Vis.js: A Visual Interaction System - <AUTHOR> http://visjs.org/ <comment><USER2> Does anybody know of a site that keep tracks of all these JavaScript visualization libraries, or JavaScript libraries in general?

There are lot of great JS libraries, but it is difficult to keep track. I would like a resource for JavaScript libraries like ruby-toolbox.com is for gems.

If somebody has the time, the data could be pulled with GitHub's search API:

[https://developer.github.com/v3/search/](https://developer.github.com/v3/search/)

<comment><USER3> Here's a good non-exhaustive list of JS visualization libraries:

[http://selection.datavisualization.ch/](http://selection.datavisualization.ch/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! That site is helpful. The UI looks great, and would be even better if it had GitHub fork and star data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dammit... other visualization library that handles timelines.. this makes me to feel a bit useless. I keep working some months in a JS library to create and visualize TimeLines : (old version) [http://elgreco.digibis.com/en/musobjects/timeline.html?busq_...](http://elgreco.digibis.com/en/musobjects/timeline.html?busq_concept=53)

<comment><USER5> Wow, not useless at all -- that is really well done. I'm working on a similar "all about" site for Shakespeare, in which I've struggled to make a clear and usable timeline. This is a really helpful model.

Is there a way I can contact you at some point. I'll be doing a "soft launch" later this month and wanted to start with smart people :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are the supported browsers?

Would be good if I could easily find that info somewhere on the site

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Or at least a description of what technologies are used (e.g. Canvas, SVG, VML, etc).

<comment><USER8> We currently use Canvas for the graph and HTML DOM for the timeline. As for browser support, see my post in reply to the post you replied to :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love these network diagrams...but I've never seen anyone actually use them!

<comment><USER10> Graphs are a poor visual representation for a lot of data sets. In cases where they provide significant benefits (think maps, dependency structures, routing), graph layouts are hard problems.

Generic algorithms are great for large networks but computationally intensive. Small network diagrams with an explicit message often have to be manually curated to make sense.

That said, this is a great library, especially since it works so well in the browser. I'm looking forward to future development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazing... And very smooth! In one of the graph examples, I plugged in 500 nodes, thinking it would crash. But it failed very gracefully, and simply "slowed" things down instead of jittering into oblivion.

</comment><comment><USER12> Some of those examples might violate one or more Xerox patents, just as an FYI. I do think this is pretty cool though, shows some interesting JavaScript uses.

<comment><USER13> Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I will direct my colleagues, who created this library, to this thread to answer your questions. You won't get much help from me, my expertise is C++ and robotics. :-)

It's nice to see that our policy of creating open-source software is starting to pay off. It's sometimes quite hard to gather interest from the wider internet population!

<comment><USER15> Thanks for pointing this out, great to see interest in the library.

I've been developing this library for a couple of years now, and since a couple of months working on it together with another colleague.

Guys feel free to share ideas and code to improve the library and make it even better, check it out on Github.

<comment><USER16> what is the github link?

<comment><USER8> [https://github.com/almende/vis](https://github.com/almende/vis)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Two sections that are required in every good readme: "Prior Art" and "Why".

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know why most graph libraries that I see of this type have nodes that seem to bounce all over the place? Is there a practical motivation for this? I would think a less animated version would be more usable.

<comment><USER19> The computation of the physics simulation (applying forces between nodes, ending once it finds a local minimum) is an intensive process. You could do it all at once but it would probably hang your page for a meaningful time. You could also reduce the framerate or only show the results at the first an final frames, but those also have user interface implications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have been searching for such a library for quite a long time. It looks very neat. I really like the idea of DataView on top of a DataSet as it can be used to define different perspectives of the data.

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks nice. Demos should be styled to support higher resolution displays, though (looks "pixely", if this can be a word, on retina display).

<comment><USER7> Yeah, on my rMBP the timeline examples look fine, but the graph examples are distractingly blurry.

I look forward to a day when all of these high PPI growing pains are behind us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The animation (dragging, panning and zooming) is smooth, that's really good! Can one put html formatting into the __graph __nodes?

<comment><USER8> Hi, I'm the colleague josdejong mentioned and I've been maintaining and developing the Graph module. The module is currently in canvas so you cannot put HTML formatting in the nodes. There are a variety of shaped and formatting you can use to customize it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was learning about directed graphs and recursive searches in PostgreSQL and this library helped me visualize my data.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow I needed this library about 3 weeks ago! Anyone know else know of any alternatives?

<comment><USER25> I may be missing something but it seems to be going for the same space as the popular D3.js library: [http://d3js.org](http://d3js.org)

<comment><USER26> d3.js doesn't target <canvas> (it renders to <svg>) so graph drawing can be pretty slow. Some more alternatives for this scenario (both of which handle fast drawing to <canvas>:

[http://trifacta.github.io/vega/](http://trifacta.github.io/vega/) [http://sigmajs.org/](http://sigmajs.org/)

<comment><USER27> This is definitely incorrect. You can use d3.js to target svg, canvas, html, or any other data format that you want. Check out [http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/2647922](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/2647922) for a canvas based example.

I've actually built very similar graphs to the examples shown in vis.js with d3.js. I was a bit surprised that it wasn't just a wrapper library on top of d3.js (plenty of those exist to make working with d3 a little easier).

<comment><USER28> You can target canvas with d3, but you loose much of the abstraction that makes d3 powerful. For example, look at all of the low-level canvas rendering code that is used. Not as powerful as visualizations driven by chaining .data().enter().append().attr() which can easily be re-shaped by swapping html tags and CSS attributes.

d3 really is a three-legged stool of HTML, JS and CSS. When targeting <canvas>, you loose both HTML and CSS and thus much of the power.

EDIT: I should clarify that I'm thinking of HTML in an abstract sense that also includes SVG. By hooking into the DOM, d3 gets a free scenegraph that makes it easy to modify the components of the visualization without writing low-level code.

<comment><USER3> I'd argue that much of D3's power comes not from the update pattern for DOM elements, but the reusable components pattern.

[http://bost.ocks.org/mike/chart/](http://bost.ocks.org/mike/chart/)

Examples in the core library, all compatible with Canvas, include scales, layouts, geographic projections, time/color utilities, CSV/TSV loading, and behaviors (drag/zoom/etc). There's some built-in canvas rendering like d3.geo.path which can be provided a canvas context.

The only things you lose are selections and the convenient transitions that go along with selections. But you _can_ use these to modify and transition the canvas elements themselves!

<comment><USER28> In most cases you also loose the ability to specify graphic components declaratively through .append() and .attr(). Instead, you must imperatively specify how to produce the drawing from the data by manipulating the canvas context.

I have use d3 to create composite graphics that included elements rendered to canvas and it certainly is powerful. But, I still believe that the sweet spot of the library requires being able to work with the DOM and CSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice, I like the simple layout, but maybe the formatting could be a little smaller?

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice, though when I test the examples (edit items [1]), I would expect better than confirm/alert usage.

1\. [http://visjs.org/examples/timeline/08_edit_items.html](http://visjs.org/examples/timeline/08_edit_items.html)

<comment><USER31> What's wrong with confirm/alert? It's built into javascript, mobile friendly, and a lot less buggy than most libraries.

<comment><USER32> It's modal, so it blocks the entire browser until the dialog is dismissed. That's terrible interaction design, except for actions that would melt your computer.

I understand that the library focus is on visualization and not on realistic and usable examples; I put the blame on browser implementors - they should have fixed that problem years ago, instead of relying on developers to do the right thing.

Edit - Update: I've tried it on Firefox and it does the right thing, blocking only the current tab; blocking the whole application must be a Chrome-only thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> is this library independent of d3.js ?

<comment><USER8> Yes it is. It uses canvas and HTML DOM manipulation without using plugins like d3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Really good!</comment>


Startup Fitness Advice From Battle-Hardened Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.derekflanzraich.com/2011/07/startup-fitness-advice-from-battle-hardened-entrepreneurs/

<comment><USER2> BTW, a lot of these people are pretty committed athletes. If you're not, and you're looking for something that's easy and obvious, try doing some pushups throughout the day. When I'm feeling antsy, sometimes I get up, do 20 pushups, and then go back to what I'm doing. Start small: two pushups count if you're not used to them.

I like to run, and if you're starting out, it's relatively easy to buy a pair of running shoes (try going to a running shop with a pair of shoes you already own; the staff should be able to look at your wear pattern and adjust the shoe they recommend accordingly) or a pair of Vibram Five-Fingers. Start easily: go out running for five minutes. Or ten minutes. Build up little by little.

Otherwise, I think the meta-advice of this article is that we make time for things that're important to us, which most of us probably already know, or know on some level.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. continuation > one-time max exertion.

Find out what you enjoy doing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the best fitness advice HN has?

<comment><USER5> If you eat ice cream frequently, buy a heavy spoon.</comment></comment>


Update in ajv package broke webpack - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/8768 <comment><USER2> I love how the thread immediately devolves into confusion over whether the way to fix the problem is to manage dependencies with npm or with yarn.

Never change, frontend community!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is what happens when you don't pin your dependencies, right?

<comment><USER4> It's indeed a good reason for _apps_ to pin their dependencies; those that did so presumably didn't have their builds broken by this issue. I don't feel that pinning dependencies necessarily makes a whole lot of sense for _libraries_ , since it creates inflexibility and dependency duplication for app developers. But opinions vary.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't we consider the way that most people use webpack to be as an app, not as a library?

<comment><USER4> No, because you declare it as a dependency.

<comment><USER5> Is this a novel definition of "library"? To me, library code is called by my code while my code is running. So, most libraries are dependencies, but lots of dependencies are not libraries. Test, code coverage, or documentation tools might be dependencies, or as npm would say instead _dev_ Dependencies, but they are not libraries. Similarly, webpack is what we might call a build tool, which is also not a library.

<comment><USER4> I think it's just a semantic distinction, not a substantive one. The relevant thing is indeed that Webpack is generally used as part of another build process.

<comment><USER5> OK let's go with your definition. You're saying that "endpoints" may pin their dependencies, but any package that is depended upon by some other package should not in turn pin its own dependencies. ITT, I don't see support for this proposition. 'rigaspapas observed that the problems described in TFA could have been avoided through pinning. Presumably you're thinking of other problems that could be _caused_ by pinning, but why would you think those problems are any worse than causing the program to completely fail to accomplish anything?

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily worse, but more common. Diamond dependencies happen a lot, especially in npm.

<comment><USER5> Diamonds are more common because node unlike many environments is absolutely tolerant of them. Maybe this "wastes" some disk space, but otherwise this is not a problem. It is orthogonal to actual problems like bugs in particular package versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is why I have a global npm config flag to install the exact versions of packages. I think it's a huge mistake to install "anything over X" versions or even have that as a feature.</comment>


Decline and fall: how American society unravelled (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled <comment><USER2> American society is a massive collection of many, many different groups. No other heterogenous group of this scale relative to the rest of the world, save perhaps for the great empires of the past, has ever existed. We are bound to have struggle.

The story of America is the story of the world. When America oppressed minorities, it did so as all societies on Earth had oppressed their minorities, until the modern age has begun to open our eyes to better ways of living together.

As the American middle class dissolves, it does so as the middle class throughout much of the developed world dissolves.

We are a unique country, saddled with unique challenges, but these are more challenges of scale than anything else.

We will require visionary leadership if we are to overcome them.</comment>


Ask HN: If your job involves continually importing CSVs, what industry is it? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering if people still use CSVs for data exchange now, or if we've mostly moved to JSON and XML. <comment><USER2> We do a _lot_ of CSV imports (inventory/data management for art galleries). This is for a few reasons, most of which boil down to "it's an easy format to share with clients":

\- Clients that don't already have their data in an inventory management system usually have Excel spreadsheets, so we can just export that to CSV, parse it, and stick it in the database.

\- If they really have nothing (some commercial galleries, especially ones that have been around for 30+ years still do everything on index cards), then you can give someone a spreadsheet template to do the data entry into, and script the import step.

\- Even if they do, when preparing data for import, it's easy for the clients to look through the data (and for us) to see potential errors/inconsistencies that need to be corrected during the course of importing.

\- Small industry (data management services for commercial art galleries is maybe 2-3 companies in Europe, 1-2 in the US, and that's about it), all writing proprietary software, no semblance of agreed formats/standards. When a client quits one company and moves to another, it's easy to dump their data to CSV and leave the company doing the import to sort it out on the other end. Trying to piece together random-looking values across 15+ CSV files to see what the last legacy system meant by some string is a pain, but it's something that the client will pay for in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER3> E-commerce advertising. I worked at a company that managed online advertising (mostly Adwords at the time) for ecommerce companies. Most would provide us with a CSV with all their products - this would sometimes be hundreds of thousands of entries. We imported enough CSV (gigabytes a day maybe) that it was worthwhile to do things like implement custom CSV parsers to deal with some of our larger customers noncompliant CSV.

JSON might have been nice, but I can imagine it coming with its own trouble as well. CSV worked well since our tools would allow analysts to interpolate columns into the copy or key words when doing bulk ad creation. The nestable nature of JSON would have complicated the interface given to our nontechnical analysts.

I also imagine many of our clients wouldn't even know what JSON is.

</comment><comment><USER4> Arguing for the CSVW (CSV on the Web) W3C Standards:

\- "CSV on the Web: A Primer" [http://w3c.github.io/csvw/primer/](http://w3c.github.io/csvw/primer/)

\- Src: [https://github.com/w3c/csvw](https://github.com/w3c/csvw)

\- Columns have URIs (ideally from a shared RDFS/OWL vocabulary)

\- Columns have XSD datatype URIs

\- CSVW can be represented as RDF, JSON, JSONLD

With CSV, which extra metadata file describes how many rows at the top are for columnar metadata? (I.e. column labels, property URI, XSD datatype URI, units URI, precision, accuracy, significant figures) ... [https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibility#csv-...](https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibility#csv- csvw-and-metadata-rows)

... CSVW: [https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/knowledge- engineering#csvw](https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/knowledge- engineering#csvw)

      @prefix csvw: <http://www.w3.org/ns/csvw#> .

@context: [http://www.w3.org/ns/csvw.jsonld](http://www.w3.org/ns/csvw.jsonld)

</comment><comment><USER5> I am currently working on a project for a client in real estate management. They are aggregating data from state licensing agencies, insurance rating agencies, etc., and there are a lot that only provide CSV data. I imagine on the other side of the fence there is some guy or gal managing all this info in Excel, and CSV is the easiest path for the data to flow out.

Previously I worked for a company that provided a dashboard for small businesses to manage their listings (Yelp, Facebook, Google, Tripadvisor, etc). For multilocation clients, for initial setup we needed a list of all locations, addresses, phone, etc., and not a single client said "here's our api, grab the data in JSON format". Instead, we always got a CSV. We eventually gave them a CSV template file for them to copy/paste into.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, so like information from data.gov or other public data to verify people. That makes sense.

I'm guessing small businesses want to do integration with the web, but they didn't really have the engineers to do an API integration?

<comment><USER5> Some of these companies didn't even have the data in CSV format...we had to buy it from another vendor in CSV form ([https://www.aggdata.com](https://www.aggdata.com)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am also curious, but just to share my own insight on this, I've actually looked into a lot of CSV providers and they all seem to cater towards raw data with less semantics compared to the type of data that we would normally see through JSON or XML.

For example a lot of CSV data is used for plotting/visualization, because all they have is numbers. If they had more metadata they probably would have ported them to JSON.

Another observation: A lot of CSV dumps online are really that: data dump. It's a huge size file that's meant to be used after downloading, not for streaming like JSON/XML. You don't see many JSON apis that return huge size data, but it's common to see a lot of huge sized CSV files.

<comment><AUTHOR> What sort of people provide the CSVs?

I myself have had to integrate with 3rd party logistics companies, and the way we got them to send out our inventory was to send them a CSV of our orders twice a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Former company: comparison shopping engine / website, used for transferring e-commerce offers from merchants to our database. CSV is vastly superior (at least to XML, maybe JSON) due to its size and quick line-by-line parsing. The downside is lots of quirky and broken formats, there's no real standardisation in e-commerce.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes - Insurance. For one thing, many people can code well enough to move data from CSVs to a database (or vice versa) but not well enough to read/write an API. I guess the main reason, though, is that many back-office applications don't need to be 'real-time' and for those it's always going to be easier to send files and have someone import them to a DB.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's CSV all over the place.

Tables of data are best represented with... well, tables of data. For data that's not nested it's a perfectly acceptable format. Importing well-formed (and there's the rub) is trivial and a well-known process.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, many of our customers in the public utility industry use CSV. Use of JSON is somewhat rare, but XML is quite common.

</comment><comment><USER11> I work with a lot of environmental data coming from disparate sources.

.csv is like the lowest common denominator of data formats.

</comment><comment><USER12> CSVs are often superior for the specific types of structured, tabled data used in bioinformatics and statistics.

</comment><comment><USER13> Electrical engineer here.

EDA tools often export BOMs as CSV, which we import to Excel.

ATE programs often export test data as CSV, also imported to Excel for manipulation and graphing.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm in health care and we use CSVs as outbound file transfers. We also use x12 (EDI) for transfers which is not XML/JSON

</comment><comment><USER15> > moved to xml

No people still use the obviously superior format for structured tabulary data. Why would anyone use something that is highly suboptimal for things like these?

<comment><AUTHOR> \s ?

<comment><USER15> Why do people seriously think csv is obsolete? Have you seen all the metadata a json or xml contains? Why in the world would anyone use that for structured/tabulary data.

Its like when people starting saving photos as png because they read somewhere how "shitty" jpg is...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In social science we use Stata/SAS when possible but CSVs show up a lot.

</comment><comment><USER17> Media was a lot of CSVs (exports from TV buying programs), had some logistics guys use CSVs a lot too

</comment><comment><USER18> Finance

<comment><AUTHOR> What aspect of finance? Or rather, who are you getting the CSV from and what do you do with it?</comment></comment>


Alaska is warming so fast, quality-control algorithms are rejecting the data - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/12/12/barrow-is-warming-so-fast-algorithms-removed-the-data-because-it-seemed-unreal/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories-2_alaska-warming-230pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory <comment><USER2> "Just this week, scientists reported that the Arctic had its second-warmest year — behind 2016 — with the lowest sea ice ever recorded. "

Lowest sea ice ever recorded is verifiably untrue. [http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2017/09/arctic-sea-ice- at-...](http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2017/09/arctic-sea-ice-at-minimum- extent-2/)

It was the 8th lowest in the 38 year record.

<comment><USER3> OK soperj, why not come out with your real snag with this article, rather than sniping around the edges.

Are you seriously a sea ice height/depth soz - level fan?

<comment><USER2> Yes. I check it out nearly every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth...

I was reading like two days ago the Antarctic was warming faster than any other place on earth and shedding icebergs like crazy. Some sort of runaway effect from warm South Pacific water eating them away from underneath. Sea level to rise like 70ft.

Get your story straight people...

<comment><USER5> Nothing you say contradicts.

<comment><USER3> Arctic != Antarctic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The missing station was just the result of rapid, man-made climate change, > with a runaway effect on the Arctic.

I'm not a climate change denier, but isn't it disingenuous to label this as man-made. There isn't enough science around how the climate functions in general to make the assumption that in this specific area, the changes are a result of humans rather than natural cycles we have yet to identify because of the very little data we have.

<comment><USER7> It's a pretty firm scientific consensus that mankind is having an outsized impact on the changing climate. It would be disingenuous to report otherwise.

Sure, we could be exacerbating natural cycles, but according to the large volumes of data we _do_ have it's pretty clear that humans are a major contributing factor.

<comment><USER6> Consensus is not conclusive. It takes a special kind of hubris for someone to think they understand climate change with the minute dataset we have.

We don't have enough data to guess next month's weather let alone the possible effects in 10+ years.

<comment><USER7> > It takes a special kind of hubris for someone to think they understand > climate change with the minute dataset we have.

And an even greater hubris to ignore the pretty vast dataset we do have and go diametrically against the conclusions it suggests.

It's also pretty funny how that greater hubris is exhibited mainly in a particular country, and a specific party in that country which has a lot of ties/donations from oil companies. Especially when other branches of the government are preparing for the results of man made climate change. Makes you think, doesn't it.

<comment><USER8> In a certain state in said country, the majority of people are very much not a part of said party, recycle by law, and claim to live with minimal carbon footprint.

They also prefer to buy gas-guzzling SUVs, use millions of gallons of water to maintain lawns in the desert, redirect water to their large population centers to do so, and line up to buy the new iThing each year (tossing out the perfectly good old one in the trash).

<comment><USER9> I'm seriously trying to figure out what state you are talking about. Definitely not California (cities aren't very near the desert, even Los Angeles is in a semi humid basin), Arizona doesn't have lawns mostly, Utah SLC wouldn't really qualify as desert either. So then I thought you might mean Saudi Arabia?

<comment><USER10> > Definitely not California (cities aren't very near the desert

The coastal cities aren't, but the southern central valley cities (Bakersfield, notably) are _in_ the desert.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but that isn't many of them. A drive through the desert finds it is mostly unpopulated. Definitely "desert" doesn't define most of California's population, it isn't related to the Bay Area, Sacramento, etc....

You can find a list of California's largest desert cities at [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserts_of_California](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserts_of_California), and it's pretty marginal. Note Bakersfield isn't even on that list.

<comment><USER10> > You can find a list of California's largest desert cities at > [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserts_of_California](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserts_of_California), > and it's pretty marginal.

The list is incomplete; it seems to include only cities in the named deserts, not cities in desert climate; much of the San Joaquin Valley, especially the southern part, is desert—but not in a specifically _named_ desert—that is irrigated for agriculture.

<comment><USER9> That still doesn't make sense, those people primarily vote Republican and are agricultural. GP was hinting about vast liberal desert cities...so they must mean some other state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there hard data showing sea ice melt causes ocean levels to rise? Because water will displace the same mass whether it is frozen or not. The best explanation I've heard is the loss of reflection from the sea ice will cause the water to warm, and warm water is less dense. But most sea ice is underwater, so am not sure just how much reflection is lost, and how much that affects the sea water warming.

<comment><USER3> "Because water will displace the same mass whether it is frozen or not."

Why do bergs float and have a bit sticking up out of the water?

Why do ice cubes in my G&T insist on floating?

Sea ice melt is a bit of a worry if you are a polar bear that hunts on pack ice but for sea rise the real snag is land based glaciers melting into the sea. Greenland may be off your radar but it is a bit of a worry - lot of ice turning into water there, along with other places.

<comment><USER12> Sea ice melt is a huge worry because it changes the albedo of the polar ocean. That means more heating from the sun, which means a warmer Arctic and a warmer planet. It's one of the positive reinforcement mechanisms that's a huge worry to the climate community.

Greenland melting is also huge, and sea ice melting will make it go faster.

<comment><USER11> But how much does it actually change the albedo? Are there hard numbers and analysis? Most of the sea ice is below the surface, so a lot of sea ice melt does not necessarily translate to a large change in albedo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Previous submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893859)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15083989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15083989)

</comment><comment><USER14> and it's snowing in Florida already...

<comment><USER3> I've got relos in Palm Spring FL. Should I be warning them? 8)

<comment><USER14> not sure... this snow was north Florida... sometimes it doesn't even snow this early in southern Canada

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe its because the data input is bad.

The Earth isn't warming, that we know.

The models that used to predict the warming can't even output data that matches the observed data.

In 20 years, when the Earth has cooled, all the people who failed to use science will look like fools.

<comment> King-Aaron > The Earth isn't warming, that we know.

[citation needed]</comment></comment>


Fastest Growing and Shrinking Companies in the Fortune 500 List - <AUTHOR> https://craft.co/reports/fortune-500-fastest-growing-and-shrinking-companies <comment><USER2> So, energy companies are doing badly and industrials and technology companies (incl. healthcare) are doing well, which is usually the case in a period of economic recovery.

[http://investoracademy.org/business- cycle-101/](http://investoracademy.org/business-cycle-101/)</comment>


CA's new employment law has boomeranged and is starting to crush freelancers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/californias-new-employment-law-is-starting-to-crush-freelancers.html <comment><USER2> My ABC test: Anywhere But California</comment>


Project Fi Is Now Google Fi - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/28/18115264/google-fi-iphone-android-project-official <comment><USER2> seems like a decent deal. i'm having trouble understanding the 200$ credit: it seems to good to be true. the way i understand it: If i have an existing phone and sign up for FI then I get a 200$ credit, which means, if my monthly bill is say 45$ (20$+15$+10/gb) then i won't have to pay for the first 4.5 months?? wow, seems to good to be true.

i think the catch is: most phones aren't supported so you have to buy a relatively new phone to be elligble for it, right?

<comment><USER3> The other offer of giving travel reward seems too good to be true too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was on Project Fi. Now on Mint mobile. If T-mobile coverage is good in your area, Mint is the way to go. (25$ a month for 10GB data)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like they are opening it up to most phones. I've been pretty happy with the service. The data isn't as cheap as I would like but the international data being the same price is a pretty big deal for me.

My promo code if anyone wants to signup ($20 statement credit) [https://g.co/fi/r/72U5TT](https://g.co/fi/r/72U5TT)

<comment><USER5> Interesting. One of the cool parts about Fi has been the seamless switching between different cell networks, which as I understood it was reliant on hardware that was only available on certain phones (e.g. Nexus, Pixel). Apparently if you use Fi on a device that does not support network switching, you'll just be on T-Mobile's network:

[https://reddit.com/r/ProjectFi/comments/a17iq6/introducing_g...](https://reddit.com/r/ProjectFi/comments/a17iq6/introducing_google_fi_android_ios_ready/)</comment></comment>


US Forest Service Prevents Its Own Scientists from Talking About Study - <AUTHOR> http://kvpr.org/post/us-forest-service-prevents-its-own-scientists-talking-about-study <comment><USER2> Man that's some crap right there. Science should be in the direct interest of politics, esp. in the case of ecology, environmental studies.

What does it mean to be forbidden to speak, that's a load of shit, if there is someone that's studying the field, allow them to present the facts of what occurs, and whats the best way (saving lives of wildlife, cost effectiveness, etc) to officials.

a load of bullshit its whats holding us back.

<comment><USER3> > What does it mean to be forbidden to speak

It means you'll lose your job if you speak.

<comment><USER2> i do understand the implications, what i dont understand is the reasoning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Francis Fukuyama recently wrote an excellent article about the US Forest Service in Foreign Affairs. Title: America in Decay

[https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united- states/2014-0...](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united- states/2014-08-18/america-decay)

<comment><USER5> "45 percent of recent new hires to the federal service are veterans, as mandated by Congress"

This is disturbing if true. Certainly not a way to get the best quality work force.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if I agree... 45% might be a too high percentage but hiring veterans? Absolutely yes. Likely a win/win.

Federal services get provably dependable people and veterans get work.

<comment><USER5> Simply showing up doesn't make one "provably dependable". One needs to actually carry out tasks, something the armed services are woefully inadequate at. Which is of course why all the contractors.

It's a terrible idea to mandate this. Horrible.

<comment><USER6> Don't underestimate soldiers.

If doing what you are supposed to do again and again even when your life is at risk isn't proof of being dependable I don't know what does.

Not saying this is the only thing Federal Services need but doubting their _dependability_ seems unjusified.

Many contractors on the other hand seems to have their

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the paper they're talking about:

[https://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1280.summary](https://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1280.summary)

Unfortunately only the abstract seems to be free.

<comment><USER7> Some non-paywalled resources for more information are cited directly from within the paper:

"Although agencies are slow to reform internally, they may more rapidly respond to local stakeholder pressure... This has begun to change as communities increasingly threatened by large fires are urging land-management agencies to accelerate fuel reduction efforts, including the use of managed fire [1][2]."

[1] [http://yosemitestanislaussolutions.com](http://yosemitestanislaussolutions.com)

[2] [http://4fri.org](http://4fri.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a nifty disclaimer in the main text: "The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the USFS."

In any case, here are few of the more interesting citations from the full text.

"Globally, wildfire size, severity, and frequency have been increasing, as have related fatalities and taxpayer-funded firefighting costs" CITATION: [http://nature.berkeley.edu/stephenslab/wp- content/uploads/20...](http://nature.berkeley.edu/stephenslab/wp- content/uploads/2015/04/stephens-et-al-boreal-mega-fires.pdf)

"But the 2% of wildfires that escape containment often burn under extreme weather conditions in fuel-loaded forests and account for 97% of fire-fighting costs and total area burned" CITATION: [http://www.wildfire- economics.org/Library/Calkin_et_al_2005....](http://www.wildfire- economics.org/Library/Calkin_et_al_2005.pdf)

Bonus: Malcolm North on Climate Change and Wildfires - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9buMJNu6v4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9buMJNu6v4)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've read this through a few times and have yet to see anything even remotely controversial.

It's accepted, conventional wisdom - so deeply as to be cliche - everywhere in the fire service that managed burning and moving away from the emphasis on "stopping all burns no matter what" is the way to go.

I've never spoken to anyone that disagreed with this on any level other than specific tactics...

<comment><USER10> This was certainly common enough knowledge that it was taught to me explicitly in Boy Scouts back in 1997. Preventing all forest fires builds up undergrowth so that the severity of eventual fires is much worse and they are less controllable.

At the time, they were doing controlled burns of the Boy Scout camp (Philmont) in Nevada to try to make up for decades of undergrowth buildup before they knew better.

<comment><USER11> Philmont is in New Mexico.

<comment><USER10> I learned my geography in Indiana!

...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone show some example maps of the proposed zoning? I have trouble envisioning the proposed policy.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't sound like there are example maps, as this is just a paper studying what has happened, and one possible future mitigation. From what it sounds like, if we use Los Padres National Forest as an example, [1] they'll let areas near Alamo Mountain burn, but Pinon Pines Estates and Lake of the Woods would get forces concentrated there, with preventative forestry work to thin trees, etc to make things more manageable.

[1] [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Los+Padres+National+Forest...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-119.1781503,11z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x80ec84fd38f0735f:0x445f88fa1ca91e6c)

<comment><USER12> how does propagation work? wouldn't a fire travel all the way from a inhabited place to the habitations? do they have some kind of maximal propagation distance?

<comment><USER13> Short answer: it's complicated. It's possible, and near definite if they started this policy without getting a forest close to natural, that letting areas burn could burn from "wild" areas to inhabited areas. Normally, fires would be stopped by natural firebreaks, like rainstorms, rivers and canyons, or unnatural firebreaks, like fire roads. However, because fire policy has been to put all fires out immediately, all of the dead brush, fallen branches, etc, are left to litter the floor of the forest. This means that a fire, which would normally just scorch the base of the living trees and ignite some of the dead but standing trees, would have a very good chance to burn nice and hot due to all the kindling in the form of dead brush and growth. This would in turn end up igniting even trees that reproduce in the fire cycle, like pines and sequoias, leaving the forest absolutely barren for miles and miles.

However, there are ways to get the land fairly close to natural so that fires can stay relatively small. One of which is through prescribed burns, where the forestry department will intentionally, and carefully, set an area on fire to clear up all the brush and dead growth to act as an imitation of the natural process. It would also mean doing things like carefully grooming the areas around inhabited places to give even less fuel for any kind of fire. Unfortunately, implementing such policy would be very difficult because it would involve needing a lot of firefighters in the near term to manage prescribed burns, and the powers that be are hesitant to give much money to the forest service as it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On Australian aboriginal peoples' burnoff traditions: [http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2010/12/aborigin...](http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2010/12/aboriginal- burn-off-theory-hosed-down/) and [http://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/management/fire/fire-and-the- envir...](http://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/management/fire/fire-and-the- environment/41-traditional-aboriginal-burning)

</comment><comment><USER15> Way to promote the paper and make sure its gets plenty of news coverage. I wish I could think they planned it that way, but I know better.

</comment><comment> bro-stick We own a rural residential property near Chico, CA on top of a mesa in a fire- prone area, and the forest "management" is haphazard, combined with clueless American neighbors whom the city has to force to mow their weeds and remove fuel from their land, and you have a constant battle against stupid and/or lazy people whom don't know how to mange their land and are liabilties to everyone else. I'm often think about "accidentally" chucking a roadflare in their yard to get them with the program.

IIRC forest management changed significantly under either Bush Sr. or Clinton.

</comment><comment><USER16> Dear scientist, please shut up, you are ruining our budget rise prospects. Bigger the fires bigger the budget and elevated importance of management positions.

<comment><USER17> I read it more as "we have spent all of the prevention money on fighting."

Along the lines of the "when you are up to your ass in alligators, it may be hard to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp."</comment></comment>


Nasa: India's satellite destruction could endanger ISS - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47783137 <comment><USER2> He who has rockets, can deny all others space entry for centurys.</comment>


Interviewing Non-Technical Hires - <AUTHOR>

I'm the founder of a small ten person startup. Right now everyone here is a programmer and as the CEO I handle 100% of our company's non technical duties. We're now growing to the point where it is too much work for me to handle all of that work myself, so we are in the process of hiring our first non technical employee. This person will (due to our size) be very much so a generalist, but will mainly be doing marketing and customer service.
We have a very good process for interviewing technical people, but I have no experience with hiring non technical people, and I'm not quite sure the best way to do it, especially since it seems a lot harder to quantify ability. For technical hires we can learn a lot by looking at their code or watching them code and I'm not really sure what the equivalent is for non technical hires.
So in short: Does anyone have any good suggestions or resources for vetting marketing hires? <comment><USER2> I am an engineer. But have done a lot of hiring, both technical and non- technical. I now run [http://InterviewKickstart.com](http://InterviewKickstart.com).

The core thing you have to realize, is that there is NO reason for a non- technical person to not be as smart/driven as an engineer. I am not saying you believe that, but what I'm saying, is that while the questions may be different, your grading standards should not change. Especially not when you're a young company growing fast. The hire you make now, will likely be with you for a long time.

Having said that, the following have worked well for me in the past:

1\. Ask them simple logical brain-teasers. The kind that don't need programming knowledge. You are looking for excitement and a drive to solve them, instead of backing down.

2\. Ask them to present something to a small group of people. It could be their favorite project, or their hobby or whatever. You are looking for clarity of thought, the ability to explain something to a few people, the depth of interest, empathy for the audience and confidence in themselves.

3\. Ask them for a writing sample. This is very much akin to a code sample. Is it clear to understand? Is it engaging? Have they taken care of details and punctuation? Very important.

4\. Put a few different personalities in the interviewing panel. Are they able to hold a conversation with everyone? Are they able to treat them with respect, regardless of the personality type?

5\. Ask them what they want to do in short and long term. Is there clarity? Is there ambition? Is there reason and grounding?

Good luck!

<comment><USER3> >The core thing you have to realize, is that there is NO reason for a non- technical person to not be as smart/driven as an engineer.

I'm going to push back on that and say _there is if you 're paying them less than half what you pay engineers_, which might be a perfectly reasonable market rate if most of what they're expected to do involves relatively basic admin tasks. That doesn't mean you want to be hiring people that come across as lazy or inept, but it does mean that someone can do an efficient job at managing your office despite being stumped by that very simple conditional probability puzzle. (although if that probability puzzle was based on conversion rates you should perhaps be hoping for a prospective VP Marketing to nail it...)

The flip side is there's no reason why an engineer shouldn't be able to ask a non-technical questions on interviewees' approach to tasks they'll be performing and understand enough of the answers to be reasonably confident of which interviewees are thoughtful about their approach to marketing or operations or customer service. Instead of brain teasers, ask them about problems you actually anticipate them solving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Give them a situation where they have to deal with the problem and compare how well they handle it. Like if you are a product company, ask them to act as marketing and to sell the product to a potential buyer but the customer is orthodox but wealthy. See if they can crack the deal!!!

You can email me, I am good at such scenarios. I would love to help!

email@example.com</comment>


The Heir to a Tofu Dynasty Finally Learns to Make Tofu - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/nyregion/the-heir-to-a-tofu-dynasty-finally-learns-to-make-tofu.html <comment><USER2> \-- Mr. Eng asked one of his parents' former employees how much baking soda a particular recipe called for. He said, "A cup." ... "Like a coffee cup?" "No, this one cup that we had at the shop." The cup, naturally, had been thrown out.

This is so hilariously like my Chinese mother-in-law, get angry recreating her receipt at my house because why would anyone not using her "standard" sized cups (giveaways at the mall). She is not the only one, so is my grandma and mom.

<comment><USER3> I have a Nepali friend who was at the time doing a Ph.D. in biology. Part of his daily routine is to do DNA/RNA extraction, which is highly time-consuming and precise. It involves using pipettes to transfer a minuscule amount of stuff from one tube to another, wait for hours, spin it, add some enzymes, spin it, etc. Sometimes you do what you're instructed to do from the kit and the extraction still doesn't produce a useable result.

He had a pretty snuggly relationship with his advisor, and from time to time would bring his food to the lab to share. He told me one day, the advisor decided to ask him how to make the food. Like any biologist, she came to his house with a notebook, fully expected to be able to take notes. She expected him to show her the recipes like what you do in the DNA extraction. Instead, what he told her was... put a reasonable amount of this herb and that herb into the pot, then cook until done. She got frustrated and threw the notebook away and gave up the dream of cooking Nepali food.

I am Vietnamese and there's that special Vietnamese dipping sauce recipe that I wanted to make to treat my Chinese friend at the time I stayed at her place. I got really frustrated when I was following a recipe to make it and couldn't get it right and wasted 3/4 of what I bought. My friend was like... so... let me try. And she just mixed shit randomly, tasted it, and tried adding more shit by her instinct, and it worked!

I do enjoy cooking by the book from time to time. At the same time, there is a lot of Asian food that is made by instinct. It is part of what made the food interesting. It made the food part of an envolving species instead of being fixated.

BTW, learning from mistakes, my biologist friend now has a website with real recipes you can sorta follow, please like and subscribe™ if you want to make Nepali food: [https://avikarn.com/foodblog/](https://avikarn.com/foodblog/)

<comment><USER4> > _Instead, what he told her was... put a reasonable amount of this herb and > that herb into the pot, then cook until done._

Maybe I'm a biologist at heart, but this is what really annoys me in the cooking scene. "Reasonable", "a pinch", "add to taste". It's like with the famous owl drawing tutorial - "1\. Draw some circles; 2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl". You have to already be an experienced cook to be able to use such recipes.

<comment><USER5> When I was first learning to cook, I found this very frustrating too. Like, why can't someone just write down the precise amounts of everything and then a great recipe could actually be reliably shared and repeatable?

My moment of enlightenment came when I realized that many of the fundamental units of cooking are wildly variable. A recipe for baked potatoes that says "Add 1.3582 grams of salt" can have as many significant digits of precision as you want, but it won't fix the problem. One potato might be 50% bigger than another. Even potatoes of the same size may vary in water content, starch, etc. Even different kinds of salt vary in how salty they taste.

When a recipe says "Add 1-2 tsp salt" or "adjust to taste", it's not that the recipe is _vague_ , it's that it's _parametric_. What it's really saying is that the ingredients you already have going will influence how much of _this_ new ingredient you need so that's where you need to make some choices. The vagueness itself, compared to other ingredients which have precise quantities, is a useful signal for you to know which parameters need tuning and which don't.

It _is_ a problem that it means you can't guarantee a new recipe will come out great the first time you make it, especially if you are a new cook. You're basically turning a knob blindly to see what happens. But for most recipes, there isn't really an easier solution. Imagine a recipe like, "Weigh the potato and then immerse in water to measure its density. Add a quantity of salt based on the following formula..." Would that work? Maybe. Would it be less work than just trying it a few times and getting a feel for it? Probably not.

<comment><USER6> It's not just weight that's variable, it's flavor too!

I cook all of my family's meals, and when I started out years ago, I tried to write down recipes exactly, weigh everything (how much is a cup of flour when density varies?), but then I realized, all the damn ingredients aren't the same twice.

Carrots can go from bitter to sweet, potatoes can range from starchy to gooey, herbs can be really subtle, or really strong, it depends on the weather. Even in my own garden, the herbs are completely variable. The only thing that seems consistent is meats and inorganic things like salt. Corn fed beef is different from grass fed beef, for example, but within each category, pretty consistent.

So, frustrating as it is, it's near impossible to write a perfectly reproducible recipe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone is interested in making their own tofu I found these books to be quite good.

Asian tofu by Andrea Nguyen The book of tofu by William shurtleff and akiko aoyagi

The first is a bit more basic but covers a range of Asian tofu and is easier to get into.

The second is very dense with information and is more specifically about Japanese tofu but after getting started with the first book I much prefer referring to this one.

</comment><comment><USER8> Homemade tofu is incredible easy to make, it's only soybean, of course, water, heat, and Glucono delta-lactone

<comment><USER9> "<doing the thing> is easy, you just need to know how to <do the thing>" isn't very helpful.

<comment><USER8> If you really want to try I can give you a recipe: 1\. 180g dried soybean soaked in water overnight 2\. drain the water then put in 1100ml water in a food processor 3\. grinding for 1 min 4\. filter the liquid 5\. measure the liquid weight or volume for weight of glucono delta lactone, 3g per 1000g or 1000ml, dissolve it in water as little as possible, and then add to a large bowl big enough to contain the liquid 6\. boil the liquid, after boiling turn to mid heat for 5min. Then filter. now you have soy milk 7\. remove from heat, stir to dissipate heat 8\. slowing pouring to the bowl added with glucono delta lactone, pouring toward the wall not the bottom of the bowl 9\. cover the bowl with paper towel or cheese cloth, then the lid, waiting for 30 mins

voila now you have Douhua ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douhua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douhua)), which often seen in China as a breakfast dish

to get tofu, just drain the water out, to do so put the douhua in some container with holes at bottom and then add weight.

<comment><USER10> Is the result much better than the stuff I find at the supermarket? Because that sounds like at least on hour of work.

<comment><USER11> Let me put it this way... It's better in the same way that fresh home made bread is better than store bought bread. Now imagine that you live in a country (like Japan) where the average person thinks that a baguette is essentially a big hotdog bun that has been sitting on a shelf for 2 weeks. That's the equivalent of the tofu that you tend to buy in a supermarket in the US. It is possible to buy good store bought tofu, but usually it is unavailable unless you have a big Asian population nearby. Like bread in France, you really want to go to the tofu store in the morning for your tofu because day old tofu is tasteless and horrible (just like day old bread).

Whether or not you can actually make great tofu at home without a _lot_ of practice is debatable, but at the very least the average person can make something that is worlds apart from the lifeless, bitter chunks of woe that the supermarket calls tofu. If you get a chance to go to a real tofu restaurant in Japan or China, you should leap at the chance. It's just like your first trip to a boulangerie in Paris -- mind blowing.

<comment><USER12> Not to take away from your point, but Japanese baked goods—especially breads and pastries—are extremely high quality, even if they've got a local spin that might turn off the hardcore purists.

By the way, I just bought a homemade kurogoma dofu today from the little shop in my neighborhood here in Kyoto. It's not "real" tofu, but it's mind- meltingly great!

<comment><USER13> I think you missed the point of the grandparent comment. It referred specifically to what "the average person thinks [is] a baguette". I love Japanese baked goods, lots of super light fluffy bread, great pastries. But crusty, fresh baguette is not something I saw much in three years of living in Japan. Every supermarket had bread in a bag that was called バゲット and looked like baguette — but every one got the texture all wrong.

Just like there are places (Asian groceries, etc) to get good tofu in North America, I'm sure there are places to get good baguette in Japan. But the average person would think of what they can get in their local supermarket, which is decidedly not-good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The gentrification of food :(

<comment><USER15> Local artisans have been a critical part of food culture for hundreds/thousands of years.

Plus, the shop is selling tofu bricks for 2 bucks. I would call this a great example of the opposite of gentrification - bringing something back to its humble roots while allowing for sustainability in the modern economy.

<comment><USER14> Did you even read the article? People leave the shop after seeing tofu being sold for $2 instead of $1</comment></comment></comment>


Corporate Busy vs Creator Busy - <AUTHOR> http://scrivle.com/2011/03/07/corporate-busy-vs-creator-busy/

<comment><USER2> Beautiful, i'm going to justify the weeks of procrastination with this.</comment>


Raising urban chickens--the latest SV status symbol - <AUTHOR> http://www.chickenvideo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the other side of the barn: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmcwilliams/2013/11/21/five...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmcwilliams/2013/11/21/five- reasons-why-owning-backyard-chickens-is-for-the-birds/#38a665097f44)</comment>


Why Is Same-Sex Sexual Behavior So Common in Animals? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-is-same-sex-sexual-behavior-so-common-in-animals/ <comment><USER2> TLDR (tongue in a cheek): Review your assumptions, why would it not be?</comment>


The TLA Home Page - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/tla.html <comment><USER2> Why did you submit the redirect rather than linking directly to [http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html](http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html) ?</comment>


Postmortem on a beta regression - <AUTHOR> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2016-January/003836.html <comment> semi-extrinsic Being annoyed at how Firefox has handled the introduction of add-on signing, this stuck out like a sore thumb:

""" the problem was discovered, and filed as bug 1240559. This was on January 18th, which is 8 days before the beta gets shipped to release.

A workaround for add-on developers was posted in [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1240559#c10](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1240559#c10), and the bug was marked as a WONTFIX on the 21st.

On the 22nd, an add-on developer reopened the bug, saying that the workaround wasn't acceptable, as they wouldn't have time to fix their add-on and get it approved before 44 went out the door.

A patch was written, and then the decision was made to land the fix directly onto release. The add-on author confirmed the fix, and the bug was closed out. This is what we ended up shipping. """

The add-on developer in question who got this reopened, Ben Bucksch, got it absolutely right:

""" This is a major goof for ext compat. You goofed, you'll have to fix it. You can't leave the dirt on our carpet. You can't just remove APIs without warning and then say "sorry".

This is a must fix. And even if FF4 were to be released tomorrow, you should still be glad to have found it before it hits end users.

> No, there isn't anything left to do.

NewTabURL.jsm was accidentally removed. There's a trivial fix: Re-add the file. """

Mozilla devs appear to be completely out of touch with what their core goal should be: a stable open-source browser with an awesome add-on community. Instead the Process is holy and cannot be altered. In the process they're alienating add-on devs, people who make their product more awesome _for free_. Come on, guys, who gives a shit about whether about:newtab is remotely hosted?

<comment><USER2> > Mozilla devs appear to be completely out of touch with what their core goal > should be . . . Instead the Process is holy and cannot be altered

They made a mistake. They then fixed it and admitted exactly what the mistake was. Because they did so, they're called completely out of touch.

I often advocate for my employer to be more open in our postmortems, but responses like this make it impossible for my side to win the argument against folks who claim, quite reasonably, that admitting any kind of mistake will result in people using it against us later.

<comment> semi-extrinsic They made a mistake, which broke an API used by many third parties. The fix was very simple. Yet they close as WONTFIX until another dev makes repeated comments that point out this is not tolerable. Then they reopen and fix.

It's the closing and insisting "this is not a showstopper, work around the bug in your third party code", that indicates to me they are out of touch. What happened after that was fine.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind the perspective of the people trying to ship Firefox:

* The bug does not break the vanilla (and therefore vast majority of userbase) firefox experience

* The bug is easily worked-around (as opposed to completely unfixable)

* The release candidates were already being built (which means you don't want to make changes, because you have to rebuild+resend to manual QA+resign)

* The bug was merged in as part of a security fix which they can't risk touching

They're not necessarily out of touch. It could easily be that people who didn't have all the details (e.g. release managers who didn't realize the fix was re-adding a single trivial file) were worried about the risks of upsetting a security release.

Sometimes it takes time for the severity of a regression to work its way up to a decision maker. And in the end they did exactly the right thing, with 5 separate people all putting in work on a weekend to make it right.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Knuth – Estimating the Efficiency of Backtrack Programs(1975) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/1975-29-129/S0025-5718-1975-0373371-6/S0025-5718-1975-0373371-6.pdf <comment><USER2> Note that this paper (Knuth's "P69") was reprinted as Chapter 6 of _Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms_ , and this material is covered (in compressed form) in Pre-Fascicle 5B of _The Art of Computer Programming_.[1] This will be part of Fascicle 5, due to be published later this year, and eventually the first one-third of Volume 4B (the middle third, namely Fascicle 6, has already been published).

Pre-Fascicle 5B is[2] entirely about (what Knuth considers an "introduction to") backtrack programming, and Pre-Fascicle 5C follows it up with a special low-level technique for making backtracking more efficient, namely Dancing Links. And Fascicle 6 is about Satisfiability (aka SAT), the premier instance of a problem solved by "backtracking". All of these are already available!

If you're interested in algorithms for combinatorial problems you should check out whatever Knuth has published since he started working on Volume 4; there's a lot of fresh material and he has a unique perspective of his own.

Edit: What I mean by unique perspective: For example, unlike mainstream Theory-CS, Knuth is not primarily interested in the asymptotic complexity of problems (despite being the "father" of analysis of algorithms and the popularizer of Big-O notation in computer science), but is interested rather in real programs that can be executed on real computers, and in the mathematical analysis thereof. Given a problem, what I can imagine a mainstream theoretical computer scientist doing is coming up with a suitable abstraction that is mathematically elegant, reducing the problem to/from other known problems, getting asymptotic upper and lower bounds on complexity, not minding if one ends up with a "galactic algorithm", etc. What I can imagine Knuth doing is writing an assembly program (perhaps in MIX/MMIX, his best approximation to the wide variety of actual machine languages in existence), then doing a no-holds-barred mathematical analysis of its running time (not just Big-O but including the constants for the leading terms: here Big-O is used only to suppress less-useful information), then comparing this running time against empirical estimates derived from writing and running a C (or CWEB) program. See some talks on Sedgewick's site for examples of the difference (sorry can't find the exact reference right now).

[1]: [https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news19.html#targetText=5b](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news19.html#targetText=5b) (search for "5b" on the page)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Art_of_Comput...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Art_of_Computer_Programming&oldid=919657342#Volume_4B,_4C,_4D_–_Combinatorial_Algorithms)

<comment><USER2> To put it differently, Knuth's perspective is that of someone who's fundamentally a programmer at heart, but also happens to be a supremely competent/skilled mathematician. There are not many people like that (Bill Gosper comes to mind).

In this paper, which is worth reading even if you've never heard of backtracking before — Knuth introduces backtracking with a very simple example that he then deeply analyzes to great effect — you can get a sense of this from the very first page:

> _Sometimes a backtrack program will run to completion in less than a second, > while other applications seem to go on forever. The author once waited all > night for the output from such a program, only to discover that the answers > would not be forthcoming for about 10^6 centuries. A "slight increase" in > one of the parameters of a backtrack routine might slow down the total > running time by a factor of a thousand; conversely, a "minor improvement" to > the algorithm might cause a hundredfold improvement in speed; and a > sophisticated "major improvement" might actually make the program ten times > slower. These great discrepancies in execution time are characteristic of > backtrack programs, yet it is usually not obvious what will happen until the > algorithm has been coded and run on a machine._

> _Faced with these uncertainties, the author worked out a simple estimation > procedure in 1962, designed to predict backtrack behavior in any given > situation. […] during subsequent years, extensive computer experimentation > has confirmed its utility._

He spends 4 pages (one-fourth of the paper) gently introducing backtracking, then a page making a mathematical formalism out of it, then the method falls out almost naturally. The method is elegant and almost too good to be true: instead of doing your backtracking (systematically trying every possible way to extend a partial solution), at each step just pick a _random_ way to extend the partial extension. Continue till you get stuck or find a solution. (You're basically going down just one random path of the search tree.) The cost of this path, weighted by appropriate probabilities, is an estimate of the cost of the backtracking program.

Two corollaries show the worth of the formalism, then he refines the method to work better in practice, etc. The motivation is always better tools for the working programmer, but he's happy to, e.g. introduce generating functions and differentiate them, when needed.

> _Furthermore, the game [hand calculation] is worthwhile, because it gives > insight into the behavior of the algorithm, and such insight is of great use > later when the algorithm is eventually programmed; good ideas about data > structures, and about various improvements in the backtracking strategy, > usually suggest themselves._

<comment><USER3> Another notable mathematician and exemplary programmer is D. J. Bernstein.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Knuth mentions this paper in _Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About_. He said that the success of randomization for quantitative problems led him to use similar techniques for qualitative problems -- like studying the Bible by studying only a "random" sample of verses. He ended up choosing to focus on verse 3:16 of each book (actually, the 16th verse after the start of the 3rd chapter, provided such a verse exists). Questions about whether this was an appropirate sample and whether this was a good idea at all are discussed extensively in TACSRTA.

</comment><comment><USER5> Perfect timing, I just realized this evening that I might need backtracking [https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/aa46e1e88c3bcd2db83c...](https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/aa46e1e88c3bcd2db83c01f9af076270)</comment>


A Libra Wallet Proof of Concept - Yello-Wallet Hi there I would like your opinion on a little proof of concept we have been working on. It is called Yello and it is an easy and social wallet for the Libra network. Although Libra has not been launched (if ever) you can already use Yello on the Libra testnet. We will launch Yello next week but you can already take it for a test drive using this link: https://yello.social/?access=canihasaccess <comment><AUTHOR> Code?

<comment> Yello-Wallet We launched yesterday. So no need for an access key anymore. And we really are interested what you think aboutit

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I have no interest in Libra as a currency. I'm sure your work is good.</comment></comment></comment>


Victorian London in detail with OpenLayers - <AUTHOR> http://mappinglondon.co.uk/2013/victorian-london-in-incredible-detail/ <comment><USER2> I thought my house was built some time between 1890 and 1900, but as I can see it on this map, I guess that puts it nearer to 1890.

I'd like to think of some Victorian gentleman sitting in this very same room, smoking a pipe, reading in the paper by gaslight about the newly built power station at Deptford, and about Idaho becoming the 43rd American state.

<comment><USER3> You can look at census information if you are curious.

I was curious about my victorian house. These days it is a typical 3 bedroom detached semi, constructed circa 1890.

A check of the census revealed that back in 1901, there was a married couple, the husband working for the Pearl Insurance company, 8 children and a grandmother living in it. The toilet was outside (but at least they had their own!) and there was only one dedicated bedroom as upstairs had not been converted.

So your idea of a "victorian gentlement" sitting alone in the room is probably wrong. Likely the house would have been teeming with children, who would be employed after the age of 12 or so. Multiple people would sleep in each room. The kitchen would have a bed recess. Constant work would be done all day every day for everyday tasks now like keeping dishes clean, heating water, cooking etc.

The husband probably spends his occasional free time at the pub to avoid the endless activity of home.

It is surprising how much more poverty-stricken and arduous even middle class life was then, compared to now.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a link to where you can search census data by address? Most of the standard sites let you search by name.

<comment><USER5> [http://search.findmypast.co.uk/search-world- records/1901-eng...](http://search.findmypast.co.uk/search-world- records/1901-england-wales-and-scotland-census)

hit the address tab on the top of the search page

<comment><USER6> You have to subscribe to that site right?

Edit: Seems a bit scammy.

[https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.findmypast.co.uk](https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.findmypast.co.uk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It even shows Horse Troughs, which are still there

[http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=19&lat=51.5230&lon=-0.1...](http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=19&lat=51.5230&lon=-0.1060&layers=163)

</comment><comment><USER8> Some building seem to have their internal walls mapped. For example:

[http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=20&lat=51.5226&lon=-0.1...](http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=20&lat=51.5226&lon=-0.1061&layers=163)

Or am I reading this wrongly?

<comment><USER9> No, you're right. If they're a public space they're likely to be mapped.

<comment><USER8> Google Maps Inside back in 1895!

It looks like the building I noticed was a courthouse from 1780 to 1931 [1], so yes a public space. Its now a private members club targeting tech workers [2].

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

[2] [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/home- house-t...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/home-house-to-woo- londons-tech-staff-with-clerkenwell-club-8844553.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=21&lat=51.5343&lon=-0.0...](http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=21&lat=51.5343&lon=-0.0487&layers=163)

<comment><USER7> Not any more, apparently society doesn't need to pee

<comment><USER11> The other urinal, at the park gate to the east, is now marked as a toilet on OpenStreetMap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This looks a lot like the maps that came with the old Sherlock Holmes Infocom game: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock:_The_Riddle_of_the_Cr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock:_The_Riddle_of_the_Crown_Jewels) ... which makes sense I guess.

</comment><comment><USER13> Forget London, try browsing round other areas of the UK and looking at some of the historic OS 25 inch maps.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a page that explains all these abbreviations and symbols? P.H.? H? F.P.? That little arrow against the walls? [http://maps.nls.uk/townplans/symbols.html](http://maps.nls.uk/townplans/symbols.html) only has a couple.

<comment><USER15> They are likely the same as used in modern OS maps - [https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/resources/maps-and- geograph...](https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/resources/maps-and-geographic- resources/map-abbreviations.html)</comment></comment>


Browserify-fs, a FULL implementation of fs for the browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mafintosh/browserify-fs

<comment><USER2> Good job. Would be interesting to try browserify some of the more fs-heavy modules from npm.</comment>


Show HN: Dev Kit for Chrome Extensions - <AUTHOR> https://ChromeExtensionKit.com?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN! The kit is meant to help you build and grow Chrome extensions and includes: 6 Basic Starter templates (HTML/CSS/JS), 7 React Starter templates (with utility scripts), 3 fully functional example extensions, and an ebook.</comment>