Ask HN: Please Review My New Site. - <AUTHOR> http://www.drinkingfor.com

<comment><USER2> My attention was drawn to the tag cloud first, and that made me confused as to what the site was about. Only later I noticed there was a description on the left.

Personally I am also a bit skeptical of the usefulness of tag clouds. It seem to me they are mostly interesting to techie types who like to think about raw data. I would rather see some specific examples of recently hot drinking games from the site.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. Featured games, plus (possibly) photos of college kids (your friends, i'd assume?) playing the featured games, possibly a video...

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe do something like a video service?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would change the text: "If you do decide to drink, DO NOT Drive. Drink Safely." to simply "Always drink responsibly." and have that section of the text be a link to a new page with a paragraph about drinking and driving. You also might include some external links on that page (MADD, AA, etc).

It is more direct to use a command instead of a conditional and use a positive instead of a negative.

<comment><USER5> It is worth noting that "Always drink responsibly" is the alcohol industry's PSA slogan. It was almost certainly chosen because it contains "Always drink" as opposed to being effective. This is why you see it in industry supported ads instead of the MADD ads.

<comment><USER4> The industry may have created that phrase in a conveniently ambiguous way; still, in English, positives are always better than negatives when giving a command. Consider the difference between "I don't eat junk food" and "I always eat healthy foods." The first contains the proposition that you have the capability of eating junk foods; the second does not.

Perhaps "Always Drive Safely" or "Always be Responsible" as the link text would be better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "Drinking For.com" is only half visible in Safari. (Can only see top half of it).

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, will look into.

<comment><USER7> The background color of the logo is gray in IE6 and the Add Game page is messed up in IE6 also. Although, I can't blame you if you aren't planning to support IE6.

Also the OpenID button does not load in Opera 9 and slows down the loading of the rest of the form greatly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't expect to make money off this site, but I do hope to make some headway as my first true website...

Let me know what you all think. Its a Drinking site which will one day bring all the drinking activities together hopefully.

<comment><USER8> Trying to upvote a game didn't do anything - the number didn't change, I didn't see any message telling me something went wrong - just nothing.

At that point, I got bored and left.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha, Only logged in users can up vote. Don't want abuse of the system. Will have to display a message that says something like that,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Definitely an interesting idea. Here's a few things:

\- Iterate on the design: I'd start on the color scheme, since it's easy to get right. Resources: <http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index- en.html> <http://beta.dailycolorscheme.com/>

\- Random design tip: Please don't use a grey gradient on everything. It looks like everything has a layer of virtual dust on it. Try black or white, and then tweaking the transparency/opacity of the gradient down to 25-75%.

\- Maybe I'm alone, but I never really thought tag clouds were a great data visualization. Regardless, I think another way to explore the games is worth pursuing. Example: <http://www.extratasty.com/recipes>

<comment><AUTHOR> All points taken and noted.

Where did you see Grey Gradient? You talking about the voting system?

<comment><USER9> The DrinkingFor.com logo at the top and the bottles on the left side

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The layout seems like it's missing something to me. The tag cloud block is too short vertically maybe? I kept waiting for something to load under it, and it never did.

The other option is to put the tag cloud in a column on the right and make a center column where you can have a featured game or something? You know, to put some content on the front page.

Anyways, it seems like a cool idea - good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks,

I will be putting a top ten games voted on kind of thing at the top.

I also want to put a BIG BUTTON for the ADD a Game...

Hopefully that should fill it out a little.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "We are here to provide a source of entertainment for any sort of drinking game/activity. We wanted to provide the best place to find any activity for drinking so feel free to look around and add a game/activity or two."

This is not as concise as it should be. Cut it down to like 7-8 words.

</comment><comment><USER12> i like the idea to get creative ideas :-) a few suggestions:

\- i would not only display a tag-cloud on the homepage but also top games.

\- why do you need people to log in / "register". wouldn't a captcha also do the job of avoiding spam and make the log-in/providing personal data optional. i think it makes it more likely people would contribute

\- categories might could help people to navigate / provide contributers with suggestions how to classify their games. it also enables to "surf" the site.

\- i don't dislike the design but i would make the navigation a bit more dominant and combine the two logos, combine the picture of the bottles and the title

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I second categories. I think there should be a few: top games, type of drink, by game type (movies, speeches, skill games, etc), size of group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd remove the need for a log-in to vote on games. Regardless of 'abuse', which should be relatively easy to monitor, if someone feels particularly passionate about up-voting, perhaps they should be able to express it.

Considering a large percentage of individuals who play such games are likely underage, who would want to log-in and, essentially, confess to their crime?

In my experience, sites like this which are 'cool content' driven depend heavily on equally 'cool' design. Perhaps consider design overhaul, find a friend good with web design?

</comment><comment><USER15> When you click a tag and see a listing of activities, the headers ("equipment" and "rules") are inline with the text. Where it should read like:

      Equipment
        foo bar and baz
      Rules
        blah blah blah.

it looks like

      Equipment foo bar and baz Rules blah blah blah.

That is hard to read, and ugly.

Also, the colors aren't so pretty.

Neat site though. Clever premise.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with this is users are allowed to enter in data so I will never be able to control what is in the site and not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems like a fun idea, but it doesn't _feel_ fun. I think the tag cloud is detrimental. It makes drinking feel like work.

The logo doesn't appear in Safari, as was noted.

Beyond that, this feels like you could have much more than drinking games on the site. There aren't enough drinking games to make a directory seem worthwhile unless you're adding some other features to the site to make it seem big.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was asking my self the exact same question. Should I just put drinking games and move on or should I build up the site more. I don't know how much real type of advertising I can get with this site so I was thinking it might just be a waste of time to put more into the site. What do you think?

<comment><USER16> Well, I'm guessing you'll be using this site, so just figure out what works! Off the top of my head I'd think of either putting drink recipes online, or letting people talk and tell stories about each game, making it a bit more social. But it's your site, so I'd figure just make it whatever you want and if you like it, other people will too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't say I'm too fond of the color scheme. However, I left the site feeling impressed, primarily because I'm quite fond of the site's purpose.

It might be beneficial to replace the tag cloud with something a bit less abstract and considerably more specific -- possibly even a "recommended games" or "top games" page. Though you could always use the tag cloud to supplement the interface.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's nice to see a fellow asp.net website. It also looks like you're using the mvc beta. Though, the site could use a designer.

</comment><comment><USER19> \- Let users add photos/videos \- Make design more fun, cheerful, drunken... \- Maybe link to social networking sites

<comment><AUTHOR> We are looking into it.

The thought on this tho would be after we are finished building the site where you can put games, would we want to expand it or move on to another idea...

Once all the problems and bugs have been fixed, do we stay and develop on it for another 3 or 4 months or do we move on?

<comment><USER19> I would move on... don't see too much future on this idea only, as fun as it is

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice man. Black text on blue is hard to read for me, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> suggest another text color? I was wondering about that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Typo from the About page: "If your still reading this..."

</comment><comment><USER22> whats in the light blue box on the right? adverts?

remove it, make the content wider.

<comment><AUTHOR> There will be adverts there. Wanted to get the site filled out a bit more before I place advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I appreciate the fact that there is a disclaimer about not drinking and driving. Perhaps one could further add a disclaimer that once one gets into the order of a dozen or more shots in a single night, one runs a risk of dying from alcohol poisoning, and that can happen with these kinds of "drinking games", so sort of a "proceed at your own risk" link might be appropriate and link to a medical article on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very non-standard navigation up top, but not so bad, I actually like it since it is so simple.

The site looks nice. What would make sense is that the 1st page is the description up top, then tag clound. Every other page has the description on the side.

</comment><comment><USER25> actual:)</comment>


Facebook Changed Everything, It's Not a Fad, and I'm with Zuck (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://codefury.net/2012/05/facebook-changed-everything-its-not-a-fad-and-im-with-zuck/ <comment><AUTHOR> At the time that I wrote this post, I was only getting started in digital advertising. I knew Facebook had a wide social and technical moat. But now I know that as a competitor to, and user of Facebook advertising — it's so much more powerful than other options for advertising at scale. The craziest part is that they haven't even opened the doors to what they can _really_ do yet in terms of targeting.</comment>


Pedants' Favorite Grammar Rules are Probably Fake - mkr-hn http://daily.jstor.org/grammar-rule-is-probably-fake/ <comment><AUTHOR> "These are "the modern truths about language: language changes constantly; change is normal; spoken language is the language; correctness rests upon usage; all usage is relative."

There's of course truth to these statements, backed by a lot of linguistic research. Yet one has to be careful so as not to lean too much the other way. Using certain forms of language may be acceptable to your local peer group but may be a marker that others pick up on and label you.

As for "all usage is relative": I think the points pg makes in his essay "Taste for Makers" ([http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html)) are spot on (though he was talking in the context of art, beauty, and taste):

"Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things.

Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better. Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It's a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job. If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it."

<comment> aaron-lebo Taste _is_ entirely a personal preference. The trick is to get other people to agree with your own. It's hard to look at the drastically different ideas of what is "tasteful" across different cultures and believe that there's any such thing as a universal view on it. We only have that mindset because Western/American culture in particular has been promulgated across the world and poeple in Hollywood or SV have chosen what is or isn't fine.

Also, who cares if people label you for your use of language. Those people can get over themselves. Some of the linguistic tricks from those in the lowest rungs of society now dominate our discourse and it's because they didn't care.

<comment><USER2> Well _you_ should care if you want to be hired, published, or generally taken seriously in certain environments. (Note that speaking "proper" English is not always what you want either; there are some social situations where other dialects will get you farther -- and, of course, all of this also applies to languages other than English.)

But I also take your point. The problem--as is often the case with various forms of stereotyping--is that such preconceptions are simultaneously useful as indicators about a person you are dealing with (such as level of education), but also deserving of serious skepticism since they can have the effect of disadvantaging certain groups, cause you to miss interesting opportunities, and generally making life less interesting by enforcing a stultifying uniformity.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty normal to switch between styles of speech depending on the situation. Word and grammar choices you use with a good friend are different than those you'd use in a television interview are different than those you'd use in court.

There are times in your life in which you need to speak with precision, and that means using generally agreed upon grammar and vocabulary. There's no harm in breaking those rules in everyday speech, but you should _know_ them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article does a very poor job of acknowledging and discussing the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive linguistics.

In contrast, David Foster Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage" (pdf: [http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...](http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsage.pdf)) is an excellent, though lengthy, discussion of these issues. I can't recommend it enough to anyone interested in these sorts of things.

<comment><USER5> There is such a thing as linguistic prescription, but there isn't really such a thing as "prescriptive linguistics". There are linguists, who study and describe language, and then there are people who promulgate their opinions about language. Opinion promulgators are not "prescriptive linguists" and what they practice is not "prescriptive linguistics".

<comment><USER6> Is this a meta-joke about pedants?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo I used to be a pretty big pedant, then I took a semester of a lingusitcs program and the point was hammered home that language really is relative. Right/wrong has very little place in the topic.

I can't find the exact quote but in Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky makes some statement about how the ability for any person to speak, use, invent, modify, evolve language proves that everyone, not just a select few, are inherently creative and intelligent. We just don't always harness it. Of course, there are some limits to that statement (Chomsky would know that more than anyone else), but it rings true.

The idioms and phrases that we deem correct today were incorrect at some point in the past and there are phrases that sound wrong now which will be perfectly natural in the future. Being a pedant is a waste of time, what's more: it stifles creativity.

As a small example, I constantly see "bias" used in place of "biased" and "dominate" used in place of "dominant" online, usually in discussions about sports. I hate those uses every single time I see them (especially the latter because the spelling/sounds don't even match), but I've come to realize that language will often simplify itself and take shortcuts, and that may be what's happening here.

What would be really interesting is to track the evolution of language, which you could do online very well, even perhaps arriving to the origin of certain words/phrases, etc.

It's really a fascinating topic if you can let your own bias get out of the way.

<comment><USER7> A Way with Words is a fantastic podcast, also aired on many NPR stations. Definitely check it out if this topic interests you. [http://www.waywordradio.org/](http://www.waywordradio.org/)

They usually have a segment about tracking the origins of certain words/phrases, often to a regional dialect. And they have segments about pet peeves or settling grammar disputes, e.g., between spouses.

Listening to the show has helped my pedantic tendencies. I still think it's important to know the current established, mainstream grammar rules and vocabulary, but it's also important to understand that language is always evolving and highly dependent upon context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My pedantry is involuntary, these rules were drilled into me as a kid. When I see a mistake my eye gets snagged on it, as if I were running and stumbled over - it's annoying. So this article doesn't help me much personally.

<comment><USER9> Which, is often on purpose. Sometimes I want you to. Trip.

<comment><USER3> Which is fine, as long as it's deliberate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would say that unless you know the rules (imaginary or real), it's not possible to break them in a way that is interesting. A programming example: PEP 8 makes no difference to whether or not your Python code will run. You can quite happily code all day without knowing anything about it. There are also plenty of times when you shouldn't follow it religiously. But without reading it and taking on board what it means, people will find reading your code more tiresome, and you won't know when to break the rules in a way that's helpful or interesting for the reader. The same, I believe, applies to English grammar.

<comment><USER11> I see a few distinctions between code and prose.

Code is written with two kinds of readers in mind: the computer and other humans. Prose is written just for humans.

With code, there is a very precise set of rules determining whether the code will be readable by a computer. There is no correspondingly precise set of rules for understandability by humans.

I can see the analogy between PEP 8 and grammar rules, but I think there's an important distinction in the provenance of those rules. PEP 8 is a formal proposal adopted by the BDFL. There is no mechanism for submitting or approving formal proposals for English grammar rules. So the spoken language is always the authority on what's correct and what isn't.

<comment><USER10> > Code is written with two kinds of readers in mind: the computer and other > humans. Prose is written just for humans.

I don't think the fact that code is also meant to be read by a computer is relevant in this context. But let's take another example if that doesn't work for you: the novel Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. It's written in a phonetic Edinburgh style. By 'normal' english standards, it doesn't make any sense. If someone was to write in the same style way without any knowledge of English grammar and spelling, you would just assume they couldn't spell. But that's why, in the context of a novel written by a talented author, it's actually a great bit of prose. I could give thousands of other examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The topic is complex. Author is right that law/science/anything-orginated standard of language is a trap and misunderstanding. On the other hand this can be easly interpreted as "we can speak just as we want".

As a language freak (and polyglot by the way) I have found out that one should develop his own language and in fact he/she's gonna do it anyway, the only choise - consciously or not. I've choosen to constantly improve my language and I like this decision, I've seen how big is language's influence on speaker. It's just like an operating system for computer.

On the other hand if you want communicate efficiently you must accept the fact that everybody have own word meanings and speak a little differently and you should adapt to it. Another thing is relation language-subconsciousness, I belive there's very broad influence. Those factors that make caring about language worth. By the way conforming national standard is not the best way: "who's language - he/she rules", so if you want to rule, you need your personal.

As usual, we need to find the golden mean.

</comment><comment><USER13> If enough people make the same error, especially if they're sufficiently high- status, eventually it becomes standard usage. But there's a transitional period during which those who care about clear communication are understandably disturbed by the mistake. E.g., the usage "I'm going to lay down" is wrong, but it's common even among educated speakers. (In this context "lay" requires an object; the right usage is "I'm going to _lie_ down" or, more poetically, "I'm going to lay myself down.") Shall we simply lay down—sorry, _lie_ down—and accept such linguistic shifts, or shall we rage against the dying of the lie, er, light?

</comment><comment><USER14> What does this say for the GMAT? The test has two categories: verbal and quantitative. 35% of Verbal questions fall into a category called 'Sentence Correction', which test grammar. Many correct answers to these questions are hotly-debated and often in contradiction to current style guides.

Perhaps, there is some value in segmenting test-takers in their ability to learn and apply an arbitrary set of rules in place of their own. But, perhaps not.

</comment><comment><USER15> From Archer:

"I need a lead-acid battery, fifty units of plasma, some bolt cutters, and something called a - Defrimbulator?"

"That's a made-up word."

"They're all made up."

<comment><USER16> Also "what are we gonna do with literally, not figuratively, a ton of cocaine?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Despite this, it's still valuable to be able to speak with precision when necessary. The same is true of speaking concisely.

<comment><USER18> Sure, but is there a point to all those boring English classes?

I need to speak in a clear way for others to understand me. That may not mean speaking how my English teachers in public school expected me to.

It's like starting a company. You have an idea, a product, but you have to build custom scaffolding, engineering, human resources. Whatever. There may be some common patterns/idioms one can rely on for guidance, but you'll rarely ever cling to them religiously.

Which is, IMO (though backed by academic research as well), where a lot of this pedantry originates. Humans and their long history of forcing our personal notions of right/wrong on each other.

It's ideas like this article, and this ensuing discussion that prop up my hope that we'll maybe, possibly, start realizing it's bullshit. Instead of saying "Hey, do it my way." we'll start asking how we can be of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The proof is in the pudding, which begs a large question that's growing like Topsy.

Now I need to take a shower.

</comment><comment><USER20> Eh, if language is primarily about communication, there are many benefits to standardization. It feels like a cop-out to just say that everyone gets to make up their own rules of grammar. People also used to make up their own spellings, but standardizing increased the efficacy of communication.

<comment> mkr-hn I have never seen a situation where using a less common spelling or grammar was more distracting than the pedantic tangent it produced.

<comment><USER21> I've experienced confusion reading corporate documents which contained poor grammar or orthography.

As an example of the latter, based loosely on a real example:

      It is preferred to take the server to run-level 1 then to reboot.

So, I telinit 1 followed by shutdown -r now ...?

In operational-readiness documents there really must not be any leeway for confusion or ambiguity, yet I've encountered many such examples. The usual retort of 'language evolves!' doesn't hold true in circumstances where a common, unequivocal meaning is required.

You'd think programmers would be aware of that, writing strictly-defined grammar all day long!

<comment><USER22> That's a fantastic example, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyways... most people ignore them.

</comment><comment><USER24> If they really believed this the title would be, "Fake Probably Is Grammar Rule Your Favorite".

<comment> mkr-hn English sentence construction flexibility is super. You can invent a construction to fit your point (and nothing else), but that doesn't mean there are hard rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article is definitely useful for the HN community.

...

</sarcasm>

<comment><USER26> I genuinely think it is useful to have articles like this on HN. We do have our share of pedants, and many with comments that do nothing but correct someone's grammar or spelling. I suppose a debate can be had over how useful any of that is. Is it worth shutting down or diverting a discussion due to things like grammar?

<comment><USER25> Sure, every community has pedants, but HN is supposed to be for news that relates to startups, technology, and web/software development. There are a ton of other sites and communities where articles like this belong - reddit, digg, etc., HN just shouldn't be one of them. Would you post this article on a web- development-based subreddit?

But hating "grammar nazis" is something everyone loves to do, and feeling mentally superior is something that the HN community loves to feel, so articles like this get up-votes while people who want to stay on-topic get down-votes.

But, oh well, just another step towards the degradation of this community and its content. NBD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm amazed that even (pseudo-)academic articles now have clickbait titles.</comment>


Modeling a car suspension in Javascript, part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://burakkanber.com/blog/physics-in-javascript-car-suspension-part-1-spring-mass-damper/

<comment><USER2> Interesting, it's little physics demos like this that started me programming. I went on to specialise in physics modelling as a result. I'd have lapped this stuff back as a teenager.

I see this in a series, is there going to be an introduction to more advanced topics (n-body problems, non-naive integrators), or is it being aimed more at beginners?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aiming for the series to have around 30 articles in it. It will include n-body problems, but the series won't just be on mechanics. We'll do heat transfer, electromagnetism, and other fun topics. Maybe even quantum mechanics and special relativity. We'll see how the readers respond to all that!

<comment><USER2> Electromagnetism will be tough without a good understanding of the physics first, I think. The quantum mechanics is surprising approachable though. Simulation of a quantum computer is a neat project, especially if written in a way to implement various quantum algorithms.

<comment><AUTHOR> E&M has always been a tricky subject for physics students which is exactly _why_ I want to tackle it! I'll have to figure out a clear and concise way to communicate the concepts to beginners, and while that'll definitely be challenging, it's not a challenge I'll shy away from easily. Bring it on, physics!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3>
      		block.v += a * frameRate;
     		block.x += block.v * frameRate;

_"If you use Euler then you are a bloody idiot"_ <http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/integration-basics/>

Based on own experience if you replace euler with RK4 you can multiply your timestep with 10x and still get more accurate results. Once you start adding constraints this is a must or your constraints will disassemble almost instantly with euler, while rk4 barely requires any after-adjustment to keep the constraints intact.

<http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/> would also be a nice improvement to the simulations.

<comment><USER4> That's about right, but note that both Euler and RK4[1] have the same kind of "whiplash" failure modes when faced with out of band inputs. So RK4 is good, and simple, and worth learning. But as you point out it's really just a _performance_ improvement over naive Euler integration[2].

Basically, don't get hung up over pedantry here. Euler is extremely simple, trivially verifiable and works well in a large number of domains. Demanding everyone who wants to do a simple physics model crack open a textbook is, I think, missing the point.

[1] Fourth order Runge-Kutta integration, a common and reasonably simple algorithm for numeric integration. See: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods>

[2] Euler is the simplest possible integration algorithm most people learn in grade school, essentially: compute your derivatives, multiply by the timestep and add to the current value, and repeat. It falls down and produces wild output when the derivative*timestep product is not small in comparison with the current value.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This article and the other Physics in JS article mention that we're using Euler only because it's the easiest for a student to understand. The article also mentions that the next post will be dedicated to exploring the different integration solvers.

My guess is that the original commenter just skimmed through the code without reading any of the prose ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of a mechanical-modeling "computer" that Lee Iacocca described in his autobiography. Resistors were used as struts, capacitors as springs, etc. The magnetic force of the electricity represented the force of gravity as the modelled car traveled along the simulated road.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are direct parallels between mechanical systems, electrical circuits, and plumbing systems. Three totally different systems can be modeled by the same exact equations!

<comment><USER6> Yes -- exactly why electrical circuit simulation tools sometimes get used in non-electronics contexts. Here's a simulation of your spring-mass-dashpot system in CircuitLab (JS-based circuit simulator, which also works for some mechanical models like this): [https://www.circuitlab.com/circuit/pr4n2d/physics-car- suspen...](https://www.circuitlab.com/circuit/pr4n2d/physics-car-suspension- pt-1-spring-mass-damper/)

We also have some combined electrical and thermal systems such as [https://www.circuitlab.com/circuit/a4xaa6/sous-vide- combined...](https://www.circuitlab.com/circuit/a4xaa6/sous-vide-combined- thermal-system-and-control-loops/) . Looking forward to the rest of your blog series!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neat! I hope physics classes today are getting more into using such web interactive modeling. Or, that the new wave of interactive books are leveraging this kind of ability.

<comment><USER8> When I was in high school, the teacher often used:

<http://www.walter-fendt.de/ph14e/>

Which are Java applets. Not quite as good as modern JS would be, but given the era they were written, they were pretty cool things.

<comment><USER9> There are a ton of excellent physics simulations here, too: <http://phet.colorado.edu>

Although they are also not done in javascript, but a mix of java and flash.

<comment><USER10> As a student, I enjoyed playing around with these: <http://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html>

(All are Java applets.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Repeating myself a bit, but this article with embedded jsfiddle, Bret Victor (<http://worrydream.com/>), and ipython notebook work. The distance between communication/education and execution is getting smaller and smaller. Symbolically flipping the debugging coin on both of its side at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for this. Added to the "read-when-I-get-home" list.</comment>


Zoox Flashes Serious Self Driving Skills in Chaotic San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/zoox-self-driving-car-video-san-francisco <comment><AUTHOR> While obviously the video only shows the car doing each ~difficult scenario once, to my untrained-in-the-intricacies-of-self-driving-car-eyes, these folks seem to have made serious strides in perfect situational awareness.

They're noticing some pedestrians that I can only notice because of the little pink boxes their software is drawing around them.

Very cool!

</comment><comment><USER2> Impressive set of hard scenarios. I'm hoping this is indicative of them being able to handle these scenarios with regularity. If so, they're up there with the top players in this industry!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some resume/portfolio style webpages you like? - <AUTHOR> I am starting to think more and more that I should maintain my resume on the web rather than with desktop publishing tools, simply because of its dynamic nature. However, I'm also a firm believer that when choosing a medium, you should take full advantage of it and not just translate things over with no consideration for the differences. In other words, what neat things can you do with an HTML resume that you can't with a PDF?
Things I have thought of:
- Update it frequently
- Conveniently link to projects
- Make it small-screen responsive
- Serve plaintext when curling it
- Provide details on demand
Things you lose:
- Control over typography
- Ensuring it fits neatly on a printed page
Any more tips for inspiration? <comment><USER3> As tomahony has pointed out, a resume is different from a portfolio. If you are thinking resume only, I'd make it available online as a pdf file - <USER2> more: simply adding HTML markup is not likely to make a difference or impress. Besides, maintaining the 'source content' elsewhere (desktop, google docs, etc.) and uploading a new pdf file each time you have a change is easier, more efficient and avoids duplication (you'll need it as a pdf regardless).

If you want to showcase your coding (HTML, etc..) skills, I second what others suggest: make an online portfolio, or add your projects to your personal website. Check online - there are lots you can use for inspiration. I'm mostly back-end, so mine is minimalist: [http://icode4.fun/projects](http://icode4.fun/projects) .

</comment><comment><USER4> A portfolio page is very different to a resume page. Your portfolio is your professional landing page. It might include a blog, relevant profile links, recent projects etc.. A resume _could_ be a part of this, but it's only one part of many. A portfolio is generally intended to drive traffic. For example, if you begin blogging about a particular technology, you can expect to start getting traffic from people searching that technology. This might lead to recruitement and inquiries. You will generally want to it show first on Google when someone searches your name.

If you just want a single-page resume, you don't need to do anything as fancy. Create an index.html and get a nice clean stylesheet to format it. Host it for free on S3 and off you go. I wouldn't overthink the "features". Who is going to CURL your resume?

For reference, I have a pretty active portfolio site that receives a lot of traffic via the blog from Google:

\- [https://timmyomahony.com](https://timmyomahony.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comments. I'm a bit undecided as to what the purpose of the site I'm planning is. Part resume, yes, but also sort of a business card, with links to my things in a central place.

Yours is a very appealing site. Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're a (junior) front-end developer, then use the website to show off your skills. In other words make it responsive, accessible, use js libraries _when it makes sense to do so_, maybe some visual bling (background effects, scroll snap, a nice design). Https obviously, clean css, small page size, must load quickly.

The reason I'm recommending this: I recently looked for a junior web developer, in the zero-to-little experience range (combined work & school curriculum). I received more than 50 CVs, all stating that they were fluent in HTML/CSS/js. Less than 10 of these had personal web page links. I looked at all of these web pages, and they were a big factor in who got an interview. Off the top of my head, I don't think we interviewed a single person who didn't have a personal resume/portfolio webpage, because we already had a pool of candidates who demonstrated that they had an actual practical experience of building a web site.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the things you mention are boxes I intend to tick. But I'm not really interested in junior web dev roles; I'm more of an algorithms kind of a person. The reason for making a good web page is more to indicate that I am as much of an allrounder as I say, that I attention to details, and that I care about communication.

<comment><USER5> I agree that it's (mostly ?) about signaling. I mentioned the junior web dev profiles because it happened a few weeks ago and because this is precisely a situation (lots of candidates, little to no priors to judge on, similar profiles / education) in which signaling plays an important role.

A personal website is interesting in that there are many dimensions on which you can show your attention to details, from design to hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a personal site at [https://www.milanmotavar.com](https://www.milanmotavar.com).

The site showcase's my skills and interests in highly organized manner.

My suggestion to you is to keep your portfolio site structured and easy to navigate.

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing I do with my online resume is tweak/customize my resume to the job rec and then use zeit.co/blog/new-static-deployments or surge.sh to deploy a static site with a custom/creative url. Additionally, if there's a take-home assignment/challenge, I just deploy the take-home challenge alongside my resume. Feedback has been positive.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is ingenious. Absolutely takes the prize. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a developer who is mostly back-end and created this minimal website with a simple CSS framework ([http://getskeleton.com/](http://getskeleton.com/)) at [http://jryan.io](http://jryan.io)

I'm no web dev so I have no idea how it looks but it looks okay to me.

If I need to print it I just "Print to PDF" and it looks good, so best of both worlds imo.

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps it depends on the market, because often you will just need a plain CV/Resume. However, there are recruiters/companies who stumble on your personal website (e.g. [http://iamliesa.com](http://iamliesa.com) is my partner's website about content marketing) and if it is attractive, it already convinces them to take the next step and contact you.

</comment><comment><USER10> _\- Control over typography - Ensuring it fits neatly on a printed page_

CSS gives you a huge amount of control over both of these things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Compared to desktop publishing software? Would not say so.

No intention of diminishing the great things about modern CSS, just stating it for what it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most recruiters still need your CV/Resume in a PDF or Word doc so it can be scanned by their software.

This is mine [[https://code-designs.co.uk/](https://code-designs.co.uk/)] it's fairly minimalist with a single typeface so the focus is on the content not the design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting choice of aesthetic. Are you not worried it will look unstructured to the first time visitor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do mine in Google Docs. Editable via the web and I can download as Word or PDF.</comment>


The Spectre 13 is HP's attempt to out-design Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/5/11365474/hp-spectre-13-announced-price-specs-release-date <comment><USER2> I'm a huge fan of the way they've changed the logo on this[1], it looks much better than the old design as stated in the article. All in all, this looks like a beautiful piece of hardware, hopefully HP can offer comparable support to Apple's offerings. Battery life also seems questionable with the processor choice but real world use will answer that question. The only other thing to catch my attention is the massive bottom bezel on the display as you can see in the video. Not a deal breaker, but certainly the first thing I noticed about the display.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/5/11367248/hp-new-logo- spectr...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/5/11367248/hp-new-logo-spectre-13)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that this supports Thunderbolt over USB-C. Can they drive a 4K monitor?</comment>


Startup bank account, before & after investment - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151080959691653&set=a.91601426652.96396.693366652&type=1&theater

<comment><USER2> Before and after investment doesn't have that same nice feel of before and after sales.

Looks like the investment came in at a good time though, that "before column" was looking quite slim.</comment>


The Nooscope – a visual manifesto of the limits of AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/nooscope <comment><USER2> This is great iconic map of machine learning in general, ambitious, not 100% precise, but useful to explain a lot problem of AI to the people...</comment>


CSS Markup Detective - <AUTHOR> http://www.red-root.com/sandbox/holmes/ <comment><USER2> This seemed like a cool idea at first glance, but it's actually quite useless.

I ran it on one of my projects, which I've already tested for standards and accessibility compliance, and it highlighted _everything_ on the page. There's no messages explaining what is failing and where. A traditional validator would be more helpful here.

<comment><USER3> If you are a web designer you can just inspect each element in firebug. It will give you a list of the currently applied styles to that element and the top one is something of the form:

.holmes-debug div:empty, .holmes-debug span:empty, .holmes-debug li:empty, .holmes-debug p:empty, .holmes-debug td:empty, .holmes-debug th:empty

If you are on a div and it's empty then that's why, etc....

It would be a lot easier if there was a popup explaining but as a first pass it's pretty useful and not all that hard to get at the info you want.

<comment><USER2> Good tip. I went back and took a look at while my previously validated page was failing so badly.

It turns out this test suite is really poorly designed! For example, it can't identify implicitly associated labels, so the whole concept behind this tool is quite flawed.

<comment><USER3> Yeah there is only so much that you can do solely with css but I prefer explicit labels anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be nice if the documentation described or at least linked to explanations of why all the things it highlights are bad. It's relatively obvious why deprecated elements are bad, but what's wrong with links to "#" or links without a title? If you have time, don't just reply to my comment with the answer; Fork and Edit the docs on GitHub ([https://github.com/redroot/holmes/blob/master/README.markdow...](https://github.com/redroot/holmes/blob/master/README.markdown)) so everyone can learn.

The Browser Support section wonders if Holmes.css works on IE9. I tried the bookmarklet on this very Hacker News page, and the only colored borders I see are grey, whereas in Firefox 4 I see all three colors of border - so, it seems IE9 only partially supports Holmes.css.

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat idea, but it lacked feedback for the user.

I have forked the project and added a pop-over description of the error when the user mouses-over the 'diagnosed' element (not supported on all elements)

\- <https://github.com/MrNibbles/holmes>

</comment><comment><USER6> Great idea. Even better that it's on GitHub (1). That way it can improve quickly and have community discussions on some of the more subjective markup guidelines.

I think this can be especially helpful on local dev servers (turned on when a DEBUG flag is set, for example) while building a fresh site.

[1]: <https://github.com/redroot/holmes>

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks awesome and very useful. How do you envision the use case for Holmes to be? Would I always include it in my site, and just switch on the 'holmes-debug' class when testing? Or would I only include the .css file during development?

<comment><USER6> I would think conditionally linking to it, that's what immediately came to mind while reading this. Within your HTML template and preferably using a built-in variable that indicates you're running in DEBUG or DEV mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks very cool. There are a few typos littered throughout the page that the author should fix:

accessility -> accessibility maet -> met

</comment><comment><USER9> Could this be made into a bookmarklet? I could see using this to diagnose issues on 3rd party sites where source access isn't available.

<comment><USER10> There is a bookmarklet in the yellow download box on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow: Chrome supports marquee tags</comment>


London Hacker News meetup: Thursday, 18 Oct - <AUTHOR> http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/events/86021202/

<comment><USER2> I probably should go to one of these one day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Better still, come do a talk! I am sure you have tons of great stories to share.

<comment><USER2> OK. What would you like me to talk about?

Could perhaps talk about what it's like to write a book for O'Reilly based on my experience of writing The Geek Atlas. Or talk about the Analytical Engine project. Or how everyone in London should be using CloudFlare. Or bit banging on micro controllers. Or what I like about Go. Or being a programmer over 40 :-)

Or..?

<comment><AUTHOR> Analytical Engine sounds brilliant. Could you drop me an email on firstname.lastname@example.com and we'll arrange it all.

<comment><USER2> Dropped you a line. I'll come and do a talk entitled: "That'll never work!" about some crazy ideas that I've had in the past (The Geek Atlas, the Alan Turing Apology and the Analytical Engine project) and lessons from having crazy ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is also Flagon's Den this evening if anyone else fancies going: <http://london.flagonsden.com/>

<comment><USER4> RSVP's are currently closed? Is it still ok to just show up?

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please signup for the waiting list? We will have a few people dropping out and you'll be able on the guest list in no time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ahhh, I really wish I could afford to go down there, I just moved in to a new flat and can't afford the transport.

If anyone from the north west is planning on driving, let me know and I will happily chip in for petrol (and I'll throw in 10 hours of free PHP work on a project of your choosing!)

It's a shame this isn't after the 24th when I get paid. I hope all of the attendees enjoy themselves.

<comment><USER6> There's normally one every month or so (it depends a bit on when Dmitri and the other organisers have enough of their time they generously donate), so if you can't make this one you can just look forward to another in the future.

<comment><USER5> Oh, fabulous! That's great news, thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it necessary to register or could I just show up? Not sure if I'll still be in London is all!

<comment><USER8> Just show up, they certainly don't check that you have registered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Upvoting this just so more people have a chance to see it. Although judging from when I was there, I'm not sure if you guys really need even more members!

</comment><comment><USER10> Excited to be attending for the first time - I'm on @shhmooze - download the app and say hi!

<comment><USER11> I am on WP7... "Right now, Shhmooze is only available for iPhone. We're working to get Shhmooze on as many platforms as possible. In the meantime, get onto email@example.com and tell us what you use."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hacker News is a great meetup and the original London tech meetup for real hackers and startup folks. Highly recommended for newcomers. Other good meetups to checkout are Silicon Drinkabout and Digital Sizzle.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really need to start being more sociable inside tech circles like this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Don't forget London Open Coffee - <http://www.meetup.com/londonocc/> if only for the mailing list :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> Why on Thursday? I know a lot of you guys are working on your own things or freelance but a lot of people have office hours and might need some time to move :(

<comment><USER16> Having organized several parties involving mostly programmers before, i can say that yes, doing it on weekday makes event way more fun, because it puts a strong positive filter on those attending.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have registered, but not sure what the agenda is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just got it sorted today and will prob announce on Monday. It will be good, promise.

<comment><USER17> No worries! :) Looking fwd to the meetup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm flying to SF the next day for Startup School.. could be all HN'd out by the end of the weekend..anyone else going?

</comment><comment><USER19> Won't be able to make this, but thanks for announcing angel hack - just bought my tickets!

</comment><comment><USER20> Drat, I leave on the 18th. If anybody wants to meet before then or organize a mini-soiree, drop me a line. I promise to be mildly, and only mildly, entertaining.

Alternately, you can try to stalk me at the regent street apple store. I'll be the American sitting in the theater not paying attention to the presenter.

</comment><comment><USER21> Could anybody tell me, is it OK if I just come and listen as a novice?

<comment><USER15> I really do not see why it wouldn't be OK. You can go and meet people. It's not that you are forced to do anything :)

<comment><USER21> haha, I asked like that since I am new to this country still a student in Southampton. I have no idea what a meetup is like here.

<comment><USER15> Generally it's very nice, you go, meet a lot of people, share experience, present yourself, and listen to some talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> never been to this meetup, but I am going to google's campuslondon on 16th, how many people come at your meetup?

<comment><USER22> We average about 400 people per event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Aww it says it's full. Maybe nest time!

</comment><comment><USER24> Looking forward to attending very much!

</comment><comment><USER25> I didn't know this existed. excellent!</comment>


From Linear Models to Machine Learning (draft) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/draftregclass.pdf <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing. I also recommend "An Introduction to Statistical Learning - with Applications in R": [http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/](http://www- bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/)

<comment><USER3> A direct link to the PDF for ISL is here:

[https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/ISLR_pri...](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/ISLR_print6.pdf)

The grownup version of that, ESL, is also available free:

[https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/ESLII_pr...](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/ESLII_print10.pdf)

And for people who are genuinely curious about how this segues into graphical models, NNs, and the autoencoder (maybe the most interesting part of modern NNs), there's

[https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/StatLearnSparsity_files/SLS...](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/StatLearnSparsity_files/SLS_corrected_1.4.16.pdf)

The more curious or research oriented may appreciate

[https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/hastie_glmnet.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/hastie_glmnet.pdf)

I doubt Gareth or Daniela (the primary authors of ISL) would mind my pointing you towards Hastie's archives since both of them were advised by Trevor Hastie during their PhDs.

Matloff is a great guy. The chapters on shrinkage and dimension reduction aren't yet written in his book, and since these are important topics, you should consider reading the others. These things are mostly of interest for people who want to draw inference about underlying processes that may be generating observed outcomes. If all you care about is prediction, fit a Random Forest or xgboost GBM or a DNN and be done with it. But if you're actually curious about how complex descriptions of rare events can be thoughtfully analyzed, this is the standard progression.

Matloff's book is a great introduction. I particularly like the example on page 204. /ducks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone come across something similar using Python?

<comment><USER5> Here you go: [https://github.com/JWarmenhoven/ISLR- python](https://github.com/JWarmenhoven/ISLR-python)

R is a popular language for doing any form of stats/ learning theory work for research/ academia. Productionwise not as popular.

<comment><USER6> It's pretty popular.

<comment><USER7> I've put substantial amounts of R code into production - it's a nightmare. Both for development and operationally. I think 2-3 years ago R was still a superior language for ML/data science dev work. But Python's library support has really caught up is now mature. The policy I put in place on my current team is to minimize R in production, with Python and Scala preferred. R in some cases still has the best machine learning libraries, which is really the only reason I've found to use it in the production stack. Even then, I prefer to just keep it at a few lines of R code (load the data, build the model, handle errors, export the model).

For analyzing data I love R and almost always prefer it to Python.

<comment><USER8> > R in some cases still has the best machine learning librari

Would you mind naming some specific machine learning techniques that are still better in R? I've been studying machine learning and linear algebra the past few months, and I'd love to have a try at implementing one myself in Python, as a learning exercise.

<comment><USER9> Glmnet and Cox proportional hazards regression (survival analysis) are two recent examples I came across missing Python implementations.

<comment><USER8> Did you look in statsmodels? I appreciate the suggestions, and for a moment I was hopeful about the need for survival analysis models, but it looks like both that and GLM are well-covered in the latest version of statsmodels (don't be misled by the old sourceforge site, there's been a huge flurry of recent activity in statsmodels, hundreds of new PRs merged, look at Github and the docs site linked from that repo: [http://www.statsmodels.org/stable/](http://www.statsmodels.org/stable/)).

There's even a Jupyter notebook comparing the R, Stata (that takes me back, used Stata in survival analysis class 10 years ago), and Python versions of proportional hazards regression: [http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/urls/umich.box.com/shared/static...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/urls/umich.box.com/shared/static/epie6pcdk1rgb10zcd5v.ipynb)

<comment><USER7> Glmnet has quite a bit of functionality that is lacking in the Python elastic net implementations. The most notable is the regularization parameter sequence grid search (alpha in statsmodel, lambda in glmnet) which works remarkably well and can be orders of magnitude faster than a traditional grid search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Use of non-monospaced fonts for code fragments in LaTeX composed books must stop.</comment>


Show HN: UrlDiff – Simple visual regression testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.productchart.com/blog/2015-07-19-urldiff

<comment><AUTHOR> In the blog post, I show how to easily code your own visual regression tester. If you want my version with some more bells and whistles, let me know and I will put it up on GitHub.

<comment><USER2> Yes please :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Outfox. Beautiful drag and drop email - <AUTHOR> https://outfoxmail.com/

<comment><USER2> The screenshots and website are polished and look really interesting, however without a "free" trial upon registration a working demo is lacking. Am I missing it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Every plan comes with a 50 message free trial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks a lot like the Sparrow Mac OSX client turned into a web interface. While it looks good, do we really need another webmail service ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I think it's a lot more than that, picture drag and drop blog creation meets email. Because it sits on top of the normal email protocol, what it can deliver is significantly less restricted.</comment></comment>


Data trumps everything - <AUTHOR> http://timpark.io/data-trumps-everything/

<comment><USER2> Not everything - "data" does not trump philosophy. That we ought to go by the facts (i.e. data) and that we are capable of discovering the facts are examples of philosophical ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> You got me there! The larger trend I'm trying to point out though is the steady move away from intuition based companies and into companies nearly completely driven by data.

The shift that we are seeing in lean startups reflects this - it is not a guru based process but a data driven one to start a company. Obviously, execution counts as well, but given two otherwise equal companies: One with a guru based approach (ala Steve Jobs) and one with a data driven process, I believe the inflection point has been reached where the data driven company wins consistently.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't that the approach of some Cybernetic idealistits in the 50s?

That the world would be such a better place, if we just could ban intuition and let everything get run by machines?

Even if that would be hypothetically be possible, I would neither want to work nor life in a world like that. Predictability kills any excitement.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that a tad black and white?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a pretty big fan of data...but this is too extremist. There are plenty of things for which data does nothing and more data does more of nothing. Data only improves your decisions if the past can be helpful in predicting the future, and it only improves your knowledge to the extent that truth is immutable and the data is completely unbiased. And this is all before we get into practical problems where data is messy, unstructured, inaccurate, and still requires intelligent brains to interpret and understand in all of its dimensionality.

Sometimes you are just better of with a solid theoretical abstraction, or a good intuition. If you are smart, you will understand that they make great priors that can get better with data. If you take the dogmatic route and only trust data, you will constantly feel like someone else had a head start on you.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're looking for more examples and information about using simple algorithms with lots of data, I recommend Peter Norvig's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data": <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs>

</comment><comment><USER7> > "But the vast majority of these are changes that frankly they don't > completely understand"

Sounds like over-fit to me. I much prefer interpretable and plausible models to magically accurate predictions.

</comment><comment><USER8> Statistics is the new plastics.

<comment><USER9> Exactly - if I could make any change to my engineering education, it would be to have taken even more statistics.

<comment><USER10> Really? Can you name of some examples of where you've needed it in your work? (honest question)

I am a programmer who works with a bunch of statisticians, doing "big data" stuff. What I observed is that most of them don't really spend very much time doing statistics. They spend all their time finding, collecting and massaging data. That generally involves a lot of programming. Once you get the data, the conclusions are fairly obvious without any statistics. Just make some plots and there are glaring orders of magnitude deficiencies.

I also wanted to learn more statistics... but basically with software, you are overflowing with data. The challenge in science usually is to gather data. In software the challenge is the oppoosite -- you have so much data and you need to make sense of it. To be concrete I'm talking about stuff like logs from web servers and various other systems.

So I learned a lot about sampling algorithms to cut down data, as well as various streaming algorithms. But I haven't actually learned that much about statistics. So I wonder if I am missing something.

<comment><USER11> It sounds like the sampling and streaming algorithms you know are statistical algorithms. Have you got any good references for streaming algorithms?

<comment><USER10> They're not really statistical algorithms -- you certainly wouldn't learn them in a statistics class.

I actually looked online for some references on streaming algorithms ... but somewhat surprisingly, I couldn't find anything really. I realized a lot of this knowledge has been hard-earned, I guess that is good :) But there really should be a reference.

Definitely look up "reservoir sampling", which gives you a fixed size sample of an infinite length stream. This algorithm has come up over and over for me, and I've implemented it in multiple contexts. There is a way to do it in MapReduce which is very useful.

You know probably the most condensed version I can think of is quite hidden: see the open source Sawzall code:

[http://code.google.com/p/szl/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fsr...](http://code.google.com/p/szl/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fsrc%2Femitters)

All those functions aggregate some property of a stream. Someone (maybe me if I finish the 30 projects I've started...) really should write up some real documentation about all those algorithms, because they're not only fun, but useful.

A lot of them are (necessarily) approximations. You don't learn that many approximate algorithms in a traditional CS class. None of this will be in any stats class for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Example of data, August 2007:

Oh no, there's no risk to these mortgage backed securities at all! They're priced to be AAA by everyone on Wall Street!

September 2007:

Oh shit...</comment>


Fat, Lipoproteins, Cholestrol - very well explained - <AUTHOR> http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Especially the essays on Fat and Cholestrol:

<http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm.htm#fat2>

<http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm.htm#lipoprotein>

</comment><comment><USER2> Not sure how this is related to hacking ...

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are hacking your exercise routine, dieting/eating patterns, health...etc. Understand the basics and you will go further than if you didn't. Did you check out some of the essays ? Extremely relevant to the today's top killers (heart attack, cancer, stroke, obesity, diabetes...etc).</comment></comment>


Furstenberg and Margulis awarded 2020 Abel Prize - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00799-7 <comment><USER2> One of his early results is a topological proof of the infinitude of primes[1]. I was amazed in my first year in uni when I saw it.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furstenberg%27s_proof_of_the...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furstenberg%27s_proof_of_the_infinitude_of_primes)

<comment><USER3> I first encountered that one in _Proofs from the Book_ , which, BTW, is a beautiful book in every sense of the word.</comment></comment>


Crux: Open-source document database with bi-temporal graph queries - <AUTHOR> https://opencrux.com/ <comment><USER2> Rather than just looking at the home page for Crux (which has a lot of impressive tech jargon), I recommend that you watch the related video, "Temporal Databases for Streaming Architectures", on YouTube which I found did a much better job of explaining things.

I read a quote the other day where somebody suggested that the Clojure ecosystem feels like it's filled with a bunch of tools from the year 3000, and I think that Crux is a good example of that. It looks very cool.

[0] [https://youtu.be/ykbYNBE-V3k](https://youtu.be/ykbYNBE-V3k)

<comment><USER3> And here's a talk from JUXT (company developing Crux) about it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Stja6YUB94](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Stja6YUB94)

<comment><USER4> The Strange Loop 2019 talk linked by the GP is more recent and contains more technical details, but yes the Clojure/north talk is a nice bit of history showing the unveiling :)

My personal favourite is the talk from ClojuTRE by the main architect behind Crux, which looks under the hood a lot more and discusses many of the key design trade-offs during initial implementation: [https://youtu.be/YjAVsvYGbuU](https://youtu.be/YjAVsvYGbuU)

<comment><USER3> Ah I haven't watched the ClojuTRE talk, thanks for the link. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I looked through the docs and these are the main points of "bi-temporal" and "unbundled":

> Record the true history of your business whilst also preserving an immutable > transaction record - this is the essence of bitemporality. Unlock the > ability to efficiently query through time, as a developer and as an > application user. Crux enables you to create retroactive corrections, > simplify historical data migrations and build an integrated view of out-of- > order event data.

> Apache Kafka for the primary storage of transactions and documents as semi- > immutable logs.

> RocksDB or LMDB to host indexes for rich query support.

<comment><USER5> Sounds good except for "is a document db".

<comment><AUTHOR> What's wrong with document DBs?

<comment><USER2> Document DBs are ok if you only ever want to use the data in the same way that you stored it. There are definitely use cases where that makes sense, but you lose a lot of query power when compared to a relational database, which makes it less adaptable to changing requirements.

That being said, I believe (it's been a while since I looked at Crux), it actually maintains a separate set of Entity-Value-Attribute indices generated from the contents of the immutable series of documents stored in Kafka/RocksDB.

This should give you similar level of query power when compared to something like Datomic.

Disclaimer, I haven't had any actual hands-on experience with either Crux or Datomic, so I could be wrong.

<comment><USER4> That's a pretty accurate summary. Documents are very straightforward to reason about at a transactional level, particularly when handling unpredictable changes to data models.

Once documents are ingested into the EAV-like indexes you can query everything much the same as a typical graph database, because all the ID references within the documents translate into edges within a schemaless graph of entities.

Crux's native query language is a flavour of Datalog but we also have a SQL layer in the works using Apache Calcite, for a more traditional relational feel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi everyone, thanks for the interest!

I help steer the roadmap for Crux, which is very openly visible on GitHub, and we have a 1.9 release coming up in the next couple of weeks which will be the most significant milestone since we launched last year.

Shortly after 1.9 we will be adding SQL query support, which uses Apache Calcite to compile SQL into Datalog on-the-fly, and end-to-end JSON APIs. Both of these together should really broaden the appeal of Crux far beyond Clojure and the Java/JVM communities. Stay tuned!

I would be very happy to answer any questions and hear feedback, as ever.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great to see the advances made in Crux :-)

I'm working on a versioned database system[1] in my spare time which offers similar features and benefits. The core is Java based, whereas the Server is written in Kotlin using Vert.x. A Python client as well as currently a TypeScript based client for a non-blocking, asynchronous HTTP-Server exists.

The data store can easily be embedded into other Java/Kotlin based projects without having to use the Server indirection.

Lately I changed a lot of stuff regarding the set-oriented query engine which uses an XQuery derivate to process both XML and JSON as well as structured data. For now I've integrated rule based index rewriting stuff to answer path queries and path queries with one predicate through the index, filtering false positives if necessary. Next, I'll add a twig based operator and AST rewrite rules to answer multiple path queries with a single scan over smaller subtrees.

Furthermore, I want to use the new Java Foreign Memory API to memory map the storage file and change the tuple-at-a time iterator model to fetch batches of tuples at once for better SIMD support through the JVM.

I've also thought about replacing the Kafka backend with SirixDB itself, as SirixDB doesn't need a WAL for consistency... so SirixDB can hopefully horizontally scale at some point in the future.

Some of the futures so far:

        - storage engine written from scratch
        - completely isolated read-only transactions and one read/write transaction concurrently with a single lock to guard the writer. Readers will never be blocked by the single read/write transaction and execute without any latches/locks.
        - variable sized pages
        - lightweight buffer management with a "kind of" pointer swizzling
        - dropping the need for a write ahead log due to atomic switching of an UberPage
        - rolling merkle hash tree of all nodes built during updates optionally
        - ID-based diff-algorithm to determine differences between revisions taking the (secure) hashes optionally into account
        - serialization of edit operations for changed subtree roots to make comparisons between consecutive revisions or subtrees thereof incredibly fast (no-diff computation needed at all)
        - non-blocking REST-API, which also takes the hashes into account to throw an error if a subtree has been modified in the meantime concurrently during updates
        - versioning through a huge persistent and durable, variable sized page tree using copy-on-write
        - storing delta page-fragments using a patented sliding snapshot algorithm
        - using a special trie, which is especially good for storing records sith numerical dense, monotonically increasing 64 Bit integer IDs. We make heavy use of bit shifting to calculate the path to fetch a record
        - time or modification counter based auto commit
        - versioned, user-defined secondary index structures
        - a versioned path summary
        - indexing every revision, such that a timestamp is only stored once in a RevisionRootPage. The resources stored in SirixDB are based on a huge, persistent (functional) and durable tree
        - sophisticated time travel queries

As I'm spending a lot of my spare time on the project and would love to spend even more time, give it a try :-) Any help is more than welcome.

Kind regards Johannes

[1] [https://sirix.io](https://sirix.io) and [https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix](https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix)

</comment><comment><USER7> I might need to look at Crux again for my prospective it was missing pull syntax and schema on write

But reading from this thread that documents are converted into EAVT for every attribute? Sounds interesting

<comment><USER8> Without schema-on-write, the A in EAVT has no meaning. A tells us nothing about V. That makes it basically impossible for declarative systems like Hyperfiddle to understand your data structures and auto-generate UIs and such from the attributes. The fourth goal of Datomic is to "enable declarative data programming in applications" [1]. That's the design goal that makes Datomic so interesting to me, and Crux does not share it. Which is fine. Crux have given great reasons for doing things that way.

[https://www.infoq.com/articles/Datomic-Information- Model/](https://www.infoq.com/articles/Datomic-Information-Model/)

<comment><USER4> Within Crux's new transaction functions you are able to run queries against the entire database and (very soon) also against speculative transactions, to enforce all manner of constraints and control whether the transactions succeed/fail. Schema-on-write is therefore a matter of funnelling all `put` & `delete` operations through these functions. I suspect someone could even create a library of transaction functions to emulate the entire Datomic data model, if so desired.

However, I still believe schema-on-read is more desirable in general though, as you can simply extend a query to only care about the AV combinations which conform to some definition for that A. The Calcite SQL integration we've been building works like this. Conformance could also be processed asynchronously and documents be labelled as "conformed" as/when to reduce the burden during general queries.

(also, hey!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The time history feature is very smart!

<comment><USER4> Aha, well it's certainly been a learning curve for me!

I found the public MIT lectures on "retroactive data structures" (by Erik Demaine) very helpful to clarify the mental model and properties of temporal databases. Point-in-time bitemporal queries are fairly simple compared to the kinds of things some organisations use data warehouses for (e.g. temporal range queries across N dimensions), but surprisingly few teams think about representing time so clearly within their transactional OLTP/HTAP systems, so even point-in-time queries seem more novel than they really should.

Everything is moving in the right direction though as immutable data becomes the default.

<comment><USER10> Ty for the link. Do you have more material that helped you with your work on crux? And do you mind sharing?

<comment><USER4> The best place to start for context would be Håkan's ClojuTRE talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjAVsvYGbuU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjAVsvYGbuU)

And here are the slides for that talk, which include a few references: [https://juxt.pro/hakan-raberg-the-design-and- implementation-...](https://juxt.pro/hakan-raberg-the-design-and- implementation-of-a-bitemporal-dbms.pdf)

Feel free to reach out to the team, or find us on Zulip/Slack, if you want to hear more or just chat :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android developers, stop making casual games - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mixrank.com/android-developers-stop-making-casual-games/

<comment><USER2> As far as I know "casual games" are games that are very easy and very rewarding, thus great for pretty much everyone that just wants to pass some time (a huge audience obviously). This article somehow manages to use "casual games" as separate category besides, say, "Cards & Casino". What's the difference? Almost all games I've tried from the Play Store are casual games, even all racing and almost all arcade games, and I gave up on mobile gaming because of that.

<comment><USER3> I think they're just referring to the subcategory in the Play Store, but yeah, almost any mobile game could be labeled as Casual.

<comment><USER4> Well, almost: Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy IV, Chaos Rings, Chaos Rings II, Chaos Rings Ω, Ingress, Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice Cities wouldn't be 'casual'.

Then there's also: SMS, N, SG, SD, NES, SNES, N64, GB, GBA, DS, PSX, GC, Wii and PSV emulators that contain 'non casual' games.

<comment><USER5> Many of those games lose a great deal of interactivity and control when ported to a touch only interface though. Turn based games like Final Fantasy fair well though on touch interface, but real time games like GTA not as much. I wouldn't call games like GTA III casual on mobile, but I don't think they quite appeal to the exact same audience they did on consoles or PC.

<comment><USER6> GTA III and Vice City are actually surprisingly good on mobile. I bought GTA III on a whim when I got my Nexus 7 last year with the Play store credit that came with it, and I actually loved it. It took me probably 20 minutes to get a feel for the controls and ended up playing the game all the way through after a while (halfway through Vice City now). Rockstar really nailed the controls for the touch interface, at least on a tablet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not really about being in the charts, or even downloads, unless developers can make money from them. Unfortunately, there is more piracy on Android; ads can only bring in so much and break the experience of a game. Also, given the wide range in device performance, specs, and software, you really have to wonder if it's worth the time and money investment.

</comment><comment><USER8> If this wasn't about mobile you would have almost definitely included more categories, which is the immediate problem with mobile.

the current game atmosphere really makes me sick. I don't know what it is about a casual game on a freemium model that is built to annoy you into reaching into your wallet that is so appealing to everyone.

You used to (and still do off mobile) buy a game in full and enjoy its lifetime value. I think mobile could be a great spot for more managerial type games, I used to love being the GM in many games

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, but they are so much easier/cheaper to write and produce. 2D is par for the course for casual. Action and adventure much less so.

<comment><USER10> Since when? Action/adventure hasn't left the 2D realm at all.</comment></comment>


The fall of RNN / LSTM - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/the-fall-of-rnn-lstm-2d1594c74ce0 <comment><USER2> I remember that article - now 8 months later, do the conclusions still hold?</comment>


iPadOS impressions: flexible and powerful, but is it intuitive? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18654314/apple-ipad-os-ipados-wwdc-first-look-windows-usb-user-interface-new-features <comment><USER2> I love my iPad, but I'm getting a bit concerned there's just no viable alternative anymore, and that's worrying long term. I can't really complain that Apple are sitting on the platform and not innovating due to the lack of competition – they're pushing ahead aggressively with advanced features. Presumably the devices are profitable enough to justify the investment, and they see their technology advantage as a moat against competition that they need to make as wide as possible.

Still, it's disheartening to see the lack of other options. It might be nice to have a cheap tablet running an open OS I can hack on as well as my beloved 10.5", but there's very little I could do on a cheap tablet that I can't do on an iPad anyway so there seems to be little point.

<comment><USER3> Well, I see iPad always a 2nd Choice comparing it to a Surface. With Surface you have a real computer plus the simplified version with some apps. If you're crazy enough, you can install docker or virtual machines on a Surface, or have a full working Office suite for your needs. When I see people using their iPads, they are always with the mail client opened, that's it. If you haven't big pretending needs (e.g. surfing and email), iPad is a good choice. If you need something more (editing documents, do some live demonstration, etc.), Surface is the right one

<comment><USER2> Fair enough, but I've got no real use for Docker. Almost all of my hobby programming is done in Pythonista these days. Google Docs also works fine in iOS, PureFlow is great for diagraming. It's reached the stage now where I'll be sitting at my desktop browsing or playing a game, and I'll decide I want to do something productive with those apps on the iPad and go to the couch to do it.

I still work from a desktop and that's not going to change, but I haven't personally owned a laptop in more than 5 years. At home I have a desktop and an iPad, and the latter fulfils all my mobile computing needs, and most of my productive or creative needs.</comment></comment></comment>


Graphical User Interface Gallery - <AUTHOR> http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html <comment><USER2> It's my opinion that the Windows Control panel (pictured here: [http://toastytech.com/guis/win10control.png](http://toastytech.com/guis/win10control.png)) is the single worst designed user interface of all time.

Why? It is the only - and I mean only - list of items on a screen organized horizontally in any OS I can think of. Any time you resize the window, every single item in the list is now reorganized into different rows and columns.

Ever wonder why you can never seem to find what you want in the Control Panel? It's not just because Microsoft loves to subtly change the names of core settings every year or so, but because they're constantly moving and shifting around.

Seriously, give me an example of a horizontally organized list like this in any OS - past, present, desktop, mobile... I can't think of any. Nothing else is so dumb. There must be special code in this particular window to keep it so moronic, that Microsoft continues to maintain, year after year. Amazing.

/rant

<comment><USER3> Not sure if this is what you meant, but Ubuntu mimics this in Unity... in fact I think most Linux DEs now come with something similar...

[http://imgur.com/80Pl4tx](http://imgur.com/80Pl4tx)

<comment><USER4> That's much more like a copy of the Mac's System Preferences, really.

<comment><USER5> But crucially the mac pane can't be resized or reorganized.

In practice, I use search for the configuration option every single time on mac. It's great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know when it happened but at some point I just fell completely out of love with the whole concept of a graphical interface. I think around Windows 2000 (Server) I remember thinking: "this is quite nice", but since then nothing.

I ought to at least feel some nostalgia around all these interfaces, but actually I don't. I just feel like, why on earth did I think Windows 95 was a good thing? Why didn't I see what a huge step backwards it was - at least for a user like me. The beginning of moving away from understanding the machine I was using.

I know too, the Terminal+Browser existence I have now is far from perfect, but I just feel liberated to know I don't need to spend most of my computing time navigating visually - it just doesn't suit me at all. I think the only interface now I feel as negatively about as the Windows-style interface is maybe the filesystem. Not for any rational reason I can explain - I feel like there's something wrong with our whole way of thinking about that. But I'm like a rat in a maze and can't imagine what outside of the maze might look like.

<comment><USER7> Looking back at Mandrake 9.0 with KDE 3.0.3 brings back some warm memories for me [http://toastytech.com/guis/mkde.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/mkde.html)

<comment><USER8> Loved Mandrake Linux :-)

It wasn't perfect but it was amazing I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> saw-lau I particularly enjoyed the thoughtful and reasoned critique of Windows 10: [http://toastytech.com/guis/win10.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/win10.html).

<comment><USER9> I am not entirely sure how much of your comment is sarcasm. Most of the author's complaints about Windows 10 are on point. Comparing Windows 7 and Windows 10 leads me to similar conclusions: the UI is more cluttered, there's unnecessary (and unwanted) marketing all over the place, the level of built-in privacy intrusion is worrying and the attempts to lock you into Microsoft's online services are blatant.

<comment><USER10> And let's not forget the ridiculous need to install third-party software just to be able to tell which window has focus by the color of its title bar.

EDIT: I guess they fixed that. I didn't follow up after I installed some third-party software a while back. I guess it wasn't third-party either, but messing with the themes [0]. I've been chugging along in blissful ignorance ever since. My bad.

[0][https://www.howtogeek.com/222831/how-to-get-colored- window-t...](https://www.howtogeek.com/222831/how-to-get-colored-window-title- bars-on-windows-10-instead-of-white/)

<comment><USER11> > And let's not forget the ridiculous need to install third-party software > just to be able to tell which window has focus by the color of its title > bar.

They added back the "active window titlebar color" feature in the 2nd Windows 10 update in late 2015: [https://www.howtogeek.com/232176/whats-new-in- windows-10s-fi...](https://www.howtogeek.com/232176/whats-new-in- windows-10s-first-big-update-the-windows-10-fall-update/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pour one out for BeOS. Unix-based, lightning-fast GUI, process isolation, and no user isolation on a single-user machine. They got quite a few things right 20 years ago.

<comment><USER13> BeOS doesn't have anything to do with UNIX.

No user isolation on a single-user machine, via type safe languages, was already done in Xerox PARC workstation written in Mesa/Cedar.

Actually had Apple adopted BeOS and succeeded in doing that, there wouldn't be any major UNIX desktop to talk about.

<comment><USER14> Presuming everything else went the same way elsewhere in the ecosystem, Unix greybeards might have become very excited about Android or ChromeOS and the "developer hype" might have pushed Google into making one or the other a workstation OS.

(Or we could call W10 a Unix desktop. Is that allowed?)

<comment><USER13> There is a big difference between being a UNIX and just supporting POSIX syscalls, regarding OS architecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I quite miss RISC OS sometimes... Macs seemed great when I switched from whatever vague succession of Linux distributions I was using in around 2004, but for quite some years now Macs have annoyed me in a way that I don't recall RISC OS ever did. Probably just rose-tinted glasses!

<comment><USER15> RISC OS solved the "file open/close dialogues are a different view on the same objects" problem. In RISC OS, a save dialog is just an icon in a box. You pick up the icon and drag it into a folder window to save. Done.

You could even do simple OLE by dragging the icon into another app, instead of a folder.

I so wish other OSes would copy that model.

<comment><USER14> Heck, Windows 3.1 had the start of something even more interesting: there was no real distinction between an icon and an _iconified_ (minimized) window.

If we had carried through with that metaphor, and kept a 1:1 document:window relationship, we could have evolved a modern OS where a generic WIMP "document" icon was just the representation of a portable, disk-hibernated GUI process holding the memory-state of that document, rather than having a 1:1 mapping to a POSIX-filesystem file containing a custom-serialized representation of said state. (Sure, we could also have those, but maybe only "for interchange." Like how computers have directories/folders locally, but use archive files for interchange.)

Most of the time, when you were done with something, you wouldn't close it; you'd iconify it. Either it'd return to where you previously un-iconified it from; or it'd land on your Desktop; or it'd get stuck to your cursor as if you were dragging, and you'd have to drop it somewhere. It'd be _sleeping_ at first (so, basically a minimized window); and then hibernated later. It'd just be a difference in restore-time: events, like chat-notifications from a chat- client window, would still appear even under hibernation (i.e. background services would still run for hibernated documents, unless you right-clicked and "froze" or "muted" the document or something.)

Imagine if bookmarks were just... iconified browser windows. Or if git repos were iconified IDE/text-editor sessions (which would then contain further icons for things like shell sessions spawned inside the repo.) Or—remember old MacOS?—"folders" would literally _be_ iconified file-manager windows, separate from the underlying file-system concept of a directory (which might not be exposed in the GUI at all.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These days I was looking for the Burroughs ICON. I wonder if any Canadian retrocomputist is around.

Another I've searched over and over in vain is a GUI I used on graphical terminals connected to a SINIX server. It was called Collage and looked a bit Mac-like.

<comment><USER17> That's an interesting one I've never heard of. I'd be curious to see some photos as well.

<comment><USER16> ICON is easy: [http://www.old- computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=971](http://www.old- computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=971). Later there was a more compact version, [http://www.poprewind.com/it-came-from-canada-unisys-icon- com...](http://www.poprewind.com/it-came-from-canada-unisys-icon-computer/).

The Collage GUI, I have no idea. I could never find anything about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He has some good ones, my favorites though are the ones that run in <64k of memory. In particular the Apple ][ desktop [http://toastytech.com/guis/a2desk.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/a2desk.html), which he comments on finding on a IIGS, but in reality it would run on the IIe and IIc as well. Although, it qualifies more as a "launcher" than a GUI/desktop because outside of the apps it comes with I don't think anyone every wrote anything for it. Meaning all its apps were just normal 8bit prodos applications that took over the whole machine. Given the timeframe though, the mac didn't have the multifinder until system 6 a couple years later.

(whats pretty scary is that I've run (or at least booted) nearly all of them, all the apple and x86/PC ones for sure, plus quite a number of the others). GEOS was pretty cool too.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wish there were more complete collections of industry specific software GUIs. For example, the Bloomberg Terminal is a very specific and near complete sub-UI: [https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/economics/images/bloomberg...](https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/economics/images/bloomberg/CGB0347a_edited-1.jpg/view).

</comment><comment><USER20> cool! I loved this!

</comment><comment><USER21> I really enjoyed his fantastic GUI design advice here ([http://toastytech.com/guis/uirant.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/uirant.html))</comment>


Terminally ill teen won historic ruling to preserve body - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38012267 <comment><USER2> Here's a link to the judge's decision: [http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2016/2859.html](http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2016/2859.html)

This case about cryogenic preservation of a 14 year old has some really sad parts in the decision.

The father, dying of cancer, has experienced the death of his child, was unable to see her body after she died, and has suffered the breakdown of his marriage.

> Despite this, during the course of the first hearing, the father, who was > then unrepresented, changed his position, saying: "I respect the decisions > she is making. This is the last and only thing she has asked from me. I > would like to have written confirmation that I will not have to pay the > costs as I have cancer and I live on benefits." However, by the second > hearing, the father was legally represented and his position had changed > again. He said that he was prepared to agree to what JS wanted on four > conditions: that he and other members of his family could view her body > after death; that the mother would not pursue any financial claims against > him; that the mother and her family would not make any contact with him and > his family; and that he would not be pursued for any contribution to the > costs of the cryonic process. The father's last statement at this hearing > was that he wants the court to know that he respects JS, and that he will > respect the court's decision.

</comment><comment><USER2> This bit of the judge's decision should give real concern to people wanting to be crygenically preserved:

> (2) The voluntary organisation is said to have been under-equipped and > disorganised, resulting in pressure being placed on the hospital to allow > procedures that had not been agreed. Although the preparation of JS's body > for cryogenic preservation was completed, the way in which the process was > handled caused real concern to the medical and mortuary staff.</comment>