Less guns = more violence: Harvard Study - <AUTHOR> http://lifesciencephdadventures.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/harvard-gun-study-less-guns-results-in-more-violence/ <comment><USER2> Having skimmed the paper over, I'd like to quote this parapgraph, running from end of page 16 and rolling over to page 17.

 _Once again, we are not arguing that the data in Table 2 shows that gun control _causes_ nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring nations that permit handgun ownership. Rather, we assert a political causation for the observed correlation that nations with stringent gun controls tend to have much higher murder rates than nations that allow guns. The political causation is that nations which have violence problems tend to adopt severe gun controls, but these do not reduce violence, which is determined by basic socio‐cultural and economic factors._

Stringent gun control policies tend to appear in nations and/or regions where violence is _already_ a problem. This study merely underlines the futility of any single tunnel-visioned policy - people who are willing to commit murder, are also willing to expend effort to find any weapon(s) to allow them to proceed in their endeavours.

Here in Finland, we have quite a few weapons, but they are rarely used in violent crimes. This nation tends to favour bladed weapons in their homicides: knives, axes and other things that are easy to pick up and use in drunken anger.

<comment><USER3> At least with knives and axes you have some chance to run away.

<comment><USER4> And it's hard to stab 70 people ..

<comment><USER5> The #1 weapon of mass murderers, despite what the media would have you believe, is fire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Remove just four cities from US homicide rates and the USA drops from one of the highest on the per-capita murder list to one of the lowest. Interestingly, those cities also have the highest level of gun control.

<comment><USER7> I don't have the numbers on hand, but I've tested that claim in the past, and have to say that it isn't true.

Without knowing which 4 cities you were citing, let's assume that we're talking about 4 Chicagos (the national worst), whose homicide tally for last year was 500 (435 gun-based), that means we could remove as much as 2,000 from the intentional homicide rate, which doesn't move us substantially along the scale, and certainly doesn't put is within even a couple dozen of the bottom of the list.

If we refine the parameters even to be more optimistic, and limit it from first-world countries with similar domestic output, it still doesn't push us substantially down the list to consider us even remotely "one of the lowest".

Of note, perhaps, is that I am a civil rights supporter, and I believe that the second amendment grants us the right to keep and bear arms without infringement. Regardless, I tried for a few days to make that claim reconcile with reality, and couldn't.

If anybody knows of the criteria chosen, I'd gladly re-do the numbers, but I feel it would have to stack the deck pretty deliberately to get even close to that outcome in actuality.

<comment><USER6> The extent of the jurisdiction may be a squishy factor. The "greater metropolitan area" may extend well beyond the strictly-speaking city limits.

<comment><USER7> Very fine point. I don't know that I've ever looked at data that represented crime in "a given city" and "surrounding areas".

Might indeed be the tipping point. Thanks!

<comment><USER8> Indeed. In the case I'm most familiar with, a whole lot of people decamped from impossible D.C. to Prince George's county, Maryland.

Now, to someone who lived in Arlington, Virginia for a dozen years the crime in PG was awful. To someone living in D.C. I strongly suspect PG was not bad at all, and being allowed to own a firearm in your house made I'm sure a significant difference.

Or take Boston, which the WASPs kept small after the Irish took over the city; without looking in more detail, the top level Wikipedia page indicates annexations stopped after 1874 with one non-WASP exception ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Park,_Boston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Park,_Boston)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Less guns = more violence: Harvard Study

"Less guns"? No one at Harvard would dare write such an ungrammatical headline -- this had to be the work of the submitter. And it is.

[http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer- vs-l...](http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-less/)

<comment><USER6> The wording is probably influenced by the title of the popular book "More Guns, Less Crime".

<comment><USER9> Yes, and ironically enough, that's grammatical, because crime is a continuous quantity. Oh, well, I guess it's all a bit arcane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really hate random people taking an article and twisting it for there own link bait. No where in this study does it say that "less guns" equals "more violence". All it says is that areas with high violence (irregardless of guns, this also does not take into account the % of those murders that happen due to guns) have high gun control.

This article also does not take into account areas in Africa, and the Middle East and instead focuses on Europe, which is greatly swayed due to the high level of murders in Russia.

This article should be called "In Europe More Guns != More Violence".

</comment><comment><USER11> Here is a thought experiment:

You are someone who is considering committing a crime. Let's say a robbery of a convenience store. You already own a gun. It doesn't matter how you acquired your gun, you already have it. You now have the choice of where to commit your crime. You can commit that crime in an area where it is illegal to own a firearm, and your victim will very likely not be able to defend himself, or you can commit that crime in an area where your victim can legitimately own a crime, and may shoot you if you try to rob him. Where do you choose to commit your crime?

<comment><USER12> How plausible is it that enough people cross state or country borders in order to rob convenience stores to make a difference in the measured violent crime rates?

<comment><USER6> Correcting your question to replace "state or country" with "jurisdiction", considering the extreme variance of gun laws within the USA, the answer is it _does_ make a difference.

There is growing evidence that criminals DO, at least to a meaningful degree (hey, they're criminals - most are stupid), choose their targets based on odds of the would-be victim fighting back. Of late and in particular, several mass murders have occurred in "gun-free zones" when more convenient/suitable (to the killer) venues existed but allowed civilian weapon carry.

Parallel answer to your question is that the measured violent crime rates you reference are too broad, aggregating a few small high-violence areas with broad low-violence zones, creating misguided statistics.

<comment><USER8> ALL the notorious recent mass murders except for the Arizona Congresswoman shooting happened in gun free zones. If the people right there hadn't restrained the shooter he would likely have been stopped by an armed citizen who showed up moments later (while the restraining was still an act in progress).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "With increased firearm regulations you find an increase in violent crime."

Is there some control for the possibility that those areas enacted firearm regulations due to already having a lot of violent crime?

Edit: It is addressed in the linked to document:

"But the more plausible explanation for many nations having widespread gun ownership with low violence is that these nations never had high murder and violence rates and so never had occasion to enact severe anti‐gun laws. On the other hand, in nations that have ex‐perienced high and rising violent crime rates, the legislative reaction has generally been to enact increasingly severe antigun laws" \- (Bottom of Pg. 672)

</comment><comment><USER14> Should be obvious. Violent areas need to create more laws to control the violence. Peaceful areas don't need to tell their citizens not to have guns.

See also [http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-03-03/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-03-03/)

<comment><USER6> The point is those additional laws _don 't_ control the violence. Good/law- abiding/upstanding armed citizens, however, do.

<comment><USER15> I'd love to see a citation for that.

Maybe its just the sad fact that bad news tends to travel more widely but I have yet to hear (on UK news) of a situation were an honest law abiding citizen has stopped a tragedy. I realize that their very intervention may have stopped a tragedy, making it not news worthy but I'm sure there should be more instances to justify that argument.

<comment><USER16> Well in the UK law-abiding citizens can't arm themselves so you'll never hear that story. The law in the UK even goes so far as to prohibit citizens from carrying an 'offensive weapon' without a good reason.

So if you happened to be walking down the street with a knife and you were not a chef on the way to work, you could be arrested.

<comment><USER8> Even using "more force" than the assailant is illegal. Even if both are examples of deadly force, e.g gun v. knife. Done by the courts in the '50s, the Parliament in the '60s, so even the habits of self-defense are a distant memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Removing bullets from people causes violent crime.

Look, we can statistically show that everywhere someone has tried to do something about people getting injured with guns, there is more violent gun crime!

We must stop these surgeons! Clearly, by trying to help, they're causing the problem!

</sarcasm> <logicalFallacyReference name="post hoc ergo propter hoc" />

<comment><USER18> Don't assume that everyone, especially Harvard researchers, are as ignorant of statistics, correlation and causation as you appear to be. Their intention and conclusion is clear in the paper. They aren't making any bold, ridiculous claims.

<comment><USER17> First, "as you appear to be." Where did that come from? Do you have any basis for that thought, or do you just enjoy typing angry words that sound good to you?

Second, the Hacker News article headline is, "Less guns = more violence." That is an absolute declaration of causation.

The linked article makes this assertion without any backing:

 _And enacting legislation without proper evidence supporting that it will have the desired effects can actually result in, as these studies show, the complete opposite._

The study does not show that. In fact:

 _we are not arguing that the data in Table 2 shows that gun control _causes_ nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring nations that permit handgun ownership._

As close as they get in the report:

 _these [laws] do not reduce violence,_

While the linked article claims that they _increase_ violence.

TL;DR: The linked article makes false claims about what the report says, and the Hacker News article headline is just as bad or worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Its not a "Harvard study", its a study by people with no affiliation with Harvard published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Polic, which isn't a scientific journal but a Harvard Law student-run publication that bills itself as "The nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship."

Its also not a structured analysis (or meta-analysis), but a polemic with footnotes.

</comment><comment><USER20> Note the title of the article in the link has changed (after a comment there) to "more gun regulation correlates to more violence", which is quite a bit different from less guns correlate to more violence (the current title here).

<comment><USER9> Yes -- it's grammatically correct, and this title isn't.

<comment><USER20> Well, the tacit assumption that "more gun control" means "fewer guns" is a more substantive problem. I think other "Harvard studies" (Hemenway) show, in fact, that fewer guns correlate with LESS homicide. [http://nyti.ms/142rOJe](http://nyti.ms/142rOJe)

<comment><USER9> Shifting topics away from grammar for a moment, it's unfortunate that these issues can't really be studied scientifically. The result is that people can take the existing data and twist it to suit any conclusion.

Most European countries have fewer guns or no guns, and much lower levels of violence. But then, they're different people with different values -- the role of guns in their societies might be an effect, not a cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What makes the title more absurd than usual (regardless of if it's been edited or not) is that the final paragraph of the post emphasizes that complex systems of society can't be boiled down to simplistic relationships. Such as "less guns == more violence" or vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER22> 'Diverse society will fail' \--Robert Putnam.

[http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/)

</comment><comment><USER23> And correlation is still causation!

<comment><USER14> In this case, it is causation. Just not in the direction the gun advocates would like to think. Gun violence causes gun control laws, not the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Gee,I hope there is no bias. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute)

</comment><comment><USER25> You can't ban stupid people by law. Or there isn't one that succeed yet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like they are cherrypicking data to prove their pet theory. A couple of points:

\- Legally held guns in England are generally owned by farmers, collectors and hunters. Those people predominantly live in rural areas, where crime is low. High rates of homicide generally occur in cities using illegal guns. So naturally you will see a negative correlation between LEGAL guns and violence. However it isn't the gun control legislation that is causing the increase in violence (LOL). In fact if you allowed teenagers in the shitty housing estates to legally own guns, I suspect you'd have a lot more homicides.

\- Compare Canada to the USA. We have 1/3 of the legally held guns you have, and about 1/3rd of the homicide rate.

<comment><USER16> The Harvard study unequivocally does not say that gun control legislation causes the increased violence, nor does the linked blog post.

The Harvard study is simply stating that murder rates are not appreciably affected by gun control legislation, and that the big drivers of violence are socioeconomic.

<comment><USER19> > The Harvard study

Contrary to the headline (here and of the blog post), there is no Harvard study involved. If you can call the paper a study (which is, I think, somewhat dubious -- that implies a structured analysis or meta-analysis, which this is not) by two non-Harvard-affiliated scholars (one of which is affiliated with a right-wing think tank) published a student-run publication out of Harvard that bills itself as "the nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship."</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper - <AUTHOR> https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ <comment><USER2> Wow. I thought this would just be gimmicky, but I kind of... almost actually like it better than the main HN page.

Having text snippets from the first paragraph, and an image, give me _waaay_ more information as to whether something's interesting enough to click. This is _really, really_ nice.

A bunch of random thoughts, hopefully it's useful feedback:

\- I don't care about it looking like a "paper", but I love the grid view with image+blurb. So if you could make the top stories the same size as the rest, and make all images color, I'd love that even more

\- I find both the upvote count and hours ago added really useful, if you could find a way to include those back in

\- Some blurbs are 15 lines long, others are 2. Instead of trying to break at a paragraph boundary, I'd prefer if they were all just a standardized 6-8 lines. I'm glancing just to see what the article is actually about (for when the headline is vague), I don't care if it ends at a sentence ending

\- The bold "topic" thing you click on to get to the comments is clever in whatever ML you use to select it... but unfortunately is also meaningless and kind of distracting, so I'd prefer it without

But for real... I think that if you focused on making this a "rich" image+blurb feed for HN instead of the newspaper thing, you could become a super-popular interface for HN.

Kudos!

<comment><USER3> -1 to images in color. BW images are way less distracting.

According to your comment I think you might like [https://hnews.xyz/](https://hnews.xyz/) that I read when in mood of a "HN magazine". I'm tempted to make a switch now.

<comment><USER4> I'd love to see it taken further with the images half-toned, I'm sure there has to be a good half-toning CSS filter out there somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating! Just to keep the conversation going, I'll argue that HN's current format works much better for me.

I appreciate newspaper formats when dozens of stories have roughly equal appeal to me, and I get value out of lingering on each one for 5-30 seconds before moving on.

HN, for me, is intensely bimodal. The bare-bones listing of headlines lets me skim very fast past the 93% that don't quite work for me -- and dive into the 7% that are today's gems. Those then deserve a close read and many minutes in the comments.

So I'd be very frustrated if HN switched to newspaper mode. But everyone's tastes are different, and having both formats available would be cool.

<comment><USER6> Well I think it also has a lot to do with, that, beyond a certain look & feel, this example has very little in common with a print news paper (or online outlet that use that style).

In a traditional news paper absolutely everything is carefully curated. What stories go where, how much space they can take, whether they'll have an image, title setting guidlines, grouped by various things like topic, etc.

For example the www.nytimes.com front page is very closely structured like a traditional print paper: The top stories (the main sellers from the kiosk age) of the moment are "above the fold", followed by a bit broader polical or societal pieces and the going into more and more softer content like fashion, cooking, travel. The latter topics are were generally the bulk of the advertisment money comes in.

So I think a newspaper mode for sites like HN could work well. Not as a live view, but instead of say a weekly, curated edition of what has been relevant and interesting.

</comment></comment><comment> non-nil Neat Droste effect when this article itself is featured: [https://imgur.com/yrwMWnw](https://imgur.com/yrwMWnw)

<comment><USER7> Why does it not timeout?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's nowhere near as sophisticated as you're imagining—I created the effect by running the generator locally, overwriting the screenshot a few times, and then setting the result as the og:image on the page. It doesn't update automatically or anything like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You should find a better font and work a little on the proportions. Nice to see the images, a little more polished and I would use this instead of the normal HN website.

<comment><AUTHOR> The font is whatever you have as the default in your browser—if you don't like it then set a better one :)

I agree about the spacing, it feels off to me too but I couldn't put my finger on why. Whitespace has always been a challenge for me (I still remember my mom looking at my elementary school projects and telling me repeatedly, "Margins! You need more margins!") and though I'm getting better at it I don't expect to get a job in graphics design any time soon. If anyone has suggestions for improvements I'd be glad to hear them.

<comment><USER9>
      body {
        font-kerning: none;
        letter-spacing: -0.00214em;
        font-family: Helvetica;
      }

> but I couldn't put my finger on why

You probably shouldn't use serif, Helvetica is much easier on the eyes and more forgiving.

<comment><USER10> Not everyone has a Helvetica font installed; at least add the generic sans- serif as a fallback. (Though if the aim is to be reminiscent of a print newspaper, a serif font may still be the better choice.)

Why disable kerning? If the user's font has kerning information, surely a newspaper should respect it.

<comment><USER9> You're completely right. Helvetica was just a suggestion as most newspapers use it and is widely supported, but he could and should add fallbacks (preferally sans-serif based). As for the kerning it appears something was messing up the spacing for his website and the combination of disabling kerning and letter spacing (even if counter-intuitive) seems to 'make it prettier' at least in firefox.

<comment><USER10> I'm a bit surprised by the statement that "most newspapers use it [Helvetica]", as my perception is that they mostly use a serif font. (How do you suppose Times Roman got its name?)

But perhaps this varies between markets/regions/languages/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love that your front page made your front page.

<comment><USER12> Makes sense if it's constructed on demand or even periodically fast enough to catch that.

<comment><USER11> I didn't say it didn't make sense. The recursion just made me smile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are you planning to keep running it?

I hope you do, I can definitely see it becoming my default home screen while browsing. It'd be cool to see if you can wrap up the rest of HN, especially comments also. But I do realize that may be a lot of work.

<comment><AUTHOR> It'll keep running as long as the cron job doesn't break. It _might_ even keep running after that, if I get around to doing maintenance, but I'd like to keep expectations low. Worst-case scenario someone can always fork it and leave an issue on the repository explaining where to find the new one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This looks really amazing! I particularly like that it makes good use of the width of an ultra-wide screen.

While I wouldn't want it to replace the actual hackernews layout, I can really see it shine for discovering interesting articles whose headlines alone do not tell me enough to identify them as interesting (seems perfect for Friday afternoons).

One suggestion: I would appreciate more visual hints to indicate which images and texts belong together. When I scroll down the site and something catches my eye, it takes me a bit of looking around to be sure where to read for the corresponding text. Slightly larger margins and/or vertical and/or horizontal lines between the articles might help to make it feel more convenient.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! I added some more whitespace and some horizontal rules, what do you think of it now? (Please feel free to tell me it still looks terrible!)

<comment><USER14> Looks great! This really makes it easier for me to see what belongs where.

Thanks for the quick adjustment! I'm already curious what new things I will find with this site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really cool, definitely see some of the polish come out since the last version published here.

If you wanted to host this indefinitely for $12 / year, you could buy a domain like hackernewspaper.com or something similar, and host the frontend using a static HTML/CSS/JS bundle on S3 + CloudFront + Route 53. For reference, here's a CloudFormation (infrastructure-as-code) template I made for that stack here: [https://github.com/tinydevcrm/tinydevcrm-api- docs/blob/a4d29...](https://github.com/tinydevcrm/tinydevcrm-api- docs/blob/a4d293f79d3a8a41920e4b4d9a6c5cc26fa988c5/stack.yaml)

<comment><USER15> To clarify, the $12 / year would be the cost of the domain name, running the stack should be close to free.

<comment><USER16> how is it free?

<comment><USER17> Because "AWS Free Tier includes 50GB data transfer out, 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS Requests with Amazon CloudFront" presumably.

For small websites you can often find ways to fit inside free tiers these days. If this site is just static files you could use similarly use netlify (100GB/month free). Or you could use a free tier VPS from GCP/AWS and cloudflare to cache traffic (to keep you under the free tier bandwidth limits). Or so on.

<comment><USER15> Yup, CDNs and object stores are a dime a dozen these days. If one's too expensive or unreliable just move on to the next one. I believe this free tier doesn't run out after 12 months either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> p-law Fantastic. Surprised to find myself with cataracts at my age, HN is so much more readable as presented here, comparable in improvement to viewing it under dark mode.

More importantly, by providing the lead/lede, I've found a few more pieces to read that I didn't know I wanted to read just from the headline.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like this very much. Showing the first few lines of the article is nice to see if one wants to dig deeper. I made this my new default link to HackerNews!

</comment><comment><USER19> Ok, now something that turns a newspaper into HN format? Or has that already been done?

<comment><USER20> tada [https://boards.kenforthewin.com/b/news](https://boards.kenforthewin.com/b/news)

<comment><USER21> That's cool but it doesn't seem to have any users. And only NYT as a source (for now). And even if it had users there's no way to align them with my interests (you might get a hoard of neo-nazis upvoting all the wrong stories). This could be solved by basing it off a specific subreddit, for example.

That said it's a cool RSS'y way of browsing NYT.

<comment><USER20> I haven't really posted it anywhere yet, just a WIP side project for now. That said you can create your own Board and add any RSS feed, and moderate comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I know that the OP probably did the research, so I'm just going to ask :

Isn't this possible with only CSS?

I see each article ( section ) with position absolute and heavy JS calculations. My browser brain thinks that with some combo of flex-box / flex- wrap and breakpoints you could achieve this without the need for resize handler. I guess that's not the truth

So can you point the struggles not doing this with CSS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. So, there are a couple of things I wanted from the design:

1\. The top few stories should be wider than the rest, if there's room to do so.

2\. The stories should be sorted more-or-less with the top ones near the beginning of the page.

3\. Stories in a column should flow continuously—there shouldn't be any gaps where multiple columns realign. (Bear in mind that stories can be any height, and there's no way to precompute it.)

There's a few ways of doing layouts that meet _some_ of these criteria in pure CSS:

• `column-width`: Meets requirement (3), but you can't span columns and layout is done column-by-column so the top of the page would have stories 1, 8, and 19 (or so).

• flexbox: Meets (1) and (2), but leaves unsightly alignment lines as stories can't shift upwards to fill in gaps in the previous row.

• grid: Same problems as flexbox.

• server-side column break computation: requires the server to know how tall each story is, which (a) won't work with a stylesheet where nearly everything is in relative sizes that depend on browser settings and (b) would probably be tricky with responsive design.

As far as I can tell, there's no way to do a responsive "masonry" layout with items of arbitrary height in pure CSS. At the very least it was going to be tricky and frustrating to get right, and Masonry.js was already available and (after a little poking to figure out how to tell it what I wanted) did the job without any more fuss.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't help right now, obviously, but for future consideration you might be interested in the proposal to extend CSS Grid to have Masonry support; see [https://github.com/w3c/csswg- drafts/issues/4650](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4650).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks nice and inviting :- )

Took a while until I realized what to click, to jump to the actual discussions. What about showing a "NN comments" clickable link at the end of the articles? But: _"... the master branch. SDF, 1"_ — then not so obvious what to click.

This "HN newspaper" could maybe be a good way to make people interested in tech, if anyone wants that for some reason

<comment><AUTHOR> I avoided the word "comments" to keep the newspapery feel—I fear that mentioning the ravening hordes just around the corner would rather spoil the effect. I agree that the result isn't entirely intuitive, but I'm not sure what to do about it. (It's not obvious that the headlines are clickable either, but underlining them looks ugly and letting them be blue is even worse. Such are the perils of skeumorphism.)

<comment><USER23> > I avoided the word "comments" to keep the newspapery feel

(Maybe a comments icon instead, + a number?

Or "123 readers thoughts" or "123 replies"

or "123 people talking about this", here 123 would be unique users not comments)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have JS off by default and the site still loads -- in fact it's exactly the same (including all functionality) except it's got a mobile layout? When I enable JS then it lays out like a real newspaper. That's interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Progressive enhancement! CSS isn't quite up to the task of arranging things the way I wanted so I'm using Masonry.js for layout. (This is also why there's a progress bar while the page loads—it needs to wait for all the images so Masonry knows how much space everything takes. I'd like to cache the images and pre-specify their sizes but haven't gotten to it yet.)

<comment><USER25> For whatever it's worth, on mobile I think I'd prefer it without images, or maybe just a select few images throughout the page. The page just feels too long. I'm not sure what a good way would be to pick out which to show though. But I really like this! I'm excited to try it on desktop in a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> 30 items is a lot no matter how you slice it, really. I did experiment with hiding some of the image but I couldn't think of a way of identifying "good" images; and having them appear and disappear based on things like position on the page seemed to just make things more confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is really cool. I especially like the article preview text and the color image on hover (very nice touch).

Interestingly, I feel more inclined to read the articles than peruse the comment section first.

</comment><comment><USER27> How is this related to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23658721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23658721) ?

<comment><USER28> OP of the other post here -- not related except in concept, I guess just inspiration to quick execution :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have just one problem with this - it's only one page.

</comment><comment><USER30> I like the idea of changing the order of newspaper headlines and how this link could be #1 recursively.

</comment><comment><USER31> I love how this contributes to our understanding of how we like to consume information. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER32> Pretty cool, but the format looks like literally every other news site now right? (title + image + read more)

To me, the best thing about HN and Reddit is being able to efficiently skim through many article titles at once, without judging; writing style or image quality.

</comment><comment> jeppesen-io Thank you!

One nit. On mobile I have to scroll left and right to read the titles. Otherwise, I love it

<comment><AUTHOR> Ack! Looks like I messed up the mobile view when I adjusted some spacing. How is it now?

<comment> jeppesen-io Wow! Now that's feedback - Perfect now. Very nice work

EDIT: I have a z-flip so it's more narrow than most phones, but still looks great

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting idea. I couldn't open the site, though, because uBO blocked something like 50 domains and figuring which ones are actually needed would be quite an effort. Yes, my uBO blocks everything unless I make an exception.

<comment><AUTHOR> Congratulations on having a browser that doesn't work? Most of requests are thumbnail images (I'm hotlinking at the moment); to get things to display you can either disable JavaScript altogether or unblock just unpkg.com to get the libraries the page needs for layout.

Edit: just for you I've added a check to handle the case when the libraries can't be loaded. It will look broken but at least you should be able to read it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> amazing how quickly he went from inspiration to implementation. absolutely love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I was inspired by looking at unim.press and wondering, "how hard would it be to put an extract from the page there instead of lorem ipsum?" (Quite difficult, it turns out—I don't think there's any way short of human curation or maybe some sort of ML training on a large corpus—but you can get reasonably far with a carefully tuned set of CSS selectors for commonly seen class names.)

It took me about 8 or 10 hours yesterday to build, and I think about half of that was tweaking the heuristics for the paragraph/image extraction and keyword selection (the "STYLE, 3" that links to the thread page).

<comment><USER28> OP of Unim.press here-- yep, extracting text is pretty hard, though I think Instapaper and Pocket have good tech in that space. Certainly more than a weekend project's worth of work, which is why most of my focus personally was on the layout / visual fidelity. But it's cool to see that you put more time into extracting the content. I think for HN which is mostly longform online writing it definitely adds value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow, this is really nice. I'd love to see a tiny bit more refinement on the CSS.

\- Pick a specific serif font, maybe Palatino?

\- H2: text-align: justify

\- maybe something a bit lighter and more elegant than the heavy lines separating articles

</comment><comment><USER36> I made something similar several months ago. Here's the HN front page in the style of digg.com: [https://rigg.now.sh/](https://rigg.now.sh/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Looks way better than the real newspapers I see on the internet and I quite like it for Hacker News too. You just need some ads and you're set (joking). I'm very impressed anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's already some classified job ads at the bottom of the page—I figured it fit in with the theme and it was a good way to thank HN for making an API available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Long back i built something similar to show a rich preview of articles posted on Hacker News.

[http://richhn.herokuapp.com](http://richhn.herokuapp.com)

</comment><comment><USER39> This post itself being on the front page gives a sweet Droste effect

</comment><comment><USER40> Very nice. What I liked about it is that thumbnails to the article allows readers to skim through the list more quickly and still understand more clearly what they are about.

</comment><comment><USER41> It would be nice to see the top comments expressed, too.

Like this [https://unim.press/#LOLHackerNews](https://unim.press/#LOLHackerNews)

</comment><comment><USER42> That was pretty fast

</comment><comment><USER43> Having worked in print newspaper production, this looks cool, but of course no real newspaper would ever have that much white space.

<comment><AUTHOR> A few minutes ago I added some extra space because people were complaining and excessively narrow margins have always been a bugbear of mine. Sounds like I may have overdone it a little; I've just changed the text to justified (which helps each section look a bit more like a cohesive solid block) and bumped the margins back down a bit.

<comment><USER43> Too-narrow columns and margins are what made newspaper layout fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wow sitting at an outdoor dining table and just opened the link, looked like staring at an actual newspaper! Good work.

</comment><comment><USER45> Fascinating. Now do it for facebook posts.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is great. It reminds me how much I miss the straightforward, full screen width layouts from 15+ years ago.

</comment><comment><USER47> Pictures + snippets = so much better than HN's default, for me anyway. Hopefully this will inspire HN!

</comment><comment><USER48> Now I just need a 32" eink display.

</comment><comment><USER49> Just put my printer to do this everyday (laser black and white) this is the best thing I've seen

</comment><comment><USER16> who bought the domain (hackernewspaper.com) name? i hope it's the author of the script.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it wasn't me. I'm guessing someone else has gotten inspired and we'll see another variation on the idea sometime in the next week or so.

<comment><USER50> That was me! I came across the Reddit post yesterday too and figured it would make for a fun weekend project. I'm not sure when I'll get the opportunity to build it though so if you're interested in the domain, shoot me an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Some sort of horizontal line between the articles would look nice and help with readability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion—just added this, along with a few other tweaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Bravo! Such a refreshing take, and may yet become my preferred way of browsing HN.

</comment><comment><USER53> OMG, how very beautiful ! Is it fully automatic? Will it persist?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's semi-fully-automatic; right now the generator is running off my laptop as I make tweaks but I plan to set up a cron job shortly. The page will stick around as long as the domain is still up, and I _intend_ to keep it updating, but as it's something I knocked together over a weekend I make no guarantees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> sad there isn't an infinite recursion of the paper showing this page in an article. It's just one deep.... but maybe if we can get this towards the #1 spot....

<comment><AUTHOR> Squint a little closer at the thumbnail :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Seeing this post in print newspaper style is a trip.

</comment><comment><USER56> Absolutely fascinating! Hail to you Sir. Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER57> Bookmarked it. Better than the news websites.

</comment><comment><USER58> pleasingly recursive instance of the site embedded in the site... because you're on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER59> I love this. Exceptionally well done.

</comment><comment><USER60> Really cool - thank you :)

</comment><comment><USER61> Kudos, amazing effort!

</comment><comment><USER62> Thanks!! I love this

</comment><comment><USER63> Great job! what is your GitHub repo? I want to play with this later

<comment><AUTHOR> It's linked in the box at the bottom of the page: [https://github.com/wolfgang42/paper-hn](https://github.com/wolfgang42/paper- hn)

Patches welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I really like this

</comment><comment><USER65> Well, the distinct lack of "lorem ipsum" is a positive!

</comment><comment><USER66> I like this one!

</comment><comment><USER67> Bookmarked

</comment><comment><USER68> I love it.

</comment><comment><USER69> cool! [bookmarked]

</comment><comment><USER70> This is nice :)

</comment><comment><USER71> love it!

</comment><comment><USER72> Really cool.

No HTTPS, though? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The site is HTTPS—if you're talking about the mixed content warning, I'm hotlinking all the images so it's unfortunately unavoidable.

<comment><USER24> One of the top post images is 404ing so it displays a little broken file icon instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that page has very explicitly set an og:image that doesn't exist. (It looks like it was intended specifically for that page, too.) It's unfortunate but I'm afraid there's not much I can do about it short of hard-coding a special case for that one post.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


San Andreas fault 'ready' with big earthquake, expert says - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-andreas-fault-earthquake-20160504-story.html <comment><USER2> Relevant article about the _Cascadia subduction zone_ which is arguably a much bigger threat:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really- big-...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one) with 612 points w/ 275 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9878160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9878160)

Although, I don't wish to downplay the risks of the San Andreas faultline.

It seems the west-coast should be investing a hell of a lot of money in preparation for this stuff. British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon included.

If I lived in a high risk area I would invest in a 'go' bag, a mountain bike, and a plan to get to high ground as quickly as possible. You'll have about 15 minutes after the earthquake before the wave hits. Cars will be useless in the traffic. The hardest part will be ignoring the initial destruction and focusing on getting out of the area.

<comment><USER3> To some extent people over-dramatize the Cascadia earthquake threat to the major population centers. The major cities are hundreds of miles from the fault line, which will substantially reduce ground motion; Seattle had a 6.8 earthquake in 2001 on one of its many _local_ fault lines and the city is still standing. Second, some of the major cities like Seattle have greatly mitigated tsunami risk due to their location and geography. In fact, the largest tsunamis in Seattle's geological history were generated by fault lines that run directly under the city; tsunamis that reach what is now Seattle from the Cascadia subduction zone are quite modest. Vancouver is in a similar situation, though they probably have somewhat higher tsunami exposure. People that live on the outer Washington and Oregon coast will be in serious danger but that region is sparsely populated.

The San Andreas fault, by comparison, runs right through the middle of densely populated areas of California. Minimal tsunami risk but much higher ground motion risk.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Thanks for clarifying that. I always thought Seattle was closer to the coast than it is. But it's actually just within an inlet, with Olympic National Park in between.

I'm interested in moving to Victoria, Vancouver Island, BC, which is why it concerns me. I believe that would fall into the low-medium risk category:

> People living along the outer coast of Vancouver Island will have between 15 > and 20 minutes to escape. Victoria can expect a tsunami wave of between two > and four metres within 75 minutes.

[http://globalnews.ca/news/1779057/boxing-day-size-quake- due-...](http://globalnews.ca/news/1779057/boxing-day-size-quake-due-to-hit- vancouver-island/)

<comment><USER4> I live in Victoria and have looked into this before. Being an island, in most areas the land tends to rise fairly rapidly as you move away from the water. Predicted rise due to a tsunami is relatively small given the that the lower island is sheltered by the Olympic Peninsula. There has been extensive modeling done, as described here: [https://www.crd.bc.ca/docs/default- source/news-pdf/2013/mode...](https://www.crd.bc.ca/docs/default-source/news- pdf/2013/modelling-of-potential-tsunami-inundation-limits-and-run-up- report-.pdf?sfvrsn=0)

See page 16 for maps of predicted rise. You can compare that to an elevation map of the area, ie here with the contours turned on: [https://maps.crd.bc.ca/Html5Viewer/?viewer=public](https://maps.crd.bc.ca/Html5Viewer/?viewer=public). As you can see, in most areas the predicted rise of up to ~ 3 meters doesn't get you more than a few meters laterally away from the coastline. It will obviously still be a risk, but as long as you're not right at the beach it should be ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish people would take the California earthquake situation more seriously. We've had decades of warning yet are still minimally prepared for disaster. The sad thing is, the only way we'll see real change is after a major earthquake where thousands of people are killed/injured. Then people will fight/sue/vote for change. It's just like in the city I live in, where we have multiple known-to-be unsafe traffic intersections. Only after there's a serious accident and someone sues the traffic lights get built. It's unfortunate that even today, the cost of change is priced in human lives.

<comment><USER6> When I lived in Vancouver in the 80s, they had earthquake drills because scientists said "It was too long, we're due for a Big One!" Everyone took them seriously.

30 years later, no significant earthquake, and earthquake drills are nothing but a distant memory. I think humans are really terrible judges of what "long overdue" means, especially related to geological events.

Yes, at some point there will be an earthquake. Yes, some people will die. But overreacting and worrying about it when humans have no ability to predict it is worse. The best way is just do what we have been doing, which is increase building standards, have once-a-year drills, and stop trying to predict when disaster is going to strike, because humans can't.

<comment><USER7> Having basic supplies on hand is just as important as building standards and drills. As I mentioned in another comment my family and friends lived through the Canterbury (New Zealand) earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 that destroyed much of the largest city on the South Island. Water, food, and shelter were all important concerns especially during the first 48 hours in some parts of the city. Even if help arrives quickly it can take several days for basic services to be restored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Earthquakes are serious. But we're no good at predicting when they'll happen: [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-still-cant-predict- ea...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-still-cant-predict-earthquakes/)

This means there is elevated risk, but we can't say much more than that.

</comment><comment><USER9> The incredible thing is that the cascadia subduction zone is _also_ locked, and past the average interval for moving. How unfortunate would it be if the entire west coast unlocked at the same time?

<comment><USER10> Have there been any studies done on how one may affect/trigger the other?

<comment><USER11> What type of study are you proposing exactly?

The best data we have at the moment would be records of geologic events that have a strong correlation to earth quakes and seeing how they line up between the two different areas.

My gut tells me to expect, usually not co-incidence, but as they are part of the same larger system, possible co-incidence (and likely at a much more catastrophic level when something THAT LARGE does happen).

<comment><USER10> Not knowledgeable enough about quakes to propose a study. As you and a sibling comment have stated I was just wondering if the 'they are geographically close enough and could affect each other' intuition may have merit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought "The Rock" had already sorted this?

<comment><USER13> Right? So long as he's in the area and has access to a helicopter I think everything will be fine.

<comment><USER14> Only if you're in his family - he doesn't seem to care much about helping anyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra There's this idea of simulating earthquakes with explosions (possibly nuclear subterranean) in order to relieve plate movement. This should be causing mild earthquakes as opposed to catastrophical ones.

Should be tested somewhere, tho.

<comment><USER15> The numbers don't work out because the scale is logarithmic, and no serious seismologists appear to recommend such a thing. To avert a magnitude 8 earthquake every 100 years, you'd roughly need a magnitude 6 every year, or a magnitude 5 every three and a half days.

<comment><USER11> I wonder how many would advocate trying to have a /planned/ earthquake each 100 years? Surely one planned in advance which everyone is prepared for is better than the unknown.

<comment><USER16> The general concept of prescribed forest fires has been considered good forestry practice for a long time now.

As for the actual method, nuclear bombs every few years for a large magnitude doesn't seem like it's mild enough.

We've seen that fracking often has the side effect of causing faults to get lubricated and slip more easily causing earthquakes.

Maybe research into the ideal chemical cocktail to most effectively lubricate and hook up injection stations along the length of the fault line, when there aren't aquifers in the nearby vicinity. Bonus for some kind of lubricant that degrades into non carcinogenic materials.

You wouldn't want to just start pumping fault lubricant into the system while it's so full of energy, but after the next "big" earthquake you could have a window where the pumping would trigger small size 3 or 4 earthquakes similar to aftershocks in perpetuity.

<comment><USER17> Fracking itself isn't implicated--it's the wastewater injection wells that seem to be the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone who lives near the fault in Redwood City and has an older single story wood frame ranch,Mehta are my best options for protecting my asset and life?

Is earthquake insurance worth it?

What about retrofitting for earthquakes? I've read some pretty scary stuff that even retrofits done with permits don't have much consistency between them and no guarantees. Not even sure how to find a reputable retrofit contractor because I'm not sure how to judge the quality of their work since we haven't had a big one recently.

What should my priorities be for solving for all of this?

<comment><USER19> Earthquake insurance is probably a waste for most homeowners because the deductible is so high. You would probably be better off putting that money into structural renovation to make the house better able to handle an earthquake. Make sure the frame is properly anchored to the foundation. [http://resilience.abag.ca.gov/residents/planset/](http://resilience.abag.ca.gov/residents/planset/)

<comment><USER20> Plus, in the event of a huge Earthquake, you'd probably have access to FEMA funds anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Time to check/update the earthquake supplies again...

<comment><USER16> If this article is right and there is a risk of a large earthquake that will release a century of pressure buildup, it might be good to keep a week or two worth of supplies, including a bucket with attachable toilet seat lid, bag of saw dust, and a shovel to bury the waste.

If you're in a home, you might want to make sure that your supplies are more easily accessible from the perimeter of your structure in case enough damage is done that your home is not able to be entered. Ideally, a backyard shed or storage box would be the best place to store your supplies. If that's not available, in a garage near the rolling door or by a back door of the house.

If as much damage occurs to water and waste water infrastructure as they fear, and if your home becomes inaccessible, it might be prudent to make sure that you also have several changes of clothes and a pair of boots in your kit.

Basically, pretend that you're preparing for a week-long camping trip in the middle of nowhere and pack accordingly. Tent, sleeping bag, clothing, supplies, small solar panel to charge a phone, etc. It'll take a lot more space but it will make the (potential) experience a lot more tolerable.

</comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Maybe a massive earthquake and subsequent reconstruction could be an opportunity to fix the Bay Area's housing situation

</comment><comment><USER22> On the bright side, this will probably simplify and unlock the current urban planning issues.

<comment><USER7> Good luck with that. My family lived through the Canterbury (New Zealand) earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 (and the 12,000+ aftershocks). Most of the CBD has been cleared and rebuilding is underway but there was/is a huge political fight over what the rebuild will look like. I can only imagine how difficult that process would be in the context of the US political landscape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder how many here realize that the only social contract (between building engineers and the rest of us in North America) is that for the absolute majority of buildings (> 99.9% of building stock) under the scenario known as the maximum considered earthquake a building shall not collapse. Meaning that any damage beyond repair or any failure of structurally non-critical components that can possibly entail lives lost is acceptable.

<comment><USER24> Do you disagree with that approach?

I live about 3 miles from a large fault line, and am OK with it - my concern is that my family does not get crushed when/if the predicted big earthquake hits. As long as that is true, I do accept that I will have a lot of repair work to do, and will lose some objects. I am not going to live my life pouring money into preserving material goods, or preserving all of my home, when I can spend that same money rebuilding, when/if that day comes.

<comment><USER23> Consider if the recovery might be thwarted by airports unable to accept arriving crews, hospitals and shelters without power and water, the fallout from a high tech hub taken out of operations for months etc. There's also the conundrum that -- because there's no metric in place to differentiate between structures that would perform vastly differently under a seismic event -- there's no rational way to estimate the damage. You may be at once overpaying and overvaluing your earthquake insurance. Your insurance has no way of reliably estimating its risks, which undermines its solvency, which unwittingly reduces its worth to the consumer. One might not be in a position to rebuild.

The issue is that our society at present does not single out life-critical operations and provide for them accordingly. The cost-benefit analysis has not been done.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which are the best written tutorials you have seen till now? - <AUTHOR> Starting next year, I am planning to write more well-organized tutorials as a way to increase my rate of learning and understanding (The topics won't be of interest to general HN community). But I wanted the see what kind of best practices are appreciated in the community. I am not referring to documentation per se, of which I do plenty for myself during work. But on improving myself as a communicator in the written medium when explaining things through code+simpler language. <comment><USER2> I'm sure it's a cliche at this point, but I don't think enough writers emulate K&R's style on The C Programming Language. The prose is short, dense, and yet not tedious.

Another great "tutorial" to emulate is the TeXbook by Knuth. This one is verbose, but it shows the reader all the little details and pitfalls about the software without becoming boring.

<comment><USER3> >I'm sure it's a cliche at this point, but I don't think enough writers emulate K&R's style on The C Programming Language. The prose is short, dense, and yet not tedious.

Agreed. It's also very clear, although at least I had to read many paragraphs more than once to really grok the meaning.

Anecdote: Some years after learning C from that book, and using it a lot at work, I once conducted a C programming course for 10 to 15 senior devs of the IT dept. of a public sector company (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited), all of whom had over 10 years software experience (but not on C and Unix, their experience was on some mainframe, I think Unisys, and some proprietary software running on it). I used the K&R C book for the course. I put a lot of effort into it, and they were pleased with the training. They arranged a small send-off for me on the last evening, with tea and snacks, the manager of the team made a brief speech, thanking me (they were that formal kind) and they gave me a gift as a token of appreciation - a quartz wall clock, which I still have. Another fun thing I remember from that course was that I asked them this question at the end of the course:

"How do you write a C program?"

As expected, they were all puzzled. I mean, they had just attended the course, right? They knew now (some) how to write C programs. No one could think of an appropriate answer. Then I gave them my answer:

"Very carefully."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kubernetes the hard way: [https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the- hard-way](https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way)

Gave me the necessary understanding of the core layers of a cluster.

The Digital Ocean docs were already mentioned but they're also an exellent reference source.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are nice. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any of the Explorable Explanations that Bret Victor creates. Later followed up by more from Nicky Case, and more

<comment><AUTHOR> All the links I clicked led to other websites. Is it an aggregator?

<comment><USER6> What you saw probably was the collection created by Nicky Case. Check his own explanations though [https://ncase.me/](https://ncase.me/) and then also check [http://worrydream.com/#!/ExplorableExplanations](http://worrydream.com/#!/ExplorableExplanations) (and other explanations by Bret Victor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought _Eloquent Javascript_ was wonderfully done. Read online here: [http://eloquentjavascript.net/](http://eloquentjavascript.net/)

Everything by Julia Evans [https://jvns.ca/](https://jvns.ca/) , Arnold Robbins, Brian Kernighan (e.g. _The AWK Programming Language_ )

More mathematical: Knuth et al, _Concrete Mathematics_ ; John Stillwell, _Mathematics and its History_ ; Tristan Needham, _Visual Complex Mathematics_

</comment><comment><USER8> This was probably the most effective tutorial I have ever used: [https://www.amazon.com/RPG-III-400-Shelly- Cashman/dp/0878352...](https://www.amazon.com/RPG-III-400-Shelly- Cashman/dp/0878352465)

Early in my consulting career, I got a gig doing RPG III and in three days got up to speed.

Not relevant to many folks these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm more interested in exposition style, rather than topics. Is there anything particular you liked about that book? I'll try to find a PDF for a looksie.

<comment><USER8> It was an unusually clear and understandable tutorial that worked well for someone not familiar with the machine. Examples that were broken down in very understandable chunks, expositions of applicable context, very clear non- jargon language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://internetingishard.com](https://internetingishard.com) \- one of the best ever tutorials on HTML and CSS.

</comment><comment><USER10> Learn from Kernighan. Most tutorials are dry and teach "follow these steps". The better ones explain the "why" of the feature. Kernighan comes up with fun examples to keep the reader engaged.

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.raywenderlich.com/](https://www.raywenderlich.com/)

Funny, insightful, plenty of screenshots and very detailed explanations.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really like Mark Myers' style. He writes "A Smarter Way to Learn Bla" books. His books allow you to turn off your brain and simply sail through.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Could you link to some of his online pieces you like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Go lang turorial. It is very good to learn while running source codes.

<comment><USER14> The official go lang tutorial?

<comment><USER13> Yes. I did not remember tutorial's name, but I found it when I searched. I think it is easy to understand. [https://tour.golang.org/](https://tour.golang.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Digital Ocean docs

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually a good idea. I have always found them to be precise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Almost anything on NSHipster

</comment><comment><USER17> vimtutor</comment>


Amazon status all Green, but IAM roles unreachable - <AUTHOR> I am trying to upload some Amazon Lambdas. I have not had a problem doing this before. Now, out of the blue I am getting 503 errors during the upload process. Here is an image of the error: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2jPVs9ymvNddl8tam5xczBERzA. To be sure it was not my environment I went to the Amazon console directly. I am getting errors there as well: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2jPVs9ymvNdTkVJbmVRejA3Qlk<p>I can't open a ticket because I would have to buy a support contract. I also know it is no use posting in the Amazon forums because I have never received a response. <comment><USER2> Yeah, it's down. I'm experiencing issues too. Also see [https://twitter.com/aws_shd/status/767864566667542528](https://twitter.com/aws_shd/status/767864566667542528)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/](http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The day the status isn't green is the day a datacenter gets hit by a nuke.</comment>


NASA Considering Fuel Depots in Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/science/space/23nasa.html

<comment><USER2> I cannot imagine how the physics of this idea make sense. You still have to put the fuel in orbit. You could do the same with orbital assembly of the vehicle. I suppose you'll have a pretty good idea what you'll use the fuel for.

<comment><USER3> There is a claim that answers your question in the very beginning of the article.

> _Currently, all of the fuel needed for a mission is carried up with the > rocket, and the weight of the fuel limits the size of the spacecraft._

<comment><USER2> That doesn't make much sense. You can send a booster stage to orbit, complete with engine, cluster boosters (or add already full tanks) if needed and dock the spacecraft (which can be assembled in orbit too) in place. There is no reason to send empty "fuel depots" to orbit or to transfer cryogenic fuel and oxidizer in zero-G.

<comment><USER4> I think the point is to minimize launches. 2 launches per mission as you suggest is eventually going to cost more.

If it takes 10 launches to initially set up and 1 every say 5 fuel ups, then it's only going to be 12 launches before it breaks even.

Given the Space Shuttles did 135 missions, doing 135 additional launches definitely isn't cost effective. Not to mention you wouldn't have to re-enter a vehicle or do another launch if you wanted to extend a mission.

It would pave way for transfer and potentially one day freight transfers in space. Also it gives the potential for "Oh Space X you need fuel, well look who has a fuel depot bitches."

<comment><USER2> The number of launches should be more or less the same, since the mass that gets to orbit is more or less the same. With the advantage pending towards placing already full tanks in orbit because you don't have to launch a separate tank plus the apparatus needed for the fuel transfer.

Unless this "surprise you need fuel" thing becomes common, something _very_ unlikely because you usually know what you are going to do in orbit, this "fuel depot" thing makes no sense at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best part of this idea is that it's incremental. Past manned missions seem to have a long period when stuff gets studied, then when it comes time to spend the real money, it gets killed in favor of the study phase for some other mission.

By costing a comparatively modest amount at a time over a long series of missions, it's more likely that it will be easier for Washington to complete a mission that's already well underway and take credit for it than to kill it to save a little bit more money at that point.

And to be really pessimistic, even if it does get killed halfway through, if we've put a fuel station in space and started filling it, we can at least try to reuse those resources for whatever the next mission is.

<comment><USER4> What I think is the greatest potential here is that this is essentially paving the way for the government to begin selling this fuel to companies that can't afford to put their own fuel depot into space.

Why is this good? Because once Congress sees the potential to make profit from NASA, then we'll see hundreds of billions dropped into it.

I believe the next step to this would be to set up a depot in orbit around Mars to reduce the weight necessary for a mission to Mars.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If somebody could explain why storing fuel in space is more efficient than just packing what's needed for each mission? :)

<comment><USER6> If you move to a new apartment, on the third floor, it's "more efficient" to carry all your stuff up on one trip. But there's a limit to how much you can bring up on that one trip.

If you make a lot of smaller trips, there's almost no limit on what you can have once you take the "final" trip up.

Also, if you drop something on one of those trips up, you don't lose all your stuff (and you) at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr: Congressman Rohrabacher (R-Boeing) is "shocked" that NASA would consider rejecting a plan that would have created an artificial need to order a bunch more expendable rockets, even though NASA already found that the plan would have been far more expensive and unreliable.</comment>


Anyone here uses ncrypted cloud, boxcryptor or their competitors? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone here using ncrypted cloud, boxcryptor or any other application to protect your files on dropbox. What do you guys think about the apps? Disclaimer: I am making a yo-fied clone of their apps. <comment><USER2> I really love and reccomend Sookasa (sookasa.com). They build a HIPPA- compliant, fully encrypted way to store files on dropbox, box, skydrive, and google drive.

You basically have an 'encrypted folder' inside your cloud storage drive and anything you put there is immediately protected from hackers, fraudsters, etc.

It's being used today by doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, lawyers and such.</comment>


Seth Godin on College Education - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/the-greatest-ma.html

<comment><USER2> I thought the college application process was a bunch of bullshit. I went to a local community college for a year, transferred over to a University of California school, and doing that you get a degree that's precisely the same as the one everyone else gets, at the same time, for cheaper, with a lot less stress.

I didn't have to take the SATs or any of that nonsense, either.

The classes I benefited the most from were project-based ones where you spent a few weeks in the library, hacked like mad for a few, then wrote a report and gave a presentation.

<comment><USER3> _I thought the college application process was a bunch of bullshit._

You were correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rule of thumb: If you think you need to graduate from a top college, you're probably right.

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone "needs" to graduate from a top college. But I think it's also true that the quality of the engineering education at, say, MIT is much better than the quality of the education at an average university. Part of that is the quality of the lectures and lecturers, but another major factor is the environment -- the quality of your fellow students, and the social norms in a place like that.

I think that is even _more_ so for graduate programs, but significantly less so for degrees in arts or the social sciences -- if you're taking poli sci, I think most of the advantage of going to Harvard is in the social connections you can make.

<comment><USER3> I think the point that Alex was trying to make is that if you are not intelligent enough to realize that it doesn't matter that much, you probably are going to need all the credentials you can get.

<comment><USER6> Which is funny as he appears to have gone to cornell.

<comment><USER7> as an alternative to going to a proper Ivy league school

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with the classic argument of "whether or not it is worth paying a hefty premium to go to an elite school" is that it discounts the impact of intangibles, such as positive peer influence and brand value.

I say yes. The effect is even more pronounced in highly competitive industries like finance. I've found that an overwhelming majority of successful recent grads in that industry (2-3 yr exp analysts making $300,000+/year) are top 20 grads. I doubt the average 18-22 yr old is going to exhaust the knowledge that their professor can impart, but you put an above average student at a school where he's rubbing shoulders with future entrepreneurs, politicians and thought leaders there's no doubt that it will increase his likelihood of success.

So back to the question: Is it worth paying $200,000(over 4 years at Skull and Bones College over paying $10000 at Big State U? In many circumstances, yes.

And yes--there are always exceptions to this rule but the discussion is about the overall trend not particular instances.

<comment><USER9> Along these same lines, Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages" of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In". <http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html>

Some would probably argue that going to a big name school allows you to make better connections, etc, thus resulting in a higher income.

But as pointed out in the Gladwell article, this just isn't the case.

While it's easy to point out the kid that went to MIT is making more than the kid that went to state college, this just isn't a proper comparison.

From the article... "As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don't."

The moral of the story is that if you're a hard working individual, connections and money are going to follow regardless of where you go to school.

<comment><USER8> The problem with your argument is that you don't isolate factors when arguing your point. I'm not arguing that there aren't other factors that make a person successful. I'm saying that all things equal, the influence of one's surroundings can have a significant positive effect on a persons chance of succeeding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Logic and price rationality have no more to do with it than buying a McMansion or a Mercedes instead of what you really need.

Having a kid at Swarthmore is a great way for boomer parents to further differentiate themselves from the pack.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't work, though, because all the boomer parent's friends' kids went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Williams, and Columbia.

I think they do it to avoid falling _behind_ , because while having a kid go to Amherst is nothing special with this group, having one go to UMass is borderline shameful. Which is idiotic reasoning IMHO, because that UMass student can take the exact same courses as the Amherst kid, taught by the same professors, and might be just as smart, but parents can be illogical sometimes.</comment></comment>


Out-of-print book, "The Making of Kubrick's 2001", posted online - <AUTHOR> http://cinephilearchive.tumblr.com/post/50996999612

<comment><AUTHOR> The OP links at the end to the PDF he uploaded, but just in case you missed it: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/143395393/The-Making-of- Kubricks-2...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/143395393/The-Making-of- Kubricks-2001)</comment>


Ask HN: I'm Looking for a New and Different Browser, Can You Help? - <AUTHOR> To start with, I'm expecting a lot of downvotes here, so don't be ashamed.  Frankly, I'm looking for a new browser that isn't from one of the mainstream developers.  I just don't trust them anymore.
I'm running Win7 x86 (on an actual x86 single-processor PC); so suggestions for Linux aren't going to help me unless there's a 32-bit Windows binary available.
I honestly don't trust Mozilla anymore - the pattern of behavior that includes Australis, Pocket, Cliqz, WebExtensions, and Looking Glass has caused me to no longer consider Mozilla trustworthy.  This further extends to SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Pale Moon, and Basilisk; because the core of those three browsers is all reliant on Mozilla code.  Pale Moon is my current primary browser due to their fiercely independent stance regarding Mozilla; but I'd like to move away from that browser family altogether in the near future.
I don't trust Google, either, and I don't want their software on my PC. That includes Chrome, Chromium, Opera 15+, Vivaldi, SRWare Iron, and probably a hundred other Chromium forks I simply don't know about.  Realistically, if it uses either Blink or Chromium, I don't want it anywhere near me.
As I said, I'm on Win7 x86 and this machine is not upgrading or changing OS, so I've got IE 11 installed and that's the long and short of that possibility.
With that in mind, what options are there left to me? <comment><USER2> Are you against using Webkit ?

There many smaller and alternative multi platform browsers using it for rendering, such as Midori or QupZilla.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the security benefits of a popular, frequently-updated browser (not IE11) far outweigh the risks posed by use of a rendering engine that certain companies have touched. I echo the suggestions of a WebKit browser or, failing that, Mozilla Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would have suggested Vivaldi as I think feature wise they are good to support and see what develops but they are Blink engine.

Is Tor browser any good? Its Gecko and very privacy driven I believe.

Alternately could you use an old Opera version when they were on Presto?

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you tried Brave? I am hearing a lot about Brave. Give it a try. Hopefully, that will end your search.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use Brave on Linux, [https://www.brave.com/](https://www.brave.com/) .

<comment><AUTHOR> Brave uses Blink.

<comment><USER6> The guys behind Brave clearly focus on end-user privacy and security and are very capable to detect any bad behavior from Blink if Google will put such thing. If one cannot trust them, I do not see how one can use Windows. One has to trust Microsoft that they do not spy on you.</comment></comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi 2 vs. Odroid-C1 - <AUTHOR> http://hsto.org/files/7e9/6c7/39e/7e96c739ed1a429e8378c82b703cdd41.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> The source[1] is of course bias. Would be interested in seeming someone else reproduce the results.

[1] [http://magazine.odroid.com/assets/201503/pdf/ODROID- Magazine...](http://magazine.odroid.com/assets/201503/pdf/ODROID- Magazine-201503.pdf)</comment>


BildX: A self-hosted version of imgix, Cloudinary and other services - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adamazad/bildx <comment><AUTHOR> PRs are highly appreciated. There are only 4 APIs implemented at the moment: blur, fill, width and height.</comment>