Java 11 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/09/java11-released <comment><USER3> Noteworthy, the oracle JDK license has apparently changed so you can't legally use their distribution for much of anything except for the development of inhouse java applications? So I guess you can't even use it just for its JRE to run, say, eclipse for PHP development, or to host a servlet web server? Anyways looks like the OpenJDK is now on feature parity and is GPL licensed. [https://blog.joda.org/2018/08/java-is-still-available-at- zer...](https://blog.joda.org/2018/08/java-is-still-available-at-zero- cost.html)

<comment><USER4> With Java 11, there are supposedly no differences between Oracle and OpenJDK so time to go OpenJDK

<comment><USER5> One huge difference for enterprise users is release cadence.

OpenJDK will be updated much more rarely, on a quarterly cadence only, __including for security patches __. So if you go the OpenJDK route, be ready to do some JDK-level patching yourself if you want to mitigate any zero-days that surface.

Fixes will also only be applied to the latest versions, so you'll need to be prepared to live on the bleeding edge and accept all the risks that come with that.

<comment><USER6> The slower release cadence of openjdk makes it a good fit for enterprise users as they tend to also have a slower release cadence. Is anyone even using Java 9 or later?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't follow Java too closely these days as I haven't worked in it in years. Pretty wild that Applets are now removed. I still remember the wonder of being able to build a compiled application that could run from command line or in the browser. RIP Applets, long live Java :)

<comment><USER8> With the removal of applets I feel like the last of the Java that helped build is gone. The process of working on the development of, and then watching the weaponizing of Java is one of the more memorable chapters in my career.

For those who weren't there to remember, the concept of Applets, or applications that ran in a web browser and didn't need an operating system to run, was apparently terrifying to Microsoft. Sun's senior management exploited that terror blunt the invasion of Windows desktops in Sun's enterprise accounts. So many complex technical issues resolved with the test "will it scare/attenuate Microsoft?" rather than "Is this what the language/system should be?"

[1] [https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/doc/people....](https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/doc/people.html)

<comment><USER9> I was working for Sun during those days. They used to have this vision that everything would be written in Java. They threw everything at that wall, and ran with the ones that stuck.

I've been in presentations showing all kinds of things being rewritten in Java just because apparently that was something that needed to be done. I particularly remembers seeing a NIS (YP) server and and NFS server in Java. When I asked why they did that, and particularly why they didn't go for NIS+ (which was many years old at the time) or event LDAP, they had no answer.

<comment><USER8> Java wasn't really good at being a server early on, it was very much 'client side.' It would have been an interesting exercise for me to implement NIS+ in it :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is Oracle's rationale for the new licensing terms ? It seems counterproductive to me as it will push developers to use OpenJDK ,which is pretty good on its own and "unlink" Oracle from Java in our minds. To be honest, I have climbed through hoops to install Oracle's JDK on my Ubuntu just out of habit. Now I wont do that because any application I develop on this JDK cant be put into production.

<comment><USER11> Big companies which need support and security patches after 6 months can get it from Oracle. Others can update to new OpenJDK after 6 months.

<comment><USER12> In other words: OpenJDK is like Fedora, and OracleJDK is like RHEL?

<comment><USER13> Yes that is pretty much it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote a user friendly version of the release notes. Maybe this is useful to someone:

[https://winterbe.com/posts/2018/09/24/java-11-tutorial/](https://winterbe.com/posts/2018/09/24/java-11-tutorial/)

<comment><USER15> wow, after all these years, the Java syntax for

print(fetch("[https://winterbe.com")](https://winterbe.com"\)))

is still this behemoth:

var request = HttpRequest.newBuilder() .uri(URI.create("[https://winterbe.com")](https://winterbe.com"\))) .GET() .build(); var client = HttpClient.newHttpClient(); HttpResponse<String> response = client.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString()); System.out.println(response.body()); !?

One can argue about taste, but how can _anyone_ defend such uuuuuuuuurgh?

<comment><USER16> This is really a really weird overdesigned API. Maybe I don't understand the purpose of it but it seems like an excessive use of design patterns.

Why would you need a Builder method on a static object to create a request object? Oh well, let me rephrase that: First you instantiate a Builder object that you need to call the create method on to get a request. Makes no sense to me.

What not make HttpRequest a concrete class and just instantiate it? If there's any good reason for that design please enlighten me.

<comment><USER17> Many use cases want to make a whole lot of pretty similar (URI, creds, method) requests that vary only in a single way ( e.g. a POST parameter) or don't vary at all (e.g. polling).

A builder is a convenient way to wrap up those common settings so that they can be handed to other parts of the code that don't care about them/want to override specific parts and leave the rest in common.

Now, there are other ways to do that (instantiating a concrete class with common settings and mutable fields for customizations in a function, and then passing references to that function to everything that wants the common- config-defaulted output object). The choice between that kind of strategy (or an instantiate-and-freeze-early and pass your mutators in, or a refactor-all- your-code-to-not-mutate strategy etc...) and a builder pattern is a subjective and debatable one. But the approach taken here is certainly defensible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just installed OpenJDK 11 on my macOS machine. Remarkably unfussy install process. Missed the times when installing will involve accepting license, multiple clicks on installer GUI and helpful offers for browser toolbars used to be present :-)

<comment><USER18> Feeling like a bit of a noob, but how did you install it?

I only found a targz download link, didn't understand the contents of it - <USER2> looks like the inside of a macOS application package. The installation instructions refer to it being for .dmg file, which it doesn't seem to be.

<comment><USER19> I use sdkman to manage my java versions on osx . It is similar to rvm or nvm. [https://sdkman.io](https://sdkman.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One setback with this release is that the javapackager tool, which made native installers that bundled the Java runtime, was removed (presumably because it depended on JavaFX) and there is no replacement for it. One is being proposed at [http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/343](http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/343) but I'm not sure when that is expected to be done.

<comment><USER21> If your application doesn't do bytecode generation or instrumentation at runtime then the graal native image compiler might do the job too or even better.

[https://www.graalvm.org/docs/examples/native-list- dir/](https://www.graalvm.org/docs/examples/native-list-dir/)

<comment><USER22> > If your application doesn't do bytecode generation or instrumentation at > runtime

I believe it also has trouble with reflection involving class names that aren't effectively constant at compile-time. So with that and the other limitations, there's a whole lot you can't do. Hopefully they can resolve that.

<comment><USER23> > reflection involving class names that aren't effectively constant at > compile-time

Can you give an example?

<comment><USER22> Sure, just about any project that has the concept of plugins. At runtime the code looks for plugin instances by searching for, e.g., META- INF/services/<interface_name> on the classpath. Inside that file (or files) you have implementation class names, which are collected and instantiated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you're wondering about the license changes and whether Java is still free or not, you should have a look at "Java Is Still Free"[1].

[1] [https://itnext.io/java-is-still- free-c02aef8c9e04](https://itnext.io/java-is-still-free-c02aef8c9e04).

</comment><comment><USER25> I think that a lot of people misunderstand Oracle. As a former Product Manager there, I can safely say that Oracle only cares about development tools to the extent that it furthers their business interests (based on Executive Meetings I attended). And since Microsoft provides a popular and full-featured development environment, Oracle is forced to provide an alternative or they might get shut out of all development projects by Microsoft (in fact, that is Microsoft strategy as learned by some of our "spies". Or did you think that Microsoft supports development tools because they want to be in that business?). In addition, based on meetings with executives from several Fortune 50 hardware and software vendors, it is clear that transferring as many costs as possible to open source groups saves money. And, as another benefit, any bugs or shortcomings can't be blamed on the corporation who sold them their hardware or software - again saving costs and preventing many lawsuits (which account for many, many millions paid quietly.) So be careful about projecting the "myth" of open source on to the companies involved with open source. The interests they claim are not their real interests. (And since some HR readers routinely ask me "what proof" and then work to dismiss anything I write - let me say that I have no proof. Insisting on proof for all data-points leads to poor judgment. It makes more sense to collect unproven data-points and assemble those along with known data to craft good judgment. Honestly I feel sorry for those whose judgment is blinded by their insistence on legal-level proof. They are mentally disabled.)

<comment><USER26> IMO, your comment would have carried more weight without those last two sentences. Those seem a bit unnecessarily insulting?

The rest of your comment is relatively consistent with some trends that I've seen in the development tools communities. I think it is also why it is so difficult to make money in that space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Could anyone benevolently compare/contrast the modern development of Java's ecosystem with that of .NET Core?

<comment><USER28> I'm more qualified to comment on .NET but the main difference here is that Core was basically starting over on .NET from zero to go cross-platform and then immediately scrambling to get everybody's favorite feature plugged back in. Java _seems_ to be trying to chip pieces off of the standard library by either modularizing or like this, just dropping it from the standard offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We're still using the 6 FML

<comment><USER30> Ouch. Java 7 and 8 introduced a bunch of very pleasant syntactical fixes that greatly improved my pleasure in coding Java. What's holding you back on 6?

<comment><USER31> Probably they are using an "enterprise" J2EE stack that hasn't been updated to the latest version.

<comment><USER29> Bingo! Ginormous amount of technical debt that nobody is dealing with and probably not even seeing ... Plus a culture of "if it works don't touch it" ... I am dying inside ...

<comment><USER6> 6 to 7 is an easier switch than 7 to 8, they changed the boolean value of at least one default runtime parameter in java 8 without telling anyone

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well, removing SOAP is a little too radical. Indeed nobody likes SOAP and it is mostly used by EE guys but there still probably are many non-enterprise public SOAP APIs. This makes me wonder if they are going to remove XML support in the next version :-) Also, JavaFX is amazing, I actually wish it would get more popular, it feels like the best GUI framework I've seen so far.

<comment><USER33> JavaFX getting removed from the JRE/JDK is probably the best thing for it, I think Gluon and other contributors will do a better job acting as stewards of it than Oracle.

<comment><USER13> I hope they eventually improve the 3D classes, specially shader support.

That and Android support as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does the new licensing mean someone at Atlassian will try running their apps on OpenJDK for once instead of keeping it blacklisted?

/methinks probably not. The money is in hosted licenses.

<comment><USER35> Atlassian is working on supporting OpenJDK across the board.

[https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/supported-p...](https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/supported- platforms-776640981.html)

[https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-16431](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-16431)

[https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-41589](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-41589)

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the links.

Wow, those issues are from 2009.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Pardon my ignorance but as an outsider(I know nothing about Java), why do GUI applications that use Java are _terrible_? Eclipse IDE comes to mind.

They're hugely clunky. Also, Java based applets that used to run on browsers were awful.

I'd love to know if this is something to do with Java itself or the way these apps are developed. I understand they're not using OS's native GUI APIs.

<comment><USER37> Eclipse actually uses SWT, the least terrible Java UI framework! But making a cross-platform UI framework is just fundamentally difficult, it seems, and is always a compromise.

With SWT, the upside is that you get native widgets that look and work like they're supposed to on the platform, but on the other hand, if the same widget can appear with different sizes, looks and behaviours it's difficult to customize it, align it nicely and ensure the whole design behaves coherently.

With Swing, the other terrible Java GUI library, you get the same look and feel everywhere, but that look and feel is wrong on every platform. As well as slow, ugly and (still!) full of bugs.

Here's a fun Swing bug I noticed yesterday in IntelliJ:

1) Put IntelliJ somewhere in the middle of the window stack, i.e. with some windows under it and some above it.

2) Switch to a different virtual desktop. (Tested in Xfce on Debian.)

3) Switch back to the desktop with IntelliJ on it.

You will find (or I did, at least) that IntelliJ has moved

a) to the bottom of the stack, if using Jetbrains' bundled JRE;

b) to the top of the stack, if using Debian's JRE.

Some Java developers like to claim that it's just everyone using it wrong, but Swing is stuffed with these focus-related bugs. I've seen them in every Swing application now and then, for decades. (It also likes to create windows at the wrong position only to move them to the right position, and draw things initially with slightly wrong layout and then redraw them with the right layout. You can observe this as well in IntelliJ when it starts up.)

<comment><USER13> Yes it is using it wrong, because while some issues are indeed Swing interop bugs with the host GUI, others are lack of skills by not reading canonical books like "Filthy Rich Clients", written by Chet Haase and Romain Guy, the guys that drove most of Android rendering stack.

Romain Guy's team recently released Filament, [https://github.com/google/filament](https://github.com/google/filament)

Back in the Sun days, Romain had a blog about writing nice looking Java UIs, which eventually lead to the "Filthy Rich Clients" book publication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So they went from 8 to 11 ?

<comment><USER39> Java 9 and 10 were released. Java has moved to a time-based release schedule where they release what is ready for each release rather than having things block releases forever. Every third release is a long-term-support release. It's similar to Ubuntu where they release every 6 months, but then there's an LTS release that many people will wait for.

<comment><USER30> So yeah, in essence Java went from 8 to 11 if you look at it as a sequence of major releases such as 5, 6, 7, 8, and now 11.

I think a lot of developers skipped/will skip Java 9 and 10 (Java 9 is already unsupported and effectively history), except for testing their builds and preparing for the Java 8 to 11 migration.

<comment><USER40> Java 9 was a major release. Project jigsaw (introducing modules) was a major change and blocker. Once they got that out of the way they changed the release cycle, which is why java 10 was released soon after java 9.

So they actually just went from 9 to 11, going by your logic.

<comment><USER41> It was a major release in terms of features and platform architecture, but it was not in terms of adoption. Project jigsaw at this moment is a blocker for upgrade from Java 8 - majority of developers will move from it only when it sees the ecosystem ready for that step. Now it's not - due to plenty of major libraries and tools that didn't even start the migration or still have "alpha" in their version numbers.

<comment><USER30> Also Java 9 and 10 aren't LTS-releases, which in turn causes the ecosystem to ignore them largely, because they'll be buried and forgotten by the time they're ready for Java 11.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


23andMe Anne Wojcicki Berates Stanford and Valley Med on Behalf of Sick Friend - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/05/dying-friend-of-anne-wojcicki-gets-help-from-stanford-after-the-23andme-founder-shamed-the-medical-center/ <comment><USER2> Um, you're a millionaire. Why don't you put up the money? _Someone_ is paying for it. This is literally an ultra-wealthy person complaining that someone else won't pay for her friend's million dollar medical treatment.

It's fine if you want to argue for single payer healthcare. But where do you get off berating a non-charitable institution about covering their costs? They have their longevity to think about. If they simply gave everyone infinite treatment for free they wouldn't exist anymore.

<comment><USER3> You are defending the position that we should let someone die because they don't have enough money to pay for medical treatment.

Are you really sure you want to go there?

Now, if you want to argue I would argue that why is this CEO letting a "friend" go without healthcare when CoveredCA has platinum plans at about $7000/year for an individual?

<comment><USER2> > You are defending the position that we should let someone die because they > don't have enough money to pay for medical treatment.

> Are you really sure you want to go there?

Yes, I absolutely am. Grown-ups in the adult world have to make choices. We have limited resources and time, and yes, sometimes that means that we can't give life saving treatments to every person that needs it.

<comment><USER4> This sounds extremely weird when you read it in Europe.

<comment><USER5> We in Europe have the same choices to face. For example,

 _" In June, Nice said the £48,000 per year price tag of the drug, which could benefit 450 women a year, could not be justified."_

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11785840/NICE- refuse...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11785840/NICE-refuses-to- fund-ovarian-cancer-drug.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The larger point of this article is about the need to advocate for your own medical care. It really hit me hard, due to my own and family experiences with hospitals and doctors who simply didn't care or recognize the effect of their everyday behaviors on the lives of others.

The example given in the article is Valley Med requiring 5-10 days to serve patient medical records. These 5-10 days can be the the difference between LIFE and DEATH when it comes to medical care. There exists an inefficiency, which can lead to wrongful death, and there is a clear path to remove the inefficiency. Why is nothing done and why does society accept it, despite paying ridiculous amounts for healthcare?

The fact is that doctors are perfectly adept at handling 95% of cases which they see often, but outside of that they seem to lack the drive to 'connect the dots.'

When I go to the doctor, I do my research before I step foot into the office and I tell them what I am thinking. Sometimes I am wrong and cede to the doctor's explanation, other times it results in different tests taken/treatment paths.

<comment><USER7> There's one problem with this.. for emergent care, the records can be faxed over immediately. At least PAMF does that. They can also get the doctor on the phone. Always remember your doctor's name. It's on the discharge sheet.

<comment><USER6> Requests for medical records should not take 5-10 business days period. When someone requests medical records it is for some purpose related to health. A hospital taking 5-10 business days to make medical records available can only hurt patients.

<comment><USER7> I agree. Nothing I said disagrees with that. His care was emergent. and I also agree that medical records should be ready the same day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps the problem is more that there exists expensive treatments. As long as they exist, people will be upset at not getting them. When they don't exist, people won't blame anyone for their death. Imagine if some miracle cancer cure is discovered but it genuinely costs a million dollars (not just due to patents). There'll be no option but to let uninsured poor people die. There might not be enough money in the country to actually save them all.

<comment><USER9> Considering that the USA spent $1.9 trillion on the Iraq war, something that was quite literally not needed by anyone, I wouldn't be so sure that money couldn't be found to provide lifesaving treatment and research technological advancements to bring its cost down in the long term.

<comment><USER10> In this scenario, that $2 trillion would prevent about a quarter of the deaths from cancer in one year, except that spending was over a decade, so assuming that we could spend at that same rate perpetually, replacing Iraq War spending with million dollar cancer cures would prevent about 2% of cancer deaths.

<comment><USER11> Do you have a source for that $2 trillion/ quarter of all deaths figure? I understand healthcare in the US costs far more than in the rest of the developed world, but those calculations seem quite wrong.

[http://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2016.34.15_suppl.661...](http://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2016.34.15_suppl.6618)

> In the EU in 2012 the estimated cancer incidence was 2.6 million cases. The > estimated cancer mortality was 1.3 million deaths, accounting for 26% of all > deaths. DHCC (direct health cost of cancer) in the whole EU increased from > €79 to €86 billion during 2005-2014 (in 2014 prices)

The population of the EU is over 500 million people. The annual taxation needed to afford this level of care ranges from 50-270 euros per person across the region.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's nice that she was able to help out, but think about how many people aren't in a situation where they can call up the CEO of 23andMe to help.

<comment><USER13> I think this situation shows how ludicrous our current situation is. You shouldn't need to know the CEO of a billion dollar company to get healthcare.

And good for her fiend, when your life is on the line no one shoood feel bad about using every option available to them.

<comment><USER14> You obviously don't need to know the CEO just "to get healthcare" \- her friend was already being treated. It only seems to be necessary as a means of getting access to expensive private treatments that were otherwise unaffordable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Such assertiveness came in handy when Wojcicki was visiting her grandmother in a Palm Springs care home several years ago and couldn't find a doctor in the building."

The nursing homes I'm familiar with have nurses and a doctor who comes in one day a week, and takes calls from staff. If anything significant comes up the resident is taken to the ER.

A care home with a doctor on staff full time (let alone 24 hours) would likely be significantly more expensive.

I suspect Wojcicki's grandmother couldn't afford that. And it's probably overkill.

<comment><USER7> It's standard of care to send a patient to the ER from the nursing home... We may not "know" this but it's also fine to call 911 and get an ambulance especially if the staff on hand is not cooperative. Some nursing homes have a clinic attached to them for daily and urgent care but even if you had a hospital next door they would still have to be wheeled or taken by ambulance. So this specific part of the article is overly sensational.

<comment><USER15> If the issue was really urgent enough for an ambulance, then "a doctor" probably wasn't what was needed. The doctor would just call for an ambulance - they probably wouldn't have much in the way of emergency treatment equipment on hand anyway.

If the issue wasn't urgent enough for an ambulance, and she just wanted to escalate the issue because she didn't trust the nurses or wasn't happy with the quality of service she felt she was getting, then it would be irresponsible to call 911. 911 is not for the use of impatient rich people.

She could have just called her grandmother's doctor.

<comment><USER7> You basically rehashed everything I just said without offering anything new or substantially different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Glad Anne Wojcicki, CoveredCA and Legal Aid were able to step in and help. There are some specific problems highlighted in the article that could be fixed by software startups:

1) Problem: Difficulty to identify a Doctor for a second opinion. a) Possible solution: software that allows you to input the medical term (or possibly the medicare code for a disease or combos of diseases?) and find all the second opinion doctors located near you. The software needs things like sort by reputation or reviews, price estimates, speed to get second opinion, time window (with a button to click for life-threatening emergency). Also, why be local? Through telemedicine you could video chat with your second opinion after digitally transferring records.

2) Problem: Too long to transfer medical records 5-10 days instead of 10mins. a) Possible solution: HIPAA and GDPR compliant digital medical health platform that works with all hospitals. (Very difficult to solve this because of non- standardization.) b) Secondary solution: Biometric authorization (fingerprint and voiceprint ID or DNA scan) and quick digital download of medical record in plain text. Must complete in less than 10mins even with slower bandwidth.

3) Problem: Didn't have health insurance. Hospital was looking at a potentially very large unpaid bill. a) Single payer government health insurance is the best solution. b) SW Tech company solution is quick instant insurance signup with government or charity guarantee for some percentage of bill. The rest of the bill is dumped into CoveredCA or something else. And the patient is enrolled for 1 year after the fact and must pay premiums. ? There are probably better solutions.

4) Problem: Must rely on humans. a) IBM Watson for disease diagnosis and treatment recommendations combined with additional neural net or machine learning technologies could be used to created automated second opinions. Feed all the raw data into the system to determine the outcomes and probability of recovery for all treatment options.

<comment><USER17> The problem is that when you have a hammer (a software startup), everything looks like a nail:

1\. There may be a shortage of Doctors to provide a 2nd opinion. The cost of a medical education is quite high, and the pay has been going down these past few years. This can't be solved by a software startup.

2\. Hospitals have less funding than ever, and are trying to do more with less. So there may already be software out there, but they can't afford it (or the staff to to maintain it, never mind the staff to distribute it). This can't be solved by a software startup.

3\. This is really a political problem, and again that can't be solved by a software startup.

4\. A medical opinion may not be a binary option, and it could be a moving target where data changes by the day, and it could be a suggestion to collect more data, or even to talk to someone else. Opinions by definition are arbitrary, as where something like IBM Watson may just give you options based on probability (but that probability is only as good as the data you collect, which may not be all inclusive, and may be a moving target). So a startup might even make things worse as people base their options on incomplete data or dated options.

The depressing reality is that there is a great deal of economic inequality in our society, and that's reflected in the quality of healthcare that many people receive. It should also be noted that poverty can prevent access to preventative healthcare strategies which include everything from diet to access to basic medication.</comment></comment>


Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/867856602/millions-of-americans-skipping-payments-as-tidal-wave-of-defaults-and-evictions- <comment><USER2> I'm so extremely grateful that I accepted section 8 tenants into my rental units. Most of these tenants have nearly all of their payment covered by the government and they just have to pay $100 or $200 on top of that to cover what the government won't.

These tenants are often not accepted by landlords because they're thought to cause more issues. Mine are great. They keep the units spotless, mow the lawn for me on my multi unit properties. When I have a tenant like this, I never raise their rent, and if they can't pay the hundred bucks the government won't I sure don't care.

<comment><USER3> > if they can't pay the hundred bucks the government won't I sure don't care

I used to have this same mentality. Until the person who was renting one of my properties decided to lie about certain issues (like claiming a shampoo bottle lodged down one of the toilets was there for years). When I decided to not renew the lease with that tenant, they decided to cause considerable damage to our property.

Sometimes, when things come easy to people, they don't appreciate it. Holding people accountable helps them lift themselves up too.

<comment><USER4> > when things come easy to people

I think you have a very misguided idea of what it's like to live in poverty.

<comment><USER5> I think you have a very misguided idea of what it's like to be a landlord....and perceptions of who/what 'landlords' (a very unfortunate term) are from some tenants... no good deed goes unpunished etc. Plenty of great people around but you have to be very careful who you rent to...

<comment><USER6> > Plenty of great people around but you have to be very careful who you rent > to...

This goes both ways. You have to be careful who you rent from, too.

Of all the investment opportunities available to people, I'm not particular sympathetic to purchasing property to seek rents.

<comment><USER7> When we talk about 'rent seeking' it's usually not about actual rental of property, which fills a very real need in society.

Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but where I live, rent seldom covers the mortgage on a property, let alone all other expenses. The profit, if any, generally comes from capital gains when selling the property (which right now isn't on the cards for pretty much anyone.)

<comment><USER8> > rent seldom covers the mortgage on a property

Don't forget that "covering the mortgage" involves building the landlord's equity, so it's not as if this portion is lost to the bank while the landlord has to depend on appreciation. If I "only just cover the mortgage" while renting for the entire term of the mortgage on a house that doesn't appreciate above inflation, the landlord still goes from owning 20% of a house to 100% of a house over that term.

<comment><USER7> True but there are a lot of additional costs (maintenance, council rates, depreciation) to owning a house on top of the mortgage. Again only speaking for myself but I have a small rental property and the rent basically only covers the interest plus expenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is just the start. Landlords would be smart to work with tenants to share some of the loss and renegotiate temporary adjustments to keep at least some revenue coming in because the heady days of high demand for rental units is likely behind us for a while.

It'll be worse in downtown areas. I've heard from multiple firms that are looking at downsizing their expensive office space and continuing to allow employees to work from home. if a person doesn't have to work downtown they will often choose not to live there either.

COVID is going to change the face of urban real estate. So if you have a tenant, they're gold and do what you can to keep them.

<comment><USER10> In California for example, due to state-wide rent control, it's very dangerous for a landlord to lower rents. I would rather offer 6 months free rent than lock into permanent nonadjustable lower rent situation.

<comment><USER11> If a lot of landlords start exploiting that loophole, I wouldn't be surprised if the law were revised to be based on the average rent over a year, or something similar.

<comment><USER12> They wouldn't have to change it, because that is factored in. The law states:

"In determining the lowest gross rental amount pursuant to this section, any rent discounts, incentives, concessions, or credits offered by the owner of such unit of residential real property and accepted by the tenant shall be excluded."

So if your rent is $3k/month, and the landlord gives you 3 months rent-free, your rent according to AB 1482 is still $3k.

<comment><USER13> That doesn't mean the law cant change.

<comment><USER14> No, but it means the law was expressly with to account for this circumstance, so it isn't a "loophole".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >He says a call center worker told him that he didn't qualify for any help because he was late on a car payment last year. When NPR contacted Ford, the company said that is not its policy. And after reviewing the case, the company is now letting Baird skip his next car payment, which he says is a big help.

It appears Ford operates on the Google customer service spectrum of only helping those who can gain support of public outcry.

What I would like to see is a response from Ford that they will open an investigation to review everyones requests which have been denied for skipping payment.

<comment><USER16> Like when Wells Fargo investigated their mortgage department and found no problems, right? Or when Google investigated Andy Rubin and decided he wasn't that bad and protected him for three more years? Why on earth would you ever trust a corporation to police themselves? They always lie, they always fail.

<comment><USER17> It can't hurt to expect companies to actually troubleshoot their own policies. We don't have to expect that it's the _only_ recourse (eg. government regulation, civil suits, public brand shaming, etc).

<comment><USER16> I have seen no evidence of any positive outcome from companies policing themselves, only negative results and coverups.

I'm sure there have been a few instances, somewhere, there must be, right? I just don't recall reading or hearing about them in my entire life, ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a commercial tenant who was forced to shut down their business during the lockdown. I just waived rent until they were allowed to reopen. You can't get blood from a turnip, and I really don't want to force them into default and try to find another tenant in this environment anyway.

Almost everybody is taking a haircut this year.

<comment><USER19> Isn't the smarter move to _defer_ payment of the rent for a few years?

One day, they'll be able to pay, and then you'll get paid.

<comment><USER18> Smarter? Eh, probably.

I dunno though. It's a small enterprise that doesn't do a lot of business even in good times. I'm ok helping them out. It can be my good deed for the decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A wave of more layoffs will happen as soon as the Paycheck Protection quiet period ends.

After June 30, companies that took PPP money are free to fire people without repercussion.

<comment><USER17> I like to remind people that in 2008, Bear Stearns fell in March. Most of the the economy didn't realize the financial system problems until late August.

I'm waiting for a very large shoe to drop in a few months. How big will depend on whether consumers feel comfortable about their jobs+health.

<comment><USER21> Titanic Syndrome. Everything's going under, but the people on the upper decks are still enjoying their late-night cigars while the boiler crew is drowning. It's an interesting phenomenon (and, I'm sure, has a better name than the one I just made up).

<comment><USER22> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure)

<comment><USER21> I wanna say, "There we go," but this is slightly different. Not so much that one failure unexpectedly causes total collapse down the line, more so that a catastrophic failure of important components (which obviously are going to cause a system collapse to anyone who knows what happened) happens in a system so large that other portions of that doomed system are not even aware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Lockdowns are effective as tourniquets, but indefinite or long term use was never logical. There should have been more forward-thinking and pragmatic options pushed earlier. We will now see the natural repercussions of lockdown- centered policies.

<comment><USER24> Nobody was ever advocating for indefinite or long-term lockdown policies. That's a strawman.

<comment><USER23> Also: " Durham leaving stay-at-home order in place indefinitely" [https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triangle- sandhills/news/202...](https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triangle- sandhills/news/202..).

NJ stay at home order continued indefinitely | FOX 5 New York [https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nj-stay-at-home-order- continued-...](https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nj-stay-at-home-order- continued-..). And many many more...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If there is no spike in infections within two weeks, from areas which had large public protests in the past week, can millions of Americans be helped by restarting the economy?

<comment><USER26> >If there is no spike in infections within two weeks, from areas which had large public protests in the past week, can millions of Americans be helped by restarting the economy?

Daily new infections have more than doubled here in North Carolina in the last two weeks since "reopening" [0]. We have had more new cases in the last two weeks (2200) than in the entire length of lockdown from March until then (2000). The death rate has massively spiked beginning May 24th, exactly two weeks (the median time from infection to death) from May 9th, the day the governor relaxed restrictions [1]. The dream of this thing just magically going away is absolutely delusional.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/north- carolina-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/north-carolina- coronavirus-cases.html)

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/north- carolina-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/north-carolina- coronavirus-cases.html#deaths)

<comment><USER27> Remember the whole point of shutdowns was to "flatten the curve" to keep the hospitals from being overrun. We can't stop the disease and we can't commit economic suicide.

NC has only seen a slight uptick in hospitalizations: [https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard](https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard) and it's been flat for the past week.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the shutdowns failed miserably if we thought we were going to eradicate infections.

The government failed badly at communicating this.

So now you have half the people saying the shutdowns were useless (cause the virus still exists) and another half saying they have to continue (cause the virus still exists, also)!

If we had realistically wanted to squash this thing, the examples of other countries suggest we would've needed much more aggressive tracing and isolating of people, widespread early mask distribution and wearing, and more tracking.

I fear that the government also may have failed miserably at taking advantage of them to bring more capacity online. Maybe the minimum stuff like masks and clothes and ventilators are taken care of, but we still seem in a very precarious place.

Voluntary changes in behavior persist, though, which will make things very hard to untangle "effect of shutdown" from "effect of people being cautious about high-risk environments."

<comment><USER28> Can you define what you mean by saying other countries squashed the thing? They may have flattened the curve, drove numbers down, etc. but until they get either a herd immunity or a wide vaccination the infections will likely flare up again as soon as travel restrictions get lifted.

<comment><USER29> Some countries aren't planning on lifting travel restrictions, or are planning on having mandatory quarantine for arrivals

<comment><USER28> Not lifting travel restrictions is not realistic unless you are talking about North Korea. If you do not lift restrictions you are also punishing your own citizens (if you let your own citizens travel they can bring back the gift that keeps giving). We will see. And quarantine where? In many countries for returning citizens it just means "please go home and try to avoid contacts for 2 weeks", which is not super effective and gets treated creatively _a lot_.

I see friends (US and 2 countries in Europe) who are not affected by job losses booking vacations like crazy to take advantage of low prices to visit places they always wanted. So I suspect there will be a lot of travel again in the near future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As a passive real estate investor I'm seeing bidding on new sales has actually been more competitive than ever in my area (Atlanta GA). A lot of houses are selling above asking prices with 8-10 offers on the table. I am not sure if people genuinely think it is a good time to buy, or is it mostly FOMO.

<comment><USER31> I've been watching 20+ properties around Austin, some out of genuine interest, others for a baseline. Zero of them moved in March and April despite asking price coming down every couple weeks. Now in the last couple weeks, 8 of them have had offers. I can't tell if they just dropped back into a "reasonable" range or some segment of the market has turned but it's fascinating.

<comment><USER32> My understanding is real estate was not essential here in Texas. Agents tried to do virtual showings but, come on, most people want to see a home before they submit an offer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm likely out of touch here, but at least for the person mentioned in the article, why does he need a huge SUV? If the crisis hits and you cannot re-pay the bills, that would be the first thing I'd get rid of. It doesn't look like he needs it for work, and he could just get away with a used Honda Civic or a similar smaller car that doesn't require much gas, expensive insurance, and most importantly monthly loan payments.

During the last financial crisis I sold lots of stuff that was dear to my heart but wasn't essential like motorbike, mtb, etc.

Is it the cultural gap that I'm not seeing as a European? Or something else?

<comment><USER34> If he's like a lot of Americans, he's "upside down" on the truck - as in, he still owes more on the loan than he could realistically sell the truck for. That would leave him still in debt, but now without a vehicle, even if he could be content with a 10 year old Civic or Corolla.

The wisdom of having purchased such a large vehicle on credit to begin with is another discussion entirely. Americans are, on average, far more relaxed about owing a lot of money on a vehicle than, say, Germans. I grew up assuming a car payment was just part of adult life; my husband, a German, was raised to believe that borrowing for anything other than property was foolish. I've since come around to his point of view, and am the reasonably content co-owner of a 12 year old Fiesta, though considering our upgrade options as we have a baby on the way.

Why a large truck in the first place? A lot of American men, especially in the South (where this guy is), consider small sedans to be unmanly. If they're overweight like most Americans, they also think they're going to sit more comfortably in a larger vehicle. Plus, SUVs and trucks are less expensive in the US than they are over here - for what I'd have to pay for a new Corolla hybrid station wagon (my current coveted car) in Germany, I could get a Toyota Highlander mid-sized SUV in the US, which Toyota doesn't even bother trying to sell here.

<comment><USER33> Gotcha! Thanks for a thorough explanation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Will this effect the economy and the stock market at some point? That is not clear to me. The way the stock market is going it makes me quite scared. The whole thing might just collapse under its own weight at some point.

</comment><comment><USER36> Meanwhile stock market is preparing to for its record high :).

<comment><USER37> > Meanwhile stock market is preparing to for its record high :)

Yes, and I don't understand it. The S&P500 is within 8% of its all-time high (3393). Even without a second wave of coronavirus cases and deaths, the current levels of unemployment, defaults, and bankruptices, I can't see what supports these asset price levels. Any ideas?

<comment><USER38> The average P/E ratio for SPY companies is around 15. The price of the stock today is built on the earnings of the next 15 years, and most investors seem to believe we'll bounce back in a year or two.

<comment><USER36> Good investors don't rely on P/E ratios. At this point, GAAP earnings are basically becoming smoke and mirrors:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/11/19/pe...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/11/19/pe- ratios-are-misleading-especially-right-now/#312932502281)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I imagine a huge cash crunch is coming up soon as deferred payments come home to roost.

We can't continue kicking the can down the road forever. If people are over leveraged or insolvent we have to bear the pain eventually. It's part of the credit cycle and it's how savers get their foot in the door regarding asset ownership. Otherwise we will have basically embraced some absurd worst-of- both-worlds kind of socialism in which we bailout the people who are leveraged and over-exposed-to-risk at the expense of future generations and savers.

The Fed/Government can probably kick it down the road until November though.

<comment><USER40> For mortgages I don't see why the deferrals are a problem as long as they are just tacked on to the end of the mortgage.

It is going to be a major problem for renters.

<comment><USER39> If people don't have their jobs immediately come back after all the restrictions are lifted then they'll still be unable to make future payments.

Correct though that renters will be hurt more, though it will likely have less systemic effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is one of those cases when delaying solving a problem can turn out to be a good thing. And in the end, a jubilee (debt forgiveness) might be inevitable. Which is likely to be a good thing too, especially if it covers student loans and other things that aren't cleared by bankruptcies.

</comment><comment><USER42> I know people who are skipping payments just to be in solidarity with people who can't pay. They see it as an act of protest not only of inequality generally but of the fact that no matter what happens the financial industry will get a limitless bailout at the expense of everything else. Not paying is a way of getting a piece of that bailout.

I agree with the latter point. We've seen in the past 10 years or so that the regular economy will be sacrificed to save the financial industry. This has resulted in a complete decoupling of the two. The regular economy can be in a state of total collapse and the stock market goes up.

(By "the financial industry" I mean top politically well connected banks, not necessarily smaller private equity or smaller financial institutions. Those will crash and burn and be sold off in fire sale prices to larger banks that get bailed out, just like 2008.)

If we ever have real leadership again, one of the tasks before that real leadership is going to be undoing the loss of integrity and trust created by the 2008 bailouts. Like the second Iraq war, people have yet to even grasp how much damage was done in those years.

<comment><USER43> > I know people who are skipping payments just to be in solidarity with people > who can't pay.

So they're donating what would have been spent on rent to an appropriate cause? Surely they're not keeping the money if it's _just_ that. /s

<comment><USER44> Yeah they're donating the money to their self-in-3-months, who has even less than they do now, with no job and no prospects and no bailout on its way.

<comment><USER42> Exactly. They're thinking of it as an act of simultaneous self-preservation and civil disobedience to the fact that bailouts are only for huge banks and corporations. The perception, which is at least somewhat true, is that Wall St. and DC will be saved and the rest of the country can burn.

From what I've seen, the 1% vs the 99% is catchy but wrong. The reality is more like the 0.01% vs the 99.99%.

We are probably nearing the point where we will see actual change, since we're approaching a place where the wealth distribution hockey stick is so steep the upper middle class and "merely rich" will start seeing themselves as "the 99%." You'll see working class and hippies marching with lawyers, doctors, and owners of businesses that make "only" a few hundred million a year (and don't have lobbyists).

Wish it didn't have to get that bad, but that appears to be the case. We'll probably do something about CO2 when NYC is underwater.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How many HN readers are landlords?

</comment><comment><USER46> This is the main reason I have been scratching my head thinking how the hell is NASDAQ going up. Though might just be sour that I didn't go back in after getting at the right time

</comment><comment><USER47> Seems like working in IT isn't enough, judging from the number of landlords on this post. Almost as if all productivity gains flow into land in our current system!

</comment><comment><USER48> Yet the S&P500 is still green. The Fed continues to print in order to delay the inevitable. Either a currency crisis or hyperinflation.

<comment><USER10> I wonder who downvotes this and why.

<comment><USER40> QE has been going on for years since 2008. Still waiting on that inflation.

[https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-i...](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical- inflation-rates/)

QE contains an easy break on inflation. If it starts surging, the market can just have the assets the fed holds added back to it.

<comment><USER49> You're looking in the wrong place. QE doesn't go to families, so it doesn't increase the cost of milk, apples, or eggs. It went to the wealthiest banks and corporations, and wouldya look at that -- asset prices are inflated, "startups" have absurd valuations, and the wealth gap is larger than ever before.

The inflation is there, clear as day. You're just not looking in the right place and you think you're so smart because of it.

<comment><USER50> THIS, so much this ... for years people said bottom-up stimulus plans would inevitably cause inflation. Injecting the money on top changes little, now it's just trickle-down inflation.

(and if this doesn't hold, I would love to understand why)

<comment><USER51> It doesn't hold because people get the money via loans at low interest rates and then spend more.

Fed policy has a clear impact on AD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Guy has what looks like a luxury truck and is apparently having trouble deciding between food and his car payment.

Sell the car, get a cheap used beater, reduce expenses, keep looking for a job. Not sure what NPR wants me to take from this example.

<comment><USER53> Many people finance expensive cars with no money down and are immediately underwater on their loan. In a situation like that, you can't offload your vehicle easily without also coughing up thousands to cover the difference between the car's sell value (who is even buying right now?) and the cars loan balance.

<comment><USER19> Auto loans should allow you to return the vehicle and walk away... They should be more "rent-to-own".

In fact, in my opinion, all secured loans should be this - you should be able to hand over the security to the lender, and walk away without penalty.

<comment><USER54> what happens if you crash it first it or ding it up or run it as an uber and have lots of trash passengers? you're talking about leases vehicles which already exist.

<comment><USER55> Well look at it this way: hiring a car is a thing. Avis etc. They sell lower excess too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Skipping payment != need to skip payment.

</comment><comment><USER57> Yet the stonks go up.

</comment><comment><USER58> The impact of this is going to be extremely bi-modal.

Working class people are going to be decimated. No income and the cost deferral cliff.

Middle class (office workers are least) and upper class people will do very well. They still have their jobs and their costs have collapsed.

I am no longer paying for gas, childcare, bussing fees, car insurance, and all manner of other things. I can shop at Costco now that I have more time, saving me even more. Nobody is buying lunch out as we now have tons of saved time to make food ourselves. I used the crisis to squeeze by suppliers of internet and cell phone and whatnot. We now save 40% of our take home pay.

Personally the crisis has been great for me.

<comment><USER59> How did you get cell phone and internet discounts?

<comment><USER17> Many companies have advertised that "our customers who are affected by COVID can contact customer support for ..." type of PR messages announcing discounts/deferments.

I actually started collecting the URLs, but there are so many it's not worth centralizing.

Verizon: [https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/covid-19-faqs/#bill](https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/covid-19-faqs/#bill)

AT&T: [https://about.att.com/pages/COVID-19.html](https://about.att.com/pages/COVID-19.html)

Cox Cable: [https://www.cox.com/residential/support/coronavirus- response...](https://www.cox.com/residential/support/coronavirus- response.html#coronavirusFrequentlyAskedQuestions)

Comcast Xfinity: [https://www.xfinity.com/prepare](https://www.xfinity.com/prepare)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> US and Canada are going to soon realize that all the govt did was buy temporary peace.

Not sure how either country will lift from this without having a negative impact, as not only was it giving emergency funds to people, but in a lot of cases giving up to 200-300% of what they earned prior.

It will be a shitshow.</comment>


Announcing Amazon CloudFront Streaming - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/12/15/announcing-cloudfront-streaming/

<comment><USER2> Another HN discussion about this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998259></comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone else getting tired of "awesome-blank" on GitHub? - <AUTHOR>

...or any other similarly based repo that isn't really a programming project?
These repos somehow manage to make it to the top every day, and it's been going on for quite a while... https://github.com/trending Some of them are pretty useful, e.g. "free-for-dev".
Just want to hear what the consensus is. <comment><USER2> _isn 't really a programming project_

They certainly aren't code, but there's more to writing a program than just code. These are research, and I'd argue that _is_ part of a programming project. It might be preferable to host them somewhere other than Github, because Github (and git) aren't necessarily the best tools for the job of archiving your research in to something, but for now Github is what we've got. Perhaps there's an opportunity for someone to invent a better solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> GitHub was never solely meant for code, but anything that is textual data which can be transferred to a revision control system. Including books, blogs, and yes, lists with bookmarks.

As a aside personally I like them a lot, given that I am a polyglot programmer. Saves me tons of time finding the better kind of libraries, tools and/or frameworks for any given language and environment given a specific technical or functional requirement myself.

</comment><comment><USER4> I actually find them very useful. If I need any external library I usually check them out first.</comment>


Google Street View now includes interiors - <AUTHOR> http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.742568,-117.820365&spn=0.004853,0.013561&sll=33.742814,-117.816672&layer=c&cid=7704649002191693046&panoid=qHPoNvOZOYBaFsE0vGCa5A&cbp=13,127.37,,0,11.85&gl=us&hq=comic+book+store+orange+county&t=h&vpsrc=0&cbll=33.742848,-117.816622&z=17 <comment><USER2> Here's another one: <http://maps.google.com/?q=Scream%20Sorbet,%20Oakland,%20CA>

This one's my business. They came to shoot the interior as a perk for participating in a "Google Offer". I think this is how they are rolling it out, at least in the Bay Area. To me, the results came out fine, although I worry that it now makes "casing the joint" a little easier.

It took them two visits to get it right. The first time apparently had some silly technical glitch where the automatic processor didn't stitch the photos together correctly. It took maybe 20-30 minutes for the full visit, which would make doing this universally quite a chore.

<comment><USER3> I can't figure out how to get inside your store. I feel a bit like I am playing badly-designed video game.

Also, you own a food business!?? I am fascinated by the idea, can you talk more about it?

<comment><USER4> > I can't figure out how to get inside your store. I feel a bit like I am > playing badly-designed video game.

lol me too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love the idea, but the Street View UI has never felt all that fun to use and it feels worse indoors. Walking around a shop or mall at Street View pace—12-ish steps for every press of a small, non-fixed arrow—is something I hope I never have a reason to do.

The pancake ([http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/04/introducing-the-pancake- a-l...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/04/introducing-the-pancake-a-less- annoying-way-to-move-through-google-street-view/)) and the city-scale of things make moving on streets more tolerable (though Legoland is not bad: [http://maps.google.com/maps?q=legoland&hl=en&ll=33.1...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=legoland&hl=en&ll=33.127451,-117.310389&spn=77.42549,111.621094&sll=37.78875,-122.4176&sspn=0.009818,0.013626&vpsrc=6&hq=legoland&radius=15000&t=v&z=3&layer=c&panoid=v9MxPqkuglORfTXUMpxn0A&cbll=33.127451,-117.310389&cbp=13,-7.751031121039244,,0,11.516451682129372)), what's the interface for person-scale, cramped interior navigation? Until there's a solid answer this doesn't seem very enjoyable.

<comment><USER6> You can double click on the ground to move to that spot, or on the side of a building to move there and look at that spot. I see that indoors you cannot do this, but hopefully they will add it.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that's the "pancake". It works in street-level view because there's 3D spatial data to help bound navigable regions, and because when you're at street-scale you don't mind being a little off. In this comic bookery or in any cramped space I feel like I'd need slightly higher fidelity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This set me to imagining: every item in the store is dropped into a box before being put on the shelf. The box contains cameras on every interior face to snap a set of 360° views of the item. The UPC code is scanned and entered into inventory. The item goes on the shelf. If sold, the sale removes that item from inventory.

Each night after store closing, a Store View bot roams the aisles taking pictures and updating for the next day.

You browse to the store on Google Street View, go inside with Store View, and if you see an item you like, you draw a box around it and ask the image search algorithm to look for a match based on appearance. It finds the item, tells you how much it costs, and gives you the option to buy it.

Stores would get some basic frequency (annual?) of scan free, more frequent scans or keeping a bot on premises to scan every night would cost more. Integration of the online store would have a fee attached to every purchase. Prices and discounts could be updated daily and there could be different incentives for online vs. in-store purchases.

As data storage and computational power get cheaper and cheaper, and image recognition algorithms get more sophisticated, this would seem to be a potential outcome. A package of algorithms could even be marketed as a store manager: moving stock that has sat on the shelf too long with discounts, predicting what will require reorders soonest, integration with price comparison engines to analyze competitiveness, etc. Once imagery is dissectable and searchable in the same way that language is, things could get very interesting very fast.

<comment><USER8> Through this idea, Google turns brick-and-mortar stores into the equivalent of an Amazon distribution warehouse. The result could be a highly decentralized Amazon alternative with Google's imprimatur, grown from the bottom up.

<comment><USER7> And while Amazon is stuck with maintaining both computer and physical infrastructure, Google will have effectively offloaded the physical infrastructure to the free market. Not only that, but while Amazon must seek economies of scale and efficiency at every point of the distribution network, Google can leverage the irrationality and inefficiency inherent in a distribution network composed of individual retail outlets. In the same way that eBay doesn't have to worry about packing up and shipping millions of disparate items, it just takes a fee off the top for delivering the sale.

I wonder about the benefits versus the costs to stores. Though you can already walk into a retail store and Google up an item on your phone to see if it's cheaper somewhere else... and you can already search for reviews of an item online, etc. I guess what is interesting here is that Google is delivering the physicality of a store to your screen; so conceivably some walk-ins that might have occurred just to check a place out will now occur online. On the flip side, turning every retail outlet into a 24 hour business has got to have some appeal.

Going really crazy with this, looking ahead to Google's driverless cars getting approval to run without a safety driver on board, you could Store View to your favorite cafe, put in your order for the caffeinated beverage of your choice, have the Google car drop by, the barista puts the drinks in a carrier in the back seat, the car picks up some Chinese food, energy bars, and a pair of earphones for you on the way back, you get a text telling you to go outside to pick everything up, you scan your GoogleID into the car, get your stuff, head back into the office and prepare to code all night. If you are so inclined, you drop a few bucks into the online tip jars of the coffee shop and restaurant. Based on your tip ratio, the star rating of the establishments in question are bumped up ever so slightly.

Google has the computers, cameras, and cars to take over the world of running errands.

<comment><USER9> One of the phrases I've started using is, in the future you don't have to talk to anyone.

You see this already with the self-checkouts at stores. You walk in, grab what you want, check out and leave without talking to anyone. This is just the start of a torrent of low level automation. At some point there is not a lot left to do.

<comment><USER7> What amazes me is that we are seeing this happen around us so rapidly; near- total automation is on the visible horizon.

"At some point there is not a lot left to do" reminds me of the story "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson. <http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780312852535-0>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most interesting part comes when they start indexing these images so that you can search products (and prices) within stores. The tech is mostly there (see google goggles).

Then you can answer the question "Where's the closest store with jumper cables?" Or really, "show me where the jumper cables are."

A very big map reduce job, but seems feasible.

<comment><USER11> I've often wanted to google the location of items within Home Depot for example. That would be way easier than asking someone, who often doesnt know the answer!

<comment><USER12> I used to be too timid to ask employees, but since I've gotten over that I've usually found that they do know where things are.

<comment><USER13> Not at Home Depot. The employees there tend to only know where things are in one small section of the store. And for other sections they send you on a wild goose chase where every employee you ask tells you a completely different section and you cannot find what you are looking for in any of them.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure this varies wildly by locale. In Austin, most employees I've ever asked anything pretty much knew.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They blurred the face of the guy in the store, but not the faces on the comic- book covers. Interesting.

<comment><USER16> Although I agree that most comic faces are left unblurred--when I look at some (perhaps 15%) of the faces visible, they are without a doubt blurred. They tend to be the ones that are forward-facing, without facial hair, and natural skin colors.

Example: Take a look at the GI Joe comic on your right all the way at the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is this an Easter Egg? When I zoomed out I couldn't find a way to get back in.

<comment><USER18> If you clicked the white "backwards" arrow to zoom out and see the storefront (along with neighboring stores), click the "forwards" arrow to get back into the store.

<comment><USER17> I zoomed out to the normal satellite view. I could then only get street view on the roads and not the shop.

<comment><USER19> You have to click on the link to the stores Place Page on the left then under the mini map on the right you will see rotating images, click that and bam!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And the store owners will be able to put on digital price tags and ads, and viewers may click to buy online... next thing you know, you and your friend are "sitting" inside a restaurant on google "store" view and eating the food delivered from that place...

<comment><USER21> And suddenly, I want to re-read Snow Crash.

And also have a digital assistant whose ethnicity changes based on who wanders into my virtual business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd like to see a "Local Product" search come out of this.

Allow businesses to integrate their inventory systems with Google so that I can search for a copy of Strictly Turntablized and see that a used CD shop down the street has a copy.

Have the results include how many copies they have on hand, the price of the item, information about how to reserve the item and where I might find it in the store (floor, isle, shelf) if I choose to just run over there.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm most impressed with the stitching and lack of the typical fisheye distortion effect that plagues 3D views like this. Almost every possible view looks like a normal photo. Well done!

<comment><USER24> The "fisheye distortion effect that plagues 3D views like this" that you describe is nothing of the sort. You are talking about a very wide angle of view. These images have a limited FOV, and it's not possible to zoom out so much that you get such distortion.

Actually it is not fisheye distortion that you describe at all - it is a rectilinear projection, and it's this type of projection that looks bad in a wide FOV. A fisheye projection looks much _more_ natural if you are looking at a view with 110º FOV.

These things are not "distortion" at all but merely different projections of a spherical image on a flat surface. There is no "correct" way.

You can right-click on this panorama to change projection and understand more what I'm talking about. <http://www.360cities.net/image/a-busy-morning>

<comment><USER23> I realize that, just wasn't sure of how to describe it which is why I tacked on "effect" (might not be the actual type of distortion, but to a user the appearance is similar). From a user's perspective it most definitely does look wrong even though there is technically no "correct" way. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like them plotting more of the Y axis points of place. But I really look forward to the day when we can move on X, seeing the changes in these over time.

<comment><USER26> There are a few research projects to reconstruct historical views by automatically aligning and extracting building outlines from old photographs, e.g. this one from a few years ago: <http://4d-cities.cc.gatech.edu/atlanta/>

Google presumably has a ton of data to do it going forward somewhat more easily, though, if filling in pre-streetview periods isn't a priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Over time, the problem of maintenance overwhelms usability. Like the street view, but to a greater degree now, comes the problem of keeping those googlebytes of data updated ahead of looming obsolescence. Cool I can go in a store and look around...but what updates store change or - worse - closure?

ETA: puzzled by downvotes. Satellite views can be updated on a regular basis with relative ease by a largely passive system, and what's imaged is rather static; street view updates come with re-driving every road which ain't easy or cheap and may need more frequent updates; interiors change even more often and imagery/data cost much more per byte to maintain. Sure, interior views are cool - what's the cost of obtaining, and more important maintaining, them?

<comment><USER28> I think the 360 Pano guys have a potential solution for the update challenge: <http://www.occipital.com/360/verse>

I'm curious what long-term incentive would be for updates, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> More info from Google - <http://maps.google.com/help/maps/businessphotos/>

</comment><comment><USER30> I started a company a few years ago to capitalize on being able do shoot high quality, 360 interiors. Started out shooting exteriors and then Google Street view popped up, so we needed to figure out how to do something different. We developed technology to mass produce high quality 360 panoramas and integrate a social tagging component (click on the shoe in the store to get information about it and buy it or click on a bench downtown and post about the special moment that occurred on it).

Here is the site if anyone is interested: <http://walkspots.com/beta/>

Long time HN reader, but this is my first post.

</comment><comment><USER31> So is there anything other than this one comic book store an Legoland San Diego available? How can we find 'em? I'd love to go for a stroll through, say, the British Museum.

<comment><USER32> <http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/nationalgallery>

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Haha, wow. I use Google Street View a lot for scouting out empty buildings (I squat for housing). It would be amazing if you could see the inside of them without having to break in to do so!

</comment><comment><USER34> The Guitar Shop is awesome, [http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Gruhn+Guitars+Inc&hl=en...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Gruhn+Guitars+Inc&hl=en&ll=36.160399,-86.776124&spn=0.005786,0.008905&sll=36.160983,-86.777265&layer=c&cid=609519256254457243&panoid=3w450W0PAZ- wHXPu3s-i-g&cbp=13,290.98,,0,3.77&hq=Gruhn+Guitars+Inc&cbll=36.160983,-86.777265&t=h&z=17&vpsrc=0)

Go outside and lots of people walking around with blurred faces.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yes, I would shop here [http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.742817,-117.8166&spn=0...](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.742817,-117.8166&spn=0.005478,0.009645&sll=33.742814,-117.816672&layer=c&cid=7704649002191693046&panoid=WfsqM62TX -- 7pc0ZZEGxAA&cbp=13,205.36,,0,37.08&gl=us&hq=comic+book+store+orange+county&t=h&vpsrc=0&cbll=33.742817,-117.8166&z=17)

(Yay deeplinking)

</comment><comment><USER36> This reminded me of quite interesting talk about bing maps: <http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html>

They too showed some interior and (I think) talked about "mapping" it. The talk is almost two years old so it suprised me that it's new in google maps. But I don't know if it's actually used in bing maps as I don't use them (just for the bird-eye occasionally).

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting to see this on HN since I blogged about this a few weeks ago. [http://geek.michaelgrace.org/2011/10/google-street-view- in-y...](http://geek.michaelgrace.org/2011/10/google-street-view-in-your- stores/) Not sure exactly when Google first started doing this but I like it.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is one of the Google Maps new features I suggested during my phone interview for a job in Google almost two years ago... their choice to reject my application didn't make much sense to me back at the time, but right now it makes no sense at all!!

</comment><comment><USER37> Love the simplicity of their setup (camera on tripod on wheels) [https://skitch.com/mikegrace/gds67/screen- shot-2011-10-26-at...](https://skitch.com/mikegrace/gds67/screen- shot-2011-10-26-at-11.41.54-am)

<comment><USER39> I wonder where the operator has to stand. Maybe it takes it one side at a time?

Otherwise you'd see camera guys hiding behind trees and such, which is an amusing thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I do think the interior is the next big push, but its not grabbing historical photos - its interior location so you can target ads in real-time and real- location. Manga, produce, housewares, TVs?

</comment><comment><USER41> Pretty soon video games will use street view to create their maps.

</comment><comment><USER42> "Google - Indoors" for privately-owned houses and flats:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EhK4jW8HYo> (in German)

</comment><comment><USER43> If you look straight down in the linked shot you can see that they are using a camera on a tripod in lieu of the previous backpack or cart mounted multi- camera rigs

<comment><USER44> Even clearer from the shadow outside : [http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.742845,-117.816621&spn...](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.742845,-117.816621&spn=0.006343,0.007778&sll=33.742814,-117.816672&layer=c&cid=7704649002191693046&panoid=AjKeVCGAFiRzFSj7QOTd1w&cbp=13,326.95,,0,63.31&gl=us&hq=comic+book+store+orange+county&t=h&vpsrc=0&cbll=33.743,-117.816917&z=17)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> @ahmetalpbalkan

Good point, I cannot find this anywhere else at the moment.

btw, you've been hellbanned for about 52 days now, so no one can see your comments unless they have showdead=on.

<comment><USER46> @ahmetalpbalkan comment on hating Lisp books seems to have done it; your karma average is only .22.

<comment><USER47> could also be the fact that most of his submissions are from his own site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Wow, if those shown stuffs will be searchable and we can run e-commerce, such technology might completely change our world. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER49> Looks innovative.

Userinterface needs some improvement, how about using a mouse wheel to navigate forward/backword. Move mouse left/right to turn.

<comment><USER50> You can move forward/backwards/anywhere an arrow points using the arrows on the keyboard and look up/down/left/right with the WASD keys - much better than clicking with the mouse :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This actually is pretty cool. Two wishful additions:

\- Indoor navigation.

\- Integration of live video streams at location.

<comment><USER28> There are a few startups working on the Indoor Navigation part: [http://www.qubulus.com/2011/06/07/the-indoor-positioning- mar...](http://www.qubulus.com/2011/06/07/the-indoor-positioning-market- shaped-list-of-indoor-positioning-companies/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> sweet, that's pretty close to where I grew up. What other places can I "walk" into?

I dragged the little guy around, and all it shows are streets that I can view (even a parking lot, which seems pretty retarded).

</comment><comment><USER53> Now, just need click-to-purchase, and we have a virtual store.

</comment><comment><USER54> This might be good for finding places in theaters and planes.

</comment><comment><USER55> This sucks. I can't even open the pages of the comics!

</comment><comment><USER56> Anyone have any ideas on what caused the phantom cars?

</comment><comment><USER57> Something along these lines was predicted 2 years ago. Remember the Google Maps is Scary video?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyjms9W8PCc>

</comment><comment><USER58> Google Peep View?

</comment><comment><USER48> This will be "Earth Mall"

</comment><comment><USER59> that bike outside isn't locked ...

<comment><USER60> now thats the kind of information we want to know. When do we get real-time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> what?! its not april 1st yet...

</comment><comment><USER62> If I were a business I would OPT OUT of this immediatley.

The only thing I can parallel this too is Googling your date before the first date. Going in knowing too much can often ruin the fun or the mystery of discovery.

Sure it might save you from "bad experiences", but we need bad experiences in life to really value the good ones!

<comment><USER10> On the other hand, being able to share links to products in a specific store may have interesting effects. Imagine someone writing a Facebook post about dress they found, and linking directly to it in the store. Or some viral twitter post. Once that happens a few times, stores will be paying companies to keep their interior up to date on Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Now I have everything I need to plan a robbery. I can see the setup of the store and the best getaway route, all without having to step foot in the store before the robbery!

<comment><USER64> no one was stopping you from putting on sunglasses and a hat and walking around the store before this</comment></comment>


Weird and Innovative Chips (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu7.html <comment><USER2> A more appropriate title, and actually from the article, may be: "Weird and Innovative Chips".

Loved this post, anyways. I think it's important to look at radical and strange computing paradigms from the past, even if their DNA is not obviously in today's mainstream architectures.

<comment><USER3> Would be interesting to see of there are newer examples of these weird chips. After all, the post is only from 2005(from copyright info at bottom of page).

<comment><USER4> The Tile chips and descendants made by Tilera and now Mellanox might fit the bill. They were noted in the press quite a few times back in 2010-2013 or so. They had 64 cores (sometimes other numbers) and could run Linux (or a bare metal environment). The idea was/is to have a grid of identical cores which can each talk at high speed with low latency to their four neighbors. The "outer" cores used their outward-facing bus to talk somewhat directly to DDR, Ethernet, and other ports. If a core in the middle wanted to do an Ethernet send, it had to send the data to its neighbor and so on until it reached a suitable "outer" core. And you could (perhaps even should) program these communications explicitly.

Linux and GCC support meant it was easy to program, but perhaps not easy to program well enough to beat x86 (which for most potential customers was probably the more relevant comparable, rather than the DSPs, FPGAs etc that Tilera suggested might be replaced).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Other interesting systems worth poking your nose into are the c.mmp and cm* architectures developed in the '70s at Carnegie-Melon. Also ncube.

IIRC c.mmp was a multi-cpu-multi-memorybank setup where any cpu could connect to any memorybank via a crossbar switch. cm* was (I think) some sort of multi- cpu-multi-memory architecture with a packet switched bus as interconnect.

They all predate any possibility of being 'chips', so by that criterion wouldn't have qualified for this article/book, but nevertheless are probably still interesting.

</comment><comment> rajesh-s Found a few posters on the history of computing:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000407)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm really hoping someone builds von neumann's harmonic integration computer someday. It was patented after his death.

Feels like a better bet than quantum computing, but what do I know?

[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065705](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065705)

</comment><comment><USER7> The AMD 29000 series really should rate a mention in such an article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Am2900_and_Am29000...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Am2900_and_Am29000_families#Am29100)

<comment><USER8> It does [http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu4.html#Sec4Part3](http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu4.html#Sec4Part3)

<comment><USER9> That's a somewhat misleading response. It isn't mentioned in the linked article, "Weird and Innovative Chips", but in an entirely different section called "Unix and RISC, A New Hope".

<comment><USER8> The linked "article" is one chapter in a bigger work, and they only put chips in one section even if they could be in two. It has an article in the greater work as this is one chapter and shouldn't really be read in isolation as the rest of the work references chips in different sections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One wonders if some of these designs might make a comeback as Moore's law slows down.

For the longest time, processor performance was dominated by who had the best manufacturing process or, more recently, who could keep up best with fab's updating processes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interestingly enough, the AT&T Hobbit processor was used in the original BeBox which ran BeOS (Which we discussed the other day.) Though only about 30 machines were made and were only used for internal development.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/kdanvers2002/43385092882](https://www.flickr.com/photos/kdanvers2002/43385092882)

</comment><comment><USER12> I was not impressed by the i432 architecture. Like the Multibus, it seemed to be trying to be very fancy, but with no elegance or taste. The result was an architecture that... um... might possibly have worked. It's still an ugly, tasteless architecture, though.

<comment><USER13> The i432 was well before my time, so it's hard to account for the privilege of hindsight, but I found myself looking in horror at most of its design. Hardware needs to account for the fact it's ultimately a piece of physics, and the i432 dismissed this completely.

It's a real shame because the failure of old innovative architectures—faults ultimately down to poor and complex designs—have burned people enough that few people dare to try again. For all its flaws and forever-vaporware status, the Mill shows that you _can_ make an architecture much safer without paying extra as long as you do things with principle.

<comment><USER14> I think that the lesson of the Mill is that you can make an architecture much safer without paying extra as long as you do things _in_ principle.

(as opposed to, say, in practice)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Other than the mill, does anyone here know of any particularly weird and innovative chips being developed in 2020?</comment>


A Note on the Recent GitHub Outages - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/blog/597-a-note-on-the-recent-outages

<comment><USER2> As much as it sucks when Github goes down, there's a sense in which I look forward to it happening. It's yet another chance for me to get a peek at their architecture. As a high school student it's pretty disappointing to me how hard it is to find fully laid out architectural plans for large websites. So I appreciate sites like Github and Ravelry being open with that information.

<comment><USER3> Google architecture: <http://highscalability.com/google-architecture>

Google infrastructure: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform>

Amazon architecture: <http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture>

No one will layout the blueprint for you, but most general information regarding infrastructure are out there.

<comment><USER4> Wow, thanks for bringing highscalability.com to my attention. Awesome breakdown of sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another Yahoo! bot behaving badly? Between them and MSN/Bing's bot, what the hell is going on with search engine spiders lately?

<comment><USER6> Imagine you have to write a computer program to visit every page of every website on the entire Internet.

Sometimes you are going to make a mistake, and someone on the Internet is going to notice.

<comment><USER5> Except this has been going on for months, has happened a number of times, and occurs in violation of standards, like robots.txt, that were created to prevent it from happening. I'd expect it from an individual or startup, but not a large company that's been doing spidering for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the explanation it looks like github isn't using '5 whys' when things go wrong. Has anyone tried this? Is it overkill or does it work?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys>

</comment><comment><USER8> If I were GitHub I think I would have mentioned the cause of outage number 3 _after_ I put the rate limiting fixes in place, which is not the impression I got from the article. It is not hard to write a basic HTTP request spoofer and it sounds like they're still vulnerable.</comment>


Explain Shell: match command-line arguments to their help text - <AUTHOR> https://explainshell.com/ <comment><USER2> I am not sure how much I will use it, but the tar example will probably become one of my all time favorites ;-)

[https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=tar%20xzvf%20archive.ta...](https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=tar%20xzvf%20archive.tar.gz)

<comment><USER3> In my head I always say "eXtract Zee Files.." I think I read it on a message board years ago and it stuck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I clicked the "tar zcf" example, IMO it's not an explanation that a newbie would understand, the command is pretty "advanced". But well, it's a useful replacement to man tar and trying to search "-z", "-c" and "-f".

A cool next step would be to make this a cli, where you type e.g. explainshell "command" and get this info as a textual output...

<comment><USER5> It'd be even cooler if you didn't have to type a command and could just hover over the parts of the command in your terminal to get the relevant docs as tooltips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find this super impressive! It parses man pages into structured data. I imagine it could also be used on "\--help" output.

I wonder if one could automatically construct GUI's for users based on the structured data generated. That may make command lines be more discoverable and have an easier learning curve for new users.

<comment><USER7> If you consider pursuing that idea, I highly recommend you check out the OpenBSD mdoc format.

> mdoc — semantic markup language for formatting manual pages

> The mdoc language supports authoring of manual pages for the man(1) utility > by allowing semantic annotations of words, phrases, page sections and > complete manual pages. Such annotations are used by formatting tools to > achieve a uniform presentation across all manuals written in mdoc, and to > support hyperlinking if supported by the output medium.

[https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc.7](https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc.7)

Given that OpenBSD is using this language for their manual pages, you would have a pretty good starting point I think.

The program they wrote for that is called mandoc. From Wikipedia:

> Development began in November 2008 specifically to produce CSS-enabled HTML > forms of manuals in response to the limitations of groff. [...] mandoc > became the default formatter of manuals for OpenBSD 4.8, released in > November 2010. It later became the default formatter in NetBSD, FreeBSD, > illumos, Void Linux and Alpine Linux, and is also included in DragonFlyBSD, > MINIX 3, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Fedora.

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

All of that being said, I think fundamentally that the way of organization flags and options for command line utilities are quite different from what you'd typically want in a GUI program.

I use the command line a lot, but mostly you learn a few flags and options that are useful to you, and for the ones you use more rarely you look it up in the man page or on the web.

For example, the most obvious way to do what you are talking about would be to like have the GUI show basically all of the options and flags and arguments from the man page in one huge form. But that would also be going about it the wrong way IMO. You end up with using a lot of screen real estate but with a lot of the information that is shown on screen being irrelevant for day to day tasks.

If there was a GUI for the command line, one way that I think has potential but which I have not had time to create yet (hopefully I have a lot of years left of my life though so I wish to make it one day), is to make it node based. Like visually it would be like the Blender Node Editor, Unreal Blueprints, Nuke nodes etc

[https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/render/blender_rende...](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/render/blender_render/materials/nodes/introduction.html)

[https://docs.unrealengine.com/en- US/Engine/Blueprints/Gettin...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/en- US/Engine/Blueprints/GettingStarted/index.html)

[https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/getting_started/using...](https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/getting_started/using_interface/working_nodes.html)

And to make it a fast and efficient thing to use you'd construct reusable primitives that work like command line utilities but which have their options set already.

So for example, say I want to run the equivalent of:

      tar cf - CoolProject/ | pv | ssh workhorse 'cd /var/Projects/2020/ && tar xvf -'

The wrong way IMO would be for the user to have to create the whole pipeline in the GUI each time.

Instead you'd have one or more node primitives that were wrapping one or more command line utilities (or reimplementing their functionality, or using underlying libraries, whichever is more convenient and suitable for each individual node).

Now, how these nodes look and how you form primitives come down to how you think about a task.

For example, one person might find a single node representation most suitable for the above given example, where the node is named "Send directory to workstation", and it takes as input the local and remote paths as well as the network name of the remote host.

Or you might imagine that to someone else they would want a two-node setup, with one node internally calling to _tar cf -_ and the other to the ssh command above, each of the two nodes taking respective inputs.

And inputs and outputs would be statically typed.

But there is a reason perhaps that I have not gotten around to this yet. Well two reasons.

One is that it would be time consuming to implement all of that.

The other being that the command line works pretty damn well, all of it's warts in spite.

But I definitely think there is room for doing something really nice about the command line, with a visual workflow, either with nodes like mentioned or with something else.

Also, in my system the nodes would have the possibility of caching outputs in them, so that you can tweak a pipeline without having to re-execute the pipeline as a whole where that is desirable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a super handy website, kudos to the hackers that created this.

</comment><comment><USER9> I use this all the time!

I don't know if it's feasible at all, but one thing I would love is a version of this that uses the man pages of alternate Unix OS's, such as BSD/Darwin.

<comment><USER10> There's a small dropdown at the left of each command to toggle between different man page versions. Unfortunately no BSD/Darwin though (at least for the command I've tried).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks nice. Folks interested in this might also like [https://tldr.sh](https://tldr.sh). It gives a tldr version of man pages for popular commands on command line.</comment>


Type I and type II errors - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors <comment><USER2> In main street interpretation of statistical findings, type II errors are often swept under the rug.

A good illustration of the danger in only telling the type I side of the story is [xkcd/1132]([http://xkcd.com/1132/](http://xkcd.com/1132/)), the frequentist looks hilariously stupid, and we all hail the Bayesian smartness.

Yet a closer look from the frequentist view, the type II error of the test: H_0: the sun has gone nova is Pr[detector reports no|the sun has indeed exploded] = 1 - 1/36 > 95%; in other words the power of the test(1-Pr[type II error]) is extremely low (1/36). Even though the test has a reasonably low level alpha=0.05(type I error), it's still pretty useless as its power is also pathetic.

The comic made the frequentist look idiotic, however, he's just not a good frequentist with a sufficient grasp of type II error. In reality, many people are like the freqentist, easily satisfied with a low p-value without thinking about the fundamental usefulness of their tests (power), becoming victims of type II errors.

EDIT: I made a mistake, see eli_gottlieb's comment below for correction.

<comment><USER3> Actually, the comic specifies a 1/36 chance that the detector _lies_ , no matter which result is true. So the P(detector reports no | sun has in fact exploded) = 1/36, making it a very strong test. The real problem there is that the p-value just doesn't mean what he thinks it means, and he in fact hasn't factored in any prior for how often the sun actually explodes.

<comment><USER2> Oops, you are right, I am a bad freqentist. Just had the discussion about the comic with a friend verbally, thought we figured it out. I guess it is really easy to get even the most basic concepts applied wrong.

<comment><USER3> And this is why I am currently in my office at 8:15pm reading Jayne's probability theory book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And my favorite: Type III Errors, wherein the very premise for the calculation is flawed. Always be wary of precisely answering the wrong question.

[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1957.105...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1957.10501374)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is one of those fundamental things they should just make mandatory in grade school. I constantly find myself explaining this to people I work with - and even though it's kind of intuitive ("penny wise, pound foolish", "straining gnats to swallow camels"), it helps to have a formal concept like this to hang the concept on.

</comment><comment><USER6> The terms "false positive" and "false negative" are so much clear.

<comment><USER7> True, but we get to sound a lot smarter saying stuff like "type I error" and "type II error".</comment></comment>


Arduino hardware hacking: Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuxradar.com/content/arduino-hardware-hacking-part-2 <comment><USER2> I'm currently trying to build an RGB Arduinome[1] using an arduino board, and it's my first interaction with µ-controllers. I am _loving_ it. As simple as it is, seeing an LED blink a pattern you just programmed into it is very rewarding. Reminds me of the first time I drew a few circles with BASIC when I was nine.

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

<comment><USER3> As someone who just built a monochrome Arduinome, I wish you the best of luck.

Arduinos are great for rapid development, no doubt about it. There is also pySerial which is great to use in conjunction with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to the Part 1 discussion...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597919></comment>


'Brain fitness' market booming as Boomers age, but does it work? - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5186024

<comment><USER2> They "work" as far as making you an expert at the training task itself; i.e., a domain-specific task. 100 faces in 15 minutes? I feel great about my cognitive prowess now!

Staying sharp is so much more than clicking on colorful boxes and memorizing the position of pictures. I almost get queasy when I see those "guaranteed to work!" spins on these programs.

Meanwhile, Warren Buffet (78), Bill Gates (53), and Morris Chang (77) are all world class bridge players. How's that for a brain game, huh?</comment>