How the Unicode Committee Broke the Apostrophe - <AUTHOR> https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-character-should-represent-the-english-apostrophe-and-why-the-unicode-committee-is-very-wrong/ <comment><USER2> Makes a real effort to completely gloss over a very common English use of apostrophes. From the article:

> Consider any English word with an apostrophe, e.g. _"don't"_. The word > "don't" is a single word. It is not the word "don" juxtaposed against the > word "t". The apostrophe is part of the word, which, in Unicode-speak, means > it's a _modifier letter_ , not a _punctuation mark_ , regardless of what > colloquial English calls it.

> According to the Unicode character database, U+2019 is a punctuation mark > (General Category = Pf), while U+02BC is a modifier letter (General Category > = Lm). Since English apostrophes are part of the words they're in, they are > modifier letters, and hence should be represented by U+02BC, not U+2019.

> (It would be different if we were talking about French. In French, I think > it makes more sense to consider «L'Homme» as two words, or «jusqu'ici» as > two words. But that's a conversation for another time. Right now I'm talking > about English.)

OK, I've considered an English word: "man's". In the sentence "That man's pants are on fire!", this is usually considered a single word, the genitive case of "man" (personally, I'm not a huge fan of that approach, since the "genitive" 's attaches to phrases, not to words, but it is the mainstream position in linguistics).

In the sentence "That man's about to jump", on the other hand, the "word" "man's" is two words joined by an apostrophe, exactly as in French "l'homme". These clitics aren't exactly rare in English. The author shows some linguistic training in the comments to his piece, but never once mentions clitics, and fails to address them when another commenter brings them up.

Use U+0027 for English apostrophes. ;p

<comment><USER3> Is a clitic distinct from a normal contraction?

I am not up on linguistics, so I'm just curious, but I'd class "don't" and "man's" as in "the man's about to jump" the same as just contractions.

<comment><USER2> What's a "normal contraction"?

The mainstream view is that English "don't" is just a word, the negative form of "do". The apostrophe is a historical accident. The author of this piece gives one argument for this view in the comments, pointing out that "don't" can appear in contexts where "do not" is ungrammatical.

A "clitic" in linguistics refers to an item which is (1) a word in the sense of having its own dictionary entry (which I might call "at the lexical level"), but (2) _not_ a word at the phonological level -- clitics depend for their pronunciation on the word(s) (usually just one word) next to them. So, for example, the 's of "the man's about to jump" is lexically a form of the verb _is_ , but it's been reduced down to zero syllables. The indefinite article (a/an) is another English clitic, and you can observe its pronunciation changing according to the word that follows it in the sentence pair:

1\. A cow trampled me.

2\. An elephant trampled me.

Traditionally, the definite article ("the") is also clitic, with one pronunciation before consonants and a different pronunciation before vowels. The before-consonants pronunciation is in the process of becoming universal.

Languages differ in whether clitics are written together with the words they attach to phonologically or not. Ancient Greek clitics are traditionally separated with orthographic spaces (we know they're still clitics because they affect the placement of word accents). Latin clitics are written as part of the same word: "felis canisque" (="the cat and the dog", where -que means "and"). English uses both approaches.

SUMMARY, about the specific example you chose: "don't" and the "man's" of "the man's about to jump" are not in the same class, because "don't" is just a word with no internal structure, and that "man's" is two words which are realized in speech as a single syllable. That "man's" might be thought of as a "normal contraction", a term of no meaning that I know, but linguistically is a full word ("man") with a clitic ("'s") attached. However, clitics in general are not necessarily zero syllables long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In a _ideal_ world, yes, this is how it would work. But in practice it is not. The vast, vast majority of documents using non-straight quotes use ' (U+2019[1], the Windows-1252 \x92 right curly quote that Microsoft Word <3s) for apostrophes. There's not much that can be done about that.

Unicode has to strike a balance between what's most "correct" and how the real world actually uses it.

[1] I was looking at that codepoint and thought it must be wrong. It's too big a number for a Latin-1 codepoint. Aren't the first 256 characters of Unicode just Latin-1? Well, exactly. They're Latin-1, _rather than Windows-1252_ , which is where the now-infamous curly "smart quotes" come from. The two encodings are easily confused, because they're mostly the same. The difference is Microsoft replaced the extra control codes in the high byte (who needs those, really? ASCII had too many already) with more useful new printable characters.

<comment><USER5> " _Unicode has to strike a balance between what 's most 'correct' and how the real world actually uses it._"

 _That_ train left Unicode station a very long time ago. They have chosen correctness over convenience too many times to switch tactics now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sadly, Unicode is a clusterfuck. But can anything be done about it? Or should we just be happy we for once have managed to get a decent adoption of something interoperable?

<comment><USER7> Unicode is not a clusterfuck. Overall, it is a very comprehensive, well thought out standard, that has improved the situation for interoperable internationalization dramatically over the hundreds of separate encodings that preceded it.

The clusterfuck is mostly in the essential complexity of the problem; the world's languages and writing systems are quite complex and varied, and all of the writing systems and punctuation conventions were designed for reading, hand-writing and hand-typesetting by people who understood the language in question, not automatic typesetting and processing by a general purpose computer.

The complexity of the problem was increased by the necessity of providing migration paths from legacy encodings to Unicode and back again; without such a guarantee, bootstrapping the world into using Unicode would have been a much more difficult proposition, but that constraint also means that many oddities of legacy encodings have had to be preserved in Unicode in order to be able to preserve that round-trip mapping.

Unicode, and sister projects like the Common Locale Data Repository, are doing an admirable job of navigating and standardizing this complex problem.

There are definitely aspects of the Unicode process where they have gotten it wrong; UCS-2/UTF-16 is one of them, in hindsight it is apparent that UTF-8 is superior in pretty much every way. Having a variable width encoding but which most of the world's text fits in a fixed width, and which has endianness issues that necessitate inclusion of an non-textual byte order marker to disambiguate, has caused a number of problems and incompatibilities. There may be a few other points of legitimate criticism, like some aspects of Han unification.

But on the whole, outside of a few problems like those, the "clusterfuck" is caused not by Unicode, but simply by the essential complexity of the problem involved. Language and text are simply difficult things to model in a computer.

<comment><USER8> > The complexity of the problem was increased by the necessity of providing > migration paths from legacy encodings to Unicode and back again; without > such a guarantee, bootstrapping the world into using Unicode would have been > a much more difficult proposition, but that constraint also means that many > oddities of legacy encodings have had to be preserved in Unicode in order to > be able to preserve that round-trip mapping.

While I agree that preserving round-trip integrity was essential for Unicodes success, I'm not sure if the approach taken to achieve that was the best one. I would have preferred that the complexity tradeoff would have been shifted to software converting between Unicode and legacy encodings by having more complex mapping tables and cleaner code point space.

I also think that Unicode Consortium should have been more aggressive in segregating (and discouraging the general use of) legacy compatibility features/codepoints and the stuff that is actually supposed to be used. My personal pet peeve is precomposed characters.

In a more general note, I sometimes wonder if it would have been beneficial to have separate layers in Unicode and have more focused on providing generic primitives. As a simple example it is mighty convenient that I can type 2³ = 8 in plain text, but arguably it would be even nicer if instead of special 'SUPERSCRIPT THREE' codepoint there would be generic superscript modifier codepoint that could be combined with any character.

Speaking of superscripts, they demonstrate well one aspect that I dislike in Unicode, the way they have absorbed legacy encodings verbatim. The numeric superscripts (e.g. ⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶) happen to have inconsistent look on my machine because the superscripts for 1, 2, and 3 are from Latin1 while the rest are in their own block.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sold, I think... (U+02bc isn't really intended for such use, but until there's a proper alternative, other than U+2019 or U+0027, I'm using it)[1].

        (in ~/.XCompose)
        include "%L"
        <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <minus>                : "'"   U02BC   # MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE

[1] A potential problem with U+0027 is that low-ascii ' and " have uses for demarcating things (like attribute values in html, most popularly), so if you're editing anything that uses ' for markup, you can't search and replace based on ' anymore.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Using U+2019 is inconsistent with the rest of the standard" I agree with the article, just my negativity is such I would say the correct statement is more like: "Using U+2019 is inconsistent with good use, making it consistent with the rest of the mess that is the standard."

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9655387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9655387)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think there are a few things wrong with this argument. I'm unconvinced by the argument that this should actually be considered a modifier letter.

      Consider any English word with an apostrophe, e.g.
      "don't". The word "don't" is a single word. It is not the
      word "don" juxtaposed against the word "t". The
      apostrophe is part of the word, which, in Unicode-speak,
      means it's a modifier letter, not a punctuation mark,
      regardless of what colloquial English calls it.

The definition of a modifier letter is ([http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode7.0.0/ch07.pdf#G15832](http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode7.0.0/ch07.pdf#G15832)):

      Modifier letters, in the sense used in the Unicode
      Standard, are letters or symbols that are typically
      written adjacent to other letters and which modify their
      usage in some way. They are not formally combining marks
      (gc=Mn or gc=Mc) and do not graphically combine with the
      base letter that they modify. They are base characters in
      their own right. The sense in which they modify other
      letters is more a matter of their semantics in usage; they
      often tend to function as if they were diacritics, in
      dicating a change in pronunciation of a letter, or
      otherwise distinguishing a letter's use. Typically this
      diacritic modification applies to the character preceding
      the modifier letter, but modifier letters may sometimes
      modify a following character. Occasionally a modifier
      letter may simply stand alone representing its own sound.

Punctuation, on the other hand, is ([http://www.unicode.org/faq/punctuation_symbols.html](http://www.unicode.org/faq/punctuation_symbols.html)):

      Punctuation marks are standardized marks or signs used to
      clarify the meaning and separate structural units of text.

Based on these definitions, the apostrophe seen in contractions and possessives is definitely punctuation, not a modifier letter. Modifier letters indicate some effect on sound or pronunciation, either modifying an adjacent letter or having a sound on their own. U+02BC (MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE) is such an example, being used to indicate a glottal stop.

Apostrophes used in contractions and possessives, however, have no effect on pronunciation; instead, just as in the definition of punctuation, they are used to "clarify the meaning and separate structural units of text."

      But we shouldn't be perpetuating this problem. When a
      programmer is writing a regex that can match text in
      Chinese, Arabic, or any other human language supported by
      Unicode, they shouldn't have to add an exception for
      English.

Thinking that it's possible to do text processing in a language or writing system neutral way is a fallacy. Unicode simply provides an encoding that allows all of these writing systems in a single document, plus a number of algorithms that are designed to be fairly reasonable across the entire encoding, but which cannot be correct for all languages and writing systems without specific tailoring.

Many writing systems do not use spaces between words. Any form of word segmentation for these writing systems will necessarily be language specific, generally involving dictionaries. Using a regex like \w+ on Chinese or Thai text is fairly meaningless, as it will generally match an entire sentence at a time, rather than actually matching a single word.

      For godsake, apostrophes are not closing quotation marks!

No, they are not. However, they also aren't modifier letters. If you wanted to provide a distinction for the purposes mentioned here, you would probably need to add a new, distinct punctuation character "curly apostrophe" or something of the sort (since the ASCII range apostrophe can't be reused due to its overloaded meaning). However, even if you did that, you would still need to deal with all of the legacy documents which use ASCII apostrophe and closing quotation marks; you wouldn't actually be able to simplify the implementation by making the assumptions that a closing quotation mark was always actually closing a quotation.

Now having three different characters that looked identical (the modifier letter apostrophe, the closing quotation mark, and the punctuation apostrophe) would additionally add to confusion.

Even if you didn't introduce a new character, and instead used the modifier letter apostrophe as a punctuation apostrophe, you would still have all of the problems with legacy documents; it would take years for this change to make it's way through all of the various word processing programs and text editors, even after it had there would be existing documents using the old conventions, etc.

In short, text processing is hard, because text conventions were designed for human readers who know the language, not computers trying to process text in a language-independent way, and they were designed either through handwriting or manual typesetting, not keyboard entry. You are never going to achieve a perfect text processing model that can handle all of the world's languages simply by using particular global Unicode properties of characters and applying a simple algorithm or categorization on them. A lot of text processing will need to be contextual, language (and locale) specific, and involve dictionaries.

I don't think that switching from the punctuation closing quote character to the modifier letter apostrophe for the punctuation apostrophe is likely to help much; and the confusion caused by nearly 20 years of documents that follow the existing conventions and so having to support both conventions is likely to make the situation much worse, not better.</comment>


Andreessen Horowitz Sells Some Lyft Shares to Prince Al-Waleed - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/article_email/andreessen-horowitz-sells-some-lyft-shares-to-prince-al-waleed-1455145074-lMyQjAxMTA2MjEzMDUxMjA3Wj <comment><USER2> On one side of a transaction you have VCs, who have long investment horizons and are highly incentivized to maximize returns, taking a short-term profit on an investment long before it has (theoretically) reached its potential. On the other side of the transaction you have GM and a Saudi Prince.

I wonder who is the smart money...

<comment><USER3> Did AH exit completely, or are they just getting some liquidity for other early-stage investments?

<comment><USER4> Typically a VC fund does not re-invest profits back into other startups — the profits are disbursed to LPs

VC funds tend to dislike small exits: they're not enough to return the fund and they can't re-invest the capital.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> don't twitters activists see the irony of using a platform owned by horrible misogynist and human right violaters like Prince Al-Waleed.

<comment><USER6> From wikipedia: Al-Waleed is considered a proponent for female emancipation in the Saudi world. He has financed the training of Hanadi Zakaria al-Hindi to become the first Saudi woman commercial airline pilot and has stated on her graduation that he is "in full support of Saudi ladies working in all fields". Al-Hindi became certified to fly within Saudi Arabia in 2014.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al- Waleed_bin_Talal#First_Saud...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al- Waleed_bin_Talal#First_Saudi_female_pilot)

Do you assume he's a misogynist and a human rights violater because he is from Saudi Arabia?

<comment><USER7> Yes, how is it we assume he's a misogynist and human rights violater for being an integral part of a government that does these very things?

You can not be serious? Of course that's why.

<comment><USER6> He's an integral part of what government? He doesn't have an explicit government role in Saudi Arabia - he's just the (very rich) CEO of a holding company.

And let's say he was even a part of Saudi government - how dare you presume that he's a misogynist because of that? Maybe we should have a quick conversation about how Obama is a racist because of he's an integral part of the state apparatus that institutionalizes racism and incarceration of black people, eh?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Obama Administration Released Two Reports on Artificial Intelligence in October - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/10/12/administrations-report-future-artificial-intelligence <comment><AUTHOR> The first report, _Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence_ [1] details policy opportunities raised by AI, while the second, the _National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan_ [2] lays out a strategy for the federal funding of AI-related research.

[1] [https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/whitehouse_fi...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/whitehouse_files/microsites/ostp/NSTC/preparing_for_the_future_of_ai.pdf)

[2] [https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/whitehouse_fi...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/whitehouse_files/microsites/ostp/NSTC/national_ai_rd_strategic_plan.pdf)</comment>


What do you use for your CDN provider? - <AUTHOR>

I started out with CloudFront serving videos but now I am looking other CDN providers that are cheaper than CloudFront. I don't mind paying upfront for a bandwidth. <comment><USER2> For one of my iOS/Android app which require to download every 3 or 4 days a file that is around 10 to 15MB, I went with Amazon S3 and CloudFront... I did check a few other (it was more than a year ago) and the convenience of the various third party API, the AWS console, and the management side to automatically delete old files without my system doing any extra work made my decision easy.

Over the last year CloudFront charges did increase but still reasonable (in the $50 range usually). Since the users of my app are all around the world having a solid CDN was key, but what made me decide to stick with CloudFront was all the third party API/client lib.

If someone can point out another good CDN with good API/client lib (python/java) that can make me reconsider my current CloudFront usage.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depending on your usage, CF reserved pricing and price classes may be useful; linking to these just in case you haven't seen them:

[http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/#Can_I_choose_to_only_...](http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/#Can_I_choose_to_only_serve_content_from_less) expensive_Amazon_CloudFront_regions

<http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/> (reserved pricing and price classes at the bottom)

</comment><comment><USER4> It is probably hard for people to give you recommendations if you don't give any details about your usage.

But I've used maxcdn[1] before but they seem to have changed their pricing recently, but they do allow you to pay upfront and they do email out cheaper deals about every month for large-ish amounts (5TB and up).

[1]: <http://www.maxcdn.com/></comment>


Change directory forwards or backwards though time. - <AUTHOR> http://www.lbackup.org/lcd_manual New LBackup screencast online :
The 'lcd' command (a component of LBackup) allows you to change your working directory forwards and backwards though time within your backup set.
An introduction to the 'lcd' command, screencast was just released :
http://www.lbackup.org/screencasts
The screen cast focuses on Mac OS X within a BASH shell. <comment><USER2> Looks like an interesting command. How does it know the root of the backup?</comment>


Dropbox Launches Mailbox For Android, Previews Mailbox For Desktop - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/09/mailbox-android-desktop/

<comment><USER2> Huh? This article didn't make any sense... People archive spam or unsubscribe from it? Nooooo

Here is a better article submitted to Hacker News on what "Auto-swipe" in Mailbox is --> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7561088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7561088)</comment>


Ask HN: Facebook alternative - would you start one? - <AUTHOR>

With all the attention on Facebook and their privacy, or lack thereof. I'm wondering if anyone is considering creating their own social network to correct the perceived negatives of Facebook and other existing platforms. <comment><USER2> I think Facebook is beginning to have systemic user privacy/comfort issues resulting from their persistence in oversaturating their social graph. yan is right in that only a tiny minority of their userbase (such as us) really cares about this right now, but I think that in this case our concerns are leading indicators for those of the rest of the Internet-using population.

I don't think that any site that tries to combine the entirety of the social graph with contextually agnostic personal content will ultimately be successful - in other words, no one wants a site where everyone they've ever met can see what they're doing all over the Internet, and this is what Facebook seems intent on creating. It's more than just a pure privacy concern (where privacy means restricted access to personal information) - there's also filtering issues, with my 'friends' being exposed to/spammed by content I create that simply isn't _meant_ for them.

For what it's worth, I'm also actively working on an alternative to Facebook, which will be a tool for users to partition their online social network to match their real-world social contexts, and then use those partitions to manage their 'friends' lists on the myriad other sites where people already share content (Flickr, Foursquare, Vimeo, Twitter, and so on).

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think anyone (by anyone I mean techies or people specifically interested in this, read: tiny minority of their user base) really cares about this. People that do won't rush to join yet another social network and give them more personal info in the hopes that they'd be better with it than Facebook.

I actually think Facebook is doing the public a service by being up front with the lack of privacy you have on the internet. Do not ever, ever assume that you can hand over your private information to a corporation operating under US privacy laws and hope that they'll treat it respectfully (by some conservative definition of respectfully).

Social networks, by their very nature are about sharing personal information, and anyone thinking otherwise should ask Facebook for a refund.

<comment><USER4> They care that suddenly they're on Microsoft docs.com, and their settings are being changed. They may not look at the deeper implications, but they know they're being jerked around and don't like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No, insofar as it would be so hard to get off the ground commercially. There's already a business alternative in LinkedIn, and a lot of communities (eg Metafilter or various specialist discussion forums) already have the rudiments of a network in place.

I'm rather surprised nobody has made a peer authentication thing for PHP-BB or similar, so that members of on one of the many forums running on this platform can 'visit' another website and cross-post, if you see what I mean.

for that matter I'm surprised Google Wave hasn't been polished up yet - you'd think Google would take advantage of their enormous user base and prior experience with Orkut and Buzz etc. to offer robust group communication with the requisite privacy controls by now. It's not like they don't have all the necessary components.

</comment><comment><USER6> To murder any competitor, Facebook only has to change their privacy (or other natives) "enough" - whatever prevents enough people from leaving. While you have to create a new model from scratch, get funding, find users, build up a platinum-standard brand...Facebook has to...jiggle the privacy settings a bit? I'd suggest that you'd need a _seriously_ different model to succeed. Not "Facebook with a few changes", but "something Facebook can't get to without breaking their model".

The network effects of having every friend and family member you have on a website is very hard to beat. Google is trying. Yes it can possibly be done, but a couple of privacy tweaks won't do it.

<comment><USER4> Have you ever been in a relationship? Once trust is gone you can never get it back. No mater how hard you try.

Once Mark Zuckerberg loses people's trust - which it seems he is doing so now, he can never regain it.

<comment><USER6> Agreed it's a huge risk, but FB users have been getting shafted for ages in terms of privacy, and have hardly blinked. Geeks and privacy-oriented people yes, but most just want to share pics, see what their friends are doing and play games. It's easier to tweak their privacy settings than move to a place where they can't as easily (or automatically) share pics, have to build up their friend network from scratch, and there aren't as many games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think theres space for creating a social network for private groups of friends - rather than competing head on with facebook.

</comment><comment><USER8> FB became big initially, because their privacy settings were strong. What is the guarantee that a new social network starts off strong on privacy settings etc, will not become yet another FB as they grow big? (reminds me of Animal Farm).

End of the day, I guess it is a business and every business just cares about their profits and keeping investors happy.

</comment><comment><USER9> What I'm working on will have the side effect, I hope, of moving into a competing social network but with clearer privacy constraints.</comment>


Why smart hardworking people don't become successful (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@melissachu/7-reasons-why-smart-hardworking-people-dont-become-successful-d4d3b6119cbc <comment><USER2> > But as I grew older, I realized that's not necessarily the case. A few > people I know who are intelligent and have a strong work ethic have gone on > to do notable things, while many others are doing fine. Unfortunately, there > are some that drift along, unsure about what to do.

Not all who wander are lost.

This post is terrible advice, it's like a sermon from the Church of the Silicon Bubble. Smart but not successful? You don't reach out enough. You don't sacrifice enough. You're too distracted. You don't take enough risks. You don't believe in yourself. You can't commit. It's all in your head!

<comment><USER3> > " _Not all who wander are lost._ "

I'm not really sure that quote means what most think it does. The source seems to be:

" _All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king._"

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The implication is not that wandering aimlessly is OK but kind of the opposite: that one who looks like a wanderer has a grand purpose and destined greatness within him that is merely temporarily hidden.

Anyway, going back to the main point, a different quote comes to mind: " _The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man._ " ― George Bernard Shaw

<comment><USER4> > The implication is not that wandering aimlessly is OK

That wasn't the point of the GP.

> I'm not really sure that quote means what most think it does

Wandering is exploring a domain. Knowing a domain is part of forming a strategy or merely the goal in itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article glosses over the fact, known to us who have witnessed humans up close in business environments, that success is almost entirely political within an organization.

<comment><USER6> One would think that being smart should be an asset when playing politics, though.

<comment><USER7> Politics require social skills, being smart is detrimental because it lets you see thru all the bullshit.

<comment><USER8> If you were smart, wouldn't you know how to optimally deal with bullshit?

<comment><USER9> This takes a whole different set of skills against e.g being good at programming.

For example, how do you react to inherently unfair situations, someone taking advantage of someone else? If you start picking on people good politicians will quickly "plausibility deniability" you out of the equation.

It's much easier to accept (with a bit of anger) that you made a mistake in your program that bring defaced due to your "judgement being clouded by anger".

You may be smart enough to even understand what you have to do, but it will take practice to do it well even if you understand it conceptually.

<comment><USER8> Just because you're a good programmer doesn't mean you're smart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This doesn't mention charisma, and the fact that smart hardworking people often lack it.

From what I have observed charisma is by far the number one factor for success. It's more significant than hard work, intelligence/IQ, appearance, or the quality of one's ideas. You can put charisma behind an obviously stupid idea and get quite a bit of traction. It does often fail eventually but the charismatic founder often profits nonetheless and moves on to something else.

Charisma is so powerful that I find it disturbing. I've watched people who really ought to know better become transfixed at the presence of a charismatic person even if the stuff coming out of their mouth is nonsense. I think it works so well because it bypasses the rational mind and speaks directly to the brain stem and says "I am big alpha, follow me and I will get you food and safety" or similar. It speaks to the most ancient parts of the brain.

I don't mean to sound totally negative. Like any power it can be used for both good and evil. It's just that I've mostly observed it being used for evil in today's world.

</comment><comment><USER11> Another post about success is only measured by position at work and money and "following your dreams", where usually the dream is get rich and/or famous.

According to my 10 years old me, I'm the most successful person in the world, because I wanted to learn to play the bagpipe (in my original country it was pretty impossible), now I'm moving to Scotland and learning to play the bagpipe.

Please don't buy this bullshit, that success is measured in job titles and whatever you can do at work. (Dont get me wrong, my job is important part of my life, I have a nice and IT fulfilling job, which buys my family food, a roof over our head because Scotland is pretty rainy.)

<comment><USER12> Ugh but it's so hard to let this go, I lie awake at night thinking to myself "stop spending so much time doing work" and every morning I wake up and crush work again because it feels good. Work is like a drug :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always found the notion that we have to climb upwards and always make more money to be a bit weird.

As long as I have enough to live comfortably, stash some away and not worry I'm good, I don't need more. As such, I don't really get involved in most of the things that this post is about nor do I particularly care to do so either.

Work is what I do in order to sustain myself, it's not my life. The minute I walk out the door at work I've forgotten all about it and never think about it until morning. I realise this is me being pretty lucky but I'd probably even change career completely if I couldn't do this anymore working in tech. I think a lot of people struggle to find that balance, sadly.

<comment><USER14> I think that the issue is that most people do not make enough money to live comfortably, stash some away, and not worry. For example, if someone wants to own a home in a major cosmopolitan city in the United States, then they must be extremely wealthy.

<comment><USER15> If you can't afford a home in "a major cosmopolitan city" then you probably shouldn't be there.

<comment><USER16> All major cities in the US have 50-70% of the population as renters. Let me deliver the news.

<comment><USER15> I wasn't making a distinction between renters and home owners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Success as defined by society isn't always what smart people aspire to.

 _``Thus is happened he became neither musician nor poet - \- if we use this latter term in its every-day acceptation. Or it might have been that he neglected to become either, merely in pursuance of his idea that, while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious, the highest is above that which is termed ambition? And may it not thus happen that many far greater than Milton have contentedly remained `mute and inglorious '? I believe that the world has never seen -- and that, unless through some series of accidents goading the noblest order of mind into distasteful execution, the world will never see -- that full extent of triumphant execution, in the richer domains of art, of which the human nature is absolutely capable.''_

\-- Edgar Allan Poe (``The Domain of Arnheim'')

</comment><comment><USER18> Another missed reason: Derailed by a lengthy divorce. Or, corollary to that reason, family difficulties that drain you of energy and attention. Many heroes out there whose struggles will never be know but who deal with a lot.

<comment><USER19> Even a divorce which is not lengthy and avoids acrimony can leave one feeling like the "reset" button got pushed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a more basic reason missed by the article: many smart, hardworking people don't know how to sell. Almost everything in life, regardless of what you work on, is selling and no one is born with this particular skill set. You learn it like any other.

It was likely the single most valuable skill I (eventually) learned, as a "smart hardworking people" by nature.

<comment><USER21> How did you go about learning it?

<comment><USER22> Read Influence by Cialdini. Take an improv class. Find some mentors with skills orthogonal to you. Learn to be fine with being uncomfortable as you learn and get feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Seems like the #1 reason smart hardworking people don't become "successful" is that the author has a vague and kinda weird view what constitutes "success". If some super-smart, hardworking dude is just drifting along reading HN instead of climbing the corporate ladder or whatever, I'm guessing they're also smart enough to be doing it that way on purpose.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is good advice, especially for folks who entered the workforce during the Great Recession.

You have to take risks and be uncomfortable to grow. But you also have to accept that your choices have opportunity costs and it takes time to make them come to fruition.

</comment><comment><USER25> Because life is full of uncertainties, randomness and unfairness. Even the most successful ones are not inmune to this. Steve Jobs was fired from his own company and died of pancreatic cancer at 55.

</comment><comment><USER26> Because people only want what they can't have.</comment>


Article 13 will wreck internet because MEPs accidentally pushed the wrong button - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/03/26/jfc-fml-jfc.html/ <comment><USER2> Hey, in case anyone hasn't read the article closely enough, this title is seriously misleading - the Article _actually_ passed by a sizable majority, 348 votes to 274.

The thing he's freaking out about was that the motion to let it pass _without amendment_ won by accident, but even then, do you _really_ think they would have magically fixed a law with this many problems that most of them, empirically, wanted to pass anyway?

<comment><USER3> Sorry but all the "internet's requests" was all for those two artcles, so it is no a matter of what you said. Did I misunderstood or are two different votes? The law was already known it will pass, but what concerns those two articles, I guess it was a different vote, where the 5 was "missing", if I'd understood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 5 votes. Remember that "Key Polish Political Party Comes Out Against Article 13" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19467726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19467726) and how people didnt believe Poles pointing out this particular party is just a bunch of has been crook liars? Guess what, 7 of them voted for ACTA today. No one was shocked in Poland by this, as it wasnt the first time they publicly lied to constituents about official position.

</comment><comment><USER5> I saw a PDF of the votes, and it had the statement at the top that MEPs could ask for the correction - but that it wouldn't affect the vote.

As soon as I saw that I predicted that someone would pull exactly this stunt - vote one way, then try to claim the credit for actually wanting the exact opposite.

Have this group of MEPs pulled this stunt before?

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. Welp, time to see how this plays out, I guess.</comment>


Creative Commons -NC Licenses Considered Harmful (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/11/16331/0655 <comment><USER2> Summary: "no commercial use" is impractical and counter productive; giving something (digital) away for free and then telling people not to resell it, is a misguided form of jealousy. Use GPL-style "share alike" instead.

<comment><USER3> While I agree with the sentiment from a perspective of personal agency, a copyright license should match the wishes of an author. In many places copyright has a moral aspects where the author has a right to forbid having their work associated with areas they dislike. A common example is political association where a author might not like having their creative expression being associated with it.

I would not call that jealousy, but rather a rational decision regarding the social impact that ones work has.</comment></comment>


Intel Reinvents Transistors Using New 3-D Structure - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/05/04/intel-reinvents-transistors-using-new-3-d-structure <comment><USER2> Again one of those "I bet AnandTech has the best description out there" and I go check and am pleasantly surprised.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/4313/intel-announces- first-22n...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4313/intel-announces- first-22nm-3d-trigate-transistors-shipping-in-2h-2011)

<comment><USER3> Ah, but PC Magazine has "9 things you need to know" about it, which includes an incorrect explanation of what a nanometer is. I think it's in a sidebar next to their "38 makeup tips for the summer" article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the sort of thing I read and think to myself "go check HN comments where someone smart will explain this in layman's terms"

<comment><USER5> Agreed. It's all magic to me but it seems like, if this breakthrough can keep Moore's Law chugging, it's worth a pretty penny. I'm surprised their stock isn't up more today.

<comment><USER6> The funny thing about silicon is a breakthrough is only worth anything if it doesn't cost practically anything! (on a per-chip basis)

<comment><USER7> Yes, and that's already included in Moore's law, which explicitly talks about costs per transistor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome! The current a transistor can put out is porportional to the width over the length and chip designers usually want wide transistors[1], but wide transistors take up space which causes more line capacitance. This innovation will let people put more, wider transistors in a given area which will both increase the current they're putting out and decrease the capacitance they're fighting against, leading to higher frequencies[2].

[1] Wider transistors also cause more capacitance for the other transistors that are driving them, but for most modern designs this is smaller than line capacitance.

[2] Having transistors closer together can also help overcome speed-of-light delay. This can be important in caches.

EDIT: Also, some stuff I didn't notice until reading the Anandtech article is that the thinness of the silicon will give you the same artificial limitation of the depletion region that SOI does, leading to the same accelerated inversion. Oh, and better isolation from the base too. I don't think that I can explain that succinctly for non-EEs so go read Wikipedia on MOSFETs if you're interested.

<comment><USER9> > Having transistors closer together can also help overcome speed-of-light > delay. This can be important in caches.

But in this case, while they take up less space, the distance is the same -- they're simply traveling up and over, rather than just over. Unless I'm missing something here.

<comment><USER8> The number of things of a given size you can fit on a plane within distance R of you is proportional to R^2. The number of things you can fit in a three dimensional space is R^3. So as we utilize 3D more and more things will tend to be closer together.

<comment><USER9> They're closer together, but the distance traveled in total is the same. Imagine the transistors are pieces of paper, and you're drawing a line over them. If the paper is flat, then you're drawing a line of distance _n_ , and the points are _n_ apart. If you fold the ends of the paper together, then the points are _0_ units apart (or near enough to make no matter), but that line still has a distance of _n_.

<comment><USER8> Oh, I think I get what your confusion is now. The signal doesn't have to travel up and over now any more than it did when everything was flat. The signal will travel up a few gate widths to the low resistance metal interconnect layers, travel a few tens or hundreds of gate widths sideways to get to the next transistor, then goes down again to make the connection. Going to 3D doesn't change this except to make the up and down slightly longer and sideways much shorter.

<comment><USER9> Ah hah, I see what you're saying now. Thanks for clearing that up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This Intel R&D paper sums the technology up and has a picture that makes it clear what they are doing: <http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/integrated_cmos.htm>

In a nutshell, the drain/source is a tall trace, the gate approaches from the side and climbs over the drain/source, covering it on three sides.

<comment><USER11> The good stuff (discretely linked from the press release) is here: <http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-2032> . In particular, this PDF has color drawings of the devices, and SEM pictures: [http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/22nm/pdfs/22nm- Detai...](http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/22nm/pdfs/22nm- Details_Presentation.pdf)

It is as you said - instead of the gate controlling the flow in a shallow ditch (the old "2D" does have some depth ;-), they built up a pipe and the gate is the choke around it.

Well, that should help stem the pesky leakage current problems that plague the deep sub-micron technologies ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The New York Times has an article: <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/science/05chip.html>

The article links to some graphics: [http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/05/science/05chip_...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/05/science/05chip_graphic.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> I liked Engadget's coverage of the release [http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/04/intel-will-mass- produce-2...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/04/intel-will-mass- produce-22nm-3d-transistors-for-all-future-cpus/)

I'm a sucker for videos. This Tri-Gate tech was first announced in 2002, I love seeing pie in the sky technology come into reality and widespread usage.

<comment><USER14> the videos are at the same time incredibly good and incredibly bad, thanks :)

<comment><USER15> They are even better than the "get perpendicular" video by Hitachi <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From what I've heard, using 50% as much power for the same performance as the previous generation still will not be sufficient to bring Intel's Atom performance/energy consumption ratio to that offered by ARM chips. However, it's a huge leap in the right direction. Add better-designed power-saving features on the next generation of Atom chips, and future process shrinkages, and it's easy to see ARM's lead getting chipped away until it's gone.

<comment><USER17> This is orthogonal. An ARM Cortex (or GPU, or whatever) on this process would see similar gains.

It's also worth pointing out that current Atoms in the market are still 45nm parts, not even 32nm. Intel, for obvious reasons, tends to prioritize production of high-margin desktop and server CPUs over low-margin embedded parts.

Really, this announcement isn't about ARM-based vs. Intel-based SoC designs. I think it's clear that Intel has some catching up to do there. This is about Intel cementing and extending its _complete and total dominance_ of high end digital logic fabrication. At this point they look to be about a full two years ahead of everyone else. AMD, IBM, Samsung, TI, TSMC and the rest of that crew have to be more than a little worried.

Objectivity disclaimer: my wife is at Intel working on precisely this 22nm process. So I'm about as biased a source as you can find.

<comment><USER18> > This is about Intel cementing and extending its complete and total dominance > of high end digital logic fabrication.

Given that, (and given that Intel has been dominant in process technology for some time now) I've always wondered why Intel doesn't do fabrication for third party, high-performance/high-margin/high-power-budget products that don't directly compete with Intel's main CPU product line. Networking/telecom processors, top-end FPGAs, DSPs, and so forth. Is it just that they are at capacity making CPUs and don't see any need to get into that business? Or do they do it already and I'm just not aware?

<comment><USER19> They are going to fab some FPGAs for a company called Achronix: [http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210263/Intel-to- fab...](http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210263/Intel-to-fab-FPGAs- for-startup-Achronix)

<http://www.achronix.com/>

I've worked with audio equipment that uses FPGAs, CPLDs, and DSPs for various purposes, and being stuck on relatively-ancient processes makes that equipment generate a lot more heat and fan noise than would be necessary with DSPs and FPGAs on a modern process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone know if the 3D structure is patented by Intel? If so, wouldn't this give Intel a monopoly on transistors given how much better this new design performs?

<comment><USER21> No this design was developed back when I was in college, the revolutionary change here is that Intel has a process to actually manufacture these things effectively and get decent yield. IBM had these things built in test cases back in 2007 but didn't have a manufacturing method.

Intel will likely not patent or reveal the manufacturing method thats how most semiconductor manufacturing technologies go. They tend to be trade secrets that are a combination of process and machinery which your competitors are unlikely to ever reproduce exactly, so no point in patenting it.

<comment><USER20> Thanks, that makes sense. I did find this patent from Intel about manufacturing the 3D transistor: [http://www.google.com/patents?id=1D2gAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=1D2gAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking at these pics [http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/05/science/05chip_...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/05/science/05chip_graphic.html?ref=science) its almost impossible to not get the feeling, that we are still in the stone age and a bright future lies ahead of us.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this will mostly help increase the life expectancy of the Moore's Law by another 10 years or so. When we'll get to 11nm or whatever is the limit, we'll just start stacking layers of transistors on each other. That will only work until the chips become too thick, though.

<comment><USER24> Intel is projecting to be at 10nm in 2015, way ahead of the industry lithography roadmaps published five or ten years ago.

Below 10nm, Intel and other fabricators will start looking beyond CMOS, perhaps to carbon based structures.

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't say way ahead. They are about a generation ahead.

When Intel was at 45, the ARM makers were 65. Intel at 32, ARM makers at 40/45.

When Intel will be at 22. ARM makers will be at 28/32. When they'll be at 10nm, ARM will be at 14nm using IBM's foundry.

<comment><USER24> I agree with what you said, but I'm sorry you misunderstood my point. The ITRS lithography roadmaps for years have assumed that lithography would advance at the rate of 36 months between nodes, e.g. between 45nm and 32nm. But in response to AMD competition in the previous decade, Intel introduced their "tick-tock" cycle in which Intel advances the lithography node every 24 months. Other CPU fabricators have been forced to keep up with Intel's pace, and as you point out they have been a process generation behind.

As a result, 10nm will be released in 2015, rather than 2020 as ITRS predicted in much earlier roadmaps.

What gets real interesting in just a few years is how Intel and others will get below 10nm. Could be a shift to carbon based structures will be necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Curious as to what clock speeds will be available when Ivy Bridge is released in the first half of 2012? If one expects a 37% performance increase at low voltages, then what would be the performance increase at standard voltage? 20% or so?

<comment><USER24> Anantech gives a gate-delay chart and explains that Ivy Bridge will be 18% faster at the standard voltage compared to Sandy Bridge. That might mean Ivy Bridge CPU parts at 4 GHz as compared with Sandy Bridge parts at currently at 3.4 GHz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I often wonder at the incredibly small size of these chips (22nm) if the have to worry about relativistic effects of electrons "jumping".

<comment><USER26> The quantum tunneling effect [1] is what you are referring to, right?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling>

<comment><USER25> Yes, sorry, been a while since I took P-chem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A couple of highlights from the article:

"The key to today's breakthrough is Intel's ability to deploy its novel 3-D Tri-Gate transistor design into high-volume manufacturing."

"The 22nm 3-D Tri-Gate transistors provide up to 37 percent performance increase at low voltage versus Intel's 32nm planar transistors."

</comment><comment><USER28> "Moore's Law" is mentioned 14 times.

<comment><USER29> I wonder if Gordon Moore had worked for IBM instead of being an Intel founder, whether that number may have been a _slight_ bit smaller.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely! IBM's was never motivated to improve performance for their mainframe and minicomputers as quickly as Intel improved performance for microprocessors.

Really, Moore's law is a sort of management principle rather than any kind of physical law. Simply, Intel introduces new fabrication process technology at the pace which optimises their profits.

Advance too slow and competitors will take the business, advance too fast and capital costs are higher, plus customers need payback on their current purchases. Advance at just the right pace and customers are motivated to replace perfectly good products just a few years old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't mean to trivialize this, but "reinvent" sounds a little strong to me. This is a modification on silicon design, and a great one, but is just another notch in the miracle of Moore's law. It's more evolutionary than revolutionary.

See 2007 for a similar announcement and reaction:

[http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/01/27/1614207/Intel- IB...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/01/27/1614207/Intel-IBM-Announce- Chip-Breakthrough)

</comment><comment><USER31> Although not the link for this story, the fact that this story broke in the NYT (not that surprising), with an explanation to attempt transistor design and functionality (incredibly surprising) is really uplifting. A good piece of purely anecdotal evidence against those who claim America is in perpetual intellectual decline. The general populace IS interested enough to try to understand complex ideas.

</comment><comment><USER32> Will this allow them to increase clock speeds? They mention a 37% perf increase, but I don't know what exactly they mean by that.

<comment><USER33> Clock speed is just another metric, not the most important one. You also have chips that do several operations per clock cycle, low power consumption chips, chips that do parallel processing. All these factors affect performance as well.

<comment><USER12> That may be true for a processor, but when talking about transistors, I think that clock speed and power consumption are the metrics to measure.

<comment><USER34> I would argue that neither of those things are metrics to measure for a transistor, since they are affected by how its used. Properties of the transistor itself are what matter: size, drain and source capacitance, leakage current when off, drain-source voltage drop when on, and probably a dozen things I don't really know about.

<comment><USER12> The properties you mention are mainly "low level" properties, which in the end affect the "high level" properties that are speed and power consumption. For example capacitance limits clock speed and also has an effect on power consumption, and leakage current reduces power efficiency. Capacitance and leakage current themselves depend on size. I think that the physical properties you mention (and maybe others) may be used to create a model, which can then be used to estimate clock speed and power consumption at different operating points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "the world's first 3-D transistors, called Tri-Gate, in a production technology"

I wonder if this is truly Intel's invention or not:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=tri+gate+trans...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=tri+gate+transistor&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C22&as_ylo=&as_vis=0)

<comment><USER36> All of those papers either post-date Intel's announcement from 2003 regarding tri-gate transistors, or are written by Intel employees. That search also brings up multiple patents held by Intel on the technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Its funny how at the end of the day basic shapes are still an important rule in technology :-)

</comment><comment><USER38> It will be interesting to see whether patents will make this a defensible innovation. Will AMD et all have to invent a similar but materially different technology in order to keep pace?

<comment><USER13> Considering Intel first announced the Tri-Gate tech in 2002 AMD would have to had been working on something for 9 years to be launching a competitor anytime soon.

<comment><USER39> Why wouldn't they have been?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> After watching the video I have to wonder: why not use the shrinking ray to reduce the transistors themselves?

</comment><comment><USER41> Great, now I won't have to learn Erlang for a few more years

</comment><comment><USER42> Anyone care to explain this to a normal person? :)

<comment><USER43> It's building electronic components vertically instead of laid out flat (think of a book stood on an edge rather than laid down, kind of). That has two advantages - they take up less room and they don't leak so much electricity to the silicon that they're sitting on.

<comment><USER42> Thank you! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Who at Intel thinks type set at 12px is legible?

</comment><comment><USER45> Intel stock is up 2% and ARM is down 6% (was down 7.7% in London trading). Looks like their Apple-esque announcement strategy has had some impact.

<comment><USER46> Apple obviously had a heads up on this - since they announced the switch to intel not long ago. Which means they had insider information. I wonder if anyone made billions off it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> sometimes i feel like intel should space out their chips more. as a consumer i feel like i can't keep up.

<comment><USER48> Why do you need to keep up?

<comment><USER49> As a consumer he might not have any good reason to do so, but look at it from Intel's perspective: They're potentially not getting the best return on their R&D investment by encouraging customers to regularly skip generations.

<comment> space-monkey Most people don't upgrade their CPUs. Most people don't know what generation their CPU is from when they buy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is a big win for graph DBs that need to scale up rather than out.</comment>


The RF thruster: an electrodeless system for space propulsion [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.phasefour.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Siddiqui-and-Cretel-Phase-Four-RFT-updated-performance-measurements-AIAA-2018.pdf <comment><USER2> Can this be described as:

"Get some gas, microwave it to make it really really hot, hold it in with magnets as long as possible, then when it escapes out the back it's going really fast, pushing the spacecraft forwards".

<comment><USER3> "The entire assembly is housed inside a tailored magnetic field called the "magnetic nozzle". When an RF signal is applied to the antenna, the near-field pattern acts to ionize the propellant in the liner, and subsequently heat the plasma via stochastic electron-RF interactions [9, 10]. These interactions drive electrons out of the exit of the plasma liner. To maintain steady state charge balance, ions are accelerated by this momentary charge imbalance out of the liner, generating thrust. "

Essentially, instead of using an electric field generated by a anode/cathode grid to pull the ions out of the thruster, they are using the RF to generate free electrons which generate an electric field and pull the ions out of the container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> tldr: Simple/small thrusters getting within order of magnitude of performance of bigger/more complicated.

Introduction:

> _"Electrodeless" RF thrusters are distinct from Hall effect thrusters, > gridded ion engines, and gridded RF thrusters ... in that they do not use > grids, anodes, cathodes, or high voltages to accelerate the propellant, > greatly simplifying the thruster architecture. Their electrical and > mechanical simplicity allows for electrodeless RF thrusters to be designed > for the production requirements of the next generation of large satellite > constellations._

> _Despite their promise, electrodeless RF thrusters have not gained wide > acceptance due to their sub-par measured performance compared to state of > the art Hall effect and gridded ion systems._

> _The Phase Four RFT approaches the concept of electrodeless RF plasma > acceleration by acknowledging that the primary technological advantage of RF > lies in the minaturazation of RF power electronics by the wireless power > industry._

Discussion:

> _To the authors' knowledge, the specific impulse and thrust efficiency > levels measured in the Phase Four RFT presented here represent the highest > performance electrodeless thruster results ever demonstrated, by a > significant margin. Specifically, the electrodeless RFT-X engine produced > specific impulse on par with state of the art low power Hall effect > thrusters, within 50% the thrust output at the same power level [17, 18]. > This is as opposed to previous electrodeless thrusters that could not > achieve the same order of magnitude thrust and /or specific impulse as their > traditional Hall effect and gridded ion counterparts._

> _The performance improvement highlights improved understanding of the > thruster ion acceleration and energy transfer mechanisms, which are captured > in proprietary unified design rules that extend across thruster variants._</comment>


Ask HN: How to verify a Chase PPP secure message/email? - <AUTHOR> So I got an email from Chase with an attached html file which loads a "secure message". The tech seems to be supplied by Voltage which seems legit but it uses the domain jpmchase.com or more specifically https://securemail.jpmchase.com/ A few issues
1- I had to make a new password and confirm my email to then open the secure message - if its from chase why do I need to make a new password? How do I know its them if they don't take my existing password? All of the trust challenge is on my side which I get but it seems like they would assert something for me to know I can trust them/it? 2- The email footer copyright is 2002-2017, it seems odd that its 3 years out of date? 3- The 2 people on this secure message both have chase emails but one is chase.com and the other is jpmchase.com I tried to google both of them and found that the main guy is on linkedin but cant find a contact number or something to really associate him with Chase as a company other than it being on his resume but I don't think those are validated? 4- After logging in to the secure message I notice that its footer is also out of date
I then tried to call my local Chase to verify the email, the people, or the legitimacy of the transaction. The branch automated service hung up on me after a few minutes (Austin branch). I then went back to google and found that the guy mentioned above is in Ohio at JP Morgan Chase so I called that number, it's disconnected from the google result.
You might be wondering why I would even remotely think this is legit? The application ID in the email happens to match the ID I got when I submitted my actual application. So that being somewhat random (I think) is the only way to really think this is not 100% spam/scam.
So, How should someone with tech chops go about validation anything like this? How do we expect a non-technical person might go about it as well?
any thought appreciated. <comment><USER2> I've used Voltage for bank communication. Voltage messages are usually sent with prior notice (e.g., someone in regular email tells you they are going to use Voltage).

Chase is a large organization with multiple domains, including both chase.com and jpmchase.com.

I generally trust Voltage messages because they are typically received after another persons tells me to expect one, or I request one when transmitting PII or other secure data.

If you received this message out of the blue, do your due diligence. If your business is actually relying on Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and you do business banking with Chase, you should already know what's going on here and continue the application.</comment>


HolographicJS – Build Holograms with JavaScript and Microsoft HoloLens - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lwansbrough/HolographicJS <comment><AUTHOR> I built this as an experiment to get acquainted with the Windows Holographic platform. I believe Javascript could be a great jumping off point for developers who are interested in hologram development on HoloLens.

There's a lot to understand when it comes to getting started with HoloLens (Unity and DirectX are the only choices other than this) and the ramp up time can be significant. A lot of web developers out there have experience with, or have played with Three.js. My hope is to bring WebGL and Three.js to HoloLens so the barrier to entry for curious developers will be as low as possible.</comment>


The fruits of the feminist revolution: eight hours a day in a cubicle. - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/working-moms <comment><USER2> I don't think having children really fits well with the feminist paradigm. While tricky, it's certainly possible to change the world and raise children at the same time, I just get the sense that a personification of the women's movement might say something like "Well you certainly _can_ do that, and more power to you if you can!". It seems like child-rearing is relegated to a hobby that distracts from the real work, like gardening or going to the symphony. I don't think there are many people actively hostile toward mothering, but it just doesn't seem all that valued in society.

For example, suppose an individual took child development and nutrition classes because it would help make them a better parent. Would that garner the same lever of respect as, say, studying for the bar or going to french club.

If parenting isn't valued, but a lot of it still has to go on, the result isn't a happy contented society.

<comment><USER3> I learned a lot about parenting from an amazing man I met in Barcelona. His son and he were staying in the same hotel as me, they were traveling Europe together after he just graduated college.

His son met a really cute Czech girl in Spain, so Dad rightfully gave him space. But the father and I really hit it off, so we'd sit at a Spanish bar and eat tortilla sandwiches and drink coffee and we had some really interesting chats. He's a very successful real estate developer from Los Angeles, even post-crash. He converts rental properties into vacation properties, which is a lot more work but can generate 3x-7x stable rents. (Of course, you've got to rent/clean/maintain/etc - definitely more active and risky money than standard landlording).

He told me about his family. After having his second son was born about 15 years ago, his wife got depressed and wanted to get out of the marriage and family life ASAP. She was breaking down mentally, basically, and wanted to run - fast.

So the man says, "I understand, that's fine, but you can't support yourself right now, and you'll need to be able to do that before we can get divorced. Even if I take the kids, they'll still spend a lot of time with you and you need to have a clean, nice place and income so they can have a nice life with you and be proud." She got into a nursing program, and got either a certificate or a degree in nursing. By the time she finished 2-4 years later, she's cleared up. They had another child and went on to both be very happy and successful. She pulls down $80k/year now as a nurse, and they've done very well investing too. His son seems like a hell of a guy, thoughtful, mature, intelligent, cultured, poised. The Dad's a very cool guy too. A good family.

One thing he told that made a lot of sense - "Sebastian, you've got to understand, kids are the most selfish, ungrateful creatures in the world when they're young. All they do is demand, demand, demand things, and they're not grateful at all. Later they realize and appreciate what you've done for them, but a woman who just raises kids pours in so much effort for so little gratitude and appreciation and respect...." He goes on to explain how the regular praise, promotions, and the steady paycheck are instant rewards and validations from work, and help a person's self esteem. He thinks any woman would do well to have at least some part time work or project that she gets respect, appreciation, and validation from - because kids won't provide that until they're 20+, and you need to not go crazy in the meantime.

Maybe now in the West, society doesn't value parenting as much as traditionally, so women get even less respect for being a good parent now. Not sure about that myself - if that's true, then it's even harder to raise children than historically. But his points really resonated with me - I've talked about it with all the girls I've dated. I personally date two types of women - hyper-driven, top of the game, ambitious high performance girls, and quite traditional, feminine, nurturing girls - and usually not much in between. But all of them, with some talking to, come to agree about keeping a part time project to help women stay sane. If I make my life with a traditional woman who is happy to be just a good mother and keep a good household, it'll still be good for her to do a little bit of work for the validation that comes from that. Even something small like teaching a one hour class twice a week, or doing some flower arranging for a couple local small businesses. Same with driven women - they'd go crazy if they completely hung up their spurs and only raised kids.

I'm probably a bit more traditional than most American men from the international cities - I place a lot of respect and value on having a woman who is very in tune with my emotions after a long day, can cook well, can clean and mend clothing well, and has mastered the other domestic skills, which I consider quite invaluable. It's less important to have hyper- intellectual conversations with my girl or play Chess with her - I get plenty of that with my male friends anyway. But even if I take the most traditional, old world European or Japanese girl to make a life with, I still think something that provides her that instant positive feedback is very good for happiness.

<comment><USER4> This gut got lucky, specifically at this stage:

>> So the man says, "I understand, that's fine, but you can't support yourself right now, and you'll need to be able to do that before we can get divorced..."

The wife was well within her rights to say "screw you" to the guy, file for divorce with a contingency lawyer, and get a bunch in child support and income equalization from the guy - and probably custody too if she put a bit of effort in.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you on how ugly the family court system can be, but this one's a bit different. She didn't want the kids - she wanted to leave because she was going crazy. I'm pretty sure he/they weren't wealthy yet at that point either. She wanted to leave the kids with him, end the marriage, and move on. She was in a full blown panic/depression/something like that.

Most men would freak out there. Instead of taking it personally, he was practical about it and helped put her through school, saying that the kids came before both of them, and she needed to be able to support herself. He didn't make her feel trapped or beg her or insult her, he just set about practically so they could run two households effectively if they needed to. It turned out, they didn't need to, now they run one very successful household.

I really admire his stoic practicality there. In a place where a lot of men would freak out, he was calm, sympathetic, yet unfailingly practical. He was willing to have his marriage end on a practical note, but instead it wound up keeping his marriage together and building a very strong family. A very, very insightful guy, I was very lucky to cross paths from him and get the opportunity to learn some really important lessons.

<comment><USER5> He was clever. If he invested that time and money and she still wanted out, her salary would be much closer to his, which would have worked out in his favor when it came time to calculate child support or alimony. It's possible (maybe unlikely) that if she had made more than him that _he_ could have ended up receiving money in the divorce.

In fact, I can't see a down side in this case for either (adult) party -- being poor and uneducated with child support is inferior to being relatively self-wealthy with modest child support, so it was a win for her.

There's a value to raising your children yourself; a stay-at-home parent can focus on the needs of the children and spend more time on giving them a first class childhood experience. If the relationship is headed for the wall, however, it surely is superior to do this at the expense of trying to continue stay-at-home parenting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "it does not take well-developed political skills to rule over creatures smaller than you are, weaker than you are, and completely dependent upon you for survival or thriving."

Truly spoken as someone who has not spent much time caring for children. At least, I hope not. The implication that being smaller than you gives you more power, only makes sense if you are going to consistently use physical force to ensure compliance. The fact they are completely dependent on you only gives you power if you are willing to keep basic necessities from them to coerce them into compliance.

Otherwise, political skills are going to be pretty darn handy at times.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't the talk about feminism mostly useless? I think technology is what really drives things forward. Frozen food, washing machines, dishwashers, industrially produced cheap clothes and stuff like that is what "frees" women, not some philosophical discussions.

In former times it was not just evil, suppressive men that constructed society as it was. The role models were necessary for survival.

</comment><comment><USER8> What an insanely long, winding article. Get to the point already!

<comment><USER9> _In these post-Lisa-Belkin-New-York-Times-Magazine-"Opt-Out" years, we've now learned the worst: even female Harvard graduates are fleeing high-powered careers for a kinder, gentler Martha Stewart Living. Not only does the Problem Have a Name, it has its own line of Fiestaware!_

What? Huh? This article is written in such überhip language, I can't tell what it says.

<comment><USER10> Same here - after trying hard to read each long, pointless paragraph I was wondering: what is she saying? I gave up after the first third of the article.

<comment><USER11> There are few things worse than reading an article consisting almost entirely of obscure references, proper names, and (presumably) complex ideas, linked together by an extremely subjective thought process, and expressed in such an idiosyncratic style that only the author herself is likely able to make sense of it, while to anyone else it resembles the output of a victim of Wernicke's aphasia.

<comment><USER12> For those curious, as I was: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptive_aphasia> (also known as Vernicke's aphasia). Basically, these patients get words mixed up and speak funny sentences like the article.

I too thought it was superfluous hipster talk and got bored reading it. The point of the article in my mind was that after women's fighting for the choice to work, now they want to choose not to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So much naval-gazing. Feminism is on Darwin's chopping block. Simple as that. Unfortunately, the cleaver is mighty slow.

</comment><comment><USER14> Men are not better than women or the other way around. But we are different, that's just a fact. We have to behave accordingly then, instead of trying to ignore those differences.

<comment><USER15> <http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm>

Interesting article talking about gender differences.

<comment><USER16> This was also on HN a while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346>

I find the version linked on HN, from dennisdutton.com, much more readable.

EDIT: Your link could be considered "closer to the source," though, seeing as it's the author's webpage rather than Dutton's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's not forget that the OP does not reveal what women think, it reveals what women who went to Harvard and live in Manhattan think.

</comment><comment><USER18> Upvoted for the title. The article not so much.

<comment><USER19> What an incredibly succinct way to sum up how the decline in quality on social news sites occurs. Thank you, I'll have to remember that phrase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's never been easy to have your cake and eat it too.

<comment><USER21> Feminism gives women the right to choose their destiny in life. If they want grueling 8 hours in a cubicle over the "comfort" of being "taken care of" by a loving, all-providing Man, so be it.

Men constantly choose to have their cake and eat it too. They have careers, but they also have families. Men's right to choose the life they want is never questioned, so why are the life choices of women under such scrutiny?

<comment><USER22> "Men constantly choose to have their cake and eat it too. They have careers, but they also have families."

There's not much special about _have_ -ing a family. Almost anyone can create children and/or get married. The question for both men and women is: what are we missing by allowing ourselves to be taken out of the home and sent our separate ways?

I (a man) ended up leaving my cube job fully convinced that a startup run from or very close to home is the next step towards my goal of a family business.

<comment><USER21> It's in the hands of the couple to choose which one of them needs to stay at home with the kids at any given day. (e.g. a female executive need not quit her high-paying job of if her novelist husband can stay at home during the day with the kids.)

However, it's often the case that women end up sacrificing their dreams and quit their jobs to raise kids, when the division of household labor is in fact an artificial one, a remnant of cultures and societies past.

<comment><USER22> It's a sad day when raising your kids equates to sacrificing your dreams. Sad day for the kids.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bug causes Google to return porn results when searching for "-4^(1/4)" - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Google-Search/What-does-4-1-4-mean-and-why-is-it-connected-to-porn

<comment><USER2> One can already search for porn explicitly in google. I don't see how it's that big a deal that some meaningless queries return noise, it's not like anyone is likely to be making those queries on purpose.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that some results return noise, but others don't.

[-3 "3 4"] returns porn links.

[-3 "2 3 4"] returns nothing.

[-fish "fish and chips"] returns nothing.

Curiosity, especially about the small things that break, is a strong feature of hacker mentality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps the bug isn't specifically selecting "adult" material, but that such material comprises such a large proportion of all (indexable) material, that it's what an effective random sampling returns.

<comment><USER5> From the article

" Google software engineer Jeremy Hoffman commented in the Quora thread, saying it was a bug:

As a web search query, [-4^(1/4)] is interpreted like [-4 "1 4"], as in "Find me pages which contain a 1 next to a 4, but which do not contain a 4." This should return zero results, because it is impossible to satisfy both requirements. However, we have uncovered a bug that causes some web pages to "match" these contradictory queries. Since these are the only results that "match" the query, they are the results that get shown. We are working on a bug fix. Thanks to the Quora community for bringing this to our attention."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That is not a bug, that's a feature!</comment>