Python Shortcuts for the Python Beginner - <AUTHOR> http://maxburstein.com/blog/python-shortcuts-for-the-python-beginner/ <comment><USER2> Another method that I find isn't used enough: dict.setdefault. Instead of doing this:

        if 'key' in d:
            val = d['key']
        else:
            val = d['key'] = 'some default value'

You can do this:

        val = d.setdefault('key', 'some default value')

This is super-useful for configuration in frameworks, for example - it's a one-liner to set a default config value if the user didn't provide one.

<comment><USER3> I find I use it most in multi-level data structures, not unlike Perl's auto- vivification system:

        logins = {}
        for user, date in getLogins():
          logins.setdefault(user, []).append(date)

Here you login ends up having one key per "user" with a list of "date".

<comment><USER4> Probably better done with a defaultdict:

      from collections import defaultdict
      logins = defaultdict(list)
      for user, date in getLogins():
        logins[user].append(date)

<comment><USER5> if you have a lot of them, plain dict may prove faster.

<comment><USER4> Not likely. Proof?

I'd agree if you'd said "not a lot of key/values," as the setup could supersede the subsequent speedups. However, in that case, the difference is negligible, and we should do what is "pythonic."

<comment><USER5> Yes, I meant a myriad of very small dicts. In this case a plain built-in is faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice list. I only wish the author warned the readers that using the "get" method to get an item from the dictionary is not 100% equivalent to using try/except.

When using the method, the default value argument will always be evaluated, regardless of whether the dictionary key exists. If the expression that produces the default value is an expensive one or has side effects, the programmer might want to use the try/except variant instead.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice tips. One nitpick: the "inline if statement" is handy because it works as an expression, not just as a statement.

A few more useful things:

frozenset: immutable set values. these can be hashed, so you can use them as keys in dicts or put them in sets.

poor-man's transpose via zip:

      >>> x = [('a', 'b'), ('c', 'd')]
      >>> zip(*x)
      [('a', 'c'), ('b', 'd')]

slices can be constructed with the "slice" function and passed around as values:

      >>> f = lambda x, s : x[s]
      >>> first3 = slice(3)
      >>> last3 = slice(-3, None)
      >>> rev = slice(None, None, -1)
      >>> f('hello', first3)
      'hel'
      >>> f('hello', last3)
      'llo'
      >>> f('hello', rev)
      'olleh'

</comment><comment><USER8> Good list. My only thoughts:

Prefer itertools.izip instead of zip to avoid materializing a new list.

Appending the comma operator to the print statement suppresses the newline character and appends a space instead, which is how print 1, "world" works.

The only tip I'd add is using mapping keys in string formatting operations:

        >>> d = {'cow': 'moo'}
        >>> print 'the cow says %(cow)s' % d
        the cow says moo

<comment><USER9> For python beginners i would not mention the print statement. It won't work for python 3.x.

So, beginners: Please use print() instead of print, to save you some hazzle when using python3 :)

<comment><USER10> Without `from __future__ import print_function`, print doesn't work the same way in Py2k, though.

<comment><USER11> In 2.7, it does.

<comment><USER12> In 2.6.6 also works.

<comment><USER10> If you use print() in py2k, you're still using the print statement and group the argument in parentheses. It falls apart, if you try to use more than one argument, because it's interpreted as a tuple then.

Python3:

        >>> print("hello", "world")
        hello world

Python2:

        >>> print("hello", "world")
        ('hello', 'world')

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I actually would prefer people on my team NOT use these shortcuts. For example:

      numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
      even = []
      for number in numbers:
          if number % 2 == 0:
              even.append(number)

is much easier to read and maintain imho then

      numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
      even = [number for number in numbers if number % 2 == 0]

Also:

      for x in range(1,101):print"Fizz"[x%3*4:]+"Buzz"[x%5*4:]or x

is a piece of code I never want someone else to write that I may someday have to maintain. Write it out the long way and make your teams lives easier.

<comment><USER4> While it's OK for you to enforce not using trivial list-comprehensions on your team, I think you'll find the majority of Python's community disagreeing. Your example is really tame as far as comprehensions are concerned, and "beginners" are going to need these basics to comprehend more advanced patterns.

<comment> brown9-2 It's especially tame given the friendly variable name chosen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Slicing a list is not the same as taking subsets, the examples he provides are also misleading in this context.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great post! For those who know Python, this may be common knowledge, but for the uninitiated, this is a great showcase of some simple ways that Python makes coding more intuitive and enjoyable.

You might also consider mentioning both dictionary and set comprehensions along with list comprehensions, as they are the exact same concept, yet even a lot of intermediate Python programmers don't know about them!

<comment><USER16> Except the silly 'False = True' at the end. How's that useful?

<comment><USER15> I think it's just demonstrating how its possible to redefine even Python keywords.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The last one is terrible ... I have seen

#define TRUE 0 #define FALSE 1

back in the day.

Too bad there was no source control in the company then, so I could not find out who was responsible for that travesty and "talk calmly" some sense into them.

<comment><USER18> Processes (and a common design for c functions) return zero on success and an error code otherwise. Although it might be unexpected (and certainly breaks flow constructs), it's probably not so bad with some context.

Worse, though, Windows defines TRUE and FALSE for you somewhere in windef.h - so you would have to be careful about where your code was included..

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Shouldn't "the last 3" be [-3:] instead of [3:] ? Inyour case it gives the correct result, but that's because your list has 6 elements i think. ( note : typing on my phone so i can't verify).

</comment><comment><USER20> Don't forget itertools.product

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13885234/python-nested- lo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13885234/python-nested-looping- idiom)

</comment><comment><USER21> Could it be possible to explain what does

        Print "Fizz" [x%3*4::]

Since range is going from 0 to 101 I have the impression the result won't match the directive.

<comment><USER22> "fizz" is a string - treated as a list in python

"fizz"[0] is the zeroth character in the list / string

Note "fizz"[:] will output all chars in the string (implicitly it's [0:] - from zeroth string to end

X % 3 is x modulo 3, producing 0 only if x is divisible by three - so we want to print fizz here. 4 is the number of chars in both fizz and buzz - so the meat is

"fizz"[x%3*4:] is "fizz"[0:] if x%3 is 0 - when we want tp print fizz, otherwise it's [somevaluegreaterthan4: to the end of the list (ie nothing). The extra : stops index error

<comment><USER21> Now I understand it. I wasn't aware one could append a subscript operator after a litteral string. I also didn't know of the second : role. Thank you.

But what do you get if x is 0 ? As I now uneerstand it, you would get "fizzbuzz". Shouldn't the list start at value 1 ? So shouldn't the range be (1, 101) instead of (101) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're correct. That was my mistake. Here's the updated version:

for x in range(1,101):print"Fizz"[x%3 _4:]+"Buzz"[x%5_ 4:]or x

I basically just removed the extra colons and added 1, to the range so that it starts at 1. lifeisstillgood was spot on with the reasoning that this works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> nice list, agree with the other comments that the Fizzbuzz example is cool, but can be confusing to work out what it does, especially since this post is aimed at beginners.

I would also mention `getattr` similarly to `get`.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's confusing that output is on the >>> lines while input is not -- backwards from the REPL.

More things to consider: dict.iteritems, collections.defaultdict, enumerate(seq, 1)

</comment><comment><USER25> Somethings's up with your site. All I see are black boxes where your examples should be: <http://imgur.com/N8vdzGX>

<comment><USER26> You need to allow some JS from other domains for it to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Expression `False = True` reminds me of <http://stackoverflow.com/a/771974/458610>.

</comment><comment><USER28> Are inline if statements considered good form? I rarely see them in use and I've heard people complain about them before.

</comment><comment><USER29> Very good list except the fizzbuzz example. It solves the problem but not easy to read, which is not python way.

</comment><comment><USER30> Also good read for seasoned pythonistas, nice work, mburst

</comment><comment><USER31> you should always check the length of lists before zip, otherwise you end up with surprises (try running zip with unequal lengths)

</comment><comment><USER32> I didn't know about some of these. Nice!

</comment><comment><USER33> Sharing this with my AS Computer Science students. Very clear explanations.

<comment><USER34> The article requires some corrections if presented to beginners.

`something` should be written as repr(something). `` (backticks) are gone in Python 3.

if 0 < x > 1: is syntactically correct but it should be written as: if x > 1\. The combining syntax could be used for the same direction e.g., if -1 < x < 1.

Code golf is not the strong side of Python and it is not the point of FizzBuzz. Code golf might demonstrate language features but it doesn't provide the correct context for their usage i.e., code golf doesn't show to a beginner how something should be used correctly.

True/False are keywords Python 3 (you can't assign to them).</comment></comment>


Why cheaper computers lead to higher tuition - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/steven-pearlstein-why-cheaper-computers-lead-to-higher-tuition/2012/10/05/5dced2a0-0fd6-11e2-acc1-e927767f41cd_print.html

<comment><USER2> This would be a more interesting article if the author understood that the real reason for the increasing cost of both education and healthcare is the decoupling of the buyer and the seller. With healthcare, the decoupler is health insurance; with higher education, it is the student loan. (Doesn't everybody understand this fact by now?)

I experienced the former, once again, just yesterday at the doctor's office. He explained several procedures he wanted me to undergo. When I asked him specifically about one of them, he explained "because your insurance covers it." I shit you not. When I laughed he looked puzzled.

And anyone who had seen how easy it was to get a student loan in the past 10 or 15 years, with very little qualifying information required, should understand the latter point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doubly interesting to me -- when I realized that programming pays well because automation puts people out of jobs, or perhaps forces them to learn new skills, I started moving from hard libertarian to embracing certain pieces of socialism.

I don't buy into the coming stagnation bit though, once automating those services is the best bang/buck, it WILL be done.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about technology putting people out of work in the goods sector and then those out of work people trying to get jobs in the services sector? The high rates in services coupled with out-of-work goods employees seeking to now perform services jobs should act as a self-correcting force on prices in education and healthcare.

I know that there is "retraining friction", but that should be temporary and shouldn't lag more than a few years (1-4 years) on average.

It doesn't need to just apply to people who lose their jobs in goods, but also people who are never trained to perform those jobs at all when younger because it had been forecasted that those jobs would be automated away.

</comment><comment><USER5> non-print version: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/steven-pearlstein- why...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/steven-pearlstein-why-cheaper- computers-lead-to-higher- tuition/2012/10/05/5dced2a0-0fd6-11e2-acc1-e927767f41cd_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> It is relatively higher, not really higher. As a fraction of average hourly wage, tuition is cheaper than ever. Problem is that wages are not evenly distributed.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumols_cost_disease>

<comment><USER7> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's up with Jobspice? - <AUTHOR>

I haven't been able to access the site for about a day now - particularly unfortunate for me. I know they're YC, so does anyone know when they'll be up and running again? <comment><USER2> we should be up and running -- if you run into any more problems, email us at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> They look like they're up now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still timing out for me. I'll try another computer or a proxy first.</comment></comment>


Lyft's IPO Filing Reveals Nearly $1B in Losses - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/technology/lyft-ipo-filing.html <comment><USER2> I really don't see how ridesharing will ever be profitable enough to justify these valuations (esp starting at these losses). Lyft had proven that they aren't going away, so unless Uber and Lyft merge (which the government shouldn't allow) there's not enough pricing control.

The "we will be profitable once self-driving cars are a thing" argument? Good luck. That market will be _even_ more competitive. Waymo is going to knock all their teeth out.</comment>


Is your company ready for the Apple Invasion? - <AUTHOR> http://bytes.com/forum/thread797221.html

<comment><USER2> Maybe a better article would have been:

"Is your company ready for higher attrition rates when your most skilled workers leave because you won't let them use the tools they prefer?"

Maybe the title's too long.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there is a version of this article in the desk drawer of everyone who writes about tech.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love the pie chart on that page. That's the smallest 48% I've ever seen.</comment>


Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://www.hulu.com/watch/104814/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-from-here-to-neutrality#x-4,vclip,1,0 <comment><USER2> I saw this and was very happy that he was exposing the issue of net neutrality to a large audience. However, I felt at times the explanation got a little too complicated. I could see how a non tech person might just stop caring about the conversation when it gets muddled.

It's not a nuanced political issue. Simple analogies (like the one Stewart uses, the carpool lane for rich assholes) are the way to go. Or just show your non tech friends this image: [http://cupojoe.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/images- netneutral...](http://cupojoe.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/images- netneutralpricing.jpg)

<comment><USER3> > Simple analogies (like the one Stewart uses, the carpool lane for rich > assholes) are the way to go.

I wouldn't mind a non-neutral connection that's faster or cheaper for www than, say, torrents. I reckon it'd be market suicide for an ISP to cut off access to the web without paying more, so some mix of faster/better/cheap/preferential for the most popular sites or lower bandwith content would be okay with me.

Net neutrality sounds decent enough, but the government tends to pass laws while they're hot button issues that become arcane bureaucracy later. That bureaucracy is rarely revisited and scrubbed off the books after it doesn't make sense any more. Who knows what new technologies are going to come online in the next 10-20 years? Internet regulations stand to be antiquated really fast, to potentially negative consequences later.

<comment><USER4> Except that net neutrality _is how it is now_. Nobody's talking about imposing new rules or bureaucracy.

<comment><USER3> > Except that net neutrality is how it is now.

I understand that - but I imagine the internet will continue to change dramatically over the next 3, 5, 10, 20 years.

> Nobody's talking about imposing new rules or bureaucracy.

It runs the risk of handcuffing the future, especially if there's new and different protocols used to access the internet in different ways in the future. We have a lot of silly and antiquated laws on the books in the USA. Net neutrality sounds like a good thing, but it runs the risk of everyone saying, "Idiot 2009 people passing stupid laws so that XYZ Cool New Technology is illegal... what were they thinking...?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are outside the USA:

[http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon- october-26-2009/from-h...](http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon- october-26-2009/from-here-to-neutrality)

<comment><USER5> Link doesn't work in Canada -- includes link to the Comedy Network but not to the specific video. While we're working on Net Neutrality, how about working on this too!

<comment><USER7> "The irony ... the irony."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah, Stewart. I'm always happy when he tackles an issue - and much unlike regular TV news, I usually end up learning something too. Kudos to both him and his writing staff.

</comment><comment><USER9> idgi? Why fix something that is currently working well?

</comment><comment><USER10> Speaking of net neutrality, the posted video is only available for those who are in the US. Priceless irony.

</comment><comment><USER11> Who wouldn't want the FCC to regulate the internet? They do so well with FM Radio and Television!</comment>


Awesome Thesis: survive your CS master thesis - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ocean1/awesome-thesis <comment><USER2> I don't see "how to find a ghostwriter who turns my factually correct bullet points into fluffy writing" :P

That was my only real problem. I can ramble a thousand words for a blog post or write technical docs in no time, but let me write some thesis or anything even remotely resembling paper and writers' block kicks in. Pretty glad I don't plan on getting another degree, ever.

<comment><USER3> Struggled with this a few times myself, I plan to add some points to the "writing" section with more generic "writers tips". Thanks for the feedback!:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm very surprised about the title (or the content, really).

I expected the tiny section Mental Health to make up the whole repo, since that is what I feel "survival" is all about. The rest of the links seem to be about how to write, present, etc. which are all about further success.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment! This list is pretty much WIP, and I hope to expand the mental health section soon, I believe it's fundamental. As of now it's just a collection of useful resources that are often recommended to master and phd students, and workflows that have proven useful. ...maybe I should use a better wording :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Survive" is the right word for it. I would have liked having it when I started my master thesis since I went through all of that stuff on my own :D

<comment><USER3> You explained perfectly the reason why I used the term "survive" :P Thank you! :)</comment></comment>


Google's Secret Plan To Kill Groupon In New York And San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-offers-new-york-2011-6 <comment><USER2> I've been wondering if all this negative Groupon stuff had anything to do with Google and Facebook wanting to get in the game.</comment>


Weird pupils let octopuses see their colorful gardens - <AUTHOR> http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopuses-see-their-colorful-gardens/ <comment><USER2> For a moment there, that headline had me thinking that school kids who happen to be weird have colorful gardens and are showing these gardens to octopuses.

<comment><USER3> I'm not going to click it, and just keep believing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _[cephalopds] are colorblind – their eyes see only black and white – but their weirdly shaped pupils may allow them to detect color_

Do PR people ever think about the awfulness of the drivel they write? I see the point the author is trying to make here but writing self-contradictory sentences is not the wright approach.

      Cephalopods, long thought to be color-blind, may in fact be able to detect color....

      Although the retinas of cephalopods cannot detect different colors, new research suggests they may be able to detect color another way.

      ...etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow. This is cool. For anyone else who's interested, the full paper is at [http://www.pnas.org/content/113/29/8206.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/113/29/8206.full) and supplemental information (including movies) at [http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2016/07/01/1524578113.DCSu...](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2016/07/01/1524578113.DCSupplemental) .

<comment><USER6> The "S1" video is a classic, and every time I see it I do like it again and again.

The original is AFAIK by Roger Hanlon:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoCzZHcwKxI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoCzZHcwKxI)

[http://www.mbl.edu/bell/current- faculty/hanlon/](http://www.mbl.edu/bell/current-faculty/hanlon/)

Who has published a few more nice videos here:

[http://www.mbl.edu/bell/current- faculty/hanlon/videos/](http://www.mbl.edu/bell/current- faculty/hanlon/videos/)

<comment><USER5> I hadn't seen these before. They're great. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Took me a second. "why would students be showing a garden to an octopus?"

Oh, and I love your username op. My brother started a comic with that same title, never did finish it

<comment><USER8> > why would students be showing a garden to an octopus?

Well according to the title those students are weird... :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a beautiful hack by nature. I wonder if you could create a lens with a similarly shaped pupil/iris and see the chromatic aberration in a black and white camera correctly focused on the output. Would make for a fun weekend project :)

<comment><USER10> Maybe possible to use this technique on space probes to capture true colors in a single channel, saving on data transfer

<comment><USER11> This was brilliant to me at first blush. After thinking about it, though, wouldn't the image have to be a higher resolution to compensate for the blurring of the chromatic aberration? When you process out the blur to extract the color information, you'll have less resolution left over. I'm guessing that would offset the gains on using a single channel. Ultimately for "full color", at a specific resolution, you need a specific number of bits of information, regardless if it's encoded in three color channels, or a single channel.

<comment><USER10> Yea just throwing it out there. I think you're right it would most likely require more data

<comment><USER12> It might still be good for other reasons, though. Like if the colour filters used in space probes degrade over time (I don't know, do they?) then it would allow more consistent colour recording. Also it might be usable on very small probes that primarily take black and white images but can capture colour (at expense of resolution) if required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can't let a post on octopi go by without re-posting this amazing out-of-the- water predation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fZu-1bt6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fZu-1bt6Y)

<comment><USER14> Octopus does not originate from latin, but instead greek. So it would be octopodes[0], however, we all speak english, so octopuses is fine. Or, you know, use what you want because english isn't prescriptive...

[0]: [https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-are-the- plura...](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-are-the-plurals-of- octopus-hippopotamus-syllabus)

<comment><USER15> I'm hip. In fact, saltshaker blended diffeomorphism, but rather crispness loves polarity muchness than tilings. Or not; I'm not really sure.

<comment><USER12> What a hoopy frood you are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fascinating tidbit for those who check the comments first:

> Intriguingly, using chromatic aberration to detect color is more > computationally intensive than other types of color vision, such as our own, > and likely requires a lot of brainpower, Stubbs said. This may explain, in > part, why cephalopods are the most intelligent invertebrates on Earth.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone tell me if I am understanding this right? If not, can you clarify?

This is how I understood it:

They don't have different cones cells for detecting color. Instead, their pupil is more like a slit, causing light to be diffracted, not unlike a prism. Because of the diffraction, different wavelengths of light fall on different areas of the retina. Their brain is mapped as such that they understand the location of the light as the color. Moving the eye around helps them refine this information.

</comment><comment><USER18> How did they establish that octopuses are colorblind in the first place?

Wouldn't a behavioral test immediately reveal that they are not colorblind?

I'm curious about the scientific process here.

<comment><USER19> They looked at the retina, and at its lack of color cones.

<comment><USER20> I think something similar happened with dogs (no color cones), but then behavioral tests showed they have some limited color vision.

<comment><USER19> Are you sure about this? I seem to recall that dogs do have cones, just not many and not of as many varieties (that is, three) as we have.

<comment><USER20> I'm not a biologist nor vet, so not my area of expertise, but there are a lot of jokes about dogs being colorblind (tv series, movies, etc) and in the end it happens that they do have some limited color vision. Sorry I can't give any reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what their color range is; if I'm reading right, this isn't necessarily the same spectrum range that we are accustomed to.</comment>


Swiss 'Fusion Man' Flies Over the Alps With Jet-Propelled Wings - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,355609,00.html <comment><USER2> this guy is awesome. i remember watching a video of him on youtube a year or so ago:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-66AcTo9TU></comment>


Comet Ison passing by Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/timeline-of-comet-ison-s-dangerous-journey/#.UoyAH2TBsmU

<comment><USER2> Do they mean to say that it's never completed a single orbit around the sun since the solar system was formed? Is it possible for an orbit around the sun to be that huge? I mean, just because we only observed it for the first time in 2012 doesn't mean it's never been to this part of th solar system before, or does it? I wouldn't know, but I'm struggling with the notion that there is a body that is in orbit around the sun that is yet to complete an orbit since the solar system was formed all those billions of years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ison was likely just hanging about in the Oort cloud until a the tidal impulse of passing galaxy nudged it enough for it to "fall" towards the sun. To get here it's travelled at least 100,000 AU (9.3 trillion miles), and not especially quickly at that. I _think_ is the first time it's gone past because it's actually very new in comet terms.</comment></comment>


Hey Ubuntu, Stop Making Linux Look Bad - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7600/1.html <comment><USER2> The article is a little bit too harsh, but I get the idea. Let me explain ...

First, the title is wrong. Ubuntu is absolutely making Linux MUCH friendlier to use than ever before. In fact I would seriously doubt if Linux could be as popular as it is now without Ubuntu.

But the problems mentioned in the article are real --- every Ubuntu upgrade fixes some issues and breaks some others, especially drivers. I think the reasons are pretty obvious here: Apple has only a small portfolio of hardware configuration and generally Mac users don't tweak their systems as much as Linux folks do, and Apple can actually test each release on all possible hardware (Hackintosh excluded) AND reasonable system variants before they make it public and feel pretty confident it won't break too much stuff. So it's not very fair to compare Ubuntu with OS X for driver compatibility, as there is simply too much combinations of hardware and software to support. In this regard, Ubuntu is more similar to Windows.

But Windows has an advantage right now: it has a much larger install base which forces hardware/software vendors to "manufacture to Windows". And Windows has only a handful clearly-defined "reference implementations" for vendors to test out---currently the "reference implementations" are XP and Vista/Win7, then double the number to account for x86/x64 variants. Even then it is very hard for Microsoft to keep all devices working for all Windows users.

The situation is much worse for Ubuntu: officially there are four editions (U, K, X, and Netbook Remix), and think about the number of platforms it supports. In addition only a few vendors actually test their products on any flavor of Linux. And those who do test on Linux are usually big names like Intel (even then they suck from time to time). Your cheap webcam manufacturers don't really have the money or time or any incentive to test the $5 crap on Linux they sold to you. So the reality is, the test coverage for a particular installation of Ubuntu on a particular hardware configuration for the vast majority of users is pretty limited. You shouldn't really expect too much more than what we have now.

The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the effort Ubuntu and the whole Linux community spent to make Linux more approachable to common folks like my dad (he's been using Ubuntu for quite some time now and never bothered by virus/trojan any more -- I just don't upgrade the system as long as it works).

But problems are still problems. A year ago when my old laptop finally stopped working after a glass of juice got into its body I switched to a metal MacBook. I finally decided that my time wasted on figuring out how to make my webcam work again after each Ubuntu upgrades, if accumulated, is actually worth something. I feel much happier now on a Mac. Sometimes I still long for the power of control on Linux and really get annoyed by various little things on OS X (like even in Snow Leopard the default Terminal.app doesn't support 256 colors -- WTF!!??), but I'm willing to accept the trade-offs. Besides, when I really need the power of Linux I immediately summon the Ubuntu installed in VirtualBox and ssh into it (actually I think this is the preferred way of running Linux -- you avoid all the driver issues by virtualizing the hardware).

</comment><comment><USER3> Linkbait title; Ubuntu has done a great deal to make Linux look much better.

<comment><USER4> The article points this out. But it also points out (using the Ubuntu release notes) that there are quite a few regressions as well.

In other words, there is a lack of professionalism and polish associated with Ubuntu releases. Maybe they're code-freezing too late in each cycle to be able to stabilize everything in time for the release?

<comment><USER5> > In other words, there is a lack of professionalism and polish associated > with Ubuntu releases.

I agree. I think they should make their releases less frequent, e.g. move to a 2 year relase cycle. I have zero interest in fiddling with a working computer setup every six months in order to get the latest goodies.

<comment><USER6> Their mission is to get more people using Ubuntu - a 6 month release cycle works wonders for that. People (like me) who think "I could _almost_ use the permanently" get excited, and give it another go, when a new version comes out. Also, it generates a lot of buzz.

However, 9.10 hasn't been a smooth ride for me. When I plug in an external monitor, and open Display Options to enable it, my X server crashes, due to Compiz not handling such a large resolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps the LTS version should be offered more prominently, and the regular releases billed as experimental?

<comment><USER5> Better still, just have the LTS releases.

<comment><USER8> But then nobody would be testing them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Canonical is not an open source company, they are just using free software to try and get a slice of the huge operating system market."

looks like the article is a smear job by someone with a hidden agenda.

</comment><comment><USER10> They claim that a poll said only 10 percent of people had a flawless install but the link actually shows 16 percent had a flawless install with another 12.5 percent having only minor problems. I don't know whether those numbers are good or bad. There's a selection bias in the poll (people with problems are far more likely to be cruising the site). I'd like to see a random sample. For myself, I installed Karmic on a quad core desktop and a netbook with no problems at all. The first time I've installed any Unix without any grief.

<comment><USER11> It's interesting to compare the results of the polls after they stabilise. I'm not sure if it fully accounts for selection bias, but it seems to be a better basis for comparison.

In terms of show stopping problems, Karmic is currently about the same as Jaunty with about 32% of people reporting they couldn't work around their issues, while for Intrepid it was 45%.

I can imagine there's selection bias at that level as well - the people who can't work around problems for one release aren't going to be involved in the poll for the next release.

Anecdotally, everyone that I've convinced to try Ubuntu has been badly burnt by upgrade issues - only my girlfriend has continued to use it since I do the upgrades for her. I'm sticking with it as I seem to be able to workaround or fix anything that comes up, although it feels like I'm rolling dice everytime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> About an hour ago I downloaded the windows installer for Ubuntu. It ran just like any other installer on windows and when I restarted there it was, right beside windows. I can also uninstall it with the add/remove programs window.

That was by far the most painless install of any OS I've ever installed.

<comment><USER13> Keep in mind the ubuntu boot sequence you will experience will be slightly slower by doing so.

<comment><USER14> Its not just the boot process, but disk access in general will be slower, especially if your disk is fragmented. The file system is implemented as a single file on the windows partition.

<http://linux.about.com/od/dist/gr/dstwubi.htm> <http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-536450.html>

<comment><USER8> I use Debian in a Windows VMware host (at work), and it is more than fast enough. The only problem is that VMWare's X server is broken in such a way as to not be able to draw window decorations if they are drawn via X's standard function to draw window decorations. Very stupid.

<comment><USER13> I had that problem in Ubuntu and switched to VirtualBox. Surprisingly, when I enabled 3D rendering in VirtualBox and enabled compositing in OpenBox, My performance and snappiness increased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's a sort of reply to these sort of articles from Jono Bacon, Ubuntu's community manager: [http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/11/06/the-intersection-of- qual...](http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/11/06/the-intersection-of-quality-and- expectations/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ubuntu is about optimizing the common case at the expense of the corner cases. If you want something that is actually stable, use Debian.

<comment><USER16> Do you have any specific examples? I've been bumping up against this wall a bit lately and have never tried Debian.

<comment><USER8> Packages that are in Debian stable are extensively pre-tested by the users of unstable and testing. I have been an unstable user for years, and the one or two time a year things break (I update approximately weekly) and I try to report a bug, the bug has already been reported and resolved. This is what they call _un_ stable, so imagine how well stable works.

Debian unstable doesn't have releases, so packages that make major changes have to apply cleanly to a variety of configurations (not just whatever the previous version was). Since people are testing these packages daily, any problems are resolved way before anything is marked "stable". These changes are also incremental, so instead of a testing team having to work out 100s of major changes with a six-month deadline, they are made and tested as-needed.

The end result is a system that is very up-to-date but rarely breaks. (Debian stable probably "never" breaks, but it is not exactly up-to-date either.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not sure why people expect reliability from a bunch of unrelated software packages written in C without any automatic testing. Of course stuff is going to break. My laptop's sound card alternately breaks every other major kernel release. Nobody to test + no automatic tests + minor changes in the sound subsystem = breakage. (I don't care about this, though, as the card is junk and I have a decent USB DAC connected to my machine. But still...)

I am mildly surprised every time I see a Linux system boot to completion. (And yes, Linux is my favorite OS.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, what a useless article. "Early" adopters experiencing bugs?! Clearly the author must be new to "early" adopting. (Why he uses quotes for "early" I don't really understand.)

<comment><USER15> Because "early adopting" is generally used when talking about beta software, but in this case the software was declared released, but the users' experiences resembled that of early adopters'.

<comment><USER8> Bad when it's Linux, great when it's Revision A Apple hardware...

<comment><USER18> Plus: there are no reports of Ubuntu installs like iPods ;-)

It's also easier to patch software, although it's harder to make it run on hardware someone else designed and who will not tell you anything about how it works. Apple doesn't have this problem either: the least they can do is OSX folks pointing fingers to Macintosh hardware designers.

But I have to admit Apple hardware has the good looks on its side.

<comment><USER18> oops... Ubuntu installs catching fire like iPods...

mental note: never, ever engage in witty comments past bedtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's weird... It worked here flawlessly. I even did an upgrade over from last release and not with a fresh reinstall...

The worse that happened is that it disabled my 3rd party repos (Skype, VirtualBox) - that is after warning me it would.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yeah, Canonical's own release notes for my netbook actually recommended _not_ upgrading because of regressions.

I did however upgrade my desktop just fine and I _love_ it!

</comment><comment><USER20> I had issues with my WPA2 keys in 9.10. Could not get my router to accept my password. I downgraded back to 9.04 were everything works flawless.

<comment><USER21> You should have just tried the WICD package, which replaced Network Manager quite well.

<comment><USER20> I did try the WICD package and it didn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Free software is supposed to improve with each new release. Take OS X, which gets faster. Cleaner. Better.

Funny, my experience has been just the opposite...

(before you downmod: I'm referring to 10.6, and yes I know it's been fine for some people and not fine for others; this is my personal experience)

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey Christopher Smart, Stop Making Linux Magazine Look Bad

</comment><comment><USER24> I would say it _just_ the other way around. Not kidding. And using on _production_ 9.10. Smooth.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am using Ubuntu 9.10 as my primary OS also and it has been nothing sort of satisfactory. However the article does point out a few useful suggestions in order for Ubuntu to be the leader in Linux Desktop Computing.

<comment><USER25> It does? All I read was whining.</comment></comment></comment>


Develop inside a container with the Okteto CLI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/okteto/okteto <comment><AUTHOR> The Okteto CLI lets you develop inside a container, no matter if it is running locally or in a remote cluster. The main advantages of developing inside containers are:

\- replicability: development containers eliminate the need to install your dependencies locally, everything is pre-configured in your development image.

\- fast inner loop development: native builds inside your development container are faster than the docker build/redeploy cycle.

\- less integration issues: your development container reuses the same variables, secrets, sidecars, volumes, etc... than your original deployment.</comment>


VerbalExpressions – JavaScript library that helps construct regular expressions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jehna/VerbalExpressions#

<comment><USER2> That's cute and on one hand I like the concept, but on the other hand I find that's exactly how normal terse regexs read to me anyway...

        ^https?://(?:www\.)?[^ ]*$

is way more succinct and just as easy to read as:

                .startOfLine()
                .then( "http" )
                .maybe( "s" )
                .then( "://" )
                .maybe( "www." )
                .anythingBut( " " )
                .endOfLine();

Well... assuming you know regular expressions. Which you should if you are a programmer.

<comment><USER3> I kind of know regular expressions but every time I have to write one I head off to regexpal to write it. For instance, off the top of my head, I have no idea what the "?" in the parenthesis does. Usually expect a character to precede a "?", "." or "*".

I also don't use them often enough to commit all the rules to memory.

However, given VerbalExpressions, I don't think I'd have a problem building regular expressions. For a newbie, startOfLine and endOfLine is far more memorable than "^" and "$".

> Which you should if you are a programmer.

You can be pretty productive programmer without knowing regular expressions. Depends on the kind of programming you do really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have always struggled writing a regular expressions. Even after being successful in writing one, I could not retain what it did once I returned to it. This library is definitely for people like me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Damn, this is so simple yet so powerful I can't believe it's the first time anyone has thought about it.

<comment><USER6> > I can't believe it's the first time anyone has thought about it.

Implying this is?

<comment><USER5> Not implying that, but haven't seen something as similar and high-level before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a diabetic, I try and not over-dose on syntactic sugar...</comment>


Kinetic Sand - a non-Newtonian fluid - <AUTHOR> http://www.wabafun.com/product_info.php/manufacturers_id/11/products_id/61/osCsid/d9212b38109bda500dd752a45d224612

<comment><USER2> What's up with their website? Press links don't work, their add to cart adds 2 and then pre-sets 3 different mailing addresses to what I assume is real people at real addresses... is this a legit thing? Cause I want some.</comment>


How does your company treat part time employees?  - <AUTHOR>

I work for a web development company in the Midwest. I read all about today's tech companies and the kind of culture and environment they provide their employees and I do my best to try and emulate them where we can.<p>The one thing that I have not yet read about is how start-ups, or tech companies in general, treat part time employees? We employee about a quarter of our staff at < 30 hours/week. They are also not all developers- some are tech support and marketing as well. Do the benefits provided by the company (no vacation policy, paid holidays, free meals, etc) flow freely to all employees or is there some sort of cut off? <comment><USER2> The way my previous employers have handled it

* Holidays are the same (don't come into work!). Depending on the company it could be either paid or unpaid, but it's generally the same for everyone.

* Vacation is accrued based on the hours you work. Exempt employees generally have N days, and non-exempt would accrue N days if they worked 40 hours a week. Most of the time you have to work at least a year to get the days.

* Free meals are the same. Whoever is there gets the free food. If your part timers aren't there for the free lunch, oh well. Note - if you have contractors, I think giving them free food could potentially cross the line into them being an employee. My previous employer was always very careful never to give contractors freebies, not even free soda.

<comment><USER3> How could/does freebies to contractors make them employees? I ask because I am currently a contractor where I work, but get access to the soda/beer fridge, same as all the employees.

<comment><USER2> Suppose you're a contractor who works full time at a particular company. This company is your only place of employment, and your contract doesn't have a defined term length (e.g. you're on till we don't need you anymore). Then you get all the miscellaneous perks of being a full time employee, but the company doesn't pay your holidays, time off, or health benefits. At that point, you start to look like an employee to the government.

This is why Microsoft and Google have defined contractor terms, and you can't come back for a period of time afterwards, etc.

<comment><USER3> Then I may not fall under that category, as I am a contractor in the sense that my "employer" is a staffing agency, and I am working for their client for 6 months before converting to an employee of the client. So, while I am a contractor for ClientX I am legally and employee of StaffingY

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is one of those situations that Contracting takes care of so nicely. It solves every one of those problems in the exact same way.

\- Vacation: None. But they pay you enough that you can sort it out on your own.

\- Paid Holidays: None. But they pay you enough that you can sort it out on your own.

\- Health Care: None. But they pay you enough that you can sort it out on your own.

\- Free Meals: None. But they pay you enough that you can sort it out on your own.

If you want to ramp down from 40 hours to 30 hours when you're on a contract, you simply do so. You'll find your pay adjusts accordingly but you still have plenty extra to take care of all those above items.</comment>


We analyzed 16,625 papers to figure out where AI is headed next - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612768/we-analyzed-16625-papers-to-figure-out-where-ai-is-headed-next/ <comment><USER2> "Among the top 100 words mentioned, those related to knowledge-based systems—like "logic," "constraint," and "rule"—saw the greatest decline. Those related to machine learning—like "data," "network," and "performance"—saw the highest growth."

If you couldn't guess by the fact they "analyzed" thousands of papers, all they did was word counting. This doesn't tell you where AI is going, it only tells you where it already is. "Neural Network" of course has had a large increase over the last few years too.

If you want to know where AI is heading, you already know where to look just by reading a few news articles on recent AI breakthroughs (e.g. from DeepMind).

At the end, they mention "reinforcement learning" as well as having gained momentum, but end the article with roughly the sentiment that the author has no clue what the next thing in AI is after the current trend.

If they had applied ML or AI techniques in trying to guess, instead of word counting, that would at least be an interesting article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is becoming a trend asking for email just to read the article?

what a turn off, I closed the tab.</comment>


Bartending classes, Professional academy, Bartending class - <AUTHOR> http://www.barjobfinder.com/bartending-classes.php Barjobfinder a professional academy offering  Bartending classes,, Bartending class,  Bartending courses, Bartending jobs  and much more <comment><AUTHOR> Barjobfinder a professional academy offering Bartending classes,, Bartending class, Bartending courses, Bartending jobs and much more</comment>


A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/vault-faster-more-efficient-cryptocurrency-0124 <comment><USER2> I have long wondered how cryptocurrency fans would answer the question:

'Would you be happy if the crypto-utopia you bring up happens in the next 10 years, and all value is stored/transacted through a cryptocurrency, but it was a coin that you do not possess now, nor could you transfer any of you current currencies into it?'

Say tomorrow someone releases the one true coin, but no one notices. All other cryptocurrencies drop to zero value, then a crypto miracle occurs - the one true coin is uncovered and almost overnight becomes the defacto monetary standard. Would crypto fans be satisfied?

This is a long way of asking: do you want cryptocurrency to succeed if you knew that you could not profit from it doing so?

<comment><USER3> How do you think bitcoin started ? You'd had to be crazy to believe in it 9 years ago, and spend time and energy in the community, nlt to lention monney, to foster the project.

My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things.

Btc was banana money at first, and only people believing it would be a great thing as a concept made it work. We didn't expect to make banks, it was a happy side effect of a mad naive bet.

All great things start like that. Comics are now the thing, but 20 years ago were still for pationate nerds.

<comment><USER4> > My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my > time, and so lany things. ... All great things start like that.

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

\-- Carl Sagan

[https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/carl_sagan_163043](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/carl_sagan_163043)

<comment><USER5> "First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world." - Elizabeth Holmes

<comment><USER6> I don't think she is the original author of this quote.

Going to share another quote, which I think is relative here -

"Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do." - Steve Jobs

<comment><USER7> Sadly those you think are too crazy to change the world, usually are

<comment><USER8> s/Sadly/Thankfully/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Full disclosure: I work on the cryptocurrency in this article, Algorand.

There are a lot of questions and speculation here about this paper and Algorand. I would be happy to try an answer them to your satisfaction. Some context may be helpful first, though. This paper is an innovation about one aspect of our technology. Algorand has a very fast consensus mechanism and can add blocks as quickly as the network can deliver them. We become a victim of our success. The blockchain will grow very rapidly. A terabyte a month is possible. The storage issue associated with our performance can quickly become an issue. The Vault paper is focused on solving this and other storage scaling problems.

The Algorand pure proof-of-stake blockchain and associated cryptocurrency has many novel innovations aside from Vault. It possesses security and scalability properties beyond what any other blockchain technology allows while still being completely decentralized. Our website, algorand.com, and whitepaper are great places to start to learn more.

If you learn best from videos then I suggest you watch Turing award winner and cryptographic pioneer, Silvio Micali, talk about Algorand: [https://youtu.be/NykZ-ZSKkxM](https://youtu.be/NykZ-ZSKkxM). He is a captivating speaker and the founder of Algorand.

<comment><USER10> Without the marginal energy cost of mining blocks from proof of work, what do you think would drive the value of such a currency?

<comment><USER11> This question seems to assume that the cost of electricity and mining sets cryptocurrency prices, but I'm not sure why that would be the case. I think it's the other way around. Demand for Bitcoin doesn't increase when electricity gets cheaper / mining becomes more profitable. Mining becomes more profitable when demand goes up. If electricity became more expensive or mining otherwise became less profitable, demand for bitcoin does not go down; most traders and users of bitcoin probably don't even notice. The only direct effect is that some miners stop mining (and the network becomes a little more vulnerable to 51%-attacks).

Another way to think about it: if Bitcoin somehow worked without mining, that's no reason for demand or usage of Bitcoin to go down. The value of bitcoins comes from network effects and scarcity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> good-idea I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those)

But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a _real problem_ \- it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems above). This is something that literally affects every human being.

Of the 203 comments (at the time I am posting this), there are only two uses of the word "environment". One of these is about the "regulatory environment".

Let's say Bitcoin, Ethereum, or another coin achieves an economic value & level of efficiency that makes mining an accessible investment for low-income people. Instead of server farms in Iceland, mining would be done by millions of people around the world. Some of the energy used for this would be renewable - but plenty of this is going to be coming from coal. In that sense, the coin would create an economic incentive to pollute (there are plenty of these already), and there's no way to regulate that kind of decentralized network. (That's the whole point)

My favorite summary of crypto is something along the lines of: leaving your car running while it solves sudoku puzzles in exchange for drugs. The drugs part isn't as relevant anymore, but the rest is.

I'm not here with an answer. There are many problems that I think crypto can solve and I'm glad it is something on the horizon.

But we _need_ to talk about the environment.

<comment><USER12> No, we don't.

Bitcoin is one _way_ to use energy. There are hundreds of thousands of other ways.

When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean? Presumably, you mean it in a stronger sense than "using energy to produce food hurts the environment" or "using energy to run an ER hurts the environment".

That is, you think that _relative to the benefit provided_ , the use of (harmful) energy to run bitcoin miners doesn't justify its environmental cost.

Which is great, but I could say the same thing of Ferraris for show-off producers in LA, or Hello Kitty backpacks.

What justifies focusing our attention on _Bitcoin_ per se, and not those? Do you plan to publish a universal, agreed-upon list of things whose social value doesn't justify its environmental cost?

The real problem is energy users not bearing the full environmental costs of what they do.

The thing is, we have a well known solution to that: cap the total carbon emissions, or tax them in a way that reflects the harm.

Yes, Bitcoin creates an incentive to use energy. And it will be spent by miners who weigh the costs of the energy against the value of the Bitcoins produced. Like every other good on the market, it will respond to incentives created by laws.

If the damage of energy isn't priced in, then there will be too many resources spent on mining relative to the environmental cost. But _this is true of every other good as well_.

All Bitcoin does is amplify the problems of the existing failure to appropriately price energy. But this is true of literally every other energy- using good in existence!

There is no reason to single out Bitcoin. To blame it for environmental problems is special pleading or privileging a hypothesis.

"I don't want wiggins at my university. They cheat!"

'Well, a certain percentage of any demographic is going to ch--'

"Irrelevant! We're talking about wiggins!"

EDIT: Should probably add the disclaimer that I'm long Bitcoin.

<comment><USER13> An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste.

You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for _any_ of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going.

That said, I do support some form of decentralized currency. Not because people are ever going to be smart enough to be their own bank or because I think some currency will magically topple governments and financial structures, but mainly so people can transact without overly-censorious middle-men who take a cut while adding nearly no value.

We have the internet, now. Payment networks should have died years ago. I'm glad this problem is being worked on. However, it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~ _10 transactions per second_.

<comment><USER14> > You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical > success for any of its goals.

I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million in my brain, and full confidence that that money is _mine_. That's pretty damn cool.

> I do support some form of decentralized currency. Not because people are > ever going to be smart enough to be their own bank or because I think some > currency will magically topple governments and financial structures, but > mainly so people can transact without overly-censorious middle-men who take > a cut while adding nearly no value.

It sounds like you're projecting what you think Bitcoin should be.

> We have the internet, now. Payment networks should have died years ago. I'm > glad this problem is being worked on. However, it's possible to solve > without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 > transactions per second.

10 transactions per second on the L1 network (averaging $10k-20k each), and many thousands possible today on L2. Plus a way to securely store the transacted value.

To argue that a small country's worth of energy being used to secure Bitcoin is a poor use of resources, you really have to consider how much energy the worldwide banking system consumes in all its complexity to do the same thing. I don't know how to do that calculation, but my point is there's more to it than you're seeing.

You have to also consider which energy is being used. Dirty energy is certainly part of it. But a lot of the energy used is through geographic renewables arbitrage. For example, there are hydro power facilities in China that were built and never fully utilized or connected to the main grid. You can set up miners nearby those facilities to use the surplus energy, and as long as you are connected to the internet, you're good to go.

It's also a potentially great incentive for governments to start NEW renewables facilities, because they have a way to use the surplus power until their populations grow to use the full capacity of those plants.

<comment><USER13> > I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million > in my brain, and full confidence that that money is mine. That's pretty damn > cool.

No, you can have 30K BTC in your brain, but unfortunately the USD value fluctuates so wildly that as a store of value, it's useless.

> It sounds like you're projecting what you think Bitcoin should be.

Probably, yes. Bitcoin is a failed project. It spawned many others, some of which may be successful. I am interested to see how they do.

> To argue that a small country's worth of energy being used to secure Bitcoin > is a poor use of resources, you really have to consider how much energy the > worldwide banking system consumes in all its complexity to do the same > thing. I don't know how to do that calculation, but my point is there's more > to it than you're seeing.

That's assuming that banking is JUST storing and sending value. Banking does a whole lot more. I understand the drive behind taking that power away from banks, but it's just not going to happen until one can fluidly exchange USD for some for of _highly-stable_ distributed currency. And once that happens, banks are still going to exist and handle most of the transactions! Please, take a stroll in r/cryptocurrency or r/bitcoin and see how many people are whining about how their private key got lost or stolen or etc etc. Banks exist because they not only store value, but protect it in numerous ways. They will continue to exist past whatever cryptocurrency-revolution people envision.

> You have to also consider which energy is being used. Dirty energy is > certainly part of it. But a lot of the energy used is through geographic > renewables arbitrage. For example, there are hydro power facilities in China > that were built and never fully utilized or connected to the main grid. You > can set up miners nearby those facilities to use the surplus energy, and as > long as you are connected to the internet, you're good to go.

Great? So a fraction of the energy would have been wasted anyway. Fine, use that for bitcoin mining. For everything else, it's pouring carbons into the atmosphere so idiots who don't know how investing works can leverage 100x on margin while the exchange they're betting on is manipulating the price to call their bets and wipe them out.

> It's also a potentially great incentive for governments to start NEW > renewables facilities, because they have a way to use the surplus power > until their populations grow to use the full capacity of those plants.

Really? "Let's buy a bunch of toxic waste and dump it into the river because the government will be incentivized to not output toxic waste" isn't the best argument for why bitcoin is useful.

<comment><USER15> In response to stability criticism, chadski on Lobsters told me about so- called stablecoins with MakerDAO and Dai being in active use:

[https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper/](https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper/)

It's an Ethereum-based scheme that's tied in value to the U.S. dollar. That sounds good. The methods to achieve that look... complex... to say the least. If they work, then there's at least one of them that's stable so long as there's no serious problems in it and/or Ethereum. Well, that sounds promising. ;)

<comment><USER13> I'm aware of Maker.

It's a bunch of math that uses market mechanisms to try to solve the problem of stability when the only real answer for the question "how do I stabilize a cryptocurrency" is "for each unit you issue, you have a bank account with $1 matching USD in it."

Maker essentially banks on the fact that a bundle of cryptos (ETH and a few others) will not drop past a certain amount _in relation to USD_ over a given amount of time. They've been correct, so far, but that doesn't mean there won't come a time when the markets drop past whatever magical threshold they've set.

I'm not putting down the project, I followed it closely for a while and a lot of work went into it. My point is you can't really have a stablecoin unless you have the USD to back it up.

An interesting plot twist will be if Maker derives from other stablecoins (ones backed by USD reserves, like GUSD) and not ETH.

<comment><USER16> I would think that, regardless of the math, the token prices might remain stable just because people think the algorithms are doing their work. Kind of like an "invisible hand" situation.

Circulating supply fluctuations don't seem to have much of an influence on crypto prices (as seen with quarterly Binance Coin burns for instance)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This gets asked often, but in case something changed recently - what are the use cases of cryptocurrencies that are not:

      - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is)
      - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserver or VISA)
      - Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players

I am not looking for answers of the form "well whenever you want to avoid a third party...", I actually want to know what _are_ those cases where you have to avoid a third party, and why.

The economist-in-me appreciates that non-legal activities are perfectly capable of both demanding and supporting a novel financial instrument on their own, I only exclude it from my question because it's a rather obvious application and I would like to probe beyond that.

<comment><USER18> I don't know if you've realized this, but HN is religiously against crypto and anything that rhymes with it. Like, irrationally mad.

If you want to explore the utility of crypto go check out different online communities that focus on that, some decent ones on reddit. The level of discussion on HN is usually "crypto baaad, centralized goood". As an economist I'm sure you expect more. Unless you want those ideas reinforced, keep the discussion here!

<comment><USER19> I think you are conflating bad with unjustified. They aren't the same but can appear similarly themed. HN is skeptical of the utility and validity of crypto.

<comment><USER18> That's what I thought too! But no - HN is against crypto at the moral level. One day the almighty father Paul Krugman declared crypto as thought-crime, and ever since, progressives have dutifully towed that line. It's _tiring_.

I think they subconsciously see it as an attack on state-sovereignty or something like that. The ability to tax and redistribute. That's just me reading between the lines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _> In experiments, Vault reduced the bandwidth for joining its network by 99 percent compared to Bitcoin and 90 percent compared to Ethereum, which is considered one of today's most efficient cryptocurrencies._

Ethereum is not considered one of today's most efficient cryptocurrencies, not remotely. One of the most full-featured perhaps, but not efficient. Not even Bitcoin is since the invention of the MimbleWimble protocol, and more recently the even more efficient Coda Protocol. The real efficiency comparison is against those two.

[https://grin-tech.org](https://grin-tech.org)

[https://codaprotocol.com](https://codaprotocol.com)

<comment><USER21> This is true. I would be interested in knowing the difference in approaches between vault and coda.

<comment><USER22> Hi, I'm one of the founders of Coda -

In Coda we use zero knowledge proofs to stand in for downloading / checking the blockchain. This means you get the identical computation to normal blockchain syncing, but in only the size of the zero knowledge proof and your account, which ends up being both constant and ~20kb. Which makes a big difference if you want to use Coda from a phone or browser.

Check out this video if you want to understand more of the tech behind it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWVGATxEB6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWVGATxEB6M)

And feel free to ask any other questions as well!

<comment><USER21> Whats the difference with vault?

<comment><USER22> Biggest difference is Coda's constant 20kb vs still at least a few hundred megabytes for Vault. This matters because it helps in making cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency apps usable by people from their phones and browsers, at 20kb with Coda that's actually possible.

I haven't looked particularly into if any consensus / security assumptions are different either with Vault, but that could be another place for them to get down to a few hundred MBs without zero knowledge proofs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Paper: [http://www.mit.edu/~yossigi/vault.pdf](http://www.mit.edu/~yossigi/vault.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> There's no free lunch. These gains come with a tradeoff in security. Bitcoin's proof of work which uses an algorithm and processing power to secure it. Vault/Algorand throws out PoW and replaces it that with a pure "proof of stake" system that requires 2/3rds of the currency's value is held by honest actors. In addition, if the network were ever to go offline, there isn't a deterministic way to get it back online.

<comment><USER25> >In addition, if the network were ever to go offline, there isn't a deterministic way to get it back online.

I haven't heard anyone say this about Algorand. Can you provide more details? Lets say a bug causes all the Algorand nodes to crash. After a patch is released 90% of the network comes back online. What prevents the selected users from arriving at consensus over the next block?

<comment><USER24> If the network goes down completely, as it's coming back up, groups of nodes will start adding blocks before all of the other nodes are back online. When connectivity is completely restored, you end up with different parallel chains, each of which thinks it's the main chain. With Bitcoin, there's a simple, deterministic way to decide which chain to trust: the one which has had the most work done it. With Algorand, it's not clear what would happen.

<comment><USER26> (I work for Algorand) This is false. The BFT protocol that Algorand uses guarantees that each round may have exactly one block (up to our security assumptions with regard to honest stake); this is one of the protocol's "safety" guarantees. In the case that a large number of participating nodes crash, the network will refuse to produce a block until a sufficient amount of stake begins participating again. Nodes that fall behind can use the standard catchup protocol — the one that nodes new to the network make use of — to pick up where they left off.

<comment><USER24> Calling the case of the network halting "safety" doesn't help things.

To walk through a plausible example: let's say 3 Chinese services control 35% of the stake of Algorand. Without warning or any public announcement, the Chinese government steps in and forces them to turn off their servers. The Algorand network will now stop functioning as it can't reach 2/3rds. Hours go by and no one is able to transact. At this point, the network needs to decide how to proceed. Does everyone just agree to take a complete loss?

Most likely, a group of other stakers would work on a proposal to deal with it, maybe by removing the offline tokens. How do they get consensus for this proposal? And, if they do it, what do they do if the Chinese stakers come back online?

<comment><USER26> In this case the Chinese government can kill the liveness of the network (preventing it from producing new blocks), but not the safety of the network (they can't fork the chain).

Your question has changed into: "doesn't the system break when a malicious party controls 35% of the stake?"

To which the answer is yes. If a malicious party can control 35% of the stake, that is very bad.

I should add, though, that if you know your machine is going to be taken down, you can mark your account as "offline" via a special transaction, which will allow the network to proceed without you by increasing the probability that others will be chosen to be on a committee.

<comment><USER24> "If a malicious party can control 35% of the stake, that is very bad."

That didn't happen in this case. The Chinese government never took anyone's keys or controlled any stake, which is the point of the example.

The malicious parties don't need control. They don't need to take anyone's keys or access their servers. They just need to be able to bring it offline, which is much easier to do.

Which raises the question I asked and you didn't answer: if 35% of the stake goes offline with no signs of coming back, how do participants reach consensus?

<comment><USER26> You are right to call out the difference between "control" in the sense of keys and "control" in the sense of a network adversary. I should have been more careful with my wording there.

It is true that if 35% of the participating stake is suddenly prevented from contacting the network, no new blocks will be created. The word "participating" is important -- you can have stake that is not participating in the agreement protocol, but that is still spendable.

The only way I can think of to mitigate the scenario you've described would be this: before going offline, you can broadcast a transaction which essentially removes your stake from the pool of participating coins until you're able to come online again. This would ensure the network can proceed without you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hadn't heard of vault or Algorand before, but woah, what a team of heavy hitters: Micali, Goldwasser, Andrew Lo, Kenneth Rogoff, Herlihy etc. basically a who's who in CS, Cryptography, Econ & finance. If any group will do crypto right then at least on paper it would look like this team

<comment><USER21> Yup. It's a shame that HN isn't willing to talk about the interesting new research instead of debating around the same philosophical discussions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A "faster, more efficient cryptocurrency" is already in productive operation since 2015. Called "Nano" [https://nano.org/en](https://nano.org/en)

<comment><USER29> Care to elaborate? If this is faster and more efficient, why is it #40 on coinmarketcap.com?

<comment><USER30> Coinmarketcap is not to be taken as a standard of quality. I mean Bitconnect used to be in the top 10 before it was exposed as a massive ponzi scheme.

[https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20171029/](https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20171029/)

Coinmarketcap just reflects what people invest in at a certain time, it doesn't mean that these investments are rational or are based on highly calculated decisions. A lot of coins in the top 100 are copycats, tokens or just concepts, very few are fully functional products.

<comment><USER31> > I mean Bitconnect used to be in the top 10 before it was exposed as a > massive ponzi scheme.

and after

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It seems most of this is already covered by Ethereum, but Ethereum also has much more in the way of functionality and already has very significant resources behind it. Can we incorporate the vaulting concept also into Ethereum? Since it seems like they are trying to steal their thunder I wonder if someone from that camp will come out with a reason vaulting can't work.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's been pretty telling to watch sentiment on HN towards crypto slowly shift from complete disgust to mild curiousity

<comment><USER21> When you look at the big cryptographers behind vault and algorand you understand why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Design reduces by 99 percent the data users need to join the network and > verify transactions.

Is this enough? I'm guessing that if bitcoin would grow to support even 1% of global payments, that 99% performance increase is not going to cut it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Another approach to similar problems is Coda: [https://codaprotocol.com](https://codaprotocol.com) .

<comment> Ar-Curunir Coda takes an entirely different cryptographic approach than Algorand. Different layers of solutions.

<comment><USER21> No it doesn't. Coda can work with Algorand's byzantine agreement protocol.

<comment> Ar-Curunir Sure, but Coda targets a different scalability bottleneck.

<comment><USER21> Hence why it can work with algorand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does this just reduce join bandwidth? If so it's a minor improvement since the real problems with scalability are transaction size and proof of work cost per TX.

<comment><USER37> > With traditional cryptocurrencies, users compete to solve equations that > validate blocks, with the first to solve the equations receiving funds. As > the network scales, this slows down transaction processing times. Algorand > uses a "proof-of-stake" concept to more efficiently verify blocks and better > enable new users join. For every block, a representative verification > "committee" is selected. Users with more money — or stake — in the network > have higher probability of being selected. To join the network, users verify > each certificate, not every transaction.

Seems they've moved to a Proof of Stake solution, rather than a Proof of Work. Ethereum was meant to switch to it, iirc, but never did.

<comment><USER38> Ethereum is still planning the switch. They've combined proof of stake with sharding for scalability, and the combined system is being rolled out in three phases, the first of them this year. There's a complete spec for the first phase, and teams building implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> There are a few cryptocurrencies out there on market and usable with big communities that use 99% less energy and data that bitcoin

<comment><USER40> I should do my own research but I'd appreciate if you can name a few of them.

<comment><USER30> I would name Nano, a very underrated cryptocurrency. Uses DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) instead of Proof of Work, so it doesn't do mining, also it has zero fees and minimal transaction times.

I've ran a full node for some time to support the network, the whole blockchain size was about 5GB, but the downside of zero transaction fees is that there is less incentive for people to run full nodes. I stopped mine out of boredom when the market crashed.

Unfortunately the market is so full of overhyped projects and buzzwords that people are no longer interested in something that just works.

<comment><USER21> If no fees, what are the incentives to accept transactions in a block?

<comment><USER41> Also, what stops you from spamming the network?

<comment><USER30> I've had concerns in this area as well, as far as I know the team performed some stress tests and the network can do 100+ transactions per second, maybe more. There is also a small computation that the hardware needs to perform before sending the transaction, which is only a small guard against spam but pretty useful.

<comment><USER39> afair peak of stress test on main network was >300TPS, on test network is was >1500TPS. there exists dedicated software to create wallets and transaction using GPU, just for stress testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Here is also a lesser known open source project that demonstrates the use of proof-of-stake for energy efficiency, combined with a fixed-width directed acyclic grah with transaction sharding for parallelization. Furthermore, "final" and "stale" blocks are dynamically forgotten to increase storage efficiency.

It achieves 10,000 tx/s on chain and transaction times below 1 minute.

[https://blockclique.io/](https://blockclique.io/)

<comment><USER43> There's also Credits which claims to be the fastest chain at 0.1 second transaction times and to be capable of over 1 million transactions a sec. Though it you run it that fast you use a lot of disk space. [https://credits.com/](https://credits.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is data usage a big problem for Bitcoin?

<comment><USER45> Yeah, I can't run a node without 200GB+ of free storage space. No way I do it on the phone for example.

<comment><USER46> You can bootstrap a node without storing the blockchain. You have to download it though to build up and validate the unspent transaction outputs which are < 1 gb iirc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This seems like just another proof-of-stake currency, albeit with some niceties like sharding and the 'vaulting' mechanism. It'd have all of the issues with a proof-of-stake currency, such as leading to small clique with most of the coins in the system, who get to decide who gets their transactions signed. Can anyone see anything more here or is that all there is?

</comment><comment><USER48> _Up to_ _99%_ more efficient are meaningless number.

Just tell me how much electricity is require for each transaction. How much is required for minning, Maximum possible transaction per second. etc.

I still believe in Blockchain, one way or another for many possible use case once all the technical / unit cost problems are solved. But I remain extremely sceptical of Cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is interesting. It sounds similar to the non-interactive proof of proof of work system that uses "super blocks" of excessive work to prove that blocks in between must have occurred.

[https://nipopows.com/](https://nipopows.com/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Vault is based on proof of stake, which is much less energy intensive than PoW...

</comment><comment><USER51> I was just thinking on my way to work this morning about crypto - it was so much fun riding the thrill late 2017, excluding the tech, it was an exciting time for many. I crave another crypto boom

<comment><USER52> I was in the thick of it and frankly I found it to be pretty cringeworthy to see so many armchair "investment experts" coming out of the woodwork.

<comment><USER51> Well yes, there was a huge cringe factor. I'd say 99.99% of everyone was the opposite, clueless in the midst of it (In hindsight I made my mistakes as well!)

I'm no expert on blockchain, but crypto taught me very very very powerful and insightful investing lessons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It seems the MIT lives in a world were only Bitcoin and Ethereum exist. Seriously, who besides Vitalik Buterin himself considers Ethereum as one of today's most efficient cryptocurrencies?

</comment><comment><USER54> Nano is a crypto that already has some of these qualities and is already brought to market.

[https://nano.org/en](https://nano.org/en)

Disclaimer: I own some nano

</comment><comment><USER46> Hogwash. How can a user be sure that the chain is valid if they don't download the transaction set?

If users cannot verify the amount of coin in the network this is useless.

<comment><USER55> Not usable for certain operations perhaps. But useless? That seems a little extreme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> From the article, it sounds like it uses sharding and pruning to scale. Both are nothing new, pruning has been implemented in many crypto-currencies already, sharding is currently an area of intense development.

Quote "Vault, a cryptocurrency that lets users join the network by downloading only a fraction of the total transaction data. It also incorporates techniques that delete empty accounts that take up space"

</comment><comment><USER57> Wow, I'm pretty disappointed that the entire MIT website isn't secure. What's going on over there? Meanwhile, my random state school has a fully secure https website.

Security is of critical importance to cryptocurrencies, and it's hard to take anyone seriously on that subject if they can't even get the fundamentals of web encryption right.

<comment><USER21> Wow wow wow

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Setting aside the giant environmental debate, does anyone here actually have an opinion of this new cryptocurrency?

e.g. Do you think the advancements are novel, or just a mashup of ideas already tried in other blockchains?

Do any other cryptos do the "breadcrumb" shortcut?

</comment><comment><USER59> This sounds pretty similar to the benefits of MimbleWimble, the design behind Grin (and another earlier system whose name I forget). Grin recently "went live" in the sense that now there's a network that isn't the testnet.

<comment><USER21> Not true

<comment><USER60> How is that not true? In grin you only have to download the block headers and only the last 5000 blocks (called horizon) for a full sync. Bandwidth saving is even greater than 99%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Where can I get the source code?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if the source code has been released, but I think the company funding the research has published an API: [https://developer.algorand.org/docs/installing- mac](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/installing-mac)

<comment><USER62> How can it both claim decentralized trust and be closed-source?

<comment><USER26> (I work for Algorand) The project will be open-sourced prior to the public launch of the network.

<comment><USER63> When will the launch happen?

<comment><USER20> When it's ready.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> But it's still proof of work, right? If it has a ratchet like bitcoin, it becomes uneconomical to mine at some point.

I think proof of space-time (Bram Cohen's and spacemesh.io's currencies are examples) is a better way forward.

</comment><comment><USER65> Crypto currencies have all seemed like an obscurantist version of hot potato. Either the hash gets too long to calculate effectively or the amount of money at stake means very very smart people will start finding ways to hack the coin (and they will).

But basically the deal crypto developers are trying to make with me is to trade US backed dollars for "fun bux". These developers are usually very smart people - often much smarter than I. But I don't like smart. Take US dollars. Little pieces of green paper are very uncomplicated and if anyone starts copying them armed thugs show up at their house to have a very serious discussion. And my corner chemist takes dead presidents on delivery no questions asked.

<comment><USER18> Bro have you looked at the source code for the green paper? There's weird ACL rules, double spending, it's backdoored and pre-mined. Trust me, crypto is wayyy simpler to understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Until the 51% attack problem is "solved" I can't take any cryptocurrency for serious. You can't use the word "secure" with this attack vector being possible.

<comment><USER67> What do you believe about the "51% attack problem"? It's a very overblown concept.

<comment><USER66> [https://twitter.com/etherchain_org/status/108232936094896947...](https://twitter.com/etherchain_org/status/1082329360948969472)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> So basically they re-invented light clients and checkpointing?

</comment><comment><USER69> Interesting, will they accept tuition payments in it?

<comment><USER70> That could be an interesting first use case: accepting partial or full tuition payment or maybe student fees or club/activity fees with this?

<comment><USER69> Yup, that could become big - Facebook started first in academias and first users were students.

<comment><USER70> Agreed, college students can be a good target user-base. Making payment easier/simpler/"more futuristic/cooler" could lead to buy-in/usage. Just recall how it was to interact with your university registrar/bursar...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Could existing Coins switch their network to the new technology or is there something fundamentally in the way of that?

</comment><comment><USER72> Love MIT but truthfully I don't find this is that different from what folks are already implementing.

<comment><USER21> What folks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> This sounds extremely similar to Grin project imho... which was just released last month.

<comment><USER74> Grin is PoW and this seems to be PoS though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> It needs to be simple enough so that a layman can understand, implement and use it.

</comment><comment><USER76> If this kills proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, I'm all for it.

<comment><USER21> It is already dying

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> do we want governments and politicians to use transparent money that can be tracked? hell yes

</comment><comment><USER78> cryptocurrency is and always has been a useless technology in the best tradition of useless technologies: a combination of libertarian aesthetics and a pyramid scheme.

the complaints people have with state currency are basic political problems that cryptocurrencies are not going to resolve. the basic feature that gives state currencies reliability is the backing of the state. without that, and states will never want to give that to cryptocurrencies, they will always be commodities with no stability and no real use value. and all the people who have bought in already will need to sell to a new generation of suckers, regardless of if they conceptualize it like that or not.

</comment><comment><USER79> Anyone still believe this shit after the bitcoin pyramid?

</comment><comment><USER80> Yet another PoS shitcoin... The validation of a cryptocurrency must burn real world asset!

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't call Algorand a shitcoin. There's Bitcoin, altcoins and shitcoins. Altcoins have credible teams exploring alternative architectures, which is fine. And yes current wisdom is there's no free lunch and you have to spend some resource to gain decentralized security. But it's worth having credible altcoins exploring if that rule can, like Neo in the matrix, be bent or broken with some clever crypto or other CS. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> When moon?

</comment><comment><USER82> I propose a "proof of workout" cryptocurrency.

It will make miners fitter with no cost to the environment.

</comment><comment><USER83> As usual assumptions are much stronger than what Bitcoin has. I'm really sorry about the fact that this currency is voted up so much.

<comment><USER84> Well, in some sense that's a good thing. Bitcoin relies on a synchronous network - an honest majority of _online_ miners must be honest. Algorand's safety assumption is stronger - the honest stake need not be "always online", and the system cannot fork even under worst-case asynchrony.

As a result I certainly don't trust Bitcoin with anything more than pocket change. I would, on the other hand, put money on Algorand. A Bitcoin attacker could conceivably DOS a handful of honest miners/network relays (given that mining seems pretty centralized), sequester a third of the mining network, and mint money.

No matter how much DOS power you have, you cannot mint money on Algorand without a substantial proportion of the stake.</comment></comment>


Hacker News Integrates with iPaper - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scribd.com/2008/03/hacker-news-integrates-with-ipaper.html

<comment><USER2> This change makes those types of content completely inaccessible to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Which is funny since Buxfer released their iPhone interface to Hacker News this same day.

Edit:

I'm sure something will change about this, but until then here's a bookmarklet that rewrites iPaper urls to point straight to the original files (take out the line breaks when you make the bookmark):

        javascript:function%20revertScribdLinks(a){for(var%20i=0;i<a.length;i++)
        {a[i].setAttribute(%22href%22,a[i].getAttribute(%22href%22).replace(
        /^.*\.scribd.com.*\?url=(.*)$/,%22$1%22))}}revertScribdLinks(
        document.getElementsByTagName(%22a%22));

<comment><USER3> Nice code, but no need for this. We'll be looking for the iPhone user agent and redirecting automatically to the original file soon. Also, the link to the original file is going to be preserved, either on our side or on Paul's.

<comment><USER4> It appears to be a Flash wrapper for PDF that breaks my keyboard shortcuts, scrolling (by either spacebar or mousewheel), zooming, and searching.

Is this an improvement on some platform, like Windows? Could you whitelist those platforms, instead of blacklisting iPhones?

I suppose I could have my browsers (on Mac and Linux) claim to be an iPhone for HN, but that seems like a silly hack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suggested (222 days ago) a way that'd make it easy for me to remember at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661>

        http://<address><uri> becomes http://<address>.pdf.scribd.com<uri>

        http://www.janestcapital.com.pdf.scribd.com/yaron_minsky-cufp_2006.pdf

Instead of pdf.scribd.com it'd obviously be nicer if it was just scribd.com. It's easy in BIND to set a wildcard record for everything except the subdomains you actually use.

<comment><USER6> It may come down to personal preference, but you can already cleanly pass the PDF's url as a GET parameter to /slurp.

So, your URL would become:

      http://scribd.com/slurp?url=http://www.janescapital.com/yaron_minsky-cufp_2006.pdf

<comment><USER5> I understand that, and you've definitely done the important part of making it so docs don't have to be uploaded via a form. That's a big deal. I think if you made it really easy to remember people would get in the habit of doing it when they linked. They're not going to go to your website and find "/slurp?url=" every time though. It should be simple enough to remember off the top of your head.

 _"Documents on the web causing you pain? Just add scribd.com to the domain!"_

Yes. I'm a cheesy bastard like that. Thanks for responding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> sorry, but I prefer to be redirected to the original url

maybe there should be a supplementary shortcut to scribd, that would be more reasonable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or maybe the title should point to the iPaper version and a [PDF] or [PPT] link pointing to the original URL should be automatically placed next to the title. No need to include it manually part of the title for those kind of files.

<comment><USER7> sounds good

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry this is unrelated, but I must see the integration in action.

Lorem ipsum pdf: <http://jedidiah.stuff.gen.nz/marbles-presentation.pdf>

Hm. Guess iPaper integration ain't in comments. That's kind of sad. Why not?

EDIT: Someone else made a test story that linked to a pdf: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134854>

</comment><comment><USER9> this should have been submitted as a pdf ;-)</comment>


Starcity launches $1k a month rooms in Oakland - <AUTHOR> https://starcity.com/communities/downtown-oakland <comment><USER2> Cohousing/co living are good solutions to ongoing housing crisis in Ca. Best of luck to them!</comment>


Focus on What Matters: Building Product and Getting Customers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wepay.com/blog/2011/03/25/focus-on-what-matters-building-product-and-getting-customers/ <comment><USER2> Certainly. The most important thing in the first stage of _any_ business is _selling_ (a.k.a. getting customers or users) and figuring out the most effective way to do so. Not design, not logos, not getting funding, not adding features, and not even refining and perfecting what you already have. There's no point in polishing a turd or putting it in a fancy suit if you can't figure out how to get any traction for the basic version.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more.

I'm always more impressed by the companies that show a list of customers before they launch, then the companies assuming they need to launch to get customers (or that launching will necessarily lead to additional customers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Noteleaf is great, but it can't tell you why you're meeting somebody or whether it's a poor use of your time."

This is somewhat orthogonal to the meaning of the conclusion, but maybe they could track that somehow. Add some kind of "why" description when you create a meeting and then afterwards allow you to rate it on usefulness?

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the cofounders of Noteleaf here:

Perhaps, but one thing we've found as a rule is that people don't want to do work in order to gain something. Only a small percentage of would likely want to write something in a why description and rate it thereafter.

Now if there was something to be gained by the user, like a shot of happiness, bragging rights, increase social capital, then they'd be willing to rate their meetings.

But for the time being, we don't have anything that would be compelling enough for people to do that.

<comment><USER5> How about rewarding them with a coupon? Only half joking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely right!!! I would also like to add one more thing here.

That is taking great care of employee.

Someone might ask how about investors? Well, If we do these three things right, the outcome should make investors happy.</comment>