F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it - <AUTHOR> http://thosefuckingpopups.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> In case you're wondering why anyone would use these _obviously_ annoying popups, here's why: If done right, they actually work.

Here's a real example:

In March I added a delayed popup to my blog to invite people to subscribe for future updates about user acquisition. It was on a delayed timer so that the reader has a chance to at least get part-way through the post. Also, if you closed it out once then you wouldn't see it again for something like 30 days.

Since then, it's been seen by 11,848 people, of whom 232 (1.96%) signed up.

Most blog readers come for the article, not for the blog or the company. They read the article then carry on with their lives, even if the article was very helpful or interesting to them.

Here's how I see it: I now have 232 people who are actually interested in learning about user acquisition, and gave me permission to send them more helpful posts. I wouldn't have this if I never asked them to enter their email. I realize the price to pay for this is mildly annoying the other 98%.

With that said, I'm trying to minimize that annoyance. I'm now experimenting with a less invasive prompt; a thin bar at the top of the screen, that also hides when you're scrolling down (presumably reading). If it still gets subscribers _and_ is less annoying to the others, then I'll keep it.

tl;dr - Companies know and don't care that popups are annoying, because they're effective. Some companies care a little and try to make the popups less annoying to those who wouldn't have signed up anyway.

<comment><USER3> "I realize the price to pay for this is mildly annoying the other 98%."

To me this does not make sense, and is exactly the reason I avoid annoying users in my applications (advertising or otherwise). Because you definitely have numbers to back up the effectiveness of the popup (although I would argue it is not effective). What you don't have is of the 98% you annoyed, how many will not return because of the annoyance (by choice anyway).

Or to put in another way,

Would you implement a feature in your software that only benefitted 2% and annoyed the 98%?

Seems like this kind of approach hints at a deeper issue here and that's effective targeting.

<comment><USER4> My other comment in this thread addressed this, but basically, I think it's a filter for removing those site visitors unlikely to become customers, allowing a company to focus on people who are receptive to the medium (popup) as well as the message. These people are going to be easier to advertise to, because they don't get pissed off when you put an ad in front of them.

The software analogy is invalid, because those people are already your users or customers. In the case of reading the article, think of a popup as a criterion filter in much the same way as 419 scammers use poor english.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The worst type is the: "We would love to have your feedback" popup overlay upon entering a site. I've just landed on your site! How am I supposed to have an opinion of it already? Well I do now, the first 3 seconds sucked big time!

<comment><USER6> Microsoft would ask if you wanted to take a survey when you were done with a site, then pop-under a window that would detect when you had closed the first one and start a survey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm struggling with this now and I could use some insight.

I absolutely share OP's loathing of these pop-ups. On the other hand, I'm just starting to try to drive traffic to my physical-product website (through PPC ads, facebook marketing, etc).

I KNOW I need to try to collect some contact information. But I _cannot_ find a way to do it that isn't appalling.

\- Collect on landing page? How do they know if they want to sign up, they just got here.

\- Put on Contact Us page? Nobody will see it.

\- Pop up a window after 30 seconds, or three pages viewed, or whatever? I end up on thosefuckingpopus.tumbler.com, and for good reason.

\- Don't do anything? Patrick McKenzie finds my house and draws rude things on my face while I sleep.

Has anybody come up with an _acceptable_ design solution for collecting emails from people who are interested in being on your list?

<comment><USER8> _You_ find them annoying, but your customers probably wont.

Remember you are not the best case when deciding what is effective at capturing your audience. You are more "internet savvy" or whatever...

Popups, email marketing, retargeted ads, et al are very, very effective means of capturing an audience online.

<comment><USER9> Don't fool yourself. Everybody finds them annoying. Like the frog in the frying pan who sits as the heat is turned up, folks have begun to believe its the price of visiting the internet.

<comment><USER8> > Don't fool yourself. Everybody finds them annoying

I don't believe that's true. What we see here is an exhibit of the False- Consensus Effect[1]. You believe they are annoying, and many on HN believe they are annoying, therefore they (popups) must be annoying to everyone. This logic ignores the fact that 99% of web users are not technical, and view the web in an entirely different light.

On ecommerce websites, popup forms are incredibly effective at capturing customer email addresses later used in direct email marketing. So effective, there is an entire industry built around providing the technology and controls to target certain customers with the popups (viewed 6 pages but did not add anything to cart yet, sat on a product page for 2 minutes, etc...).

For a lot of popups, an incentive is offered to the potential customer. Give us your email address and we'll give you 5% off your next purchase. We're basically buying the right to email market to you... understanding full well that some customers will be annoyed with the popup, and some might even provide fake details. But for the majority of customers, we just bought their loyalty. They will make a purchase with their new 5% off coupon, and will likely shop the site again when we email them promo offers later on.

If you visited one of my sites, and got annoyed by the popup, then I'd be OK with that... you were not my target. But if your parents or grandparents visited my site... chances are they'd fill out the popup. They are my target.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False- consensus_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect)

<comment><USER9> I think somebody is fooling themselves, and I think it isn't me. Its self- serving to stick a dialog box in somebody's face, then spend 100's of words defending that choice by denying the obvious.

All the arguments above are about the site, not about the visitor. "capturing customer email", "Buying the right to email market" are not about the visitor gaining value by reading a blog entry. And those who object to the process are "not my target". Very convenient. Perhaps I was a whale with a blank check, reading the blog entry to find out more. One popup and now I'm gone. You'll never know, since you've already convinced yourself this is all ok.

<comment><USER8> > Perhaps I was a whale with a blank check, reading the blog entry to find out > more. One popup and now I'm gone.

You don't run websites (especially ecommerce websites) hoping and praying for a "whale" to come along and bless you with their deep pockets... just like you don't play baseball hedging on hitting only home runs. That's a recipe for failure.

> Its self-serving to stick a dialog box in somebody's face

Yes, that's the point. I want their email addresses.

> then spend 100's of words defending that choice by denying the obvious.

Frankly, you cannot argue with the effectiveness of popup email collection. Every time we blast our 150,000+ email marketing list (mostly gathered via the popup as well as other means), the websites are almost crushed under the traffic load. 1 email can generate $10's of thousands in revenue... so yes, collecting emails is of very high importance for us, and many similar ecommerce companies.

> are not about the visitor gaining value by reading a blog entry

You are certainly right -- it's more about the company gaining value, however, a great many of our customers gain value by seeing deals on products they are interested in. That is a win-win for everyone.

> And those who object to the process are "not my target".

If you aren't buying something from my site, or clicking an ad, then you are not my target. Instead you are just consuming my company's resources and ultimately won't convert into a sale. To be frank, we don't want those types of visitors on the website, although it's unavoidable (ecommerce generally considers an average 3-5% conversion rate to be good).

The point is, you are annoyed by popups, and choose to punish sites that employ them. Just like some choose to punish sites that provide free content but pay the bills with ads. It's a strong bias to impose on the rest of the internet users... especially when you are in the minority percentile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You know, the age of ACTUAL pop-up windows really sucked, and it was amazing when browsers rendered them largely obsolete by limiting how websites could launch another window but at least all of those had the X in the SAME EXACT PLACE.

The new crop of lightboxed modal popups that are now ubiquitous are 100 times worse since they:

\- are modal

\- often work poorly on mobile

\- have as many different dismiss mechanisms as there are popups

\- web marketers love them

<comment><USER11> I really wish there was a way to globally disable all lightboxes without having to disable JavaScript entirely.

Maybe a Machine Learning model to prevent scripts from executing if the classifier indicates it will spawn a lightbox...

<comment><USER12> Something as simple as checking that nothing dynamic blocks too much text would detect most of them currently.

But it quickly turns into a cat-and-mouse game.

<comment><USER13> That would stop any drop-down menu navigation bars from working though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've definitely noticed a trend in technical blogs/ newsletters (some of which have been featured on HN) throw up a "like this article? Sign up for our newsletter" popup after you start to scroll down the page.

"I don't fucking know if I like this article, you're interrupting me while I'm still in the middle of reading it!"

<comment><USER15> Is it popping up halfway through or when it thinks you're mousing over to close the tab? Sudden upward mouse movements trigger some of those javascript retention popups, even though you were just moving to the scroll bar or something.

But while we're on the topic, the recent trend of "No thanks, I don't want to get all this awesome stuff" or "No, I don't want to become a master in subject X" buttons are very condescending.

<comment><USER6> I have seen that, but some of them pop up partway down a page or even on a timer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I'm forced to provide an email address to access wifi but the email address doesn't have to be valid, I typically use something like pr@ or press@ the responsible organisation's mail domain.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've never understood this design. Someone came to your website to do something. Why is the first thing you do is give them a bad experience?

<comment><USER18> Because it works.

I had a small deals aggregator site which got most of its traffic from Google. When users landed I knew they were interested in the content, and I showed it through a semi-transparent background and forced them to enter their emails before being able to click through. I remember conversions going from 10-20 new emails per day to over 100 emails per day.

<comment><USER19> Ok fair enough. But, if I were you, just to be 100% excited about this strategy, I'd ask myself these questions:

1\. Am I measuring the quality of the email addresses before an after the introduction of the popup?

2\. Am I measuring the number of visitors who abandoned my site (closed my page) immediately after I interrupted their visit with my popup?

Ultimately, the question ought to be: what am I really measuring? Is it the number of new rows in my emails table or the impact on brand perception and ultimately bottom line?

<comment><USER20> As a web marketer, I am paid to generate leads, not revenue. Revenue is someone else's problem. Yay non-owner employment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm ok with those as long as they react to ESC key .. otherwise it's instantly close tab

What I hate the most are those install alerts, during page load, which then ends up being a phonegap/cordoba of SAME site (!)

..or to be redirected to "m.example.com" because they think that an special diminished experience best fit for my perfectly capable phone

</comment><comment><USER22> As much as I hate this tactic - and I dont use it - it's really attractive because it works _so_ well for collecting emails / signups / likes / whatever.

You might piss off one person, but 10 more sign up. You decide if it's worth it or not.

<comment><USER23> > You might piss off one person, but 10 more sign up. You decide if it's worth > it or not.

The current top post says he has a 1.96% success rate.

So it's more like "piss off 98 people, sign up 2". I'm not convinced that's worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are there any good pop-up blockers for ads like these? I know one of Firefox's original USP's was having a built-in popup blocker because popups were so annoying back then, so why not for these?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure, because some of them are actually used to log in to sites. You'd have to have an exhaustive blacklist, or some heuristics that block common copy-and-paste versions but wouldn't block all of them.

If you only care about the text on a page, Readability will pull it out and show it to you in a plain style. [https://www.readability.com/](https://www.readability.com/) Safari already has this built-in, and it's in Firefox Beta so it should be in the next shipping version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The only pop up window I really hate is Quora's, because in order to remove it without signing up for an account I have to go into the developer tools and delete its enclosing div. Quora, I don't want to sign up for your site, and I don't want to "complete" an account I don't have. I just want to see the answer to the question you were somehow the top search result for.

<comment><USER26> or just add ?share=1 to the URL

<comment><USER27> As the parent poster is complaining about "completing" an account, I think he's in the state where he once said "fine, I'll log in with Google to make this popup go away", at which point it asks for pages of additional personal information and _will not let you back out_.

Not even if you leave the site and come back. Not even with share=1. You have to ban it from using your Google account to regain control.

<comment><USER25> Yes -- this is what happened to me. I will try deauthorizing it from Google to see if that fixes my problem, actually.

Edit: So I revoked access through my Google Account, and it's still doing it. Emailed email@example.com to see if they can help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I get the impression some of these only pop up when I move my mouse to my tab/address bar. Am I right or is it just in my mind?

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there enough commonality in the way these popups work that would make it easy to kill them automatically?

The problem is this is likely to cause problems for image light boxes. I hate those too (I would prefer a slideshow on a separate page) but unlike stupid popups they are necessary for the working of the site.

</comment><comment><USER30> I was just thinking about these annoying popups - funny I ran into this thread!

I manage a host file that redirects any site I run across that gives me a popup back to my home page. I refuse to visit these sites - even if the popup is a one-time-only thing (which it isn't for those of us who clear cookies)

</comment><comment><USER31> When I get these, I use firstname.lastname@example.com. It seems if we can generally agree on which one we all pick (or some small number of choices), we might have a chance of making a dent when the postmaster starts getting effectively self-spammed.

</comment><comment><USER32> ...and this is another one of the reasons why I keep JavaScript off by default.

</comment><comment><USER33> So long as they keep working, those popups aren't going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER34> Idea for a browser plugin?

</comment><comment><USER35> That's ... angry.

I think "signing up" needs editing, it's not idiomatic English (at least to my non-native ears).

Perhaps "naming and shaming", heh.

<comment><USER36> It looks like they are literally signing up the offenders for their own newsletters in these popups, so the title is appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't see why Dropbox is on there. That's just a sign in/register window for a service that requires an account.

<comment><USER6> When you try to _download_ the software, they try to make you sign up or log in for no reason.

<comment><USER38> IIRC on the old versions the installer had your login data attached so you did not have to relogin inside the app once installed. But I believe this does not work anymore since code signing.</comment></comment></comment>


Austrian far-right presidential hopeful soundly defeated - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-austria-election-idUSKBN13S0W0 <comment><USER2> Not on topic for Hacker News: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Since HN has been on a political binge just like everybody else has, we're going to do what some people do after a festival and have a cleanse. Starting tomorrow, it'll be Political Detox Week on HN. During this week, all primarily political stories will be off-topic. We'll kill them when we see them and invite users to flag them. We'll do this for a week, just to see what happens.

We need to clarify what HN is and isn't. What HN is: a place for intellectual curiosity and thoughtful discussion. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield. Accounts that use HN primarily for the latter are abusing the site. We ban such accounts.

Note that word "primarily". This seems to be a good test to distinguish ordinary HN users, who are here for a wide range of interests that occasionally include political ones, from the ideologically committed sort of commenters who don't seem to care about other things and come here to argue against their enemies. We'd like those commenters to understand that they are really looking for a different kind of site. They need to find another, or maybe start a new one.

More here for those interested: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13096750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13096750).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry @dang, I missed that.

<comment><USER2> No worries; as you can see, the problem is more in the rapid upvotes than the original submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In my opinion, these types of articles should stop making the front pages of Hacker News. They aren't generally relevant in anyway to the greater community of readers on here. There are plenty of different sites that specialize in non-geek culture related things, but that isn't why the bulk of us come to this site. Just my opinion, however I also agree, I could just as easily not click on it.

<comment><USER4> There was plenty of discussion in relation to the US election though [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Trump&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Trump&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment></comment>


Turn Off Gmail's Email From Google+ Users - <AUTHOR> The Gmail setting is now active for Google+ users.
Go to Gmail Settings and right after "Conversation View" should be the setting "Email via Google+".
Change the setting to "No one" <comment><USER2> I cannot believe that they would make this opt-out rather than opt-in. I love most google services, but they're really starting to go too far with stuff like this.

<comment><USER3> Just like Buzz was opt-in? Just like various Facebook "feature" launches have been opt-in? /sarcasm

Actions speak louder than words. And Google's "social" choices as well as Facebook's (and others) have been making it clear that they favour, with a strong arm, "co-opt" over "opt-in".

Unfortunate, but as users we should continue forward with eyes open.

P.S. My parents just upgraded their phones from the original Droids to Moto X. During the process, Google and Motorola worked very hard to ram Google+ profile creations down their throats. Dad eventually found a non-obvious and unannotated flow through the order/configuration web site that let him complete the orders without activating Google+.

There are parts of Google I still respect, but I've about had it with their newer "social", panopticon front end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Done and done. Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER5> +1</comment>


Kronos Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://www.kronosnotebook.com/haskell <comment><USER2> Hey all! Author of IHaskell and Kronos here. Feel free to ask any questions :)

Sadly Kronos is outdated now, because it is based on IPython 2. IHaskell now supports IPython 3 / Jupyter only, as of the release that I'm going to try to put on Hackage today. I strongly recommend installing from Github master now - we have two easy to read installation scripts for Linux and Mac (so no need to trust them blindly, you can just read their source to see what they do).

Someday when I have the time Kronos will get an overhaul. The Python version will become free - it makes no money, unsurprisingly - and you will be able to download kernels from the app, perhaps including Julia and others, instead of installing separate apps.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your work!

I was trying to get IHaskell to build on Arch Linux(using the Hackage package). I couldn't get it to work with either the arch packages for ipython2 or for ipython3. The version that IHaskell tries to install also didn't work. Should I just wait for your latest release?

<comment><USER2> I recommend installing IPython 3 with pip, cloning the repository, and then running ./build.sh ihaskell. If that doesn't work, file an issue and I'll be happy to help figure out the installation woes. (Note that ihaskell install must be run for IPython to know about the kernel! Updating the documentation is the last bit before release... :) )

<comment><USER4> This is the whole reason why Juypter is being made. Everything in Juypter will be kernel agnostic. The only part of Juypter that will be first class Python is the IPython kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I am NOT the author of Kronos. I'm learning the language and I'm into all things Haskell. I thought it could be interesting to HN as well. You can read more here: [http://goo.gl/SNLxjo](http://goo.gl/SNLxjo)

If you want get into functional programming, _Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!_ , _Real World Haskell_ and _Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell_ are available online for free: [http://goo.gl/4RoYrJ](http://goo.gl/4RoYrJ)

EDIT – Here's a handy cheat sheet of features: [http://cheatsheet.codeslower.com/CheatSheet.pdf](http://cheatsheet.codeslower.com/CheatSheet.pdf)

<comment><USER5> If you'd like to learn Haskell, I'd suggest doing cis194 and then the NICTA Course rather than LYAH and RWH, based on my experiences learning and teaching Haskell.

I have a guide here that lists my recommendations: [https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell#yorgeys- cis194-cou...](https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell#yorgeys- cis194-course)

I've explained my stances towards what not to use to learn Haskell here: [http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional- education.h...](http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional- education.html)

<comment><USER6> Wanted to second the NICTA course as a top-notch resource for learning Haskell. It was only by working through the NICTA exercises that I finally understood functors, applicatives, monads, etc. and _more importantly_ strengthened my intuition for when I could apply these functional tools to practical problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great to see the IPython notebook being used by languages other than Python!

I've been wanting to read The Haskell School of Music[1]. I'm hopeful this would be a useful environment for working through it.

[1] [http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea/haskell-school-of- music/](http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea/haskell-school-of-music/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there any way to build this for Linux, or am I better off just using IHaskell?

<comment><USER8> Just build IHaskell or use the docker container. Kronos is by the author of IHaskell and if I recall also had a repo for a node-webkit wrapper around IHaskell or IPython which this appears to be the continuation of.

To add: Building and installing IHaskell (on Mac at least) is a bit of a hassle if you just want to get up and running. You need XQuartz, cairo for the Diagrams module, gcc, a non-distribution ipython (recommended), and of course a sane cabal environment. If you know what you're doing, that's a few minutes in shell commands, making sure you're in a sandbox, etc. If you're new to all of this, have fun figuring out why your build keeps exiting because of some weird ABI breakage in an upstream Haskell package, or setting the right library paths so that GCC can do its job, or finally getting everything to build after GHC takes a week off in the Bahamas only to find that the kernel dies immediately... ([https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell/issues/287](https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell/issues/287) now fixed, don't worry!)

Despite that, it's a great tool and without it I don't think I would have been as motivated to work through the stack of Haskell learning materials I've got piling up.

Edit: Based on the author's comment above (PieSquared) Kronos is deprecated with IPython 2, so it must be what I was thinking of regarding the older repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can any of you get it to work? I spend forever trying to get the open source version working on Linux and gave up at tried this version on OS X.

I hope it will become part of the juPyter package in the long run.

<comment><USER3> I used cabal install ihaskell --reorder-goals, and it built without any errors. However when I try to run it, IPython does not detect the IHaskell kernel. I get this error:

        /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/IPython/kernel/manager.py:95: UserWarning: Setting kernel_cmd is deprecated, use kernel_spec to start different kernels. warnings.warn("Setting kernel_cmd is deprecated, use kernel_spec to "

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> applying this to my list of 'interesting techie things'

</comment><comment><USER11> The GitHub Pages site is dead.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, every language should have such a nice working environment, with graph & math rendering built in. Too bad Haskell is such an impractical language.

<comment><USER13> > Too bad Haskell is such an impractical language.

When does this nonsense ever stop?

<comment><USER14> It's not nonsense, though. But IMO it's not the language itself, but the libraries that are impractical. The naming is the worst. If Haskell's authors really wished to create a practical language, they would never have allowed things like ">>=", "\", "." or "!!" into the standard libraries. It's not the first programming language to use lots of arbitrary signs, but it's certainly the worst I've ever seen. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that Haskell's written by people who love memorization and don't care much about explaining to others.

<comment><USER15> Have you ever tried doing any non-trivial work in Haskell? I've used it professionally, and spoken with a lot of other people who have, and exactly zero people have expressed an experience that the naming of operators has caused the language to be less practical for them. Some think it's less aesthetically pleasing than it could be, but that's not a practical concern.

Furthermore, the specific operators you cite are confusing examples, given that ">>=" can be elided using do notation, "\" looks enough like a lambda that it took me a while to remember what you were referring to, and "!!" is _rarely_ used. A slightly more reasonable argument for your case would be to cite the operators used in the lens library, but those are all aliases for regularly-named functions.

There are some arguments against Haskell in terms of practicality, but this is not one of them.

<comment><USER16> > I've used it professionally, and spoken with a lot of other people who have, > and exactly zero people have expressed an experience that the naming of > operators has caused the language to be less practical for them.

This is a pretty self-selecting set. One of the reasons I don't use Haskell professionally is that I hate its operator-naming culture, and Haskell isn't big enough in industry yet that it has lots of involuntary users (like C++ or PHP or Java does).

<comment><USER15> As I said, you can definitely raise aesthetic objections. You're free to hate operators all you want, though it does strike me as a peculiar basis on which to decide what tool to use. My point was whether there are actual _practical_ implications, though, and I don't think the self-selected nature of Haskell professionals has any bearing on that. I frequently hear many other objections from people working in the language, so it's not a case of rose-colored glasses in which we think everything about the language is fine. It's simply a case of operator naming not being very important, from a practical perspective. To the extent that it is important, most people who _actually use_ the language think it's a benefit, not a detriment.

<comment><USER16> Well right, but what I'm saying is that the people who actually use the language are the kind of people who like the operators. I know Latin, and a language whose functions were named in Latin would not be a practical impediment to me, but I wouldn't say that such a language would be practical in general. Haskell's operators aren't on that level, but I do think if you introduced it in a company where people were hired to write Python/Ruby/C/whatever, there'd be people who found them a practical problem.

<comment><USER15> Again, whether or not people _like_ the operators is irrelevant. Aesthetic opinions about syntax don't have a material effect on productivity. As I said, there are people using the language professionally who have an aesthetic distaste for the use of operators in, e.g., the lens library (i.e. your purported selection effect is empirically false). Those people will still admit that this has little practical effect, and certainly not enough to make a _language choice_ based on it.

If there were a language written in Latin, and it was useful for some reason, people would quickly write aliases for all the Latin functions, named in English. This is very easy to do in Haskell: if your argument held, you would expect to see aliases for all of the operators. With a few exceptions (again, lens), this isn't the case.

You're choosing where to live based on the color of the neighbor's bikeshed, against evidence from previous tenants that the current color is quite pleasant.

<comment><USER14> It's not about liking, it's about looking at a piece of code and going and going "I understand all that" vs "What does all these signs and single-letter variables mean?". Naming matters.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it's very important that people who work in the language be able to read and understand it easily. It is not, however, important that people who do not work in the language be able to do so. The most persistent critique of Haskell is that it is hard to understand for people who haven't learned it. This is as reasonable as critiquing Java because it is hard to understand for people who do not know how to program. You're welcome to claim that Haskell has a larger barrier to entry, but that is a fundamentally different claim from the claim that operators make the language harder to read for practitioners. I have been attempting to refute the latter claim, using my experience discussing the issue with said practitioners. If you want to discuss the former claim, I'm happy to do that as well, but you have to acknowledge that it is a separate claim and be clear about what it is you actually mean.

<comment><USER14> >Yes, it's very important that people who work in the language be able to read and understand it easily. It is not, however, important that people who do not work in the language be able to do so.

Well, I guess we disagree there. And remember that some people may only work a little bit in a language, and it matters, to them, how much time they need to get into the groove with a language. Once you work enough in a language you get used to all the weirdness anyway, which is how you end up with people claiming C++ and PHP are actually kinda neat languages. The only good judges of language syntax are people who have never seen that syntax before.

<comment><USER15> I think the exact opposite: the only good judges of syntax are people who understand the semantics deeply enough to understand whether the syntax accurately reflects them.

It's all well and good to say that people should be able to bounce around between languages within a paradigm. A Rubyist should be able to read Python, Perl, and PHP, sure. A Java programmer should be able to read C++ and C#. Claiming that people should be able to read _any_ programming language, though, means that languages aren't allowed to explore significantly different semantics. A JavaScript programmer isn't going to be able to pick up something written in Prolog or Forth and quickly understand exactly what's going on, and _that 's as it should be_. The whole point of having multiple paradigms is that they can express different ideas and ways of approaching problems.

So, I agree that an SML or OCaml programmer should be able to "get into the groove" with Haskell quickly. In my experience, this is usually the case.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pepsi gets a makeover: Taking the challenge  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/business-finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15772138 <comment><USER2> The article describes fruit juice as being better for you, which, of course, is true when you are comparing it to Pepsi. I just wanted to warn people not be careful about taking that at face value. Fruit juice has a lot of fructose and other sugars, and most importantly has little or no fiber, which is required for glycemic control. If you drink juice, make sure you have it in the context of a healthy meal with plenty of fibrous vegetables and the like (or drink it right after a hard workout!).

If I were Pepsi, I would create a separate brand for healthy products based on somewhat unprocessed foods, for example maybe high protein bars that use raw grains, or supplemented milk beverages with interesting flavors and various vitamins, fish oil, etc.</comment>


Recent Android security hype, is just hype. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomdignan.com/?p=66

<comment><USER2> From the article: "bottom line on this one is that users click OK. Well we may or may not be able to trust users to read the screen before they click OK, it is not appropriate to paint this as an Android security flaw. What it really is, is a human security flaw. Therefore the hype is invalid, as this fact about the human condition has been known by almost every living being for hundreds of years."

I am not an Android user, but as a general computer user for years, this section annoyed me. The problem is that users frequently suffer from warning fatigue. After you see that screen 30x, you just don't see it anymore, no matter what it says. There are way too many people who don't take human factors into consideration when they design security features. Humans aren't robots. They aren't infallible. Even the best of us screw up. Software needs to be designed around that concept and provide multiple safety mechanisms and methods for notification. I'm not saying it's easy, but surely we can do better than just slapping a bunch of text into a dialog?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, and I totally agree with you. The problem is that this is still a human flaw. It's not a flaw with the security of android as a platform.

<comment><USER3> When software design causes users to behave in a good way, we praise the software. So too must we blame software when it causes users to behave badly.</comment></comment></comment>


China working on uranium-free nuclear plants in attempt to combat smog - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/china-uranium-nuclear-plants-smog-thorium

<comment><USER2> "A team of researchers in Shanghai has now been told it has 10 instead of 25 years to develop the world's first such plant."

Or else what?

Oh. Ohhhhhhhh.

<comment><USER3> or else funding stops?

<comment><USER4> But it's so much fun to think of them getting killed because they couldn't deliver.

/s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can a pure thorium reactor even work in theory? I thought it needed a neutron source to sustain fission like uran or something similar

<comment><USER6> You are correct.

You start with thorium plus a fissionable isotope of uranium or plutonium. The fission neutrons convert the thorium to U-233, which is fissionable. After that you rely on U-233 fission for neutrons and keep feeding thorium to it.

It can be done with solid fuel but with liquid fuel it works out really nicely. You can fission pretty much everything and have just fission products left over, which means a lot less nuclear waste that only has to be contained for a few hundred years. And you're not shipping anything fissionable to or from the reactor.

<comment><USER7> Was wondering if the headline was misleading in mentioning 'uranium free'...

Incidentally India's 3-stage plan is meant to use its vast Thorium deposits in the 3rd stage:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three- stage_nuclear_p...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three- stage_nuclear_power_programme)

which eventually uses Pu-239 from the fast-breeder reactors (2nd stage) as the neutron source to take it to the 3rd stage.

IIRC, the original plan predicted to reach the 3rd stage in the 90s', but due to various sanctions, it is still stuck in the first stage; probably it will speed up now due to the Indo-US nuclear deal during the 2nd term of the Bush administration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a terrible title. A Uranium fuel cycle would combat smog just as much. Thorium plants can in principle be less risky, though is you factor out proliferation and reprocessing risk it is possible to make Uranium fuel plants that are inherently safe from meltdown, too.

The news is that China is about to outrun everyone in bringing nuclear plants online. They have a lot of construction under way.</comment>


H4: 'Kids Use Google Docs, but Lawyers Still Use Word and Email' - <AUTHOR> https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2020/06/10/h4-kids-use-google-docs-but-lawyers-still-use-word-email/ <comment><USER2> It seems like it would be either illegal or a really bad idea to use google docs or even gmail as a lawyer. It seems like you could be opening yourself up to a lawsuit for breaching attorney client privilege since google can scan every document and email created or stored on its platform.</comment>


Mary Meeker Reportedly Raising Up to $1.25b for New Fund - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/09/mary-meeker-is-said-to-be-raising-up-to-1-25-billion-for-her-new-growth-fund/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original reporting from BI (paywall) [https://www.businessinsider.com/mary- meeker-raise-1-billion-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker- raise-1-billion-fund-2018-11)</comment>


MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3KuE7UjGA <comment><USER2> This 6k vs 6M LoC comparison is pretty dubious. If your disk driver has a bug and overwrites some data you're just as screwed up, be it running in userspace or kernel space. The argument these bugs are less powerful because they are now in userspace "can't do very much" is at best limited. Drivers can screw up hardware just as easily, filesystems can screw up your data just as easily, etc. The memory grant stuff seems interesting though and I see how that can protect you from some forms of memory corruption.

Running all these processes in userspace seems to gain you some capabilities to more easily respawn/reset drivers. Live upgrade seems exciting. I wonder if you are paying for that in added complexity that is hard to debug. The tests they did are simulating basically hardware errors, and it does seems to be quite resilient to those. In practice I fear the software bugs more. The bugs I actually see in Linux tend to be oopses generated by bad code that simply disable the driver. The bad ones screw up the hardware they are controlling and require a reboot. It is unclear in these situations that the driver can be correctly reset without resetting the hardware too.

I wonder how much of this respawn/update functionality you can apply easily to a Linux kernel right now. Most drivers and filesystems can already be built as modules and loaded/unloaded in a live kernel. I wonder how much that can be extended.

<comment><USER3> This 6k vs 6M LoC comparison is pretty dubious. If your disk driver has a bug and overwrites some data you're just as screwed up, be it running in userspace or kernel space. The argument these bugs are less powerful because they are now in userspace "can't do very much" is at best limited

They are less powerful in user-space he states this about 25 minutes into the talk "moving bugs to user-space will do less damage"...roughly.This is true instead of getting full ring0 access to anything I can only do what the driver is allowed to do if I exploit a bug in the driver.

Running all these processes in userspace seems to gain you some capabilities to more easily respawn/reset drivers. Live upgrade seems exciting. I wonder if you are paying for that in added complexity that is hard to debug

Why would there be added complexity? Linux has an api just as well but less defined than simple ipc - even more complex. Hard to debug? you do understand that having parts of the kernel in userspace makes it _easier_ to debug

The bugs I actually see in Linux tend to be oopses generated by bad code that simply disable the driver.

Read LWN theres roughly a root exploit every 2 weeks

An ideal operating system would be a sort of exokernel but proven and a 'relaxed' api that would allow distributed computing. Unverified applications would run under a vm with proven parts being compiled as well as compiling heuristically verified parts and jitting the other needed parts.

<comment><USER2> >They are less powerful in user-space he states this about 25 minutes into the talk "moving bugs to user-space will do less damage"...roughly.This is true instead of getting full ring0 access to anything I can only do what the driver is allowed to do if I exploit a bug in the driver.

I did listen to the talk and that justification. That's why I said it was pretty limited. That may be true for security bugs in drivers. For a network driver that may even be very important. In practice what I see is that the actual bugs I care about in Linux drivers are code bugs that disable the device, or in a filesystem cause disk corruption. None of those are solved by a microkernel. Microkernels give you a bunch of provable advantages in areas that monolithic kernels don't seem to do too badly at.

>Why would there be added complexity? Linux has an api just as well but less defined than simple ipc - even more complex.

This is anything but simple IPC. You're sending async messages around and wanting to handle restart of whole pieces and reissuing of commands. It is much more complex and with many more edge cases that the equivalent Linux call stack.

>Hard to debug? you do understand that having parts of the kernel in userspace makes it easier to debug

Because now you're trying to restart a driver for a device that is in an unknown state and then restarting the operation of the filesystem accessing the driver that now has to make sure its operations are idempotent otherwise it will screw up. The number of new edge cases is immense. It could get hairy really fast. That is even touched upon in the presentation with the async messaging and deadlock avoidance. That's why it's harder to debug. Because you're adding a bunch of complex code in error handling paths that get executed once in a blue moon.

>Read LWN theres roughly a root exploit every 2 weeks

I read LWN every week, there are some local root exploits once in a while. The memory protection stuff could be good for that and you could implement it in Linux if you wanted. I specifically stated that part is interesting for this. My point is that the non-security bugs I care about wouldn't be prevented by this technique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it fascinating that the actor model seems to be _the_ model for creating reliable software. You can see it in Scala or Erlang at the user level, get it in MINIX3 at the kernel level. I think if you combined the two you could potentially create systems which stay up for years.

<comment><USER5> I have met a couple of QNX-based, also microkernel-based, systems that had uptime measured in years.

Lovely OS. I learned C on it.

MINIX reminds me of GNU/HURD. Since they are all Unix-ish from the application's point-of-view, I have hope they someday can more or less compete on equal footing with more traditional monolithic (it would be fair to call OSX "duolithic") OSs like Linux, _BSD,_ Solaris.

Very usable desktops like the Gnome I am using to write this don't care much about what is under the libraries they link against. They would be fine on top of any OS as long as libraries provided the environment they expect. Oddly enough, the first time I ran Gnome was on top of IRIX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> MINIX is a fantastic kernel to practice kernel hacking on and see how operating systems function without the real world cruft of performance and portability hacks.

<comment><USER7> Personally, I found the code relatively painful to follow through. I'm not even talking about how the parts communicated - the code was difficult for me to trace through in the small. Even when compared to Linux or the BSDs, let alone Plan 9.

K&R prototypes, overly decorative comments that just echo the name of the function, defining macros like 'PUBLIC' and FUNCTION_PROTOTYPE(name, args) which are effectively no-ops, and a host of other little annoyances that make the code - at least in my opinion - rather unidiomatic and painful to read C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The self-healing thing in Minix 3 really works.

Some years ago I installed Minix 3 on a very old Thinkpad that had an esoteric video hardware quirk that would crash most OS's. It was "designed for Windows 95" and by God they meant it because you couldn't run anything else on it. Neither Linux nor Windows 98 would run for very long before the hardware would cause a driver crash and a kernel panic/bluescreen (even in text mode). But with Minix 3 the video driver would just transparently restart after each crash, so smoothly that I wouldn't notice it unless I was watching the logs.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome, and I'm sure its the sort of story the developers would love to hear about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not knowing much about OS design, is there any inherent reason why operating systems built on microkernels seem to be so unsuccessful? They always seem really elegant, but are never widely adopted (with the possible exception of Mach -> OS X).

<comment><USER10> I tend to think that Linus was right and microkernels are in reality a bad design.

Case in point: Minix 1.5 (which I hacked on before Linux came along).

Minix 1.5 has two "daemons" called mm and fs which run the memory management and filesystem respectively. Now consider process creation and loading (fork and exec). Creating and loading a process intimately involves both mm and fs, so in Minix 1.5 the program sends a message to mm [IIRC] which sends a message to fs and both daemons have to coordinate with each other. This makes it a lot more complex than if there was just one daemon (ie. a monolithic kernel).

Another example is that if mm or fs die, your OS dies. You can't restart one or the other because there's so much process state spread across the two daemons. So the claim that microkernels are more resilient because you can restart daemons seems to be nonsense (but I should say that QNX can apparently restart some(?) components transparently).

Nevertheless it's not all roses for monolithic kernels either. There's no process protection and they're usually written in deeply unsafe languages like C. Exokernels might be the answer to this because they have monolithic qualities (fast calls and shared state) but keep virtually everything running in userspace so you can use sane, safe programming techniques.

<comment><USER3> This shows nothing more than a badly implemented api. POSIX is a bad api for anything modern (distributed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In my undergraduate operating systems class we hacked away at an early version of Minix. The level of detailed code documentation always just blew me away.

</comment><comment><USER5> Absolutely fascinating lecture. Very much worth watching.

</comment><comment><USER12> His book, "Modern Operating Systems", is a fascinating read for any geek. He discusses MINIX a fair bit (unsurprisingly!)

<comment><USER13> Or, just get his "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation", which is a great read, and contains the full MINIX3 source code (printed and on CD).

<comment><USER5> Wow... I remember having read that in 88 or 89... It's a bit sad MINIX 1 would still be considered pretty modern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After watching the lecture, just download Minix, setup it up in VMWare/Virtualbox/Bochs and hack something in it. Really, do it. It's amazingly cool OS and fun to play with.</comment>


Undefined - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/post/eead6b0079 <comment><AUTHOR> We have a huge problem in our industry, tested our idea with very senior industry leaders or managers, starting conversations with partners and getting letters on intent (#fingerscrossed). We are looking for a great tech-oriented partner / co-founder with integration and ML experience (not a must).</comment>


Ask YC: How about some other user/karma stats on news.yc? - <AUTHOR>

The leader board and user pages have total karma, but what about things like average karma per post? (perhaps with some minimum karma cutoff)
Surely someone with 20 posts with an average of 5 should be higher than someone with 100 posts with an average of 1, right?
Others could include min, max, even standard deviation. Maybe I just really like statistics... does anyone else want this stuff? <comment><USER2> Karma per submission was calculated once: <http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html>. (Scroll down to August 6th's entry.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not really interesting to me...

Any leader board just tempts me to game the points and get to #1 anyways.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the point, it's hard to cheat "average karma per post"... you have to actually have posts that people like and upvote, instead of zillions of crappy posts.

<comment><USER4> Not sure it's so hard... with a leaderboard there's much more incentive to start working with others to vote up your submissions, use multiple accounts, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Laser fusion put on slow burn - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/laser-fusion-put-on-slow-burn-1.12016

<comment><USER2> Relevant graph:

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusio...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png)

<comment> simba-hiiipower wow, that's pretty sad. the 'moderate' path would have required an average expenditure of ~$2.5 billion a year, and projected the completion of a reactor by 2005. a pretty small investment when you consider the size of the federal budget [1] and where most of the funding goes.

even more sad, when considering the likelihood that many graphs relating to other potentially transformative technologies probably look much the same..

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_Stat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_States_federal_budget)

<comment><USER3> Uh... I would not take that graph as some sort of gospel. The truth is that even now we do not have an effective known path to economically viable fusion power generation, and if nothing else our computer simulations are indescribably better than anything they had in the late 70s. Had we blown billions more in the 80s, we probably would simply have blown billions more in the 80s and still have no fusion today.

<comment> simba-hiiipower that may be true, but getting it (or any new technology for that matter) to the point where it'd be economically viable requires an investment at some point..

and 'blowing' those billions in the 80s may very-well not have paid-off with economically viable fusion power today, but i highly doubt it would have left us with nothing to show for it.

<comment><USER3> We don't really have a hell of a lot to show for what we _have_ spent. Non- zero, sure, but a lot of the lessons we learned could certainly have been learned for a lot more cheaply if we hadn't tried to leap to the end of the process with grandiose projects built more on hope than science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm all for fusion research. Love the idea of clean, inexhaustible power. However, the NIF has consistently over promised and under delivered, and they have no idea _what_ their problems are [1]. They could use a little restraint when making schedule predictions.

[1] <http://fire.pppl.gov/NIF_NIC_report_rev5_koonin_2012.pdf>

<comment><USER5> Yep. NIF is such an old project that it was used as the "digitizer" in the original TRON movie. Still no progress.

<comment><USER6> What a silly thing to say -- of course there has been progress, even if it's only a better understanding of what doesn't work.

<comment><USER5> Only the US bothers with lasers because everyone else understands that lasers don't work for fusion. Tokamaks are where it's at.

The only real use of NIF is to better understand fusion so as to better understand how nuclear weapons work. I just want them to be honest about it.

<comment><USER7> _Only the US bothers with lasers because everyone else understands that lasers don't work for fusion._

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Mégajoule>

I personally think lasers are much more promising, if only because of how much room there is for disruption with solid-state lasers. Look at how horrible the NIF lasers are: ~1% efficient [0], billions of dollars, the size of a warehouse [1]. And the fusion end seems to work fine.

[0] <https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/about.php>

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Dri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Driver_laser)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> one thing i never understood about fusion is how you can capture all the released energy efficiently enough. isn't it released in many ways that cannot really be harnessed directly eg: gamma radiation, x-rays, emf. that makes me think that the input:output ratio would need to be not just marginally better, but sufficiently better. does anyone know what the current best input:captured number is?

<comment><USER9> It depends on the type of fuel used. The holy grail is a boron + hydrogen reaction, which produces three helium nuclei.

Since the nuclei are positively charged and moving quickly, the net voltage is around 2 million volts. When done correctly, fusion will create electricity directly. At that point it's just a matter of stepping it down to a usable voltage, but we have lots of ways to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Misleading title, from the article NIF is a weapons research project.

</comment><comment><USER11> _to help weapons scientists to care for the ageing US nuclear stockpile_

Simulating explosions helps determine maintenance for nuclear warheads?

I would bet they were more likely trying to make a "nuclear" weapon without radiation/fallout and failed.

I wonder what the world would be like with really cheap power though - I'd like to think a better place to live but more likely there would be a lot more war since the energy to do it would then be cheap.

<comment><USER12> _"Simulating explosions helps determine maintenance for nuclear warheads?"_

Yes. Radioactive material is, by definition, slowly becoming non-radioactive by decaying into other atoms. You can think of those other atoms as 'contaminants' in your plutonium soup.

What this means is if you create a nuclear warhead, and put it on the shelf, if you did nothing you would have a very sophisticated box holding some lead. But long before that it stops working as a nuclear warhead.

So what you do is you take put one on the shelf in the lab and you sample it periodically to see how its content has changed, and run your simulations to see if plutonium or uranium with those makeups would still work within the boundaries of the device, and you try to test it periodically under conditions that simulate, as much as possible, an actual explosion.

They used to do this at the test site, basically explode one warhead from a batch every 2 - 3 years to insure they still worked. But they stopped when we banned such testing.

<comment><USER13> That's not the only problem. Plutonium has numerous allotropes, and the allotropes have different material properties such as hardness and density. Given that creating super-criticality in a fission weapon is highly dependent on density and that the implosion dynamics are dependent on the properties of the fissile material this has a significant impact on weapons design. Given that an allotrope of Plutonium can change into another over time this makes keeping an eye on Plutonium based nuclear warheads quite necessary.

Additionally, radioactive decay releases Helium gas (alpha particles) over time which will lodge in the crystalline structure and cause disruptions over time.

Either of these factors can result in a change in the reliability and yield of nuclear warheads kept in storage for a long period of time.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple buying a third of world's gold to meet demand for iWatch - <AUTHOR> http://www.mining.com/apple-buying-a-third-of-worlds-gold-to-meet-demand-for-iwatch-14071/ <comment><USER2> "A third of the world's gold production", not "a third of the world's gold".

<comment><USER3> Yes, 1/3 of the annual production.

That's also assuming 1M/mo sales and 2 troy oz per watch, neither of which (I believe) are very accurate.

Still a shocking amount though, even at 1/10 those numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cost: 62 grams @ $38,735 per kg of gold is $2,401

Volume: At 2,767 ton mined 2013 this equated to 44.6 million watches sold in a year to take a third of production. This vs. around 170 million iPhones sold in 2014. Guessing twice as many have iphones this is about a 15% take-up + a growing market.

Volume wise, Apple could easily sell this many watches if it's really good. But a gold version that's going to cost $2,401 in gold alone, plus if Apple did buy this much gold the price is sure to increase. So we would have to be talking a $3,000+ watch that needs replacing every 2 years...hmm I'm skeptical about this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rolex gold watches contain 2-3 oz of gold (depends on the model and year). Rolex sells 0.5-1 million watches per year, I don't know what proportion of that are gold watches.

So if Apple Watches are a golden success, they will have to buy a lot of gold indeed, but not one third of mined output. Annual production is about 80m troy ounces, 50% of which is used in jewelry. [1]

[1] [http://www.numbersleuth.org/worlds- gold/](http://www.numbersleuth.org/worlds-gold/)

</comment><comment><USER6> The whole point of that Tidbits article was "the WSJ is probably wrong, because the idea that Apple would use 1/3 of the world's gold is an absurdity." Treating a reductio as if it were a proof is just deeply silly.

</comment><comment><USER7> "His estimations — admittedly based on the Wall Street Journal predictions, not official figures"

<comment><USER7> "Apple _may_ soon buy up one third of the world's gold"</comment></comment>


Coordinatr: Elegant Solution For Event Planning - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/03/13/coordinatr/ <comment><AUTHOR> Three weeks ago we posted Coordinatr.com to News.YC and got some great feedback: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120550>. Now we're launching and the reviews so far have been great!

Just wanted to again say thanks for everything!

</comment><comment><USER2> a commenter left this for you on the article:

"Those services are nice but may be too simple. Probably good to school parties. But is there something more business oriented? I have a little services company which has a lot events with assigned employees. And i'm almost crazy trying to manage all the frecuencies and odds. I'm trying to control it with Outlook and I'll try google. But i'm afraid these aren't tools made to do that."

<comment><USER3> There is definitely a chasm between the social coordination of "let's go to the movies on Friday" and the stuff that we (Upcoming.org) do, which is more tailored to public entertainment events.

Whoever wrote the article is kind of a dunce, he should have emphasized that fact rather than just suggest "um, well maybe you want to be non-mainstream".

<comment><USER4> We absolutely agree that there is a significant difference between the small, impromptu get-togethers that we are targeting, and the large, intensively planned events that sites like Upcoming.org cater to.

It will be important in the future for us to emphasize this fact to end users. Great point..thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment></comment>


Python and Vim - <AUTHOR> http://www.tummy.com/Community/Presentations/vimpython-20070225/vim.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Ii was, for a while, thinking about trying out emacs, simply because it clearly had superior scripting capabilities... Since apparently Vim can be scripted in pretty much any language though, I no longer see a reason!</comment>


Allegory and effect of good and bad government - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/jk3wNadYA7k <comment><AUTHOR> Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Palazzo Pubblico frescos: Allegory and effect of good and bad government</comment>


Whores, Vegetarianism, Moral High Ground & Capitalist Baggage - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crowdspring.com/2010/04/hello-whores/

<comment><USER2> I recall reading recently an exchange between someone and their utility company that was pretty funny. Always get a kick out of such communications. Why do customers take the time. And more importantly, why do companies take the time to respond?

</comment><comment><USER3> That's one of the nuttiest customer service exchanges I've ever read about. Don't know if I would have responded at all, but love that you did!</comment>


Hans Reiser Offers To Lead Cops to Nina's Body - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/hans-reiser-off.html <comment><USER2> Would someone who supports the view of him being innocent care to comment? :)

<comment><USER3> "OK, the DA is saying that. Not Hans. Hans is not saying he will tell them where he hid the body. The DA is trying to get the public on board with the sentence and so holding bogus announcements that he is negotiating for a reduced sentence in return for body location.

This is a publicity stunt by the DA to fool the public with spin."

<http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=36938#465360>

<comment><USER4> The DA won first degree murder. Why would they be spinning?

<comment><USER5> (Playing Devil's advocate here)

So an appeal would be turned down. The more info that is floating around out there that makes him seem guilty the better.

Also, I think it's wise to ignore all this talk of "unnamed sources". We have no idea what their motives are, or even if they speak the truth.

Btw, I think Reiser is guilty, based on what I read about in Wired (which had very good coverage, IMO).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The misleading title of this blog entry reminds me of another gem of a recent useless blog article: [http://gigaom.com/2008/06/06/why-amazon-went-down-and- what-i...](http://gigaom.com/2008/06/06/why-amazon-went-down-and-what-it- means-to-you/)

Are publishers pushing page views over actual content?</comment>


Ask HN: Need a policy on log retention. Suggestions? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> > What to keep and for how long time ?

Try to make the data anonymous when possible (remove from log file all potential personnal data, not needed by your data process). If usernames are kept and can contain personnal data, if you don't need these data, remove them from log file.

Log only valuable data you need and only for the amout of time you need them.

> Is there any guideline here ?

In Europe, you have the obligation to retain all informations needed to identify the owner of an online publication.

"This Directive aims to harmonise Member States' provisions concerning the obligations of the providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks with respect to the retention of certain data which are generated or processed by them, in order to ensure that the data are available for the purpose of the investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime, as defined by each Member State in its national law." - Directive 2006/24/EC - <http://bit.ly/HxZcW>

If you are based in Europe, you must refer to your national law for more informations.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd just copy the policy from whoever your nearest comparable is. It is fairly specific to your application and needs.

Probably the best thing is to find comparable companies, take their policies, and then go to your lawyers with that info and see what they suggest.

<comment><USER4> > _I'd just copy the policy from whoever your nearest comparable is. It is > fairly specific to your application and needs._

While bearing mind that legal documents are often copyrightable and you may need your own to be independently drafted.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My company has built a social networking app that is growing very, very quickly. We have a LOT of data. We're trying to figure out what makes sense to keep - 30 days? 90 days? This is a mostly-anonymous social network so the idea of anonymity is important. Would less than 30 days be OK? Is there a legal guideline here? (i can't find one) In the absence of legal framework, what are best practices?

I say idea of anonymity because we don't prevent you from using personally identifiable information - but you're free to make up a username (or change it later) and the app doesn't show your exact location, IP address, guid, etc.

<comment><USER5> _"I say idea of anonymity because we don't prevent you from using personally identifiable information - but you're free to make up a username (or change it later) and the app doesn't show your exact location, IP address, guid, etc."_

I think you should change any mention of anonymity to pseudonimity in order to eliminate any misconceptions.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's never referred to as anonymity. in fact it's the opposite - it's "meet people".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first thing you need to do is identify any legislative/regulatory requirements.

If you are unsure about your industry/jurisdiction maybe update the question with your relevant info.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. researched and can't find any in either category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We aren't lawyers and you need to talk with one.

<comment><AUTHOR> agreed. except that a) we have lawyers, b) i'm not asking for legal advice, just best practices.</comment></comment>


The International Flag of Planet Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.flagofplanetearth.com/ <comment><USER2> The rings are not interleaved consistently, which is annoying me because there's no explanation as to why.

The middle ring is on top of all the rings, but the two bottom ones.

The right-most ring crosses its neighbours from under, instead of in an interleaved under/over like the other rings.

The top-left ring crosses its neighbours from over, in the same fashion.

The other 4 outer rings are (clockwise) over their precedent, then under their following ring.

I'm curious if it's on purpose. If it's not on purpose, then I'm a bit disappointed that something so obvious wasn't found, when the rest of the presentation and discourses suggest great consideration. If it is indeed on purpose, then I don't understand why it's not explained, and why they made the top-left, right most and center rings different from the other ones.

Anyways, in other cases I'd say I'm nitpicking a whole lot. But this is a flag design, their text appeals to great consideration for the craft of designing flags. I'm a noob and I can notice the inconsistency, so I'm perplexed.

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing this is because if it were interleaved consistently, then it couldn't possibly be constructed in 3D space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As with these sorts of things, I respect the academic exercise, but they always feel really arbitrary. Like, I could pick fifty different decent symbols and color schemes and come up with something that kind of looked good and might be a good Earth flag in a movie or something. If that's the goal, then the challenge isn't really that hard.

If you _really_ wanted to explore a flag for Earth, you'd engage people from around the world. What symbols are important to them? What colors? How do they want to be seen? What does it even mean to them to have a flag that represents Earth as something uniquely ours? And such. Then begin to distill these ideas down into a flag. Or try to create a process by which an idea could be brought about. And try to get buy-in from all of these diverse people. That's the hard part. The interesting part!

(Also, nitpick about the video: 5:8 != the Golden Ratio.)

<comment><USER5> That would lead to analysis-paralysis pretty quickly. Just saying.

<comment><USER6> Isn't that sort of the point?

"Make a static, single, identifiable representation of a massive, diverse, scattered, irregularly sparse time-malleable dataset"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This one is still my favorite: [http://imgur.com/gallery/7ze3a](http://imgur.com/gallery/7ze3a)

<comment><USER8> Seems like using a flag that gives an unknown contact your home address is a bad idea. That information might not be something we want to communicate right off the bat.

<comment><USER9> Completely agree. Reminds me of Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem novels :)

<comment><USER10> I just read that and the Dark Forrest and that (fundamental) part of the book honestly made no sense to me. His claim that you can't locate a signal's source location was in complete conflict with everything I thought I knew about astronomy and how we locate things in space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having a flag for planet Earth is an oxymoron. The very purpose of a flag, and nationalism in general, is to be a symbol of a nation, and the very concept of a nation can only exist _in contrast to other nations_. One side of the coin can only exist because there is another side. All of Earth, considered as a whole, has nothing to compare itself to. We call the sides of a coin "heads" and "tails", but we don't have a word for the "side" of a sphere, since it would be pointless.

(Incidentally, there are already a few symbols for the planet Earth: Unicode 2637;TRIGRAM FOR EARTH¹ and Unicode 2641;EARTH²)

That said, there may be a need for a slightly related symbol: In the world today there is a common _assumption_ of nationalism, so whenever some grand achievement is done, there is the assumption that it is done in the name of some country or other, and everything is done with a place reserved for a symbol for that country – commonly a flag or a heraldric shield. To _contrast against this_ , we may need a symbol _against nationalism_.

① [http://graphemica.com/%E2%98%B7](http://graphemica.com/%E2%98%B7)

② [http://graphemica.com/%E2%99%81](http://graphemica.com/%E2%99%81)

<comment><USER12> >To contrast against this, we may need a symbol against nationalism.

The 'against-nationalism-ism' would just turn out like a nationalism. After all, it has a flag.

Just look how the International turned out when they managed something resembling of the revolution they longed after in one corner of Earth.

<comment><USER11> Well, there's always the "against centralized authority" symbol: Ⓐ

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two things:

1) Blue and white aren't exactly politically neutral. They tried to give Iraq a blue and white flag, with blue stripes representing the rivers. It did not go well.

2) A flag should not be so complex that children cannot draw it with crayons. The interlocking rings are nice, but the specificity of which goes under which makes things too difficult. The union jack is perfect example of this complexity but at least there is was the result of various mergers.

<comment><USER14> I completely agree with your second point. Being able to easily draw a flag is a really nice indicator of how nice your flag is (eg. is it too complex? Does it scale well?).

Look at the image posted by dakridge: [https://imgur.com/gallery/7ze3a](https://imgur.com/gallery/7ze3a) Anyone could easily draw that, and that makes it much better than OP's flag.

<comment><USER13> Ya, but its a little dated now. Any reference to the number of planets cannot survive the next upstart science teacher pushing out a new definition to get himself on the daily show.

<comment><USER10> Are you referring to Pluto losing its status as a Planet? That was a complicated process that was based on new discoveries and not some idea by some "upstart science teacher" on the daily show. Keeping Pluto as a planet would have made our definition of planet very wide and to be consistent Ceres should have to be turned back into a planet as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here is a much better proposal, with the added benefit of keeping our planet safe:

[http://traipse.com/upgrade/](http://traipse.com/upgrade/)

<comment><USER16> This was quite unexpected and has brightened my day

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Remind me of this: [https://i.imgur.com/mkyyF9A.png](https://i.imgur.com/mkyyF9A.png)

<comment><USER18> polish flag should be white over red.

<comment><USER19> Also some of the shades don't match - these are precisely defined, I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just googled for "earth flag". Among the various results, this is the only one that impressed me:

[http://marketblog.envato.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/05/ru75...](http://marketblog.envato.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/05/ru75u9.jpg.png)

Not saying it could actually be used as a flag. Notice how it puts the accent on us rather than the environment. I find it fresh and combative, it reminds us of our unity but also of our animality. It says very well who and what we are (without giving away our address!). However it's not inclusive and well- meaning enough to be politically acceptable. Isn't that strange?

All the other efforts, including the one linked by the OP, look trivial or perfunctory to me.

<comment><USER21> Stylish, sure. But this Earth is so much more than just one species of primate. If life is to define Earth, it should be more inclusive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yet another possibility is to use UN flag as representing earth?

Also any "planetary" space program, as opposed to country specific programs like NASA for US, JAXA for Japan etc, can be under some newly created body, like "UN space program" or something.

<comment><USER23> There are a large number of political and practical reasons why the U.N. flag isn't going to be used to represent earth, the biggest one being that few nations would say the U.N. as a body represents anythijg more than the interests of the five permanent members of the security council.

Add on the fact that the organization as a whole is bloated and encumbered by institutional dogfighting that would put Microsoft to shame, I don't see any UN funded/backed/approved space ventures happening anytime soon. Theres a reason the ISS isn't under a UN flag.

<comment><USER12> Can you imagine why and how any of those powers -- or any of the others -- would agree to anything else?

If the security council can agree on a policy how to represent Earth, they have armed might to back it up.

If they do not, all the bets are off, but I suspect that most of the powers and many smaller countries would do their utmost to fight down any independent movement claiming to represent the Earth their governments do not approve of.

The UN is a bloated thing of corruption, but so is most of all of the organized humanity on any scale, so that's quite fitting. Most of our existing international operational frameworks both _de jure_ and _de facto_ are coordinated under the UN or very related organizations. Assuming the world will resemble the one we live in now, if a need to represent the Earth arises (like, say, alien contact) and if everyone who matters agrees how to deal with the aliens, they'll probably just stick the UN sticker on that decision. If they do not, sucks for us.

If someone not-UN will start their space adventure to _find_ aliens, they'll use their own nationalist / corporate / ideological symbolism. If they in addition claim to represent the Earth or the Humanity instead of just themselves without everyone's approval (can't see that happening, I doubt the permanent members would agree precisely because the reasons you outlined), they will probably have a war at their hands at home. In that case and without drastic changes in the international political reality, I'd wager that the ones who can make their claim to stick would be the UN permanent council members, because that's how they got in there in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I prefer this one... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Terra_flag.gif](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Terra_flag.gif)

Aqua, terra, aer et somniorum.

</comment><comment><USER25> All I can see is a striking resemblance to [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hazard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hazard)

<comment><USER16> The implications are apt, I'm afraid

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's an interesting start, but the balance feels a bit off. A bit too yonic in the center and the way the rings overlap with negative space makes it look worse at small sizes. Realistically speaking a flag is in many ways the way you are different from _other_ flags but this raises the question: Who is looking at the flag of Earth? Who does the flag _not_ represent? In the short term I'd argue it's Venusians or Lunarian settlers. To them a flag that represents _origins_ is more important. I like the idea of a blue background symbolizing water / the earth sky, and the primary molecule that makes up our actual tissue, but the symbol in the middle shouldn't be based on circles. _All_ planetary life would want to use a circle. Especially as the flag for the first planet that humans arise from, it's weak.

In the long term the symbol for Earthlings may even be observed by aliens. In what ways will we be different from them? The flag may even be used as a symbol for other Earth species like Dolphins once we get the technology to communicate with them effectively or to artificially increase their intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER27> My ideal Earth flag: a blue marble on white or black background.

</comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't have an organisation or even a not-very-organized ideological movement or anything to back it up.

Thus, all the symbolism remain meaningless because practically nobody cares about it. And those who care or say so (for whatever purposes) are probably sporting UN emblems, and have been doing that for about half a century.

In reality, if the need arises, we'll use the UN org and its flag to represent Earth, if it's still around (it probably will) and security council can decide upon what to do with the aliens (no idea).

(Assuming the pessimistic but oh-so-realistic scenario, cooperation won't probably work out, so we'll probably have the majority of security council maybe waving the UN flag (if the majority is suitably overwhelming), the others waving whatever alliance symbols they bother to come up with (if at all, in the world wars just different compositions of national flags were popular in the propaganda, and that's not likely to change), and the first global civil war. After it's over and if there's still someone around to declare themselves as the winning side, the victors' flag (which will be used) will be a meaningful flag full of symbolism.)

</comment><comment><USER28> The flag represents nothing. Humanity is divided.

</comment><comment><USER29> For the purpose of human unity, this is a great idea. As globalization progresses, rallying behind divisive banners may become less and less relevant (or they may shift to non territorial notions, but that's a whole different story).

But why overthink the symbolism? We already have the globe outline [1] as a relatively well understood symbol.

[1] Unicode U+1F310

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a silly project that solves a problem no one has. When we encounter aliens, it'll maybe make sense to have some designation for humans/earth as a whole. In the meantime though, it's completely meaningless.

And the flag itself is... ok I guess, but there are a million designs that would be equally acceptable.

I just don't get the point.

<comment><USER31> I'd say it creates a sense of unity with those that travel into outer space.

<comment><USER32> I concur. When I see some spacecraft bearing the flag of one particular country, I feel something is missing, for I myself also feel part of quest for a greater understanding of our boundaries with outer space. A flag of the earth would create that sense of unity you referred to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yeah, I'd say acceptable, and I could get used to it with time. But honestly, it seems to me that every time someone makes a flag for a real-world thing, it almost always suck. Why can't they just hire Michael Okuda, whose work in Star Trek (and NASA) produced really pretty logos and flags?

[http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/underwire/2009/06/image-9a...](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/underwire/2009/06/image-9afc0d4cddf311dc.jpg)

[https://startreklives.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/emblem.gif](https://startreklives.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/emblem.gif)

\--

Still, I'm willing to wield current design because solidarity as a species means more to me than petty design issues :).

<comment><USER34> Those are all either 1) a derivation of the general "starfleet arrowhead" or 2) a ripoff of the UN flag. Most of them are also afflicted with awful outdated-looking gradients.

<comment><USER35> I'm not sure if "ripoff" is the best way to think of those designs. They were likely conciously constructed with those elements with the intent of portraying a believable future descended from our present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why not use the Olympic flag. Isn't that the purpose of the Olympic Games? To unite humanity?

<comment><USER11> If you read up on the actual Olympic Games and the Olympic Committee, you could get the impression that their purpose is to unite humanity _against the Olympic Committe_.

<comment><USER37> Well, common enemies tend to be the best bonding agent in any given situation, so I propose the following:

 _Azure_ , the Olympic symbol _argent_. Motto: "Fuck the International Olympic Committee!".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Couldn't we just use the flag Daffy Duck used!?! [http://www.gargaro.com/webpages/general/marvin17.jpg](http://www.gargaro.com/webpages/general/marvin17.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER39> What a bunch of nonsense. Can we at least start acting like humans are marginally advanced by just skipping the whole flag thing, a fetish used in ancient times to indicated who you belonged to and to communicate across open space during combat and for wholly violent and militaristic reasons.

Sure, it's not really a flag, a piece of fabric suspended from a big stick, but at the very least, let's simply go with an icon, rather than "flag", aka, rectangle. It's so primitive an nonsensical.

</comment><comment><USER40> Looks ugly.

<comment><USER41> That was my knee-jerk reaction, as well. Sort of a less interesting variation on the Olympic flag.

Now this, this has pizzazz [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_in_Futurama#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_in_Futurama#/media/File:Futurama_flag_of_Earth.svg) /s

<comment><USER42> Yeah, the Futurama one is just fine if you subscribe to American Exceptionalism. Which would suit 4.48% of the world population just fine.

<comment><USER43> ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Without javascript, this page renders as empty white space.

I suppose it is made up of complicated things like text and images, so maybe an unfair observation.

Anyway, the flag. Sure, make an Earth flag, good idea. But I think it should look better than a few interlocking circles. Needs a bit more spice or something. Let's call the 7 circles version 0.1. Looking forward to version 0.2.

</comment><comment><USER45> If the earth needs a flag, then the flag has the purpose to identify the earth and indicate the origin of an earthling. Thus, it should look like the earth as seen from space. Which would result in the borders of our continents. This would be boring for us, but it would make sense for aliens.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow. Who would have thought it'd be a bunch of overlapping rings? I'm completely surprised.

</comment><comment><USER47> For a good podcast / ted talk on the elements of a good flag design, check out:

[http://99percentinvisible.org/news/99-invisible-at- ted/](http://99percentinvisible.org/news/99-invisible-at-ted/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think anything with five or more interlocked rings are illegal in any country that wants to ever host the Ol*mpics.

I seem to recall a game (or something) that had a similar logo to this flag but had to be redesigned.

<comment><USER24> Found it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Five_Rings#Inter...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Five_Rings#International_Olympic_Committee)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Interesting last picture where there is a row of the American flags and then a lonely Earth Flag. I would have though it would be Swedish flags as this project is from a design college in Stockholm.

<comment><USER37> Few other countries love displaying their flag as much as the US (plus a lot of stock photography just happens to come from the US), so I'd wager it's the easiest place to find stock photography to put the flag in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> _outer space_ is not the right term to describe low earth orbit. It's the nearest space there is, and if you're there, you're strongly gravitationally bound to the earth itself.

</comment><comment><USER50> Lol this flag actually looks like the flag of some Japanese shogun. Maybe somebody has even already used it in history!

</comment><comment><USER51> I expected a blue disk on a black ground.

</comment><comment><USER52> I hope by the time this flag is used, space suits don't have to be that bulky.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why would you put the flag for planet Earth on Mars? That just seems confusing.

</comment><comment><USER54> I would like to hang this flag outside my home.

</comment><comment><USER55> It needs more.. pop? ;)

Joking aside, I kinda dig it.

</comment><comment><USER56> It looks like a logo of some bank.

</comment><comment><USER57> What will the favicon look like?

</comment><comment><USER58> Don't we have the Olympic flag already?

</comment><comment><USER59> tl;dr - a self-promo piece by Oskar Pernefeldt, whoever this guy is.

<comment><USER60> It was a school project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> 10/10 photoshop skills

</comment><comment><USER62> Pure utopia man. But, we could make a first step by helping the refugees from middle east and people of downtrodden African nations.

</comment><comment><USER63> Uh oh, world flag? What`s next a universal P2P crypto currency to be used across nations...? Smells like NWO reptilian agenda is advancing :-) Seriously though, this is really nice initiative.

<comment><USER63> HN, where's your sense of humor? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Great, give us an Earth flag and we can go stick it in things and claim them! Then we can explain to the local inhabitants how that has changed their situation. We'll need pamphlets in a universal language too.</comment>


Why buying a house today is so much harder than in 1950 - <AUTHOR> https://www.curbed.com/2018/4/10/17219786/buying-a-house-mortgage-government-gi-bill?src=longreads <comment><USER2> Don't live in California?

<comment><USER3> Yeah the article starts with "To understand just how unaffordable owning a home can be in American cities today, look at the case of a teacher in San Francisco seeking his or her first house."

You could just as easily write how now is the most affordable time to buy real estate and use Mississippi as your model.

"Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers." ― Luis Alberto Urrea</comment></comment>


The faster-than-fast Fourier transform - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/faster-fourier-transforms-0118.html

<comment><USER2> Today's pedantic minute is sponsored by Carl Friedrich Gauss.

The FFT algorithm was _re_ discovered in the 60's. Gauss discovered it in the early 19th century while studying the phase of the moon, before Fourier described his transform. He published it in latin, and the text was lost until 1984.

<comment><USER3> Not to detract from Gauss' remarkable discovery but there is no relation between Gauss' FFT algorithm and the continuous Fourier transform that Fourier discovered. It is also worth mentioning that credit for the discrete Fourier transform goes to Vandermode and pre-dates Gauss' FFT algorithm by about 30 years.

<comment><USER2> I didn't know about Vandermonde, its always nice to learn something.

I'm no mathematician, and my understanding of the subject is limited. How is the discrete Fourier transform unrelated to its continuous counterpart? Their definitions are extremely similar...

From a semantic point of view, it is nice that all these transform bear the same name, but historically, it is a bit unfair to attribute Fourier analysis to Fourier, who didn't discover it (even though he greatly developed the subject).

I know there's an eponymous law that describes this phenomenon, and it is of course not named after its inventor, but I can't remember its name.

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiglers_law_of_eponymy>

<comment><USER5> I wonder if HN clipped the quote in that url. Let's try this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy>

Yep--for some reason that worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paper: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2501v1>

It starts by dividing the spectrum into frequency bins, and assumes that there is usually 0 or 1 non-zero coefficients in each bin. It wasn't clear to me what happens when a large number of non-zero coefficients are clustered together in one bin. Can O(k log n) still be achieved when most frequencies are clustered?

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. I've a friend in Australia who's been doing some work analysing rainfall using arrays of wire across long distances (details somewhere here: <http://wiredlab.org/>), and during a recent conversation he pointed me at this paper: <http://www.icita.org/icita2004/abstracts/128-5.htm> which seems to use another method (involving Primes) for calculating Fourier Transforms, and claims a 95% speed up.

Sadly I haven't had a chance to look into it in any great detail yet, although it's "in the queue" of things to poke at. I thought it worth pointing out in case anyone else might find it useful.

</comment><comment><USER8> Spare transforms like this are very interesting, and these seem like some very good performance results. It's worth noting, though, that FFTW (<http://www.fftw.org/>) is still much faster on the sizes of transforms that many (most?) applications do - less than 2^15 or so entries. Also, as the number of non-zero frequencies climbs, sparse algorithms very quickly get overtaken by good implementations of more standard FFT algorithms.

Still, very cool stuff.

<comment><USER9> They actually point out a specific comparison to FFTW in the paper: their "preliminary implementation" is faster than FFTW for n=2^22 and k<=2^17, and they point out that this performance is a distinct advantage over previous algorithms, which were faster for only k<=2000 or so. In other words, it seems that this algorithm is faster than FFTW for a much larger number of non-zero frequencies than was previously possible.

I don't know how to estimate what values of n would be relevant for today's applications, but n=2^22≈4M doesn't seem like such a big number for images or video (if signal length roughly corresponds to number of pixels). Any thoughts?

<comment><USER8> > I don't know how to estimate what values of n would be relevant for today's > applications, but n=2^22≈4M doesn't seem like such a big number for images > or video (if signal length roughly corresponds to number of pixels). Any > thoughts?

Transform codecs for video typically don't transform an entire frame at a time, but rather blocks of the frame. This is for three reasons. The first is efficiency - most of these codecs date back to a time when huge transforms (FFT, DCT, etc) were very expensive. Possibly the most important is the local artifacts are less noticable than global artifacts in video, and using blocks is a nice way to bound that. Finally, the point of using a transform is to be able to extract some 'structure' from the data that can be used to encode it in a more efficient way. Small blocks make this easier to do in a perceptually acceptable or transparent way.

There are absolutely applications for large transforms, but video encoding typically isn't one. Incidentally, many modern approaches are based on other transforms, like the discrete wavelet transform, or approximations to transforms like the DCT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As usual the article misrepresents video compression. Almost l useful coding tools are spatial and not frequency based; the only famous one (DCT) was replaced with a rough approximation in H.264 and it works just as well.

This is because lots of realistic images don't really have meaningful frequency-based content. (imagine sampling every 8 or 16 pixels - would their values be in any way related to each other?)

<comment><USER11> Don't think of them in terms the full function. You can approximate a strait line by a small part of a long sine wave. [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sin%28x%29++from+.01+to...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sin%28x%29++from+.01+to+.02)

But, for a real world example look at jpeg.

 _Next, each 8×8 block of each component (Y, Cb, Cr) is converted to a frequency-domain representation, using a normalized, two-dimensional type-II discrete cosine transform (DCT)._ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess this is the project page, also contains the papers and some benchmarks:

<http://groups.csail.mit.edu/netmit/sFFT>

</comment><comment><USER13> For the plain ol' FFT, I've found the "Fastest Fourier in the West": <http://www.fftw.org/> to be an excellent library, which implements a whole bunch of different solvers, and picks the appropriate ones to use for your data.

Hopefully this new algorithm can be added to their toolbox in the future.

<comment><USER14> In the paper, they state that they compared their implementation to FFTW and beat it handily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's lots of things you can do with practical algorithms when you start thinking data-first approaches and try to fit the optimizations to the probability distribution of the data, i.e. fastest path for the most probable or important input and vice versa. Many approximations are based on the idea of ignoring input data which is improbable or has little effect on the outcome, and can be quite safely pruned out early.

<comment><USER16> Or as they say in computer architecture 101, optimizing for the common case :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's the SODA paper:

<http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/~dina/pub/soda12.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER18> The talk at SODA is in 1.5 hours, I'm going to attend it.

Any other HNers at SODA?

<comment><USER17> How was the talk?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is the algorithm patented?

<comment><USER20> Mathematical methods ( _as such_!) are a specific exclusion in Europe (EPC 52(2) &(3)).

Of course that _as such_ gives you somewhere to hang your patent application if you can afford the patent lawyers fees to protect the monopoly.

<comment><USER19> Mathematical methods are excluded in the U.S. too by case law (Benson, Flook, Diehr). But "law" in terms of what's on the books and "law" in terms of what happens when you go to court are two different things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is very interesting, thank you. I'll try to implement it this weekend.</comment>