Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2 - <AUTHOR> https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-2/ <comment><USER2> GTK for a smartphone is an interesting choice. I'm curious if the Gnome team would ever commit to this.

The use of a stylus in the video is a bit concerning though.

Off topic but I hope Librem releases a high-end laptop in addition to their mid-tier one, ideally with a high performance AMD CPU. Something that could be the open-source friendly version of a Macbook Pro.

The way they disable Intel ME and add hardware toggles for webcams/microphones, and their general good taste is a big draw for me.

Edit: looks like Gnome is backing Purism's project. Neat. [https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/09/gnome-foundation- partners...](https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/09/gnome-foundation-partners- with-purism-to-support-its-efforts-to-build-the-librem-5-smartphone/)

<comment><USER3> I believe they're working with the Gnome team on this, as well as support for Plasma Mobile.[0]

[0] [https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-in-pureos-diversity- acro...](https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-in-pureos-diversity-across- devices/)

<comment><USER2> > In addition, Purism is needing to lead some of the development within the > GNOME community, since there is not a large community around an upstream- > first GNOME/GTK+ for mobile yet.

This makes me happy. This is good news for all Gnome users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to like Librem's smartphone, I really do. I like having control over my software, and I like being able to really understand how it works and tinker with it and stuff. But I have this sinking feeling that the Librem 5 is just vaporware, or worse, that it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps. On that latter one, I really don't see how they'll fix the problem. On the former, the thing is that the affordences for bad UI design are a LOT tighter on mobile devices and it's taken a long time for desktop Linux to get their game together. Plus, all of Librem's other stuff is over priced and a bit cheap looking, and I'm not sure I want a phone like that.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't look like vaporware to me. The videos and updates seem legit.

> it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps.

Have you even looked into the project?

It's running Gnome, on Linux, all the regular apps are there.

Check out the videos in this link, it's not half-baked:

[https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone- week-3...](https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3/)

<comment><USER6> I have been following this for a while and am likely to buy it if/when it is released. Even though that will require me to change to a much more expensive cell carrier.

The software seems good. After all, it is just GNU/Linux/GNOME - all you need to do is get a C compiler and hardware drivers and then it just works. An older video did show major stutter during scrolling but that can probably be mitigated.

What's concerning is the hardware side of things. I don't think many people expected it to actually ship on the original planned release date, but the delay has been getting quite large. All the stuff on their blog is about software running on the dev kit; we have no idea what progress is like on the hardware. Turning it from that bare PCB into a phone is a lot of work.

Their marketing guy also released a video a month or two ago comparing the Librem boot time to that of an old Android phone, complete with OEM crapware. If they have nothing better to do than make such stupid comparisons, then it is hard to believe it isn't vaporware.

<comment><USER5> I highly recommend looking into an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator).

There are inexpensive pre-paid plans that use the major cell network towers, and you get the same speeds. I recommend Straight Talk; their plans are very cheap for the data you get, but there might be other cheaper services.

I agree it's taking them a while, but I've never built a phone before, so I am cutting them slack.

I find it easy to believe that it is _not_ vaporware. They have videos of working devices, something that can be replicated in mass, not renders etc. They've shipped dev boards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is incredibly exciting.

For those that haven't seen it, here's a bullet list of the Librem 5 differentiators:

      + Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions.
      + CPU separate from baseband, isolating the blackbox that the modem may represent and allowing us to seek hardware certification of the main board by the Free Software Foundation.
      + Hardware Kill Switches for camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband.
      + End-to-end encrypted decentralized communications via Matrix over the Internet.
      + We also intend the Librem 5 to integrate with the Librem Key security token in the future.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just shockingly ugly. If you're going to do a pixels-under-glass UI, you really have to start with a toolkit that isn't awful, or you end up with the openmoko which looked exactly like these demos but 12 years ago. You end up with, in short, a phone where the user adjusts the volume using alsamixer in an xterm because the UI wasn't really thought through.

<comment><USER5> > Just shockingly ugly.

Are you sure about that? It looks amazing:

[https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone- week-3...](https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3/)

<comment><USER6> I'd say its better than most modern phones with their stupid flat UIs. I use KDE on the desktop for its featured richness, but gnome is still much more 3d and I envy its appearance. Buttons very clearly look like buttons and text boxes look like text boxes and the whole thing just looks 'nice.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure people will disagree with this but I think they should focus on getting an easy way for people to target their devices with React Native, NativeScript, PWAs and every other cross-platform framework.

That way they can much more easily acquire software. Seriously making an app from scratch is no small task, and often time isn't worth it for such a small market.

<comment><USER10> Have you seen what development for this is like? You can slap together simple apps (the UI anyway) with a few dozen lines of C. It's extremely simple, lightweight and fast, everything react/PWA's/etc aren't. This is what excites me about librem the most, it's so easy to just write code with no bloated IDE, 15 xml files, AbstractFactoryBuilders and the rest of the android crapfest.

PWA's and the like can stay away, I want software from developers that actually respect their users, software that doesn't waste resources, software that actually looks native.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure it's just as easy as any other UI.

My point is it's so small, nobody will focus on it. However, if they can easily port their existing codebase, it will have more apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Registered just to post this. Love Purism, want it to succeed. But...

IMHO, the effort is going to fail miserably, unless folks stop wasting time trying to build a phone UI, i.e. another attempt to build Android/iOS ecosystem. There were Sailfish, MER, Openmoko, and whatnot attempts to make a pure Linux-running cell phone. Just stop it. You will burn through your money doing half-baked UI, there will be no adoption, then no developers, then no apps, and thus no users.

As per OP link, Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI. What a waste of time to re-write (or port) all of this, all over again.

The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox. Make it fast, make it perfect. Then, automatically you will get:

\- Adoption. [http://m.uber.com](http://m.uber.com) [http://m.lyft.com/](http://m.lyft.com/) work out of the box. I am not leaving home without the phone because it enables to access essential day-to-day services. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps.

\- Adoption. Web-based music: Spotify, SoundCloud. Out of the box. Purism doesn't need to waste time on this. Just have pre-installed bookmarks to those apps. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps.

\- Adoption. Endless web apps such as "Clocks", "Notepad", Games and drawing apps already exists. Purism don't need to waste time on this stuff. Just have pre-installed bookmarks for those apps. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps.

Once basic needs satisfied, those of us who need Emacs, will be able to port Emacs and Torrent clients themselves. Why waste _your_ time, Purism?

Focus on releasing the hardware, be different from other phones, be lean, get immediate adoption, community will fill the blanks.

<comment><USER10> > The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have > to port ONE app: Firefox.

You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right?

> Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME > Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent > client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI.

They haven't wasted time, pretty much all of these are existing apps, you can run most of them on a gnome desktop.

> Focus on releasing the hardware

That is what their doing and what differentiates them from most previous efforts like sailfish, they are a hardware company making a phone the runs linux, others were trying to re-create android and leave the hardware for others.

<comment><USER11> > You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right?

Right. And this was a mistake by Mozilla: they tried to make an OS, and a browser and interact/negotiate with 3rd-party phone vendors. I did not care for FirefoxOS-based phones indeed because they where "same old ridden-with- firmware black boxes".

Mozilla makes a good browser, they'd rather keep doing that.

Purism is a different story. It seems they understand that some folks appreciate open hardware, privacy-focused designs. Cool, one ingredient for the success: check. But in order to be a successful product, the phone has to be useful out-of-the-box. And if the hardware company will attempt to make a whole "native" software stack, they will fail the same way as Mozilla failed at being an OS-company and HW-facing company: not enough resources.

So, how about Purism makes a great hardware (+ drivers), and integrates exactly three apps: 1. a phone app that is able to make/receive calls, 2. a short-text messaging app 3. and a blazing-fast browser to access the world. Done. Basics are there: I can make calls, I can receive/send messages, I can access email, slack, hail uber/lyft, use web-based maps/navigation, listen to online podcasts/music, use web-based calendars, etc. A phone I could use everyday.

<comment><USER5> Purism pretty much is doing what you're suggesting.

They're working with upstream packages so that when you install Linux on it, it just works, no hunting for additional drivers to make it work.

Those apps already exist. Again, they're working with those apps to make the phone "just work" when you install the apps/programs/packages/whatever. They don't need to reinvent Firefox, they can let Mozilla focus on that, and Purism can focus on what they're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If someone were to develop an iphone-quality design with the same objectives as the librem 5, I'd pay $3000 for it. How much would the market shrink if that was the price of what would become the librem 5? It's rather niche to begin with, but there isn't any real competition the meets the same objectives, and I assert that the customer base has the money to afford it.

<comment><USER13> I'm considering ordering a librem 5, but I would go without any phone at all rather than spend thousands on one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any reason why applications cannot be written for the Librem 5 with Flutter? The Flutter framework compiles to ARM binary and the UI is rendered with Skia, a C++ UI layer. It's not like a bunch of widgets would need to be written and supported on Librem, just the Skia layer. What am I missing?

<comment><USER15> That would be a massive amount of work. In my opinion, Purism correctly limited the scope of the original proposal -- a FOSS phone that can make calls, and send messages (and maybe use a web browser?). libhandy (the library that allows GTK applications to "shrink" their UI for a phone) is intended to minimise work by allowing Purism to take advantage to existing software (e.g. Settings, Web browser). Even this is a huge amount of work (I've written about it here/Reddit in the past).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd welcome more push behind Plasma Mobile for it. There is practically no progress now. It could benefit from moving towards more touch oriented design, Sailfish like, dropping lingering elements inherited from the desktop UI.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any demos of the phone making an actual phone call, sending an sms text message?

<comment><USER3> [https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress- report-12/](https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-12/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone here attempted to develop software for librem?

Mind share your experience with us?

</comment><comment><USER19> Any idea on when this ships?

<comment><USER7> Q3 according to the videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What was the reasoning for going with Gnome/GTK instead of Qt?</comment>


Fast 2D Rendering on GPU - <AUTHOR> https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/graphics/gpu/2020/06/13/fast-2d-rendering.html <comment><AUTHOR> Fast 2D rendering on GPU has represented the last few months of concentrated work for me, and I'm happy to present the results now. It's required going pretty deep into various aspects of GPU compute, so feel free to ask me about that, 2D vector graphics, or anything related.

<comment><USER2> \- Shouldn't 2D rendering be a solved problem given that it's basically a subset of 3D rendering?

\- Don't libraries like Skia, Qt, Cairo use GPU rendering? I've always assumed so. I mean, this is 2020, GPUs have been around for decades.

<comment><AUTHOR> Others have spoken to this, but as a general introduction I highly recommend Jasper's post "Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?" In short, no, it's not a solved problem.

Also, I see a lot of variations of this question, but I should state this more clearly. There's been accelerated graphics in one form or another for a long time, but what I'm doing is a completely different type of thing. In my world, on the CPU you just encode the scene into a binary representation that's optimized for GPU but in many ways is like flatbuffers, and then the GPU runs a highly parallel program to render the whole thing. In previous approaches, the CPU is deeply involved in taking the scene apart and putting it back together in a form that's well suited to relatively dumb pixel pipes. Now that GPUs are _really_ fast, that approach runs into limitations.

It also depends what you're trying to do. I'm focusing here on dynamic paths (and thus font rendering), while most of the libraries optimized for UI put text into texture atlases and then use the GPU to composite quads to the final surface, something they can do well.

[https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is- harde...](https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harder- than-3d-graphics/)

<comment><USER3> Can you expound the principle of tiling mentioned in your algorithm a bit more ? The conventional mechanism is to use de-Casteljau to divide a bezier curve into triangles and then rasterize these triangles using GPU. If the curve is required to be scaled, the triangularization/tesselation is done again How is the algorithm presented in the link different ? Somehow the concept of tiling seems to imply that rasterization of the curve is done in the CPU itself. What am I missing ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I recommend reading the blog post series, I'm not sure I can usefully summarize the concepts in a comment reply. But very briefly, there's a flattening step (evaluated on GPU, based on de Casteljau) that converts the Bezier into a polyline ( _not_ triangles), then a tiling step that records for each tile a "command list" that contains the complete description of how to render the pixels in a tile, finally "fine rasterization" so that each workgroup reads that command list and renders 256 pixels in parallel from it. From your question, it sounds like your mental model is pretty different from how this pipeline works.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I am trying to align my mental model with yours. I read your blog post "A sort-middle architecture for 2D graphics" & "2D Graphics on Modern GPU", but still unable to grasp the fundamental guiding principles. It's not clear what are the commands that constitute each tile and whatever they are, what is the fundamental reasion which leads to the performance being better than joining the polylines of a curve to get a triangle list and having those triangle rasterized by the GPU. Any blog/article on the fundamental principles, that you would recomend

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would like to get an idea of the capabilities of these things.

Suppose I was to make an ebook reader designed to be modelled more closely after paper, on a device like the Surface Book's 13″ 3000×2000 display, showing two pages side-by-side. Each page might contain something like 2,000–2,500 letters. I want to be able to flip through pages like I might with a paper book, so that I might be roughly completely rendering several pages at once, and perhaps parts of several more pages; ideally it _might_ render the page like a real 3D page, but if that's too troublesome I'd settle for an affine transformation while flipping. Assume that the layout of the pages, with all the shaping, is all done ahead of time and is in memory.

I've never seen anyone attempt anything like this before. In the old way of doing things, I think anyone attempting this would render each page to a bitmap and use that as a GPU texture, and I think that could provide acceptable performance (unless you were flipping rapidly through hundreds of pages, because that'd take a _lot_ of GPU memory to keep), but I imagine that the quality of the rendering mid-turn would be fairly atrocious—it could be the sort of thing where the appearance of the text subtly changes half a second after you finish turning the page, as it switches from one renderer to a slightly different one.

Would the performance of this new approach be sufficient to render what I describe at 60fps, while rendering each frame perfectly?

I was talking about the Surface Book; its Intel Core i7-6600U has Intel HD Graphics 520 as its GPU; probably not too far off your 630's results. (And I'm interested in what integrated graphics can do, more than a dedicated GPU.)

My _guess_ based upon your paper-1 results is that this is probably _just barely_ possible with integrated graphics, so long as you employ a few tricks to reduce the amount of work required.

<comment><AUTHOR> Short answer, yes, I believe it could work, though not with much margin to spare. It might require some dedicated optimization work to fit the frame budget, especially when you know things about the scene (it's mostly small glyphs and with basically no overdraw) as opposed to being completely general purpose.

Doing a warp transformation in the element processing kernel would probably work just fine, and give you realistic movement and razor-sharp rendering.

I'd love to see such a thing and would very much like to encourage people to build it based on my results :)

<comment><USER5> For the OP's effect, remember you're probably going to want motion blur in each frame, which means you can render at a much lower resolution in the direction of motion (as long as you can do multipass rendering)

<comment><USER6> I don't think you do want motion blur, as you don't know the direction in which the user's eyes are tracking. When games and films do motion blur, they know where they expect the viewer's attention to be, so blurring things they won't be tracking improves the look (especially at the low frame-rate of films). But if you happen to track the moving page, and you are likely to, and it has blur added, then it will look worse.

Look at phone interfaces; even if you scroll fast, they don't add motion blur, and on high framerate and/or low-persistence displays, you can read things while it scrolls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Noob question. Isn't some GPU acceleration for 2D used since forever? I keep being perplexed as to why browsers still have problems with it (at least on my older Macbook with a shitty Intel's embedded GPU). I thought some stuff, like scrolling, was offloaded at least in early/mid-2000s, making for a distinctly meh experience when proper drivers weren't installed.

<comment><USER8> GPUs derive most of their parallelism from emitting rows of related "quads" (the smallest unit of the screen that supports a difference operator). 2D graphics are "chatty" in window sizes that are more like 5–10 units in diameter. It's _hell_ on HW perf. To make things worse, 2D applications usually want submillisecond latency. A GPU driver/hw stack will struggle to get latency below 1–2ms. When there's lots of multipass rendering (which is a thing 2D also wants a lot of), latency can to 10+ ms.

<comment><USER9> What does latency have to do with 2D? Are you suggesting UI toolkits are writing GPU commands synchronously? You should fill display list, fire it and forget about GPU until the next update.

<comment><USER8> Pen drawing for UIs. The _ideal_ case is to update a small portion of the screen at about 240hz, to provide a good simulation of pen/pencil feedback. Really, your latency envelope should be on the order of the propagation of sound through the barrel of the marking device, but screens don't update that fast.

<comment><USER10> Surely >95% of screens out there right now are running at 60Hz, so 240Hz "pen drawing" is pretty niche and not a priority?

<comment><USER4> And >95% of screens don't support pen drawing.

I expect a screen that supports or is designed for pen drawing to be somewhat more likely to be above 60Hz. All of these things are niche things that not many care about, but in any case, it'd be nice to be _able_ to do better. And like with Formula 1 race cars, benefits from high-end techniques tend to trickle down to other more mainstream targets in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does this (and Pathfinder for that matter) compare to NanoVG? I've recently been experimenting with swapping out Cairo for NanoVG and it seems much faster. The lack of dashed lines may kill my experiment though unless I can think of a decent workaround.

<comment><USER12> I've just released a fork of nanovg that does GPU rendering a bit like Pathfinder, so it can support arbitrary paths - nanovg's antialiasing has some issues with thin filled paths. It also adds support for dashed lines.

[https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC](https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC)

If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you.

<comment><USER11> That is very exciting to hear. I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Something I am not sure to completely understand, after reading the article, is: in which way is it better/ more desirable than the classical approach of GPU rendering? (with vertex, triangles, and shaders)

<comment><USER14> The basic problem is that, without compute, you either have to encode the vector scene into GPU primitives (triangles) as quickly as possible, and all the ways I know of to do that either involve (a) an expensive CPU process or (b) a cheap CPU process but way too much overdraw on GPU side. Compute gives you the best of both worlds, allowing you to upload outlines directly to GPU and do the processing necessary to lower them to primitives on the GPU itself.

Pathfinder in there is actually using regular old GPU rasterization with triangles and so forth, and I'm fairly confident it's about as fast as you can go at D3D10 level (i.e. no compute shaders) without sacrificing quality. Note that the numbers can vary wildly depending on hardware. On my MacBook Pro, with a powerful CPU and limiting myself to the Intel integrated GPU only, Pathfinder is actually about equal to the GPU compute approach on a lot of scenes like the tiger, though it uses a lot of CPU.

<comment><USER13> Is it true for all 2D rendering?

From my intuition, this seems pretty specialized for vector-like rendering, with a lot of small bezier shapes.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, when I say 2D I mean vector art. There are a lot of things under the heading of 2D rendering, such as blitting raster sprites, that are much closer to being solved problems. (Though you might be surprised--power concerns, coupled with greatly increased pixel density, have brought renewed attention to performance of blitting lately...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> c-smile Question to the author: is this only implementation of GPU rasterizer? What about anything like WARP ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Advanced_Rasterization...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Advanced_Rasterization_Platform)) - fallback rendering when GPU is not available ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's something I'd like to explore at some point, also Swiftshader, which might be easier to explore, as it's already Vulkan. I expect performance to be pretty good, but there are already really advanced CPU renderers such as Blend2D. Doing serious performance evaluation is hard work, so I actually hope it's something others take up, as I have pretty limited time for it myself.

<comment> c-smile I understand.

Problem is that any practical 2D rendering solution shall support as GPU as CPU rendering unfortunately.

It would be interesting to see any GPU equivalent of something like AGG by Max Shemanarev, RIP.

<comment><USER15> Practical 2D renderers implement an abstraction layer that lets them easily redirect their output to a number of low level libraries, which can be either CPU or GPU-based (or a mix). I worked on a few such 2D stacks, including OpenGL, DirectX, WebGL, and AGG based, and it took no more than a few days to add new 2D backends to an existing pipeline. Most 2D rendering is based on concepts from PostScript so it's usually easy to do such ports -- except for AGG, that one was a bit like a library from outer space. Maxim himself worked on a hardware accelerated 2D renderer for Scaleform, and it looked nothing like AGG, mostly because AGG is practically impossible to move to a GPU implementation.

<comment> c-smile I know, AGG is just a set of primitives but not an abstraction like class Graphics {...}. But that one can be assembled from them. Did it once for early versions of Sciter.

Ideally GPU and CPU rendering backends should have pixel perfect match that makes "adding new 2D backend" tricky at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> iTerm's usage of metal on macOS is good example of benefits in implementing 2D rendering on GPU[1].

[1][https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/wikis/Metal- Renderer](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/wikis/Metal-Renderer)

<comment><USER17> That links to iTerm2 which is what I'm guessing you meant to say ? Kitty is also a GPU accelerated terminal emulator and one that I enjoy using [https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) Not sure if it uses Metal on Mac though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Naive question - but does this change to make use of DX11/shaders in newer GPUs make it more likely to have a good cross-platform UI for app development?

I've looked before and although OpenGL is good for windowing, widgets etc, it's not great for sub pixel rendered/anti aliased text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the motivation and long term goal for this work is to provide a performant foundation for cross-platform UI. There's a lot to be done though!

</comment></comment><comment> Const-me I wonder how it compares performance-wise against my solution of the same problem: [https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac#vector-graphics- engine](https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac#vector-graphics-engine)

I don't use compute shaders, tessellating input splines into polylines, and building triangular meshes from these.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is very impressive. Have you benchmarked it against core graphics on a Mac? I believe they've done a similar thing - performing the render on Metal

<comment> c-smile CoreGraphics is pure CPU rasterizer, similar to GDI+.

Sciter ([https://sciter.com](https://sciter.com)) on MacOS uses Skia/OpenGL by default with fallback to CoreGraphics.

It is possible to configure Sciter to use CoreGraphics on MacOS to compare these two on the same UI by using

        SciterSetOption(NULL, SCITER_SET_GFX_LAYER, GFX_LAYER_CG);

I think it is safe to say that Skia/OpenGL is 5-10 times more performant than CG on typical UI tasks.

<comment><USER19> Interesting, thanks - I remember hearing at one of the WWDC that Coregraphics got a 10x speed improvement using metal. I just read the fine print - it seems draw calls only have a 10x speed improvement, I assume because they render through a layer of some sort. The CA* libraries may use metal - animation and layers, which I guess is where the 10x draw call improvement comes in maybe.

Some discussion here [https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1285571](https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1285571) , though a lot of guessing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Metal is definitely used extensively in CoreAnimation, and Apple UI tends to rely on that - relatively slow (and memory hungry) rendering of layer content, which is then composited very smoothly and nicely in CA.

They might use it for other stuff like glyph compositing (I think this is one reason they got rid of RGB subpixeling, to make it more amenable to GPU), but last I profiled it, it was still doing a lot of the pixels on CPU, as others have stated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is GPU here synonymous with Nvidia?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's designed to be portable to all GPU hardware that can support compute, which these days is a pretty good chunk of the fleet. I tested it on Linux on Intel HD 4000, and the master branch seems to run just fine, though previous versions.

A lot of the academic literature (Massively Parallel Vector Graphics, the Li et al scanline work) is dependent on CUDA, but that's just because tools for doing compute on general purpose graphics APIs are so primitive. I have a talk and a bunch of blog posts on exactly this topic, as I had to explore deeply to figure it out. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22880502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22880502) and [https://raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2020/04/30/prefix- sum.html](https://raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2020/04/30/prefix-sum.html) for more breadcrumbs on that.</comment></comment>


4 Types of Person (a guide to stupidity) - <AUTHOR> http://www.secretgeek.net/4TypesOfStupid.asp <comment><USER2> This article, unfortunately, falls in the top right quadrant.

The insights are fairly dull and overly simplistic. The conclusions are not all that useful.

<comment><USER3> You used a tool developed in the top right quadrant to describe an article that belongs in the top right quadrant.

Ouch. I think you just hashed me into the top left quadrant.

<comment><USER2> Well, I think it's only fair to apply the article to itself ;-)

As for you, you are not the author of this article, so I presume there is no good reason to force-fit you into its simplistic model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A 2x2 matrix - must be a consultant.

</comment><comment><USER5> "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." \- William Shakespeare from "As You Like It"

<comment><USER6> (predated famously by Plato)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect>

"Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd."

</comment><comment><USER8> You don't know anything (about a subject) until you know what you don't know.</comment>


Ask HN: What motivates the GHCQ to claim Ubuntu is the most secure Linux? - <AUTHOR>

What motivates the GHCQ to claim Ubuntu is the most secure Linux? Is it because Canonical is a British company? Too strange considering there are many more distro's out there with better focus on OS security. <comment><AUTHOR> @oracuk yes that would explain it.

I was wondering since there are rumours ([http://techrights.org/2013/11/24/tpm-back-doors-patriot- act-...](http://techrights.org/2013/11/24/tpm-back-doors-patriot-act-etc/)) of possible RedHat being too close to the NSA who is to rule out similar interests or ties between GHCQ and Ubuntu? Canonical is a UK company which could easily be convinced to add certain features. (see also privacy issues [http://beta.slashdot.org/story/182197](http://beta.slashdot.org/story/182197))

@wiml please see the link provided by @oracuk and also below: [http://www.zdnet.com/uks-security-branch-says-ubuntu-most- se...](http://www.zdnet.com/uks-security-branch-says-ubuntu-most-secure-end- user-os-7000025312/) [http://www.muktware.com/2014/01/ubuntu-12-04-lts- declared-se...](http://www.muktware.com/2014/01/ubuntu-12-04-lts-declared- secure-os-gchq/19295) [http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open- source/linux...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/linux- the-clear-choice-for-security/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I think the answer is what didn't motivate GCHQ to review other distributions. I think you're referring to their End User Devices Security review?

[https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/end-user- devices-s...](https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/end-user-devices- security-guidance--2)

They didn't single Ubuntu out of a crowd, they just only reviewed Ubuntu which is probably due to the brand name recognition in the government departments the advice was aimed at or possibly the experience of the team doing the review.

I have assumed that was what you were referring to and not a different statement?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious why you think GHCQ claims that Ubuntu is the most secure Linux. Where do they say that?</comment>


Password Recovery Using Discrete Hopfield Neural Network in Python - <AUTHOR> http://neupy.com/2015/09/21/password_recovery.html <comment><USER2> Its refreshing to see other uses of neural networks other then the standard deep learning stuff. keep up the good work!

EDIT: You might want to check the [Source] links in the docs. they throw a 404

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response. There are would be more interesting projects related to neural networks.

And also thank you for detecting this problem with [source] link. I fixed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this would work as a kind of spell check. Associate misspelled and mistyped words with the correct word/spelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an interesting idea. But I guess there are would be two main problems.

1\. Memory is limited. For this task you need to save a lot of words to make possible use it in applications. To solve this problem you should save words in a huge dimensional vectors.

2\. This network can't solve the problem of missing letters in words with a high accuracy.

<comment><USER3> I was thinking of encoding words as letter pairs. E.g. the word "hello" would have 1 'he', 1 'el', 1, 'll', and 1 'lo'. That seems more natural and robust than the binary bits of it's ASCII encoding.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two main advantage of ASCII approach. The first one is that vectors weight is not very big and you can build relatively small matrix that easy to store and faster to use. The second one is that usual encoding alternatives give a vary sparse vectors and as a consequence there would a big number of negative values (because we encode 0 as -1 value) inside the weight. For instance, if you have something encoded as 1 (word, letter or anything like that) with a big number of zeros (which would be encoded as -1 value in Discrete Hopfield network) that would be very unlikely to see the same ones at the same place multiple number of times and after some number of iterations negative values will reduce value encoded as 1 inside of memory and these -1 values would be as a dominant value for specific pattern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yawn. Instead of making brand new neural network libraries, why not help contribute to already mature libraries?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that there are some great projects related to neural networks. But they are focused on deep neural networks. Apart from this trend in neural networks there are many other great ideas like Autoassociative memories, learning base on associations, Adaptive resonance theory and so on. They are really cool and you can make a lot of interesting projects with them. This was a major inspiration for this library.

<comment><USER4> "But they are focused on deep neural networks" \- No. They're really not. If anything, they're focused on making matrix operations faster and faster; where the natural result is deeper and deeper networks. But, why not submit a pull request to a highly mature library and add these features so that you can have maximum impact instead of something fairly basic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Usually each library has it's own architecture. This architecture based on some default classes that implements core functionality for models. I already have a chance to check source code for the popular neural network libraries and I found that their architecture requires some basic classes that are related to the Backpropagation algorithm and it's variation. In neural networks there are a lot of algorithms that really hard to compare and generalize. To make your idea possible I see two ways for that. First one is to change architecture for the main models classes in popular library. In practice for the popular libraries it's a huge amount of work. Even if you found possibility to generalize core architecture with other network that you want implement, probably, you will broke a big part of library that works before. The second one is build a new folder inside of existing library that contains localized code that don't have relation to the core part. How it differs from the decision of a single repository for a different library? In practice its a good way to separate something without relation, because further attempts to combine all in a big library will lead to breakage and bugs that are difficult to debug and fix.

<comment><USER4> Different strokes for different folks, man. Help contribute to the research/dev community by helping affect the research/dev community where it matters.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


If Microsoft goes Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.gonegoogle.com/presentation/2c44133b95cd41678028a5fb3c8c9091/

<comment><USER2> Well, if _Google_ switches to Google, they can save up to 50-70% on their enterprise email costs. Presumably they can then do this again, until they are paying a vanishing fraction of a penny on emails costs. No wonder GMail turns a profit.

In other news, the blinding geniuses at Google, whose shoes you are not fit to shine, recently announced a compression algorithm that uses MapReduce on BigTable running in The Cloud (TM) based on Node.js async javascript running on top of Chrome's V8 running in mobile data centers powered by renewable energy that can compress _any_ data by at least one bit by harnessing the mighty power of buzzwords. Google is preparing a presentation in which they will shortly announce that they will be putting up a torrent containing every file on the internet using this technology.

<comment><USER3> _Google is preparing a presentation in which they will shortly announce that they will be putting up a torrent containing every file on the internet using this technology._

That last bit was really good :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For what it's worth, most of the numbers for Microsoft in the "assumptions" are wrong - I wonder if it's possible to have a set of assumptions such that this application wouldn't recommend a move to Google Apps?

What I found the most interesting however is that it's not possible to set some of the numbers in the assumptions below certain thresholds. For example, in the "unplanned downtime" section you're required to put in a number greater than 15 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Employees at Microsoft will be 2.8 times more productive when mobile_

Except when they don't have an Internet connection, in which case they are 100% _less_ productive!

 _Microsoft could add 612,500 GB of email space_

Does anyone have any evidence that e-mail storage on Outlook is an issue? Since the e-mail may be stored locally and hard drives are infinite capacity (compared to the the 2GB allocation of Gmail), this sounds like a bogus argument.

 _there's a single version of the doc so everyone knows they are working on the latest version_

Yeah, right. Works great until you need to really modify a document locally, because you are experimenting with major changes. Good luck merging it back with either platform.

 _Microsoft may spend as much as $3,750,000 in data recovery services to protect from natural disaster. By going Google you'd spend $0 and wait 0 weeks_

Does anyone who is in charge of mission critical stuff advises to trust Google storage and not perform any extra backups? Really?

I love watching how Google slowly but surely loses all the goodwill they accumulated, in their quest to become just another $10B company. Business as usual.

</comment><comment><USER6> Guys? Are you intentionally being stupid?

<http://www.gonegoogle.com/> and enter in the name of any company you want...

It's a generic advertisement, not something specifically targeting Microsoft.

Also, this article is a duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1395521>

</comment><comment><USER7> microsoft can already do all of this internally using the new Office 2010, office online apps and sharepoint.

<comment><USER8> Yup, now if they can sell those features to their customers...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of course, it does make it much harder to delete emails; that'll probably cost a pretty penny when the US DOJ next comes knocking...

</comment><comment><USER10> My favorite is:

"At Microsoft, if 10 team members working on a project each make 5 revisions there would be 50 versions of the same document floating around. Yikes."

<comment><USER11> Apparently they never heard of the built-in revision tracking in Office documents, and it completely ignores SharePoint. Google is sinking to Microsoft's level. This is as shameful and FUD-filled as the "Internet Explorer 8 - safer, faster, easier" message I see when browsing MSDN with Firefox.

<comment><USER12> At least it's more secure than a potato.

<comment><USER7> ahahaha +1

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> rf;dr

(requires flash, didn't read... on my iPad)

<comment><USER14> PDF summary:

[http://www.gonegoogle.com/poster- report/90c6d40a87ea45a7a5c5...](http://www.gonegoogle.com/poster- report/90c6d40a87ea45a7a5c53fc68cb37929)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If Microsoft ever does 'Go Google' I'll eat my hat: That would be like Bluto deciding to eat spinach to gain Popeye's strength, it just won't happen.</comment>


FPGA Softcore SoC Shootout - <AUTHOR> https://justanotherelectronicsblog.com/?p=705 <comment><USER2> If you are interested in a framework for stitching together a soft SoC there is a great framework call FuseSOC. It supports several of the cores used here. : [https://fusesoc.net/](https://fusesoc.net/)

There is also the LiteX project: [https://github.com/enjoy- digital/litex](https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litex)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm slightly surprised the author didn't mention the core I work on Ibex: [https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex](https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex) but maybe not too surprised as it's primary target isn't FPGA softcore, though it does work fine for this purpose.

It's got an extensive verification environment (though relies on UVM so you need closed tools to run it, we have a verilator setup for running RISC-V compliance and arbitrary binaries), good documentation and we're pushing the performance up (you can get 3.09 CoreMark/MHz with the current master and that will increase with some branch prediction work I'm currently doing). It's configurable so you can choose your own trade offs between size and performance. Plus we've got support for the B (bitmanip) extension, which our verification environment also tests.

All cores have their pros and cons and Ibex is no exception but if you're looking for an open CPU core I think it's well worth a look.

<comment><USER4> Any idea what clockrate ibex would achieve on his hardware? Being able to hit 125 MHz is useful e.g. for gig-e support.

Bitmanip extension is pretty awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent analysis! Do you have CoreMark scores instead of DMIPS?

<comment><USER6> Neither is really that great. Embench should be getting there maybe.

<comment><USER5> I've seen their repo, it's pretty lame. CoreMark is still difficult for compilers to optimize away so I think it's better than DMIPS.</comment></comment></comment>


Le Bolze: Switzerland's Fifth Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190422-the-swiss-language-that-few-know <comment><USER2> As someone that has had the pleasure of living in Switzerland, I would rather say that Le Bolze would be sixth language.

Given that English, although not an official language, is what gets used by most nationals across language borders, given that many of them don´t bother to practice the other languages beyond what is required in school.

I always found ironic that I can switch easier across German, French and Italian than most of my Swiss friends.

<comment><USER3> Yeah and how most swiss youngsters will now switch to English instead of national languages when only crossing the röstigraben.

A bit depressing if you ask me. Yet, here we are talking to each other in the 5th national language on an American website ;)

<comment><USER4> I grew up in Geneva, and I blame this on way German is taught over here.

What you learn in middle-school is fairly casual, but it doesn't go very deep. Then high-school switches to a more academic approach even though you're still lacking conversational skills. While I loved reading Zweig or Kafka, this was an extremely inefficient way to teach me the language. I'd have had a lot more fun focusing on _speaking_ in German (and Swiss German). It might have been a little hard back then, but nowadays it'd be fairly trivial to have regular videochat sessions between students on both sides of the language border.

English is a lot easier. First, whether you want it or not, you'll get exposure and interaction, especially in a city like Geneva. The learning curve is a lot less steep as well. I could read proper, non-simplified books after only 2 years of high-school classes.

I believe some cantons are doing better (Fribourg, Bern, maybe Jura and Valais). But nothing beats the system in Luxembourg where a good chunk of classes are taught in German during middle-school, then French in high-school.

<comment><USER5> I lived and worked in Geneva for a couple of years as an older adult. While I went to the trouble of learning written and spoken French (which I love as a language), I was really surprised at how little I ever required it in everyday activities.

BTW, I really loved Switzerland and Geneva in particular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> German national, Swiss resident of 10 years here.

The audio sample is pretty understandable. Obviously the speaker took great care to enunciate clearly for the recording, so he sounds like he speaks very understandable Swiss German with a lot of French vocabulary thrown in. Like a French exchange student or the like.

<comment><USER7> As a Swiss I'm quite puzzled why the author thinks it is another language. The audio sample disproves the claim in the article that even with full command of French and Swiss-German, you can't understand it. Sure, it can be hard to follow, but the same is true for other dialects in the country.

I think given the title, "the Swiss language that few know", they should have picked Romansh. The fourth official language of Switzerland that got completely overlooked by the article. A descendant language of the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire. Haven't met many people around the world who have heard of it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElfJX-4yET0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElfJX-4yET0)

<comment><USER8> To be fair, the article mentions Romansh and links to another article only about our fourth language[0]

I agree the sample is not difficult to understand as a nativ Swiss-German speaker. Only thing that comes to mind is that it's a Bernese (?) Swiss-German dialect which is not always easy to understand for 'proper' German speakers.

But in my opinion almost every single dialect in Switzerland has it's own specific words and almost every canton has it's own dialect so I wouldn't call them a language.

[0] [http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180627-switzerlands- myster...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180627-switzerlands-mysterious- fourth-language)

<comment><USER9> The article explicitly mentions St. Moritz (which you could call the epicenter of romansh) as a german speaking town.

<comment><USER8> That example raised my eyebrow as well while reading.

My guess is, that it's be most famous example city for the eastern parts, although for British people Klosters would be a known alternative as well, their cable car booth is name "Prince of Wales" and in the Prättigau they rarely speak Romansh

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it fascinating how mixing vocabulary and grammatical rules from two different languages can create something which is not understandable by speakers of only one of those language, especially when spoken fast.

In my circle of friends/family we're all bilingual french/english, so when speaking to eachother we tend to speak with a mix of both while conserving proper British and French prononciation. Sometimes conjugating English verbs in French and vice-versa. A normal sentence would be: "Je book a table et on se voit downtown". In an isolated society it would probably evolve into a creole, but our little pidgin will certainly die with us.

<comment><USER11> I do the same when I have to converse in 2 or more languages daily.

"On a besoin a room fuer zwei Personen por tres noches!" \-- me to the housekeeper in the Dominican Republic (she did not understand it, but we had a good laugh)

<comment><USER12> I love the fact that I can understand that even though I consider myself largely monolingual. The only word I had to look up was zwei though it is clear from context that it is a number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vincent-toups I lived in the Alsace region of France for awhile and there is a local dialect of German/French there called Alsatian. We used to ride our bikes down the Levee to a village called Le Wantzeneau and get the local version of Pizza from a food truck.

The language is, as I've suggested, a weird combination of both French and German, and it seems to be spoken through the nose somewhat. It reminded me a lot of Cajun French, which I heard a lot of as a kid.

I'm really for maintaining regional languages. I missed out on a Cajun French revival as a kid but I'm planning on sending my son down for immersion camp.

In an era where economies of scale are an overwhelming pressure on culture, maintaining a region's own weird language is kind of rebellion. It calls to mind the Cajun folk hero Dudley LeBlanc who skirted FDA regulation on his bullshit patent medicine (itself merely a way of bypassing the prohibition on alcohol sales) by advertising it on local Cajun French radio stations (which regulators had trouble understanding). Speaking multiple languages is anti- authoritarian!

</comment><comment><USER13> Somewhat similar: Citéduits, a nearly extinct German-Dutch mixed language spoken in the mining town of Eisden, Belgium: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoJGWUzjtd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoJGWUzjtd4) .

</comment><comment><USER14> tl;dr; in the historical city center of Fribourg, at the border between French and German speaking Switzerland, there are still a few speakers of a dialect originated in the 19th century that adds some French lexicon to the Swiss German dialect.

<comment><USER15> That's what I was thinking as well: a _dialect_. This isn't a language. There are _so_ many dialects in The Netherlands and Belgium, with different ancestors. Together with their accent they are part of a local region's history. However, the The Netherlands has only 2 official languages: Dutch and Frisian. The Frisian language is also an official language in Germany, and its spoken also in Denmark. See [1]. Zeelandic, however, spoken in the province of Zeeland (in the south-west of The Netherlands) is a dialect. It isn't an officially recognized language. The point being: this isn't unique to Switzerland. What is unique to Switzerland is it having _four_ official languages (German, French, Italian, Romansh), none of which is spoken _mainly in Switzerland_. Nowadays, due to migration and globalization, a country contains many spoken and written languages anyway. For example, in the city of Zaandam there is a large Portuguese community.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's plenty of other language in each canton (country subdivision). There would be like 20 languages at least if we count each modification of German, French, or Italien, each part of the canton use specific argot. I would not count Bolze has a language because of that. Like patois vaudois, patois fribourgeois, valaisan, etc.</comment>


iWatch - <AUTHOR> http://x4ab.tumblr.com/post/21254917204/iwatch

<comment><USER2> Am I the only person in the world that thinks Siri is overrated and not all that useful?

I did the "iWatch" idea, but having it act as a "second touchscreen" for the iDevice I'm using would be more than enough, imho (no need for voice commanding - I'd leave that for the scifi flicks)

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree, voice command would be perfect for iWatch. iWatch shouldn't be just a "second touchscreen", a user should be able to interact with it. And the best way to interact with a device that lacks sufficient screen real estate is by voice command. It'll take significantly less time to just talk into your watch than taking your phone out and typing on a virtual keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should look at Pebble: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e- paper...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch- for-iphone-and-android)

<comment><USER4> 3.4MM and 31 days left? This might be the new record.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is a great phenomenon and I am very happy with their success. Thanks to crowd funding sites like kickstarter, now hardware startups will be able to get more publicity and promising market condition even before massive production. But the point I'm trying to make in my post is not that Pebble is a failure. Of course not, they are very successful and I have nothing against them. All I am saying is that Apple won't allow Pebble to access their proprietary services like Siri and others. And without perfect sync with iPhone Pebble cannot win this "battle". Of course, I'm assuming my prediction of Apple turning Nano to iWatch will happen. And if I am an iPhone user and have a choice of choosing between Pebble and iWatch, I would go with iWatch. Wouldn't you? My post was inspired by this Smart Watch craziness and my thoughts on what Smart Watch should do. I had no intention of belittling Pebble's accomplishment or impact that Kickstarter is having in Hardware startup atmosphere.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Privacy Policy (copyright 2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-requests/ <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this...

I think it's interesting to consider Apple's claim that

"Less than 0.00673% of customers have been affected by government information requests"

Suppose that Apple is compelled to do everything in it's power to retrieve data from the San Bernadino cell phone...

Further, suppose that it yields information that provides information valuable to exposing the identities of other terrorists...

Does that change your opinion on this issue?

Just curious...issues examined from both sides often result in a comfortable consensus, sometimes not...?</comment>


Is "Gamification" the new assessment game changer? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.talview.com/is-gamification-the-new-assessment-game-changer <comment><USER2> I for one hate gamification in 99% of the cases and I am pretty young.

Why not focus on the core product and actually making the product faster, more resource efficient and more available instead? And if you have a lot of money just lying around, hire some people and create a really good customer support instead.

A prime example of this can be found at one of Swedens largest retailer stores: [https://www.webhallen.com/](https://www.webhallen.com/).

They have gamification which is actually quite good but they don't even have a mobile friendly website so there is no way to place an order from your mobile phone.

Therefore I nowadays place all my orders from one of their competitors that have that and focus more on good customer experience in form of service and availability ([https://www.inet.se/](https://www.inet.se/)).

I love boring software that just solves problems and do nothing more. I think most people actually do and values that a lot more than gamification. If I want to play a game, I will purchase a game.</comment>


The Man Against Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.chronicle.com/article/the-man-against-everything/238803 <comment><USER2> Kind of related, but does anybody have any links to essays/reading critiquing the whole assumedly-good concept of self-improvement?

<comment><USER3> You're begging the question (who is doing the assuming?), but in general you'll want to look into critical theory, perhaps beginning with Spinoza's TIE (an easy read). The point as I see it is to analyze what is meant by "self- improvement," and whether the choice of topics of things to improve about oneself involve an ideology that is irrelevant to the process of self- improvement. That is, whatever you become by improving on a specific item or topic involves a question of why that thing was chosen. This is what critical theory helps with. The Spinoza helps to construct a model of first principles.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply. Will look into it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> what's the tldr?

<comment><USER5> There isn't much of one, unfortunately.

Here's a guy, he wrote some things, they ask some questions and are hard to characterize.

Add some pretentious styling, call it an article.

<comment><USER4> lol, I stopped reading partway because I was afraid of that!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it illegal or unethical to build apps based on previous paid work? - <AUTHOR>

Is it illegal -- or simply unethical -- to work on a competing product in your free time to one that you developed at a previous job?
I was previously employed in a field other than programming. My official title was about as far away from engineering as one could get. However, being that it was a very small company that I worked for (less than 5 employees), when it got out that I could code, I started working on little projects here and there.
One of the projects ended up being rather useful. However, since programming was not my official role, getting time approved to actually work on it was very tricky to do. In short, the software was built to a point where it works, and they use it on a daily basis for their business, but due to time constraints, it never reached the point of what I thought it <i>could</i> be.
I've now switched jobs, but that little app still floats in the back of my mind. I want to built it into the useful tool that I know it could be. Obviously no code would be reused from the previous job. Do I risk any kind of legal trouble for doing so? <comment><USER2> IANAL - Do it.

You have specialist knowledge of a field that's led to you developing a solution for it. No reason why you should have to censor your potential to iterate further improvements for the human race, eh?

If you'd've been tied to them as a programmer, or had to sign some non-compete agreement, that'd be a different matter... but even then it'd only be a matter of time before you'd be allowed to carry on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless your using code that they have laid legal claim to by making you sign NDA's or "All your work is ours" sorts of contracts, you should be in the clear.

Just re-using the idea and no code? That's called experience.

<comment><USER4> Lets say you signed an "all your work is ours" contract...

...how about re-using a function, like a snippet that connects to a db, that could be found all over the internet?

I assume you could argue that snippet was in the public domain prior, but it could be an interesting conversation regardless...

<comment><USER5> Really, it's going to come down to how litigious your former employer is. I've heard of cases where a person was sued simply because the idea for the work came the previous job with the concept that you would have never even thought to do this code if the previous employer hadn't tasked you with the challenge.

As has already been said though. If you have any doubts, talk with a lawyer who specializes in Intellectual Property cases.

<comment><USER6> Gah! That sounds so ridiculous Law is so opaque, obscure, confounding, and downright obtuse that I sometimes wonder how it can still be _a thing_.

Soon we'll need lawyers to tell us what we can or can't do when we're writing a simple bash script.

I'm of the opinion that, if everything involved law, there'd be virtually no progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IANAL but I was in a similar situation (didn't end up going through with it) and did some research.

The technical answer is you are probably in the clear unless some part of the app's flow or design was "non-obvious", and obviously you can't re-use code.

The real answer is if your old company decides to sue you, you won't be able to pony up the money for lawyers to fight it. If you get huge before they figure out and sue you, then at best you have a crazy expensive settlement on your hands.

Don't do it. ideas are dime a dozen, why not pick one that doesn't have strings?

</comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR - Only a lawyer can really answer that.

That said, it really depends on what's in your employment contract, either explicitly or implied. Definitely start completely from scratch (use none of the code or even notes you wrote while an employee), but the other IP around this is where it gets tricky. Every jurisdiction has it's own subtleties.

It's also important to note that in many places (you didn't say where you are) you could be sued even if they don't really have a case, forcing you to spend the time and money to defend yourself.

</comment><comment><USER9> Depends for what your clients pay you for. My clients pay me for my time, not the code. I have used code written in my own time for client projects and I have used code written for a client for another client's project.

I also do some custom work for customers of our saas and I always tell them that the code I write for them is non-exclusive which means I get to re-use the code and resell it. I estimate nearly 80% of the app has been created that way including almost all the add-ons.

</comment><comment><USER10> Most stuff is based on previous work, whether paid or unpaid. Denying that is claiming you can build a wall without laying a brick upon the other, and asking people to mimick a red fish.

It's impossible to do, because it's impossible not to use a solution you know of to the problem at hand. Not to mention it's stupid.

There's a reason for the expression "Not reinventing the wheel" to exist. I mean, what's experience if not building something based on previous work ?</comment>


No Jobs? Young Graduates Make Their Own - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/business/12yec.html

<comment><USER2> My wife and I were in a similar situation when we graduated college - she had a degree in agriculture development and I had a degree in information systems. Back in 1999, we couldn't have had two farther apart career paths - agriculture in small towns and technology in the major cities.

Instead, we decided to create our own jobs and blend our skills together. The result was several agriculture software programs that have been sold in over 55 countries. This business has been our main source of income for the last 10 years and allowed us both to work from home and raise our family.

Living near College Station, TX (home of Texas A&M University), I volunteer to work with students often and am seeing more and more students that want a financially rewarding and satisfying career while maintaining a lifestyle balance. In many cases, entrepreneurship offers the best chance of achieving this goal as you are in a position to decide which opportunities you pursue and which you pass.

<comment><USER3> Very encouraging story and congratulations. Just out of curiosity, what does agriculture software do?

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the compliments.

Today it's primarily my wife (support & some marketing) and me (development & marketing) running the business and we have two home-based support reps. Our main product is a cattle software program that lets ranchers keep track of their cattle including information such as breeding, calving, purchases & sales, medical treatments, pedigree/lineage, etc. Once they have recorded this information, it helps them make management decisions so they can be more profitable. Our website is at <http://www.CattleMax.com>.

<comment><USER4> A rancher once attempted to hire me to develop a replacement for CattleMax. He wanted to pay me the cost of a CattleMax install. You are safe from competition (from me).

<comment><USER5> A rancher once attempted to hire me to build additional things on top of CattleMax, so that he could implement performance based pay for his milkers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't particularly like the way this article covered the topic, but it's probably just sour grapes because I wasn't included in it. I did exactly what they're talking about, so here's my story on how it happened and how long it has taken to actually be a suitable replacement for a job.

I graduated in December '05 (a semester early) from an Ivy League school with a degree in Industrial and Labor Relations. I had interned in HR for two summers with a company that I was really excited about. Because of relationships I developed there, I had multiple job offers, even though I didn't go through the on campus recruiting process. Fortunately, during my internships, I realized that HR wasn't for me (I'm sure the HN community can understand that). After committing most of my college years towards pursing a career in HR, I felt a little lost when I decided that I wanted to something—anything—else. I felt a pull towards entrepreneurship, but I didn't even know the startup world existed when I graduated.

So, I took a contract job for a few months while I stayed on campus for the Spring semester. Then I moved back in with my parents and took some time off to "think." And some more time off. And then a little more. (I also had a girlfriend who was still in school, which played a part in my unwillingness to commit to a job. We're still together, so I'm happy with my decision to ) When I finally started searching for a job, I realized that I didn't really want one. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I had no idea, no experience, and no clue of what was possible. So I looked for jobs that might prepare me for entrepreneurship in the future.

From December of '06 to May of '07 I committed myself to searching for jobs, while I also spent time learning about industries that interested me. I landed a decent number of interviews, but nobody wanted to hire me. I think that they could smell my bad attitude, and they also figured that someone with a résumé as good as mine but still on the job market after a year must have something seriously wrong with him. I was in a rut, my girlfriend and parents were losing patience with me, and I was extremely unhappy. I just wanted to be a productive part of society.

I had wasted most of what I had going for me when I graduated, so I decided that the only way that I could "get it back" was to start my own business. Luckily, by May of '07 I had been job searching long enough to know how broken the job search process is for grads who didn't have a clear idea of what career path they wanted to pursue.

After learning about Woot.com, I came up with the idea of one job a day, and I took things from there. I learned everything that I could about online recruitment, and I started building my site and my business. I had built websites in the past, but I pretty much had to start over. My parents were still supporting me to some extent, but I decided that I'd only use my own savings. The idea of taking money from someone else to start my business seemed ridiculous to me.

Oddly enough, I landed an interview with a startup in the job search space just as I was starting my company. I was surprised to learn that CEO would be interviewing me, and he didn't seem to like it when I told him that I was in the process of building a startup in the same space. (I needed to tell him something about how I spent the previous year.) He kind of got angry at me, and I obviously didn't get the job. Three and a half years later, his company's ad platform is one of my main revenue sources.

So, I started One Day, One Job - <http://www.onedayonejob.com> \- in late May of '07 and launched it in November of '07. I had to bail on the idea of selling daily job postings, and I instead decided to write about them from an editorial standpoint. It was the only way that I could build an audience without selling aggressively with nothing to sell.

After two years the company was "profitable." Three and half years in, I'm finally making enough money to cover all of my personal expenses. If things keep up, next year should be great. I get calls from VCs occasionally, and I've had multiple acquisition offers. More importantly, I've reached hundreds of thousands of college students and helped quite a few of them do what I couldn't—land an exciting job straight out of college.

I made a lot of friends who were doing the same thing along the way. Most of them failed and eventually used their experience to land a full-time job. I stuck things out, and it's finally starting to pay off. I couldn't have done it without a supportive girlfriend and family—I guess they're my "investors."

To make a long story short, I'm a graduate who made his own job. The added twist is that my job is helping other people with their job search. Maybe that makes me like the people who make money teaching people how to make money. I often get called a "job search expert," but I'm really just an entrepreneur who uses the lessons he's learned from starting a business to teach job seekers how to improve their approach.

I wouldn't say that creating your own job is as much of a trend as the Times makes it out to be, but there are people like me who have made it work. Missing out on a salary for 3 years is really hard, even if you know deep down that the equity you're building is valuable. The quickest return on investment is in the form of experience. Even after a year of running my business, I knew that if I quit I could have jumped into much better job opportunities than I could have right after I graduated.

I'd certainly recommend creating your own job to any graduate who isn't happy with his or her options, but I'd also make it clear that it can take a long time to make it work—and for many it never does.

</comment><comment><USER7> Slate has a weekly segment on the New York Time's bogus trend of the week (<http://www.slate.com/id/2259817/>). Not 100% sure that this is the case, but this article didn't really ring true to me for two reasons:

1) All of my friends majoring in engineering or CS or anything tech are already deciding between multiple job offers all over the country. AFAI can tell there is a huge shortage of qualified candidates for tech positions; at least companies are recruiting heavily at my somewhat well known state school. I have talked to friends in other disciplines and it is definitely harder for them- but they are usually the ones much less interested in entrepreneurship as well.

2) While I see a much higher level of enthusiasm for entrepreneurship in general, I really don't see any higher level of students taking the plunge and actually doing it. Most people (like me) are deciding that given the high cost of college and their lack of savings/debt the prudent thing is to save as much as possible by working. Again- those who are considering entrepreneurship tend to be tech students with job offers they are turning down, not turning to as a last resort.

In short, the recession seems to either be ending, or just not particularly relevant for people with tech degrees, and I would obviously love there to be a ton more students diving into entrepreneurship when they graduate, but I think the trend is overstated in the media.

<comment><USER8> There are lots of opportunities for non-tech people to be entrepreneurial online. The internet's made it much easier to sell products and services at virtually no cost, it doesn't matter if your a designer or a drop-shipper, the tech is mostly prebuilt and out there for you to just use.

As tech entrepreneurs we should be figuring out what's stopping non-tech entrepreneurs starting their own business in their area of expertise/passion and figuring out how to build the tech that will enable them to do so !

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Those hitting the access wall can access NYT articles through Google News, by doing a search for the headline: [http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&...](http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=No+Jobs%3F+Young+Graduates+Make+Their+Own)

<comment><USER10> ... Or by registering for free and signing in. You won't have to do anything else until you delete your cookies or change computers/browsers.

<comment><USER11> Use BugMeNot.com so you won't need to register either!

<comment><USER10> Until they delete the account and you have to go through the hassle again. I find it much easier to just register and log-in once per browser.

<comment><USER11> They show the success rate, the first one worked for me, and actually NYT is one of the most popular on their list of sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This behavior harks back to an older time when people similarly had little choice but to start their own businesses or work freelance. For the past 50-100 years, in urban areas being independent or an entrepreneur has looked like a lifestyle choice given how many jobs were available, but now it's become a necessity again, just like it used to be. I'm not sure this is a bad thing at all.

</comment><comment><USER13> Somehow my belief regarding statistics numbers (such as unemployment) that came out from the government has declined year-to-year.

On the other hand, this article is an eye-opener that software is becoming a commodity for certain segment of business.

</comment><comment><USER14> As in "No Jobs? A handful of young graduates, less than 5%, make their own".</comment>


The Sound of the Sun - <AUTHOR> http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/mediacentre/2010/1662.html

<comment><USER2> I oddly enjoy this.

Anywhere to get longer versions of the Sun's "sound" that are also free of any copy protection? (Sounds odd, I know the sun doesn't copyright it's own sound, but not sure if somehow those going through the trouble to "record" it can?)

</comment><comment><USER3> Make sure your speaker volume isn't on 10 before watching the video, that was terrifying.</comment>


Airborne Wind Energy Company Closes Shop, Opens Patents - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/exclusive-airborne-wind-energy-company-closes-shop-opens-patents <comment><USER2> A couple of cool things:

This was a cool idea. I first read about airborne wind power generators back during the great commodity price spike in 2005 - 2007.

(The technology/experience might be useful for setting up a base in Venus's upper atmosphere, one day.)

It's also cool that other wind generation and PV prices have fallen so far that this idea can't compete any more.

</comment><comment><USER3> A tragedy. It was an interesting tech that could have been useful elsewhere. It wasn't just a "what if we put solar panels in a road" scam.

Hopefully the military will take it up. Use it for high altitude platforms or something. Keep it in development.

To release the patents, and the doco and the books and the simulator for free is pretty amazing.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone built a cabin before? Advice? - <AUTHOR> Thinking about building a modified A-Frame cabin on a plot of land. Doing most of the work myself, with contractors for the toughest parts. Anyone done it before? Costs? Advice?<p>Would be great to hear about your experience. <comment><USER2> My opinion is that sadly in 2020, most local governments will make it very difficult for you to comply with the building rules if your goal is a house that is anything different from what a "normal" house is.

Like the other commenter suggested, try with a shed, or even better, try making a tabletop model of your cabin with all the measurements and cutting scaled down from your ultimate goal.

If you do find a place to build, then great! But most likely it would be occuring in an area so far outside of town that it would be a very different life from suburb living.

Though I do know of a few people who made a house within a house....

<comment><AUTHOR> I was hoping to sell the local government on it being a green building somehow, or something else that might motivate them to help with the building codes. Perhaps reaching out to universities within the region.

I think I'd like to try the tabletop model idea. I plan on having it be a second home / AirBnB spot.

<comment><USER3> It depends on the governing municipalities. Portland allows tiny homes on wheels [[https://www.portlandoregon.gov/eudaly/article/662852](https://www.portlandoregon.gov/eudaly/article/662852)] on property so depending on where you are located it might be allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ever built anything? done a major remodel? practice first by building a shed in your backyard. you don't want your cabin to be your first rodeo.

most important is learning to hire quality subs. very very hard if you're not a GC in the biz.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I'll try starting with a tabletop model as the other poster suggested.

Any thoughts on acquiring the land? I was told getting in touch with a realtor local to the area would be a good start.

<comment><USER5> You'll want to still take his shed building advice. Building a tabletop model will not give you the carpentry experience needed to build a cabin. At all.

You can also volunteer for your local variant of Habitats for Humanity but it's inefficient and it's more herding cats than carpentry. Still you might make some connections and someone may allow you to ride under their wing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it really that difficult? I'm imagine there are things I am missing, but isn't it pretty much: build foundation, build floor, build frame, build out roof, build walls, etc.?

As long as I research, do proper leveling, cutting, etc. and follow along with other builds' process, I am thinking I will be fine. Would be great to hear where I might be wrong though so I don't sink money into a failed build.

<comment><USER6> Yes, unless you have prior experiences, it is that hard. I agree with the others here who recommend you build an on-site tool/storage shed as practice. And no, it's not just about building foundations, floors, walls etc. You will need to consider how to rough-in for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, etc. as part of the build. Your wall-framing techniques have to take into consideration things like openings for doors, windows, and even how you will hang sheetrock.

Your biggest hurdle is probably going to be the permitting/inspection processes, assuming you want a legally habitual dwelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed there, I know not to mess with plumbing, electric, and/or heating myself. Was debating going with spray on insulation done professionally, although I understand costs will rise the more I hire contractors.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Compressing text using AI by sending only prediction rank of next word - <AUTHOR>

   Is there any effort made to compress text (and maybe other media) using prediction of next word and thus sending only the order number of the word/token which will be predicted on the client-side
   i.e

   SERVER TEXT: This is an example of a long text example, custom word flerfom inserted to confuse, that may appear on somewhere
   COMPRESSED TEXT TRANSMITTED: This [choice no 3] [choice no 4] [choice no 1] [choice no 6] [choice no 1] [choice no 3] [choice no 1], custom word flerfom inserted [choice no 4] confuse [choice no 5] [choice no 4] [choice no 6] [choice no 5] on somewhere
   (Note: of course [choice no 3] will be shortened to [3] to save bytes and also maybe we can do much better in some cases by sending the first letter of the word)
   of course it means that the client side neural network has to be static or only updated in a predictable fasion, so the server knows for sure that the client neural network's predictions will follow the given choice orders. I tried example with https://demo.allennlp.org/next-token-lm, but the prediction is not that good. maybe gpt-3 can do better . but its too heavy for use in a normal pc / mobile device
 <comment><USER2> Fabrice Bellard has done some work on this - [https://bellard.org/textsynth/sms.html](https://bellard.org/textsynth/sms.html)</comment>


New Flexibility at Music Labels Aims to Help Web Start-Ups Thrive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/technology/start-ups/28music.html?hpw <comment><USER2> First they sue you, then they partner with you, then you win.</comment>


Saucelabs/kioskwm – minimalist window manager for kiosks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/saucelabs/kioskwm <comment><USER2> Looks interesting, this can be useful for a project I am trying to build.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could be a good educational tool thanks to the simplicity. I encourage you to add more comment here and there.

Kudos.</comment>


Study produces 3D images that float - <AUTHOR> https://news.byu.edu/news/better-hologram-byu-study-produces-3d-images-float-thin-air <comment><USER2> Another method is to use a high-powered pulsed laser to create little balls of plasma in mid-air: [https://www.popsci.com/secret-interactive-holograms- plasma-a...](https://www.popsci.com/secret-interactive-holograms-plasma-and- femtosecond-laser)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, the plasma-balls one's from 2015!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I feel like I've seen reports of research demonstration with near future commercial possibility in this field every couple years since sometime in the mid-1990s.

<comment><USER4> That's the reporting. Ideally researchers should just say "we did this." But then they need continued funding so they like to say "we did this and we believe with more research the commercial possibilities are promising." And then reporters hear this all and say "the Star Wars display is here now, and soon you'll have Princess Leia in your living room."

Honestly I feel like the best solution is just to train everyone critical thinking skills but I guess in practice that doesn't seem to happen.

<comment><USER5> There are lots of ways to make star wars holograms that are much more accessible than this. With our new depth sensors and some other really stupid tricks you can achieve that. There's a reason Apple is hiring like crazy for AR designers. We are pretty closer to in that future.

If you're looking for the bleeding edge of what's here now, RED[1] the camera company is putting out a hologram cell phone probably like next month I guess with a hologram display from a company literally called leia[2].

[1][https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/8/16272838/re...](https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/8/16272838/red- hydrogen-one-holographic-display-leia)

[2][http://www.leiadisplay.com/](http://www.leiadisplay.com/)

<comment><USER6> From the FAQ:

> Is LEIA a hologram?

> Leia makes it possible to project an image in the air – an image through > which you can put your hand or walk but it's not a 3D projection. The image > is flat and thus does not meet the criteria of the hologram definition.

So what is it?

<comment><USER5> When you really get into spatial imaging, splitting hairs on definition is really important. To the layman, it's basically what you think of as a hologram. Holography is a photographic record of a light field. Leia might be more accurately described as a spatialized parallax display. With a light field you would be able to infinitely change your depth focus to any item in the volume because the entire light field is captured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really clever, from a design perspective. I mean, projecting onto a moving particle is a really innovative idea. But scientifically, what I find the most surprising, is that a laser trap can move a particle around at sufficient speeds, outside a vacuum, without losing it. Impressive! I had no idea that was possible. Anyone know what speed or frequency of movement it can achieve?

<comment><USER8> Judging from my experience with other well-polished PR pieces from universities, I would expect only the "oscillating above the finger tips" parts to be real time. The more advanced examples were only shown statically and thus were probably like long-shutter images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've seen this in operation and am acquainted with the researchers. I may be able to attempt to answer some questions about it.

<comment><USER2> Awesome achievement! This really looks like a viable way of true floating 3D-images.

Can you levitate multiple particles at the same time? How fast are they moving? How sensitivie is it to disturbances in the air?

<comment><USER9> > Can you levitate multiple particles at the same time?

Yes, but their device currently is only capable of levitating a single particle. With the current approach, the device would need one laser for confining each particle. The lasers used for RGB could potentially be multiplexed between particles, but this is less likely to work for the confinement due to the instability of the trap.

> How fast are they moving?

Pretty slow. All the "big" images (Leia, grad student, etc) are long-exposure. You can see the particle moving in real-time at about 0:50. In the videos, you can see the device can almost do real-time persistence of vision for volumes substantially smaller than a fingertip.

> How sensitive is it to disturbances in the air?

As I mentioned above, the confinement is weak and the trap is pretty unstable. Its possible that they have improved the longevity of the trap in the last few months, but when doing long-exposure the device is surrounded by a heavy cloth barrier to block both external light and air movement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For now, they created a single pixel by trapping one particle (not sure what it's made of) and beaming different colors on it.

Depending on when they managed to trap two particles, we can start applying Moore's law and double it every so often.

<comment><USER11> It sounds to me like they move the particle around and use persistence of vision to make an image.

<comment><USER12> Kind of like CTR displays but in 3D.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Humans cannot discern images at rates faster than 10 per second

If the PCMR folks already hate everyone saying the human eye sees at 25FPS, imagine how they'd react to that!

<comment><USER14> I have to admit my first reaction to that was "and yet 60fps is apparently too slow for VR".

But I think they might have been talking about how long the trail would persist for in our vision, making it appear as one object when it goes in circles. Not how quickly you can flash images in front of us before we won't be able to see them. I'm not sure if it's true in that case.

<comment><USER15> VR is not about image perception, but image reaction. The important part is how long it takes from you providing input to the input reaction being perceived by you. The latency between that. And given a sufficiently huge sample size (interacting with VR is many minutes of nothing but samples) a human can very easily discern this latency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it interesting that people with such a large variety of world views (Mormons, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, etc.) can all produce groundbreaking advances in science, math, and engineering.

Pick any two of those aforementioned groups, and you'll find plenty of members from one who consider the other's members to have unfathomably bad reasoning and common-sense skills. And yet, somehow, some members of all those groups bear wonderful intellectual fruit.

<comment><USER17> Maybe because most questions about life are 'why?' questions and not 'how?' questions.

<comment><USER18> Minus, say, "how did we get here" or "how should we behave?"

Or another way to look at it, we could reduce almost all questions, in science or religion, to something like "what is the nature of this stuff around me?"

A subpart, "how can I interact with the stuff?" A subpart of that question, in turn, is "what are the consequences of those interactions?"

Sometimes the stuff around you is carbon. You can burn it or build things with it. If you breathe enough of it in certain forms, you might suffocate.

Sometimes the stuff around you is other people. You can help them or hurt them in a near endless variety of ways. The consequences are complex but it's generally better to not be a dick, for a variety of reasons.

Maybe the stuff around you is... all of reality? Which may or may not be controlled by a unimaginably powerful law giver. Maybe not, but if so, that would certainly affect the consequences of a lot of actions, so it would be worth trying to work out how that system worked if that was the deal.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for Pascal's wager here, I'm just needling the idea of non overlapping magisteria.

Isn't it all just, "How does reality work?"

<comment><USER19> I hadn't heard of non overlapping magisteria (NOMA) before.

My immediate thought was that if you assume the 'teaching domains' of science and religion do not overlap at all, then the domain of religion is vanishingly small.

If you accept that science covers (at least) all observable things, and also hold the idea of NOMA, then religion must never deal with anything observable. The teaching domain of the unobservable seems like it would be near non- existent.

Alternately, let's start from the position that a supernatural power exists and cares about what we do. Why would we be interested in that? We would be interested if that supernatural power has the ability to affect our lives/the world we live in, or will affect our lives after we die/some other aspect of some supernatural world beyond this one.

If the power can affect this world, we should be able to observe that interaction. If it is literally impossible to measure any effect, it is the same as if the power is not interacting with the world at all. Which is to say, if the power interacts with the world, then those interactions fall under the domain of science.

If the power does not interact with the world, then we can only be interested in what effect our actions, choices, and beliefs will have outside this world, on the supernatural or afterlife. The thing is, we have no way of knowing what that would be, because communicating any of that information to us would count as interacting with the world.

Thus, anyone claiming that something should or shouldn't be believed or done, for religious reasons, is either making a testable claim or claiming something which has no reason to be believed.

If the magesteria of science and religion truly are non overlapping, it seems that religion's must necessarily be very very small.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> HN title: "Holograms are here"

Actual title: "Better than a hologram: BYU study produces 3D images that float in 'thin air'"

Article text: "First things, first, Smalley says. The image of Princess Leia is not what people think it is: It's not a hologram."

Can we not editorialize and/or get the titles completely wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually a hologram - which is by definition a 3D image. I contend that my original title is appropriate. Holograms ARE volumetric displays. I can see why the researcher wouldn't want to call it that - claim you invented something better than science fiction = instant media coverage.

hol·o·gram noun A three-dimensional image formed by the interference of light beams from a laser or other coherent light source.

<comment><USER21> As indicated by your definition, the 3d-effect of a hologram arises from _interference_ of a coherent light source. In the display that is shown in the video, the 3d-effect arises from light-emission (scattering) of a point source that moves around. The light from the point source need not be coherent for this display to work! Therefore, the term "hologram" seems inappropriate.

I have never seen a hologram that is also a volumetric display. To me, this would be the holy grail of hologramming, since you could use interference for occlusion effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Kind of funny title given that the speaker says several times in video that it's NOT a hologram

<comment><USER9> Nonetheless, everybody calls the displays in Star Wars "holograms". Smalley notes this, and the title is using the word in this colloquial sense. There is an unfortunate disconnect between the technical and colloquial meanings of "hologram".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16225854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16225854)

47+ points

Actual title of _this_ submit was "Better than a hologram: BYU study produces 3D images that float in 'thin air'"

</comment><comment><USER24> "The future won't be the future without a Princess Leia projector".

Love.

</comment><comment><USER25> Great _another_ medium from which failed reality stars can convince an increasingly stupid public to vote for.

Edit: This is funny, no one was a sense of humor. Just imagine Donald Trump's holographic head spinning slowly while he gives the state of the union. That's the future.

<comment><USER26> Please don't post unsubstantive comments or add political flamebait into HN threads.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Edit: you've posted a ton of unsubstantive comments and we've asked you before to stop, so would you please stop? We're hoping for higher discussion quality here.

<comment><USER25> I guess I could've framed it differently, but I think it's pretty high quality stuff idk.</comment></comment></comment>