Go Daddy patents "announcing a domain name registration on a social website" - <AUTHOR> http://domainnamewire.com/2012/09/25/go-daddy-patents-announcing-a-domain-name-registration-on-a-social-website/

<comment><USER2> For what it's worth, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you want to read the arguments, enter the patent number 8276057 at this website:

<http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair>

Look under the heading "file wrapper" for all the communication. In particular, read:

    	 CTNF	Non-Final Rejection
    	 REM	Applicant Arguments/Remarks Made in an Amendment
    	 NPL	Non Patent Literature
             NOA	Notice of Allowance and Fees Due (PTOL-85)

The initial rejection (CTNF) is followed by applicant rebuttal (REM), several prior-art searchs (NPL) and then the acceptance (NOA, first document with 6 pages).

I'm not bored enough to read the whole thing, but the claims seem to have been some constrained on very technical points.

Please note: this patent is completely bogus, and I am not defending it. I am pointing this out because I think it is critically important for people to understand how the process works. Otherwise all this hand-wringing is for naught (and those who don't learn from history, etc...)

A suggestion for an enterprising web designer who happens to also be a bored 2L: make a website to semi-automate collation of prior art challenges. _Court is not the only way to challege a patent_. Patents can be challenged by 3rd parties through an "ex-parte re-examination request". One of the big limitations to this is the cost of the legal process and prior-art search/summation. I'm dreaming of a website that would allow crowd-sourcing to get 95% of the way to a ready-to-file submission, which could then be vetted and finalized by pro-bono lawyers, students in legal clinic, etc.

<comment><USER3> For those who haven't seen it:

<http://patents.stackexchange.com/>

(This is the same as askpatents.com)

<comment><USER4> And a link to a question specifically pertaining to this patent:

[http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/535/prior-art- for...](http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/535/prior-art-for-godaddy- patent-announcing-a-domain-name-registration-on-a-social-w)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No.

GoDaddy _titles_ a patent "Announcing a Domain Name Registration on a Social Website"

Regardless of your position on US copyright law, you simply must understand this important and not-so-subtle distinction before you make arguments about the validity of a patent. There are 18 claims in this patent. Read and complain about specific claims.

To choose a random example, patent US496217 by Stihl (1990) is titled "Handle for a chain saw", yet Stihl did not patent handles on chain saws.

<comment><USER6> "Handle for a chain saw" patents are usually described with language precise enough they can't do that.

"Method and apparatus for lifting and operating a chain saw" would be more akin to the useless software patents that are out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow! What an innovation. I would never have thought of doing this. Its a shame I won't be able to do this myself now.

Hang on? Isn't everyone already doing this for just about every other online venture? Someone registered via Facebook -> Post to wall. Hmmm. Maybe I should copy and paste their patent application and switch out "domain name registration" for any other service name.

I think it is silly for 2 reason's. Firstly this is not an innovation in any shape or form. People have been doing this for years with everything. It shouldn't have been approved. Secondly, GoDaddy have spent time and money gaining a patent which they can't enforce. Seems silly. I feel they just wanted to add "using patented technology" in their advertising.

<comment><USER8> You seem certain that "everyone already doing this" is doing it in the way specified in the claims. Are you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Patent trolls have had open season on engineers because the lawmakers and moneymen don't listen to us.

Going after marketers, however, will be their undoing.

</comment><comment><USER10> The patent system is like a bug in a software that all your clients rely upon and will never let you fix. I expect peace in the middle east to happen before the patent system gets scrapped.

<comment><USER11> There's still a huge valid question about reform as opposed to scrap. The system would work if it was actually applied correctly. (I understand application is part of said system, but I'm referring to the overall human aspect, ie, the reason AskPatents.com was made.)

<comment><USER12> I understand why this is downmodded -- software patents as a whole are pretty awful. And I think we can just about all agree that the patent office is incapable of sifting through requests on its own.

But askpatents.com looks to me like it has some potential to work, and if it did, it might solve at least most of the really heinous examples. I'd say that at least merits making the possibility of reform an open question.

Forcing a massive shift in IP rights (that may not benefit large, entrenched interest) through Congress is an enormous undertaking that may not succeed. Reform may be a more practical option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even scarier is their definition of social network. From the patent document:

"Social networking websites may comprise internet-based social networking services that focus on building and verifying online social networks for communities of people who may share interests and activities, wish to communicate with each other efficiently, and may be interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software applications".

In addition to Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn and Facebook they also list YouTube and Flickr as specific examples. This thing is pretty far reaching.

<comment><USER14> IRC, Email?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is silly. They should have patented "announcing something on the internet"

<comment><USER16> on the internet.. using a mobile device!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In gmail, I filter every email from GoDaddy and apply label "change registrar", just so I'll remember when my domains expire. I'm not really liking most things I see from GoDaddy; perhaps with the exception of pricing.

<comment><USER18> Most of the registrars top up the time your domain has with the current registrar at the point of transfer. At least Namcheap does.

Be aware of the following 60-day restriction when planning the transfer from GoDaddy: [http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/3560/transferring- do...](http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/3560/transferring-domain-names- to-another-registrar)

<comment><USER19> All com/net/org/info registrars do that -- it's an inherent feature of the registry.

<comment><USER20> That's actually not the case. Godaddy implements this locally, and arguably in contravention of the ICANN policy.

oBDisclaimer: I participated in the development of the original and amended ICANN transfer policy. I understand that there has been a subsequent amendment and I'm just not interested enough anymore to find out what it includes. You may in fact actually be correct in that ICANN _now_ permits this, although I'm pretty sure that this isn't the case :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They should patent "Getting Away With Outrageous Misogyny In A Business That Would Seem Inhospitable For It"; that's their true and only talent.

<comment><USER22> but there is so much prior art for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd love it if the clerk(s) in question could explain how it isn't "obvious to a person 'skilled in the relevant art' applying reasonable diligence and effort."

One thing these characters could patent is a system and method of auto renewing and parking a domain they host if their site is used to check on it as it approaches expiry. I give GoDaddy a wide berth.

<comment><USER24> Be careful what you wish for.

There are pretty well established guidelines for determining the "obviousness" of a patent, and one of these (as you mention) is determining whether the patent would be obvious to one with an _ordinary_ level of skill in the relevant art.

The average software developer can't code fizzbuzz. Therefore anything more sophisticated than fizzbuzz is potentially patentable.

Think about that. Really let it sink in.

I have come to believe that the problem isn't with software patents, the problem is with _us_. Most software developers really are that bad. It is easy to forget this, but the people who hang out on Hacker News are really a slim minority.

We need to get our own house in order and demand more of the people who practice this art. Other industries have professional certification or restrictive guild systems - maybe we need to adopt the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Damn I need to move that last domain off of Go Daddy. Ill do that today.

<comment><USER26> Just started my own transfer for one of my domains; I might let the other one lapse.

This was the last kick in the pants I needed to get off of GoDaddy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I could expect this out of Go Daddy, but should the people approving this patent also be blamed?

<comment><USER28> I guess you could try blaming the rubber-stamping machine they're clearly running these applications through, sure.

<comment><USER29> Just out of curiosity, does anyone have an idea of what sorts of software patent applications have not been approved?

<comment><USER30> I heard they determined _The Singularity_ was not innovative enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe someone here can patent the act of making trivial, over-reaching patents and put a stop to all this?

<comment><USER32> Too much prior art.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have JUST patented announcing the patent of announcing a domain name registration on a social website...

You all owe me £1m each ... (I also patented talking about it).

<comment><USER34> Genius, however, I had already patented getting a patent on patenting the announcing of a domain name registration on a social website.

times infinity...

<comment><USER35> Guys, this isn't reddit.

Edit: Or Slashdot.

<comment><USER34> Yeah I wouldn't normally post something that ridiculous, but given the state of the patent system, it seemed worth mocking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Software patents with troll owners have long been the Sword of Damocles for the bootstrapped startup. This one is probably of no consequence but overall they represent a barrier to entry that has no basis in natural law. I really doubt we'll ever see meaningful reform because those who could effect a change don't have a clue about the technology their laws affect.

</comment><comment><USER37> The patent's claims are slightly more specific than the title would suggest, but are still absurdly broad. The patent appears to cover announcing, after a delay, a domain name registration on a social website using oauth.

</comment><comment><USER38> So, say I buy a domain from Register.com and then manually post it on my Facebook that I bought this, that isn't Register.com's fault right?

This seems pointless because you could still just encourage people to do it manually, in another part of the purchase flow, or maybe even a week or two after? It seems to me that the patent just blocks you from having an official Facebook share button or Tweet ( _or something like that_ ) button on the checkout summary page.

<comment><USER39> But what are you doing buying from Register.com? Yeesh.

<comment><USER38> ...that was just the first competitor example I could think of, I don't actually purchase my domains from there! :P Haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> On this basis:

A photo-sharing service can patent "announcing a picture upload on a social website". A location service can patent "announcing a check-in on a social website" A restaurant review service can patent "announcing a restaurant rating on a social website"

It might actually help more such "ridiculous" patents being granted. Eventually, the non-tech crowd will be affected and the whole system will be brought into question.

</comment><comment><USER41> But that's just a small part of what the sites are doing these days, such as providing free renewal for the second year in case a user allows connecting its Facebook Account, and granting permission to the site to publish any promotion post on the wall of the user(which can be anything more than saying that user has registered an 'example.com' domain name on register.com).

They should have gone for a wider range of things.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is just ridiculous. Where does it stop?

And after reading articles like these - [http://www.law.com/corporatecounsel/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202...](http://www.law.com/corporatecounsel/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202572623576&PTO_Adds_Crowdsourcing_Tool_to_Patent_Application_Process) \- makes one feel the legal system is aware how outdated and broken it is.

</comment><comment><USER43> How is this patentable? Isn't this just API stuff?

<comment><USER44> Almost everything is patentable. The real test is holding the patent up in court.

<comment><USER45> _> The real test is holding the patent up in court._

Or threatening enough people to sue them for umpteen fantastillion dollars unless they pay you ransom money^W^W licensing fees.

Remind me why we still have this fucked up system?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I don't think this "service" will even be successful. Domainers certainly don't want to share their business matters with their Facebook friends. And business owners may spend several months developing a site before publishing it. No timer can predict when the site is done.

<comment><USER47> Yeah, but imagine the lay user buying a domain and letting their friends know about it. Then everyone else is like, "Wow, you got your own dot com!"... "Me three".

And so Godaddy makes money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> In addition to requiring a delay, the patent claims as allowed require that you GIVE GODADDY your credentials to the social networking site and that their server will use the credentials to log you in. Contrary to what some of you are saying, this is _not_ oath.

</comment><comment><USER49> Hm. Another fairly bogus patent, but who exactly is going to use it anyway? Even if you had the site already prepared and developed... CNAME and other DNS jazz takes a day to propagate anyway. You'd end up announcing something that wasn't there.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is genius, announcing registrations on Facebook. I have never seen such a thing.

</comment><comment><USER51> How can it be for real? Not surprising tho since the structure of the legal system and the law as it currently is just cannot keep up with technological progress.

</comment><comment><USER52> I will patent announcing patents on social websites.

</comment><comment><USER53> Good to see Godaddy focusing on their core business and keeping secure, reachable and reliable instead of useless fringe projects.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm surprised this was not patented already.

</comment><comment><USER55> You have got to be kidding!

</comment><comment><USER56> RIP Patent System...

</comment><comment><USER57> They are going to be patenting sandwiches next!

</comment><comment><USER58> if some politician would get rid of "business process patents", we would be 90% of the way there.

<comment><USER59> I was under the impression that those already didn't qualify for patents. At least, this is what my friend told me years ago when he was either in or had recently graduated from law school at UT.

Is that not the case?

<comment><USER60> Do a patent office search for "system and method" and you will discover that they certainly do qualify. There was a period where they did not, but then some appellate court suddenly decided they do and now you get what we have here.</comment></comment></comment>


Acceleration of Deep Neural Network Training with Resistive Cross-Point Devices - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07341 <comment><USER2> I fully expect similar approaches to come to dominate artificial neural network implementations, due to their ability to accelerate on-line learning. Either memristive or ferroelectric (FRAM) nonvolitile memory could be used to implement this technology in the very near future; note that TI has FRAM in commercially available chips.

I suspect some of the bigger players have research along these lines, but I don't really know. If there are any (well funded) groups onboarding in this field, let me know, though. I have extensive experience in R&D at the basic semiconductor materials, device and systems levels, and I've studied the software techniques on the side.</comment>


The Economist: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21731332-weaker-dollar-and-energy-boom-are-pushing-up-pay-blue-collar-wages-are-surging-can-it?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/bluecollarwagesaresurgingcanitlastcheerfortheblues <comment><USER2> Much of the article seems to hinge on the dollar's decline in value, this may be down to Mr Trump being president.

Similarly with the UK's decline in the value of the pound after Brexit making it superficially more competitive.

Dare I say it, devaluation is overvalued.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hard paywall.

Was not able to read the full article in full, but title is an interesting question.

High wages in blue collar fields will be a thing of the past in an world where automation will thrust massive amounts of people whose jobs were automated onto the unemployment line. These people will have to make a choice :Either get re-educated or do simple blue collar jobs.

The good thing is the price per hour for plumbing and other Blue Collar jobs will be a lot cheaper than it is now because of an increase in Labor Supply.

Again I could be totally wrong, but as of today that is the direction we're headed.

<comment><USER4> The guy who puts the toothpaste cap on the tube will come back to repair the robots that replace him. If you think automation won't create new types of blue collar work then you're only looking at a narrow strip of the problem. Consider the ice delivery man: refrigeration destroyed his industry, but created so many more possibilities that there was a net gain in blue collar work. If you think we're on the precipice of AI/automation being able to solve complex problems without human aid I think you're overestimating the capacity of the capabilities of current generation tech. More specifically the blue collar work will be replaced by the blue collar work of tomorrow, it will be different, but it will still need humans at some level of the chain. Additionally there will be steep switching costs; I don't automation is going to replace ALL needs of current blue collar work as quickly as you think.

TL;DR Automation will...

* replace some current blue collar work over time

* create new blue collar work over time

* take a protracted period of time to fully supplant all labor needs

<comment><USER5> How many seamstresses do you need to create 100 t-shirts per hour?

How many techs do you need to repair one seamstress bot that pumps out 100 t-shirts per hour?

<comment><USER6> How many bots can do plumbing, carpentry, or electrical work? Zero.

If we ever get to that point, we'll just start churning out bots and giving them away for free to do the work.

<comment><USER7> How many plumbers, carpenters and electricians do we need?

<comment><USER3> The information by then will be so common, that it will be a question of not how to fix, but whether or not it is convenient/one is willing to fix</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chaos Computer Club hackers 'have a conscience' - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9393571.stm <comment><USER2> Most of the talks on the congress were in given in english, you can browse the schedule on <http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/> and download all recordings [http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/wiki/Conference_Recording...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/wiki/Conference_Recordings)

Have fun!

<comment><USER3> Some of the talks are in German and some are in English. You can tell the language in the filename, -en- or -de-. And the talk numbers on the left of that chart link to notes, slides, and blogs related to the talks.

<comment><USER2> ~78% of the talks were in english.

<comment><USER4> Even though 75% of that 78% shouldn't have been held in english.

I find it admirable that the CCC wants to cater to an international audience but for years the community has been demanding: FOR THE SAKE OF GOD please require that the people holding english talks can actually speak english.

If you want to witness the engrish-apocalypse just watch the talk about INDECT.

ps: <3 constanze

<comment><USER5> Actually, the speakers and the audience came from many different countries, not at all limited to Germany and UK. Sure, language can be an obstacle, but all of them were fascinated by technology and did crazy things with it. That is what counts.

If you argue otherwise, you might be missing the point, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sadly, I didn't have the time to go to the congress, but I've seen their club in Munich. Their spare-time projects impressed me quite a bit: the members unlock the door with a digital key sent to the lock via wlan; they built that 3D-printer that can print it's own components, they have a self-written mandelbrot-based music visualizer, a soda machine where you can pay with a specially prepared USB-stick (anonymously, of course), computer-controlled lights in the whole flat, and lots of other cool stuff. The members were very nice people, too.

</comment><comment><USER7> They call it "Chaos" in this video, but the correct short name would be "CCC".

</comment><comment><USER8> I guess the BBC has found, after 25+ years, what a white hat hacker is.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure why you think they didn't before... The term is in their glossary [1]. A cursory search found the term has been in use by BBC News for at least a decade.

[1] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5400052.stm#whitehat></comment></comment>


Userfly: Get Usability Insights with One Line of Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/userfly_get_usability_insights.php <comment><USER2> Looks eminently useful.

I would like to try this with experimental pages + mturk workers.

</comment><comment><USER2> Competition looks like crazyegg.com and also usertesting.com to some extent.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> useful for startup sites</comment>


I interviewed at Adzerk - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/fT2TnSwk

<comment><USER2> I don't mean to be rude, but why is this on HN? I mean, there's nothing wrong with it and its a nice read, but, I dunno, haven't we all had experiences like this? Is there some broader context I'm missing?

<comment><USER3> I would like to see how this almost made it to the top 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting choice to use pastebin instead of the built in text submission.

Sometimes things just don't work out. It sounds like you had a good experience, but the end result wasn't what you'd hoped for. That happens.

Best of luck on whatever comes next.

</comment><comment><USER5> Adzerk is a world-class team, between Nate, James, and the amazing people they've brought on board (it sounds like you met Patrick, too!). I wouldn't take any rejection personally; the opportunity to be interviewed there is validating enough.

<comment><USER6> I agree with statement, Adzerk are an amazing team!

<comment><USER7> "I saw the best minds of my generation... (writing ad software)"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A little strange to interview for a position that isn't open and then feel rejected when they reply they aren't going to create an opening for you. That would be the expected answer, I'd think.

</comment><comment><USER9> I ran into something similar interviewing at an NYC lab; loved the culture, loved the pre-screening interview, team was great, did well at the interview, didn't get the offer. I couldn't be happier at my current job, however.

Just have to roll with the punches! It's a little Bioshock-y, but I'm a firm believer that regardless of where you are, things will end up pretty similarly.

</comment><comment><USER10> When you asked people at Adzerk the questions you mention at the bottom of the paste, what did they say?

</comment><comment><USER11> Good people have bad days!</comment>


Google quietly changes the world again - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9143523/Mike_Elgan_Google_quietly_changes_the_world_again?taxonomyId=169&pageNumber=1 <comment><USER2> I'm not convinced that computerworld is right about this. Generally, world- changing developments take such magazines by surprise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, uh. Companies like Socialight (<http://socialight.com>) have been doing this for years. Admittedly google has a higher chance of succeeding given their already popular maps application, but it isn't world changing...

</comment><comment><USER4> People have been talking about "augmented reality" for years.

I'm usually a cynic about "a big thing is going to happen soon" puff pieces ... but I'm convinced.

This time it's for real.

Exciting times!

</comment><comment><USER5> That's pretty neat that Google keeps poking around with different concepts without a "profit source" behind it. Normal business school analysis would require a internal rate of return before starting.

<comment><USER6> The profit source is the user generated content. Free content = $$</comment></comment>


Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment - <AUTHOR> https://blog.bugsnag.com/benefits-of-using-tmux/ <comment><USER3> If you want to get a taste of the benefits of tmux without having to learn anything new, I recommend using iTerm and setting up an alias for

      'ssh [your server] -t "tmux -CC attach || tmux -CC"'

Just running that command will connect to your server and attach to an existing tmux session, or create a new one if needed, and make use of iTerm's tmux integration, so you can use the standard macOS keyboard commands (or the UI) to do things like switch tabs, make new tabs, close them, make new windows, etc. all using tmux and a single ssh connection. You can press 'esc' in the command window to detach from your session and when you return (just using that alias) all your work is just as you left it.

<comment><USER4> Use mosh[1] instead of ssh for superior handling of weaker connections and roaming. You close your laptop one place, go elsewhere, switch to LTE, whatever, open the lid and you're back on. Don't even need to reconnect.

[1] [https://mosh.org/](https://mosh.org/)

<comment><USER5> It's a real shame that it can't handle X11 forwarding, which is pretty much all I use ssh for nowadays.

<comment><USER6> Well, that and tunnelling all sorts of other traffic, basically mini-VPN. I use this all the time for a variety of remote systems (or local, _I_ am the remote one).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use a tool called tummy ([https://github.com/minhajuddin/tummy](https://github.com/minhajuddin/tummy) full disclosure: built by me) which allows me to create a Tmuxfile per project. A typical file looks like this:

      session "liveform"
      directory "/home/minhajuddin/r/liveform/frontend"

      window "src", [
        pane("vim TODO"),
      ]

      window "server-pry", [
        pane("puma --port 3000 --config <(echo '')"),
        pane("rails c", :horizontal),
      ]

      window "play", [
        pane("git status"),
      ]

      window "misc", [
        pane("sidekiq"),
        #pane("httpdebug", :horizontal),
        pane("cd ~/s/html; fs", :horizontal),
        pane("guard", :horizontal),
      ]

      # vim: filetype=ruby

<comment><USER8> I used to use tools like that (tummy, teamocil, etc) but I've since discovered tmux-resurrect. It persists tmux sessions, windows, panes, and a whitelist of non-destructive commands like vim and top across reboots. Now my tmux sessions just organically grow and shrink as necessary and I never worry about having to recreate them.

Of course I can see the case for combining both tools. If you have a lot of projects, and/or want REPLs loaded you might not want them sitting around in memory for months if you're not going to use them.

It is trivial to get working. Just use tmux plugin manager to install tmux- resurrect and tmux-continuum.

[https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm](https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm)

Example usage in my dotfiles: [https://github.com/positron/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf#...](https://github.com/positron/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf#L72-L99)

<comment><USER9> Does it save environment variables too?

<comment><USER7> It doesn't save anything, it is just a startup script to get your tmux session set up the way you want. You can however, have env vars in the script or source from a particular file. e.g.

      session "grnc_hub"
      directory "/home/minhajuddin/a/grnc_hub"

      window "server", [
        pane("RAILS_ENV=production rails s"),
        pane("source ./.env && rails s"),
      ]
      ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To me tmux, like a lot of tools, suffers from bad defaults that makes it less enjoyable to use. One example is not being able to scroll with a mouse. I usually find someone's tmux.conf online and use it, but always run into strange problems that I don't have the energy figuring out. My current conf suffers from the navigation bar going completely black when I try to rename a pane (can't see what i'm typing).

Really wish more tools took care into making solid defaults and not assuming all users are like the ones on their mailing lists.

<comment><USER11> I was able to work out pasting into tmux from the system buffer, but no solutions I've seen for copying _out_ of tmux have ever worked for me. So yes, that's a pretty basic usability issue.

<comment><USER12> I have a plugin I use for that [1]. I enter copy mode, either by scrolling with the mouse or hitting Prefix + esc. I have the copy mode key bindings set up in vi mode (as is my shell), so I navigate around, hit V to enter visual mode, select some text and hit y. Now that text is in the system clipboard.

[https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank](https://github.com/tmux- plugins/tmux-yank)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use Byobu ([http://byobu.co/](http://byobu.co/)), which is a configuration layer over tmux. It's tmux with nicely packaged features.

<comment><USER14> As a screen user, Byobu is the best alternative. When I muscle-memoried screen commands the first time Byobu detected my actions and asked if my configuration ought to be changed to use screen bindings. Now that is UX done right.

<comment><USER15> Yes -- same for ctrl-a, its normal escape sequence. It detects emacs users typing ctrl-a and invites you to map it the way you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you use tmux and vim, and if you run tests, then you must look at janko-m/vim-test and vim-dispatch. Runs any test seamlessly in the background.

Vim-dispatch also has the best intro video to anything ever ;)

[https://vimeo.com/63116209](https://vimeo.com/63116209)

<comment><USER17> Video is awesome. What is the advantage over just having a separate tmux/screen session in which you launch your command though?

<comment><USER16> Well, the nice thing here is that with the integration between vim-test and vim-dispatch is that you don't have to do anything for having the tests run in a separate session. It just works. I mean really you _are_ just having it run in a separate session, just more smoothly.

If the tests pass then the tmux window the tests were run in will just disappear, if not, you get popped back to the quickfix window with the errors listed.

Give it a go and see how you like it! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'll give a shout-out to DVTM ( [http://www.brain- dump.org/projects/dvtm](http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm) ) which I've been using successfully for a couple of years.

Prior to that I used tmux for a few years, and screen before that. I suppose the only compelling reason to use DVTM is that it acts like a tiling WM, so if you use one (I use XMonad [http://xmonad.org](http://xmonad.org) ) the experience is basically the same (mod-h/mod-l to resize, mod-j/mod-k to navigate windows, mod-space to switch layout, etc.).

The main reason I switched is my preference to avoid bloat. DVTM doesn't do everything tmux and screen do, it _only_ does window management. I use dtach ( [http://dtach.sourceforge.net](http://dtach.sourceforge.net) ) for persistence. I previously used abduco ( [http://www.brain- dump.org/projects/abduco](http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/abduco) ), but it segfaulted on me a couple of times (months apart, in a non-reproducible way); haven't tried it for about a year, so it might have stabilised.

I use st ( [http://st.suckless.org](http://st.suckless.org) ) as my terminal, again to avoid bloat.

<comment><USER19> I cannot use st because it still has corner cases that xterm works well but st doesn't yet, and I find the need to patch the sources hard to maintain when a new release comes out and has refactorings included.

But I must say that st's font rendering of Unicode is more complete than rxvt- unicode or xterm. With the same font configured in all three, st is the one that manages to render the most glyphs of plan9port's unicode sample file. Would be great to have the same in urxvt or xterm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've used screen for darn near 20 years now. Have tried to switch to tmux, but even with screen-like keybindings, I end up running into something[0] that makes me switch back because screen is just muscle memory for me at this point.

[0] like switching to a non-existent-numbered screen to get a list of which ones I _do_ have...

<comment><USER21> I was the same way when I first started using tmux. I just "fixed" the keybindings in tmux to what I was used to and went about my business.

It is slightly inconvenient the first time I fire up tmux (with the defaults) on a new host. I just take a 30 second break, create my customized ~/.tmux.conf, and continue on like nothing happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone run tmux with a tiling window manager for local development?

If so, what are the advantages? I know automating sessions is one of them, as explained in the article.

I am more interested in hearing about interactions with the terminal. You already get good mouse-less window management with something like i3 or xmonad.

How about copy & paste? I use urxvt plugin for this, but I often find myself using the mouse to select and middle-click. Is tmux better?

<comment><USER23> I do that, not in a real "tiling window manager" but something very close: openbox, set to show no titlebars, and using shortcuts to title the windows to precise positions. I have 3 position: most of my screen on the left, a small vertical slice on the right, a smaller chunk underneath. If I want a titlebar for some application, I have a shortcut that will give the window a titlebar, and then I can move it around with the mouse if I want to. So I get the best of both worlds.

Surprise - I don't run tmux. It is simpler to have several roxterm, in these position, with various tabs open. When I work remotely, I use screen on the remote host, but that's all.

To give you an idea of my shortcuts, in a real life scenario ; my caps lock is remapped to control or escape with xcape:

\- esc: pop a new roxterm and from wherever I am, bring me to the terminal desktop

\- f9: resize this roxterm to the left part of the screen

\- esc: pop another roxterm, focus it

\- ctrl-f9: resize it to the right vertical slice of the screen

\- f4: switch to the browser desktop

\- f12: put by browser in full screen, to check some reference without distraction

\- f5: switch back to the terminals desktop

\- alt-tab: switch to the roxterm that's currently on the right

\- f12: make this roxterm full screen to do something without distraction for a while

\- f12: demaximize and put back this roxterm where it was

\- f9: now move this roxterm to the left, over the other one

\- alt-tab: move to the other roxterm that was on the left

\- ctrl-f9: put this roxterm in the vertical slice position on the right

\- ctrl-space: make this roxterm sticky, showing on all desktop

\- f4: move back to the internet desktop to check more documentation

\- f9: resize the browser to be on the left part of the screen, so that I can see both the browser and the roxterm

\- f5: move back to the terminal desktop. The space occupied by the browser will be replaced by the roxterm I left there, on the left

\- alt-tab: move focus to this roxterm

\- ctrl-t: open a new tab in this roxterm

\- ctrl-v : paste some stuff from the internet browser

(etc..)

I have accomplished all that with about 20 keystrokes, from muscle memory. When I connect my extra wide screen, f10 and f11 have similar windows resizing function as f9 do on the laptop screen. f1 to f8 take me to desktop dedicated to some use or another (f7 is the windows desktop, with visual studio, f6 is the rstudio desktop, etc)

One think I positively hated until recently: copy and paste. Muscle memory means ctrl-shift-c in one application and ctrl-c in another didn't work. So in the terminal, I remapped the sigint signals to ctrl-x with stty. Hitting ctrl-x is just as convenient as ctrl-c and now I can copy paste as needed. ctrl-v to enter verbatim sequences is done with ctrl-q, just like in vim. so ctrl-c and ctrl-v work everywhere.

When I catch myself wanting to use the x copy paste buffer, the middle click is not so hard: on a thinkpad keyboard, it is right below the space key. But I just prefer ctrl-v. The luxury of having 2 independant copy-paste buffers is appreciable for some tasks however :)

Anyway, sorry for the long reply. I just don't have a lot of opportunities to talk about my setup. I am some kind of an optimization freak, I know it. But I don't want an interface to bother me. I have been using that for the last 3 or 4 years after giving up on OSX, and it has one great quality: I don't have to think about it. It just work the way I want. YMMV of course.

<comment><USER22> Thanks, this is very interesting.

I agree one of the major pain points of X11 systems, terminals, etc is the clipboard. So many different concepts and shortcuts across programs.

I use xmonad, urxvt or xterm, emacs-nox and vimperator. I'm trying to make all them consistent. Perhaps the last thing to polish in my setup.

<comment><USER24> Not ideal, but the best solution I've found so far for moving text between the command line and other applications in urxvt is setting Bash to vi mode and then using visual mode for yanking/putting. I have Vim as my $EDITOR, which is opened when entering visual mode (I believe opening the editor is default Bash behavior). Vim is set to use the system clipboard ("set clipboard=unnamedplus" in the .vimrc) so from there I can bus text to/from other applications.

Dealing with stdout/err is another beast...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I recommend the book: Tmux--Productive Mouse-Free Developmenet, written by Brian P. Hogan. It's a concise and practical book about Tmux. There are some usable configuration in it, and you can learn something about concepts like session, window, pane in the book. After you combine vim style with tmux, it's quite perfect to do anything in the terminal. Haha, enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER26> This is actually why I prefer Emacs. I can literally do all my development work in Emacs, with a full-featured shell (e-shell), directory explorer (dir- ed), REPL and full IDE for Clojure (CIDER). It's pretty great.

<comment><USER27> > a full-featured shell (e-shell)

My experience wasn't so simple. Griefs: coloring, git support problems, bash aliases. I'm sure there's a way to get it to work, but I wouldn't call it a full featured shell out-of-the-box; at least, it doesn't really compare with Terminal.

<comment><USER28> For git I use Magit, I don't have any bash aliases, and anything I would normally see coloring in when using bash in a real terminal has a full-fledged Emacs analog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> joatmon-snoo When I was first introduced to tmux, I was _really_ excited by having a terminal session I could reattach to. I was never able to get very deep into it though: (1) a lot of the time a single script would get me up to speed, (2) the extra layer of abstraction broke some stuff I was doing, and (3) I couldn't make heads or tails of a lot of the tmux documentation. I'll definitely take a second look at a lot of the things people are posting here, but in the meantime, is there somewhere I can actually learn how to use tmux properly?

<comment><USER29> Half a dozen commands will get you 90% of the way there. After you've run tmux:

      ctrl+b followed by...
      % - split pane vertically
      " - split pane horizontally
      arrow keys - change pane you're typing in
      :new-window
      2 - switch to window 2
      x - kill pane
      d - <USER2>

Command line arguments:

      tmux list-sessions
      tmux attach #will attach to last session by default
      tmux attach -t0 #will attach to session 0

<comment> mickael-kerjean A nice and convenient shortcut for:

tmux list-sessions

tmux ls

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> One of the first things I had to with tmux is figure out a convenient prefix key. I found the default prefix key (C-b) to be a little clumsy to use. After a little experimentation, C-j has become my secondary tmux prefix key of choice.

It doesn't interfere with my shell or Vim usage. C-j is redundant in shell as well as Vim because it does what pressing the Enter key would do. Further, in Vim, C-j is synonymous to j in normal and visual modes. C-j is also very easy to type because my right forefinger always returns to j while resting.

This is what my ~/.tmux.conf looks like.

      # Set C-j as secondary prefix key.
      # C-b remains intact as primary prefix key.
      set -g prefix2 C-j
      bind-key C-j send-prefix -2

      # Eliminate delay after <Esc> key press in Vim.
      set -g escape-time 0

      # Let Vim use 256 colors.
      set -g default-terminal screen-256color

<comment><USER31> I use C-], but basically pick anything that isn't a common bash or emacs cursor movement. I can't use C-b as that is my "backspace"

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been using tmux heavily in my local development workflow for the last 6 months or so, and it absolutely pays off to have three window tiles in a single terminal window at a bare minimum. I am also using teamocil to manage windows and panes in tmux, although it's not needed at all: [https://github.com/remiprev/teamocil](https://github.com/remiprev/teamocil)

When I set up initially on OSX, the conf took me a few to get right so that I have some mousing abilities and reasonable vim support. Here is a copy of my (simple) tmux.conf file: [https://gist.github.com/mcescalante/004e649d8484574ce9d296ad...](https://gist.github.com/mcescalante/004e649d8484574ce9d296ad69a80a08)

<comment><USER33> How do you get into VI copy mode?

<comment><USER32> Either (v) for visual and the arrow keys, or (V) to select entire current line, then (y) to yank. (yy) will also yank lines without entering visual mode, which I use a lot.

If you're asking how I copy in general from stdout with the cursor, I select the text (selection appears yellow) and press Enter and it copies to the clipboard :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _" All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection"_ David J. Wheeler

Tmux/Screen provides an extra redirectable abstraction layer over the terminal device.

The biggest complaint I regularly see about it is that people are used to the screen keybindings. I wonder why not add an abstraction layer there, where keypresses really call commands that perform the actions, and you could reconfigure these.

This is how Emacs has done it for 30 years...

<comment><USER35> > The biggest complaint I regularly see about it is that people are used to > the screen keybindings.

That's my problem with Tmux. Ctrl-a,d is already burned into muscle memory, and for my applications Screen is "good enough".

<comment><USER36> Tmux expects you to rebind its leader to Ctrl-a once you're ready to move off of screen. Otherwise, it's default works nicely if you are nesting screen inside of Tmux or vis-versa

<comment><USER34> I use Ctrl-a as the "go back to beginning of line" shortcut that Readline- capable programs offer by default [1]. That's actually one reason I never got used to Screen ;)

[1] that is, using the Emacs keybindings it exposes by default. I know you can change that through .inputrc

<comment><USER37> I'm using Ctrl-a on tmux, and to get back to beginning on line I just have to press it twice Ctrl-a Ctrl-a.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I use Tmux resurrect[1] with Tmux continuum[2] so that after rebooting my laptop, my tmux session is restored.

[1]: [https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect](https://github.com/tmux- plugins/tmux-resurrect) [2]: [https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux- continuum](https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum)

<comment><USER39> If you use ViM, vim-obsession[1] work with tmux-ressurect[2] to restore vim -S

[1]: [https://github.com/tpope/vim-obsession](https://github.com/tpope/vim- obsession) [2]: [https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux- resurrect/blob/master/d...](https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux- resurrect/blob/master/docs/restoring_vim_and_neovim_sessions.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> iTerm2 has integration with tmux. Much better than the default Terminal shipped with macOS.

<comment><USER41> I greatly prefer Terminal.app on OS X, very standards compliant and predictable; if a bit slow but iTerm2 is slow as well.

<comment><USER42> iTerm's killer feature for me is the special paste modes - it is trivially easy to do things like visually select a block of processes numbers from ps and then paste that block as a space-delimited list on one line to kill them, etc. Terminal.app is fine for most things but can't do stuff like this.

<comment><USER43>
        ps aux | grep 'thing' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill

<comment><USER44> My own version of that command:

        ps -ef | grep 'thing' | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' | sh

On most of my systems, I tend to make a shell script out of it and usually save it to /usr/local/bin/kll (and I don't care about grepping out grep because it doesn't seem to affect anything).

<comment><USER40> grrr....

        pkill thing

        killall thing

And then there's also pgrep instead of ps | grep

<comment><USER44> killall and pkill don't work if the thing I'm trying to grep for isn't the first word of the process string.

Let's say I'm trying to kill 'python foobar.py' but I don't want to kill 'python bazquux.py'. The only thing it'll respond to with killall is 'killall python', but then both of them will respond. So I have to grep out the parameter and then kill that, with: ps -ef | grep 'foobar.py' | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' | sh

<comment><USER45> Check out -f parameter of pkill.

<comment><USER44> Ooh... nice! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The one issue I have with tmux, versus using iterm natively, is that every single time I have to reboot my machine for an operating system upgrade, I lose all the terminal history of my tmux sessions - whereas with iterm, when the machine restarts, it restarts with the all the windows and terminal histories intact.

Its ironic that tmux doesn't provide any mechanism to save your terminal history between reboots. Tools like tmuxinator/tmux-resurrect will save your session/window/pane configs, but you lose all your history...

If I could just recover my (typically very valuable) terminal history between reboots, tmux would be the perfect tool for managing my terminal environments...

<comment><USER47> tmux-resurrect seems to have an option to save bash history. When combined with tmux-continuum, it should happen seamlessly.

<comment><USER46> The history I'm referring to is the scrollback buffer. The work that I do, which is predominantly interactive in a REPL like environment with remote devices, has a rich history of information in each window/pane. I dread losing those scrollback buffers every time I have to restart tmux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> screen master race reporting it!

that said, i do mix screen on the local machine and tmux on the remote machine. lazy, but does the trick. of course one can script either to do everything one needs.

</comment><comment><USER49> As an unsophisticated screen user without any interest in what seems to be a turf war, what is the deal with the never ending stream of "Use tmux!" articles on here?

</comment><comment><USER50> I came from screen when I started using tmux. I spend quite some time to make the key bindings similar to screen, however, kept some things the tmux way because it was better. For people interested, this is my complete tmux.conf:

[https://github.com/gitaarik/tmuxconf/blob/master/.tmux.conf](https://github.com/gitaarik/tmuxconf/blob/master/.tmux.conf)

</comment><comment><USER51> I do a lot of work in ssh shells, and somehow years ago I got out of the habit of using screen or tmux. I just took 20 minutes to go through the tutorial linked in this article.

With a pane open as a shell and another pane opened with emacs+intero almost immediately it felt better than using different ssh shells, which is what I usually do. The control-b prefix character use never interfered with any of my activities.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been a GNU Screen user for a good while. The increased productivity is wonderful.

However, I'm prevented from switching to Tmux because you can't attach to the same session from multiple terminals, and show a different window in each terminal.

I use this all the time in Screen - in Tmux, changing the window being viewed in one terminal, changes all other terminals attached to that session.

</comment><comment><USER53> I dropped tmux for neovim terminal emulator with neovim-remote to hook into my existing nvim session. So far so go!

<comment><USER54> How do you deal with :terminal replacing your current buffer (it close it when you exit the shell). And the fact that as far as I can tell none of your keybindings work when you're inside :terminal?

<comment><USER53> Here's my terminal mappings: [https://github.com/hhsnopek/dotfiles/blob/master/.nvimrc#L93](https://github.com/hhsnopek/dotfiles/blob/master/.nvimrc#L93) Otherwise I use neovim-remote ([https://github.com/mhinz/neovim- remote](https://github.com/mhinz/neovim-remote)), which will soon be natively in neovim, but until then you can connect to your vim instance and either create a new buffer or replace the existing one. You perform your things and then use `:w | bp` and jump back a buffer if you created a new one.

Similarly my keybindings can be mapped just as I did in my dotfiles (first link). Probably my favorite part is being able to search my terminal instance in vim style with `/` and navigate as I would in any other file

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I started writing a terminal multiplexer in Rust, partially because I wanted to fix clearing ANSI escape codes to EOL, but also because I wanted to try and come up with a multiplexer that had very similar shortcuts and commands to Vim.

<comment><USER56> That sounds like an interesting project.

Another approach might be to use NeoVim which now has a built in terminal emulator. [1]

[1]: [https://neovim.io/doc/user/nvim_terminal_emulator.html](https://neovim.io/doc/user/nvim_terminal_emulator.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Hmmm. I had no idea there was powerline for tmux (I used powerline a couple of times in vim, then lost patience with it because sometimes I'd lose the wedges for some reason. It was early days then).

</comment><comment><USER58> Looks like a nice .tmux.conf. Wonder if it's online anywhere.

<comment><USER59> From the author's GitHub repository: [https://github.com/keeganlow/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf](https://github.com/keeganlow/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf)

<comment><USER60> Long time tmux user.

Thanks for posting the .tmux.conf link. Modified the window decorator line as sometimes you can't always tell which pane you are in:

set-option -g set-titles-string '#(whoami)@#H session: #S window: #I-#W pane: #P'

Also noticed that the status right only updates the time if you perform a tmux op.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I've never heard of tmux. Where should I look? Little hint?

<comment><USER62> ... first Google hit? [https://tmux.github.io/](https://tmux.github.io/)

<comment><USER61> You misunderstood the question. I'm more interested in how a terminal multiplexer is good for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The one reason why I would prefer tmux over screen is that it is possible to script it. AFAIK screen is much more difficult to script.

<comment><USER64> Screen has awful support for unicode. When people started using emoji a lot on IRC i swtiched so irssi would stop moji-baking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> As developers we need a super simple way to log a session. Unfortunately that's non-trivial in tmux.

[https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/629#issuecomment-2584153...](https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/629#issuecomment-258415386)

</comment><comment><USER66> Does anyone know the color scheme used in the examples? It is very nice.

</comment><comment><USER67> Benefits of using tmux if you don't need it: none.

</comment><comment><USER68> I prefer opening tabs in my terminal window instead of this or other similar tools. It's not an exact replacement but I try to avoid learning and remembering new sets of keystrokes, and there are some other small UI wins in my opinion.

<comment><USER69> I agree with you. I like that I can rip off terminal tabs and move them around. Also move them to different virtual desktops. I tend to have a virtual desktop for each project I work on keeping things spatially separate that way. One piece of functionality missing form this setup is the "pre configured scripted dev environments" but i've used this tool

[https://github.com/achiu/consular](https://github.com/achiu/consular)

to achieve that behavior

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> It's definitely a cool tool if most of your development uses the command line. As a mobile developer, however, most of my development is spent in IDEs. Alas, that means my use of tmux is limited.

</comment><comment><USER71> linux/unix as an IDE has it's merits. are there any specific distros that focus on setting up an environment?</comment>


It might be legal to gamble online soon - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/gambling-gets-boost-obama-administration-113418228--spt.html

<comment><USER4> Prohibiting voluntary victimless activities of the physical kind didn't even work very well in the 20th century. The technological kind in the 21st century? Downright impossible. It just moves outside your borders - <USER2> outside your ability to tax. Unless I'm ignorant of some industry-specific facts I think this would be a win-win for everybody (except, as always, the poor souls that willingly throw their money away...)

Edit: Good point by cellis below. Still, I think legalizing activities via connected interests is progress compared to fake illegalizing that exists currently.

<comment><USER5> Win-win for the politically connected oligopolies ( tribes, states, vegas ). Equation stays lose-lose for everyone else ( startups, customers ). And of course there is still _UIGEA_. So, don't get your hopes up.

<comment><USER6> The UIGEA no longer applies to internet poker because internet poker is no longer unlawful (the _Unlawful_ Internet Gambling Enforcement Act).

<comment><USER7> Tell that to Absolute Poker exec Brent Beckley who just pleaded guilty to charges that included violations of UIGEA

edit: And this clarification of the Wire Act changes nothing as to the legality of online poker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, this is finally happening. The fact that states like Nevada and California are pushing for intra-state legislation will probably make the federal government scurry to pass a bill (likely HR2366, which everyone speculated would pass by Thanksgiving of this year). While sites like PartyPoker could hypothetically start allowing Americans to play right now, they aren't going to ruin their chance to tap into the market without getting formal licenses, whether that happens at a state or federal level.

The brick and mortar casinos will be the first candidates to get licenses to run real money sites regardless, and guys like myself will have to pull some strings to get our little platforms into the market. But hey, there's always the Zynga poker business model (sell X play chips for $Y; no prizes for winning aside from being able to play in "high stakes" play money games) to tide us over until then.

The first decade of the twenty-first century was the "wild west" of online poker. A number of times I've had my bankrolls on various sites disappear as they shut down and run with the money- similar to getting robbed at gunpoint in a high stakes showdown in the days of the Texas road gamblers, or Mississippi riverboat poker games. We're headed for a safe, regulated form of the American pastime, and although it will likely be taxed viciously, there is a very good chance that we'll see another poker boom like that started when Chris Moneymaker won the main event of the 2003 World Series of Poker.

</comment><comment><USER7> Most of the mainstream media is sadly over-stating this. Although this is welcome clarification on the Wire Act, online gambling still falls under UIGEA and IGBA laws. The Black Friday indictments did not make use of the Wire Act specifically because of the ambiguity.

For further reading from the online poker media:

[http://pokerfuse.com/news/law-legislation/department- justice...](http://pokerfuse.com/news/law-legislation/department-justice- shifts-stance-wire-act-replies-reidkyl-letter/)

[http://craakker.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-doj-wire-act- opinio...](http://craakker.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-doj-wire-act-opinion-is- no-big-deal.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> This was always going to happen. It was only banned in the first place to clear the field of foreign companies that dominated the market. So now - <USER3> years later - american companies have finally caught up, it's time to repeal the ban.

Side note: I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. I mean if someone's going to profit off the misery and suffering of addicts, it might as well be their fellow countrymen.

EDIT: re:"it was only banned" : I know it was technically illegal, however I suspect that wouldn't have been an issue if it was a field dominated by american companies.

<comment><USER10> Interesting point. If / when online poker is legal do you think off-shore companies like PokerStars will move their operations to the US? Will that be part of the deal to allow US players back to their gaming platforms?

As a side note, I hope this continues to move forward. I would gladly pay taxes on my poker winnings and receive checks from legitimate banks as opposed to the KBG Bank of Canada (or something like that) where I used to get my checks from in the past.

<comment><USER9> Very possible.

Taxes have to be collected and money laundering legislation must be enforceable -

not to mention all the "protective" internet legislation you guys seem to be getting recently...

...!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Man, a second poker boom would be amazing...

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't undertand how the article, which mostly talks about state lotteries, implies anything about online poker.

<comment><USER13> from the article:

"Until now, the department held that online gambling in all forms was illegal under the Wire Act of 1961, which bars wagers via telecommunications that cross state lines or international borders.

The new interpretation, by the department's Office of Legal Counsel, said the Wire Act applies only to bets on a "sporting event or contest," not to a state's use of the Internet to sell lottery tickets to adults within its borders or abroad."

\- basically, they restricted the interpretation of the Wire Act to be specific to sports gambling, and nothing else (such as poker)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't online poker a "contest"?

</comment><comment><USER15> Step 1: Get rid of offshore casino sites

Step 2: Make gambling legal and tax

Step 3: Profit

<comment><USER16> The Internet after SOPA: Government approved liquor sales and gambling, no unauthorized websites.</comment></comment>


Denotational Semantics: A Methodology for Language Development [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Andrew.Butterfield/Teaching/CS4003/DenSem-full-book.pdf

<comment><USER2> I also highly recommend "Semantics with Applications" by Nielson and Nielson. I read it this January and it is an excellent book. It is very approachable for someone with only the lightest background in formal methods. If you are looking for a good introduction to the field I would start there. I am definitely going to look into the OPs book it looks awesome.

download <http://www.daimi.au.dk/~bra8130/Wiley_book/wiley.html>

print [http://www.amazon.com/Semantics-Applications-Appetizer- Under...](http://www.amazon.com/Semantics-Applications-Appetizer- Undergraduate-Computer/dp/1846286913)

EDIT:

after reading the author page it looks like the OPs book has not been updated so keep in mind that it is the state of the field as of the 80s. The work by Nielson and Nielson is fairly recent. I would also suggest "Principles of Program Analysis" for a follow up book.

[http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Program-Analysis- Flemming-N...](http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Program-Analysis-Flemming- Nielson/dp/3540654100)

<comment><AUTHOR> I stumbled across the book yesterday in this post on Lambda the Ultimate's "Getting Started Page."

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/492#comment-3799>

Van Straaten suggests the first few chapters.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author's [David Schmidt's] landing page for this book is here: <http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~schmidt/text/densem.html></comment>


Don't worry! 75% of people have never even heard of SxSW - <AUTHOR> http://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/03/dont-worry-youve-probably-never-heard.html

<comment><USER2> I would argue that ~25% == mainstream, especially for a hipster who won't even consider something once more than one friend mentions it...</comment>


The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3631 <comment><USER2> I've been trying to get an 80GB Intel X25-M G2 for a few days. They are going for well over double MSRP ($600 versus $230) at several retailers (e.g., [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167023))

<comment><USER3> Newegg has an autopricing algorithm that ramps the price up into the stratosphere if a lot of people are buying something. It takes a while for the price to settle back down to 'reasonable'.

Either find it elsewhere, or wait it out... Amazon has had good prices on hard drives recently. The magnetic kind; I haven't been paying attention to SSDs.

<comment><USER4> They are pretty surprisingly hard to get. At the beginning of the summer I tried to buy, I think, 20 drives, to upgrade all the developers to SSDs and I remember being surprised that I cleared out Amazon AND NewEgg completely to get the drives I needed.

<comment><USER5> According to his benchmarks, compilation of C code (Pidgin at least) doesn't seem to benefit from SSD, even the 5400RPM drive performs the same.

SSD for developers is usually waste of money from technical POV, as the working set usually fits in the fs page cache.

30" IPS panels, OTOH, would be money well spent.

<comment><USER6> Developers often do more than simply compile code. For example if I could cut the start up time of the app I'm developing in half that would be really quite nice indeed, even if compile times stay the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One minor quibble: as far as I can tell, Apple is actually mostly shipping drives manufactured by Toshiba, which don't seem to be rebrands of Samsung's tech. The way to tell is to look in System Profiler; Toshiba drives will be labeled "Apple SSD TS128" or "Apple SSD TS256", while Samsung will be "Apple SSD SM256" (they only seem to show up in the 256GB option, and even most of those are Toshiba).

Anyway. I recently picked up a new MacBook Pro and went for the (256GB, ended up with Toshiba) SSD option, and I've got to say I don't ever plan to go back to a mechanical drive if I have the choice. It's not just the flashy-but- pointless things like boot time or first-time application launching. It's the fact that most of my life consists of reading, paging and grepping through lots of files, and that is _stupid_ fast with the SSD. I don't worry too much about write performance, because typically I'm in an incredibly read-heavy workflow.

</comment><comment><USER8> After several hours of researching SSD options, I recently bought a Corsair P128 from Amazon. Firmware version was VBM18C1Q (which supports background garbage collection as the article points out).

Price is currently identical on both Amazon and NewEgg ($330.99), but NewEgg has tons of user reviews. Affiliate-free links:

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16820233087)

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B002CI41US/>

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't wait for the new X25-M. Recently threw a 160GB X25-M (first gen) in a datamining database server to replace a 6x15k SCSI RAID 10 array, and it was 2.5x faster. One disk faster than six.

<comment><USER10> Interesting! Can you elaborate a little bit on the usage pattern and how you measured the speedup, please?

<comment><USER9> It was a very simple, unscientific test: ran a MySQL query with the old drives, then ran it on the new drive. Old drives took 5 minutes, new drive took less than 2 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "There's a Mac Edition of the Vertex, unfortunately it's no different than the regular drive - it just has a different sticker on it and a higher pricetag."

As a longtime mac user, this kind of thing drives me crazy.

Also the article talks about Windows XP and Windows 7 but doesn't mention anything about TRIM support in Mac OS X. Is this something that needs to be enabled at the kernel level? Does anyone know the status of this command with the Snow Leopard kernel?

<comment><USER12> IIRC older kernels blocked any unknown ATA commands, including TRIM. Newer kernels no longer block TRIM, so someone is working on a third-party utility.

[http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=409...](http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=409366#post409366)</comment></comment>


360° Oculus rift music video: Steye and the Bizonkid – What do we care 4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.surroundvideostream.com/api/2/staff/videos/986/preview

<comment><AUTHOR> Proof of concept made by a few friends of me.

Install the Surround Video app ([https://appsto.re/nl/QdvDL.i](https://appsto.re/nl/QdvDL.i)) and use your iPhone/iPad as a Oculus rift alternative.</comment>


Adobe: Flash will not be supported in Android OS 4.1 - <AUTHOR> http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/06/29/adobe-flash-will-not-be-supported-in-android-os-4-1/

<comment><USER2> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175399></comment>


Did I kill Gawker? - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/08/did-i-kill-gawker.html?utm_campaign=select-all&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1 <comment><USER2> Does it really matter? Gawker needed to be brought down a peg. It was the poster child for bad so-called journalistic behavior. Max Reed contributed to that bad behavior. Gawker fell because society said enough, is enough, you cannot violate someone's privacy and call it news just because you also call yourself a journalist.

Reed, Denton, and everyone at Gawker should stop blaming others, or trying to make excuses for their bad behavior, admit their culpability and promise to do better.

<comment><USER3> Society didn't really do it. When you mess with people with power often enough, eventually they will find a way to take you down.

<comment><USER4> Well Society here would be the Jury that slapped their hand.

<comment><USER5> You mean 12 Floridians?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Among the most frustrating things about the Hogan lawsuit, as it slowly marched toward trial, was that no one who hadn't worked for Gawker seemed to have any sympathy for the company." \- Not sure this should be surprising. Personally I didn't read gawker but outside of some nostalgic love, my general understanding is that most folks thought that it's impact on discourse was more often negative than positive?

</comment><comment><USER7> Reading the article makes me very glad that Gawker got sued into bankruptcy. The author has no sense of introspection or empathy for others outside Gawker. It reminds me of school bullies who do mean stuff to people and then say stuff like "I was just kidding, can't you take a joke?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Karma killed Gawker. Its whole business model was evil, and sooner or later some of the many, many people they were evil to, were bound to seek revenge.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's just one of those things where everyone on every side is an asshole. The post outing Thiel (among others) was pretty disgusting, but I also don't think we're in a better place for Gawker having been taken down.

</comment><comment><USER5> This guardian article explains the danger posed by this type of lawsuit. It does have a chilling effect on publishing and the media.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/15/peter- thi...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/15/peter-thiel-gawker- bankruptcy-lawsuit-hulk-hogan-sextape)

<comment><USER10> Other Guardian articles make the point that you shouldn't publish other people's sex tapes without their consent.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but shouldn't and shouldn't be able to are totally different. Saying that what gawker did was in poor taste and saying what Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel did has had a chilling effect on the media are completely compatible statements.

<comment><USER10> How does people defending themselves from outing or unauthorized publication of their sex tapes have a chilling effect on journalism?

I would have thought it has a chilling effect on outing people and unauthorized publishing of sex tapes.

<comment><USER11> Here's a pertinent current example:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/07/jim_de...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/07/jim_derogatis_on_his_r_kelly_story_for_buzzfeed.html)

> Most of that time was spent, post–Hulk Hogan and Gawker, finding a media > outlet that was willing to run it.

<comment><USER10> Not buying it. Having sex with underage kids is still a crime that can be reported on and an off hand comment by a bitter Slate journalist who's sad his power as a journalist to wreck lives has been curtailed doesn't change that.

Since you mentioned 'what Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel did' as if they're somehow not the victims, I suspect you're a journalist too. Are you?

<comment><USER11> > a bitter Slate journalist who's sad his power as a journalist to wreck lives

Jim DeRogatis doesn't work for Slate and has been exposing R Kelly's child abuse since 2001.

> Since you mentioned 'what Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel did'

Wrong person.

> I suspect you're a journalist too.

And wrong career.

<comment><USER10> Fair enough.

Honestly surprised someone outside the profession would use 'what Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel did'. I know a bunch of otherwise-pleasant journalists who are only ever pro publishing unauthorized sex tapes and outing when it comes to Hogan and Thiel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a shame that this person still has a career after that one article.

</comment><comment><USER13> This post is almost exactly a year old; should be labeled 2016.

</comment><comment><USER14> Karma eventually does work</comment>


Teagueduino: Arduino + Processing = Realtime Awesomeness - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teague/teagueduino-learn-to-make <comment><USER2> This looks good but I am divided. On the one hand, being a sw person and a solder virgin, I was recently flummoxed when I saw that the USB shield I ordered needed to be, gasp, soldered (and it's really tiny connections, too)!

On the other hand, one can argue that a large part of learning _is_ the getting flummoxed and learning to conquer it, so packaging everything up may kill the hands on aspect .

<comment><USER3> I'm in the same boat as you, but I just dove in head first last week. My current project requires that I know whether a TV is powered or not. Even after using all the Google-fu I know, I wasn't able to find an off-the-shelf current sensor that was network or usb accessible. I decided to build my own. It's Arduino based with a current sensor on a separate breakout board. I was soldering connectors on to the breakout board and accidentally left the heat on way too long. Two tiny surface mount resistors fell off. It took 20 minutes, but I managed to solder both of them back on. The board even worked afterwards!

That was last weekend. This weekend I now have 2 of these things built and my soldering skills have improved immensely.

You're smart. You'll figure it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That looks like a really neat project, but asking $160 as a starting price for the kit is a bit too steep. Offer a cheaper alternative at less than $50 and lots more people will get involved, learn and fund your project. The current pricing structure just encourages people to buy stickers, not make stuff.

You can get started with Arduino for less than $40 and even get a good kit for less than $70, so why does this cost so much more?

I think the easier software interface should really be the focus of this. Why don't you make it work with any Arduino?

</comment><comment><USER5> Just put down a few bucks. Good luck with the rest of the fundraising.

Any future wireless add-on potential using RF, zigbee, etc, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for helping out!

Teagueduino will run the code anytime it has power over USB -- communication is only needed while programming/debugging. With a USB battery backup, you can run self-contained projects. [http://www.amazon.com/5000mAh-External-Motorola- Blackberry-N...](http://www.amazon.com/5000mAh-External-Motorola-Blackberry- Nintendo/dp/B004P8E612/)

We've also been thinking about integration of wireless. It quickly makes things more complex and expensive (unfortunate for beginners and education/schools), but enables lots of cool projects (especially vehicles and remote automation). In the meantime, you should be able to use a wireless USB cable setup if you want to remotely program/play with it: [http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Go-29570-TruLink- Wireless/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Go-29570-TruLink- Wireless/dp/B001JEPC3G)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More detail and photos of the Teagueduino board here: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teague/teagueduino- learn...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teague/teagueduino-learn-to- make/posts/116104)

</comment><comment><USER6> They need better examples in the video. There's nothing that wowed me. All I saw is some lame and boring interactive "art". At the same time I understand that something really cool can be done. So show us something truly cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still a simple example, but this video shows some basic analog communication/feedback using 5 boards.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRSNKgDEQ2g>

<comment><USER6> Does that wow you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha.. Well, I guess the cat scrambler is really more my kind of thing. :)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0xwdhOoT68></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Chris McCandless Died - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/how-chris-mccandless-died.html <comment><USER2> Obligatory quotes from McCandless' wikipedia page ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless)):

Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote:

"When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn't even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament [... ] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.[11]"

Sherry Simpson, writing in the Anchorage Press, described her trip to the bus with a friend, and their reaction upon reading the comments that tourists had left lauding McCandless as an insightful, Thoreau-like figure:

"Among my friends and acquaintances, the story of Christopher McCandless makes great after-dinner conversation. Much of the time I agree with the "he had a death wish" camp because I don't know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the "what a dumb--" territory, tempered by brief alliances with the "he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest" partisans. Mostly I'm puzzled by the way he's emerged as a hero[13]"

<comment><USER3> I think the point is that he was an independent thinker, and thus was disillusioned by all the BS in modern society. Sure he made some mistakes and he had some back luck, but he chose to find meaning in his life instead of being another sheep. Can you say the same for your own life?

<comment><USER4> Give me a break. The guy was most certainly not an independent thinker. Nor was he a critical thinker. Nor did he have any respect for the challenge he was taking on. He was an angst ridden teenage boy captured in an twenty something's body that never learned the difference between fantasy and reality. Most importantly, he never learned that in the real world there are consequences for stupid actions.

<comment><USER5> This. The previous comment is the reason why McCandless is such a polarizing figure. Those who prepare and go on a quest without suffering negative consequences are somehow derided for not being independent thinkers, somehow cheapened for not risking enough.

"Adventure is just bad planning." \- Roald Amundsen

<comment><USER6> The good admiral has a point, but I don't think it gets to the heart of the McCandless drama.

For that, I think I'd look to Norman Maclean's _Young Men and Fire_ where he talks about smoke jumpers:

"It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling...

"For many former Smokejumpers, then, smokejumping is not closely tied up with their [eventual] way of life, but is more something that is necessary for them to pass through and not around and, once it is unmistakably done, does not have to be done again. The 'it' is within, and is the need to settle some things with the universe and ourselves before taking on the 'business of the world,' which isn't all that special or hard but takes time. This 'it' is the something special within that demands we do something special, and 'it' could be within a lot of us."

If people here are reading this and haven't already realized some parallels between not just McCandless and smokejumpers _but also entrepreneurs_ I'd be surprised.

Now, you can draw distinctions between McCandless and smokejumpers, too: the later train and drill and prepare, probably as well as Amundsen could be satisfied with. And their work has a practical end. But their work is still an adventure because they also operate in an area of high risk, and as a result they sometimes pay a high cost.

And they don't do this job for entirely practical reasons. They do it because they have a need for an internal narrative that settles certain things and establishes a kind of identity, they do it because they need something off the beaten track for middle class success.

McCandless was clearly looking for that. I think it's fair to ask if he'd been a little less romantic about it and a little more thoughtful whether he might have had both his survival adventure and his survival.

Then again, unless you're Batman or some other protagonist whose superpower is acute anticipation by authorial fiat, it's mitigated by the limits of the best laid plans.

<comment><USER7> Admiral?

As far as I know, Roald Amundsen was not affiliated with any military. Ironically he died while trying to rescue other, less competent, explorers.

<comment><USER6> You're quite right, in my head I'd accidentally lumped him in with fellow polar explorers Peary and Scott as a Navy guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made my own personal pilgrimage to The Magic Bus in summer '09 [1]. It's an extremely special place like none other I've visited.

Completely coincidentally, one of my close friends where I now live in the far North was with the girl who tragically drowned trying to cross the Tek River in summer 2010.

Also co-incidentally, just today I gave an interview for someone writing an article on the anniversary of Chris' death. She was at the Tek river a few days ago, and watched three backpackers get swept downstream, luckily without major injury.

It's amazing how this place and Chris' story have impacted so many people's lives. I'm making plans now to go back in the winter/spring, when the river will be frozen and the scenery will be spectacular.

[[http://theroadchoseme.com/the-magic-bus](http://theroadchoseme.com/the- magic-bus)]

EDIT/UPDATE: I'll add that there is no doubt in my mind Chris helped me find the courage to quit my Software Engineering job, sell all my stuff and spend 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina. No doubt it was the best decision of my life so far.

<comment><USER9> What did you do for the Darién Gap? I've thought about making a similar trip a few times, but have never really gotten far into the planning stages.

<comment><USER8> I loaded my Jeep into a shipping container and ocean freighted it. It's much cheaper (~$800) and easier (~1 week) than you might think, and well, well worth it.

My report is: [http://theroadchoseme.com/shipping-across-the-darien-gap- pt-...](http://theroadchoseme.com/shipping-across-the-darien-gap-pt-1)

And there are much more up to date reports and costs at [http://wikioverland.org/Pan_American_Highway](http://wikioverland.org/Pan_American_Highway)

If you're serious about this kind of travel, [http://wikioverland.org](http://wikioverland.org) has everything you need to know.

<comment><USER9> Awesome, thanks!

<comment><USER8> You're welcome.

I'm interested in your username. Does that indicate your name?

My last name is Grec, and I'm always on the lookout for more :)

<comment><USER9> Close, mine's got an "o" on the end of it. ;) It's a fairly common Italian surname meaning "Greek".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if we aren't starting to miss the forest for the trees here. Perhaps this is the true, final reason. However, if he'd fallen down the steps on that bus and broken his leg he would most likely be dead. He basically put himself in a position where he had such a small margin for error that it's not all that surprising he didn't make it. I backpacked Central and South America for quite some time pre-internet and pre mobile. There were a lot of people who were removing themselves from their environments and doing some wonderful self discovery. There was also the odd, additional person, who was so completely reckless that it seemed inevitable that something bad would befall them. I've always thought of those people whenever I've bumped into stories on Chris MacCandless.

<comment><USER11> Yea I mean the entire debate shouldn't even be about whether he was stupid to do this. Because of him, we are able to say in hindsight that travelers should be weary of these kinds of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author posits that it wasn't stupidity that killed McCandless for eating a plant not known to be toxic, but rather ignorance.

However the reason he (and the rest of us) were ignorant of the danger of the potato seed is that the potato seed isn't dangerous to anyone except those in a severe caloric deficit and still undergoing physical exertion.

In other words he applied knowledge gained in one situation (normal persons eating potato seed) to a situation far outside of the experiments that seemed to show no issues with potato seed.

Call it ignorance instead of stupidity if you want, but he's still just as dead (and apparently wouldn't have died had he maintained something other than a caloric deficit which must have eventually led to his death anyways).

<comment><USER13> If he didn't eat the wild potato seeds, he would have survived the 18 days until help came. He would have survived on squirrels and porcupines. The wild potato seeds poisoned him. He died from complications of paralysis. No one should eat wild potato seeds, ever, just to be sure they don't become permanently paralyzed. Young men are the highest risk group. This is new information. No one knew this before. I don't know how to help you understand the article better. You got it very wrong.

<comment><USER14> Well, you really don't know that he would have survived. He put himself in a precarious position and as others have said, he could have succumbed to any number of other dangers.

<comment><USER13> He would have survived. As other people have said he could have survived any number of ways (eating squirrels, porcupines) all while enjoying any number of comforts (sitting by the fire, sleeping, reading). You don't really know that he would not have survived.

<comment><USER15> How can you condemn his post for being so certain while expressing the same (opposite) certainty yourself? You sound a bit ridiculous, obviously _no one_ can be certain of what would have happened had he not eaten the potato seeds. In any case, the article says:

"After subsisting for three months on a marginal diet of squirrels, porcupines, small birds, mushrooms, roots, and berries, he'd run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down."

Meaning the only reason he started eating the potato seeds in the first place was because his other sources of nutrition weren't cutting it. So if he hadn't eaten them, he would have at least needed to find another source of calories.

<comment><USER13> I'm sure that if he did not eat wild potato seeds he would not have died of complications from paralysis. I'm absolutely certain. I know it. I can think of nothing else in his environment that would have poisoned him and made him permanently paralyzed and unable to move or hunt. The other source of calories that he needed was on its way and would have arrived 18 days later. He would have been fine subsisting until then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> " Krakauer took a poor misfortunate prone to paranoia, someone who left a note talking about his desire to kill the "false being within," someone who managed to starve to death in a deserted bus not far off the George Parks Highway, and made the guy into a celebrity. Why the author did that should be obvious. He wanted to write a story that would sell."

Well, if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that selling books wasn't why Krakauer was compelled to tell that story.

Reading Krakauer's accounts of his own life, in both Into The Wild and in Eiger Dreams, it's pretty clear he felt the same urge to challenge himself with the wilderness that McCandless did, and that the books are Krakauer's attempts to understand that drive.

Those books are mainly journeys of self-understanding that happen to be available for other people to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> Into the Wild is probably one of the best movies I have ever watched. It's a very powerful and emotional story.

<comment><USER17> I agree, and it had a great soundtrack. In real life, it was a silly death though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Did he eat the seeds raw? This paper suggests it may be possible to reduce the toxin through simple means:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291097-00...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291097-0010%28199605%2971:1%3C50::AID- JSFA545%3E3.0.CO;2-J/abstract)

      Ordinary cooking and pressure cooking of pre-soaked seeds
      were found to be most effective in reducing the levels of
      all the natural toxicants examined...

      These findings and the high water solubility suggest that
      a simple and effective means of detoxifying Lathyrus by
      removing this neurotoxic amino acid may be practicable.

</comment><comment><USER19> I read about Chris back in '94 or so and was moved. I sold everything I had and decided to head out into the Colorado wilderness.

However, while working and saving for my trip I saw Phish and ended up going on Phish tour '95 instead.

Whether you head into the wilderness or follow your favorite band - IMO life on the road is a great building block for life.

There's hardly a period that goes by where I don't somehow think about my time spent on the road.

(...and I still see Phish every year ;-))

</comment><comment><USER20> Am I reading this correctly:

"EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEED."

McCandless wrote "POT SEED" and the author inferred that he meant potato seed? Is that a given...?

Also, doesn't this author seem a bit sloppy? First, he asserts in an 8400-word article that McCandless died from sweet pea seeds, which he shrugs off because he was on a tight deadline. Then he says he made a "rash" decision to suggest in his book that the wild-potato seeds contain swainsonine?

<comment><USER13> It is a given. McCandless meant to write potato seed. Krakauer wasn't sloppy. He was right. He knew that wild potato seeds killed McCandless. He just didn't know how. Krakauer pursued the analysis himself to determine what toxin was present in the seeds. That's not good enough? Man, everyone's a critic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I highly recommend reading Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild if this story interests you - it's the story of McCandless in all its gory detail.

</comment><comment><USER22> For everyone who liked 'Into the Wild' I suggest the documentary 'Once I Was a Champion' that tells the story of Evan Tanner, a mma fighter who died in a pilgrimage in the Californian Desert. Evan, an avid travelller just like Chris, was also a person who had trouble finding his place in this world and suffered from depression and a deep sense of alienation.

</comment><comment><USER23> This warning was also recently added to the Wikipedia Page for Hedysarum alpinum.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedysarum_alpinum&...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedysarum_alpinum&diff=570431498&oldid=542725679)

There's even a bit of back and forth as people argued about mentioning McCandless in the page :)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm disappointed by the hypocrisy of most of these negative HN comments.

How can you be so quick to rubbish what McCandless achieved, calling him stupid and unprepared, then go straight back to reading the next "Why I sold my home to Bootstrap my dating App" blog post to grace the front page or "How I finally achieved my dream" and then be full of praise and admiration.

Don't you see, McCandless was a young guy with a dream and a philosophy and actually had the balls to go and try it for himself. He's become a bit of a cult icon because he showed exactly the same disregard for the rules and society norms that make Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson such heroes.

To everyone commenting along these lines, I look forward to not-reading your next blog post; "How I could have done x, if only I'd tried"

</comment><comment><USER25> Call me a cynic, but this is about the guy who went to live into the wilderness underprepared and full of noble ideas and died, either from poisoning or from hunger.

Now he has his own wikipedia page and inspires people.

I mean, wouldn't one rather admire someone who tried a similar thing, but was prepared and _succeeded_?

<comment><USER26> _I mean, wouldn 't one rather admire someone who tried a similar thing, but was prepared and succeeded?_

Do you have any examples? Ted Kaczynski doesn't count.

I have one: Sooyong Park.

You know why he's not widely admired? Because people don't know much about him because no one's been able popularize a good narrative about him. Some it it is just marketing, and the extent to which he succeeded or not is a minor detail.

Also, what Park did was dangerous, too, filming tigers in the Siberian wilderness. He easily could have died accidentally in similar fashion to McCandless. He was prepared be he still could have been killed many times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My one issue with this is that he was, by all accounts, alarmingly thin before the seeds did him in, and winter hadn't even arrived yet. It's hard to imagine him surviving the winter, seeds or not. So while the seeds obviously shortened his life, I doubt it was by a very large factor.

<comment><USER8> He never planned to stay the winter. He was just going to wait another month or two until the river level dropped, then he could just hike out the same way he hiked in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's interesting to note that Jon Krakauer also wrote _Three Cups of Deceit_ , when _Three Cups of Tea_ was required summer reading for me in high school. Funny how opinions about people change--though in this case it's sad instead of angering.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there any way to prepare the seeds for consumption that destroys the compound responsible for this; e.g. boiling into a mush?

Just curious if there was a way that, rather simply, these could have been made completely edible had Chris done it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hmm, I wonder what other types of otherwise harmless food stuffs can become detrimental given the correct physiological conditions of the consumer? How do we even go about humanely testing that sort of thing?

<comment><USER31> It depends on loads of factors.

Also, differentiation between acute toxicity (would kill within a month) or chronic issues (inflammation, deficiency, hormone altering, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It was interesting to learn that people still eat the grass pea, which was the plant containing ODAP used in the concentration camp.

Apparently what causes most deaths by ODAP poisoning is that it survives droughts better than most crops making starving people eat it. The very group most susceptible to the poisoning.

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

</comment><comment><USER33> So some new scientific knowledge has come out of this unfortunate death.

That's good.

</comment><comment><USER34> Never knew he was injured at the end as well, that may have put him into a catabolic state. But he was ahead of his time.. "rewilding" is a hip thing to do now.

</comment><comment><USER35> holy hell.. "How Chris McCandless Died" is such a bad title considering at the very end it says - "there is ample reason to believe that McCandless contracted lathyrism from eating those seeds". So he /may/ have died that way.

Jon Krakauer just really wants to believe that McCandless could have survived if he hadn't been a dumbass.

<comment><USER36> Well, "could have survived is [s]he hadn't been a dumbass" is a valid comment about an astonishing number of human deaths.</comment></comment>


Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2010/transparent-medical-devices.html

<comment><USER2> There was a talk about this recently on one of the IT Conversations podcasts, one of the O'Reilly conference keynote speakers, I believe.

The speaker discusses her inquiry into trying to find out about the device to be put into her own body.</comment>