Remapping the world: maps without political borders - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1971133_1971110_1971105,00.html <comment><USER2> >Political borders remain among the most fundamental obstacles to human progress around the world.

citation?

There has been many examples where throwing unrelated groups into the same country can causes serious strife. Why would it be different on a global scale? You still have to allocate resources, provide security, make laws etc...

The author makes this very point further down:

>A more stable and peaceful arrangement for Sudan would be to focus on independence for Darfur and South Sudan sooner rather than later, allowing them to rebuild themselves as smaller states at peace with their neighbors instead of facing Khartoum's persistent and nefarious undermining from within.

So it's not the borders that are an obstacle to 'human progress', it's the arbitrary way in which they were drawn by colonial powers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if it's valid to draw conclusions that the peace of the E.U. is due to its relaxing of border controls, and that we can apply this method to places like the Middle East. I do agree that infrastructure is a key part of peace for Palestine-Israel, but Israel seems hell-bent on dismantling all of Palestine's infrastructure and isolating its communities with corridors for its transport etc. So, good luck convincing Israel to reverse those policies.

</comment><comment><USER4> The EU is at a turning point. A single currency without a single fiscal policy looks to be unworkable. The EU has either to take on more of the characteristics of a single country or retreat from the current level of integration.

Yugoslavia was a previous experiment to have no borders between 6/7 small countries in Europe. The Soviet Union was another, also Czechoslovakia.

The USA fought a very nasty civil war despite being a country with very little historical baggage by European standards.

I'm far from certain that a US of Europe is the way forward for the EU

</comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes an essay, like a good movie, requires a suspension of disbelief. The writer paints a picture of a future world and the reader is expected to "play along" with him in order for him to complete and state his vision.

I found I could not suspend disbelief enough to follow along with this writer. While he means well, using examples like the Sudan or the Kurds is cherry- picking at the extreme. After all, his thesis is "maps without borders" It's one thing to look at a government that's been around for 20 years (or, in the Kurd example, not really existing yet) and make some generalization. It's another thing entirely to apply such generalizations to the rest of the world. He failed with this.

He also meandered quite a bit around resources: pipelines, roads, and such. I'm sure there was a point there, but heck if I could grasp it.

This is just not such a good article. I'd like to see these ideas explored in a more cogent fashion though. I think there's an interesting concept in there.

<comment><USER6> Part of the problem is that he isn't even internally consistent.

Sudan is too large, and should be split up. But also: "Africa can become economically viable only if its plethora of puny economies merge from more than 50 into just a few."

So what needs to happen? Merging Africa into a few gigantic balkanized states with no shared interests (like Sudan), or splitting it up into many small city states, a few of which will be well run?

<comment><USER7> "a few of which will be well run?"

A few of which will serve as an example for the rest.

But this: "Merging Africa into a few gigantic balkanized states [...] or splitting it up" is part of the reason they're doing badly. Being a battleground for foreign intervention has not allowed much in the way of economic development.

<comment><USER8> > A few of which will serve as an example for the rest.

Africa has always had a few well run countries. Why will their example help more in the future than it has in the past?

<comment><USER7> Speaking in the context of a city-state/small-state fragmentation of the larger African states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a nice idea but it's naive to believe everyone is going to adopt similar ideologies simply because we remove borders. Will everyone be happy to compromise? People have different ideas about how things should be run, even the assumption that deep down everyone really wants western style democracy seems a little arrogant.

Europe succeeded in the relaxation of its borders because this was preceded by cultural/ideological homogenisation that took a very long time. This can not be imposed by policy.

I guess the author realises this to an extent and by the end of the article much more modest goals are being set. Still it all sounds very vague like it's kind of meant to somehow take care of itself.

</comment><comment><USER10> >why do we lazily accept the continuing existence of Sudan, a >British colonial construct joining Arab Muslims and African >Christians in Africa's second largest country

If you're going to divide political borders into "real" ones maybe you should start with those within the united states instead of mucking around in Africa. There is always Cascadia.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_(independence_movement...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_\(independence_movement\))

and then you could consider making a state out of New York City since the culture, religion and ethinic mix is radically different than upstate New York (That is the kind of criteria the author cites).

and realistically, you could look at most of the big states in the US and split them up if we're going to start remaking political borders just because they're old or ineffective. I nominate South Jersey as "Snookiandia". Wow this could be fun!

</comment><comment><USER11> Some foreigner (ie, not from either region) starts pontificating about how political borders should be redrawn in Africa and the Middle East. It must be Wednesday.

(Not removed - that's just the mind-numbing pitch that he steps back to just redrawing borders.)

Meh. I wish I could still flag articles, as this is one of those I-feel- stupider-for-having-read-it essays.

</comment><comment><USER12> "One obstacle to the realization of a Palestinian state is the fact that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not connected." Yet if they were then Israel wouldn't be connected and there would be a war between Fatah (West Bank) and Hamas (Gaza).

</comment><comment><USER13> Shameless plug... an old site of mine (2005!), which attempts to democratically draw "non-political" borders within the US, based on user responses:

<http://commoncensus.org>

</comment><comment><USER14> Political borders were created for a reason. Removing borders will make those reasons apparent again, and instigate the same violent strife which created them.</comment>


In the Future, We'll All Wear Spider Silk - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/in-the-future-well-all-wear-spider-silk <comment><USER2> Not only is the material made from water, sugar and heat instead of oil (compared to synthetic fabrics), but it also comes from a known genetically encoded template. That genetic template can be varied by an atom here or an atom here with the the flip of a genetic bit. It can even encode additional biological functionality into the fabric itself.

Recombinant silk is a pretty cool platform upon which an entire industry can rationally and rapidly tune the properties of new fabrics.

Play with the protein, ADF3, orb-weaver dragline silk [https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/adf3/](https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/adf3/) from Dan's original paper: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1038/msb.2009.62/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1038/msb.2009.62/full)

<comment><USER3> I love reading about news of technology like this. Makes me feel like we're getting a step, even if an infinitesimal one, closer to the world of Numenera, where science is, effectively, magic.

[https://torment.inxile-entertainment.com](https://torment.inxile- entertainment.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The last time I commented on an article about Bolt Threads, it was June 4, 2015, and the articles said that Bolt expected its products to be available in 2016. I was skeptical.

Article here: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-03/a-bay- are...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-03/a-bay-area-startup- spins-lab-grown-silk) HN thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9659712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9659712)

I guess that technically they're just a little late, but honestly an ultra- limited run of ties without any impressive spidersilk properties makes me think that not a lot has changed in the last almost-two-years.

We'll see if Bolt can actually make a real serious product. As the article points out, there have been a lot of swings at this particular pitch.

<comment><USER5> They still seem to have capital to operate and seem to be following through with a sale: [https://ties.boltthreads.com/](https://ties.boltthreads.com/)

"5-years in the making" is a long time. But I'm not sure the entire process was a failure. They probably have some excellent domain knowledge of value to many bigger firms as a fallback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I take it the writer of the headline has not met the Cotton Lobby in the US. We should all be wearing hemp, but they are quite good at their job. North Dakota grew hemp during WWII, but getting it legal again is a pain in the rear. I'm sure spider silk will have a bit of problems too.

<comment><USER7> I don't know if it is necessarily true but the hemp fabrics I've felt have been stiff and scratchy.

<comment><USER8> Thats just the unprocessed hippie shit. Thank you stereotypes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sort of pessimistic. I don't think we will ever have a perfect single textile material. A mixture of materials is more likely.

Just because something is light and super strong does not make it comfortable. Otherwise we would all be wearing nylon all the time (or some derivation... nylon is super strong and of course there is Kevlar as well).

The problem is nylon is pretty damn uncomfortable.

I remember seeing something on PBS where they showed spider silk and I admit it seemed compelling and I can easily see it probably mixed in with other textile yarns.

Of course why stop at spiders and not modify geese, goats, and sheep for their incredible and generally efficient fabric production.

Synthetics still have a hard time beating goose down for warmth. Is spider silk going to be better for high loft? I doubt it.

<comment><USER3> Other than optimal temperature, what does the human skin need to feel "comfort?"

Would the below work?

[ Body | A layer of comfortable fabric that is only a few atoms thick | Pockets of air | A layer of light+strong magic material like spider silk ]

and nanobots embedded throughout the clothing that sense your skin's temperature and heat/vent the air pockets accordingly.

<comment><USER9> > Other than optimal temperature, what does the human skin need to feel > "comfort?"

Water... Humidity control and water transport is a huge aspect.

This is why wicking is a big deal for base layers. And there is different types of wicking as well: moving to the next layer or just absorbing the water. There are pros and cons to both methods. The synthetics usually transport moisture... but this really sucks if your outer layer is waterproof which is often the case.

This is one of the many reason why wool is often used as a base layer. Wool has great humidity control via absorption with out loss of temperature. Some fabrics via absorption become like heat sink conductors (cotton) and others like neoprene (wool).

Otherwise you get chaffing, extreme heat loss, fabric freezing to skin, difficult to dry among other things... there is hackneyed expression that hikers have: cotton kills.

However wool can only absorb so much water. One of the fundamental problems is that it is really hard to create breathable fabric and waterproof fabric (despite gore-tex marketing claims).

But yeah if you had nanotech adjusting to heat/cold and water... sure it would be possible.

<comment><USER10> >This is one of the many reason why wool is often used as a base layer.

Wool is itchy and scratchy. Lots of people hate wool.

>there is hackneyed expression that hikers have: cotton kills.

Yes, cotton is terrible as a base layer. That's why high-quality hiker's socks have a lot of nylon, the thing you claim in another post is "pretty damn uncomfortable". My hiking socks aren't uncomfortable at all.

<comment><USER9> > Wool is itchy and scratchy. Lots of people hate wool.

And synthetics stink like crap after short use. Today's Merino Wool is not as scratchy as yesteryear (e.g. smartwool, icebreakers, etc).

> Yes, cotton is terrible as a base layer. That's why high-quality hiker's > socks have a lot of nylon, the thing you claim in another post is "pretty > damn uncomfortable". My hiking socks aren't uncomfortable at all.

Nylon is fantastic for feet particularly if mixed with other fabric. DarnTough and Smartwool use a merino nylon mix.

Your feet are different than the rest of your body and my previous comment was alluding to 100% nylon.

If you think a 100% nylon shirt is comfortable (or even warm for that matter) I must admit I will be amused.

<comment><USER10> >Your feet are different than the rest of your body and my previous comment was alluding to 100% nylon.

>If you think a 100% nylon shirt is comfortable (or even warm for that matter) I must admit I will be amused.

Tons of women seem to have no problem with nylon hosiery. And tons of men are now wearing fairly similar "baselayer" leggings made of nylon.

<comment><USER9> > Tons of women seem to have no problem with nylon hosiery. And tons of men > are now wearing fairly similar "baselayer" leggings made of nylon.

And there are tons of women that do find it uncomfortable. In fact I don't know of a single woman that enjoys being in nylons all day.

As for men wearing nylon leggings (which I assume non hosiery but for active wear) it is a blend of fabrics. Usually it is a mixture of nylon, spandex, polyester maybe some wool. To be honest spandex is more of the key component (not by total % but giving it the stretch) in leggings these days.

EDIT your reference to yoga pants/tights is amusing but you do know that yoga pants/tights aren't made of 100% nylon?

They are made just like work out leggings which _might_ have nylon as component. The key ingredient for tights these days is _spandex_ and not nylon.

<comment><USER10> >In fact I don't know of a single woman that enjoys being in nylons all day.

Maybe you aren't talking to the right ones then. Considering how many young women I see dressed casually in tights these days, apparently a lot of people do like them. If you're talking about business-wear, it's probably because business-wear in general isn't very comfortable; men's suits are horribly uncomfortable too, so I imagine women's business skirts and jackets are just as awful. If you want to see what's comfortable (or at least not horribly uncomfortable), look at what younger people are wearing away from the workplace.

<comment><USER9> Your reference to yoga pants/tights is amusing but you do know that yoga pants/tights aren't made of 100% nylon?

They are made just like work out leggings which might have nylon as component. The key ingredient for tights these days is spandex and not nylon.

> If you're talking about business-wear, it's probably because business-wear > in general isn't very comfortable; men's suits are horribly uncomfortable > tooa

Men's suits made with wool are not uncomfortable unless we are talking extreme heat. They are silk lined and the wool is ultra fine. Is it as comfortable as cotton? maybe not.. but is for damn sure more comfortable than 100% nylon. I remember thinking men's biz wear was uncomfortable when I was younger and bought crap.

> so I imagine women's business skirts and jackets are just as awful

They are worse. I won't go into the details but women's clothing is more volume based than quality. Also almost all men's dress clothes are tailored and it is rare for women's clothes to be tailored.

You know what is uncomfortable that is apparently casual these days is "skinny" anything. Skinny jeans are damn uncomfortable.

<comment><USER10> >Your reference to yoga pants/tights is amusing but you do know that yoga pants/tights aren't made of 100% nylon?

Actually, no, I'm talking about tights, not yoga pants. If I had meant yoga pants, I would have written that. Tights are just thicker versions of women's pantyhose.

>The key ingredient for tights these days is spandex and not nylon.

Untrue; go look at the labels. Spandex is usually in the single-digit range as a percentage, and never more than 15% from what I've seen. I guess you could call it a "key ingredient" like egg is an essential ingredient many baked goods, even though it's a small portion of the overall volume, while the majority is wheat flour. But no one makes anything out of mainly spandex; it's added in as a small component for its extremely elastic properties.

>You know what is uncomfortable that is apparently casual these days is "skinny" anything. Skinny jeans are damn uncomfortable.

Tons of young people seem to disagree with you. Most likely, they have spandex added. It probably also helps a lot to not be fat.

<comment><USER9> > Actually, no, I'm talking about tights, not yoga pants. If I had meant yoga > pants, I would have written that. Tights are just thicker versions of > women's pantyhose.

Well I admit it seems I have mixed up the word tights. Apparently tights can mean hosiery.

I meant the black pants you see around college campuses. They don't wear skirts with them but I suppose skirts can be worn.

> I guess you could call it a "key ingredient" like egg is an essential > ingredient many baked goods

Yes that is exactly what I meant.

They make cotton spandex leggings.

> Tons of young people seem to disagree with you. Most likely, they have > spandex added. It probably also helps a lot to not be fat.

Hmm I'll make sure to put on my nylon spandex pajamas on tonight.

When I google lounge wear there seems to be trend of things being"relaxed" fit... which seem to be loose. Even the term "relaxed" sort of implies comfort.

The main reason why they put nylon in anything is to make the garment stronger and not for comfort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of my friends works at a Japanese company called spiber, I think they made a jacket out of spider silk:

[https://www.wired.com/2015/12/the-north-faces-moon-parka- is-...](https://www.wired.com/2015/12/the-north-faces-moon-parka-is-spun-from- faux-spider-silk/)

<comment><USER12> > North Face Will Start Selling Parkas Made from Fake Spider Silk for $1,000 > [1]

...a bit pricey at this point. Maybe spider-silk-enhanced fabrics would be more reasonable.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/north-face-fake-spider- silk/](http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/north-face-fake-spider-silk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any other Worm readers here?

#skitterasaservice

<comment><USER14> Some evangelism in case someone else happens to have a thing for ridiculously long, ridiculously well-written works of fiction: [https://parahumans.wordpress.com/](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER15> I forget how Eliezer Yudkowsky phrased it, but it's appropriate at this point to give a warning like "do not start reading this unless you have a couple weeks in which to not stop." It's the most intense thing I've ever read, and the stakes just get higher and higher and...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can it be made resistant to pest bugs like the clothesmoth or carpet beetle? That would be nice(and in some respects, already possible if you use only synthetic fabrics).

</comment><comment><USER17> except for vegans i guess</comment>


Google Cloud Is Releasing Covid-19 Public Forecasts on BigQuery - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/google-cloud-is-releasing-the-covid-19-public-forecasts <comment><USER2> Anyone still remember that prediction from Singapore University of Technology and Design?

[http://archive.is/lAHOB](http://archive.is/lAHOB)

Let's see in few weeks how this forecast goes.

EDIT: Unfortunately I can not access the Google Cloud forecasts to archive them when I click "View Data set" I get " To view this page, select a project."</comment>


Do you watch "The Apprentice"? - <AUTHOR>

I am curious - do any of you watch this show on NBC? I watched the very first season years ago and it is terrible now. I thought the first season had some good entrepreneurial lessons. Perhaps this is an idea for someone to create a show that has some merit - broadcast competition among startups :) <comment><USER2> I watch it, I like watching the group dynamics although in terms of business lessons it doesn't have a ton to offer, in the first few seasons were more watchable in that respect. Also I find Trump kinda fascinating to watch, despite all the things that one would normally find detracting (ego etc). I find it interesting how he embodies a role (the big NY billionaire) and plays it unashamedly and boldly, it reminds me of the world view the author of the 48 laws of power (Robert Greene) talks about.

I like watching the 'Dragon's Den'(UK tv show) and seeing how entrepreneurs pitch/fail to pitch and watch how potential investors evaluate deals.

I'd love to see other types of reality shows that follow startups & entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Both are purely entertainment versus encouraging entrepreneurship especially Dragon's Den which is pretty much ritual humiliation. I find that mentality is what hampers the U.K from developing an entrepreneurial culture.</comment>


Evidence that Alzheimer's 'lost memories' may one day be recoverable - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/03/17/mit-scientists-find-evidence-that-alzheimers-lost-memories-may-one-day-be-recoverable/ <comment><USER2> Seeing this paper is bittersweet for me as I work in a memory neuroscience lab that's been working on essentially the same question for a number of years. These guys beat us to the headline :(

That said, it is a great accomplishment for the field. Less so for the prospect of 'memory-restoring' technology in the near future, but more for what it says about how memory works. Essentially, this paper (and our work hopefully coming soon), proves that retrieval cues are the most superficial aspect of the brain's systems for memory. Thus, they fall first to the ravages of Alzheimer's and when they're gone, the pattern of information is still there, but the brain is unable to recall that specific memory when input into the network is noisy. There's been some other papers recently showing the persistence of memories even when synapses and spines are lost (for example, during hibernation). It's as if a record of learning is also stored somewhere in the cell's genes, but no one seems to really know what to make of it.

Maybe that stuff will also be of interest to neural network people...

All that said, there's now a large-scale study getting started in Canada that will be stimulating the brains of MCI and AD patients with tDCS to slow down Alzheimer's (pACT-MD). Maybe they'll be able to recover some those lost memories!

<comment><USER3> As in the cells store enough information to recreate those synapses when needed?

<comment><USER4> Not an expert; what I think jdpigeon is referring to, though, is that the information storage is just fine, even if the indexing mechanisms aren't.

Like recovering data from a broken filesystem - the directory structure is lost and for a normal usecase the data might as well be gone, but a lot of the content is theoretically _there_ and recoverable if some indexing system (even one different from the original) can be created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps it an be linked to this study : "decapitated worms regrow heads keep old memories" [http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/16/decapitated-...](http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/16/decapitated- worms-regrow-heads-keep-old-memories/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a medical student and had to conduct several simple short-term memory tests (Mini Mental State Examinations, or MMSEs for short) today. It's quite upsetting for the patient when they don't even know how to spell 'world' backwards, or can't recall the words "ball car man" that you told them half a minute earlier. I wonder if this concept will improve both long term and short term memory, or just the latter?

</comment><comment><USER7> The article says: Doug Brown, director of research at the Alzheimer's Society, cautioned that the technique is not something that can be translated into a procedure that is safe for the estimated 44 million people worldwide with dementia just yet. which makes clear that the blue light technology is very far from being a cure for Alzheimer.

On the other hand, Dr Dale Bredesen has already in a very small study with 10 persons, reversed Alzheimer in 9 of 10 patients. A followup study with 100 persons is not yet finished but preliminary results show "similar results". The work of Dr Bredesen is mostly unknown but this will likely change in the near future. The work of Dr Bredesen may start a revolution since he does not use a traditional medicine but a holistic approach which basically fights inflammations at all levels possible.

<comment><USER8> I did some digging into Dr. Bredesen's work and the study you mentioned didn't have a control group. If you don't have a control group and you're changing dozens of variables simultaneously, you're not doing science.

This is not to say that his patients don't enjoy some subjective benefits, or that diet and exercise and mental stimulation aren't helpful, but Dr. Bredesen cannot have any scientific insight into Alzheimer's until he does an actual study.</comment></comment>


Aperture Science Personality Core 01 - URL Lengthener - <AUTHOR> http://spaaaccccce.com/# <comment><USER2> [http://spaaaccccce.com/Space_wanna_go_wanna_go_to_space_wann...](http://spaaaccccce.com/Space_wanna_go_wanna_go_to_space_wanna_go_to_space_Lady_I_love_space_I_know_Spell_it_S_P_AACE_Space_Space_You_are_the_farthest_ever_in_space_Why_me_space_Because_you_are_the_best_Im_the_best_at_space_Yes)

<comment><USER3> Best link ever ! (Haha we had the same idea)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite part is if you go to this site and hold the space bar. Just trust me.

<comment><USER5> Nothing happened. I'll never trust you again.

EDIT: I usually keep my sound muted. I trust you again.

<comment><USER6> It plays spaaaccccce.com/mp3/space.mp3 . Didn't work in my browser either, I had to go digging source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://spaaaccccce.com/Wanna_go_to_space_Space_Please_go_to_...](http://spaaaccccce.com/Wanna_go_to_space_Space_Please_go_to_space_Hmmm_Hmmmmmm_Hmm_Hmmmmm_Space)

</comment><comment><USER8> What is special about this? Am I missing a Portal joke again or are we finding a 10-year-old technique funny today?

<comment><USER2> You're not missing out on anything. The joke is a lie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ha! Still brings me a smile every time. [http://spaaaccccce.com/Space_space_wanna_go_to_space_Yeah_ye...](http://spaaaccccce.com/Space_space_wanna_go_to_space_Yeah_yeah_yeah_Im_going_Going_to_space_YEEEHAAAAAW)

<comment><USER10> Hey, thanks! That was really informative. I didn't expect to get a link that wasn't effectively a rick-roll. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://spaaaccccce.com/Yes_Please_Space_Orbit_Space_orbit_In...](http://spaaaccccce.com/Yes_Please_Space_Orbit_Space_orbit_In_my_spacesuit_Theres_a_star_Theres_another_one_Star_Star_star_star_Star)

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://spaaaccccce.com/Gonna_be_in_space_Space_space_space_G...](http://spaaaccccce.com/Gonna_be_in_space_Space_space_space_Going_Going_there_Okay_I_love_you_space_Wanna_go_to_earth_wanna_go_to_earth_wanna_go_to_earth_wanna_go_to_earth_Wanna_go_to_earth)

</comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't the image mask/alpha should have holes between the two very thin bars (x4) ?

</comment><comment><USER14> URLs you can laugh at!

</comment><comment><USER15> This made my morning. I shared it with some older, non-gamer coworkers, and they just didn't get it. Oh, well. I'm going to spaaaccccce!

</comment><comment><USER16> There are several of these around, on different themes, like [http://fattweet.com](http://fattweet.com)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is so fantastic. Makes me want to play Portal again!

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice idea, I like it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Didn't really expect this to trend... glad you enjoyed it :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Upvoted because I am a hopeless Portal fanatic.</comment>


ClariNet: Parallel Wave Generation in End-To-End Text-To-Speech - <AUTHOR> Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab has reached a new milestone in speech synthesis with the release of ClariNet, the first fully end-to-end TTS model that directly converts text into audio waveform with a single neural network. It generates all samples of a waveform in parallel. <comment><AUTHOR> Blog post: [http://research.baidu.com/Blog/index- view?id=106](http://research.baidu.com/Blog/index-view?id=106)</comment>


In Milpa Alta, people still speak Aztec - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180705-in-milpa-alta-people-still-speak-aztec <comment><USER2> Nahuatl is spoken by something like 1-2 million people and is probably the fifth most spoken indigenous language in the Americas

[http://www.native-languages.org/most-spoken.htm](http://www.native- languages.org/most-spoken.htm)

and the most-spoken in Mexico.

I think the title (and to a slight extent the text of the article) make the language sound like a rare curiosity but it's actually a major cultural phenomenon. Grabbing some numbers (which are always subject to definitional quarrels), I think Nahuatl is as common in Mexico as Tagalog in the U.S. (by absolute number of speakers) or as Chinese in the U.S. (by proportion of the population).

Among many other things, our words for tomato, avocado, chili, and chocolate all derive from Nahuatl.

(Edit: of course the social role of indigenous languages in Mexico is different from that of Tagalog or Chinese in the U.S., and the main indigenous languages there are strongly associated with rural and semi-rural communities, as this article points out... which might mean that city-dwelling Mexicans might have quite a bit less contact with Nahuatl and Maya languages than city- dwellers in the U.S. would have with Tagalog or Chinese.)

<comment><USER3> I always thought avocado was the Spanish word, and guaca along with guacamole (guaca + mole meaning sauce) was the indigenous word.

<comment><USER4> You're right.

Avocado -- mid 17th century: Spanish alteration (influenced by avocado 'advocate') of aguacate, from Nahuatl ahuacatl.

Guacamole -- from an Aztec dialect via Nahuatl "āhuaca molli", which translates to "avocado sauce/concoction".

<comment><USER2> > (influenced by avocado 'advocate')

I think you mean "influenced by abogado 'advocate'".

<comment><USER5> Which is pronounced with /β/, a sound closer to /v/ than /b/.

<comment><USER2> I wonder what sound changes led from the Latin pronunciation [adwo] to Spanish [aβo]. (I'm sure this is well known, just not by me!)

<comment><USER6> The dropping of /d/ is not surprising. This happens all over the place. Look at Latin "ad" becoming Spanish "a" for a simple example. (ad like the preposition built into this very word, ad + vocare)

The classical /w/ from Latin obviously became /v/ in a lot of romance languages. /b/ and /v/ merging to create [β] I think was particular to Spain and pretty old. But I think I also read that in many places vulgar Latin /b/ had a [v] allophone, but still distinct from /w/ (orthographic v) which I guess evolved into /v/ outside Iberia with the old [v] sticking around as /b/.

Here is one of the top google hits from an old saying about this: "beati hispani quibus vivere bibere est" \--[http://en.antiquitatem.com/felices- hispani-quibus-vivere-est...](http://en.antiquitatem.com/felices-hispani- quibus-vivere-est-bibere) \-- this seems to put the b, v merger at the first century AD and have a lot of quotes about Iberians doing it it from the ~1500s, blaming it on Basques.

By the way, in my amateur opinion the much more head-spinny Iberian sound change was the creation of modern /x/ in words like "Quijote" or "México". It would seem that the Spaniards conquered the new world with those things as [ʃ], transcribed a bunch of Mexican place names with that, then later changed the sound to [x], and _brought the change back_ to the colonies. It is interesting to me that such a pronunciation change in relatively isolated populations can still be held on both sides of an ocean, and not have some other form just end up as one side's peculiar accent, as occurred with, say the evolution of the [θ] sound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's also not terribly uncommon to hear indigenous languages of Mexico spoken in the United States. I am an American who understands Spanish and I've occasionally recognized this in public, just overhearing people on the street in certain places.

Sometimes I hear a speaker switch back and forth between some language I can't recognize and a very recognizable, Mexican-accented Spanish. Or sometimes they will only code-switch with a few Spanish words here and there.

<comment><USER2> There are a whole bunch of Yucatec Maya speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area -- reportedly tens of thousands!

<comment><USER7> I hear people speaking Tzeltal on a regular basis in San Francisco. (A Maya language from Chiapas.)

<comment><USER2> One way to recognize Maya languages from Spanish without that much familiarity with either is that /ʃ/ (English "sh") is a common sound in all Maya languages but not present in Spanish (except Rioplatense Spanish).

Also Maya languages make a lot of use of ejective consonants like

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It was disappointing that the article didn't have audio or video so we could hear what it sounds like.

Youtube offered some some hokey "learn some phrases" videos, but this is a guy speaking naturally:

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

<comment><USER2> Three people if you watch the whole video!

There's an interesting code-switching thing for two of them (especially the last speaker) where Spanish "este" ('this') is used apparently at the beginning or end of new thoughts or to relate ideas to each other, including "para este"/"para" ('for this') when describing a reason for something and "pero este" ('but this') when drawing a contrast. I don't think this is quite idiomatic in Spanish when used this way, and I wonder if these are translations of particular Nahuatl words or phrases.

I thought the situations where these were used were mostly ones where we might say "so" or "well" in English (I might expect something like "entonces" or "bien" in Spanish).

The stories that the people tell in the video involve some maltreatment from other people on account of the use of Nahuatl. I really liked the first speaker's intuition, something like: "If we use our language, people are going to be curious and want to learn it!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh, Nahuatl speaking people, how rare! They must be very busy maintaining the Nahuatl Wikipedia [https://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal%C4%ABxatl](https://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal%C4%ABxatl)

</comment><comment><USER10> The name of the language is Nahuatl rather than Aztec.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Speak Aztec". wow. Nahuatl is actually from Utah. It's not an original language of Mexico.

<comment><USER9> Utah was just a small part of a vast region where proto-nahuan languages are theorized to have dominated. Proper Nahuatl is Aztec.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any free programs for optics design? - <AUTHOR> Are there any free & open-source CAD software for optics (optical devices) design and simulation?
To be clear: need desktop (optionally, mobile) app with GUI.
On Quora same question still is unanswered.[0]
[0] https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Are-there-any-free-optics-simulation-programs <comment><AUTHOR> WOW, I just discovered two cross-platform programs (both are Qt-based designed same author[0]) on GitHub:

 _Astree_ — app for optical design and optimization.[1]

 _Foucault2_ — app for mirror design and polishing.[2]

But seems like both has some issues with compilation (according its commits history).

Also just found free simplified optical simulator app for Android, but seems like it not in active development since 2017.[3]

[0] [http://edeforas.free.fr/](http://edeforas.free.fr/)

[1] [https://github.com/edeforas/Astree](https://github.com/edeforas/Astree)

[2] [https://github.com/edeforas/Foucault2](https://github.com/edeforas/Foucault2)

[3] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raytrace](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raytrace)

</comment><comment><USER2> An optical path simulation I found (or maybe it was mentioned here or elsewhere?):

[https://ricktu288.github.io/ray-optics/](https://ricktu288.github.io/ray- optics/)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.gnu.org/software/goptical/](https://www.gnu.org/software/goptical/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like it is just a lib, not an app.</comment></comment>


Circle - Continuous Integration made easy - <AUTHOR> https://circleci.com/ <comment><USER2> For those who are looking for the list of supported languages it's buried here

<https://circleci.com/docs/environment#languages>

No Perl at all. No Python 3. But they do support Clojure.</comment>


Open Plan Offices Kill Productivity. Here's What to Do Instead. - <AUTHOR> https://readwrite.com/2019/06/20/open-plan-offices-kill-productivity-heres-what-to-do-instead/ <comment><USER2> > Thankfully, you don't have to play the guessing game when it comes to your > team's productivity. Time-tracking software like Time Doctor lets you keep a > watchful eye on your employees from afar. This software monitors workplace > activity by tracking time use, taking screenshots of employee computers and > providing analytics on potential poor time use. Through this data, you can > glean insights into your team's productivity and even monitor your workers – > without paying for an office.

Earlier on the author cited research that open office architecture makes everyone more observable or 'transparent', which dampens office productivity. And then suddenly this? I couldn't take the author seriously after I got to this part.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Working from home is not a silver bullet for solving the "open office problem", sufficient privacy afforded to employees is, although for individual employees, flex time and WFH days have their advantages.

For small businesses without offices, what would an appropriate solution be, cubicles?

I'm personally not someone who can work from home every single day. I enjoy going into the office and often get more done despite losing two hours to public transit.

<comment><USER5> The best office space I worked at was divided in 6-8 persons rooms. Each team had their own conference room isolated from the rest. It was kind of a mix between cubicles and open space. It isolated us from other parts of the business (sales, management, etc) but allowed fast & easy collaboration between team members.

<comment><USER6> This is similar to what we built at MP3.com 20 years ago. Offices with two to four work areas, maybe a table in the center, and grouped people by function and overlap. The Systems & Networking team was next door to the DBAs and in the same hallway as the developers on the content acquisition, management, and delivery teams. We also had a number of open areas with seating and whiteboards for casual conversations. I even recall designing the new storage management system on a paper table cloth at the local greek restaurant and posting it in a common area to start the design conversation. It was quite productive and many of the team members remain great friends to this day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article is mentioning remote work as the solution. But I was expecting to see an office design solution after reading the title.

</comment><comment><USER8> How about letting employees choose themselves?

Certainly there are those who are super-productive in open-space, and those who are more efficient in closed offices, cubicles or working from home.

This is 2019, we have and enormous selection of tools that makes it possible to work from just about anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER9> This felt like a sly advert for Time Doctor.</comment>


Brazil-based Semco, has let his employees set their own hours, wages - <AUTHOR> http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Ricardo-Semler-Set-Them-Free/ <comment><AUTHOR> Print version. [http://www.cioinsight.com/index2.php?option=content&task...](http://www.cioinsight.com/index2.php?option=content&task=view&id=881099&pop=1&hide_ads=1&page=0&hide_js=1)</comment>


Hyper.sh: Container-native Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nrfEcCITAofSDPFTIkiASLa4UvmCOUmgPE6ayFZBR0c/edit?usp=sharingl <comment><USER2> HyperApp: [https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple- store/id1179750280?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple- store/id1179750280?mt=8)

Hyper.app: [https://hyper.is/](https://hyper.is/)

hyperapp: [https://github.com/hyperapp/hyperapp](https://github.com/hyperapp/hyperapp)

Hyper.sh: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nrfEcCITAofSDPFTIkiA...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nrfEcCITAofSDPFTIkiASLa4UvmCOUmgPE6ayFZBR0c/edit?usp=sharingl)

Adding this to the list [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634284)

<comment><USER3> There are countless examples of overlaps in software naming. I'm sure this isn't even the word with the most duplicates.

Also, the .sh does make this particular example at least slightly distinctive.

<comment><USER4> Hyper.is is a Mac terminal. I used it for a time, and would always go to hyper.sh looking for docs or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Video is here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCldsRNuGkc&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCldsRNuGkc&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm interested - what type of app can you run on 64mb of ram? What languages are suitable for building these types of microservices?

<comment><USER7> I'd just like to say how dispiriting I find this question considering I how envious of my friends $4k+ computer I was because it had 64mb of RAM and could play C&C Red Alert with absolutely no slowdown. Let that sink in...in the mid 90s, we comfortably fit a Windows GUI and a somewhat sophisticated game into 64mb of RAM and 20 years of "progress" later, we're asking what kind of special accommodations are necessary to handle HTTP requests with the same resources.

Note: It's an entirely reasonable question to ask, which makes it all the sadder.

<comment><USER8> My favorite comparison is the Apollo guidance computer's memory (though completely different comparison from your GUI and game description). But the AGC is absolutely fascinating.

> 16-bit wordlength, 2048 words RAM (magnetic core memory), 36,864 words ROM > (core rope memory)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.hyper.sh/pricing.html](https://www.hyper.sh/pricing.html)

      Cheapest single container with a publicly accessible IP (FIP) assuming a 1GB Docker image size.
      S1 container: 1.03/month
      FIP: $1/month
      RootFS Container Volume (10GB@$0.1/GB/month): $1/month
      Container Image (1GB@$0.1/GB/month): $0.1
      Total monthly price: $3.13/month

<comment><USER10> They have per-second billing. Use it as serverless.

<comment><USER11> 5 second boot time though. Better than a normal VM, but maybe not great for user facing serverless.

<comment><USER12> How is it better than a normal VM (or have I misunderstood)? You can get a full VPS with dedicated IP on OVH, Hetzner & co. for EUR 3.50/month.

<comment><USER11> Just pointing out that the 5 second boot time is better than a regular VPS. Which (combined with per second billing) makes this good for batch/cron oriented serverless functionality. But is too slow for "function as a service" type serverless where the end user is waiting for it to fire in a browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So.. it's like AppEngine Flexible? A PaaS for Docker containers..

[https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Having a hard time understanding what this brings to the table that Kubernetes doesn't?

<comment><USER15> Kubernetes is not a provider, hyper.sh is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is heroku not addressed?</comment>


Fixing a Disk Space Alert at 3 AM - <AUTHOR> http://slashmili.org/blog/2015/07/13/fixing-disk-space-alert-at-3am/ <comment><USER2> Randomly rewriting a file that mysqld has open seems a lot more dangerous than restarting mysqld. What if that was e.g. where mysqld was batching up query results before streaming them to the client? Now you've not merely had a query fail, you've silently sent back incorrect results.

If you can't restart mysqld you have an architectural problem. Your database will go down sometimes and your system should be built to tolerate that.

<comment><USER3> Good thing the author wasn't randomly rewriting a file, then, and that the file was deleted and inferably unlikely to be used in a critical operation!

Restarting MySQL is a violent operation. For large databases, it can take several minutes. If I can avoid it, I do so, and this was a really clever workaround for an issue that indeed avoided a restart. That's a good thing.

<comment><USER4> I find it quite ironic that you and author of the article completely misunderstand what is happening.

Creating then deleting a temporary file is very common technique to make sure that that for will be removed as soon as the application closes it, it also is used to make sure that nothing will tamper with it. I find amusing that author found a way to still tamper with it.

Now depending on what the file was used for either the corrupted files caused database to return corrupted data to the user, write corrupted data to the database, our in the best scenario return error to the application issuing the query.

<comment><USER5> open's O_TMPFILE (since Linux 3.11) does exactly that without creating a named file and immediately removing it from the filesystem. I don't argue that the other technique isn't common though.

<comment><USER4> The older technique is probably more common since it is available in older version of Linux and also compatible with other Unix based systems.

That said it still doesn't prevent the author for modifying the file by referencing file descriptor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Former MySQL admin's advice (for OP, and others who run into this same issue):

Someone probably started running queries which were doing disk sorts. Look for abusive queries coming in and kill those, the temporary files will go away at that point. Based on the size of the files, simply looking for long running queries should be sufficient; if it's the backend for a web server, it's likely that the client and server have already given up on the query (or in the worst case, re-sent the debilitating query).

As stated by other users, truncating random files will cause more problems for MySQL than just restarting mysql. In fact, I'd recommend going in and restarting it now, to ensure that you're at a good state. Failing over to your slave (you do have a slave and failover procedure, right?) is less of a headache than trying to identify what problems were caused by manually truncating these sort files.

Finally, have a look at Skyline from Etsy[1]; a trend monitoring tool like this would have alerted you when the ramp started closer to 1am, well before this was suddenly an outage event.

[1] [https://github.com/etsy/skyline](https://github.com/etsy/skyline)

<comment><USER7> There's a quick mention that this was a reporting server. I'd guess the reports have a common query in them that yesterday did not spill to file sorts, and today does, so literally overnight the report process goes from using virtually no disk space to using arbitrary multiples of how much you have.

Nothing really great leaps to mind to solve this in the general case. These sorts of correlated behaviors can really be jerks.

<comment><USER6> In this case I'd look for a recent table alter which involves a blob-style column - queries involving those will always be sorted on disk. Limiting the queries to not include the blob fields, or doing alters to varchar fields (even big ones) will help this out.

Having a daemon which kills off long running queries (such as ones with extensive disk sorts) can help as well, just be sure to follow up on the queries which were killed to fix the frontend or chastise the person doing `SELECT * FROM blob_table ORDER BY id`.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Opening files and the deleting them is a classical pattern for using temp files; it makes sure that they will be gone when the process exits. Finding a deleted but still opened file is no indication that it's not needed anymore.

My approach would have been to kill the mysql worker process that keeps them alive. That way the program that started the query gets an error message, instead of whatever undefined behaviour you get by empying the files and surprising mysqld.

</comment><comment><USER9> Top commenter on that article:

      First of all... If you're getting paged on disk alerts at 3 in the morning,
      you're doing it wrong. Write a script that checks every file system and
      makes sure that X amount of free space is always present, adding free space
      as-needed, and emailing you on the backend during business hours whenever
      the volume group is nearing depletion.

I'm sorry, but no -- I'm not going to automate adding more disk to a VM, extending a volume group, and growing a filesystem. Not now, not ever. No way in hell.

That needs to be done by a human after a backup has been tested and writes have been quiesced.

       This is what grown-ups do. Storage is cheap. Downtime is not.

Then I don't want to grow up like you. Have fun recovering your corrupted filesystem.

<comment><USER10> Welcome to the devops world, where admin is boring and coding is fun...

<comment><USER11> Eh, sort of. I do Devops/Infrastructure exclusively, and while the tedious stuff is automated away, I've seen too much shit break on the other side of the fence to trust it fully (AWS API throwing errors when you absolutely need it to work, etc).

If something is broken, you should have enough automation to get it into a known good state without a human involved, while maintaining data consistency. Anything else should be automated, but you should still be around to babysit it while its going through the motions.

If you think you can automate everything and always trust it to work flawlessly, you haven't been around long enough for the edge cases.

<comment><USER10> > If you think you can automate everything and always trust it to work > flawlessly, you haven't been around long enough for the edge cases. <

And then you have some "clever" coder coming along with a fix for said edge case (that invariably create some new edge cases just outside the domain of the fix).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is sometimes useful to keep around a 1-10GB 'ballast' file full of zero you can remove if you're in this kind of emergency. Tuning the root reserved space as mentioned in the article comments is another useful trick.

<comment><USER13> I love this ballast file idea. It reminds me of a programming story by Noel Llopis[0] where a game developer was working with a strict memory limit and placed _static char buffer[1024_ * _1024_ * _2];_ in the code as an insurance policy[1]:

[0] [http://gamesfromwithin.com](http://gamesfromwithin.com)

[1] [http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game- deve...](http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game- developers.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I cannot imagine being in this situation and not either looking for queries to kill in mysql or restarting the daemon.

And as others have mentioned, having an open file descriptor to a deleted temp file is a classic unix pattern, truncating them is a horrific idea.

</comment><comment><USER15> As mentioned in the article comments, this is a classic example of why you should partition your systems.

Still an interesting way to troubleshoot and alive the issue though. I'm sure during on-duty at 3am I wouldn't have come up with anything better.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the canonical story of databases, I had similar frightening nights several years ago with my MongoDB setup. I'm not a DevOps guy and having to wake up to figure out what is broken (and it always being the database) eventually took a toll on me. What's the point of running my database in the cloud if my storage space is still finite? Isn't the whole point of the cloud unlimited scalability? So why on earth do I have to be an expert in MDADM, LVM and all that other junk in order to make use of those unlimited number of hard drives? Ugh, sorry for the rant but this story causes triggers in me back to those days. I tried doing stuff differently since, experimenting with new database concepts, trying to make things better, and the good news is that I have never had this problem since - so hopefully I can save the pain and woes of future souls, [http://gunDB.io/](http://gunDB.io/) .

</comment><comment><USER17> Mysql uses TMPDIR for sorting, multiple large tempfiles indicates heavy queries that should be optimised and/or missing indexes.

Deleting those files while the server runs is an awesome way to "f@ck s*it up"! Do you really trust Mysql to behave nicely in that situation?

Add more disk space and point TMPDIR somewhere else than /tmp, /var/tmp or /usr/tmp!

</comment><comment><USER18> To find easily about disk usage, I'm personally a big fan of `ncdu`. It's a really nice ncurses interface to du.

<comment><USER19> Second this in general, although I don't think du (and consequently ncdu) will show anything about disk space claimed by deleted but unclosed file descriptors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any risk to mysql when we nuke those handles?

<comment><USER21> Yes. Never do what this person did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In Windows we use TreeSizeFree to find the offending files. Tracking down the lock and unlocking can be tricky, but Process Monitor and File Unlocker are usually go to tools.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm still looking for a way to close open sockets of a process. I know about the gdb hack [1] mentioned in the comments of the article, but it seems like an opportunity for somebody to write a nice tool for this.

[1] [http://hacktracking.blogspot.nl/2013/06/closing-process- file...](http://hacktracking.blogspot.nl/2013/06/closing-process-file- descriptor-while.html)</comment>


Show HN: Set custom radio stations for specific, named Spaces on macOS - <AUTHOR> Blog with demo video:
https://spencerdailey.com/2020/05/07/how-to-give-each-of-your-macs-spaces-a-custom-sound/
Hello there,
After ~2 years of solo-developing CurrentKey Stats, which lets you assign persistent names to Spaces on macOS - I've pushed an update that extends its functionality out of the sandbox. A decent way to demo this was with Broadcasts (an app by indie dev https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith), which has AppleScript support.
So, as you move between your Spaces (the app calls them Rooms), any number of custom events can be triggered. So you could... turn on Dark Mode for your "Coding" Room only, or... always Mute volume when you move into your "Reading" Room, etc.
For my purposes, the macOS sandbox was not too limiting, as long as the user moves an AppleScript into the app's Scripts folder (which I provide a shortcut for), all the power is there without limitations.
I'd love to hear any and all feedback -- most of the features in the app that have shipped since launch are by request.
Thanks everyone!
CurrentKey free on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1456226992?pt=119982183&ct=hn&mt=8
Featured app, Broadcasts: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/broadcasts/id1469995354 <comment><AUTHOR> If you're having trouble clicking the links above, these should work:

Blog with demo video: [https://spencerdailey.com/2020/05/07/how-to-give-each- of-you...](https://spencerdailey.com/2020/05/07/how-to-give-each-of-your-macs- spaces-a-custom-sound/)

CurrentKey free on the Mac App Store: [https://apps.apple.com/app/apple- store/id1456226992?pt=11998...](https://apps.apple.com/app/apple- store/id1456226992?pt=119982183&ct=hn&mt=8)

Featured app, Broadcasts: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/broadcasts/id1469995354](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/broadcasts/id1469995354)

Sorry about that, thanks!</comment>


Do you believe computers can be composers? Here's the improved computoser - <AUTHOR> http://computoser.com/?

<comment><USER2> This is actually quite decent elevator music.

For further development, I believe the randomness is quite clearly audible and would have to become more purposeful, i.e. stochastically deterministic.

Perhaps machine learning could be used to fuzz out what people will respond to. I believe some dude who did some Bach composalikes used this approach.

</comment><comment><USER3> The results are actually pretty impressive, but the player seems to be broken for me; I have had to manually download everything.

</comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like me playing the piano. You might be fooled for a moment but it's definitely not music.</comment>


Ask HN: No option to delete my account at HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If there were, would you (all) expect your comments and submitted links to be deleted, or should they stay but attributed only to a "deleted user"?

<comment><USER3> Deleted.

<comment><AUTHOR> not really, still it exists.

<comment><USER3> Hm? I'm answering he question. If my account were deleted I'd expect my posts to be deleted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tracking the European Flights Cancellations - Interactive Feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/15/world/europe/airport-closings-graphic.html <comment><USER2> Pretty useful. My mother is stuck here in Bay Area till at least Wednesday, as her flight to Moscow through Munich is postponed.

What amazes me is how poorly Lufthansa (and possibly other airlines) are handling this. There is _no_ way on their website to check for e.g. status of the itinerary given the original confirmation code, and their call centers simply cannot handle the load.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any HN'ers stuck in any of these places?

EDIT: Adding related article - <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/world/europe/18ash.html>

<comment><USER3> I'm stuck in Europe. No, wait, I'm living here :)

(We were promised beautiful sunsets but I didn't see any. Nothing interesting to see in southern Germany except perfect blue sky without any contrails. I guess a good many researchers are happy[1].)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#September_11.2C_2001_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#September_11.2C_2001_climate_impact_study)

<comment><USER4> I noticed the blue sky too. Amazing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I find incredibly amusing is that the airport in Iceland is still operational...

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the volcanic ash is going with the mostly easterly winds

<comment><USER5> Yeah, regardless of any sensible reasoning it's just funny that the country to blame for it all (sorta) still has an airport.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Dit – Live demo of a container file that can hold any data - <AUTHOR> https://www.ditabase.io/demo.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everybody! Looking for feedback on the essential components of the product. I would love to hear all your ideas on how dit could work differently, and how I can make it better!

<comment><USER2> I would start with some use-cases and explanation of the unique value proposition rather than dropping directly into the tutorial. I wasn't really sure what it was or why I would use it, even after the tutorial.</comment></comment>


AMD Ryzen brings 8 cores from just $329 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/amd-ryzen-arrives-march-2-8-cores-16-threads-from-just-329/ <comment><USER2> Sigh... I really hope that a couple months after people get their hands on these that they are really more bang for less buck, but last time AMD made these claims it was all about specific multi-core stuff and they were not the better all around processor.

Something needs to push Intel forward, because there have been more incremental ticks then leaps forward lately.</comment>


Ruminations on iOS 5 - <AUTHOR> http://alexknight.net/blog/2011/4/27/ruminations-on-ios-5.html

<comment><USER2> If the dock moves, then why have a dock at all? It would just be another row of icons.</comment>


How's Rupert Murdoch's paywall working out at the Times of London? - <AUTHOR> http://shenews.projo.com/2010/07/hows-rupert-murdochs-paywall-w.html <comment><USER2> Hmmm. I'm probably in the minority here, but I'm a subscribed member. I've been reading the Times for a while, and I really enjoy their writing, so I decided to sign up.

The one thing I noticed is that a) most articles don't have comments any more. 3-4 comments is the norm. On one hand, it's a bit sad...but..

b) the comments that are there tend to be far more worth reading. The old Times site had a big problem with trolls and flamers, and somewhat unsurprisingly, this problem is greatly diminished. It would be nice to see more comments though.

For me, it's almost like a very quiet HN at times. I haven't regretted signing up yet, though I've never used any of the Times+ stuff that's 'supposed' to be the benefit. Cutting out the trolls in the comments is worth the money to me.

<comment><USER3> You read newspaper for comments?

<comment><USER2> Nope :).

I signed up because I like the writing, and columnists and I'm willing to pay for good content. Comments are just something that I noticed was an emergent property.

<comment><USER4> You think their writing is so much superior to say the guardian, or seeing as you might have conservative leanings, the telegraph?

<comment><USER2> Simply put..yes! :).

I did try the Guardian and Telegraph, but I just preferred the articles I found in the Times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't a particularly surprising outcome.

I think the problem they're facing is twofold:

1) There's lots of news content available for free.

2) Very few people actually _need_ the news. I can think of maybe two situations in my entire life when I gained information that was personally relevant from following the news (and this is despite being somewhat of a news junkie). What people need is entertainment, and the internet provides almost unlimited amounts of that for free.

It's an interesting experiment (and I salute Rupert for trying it) but I really don't see what the value proposition is for subscribers to a mainstream newspaper.

</comment><comment><USER6> Complete, non-sequiter, but PG reads the Providence Journal?

Just shocked me since I lived in La Prov for 3 years. I haven't thought about the Providence Journal for years.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this some kind of subtle ploy to prove to the government that the BBC has an unfair advantage?

</comment><comment><USER4> I think we need to see data. Those seem to be merely opinions.

I think so too is a bit early to tell. Give it a year. The Times is either sinking or swimming.

I can see this working. For example they could publish some very exclusive stories, engage in some PR and then people would subscribe. They could increase their level of journalism above all other newspapers, be truly independent and then people might see value and subscribe.

If however they continue as they have been, meh, they just another copycat, reproducing the same news as all other newspapers, hence it is a no brainer that no one would pay for it.</comment>


Why the Nitro JavaScript Engine Isn't Available to Other iOS Apps - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/nitro_ios_43 <comment><USER3> _The clear insinuation is that web apps running outside Mobile Safari have been made to run slower, but that's not true. What happened with iOS 4.3 is that web apps (and JavaScript in general) running inside Mobile Safari have been made significantly faster._

This is such a ridiculous argument, and Gruber chooses to _lead_ with it. So, according to Gruber, if 10 years from now everything else on iOS got crazy faster (including Mobile Safari), but web apps on the home screen remained the same speed as they do _today_ , then Apple _still_ wouldn't be hampering them. How can anyone even read the rest of the article after this?

But, if we do, we find the security argument is equally frivolous when it comes to home-screen web apps. There is nothing less secure about a home screen app (which is just a glorified bookmark) than MobileSafari. MobileSafari is connected to the _web_ , which means they're already allowing _anything_ access to Nitro. If anything, there would be a _much better_ argument for ONLY allowing home-screen web apps, because the user is implicitly stating they trust it more (than any random page you might be redirected to).

Beyond all this, I am willing to believe the "hey, it'll come with time" argument. But we should just say that, not bend over backwards to manifest false reasons.

<comment><USER4> Elsewhere in the comments I'm reading HN folks who agree that there _are_ security implications with having writeable code pages available to native apps, and that it's reasonable for some of the JIT stuff to appear in Mobile Safari and not in native apps (although there are other approaches Apple may pursue in the future).

Have you read these arguments? Do you disagree with them? Or are you saying something else?

Just trying to understand...

<comment><USER3> For starters, my argument is only about MobileSafari (MS) and home-screen web apps.

If you read my other posts I think you'll see I have no issue with the idea that there may be a security issue with JIT. That is fine and acceptable.

What I have an issue with is the idea that MobileSafari is somehow the safest place to put it. If there is a security issue, then MobileSafari is clearly the absolute least safe place to put it (vs homescreen web apps), since any malicious web page has access to it. That includes random ads loaded on otherwise safe web pages. The user is not prompted when entering a web page if they want to use Nitro or not, so basically anything goes on the open web. If a security flaw is discovered in Nitro, I have only to place it on an ad that gets deployed to popular sites to take advantage of it. And Apple's only recourse is to issue an entire _system upgrade_ and hope people update.

Home-screen web apps are thus at least as safe as MobileSafari, since they are literally just bookmarks that load web pages (in a different process and without chrome, but fundamentally the same, no access to any other native code or anything). They are in fact arguably more safe, because the user has to _first_ grant it "home-screen" status. This is a sensible time to ask the user if this ONE app should deserve more privileges than the rest of the wild-west web. In other words, had apple done the opposite, ONLY allowing home-screen web apps access to Nitro, it would make _a lot_ of security sense, especially because Apple could warn the user before they download the app saying "downloading this app gives it access to the special Nitro engine, which may be less secure...".

<comment><USER4> I am not arguing with you, I was only trying to distinguish between saying "Gruber could possibly be right, but I think he is wrong" and saying "Gruber can't possibly be right, and he ought to know better."

The situation is complicated by the fact that he is reporting what Apple is doing and what he has been told is the motivation for doing so. So he could be right that Apple is doing this, but you assert that Apple is wrong. Or that Apple is doing this, but not for the reasons they give.

You assert that there is no vulnerability in home screen apps wrapping UIWebView that isn't in Mobile Safari, and thus there is no downside to granting writeable code page permission to home screen apps. Ok, I think I understand what you are saying, why you are saying it, and what you would do in Apple's shoes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure why I read John Gruber anymore. I get my hopes up that perhaps I'll see some of the smart, incisive that I remember from years ago, but instead I see another pretty baseless apology for Apple's behavior. He may actually be correct in this case, but it's hard to take him seriously given that he seems to bend over backwards to interpret Apple's actions as charitably as possible. This post is certainly more defensible than his recent defense of Apple's 30% application revenue power-grab, but I am skeptical that it was written in any better faith.

With every thing he writes like this, he's behaving more like a fanboy and less like a reliable source of information. It's a bit sad.

<comment><USER6> His reasoning seems shaky to me. Assuming this new JS engine is a security risk (it's not really, but lets pretend) you're not protecting anyone by making it Safari-only. It'd be like leaving all your ground-floor windows wide open, whilst locking your front and back doors in hopes that it will discourage burglars.

If the new JS engine is a security problem either fix it or remove it. Compromise helps no one.

<comment><USER7> Apple can't turn on the ability to do executable, dynamically written to memory pages just for their library: they'd have to turn it on for the entire process, at which point you could also do crazy things like download native code and execute it, bypassing the entire concept of their "codesign" mechanism.

<comment><USER8> Not just bypassing code signing, but the App Store approval process altogether?

<comment><USER7> The application that is downloading and executing code would itself have to be signed, so this doesn't get around the App Store approval process: the bootstrap app could be loaded by anyone with a developer certificate, but then they can just sign anything they want that runs as a normal process.

The effects this would have are in:

a) security (although codesign is a fundamentally flawed system due to return- oriented programming techniques and is frankly just security theatre at this point)

b) meta-store fronts (Apple would have to be much more careful about approving applications that downloaded other applications at runtime; Apple could revoke these, though, and you can already do stuff like this with interpreters, although you might not want to bother)

and, I'd say most importantly, c) JITs (suddenly there would be no technical obstacles to having good versions of Java, Mono, or even Flash; and given that the contractual obligations they added got so much pushback that they were removed, we /would/ see good versions of Java, Mono, and even Flash)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What really disturbs me is not the nitro JS performance part but this (from the register article):

        What's more, such "home screen web apps"
        can't use various web caching systems,
        including the HTML5 Application Cache,
        which means they can't be cached to
        run offline.

I can live with my app being a little slower; after all, I don't really even contemplate writing performance sensitive apps as off line web apps anyway. I can NOT live with my apps not working, being unreliable, or taking ages to load because the user went through a tunnel or tried to use it on a plane.

Not only is this a much worse consequence and far more damaging than slower javascript, it's not addressed by any of the arguments I have heard about security. How does anybody explain this as a consequence of marking memory pages non-executable?

I will be very interested to see whether Apple fixes this and how quickly they do it. If they fix it urgently then I will recall the cynic hound-dogs within me. But if they let this lag for months then it seems pretty clear to me that they are just cynically closing down any attempt to route around the app store, if only by ensuring nobody will try to do so due to the chilling effect of knowing such apps could be broken for months at a time.

<comment><USER7> As far as I know there was a bug on 4.2.1 where home screen web applications marked with a specific flag couldn't use the HTML5 Application Cache. Maybe they didn't get to fixing this in 4.3, but on 4.2.1 there was a reasonable-ish workaround.

Look, I hate Apple as much as the next guy (maybe more so: I mean, I've dedicate my life to messing with them), but the random rumor mongering surrounding tiny actions that they perform needs to stop.

Like, the HTML5 Application Cache? That code is horribly broken. I started using the HTML5 Application Cache in Cydia (and am now sufficiently "down that road" that I'm launching with this, hell or high water), but WebKit's implementation's barely works, and I don't think it is reasonable for people to be holding Apple quite to task on whether this feature happens to be working in every scenario.

I mean, seriously: when you start going through the WebCore code history and public bug tracker teasing apart what is going on, you find that the developers working on with some of these issues (and there are still critical show-stopper bugs that have only been noticed a few months ago, as well as ones that are still open) actually claim "no one understands this system", something you really believe when you see the massive unstable state machine that surrounds it.

It is therefore entirely plausible to me that the reason the app cache isn't working in apps with some random meta flag is solely because of one of the numerous queue bugs in WebKit's appcache logic that totally wedge the mechanism (even crashing it at times) if things happen to reload in the wrong order.

<comment><USER9> It's been working for a long time to suddenly just break now ... when Apple just happens to be exercising some particularly anti-competitive practices against other players who might conceivably use it as a workaround.

Like I said - if they jump on it and fix it I'll say fair enough - <USER2> can get broken in the rush to put out a new release (especially with a high profile new device involved - one can hardly expect they would be delaying release of iPad2 because of something like this). So we will see what happens. However until I see it fixed or some kind of indication that it will be I remain _highly_ skeptical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gruber: _It is not an oversight or a bug, or the result of a single person at Apple wishing to hinder the performance of web apps._

Ars: _Apple is aware of the issues, which are currently filed as bugs... are marked "not to be fixed by exec order,"_

Well, this ought to be interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have any idea where the truth lies, here, but it's worth pulling the whole paragraph:

 _But according to Matt Asay, who is vice president of business development for mobile Web framework maker Strobe, Apple supposedly has no plans to fix them. Instead, they are marked "not to be fixed by exec order," suggesting that a higher up at Apple is preventing engineers from fixing the problems._

"Supposedly" and "suggested" let Ars weasel out of determining the truth of these assertions. Unless Apple has suddenly turned absurdly transparent, I have a hard time believing that this guy actually has any inside knowledge. On the other hand, he certainly has an incentive to bring pressure on Apple to make his business work better.

<comment><USER11> AFAIK strobe is made up mostly of ex-apple people - furthermore, they knew about the "bugs" at least a month ago - Charles Jolley was talking about them at the most recent sproutcore nyc meetup. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe the truth of these assertions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like there _might_ be some justification for restricting Nitro from UIWebView because then you have to trust a third party app... but a webapp launched from the home screen is completely controlled by Apple's apps just like if you launched it from Safari (except less annoying). Surely these home page webapps can be treated just like Safari?

<cynical>Unless, of course, you want to discourage their development</cynical>

<comment><USER13> > but a webapp launched from the home screen is completely controlled by > Apple's apps just like if you launched it from Safari

Not quite. In essence, a native app using UIWebView is created on the fly, and past that point it acts just like a standalone app. Only real-deal Safari gets the exception.

<comment><USER12> ok, but it's created by iOS so surely can be trusted just like Safari?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The thing is, and I believe Gruber himself has pointed this out regarding Microsoft's past transgressions, you don't need a Simpsons style committee of evil for this stuff to happen. You just need a normal corporation filled with employees smart enough to know what's in the financial interests of their employer, and that sticking to those interests aids their own career progression.

Bugs and difficult to solve issues arise in all sorts of code. Just by prioritising what you work on and fix you can hose your competitors both within or outside your ecosystem. In this case, extra speed for Mobile Safari was clearly more important to Apple than extra speed for mobile apps that compete with their native apps.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a design issue that is basically unsolvable unless Apple fully rethinks the iOS security model. In the current model, you can't give a library separate permissions than the process in which it was loaded - that's the gist of it. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Security as Gruber is spinning it to be - not directly at the least. As with Flash the real reason seems to be bypassing control.

I suspect RIM's security model allows them to do package / API specific permissions and prevent the app from doing things such as mmap(... PROT_EXEC) - anyone familiar with BB Security/Permissions model - care to comment?

</comment><comment><USER16> But why is it a good idea to have a saver web view outside of Safari when Safari remains wide open?

Maybe they think that people are aware that the web is generally less safe and act accordingly? And they don't want someone to smuggle that unsafeness into apps? (The homescreen webapps are more or less just collateral damage if you take on this view.) That's the only somewhat plausible explanation I can think of and it doesn't make all that much sense.

<comment><USER17> Maybe the problem is that Nitro requires that an app have special permission to mark pages as executable. Apple may be comfortable giving this permission to Safari (or any if their apps, for that matter) but not comfortable giving it to third party apps. Along the same lines, it could be that apps saved to the home screen don't get Nitro because there is a special exemption low in the system for Safari, and they haven't yet worked out how to roll it out to the thin apps that are created when you save something to the home screen.

<comment><USER7> As someone who pulls this system apart constantly: this comment is dead on accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To say that Apple does not allow writable executable pages for security reasons is to ignore the bigger reason Apple does not allow modifiable code: Apple does not want apps to have writable executable pages because then an app could implement an app store.</comment>


God is on the ropes: [] new science that has creationists [] terrified - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2015/01/03/god_is_on_the_ropes_the_brilliant_new_science_that_has_creationists_and_the_christian_right_terrified/

<comment><USER2> Terrible title, terrible article.

It conflates three different things: 1) the existence of God 2) the creation of the Universe 3) the origin of life.

For example, the Catholic Church is by far the largest Christian denomination.

With respect to 3), the Catholic Church has been okay with evolution for a long time (this was made official by Pius XII in 1950). With respect to 2) the guy who developed the Big Bang Theory was actually a Catholic priest.

Pretending that the 7,000-year-old Earth, created in 7 days story represents the mainstream Christian view is intellectually dishonest.

The title is terrible in another respect. Those who do believe in the young Earth, 7 day story won't be "terrified" by this at all. They'll simply ignore it, as they ignore all other evidence.</comment>


Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce Covid-19 mortality - <AUTHOR> https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/news--wuhan-coronavirus/ <comment><USER2> This is the modelling informing the UK's policies. Apparently some assumptions were revised during the weekend causing a pretty huge change in policy from Boris' last speech on Thursday to today's on Monday.

All the models in table 4 show 10-20k+ less deaths if schools are closed, so we'll hopefully find out soon why they haven't announced any school closures. Not sure why table 3 says the opposite either.</comment>


How the CPython VM works - <AUTHOR> https://tenthousandmeters.com/blog/python-behind-the-scenes-1-how-the-cpython-vm-works/ <comment><USER2> > _CPython is [...] one of the Python implementations, alongside with PyPy, > Jython, IronPython and many others._

What others are there? I'm only aware of MicroPython, but it only implements a subset of the language.

What's more, aren't both Jython and IronPython dead? Leaving PyPy as the only significant alternative to CPython?

<comment><USER3> Oracle Labs is actively working on a Python for GraalVM: [https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython/](https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython/)</comment></comment>


Security Announcement for Devise (Rails authentication solution) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2013/01/security-announcement-devise-v2-2-3-v2-1-3-v2-0-5-and-v1-5-3-released/

<comment><USER2> Is there any more info about the severity of this attack? Is this a drop- everything issue? What are the vulnerable endpoints (reading between the lines implies password resets?).

<comment><USER3> "Upgrade immediately" so do drop everything. I have amended the blog post to mention an attacker could gain control of other accounts.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Is there a firewall level rule we can use to block requests (in addition to updating rails itself). We have a ton of apps to update, so a catchall rule would be very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is "all other databases" a euphemism for MySQL?

<comment><USER3> No. SQL Server, Oracle, IBM and other NoSQL databases. Everything that runs on Rails that is not SQLite3 or PostgreSQL requires an upgrade.

<comment><USER5> That's really interesting/terrifying - I wouldn't have suspected NoSQL datastores to be susceptible. Now I'm really interested in seeing what the root cause was.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, the problem is not only the NoSQL data stores but their ORMs. In fact, Devise was not vulnerable to any of the Rails previous vulnerabilities because MongoDB ORMs forced us a long time ago to sanitize all input values because if you do this:

        User.where(password_token: params[:password_token])

You could make `params[:password_token]` return `{ "$ne" => "1" }` and effectively get any record from the database in MongoDB ORMs. So we limit the set of input values you can pass as argument for a while now. This is also why our patches were so simply, the whole sanitization infra structure was already there.

We were not able to test all ORMs and databases (because we would need to effectively test combinations of those) but we could verify the problem does not happen for PostgreSQL nor SQLite3. That's why you must upgrade if you don't want to take any risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ruby is really plagued by security concerns at the moment, even though most of them seem to be stemming from the same issues. Just makes me wonder how many blackhats figured these out years ago and have been abusing them under everyones noses.

<comment><USER7> This issue has nothing to do with either the "SQL injection" bug from a few weeks back (which wasn't SQL injection so much as a very limited form of code injection) or the remote code execution bug. It's (I believe) a MySQL type coercion bug.

If this is the bug I think it is (from following joernchen), it has a lot more to do with the "MySQL is terrible" post from a few days back than it does with Rails/Devise.

The recent remote code execution bug was so bad that I think it is in fact legit to worry about how many people had been running around with it months or years before disclosure.

<comment><USER8> Can you please link to the remote execution bug?

<comment><USER9> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5028218></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should I ask Dr. David Ferrucci, the leader of IBM's Watson project - <AUTHOR>

A little background: I am a senior CS major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and this upcoming week my school will be holding a 3 day event to cover the Watson computer system taking on Jeopardy.  The lead researcher, David Ferrucci, is a graduate of RPI and will be here one of those days to do a Q&A, but I don't really know much about the system and figured HN might have a few insightful questions that I could forward on.<p>Also, kind of a weird twist, but Ferrucci happens to be my roommate's first uncle (he's a management major and never mentioned it since him and I don't really talk CS all that often), so I might be meeting Dr. F personally afterward - making the question asking even more feasible. <comment><USER2> Ask him what he thinks the various applications of the Watson project are (if he can disclose some of them). I heard they were going to use it for medical purposes (let Watson answer people's questions and help diagnose them), but I'm sure they have a lot more in mind. It'd also be interesting to have him compare this feat to Deep Blue.

Let us know the question you end up asking him and his answer, if you can! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> Could you ask him what is the single most important thing that makes Watson possible, whereas Watson would not be possible five years ago? Was there an advancement in querying unstructured data? Or was it simply disks got big enough to hold a lot of data?

</comment><comment><USER4> You're his nephew's roommate? Ask him "May I send you my resumé?"

Seriously, I presume that his budget was large, but not inexhaustible. Ask him what he could have accomplished if he'd thrown more hardware/people at the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm already employed, but when my roommate told me this you better believe I went off on him (in jest) over not telling me before, in the past 3 years of my knowing him.

That being said, I think the latter part of your comment this could be a good question. I think asking him what issues he ran into - which might be more appropriate after he explains what the particulars of the project were/are - might be a little more generic though.

As an aside, after I posted this I went and did a little research on IBM's site - which is more marketing fluff than technical explanation - and one of the things they emphasized was that Watson was built as a custom solution to overcome some (ambiguous) lack of technical feasibility with existing hardware. One of the questions that came to mind after hearing this was why they couldn't just use the same algorithm/ of a blue gene/X. Basically, what differentiates Watson from any other distributed super computer, if anything (significant). I imagine theres no big difference, probably just tweaks in networking types, cpu counts/speeds, etc. - things that would've made Watson doable, but not optimally doable.</comment></comment>


Bandsintown on Mashable - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/06/08/bandsintown/ <comment><USER2> Whoah. That's pretty good stuff you got there. Just one gripe - it's really not obvious that the bands I am seeing listed there are the bands in my town.

Did you get yc rejected or accepted?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you about how obvious the meaning of what's showing in the clouds is, and what the sizing is based on. We have also have had some critiques on some of the visibility of the links and also the lack of directions or explinations on what the site actually does. At the same time, our users have raved about the simplicity once they pass the slight learning curve... so it's a toss up in my mind, and a balance that we are going to have to think about once we have more of our core features in place, and can really analyze the entire user experience.

Rejected. I am sure there will be a lot of successful accepeted and rejected ycombinator companies in the future though.

<comment><USER2> Well, personally I believe that it is a fundamental flaw. It's a minor issue, but it IS an issue, and not a question of philosophy. You should label the box so that it's clear that the bands in that box are the bands that are in your town right now.

Remember that you know EXACTLY what your site does. When I visited the site for first time, I had these few moments of confusion. This is bad with software. Software should always be instantly clear as to what you are seeing. Bad software is confusing software. Good software is obvious.

Everything else is okay because one can click to find out how it works, in my opinion. If you add explanations or not is a thing of philosophy.

By the way, I had one other issue. I live in a city. A big city. The site showed me bands in other towns that are quite a distance from my city. That does not make sense to me. Why would I want to go to another town for a concert when there must be hundreds in my city every weekend?

I ycomb made a mistake rejecting your application. It's not your idea that is revolutionary, it's your execution. It's an excellent implementation of a simple function.

I'm not going to use your site, because I don't care that much about concerts in my town. However, just giving you an idea where else your code would be useful: A nice tool would be one that shows me what is happening TODAY in my city, and how popular is it? As in - Dave Chappelle is going to be in Mudds comedy club, and 100 people are interested in this item. I normally would not find that out that Dave was in my town, but because others find this interesting, it floats to the top of the tag cloud. Just an idea for the future, in case you decide to expand....

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback. I hope to do as much as i can to make it as useful as posisble for as many people as i can. I appreciate your comments and feedback, I hope to be able to apply this kind of funtionality to other ideas in the future as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> to sign up before the public launch use "revolution" as your invite code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice design.</comment>


Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008624>

Many comments there already.</comment>