever.

I reverted, and dropped in Font Awesome. It was as simple as changing one line of css if you use the CDN, done. No tweaking required, and there's load more to choose from.

<comment><USER10> I also have found Font Awesome to be an easy and comprehensive solution (mmmm that huge icon selection, dang!). I honestly don't understand, why hasn't FA been folded into Bootstrap? Is it some licensing thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No submenus is kind of a bummer for applications. Sometimes I work on traditional stuff with an audience that expects this kind of navigation.

I still really appreciate it, though. If it turns out I really need them, I'd rather start with Bootstrap than have to start from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER12> Honestly this is the biggest point in Bootstrap 3 :

> box-sizing: border-box

I never understood why they didn't use it.

<comment><USER13> Bootstrap 3 paints 2x as fast compared to Bootstrap 2.3.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1IqzeA3XXg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1IqzeA3XXg)

<comment><USER14> You're right, in my personal testing it does appear to be about 2x faster.

The big perf wins:

* Fewer box shadows

* Fewer gradients

* Fewer semitransparent borders (a big performance problem, especially in chrome - I've seen > 10x performance slowdowns when using rgba borders & border-radius: 0 - see Chrome's tracker [1])

* Simpler rules (fewer styles to cascade)

1\. [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=170882](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=170882)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm just glad they kept table.table and label.label

The department of redundancy department can sleep peacefully tonight.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been working with the release candidates for a while for my Shopify-based Bootstrap theme ([http://bootstrapforshopify.com/](http://bootstrapforshopify.com/)), and while it's been a bit of a tough ride sometimes (with pretty significant changes from release to release), I'm really impressed with what v3 brings to the table.

Hopefully, the way the new styles are laid out will encourage more people to treat Bootstrap as a starting point rather than the end game for layout and styling (although it's a pretty good starting point in of itself).

Edit: And, of course, massive thanks to Mark and Jacob (plus the ever- increasing community) for all of the work they've put in over the last two years :).

<comment><USER17> Yeah, sorry about those changes in the RCs. Really we used the wrong label and are sorry about that. All in all though, everything with those pre-releases worked out really well. Just a naming thing :).

And thank you! <3

<comment><USER16> Apologies not necessary :).

<comment><USER18> I appreciate the apology. I updated a site on the assumption that RC1 was a release candidate and not a work in progress. Now I need to update the site again. Ugh.

<comment><USER19> Release candidates are expected to have bugs!

I generally prefer using Major.minor.1 or Major.minor.2 of a new version (as many more bugs get fixed in those versions, after the stable version is used in production environment) or the last major version with all bug fixes.

<comment><USER18> RC1 to RC2 was much more than a bug fix release! [http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2013/08/13/bootstrap-3-rc2/](http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2013/08/13/bootstrap-3-rc2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Everything in Bootstrap gets box-sizing: border-box

Why w3c didn't make it default is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER21> Bootswatch is in the process of updating its themes to Bootstrap 3 too:

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

<comment><USER22> I've never heard of bootswatch. I could see many people using this. One thing bothers me on your page though. The header text is fixed with no background so it ends up jumbled with the other text: [http://cl.ly/image/3D133Y1E1V2P](http://cl.ly/image/3D133Y1E1V2P)

fyi I'm using chrome28 on osx 10.8.4

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Now I'm waiting on a SCSS port of it.

<comment><USER24> If you are looking for SASS and Rails, this port works great. [https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass](https://github.com/thomas- mcdonald/bootstrap-sass)

<comment><USER17> Yup, and we'll be working with these folks make this more official shortly. Stay tuned!

<comment><USER25> That's great, there are a couple of sass ports for 2 and it was time consuming evaluating them so an officially blessed port would be great.

For those of us integrating it with web app where we use semantic class names that we want to map to template styles, it would help if there were sass versions that create no concrete styles, just mixins and placeholder styles, so that we can extend our classes with bootstrap ones without inheriting styles on elements where we don't want the bootstrap style. e.g. I wanted the .nav-tabs style but already had my own .nav styling.

Do you have any plans to make it possible to extend from bootstrap in this way?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Get it from a fast CDN [http://www.jsdelivr.com/#!bootstrap](http://www.jsdelivr.com/#!bootstrap)

<comment><USER27> I prefer [http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/](http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I checked this out last night and noticed a bug in the nav bar in the justified menu example (in Chrome, when you resize to sm and back to lrg, two of the menu items seem to drop down and unstyle themselves). If the issue is still up by the time I get to a computer, I'll submit an issue on Github.

</comment><comment><USER29> Awesome. Does this mean no more breaking changes for vn 3? It's been a mad game of catch up so far, every time I update I have to spend some time going through and updating the html to use slightly changed class names.

</comment><comment><USER30> Odd error on Safari 6.0.5 here. Where you should have three column layouts in the example page you get a single column list type layout. (Not a designer.) I've disabled both adblock and clicktoflash plugins.

</comment><comment><USER31> Opening the mobile menu still lags a lot on my phone (Galaxy S3, stock browser). Why don't they use CSS animations for it instead? I was really hoping it would have been fixed in v3. Love the rest though.

<comment><USER32> No issues here both on stock browser and Chrome Beta (Nexus 4). Do you mean the initial delay or rendering jitter?

<comment><USER31> Rendering jitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Looks quite nice - I really like the new theme, as it allows you to go for a gradient look but appears much less intrusive than Bootstrap 2's theme, in addition to being optional.

Better documentation is also a huge plus.

</comment><comment><USER34> Checkout roostrap too, one of the first Java web frameworks to support the new Bootstrap 3

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6241294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6241294)

</comment><comment><USER35> FWIW, migrating from a RC downloaded 2 days ago to this final release broke some stuff, most notably related to glyphicons CSS - so if you plan on upgrading, just be aware that it might not be seamless.

<comment><USER36> I have found that `btn-large` changed to `btn-lg` during the release from RC to today. So definitely take a look at this for larger projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'd like to see a collapse menu come from the left or right incorporated into Bootstrap. Like the one at [http://purecss.io/](http://purecss.io/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Glad to see that Mark put the theme information is right on top :). Hopefully this will allay criticism from the "why is it flat" developers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Last time the RC was posted everyone was saying it was a beta and not an RC. So either it was ready for release or they just released a beta.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does Bootstrap now play nice with jQuery UI?

</comment><comment><USER40> Am i the only one who finds that far too many pages look alike thanks to bootstrap and co?

</comment><comment><USER41> Nice work bootstrap team! I really like how mobile friendly this version of bootstrap is!

</comment><comment><USER42> wasn't the easiest upgrade from 2 to 3 on one site of mine...

<comment><USER43> yup me to.. they changed the css a lot.. have to check one by one.. :(.. But output outsome. Rc1 ->rc2 -> 3.0.. my menu 3 drill down work again.Rc2 not work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm glad they decided to keep glyphicons properly integrated.

</comment><comment><USER45> Do you have a list of the differences between RC2 and this?

</comment><comment><USER46> odd bug- i just switched from rc 2 to the official release- now the page shifts slightly left when modals open, and back when they close. What is going on?

</comment><comment><USER47> Love the vids!

</comment><comment><USER48> Awesome!

Thanks to all contributors for the hard work!

</comment><comment><USER49> Well I'm glad I finished a customization of the v2 carousel last night. Will this thing break if I update? I'm betting yes.

</comment><comment><USER50> On the grids part, basically added what foundation already had

</comment><comment><USER51> "Yo Bootstrap, I'm really happy for you, I'll let you finish, but Foundation has one of the best frameworks of all time. One of the best frameworks of all time!" ;-)

<comment><USER52> I found myself backing out of using Foundation after downloading their latest version and trying to use a couple of their javascript components. Lots of bugs and generally fugly workarounds needed for the most basic things.

I just removed it, and went back to Bootstrap.

<comment><USER53> Except Bootstrap 2.x's JS was terribly basic and didn't play well with single page apps. I haven't tried v3 yet so I don't know if it has improved.

<comment><USER52> I wouldn't know about that; I've never built a single page app.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs - <AUTHOR> https://www.youdontneedwp.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't know why this is attracting so much hate here. It's a novel and useful idea. Sure, you're relying on Docs, but that's an established, mainline Google service which makes them money through their enterprise work stack (so I doubt it'll get Google Reader'd). If you were using Google's cloud, nobody in the comments would know or care. Sometimes HN is just negative for the sake of being negative.

I think this is a great solution for anyone who wants to throw some articles online without having to muck about with frameworks or the minutiae of managing a blog. Good work, OP!

<comment><USER3> > I think this is a great solution for anyone who wants to throw some articles > online without having to muck about with frameworks or the minutiae of > managing a blog.

Your comment might be right, but this sentence is puzzling. How does this require less minutiae than, say, Medium or tumblr?

<comment><USER2> (As good as) No login (if you're logged into Google)

Docs UI -- Editing documents in a proper word processor is better than most blogging platforms

This lets you make a blog of existing docs

It's not a drop-in replacement for everything, but it's novel and makes sense as an option for a lot of people

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

In my opinion, platforms like WordPress can feel bloated or be intimidating to new users.

For this reason, I wanted to build a blogging platform on top of Google Docs.

I actually run my own blog as a side project, and I use GDocs religiously because of its excellent collaboration and sharing features. When I'm collaborating with dozens of writers, it's convenient to be able to use a product that everyone is familiar with.

Another cool thing, I built and launched this project in 24 hours and streamed the whole thing on Twitch ([https://www.twitch.tv/videos/313288148](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/313288148)). I started with just an idea, and streamed the entire process to launch and had a few thousands viewers tune in.

Excited to get your feedback.

Pat

<comment><USER4> It looks like good fun, but I'll be honest I find the name very insulting.

I've had a wordpress website for 8 years. Is this going to work in 8 years? 6 months?

<comment><USER5> The name is inspired from You Don't Need jQuery, You don't Need MomentJS and so on.

<comment><USER6> Context context, always good to add context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You don't need Google Docs either. Seems like a terrible decision since Google is known for randomly shutting down services and updating their terms of use at any point. It's a nice proof of concept but I'd stick with WordPress or a static site generator

<comment><USER8> Most static site generators require authors to learn something like Markdown in order to publish, which is a much bigger hurdle for non-technical people than technical people generally appreciate. Google Docs at least provides a WYSIWYG-ish interface many people will already be familiar with, and those that aren't won't find as forbidding.

<comment><USER9> I never thought I would hear someone call markdown a hurdle to adoption. Maybe I'm more semantically minded, but I have yet to find a markup syntax easier to figure out than markdown, including the rich text editors in Google Docs.

<comment><USER8> It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that _non-technical people see these things completely differently than technical people do._ Seen through the eyes of technical people like your average HN reader, Markdown is simple and lightweight. Seen through the eyes of a non-technical person, marking up text in any format (not just Markdown) looks indistinguishable from _writing code_ , which is something they believe deep down is way over their heads. The pushback you will get from them if you try to force them to do it anyway is typically epic. They will fight against it every step of the way.

It's not _impossible_ to get regular people to mark up text; WordPerfect did so very effectively for many years. But it's worth remembering that (1) that was in the 1980s, when people put up with having to learn things they didn't want to because the technology wasn't advanced enough to offer them an alternative, and (2) eventually the technology _did_ advance, and Microsoft Word came along with its WYSIWYG interface and promptly put WordPerfect into a hole in the desert.

It's also not impossible to write a static CMS that provides a normie-friendly WYSIWYG interface, rather than having everything revolve around editing text files. That's what Movable Type ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type)) was, for instance, a set of Perl scripts that provided a friendly WYSIWYG interface over content stored in a database, and then ground out static pages from that content whenever it changed. But modern SSGs are pitched to developers first and foremost, so they all revolve around stuff like Markdown and Git that are about as approachable to non-technical people as garlic is to Dracula.

<comment><AUTHOR> This.

For my blog that I mentioned in my top comment, I use Google Docs because I'm working with people that usually don't know Markdown (I'm interviewing e-commerce business owners).

I need it to be as easy as possible for them to get the written interview done. From my experience, a Google doc is the easiest way to do this, and it allows for _very familiar_ features when I ask them for edits or provide feedback in-document.

Basically, I'm trying to make as little friction as possible to getting the document complete.

This is just my experience.

<comment><USER10> There are free/libre simple markdown editors[0] available that have the buttons and keybindings more similar to Word. Additionally, collaborative editors like Etherpad[1] don't use markdown either (and btw, neither does WP, of course) and will be entirely familiar to non-technical people.

> Basically, I'm trying to make as little friction as possible to getting the > document complete.

I can see how it may be more frictionless for you to use Google Docs, and how this may be less work for you than for example installing and running your own Etherpad. But I think it's too grand a statement to say that "You Don't Need Wordpress" because people that don't want to give up their online freedom still do.

Maybe that's what's upsetting people about this project, it's grandiose title that's dismissing another successful free blogging platform? While I fell kinda bad about defending anything PHP, WordPress does have a lot of extensions and your solution couldn't replace WooCommerce or WPForms.

[0]: [https://simplemde.com](https://simplemde.com) [1]: [https://etherpad.net](https://etherpad.net)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> WordPress isn't really targeted at single-user blogs for technical people... it's targeted at an environment where you can have multiple people writing blog posts and doing design without being programmers or mucking with the server. And it fits that need very well.

<comment><USER12> In a comment from the author[0], he mentions that one of the reasons for making the product was because he likes the collaboration features of Google Docs.

[0]:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18077455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18077455)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I maintain a blog built on static tools since 2009, which is older than most people's blogs I see on Hacker News: [https://alexn.org](https://alexn.org)

Hosting is free if you host it on GitHub Pages. I have my own VPS on DigitalOcean. Maintenance of that node is insignificant though, as the machine auto-updates itself. And you don't need to do it if you're on GitHub or GitLab Pages or other similar services.

The initial cost was a little high, setting it up and all. But now that cost is virtually zero.

And guess what ... it's mine, my blog, my website, on my own domain. It's part of my identity, it's the link I place in email signatures. It's my creation, just like my work or open source contributions.

In 2005 when my career started I was also using a blogging service. Until my membership was revoked for some reason and I lost articles in which I poured my soul in. Never again.

Outsourcing your blog to others is ... foolish. And not having a blog, as a computer scientist, is equally foolish.

So setup a static blog with a tool like [https://jekyllrb.com](https://jekyllrb.com). The initial setup smells like yak shaving, however you'll get over it and you won't regret the investment.

<comment><USER14> Now what if my 55 years old mother want to create a blog on her own ?

<comment><USER15> It's easy: she just needs to become a computer scientist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Or you could use the new Google Sites which has a lot of the same features and benefits.

[https://sites.google.com/](https://sites.google.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow I've never seen that. Pretty cool.

After building this project I was thinking about a similar project where you could build a straight up website with Google Docs. Since Google's HTML export is pretty sophisticated (it also converts charts/shapes/etc) to HTML, it could work!

Almost a throwback to that Microsoft product? Can't remember the name..

<comment><USER17> FrontPage! Good memories...

<comment><USER18> We were pretty impressed with ourselves when we replaced all of our corporate intranet sites created in FrontPage and Site Server with SharePoint.

Not really sure if justice was served at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Or, if you can afford $20 per year, there's this [https://blot.im](https://blot.im) which lets you dump stuff in a Dropbox folder to become blog posts. -

</comment><comment><USER20> This reminded me of [https://www.sheet2site.com/](https://www.sheet2site.com/) , which lets you make a website using a Google spreadsheet. I think they're nifty, and although I haven't had a personal use case for them, I could see building a prototype with them.

</comment><comment><USER21> I want to own my own content, servers, domains, etc... it's not even about Google specifically being evil—we gotta stop outsourcing stuff to people providing it to us for "free."

<comment><USER22> For me, it's all about knowing, and owning the stack.

If something breaks, I _know_ its my fault, and using the knowledge gained by setting it up, I should have a pretty good idea where to start.

Never stop learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Ensure that your users never get any privacy at all! Why install Google analytics on your WP blog when you can just give the entire blog to Google in the first place!"

</comment><comment><USER24> I did something similar back in 2013-2014 for the initial Makers UPV blog[1], which was much later migrated to Ghost.

The underlying technology we used is drive-db[2], a library I made to use a spreadsheet as the database. Then just used an obscure-ish Google docs API to retrieve each article content. When you wanted to publish an article, you had to create the doc, publish to the web and copy the link to the spreadsheet.

This looks like a very well put together product of the hacky solution I did back in the day, so kudos!

Edit: the best feature of this is that several people can collaborate in real time on an article! Something that Wordpress doesn't have and was used a lot for us in the beginning.

[1] [https://makersupv.com/](https://makersupv.com/)

[2] [https://github.com/FranciscoP/drive- db](https://github.com/FranciscoP/drive-db)

</comment><comment><USER25> Please, if you are going to use this setup a new google account. The permissions that this requires is crazy.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was super excited by this because I do most of my writing in Google docs. But then I realized how much other information is in my Google docs! What are the privacy implications of signing up? If this project happened to be taken over by an evil villian, could they snoop my docs?

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been using same idea for years now

Using Spreadsheets instead of Docs, and it's not a product per-say, more like a go-to setup for medium size websites

Glad to see more people are using the technologies freely available instead of using wordpress for every small project

</comment><comment><USER28> This looks like a great idea since Docs is both a good editor and a good way to collaborate. However I don't want to give access to my whole Drive to an unknown product, it would be good if it could just get access to one directory or the like.

<comment><USER29> Same, wanted to play around with this but I won't risk it

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Enjoyed watching the idea-to-launch process on Twitter and Twitch. Nice work, Pat!

<comment><USER10> It got too a bit too meta for me after watching 10 minutes screencast of the author posting about this on Reddit. Perhaps I am not the target audience for Twitch-style videos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah man sorry that was just the beginning to get the ball rolling on the stream.

There's a recording on Twitch if you wanna skim through it (I linked to it in my top comment). Cheers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The name seems weird. There's tons of blogging systems that aren't Wordpress, presumably your product is interesting for many of their users too, while not being interesting for many Wordpress users due to not matching Wordpress' capabilities.

At least your landing page actually talks about what makes your thing good, I've seen worse examples of promotion which then also spend a large percentage of their space talking about their competitors.

</comment><comment><USER32> Hmm, I can't hit the site in my browser, but curl is grabbing it just fine.

However I am beginning to feel that the user experience might not be exactly equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think this is pretty cool. I know more than one person who loves google docs and hates wordpress whom I will be forwarding this to.

</comment><comment><USER34> Great idea. But how to change the template or add more data like custom fields? I've been using Meta Box plugin ([https://metabox.io](https://metabox.io)) for custom fields and can't live without it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why do I have to sign up using my Google Account, and give you permissions to host my content in Google Docs in my Google Drive? And where is it Open Source? How can I use it without singing up?

I looked for this information and could not find it. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER36> I can actually see that being helpful for non-technical people

</comment><comment><USER37> Pretty cool. I wonder if Google will end up adding this in as a full fledged feature at some point.

</comment><comment><USER38> Super cool. Custom fields though?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean custom fields?

<comment><USER39> wordpress has stuff like custom fields: [https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/](https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/), allowing you to create more structured cateogories and taxonomies which can then be used for filtering and stuff. I think that's what they mean

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Nice - so are there any actual blogs built on this that I can take a look at?

</comment><comment><USER41> How hard is it to just create a simple html file and throw som CSS on it ?

<comment><USER2> For most people, pretty hard. This comment reminds me of the comments left when Dropbox first shipped saying stuff like "This won't sell, people who want this service will just use rsync and rent a VPS"

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> But it's Google and right now we're mad at them.

The most pleasurable set-up I do, for work and personal, is have a DO droplet hosting a bare-boned server, where static pages are served up, mostly text - because content is King, right?

<comment><USER43> Very mad. Also, I can't find anything easier to publish content than this aside from Medium.</comment></comment>