On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J - <AUTHOR> http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2008/12/08/on-leaky-abstractions-and-objective-j/

<comment><USER2> This is very well thought out, and their reasoning was surprising to me. I knew the whole point about Objective-C choosing its syntax to allow it to be a compatible superset of C, but never applied the same reasoning to Objective-J and Javascript.

Having said that, I still maintain some skepticism about using a single language for the entire webapp stack. I understand their desire, for example, to be able to swap out the "rendering layer" in the future. However, CSS is a pretty good language for specifying how things should look across an entire web site, or part of a website, or single page, etc. I don't think Objective-J is a better tool for this particular job. Likewise there may be times when you just want to express structural relationships, and HTML might be better than Objective-J for that purpose (less sure about this one).

I don't know the details about Objective-J. Maybe they address this point elsewhere. The counter argument may be that Objective-J is for "rich web applications," and you don't worry so much about site-wide CSS style in that case.

<comment><USER3> I agree, probably HTML+DOM+JS isn't going anywhere, at least for the next 5 years, so who cares about an SVG rendering engine today? Probably someone who is focused solving the wrong problem and burning money unnecessarily, because there are enough issues to handle with a web startup.

I think this Objective-J is the wrong thing.

<comment><USER4> Who said anybody was working on an SVG rendering engine? Also, SVG is now available in the latest release of every major browser, so it doesn't matter what else is around, the point is that SVG is now one option for building web apps.

What does burning money have to do with anything? Cappuccino is an open source project. 280 North is a 3 person company.

<comment><USER3> When you are building for the web you make some browser backward-compatibility choices. Their implementation in that case which is build to be backward- compatible suffers significantly for being really slow.

I would not consider SVG as an option or necessary except if you are a building an well targetted network app served over the web.

Burning "money" is valid when you can't afford it. For a startup that "money" is the effort. So it's more important for a group of 2 or 3 to solve real problems.

YouOS, a team of smart guys got busted for getting caught in wrong execution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author is against language features implemented as a library. However, the drawbacks he points to are really a lack of community programming conventions. If there were an agreed on standard Javascript way to do things like traditional OO class based inheritance, then there wouldn't be the problems he cites. Having such conventions encoded as syntax would reduce some of the power of Javascript. The fact that you can implement your own domain-specific mini-language is very powerful.

This is really pointing back to the old "Cathedral vs. Bazaar" dichotomy.

<comment><USER6> There is also the issue that implementing things like method_missing and import are prohibitively difficult without new syntax.

Objective-J's code importer is one of the more complex pieces (as it manages to do so completely asynchronously). All the approaches that use a simple JavaScript function to grab code, like grab_and_eval("file.js") are forced to happen synchronously (since you have to guarantee that the code is evaled before the next line). Without some sort of lexing support, its really not possible to both grab files asynchronously and also be able to continue executing.

Also, as stated in the article, you can't intercept JavaScript method calls, so if you want something like method missing you're forced to do something like:

call_method_or_send_method_missing(object, "method_name")

And again, since Objective-J is a proper superset of JavaScript, it doesn't _lose_ any of its powerful features.

<comment><USER7> _And again, since Objective-J is a proper superset of JavaScript_

really? what can it do that js can't do?

<comment><USER8> Read his first sentence again:

"There is also the issue that implementing things like method_missing and import are prohibitively difficult without new syntax."

<comment><USER7> "difficult" has nothing to do with the power of languages

TeX macros are fundamentally as expressive as java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone else find the term "leaky abstraction" annoyingly redundant?

<comment><USER10> Why? Mathematical abstractions are leak-free, and so are a lot of computer abstractions. What's wrong with emphasizing the leakiness in some cases?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a graphic designer I can tell that if we could replace any transparent PNG with their bogus gamma by a simple SVG, it will make instantly any "traditional" web page more beautiful, richer yet simpler and faster. I see a big advantage to switch the rendering layer to SVG when appropriate and on the fly. And I don't see Flash being an alternative for this. So Cappucino really kick ass for me. At the end of the day we're still dealing with pixels. But with monitors at 200ppi or more, it's not a viable option, we need to use vectors, proper mathematics and abstraction layers.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think languages have to change every few years, in fact, I prefer they wouldn't in many cases. I also think that the JS libraries kind of define language extensions, but it also feels better to me to stick with the JS syntax than to redefine the syntax.

Even with LISP, I am not sure if I am so happy about the new trend to add syntactic sugar. Having just brackets is pure, in a way, throwing in square brackets makes me feel a bit uneasy (not that I am much of a LISP specialist, so maybe my judgment is completely off base).

<comment><USER13> Why would you NOT want to redefine syntax if that new definition could make you dramatically more productive and or your code more readable? Sure if you are working on a large project for a large company (or even a large open source project) of course you want to make sure your code can be understood/maintained by johnny random but when you are talking about your journeyman type project - why would you compromise - and better yet why is it you aren't tackling problems which make you "up your game" in terms of abstractions and tools available to you?

Mechanics have wrenches with the edges ground off or thinned down, even heated and bent to fit special applications. So why shouldn't I have my own syntax which sits on top of a readily available platform?

<comment><USER12> Not against changing syntax in general, but in the case of LISP, it seems hard to change it without messing it up.

I guess I don't like more and more "special signs" (like @, [], <>, #) invading the code.

I've witnessed it with Java where a lot of new syntax was introduced. The thing is, these are all new concepts adding to the complexity of the language (annotations, generics,...). I prefer to keep things simple.

<comment><USER13> Good point - there is definitely fundamentally beautiful and intrinsic about the balance and simplicity of lisp. Personally I find removing syntax (another way of changing it) to be an empowering project. My current project is to introduce a syntax for php which is something more along the lines of smalltalk meets lisp - the real trick here was removing syntax and making it more gramatically relevant if used at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting article but I for one genuinely prefer libraries to syntactic language changes. We do not need another language among the thousands already there.

<comment><USER2> "Interesting article but I for one genuinely prefer libraries to syntactic language changes."

I feel like there is some terminology confusion here (I already replied to someone else in the same vein).

I think it makes more sense to say "I prefer libraries that do not introduce syntactic language changes to ones that do." Technically, I would say Objective-J is a Javascript library, in addition to being a language in and of itself.

I think that Prototype, jQuery, etc. also add some syntactic changes, so I would say the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

<comment><USER14> At that point, we are venturing into LISP territory where the line between mini-language and library is truly thin (and sometimes non-existant like in the CL loop macro).

My standard: Can a common JS interpreter (say firefox) execute the code without modifications?

If that is true, then said "thing" is a library.

<comment><USER15> Check out parenscript. <http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/> It is the only non js way of coding js that ever made sense to me. I saw Vladmir speak at an event and he got js and lisp.

I have looked through some of the code for parenscript and although I'm not a lisp expert I could grok what it was doing. I could also see how I could write my own macros if I put my mind to it. One huge advantage of compiling to js is that it makes obfuscation and compression a lot easier (this is true for GWT, objective-j, pyjamas, and parenscript).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> if the only reason to embraced objective-j is its support for an (apparently) more "natural" means of OO programming, then to me that isn't a reason at all. how many people are modelling client software these days strictly by virtue of OO techniques? i'd go as far as to say OO is dead. i much prefer something like jQuery which doesn't get hung up on methodologies, instead looking to adapt better to the specific task at hand.

my guess is that objective-j is DOA. the pool of objective-c programmers is not a motivating factor...i'm not even sure there are many people who really love objective-c. indeed i would offer that the "leaky abstraction" is that which tries to graft one so-so language on top of another so-so language. just man up and use javascript for what it is.

<comment><USER4> I can't help but feel you did not read this post. Simply saying Obj-J is a "leaky abstraction" is meaningless, and yet you offer no examples of how the abstraction leaks (or why its actually problematic).

On top of that, you seem dedicated to the argument that Objective-C is a bad language, and that Objective-J is silly for wanting to re-implement it. Of course, as mentioned in the post, that was in no way the goal of Objective-J. The actual language isn't the point.

Separately, Objective-C is a great language, and plenty of people love it. More every day thanks to the iPhone. Can you give me three reasons why you don't like it?

Finally, claiming OO programming is dead is nonsensical. Java is by far the world's most popular programming language. Right below it you'll find C++ and C#. Three strictly OO languages. Not to mention the fact that two of the three most popular JavaScript libraries build in classical inheritance.

<comment><USER7> _Separately, Objective-C is a great language, and plenty of people love it_

so much so that its almost impossible to find it being put to use outside of places apple forces it. and before you say "gnustep"...no one uses that

 _Can you give me three reasons why you don't like it?_

1\. goofy/eyes-bleed syntax

2\. i don't care about OO

3\. i'll think of something later

 _Finally, claiming OO programming is dead is nonsensical. Java is by far the world's most popular programming language._

java is a ployglot language. they're busy now trying to turn it into a hybrid- functional language...just like c#, the other kitchen-sink language

and c++ was designed from the ground-up to be multi-paradigm, this is all over everything stroustrup says about it

<comment><USER2> "1. goofy/eyes-bleed syntax"

This is almost always an indication that a programming language critic has nothing really thoughtful to say. Same with Lisp and S-expressions.

If I may paraphrase: "It's slightly different than what I'm used to, therefor I despise it."

<comment><USER16> I agree, the middle part is weak, but the bookends are compelling arguments.

<comment><USER2> You mean:

"impossible to find it being put to use outside of places apple forces it."

That's a huge caveat. iPhone development is extremely popular. Maybe the point is that people just put up with Objective C in order to do iPhone/Mac development. But I don't think that is true. NextStep had a small but rabidly devoted following, and part of that was because they really liked Objective C. Apple tried Java bindings to Cocoa at one point, but found everyone used Objective C anyways.

In general, I think it's true that most developers don't know much about ObjC until they want to develop for iPhone/Mac. But once they learn it, they tend to like it, from what I can tell.

<comment><USER7> _Apple tried Java bindings to Cocoa at one point_

oh come on, it is well known that apple intentionally dragged their feet on their java support for years

probably because they realized that as gross as java was, very few people would bother with objective c if they could get first-class support for java on cocoa

<comment><USER17> No, if they "dragged their feet" it was simply because Java's static OO-ness doesn't map well to Objective-C's fully dynamic nature. Objective-C is basically just Smalltalk semantics (minus control structures) bolted on to C.

It works surprisingly well, but you can't and won't believe it until you try it yourself.

<comment><USER16> That's inconsistent with how quickly Apple had Carbon ready using C. Just a matter of effort.

<comment><USER4> Carbon is a port of C APIs from the classic mac mostly. On top of that, Objective-C is ultimately C, and its easier to talk between the two than Java.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you feel about affiliate links in comments? - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed that when linking to a book on HN, people often directly note that it is not an affiliate link.
But if you recommend a good book to me and I buy it, I have no problem with you getting a kickback. Especially if you use that to buy more interesting books.
What's your take on affiliate links? <comment><USER2> I can't speak to the HN consensus, but on some comment areas/lists I've moderated in the past, we generally tried to allow ones that were there in good faith. It's a fine line, though. It's ok with me if someone was going to recommend a book anyway, and throws in their affiliate link rather than giving the exact same link without an affiliate code. But does this subtly induce people to include more Amazon links than they might have otherwise? To recommend books that are only _sort_ of apropos, or even kind of a stretch? To link Amazon when the author's site about the book, a Wikipedia article on it, or a relevant Google Books excerpt would otherwise have been the obvious links? In book-related discussions, does it induce people to recommend books they think will be popular or eye-catching (or at least get clicks), as opposed to ones they genuinely think are good?

I think the answer is probably yes to all of those, but with the right people/context/community it probably isn't bad enough to be fatal. And I agree that if someone _does_ recommend me a book that I do end up buying, it seems fair to give them 4% or 6% or whatever, especially since if they didn't get it, that amount would just go to Amazon.

I guess in summary: previous experience leads me to believe "maybe, it depends".

</comment><comment><USER3> An old trick for a lot of forums posters is to include both links, one with .. and one without and give users a choice (if you trust me use the affil link, if not the regular). Although I cringe in recommending this practice overall as I can easily foresee HN being overrun by stealthy affiliate marketers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Personally I'm probably just going to circumvent the link and find it myself. I think it's probably a waste of time by the OP really - like delirium said, they get probably 4-6% of the sale, right? If it's a $12 book (a popular amount for business books), they earn $0.60 per sale. If they cause 10 sales, they earn $6. I would think that it is rare that there are more than 10 sales via an affiliate link on HN but I could be way off. But really - even 100 sales is "just" $60.

Waste of time if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd say go for it. We can downvote ones we think are not acting in good faith.</comment>


Nanoresonators create ultra-high-res displays - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/University-of-Michigan-nanoresonators/ <comment><AUTHOR> Would this let us create real time holograms? I heard the thing holding us back was pixel resolution?

<comment><AUTHOR> This says we need a display with pixels half the wavelength of light, .2 microns. <http://www.phased-array.com/1996-Book-Chapter.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> After more research: wow, this is actually getting kind of close. The iPhone 4 has pixel size of 78 μm, and if this can do 8x smaller that's around 10 μm. Just two orders of magnitude to go!</comment></comment></comment>


OpenX: Open Source Ad Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.openx.org/ <comment><USER2> for reference, openx used to be called openads, up until recently.

<comment><USER3> Do you know why they keep changing their name? I remember phpadsnew, openads, and now openx?

<comment><USER2> basically, they've changed the name each time leadership changes hands.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a bad sign... thanks for the education about history

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> worst name ever. seriously misleading.</comment>


Emoki Keyboard for iOS (Predictive Emoji Suggestions and More) - <AUTHOR> http://emoki.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone Vicc here! I'm one of the co-founders @ Emoki! We just launched our first product and would love to hear what you think! Feel free to ask us any questions! :D

P.S. We're also on Product Hunt, where we explained a bit more about how Emoki came to be, in case you're curious! Enjoy! - [http://www.producthunt.com/posts/emoki-keyboard-for- ios](http://www.producthunt.com/posts/emoki-keyboard-for-ios)

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome man! Just downloaded the app and I have to say I love the fact I don't have to change keyboards to add emojis. Love it man! Can't wait for updates!! -JD</comment>


Netflix might be overcharging you if you are a frequent traveller - <AUTHOR> I thought there might be other people like me on HN who travel a lot for work so I want to share my experience with Netflix's unfair charging policy. I live in Turkey but I travel a lot for business and seems like I've created my Netlix account with Standard plan when I was in Poland 2 years ago. Today I have just noticed that Standard plan is 27.99 Turkish Lira in Turkey but I've been charged 43 Polish Zloty since 2 years and it is equal to 71 Turkish Lira. I wouldn't mind if it was a small amount but since the difference is quite big, I've contacted customer service for a refund but they refused to return the extra money I've been paying and I'm told that there is nothing they can do to compensate this unfair charge which is quite disappointing to me.<p>So, please check where you created your Netflix account if you don't want to be charged unfairly. <comment><USER2> There is nothing unfair about this. They have different prices for different countries and different offerings for different countries.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is nothing wrong with charging different prices for different countries. The problem is I'm living in Turkey most of the time and my bank is a Turkish bank but I have been charged in Polish Zloty all these time. I don't think they would let me pay less if I created my account in a country 2 years ago where price was 2,5 times cheaper than my original country.</comment></comment>


Microsoft says Android is not free - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1733713/microsoft-android-free?WT.rss_f=News&WT.rss_a=Microsoft+says+Android+is+not+free

<comment><AUTHOR> It somehow reminds me of their old strategy towards Linux. Microsoft claimed that a research (sponsored by them) had proven that Linux is not free, but more expensive than Windows, when you calculate the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) according to a certain methodology.</comment>


IPhone Camcorder? - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043003193.html?nav=hcmodule

<comment><USER2> Why would this be news, it is not too difficult to achieve. I have been using "Cycorder" <http://cydia.saurik.com/info/cycorder/> on my iPhone for months now and it works flawlessly. The only gotcha is that you have to have a jailbroken iPhone, and use cydia to install it but the video quality and sound quality are fine. If as the article suggests, this is a software only upgrade it is not a big deal. The article talks about doing video editing on the iPhone itself which I don't think is practical. It would be news if the next version of the iPhone had a real hi-def camera to allow to acquire HD video, however I doubt that this is apple horizon any time soon.

<comment><USER3> How well does it handle motion? I ask because whenever I try to take a photo from my car with my iPhone it ends up distorted. The sensor scans from top to bottom, which means that anything that moves (like signs, etc) will look like they're bent.

<comment><USER4> That really annoys me, I'm a big boy and can deal with battery intensive activities. Much like using data uses a lot of juice, I'm alright that I get a hit if I take half an hour of video. Being protected from running down my own battery is lame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Analyst reports on Apple developments are particularly cringe-inducing to me. Many are clearly unsubstantiated guessing by folks who are perhaps only marginally familiar with Apple's plans.

The only thing that makes this particular article worth a look was the link to BusinessWeek's article. And the only thing that makes BusinessWeek's article worth a look--the only part that didn't amount to a guess or "info" from an "undisclosed source"--was the link to Gizmodo's article ( [http://gizmodo.com/5202166/iphone-30s-video-recording- interf...](http://gizmodo.com/5202166/iphone-30s-video-recording-interface- revealed) ), which documents its evidence clearly and keeps its analysis firmly based on demonstratable qualifications.</comment>


Man builds working computer inside LittleBigPlanet video game (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiRgYBHoAoU

<comment><USER2> LBP is the most creative game I've seen yet on the PS3 (or any platform so far). They give you a seemingly endless set of tools with which to create new levels, and I've found that the user-created levels are where we spend most of our time.

Funny thing is that _this_ was the game that taught me that my four year-old daughter had more creativity in her little pinky than her startup-minded Dad did in his entire body. The boards she created astounded me.

I know it's OT, but I personally can't wait for LBP2.

<comment><USER3> Has anyone created a "clone" for any other platforms?

<comment><USER4> Yes, to the point that PSN had to take down a bunch of maps for blatant copyright infringement (to say nothing of trademark). [http://g4tv.com/videos/37442/GDC-09-LittleBigPlanet-All- Acce...](http://g4tv.com/videos/37442/GDC-09-LittleBigPlanet-All-Access/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I consider the Turing Complete Dwarf Fortress fort "Razorlength" to be even more impressive, since the gamer had to convince recalcitrant dwarves to build it for him: <http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-8269>

</comment><comment><USER6> The sequel to LittleBigPlanet was announced recently (<http://www.littlebigplanet.com/2/>), and reportedly takes this to the next level with the addition of what appear to be breadboards and integrated circuits. I seem to recall someone at Media Molecule referring to this level specifically and saying its logic can now be condensed into a single in-game object!

Of course, there _is_ something intrinsically more impressive about watching a seven-core RISC chip run a detailed physics simulation to model a network of electromechanical relays to perform integer math.

</comment><comment><USER7> While this is still amazing and I applaud this man's (or woman's) work, is this capable of only basic arithmetic? Or did this person actually build a turing machine in LittleBigPlanet?

I've never played LBP so I'm not sure what kind of tools they provide you with, but I'm just curious how powerful this "computer" actually is that was built.

<comment><USER8> I think he built equivalent of a logic circuit to do the arithmetic, but using apparently the simulated mechanical physics within the game. The simulated ropes, levers, pulleys, or whatever, he navigates in the second half are the implementation of that "circuit". A lot of work.

<comment><USER9> He used "digital" means to create the circuit. He even said it would've been easier and simpler to create a mechanical version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's conway's game of life in LittleBigPlanet: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13GOFa1C4e4>

</comment><comment><USER11> Posted 2008. This video made me salivate at getting a PS3. I never did buy one. But still, pretty neat!</comment>


6 Tips To Boost Your Landing Page Conversion Rates - <AUTHOR> http://www.iafrikan.com/2014/03/04/6-tips-to-boost-landing-page-conversion-rates/

<comment><USER2> Regarding #3:

> _Bland landing pages are often the best at converting visitors, > surprisingly._

I think that's because you need to see more. The less information on the landing page, the more you're going to want to click to the "about" page. I don't think it really increases the chances that a user will fill out the form to Try Now or actually buy anything.</comment>


Watch A Tugboat Drag An Arctic Iceberg To Parched People Half A World Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1755444/tugboat-vs-iceberg-video <comment><USER2> My gut says that desalination is a better option. The amount of energy need to drag around something that size could be better applied just desalinating the ocean water you already have.

Even if they can plan some route that will give them an adequate current all the way to their destination (which I doubt), what happens then? How will you keep the iceberg in place while it's consumed? Or will it roll around the coast tearing up other unrelated valuable bits of property/equipment.

You can use unreliable power sorces like ocean/air currents, but you had better make sure your system will fail-safe. Specially when you are talking about weights/inertias in the millions of tons.</comment>


U.S. State Department adding intrusive questions for US passport apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2011/04/25/state-dept-adding-in.html

<comment><USER2> commenters on that site have pointed out that this 'intrusive questionaire' would only be required if you can't provide a birth certificate

<comment><USER3> you know what i'm going to say...

<comment><USER4> Going to finally confess to actually being from New Jersey? We need you to show proof.

<comment><USER4> And look what I found: [http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/poll- fin...](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/poll-finds-most- americans-uncertain-of-trumps-birthplace/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Things Are Getting Better for Women in Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/27/y_combinator_founding_partner_jessica_livingston_on_women_in_startups.html

<comment><USER2> The challenge of getting more women in tech needs to involve the whole community - investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, both male and female. It cannot be a female only dialogue. I am a technical woman founder myself. And,my biggest challenge is fighting those subtle biases that men have. When I am in a meeting with investors, I find that I am treated in a patronizing fashion vs my male co-founders. Whenever the investor is speaking, he's addressing my male colleagues more and I am ignored. The only way to fight these is to make men aware of how they behave. Women already know it, since they are at the receiving end. Hence, I do not like closed, women only conferences.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's great to hear that more female founders are applying. I hope this will have a snowball effect. As a female University Student in Software Engineering, I have seen the interest and enrolment of female students in CS programs grow exponentially over four years. When first year and high school students have role models in upper years, they can imagine themselves in similar paths.</comment>


Heynewcity,relocation made easy - <AUTHOR> https://heynewcity.sharetribe <comment><AUTHOR> Heynewcity is a relocation marketplace that aims to make the tedious relocation process easy for individuals and companies by connecting them with vetted new city on-boarding coordinators in cities they are relocating to, to take care of all their relocation needs and ensure smooth transition, peace of mind and that they hit the ground running.

Sign up today, add your location, earn extra cash on the side welcoming people to your city!

</comment><comment><USER2> This site can't be reached heynewcity.sharetribe's server IP address could not be found.</comment>


Ask HN: Relationship between HN and Scribd? - <AUTHOR> I recently submitted a link to a PDF paper. It first appeared as I submitted it, but after some time the title had been changed to include a Scribd link. I found this off-putting: it implied either that I was encouraging the use of Scribd, or that the author had already chosen to use Scribd as a publisher.<p>What is the relationship between Hacker News and Scribd? Are all PDF links modified to link to Scribd automatically, or is this done by hand on a case-by-case basis?  And why is the use of Scribd officially encouraged, while primary non-framed links are preferable for HTML content? <comment><USER2> I think Scribd is a Y-combinator funded startup (hence the Hacker News connection) and some of the Hacker News admins by-hand edit other people's posts. I am very against copying PDFs into a walled-garden like Scribd, but this isn't my website.

<comment><USER3> If true, that seems downright unethical to me. I've actually met (and possibly drank with) some of the Scribd founders and they seem like really nice, smart fellows, but this practice really shouldn't be encouraged (unless there is a good reason behind it other than to promote Scribd).

<comment><USER4> I've found clicking a PDF link on anything but Mac OS to be rather unpleasant. Many people (me included) consider the scribd link a more pleasant experience.

<comment><USER5> Try foxit reader over the adobe junk :-) I switched a while ago and it's such an improved experience.

<comment><USER4> That doesn't run well on my platform of choice. Evince does though, and is also fast and lightweight. Still, I find PDF links a bit annoying, and am glad to have the scribd option.

<comment><USER6> I just put Evince on all my Windows machines and I am very happy about it. I was able to remove all the Adobe Air bonus arterial sclerosis.

I tried Foxit and was not very impressed. I thought it was interesting that the Evince windows port was made since the last time I looked for an Acrobat replacement about a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't like Scribd, but I also don't like it when I click on a link and a file appears on my filesystem, which is what happens when I click PDF links in NetNewsWire.

</comment><comment><USER8> The consensus here seems to be that it's an effort to promote Scribd, but I had always assumed that it was an attempt at trying to be helpful to those who prefer to remain within a browser, and to those who hate opening PDFs. At least, it serves that use case to me.

<comment><USER9> I think it's both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> how about we submit pdf's inside google's pdf viewer?

<https://docs.google.com/viewer>

just mention the real domain in the post title

<comment><USER11> Submitting the original pdf link is best for pointing to the real source and giving people the option of how to deal with it. Those that like Google viewer links can always fix that themselves. Details in this sub-thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1115897>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If anything, HN scribd posts seem to turn into straight pdfs. I think the admins search for posts with [scribd] in the title and link to a pdf version instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> No. I say this with absolute certainty, having just submitted a link to a PDF, to which the [scribd] portion was added, either by the system or by an HN administrator.

If you click on the title, it still goes to the original URL, which in my case was a straight PDF. If you click on the [scribd] portion, you are taken to a copy at Scribd.

<comment><USER13> Oh, from the original post I took it that it replaced your link with a scribd link (rather than adding a second link). I still think it is a questionable practice, but find it much less objectionable than I did at first.

<comment><USER14> IIRC, when I joined (circa mid 08) it did replace your link with one to Scribd. There was some questioning about whether this was right, people don't like the Scribd layout, blah blah, and I believe the decision was made to add a Scribd link but keep the original.

<comment><USER15> Posting it violated the Scribd TOS sections 8.1 and 8.8.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/science/05robots.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one who thinks this product could be a game changer? Maybe the tipping point that makes employers embrace hiring telecommuters?

<comment><USER3> I have to say, its pretty incredible, but I imagine its kind of expensive. Might be able to convince the boss you could offset the cost with the fact your not taking up a seat in the office. Depends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As these develop, there are huge opportunities for improving transnational trade. For example, I am interested in using this to monitor a Chinese manufacturing facility for QA of product before containers are shipped stateside. That reduces huge amounts of money and opportunity cost spent on cross-Pacific travel.

<comment><USER5> QA in Chinese manufacturing is much more complicated than that. Look at this example that I just got from an excellent blog I normally follow:

[http://silkroadintl.net/blog/2010/09/01/%e2%80%9cdoing- busin...](http://silkroadintl.net/blog/2010/09/01/%e2%80%9cdoing-business-in- china-you-always-play-the-games-or-they-will-eat-your-weakness-%e2%80%9d/)

Note the amount of local knowledge required to make things happen. One cannot acquire that much knowledge with a webcam attached to a machine.

My point it that it's not just a matter of being physically somewhere, but also the context knowledge that matters.

<comment><USER4> The article you linked was not about QA, it was about contract negotiations for one-off projects.

I source thousands of tons of material from Chinese factories, and the QA challenge is different. My option is to station Chinese employees (who are trustworthy) at multiple factories overseas to verify product quantities and quality prior to sailing the can. Or I could have my Chinese-American staff in the US office monitor shipments via remote robotics.

Certainly telepresence does not replace international trips to build and maintain the relationship, but it can greatly assist in monitoring QA processes after the initial setup has been completed.

<comment><USER5> So how that would be different from someone local holding a webcam? (or a cell phone)

My point is that maybe there is an opportunity for such solution today. Instead of an expensive robot, one could hire a trusted person to hold a camera, so someone else could do the inspection remotely.

Would that be useful for your job?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> AnyBots founder and CEO Trevor Blackwell (quoted in the third section of the article) is also one of the Y Combinator co-founders, and I believe both companies are in the same office building.

RiderOfGiraffes lists some relevant HN items here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1562602></comment>


The AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 Review: Vega Burning Bright - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11717/the-amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-and-56-review <comment><USER2> I ordered a $499 RX Vega 64 from Amazon at 9AM this morning, mainly to show support AMD's open source Linux GPU efforts [1] and since there should be pretty good compute potential, but I will have to admit to being fairly disappointed about the power consumption and general performance (only a 30% improvement vs 2yo Fiji w/ a shift from 28nm to 14nm and much touted architectural improvements [2] vs Nvidia's 70% uplift launched over a year ago).

Interesting notes from the reviews - HBCC is not enabled by default but doesn't give much of a performance boost anyway [3].

According to Computerbase [4] (DE) primitive shaders are still inactive: [https://www.computerbase.de/2017-08/radeon-rx- vega-64-56-tes...](https://www.computerbase.de/2017-08/radeon-rx- vega-64-56-test/) (RTG engineer discussing that it should be automatically used in the future [5])

One interesting note is that while it looks like initial supplies have all sold out, early testing shows that OOTB Vega is pretty awful for mining right now. [6] Vega 64 is clocking at about 30MH/s at about 300W - a flash-BIOS'd RX 470 can get 28-30MH/s at ~150W.

[1] [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rx- vega-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rx-vega- linux1&num=1)

[2] [http://www.pcgamer.com/the-amd-radeon-rx-vega-56-and- vega-64...](http://www.pcgamer.com/the-amd-radeon-rx-vega-56-and- vega-64-review/)

[3] [http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_rx_vega_56_8...](http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_rx_vega_56_8gb_review,31.html)

[4] [https://www.computerbase.de/2017-08/radeon-rx- vega-64-56-tes...](https://www.computerbase.de/2017-08/radeon-rx- vega-64-56-test/)

[5] [https://mobile.twitter.com/ryszu/status/896304786307469313](https://mobile.twitter.com/ryszu/status/896304786307469313)

[6] [https://nl.hardware.info/reviews/7517/23/amd-radeon-rx- vega-...](https://nl.hardware.info/reviews/7517/23/amd-radeon-rx-vega-56-- 64-review-minder-euros-meer-watts-testresultaten-amd-radeon-rx-vega-voor-coin- mining)

<comment><USER3> And a non-flashed 1070 can get around 30 at 120W(ish)...

I guess the miners are hoping that a driver update will unleash the rumoured 70+MH/s. If it dosn't materialise I can imagine these being sold on fairly quickly, with that power consumption.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be surprised if the performance is artificially hindered until later driver updates, to prevent them from being gobbled up by miners.

<comment><USER5> why is it an issue if miners gobble it up? A sale is a sale no?

<comment><USER6> Miners tend to have very high rates of warranty returns, due to running the cards 24x7x365. In some markets manufacturers are trying to market mining cards which don't have display outputs, etc. and have short warranties. Many markets (US, EU) don't let you invalidate warranties just for using a product 24x7, so it doesn't work everywhere.

<comment><USER7> They could base GPU warranties based on usage, the same way car part warranties are based on mileage. In fact Samsung already is doing the same for SSDs: they have data write limit of 400 TB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> RX Toaster, they need to pull some magic out of the chip with upcoming drivers, otherwise this won't be the big return everyone expected, I feel.

I just hope the MI25 cards will be far cheaper than the $6k Tesla P100's and that the ROCm stack is good enough so for compute the architecture may still be a viable and very competitive option.

<comment><USER9> On the Open Source Linux OpenGL drivers (but not the proprietary ones), it is competitive with the 1080Ti at considerably lower MSRP and real retail price (once stocks recover from the most hyped GPU launch since... the Geforce 9800GTX? I don't even know). Power to performance ratios are also not well shown with the current shipping proprietary drivers; frankly I don't understand how AMD can't seem to get that team to deliver stellar day-one drivers for every launch, it is what it is I guess.

<comment><USER8> > On the Open Source Linux OpenGL drivers (but not the proprietary ones), it > is competitive with the 1080Ti at considerably lower MSRP

Yaaay! Really, that's cool but it's a negligible fraction of the market. Unless Linux gaming becomes a market force overnight, it won't matter a lot, I think.

> Power to performance ratios are also not well shown with the current > shipping proprietary driver

I doubt they can close the large power gap that the initial benchmarks show (compared to the 1080 and esp. 1070), but I'm hoping the power margin will get narrower and a bit of performance increase might compensate too.

Indeed, I am dampening my expectations, I'm most hopeful that in the high-end GPGPU compute arena they might not be too late and will provide enough Perf/W/buck to gain traction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Surprisingly, native FP16 operations are not currently exposed to OpenCL"

Given that these cards have potential to crash the price/perf of current deep learning solutions, this is more than regrettable.

<comment><USER11> This is the sort of decision which scares away deep learning people: when the only hardware advantage is not supported at launch, it tells us that AMD really is not serious about good support and that the stack cannot be trusted.

<comment><USER10> I regrettably agree there. I spent time doing OpenCL implementations of some of our stuff, but most recent decisions from AMD's side seem to indicate they'd rather get rid of it as well, in favor of some CUDA compatibility layers.

This isn't very encouraging to continue supporting AMD cards. Might as well drop them entirely until their CUDA compatibility is more mature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Impossible for me to get excited about this. What are these really going to sell for after the introductory stocks run out - $1000?

Can't wait for this crypto madness to end.

<comment><USER13> I feel the other way, I want power users to buy these in bulk and dump them for cheap on ebay once they are no longer powerful enough for mining.

Of course, many factors affect the final price on eBay and it's also about whether you need one today.

<comment><USER12> Right now it looks like the RX 480s and 580s get dumped for MSRP. After being abused like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Where is Quantum [1] and the EHP[2]? Since we have Epyc with 4 die, and Thread Ripper with 2 die and 2 place holders, it's time for AMD to make a multi-chip module with Ryzen, Vega, and 2 stacks of HBM2 memory. That could be packaged into an awesome SFF PC much like their old Quantum concept.

[1] [http://wccftech.com/amd-project-quantum-not-dead-zen-cpu- veg...](http://wccftech.com/amd-project-quantum-not-dead-zen-cpu-vega-gpu/)

[2] [http://wccftech.com/amd-exascale-heterogeneous-processor- ehp...](http://wccftech.com/amd-exascale-heterogeneous-processor-ehp- apu-32-zen-cores-hbm2/)

And please don't illuminate it with plain LED light, use laser diodes so we get that ethereal look of the interference pattern ;-)

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone else also think the bundles are mostly a bad deal for the customers, and maybe only a good one for AMD?

First of all the monitor. Chances that I need one are fairly small. And if yes, why would I want exactly that one? I personally think the resolution (and especially pixel density) is below what I would want now, especially with so much GPU power available. A 4k screen with Freesync would be more attractive.

Then the CPU/board. Chances are a little higher that one could use that, but I guess even less than 40% of buyers would require a CPU and board. If we restrict it to Ryzen 1700 options the number would be even less, since a 1600X might be the more interesting option for many gamers. And of course some may also prefer Intel. If we treat the CPU/board part as the main benefit of the bundle it's also still mostly a zero-sum game, you pay 100$ extra to get a 100$ discount. I could most likely get a better overall deal when I buy both GPU and CPU seperatly in shops where each has the best price.

When we finally factor the games in it might be a small benefit for a small number of buyers. However their value is really small, since Prey is already some days old and one can get it discounted.

If the demand for the bundles is as low as I think and AMD really wants to sell most of the cards in bundled form (predicted by anandtech), then the overall prices will mostly trend towards the bundle prices for all cards due to availability.

<comment><USER16> The reason for the bundles is that they are trying to prevent purchases by miners. I do agree that they aren't a perfect solution

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Relative to the GeForce GTX 1080, we've seen power measurements at the wall anywhere between 110W and 150W higher than the GeForce GTX 1080, all for the same performance."

The Vega 64 has similar performance to the GTX 1080 for a similar price (if not for the fact that the new Radeons will never be in stock due to mining), but with much higher power consumption.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why are they so power hungry? Vega looks very promising for Linux gaming, but that power consumption is just way overboard.

<comment><USER19> It is a trend that AMD overvolts their cards to push their clocks to compete with Nvidia. Undervolted every GCN generation comes in line with Nvidia in performance per watt, the problem is your actual performance is too low to be impressive then. In the end, the numbers win - so if you are at a slight disadvantage (and generally AMD makes one series of dies, and sells them to both the consumer and enterprise segments, whereas Nvidia will at the hardware level disable features of dies when going into gaming cards to eek more efficiency out of them) then cranking up the power draw to reach performance parity almost surely sells more units than being just as efficient but performing worse per die area (because wafers are near fixed cost).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is unfortunately very disappointing. It practically can't even compete with a 1080 at the same price, and that card has been out for a year now.

Really goes to show how far ahead Nvidia is.

<comment><USER21> Only on DirectX 11 games, which I could care less about. When I buy a video card, I expect it to last 2-3 years, which means that the most important benchmarks are the DX12 and Vulkan ones. Vega has a significant lead on those.

<comment><USER22> If you could care less, then you do care at least somewhat. There are still PLENTY of DX11 games to play, considering a lot of us have backlogs the size of Texas. DX12 titles are very limited right now.

<comment><USER18> Vulkan titles will overtake them.

<comment><USER23> Why do you think game studios will support vulkan when they can just target dx12 and get pc and xbox support?

<comment><USER18> They already do. There are more Vulkan supported games out, than DX12 ones as far as I know. Why has many variables. But simple answer, Windows 7 is still a common target (it has no DX12 support). More deeply, because forward looking studios don't want to fall into hard MS lock-in, and growing number of studios support Linux as well.

There was some good write up from Star Citizen developers on this topic, who decided to ditch DX12 for Vulkan.

<comment><USER24> Can you link a few? I feel like I'm missing something here because the only AAA game out with Vulkan support I can recall is Doom.

<comment><USER18> Just some: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Vulkan_supp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Vulkan_support)

Plus, more games for Nintendo Switch will be using Vulkan. Also games with common engines like Unity, Unreal and Cry (that's in the future, they basically have just added or adding Vulkan support).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well I bit the bullet and ordered one of these, at the "special introductory price" of _only_ as much as an nVidia GTX 1080...

The compute power seems pretty good from that review. YesI will be mining with it, so I'm hopeful of good results. I won't just be mining with it so I hope the game performance is worth it too!

<comment><USER25> Don't you have to carefully balance your mining speed and power consumption to be profitable. This seems like the worst card for that?

<comment><USER3> If you're buying the card purely for mining, sure.

If you want one anyway (i.e. you don't necessarily put the card cost in your sums), then the returns ought to be better than just the electricity costs. Especially if (say) mining to hold rather than sell straight off.

There are also rumours of outrageous hash rates being possible - multiples of the current nVidia hash rates. But we'll see if they ever come to fruition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really wonder if miners are going to buy the whole stock despite the game bundle program and the low power efficiency.

<comment><USER27> I doubt it, a 1070 is still better performance per dollar with the power consumption figured in

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder which model Apple will use in the iMac Pro.

<comment><USER29> I think Apple says 11 TFLOPS Single Precision and 22 TFLOPS Half-Precision, which puts the GPU at a Vega 56 I think? I don't think Apple has said how many possible GPU configurations there are, so you could be able to bump it to a 64.

<comment><USER30> You're correct -- the specs page of the new iMac Pro is intentionally vague, but they do confirm this much at least: [https://www.apple.com/imac- pro/specs/](https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/specs/)

(The 64-variant will actually have 16GB HBM2, instead of 8, though.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> their stock price jumped 8% today, i wonder if it's too late to get in ?

<comment><USER32> AMD has been bouncing up and down between ~ 10-14 since ryzen hype</comment></comment>


First Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta Released  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/beta1

<comment><USER3> This is the first lucid release that I've been able to install under vmware fusion (without using the "easy install option") that actually boots.

I've already upgraded (sudo do-release-upgrade -d) one box from 8.04 LTS to this beta successfully (serverbeach). One VPS from (prgmr.com) has a dependency cycle with libplymouth2 and/or mountall and won't upgrade - <USER2> other than that this beta looks ok so far.</comment>


MetaMate – Your API for Everything - <AUTHOR> https://metamate.io/ <comment><USER2> So is this like a modern Yahoo Pipes?</comment>


Show HN: Black-hole.js – Visualize black hole gravitational lensing in WebGL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cliffcrosland/black-hole.js <comment><USER2> May be of interest: Posts from Double Negative, the VFX company that did Interstellar: Blackhole: [http://dneg.com/dneg_vfx/blackhole/](http://dneg.com/dneg_vfx/blackhole/) Wormhole: [http://dneg.com/dneg_vfx/wormhole/](http://dneg.com/dneg_vfx/wormhole/)

<comment><USER3> I'd love to see the wormhole simulation implemented someplace I could play with it.

<comment><USER4> [https://sirxemic.github.io/Interstellar/](https://sirxemic.github.io/Interstellar/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did once the same thing[1] with canvas. However, this demo warps the whole picture instead of circular region which seems unnatural. Other than that, you did great job.

[1] [http://cihadturhan.com/lab/gravitional- lensing/](http://cihadturhan.com/lab/gravitional-lensing/)

<comment><USER6> Yours is really cool, too! Thanks for sharing, since lately I've been doing a lot of reading/learning about black holes. But where is the hole in your demo? I see the distortion but I also can still see stars within the event horizon, if there is any.

<comment><USER5> I kept radius of blackhole very small ( ~3px) because many demos do so[1][2]. If you look into the code you will see it's a faux effect. It's canvas so you can imagine performance when comparing with WebGL :) It just replaces positions of pixels according to an effective radius and some simple mirror algorithm. Also to smooth effect I used smoothstep function.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCoxYlpJq9s&t=1m13s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCoxYlpJq9s&t=1m13s) [2] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/BlackHole...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/BlackHole_Lensing.gif) [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothstep](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothstep)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Came across this some time back: [http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/23574](http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/23574)

</comment><comment><USER8> I can haz black hole, pleez?

Love the cat, visible over and under the focal point.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would be fun to turn this into an art project.</comment>


The Taming of Tech Criticism - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism

<comment><USER2> The author responds to Morozov's disastrously wrong-heaeded calls for ideological purity in tech critique here -

[http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5764](http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5764)

It's easy to agree -

[http://www.metareader.org/post/a-litmus-test-for- humanistic-...](http://www.metareader.org/post/a-litmus-test-for-humanistic- technology-critics.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Clearly this review was not written with people like me as the intended audience, as the introductory paragraphs were almost completely incomprehensible to me on my first pass through them.

That said, what follows is an excellent argument for why Nicholas Carr's _The Glass Cage_ is terrible. I assume the introduction designed to prime the intended audience* for this argument.

* Which I assume is made up entirely of people whom I'd be very sad to find myself at a cocktail party with (although I expect they'd be similarly sad to find themselves at a cocktail party with me). I'm reminded of Cryptonomicon and Dr. G.E.B. Kivistic.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article seems to be saying "Clearly technology is bad, now we just have to figure out a reason it's bad."

<comment><USER5> I read it more like "don't bother saying that technology is bad unless it helps advance the correct political agenda."</comment></comment>


Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/news/2012_elections/index.html?story=/politics/elections/2011/09/27/votinghack <comment><USER2> For a very comprehensive rundown of all the awful things about electronic voting from someone who has been researching it for 12 years, see the following hour long talk given at google:

Electronic and Internet Voting (The Threat of Internet Voting in Public Elections) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GjmRwfkRXY>

It goes through all the highly nontrivial challenges around holding an election, and discusses the major failings of the technology over the years. (Mostly diebold gear as you might imagine.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh for the love of Pete. Why are the voting machines connected to the tallying devices?

Wouldn't it be safer to have the voting machine output a machine readable ballot that is then read by a generic non-election specific scantron-like machine that has no understanding of what it is scanning?

</comment><comment><USER4> Obligatory shout out: <http://homepage.mac.com/rcareaga/diebold/adworks.htm>

This is another interesting case to follow. Matt Blaze's work here is also telling (they found a bunch of software exploits). I wonder about the forces pushing electronic voting when there are so many issues unresolved. Perhaps Anonymous should elect itself President. That would wake some folks up.

<comment><USER5> I like the "vapor" poster. I wish I had thought of "voter verified vapor audit trail" back when I was fighting against these touchscreens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having thought about this a bit, I don't see how you do electronic voting without giving the voter a receipt that contains a sequence number, timestamp, and current status of the machine. All encrypted, of course. That way the paper trail can be reassembled if necessary to see if it matches the end state. Hope that was explanatory enough. It also partially distributes oversight authority to all the voters instead of having it all at the poll.

<comment><USER7> There's no point in maintaining a distributed paper trail, since actually making use of it would violate anonymity and be a gigantic hassle, you might as well just keep the paper trail centralized. And if you're doing that then you might as well just go back to electronically scanned paper ballots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone with more knowledge of this please tell me: Why is physical access to the voting machine innards allowed at all? Why isn't the machine glued shut with some color changing seals to show tampering?

It doesn't seem like poll workers (or anyone other than the manufacturer, for that matter) would need access to the internals. If a machine is broken, send it back or fall back to paper voting.

<comment><USER9> For no particular reason, the prevailing stance is to avoid paper fallback so they want to preserve the ability for pollworkers to deal with problems themselves. I know, "what could possibly go wrong with that?"

There is nothing in the electronic voting debate that won't make you scratch your head wondering why they don't use known-good techniques. The only time- worthy thing to do is to oppose them until open-source solutions are accepted. Everything else will be a through-and-through scam by Diebold or one of their cohorts.

<comment><USER10> "The only time-worthy thing to do is to oppose them until open-source solutions are accepted."

Meh, I'm still unconvinced by the virtues of electronic voting at all, open source or otherwise. Little electronic currents simply have less mass than pencil marks on paper, and I mean that in a number of ways, including the fully literal one. A full accounting of cost/benefits shows the costs to be staggering once one accounts for the risks of tampering and the difficulty of preventing it, and the benefits mind-bogglingly tiny. (Heck, even if one merely accounts for the costs of _materials_ the cost/benefit analysis isn't all that great.)

If it wasn't so darned _shiny_ and _high tech_ nobody would even consider electronic voting. It's just technofetishism run amok.

<comment><USER11> > If it wasn't so darned shiny and high tech nobody would even consider > electronic voting.

Were you in a Nepalese monastery during the 2000 election or something?

<comment><USER10> See, that's an example of what I mean. You simple take it as given that technology will simply solve the problem by virtue of being _TECHNOLOGICAL_ , when a moment's thought starts poking huge gaping holes in logic.

Suppose Florida is a close race again in alt-2000 where electronic voting is widespread. But wait! In three precincts, close examination of the voting machines reveals that they have been systematically tampered with, in exactly the way described in this article, and the voting totals are unreliable. Aaaaaandd...

... now what? Count the ballots again? Can't. No such thing. Re-add the wrong numbers together for the wrong result? Hold the vote again in those precincts? That's fraught with its own serious problems. The vote is just screwed and there's basically nothing you can do about it.

"But the vote can be screwed with paper ballots too!" Yes, but it's _much harder_ , leaves a much larger and harder to forge trail, requires vastly more effort, and is much easier to detect. (Ye olde "Benford's Law" trick will work only once, you know.) The question isn't whether computer voting "works", it's whether it's _better_.

And, secretly, I palmed a card. I tampered with those voting machines _after_ the vote occurred. The vote numbers are totally accurate in my hypothetical scenario! But good luck proving that in real life.

One thing that people don't often get is that voting isn't about choosing a winner. Choosing winners is easy. It's about convincing the losers that they lost, and that the process is fair, and it's far better for them to participate in the Great Debate and sway people to their position and try to win the next election, rather than forming an armed mob and going on a rampage. Electronic voting machines make that outcome much harder. For once, Hollywood-hackability works on our side and the pervasive message that all computers are intrinsically infinitely hackable is not so far from the truth.

(... oh, and if you stay tuned for long enough, we'll be able to answer that "Now What?" question sooner or later, because it is only a matter of time before the body politic is literally faced with that question, instead of merely hypothetically.)

<comment><USER11> That electronic voting has problems doesn't in any way mean that paper voting didn't have problems. The statement "nobody would even consider electronic voting" is false. Plenty of people consider electronic voting because of the hanging chads, photos of people with magnifying glasses peering at ballots, etc.

<comment><USER10> Some evidence that you've actually read what you're replying to would be nice. I made your own point better than you did when I went into more detail on the problems with paper voting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Paper.

It works.

There is a _physical_ backup for recounts. It's verifiable. Its trustworthy, and it's secret. If you want results faster. Volunteer at the voting place. If you don't trust a voting place. Send an observer. All of this can and should happen in secret in plain sight.

I know this is hard for us nerds to admit, but there are systems that do not need to be, nor should be computerized.

<comment><USER13> > There is a _physical_ backup for recounts. It's verifiable. Its trustworthy, > and it's secret. If you want results faster. Volunteer at the voting place. > If you don't trust a voting place. Send an observer. All of this can and > should happen in secret in plain sight. I know this is hard for us nerds to > admit, but there are systems that do not need to be, nor should be > computerized.

Sort of. But a poll worker could toss out ballots and you'd have no idea. A voter could toss in multiple (stolen) ballots and no one could stop it. Etc etc. There are serious problems with electronic voting, but paper ballots aren't immune to problems. Physical backups mean shit when the source is fraudulent.

<comment><USER14> No idea where you live but in Germany you can be a volunteer if you desire to monitor the process. Also you cannot put in multiple ballots. Each voter is checked off a list, a mismatch between "people who came to vote" and "ballots in the box" would be easy to spot.

<comment><USER13> You can volunteer here in the US too, but what if the volunteer commits fraud?

If there's a mismatch, what would you do? It's a secret ballot so you can't throw out the extra votes, you'd have to throw out all the votes in that ballot box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's really a shame, because Diebold knows how to do better.

While not perfect, I think the Brazilian electronic ballots are not vulnerable to most of the attacks I see being demonstrated against Diebold machines used elsewhere (they are certainly not as easy to attack as the one on the video). And Diebold has the know-how in house because they acquired Procomp, the company who won the last couple competitions to provide them.

I worked on the Unisys version (which was the last competition Diebold/Procomp didn't win, IIRC) and I distinctly remember our discussions about possible exploit scenarios and how to counter them (sometimes, with physical handling protocols and tamper-proof seals).

</comment><comment><USER16> Tampering attempts could be easily detected with a paper log of votes. All that is needed is a paper based receipt logger installed in each voting machine. If tampering is suspected, review the paper log.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple.

An advantage of electronic voting is that the machines can be designed for use by the blind. This is in fact one of the goals written into the act of Congress which funded the development of the machines originally.

Political advocacy groups for the blind oppose using paper logging, because it would mean that the only authoritative record of the vote is the one that blind people cannot personally confirm.

A machine could read the paper out to the blind vote, but that just changes which electronic device you have to trust to report the vote correctly.

A sighted person could confirm the ballot for them, but that was already possible in the past (and was how the blind voted until now). Electronic voting was an advance for the blind specifically because an individual could vote on their own with no assistance other than that provided by the machine.

From a security perspective, it is at least as plausible that the sighted assistant would manipulate the vote of the blind person as it is plausible that a hacker would manipulate the votes on an electronic system.

It can be argued that although both scenarios are plausible, hacking is more likely and has a larger impact, but arguments based on relative costs and benefits are a poor match for an emotional debate on civil rights.

<comment><USER18> Can't the printed log be output in braille as well as ASCII?

The blind voting advocacy groups sound like they are completely against anything that allows a vote log to be confirmable outside the (extremely vulnerable) blackbox voting machine. I begin to wonder where their funding comes from.

<comment><USER19> They might even make the Braille version the authorative one in case of discrepancies. It's easy enough for a sighted person to learn enough Braille to distinguish choices on a voting ballot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why can't I verify my vote?

Get a print out, then go online, punch in my number and confirm my vote.

Wouldn't this solve a lot of problems? Of course not everyone would confirm their vote, but I am sure the math can be done to see if everything checks out. Just like exit polls.

<comment><USER21> Not giving poll receipts comes from a sorted history of people coercing people to vote got a certain candidate.

"Vote for the right person or you'll be fired. Show me the receipt"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Funny, the attack only requires an "eighth grade science education" to execute but it took the Vulnerability Assessment Team of the Nuclear Engineering Division of the Argonne National Laboratory to develop it.

edited for clarity.

<comment><USER23> So? Some web exploits can be used by script kiddies while others require active skilled-programmer intervention, although both kinds require a clever hacker to figure them out in the first place, and we find that a useful distinction to make as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> More info (although old news):

<http://www.bradblog.com/?p=1839>

<http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3467>

</comment><comment><USER22> I'll just leave this resource here: <http://www.blackboxvoting.org/>

<comment><USER25> If that resource wants to be taken seriously it could start by getting a web design that doesn't scream "quack".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Obligatory xkcd reference: <http://xkcd.com/463/>

</comment><comment><USER27> I thought they were called Premier Election Systems these days. Or am I confused?

</comment><comment><USER28> Ah I see they're already gearing up for their "Republicans stole the election (again)" series when Obama loses next year. Although I think this is jumping the gun a bit. Funny how these lab tests never seem to be done when it look like a Democrat is going to win (or won).

<comment><USER29> There was plenty of voting machine hack news in 2008.

<comment><USER28> Maybe but nothing like 2004. The RFK Rolling Stone article, HBO documentaries, hell Black Box Voting was founded that year.

In 2008, the NYT was publishing opinion pieces about "The Myth of Voter Fraud" <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13tue1.html>

Trust me this will be a front page issue again in 2012 The irony of course is that calling into question the validity of an election is the oldest form of election rigging there is.

<comment><USER30> Nope, it was a big deal both times. This is confirmation bias on your part, simple as that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein's - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-hidden-hand-behind-the-islamic-state-militants-saddam-husseins/2015/04/04/aa97676c-cc32-11e4-8730-4f473416e759_story.html?tid=sm_fb <comment><USER2> I found this flagged dead and vouched for it. That's not to say I have prior reasons to believe its claims; only to say that I think it's making an interesting argument and deserves discussion. If anyone who flagged it wants to say why, and chew me out for vouching for it, please, go ahead :-)

<comment><USER3> I think it makes sense that Saddam's own generals and military leaders had something to do with the rise of ISIS. They were thrown out of power in Iraq and denied pensions and everything. Had to find a way to make a living and get back in power at any cost.

Iraq had caches of suicide vests and other stuff that Saddam was planning on using. We discovered those things after the invasion.</comment></comment>


Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equations-of-software/ <comment><USER2> I admit that I don't completely understand Lisp's claim to fame. Yes, programs in the language are represented by a built-in data type, and you can write a self-interpreter quite easily. But the same is true for a simple assembly language, if you know the instruction encoding! You can represent a program as a code pointer, and it's easy to write an analog of "eval" by hand, using just a handful of arithmetic instructions and conditional jumps. What's more, such an "eval" won't even depend on a garbage collector or other niceties that Lisp self-interpreters take for granted.

<comment><USER3> Lisp gets a great deal of undue credit as being some kind of timeless enlightened wisdom, which I see as ignorant of the history of the language's development.

It took years to develop approaches to garbage collection (the earliest prototypes used bump allocators and crashed when they exhausted a heap), years to finalize the syntax of the language (you'll notice that the "maxwell's equations" are written using M-Expressions, a syntax for the language which was discarded for ease of implementation and later rationalized because homoiconicity can be handy), decades to realize how important lexical scope (versus dynamic) is to maintaining encapsulation. Modern Lisps are substantially different in syntax and semantics from these earliest ideas; we're just still calling them Lisp.

It's very easy to make Lisp look elegant when you brush all the implementation details under the rug.

<comment><USER4> No language that is developed is perfect on release. The timeless wisdom of Lisp, as you call it, rest largely on macros and lambdas. Those ideas are powerful in their ability to allow you to build abstractions and customize the language to your needs. Basically, Lisp allowed for DSLs before the concept of a DSL was even recognized.

<comment><USER5> You can't call it timeless if it took time to develop.

<comment><USER6> Yeah- you're right. Pythagoras' theorem obviously isn't timeless; the fool took time devising the formula!

<comment><USER5> Pythagoras did not discover the theorem, it's just named after him. He _may_ have been the first to record a proof of it. It's conceivable that the very first peoples to become seriously interested in geometrical calculation would have discovered it as a matter of course. It does meet the definition of timelessness whereas Lisp does not.

As Wikipedia notes: "Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese mathematicians are all known to have discovered the theorem independently and, in some cases, provide proofs for special cases."

<comment><USER6> ... which is irrelevant. The point posed was that the ephemeral form heralds the so-called 'revolutionary' concepts, and stating that a prolonged delivery of the concepts invalidates their usefulness is the result of an overly literal interpretation of a common phrase.

<comment><USER5> Usefulness? When did I say Lisp wasn't useful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Submitter here,

I stumble upon that article from my bookmarks while pouring my latest side project ([http://www.learn-computing-directory.org/languages-and- progr...](http://www.learn-computing-directory.org/languages-and- programming/compilers-fundamentals.html)) and thought about submitting it to HN. By the way, feel free to give me feedbacks about the directory! (in still in very alpha state but already online). I only fill for the moment the "Algorithms and Data Structures", "Compilers" and "Theory of computation" topics.

Two great articles that complements perfectly the one submitted are LISP interpreters in Python from Norvig: [http://norvig.com/lispy.html](http://norvig.com/lispy.html) and [http://norvig.com/lispy2.html](http://norvig.com/lispy2.html) Also, the book "Understanding Computation" ([http://computationbook.com/](http://computationbook.com/)) can be a great companion as there is a section about Lambda Calculus.

Jérémie.

</comment><comment><USER7> While this is nice academic view. As a Lisp programmer, the Power of Lisp comes from being big ball of mud, see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud#In_programming...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud#In_programming_languages).

Usable and efficient Common Lisp implementation can be build from just ~25 primitives (more than core LISP but still very elegant). Elegant derivation of Lisp world does not matter when the atoms and the molecules can't be distinguished. Is the object system and meta-object protocol implemented as primitives by people who designed the Lisp implementation, or is it external library? Who cares. Only performance and correct function matter.

</comment><comment><USER8> I understand why Alan Kay said what he did, but a closer analogy would be to Euclid's Elements. If one follow's Lisps axioms, one ends up with Lispian Computation, elegant, clean, tail-call optimized.

Other axioms of computing lead the user in different directions, notably Hindley-Milner. Lisp carves territory in mathematical state space, not physical reality.

<comment><USER9> Maxwell's equations in the usual Heaviside form aren't even the most elegant way to write them: [http://www.av8n.com/physics/maxwell- ga.htm](http://www.av8n.com/physics/maxwell-ga.htm)

I'm curious how people might carry that through the analogy.

<comment><USER10> I'm rather partial to the differential form version. Something about the neat almost symmetry (in the layman's sense) of the two equations. And how deceptively innocent looking they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just noticed this was authored by Michael Nielsen... co-author of _the_ text on quantum computation, and now a huge open-academia advocate. And he's open- sourced the micro-lisp he wrote in this article: [https://github.com/mnielsen](https://github.com/mnielsen)

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're near Boston/Cambridge, the Clojure Meetup Group is showing a live video of William Byrd talking about this tonight.

[http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Clojure- Group/events/218650142/](http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Clojure- Group/events/218650142/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Any chance of a resurgence in Lisp machines? Especially in view of the changes in CPU architecture due to semiconductor scaling challenges.

<comment><USER14> I've been thinking hard about this lately, and the first question for me is "What would a 21st Century Lisp Machine _mean_?"

Lisp Machines were created in part due to the desire to get the most performance possible back in the days when CPUs were made out of discrete low and medium scale integration TTL (there were also ECL hot-rods, but their much greater costs across the board starting with design limited them to proven concepts, like mainframes of proven value, supercomputers, and the Xerox Dorado, after the Alto etc. had proven the worth of the concept).

Everyone was limited: maximum logic speeds were pretty low, you could try to avoid using microcoded synchronous designs, but e.g. Honeywell proved that to be a terrible idea, as noted elsewhere memory was very dear. E.g. the Lisp Machine was conceived not long after Intel shipped the first generally available DRAM chip, a whopping 1,024 bits (which was used along with the first model of the PDP-11 to provide graphics terminals to the MIT-AI PDP-10), etc. etc.

So there was a lot to be said for making a custom TTL CPU optimized for Lisp. And only that, initially: to provide some perspective, the three major improvements of LMI's LAMBDA CPU over the CADR were using Fairchild's FAST family of high speed TTL, stealing one bit from the 8 bits dedicated to tags to double the address space (no doubt a hack enabled by it having a 2 space copying GC), and adding a neat TRW 16 bit integer multiply chip.

The game radically changed when you could fit all of a CPU on a single silicon die. And for a whole bunch of well discussed reasons, to which I would add Symbolics being very badly managed, and LMI killed off by dirty Canadian politics, there was no RISC based Lisp processor, Lisp Machines didn't make the transition to that era. And now CPUs are so fast, so wide, have so much cache ... e.g. more L3 cache than a Lisp Machine of old was likely to have in DRAM, the hardware case isn't compelling. Although I'm following the lowRISC project because they propose to add 2 tag bits to the RISC-V architecture.

So, we're really talking about software, and what was the Lisp Machine in that respect. Well, us partisans of it thought it was the highest leveraged software development platform in existence, akin to supercomputers for leveraging scientists (another field that's changed radically, in part due to technology, in part due to geopolitics changing for the better).

For now, I'll finish this overly long comment by asking if a modern, productive programmer could be so without using a web browser along with the stuff we think of as software development tools. I.e., what would/should the scope of a 21st Century Lisp Machine be?

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the detailed perspective.

My limited & roseate view of a 21st century Lisp machine is based on an old theme - a massively parallel computing system using bespoke silicon logic blocks.

As you have noted below, not only are the cache sizes in a modern CPU monstrous, there's also the compilers optimized for these caches, instructions, branch prediction units, etc. No point in ending up with a chip that is much slower than an equivalent one running on a specially-designed virtual machine, which is itself much slower than MPI.

Dreaming on, such a Lisp machine would need a vast collaborative academic effort with substantially new IP design, in say the 32nm silicon process node. That's the most advanced node where lithography is still (somewhat) manageable for custom IP design.

<comment><USER14> Well, there's the first Connection Machine architecture, very roughly contemporaneous with Lisp Machines (I had to regretfully tell my friend Danny Hillis that LMI wouldn't be able to provide Lisp Machines for Thinking Machines Corporation in time (which had to be formed because the project needed 1-2 analog engineers, which MIT was structurally unable to pay, no one gets paid more than a professor). He was really, legitimately pissed off by what Symbolics did with Macsyma, a sleazy licensing deal to keep it out of everyone else's hands (and they tried to get everyone in the world who'd gotten a copy of it to relinquish it). Later neglected, even when it became the Symbolics cash cow.)

Anyway, if you're not talking ccNUMA, the limitations of which has got me looking hard at Barrelfish ([http://www.barrelfish.org/](http://www.barrelfish.org/)), e.g. if you're talking stuff in the land of MPI, again it's going to be very hard to beat commodity CPUs.

Although in that dreaming, look at lowRISC: [http://www.lowrisc.org/](http://www.lowrisc.org/) looking at things now, they propose taping out production silicon as soon as 2016, and say 48 and 28nm processes look good. From the site:

 _What level of performance will it have?

To run Linux "well". The clock rate achieved will depend on the technology node and particular process selected. As a rough guide we would expect ~500-1GHz at 40nm and ~1.0-1.5GHz at 28nm.

Is volume fabrication feasible?

Yes. There are a number of routes open to us. Early production runs are likely to be done in batches of ~25 wafers. This would yield around 100-200K good chips per batch. We expect to produce packaged chips for less than $10 each._

And with a little quality time with Google, the numbers look good. Ignoring the _minor_ detail of NRE like making masks, a single and very big wafer really doesn't cost all that much, like quite a bit less than $10K.

And we now have tools to organize these sorts of efforts, e.g. crowdsourcing. But it's not trivial, e.g. one of the things that makes this messy is modern chips have DRAM controllers, and that gets you heavily into analog land. But it's now conceivable, which hasn't been true for a very long time, say starting somewhere in the range between when the 68000 and 386 shipped in the '80s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's nothing inherently unnatural about taking a bottom up approach to solving problems. Sometimes, knowing you're going to need a particular tool and doing that first makes sense. I think of it like the cooking technique Mise en place [1], where you lay out all the ingredients before you start cooking. Neither bottom up, nor top down, is always the most natural way to attack a problem. Sometimes you can attack a problem from both sides at once.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place)

</comment><comment><USER16> What does Lisp provide on top of e.g. the lambda calculus? I'd expect the latter to be even more fundamental. But I suppose one could reasonably argue that that wasn't 'Software', just Math.

</comment><comment><USER17> surely this is actually that a short lisp compiler or interpreter is the maxwell's equations. the analogy is way off the mark for software as a discipline in total. you can know nothing about lisp and understand pretty much everything... thats not true of classical electromagnetism and maxwell's equations

<comment> one-more-minute Not necessarily. You learn a ton about electromagnetism before you ever get to Maxwell's equations.

<comment><USER10> Faraday sure did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> for what it is worth, here is a version of a lisp interpreter I wrote in python: [https://github.com/keithgabryelski/plisp](https://github.com/keithgabryelski/plisp) I used _Interpreting_LISP_ by Gary D. Knott as a guide.

<comment><USER19> Lisp in Python in 137 LOC:

[http://www.flownet.com/ron/l.py](http://www.flownet.com/ron/l.py)

<comment><USER18> not really, but it is interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That half a page of code isn't "Lisp in itself".

I do not see any low-level I/O routines, or a reader to scan expressions and convert them into objects.

I don't see the actual function call mechanism: where the subroutine linkage is set up and torn down, and what goes into what register.

I don't see a garbage collector.

A whole bunch of hand-written assembly language made the code on that page work.

</comment><comment><USER21> Shouldn't [2012] be appended to the title? I've seen the article discussed on HN before. [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830867](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830867)

<comment><USER22> I thought HN wont allow to re-post the exact same url, so to bypass people add noise to the url.

is date of post also considered?

<comment><USER23> As far as I know, re-posts are allowed after some period of time has elapsed. I don't think this is documented anywhere though.

<comment><USER8> I've always figured the URLS just fall off a queue, so there's no absolute period of time involved. No actual knowledge, just a guess.

<comment><USER22> sweet, so we could attempt to find out the queue size!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Disagree with premise, Maxwell's equations are useful in practice.

</comment><comment><USER25> I hate that. The half page of code is not Lisp. Not even close, and I'm not talking about a standard library. There is no parser in there. Eval is operating on Lisp data, not lisp source code. There is no support for efficient math, or strings, or anything really.

If that is lisp, then a byte code interpreter loop is every interpreted language: read_opcode, inc_pc, call a function indexed from a list indexed by opcode. It can be written in one line of C. This BTW translates to hardware a lot easier than the half page of Lisp. That one line of code by itself is also just as useless as the half page of Lisp.

It's still interesting, but people need to stop claiming it's Lisp defined in this tiny little block of code.</comment>


Ask HN: Any cool innovation in e-commerce startup? - <AUTHOR>

Is e-commerce very unsexy thing for startups nowadays? <comment><USER2> There are whole categories of new startups that cater to e-commerce sites:

* new analytics tools that understand the need to segment customers and track LTV

* abandoned cart recovery

* automating lifecycle e-mails

* making e-mail marketing easier for non-technical store owners

* connecting stores to all the comparison shopping / product ad sites with their separate feed formats (Google Shopping / Amazon Product Ads / Shopzilla / etc)

* rehosting stores to multiple platforms (e.g. take your Shopify store and sell on Facebook)

* automating fulfillment or quoting and purchasing individual shipping labels for small sellers

* improving customer service

If you're interested in who's servicing e-commerce companies, just look at the app stores of the new generation of e-commerce hosts like Shopify: [http://apps.shopify.com/](http://apps.shopify.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: How would you spend $25 on barnesandnoble.com? - <AUTHOR>

I trust this community a lot and I just got a $25 gift card. I am not a very savvy or well read reader. I really enjoyed superfreakenomics and Founders at Work.
What reading does HN recommend these days? I have not read Hackers and Painters.
p.s. I am a college freshman. <comment><USER2> I really can't recommend The Long Tail enough. It is overrated and overstated and _still_ the single most important book I've ever read about marketing on the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Although its not really in the same vein as hacker news, I really enjoyed Gang Leader for a Day: [http://www.amazon.com/Gang-Leader-Day-Sociologist- Streets/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Gang-Leader-Day-Sociologist- Streets/dp/014311493X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266574137&sr=1-1)

</comment><comment><USER4> buy Zen-and-the-Art-of-Motorcycle-Maintenance (paperback, $7.21), spend the rest on coffee

<comment><USER5> It's a very cheesy book and tedious in parts and overall is rather pretentious. The central metaphor, though, makes a brilliant recommendation for someone who "trusts" HN so much, etc.

But... college freshman.... presumed to be "typical" ... hmm...

Maybe there's a good dictionary in that price range? The "Concise English Oxford" is about $25, though I haven't personally seen it so can't specifically recommend it.

Or, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook? Or something about how to do laundry? Or something about law for tenants in landlord-tenant relations?

Perhaps some artsy fartsy book of erotic photos?

Oh! Got it! In the same vein as "Zen and the Art of...", how about "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard Feynman?

p.s., re: "I really enjoyed superfreakenomics and Founders at Work." Which is a good reason to not recommend any books in that vein and to instead suggest books that encourage becoming mature and balanced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> art of the start by guy kawasaki</comment>


Why does everyone think I'm an asshole for not having a TV? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.glenelkins.com/asshole-tv/

<comment><USER2> The site is down, but I'll take a stab at it anyway.

Not owning a TV doesn't make you an asshole.

Making sure that everyone else _knows_ you don't own a TV is what makes you an asshole.

<comment><USER3> _Making sure that everyone else knows you don't own a TV_

Speaking as a non-TV owner (and, unlike the author of the block post, someone who doesn't watch it particularly much either), you kind of have to. It's practically a survival skill.

People who do own and watch TV are constantly bringing it up in conversation. Generally, they start by assuming you watch $POPULAR_SHOW[0]. Once they figure out you have no idea what they're talking about, they move on to quizzing you about whether you watch $POPULAR_SHOW[1..7]. After a series of negative replies, they move on to explaining how you simply have to start catching $POPULAR_SHOW[8..13]. By the time they're done, it can easily have been the sole topic of the entire dinner's conversation.

And it's a long, tedious conversation that I've had way too many times. I'm not sure why it has to happen; I don't try to talk computer science with people I know aren't interested in computer science, and it seems like it shouldn't be hard for others to afford me similar courtesy. But it happens, and if it happens much more I just might die of boredom.

So for me, it's much easier to just shut it down by laying it all out there. "Don't watch TV, don't have a TV, don't go to movies, don't have a Netflix account, not interested in getting one." The quizzing usually doesn't end there, because this apparently makes me some sort of sideshow curiosity. But it's usually over with rather more quickly, so that we can sooner move on to a conversation topic that we can both enjoy.

<comment><USER4> > $POPULAR_SHOW[0]

popular(adj) ... "regarded with favor, approval, or affection by people in general"

> The quizzing usually doesn't end there, because this apparently makes me > some sort of sideshow curiosity.

Why are you surprised at that? If you want to be considered part of "people in general", then I'd suggest becoming familiar with a few (self-described) popular shows!

I don't watch much TV, as such. But I've found the best way to exercise is to queue up various series of shows and hit the cardio machine. Usually they're ~40 minutes an episode with ads removed which is a reasonable cardio time. You get a little popular culture and some fitness too. But I'll bet you're about to tell me that those popular cardio machines aren't for you, and you only enjoy exercising by hiking mountain trails :)

<comment><USER3> _If you want to be considered part of "people in general", then I'd suggest becoming familiar with a few (self-described) popular shows!_

If spending my precious free time on an activity that I find to be enormously boring is a condition for being considered a peer by people who're so devoted to an activity that I find to be enormously boring that they're not sure how to interact with me in a way that doesn't revolve around said activity that I find to be enormously boring, then I suppose that's fine. Seems a bit unfortunate that anyone should be so devoted to one thing out of a whole universe of activities and topics, but if they really don't have anything else to talk to me about, then I suppose I probably won't have anything to talk to them about that would interest them, either. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You don't have a TV?

You just have a machine that can receive television programs and display them on a nice screen? It kinda sounds like you have a TV.

</comment><comment><USER6> The advertising boxes here don't have much to offer for me. I can entertain myself with my computer if I need to.

Why would anyone without a tv be an asshole? We are all born assholes I guess.

</comment><comment><USER7> Probably because he's surrounded by assholes.</comment>