Is she Photoshopped? In France, they now have to tell you - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41443027 <comment><USER2> The implication of this article is that agencies would be obligated to use what the article calls "more obtainable" bodies. Is this actually the case? I think it's vastly more likely that this will do little more than sharply increase the demand for people that actually have the bodies that other individuals were being photoshopped to have.

It'd be like if a country banned all voice processing software when singing (which has become ubiquitous today). It's not like studios would simply begin accepting people with less than ideal singing voices. Instead they would actually have to seek out talent that can sing without having their voice filtered through digital signal processing software. And in the end, I think this would (and will) be a good thing. Authenticity should be encouraged and incentivized.

<comment><USER3> > _The implication of this article is that agencies would be obligated to use > what the article calls "more obtainable" bodies. Is this actually the case? > I think it's vastly more likely that this will do little more than sharply > increase the demand for people that actually have the bodies that other > individuals were being photoshopped to have._

You could always insist that the distribution of bodies shown in a magazine follows the distribution of weights/heights in the general population (with some margin of error). And heavily fine them out of business when it does not. Problem solved.

(The voice processing ban example doesn't capture the problem with body photos, because people don't go out of their way to sound like their favorite singers -- auto-tuned or not--, nor does it have many adverse psychological or health effects to have singers voices be unattainable to most people. Whereas body image from ad/fashion/etc models influences the self-perception of billions of people, and leads a multiple-100s billion dollars industry).

<comment><USER4> > You could always insist that the distribution of bodies shown in a magazine > follows the distribution of weights/heights in the general population (with > some margin of error). And heavily fine them out of business when it does > not. Problem solved.

That sounds like an infringement on the freedom of speech, in countries where it applies.

It also seems ridiculously difficult to judge and enforce. The government would need to do periodic surveys of height/weight in the country (or get the data from doctors), prove data is correct, set up an office that reads magazines all day, tries to judge the heights and weights of the people in the pictures by looking at them...the more I think about it the worse it sounds. EDIT: Or mandate that every magazine files the height/weight details of every person pictured in every issue with the government.

It's like the premise of some dystopian black comedy or satire.

EDIT 2: No seriously that would be quite funny. "Sorry Bill we can't do that feature on the Indian women's volleyball team, we got Shaq on the cover this month. We're over our height budget"

<comment><USER5> But is it really fair that surgeons or NFL players don't match societal distributions for their respective traits? Think about how this makes all of the low-dexterity, low-coordination little boys and girls feel. For the sake of feelings, I demand mandatory mediocrity for every profession. Anyone trying to be exceptional should be hampered accordingly.

<comment><USER6> You're comparing advertisement to skill based jobs...

<comment><USER5> TIL being a 6'5" athletic model is not a skill, being a 6'5" athlete is a skill.

<comment><USER6> Athlete, yes. 6'5, no. Come on man, do you hear what you're saying?

<comment><USER5> Woosh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > It's no secret that images of models are often retouched

Well it's not a secret, but it's not obvious for most teenagers. And may be not either for people without high degrees education.

A lot of people, and I suppose not only in France, are not at peace with their body shape, even if they're not obese nor anorexic. Been exposed to not really existing bodies images can be painful for self esteem.

Of course, computer modified photos are recent, but fashion already used lightning and tricking exposure when producing photos from film since, well, the fashion press exists I guess.

<comment><USER8> > Well it's not a secret, but it's not obvious for most teenagers.

Fair enough but the list of things that can harm a teen's self esteem is endless. So in a way there is no way around learning how to deal with issues of imperfection on a personal level. And this, in turn, makes you wonder whether you couldn't spend the money that goes into this project more worthwhile. For instance, you could invest it in free sport programs. That way teens wouldn't just improve their body image but also do something for their health.

IMHO these kind of initiatives are mostly egotrips of people who want to make their mark.

<comment><USER3> > _Fair enough but the list of things that can harm a teen 's self esteem is > endless._

Many things are endless or numerous, that's why people prioritize dealing with a) the most important ones, b) low hanging fruits.

<comment><USER9> of course, it's not clear that there's an actual, rational reason to believe this will have any positive effect, so it's probably option c) must be seen to try something

if they could eludicate the mechanism that has this impact, they would likely also have evidence that violent video games cause male violence, or that bowser kidnapping princess peach causes sexism.

my guess is the operative pressure arises from peer groups, and this initiative is pissing in the wind

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My mother and wife were both photographers at some point and basically every photo is modified, touched up, and otherwise "enhanced" in Photoshop or other tools. It doesn't matter if it's a landscape, a room setting, or a person.

While saying "this has been modified" might be valuable, without knowing _how_ this seems misguided at best.

<comment><USER11> To be fair, the law seems to be quite a bit more specific than that. It applies to commercial use of models "whose physical appearance has been modified through the use of image processing software to slim down or thicken the model's silhouette" according to the translation on this site. [1]

[1] [http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2017/08/france-photoshop- decree...](http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2017/08/france-photoshop-decree- coming-up-soon.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've had that in argentina, in all billboards and magazine ads, for a while, but you need an electron microscope to read the warning.

<comment><USER13> Also, each and every photo in an add has the same warning, so it's completely ignored by the people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This will probably just end up being another warning that is stuck on everywhere, and doesn't mean much. Just like the "we use cookies" popup, or all the "x may cause cancer" warnings, it is easier to just add the warning than change the product/advertisement.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are they going to start telling you when they're wearing makeup or not?

<comment><USER16> They already do in the UK - to a degree. Here's a mascara advert which was banned because the model was wearing fake eyelashes.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/18/rimmel-mascara- ad...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/18/rimmel-mascara-advert- starring-cara-delevinge-banned-use-false/)

A similar case in the USA - [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/fashion/Mascara-Ads- Draw-C...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/fashion/Mascara-Ads-Draw- Criticisms.html?mcubz=0)

<comment><USER15> Well that's a bit different. That would be a direct misrepresentation of the product. i.e. you can not make anyone look like that with the advertised product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > any commercial image that has been digitally altered to make a model look > thinner

This will backfire. Ads will only use ultra-thin models, it's not like there aren't.

<comment><USER18> Images of those ultra-thin models are themselves typically photoshopped to remove signs of anorexia and bulimia (arm hair, gray pallor, dental discoloration, pronounced tendons). This is (according to an acquaintance whose day job used to be retouching fashion photos) a frequent enough need that language like "remove visible signs of anorexia" is included in the boilerplate instructions given by agencies to post-production teams.

<comment><USER19> Sure, but this law doesn't really cover those edits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Stupid. Are they going to tell us when men's physiques are photoshopped too? How about wrinkles or hair color changes or blemish and scar removals? What about wearing makeup?

If a picture is printed, it has been edited.

<comment> chalupa-man It applies to men and to women, and not to blemishes or colours but to reshaping silhouettes. It's worth taking thirty seconds to read something before attacking it as stupid based on your imagination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Of course she is photoshopped. All photos you see in magazines are by default heavily photoshopped, even of "flawless" models. You literally don't see a single photo straight out of the camera where retouching wasn't applied when it comes to women.

</comment><comment><USER22> This law should be good for the careers of models who actually are nearly perfect looking.

<comment><USER13> Nah, if there is a bad shadow or they want to remove a few hairs from the fringe, they have to add the same warning. They ant write "This image is 99% not Photoshopped.".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> They'll probably just render a completely digital image instead, no photoshopping involved in that.

<comment><USER24> Looking how modern game characters look and _move_ , I think ad models will feel the competition very soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How absurd. Virtually every single photo of every male or female that is printed is photoshopped. A lot of people photoshop their pictures before posting to Facebook even. Should that all be declared too? What about those filters on social media apps that make peoples eyes bigger and clear the complexion?

And why the emphasis only on pictures of women when pictures of men have just as much photoshopping? Seems a bit sexist.

<comment><USER26> _And why the emphasis only on pictures of women_

Where do you see this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The subtext of the article seems to be that anorexia is a worse public health problem than obesity.

<comment><USER28> it may not be a worse public health problem, but eating disorders, especially anorexia, have the highest fatality rate of any mental health disorder.

source - [https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas- insel/blog/2...](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas- insel/blog/2012/spotlight-on-eating-disorders.shtml)

<comment><USER29> _Obesity_ has the highest co-morbidity of any mental health disorder.

<comment><USER30> Is this illness olympics? Both are bad.

<comment><USER31> Facts matter. Obesity is much, much worse.

<comment><USER32> In France? With regards to mortality rates of young people?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good, now if only they would do the same for male models who use illegal performance enhancing drugs to achieve their physiques. According to many male fitness models, anyone who earns money based on their body is almost guaranteed to be using them.

I find it really strange how the topic of "enhanced" male models never comes up, but these articles about women pop up several times a year.

<comment><USER26> Yes, they should really pass a law to deal with those _illegal_ drugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Reminds of the Fast Food ads here in the US. Looks Gourmet on TV while the real thing is not even close.

<comment><USER35> >Reminds of the Fast Food ads here in the US. Looks Gourmet on TV while the real thing is not even close.

In that case there should be a warning that what is in the images isn't even edible (often wax and plastic replicas are used in photo shoots and videos), and even if the food is real _almost anything_ is added to it to make it look better JFY:

[https://petapixel.com/2012/08/02/random-things-you-can- use-t...](https://petapixel.com/2012/08/02/random-things-you-can-use-to-make- food-photos-more-appealing/)

<comment><USER13> On the other hand, there was a very interesting documentary of McDonald's about how they prepare the hamburgers for the photo. [tl;dv: It's true food, but it's cooked in a very strange way.] "Behind the scenes at a McDonald's photo shoot" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8) (I remember that it was discussed here a few years ago, but I can't find the submission.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What kinds of ads are required to have this warning and what kind of edits are counted as edits? Does debayering, remapping brightness or denoising count as "digitally altering"? Then all ads will have such warnings.

</comment><comment><USER37> I can't find the actual article, but i was reading that the rise of instagram or just selfie cameras has lead to an increased amount of face surgery.

Just the fact that people spend all their days looking at the imperfections of their own body and compare it to perfect ones(the photoshoped) will lead to surgery.

I think adding a photoshoped disclaimer is a step up, but it is not the ultimate solution. At some point we will end up with a mandatory 200by200 picture of a failed surgery plastered on every doctored photo.

</comment><comment><USER38> In Argentina it has been the case that digital alterations of the human figure must be stated for several years, and people still use photoshop and just add a tiny disclaimer below. Pictures are roughly the same.

</comment><comment> d--b that's it I'm investing in thinning mirrors.

<comment><USER39> What about a real-time enhancement with AI?

<comment><USER40> The trick with mirrors (pure optics, rather than image enhancement) is that photos are not "edited" or "retouched" ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We've seen first steps toward this in the UK. Ads for mascara now have to say if the image is photoshopped or not. This is mostly policed by the companies themselves, reporting each other to Advertising Standards.

<comment><USER35> The mascara thing you mention is about avoiding false representation of the effects of the product.

This is very different, it is specifically about thinness, I believe that anorexia (or if not anorexia at least the psychological troubles that can lead to it) are becoming very common among teens, so it is more than anything else a "public health" campaign to remove the (false, or retouched) images of impossibly thin models from becoming the "reference model" of the youngers.

There was already something similar in a few EU countries, where Laws or Codes of Conduct were made prohibiting to hire fashion models with a BMI lower than 18 for the catwalk: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#Legislation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#Legislation)

The debate was at the time (and still is) whether the BMI in itself is a good metrics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand, this seems like someone never bothered to learn about anchoring. Is there research that I've missed which shows anchoring doesn't apply in body-image situations?

<comment><USER41> how do you feel 'anchoring' applies in 'body-image situations'?

<comment><USER31> The underlying problem we're talking about is that people are seeing these unrealistic images of what a body should be, and are comparing themselves to that. I would argue that given what we know about how anchoring works, even if you tell someone that the image they're seeing is fake, the damage has already been done. Consider the Barbie doll; everyone knows that Barbie is a plastic doll and not a real person, yet there was a generation which grew up with that body being the goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> i don't see this working.

will girls have to label their instagram photos as airbrushed as well? It's much more common than you think.

</comment><comment><USER43> The problem is how to define 'Retouched.' Being an amateur photographer and having met a number of commercial ones, the sentiment and knowledge I picked up over the years goes something like this:

Retouching a photo has been done since the (physical, real) lightroom days. Many of the strange phrases and techniques in Photoshop (dodge and burn, and probably crop and most others with photo-specific context) came from techniques in the lightroom.

Even the most famous photographers adjusted their photos in the lightroom, making alterations that are absolutely in the 'retouched' category. You can find these online (Cartier-Bresson did this, and many others). Source: [https://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show- ico...](https://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-iconic- prints-edited-darkroom/)

Therefore, it's extremely common for any portrait or wedding or any other photographer to retouch. Do 100% do it? Probably not 100%, but damn close.

It's not considered cheating to remove an element, lighten or completely darken/render invisible an element of the photo.

What the photography community considers cheating is portraying something that isn't there. There's a fascinating conversation with a photojournalist on the topic here with examples: [https://petapixel.com/2015/08/04/interview-michael- kamber-on...](https://petapixel.com/2015/08/04/interview-michael-kamber-on- photojournalism-ethics-and-the-altering-of-images/)

So is taking a model and making her thinner, taller and tanner retouching to the point of portraying something that isn't there? Which is a vague phrase, admittedly. Perhaps.

But what about removing a pimple from the face? If you get a portrait done professionally, it'll be almost automatic. Maybe it's not so bad. But if it is, let's say, then what about giving you a better skin tone? Because a bare flash without a CTO gel, or the mid-day sun, with a daylight white balance, is going to make you look potentially weird (if you're caucasian in this example; you might look ghostly). A lamppost nearby, or a store sign nearby might change your skin tone too. So what if you change the white balance in Photoshop/Lightroom/Gimp/whatever and make it look a little bit like sunset? Is that cheating?

But if you do nothing, there's automated settings in cameras that will auto- set skin tone and adjust lighting conditions. Is that cheating?

It's all extremely vague because the BBC article failed to explain the criteria for retouching: the word retouching is too broad.

This is an endlessly debated topic in the photographic community, but banning ALL retouching would, I am convinced, be reviled by almost everybody.

</comment><comment><USER44> Good.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm disappointed and appalled how this headline is in gross violation of Adobe®'s General trademark guidelines ([http://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html](http://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html)). It should read "Is her image enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software? [...]"

Maybe that's the next thing that should be legally enforced somewhere in this world.

<comment><USER23> No the error is using a capital P in photoshopped. The act of photoshopping is a generic term, I use The GIMP or Draw for my photoshopping.

By making it a capital P the suggesting only those editing their photos with Adobe Photoshop will have to mark their photos as altered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> In the United States, Obesity is one of the leading causes of death, with estimates as high as 300,000 deaths/year.

(See [https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html](https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html) )

Deaths from Anorexia are about 150/year

(See [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11513012](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11513012) )

Yet we're all hypersensitive about telling women they are overweight or obese.

It would be like spending weeks in urban schools talking about how to avoid poisonous snake bites and spending 15 minutes on automobile safety.

<comment><USER47> As a French person: stop subsidizing corn, start subsidizing vegetables, stop eating take-out.

If you look at a middle-class supermarket in France and in the US you understand why your poor are obese pretty quickly.

<comment><USER48> Not just France, but most European countries.. every time I travel in Europe there's always this initial realization that I'm no longer surrounded by obese people. None of the places I've been to over there encourage the same eating habits that you find prevalent in the US.

<comment><USER49> Well portion sizes are smaller, but most people walk, bike or transit to work. For example this week I haven't done any exercise due to a "sports"-related injury, and yet managed to burn an average of 2571 calories -- and before you think I'm lucky to live near work, my one-way commute is 30 miles. Even just 40 minutes of daily physical activity built into a commute can make a huge difference.

<comment><USER48> Oh yea, totally. I bicycle to work almost every day (it's ~6 mi one way), but I'm lucky enough to live in a location with decent cycling infrastructure. I think another aspect of why most folks drive here (the US) is because a lot of locations have little or no infrastructure for getting around without a car. In the area where I am originally from (different part of US), you'd get smashed by cars pretty fast because you'd be forced to travel on highways/freeways.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google AdSense: "we're going to optimize your ad settings for you" - <AUTHOR> https://i.imgur.com/ixzn8yB.png <comment><USER2> That's nice of them. I wonder in whose favour the optimisations will be, them or their customers.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the model that you as a publisher get paid based on the bidding of the advertisers and Google takes a percentage? So if they make your ads perform better (read: probably make them more annoying to your visitors), then the advertisers will pay more and both Google and you will get a higher fee.

So this thing is probably good for the short-term AdSense revenue of the publisher, and bad for visitors and thus the long-term use of the site. (Or maybe just good for adblocker install rates)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am surprised that there are so few Adsense threads on HN while almost all of the web carries them.

Are startup founders "special" in a way they do not use Adsense?

Is the web not build / run by startups?

<comment><USER5> >Are startup founders "special" in a way they do not use Adsense?

I don't find depending on Adsense for revenue great, good or healthy, but I presume for many small web sites there's no other option.

>Is the web not build / run by startups?

What is the Web? What is a start-up? If by Web you mean WWW, and by start-up you mean "new shiny online businesses which are perceived by lots of public as being cool and trendy and are funded by VC", then the answer is no.

We have WWW since Tim Berners Lee invented it, and it ran just fine before "start-ups" were a thing.</comment></comment>


Software Engineering is a Joke - <AUTHOR> http://dewitters.koonsolo.com/sejoke.html

<comment><USER2> Erm, people label it as an engineering discipline because it uses some of the same principles of system design, use of modules and reuse that other engineering disciplines share...

Engineers solve problems. Understanding physics is a means to solving some problems. That's it.

"The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems." <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/engineering>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is ignorant. There's no substance to this argument.

Software and the process of building software can't be measured because it's not physical?

"The confusion of software engineering probably comes from the fact that programmers often have the same intelligence as engineers, and most of the time share the same interests."?

One of the few things I dislike about news.yc is that something like this, an hour old with 3 points and one comment can make it to #8 on the front page. Programming.reddit actually seems more discerning.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi there, I'm the author of that article :). It always seems to provoke a lot of discussion, and most people that react on it always seem to disagree with my point of view ;).

Unfortunately my main thought always seems to get lost. Maybe I should try to make it more clear in the article. In my opinion the core focus of software development, and therefore also the most difficult part, is to create an image of the real world (both in source code and the program). An engineer's main focus is completely different.

<comment><USER5> Would you agree that chip design, via a EE degree, is in fact an engineering discipline? It uses metrics, tolerances, correctness, etc, just like a civil engineer has when building a bridge.

Software is simply a layer of abstraction on top of this. For instance, when the USAF wants software for the F-22, you better believe there are requirements and processes just as stringent as Intel's process for designing/developing a CPU. And the people producing that code, imho, are every bit as much engineers as the EE's.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, I even agree that the people that write software for the F-22 are engineers, and better use engineering practices to build their software. The requirements are probably pretty strict/well defined.

But there is plenty of software out there (maybe most software) like ERP/CRM, desktop/web applications, games, etc ... , where the technical parts are not that important, or aren't really the main problem. The main problem is to try to create the most clear representations of real life items (customers, business processes, human resources, etc.), and make them clear to other programmers in the source code, and to the customers (who most of the time aren't technical).

It's probably true that my theory doesn't make much sense for lower level/close to the hardware software development. But for high level things I still think I'm absolutely right ;).

<comment><USER5> Point taken. :) Let me ever so humbly posit, however, that this is the exact attitude that separates software developers from software engineers.

If you want to develop software without strict practices, that's just dandy, and you don't have to refer to yourself as a software engineer. It does not follow that software engineering is a joke: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132640>.

On the other hand, if you do want to be a software engineer, these practices can be applied to all projects, no matter how small or high-level. I think this may be what your professor was trying to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please, do yourselves a favor and read this instead: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130757>

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3674140982294628000>

"First of all it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art. ...has a lot in common with magic."

So, who knows what it is exactly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Spoken like a true ignoramus. If I were the author, I'd start off by learning what engineering is before I pontificating about it.

Truly, one of the lamest things I've read all year.

<comment><USER9> Can you give an example of something specific he says that you disagree with?

<comment><USER8> Heh, upon review of what I said, it probably came off as too harsh. I was so terse because I didn't feel like writing a long polemic at the time I made the comment. :) Now that I have a minute, here are some of the points I disagreed with in the essay.

 _"Unfortunately . . . software development and engineering are, even at the most fundamental parts, completely different. Engineering is the practice to develop something touchable, something that obeys the laws of physics."_

That premise is flawed and leads to misguided conclusions. Engineering is the application of technical knowledge to solve problems. There are tons of ways to say this, depending on who defines it, but no reasonable definition _prima facie_ excludes software from being an engineering discipline.

 _This implies that the product produced can be evaluated with the laws of physics. You can make all kinds of statistics, strength calculations, etc on the product. . . . . Software on the other hand, doesn't obey the laws of physics, by the simple reason because it can't be touched. Sure, it has physical parts, but those physical parts are not that important._

Let's forget for a second that all software can be specified in hardware. There are _still_ important "physical parts," constraints, and metrics applicable to the design of software. For instance, one would be hard pressed to argue that physical constraints of RAM and processor speed are completely irrelevant to software. In addition, much of software engineering actually turns out to be how to optimize output of teams with finite amounts of man- hours available. This is non-trivial and subject to a wealth of metrics, experimentation, and methodologies.

But let's go even further and put all of _that_ aside. The argument still doesn't hold up. Even if software could not be touched, it could still can be engineered. Disciplines like process engineering and human factors engineering are examples of rigorous practices applied to seemingly abstract implementations. Useful software engineering principles such as modularity, coupling, cohesion, reuse, interfaces, specifications all come directly from other "traditional" engineering practices and have been shown to improve the quality and speed of software development.

Look, I appreciate the art of software development; that's part of what I love about it! And there's certainly a point to be made about focusing too much on process over creativity at the wrong stages. But that point wasn't made. The article seemed to suggest that we just throw up our hands and give up trying to do anything rigorous with the products we design because it's all an illusion anyway. I think we can do better than that. We _need_ to do better than that.

<comment><USER4> My point in the article is also that we can and need to do better (maybe not clearly explained ;), but it is my belief that using the "engineering" metaphor will hold us back. A lot of people, maybe even most, believe that we should improve ourselves by becoming "more like engineers". For example by using Formal Methods etc. This might be true for a small number of projects, but it is my believe that for most software projects, as software developers we need to become "less like engineers".

"Engineering is the application of technical knowledge to solve problems.", therefore, engineers try to gain as much technical knowledge as possible to solve their problems. In my opinion software development should evolve to require less and less technical knowledge, that way we can spend more effort on the real problem: mapping the problem domain into a clear software representation. Developing software should evolve closer towards the human side, and not towards the technical side. And so far, programming languages for example have evolved in that direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> he's not saying software engineering is a joke. he's saying the phrase "software engineering" is a joke in that programming is much more fluid than mechanics

that doesn't stop people from trying to engineerize software development, for worser or worse

<comment><USER11> The problem with his argument is that other forms of engineering are not necessarily "engineerized" any more than with software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with his point. The development of software is not an engineering discipline because there is a literal and metaphorical art to it. Software creators need to take quantitative aspects of engineering, and incorporate qualitative aspects such as design and aesthetics into the final product. There are no real metrics for measuring some aspects of software creation. Software creation can be viewed as an art.

<comment><USER13> There's art, design and aesthetics in many other types of engineering. Ever seen a beautiful bridge?

Obligatory beautiful bridge link: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/15.html></comment></comment>


Show HN: Jekyll includes to save you some time - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sourabhv/jekyll-essential-includes

<comment><USER2> Send a pull request to mdo.

[https://github.com/mdo/jekyll-snippets](https://github.com/mdo/jekyll- snippets)</comment>


Kim Dotcom's recipe to stop piracy - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/288199968932630528 <comment><USER2> what a joker, we used to call that the internet, then it was called appstore, and now its... i'm not buying it anymore anyone can code for free these days has he ever heard of linux ?</comment>


A Nazi Controversy Deep in the Solar System - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/ultima-thule-nasa-nazi/589693/ <comment><USER2> Whilst the term was usurped by Nazi Germany, it predated it and for many - would not associate it with Nazi Germany in any way and be oblivious of it's usage until reading this.

Should we abandoned long standing words that have been usurped by evil people, or be reclaiming them. For me, with this I'm with the later.</comment>


Migration trends in U.S. metro areas - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-14/chicago-exodus-sees-city-shrink-by-156-daily-demographic-trends <comment><USER2> This article is light on details but I think this is as close as it comes to telling us why:

"Soaring home prices and high local taxes are pushing local residents out and scaring off potential movers from other parts of the country."

It would make sense that as other parts of the country build out their attraction for talent, that talent is being syphoned away from high cost areas to lower cost areas with similar benefits but higher satisfaction, be it housing affordability, access to education, return on tax investment, etc.

In other words, once tech becomes mainstream outside the tech hotbeds, these surging regions will begin to attract that talent which may not be happy about costs, [primary] education, etc., if they can now make a good living in other areas too.

<comment><USER3> > will begin to attract that talent which may not be happy about costs, > education

I don't think it's obvious that some of these areas will be able to provide the same quality education.

<comment> barry-cotter It's not about the quality of education. The educational institutes post date the industry cluster. Paris was a centre of fashion before fashion was studied in universities, ditto Nee York. Los Angeles was the place for movies in the states for three or four decades before film schools existed. New York was the home of American finance long before commerce or finance were more university centred than apprenticeship, if that's even true now.

Agglomeration economies of expertise lead to large, deep labour markets. I doubt California is much behind Boston in biotech research but the industry is all in the BosWash corridor, mostly near Boston.

<comment><USER2> Not Cal as a whole, but SSF is second only to Boston in biotech holding roughly 80% of Cal bioscience tech cos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Boise is a prime example of political refugees running to a place because they love the current policies. And then voting in people who enacted the types of policies that they ran away from. The district I live in went completely Democrat for the first time in its history.

It's also making house unaffordable. My small 1100 sq ft house has appreciated almost 60% in 4 years. I couldn't afford to move into something bigger even if I wanted to.

Oh and traffic that's getting fun because our city planners are about 10 years behind on city planning.

But it's still better then San Francisco or LA. And our crime rate is still super low...For now.

<comment><USER5> Are you sure they run there because they love the current policies? Do you know that they didn't move there in spite of the current policies? The housing policy that is causing a lot of distortion in California was enacted decades ago. The people migrating to Boise aren't old folks are they? People younger than 50 didn't have much to do with the famous property tax proposition in California.

<comment><USER4> Most of them are under 45 I would say. Most I talk to are coming here running from either California's political policies(guns, taxes) or Portland because it got to weird and crime is to high. We have some of the lowest metro crime rates in the US. So that's a big draw to.

But Boise is definitely moving blue. Which is what's cause the rub between the people who have lived here and those moving in. Even though a lot of people see Idaho as a backwards messed up state(and trust me it is in a lot of ways). The people who have been here outside of the last 5 years when it has exploded are pretty resentful of the growth.

For all of these issues it's still a wonderful place to live. But that might change in the next 10 years.

<comment><USER6> Is it moving blue or have the GOP just moved deeper (crazy) red?

Maybe "blue" really means they're more left-libertarian and don't feel the GOP is a sane choice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any place with career opportunities means exorbitant housing costs and other taxes. Regardless of your politics, there's a real wealth disparity, and increased demand is only driving up costs.

I don't know what the solution is, but the first step is acknowledging the problem.

<comment> barry-cotter There's no engineering reason hosing in these areas can't grow as fast as jobs. Tokyo's population has tripled over the last twenty years while rent has been pretty much flat.

Seattle has produced way more hosing lately and house prices have crashed. [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/why-are- se...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/why-are-seattle-area- home-prices-falling-now-sorting-out-the-myths-and-the-facts/)

<comment><USER8> > Tokyo's population has tripled over the last twenty years

No, it hasn't? Tokyo's already an anomaly in shrinking Japan by staying roughly the same size, and last I checked it was also forecast to start losing people around 2020.

[http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.ht...](http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.htm)

<comment> barry-cotter You're right. I'm wrong. Tokyo has grown by 3m people in the last 20 years. It has not tripled. It's increased by ~10%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, the three areas with a triple-digit daily exodus

Yet those cities showed continuous rise in housing costs over the same period. Example: LA housing costs rose roughly 7% in the period it lost roughly 100,000 residents

> Honolulu, San Jose, New York and Bridgeport, CT lost the highest shares of > their residents to other parts of the country.

Yet San Jose housing costs have risen 16% in the last year.

And I note even Flint Michigan has had a 9% cost increase over the last year.

What could possibly explain this?

<comment><USER10> Land speculation, majority low income people leaving, interest rate adjustments

<comment><USER11> Relatedly, families with children being replaced by young professionals.

Imagine a lower middle class family of five, two working parents and three kids, in a 3-bedroom place. They get priced out and are replaced by three upper middle class engineers with no kids, sharing an apartment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The scariest thing about Texas growth to me is the insane sprawl that seems to go unchecked in the state. Massive roads lined with gas stations, chain restaurants and big box stores, surrounded by cheaply built homes with four cars in the driveway/garage, just everywhere. It makes me want to leave the country.

<comment><USER13> That sounds amazing, I might want to move.

Why does it bother you how other people want to live? Not everyone wants to live in an Arcology. If you want to, then go for it but let other people live as they want.

<comment><USER10> Are you in Europe or something? Just about every city in the United States is surrounded by single family homes and freeways with the same chain stores repeated every few miles. It's really hard to not find what you're looking for.

<comment><USER12> It isn't. Your footprint becomes much smaller once you get out of your car. There are walkable/bikable areas all over the place that are livable, but they may not stand out if one isn't looking for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Title is misleading--the article only discusses metro areas. I'm interested in seeing the stats within city limits.

<comment><USER15> Census data, which _might_ form a part of the data used for this article, typically includes a proper superset of the city limit.

e.g., for NYC: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area#Met...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area#Metropolitan_Statistical_Area)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Arguably LA, Chicago and NYC are fairly saturated metro areas already, and for them to be experiencing outmigration is a desirable safety valve. What's not being shown here is whether there's an actual net population loss in these regions. If there is, I suspect it's minimal.

<comment> barry-cotter This is insane. Any of these cities could fit 25m within city limits if they just upzoned. Shanghai has 25m and half the municipality is farmland or two or three story buildings.

<comment><USER17> It would require more than just upzoning to increase the population of a city to 25m. NYC's subway, for example, would need significant improvements to support that kind of population.

<comment><USER18> The tax base grows with population growth. The advantages of subways and other mass transit are strongest with denser populations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "fleeing" is quite emotional, but given that this excludes natural growth, I don't see what's surprising or bad here. Crowded places need a constant flow of people leaving to avoid overcrowding. What do the numbers look like when births are included?

</comment><comment><USER20> I suspect you'll see more of this as legacy public sector structures force taxes to go up in these cities. Texas is great. Low cost housing, low taxes, good schools. You can be a regular person in these cities and buy a house with a pool in a decent school district.

<comment><USER21> I'm a Bay Area resident but visited Austin for the first time over the weekend. It's an amazing city, but the locals were openly unhappy about any more Californians moving there. Seems like there's already a big ex-CA population.

<comment><USER22> Longtime Austin resident, frequent Bay Area visitor here..

Yes, the problem we run into with people from California is that they move here and immediately start trying to create similar policies they left.

It was the local left (backed my Mayor Adler, local Hillary organizer) that banned Uber & Lyft, have raised property taxes to the legal maximum every year, pushed for a state income tax, and many other things.

My property taxes are 1/2 of my mortgage payment now and only going higher. While I can adjust and make due, it's pushing out more and more of the people who make Austin great.

<comment><USER23> > It was the local left (backed my Mayor Adler, local Hillary organizer) that > banned Uber & Lyft

When were Uber and Lyft banned? I recall when they left because they did not want to comply with driver fingerprinting requirements, but don't recall any ban.

<comment><USER24> Also, Uber and Lyft began and are headquartered in literally the most leftist city in the country, San Francisco. The notion that "leftists" don't want Lyft or Uber seems odd.

<comment><USER25> "The left" is a broad group with many different ideologies. I don't think ride share companies that flaunting regulations to even be a left vs right issue. It's more entrenched encumbent/rule of law vs anti-regulation/technocracy which doesn't fall into any neat categories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This does not seem to account for retirement. I bet that most of the people moving to Phoenix, for example, are retirees. Why would you want to retire in the snow in NY? Plus, the taxes in NY are much more than in Phoenix or Florida.

<comment><USER2> Do you expect an upsurge in retirement? Otherwise it should be a pretty steady rate, year-to-year, no, unless major companies with major layoffs favoring seniors happened in those regions this year...

<comment><USER27> The boomer generation is retiring now, no?

<comment><USER2> Yes, but they all didn't grow up in three main regions, nor during a narrow time window. In other words, if this were solely due to retirement, I'd expect to see a more gradual increase and in more places.

<comment><USER28> Considering that NYC, Chicago, and LA are the three biggest cities in the country, I would say, yes, quite a few of them grew up in these regions. If anything, boomers would be the only generation that could afford living comfortably in said regions.

<comment><USER2> Yeah but parent said "now", and I would not expect a big jump. You may be including retiring "now" \+ already retired [who no longer want to or can afford those places and also are moving].

<comment><USER27> Yeah, to be clear, I don't think this is the only contributor - I'd imagine taxes and cost of living definitely have an impact, among others. I do think some of these factors might work in concert too though - it's not difficult to envision people entering retirement, who own their abode in gentrifying areas and have seen property values (and taxes) go up, deciding to sell and see that money go further in a lower-cost-of-living area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It'd be useful to study the pairwise origin and destination of the domestic moves. That would lend insight into whether the gains posted by Sunbelt metros are largely of the rural-to-urban nature (or small metro to large metro, but still nearby), or whether most domestic arrivals are coming from places further away, from other regions of the country.

After all, the former kind is the usual urban concentration we've seen for a while, while the latter might be indicative of broader demographic trends like the Great Northward Migration, or the first Sunbelt Boom.

</comment><comment><USER30> A couple of things are unclear from the article (for NYC specifically, and, more generally):

1\. Does NYC still lose people after accounting for the effects of international migrant inflows?

2\. What are the education levels of the people leaving the city?

3\. Are they referring to the city only, or the metro area (which, IIRC, can stretch into Westchester and parts of Jersey)?

<comment><USER31> For NYC, it appears the city is growing when considering international migration (subject to various caveats about quality of data). More detailed information can be found here: [https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data- maps/nyc-population/...](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc- population/current-future-populations.page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was engineered to do this.

Punish blue state earners with higher taxes. These folks flee into red states and hopefully bring some jobs with them.

<comment><USER33> Punish in this context means reduce the amount of state taxes they can deduct from federal taxes - in effect increasing their tax rate. Isn't it predominantly "blue" people asking for more taxes for more social programs? Sounds like they got what they were asking for..

<comment><USER34> Pray tell, what social programs did they get for this? The tax bill was barely paid for.

Not to mention that affluent blue states already pay more net to the federal government than they get back in services.

<comment><USER33> This is the one I'm most excited about [https://eig.org/opportunityzones](https://eig.org/opportunityzones)

<comment><USER27> Describing a tax incentive for private capital as a "social program" stretches the bounds of credulity.

Furthermore, speaking as a resident of one of the designated "opportunity zones", it's already full of luxury condo developments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google open sourced GPipe, a library for training large ML models - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/introducing-gpipe-open-source-library.html <comment><USER2> Interesting, if you're a large company that can afford the compute.

<comment><USER3> Actually, anyone can use a Cloud TPU v2 (one of the accelerators mentioned in the blog post) for free via Colab: [https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/tpu.ipynb](https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/tpu.ipynb)

Several other TPU-enabled Colabs are linked from the TFRC website: [https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc/](https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc/)

<comment><USER4> Colaboratory is a great resource for learning and prototyping code, but it has drawbacks that render it useless to anybody who needs to deploy anything compute-intensive. The grandparent commenter has a point despite the availability of free GPU/TPU compute like Colab.

Here are two dealbreakers that come to mind, with quotations from [https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html](https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html):

1\. Vague disclaimers that your VM is reset (even when it's running? Probably, but who knows?) after some unspecified maximum lifetime, and GPUs are "sometimes unavailable" (What does "sometimes" mean? They don't tell you. Does this apply to TPUs as well? Probably, but they don't say). Also, the mere act of manually resetting the VM is "sometimes unavailable"!

Relevant passages: "Code is executed in a virtual machine dedicated to your account. Virtual machines are recycled when idle for a while, and have a maximum lifetime enforced by the system."

"Colaboratory limits how often [resetting all your managed VMs] can be done to prevent undue resource consumption. If an attempt fails please try again later."

"How may I use GPUs and why are they sometimes unavailable? [...] _Long- running background computations, particularly on GPUs, may be stopped._"

2\. The only way currently to use Google's free GPU/TPU resources is to connect through a browser running a Colab Notebook, which is Google's homemade flavour of Jupyter Notebook, which adds Google-Drive-like live editing of the same document, but (in my opinion) ruins critical UX/UI features that make vanilla Jupyter Notebooks tolerable to use. Colab has worse keyboard shortcuts, and _sort of_ offers command and edit modes, but half the time you can't see which mode you're in, and it's not obvious or consistent at all how and when to switch modes. Not only does Colab force over-reliance on notebooks and Google Drive as opposed to "proper" version control, but it limits you to a nonstandard Notebook version that makes the code-writing experience far less fluent than it has to be.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, if those are your deal breakers, then you seem to be a prime candidate for the "pay for your own damn resources" tier of pricing model, that way you can have whatever you want.

<comment><USER4> I fully agree! The purpose of my mini-rant was simply to address the parent comment, which seemed to imply that thanks to Colab, paying for compute is obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tried similar approach several years ago but was unsatisfied with final accuracy results. Pipelining is obvious method to accelerate a sequence of computations, but with respect to SGD it requires some accuracy tolerance because weight updates go out of sync.

<comment><USER7> It seems they're not actually increasing the minibatch size here. I don't see how the updates for N microbatches of size M will be any more out of sync than a single large minibatch of size N*M.</comment></comment>


Show HN: The Road to learn React – Build a Hacker News App on the Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.robinwieruch.de/the-road-to-learn-react/ <comment><USER2> The previous tutorial posts by Robin are fantastic, and cover topics like React, Redux, MobX, Flow, and ESLint ([0]). This book looks to be even better. I'm going to preemptively recommend it without having even read it yet, because I know it'll be extremely well written.

As a similar note and bit of a self-plug: I keep a big list of links to high- quality tutorials on React, Redux, and related topics, at [1]. Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a source of quality info on more advanced topics. I've also been blogging at [2] on React and Redux usage, and just posted "Practical Redux Part 5: Loading and Displaying Data" [3], the latest in a tutorial series intended to demonstrate some intermediate to advanced usages of React and Redux.

[0] [http://www.robinwieruch.de/](http://www.robinwieruch.de/)

[1] [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links)

[2] [http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/)

[3] [http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/12/practical-redux- par...](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/12/practical-redux- part-5-loading-and-displaying-data/)

<comment><USER3> Do you know of any high quality Vue tutorials such as the one in OP?

<comment><USER4> Here's a great series on Vue 2:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzSjlLzGB1A&list=PLwAKR305CR...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzSjlLzGB1A&list=PLwAKR305CRO_1yAao-8aZiQnBqJeyng4O)

Egghead also has got a Vue 2 series but I've yet to watch it though it comes recommended.

[https://egghead.io/courses/develop-web-apps-with-vue- js](https://egghead.io/courses/develop-web-apps-with-vue-js)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love this book, the flow, the levels, and the rhythm!

The only thing I stay apart from, is the implicit approach of ES6.

IMHO, explicit is better than implicit. Therefore:

        return (
...
)

Is better than

        {

...

        }

and

        this.state = { list: list };

Is better than

        this.state = { list};

Everyone these days seems to take the implicit ES6 way though.

<comment><USER6> Well, explicit is better than implicit when there is a very real chance of missing the implicit, especially when just going over the code quickly. The return example is a good case of this, reading over code you can easily miss that those particular brackets are supposed to be a return.

I think though that this.state = { list}; is just as easily understandable as this.state = { list: list }; once you are familiar with the syntax, and may be even more easy to understand due to the being easier to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Two days ago I made a comment about HN evangelizing React, but never posting any good/current getting started points. I officially stand corrected.

I'm still curious about reasons to invest time in learning it over plain old javascript.

<comment><USER2> The React docs were recently rewritten by Dan Abramov ([0]). He's also spent a lot of time building Create-React-App ([1]), a project creation tool that provides all the build handling for you so you can just jump in and start writing code. CRA has been compared to a boilerplate, but unlike most boilerplates, it's designed so that you can keep upgrading one dependency and get all the build updates as they come out ([2]). It's a great way to start using React.

Besides the React docs, the authors of a book called Full Stack React are currently doing a tutorial series called "30 Days of React" ([3]), which has been excellent so far. Covers a lot of key topics. Also see my main comment above for my list of links to React tutorials and resources.

As for reasons to use React: I could talk about it for quite a while, but I'll stick with just one for now. Going from imperatively poking around at the DOM and toggling things to simple declaring what the UI output should be based on props this component was given and state this component controls is a huge improvement. It takes some time to switch your mind around to thinking in that style, but once you do, your code becomes much more predictable and straightforward.

[0] [https://facebook.github.io/react/](https://facebook.github.io/react/)

[1] [https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react- app](https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/5gt2c4/you_dont_ne...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/5gt2c4/you_dont_need_a_boilerplate/davn6e8/)

[3] [https://www.fullstackreact.com/30-days-of- react/](https://www.fullstackreact.com/30-days-of-react/)

<comment><USER8> I would add in addition to being more predictable it's significantly easier to test. If you fully embrace having stateless components, those components take inputs(props) and have a straightforward output (the elements they generate) which shouldn't have any side effects. A unit test can easily capture this behavior rather than building up a large test suite to test a button click.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pedantry alert: small typo - "if you can effort it" should be "if you can afford it".

</comment><comment><USER10> Why would you want to teach React without Redux?

I failed on the trap as well, I mean, why would you want to add yet another 'concept' to your stack when you can just get a simpler piece of code do the same thing as a more complex one?

The truth is that if you're going to build something as simple as a simplified Hacker News clone, you can just get along using concepts of Redux with plain- old React without actually using Redux.

However, if you want to build a much more complex frontend system using Redux does give you a utility.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get your point. But I think you have to see it from two directions: real world developing and teaching.

When I wrote [The SoundCloud Client in React + Redux]([http://www.robinwieruch.de/the-soundcloud-client-in-react- re...](http://www.robinwieruch.de/the-soundcloud-client-in-react-redux/)) I made the mistake to think one could learn everything at once. I agree with your point that, when you are developing a more complex app, you will need some external state management eventually. But when you want to teach about one subject, I learned to stick to that subject and to teach it properly before students should dive into something else.

I can't agree with your other point to use only Redux without React internal state management. Once your app grows more complex again, you don't want to store everything in your global store. (You shouldn't do so from the beginning.) In a development environment with multiple developers/teams you want to keep your store tidy. I had to learn that the hard way, because I made the mistake to learn React + Redux without React's internal state management in the beginning.</comment></comment>


The Lisp 2 Project (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2018/01/31/981/ <comment><USER2> I love a good history lesson. :)

In case it helps anyone: this is about a version 2 of the original LISP language. It's not about the distinction between a "Lisp-1" and a "Lisp-2", which describe two different families of Lisp languages (those with a single namespace, like Scheme; and those with separate namespaces for values and functions, like Common Lisp).

</comment><comment><USER3> And a follow-up post is "GTL is a LISP 2 implementation" [https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2018/06/04/1001/](https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2018/06/04/1001/) . Which I note only because it's easily overlooked if one doesn't scroll down far enough.

</comment><comment><USER4> When your language has to include a built-in swapper to manage the memory you know you are suffering from the second system effect.

> The Q-32 version was so cramped for space (approximately 48,000 48-bit > words) that an application-level swapper was written: If a function was > needed but not in memory 1) if memory space was available, the function was > paged in by LISP from an ordinary data file, 2) if space was not available, > the memory manager tried to create space by shuffling the in-memory area > holding binary code to make space, if this did not work some in-memory code > was excised or the GC invoked then 3) the dynamic loader read the binary > code into memory.

<comment><USER5> Turbo Pascal had a system like that called "Overlays" back in the 640 kB memory days. If you had multiple code modules of which just one was in place at a time, you could overlay them so just one got loaded at a time.

While that's before my time (Turbo Vision in 6.0 was when I started), TP 2 and 3 supported only COM files which could have only 64 kilobytes of code, making overlay extra important.

<comment><USER6> Overlays were common on MS-DOS in the 80s.

A typical scheme was to have a configuration file / script for the linker. You would list one or more blocks, each of which had a list of mutually exclusive .obj files to be swapped in and out as needed. It could be challenging to track dependencies between objects to make sure you never called between modules which were supposed to be mutually exclusive, which was why you sometimes had multiple swap buffers.

Later linkers, or proprietary schemes like in Turbo Pascal version 5, would swap things per subroutine, rather than per compilation unit (.obj file), which was much easier to use.

(I did once see some people make a C function that was literally over 50 printed pages long, and the overlay manager didn't help them much with OOM, among other problems that thing had)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the title I thought that a new version of common lisp was being made.

<comment><USER8> Common Lisp already supports fsym, a function with the same name as a non- callable symbol. Hence its called a Lisp-2, in opposite to older and simplier lisps (like Scheme) with only one namespace. Lisp 1.5 started with that. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp#The_function_names...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp#The_function_namespace)

[http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical- Issues.html](http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html)

The - is significant. Most people hearing lisp-2 would refer to the namespace seperation, not the 1.5 followup version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://t3x.org/lisp64k/index.html](http://t3x.org/lisp64k/index.html)

Great series of blog posts exploring what you can do with early lisp.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how far one could get combining the strengths of Haskell's bidirectional type system and Dlang's ([http://dlang.org/](http://dlang.org/)) efficiency into Lisp to get a fast language.</comment>


The reluctant Airbnb host: why I rent my spare bedroom to pay my own rent - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/01/airbnb-host-rent-housing-crisis-los-angeles <comment><USER2> Wait - this person is subletting a room in a rented house? How is it even legal?</comment>


Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg named top US philanthropist - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26121026 <comment><USER2> Zuck moved a billion "dollars" from his ledger to another org's ledger.

Hooray for vanity metrics! Lets look at impact, not bank account shuffling, please.</comment>


Typing Chinese like English - <AUTHOR> https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2016/10/31/typing-chinese <comment><USER2> As a native Chinese speaker and one of the first generation born and grew up with personal computers (born in early 80s), I'd say a machine-learning powered handwriting input method is more convenient. No hard feelings. It's just too hard to reinventing the wheel on this issue where tens of thousands of engineers had worked on this problem throughout the 90s. I remember when I went to college in Beijing in late 90s there were literally 100s of companies were selling Chinese input method softwares and hardwares or both. What I've witnessed along the past two decades is that all converged into a few methods based on pronunciation (variants of Pinyin or voice dictation) or based on shapes (variants of Wubi or handwriting). And I can attest that Pinyin is predominant since it's a mandatory course in schools. There are even newer machine learning powered hybrid input methods emerging.[1]

Having said that, if you don't know Chinese neither any of its input methods, just want input Chinese characters casually, this may be useful but if you do want dive in to learn Chinese from ground up, I am not sure if learning this Wuhou input method is time well spent.

[1]: [http://www.xunfei.cn/](http://www.xunfei.cn/)

<comment><USER3> > if you don't know Chinese neither any of its input methods, just want input > Chinese characters casually, this may be useful

As a casual student of Chinese, pinyin is actually pretty good for me (I'm American). I don't need any new markings on my keyboard, and it helps force me to learn pronunciations anyway, which is good. :)

Also: I saw people using the handwriting-based input in Hong Kong and it seemed like they were typing slower than I do, which is bananas.

<comment><USER4> > Also: I saw people using the handwriting-based input in Hong Kong and it > seemed like they were typing slower than I do, which is bananas.

Speaking as another American who types in Chinese, predictive input doesn't work at all for me when I type in English. It works really well when I type in Chinese, because I'm just not able to produce intricate, idiosyncratic Chinese sentences. It doesn't surprise me that native speakers might take more time to type in their own language; their range of expression is much greater.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suggest you looking at Wubi input method[1] which is widely used in China for more than 20 years. My first impression of your method is just the same as Wubi.

The reason why Pinyin input method is more popular, I guess, is that Wubi is too hard to learn which need remember a lot of rules.

But quoted from Wikipedia,

> it is true that Wubi is extremely fast when used by an experienced typist.

So Wubi is still very popular among those who need to type a lot of characters.

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

<comment><USER6> Wait, what's the difference between "wubi" and "wubihua"?

<comment><USER7> wubi is based on components of a character, which means typing is super fast at the cost of memorizing all the components. wubihua is based on 4 strokes, first 4 and the last one. It's much simpler to use yet not very fast

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _My current employer doesn't let me work on Open Source projects or personal > projects without prior permission_

That's ... weird. I hope they're paying well for this.

<comment><USER9> I had the same thought. Do you know if there's a list anywhere of valley / well known companies with this type of policy?

It's the type of thing that'd turn me off for sure during a job search.

<comment><USER10> It's more typical for them to claim ownership of it, rather than to forbid it. Any job where you have to submit a list of prior work with your employment contract (which is most of them in my experience) is usually a sign that there's a clause in there claiming ownership of everything you do while employed there. Personally I doubt it's very enforceable, especially since California is so worker-friendly on everything else I know about, but I don't know how well these clauses work out in practice.

<comment><USER11> > especially since California is so worker-friendly on everything else

Are there no tech jobs outside California?

<comment><USER12> He said "valley"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > My current employer doesn't let me work on Open Source projects or personal > projects without prior permission, so let me be clear that this is something > I developed prior to my current employment.

Err wait. How does this work?

<comment><USER14> Usually, it's a clause in the employment contract saying that the company claims ownership of anything you create while under their employment, under the theory that a salary covers more than just the time you're in the office. Maybe combine that with a company policy against releasing internally-produced source code, or something?

My employer has something similar to that contract clause, but I've never heard of them actually invoking it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is already wubi typing method in China, which was widely used by my parents' generation. This is essentially reinventing wubi method.

<comment><USER16> It's way easier than Wubi. At least, that's the intention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey, I don't know who you are, but thanks for posting about my input method here! Most of my referrals are coming from here.

Edit: Hacker News is now complaining that I'm commenting "too fast" and won't let me leave new comments. Feel free to leave comments on my Wordpress blog.

Someone upthread said they couldn't figure out how to type the 金 radical. It's just the 金 key. 钱 is just "金戋". Couldn't be easier. Make sure you have simplified mode (简体) selected at the top of the page since that's a simplified character.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not sure if it is a new system or an implementation of an existing one. There are already a few existing ones [0] (no English translation). They are great for people who can't speak the official Chinese language properly, which is more than 80% of the population in China (or > 90% world wide), to whom pronunciation based input systems are impossible to grasp.

[0] [https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/字形输入法](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/字形输入法)

The efficiency of such input methods depend much on one's proficiency, and also the compression ratio of the encoding. After some practice, these methods beat pronunciation base methods easily, as the codes are shorter and with less degeneracy.

On the other hand, all the cell phones have the basic Wubihua [1] that uses only five keys to encode the order of how you would write a character.

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

<comment><USER18> As you indirectly suggest, it really depends who the user is.

Especially when you say these methods beat pronunciation-based methods, I think it's important to qualify that as something that depends on the specific user.

For a touch typist and an only semi-literate (emphasis on semi) non-native speaker, the ability to go straight to touch typing of pinyin with absolutely no learning curve is a HUGE advantage over other systems. By contrast, this system does not leverage my existing typing ability at all, so its ultimate speed is gated by the fact that I will never bother to use and learn it. For users like me, the same is true of other such systems.

The point is just that theoretical speed comparisons are moot for some people if practical matters make one system more useful.

Speaking of moot, it seems to me that all our points may be moot as voice input is going to be an ever growing proportion of how text is entered. Especially in Chinese languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _shameless plug_

And for those who can speak Chinese, i.e. know the grammar but are limited to pinyin and can't type in Chinese characters there's this handy tool that combines pinyin input with a dictionary (and frequency table) and makes it easy to write in Chinese. Basically just type the word in pinyin and then choose the right chinese character from the suggested word list. The English definition of the word helps to choose the correct Chinese character. There is support for traditional and simplified.

[https://github.com/ensisoft/pinyin- translator](https://github.com/ensisoft/pinyin-translator)

<comment><USER20> In fact popular IMEs like Sogou do this and also get updated to recognize names of famous people, movies, etc.

You can even type abbreviations for common phrases, like "cflm" and it'll figure out you meant chi-fan-le-ma 吃飯了嗎

<comment><USER19> Oh, that's interesting. Back in the day when I wrote that tool all the IME tools I found and tried that were able to understand pinyin expected you know the _correct_ character but lacked support for any kind of verbal cue (definition, dictionary) about which is the correct character with the intended meaning.

<comment><USER21> Current input methods are based on large corpora and use context to disambiguate. They are surprisingly smart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a non-native/hobbyist Chinese learner, and I'm liking it so far. I wonder if this could end up suiting the purposes of people in my niche, even if it can't supersede other methods among native speakers? Personally, I strongly dislike pinyin because using roman letters engages the intrusive "thinking in English" part of my brain - something I (and I think, a lot of other learners) try and avoid when engaging a new language.

I've spent a decent amount of time trying wubi, and this seems to be easier. Wubi tries to limit itself to 26 keys, so you get a lot of non-intuitive grouping of seemingly unrelated strokes onto the same key (Or at least, going back to my first point, non-intuitive to non-native speakers. Can't speak to how the groupings are perceived by people who learn to read/write via the standard pedagogy.).

Small things that would make this better for me:

* The fact there's more radicals behind the shift key is really not obvious. You might want to add a note/tooltip pointing that out?

* A "reverse lookup" going from character to key compositions. Right now I'm struggling to figure out how to type 钱 because I can't figure out how to write the 金 radical.

* Is there just the one, canonical way of writing a character? Or can you "compose" them up from any "correct" series of strokes? If it's the latter, how hard would it be to make it the latter?

<comment><USER4> > Personally, I strongly dislike pinyin because using roman letters engages > the intrusive "thinking in English" part of my brain

If this really bothers you, use zhuyin, or double pinyin.

> Is there just the one, canonical way of writing a character? Or can you > "compose" them up from any "correct" series of strokes?

There is always one canonical way (the "stroke order") of writing a character. I find it a little surprising that a hobbyist learner wouldn't already know this? How are you studying?

My introductory text for writing characters was [https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Chinese-Characters-Ms- Zhang/...](https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Chinese-Characters-Ms- Zhang/dp/7561912943/) , and it worked well enough that I can generally input unfamiliar characters in bihua.

On your phone, pleco (which you should have if you're studying Chinese) has a $5 stroke order addon, and skritter (meh) is all about practicing stroke orders.

<comment><USER22> > If this really bothers you, use zhuyin, or double pinyin.

Double pinyin is still pinyin. Zhuyin works, but I suppose, on reflection, I also want the benefit of reinforcing my knowledge of how to write a character by hand.

> There is always one canonical way (the "stroke order") of writing a > character. I find it a little surprising that a hobbyist learner wouldn't > already know this? How are you studying?

I'm well aware; I was talking about in this input system. Ie, a given radical can be further decomposed into smaller radicals or individual strokes. If I input "stroke 1" \+ "stroke 2" instead of "radical comprising stroke 1 and stroke 2" is it meant to still work? (I discovered several situations where that wasn't the case, so another way of stating my question is: Is this intentional or a bug?).

<comment><USER18> >I also want the benefit of reinforcing my knowledge of how to write a character by hand.

In that case you should just use handwriting recognition software such as that built into your smartphone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Things like this make me appreciate Hangul(한글) more and more. It isn't immediately obvious to me how I can enter basic characters like "国". (I still can't figure it out.)

<comment><USER24> because you're using the simplified version.

the traditional version of that character is: 國

type "F" for 囗, and "z" for 戈, if you were using cangjie you'd have to add the extra "口" and "一" but i'm guessing this system proposes that 國 is just 囗 + 戈 because that's good enough to identify what you're going for.

edit: the problem seems to be you need to switch to simplified. "F-q-g-e" got me the character.

<comment><USER25> but some simplified characters are encoded (like 号). I also can't type words like 回 (which is weirdly not FF)

<comment><USER26> It's Ff (capital F, lowercase F). Don't know why there's a difference between big and small 口, though.

<comment><USER25> Ah, so 国 is Fqg

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What I enjoy about pinyin input is I can just touch type.

Without remembering how the character is written.

And then when I see the result, I can check it and (assuming I sort-of-know the character well enough to do so) I confirm it and go on. Sometimes confirming is not an extra step; it's simply continuing to type.

Also I can type a long bunch of characters in sequence, and they give each other context so the characters get disambiguated, meaning I have less to check and fewer things to choose or correct.

This new method seems like a good system for someone who doesn't know how to say the words they want to type. Such as some of the people the OP described, so good job on that front! Maybe not so good if you are learning or aiming to learn spoken Chinese, though, because it keeps you away from learning or reinforcing the pronunciations, doesn't build on existing knowledge of the keyboard, and doesn't create a very portable skill as pinyin typing would.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thank you! I'm working for a computer company in Kaohsiung. There are no Mandarin classes outside my working hours. I'm doing what I can with private tutoring and self-study, but it's going to take decades before I can read basic signs or have a conversation. I thought about making an app like yours, but also got quite intimidated by the scale.

Is there some way to see your character composition database? Lots of words that look like 包 sound like "bao" or "pao", but I haven't yet seen any patterns in the few characters I've actually learned.

<comment> barry-cotter It won't take decades. I have not been the most diligent of students in my four years working in Shanghai and it was over s year before I even tried to learn to read a bit. It's really easy to get by in Shanghai with very, very little Chinese too.

You won't be able to get cheap one on one tutoring in Taiwan but you can get pretty cheap tutoring over italki.com or another language exchange website. Putonghua and Guoyu aren't that different anyway.

For learning to read the best way in the long run is to hand write it but it's a massive pain. Skritter is almost as good and takes care of revision for you. It has a great spaced repetition system inbuilt. You should also get Pleco. The free version is excellent, the paid version is cheap if you actually use it. It also has a flash card SRS built in for practicing vocabulary.

There are a number of good simplified Chinese graded readers. I'm not familiar with any for traditional Chinese but if you look through tokenadult's comment history you'll find some recommendations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Tangent: One of the nice things about OSX is that it has a pretty robust set of input method APIs. I used them to make a transliterating Russian keyboard[1] (though I only scratched the surface) and I think they would work really great for something like this as well. Typing in a browser (in my case, using translit.ru) works alright, but nothing beats native support!

[1]: [https://github.com/archagon/cyrillic- transliterator](https://github.com/archagon/cyrillic-transliterator) (warning: not very polished!)

</comment><comment><USER29> Finally! Looking forward to sending this to my parents after it develops a bit more. They've struggled with communication for years (decades?) now because they can't type using phonetics.

<comment><USER16> That's exactly my goal! I'm very much interested in supporting people who speak minority dialects. I don't feel that technology should be pushing Mandarin on people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I really want to like this. Maybe what the developer can do is to build a simple app that translates a Chinese character into a series of keys. That will ease some of the frustrations on not being able to figure out how to type using this input method. For example, I am trying to type 瓦 but for the life of me I can't figure out how.

edit: removed "shift doesn't work"...does seem to work.

<comment><USER30> Ok, I figured it out...瓦 = qRre

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would be interested to read more about the history of this idea and how it compares to existing input methods.

</comment><comment><USER30> Ok, trying to write 国家栋樑. Unfortunately I only got the first two characters..国 is Fqge, 家 is ei(, but haven't figured out how to do the last two. Any idea how to get the last two?

Quick suggestion: when shift key is not down, should show lower case letters. When shift key is down, show upper case letters.

</comment><comment><USER31> Think I'll stick with the pinyin input method.

I spent about 20min trying to figure out how to write 白 and still cannot.

<comment><USER16> It's 丿日.

Did you figure out that you have to press Shift to see some of the radicals? Apparently that's not obvious. My bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A basic lookup table would be very nice to get started with this input method. I am currently trying to find out how to type "武后".

<comment><USER33> It's very similar to how you would look up characters in a paper dictionary and as such most dictionary apps iknow of have a similar feature.

Start at the top left and go counter clockwise and look for compounds.

Try typing 一戈 to get 武

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I like this a lot. I didn't even read how it works, and was able to input some Chinese characters I know. Incredibly intuitive.

<comment><USER35> I actually had the opposite impression. Tried to write my Chinese name but couldn't figure out which pieces to put together. There seem to be a lot of shorthand radicals but not enough basic strokes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It is really awesome as a side project. Super curious how he build the big (19K) lookupMap, anybody knows?

</comment><comment><USER37> Nowadays voice input in pure Chinese is already fast enough for daily usages.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is it actually a new system or is it an implementation of an existing one?

<comment><USER16> New system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How do I write "日月"? I can only write "明"

<comment><USER39> space after each character.

so 日 <space> 月 <space>, or c <space> v <space>.</comment></comment>


Most archaeologists think the first Americans arrived by boat - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/most-archaeologists-think-first-americans-arrived-boat-now-they-re-beginning-prove-it <comment><USER2> I've long thought that arrival of the earliest people by boat made a lot more sense than coming over the land bridge from Asia.

There was a study published in Nature last year [1] that concluded that it took hundreds of years after the ice sheets receded and the route become passable before plants became established, and then later animals, to make it possible to survive off the land during such a trip.

We know that the Clovis culture was established before then, so if they or earlier people came by the land route then they must have brought their supplies with them.

That was before the invention of the wheel, so if they brought all their supplies with them for the journey it wasn't on wagons or carts. They only animals they might have had to help carry things were dogs, because no other animals were domesticated at that point.

So we're looking at carrying everything they need for the trip on their own backs or on crude sleds, possibly with the aid of dogs (and if they are bringing dogs, they have to bring all the food for the dogs, too).

This just seems to me to be too farfetched.

Now compare to coming by boats. With boats it is easy to bring plenty of cargo. Whatever food they bring with them can be supplemented with fish and other seafood they can catch on the way. Maybe they can even live entirely off seafood.

[1] I haven't seen the study itself freely online, but here's an article that goes into detail about it: [http://www.history.com/news/new-study-refutes- theory-of-how-...](http://www.history.com/news/new-study-refutes-theory-of- how-humans-populated-north-america)

<comment><USER3> Boats (capable of crossing seas) were invented before wheels?

I genuinely don't know, but that seems surprising.

<comment><USER4> I was surprised, too. I found this article[0] which specifically calls out boats as having been invented before the wheel. It puts the wheel's invention in good perspective, I think.

Regarding boats capable of crossing the ocean: Australia was settled 40,000 years ago, presumably by settlers who arrived by boat.

[0] [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to- the...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to-the- wheel-31805121/)

<comment><USER5> More like 65,000 years.

[https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fnature22968](https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fnature22968)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Loosely related topic: the tales of the ancient Polynesians finding and settling on many island groups in the Pacific, based on navigation skills they developed over time, involving the sun, the stars, the wind, the waves, ocean currents, bird flying patterns, etc. National Geographic magazine had an article or a series on it several years ago, and IIRC, they sent a team out to the Pacific area to research this stuff some, and to interview such living Polynesian navigators. I had read the article/series.

The Morris West book "The Navigator" is also interesting in this connection (though there is only a bit of discussion of the navigation topic in the book, it is not the main focus), and the book is a good read apart from that, both entertaining and for topics like human dynamics when on a voyage as well as when stranded on an island for a long period.

Update: Added link to his Wikipedia page:

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

<comment><USER7> There was a great film about the discovery/arrival of humans in America and the Polynesian culture was mentioned as a likely candidate to have arrived in South America. As they said in the film (paraphrasing) "They discovered dozens of Islands. How could they not find the largest island, America?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0F8mUmQvwI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0F8mUmQvwI)

<comment><USER5> For a fun Wikipedia page which I try to keep up to date with occasional emerging results of scientific studies, check out [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans- oceanic_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans- oceanic_contact_theories)

<comment><USER6> Checking it out, looks interesting ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The really interesting question is : why did "experts" ever think the opposite?

<comment><USER9> > _The really interesting question is : why did "experts" ever think the > opposite?_

No evidence.

In all fairness, such evidence would be hard to find because at the time sea- level was 400 feet lower than it is today. It is likely that the best archaeological sites are now underwater. The article of course mentions this. In fact, the article mentions one location in British Columbia (Quadra island) where post-glacial rebound was so great that near-sea-level sites during the last ice-age are still above sea-level today. But that investigation is relatively recent.

<comment><USER10> In theory, that could be a good thing, as the sites could be better preserved, not trammeled on by later generations of humans.

Although in practice, actually finding them is hard. Note there are sites like this in Europe, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So they invented boats that can travel across the ocean, but after more than ten thousand years they never invented the wheel?

And we have consensus on this?

<comment><USER12> Inventing the wheel is no longer considered significant in the way you seem to imply - see e.g. [https://uncoveredhistory.com/mesoamerica/wheeled- toys/](https://uncoveredhistory.com/mesoamerica/wheeled-toys/) :

> Archaeology has now revealed that the wheel wasn't invented until the 4th > millennium BC – which puts it thousands of years after the first cities were > built and after the invention of metallurgy, and its importance in > determining the intelligence of a race is no longer rational.

Boats solve a more basic problem. No-one _needs_ wheels - there are other means of transportation available.

Also, the above article points out that Mesoamericans seem to have independently invented the wheel, and even made wheeled toys.

You could say something similar about the Polynesians, although they came later

<comment><USER13> Wheels also are not very useful without roads.

<comment><USER14> Rollers for moving heavy items, pulleys for ...er ... moving heavy items; or are they not classed as wheels? Wheels are good for farming too, laying furrows, say. And making clay pots. And grinding corn. And crushing fruit.

Ah, this might turn in to a "What has the wheel ever done for us" sketch after the style of Monty Python.

<comment><USER13> I suppose it hinges on what is the simplest and most useful thing a wheel could be used for in a primitive society? Building a wheel with an axle and framework is not a trivial undertaking, and someone would need an immediate use for it to justify the effort.

(Try making a decent sized wheel out of a plank - it'll shatter along the grain. Getting a snug 90 degree hole for the axle isn't trivial, either, and without that the wheel will wobble so badly it'll be largely useless.)

<comment><USER15> Wheelbarrows relatively simple, you don't need a long axle and, of course, only one wheel. And they are pretty good on poor roads.

[http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese- wheelbarr...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese- wheelbarrow.html)

<comment><USER13> Making a spoked wheel is not simple. (Remember, all you have to work with is wood and a stone axe.)

A solid one is easier to make, but will be very heavy and have severe durability problems.

You also have never seen a machine in your life. You have nothing at all to guide or inspire you.

Wheels might have been invented and then abandoned and forgotten multiple times, because they were too hard to make and not that useful.

<comment><USER14> I imagine the model would come from moving things on rollers, out perhaps from turning food on a spit.

From a piece of wood hanging on notched or Y shaped branches on which to hang meat for smoking/cooking to a spit to a pulley doesn't seem to far?

A simple barrow is a couple of sticks with a pulley. Though the utility over a simple dragged carrier is not much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They would have been the first _proto Canadians_ to arrive in the lower 48, arrived by boat since if they were not native to here they could not very well be (proto) Americans (of the lower 48) --their descendants yes, but the people who landed here were by the nature of things, not from the lower 48.

Or they could simply have claimed, most archeologists believe the first ancient people to arrive in the lower 48, arrived by boat.

<comment><USER17> I can't parse what you're saying. Are you splitting hairs over the word "American"? Context matters, and the context is obvious here.

<comment><USER16> Well, you wouldn't say the first Italians (or the first Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, or the first Koreans) arrived from (some place) in xxxx BCE.

<comment><USER18> "Americans" can also mean "people living in the Americas".

<comment><USER16> True, but if you read the article it is referring to the first people to arrive south of the 49th parallel. People were already inhabiting what is now Canada.

The context is they theoretically traveled along the littoral in boats vs some inland pathway on foot.

<comment><USER18> I read the article, thanks. There is mention of Clovis culture in what is now the United States, but it clearly uses "Americans" in the broader sense. For example, here, where Monte Verde is a site in modern day Chile:

 _Early Americans apparently knew how to take full advantage of its abundant resources. At Monte Verde, once 90 kilometers from the coast, archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville found nine species of edible and medicinal seaweed dated to about 14,000 years ago._</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get entire list of all registered .io domain names? - <AUTHOR> I doing some research on the trends of .io domain names. I'm having trouble getting a reliable list of all registered .io domain names, though. I've purchased a few curated lists, but they were obviously incomplete. The .io registry does not supply access to zone files like verisign does (use to?).<p>Anyone know of a reliable way to gather the entire dataset of registered .io domain names? <comment><USER2> Have you tried getting in touch with .io directly? They may not make their zone file publicly available, but they probably do privately...

</comment><comment><USER3> All names in the .io zone are DNSSEC signed

[https://www.nic.io/](https://www.nic.io/)

hence, you should be able to do a DNSSEC walk?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=dnssec+walk](https://www.google.com/search?q=dnssec+walk)</comment>


Now Alexa can help you microwave dinner - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/04/now-alexa-can-help-you-microwave-dinner/ <comment><USER2> This is all fun and games until an internet worm attempts to turn them on indefinitely. An empty microwave oven will overheat, hopefully shutting down in the process, though who knows? [https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/microwaves-can-be-a- fir...](https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/microwaves-can-be-a-fire- hazard-040413.html)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about our new link blogging service? - <AUTHOR>

Hi friends, we're a few weeks into development for our link blogging service and we'd love feedback. Basically a quick and easy way to post links for people who are lazy but like to share things, kind of like Facebook Links + Twitter.
We think we can evolve it into something interesting, not only a place for sharing content but discovering and discussing content too. Right now the focus is on making posting easy and look good.
http://www.howl.com
You can register or use (demo // asdfasdf)
Please give it a try, post bunch of different URLs, and try to break it. Let us know what you think about our product and market. Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.howl.com></comment>