JumpScan - QR-Code redirector - <AUTHOR> http://jumpscan.com/ This looks interesting... Links all your stuff with one QR-Code... <comment><USER2> With the proliferation of barcode readers, it becomes more and more apparent that traditional applications that rely on these codes: item tracking and warehousing have no built-in security, some even allowing direct executable code injection via barcodes.

<http://www.securitytube.net/Hacking-Barcodes-video.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER3> This makes a ton of sense. It's incredibly surprising nobody has done this / publicized it already. Win.

(I ran into an error trying to connect with fb; second time worked.)

<comment><USER4> <http://www.getaquirk.com/>

And my Rate My post from ~August: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672140>

I've moved away from it since, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice but this is basically what <http://www.p8tch.com/> has been doing for years with real qr codes. You get a patch with a qr-code that you can redirect to any URL you want.

I have one on my backpack, sorry for the awful picture: <http://i.imgur.com/DvyCy.png>

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice!

Also: "simpleqrcode" app on android market allows you to encode your contact info into a QR code directly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I would like to see your app, but it is not found when I use "Android market" on my Nexus One. Perhaps your app is on another market place?

<comment><USER6> Looks it got pulled in the meantime. Oops. Looking at it now it says in light gray letters at the top "for docomo" so maybe it was some kind of beta that I accidentally downloaded.

Here's a link to author's blog - there are examples of using zxing library for generating the QRCode. HTH.

<http://d.hatena.ne.jp/tomorrowkey/searchdiary?word=*[qrcode]>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The site does a real nice job of explaining what without giving me reasons why.

</comment><comment><USER8> www.qr-stories.com</comment>


Enormous Palaeozoic flesh-eaters created in lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/01/paleozoic_park/

<comment><USER2> TA: "Crazed boffins in the USA say they have successfully carried out a Jurassic Park-style project in which enormous flesh-eating creatures from the remote prehistoric past have been successfully bred in the laboratory. Incomprehensibly this laboratory is not located on a remote island."

First off, by "flesh eater" they mean a big huge dragonfly.

Second, this is not even remotely a Jurassic Park style project. No genetic engineering involved at all. All they did was increase the oxygen in the atmosphere to 31%.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pictures pls</comment>


The Walkman wasn't invented in Japan - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/world/americas/an-unlikely-trendsetter-made-earphones-a-way-of-life.html <comment><USER2> I found some pics of his device on a german site: [https://heureka- stories.de/2-uncategorised/105-der-walkman-d...](https://heureka- stories.de/2-uncategorised/105-der-walkman-die-ganze-geschichte.html)</comment>


Why do Finland's schools get the best results?  - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8601207.stm

<comment><USER3> Summary:

1\. Finnish parents read with their children. 2\. Low immigration - <USER2> "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3\. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4\. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.

<comment><USER4> Canada also scores highly in PISA rankings. However it is officially bilingual, has high immigration, many ESL and FSL students.

Within Canada: Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec score higher than the national average and they are the provinces with the highest in-migration.

<comment><USER5> Finland is officially bilingual, too, and a significant number learn finnish as a second language (like this Thorvalds guy you might have heard about). The rest start learming swedish as the second language in grade 3, IIRC.

<comment><USER4> Yes Linus is from the Swedish-speaking minority - about 5% of the population right? However, I don't think you are disagreeing that Canadian schools have much more ethnic and linguistic diversity than Finnish schools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Genetics?

The article doesn't even pause to consider the possibility that Finnish people, a small and relatively isolated population, might just happen to be, on average, genetically just a bit smarter than world population at large. While thinking about these things is horrendously unfashionable, it should be considered before we start assuming that we can replicate their success by copying their school system.

<comment><USER7> Equally unfashionable is the idea that there are advantages to homogeneous societies and classrooms.

<comment><USER8> Your statement is glib and unproductive. Obviously there are advantages to homogeneous societies. There are advantages to heterogeneous societies, which the U.S. is a pretty good example of. The point is not which is "better", but what lessons can we take to improve the things in our society which are deficient?

Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to be done to improve.

<comment><USER6> _Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to be done to improve._

Or perhaps we need to do things which it is intuitively obvious _should_ work, but which there is currently not the political will to implement -- eg firing bad teachers and doing more to stop student truancy.

<comment><USER8> The problem with your intuitionist approach is that you are myopically focusing on some issues without proposing any real solutions. You are not proposing a path from here to there.

Fire bad teachers: good idea, but you need to train and attract good teachers at the same time. How do you do that? Teaching is a badly overeducated, underpaid, and under-respected profession in the U.S.

Doing more to stop student truancy: This is cultural. Put armed guards to stop the students from leaving, and they don't show up in the first place. We need to foster a culture such that school isn't simply a prison students are coerced into going to for 9 hours a day.

The path from here to there is difficult and there isn't currently any money in improving education, so there isn't any political will either. It's a lot more difficult problem than your simplistic world view admits.

<comment><USER6> _there isn't currently any money in improving education, so there isn't any political will either_

That was my point, these are two examples of ways in which education which can be solved with political will alone rather than requiring complicated new research.

Teacher salaries aren't as low as often assumed, by the way; the average teacher's salary in the US in 2006 was a surprisingly respectable $51,009 (with all sorts of perks) which, while no path to riches is certainly a ticket to a good middle-class lifestyle, especially in a two-income household. I personally wonder if part of the low attractiveness of teaching as a profession can be attributed to the fact that teachers' unions spend so much time whining about how low teachers' salaries are.

You don't need to put armed guards to stop 'em leaving, you just need to make sure they're punished when they don't show up. I never once played truant from my school; not because it was such a fabulous caring-sharing environment that I never wanted to leave (this is impractical, children will get bored at school) but because I knew if I might get caught and if I got caught I'd be punished. Now for me personally, the threat of detention and having my parents find out was a scary enough punishment, but I realise that this won't work on every kid... which is why I strongly believe that every school needs a form of punishment which _every_ kid is afraid of; and if suspension won't do it for some kids then we need to bring back the cane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Culture.

The system is derived from their cultural values and works _because of_ the cultural values. It's been shown again and again in educational studies: some systems are certainly better than others, but culture is _the_ primary factor.

<comment><USER10> But there are noticeable differences in how schools are operated in Finland ("The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.") that should be looked at in trans-national comparisons.

The detailed reading I am doing currently in The Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers Need to Know

<http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083>

draws together research from various countries in various parts of the world that don't have a common "culture," but do have common teacher training curricula in teacher training programs (which are not even at university level in some of those countries) and common characteristics in math textbooks across languages and common characteristics in elementary school classrooms. Those characteristics are very important to look at if they result in success across varied world cultures.

After edit:

 _It's been shown again and again in educational studies_

What particular studies do you have in mind? Citations, please?

<comment><USER9> Absolutely, methods matter. But there appears to be a very real limit at which changing the method doesn't notably change the results.

I don't have a quick cite list. But it's been consistent across literally every single study I've seen that controls for parental involvement/cultural value of education. It's more predictive than parents' education level, neighborhood, curriculum, socioeconomic status, etc.

The only off-hand references I have to get you started are what the Michigan Department of Education has been beating my sister-in-law over the head with since she's enrolled my niece in public school.

[http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:w...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:www.michigan.gov/documents/Final_Parent_Involvement_Fact_Sheet_14732_7.pdf+educational+study+parents+more+importan+than+schools&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESi1Zf8LcSmR43Wnxipj42z7ixpTyG8-rvBRrI- TrZKhKvWYI0OSbgB7PRg0VPNR38poxOKygnqH6Qsty4QS__X-Y6oWU11Mcmqe95elMRX4Hm6volQBcfD892V6Z5OZ- nJh6J6L&sig=AHIEtbQ9gadEneSnbwTjpWyQ1a0MqwZGgg)

[http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch1...](http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch13.html)

<comment><USER10> Those are some very weak correlations reported in that second link, and of course observational studies of the kind reported there have nothing to say about causation.

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

It is regrettable that United States school officials are not more curious about what is going on successfully in other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Notice that technology is not a critical part of their success. I didn't see a lot of shots of kids in front of computers, but rather, teachers and students interacting with each other. I work at a private school that has a similar philosophy, which contrasts with the other private schools in the area with which we compete. We're not interested in 1-1 laptop programs because we don't want devices getting in the way of personal relationships. Of the upper tier private schools in the area, we have the highest scores and the lowest tuition, and very good acceptance rates in top colleges. We invest in teachers who are well educated (all at least masters, several PhDs) and are happy (very high retention rate).

I don't mean to boast, but as technology director at this school, I'm always being asked about laptops, SmartBoards, and other cool and popular education technology things that we have decided not to use. I think it's important to carefully consider how technology can best be used, and to know when to stay with low-tech methods that work well.

</comment><comment><USER6> One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in all the handwringing about the US educational system is that the US still has by far the best universities in the world. Whatever ranking system you look at, US universities dominate the top of the leagues table (along with a few foreign universities like Oxford, NUS and the Ecole Polytechnique). While there are many reasons for this, it seems like crummy performance in a few primary-school level tests certainly isn't crippling the entire education system.

For what it's worth, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranks the University of Helsinki as Finland's best university, in 108th place equal with UC Davis. Still a pretty impressive showing for such a small country; among the small (<10m) countries only Israel, Ireland and Singapore have entries in the top one hundred.

<comment><USER12> Just a nit, New Zealand is also in that list of small countries.

The University of Auckland (my alma mater) ranks 61.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I never thought these tests were fair comparisons. The United States has a lot more people than Finland and as a corollary the United States has to help a lot of people get through the educational process that are not as well off as the average citizen of Finland. In other words, we have a lot more ghettos than Finland and that hurts our aggregate scores.

A much more accurate test would be to find those of us in the United States that have been afforded the same living amenities as those living in Finland. I would bet that we are not far off at all.

<comment><USER14> So what your saying is the more socially stratified US is falling behind the socialist (compared to the US) Finland. There shouldn't be a lot more ghettos compared to Finland but there is. And the priorities are all screwed up.

Obviously, Finland should be spending more money on defense, corporate welfare, and privatized healthcare so that their education budget should shoulder the cuts and they can brought down to the US level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Higher education in Finland is free, therefore education level is high. If I remember right, almost 60% of people have some kind of higher education, university or polytechnic. Education is valued here.

And it is also said that entrepreneurship is not that valued in Finland because of high education... Most of the grads want to work for big companies & goverment positions.

<comment><USER16> I don't get it. Why would entrepreneurship not be valued _because of_ high education?

<comment><USER17> More education is less time in the workforce prior to parenthood, which probably has a lot to do with founding startups (less work experience, frustrations, capital, confidence).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> perhaps delaying the mind-warping effects of school for a few extra years really helps.

<comment><USER19> That leaped out at me as well.

Piaget demonstrated that brain development tends to come in spurts that are closely correlated with growth spurts. One of the key ones generally hits in the range 5-7 and gives a sudden improvement in ability to learn concrete mental operations such as the ones involved in reading, writing and arithmetic.

By contrast the decades long US trend is towards pushing abstract learning younger. There are some statistics indicating that this trend has been strongly correlated with increased gender disparities in school motivation and performance in favor of girls. Which makes sense since boys tend to hit that initial spurt later, and so are more likely to have bad experiences with the start of school. That could easily lead to long-lasting bad attitudes towards school that will guarantee poor performance later on.

Also the Finnish attitude of less school makes perfect sense for me. Because the key is to maintain interest and motivation. The actual hours of instruction we need are not that great, but increasing hours at some point brings diminishing returns on instruction at the cost of frustration and pain for the students.

This brings me to homework for obvious reasons. Research on the benefits of homework show an interesting mixed effect. Homework is practice, but practice can as easily fix wrong ideas as right ones. So homework drives responsibility for teaching to the ability of the home to ensure correct practice. The result is a strengthening of socioeconomic factors on school performance but little net difference in learning. Of course the strongest correlation found is that quantity of homework correlates with conflict at home. With said conflict arising due to the attempts of parents to get kids to do homework they don't want to do.

So summarizing, delaying instruction until kids are ready to learn, giving them sufficient high quality instruction that they do learn, and then limiting the quantity enough to prevent frustration is likely to lead to sustained learning. And sustained learning has good results. Makes perfect sense and makes you wonder why the USA takes the opposite approach on each of those things.

<comment><USER12> My mom held me back from going to school until I was 7, when the average person went to school at age 5 or 6.

I asked her about it the other day, and the reason was "kids need time to be kids".

I cannot thank her enough - I never had problems learning throughout my school career, and I was never behind the physical curve either, so did reasonably well in sports as well.

I know it's anecdotal but it's something I'd strongly consider if I had kids as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A Finn here. I noticed a couple of mistakes there.

> "Primary and secondary schooling is combined, so the pupils don't have to > change schools at age 13. They avoid a potentially disruptive transition > from one school to another."

This is exactly contrary to the truth. Nearly everyone does change schools at age 13 and it _is_ disruptive.

"Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and teaching standards are high."

Yeeaaah, I don't know. Most teachers (even comprehensive school) are MSc or BSc the very least. Their pay doesn't reflect that.

> "Children in Finland only start main school at age seven. "

What?! You guys put your kids into schools earlier than that? But why?

<comment><USER21> Highly valued is not the same as being adequately rewarded. Being a teacher in finland is valued in the way that it is respected and prestigious, something that shines through in the high grades needed to become one. In alot of countries, this is not at all the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One of the bigger factors that differentiate between average teachers and great teachers is the ability of great teachers to give a lot of personalized feedback to every student.

Also if other fields of learning like music, sports , computer programming and others, the importance of rapid personalized feedback to learning is very big.

"in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject"

There's a reasonable chance that the most of the advantage of the finish system comes from this method of teaching.

</comment><comment><USER23> They may get the best results, but there are a lot of contributions to society that have come from less educated people.

A lot of great athletes, musicians, inventors, generals, etc, have come from societies where the average result is not so high.

Finland may have a high education level - but I could also make the claim that Finland is boring. If everyone gets educated the same, then everyone turns out the same and there is little diversity of thought.

So I really don't think the world should aim towards using the finish system.

<comment><USER24> I'm sure neither of us are going to be receiving a lot of upvotes, but I don't think your completely wrong.

I've spent a fair amount of time in Finland working with various teams at Nokia. While Nokia obviously does a lot of things right, their decision making always baffled me. Watching Series 60 evolve was just baffling. They're emphasis on consensus around decision making led to all sorts of 'designed-by- committee' products built right into the core of S60.

For example, S60 had an app-store long before the iPhone. It was a usability nightmare. It had different 'catalogs' each mostly selling the same stuff. Navigation was nearly impossible. You where dumped into a home screen with no real affordances. The whole thing was just a nightmare. It was that type of decision making and general lack of forward thinking that delayed the launch of the touchscreen S60 phones for years. When they did hit, they where far away from the iPhone in a lot of ways.

It was really no wonder that iPhone leap-frogged them so effortlessly in terms of usability (and has taken a big chunk of their market share as well).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> People also say that Finish is fiendishly difficult to learn. Perhaps there's some ground in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

<comment><USER26> Finnish is not insanely difficult to learn. It is however very difficult to teach using traditional methods. It is nott an Indo-European language, shares next to no vocabulary base with other language groups in the region, and is incompatible with the standard (historically Latin-derived) models of grammar. This makes a formal description of the language much more complex than the language itself. It is possible for non-natives to acquire Finnish (I did it, and natives have problems telling I am non-native) and it doesn't take much longer than it does to acquire any other European language. People who take Finnish lessons, however, tend to be unable to make the leap from passive understanding to active usage, and I suspect this is because language course present the grammar formally, making it much more complex than it really is in order to explain it.

<comment><USER25> You refute that it is difficult to learn in the first sentence then go on to explain why it's difficult to learn. Finish may help with second language acquisition.

My other point was the focus on linguistics. This could cause the Finish people to see things in a more lateral way as they have more linguistic tools to describe problems expressly because of the focus on languages. This leads to greater communication and understanding.

<comment><USER26> I state none of this. Finnish is difficult to teach, not difficult to learn. My point was that Finnish is easy to acquire, or at least not significantly more difficult than other languages, but courses that teach Finnish do a worse job at it than those for most languages because the abstractions they use to explain grammar do not fit the language. Finnish does not have more linguistic tools than other languages (it has, arguably, less) and Finns are not more language-focused than other cultures, though there is a strong focus on foreign language teaching in Finnish schools (as there is in almost every country with a small population and a country-specific language).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Let child _teach_ the parent. I _pretend_ that I don't know how to kick a soccer ball. And my 3 yr old child _teaches_ me how to kick his soccer ball and how to play with his remaining toys.

<comment><USER28> My 3 year old teaches me how to operate my cell phone... it's a little scary.

<comment><USER27> Ditto here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There are 5 M inhabitants in Finland.

How much do they spend in their education system? Does it scale to a country of, say, 50 M inhabitants?

<comment><USER30> I don't see how it wouldn't. It's not like if you have 10 times as many students then you'll build a school 10 times as big. You'll instead build 10 times as many schools, all operating more or less independently at roughly the same scale as each other. There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of scale in others.

<comment><USER31> > I don't see how it wouldn't.

Let's see if we can think of some reasons.

> There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause > some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of > scale in others.

How do we know that the two "may" s cancel each other out.

Moving organization-wide decision-making one level further away from the base often has an effect.

Let's put Finland's 5 million in context. Ohio is just over 11M and Los Angeles County is just under 10M.

<comment><USER30> You're right that I don't know that the two would cancel each other out. But even if there is some non-zero effect at work, when you spread it out over all taxpayers, any additional costs/savings are probably trivial.

The main factor at work here seems to be that education is highly valued in Finnish culture, as opposed to the US, where for a large segment of the population, it is not a priority. You can scale processes, but you can't scale culture.

<comment><USER31> > But even if there is some non-zero effect at work, when you spread it out > over all taxpayers, any additional costs/savings are probably trivial.

I seriously doubt that. Large organizations are qualitatively different from small ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Better results in school measures what exactly?

</comment><comment><USER27> "You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't India produce homegrown Tech Product firms? - <AUTHOR> I am curious why India does not have good product companies with global reach like TWTR, Slack, FB etc.  We have a lot of talent (large number of CS grads), but most people end up in IT services or doing maintenance/Dev work for large companies like ORCL, AMZN.
Most of the so called Indian "Unicorns" Like Ola and Flipkart are rip-offs of successful US companies.
What would it take to build billion dollar product companies in India? <comment><USER2> Lets see. There is a funding gap here. Things that are rippoffs get funded easier. Most SV vc firms have an office in India and they are pattern matching for results. Also India still needs ELECTRICITY and INFRASTRUCTURE built. The opportunity is not to build the TWTR/FB for india but to build the AT&T,National Highway system, and basic amenities. There is a severe misunderstanding of which problems to solve vs which solutions will get me money which i will then use to solve my problems

<comment><USER3> I agree with this. You can build an amazing product for the Indian consumer, but if the people can't use it, what good is it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > What would it take to build billion dollar product companies in India?

Block foreign companies (mostly Americans but in the near future Chinese), like China and Russia did. You have to protect local companies for them to grow. Technology takes time to mature.

<comment><USER5> I completely disagree with this.

I run a startup here in India. Practically speaking the main problems that we face are more administrative in nature. We spend almost 40-60 percent of our time sorting out issues from accounting, raising capital, convincing investors to back ideas here from India and most importantly educating them.

More protectionism will definately mean a lot more difficulty in convincing international investors from looking seriously at us since at the end of the day, they need to be able to take out money if the want to.

What we need desperately is a strong administrative and LEGAL framework to support business; This will really raise investor confidence both domestic and international. And overall give people the ability to compete at a global level.

Indians are brilliant and dont need handouts or protection.. All we need is an decent environment and we can take anyone on.

<comment><USER4> > convincing investors to back ideas here from India and most importantly > educating them.

Why do you think someone is going to back your idea if a foreigner can operate overseas and get all your market? That is why you are spending 40-60 of your time doing it (and probably without success, like all but few startups).

You will not have investor confidence without a big success, like Yahoo or Alibaba. And you don't have a local big success if every company in Silicon Valley has an advantage over you. I'm from Brazil, so reality here is very similar with India.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Also a billion dollar product for the indian customer looks nothing like a tech startup in the US. So enabling that to grow is key. This is a generational problem. Services and products are being built this generation to lay waste to that claim

</comment><comment><USER6> I disagree with the OP. There are many companies in India who are doing a great job (especially in SaaS). Companies such as Zoho, Freshdesk and many such others are homegrown. They are doing great globally as well. The only reason you don't hear about them is because sub-standard Indian startup blogs are more interested in publishing click-bait articles about Flipkart, Ola, OyoRooms, Housing.com etc. And it's not their fault entirely. Tech-savvy Indians love reading such articles and that's how these blogs make money.

</comment><comment><USER7> Brain drain is also a huge problem in india. Most of talented engineers go abroad mainly US. The mentality of indians is take a good job in US firm. In india their is very less research infrastructure and government polices does not support local market like china so many young indians seek to take job.

That is reason there are many Indians at top positions in US companies.

<comment><USER8> I think this is the biggest problem. US just has better opportunities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's really hard to gain traction remotely so you need to be able expand your markets by sending folks over establishing beach-heads in new territories. Going from US to India is a visa on arrival. Going to the US (or pretty much any place with money) from India is a ordeal and a gamble.

</comment><comment><USER10> It may well be that the IT services industry you mention is taking all the talent. Apparently, the Indian ecosystem tech is currently structured such that this is the most rewarding career path.</comment>


How to hack your own personal daily comics page - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeremyraines.com/?p=21

<comment><USER2> Seems awfully pointy clicky to me.

I just use this script and cron.

      #!/bin/sh

      function getone
      {
          PAGE=$1
          TO=$2
          SUBJ=$3

          URL=`curl -s "$PAGE" | sed -r -n -e 's/^.*"(http:[^"]*zoom.gif[^"]*)".*$/\1/p'`

          [ -z "$URL" ] || ( curl -s "$URL" | mime-construct --subject $SUBJ \
              --to $TO --attachment comic.gif --type image/gif --file - )
      }

      getone http://comics.com/9_chickweed_lane/ firstname.lastname@example.com chickwee
      getone http://comics.com/dog_eat_doug/ email@example.com dougeatdog

Of course any kind of content scraping brings ethical questions.</comment>


Why is the stock market going up despite horrible economic news? [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ECqDaPjjV0 <comment><AUTHOR> Seen this question a lot on here lately, this is by far the best most concise explanation I've come across. Enjoy!</comment>


Develop Compelling and Effective Email Marketing Campaigns - <AUTHOR> http://www.getapp.com/blog/activecampaign-helps-small-businesses-develop-compelling-and-effective-email-marketing-campaigns/

<comment><USER2> email marketing is often overlooked by small businesses but if done properly with the right tools, it can be a cost efficient way to generate new leads</comment>


How period trackers have changed girl culture - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/how-period-trackers-have-changed-girl-culture/ <comment><USER2> As the app mentioned is free, I would deduce that they try to turn the data about their users cycle into a monetary value.

Is there research how certain periods of the cycle would affect women shopping behaviour (or behaviour in general)? I am asking this to understand how much value is in such information.

Perhaps there are other aspects I am overlooking?

<comment><USER3> _As the app mentioned is free, I would deduce that they try to turn the data about their users cycle into a monetary value._

There are good reasons why people might want to make this sort of app beyond selling the data. There's a huge potential for health care service providers - if women don't need prescription drugs or appointments to see their doctor, and any other medical issues are resolved more easily because there isn't the problem of the drugs interacting with the pill, then that represents a vast saving in the cost of supplying services.

<comment><USER2> The maker of one of such app mentioned, Clue, is a Berlin based startup: [https://www.helloclue.com/company.html](https://www.helloclue.com/company.html)

I guess that 4 people do not work for free. I understand that _There 's a huge potential for health care service providers_, but how could this company get money out of this? This app is free for everyone. I do not connect the dots why one health care service provider should fund it. So perhaps you could elaborate it from this point of view?

<comment><USER3> In the case of Clue it looks like they are selling data insights, although it looks more like they're interested in overall trends rather than individuals (caveat: based on their marketing). They're already quite big at 22 staff (the 4 you saw on the site are the founders), and they're still hiring. That's all paid for with VC cash at the moment. I don't imagine they can easily cover that level of burn without targeting enterprise customers once the inventment runs out, which likely will be things like white label apps sold directly to health care providers - in European countries there's often one major provider that's run by the government. Selling a white-labelled app to them that can save the provider a large sum of money wouldn't be that hard.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but this one insurance instance is run by the state or directly controlled by the state.

Are women really so naive that they would provide such information to the state?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I never understood the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process that half of all people have.

<comment><USER5> It's not unlike the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process that almost all of people have, which is defecation. Operationally speaking, the two are very similar. So, why is there a stigma behind defecation?

<comment><USER6> I don't know about operational speaking, but epedemiologically speaking, the two are very different.

One of them is associated with e. coli, a lethal bacterium that even in modern times and developed nations kills people on a regular basis, e.g. Walkerton, Ontario, where seven people were killed by improperly treated drinking water in 2000:

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

It's easy to see why humans have developed behaviours and social stigma around defecation.

Menstruation is very different. Our social behaviours around it may have more to do with our social behaviours around genders, sexual availability, and other stuff. I'm not an anthropologist, so I'll just stop here before I dig a hole for myself.

I'll just note that the two are very unlike in very important ways.

<comment><USER5> I'm not a native speaker, so forgive me for not expressing myself clearly enough, but isn't urination also considered to be defecation, or does defecation in English refers only to the "number two"? I'm asking, because urine is mostly sterile.

However, my point was that while there are a lot of obvious differences, defecation is similar enough to menstruation, such that it's not surprising that stigma is also similar.

<comment><USER6> I'm only familiar with the word "defecation" being used to denote expelling of faeces:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It must be fascinating to work on an app where the target demographic is slightly less than half of the world's population. The CEO's Twitter feed is very interesting too.

[https://twitter.com/idatin/status/659853258496851968](https://twitter.com/idatin/status/659853258496851968)

What may seem as a simple tracker app on the surface is actually a very complicated product tackling many problems all over the world.

</comment><comment><USER8> To someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s like me, this seems like a strange regression in some ways. The overwhelming majority of girls were on the pill pretty much when they became sexually active, and when I look at my age group right now, that's still the case to this day. The pill was considered normal, safe, and liberating. Many said their menstrual problems were greatly reduced, and of course there was a completely reliable schedule that came with it.

Just two decades ago, period trackers would not have been all that useful to most people. That's a big culture shift.

<comment><USER9> You think it's a good think that the majority of women were resorting to a drug to cope with a normal healthy body function?

I think it's good if more women are able to cope without the drugs.

<comment><USER10> I think that the pill is supposed to "cope" with potential unwanted pregnancy, not with periods.

<comment><USER9> > Many said their menstrual problems were greatly reduced, and of course there > was a completely reliable schedule that came with it.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I can read. My point is, while this might be a desirable side-effect, this is not the reason women are on the pill.

<comment><USER11> Actually, a lot of women who have really bad periods sometimes specifically go on the pill to reduce their intensity. Source: friends in med school who have gone through their ob-gyn rotations.

<comment><USER10> Wow, I had no idea. Thanks.

<comment><USER12> Just to add to mkaziz's info, my wife specifically went on the pill in her teens, and was on it through her early through mid twenties specifically to address how painful her periods were.

Its not well known, but some women's periods can be debilitating (several days where you experience intense pain and cramping, where you don't even want to get out of bed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it really such an issue in the US? I find that hard to believe. I can imagine it is not a popular subject, just like other subjects of hygiene. But that is not the same as being stigmatized.

</comment><comment><USER14> Period trackers don't protect against STDs, and neither does 'the Pill'.

<comment><USER15> And like other "rhythm" based contraceptives, they are not great protection against pregnancy either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A bit click-baity title since the product's USP is not even mentioned:

When to have unprotected intercourse with a 'lower' probability of getting pregnant

EDIT: Thanks for the downvote, please elaborate

<comment><USER17> That is explicitly mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER16> true, I was too fast but the mention in the article feels more like a side benefit, from what I heard it's one of the core features, here the snippet:

"They also can record when you had sex (Clue's icon for protected sex is a man wearing a tie) or remind you to pack tampons"

<comment><USER17> There's a much longer snippet further down</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bosch robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/bosch-deepfield-robotics-weed-control <comment><USER2> (From TFA)... "Given the scale of farming today, treating weeds chemically is really the only practical way for humans to keep them under control"

That's not true. Cultivators have been used for a long time to keep weeds under control. Chemicals have simply become more convenient for many. This pdf explains a lot about cultivators and is a great read for anyone interested in the topic of weed control.

[http://www.sare.org/content/download/29730/413972/file/Steel...](http://www.sare.org/content/download/29730/413972/file/Steel%20in%20the%20Field.pdf)</comment>


Anonymity Lecture by the Creator of Tor - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgGTJIgNewE <comment><AUTHOR> From this collection of lectures: [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical- engineering-and-compu...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering- and-computer-science/6-858-computer-systems-security-fall-2014/video- lectures/)</comment>


Why is HN now wider than the screen? - <AUTHOR> Some time in the last 48 hours, something changed on YC which makes the pages about 5% wider than the screen when long text lines are present. Resize the window, and YC resizes, still about 5% too big.  Looks like broken "responsive design". <comment><USER2> Screenshot, maybe? Haven't noticed any issues here, on desktop or mobile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like it got fixed. There's now a consistent 1" margin at all zooms on Firefox desktop. For a while, the right margin seemed to have gone negative.</comment></comment>


A digital diorama of the house from PARASITE (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://miniature.to/parasite/ <comment><AUTHOR> Found here: [https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/g9by4a/i_made_a_dig...](https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/g9by4a/i_made_a_digital_diorama_of_the_house_from/)</comment>


Keeping Punxsutawney Phil's Website Online Through Groundhog Day Traffic Flood - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-saves-groundhog-day <comment><USER2> I'm confused: is Cloudflare an HTTP caching proxy like squid-cache?

<comment><USER3> It's more like a reverse proxy. [1] You point your domain to their DNS, and then they cache your site on their CDN, reducing loading times and CPU consumption.

It also uses data from Project Honeypot to serve captchas and links to popular virus scanners to people who are listed as having a blacklisted IP addresses in Project Honeypot, the idea being that they're probably using a zombie computer and launching attacks without them knowing it. By raising their awareness that they've been listed, they're more likely (hopefully) to remove their malware.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy></comment></comment>


Police data-mining looks through social media, assigns you a 'threat level' - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/12/12/police-data-mining-looks-through-social-media-assigns-you-a-threat-level/

<comment><USER2> I assume I'm considered an enemy of the sate by not having a social media presence. Unless HN counts but if it does it probably doesn't help that rating.</comment>


Hilary Putnam: Minds, brains, machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/hilary-putnam-footnotes-to-plato/ <comment><USER2> > When Oscar uses the word "water" he is talking about water, whereas when > Twin Oscar uses the word "water" he is talking about twin water. As a > result, what you mean depends in part, but crucially, on the world around > you.

 _(edit: i 'm sure the "Criticism" section of the wikipedia article abt Twin Earth does a better job explaining this, but anyway...)_

i never understood this perspective. let's assume the Oscars don't know anything about water's chemical composition, and H2O and XYZ have the same properties (which i think the experiment does). then magically swap the Oscars; neither of them would realize it, nor would anyone around them. and there's no magical oracle who would be able to say that e.g. Twin Oscar's thoughts about "water" are now all nonsensical because he's thinking about Twin Water and not the Normal Water he's actually experiencing -- actually, i'd say they'd make as much sense as they did before the swap. because "meanings" _are_ in the head, they're not magically bound to the real world, at best correlated.

though if i'm misreading Putnam, please let me know! i'd be happy to stop being vaguely annoyed every time i see his stuff mentioned :)

<comment><USER3> I understand "meaning" here to signify reference, as in, "What is the object that Oscar and his twin refer to when they talk about 'water'?" The twins are psychologically identical, but it turns out that they refer to different objects by virtue of their environments. So meaning can't just be a matter of psychology.

I guess you might think that "meaning" is best understood as something other than reference. But that seems to be a starting point for Putnam.

<comment><USER4> > So meaning can't just be a matter of psychology.

I disagree.

When the two Oscars talk about "water," they refer to the same object -- an abstract notion of a blueish liquid essential to the existence of life as we (they) know it. They can point to physical objects and tell you that they match their idea of water ("this is water"), but this idea has no relation to the underlying physical and chemical properties of the substance.

The idea was born out of limited human cognition, its meaning cannot transcend that limitation.

<comment><USER2> i disagree with that idea too, but i think GP is describing Putnam's position, not necessarily their own. so it's Putnam we're disagreeing with :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a good article about Putnam. I would just add that his philosophy is part of a much larger trend in philosophy that includes pragmatism, post- Wittgensteinian analytic philosophy, and existential-phenomenology as in Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, all with overall views rather similar to Putnam's.</comment>


Donate your TALENT to support your favorite charities - <AUTHOR> https://edgecoders.com/donate-your-talent-to-support-your-favorite-charities-13e1a52dcb17 <comment><USER2> There doesn't appear to be a way to sign up without authenticating via Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER3> seems kind of cool. I initially thought it was so you could donate your skills to an actual charity, which would be cool, may even already be something for that.

<comment><USER4> > I initially thought it was so you could donate your skills to an actual > charity

I agree, I'd be really interested in that kind of platform.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't be hard to build something like that.

<comment><USER4> A naive platform, sure. But then inevitably you'd end up with flaky donors and charities, pissing off people on both sides.

For something like that to become trusted and popular, it would have to be actively managed, which means both additional tooling and operations/admin staff.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin befuddles US customs agents, thwarting visit by digital currency guru - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2011/bitcoin-befuddles-customs-agents-thwarting-seattle-visit-digital-currency-guru

<comment><USER2> Advice for crossing the US Border.

1) You are there on a holiday. Telling them you are self employed and going to work in an office you are renting there is only asking for trouble. It confuses the hell out of them. You think where you do the work from doesn't matter, they think you need a visa. You lose.

2) If you are going for a conference, print the badge off before your flight and have it with you.

3) Email or upload all your files to dropbox/some server in a TrueCrypt container, and wipe all devices you will be crossing with, including your phone. What do you need them searching through your stuff for? Who knows what they will do with it. It's just asking for it.

<comment><USER3> This is good advice, but of course it's pretty absurd that anyone has to take these steps to avoid the overly invasive US government.

<comment><USER4> This is pretty much true of clearing customs in any other country. The reason we hear so much about the US is because it's a really big country.

(As an American, I hate crossing the UK border just as much as crossing the US border. What's the point of being in the EU if you aren't going to act like it? :)

<comment><USER5> The EU isn't Schengen, that's why.

<comment><USER6> But that's pretty much only because of the UK. There are a few countries that are supposed to be in the schengen area but aren't, a few countries that got in because it would have been impractical to keep them out, and the EU countries except the UK and Ireland (who are only out because of the UK).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nothing in the story says he was flagged for deeper interviewing because of his involvement with Bitcoin. He told the agent he was saying for two months on $600 USD and, making an assumption here, no credit cards or anything else to supplement his stay.

How do we know he wasn't flagged under a different rule, such as "$100 a week in the US? Maybe he's taking a temporary job. Let's look further". Border agents _hate_ finding out you've come under a tourist visa when really you've come to work.

<comment><USER8> I think you're confused about the definition of befuddle.

be·fud·dle

1\. To confuse; perplex.

2\. To stupefy with or as if with alcoholic drink.

Customs agents didn't flag him for his involvement in bitcoin; they didn't understand what it was and how he could possibly fund his trip with it.

<comment><USER9> I DO know what bitcoin is, and I don't understand how he could possibly fund his trip with it. Doesn't seem like the top of the list for liquid assets, i.e. what you need when travelling. Part of their job is to make sure you can fund your trip. This guy couldn't, from a variety of reasonable interpretations.

<comment><USER10> You genuinely don't understand how he could possibly fund his trip with bitcoins?

Or are you exaggerating to make a point?

I think it is conceivable that he could fund his trip by bartering for the majority of his food and/or lodging using bitcoins. That is, it is a possibility that there are people in the United States who will accept bitcoins in return for providing food and/or lodging. And presumably as a "digital currency guru" he would be able to identify those people and effect payment with the agreed upon medium.

He even has a fallback option of cash if there is something he cannot acquire through the use of this bitcoins.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, I exaggerate a bit. But I think @praptak above expresses the issue admirably. It's not a question of possibility so much as one of trust, and it's a customs agent's job to be wary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am most concerned about why they made copies of his iPhone and iPad. I'm not going to sit here and pick apart whether they had a "right" to do that -- it has long been abundantly clear that customs Gestapo can arbitrarily assign whatever rights they want to themselves, with full legislative and judicial blessing, in the name of security theater. But why? What did he do that earned this treatment?

<comment> mike-cardwell This confused me as well. What possible reason could they have had to do that?

<comment><USER12> "Why not?"

<comment><USER3> That's probably the right answer, since they have the power to do this. But of course it is disturbing and unacceptable that they would violate someone's personal property with no crime or even a suspected crime having been committed (or even if there had been a crime committed). Unfortunately the only practical way to change this that I see is to wait for the US government to collapse due to its unsustainable financial policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I worked out the plan (well, mostly just said "okay") when Nefario suggested coming out to Seattle to try and launch a Bitcoin Incubator.

Knowing him a little (over skype), I'm not surprised things went badly at the border -- he's got a sort of sweet naive / anti-banking system mix in his persona; from what he told me, it was a tough and stressful spot -- interrogation tactics at the end of two+ days of travel..

I'm bummed, though. I was thinking that it would be excellent to have a physical location for bitcoin development in the US as a sort of center of gravity. mckoss was kicking in some office space at StartPad, what wasn't to like?

I'm not clear now what a good plan would be.

<comment><USER14> Maybe he can come back with dollars in his pocket this time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I found the part about them copying data from his phone and iPad more troublesome than the whole bitcoin thing. Why would a self-described "cypherpunk" travel with non-encrypted digital devices, anyway?

<comment><USER16> Just to be clear, the phone and iPad had been wiped before coming and had just enough information on them to complete the trip, i.e. a map to the startpad.org office, and the needed phone numbers, nothing else.

The U.S. has internet access, so upload everything to the cloud(encrypted) and then sync when you get there, which is what the plan was.

Also having an encrypted device is useless if they can hold you until you open it.

Finally I was talking to someone about this yesterday evening, they had their laptop taken off them for about 10 minutes by the border agents, in that time they installed a rookit on it to track keystrokes.

<comment><USER17> > ...had their laptop taken off them for about 10 minutes by the border > agents, in that time they installed a rookit on it to track keystrokes.

Really? How certain is he that the keylogger was a recent addition? I have a hard time believing that an ordinary border agent is that technically competent, even if he just had to put in a usb device and select a few menu options.

<comment><USER16> Quite certain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was in Seattle a month ago for AMD Fusion conference. Here my dialog with the Immigration Officer:

        I.O. - "What's the purpose of you visit?"
        me   - "I come to the AMD conference"
        I.O. - "For how long do you visiting US"?
        me   - "8 days"
        I.O. - "How many days is the conference?"
        me   - "3 days"
        I.O. - "So why do you come for 8 days??"

;)

Re: "Dr. Nefario" - I can't believe he has no credit card.

<comment><USER4> Here's a word everyone speaking with an immigration officer needs to know: sightseeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if the customs agents also had a problem with him trying to do work in the United States while here under the Visa Waiver Program?

<comment><USER20> As an Australian citizen who has recently traveled to the US under the Visa waiver program with the sole purpose of working (I was sent to the US by my employer), I can say pretty definitively that they dont have an issue with working as long as you have a return ticket (which they checked out in my case)

<comment><USER21> Work is definitely not allowed under the VWP, only "tourism and business": [http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html#...](http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html#travelertype)

Maybe a trip when you work on behalf on a foreign employer counts as "business".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How would this be any different from bringing an equivalent value in "goods"? (whether they are digital or physical)

<comment><USER23> You would declare the goods you're importing (which brings with it its own set of issues when importing high-value goods). That said, it's unclear when or if bitcoins would be 'imported'. And it's also unclear whether, for example, someone bringing in $5000 worth of gold bullion via a passenger jet would be able to come in via visa waiver (they may classify selling it as a form of work).

Anyway, the visa waiver program is for ordinary tourists. Doing something way out of the ordinary like that is just asking them to deny your visa. At the very least, apply beforehand and explain the situation to the immigration agents.

<comment><USER16> The bitcoin is on a server, and is only "imported" once you download it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> His blog post itself had already been discussed before here, but it looks like the link is dead.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2802257>

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow! My Bitcoin Weekly interview with Doctor Nefario got mentioned in a news source.

Lucky lucky me!

</comment><comment><USER26> Not surprising. They employ people with below average intelligence who are convinced that the U.S. is such a brilliant country and every single person they come into contact with is from such a terrible shithole that the only reason they could possibly be "visiting" the U.S. is because they plan to illegally overstay so that they may enjoy a much better life in the greatest country on Earth.

...And that's if you _are_ white.

<comment><USER27> Pretty sure you are overgeneralizing there.

<comment><USER26> Of course I am. But there is still some truth in there. Some CBP officers are friendly... many are not.

Upon entering the U.S. you effectively have no rights whatsoever. Whether or not you're allowed to enter the country is entirely at the discretion of the CBP officer you happen to get, and you have no right to appeal their decision. Run into one who's having a bad day and doesn't like the look of you and you're screwed.

<comment><USER28> That's the awesome thing about sovereignty- we get to run background checks and see if someone's been hanging out in Pakistan Frontier Provinces or Yemen lately. If someone looks sketchy, we boot them out.

Coming to an expensive first world country with $600 for 2 weeks is pretty clearly sketchy.

CBPs make wrong decisions sometimes. This wasn't one of those times.

<comment><USER29> >Coming to an expensive first world country with $600 for 2 weeks is pretty clearly sketchy.

Bingo.

Entering the US with $5000 in Bitcoin would be equivalent to crossing the border with $5000 in Somaliland Shillings. They are both currencies that are bought and sold every day, but you can't take either to your neighborhood bank and convert them to USD. They have a very limited -- hell, even zero -- utility outside of circles that deal directly with them.

As such, CBP was rightly suspicious.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NomadBSD - <AUTHOR> https://nomadbsd.org/ <comment><USER2> It is a bit interesting for the future of the product that most of the comments aren't about the actual functionality that this _BSD provides. The cool thing here is that you can plug it into any computer like TAILS or a few other Linux distros and use it like your own computer. Most comments seem to focus on the unconventionality of_ BSD's. A _BSD in general is like a linux distro in that they package a kernel and userland together, usually with a package manager or a port system. The great advantage of a_ BSD is that usually the kernel-libc interface is designed better. For instance FreeBSD used to have a much faster writev implementation compared with Linux(from personal experience and the Advanced Unix Programming Book's test).

Edit: I tried using a \star character before BSD which apparently is italics in this editor.

<comment><USER3> The main differentiating feature vs. (free,net,open,whatever)BSD seems to be that it boots from a pluggable external device like a USB flash drive and doesn't perturb the system it's booting on.

Seems like something that should just be added to FreeBSD.

<comment><USER2> So adding that is hard. I mentioned that a bit by alluding to TAILS, storage on USB is interesting since most users just yank it at some point. FSCK and making sure writes complete in nontrivial. Feature detection on boot is interesting as well. Those two points are not things you regularly want. I would prefer my modules compiled into the kernel in Linux terminology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great, now I can check if my cheap fringe laptop is usable with BSD. Been itching to switch for a while, but haven't dared.

<comment><USER5> The major BSD derived operating systems all have 'live' boot media for installs - however this usually means CLI. That said, this should be enough to verify most HW compatibility. I say this because this is FreeBSD based, so you're not going to find out about OpenBSD or NetBSD compatibility this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FuryBSD also made it to the HN frontpage yesterday.

Both FuryBSD and NomadBSD are based on FreeBSD.

Is FreeBSD just generally a better desktop OS than OpenBSD? I've never used any *BSD in my life, so I honestly don't know.

<comment><USER2> I used to be able to run Matlab on FreeBSD(linux only since ~2016), so that made it much more desktop friendly as far as I was concerned. Currently OpenBSD can't run Wine and doesn't have any Linux compatibility layer. NetBSD had a youngin work on fixing Wine, but that hasn't been merged in to a release.

<comment><USER7> Did you try Octave?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oooo, I kind of want to get that $200 Pinebook to play with this on.

I have a nostalgia for posix like systems on older hardware, I remember when my daily was Ubuntu on a PIII.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would love to boot something like this on a Pinebook. Unfortunately, the releases are only for amd64 and Apple-specific amd64 hardware. For the Pinebook, maybe a GitHub issue for aarch64 is a good place to start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty much exactly what I wanted in an OS. Decent lite-weight desktop BSD with a Graphical installer that isn't TrueOS (I don't like it).

<comment><USER2> Why is the graphical installer important to you? Is it to check the GPU is supported? You can usually install a DE after the initial install of the OS easily, and FreeBSD and OpenBSD at least have very nice user friendly installers.

<comment><USER9> Yes I know. I can install it fine. Do I particularly want to use a text based installer than looks like something from the 80s? Nope. I have an Amiga 1200 on my desk and that has a better installer than most BSDs. This is essentially a dead OS that fits on 5 floppy disks has a proper graphical installer and BSD doesn't. Icaros (Amiga clone OS) has a better installer than most BSDs.

Like it or not Windows with its spyware is the only Desktop OS that isn't tied to expensive hardware or has the problems of Linux (which will get worse as things become more corporate) and has decent software and hardware support i.e. my Nvidia card is supported (No Radeon cards aren't an option mainly because they tend to be garbage IMO and every card I've owned that been a Radeon has had problems). Also Windows is pretty stable for the most part even with the forced updates and annoyances of having to turn all the garbage off.

> You can usually install a DE after the initial install of the OS easily, and > FreeBSD and OpenBSD at least have very nice user friendly installers.

The partitioning for OpenBSD the last time I bothered looking at it was asking me to work out cylinders and all sorts of other crap. When I was at uni and had free time I didn't mind getting the calculator out and working it all out, now I just do A for auto partition and hope it is okay (which isn't good).

I have a ISO somewhere where I scripted everything up and then one of the released broke it and I just gave up and stuck CentOS on the machine and only use OpenBSD now in VMs for hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's window manager they are using? It must be light weight to run on just on 1G of RAM.

<comment><USER11> Oh wow, now I feel old. I remember compiling and running Java course work on a laptop with 8MB of RAM. The display was monochrome, and the compiler literally took ten minutes to spin up (as go get, and drink a cup of coffee before it's done - probably swapping like mad). But it worked well enough with x11 and fvwm.

I see i was on a supercharged "pro" workstation with that much ram, though:

[http://www.fvwm.org/history/](http://www.fvwm.org/history/)

> There were two or three reasons for starting FVWM and RXVT. First, I had a > need 33 MHZ 486 laptop PC with only 4 MB of RAM, and I thought linux and X11 > were way better than the windows versions of the day. X11 with TWM and xterm > would run on my PC, but just barely.

<comment><USER7> fvwm was always faster than TWM, even if at a first TWM runs faster. Also, TCL would be faster than Java :)

<comment><USER12> Maybe back then, but nowadays I'm pretty sure java is a lot faster than tcl.

<comment><USER11> Actually the small Java gui app (tick tack toe, or something like it, I think) ran fine. And I think the startup problems with javac might have been solved too (use less ram) - but I never did get around to it. I think I tried IBMs "jikes" compiler, which I think was (at least partially) implemented in c++.

But mostly I was just shocked anyone could think running a wm could reasonablyrrequire a gig of ram...

<comment><USER7> >But mostly I was just shocked anyone could think running a wm could reasonablyrrequire a gig of ram...

Eh, most people run Fvwm/Blackbox/WMaker with 16MB/32MB of RAM. 8... well. To be confortable enough, maybe with NetBSD, FVWM, URxvt, a ultraslimmed kernel and jikes/any tiny Java compatible VM.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brahmosjs: Super charged JavaScript library with React API and native templates - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brahmosjs/brahmos <comment><USER2> Not to knock this project (I know near nothing about it), but the readme could benefit from a "Why" section. Given the existing complexity of JS build tooling these days any new build tool might start by stating its case for inclusion in your project.

<comment><USER3> Tagged template literals are one of faster ways to render currently afaik, and also natively supported by browsers. They are also lightweight and don't require a virtual dom or compilation (like with Svelte). I think one of the earliest libraries with this approach was hyperHtml [1], now there is also lit-html [2] and probably some others. Brahmosjs seems to be an attempt to replace the heavy vdom diffing engine with this lightweight approach, but still keep the familiar React API and JSX syntax.

[1] [https://viperhtml.js.org/hyperhtml/documentation/](https://viperhtml.js.org/hyperhtml/documentation/) [2] [https://lit-html.polymer-project.org/guide](https://lit-html.polymer- project.org/guide)</comment></comment>


Google's self-driving car will use road-based QR codes to get directions - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/109887-google-patent-self-driving-car

<comment> mike-cardwell "In one scenario, it appears, a driver is looking for a parking space and drives over a giant QR code on a street or in a parking garage. The QR code might either have exact directions to a specific parking spot, or it might link to a parking garage database of which parking slots are open."

This strikes me as ripe for abuse.

<comment><USER2> Surely the technical part is no more open to abuse than normal parking signs in cities listing the amount of available spaces in certain car parks.

The QR codes would contain very little information I would imagine but rather a key that is used by the car as an argument for further operations. Leaving all the directional data on the road would be way too easy to abuse.

<comment> mike-cardwell You're thinking too small.

"it might link to a parking garage database of which parking slots are open"

Imagine creating a QR code, (or copying one that already exists) which tells the car to fetch information from <http://your.competitor.example.com/>. Then imagine going out late at night and sticking it on a busy motorway.

DOS by traffic.

Also. You better hope that your car doesn't have any vulnerabilities that can be abused by a specially crafted QR code, or by fetching specially crafted data that a QR code prompts it to fetch.

<comment><USER3> You're thinking way too tin hat.

While we're there we better do something about all those people using radio jammers to down auto-landing aircraft.

Also, you better hope their are no vulnerabilities in the automatically driven mono-rail / train system you are riding in.

These type of issues are going to be discussed to the end of the earth but I can't wait to see driverless cars make their way from the lab to the car dealer.

As far as introduction, I would bet these features will be added to high-end luxury models and quite possibly initially limited to main roads (motorways / interstates) where the chances of encountering something unusual are lower. With the addition of a fair splattering of warning labels.

<comment><USER4> Quote from _VBprogrammer_ :

 _You're thinking way too tin hat._

I very, very rarely resort to _ad hominem_ , least of all on HN, but your nickname says it all (if indeed VB refers to Visual Basic). Far too many computer problems of yore were created by VB programmers not being nearly "tin hat" enough. When engineering systems which can damage other systems or cause bodily harm, one's responsibility is to anticipate, mitigate, and prevent the worst case scenario to the maximum extent possible.

<comment><USER3> Well VBprogrammer is a moniker I've used since I was 14. I now work for a company building websites which have thousands of hits a minute, require PCI compliance and use a variety of tools, none of which are Visual Basic.

Given that you resorted to ad hominem I assume you have no other reasonable arguments against what I said.

<comment><USER4> I understand the desire to keep an old handle. Regarding your last paragraph, I believe my second sentence stands on its own, and that others have said anything else I might care to express. Basically, with something that has the potential to maim and kill (like self-driving cars), I expect engineers to take every precaution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess Google learned from the patent war on smartphones and they'll be better prepared against the auto industry.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good thing it doesn't snow down there!

<comment><USER7> The pavement could be heated only where the QR code is located.

<comment><USER4> ...thus creating a patch of ice around the QR code as the melted snow refreezes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect this is simply one of many self-driving car patents Google will file, but it's fun to speculate:

Technological hurdles aside, the catch-22 situation is that without much evidence the technology works there will never be public acceptance and legislation for it to be used on the roads. Perhaps Google plan to initially market the system as some sort of beefed-up parking assist - one where you leave your car at the entrance to a car park and collect it from there later. I'm not lawyer, but car parks != public roads, so different laws should apply.

Obviously, nobody would pay loads of extra cash just for that feature, but maybe Google would be willing to subsidise it in the hope that it gets them over the public-acceptance hurdle as people would start getting used to cars driving themselves around without incident and start to trust the technology. It would also build up thousands of hours of evidence of the safety of the system, which the legislators are going to want to see before they okay it for general driving.

Personally, I can't wait until self-driving cars are a reality. It's going to revolutionise transport. :)

<comment><USER9> Probably autopilots will be sold and marketed as glorified cruise control. To be used only with a driver behind the wheel. And then they will gradually get accepted to the scale that it will be silly not to have a full permit for autonomous vehicles.

<comment><USER8> Possibly. Though they'd either have to build in something to monitor the driver or accept that they're just going to tune out and read the paper/go to sleep.

Could be a potential way to bring it to market that keeps the insurers happy though. Make the driver 'promise' to pay attention and should an accident happen and the driver didn't take over then the insurer doesn't pay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was discussed a few days ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3355876>

</comment><comment><USER11> Can't they just use NFC?

<comment><USER12> This is a patent and not a detailed report on what they intend to use or are implementing.

Strategically speaking the optimal case is a patent to cover the process of sending directions to a car, including everything needed to request them, using any means.

Everyone who produces cars will have to implement some form of that at some point to stay relevant, which makes this a very valuable patent.

<comment><USER13> Sad that a patent could have so many ways to be implemented. Patents are supposed to be implementable. Google could hide a ton of trade secrets behind this patent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cue in "drive-by buffer overrun".

</comment><comment><USER15> Can I tell the robot car to run over a pedestrian if he has an ak-47 pointed at me and he is on the curb? A self defense situational awareness algorithm that understands kill or be killed?</comment>


Physicists discover flaws in superconductor theory - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-04-physicists-flaws-superconductor-theory.html <comment><USER2> Their source: [http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/119/13/10.1...](http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/119/13/10.1063/1.4945018)

Looks like this will lead to new physics discoveries? And better electric engines?

Does anybody think this could extend to antennas too?

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Persist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Persistent_mode)

> An alternate operating mode, once the magnet has been energized, is to > short-circuit the windings with a piece of superconductor. The windings > become a closed superconducting loop, the power supply can be turned off, > and persistent currents will flow for months, preserving the magnetic field.

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be interesting to imagine a society without magnets. We could use steam engines to pump water. Fiber optic light pipes for some home lighting. Gas stoves for cooking.

<comment><USER5> There are many ways of generating electricity without magnetic induction: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods_of_generating_electricity)

Batteries was (iirc) the typical way it was done before Faraday.

<comment><USER6> Motors would be harder though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This could also have applications for cheaper and smaller fusion reactors? And particle accelerators.

(And I'm guessing they meant MRI instead of X-ray in that last paragraph)

<comment><USER7> Agreed, it's probably MRI. There's more strange things going on in this article. While "In a way, they [superconductors] are the opposite of toasters" made me giggle a little, "Without magnets, we'd lack generators [electric lights and toasters], motors [municipal water supplies, ship engines], magnetrons [microwave ovens], and much more" made me cringe. Electric lights and toasters are pretty much unrelated to generators and I've yet to see an electric engine on a commercial ship. I wonder whether the author of the article put the examples there, I doubt that Prof. Weinstein did.

<comment><USER8> Electric light and toasters run on electricity "generated" by the generator.

A lot of ships have electric engines. On cruise ships, diesel electric propulsion offers quieter and smoother rides. Some air-craft carriers and submarines have nuclear-electric propulsion systems.

The article made me cringe, too, but mainly because it created a false impression on how big magnets are really energized. I've done it a few times (always with the same magnet, which keeps quenching...), and described the process here:

[http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69222/](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69222/)

<comment><USER9> Diesel electric propulsion is quietly taking over most large mobile applications. Even cars are slowly going gasoline-electric. Better magnetics would only speed up the switch.

Of ships it has what you stated, and you no longer have to build the engine on a incline to drive the propeller or have complex transmissions. Other benefits are you can have 2 engines and only run 1 during calm weather cruse. Also electric motors are able to be mounted in stearable pods, greatly increasing maneuverability of a ship (need fewer tugs to go into port). Some ships have nothing but the pods for good station keeping.

Multiple locomotive trains only need 1 engine, but run power to several for extra traction, and it enables things like traction control that can't be cheaply done mechanically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "The most encouraging is that we can now produce full-strength TFMs with a > pulse strength 1.0 times that of the TFM," he added.

I have to assume that's a typo, right?

<comment><USER11> No, why would it be? Previously, pulse strengths 2-3.2 times as strong as the TFM were required, and they're trying to bring it down, so this is a good result. It's a weird way of phrasing it, but I assume that's for emphasis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this article is saying I should build an iron man suit.</comment>


Why how is boring and how why is awesome - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bitquabit.com/2011/04/28/why-how-is-boring-and-how-why-is-awesome/

<comment><USER3> Maybe I'm fick, but I do these in my company routinely using CVS:

"...identified what I thought were two of DVCS' killer scenarios: maintaining multiple versions of a product without dropping bug fixes, and being able to reliably develop new features of a product while always being ready to ship a bugfix in a heartbeat."

I use git for my own projects, FTR.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's pretty coincidental that I read the headlines on the front-page and noticed 4 of the top 10 articles are Why this or Why that instead of How:

* Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation (marco.org)

* Joel Spolsky on Why Lunch is So Important at Work (joelonsoftware.com)

* Why we need an Open Wireless movement (eff.org)

* Silk: why we use Haskell (typlab.com)

So I searched for "why" in my browser and found this article just down the page. Hows add to my technical skill set, whys help me make better judgments in the future. I personally prefer the "how" more than "why" because everyone can have a different reason for why. Why marco prefers not to make Instapaper free or why Fog Creek devs prefer DVCS certainly help me decide if I want to go down that part or not. But in the end, how interests the hacker in me more.

<comment><USER5> "How" is necessary, but I think "Why" is more fundamental. There is always more to know about the universe than we can stuff in our heads (I can't even tell you the contents of my desk), but "Why" provides the motivation - <USER2> framework or outline on which to hang all the details involved in "How". If the detail doesn't move me toward the goal, I ignore it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I look at this and can't help but think how important it is to entrepreneurs. "Why" is fundamental, the building blocks for your implementation/execution, the "how".

The fundamental question for a venture is: Why are we doing what we are doing? Expressed market demand. We can make money providing the supply for that demand.

Interestingly, "why" is also where all "how" questions eventually lead when you dig deep enough. How are we going to provide a solution? Through a mobile application. Why a mobile app?

If you are not asking a why question, you haven't thought enough about a particular topic. And if you think long enough, all your "why" questions should eventually lead back to the fundamental answer, "because there is demand for this".

</comment><comment><USER7> I was a little disappointed that this wasn't about _why</comment>


We launched Deckset - <AUTHOR> http://chris.eidhof.nl/posts/we-launched-deckset.html

<comment><USER2> I like the idea of writing content in markdown and thus keeping presentation separate from content. Hope this takes off. If I were someone who presented a lot, I would definitely consider purchasing this.</comment>


Habitual tea drinking modulates brain efficiency - <AUTHOR> https://neurosciencenews.com/tea-drinking-brain-efficiency-15063/ <comment><USER2> They don't mention exactly what they mean by tea in this abstract, so I kind of assume they're talking about typical tea on the green to black spectrum, and probably caffeinated.

They do mention herbal teas at one point, but there are lots of different kinds of herbal teas.

I drink a lot of lemon ginger, mint, and roasted dandelion root (my favorite), and also some chai decaf. I wonder if these kinds of teas show similar effects.

I like to have a yerba mate every once in a while too but usually have trouble sleeping afterwards.</comment>


Heroku Waza: Programming and the Visual Arts [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/groups/waza2013/videos/61113159

<comment><AUTHOR> Speaker here. Thinking about writing something longer about this, so would love some feedback.</comment>


XP Paint – A Web-Based Version of Window XP's MS Paint - <AUTHOR> https://chowderman.github.io/xp-paint.html <comment><USER2> This version of MS Paint is like the peak example of covering 99% of basic use cases while being incredibly simple to use. Whenever I need to make an arbitrary image real quick I miss this version of Paint. Nothing else I can find in 2020 even comes close to its intuitive interface.

<comment><USER3> Isn't mspaint in Windows 10 basically the same thing but with a ribbon instead of a toolbar?

I don't much care for the ribbon but I'm used to it now. Hitting WinKey-R, mspaint, [Enter] is still my goto for simple picture editing, even just recording a screenshot despite the existence of the snipping tool...

Other than the minor annoyance of getting used to the ribbon I felt as if I was still using the same old paint when I did this.

<comment><USER4> Two things I dislike about the new Paint are;

1\. Can't select secondary colour with right click

2\. Needs way more clicks to get a filled Rectangle

<comment><USER5> 1\. On latest Windows version I am on now it works as the classic paint. 2\. On classic paint you set colors > rectangle > select filling (w/ outline or w/o). On new paint is set colors > rectangle > fill > select filling > outline > select outline. So 1 or 3 more if you want to remove the outline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the repo as well: [https://github.com/chowderman/xp- paint](https://github.com/chowderman/xp-paint).

Note: this is in no way affiliated with Microsoft, its merely a fan project based on my love of Windows XP

<comment><USER6> Added a PR to make it installable on desktop. The build script rewrites the link to a local directory for some reason though

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is you like MS Paint art then you should check out Jim'll Paint It ([https://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/](https://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/) \- also on facebook).

He takes requests.

<comment><USER8> That's... an unfortunate name. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile)

<comment><USER9> Nonsense. Jim is a very common name, too widespread to be impacted by one bad guy.

<comment><USER10> GP wasn't comparing just the name _" Jim"_, it was comparing _" Jim'll Paint It"_ to _" Jim'll Fix It"_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim%27ll_Fix_It](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim%27ll_Fix_It)

<comment><USER9> Okay, now I understand their point. Strange not to link it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like this is a fork of [https://jspaint.app/](https://jspaint.app/)

<comment><USER12> What is the difference between those two?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main differences are:

* it works totally offline (it performs no XHR requests and none of the libraries are linked to CDNs or other sites)

* is contained within a single ~1 MB in size .html file (I baked all images, scripts, style sheets, etc. within a single file)

* is lighter, as I removed some features to keep it closer to the original (but kept a few like the history and rendering as a GIF)

* is Win XP themed instead of Win 95

<comment><USER13> Is it possible to save it locally and work on that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a very good recreation. Pleased to see it even replicates the hidden zoom (below 8x). I also spot a good inaccuracy: the undo doesn't appear limited to 3 :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> How where you able to implement such a fast floodfill? I tried to make something similar a few years ago, but was not able to get the floodfilling to work in reasonably time

<comment><USER16> Here's the source code for draw_fill: [https://github.com/chowderman/xp- paint/blob/b6dfcce7f449d3bb...](https://github.com/chowderman/xp- paint/blob/b6dfcce7f449d3bb6eec21c3c859571067e7c771/xp-paint/src/image- manipulation.js#L362)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The square brush tool is broken [https://imgur.com/a/2CqIdhx](https://imgur.com/a/2CqIdhx)

<comment><USER18> Same for me as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In 1993 I was 12 years old and spent many, many hours drawing a pixel-perfect replica of the Mortal Kombat dragon logo in MS Paintbrush (the name of MS Paint at the time). I believe it was a 640x480 BMP. I so wish I had saved a copy of this and all of the other stuff I downloaded off bulletin boards! Stuff like this got me started in web graphics, HTML, and eventually sysadmin.

To this day I still take screenshots (PrtScn) and save them using pbrush (WinKey+R pbrush).

</comment><comment><USER20> So is this just a fork of [https://jspaint.app/](https://jspaint.app/) with styling changes?

<comment><USER21> yep says so in the Help > About modal

"XP Paint is a fork of the web-based remake of MS Paint called JS Paint."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Holy crap that was fun. Big fan of the history view and the spray effect. Is the cursor lagging behind the mouse intentionally or is it just lag because javascript? I didn't notice anything else lagging, but I don't remember MS Paint having a mass/drag effect like that. FWIW, I found it even easier to write my name with the pencil on a trackpad.

</comment><comment><USER23> These always miss my favorite hidden feature of mspaint: Control + Scrolling should be able to increase/decrease the size of the brush to sizes much larger than you can normally select. Instead, this just zooms the browser but maybe it could be changed to alt + scroll or something.

</comment><comment><USER24> For some reason, I can't zoom via main menu (View/Zoom). Level 3 menu just diappears. (My browser is Firefox if this matters.) Keyboard accelerators don't work either (e.g. Alt+V,Z,L). Only level 1 menu works via keyboard accelerator (Alt+V).

</comment><comment><USER25> Small bug: on Brave browser, the "fill" tool is not covering 100% of the pixels [https://i.imgur.com/Ej6owmI.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ej6owmI.png)

</comment><comment><USER26> Someone I know once got brief access to source code for a version of Windows that included paint. He had just a few mins with it and opened up the source to paint because he liked the software. One of the variable names was something like "fluffy_bunny_rabbit" and he read a comment that said "this fixes bug X, I don't understand why, but just leave this code here." Unsure if former softies can confirm this was code quality back then...

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice work! It would be great if you could include a feature to crop an image, similar to how you can in MS Paint. Crop is the feature I probably use most often in MS Paint.

</comment><comment><USER28> Started using MS Paint or whatever it was called then after years of drawing on Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. I wasn't very impressed, but now after seeing later alternatives it's actually not too bad. Didn't Hockney do lots of recent paintings on the most basic iPad drawing program?

</comment><comment><USER29> There is also [https://jspaint.app/](https://jspaint.app/)

</comment><comment><USER30> If you don't like the display scaling, you can try running this in the browser console:

      document.body.style.zoom = 1 / window.devicePixelRatio

</comment><comment> destory-everyth This is the best replica of mspaint I have seen everything looks and behaves exactly the same , well done!

<comment><USER31> I wish it would save as bmp only, that png feature makes it orders of magnitudes less horrific than the orignal paint.

And I think it should only save to localStorage, so that saving a few images would fill up all the space like I quickly did on my few GBs hardrive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The best version of paint. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> you know it! It had a sleek and modern look for the time, while still having the simplicity and user-friendliness of MS Paint from Win 95/98\. really wish this version of paint was still supported in Win 10

<comment><USER33> Surely it can be packed as an Electron app?

<comment><USER34> I wouldn't be surprised if a stripped-to-the-bone installation of WinXP in a VM, running only Paint, is lighter on system resources than Electron running this.

<comment><USER35> A very basic XP install with a GUI can fit in 20-30 MB[1][2][3], using minlogon, but even with a "standard" Winlogon it should be below 50 MB, so it surely would take less disk space than the hypothetical 100 MB electron based version.

[1] [http://reboot.pro/topic/3717-xpsp1-with-full-commandline- and...](http://reboot.pro/topic/3717-xpsp1-with-full-commandline-and-ntfs- below-10-mb/)

[2][http://reboot.pro/topic/16765-minixp/](http://reboot.pro/topic/16765-minixp/)

[3][http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/MiniXP/](http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/MiniXP/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> n-gauge Nice job! (Would like to see Ctrl + e focus into the first value box)

</comment><comment><USER36> Oh my! This even has the secret x10 zoom! That's awesome. :)

</comment><comment><USER37> Is anyone else having trouble going View > Zoom > Normal

</comment><comment><USER38> As much as I enjoy this, I feel for it to really shine would be a desktop version, not locked into the browser. I think a Chromium/Electron app would be fine.

<comment><USER39> I couldn't disagree more. An entire electron app just for mspaint? That's ridiculous.

<comment><USER38> I disagree with you. The way I work is based in realms of OS apps, not browser tabs. Electron is bloated, but for a 'cute' app like this I don't think it's any worse than Slack, or a Qt app. Overall, I'm less likely to use an app on a regular basis if I need to go to a website to use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Nice work! Please add a LICENSE file</comment>


Education is for pussies - <AUTHOR> http://codefoe.com/education-is-for-pussies/

<comment><USER2> Ignorant and obtuse. Just because it worked out for you means that everybody should ditch it? And what about industries that you _must_ have school for like medical?

<comment><USER3> They are pussies. The author has some growing up to do - go go girls asses. Really?

<comment><AUTHOR> What, you got something against asses?

<comment><USER3> Assuming English English rather than American English, it is rather funnier to read...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Even after almost half a year of absence from school, they still tried their > best to make me change my mind and continue learning.

It's a fatally self-referential claim. The first thing the author needs to learn is to stop saying "learning" when he means "schooling". Education and schooling are separate topics. One may leave school, but one never leaves education.

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain</comment>