Why We Hire Great Developers, Not Great Mobile Developers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/runkeeper-everyone-every-run/why-we-hire-great-developers-not-great-mobile-developers-98acf14112d5#.5zn08imsu <comment><USER2> Makes total sense. Once you've figured out how coding works, you can do any stack, any framework, any language.

It bothers me how job ads tend to focus on various buzzwords. I'm quite sure you're better off hiring someone with good fundamentals who can learn your stack, rather than someone who is a novice but has some experience in the stack.

I started off doing financial trading code in c++ / c#. It wasn't a huge leap doing Android and iOS. Principles are the same:

\- Some kind of OO. They are all pretty similar for most purposes. C++ is maybe a bit more intricate. Similarly, some kind of functional/lambda.

\- Some way to access a database. Plenty of ORMs or ways to do SQL if you need that.

\- Some GUI organisational principles. WinForms, WPF, Qt, Android, iOS, whatever. They tend to have things like "only draw on the main thread" and a pile of APIs for organising the screens, buttons, and so forth. But if you've done one, you're not going to need a course to do another.

\- StackOverflow will tell you everything that's pure translation. Things like {} dicts for python.

\- Get a brief tutorial for each new language/framework. They're all over the web, and the main point it just to highlight the features.

<comment><USER3> If you're hiring someone to do something like implement a new machine learning algorithm or a new compiler optimisation they're not to just pick that stuff up off of stack overflow are they? Sometimes you need specialist knowledge.

<comment><USER4> If it's a new concept then the entropy is huge for anyone regardless of background.

<comment><USER5> That's not correct. Who do you think would be able to implement a spam machine learning algorithm in a month? A NLP PhD or a regular Android developer?

<comment><USER6> Given a whole month? Anyone who can use google and isn't afraid to experiment with the available libraries they find.

<comment><USER3> Would you trust your security to a TLS implementation done by someone who'd spent a month googling on it?

<comment><USER2> What if they spent the month finding out how some open source implementation worked, including what experts thought of it, and wired it up for your needs?

<comment><USER3> You know, at the bottom of your stack someone, somewhere, needs to know a subject well enough to implement things from scratch. If what you are doing hasn't been done before you can't just google or find an open source library. Even if it has been done before often these things are often barely written down.

Do you think when Google decided to create the V8 JavaScript JIT they hired a couple of Django programmers and asked them to google 'how to write a JIT'? Or do you think they specified a certain level of experience in writing JITs on the job advert?

<comment><USER2> > You know, at the bottom of your stack someone, somewhere, needs to know a > subject well enough to implement things from scratch. If what you are doing > hasn't been done before you can't just google or find an open source > library.

That really depends on what "from scratch" means. Any particular piece of code can be examined in enough detail that nobody in the whole world would understand all of them. Luckily people who understand specific pieces will produce a part for others to use. Often the only thing that hasn't been done before is one particular mashup of existing parts. Then the skill of coding is like the skill of cooking: using judgement to assemble well known parts into a new whole.

> Do you think when Google decided to create the V8 JavaScript JIT they hired > a couple of Django programmers and asked them to google 'how to write a > JIT'? Or do you think they specified a certain level of experience in > writing JITs on the job advert?

That wasn't the point. I'm not saying that any programmer can do any programming job. But that the selection criterion (language, framework) is in general wrong. If you have a guy who did a JIT for Java, do you disqualify that guy from a JIT for Go job? I don't think so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I have noticed in the first paragraph: "It seems that some schools have caught on and are teaching students the ins and outs of being a mobile developer but for the most part graduates seem to only have a course or two of mobile dev under their belt."

Am I the only one who finds that weird? During my 5 years of college education in "informatics" I never had a 'programming for..." course. We were taught how to tackle problems, algorithmics, patterns and practices, formal languages, ai, distributed mechanisms and so on. We had to get that hard concrete experience on our own. IMHO having courses like "programming for Android" or "Web/JS programming" is a great way to mass produce monkey programmers.

<comment><USER8> Totally agree with the "mass-produced monkey programmer" comment. I've seen it in practice, when interviewing new graduates.

The grads from good (not necessarily great) schools tend to have solid fundamentals, and even without lots of "buzzword" coursework, they come out better. The grads from mediocre schools often have more buzzwords on their resume, but often lack solid fundamentals.

Of course, that isn't written in stone. We have several great new hires from schools that are typical regional universities.

<comment><USER9> The graduates from schools with higher entrance requirements have better graduates than the schools with lower ones?

And you think it's their course material...

<comment><USER8> Yes. Based on what I've seen, there is absolutely a curriculum problem at some schools. None of these were terrible schools, just not R1 universities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I saw this, I thought it was going in a different direction. I personally despise mobile development because so little of it is elegant writing of code. A lot of it has to do with learning the bizarre ins and outs of thoroughly fragmented targets, as well as documentation that's sometimes very lacking. I had assumed any developer who really loves coding (rather than debugging or trial-and-error) would avoid mobile development, leaving the talent pool very lacking.

<comment><USER11> Also, most of mobile development seems to be writing another UI for sensors or SQLite database, or sometimes another game like the plenty out there. Why would anybody think of that as exciting?

<comment> V-2 Like your typical web app isn't yet another CRUD or CMS ;)

<comment><USER12> > Like your typical web app isn't yet another CRUD or CMS ;)

Indeed. To avoid the CRUD groundhog day, I'd stay away from both web and mobile.

<comment> V-2 What do you do then?

<comment><USER12> There are tons and tons of areas in software that aren't web (or mobile, which is usually just web with another toolkit).

Games, Desktop apps, Industrial, embedded, ...

Personally I do desktop applications and love it.

<comment> V-2 Yeah I did desktop apps for a while (in .NET), but they can be just as repetitive and non-inventive. In my case they were mostly shelf-stacking / syncing apps for internet shops.

I simply don't believe that a domain (understood broadly, ie. desktop/mobile/web) in and of itself dictates whether projects are original and interesting.

Not until you work on something really specialized, like AI etc.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, so long as a desktop app _could_ have been a browser app, it tends to have the same problems as a browser app (i.e it's just CRUD).

They are usually only interesting if they are desktop apps because they have to, like image editors, games, CAD.

My test for interesting work is the fraction of lines of code that relates to processing data and not just input/presentation/persistence/validation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice article.

As someone that occasional does some hobby Android and WP coding, when time allows, it is quite interesting to see this type of attitude.

Here in Germany many IT companies seem to disregard skills if they aren't listed as part of the previous job. Regards of what one would be able to show at the interview, if HR didn't filter out the CV.

So no chance of switching tech stacks unless one is able to land in a greenfield project that is taking off, inside the same company, before doing the jump.

<comment> V-2 That's not just Germany, it's typical. It reminds me of [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/1847](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/1847) :)

<comment><USER14> That's perfect. Definitely not a Germany thing.

<comment><USER12> Wow, so there are situations where a bad programmer with the right CV keywords would be chosen over a good programmer with the wrong keywords on the CV? I thought we were past that now.

<comment><USER15> Worse than that is when a developer has side projects that may show real expertise that was not required nor used in the previous jobs. Considering only the skills endorsed by previous jobs when doing a hire is a sure way of handicapping your company!

<comment><USER13> That is what prompted my comment.

Once an HR drone has explicitly told me that my side projects had zero value for the application, even though they matched what was being searched for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As long as someone understands the platform you can do this. I've seen way too much iOS code written by smart people new to iOS with no clue how to structure and ship a successful mobile app. This is likely true for most platforms. A smart developer can learn in time but usually you don't get that time so it's better if at least someone has done whatever it is before. I am sure I could master Android in time but if I started building an app on day 1 it would likely be terrible.

<comment><USER8> The article addresses this. They have experienced developers on-hand to assist and ensure standards are maintained. Getting the time to learn is a management problem, not a developer problem.

I've taught C# and the .Net framework to several teams over the last two years. The good developers pick it up without much problem. But, we usually start with several sprints of co-located group programming (for complete teams learning the stack).

<comment><USER17> Agreed, it's important to that the entire teams understands when someone is learning a new skill set or language. We try to allocate more time in our sprint for not only the developer who is learning but also for another developer on the team to help ramp them up.

It takes a bit of working with the PM to determine what is a good task that isn't super time sensitive but it's typically a solvable problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How can I find a place like this to work.

It seems like everybody sharing their interview experiences says they all use the same Google-wannabe standard. Ie whiteboarding, implementing an advanced data structure from memory, and rapidly solving CompSci homework questions.

I'm no CompSci grad but I have pretty a pretty experience in many languages/stacks. I have confidence that I could design and implement a reasonably complex distributed architecture if requirements called for one. Yet I'd look like a complete asshole if asked to whiteboard a R/B tree from memory.

<comment><USER19> Fair enough. In my experience, "no one was ever fired for buying ibm" kind of thing is very strong in the interviewing.

Why are you asking these meaningless questions, that don't give a chance to demonstrate any relevant knowledge?

Everyone does that, duh.

<comment><USER18> It's kind of sad that a person's worth can be reduced to such a useless metric.

HR has no ability to objectively judge technical talent, so they follow the latest 'flavor of the month' interviewing strategy.

The suits are heavily influenced by sources like Business Insider that repeatedly parrot advice about avoiding 'false positives at all cost.'

Meanwhile the tech specialists who should step in and call BS, won't because they're to arrogant to admit their own hindsight bias. Ala judging new candidates based on their current level of ability and specialized knowledge rather than the level they were at when they were initially hired.

It seems like the industry is dead set on forcing the perception that software development is hard science -- as in -- everything can and should be described in terms of fundamental data structures and algorithms. When the reality is, software development is 95% art and about 5% hard science.

The vast majority of clever algorithms and data structures can be implemented in less than 100 lines of code each. What accounts for the other millions of lines of code in a system such as the Linux kernel?

The world will never know...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Mobile Devs might be better versed in the UI layer as they would be more familiar. Could end up not having to need a "photoshop-designer".

We've used good developers on iOS projects, and while they would do ok with actual logic, they didn't do well when it came to Core Data or UIKit. It's not an education problem, but an interest issues. Most of them used Androids, the ones with iOS devices really didn't care much about UI.

But I kinda agree with this in other aspects.

<comment><USER17> That's a valid point. Although, we hire developers who are interested in becoming mobile developers. If you want to succeed as an iOS developer, Core Data and UIKit are essential to learn. If the person isn't interested in doing the front end then mobile dev probably isn't for them. That should come up in the interview process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Small nit pick, but I would be worried about a mobile development place that thinks it has only been around 8 years, not heard of J2ME, Symbian and Windows CE etc?

I do agree with the idea of hiring decent engineers and just training them, my only concern would be that without having had the mobile experience they might not know that they don't like it - it can be quite painful getting code to work nicely on a large collection of different hardware.

<comment><USER22> That is a pretty small nitpick you've got there ;)

It's a bit like saying "don't they know human flight existed before the Wright Bros." or "don't they know cars predate the Model T?"

Of course, but the iPhone (and subsequently Android) presented a gigantic turning point in mobile development, to such a degree that mobile development can largely be categorized into "pre-iPhone" and "post-iPhone".

Pre-iPhone mobile development was a vanishing small industry compared to today and used technologies that are largely completely not around today (see: J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE).

So yeah, maybe they could've said "mobile development in the modern context centered around multitouch-centric interfaces using soft keyboards has only been around 8 years", but that's kind of a mouthful, and unless we're trying to write an accurate history of mobile software, not particularly relevant to anything.

<comment><USER21> I would agree with the pre/post iPhone shift - but the likes of EA/Glu and other major games companies shifted an awful lot of apps pre iPhone.

The big shift is that touch became the only game in town (along with all the associated dev wrinkles). Also the demise of all content aggregators meant we could just upload our apps to a store and keep 70% (prior to this we got ~20% i.e. operator took 60-70%, aggregator took 30% and we got 50/50 on that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think this is mostly true for all successful companies, not just startups. You are looking to hire for the company and not for a particular position. Hire for talent and let them grow with the product/domain/technology.

<comment><USER17> I strong agree with this. It's important to hire people who are excited about the company and the environment. This will inspire them to learn/grow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Totally agree with the approach. Relevant - [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html) Although perhaps 'Smart and Gets Things Done' is an over-simplification.

<comment><USER25> You might like this [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets- things-...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets-things- smart.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What I can't seem to teach my project manager is that the App Store review process takes as long as it takes and other app store restrictions.

</comment><comment><USER27> On the other hand, programmers jumping from one industry to another build no domain knowledge. The result is that domain experts, such as accountants or telecom technicians, specify the requirements, which then get translated 1:1 to software design, no diligence applied. The result is shitty software.</comment>


They raised $400K for a homeless vet. There's none left to give him, lawyer says - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/09/04/they-raised-homeless-vet-theres-none-left-give-him-lawyer-says/ <comment><USER2> Good old fashion GoFundMe fraud.

>Bobbitt filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey couple who had raised more than $400,000 on GoFundMe to help him rebuild his life, alleging they'd withheld the money and spent it on vacations, gambling and a luxury car. A judge gave them until Sept. 3 to hand over the remaining funds. But a day after the deadline, a lawyer for Bobbitt said there's no money left to surrender

This is why I refuse to use GoFundMe, I think fraud like this is rampant and underreported. There's been many times when you see a sad story in the media and multiple GoFundMes are created for the person in the story by people who are unrelated to them, or some who are related but have less than honest motivations. It's just too ripe for fraud and abuse. Even if I 100% know the campaign is real, I won't use the platform out of principle.

They claim they would release the money once the homeless man got off of drugs. I don't even think that's appropriate, if they raised money for him they will have to accept he will spend it the way he wants.

<comment><USER3> I also tired of GoFundMe rather early. Every sap with a sob story had a GoFundMe. Now, some I feel true compassion for: funeral expenses, medical expenses, and the like.

But then I started seeing some that were like "Eh. Whatever". Stuff like "I need to buy my college books" or something where it's like "Yeah, you kinda need that, not really an emergency, but if you don't have the money and are trying to avoid credit, yeah, whatever".

Then the ones that are just blatant begging. "Hey, I want to go on vacation". "Hey, I want to move back home". "Hey, I want to be a streamer and I need all this equipment". Fucking sorry, mate. If I had $5 to pitch in for any of that, I'd pitch it into the "I'm gonna do that shit" fund before yours. I understand you need to live your best life, but not at my expense. Sad thing is that people I know have engaged in these.

And of course, just blatant fraud.

<comment><USER4> I mean the move back home one is kind of necessary. It means that the person failed to be independent away from their support network without being homeless

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why state welfare is so much better than random charity. People hate goverment bureaucracy, but it is there to make sure that money ends in the right hands. It is not 100% foolproof, but it is way better than this.

<comment><USER6> Don't donate to random charities, then. Donate to established ones with high levels of transparency or trust.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.givewell.org/](https://www.givewell.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How quickly they became corrupted by money. Hopefully they get prosecuted for fraud.

In their eyes a homeless man didn't deserve it all because of drug abuse, so instead they spent it on trips and a BMW for themselves.

[https://abc7.com/society/all-gofundme-money-is-gone- attorney...](https://abc7.com/society/all-gofundme-money-is-gone-attorney-for- homeless-man-says/4144230/)

<comment><USER9> I think that's just a defense strategy.

A pretty bad one I'd say, but I doubt they really thought they deserved the money because of his conditions. Sounds more like an excuse rather than a reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The right thing to do would have been to spend some of that $400k for a lawyer, to set up a trust with Bobbitt as the beneficiary and the lawyer as the trustee, put the principal into a no-fee index fund, and distribute $1000 per month, $200 (0.6% of principal annually) to the law firm for trust administration, and the rest to pay for Bobbitt's housing, utilities, food, and fuel, in that order. $12000 a year ain't much, but even if it doesn't keep the wolf from the door, it ensures the door continues to exist.

Then you step away from the funding campaign and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. If you're still self-interested, you hold out a secret hope that someone else sets up a campaign for you to reward your virtue and pay it forward.

And that's the same thing to do if you win the lottery. Pay a lawyer to handle the taxes and set up a trust, give yourself a (nearly) guaranteed inflation- adjusted income for life, and protect the principal from you and your temptations. Salesmen, scammers, and crooks can only milk you for a month at a time, instead of for everything you have all at once.

<comment><USER2> I'm wondering, can you set up those sorts of trusts for adults who have not been deemed incapable of handling finances?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is sad on multiple levels.

$10,000 would have helped him immensely. Could have put him up in an apartment for a while, gotten some new, fresh clothes, etc, and he probably could have started turning his life around.

$400,000 is life changing to most people. You can set yourself up in a reasonable situation with that kind of cash. Basic shelter and transportation at the very least. And that's a huge load off for most people.

So yeah, I can see the temptation when the nice thing you wanted to do explodes into basically winning the lottery.

So you start thinking about it. He's just a homeless guy with an opioid addiction. So you put up the barriers. He needs to get a job, he needs to be clean for X days/weeks/months.

And really, what's the legal obligation? I mean, you bought him a camper, a TV, a phone, a vehicle. You've done far in excess of $10,000. Why don't _you_ deserve something as well. Dude was just lucky the internet took to the story. Could have been anyone. I've paid him back. He wouldn't even have a whiff of this money if not for my compassion. Where's mine?

And then we're here. Fighting a homeless guy for a couple hundred thousand.

</comment><comment> j-c-hewitt GoFundMe is not about giving money to some dude, it's about looking like a good person. Indulgences were popular and successful because of this basic human need to posture as a good person. Charities often get away with double dealing behavior because absent strict controls, the tendency will be to structure the organization such that it's highly efficient at generating the appearance of goodness while the principals of the organization embezzle everything.

I remember this specific instance because it was being portrayed favorably on local TV news when I was visiting my inlaws, and I was characteristically a skeptical grinch. This confirmation that I wuz right about this has made my shrunken heart grow three sizes this day.

</comment><comment><USER11> Increasingly gofundme is looking like some large scale money laundering tool. Want to support political persons XYZ? Tell them to start a gofundme and then watch it magically fill up with hundreds of thousands of dollars

</comment><comment><USER12> This is sad.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, though mildly predictable. If true, which is yet to be seen, They probably saw the money and thought why should someone else get so much money while they continued to struggle.

<comment><USER14> In that case why start fundraising in the first place?

<comment><USER15> (Not apologizing for what is clearly fraud, and hopefully they will spend a bit of time in prison after having all their assets liquidated and turned over to Bobbitt through civil actions)

They started a fundraiser for $10,000, which ballooned unexpectedly to $400,000. If I had to guess, I would say that they thought that $10,000 was reasonable for Bobbitt, and would have "happily" turned it over. But $400,000 they saw as excessive and unreasonable -- like the GP said, "why should someone else get so much money while they continued to struggle". $10,000 wouldn't have changed their life in a significant way, but would have tremendously helped Bobbitt, but $400,000 probably just seemed frustratingly unfair -- it would give Bobbitt a lifestyle in excess of theirs, and the only reason the money was there was because they started the GoFundMe. So really, it's their money, when you really think about it, because they raised the funds. Right? Right?

<comment><USER16> Bobbitt was checked into rehab recently, too. Coke binge much?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This story is so emblematic of today's America. GoFundMe to help a veteran in need. Media attention leads to huge results. Everyone involved suffers from various addictions. Everything goes to shit. Lawyers, tech company and media likely the only ones making any money off this.

</comment><comment><USER18> sounds like jail time to me</comment>


Burglars can break into homes by copying sound of key in lock - <AUTHOR> https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/leisure/2020/08/27/burglars-can-break-into-homes-by-copying-sound-of-key-in-lock/ <comment><USER2> I have yet to find a single home or civilian office building in the US I can't non destructively enter with cheap tools.

Often you don't even need tools.

Code entry boxes on most apartment complexes and office buildings (including very commonly police stations) tend to use keyed alike keys you can straight up buy on Amazon.

Most call boxes: 16120 Most police cruisers: 1284

To add insult to injury most buildings are required to have spare keys in a Knox Box on the side of the building every fireman has keys to.

They wont sell you keys but they will sell you a box you can measure the pins on to cut a key anyway.

Locks are pretty much entirely security theater in the USA.

</comment><comment><USER3> With bump keys that can do the same job in 30 seconds or less, is there any advantage of this method? The first time I saw a locksmith use a bump key, I totally freaked out and ended up upgrading my locks to what he was recommending at that time - Mul-T-Lock.

</comment><comment><USER4> *theoretically can. And considering the caveats, I doubt this will ever become a realistic threat. This is harder to make work than kicking in a door, breaking a window, etc.</comment>


2013 Nissan Leaf Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/latest-reviews/top-selling-nissan-leaf-defies-expectations-article-1.1346946

<comment><USER2> Having used a Leaf twice for 2 full weekends in the North East of England I can say that I think it's a great car. It feels like driving the future of affordable family vehicles. In the short term it is only as a run around / second family car for weekday commuting and running to the shops. At UK electric prices the cost per mile is not quite as low as you would like, can't remember exactly what I worked it out to be but is was about 30% of the cost of a petrol mile - don't hold me to that though I can't quite remember.

The short range is a pain and the first weekend we used it we had 5 inches of snow and it was -5 so not ideal with the climate control on.

I have a close connection to someone who works at the Nissan plant where they are ramping up the production (Sunderland) and my understanding is that Nissan see this as a long term investment to be improved year on year to be a main stream alternative.

</comment><comment><USER3> MPG for electric cars - all explained here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_per_gallon_gasoline_equiv...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_per_gallon_gasoline_equivalent). Basically you convert everything to equivalent energy to do the comparison.

I leased a Nissan Leaf a couple of weeks ago as a commuter vehicle. I only did it because of the price, which was amazingly low, combined with the benefits of no gas, carpool lane access, and no emissions. What has surprised me is how much I like it as a car. It's rather cheap and cheerful materials, but it's thoughtfully designed, and drives great. Given the Federal rebate in the US, and the extra ones you get in California and other states, I highly recommend it. (particularly somewhere like the Bay Area, where there are charging stations everywhere)

<comment><USER4> That page is pretty funny:

"... research showed that participants did not understand the concept of a kilowatt hour as a measure of electric energy use despite the use of this unit in their monthly electric bills. Instead, participants favored a miles per gallon equivalent, MPGe, as the metric to compare with the familiar miles per gallon used for gasoline vehicles. The research also concluded that the kW-hrs per 100 miles metric was more confusing to focus group participants compared to a miles per kW-hr."

The fact that people find inverse consumption less confusing than consumption seems to indicate the they never actually do any calculations based on that number...

The problem with MPGe is that, while it makes for a nice number to compare to ICE vehicles, it entangles things like the average national efficiency of power plants with the energy consumption of the car, so it's impossible to calculate e.g. how much it will cost me to drive to work every day or how large a PV setup I need to supply my commuting energy need.

<comment><USER5> Oh yes, the classic "people won't understand that so let's go with the bad solution".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After the third paragraph sits this comparison with the Tesla Model S. [http://autos.nydailynews.com/compare/1525-1606-1613-3976/201...](http://autos.nydailynews.com/compare/1525-1606-1613-3976/2013-Tesla- Model-S-vs-2013-Ford-Focus-Electric-vs-2013-Honda-Fit-EV-vs-2013-Nissan- LEAF-S)

The word 'disingenuous' comes to mind, as you can see they've deliberately started off with a Tesla Model S column containing nothing but red "x" marks suggesting it lacks every feature of every other car. Looks like a disguised smear campaign to me.

<comment><USER7> Wow, it is also wrong - the tesla does have many of those features.

<comment><AUTHOR> They're comparing the $50K model, which is the most spartan Model S.

<comment><USER8> Right, and no "Driver and Passenger Seat Airbags?" Come on...

And now compared against the Signature Performance. [http://autos.nydailynews.com/compare/1528-1606-1613-3976/201...](http://autos.nydailynews.com/compare/1528-1606-1613-3976/2013-Tesla- Model-S-Signature-Performance-vs-2013-Ford-Focus-Electric-vs-2013-Honda-Fit- EV-vs-2013-Nissan-LEAF-S)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed; they have bullshit specs for the S.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reads a lot like a mildly massaged press release.

<comment><USER10> time to shove it into that text fluff analyser website that was linked a while ago, wish I'd remember its name.

<comment><USER11> <http://www.blablameter.com> ?

<comment><USER12> Your text: 3078 characters, 539 words Bullshit Index :0.24 Your text shows some indications of 'bullshit'-English, but is still within an acceptable range.

That's good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The stat sheet they have posted there has a lot of misinformation or misleading information/omissions...

<comment><USER14> Proof?

<comment><USER6> The stat sheet ([http://autos.nydailynews.com/compare/1525-1606-1613-3976/201...](http://autos.nydailynews.com/compare/1525-1606-1613-3976/2013-Tesla- Model-S-vs-2013-Ford-Focus-Electric-vs-2013-Honda-Fit-EV-vs-2013-Nissan- LEAF-S)) suggests that the Tesla S has none of the features of the other cars (including some obviously false claims like that it has no driver and passenger seat airbags). All of Tesla's features can be found here <http://www.teslamotors.com/models/features> Almost every one of those red 'x's placed in the Tesla column is a bold faced lie.

The stat sheet states outright that Tesla has no backup assist, video display, usb audio connections, bluetooth, climate control, navigation, on and on, and every single one of those is included as a feature on this section of the Tesla page: <http://www.teslamotors.com/models/features#/interior>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure it's a lie, per se: they're comparing to the $50K model which doesn't exist anymore. But even the current low end model at $67K doesn't include navigation.

EDIT: No, looking further at their database, they have no data at all for Tesla, and everything is pretty much wrong. Total fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I leased a Leaf about 3 days ago (24 not 36 months so I'm out of the $2,500 state rebate but I'd rather turn the car in, in 2 years and get another). Waiting at a Toyota charging station in Oakland, CA right now while the wife is getting a pedi. The Assistant Service Manager started to give me a hard time saying they only charge Toyota EV's, but his manager changed his mind. So far, so awesome. It's actually kind of exciting driving past gas stations.

My previous car was a sports cars (cayman) that I drove constantly over 80 MPH as a norm, and filled with 91 octane. (apx $4.15/gallon) The tires, the 60K service, brakes, etc. I just got tired of the expense and the looming expenses of owning a car like that. The Leaf is certainly a personal life change but I actually feel a bit relieved. I find myself chauffeuring my wife around more, which to be honest is kind of cool too. She feels it's too "technical" for her to feel comfortable driving, but that's just because she hasn't driven it yet.

<comment><USER16> The sports car thing must be a phase. I can't wait for the day I walk in to a dealer and drive out with an Audi R8 Spyder. And I am very non-luxurious with the rest of my expenses.

<comment><USER15> You'll grow out of it. It's really easy to grow out of $2k (slightly less) for tires. My advice is to stay clear of this sort of thing because you may fall in love.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Four seats, soft top convertible, for forty thousand or less, and then I will join the electric crowd. Currently we have this quirky little Nissan, the all too small 500e, and the big as a boat Tesla.

Give us something fun and environmentally friendly, thank you.

<comment><USER18> Given the drag that a convertible imposes, you're probably waiting a long time for that.

Are you sure the 500e is too small? None of the dealers I've called have one yet.

Don't forget the Honda Fit EV and Rav4 EV. The Rav4 is effectively a cheap tesla. But. Neither model is priced to compete like the leaf and 500e are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be awesome if the linked comparison chart wasn't full of errors (the Tesla apparently has NO features), included ranges (even best guesses) for each of the vehicles and mentioned whether the stated range of the Tesla was for the base price model.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've never understood 1 thing about the car industry – why are 90% of cars so boring- or even ugly-looking? Why don't the manufacturers make designs like the Tesla S?

<comment><USER21> Have you ever seen an Aston Martin, a ferrari, a lambo or a rolls royce? They all look fantastic. If you can charge 80k+ for a car you can invest time in making it look good.

The Leaf is 1/3 rd the price of the Model S.

<comment><USER20> That's what I don't understand. Does good design really add substantial cost to the car?

<comment><USER22> Luxury cars can start from the ground up. In the case of the Leaf, the first line is "start with a Nissan Versa..." Plus there are all kinds of trade-offs between aerodynamics, noise reduction, aesthetics, and cost.

Me, I'm fine with the looks of the Leaf. But we also own the original Scion xB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hmm I just read an article in Japanese regarding Nissan's struggles with the Leaf, so I'm not sure which story to believe.

<comment><USER24> Based on what I saw in Revenge of the Electric Car, I think they expected much more out of the Leaf than they've gotten so far. I think they were also aiming for 100 miles of range, though, and fell short of it by a significant margin...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's a nice chewy review: [http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/02/review- a-week-in-a-...](http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/02/review-a-week- in-a-2012-nissan-leaf/) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730002>

</comment><comment><USER16> 50,000 cars sold globally makes it the best selling electric car? I thought that number was very low and then I googled some stats - it seems that the mini cooper for example sells ~100,000 cars per year. Somehow I'd have expected for cars to sell like a million units to make their whole manufacturing profitable.

<comment><USER22> Sadly, yes, the Leaf is selling like dog shit sandwiches. The Chevy Volt is doing a little better, apparently. I don't know if it's those weekly trips from SFO to LA that people raise as an objection to EVs, or because a gasoline car is the safe bet. After almost two years of ownership, I can't imagine why anyone with the means wouldn't buy an EV as at least a second car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why the moderators not only changed the title, but changed to one that is NOT the article title?

Usually they do the opposite (and ruins a perfectly good title), not they did something consistant (ruined a title) while not following the guidelines they claim to follow (of renaming to follow the article title)</comment>


John Carmack Interview - <AUTHOR> http://www.nowgamer.com/print/feature/1308

<comment><USER2> I had the great pleasure of meeting Mr. Carmack recently (here's the photo proof: <http://jacoblear.com/carmack.jpg> ) and was able to listen to him talk casually, as opposed to in an interview or speaking event. He doesn't turn his brilliance on and off, it's there all the time.

When I was a kid, I wanted to do 2 things, make video games and go to space. Here we have a man who is a legend in the games industry, and also started a company sending rockets into space. He's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> "I just turned 40 and I can be programming for another 40 years; there's a lot yet to do!"

I love John Carmack.

</comment><comment><USER4> "...At the last Quakecon I took a show of hands poll, and it was interesting to see how almost as many people there had an Android device as an iOS device. But when I asked how many peple had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android store, there was a big difference. You're just not making money in the Android space as you are in the iOS space."

Interesting

<comment><USER5> But...are there _any_ $20+ games on the Android market? Are there any $20+ iPhone games, for that matter?

People will accept significantly higher prices for iPad games, because there's a different class of games that can be played on a tablet device. A phone's too small.

There's a bit of a catch-22 going on here in general, where Android users are spending less money on apps because there are fewer really good apps available. I'm one person who owns multiple devices. But I wind up spending lots of money on iOS because 1) there's plenty of good stuff, and 2) the app store is nicely designed to make me buy things.

<comment><USER6> The question he asked at Quakecon 2010 was actually "who has spent at least $20 on the Android app store?"[1], not just on a single game. Your catch-22 scenario still holds, though I think the quantity and quality of free apps in the Android app store has also raised the bar for pay apps.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SdC8LVODY&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SdC8LVODY&feature=player_detailpage#t=542s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm always happy to hear when developers optimize for refresh rate over graphical complexity, especially if competitive play will be involved.

<comment><USER8> Do you think 60Hz is the right rate? Just seems like such a huge jump over 30. Does 48 make more sense?

<comment><USER9> In competitive play it makes a big difference.

Each frame of a 60Hz game spans 16.66ms, while in a 30Hz game it's 33.33ms. Depending on how well the engine is coded, there will be at least one frame of latency between input and reactions, and maybe more. So we could be looking at the difference between 33 and 66 milliseconds of input latency, at least. This doesn't even consider latency from input to the computer, or from the computer to the display.

Now consider that we _react_ to events within about 200-300ms. 66ms of latency on top is going slow things down considerably, and when games are poorly coded and dump a few additional frames on top - which could happen because of propagation through events and subsystems, network latency, or animation concerns - the control starts to feel "wrong" in a hard-to-identify way.

<comment><USER10> Digital Foundry has a series of interesting articles about measuring input lag in console games; I think this is the first: [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag- factor-...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-factor- article)

<comment><USER11> Interesting article. I'm not much of a console gamer (not much of a gamer anymore in general) but those figures are horrifying for a PC gamer to look at! 100-150ms lag (not counting any network lag on-top) would be pretty hard to swallow for me, but I'm biased and have a bit of a purest view on these things. I guess the most important thing is that you have fun - in which case, if the game achieves this but lags a bit, who cares?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is why Carmack keeps shipping incredible products:

"I am more excited about what I'm doing and what I'm working on than ever before."

Great advice to those of us building companies, along the lines of the "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" quote banging around here recently</comment>


Ask HN: Is the term "Startup" always mean Tech Startup? - <AUTHOR>

I have always dreamed of building an startup but I have not yet reached a viable idea that I can start with.
So, I have a plan b - e-commerce. I have a product in mind that I want to sell online via Shopify. I won't manufacture the product myself.
The question is, does an e-commerce business (retail) qualify for the term "startup"? <comment><USER2> With all due respect, I'd wager you've already spent more time worrying about this issue than could ever possibly be warranted. "Startup" is just a word, nothing more. Do what _you_ want to do, quit worrying about how some people use a word.

But if you really care about the opinion of some random stranger on the 'net, I'd say that a "startup" does not have to be a "technology company" but I'd say the definition has more to do with the scalability of the company. If you're starting a restaurant that will never be more than one location, and will just provide income for the proprietors, then I'd say that isn't what I think of as a proper "startup." But a restaurant that's the first of a planned nationwide (or worldwide) chain, that expects to eventually do billions of dollars in revenue, I would count as a "startup."

On the flipside, just because a company is a "technology company" doesn't necessarily mean they'd be what I consider a startup. Look at the Micro-ISV movement and the idea of small software companies that aren't meant to scale up and grow big. I wouldn't consider those startups either.

If you expect to take outside funding, and see a potential path to an IPO, you probably have a "startup" by most standards. But, again... none of this crap really matters. Forget playing semantic games with labels and definitions and get to work, regardless of what you call it! :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> The term startup more reflect the growth curve than the type of business, is it something that could grow 10-100x+ fold in a short (~5 year) time period. So something like Groupon or Zappos could have been considered a startup even though they were essentially retail businesses they had that hockey stick growth curve.

Similarly a tech business which is very labour intensive (for example a consultancy firm) is unlikely to be a startup because scale that type of business tends to be a very slow and expensive process.

</comment><comment><USER4> The term "startup" varies depending on who you are talking to. To most people, "startup" simply means a new business. Around here, it seems to have a specific meanign that I will not atempt to elaborate on because I would only get it wrong.</comment>


Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/09/07/college-sports-major/ <comment><USER2> I agree with this somewhat. I'd go further and say that colleges should scrap the whole "unwritten rules" system. Why are surreptitious acceptance policies accepted in public-funded universities? If they're going to be lax on athletes for academic standards, why it taboo to discuss even though everyone knows it happens? We all know that rich donors get preferred admission as well. Can't we just be honest about it instead of pretending that the system isn't corrupted? We can't improve without acknowledging any failings.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of the college that only offered sports:

[http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/19136428/the- dow...](http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/19136428/the-downfall- america-first-sport-only-college)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have an optimal time allocation for cognitively draining tasks? - <AUTHOR> Naturally I fall into a trap of cognitively inefficient behavior that I guess most people do: I work too long, and then I spend too much time consuming news feeds and comments, or playing video games.<p>I realize I need to better understand how to give myself better rest periods, better leisure time, and more-focused work periods. <comment><USER2> I suck at this too. I force myself to take out long walks (luckily, Spring is just starting around here, which means that they'll become pleasant again!) just to clear my head and unplug for 2 hours.

Other than that, my conclusion is that I have maybe 25 hours of focused work per week in me. Maybe if I did absolutely nothing else in life (i.e. literally lie in bed and stare at ceiling when not working), my mental capabilities would regenerate faster and thus I could work more, but what is the point of a life like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's tangentially related, but I highly recommend the Coursera course _Learning How To Learn_ for more insight into how your brain works. The course discusses procrastination and how to work with it.

Specifically, I'd recommend pomodoros, sleep, exercise, and the balance between focus and diffuse mode. The latter could be something as simple as taking an hour walk to let your brain process in the background, and I've found that all four are helpful.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have struggled in the past with making progress on draining tasks.

I have takes a slightly different approach.

I try to get a little bit of time in on my top long term goals on a more regular basis.

I am using mini habits method to overcome lack of motivation or other barriers my brain puts up.

See [https://tysonmaly.com/books/how-to-make-habits-the-easy- way/](https://tysonmaly.com/books/how-to-make-habits-the-easy-way/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you tried pomodoro?</comment>


Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://plus.maths.org/content/ramanujan <comment><USER2> An interesting coincidence: it was recently (2019) discovered that the fastest way to multiply two n-bit integers, in time O(n log n), involves 1729-dimensional Fourier transforms: [https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-02070778](https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02070778). It is quite surprising that the asymptotically best way to perform such an elementary operation should be tied to Ramanujan's famous taxicab number.

(Technically, it works for any number of dimensions >= 1729, but the proof fails for dimensions less than that. Future work might bring the bound down, or better explain why that bound is necessary.)

<comment><USER3> In fact, there seems to be a lot of interesting things about 1729: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_\(number\))

<comment><USER4> I love how the article starts with the most boring facts about 1729:

> 1729 is the natural number following 1728 and preceding 1730.

<comment><USER5> Heh. I've been reading HN for long enough to never be surprised by the capability of incredibly pedantic people to be incredibly pedantic.

<comment><USER6> We had to have a home somewhere :) And this is it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He credited his work to his family goddess. From wikipedia:

"A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. "An equation for me has no meaning," he once said, "unless it expresses a thought of God.""

<comment><USER8> Mathematics are the best expression of the transcendental divine. Pythagoras and Plato had the same perspective.

<comment><USER9> Funny to use the word transcendental there, since the Pythagoreans held ratios to be divine but couldn't figure out irrational numbers, like pi. They had trouble squaring that circle.

<comment><USER8> That's why I think Pythagoras refused to write down his doctrines. He knew there was more to be empirically discovered -- and he was wary of how text could become dogma. The divine he uncovered was based on a mathematical, harmonious cosmos; but he recognized it was beyond understanding in a lifetime. That's why Pythagorean mysticism is compatible with modern science -- he didn't write anything down!

2000 years later, Kepler had faith in a harmonious cosmos, and charged his model of harmony so it could fit the evidence. He elipsed the circles, instead of squaring them.

Fun fact #1: it is impossible to square a circle [1]

Fun fact #2: the Pythagoreans conducted the first attested scientific experiment in Western history (according to a recent PhD thesis at UMich [2])

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle)

[2] [https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/150050](https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/150050)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great read! When you first hear the taxicab number story, your initial impression is to be struck by Ramanujan's innate calculating capability. It's interesting to find out that the real coincidence here is that Hardy rode in a taxicab whose number had happened to show up in Ramanujan's investigations of Fermat's last theorem.

<comment><USER11> A lot of genius stories are like this. I was also under the illusion that these guys could just do things that fast, but at some point, I read Feynman's biography where he explicitly talks about how he used to solve homework problems or something beforehand and then he used to pretend that he found the solution while solving it if his classmates asked.

That threw me for a loop and I started believing shit like no one's smarter than I was etc. Then I just ... grew up, I guess. And I remembered this story by Feynman and I realised that despite his absolutely undoubtable genius, he'd have appeared godlike to me if I was his classmate back in the day.

Ramanujan's brain worked even faster by most accounts. He dreamed in math, I think. So there are multiple stories where people ask him a puzzle and he'll answer with an equation that solves it for the entire family of problems that the puzzle could come from.

<comment><USER12> What was the quote about Feynman? That he loved to cultivate anecdotes about himself or something similar? Makes a lot of his stories make a lot more sense, too.

<comment><USER13> i recall him explaining several shortcuts one can use to solve problems in seemingly impossible speeds by drawing on a breadth of experience from similar problems that you have memorized or are easy to compute and interpolating.

its still genius but not in the sense of actually being able to do huge calculations in ones head the way a computer would.

<comment><USER14> Often it's also simply just that people are not _used to_ thinking about more efficient ways of solving a problem.

There's a (quite possibly apocryphal) story about Niels Henrik Abel in primary school, where his teacher supposedly wanted time to do some grading and assigned the students the busywork of adding up all numbers from 1 to 100. Abel supposedly quickly found the well known formula n(n+1)/2 and gave the teacher the answer within minutes, and the teacher supposedly believed he'd somehow "cheated" because he could not imagine any of them could figure it out.

I have no idea if the story is real (I grew up in Norway, so Abel was a popular subject for stories like this) - it was told to me in high school by a maths teacher after giving us the modified task of seeing if we could find any shortcuts to doing the sums, and seeing what we'd come up with. I found the formula quickly, but at that age that's nothing special, especially not when prompted to find an alternative solution.

But the overall idea the teacher was trying to get us to understand was how to pause and think about how to decompose a problem rather than just picking the most obvious alternative, and learning to be "lazy" in the sense of relentlessly looking for an easier way to do things is a large part of what got me into software development..

<comment><USER15> When I heard this story it was about Gauss.

And I looked it up- Yes, the same possibly apocryphal story is on his Wikipedia page: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss)

<comment><USER14> Interesting. Not surprised this is the kind of story people might have adapted rather freely to sound more familiar to a local audience...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The taxi cab story is easily a top-5 math story, and is quintessential Ramanujan.

Has there been a genius of his kind since? Maybe Terry Tao, but his work also lacks the ease and lack of machinery that Ramanujan had. Truly amazing.

<comment><USER17> What are the other 4 top math stories?

For me one of them has to be of Évariste Galois[1], who, legend has it, hastily wrote fragments of his last mathematical discoveries on his shirt sleeves before fighting the duel that would end his life.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois)

<comment><USER18> Fun mathematical tourism stop: go up to the top of the Tour Montparnasse. Look straight down. Galois is buried in the cemetery below. Nobody knows where, but he's down there somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10518452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10518452)

</comment><comment><USER20> I always found Ramanujan very intriguing. He operates on a dimension that is unknown to most of us. Makes me wonder if he is a great yogi or a time traveler.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fantastic article that explains the math (and physics) very clearly.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting read, The title should have 2015 in it though.

<comment><USER19> Added. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ramanujan also claimed 1 + 2 + 3 + ... = -1/12.

How does that work? Who can explain this to me?

<comment><USER24> I think this is basically a "shock value" interpretation of a more subtle statement. Obviously adding strictly-positive numbers does not result in a negative number under normal arithmetic. Check the numberphile video and you may be simultaneously irritated and disappointed.

<comment><USER25> Burkard Polster's (Mathologer) videos on the subject are probably going to be more useful than Numberphile. Numberphile merely presents a trick; Mathologer points out _both_ that it's patent nonsense [0] and that it's _useful_ patent nonsense [1].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Don't we think that the credit for the number 1729 should belong to Hardy, for he took the cab and mentioned that number to Ramanujan. Of course, Ramanujan could see beauty in every number and would have produced something equally beautiful for some other number Hardy could utter.</comment>


Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/minitel/530646/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Minitel had one huge drawback: it was too good. It put France a solid 4 years behind the rest of the world when the web hit. Everything in France was done via Minitel, and in the beginning the web was still so small and capable of much less that the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had. But that changed rapidly and before long the head start turned into a lag and a ton of inertia. The world had nothing to compare the web with so that's what it moved to at an incredible clip. Roughly around 1996/1997 France saw the light and then they moved quite rapidly.

Even so it took until 2012(!) before Minitel was finally decommissioned.

<comment><USER3> > the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they > already had

What they didn't see though was that Internet was a decentralized, truly democratic network unlike Minitel and the likes (e.g. CompuServe, AOL, Bitnet I think?). For its time Minitel was quite good aesthetically and in terms of UI, but as a centralized consumer-oriented network it had no chance to compete with the Internet.

<comment><USER4> It was not totally centralized technically. You could host your own full service, using your own modem banks and servers. The drawback was that you would not be discoverable in the minitel directory and you would not get the billing system etc. People needed to know your phone number and dial it to connect.

Minitel took a long time to die because it was a cash cow, both for France Telecom and service providers. The economic model was very simple: users pay the time spent online, and the revenue is shared between the telco and the service provider. No ads, no tracking ;)

It was also successful because every household got a Minitel for free in the mid-80's, when personal computers were very uncommon. And if you had a computer, you could use the Minitel as an external model with a serial port adapter and reach BBSes! Because of that I once had to explain to my parents why I was spending hours calling a number in Germany, which was not a cheap thing :P

<comment><USER5> > every household got a Minitel for free

People got minitels (available for free) because phone books were eliminated, so even people not interested by the online world (shopping, train/flight reservations, dating "sites", high school diploma results, weather forecast, etc...), would get one in order to be able to look up phone numbers.

<comment><USER6> Phone books were not eliminated. Minitel gave you access to the phone numbers in the whole country, whereas phone books were limited to your department (for foreigners: France is divided in about 100 departments).

<comment><USER5> Seems correct - weird, I was sure this was the case... They are eliminating the white pages only now:

[https://www.nextinpact.com/news/98960-les-annuaires- pagesbla...](https://www.nextinpact.com/news/98960-les-annuaires- pagesblanches-ne-seront-plus-distribues-a-partir-2018.htm)

So it was only hosehold with a minitel that stopped receiving white pages:

"les foyers équipés de Minitel ne recevaient plus que les pages jaunes" (Homes with Minitel received the yellow pages only)

[http://obligement.free.fr/articles/histoire_minitel.php](http://obligement.free.fr/articles/histoire_minitel.php)

<comment><USER7> You ll find more about the minitel history here: [http://www.inaglobal.fr/telecoms/article/du-minitel- linterne](http://www.inaglobal.fr/telecoms/article/du-minitel-linterne)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As stated by Jacquesm, Minitel slowed down Internet deployment in France. Every bank, mail ordering sellers or alike already had their Minitel "site" (in which they invested money) so jumping in the new train took time.

At the end of the 90's, I had to develop a Minitel Emulator for a French bank who wanted to put PC based kiosks where people could have many informations (static coded texts) but also connect to their accounts. Not a web kiosk (we were specialized in that at the time). A minitel one.

<comment><USER9> Just for the record: We had a similar experience with banks in Germany, it was called "Bildschirmtext" or "BTX". It took a long time and a lot of emulators until they finally adopted the Internet. Besides this, BTX was not as omnipresent as Minitel was in France.

<comment><USER7>
      "Bildschirmtext" (BTX) is almost as old as Minitel and
      technically very similar, but it was largely unsuccessful
      because consumers had to buy expensive decoders to use it.
      The German postal service held a monopoly on the decoders
      that prevented competition and lower prices. Few people
      bought the boxes, so there was little incentive for
      companies to post content, which in turn did nothing to
      further box sales. When the monopoly was loosened, it was
      too late because PC-based online services had started to
      appear.

[http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countrie...](http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countries)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surprisingly, the Internet is becoming centralized like the Minitel was. Is history repeating itself?

<comment><USER11> Specifically, the Apple app eco system comes to mind.

<comment><USER12> Apple's apps have nothing to do with an open or closed Internet.

<comment><USER13> But people seem to think that and they have a reason. When apps replace web content, they quite clearly have something to do with the Internet. Web is part of the Internet. Isn't this obvious?

<comment><USER12> People like the guy I responded to think that because they have an axe to grind against Apple. Notice how he said "Apple's app ecosystem" and not "Android app ecosystem", when Google's platform is just as robust? And didn't Microsoft start it with ActiveX and IE? Or how about "Works best with Netscape Navigator"?

But no, it's Apple's fault. Everything is Apple's fault.

<comment><USER7> Maybe I'm wrong but my interpretation was quite different.

To me he's just pointing out a fact, to me along the 20+ years since I've been aware of the issue many things happened or didn't happen but a few specific things come out of the pack, including the one he cited.

To me you came out as the apple fanboy who cannot stand that apple is part of the issue and that it is undeniably apple who popularized the "app store" model, emblematic of the problem at hands. It's only after apple's success that the others followed suit and copied the model to recreate their own distinct impossible to interconnect ecosystem. Even Mozilla has one now.

Yes Apple is among the GAFAM who are to blame among many others for the current state of things, but ultimately the failure is in us who chose voluntary submission to new masters, who failed to use our technical knowledge to provide to other less technically inclined, who failed to force ISP to offer the means to self host, and so on

I guess this is quite an illustration of "don't argue with fools, from a distance people may not be able to tell the difference".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've always wondered how much Tim Berners-Lee was inspired by Minitel given the fact that he must have frequently seen or even used them in the area around CERN.

<comment><USER15> The UK had Prestel [1], it wasn't nearly as widely used as Minitel though.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Funny anecdote : the founder of "free" internet provider, xavier niel, made his first bucks running a minitel service ( an erotic service iirc, what people called "minitel rose"), then later completely disrupted french internet dsl access by offering unlimited high speed access for a few bucks a month. I worked at france telecom at the time ( the old monopolistic company that owned all the coper lines), and i remember employees not believing this offer to be real.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interestingly, the minitel solved the monetization problem as visitors would automatically be billed by the phone company at the rate chosen by the service they visited.

<comment><USER7> Somehow this does not add up with the PTSN era of the internet and with the current options to be billed on your ISP bill such as internet+[1].

[1]: [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+) [http://internetplus.fr/](http://internetplus.fr/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never got to use a Minitel. :(

Don't forget Plato. That was my first experience with a networked computer. In about 1985 in Escanaba Michigan no less.

I remember chatting with someone on the Dungeons and dragons type Wizardry game & learning they were in California. Whoa! ( I was about 10 or 11 )

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I)

</comment><comment><USER19> People who find this interesting may like to read more about the AlohaNET, PRNET, SATNET and AMPRNet.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Aloha_and_PRNET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Aloha_and_PRNET)

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Minitel was also used a lot for chatrooms (most of them for sexual purposes). Of course most of the women in those chatrooms where men working for the service. A few guys has made a lot of money with it (the creator from "Free" french internet provider). It is extremly funny because on the picture you can see a list of nicknames, it looks like some bdsm chatroom :)

<comment><USER7> Also Marc Simoncini (creator of meetic), and there's a few others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The real minitel was a public domain modem comms program for MS-DOS/PC-DOS created by the brilliant Tom Jennings in 1983 (the FidoNet guy).

<comment><USER22> From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel) :

 _The service was rolled out experimentally in 1978 in Brittany and throughout France in 1982_</comment></comment>


Let's use cruise ships. Move ships around coastal cities where needed - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/forwardsanti/status/1242532500431396865 <comment><USER2> Because that worked so well for the quarantined ships?

Wouldn't be surprised if cruise ship design promotes disease spread, and hospital ship design does not.</comment>


Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (1992) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp <comment><USER2> This book is timeless classic that is not getting old.

It's basically two things:

* Learn to program book written in very basic old school Common Lisp. Or, learn to program after you already know how to program. If you never really dwell deeply into code that others write to improve your own skills this is good book so start. It's programming as art or literature.

* Overview of some old AI techniques, interpreters and parsers. Old AI techniques are today's good to know heuristic algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER3> Peter Norvig is probably my favorite online teacher, from the AI class in 2011 to his Design of Computer Programs on Udacity. His attitude is inviting, and his exposition clear.

The kerning in the PDF looks weird on my Mac, but it's really cool that this is available.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please check again, now there are better PDFs in the repository.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, it's great this book is now available online for free!

It's definitely one of my all-time-favorite programming books - my own copy is well worn by use. It's not exactly cutting edge AI in 2018, but the general programming advice is timeless and the AI samples can be seen as a fun domain to play in.

<comment><USER5> Based on the repository description I thought it was just the code examples, but wow yeah it's the whole thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This book is excellent. The AI stuff might be a little dated, but if you've read some intro to Common Lisp books and want to learn more about how to use the language, this is a great place to dive in.

As someone mentioned, this particular scan/OCR has some wonky kerning. If you happen to be an ACM member with access to their library there's a much nicer PDF available there.

<comment><USER7> This is heartening news - I bought the e-book of PAIP a while ago, and the OCR in it is horrible, with many errors (although perhaps they were deliberate, to keep readers on their toes?).

<comment><AUTHOR> Please check again, looks like there is a new version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My favorite programming book.

The chapters on performance tuning are timeless. Following Norvig's thought process on how to develop computer programs is like pair programming with one of the best programmers of all time.

<comment><USER9> Only second to the SICP book, but yeah, I agree. Fantastic read and timeless advices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Was slowly re-reading the paper version looking for the particular phrase :) . Search in electronic version got it quickly... but it's still cool to read the book, even though author recommend to go to "AI: modern approach".

The quote I was looking for (found when reading the book earlier, then forgot the exact place):

"To put things in perspective, consider that Lisp is at once one of the highest-level languages available and a universal assembly language. It is a high-level language because it can easily capture data, functional, and control abstractions. It is a good assembly language because it is possible to write Lisp in a style that directly reflects the operations available on modern computers."

<comment><USER11> Is there any example of this assembly style of programming in Lisp?

<comment><USER12> Any time people claim that Lisp is a functional programming language, I like to drag out this example posted by Joe Marshall to comp.lang.lisp[1]:

        (DEFUN RDSYL (L DF)
          (PROG (LL BRAKP ANS CH)
                (SETQ DF (MERGEF DF '((* *) * *)))
             AA (SETQ LL (SETQ BRAKP () ))
              A (SETQ CH (OR (CAR L) #/_))
                (COND ((OR (= CH #/ ) (= CH #//))     ;"/", " "
                       (POP L)
                       (SETQ CH (CAR L)))
                      ((AND (= CH #/[) (NOT #%(ITSP)))    ;"["
                       (SETQ BRAKP 'T))
                      ((AND (= CH #/]) (NOT #%(ITSP))) (SETQ BRAKP () )) ;"]"
                      ((OR (= CH #/( ) (= CH #/) )) (RETURN () ))  ;Cant have parens here
                      ((= CH #/,)     ;Comma
                       (COND ((NOT BRAKP)
                              (POP L)
                              (GO RET))))
                      ((= CH #/_) (GO RET)))
               (PUSH CH LL)
               (POP L)
               (GO A)
          RET  (SETQ DF (MERGEF (NAMELIST (MAKNAM (NREVERSE LL))) DF))
               (SETQ ANS (NCONC ANS (LIST DF)))
               (AND (= CH #/,) (GO AA))
               (RETURN ANS) ))

There is a lot of this kind of code around in the various Lisp Machine sources (CADR is legally available for poking around in[2]). Occasionally things like this pop up in contemporary Lisp compilers or IO/concurrency libraries. Some algorithms are much easier to express with _goto_.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/4nwskBo...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/4nwskBo3FR0/cmVlCio6s64J)

[2] [http://www.unlambda.com/cadr/](http://www.unlambda.com/cadr/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the best books on programming there is. Every time I get the gumption to work on one of the chapters from this cookbook, I always learn something new.

:+1:

</comment><comment><USER14> I've lightly skimmed this book in the past and got an impression that it is a collection of intros to bunch of subjects. For those who read it thoroughly - do you think this book is useful for experienced devs who are aware/knowledgeable (from other sources) in most (or all) of the subjects mentioned? Or maybe this book is aimed for more beginners, e.g. as a second book after SICP or similar?

<comment><USER15> I had the same impression when it first came out and I dipped into it in the bookstore a couple times: it looked like a good treatment of a bunch of topics I'd mostly already been introduced to.

This misses what I found most valuable when I did get around to it. There's another thread up on HN right now, "Nobody's just reading your code". Back then I read a lot of code from books, and read more actively by treating it like a reviewer: how could this code be clearer or otherwise better, how else might you do it? Most of the time, in many other books, you wouldn't get far before seeing some clear improvement. In PAIP this basically never happened. Often enough I would think of something, but if you worked it out in detail there was some less-obvious reason the code was the way it was. At one point I spotted a bug, and he wrote back that it'd been a year since the last bug report, and he'd started to hope there weren't any more.

All the code in the book is pretty short, and it's not really "production code", but it's enough to be an education in craftsmanship at every level. I found that more interesting than the object-level topics, though they're worth learning about too.

Nowadays if you prefer Python you can get a similar experience at [https://github.com/norvig/pytudes#pytudes-index-of- jupyter-i...](https://github.com/norvig/pytudes#pytudes-index-of-jupyter- ipython-notebooks) treating different examples.

One more personal reaction I had to this book: feeling like here was someone else with some of the same values. (Only, you know, smarter.) Someone with a similar taste, who couldn't resist coming back to their code repeatedly well after it's "done". The work in the end looks pragmatic, but sort of an idealized pragmatism: you have to really want to produce your best work, to work that hard over it.

<comment><USER14> pytides looks interesting. I wonder if he ever produced (or worked on) a similar material/project using statically typed traditional languages.

<comment><USER15> He cowrote a Scheme interpreter in Java -- you can find it on his webpage. There are some projects from others on implementing algorithms from AIMA in other languages, such as this one that just came up in my feed the other day: [https://github.com/MrDupin/aima-go](https://github.com/MrDupin/aima-go)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. Wish I'd found this a month ago. I just bought yet another paper copy (the binding of the paper version is not very durable).

</comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome! I lost my copy or borrowed it to somebody and do not remember who or when.

Either way, this was one of the most fun programming books I have ever read, Lisp or no Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER18> I bought this a long time ago and never took the time to go through it. I should correct that, maybe this reminder will get me to finally dig in.

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome. I have had this much-recommended book sitting on the shelf for a year now and this is a helpful reminder that I should start on it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't know why the title of the submission has been changed. It's not only the code, a PDF of the book is in the repository, too.

<comment><USER20> 962 pages. It'll be a while I guess.

<comment><USER21> Yes, it seems big. Tried to download the PDF on my mobile earlier, Android said the file is too big. Same for the text file :) First time I've seen that message. Checking it out on PC now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea I distinctly remember learning memoisation from this book. Great memories!</comment>


A parking space in Hong Kong sold for nearly $700,000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-14/hong-kong-parking-space-sells-for-record-664-300-ming-pao-says <comment><USER2> Back in 2012, someone was asking $1 million for a 12'x23' space at 66 East 11th Street, NYC

[http://nypost.com/2012/05/20/the-1-million-parking- space/](http://nypost.com/2012/05/20/the-1-million-parking-space/)</comment>


The Quantum Origin of Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160708-the-past-is-not-set-in-stone-so-we-may-be-able-to-change-it <comment><USER2> > If you watched a video of two billiard balls colliding and bouncing away, > you would be unable to tell if it was being run forwards or backwards.

I've seen this image used more than once to make the point, but now I think about it, I don't think it works. It is only acceptable if we think of billiard balls as ideal elastic spheres. They are good illustrations of the concept of "ideal elastic sphere" in our material life -- but they aren't, really, and that destroys the thought experiment.

Let's run the tape at super-duper slo-mo, shall we? The two balls slowly approach, collide, rebound. But now at super-duper slow-mo we can see that, being actual collections of atoms, they behave somewhat like water-balloons. At the point of contact, there is deformation, flattening, and rings of compression waves radiate away, to meet at the other side of sphere, interfere, and come back. (Something of the sort happened to Saturn's moon Mimas.)

So if we play the video in reverse, it is quite easy to tell the "before" from the "after". In reverse, we have balls that, as they roll toward each other, develop increasing concentric ripples of deformation that start from the opposite sides and shrink rapidly to the contact faces, disappearing completely at the moment of contact, and two unperturbed balls separate.

The only way the billiard balls image works is if we instead use ideal perfect spheres of adamantium. Even balls of titanium or diamond would have some kind of internal elastic shape change that would exist only "after" and not "before" the collision.

Which is simply to admit that in the real world, there are no collisions that are actually reversible even in principle.

<comment><USER3> It's the old,"A farmer has three chickens that won't lay eggs. So he calls a vetrinarian, and he can't help. So he calls a biologist, and she can't help. So finally he calls a physicist.

The physicist takes copious notes, precise measurements, and spends the rest of the day furiously scribbling in his notebook. Finally the physicist shouts excitedly, and rushes into the farmhouse.

The farmer says, "Did you figure it out?" And the physicist says, "I did! But it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum."

<comment><USER4> I thought the canonical version of the joke was about a spherical cow[0].

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

<comment><USER3> Idealized spherical cows in a vacuum reduce to idealized spherical chickens in a vacuum if you work out the math ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to really blow your mind with regards to time, look at QED. I highly recommend the Feynman lectures.

The net result of quantum interference is that light tends to move at the speed of light, particles tend to move forward through time, but only because everything else mostly cancels itself out.

(The rest of this is slightly rambling, but so was the article so it's hard to comment without matching it, so dusting off my very rusted physics degree...)

With Multiple-Worlds, I think the delayed-choice experiments more show that each universal snapshot is inherently self-consistent, rather than retro- casual. Any non-consistent snapshot is just canceled out. Meaning, there was probably a universe in which the 2-slit delayed-choice experiment didn't show interference, but it didn't survive past the delayed choice boundary. Now, the really big question (to which people keep arguing no, but I have doubts) is can you establish faster-than-light communication using a delayed-choice style effect by essentially canceling out any casualty that doesn't agree with your communication.

My personal favorite for explaining the directionality of time is looking at the boundary conditions. If you assume that at time T0 around the big bang, the universe looked like X, then it requires that particles move away from it in spacetime (otherwise it wouldn't look like X anymore). Thus, there is probably an antimatter version going the other direction in time away from us. Away from the boundary, entropy-like effects would prevent the odd positron coming back in time at just the right moment to produce a non-local causality violation.

<comment><USER6> That sounds like it might be testable by looking at the CMB for evidence of interference with the antimatter universe. It lso looks a bit like a solution to the whole "why is there more matter than antimatter" question. That's a very interesting hypothesis you've got there. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems that if we speak of information traveling "backwards in time", we must make an assumption of a global time (against which to travel) -- but isn't that (global synchronized time) known to be a myth?

What if each particle/object has its own relative time frame? Doesn't that solve the problem without needing to invoke "retro-temporal causality"?

For example, in the double slit experiment, perhaps the wave/particle and the slits form a local time frame group, within which no further waveform collapse is necessary. When this group interacts with the "environment", it may or may not have to collapse a large set of possibilities into a smaller set. If that environment includes a system which requires particle-like behavior, the interaction resolves to particle like behavior (as opposed to wave interference). The interaction of the "slit-particle/wave group" with the "environment group" would be a "synchronization event" of sorts which actually determines "causality". No backward time travel necessary if the "arrowed" forward motion of time _is_ the act of waveform collapse. Causality of this sort would affect trajectories we perceive as spanning into the "past" (because we tend to want to view time as globally synchronized), even if in reality that whole past-present trajectory was just a superposition of all possibilities, until resolved via interaction of other "quantum timeframes".

Does that make sense to anyone else? Apologies if this is obviously true or false -- I'm not a physicist, but do love thinking/learning about this stuff :)

<comment><USER8> Not a physicist either, but I will give it a shot. Relativity tells us that their is no universal time ordering of arbitrary events, you can find reference frames where A occurs before B and where B occurs before A if the events occur at different positions in space. There is nonetheless still a global causal ordering of events - events can only be influenced by events in their past light cone and they can only influence events in their future light cone and light cones do not change when you switch reference frames so everybody agrees on this causal ordering.

I also think your view of quantum effects has some misconceptions. A photon is what it is, it does not switch between particle like and wave like behavior. It goes neither through one slit, nor through the other, nor through both or neither. It is really different from a classical wave or a classical particle. But that is just the way the universe works, the strange thing is not what the photon does, but that macroscopic objects do not behave like quantum objects.

I am not so sure about that one, but I think there are not so many people believing that the wave function collapse is a real fundamental thing. It is just incompatible with the unitary evolution of the wave function and causes you all the trouble figuring out what constitutes a measurement and what not. This is obviously an open problem but the collapse postulate is probably viewed as an approximation at best by most.

And the problem of the arrow of time kind of sits on top of the problem what time is in the first place. One view I picked up recently makes a lot of sense to me but I did not have much time yet to really look at it in some depth. Anyway, here we go. Fundamentally all fundamental particles are massless and travel at the speed of light. This kind of removes the need for time, massless particles travelling at the speed of light experience no time and if everything just moves at the speed of light there is no real need to use time to describe velocities, changes of position over time, because it is implied due to everything moving at the speed of light.

But then fundamental particles interact with each other, they attract and repel one and another. This opens the possibility that the composite system of several fundamental particles moves at a speed slower than the speed of light while all the constituents still just move at the speed of light. It are only the composite systems that are not following lightlike trajectories which experience time. One just compares the rate at which processes occur in composite systems to establish a time base.

Take a photon clock, a photon bouncing back and forth between two mirrors a fixed distance apart. All the electrons, quarks and gluons in the mirrors travel at the speed of light but the composite system is at rest from your point of view. The events of the photon hitting one mirror and then the other establish a time base for you. If you then boost the photon clock away from you with a very high speed, maybe close to the speed of light, the photon takes longer to bounce back and forth between the mirrors because it moves still at the speed of light but the mirror kind of runs away from the photon, that is time dilation. And if you boost another person along with the mirror and look at the cells of that person you see the same thing, molecules take longer to move around and reach their destination because all the parts of the cell move with a high speed and velocities do not simply add linearly, the person ages slower.

As said, I had not yet the opportunity to really look into this way of thinking. Especially I am not sure if really all mass stems from dynamic processes or if there are some fundamentally massive things out there. Maybe someone can provide some further insides whether this is a valid or helpful way of thinking about it.

<comment><USER9> You might enjoy this:

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and- ar...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of- time.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _In other words, a putative "future memory" is fine-tuned to a particular > outcome, and must be readjusted if any slight change occurs between now and > the appearance of the "remembered" future state. That means it is too > fragile to count as a genuine memory._

Or perhaps it's enough if "future memories" just become more and more fuzzy as they refer to events further and further away into the future.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Yet none of this one-way flow of time is apparent when you look at the fundamental laws of physics: the laws, say, that describe how atoms bounce off each other. Those laws of motion make no distinction about the direction of time."

I'm not certain precisely what laws we're talking about, but I'm having a reaction that this argument may be specious due to the fact that the known fundamental laws of physics are human constructions, not the entirety of all that is possible. Most of the physical laws I know were specifically designed to factor out time; conservation of mass & energy equate state before and after an event, and prove nothing else. This article seems to be suggesting that the known "laws" of physics do encompass everything possible and thus the lack of a law proving the existence of time somehow proves that time doesn't exist (or is bi-directional).

</comment><comment><USER9> If you like thinking about this sort of thing you might want to read this:

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and- ar...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of- time.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I wanted to like this article, but it seems very confused. The essential premise, that the arrow of time is a QM process rather than a classical thermodynamic one, isn't presented as much as reams of background on the general topic are.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it more for its interest (to me) as a long scientific article from a popular news outlet on a topic I'd never heard about before. It looks like it may be a re-working of this older article :

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140416-times-arrow- traced-t...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140416-times-arrow-traced-to- quantum-source/) and of course the underlying scientific papers:

[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/14/1/013...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/14/1/013063)

[http://math.rutgers.edu/~oldstein/papers/TypicalDecayLett03....](http://math.rutgers.edu/~oldstein/papers/TypicalDecayLett03.pdf)

<comment><USER12> I appreciate the additional reading very much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Actually isn't time's arrow pointing in the direction of information being increased? Entropy as defined in Claude Shannon's information-theoretic sense is actually correlated with information. More entropy means more information. And indeed, intuitively, we have more information as time goes on (about the past) and not the other way around. If you assume that information does not travel backwards in time - then you once again get that information increases in the direction of time. The article stated it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER14> Am I unusual in being constantly surprised when people assume time's arrow in everyday conversation? I can never quite accept the sheer oddness and asymmetry of it.

<comment><USER15> It does sound very unusual to be surprised by that, yes. Although it is understandable that your surprise is constant.

<comment><USER16> Well done! I'm reminded of an Ani Difranco song that was playing back in my college days: perhaps parent is a goldfish?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The grammar is atrocious. And why are all of the paragraphs only a sentence or two long? Is this the ELI5 quantum physics/philosophy column?

</comment><comment><USER18> God, the double slit experiment drives me absolutely crazy

</comment><comment><USER19> Axaxaxaxa</comment>


Ask HN: How do you host your Rails Application? - <AUTHOR>

I've just learned rails a month back, I'm building some small apps, I'm trying to host it. Heroku seems easy to host, but it seems costly (remember costly is subjective) down the road.
I researched a bit, and found may be using Heroku with Amazon RDS might reduce costs. I also think since these are new applications, why not host it on a dedicated server, until scaling issues shows up.
I was wondering how you rails devs, host your application? Also, which method is cost effective?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I use Heroku while building out or testing applications - the first dyno is free and additional are $36/month. You can handle a decent amount of traffic on 2-3 dynos. To keep dyno time down, set up workers to run only when needed.

It would be a good idea to plan ahead for your db needs - AWS is a good solution. Try to run you RDS in the same zone as Heroku.</comment>


Show HN: Daydream.fm - build and share your own world of soundscape and music. - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, I want to show you a site I built, which lets you build your own virtual world of soundscape.
I work out of cafes all the time because the white noise and ambience helps me concentrate well. Then one day I wondered: what if I could have my own cafe on my laptop, so I can enjoy that state of mind anytime, anywhere? And what if I can share it, so other people can enjoy that emotion too?
So I built Daydream. It lets you create your own world of soundscape, by combining visual, sound samples, and music. Once you set it up, you can just use it as an ambience player, or a music player with ambience, by adding more songs to their relevant contexts.
Here's the link: http://daydream.fm
I would really appreciate it if you guys shared what you think. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Fun app. I made one, have a few suggestions:

<http://daydream.fm/places/6a14bd5c7>

1\. The song title is overlaying my screenshot, munging it all up. Suggest moving the title to the top bar or somewhere it won't mess up the screenshot/background (same with the comments box on the right).

2\. Music played when I previewed it, but it's not playing after publishing. Not sure why.

3\. Due to #2 I want to edit my creation and change from this 'song' (white noise actually):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA>

to this one:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA>

to test if one can play and the other can't. But I don't see a way to edit a creation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

regarding #1: how about hiding them when you're idle? Would this work? (Just pushed an update, please check it)

regarding #2: Is it still not playing? I visited that url <http://daydream.fm/places/6a14bd5c7> and it seems to be playing. By the way, is it still not playing? It seems to work on mine. Also, the two youtube links you mentioned seem to be the same, aren't they?

regarding #3: Yeah currently there is no edit currently. I had it before but removed it because things started becoming cluttered with all the buttons, I guess I should add it back. In the meantime, you can "remix" to inherit existing properties from the current one, and delete the old one.

<comment><USER2> _> regarding #1: how about hiding them when you're idle? Would this work? (Just pushed an update, please check it)_

Just checked, good enough.

 _> regarding #2: Is it still not playing? I visited that url <http://daydream.fm/places/6a14bd5c7> and it seems to be playing. By the way, is it still not playing? It seems to work on mine. Also, the two youtube links you mentioned seem to be the same, aren't they?_

Still not playing though.

And sorry, the two youtube links are supposed to be different. One is 24hrs, one is 1.5hrs. Here they are again:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA> (24hr)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqCoUvz_nwI> (1.5hr)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry about that. That's weird. Is it just that page? How about other ones? Also I would appreciate it if you could tell me your browser and computer environment. That would help in debugging. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Yeah it's just my own page. The next ones in the queue after mine all work just fine, can hear them all.

If it weren't 3am I'd rebuild mine and see if I can get a new working.

Google Chrome 18.0.1025.168

Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop x64

$> uname -a

Linux hp-dm1-4050us 3.2.0-24-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 25 08:43:22 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's nice, when I need to chill I often put on <http://www.rainymood.com> and <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECyfX1OR_nk> at the same time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, the cool thing about this is that it's meant to be published (therefore reused by anyone else). For example, this rainy might be of interest to you: <http://daydream.fm/places/a83101fc3> I've added a dozen tracks to it and will be adding more as I come across more. Just click next to check out the other tracks I added to the rainy night. Hope you enjoy :)

<comment><USER4> Oh thanks... I click on the link that takes me to a picture of the theater in downtown Savannah I can only assume. Memories of another time...

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh it's actually an animated gif I just found on the web. I don't know where it is :)

By the way can you hear the sound? Just asking since you only mentioned the picture.

<comment><USER4> Oh yeah. I enjoy the work actually as the potential could be rather cute. Ever come across that youuuuuuutuuuuuuubeee site that does a filmstrip-esque effect to the youtube video? Might be neat to add that to this in some genres. edit: [http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/v/?width=72&height=72&y...](http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/v/?width=72&height=72&yt=jt7AF2RCMhg&flux=0&direction=bottom_left)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable link: <http://daydream.fm></comment>