Lightweight versions of websites without all the bloat - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites <comment><USER3> We need a Web again. A hypertext document browsing system. Update the basic elements like they should have been updated 20+ years ago (sortable tables seems like a no-brainer to include in base HTML, there's got to be a way to update frames so they suck less and fit 90+% of the legit uses of AJAXy page updates, improved form elements like you get in a real GUI toolkit, file upload with preview, and so on) but NO javascript, NO talking to any server behind the user's back. Once the page loads my network connection should be silent until I click a link. I should get a preview of what a form's about to send. Anything but a GET to any server but the one I'm currently on, flatly disallowed. Somewhere you can browse hypertext documents with high performance, in safety, with no spying.

This one can be abandoned to spyware and apps. Whatever. That's fine. But I don't want safe hyptertext browsing comingled with the same program that can and constantly does load spyware and other abusive junk.

<comment><USER4> There's nothing stopping you from browsing that way if it's what you want. Install uMatrix, uBlock, and a couple other extensions, and you can lock down pages as much as you want. You can even take it a step further and use an older browser that doesn't support the modern features you're complaining about.

Unfortunately, what you can't do is force everybody else to participate. HTML3 still works great in modern browsers, but the people making the sites want to use modern features.

<comment><USER5> > There's nothing stopping you from browsing that way if it's what you want.

There is. Pages that don't work without Javascript.

<comment><USER4> That was my point. You can control your browser, but you can't control what other people offer up.

<comment><USER5> And that's what's stopping them from browsing a sane web.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but nobody's twisting their arm to use those websites.

Making yourself out to be a victim doesn't make it so.

<comment><USER6> Saying that you have perfect choice when half of the things you _need_ to use use dark patterns rife with abuse does not make it true either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great to see a post about lightweight websites having over 100 upvotes.

To me, the "heaviness" of the web is making it much less enjoyable then it could be.

As a user, I regularly read the HN discussion of an article rather then the article itself. Simply because HN is so lean and other websites are usually bloated. So bloated, that I prefer to infer the content from the HN discussion just so I can avoid visiting the website.

I run multiple very lightweight websites myself:

[http://www.gnod.com](http://www.gnod.com)

I categorically refuse to add heavy assets or frontend libraries.

Many of my developer friends insist that "Normal users don't care!". I am not so sure. I wonder how big the target audience for "Lightweight websites" really is. Would love to see a poll that asks people "How much do you like the typical website? What are the most common reasons that make you dislike a website?".

<comment><USER8> > _Many of my developer friends insist that "Normal users don't care!". I am > not so sure._

I am with you. I've spoken to a lot of non-technical users in my life. Their very typical and often response on the matter is "it is how it is, I cannot change it, of course it's annoying but I have no alternative" \-- this is about ads, heavyweight sites and possible tracking/spying.

So IMO most non-technical people accept it as a fact of life but would rejoice if the Web became lightweight again.

<comment><USER9> > _So IMO most non-technical people accept it as a fact of life but would > rejoice if the Web became lightweight again._

Yup. There's also a subset of non-tech people who don't have a basic mental model for how things work; from those, I hear "my computer is slow, probably has viruses, could you help?". I come, and the computer is often fine - it's popular websites that just went through another bloat-up cycle, and the computer struggles with them. Installing uBlock can make such computer live for another year, but ultimately people end up discarding perfectly good hardware just because the web keeps accruing bloat.

<comment><USER10> >So IMO most non-technical people accept it as a fact of life but would rejoice if the Web became lightweight again.

What most non-technical people want is for the web they're using _now_ to work faster. The problem is, the people who want to make the web lightweight again seem to want to do so by eliminating the modern web entirely. No one seems to be asking how we could make the web that exists, and that billions of people actually use, better.

<comment><USER8> I am asking. What would you propose?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently started a subreddit with a similar goal: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb/.compact](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb/.compact)

Explanation: [http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/spartan_web.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/spartan_web.html)

<comment><USER12> This is cool! I would appreciate pull-requests to add these to the repository

Otherwise I will take a look at them later on myself

<comment><USER11> Submitted a few I found fitting: [https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite- websites/compare/ma...](https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite- websites/compare/master...qznc:patch-1)

There is no section for individual blogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if anyone here would agree to pay a small subscription fee, say $2/month, to get a text only version of websites. No to minimal images, no to almost minimal CSS flash/bloat/design. Pretty close to reading things on a newspaper.

<comment><USER14> What's wrong with the various reader modes that Safari and FF already have? They're great at de-formatting a page to it's base article. No cruft. It's very newspaper style. (Chrome has reader plugins that can doing this too)

Not sure what your $2 would be doing another than adding an actor between me and the page I wish to read. For privacy purposes, I'll be keeping well clear of such "solutions".

<comment><USER15> Dont you normally have to wait for the heavy site to load before switching to reader?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is fantastic. I have a thing for older laptops and many modern websites are too bloated to run on them. I might use some of these on every machine... why waste cycles when I just want to read?

<comment><USER17> I have a 2018 MacBook Pro, and reddit "lags" in safari unless I use the old version.

<comment><AUTHOR> On my netbooks I have been using the html only version of Gmail because it became faster than the modern web app.

<comment><USER18> I use it everywhere now. It loads instantly, it's amazing. The only thing I miss is the auto categorization, I have to filter out all the newsletters with my brain now.

<comment><USER19> You can also setup filters which are easy to do in gmail and work better than autocategorization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't like that this conflates bloat with JS.

I have a minimal chat application that heavily relies websockets and JS, that said, it strives to be data minimal. The heaviest part is the initial load of emoji images which get cached. Other than that there are no third party scripts or data transfer.

I get that JS can suck and be abused, but I don't really understand the complete allergy to it. A websocket implementation is going to have a lot less overhead than page loads for everything.

<comment><USER21> The article is talking about _websites_ , not webapps --- i.e. document- oriented sites, for which JS is really not necessary. For a realtime interactive application like chat, however, the circumstances are different.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure that's the case, there are a number of the sites on this list, like Facebook and Reddit, that I definitely wouldn't categorize as _document- oriented_. It seems more of an issue with both how resource intensive the JS- heavy sites are, as well as the purpose of the JS- is it used to track me and invade my privacy, or does the JS have a legitimate use (as in a chat application)? Personally I LOVE JS-powered websites/webapps, as it means that as a lone developer I have the ability to create a website as powerful as a desktop application, without developing multiple versions for each OS/app store. So I, too, don't wish to see a massive backlash against JS, only against _bad JS_.

<comment><USER9> Facebook we could dispute once we include the chat (though the chat is available as separate Messenger site/app), but without it it's almost entirely a document-oriented experience. Profiles, timeline, posts, comments - <USER2> are all just glorified documents with forms. The same is true about the entirety of Reddit - it's document-oriented by nature.

Consider HN as an example of a document-oriented social media site _actually implemented_ as documents.

<comment><USER22> Even the chat application mentioned previously could be viewed as (and implemented as) "documents with forms". This oversimplification doesn't help us much. It's the powerful, real-time interactivity that javascript provides that is being debated here.

<comment><USER23> The question is whether the real-time interactivity is _desirable_. For a chat widget, it almost certainly is. It's less clear for something like Reddit, where the main mechanism for getting updates to the page you're currently viewing is to explicitly refresh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is this the top voted story barely 40 minutes after submission? Are people really excited for 20 links, most of which aren't even "lite" websites?

Every now and then there's an odd top story on HN which makes me wonder who actually reads this site. I guess I'm not hip enough!

<comment><USER25> I'd guess there's high correlation between people who want this and people who use emacs, which is a non-trivial portion of HN readers.

<comment><USER9> Don't know how one relates to the other, but I for one know a couple of web sites which UX would vastly improve, were they accessed through Emacs instead of the web browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would like to see more developement towards features like the "reading mode" in browsers. There is no good reason why the style of text should vary between websites. The same is true for many other "features". Why do tables with data look (and feel) different across websites? Why does every website implement user registration/login in it's own unique way? Every website has it's own navigation style/concept - instead of allowing me to use my choice for all websites (as a browser setting). The downsite though is less creativity/innovation.

<comment><USER15> Im with you.

Id like to see a browser come out that does this. Reading mode by default, along with some p2p network of userstyles and templates. Opera sort of did this once, where the community maintained .js patches to make websites work better in the browser. It would be nice to have a set of standard browser templates, and then be able to have an on/off button for "allow most popular community patches to load automatically," those patches basically being css tweaks for sites that dont quite fit a template.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The examples on the page are still fundamentally bloated. Take a look at the source of any example and you will find the regular div soup albeit not burdened by 106 cookies and 46 tracking scripts.

The web has HTML5 elements and the CSS grid layout engine that can be made fully responsive with maintainable CSS variables to look excellent in evergreen browsers. However nobody is able to code up a page this way as there is so much technical debt in the way web development teams work and the hacks that can't be dispensed with overnight.

Recently I tried to make a CMS form look pretty. The forms needed have to have the simplest markup, e.g. label followed by input, label followed by input with those inputs having HTML5 niceties such as placeholders and the 'required fields' being styled with simple CSS that is based on 'required=true' being on the input boxes. However, the templates had two divs and spans around the labels and two more divs around the inputs with a container div holding it all together, everything decorated with untold class tags. To make this look good and responsive in CSS grid I needed to get rid of all of it apart from the inputs and labels. If I didn't have confidence in what I was doing I would have just added yet more CSS and yet more complexity.

Anyone can make stuff complex, making stuff simple and concise is an entirely different skill. None of the examples on this list have fully grasped what a modern web page should be like. It is as if nobody has taken the time to learn how to write content with the correct elements and then style it up for the evergreen browsers people actually use with modern CSS.

<comment><USER28> Any suggested resources or examples to learn from?

<comment><USER27> I do not actually see a concise course out there that puts it all together. I am a big fan of Rachel Andrews, Jen Simmons and Lea Verou, however, at the moment it really requires some DIY effort to get everything learned. You also need a project such as your own portfolio site to have a go with.

Given there is no guide out there I think I had better write one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was unaware of reddit.compact, looks even better than old.reddit.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anybody know of a good browser extension to apply some default CSS to sites you visit? It took me just 4 lines to turn the CSS-free NPR site into something that I enjoy reading.

Before and after: [https://imgur.com/a/EJympO9](https://imgur.com/a/EJympO9)

<comment><USER18> font-family, font-size, max-width, what's the fourth one?

<comment><USER25> line-height

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> CNN is night and day...

<comment><USER31> The regular CNN site isn't even usable in Lynx

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> HN pedantry of the day: 'lite' vs 'light'. I screamed internally a bit at "a list of _lite_ websites", so naturally I looked up the definition and etymology.

It turns out that _lite_ is basically a modifier for product names. Early in the 20th century it was used for products like "Auto-Lite" and "Adjusto-Lite", apparently as a diminutive form of "light". But then later it was used to connote fewer calories (as in "Miller Lite", "Kikkoman Lite") whereas other products still use the full form ("Yoplait Light"). _Lite_ 's other definition is "diminished or lacking in substance or seriousness ... innocuous or unthreatening", implying an almost childish, immature, or unthreatening form.

In this website's case, the list is specifically referring to the "weight" or "heft" of the websites, relative to the content which isn't solely what the user is looking for. It also is not referring to a product name. That falls squarely under the definition for _light_ , and not _lite_.

But the name of the repo, _awesome-lite-websites_ , can be seen as a product name. So the word _lite_ fits for the name, but not in the description. (indeed, in the README the word "lightweight" is correctly used)

[1] [https://grammarist.com/words/lite/](https://grammarist.com/words/lite/) [2] [https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/10/lite-or-light- whi...](https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/10/lite-or-light-which- spelling-is-right.html) [3] [https://www.etymonline.com/word/lite](https://www.etymonline.com/word/lite)

</comment><comment><USER33> The web brought us easy access to static content. Then, interactive web apps appeared and mixed code with content. Easy access to content need up restricted by new rules designed by app owners.

So, could a better separation of content from software improve the situation?

</comment><comment><USER34> The twitter mobile version is also the "new" standard desktop version if you enable it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Should also check out wiby.me, it is a search engine that only contains lightweight websites.

</comment><comment><USER36> Added +2000 bonus points if : uBlock (0), as in text.npr.org or HN.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why does ddg do a POST request?

</comment><comment><USER38> Is there a plugin that automatically sends me to the lighter version of a site if it exists?</comment>


Yet another variant on reddit:  Submitter determines and can change rank of link on front page - <AUTHOR>

The idea here is that the submitter determines the rank of his/her link.  Moreover, the submitter may change this rank at any time.<p>The issue is that a link ranked highly will have to share that rank with many links.  The probability that a user will see a link at rank k depends on the score of that link with respect to the scores of other links with rank k.<p> <comment><USER2> Aka meta-ranking. Digg already does this transparently by asserting the links initial rank based on the popularity of the users past submissions. But I get your point on having a truely democratic user-driven ranking system.</comment>


IPhones start slowing down after a year - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/20/16803190/iphone-slowdown-is-needed-but-also-a-problem <comment><USER2> If your battery is only reduced by 8% after a couple of years, why does the device have a artificial, significant decrease in performance after just one year?

Worse yet, Apple doesn't disclose this and it took an independent researcher to actually measure it and discover this. Wonder why? Smells a bit reminiscent of VW's diesel strategy.

"Thank you for spending your precious, discretionary income on a new Tesla! Your new vehicle will automatically slow down as it ages, because random battery parts will wear out, and going slower 'helps stop random shutdowns, which are a major pain.' By year five, your vehicle's max speed will be artificially limited to approximately 20 mph. We can help with that if you bring it in to an authorized manufacturer-owned store, assuming there is one in your country, or ship it to us at your cost, where we will replace a random part at only 20% the cost of a new Tesla. You could do this every year to maintain peak performance, but we prefer that you don't know about this at all and just buy a new car from us instead."

Planned obsolescence, with an air of plausibility to its reckless, environmentally unsound _' science'_ that forces you to dispose of the phone (if you don't know about this pre-programmed slowdown) or battery (if you do) before it actually ceases being useful to you.. brilliant.

But, when you get that shiny new phone home, you're blown away at how 'fast' it is compared to your previous phone.

It's actually _breathtakingly_ brilliant, in an evil genius sort of way.

<comment><USER3> The slowdown is related to battery health. For some devices, it starts happening after a year; for others it takes longer.

Replacing the battery restores normal performance. You don't need to go to an authorised repair shop.

<comment><USER4> Any responsible manufacturer would notify users about faulty hardware and not try to hide the problem.

<comment> forgot-my-pw It's not considered faulty, more like degraded over time. So the CPU is throttled when the battery is no longer optimal to preserve battery life?

I rather have shorter battery life with same performance so it's more noticeable that I need to replace the battery.

<comment><USER4> Apple says that if they don't throttle it then phone can suddenly shut down (battery overheats, fail-safes shut the power so it doesn't explode) under certain circumstances, which is perceived as fault by end user.

I would like to be informed of this "Your battery is starting to fail". Same way as SMART monitoring in disk drives tells you that it degraded too much and will break soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few things that I haven't seen discussed much.

1\. Battery degradation should happen to all phones, regardless of OS/manufacturer. How do other phones handle this (flagship Android phones etc.)?

2\. If other phones don't experience these shutdowns on such a wide scale or don't throttle the performance so harshly (to literally half or one third of original performance) to avoid shutdowns, what about the iPhone is different to force them into this decision?

Geekbench which posted the larger group of data confirming this, they could probably run the same analysis on S8 phones from Samsung.

Now, if the same does not happen on other phones, the entire debate being framed as it currently is, is a pretty amazing PR spin.

It's much easier to justify the decision between phones shutting down or throttling the device, than it would be to justify a engineering decision that makes the above two choices the only choices, despite other vendors being able to seemingly pull off this magic trick of keeping devices working for more than a year.

With all of Apple's resources and engineering know-how, it seems a stretch that they would be the only ones incapable of solving this issue.

I don't actually know if other vendors solve it differently, but I do know that they have the same battery life, the same phone thinness and powerful specs.

Does anyone have a clue about this? Seems like the more interesting story.

<comment><USER6> If you bought a car and it stopped working after a year because the battery failed, you would expect to be able to change the battery yourself.

<comment><USER7> The ol' car analogy has failed you here.

Cars do sometimes stop working after a year because their batteries fail and the great majority of people in that situation take their cars to a repair shop rather than do the work themselves.

Actually, the battery in a phone is more comparable to the entire fuel delivery and ignition system in a car, not just the battery. Even fewer people could handle that work on their own.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it is relevant "who" changes "what" (you or a specialized technician).

The point revolves more around whether replacing a vital component after only one year of normal use would be covered by warranty (in EU for consumers warranty is two years for _everything_ ).

Another interesting point is how you discover that some part needs to be replaced.

For the car, it is easy, one morning it won't start.

What if (say) Ford or Chevrolet (or Volkswagen that has some documented experience in the field ;)) had a hidden electronic device that - in order to save the battery and your next morning start of the car - progressively dimmed a litte bit your head and tail lights and/or lowered the heating or the cooling set temperature slightly, starting, still say, after six month?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm going to throw out an impossible solution to this problem. It's impossible because it's very un-Apple.

Let the user choose their own fate. I know, I know, that's crazy talk, right? If given the option on my old iPhone 6 plus, I would have chose to maybe have the phone shut off suddenly at 40% battery life and run at full speed. On the rare days when I'm going to be heavily using my device (and not near constant power) I could change the setting so that it would run slower, but not freak out with battery problems.

This assumes that Apple doesn't know best, and that the user actually has a say in the matter, which goes against iOS / OS X / Apple at a deep, philosophical level.

<comment><USER10> >> If given the option on my old iPhone 6 plus, I would have chose to maybe have the phone shut off suddenly at 40% battery life and run at full speed.

This sort of begs the question - if your phone is shutting off suddenly at 40%, is the battery really at 40%?

People have certain preconceived expectations when they see a percentage. The best analog I can think of is a gas tank. People know that how they drive affects their fuel consumption, but they also know that when their gas tank is 40% full, their car's not going to shut off suddenly.

Perhaps we need to look at using a different measure than percent to indicate remaining battery life. Having said that, I don't know what that different measure would be.

<comment><USER11> Batteries have a predictable discharge cycle. They're fully charged when their output voltage stops increasing and as they discharge the output voltage slowly falls until it reaches a certain threshold where the output voltage is no longer enough to power the device. That cut off voltage is a fixed number. The part that varies is the time it takes to go from fully charged to the cut off voltage.

As a battery degrades, the time is reduced.

Regardless of what the initial voltage is, a plot can be drawn based on measurements of the voltage to see how quickly it's approaching the cut off voltage.

So the battery capacity should really be where the voltage is relative to the last peak when fully charged compared to the cut off voltage.

If Apple is reporting a battery at 40% capacity when it cuts off then they're fudging their numbers.

<comment><USER12> Drawing power causes voltage drops; I suspect what they're saying is that a degraded battery under heavy load will momentarily drop from 40% to under cutoff threshold.

<comment><USER11> Large voltage drops under load are typically an indication of a bad cell or battery. You could argue this is beneficial to the customer but Apple is hiding the fact that they're doing this. Why?

I recall when they switched to non-replaceable batteries in MacBooks, they boasted how their battery lives were the best and would last x years. Is this how they did it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another way to look at this is Apple isn't putting in the right sized batteries in their phones because they believe thinner phone is a better phone. If all it takes is one year for the phone battery to stop providing enough juice to the CPU/GPU then either the battery is not of adequately designed capacity or the CPU/GPU has too much peak power draw for the battery.

Either way looks like a design issue that's just too convenient for Apple to keep selling new phones each year. If they put slightly thicker battery with adequate spare capacity or reduced peak power draw for their SoC people can get 2+ years of consistent performance out of their device. Instead Apple is designing to provide one year of peak performance followed by slow downs so you can go out and get the new phone next year - sounds not very user friendly to me no matter if it looks intentional or not.

<comment><USER14> Who in the world would run right out and buy a new iPhone if their last one became unusable in one year?

People switch _to_ the iPhone because of their longer usable life compared to the competition. People pay _more_ for old iPhones compared to the competition because of their longer usable life. Not only is it not in Apple's interest to make self-destructing phones, to even accuse them of that requires ignoring the entire history of iPhone adoption and resale value.

Further, there is no "one year" for batteries. Batteries with more charge cycles degrade faster. Batteries that push peak performance more often degrade faster. Batteries that spend time in extreme heat and cold degrade faster. Because of this, a simple anecdote of "throttling after a year" means even less than usual.

No-one has data on how much throttling is going on, but Apple. The best proxy we have is the aggregate purchasing decisions of people who had iPhones, and the prices of used iPhones. And people with iPhones overwhelmingly keep buying iPhones. And the prices of used iPhones aren't going anywhere. This "Apple makes self-destructing phones" theory needs a rest.

<comment><USER15> > Who in the world would run right out and buy a new iPhone if their last one > became unusable in one year?

A lot of people? I'm sure there are tons of people who do this where cost isn't an issue.

<comment><USER14> Let's assume some measurable number of people might do this, purely for arguments sake. Why does the resale value of old iPhones not reflect these devices being "unusable?"

<comment><USER13> You keep saying unusable - nobody said throttling makes it unusable, just slower than a year ago when you bought it. Value of iPhones is irrespective of the Apple admitted fact that they do in fact throttle older phones. Some one year later and some two but it is a known fact that it happens. What it has to do with resale values is a separate thing that would be interesting to debate if Apple had not verified the throttling part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just a heads up to everyone. I had my 6S battery swapped for free under Apple warranty last weekend. The CPU has remained at 1848mhz the entire time since, all the way down to 1%. It no longer throttles the frequency. You should contact Apple if you're having whacky slowdown issues. Because my old phone feels brand new again.

[https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/](https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/)

<comment><USER17> How was your 6S still under warranty? Were you able to claim "manufacturing defect" to Apple?

<comment><USER16> [https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/](https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/)

Type in your serial number, and it's probably covered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Or Apple could make it easier and cheaper to replace the iPhone's battery

Apple charges $79 to replace a battery. Seems cheap to me. And, btw I have been running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8%. Seems pretty good to me. I think peoples expectations are just absurd.

<comment><USER19> > I think peoples expectations are just absurd.

From the perspective of environmentalism, I think all phones should have mandatory replaceable batteries. Is that really so absurd? Why are companies allowed to design devices with such disregard for the environment.

<comment><USER20> All phones _do_ have replaceable batteries, if you're brave enough.

But Apple sets the bravery bar extremely high. The process of replacing a battery in e.g. my SE is _insane_ : [https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+SE+Battery+Replacement/6...](https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+SE+Battery+Replacement/61303) describes the teardown, and [https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+Battery+Adhesive+Strips+...](https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+Battery+Adhesive+Strips+Replacement/56465) the process of applying adhesive to the replacement battery - yes, that second task is complex and difficult enough to require an entire separate guide of its own.

I get that the goal of this design is to ensure that the battery _does not move_ once it's fixed into the case. And I understand why that's necessary. What I don't understand is why it can't practicably be achieved by a combination of closer dimensional tolerances and the application of some thin elastomer to the parts of the case that contact the battery. Given the complexity of the assembly process, I can't imagine that such a design would be more difficult to assemble than the one that shipped, and it would provide a considerably more approachable battery replacement process - I'm not shy about performing my own device repairs, and I'm good enough at it that I haven't ruined anything yet, but this is one where I'd rather pay the $79 to have it done in an Apple store, and the adhesive is about 95% of why.

<comment><USER21> And all humans _do_ have replaceable kidneys and hearts but we cant't go around hot swapping them on a hike.

<comment><USER20> The expressed concern around environmentalism suggests we're discussing this in a context of replacing batteries rather than throwing phones away, instead of hot-swapping batteries to keep using a device while away from a charger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think the outrage is excessive and I am more inclined to think poorly of the people not outraged by this. And those ok with the price of replacing something that should be user replaceable anyway.

This is one of the richest companies in the world who charge some ridiculous prices for their products arbitrarily slowing down older models of their phones on purpose for no other reason than to force their customers to upgrade to newer phones. Planned obsolescence. Their stated reason for doing this is smacks of bullshit.

<comment><USER23> I'm in full agreement with you. A good chunk of the comments in this thread seem ridiculous to me. Some people not deeming these users as doing anything important enough ("Most users just use their phones for casual internet browsing, candy crush, and texting.") to get what they paid for.

Here's another one, apparently straight from Apple's marketing team: "It makes perfect sense for Apple to optimize their devices for stability and max run time."

This was perfectly timed to come out just after the silly Mozilla thing, with people talking about how they've lost trust in the company; here's Apple gimping their hardware and not telling their paying customers a damn thing about it.

<comment><USER22> The difference between the Mozilla thing and this though is the level of outrage and the fact people are actually trying to make excuses for Apple.

Mozilla did their thing imho in all naivety. Someone there thought that would be "cool" you know because Mr robot is cool, but clearly missed the point.

Apple have a history of trying to pass off design flaws as features; antennagate anyone? As far as I'm concerned if you know that a component will deteriorate over time like a battery making it practically impossible to replace is a design flaws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I smell a lawsuit coming. Its perfectly fine if the phones are designed to slow down as long as this information is disclosed to the customers. Intentionally misleading customers is illegal. Its probably splitting hairs, but I can easily see a law firm looking into this.

</comment><comment><USER25> The only reason I'm upset by this is speculative.

If I buy a 'boost' battery case because I know the battery is going to be getting worse with time does their software solution acknowledge this and let me keep the full speed my phone should have?

<comment><USER26> No, it only checks the battery state. I'm suspicious it runs off the battery even when plugged in, and works like power>charge controller>battery>power management>system rather than power>power management>system when plugged in(or "plugged in" to a case). An iphone usually wont boot with no battery

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Apple's power management decisions have always been a little... odd. This throttling reminds me of their older Macbooks with removable batteries, which would actually slow down when running on mains power only, because they (deliberately) designed their AC adapters to not be able to supply enough power to run the computer at full load:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080913210306/http://support.ap...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080913210306/http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2332)?

The exact opposite of all other laptops I've used, where AC-only/AC+battery will be the highest performance, with battery-only being the least.

It'd be interesting to see if these iPhones run faster or slower when plugged in and charging.

<comment><USER28> I just ran Geekbench with it plugged in. Got the same crappy performance with an iPhone 6, getting 1000, when it should be 1400. Here I was hoping a battery case would do the trick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This brings to mind Louis CK's "everything's amazing and nobody's happy" routine from several years ago[1]. Sure, Apple could communicate this, and a thousand other trade-offs like it, but that would shatter the illusion which people pay Apple so much money for: a magic black box that just works.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4)

</comment><comment><USER30> It makes perfect sense for Apple to optimize their devices for stability and max run time. These are arguably the most important features of any device.

Any other behavior, including offering the user power options (because many users won't understand them) would introduce a poorer user experience (abrupt hard shutdowns, constant need to charge) and likely sway some portion of non- tech users to purchase a different brand when they refresh.

At the end of the day the battery is replaceable and if you chose to buy an iPhone you're already aware that they it is a "premium" device.

<comment><USER31> Spoken like a tone-deaf apple PR person. The entire furor around this suggests your opinion is not shared by the general populace. A problem I usually run into with product managers.

<comment><USER30> A the verge article represents the opinion of the general populace? Please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's a tradeoff, would you rather have to charge it more or have it slow down slightly to extend battery life?

<comment><USER33> It's disingenuous on Apple's part to slow down the phone without notifying the user. So instead of a user knowing the battery is degrading and can be replaced for just $79, the user is led to think the phone performance is degrading and probably needs to upgrade the whole thing.

<comment><USER4> But the part that makes this trick even more ingenious is that you will not notice phone slowing down by 1% every month and write it off as being some sort of observational bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the outrage is a bit excessive. People buy apple phones because they want all the technical details abstracted away and they don't want to have to make the decisions on things like the tradeoff between clock speed and battery life. That's Apple's selling point in a way, making technology accessible.

If you want to tune your core voltages then isn't that what Android is for?

<comment><USER35> People aren't upset because they cannot tune the voltage themselves; they're upset because of a lack of communication.

You cannot make informed purchasing decisions if manufacturers are hiding this kind of information from you. How many people bought a new iPhone due to degraded performance when a new battery would have fixed it right up? People didn't have the information to make that choice, and I believe that's what's upsetting at least some people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This situation provides another good argument for the need for Free software operating systems, especially on mobile devices.

</comment><comment><USER37> I did not notice a big difference with my iPhone 6 and 10.2. I have noticed a difference with 11.2. Very low sample counts of CPU frequency using the "CPU DasherX" app seem to back this up: my CPU has gone from running at 1.4GHz prior to 11.2 to 600-839MHz after the 11.2 update.

I'm averaging roughly 3.25 years per iPhone, having upgraded from 3GS to 4 to 6 over the past ten years. I'm going to replace the battery on my 6 and see how long I can keep it going.

</comment><comment><USER38> One should be able to repair and swap batteries in electronics including the batteries. It is not sustainable for the environment to buy and throw cell phones every few years apart. One should alas be able to reuse components such as displays.

If one would be able to swap batteries in the iPhone and Samsung s7 there would have been a less issue.

Phones should also have boot loaders allowing free operating systems. It would help with new environmental laws demanding reapairability.

<comment><USER39> > It is not sustainable for the environment to buy and throw cell phones every > few years apart.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but is this part actually true? How does the environmental impact of creating a phone compare with that of creating a TV which might only last 10 years, or a car? Feels to me like the phone impact must be pretty minimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My question would be - how are you supposed to know when to replace the battery? You can judge your battery capacity fairly decently yourself - if the phone used to be at 40% after a day of hard use and now it barely makes it to bedtime you know its degraded. Measuring relative performance of the phone would be very difficult to gauge yourself. Granted, in both situations you could have other issues (unknown apps running etc), but if you aren't changing anything about your phone for the most part you'll know when the battery is not doing as good as it has. You then know to replace it.

Even if this isn't planned obsolescence, it is tangential to it. They know they are putting a new phone out every year or so, and they are hedging their bets that people will move to it so this decision makes total sense for them financially. It feels underhanded even if not fraudulent, they made a decision that is better for them than you. God forbid you have to charge your phone during the day?

<comment><USER14> Apple needs to do _way_ better at informing the user when the battery is notably degraded, and when that degradation is leading to notable throttling.

Particularly, when as the throttling is severe (more than 25% or so) and when the user is encountering it with any frequency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is another example of a corporation that's too greedy and dishonest. Apple is by no means the only one. I'm sure there are going to be many "fan boys" and girls or maybe marketeers that will try to justify this, but the fact remains that the company that manufactures and sells the most expensive device in the market and has 100% control over the hardware and software , is degrading its performance on purpose. The user has no knowledge of this (hence the lying) and doesn't have the option of replacing the battery in an easy way. Who tells me that this isn't part of a strategy so that the user will buy the newest and more expensive phone...

</comment><comment><USER42> 100% there will be multiple class action lawsuits regarding this. Whether it's right or wrong going to be people that will wanna see if they can throw something against the wall and make it stick.

</comment><comment><USER43> In January, 2016, I put my two-month-old 6S into the Apple battery case, and it's been there to this day. One of the benefits of the case is that it uses the case's external battery first. During a typical day, I never use the internal battery (when traveling I end up using both).

I don't have any empirical evidence to support it, but I've noticed no degradation in performance of the phone. Given this news I'd like to attribute that to the minimal use of the internal battery.

<comment><USER44> How does your phone know it need use your case battery first?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The last time I replaced a battery was for my 5S and I noticed it definitely got snappier. My SE is a year old right now at 92% and I'm quite happy with it. I suppose if I was running benchmarks on it all day long, I'd notice. Maybe if I was doing mobile gaming and losing, I'd notice. But I don't.

So if this approach gives me a more hours albeit less snappier hours, I'm good with this. But it should be a mode.

</comment><comment><USER46> This was a surprise to me. I always thought Apple engineers worked on the next flagship device and the lag on older hardware was because they didn't optimize iOS for the older devices. As an app developer myself I tend to test my app on the latest device that I could get hold of and the older devices are an after thought (most of the time).

</comment><comment><USER47> It would be quite different if they reduced speed without a need to control battery expenditure. Planned obsolescence is a benefit to future sales, but seems this is a technical requirement to work around limitations of batteries.

Transparency to end user would be helpful to end user. Doesn't full performance come back when running on wire power?

</comment><comment><USER48> How is this news like 3 or 4 times? I'm serious when I say I believe this has hit the frontpage that many times or more...

</comment><comment><USER49> Woah. I have a 2013 macbook that was getting pretty sluggish even for browsing. Thankfully the battery is easily removeable and I could test this. After removing it I noticed a great difference! I'll try to live with the dangers of a sudden power loss from the cable unplugging.

Why throttle the ac connected devices?

</comment><comment><USER50> Apple seems to be side-stepping the real issue: them not making iPhones with user-replaceable batteries.

There are multiple ways in which Apple can do _planned obsolescence_ without actually there being a record somewhere of a "meeting on planning to make the iPhone obsolete".

</comment><comment><USER51> Why can't this just be rolled into "Low Power Mode" or something?

I have a charger at work, at home, and in the car. I'm used to having to charge things. Just having a reduced battery life is fine with me.

The reason why they're taking the "reduced performance" route is that it is planned obsolescence. It drives sales of new phones in a world where the actual phone, if well-protected, could last a decade. In our current world where smartphones have plateaued for years and Moore's Law has stagnated, it makes business sense to artificially induce a marked GUI performance difference between an older and newer phone. But it sucks for the consumer, and this sort of intentional downgrading should almost be illegal.

Glad to know I just have to change the battery. ~$40-50 at a local shop.

</comment><comment><USER52> They should at least give an option in settings. What is the algorithm for slowdown? Is it guaranteed to be fixed on replacing the battery or its just a linear decay function based on age of phone.

</comment><comment><USER28> FYI, I ran the benchmark with power from wall and with out, and got the same performance. It appears to check battery life before deciding core speed.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is so over blown, but expected for something related to Apple.

Batteries wear out and need to be replaced after a year or two. Apple does something to make the phones last longer, and people frame it as a negative.

I've replaced a handful of batteries in iPhons and it is quite easy for anyone who knows how to use a screw driver and watch a YouTube video. Or just pay some small business to replace it.

<comment><USER54> The problem is that there is no way for a user to know that they can spend 79$ to fix the problem. Most will asume that is has become slow and think the only solution is spending +700$ on a new one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Just curious what happens to the benchmarks when the phones are plugged in to a charger?

</comment><comment><USER56> I'd rather have more battery life. I see no problem with this.

<comment><USER57> 100%. Most users will never know or care about this. Most users just use their phones for casual internet browsing, candy crush, and texting. They'll never notice the slowdown like they would notice the battery life decrease. You have to target the main consumer base of your product and make things work well for them, even if the loud tech community minority may get upset.

<comment><USER54> I noticed the slowdown. Never believed in planned obsolescence so I though it could be an optimisation problem in iOs 11 but problem persisted after several os updates.

I finally decided to upgrade to an X because how bad it was. Turns out it is throttling by as much as 50% (I still have the phone) so I could have just spent 79$ instead of buying a new iPhone.

The same will happen to a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> To those who've read the article: is the performance limit lifted when the device is put on a charger?

<comment><USER59> Please don't bring lazyweb to HN.</comment></comment>


Pragmatic reasons for choosing Common Lisp (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.darkchestnut.com/2017/pragmatic-reasons-for-choosing-common-lisp/ <comment><USER2> Sometimes I see articles with tables and decision trees regarding language choice. I find it funny, because if I was doing any old thing, I'd use $typical_lang, and if I was writing a script, I'd use bash-and-not-python- because-I-don't-know-python. If I craved novelty, I'd use $not_blub.

If I thought everyone was like me, I'd joke at this author, "Come on. You wanted to use CL and you needed justification." But I suppose there are people who are not like me, who decide how this author decides.

Ok I'll take my own bait: Why not Java? Depite not compiling to a native executable, It'll be faster than Ruby, Python, and Scheme. Deployment is a jar file. More than adequate GUI tools. As regards language stability, the language committee is conservative. To me, the answer is, "Because the author already knows Ruby, Python, Scheme, and Common Lisp, and already-knowing a language is huge." But of course: I'm baiting because I'm projecting : ).

Or why not Haskell?

<comment><USER3> Or at the very least, why not Clojure? I'm unaware of _any_ advantage CL has over it at this point.

<comment><USER4> A wide variety of implementations

Performance

save-lisp-and-die

CLOS

LOOP

Conditions system

If you need to build what Hickey calls a "situated program", Clojure is a great choice, but that's not the only type of environment we need to run programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should look into CLOS though. It will really impact the way you code Lisp. Even those that will never code in Lisp can benefit from looking into its approach to object paradigms.</comment>


Ask HN: Best clipboard manager for programmer - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for a free clipboard manager (Win 8) which is geared up towards programmers. Maybe it should allow 3 hotkeys (for copy/paste). Any thoughts on what would be a good tool? What features (or tips/tricks) do you use? <comment><USER2> Not free but 'donation' ware: [http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/clipboardhelpan...](http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/clipboardhelpandspell/index.html)</comment>


Ask HN: What does the richest person you know do? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> I'm guessing you mean know personally?

It also depends what you mean by rich - I'll assume you mean monetarily.

I know several who have inherited great wealth - so I won't count them.

1) One guy I know very well left school at 16 and became a carpenter. He bought a run down house and did it up on evenings and weekends - sold for a profit, bought a bigger house, did it up on the side etc. He later partnered with his friend who was an estate agent and they worked very successfully buying, doing up, and selling properties together. Net worth around £5 million. He's still working.

2) Another guy, a friend of my Dad's, bummed around after leaving school at 14, worked as a tram driver and taught himself plumbing on the side, basically worked 7 days a week. Then got a job at Heathrow loading bags on planes. He worked every shift he could and continued plumbing on the side. Bought a run down house, filled it with lodgers (mostly Irish navvies). Bought another run down house, filled it with lodgers. etc. Grafted like this into his 70s. Now retired. Net worth around £10 million.

3) Another guy I know was especially bright. Did a degree in Economics and German. Became an accountant. After a period doing auditing he moved into small company analysis, specializing in small German companies. Twenty years ago his bonus alone was more than a million a year. He bought a million+ pound house without a mortgage - then bought one that was probably three times the size of that. In the end he cut back on work, and now only works from home, and only does work that interests him. He pays his daughter to pretend to be him on Skype, so he can go off and play golf. Net worth, around £20+ million.

Couple of interesting points - the first guy never got married, never had kids, never really had a serious girlfriend for more than a few months - <USER2> is not particularly happy. Second guy was completely obsessive about not spending money, he drove around in a clapped out van, which he fixed himself, and never really enjoyed his money. Third guy was a real family man and met his wife (who is gorgeous) when he was a student with no money, and she was a nurse (with probably even less money!). All their happiness comes from each other and their three beautiful kids. But yes, they do live in a big house - but I suspect they would have been just as happy in a semi.

Funnily enough, none of the software engineers I know are particularly well off (financially)!

<comment><USER4> Real estate seems to be a common theme amongst people generating wealth.

<comment><USER3> In the UK it can be a very tax efficient way to build wealth. You pay stamp duty when you buy a home, but there are no taxes when you sell if you are selling your main home. So you can build your wealth tax-free in your main home. A lot of people build wealth here this way. Not saying that's good or not, just that is indeed a common theme.

<comment><USER5> You usually can't build wealth or increase the value of a single home much. The physical house depreciates, but the land it sits on increases in value due to factors outside of the owner's control. You are right though, that it's a tax-free way of saving, and you can keep trading up using the gains and the leverage you have.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure about that. A lot of people purchase run down homes and renovate them, often selling these homes for good profit. That's not due to the increasing value of land?

<comment><USER3> Yes you are right. What my mate often does is add value through renovation and/or extension. For example, one house was very run down and was on a large plot of land. He renovated the main house, and extended it, building an extra bedroom and detached garage. He then divided the land and built a new house on a separate plot. Then sold both houses. His net profit was around £150K I believe. Other projects are smaller, such as just a straight renovation. On his current personal house he bought it for around £350K - it was very run down. He lived in a caravan on site for 18 months while he renovated and extended. He has since extended twice, and converted the barns into living accommodation. Estimated value now is around £2million. He owns another property outright that he rents out. Rental income around £1,400 a month net. That property is worth around £500K I would say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I rarely talk about finances, so I'm not even sure who the richest person I know _is_. It also depends on how tightly you define "know". Like, I've met Mark Cuban and exchanged a few words with him, so by that standard, the richest person I know runs a basketball team. But in terms of people I know on a more personal level... I used to work for Bob Young at Lulu and while we're hardly buddies, I can legitimately say I "know" him. So by that standard, the richest person I know does whatever it is that Bob is doing these days.

Outside of that, I know a few VC's and a few founders who have had successful exits. Of the ones who fall in the "founder" camp, I think they've all gone on to founding new companies since their exits. The VC guys are all still VC's as far as I know, although I haven't talked to most of those guys in a while.

</comment><comment><USER8> He recently sold his consulting company of 15 years and is in the process of retiring. He was a sales guy with a little technical know how and worked hard into his 60s. Net worth 10mil++, wouldn't be suprised if the company went for 100mil+.

</comment><comment><USER9> He founded a hedge fund, became a billionaire, and now pursues other interests.

</comment><comment><USER10> Runs a B2C SaaS company for photo manipulation / editing.

</comment><comment><USER11> The richest person I know works very very hard and is still going.

</comment><comment><USER12> Medical sales</comment>


Amazon Employees Share Our Views on Company Business - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/amazon-employees-share-our-views-on-company-business-f5abcdea849 <comment><USER2> This might be the morally correct thing for these people to do, but I predict that soon, this will be a list of 363 people who just lost their jobs. Amazon has around 750,000 employees. This just isn't a large enough number of people to make any difference.

Even if there is backlash over the firings, it will blow over quickly enough. Americans don't seem to care about things that are arguably far more important than one company's internal policy on employees speaking out, or, even their willingness to sell facial recognition technology to governments or help oil and gas companies continue to damage the environment.</comment>


World Population Cartogram (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-cartogram <comment><USER2> About 10 years ago I got the same urge to find or make maps to visually detail humanities conditions. An ostentatious write-up of the idea survives here [1]

I imagined a wiki like effort to crowd source data that scores regions for 5 "Domains of Human Circumstance"

\</comment><comment>-

Labour : opportunities, conditions, demands and rewards of productive endeavour

Food : calories, nutrition, contaminants, variety, taste

Material Environment : air & water quality, land quality (toxicity, civil engineering, architecture, ecology)

Social Environment : access to education, entertainment, arts, media, therapists, medicine

Private Environment (shelter,clothing) : allocation, facilities, privacy, preference, private architecture/furnishings, quantity

Physical Security : statistical hazard from criminal predation, military trauma, political/economic upheaval

\</comment><comment>-

The category scores would be rendered in colored combinations on maps in a manner which importantly would not average out distributions, so that a region with many people living with low scores and others with high would not deceptively appear as equivalent to everyone with middle scores.

I've regretfully never made any progress on it.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20131211161318/http://pericosm.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131211161318/http://pericosm.com/hcrp/worldview.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The main driver of pop growth has been Asia where pops have tripled since 1950. That's a lot of growth for one region in such little time. India won't stabilize till 2060s. That's scary. Also 100 million along one fertile river valley in Egypt.

Any fluctuation in resources can have dire consequences.

<comment><USER4> Let it be noted that the US population more than doubled in the same time period (1950-2018, from 150m to 325m, vs 1.4b to 4.5b). So 215% vs 310%.

<comment><USER3> While true, that was not driven by natural native growth whereas in Asia it was. Not only that but the base pop was already very large, so a trebbling is significant.

For instance Belize tripling its pop now is no big deal, Bangladesh tripling its pop is a huge problem, maybe catrastrophic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many countries need a one child policy, the sooner the better. Not only for their own interest, but also specially for the interest of adjacent regions that are being affected and reap no benefits.

<comment><USER6> The UN's population projections have historically been very accurate. They have also consistently shown that the better educated and developed a country is, the quicker its population stabilises.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what you are referring to, because here ([https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/](https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/)) I see 3 models, a high, medium, and low, and they diverge _hugely_ by 2100.

<comment><USER6> They have outlier models, but look at the probabilities associated with them (should be >90%, i.e., <10% probability for those lines). A better statement on my behalf would have been that their _probabilistic distributions_ have been historically very accurate.

They are also updated very diligently to account for new phenomena. I don't work for the UN, but they take population growth very seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really great visualization. I was surprised by how small Russia is relative to expectations. Also how small Canada and large Mexico is.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love maps like these, they give such a great sense of where the people are. A technique that this map doesn't take advantage of is using color or brightness to represent population growth or age distribution, so you can project into the future.

Along these lines I also like maps adjusted for GDP and economic growth that show where the money is and where they're creating more of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is dataviz done right. Gorgeous and useful.</comment>


Nikola Trucks Have an HTML5 Supercomputer - <AUTHOR> https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-of-the-new-nikola-hydrogen-electric-truck <comment><AUTHOR> > "The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. > "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so > using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every > component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. > It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to > communicate."

</comment><comment><USER2> see also comments at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24481602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24481602)

</comment><comment><USER3> (2019)</comment>


Ask HN: Is Haskell Worth Learning? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'd say it depends on which languages you already know/have been exposed to.

After downloading some software written in Haskell this week, I installed GHC and got some books on Haskell. Got sick of constantly hearing about how cool it is! After reading a few dozen pages, I thought it looked a _lot_ like (Standard) ML, which I got into a couple of years ago. So I googled differences between Haskell and ML, and they indeed sound not-so-very- different. So I gave up on that idea for now. I was after a language very different from any I knew before. Maybe next year. (In recent years have gotten into Lisp, Prolog, Forth, ML, Tcl etc - each totally different from each other and from languages I knew before.)

 _A language that doesn 't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing._ \- Alan Perliss

<comment><USER3> I initially picked up Haskell because I hadn't done anything that was lazy by default, which - when you focus on pulling at that thread - can be a pretty big difference from any of the ones you've mentioned.

The syntax is pretty close to ML, for sure.

Ultimately, it's the type system and the pervasive immutability that I miss most when I'm working in other languages. The ML type system is related, but the differences (in both directions!) are interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Absolutely yes, if you have only been working with langs such as C, Java, Javascript etc. Basically it will fundamentally shift your thinking.

Honestly though, I prefer ocaml much more than haskell because it has a cleaner syntax.

<comment><USER5> > I prefer ocaml much more than haskell because it has a cleaner syntax.

That's interesting. One typically hears the other way round. Could you give some examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you were never exposed to functional programming before, learning Haskell will give you a whole new perspective on how you write code, and I bet it will make you a better programmer just because of that.

With that said, in Europe I ever came across exactly zero job ads that require Haskell, and exactly one in Singapore. In North America / Bay Area it might be more common though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Depends on your goals. Really I think Prolog, Constraint Handling Rules and similar systems are more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER8> If it's only for fun sure. Otherwise no.

</comment><comment><USER9> No. Try Elixir. Much more useful in the real world.

<comment><USER10> He said worth learning, not worth using, and Haskell is absolutely worth learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It depends.

</comment><comment><USER12> F#

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes

</comment><comment><USER14> No</comment>


Should a startup write a business plan? - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitegloveapps.com/2010/12/20/startup-write-business-plan/

<comment><USER2> I guess it depends on how you define business plan.

Business plans are important because they force you to think about things you need to accomplish to have a successful business. Potential market, competitors, goals, cashflow, etc are all very important to starting a company and founders need to all agree on the these things to progress.

However, I don't think a formalised 50-page business plan with research, etc is really all that necessary. It's much more important to have actually thought about all the things that affect the success or failure of your company than to have documented them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're right. Planning is worthwhile; the business plan becomes a time sink when people focus on making it long and perfectly formatted, and have financial projections out for many years. The reality is, a startup is still looking for its business model; all the things that flow from that will change if the model changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have my own business and don't have a business plan. I think that it's hard to come up with a realistic plan when you're just starting out; you just don't know much about how things really work in your market. I've learned a lot, mostly about what doesn't work, in my 2+ years of being in business. Maybe I could use that knowledge to write a plan for the next year.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's definitely value in re-evaluating once you've been in business for a while: some things you have to learn things by experience, so after you've learned them you can plan better.</comment></comment>


Space as a Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.judegomila.com/2012/11/space-as-service.html <comment><USER2> "X as a service" is HN's equivalent to the old "imagine a beowulf cluster of these" Slashdot meme.

<comment><USER3> You should check out "...in space!" at TV Tropes. (<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RecycledINSPACE>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fascinating stuff, maybe not too far away. I wonder, however, what is the advantage of OffGlobe (providing a data center on the moon). You get extra latency and maybe reliability issues. Or maybe the advantage is to be off local jurisdictions and safe from FBI operations ?

<comment><USER5> You'd be safe from seizure of the actual SSDs, which sounds nice.

Until the FBI obtains a court order granting them root access to the OffGlobe C&C infrastructure. Oops.

Or until the FBI obtains a court order freezing OffGlobe's bank accounts until they suspend a particular user. Oops.

And so on.

Sovereign risk is difficult to cope with because the Crown or the People always have multiple ways to obtain compliance. This is as it should be, but it does mean that in riskier fields you need continuity plans that go beyond the merely physical.

<comment><USER6> Do you remember Sealand? Offshore datacenter on an independent "principality" off UK coast?

<comment><USER5> I do. I also recall that the venture was a failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another for the Data category: Silvia Terra (<http://www.silviaterra.com/>). They count trees from space.

<comment><USER8> Why is this useful? I'm asking because I am a tree counting noob, vs. trying to be a dick

<comment><USER9> If I remember correctly (One of the founders is an acquaintance), logging companies frequently have large parcels of land of varying quality, size, and even contiguity. Being able to cheaply determine the the composition of the trees on these disparate parcels better allows them to determine which areas would be most lucrative to develop logging operations (an enormous capital investment) in, which is incredibly valuable.

<comment><USER10> I'm not friends with any of the founders, but I'd imagine it'd be useful for environmental groups too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As I read these, my first thought was that I don't think big enough.

<comment><USER6> Agree (i thought the same thing about myself). Big ideas for a big space are hard to come by.

<comment><USER10> Nonsense; there's plenty of ideas. Just attend the Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace conference to see, or pick up any O'Neill-inspired hard sci-fi and have a read.

What's missing is execution. Why do we all have a man-crush on Elon Musk? Because for the past 30 years it's been the same pool of a dozen-odd failed entrepreneurs suckering the next batch of investors to losing money on The Next Variation Of The Same Old Idea That Will Really Make You Money This Time, I Promise. Now SpaceX is actually pulling it off, and all it took was a little execution. Kistler? Bell? Rotary rocket? They all tried the same business model. What they lacked was the business know-how and straight-forward execution to make it happen and get in the black.

I encourage every entrepreneur here with real world experience to give the space sector a serious look. We could use your experience.

Remember, the first trillionaire will be made in space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Space Burial: <http://elysiumspaceflights.com/>

<comment><USER13> now that's something new!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This overview about 'space as a service' is good, but it should specifically mention X Prize founder and Singularity University co-founder and now Planetary Resources co-founder "Peter Diamandis" as somebody of interest in this industry.</comment>


VNC client in 200 lines of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mgechev.com/2013/08/30/vnc-javascript-nodejs/ <comment><USER2> An interesting article, but many posts titled "Create <awesome program> in <small number> LOC" are misleading if they are highly dependent on underlying libraries. The logical end of this style of article would be something like "How to do X in one Character" and make a call to some external package.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right about the underlying libraries, I guess the the title wasn't the most appropriate one. Anyway, if we count V8, node.js standard libraries, webkit,...etc. there's no software written entirely in JavaScript which is less than millions lines of code. The main idea of the article was to show how easy things goes with the tools HTML5 gives us.

<comment><USER3> I'd say you accomplished your aim. Great little article, and awesome to see the power of the remote frame buffer lib.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice work, and thanks for sharing.

BTW I'm not sure why other posters are attacking you for not including 3rd party library LOC counts in your LOC count. That is not standard practice, and you aren't misleading anyone by not counting 3rd party libs. Some people just have to find something to complain about, I guess.

<comment><USER5> It's not that people have to find something to complain about, it's just accurate. It's ridiculous to say VNC can be implemented in 200 lines of JavaScript. Of 200 lines of any language. If the third party library does low level stuff like collections, or http or whatever then they usually don't get counted, but if the majority of the functionality is in a library then it's disingenuous to not include them.

<comment><USER6> Create a new language, VNCscript, which has a single keyword, 'start'. Implement a VNC client in a single line of code :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is nice ; is there a way to extend this to be a Javascript based Webex like library. I would pay for that . I often have to walk my users through a DHTML screen when I am on the phone with them and without being able to see what they are seeing, support task becomes a challenge. I would gladly pay for such a library.</comment>


GFS and its evolution - <AUTHOR> http://glinden.blogspot.com/2010/03/gfs-and-its-evolution.html

<comment><USER2> Without blogspam: [http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/3/76283-gfs-evolution- on-...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/3/76283-gfs-evolution-on-fast- forward/fulltext)

</comment><comment><USER3> Things like this are what make me wish I worked at Google; they're a company that does the software equivalent of megastructure engineering, building bridges, dams, and nuclear power plants, while everyone else is building Furbys and Slap-Chops.</comment>


Twitter marketing tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawseo.com/news/2009/02/19/top-5-twitter-marketing-tools/

<comment><USER2> Worth noting that, for my part, I immediately unfollow anyone who sends me an automated (or otherwise mass-produced) thank you DM when I follow them.</comment>


An update to 37-year-old MIDI - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1788828/how-will-midi-2-0-change-music/ <comment> core-questions > In MIDI 1.0, all data was in 7-bit values. That means musical qualities were > quantized on a scale of 0 to 127. Features like volume, pitch, and how much > of the sound should come out of the right or left speaker are all measured > on this scale, with 128 possible points. This is not a lot of resolution. > For some really sophisticated listeners, they can clearly hear the steps > between points.

This is extremely misleading. Sure, the velocity input into your synth is going to be at 7-bit resolution, but at soon as the synth has it, it can play anything it wants at whatever volume it wants to based on how you have configured it. There's nothing about the external 7-bit implementation that is really limiting the dynamics of the synth itself.

Higher resolution timing and a greater amount of 'awareness' about the features of the device at the other end so as to facilitate automatic mapping of controls from surfaces to synth parameters is what I would find more useful.

<comment><USER2> Also, if we talk about the volume parameter.

The human ear's dynamic range is about 120 dB, which includes about 20-30 dB of pain. With 127 bits, we can map that with 1 dB resolution.

16 bit audio ("CD quality") only has a 90 dB dynamic range.

We would almost never want a single instrument to have a 90 dB dynamic range, but if we did, MIDI values could logarithmically encode it with a better than 1 dB per step resolution.

In a mix, any instrument that is reduced by more than about 20 dB will disappear.

When synthesized music (e.g. electronic drumming) lacks dynamics, it is not because of the encoding of the raw volume parameter. It's due to other factors, like poor synth patches. Poor synth patches use a small number of samples, like say a snare drum being hit in three different ways, and they stretch that over the dynamic range with some naive scaling. A real drum doeesn't work that way; it makes a different sound for each intensity with which it is struck. You need samples of it being played at a myriad volume levels, sort those by intensity and map them to the intensity range.

Some instruments don't even change intensity that much when they are played louder; a lot of the perception of loudness comes from changing harmonic content. If you fake it with one sample that is just volume-adjusted, it will not sound right.

Synthesizers have tricks to help with this, like low-pass filters that respond to velocity: hit the key harder, and more high frequencies go through. That's one tool in the box for creating a more dynamic sound from scratch.

<comment><USER3> The perceptability of the 128 steps depends on the parameters it influences. If the midi parameter influences e.g. some form of pitch, 128 values won't get you very far without having the steps perceived.

It also has to do with the pressure range of midi controllers: 128 steps are few if you have to distribute them between "barely touching" and "hammering on it with full force". When you play a real instrument, you will notice that the range of things between the most silent and most loud you can manage is usually huge. For midi controllers this is kinda limited, so good developement.

<comment><USER4> You can distribute the values non-linearly, though; the difference between smallest and largest value might be big, but I don't think I could hit a pad or key in 128 different ways. Some controller software does offer a selection of velocity profiles.

<comment><USER5> It depends on the instrument. 128 positions is well enough for piano. From other instruments, drums is the one I know best, and there single parameter is just not enough: the result depends on velocity, the position where the stick hits drum head, for non round tip sticks the stick angle. For cymbals, in addition to hitting different parts of the cymbal, stick tip, shaft and shoulder give different sounds. And so on... There's a good reason why loops sampled from acoustic drums are used even though drum synths exist.

<comment><USER6> You do not need MIDI 2.0 to solve any of those problems.

<comment><USER5> No, and I don't expect MIDI 2.0 to help. It was just response to the idea that single parameter would be enough but 7 bits wouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> By the way, seems that MIDI playback support in operating systems and browsers is petering out.

About nine or ten years ago, I had little trouble playing back MIDI files on various platforms.

Recently, I sent an old .mid file that I produced almost a decade ago to someone (at Google!) and they couldn't play it. After trying it myself, I was shocked. Browser after browser, system after system; no dice.

I ended up converting to MP3 using Timidity -> Lame.

<comment><USER7> It is possible for current browser to play midi using some JavaScript library just like you use native players to play midi. see MIDI.js.

So, for programming usage, it does not matters that much

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> MIDI 2.0 is awesome and all, but I'd be happy if Firefox supported MIDI 1.0. (only Chrome and Edgium and the like do, Firefox has been saying they will for ages -- [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897) \-- and it seems to be extremely low priority)

<comment><USER9> Audio apps should stay out of the browser

<comment><USER10> Why?

<comment><USER9> Because "the audio thread waits for nothing." Garbage collection is unacceptable, more than a single pointer dereference to get to state is borderline unacceptable, and synthesizers (that an MIDI system would trigger) are up there with some of the most computationally demanding software you can develop even for toy projects. Especially so, even. A naively coded soft synth in C++ talking directly with drivers can easily crap out with 4-5 voices of polyphony.

Now onto why a browser is a bad place to do this. Your audio subsystem supplies a buffer to you (or you supply a buffer to it, depending on OS) and you need to fill it in a fixed amount of time to avoid a buffer underrun, or increase the buffer size. At a 48kHz sample rate and a buffer size of say, 512 (default on MacOS) you have ten milliseconds to fill it.

But you don't get all that time. As buffer sizes get smaller, the dominant factor becomes how much time it takes to get data from kernel to userspace, and from userspace down to kernal. In a browser now you have to go from kernel to user space to sandbox down to user space down to kernel.

So getting low latency MIDI input to a browser, rendering it to sound, and getting it back, is basically a terrible use case scenario in terms of latency. Yea you can do a lot when you don't care about latency, but then the question is, why would you care about live MIDI input if you don't care about latency?

Firefox's audio engine (or at least WebRender) is actually fairly impressive - I've heard things that they can get sub ms latency. But I don't really trust that you can do that and do serious audio processing, which any non-sine synth is going to entail.

<comment><USER11> A midi event stream is _massively_ less demanding than a waveform stream. A browser could at least be a source of such events that you would route to your favorite hardware synth.

Interestingly, browsers are capable of native audio and video playback for years; somehow it wasn't such a problem, given their relaxed requirements for latency.

<comment><USER9> It's because streaming video and audio is simplex, MIDI + rendering is duplex. Round trip latency for a decent app needs to be sub 5ms, it doesn't matter if you have 200ms+ for receiving packets from a video/audio source on a web page, since you're not providing live input to get live output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It won't. Most people aren't interested in those musical subtleties; the ones that are either like their music acoustic (from ballads to grand opera) or listen to experimental electronic music like Autechre which liberated itself from the MIDI straitjacket years ago.

It will likely change music performance to some extent, making techno and other highly synchronous styles more fun and interesting to perform live than is currently practical.

</comment><comment><USER9> imho MIDI 2.0 hits the low hanging fruit but doesn't go far enough at fixing the biggest problem in professional audio. Deterministic rendering. Basically same input makes the same output, which doesn't happen even in totally digital systems - doubly so with live (or recreated) midi events.

I'll give an example - you have your PC with $DAW_OF_CHOICE running and plug in $MIDI_2_CONTROLLER to USB and enable a track and hit record, play your stuff, and stop. When you play it back, unless the cosmic forces are exceptionally on your side, _it will not sound the same as when you played it_. It's subtle and sometimes ignored or even desirable, but it's there.

There are a lot of reasons why this problem hasn't been solved, some technical and others artistic. But imho, a certain grade of equipment (namely, recording/reproduction, of which the MIDI protocol is a key component) should behave identically under the same conditions and be able to reproduce a performance exactly. It's a goal that borders on absurd, but I think we could do it!

Namely - enough of this "transport agnostic" horseshit. Give me a professional event protocol that is sent synchronously with the audio, on the wire and on the board. I want my codec chips interleaving midi messages (don't care if they're 16/24/32 bit) as a separate audio channel, even if it is undersampled (eg send LRLRLRMLRLRLRM over I2C at the appropriate clock to have audio in time and MIDI undersampled by 3x per word), I want MIDI events _in my interrupt_ and in the callback, synchronized _exactly_ to whatever audio is coming in at the same time.

And give me unadulterated total, absolute dictatorial control over the audio drivers using a ping/pong buffer that gets mapped to memory in the audio callback for my professional application and mine alone. Minimize the kernel time spent mapping physical memory to virtual memory, like ASIO drivers but without the bullshit. I want as little overhead between the frame buffer coming in off DMA to the chip as I want without the possibility of pwning the system. Hell, give me a dedicated core!

<comment><USER13> > I'll give an example - you have your PC with $DAW_OF_CHOICE running and plug > in $MIDI_2_CONTROLLER to USB and enable a track and hit record, play your > stuff, and stop. When you play it back, unless the cosmic forces are > exceptionally on your side, it will not sound the same as when you played > it. It's subtle and sometimes ignored or even desirable, but it's there.

I'm sorry, but...what?

I'm the rare non-professional-programmer on this site. I'm a professional composer -- I spend my days writing/producing/mixing music on a computer.

Can you go into more detail of what you're talking about here? Because, no offense, but if you were right, I think I would have noticed by now.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't be at all surprised if the process is not bit perfect; the question is: can you hear a difference on your own? Can you hear the difference if it is pointed out ahead of time (through waveform comparison)?

<comment><USER13> I would be absolutely surprised if it _weren 't_ bit perfect.

We're dealing with 7 bits of MIDI data controlling, typically at most, 48,000 samples per second. These numbers are chump change for modern computers. The bit depths can add some more complexity to that in terms of dynamic range (I'm usually working at 32 bit float), but that doesn't apply as much to the situation here.

Yes, real-time performance is a tough task (as is always stated, "the audio thread waits for nothing"), but OP here is talking about recording MIDI data, which -- once recorded -- acts as a _static input_ controlling either a synthesizer or sampler. So let's break that down.

A digital synthesizer, unless designed with some amount of randomness (typically for "analog-like" behavior purposes), by definition is the same every time. The MIDI data in this case is going to be something like CC7, controlling output volume; CC1, controlling some pre-defined parameter (i.e. opening/closing a filter); etc. A solid representation of OP's example in this case would be "CC7 controlling output volume of a synth over a 4 second period, linearly from totally silent upwards to 0 dB." I fail to see how that could possibly change from one playback to the next, unless, again, some amount of randomness-with-same-MIDI-data is a feature of the synth's programming.

A sampler is just, at its most basic form, playing back audio. Audio is a static file; MIDI is controlling which audio is playing back. Round Robin sampling, where, say, C4 is played N number of times and X number of similar samples are called randomly so as to avoid the "machine gun effect," where _literally_ the same sample is called, could account for "it not sounding the same," but like the "analog-like" programming of the synth above, that's on purpose, not a flaw.

I routinely deal with situations where phase cancellation null tests would reveal the kind of behavior that OP is talking about, and I simply have never come across them. And that's not even going into sensitivity in listening, which while subjective and impossible to prove, is something I put a lot of faith in.

Sorry, unless OP can point me to a solid source laying out a further explanation, I call horse shit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Recent & related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180731)

</comment><comment><USER16> Why in the world would you reference Adam Neely of all people? He is YouTube famous, but by no means a foremost expert on any of this stuff. He literally just reads the feature list in his video and adds some simple explanation while filming himself walking around a convention. If you want to learn about something like this, talk to one of the contributors or an actual hardware/software developer.

Neely, like all YouTube explainer-celebrities, is primarily concerned with getting views and having "production quality", while leaving the audience with a vague sense of having learned something without actually having learned anything at all. His most popular videos are chock full of non sequiturs and made-up nonsense.

<comment><USER17> His comment about classical betrayed this a bit. It was pretty ignorant (in the pure sense of uninformed) and confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems to just be an articleized version of Adam's excellent video from several months ago.

<comment><USER19> Who is Adam?

<comment><USER20> Adam Neely, musician and living Jazz meme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm happy about it, but if you're able to use Open Sound Control, it's better. Rather than gibberish channel numbers, OSC lets you label your messages meaningfully, as in "/trumpet/volume 100". And it lets you send lots of data types -- numbers, strings, lists -- rather than only numbers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there any reason why music production in the cloud isn't the standard yet?

High-quality VSTs requiree a lot of CPU power. Even my 16-inch MBP easily heats up once I add some more advanced VSTs.

I would rather pay X$ per month and have my music production work station in the cloud and interact with it from any old device with a fast internet connection.

Working with a buffer size of 512 samples, I currently have a latency of 11.6ms in Ableton. Adding another 10ms latency through the internet connection wouldn't be a drama for me.

Working in the cloud would allow me to easily upgrade or downgrade my system based on my needs, better collaboration with others, automatic backups, one- click access to new VSTs and samples, etc.

This set up would probably be less ideal for people who actually have to record a lot of 'real' instruments but a lot of music is only created in the box today with VSTs.

But I'm surely missing something here. Why hasn't this been a trend yet?

<comment><USER23> Audio over internet would be at least 300ms latency, not sure where you're getting "10ms". Anything over 10ms is annoying, and 50ms is nearly unplayable.

<comment><USER22> Why would it be at least 300ms latency?

<comment><USER23> To send/receive a multi-channel audio/MIDI buffer to/from a server, you need to go through at least a dozen protocols, including waiting for the speed of light between you and your server. If you're in NY and your server is in LA for example, that's already 30ms gone _just_ considering speed of light. Other factors multiply this latency by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER22> Okay and you would say that if you optimised all of these factors you would end up with a latency around 300ms?

I just set my Ableton Live to 300ms and it was actually o.k. I think the reason is that a lot of people don't actually 'play' their instruments these days - at least in electronic music.

Instead, they program their drums by putting midi notes on the grid and then listening to the result. The same with synths etc. So when I work this way, the 300ms latency are actually bearable. Of course it would be different if I used drum pads to play my drums 'live'. But honestly I don't know many people who do that and when I watch tutorials on YouTube also almost no one is doing that. A lot of electronic music producers 'play' their instruments with their mouse button.

<comment><USER23> Access Analog ([https://accessanalog.com/](https://accessanalog.com/)) is already doing something similar, and their system is around 300-2500ms latency ([https://accessanalog.com/support/#1534876416634-f660a710-8f4...](https://accessanalog.com/support/#1534876416634-f660a710-8f47)). A company cannot reliably offer much better than this latency, unless they have servers in all their customer's cities.

To most DAW users, 300ms is unacceptable, so any service that processes audio on a server needs to make this caveat very clear in their documentation. The problem with such a business idea is that local computers run DAWs just fine, so very few people would seek remote audio processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My "turing test" is whether or not you can tell the difference between Stan Getz playing it and a midi device playing it.

<comment><USER25> There are three elements there though:

1) the capture of all the musical and performance input (a wind controller, etc) 2) the transmission of all that information in real-time without latency 3) the conversion of that information into the appropriate sound.

Midi is only part 2 of that - advances in other areas are needed for a fully convincing facsimile, but given the incredible improvement in sample-based libraries over the last 10 years or so (and even more so comparing something like a Spitfire Audio library to a synth string patch), it is possible that will be the case, given the investment of time, brains and money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why not just use USB? Standardise all instruments on USB and use adaptors for backwards compatibility.

<comment><USER8> Most MIDI seems to be done over USB already. MIDI 2.0 is mostly unrelated to the actual connectors and such, it's more about the protocol.

<comment><USER20> "MIDI" on your Desk may well be done over USB but MIDI as a hardware protocol is absolutely rock solid and is the only choice for live music. Speaking as an occasional backstage gremlin, I minimise the USB proportion of the signal path because reduces the amount of testing required (MIDI is generally well implemented on the hardware side, but not all USB midi interfaces are made equal).

That and a lot of MIDI is instrument-to-instrument rather than to a PC (Or more realistically a Mac, because you have to have a Mac to be a creative, right...)

<comment><USER27> Windows audio latency increased to a 35ms floor in Vista and never recovered.

<comment><USER5> This is why many music apps use ASIO drivers that skip Windows audio. ASIO is awful in many ways, but latency is not one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love how clickbait gets torn apart on this site.</comment>


The man who saw the future - <AUTHOR> http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-12/06/oscar-niemeyer-brasilia-architecture-interview/viewall

<comment><USER2> I am not enamored of architects like this. Bless his soul. But I don't bless his architecture. At all. Architecture is NOT a large-scale form of sculpture that you inflict on people, which is what people like he did. It is not a bragging medium for materials science or a way to make me appreciate visual and abstract art from a distance.

Architecture is something the REAL PEOPLE have to actually deal with for generations. I don't care if you like vaginas. If you like vaginas, you should not inflict that on the places where I, my kids, and grandkids, live or work, or walk between. Maybe you could paint them instead. On a canvas.

Architecture should be organic and follow simple rules. It should make people feel comfortable, not anonymous. It should give people a sense of shelter, not foreboding.

Niemayer was the wrong direction.</comment>


No Cell Signal or Wi-Fi: Growing Up Inside America's 'Quiet Zone' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/green-bank-west-virginia-quiet-zone.html <comment><AUTHOR> Back in the day we called it growing up in the 1980's (also the 1970's, 1960's, 1950's, etc.)

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't say that these two experiences are necessarily equivocal. Growing up without the internet before its advent and mass adoption is a different experience than living isolated in a society where immediate connection is a norm. A better comparison would likely be to growing up without a television or telephone during those time periods.</comment></comment>


New AWS Session Manager for Shell Access to EC2 Instances - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-session-manager/ <comment><USER2> This looks like it an interesting alternative to Gravitational Teleport.</comment>


"Twice a silly price is not twice as silly" – Einhorn's short basket - <AUTHOR> https://www.streetaccount.com/FileLinkHandler.axd?filename=STORYID1475487_Greenlight%20Capital%201Q14%20letter.pdf&e=0&u=73988

<comment><USER2> I put my money in us treasuries. I think the market is probably going to not go up much but it could go down a lot. I'll put it back in after it crashes.</comment>


Show HN: Blix - Discover what's going on nearby, like parties and food trucks - <AUTHOR> http://getblix.co <comment><USER2> Request you to use a Show HN. And posting only once.

<comment><USER3> A repost was fine because both the title and URL were off the first time. We'll kill the original post as a duplicate.</comment></comment>


Heroku says PostGIS support enables smarter mobile app development - <AUTHOR> http://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2013/4/30/building_location_based_apps_with_postgis/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to have that 3 months ago before we moved from heroku</comment>


On Disk IO, Part 4: B-Trees and RUM Conjecture - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ifesdjeen/on-disk-storage-part-4-b-trees-30791060741 <comment><USER2> The entire serie is worth reading.</comment>