Writer Unblock - <AUTHOR> https://scriptspry.com/writerunblock/ <comment><USER3> A few years ago I wrote The Most Dangerous Writing App. It's been acquired since, but the open-source version still has a "hardcore mode" very similar to this, where you only see the last letter you typed: [https://maebert.github.io/themostdangerouswritingapp/](https://maebert.github.io/themostdangerouswritingapp/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The irony about these "distraction free writing" projects is that I'd bet the majority of them are created by people procrastinating when they could be writing.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've made a project that incentivize people to write every day by planting a tree on their behalf for every day they write a certain word count. I made it because I think too many apps try to keep writers writing by punishing them, and I want to try positive reinforcement instead. Unfortunately I don't think that works.

Writer's block is a real thing. As least it seems to me like one. There's no trick to bypass it every time. It's like fighting common cold: it's painful, but it will pass eventually.

You will continue to write if you haven't given up by the time inspiration strikes. It's a test of persistence, really.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes, you just need to put down your thoughts with out the fear of someone looking at what you are writing, or with out your editor bugging you about all the typos you are making or with your eyes closed and give control to your fingers to put down what thoughts run in your head.

Can do away with the internet too, if a data url can be crafted with this html and bookmarked.

Happy unstucking!

<comment><USER6> Link to this:

data:text/html;base64,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

<comment><AUTHOR> Added a neat "hack" instead to set the href of a link dynamically.

'data:text/html;base64,' \+ btoa(document.documentElement.outerHTML)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My personal favorite writing unblocker isn't a piece of software - it's cannabis use. Writer's block is arguably technically a form of anxiety - <USER2> yes it is possible (speaking from personal experience) to be prescribed medical marijuana for writer's block. Of course, YMMV depending on what state you're in.

<comment><USER8> I'd prefer it if people didn't advocate drug use for productivity or creativity or performance gains.

<comment><USER7> I hear you but I specifically am advocating for cannabis use in a medicinal way for anxiety reducing gains - which I suppose could be construed as performance gains. Nowhere did I advocate that it increases productivity or creativity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a white content-editable <p>, for anyone trying to figure it out.

<comment><USER9> There are plenty of other minimalist text editors, so I'd say this is a one- day-hack kind of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why don't use pen and paper

</comment><comment><USER11> I rarely see halfway decent "Show HN" style posts, people seem to prefer amateur hour stuff in that category instead. Why?

Recently we had the uninspired Pickle Rick "terminal" someone made in four minutes and then an allegedly multiplayer game called Space Frigates. It was astonishing to see people upvote and praise Space Frigates one after the other despite it being broken, full of bugs, and completely unplayable. To test my theory I posted a link to microgravity.io which is an actual polished and working browser multiplayer space game created by two bored teenagers, objectively much more inspiring content because if kids can do that then just imagine what you can do if you put in the effort? Yet it only received 3 upvotes while Space Frigates received 180.

Is this because people can relate more emotionally to someone who makes depressingly little progress on a side project? Or is the first step more exciting to witness than the end result? Or what?

<comment><USER7> I think if the teenagers themselves came and showed HN their microgravity game, it'd be better received.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best book for every topic - <AUTHOR> I recently came across a book that I would have never thought I would enjoy. It's a book on men fashion that is supposed to be THE book (Dressing the man). As I love learning about every topic I can (my name here must tell you something, philomath), I was wondering if people could, for their fields of expertise, share the one and only book that you should read to learnabout that topic.
Examples would be:
- Building a house
- Cooking
And I hope, many many others <comment><USER2> I'm no expert, but I've gotten a lot out of 'A History of Greek Philosophy' by W.K.C Guthrie, especially volume 3 dealing with Socrates and the Sophists [0]. In one of the later volumes he responds to a criticism that it was too difficult for beginners but too easy for experts, by saying that if that's the case, he had hit his mark: students.

[0] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/301430.A_History_of_Gree...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/301430.A_History_of_Greek_Philosophy_3?from_search=true)</comment>


Waffle House closes 365 locations across the U.S. - <AUTHOR> https://www.wafb.com/2020/03/24/waffle-house-closes-locations-across-us/ <comment><USER2> Waffle House is so good. I was on a road trip between New Orleans and Atlanta and stopped at a Waffle House in the middle of Alabama. Biggest surprise in terms of expectations and food quality. It's like the In-n-out of breakfast food.

<comment><USER3> The hash browns are amazing.

They are usually open 24 hours and there are reasons why we have a _Waffle House Index._

Previously on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15105662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15105662)

<comment><USER4> I highly recommend either smothered and covered or all the way. They're one of my favorite eateries, and working the grill for a short stint is on my bucket list to buy a few shares of stock to frame on the wall (their stock is private and can only be bought by employees).

<comment><USER5> I thought if too many different people bought a stock, you had to make it public. Is that true? How do they keep their stock private?

<comment><USER4> It's a good question. I don't have access to their ESOP docs, all I know is there's about 10 million shares outstanding. More research required on my part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of these articles announcing closings don't make it clear whether it's temporary or permanent. This one is no exception.

While I would assume it's temporary, I'm confused why this is front page on HN. Several businesses are closing temporarily due to Coronavirus. Not sure why this is news.

Unless these are permanent closings, which would be (sad) news indeed.

<comment><USER7> It's news because, as pointed out by a number of other comments, Waffle House is notorious for staying open even in dire circumstances.

<comment><USER8> I bet the wafflers are making a disaster plan for pandemics and they will be ready to come back soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> OK, _now_ we're fucked[1].

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

<comment><USER10> > to determine the effect of a storm

<comment><USER11> "Hurricane" Corona, based on projections, is estimated to claim more lives in FL than all other hurricanes combined.

Could be hype or truth, but both storms and pandemics require lots of prep and recovery.

<comment><USER12> I always thought Florida would take the brunt due to its demographics, but then the casual attitude towards Spring break strengthened that thought. Do you have a link to that projection?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On international waffle day, of all days!

[https://nationaltoday.com/international-waffle- day/](https://nationaltoday.com/international-waffle-day/)

<comment><USER14> damn, that's dark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Before today, the record number of Waffle House closures at one time was 107 (Hurricane Katrina, 2005)

</comment><comment><USER16> We need a map of the locations.

</comment><comment><USER17> Waffle house is delicious, but they've got a lot of locations around the country. so I think they'll be fine

<comment> mark-r I don't think they have any left in Minnesota anymore. They closed the one closest to me at least a year ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just saw that comment today, and now this. Things are going downhill fast.</comment>


Job ads are a valid indicator of programming language acceptance - <AUTHOR> http://bloodredsun.com/2011/11/22/job-ads-valid-indicator-industry-acceptance/

<comment><USER2> popularity == popularity. fascinating.</comment>


Haunted by [big] Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXLHM-1Psk <comment><AUTHOR> I stumbled across this talk, and it really left an impression, although I'm just a humble web developer.

At the end of the presentation, he talks about sampling and using transient data, rather than storing and mining it. Are there any academical papers that support his statement, that a little fresh data is better than a lot of it, with a big chunk being "stale"? What's your experience?</comment>


Show HN : My week-end application, MovieWall.org (Angular.js stack) - <AUTHOR> http://moviewall.org

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using TheMovieDatabase[1] to fetch movie data (I made a tiny little Angular service and I inject it into my controllers). It's a very nice API with a clean documentation.

I have only two vendors : Angular itself and Require.js. The later is not mandatory, but I like being able to split my code into multiple files[2].

Assets compilation is done by Grunt. The code is hinted and optimized with r.js, so it makes it easy for mobile to download the application, which is very lightweight (excluding Angular, 300 significant js loc).

[1] [http://docs.themoviedb.apiary.io/](http://docs.themoviedb.apiary.io/)

[2] [http://moviewall.org/sources/application.js](http://moviewall.org/sources/application.js) etc

<comment><USER2> You may want to fix the double scrollbar(vertical).

<comment><AUTHOR> Which browser do you use ? I've just fixed a box-sizing issue with Firefox

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice project ! ;)</comment>


Wisconsin may force colleges to buy private Internet, withdraw from Internet2 - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/plan-would-force-u-of-wisconsin-to-return-39-million-in-u-s-broadband-grants/31618

<comment><USER2> "Bill Esbeck, executive director of the Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association, was quoted on Channel3000 saying that WiscNet should be allowed to run only without financial support from the University of Wisconsin."

This man speaks sense. Why throw away all the money already invested in this? I can only imagine that someone has a stake in the other internet service providers in the area and wants to increase their profits.

As for the $39million in grants... Taking them back after granting them is playing foul. Especially as they've apparently already spent some of the money. How are they supposed to trust grants when they can be pulled out from under them at any time? It's going to lead to stupidity like putting grants in the bank until they're sure the grant won't be stolen back, instead of using the grant to improve education.

<comment><USER3> I think you've misread the part about the grants. Its not that they're being taken back, its that the state law would prohibit the state university from undertaking the actions the federal grants are for. Since the university can't undertake the actions the money was given for, it must return the money. Any money already spent towards the grant goals would, I suspect, need not be returned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This state continues to follow the Ned Ludd (Luddite) model, I can only hope that they all meet the same result.</comment>


Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations

<comment><USER2> Well, maybe. Unless they have some kind of faster-than-light technology, they won't even know what we're up to for years, decades or even centuries, depending on the distances involved. And decades or centuries more for them to come here and start bashing on us, by which time we'll either have gone extinct or developed advanced technologies with which to defend ourselves, and/or fixed the environmental problems that attracted them in the first place.

Although, the whole idea is rather preposterous in the first place. Aliens might have a totally different idea of a friendly ecosystem -- 800 degrees C, 100x the pressure, atmosphere of pure methane, etc. I mean, is there a galactic standard for "green"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably the standard is to maintain the ecosystem, currently there are many species that will go extinct, the ecosystem is out of balance.

Our understanding of travel through space is limited by our understanding of the universe, a century ago nobody believed that we will land on the moon.

A few centuries ago we used horsemen to send messages, now we use radio waves, maybe also radio is something primitive to advanced civilizations, who knows what we will discover, quantum entanglement for example looks promising.</comment></comment>


Quickly identifying a sequence of digits in a string of characters - <AUTHOR> https://lemire.me/blog/2018/09/30/quickly-identifying-a-sequence-of-digits-in-a-string-of-characters/ <comment><USER2> SWAR approaches are pretty awesome. They are the poor man's SIMD, and are even useful in combination with SIMD: especially on GPU where you often don't have byte or 16-bit operations in the first place: you can "roll your own" with SWAR rather than just extending every element to 32-bits.

I recommend the classic bithacks page: [https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html](https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html) as a good source, once you work your way through a few of these examples the basic approaches (using carries to check multiple bits, using multiplications as broadcasts, using shits as mini-lookup tables, etc) become clear.</comment>


Improving DuckDuckGo - <AUTHOR> https://improving.duckduckgo.com/ <comment><USER2> > At DuckDuckGo, we do not collect or share any personal information.

> These requests are anonymous and the information is used only by us to > improve our products.

There are some philosophical questions here, like: What information is personal information? What information is personally identifying information? What information can be made into personally identifying information, even if it's not personally identifying in its raw form?

Maybe DuckDuckGo is really genuine about protecting its users' privacy. But if it is at all possible for the information it collects -- even if ostensibly anonymous -- to be used to fingerprint users, then regardless of whether DuckDuckGo intends to fingerprint users, there's a vector there that some other party (government, hacker, or otherwise) might try to leverage. I'm not saying it would be worth their time to do so. But it would be nice if DuckDuckGo were to either affirm or deny that the data it collects could conceivably be used for fingerprinting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to the related Help Article

[https://help.duckduckgo.com/privacy/atb/](https://help.duckduckgo.com/privacy/atb/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Link is dead for me

</comment><comment><USER5> I love DDG, but the country specific search simply doesn't work, which is a shame.

</comment><comment><USER6> ?</comment>


Say Goodbye to Mixpanel. Meet Banias - <AUTHOR> https://blog.doit-intl.com/say-goodbye-to-mixpanel-meet-banias-12e09fecc44a <comment><USER2> Thank you! This is going to save us so much time

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool stuff. the code looks amazing!

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent sulotion!</comment>


Homebrew 1.1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://brew.sh/2016/11/07/homebrew-1.1.0/ <comment><USER2> I'm going to ditto the positive comments. Kudos to the maintainers - not just for the package itself but for growing it. They successfully went from a hacky page with some scripts, to a big giant repository, to multiple repos, to a fully fledged mature best-practices package manager for macOS with all the bells and whistles.

The sign of a great project isn't just that it does one thing well, but that it grows with the needs of the users and engages with them to constantly make something better without falling prey to bloat. And by that measure, Homebrew gets a gold star.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words. You'd be surprised how motivating they are. <3

<comment><USER4> Thanks so much! Without homebrew I'd probably end up going back to Linux.

<comment><USER5> Same here. It's a bother to use a computer without apt-get or homebrew.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Homebrew maintainers are doing a fantastic job, made my life as a developer so much easier! I wanna use this opportunity to "publicly" thank them!

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Homebrew has saved countless hours for developers, I can't believe how many hours I used to spend installing/updating different versions for testing. Now we just run (>brew switch package version) done.

<comment><USER8> Whoaaa didn't know that command. This could replace something like say nvm?

<comment><USER3> It maybe could be hacked into replacing it but I'd not recommend it. Better to use a dedicated tool that handles this stuff more cleanly e.g. nvm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have very mixed feelings about homebrew. When it works, it is awesome, but when it doesn't it can be a serious nightmare. In particular, homebrew refuses to run under sudo. Instead, to instal in /usr/local it wants me to recursively chown /usr/local to myself, which is a Really Bad Idea (tm). I have mostly stopped using it for this reason.

I understand that running a program that runs third-party scripts under sudo is a security nightmare, but there has to be a better solution than globally chowning /usr/local.

[UPDATE] Apparently, this is no longer the case. Good to know!

[UPDATE2] Alas, the problem seems to not have been fully addressed. You still need to chown /usr/local/bin :-(

<comment><USER3> > recursively chown /usr/local to myself

As of 1.0.0: you don't need to do this any more and we don't ask you to.

<comment><USER9> Ah, that is very good to know! Thank you! I will take a fresh look at homebrew. :-)

<comment><USER3> To perhaps save you some effort: we still ask you to chown e.g. `/usr/local/bin` which may or may not make it unacceptable to you.

<comment><USER9> That's not quite as bad as all of /usr/local, but still not great. Why "e.g."? What else is there? And why not just use /usr/local/homebrew or even better, a path determined by an environment variable? I don't mind giving you a user- owned directory to install things in. I mind very much being required to change system default security settings.

<comment><USER10> You can use a different directory, though some packages may be broken:

[https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Installati...](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Installation.md)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's kind of the situation I'm in. So for any given package it's a crap shoot whether or not it will work. (And if it doesn't work, uninstalling it can be a real problem!) Hence my continued mixed feelings about homebrew in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are lots of minor changes, but nothing major IMHO. The reason for bumping the minor version are a couple of breaking changes:

        - Disable SHA-1 checksum support in formulae
        - Disable running Homebrew as the root user (e.g. sudo brew)
        - Bottles with _or_later tags no longer use _or_later in their filenames so the existing bottle can be reused

<comment><USER12> Side-topic: Shouldn't the breaking changes be enough reason to bump the version to 2.0?

<comment><USER13> relevant discussion here [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew- core/issues/6677](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/6677)

<comment><USER14> Of specific interest: "This deprecation was announced and these methods removed/undocumented before 1.0.0 was tagged so arguably it was not part of the public API when 1.0.0 shipped."

I'm ambivalent. If I rev 1.0 - 1.1, then I'm going to assume the API won't change, even if I'm using undocumented and warning-spitting methods.

But I shouldn't be doing that, I shouldn't roll in a minor update without at least reading the change log, it's a FOSS project run by a volunteer staff, and brew never swore an oath to follow the laws of versioning as set by semver.org.

If the brew documentation said, "We use semantic versioning," then I'd say the complainants were correct. Otherwise, versions are just versions, and all you can count on is (Major Changes).(Medium Changes).(Minor Changes).(Tiny Changes).(etc.)

edit: Thoughts:

Years and years ago, I spent a lot of time and energy ranting about the fact that Google called GMail "beta software" when it was clearly not feature complete, and beta has a meaning, and we are just destroying a useful system of names for the software testing and release cycle, and…

But in the end, version numbers and development stages are language, and you cannot force your language on others, irregardless of whether or not you'd like to.

<comment><USER15> > I'm going to assume the API won't change, even if > I'm using undocumented > and warning-spitting methods.

And here I disagree, quite strongly. If I'm using "undocumented and warning- spitting methods" then I know what I have done is a hack and those methods could disappear or change at any time and I should proceed at my own peril.

<comment><USER14> >And here I disagree, quite strongly. If I'm using "undocumented and warning- spitting methods" then I know what I have done is a hack and those methods could disappear or change at any time and I should proceed at my own peril.

We're in complete agreement, actually. I'm just saying that I generally don't _expect_ things like that to change on a point release, not that it can't, won't, or shouldn't. You're definitely juggling chainsaws if you're in a situation like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Without Homebrew, MacOS would be a lot less a fit as a development machine for me. Thanks to the authors.

</comment><comment><USER17> Always good news to see progress in Brewland. I personally do not like having it installed in /usr/local and have ensured it never is on my installation, but I've not had the chance to ever discuss with one of their team why they do it and what things may possibly explode by not having Brew installed to /usr/local

<comment><USER3> We put as much stuff as possible in `/usr/local/Homebrew` and `/usr/local/Cellar` now so hopefully that helps a bit. `/usr/local/bin` and friends are now mostly just symlinks. As mentioned in another comment, we've got some historical and current reasons for this location and build our binary packages (bottles) for there but you can install Homebrew in any location you want: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Installati...](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Installation.md#alternative- installs)

<comment><USER17> Bottles are good. But I've never hit those other problems, while I have hit issues through using /usr/local.

Perhaps your release of Homebrew is better and safer than you expected? :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Just a quick poll. Is anybody still using MacPorts or anything else? If so, why?

<comment><USER18> I still use macports! As for why, there are a couple of reasons.

First, Macports is often the fastest at updating their ports database after new versions of an upstream are released. Next, I also like that Macports doesn't really rely on anything OS-X specific except for Xcode. So I don't need to worry about crap like whether some Python package will work with Apple's Python distribution, or whether installing a new version of Openssh will break any core Mac OS components.

<comment><USER19> > I don't need to worry about crap like whether some Python package will work > with Apple's Python distribution

This is exactly why I use Macports. Everything lives in a parallel universe of /opt. This means the first few packages you install take WAY long as they pull in a ton of dependencies; Homebrew avoids this by relying on stuff already installed by the system. But the up-front cost pays off in the long run (IMO) since you face fewer issues with breakage. OS X can update its userland tools and you generally don't care.

<comment><USER20> This is also exactly why i use MacPorts. It works. It doesn't do silly stuff. It's been consistently solid for years.

Today, i got into a fight with Homebrew because i wanted to use a second user account on my laptop. I have one primary account, and another i use when doing workshops with clients, so i don't accidentally show them my sekrit files. The only way to get brew to install things without making trouble was to sudo -i to my primary account in a shell.

Don't get me started on "brew install docker" vs "brew cask install docker".

That said, 'sudo port upgrade git' has been failing for me for about a day now, because none of the archives have 2.10.1. I see this sort of thing occasionally, and it's annoying, but not really obstructive.

<comment><USER21> > That said, 'sudo port upgrade git' has been failing for me for about a day > now, because none of the archives have 2.10.1. I see this sort of thing > occasionally, and it's annoying, but not really obstructive.

You are probably using on old version of OS X that does not yet support TLS 1.2. Therefore system's libcurl cannot talk to [https://kernel.org](https://kernel.org) anymore, which got very strict recently. As a workaround, you can download the tarball manually with your browser and place it into /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/git/.

[https://trac.macports.org/ticket/52604](https://trac.macports.org/ticket/52604)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Disabling sha1 does not seem like a good decision. There are still enough upstream software projects that only publish their checksums as sha1 or even only md5. Keeping the original checksum allows quick comparison that a Formula is meant to use the same tarballs that were published by upstream. The problems of algorithms such as sha1 or md5 can be remedied by an additional strong checksum in the Formula. Checksum calculation is so fast that doing it twice will not matter.

<comment><USER22> Homebrew does, in fact, always use its own strong additional checksum (sha256) in the individual Formulae for all downloaded resources.

<comment><USER21> There is nothing wrong with calculating your own additional checksum, but as far as I can see, sha256 is now the only supported checksum type in Homebrew at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have been very happy with Homebrew some far. What are some good windows alternative? Making the move from OSX to Windows in a week.

<comment><USER24> I switched to Windows last year for work after having worked primarily on Debian and OSX.

Chocolatey is the best that I've found. I have run into issues though, so I can't say it's perfect or even close. It's not bad though.

[https://chocolatey.org/](https://chocolatey.org/)

Also depending on the type of development you do, you may be able to use Bash On Windows and use ubuntu's apt for everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Of all package managers I use, homebrew is without a doubt the most satisfying. It tracks updates closely and has always had any package I was looking for, yet I don't remember the last time I ran into an error.

(I'm sure all three happen, but if I can't find them with close to 200 packages installed, they must be doing something right)

<comment><USER26> Despite the warnings from their team, as soon as I switched to /opt/homebrew all of my homebrew problems went away.

The biggest issue by far are the number of traditional packages that install in /usr/local with root privileges, thereby clobbering homebrew and making "brew doctor" freak out.

<comment><USER27> > The biggest issue by far are the number of traditional packages that install > in /usr/local with root privileges

That is very much a problem with Homebrew, not those "traditional" packages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To echo everyone else: Apple should be paying you folks a boat load of money. If homebrew didn't exist, I don't think we'd bother with macOS as a developer environment.

</comment><comment><USER29> I absolutely adore Homebrew and can't thank the package maintainers enough. I think of all the times I battled with compiling some package, or installing it via MacPorts only to struggle updating it.

Never with Homebrew. So much <3

</comment><comment><USER30> I have mixed feelings about Homebrew. Don't get me wrong, it's great, good job everyone involved. It makes my OSX laptop a viable development option for me. Without Homewbrew I wouldn't use it.

Alas that's also the problem. It makes OSX so familiar that this one OSX machine has now crept into my collection of Linux boxes and won't leave (thank you iOS development). I guess if your only complaint is that the software is too good...that's a pretty great thing :)

Sometimes I wonder how valuable Apple thinks Homebrew is for them. Any info on how much they contribute to the project?

</comment><comment><USER31> Recently had to reinstall my mac from scratch. I was able to install 95% of my daily software through brew, by far a new record. Big thanks to the developers / maintainers of this project.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a developer, if it weren't for Homebrew, I'd ditch OS X.

</comment><comment><USER33> I love homebrew! I have it all on of my macOS machines. Best, easiest way to install common software I use between computers (Where supported, anyway) and developer packages. Now if we could just get [http://linuxbrew.sh/](http://linuxbrew.sh/) up to the same caliber....:)

</comment><comment><USER34> Homebrew: The macOS package manager Apple should have included from the beginning.

Thanks for stepping up.

</comment><comment><USER35> Probably stupid question but: how do you update your version?

<comment><USER36> Pretty sure just brew update.

<comment><USER35> That's what I thought, but after running that it doesn't log any sort of version update.

<comment> yoz-y I have done brew update and now brew --version reports:

Homebrew 1.1.0 Homebrew/homebrew-core (git revision 375a8; last commit 2016-11-07)

It did not mention updating to new version in the output of the update command though.

<comment><USER35> Confirmed. It worked for me too :) Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It is so much easy to make your code public for everyone to use on Homebrew. Great job maintainers!

</comment><comment><USER38> Homebrew is one of the great things I love about doing dev on a Mac. /micdrop

</comment><comment><USER39> Homebrew is what keeps me working on a Mac, plus now that Docker for Mac is out....

</comment><comment><USER40> There is definitely a lot to like about Homebrew (it's better than macports), but like others have said, when stuff goes wrong you can end up spending an entire day googling, only to end up going down a rabbit hole of archaic and often obsolete commands that may or may not work.

Once you get your environment set up it's fine, but try updating to the most recent Mac OS version with a ruby environment and you'll find pretty much all your gemsets broken in one way or another (if you have anything that needs native building).

I might just be bitter, though, as I spent most of a day working through this exact situation just last week.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's funny how every hipster dev uses a MacBook for development, yet you have to resort to this kind of hacks from day one if you want to be productive. Anyway.

</comment><comment><USER42> A Good Software. Thanks for the hard work, Homebrew peoples!

</comment><comment><USER43> First order of Action when setting up new Mac install chrome and homebrew :), Fantastic tool keep up the great work.

</comment><comment><USER44> I know they're different platforms, but how does this compare to apt? Which is better?

<comment><USER3> Homebrew maintainer view: apt is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Anyone here used port? What made you choose brew over port? I'm on the fence here.

</comment><comment><USER46> The most fitting name for a software I've ever seen!

</comment><comment><USER47> Docker for mac has replaced homebrew for me. Run anything under the sun in a temporary container and mount the current directory. Works great and is very nice isolating everything

</comment><comment><USER48> How do I donate?

<comment><USER49> This is described in the README: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#donations](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#donations)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Homebrew is awesome. Comes close to apt.

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't know if I can trust homebrew, I hear their implementation of reversing binary trees is weak.

On the other hand it's been pretty darn good for me.

<comment><USER52> That made me laugh! I hope everyone gets the joke. Homebrew is great. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Switch from Ruby to LuaJIT! I'd wager this is the best package manager out there if not for the slowness of Ruby's VM.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's upsetting that Apple doesn't care about developers. Why is there no Apple maintained package management system? This results in having to turn to solutions like Homebrew, which -- while a valiant effort -- is completely insufficient for distributing state across multiple machines.</comment>


Understanding How Dilution Affects You At A Startup - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/understanding-how-dilution-affects-you-at-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> When investors talk about dilution numbers they only present the best case scenario, and this post is no exception.

If you really want to understand dilution, don't look at the best case. You need a graph showing your payoff as a function of exit size. Pay special attention to the range where liquidation preferences and multipliers kick in, because the sharks aren't going make you an infographic for that case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you seen anything like what you describe that you can share?

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately not. The people who have that spreadsheet would find it very hard to hire if employees knew how the game was rigged.

<comment><USER2> Actually, it looks like Fred Wilson did an example here: [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/10/liquidation-analysis- continu...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/10/liquidation-analysis- continued.html)

Note that his example does not show a multiple on the liquidation preference, and it doesn't show how the early employees can get screwed even when the founders do well. But it's more realistic than Suster's infographic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Informative in a nice visual way.

Bottom line #1 - the actual sale price of the startup can have very little to do with what the founders get to take home (especially after taxes).

Bottom line #2 - (obviously) increase the startup value by orders of magnitude if looking for FU money.

<comment><USER4> Actually I didn't find the infographic that easy to understand. Here's a version I made that shows a large amount of money going into the business but the founder value increasing at a slower rate due to dilution: <http://bit.ly/qO90k5></comment></comment>


Drones Could Soon Be Used to Deliver the Mail in Singapore - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/drones-could-soon-be-used-to-deliver-the-mail-in-singapore/ <comment><USER2> Singapore will eventually use drone as the main purpose of mail delivery because in the high-tech era, using drone is becoming more popular. However, there are many factors that they should take into consideration. First, how can they ensure that the drone will deliver the mail/package to final destination without getting stolen from people. Second, how using drones can affect the unemployment rates in Singapore. The government also have to come up with law regarding controlling the drone delivery. There are many more problems needed to be addressed and fixed before Singapore can put drone into widely used.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doubtful considering that Singapore is a huge social net for its citizens. Drones would replace people's jobs and then they couldn't brag about that 0% unemployment rate.

Half kidding, half serious there, but Singapore isn't Japan and wouldn't replace people's jobs with robots.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use OpenStreetMaps (OSM) Routing systems on production? - <AUTHOR> Hi,<p>We are trying to replace [Google Maps]( https://developers.google.com/maps/premium/) to use other alternatives like Mapbox, HERE in the future. However, we found that there are some Open Source Project like OSRM [1], Valhalla [2]. I would like to know what is your experiences with OpenStreetMaps as a backend for routing systems. If it is the case, would you please share your opinion and experience.<p>[1]: https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend<p>[2]: https://github.com/valhalla <comment><USER2> I am developing on OSRM.

OSRM is done by Mapbox guys, Valhalla team has joined Mapbox.

PGrouting is very slow. OSRM expects data in OSM/PBF format for parsing. there are no Postgis plugins to export to OSM/PBF. QGIS is a friend. OSRM is fast but needs 2 times the size of index as memory, for one server we are using 36gb RAM. Openstreetmap has many abandoned projects, does not have many features available in commercial projects. openstreetmap needs a fork to make it competitive for current generation of GIS apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about the pgRouting([http://pgrouting.org/index.html](http://pgrouting.org/index.html)) project? It's based on postGIS and its database based routing approach.</comment>


Why Everyone is in Sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/why-everyone-is-in-sales/ <comment><USER2> As much as I kind of despise sales and salesmanship, I'm slowly realizing that it's an essential skill to getting the things you want in life.

A friend of mind helped me rework my resume recently, and the fundamental point she finally got through my skull after a few hours was that the point of the resume is to demonstrate my potential value to the prospective employer. Which is part of what patio11 is saying on here all the time (in addition to: find the place where you can provide the most value).

It's something I've always sucked at, and I've been trying to figure out why. I think it's something a lot of nerds hold in common.

Partly it's modesty. I don't like to self-promote (to use the term in a neutral way, including a simple demonstration of potential value), because I just don't like to talk about myself.

Partly it's humility. The more I learn, the more I learn how much I don't know. The more people I meet, the more I realize how awesome people are. Self- promotion in this context feels false.

Partly it's some weird version of misplaced pride. I don't feel like I should have to self-promote. My actions, ideas, and accomplishments should speak for themselves. Similarly, I feel like I shouldn't have to find a place where I can provide value; it should find me. These are both wrong and stupid sentiments, of course.

I think this is really hard for some of us. These feelings make us allergic to sales, in both directions. But it seems like people like patio11 have found a sort of middle path between unrewarded toil and shameless blow-hardiness. This post feels a bit to me like someone on the other side of the divide trying to reach out to me, and while I appreciate the effort, I still feel instinctively suspicious. I think what I need is more from people who started on my side of the divide and found a good place in the middle about how they got there.

<comment><USER3> As a fellow smart, hard-working, nerdy introvert, let me add another bullet point (or perhaps a sub-point under "humility"): personal ethics.

I grew up with a serious aversion to bullshit in all of its forms. Especially when it verged on outright lying. All too often, I'd seen hucksterish, self- promoting coworkers tell bald-faced lies about their work, their accomplishments, their positions, etc., and get massively rewarded for doing so. I couldn't bring myself to do it. Consciously, I knew that bullshitting about myself -- even just a tiny bit -- was a successful career ascension tactic. And I knew that _not_ doing so was, perhaps, actively slowing me down. But damn it, it just felt so fake and slimy and wrong.

Eventually -- and it's taken me more years to learn this fact than I feel comfortable admitting -- I realized that bullshit is not binary. There isn't some black-or-white dichotomy between "lying" and "telling the truth." In between lies an entire spectrum, and some of that spectrum is safe to play in. Even encouraged.

It's possible to sell yourself with only a drop of bullshit. Sort of like a fine layer of rhetorical polish. It's not about fabricating accomplishments out of whole cloth, but rather, about talking your real accomplishments up, and describing them in just the right way. For a lot of people, finding that level of just-the-right-amount-of-bullshit comes very naturally. For others, like myself, it's a skill that needs to be learned.

<comment><USER2> Great point, and as an illustration of the same mentality, I find something inside myself recoil at the thought of compromising even a little on bullshit.

And I totally agree with you that it often seems like bullshitting talent and skills get people a lot farther in any field than actual value. Which is infuriatingly unfair.

I think the struggle is to figure out how to hit the same pschological targets that bullshitters do, without bullshitting. And the answer I'm sort of converging on is, again, to demonstrate your true value.

Even this, I think, is something that comes naturally to some and not others. I keep bringing up patio11 because he in no way sets of my bullshit detectors, but manages to demonstrate his value. The feeling I get is that it's something he has a talent for.

<comment><USER4> I think at some point you have to move away from the idea of "bullshit". Human beings are basically incapable of making fully rational decisions where all options are weighed and the cost benefit analysis is complete.

There is no way to be totally "pure". If you make the world's greatest device and no one knows about it, no one will benefit. The moment you tell anyone about it, you are "selling" and how you choose to portray the device, it's features/benefits, how often and forcefully you endorse the device is all part of sales.

Salesmanship IS demonstration of value. Patio11 would be able to sell hackers/developers on something better than a used car salesman, but the verse is true regarding the sale of used cars to regular people.

<comment><USER2> Listen, Jason, please don't take this as an attack. You seem like a nice, earnest guy who in many ways is really trying to help.

But your inability to distinguish between bullshit and demonstration of value is abhorrent to me. If you make an amazing product and never tell anyone about it, you're keeping it a secret. If you honestly demonstrate its value to a demographic who can truly benefit from it, that's good marketing and communication. If you lie or exaggerate to people about what your product can do, that's bullshit. These are on a spectrum.

I'm going to be blunt here. Pretty much everything on your site, from the branding, to the copy, to the actual blog post itself, which I find mostly insubstantial, sets off alarms. Your basic premise -- that transactions should be mutually beneficial and sales is communication of that mutual benefit -- is not particularly insightful or well-represented. The ratio of self-promotion to content is disconcerting. The presented 'attitude' is off-putting and seems forced.

The fact that you can't distinguish between what patio11 does and what an archetypal used car salesman just makes me think you're a bullshitter.

But maybe I'm not your target demographic. That's fine. Don't let me stop you. If it works, it works. But know that that's the kind of stuff that makes me allergic to self-promotion in the first place. I don't want to present myself this way, I don't want to _be_ this way, even if that's what it takes to succeed. And the fact that it works hurts my soul.

Again, I'm not attacking you, and I'm not trying to be negative. I'm trying to be honest about how I perceive your site. (If you don't think I'm your target demographic, please safely ignore me.) I'm also trying, in my own way, to come to terms with a form of salesmanship that doesn't make me hate myself.

<comment><USER4> Haven't taken any offense and appreciate the honest dialogue. I haven't said anything or implied anything about lying and I think we agree that these behaviors are on a spectrum.

The point of the post was actually to just underline the importance of sales in our lives - and that everyone needs to sell in order to succeed. Many others have made this point before, which is fine. I believe that "honestly demonstrating its value to a demographic" is a form of selling and that improving the ability to sell will help achieve goals.

I appreciate your feedback. I know that some find my style distasteful and acknowledge that not everyone sees things this way. I will say that U have targeted this series toward people who are closer to the patio11 than used car salesman and this thread will help me adjust my future posts to get my message across better.

<comment><USER2> Hey, I have to say that as much as I don't like about your presentation, I admire your willingness to engage and your openness to criticism.

If you'd like any specific help, like notes on how your site and writing looks from my side of things, please don't hesitate to let me know. And I'm always open to feedback on my own site and writing (though you might not be my target audience, but, then again, I don't really know who is). Maybe we can even come to a mutually beneficial transaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A recent article in the New York Times called "Generation Sell" also talks about this issue: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the- entrepr...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the- entrepreneurial-generation.html?pagewanted=all)

"Well, we're all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We're all selling something today, because even if we aren't literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we're always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted."

<comment><USER6> Relevant and prescient: <http://xkcd.com/137/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I tend to think it is part of the business cycle as much as anything. Trends and viewpoints on this change, and we are currently in an extreme. In other periods, it may be looked down upon unless you are both very good at it and have substance backing it up. Essentially, the other party can't realize the extent that you are doing it.</comment>


Best Job: Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704723104576062173458318658.html?mod=WSJ_hp_editorsPicks_5

<comment><USER2> OT:

[http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB- LP752_bestjo_G_...](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB- LP752_bestjo_G_20110104181215.jpg)

Looking at that photo of two programmers in white lab-coats just proves that anti-virus companies are in the business of fear theatrics, bamboozling and lies. Scum of the earth.

I can't imagine what public presentation would merit this monochrome spectacle of terror. A debug.com/symdeb.exe disassembly and hexdump of some antique 16-bit DOS virus, presented by a panel of scientists in lab-coats. Makes you wonder why they aren't wearing gloves and gas-masks.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Mathematician" is pretty vague, but from what I know about working mathematicians, it probably involves a lot of statistics, so #2 3 and 4 all come down to knowing statistics. I always knew getting a math degree was worth it, now I can point the haters to this article.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am not surprised.

When you have a job where the masses cannot achieve it simply by going through school, and finding a worker is very hard as the right one is one in a handfull, and a good worker can save tons of money for companies, or even make companies, or do wonders, I am in no surprise about this.

My wife is a speach pathologist. Don't get my wrong I am in no way playing down her job. She had to study for more than I did, and it is no easy task. However now that she has a job, her interview is "when can you start" literally. There are too many jobs for speech pathologists; they are needed everywhere. And too little speech pathologists out there.

So basically when the demand is a lot higher than the supply, that job will be the best one to be in. As many studies and as tons of experience notes it, many programmers can't program. Which means that for the good ones, work is easy to find. The technological boom has just started... what 10 years or so of heavy tech advances that penetrated our culture, and 30 years of just advances? Everyone wants a piece of the pie but as people realize you need the right people.

I remember during the dot com burst, many of my family friends were getting laid off, could not find work. My family was telling me that programming is a dead end job that you DONT want to be in. I stood my ground, and it was worth it. However it is most definitely not for everyone. Those getting fired left and right who cold not get another job, yea they had their 1 year of training in "programming" and could not tell you what a thread is to save their life.

<comment><USER5> I am not surprised either.

Apart from being reasonably difficult to learn, software engineer is pretty unpopular with the masses. Its image is not very glamerous. This keeps the supply down even more.</comment></comment>


On Some Planes, Empty Rows While Passengers Crowd Together - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/travel/airplanes-social-distancing-coronavirus.html <comment><USER2> NYT has a responsibility to name the specific airlines that are doing this. Their job is to give you the information you need to make an informed choice when you're buying that plane ticket.</comment>


Germinating a seed after 32000 thousand years - <AUTHOR> http://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2015/11/4/germinating-a-seed-after-32000-years <comment><USER2> Fix the title; it's thirty-two-thousand years, not thirty-two-thousand- thousand years.</comment>


Linux is now a viable OS for PC gamers, thanks to Steam's Proton initiative - <AUTHOR> https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming-linux-has-come-long-way <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see how Valve alone changed the landscape when it comes to gaming on linux. For once someone, no matter their motive, put their money where their mouth is and actively contributed towards that effort. I know, they're standing on top of years of effort of the open source community but still, they managed to bring things together and ship a more or less painless experience with Steam. Between Steam supporting linux, contributions to various related open source projects, linux VR support, employing the author and DXVK and streamlining the use of Wine if there is anything as customer loyalty, hey they got it from me!

That being said it's not all roses. There are lots of titles are using weird anti-cheat methods that are so intimately integrated with Windows that is unrealistic to expect them to work at some point with Wine, if ever. Unfortunately these titles also tend to be fairly popular so if you're into these competitive games, no luck.

On a separate but related note I see lots of people complaining about NVIDIA GPUs. Although personally I've never had a problem with their cards their stance and drivers are problematic at best. I'm fairly certain that a good quality open-source driver for NVIDIA is possible but given how unwilling NVIDIA is to cooperate I wouldn't hold my breath. Seeing how far AMDGPU has come the last years my next GPU won't be NVIDIA (voting with your wallet and all that).

<comment><USER3> > There are lots of titles are using weird anti-cheat methods ...

Yeah. Crysis (original version) seems to be one of those. No-one seems to have gotten it working through Proton, which is unfortunate as it was the best/most enjoyable release in the series (my opinion obviously).

That one aside, many other titles do work well. Even Enderal, the full conversion mod for Skyrim that has it's own Steam game entry now, works well:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/933480/Enderal_Forgotten_...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/933480/Enderal_Forgotten_Stories/)

For that one though, some mucking around with paths needs to be done first time around to get it to launch. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been running PoP!OS (despite its stupid name) as my daily driver because it supports Nvidia drivers and all the CUDA libraries for deep learning right out of the box, as well as a pretty large number of sane defaults and preinstalled codecs, etc.

I was pleasantly surprised that Steam was a one-click install, and probably 90% of the Windows games that I have tried work without issue.

<comment><USER5> > Pop!_OS

It's actually even worse: Pop!_OS.

<comment><USER5> …I just realized I copied the same thing twice. The quoted portion should be "PoP!OS".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been amazed with what proton can do and how well it runs. A number of games run very well, and performance is generally very good.

But I'm planning a new SFF build and I'm trying to figure out how to get two gpus in an ITX build. VFIO is still the best option to me for gaming on Linux.

Several nights ago I signed up for the origin pass. Reading on Lutris it worked relatively well with Battle field and others. Single player only, not worried about online. First night was fine. Then next day BF1 forced an update. The game no longer worked. Then origin updated, that stopped working.

I just bought the new Resident Evil 2 remake, which had a gold proton db rating. Booted it got past the intro then it crashed. It was a documented issues, but none of the fixes I saw worked.

I don't game in long stints any more. I use it to relieve the stress. Every couple of days in maybe thirty to forty minutes spurts as a break. Essentially today I spent the time I wanted to take a break debugging a game issue.

This is not in a negative manner to the developers. Either open source or the game companies. Just there are fringe issues / edge cases. With VFIO I just have an external VM that does one thing and encounters little issues. I trade continual trouble shooting, for an initial troubleshooting phase.

<comment><USER7> Assuming you aren't going to be gaming on Linux directly (only in the Windows VM), PCI-E bifurcation can do this. Going down to x8 from x16 only loses you a few FPS, generally speaking, and something like Sliger's SM560 ([http://sliger.com/products/cases/sm560/](http://sliger.com/products/cases/sm560/) \- no relationship but I have a SM550 and am pretty happy with it) would allow you to fit a 2-slot Nvidia card for the Windows VM (recommended over AMD; Vega & Navi AMD cards cannot don't do pcie FLR or full reset properly so you'll have to do full machine reboot per VM restart if you're using one of those for Windows), and a 1 slot AMD workstation card for desktop usage. Note that you'll need a motherboard with BIOS that supports bifurcation; Gigabyte & ASrock tend to, ASUS rarely if ever does, other brands YMMV, but regardless you should check mobo manual before purchasing and see if the settings are there.

<comment><USER8> > Vega & Navi AMD cards cannot don't do pcie FLR or full reset properly so > you'll have to do full machine reboot per VM restart if you're using one of > those for Windows)

To add: for Navi 10 (RX 5700/RX 5700 XT) there's currently a patch available at Level1Techs[1] which force the card to enter and exit Bus Active, Chip Off (BACO) which essentially resetting the card.

I have been using this patch with my VFIO setup ever since the author made it available and has been working quite reliably for me with my RX 5700 XT reference card. v1 patch sometimes stuck in weird state after BACO but usually it could be fixed by sleep the machine and wake it up. I have not experience any issues with v2 patch so far.

[1]: [https://forum.level1techs.com/t/navi-reset-kernel- patch/1475...](https://forum.level1techs.com/t/navi-reset-kernel-patch/147547)

<comment><USER7> Ahh, fantastic; good to hear that that got somewhere

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am now getting significantly better graphics quality (Lighting specifically) and between 20% slower and 20% faster frame rates under Linux/Steam/Proton/DXVK on Manjaro. Significantly improved over Ubuntu performance.

Completely shocked.

</comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone had any luck with SteamVR and the HTC Vive? I tried Proton a few times, was hugely impressed but the one pain point remaining is that I can never seem to get the headset to work properly

I play a fair bit of Beat Saber so it kinda forced me back on Windows 10 :(

<comment><USER11> Do different headsets work very differently in terms of software requirements? I have the Valve Index and it works fine under Ubuntu (both for native and for Wine/Proton games).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Traditionally, the open-source OS has been far behind Windows when it comes > to gaming, but is that still the case in 2019?

From a hardcore Ubuntu gamer's perspective, you defeat your own argument by using "open-source" and "NVIDIA" in the same sentence. Historically, they have never gotten along and have caused eternal pitstops for gamers using a Linux distro like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS for tweaking their systems for using the latest NVIDIA GPUs.

While the news here is welcoming for general PC gamers, the moment Windows gamers try to move to a Linux distro (Ubuntu) with NVIDIA as their GPU, things get chaotic if the GPU is too new. If I was to go for a Linux-based gaming machine these days, the CPU must be AMD Ryzen and the external GPU must be Radeon.

Also "Linux" is a OS kernel rather than a full OS. Ubuntu or Pop!_OS with AMD is "the" viable OS for PC gamers migrating from Windows. The moment you involve NVIDIA, then it becomes "almost" and if it involves VR gaming then it becomes "nearly there, but not quite".

</comment><comment><USER13> What I don't get is why Valve hasn't ported Steam to ARM yet.

The Raspberry Pi is plenty used for gaming, but for lack of first-class support by the likes of Steam it's been mostly used with emulators for retrogaming.

My games on Steam are just a toolchain setup and rebuild away from supporting the Raspberry Pi, but there's no point in adding support when there's no Steam client available for the platform. I would love to sell to Raspberry Pi users via Steam, but Steam is just getting in the way here.

I feel like their Linux/SteamOS support would be better represented if they supported the non-x86 platforms better. It's one of the areas Linux shines, and they're completely missing the boat by neglecting it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I could live with all the limitations of Linux and Proton but I can't live without the anti cheat. It is the single biggest roadblock for gaming on Linux right now.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish proton would also let me use photoshop, and illustrator so I can completely ditch windows

<comment><USER16> IDK if you need it for production (in which case this may not suit you completely), but Wine can install CC 2018 at the moment: [https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=36206).

Should just be double-click the installer and run, hypothetically. 2019 works if it is cracked (although that is obviously not suitable for real-world use).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> While this works for occasional casual gaming, it's way more performant to use Looking Glass and GPU passthrough using KVM. Windows licenses are cheap(if you don't want to use the evaluation) and all games just work.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't want games to work on Linux, I want Windows 7 back.

<comment><USER19> Then just install Windows 7 and play games on it, this is something that already works.

Games on Linux are nothing away from you...

<comment><USER18> Wrong, it doesn't work anymore. Nearly out of official supprt. Major privacy violations. Can't pick your updates anymore.

But your second comment is just a non sequitur.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm curious about the statements saying the NVIDIA drivers being "more stable". Is this true? I recently heard that the amdgpu driver is better than where Intel is currently at - although the discussion/context at the time was prioritizing hackability and tinkerability.

<comment><USER21> The AMDGPU driver is open-source and generally seem the best integrated with the rest of Linux; performance is comparable to Windows. The nVidia closed- source drivers also give performance comparable to Windows but have issues like graphics corruption with KDE on suspend ([https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364766](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364766), supposedly KDE's misuse of OpenGL). The open-source Nouveau drivers for nVidia are not really usable: the team has to reverse engineer everything and nVidia doesn't really support their efforts so it's rolling a stone up a hill.

Intel graphics are open source but they're mostly used on laptops, so I don't think the drivers support much beyond basic functions. I guess light games would probably work well with them though.

<comment><USER22> The Intel drivers on Linux are fine, they are very reliable and don't lack important functionality. The problem with Intel graphics for gaming is underpowered hardware.

<comment><USER21> I was looking at [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics). There are quite a lot of workarounds listed which have the effect of disabling certain hardware optimizations. I'm sure the drivers work well for most people, since even the Nvidia drivers are quite usable, but they do seem to have some bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Tldr: Wine

</comment><comment><USER24> "Viable" except none of the recent games work properly, if you're a real gamer Linux is absolutely not an option.

That's not even talking about the performance on some games that is way slower than on Windows.

Age of empire 2 && Terraria don't qualify for "Linux is now a viable OS for PC gamers"

<comment><USER13> What does "real gamer" even mean?

<comment><USER25> I think "real gamer" in this context means a gamer that is interested in buying new titles, not just playing old titles. That is, "real gamer" means that you're a viable target for the gaming industry to make money off of.</comment></comment></comment>


Placeholders on the fly - easy to remember - <AUTHOR> http://placebox.es/ <comment><USER2> The "Click here to download full code example including HTML page" link is giving a server error.</comment>


eCompuCloud startup is raising funds - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/eCompuCloud?a=742602

<comment><AUTHOR> This startup is intended for helping home and small businesses to take advantage of the power of cloud computing!</comment>


Finding my Identity Thief? - <AUTHOR> Someone stole $2000 out of my bank account back in March of this year. The detective on the case never cared to follow up on anything we gave her. I had a phone number on my credit report from a credit card they tried to get. I sent messages to the the phone which is a voip number on the GoTextMe app. I received messages back from the person for a few weeks, I acted like I knew them.
Finally I sent a link to obtain an ip address. They clicked it and I never heard back from them after I sent that.
How can I find out more information on the people who stole from me. I do understand a law enforcement request would be needed for Gotextme to provide more info and also the isp Spectrum would need one. Currently, law enforcement doesn't care and the case is inactive now. How can I go about it and without a lawyer.
+++++++++++++++++++
Things we know.
- Video Footage we saw for a split second at the police station. We believe its a Honda Accord, dark colored.
- 3 people in the car. 2 guys and 1 girl who did the transaction through the drive through at the bank. Bad video quality.
- Voip phone number from GoTextMe found on a credit card application days after the bank money was stolen.
- Spectrum ip address. Was obtained by me sending a link...they clicked on it.
- I used geo ip location services and they are all over the place in locations.
- Was locked out of my bank account before it happened, someone may have known my password.
- On the bank account the phone number was changed to an old employer I once worked at years ago. I have a strong suspicion it could be someone I know.
- Prior year someone stole my wallet out of my car, 2 of those suspects were found, I did not know them.
Any ideas? Any help? <comment><USER2> Dangerous, but if you can find them and arm yourself you can try to confront them.

Let the police know about 15 min beforehand. They will tell you it's a dangerous idea (it is, you might get murdered), just tell them that's their problem and they better hurry up!

That said, consider that they are probably either pros who will not be taken down or just random losers who definitely don't still have your money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't say I wanted to confront them. I just want to know who it is and its highly likely its someone I know. They are not pros, by leaving that much evidence on the table.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: UI/UX people, good resources for digital artists wanting to design apps? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN!
TL;DR: If a digital artist who is good at stuff like painting, 3D and animation wants to do some UI work for a hackathon project, what are some good resources/tools/suggestions? More generally, what are essential reads for non-UI artists or even engineers who hope to develop beautiful and usable interfaces?
I'm a CS student who has decided to go to a hackathon with two other friends (also CS students). We figured that UI is very important for hackathon projects, so we decided that we need an artist on our team. One of our friends goes to a digital arts school and makes absolutely stunning paintings, characters, 3D scenes and models, animation, etc. She's especially fond of video game art and wants to work in gamedev after school.
Now, she has done some graphic design and layout for school projects, but not very much besides that. She has a good eye for aesthetics, but I want to help by providing her with some good resources, tools and suggestions on how to approach UI/UX work. She'll probably make mock ups or wireframes during the hackathon, and I'll translate that to HTML/CSS.
I'm interested in write-ups, cheat sheets, important principles that may be overlooked by someone who's an artist but has had little prior experience with UI design, examples of well-designed apps, tools that can help with the rapid development of mock ups, wireframes, maybe some Photoshop resources (icon packs, templates maybe?) and things like that.
More generally, I believe that UI/UX people of HN can help everyone tremendously if they would post some essential resources for non-UI or even non-artist people out there. We see a lot of interfaces that e.g. engineers design, and they all look like an engineer designed them :) (I myself am guilty of this too often.)
Thank you in advance for your suggestions! <comment><USER2> If you don't get enough answers: there is a [https://www.designernews.co/](https://www.designernews.co/) spin-off of hackernews.</comment>


MIT Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Spring 2015) - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-046j-design-and-analysis-of-algorithms-spring-2015/lecture-videos/ <comment><USER2> Hey! If anyone's interested in an intro to algorithms, I'd like to pitch my book Grokking Algorithms[1]. It is an illustrated guide with a focus on being easy to read. I've gotten a lot of comments about how easy it is [2] [3] [4].

Sample chapter here [5].

[1] [https://amzn.com/1617292230](https://amzn.com/1617292230)

[2] [https://twitter.com/cachilders/status/746522721794691073](https://twitter.com/cachilders/status/746522721794691073)

[3] [https://twitter.com/ashkrit/status/745636106163478529](https://twitter.com/ashkrit/status/745636106163478529)

[4] [https://twitter.com/bertrand_cachet/status/74369502984414003...](https://twitter.com/bertrand_cachet/status/743695029844140032)

[5] manning.com/bhargava

<comment><USER3> This is very interesting. I will look into. Going to start the Stanford algorithms course on Course in 1-2 weeks and I think this might be a help to me.

UPDATE: What's with Manning, if you don't mind me asking? I can buy dead tree and all digital media included from Amazon at 33.00 and change, but for 34.00 and change from Manning direct I don't get the paper copy? I live abroad so shipping would screw me. Haha.

<comment><USER4> Just an FYI, Manning has a code the past two days for 50% off all books, and they will often have 35-50% off single books at anyone time. Their shipping is also expensive for a single item, but free for three. But yes, otherwise it's very expensive. $45 for a 200 page picture book on algorithms is a bit steep.

<comment><USER2> Correct, Manning frequently does "deal of the day". I will tweet the next time it happens for my book (@_egonschiele). I don't set the prices (obviously). The book is also available through Safari books online, and US-based folks can request it at their library also.

<comment><USER3> Oh really? I have access to Safari. Thanks.

Still though, I think later this week I will buy a copy. I like your blog too, and after years of intro level courses of different types (currently watched my eyes water over when redoing insertion sort in Scala with Odersky in his Scala class in Coursera doing pattern matching and functional decomposition), perhaps all I really need is a picture book.

Out of curiosity, as a busy (what seems to be from your blog and GH profile) Etsy engineer, how did you get into writing such books?

I am very newbish but I love the quality content coming out of non-traditional non-academics on better CS instruction. What makes you tick, egonschiele?

<comment><USER2> Thanks, that's very nice of you to say. I wrote the book because I didn't find an easy-to-read book on algorithms, and it took me a long time to learn. I think teaching hard concepts in a clear way is very important, so that's what I try to do with my book and blog.

<comment><USER3> Tell me about it. I think picture books for programming. Animated turtles all the way down!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who want an advanced course on algorithms, here is one: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6ogFv- ieghdoGKGg2Bik...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6ogFv- ieghdoGKGg2Bik3Gl1glBTEu8c) This is an MIT course. It doesn't appear at ocw though.

<comment><USER6> This is fucking awsome. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Berkeley was making all of their lecture videos available to the public until they recently moved to EdX. Course videos from Spring 2015 and prior (going back as far as Spring 2010) can be accessed here: [http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science)

I have been working through the cs core classes (61a/b/c) by following the syllabus from the semester corresponding to the videos for reading and homework assignments. A google search of course number and professor's last name has been the easiest method of finding the course website (not all of them use the Berkeley course page).

<comment> Ar-Curunir We didn't move them to EdX, we just made them private and available to Berkeley students only. I think this is because of some rulings stating that lecture videos have to be provided with CC if they are to be made public (OCW was sued for this).

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the clarification. Obviously the lawsuit was seeking equal access for deaf/hard of hearing individuals but had the unintended effect of removing access for everyone (public).

It's a shame that a better solution could not be reached because it was very nice having recent course videos available (as opposed to many EdX courses which use 5-10 year old videos).

<comment><USER8> In case of this lawsuit, it achieved negative results hence: "the cure was worse than the disease".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jeremy Scott from MIT, along with two other people, created a visual language for tracing and explaining data structures and algorithms. "A Direct Manipulation Language for Explaining Algorithms" ([https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mug/pubs/Scott2014DirectManipul...](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mug/pubs/Scott2014DirectManipulation.pdf))

A bunch of teaching assistants used it during recitations for the course. It looks really cool and very helpful for developing intuition.

Does anyone know if there are any course materials online related to this?

<comment><USER10> One of the authors of that paper, Philip Guo, created the invaluable Online Python Tutor.

[http://pythontutor.com/](http://pythontutor.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great! I just picked up the famous algorithms textbook (CLRS) and have been reading through (I'm just past the introduction and am moving in to chapters 1 - 3 (basing my schedule on the readings in this course)

I figure if I follow along in the videos it'll be a great compliment with the two of them enhancing each other.

Now if only I could find the "algorithms certificate" to go with it, maybe I could use this and my 15 years programming experience towards a master's program enrollment. (Along with a calculus and linear algebra)

<comment><USER12> Not sure.. CLRS is too dense for page-to-page reading. The more I was advancing through the book the more I was forgetting from the previous chapters... :)

<comment><USER13> It's a bit dense, but I found the first few chapters to be the worst. Once you get past the dull beginning, the rest is really interesting. I think it's a GREAT book! (We used it in all of my algorithms classes.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never understand the course numbering for CS. Is there a formula or some specific prefixes I should know to search for CS courses for MIT, Berkeley and Stanford? I feel like knowing these would help find alternate sources youtube, etc for viewing.

</comment><comment><USER15> Do you think these materials are enough to pass interviews at big tech companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> These courses will provide you a good theoretical background, which may not be enough to crack the interview problems. You might wanna look at some of the programming problems on Hackerrank, Codejam etc to bridge the gap between the theory and the implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's great, what other courses there are updated ?

<comment><USER17> You can find a lot of other courses if you poke around the net. For example, 6.005 - Elements of Software Construction is "As taught in 2011" on OCW [1], but you can find the latest notes here [2]. The content hasn't changed a lot since 2011 though, and the changes are mostly in the order of which the content is presented. As a side note, this is is easily the best course out there for novice/intermediate programmers. No videos though.

Another great course (started it yesterday) is 6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems [3] and it also has videos available.

All in all, there are a lot of great courses for any level of experience/knowledge. It's best that you check them out and see what you like yourself. This [4] is the list of all the EE/CS subjects that are offered on OCW. Some of them have videos, others don't. Note however, that almost all of them have comprehensive lecture notes and if you get stuck, you can always look for more information elsewhere. Finally, if you want to check what they offer every semester, see here [5] (note: their EE/CS courses start with 6).

[1] [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-005-elements-of-software-construction-fall-2011/index.htm) [2] [http://web.mit.edu/6.005/www/fa15](http://web.mit.edu/6.005/www/fa15) [3] [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-172-performance-engineering-of-software-systems-fall-2010/) [4] [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#electrical-engineering-and- compu...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#electrical-engineering-and-computer- science) [5] [https://stellar.mit.edu/courseguide/#course_6_sp16](https://stellar.mit.edu/courseguide/#course_6_sp16)

<comment><USER18> Thanks for posting those links, [3] in particular looks fascinating.

<comment><USER14> Wow, link [3] look awesome. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome. No torrent sharing for the videos?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can download all the videos from here [https://archive.org/details/MIT6.046JS15](https://archive.org/details/MIT6.046JS15) . Available as torrent too.

<comment><USER20> or use youtube-dl on the youtube playlist

<comment><USER21> Here is the command for downloading all videos in playlist at 720p in a folder with the same name as the playlist's

youtube-dl -o "%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s. %(title)s.%(ext)s" $YTplaylistLINK -f 22

<comment><USER22> Thanks for sharing! I'm trying the following, but it's not working.

youtube-dl -o "%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s. %(title)s.%(ext)s" [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP62K2DjQLRxD...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP62K2DjQLRxDNRi0z2IRWnNh) -f 22

What is the correct format?

<comment><USER21> try this [http://paste2.org/4dbGV36n](http://paste2.org/4dbGV36n)

<comment><USER22> Working! Thank you :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Implementing Kernel-Based Approaches for Sequence Modeling - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/palakg11/KASM-Pytorch <comment><USER2> Interesting but code needs a bit of work.

For example file "kernel.py" lines 33-38</comment>


Voxel.css - <AUTHOR> http://voxelcss.com/ <comment><USER2> Cool demo.

But, for those thinking they're going to make a minecraft clone with this it's not going to work. Making games is all about drawing as little as possible and making as few draw calls as possible. Since CSS only supports planes (3d rectangles oriented in space) that means every cube is 6 draw calls and worse, if you want the browser to draw them correctly they have to be sorted. So let's say you had a 16x16x16 voxel area, that's potentially 24000 planes+ and 24000+ draw calls. That assumes worst case, all cubes with transparent bits like tree leaf blocks. For comparison many AAA games do little than 5000 draw calls per frame, possibly less.

Compare to a functional minecraft clone all of that would be condensed into a single mesh representing a 16x16x16 area. One draw call.

So yea, neat demo but you're going to quickly hit the limits past a few boxy logos

If you're looking for something that actually does do the optimizations necessary for a minecraft clone in the browser see [http://voxeljs.com](http://voxeljs.com)

<comment><USER3> Honestly I don't understand the craze of wanting to put EVERYTHING in a browser. I'm sure in many cases (for game development at least) it's _easier_ to do it native, not to mention a tonne faster and less resource-intensive.

Heck, I'd even go so far as to venture that Java webapps run better than WebGL+JS. Perhaps I'm just biased/bitter because the open source radeon driver does nothing good by way of 3D acceleration.

<comment><USER4> If your game is in the browser then I run it in a sandbox which I trust (if you're using native web technologies as opposed to a java 'webapp'). I don't need any storage on my local machine and when you make a change I just 'update' by refreshing my page.

<comment><USER5> And it doesn't matter if i'm running it on a phone, tv, desktop, laptop, x86, ARM, windows, linux, mac, etc...

It removes all of those from the equation, web tech will be available on most platforms i want to use, so i'm free to choose the best for what i want without worrying if a ton of my software is supported.

<comment><USER6> Except all of those have vastly different methods of interacting with your web app. A responsive website can handle the more similar methods of interaction that a desktop, laptop, and mobile devices rely on with slight tweaks to account for a fingertip vs a mouse, but trying to run a similar application on a TV will be an exercise in user frustration.

<comment><USER5> I'm not saying you get magical interaction for free, but i've written a toy web app that works fine on my tv.

The arrow buttons on the remote act as up/down/left/right and the "OK" button acts as enter. It actually ended up needing very little in the way of custom code to work, but like i said this was a pretty small toy app.

Still, if you want an example of a real "web app" that runs on all of those platforms, just look at netflix.

<comment><USER7> Though in fairness, Netflix hasn't historically bee based on native web tech; it used to be Microsoft Silverlight for web browsers (I think they've gone/are going HTML5 now), and even now it's native apps for mobile devices/smart tvs/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't get me wrong: this is cool. It just makes me sad the performance is so night vs day on Firefox vs Chrome (Nightly and Dev branch on Linux). The former is glitchy (some planes are rendered when they should be hidden behind other geometry?) and stutters.

It's even sadder that even in Chrome the FPS is noticeably low. This isn't a gaming rig, it's just an Intel card, but it can run plenty of games (at 40+ FPS) from the past five years that are drawing far more than this demo, and reacting to far more inputs.

In principle I love the idea that we could write everything to be portable across OSs and form factors by writing for 'the browser', but still at this point, on this modern computer, the performance is noticeably worse, and ultimately lackluster.

It's the same story on mobile, and not just limited to GPU-bound applications, despite the prevalence of web tech in that space. At the end of the day all of this 'write it for the browser' just translates to using far more CPU cycles than putting in the effort for 'native'.

</comment><comment><USER9> Simmer down comment section. So what if it's not the most perfect thing ever. This is neat. Good job by all that worked on it. I'll bet they learned a lot in the process and had fun doing it. thanks for sharing it with us.

</comment><comment><USER10> Tridiv [1] is something cool to check out as well, really cool concept taken to a crazy complex level. It's an actual editor for making complete 3D models in the browser. I wonder if something of the complexity of the X-wing model [2] could be used with voxel css to make a flexible game engine.

[1] [http://tridiv.com/](http://tridiv.com/) [2] [http://goo.gl/sn7Y30](http://goo.gl/sn7Y30)

</comment><comment><USER11> The demo page has some serious z-order issues. (FF 43)

<comment><USER12> This is actually a bug with CSS3D transforms in general with Firefox:

[http://jsfiddle.net/yNfQX/21/](http://jsfiddle.net/yNfQX/21/)

<comment><USER13> This is being tracked at [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1187209](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1187209)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Locked up my iPhone 4 when I scrolled down to the spinning cubes (in Safari). Eventually after about 10 minutes of being completely unresponsive, it rebooted. No judgment, just reporting what happened when viewing on a phone.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, you're using a 3 year old iPhone, with Safari. My HTC One M8 runs it pretty fast with Chrome.

<comment><USER16> I think the iPhone 4 is from 2011 so roughly 4+ years old. With safari though, I'd also be interested in knowing the iOS version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice demo. The .css in the name gave me the impression that this was a pure CSS library.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is definitely an impressive demo. I wonder if 3D will begin to be used a lot more in websites and mobile sites in the next few years.

We just celebrated our 4 millionth user with a 3D visualization of all our users. It uses canvas to draw instead of css, but I think it is one of the best ways to convey a feeling of our global userbase actually using the app. I'm curious what you think of its "3d performance":

[http://qbix.com/blog](http://qbix.com/blog) \-- it loads in the first post

<comment><USER19> Congratulations on 4 million users! The visualization works really well, IMO. A couple thoughts on its implementation: 1) The dropdown list of countries is not alphabetized. Makes it difficult to find reviews from a given country, although it does make you use the map:)

2) If you click on a country that doesn't have a review, it produces a blank, instead of the country name and flag with no reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does this work around broken 3D transform depth sorting? To see what I mean, look at this in Firefox: [https://ajf.me/demos/200blocks/](https://ajf.me/demos/200blocks/)

I love 3D transforms, they're great. I wish I could practically make stuff with them. But they're so slow and there's bugs in every implementation.

So WebGL is all that is practical for anything beyond a few spinning cubes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's a cool project to efficiently and flexibly implement minecraft-like games in the browser in JavaScript/WebGL. It's built out of a bunch of NPM Node modules with browserify.

In the video at the top of the page, Max Ogden's presentation is fantastic and well worth watching! He did a survey of many other similar projects on github, and built on top of the best ideas from them all.

[http://voxeljs.com/](http://voxeljs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is really cool! I don't know what I could do with it but definitely a fun project to play around with.

<comment><USER23> Google Sketchup is an unsophisticated but good quick-and-dirty modeling app. It wouldn't be a huge leap to see it built in a CSS framework like this.

<comment><USER24> SketchUp[1] is built for ease of use for in mind for people who are not 3D pros but there's actually quite a lot of clever things going on under the hood[2] so it would not be a weekend project to reimplement. But yes, a web based clone would be awesome.

[1] It's now owned/developed by Trimble, Google sold it to them ~4 years ago

[2] [http://mastersketchup.com/sketchup- inference/](http://mastersketchup.com/sketchup-inference/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone had any luck finding the license?

<comment><USER26> Looks like it's MIT-licensed: [https://github.com/HunterLarco/voxel.css/blob/master/package...](https://github.com/HunterLarco/voxel.css/blob/master/package.json#L31)

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the link! Looks like author added it too, it is indeed MIT: [https://github.com/HunterLarco/voxel.css/blob/master/license...](https://github.com/HunterLarco/voxel.css/blob/master/license.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The page process and the GPU process are duking it out in Chrome to see which one can most fully peg a CPU core.

I'm watching just the three cubes at the bottom of the page.

GPU is holding steady at 97-99% for several minutes now. voxel.css is 80-90%.

</comment><comment><USER28> Cool. Making this stereoscopic would lead to using this to experiment with a VR type of use case - even for a non-interactive flavor.

<comment><USER29> Mozilla's been working on declarative, VR-enabled markup under the A-Frame project ([https://aframe.io/](https://aframe.io/)), which might be of interest to you.

<comment><USER30> Just learned about this..great project. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how hard it would be to get a Leaflet.js map rendering as a mesh - would be a cool little toy to flip between lots of maps.

</comment><comment><USER32> Neat, but it's laggy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Awesome! Dragging doesn't work on mobile though

</comment><comment><USER33> Very interesting, but needs gimbal lock correction.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thought css support for webgl ):

</comment><comment><USER35> Crazy demo!!!

</comment><comment><USER36> This is not a useful submission title.

<comment><USER37> It seemed pretty straight forward to me. How did you not find it useful?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Someone should make a Minecraft clone out of this.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why is it called CSS when it's a JS library for 3D? Totally confusing name that breaks convention.

<comment><USER39> It's all rendered in CSS

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Voxels are the most expensive way to model a 3D shape, and browser CSS is the slowest way to render a 3D shape. These two were made for each other. The next step is to reimplement the Mars DOS demo [1] using voxels in the browser, and marvel at the slowdown compared to 1993. It's discouraging that we're supposed to cheer for progress even when it's headed backwards.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k)

<comment><USER5> I love when you guys come into a thread about web tech and dump on it.

Web tech isn't "going backwards" any more than a flag-ship phone is "going backwards" because it's not as powerful as a high end desktop PC.

They solve different problems.

A browser based program is sandboxed, can be instantly "downloaded and installed", runs on all architectures, runs on all major platforms, runs on both desktops, laptops, phones, tvs, and anything else that you can run a browser on.

And even if it was verifiably worse in every single technical way, it could STILL be "progress" if it's easier to use than the alternative.

It's not the same, stop acting like it is.

<comment><USER40> Zero installation at the cost of 10x worse performance is a worthwhile tradeoff for websites, but not for games or other 3D-heavy applications. That won't change as computers get faster, because native apps get faster too. Web 3D won't be widely adopted until it can close the performance gap. The OP makes that problem worse, not better. Hence my negativity.

<comment><USER5> Bullshit that web 3d won't be adopted. It already is! Google maps uses web 3d pretty heavily already, and it's a perfect example of this.

But even if i concede that point, i still don't agree. Who are you to say that this doesn't solve any problems?

Say for example a website that wants to include something so you can view a product in 3d and be able to move it around and inspect it.

That's not something i want to have to download a full desktop program for and give it access to god knows what on my machine for, but it's something i'd love to have to see a 3d render of something to get an idea for it's size/shape/other features.

OP isn't even marketing it as a library for "games or other 3D-heavy applications", he's marketing it as a really easy way to get some 3D rendering in the browser.

<comment><USER40> For what it's worth, I agree that the web needs something like WebGL to cover the Flash use cases (animated ads and casual games).

Not sure why you need voxel.css, though. When would you use it instead of [http://www.marmoset.co/viewer](http://www.marmoset.co/viewer) ?

<comment><USER41> No one's claiming it has any practical use case, this is really just a toy.

Though, one use case might be to have a 3D environment where in-game menus are made with the DOM. Maybe in a virtual reality thing, or a rotating cube interface: [http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11229/is-this- rotating...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11229/is-this-rotating- cube-interface-user-friendly)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Feynman On The Importance Of Playing - <AUTHOR> http://pythonwise.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-importance-of-playing.html <comment><USER2> I'm a grad student and I regularly run across this quote of Feynman. What strikes me about the quote is that unlike Feynman, I can't always just drop whatever project I'm currently working on and start doing "cool new stuff". I have responsibilities and commitments to my adviser and my colleagues. Even if I'm at a point in my research where starting something new is possible, sources of funding, adviser's expertise and interests etc. still constrain what I can possibly work on.

I guess you can do whatever catches your fancy if you're Richard Feynman. For the rest of us mortals, the challenge is in finding interesting stuff to do within the constraints of the environment we're working in.

The lesson that I take from the quote is that you've got keep yourself interested in whatever you're doing. If getting up in the morning and turning up to the lab seems like a chore, then something needs to change until it isn't.

<comment><USER3> While I sympathize with your specific situation, I can't help but suspect that, in the general case, there's something of a selection bias when it comes to playfulness and autonomy. What I mean is, people who are dedicated to maintaining their playfulness will tend to opt out of systems that don't allow it.

Anecdotally speaking, a lot of the creative and playful people I know seem to spend their careers moving, incrementally of course, from less autonomy to more autonomy. I see these moves happen when people leave a job, accept a new job, start a business, switch majors, transfer universities, or apply to specific grad program.

My point is that it could have been something essential to Feynman's character that led him toward the amount of autonomy he's famous for having had.

<comment><USER4> He was a professor. With tenure. Lots of those around.

<comment><USER5> A sentence. Requires. A verb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A TED talk from a woman (Paula Scher) who knows how to be "serious" without being "solemn" and losing your sense of play: [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paula_scher_gets_serious....](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paula_scher_gets_serious.html)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link, it is a fantastic talk and her work is very good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a good anecdote about Feynman and his sense of play in Danny Hillis's keynote for the 2000 Game Developer's Conference (video at [http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014862/2000-GDC-Keynote-Dr- Dan...](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014862/2000-GDC-Keynote-Dr-Daniel)). At 10:50 he talks about asking a physics question with respect to why dry spaghetti shatters a certain way, and what that led to.

There are also some other good stories in that talk, one about Marvin Minsky which immediately follows the Feynman story. The whole thing is worth listening to, I think.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is what I like about coding. I enjoy trying to solve those small puzzles that make up a full application. The problem sometimes is that the application gets so big and the solutions take too long that it becomes a grind.

I find that when I reach that point, it helps to take a break, look at the problem with a fresh mind, and try to break down the solution into smaller pieces. At that level, some parts become interesting and fun again, even though others might not be. At least you have fun in some of the parts, instead of feeling the grind of the entire thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Play is so important, but since it's difficult to measure the value, it gets down-played as "non-productive." While it's obvious when someone is "over- playing," it's just as important to identify when you're "under-playing"...

Some of my biggest breakthroughs on work-related projects have come to me as I've been hiking, taking in a museum with my wife, or pushing my daughter on a swingset.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity>

</comment><comment><USER12> You can't like to do something unless you can play with it without worrying about the consequences. This is the exact reason why I didn't want to do PhD... and I am glad I still like Physics, Statistics, and Mathematics - because I play with them whenever I want to.

</comment><comment><USER13> Principal Skinner: Here's a whole box of unsealed envelopes for the PTA!

Bart: You're making me lick envelopes?

P.S.: Oh, licking envelopes can be fun! All you have to do is make a game of it.

Bart: What kind of game?

P.S.: Well, for example, you could see how many you could lick in an hour, then try to break that record.

Bart: Sounds like a pretty crappy game to me.

P.S.: Yes, well... Get started.

<comment><USER14> Sound a lot like something was done at my work. Metrics, just as number of tickets closed, were given. More we do the better :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Upvote if you spent at least a couple seconds trying to unhighlight the Feynman text.</comment>