Solaris 12 removed from Oracle roadmap, Solaris 11.next planned as next release - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/18/solaris_12_disappears_from_oracles_roadmap/ <comment><USER2> Solaris died a long time ago, regardless of what roadmaps say. It died the day Oracle acquired it. Even if Oracle invested heavily in Solaris, it's hard to imagine how they could match Linux long term.

Solaris had opportunity to compete with Linux, by becoming a real open source project. Not in the Android sense ("we let you see and modify it, but we don't let you participate in the development), but in the Linux sense. Do all your development in the open, kill the bureaucracy, make other companies trust that they aren't being taken advantage of if they contribute to it. Sun attempted to go in this direction, but Oracle killed it.

<comment><USER3> But why would people develop for Solaris if there is Linux and the BSDs? Sincere question

<comment><USER4> Solaris had a lot of useful and unique features, and was backed with a substantial support apparatus. If you developed a feature for Solaris that got in, it'd be documented and supported to quite a high degree.

If you wanted support from the primary vendor of your OS, and wanted a pretty high-quality Unix, Solaris would fill that niche for you. There's definitely a market for that, but not nearly enough to keep Sun or Solaris alive.

<comment><USER5> OpenSolaris did not accept contributions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like the rumours [0] [1] were true.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079370)

[1] [https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KTCW4qz](https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KTCW4qz)

<comment><USER7> Regarding [1]. !@#@#!@# it pisses me off when people post stuff without a date. Even the comments don't have dates!!

However, thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's incredible hard to figure out what Oracle is planning and they really need to make their intentions more clear. If they don't, Solaris and SPARC will just die off, and to be fair, that might be the plan.

Right now we don't know if Solaris 11.Next is a maintenance release or if they are just moving to something more akin to a rolling release, as some people have suggested. Unless all the question currently floating around are addressed by Oracle, no sane person would base new infrastructure on neither Solaris, nor SPARC.

Perhaps Oracle want to move all Solaris and SPARC deployments in-house, but what sense would that make?

<comment><USER4> AFAICT, Oracle bought Sun to get at their (really x86_64) hardware business, to compete with HP/IBM. One quick ref that kinda shows this angle: [https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Oracle-buy-Sun](https://www.quora.com/Why-did- Oracle-buy-Sun)

The rest of Sun was just extra. So Oracle's seeing if they can use them. If they find that they can't they'll just dump them. As they're doing now.

<comment><USER9> I thought they bought Sun for Java, especially the (then-ongoing) lawsuit against Microsoft?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We actually used to run OpenSolaris in production for quite a while. It took some time, but it's safe to say that FreeBSD has properly come forward and filled in those shoes quite readily.

I doubt they exist, but if there are any Solaris fans that haven't tried FreeBSD yet, you really should.

<comment><USER10> Oh, there is one thing I _do_ miss: Solaris was ABI compatible between the x86 and x86_64 kernels. You could run code (or kernel modules, even) compiled for one platform against the other. FreeBSD is not yet ABI-compatible between the two; it's been a todo list item going back to FreeBSD 8 or 9, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Back in the 90s Solaris ruled the world and you could be fired for bringing a Linux system into the building, everyone assumed open source was insecure in the 90s. It was immature so it was scary for the suits back then. Things have changed a lot lol.

<comment><USER12> As a sysadmin from the 90"s. I was told by the CTO of a fortune 500 company, "You will never run Linux on my network". So yeah, what you said.

<comment><USER13> That was a pretty sensible position in the 90s. Linux was in its infancy, and the commercial UNIX vendors all had very robust offerings (Solaris/Tru64/AIX/HP-UX/IRIX; all _very_ good systems at the time).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can think of four reasons for Oracle staying at Solaris 11.x instead of planning a new Solaris 12 release:

1\. Some enterprises have a general policy of only running versions N and N-1 of software. The release of Solaris 12 would trigger a review of Solaris 10 in those environments, which would accelerate the trend away from Solaris. (The Solaris 10 to Solaris 11 upgrade is particularly disruptive due to the switch to IPS packaging and the networking changes, so migration to Linux is of comparable complexity.) Immediate loss of legacy support revenue for both Solaris and SPARC hardware.

2\. Solaris 11 support is promised until at least 2031, or 2034 if customers pay for extended support [1]. A new release would just add another stream to support with at least 15 years of overlap.

3\. The old SVR4 packaging was so slow and Live Upgrade so unreliable that new releases were required to stop patch bundles from getting too unwieldy. IPS is much faster and safer so it is more technically feasible to stick with the same major release.

4\. I'd tend to agree with Adrian Cockcroft that the interesting things are happening elsewhere now [2]. There may not be enough reason for customers to upgrade. Oracle can avoid the story of a failed release by not doing the release in the first place.

[1] [http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support- ha...](http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support- hardware-301321.pdf)

[2] [http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my- sun...](http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my-sun-friends- at-oracle.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Even if Oracle plans to reduce the scope of Solaris 12 or moving to a rolling release like Windows 10, they could have avoided this scrutiny by keeping the Solaris 12 name instead of inventing Solaris "11.next". Perhaps they thought existing Solaris 11.x customers would be more likely to upgrade to 11.next than 12.

<comment><USER16> It's reasonably safe to assume that 'next' is a placeholder for .4, .5, .6 and so on. This seems to me more like a project management issue than a technical issue. I.e. the scope of Solaris 12 was too ambitious and individual teams were finishing their work on different schedules. Rather than have everything sit idle, they are releasing it piecemeal under the Solaris 11.x umbrella.

To the extent that there are commercial ISVs supporting Solaris it also makes their jobs a little easier since they can deal with change in smaller increments.</comment></comment>


Amazon Invades India - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/amazon-india-jeff-bezos/ <comment><USER3> Amazon's service is head and shoulders above any other ecommerce player in India. Despite its late entry, it has largely replaced Flipkart as the provider of choice. This is almost exclusively due to the stellar service and customer support from Amazon. I've had to deal with customer support multiple times due to rescheduling delivery or returns, and have had a 100% pleasant experience. Compared to Flipkart, where the customer support people have very little to zero idea about every non trivial problem, it's amazing how Amazon has been functioning.

<comment><USER4> Actually I've had 1 unpleasant experience out of 3 so far. I wanted to buy an item at a lower cost(because it was a lot cheaper on other sites) and asked an exec about the same. He could've said something like "Just monitor the prices, they might come down" and I would've done it, instead he said "I'll personally keep a tab on the prices for you and will intimate you in case the price falls to your expectations". While it definitely looked like a false promise, I assumed from all the online reviews that he actually would follow up. But what alerted me was a BuyHatke monitor when the prices fell down. The prices stayed low for two days and I waited to see if the customer exec would really follow- through, but he didn't.

There was no real loss to me, but it was just an unpleasant experience. I am pretty sure that wouldn't happen if it was a refund/return.

<comment><USER5> Some CS reps might not actually do whatever is promised, and that's a cause of frustration on top of the customer loosing trust in Amazon, which is not acceptable at all.

You should consider writing to them firstname.lastname@example.com, and if you know the name of customer associate that interacted you with, the better. You could also, alternatively, utilize Amazon's chat-based customer service, as you can actually "keep a record" of things they said and things you said. If what was promised isn't delivered, you can sure make enough noise by directing the query to email@example.com, and/or jeff@ and amit@

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few months ago, Amazon's competitor Flipkart started asking users to order via the app rather than through the browser. That's when a lot of my friends and I switched to Amazon. I never really understood the reason for insisting on ordering via the app.

Apps don't have a good way to convey that they are using HTTPS, so I don't like the idea of entering my credit card details in an app. Most internet banking gateways in India aren't yet mobile optimized, so that's inconvenient too. (Internet banking is a popular alternative to debit cards in India; merchants re-direct users to their bank's website where users can login and agree to paying the merchant. It's actually a lot more convenient than credit cards because you only have to remember your bank account's username and password.)

<comment><USER7> That is the most brain damaged idea I have seen from an e-commerce player yet.

<comment><USER8> I've stopped using Flipkart on mobile because of that. Only use it from my laptop now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only reason to switch from flipkart to Amazon was that flipkart is pushing the app in users throat. I dont know what the use of the pushing a user witj "Open in App" Ad when i am on desktop and shopping experience is bad on mobile device. I want to read reviews on internet on side while I shop. Also most offers are on App . I dont know if the flipkart wants sell app or goods. But recently amazon is also starting to push that path as well here is what i started doing. Read reviews and note the the price on PC and go to local reatiler ask him to give at that price or 50 bugs extra as it is immediate delivery it is ok to add 50 bugs and take it. But till now i amazon did not disappoint but shopping in app, no way.....Because apart from small screen ad unable to see product pic clearly. Every app in mobile is able to intercept communication and keystroke etc... an no way of know if bank transaction is secure like gold padlock on PC. And i dont if there is a issue like cross site scripting on mobile as cross app because after i finish banking transaction that session statys and flipkart comes on top.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article doesn't mention anything about imports so I'm wondering what is the situation in India.

Here in Brazil, I don't have a lot to complain about the e-commerce websites, they do a good job. The import taxes on the other hand are ridiculous.

Amazon.in seems to have very competitive prices compared to Amazon.com. A LG Nexus 5X sells for $348 vs. $329 in the US. In Brazil, the same phone costs around $580 USD. That would've been around $775 in the beginning of the year (BRL depreciated quickly this year due to internal turmoil).

I initially hoped Amazon would disrupt the Brazilian market but it seems the taxes are the biggest problem and they can't do much to fix that. In the retail area, they will get fierce competition since that are many entrenched players already. That might be a reason they have limited themselves to selling books and Kindles for now.

<comment><USER11> Electronic items are India's third largest import (after crude oil and gold). The duties are generally around 30%, and generally electronic products, like smartphones, tablets, computers and others, do cost a lot more in India when compared to the U.S. There are some exceptions, like hard drives, that cost almost the same. Maybe it's also a matter of how the manufacturers price things in different markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazon has deep pockets and they are doling out incredible offers on top of great customer service. Once they establish dominance or once the smaller players run out of wall street sponsored discounts, the Amazon offers will also disappear. Then it'll be a fair comparison.

There's a grim side to the booming multi-billion dollar e-commerce - <USER2> delivery guys. They are carrying huge, heavy bags on motorcycles [0][1], rushing to meet their delivery targets, braving the elements, earning a measly salary with little or no health benefits. There should be laws to regulate how much weight/size of bags they can carry. They are delivering smiles to millions of homes, but they can hardly feed a family.

[0] [http://media2.intoday.in/btmt/images/stories/jabong_660_1222...](http://media2.intoday.in/btmt/images/stories/jabong_660_122214052620.jpg)

[1] [http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vZh5ZbMGlpU/U8qEZ9eN4wI/AAAAAAAAAX...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vZh5ZbMGlpU/U8qEZ9eN4wI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/_JXPG-w4MNo/s1600/Edit+IMG_20140711_093424.jpg)

P.S. Some more articles on the state of delivery guys :

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-e-commerce-can-be-a-big- pain...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-e-commerce-can-be-a-big-pain-for- indias-deliverymen-1427679248)

[http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/how-j...](http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/how- jobs-with-e-commerce-companies-like-flipkart-is-taking-toll-on-the-delivery- men/48419152)

[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/We-have- no...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/We-have-no-loos- basic-facilities-complain-Flipkart-delivery-boys/articleshow/48279539.cms)

<comment><USER13> > Once they establish dominance or once the smaller players run out of wall > street sponsored discounts, the Amazon offers will also disappear.

My experience as an Amazon customer in the US has been contrary. Amazon is actually one of the rare companies that values loyalty and rewards existing customers. Most other startups (even ones outside e-commerce, like Uber/Ola etc. have offers that aggressively target new customers, but rarely offer anything for existing customers) Compare that to the experience of an Amazon Prime account holder. What started as free 2 day shipping now covers free 2 hour shipping, access to lots of media etc. at no added charge. A majority of the offers and discounts are also made available to all customers, not just new ones. Is this not the case in India?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The economist podcast covered similar issues, and noted that there is ~4% credit card penetration in India - that the local delivery services had had to work out how to take cash on delivery as the main means on income - I shudder to think of Amazons CFO shuddering to think of that.

I will be surprised if Amazon can do more than maintain a token presence outside of major cities, but I am sure they have plans.

<comment><USER4> They already do. I live(rather work from home) in a remote village in Southern India. Ordered a Nikon camera recently which the local stores said will take atleast 7 days to procure, and Amazon delivered in 3 days. The item was shipped all the way from Northern India(Nagpur) and guess what, it was 500INR cheaper on Amazon.

While on one hand I was more than happy to get it in three days and a little cheaper, I also realized that this won't last forever. Amazon's capital has gotta run out at some point in time and the cheap/fast service will stop there.

<comment><USER15> Nagpur is close to the center of India, not the north.

<comment><USER4> You have my apologies. We often joke that anything northern than Bangalore is North India!

<comment><USER16> Well then Chennai is North India!! A lot of people don't realize that Bangalore is actually south of Chennai.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > obligatory two-step authentication

That sounds like a _good_ thing to me.

<comment><USER18> It sounds good. Except as was the case today for me where you enter an OTP pin and its expired (HDFC Bank) because each bank has its own OTP system.

Keep in mind this is something that any bank can use (3D secure). It is up to the merchant on whether they want this or not. There is an additional discount on the transaction fees if you use this.

Problem is of course, every bank has their own interface that doesn't always work. Customers give up on their transactions. You can't have subscriptions. You have _no choice_ on whether you can disable OTP, even though you are the customer. You can also not save your card (keep in mind you can have direct debits anyway for subscriptions via a bank debit agreement)

It also sucks when you want to buy something and your phone is dead. It also makes integration quite tedious as you have to support dozens of payment methods.

Honestly, it sucks. It's nice to have that sense of security but it comes at the cost of taking care of 1/100 customers ad the expense of 99 of the others by forcing them to use 2 factor auth (or more if you look at the lost ones).

<comment><USER5> I'd trade all of those inefficiencies for secure 2FA, anyday. YMMV.

<comment><USER19> You can if you want, simply ask your bank to require 3D secure for all transactions. Can't say it'll always go through as not all websites/apps will support it.

All I'm saying is it would be good if there was a choice to it as a customer holding a cr/dedit card

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Amazon has to sail through most racist people on earth [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating- map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/)

<comment><USER21> Ah..the bullshit map!, read the footnote as well as the follow up. It has more shades to it and is not black and white. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/17...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/17/5-insights- on-the-racial-tolerance-and-ethnicity-maps-from-an-ethnic-conflict-professor/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The past month I realized (wish it was earlier), the arbitrage that existed between the same book between Amazon USA (I am a Amazon prime member) and India - India is cheaper but ~60%. Once I realised it I have ordered one book a day :)

Having said that Amazon India, charged me twice for an Iphone ordered and I just happen to catch it. I chalk this up to process tightening and not malice.

<comment><USER23> I have visited India a few times and one of those times I found myself in Bangalore and visited the famous Higginbotham's bookstore and bought $100 worth of math and computer textbooks that would likely would have set me back at least several hundred dollars if not over a thousand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> From the article : "The Tata Group is launching its e-commerce platform in February!"

<comment><USER11> It's probably far too late in the game. If it has Croma (the electronic store arm of Tata) like prices, which are comparatively higher than other stores, then there's absolutely no hope at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> AMZN return policy is the best

</comment><comment><USER11> [Long rant ahead] Amazon India's chat customer service has usually, but not always, been helpful and easily reachable. That's really a great comfort when it's needed. On the other hand, I don't know if Flipkart even has something as prompt and useful. The rest of the players hide behind email addresses (no phone numbers) for customer support. If there's one thing competitors must learn, it's the _value of putting customers first and providing them assistance as quickly, as conveniently (for the customer) and as efficiently as possible._

> He (Piacentini) and Agarwal tell me Bezos has given them wide freedom to run > India without his intervention, accepting that it could take years for the > billions of dollars in investment to show returns. "His solicitations are > never, 'When will we make money?' " Piacentini says. "It's always, 'Are we > investing enough?' "

I don't know what to make of this. Maybe Amazon India is investing a lot in getting more sellers on board, in improving its warehouse and fulfillment operations, and marketing. But one area where it has been severely and pathetically lacking is in the "findability" of products and refinement of searches for what someone is looking for. I find it baffling, exhausting and extremely frustrating that Amazon India cannot even get "sort by price" correctly. If you know exactly what to search for, it's possible that you might find it. If not, prepare to wade through multiple pages because a "sort price - low to high" may have some lower priced items later on or on the second or third page. It's really shameful and unbelievably terrible that a company like Amazon cannot get this right! As an example on search refinement and filtering, you want to narrow searches only to hard drives that are 1TB and larger in size? Choose that option and find 500GB and other sizes also listed in the results. Wade through the list one again and waste your time. _I have repeatedly provided feedback on these for the last few years_ , but have not seen any improvement at all. If anyone in Amazon.in is reading this or if Jeff Bezos bumps into this comment, you really need to get your act together seriously and hire some competent people who can get this done. You people don't seem dedicated to what Amazon claims it wants to achieve. Stop wasting our time and putting us off your site! Look at Newegg if you want to see how to get product search and filtering done better.

On to other players, my recent favorite is Paytm (paytm.com). It's also a market place. It does not have an Amazon India like customer service option (just an email address). Its product descriptions and details are glaringly inadequate in many cases. Its search and refinement options are close to Amazon India, sometimes better and sometimes worse. But where Paytm excels is in cashbacks on products. Unlike cashbacks from Amazon or Flipkart where you'd get a gift card to shop from the same site, Paytm cashback can be used for paying phone bills, paying cable bills, booking Uber cabs, buying bus tickets, and several other things from other merchants. Its digital wallet comes in handy to transfer money to or request money from other people instantaneously.

After Amazon, I think Paytm is the one to watch out for in the Indian space. It has deep pockets (all those cashbacks are really mind boggling) and will trounce others very soon. In my experience, Flipkart has always been the most expensive for products, and its push for the app only shopping part is highly immature and not thought out well at all. People who do compare prices across other sellers will migrate out of Flipkart. My experience with Snapdeal is very limited, but its somewhat similar to Paytm in lacking product descriptions and details. I've also read some horror stories about product delivery, fraud, etc., online (this didn't happen in my purchase experience with Snapdeal though).

<comment><USER20> 180030009009 is better</comment></comment>


HackerSurfing II: Free Trip to Italy for Job-Seeking Engineers and Designers - <AUTHOR> https://hackersurfing.com/italy <comment><USER2> I created this. I'm happy to answer any questions about it!

<comment> a-real-dinosaur I applied, but it sounds like a laptop is mandatory?

Also kind of left it last minute, because I only just found out about it today at work. oops :p</comment></comment>


Rally Software Buys Flowdock - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/13/rally-software-buys-flowdock-a-real-time-social-collaboration-hub-for-developers/

<comment><USER2> Rally's flagship product was really, really bad when I last used it a few years ago. I'm curious if it's gotten better since they acquired AgileZen. The Flowdock acquisition is interesting, I wonder how they'll tie that in to the rest of the products.

<comment><USER3> I was using RallyDev in our last project and liked it quite a bit. Fairly easy to use and pretty responsive. I'm not a big fan of scrum but RallyDev made it a bit more palatable to me.

<comment><USER2> Like I said, it may have changed. It's been a few years. It was very difficult to use compared to Pivotal Tracker. Lots of fields to enter a story card, no live updating. I had to constantly remind my team to go in and update their cards, because they hated doing it. It would time out after a few hours, so they couldn't leave it open all day. Navigation was also cumbersome. You had to go to a bunch of different pages to see everything.

When we switched to Pivotal Tracker it was a breath of fresh air. Everything updated in real time, so if two people were making changes, they would see them immediately. Everything was all on one screen, and it never timed out so they could just leave it open all day. I never had to remind them to update their story cards again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a little app hidden among the list of all the various RallyDev Apps.

<http://www.rallydev.com/more-cowbell>

It's good for a laugh.

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to the guys. I love Flowdock. We've been using it for two or so months now.

I _really_ hope it won't be bundled and turned into a component into some enterprise bloatware.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congrats guys!</comment>


Follow up to a tale of 132 e's - loa-in-backup https://linuxwit.ch/blog/2018/12/everything-that-lives-is-designed-to-end/ <comment><AUTHOR> So... If the limit is 132 characters, then why is there some unwritten rule that 132 characters is to many. Hrm.

</comment><comment><USER2> I confess that I don't find Github's response _that_ objectionable... the "10 and 10" limitation they suggested is plainly pretty thoughtless, though, since it clearly doesn't align with reality.

I do appreciate the Nier: Automata references in the post, though.</comment>


Practical Earley Parsing (2002) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://webhome.cs.uvic.ca/~nigelh/Publications/PracticalEarleyParsing.pdf <comment><USER2> A more useful paper which has a complete Earley algorithm in pseudocode: [https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/28889090.pdf](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/28889090.pdf)

</comment><comment> dfeojm-zlib Neat. Has anyone seen _Parsing with Derivatives (2011)_ ?

[https://youtu.be/WPde6DDLtXg](https://youtu.be/WPde6DDLtXg)

[http://matt.might.net/papers/might2011derivatives.pdf](http://matt.might.net/papers/might2011derivatives.pdf)

[https://blog.klipse.tech/clojure/2016/10/02/parsing-with- der...](https://blog.klipse.tech/clojure/2016/10/02/parsing-with-derivatives- regular.html)

[https://elfsternberg.com/2018/01/24/parsing-derivatives- naiv...](https://elfsternberg.com/2018/01/24/parsing-derivatives-naive-python- edition/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11976769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11976769) (2016)

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.04695](https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.04695) (2016)

</comment><comment><USER3> A practical implementation of Earley parsing, with some cool features, is Marpa [1]. In particular it is practical in that it parses in linear time

* all the grammar classes that recursive descent parses

* the grammar class that the yacc family parses

* most unambiguous grammars

* all ambiguous grammars that are unions of a finite set of any of the above grammars.

The author's blog [2] presents some interesting features of Marpa, as well as interesting discussion of parsing in general.

[1] [http://jeffreykegler.github.io/Marpa-web- site/](http://jeffreykegler.github.io/Marpa-web-site/) [2] [http://jeffreykegler.github.io/Ocean-of-Awareness- blog/](http://jeffreykegler.github.io/Ocean-of-Awareness-blog/)</comment>


Kojo - Scala for Kids - <AUTHOR> http://www.scala-lang.org/node/5624

<comment><USER2> Whoa. It takes more than a turtle to make a Logo. The neat thing about Logo was that kids, even at an extremely young age, could leverage their budding English language skills to do some amazing things in very Lisp-y ways, starting with something as simple as "tell turtle go up 5" and seeing that work. No defs, no need to build scaffolding of any kind to get immediate feedback. This may be simple, but there'd be a lot of hand-holding needed for the little 'uns.

<comment><USER3> Well, according to the docs, the following code works:

repeat (4) {

        forward(100)

        right()

}

which implies that a lot of the usual Scala scaffolding can be omitted (kind of like immediate mode in Processing, which lets you eliminate most Java boilerplate for simple drawing tasks).

Haven't actually played with it myself, though, so I can't comment further...

Looks very interesting, in any case. I was excited when a Scala version of the Processing environment was released, but that project seems to have been abandoned (or rather, it was only a proof of concept anyways), so it's nice to see someone run full steam ahead with the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My opinion on Scala is that while it's a much nicer language than Java, it's going to be quite difficult to pick up unless you have previous programming experience in at least one of Java or an ML-like language. If this can successfully teach kids Scala as a first language I'm very, very impressed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Scala as a first programming language? Whoo. Scala is the richest language I've interacted with so far.

But then again you can't underestimate motivated kids with infinite free time. I certainly remember that my own abilities were vastly underestimated when I was a youngling.</comment>


JuliaDB - <AUTHOR> https://juliadata.github.io/JuliaDB.jl/latest/ <comment><USER2> Just to set expectations while this package is decently stable and used by a number of people, both commercially and in the open source, it is basically in maintenance mode at this point in time. The intention a few years back was to build a complete analytical database on top of Julia, but have it be a mostly independent project. That vision didn't quite materialize, partly because not enough people wanted to do distributed analytical work (often a single big box is enough, particularly with a language as fast as Julia) and partly because the main developer left to pursue a PhD. I wouldn't be surprised if it got revived in the future, but for the moment, it's basically just the distributed tabular computing part (which is useful if you have that problem, but more limited than the name might imply).

<comment><USER3> > not enough people wanted to do distributed analytical work (often a single > big box is enough, particularly with a language as fast as Julia)

As someone who's in the midst of a plan to migrate off of Apache Spark, because we've discovered that, for our particular purposes, a single-machine implementation in a language with better crunching and multithreading chops than Java, can easily achieve comparable performance to a Spark cluster, while being good deal easier to develop and maintain, this comment strikes me as being very poignant.

I have come to suspect that the big data ecosystem is a castle that was largely built on a nice, thick technical foundation that is largely composed of pointer chasing.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, just look at kdb+/q performance compared to Spark. The former is orders of magnitude more efficient and you realize that a cluster is only necessary because the performance and memory usage of the JVM is very poor on numerical workloads. Same goes for Hadoop.

The amount of money and engineering resources thrown at a problem that actually has a pretty simple solution (integrate your db and language, make your program and language runtime fit in L1 i-cache, optimize the hell out of your language) is a little disheartening. But hey, it keeps people employed managing and debugging an unholy mess of DBs, K8 clusters, load balancers, KV stores, and message brokers..

<comment><USER5> Sure, but there are 12 people in the world who know how to use k and q efficiently, and there is no fail recovery or any way to deal with data that actually does not fit in ram

<comment><USER6> That is not true. RAM is cheap (terabytes per node is not uncommon). Moreover, a common pattern for kdb+ databases is to have two parts: a real-time database (rdb) that is typically memory backed and a historical database (hdb) that is serialized to disk (mmap'd for near-RAM speed). In practice, most data fetching is sequential (cache friendly), so you get good performance regardless. kdb+ is commonly used in the financial industry, where data volumes are large.

The language itself is extremely minimal, so the learning curve is actually much lower than most languages (it forces you to write in a "vectorized" style, which is not too different than how numpy/R/matlab works). I was able to get up to speed in a couple of days.

Source: Used to work with kdb+ (still do sometimes). Not a shill (I don't even like k/j/q/APL).

<comment><USER5> I am kdb user, I am not arguing against it. More power to you if you can afford to endlessly scale kdb vertically. Rest of the world have to deal with distributed systems, because people do not want to pay for kdb or the machines to run it on

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does JuliaDB compare to DataFrame.jl? I know JuliaDB has row indices, which is a very nice feature that DataFrame lacks. Is there any reason I shouldn't use JuliaDB even if I don't need persistence.

I wish the Julia ecosystem was a little more integrated: there are a lot of different competing libraries that ostensibly do the same thing. Python has the advantage that it's obvious what you should use: numpy, Pandas, scipy, statsmodels, matplotlib, etc.

With Julia, it's less clear. Though I think part of the reason is that actually releasing a new scientific computing Python library is incredibly difficult and requires a lot of expertise.

Julia makes it pretty trivial for anyone to contribute a model that has excellent performance. This fragmentation is a common problem among expressive languages.

<comment><USER7> Partly, it is because Julia is newish and partly because of the Lisp curse that Julia suffers from.

But nonsustsined efforts will fall by the way side and true gems will emerge as the clear front runner like DataFrames.jl

<comment><USER8> > and partly because of the Lisp curse that Julia suffers from.

The Lisp curse?

<comment><USER9> [http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html](http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always found it rather ironic that this package, which was developed by JuliaComputing, manages to violate two common conventions for package names in the julia ecosystem

1) don't put "julia" in the package name

2) don't use abbreviations in the package name

Of course, JuliaDB is probably older than these conventions, but it's amusing nonetheless.

<comment><USER11> It's not only a Julia package though, is it?

If it's a full database engine, it might be usable from other languages. So the name makes sense.

<comment><USER10> It's 'just' a julia package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, it's a Julia implementation of something similar to Pandas / numpy. It's not a "DB" in the sense Postgres, SQLite, or dbm are "DBs", it's not persistent and data must fit in RAM.

It's cool that it's pure Julia, so it's instantly portable everywhere Julia runs, and the code is safer than it could be were portions of it written in C.

<comment><USER13> Difference from DataFrames: it's possible to use on larger-than memory data, as long as you have it in separate csv files which can be super useful at times!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks like barely faster than Pandas?

<comment><USER12> Hey, Pandas wrap heavily optimized C and Fortran code, with a thin layer of Python interface on top.

This thing is pure Julia.

This being _any_ faster than Pandas is a huge compliment to Julia the language in general and its JIT compiler in particular.

<comment><USER15> > This being any faster than Pandas is a huge compliment to Julia the language > in general and its JIT compiler in particular.

Indeed. This 'whole stack under the same language' is an important feature to have. You get to reap the advantages of an improved JIT. End to end autodiff is easier. Some of these things are a problem, for example, in PyPy because of the Python <-> C bridge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> why is it being compared to pandas ? is it a data analysis library?

<comment><USER17> Apparently yes

But it's called a db

<comment><USER4> It does support persistence, but it's essentially a DataFrame library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish this website spent its banner space on "what it is" rather than "star us on GitHub!". I doubly wish this because it's pretty confusing what JuliaDB is! From the name, I expect it to be a database, but the website immediately compares it to Pandas. I think of Pandas as a library for in-memory manipulation and analysis of tabular data, not a database / persistence engine. So is JuliaDB not a database at all, but in fact an alternative to Pandas / DataFrames.jl?

In fact, I've been using Julia for work and following the ecosystem since version 0.4 (we're at 1.5 now), and I'm _still_ not sure what JuliaDB is. No doubt this is mostly due to me not having reason to look very deeply (and/or not being very perceptive), but certainly doesn't feel like the marketing copy is giving me any help...

<comment><USER19> I think it is actually a database, so it seems they haven't committed the cardinal sin of putting "DB" in the name of something that's not a database.

> JuliaDB is a pure Julia analytical database. It makes loading large datasets > and playing with them easy and fast. JuliaDB needs to support a number of > features: releational database operations, quickly parsing text files, > parallel computing, data storage and compression.

Got this from [https://juliadb.org/talk/juliacon2018shashi/](https://juliadb.org/talk/juliacon2018shashi/) which appears to go into more details

> This talk is a bottom-up look at the construction of JuliaDB. We will talk > about the scope and implementation of underlying building block packages, > namely IndexedTables, TextParse, Dagger, OnlineStats and PooledArrays.

<comment><USER20> > they haven't committed the cardinal sin of putting "DB" in the name of > something that's not a database

It doesn't seem to store data in any way - so it is definitely a data processing engine, but a database without an "INSERT" command feels a little off.

From that point of view, this looks a lot like what original MapReduce did - the data lives outside it & is referenced as urls, but the engine itself does processing out-of-core and in-memory for very large datasets.

<comment><USER21> "It doesn't seem to store data" is a complaint that doesn't really make sense to lodge against a _library_ rather than a standalone program. If your program is using a database library, it's your job to write the line of code that tells the library to load data from a particular file into memory. The library cannot persist as a running process of its own across multiple executions of your program that is using the library. This is as true of SQLite as it is of JuliaDB.

I agree that it's a bit odd to not have a direct analog of SQL's INSERT, but you can definitely add rows to an existing table by making a new one and doing a merge operation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Android devices do you use? Do you like them? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I have a Nexus 5 and a no-brand tablet I use only to read ebooks.

And no, I do not like them.

It's not about the hardware, the software or usability.

It's about the fact that mobile phone has become the 21st century leash.

I do not install random apps, and still my phone is always busy and burdened with notifications, notifications, unread messages and such.

Wherever I am, day or night, someone is going to trigger a notification on your phone, send you a message or worse, CALL YOU.

And thank god I ditched Facebook a long long time ago.

This is _SO_ annoying.

Also, it is ABSURD that I have to manually edit notification settings for every app in order to disable crap.

And apps want absurd permissions (stupid example: want to convert degrees to radians? well, I'm gonna need access to camera, microphone, your contact list and your identity). Thank god android 6 fixes this.

Sometimes I think I should switch back to my old (but SILL WORKING) Nokia N73, and keep my Nexus 5 as nice toy, just in case I need Google maps or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a nexus 9 and had a nexus 5 (turns out it can't survive the ocean) as well as a nexus 7.

I love unmodified android. I won't get an android device that another company has modified due to how long, if at all, they take to get updates. I also think they're kinda ugly or gimmicky anyways.

Nexus 5 and 7 I loved.

Nexus 9 is disappointing. It's just not powerful enough to provide a smooth experience for me.

Developing wise, I'm conflicted. I've done iOS and android development. I don't like Java and I like ios's framework pattern but android is easier to get up and running IMO which is nice. Also now that iOS has Swift, which I think is a lot better than objc, it makes it harder for me to want to develop for Android. I know you can develop in a bunch of different things for android, but if I was doing something for production, I'm not going to be using something not supported by Google.

</comment><comment><USER4> disclaimer : I make a living as an Android engineer for a big startup, so my vision of the platform is probably a bit different than if I were working in another field.

I very recently bought a Nexus 6P. Very nice device and makes a compelling point for big screens.

I am still in my adaptation phase and need to decide whether I prefer easy one handed usage or a big screen.

The pixels dance on that screen though.

The camera is superb.

The rear bump is another compromise. I don't like it more than the camera bump on the more recent iPhones : I understand why it is necessary (good camera captors just need some room) and for such a large phone, making it as thin as possible is a good idea.

So, to sum up, I like it :)

Before the 6P, I have been using a Nexus 5 for 2 years. Very good device. Some of the best real life performances, especially compared to the disastrous samsung devices.

I also have a 2013 nexus 7 tablet. I only use it for reading / watching youtube. Nice device too.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a "Droid Maxx" which is the Verizon version of the Moto X, but with an extra large battery. I love it.

I have the latest generation Nexus 7. It's starting to be slow recently, but I still like it.

I also have an android smartwatch (Sony SW3) and I usually don't bother to wear it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have an HTC M8, I am really really happy with it. It's a solid device, snappy and good looking. All the features I could possibly want. TBH, I can hardly think of anything else that could be added to improve my experience.

</comment><comment><USER7> Samsung Galaxy S6. Yes.</comment>


Opening a Delaware Corporation: an Incorporation Guide for Foreigners - <AUTHOR> http://myeverwrite.com/opening-a-delaware-corporation-an-incorporation-guide-for-foreigners/

<comment><USER2> It seems that this post may have been artificially upvoted by the author of this post.

The oldest comments are all at the bottom and are short, trivial and grayed out comments. One of those comments appears to be legit and another appears to be from a fellow Brazilian entrepreneur. However the rest are suspect.

The submitter/author of the post created his account 23 days ago.

The following accounts were all created 22 and 23 days ago and have only commented on everwrite related posts.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mateusbicalho> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bgrossi> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lucasarruda>

These accounts were created shortly after this was submitted and have only posted on this submission with the same short, positive comments.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpresende> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eusouomatt>

These all do have real name formats, so perhaps these are all employees of everwrite and were asked to come vote this up? I'm not sure what the official rules are here, but it certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth to send five associates here to vote this up and comment on the article in the early stages of the post, where five upvotes likely makes a large difference. And if it's straight up sock puppeting, it's simply unacceptable.

EDIT: I take back that one of the early comments seems legit, this account <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lucianot> is also associated with everwrite in some way. <http://twitter.com/#!/lucianot/status/114152173767639042>

I hate to be the one who makes the drama, but the whole thing seems disingenuous to make all these fluff comments without disclosure and is not beneficial for the community. Imagine if a company with 2000 employees sent an army this way!

<comment><AUTHOR> We shared the post with some friends, that's for sure. But everybody seems to have liked it. ain't that a good post? We thought that by writing about our incorporation adventures we would be giving back to the community. Sorry if you didn't like it, unfortunately we can't please everybody.

<comment><USER2> The quality of the article is not the issue. It's just that if everyone behaved the way you did, HN would merely be a contest of who can call in the most favors/have the most accounts under their control.

<comment><AUTHOR> So now you rule here. And i can't mail my friends with my article here. Ok then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Note: $2K is about $750 too high. (Hell, I think the whole thing is way high for what is a cut and paste exercise to a junior lawyer. I think this industry is ripe for a startup to make a boilerplate, perhaps open-source.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so. The lawyer helped us a lot with incorporation, TOS, Stock options, so we spent U$2k. This is not directly related to incorporation, but we did some of this stuff in the same pack. Will clarify on the next post.

<comment><USER3> > The lawyer helped us a lot with incorporation, TOS, Stock options,

I was guessing that's true; it's pretty standard for a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote this for Canadian startups wanting to incorporate in the US, but it applies to most countries AFAIK. [http://blog.carlmercier.com/2011/08/29/us- incorporation-for-...](http://blog.carlmercier.com/2011/08/29/us- incorporation-for-canadian-startups/)

</comment><comment><USER5> On a similar vain we are thinking of incorporating in the US but we will also need a bank account there. Anyone know what the procedure/requirements would be for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> On the next post we will publish about opening a bank account. We chose Silicon Valley Bank. Great entrepreneur support there.

<comment><USER5> Cool... Im looking forward to reading it already, great work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing. As far as I know there is no double tax treaty between Brazil and the US. Does this mean you will have to pay income tax twice?

Also very interested to know how did you get a US bank account. As far as I know it is not possible to do it remotely since Patriot Act has been passed.

<comment><USER7> The US doesnt have any double tax treaties. If you are Brazil resident, but have US income you may well be double taxed if you are employed in the US. If you are not Brazil resident then Brazil wont tax you. Only the US taxes non resident citizens I think.

<comment><USER8> _The US doesnt have any double tax treaties._

That's not true. <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-trty/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank you for sharing! I've been researching this for quite some time and now I finally know how to do this. The StartupLawyer mentioned in the article should be releasing articles and guides like this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked! He is, have you seen his bloig startuplawyer.com? Helped us a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Going on a tangent, what are the primary reasons people incorporate in Delaware as opposed to say Nevada or Wyoming? Is it mainly because more lawyers nationwide are more familiar with Delaware laws?

<comment><USER3> Delaware law is very favorable to the corp.

As an aside: Nevada used to be a big flag to the IRS, since it was one of the few states (the only?) that did not data share with the feds.

<comment><USER10> I agree with the Nevada statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Check out the second episode of this series here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3018620>

</comment><comment><USER11> Tks a lot :)

</comment><comment><USER12> tks for sharing it, truly helpful!

</comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting! ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> Thanks! Very useful :)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is really helpful. Thanks for the post.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great! Thanks for sharing...

</comment><comment><USER17> Very nice post! Thanks for sharing all the process and info.

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome guide! Will definitely help us in the future. Thanks!</comment>


An electric power plant on the roof of your car? - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-triboelectric-generator-on-a-car-20140920-story.html

<comment><USER2> "charge a 1,000-microfarad capacity to 30 volts in 25 minutes" == 0.0003 watts, tiny even by energy harvesting standards.</comment>


How a Stand-Up Comedian Made The World's First Handheld Panoramic Video Camera - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/06/standup-comedian-and-startup-ceo-jeff-glasse-is-revolutionizing-the-panoramic-video-camera/

<comment><USER2> The kickstarter page:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dot/dot-360o-video- captu...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dot/dot-360o-video-capture-for- the-iphone-4)

A great sample of what you can do with it on their site:

<http://www.kogeto.com/dotspots/3HRHSO232OYA>

Simple and beautiful product.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is some video of this camera in action on Youtube

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfnU7ts7mlk>

<comment><USER4> A version of that camera that can be fitted to a helmet for skiing/boarding/cycling would be _really_ nice.

<comment><USER3> Build it and they will come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Be sure you don't miss page 2 as page 1 at first glance seems like the article concludes with his stand-up routine video; the second page has videos of the device in action and goes into its New York manufacturing.

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone who's interested, here is Kogeto CEO and Dot camera co-creator Jeff Glasse doing his stand-up comedy routine.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LuQSCUcMgk></comment>


Ask HN: Those who signed up in 2007, what do you remember the most? - <AUTHOR> Can't believe I made this account on April 30, 2007. When did HN first debut? <comment><USER2> I think it launched to the public on Feb. 21st, 2007. It was in private beta for a while within YC before then.</comment>


Insurance makes wealth grow faster - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.04655 <comment><USER2> " The net premium, often called the "fair price" plays a less significant role – a range of prices is beneficial for both parties. The fair price is never part of that range (it is the end of the range in the limit of the infinitely wealthy insurer). Where exactly the price of trade will lie can be negotiated."

What does it mean? Can anyone explain? Does it mean a wealthy insurer will charge more premium over a small one? Or am I reading it wrong?

Economies of scale should make the bigger insurer costs less and as a result cheaper premiums. Isn't it?</comment>


Chapp – IRC alternative - <AUTHOR> http://chapp.is

<comment><USER2> Yay! Just what the world needs is another proprietary closed source chat system. Assuming its closed anyway, nothing yields source on Google, and the actual web site is down.

IRC works just fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just out of curiosity - would you be interested in open source chat similar to this one, made with pytnon?

What would it take for people to switch from IRC to a website like this?

Are there some pain points of IRC that can be solved?

Because personally I like chapp a lot more than irc, and I would be happy to use a system like this, especially if it gets more developed/popular. I think it can be a lot more beautiful, have a lot of cool features, and open irc to more mainstream communities.

So I'm wondering, is everyone in tech community averse to this and will prefer to use IRC, or is there a space for a startup here?

<comment><USER2> I only work on F/OSS and spend my entire day on Freenode, so I don't think really I have a need for anything else.

A lot of people rave about Slack, and I think it's very unfortunate its a very closed platform.

There's already [http://www.mattermost.org/](http://www.mattermost.org/) a open source alternative, which I haven't tried.</comment></comment></comment>


20 Things I Believe That Many Do Not - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mauricemauser/20-things-i-believe-that-many-do-not-5e6375ac40ca

<comment><USER3> My 2¢:

1\. Life is about the continuous cycle of our human species development and where we fit in that as individuals.

2\. A religion as a system of beliefs is not so much to be true as to fulfill a purpose. The purpose (and the religion) can and should be revised from time to time. (Religions can be replaced.)

3\. Agreed.

4\. Justice is grounded on power. It should be on reason.

5\. We need adequate regulation. If what we have is adequate or not is a subjective and a political mater.

6\. University education should not be a replacement for auto-didactic learning.

7\. Agreed. Overspecialization is a weakness in itself.

8\. Partially agreed. The package of ability and personality is both genetically inherited and later shaped.

9\. If in doubt, improve your ability to make an educated guess by learning more about the mater. This is what humans (should) do, as a species.

10\. Luck is both given (by arbitrary events) AND created (by how we react to arbitrary events).

11\. "Risk-avoidance is the riskiest strategy." does not fully respect the logic.

12\. Through "well-intended conservation" the good is at most just preserved (by definition), therefore the comparison is flawed. Also, it's worth noting that there is an effect called "absence blindness" that kicks in in such comparisons. [http://joshkaufman.net/absence- blindness/](http://joshkaufman.net/absence-blindness/)

13\. Technological progress spawns a lot of things, including extinctions for many things that we come later to disregard.

14\. Progress is not a mathematical function and any attempt to force it to look otherwise is an error-prone exercise.

15\. The average is a more simplistic reduction than the power-laws, so agreed. A less simplistic representation than power-laws is also possible.

16\. Agreed. (We would probably need a religion drive to achieve that.)

17\. Agreed.

18\. Aging is a natural biological process. Humans will step over their biological limits, but that will threaten our cohesion on a species level. One of my personal wishes is to leave behind the humanity in one piece...

19\. Consciousness is a feedback loop. (The most simplistic reduction.)

20\. Free will is an optimum seeking mechanism (made of deterministic components indeed).

In the end looks like for the most of the beliefs I'm too in those that the OP refers to as "many".

<comment><AUTHOR> > _" 1\. Life is about the continuous cycle of our human species development > and where we fit in that as individuals."_

If you create what feels authenticate to you, it will fit in with humanity as a whole.

> _2\. Religion as purpose._

I'd say purpose is drawn from _philosophy_ in general, and religion is an instance of philosophy.

> _4\. Justice._

There is a political dichotomy of merit-based systems vs. egalitarian systems. I lean towards merit, and equal opportunity.

> _5\. Adequate regulation._

There is an overregulation bias. If in doubt, a new law is passed. This is especially harmful to innovation: see AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, Synthetic Biology.

> _6. "University education should not be a replacement for auto-didactic > learning."_

But the emergence of MOOCs makes autodidactic learning a possible replacement for university education. In an unbundled form, of course, as you still need to develop your network (w/o the campus) and build your reputation (w/o the degree).

> _9\. Authenticity vs. social convention._

Again, given the _dichotomy_ of authenticity vs. social convention, favor authenticity. ("if in doubt" is more of a stylistic element)

> _" 11\. "Risk-avoidance is the riskiest strategy." does not fully respect > the logic."_

It would not, if we could control all of the risks. However, we cannot fully predict and avoid the occurrence of extreme events. Hence, it is better to embrace them via antifragile systems: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile). Moreover, not taking any _seemingly high_ risks, usually leads to not making any progress at all - and stagnation is the ultimate risk.

> _12\. Creative destruction vs. conservation_

The comparison is to be understood on the level of "where should I, as an individual, focus my limited attention and energy on?" Environmentalism or Technology? Answer: Technology.

> _13\. Technology-driven extinction_

Many people primarily see the dangers of technology, whereas - imho - <USER2> benefits outweigh the costs. In fact, the opportunity costs of not advancing technology because of naysayers would be higher than the damage that is done by technology itself. (extinction is meant on the level of humankind)

> _18. "Humans will step over their biological limits, but that will threaten > our cohesion on a species level."_

Threat and opportunity usually go hand-in-hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Democracy is not the best form of government, meritocracy is.

The problem here is that what is valued as meritful is easily manipulated. If killing in war is proclaimed as meritful, then killers rule in such a meritocracy. Churchill said it best, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. [http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html](http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, one of his better quotes!

Of course a healthy meritocracy relies on a meaningful and objective measure of performance. Technology should make it easier to implement such a system today though, compared to the times of the old Greeks.</comment></comment>


A Disturbing In-Flight Experience - <AUTHOR> https://www.popehat.com/2017/05/01/a-disturbing-in-flight-experience/ <comment><USER2> You can't be a bystander and complain nobody said anything. You disembarked before him, should have notified airport security, especially with your credibility as a former fed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately without video Americans could not care less about an incident.

As for the issues cited, as with almost everything in America there's just a pathetic lack of a training culture within organizations, a lack of order and a lack of respect for it.</comment>


The Indian government is set to endorse Universal Basic Income - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/the-indian-government-is-about-to-endorse-giving-all-its-citizens-free-money/articleshow/56317597.cms <comment><USER2> I don't see how they would afford this. Rough approximations show that even giving $20 a month to India's 900 million adult population would mean an annual expenditure of 216 billion dollars, more than 4 times the country's annual defence budget. Where does all this money come from? Increased taxes from the middle class (so that they pay $40 to get $20)?

<comment><USER3> This is what I point out whenever BI is brought up as a possibility in the US. With 1/4 the population of India, higher GDP, and allowing for all the existing entitlement programs being retired, we can't afford it either. The math just doesn't work out.

Edit: Some grossly simplified numbers.

Assumptions: BI matches poverty level. Everyone gets BI (parents receive their children's payments until they reach majority). Family size is 3 (average household size is really 2.54 persons in the US)

US Population: 312 million, which is 104 million families (households). The Census dept. says poverty level for a family of 3 is $20,000, so that's what BI must match. This gives us annual BI payments of $2.08 trillion.

Savings from shuttered entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, ACA subsidies: $938 billion. EITC & CTC: $362 billion. Total savings is $1.3 trillion annually.

But what about Social Security (OASI/DI) with $888 billion in payments? Since that's a pay-it-forward program we can't end it suddenly (it'd be political suicide, in any case). It'd have to be tapered off in some fashion. The trust fund (Al Gore's "Lock Box") doesn't exist as a big pile of money to be tapped, as that has been turned into US-issued Treasury Bonds.

So there's a shortfall of about $810 billion each year. Could we tap into the money sent to the Pentagon? Yes, but that's "only" $610 billion and we'd have a military that isn't being paid and with increasingly obsolete equipment. Not a good situation.

<comment><USER4> Raise taxes on the wealthy (yes, including Silicon Valley programmers). It's really that simple. People just don't want it to be.

<comment><USER5> > Raise taxes on the wealthy. It's really that simple.

I'm a big fan of aggressively progressive tax systems but it isn't as simple as you think.

California has a very progressive tax system, with most people paying some but most of the money coming from a small number of taxpayers. Sounds great, and basically most people like it. The problem is that when the economy tanks, California takes a huge hit in income since wealthy taxpayers' capital gains drop precipitously.

Yes, there's a simple-to-describe fix: build a surplus in good times and borrow in downtimes. But this is very hard to implement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After the recent Demonetization brouhaha, which led to over a 100 deaths[1], most of them from the lower strata of society, it makes sense for the current government to start off UBI whole heartedly, especially since they can tie in the entire demonetization/cashless economy/jan dhan etc. stories together. However, I sincerely hope that the execution is well planned, rather than hasty.

This article though seems to be a marketing report for BIEN. Remember that with a country as large as India, Government reports are many in number but very few schemes having national level adoption. I can think of numerous states that would support doling out sops for the poor instead of UBI.

Interesting times these are for the country. Let's hope sense prevails.

[1] [http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-demonetization- governme...](http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-demonetization-government- not-mourning-over-100-deaths-due-to-cash-crunch-says-opposition-2280902)

<comment><USER7> I'll take liberty to correct your perspective: A demonetization move that directly affected livelihood of billion Indians, with a possibility of large- scale riots, but ended with only 100 deaths. I don't see how it cannot be termed a success. Can you think of any major move that directly affected the entire country but did not end in large scale riots? If you need to understand what a "hasty decision" means take a look at the Partition of India, where only a small fraction of the entire populace was displaced but ended up causing up almost 2 million deaths by some estimates.

<comment><USER8> > a possibility of large-scale riots, but ended with only 100 deaths. I don't > see how it cannot be termed a success.

What is the upside we got with demonetization that we can call success?

Did it end black money? No.

Will it end counterfeit currency? No.

Does it help citizens in any way? No.

Then what exactly is the success we achieved here?

Modi have blood of 100 citizens on his hands this time instead of thousands like it was in Gujarat riots under his leadership. Is that the benchmark of success?

<comment><USER9> It has reduced black money _significantly_. Especially for terrorist and militant groups - both Pakistan sponsored and home grown Naxalites. They are now being forced to raid banks for new cash. The new notes are also much more difficult to counterfeit. That's two points crossed in your list.

<comment><USER8> They have been able to convert their cash to new Rs. 2,000 notes through the underhand deals with corrupt Government and Banking officials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have there been any studies on the impact to prices on staple foods?

Because if everyone can afford food and basic items for living, does that mean the prices for these items will go sky high? Especially as supply will be short of demand?

<comment><USER11> "Because if everyone can afford food and basic items for living", the economic collapse is unavoidable. How did we develop this notion that the economy can function well only when a portion of the population balances on the edge of starvation.

<comment><USER12> >How did we develop this notion that the economy can function well only when a portion of the population balances on the edge of starvation.

"Pure ideology", a belief that's more moral than factual. You see, we have to discipline the lower classes into working hard, therefore they _must_ live on the edge of starvation, therefore _not_ attaining this disciplined state will inevitably collapse the economy. The causal connection is conjured from air to support the desired policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every time UBI is brought up, vague arguments about inflation come up. However, I've never seen anyone cite economic literature that actually quantifies such an effect. It's just a claim justified by an understanding of economics 101. However: there's a reason why a study of economics doesn't end at the 101 level. Economics 101 is a grossly simplified toy facsimile of the actual capitalist economy.

There are professional economists who support UBI or at least experimenting with it. Am I supposed to believe that they never considered the vague and simplistic argument that can be posed with minimal effort in an Internet comment?

<comment><USER14> Because claiming that UBI will cause inflation is _not_ justified by an understanding of Economics 101. Most basic economic theory will state that inflation is basically a monetary phenomenon. (Now, if you use monetary expansion to pay for the UBI, as the occasional person has suggested, then Econ 101 would suggest inflation, but that's true for any expenditure funded that way.)

<comment><USER15> > Most basic economic theory will state that inflation is basically a monetary > phenomenon.

Uh, no, that's not true at all. Monetary policy is only one of many factors that can drive inflation.

> Because claiming that UBI will cause inflation is not justified by an > understanding of Economics 101

Uh, yes it is. MV = PQ is literally in introductory economics textbooks. _Advocates_ of UBI talk about how it would encourage growth by "stimulating spending". Well, that's literally saying that it would increase both V and Q. And mathematically, we know that a redistributive policy cannot increase Q as fast as it increases V, which means that P increases. Hence, inflation.

You can make an argument that increasing the monetary supply at the correct rate would offset the increase in prices, or that the impact on unemployment rates would factor in, but at that point you're moving _way_ beyond Economics 101 and far off into the realm of contested and unproven research conjectures.

<comment><USER14> Well, I think advocates of UBI arguing that it would encourage growth by stimulating spending are ignoring the fact that a tax-funded UBI would take money from elsewhere. It doesn't necessarily matter what advocates of UBI say about its suppose growth-boosting effects or what have you - the parent post was saying that Econ 101 understanding affirms that redistributive policies increase inflation, and I disagree. I should definitely qualify that with the caveat that I'm talking about _Monetarist_ Econ 101, where V is stable in the long run, and Q is determined by overall productivity. Therefore P is roughly proportional to M. Sure, there's short-term effects, but over the long run, by Monetarist Econ 101, a UBI, if funded out of tax revenues, shouldn't cause inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just don't see how it won't cause massive inflation. basically to the point that the payout is practically worthless.

<comment><USER17> Because no money is being created, it's being reallocated from other people, so it doesn't directly affect the money supply.

The recipients are more likely to spend it, which creates some demand (and thus inflation), but it should still be less than the increase in spending power it provides them.

<comment><USER18> "Because no money is being created, it's being reallocated from other people, so it doesn't directly affect the money supply."

And unfortunately that is bunkum. Money isn't stuff. If you take what is currently savings and put it into flow then you will get an increase in production - that is then effectively taken away and given to people who haven't earned it.

The result is, over time, an increase in political pressure to get rid of the hand out from those doing all the work and getting nothing for it in return.

And that's how an income guarantee scheme ends. Just like every other 'experiment' in history.

People want the ability to exchange their labour for goods and services, not be the recipients of handouts and resented for it by those doing the work.

<comment><USER19> Governments have found one neat trick to hide what are exactly handouts from scrutiny like that. They call them "tax credits". A "tax credit" is literally just a handout, a $1000 tax credit means you get a $1000 check. You don't even have to pay any taxes to get a tax credit. It's a pure handout. But the phase "tax credit" implies that it is somehow connected to taxes that you've paid some time in the past, so in people's minds it's not a handout anymore. Even hardcore conservatives can get behind "tax credits"!

All you go to do is call the handout a tax credit and give it to almost everyone, and you implemented UBI. In the USA, you wouldn't even need a new system to implement. We have various proto-UBIs written in our tax code, the most notable being the Earned Income Credit, we would just need to "enhance" it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This thread is political, just that it is Indian politics instead of American politics being discussed. An opportunity for American readers to get a first hand idea of what it feels like to have long threads of inane politically motivated discussion which doesnt' make much sense to readers from other countries ;-)

</comment><comment><USER21> What is happening?

I guess shadow powers don't want global riot in 10-20 years.

<comment><USER22> Most of my friends who are communists are calling this "class control" and I'm laughing at them because they are getting what they wanted just without mass riots and murders of the rich.

<comment><USER23> How are they getting what they want? What communists (and in a lesser sense, socialist countries) want is less of a chasm between the lower and upper echelons of society. Just this day it was posted on Reddit that a top London banking boss will already have made more since the start of the year than an average worker will the entire year (!!). All UBI does is make sure everyone has a baseline to live from. That's great, but its just a sedative for the masses. You're a lot more likely to riot if your kids are starving. I wonder what will lie beyond UBI. 3D-printers for everyone? Everyone can print a fancy car, a lobster, a new arm, etc.. which would basically make everyone completely equal.

<comment><USER24> >That's great, but its just a sedative for the masses.

As opposed to the great energy drink of communism?

<comment><USER23> No, and some difference will always be there. That's healthy - it aspires people to be more. But I'd like it to be more like Star-Trek: people work hard and achieve things for the prestige. If you become captain of a star ship, you're admired, and you (for example) still get more pretty ladies fawning after you than the helm officer. And he does so more than a dude who wants to do nothing but play GTA:XXIV on the Holodeck. But that dude can get the same food, education and modes of transport as the captain, if he so desires.

<comment><USER25> Most importantly, the kids of the holodeck videogame player are not condemned by the sins of the father, and the kids of the starship fleet captain don't get to ride the coattails of their father either.

Hardass "realists" love modeling the market as anarchic self-interested atomic agents until it comes to giving their own kids a leg-up even if they don't deserve it. Then it's all biology and social psychology.

<comment><USER22> > sins of the father, and the kids of the starship fleet captain don't get to > ride the coattails of their father either.

You need to watch more DS9, Voyager, and TNG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Negative income tax or there is no shot it will work. You can't disregard human nature for the sake of humanity...

</comment><comment><USER27> Feudal society should have Wealth tax, not Income tax [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_india](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_india)

</comment><comment><USER27> UBI will provide impetus to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility) due to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_politics_in_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_politics_in_India)

</comment><comment><USER28> That's insane.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is constructed/inferred/derived/fabricated i.e. "fake" news.</comment>


Static analysis of an unknown compression format - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lse.epita.fr/articles/8-static-analysis-of-an-unknown-compression-format.html <comment><USER2> That's a fairly common compression technique on PS3 titles. Breaking the file into regularly sized chunks about 64kb (for lzma) permits decompression of the file in parallel on the SPUs as the dictionary and decompressed data can fit entirely in local store.

Since optical drives have terrible seek times and low bandwidth most assets are stored compressed on disc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there any tool to generate bitmaps from binary files? For example using each byte as grey value and letting the user specify the column width. Or with more than one byte and then using color.

Wouldn't this be a trivial and somewhat useful thing to see structure in binary files?

<comment><USER4> When doing simple graphics work at university, I would name files that contained nothing but pixel data foo.raw and IIRC some image editors would offer the options you mention when opening the files, then display them fine. Maybe that was before .raw got associated with cameras (and presumably more complex).

<comment><USER5> raw (can be) interpreted from any stream of binary data, you can open EXEs in photoshop as RAW, save it as a PNG, transfer it, then resave it as a raw and it will run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of reverse engineering an email archiving format used by EMC IIRC. It used an ancient PKZIP compression algorithm to compress COM IStream data and then wrapped the compressed data in what was essentially a proprietary linked list.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this overlooks the classic technique of reverse engineers all over, IDA Pro!

</comment><comment><USER8> Funny, I was just about to start playing "Tales of Symphonia" when I read this...</comment>


Cloudflare Kicking 'Daily Stormer' Is Bad News for Pirate Sites - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is-bad-news-for-pirate-sites-170817/ <comment><USER2> It's an interesting case of "slippery slope", but in this case specifically I think the means justify the consequences (potentially losing pirating sites).

If I had to choose between allowing hate-peddling sites to exist or losing every pirate site available, I would choose banning the hate every time.</comment>


Abusing anti-DDoS mechanisms to perform DNS cache poisoning - <AUTHOR> http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/en/the-anssi/publications-109/scientific-publications/conference/abusing-anti-ddos-mechanisms-to-perform-dns-cache-poisoning.html

<comment><USER2> If i've got this right, here's how the attack works:

1\. Make a resolver (your ISP) query a nameserver (ns.godaddy.com) until the nameserver's DDoS protection kicks in (dropping DNS queries).

2\. The resolver's s queries are getting dropped now, so it re-tries them over and over. While the resolver waits for a response from the nameserver, you send the resolver Kaminsky packets to poison its cache.

According to the slides, this works everywhere that Response Rate Limiting is enabled and set to "2" (the default).

Apparently this has been known for some time. Here's a response from ISC on the whole thing: [http://www.isc.org/blogs/cache-poisoning-gets-a-second- wind-...](http://www.isc.org/blogs/cache-poisoning-gets-a-second-wind-from- rrl-probably-not/) An article by Paul Vixie at the bottom has the most insight about the whole thing.

<comment><USER3> I believe you've got this incorrect:

We have the following:

      ServerWeb
      ServerDNS
      Attacker

Background: To poison DNS for ServerWeb, Attacker will need to send forged DNS packets to ServerWeb from ServerDNS. However, ServerWeb will only accept packets for the short interval between requesting the lookup and receiving the reply. In practice, that makes poisoning the DNS extremely unlikely.

DDoS protection: A completely unrelated attack on ServerWeb by Attacker is to send a spoofed DNS request to ServerDNS from ServerWeb. This DNS request uses very few bytes. However, the answer to this request sends many more bytes. This means that Attacker only needs X bandwidth to create a DDoS of 100X bandwidth on ServerWeb. To avoid this, ServerDNS will simply ignore these types of requests that generate a lot of data.

The problem: If Attacker is able to make ServerWeb request these types of large response DNS queries from ServerDNS, ServerDNS will simply not reply. This is very good for Attacker as he now has a good 10 seconds or more to forge the correct request and poison ServerWeb.

The attack shows how the complexity involved in DNS and other web protocols can quickly go out of control when making seemingly simple 'fixes' to stop newly discovered attacks. Understanding the repercussions of even minor changes to any part of the infrastructure can have unintended side effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The original vuln that invited in this kludge:

[http://unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-kaminsky-dns- vuln.html](http://unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-kaminsky-dns-vuln.html)

The solution to this kludge?

> What has ANSSI done to improve the security of the DNS?

> ANSSI led a 4 months alert campaign, warning DNS software vendors and > critical DNS operators (such as the root operators and several TLD > operators).

aka, nothing, more kludge, push complexity off onto clients.</comment>


Ask HN: What resources exist to help me build my own PCB boards? - <AUTHOR> Hi!<p>I am an electronics novice who want to design my own PCB for some projects. I am looking for any resources or materials (apps, url, books) to guide me in my endeavor. <comment><USER2> I have a youtube tutorial for making a PCB using KiCad (5.0) called "Getting To Blinky". It has helped some people design their first PCB. This will be a separate exercise from learning about actual electronics, but will help you get a PCB made: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVhWh3AsXQs&list=PLy2022BX6E...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVhWh3AsXQs&list=PLy2022BX6EspFAKBCgRuEuzapuz_4aJCn)

</comment><comment><USER3> As for books to learn from, get the latest edition of "The Art of Electronics", that is kinda like a bible to a lot of people. I have definitely learned a lot from it.

As for making PCB's, personally I pay for a subscription to Eagle. Yea there are better software solutions out there (Altium), but the cost is significantly more. I personally like Eagle better than KiCad, I think Eagle has made a lot of progress and I can tie it to Fusion360 now and do full design views, enclosures, heating etc. Altium is the more professional and complete solution, and they have a free version called CircuitMaker (same company IIRC just not as sophisticated). I like Eagle because there are tons of resources to help you with, getting parts into the library is easy and it isn't hard to use.

As for creating PCB's (assuming you are US based), Use Osh Park ([https://oshpark.com/](https://oshpark.com/)) over seeedstudio, although I have used both. I'll still use seeed sometimes for prototypes and even small runs when I need more optionality than OshPark allows. There are some other US based production houses like OshPark that I use from time to time too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you mean actually build a PCB? If so, there are many tutorials using different types of tools on instructables.com For best results you'll want to get access to a laser cutter or small CNC mill, perhaps through a local makerspace. That being said, there are now many short-run and one-off PCB manufacturing houses you can use for much higher quality boards than you can make yourself. People seem to like seeed for this - [https://www.seeedstudio.com/fusion_pcb.html](https://www.seeedstudio.com/fusion_pcb.html)

If you want to learn the design side, there are many other threads on HN with tool recommendations. Ex. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16533475](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16533475)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

I realised, that I was looking for a text book for electronics, because online courses had confused me as I had been doing it without a reference text. The Art of electronics, (PDF, IIIrd edition) appears to be the one I had been looking for. I shall definitely be checking seedstudio as well.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do with old technical books? - <AUTHOR> I have a fair number of books (about 150 shelf-feet worth, or 45 shelf-meters), many of which are technical books. Many of them are older, and I'm contemplating getting rid of those to free up shelf space for other uses, but I'm not sure which to get rid of, and how to get rid of them, so I'm curious what others here do.
On the question of which to get rid of, the candidates fall into two groups.
1. Technologies that are pretty much dead now. It's very hard to imagine that I'm ever again going to need to crack open "Undocumented DOS" or "Inside AppleTalk", for example.
2. Technologies that are still in use, but my books cover older editions. For example, I have the second and third editions of Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language", and also several other C++ books from that era. I haven't done C++ in long enough that I've largely forgotten the language, and will probably need to relearn it at some point.
C++ has grown a lot since those books were written, but it seems much of what is in them would still be valid, and one might even argue that for something like this learning an older, simpler version first might be better.
For getting rid of books, the obvious thing that comes to mind is tossing them in the recycling bin. Mine takes paperbacks, and hardbacks if the covers are removed first, so this would be easy.
A coworker suggests trying to sell them to a used bookstore or giving them to a used bookstore if they don't want to buy them. I don't like that, at least for books in the first category above, because they could end up bought by someone trying to get into technology who doesn't realize that these are dead technologies. <comment><USER2> I know exactly what you mean. Only a few feet from me as I type this, I have a bookcase staring me in the face, loaded with books on COM, DCOM, ActiveX, OLE, MFC, ATL, Win32 API, etc. I know I'll never need this stuff again, either because it's obsolete or because I have developed an ideological aversion to any of this proprietary crap. I only have this stuff because it dates back to the beginnings of my career when having some knowledge of the Microsoft way of things seemed like a prudent, pragmatic approach.

Anyway... this stuff sits there, taking up space and maybe bringing back memories, but adding no value otherwise. But I can't bring myself to just pitch them all in the bin. I guess I'm a bit of a book hoarder and I have a hard time getting rid of books.

Hopefully if you get some good answers, it will help motivate me to try and get rid of some of the cruft I have here.

All of that said, I can see how some of this stuff could have value to _somebody_. Even the _Inside Appletalk_ book could be useful. Maybe somebody who's way into retrocomputing and actually wants to implement an AppleTalk network. Maybe a historian writing a history of computer networking technologies. Or a hobbyist looking for an older, simpler networking standard to reverse engineer and build something off of. Who knows?

One option might be to see if you have a hackerspace/makerspace in your area, and offer to donate some or all of you superfluous books to them, or their members. I think that's the kind of crowd where you might find somebody who actually _wants_ a copy of _Undocumented DOS_ or _Inside AppleTalk_.

Another option might be to try selling them on Amazon.com.

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorite approach is, at the office where I work, you can pile books up on top of the recycle bins, and people often do just that. They'll linger there for a few days, maybe a week, before they get collected to be recycled. Sometimes someone else will walk up and grab one. (I parted with my 3rd edition of Stroustrup this way, with a shiny new 4th edition on my shelf today.)

If you work in a large enough office, that could be a good way to give a decent number of other programmers the option to grab some free books, and anything nobody wants gets recycled.

</comment><comment><USER4> If they are old enough that if browsing a used book section you wouldn't purchase, then throw them out or recycle them.

If there is some sentimental value in keeping some, like it reminds you of a cool project or team, etc. then sit down and flip thru the book with your favorite beverage. Then throw it out.

If you are feeling that later on some of these books might be useful, like there is some resurgence of the tech where you can make ridiculous money as a consultant, cherish that fantasy and then throw them out.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you opened in the the last three years? If not, toss it.

I wouldn't bother trying to sell them. Books aren't worth much. Recycle sounds like the best option. But I would put them up on Gumtree/Craigslist/Local FB group to see if there is a CS-Student or similar who couldnt' make use out of some of them.

That said, I have a couple of boxes of tech books in the shed that I've still not gotten rid of.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have the same problem. Java books from the late 90's and stuff. I should bring myself to throw them away because they are now useless but they were so expensive when I bought them... I'd gladly give them away but I can't imagine anyone wanting them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty ruthless about this stuff, my local supermarket has a bin for books, they either end up for sale on AbeBooks or if they aren't worth anything they go for pulp.

I used to try and sell them if I thought they had some value but it was just too much hassle.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I was still in school there was a table near the CS department where professors would put boxes of old technical books so that people could pick them up (they all got picked up) if they wanted them.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would like to find some books on Forth. I just dump my old books in a donation bin.

</comment><comment><USER10> Keep them on my bookshelf! Most of my books are technical manuals and references

</comment><comment><USER11> Why not donate them to a library?

<comment><USER12> While the idea of donating to a library is always good, I doubt the usefulness of giving a library books on completely outdated technology that 0.0001% of people still use. Have you ever been to a used book store or library? Their tech section is nearly useless. I would honestly not want more tech books from 2002 unless they're well respected and in some way still useful.

I'd find a way to recycle them. The sad part about tech books is that most of them become useless after five years, if not before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Use them to prop up my monitor</comment>


What Was the Mouse Utopia? (2017) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=HfNKFvHtA3g <comment><USER2> I'd like to see a replication of the Mouse Utopia experiment. It seems to have the character of a lot of the "Failed to replicate" studies in psychology and sociology. The study finds a conclusion that is directly applicable to the issue of the day (overpopulation and overcrowding in Calhoun's time) and has an interesting metaphorical attention getting alarm to it ("We humans are the rats!").

One problem that stood out to me is how the mice in Calhoun's experiment are any different than any other kind of laboratory or pet mice. They are given unlimited access to food and water - but, aren't all pets and lab animals given all the food and water they want? What's special about these?

Another problem is that Calhoun does a lot of evaluating rat behavior. They all eat together - is that abnormal? Some of the rats and lazy, and live by themselves. Is that abnormal? Some rats kill their young and the infant mortality rate rises as population density does. Is that abnormal?

I'd like to see a modern recreation of it, along with better statistical representation of the data and the changes over time. If it's possible, I think a control setup should be added, where the rats in the control "universe" would have to engage in activities like their natural behavior to get food.

<comment><USER3> I recently took a longer look at Mouse Utopia and was not too impressed: [https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse- utopia](https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse-utopia) It's very confusing what it actually showed. For starters, there's no such thing as _the_ 'Mouse Utopia'; Calhoun ran dozens or scores of related experiments, it seems, and only very briefly and cursorily described a few of them at different stages in a handful of publications, which are about the only source for all discussions of 'Mouse Utopia'.

<comment><USER4> \+ unexpected confounding factors like [https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2935?&code=2968f10f-2f...](https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2935?&code=2968f10f-2f78-4056-b360-df675bfe2ef4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting, never heard of this before. I gave this some thought, and I think I can come up with a simple reason for the observed behavior and also why it does not apply to humans. Female mice mate with dominant, territorial male mice who's role after conception is to defend the nest from the attack of rival males, who will kill/cannibalize the babies if given the chance. At some population density, there are way too many rival mice for a dominant male to defend, and this reproductive strategy breaks down. The imagined limiting conditions like food and housing were not the actual limiting condition of the colony - the killer rivals were. Human females don't form harems under the protection of dominant males, and thus this would not be a limiting factor for humans.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o) Here's another video, with more details about Calhoun's other experiments before Universe 25, and historical context around them.

</comment><comment><USER7> People can talk about replication problems but the fact that this happened even once is interesting. I would claim that the reason the rats went extinct was because they were put in an environment that was far too different from their natural environment to survive. The question for people is not how do deal with overpopulation the question is why aren't we experiencing overpopulation.</comment>


Two Trains Puzzle - <AUTHOR> http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TwoTrainsPuzzle.html <comment><USER2> The oldest telling of this puzzle I know of is Wigner's account of Max Born posing the question to von Neumann in the 1920s: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTS9O0CoVng&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTS9O0CoVng&feature=youtu.be&t=1006) . In that version, it was a pair of bicycles, not a pair of trains.</comment>