E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be' - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime <comment><USER2> I didn't notice at first, but, like with some other Wikipedia articles, the editors of this one have enforced the E-Prime constraint on the article itself. After the possibility occurred to me and I went back to the page to check, I only found it particularly unnatural in the initial sentence, since almost every other article begins with the sentence "[subject] is [concise definition]."

For a similar example, the "Plot Summary" section of the page about "A Void" also conforms to its subject's constraint--in that case, avoiding the letter "e": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void#Plot_summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void#Plot_summary)

It surprises me that avoiding forms of "to be" presents such a challenge for me--particularly with this sentence. I feel that it makes my writing sound more repetitive, since I end up replacing "X is" with wordy alternatives like "I find X" or "X seems"; while I'm used to forms of "to be" appearing dozens of times in a paragraph, my replacements stand out more when overused.

<comment><USER3> Actually the first sentence shows a loop-hole doesn't it?

> E-Prime, a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms > of the verb to be.

Doesn't the part parenthesised in commas have a kind of implicit 'is'?

For example E' is supposed to stop me saying things like 'Terminator is a good film and is 2 hours long', but I can say 'Terminator, a good film, lasts for 2 hours'.

<comment><USER4> It does. Specifically, it is carrying an implicit "which is":

> E-Prime, [which is] a prescriptive version of the English language, ...

That sentence should instead be written:

> E-Prime prescribes a version of the English language which excludes all > forms of the verb "to be".

<comment><USER5> s/prescribes/is

Prescribe seems out of place there, anyhow.

<comment><USER4> Prescribe is a linguistic jargon. [0] It is exactly the correct word. And the whole point of E' is to remove _is_ in such cases, because it carries an overloaded value which could change from person to person. In this case, a linguist would likely understand that it is prescribing a form of English, but not everyone would share that interpretation.

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

<comment><USER5> He, my bad then. English is very contextual. Point in case, prescriptive could also mean a speaker of E' must speak prescriptive. As foreign speaker, i then figured it means descriptive, which would've made some sort of sense to me, but is actually the opposite in linguistic terms.

Now I get down into semantics, can E-Prime prescribe something or is it the name of a rule-set that can be prescribed? I lean to the latter, hence my remark is still valid?

On another note, I find the recursion mentioned by OP quite interesting in a broader context. Choice of grammar has meaning itself.

Edit: Ultimately though, language is inherently underspecified, I heard, and I suppose in linguistic context it means a lack of definite distinction. You could go on subdividing prescription into negative and positive, i.e. prohibitive and, say, constructive. You could divide that ad infinitum. No?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have spent an entire week writing everything in E-prime. All texts, all IRC chats, all postings, every email.

I also spent the following week trying to speak in E-Prime. This proved very difficult but worth it. I had a notepad with me with several useful phrases in it. Even simple things like ordering from a coffee shop made me stumble. But I would try my best to speak in E-prime. I failed several times!

Writing appeared much much easier. It made emails and other postings less personal, less objective and more subjective and relative. I believe "Non Violent Communication" has many similarities to E-Prime.

Robert Anton Wilson wrote a very good introductory text explaining E-Prime. [http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm](http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm) I suggest you all check it out!

<comment><USER7> How do you introduce yourself? I find it difficult to find a replacement for:

\- I'm Steven

\- Hi, my name is Steven

\- I'm named|called Steven

The only thing I could come up with "Hi, Steven, nice to meet you" sounds rather forced.

The grammatical rules of English make it more difficult to use this compared to some other languages. E-prime seems very stinted, especially when asking questions:

       Is "less objective" really an advantage over "more subjective" for a hacker?

And let me ask that example question as well. As somebody working in IT, I strive to come across as (nay, to be!) as objective and as precise as possible.

<comment><USER8> "My friends call me Steven. You will address me as Mr Seagal."

One of the advantages of this restriction on speech is that it forces you to think about relationships between things. In this case, _what does it mean to have a name_?

<comment><USER9> In other languages the construction for "My name is Steve" is something like "They call me Steve" (Russian) or "I call myself Steve" (Spanish).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The argument for forbidding "to be" seems a little like the argument for forbidding "is a" (inheritance) relationships in programming: that any "is a" can be expressed more precisely as a "has a" and/or "does _".

I think it's interesting to take the argument even further, to argue for structural types (like interfaces in Go and Typescript, and objects in OCaml) over nominal types (like Java interfaces and Haskell typeclasses). The former just says "if Bar is an interface with method Blaz(int, int, bool), and Foo has a method Blaz(int, int, bool), then Foo is a Bar", while the latter require the programmer to explicitly specify that Foo is a (implements) bar.

<comment><USER11> I have suspect that naive architecture of a program is heavily affected by native language of the programmer. My native language is easy to parse (14kb parser can parse 98% of technical language, while 200Kb parser can also fix errors), logical and composable, which may be the reason why there is so high rate of good developers from my country: not because we are smarter than average, but because we are taught from birth to think logically.

<comment><USER12> Can you tell what your native language is? Finnish?

<comment><USER13> My money is on Ukrainian based on the handle. (Slovak would be a candidate too but less of a fit for "many programmers, etc")

<comment><USER11> You are right, I am Ukrainian. Ukrainian language is easy to parse: in most cases, just chop largest matching prefixes and suffixes from a word until word root will be left. Then suffixes can be used to understand sentence structure, while roots and prefixes can be used to understand meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sometimes I use E-Prime as sort of a verbose flag for English.

Instead of: "Mount Everest is almost 8 km tall."

A verbose E-Prime version would sound something like: "I recall having read an Wikipedia article that reported the height of Mount Everest as almost 8 km."

Notice all the extra verbs in there.

"Recall"? Could I have mis-recalled?

"Read"? Could I have misread?

"Reported"? Could Wikipedia have misreported it, intentionally or unintentionally?

<comment><USER15> "Mt. Everest _stands_ 8km tall." In many cases, it's all about moving away from declaring a property of a subject ("X is Y") to using the verb that causes the subject to exhibit the property.

I'm familiar with this concept but this is the first time I've heard of it formalized with a name, or used outside of creative/narrative writing. When I was in high school, a writing teacher made my class perform an exercise to memorize a superset of the "to be" verbs. The rationale was that, while these verbs are direct and objective, they are "flat" and fail to engage a reader.

In the case of descriptors/properties that simply require too much wrangling to find an appropriate verb - the case of color came up elsewhere in these comments, as in "the barn is blue" \- the guiding rule is that those descriptors shouldn't be the focus of a sentence in the first place. "The barn was blue" is not interesting enough to stand on its own as a sentence and something else needs to take the verb. "The blue barn loomed over the landscape" or "The blue barn dominated his thoughts."

Writing a Wikipedia article in this style is certainly an interesting exercise, but given the goal of a Wikipedia article I don't think it's a good fit. An encyclopedia entry is not narrative and needs to be direct and objective.

As an aside, her exercise proved to be oddly effective, as I can still recite the list from memory: am, is, are, was, were, have, has, had, be, been, being, do, does, did, can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, must. :)

<comment><USER4> > ... can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, must.

I wonder what the reason for removing these are. They are basically evidentiality and epistemic markers [0], and don't really mean anything in and of themselves. Then again, perhaps that was the point?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality#Evidentiality_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality#Evidentiality_and_epistemic_modality)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> E-Prime has two very practical uses:

1\. Code documentation. If you write your comments and docs in E-Prime, you will find it a little more difficult to write ambiguous docs. In comments, E-Prime helps you avoid using "is" to describe a variable's contents and type with the same phrasing, which can confuse later readers.

2\. ET speech in Sci-Fi movies or Tee Vee shows. If you write, say, a Vulcan's lines in E-Prime, you almost always end up with a slightly foreign, or "scientific" sounding prose.

</comment><comment><USER17> This _is_ an interesting version of the English language. It _is_ clarifying thinking and strengthening writing.

Or should I say: I find this version of the English language interesting. It clarifies my thinking and strengthens my writing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Having read 1984, I find the desire to remove undesirable language from our vocabulary quite unnerving.

I realise it has the best of intentions, and nobody is proposing to remove 'to be' from everything. But the discussion here about how adopting E-Prime forces you to rethink what you mean to say, is eerily reminiscent of how Newspeak was used to control people's thought process.

<comment><USER19> Perhaps, but that sounds more like a kneejerk reaction rather than a real critique.

The idea behind it is supposed to show that by removing the verb 'to be', you have to think more on how to properly convey what you actually mean.

So in a sense it even allows you to get your actual thought process out there rather than having it dismissed for sounding overly harsh for example.

Contrast that to Newspeak, whose design is to limit and shape people's thoughts by external means (Another person chosing what is ok and what not), where as here /you/ get to choose what you say, it is merely the form that changes.

<comment><USER18> It's not an in-depth critique, you're right. But there are some interesting themes here, and by mentioning 1984 I'm referencing some deep questions in (what I hope is) a fairly shorthand way.

To be more explicit:

1\. Do people 'think in a particular language' such that limitations in language limit their thought? This is something that psychologist have considered. The other comments in this thread suggest to me that there might be something in this.

2\. Is it dangerous to allow any kind of authority that tells people what they can/can't say? If the answer to #1 is 'yes' then would such a group be too powerful to be allowed to exist?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I was in high school my mom (a marriage and family therapist) cajoled me into using something like E-Prime. I had to be really careful when making generalizations around her, and the big no-no was to say that something or someone "made me feel" a certain way. It was infuriating at the time but it certainly made me take responsibility for own my feelings and opinions. This experience probably influenced my decision to major in linguistics.

</comment><comment><USER21> The Turkish language has no "to be" verb at all. In addition, Turkish has an extra verb tense not present in other languages which distinguishes between things that the speaker has observed directly from those they are only relaying 2nd hand.

<comment><USER22> Turkish lacks a explicit free morpheme (i.e., a separate word) for "to be", but it most definitely has translational equivalents, most notably the "zero copula" used for predicate adjectives and nouns in the simple present tense, declarative mood. All other situations involve an explicit inflectional marker (either a suffix or a clitic) that translates "is/are/were".

This is not unusual; lots of languages work that way. And in my experience, it does reduce the use of copula constructions compared to English, but not by much.

Incidentally, the "extra verb tense" you refer to is formally called "evidentiality", and is not considered the same thing as a" tense" by linguists. That's also fairly common in many languages, though it may seem exotic to English speakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I find this article really interesting. I am a native speaker of Spanish and the verb 'to be' is usually one of the first lessons we learn when we study English.

Spanish has to different verbs to depict the meaning(s) of 'to be' -> ser (exist) and estar (stay). I always thought merging those meanings into a single verb did not help to express the richness of the English language.

<comment><USER6> Within E-Prime some people think that using the verb "to be" for expressing stay, location etc should be allowed. For example: "The shop is over there" or "the cat is on the map" should be allowed. However I think the majority of E-Prime likers think that these should be excluded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 17th Century language geeks thought that English should be more like Latin, so they banned split infinitives.

21st Century language geeks think that English should be more like Klingon, so they ban the verb "to be".

</comment><comment><USER25> Chinese uses "is" much more rarely than english. And that's something it takes a while to get used to.

For example 中國很大 ("China is very big", literally "China very big")

But for a while you'll be tempted to add an "is" in there.

In fact you can use an "is" to change the emphasis.

Eg. "中國是很大的" (literally "China is very big _adjective modifier_ ")

<comment><USER26> On a tangent, Thai lacks "yes" and "no", and _in theory_ one signals assent by repeating the verb or adjective, with or without a negative modifier.

"Hungry, or?" \- "Not hungry" "Take, no?" \- "Take"

In practice, people will often grunt for yes, and shake their head and break eye contact for no.

<comment><USER6> Irish also has no "yes" and "no" also (generally speaking) One has to answer with an affirmative statement. "Do you like tea?" "I do"

"Has mary got the message?" "she has"

"ooh, it's wet outside today" "it is"

"Are you happy?" "I am"

<comment><USER27> Anecdote warning, but this feels very common to me in "Hibernio-English" as well. I do it a lot when a simple yes/no would suffice, and I notice other people doing the same. I assume it's a construct that translated over from Irish. I must start listening out for native English speakers of different nationalities for comparison :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How do you communicate someone's name then? You can't say "the name IS", or "He/she IS called". The cognate to the word all the other Germanic languages use has become archaic and even lacks a present tense form:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hight#English](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hight#English)

Maybe: "One calls her/him"?

<comment><USER29> AFAIK Russian, which lost the present tense of "to be", just says "my name X" (Меня зовут X).

Italian, which has the verb to be, nevertheless uses a different form: literally "I call me X" (mi chiamo X). "I'm X" (io sono X) would be understood but it's more the answer to who are you than to what's your name.

<comment><USER30> The Russian phrase means "[They] call me X". "My name [is] X" would be "Моё имя — X".

<comment><USER29> My Russian is very very basic. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Do we also lose the progressive tense, then? How would one express something like "The car ran me over while I was walking to the store?"

I suppose "The car ran me over while walking to the store," but that's ambiguous, since some sort of walking car could have run me over, when I happened to be sitting on a bench outside the store.

</comment><comment><USER32> A quick scan through the text and, as far as I can tell, the whole article is written (modulo examples) in E-Prime.

<comment><USER33> Almost - I count at least five occurrences outside of examples or quotes. Admittedly not bad for an article of its size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> In High School, my English teacher had us write essays in a format that incorporated E-Prime, but I had no idea that it was actually called "E-Prime". In addition to not using forms of "to be," we followed the SEXI format. This meant that every body paragraph was composed of four parts: Statement, Explanation, eXample, and Interpretation (one web site lists this as Importance). I think that in short essays each SEXI paragraph also had to be four sentences long.

The combination of E-Prime and SEXI was a real challenge to write at first, but with practice I found that it led to really solid papers with greater clarity of thought. It was a tremendous help in writing my college senior thesis.

Unlike the article, I didn't try to use either form in my comment. :)

<comment><USER35> > Unlike the article, I didn't try to use either form in my comment. :)

I'll give it a shot. This proved harder than I thought it would, and might read awkwardly. (Especially the "actually called 'E-Prime'" part. I can't think of a way of rewording that that doesn't sound weird.)

\---

In High School, my English teacher had us write essays in a format that incorporated these rules, but I had no idea that it had a name: "E-Prime". In addition to not using forms of "to be," we followed the SEXI format. This meant we composed every body paragraph from four parts: Statement, Explanation, eXample, and Interpretation (one web site lists this as Importance). I think that in short essays each SEXI paragraph also couldn't number more than four sentences.

The combination of E-Prime and SEXI created a real challenge to write at first, but with practice I found that it led to really solid papers with greater clarity of thought. It tremendously helped in writing my college senior thesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I haven't read the paper/books but from the wiki article I find it problematic that "the code is red" is replaced with "we see the coat as red". Specifically if I were forced to use E' it would be very hard to argue certain philosophical positions. Objectivism vs. Subjectivism for example or to return to the coat...there could be a philosophical difference between the redness of the coat and the perception of it and not everyone wants to bundle those. Due to this reason I find it rather curious that identity was picked as one of the troublesome uses. Identity seems like one of the most important uses of is for me.

Without thinking about it too deeply, formal logic would probably also be rather funky.

<comment><USER10> >Specifically if I were forced to use E' it would be very hard to argue certain philosophical positions. Objectivism vs. Subjectivism for example

Some philosophers, e.g. early Wittgenstein, would argue that certain philosophical positions only exist by sleight of tongue, being based upon some form of incoherence that can only exist in imprecise language.

From his Tractatus (note that he sort of changed his mind in his later work): "The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one.

<comment><USER37> E' version...

Some philosophers, e.g. early Wittgenstein, would argue that certain philosophical positions only exist by sleight of tongue because the philosophers who held these positions based their theories upon some form of incoherence that can only exist in imprecise language.

From his Tractatus (note that he sort of changed his mind in his later work): "The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I bemoan rather than beatify prescriptionists who bequeath their own bespoke English upon the world, befuddled when the rest of us find it somewhere between _befouling_ and _beleaguering_ rather than bewitching. Belike I belabor the point; I can begrudgingly believe avoiding "to be" might bestow a little clarity, sometimes. But betwixt you and I, in excess it bewilders me.

<comment><USER39> "betwixt you and me"

<comment><USER38> More prescriptionism?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sounds more like a statistical misattribution to me.

1\. Many unclear English sentences have "to be".

2\. Therefore, let's disallow "to be" to make English clearer.

Well, the obvious alternate explanation is:

3\. Since "be" is an extremely common word, for most attribute X, a subset of "English sentences with attribute X" will naturally have many sentences with "to be".

I mean, in what way is "Mars is round" any less clear/objective/interesting than "Mars orbits around the sun"?

<comment><USER35> The point of E' is to provide a kind of mental exercise. By forcing yourself to write this way, you discover clearer ways to make your point, or to convey information.

Think of it like the weights baseball players put on their bats during practice. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_doughnut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_doughnut))

<comment><USER40> I understand that it can be an interesting mental exercise. I'm just objecting to the underlying assumption that "be" makes sentences inherently unclear or subjective. For exercise, you could instead have excluded, say, every five- letter word, but (hopefully) nobody will claim that five-letter words make English unclear.

It seems to me that E-prime works only because "be" is so common that you're forced to rewrite almost every sentence, yet it carries so little "semantic weight" that all such sentences can be rewritten with a bit of practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This reminds me of how most people seem to use "hopefully." I very seldom hear people say "I hope this works." Instead, almost every time I hear, "hopefully, this works." It seems to have a "language smell" of wanting a way to weasel out making a commitment to a particular stance or viewpoint.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have noticed an interesting effect where initially one is given the freedom to use all tools available to achieve a task, and over time restricted to an increasingly smaller subset. I find that this makes me optimize the process and in case of writing computer code, makes for easier to understand and more stable building blocks.

</comment><comment><USER43> This helps achieve the objective in general semantics of 'silence on the objective level.' In other words, that none of us have access to reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs, so it is best to not make statements that assume we do.

<comment><USER44> _" none of us have access to reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs"_

That sounds like a statement about "reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs".

It's not uncontroversial either, as lots of people have in fact claimed to have just such access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> If I'm not mistaken, Russian does not have the verb 'to be', right?

<comment><USER29> It's omitted only in the present tense. [http://masterrussian.com/verbs/bit_pobit.htm](http://masterrussian.com/verbs/bit_pobit.htm)

<comment><USER45> Ah, nice. Thanks for clarifying. I learn something new every day :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> As evidenced by some of these HN comments, E-prime encourages a voodoo-like approach to writing, in which you can magically make bad writing better just by doing a search-and-replace on a few words.

</comment><comment><USER47> Could we also change the number system. All teen numbers are switch to ten-# as in Eleven is Ten-One, twelve is Ten-Two.

</comment><comment><USER48> So, instead of "X is Y", we now we have to say "the equality relation has member (X,Y)".

Very handy.

</comment><comment><USER49> Shakespeare would not have appreciated this. How do you say "to be or not to be" in EPrime?

<comment><USER50> The article gives this as an example. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime#Examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime#Examples)

      To live or to die,
      I ask myself this.

<comment><USER49> Almost a haiku but not sure as memorable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is unlikely to see widespread adoption. Boooom!

</comment><comment><USER52> I think, therefore...wtf?

<comment><USER53> I think, therefore I exist.

<comment><USER52> I'll allow it:-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> an eprime linter? [https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=eprime](https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=eprime)

<comment><USER55> In particular is eprime-mode for emacs: [https://github.com/AndrewHynes/eprime- mode](https://github.com/AndrewHynes/eprime-mode)</comment></comment>


Scientists uncover mystery of ball lightning - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-12/scientists-uncover-mystery-of-ball-lightning/4310800

<comment><USER2> Here's a slightly less superficial version of the same article from CSIRO who produced the work: [http://www.csiro.au/en/Portals/Media/CSIRO-explains-the- myst...](http://www.csiro.au/en/Portals/Media/CSIRO-explains-the-mystery-of- ball-lightning.aspx)

Here's the paper: <http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012JD017921.shtml>

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Here's a slightly less superficial version of the same article from CSIRO ..."_

thx for finding this. There's always a balance between posting a general news article and the research source. The former is usually shallow, the later too deep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The full pdf is not accessible and the abstract is too light.

Many ball lightning have been witnessed in absence of windows. What's the point of such explanation ?

It is a frequent behavior to select one caracteristic of a multi variated phenomenon and derive from it an explanation. Obviously the explanation can't account for all the other caracteristics of the phenomenon. But that seem to be a detail.

BTW my father proposed an explanation of ball lightning that he presented at AIS in 2011. The proceedings are not yet published.

The explanation is that ball lightnings are plasma bubbles. The plasma is in the thin layer of the bubble. The ions ocillate radialy. The ball consumes ozone and follows ozone gradians.

There are two types of lightning balls. One that ends by lighting off silently and one that ends by an explosition. If my memory is right the difference comes from the nature of the negative charge carrier. In one case they are electrons and in the other negative ions. But I'm not sure.

This is just the main idea. There is much more to it.

To create ball lightning experimentally we thus at least need ozone.

<comment><USER4> The point of this study is to supplament previous studies of ball lightning. The most widely accepted theory is that ball lightning is a ball of silicon gas, resulting from lightning striking the ground. That obviously didn't address the cases of ball lightning appearing in and around aircraft, which is the gap this study fills in.

So now it seems we have one workable theory of ball lightning. To claim it is incomplete, you need to find cases of ball lightning that were both a significant distance away from the ground AND far, far away from any windows.

My doubts about this theory lie in the various behaviors when ball lightning encouters solid objects... Sometimes it burns a hole, while other times witnesses claim it passed right through solid objects without causing any damage. That seems to indicate there may be two very different types of ball lightning, but perhaps the ground versus windows source will prove to generate a sufficiently different type of ball which will suit both observations.

<comment><USER3> The silicon gaz is new to me. Never heard of this theory. How would such a gaz not disolve in air ?

How could it explain the explosions reported with some ball lightning ? The plasma bubble explains all the reported facts.

A precision to the discribed model is that ions of opposite charge move in opposite direction radialy. When they crossed each other they slow down due to the attractive force of the opposite charge up to the point they stop and reverse direction. This oscillation of the ions explains the stability of the plasma over a long period.

The plasma bubble layer is very thin. A bubble may contain other bubbles forming then multi layer bubbles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They still haven't replicated it or taken a photo. It's just theoretical modelling.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure I saw ball lightening once when I was a child. It was in the courtyard of our house during a lightning store - a ball of translucent orange that was stationary for a moment before whisking away.

Nobody ever believed me.

</comment><comment><USER7> This might be _an_ explanation for ball lightning, but I'm pretty sure it can't be _the_ explanation.

I saw ball lightning once. Got caught in a thunderstorm at 12,000 feet in the Sierras -- well above timberline -- and watched the lightning striking around me while I hid under a boulder. I was essentially in the centre of the thunderhead; things got pretty wild. At one point I saw two or three lighting balls (I _thought_ they were maybe 1-2 feet in diameter, although estimating distance in such an environment and which such unfamiliar sights is probably a lost cause), and one thing in the distance which looked like a bobbling string of pearls.

The nearest window would have been about 20 miles away, so that can't be the only explanation.

<comment><USER8> I can't comment on the quality of the theory described here, but I hope you realise there is silicon everywhere - most common minerals contain a substantial proportion of Si.

<comment><USER7> My impression is that the theory is not just about silicon, but specifically about _windows_. Seems to require a smooth silicon-based non-conducting material, with air on both sides and a charge differential between them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I came across this 2007 publication claiming creation of something similar to ball lightning.

<http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v98/i4/e048501>

</comment><comment><USER10> Totally misleading headline, crap science journalism. They didn't "uncover" anything, just invented a new (untested) hypothesis.

</comment><comment><USER11> The title sounds like a Civilization technology discovery 'Scientists uncover...</comment>


The Universal Scalability Law and the Mythical Man Month - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tacertain.com/USL-and-MMM/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you prefer reading it on Twitter, this is the original thread : [https://twitter.com/tacertain/status/1166039929354240002](https://twitter.com/tacertain/status/1166039929354240002)</comment>


Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-iphoneruby1/index.html?S_TACT=105AGX44&S_CMP=EDU <comment><USER3> When developing websites recently with an eye towards mobile visitors, I've been using the device detection classify the requester into one of three categories, and serving a possibly different presentation for each:

      - <USER2>
      - feature phones
      - desktop and laptops

I'd like to ask those of you doing mobile webdev what your take is on this. Do you use these three "buckets"? Or see any problems with doing so? Do you make different distinctions? If so, why?

Some background:

Been thinking much more about mobile users in the last few webapps I've made, using device detection to somewhat customize content depending on broad device capabilities. IMO this is a good middle ground between two extremes: (a) serving a lowest-common-denominator html response that will work OK for every requester, and (b) serving something slightly different for every (OS, browser, device) combination you care about. (And neglecting those you don't :)

So-called "feature phones" are the kind that still make up most of the cell phones people on the planet use every day. Smartphones are the more recent and, uh, featureful devices like the iPhone, Android/G1, Palm Pre, and color Blackberries.

The line between a feature phone and smartphone is fuzzy. Generally, though, a device called a smartphone will have a full qwerty keyboard for input (hard and/or soft); larger full color screens; higher data connection speeds; and richer web browsers capable of rendering full XHTML documents and (critically) complete, efficient javascript engines.

Smartphone browsers will often present the average web page more or less acceptably. However, there are a lot of good reasons to present something different to smartphones and to desktop clients. The article lists some. For an excellent demonstration, visit espn.mobi in a smartphone (which automatically serves you the mobile version). Then, at the bottom of the page, click on the link that lets you visit the desktop version, and compare.

My opinion is that, if you're going to do device detection, it makes a lot more sense to develop a smartphone version than an iphone version. Even if the iphone is the most common smartphone now (at least in the USA), a large double digit number of smartphone internet users do NOT have an iphone OS device. And who knows what the mobile landscape will look like in a few years, when the websites you're making now will hopefully still be in use?

Please share your thoughts if you've been making mobile websites.

On a related note, if you want to learn about mobile webdev, this is video is an outstanding overview of the current landscape:

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6391025572807739271>

<comment><USER4> Assuming your audience/customers use smartphones I would only have 2 buckets (otherwise just a):

a) Desktop browsers

b) Smartphone browsers

I don't bother supporting feature phones because if its anything more then a small piece of data like the weather then browsing the internet on feature phones (and some early Blackberries) is pointless.

The web based vs native app question depends on a few things:

a) Do you need to use built in smartphone features (camera, GPS etc)

b) Have enough money to invest in developing for multiple platforms? (or you could use Rhomobile for rails)

c) Need a device-specific UI in order to deliver the content in a useful way?

d) App needs to work outside of 3g/CDMA networks? (business critical?)

I believe that web based is the way to go for most cases and will continue to be a better option over the next few years as more smartphone browsers are on level with iPhone/Android. But if the answer to the questions above are yes then native is the best bet.

<comment><USER3> Re ignoring feature phones: Good point. Making a distinction between feature phones and smartphones gives us the choice to not support the former. At least in the USA, it's probably rarely worth the effort. (Don't know about other markets.)

Native is sometimes the way to go, for the reasons you mention. It's also AT LEAST an order of magnitude more expensive - especially for several platforms... It's good to see things like geo-location.js [0] taking shape.

cheers, thanks for the comments Aaron

[0] <http://code.google.com/p/geo-location-javascript/></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup - GrexIt: Build a Knowledge Base out of your email - <AUTHOR>

Site URL: http://grexit.com
Please use this invite code to register: INVGREXIT
GrexIt helps to create a company-wide Knowledge Base right out of your email. Important email discussions, customer interaction, files and knowledge remains trapped and gets lost in email inboxes. GrexIt allows to easily add email conversations and file attachments to a shared repository, so that you and your colleagues can:
- Find stuff easily
- Never lose or re-invent knowledge again
KEY FEATURES:
- Easily add useful email conversations along with file attachments to a shared repository.
- Define Rules to automatically fetch important discussions and add them to the repository
- GrexIt automatically fetches any further emails received on such discussions after they are added to GrexIt
- Search and Organize your content inside GrexIt easily
- Easily control access to email discussions added to GrexIt to allow access to specific people in your company
Would love to know your thoughts and suggestions ! <comment><USER2> This looks very useful. My immediate concern is that the system relies on human beings to mark and forward the useful bits of information. Is it possible to set the fetch rules to actually search the contents of an email for certain keywords instead of relying on labels?

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Currently it relies on labels that the user applies on the discussion in their inbox, but we're extending Fetch Rules to be sensitive to conditions similar to what you define in a gmail label, and more. (like, whenever a certain person discusses anything with a person from a specific domain or not from a specific domain, fetch the discussion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm.. first thing that comes to mind? Consultant KT (Knowledge Transfer). To be honest, I didn't look into your idea, but I recall all of the lost Knowledge whenever a consultant left; especially Dev consultants.

<comment><USER3> Totally. Thats definitely one aspect the product can help with :)

Do look at the 2.5 minute video. It give a quick, and probably entertaining intro to what the product does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool idea. There's an error in your video though. It says the email discussion between Simon and Ray is dead, except Ray didn't talk to Simon, it was the discussion between Simon and Ashook(sic) that died.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing this out. Your "attention to detail" is noteworthy ! We will rectify this soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have been using it.. a great product. I love the label feature of marking emails with specific labels and they automatically getting synced to central repository.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great Idea, I have seen enterprise focused solution developed by MNC similar to this and it turned out to be quite useful for them to improve productivity.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well done. Great concept. I see this being very useful for Teams.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. There's a lot of useful stuff that the tool does:

\- When you've added a discussion once to GrexIt, it will automatically keep track of any follow-up emails that you might receive on the discussion after you added it to GrexIt, and pulls them in automatically.

\- If two people in your company are discussing something, GrexIt will not allow BOTH of you to add the discussion to GrexIt - so it takes care of duplication of content.

\- Controlling access is very easy. Its closely tied to to our content organization feature and is very intuitive.

Would be great if you can try it out if you're on Google Apps.

<comment><USER8> This is great for dealing with clients. If I have a team and only 1 person from that team is in direct contact with that client, suddently GrexIt can allow the team to instantly see what the client has sent directly to the person in contact. Great if that person is on vacation or out for the day. Keeps business going.

<comment><USER3> Right. Support is one of the strongest use cases. GrexIt also covers you if 3 months down the line this guy leaves your company, or you have one more guy to augment the support team, who needs to access the history of discussions or support requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> clickable: <http://www.grexit.com/></comment>


Plumbum: Pythonic Shell Combinators - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tomerfiliba/plumbum

<comment><USER2> Someone needs to explain to me in what parallel universe

        (sudo[ifconfig["-a"]] | grep["-i", "loop"]) & FG

is more readable than

        sudo ifconfig -a | grep -i loop &

<comment><USER3> It's not. The reasons that one might use `plumbum` are similar to the reasons that one might use `fabric` instead of just running local/remote shell scripts, i.e.

\- Ability to leverage the richness of Python to pre/post-process the inputs/outputs from other shell commands.

\- Easier to parameterise and maintain.

\- Familiarity with Python over the likes of bash, zsh, etc.

<comment><USER4> Em, the fabric version would be much more readable I'm not mistaken:

local("ls - l | grep foo")

<comment><USER5> From looking at the code it seems like plumbum is more object oriented, instead of having stuff like [https://github.com/fabric/fabric/blob/master/fabric/state.py...](https://github.com/fabric/fabric/blob/master/fabric/state.py#L267) in fabric, so thats a good move forward.

<comment><USER6> Yes, because OOP is salvation. Right?

<comment><USER7> Right, lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure it's convenient, but I wouldn't call this kind of operator overloading "pythonic".

Not to say being pythonic is always better, but some of these tricks don't even seem that practical. Why "& FG" instead of .fg()? Using division for joining paths is cute, but why not use '+', the conventional append operator?

<comment><USER9> &FG and &BG are just shell-ish shortcuts. you can always use .popen() or .run()

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of when I first saw drop-box: Immediate recognition of the pain it will save me. I often hack up kludges that approximate this -- os.system calls that pipe to a file, then I read and parse the file. Good work.

<comment><USER11> The commands module is now deprecated by the overly complicated subprocess module, but

         content = commands.getoutput(x)

is much better than

         os.system(x + ' > foo')
         content = open('foo', 'r').read()

<comment><USER12> The subprocess mode is really not that complicated. Your example can be written as:

        content = subprocess.check_output(x, shell=True)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some really clever tricks here. I particularly like the __getitem__ one. I'm simultaneously excited and filled with horror. =)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this attempt and other simile are fun but I doubt I would use them for serious things. Maybe it should be done the other way: like markdown is an extension of html, we could have an extension of shell with python syntax.

</comment><comment><USER14> While we're on the topic, here's another shell scripting package for Python: <https://github.com/amoffat/pbs>

<comment><USER9> see <http://readthedocs.org/docs/plumbum/en/latest/#credits>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not quite sure I understand the value added over "!ls" etc on iPython. Is this module primarily for use on the vanilla interpreter?

</comment><comment><USER16> The coolest thing I see this year!

</comment><comment><USER17> thats Lead ....

</comment><comment><USER6> Haskell has done it long ago and much better:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966630></comment>


Ask HN: Techno Thriller Book Recommendation - <AUTHOR> I am looking to read techno thrillers and found a list on wikipedia (0). I was a bit disappointed that there were no software related thrillers.<p>So I am putting it out there if any HNer knows or can recommends any titles in this niche genre?<p>(0) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_techno-thriller_novels <comment><USER2> _Factorman_ by Matt Ginsberg, is a thriller based on the premise that a researcher solves P=NP.

[https://www.amazon.com/Factor-Man-Matt- Ginsberg/dp/099975711...](https://www.amazon.com/Factor-Man-Matt- Ginsberg/dp/0999757113)

Daniel Suarez' Daemon and the sequel Freedom(TM) [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1524741892](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1524741892)

<comment><USER3> > Daniel Suarez' Daemon and the sequel Freedom(TM)

I read both last year and highly recommend them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not even sure what _exactly_ counts as a "techno thriller" but you might enjoy:

Zer0es: [https://www.amazon.com/Zeroes-Chuck- Wendig/dp/0062413171](https://www.amazon.com/Zeroes-Chuck- Wendig/dp/0062413171)

Zero Sum Game: [https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Game-Russell-Book- ebook/dp/B...](https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Game-Russell-Book- ebook/dp/B078X1FD6C)

Null Set: [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GVD5T4M/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GVD5T4M/)

The Shockwave Rider: [https://www.amazon.com/Shockwave-Rider-John- Brunner/dp/03454...](https://www.amazon.com/Shockwave-Rider-John- Brunner/dp/0345467175)

<comment><USER5> Zero Sum and Null Set are both muscular pew pew novels, written by an MIT grad. I enjoyed them, but found myself oddly bothered by the fact that they feature telepathy. That said, if you enjoy muscular pew-pew novels and enjoy dilithium crystal-type science talk but where the words actually make sense because they're used by someone who knows actual science ... you'll enjoy this.

<comment><USER4> _but found myself oddly bothered by the fact that they feature telepathy._

Same here, mostly. I'm not a fan of introducing "Woo"'ish stuff like telepathy, but they were still enjoyable stories. I like the Cas Russell character a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 'Neuropath' by Scott Bakker

[...] the results of neuroscience have far more radical implications for philosophy, the subject, and meaning than any poststructuralist critique. As the author of a recent fictional psychothriller (Neuropath) – about which Metzinger has said, "This book has emotionally hurt and disturbed me in a way none have done in many years. You should think twice before reading this – there could be some scientific and philosophical possibilities you don't want to know!" – Scott is well equipped to explore the apocalyptic implications of neuroscience.

(Taken from this great blog intro here: [https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the- seman...](https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the-semantic- apocalypse/))

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe everyone's read it already, but William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ is a classic.

</comment><comment><USER8> Stealing the network: The complete series

This is an excellent collection of hacking fictions.

</comment><comment><USER9> Daemon by Daniel Suarez is pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells</comment>


Ask HN: gui front-end for ssh-keygen app? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any applications which provide a GUI interface automating the process of setting up SSH key access to a remote server? I wrote up a blog post about this [1], but then I realized that something like this probably already exists, and I just don't know about it. Anyone familiar with something like this?<p>[1] http://shadyacres.tumblr.com/post/14513004460/application-request-simplified-ssh-key-generator <comment><USER2> it's not a gui but i think you're looking for ssh-copy-id</comment>


Prove you are not an evil corporate person - <AUTHOR> http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/prove_you_are_not_an_Evil_corporate_person/ <comment><USER2> People in the comments here are obliviously missing the point of the article. Yes, the captcha image is fake. Yes, that's on purpose, only a silly person would think it is real.

The point of the article is that Google's previously "inoffensive" spam prevention technology is being coaxed into a military tool. And this is evil for several reasons.

One: A lot of people disagree with the current US military missions, and would absolutely not collaborate with them if they were asked to.

Two: Google is a massive corporation with few or no competitors. They already have overreaching powers over several aspects of society (they're not the only one), and giving them reach over the military can only spell danger, doesn't matter how you look at it.

Three: Google is already exploiting their users in several other ways, at no benefit to them. No, convenience is not a benefit, whoever convinced people that this is the case is a genius marketer. I stopped using gmail five years ago and here I am.

The general point is: Do we really want to give ourselves always to Google, Amazon, Facebook… like that? Just because in exchange we take 5 seconds to find something on the internet instead of 1 minute?

<comment><USER3> _Just because in exchange we take 5 seconds to find something on the internet instead of 1 minute?_

There are people who won't be able to find it at all without the 5 second option. There are people who use free services, like gmail, in part because they can't afford a paid service.

Your moral outrage won't get you anywhere if you don't address practical realities of that sort.

I'm quite poor. There are many factors that contribute to that. One is my gender. Another is my current profession as I am a writer. I often find myself on HN listening to well paid men dismiss my choices out of hand like only an idiot would make such choices.

I am no idiot. I wish I had the kind of life where I could afford to act like paying for email service is some minor detail not worth fretting over.

But I don't and trying to remedy that is proving to be a huge uphill battle. I have six years of college. I worked at a Fortune 200 company at one time. I was one of the top students of my state.

It turns out none of that is insulation against poverty. And before this turns into yet another pile on of people acting like I am just lazy or something, I will note that we currently have worse income inequality than in the Gilded Age. So let's just skip that BS means to avoid the issue today. This is a quite widespread systemic problem. It isn't just a handful of idiots making bad choices.

<comment><USER4> It's important to point out that thinking of free versus paid in financial terms alone does not reveal the true scope of the issue. As you are probably aware, you are 'paying' with personal data, which can be viewed as a more durable asset than cash. When you can afford to pay for something, you can buy it and it's a done deal. When you pay with data, the other party knows something about you forever. They can sell it an unlimited number of times to an unlimited number of buyers. It is quite different from a one-time monetary purchase.

I'm not going to preach that one way is right and the other is wrong - I just want to point out that they are two quite different schemes. Also, you sound well educated and underemployed - I wish you good luck and hope you get paid closer to what you are worth soon.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, since this data about you can be sold over and over its value is likely to decrease over time. Perhaps those who "spent" their data on a decade of free email got in on the ground floor and others will eventually be forced to trade their data for much less, or perhaps nothing at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It warms my heart to hear Google despises the AGPL. I switched to licensing everything I make under the AGPLv3 a few years back, let me tell you: every passing day further enshrines my conviction that this is the only fair license for Freedom Software in the new age. MIT and BSD were fun when e-mail was a good protocol. When there were no bad actors and everything was jolly fair and cooperations and bulltetin board rainbows and unicorns (it's before my time but I imagine that's what it must have been like). GPL was fun when computers were computers, not dumb terminals calling APIs on private clouds. But today, the only weapon we have to protect our liberty in a digitising age, is the AGPL. It is a breath of fresh air, and my second favourite four-letter acronym of the decade, just after GDPR.

I would like to take a moment to urge anyone starting new software projects: please use the AGPLv3. The proof is in the pudding: this very article. Corporations will suddenly have to do the unthinkable: pay you for your software if they want to limit their users' freedom! Remember, you can always license AGPLv3 by default, and offer less freedom licenses for payment. The Qt model. Win win.

Richard Stallman was right. A prophet. Like Snowden, much maligned. Unlike Snowden, oft maligned by the very people who should know better :( but that's the life of a radical.

Less flippantly: with every wave of freedom erosion, through cloud computing, DRM, etc, I am surprised at how, yet again, RMS turned out to be less and less ridiculous. I remember thinking him so obscene and extreme, but no: on bloody point. Much respect, and I thank him dearly for the weapons he gave us, for a fight we didn't even know we were about to have.

</comment><comment><USER7> I never thought about those recaptcha things. I feel guilty and almost dirty for helping them do these things. I also feel ripped off. We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it! Not only that but training autonomous military drones with dishonest crowdsourcing seems like they just made almost everyone into accessories of mass killings. I have to come to terms with this and I don't know how I will do it but something will have to be done because this is unconscionable.

<comment><USER8> > won't see a dime of it

It's a business relationship. They provide you with search, entertainment, mail, maps, docs. You provide them with samples of human behavior and with supervised training data.

Is it worth 5 seconds of your time to help them train their neural net, in exchange for access to their services?

Should our answers change if instead of Google or FB, it was Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics?

<comment><USER9> Depends on if that nueral net is being used to digitize old books to make them searchable, or to help a government's military automate killing other humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having been inside Google I can say I did not see any reasonable justification of the crazy hysterical anti-GPL and anti-AGPL position of the lawyers.

<comment><USER11> You don't see why forcing the open sourcing of the entire Google codebase would be a problem? That's essentially what GPL does, if you use even a tiny portion of it for your code and they prove it, you have to GPL _ALL_ the source code from the same for base.

<comment><USER10> Nobody is going to seriously argue that google3/ is a single piece of software.

<comment><USER12> When it is worth billions of dollars and judges often barely understand tech somebody will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> See this[1] article from 2011 that explains Google's "allergy" to the AGPL. (I work at Google)

[1]: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sour...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source_licenses/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Disclaimer: what I am going to say might be offensive to some, but it has to be said. Apologies in advance to any offended hippie.

So google uses the technology it developed to help the military. So what? How is this different from what has happened throughout history?

If you hipsters will take the trouble to pull you heads out of the sand, you will find that everything you use is either used by the military or reuses of military technologies.

Linux is used by the military in machines that help in killing people. Will you stop using Linux? The Internet protocols?

Microwaves began their lives as military radar components. Will you throw yours out of the window? The satellites that power all you TV, GPS, Uber, etc. Delivered to space based on the work of actual Nazi scientists. The food you eat? The main reason you have it because of Fritz Haber.

[https://medium.com/the-mission/the-tragedy-of-fritz-haber- th...](https://medium.com/the-mission/the-tragedy-of-fritz-haber-the-monster- who-fed-the-world-ec19a9834f74).

The man who incidentally used the same technology to start the era of chemical warfare. And this is just the last century. This same pattern has been present throughout history.

The only way to live a morally pure life untainted by things used to kill people is to live like a neanderthal. Not in a silicon valley house typing away on the internet on a MacBook. An impossible task, right?

And am I missing the sarcasm in this or people actually believe that putting everything under AGPL will solve the problem? You think google will decline a lucrative military contract just because a piece of code is unavailable. No, they will write their own implementation, while you sulk in a corner in the bubble of your victory.

We cannot stop technological progress. If you won't do it, someone else will. Not everyone in the world is high enough on Maslow's Need Hierarchy to think about self actualization. Basic Needs will always come first. A hungry man won't think about the world. He will think about food.

Our job as responsible people is to ensure that the people in power do not point this technology at us. Not living in some sort of a matrix of out own creation while ignoring the reality.

<comment><USER15> Hey, no need to make this about "self-actualization" or "a matrix" (?). The point here (and the moral imperative IMO) is to exert any influence you have over bad actors. Open source contributors have demonstrated that licensing and negative PR can be used to influence tech companies. That's all this article is calling for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google and Re-Captcha reminds me of the TechnoCore and farcast technology in the Hyperion series. An AI conglomerate gives humanity a free gift, farcasters, instantaneous teleportation to pretty much anywhere in the galaxy. But, SPOILER, it is discovered that the TechnoCore has been using the human minds traveling through these farcaster portals as processing power.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Google is known to be deathly allergic to the AGPL license. Not only on > servers; they don't even allow employees to use AGPL software on > workstations. If you write free software, and you'd prefer that Google not > use it, a good way to ensure that is to license it under the AGPL.

Man, the open source/free software community should have taken AGPL seriously

<comment><USER18> Licensing software to make it antagonistic to business is a good way to ensure no one is ever paid to improve it, which is a good way to see it stagnate. Do you really think Linux would have gone anywhere had it been licensed under those terms? There's a reason it never moved to GPLv3.

<comment><USER19> Looks like it's possible to have a "Lesser" AGPL. libbitcoin[1] uses such a license.

Also licensing things under a dual AGPL/commercial license seems perfect for things like databases. Mongo uses it IIRC.

[1] [https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/blob/master/COPYING](https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/blob/master/COPYING)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's a picture worth a thousand words right there.

<comment><USER21> It's a _fake_ picture designed to generate outrage.

<comment><USER20> Excuse me, I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought it was a real CAPTCHA. Of course it's fake. Still pretty thought-provoking, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Recaptcha is shit regardless of whether they use it to train military drones. It serves no purpose other than to infuriate legitimate web users who might or might not be using a VPN or browsing with JS off. It's a test of patience and sanity that doesn't need to exist. There's no fucking way in hell I need to pick out dozens and dozens of buildings or cars or street signs just so google can verify I'm a human. I've given up using multiple sites because sometimes, it never stops even after ten or fifteen minutes. If anything, it goes to show how shitty google's tech is. If this is what they have to resort to, a test a significant portion of humanity cannot pass, to detect humans, they are clearly not at the forefront of anything technologically. Of course, if this technology is used to train military drones, it explains the torture google has been inflicting on humanity with this garbage. While wasting millions, probably billions of human viewing hours is not as big an atrocity as helping military organizations commit war crimes with drones, it's still an ugly, disgusting activity that google forces upon so many, often through thoughtless intermediaries like cloudflare. At least now, I have an even better reason for refusing to fill in these stupid captchas.

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny we just saw Eric a few weeks ago rambling on about China overtaking us in AI ([https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us- ai-...](https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us-ai-alphabet- chairman/?partner=YahooSA&yptr=yahoo))

Seems like he might be trying to prime the US into accepting Google's participation in warfare.

</comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of Enders Game, especially the ending. Don't want to spoil it for anyone but distributed military intelligence is scary

</comment><comment><USER25> I only ever see the same car-related CAPTCHA: [https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tv/image/1505/57/1505576983483...](https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tv/image/1505/57/1505576983483.png) (random link via google image search)

I wonder if it's actually subtly altered each time, possibly with some adversarial image manipulation that people can't spot...

</comment><comment><USER26> Regardless of what you think about the current state of Google's evilness, becoming a military defense contractor is not going to do anything good for their corporate morality. Both in the broad, "killing people is bad mmkay" sense and in the narrower sense of occasionally standing up to the US government for its users, becoming a defense contractor is bad.

</comment><comment><USER27> Christ, this is silly (disclosure - I work at Google)

<comment><USER28> This sounds hilarious and awesome. Disclosure: I once worked at Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Cool that Google understands that AGPL is evil and has policies against its use! :)

</comment><comment><USER30> So, either: 1) that's a real CAPTCHA which Google is serving up, in which case that's outrageous, or 2) that's not a real CAPTCHA which Google served up, in which case using it as the visual for this article is itself pretty outrageous. I have plenty of reservations about Google's power, but putting that visual on your blog article if it's not a real CAPTCHA Google used, is different from lying to your audience in only a technical sense. It's clearly intended to stoke outrage, and outrage is not a state which results in careful reading of the article. The author must have (or at least should have) known that putting that visual on their blog post would result in many people thinking that Google served up such a visual.

<comment><USER31> I'm pretty sure the author thinks more highly of his audience than that.

It gets your attention, then you think "oh, that can't be real", and then, hopefully, "but it's the same sort of thing that they really use, and training to spot cars and signs is probably useful in a military context."

<comment><USER32> Lots of things are useful in a military context. Detecting irregular heartbeats is useful in a military context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'd be much happier if I was a googler knowing that my efforts didn't make targeting systems more effective and less likely to result in collateral damage.

<comment><USER34> In _unexpected_ collateral damage, at any rate. US drone programs target the occasional wedding, yes, but the bulk of the civilian casualties seem to be either invented targets ("they're moving tactically") or civilians in the blast area of actual targets.

I, for one, would spend a lot of time wondering whether raising confidence about targets would help justify firing with civilians present.

<comment><USER35> It's statistics, if the probability of zero bystanders killed gets higher, it's easier to justify a strike to oneself and to others without being held responsible. It gets easier to justify to the public and the world. "It was an unpredictable accident, our weapons are precise"

But even if one could identify time frames when a target is far enough from bystanders to be hit with a hellfire.. the trivial counter is to always be among bystanders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wish there was something like a kharma linkedin- every company who develops such technology, drags the kharma of all employes who spend time at the company during this project down- and it does not go up until a equal kharma positiv project is completed.

Darkdeving discouraged at self-interest rate.</comment>


What's Coming in Go 1.13 [slides] - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRo5urog_B76BcnQbIo7I391MZUKFj7l3gku6hypJ-WK1KCFw40A7BiM6NOVsqD17sA9jS7GyzCfnN4/pub?slide=id.g550f852d27_228_0 <comment><USER2> This slide deck might be nice as a wallpaper for a presentation, but it is not a good read.

Is there a blog post targeting readers in the web?

<comment><USER3> If you wanted you could copy every slide into a HN comment and then people wouldn't have to read the article. There is not much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finally a better module experience inside of gopath. That was a major hang up for me

</comment><comment><USER3> They made Go faster (priorities), added some very niche number types and TLS 1.3 support?

The only language features they seem to have added are small improvements to error handling.

<comment><USER5> A programming language should be stable, not add/change things all the time.

<comment><USER3> Sure, it's just that Golang deliberately lacks features to create abstractions which means every time I look at it I'm disappointed.

It's very frustrating how unstable and slow in terms of dev speed things are in the last _THREE_ places I've worked (as a frontend with the backends all written in Golang). Go teams seem to rebuild everything from scratch and they never seem to understand micro services in the context of distributed systems. I mean we are doing microservices, Golang, grpc, cockroach dB and we have a few thousand users maximum. It drives me up the wall that this stack is so popular and the engineers championing it can't deliver reliable software quickly in it... most of them can't even optimise queries in SQL and are concatenating strings together in SQL queries.

Take the Elixir ecosystem; I could outpace a team of three Golang engineers easily writing stuff in Elixir and my software would almost never crash or panic and be very flexible when changes were needed. Everything in Golang is calcified around current product requirements and a nightmare to change. So forgive me when I think Golang has a long way to go before it's something I'd want to use for anything but the smallest of command line tools.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like you worked with shitty backend engineers. I don't understand how Go has anything to do with that. Nobody uses elixir bud, and saying basically "my software would be perfect" is a naive silly thing to say.

<comment><USER3> I just think I've had this happen three times in a row, as if there is something likely to be wrong with the types of programmer who choose this technology.

I never said my code is perfect or bug free at all, you just made up a straw man to weaken my anecdotal evidence.

<comment><USER7> > I just think I've had this happen three times in a row, as if there is > something likely to be wrong with the types of programmer who choose this > technology.

You can add a datapoint to that based on what I have experienced as well at an employer. Exactly what you mentioned, so much time wasted either due to reinventing the wheel, or because of language friction and it being way underpowered to model the problem at hand. I keep laughing that Java would have been a way superior fit in practically all fronts.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Social loafing - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_loafing

<comment><USER2> Makes sense. CSCO found out as much recently. Chambers set up boards and councils to have collaborative leadership of technology groups rather than top down management. Reports are it led to less accountability and, I imagine, a "loafing" effect.

Two years later and the stock has lost half its value, market share is slipping away. So now the boards and councils are being vaporized... along with a few thousand employees.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pair programming done right has some pretty effective counters to this:

* Time passes much more quickly when you have an audience you want to impress. * You're less likely to waste time surfing the web when you're working with someone. * If your pair thinks you're drifting off, they can say "how about you drive for a while."

Of course it's easily defeated if both people decide to slack.</comment>


What the Internet knows about you - <AUTHOR> http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, this is just really old news and really lame. Man, I hate using the word lame. Its not an "attack". Its simply taking advantage of a feature built into all browsers since like 2000 or before.

<comment><USER3> This is now the 5th time this topic has been posted to HN. May 2008 was when it all started:

<http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248558>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404564>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617546>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717802>

<comment><USER4> That's true -- there have been several projects making use of the CSS :visited history sniffing technique. The method itself was originally reported in early 2000. See [http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/docs/details.html#re...](http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/docs/details.html#references)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. That is very clever, and very, _very_ scary.

I was unaware of that particular attack, though now that I've read about it, it makes perfect sense.

Maybe it's time to set my work machine to not keep my browsing history (like my home machine)...

</comment><comment><USER6> At least 3 years old: [http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know- where-yo...](http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-youve- been.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> The information on that site is a bit misleading. How would they figure out your name? Or who your friends were?

They would have to already know your name to search for URLs then that would contain your name. That is a lot of work to be doing in a browser. And if you have a common name, then whoptido. So what?

You can only use this technique against a set of URLs, you can't determine URLs unless you already know what to check against. At that, you would have to know the _exact_ URL to check against.

</comment><comment><USER8> "This site normally works even when JavaScript is disabled, but we temporarily switched off that functionality for performance reasons. Please come back in a couple of hours."

Riiight.

<comment><USER4> It looks like it's working now even without JS. The history detection method itself doesn't need JavaScript at all; see <http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/docs/details.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hacker News is among the 5000 most popular sites!

</comment><comment><USER10> This site produces a HTTP 500 error for me. Would someone please provide a description of what was there?

<comment><USER11> that _is_ what it knows about you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Site's down. Is it this exploit?:

[http://thecoffeedesk.com/news/index.php/2009/08/02/view- remo...](http://thecoffeedesk.com/news/index.php/2009/08/02/view-remote- browser-history/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think they mean what the _Web_ knows about you. The Internet sure as hell doesn't know about my email habits or how much streaming I do of music.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ubuntu, xkcd, freepatentsonline.com, bing, google, yahoo, mozilla, technorati, wordpress, winamp, posterous, and HN.

I guess the internet thinks I'm a geek.

</comment><comment><USER15> Congratulations, we did not find anything in this category in your browser history. Feel free to try our other browser history tests.

</comment><comment><USER16> Apparently the Internet knows nothing about me. That is ... rather surprising.

<comment><USER17> Me too. This "attack" is very old and well-known on the browser side. It doesn't work particularly well on me because I keep no history.

<comment><USER5> I had never heard of it before. I wouldn't consider myself anywhere near an expert on client-side exploits but still...

I keep up with most tech-related news as well as I can and I had never heard of it until now...

I'd be interested to see how many people actually _have_ heard about it before.

<comment><USER18> This isn't an exploit, it is a feature of almost every modern browser.

<comment><USER19> I wasn't aware that sharing your browser history with every website that cares to check it was a 'feature'.

<comment><USER18> I think that was the point...

Most people aren't aware of this.

Hopefully it was a success for you!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Preprint: Ivermectin Associated with Lower Mortality in COVID19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342056504_ICON_Ivermectin_in_COvid_Nineteen_study_Use_of_Ivermectin_is_Associated_with_Lower_Mortality_in_Hospitalized_Patients_with_COVID19 <comment><AUTHOR> In case you don't know: Ivermectin has been around for decades and is cheap as chips. Nobody is going to profit from its use, so it hasn't been getting as much publicity as other therapies and studies.</comment>


Unlimited Free Calling with Google Voice - <AUTHOR> http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Ae8glDUXDsh9ZGR2eG43cjRfMzNkOTM4ZjNjeA&hl=en&pli=1

<comment><USER2> A lot of the stuff described in this document requires a Gizmo5 account, which are difficult to come by. Registrations are closed and there's no invite system, so someone has to actually give you the credentials to an account they already have to transfer it to you.

I have SIP set up on my Nexus One, replacing the default GSM phone functions with SIP stuff over the data band. Here's what I use:

1\. The Android SIP client, sipdroid. <http://sipdroid.org/>

2\. An account with sipgate: <http://www.sipgate.com/> Free signup gets you a real phone number, same calling rates as Google Voice, decent web interface. It has some features that are more powerful than Google Voice, but no transcription.

3\. An account with pbxes: <http://pbxes.org/> (Warning, their landing page has Flash with very irritating sound, yuck) pbxes acts as a programmable in- between for SIP communications, like SIP Sorcery as described in the article posted here.

You connect sipdroid to pbxes, which connects to sipgate:

Your phone (sipdroid) <\---> pbxes.org <\---> sipgate

pbxes acts as a much more powerful wrapper around sipgate. Sipgate will connect your SIP calls in and out of landlines, and pbxes gives you more powerful control over the SIP-only stuff. Even if you don't want to use the power features of pbxes, I still recommend connecting sipdroid to it instead of directly to sipgate or another provider, as pbxes has implemented a little trick that can save you a ton of battery life on your Android phone when connecting to it with sipdroid. You can read about it here: <http://code.google.com/p/sipdroid/wiki/NewStandbyTechnique>

The hardest part of setting this up will be filling in the information for your sipgate account correctly through pbxes' web interface. It's a little clunky and unintuitive. There's a guide here: [http://seethisnowreadthis.com/2009/07/11/get-sipdroid-to- wor...](http://seethisnowreadthis.com/2009/07/11/get-sipdroid-to-work-with- any-sip-provider-on-your-android-phone/)

End result of all of this: Google Voice-priced calls, higher quality audio than GSM phones, same latency, same drop call rate, still have E911 service through normal GSM bands if you need it, programmable caller id, scriptable phone routing, near-perfect phone integration on Android. Ditch your voice plan.

<comment><USER3> I've heard a lot of complaints that call quality with VoIP on Nexus One is awful -- tons of latency, lots of clipping -- it sounds like this isn't your experience?

I've seriously considered trying out a data-only plan with T-Mobile, plus one of the pay as you go plans to fill in coverage gaps, but the bad reports of VoIP on the Nexus One have held me back.

<comment><USER2> I haven't had any problems. Keep in mind I haven't tried any of the other VoIP clients for Android -- Skype, Nimbuzz, etc. Only sipdroid. But I've used it over plain EDGE/GPRS on my Android dev phone (G1) and had no quality issues to speak of, other than the occasional dropped call, which can happen on normal GSM anyway.

As far as I know, the 'official' Skype client for Android is still 'Skype Lite' or something, which costs you minutes on your cell phone plan to use, and might connect over GSM as well (I'm not sure). It wouldn't surprise me if this craptacular idea tarnishes people's perception of VoIP on Android.

<comment><USER4> Oh really ? Sipdroid does support G.711mu only, which a) never fits into narrow GPRS/EDGE bandwidth, b) incredibly sensitive to network fluctuations, lags and packet loss. So I believe you are a little bit unfair in regards of Sipdroid voice qality :-). Even Speex and G.729 hardly fit into poor GPRS/EDGE, trust me as experienced VoIP developer.

Also Sipdroid has a bug in RTP class which introduces huge latency, somehow they don't event want to fix it although they were pointed to it many times.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Anyone Using Oracle Linux? - <AUTHOR> Other than being forced to when purchasing their appliances, is anyone actually willingly going out of their way to install Oracle Linux? If so why? <comment><USER2> Back in late 2016 a lot was made about a 20+ year Oracle/Linux veteran at ORCL jumping ship to Microsoft to lead their burgeoning Linux group.

9 months later the guy returned to Oracle. Always thought that spoke a little bit to the quality of OEL, especially after this profile from BI: [https://www.businessinsider.com/wim-coekaerts-microsoft- open...](https://www.businessinsider.com/wim-coekaerts-microsoft-open-source- executive-interview-2016-8)

MSFT and Linux seem to be doing cool things right now, so I assume he returned to Oracle our of some love for the product, and not because he didn't like what he saw at MSFT.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, ksplice plus free licenses in Oracle Cloud. Maybe plan to have heavy abstraction from the OS beforehand.

<comment><AUTHOR> ksplice is about the only reason I could see. How often are you using ksplice for patching where downtime isn't an option?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At my previous job (small ISP), I had several such machines running various public-facing services.

It was (as best as I can recall) perhaps a year or so after RHEL 6 dropped and, naturally, I was planning to use CentOS 6 for several new servers to be deployed (as most existing servers were running CentOS 5).

Unfortunately, while the 5.x releases of CentOS came out relatively quickly after RHEL, the first couple releases of 6.x were _waaaaay_ behind! Around this same time, Oracle was pushing OEL over CentOS pretty hard [0], had recently announced their free public package repository (yum.oracle.com?) [1], and even had a "CentOS-to-OEL" shell script [2] you could run on existing CentOS hosts.

IIRC, it took them a couple months to get OEL 6.0 out the door, but it was still something like six months ahead of the CentOS 6.0 release! Fortunately, by 6.2 or so, CentOS had apparently got things figured out and were usually only two weeks or so behind RHEL. Yet, Oracle was still managing to push out minor releases and updates quicker. [0]

As these were public-facing servers I was about to deploy, the delay in releasing security updates was a big factor for me. I ended up deploying OEL6 on a number of new servers (although I never used ksplice, the UEK, or gave Oracle a single dollar) and continued to maintain them for several years without any issues that come to mind. I left $job right about a year ago and there were still a handful of those machines running then. Honestly, I would not be surprised to learn that some of them are still up and running today!

( _EDIT_ : At least two of them are still up and running right now.)

(Side note: I had a 1U Sun server in one of our racks that hosted my personal web sites, e-mail, etc. From February 2013 until about three months ago -- when the hardware finally gave up the magic smoke -- it also ran Oracle Linux 6.)

(Disclaimer: I absolutely _loathe_ Oracle and everything about them -- and ol' Larry -- but I still think that was the best decision at the time. Like many folks, I had high expections for CentOS once Red Hat took it under their wing but I've been quite disappointed.)

[0]: [https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/](https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/)

[1]: [https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/free-updates-and-errata- for-o...](https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/free-updates-and-errata-for-oracle- linux)

[2]: [https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos2ol.sh](https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos2ol.sh)

<comment><USER5> I think thats changing with CentOS stream ( see [https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/09/24/changes-to- cen...](https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/09/24/changes-to-centos-what- centos-stream-means-for-developers/) ) this probably means that CentOS will have a reduced ramp up time for releases.

Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oracle Linux works fine many cases, in fact I've never found significant differences between OEL, Centos, or Redhat. Under the covers there is the UEK variant (unbreakable kernel), but again, as a developer it hasn't mattered.

Ubuntu 19.04 offers a radically more well-designed GUI and superior overall user experience compared to all Centos derivatives, and all previous versions of Ubuntu I've used. I've yet to meet a single soul genuinely using OEL7 full time on their primary machine. It's always Ubuntu these days :)

<comment><USER7> OL too comes with GNOME out of the box and there is always KDE if one wants to switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised Oracle sells their version of Linux when they could simply sell Solaris which is supposed to be "light years better" according to the couple Solaris sysadmins I know.

(I'm not a sysadmin so I don't know if they were engaging in hyperbole or not.)

<comment><USER9> If solarix really were better, there would be demand for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Only for dev work, because of dtrace. Wouldn't dare to use it in a business, though it would be fine technically.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am, it is very stable as it's built on top of Enterprise RedHat Linux version. (Disclaimer I work at Oracle).

</comment><comment><USER12> No</comment>


Adblockers: US growth could remove $12bn advertising by 2020 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/17/adblockers-us-growth-remove-12bn-advertising-2020 <comment><USER2> Maybe AdBlockers are the solution to bankrupt all those people "producing content for the sake of producing content". I searched the other day to find out how many people think there is too much content on the internet, and all I found was: how to earn more with advertising platforms. It was the journalist/blogger type of people who think about profit before thinking about quality, because all they can produce is words.

So my task for you is to find an article telling that there is just too much clickbait and RAR (Read And Repeat) on the internet. I think we need to invent a name for this habit of creating content just to earn money. Some called it over-optimisation. But then they invented Page Rank. Than publishers got clever and outdid the PR. Now we have DA. Next what.. CrackUpBoom!!!</comment>


Google+ With 60M+ Users And Growing… But Active User Count Still Unknown - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/27/googleplus/

<comment><USER2> Give them a break. Facebook first started reporting the active user counts at least 5 years after launch. Let us give G+ at least a year.

A separate issue is how to accurately track "active users" given that G+ is getting so tightly integrated with almost all popular Google services.</comment>


Blur.js: Produce psuedo-transparent blurred elements over other elements. - <AUTHOR> http://www.blurjs.com/

<comment><USER2> This is wrong on a lot of levels (x-platform, cpu usage, etc) but does make for such a pretty effect. Would be lovely if CSS(n+1) could support this kind of transform, especially to pull it out of the GPU instead of bit-banging through a <canvas/>

<comment><USER3> SVG can do it: <http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/filters.html#feGaussianBlurElement>

Unfortunately, browser support of less common SVG features is spotty – either missing or unoptimized.

<comment><USER4> This seems like it applies the filter to the entire element (including its children), which would not give the same effect as blur.js without some complicated absolute-positioning trickery.

<comment><USER5> You could do it like this with CSS, data URI and SVG:

        .blur {
          background-image: url('data:image/xml+svg;utf8,
            <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
              <defs>
                <filter id="f1">
                  <feComponentTransfer>
                    <feFuncR type="table" tableValues="0.5 1"/>
                    <feFuncG type="table" tableValues="0.5 1"/>
                    <feFuncB type="table" tableValues="0.5 1"/>
                  </feComponentTransfer>
                  <feGaussianBlur stdDeviation="5" />
                </filter>
              </defs>

              <image x="0" y="0" width="300" height="80"
                xlink:href="http://background.png"
                filter="url(#f1)" />
            </svg>
          ');
        }

(expanded for clarty, and I didn't test it so it may be buggy/not syntactically correct).

You can off course generate all that in JS and parametrize it.

It should work in Chrome, but won't in IE9. No idea for other browsers.

see <http://jsfiddle.net/estelle/SJjJb/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This creates an amazing effect that looks very similar to the Windows Aero look. Talk about sprucing up a boring modal dialog. I noticed there's a slight "flash of unstyled content." It's probably the only thing that will hold people back from using it on any elements that are visible on page load. I'm disappointed to see that even aided by JavaScript there is no support for IE8. Oh well, can't really blame that on the developer. I highly doubt IE8 would have been able to render it anyway.

Superb!

</comment><comment><USER7> Sadly too CPU intensive. The last image (mountains) freezes my chrome tab solid. The others take 1-2 seconds to process.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bizarre. I just put together a quick reader demo last week using blurs to focus the eye (like tilt-shift does for photos).

<http://www.swissariknife.com/focus>

I added keyboard short-cuts to narrow or widen the number of lines that are 'clear' at a time. You can scroll through while you read or use the arrow keys.

I ended up just hard-coding it using HTML spans and text-shadows to demonstrate the effect. This is NOT an actual solution, just an experiment.

Warning: This may appear way differently in different browsers and possibly not at all. The effect generally works in FF/Safari/Chrome.

<comment><USER9> The text-shadow trick is really clever. I think a "progressive" version could be pretty cool. Just tried throwing that together real quick by changing the blur radius in 0.5px increment. Needs some fine tuning (shadow color perhaps), but you get the idea: [https://img.skitch.com/20120309-c323134j8wm7nc34pudf9r2nri.p...](https://img.skitch.com/20120309-c323134j8wm7nc34pudf9r2nri.png)

<comment><USER8> I really like this improvement. Noted!

Might try to throw together something with blur.js now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can do this natively in CSS with Firefox. Unfortunately, WebKit has yet to catch up. (Contrary to popular belief, WebKit is not ahead in everything.)

Instructions: [http://css-plus.com/examples/2010/05/how-to-add-a- gaussian-b...](http://css-plus.com/examples/2010/05/how-to-add-a-gaussian- blur-effect-to-elements-within-firefox/)

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure this is not the same thing. The Gaussian filter you linked to blurs the entire element, including it's children. The behavior seems to be similar to CSS opacity, so if you want the children (like the text inside the blur.js demo boxes) to be non-blurry, you have to figure out some way to float them over the blurred element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I drag the "Draggable" box down to the "Changing Source" box on Chrome, the overlay messes up.

Otherwise, nice little effect, loads sort of slow (not sure if thats the javascript or the website).

</comment><comment><USER12> I tried using this a couple weeks ago. One problem I encountered was that the images have to be on the same domain for it to work its canvas magic.

</comment><comment><USER13> As usual jshint is not used... So it leaks global variables.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is not on github?

<comment><USER15> Does it have to be? ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680912> )

<comment><USER16> While I agree with the sentiment, GitHub is like crack for random hackers. At least it is for me. It's so convenient to search for <any big OSS project> and find that someone is mirroring it on GitHub for convenience. It's simply faster to use their web interface to peruse through a project or to search within a project than it is to checkout a local copy and then open the directory in Sublime.

That having been said, I don't really consider "it's not on GitHub" to be a valid criticism. I certainly understand developers wanting to use their own solutions or that they might have hurt feelings after GitHub's handling of their intrusion (not that I care, just saying based on the number of HN posting, many people seem to)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jan-hocevar Thanks, I'll try it out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Superfly

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome, awesome, awesome. I've always wanted this but I've never taken the time to learn enough about graphics processing to even know where to begin. Thanks for sharing!

For those who hate on compiz, etc, for transparent windows and readability, blur is the solution. As I can see from the demos, it clearly is true in the browser as well (well, why wouldn't it be).

<comment><USER18> > blur is the solution

100% opaque is another solution.</comment></comment>


The new iPad to better handle the normal resolution images - <AUTHOR>

I just got my new iPad (it is actually my first one so I have nothing to compare again ) and I have been like everybody blown away by the quality of the new screen. But after few minutes i leave apple wonder world, launch safari and go online and as everybody is blown away about how crap the images look. Every image is so blurry.
I have read many article online on how web developer could deliver high res images etc ... But my question is the following , wouldnt it possible to have better anti aliasing system in ios to properly handle the normal resolution images?
At the end of the day the 1 normal res pixel should only had to be replaced by 4 high res pixel of the exact same color. But obviously it is not what is happening here otherwise we would see this blurry effect.
If anyone has any information about this topic I would thrilled to read about it. <comment> mark-r The problem is coming up with a scaling algorithm that works ideally on every kind of image; it simply can't be done. Some methods work better for some images, and other methods work better on others. Wikipedia has a good overview: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling>

The scaling in the browser has to work on any arbitrary resizing, not just 2x. A simple pixel doubling only works in one specific circumstance, and would be inconsistent with other scaled images.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much, execellent read. I still think / hope that there is room for apple to improve the way they do their image scaling in iOS for the retina display. I think it is not sustenable to expect all the web to support high res images everywhere in the short to medium future.</comment></comment>