What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html <comment><USER2> "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." \- Dr Joseph Goebbels.

My god, the PR on behalf of Boeing by The NY Times is embarrassing. The accidents were the result of various actions which increased the risk and decreased safety. All beginning with moving the engines forward and up which changed the flight envelope, requiring more complex systems. Followed by not informing pilots of said new systems, and additionally selling as an add on (for profit reasons) indicators which would have informed pilots whether this system was activated.

Imagine your cruise control automatically was turning on in your car, but you had no idea, and hitting the brake pedal did nothing. This is what those pilots were experiencing.

Planes aren't hard to fly if you follow basic principles, take appropriate safety measures, and know the physics.

Responsibility for these deaths rests with Boeing.

<comment><USER3> I like the brake pedal analogy. It's not perfect, but it makes the point well. To add insult to injury, when the driver flipped a cut-out switch to disable the cruise control, the brakes were useless, the manual brake adjustment lever failed, and the only documented procedure to fix them at that point (for that model plane, err, car) was to turn cruise control back on.

<comment><USER4> As someone who's driven a lot of vehicles in various states of mechanical failure I don't. Once you stop treating a vehicle as a magical black box where everything affects everything the analogy falls apart.

Vehicles have predictable failure mode and systems that are integrated with each other in known and fairly standardized ways. Short of catastrophic mechanical failure (i. e the front fell off) someone with sufficient experience to recognize what is going on should be able to disable systems until some level of basic control is restored. Your brakes have nothing to do with cruise control other than having a little switch on them (usually two switches) to tell cruise control to turn off when you press them. I feel like airline pilots should in theory have that level of understanding of the systems in their aircraft since they are trained professionals and the stakes are very high so they need to be able to handle failures gracefully.

And before anyone puts words in my mouth I'm not saying Boeing isn't the most at fault party in all of this.

<comment><USER5> _I feel like airline pilots should in theory have that level of understanding of the systems in their aircraft since they are trained professionals and the stakes are very high so they need to be able to handle failures gracefully._

I agree. But you need to knowe that a system exists in the first place.

Something the manufacturer failed to document to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reads like yet another PR attempt by Boeing execs to shift the blame for the deaths away from their chronic mismanagement to pilot error.

<comment><USER7> I would actually _still_ place this failure directly at Boeing's feet.

Games like the ones Boeing was trying to play (overhauling an entire aircraft without having to change type rating and retrain pilots) directly lead to situations like this. Yes, the FAA / NTSB should have been more effective, but regulatory capture like this is common. It's ultimately Boeing's job to manage the risk: losing 2 airframes in a matter of months because pilots weren't trained on the aircraft _as a result of Boeing 's mismanagement_ has done catastrophic damage to their reputation that will take decades to repair. They will now be under a microscope for everything they do, which means they can't use a lot of the less risky cost-cutting they were likely doing before.

The net result of Boeing's machinations to keep the 737-Max at the same type rating led directly to a situation where pilots were not sufficiently trained in the functionality of the aircraft. So I have zero sympathy for the view that Boeing is not entirely responsible for this situation.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I'm surprised that more shareholders and more of Congress haven't been calling both for Dennis Muilenburg's head and the end to self certification.

<comment><USER8> It might make everyone feel better if he was fired, but little else. He became CEO one month before the first fuselage was completed and six months before the first flight, having been in charge of the defense unit. Perhaps a better but less satisfying target would be Ray Conner ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner)) who was head of commercial aviation from 2012 to 2016, or perhaps Jim Albaugh, his predecessor. Crucial engineering decisions would have been made during these years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" Even more pernicious was the F.A.A.'s longstanding delegation of regulatory authority to Boeing employees — a worry that is perennially available to chew on if you like and may indeed be related to the configuration of the troublesome system as it was installed. Nonetheless, in Seattle, at the level where such small choices are made, corruption, like cynicism, is rare."_

This is really embarassing to read, due to the intense naivete to have these two sentences side by side.

</comment><comment><USER10> > before reverting to a perfectly capable parallel system of manual trim

I don't have time to read the article in detail at the moment but suffice to say that this is subject to considerable debate.

<comment><USER11> Suffice also to say that, under heavy aerodynamic load, manual trim requires enough physical force to be the next thing to impossible.

<comment><USER12> Correct me if I am wrong, the pilot also need to be is specific position to have maximum leverage - ergo its not pilots its the plane that is the issue (or in that case Boeing's management).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author has done a great deal of thoughtful investigative work and that's always a good thing. However, in his attempt to reach conclusions and assign blame he has diluted the effectiveness of the article. I'm very interested in this topic, so I skimmed through it (a very long read) and get a sense of whether it's worth further study. I decided to move on.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. It reads like an attempt to validate a foregone conclusion using components of thorough investigation. The author threw in a few gratuitous statements about how "maybe MCAS wasn't the best idea" so that the they couldn't really be accused of blindly supporting Boeing.

It sounds like Lion Air were victims of not knowing the systems in place. Ethiopian Air didn't seem to have the altitude to figure things out in a timely manner.

This isn't to say that there's not corruption and other things going sideways in these investigations, but to lay blame squarely on the countries and the airlines is really disingenuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can someone validate my thinking here, please? I've been watching this saga for a while and there is something that doesn't seem to be said that really bothers me about this whole situation: the failure mode is negative, not neutral. Here is what I mean.

An aircraft has a flight envelop that defines its flight characteristics. Not only does it define in how fast or slow or high it can operate, but how that operation changes if something changes in performance. For instance, engines under the wing and on the tail cause differences as power is gained or lost. Under the wing, an increase in power will push the nose up, and a loss in power will cause the nose to drop. This is the opposite of tail mounted engines. The whole point of training a pilot is make it instinctive to expect what the plane will do when things go wrong, ie. if you are in a tail engine plane and loose suddenly power, expect that you are moving closer to a stall. The plane will both be raising the nose and losing speed. Again, vice versa for wing mounted engine. There is also another important point. If the pilot kills/loses the engine, is a neutral failure: the flight envelope does not change. The engine is no longer providing thrust so the plane orients merely to a new position in its flight envelope. But, failure in the flight system for the Max does something totally different.

The whole point of the MCAS flight computer is make the plane appear as though it has a different flight envelope. The computer automagically adjusts the flight services, notably by moving the trim. What really bothers me about the idea of using software to alter the flight characteristics is that any failure results in the plane not only falling back on a fight envelope that isn't what the pilot trained on, but also to a point in the flight envelope that the pilot didn't even choose (ie. trim being in some arbitrary position). Worse than that, an MCAS failure is negative. The very point of the computer system is "out guess" and compensate for the pilot's expectations of his or her trained flight envelop; thus, if the computer believes it is operating correctly but is not, it is actively making an arbitrary flight envelope that could be constantly changing. The pilot must deduce the MCAS software is at fault while the MCAS software is deducing the pilot is at fault.

Everything I have ever seen is that the whole point of airplane design and pilot training is to reduce flight problems to known solutions as to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. The very design of MCAS is failure must put the pilot into an unknown position and likely be actively combating the pilot's understand of the situation. If this logic is correct, I cannot fathom how any of this is acceptable.

<comment><USER14> > Everything I have ever seen is that the whole point of airplane design and > pilot training is to reduce flight problems to known solutions as to resolve > the problem as quickly as possible. The very design of MCAS is failure must > put the pilot into an unknown position and likely be actively combating the > pilot's understand of the situation. If this logic is correct, I cannot > fathom how any of this is acceptable.

This is the salient paragraph in this comment. It's ridiculous to blame pilots for figuring out recovery conditions when they can't be certain of the parameters in which they're operating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why was this flagged? It is a detailed New York Times article by a respected aviation journalist. Its opinionated reporting but I was looking forward to the Hacker News discussion.

<comment><USER17> I agree. I'm guessing that, at least for many folks, they didn't know the context, and assumed that the more positive statements are the result of naivete or ignorance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it was the first article I've read on the issue that actually explained all the factors in a clear way. As it's a complicated issue it needed to be long. Even though the pilots evidently were incompetent, I do think he's too light on his criticism against Boeing. The failure mode on this system was too drastic, and unnecessarily persistent. Combined with the fact that all that was needed was one faulty sensor this was obviously shoddy engineering.

</comment><comment><USER19> Trying to get everything under the sun grandfathered in from the old air-frame (from safety requirements and type rating) is what brought it down. Oh and being in bed with the people who could have slowed them down and said hold up here....

</comment><comment><USER20> I read the whole article. It is long.

The TLDR is something like: the 373 max crashes are the result of a lack of "airmanship" by pilots of the airlines of developing countries, a quality the author acknowledges he can't define. But he feels the pilots make many "really dumb" errors and are incompetent. And the airlines that employ and often train them are crappy.

Meanwhile, Boeing is mostly blameless. Sure, there were "bewildering" design decisions but those didn't have much to do with it. The article suggests Boeing's mistake may have been that, unlike Airbus, it failed to appreciate how idiotic pilots have become.

Ok, I failed to make my TLDR short.

This article doesn't go over very well with me. The problem with blaming the problem on an unmeasureable quality ("airmanship") is that it leaves no room for a rational solution. He suggests the max should be ungrounded, but how can you do that without improving airmanship, and how can you do that if you can't meaningfully quantify it?

While it does a great job of presenting many facts across several threads, it reads like the author wants to minimize Boeing's responsibility and interprets all the facts through that lens.

</comment><comment><USER21> How much does it cost to have an "article" like this posted on NYT?

</comment><comment><USER22> That's a 14,000 word report with no concluding statement...

</comment><comment><USER13> A friend of mine wrote:

"I don't know whether you recognized the name of the author. He is a well- known aviation writer and journalist, and the son of Wolfgang Langeweische, author of the book _Stick and Rudder_. _Stick and Rudder_ has been the bible for pilots of how planes fly since its publication in the 1940s."

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, such a long article in what probably could be condensed into 1 a4 sized page if you really are just about answering the question posed.

Who actually reads articles like this? I am genuinely curious. Comes off as information overload to me and it's hard to know what to believe.

<comment><USER24> I do. William Langewiesche is probably the best writer on aviation - if you want really deep and detailed analysis.

<comment><USER23> Cool, you must honestly be one of a few. I could never bear myself to read such a long article even if the topic was of interest.

I can listen to or view content that are hours long but in text format it's kind of overwhelming to me. Mainly because I cannot do anything else than read while I am reading which makes reading such a piece a very time-consuming task. I'd rather do something else than read such an article but it's probably for the best that there are people like you who like it as well.

<comment><USER17> I understand your point, but I read articles like this (and especially ones by Langewiesche) because there are topics that, for me, I learn better about it this way. I'm exactly opposite of you -- I generally can't bear to watch videos or listen to podcasts about these kinds of nonfiction topics because they feel way too long to me, whereas I can read an article faster and skip the parts easily that I don't feel are good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Finally, one lone voice cuts through the hysteria and garbage and speaks the unpopular truth.

The good old boy culture of training men inadequately so that they can, at best, monitor an aircraft's systems, and then pretending that they are pilots is what killed those people.

You don't like it, but it's the truth.

<comment><USER26> No... Not really.

I mean, I agree with you to a point. There is a delight taken by manufacturers being able to ostensibly cut training costs.

But in this case, the fact was the plane itself was unsoundly engineered. Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator. The pilot cannot be the primary carrier of blame when the equipment in the best hands available had only a 66% chance of having the pilot recover AFTER being made aware of what to expect.

Boeing is definitely the right one on whom to shoulder the blame here.

EDIT: Okay, On further consideration, I do see where you're coming from with the article's focus on "airmanship". My primary contention, however, remains. You can put a dangerous plane in the hands of a good airman, and you still have an airman flying a dangerous plane. That is the issue most seem to be bothered by. Even if the "modern pilot" doesn't have that visceral connection to their planes, that's no excuse for a manufacturer to produce one that requires extreme levels of airmanship to divine the existence of a system they couldn't admit the existence, severity, or implementation of to regulators for fear of not meeting deadlines.

Again, I agree with you to a point, and believe you did make a good point. Just wanted to make it clear that I don't think it should detract from Boeing's clear malfeasance here.

<comment><USER25> You wrote "Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator".

This is utter nonsense that you either made up or obtained from some unreliable source. It is categorically false.

The third pilot in the jump seat "rescued" the Lion Air accident aircraft on the previous flight by simply telling the pilots to disengage the stabilizer trim. This "rescued" aircraft continued 600 miles safely to Jakarta.

You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist.

In the words of the Air France 447 pilot just before he died from his own gross incompetence, "[Expletive], we're dead." And in this, I am referring to the human species.

<comment><USER26> What you seem to mistakenly believe I'm referring to was the third pilot in the Lion Air penultimate flight. I was not, but it is a testament to good Crew Resource Management that he was able to pick out the right course of action when other pilots were not.

I'm referring to the test pilots test flying the original proposed software fix before they were forced to reclassify the FCC failure condition to catastrophic severity due to one of them not successfully saving the aircraft in a simulated single-event upset. Three pilots were tapped by the FAA to try to recover from a single event upset which would result in erroneous MCAS activation.

The two military pilots saved the plane. The civilian test pilot didn't, resulting in an elevation of failure in the FCC on which MCAS runs to catastrophic, requiring a fundamental redesign.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/newly...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/newly-stringent-faa-tests-spur-a-fundamental-software-redesign- of-737-max-flight-controls/?amp=1)

I assume the Seattle Times is an acceptable source?

>You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist.

Okay. Just stop. I've been knee deep in the investigation and follow-up of these disasters since about March, and had honed in on the most likely root cause given a combination of information on motives (Southwest rebate), culture issues (McDonnell Douglas management strategy from their merger), fundamental hardware/software design (single AoA sensor, no cross-checking), basic aerodynamics (consequences of the engines on end behavior), test piloting (Royal Aeronautical Society, D. P. Davies interviews), experience with control systems, and research into regulatory minutiae.

Take a spin back through my comment history if you'd like. I was working on reverse engineering with only publically available information, and got to the right conclusions within about a month. Got to sit back and check conclusions off until the Seattle Times formally published their inside story in June. Suffice it to say, I'm probably the absolute _last_ person you'd want to accuse of "not knowing anything and being manipulable". The 737 MAX MCAS fiasco was an absolute travesty from the get go, and any competent computer scientist would have told them that a computer handling such a critical function must be _very carefully designed, programmed, and clearly communicated to the end user_.

I'm _very_ opinionated in this case, mainly because I've taken the time to become informed enough to truly comprehend how badly Boeing screwed the pooch. And considering they've had whistleblower testimony that the single AoA sensor, no cross-check decision was made specifically to avoid having the FAA refuse to certify the plane on time, that eliminates the idea this was "good- faith", as good-faith would have been honoring your responsibility to the public to design a fundamentally safe and well documented aircraft in full compliance with all regulations.

Whistleblower testimony first mentioned here, in a 60 Minutes Expose on the MAX.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QytfYyHmxtc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QytfYyHmxtc).

Thank you muchly, sir, and kindly take your misinformed speculation about my subject area knowledge elsewhere. It's my business to know why things fail, even if everyone involved is trying to do their best from keeping me from finding it. Physics don't lie. People, and especially businesses with everything on the line, on the other hand, do.

I have a great deal of respect for pilots, but I'm enough of an engineer to know when someone is putting an operator in serious danger. Boeing checked _ALL_ the boxes.

I've said my piece. Good day, sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >>Immediately after liftoff, the captain's airspeed indication failed, airspeed-disagreement and altitude-disagreement warnings appeared on his flight display and his stick shaker began to rattle the controls in warning of an imminent stall.

This simple fact has simply been ignored by the broder community on hackernews who are not pilots. The airspeed indicator is tied into the AoA sensor. The moment the AoA fails the pilots recieve an airspeed disagreement warning that must be fixed using the unreliable airspeed checklist. If your analysis of what happend on either of the accident flight ignores this critical fact you are wrong.

Welcome to the Danning-Krueger effect in action

<comment><USER28> What in the unreliable airspeed checklist would have saved the flight?

Once mistrim happens, there is no possible way to get either of the two flights in question, to either 4 degrees pitch up and 75% N1, let alone 10 degrees pitch up and 80% N1. Any power reduction will cause a pitch down and make the problem worse. All your advise would do is kill them faster. Mistrim must be avoided at low altitude, and in these two cases MCAS induced mistrim faster than it could be identified and avoided. It takes significant altitude to recover from it, assuming you even know the procedure, which hasn't been in the 737 FOM for decades. Neither flight had sufficient altitude for that procedure.

If all of this were just about training and checklists, these airplanes wouldn't be grounded around the world.

I also find it hilarious you misspell your insult.</comment></comment>


ORMs vs SQL: The JPA Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/05/orms-vs-sql-jpa-story.html <comment><USER2> I like the newer Scala frameworks, like Slick ([http://slick.typesafe.com/](http://slick.typesafe.com/)). They work with tuples rather than classes. Fits much better with the relational model.

<comment><USER3> I am far more interested in this kind of approach to things these days than ORMs or object databases. The relational model is a very powerful way of looking at data and almost all ORMs wind up neutering all of that power, leaving you with the absolute worst of all worlds.

What's needed is good (possibly object oriented) interfaces to relational data, which is a very distinct concept from ORM.

<comment><USER4> In my opinion, what's _actually_ needed is to realise that object orientation is a dead end. We need relational programming languages.

ORMs can't work for a simple reason. They are trying to map from the world of sets into the world of graphs. Sets are more expressive, so there is always a good chance that there will be a lossy transformation.

 _This remark constitutes 100% of your RDA of cryptic ranting._

<comment><USER5> total tangent, but in defense of graphs: it's worth noting that graphs are actually a lot more expressive than they might appear at first glance. it's possible to interpret linear orders, algebraic groups, or any other theory written in finite language with graph theory (according to Marker's book on model theory, which references Hodges' for details on the proof)

<comment><USER4> Not tangential at all and I while I hate being wrong, I like learning new things. Graphs _are_ very expressive. But most of the time, when you try to express the domain model as a _tree_ (inheritance) it leads to muddiness because most domain models are not truly tree-like. Then we try to express it as graphs (composition), but that gives up the advantages of hierarchy.

If you instead express things as sets and subsets, you can enjoy the advantages of both inheritance (DRY logic) and composition (numerous). Some languages kinda sorta have this through mixins or modules. But not quite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [2009], for the confused.

<comment><USER6> Quite a few of the detail-level problems in that post have indeed been fixed by now. Not all of them. In practice, i find using Hibernate pretty painless, but then i am the kind of person who actually reads documentation.

His final point still stands:

"If you're doing JPA, you still need to know databases and SQL. If you're using a Web application framework, you still need to know the servlets API and how HTTP works at least at a high level."

This is true of all sorts of ORM and noORM frameworks. You still need to understand how databases work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Hibernate sans Java EE for about four years. I started using it under JPA (again, without Java EE) about two years ago. Only in the last few months have I been able to deploy a Java EE environment, and there, only for a very small project, and the Java EE aspect was pretty minor, although desirable and cool.

Hibernate does not require Java EE stuff. The "dynamic weaving" is provided by Javassist (formerly provided by cglib, but cglib is apparently deprecated). No complex setup here. Put the appropriate dependency in your pom and it "magically" works.

Indeed, my biggest objection to Hibernate is the degree to which it relies on magic. A lot of that magic is truly magic, in the sense that you are not supposed to worry to hard about how it all works. If it did always just work, it wouldn't be maddening when you try to figure out why it is going wrong only to get slapped in the face by a fistful of hard magic.

For instance, the batch annotation, in pure, non-JPA Hibernate, is the fetch "mode." There are several options like "join" and "subselect." Hibernate defaults to an N+1 queries situation, but supplying "join" or "subselect" instead isn't necessarily good enough to get the behavior you want. We had a situation where no matter what we did in the Hibernate config, the behavior was an N+1 query explosion. The problem turned out to be an innocuous-looking log statement in the object model. Tracing in, it turned out that this log statement was being invoked indirectly from the object's constructor, causing the list to be "forced" before construction was complete. For some reason this bypassed Hibernate's usual configuration. The solution was to delete the log statement and take a lot of care not to touch anything that might be a PersistentList from the constructor.

That kind of lesson, while trite, is very hard to apply in practice. Especially when you have a set of developers working on the database and object-relational mapping layer and another set working on the model. Hibernate brings a lot of "gotchas." Shield's article hits on one of the more onerous database-side ones, that you are informally forced into using artificial keys, but there are enough oddball ramifications and restrictions to go around that plenty of them spill out into the Java code.

I have positive feelings towards myBatis, but I have only used it for a few edge cases in my Hibernate projects. While it is actually pretty easy to trick Hibernate into returning real objects for native queries, the trouble doesn't end there. It's very hard to do a complex SQL query from Hibernate without running into the vague sensation that the Criteria API would be better. A few hours later, you're back to building SQL strings, having read unsettling absurdities in the documentation like "There is no explicit 'group by' necessary in a criteria query."

myBatis's major advantage, in my conjectural opinion, is that it does not pretend to liberate you from worrying about the database. As a database developer, I am free to write the best query I can for a given situation, liberally using the most esoteric features of my database. My peers in the model can write exactly the interfaces they want to use. But they are not free to imagine that they have the entire object graph available to them to manage to the minutia at all times, and the ramifications of this loss on a group working solely in the model must be great, and I haven't seen them yet. I see storm clouds looming on that side of this tradeoff. It's annoying when I go to a peer and say what they can and cannot do in a constructor or a bean property getter/setter, but from then on they can still pretend that they have everything, and the worst thing that happens is really untenable performance. But everything works. myBatis, in contrast, is only too happy to give you back an incomplete object tree. There is no "weaving" or "instrumentation" in what comes back to support on-the-fly querying just because you accessed some property. Again, it is a great strength (much, much less magic) but it's also a great weakness. Your model guys aren't going to be able to ignore the database with impunity.

I'd like to hear from a group that switched from Hibernate or JPA to myBatis and how it worked out.

<comment><USER8> Very interesting; as someone's who been very happily using Ibatis with Java and Spring for many years I've always been wary of Hibernate for just the reasons you mention. The thought of ceding control over SQL to a framework so extensively would give me sleepless nights, and my hunch has always been that there will be a bunch of non-performant parent/child relation anti-patterns basically baked in and waiting to pounce (if that's not too much of a mixed metaphor...!).

<comment><USER9> I understand why people don't like ORMs. But I don't understand people who like iBatis: it is boilerplate like the hell. Imaging you have to separately update mappings for SQL select, insert, update and delete query (and these mappings are very long) for your entities.

For example, prepared statement for update looks like this:

      PreparedStatement ps = ...;
      ps.setLong(1, author.getUserId());
      ps.setLong(2, author.getStreamId());
      ps.setString(3, author.getNetwork());
      ps.setString(4, author.getIdInNetwork());
      ps.setString(5, author.getNote());
      ps.setString(6, author.getSocialId());

....

And manually counting questions is a normal practice when you add a field:

      static final String UPDATE = "UPDATE Table1 SET Domains = ?, TemplateId = ?, InternalJson = ? WHERE StreamID = ?";
      static final String INSERT = "INSERT INTO Config1 (UserID, StreamID, Domains, TemplateId, InternalJson) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)";

<comment><USER7> You have to pick your battles. It's convenient that Hibernate will do these things for you, but I have seen lots of times when the order Hibernate wants to remove something causes an integrity violation. For instance, a not-null foreign key reference in a linking table; sometimes Hibernate seems to try setting the value to null before deleting the referenced entity, leading to an integrity violation. There have been times when I couldn't figure out how to make Hibernate do this the right way (reversing the order of its deletes and skipping the unnecessary set-null step) so I instead just lifted the constraint. I hate when I have to do that, because ideally Hibernate should just live with whatever schema I have given it.

Another example is trying to depend on CASCADE in the database. The settings you need to make to get Hibernate to accept this are quite arcane and force you to manually worry about list indexes in the Java code. Yet another example of a place where Hibernate, which ought not be telling me how to make my database or my Java code, instead winds up forcing me to take certain decisions in both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Other active threads on this topic :

\- [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17860161/replacing-a- full...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17860161/replacing-a-full-orm-jpa- hibernate-by-a-lighter-solution-recommended-pattern)

\- [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/jooq- user...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/jooq- user/26Bd8wnwJgQ)

</comment><comment><USER11> I loved iBatis the moment I used it (some 8 years ago or so). And yet I always felt like a black sheep because I liked working in SQL and also liked my "ORM" to be a simple translation engine for results into a data structure that can then be used by Java.

So I was happy to see this author come to the conclusion that iBatis is A Good Thing, but I do wonder if we are still black sheep in a flock of Hibernate/JPA enthusiasts.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the JSF plug at the bottom that ends (kills?) the thread. If JSRs were people, JSF would be in Pelican Bay.</comment>


Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/97

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of this has already appeared in the popular press, but this is a lecture by a Harvard psychologist responsible for much of the research. He's funny & punchy, and generally quite enjoyable to watch.

Aside from the experiments, I thought the bit about how freedom was the enemy of happiness was pretty interesting. Among other things, it explains the reaction to PG's essays: in order to maintain their happiness, they have to believe that they're stuck in a boring corporate job and have no other options. Otherwise, they have a choice, and with that choice comes regret, and with regret comes unhappiness. So PG is really spreading unhappiness the world over. ;-) His essays only resonate with those who _already_ know they have a choice, because we're not going to become more unhappy about it, and it might inspire us to actually try it.

Also explains why the 20s can be such an emotional wasteland - coming out of college, we have so many possible choices, and nearly all of them are reversible.</comment>


Elon Musk thinks he can make getting to Mars cheaper than going to college - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/6/17/15824500/elon-musk-getting-to-mars-cheaper-college-new-paper <comment><USER2> Even better: Ad Astra University on Mars</comment>


GSA's Trump Hotel Lease Debacle - <AUTHOR> http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2016/11/gsas-trump-hotel-lease-debacle/133424/ <comment><USER2> Why are priceless treasures of our architectural heritage being routinely pimped out to private developers? And more to the point, who benefits?

That's the real scandal here.</comment>


Andrew Yang: The Prophet of Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/andrew-yang/ <comment><USER2> I feel like there are so many holes in the UBI that Yang has offered, some extremely obvious. Reminds me of Josepf Goerbells "Big Lie," which could be summed up as

simplicity x scale of a lie == popularity + efficacy.

I do not believe the narrative Yang has spun about AI taking half of our jobs in 5 to 10 years, and I think that even minute inspection of his policies turns up a lot to be answered. Just two easy ones off the top of my head:

1) giving the freedom dividend to everyone effectively dilutes other programs. For example, my mother is on long term disability, and she receives $1200 a month. Under Yang's plan she would be competing against everyone else who just gained $1000 a month because the benefit does not stack. The same argument can be made about other single mothers who do not receive disability but other benefits.

2) He says stuff like he does not want to break up big tech because "nobody wants to use the fourth best search engine." To me this means he's not as informed as appears. The reason we would break up Google has nothing to do with Bing or DuckDuckGo and everything to do with information autocracy, influence, and monopolistic practices towards new businesses.

Anyways, I could list about 100 things wrong with his plan, and I am going to make a YouTube series on it because YouTube is obsessed with UBI; meanwhile, I do not believe his theory on AI or that we can afford his plan without increasing government debt.

<comment><USER3> 1) What makes you think your mother would be "competing" against people receiving UBI? Economy is not a single sum game, and there are several studies suggesting that the boost it would give the economy would actually free up more money for social services.

2) I am not a Yang expert, and agree with you on the dangers of an information autocracy, but from what I understand he is not against breaking up big-tech, he just doesn't believe it will by itself solve the fundamental problems society currently faces with respect to tech and believes other solutions are necessary.

<comment><USER2> 1) In supply limited markets like housing, especially low income housing, there's definitely competition for that limited supply. Then there is inflation in general, which will become a factor to some extent. Bertrand's trap comes into play on highly substitutable goods like apples, so there wouldn't be much competition there, but where there is inelasticity of demand you get inflation. For poor people, this manifests in decreased quality of healthcare and less housing optionality. Healthcare example going back to my mom: she needs to get an in home nurse in the next year or two, or to be put in a home, she has $1200 a month to pay for this. With Yang's plan she would be competing against people who potentially have enough saved to pay on their own, but also have a bonus $1000 a month. This ultimately shifts purchasing power away from people like my mom. Example in housing is the same, but replace a nursing home for an actual home.

2) Yang has actually been around the map on this, the first few months he was against it, lately it has been for and against? He seems uncertain, but either way I don't really appreciate the uncertainty. I do think they should be broken up, and I think Yang should be knowledgable enough of the cause effect relationship to make a decision. Another way to look at this is that the guy who is saying that AI is going to replace all our jobs doesn't seem to have a grasp on the idea of antitrust in technology. It is also a strawman representation of antitrust, no one said it will solve all our problems; antitrust is a nuanced issue that has extreme relevance today, and it takes someone who is preceptive to understand it. Yang presents himself as this preceptive person, and foretells our ruinous future with AI, yet he doesn't understand the issue.

<comment><USER3> 1) That assumes these markets stay supply limited, which has often showed not to be the case. Even against all predictions. I know several nurses who would jump at the chance to leave the hospital infrastructure and help people on a more personal level if they could retain some level of financial stability. An UBI could provide that stability. It is necessary to see what makes these markets supply limited and address those issues if needed. This stands apart from the questions of UBI.

2) I find the fact that he does not have a simple answer to a complex problem a breath of fresh air in our political climate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A functional language and an optimising compiler generating GPU code - <AUTHOR> http://futhark-lang.org <comment><AUTHOR> Some of you may have seen this last week on Reddit. Since then, we improved the website with a gaussian blur stencil example[0], a stencil performance graph[1], and an article on Pygame interop[2].

[0]: [http://futhark-lang.org/examples.html#gaussian-blur- stencil](http://futhark-lang.org/examples.html#gaussian-blur-stencil)

[1]: [http://futhark-lang.org/performance.html#hotspot-futhark- rod...](http://futhark-lang.org/performance.html#hotspot-futhark-rodinia)

[2]: [http://futhark-lang.org/blog/2016-04-25-futhark-and- pygame.h...](http://futhark-lang.org/blog/2016-04-25-futhark-and-pygame.html)</comment>


Ways to Read More Books - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/02/8-ways-to-read-a-lot-more-books-this-year <comment><USER3> This may be an unusual opinion, but I read a lot, and I've found non-fiction books to just not be efficient means of educating myself anymore. Most topics can be illustrated and described in far fewer words than a book takes. I get about a third of the way through a lot of books and say "ok I get it", as the author basically just continues to say the same thing in different ways. I'm sure this is incentivized by current publishing structure.

Not only that, but figures and plots provide far more information density than words, and books don't frequently include them in large quantity. I've found scientific literature and a number of very high quality bloggers to be a much more efficient source of reading material.

That's not to say this is always true - biographies in particular seem to have the most consistently large content / page count.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of Naval Ravikant who suggested reading books more like blogs - <USER2> shouldn't feel some social pressure to "finish a book" but rather skip the parts you don't enjoy and drop it whenever you feel like you've gotten the main point. I've been doing this more recently and found that I don't get stuck on books anymore, no longer bottlenecked by certain parts which are boring and redundant.

<comment><USER5> This works for me too. I will regularly check a book out of the library, read three chapters, and then return it to get another. I realized that I wasn't finishing books because doing so was not a good use of my time.

Somewhat related is that I'll read chapters out of order. Many books follow an approach of "laying the foundation" before making the point. 40 pages of laying the foundation is a logical step but unfortunately is not done well in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've read more in the past 12 months than in the past few years, purely because I discovered a company in the UK called the Folio Society[1]. They sell beautifully bound and illustrated editions of fantastic books, although at rather high prices (£30-40 on average).

Previously the majority of the books I read came in the form of cheap ebooks from the Kindle store. As a result, I often abandoned them (or even just forgot about them), only reading a few chapters. Now though, when I spend £30 on a single book, damn right am I going to finish it.

Plus, as a result of the curation, there isn't a single book on their site that isn't at least worth a glance. The same can't be said for many physical bookstores, let alone Amazon, etc.

And, the best part is, I don't really need these expensive books anymore. I've gotten into such a habit of reading because of them that I'm buying regular books again and I'm reading for at least an hour or two a night.

[1] [http://foliosociety.com](http://foliosociety.com)

<comment><USER7> _> when I spend £30 on a single book, damn right am I going to finish it._

That's an interesting exploitation of the sunk cost fallacy. [1][2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy)

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

<comment><USER8> That's only works if

a) cost is high enough compared to your income

b) you are a reasonable person, and value your money enough to care

I tried to use this tactic many times, mostly to hone my programming skills - didn't work. Damn, I recently entered a postgraduate program at the university, for 2500$ cost - didn't help much, still can't force myself to spend more time learning things.

<comment><USER7> A similar phenomenon are the various ways people try to trick their procrastination habit, not with money (fake price) but with time (fake priorities).

However, as you correctly noticed, these techniques don't work well. That's normal, don't worry if these simple solutions don't work. Maybe you think they should work, because you often hear from people for whom "that one weird trick" worked. Or that one complicated technique. But usually these are the same people who try to sell you their book on that topic.

Instead, you need to the root of this issues, which may involve finding your true priorities, and may involve actively changing your habits. All this may be really hard, and you'll fail and retry many times - especially when trying to do this alone. Heck, there's a whole profession around helping people to fix these types of issues - some of them are highly qualified, others are charlatans. (The latter often call themselves "coaches" as that term doesn't require much qualification, so that they can't be sued if they do a bad job.)

<comment><USER9> How do you find the highly qualified? How are they called? How do you find the fitting one, without having tons of money to through out like a big manager would have (but probably enough, specially if the result is promising)

Thanks!

<comment><USER7> Since this is about treating human beings, of course the best qualified people are physicians. More precisely, medical psychotherapist and related professions. Among various treatments, behavior therapy is quite common, but there are others.

There is certainly some stigma around this, because most people think that going to a therapy means you have some serious mental illness. But that's nonsense. There's a huge variety of issues, small and lager, and all physicians are fully aware of this broad spectrum.

The defining criteria is always: Does the person suffer from that issue? (Sometimes also: Do the people around that person suffer from it?) And, of course: What's the best way to help them?

Moreover: If they can help people to get away and stay away from alcohol and other drugs, and are able to talk a violent to cooperation, which are both much harder tasks than anything discussed here, then they can help with "smaller" psychological issues as well.

And compared to people with some 3-months crash course, they know exactly what they do, and have all forms of therapy applied to themselves as well, that's a vital part of the training.

For reference, I'm talking about the situation here in Germany. But I think this should be very similar in other countries, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seems to something of a cargo-cult mentality underlined in this article. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Stephen King and Mark Zuckerberg all read loads of books (that's how they made their money!)

Unless you have some set goal to know a certain body of knowledge (as I presume the four above have), reading should be done leisurely -- not a race to read, and half-understand, as many books as possible.

<comment><USER11> I also found the survivorship-biasy part of the article to be a bit goofy, but I found other parts to be pretty spot on. I have fallen out of the habit of reading this past year (I think in part due to stress over political news) and I've been looking for ways to bring it back into my life. These things hit home:

* While I don't think reading will make me successful, I do find the habitual focus/relaxation aspects of reading to be beneficial

* Regarding paper books vs e-readers, as much as I like the idea of carrying a book in my pocket everywhere, I somehow allow myself to get distracted even on a Paperwhite (I'll start browsing the library and/or shopping for other books), and so I've been thinking of going back to regular old paper books

* Decision fatigue! I spend way more time fretting over what to read next than I do reading

Regarding audiobooks, I enjoy "reading" books in that format, but I have wondered lately about the downside of constantly being plugged in; it's a great way to pass the time doing dishes, but I imagine it's also good to give your brain time to sit quietly without input. It's also a struggle to resist the temptation lose myself in escapist fiction all the time; there's a thin line (for me, anyway) between the type of reading that exercises your ability to focus and the type of reading that acts as a palliative.

On second look, it appears the link was changed from a summary of a Harvard Business Review article on Quartz.com to the actual Harvard Business Review article. The summary had lots of survivorship bias, and the HBR version does not. Thought I had lost my mind for a minute there.

<comment><USER12> I think the "survivorship bias" argument for reading is a bit overplayed.

There's practically _zero_ of these mega-successful people (Gates, Buffett, Zuckerburg, Musk, etc.) who don't read. Astonishingly, I can't think of a single one. While that doesn't prove causation, it definitely points at it! Do you want to try to be the first successful person who didn't read?

It's not that reading was this one magical trick that caused them to be successful, but rather that reading was a prerequisite. At least, that's my take.

<comment><USER13> Donald Trump?

<comment><USER14> Not successful. He just inherited Daddy's money and grew that money at a slower rate than the market.

<comment><USER15> If you define success solely by the amount of money, sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One problem is Dopamine. I have learned to get constant Dopamine hits from Netflix/Youtube/Video Games. When I goto reading a book, it bores the shit out of me. Its unfortunate really. So for last month or so, I cut down all of the aforementioned things. I am now able to read much more than I did before, before feeling sleepy or caving into the aforementioned things.

Why cut down on Dopamine? Relating to Digtal Signal processing, think of your brain like an Envelope detector. When you keep supplying large peaks of Dopamine levels, the 'mundane' is considered noise. Reducing peaks the said peaks will allow you to tune the envelope detector and also consider 'noise'. Eliminating all the peaks would be ideal but likely un-realistic. Shitty analogy, but thats how I taught it to my self; relating an idea to a concept I already somewhat understand.

Happy reading.

Edited: Rephrase.

<comment><USER17> Books can really vary in their excitement/engagement dimension. I'm currently reading a history of Europe since WW2 and it's quite a bit of work, on the other hand there's other non-fiction like John Krakauer that I've found pretty easy to burn through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The game changer for me was actually learning how to read a book. I no longer approach books the same way after having read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler [1]. Once you have a method down, you can go through books rather quickly and retain knowledge. My biggest epiphany is that you don't need to read a book in its entirety to know all that it has to say.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent- Touchstone/...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent- Touchstone/dp/0671212095)

<comment><USER19> Could you give a summary of what you learnt from it?

<comment><USER20> There is a good summary on Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My biggest aids to reading more books have been technical:

1) Goodreads to track books, maintain a to-read queue, share reviews, etc. Plus the "reading challenge" feature, which shows if you're on-track or not (2016: 52 originally, then 68. 2017 goal: 78, but possibly 104.)

2) Kindle -- not having to physically deal with books while traveling, and having access to my entire collection.

3) Audible -- when driving, flying, trying to fall asleep, etc., audiobooks are preferable to text (at least for me). Certain books work very well as audiobooks (better than text, even), and some are worse.

4) Synced audio/kindle -- being able to switch back and forth on a single book between the two formats on demand

<comment><USER22> I've made the mistakes of reading more scientifically inclined books on Audible, but I've recently realized there are three strong categories (1) history books, (2) history-of-science/scientist type books, and (3) self- help/philosophy books.

Listening to Marcus Aurelius before bed while brushing my teeth turns out to be a good meditation.

<comment><USER21> I really like fiction in audiobook format, too. I have been disappointed by the short story collections I've found, but it seems like there could be a great marketplace for short fiction in audio form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article is geared towards reading more books like its a race. It would seem better to reread a few books to really grasp them. I think there is something to be said for rereading versus reading more new books.

How many times were we discussing something we read and all we can really say is "I read a book on it. something to do about blah blah. I forget the details." No real insight or grasping of the material in one read.

Maybe a book club that focuses more on grasping fewer books very intimately over constantly reading new ones. Just a thought.

<comment><USER24> When you get comfortable reading a lot, you don't need to re-read books. Certainly, a rare few books benefit from multiple readings but not all. I retain a surprising amount of details and can describe passages from Dickens and the main argument of David Cay Johnson's "Perfectly Legal" or the amazing survival story of "Mawson's Will" or an amusing passage in Ernest Hemingway's journalism story "A Free Shave" or the images of the amputation tent in Tolstoy's "The Sebaastopol Sketches--to name a tiny few.

Once your reading is not going "put-put-put" and your unbroken attention span reaches an hour, you may feel like you need to re-read. Certainly, it's a nice experience but it's really a waste of time re-reading everything.

<comment><USER23> I agree wholeheartedly for fiction, where reading for enjoyment is concerned. But even good fiction deserves multiple reads. Where rereading is more of an essential is with non-fiction. Especially non-fiction that is read for the purpose of obtaining and using the information. A few examples would be The Selfish Gene, How To Win Friends And Influence People, Better Angels of Our Nature, and of course The Art of the Deal. Ok maybe not that last one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I found out that for many books on amazon when you buy kindle version that for, usually, 3-5$ you can add audible narration of the same book! Audio books enable me to read more books in mindless situations where reading paper or kindle is not easy or not possible (example when running, in store..). Just a note, I tried (and paid) for blinklist.com before, but I am not using it anymore, I feel like I miss much out of the books that way.

<comment><USER26> THIS! Subscribing to audible has been a game changer for me. And once you get used to it, listening on fast forward has made the experience more pleasurable and you go through the books faster.

On a side note, I wish audible would make downloading the accompanying figure PDFs less cumbersome. Currently,it seems to be impossible to get them through the mobile app and one needs to use the website to download them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Add "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" to /etc/hosts

2\. Get your tax dollars' worth out of your library card

<comment><USER28> > 2\. Get your tax dollars' worth out of your library card

To add to this, shoutout to the Overdrive app/site which makes borrowing ebooks/audiobooks from libraries extremely easy.

[http://overdrive.com/](http://overdrive.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How to read more books: Speed listen to your books with adobe reader 9.5 plugin called texthelp PDFaloud 3.0 and high quality SAPI5 voices from acapela infovox, nuance realspeak, or neospeech.

<comment><USER30> Is this satire?

<comment><USER31> Upgrading to creators update Windows 10 got me started with text -to-speech.

Edge browser has a button to read eBooks (EPUB files) aloud. The voices resemble human speech but that's not why I use it.

Edge does something that make me prefer speech-to-text over audio books. I've got many unread Audio books because it's a passive activity. My body just itches to do something.

On Edge, the words are highlighted as they are being read. Thus I actively read as I listen. And most importantly, distraction is no biggie - just spot the flashing words. Also, it's easy to spot and make up when the voice mispronounces words.

 __*

I upgraded my phone to the Creators update hoping to use Edge to read on the go. However, the result was disappointing. They are definitely different browsers sharing the same name.

Luckily an eBook reader called Freda+ reads aloud pretty well. It only highlights paragraphs rather word-by-word like edge - better than no highlight.

Summary.

My eyes tire easily when reading on computer - eye issues, glare, sleep deprivation... Without speech recognition, I'll read far less books.

Note: Edge works only on EPUB files which is pretty disappointing as EPUB files are html docs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reading this article makes me really question the quality of the reading the author is doing. Reading is its own justification. Stop strategizing and just _do it_.

</comment><comment><USER33> I would thoroughly recommend trying some modern Audiobooks if you have not tried them yet. It may remind you of your grandmother but seriously, they have replaced most of my entertainment. I even got a waterproof speaker to listen in the shower! The full cast audiobooks are especially awesome. I have "read" just over 500 books since 2009 so no idea how many hours I have lost in total!

<comment><USER34> I wonder how this was not on the list as it is the most obvious solution. I spend most of the reading time while commuting. In winter by reading in summer on my bike listening.

It took some time to get used to it but it works!

Can you recommend a speaker? I thought about that too but never took it really serious.

<comment><USER33> I got an Eco Pebble [https://ecoxgear.com/shop/ecopebble/](https://ecoxgear.com/shop/ecopebble/)

It does the job, I dunno if I would recommend it but I got it for 20 notes. The only annoyance is after charging, your device won't see the speaker unless you "Forget Device" and re-pair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Roald Dahl's poem "Television" says it all: "So please, oh please, we beg, > we pray / go throw your TV set away / and in its place, you can install / a > lovely bookshelf on the wall."

There's a house 2 blocks from me where an old Volvo is always in the driveway, with a bumper sticker that says:

> BLOW UP YOUR TV

I always walk by that place and think, those people must be cool. I've never put a TV set in any place I've lived.

But I've noticed lately when I walk by there at night... they have a big TV on. I wonder if it has a sticker on it that says

> BLOW UP YOUR CAR

</comment><comment><USER12> This article touches on, in my opinion, the 2 great problems with non-fiction reading nowadays:

* Deciding which book to read next out of the seemingly infinite decision space (which book is optimal?)

* Reading books "well", such that you truly elevate your level of understanding of a topic to that of the author, and then remember what you've learned.

Notably, I think "Read More Books", the title of the article, is more of a symptom. If people could choose the _right_ books and then read them satisfyingly enough to truly become smarter and wiser, reading would be such a great deal that no one would have the problem of needing to read "more".

What's craziest is that these problems are the same ones readers faced centuries ago. Reading hasn't evolved at all! People still prefer reading physical books in the world of the internet and data science. And how do readers choose books? One-off recommendations from people that they may or may not trust.

I think with technology we can do a lot better. Specifically, I've been hacking on solving the two aforementioned problems with books such that we can read and learn like it's really 2017. Would love advice/conversation with any reading-inclined HNers! I'm firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER36> I think finding the topic is the harder issue. Or picking a topic among those you are interested in.

If you are interested in a specific topic, then usually you can find discussions of "game changing" books in that topic. Or trace the "tree" of current books to earlier books in the topic.

If you want to know what influenced an author, take a look at the sources the book cites. A quick Google search revealed a bunch of sites which offer search for book / pub citation info. Maybe that's a good place to start.

An interesting service might be to take this a step further and add some sort of visualization for a given topic.

<comment><USER12> Interesting! For myself, I tend to already know what topics I care about, e.g Entrepreneurship, History of Computing, Stoicism, etc. These topics usually become quite apparent when I look at my goals in life. Can you explain more about how you decide on topics?

As for the "game changing" books, I definitely agree! It seems that most areas seem to have those "seminal" books that most of the other books in the genre reference non-stop. One example that jumps out at me is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which seems to be referenced by every book I can get my hands on.

The visualization of a tree is definitely interesting: I suppose the goal of it would to be able to find the roots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I love reading technical books slowly, and digesting all content.

Relocating around Europe made it quite tough to carry all my book hardcopies with me: SICP, CTM, TAOP...

Finally, it seems 13 inch eink readers with support for arbitrary formats (thanks to them running Android, or even capable to process input HDMI video) will become mainstream. To me that's the way to read more books. Thousands of technical books in an eye-friendly tablet. I wonder why it took so long.

<comment><USER38> Are you referring to this? [https://www.amazon.com/Onyx-Max-13-3-Flexible- Handwriting/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Onyx-Max-13-3-Flexible- Handwriting/dp/B01EVACVHY)

Have you tried it? I personally can't stand reading technicle books on my 6"kindle. If the 13" is a better experience I'm upgrading.

<comment><USER37> Yes, I am referring to Onyx and others. Onyx is probably the best one, and they will be shortly upgrading to Android 4.4, providing a lower consumption CPU and more importantly HDMI input.

This last feature is a game changer.

I have tried Onyx 13 inch readers, and its a very good experience on technical ebooks, which I get on djvu and pdf formats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A lot of people waste their time reading the latest NY Times best sellers when they could be learning. Who cares how many trash novels you read? You might as well watch TV. Read for quality not quantity and pursue other avenues of learning. Kahn Academy has tons of excellent and free courses on YouTube. Or actually do things. Build something, plant a garden, fix your car, learn a language, write. Passive consumption is overrated.

<comment><USER40> Didn't you hear though? All successful people read. It's obvious that reading made them successful, not their upbringing or environment. As long as you read as much as possible, does it matter what you read? Be like Bill. Be successful!

I was being sarcastic, obviously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Read more--Yes!

1) It's a habit.

2) Cultivate the garden of your interests.

\- Find resources for reading recommendations (NY Review of Books, NYT Book Review, POD casts, NPR radio);

\- Devise a system to collect reading recommendations and to revisit (ie. 3x5 cards, *.txt files you can grep);

3) Get books. Find a convenient and impulsive source for books.

\- Visit your public library!

\- Reduce the stress of putting down a book that's boring (unless you're wealthy, then Amazon to you heart's content).

\- Most public libraries let you search online, reserve, call you when your book is ready, then just go pick it up.

4) Develop better reading habits (mostly for non-fiction):

\- Can't get into a book? Start at the index (in the most xtreme cases I list my interests reading the index, then tally which chapters have the most points of interest and read those first!)

\- Learn the vocabulary.

\- Pencil marginalia. Limited set of what I call "sign-posts". A small check- mark to flag an important passage or line is sufficient. (Underlining is awful; don't do it. If everything is important, than nothing is most important).

\- Keep a piece of scrap paper and write down a great idea you had while reading--this will clear your mind of your great idea, and let you get back to reading. And it also keeps your interest, because who doesn't like having great ideas?

5) Write a brief book review for every book you read for the rest of you life. Save this as a simple text file. MLA bibliographic entry. Few paragraphs about the book. Done.

</comment><comment><USER42> I've been trying to read more books in 2017, and it's been going well so far and I've read 24 books since January.

The two things that have made the difference for me are:

* use the library! I only paid for 1 of those 24 books. Of the others 1 was a physical book from the library and the other 22 were library ebooks. I rarely find things I want to read that they don't have in ebook format (although often you need to 'request a hold' and wait as they can only loan out each copy to so many people at once). For context, I'm in Austin, TX

* make reading a deliberate evening activity. I used to only read when I was in bed and then be frustrated with my progress. I've started reading on my lunch break at work, and also in place of other evening activities (TV, internet, guitar etc). If I do 30 mins at lunch, an hour in the evening and then some in bed I can finish a reasonable length book per week.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think it also comes down to attitude. I remember when we didn't have internet at home and I was in middle school through high-school, I'd always have about 20 floppy disks with me so that I could go to an internet café, download pages so I could read them home.

During sophomore year (college, Engineering), I spent a _lot_ of time commuting (could stack up to 6 hours in a day) so I was reading philosophy, economics, neuro linguistic programming, psychology, etc. during this time. I live in a country where I can't just buy any book (low availability) and electronic payment wasn't introduced until recently and I didn't have a laptop 10 years ago, so I'd print 4 book pages per A4 sheet, then they'd get folded an make a small book I'd pierce in the center and sort of bind. 500 sheets were about $5 that time.

I also read everywhere, especially in the toilet, which I think is a habit I picked up from home (I grew up with a book shelf in the toilet and we used to call the bathroom the "National Library"). As a matter of fact, I'm writing these very lines sitting on the throne.

I've never read as much as during my unemployment (I could read like 20 hours per day, but it's not for everyone).

On my way to work and after work, I reach for my laptop and get stuff done if I'm fortunate to have a seat. I work on features, do refactoring, etc. If I'm standing, I get my phone and read an ebook.

By the way, I recently found Aaron Swartz' blog posts in epub format. [https://github.com/joshleitzel/rawthought](https://github.com/joshleitzel/rawthought)

The takeaway from this is the following:

\- Making the most out of time that would otherwise be wasted: amortizing commute time, waiting time, etc.

\- Exposing myself to a variety of topics opened up a graph of interest that sent me to different directions and topics. I've learned a lot of things.

</comment><comment><USER44> I go back and forth on if its helpful to set a goal on the number of books. Sometimes its a good motivation for me. Other times its a distraction to the goals of why I read: to learn and to enjoy.

The year my son was born I spent hours everyday pushing him in a stroller to help him stop crying and give his mom a break. I read / listened to 105 books that year, which ended up being too much. I couldn't remember most of what I read / listened to. The next year I had to re-read many of the books.

The sweet spot for me is between 40 and 50, although I've adjusted my goal from number of books to subject mastery. Focusing on a subject I care about and studying books, articles, etc. on the subject has ended up being more rewarding. In addition, I have a handful of books I read simply for the joy of reading.

<comment><USER45> One downside of tracking the books I read is that I have a subtle resistance to starting super long books, because I know for that month I'll only end up reading 2 books instead of 5. It's really stupid but a side effect of tracking / counting.

It means I unnecessarily postponed reading excellent books such as "Titan" by Chernow.

<comment><USER46> I've gotten around this (at least a little) by tracking pages read instead of books read.

<comment><USER45> That's actually a really good idea. Might also make me prioritize articles more if they contribute to a "page count".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> [Off topic] You can purchase this article for $8.95? [https://hbr.org/product/8-ways-to-read-a-lot-more-books- this...](https://hbr.org/product/8-ways-to-read-a-lot-more-books-this- year/H03FGE-PDF-ENG)

<comment><USER32> Indeed; in what possible world would anyone consider that worth the price of a paperback book?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Last year I read over 100 books as part of my Goodreads challenge. This year I set the target way down at 50 books and my new challenge is to finish all the books I've bought but not finished. So my rule is I have to finish 2 books from the unfinished list before I can buy a new book.

My kindle has 470 books on it with 86 of them not complete or that I have only skimmed.

Audible account is up to 70 with 26 unfinished.

And I have about a dozen paper books to finish too which is from the point about reading physical books. I find for technical topics I do way better retaining and studying from paper books than kindle ones so I've started buying paper again.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've started "reading" lots of books now that I have Audible. I listen while mowing the lawn, while doing chores, etc. Can easily to a book a week this way.

<comment><USER23> I love audio books. They have changed my life. Though I find it hard to proselytize friends and family over to the audio side. They all give the same reason, "i tried it and it didn't work" or "i have not tried it and i know it wont work". IMHO, I think more people should give it a shot, a real honest attempt. My first audio book was Ender's Game, so maybe starting off with a bang is the way to go.

<comment><USER49> What I do is to suggest that they try listening while doing chores that require no hard thinking. Your brain will be happy to have something to engage in. Today while spreading dirt and grass seed, I listened to "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry". Was nice in that it was a one-work-session listen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I've been digging through Hacker News posts, hackernewsbooks, etc. It was a non-ficton book, about the loss of power/money/wealth in New York? I believe. It was like 1000+ pages, and only around $15, and I can't for the life of me remember what the hell it was. Had a picture of the guy on the cover, that's about all I can remember. But I know I wanted it!

<comment><USER51> "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro?

<comment><USER50> Will you marry me? This is why I love Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> As an aside, the research on ego depletion that he quotes in uncritical terms has been completely discredited. The phenomenon does not exist. Of course, to know that you need to read science blogs, not books. But there are books about ego depletion, several, filled with lies. When the container is more important than the content, I suppose truthfulness is a secondary concern.

<comment><USER53> Interesting. HBR has a recent article on the topic, so they don't think its dead:

[https://hbr.org/2017/05/your-brain-can-only-take-so-much- foc...](https://hbr.org/2017/05/your-brain-can-only-take-so-much-focus)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> For me, I started reading a lot more when I moved to New York and started taking the subway everywhere.

Public transit makes a good excuse to read, since I find it a rather difficult place to do "real" work, but there's also a lot of downtime.

Also, despite what this article says, I found that purchasing a Kindle really made reading a lot less of a chore.

</comment><comment><USER55> I use Pocket, and one of the things I wish I could do is to break books down into chapters and feed the individual chapters into Pocket. If I ever want it bad enough, I'll hack together some kind of solution. But getting text out of an Kindle ebook seems like it'd be tricky.

<comment><USER56> It's actually quite easy. Simply strip it of drm (software is easily googleable )

From there you can unzip it and the chapters exist as basically html files.

<comment><USER55> Thanks! I'll keep that in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> What worked for me was setting smarter goals. Instead of a X-books-in-a-year, I switched to 3-books-in-a-month, which is far more easier to track because I need to finish a book once every 10 days.

I track everything on Goodreads, and it has been working out great.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'd add joining a reading circle. Forces a monthly/bimonthly book on me I'd likely not have picked up by myself, discussions afterwards are usually quite insightful, plus you can frequent and support your local bookstore.

</comment><comment><USER59> Ancient Kindle (I use the keyboard edition) text-to-speech. Not as good as Audible but much more affordable. Also weird using the same narration for all books!

Humble Bundle sometimes has audio book bundle deals, usually Dr Who.

</comment><comment><USER60> Lots of people writing good comments about audiobooks. Anyone knows if it's benefits are the same of reading? Instead of listening someone narrating?

<comment><USER61> From personal as well as shared experience from several avid "audiobookers", retention is dramatically decreased with audiobooks.

Many folks will use audiobooks while multi-tasking (driving, cleaning) where the brain is partially distracted from absorbing, reflecting on, and internalizing the book contents.

I reserve audiobooks for fiction, autobiographies, and other light materials where I'm not learning so much as consuming content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Do you guys use any tool to keep track of your books? to find new books to read?

<comment><USER48> I use goodreads for tracking and the recommended books section of the kindle store which I think gives better recommendations than goodreads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> the deal breaker for me is actually picking up a new book to read, often I stop at the "searching a good book to read". when you start often is inertia.

<comment><USER64> It sounds like maybe you need a better network of strong recommendations that you would personally find interesting. For me, my interests lie in non-fiction literature, and I have many colleagues who share those interests, and so I often find myself with more interesting literature on my list than I have the free time to read and digest. However, I think that I have a much better problem than you do.

I'm certain that there are quality book clubs, social or even recommendation engines that might help you get started finding more literature that's personally interesting to you. Maybe the HN crowd knows of some quality sources for personally interesting literature?

<comment><USER65> Also, the classics, lists of great books, influences of the authors of your favorite books...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Stop reading. Start acting.

</comment><comment><USER67> Start reading a long series by a prolific author - like Bernard Cornwell or Patrick O'Brian on Kindle. Watch your bank account dwindle.

</comment><comment><USER68> We changed the URL from [https://qz.com/963692/how-to-read-more-books-this- year-accor...](https://qz.com/963692/how-to-read-more-books-this-year- according-to-harvard-research/), which points to this.</comment>


NASA rover yet to find methane on Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/nasa-rover-finds-no-methane-on-mars-yet-1.11730

<comment><USER2> I think this post title should be changed - why is the "yet" left off when it's clearly in the article title?

</comment><comment><USER3> Cassini/Huygens, Voyager, and soon New Horizons captivate the public without conducting life science. Are our Martian missions discredited if they find no evidence of life? I really hope not, and I hope the public understands so too.

<comment><USER4> They're also about evaluating the viability of human life on Mars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there any organisms that could survive in the current martian landscape so as to slowly enrich its atmosphere?

<comment><USER6> Apparently some alpine and polar lichens could survive on mars:

[http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151...](http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-3409/)

However, my understanding is that these have such slow rates of growth that they might not be terribly good at "enriching" the Martian atmosphere, at least in their current natural form.

<comment><USER7> Putting viable life on Mars would be such an important threshold. It would guarantee life to survive even the destruction of Earth. Important stuff. Like Raid1 for data redundancy.

Not many things could destroy both Earth and Mars, except the expanding of the Sun in 5 billion years and maybe the fusion Andromeda/MilkyWay in 4 billion years if we're not lucky. Also aliens.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that dangerous though? Could altering its atmosphere have a destabilizing effect? What if they evolve too fast and turn against us?

Edit: interesting to read: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars>

<comment><USER8> I think the dangerous part would be altering the planet to be unlivable to the current inhabitants. Which is a good reason for conducting these tests, to see if anything is there before we start transplanting life. If nothing is there, then we can move lichens etc without fear of contamination. If something is there, we don't want to destroy its habitat by introducing new life.

<comment><USER9> Ive just realised how good AND bad finding life on Mars could be. On the one hand, we find LIFE on another planet. On the other hand, it makes it incredibly difficult for humans to ever move there and begin terraforming the planet into a second home.

<comment><USER5> If history is any guide, native inhabitants don't stand a chance if we can kill them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _... the 95% upper and lower confidence limits of the non-detection varied between -2 and 5 parts per billion_

I can't imagine the degree of confusion which led someone to say that it's possible for Mars' atmosphere to contain a _negative_ concentration of methane.

<comment><USER11> Statistically your confidence interval can go negative but practically a negative concentration doesn't exist.

<comment><USER10> _Statistically your confidence interval can go negative_

No, it really can't. If it looks like it is, you're using a symmetric distribution function (probably a normal distribution) in a context where its assumptions do not hold.

<comment><USER5> I think they said variation, not confidence interval

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, that's a presumptuous claim given the sample size of the tests.

I mean we're talking about a whole planet here, with the possibility of canyons, valleys, underground structures which may have who knows what trapped inside them.

Maybe there are tons of gases trapped and hidden inside the surface of Mars and the atmosphere is devoid of it because over millions of years, those things escaped into space?

<comment><USER12> And I find your dismissal presumptuous, based as it is on an article for the popular press. I am thinking that the people who dedicate their lives to studying planets may have at some point had the "Gosh, planets are _big_ " thought cross their mind at some point.

<comment><USER13> ...they didn't write the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Didn't a NASA satellite already detect methane in the Martian atmosphere a few years ago?

<comment><USER14> Here's some links: [http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-09/mars- methane-c...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-09/mars-methane- changes-seasons-and-scientists-wonder-why) [http://www.popsci.com/military- aviation-amp-space/article/20...](http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp- space/article/2009-01/methane-may-point-life-mars)

I know I'm probably missing something here.

UPDATE: Okay, here we go: _Various campaigns in the last decade have claimed to detect martian methane at levels as intriguingly high as 30 parts per billion1 and 45 parts per billion2. But more perplexing was the way that the methane signals sometimes appeared as hotspots, or plumes, and then disappeared — implying both a sudden injecton, as well as an unknown process to destroy the methane quickly, which would otherwise mix in the atmosphere and persist. Skepticism for these claims has abounded (See "Curiosity set to weigh in on Mars methane puzzle" )._

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "yet"

<comment><USER5> Suppose they find it and it's some weird bacteria-like structures. It's a big deal, but what impact could it have for science and tech? I believe it would have similar impact to the (false) announcement of these bacteria that replaced P with As. Remarkable, but not sure what we would do with it.</comment></comment>


Polymorphic Allocators from C++17, std:vector Growth and Hacking - <AUTHOR> https://www.bfilipek.com/2020/06/pmr-hacking.html <comment><USER2> I was hoping that this article would be about C++'s terrible allocator interface and how to fix it. In particular C++ containers can only allocate and release memory, _not_ grow existing allocations --- at least while using the standard allocator interface [1]. So when vector needs to grow, it always needs to copy all elements.

Why is this limitation important? Doesn't realloc copy anyway? Well, not always. Linux has this neat system call called mremap [2] that in theory allows an allocation to move in virtual address space but not in physical memory. (To be precise, mremap moves PTEs directly.) Realloc-via-mremap is _much_ more efficient than relloc-via-copying, and it's a shame that limitations in C++ language design prevent our using it, at least with standard containers.

Yes, yes, a move constructor requires both source and destination addresses to be simultaneously valid, so we can't use mremap [3] in the general case. But lots of C++ objects (like, e.g., int) are trivially movable [4], and these objects would work just fine in an mremap-based vector.

[1] [https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/allocator](https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/allocator) [2] [https://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man2/mremap.2.html](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mremap.2.html) [3] well, without the shared mapping dup hack, but that's specialized [4] [https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2018/05/02/trivial- abi-10...](https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2018/05/02/trivial-abi-101/)

<comment><USER3> for memory remapping hacks to be worthwhile, the vector needs to be huge, so I doubt it is often enough a win to be suitable for a general purpose library.

The reason for realloc is that often an allocator can extend an existing allocation in place if the next block is free (and this can be done without syscalls). As you described, except for trivially copyable objects though, realloc doesn't really work in C++, so a better allocator interface for C++ would be a try_realloc that would attempt to reallocate in place but do nothing on failure. Unfortunately most system allocators do not provide it [1] so it is kind of a catch-22 and most proposals never made it into the standard.

[1] jmalloc does provide xallocx that only reallocates in place though.

<comment><USER4> Copying large objects is significantly more expensive than copying small objects, and the cost is exacerbated due to cache effects. The C++ language contains a lot of optimizations for trivially copyable objects, e.g. std::copy, so having a realloc optimization for vectors would seem to be natural.

glibc malloc switches to mmap for allocations above ~128KB by default, which could be reached by vectors with just a few thousand elements (or a few very large objects). glibc does use mremap to reallocate mmap'd chunks - so in that sense the memory remapping hacks are already present in a general purpose library.</comment></comment></comment>


Max Ogden steps down as Dat project lead over sex abuse allegations - <AUTHOR> https://blog.datproject.org/2017/12/20/organization-changes-dat-css/ <comment><USER2> Hey everyone. I'm part of the Beaker browser team (we use the Dat protocol). As Max's colleague, it's been extremely disappointing to learn about his behavior, but I'm proud of how the Dat team/community has stepped up in the last week.

Here's my statement on the situation and how the Dat community is moving forward:

[https://taravancil.com/blog/dat-leadership- changes/](https://taravancil.com/blog/dat-leadership-changes/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hacker News is meant to be a sort of non-political oasis, which I apppreciate and which helps to greatly improve the quality of discussion and the content. Their moderation does a wonderful job killing stories where the discussion devolves into sewer.

Unfortunately, increasingly, politics are bleeding into tech in a way that is unavoidable and very, very questionable and upsetting.

What deeply concerns me about this particular story is it really looks a case of a consensual relationship ending under the standard circumstances that consensual relationships end.

People don't want to have sex with each other, they start being less civil to one another. People get angry and break up after personal disputes. Someone doesn't do the laundry and dishes as much as they should. Then people fight.

Are those people now "victims" and "abusers?" I am very not ok with this terminology being used this way.

This is not a good precedent. In the last three months, a friend of mine who I deeply love was falsely accused of sexist behavior because he nearly had a nervous breakdown from working with a member of the opposite sex and asked that she be removed from his project. She then turned around and filed a harassment complaint with HR when SHE was harassing HIM!

You are not a victim if your relationship ends under standard circumstances. I am sorry, you are not. That is an expected part of being in a relationship: People do not get along sometimes.

People should not get thrown out of their projects for this. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I read Max's statement, the tweets sent by his accuser and the community statement and didn't see anything to the contrary.

Did he hit her? No. Did he rape her? No. Did he call her names? Didn't see a mention of it. Where the police called? No. Restraining order? No. Racism? no. Sexism? no. Death threats? no.

So where is the beef here?

Just a vague accusation of "sexual controlling." What the hell does that mean? He wanted to have sex with his girlfriend more than she felt comfortable with? That isn't abuse, sorry. It's grounds for ending a relationship, sure.

What this is doing is setting a precedent for hyper sensitivity and the weaponization of #MeToo in tech.

From the available evidence it looks like a standard relationship that didn't work out.

Happy to change my opinion if more evidence comes out, right now this looks like a drive by reputation shooting.

<comment><USER4> Not knowing the details, I would say that if both parties _agree_ that behavior was abusive, it was abusive. There's no reason for anyone else to second guess at that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is the Twitter thread that started this: [https://twitter.com/jllord/status/941033391750819845](https://twitter.com/jllord/status/941033391750819845)

And here's Max's statement: [https://medium.com/@maxogden/statement-to-the- community-c835...](https://medium.com/@maxogden/statement-to-the- community-c8356dbdd392). The first version, which did not include any specific actions, and to a certain degree engaged in victim blaming, is here: [https://imgur.com/zbiz1Hi](https://imgur.com/zbiz1Hi)

Note how "pressure and expectations [that were] not sensitive to her needs and experiences" turned into "sexual abuse, coercion, and controlling behavior".

But, ultimately, Max Ogden seems to have found his way to dealing with these accusations with something not entirely unlike integrity. Without knowing any specifics, I can only hope his ex-partner can find some degree of healing in it, and find a community that will support her.

And, while I feel somewhat dirty including this in such proximity to wishing his victim well, it is worthy to remember that human lives, and especially relationships, are often messy. We have all made our fair share of mistakes, and their magnitude may often have been limited more by circumstances: good friends stepping in, or sheer luck. It must, and should, be painful to suddenly be woken up and realise the pain you've caused. But Max seems to be a rather young guy. And, contrary to popular opinion, it is in no ones' interest to see his life ruined.

We have created an internet that doesn't forget. Let's see if we can handle its results. Not by forgetting. But, within reason, by forgiving.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do people keep apologizing publicly? Do they actually think that helps?

For all you guys that are interested in a key insight: once dealing w accusations of abuse the worse response you can have (regarding your personal career) is to apologize publicly.

Fight or stay silent.

<comment><USER7> Maybe people are optimizing for considerations other than their career?

<comment><USER8> The corollary is that integrity is bad for your career.</comment></comment></comment>


Kernighan's thoughts on scripting languages -or- Why He Loves Awk - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs152/lectures/CS152-Lecture_14-Kernighan.pdf

<comment><USER2> His definition never really mentions that scripting languages usually script (give a convenient interface to) code written in a more efficient but lower- level language. Good presentation, though.

Oddly, for a paper on scripting languages, it never mentions Lua. (It's not clear when the presentation was written.)

</comment><comment><USER3> PDF.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice to learn some of AWK.

Sorry, Brian, I MUCH prefer ObjectRexx.</comment>


The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/1j7/the_amanda_knox_test_how_an_hour_on_the_internet/

<comment><USER2> I have no idea about the Amanda Knox case, but one thing I have learned in life is to be skeptical of anyone as arrogant as the author of this piece.</comment>


Show HN: UI Widget to access graphically represented data - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkXgcS6kT4U&feature=youtu.be

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I'm exploring a UI idea, and I'm posting it here in search of some critique and feedback. I'll jot down a few stringths and weaknesses I'm thinking of so far. I'd love your input.

Here's the youtube demo link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkXgcS6kT4U&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkXgcS6kT4U&feature=youtu.be)

Here's the github repo: [https://github.com/mikemajzoub/ResponsiveGrow](https://github.com/mikemajzoub/ResponsiveGrow)

Abstract Use Case: Allow the user fast access to any data containing a uniquely identifiable graphical ID (badge, emoji, profile picture, color in palette, etc.). As user moves around grid, views details of current node in top part of screen.

Strengths: 1\. A common solution to represent such sets if data is generally a scrolling UITableView (iOS) or ListView (Android). This is inefficient because it requires time and energy for the user to discover off-screen options. 2\. Its simplicity lends it to be memorable and learnable.

Weaknesses: 1\. As the size of the set grows, the node's graphical IDs decrease in size, detail, and as an extension, recognizability. In the demo video, that's a 15x15 grid, which I felt was really pushing the set size limits... but then again on a UITableView or ListView, representing 225 elements would be a nightmare too. I'm a little conflicted on this point - would love some feedback here.

2\. I'm currently losing screen space at the bottom and edges of the screen so that the margin can accomodate for the growing of the squares near it. One potential solution is removing the margin entirely, and then shifting the entire grid in the opposite direction of the currently selected area, because if the user is in the lower left corner, she probably doesn't care if the upper right corner slides off-screen momentarily, does she? Do you think this is a viable option?

3\. I'm still conflicted on how to allow the user to select the data. "On release" seems like a potential option, but this means the user will have to drag all the way off the grid if she chooses not to select anything. Perhaps this challenge presents an argument for keeping the margins, so that at any moment, the user is within screenWidth/2 distance from the "do not select" area. Another potential solution would be to allow for a hole in the middle of the grid, which means that the user would always be within screenWidth/4 from the "do not select" area, but this cuts into the amount of data that can be represented on screen, so I am not in love with it. I welcome (and beg for) any ideas here...

Thanks for your thoughts and feedback - I'm still very much in the early stages of this idea, but I think it has some interesting potential and wish to keep exploring and evolving it.

In peace, Mike</comment>