Musings on AOT, JIT and Language Design - <AUTHOR> http://pointersgonewild.com/2015/11/28/musings-on-aot-jit-and-language-design/ <comment><USER3> Between this post and others like it [1], Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert's ideas sound like they're evolving towards something very much like Julia [2], a dynamic language carefully designed to make ahead-of-time data-flow-based type analysis easy. This analysis allows Julia to achieve performance comparable to C and Fortran. Much of the design involves selecting which aspects of traditional unrestricted dynamism can be given up without compromising usability. For example, function bindings are constant by default, which allows type inference to know with certainty which function object is being called in most function calls. Similarly, since much of the difficulty in optimizing dynamic languages comes from trying to guess the types in arrays/structures/objects, Julia allows programmers to specify these, thereby eliminating this difficulty entirely. More information about Julia's design and implementation can be found here [3].

[1] [http://pointersgonewild.com/2012/11/09/static-vs-dynamic- why...](http://pointersgonewild.com/2012/11/09/static-vs-dynamic-why-not- both/)

[2] [http://julialang.org/](http://julialang.org/)

[3] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145](http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145)

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't compile to C. It's very difficult to avoid undefined behavior, you won't be able to modify the compiler backend (and you will want to as you start optimizing), you can't add new language intrinsics, good GC is pretty much incompatible with that, and precise control over debug info is impossible. Compile to LLVM IR and/or GCC IR instead.

<comment><USER5> Do you know if you can compile to a text form of the LLVM IR? Also wondering how you'd interface with a GC if you did that.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, you can compile to LLVM IR in assembly format and then run the result through llc. But you will pay in compilation time for this due to the serialization and deserialization steps, so I can't see a situation in which it'd be worth it to do so.

The LLVM GC interface is controlled through intrinsics, so you can access it through the human-readable IR representation just as you can with the API.

<comment><USER6> > so I can't see a situation in which it'd be worth it to do so.

The obvious one is not having a giant build time dependency that might change and be at different versions on different platforms. The text interface is far more stable.

The problem I had with doing this is how picky llvm is when it comes to ordering your temporary registers.

<comment><USER7> As far as I've seen, the text interface is _radically_ more unstable. Like when they recently striped types from pointers, I was like "oh no that sounds like it'll be a lot of work to upgrade to", and all the backend peeps seemed to think it wasn't a big deal because LLVM's API handled it. Particularly when you factor in that any breakage in the direct LLVM API can often be resolved by looking at what Clang did when it upgraded.

<comment><USER6> That is a shame then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Honestly if you're going to take a step back and consider those things, why not also consider that we already have so many programming languages that it's almost impossible to get to a deep level of understanding of all of them.

Obviously if you enjoy making languages then you should do so - and in that case, noticing that your dynamic un-toolable language won't get wide scale adoption shouldn't matter. It's already a guarantee it won't get that wide scale adoption. Either make your un-toolable language because you enjoy making them, or contribute your efforts to an already popular language that you enjoy. There are tons of interesting problems and huge areas for improvements in every single language.

Don't make a new language for the goal of gaining widescale adoption.

<comment><USER9> This won't be good advice until it's been at least 20 years since any mainstream language was born. Today, you can point to Go, Rust, and Clojure as counterexamples within the past decade (and if there's a new mainstream language born last year, we probably won't know for 5-10 years).

I suspect what you're trying to say is "don't expect to succeed." That's true --most people will fail, but we should all hope people continue trying, unless we're satisfied with what we have. I'm not satisfied, and I think progress will require new languages, not just improving the ones we have.

Some things require that a lot of people try and fail. Language design is one of them.

<comment><USER5> I think he's also saying "do it for fun, not for success, have fun doing it", which is good advice IMO.

<comment><USER9> "and in that case, noticing that your dynamic un-toolable language won't get wide scale adoption shouldn't matter."

That's what I'm reacting to, and I still disagree. People should have an eye on what getting traction would require, even if only a tiny fraction of language designers can make it.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that a static easily tooled language is not going to be as good as the dynamic un-toolable one without massive tooling support specifically for that language's features. Creating those tools is not the job of a lone developer. The cost is immense. The language first has to achieve popularity to receive the tooling, or be heavily backed by a large tooling capable company (eg, Google, Jetbrains, Microsoft). So far, the only recent languages to receive the kind of required static tooling are from those 3 companies. Also note that the language did not come first in those cases - <USER2> requirement for the language came first, and a language was made to fit what was needed.

However even more importantly - if you're going to create a language, it needs to be the ultimate language in your own eyes. You can't leave off novel features that you have experience in because it doesn't have mass appeal or has tooling issues. You need to create the best language you possibly can if you want to compete with others trying to create the best language. Hamstringing your enjoyment of the language by going in a direction you don't like because it has more apparently mass market appeal isn't any more likely to be successful, and it certainly isn't going to be enjoyable enough for you to slog through the tiny complexities.

While there is a tiny chance that your language becomes the next big thing, it probably won't. That means you need to make the language you want to make and hope it succeeds, not make the language that 'will succeed' but you don't want to make.

<comment><USER9> Your point about support is well taken, but while Rust is being supported by Firefox, it was Graydon Hoare's side project for 3 years. It is at least possible for an individual to run with an idea for a static language and get community or corporate support, even if it is tremendously difficult. And I don't know if you can say that the language sprang from the requirement. It did, so far as a lot of people have had longstanding dissatisfaction with C++, but I'm not sure Mozilla originally was looking for a replacement (ditto for Google and Go--though lessons learned there may not apply to people who aren't Rob Pike...).

I agree with you so far as it can't be a language you don't want to make. I don't think this article describes that, but a more modest set of constraints. Elsewhere, the author mentions Julia as a positive inspiration.

I think the idea of compromise depends on the idea you're trying to bring into the world. You can't compromise your core idea, but you can compromise on other things. I guess I'm making assumptions about what the author is compromising that I'm not entitled to. Perhaps you know that I'm wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real problem isn't dynamic vs. static and how it affects tools. The problem is that programming languages are made by language designers, when what we would really need are programming experience designers.

We need people that look at the experience of programming as a whole, writing, editing, debugging, profiling, testing, analysis and packaging. People that take all of that into consideration and design languages within that context and under the constraints that imposes.

If you only see yourself as a language designer and ignore the wider context, your language will fail.

<comment><USER11> What makes you think language designers have no experience of programming? Rest assured that the Simon Peyton Joneses and Martin Odersky's of this world have been doing a lot of programming in their time.

To be sure, they do program applications that are quite different from what 'bread-and-butter' programmers do, and that might influence their taste in programming language features.

<comment><USER12> I don't think the hypothesis is that language designers have no experience programming, I think it's quite the opposite, that they have experience with poorly designed languages and tools, and perpetuate a sort of stockholm syndrome for the current state of what it means to be a developer.

We need languages designed to be used by future generations of programmers in a world where usability and tools come first. The "Manipulate symbols in this arcane syntax and hit F5/Run until it does what you want" experience is fundamentally at fault. Sure we have debuggers and IDEs, but they're more or less tacked on top of core flaws, things that allow for whitespace formatting debates or semicolon religion. My IDE and my VCS should just edit and encode the AST of my language. The compiler and IDE should share the exact same code for indexing and finding symbols in that AST -- the language acting as a library to the IDE so new releases with new features are automatically understood instead of lots of duplicated language for highlighting/completing/searching every language for every IDE. These are just a couple examples of the ways we're currently living in a state of sin.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. It's beyond my understanding how one could even consider not providing a public API to the parser, when one develops an interpreter or a compiler. Given all the complexity of such programs, this is trivial.

The standard library of a language should provide access to the parser, so that developers can easily create tools for the language they're using.

<comment><USER13> You just sang the song of Lisp programmers all over the worlds.

<comment><USER10> In Lisp basically everyone starts to develop their own languages. Given that most people can barely get a reasonable API together that's just a bad idea.

<comment><USER13> No disagreement here. I was just pointing out that what the GP wanted already exists in the form of Lisp (with different flavors of macro being different "API" to the parser, so to speak).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember reading papers around a decade ago that combined AOT and JIT advantages by profiling that fed back into an AOT compiler. Even JIT's local optimizations can happen by sending an AST to a client to AOT compile and then run, optionally with a profile to further direct optimization. These kinds of methods, minus profile, were done with agent-oriented tech in 90's and in Juice project that used compiled, Oberon AST's to replace JavaScript.

Most of what we're doing isn't about what's technically the best so much as what was and is popular. That's for backward compatibility, integration, network, and marketing benefits. A clean slate attempt at profiling-guided AOT compilation, at server or binary, could probably match or do a lot better than most modern stuff.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dynamic features in a language make tools impossible because communication is expected to be one way. The interaction between languages and their tools currently have a rigid design that is shared by almost every modern language.

I would love to see a language that breaks this mold. Where the language and the tools are intimately coupled, or at least had a more complex API. Why aren't the concepts of the convention over configuration movement being pushed further, into the developer workflow and the language itself.

What if unit tests exercising your code was expected, because this is what drives code completion.

How about a community that won't accept a new library as being complete until it hooks into the standardized tools to support its custom macros.

I'd love to see what could happen if we question our basic assumptions of the roles between language, tool, and programmer. What could we do differently if a program was stored as pure AST, instead of a text file, for instance?

</comment><comment><USER16> > _the design of my ultra-dynamic language would make it near-impossible to > have much tool support_

Dynamic, run-time reflection - yes, it is very harmful indeed. But dynamically extensible parser per se is not an obstacle for tooling.

> _If you can hijack the parsing of a program while it's being parsed, and > alter the parser using custom code you wrote, then good luck running any > kind of static analysis. It's just not going to work._

It works. Easily. No problem at all. As long as you can clearly separate compilation time and runtime.

I could easily make any dynamically introduced syntax extension to play well with an IDE without any user effort. Autocompletion, semantic highlighting, type balloons, autoindentation - all the usual IDE stuff.

> _Rest assured though, this language will be dynamically typed ;)_

This is a big mistake. Dynamic typing breaks tooling, not an extensible syntax.

<comment><USER17> Smalltalk and Lisp have each had some of the best tooling around and they are both dynamically typed.

<comment><USER16> Yes. But both failed to deliver the autocompletion the spoiled kids expect these days.

And Lisp is far less dynamic than Smalltalk and the modern lesser toys like Python.

See in ACL2 how a fully static typing can be added on top without a significant change in semantics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think static vs dynamic and JIT vs AOT compilers are orthogonal concerns. JIT is alive and well in the JVM and a lot of effort is being put into JIT compilers for JavaScript. And you can certainly write an AOT for dynamic languages which attempts analysis to reduce the cost of dynamic features (type inference, vtable specialization and the like).

</comment><comment><USER19> If you are interested in languages that compile to C take a look at Nim.

If I were doing a new language I would compile to web assembly.

</comment><comment><USER20> You can tool for anything. It's a matter of tool coverage. If there are things that circumvent the tooling, that doesn't diminish the tool. It will tend to push programmers not to use those features though (see Aspect Oriented Java for the first few years).</comment>


Unsealed docs will detail how Facebook made money off children - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/unsealed-docs-facebook-money-children/#bJPU_Uc5nmqd <comment><USER2> I feel like we _just_ talked about this and that's because we did - only but a day ago[0].

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18937640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18937640)

</comment><comment><USER3> > _" When an initial payment is made by the parent, or child using their > parent's credit card, Facebook stores the payment information. The card is > then repeatedly charged as the game is played without it being made clear > new transactions are occurring. As far as the child was concerned, they were > just using up the virtual credit purchased with the initial transaction. > This led to surprise credit card bills where hundreds or even thousands of > dollars had been racked up playing games on Facebook."_

That facebook allowed this is abhorrent, and that people actually created games willing to sell people hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of crap is abhorrent. I know why they did it, they want to rake in the profit from those juicy 'whales', even if some of those whales were children.

Well whaling is immoral when it's done by marine "research" vessels, and it's immoral when it's done by game developers. It's my understanding that such whaling is currently an industry standard practice, but that is no excuse.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's hard to feel sorry for these greedy grasping children and their families when Mark Zuckerberg is worth only $55,000,000,000, while Jeff Bezos is worth around $136,000,000,000. Bezos can lose half in his divorce and still shame Zuckerberg with his bank balance.

Give Zuck a break, a man has to earn a living.

<comment><USER5> He's earned many peoples' living. He can live 100 lives with that money comfortably. I'm not going to feel sorry for him. This type of thing needs to end.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the parent was being serious (at least I hope not!)</comment></comment></comment>


Loopt Hires Allen & Co. For Financing Or Sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/11/loopt-hires-allen-co-for-financing-or-sale/ <comment><USER2> It would be nice to know some real stats, like subscribers, revenue etc. not just vaporous speculation about valuation.

</comment><comment><USER3> when companies "hire" banks to help them find financing, is it a flat fee or performance based?

<comment><USER4> I would guess that the deal is structured to incentivize the bankers to make more money for their clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> the valuation they cite is a joke. $500 million? haha i'm sorry, 2006 is gone and won't be returning. loopt would be better off claiming they are a bank and going to the TARP...probably make more with fewer questions asked!

<comment><USER6> 1\. Wait until Apple mention your app on an advert

2\. Sell sell sell!!!!!!!!

3\. Profit?

They don't get any traffic to their website, so I guess the question is how many people they have using their app, and how much cash does that make.

Sounds like they had to do some layoffs recently, so I'm guessing the answer is "not enough".</comment></comment>


Chemical analysis and origin of the smell of line-dried laundry - <AUTHOR> https://www.publish.csiro.au/en/EN19206 <comment><USER2> Related popular article, [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/science/laundry- smell-lin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/science/laundry-smell- line.html)

<comment><USER3> [https://archive.md/mwSGw](https://archive.md/mwSGw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Ontario, Canada, some condo boards for town house developments (like home- owner associations) didn't like people putting up laundry lines and so prevented them since backyards were considered "common elements" and under group jurisdiction.

So the provincial government had an existing law that prevented the use of "renewable energy" systems from being blocked by local by-laws and such. So they classified clothes lines as a renewable energy system so people could use "solar power" to dry their clothes as a energy conservation mechanism.

> _" There's a whole generation of kids growing up today who think a > clothesline is a wrestling move," [Premier] McGuinty said during his > announcement._

* [https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-premier-lifts-outdoor-clo...](https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-premier-lifts-outdoor-clothesline-ban-1.290136)

The current Ford government repealed the law that allowed for this, so I'm not sure what the legal status is now exactly.

<comment><USER5> I have a similar clause in my rent contract in Germany, forbidding line drying, and first I didn't really understand why people care about this (I planned to use the communal dryer anyway).

But to be explicit, it's because the optics of visible laundry makes people associate to poor people who have no other drying options. They don't want the neighborhood to look like poor neighborhoods.

Maybe it will become one of those environment-conscious hip modern things and then they will start allowing it again...

<comment><USER6> Meanwhile, living in Japan, if you tell people you prefer to machine dry your clothes, they'll tell you outright that it's wasteful. The assumption is that it's only used when rain makes it impossible.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi In Spain the attitude is similar, but for different reasons.

Environmental consciousness is sadly low in general, but cult to fashion and looks is strong. Machine drying anything but towels and sheets would be considered shabby by most, as it damages clothes.

When I was looking for housing, I visited some really luxury apartments (that I could never afford, but visiting is free and I'm a curious person, so why not) and having a good place to line dry clothes was always seen as a boasting point, never associated to poverty in the slightest.

<comment><USER7> > Machine drying anything but towels and sheets would be considered shabby by > most, as it damages clothes.

So does UV light.

<comment><USER6> Your clothes get faded in the sun. A dryer quickly wears down the fabric and makes holes.

<comment><USER8> I remember reading somewhere where an author realized all that lint they collected from their dryer was a result of their clothes literally falling apart fiber by fiber. In other words all the mass of the lint didn't just spontaneously form breaking some conservation of mass law but came from the clothes shedding and abrading against each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it depends on where you live. Here in Chicago, if you leave wet clothes out to dry on the line, they'll stink of geosmin (to which the human olfactory receptors are insanely sensitive, to the tune of being able to detect a few parts per million) rather than smell nice and fresh thanks to the humidity.

<comment><USER10> Why is that chemical so prevalent in Chicago?

<comment><USER11> Great Lakes

[https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- xpm-1994-11-20-941120...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- xpm-1994-11-20-9411200261-story.html)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the link, I'm pretty sure it's talking about the exact thing I'm referring to. I didn't realize Chicago was special in this regard; I thought it was just a universal "water" thing.

> They may not be dangerous, but they are powerful in the effect they produce. > Sensitive palates can taste geosmin and 2-MIB at concentrations as low as > five parts per trillion.

I thought it was four per million, five parts per trillion is beyond comprehension! And as far as "sensitive palates" go, I'm always the one complaining to my wife who invariably responds with "it's just you," _grumble_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I lived in Arizona, I'd take the clothes out of the washer, step outside, and put them on the line. When I finished pinning them up, I'd return to the beginning of the line and take them down, perfectly dry and fresh.

Who needs a dryer :-)

<comment><USER13> Same in Perth, Western Australia. Gotta love the desert climate for that.

<comment><USER14> Same in Adelaide, South Australia. Although it has been raining a lot of late...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder whether the manufacturer of some existing artificial "fresh breeze" scent happened to already stumble upon a formula that closely approximates the chemical composition of the real thing, without knowing it. Do e.g. (scented) detergents contain these particular hydrocarbons? Does any air freshener?

Also: is there any knowledge of these compounds' effects on the human body? Are they GRAS? I can imagine an evolutionary just-so story where our bodies like the scent because it tells us that whatever's emitting the smell has, essentially, been UV-disinfected. But that doesn't mean that breathing the scent volatiles themselves is good for us. Humans think all sorts of bad-for- us things smell/taste good, like ozone or antifreeze.

<comment><USER16> Oh, that's where the name comes from.

I hang dry most of my laundry in my own house still. I learned to appreciate this after moving from a big city to a town of 13 people. Of course we all had lots of space but my house had one of those circular drying line contraptions. I enjoyed going out and hanging my laundry, even in the cold winters. Even in the snow. The sun and dry air did their thing pretty quickly.

When I lived in Amsterdam my apartment came with a new combo washer/dryer unit. As far as I could tell, it mostly succeeded in compressing the laundry into a really tight, nearly inextricable ball.

In tighter quarters having lots of laundry drying between apartments could be seen as less desirable. There are solutions for that too. But the noise and dirt of lint coming from drying machines is a counter factor to consider.

<comment><USER17> And the smell of tumble drying. I live in an apartment complex and the smell coming out of the dryer vents is overwhelming. It's not intrinsic; there would barely be any odor at all if people gave up dryer sheets and fabric softener, but it seems like many have never heard anything so outlandish as that.

<comment><USER18> I spent a couple years living in high density highrises (putting my YIMBY money where my mouth is, I guess) and the laundry exhaust (and other ventilation problems) traveling into my apartment made the air nigh unbreathable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't remember a time I ever line dried laundry outside. How significant is this smell, is it worth changing my laundry drying habits just to reproduce it?

<comment><USER20> Yes. Nothing beats it. Also, drying laundry electrically is a waste of resources, the sun will do it for free, as long as you live in a moderately warm country.

<comment><USER21> I am always disappointed that drying racks aren't more common in NA. Even in an apartment, you can set it up overnight and wake up to dry clothing in the morning. Better for the environment and your clothing.

<comment><USER22> Not so good for the apartment though, unless you have dehumidifying air conditioning.

<comment><USER23> I have lived in socialist-era blocks which are notorious for humidity issues and mold. But a mere drying rack placed next to the window will not produce enough humidity to cause problems if you leave that window open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A frost would sometimes freeze the clothes stiff overnight. And dumb kid curiosity, if you licked the clothes you would get a faint taste of detergent.

But the best small was fresh cut hay, sleeping on it in a barn

<comment><USER25> > But the best small was fresh cut hay, sleeping on it in a barn

I always wonder why nobody sells fragrances based on it. And also on freshly cut grass. Or the scent one has after spending a day on the beach.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.perfume.com/demeter/demeter-fresh-hay/women- perf...](https://www.perfume.com/demeter/demeter-fresh-hay/women-perfume)

[https://demeterfragrance.com/grass.html](https://demeterfragrance.com/grass.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I might be reading this incorrectly, but I always thought that the small came from the detergent having not been fully washed off the clothes. Which is why if you use too much detergent your clothes become stiff, due to the dried detergent.

Then again, clothes seem to smell vastly different when they dry quickly out in the open sun as opposed to when they dry slowly.

</comment><comment><USER26> UV triggers the reaction. So, driers need a strong UV source. There are some small UV driers, and sterilizers. Full-sized clothes driers with a strong UV source, not yet.

<comment><USER27> A UV dryer? You must be dreaming. Besides that it would bleach the clothes (what may be beneficial to WHITE but ONLY to white clothes), I would be skeptical about aging of the fibres. UV light is a bitch.

But I have heard about Japanese laundry machines using ultrasonic sound.

<comment><USER28> Obviously a UV dryer wouldn't have higher UV flux than sunlight, if for no other reason than cost.

Regarding photobleaching, survey the rest of this thread of people complaining clothes dried on the line turning white and then crumbling to dust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Would it work if I installed a UV light in my dryer?

</comment><comment><USER30> Good to see tax payer dollars are tackling the important questions.

</comment><comment><USER31> Awesome research in an unexpected field! I fucking love science!

</comment><comment><USER32> Sunlight is the best disinfectant. /s and !/s</comment>


iPhone secretly sends call history to Apple even when iCloud backup switched off - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/11/17/iphones-secretly-send-call-history-to-apple-security-firm-says/ <comment><USER2> To complete the headline, only when iCloud is enabled. Anyone especially concerned about privacy shouldn't be using iCloud anyway, but it definitely needs more fine-grained control.

</comment><comment><USER3> I kinda assumed that after I had my call history on my Mac and iPad Facetime apps, since it is possible to call using any iOS/macOS device in the network.

You don't always have the phone reachable, so I assumed it syncs over iCloud.

</comment><comment><USER4> should probably only have this story or [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12977612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12977612)</comment>


Argument that Investing in Evolving Your Web Site Beats Big Bang Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com//blog/darwinist-approach-to-evolutionary-web-design.php

<comment><AUTHOR> This article articulated what I have always believed. It's improved my selling points for this approach for when the boss just doesn't get it.</comment>


Entrepreneurship in Italy from a non-Italian's perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestartup.eu/2010/09/entrepreneurship-in-italy-from-a-non-italians-perspective/ <comment><USER3> In Italy there's always been the dream of the "posto fisso," the fixed position. Families celebrate when their son or daughter find a job in a bank or some other big companies, because with the actual laws, firing people is almost impossible. I remember when the insurance company where my mother was working part-time had to reduce their workforce, they gave her 3 years of salary in advance for her to quit, because there was no way to fire her.

Of course not everyone is the same. I know personally great guys who decided to step out of the grid and launch their company, or leave the country for better shores, like myself. If you want to work in the web industry the only two ways to make moneys are services (web agencies, consulting, etc.) or ads. In Italy debit cards can't be use for online transactions, and most of the italian population doesn't have a credit card. Some to purchase online uses prepaid credit cards, but even those, aren't really common. And there is a trust issue. People in Italy don't like to buy stuff online. And because of all these reasons, it's really hard to just create a product charge people for it. My Christmasfy Me iPhone app was a freemium application I made last Christmas, and was ranked among the top downloaded apps in Italy, but still, while in the US my conversion rate was close to 5%, in Italy was around 0.2%.

I love Italy, it's where I come from and where all my family is, but what do you expect from a country where if you want to buy an internet domain, you still have to send a fax...

<comment><USER4> The problem is that almost no-one today is offering the posto fisso. None of my employees has a contract like that, for example.

Two sides of a medal:

-people with a degree need to do 1 or 2 unpaid stages to get to a contract position. After that there's still a lot of uncertainity about if your job will last or what, and you might be paid not enough to go outside your parent's house until 30 or so.

-i really have trouble finding someone with a clue to hire. either they want too much (like 2K/month right out of school) or they don't know shit about the job, don't want to work hard and generally have no clue ("oh you mean i'm supposed to solve problem and you won't just tell me what to do?").

It drives me mad, we're full of young without an idea of what it takes to survive in life - they take everything for granted and expect to land a good job without doing nothing. But they only find people that wants to exploit them as bad as they want to exploit employers - this isn't functional at all.

that's why we have A LOT of small businesses in Italy and that's why I didn't even bother looking for a job after getting my undergraduate degree, I just opened my firm (consulting web agency), went out and sold a couple of websites.

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with 2k/month right out of school if they are good enough? Most of my employees are still in college, but they literally kick ass, so why not to give them what they are worth, independently of their age. We think salaries are based on age and experience and not skills.

I moved to the US right after school in Italy, I was making way more than that, I was able to rent a place, buy a car (a used one) and live what is considered a sweet life in Italy. And I'm just a designer... developers would make way much more right after college...

<comment><USER4> I'm not saying it's not fair, I'm just saying that they aren't going to find a job with a salary like that in Italy. This was also why _I_ started my company, mind you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article, the whole analysis is spot-on. In a country where risk-aversion is intrinsecally rooted in the business culture, it's difficult to be serious about any business plan that dosen't lie in a well established market, but not impossible. Unfortunately, the university system (engineering, for my experience) is focused on producing well-manned corporate consultants whose main goal is to get an open-end contract, climb the ladder and wait for a bigger paycheck. Entrepreneurship isn't considered a prerogative for the 20-something 'kid', that's why it isn't taught or discussed in university classrooms. There is lots of room for improvement, David's petition could be a first little step in the right direction.

 _(This is a comment I originally posted on Jesper's blog)_

<comment><USER6> _"... Unfortunately, the university system (engineering, for my experience) is focused on producing well-manned corporate consultants whose main goal is to get an open-end contract, climb the ladder and wait for a bigger paycheck. ..."_

Yet it's the Italian firm <http://www.arduino.cc> is powering the open source hardware, "Can Open Source Hardware Work?", Clive Thompson ~ [http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_open...](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing?currentPage=all)

<comment><USER7> interestingly enough, massimo banzi used to be a teacher in a grad school in italy that is now disappeared ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_Design_Institute_Iv...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_Design_Institute_Ivrea)).

<comment><USER8> Massimo Banzi is a great guy and a true visionary. Incidently he gave a speech in one of my classes and explained that the purpose of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea was to create an Italian verison of MIT's famous Media Lab.

Typically, he said that when it was recognized for its excellence world wide, Telecom Italia decided to shot it down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _there is only one elective in English at Bocconi focused on > entrepreneurship and having taken that elective it leaves a lot to be > desired._

Even in the U.S. my impression is the majority of universities don't teach entrepreneurship or teach it poorly. I think for within an engineering college (not b school) the technology entrepreneurship center at UIUC is great <http://tec.illinois.edu/> and other universities probably have similar programs, but nothing that compares to Mixergy + Hacker News.

<comment><USER8> I took entrepreneurship and classes at UNC Chapel Hill for my undergraduate and it was a great experience taught by former entrepreneurs and PE-people. My point is not so much that there are only few classes in Europeean b-schools but that these courses get a lot of things wrong, that they do not prepare people to become better entrepreneurs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think that the biggest obstacle to the startup scene here in Italy is the risk aversion mentality and the idea that if your venture fails banks can take everything you own.

<comment><USER11> True, cause unfortunately with an srl they almost can. We have very ineffective company structures, that are a big handbreak for innovation, but that's not the sole cause. It's the mix of factors that makes it hard, the challenge is in finding which one is the core one.

<comment><USER4> Wait, when did SRL become not-limited-liability companies?

<comment><USER10> When the banks ask the owners to back the funding to the company with personal liabilities.

For example I've seen in a case where for a € 100K line of credit the bank asked to all three the founder to back this with 100k liability EACH ONE, for a total of 300k. The banks wanted just to be sure to find someone to goto if they want the money back. <g>

<comment><AUTHOR> That sort of thing can happen anywhere. Indeed, someone close to me in the US went bankrupt, despite having a C corporation, because a supplier required signing off personally, and things went south...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> By the way, do you guys know about the milan startupnights? [http://www.google.com/search?q=mikamai+startupnight&ie=u...](http://www.google.com/search?q=mikamai+startupnight&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:it:official&client=firefox-a)

Usually held 3-4 times a year, organized by Mikamai with the aid of others like Startupbusiness.it (which also organizess percorsi dell'innovazione at SMAU)

</comment><comment><USER12> A bit off-topic, but what would be an ideal way to teach entrepreneurship at colleges and universities ?

Perhaps a common, cross-discipline, elective course would be the way forward. It could cover the nuts and bolts (basic marketing, company law, financing, etc) as well as practical "brainstorming" sessions and projects to complete (think of the Apprentice, but tailored to a more educational environment). Bring in local entrepreneurs to give lectures and Q&A sessions.

Cross-discipline would mean you don't just get the business students, but engineering/comp-sci, humanities, and so on. Students from different backgrounds will be able to contribute different viewpoints and ideas - <USER2> might even get some real-world startups coming out of it.

Heck, make it a night school class for those of us long since passed college age.

<comment><USER11> I'd say: give students two months and a legal entity, and they pass the class only if they make $10.000 in profit (legally and with all due restrictions given by their area of study).

<comment><USER4> I'd love a course like that. But I don't see many people completing it...

<comment><AUTHOR> Ultimately though, you can read and study and talk until you are blue in the face, and until you actually try your hand at it, you won't have many of those lessons sink in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd love to hear if someone else is trying to start something in Italy, either to target the italian market or as an offshoring strategy.

<comment><AUTHOR> > offshoring strategy.

When I worked at Linuxcare, we had a reasonably successful time doing just that. We had an extremely bright group of people (including antirez and several others of that caliber) that didn't cost all that much, all things considered.

I still wonder why more foreign shops don't set up some of their operations in Italy - there are a lot of bright people willing to work for a lot less than they would get abroad. Sure, it is bureaucratic and run in an illiberal way, but it's not _so_ different from other continental European countries. And the climate is nicer, with great food and a stunning amount of natural variety. The important thing is to avoid Milan:-)

I think less capital-intensive activities like R&D are best. If you're running your money through Italy via sales or something, that's probably not an ideal strategy (Google is in Ireland in Europe for a reason). However, having a bunch of smart people working on a project that requires some ingenuity and hard work is perfect for Italy.

Fabrizio Capobianco has more to say on the subject:

[http://mindthebridge.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-italy-see- fabr...](http://mindthebridge.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-italy-see-fabrizio- capobiancos.html)

<comment><USER13> Regarding R&D, there was a time before the bubble burst when that happened and some US companies had R&D centers here. Now there is not much left (various reasons involved), there is a cisco's r&d center for optical networking gears in Monza where i work atm, but i can't think of any other similar places.

I definitely agree that this is the perfect place for offshoring, especially for smaller software shops. The bureaucracy will seem a bit intimidating at the beginning but in the long run it will be worth it.

About the market, offering an innovative product (especially if it targets end-users) here feels like a sure-failure strategy. If it's some free toy like facebook it could work, but don't expect to have a meaningful number of paying customers if you are selling something/offering a service.

<comment><USER10> In Monza there're some other R&D center, left behind by the old Philips R&D of the 80s. First that come to mind in my field (embedded) is the Flextronics Medical Division.

A lot of people is currently consulting and building "dinamic-teams": one small srl take the work and the team grow as needed with consultant.

Startups? I joined one in 2000 (ubiquity, in milan) they are still around but they changed their DNA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want to start a startup in Italy, checkout h-farm, which is a startup incubator near Venice.

<comment><USER4> I've been told they take the majority of your company upon funding.

<comment><USER14> I don't know, I work for a startup funded by them, but I have no idea about that. It's still something if you live here and you _need_ funding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Too much text, needs editing.

TLDR: tldr</comment>


The Chinese suicides prevented by AI from afar - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50314819 <comment><USER2> however 'cool' it is to read about some of my country's research making it to hacker news, it does leave me wondering why our universities paid for with dutch tax euros and european research grants are running a service the chinese government should be paying for.</comment>


What the color? - <AUTHOR> http://leaverou.github.io/whathecolor/

<comment><USER2> Good for color lover. I input the correct combination but timer is not stopping.

<comment><USER3> I have tried exact color codes using Inspect element, but still there is nothing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> kinda interesting, but I couldn't get the proximity to update. On my screen, I couldn't tell the difference between the start color, and the color I entered, but still showed 0% proximity.</comment>


The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/blog/2014/08/astra-taylor-on-the-peoples-platform/

<comment><USER2> This reads like something from a parallel universe in which Google doesn't do quality work, where legacy media companies adjusted to the Internet (by losing two thirds of their revenues?[1]), and where the US has a lot to learn from Europe because we here are clearly at the cutting edge of the digital revolution.

Americans came up with Google, Amazon, Twitter and every other company named in that article when we are implementing some ridiculous memory hole ruling and hiding links in search results. That's where our "aggressive officials" have led us[2].

The best part though was a worry over the absence of the Frankfurt School thought at a web2.0 conference.

[1] [http://www.aei-ideas.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/newspape...](http://www.aei-ideas.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/newspaper.jpg)

[2] [http://cdn.static- economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...](http://cdn.static- economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print- edition/20120728_FBC674.png)</comment>


Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making&print=true

<comment><USER2> Does exercising the executive function improve it, in the same way as exercising a muscle?

If so, what exercise-recovery time frame is ideal? is it similar to weight training, of sets, pushing to exhaustion, with brief recovery (of the order of minutes) in between, and on a longer timeframe, rest days?

Or does the executive function respond quite differently to exercise?

<comment><USER3> There is research that indicates that "willpower", at least, improves the more you exercise it:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html?ex=1...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html?ex=1364788800&en=43baa50ffa5fbac4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewan)

Unfortunately, the article doesn't list the specific research papers, but it suggests that consistent exercise over time increases it ("using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity"); the article gives no word on whether exercising willpower to exhaustion is a better or worse strategy, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great. I wonder if it's possible to measure the tiredness level with a simple test? That way I would know when to stop coding ang go have some social contact instead.

But then I would also know when to get back to coding!

<comment><USER5> Number of visits/hour to news.YC is probably a good proxy...

On that note, I should go to bed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems that most of us aren't explicitly aware when our brain is "tired" (as opposed to our muscles). But we have to _decide_ that we are too tired to make decisions. In some cases, that may be non-trivial.

I don't mean to sound cynical, just curious.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if deciding which article to click on while browsing HN affects my ability to make business decisions....

<comment><USER8> The article suggests yes. Even trivial decisions deplete executive capacity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Link's expired

<comment><USER3> Looks like they've disabled the "print preview" version of the page. I had no problem getting to the original article:

<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making></comment></comment>


Lenovo admits installing BIOS root kit on wide range of laptops - <AUTHOR> http://www.itnews.com.au/News/407868,lenovo-loaded-bloatware-onto-clean-windows-installs.aspx

<comment><USER2> From Lenovo's statement [0] it seems that the root kit was not installed on ThinkPads. This somewhat calms me, but I doubt that I can trust Lenovo any more. How comes that such big Hardware vendors go unpunished after the Superfish and now this? This is unacceptable.

It is time for fully open-source hard-ware with physical switches to turn off recording devices like microphones and webcams.

[0] [http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=2013](http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=2013)

EDIT: added the [0] URL

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, seeing this makes me seriously wonder whether to ever buy Lenovo again. Superfish should have been enough, but this....</comment>


Capital One forcing me to "prove" I opened their emails - <AUTHOR> I have a Capital One credit card.  I have my account configured so that I receive email notices for various activities (bill due, card charged, unusual transactions, etc.).  Recently, I received an email (legit) from Capital One that reads in part:
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
Open emails regularly to continue receiving notifications.
Recently, we updated the Paperless Terms & Conditions for your account. We've modified the Terms to make it clear that you'll need to open a Capital One email once every 12 months to continue receiving email notifications like statement ready alerts.
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
From a tech perspective, I'm perfectly aware of what Capital One means by "open" - "load a tracking beacon".  Since I don't (and won't) I assume I won't be receiving any email notices 13 months from now.
Personally, I find this requirement from Capital One to be appalling.  I'm curious if anyone else has received a notice like this (do other banks do this?) and what your opinion is. </comment><comment><USER2> This is why you don't give the business unreliable metrics.

Whoever came up with this requirement at capital one had the sense that email surveillance was capable of delivering meaningful read metrics. Who let that happen?

You may understand the implementation makes the metric comically unreliable, especially for email with so many clients that block images by default. But when is the last time you quantified the margin of error in all the metrics reporting? Never? Great rigor you've got going there, data science. Even if you do clarify how poor the signal is, how long until someone copy-pastes it into Excel, removes that context and shows the graph to someone with more decision making power? And that's the best case scenario. People are, in general, way more statistically illiterate than you suspect. Remember how many people saw Hillary had 85% on fivethirtyeight, and were convinced that it meant she would win?

I've had arguments with Amazon employees that: no, they do not know how many people open their emails. Trying to explain what they have is a lower bound that is closer to "how many emails are read in gmail on an iphone" than "how many emails are read"? Nope. The UI says "unread," therefore it is impossible that the user read the email.

Stop implementing bullshit metrics in your software.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a trend in inboxing-rates: if there is no interaction with a sender, start moving the messages to spam and start penalizing the sending IP address. This means senders, in order to protect their IP reputation, do well to remove recipients who don't engage with email sends. The two most typical ways to do that are a tracking pixel or tracking if a link is clicked.

It seems like a natural progression. What is unfortunate is that the inboxes are really part of the problem because measuring engagement and lowering spam is a good thing, but just because I did not open the mail (load tracking pixel) or click a link, does not mean I did not engage. Reading a subject line is good enough for a lot of email I get. Many users have images blocked, and tracking pixels are rendered useless. I still have email that Gmail puts in spam that I really want, but I only use the subject. It is a non-trivial problem because there is an arms race between inboxes wanting to prevent spam and spammers wanting in, and in the middle is businesses who have legitimate email to send or normal people sending email.

</comment><comment><USER4> Call them up every month and tell them that you've read their email.

After 13 months, if/when the emails stop, call them up again and ask why they've stopped.

For even more fun, figure out which domain(s) they use for tracking and have your router/firewall block them.

Then when you complain about not receiving the emails, you can still say that you've been doing "load images" to no effect.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can imagine plenty of practical reasons for such a policy, like customers who have paperless statements going to an email address that they no longer check or have access to.

If you don't like this just switch to paper statements. Wanting to receive financial statements without leaving any evidence that you received them doesn't fall under any definition of privacy that I know of.

<comment><USER6> Dude, privacy is the definition of not leaving evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems reasonable to me to not want to waste resources sending emails that will not be seen. Opening an email once a year does not seem very onerous.

Also, they probably have a way to turn emails back on via the website / app so just mark it on your calendar.

<comment><USER4> The question isn't one of "that will not be seen" it's one of "they don't know if it's seen because the reader didn't use the mechanisms which allow email tracking."

<comment><USER7> I believe tracking pixels are the only way to track email opens. I think their goal makes sense and it's unfortunate that it doesn't work for privacy focused customers.

<comment><USER4> Another is X-Image-URL, though most mail readers don't support it.

It also doesn't work for the generation of people who started with text email so acquired a belief that if it can't be expressed in text (or maybe with an attachment) then it isn't worthwhile.

At least, that's my belief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if the issue might be some question about if the user is receiving statements or not.

IIRC even statements sent to customers are covered by some banking regulations and if they're not done right there can be serious fines.

Ages ago I worked on equipment that ran printers that printed financial statements. Any hint that anything might be late got the executive team nervous and their full attention. It was serious stuff.

Granted that was years ago and they could just want to track you but if the requirement is just every 12 months... that really doesn't seem like effective tracking.

Perhaps another issue is a security check, such as a dormant or hijacked email that would otherwise expose itself by reading all their emails from another country unexpectedly?

<comment><AUTHOR> > I wonder if the issue might be some question about if the user is receiving > statements or not.

Couldn't they just ask me? Then I could reply (or not).

> Perhaps another issue is a security check, such as a dormant or hijacked > email that would otherwise expose itself by reading all their emails from > another country unexpectedly?

A tracking beacon is no guarantee that _I_ opened the email, just that _somebody_ (with access to my account) opened the email, no?

<comment><USER8> Certainly none of it is a sure thing but doing due diligence might still be worthwhile of there are any regulatory or security questions.

It just doesn't strike me that every 12 months would provide much tracking value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a __federally endorsed banking account __, you can 't enjoy such services without assuming tracking liabilities.

If this is a burden to you, why not just open the emails in a text-only client?

<comment><USER4> The OP wrote "I don't (and won't)" use an email reader with such tracking liabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I also received this email and was concerned about it. It seems to be a new trend.</comment>


How to find a good open source project to learn a new language - <AUTHOR>

One of the most exciting things for a developer beginning a startup is the no-holds barred opportunity to choose their new language for their product or service. However picking the right language/framework, especially if it's reasonably new can be a difficult task; I find the best way to understand a language is by getting stuck into some good code to see how the wheels turn.<p>How did you find a great example of the language/framework you implemented? <comment><USER2> Find something with good documentation, support, community, activity, non- corporate use (corporate use isn't as lively or forward-moving). It isn't so much a past example of some use of what you want, just that they are common. Marco of tumblr says they picked Php/etc because they wouldn't be the biggest user of it, which is something you might want to avoid.</comment>


MIT discovers batteries with indefinite lifetimes using solid-state-electrolytes - <AUTHOR> http://www.koreatimesus.com/samsung-mit-find-way-to-make-batteries-with-indefinite-lifetime/ <comment><USER2> I have "battery breakthrough fatigue" so announcing a lab result isn't really going to get me excited. A licensing deal and a factory being built, much more exciting.

Interesting challenge of the terms indefinite and infinite. I read it as batteries that may die may not after every action (which would actually be indeterminate batteries :-)) rather than an infinite number of cycles.

<comment><USER3> What seems to be the trouble getting some of these to market? There seems to plenty of demand.

Is this a "Who Killed the Electric Car" conspiracy thing? A VC thing? Or a vaporware/chemistry-is-hard thing?

<comment><USER4> I guess that most of these are a science journalism thing: [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif)

For example, there was news recently about a breakthrough discovery of a -70C superconductor. The media spun it as if loss-free electricity transport and maglev trains are just around the corner. But in reality, this material (Hydrogen Sulfide) required 2 _million_ atmospheres of pressure for superconducting at this temperature.

No conspiracy or lack of funding is behind the lack of practical applications, in this case it is just utterly unfeasible outside of a laboratory. But even if the material will never make it to the market, it's still a _scientific_ breakthrough that will give scientists new understanding of how the processes work, and perhaps lead to other discoveries with more practical applications in 2, 20 or 200 years.

<comment><USER5> But a -70C superconductor could theoretically be used in space environment where the temperatures are even colder, no?

<comment><USER6> Space is "cold", but the problem is that it's hard to get rid of waste heat in space since you aren't surrounding by a heat-carrying fluid (air). Therefore a -70c superconductor would still require a large cooling apparatus to function properly.

<comment><USER7> Yeah that threw me too when I thought the same thing I never thought about how difficult it would be to get rid of heat in space I figured just let it go out into space not thinking there isn't anything to send the heat into; no medium.

NASA has a nice info page about it:

[http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/2001/as...](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/2001/ast21mar_1/)

<comment><USER8> Basically, there's no convection, so the only way to dump heat is by radiation.

And since a radiator absorbs as well as it emits, you need to create a shade with reflective material and point a directional radiator in its shadow at the emptiest space you can see.

So sure, superconductors could be really cold in space, but if their solar shade or thermal control system fails, they are suddenly really hot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wake me up when they have an actual reasonably priced working product in the market. This is getting tiresome as "breakthrough" news piled up but we are still using almost 10 year old technology.

<comment><USER10> R&D is not that simple and some of us appreciate this news. Coming to a thread only to complain that you can't have something immediately only adds to the overly negative feedback loop on HN.

<comment><USER11> His complain is not that he is not going to have it immediately, but that he is never going to have it. And I agree with him. We keep hearing of breakthroughs and the truth is that 99% of the time they vaporize.

That said, I'm happy to hear the amount of research put into finding better batteries.

<comment><USER10> It's always a possibility that we may never see this technology in use commercially, that does not mean that it is insignificant and cannot lead to an improved product later on. The work done here is still important regardless of whether or not we'll have it in our hands within the next five years.

<comment><USER11> I agree that every bit of contribution is important. In fact, behind every big discovery there are tens of hundreds of smaller discoveries, and hearing news like this is fantastic.

The thing though is that by defining every discovery as breakthrough, you end up confusing the readers and, more importantly, devaluing the discoveries that are really going to have a big impact.

<comment><USER12> But "Scientists make incremental contribution to the state of human knowledge" doesn't have that nice click-generating ring to it :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great. Batteries could at last hold sentimental value as we pass them on to our children. "my granddaddy gave this battery to my daddy, who gave it to me before he died" etc.

Seriously, when I think about battery tech advancement, I think about all those millions of people doing it tough in temporary communities and camps with limited power resources and inadequate infrastructure. I don't get tired of hearing about new battery tech.

</comment><comment><USER14> The abstract [http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat43...](http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4369.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Toyota already made a prototype solid-state last year.

[https://ecs.confex.com/ecs/imlb2014/webprogram/Paper33467.ht...](https://ecs.confex.com/ecs/imlb2014/webprogram/Paper33467.html)

<comment><USER16> Battery prototypes are a dime a dozen, but none ever seem to reach the market.

<comment><USER17> Some do... [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/174477-at-long-last- new-l...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/174477-at-long-last-new-lithium- battery-tech-actually-arrives-on-the-market-and-might-already-be-in-your- smartphone)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My immediate observation is that "indefinite" means "unknown", not "unlimited". I'm not sure this is the word they wanted to use, but it may be a more accurate description.

<comment><USER19> With a solid electrolyte, it means "we are not aware of any process that will limit their lifetime - but it must die some day".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Exciting!

 _"My top advice really for anyone who says they got some breakthrough battery technologies is please send us a sample cell. Don't send us PowerPoint, ok, just send us one cell that works with all appropriate caveats, that would be great. That sorts out the nonsense and the claims that aren't actually true. Talk is super cheap. The battery industry has to have more BS in it than any industry I've ever encountered, it's insane."_

Elon Musk

[https://youtu.be/TzquC0USTEA?t=19m8s](https://youtu.be/TzquC0USTEA?t=19m8s)

</comment><comment><USER21> It's all quite generic in the press release. And, nobody even tries to answer the number one question: how long until batteries like this could eventually hit the market?

<comment><USER22> The other major issue being: How does this affect all the other parameters that make a battery useful?

I mean, sure, an 'indefinite life' is fine, but not if it's got more limited charge/discharge rates, energy densities, etc.

<comment><USER23> "The new battery also has an improved power capacity that is 20 to 30 percent higher than traditional models, and can endure frigid temperatures as well"

Nothing about charge/discharge rates.

<comment> bro-stick It's completely not characterized in any meaningful form. They shouldn't have made any claims to the media without a real demo and comparison to show with it. Otherwise, it does have a tendency to come off as unobtainium fogware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not sure if this is the same "breakthrough" [https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/yolks-and-shells-improve- rec...](https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/yolks-and-shells-improve-rechargeable- batteries-0805) It was also discussed in The Economist this week. Batter tech has been stuck in a rut for a long time so it's great news that better tech is in the way.

<comment><USER25> It's been so stuck in a rut, relative to the demands of what we use it for, that it'd seem utterly magical for it to improve dramatically.

Imagine being able to use a laptop, or a phone, for days without plugging in. Seems completely impossible now, and my mental model of power usage vs battery drain is so set at this point that I think I'd have a really hard time trusting a vastly better battery to really work, even after seeing it work for a few cycles - I'd always be thinking, can this really be happening? When's it going to fail?

Wonder how long it would take for this to go away and just become the new norm? I'd love to look back on this post in a few years and laugh.

<comment><USER26> _Imagine being able to use a laptop, or a phone, for days without plugging in._

Can't do it with my laptop but my phone stays on for 1-2 weeks. That's the reason I have a very basic phone, and it does everything I want my phone to do.

I would welcome a smartphone if it could do the same 1-2 weeks between charging. I could easily live with a "dumb phone" mode, that would just basically sleep while keeping 2G on for phonecalls and texts, but with a press of a button it would switch to the big operating system and allow me to check Google Maps or use the browser. Higher current draw using those applications would be justified, but needless activity when left idle isn't.

<comment><USER27> Xperia z (at least) series devices have an "ultra stamina" mode that does basically that. I have only tested it once, but it works really well and should give you way over a week of mostly sleeping.

Source: I own a z1 compact.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Even my cheap Moto G will do something similar without having an "ultra stamina" mode. I've brought it to several hiking trips where it's been lying unused in a waterproof bag with everything turned off except basic GSM so I can receive calls and SMS. After 5 days the battery reports ~ 50% capacity and projects it will last for 4 more days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there an article on this which says something other than the same thing four times? Yes, I get they're replacing a liquid electrolyte with a solid one, but that's all this piece says. What electrolyte? Oh, and is it really infinite power as the article says? Of course not.

Willing to wager this is just a breathless piece on carbon-air tech.

<comment><USER29> The lifetime refers to how many times you can charge and discharge the battery before it no longer works (if you have ever kept a rechargeable device for a long time you'll notice that the battery becomes less useful over time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As I understand it, this does not mean you can power your laptop forever with a single charge, only that it can be recharged an indefinite number of times.

<comment><USER31> Right, they did not successfully rewrite the properties of matter and energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks like a fake article the rest of the site is not working..

<comment><USER33> The rest seems to work, but it seems to almost exclusively sports and celebrities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Let me guess: 3-5 years from hitting the market?</comment>


Show HN: Material Dashboard – Free Admin for Bootstrap 4, React, Angular, Vue.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/creativetimofficial/material-dashboard <comment><USER2> Do people actually like Material for browsers on desktops? I tried it - as it would be great to have an opinionated design language with good framework implementations but it seems to make the same mistake as Windows 8 in trying to treat everything like a phone. That really isn't nice on a desktop.

<comment><USER3> One of the banks I used "updated" their iOS app and used Material Design. It's infuriating.

The thing that bothers me the most is the "switches" (3rd example here[0]). My first thought upon updating the app was "Why did they reinvent the toggle switch when iOS has a perfectly good one built in?" Being bothered by this is irrational, yet I'm bothered by it all the same.

I also find the ripple effect[1] when pressing things to be infuriating. Just do the action I've asked, don't do this animation and delay the action by half a second. Again, this is somewhat irrational, but it still bothers me.

Perhaps the thing that bugs me the most is that it feels like I have a really well-designed Android app on my phone. The problem though is that I have an iPhone. If I wanted to use Android apps, I would have bought an Android phone.

[0] [https://material.io/design/components/selection- controls.htm...](https://material.io/design/components/selection- controls.html)

[1] [https://material.io/design/interaction/states.html#pressed](https://material.io/design/interaction/states.html#pressed)

<comment><USER4> > _I also find the ripple effect[1] when pressing things to be infuriating. > Just do the action I 've asked, don't do this animation and delay the action > by half a second. Again, this is somewhat irrational, but it still bothers > me._

It is not irrational to want your device and the software you use on it to be as high-performance as possible. In my opinion, unless we're talking about a game, software should always avoid wasting the user's time, no matter how briefly. Of course, if an animation is playing while something else is happening, that is acceptable. But in many cases, applications wait for the animations to complete (because it's "only" 300 milliseconds) before proceeding with the requested action. Disrespecting the user's time is disrespecting the user, full stop.

<comment><USER5> Yes, and no.

While nobody likes excessive animation, it is very important to let the user know their input was received. It's why the cursor changes on mouseover. It's how you know if the app is crashed, or merely processing something you requested.

I've seen a million times in UX testing where ordinary people go click... wait... click click click click click because they didn't receive any feedback to an action.

At one time this was one of Apple's UI priorities — feedback. Unfortunately, Apple has gotten away from a lot of its core UI values without a strong personality to enforce them.

 _> full stop_

In the real world, nothing is ever "full stop." You should purge that phrase from your lexicon.

<comment><USER6> > In the real world, nothing is ever "full stop." You should purge that phrase > from your lexicon.

Not to get further off topic, but: Huh? "Full stop" just means "end of message". It's an amusing leftover from telegraph technologies that people sometimes use for emphasis, but it doesn't have a literal meaning more than just "end of message".

<comment><USER7> It is interesting how the phrase's meaning has transformed. Nowadays people generally use it to add emphasis such that the previous statement is an absolute truth with no valid argument to the contrary.

<comment><USER8> end of statement. nothing more to be said. no exceptions or reasonable argument to the contrary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I basically associate material design with "slow" now, especially ever since Google has began to move all their services (flights, analytics) to material design. It's all becoming slow and annoying to use, anyone else feel the same?

<comment><USER10> I feel the same way - especially with Google Drive. It takes a good 2 or 3 seconds to get a response from the UI when right-clicking. Also, it takes 4-5 seconds for Drive to realize when I'm dropping files or folders. Not sure if these issues are new or specific to Material per say, though.

<comment><USER11> 4-5 seconds on your machine? Check for a button usually next to the power button on the CPU labeled "turbo" and give it a click. Might help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hi. This is really cool and I can tell you put a lot of work into it.

I noticed when tabbing through the dashboard that many of the elements have disabled focus styles. This can make the dashboard less accessible to users who need visual indication of what element is focused. Would you consider including focus styles on the non-form elements?

<comment><USER13> This comment is how all suggestions/comments/constructive criticism should be given when someone shares something they worked on (online or elsewhere).

1\. Acknowledge the positives.

2\. Acknowledge the effort/work put in.

3\. Introduce your idea as something to consider, with the knowledge that they may have already considered it, and have a good reason for going a different direction.

Kudos!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I dunno, looks slick but I do wonder how much of this is actually useful for building an admin interface.

Once I've got decent form styles and a navbar I find that most of the rest is either very simple, or very application specific.

Widgets are cool, but mostly we need tables and forms.

<comment><USER15> > Widgets are cool, but mostly we need tables and forms.

This (though I agree with sibling comment about a few more being useful).

I reviewed 20 popular admin themes last month for our startup, and was v disappointed with them. Either due to code quality, or throwing in loads of useless widgets which are more consumer rather than business oriented.

There's a gap for a theme that's more like Stripe's dashboard, not these heavy-left-hand-menu dashboard themes. Or something like VMWare's Clarity Design System ([https://vmware.github.io/clarity/](https://vmware.github.io/clarity/))

Something corporate.

<comment><USER16> I would definitely use clarity, if only it where React.

<comment><USER15> Or Vue. I used Angular 2 for a mobile app (Cordova/Ionic) and while it was OK, I'd rather not use it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I strongly do not like the design. To my taste:

      * colors are too bright and saturated
      * Low text-vs-background contrast: white letters on bright yellow-orange for example
      * Font strokes are way too thin which is especially bad compounded with dark-ish gray on light-ish gray low contrast (see above)

Viewing this on a usual normal-resolution 24" Dell monitor. It could be that it looks better on retina phones and monitors - can someone opine?

I would prefer something like [1] (not ideal, but found this just after 5 seconds of googling)

[1] [https://p.w3layouts.com/demos_new/template_demo/06-01-2018/g...](https://p.w3layouts.com/demos_new/template_demo/06-01-2018/glance_design_dashboard- demo_Free/215073379/web/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice theme. I like how it uses the big 3 FE frameworks.

Big shout out to Ngx-Admin as well. [https://github.com/akveo/ngx- admin](https://github.com/akveo/ngx-admin)

<comment><AUTHOR> Congrats! Are you the owner of that dashboard? Maybe we can join our forces :D

<comment><USER18> Nope, but I wish I was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looking much better and easier than many paid admin themes. I was checking it yesterday after reading about it on a website and was really impressed. All the best

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, man! Appreciate.

<comment><USER20> Appreciate you! Here is one project I used Creative Tim dashboard for [https://github.com/qorrect/sisy](https://github.com/qorrect/sisy) , screenshots at bottom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice work happening at Creative Tim! Congrats to Alex and company. I'm looking forward to collaborating on Codeply. Please check out my latest too : [https://themesguide.github.io/top- hat/dist/](https://themesguide.github.io/top-hat/dist/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Carol, thank you for the kind words and congrats on the latest themes. I really like what I see there with the "copy code" straight from the interface. We will start "cooking" something together soon. Talking on email!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice work. There is a tiny glitch on first load on windows with chrome. The content shakes in order to fit screen. It may be about hiding the default scroller.

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, I see that now, you are right. Probably it would be better to disable the default scroller for all the devices and then: on Mac/Ubuntu/iOS/Android we activate the system scroll (which looks better) and on Windows, we activate the perfectScrollbar library. We will do an update soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> On the topic of UI libraries, I've used and enjoyed Element UI[0].

Someone really needs to make a search engine for components -- React, Vue, Mithril and a few other frameworks out there are making it so easy to build and share small isolated pieces of functionality but I still don't know of a site where I can easily search for components.

[0]: [http://element.eleme.io](http://element.eleme.io)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm using this for my upcoming SaaS, and I'm disappointed with the performance on mobile.

I thought it's due to React, but after Googling "react material UI slow" I found that it's the problem with the UI framework. Don't get me wrong, I like the design, I just regretful of not testing it on my phone much earlier.

</comment><comment><USER25> Great work on the template. I actually bought the pro version as it has the most reasonable SaaS license I've seen in a lot of these templates where they pull you in with a 30-40$ license and then want 800-1400$ if you wanna use it on a product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really Happy to hear that. If you have further feedback on how to improve it please let us know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tangential: is it (in)appropriate to use an "admin" theme for a consumer app?

Maybe it's semantics, but I see the "feel" of admin pop up on many / most evolved consumer applications (e.g. GMail, Kayak, Reddit, Feedly, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER27> So this is an example of how to use Bootstrap Material Design in different web frameworks? Why use Bootstrap Material Design instead of the Google supported Material Component library that works in any framework and without the added noise of class="foo"? [https://github.com/material-components/material- components-w...](https://github.com/material-components/material-components- web)

</comment><comment><USER28> I think this is why folks give Material UI so much grief.

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

And I would not be so quick to pat Apple on the back, as I feel they have on gone backwards vis a vis the above principle when they largely abandonded skeuomorphism.

</comment><comment><USER29> The demo page section for icons[1] is buggy on Firefox. If you scroll the icon categories, the icon next to each category doesn't move with the category name.

1: [https://demos.creative-tim.com/material- dashboard/examples/i...](https://demos.creative-tim.com/material- dashboard/examples/icons.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Has anyone worked with this or similar starter themes?

Are they easy to work with? Adjust to your own circumstances?

I ask because, while easy on the eyes, they strike me as somewhat complicated and you wonder if you'd be better off starting from scratch or something simpler.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why this works for a dashboard but not for anything else:

-design is inheriently unique. You want your brand and your site to standout from the rest. A one size fits all design methology actually goes against design. A design framework for the web is like saying all stores should look the same. Even restaurants dont look the same and they are in the same usecase. Design matters and cannont be churned out like a factory product (or good design at least). There are 2 80/20 rules here. You can get 80% of your good design by adhering to 20% of the standards, yet its the last 20% of good design that makes your site stand out and the first 80% is just basic usability.

-dashboards are purely functional and not user facing (at least the admin dashboards I hope this framework is talking about). This is a great place to use a standard framework and get all the reuse out of it so you can focus on making your user facing site unique

</comment><comment><USER32> what is the relationship of this to Material-UI? [https://material- ui.com/](https://material-ui.com/)

On the Material-UI website it shows CreativeTim (the creators of Material Dashboard) as being a major contributor, additionally there is a Material Dashboard "Premium Theme" for Material-UI that's created by CreativeTim. In the MaterialUI site's thumbnail comments it says created with MaterialUI, but on the MaterialDashboard site it does not say this.

Very confusing. did CreativeTim move away from MaterialUI to a bootstrap4 foundation? or something else?

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm using Firefox and the "Material Icons" icons are never displayed properly... Any idea why?

[https://i.imgur.com/Y06PbsL.png](https://i.imgur.com/Y06PbsL.png)

<comment><USER34> strange, it works on my Firefox, maybe you have disabled some custom font loading settings for privacy?

<comment><USER33> Even in safe mode, with all add-ons disabled, it still doesn't work... I should try a clean install maybe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting, the Vue version feels significantly faster then the React version(drops frames at the beginning of the animations just after a click) and the Angular version feels much more website-like than app-like

<comment><USER36> It looks like the Angular version doesn't have the fade in/out transitions, so it feels more like navigating conventional websites via links than just transitioning states in a javascript SPA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm confused. I'm on my phone so I haven't looked at the repo. But if this material done in bootstrap or is this a ui using material? Why is bootstrap mentioned...

<comment><USER38> Nothing stops you from implementing material design using Bootstrap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Great job implementing material design principles to Bootstrap. I would say I haven't seen it done this well except for I haven't seen it done at all.

</comment><comment><USER40> Does this actually conform to Material Design guidelines? The use of shadow/depth seems gratuitous, for example, in the selected item in the left menu.

</comment><comment><USER41> Everyone is bashing the admin panel. Which one is the best according to HN based on functionality and design?

<comment><USER42> A while ago someone posted [https://tabler.github.io/tabler/docs/index.html](https://tabler.github.io/tabler/docs/index.html) which I quite like. But in most of my work I've used UI kits like [https://ant.design/](https://ant.design/) and [http://element.eleme.io/#/en- US](http://element.eleme.io/#/en-US).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What's the easiest way to through a Firebase database behind this?

<comment><USER44> Get a grid widget from some actual widget toolkit? no seriously, that's why I don't really values these dashboards. Because let's be honest they don't come with actual useful stuff for someone who is developing a LOB that doesn't need to look like a mobile website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback man! Do you have any examples that we can check so we can add some better tables/data structures?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> i've been a creative tim customer for a while, great product, fair price. no complaints :)

not a fan of Material tho, victim of Google's success really.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is really ugly

<comment><USER47> Constructive feedback would be useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I really don't like light (300 weight) fonts on web. Most of them on most screens are illegible.</comment>


One in five genetics papers contains Excel errors (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-papers-contains-errors-thanks-microsoft-excel <comment><USER2> > The researchers, who published their analysis in Genome Biology, say the > issue can be fixed by formatting Excel columns as text and remaining > vigilant—or switching to Google Sheets, where gene names are stored exactly > as they're entered

I doubt that. I fight with Google Sheets every day because it thinks some of my text values are dates.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if the world couls benefit from a SQLite-backed spreadsheet program. All the data type BS would be basically solved.

<comment><USER4> Yes, imposing a schema on arbitrary spreadsheet data absolutely fixes typing errors like this.

It also produces a tool that has the semantics of a formal database and not a "spreadsheet", so none of the biologists in question are going to use it, being biologists and not programmers. We can't fix this with tools. Like the article said, proper scientific rigor is really the only solution.

In some fields (e.g. physics), computation is so fundamental to the research that practitioners are basically computer scientists. We aren't there yet in genetics, nor do we really want to be.

<comment><USER5> > We aren't there yet in genetics, nor do we really want to be.

Why not? Interdisciplinary, quantitative biology is the future of biology, and computers make this kind of work so much easier for the same reason that they make the work of physicists easier. More and more, it seems my colleagues without at least rudimentary programming skills are being left in the dust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This headline is quite unfair. If Excel didn't try to normalize data that was being input, how many more errors would there be in these and other datasets? Anyway, no automated tool is going to make the right choices in every case. The researchers and journals have a responsibility to take care to check and clean their own datasets. They blame this class of errors on Excel. But if they aren't catching such obvious issues (like a gene name field that has a date datatype and doesn't match any gene names) what about all the errors that aren't Excel's "fault" but are much more subtle?

<comment><USER7> Did the researchers license Excel for genetic work? This seems like a major error to treat your gene data as dates.

<comment><USER8> Excel doesn't treat gene data as dates, it treats text input in certain formats as dates unless you tell it not to by explicitly specifying the data type. Scientists have a whole constellation of tools to choose from--various spreadsheets, Jupyter notebooks, R programs, custom apps written by colleagues, etc.--and each one will have a certain feature set that will have to be used properly to avoid errors. Excel is not "buggy" in this respect.

I will say, though, that I have been repeatedly surprised when creating large, complex models for others in Excel at how easy it is to have a bug in your "code" that isn't obvious. In this respect, it's a bit like JavaScript's philosophy of "don't crash or sound an alarm, just make your best guess and keep going." For simple things, this works fine, but for anything complex, I really prefer more "bondage and discipline" from the platform, so my potential errors are pointed out rather than forgiven.

<comment><USER7> I didn't expect Excel to understand gene data. I expected that scientists would have used an appropriate tool for gene data.

>complex models for others in Excel

It's best not to do that except in cases of emergency, I think. If you are going to get complex, SQL may be a much better solution, or something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Spreadsheets are not databases... but everyone insists on using them as such, so this happens.

<comment><USER2> > Spreadsheets are not databases... but everyone insists on using them as > such, so this happens.

They are, by Wikipedia's definition: "A database is an organized collection of data, stored and accessed electronically".

<comment><USER10> So is a bunch of files in a folder then.

<comment><USER11> That's right. Many databases are literally just folders of files once you look under the hood - for example, here is PostgreSQL's layout:

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/storage-file- layo...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/storage-file-layout.html)

Note in particular the comment "Each table and index is stored in a separate file" which shows that the file layout is not trivial.

SQLite is another database, but it also is "just files in a folder:" the main difference is that there is a single file for all the tables and indexes but it uses several other files in the same directory as well:

[https://www.sqlite.org/tempfiles.html](https://www.sqlite.org/tempfiles.html)

Note that MS SQL Server uses much the same strategy as SQLite, although you have the option of splitting it across multiple OS files if you need more control over physical storage:

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational- databases/da...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational- databases/databases/database-files-and-filegroups?view=sql-server-2017)

But if SQLite is a database, how is .xlsx or .ini or .json fundamentally any different? I don't think there's anywhere you can draw a bright line that will include all well known databases but exclude things that "merely" file formats. If we draw the line at "transactions," for example, we'll find that MongoDB and ElasticSearch no longer count. If we draw the line at "user access control" then SQLite and redis are not databases.

Older RDBMSes like Oracle may eschew OS files in an attempt to gain more control but they can't escape the fact that they too are are fundamentally just "organized collection of data, stored and accessed electronically." And then there are in-memory databases - which do not use the disk at all, but are plainly still considered "databases" \- it's right there in the name! These varied examples show that the word "database" is used very broadly and any definition narrower than "A database is an organized collection of data, stored and accessed electronically" will certainly fail to include many instances of things which are commonly referred to as databases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of things contain errors because of Excel "helpfully" changing data. Speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time dealing with databases and spreadsheets provided by non-technical people to input.

<comment><USER13> Same here. I frequently had to demand data in tab delimited format. Comma and quote delimited didn't make the nut sometimes, when values included quotes. Sometimes | delimited was the only workable solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ideally they should use a formal RDBMS, but that cranks up the cost of the study. A data QA team also helps. The question is whether these measures are "worth it". Are the Excel errors significant enough? Are 10 studies with a conclusion flaw rate of 30% better or worse than 5 studies for the same cost with say a 10% conclusion flaw rate? A cost/benefit analysis on this can get tricky.

In almost any endeavor there is a quantity-versus-quality trade-off per given unit of resources. In the IT field, we often say: A: cost, B: speed of delivery, C: quality. You can only pick 2 of the 3, which are they? It's kind of the same principle, but with delivery time more explicit.

</comment><comment><USER15> People doesn't realize that what they are doing in Excel is no other than the programming. If the task requires programming, it should better be handled by a programming language which support version controlling and debugging.

<comment><USER16> True. But isn't it a bit too easy to just tell people to stop using Excel (which they won't do anyway) instead of giving them something to help them solve their problems _within_ the Excel/spreadsheet world?

<comment><USER17> Departments, journals and other institutions could crowdsource an Excel plugin to solve this. (Or at least to lint the spreadsheets.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone who way too many times have had to try to wrangle data sent as excel sheets into useful shape, this doesn't surprise me even a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER19> I use occasions like these to point the website operated by the fine people of the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group: [http://www.eusprig.org/](http://www.eusprig.org/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Does this affect the research itself, or only the presentation of it?

<comment><USER21> It _can_ affect the research - doing subsequent analysis on the resulting data; searching for all genes with the name "J12" resulting in no hits, because it's been renamed to "January 12th". This is especially true when sifting through thousands of hits, where searches become more powerful than just listing/sorting the top 10 hits.

There are apocrypha in the field about when such results actually impacted results and grants. Not often, but not unheard of either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Also, we should be using Entrez IDs or ncbi accession numbers instead of the horrible gene symbol system

</comment><comment><USER23> Corrected headline: "One in five genetics researchers are careless with their data"

See also "A poor workman blames his tools"

<comment><USER24> It's an irritatingly common requirement for supplementary data submitted to a journal to be in the form of an excel file, so I'd bet a number of those errors were caused by researchers just going through all the hoops required for publishing.

<comment><USER25> Chiming in with the first big name journal I thought of—Nature, which lists Excel as a more appropriate format for supplementary data than a table: [https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/supp- info](https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/supp-info)

It doesn't mean Excel is the right tool, but it does speak to a fundamental problem: it's a non-starter to try to change the entire scientific community in one move. We need to find ways to make the tools people use do a better job at doing what we want them to, rather than shouting that they're using the wrong tool...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [2016] One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Microsoft Excel

<comment><USER27> Thanks; we added the year above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks to the person whom ran their genetic data through their Excel autoformatter?

Is this what really passes as science around here?

<comment><USER28> Oh boy... I've got some bad news for you...

<comment><USER7> What is it?

<comment><USER22> That most geneticists aren't as good at excel as you think

<comment><USER7> I don't know how good most geneticists are at Excel, it just seems to be the wrong tool for the job.

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately, in academia the only correct answer to the question, 'what is the right tool for the job?' is the question, 'what does your adviser use?' Excel is not the optimal tool—I agree. But, it's the tool (many) geneticists use, and it's important to find a way to make it work /better/ for the purposes it is /being used for/, rather than taking up space complaining that it's /not the right tool/.

<comment><USER29> Unfortunately Microsoft Office is pretty much the software bench biologists use. Excel for data files, Word for papers, and Powerpoint for presentations. Bioinformaticans may use R for analysis and LaTeX for papers and presentations, but these are seen as needlessly "nerdy" by bench types.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stifling Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_04/b4164080555772.htm?chan=magazine+channel_business+views

<comment><USER2> One of the examples of innovation here was in banking -- I'll get back to this in a second.

The problem with innovating is that it's a very Darwinian process, more attempts to innovate fail than succeed -- the risk level is thus very high. An animal is more likely to ensure survival doing what it knows than trying something new. Similarly, an organization will generally tend to continue plodding along as-is instead of innovating -- unless there are sufficient external pressures to force it to want to try.

Apple is an interesting case study in this. They compete as a single company against an enormous competitor, Wintel PCs. In order to survive they've had to keep innovating...the status quo would not ensure survival any more than a gazelle continuing to stand around (status quo) while being attacked by a lion would survive. Instead it runs off and tries to make a go of it doing something different.

In banking, it's all different. The risk to innovate is _much_ higher, and the attacker is much slower. It's more like the gazelle is being attacked by a giant sloth. It can stand around longer, doing gazelle stuff, and when the sloth gets close enough to take a swipe, it simply walks a few steps away and goes back to doing gazelle stuff. If the gazelle were to just run off as soon as it spied the sloth, it would uselessly consume calories and eventually just die of a heart attack...thus, it mostly just stands around.

So innovation in banking is _not_ the same as innovation in computing. It has to be more conservative because it'll die of a heart attack. More importantly, the analogy is only complete when we consider that the gazelle is also driving _my_ brand new car. And if it peeled out every time it saw sloth it might end up wrapped around a telephone pole. Sure it might die if it screws up my car, it might survive, but most important to me is that the gazelle, in a fit of innovational panic, broke my new car.

In other words, I really really don't want a bank screwing around and innovating with _my_ money.</comment>


Ask HN: How to word a contactual agreement to protect IP? - <AUTHOR> I am building my own software product. I also take up part-time gigs involving architecture consulting / coding. In case of signing a contract with a customer to develop software part-time (say couple of days in a week) how do I protect the IP of my product which I have been developing ? Most of the contracts say a blanket statement of "All IP belongs to the Company (the firm I agree to do contract work).
Do I specifically say that all IP developed in course of Project X (for which I agree to work) shall belong to the Company (the company I do contract work). Would that be good enough to protect my IP ? <comment><USER2> Sounds like a perfect use-case for a lawyer.</comment>