Stupid C++ Template Tricks: Snake - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mattbierner.com/stupid-template-tricks-snake/

<comment><USER2> Why not write a compiler that performs the metaprogramming?

The input for this compiler could be in some clean, well thought-out language, and the output could be dirty C++ template metaprogramming code.

<comment><USER3> I have seen more than one such compiler, usually from Haskell-like dialects to C++ metafunctions (e.g., [http://gergo.erdi.hu/projects/metafun/](http://gergo.erdi.hu/projects/metafun/)).

In this case the metaprogramming seems unnecessary---even assuming that it makes any sense to run a snake game at compile time---since C++14's relaxed `constexpr` functions are a much more readable way to achieve the same thing. Metaprogramming is only required now when _types_ need to be computed; most of everything else is more cleanly done with `constexpr`.

<comment><USER4> Constexpr is C++11, I think?

<comment><USER3> It is. The original article is already using several other C++11 features, such as variadic templates and alias templates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is what happens when you embed a Turing-complete language inside your compiler. People write programs against the compiler instead of the language.

My question is, is there a real use-case for Turing-completeness inside a C++ compiler?

<comment><USER6> > My question is, is there a real use-case for Turing-completeness inside a > C++ compiler?

That's a weird question because it seems to imply that "turing completeness" was a design goal of C++ templates. Afaik that's not the case, it's just an emergent feature of a powerful meta programming system. Also, turing- completeness doesn't mean much. It just means that there is _some_ transformation that allows to general purpose programs to be written. It does not mean however, that it's practical, performant, or advisable. Things that are turing-complete include:

* Apache mod_rewrite * The Scala type system * Sendmail configuration * Magic the Gathering

So, being turing-complete really is more of an interesting factoid, not actually a major achievement with any consequences for "real life".

See: [http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html)

<comment><USER7> C++ compile times were bad enough before people realized that it's impossible to compute in some cases whether their compilation will ever complete.

<comment><USER6> Except real, contemporary C++ compilers do not implement templates as turing complete:

       error: template instantiation depth exceeds maximum of 500 (use -ftemplate-depth-NN to increase the maximum) instantiating 'struct a<500>'</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: We Let Machine Learning Design Your Logos - <AUTHOR> https://www.designwithai.com/ <comment><USER3> How is this AI/Machine learning?

It's basically get an icon, place it on a canvas. Take the brand name, and either put it on the right of the icon or beneath it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's usually the first question we get from so many folks. From the surface, it doesn't look like an ML problem but here are some of the places where ML is needed. Given a company:

\- What color scheme to use? We generate this using machine learning (random forests)

\- What fonts combinations to use (We are trying to do this using font embeddings)

\- What icon to select given the company name and description (We use word embeddings right now for this. We are also going to use Conv Nets and Auto Encoders to get better icon representations).

\- Out of the hundreds of logos we generate using genetic algorithms, which ones to show to user? (This is an image classification problem and we're working on using Conv Nets here).

These are just some of the aspects where we are applying ML. Some of the features are being used and some are being developed.

Please let me know if you have any other questions. Happy to chat more about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this match up against other generators like Brandmark?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the feedback we've got from different sources including startup communities at reddit, our logos are much better than our competitors (logojoy, brandmark) in terms of diversity and creativity. I would love for you to have a look at the website and try creating some logos.

On the technical side, we are trying to automate as much as we can. One example of this would be a feature that we are working on right now which uses GANs to generate icons from scratch. Another is icon coloring using Conv Nets. These features are still in progress but you can see where we want to go. We want to do away with rules and let the ML algorithms decide everything for us. This addresses one of the limitations of our competitors that we observed - <USER2> lot of redundancy because of some rule based aspects of their products.

Happy to chat more about this.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. Happy to answer any questions you have. I've been working on this for over a year and it seems to be in a good form now. I would love some feedback from the community here.</comment>


Xvg: debug SVG paths in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://xvg.now.sh <comment> grey-area This is beautiful and useful, good work! Makes me want to click the control points to edit the shapes.</comment>


Free Raspberry Pi co-location in Sweden - <AUTHOR> https://fsdata.se/server/raspberry-pi-colocation/ Swedish citizens are offered free- yes, free- co-location of a Raspberry Pi in fsdata's datacenter  in Helsingborg, Sweden.  1Mbit/s, 100GB/month, 0.00 SEK per month. If you aren't a Swedish citizen, ask your facebook friends to co-locate the server for you. Don't miss out. <comment><USER2> Here in The Netherlands we have a similar initative by hosting company PCextreme: <http://raspberrypicolocatie.nl/>. 100 Mbit uplink and 500Gb data, not too shabby!

<comment><USER3> Also, Dutch is easier to read than Swedish. So there's that!

<comment><USER4> Not if you're Danish ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So why would you do this? The entire point of the RPi is not that it is a computer, but a computer that you can hack. It has GPIO pins directly hardwired into the processor. It has a JTAG interface prominently exposed. How are you going to be hacking at it in any interesting ways unique to the RPi if you don't have physical access to it?

<comment><USER6> I think some people bought it for its small footprint, low cost and ability to run Linux. I'm sure a large number of RasPis will never have their GPIO used. If they're sitting somewhere as a home theatre PC, or a file server, or as a home automation PC running stuff over USB, or as someone's desktop, are those uses less interesting?

Certainly not unique to the RPi, but then neither is using its GPIO. Maybe someone wants an always-on ARM internet server to test builds? The one-off cost of a raspberry pi is less than even the cheapest of VPSs for a year.

I don't think I'd do it, but I can see why you might.

<comment><USER5> Still, these are all excellent reasons to have one _in physical reach_. Co- locate? Is it even an efficient use of electricity and money over making a similarly performant VM sharded many times on a more performant system?

<comment><USER7> Given that the cost is 0, it seems like a fairly efficient use of money for the end user.

<comment><USER5> so if you extend that thought a little further, what is the ulterior motive of the co-location company?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's like hanging your smartphone in a datacenter. Kind of interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> Tjänsten är tillgänglig för privatpersoner och företag i Sverige.

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

Roughly translated -- this is available to users and businesses in Sweden.

I'm not sure how they're going to deal with international folks.

<comment><USER10> The way I parse it (I'm Swedish), it explicitly says that they _won't_ deal with international users for this. Isn't that pretty clear?

<comment><USER9> Thanks! :) Yep. Unfortunately, I already contacted them prior to seeing your reply.

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

Edited to add this response via email:

"Im sorry but the service is not available for anyone outside of Sweden."

</comment><comment><USER11> First of all, the company only deals with people living in Sweden.

Second of all, it's one of the worst web hosting companies we have here in Sweden.

I honestly would use a free web host of some kind instead of these guys. Seriously.

I wish you guys read Swedish and could read some reviews of these guys online. They outright suck and are experts at charging you for stuff you didn't know you were getting charged for.

Fuck FSData!

</comment><comment><USER12> Could someone explain the economics driving this? Future up-selling?

<comment><USER13> People want to see if there's a market of tiny hardware hosting, and if yes, be first to develop necessary hosting technology (e.g. power supplies, relay boards for remote reboot, optimal RPi mounting on the server blades etc).

<comment><USER14> It's a loss leader, host the Pi for free, then sell the reboots, SD card swaps, extra bandwidth, IP blocks....

Eventually upsell the customer to a full hosting package if they had used the Pi for an extremely cheap hobbiest/project/dev environment before going to a real server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool. Compare with [http://www.edis.at/de/server/colocation/oesterreich/raspberr...](http://www.edis.at/de/server/colocation/oesterreich/raspberrypi/)

<comment><USER16> That seems like it is no longer available.

<comment><USER17> "Out of stock"

[http://unavailable.s3.amazonaws.com/201304182207_raspberry_p...](http://unavailable.s3.amazonaws.com/201304182207_raspberry_pi_colocation_austria_outofstock.gif)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Remember when PythonAnywhere joked about this? <http://pinode.pythonanywhere.com/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Cool idea, but with 1 Mb/s I can as well run it from home. Even with my crappy dsl.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am Swedish, but I do not live in Sweden. Can I get one? :3

<comment><USER21> no, it's for people and companies in Sweden. It does not mention nationality.

<comment><USER22> So basically if you have a Swedish resident friend you're good?</comment></comment></comment>


Rust in a Week - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9h99HF6o <comment><AUTHOR> Just starting learning, and am recording going through the official docs. This is more of a documentation of my experience than a teaching resource.

Feedback on official docs so far: the ?Sized section[1] was difficult to understand as presented

[1] [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsized- types.html#sized](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsized-types.html#sized)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it's not the best. Working on it!</comment></comment>


Show HN: A dropbox file editor - <AUTHOR> http://cirruseditor.com/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand - why does it need access to my entire Dropbox? I usually only authorize apps that use their own folder.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought it would be easier for people to not have to move files every time they want to edit something, sinc the point is simplicity.</comment></comment>


Executive Order Is Expected to Curtail Protections for Social Media Companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/us/politics/trump-executive-order-social-media.html <comment><USER2> All because of a private company tagging misinformation designed to disenfranchise voters on their own platform.

Here's the actual EO because of the paywall: [https://kateklonick.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-...](https://kateklonick.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-Preventing-Online-Censorship.pdf)

It's another attention grab to distract from the real issues. Something like >75% of restaurants in my small town aren't expected to survive. This isn't doing them any good.

<comment><USER2> [deleted]

<comment><USER3> The EO says "The Attorney General shall establish a working group" to look at potential "unfair and deceptive acts and practices" by online platforms, and lists as an example of such an act "monitoring or creating watch-lists of users" etc.

Ironically, your post's complete misrepresentation of what the EO says is the sort of thing Twitter should presumably want to append a fact check to.

<comment><USER2> Woops, that's my fault for reading too quickly. After going over it a couple of more times I agree that your reading is probably more inline with what they meant. In fairness, they're kind of missing a few verbs there and that ambiguity makes it difficult to nail down. I'll get rid of my previous post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Twitter didn't censor anything - they didn't remove the tweet, nor did they censor any of the text in the tweet. Not that the facts matter here anyway...

</comment><comment><USER5> Are there really no non-editorial ways Twitter could have addressed the factual errors? I don't see the rationale behind picking this fight after so many years, at least in this way.

</comment><comment><USER6> When Twitter's CEO decided to enter the political game by picking sides this was bound to happen.

And before anyone starts accusing me of being pro-Trump, I'm not a US citizen, I've never been to the States, I do personally believe that most of the times he says things that are not by the book or that are just plain wrong (but the "duty" of a politician is not to say the correct things or to do the right thing, it is to get re-elected) but nevertheless I do believe that the mail- voting thing is prone to electoral fraud.

I know for sure that were they to suggest a similar thing in my country (I live in Eastern Europe) I'd probably get out on the streets to protest against it (we've had our own share of electoral fraud in our recent history, like "making" dead people vote).</comment>


Comparing the Network Performance of AWS, Azure and GCP [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG75/1909/20190218_Kesavan_Comparing_The_Network_v1.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm surprised they only tested latency and not throughput. Path differences should affect available bandwidth.

<comment><USER3> You're not likely to be able to test throughput without running into the limitation imposed by whatever instance type or service you are using to deliver it.

An individual service effectively has infinite bandwidth relative to the available bandwidth of any of the major providers.

Not that seeing test results for service-level capabilities would not be interesting, but it isn't really a test of the network itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be nice to have access to the raw performance data, all 30 days, all 1485 tests. This report is missing even the full list of regions tested. The rest of the data is heavily processed.

Surprised to see Azure having straightest routes and one of the lowest latencies - they always seemed to be an csp underdog to me.

<comment><USER5> Me too... Working with Azure daily, this is surprising. Although I suspect I am experiencing slowdowns on storage rather than network.

<comment><USER6> Me three - just using their portal (I assume an example of Azure best practices) doesn't lead to tons of confidence (at least 2 years ago)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This slideshow looks kinda incomplete without the story. Is there a presentation video somewhere, or an article?

<comment><USER7> Video should be posted at [http://www.cvent.com/events/nanog-75/custom-116-948222eca583...](http://www.cvent.com/events/nanog-75/custom-116-948222eca5834bc2b7a679399063e724.aspx) eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would be great to see global network performance comparisons with smaller providers like Digital Ocean and OVH. Everyone always knocks AWS on their bandwidth pricing, yet the pricing is in line with other major cloud providers and CDNs (GCP, Azure, Fastly). I would love to see what the actual trade-off looks like. Is there really that much of a difference in performance or reliability between them, or is it just a case of oligopoly pricing.

Would also be nice to see some stats for traffic _within_ the same AZ as well. I generally see ping times between 0.1 and 0.2 ms within the same AZ on AWS, would be nice to know what that looks like on Azure and GCP.

</comment><comment><USER9> One thing i'm still surprised about, there is still no site that allows you to easily compare pricing between all cloud providers (azure, aws, gcp, do)... seems like someone should of built one by now.

<comment><USER10> [https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp](https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp)

<comment><USER9> Thank you! It doesn't seem to have digitalocean, but still very useful!</comment></comment></comment>


Google Lets You Custom-Print Millions of Public Domain Books - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/google-books-publish-on-demand/

<comment><USER2> > Neller said he'd love to see the day when Google Book Searchers can press a > button next to a search result and find the closest local printer, but > Google says that's a long way off.

There are fewer than 100 of these printers in the world, How hard could it be to implement this?

<comment><USER3> What about, instead of printing local you could have it printed and shipped to you within 24 hours? Is there an online business in there somewhere, or are the numbers just too small?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are they still claiming copyright on the books? I was a bit disappointed to see this previously, but a quick looks doesn't show it anymore. Maybe they relented?</comment>


Ask HN: What does a 'stealth' startup mean? - <AUTHOR>

I have seen the term but am not quite sure what it means about the startup. <comment><USER2> It means that they are being secretive and don't make any information about their product (or anything else) publicly available.

Usually, stealth-mode startups haven't finished their first product yet, and are paranoid that someone else will copy their product before they are able to deliver their version to market.

<comment><USER3> It can also mean they're working closely with a small number of customers to rapidly prototype and validate early versions of a product.</comment></comment>


The last unmapped places on Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141127-the-last-unmapped-places <comment><USER2> > "It's my hypothesis that the reason Europeans are so much more > geographically aware than we Americans is that they have these maps that > make their surroundings understandable and we don't,"

Being from Oregon myself, and having spent years in Italy, I quickly realized that most people in Italy have no idea where I'm from - and it's not a small place by any means. Even the relatively small population is on par with some smaller European countries.

So I don't think it's that Europeans are 'more aware' \- it's that they're more aware of Europe. I think it's pretty normal to be mostly aware of your immediate surroundings.

<comment><USER3> I'm from Germany. Without cheating I wouldn't even be able to guess where Oregon is.

But that's still not quite fair, I think. You're kinda expected to know the neighboring countries in Europe, but you have lots of "internal" state as well. The overhead seems (arguably I'm biased) bigger. Yeah, knowing where Denmark, Italy or Norway is might be expected, but then we're comparing "them" (external state, never went there, cannot speak their language) with "us" (Germany has states as well. Would you be able to name them?).

In the end I agree with you: I think the premise is flawed.

<comment><USER2> I know all the regions of Italy and I think I could do a decent job at all the provinces too, something not all Italians could accomplish. I have no clue about the various internal divisions, of, say, Ireland, Norway or the Czech Republic (I have been to Dublin, Oslo and Prague though!).

I suspect this is fairly true for most people who live in Europe: they know their own town, region and country better than places farther away. This is fairly normal, and after explaining for about the 100th time that "Oregon is the state above California", I rapidly got over being embarassed about my compatriots' lack of geographical knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The West Wing clip on maps is still one of the best ways to teach someone about how different our classic maps are from reality: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX- PrBRtTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY)</comment>


Facebook and PGP (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/securing-email-communications-from-facebook/1611941762379302 <comment><USER2> I'm slightly surprised Facebook is still so into PGP, for users on Messenger & WhatsApp you'd think they'd start pushing notifications over those channels as they are e2e encrypted and will likely be read more often than PGPed email.</comment>


Unbundling: AOL, Facebook and LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/9/21/atomisation-and-bundling

<comment><USER2> LinkedIn has gotten worse and worse for me. As he says, the most basic features are poorly executed and I have such a distaste to use it whenever I get any notification from them since I know they screwed something up with the execution.

A fun anecdote - I had a recruiter for LinkedIn reach out to me via Quora whereas almost every other recruiter does it via LinkedIn. Not even eating their own dog food.

</comment><comment><USER3> Historically I've been a fan of LinkedIn. But one example of something that's started to bother lately are the endorsements. Most of my endorsements come from people who don't even know what the words mean. If they're going to offer this fine-grained endorsements then they should be meaningful, but they're not because they just spam out prompts to get users to endorse each other. This creates almost infinite inflation in the real value of endorsements, which of course doesn't matter one whit to LinkedIn because they own the printing press, rather it is just a cheap engagement driver for them.</comment>


Ask HN: How does your team test web services? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested in learning about how teams tests and collaborate QA for the web services they build.<p>- does your team have automated tests (post-deploy, monitoring)?<p>- what tools does your team use? (specifically testing APIs and web apps)<p>- what's the process when a test fails?<p>- how do you manage testing on a dev environment until a feature is in production? <comment><USER2> Monitoring - CPU Usage, HTTP Response codes, Login Failures, Login Successes, Ratelimit events.

Testing - Unit tests, Integration tests, nothing fancy. PHPUnit or whatever framework you want.

All hooked in to CI. Tests should always pass. If you have a flapping test it should be fixed.

We have docker containers that spin up our production environment locally, so we can test things like nginx config changes, database migrates, configuration changes, nginx changes, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, thanks for the reply.

You mention CI so I'm curious. Do you have an automated continuous delivery process? Does testing fit into that (e.g. integration testing staging or dev services after deployments)?

<comment><USER2> The difference between what we have and continuous deployment is not that big. We don't have continuous deployment, but we could. Things are pushed to staging automatically, but to production it is not.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: please share your favourite firewall/loadbalancer failover setups - <AUTHOR>

I am looking at expanding our deployment infrastructure for high availability (pivoting into the B2B market, negotiating a second contract with an SLA), and will need to make a hardware purchases soon.  I am trying to find sources of good information regarding the various failover configurations possible, and their pros/cons.  Looks like running two *BSD machines for the firewall/loadbalancer, with failover provided by CARP, is a pretty simple solution.  The Linux side of things looks a little more neglected.  Are there any decent linux firewall/loadbalancer failover solutions?
A redundant, scalable back end is a topic that has been documented extensively, and there is no lack of information or options when it comes to scaling, in this case, a Rails application.  However, I am failing to find good information on best practices for redundant front end load balancing.  An example question I have: since we are on a budget, is it "acceptable" to dual-purpose the redundant hardware on the front end?  Being able to run our cluster of background workers on the firewall/loadbalancer failover would obviously save resources, though I am not sure if it's a good practice.
If anyone has experience in this category, please speak up!  Anyone with relevant links, I would love to see them. <comment><AUTHOR> After googling around throughout the day, and bugging caseyf of ravelry, I came across some decent info.

Looks like using keepalived between two physical machines that are identically configured as a load balancer/proxy is the way to go on linux. A brief outline can be found here: [http://www.hackadmin.com/2010/02/22/ip-failover-for-web- clus...](http://www.hackadmin.com/2010/02/22/ip-failover-for-web-cluster/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Amazing company for load balancer based on open source stuff, but with enterprise support. Can run on dedicated hardware or VMWare.

<http://www.loadbalancer.org></comment>


Watch the Falcon 9 Landing - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/14/8417621/watch-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-landing

<comment><AUTHOR> Coverage on the landing. I find it amazing how "fast" it comes in, although I'm sure it has a minimal fuel budget. Again, kudos to the SpaceX team on some amazing technology, forward on to June 22!</comment>


The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/02/22/808404928/listen-the-sound-of-the-hagia-sophia-more-than-500-years-ago <comment><USER2> You can find some recordings of a live concert done using this technique on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpOiX2sO-s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpOiX2sO-s)

I've been learning and singing Byzantine chant for over a decade now. In fact, I ended up learning programming because I wanted to create software for Byzantine notation, which is very different from western notation. Here's an example of (modern) Byzantine notation with renditions in western notation: [https://cappellaromana.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/Cherub...](https://cappellaromana.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/Cherubic-Western-Pl-IV_Divine-Liturgy-Music_Cappella- Romana.pdf)

The top line of western notation shows a fairly straightforward version, while the bottom line shows one fully-ornamented interpretation. Note that microtones are used. As far as I can understand, ornamentation/interpretation can vary by teacher, and I once found a paper that analyzed the microtones used by various famous chanters to see the differences between them.

I never did end up creating any useful open source software for Byzantine chant. I did learn Racket, then Django, then became a programmer and now I'm a data scientist. So I partially ended up where I am because I was sick of typing out Byzantine chant using special fonts in Microsoft Word! There are now actually a lot of symbols in unicode for Byzantine music, but I don't think there's any way to handle the typesetting necessary for combining neumes in the various possible ways yet (think of how Korean works)... but I haven't looked into this for a few years.

I love this music, not only for the beauty of its sound but also the incredible richness of the hymns. There are teachers in the United States working on developing good methods for teaching all of this to people without such a cultural background, and critically, singing it in English so that the meaning can be understood by those who don't know Greek or Arabic. Chanting with my choir is one of my greatest joys in life. Glory to God for all things.

<comment><USER3> I appreciate the links and your story sounds interesting. I'm an Orthodox catechumen myself and am very interested in learning to sing the Liturgy as well as other chants. Might you have any tips or resources on how one might start really learning (besides just practicing)?

<comment><USER2> For Byzantine chant, I strongly recommend immersing yourself in the music by listening to it as much as possible. Try to focus on music in your native language--if it's English, then there are more and more recordings coming out. Become familiar with the scales that are used and learn what tone each song is going with. Memorize and sing back the simpler melodies that you can manage, such as the troparia commonly sung every week.

If your parish does chant, express your interest to the lead chanter and see what they have to say about learning. While we of course want everyone to be able to participate, if somebody is really off (especially with ison, which are the held "bass notes"), it can confuse people and cause a lot of chaos in the middle of a service. :)

If your parish doesn't chant (meaning they only sing perhaps Russian-style four-part harmony), then you have a more difficult road ahead. It's hard to develop this skill without a mentor and without often practicing it in the real life context of the services. And it's of course nice when you don't have to lead a service while also being a beginner!

I encourage you to check out [https://www.byzantinebeginnings.com/](https://www.byzantinebeginnings.com/) It's a unique teaching method for chant using games and exercises, rather than just reading sheet music. Although I had chanted for many years, after I took the first course I really improved a lot. A good friend of mine is involved in creating it and has used her professional teaching experience to shape its pedagogy, although it's still being refined between sessions.

Finally, I strongly recommend learning Byzantine notation over using western notation, even if you are familiar with the latter. Byzantine notation is a DSL optimized for conveying the subtle rhythm and ornamentation that is often lost in translations to the western staff. The loss of this can make renditions sound stale and lifeless. As you can see in my original comment, fully translating such nuances results in way too much boilerplate! An experienced chanter can read a series of neumes like words in a sentence and know all of the musical richness to impart to it.

May you have a blessed start to your Lenten journey.

<comment><USER3> Thanks so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I sang on this CD. The NPR piece linked here appears to be based on a segment we did a few years later for Pop-Up Magazine in Oakland. An interesting technological tidbit that they didn't mention is the use of contact mics for recreating the Hagia Sophia acoustic in live performances (and the CD recording). The Stanford crew would tape these tiny mics to the middle of our foreheads (with wires running down to portable wireless transmitters on the belt) to get a good mixable channel for each singer, which would go through their signal processing gear to produce an acoustic backing mixed with the live singing. This is totally unusual for performances of this repertory; you normally do concerts entirely "acoustic" with no mics or monitors, and good recordings typically involve either a single pair of crossed mics in front of the whole ensemble or a few strategically placed mics in the space, but no per-singer channels and pop-style mixing tech.

</comment><comment><USER5> The next step (that will probably never happen) would be to refurnish the Hagia Sophia, as it would have been before it was plundered in the fourth crusade, and seat an audience in it, as if for a mass. Then pop another balloon. All those extra furnishings and bodies would have had a significant impact on how the space sounded. The plastered over mosaics might also create a noticeable effect that would need to be compensated for. Even with the impressive work of Abel and Pentcheva we still have something that would likely sound empty and strangely hollow to people familiar with the Hagia Sophia when it was serving as a church.

<comment><USER6> The last Orthodox church services were in 1453. So I doubt that there will be many critics who remember back that far :)

<comment><USER7> Actually, there was an (incredibly unauthorized) service held in 1919 during the Allied occupation of the city:

[https://greece.greekreporter.com/2019/09/26/the-brave- greek-...](https://greece.greekreporter.com/2019/09/26/the-brave-greek-priest- who-held-a-divine-liturgy-in-hagia-sophia-in-1919/)

<comment><USER5> That could have turned out so much worse for all involved, but I suspect those involved had different perceptions of the risks than we do now. Though there was still some risk of dying, this must have seemed like a cakewalk compared to jumping out of a WWI trench!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Now imagine - it's the early 13th century. You're sitting inside the Hagia > Sophia. Marble pillars rise up around you. Dusty light filters into the > windows in the massive dome above.

The Hagia Sophia was also a great tool for the Byzantine Emperors to convert other leaders to Orthodox Christianity. There are stories of various leaders being so overcome by the experience of a mass in the Hagia Sophia that they embraced Orthodox Christianity and became allies of the emperor.

<comment><USER9> That basically works like the concept of "culture" in the Civilization video games. If you have more "culture" you gain all sorts of upper hands over the other players.

(I know the comparison is rather silly)

<comment><USER10> Seems like a very apt comparison. The spread of Christianity and Islam, including denominational conversions, works much the same today. In fact, in some places it's far more crass--fancy cars and huge televisions replace grandiose public buildings and fine art as symbols and enticements of a more civilized and prosperous life awaiting converts.

I don't mean to demean religion, it's just the reality of how mass conversions often work. You get pulled in by the fancy cars, but you stay for the social networks and economic opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was beautiful to listen to. By pure luck (should have done more reading), I was visiting Pisa in Italy. There's a building (the baptistry) _beside_ the leaning tower, which has the most perfect acoustics.

Every hour, they close the doors and a person sings a series of individual notes which then interact just _beautifully_ in the building. Hard to describe. There's a soundcloud[1] here, not mine, stars properly around 1:23. I think you really have to be there though, it was wonderful.

[1] [https://soundcloud.com/miguelisazam/pisa-baptistry-of-st- joh...](https://soundcloud.com/miguelisazam/pisa-baptistry-of-st-john) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisa_Baptistery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisa_Baptistery)

<comment><USER12> If you're interested, researchers from the University of Bologna have been working on virtual acoustic models of that space in its current form [0] as well as past configurations [1] that you might be able to look into. It is truly huge reverberation! And thus, pretty difficult to simulate.

[0] [https://doi.org/10.1080/19401493.2020.1728382](https://doi.org/10.1080/19401493.2020.1728382) [1] [http://pub.dega- akustik.de/ICA2019/data/articles/000682.pdf](http://pub.dega- akustik.de/ICA2019/data/articles/000682.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just listening to the balloon pop in the Hagia Sophia was amazing to hear. Are there any other structures with similar acoustics that still holds performances?

Also there's a YouTube playlist of the recording they mention at the end, the Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VrJ8XOwJzw&list=OLAK5uy_k98...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VrJ8XOwJzw&list=OLAK5uy_k98CAyJvDBJ0yBJQcDVyscJ1lNF66G92s)

<comment><USER14> I don't know if it qualifies as a structure since it's open, but the ancient theatre of Epidaurus is renowned for its acoustics and is still operational to this day.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Convolution reverbs are pretty cool. For Ableton Live Suite users, Ableton has made available a MaxForLive device that lets you make your own impulse response files for use with their convolution reverb, I've used it.

Howto: [https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/make-your-own-impulse- respon...](https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/make-your-own-impulse-responses- live-9s-convolution-reverb/)

<comment><USER16> Yeah... And some still remember recording the sound of popped baloons in different environments (or checked the response of analog filters to a single spike) to use it with first version of SIR VST. Awesome experience, at least as for that forgotten times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was really cool. It kind of clashes as I suspect the kind of people that like to hear cathedral music might not be into the lack of authenticity a filter added to a studio performance might give off. It would be cool to hear an actual performance side by side and see how close they got but that seems even less likely given the current politics.

Talked about in the bit, the Hagia was a church, then a mosque and is now a museum which is apt considering how many cultures touched this thing. This was mainly due to Ataturk's forward-thinking secular reforms in the 1930s. The current Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has signaled his intention, multiple times, to change it's status back to that of a mosque[0] which I think rather unfortunate. Muslim prayers have been allowed at the site for a few years and I suspect it isn't long before Erdogan makes good on his promise.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia#cite_ref-67](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia#cite_ref-67)

</comment><comment><USER18> A few years ago I went to Aya Sofya with a Turkish violinist friend who studiest at a conservatory here. Unexpectedly, up on the top floor, he pulled out his violin and started playing an Armenian/Azeri song called "Laz".

He made it through 3 glorious minutes before security escorted him out. The sound was unreal.

I would love to hear the same test done in the Basilica Cistern.

<comment><USER19> Do you have video?

<comment><USER18> My apologies, the song itself is called Lachin, not Laz.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq2KWVrLKEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq2KWVrLKEM)

(Not the Aya Sofya moment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Link- The album of Capella Romana is on Spotify for whoever's interested: [https://open.spotify.com/album/5iB2tDdXCTaV2PMlcgNYdA?si=X_k...](https://open.spotify.com/album/5iB2tDdXCTaV2PMlcgNYdA?si=X_kV4IvbRJ- qKlTO-mfLtA)

This will be my background music for weeks now :D

<comment><USER20> Here's the Apple Music link as well: [https://music.apple.com/us/album/lost- voices-of-hagia-sophia...](https://music.apple.com/us/album/lost-voices-of- hagia-sophia/1485025261)

<comment><USER21> And on Youtube Music

[https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kFvQRadRiMgs...](https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kFvQRadRiMgsuONr5wye4DtvSHXSta3iQ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really beautiful, glad I took the few minutes to listen.

<comment><USER23> Couldn't agree more. For those who listened, Capella Romana's "The Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia" is also available on Spotify. It's amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Digital reverb algorithms are a huge and interesting area. One can recreate the acoustics of a venue from recordings of a balloon pop or a pistol shot. One can also create physically impossible reverbs, where the echoes precede the actual sound or get louder instead of fading.

<comment><USER25> Could you point me to more info/examples on physically impossible reverbs?

<comment><USER26> Convolutional reverb means you convolve the impulse response of a system with a "dry" input signal to get your output. If the impulse response has any content before t=0, that content will cause a sound in your input signal to have an effect on the output before it happens. "Acausal" is the jargon.

<comment><USER27> that's possible with normal reverbs too. reverse reverb is quite a popular creative tool. i've used it on snares to make them suck you in before popping you out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Beautifully done, especially the transition from the studio to the simulated environment.

You can hear similar choral music if you visit an Orthodox Church or monastery, specifically a Greek or Georgian one maybe.

</comment><comment><USER29> It says on Cappella Romana's site that "For a thousand years, Hagia Sophia was the largest enclosed space in the world."

An interesting fact to get out this rabbit hole.

</comment><comment><USER30> I remember the first time I saw a drawing of Hagia Sophia in my history book. I was so amazed! It baffles me that the designers and builders of these "ancient" marvels often did not know why, from a scientific standpoint, that these buildings didn't just topple over.

This sound bite is magical.

</comment><comment><USER31> Truly beautiful, thanks for sharing.

Kind of reminds me of the following bit where deadmau5 talks about reverb and compression to create a sound that goes beyond what the oscillators generate. He plays a tune without, it illustrates a similar effect. (warning: lots of cussing)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYr6nlqV3oA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYr6nlqV3oA&feature=youtu.be&t=823)

</comment><comment><USER32> This practice continues in the Armenian church in their liturgical music: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmQcQ4M8ROg&t=740s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmQcQ4M8ROg&t=740s)

Not coincidentally, Armenian church and its rituals are some of the oldest in the world.

<comment><USER33> Not to 'akshually', but this specific practice more directly continues in the greek orthodox church - greek & armenian churches began to split in 500s before hagia sophia was completed and split was 'complete' shortly afterwords, which is not to say there are not many similarities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Sad that we don't really consider acoustics when building our modern structures/dwellings these days.

<comment><USER35> We do when building halls/stadiums/opera houses/temples/places where acoustics matter.

<comment><USER36> I think Parent suggests that acoustics matter more than just in spaces for explicit sound consumption.

<comment><USER37> Yes like open office plans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Any links or ideas on what it would sound like during the Ottoman Era? It was the primary mosque of the empire for centuries, so I'd imagine there had to be some form of singing or chanting (Sufis, maybe?)

</comment><comment><USER39> On a related note, I've just finished _Istanbul - A Tale of Three Cities_ by Bettany Hughes - which covers the amazing history of the city, strongly recommended!

</comment><comment><USER40> tl;dr: analyzing the sound of a balloon popping in Hagia Sophia, they made an audio filter using techniques and understanding of sound in space that only became available in last 10 years. Cappella Romana made an album called Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia using this filter to recreate the experience of listening to Christian chants in that space. It's available on Spotify, headphones probably best.

<comment><USER26> > they made an audio filter using techniques and understanding of sound in > space that only became available in last 10 years.

This is an old technique. The idea of convolving the impulse response of a system with an input to yield the output is the basis of LTI systems theory. And while convolution isn't the most computationally light operation in the world, computers have been up to the task of practically performing such operations on audio signals for at least 20 years.

There's been some more recent work about more efficiently and accurately measuring the impulse responses of a space, but given they're using balloon pops, they're not using that work.

<comment><USER41> I wonder why one would need an impulse response recording. The dimensions and materials of the chamber are known. Seems like the effect could be synthesized from that.

<comment><USER42> As I metioned earlier, the tricky part is measuring the materials. The rest can be done with pretty high accuracy. There are commercial packages for that like Odeon or CATT acoustics.

These days, some of the simulation algorithms are slowly trickling into game engines, too, with the push for realistic VR. Unfortunately, these still require some larger quality/performance tradeoffs because they have to share the processor with all the other work the engine has to perform. But it is still quite convincing. So with this tech, you actually get to walk around in a space and hear the reverb adjusting in real time, even when the geometry of the space changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This sounds very much like modern day Georgian choir singing.

</comment><comment><USER44> O man I heard this on the radio and it gave me chills.

</comment><comment><USER45> Instagram filters for sound. You heard it here first!

</comment><comment><USER27> have they made the impulse response data available. would be great to load this into Logic Pro X to use on other material.

</comment><comment><USER46> do the acoustics of the Hagia Sophia differ from that of the Pantheon/Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs in Rome?

</comment><comment><USER47> TLDR; they took an impulse response in the building for use in a convolution reverb.

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

</comment><comment><USER48> Truly magical!

</comment><comment> red-indian "Only possible in the last 10 years" is not correct.

Computer musicians have used the IRCAM ISPW board as far back as 1989 to implement live real time convolution. Single purpose realtime convolution reverb hardware has been commercially available since Sony's 1999 DRE S777. Non-real time convolution has been done for decades as well, including by myself in 1991 and likely hundreds of others during that time period. Real time convolution on an off the shelf affordable consumer platform has been available for a long time as well, including eMagic's Space Designer plugin which was released in 2003. It's still part of Apple Logic.

<comment><USER49> I think Abel was talking about his and his colleagues work in this paper when he said the 10 years comment: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bissera_Pentcheva/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bissera_Pentcheva/publication/277732009_Estimating_Room_Impulse_Responses_from_Recorded_Balloon_Pops/links/563a4b4408ae45b5d284a8ce.pdf)

He's not just talking about being able to do convolution.

<comment> red-indian To be perfectly clear, some have been sampling reverb spaces for use in convolution reverbs using a starter pistol since the 1980s, and the procedure became widespread in the 1990s.

It is not 10 years old at all in any imaginable interpretation.

This person's "innovation" of popping balloons instead of using a starter pistol is completely and totally irrelevant and inconsequential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I find chants very relaxing. And, it has nothing to do with a specific religion.

P.S. Its weird, but the Orthodox, generally speaking, "hate" Catholics more than they hate Muslims. In fact, a Muslim was /is the referee to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-religion-jerusalem- church...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-religion-jerusalem- church/muslim-holds-ancient-key-to-jesus-tomb-site-in-jerusalem-idUSKBN1DU17Q) Might have to do with the split and a tiny thing like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople)

<comment><USER7> >In fact, a Muslim was /is the referee to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

The Catholic Church has partial jurisdiction and would also be subject to any referee-ing.</comment></comment>


Megaupload Assisted FBI vs NinjaVideo, But Evidence Then Used Against Them - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-assisted-fbi-vs-ninjavideo-but-evidence-then-used-against-them-121121/

<comment><USER2> A Texas ranger was chasing a Mexican bandito around the turn of the last century. The bandito had robbed a bank in Texas and was hiding in a bar in a border town when the ranger found him. The ranger only spoke English and the bandito only Spanish so he found a local translator. The conversation went like this :

Ranger : Ask him where he hid the money.

Translator (in Spanish) : He wants to know where you hid the money.

Bandito : Tell him to go [expletive deleted] himself.

Translator (in English) : He said he's not going to tell you.

The ranger stands, draws his revolver, points it squarely at the bandito's head, and says "ask him again."

Translator (in Spanish) : He still wants to know where you hid the money...

Bandito : Okay! Okay! I hid it in the dried up town well, just tell him not to kill me!

Translator (in English) : He said that he is prepared to die.

Moral of the story, everyone has an agenda.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why are all the people fighting the fights I want to get behind, completely obnoxious? Kim Dotcom, Juian Assange, Richard Stallman, etc... Can't we have a champion for the digital causes with the charisma that exceeds new money red neck, rapist, or raving homeless person? I'm not asking for MLK or Gandhi, just an average Joe.

<comment><USER4> From what is publicly known, there's very little reason to believe Assange raped anyone and the Swedish authorities seem uninterested in questioning Assange, filing charges, or anything besides extraditing him to Sweden for some reason.

I don't really want to talk about the details and hijack the thread, but there's something Kafkaesque about how thing shave been handled. The terrifying thing about the case is people are ready to hate him because of flimsy rape allegations, even on Hacker News!

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is Assange isn't all that obnoxious if you ignore the rape media circus. Maybe he is egotistical but most important hackers are.

<comment><USER3> To quote Shakespeare "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" Fighting extradition was one thing, but asylum from Ecuador has me fairly convinced there is more to the change than I originally thought.

<comment><USER5> And 24-hour Met stakeout outside the embassy, cost running into the millions, is standard for an arrest warrant?

<comment><USER6> This has been discussed to death, but... it's not the arrest warrant that caused the large police presence, it was the fact that someone that is trying to avoid deportation was using embassy soil to do so, while flaunting it and being in the centre of a large amount of controversy.

If Assange had just gone to Sweden like he was expected to then nothing would have happened with the police, if _any_ high value media personality was wanted on an international arrest warrant and sought refuge in an embassy like Assange has done it would have warranted the same media attention and thus the same police presence.

The Assange case may be full of suspicious circumstances, but I don't think the heavy police presence at the embassy is anything other than the result of the media circus surrounding the situation (which is of Assange's own creation).

<comment><USER7> Are you implying that the police presence was demanded by the media so that they could have a better story, because there was "controversy?" I'm not sure that's a good justification for the use of public resources.

<comment><USER8> On a more reasonable note, try:

\- "The world is watching, so we better not let him get away."

\- "If he uses the embassy to avoid charges in such a public manner, could set a 'dangerous' precedent."

\- "The UK will have 'egg on its face' if they let him use this to get away."

\- "We need to save face, the world is watching."

\- "This guy is pissing me off. I normally wouldn't care too much, but he is flaunting his situation to the media, so I can't back down now."

\- etc...

No one is saying that "The Media" specifically called for this sort of action. It's the "eyes of the world" that limit options. If this wasn't all over the news, it would be more likely that they might just let him go, but with the world watching "THEY ARE LETTING A CRIMINAL GET AWAY!!!" would be the next headline were they to let this slide.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Could We Run Modern Society on Human Power Alone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/05/could-we-run-modern-society-on-human-power-alone.html#more <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437923)

</comment><comment><USER3> Some years ago, an engineer gave a talk at the French National Assembly to a workgroup debating on sustainable energy. His point was that, by comparing the average yearly energy consumption of an occidental 1st-world person to the mechanical energy production of an average human being, each occidental would need about 200 slaves to maintain the same lifestyle. This is obviously not an qualitative equivalence but it helps put our way of life in perspective.

<comment><USER4> Pre-industrial societies used hydro, wind, solar, animal, and chemical power (wood etc) making the direct energy comparison moot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article focuses on inventive ways to replace mechanical plants typical to large multi-story structures. It overlooks the mechanized power that would still be needed to grow and deliver food necessary to sustain that population density. Vertical gardening on the scale required is not at the same level of maturity as the human-power techniques the article describes.

</comment><comment><USER6> I understand this article is a bit of fun, but some of the ideas are risible.

> Could we run modern society on human power alone?

No, the current global population has swelled because of fossil fuel consumption. We _can_ run pre-modern society on human power alone however.

> Unlike fossil fuels, human power can be a clean energy source, which > produces little or no air pollution and soil contamination.

I hardly think a medieval alley with human waste pooling in it is clean.

> In combination with the right diet, human power is carbon neutral.

So not only do we have to be yoked to the Wheel of Pain, but we have to be vegetarians too?

> We can try and motivate people by making human energy production more fun, > social, and exciting.

Let's gamify slavery!

> If students have to generate their own power, they are much less likely to > waste it.

Now _this_ I agree with. If only we could turn the same attention to student loans...

</comment><comment><USER7> There is no such thing as "Human Power". Animals don't generate power, they just transform it from food via a roundabout process that produces lots of waste. There's just no way this is the most energy efficient way

<comment><USER8> > they just transform it from food via a roundabout process that produces lots > of waste.

You mean like any other machine that generates power? A human on a bicycle, assuming a ~20% efficiency of converting food calories to muscle output, gets a gasoline equivalent 600-1000mpge ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance)). And unlike a car, using a bicycle has health benefits.

<comment><USER9> Humans are a pathetically inefficient motor; Gasoline engines are around 30% efficient and battery-electric drivetrains are more than 90% efficient. A bicycle looks efficient because that inefficient motor is also pathetically low in power - a typical recreational cyclist can only sustain about 120 watts of output.

The leading vehicles in the Shell Eco-marathon routinely exceed 10,000 MPGe. PAC-Car II is the current world record holder, achieving 12,600 MPGe on hydrogen fuel.

Photovoltaic cells are also astonishingly more efficient than photosynthesis. The theoretical maximum efficiency of photosynthesis is ~11%, but most plants only achieve 3-6% efficiency. The leading commercially-available PV panels achieve ~22% efficiency and prototype concentrator PV cells have achieved over 46% efficiency.

<comment><USER8> Comparing these completely not road legal cars to technology from the 19th century is a stretch. I can legally ride my ~600MPGe bike on the streets TODAY. If PAC-CAR II equivalent cars are available to the mass market within our lifetimes, it will be impressive.

<comment><USER9> Electrically-assisted velomobiles are road-legal in most jurisdictions.

[http://www.go-one.us/](http://www.go-one.us/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode about the teenyverse: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w&t=77s&ab_channel...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w&t=77s&ab_channel=VhozmanGoodman)

</comment><comment><USER11> Covers a number of ways humans can actively (and passively) support their own energy use. Things like contributing waste to bio gas production, gym machines to mini generators, etc.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are my Amazon order emails so devoid of useful information? - <AUTHOR> Why do my amazon order details consist of:
"Thank you for shopping with us. We'll send a confirmation when your items ship."  Then it lists my order number, shipping address and amount paid.
Nowhere to be found is the product that I ordered.  This is infuriating because now I cannot search for orders in email without going to Amazon's closed wall system.
Any way to change this? <comment><USER2> I use Gmail, so I'm quite happy that Amazon doesn't automatically share the details of my purchases with Google.

Furthermore, it seems weird to be upset (let alone infuriated) about having to use "Amazon's closed wall system" to search your past orders; you have to use "Amazon's closed wall system" to shop for items and to place orders and to do literally everything else related to buying things on Amazon. I don't even see how it makes sense to talk about a "closed wall system"——as if that's a bad thing——when it comes to Amazon's retail store.

</comment><comment><USER3> They probably have a async worker picking from the $BILLING table to send these automated emails.

Meanwhile, the system cannot add the detailed description likely because: accessing order item would need your personal credential, which only you would have. Extra db calls would cause more time delays and strain on the system.

I don't work for the retail side of Amazon, but that would be my educated guess of the situation.

</comment><comment><USER4> They want you to log in to the site every time you need any info.

An algorithm has probably told them that you would be 0.0047% more likely to order something again.

..alternatively it's so that the order process is slightly more secure as the email is not secure communication.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because this way you can't use their emails against them

</comment><comment><USER6> Will Amazon send emails to mail servers with no encryption?</comment>


Wendy's faces lawsuit for unlawfully collecting employee fingerprints - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/wendys-faces-lawsuit-for-unlawfully-collecting-employee-fingerprints/ <comment><USER2> > The complaint is centered around Wendy's practice of using biometric clocks > that scan employees' fingerprints when they arrive at work, when they leave, > and when they use the Point-Of-Sale and cash register systems.

Why move from the mag-stripe card like they use at Denny's and other restaurants to track activity and spend the money on that kind of tech? When you're around greasy food all day your fingers can't possibly respond that well to the contact for reading their prints.</comment>


HD Transfer of Star Trek: TNG To Arrive This Year - <AUTHOR> http://tng.trekcore.com/bluray/

<comment><USER2> TNG is a great show. They really don't make television like that anymore.

Young kids probably wouldn't watch it if it wasn't in HD. Its like people of my age watching black and white movies. The dated special effects would be too boring and sadly might hinder people from appreciating the show.

A faithful HD remaster would greatly extend TNG's watchable lifespan.</comment>


Show HN: Statistics library for Golang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/montanaflynn/stats <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, it's been a few years since I created this library package and I've recently cleaned up the README, merged some PRs and closed some issues.

<comment><USER2> @anonfunction thank you for the library, I'm using it for keeping stats on the real-estate market in Romania. [https://imolive.ro](https://imolive.ro)</comment></comment>


Everything's Blub All Over Again - <AUTHOR>

Just a random observation, but the recent founders vs. employees kvetch-storm reminds me strongly of the response to Paul's original Blub Languages article.<p>"Blub's a great language! And there are lots of jobs programming Blub! Why would I be happier using that weird language? Not everybody wants to take risks using an unpopular language. And how dare you say I'm inferior for not using something else!"<p>I'm not passing value on the essay or its critics, but I just think it's interesting how much the two essays and their responses have in common. <comment><USER2> I'm just sick of hearing about it. This is like the OJ Simpson trial of hacker news.

Or I should say Reddit. The responses here were fairly normal until someone pointed out that reddit-ers were freaking out about it. I really hate to beat the old 'reddit is teh dumb' dead horse, but it kind of seems like it sometimes.

I think someone read into that essay what he wanted in a search for controversy, and then a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon in order to grind an axe with PG or YC, or to appear politically correct, or any number of other reasons.

It's just like when the whole world had a cow over the (lack of) unicode support in Arc0.

I am currently a caged lion, and I feel like one. I dream of nothing else but the open savanna and a tasty gazelle. How is that for taking a metaphor too far? I understood the whole thing as "startups are liberating to hackers" ... not "hackers that aren't doing startups suck" as others have suggested. I think his points about giant organizations not being natural make sense, and I really don't see why everyone took it personally.

Sure, people can enjoy their big company jobs. But you have to wonder... I have yet to meet an (ex)entrepreneur that hated running his own business. Just because you happen to like your company job doesn't mean you wouldn't get more done and feel more free in a startup. _And just because you would get more done and feel more free in a startup doesn't mean you should quit a company job you are happy at either._ It's up to the individual. It's not like we are arguing over religion here.

Or are we? It sure sounds like it lately.

<comment><USER3> The situation with reddit is a unique one. I think I'm the only person who both writes a lot and started a news site. Not surprisingly, people who like what I write tended to switch to that news site. The switch was particularly extreme in the case of reddit, because News.YC is in a sense an offshoot of reddit: most people who switched from another site to this one came from there.

The result is that practically anyone left on reddit who has an opinion about me has a bad one. At this point, I could write an essay saying 1 + 1 = 2, and the reddit comment thread would be pretty unanimous that I was mistaken, and moreover, an asshole for saying so.

Usually this doesn't effect anything much, but I think you're right that it did in this case. I exchanged email with Atwood and it seemed clear he'd been influenced by the tone of the reddit thread.

I don't think there's anything one could actually do about this problem. I only mention this because it is so far as I know a novel one.

<comment><USER4> Of course there is something you could do. People aren't static. So what if the people who like you came here, and the ones who didn't stayed there? If you say good enough things everyone will like you and it will be a mute point.

Sure it's harder because there is some initial negative reaction to overcome from the reddit group. And it may not be the best use of your time. But it could be done with sufficient skill.

<comment><USER5> _If you say good enough things everyone will like you_

Oh my goodness. You're not serious, are you? This is a strategy for obtaining misery and contempt... and deserving it!

<comment><USER4> I am serious. What do you think could possibly prevent this from working (other than insufficient skill to say good enough things)?

You say it's a strategy for obtaining misery and contempt. But it's not a strategy. It's just a fact. The strategy of attempting to get everyone to like you in this way is something different. That's hard and I didn't recommend it, I only said it is possible.

<comment><USER6> > What do you think could possibly prevent this from working?

One possibility springs to mind. What if someone was to comment on an article by PG, but without reading the article itself? Someone could say bad things about you without listening to what you have to say, you'd have no chance to change their mind.

<comment><USER4> Heh. Well if it's good enough then word will get around. One day all his friends will have read it, loved it, and told him to read it. Plus it would be all over TV and radio and culture in general, so it'd be hard to have a normal conversation while missing all the references to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Enough already. I don't see why we should waste our time on arguing with a large group of people who don't get it. No matter what you say, if it is not obvious and carries any insight at all, people are going to be insulted. This is their problem, not ours. It only takes 10% of the readers to turn a good story into a flamefest. Personally, I found this essay as insightful and interesting as any of PG's essays, and I'm sure that most of the other people who read it feel the same.

All this no-restraint bashing of an interesting article ("you shouldn't have used the 'lions in cages' metaphor! Now I feel terrible! Bghwaaa-waaa-waaa") is really getting on my nerves. Sometimes someone says something that insults you. Get over it. Paul Graham _isn't_ out to get you, and he has explained _at length_ that he didn't actually imply that cubicle workers are losers.

With that in mind: people complaining on this scale about "mere" words is usually a sign that there is an unpleasant truth being uncovered. I think everyone who had their feelings hurt should stop and think about that for a while.

</comment><comment><USER5> The funny thing about Blub was (if I recall correctly), pg introduced the concept explicitly to _avoid_ offending the users of any specific language. When someone is offended by what you're doing to avoid offending them, you've clearly touched a nerve.

Personally, I like this whole discussion because, agree or disagree, the frame of the debate is exactly what I'd like it to be: what creative people can do about the soul-destroying culture of most software jobs. Paul Graham's essays have done an amazing job of raising this question. The emotions they've provoked (or more precisely, the emotions people already feel which they believe the essays have provoked) can't and shouldn't be factored out of it.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen I've wondered if one could arrive at a good decision using _no evidence or facts_ , but only based on how the different sides debate the issue. The idea is you could determine which party is right based solely on how they say things, rather than how strong the evidence is. You look at how different parties debate. You then compare their styles or types of arguments with debates from the past that have since been settled.

It's Bayesian spam filtering, applied to debates. I don't know how accurate it would be, or if it would be easy to game, but it seems useful for educating guesses.

<comment><USER2> I've always held that the person that is the most angry is the one that is least sure of his position.

It's not useful as the only predictor, because people's emotional involvement in ideas can vary, but I find it to be useful meta-information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Compare and contrast with: "To raise your voice is to confess you have run out of arguments."

<comment><USER4> What if the other person is just being an idiot? What if you think he's not capable of understanding? What if he's a child? What if you think he's trolling? Is better argument still the way to go?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a parent, so I can answer your question with respect to children: raising your voice does not do anything except escalate the discussion into an emotional melt-down.

With respect to people you deem to be idiots and trolls, we have known the answer for a very long time. One of the more amusing bits of advice about the matter came from Mark twain:

"Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."

<comment><USER4> I agree that yelling at children doesn't help. But I'm wondering if you would debate with a child, or try to persuade him with good ideas, or would use some other sort of approach that isn't yelling or persuading?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting question, but let's take it somewhere else: Are we describing programmers as children, idiots, and/or trolls? I hope not...

<comment><USER4> I didn't mean to be, although certainly a programmer _could_ be any of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I choose to remain emotionally neutral about this article simply because taking it to heart either positively or negatively is counterproductive. I believe others have already pointed this out, but use of the lion metaphor is not unintentional. Lion is widely recognized as being the "King of the Jungle" -- a powerful and virile animal.

This is an undue specialization, a form of flattery. If anything, this alone should leave all programmers satisfied, because naturally, not everyone fit this definition or can duly ascribe it to themselves, whether they formed a successful startup or not.

A more general "animals in the jungle/zoo" might have equally well served to enrage both camps. In that instance, the onus of deciding which animal is being spoken of would lay on each individual -- some of whom would wind up with rather silly characterizations such as: ape, rat, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> Note also the correlation: startups get to choose their tools, so they usually go with cool "new" languages (yes, I'm aware that Ruby and Python are technically older than Java, and that C# is technically newer than any of the three, but here I use "new" to mean, "not the next COBOL" ;-).

Bigger, older companies tend to be more conservative, or simply have a large legacy codebase, so they tend to use Blub more often.

Languages can also stagnate and become Blub, compared to newer languages. Think of a 10-year-old dot-com-era company who used Perl 5 because it was the best thing around at the time, and now, 10 years later, has a bunch of legacy Perl code that seemed like the coolest thing ever, but somehow looks like Blub now...

</comment><comment><USER10> The response to Steve Yegge's writing about software interviewing is very similar too:

[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about- intervie...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about- interviewing.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes it pays to be a contrarian. Sometimes it doesn't. For programming and employment, it pays to be a contrarian and that is the focus of this forum.

</comment><comment><USER12> I say we just wait it out. It'll blow over.

</comment><comment><USER13> > All this no-restraint bashing of an interesting article ("you shouldn't have > used the 'lions in cages' metaphor! Now I feel terrible! Bghwaaa-waaa-waaa") > is really getting on my nerves.

Yes, I think Jeff overreacted too :)

Anyone would love to get (really) rich, and founders have a lot better chance of that happening than employees do.

So people are upset about not having that chance (at least while they're employees).

It's natural to feel like founding a startup is just more than you can handle, and maybe that's what's bothering most people.

Knowing that them founding something is very unlikely to happen, they insist that working on cool stuff is way more important anyway.

Something like the software equivalent of a cure for cancer can only be deemed more important than founding a startup, that's for sure.

But what most people seem to be missing is that being a founder doesn't prevent you from doing something noble later on - rich or not.

<comment><USER14> not everyone would love to get rich. Certain people want to get rich and some of them work in startups. But even within startups not everyone is trying to get rich. I'm pretty sure Paul didn't start FriendFeed just to make even more money, but I could be wrong.

<comment><USER13> Well, if someone asked you: "Would you like me to transfer 50 million dollars to your account?" - what would you answer?

What would the "certain people" answer?

"No thanks" ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why can't we simply admit to the jealous world of corporate wanna-be lions (i.e. pussycats) that we are the creme de la creme and they are not. We are always smarter, faster, stronger, and more sexy. We have more fun and self- esteem. We are on top of the evolutionary and social ladder. We are the gold standard. And we troll them down on their hate-blogs while we compile our next cash cow.</comment>


Ekanite: Syslog server with built-in search - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ekanite/ekanite <comment><USER2> >Its goal is to do one thing, and do it well -- make log messages received over the network searchable

Nope, that's two things. It might do them well, though.

<comment><USER3> Meant as not a generic search tool like ES. This is just for logs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ekanite looks interesting, but on first look, a design that combines collection, storage and analysis rubs me the wrong way. It's at least three different things that have such different performance implications and behaviour that it's a design mistake to couple them tightly. I've been through this process many times myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ekanite author here. Thanks for the feedback, but I'm not sure I agree. The whole point of the design was to build a system that did it all, though I agree there are trade-offs to be made that might not be necessary for distinct systems. But the advantage of having it all in one system is also significant. It makes deployment almost trivial.

I (along with a great team) also built the equivalent system as a large-scale SaaS-based analytics system (Loggly's 2nd generation system) and I was curious to see if I could do the same thing in a single binary -- hence Ekanite. Granted Ekanite doesn't provide all the features of that system, such as custom parsing and multi-tenancy, but many of the principles are present.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> grep is syslog search ;)

<comment><USER6> can't invoke grep (safely) with a browser

<comment><USER7>
      grep < log -- "$query"</comment></comment></comment>


Made a cool prototype, but hit a dead-end - <AUTHOR>

hey people. need some advice here. lets say i've written a really cool app. the idea is not original, but the way it has been implemented is different and gives it a definite edge, both from a usability and business perspective. the core of the app is all done and there's a functional prototype. but it's definitely not polished. i'd say that it's 80% there. but i am a geek, i'm not a marketing guy and i'm not into business networking as i don't have the personality for it. so now i feel like i'm at a dead-end. any suggestions would be appreciated. thanks a lot. <comment><USER2> I agree with sdurkin's comment - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1582087>

Let me add this - I'll bet you're a lot less than 80% of the way. When you get non-technical people to use your app you'll find that they don't understand, they do things you don't understand, and you'll end up in despair thinking "Why are people _so stupid?!?_ Then you'll have to redesign the way it works so they don't di the stupid things, and then you'll realise that what they did made much more sense, so you should make it work differently anyway.

Realise now that this is the case and you can throw yourself into the work with enthusiasm, rather than despairing at the stupidity of "damn users". It's users you need, and they are (almost) always (nearly) right.

<comment><AUTHOR> indeed, usability is an art!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Depending on what app you're building, I would just go out there, get the interest of just a few fairly interested users (like 5 to 10), and hear what they have to say, before proceeding with the remaining "20%" of development work.

Is it a B2B or B2C app?

<comment><AUTHOR> B2B. you're right. there's a very high chance that i'd getting it wrong without the appropriate level of feedback from the target market. i'm not good at approaching corporates, which is why i haven't done this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Post a demo, and see if you can partner up with someone who completes your skillset.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the reply. i hadn't even made a demo, which shows how dumb i am in this regard. anyway, i'll start making a demo now :)</comment></comment>


Google will no longer make its own tablet devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/google-will-stop-making-its-own-tablets-2019-6 <comment><USER2> Google shot themselves in the face trying to make ChromeOS happen at the expense of making Android tablets that don't suck. Hell, Kindle tablets kinda do suck and they still sell fine.

<comment><USER3> I do wonder how many people buy Kindle Fires when they aren't on one of their $40 clearance sales. I've bought three or four of them that way.

They are, to be honest, pretty terrible, but for reading in the middle of the night when I can't turn on the light and use my regular Kindle, they beat using my phone.

<comment><USER4> What's holding you back from the backlit Paperwhite?

<comment><USER5> Paperwhite is not a cheap product. Unfortunately there are no cheap alternatives either, I always wonder why Chinese don't clone and manufacture something similar in mass.

Is it so hard or e-ink is something that is not manufactured there?

<comment><USER6> In Europe there are lots of cheap e-ink device clones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With the advent of larger smartphones, I use my tablet less and less.

I know they're not great now, but perhaps foldables will kill tablets all together?

It may actually be a smart move to unbloat the product lines a little.

<comment><USER8> iPad sales aren't going anywhere. Apple sells twice as many tablets as they do laptops.

<comment><USER9> My iPad Pro is my favourite portable device that I wouldn't want to give up. Definitely not a feeling I have about my Macbook nor my iPhone.

<comment><USER10> _My iPad Pro is my favourite portable device that I wouldn 't want to give up. Definitely not a feeling I have about my Macbook nor my iPhone._

I felt the same way about my MacBook Air. It's been my constant companion since 2011 to a dozen countries and dozens more cities. Love that machine.

This past April my wife bought me an iPad. The last three trips I took were with the 'Pad instead of the Air. I'm really surprised how useful that little thing is.

I feel like I can go back to a feature phone now.

<comment><USER11> I did exactly that. My daily carry is the new Nokia 3310. It was $90. It's fine. I can lose it or drop it and not care. And it's small!

Learning how to type a text again using the numpad was painful, but after a few weeks I was back up to speed.

No Facebook, Slack, Email. Not even a browser. No distractions.

When I'm out with my kids, I'm with my kids. When I'm working, I'm at my desk with a real computer.

<comment><USER5> Why not a Nokia with full QWERTY layout then already?

<comment><USER11> You can't buy them.

<comment><USER5> How come? If you are an american: [https://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Unlocked- QWERTY-Dedicated-Micro...](https://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Unlocked-QWERTY- Dedicated-MicroSD/dp/B003V4AJSU/)

They are being sold a lot on ebay etc. too. Refurbished and cheap, if you are willing to wait for the package.

I use C3-00 and non of it's (primitive) smart features. It's still a dumb phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They never figured out how to build on the Nexus 7's success and momentum

<comment><USER13> As an Android user, I liked my Nexus 7 at the time, but I received security updates for a year or two max, and then never bought an Android tablet again because of it.

<comment><USER14> Google is pretty good about announcing security update support up front so you can make that decision at least. I think the Nexus/Pixel phones are generally 2 years of updates, 3 for security. Maybe a little short if you're optimistic about how long you'll keep the device but that's better than most manufacturers being late or inconsistent about updates.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, this policy (pre-planning and announcing update timeframes) only really started after Nexus 7 for Google Android devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love my pixel slate, best tablet/laptop I ever had. Such a shame. The screen is great, the keyboard is surprisingly good and it's awesome to be able to ditch the keyboard for a while when reading docs etc. Linux and Android apps mean I can run android studio and e.g. Lightroom (android version) as well as many games. I got back to playing some DOS games in dosbox.

It's fast, light and very well manufactured.

<comment><USER17> The keyboard design was quite poor compared to the Surface Pro in my opinion. It felt wobbly when carrying around too as it didn't magnetically keep the bottom part of the keyboard snapped to the display when shut closed.

I also don't feel it was light by any means. It weights almost a full 3 lbs with the keyboard attached. That's heavier than the Dell XPS 13 and much heavier than a Surface Pro 6.

<comment><USER16> That's possible. I switched from a MacBook Pro 15 and the slate is much much lighter and has a much better keyboard. Perhaps lowest bar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google's tablet dreams died when they killed the Nexus line in favor of Pixel. Instead of making devices 95% as good as other flagships at half the price, they became the market-leader when it came to overcharging.

<comment><USER19> Isn't the Pixel 3a exactly that?

<comment><USER20> Yes. 4-5 years after they abandoned their loyal Nexus-customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cbm-vic-20 I still use my 2013 Nexus 7 every day.

<comment><USER21> I was a huge fan of the Nexus 7 -- it's the device that changed how I looked at personal computers. I bought myself one, and ones for a couple of family members.

Within 3 years they were all unusably slow. Kept them going for a little while with some device resets, but eventually we just all had to give up on them. The family has been on iPads ever since and even the oldest of the bunch still run great (much thanks to iOS 12's perf improvements).

That's the whole story on how I got sold on Apple hardware.

<comment><USER22> Similarly, my iPad 3 from the same year as the Nexus 7 1st gen sees more use than my 2nd Gen Nexus 7. Also the microUSB broke and I resorted to wireless charging after 2 years, which sold me on wireless charging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Didn't they stop/restart once before? Sounds like history is repeating itself...

<comment><USER24> Yes, this is from last year: [https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/09/google-gives- up-o...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/09/google-gives-up-on- tablets-android-p-marks-an-end-to-its-ambitious-efforts-to-take-on-apples- ipad)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Checkout Xiaomi Mi Pad 4. Basically the Xiaomi-clone of the iPad Mini. And it's perfect, love it so much

</comment><comment><USER26> They talk about Pixle/Chrome OS "tablets" but not Android, which is what I actually want.

Please make a follow up to the Nexus 9.

<comment><USER27> Isn't that because they don't make Android tablets at all?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very sad to see Google bailing out while iPad Pro and iPadOS is going stronger than ever. Honestly, this is the tipping point for me to switch from the Google ecosystem to the Apple ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER9> ChromeOS/Android hybrids must have confused people

<comment><USER29> x86 2-in-1 devices are so clearly superior to the Android and ChromeOS sort, that the latter just feel like a bad joke in comparison. I can't wait to be able to run a pure tablet device on mainline Linux and GNOME-Shell; this has become truly feasible only very recently, with GNOME 3.30 and 3.32. (Hopefully the PostmarketOS project will step in and support this on old Android tablets as well, but the huge amount of hardware variety just makes it hard to predict what models will be able to support this without resorting to ugly hacks, like using old vendor kernels and proprietary blobs, etc. etc.)

<comment><USER30> It seems like most chromebooks today run on x86. I have a pixelbook I picked up on sale for around $650 (mid-grade model marked down from $1200). I've had it for around a year now and it's been a good experience.

I think the big issue for most people and chromeOS is that $400 laptops suck no matter which OS they run. A 12" macbook with the same specs (256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, i5 Y-series processor) runs $1400, has no touchscreen/tablet mode, no pen capability, a bad keyboard, one less USB-C port (a big deal for me), and (surprisingly) a smaller, worse trackpad.

Software has gotten radically better recently. I run chromeOS for my browser, Android for a few apps, and Crostini/Debian 9 for the rest and development. My big complaint is that Crostini isn't GPU accelerated at the moment (they have it working in nightly, so it's coming later this year).

The best part is how seamless it is to run 3 different OS's in one computer at the same time. Android (and Debian) are full installs, so no emulation issues. Instead, chromeOS basically hands off a frame buffer for them to fill (along with relevant IO events they are allowed to see). An Android or Debian apps act just like any other native window on the system while still providing a high level of security.

My big complaint is that some compute-intensive things like running a full test suite takes some time, but that's simply an artifact of the fanless, Y-series form factor (and I still have the option of SSHing into my desktop). I'm not a big fan of the new, unified settings and notifications (I preferred them separate), but it's not a huge issue. I'd like multiple desktops, but those are supposedly already in nightly too.

Overall, I'm not sad to leave my Macbook Pro sitting on the shelf.

<comment><USER29> > It seems like most chromebooks today run on x86.

Even those that do run on x86 are not really PC-compatible. Sure, sometimes you can open them up and unlock firmware write access, and make them usable in that way. But it's just too much of a hassle when you can just pick up a cheap x86 device that will run so much better.

> ...is that $400 laptops suck no matter which OS they run.

They really don't. Sure, ChromeOS is a bit better than the privacy-invasive, ad-infested dumpster fire that is Windows 10, but there's no comparison with something that's running a _proper_ OS! Just make sure that the hardware components are supported, be wary of devices using bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC as their main storage (this is ubiquitous on Chromebooks, BTW! A lightweight linux distribution can ease the pain, though) and you're set.

I really don't know why people would _want_ to run anything besides Linux or Mac OS X nowadays. Even Android and iOS/iPadOS don't really give you anything UX-wise; recent versions of GNOME 3 have matched it quite nicely. (You really have to appreciate the GNOME designers' foresight here! They bet big on making their UX touch- and mobile-ready, and that bet will bring very clear payoffs now that performances woes are being resolved.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> As a former nexus owner, good. The thing bricked after a couple of updates. Whereas my third gen ipad and first gen ipad mini work marvelously.

<comment><USER32> Gosh, I loved my two Nexus'iz (Nexi?). The 7" tablets.

On one I cracked the screen (still works!, sorta) and on the other the USB jack broke (broke it even more trying to solder in a replacement).

Inexpensive and rootable. Can you root an iPad?

<comment><USER33> Nexa. Maybe Nexera.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have an 8.4" 16x10 tablet and I love it for media consumption. I ride the bus for over an hour each way. It's nice to be able to use the tablet for 2-3 hours a day and not drain the battery on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER35> Meh, I've always thought of a tablet as a good idea, but always defaulted to my phone or needed the power of my laptop.

I think sleek chromebooks or large phones are the better way forward.

</comment><comment><USER36> Google just kind of repeatedly fails at things that aren't its core offerings (Glass, Google+, Tablets, Stadia will fail next)

<comment><USER6> Google IO game dev track was a joke, versus what gets shown at WWDC or BUILD.

Google really doesn't get game development.

While Apple and Microsoft make frameworks, IDE tooling, and talk studios language, Google makes PR talks about their cloud services, does some intro level talks about middleware and shows how to do 3D with bare bones FOSS libraries and CLI tooling.

Stadia will surely fail if that is all they have to offer to game studios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I own an Android tablet (Asus) but the next one will either be a Windows 2-1 foldable, or an iPad Pro.

Because only they understand that the killer feature of tablet is being the new laptops, and not just bigger phones.

Also for hobby development on the go, iOS or Windows stack are more fun to use than the whole Studio + J++ + NDK maintained as 20% project.

<comment><USER37> Tablets were always the odd device out of the bag.

Too big to put in your pocket, and not nearly as productive as a laptop with a keyboard. They were fine as a toy or purely entertainment device for someone in the backseat of a car, but mostly a dead-end as far as tech advancements go.

<comment><USER6> Which is why I explicitly stated Windows 2-1 foldables or iPad Pro.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The last Android tablet Google made was the Nexus 9, released in 2014. It was also the last tablet I bought.

The ChromeOS hybrid laptop-tablets are absolutely terrible - both the software and the hardware are miserable to use. I wish Google would just release a refreshed version of the Nexus 9. It's really all I want in a tablet.

<comment><USER39> The entire google OS stack is a mess. Most of the problems that the device manufactures are being blamed for can be traced back to the core model.

AKA the idea that the firmware/os/drivers are all bundled together and hacked to work on a given device simply doesn't scale. Its employment for engineers because very security patch, every upstream refactor, requires all those closed source patches to be rebased on the latest version. This might work ok if the underlying technology (linux) didn't change their driver APIs at the drop of the hat, or the device manufactures didn't play throw darts at the soup of ARM interconnects, ram controllers, and devices, everytime they spun a new generation of phones/tablets/chromebooks.

Apple can get away with the monolithic model because they have a half dozen fairly similar devices to support. There are android manufactures which have released more devices in the last 6 months.

Yah, google is trying to fix that, but without a hard line in the sand with respect to pushing non-core OS/driver functionality into standardized runtime firmware APIs (think powermgmt) and locking down the driver API (userspace or otherwise) and assuring that it takes a long time for API's to be replaced/upgraded/deprecated. The hardware/upgrade story will continue to be a mess.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, Google needs to make this move on Android. If they're just say "okay, if you want Android 10, you need to provide your drivers in this exact ABI way, no more custom software crap, we push the updates", that'd be awesome - basically, use the Windows model.

I believe the only reason they didn't do this out of the gate is because device manufacturers wouldn't have signed on for it. Android is establish enough at this point that it's not like many device manufacturers could really step back from it at this point.

Treble is a strong step in this direction - but they need to take it farther, open up customization APIs and drop the garbage manufacturers pump into devices. The way Treble is right now it only benefits power users who have their devices rooted - who could update without the manufacturers permission anyways.

I wonder if their only hesitation at this point is the mess they're making with ChromeOS and all their other garbage... I think the Android roof was the right one to bet on, massive numbers of users with primary devices running it, but I fear they've done significant damage with their other offerings.

<comment><USER6> There were some statements that they were updating the Play Store contracts to impose this, specially after GSI.

Because the uptake from IO to IO has been diminishing, as Android is already good enough for the purpose of selling phones, so most OEMs aren't even bothering with Treble (Android 7+) for new devices, other than flagship ones.

So Google is now forced to do exactly that if they want OEM to actually care about new versions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Org charts and job titles - <AUTHOR> I work for an organization that is currently trying to update job titles and rework the org chart to split off technical versus managerial roles. Is there any information out there to help with this process? We have struggled to find a hierarchical structure that fits our needs, and are unsure how to implement a technical role that scales in pay with a managerial role. Any advice or helpful resources? <comment><USER2> The Microsoft one was one of the tihng I thought they got right.

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-job-levels-in- Microso...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-job-levels-in-Microsofts- technical-career-track)

</comment><comment><USER3> How about looking at the value produced by each staff member? Then pay according to that value. In my experience managers are over-valued and technical staff under-valued. If managers (of all levels) are more than 5% of the head count, then you have a bigger problem than coming up with a new org chart.</comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with reading list overload? - <AUTHOR>

This is getting ridiculous. For every 10 new things I'm interested in, I finish maybe half of one. My Pocket & Kindle accounts are filling up without any chance of slowing down! Anything I can do about it (as opposed to becoming disciplined.. it's tough to not get distracted), or is this just the way things are? <comment><USER2> I tend to set aside 2 or 3 hours each day just for reading, whether blogs/online stuff, newspapers, mags, or books. I go through a lot of books in particular, with the long-established rule of one book per week. I can fly through most books in half as long, but this system allows each work time to settle into my cranium. And I think that part is key. I want to read everything too, but you have to give yourself proper time to absorb each new thing.</comment>


The Internships That Pay Best - #1:Exxon #2:VMware #3:Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/01/27/the-internships-that-pay-best/ <comment><USER2> _Internships are essential for obvious reasons, and most of us are even willing to work for free if it means we get the opportunity to hone our skills_

Internships are not essential. At all. They're generally anti-competitive and exploitative of the interns. Young people with no experience think they're essential, but they're just throwing their peers off the boat. You should never work for free. Period. You're devaluing yourself and your peers and giving employers carte blanche to skirt labor laws. Never work for free, even if it's just bringing ass-holes coffee.</comment>