Just Use Sublime Text - <AUTHOR> http://delvarworld.github.io/blog/2013/03/16/just-use-sublime-text/ <comment><USER2> I've been coding for a long time. I started on ijkm (Apple II) and editors that make vim look modern (when I was in college the congnoscenti tried to get the CS department to provide sed, and eventually implemented their own version and passed it around), and I've always regarded the vim/emacs crowd as amusingly deluded.

While there are some great tricks you can do with magic incantations in vim/emacs, you can do much more far more easily in notepad with a mouse/trackpad, and moving your hands away from the keyboard now and then is a Good Thing. Sure, i'll be downmodded by the command line junkies, and I'm sure there will be a million examples of awesomeness that you can only do with command lines and macros, and heck, maybe for some tiny number of people there's an advantage, but for the vast majority of the world's population sublime (or even just coders), textmate, bbedit, or whatever just crushes vim/emacs. Every vim/emacs junky who has tried to impress me with their awesomeness has done something either (a) I can do far easier in BBEdit, or (b) AppleScript (!) all while not having to memorize useless crap or edit config files.

But it's still worth learning to use one or more of these editors for when you need to.

<comment><USER3> > you can do much more far more easily in notepad with a mouse/trackpad

This is just completely bogus. If you think about how large a terminal window is, on average, you have a grid of (e.g.) 100x50. That means you're trying to click one out of 5,000 symbols (for example the start of a word), which are very tiny. If you then think about this in terms of Fitts's law ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law)), you can see how clicking one tiny character with a tiny mouse on a large screen isn't the easiest thing.

Compare that to using your keyboard. For instance, if you're looking for the word "pipe", typing this in vim:

      /pipe

Is obviously much faster. I don't see how anyone could believe that using a mouse is more efficient for such tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Refreshing to see this after all the Vim gospel programmers out there claiming it's benefits. I do have to say though, I've seen some videos of real Vim pros at work and it's -majestic- how swiftly they move through lines and duplicating lines, editing params, refactoring, etc - a thing of beauty akin to watching videos on /r/artisanvideos[0].

I'll stick to Sublime Text and Nano when I need some ssh terminal editing. :)

[0] - [http://www.reddit.com/r/artisanvideos](http://www.reddit.com/r/artisanvideos)

<comment><USER5> Our industry works this way and I don't understand why programmers who are always "using the right tool" call anything new that they disagree with "gospel" or "evangelizing."

SublimeText isn't that old. Somehow you found out about it, learned its keyboard shortcuts, found out what plugins to install to do your work, and made it your editor.

That's how I learned Vim. I'll admit that I have a bias, and that learning to use something else would be harder.

But here's the thing - the Vim knowledge I have can translate to Visual Studio with a plugin, to XCode with a plugin, and to Eclipse with a plugin. Netbeans, RubyMine, and Webstorm have a Vim plugin as well.

So does SublimeText.

SublimeText's knowledge transfers to the next paid version of SublimeText.

<comment> vertex-four The issue, really, is that vim is stuck in terminal land. It can't have easily navigable GUI menus, it can't really have overlays, it can't have a minimap, it can't have differently sized text, it can't have all sorts of things as a result of its dependence on the terminal. It doesn't even have autocomplete for its commands, at least out of the box, which would make it significantly more usable without disappearing into help files every time I want to do something I don't do often.

Add on to that its _awful_ configuration language and the fact that it's not really usable out of the box unlike Sublime Text, it's easy to see why some people consider it unmodern and, for them, inferior.

<comment><USER6> The issue, really, is that most Vimmers, including its core devs, don't care about all the gimmicky features you list.

<comment> vertex-four They're not gimmicky. I depend on them every day, either for learning or for regular use, just like vimmers depend on the weird ability to build up ridiculously complex commands. You may as well call user interfaces aside from the shell prompt a gimmick altogether.

<comment><USER6> _You_ depend on them everyday but most people don't and nobody cares about that because nobody is trying to force you to use Vim or even change your perspective about it. Some retarded bloggers, on the other hand, like to use their lack of patience/knowledge/willingness to learn as a proof that Vim sucks. Well… they don't really serve their goal, do they?

> vim is stuck in terminal land

For people who use a terminal it's not a problem at all.

> It can't have easily navigable GUI menus

I suppose MacVim and GVim don't count. Vimmers usually don't use menus, though.

> it can't really have overlays

And we don't want that gimmick.

> it can't have a minimap

And we don't want that one either.

> it can't have differently sized text

Same.

> It doesn't even have autocomplete for its commands, at least out of the box, > which would make it significantly more usable without disappearing into help > files every time I want to do something I don't do often.

It has tab-completion, though.

> Add on to that its awful configuration language

        set showmode

is awful? Oh yes, JSON… the answer to every damn problem on earth.

> and the fact that it's not really usable out of the box unlike Sublime Text, > it's easy to see why some people consider it unmodern and, for them, > inferior.

To be honest, if Sublime Text had been available for Mac OS X and Linux when I was looking for a cross-platform TextMate alternative I would have switched to it in a heartbeat. But I chose vim out of a very large pool of editors/IDEs and, frankly, using anything else is now a PITA.

I'm actually quite comfortable with Vim's perceived learning curve: it keeps the most superficial users out of our ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> >I'm actually quite comfortable with Vim's perceived learning curve: it keeps the most superficial users out of our ecosystem.

Literally the dumbest thing I've read on HackerNews. [https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says) material.

Why would you even care who uses what or belongs to your 'ecosystem'? What?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, in a few thousand words, the author manages to give multiple reasons not to use Vim and not a single one to use Sublime Text, except this:

> But Sublime has things Vim can never have. It's the new hotness and has a > more active community than Vim does.

"Things Vim can never have"? Details please. "It's the new hotness"? Yeah, because I choose my software based on its hip factor rather than its suitability to do what I need.

<comment><USER8> >It's the new hotness

These people are the reason we are going to spend the next twenty years cleaning up after these two-week fad languages/frameworks.

<comment><USER9> Sublime Text is 6 years old. While not comparable to the age of vim or emacs, it's not exactly a "2 week fad" piece of software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is what my Vim looks like.

[http://www.webhook.com/webhook- uploads/1396995440381_1396021...](http://www.webhook.com/webhook- uploads/1396995440381_1396021629005_vim.png)

I'm a designer, not a programmer. I can't code perl, vimscript, and can barely read python or javascript. I can use git repos, which really is all I need to know how to setup Vim properly. That and I guess the ability to read some instructions. I've done nothing more than edit a .vimrc file.

It took me a month to switch to Vim from Sublime. There are certainly parts of this article that are true... it is hard to setup initially, but it's not two years, and it's not ugly. For me, the monospace fonts means that EVERYTHING in my vim window is aligned correctly.

Believe it or not I use Vim partially because it allowed me to set up the prettiest editor possible. Sublime just LOOKS bloated to me at this point.

I'd say by month 3 I was doing things faster in Vim. It had NOTHING to do with movement around my screen (though I certainly love that as well). It had everything to do with tailoring my editor to do what I wanted it to do when I performed certain actions / key commands.

In the end I think Vim is a fingerprint. Mine is different than yours. That's pretty awesome and certain of us really want that.

What I will say is that the vimscripts website is garbage. That is absolutely true.

<comment><USER11> Whoa, I had no clue you could do all that. Did you follow any guides? I'd love to see my folder structure and be able to switch colors.

<comment><USER10> If you're someone that is coming from Sublime and are used to its features, I'd start with this consolidated plugin repo. It's unmaintained now, but was an excellent primer for me on how to set up the guts of my vim setup.

[https://github.com/fatih/subvim](https://github.com/fatih/subvim)

I ended up modifying it pretty drastically over the course of a month. And essentially I think that's why the author stopped maintaining it. Everyone will set up vim their own way. That's kind of the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't use Sublime Text because it's not free software and it doesn't run in a terminal. I like vim, but I'm not "stuck in my ways" and would gladly switch to a better editor that meets those two requirements.

<comment><USER13> [http://limetext.org/](http://limetext.org/) might be interesting to you at some point (and despite the suspicious landing page showing event from November to February and then silence, there's activity in the repository)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand the need to write an article which criticizes a matter of preference. EDIT: I am also astonished at the authors attack on those who operate the vim wiki. He suggests that those who operate the site have personality disorders and are robots and emotionless coders. Come on.

</comment><comment><USER15> > For the first 1-2 years of your Vim usage you will be much less efficient > than your current editor because of the odd yet lovable key bindings.

Seriously? It's about as hard as getting used to the keyboard shortcuts of Starcraft 2.

<comment><USER16> Haha, that's a very accurate analogy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this article drastically overstates the learning curve. Also,

> It's probably the most customizable editor ever

Emacs is way more customizable. Its help is also more accessible, its extension language awesome, its plugin ecosystem thriving.

"God willing Vim will one day have a non-Vimscript language we can use."

That day is today, and has been for years. VimScript is not the only way to extend vim. It supports scripting via Ruby, Python, and other languages, as long as you use a version built with this support.)

<comment><USER18> If by support you mean "you can generate vimscript to be executed using other languages as PHP" then yeah.

<comment><USER17> Not so! You write that other language (e.g. python) directly, then call it from vimscript.

[http://www.techrepublic.com/article/extending-vim-with- pytho...](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/extending-vim-with-python/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's the blog post I was born to read. Thank you for writing this.

The amount of stupid tedious pain you're supposed to go through with vi in order just to get a basic working editor is ridiculous. Like some kind of nerdy rite of passage. No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER20> >Vim: The Editor You Need To Read (At Least) Two Books On To Use Well

Is this some kind of joke? If this person is serious I think they're doing more harm to the image of Sublime than good.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you did want to use Sublime, I co-authored a post on Friday talking about how we get the most out of it: [http://www.onespacemedia.com/news/2014/jun/20/software- spotl...](http://www.onespacemedia.com/news/2014/jun/20/software-spotlight- sublime-text/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I would recommend Atom over Sublime Text if for no other reason than it being open source. But Atom also has the might of github behind it and a very fast growing community.

I love vim's editing commands: moving through a document, deleting, copying, etc. I think it's by far the best way to edit text. I hate everything else about vim. I find project wide search, finding and opening files quickly, shells and repls inside of vim, etc to all be subpar compared to vim's competition. I'm currently giving emacs with evil mode a try. Although not perfect, it does address most of my vim concerns after using vim for about 4 years.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think many of these comments are failing to mention one of my primary reasons for using vim... the power of being able to use the same editor in a GUI and a shell. It takes me at least a day to setup my workstation for development but if my laptop crashes I can always SSH into my workstation VPS and get work done. It's also nice to be able to edit server configuration files with the same editor that I write code in.

Vim isn't for everyone but if you're a power user that wants to master one text editor and use it for the rest of your life then Vim is that text editor.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just don't get it. The only difference between SublimeText and a GUI version of Vim is that the keyboard shorcuts in SublimeText don't follow the same command/movement patterns as Vim.

And unlike the author, I feel qualified to speak on this as I've been using Vim for 10 years and SublimeText since version 1.

ST is fancy. It's also pricey. I can save you $80 and give you a script that will set up Vim and all the cool plugins you'll need. In fact I've done just that for some of my students.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yikes. I've been trying to use vim without plugins for 15 years. I'm glad somebody told me it's unusable, otherwise I may not have noticed.

<comment><USER25> Same here, 15 years. If it wasn't for this article I would have not noticed as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article is very low on content yet appeals to those who really want an excuse not to learn something. "Oh, I don't need to feel bad about that time I gave up on learning Vim because of that random guy on the internet."

People end up becoming proficient in Vim because they enjoy using it, because it works for them. There are thousands of them.

</comment><comment><USER27> As a person who is hovering between a tmux+vim setup and rubymine, I find vim rather convoluted. I was hoping vim was going to be my goto editor, as I was looking for something which was multiplatform, and was a polygot platform ( the one thing I really do not like rubymine for).

Maybe it is just me but the idea of having to go from one mode to the other to use the standard navigation keys seems like a strange thing to do. Having to hit ESC (now I have CAPSLOCK remapped) also seems rather inefficient. On top of that having to find the right plugin to install also drove me nuts, then no intuitive short cut keys and normal vs visual mode again.

Now I did like vim because it was a console app, and with tmux I could run many terminal windows in the same session. I just do not know if vim is right for me or I haven't spent the 10,000 hours mastering it yet. I am sure I will get there with more practice.

:wq

</comment><comment><USER28> What about Emacs? I always found Vim UI (with the two modes) weird (but that's my own very subjective opinion).

It did not take me 2 years to take significant improvement in text editing. Maybe 2 weeks, if even that. Then you have plugins, but honestly I don't really use them all that much.

I mostly use basic keybindings, ssh access, and the "ace-mode" plugin that lets you jump around with ease.

The thing which makes me sad is that emacs is nowhere near the quality of IDEs in almost all languages (maybe the only exception is Emacs Lisp). So I have to suffer inferior editing capabilities to get all the nice stuff (jumping to definitions, refactoring).

</comment><comment><USER29> Don't use vim... unless you want to. One thing is certain... there's not one single editor out there that by itself can turn you into a better coder... and in the end that is the only thing that matters. Try them all use whatever you like. I'm a designer... I started using vim because I was doing a boring job and needed something to make it feel like a challenge. I still suck at most keyboard shortcuts but I like the challenge of finding a way to improve every now and then. Does using vim make more productive? Probably not. But neither does this comment :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Over the years I have extensively used (and customized) Vi(m), Emacs, UltraEdit32, back to Emacs, Sublime2. Every single one of those is a great editor and completely suitable for fast work. Major reason I am, mostly, in Sublime2 is that I have fullscreen mode with it (which I prefer) without resorting to hacks (Emacs on windows for example) or opening up editor in terminal - and it is all the same all over three OS' I use daily.

Editor wars are over. They are all useful all the same, small details matter these days... and looks.

</comment><comment><USER31> "For the first 1-2 years of your Vim usage you will be much less efficient than your current editor"

years????

This is obviously a typo.

If you used a real editor, it'd be quite easy to change "years" to "days."

<comment><USER32> I don't know, when it comes to navigating and manipulating a single document I can see vim's advantages, but having spend a few days recently trying to learn vim I didn't find any replacements for things like jumping to a file by name or recursive regex searching, things that I've come to rely on in Sublime. Feel free to point out if I missed them, but it seems based on my initial experience with vim that there's not really a concept of a "project" or a "codebase", just the collection of buffers you happen to have open at the moment.

<comment><USER33> Much of what you're looking for is provided by plugins (eg. command-T).

There's no question that vim requires a lot of messing around with initially to get it configured the way you want it. But that rapidly fades away and it's not such a big investment of time for something as important as an editor.

<comment><USER32> I think there are two kinds of programmers, those that love tweakability and configurability and spend lots of time customizing and perfecting their setup, and those that just want to use stock software with as few modifications as possible. I'm in the latter camp.

I'd like my skills in using a piece of software to be transferrable - I'd like to know that if I'm using vim or whatever on my personal machine or on another machine with no customization, that the experience is the same between both. For the most part, Sublime provides that.

However, I'm willing to give vim another shot, do you have links to the plugins that you mentioned?

<comment><USER33> I actually don't typically like endlessly tweaking my software either. I was prepared to do this with vim only because a text editor is such a key tool for a developer that it justifies the outlay of time. In addition, I wanted an editor that was available on any platform, and in a shell. It's true that vim under someone else's login will behave differently, but that's not a common case for me.

Command-T can be found here:

[https://github.com/wincent/Command-T](https://github.com/wincent/Command-T)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Or just use vim in Sublime Text through vintage mode or the vintageous plugin. I use mouse navigation plenty when browsing code, but a mouse is never going to be as effective at routine tasks like changing text inside a matching bracket, switching case, etc., none of which require dealing with vim plugins. Sure, all those things can be done through an IDE like ST without vi bindings, but only by memorizing even stranger meta key combinations that don't combine into a powerful grammar like vi.

<comment><USER35> Yeah I came in to say using vintage mode + VintageEx is fantastic and what I spend 80% of my time developing in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am a vim user and i don't understand how people always exaggerate on the learning curve of vim. Coming from a group of people that is probably the most arrogant and stuck-up group of professionals. "We are amongst the smartest people on earth", "Let's disrupt everything", "lifetime learning...", etc.

However, learning new keybindings and a bit of philiosophy seems to be too much.

Go on, downvote me. I dont't care, like bitch, i :q! you!

<comment><USER37> Programmers are programming now, today.

That's why they don't change keyboard layouts even though a different layout is probably more comfortable; it's why they don't change to VIM even though it's so powerful.

What they have is good enough for most of the time.

Perhaps universities should be teachin VIM and emacs?

It's not like the days when secretaries would be taught WordPerfect at colleges and thus WP could get away with a blank blue screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I considered switching to sublime from vim just for sane line wrapping. If you have indents, vim forces you to hard wrap or else end up with an unreadable soup. Sublime, on the other hand, makes the sane choice of preserving indentation level when a line is wrapped. Sublime's setting makes editing large HTML files in a variable width window much more pleasant...

</comment><comment><USER39> but it's non-free software.

you should also consider trying emacs.

</comment><comment><USER40> _> Vim: The Editor You Need To Read (At Least) Two Books On To Use Well_

No. You need to start using it for 2 weeks and then you can no longer look back on any other editor. You don't need to read two books. Stopped reading the article right there.

<comment><USER11> I hear ya. I'm currently giving vim a after using Sublime since learning how to code. I'm at the point where I pretty much prefer vim for backend stuff, but I sometimes like Sublime when I'm working on the frontend, especially Angular. I have so many different files in different folders, and I'm just used to being able to get there quickly with Sublime.

<comment><USER40> You should try Vim Command-T plugin, kicks ass in terms of reaching files quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sometimes I love my job.

Sometimes I read posts like this and think I should get a job at a research station in Antarctica so I don't have to watch the collapse of civilization when one of these people convinces banks to switch to Go and hype.js.

</comment><comment><USER41> > You're going to be useless in the technology world if you can't edit a file > remotely, which will you will be in a terminal for, and which you will be > using Vim for.

Whenever I _really_ need to edit a file remotely, there is nano.

</comment><comment><USER42> I started learning vim a few weeks ago and had the very same experiences as the author. However, I am currently use the "Vintage" Package in Sublime, to get the nice things from both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER43> I really want to like sublime but the rules around its extensibility are too rigid: you can't change the UI.

As a Vim user I feel like we are all just waiting for either Atom to become fast or for NeoVim mature.

</comment><comment><USER44> "Everyone talks about the steep learning curve but no one talks about what happens once you finally get hjkl in your brain for movement. The answer is months of frustration, followed by finally having a usable editor, followed by knowing some cool tricks that you use in 1% of your daily workflow."

I've seen a lot of people saying this. I've met people who actually experienced this. And I can't listen to it anymore - so I've decided to write a book about how I learned Vim quickly, and how everyone can do this as well[0]. People just don't learn Vim the right way.

There's no need for months of frustration!

When I was starting with Vim, my friends were telling me something like "Just give it a few weeks, and you'll never want to switch back.". However, in every previous attempt to become good at Vim, I would give up after couple of days. Not because I'm someone who give up easily, but because I had lots of work to do.

And with every attempt of switching to Vim, I would spend most of my time on fighting with my new editor and not on the actual work.

The thing is, I didn't have to put so much effort when I first tried Sublime, or when I tried to switch to Textmate. They were downright pleasant.

What my friends were telling me (btw, advanced Vim users), was something like:

\- "Turn off the arrow keys, it's not the Vim way..." \- "Force yourself to use keyboard all the time, don't use mouse at all!" \- "You have to learn x commands, and y things, so you could do z stuff..."

Then I realized - that was wrong! So, in my last (and the succesful one) attempt to switch to Vim (and finally learn how to be productive with it), I decided to don't listen to my "Vim masters" friends. I just decided that in the first couple of days, I'll try to use Vim as any other editor. Just like simple Notepad. No commands, no mappings, no plugins, etc. Just editing text. And that's how it all started.

With using some learning techniques, I've managed to get good at Vim really fast.

For example, if you can't get used to, or you're not productive with h j k l keys for movement, just don't use them. I don't use them. I use arrow keys all the time. Vim "masters" will probably judge me because of this - cause it's not the "Vim way". So what? I don't care. Arrow keys work for me the best, and I'm happy with it.

[0] - I'm in the process of writing a book - Mastering Vim Quickly (from WTF to OMG in no time) link: [http://www.jovicailic.org/mastering-vim- quickly/](http://www.jovicailic.org/mastering-vim-quickly/)

<comment><USER45> If you don't mind me asking—where are you from?

<comment><USER44> We're from the same country my friend ;)

<comment><USER45> Nice to see that! Your upcoming book seems promising. I'll make sure I keep an eye on it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> there is still emacs out there and getting some fresh air recently.

</comment><comment><USER47> > We will never have multiple cursors

[https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple- cursors](https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors)

</comment><comment><USER48> >:set ft=html and then gg=G. Let me know what you get. In all seriousness, never, ever tell me what you get.

Well, TIL I can easily indent html so there's that.

(thank you)

</comment><comment><USER49> I sort of, but very reluctantly, agree. I would add that modern VIm package systems like SPF13 make it much easier and more accessible, I'd suggest the author check that out instead of continuing to maintain that 700 like vimrc file. That having been said, I still end up fixing a lot of bugs that crop up even with my SPF13 setup (the bright side is I can now contribute those fixes back to a project so others don't need to suffer).

However in the end VIm and VIm style modal editing has been, at least in my opinion, a big improvement in my productivity and flow when coding. It's so big that I can't actually bring myself to switch back to something like RubyMine which is arguably a true IDE for what I work on most (Ruby on Rails).

I'm still a bit confused at peoples love of Sublime specifically. Sublime isn't an IDE, so to be quite honest I'm surprised people choose it over the tools from Jetbrains such as Webstorm, Rubymine and IntelliJ. Its benefit over an IDE, or over VIm, is perhaps just that it is fairly simple. It's downside is that it really isn't very powerful and its VIm mode is awkward and clunky.

The sad thing to me is that there are really just a couple of VIm features that make me stick around.

1\. Split management that is easy to work with.

I use this all the time. I often need to be able to look at multiple files that are part of the same context I'm working in (view, controller, service, etc.). Tab switching is not effective for this in the least. Every other tool that can do split panes does this poorly. With VIm I can just Ctrl-P<Fuzzy Search>Ctrl-X/V and it's opened horizontally or vertically relative to the current pane.

2\. VIm style text navigation and manipulation.

As true as it is that it's not that hard to just click where you want, I completely disagree with the authors assertion that it's just as effective as keyboard based text navigation and manipulation. Perhaps it's just a matter of flow, but being able to select text in multiple ways, manipulate it and repeat that is amazing. For an example of just how powerful this is in certain cases look at the VImcast on the "gn".

[http://vimcasts.org/episodes/operating-on-search-matches- usi...](http://vimcasts.org/episodes/operating-on-search-matches-using-gn/)

I use that one all the time since learning about it a few weeks ago.

The bottom line for me, is that until editors learn the lessons VIm has already taught us, it's going to be extremely hard for anyone who has learned to use VIm even half decently to stop using it. Perhaps that's the biggest reason to not recommend VIm to new people. They'll never forgive you for it. It's a trap.

<comment><USER50> I agree that the author seems to be missing some of the beauty of keyboard commands and navigation. Sure Sublime does some things vim can't, but you can do things in vim you certainly can't with mouse-only input. For instance, I use visual block mode dozens of times a day, which allows identical edits to be made to multiple lines simultaneously.

I do complex search and replace very frequently, and almost always on a particular group of lines. In vim that's as simple as typing `:{start},{end}s/{needle}/{replacement}/g<ENTER>`, but in a GUI I have to select the lines with the mouse, likely reselect since I didn't get exactly the right selection the first time, then find the control key to hit <Ctrl-F> before I can even start thinking about my search terms.

I think it comes down to giving you the power to make the edits you will be doing frequently. I find it interesting the author spoke so much about autocomplete and autotab. It's probably just a matter of preference but I've always found that those features get in the way of effective coding. Every time I'm forced to use Visual Studio for something I feel like it's an unloved little kid that keeps piping up: "hey, hey I know what you want to do" but it's always sorely mistaken.

Let me replace on lines 6 through 437 of some text dump the leading curly brace with a function call to turn it into a code file and you'll win my heart, because those are the sorts of transformations that I want my editor helping with.

<comment><USER49> Actually, Sublimes multi-edit feature is actually pretty good and it's something I'd love to see VIm able to do. What I want to edit isn't always organized into neat vertically aligned blocks.

On the subject of VIm's search and replace, the VIm style regex does drive me nuts, I constantly have to remind myself what needs escaping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Why not LightTable? -> [http://www.lighttable.com/](http://www.lighttable.com/)

<comment><USER52> LightTable looks like it might be fantastic but seems to be in desperate need of better documentation. Or maybe just better organization of the documentation. (My initial impression is that the UI has the same problem as the documentation -- very poor discoverability.)

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord As a person who doesn't even use elvis/vim as their main editor, I have to say: the reason people have such an aversion to it is because of all the years they have been conditioned to accept mediocre user interfaces and computing in general.

It's a culture shock, overall. It's like moving from Windows 8.1 to Slackware 14.1. Even if the latter is far more transparent, well designed and productive, it's just so different. You're so used to an inferior paradigm that you react with disgust and/or fear at the sight of something better, _and_ that has been around for even longer. We've figured out most of this stuff ages ago, really.

I've seen people flip their shit when I've installed something as dead simple as Linux Mint on one of their family members' computers, considering they only use the machine for web browsing and Skype, which is so much more ergonomic with a *buntu derivative. Then they go on and reinstall Windows, as if trying to rebuild their nest that was so violently disturbed.

Conditioning is some powerful stuff. We'd rather stick with goofy point-and- click interfaces that slow us down, rather than invest some time to learn a keystroke-based interface that will make us faster, more productive, and dare I say it... increase our admiration of computing?

It's why people want their eyecandy, which most of the time is little more than background noise, than use a tiling WM or something light in general. Dijkstra sardonically quipped that COBOL cripples the mind and BASIC leads to irrecoverable mental mutilation. This goes for most of our modern, consumer- oriented computing, as well.

I'm not directing this to the author, specifically. It looks like they tried, at least. We're content with inferiority. Try getting a person who's used to 20 years of QWERTY to switch to DVORAK. It may not be that difficult at all, but it requires stepping out of our comfort zone.

And in our staying with the subpar, we've erected a huge wall of inefficient software in the process. It may be invisible to the end user, but to programmers it's all too obvious, if not often admitted.

People need a consumer technology detox, I think. Personally, if you want a more standard editor/mini-IDE that conforms to the average person's expectations, go for Geany. At least it isn't proprietary.

<comment><USER53> > _It 's a culture shock, overall. It's like moving from Windows 8.1 to > Slackware 14.1. Even if the latter is far more transparent, well designed > and productive, it's just so different. _

Nope, Slackware 14.1 is not "more well designed and productive". I want a graphics editor with full CMYK proofing support and Smart Objects. Do you have one for your Slackware? Didn't think so. How about a DAW I can collaborate with any major studio, like say Pro Tools? Didn't think so again.

Of course those are MY use cases. But you can't generally talk about it "being more productive" (in general) unless you specify for what uses. For mine, it's very near useless. And that's the case for millions of people too, even if their needs doesn't include Pro Tools or Photoshop. They invariably include other stuff that Gnome/KDE don't give them. And the myth that "most people just use web and email" is also BS. Normal, everyday people, do tons of stuff Linux doesn't cater to well, from wanting to edit their child's birthday video on the PC, to wanting their laptop to sleep when they close the lid.

Slackware 14.1 might be a better for a server OS (but then again Centos and even Ubuntu LTS have eaten its lunch), but not for what lots of people use Windows for.

> _Dijkstra sardonically quipped that COBOL cripples the mind and BASIC leads > to irrecoverable mental mutilation._

Yeah, but then again he was all theory, and could snark about everything. Most of it is to be taken with huge grains of salt. Not to mention that the snide against those languages is ironic, coming from the guy who gave us ALGOL.

> _I 'm not directing this to the author, specifically. It looks like they > tried, at least. We're content with inferiority. Try getting a person who's > used to 20 years of QWERTY to switch to DVORAK. It may not be that difficult > at all, but it requires stepping out of our comfort zone._

And what for? To adopt a ho-hum keyboard system, that's presented as a magic bullet for gullible people. DVORAK, the 80+ year old late-night-tv-special of keyboard systems.

[http://www.economist.com/node/196071](http://www.economist.com/node/196071)

[https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html](https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> i learned as much as I needed to be productive in vim in one semester during one class in college. Been steadily picking things up since then. Not a high barrier to entry and definitely more efficient than sublime etc.

A little bit of effort never hurt anyone.

</comment><comment><USER55> No. I'll keep using vim, because I'm efficient in it and I enjoy using it.

<comment><USER56> To be fair, the article explicitly states the following:

> TL;DR I cannot in good faith recommend Vim to a new developer, even though I > use it.

Since you're already familiar with vim, you clearly aren't in the target audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Read 2 books to use Vim? Seriously, w.t.f? Just give it 2 weeks using Vim.

</comment><comment><USER58> Just use real vi without a million plugins.

<comment><USER7> I've been wondering lately if the "modern" Vim setup is closer in spirit to vi from which it descends or to Emacs. Seeing as how people are trying to enable all sorts of non-editor tasks inside Vim, I'm inclined to say the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author refused to learn how to use his editor so he recommends others to avoid it.

Well done.</comment>


Nasa to fund novel diffractive solar sails - <AUTHOR> https://www.rit.edu/news/nasa-announces-funding-rit-professor-develop-novel-diffractive-solar-sails <comment><USER2> I'm looking forward to The Planetary Society launching its Light Sail II spacecraft on the next Falcon Heavy.

Btw, is there any technology for huge, super lightweight solar panels that could also fullfil the role of a solar sail?

</comment><comment><USER3> A few more details here from a couple links deeper: [https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2019_Phase_...](https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2019_Phase_I_Phase_II/Diffractive_Lightsails/)

From some other (low quality) sources, it looks like the force of a diffractive sail comes from bending the light sideways, but I'm still not sure how passing light through the sail can be _more_ efficient than reflecting it from a moment conservation standpoint.

<comment><USER4> From the link you provide: it's about steering. They say that if you can spew "exhaust" reflecting / refracting off the sail at 90 degrees to the incident light, you can steer without reducing your sail area.</comment></comment>


A review of several JavaScript grid editors : I want to be Excel - <AUTHOR> http://roberto.open-lab.com/2010/01/18/javascript-grid-editor-i-want-to-be-excel/

<comment><USER2> Great post! did you forget YUI?

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to limit my research to jquery components only. The list at the end of the post if far from completeness. But yes, I forgot it :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> some got one for python?

<comment><USER4> I had an idea I had seen at least one a while ago, so I hit search for "python modules spreadsheet", and fished out this (cross-platform, GTK+) at the top:

<http://pyspread.sourceforge.net/>

The rest of the results also include some xls/odf read/write modules. Coupling with Google docs/whatever may be another idea.

<comment><USER3> Really looking for a nice little web editor for editing a .csv config

But thx anyway :)

<comment><USER5>
        import csv
        file = csv.reader(open('config.csv'), delimiter='\t')
        for row in file:
            for cell in row:
                # do something with the cell

<comment><USER3> im more of a

csv.DictReader(open('config.csv'), delimiter=",")

guy myself, but thx anyway :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Former Apple Engineer Gives Behind-the-Scenes Look at iPhone Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/04/former-apple-engineer-gives-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-original-iphone-introduction/?src=twitter <comment><USER2> Blog spam: already discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495835)</comment>


Navy: Self-guided unmanned patrol boats make debut - <AUTHOR> http://www.myfoxal.com/story/26706962/navy-self-guided-unmanned-patrol-boats-make-debut

<comment><USER2> Photo here:

[http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/navy-guided-unmanned- patr...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/navy-guided-unmanned-patrol-boats- make-debut-25972159)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm unconvinced. More patrol boats are clearly a good thing for protecting a high-value ship. But not having a sailor on board seems pointless. It makes the patrol boat More unreliable (if communications are lost the boat shuts down). It doesn't save manpower because sailors monitor the boat 1-on-1 to prevent tragedies. Why not just have that sailor on the boat? And the boat shown doesn't seem any cheaper - its a regular patrol boat with robotic systems installed - still has manual controls, seats, cargo space as if it were to be manned. And what can a patrol boat do? It can't board another boat, take over its controls and redirect it. It can only choose to shoot it (with onboard remote-control gun) or not. Very much limited in mission capability.

Whereas a very-much-cheaper drone boat of 1-2 meters in size would be harder for other combatants to detect, could travel in novel ways (submersible? High- speed hydrofoil?), and could act as a torpedo if needed to disable another combatant. Kind of like quad-coptors vs full-sized helicopters.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with you that looking into alternative form factors would be a good idea. A great one in fact!

What's the #1 reason to not just put a sailor on the patrol boat? Loss of life.

While this is not the ideal solution to the problem, it's cheap ($2000 to retrofit existing boats? That's cheap!) It's similar enough to the existing technology that it's not going to be looked at as some new untested revolutionary thing, it's going to be looked at as an incremental upgrade to the patrol boat. It saves lives and it opens up the gates for more revolutionary designs in the future, as people get more comfortable with the idea.

Seems like wins all over to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The arc of development is clear. This is only a small beginning step.

Existing boats are an easy low risk low cost platform to develop on. Expect air, submersible, and larger surface units with the same capabilities within time.

Thought no sexy, the same sort of technology will be used in logistics. Some argue the truck and the liberty ship won world war II. Automated over the beach resupply without paying for air assets would be a large cost savings and allow resupply of larger and heavier inventory items like bulk fuel, food, aircraft parts and tanks.

<comment><USER6> > __ _Automated over the beach resupply without paying for air assets would be > a large cost savings and allow resupply of larger and heavier inventory > items like bulk fuel, food, aircraft parts and tanks._ __

Awesome, now al we need is a world war and we can try out our new, efficient, automated toys!!

Its a great time to be alive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "And if communication between the unmanned boats and the sailor overseeing them were ever broken, the boat would automatically shut down." Isn't this a major vulnerability ?

<comment><USER3> Agreed. These boats are a demo of a capability; maybe not useful for much but civilian patrol.

Consider: I could put a jammer on my boat, and go out shutting down, harvesting Navy robot boats and selling them for scrap!

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that would go fine with first two boats, and then you'd have to explain yourself to a SEAL team that would come on the third one. Or, if they were especially lazy, you'd quickly learn about Anti-Radiation Missiles.</comment></comment></comment>


Kitaoka's Popple Illusions – Gabor patches to reverse engineer our visual system - <AUTHOR> http://stephenbalaban.com/akiyoshi-kitaoka-popple-illusion-gabor-patches/ <comment><AUTHOR> His illusions here were based on a 2000 paper titled "A new illusion demonstrates long-range processing" ( [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269890...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698900001279)) That paper showed that there is a global mechanism for orientation averaging. I've always been fascinated with the idea of using illusions to reverse engineer our visual system and this is a really good example of that. The paper is a really accessible read and the rest of Kitaoka's website is a treat to browse:

[http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/](http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/)</comment>


An Astute Observer's Report from the UK Parliament – 3 September - <AUTHOR> https://politics.co.uk/blogs/2019/09/03/historic-rebel-victory-parliament-moves-to-stop-no-deal <comment><AUTHOR> This gentleman suffered for the entire day in order to bring us this excellent summary from today's extraordinary session of Parliament. He is on Twitter at [https://twitter.com/IanDunt](https://twitter.com/IanDunt)

His most telling comment: "I never fucked up harder than when I forgot to buy some of those little G&T cans when I came into work today."</comment>


Show HN: Music recommendations in less than 5 taps, with Spotify Premium - <AUTHOR> https://www.noiseblend.com <comment><AUTHOR> This is a project me and a friend have been working on for the past 8 months, trying to create an easier way to find good songs in the music immensity that Spotify provides.

I am Alin Panaitiu, a fullstack developer (mostly Python, Rust and React), and I quit my job 8 months ago just to try and build something myself. So with the help of Matei Sandu, I started working on Noiseblend, a web app that uses the Spotify API to give you recommendations with the least effort possible. Of course, I also wanted to make some money off of it, but it seems like there are quite a few impediments and restrictions when you're working with big companies like Spotify.

I admit that while working on this (and a few other side-projects) I think I learned more than I could have learned in 3-4 years of working for someone else. But still, I wish I could have known that there's no easy way to commercialize an idea that uses Spotify's API.

So Noiseblend is free for all now, I hope it helps you find a few good songs! ^_^

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome work. It's so handy for me just now, because my Spotify account got poluted by someone listening to other music on my phone recently.

Does the playing data get back into Spotify? Including the dislikes? Dislikes are not the easiest thing to find/use in the Spotify apps.

Too bad about the startup side. If you have/write a story, I'd like to read it. Spotify and music recommendations are so interesting. It seems like it should be easy enough to recommend edgy things I like, but that doesn't seem to be the case in practice and I wish I knew why that is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe, I have the exact same problem. My wife is listening to music on my account from time to time and because of that Discover Weekly isn't that awesome anymore.

About the data, everything you are playing goes through Spotify. I have not implemented any playback feature, just a way to control your Spotify devices so that you don't have to go back an forth with the Spotify app. So of course, they have this data.

I can't say the same about the dislikes. They are just a way for Noiseblend to filter your recommendations. I wish it would work the same on Spotify as lately I've been given some Russian artists to listen to and I don't understand a word from that language. (But it still sounded pretty good) I think that because of the way Spotify's algorithms work, a dislike button would be quite hard to implement without breaking the ML stuff.

If you like edgy things, make sure to check out the Genres page in Discover. Almost every genre there has a "Not for the masses" popularity option which contains the edge of that genre, things that people haven't gotten to hear yet. Maybe that's for you ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I'll probably write a piece about all I've learned and been through in the past 8 months, but let me fix the bugs first :)

<comment><USER2> That's too bad about the dislikes/ML thing. I find it to be an issue for me on most recommendation systems.

Look forward to any improvements and reading a write-up. Awesome work already, by far. Kudos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there somewhere that describes what this.. does?

I love music discovery and am very excited to try this, but I'm very unclear if I should be excited.. what does it do different than Spotify, and how does it achieve this?

Ie, I can create a new playlist, add artists, and Spotify will give me new artists it thinks I should add. I can listen to a radio for any song, artist, album, etc. There's quite a few ways to discover music on Spotify, so I'm feeling the need for more information on how this product differs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, everything this does is enabled by the Spotify API. So there's nothing that I'm doing that Spotify can't do already. The point of this app is to make more easily accessible, some of the lesser known features that Spotify has:

• Tuneable Attributes (such as Danceability and Acousticness) which you can adjust to get songs meeting those values • Recommendations by multiple artists (which is something like a Radio, but for more than 1 artist) • Algorithmically created playlists such as \- "The Pulse of [genre]"\- containing music that is becoming popular but you probably never heard it before \- "Intro to [genre]" \- an attempted algorithmical introduction to that specific genre • Blends, which are one-time playlists created on the fly based on your listening history and a specific occasion like Workout, Reading, Commute, etc.

For example, did you know that Spotify has all these genres in its database: [http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html](http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html) Well, after I found out, I was thinking how could I make it easier for people to find their favorite genres and through that, maybe some favorite songs. So one of the features that Noiseblend has is discovery by genre, which collects your most listened genres and lays them in 3-card view so you can easily find one that you would really like to listen to.

By the way, Noiseblend is completely free, just check it out ^_^

<comment><USER3> Gotcha, appreciate the info!

Yea I remember a while back I was looking into the Spotify API and saw those attributes you talked of. Pretty nifty!

Appreciate your work! Sad that you're having trouble monetizing off of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        Permission is granted to temporarily download one copy of
        the materials (information or software) on Noiseblend's
        website for personal, non-commercial transitory viewing
        only.

Does that mean I can only open it in one tab? What if I have it open on my desktop - am I then prohibited to open it on my phone?

And how is transient defined? How long can I keep it open in a tab while I browse other websites?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I may have to delete that. I used a TOS generator, but no matter how careful I was, it still introduced legalese that doesn't fit my needs.

You can use Noiseblend as much as you want on as many devices as you can handle.

<comment><USER4> Ok, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The design of the site is beautiful but it doesn't feel as smooth. And it'll be good to consider those who use spotify web player.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

I noticed that the app feels laggier on higher resolutions, probably because of the CSS animations. I'll probably have to make a compromise between performance and good looking animations.

About the web player, can you please share some ideas about what I can do to improve the workflow? There is already a way to open a saved playlist in the web player: Click `Open` in the upper left on the playlist page and you should see a `Web` button.

And as far as I know, the web player creates a Spotify Connect device, so if you have a tab open with the web player, you should see the device when you click the big play button on the bottom of the playlist page.

If you're talking about the blends, I admit I didn't think about that. But it shouldn't be hard to implement.

<comment><USER5> Think lag really turns user off these days so I would advice making some adjustments there and forgo some animations. Might want to have a 'Back' button as well coz it'll be more intuitive instead of clicking your brand's logo. Profile page also doesn't have a homepage button

I was using noiseblend on iOS via chrome browser but it seems to crash too frequently. Might want to check on that.

Oh yes, my oversight. It did open up the webplayer.</comment></comment></comment>


What's your opinion about Google Data Studio? - <AUTHOR> I've been playing with Google Data Studio and I like it so far. Easy to create good-looking reports, especially from Google data sources. For non-Google connectors I'd have to import data to Google Sheets.
Since it's now free, I'm thinking about switching to Data Studio, when it's more complete of course. What are your opinions about the tool and how it will be developed in the future? Of course I wouldn't want to switch to something new and then hear that it will be closed down soon (jk)
Last thing, I'm looking for more reporting templates, if you guys know any source. I found some from Lunametrics (http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2016/10/25/free-ecommerce-data-studio-template/), a Facebook Ads one (https://supermetrics.com/blog/facebook-ads-data-studio/) and a Paid Channel Mix (https://supermetrics.com/blog/paid-channel-mix/) from Supermetrics <comment><USER2> We use re:dash - Google Data Studio looks interesting but we can't use it yet because it doesn't support encryption when connecting to PostgreSQL.</comment>


UK Open Source Awards – Nominations Open - <AUTHOR> https://opensourceawards.org/ <comment><USER2> This is a one day free event in Edinburgh in June. Please send in nominations of interesting people and organisations doing amazing stuff with free software in the UK. And come along to the event on the day!</comment>


The PyCon blog: Welcome to QNX - <AUTHOR> http://pycon.blogspot.com/2011/03/welcome-to-qnx-and-thanks-to-all-our.html <comment><USER2> I hope PyPy pings all those sponsors. As a wise lady once said, 'connections never hurt'.</comment>


If our particles have no identity, how can we? (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/quantum-mechanics-is-putting-human-identity-on-trial <comment><USER2> I would say that this is not a good article. It touches several topics and mixes them up without really being good or clear on any of them. You could write an article about the concept of identity as it applies to humans, you could write an article about this imposter case, you could write an article about identity as it applies to electrons or more generally fermions and bosons, which don't both behave the same under exchange of two particles, you could write yet another article trying to shed some light onto the wave and particle nature of fundamental particles. There would be enough things to discuss for any of these topics to get an long article out of it, heck, you could write entire books on them. But this article just grabs random pieces from all of the topics and leaves you not any wiser on any of them.

<comment><USER3> It fits a trend in modern philosophical publishing. Part of the reason I'm so quick to stop (or not even start reading) articles like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The answer is: we are not _things_ , we are _states_ (and so are particles).

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of- ontology.ht...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of- ontology.html)

<comment><USER3> This was a much better read on the subject than the original article, IMHO.

These quotes in particular stood out to me.

> Arrangement is _everything_.

> You are a computational process, reified as an arrangement of electrical > impulses in a human brain.

I honestly like how the author makes a stab at God, even if it's loaded.

<comment><USER5> The author is the commenter 'lisper

<comment><USER3> Interesting because I don't love the distinction between states and things, but that'll happen when you try to summarize this topic into a sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you attempt to identify a canonical "you" which ignores the basic fact that your particles are entangled with virtually every other particle in the visible universe, you're starting with an assumption wrong enough that _of course_ you're eventually going to run into some absurdities.

If you create a universe which is indistinguishable from our own, even in a quantum sense (i.e. you recreate the quantum state that our universe is in), then you'll necessarily have created a universe with an indistinguishable copy of yourself in it. But in fact that's the only way to create an indistinguishable copy of yourself in the first place! You can't reduce the problem any further than this.

In other words, this entire "paradox" boils down to a vague understanding of the word "identity".

<comment><USER3> Or a very good understanding of where it fits in today's (or 2015's) linguistics. It's technical, and vague, perfect for a piece like this, where the author can say a lot of pretty "profound" stuff without actually saying anything at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When you shake hands with someone, you're connected to them. Who is who? Spooky.

I think there's a cottage industry of finding confusing thinkpieces in nothing.

<comment><USER3> That's kinda the root of the problem with this article. It's not about the physical particles, it's about our sense of self (which yes, is probably an artifact of some crazy particle interactions). The distinction is that your self doesn't magically get redefined just because you touch something else, or because you shed some skin, or anything like that.

<comment><USER8> > your self doesn't magically get redefined just because you touch something > else

Phineas Gage (and everyone else with brain damage) is a counterexample in one sense. The famous statement "Gage was no longer Gage" is about as explicit as possible in support of the idea that touching something can redefine your self.

At a more fundamental level, there are chemicals which can penetrate your skin and bind to (therefore changing) your DNA.

Before saying "your self doesn't get redefined by X", you need a robust definition of what your "self" is.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, and good luck with that definition. It's going to depend on the physical space and only be related over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The buddhists went through this thought process and have decided that nothing has inherent identity. IT's called "emptiness" or "Shunyata". In general it seems a more philosophical question than scientific.

<comment><USER4> IMHO the Buddhists threw out the baby with the bathwater. Just because nothing has _inherent_ identity (which is true) that does not mean that it makes no sense to assign an identity to the unique collection of memories and experiences that I call "me".

<comment><USER10> > _that does not mean that it makes no sense to assign an identity to the > unique collection of memories and experiences that I call "me"._

Actually, that is not disputed - at least in some buddhist schools. Identity as an epiphenomenon is quite sensible, and they understood this. Well, some of them at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In quantum field theory on curved spacetime backgrounds, the notion of a particle is observer-dependent. Particles are departures from the lowest energy state, but which state has lowest energy can depend on an observer's acceleration. Consequently, different observers can disagree about whether and which particles are present in a physical system. (This phenomenon is the theoretical basis for the Hawking Effect.)

If your particles aren't real, are you real?

It's silly to base a discussion of human identity on field quanta.

<comment><USER12> It is silly - not because the question is silly, but because the article ignorantly misses the fact that there's an established and much-discussed philosophical background to these questions, and the author seems completely unaware of it.

It would be hilarious if David Chalmers is right, and science is looking through the telescope the wrong way.

Instead of there being no subjectivity, perhaps there is _only_ subjectivity - different points of view experiencing different elements of reality, loosely constrained by probabilities, limited only by relative complexity of perception, freedom of action, and processing power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > And so when particles like our electron go unwatched, they become diffuse > and placeless.

I'm curious, how is this demonstrated?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

I have a couple questions.

In the example of two electrons and the two boxes: can we not just say that they are one in kind thought two in number? This fits with Aristotle's understanding of a hylomorphic composite. As the two electrons are really both an electron (one in kind), but their accidental property of place differ (two in number).

What is the definition of a `wave`? It seems to me weird to say a thing is a wave because I understand a wave to be a property of something. A motion through a medium. So I have trouble understanding the notion that a thing is wave as such.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nothing has identity, but it might be possible to write down an identity function that gives a set of things distinct identities. The more interesting question then becomes how those identity functions fail and under what circumstances.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, this means nothing to me. Not even trying to be mean, I just don't at all understand what you are saying.

<comment><USER15> A has no identity. B has no identity. C has no identity.

But perhaps {A, B, C} can have identity?

<comment><USER3> I guess my confusion is, how can anything have an identity if we just asserted that nothing does.

<comment><USER16> The same way that a pile of identical bricks can have no identity, but a home you build out of it could?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The most interesting point, if you read the article, which from the comments no one actually seems to have done; she finishes with the idea: "Our identity is a state, but if it's not a state of matter—not a state of individual physical objects, like quarks and electrons—then a state of what?"

The geek in me thinks of a program at rest on disk vs a running program.

<comment><USER3> But running programs have state too. I stopped reading this half way because the author really doesn't have anything to say here. But I can understand that it's a thought provoking piece.

<comment><USER17> Different states.. state of an electron on disc used by every execution of a program vs the very different state of a program after it's been running for some time vs any other invocation of that program.

edit: it's what makes debugging so much fun :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My favorite consequence of simple things having no identity is this. Every oxygen atom that you breathe is a superposition of having been many places a century ago, including in every lungful of breath that anyone anywhere was breathing. It isn't "x atoms were in so and so's lungs", EVERY atom both was and wasn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly stopped reading about half way through. It seems obvious to me that we are identified just as anything. And just as anything else, it may not be perfect. I'm sure if you could copy me perfectly (which you can't) then you also would not be able to identify the original from the copy. This is basically a tautology.

<comment><USER19> It's not just a tautology, it probably made Amanda Gefter a lot of money.

<comment><USER20> Nobody's making a lot of money writing articles for Nautilus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related: integers do not have identity [0] but objects that have reference semantics have identity.

[0]: [https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/60549](https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/60549)

</comment><comment><USER22> If something has a property it has identity. Our particles have properties that differ them from other particles. I think the real issue is that we haven't discovered all of the properties.</comment>


Unicorn Frappuchinos launch day after YC interview announcement - <AUTHOR> http://www.today.com/food/starbucks-unicorn-frappuccino-t110477 <comment><AUTHOR> Will it be a lucky 24 hours for your company AND your tummy?!

</comment><comment><USER2> YES!</comment>


Design: Take Shelter in a Human Habitrail - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/09/pl_shelters_safehouse/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> "They all have fiberglass shells, which are less prone to cracking than concrete and, lacking steel, won't show up on target-acquisition systems."

How well does it withstand impact compared to concrete or steel?</comment>


Leonard Guarente's Anti-Aging Pill (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/08/is-elysium-healths-basis-the-fountain-of-youth.html <comment><USER3> This paragraph summarizes the theory behind the pill.

> The theory behind Basis is in part an evolution of the theory behind > drinking red wine: One of its main ingredients, pterostilbene, is considered > a more powerful version of resveratrol, with a more convincing track record > in the lab. As for NR, by increasing NAD levels in our cells, it in turn > appears to reverse mitochondrial decay. In a 2013 scientific paper, Sinclair > announced that a single week of injections of an NAD precursor into elderly > mice had made their muscles look young again, though without restoring their > strength. Both compounds aim to activate sirtuins, and the hope is that > together they might amplify what each does individually.

</comment><comment><USER4> Fight Aging! is a long running blog on longevity science (now more than 10 years old) and their take is usually worth reading. Here is their take on Elysium Health: [https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2016/07/an- educational-a...](https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2016/07/an-educational- article-on-the-business-of-selling-nicotinamide-riboside/)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/04/25/sub...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/04/25/subtle- changes-can-be-yours-for-fifty-dollars-a-month)

I'll pass.

<comment><USER3> > anyone who starts talking about "detoxification" and "toxins" is likely to > be a quack. It's a buzzword, something that plays to peoples' mistaken ideas > about medicine and biochemistry, that there are all these toxins from the > environment that have to be flushed out somehow for you to be healthy.

Is this true? Waste products need to be transported out of the cells and their environment, right? And they can be toxic. Why is this a controversy?

<comment><USER6> The word "toxins" induces guilt by association because most who use it are quacks. However, there definitely are substances that are toxic and get stored e.g. in adipose tissue and only removed under specific circumstances. But we have to find new names for those substances and processes because of that guilt by association.

<comment><USER3> But there's a whole scientific field called "toxicology".

Anyway, I don't like the phrase "anyone who ... is likely to be ..." in the linked article. It's basically an ad hominem attack, and not very scientific in itself (unless you take it literally, but in that case the author should have been more explicit imho, to avoid confusion/insinuation).

<comment><USER7> Correct, and a toxicologist would be able to tell you which toxin specifically is being targeted by a treatment. A quack not so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussion on this article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345526)

</comment><comment><USER9> There is a greater fool at the end of many paths of research and development, the wallet or collection of wallets that indirectly bankrolls the work. Early for-profit investment occurs because investors believe they can sell their stake at a higher price down the line. Other reasons exist, such as the desire to do good in the world, but are entirely secondary. Most investors, and certainly the wealthier ones, have a fiduciary duty to turn away from world- saving in favor of making money. The market for early for-profit investment in turn indirectly steers research interests and the ability to raise funds from other sources: whatever is presently hot is much more likely to receive grants and philanthropic sponsorship. The state of the market at the end of the development process thus reaches back to influence every part of the long chain of research and development. The predicted inclinations of the greater fool are the tail that wags the dog.

The greater fool of interest here is the one indirectly funding the ongoing construction of a grand catalog of human metabolism, an exhaustive accounting of the fine details of how our cellular biochemistry operates and ages. This is understood in outline, but beneath that outline lies an enormous unexplored space of protein interactions, causes and consequences, and the relationship of various states in the system to health at every level. The greater fool is told by various parties that the goal is to enhance healthy longevity, but that isn't really happening via these explorations of metabolism, and in truth doesn't have much of a hope of happening via this research strategy. Look at the past fifteen years of sirtuin research in connection with the calorie restriction response, wherein the greater fool was - collectively - <USER2> GlaxoSmithKline shareholder community following the Sirtris acquisition. Well- managed hype sputtered out quite quickly after that liquidity event into nothing more than a slightly greater understanding of a few very narrow areas of mammalian biochemistry. This process happens over and again for each new potential calorie restriction mimetic, or other methodology claimed to slow the progress of aging by altering the operation of metabolism. Yet there is always a greater fool willing to buy.

Even if a drug was developed to completely mimic the beneficial effects of calorie restriction, so what? That is a convenience device, no more. Those practicing calorie restriction have somewhat better health and somewhat less age-related disease, and might live as many as five years longer. It's a larger effect than any currently available medical technology can provide. Nonetheless, the large majority of those people do not and will not live to see 90 years of age in the environment of today's medical technology. They still live the last years of their lives in frailty and pain. Why spend billions on striving to create a convenience device to recreate some of this marginal effect, tiny in the grand scheme of things? Because some people can get rich doing it.

The recent history of medical development related to slowing aging is that some folk have found they can do very well thank you by promising the prospect of enhanced longevity, while delivering nothing of value beyond scientific knowledge. In different circumstances I might be inclined to praise this as a great hack on investment community culture: direct more funding into life science research rather than cat pictures on the internet, and take a deserved cut as the individual who manages to make that happen. There are certainly far worse things for the greater fool to be talked into doing with his or her money.

Today, however, this business of making hay while the sun shines, based on ways to slightly slow aging largely emerged from calorie restriction research, is a distraction from the prospect of real progress. Messing with metabolism in this way cannot even in principle produce meaningful rejuvenation: aging is damage, and slowing down the damage does nothing for people who are already old and damaged. Yet there are other research strategies that can achieve this goal: the better approach is to repair the damage that causes aging, following the existing detailed research plans that aim to produce new rejuvenation biotechnologies. These can in principle restore youthful function for the old, extend healthy life indefinitely, and should not be any more expensive to explore and develop than a continued future of whatever the next replacement for sirtuin research might be. If billions are spent, then let it be in the pursuit of technologies that do offer the possibility for everyone to live to 90, and in good health, lacking frailty, pain, and disease.

It's a fight to make this case. It shouldn't be, but it is. Attention continues to be soaked up by marginal, ultimately pointless efforts such as the one noted here. It won't let you live to be 90 in confidence, it won't create rejuvenation in the old, and no foreseeable evolution of this strategy can in fact provide those benefits. It is just more of the same search for the greater fool to retroactively bankroll the continuing mapping of metabolism.

\-----

You might recall the hype surrounding sirtuins in cellular metabolism, followed by the breathless marketing of compounds supposed to affect their expression such as resveratrol, all of which went to the usual destination for such things, which is to say nowhere. Some knowledge was added to the grand map of mammalian biochemistry, some people were fleeced, some people made a bunch of money on the backs of promises that never materialized, and that was that. This happens over and again. Every time a new link is uncovered in the complex chain of protein machinery relating to cellular repair mechanisms, upregulated in many of the ways to extend life in lower animals, or calorie restriction, a practice that extends life in short-lived mammals such as mice, and along the way alters near every aspect of the operation of metabolism, then the marketing begins for any supplement that can be linked, tenuously or otherwise, to that research.

If you recognize the general pattern, then you should be well placed to see how things will play out for nicotinamide riboside. This is yet another molecule that can be used as a supplement, and which influences some of the mitochondrial biochemistry associated with cellular maintenance processes. In mice it has been shown to modestly reduce some forms of age-related decline, either by spurring greater maintenance or greater stem cell activity. It is an open question as how much of this will be recapitulated in humans; short-lived species are much more readily influenced by this sort of thing. Their life spans are plastic, and so are their metabolic operations. Regardless, it is of course the case that a bunch of people got together to form a company in order to sell nicotinamide riboside as a supplement. That company is called Elysium Health.

The differences between this and past efforts of this nature are that (a) more reputable scientists from the aging research field are involved, more is the pity for their reputations, and (b) the whole affair is just a little closer to a sensible take on how to make progress in the field, rather than being an absolute money grab. In fact I agree with a fair bit of what cofounder Leonard Guarente has said in public on his motivations for doing this: that progress must be made more rapidly, that there is a space between the worthless supplement market and the highly regulated world of medicine in which good work can be done, and that it is important to put new approaches out there in the world to gather data. I just don't think that this particular approach has any merit in and of itself. Regular readers will know my position on tinkering with metabolism via drugs and found compounds in order to gain tiny and dubious benefits. It is a a waste of time and effort, and definitely not the road to meaningful outcomes in the treatment of aging. Further, even putting that to one side, the founders of Elysium haven't gone about this in the right way at all. They should have sold their product as an open trial of nicotinamide riboside wherein people pay for participation, doubled the price of the supplement, and used that extra money to collect data from participants. Instead they, as everyone is, are corrupted by the fiduciary duty that comes with running a company where the primary focus is selling a branded supplement - so now they are in the supplement business, not the science business. It should be an object lesson for the next group who are thinking of doing something like this.

<comment><USER10> tldr?

<comment><USER11> Probably Reason says that there will never a pill against aging, because aging is a complex process and it cannot be solved by a quick and dirty trick.

(I am just trying to summarizing, not giving my own opinion)

<comment><USER4> I think the better summary would be "there will never be a pill against aging that works through altering metabolism, ultimately mimicking calorie restriction". The reason is simple: even calorie restriction is not a solution to aging, so calorie restriction mimic can't be. I think this is obviously correct.

I think Reason is neutral about other ways against aging which is not through metabolism.

<comment><USER10> There's nothing "obvious" about aging, and we don't even understand how or why calorie restriction works [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#Mechanisms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#Mechanisms)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any reliable web host for arc - <AUTHOR> I want to host similar to HN and like to know any reliable web hosts available in the market. <comment><USER2> To host arc you need to run Racket. So any host that will let you install Racket will be fine. For lowish loads you can something for $10 / month, like linode.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not simply run your application in a docker container and deploy to any of the hundreds of container hosting options?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Good idea I think. suggest me good docker hosting guys

<comment><USER4> Amazon.

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


Is RIM the new Nortel? - <AUTHOR> http://business.financialpost.com/2012/03/29/balsillie-resigns-from-rim-board/

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because it feels like we've heard this story before in Canada. The plan to come back, but will it happen?

With Nortel there was a lot of what I would consider to be corruption (Large C level bonuses that ended up being returned in part, and financials that got re-stated), and we're not seeing this with RIM (yet) but maybe thats yet to come out.

What do you think?</comment>


Show HN: Infinity App: Change your mind about Speed-reading techniques - <AUTHOR> http://competicionmental.appspot.com/router?page=infinity&en=1 <comment><USER2> So, I'm able to recognize each individual word that cycles through the display, but I was unable to construct the narrative, and imagine the concepts conveyed. So I could verify that what I saw was a word, for each word shown to me, but lost all cognition of a prior word upon seeing the next word, leaving the words disconnected by a sort of partitioning amnesia induced by the processing overhead of word recognition.

I noticed that after I had failed to conceptualize the words, what my mind was doing when reading the raw source text from the input field, was it was referencing some of the text up front, and then performing a re-trace, after new information in subsequent sections and sentences.

This seems like a pretty important component, and highly dependent on the writer's style, and tone, which cannot be anticipated programmatically, thus, there doesn't seem to be a silver bullet rule for reading speed, universal to all passages of text.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source code: [https://github.com/vernetit/Infinity](https://github.com/vernetit/Infinity)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this based on any research on speed reading?

I always thought that speed reading was non-linear with a kind of gestalt mechanic at work. This seems more like speed listening which is a 1D stream.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is based in a competition called Speed-Memory a discipline called shapes and colors. With different velocities you can use different memorization techniques. For example First 6 shapes 1.7 seconds per shape you can use element associations (each element is image) example red square a missile white triangle ice cube (a missile explode in a ice cube) . Next two pass more quickly you use a iconic memory (only see the image). Next five (more quickly) you can use phonological loop (only say the name of the image) las two the most rapid passing figures you only see it as a photography of the shape) when the test finish you first respond the las two figures (that are in your eidetic memory) then the phonological loop and the others...

With this system you can use the different forms of mental processing of the mind.

Here the code of veolocity calculation equal to the speed-memory

count word is (0 to 14)

_n=velocity;

if(countWord>=3) _n = _n + _n * 0.2; if(countWord>=6 && countWord<9) _n = _n + _n * 0.4; if(countWord>=9 && countWord<12) _n = _n + _n * 0.6; if(countWord>=12 && countWord<14) _n = _n + _n * 0.8;

velocity=_n;

Thanks!</comment></comment>


Supermarket API Beta (Powered by AisleFinder) - <AUTHOR> http://supermarketapi.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately only a few cities seem to be supported. Is anyone else aware of any similar services?

<comment><USER2> 4500 stores between canada and usa

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried multiple cities and zipcodes in Utah and couldn't get a thing. Also tried a few in Arizona that I could remember and nothing as well.

On a different note. I actually found your api from your Quora answer about Azure. How are you liking the platform? I can definitely tell the webservice uses WCF ;) We're a .Net startup built on Azure as well. Are you in bizspark?

<comment><USER2> yes we are BizSpark(So was AisleFinder), we are trying very fast to populate the east and West Coast, only 6 of us and we have 4500+ stores so far in Canada and the US, None in Utah yet though. I will let you know when. Any particular Chain?

<comment><AUTHOR> Smiths, Maceys, Walmart, Costco</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lyft Commits to Full Carbon Neutrality and 100% Renewable Energy (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lyft.com/posts/lyft-commits-to-full-carbon-neutrality-and-100-renewable-energy <comment><AUTHOR> Relevant article from The Atlantic: Your Lyft Ride Is Now Carbon-Neutral. Your Uber Isn't.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/all- lyft...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/all-lyft-rides- are-carbon-neutral/558443/)</comment>


Ask HN: When and why did AWS decrease Spot limit from 100 to 5 per region? - <AUTHOR> According to AWS' FAQ: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run_in_Amazon_EC2
The limit of Spot instances is now 5 per region, which sounds incredibly low.
Quotes from an older version of the FAQ and answers on StackOverflow/Quora says AWS did limit to 100 Spot instances until recently.
" You are limited to running 20 On-Demand or Reserved Instances, and running 100 Spot Instances per region. [...]" <comment><USER2> "If you need more instances, complete the Amazon EC2 instance request form with your use case and your instance increase will be considered. Limit increases are tied to the region they were requested for."

You could always ask @jeffbarr on twitter as well.</comment>


3400HP 1704 ci 24 Cylinders 8 Superchargers - <AUTHOR> http://www.musclecarszone.com/3000hp-1704-ci-24-cylinders-8-superchargers-a-true-monster-why-because-i-can/

<comment><USER2> Holy cow, this picture shows how freaking huge this thing is...

[http://www.musclecarszone.com/3400hp-1704-ci- supercharged-24...](http://www.musclecarszone.com/3400hp-1704-ci- supercharged-24-cylinder-engine/)</comment>