Why Eggs Could Be Getting Harder to Peel - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/eggs-hard-to-peel/ <comment><USER2> This is a great example of how we're losing track of information. Using older eggs is a trick well-known to my wife, who learned it from her mother. It seems more and more lately that we're re-discovering the wheel. Just a few weeks ago I was reading somewhere how a weaver had un-earthed a forgotten weaving technique through Google's book project.

<comment><USER3> I didn't figure this all out until we got our own chickens.

I even threw out an egg because it had been sitting outside for over a day. I didn't know at the time that a farmer has 30 days to sell his eggs. That the grocery store has another 30 days to sell the egg. And on top of that, you still have another 3 months before the egg actually goes bad.

Incredible! Even more incredible -- and this only applies to farm fresh eggs -- there is an anti-bacterial layer around the egg.

I am pretty impressed with eggs.

<comment><USER4> My parents have had eggs for decades and we always threw then away at the end of 3 weeks after they had been collected.

<comment><USER3> I might find myself doing the same soon, we're getting a little sick of eggs....

But I hope they didn't throw them out because they thought they went bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Science of Making Perfect Boiled Eggs:

[http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/the-food-lab-science- of-h...](http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/the-food-lab-science-of-how-to- cook-perfect-boiled-eggs.html)

<comment><USER6> This is an amazing article :)

I can never get my eggs that way (to be fair to myself, I don't cook too often).

Sunday morning is going to rock this weekend, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article mentions Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" which is an awesome book for learning the science behind cooking. I'd totally recommend that book in the tradition of food/cooking hacking.

</comment><comment><USER8> Dumb! The trick is:

\- if the eggs are cold, then place them in hot water for a few minutes.

\- If the eggs are hot, place them in cold water for a few minutes.

Once that's done, all eggs peel easily.

<comment><USER9> This really only works with old eggs, where the temperature differential can help separate the albumen from the inner shell. To quote the master:

"...the best guarantee of an easy peeling is to use old eggs! Difficult peeling is characteristic of fresh eggs with a relatively low albumen pH, which somehow causes the albumen to adhere to the inner shell membrane more strongly than it adheres to itself. At the pH typical of several days of refrigeration, around 9.2, the shell peels easily. If you end up with a carton of very fresh eggs and need to cook them right away, you can add a half teaspoon of baking soda to a quart of water to make the cooking water alkaline (though this intensifies the sulfury flavor)." (On Food and Cooking (2nd Ed.), p. 88)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember some time ago I saw an infomercial advertising an egg peeler. Most things you see on infomercials are crap but this one seemed brilliant. It punctured a hole in the bottom of the egg and sent a bunch of slightly compressed air into it which exploded the eggshell outwards and completely peeled the egg. I would have totally gotten it if I cooked eggs (or anything else) at home. I wonder if that works on fresh eggs.

</comment><comment><USER11> That "Eggstractor" website is straight out of 1997.

</comment><comment><USER12> Unimpressed. By the title, I assumed they would make the case for some difference in the chicken's environment or the way the egg is processed before it's sold.

"'As the contents of the egg contracts and the air cell enlarges, the shell becomes easier to peel,' the USDA Shell Eggs from Farm to Table fact sheet states. 'For this reason, older eggs make better candidates for hard cooking,'"

...

"Statistics on the time it takes for an egg to go from hen to supermarket have not been calculated, a USDA representative told Wired.com, but there's some reason to believe that new production techniques could be delivering eggs to markets faster."

So this article is just saying that eggs sold today are more fresh? Not even that - they "could be" more fresh? This hardly seems newsworthy.

<comment><USER13> I'm completely impressed even as it fits my mental model of possible causes. I've been an ardent egg boiler for years to make whites easy to eat. And only recently have I run into the pockmarked egg after boiling. It's horribly frustrating! But it makes sense. Only recently have I had really fresh eggs.

Now, knowing this, I'll just boil older eggs. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless!</comment></comment>


Re-generative medicine: Man re-grows fingertip and fingernail - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/22/sunday/main3960219.shtml

<comment><USER2> Is this for real? For some reason looks like spam to me or an April's fools bad joke.

</comment><comment><USER3> Longer story: <http://www.esquire.com/features/esquire-100/pigfinger1007></comment>


Ask HN: Self-hosted Helpdesk - <AUTHOR> Hello!
It looks like top HelpDesk systems are cloud-based nowadays. Are there any self-hosted Helpdesks that match modern times requirements like mobile-friendly UI, OAuth and push notifications?
Edit: Good API is welcome too. <comment><USER2> Currently using zammad in production. Works well for email, website live chat, sociable media integation support channels.

No push notifications (that I'm aware of) but email notifications work well</comment>


WebGL Bitcoin Nodes Globe - <AUTHOR> https://blockchain.info/nodes-globe?series=onlineNow

<comment><USER2> Cute. This looks like the code from an existing Chrome Experiment.</comment>


John Allspaw Joins the Etsy Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/john-allspaw-joins-the-etsy-team-6183/ <comment><USER2> I interviewed at flickr around 2006 when they were doing a big batch of recruiting post yahoo buyout. Everyone was super nice (I was pretty nervous), but I walked away most impressed by John Allspaw. He was smart, patient and funny during the 30 minutes or so that I spent with him. Since then I've read his blog and come to realize just how valuable to flickr he probably was. Everyone knows who Caterina and Stewart and Cal are, but I imagine Allspaw was every bit as important to their success.

Nice pickup for Etsy.</comment>


This Is a Dark Day for Press Freedom - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3bxy7/this-is-a-dark-day-for-press-freedom-1 <comment><USER2> Freedom of press doesn't give you the right to break other laws.

<comment><USER3> What crime might that be?</comment></comment>


Snortable Chocolate Arrives in U.S. Stores - <AUTHOR> https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/snortable-chocolate-arrives-in-us-stores <comment><USER2> First thing I thought of when I read this was of the two people who thought it would be fun to play with cocoa powder. They died.

[http://1000waystodie.wikia.com/wiki/Choke-A- Lot](http://1000waystodie.wikia.com/wiki/Choke-A-Lot)</comment>


Obamacare Website Crashing Because It Doesn't Want You To Know Cost of Plans - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/14/obamacares-website-is-crashing-because-it-doesnt-want-you-to-know-health-plans-true-costs/ <comment><USER2> Yes, because applying for private insurance is so easy: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9RVy6FWkg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9RVy6FWkg)

> "Avik Roy is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of > the Forbes blog The Apothecary. He has stated he is an "outside adviser to > the Romney campaign on health care issues." He is a contributor to National > Review Online, where he was described as a member of Mitt Romney's Health > Care Policy Advisory Group."

Hmm, I wonder if this author has an axe to grind.

> "The answer is that Obamacare wasn't designed to help healthy people with > average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people > to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with > incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical > conditions."

Um, isn't that literally the function of all insurance?

<comment><USER3> > Um, isn't that literally the function of all insurance?

It used to be about spreading risk. Now, I'm not so sure. The reason the ACA exists is that instead of spreading risk into pools, insurance companies have been denying coverage to reduce risk. This seems like the opposite of what they once were.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that most medical insurance isn't really insurance as it's otherwise known. If you _know_ someone has a preexisting condition that is (statistically) going to cost more than the maximum premiums you can charge, then cost shifting of some sort _must_ occur.

And it becomes a healthcare + insurance policy, the latter protecting against the true _risks_ , like an unrelated auto accident or illness. I.e. the now outlawed high deductible "major medical" plans that covered catastrophic costs but expected you to pay out of pocket for the rest.

Which of course is another reason healthcare has gotten so expensive and opaque, when a third party pays most everything. Your eyes may go wide at the total 6 figure cost of a major procedure, but since you're only paying a relatively small copay....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having been on the technical advisory group for the implementation of Oracle's identity management system at a large public university, I am not surprised to hear that they are having problems. Eventually they got it up and running, but way way way behind schedule, and without a lot of the promised features.

<comment><USER6> That's the problem with the government and software... the release date and features are mandated by law. The only thing that can give way is quality.

<comment><USER7> Any law that was passed by Congress can be amended by Congress. If the Democrats in Congress wanted to delay the implementation of Obamacare until the web site was ready for prime time, it's unlikely that the Republicans would have objected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently addressing a quasi-free-rider issue with health insurance (those folks who pay almost nothing but still get coverage) is a bad thing. I mean, yeah, it's a bad thing for them, in the same way that it's bad whenever someone has to contribute to society to any meaningful degree.

These complaints about an individual's premium going up massively (e.g. 100%) under ACA appear to be mostly the result of extremely limited plans being phased out and replaced with more comprehensive ones. That is, the old cheap plan barely covered anything but technically qualified as insurance. The new, more expensive plan that's the minimum includes much more broad coverage. Part of tackling extremely high costs for health care is having more things covered so providers don't have to write them off; currently people with little or no insurance coverage get care and stick the rest of us with the costs. The idea here is to expand the coverage so those folks who used to have pseudo- insurance that didn't actually cover much would have proper coverage (which costs more than the skimpy plan they previously had).

It is a pain and a burden for some people? Sure, just like everything else in life. Policies change all the time and there are always winners and losers; the best policy in the world ends up impacting someone negatively. Discussing issues like adults means understanding this and not simply ignoring the good and the sensible so we can shriek and moan about the bad bits.

<comment><USER9> I don't see it as so much a free-rider issue because health care costs in this country are ridiculously, astronomically high, and the reason is definitely not the free-riders, it's the greedy-ass corporations being deliberately obtuse about pricing so as to extract as much cash from the system as they can before we shut them down.

We have a free-rider 'problem' here because of the disgusting prices. I'd gladly buy health care coverage (which I'd never use) if it were about as cheap as my car insurance.

<comment><USER4> Ummm, since a bit after WWII every emergency room in the country has had to accept and treat anyone who walks in their door (yeah, sometimes games are played to try to shift a patient to another one, but they still end up getting treated somewhere).

If you don't call the patients who do that without any coverage "free riders", I'm not sure what to say.

And obviously this is why we don't have very many horror stories of people denied treatment.

CMS claims otherwise, but there are convincing analyses that Medicare overall shifts costs to others.

And what about the rest of the world forcing drug companies to sell their products as a bit about cost? Our market pays for nearly all new drug development costs ... which of course many want to "fix".

<comment><USER10> > If you don't call the patients who do that without any coverage "free > riders", I'm not sure what to say.

Surely _some_ people walk in the door without coverage and then - here's a shock - pay their bill later. You know, with actual money. Possibly after a bit of negotiation, but still...

<comment><USER4> But we also know there are a _lot_ of people who never pay, and never intend to/can't pay; a moment with Google will find things like (([http://www.pantagraph.com/news/national/trauma-in-the-er- who...](http://www.pantagraph.com/news/national/trauma-in-the-er-who-pays-for- the-uninsured/article_43f6f99e-bae9-11e1-bece-001a4bcf887a.html)):

" _Nationwide, the uninsured account for nearly a fifth of emergency department visits.

[...]

Last year, MedStar Washington reported delivering $107.2 million in care for which it was not reimbursed. Nationwide, the total amount of uncompensated care provided to the uninsured reached an estimated $56 billion in 2008, according to one study._"

And there a very few extreme outliers who make more than a hundred visits a year.

Anyway, my point stands, I can trivially point to one major class of free riders, which deflates wild claims that it's all the fault of greedy corporations.

<comment><USER9> They reported $107 million. I don't believe that figure at all. They're using every trick in the books to pump that figure up as high as possible. If health care cost as much as it should cost, I bet the exact same load of free-riders would only be cost a tenth that number.

<comment><USER11> Right, because if they used the same insurance "negotiated prices", it'd be closer to $15 million.

<comment><USER9> Wal-Mart would love to have a $15 million theft problem, or even a $107 million one...

[http://www.thestar.com/business/2007/06/13/theft_costing_wal...](http://www.thestar.com/business/2007/06/13/theft_costing_walmart_3b_a_year.html)

<comment><USER4> More pertinent to the discussion, especially since Wal-Mart is a _bit_ larger than that hospital, is the nationwide shrinkage estimate of $41.6 billion for last year.

Or to try to compare the two, Walmart U.S., not including 622 Sams Clubs, has 4118 locations ([http://corporate.walmart.com/our- story/locations](http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations)). So the most conservative estimate would be $3 billion/4118, or about $730K per store. About $635K if the clubs are included. If that's the whole world, about $275K (all rounded to a multiple of 5K).

Which puts Wal-Mart in tall cotton compared to that hospital.

<comment><USER9> So then look at the nationwide retail sector then and compare that to the hospitals.

And to compare a store to the hospital, you'd have to take into account gross revenue. Bet that hospital takes in a hell of a lot more than an average Wal- Mart.

I'd put good money that shrinkage is in the same order of magnitude after you take all the relevant factors into account. And if you were to take into account actual costs, rather than those reported by the hospital, it would be a lot less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The main point of the article is what appears to be an intentional gross misinterpretation of a single quote.

"the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies."

Yes. So? There's basically three ways they could have approached this:

1.) They could show the "lowest possible price" anyone could get, and then have individuals suffer sticker shock when they log in and it turns out they make more than $5k a year and don't have 8 kids (or whatever else entitles you to the best discounts).

2.) They could show the highest possible price, and have individuals not even bother to sign up, because they assume they can't afford the insurance, even though they may get huge discounts due to their particular circumstances.

3.) They could force you to log in first, so they make sure they only show you prices that apply to you, avoiding either of the sticker shocks above.

#1 is underhanded and misleading (and is what typical corporations do with "up to 80% off or up to $3000 cash back!! (some restrictions apply)"

#2 would scare away the people who are among the people who need insurance the most and would get the most help from the law.

So... they went with #3. It's a usability faux pas, but at least they're being honest without scaring people away.

<comment><USER4> Or they could ask a few questions about your income et. al. and let you window shop. Which would also allow you to see how you'd fair under different financial circumstances, which is rather important since as I recall there are some nasty cliffs where making one more dollar/year results in massive cost increases. Someone else used another web resource and claims that he could not find any scenario where being married didn't cost more than living together, and that would be another financially useful thing to be able to know, albeit at a serious cost to society.

The process that the article is claiming doesn't allow researchers or individuals to ask these sort of "what if" questions. Wondering why is entirely legitimate.

<comment><USER6> That's a good point, but I think it can still give a misguided view of what you would pay, depending on how many factors go into the discounts. They would have to ask you questions for every possible factor that could influence your healthcare costs. To be fair, I don't know what all the factors are, but if it's anything else like the government provides, there's probably a huge list of factors. I suppose that if 90% of it is income and number of people being covered, that's probably a decent starting point and would at least let people see approximately how much it costs.

<comment><USER4> The really big one that cuts against this is the need for credit scores. Evidently that's a component of plan pricing, which makes sense because the price needs to reflect the probability the policy holder will pay all the way through the end of the year, adverse selection in jumping into and out of policies based on getting sick or major but not emergency procedures is a big problem with these sorts of scheme. And better verification will help keep rough credit score indications from leaking to others posing as you.

But if the system disallows window shopping once IDed, e.g. plugging in different, by definition unverifiable income figures, family structures, etc., then the highest level thesis is supported.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paypal wants you to waive your moral rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-full?locale.x=GB

<comment><USER2> This is for the UK, will US be affected as well?

</comment><comment><USER3> perpetually and irrevocably as well. I haven't used that garbage for several years.</comment>


BTC would stay as volatile at 500k+ as in the past - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BitcoinEcon/status/1169986056734859264 <comment><USER2> Looks like a technical analysis of a greedy broker

</comment><comment><USER3> Knteresting</comment>


ZumoDrive launches Palm webOS and Google Android clients - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/cell-phones/?p=3277

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to see that the Palm WebOS is much more attractive than the Android client.

Is this because it's easier to write attractive apps for WebOS, or is it just that less care has been put into the Android version?

<comment><USER3> Probably a bit of both. Seeing as WebOS is based on the HTML/JS model that web applications are already familiar with, it might have been more obvious to them how to make it look fancy. With Android, you have to start diving into how the layout and widget systems work, and requires working with Java and XML, but it is indeed possible to make things look just as nice.

<comment><USER4> OMG The selling point of the Palm WebOS finally takes hold! Wooh that took a while, I think if a Palm exec saw this post they'd shed a tear of joy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Grats!!!!

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this basically Drop Box?

<comment><USER6> Not really.

ZumoDrive doesn't use space on your drive for it's storage. It simulates a network drive as far as your OS is concerned.

Dropbox actually uses space on your drive , and syncs that across your machines.

So , ignoring local caching done by ZumoDrive , we could think of it being network intensive , whereas Dropbox is space intensive.

(I could be wrong and would love clarification. Also, 'intensive' is probably not the word I'm looking for , but I can't come up with a better one now)

<comment><USER4> Hmmm... I like dropbox because it works when you are offline vs online only, like on the train, then syncs up when you go online.

<comment><USER7> Zumodrive has selective sync, so you can keep files local when you want to. ZD is actually less network intensive than dropbox, because only file metadata is synced down from the server until you actually access the file.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Deep Learning Personas - <AUTHOR> https://personas.huggingface.co/t <comment><USER2> Hey guys.

Don't expect accurate answers here - it's an experimental weekend hack.

With this experiment, we wanted to understand how we could train a neural network on new external datasets very quickly and study the difference in the language and answers depending on the topic of the dataset.

No scripted chatbot here, we are talking of neural-nets trained in the wild :) We are using the celebrated seq-2-seq model which computes a "thought-vector" from an input sentence and generates an output sentence conditioned on this vector. We gathered various datasets from stackexchange and launched a big overnight training of our models to have some surreal morning coffee talks with our AI.

There's still a ton of work for the answers to start to make sense (longer training and bigger datasets would improve the quality of course, we can also easily add components to improve the variety and coherence of the responses) but a difference can definitely be noticed based on the dataset subset.

This will allow us to test a variety of new datasets way faster than before. Let us know what you think, and if you think of a cool dataset to test, just let us know on Github.

<comment><USER3> It can enter a loop easely. Gamer girl vs. me

me: yes

gg: I'll send screen shots

me: yes

gg: I'll send screen shots

me: yes

gg: I'll send screen shots

me: yes

gg: I'll send screen shots

....

<comment><USER2> Responses to a specific message are deterministic in this model (no diversity promoting objective implemented) so this is to be expected :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, this gives such irrelevant answers, it might as well be random. The presentation is pretty cool but it doesn't actually work well at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> Right now, it doesn't work at all. Would be great to test and iterate on it a bit and to have some sense to the answers before exposing it to the world.

</comment><comment><USER6> Q: "How many electrons in an atom of Lithium?" A: "Of course not!" \- Physics expert

</comment><comment><USER7> I asked about gravitational waves. The Physics Genius eventually answered with "Yes, a white trashbag and nothing else".

[http://imgur.com/kLtsooB](http://imgur.com/kLtsooB)

</comment><comment><USER8> Them: Yo! Does it compile?

Me: Yes

Them: I'll update the tag

Me: Ok thank you

Them: The second one then.

</comment><comment><USER9> me: ruby on rails

Full Stack Dev: Do n't do this</comment>


Forget the Shortest Route Across a City – New Algorithm Finds the Most Beautiful - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528836/forget-the-shortest-route-across-a-city-new-algorithm-finds-the-most-beautiful/?utm_campaign=socialsync&utm_medium=social-post&utm_source=twitter <comment><USER2> Can someone please make a "low-stress routing algorithm"!? Most days I honestly wouldn't care if a route took me 50-100% longer to travel if avoided traffic backups and stop lights. Call it "sane route" or "road rage free routing", but as long as I'm moving in traffic I have a much lower level of stress when I arrive at my destination.

<comment><USER3> There is no "feature" more infuriating or inappropriately named than "traffic calming" by means of timing the lights so that you have to stop every single block. It almost makes me want to drive as dangerously as possible just to spite the policy people who thought that was a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So is this the politically correct version of the "avoid ghetto" function that people joke about?

In all seriousness though, it is pretty cool use of data mining and crowdsourcing.

<comment><USER5> I could have used a feature like that when my GPS told me to cut through the Chicago suburbs to avoid highway traffic on my trip across the U.S. last summer.

I was nearly scared to death.

<comment><USER6> My first trip to California I flew into John Wayne and stayed in LA for a couple of months. On the way back to John Wayne in OC I attempted to avoid traffic. The app took me straight through a pretty bad part of Compton. That was a fun experience.

<comment><USER7> Compton's the new Brooklyn, haven't you heard

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty neat; I'd definitely use an app that did this. Not really a "new algorithm" as they say, though; when you boil it down it's really just A* and MTurk. However, it's a really cool application, and what use is science without its applications?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I had a similar reaction. The only novel thing I can think of here is the idea of using publicly-available photos on Flickr etc. to try to automatically rank the beauty of parts of the city, to avoid having to crowd source the data.

Otherwise, yeah, it's just assigning weights to different street/path segments based on perceived beauty rather than some other metric (like amount of traffic).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It always takes you through the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone no matter where you start and end.

"What? You said MOST beautiful, not shortest!"

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of a cross-country (US) trip I made some years back. Having just passed through Mt. Rushmore (home of the National Memorial Parking Scam), I asked for suggestions on routes further east. I was immediately guided to the most direct route.

I interrupted, pointing out that I'd started in southern California, was headed to Virginia, and was more interested in the scenic route. I then got pointed on some amazingly beautiful roads through the Black Hills and skirting the Pine Ridge reservation, with an Indian pow-wow on the radio, and, after sunset, a lightning storm playing out on the horizon in my rear view mirror. Spectacular.

I've been known to take the scenic route through town (or between towns) as well, particularly to avoid both traffic and ugliness.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seeing that route map gave me a pang of nostalgia, since it was the route I walked every day for a year when I was studying at the LSE—back and forth from the Southwark dorm (across the street from the Tate Modern) across the Millennium Bridge or Blackfriar's Bridge, either down Fleet Street or Inner/Middle Temple, and then to the Aldwych. Really beautiful views of the Thames every day—Houses of Parliament and the Eye of London in one direction, Tower Bridge in the other direction.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very cool idea!

Couldn't you do the same thing without crowdsourcing the opinions of what the most beautiful route by simply using exif data on troves of say, flickr images? I assume that you could tell which routes are more beautiful or interesting by the sheer number of images that are taken at specific locations.

<comment><USER14> I imagine they introduced sentiment analysis/crowdsourced beauty opinions to filter out 'negative' photos, e.g. some highly-photographed traffic accident, or a frequently photographed homeless spot

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very cool. Unless I am in a terrible rush from Ottawa's west end to points downtown or east, I will often take the river route. It's a bit longer, but ever so much nicer.

And if I am anywhere near Colonel By and it makes sense, I'll take it. Beautiful drives soothe the nerves.</comment>


Ubuntu devs discuss the change from GNOME Shell to Unity - <AUTHOR> http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/11/ubuntu-devs-discuss-the-change-from-gnome-shell-to-unity-in-natty-11-04/

<comment><USER2> I'm still pretty disappointed that instead of focusing on fixing and preventing bugs and regressions (every release of Ubuntu has featured serious bugs for features that worked fine on my laptop in previous releases-- hibernate, sound, even keyboard buttons, etc.) they're expending tons of man- hours to write a new shell that will doubtlessly be riddled with fresh bugs and incomplete features itself on its first release.

I thought the indicator applets were a bad idea, if tolerable--but after 15 years of using the Win95 desktop paradigm on my work machine, I don't know if I have the patience or desire to re-learn Canonical's new hotness that really exists mostly because Shuttleworth wants to pretend he's a one-man Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive.

Not to mention poor grandma, who had Ubuntu installed by her grandkid; eventually she'll get a dialog asking if she wants to upgrade her "distribution," whatever that is, but hey, upgrading is always good, right? She'll press OK without thinking twice, and all of a sudden the upgrade will have given her computer a virus that moved all her icons around and she doesn't know how to use it anymore, can Johnny stop by run a virus scan and fix everything?

<comment><USER3> To be fair, the last LTS was pretty good. The next probably will be, too. Between now and then, though, we all get to be beta testers.

<comment><USER2> Even Lucid had some problems for me--the system would hang on hibernate 2 out of 3 times, among various other minor, but honestly very irritating bugs.

My concern for the long-term viability of the entire Ubuntu project is what happens once a user's system starts notifying them that they should upgrade their distribution. Not sure if that happens for non-LTS releases or not, but eventually it'll happen. The user will click 'yes' and then be presented with an extremely different windowing paradigm without having asked for it. It's like having clicked 'upgrade' to go to Lucid and finding all my window buttons on the other side for absolutely no reason. Tech folks like you and I can adapt, but will Grandma continue using Ubuntu if every 6 months something crazy changes and she has to re-learn everything? She won't--she'll get fed up and ask for her "old computer" back, which means formatting and installing Windows from the rescue CD.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can't be both a viable alternative to Windows and Mac and also be a paradigm-changing evolutionary UI experiment. The two markets--nerds and grandmas--just don't mix, at least until the next generation or two.

<comment><USER4> egad - please take a 100 upvotes from me. I have actually offered to pay money (it's on a bug somewhere on launchpad) for the suspend/hibernate issues.

I'm not sure if Fedora fixes this, but if yes - I'm all over it. I'm HATING have to shutdown and restart.

<comment><USER2> It's since been fixed in Maverick for me (though who knows if it will resurface in Natty, as these kinds of bugs are wont to do). You might want to give Maverick a shot if you haven't already.

I hate shutting down every time too, but since I upgraded to 4 gigs of ram on my laptop starting from hibernate takes forever, so I shut down by choice now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> All I know is that Unity was pushed out way earlier than it should have been in the Netbook edition. I've had it chew resources like crazy, and unilaterally hijacking the left-hand side of my screen? Not cool.

That's before you get to the utter Fitz-law failure that is buttons animating out from under your mouse pointer...

</comment><comment><USER5> I hope to God that they fix Unity by then -- my non-technical spouse loved Ubuntu netbook edition, but ultimately dumped Linux when 10.10 came along because Unity just had too many problems.

<comment><USER6> As I understand it, Unity is only an alternative. You can still use Gnome.</comment></comment>


US says Chinese warship fired military laser at US aircraft - sahin-boydas https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/27/politics/chinese-laser-us-aircraft/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> The article says the plane was flying in the Pacific ocean and clearly close to the Chinese warship. The Pacific ocean is huge and more context on where in the Pacific Ocean would be great. Was it close to China or Australia or Guam?

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems the Chinese have taken a leaf out of the US Navy's workbook.

"Get too close for my comfort and I'll take action against you"

A laser that can blind a camera is a less drastic action than a missile to take down the whole plane.</comment>


Open Dylan 2011.1 released - <AUTHOR> http://opendylan.org/news/2011/12/10/new_release.html <comment><USER2> Small suggestion: Post some code examples easily accessible from the main page! I've checked the documentation, the dylan book, the "get started".. I still have no idea what Dylan looks like. Basically, a quick "Dylan in 5mins" tour to give me a taste of the neat features.. so it gives me a reason to digg further in the doc.

<comment><USER3> There are some examples here (since we didn't actually write the real 'About' page yet): <http://opendylan.org/about/index.html>

I guess we'll be working on the website a lot in the next couple of days ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great. I went to a couple of Dylan sessions at WWDC in 1994 and couldn't wait to try it. It was just one year after Apple and Symantec's Bedrock fiasco, and it seemed like a huge step in the right direction after such an enormous misstep.

Dylan and NewtonScript were very exciting languages. I remember many late- night drunken conversations at WWDC about how we were probably the last generation of desktop software developers to use C and C++. Boy, were we wrong.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting: Converting from Common Lisp to Dylan by Norvig.

norvig.com/ltd/doc/ltd.html -

Also slides from Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages (also by Norvig, in Dylan) <http://norvig.com/design-patterns/ppframe.htm>

Maxima Cas, that uses Lisp internally, could be translated to Dylan.

<comment><USER6> Given that the translator does not seem to handle CL:DEFMACRO, there is not much chance to translate anything serious into runnable Dylan code.

<comment><USER7> Here is an interesting link about macros in Dylan. IMHO, infix notation makes it so much harder to implement macros than in CL. [http://www.fun- principles.info/slot/site/dylan/alpha/openpoi...](http://www.fun- principles.info/slot/site/dylan/alpha/openpoints/Dylanmacrosareakludge..html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With all due respect for people who've been working on this: Isn't it too late (by at least 5 years)? What's the point of reviving Dylan if it doesn't bring something radically new?

And reading the project status: "No support for threads yet"; Than, isn't it too early to re-release it yet?

Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, and Scala have been fueling my interest in DSL. I don't see what Dylan would bring to the picture that the other languages provide already.

<comment><USER8> Too late for what? It's a programming language, not a racehorse.

Dylan offers something very different from the languages you mentioned; even Clojure, a fellow Lisp, rejects OOP while Dylan embraces it. There's definitely room for Dylan in the language landscape.

<comment><USER7> Too late as being able to bring to the table something that enough developers would care about so their efforts don't fall quickly into oblivion. I've seen so many times projects like this trying to resurrect a "passe" technology just for nostalgia sake. Without a decent community of motivated supporters and a real solution to current issues developers are facing, I fear that Dylan will follow the same path. In the specific case of Dylan, I remember that its infix notation didn't support very well one of best LISP features, namely macros. And while studying the language in the late 90s, I also learned that David Moon, one of the original designers, moved to work on something else. I took it as a sign. Don't get me wrong, I liked Dylan over Common LISP at the time, becauee they did a great job at simplifying the mess with collections and its notation would mean greater adoption. That was obviously not enough to succeed. As for embracing OOP, so does Scala, although at the cost of some compromises. But at least with Scala, the platform is here to address real projects. Do you really have the time and energy to start rebuilding all the libraries that are required to develop anything beside a toy project?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So does anyone here use Dylan for production?

<comment><USER3> Honestly, it isn't ready yet. We're catching up as we bring things back up to date after some years of being left to rest.

We're also not there (yet) with libraries that people commonly expect in this day and age.

We were hoping this would be a lower profile release as we learn how to make a new release and get our systems automation in place (as well as improving platform support).

<comment><USER10> As unfortunately is not low profile any more, could you guys make some main point on why one should adopt dylan? Maybe a comparison with Python/Ruby etc.?

<comment><USER11> The Dylan language spec has amazingly few edge cases. It allows a continuum of dynamic -> static typing and a range of functional <-> OO. With the right set of libraries it could be great in the scripting space as Python, but is also designed for building large systems that run fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't this a matter of now it is too late? Today, I would consider Clojure, Scheme (in particular Rackit), (J)Ruby, and maybe Go as good alternative languages for production use.

I was also excited with Dylan and played with it a _long_ _time_ _ago_. I think it was about 20 years ago that I had lunch with Larry Tesler (at Apple he worked on the Newton, a general Dylan evangelist) at a genetic programming symposium at Stanford. He tried to talk me into basically rewriting my first Springer-Verlag Common Lisp book to use Dylan. I thought about it, but decided not to.

<comment><USER13> Let's skip past whether OpenDylan is ready for production use ("No") and pretend it is.

I'd absolutely use Dylan over those languages in at least some contexts.

Dylan hits a sweet spot between performance and flexibility. Even the existing OpenDylan ought to perform better than most of the languages you named, for example. But the level of flexibility is far greater: you get full-blown macros (Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme), optional static typing (Racket), a really pleasant syntax that doesn't make me use a pile of parentheses, has a great object system based on multiple dispatch...

There's an awful lot to love there. The only reason I don't use it is because the compiler implementations have historically been very poor, and the library compatibility worse. If this project goes well, I'd definitely take another look.

<comment><USER14> Well, let's face it: There's only one compiler actively maintained. And its license is MIT!

NB: written in Dylan itself!

This even has an IDE (on Windows only), but has some problems with error reporting, producing too much output while compiling and a limited set of libraries.

The only way to improve that is to try it out, and contribute libraries!

I'm happy to look into compiler bugs - that is something I'm used to do over the last years ;)

<comment><USER15> Given the rather small community size (from what I know), wouldn't it be the best survival technique to port the compiler to JVM, to have at least some usable real world libraries at hand ? I can hardly imagine anyone starting to use a complex typed system like that without reliable and proven libraries from the real world. It just wouldn't be worth the effort of playing around with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any plans to get it on macports?

<comment><USER3> Would you be interested in bringing this up on our mailing list? That probably warrants more / broader discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have been intrested in dylan for some time know and its fantastic to see some progress. I think dylan has great potential to become the nearly as fast as C dynamic language. The Compiler and GC were made by people who really knew what they were doing. Would be cool to see some new benchmarks.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool, was just reading about Dylan and the Newton last week, in light of the recent buzz about HyperCard. I'll definitely play around with this a bit, especially due to the Emacs integration.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay for Linux? - <AUTHOR>

I've been tossing up the idea of a modern, developer-friendly distro with a nice UI, simple file hierarchy and good package management.  Linux is built around being open, and almost all distro's are free (as in beer), so this might be an unusual thing to ask, but..
Would you pay for a Linux distro?
If so, what would you want to see in that distro? If not, why not? <comment><USER2> As Linux currently is answer would be: No! There are a lot things that are extremely wonky on Linux and few things that works extremely well, but for me positives don't out weight negatives on a desktop thou.

Would I ever pay for Linux distro? Quite possibly, but only if the software capabilities on the platform catches up with the competitors, for one I like playing games on my PC and as it currently stands I get sever performance losses and tons of graphical glitches which is a driver problem and as such not so much a distribution problem.

As for now I will continue running Linux on my laptop and servers, but my desktop will stay Windows for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it'd be a hard sell. You'd need to find some real, concrete pain points that people suffer from, and then address them, and then market it towards people suffering from those issues.

I'm a desktop Linux user (Mint), and I find it to be quite developer-friendly, and it has a nice UI, and Debian has the best package management. So, personally, I'm not sold yet. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) I know I'll be burned for this but, my thought was to make it more Mac OSX-like. With a similar File Hierarchy (the Unix one seems over- complicated for its use).

A nice UI (similar to Unity), a for-profit app store, and drop support for 32-bit, and every other platform, except 64-bit and ARM, I hate so much backwards-compatibility like being able to run DOS on Windows 8 - I mean really?

I had a bunch of other ideas too, but these are all mainly behind-the-scenes work, no "concrete pain points" unfortunately I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think many people would pay for Free software (especially if you're targeting this toward developers)

But many would pay for services.

\- First class 24/7 phone support.

\- Pre-configured vertical software stacks (Eg. out the box VoIP server, or whatever)

\- Option of off-site hosting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have clarified, sorry - I intended on making it a developer-friendly desktop distro.

Also could you explain off-site hosting?

<comment><USER4> > Also could you explain off-site hosting?

Customers who don't want the hassle of having their own hardware.

You provide the hardware (in a datacentre) and rent out usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't pay for a Linux distro in isolation, but I would pay for a Linux distro guaranteed to work 100% out of the box on my laptop, backed up with support.</comment>


What is the first bit of math that made you realize that math is beautiful? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-the-first-little-bit-of-math-that-made-you-realize-that-math-is-beautiful <comment><USER2> The golden ratio as a fixed point of x → 1/(1+x).</comment>


Windows Calculator does not work on gnu/Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/130 <comment><USER2> "Closing since this is a duplicate of #113"

113 at [https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/113](https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/113) is closed with:

> Although I'd also like to see some of Calculator's features on my Linux box, > Calculator's UI is highly customized for Windows and it extensively uses > Windows APIs. It's not impossible to add support for other platforms to this > project, but it would be a huge amount of work.</comment>


Free hot desking with London coffee startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pactcoffee.com/2015/02/19/hot-desk-with-pact/

<comment><USER2> Largely unrelated to your post, but it was incredibly difficult to figure out where you were located (and even more difficult to figure out if you shipped to the US).

</comment><comment><USER3> Who quits work at 4:30? One of the nice things about working remotely us setting your own hours. You hours are to narrow.</comment>


Does unsplash work? - <AUTHOR> Is there a problem with unsplash service? I wonder if relevant with internet providers in my country? not working. <comment><USER2> What is unsplash? Pardon me but your question is very skimpy on the details.

<comment><AUTHOR> Soryy. [https://source.unsplash.com/category/nature](https://source.unsplash.com/category/nature) Random picture service.</comment></comment>


First commit in the Go source tree was in 1972 - <AUTHOR> http://golang.org/change/f6182e5abf5e

<comment><AUTHOR> via Andrew Gerrand (enneff on HN)

[https://plus.google.com/u/0/106356964679457436995/posts/iuMr...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/106356964679457436995/posts/iuMrWc8b3dU)

question 5

be sure to walk a few commits forward.</comment>


Clang/LLVM using the built in assembler builds all of FreeBSD - X-Istence http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2010-October/011813.html

<comment><USER2> As a big fan of FreeBSD, I've been following this development with great interest. I just compiled a few select ports with clang, and I look forward to rebuilding all my ports to see what compiles and see how the system feels speed-wise.

However, as a server admin, I've become fond of the extra layer of protection ProPolice (gcc's "-fstack-protector" option) provides. I know it's a small thing, but does anyone know if clang has a similar feature?

Also, are there any non-default optizations I can try out? With the stock gcc in FreeBSD, I've been able to get away with using "-O3" on everything with no build failures or instability.

<comment><USER3> It looks like LLVM does have a stack protector pass:

[https://llvm.org/svn/llvm- project/cfe/tags/Apple/clang-54.1/...](https://llvm.org/svn/llvm- project/cfe/tags/Apple/clang-54.1/clang/lib/CodeGen/StackProtector.cpp)

As for non-default optimizations, this passage from the following article best explains how much there is for you to explore:

 _Which LLVM passes to use, and which order to run them, with what analysis in between, is a huge search problem, though. There are roughly 200 optimization and analysis flags, and these, mostly, can be run in any order, any number of times. If we want to run say, twenty of the passes (about what -O3 does), that's what, about 10^46 arrangements!_

[http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/evolving-faster- hask...](http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/evolving-faster-haskell- programs-now-with-llvm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great news, with this and clang compiling Linux we might see it replace GCC on most/all free operating systems within a few years.

<comment><USER5> No, we won't. The respective communities have been developing with GCC in mind for years. While clang is fantastic, I doubt that an outright replacement will take place.

But emancipated co-existence would be neat.

<comment><USER6> Actually, quite a few BSD people will be happy to have a non-GPL compiler.

AFAIK, your comment is spot on for Linux, though.

<comment><USER7> For those BSDs that target a wide range of architectures (NetBSD is the canonical example), it'll be a while before they transition completely, since the gcc ports list is still considerably larger than the LLVM one.

<comment><USER6> Sure, OpenBSD won't be transitioning anytime soon either - indeed, there are a lot of architectures that aren't supported by LLVM yet, and making sure everything worked with gcc-4.x was enough work...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain why LLVM is better than native code (if it is)? If it's not, what's the use for this?

<comment><USER9> That's really comparing apples to oranges.

LLVM _can_ compile to intermediate code in order to make code optimizing passes more generic and better-defined, to cleaner separate compiler components and phases, to better abstract multiple architectures and to impose restrictions that make some analysis and optimization easier (like enforcing Static Single Assignment for forms), you can create a VM that runs IR directly and distribute that, among many other reasons. So IR does eventually make it to machine code, otherwise it won't be able to do anything.

Why LLVM is better than GCC is a different question. It's better, in my opinion, for being a much cleaner, more well-architected, modern, and much much better modularized code base. Also, I am a happy person when I read Clang docs on parsing vs when I read GCC docs on how to manipulate GIMPLE trees. There are also more objective metrics, like the front end being a very nice, portable library for parsing C-derived languages and exposing more functionality via libclang. (This makes very code-aware IDEs more possible and much easier to write, the use of C syntax for custom work, making custom code scanners and analyzers far easier, etc, etc)

Find more out at <http://www.llvm.org>

<comment><USER8> Thank you, I thought it was just the vm, but apparently it's a whole suite of compiler tools.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Just to extend a little: Nearly every widely used (non-lisp) compiler that exists first compiles the program into some sort of intermediate representation that is easier to manipulate and optimize, works on it a while in this form, and then finally compiles that into machine code.

The level of this intermediate representation varies between compilers -- GCC uses a very simplified and strict form of c, while many others use an IR that is closer to assembly. LLVM is not really a competitor to JVM or .NET, but an attempt to define an unified IR that many languages can compile into, be optimized in, and then be compiled into various different machine codes. So that when you write a compiler for a language you only have to write the top layers until your code turns to IR, or if you make a compiler for new platform you only have to write the bottom layers to turn IR into machine code, and in both cases you get free use of all the various IR-level compiler optimizations that have been already built into LLVM.

<comment><USER10> Most Lisp compilers have intermediate representations too, although these IRs are still technically Lisp code (although they may not be executable). There's a really good series of blog posts about the IR of the SBCL compiler by Roman Marynchak:

<http://insidelisp.blogspot.com/search/label/python-book>

<comment><USER11> It sometimes fun to take some random Lisp code and fully expand the macros:

        (macroexpand '(loop for x in list minimize (sin x)))

The output depends on your Lisp compiler, but it can get pretty wild. This is why we have the macroexpand-1 function, to just expand the first macro it finds and stop before all collapses into madness.

A compiler writer could get a lot of mileage out of this sort of thing. For example, a LET special form could be implemented as a macro that expands to a call to an anonymous function. All the looping forms could be turned into lambdas and recursion. As long as the compiler can handle that sort of thing nicely, this could really simplify the compiler code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just playing devil's advocate here: how much Clang/LLVM users are protected against patent lawsuits from companies (or individuals) who contributed patented technology to it?

I understand it never happened, but I am afraid someone somewhere may contribute something relevant and then have the patents bought by a troll.

<comment><USER3> I had to go back and check, but it appears I've had this conversation with you before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833560>

Why don't we pick up where you left off: you can tell us what compilers you use yourself, and tell us how you are protected from the same.

<comment><USER12> At that time the only argument you were able to produce was that, if Apple decided to go belligerent on whatever patented tech they collaborated to Clang/LLVM, we would have to go to a previous, pre-Apple, version and fork it from that. That would be a version from a good couple years back.

Being able to fork is the ultimate defense to certain corporate evils, but a license that doesn't provide some protection against patents, obviously, won't protect you against that specific evil.

BTW, I use GCC most of the time. And I am shielded from any patented technology Apple may have contributed to it since the NeXT days by the redistribution clause of the GPL.

<comment><USER3> Apple can only confer redistribution rights for patents they own. If they - <AUTHOR> any other gcc contributor for that matter - mistakenly or deliberately reproduced an invention patented by someone else (IBM, Microsoft, Intel...) and contributed it to gcc, then the clause you mention affords you no protection whatsoever.

<comment><USER12> What part of Apple becoming belligerent on patents they own didn't you get? Obviously no FLOSS license will protect you from patents the contributor doesn't own.

In you example, if IBM, Microsoft or Intel contributed their own patented tech to GCC, they wouldn't be able to sue any user of the GPL'ed code.

My doubts are about BSD-ish licenses - if contributing your patented tech to a BSD project doesn't put you in position to sue downstream users that didn't receive the right to use it directly from you.

<comment><USER3> The plausibility part.

<comment><USER12> Companies come and go. If one company that contributes its own patented tech to a project like LLVM gets acquired by a troll, what protection users would have?

I see no reason to trust a company to behave responsibly towards a community if and when it no longer needs it.

Your insistence in stating the obvious - that nothing protects users from third-party patents - while refusing to acknowledge the question of how much BSD-like licenses protect users from patents owned by those who contribute code to BSD-licensed projects is disturbing.

<comment><USER3> It's not that I don't acknowledge that your emperor is wearing pasties, I just don't think they cover enough to be considered clothing.

I think the onus is on you, as the advocate of this clause, to name one actual patent troll case that would have been prevented by it. SCO wouldn't have been prevented. The recent Oracle action against Google would not have been prevented. So which one?

You need to provide protection from actual, plausible danger to justify the doubt, uncertainty, and fear that you are keen to spread.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why are the Beatles albums cheaper on Amazon than on iTunes? - <AUTHOR> http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2238833.html

<comment><USER2> "iTunes LP" includes extras, and always cost more on the iTunes store. I don't know why standard versions are not available.

</comment><comment><USER3> The short answer is almost certainly that the record label has placed significant restrictions on the price.

It's not just Beatles albums. Lots of albums are cheaper to buy used on Amazon than MP3s on Amazon. It's an imperfect marketplace. A few record labels control the supply of MP3s and Amazon places little control on used album sales. Also, MP3s are a better product for people who want MP3s. They have instant delivery, no need to rip the CD, and physical storage requirements. The advantages of a CD are resale value and collectability and better archival capability, but I don't think most people care to store FLACs.

</comment><comment><USER4> Probably because the old boy distribution networks still hold power and can get discounts even though they make no sense (physical distribution costs). When Statcraft II was released it was at least £10 20 euro or $20 dollars MORE EXPENSIVE to download then it was to buy retail.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not the most helpful answer in the world, but I've generally found Amazon to be cheaper than iTunes, so I don't think that this is really anything new.</comment>


PostgreSQL Data Types: Date, Timestamp, and Time Zones - <AUTHOR> https://tapoueh.org/blog/2018/04/postgresql-data-types-date-timestamp-and-time-zones/ <comment><USER2> Is there a reason that the PostgreSQL TIMESTAMP type only goes to microsecond (not nanosecond) precision?

<comment><USER3> You might be able to delve into the history of its development for a specific answer, but I suspect it boils down to a decision needed to be made trading off it's size in bytes (8), it's range, and it's resolution. The SQL92 spec mentions fractional seconds but doesn't specify a precision AFAICS. At the time when it was implemented (and even now) microsecond is adequate for many needs.

<comment><USER4> Yea. If we wanted similar size we'd loose a lot of range. And increasing size beyond the size that can commonly be held in general purpose registers would have noticeable performance impacts as well. Types bigger than that have to be passed by reference, require allocations etc.

I think it'd not be insane to add another type (timestamphp?) that'd both have a higher precision and a higher range. This seems like a case where giving users the choice seems better.

<comment><USER3> One of Postgres' strengths is how easy it is to add custom types for specific use cases. I suspect that if you've got a special need for higher precision, _how_ high will also be a more narrow use case (how wide of a type, what tradeoff to make between range and resolution). Seems to me a great custom type use case.

And of course you could go a long way just using a timestamptz column with an additional integer (or even numeric) column with {nano|pico|femto...}seconds.

<comment><USER4> > One of Postgres' strengths is how easy it is to add custom types for > specific use cases. I suspect that if you've got a special need for higher > precision, how high will also be a more narrow use case (how wide of a type, > what tradeoff to make between range and resolution). Seems to me a great > custom type use case.

There's already a few cases in postgres core that'd benefit however. It's somewhat annoying to loose available clock precision when more is available. With hundreds of thousands of transactions/sec more accurate timestamps can be quite useful. IOW, having now(), clock_timestamp() either return something higher precision that can be downcast implicitly, or have higher precision variants of them, would be quite useful. The higher precision type should be used in a number of places inside postgres core.

I think once you bump up the storage size (128bit?) it's easy enough to cover both range and precision for nearly every usecase.

<comment><USER3> What are the tradeoffs on modern hardware using 128bit storage? I've been interested in wider types in general and have abused UUIDs for this purpose.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't really matter that much whether its 12, 16, 24 byte. The difference is that, given how postgres is doing it at the very least, can pass anything bigger than 8 byte (on 64bit arch), in general purpose registers. So function calls (which are below all operators), tuple deforming, etc, we'll instead pass those types around by reference. That always will infer another pointer indirection, and in many cases means we'll have to copy more because the datum is now dependent on the underlying tuple it has been extracted from.

Whether it matters - it's hard to say so in a general manner. I'd try to avoid using a pass-by-reference type for the columns I'm aggregating billions of rows of, when reasonably possible. I'd not go to huge lengths to do so.

Tuple deforming performance doesn't change much if it's a _fixed width_ pass by reference type, rather than a variable width one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The vision behind Opera 15 and beyond - <AUTHOR> http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/the-vision-behind-opera-15-and-beyond/

<comment><USER2> Right, so it seems like they changed their target audience.

The list of extensions for "power-users who miss previous features" is a slap in the face. A half-broken bookmarks extension and then two extensions that are using data-hungry web services. Replacing the simple notes functionality with evernote? What the hell happened to my privacy and my data being local on my machine.

<comment><USER3> Notes were still synced with Opera link so there never was any privacy. Still using Evernote to save little snippets is like using my 4WD to visit the neighborhood shop when my bicycle would do.

<comment><USER4> >Notes were still synced with Opera link so there never was any privacy

I prefer giving my data to a Norwegian company rather than an American one, especially in the light of the recent events.

Moreover, Opera has a clean track record of the matter of privacy, while they were times when they could have abused their power: a substantial part of mobile traffic[1] was going through their servers due to Opera Turbo technology, and AFAIK they did not try to exploit it.

1: They still owned more than 20% of the market in 2011. I do not know which part of the users were using Turbo regularly, but I believe they were a lot in the pre-smartphone times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm bitter-sweet about recent Opera (both browser and company strategy) - I've been using Opera for 8 years. I'm really happy to see some developments, because Opera browser always seemed somehow stalled (except for investing resources in strange technologies - e.g. widgets, unite).

I'm afraid that Opera vision is becoming a company serving ads, so the browser will be no longer best choice for power users.

The old Opera (till 12.16) just didn't have many users, but with new engine Opera could take some users from Chrome. I think this is a step for being attractive for advertisers.

Just take a look at Opera business page [1] - the "technology" part just gives historical context, whereas ads/content takes prominient place.

I think we'll see some innovations from Opera such as mentioned Stash, Discover (another way of promoting partners' content), etc. But I think in the case of web browser we really need faster horse.

What is interesting, Opera published their commits to Chromium and Blink [2] - it seams that only 8 Opera developers work with browser, at least with adopting engine.

By the way, Opera 12.16 was released, but you will not find it easily[3].

[1]:[http://business.opera.com/company](http://business.opera.com/company)

[2]:[http://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/](http://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/)

[2]:windows: [http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/1216/int/Opera_1216_int_S...](http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/1216/int/Opera_1216_int_Setup_x64.exe) [http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/1216/int/Opera_1216_int_S...](http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/1216/int/Opera_1216_int_Setup.exe)

mac: [http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/mac/1216/Opera_12.16-1860.x86...](http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/mac/1216/Opera_12.16-1860.x86_64.dmg)

linux: [http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/](http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/)

</comment><comment><USER6> "That leaves us with the riddle that every software developer faces at some point: how best to make a UI simple enough to be intuitive for a consumer who wants a solid, fast browser that just works, and yet is customizable and extensible so that power users can add the features they want?"

You don't. Taking both user groups into consideration and weighing them equally assumes that they have the same bearing on the usage of your product. Once it reaches mass market, the tinkerers (occasionally referred to as the early adopters or evangelists) are no longer the largest nor the most profitable segment of your user-base.

Therefore, you can theoretically afford to disregard them--however, in practice, this has implications that can prove disastrous. For instance, they could seek out an alternative and start the disruptive cycle all over again, increasing its appeal and reducing yours, which propagates and ultimately ruins your perception, though this can probably be avoided.

<comment><USER7> GNOME 3 is a perfect, and very recent, example of what you're describing.

It was open source programmers who made GNOME 2 and earlier a successful, usable desktop environment. These were very technical users who created software that generally worked well for their purposes, but incidentally also worked well for other, less-technical users, too.

Yet at some point, we saw the number of "designers" and "UI experts" start to grow, and eventually overwhelm the number of programmers. The "make it usable by everyone" mantra took over, but without the skill and sensibility we saw from programmers alone.

The end result has been GNOME 3. At best, it can be considered one of the worst open source disasters of all time. Its designer-driven development process and subsequent lack of usability and quality has alienated many programmers. These are exactly the kind of people who shouldn't be alienated, because they did things right in the first place. Aside from a few odd cases here and there, GNOME 3 is generally hated by anyone who uses his or her computer to do real work.

And what you say about seeking alternatives, or even creating them, is very true. KDE and Xfce benefited immensely from the GNOME 3 debacle, accepting many of the talented and valuable GNOME "refugees". MATE and Cinnamon have been born to try to fix the problem, as well.

GNOME 3 isn't the only example. Firefox is another good example, and obviously quite relevant to Opera. It has been systematically dumbed-down basically every release starting with Firefox 4, which has rendered it far less useful than it once was, causing many advanced users to abandon it.

Opera does indeed appear to be following this same path, unfortunately. Opera 15 has the same feeling that GNOME 3 does, in that it is a regression from the previous versions. Discarding so many things that make Opera 12 and earlier such a great browser just isn't a good way forward.

<comment><USER8> > GNOME 3 is a perfect, and very recent, example of what you're describing.

Agree, in a sense that it has abandoned tinkerers and focused on mainstream users. I'm not sure the result is disastrous, though. In Google Trends GNOME has maintained its position relative to KDE:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=gnome+kde#q=gnome%2C...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=gnome+kde#q=gnome%2C%20%20kde%2C%20%20xfce&cmpt=q)

If you have more relevant stats, please share!

<comment><USER2> I share the dislike of Gnome 3 with many but I also see the potential of it for others so this is meant as a humorous countergraph: [https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%22xfce%20sucks%22%2...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%22xfce%20sucks%22%22kde%20sucks%22%2C%20%20%22gnome%20sucks%22%2C%20%20%22gnome%202%20sucks%22%2C%20%20%22gnome%203%20sucks%22)

(Google Trends is not a measure of anything but Google Trends!)

<comment><USER9> [https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=gnome+issues#q=gnome...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=gnome+issues#q=gnome%20issues&cmpt=q)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Always sort of distressing to have one of your favorite features (Fit to Width in this case) described as "confusing rather than helping". I guess I should give up on hoping that Blink-based Opera will become worth using.

</comment><comment><USER11> They should have just named it "<New Browser Name>" by Opera. It would set the expectations right. When its the same name and a higher version number with most of the features missing it just alienates the existing users.

This would give time to add new features to the new browser while keeping the existing users happy with what they already have. The existing users would not crib about missing that one obscure feature that no one else uses.

In the current scenario the power users who normally jump to the next version end up missing the features they are used to. The best example in this case would be Phoenix/Firefox which rose from the ashes of Mozilla Suite. The stripped out all the fat and made a lean browser. What happened to Firefox after version 4 is another story.

</comment><comment><USER9> If Opera do focus their attentions on the UI (not the rendering engine), then that's a good thing. And there's so many ways the web browser could be improved.

I used to like Opera's bells and whistles. I loved no image mode, tabs, fit to width, it's zoom, mouse gestures, url keywords, toolbar customisation and alternative stylesheets. And some of the keyboard shortcuts (which became confusing over time.)

But the menu system, and backend was klunky. The app didn't integrate well into the Linux desktop well either.

Unite was interesting (they should have waited for IPV6 to go mainstream...) Tab stacks didn't go far enough. Speed dial - really - What's the point? I'd rather they polish up the bookmarking and history interfaces. Stash looks like it's just a lifo ordered stack, which is good, but lends no context to the stashed page. Does a stashed page retain it's history? How do I group pages/bookmarks - why is this so shitty across browsers? A stash could just be a temporary/ephemeral bookmark.

Is their any point in having graphical snapshots of pages and thumbnails? These just take away screen real estate. They bring nothing for me.

I think there should be focus on: reading aids, bookmarking/tabs, privacy, developer tools, and a very clean configuration - with sensible defaults. An easy way to flip the browser into an intermediate/advanced mode would be nice.

Bring back a slice of innovation to the browser. It needs to be more than a Chrome clone. I can think of loads of nice features that could be roled into the browser rather than end up as a stray extension.

Anyway I hope the clean core and fresh start is a good jump off point for them, I'll be watching this space.

Where's the Linux version?

<comment><USER12> > Speed dial - really - What's the point?

I use speed dial all the time, it's hard for me to believe that when it was first announced my first reaction was "meh, I don't need it". But it's extremely useful/comfortable, at least for me.

<comment><USER9> Could you say why? Are you using it on a touch device?

<comment><USER12> Well, there are three methods in Opera (that I can think of at the moment) to access bookmarks - through the main menu - which takes a few clicks and maybe modifier keys, through a dedicated toolbar which takes up screen space (I sometimes work on my 1366x768 res laptop), and finally through the side panel which again will take an F4 (I don't usually keep it open) and a few click to get there.

Compared to a simple ctrl+T or mouse gesture plus a click, or the simpler ctrl+the speed dial number, it's too much of a hassle to use bookmarks for the most commonly accessed websites. In short, I'm kind of lazy.

In bookmarks I usually put sites I might want to come back later (but I rarely do), usually documentation or stuff like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > When we took the decision to switch to Chromium, compatibility was one > reason — but most importantly, we wanted to spend our time on browser > innovation, rather than competing on building a rendering engine.

This seems to be saying that "browser innovation" can only be done in the UI? That seems misguided.

Innovating only in the UI has been tried many times: Flock, RockMelt, Dolphin, etc. It's never worked in a significant way. Not to say it never will, I suppose anything is possible, but it seems highly unlikely - what is different this time?

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's my wish list for Opera 15 and beyond:

      1. Linux support.
      2. Don't break my bank (dnb.no) like Chromium
      3. Single-key shortcuts
      4. Ability to close browser windows with C-w (or C-q without it killing *all* windows)
      5. Ability to start browser windows without tab bar

Single-key shortcuts and a tiling window manager recently brought me back to Opera after only using it for banking a while. It's far from a perfect TWM browser, but the keyboard navigation really is worth it.

Faithfully yours,

2003-2008, 2013-present

</comment><comment><USER15> I used Opera for years but now i really don't see the point. They simply won't be able to innovate enough in UI to justify using it vs Safari or Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER16> I would feel a little ashamed to go and tout my employer after it has laid out tons of hardworking people that made the company and the product what it is.

I can understand the economic pressures that drove the decision, but at least a little solidarity for those left behind would need to be in order.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hmm.. so it was too hard to keep the same UI because of Presto, and then the reasoning for the new UI is because they wanted a 'fresh start'? Seems like creating a vision in retrospect because of the time restraints.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really liked Opera. I've used it for as long as I can remember to pretty much the exclusion of all else. Best mouse gestures, integrated mail and RSS client, notes that were easily searchable and right there alongside all my web stuff, nice speed dial for regular sites, first people with tabbed browsing (though they managed to screw that up to an extent by stopping the tabs overflowing so they shrunk into unclickable icons instead.)

But, honestly, you strip out mail, you strip out notes - that's a lot of the advantages that it had going over other browsers gone. It's no-longer something you can really use to _manage_ information. You're almost in a position of saying, "Well, I mean - why _not_ use Firefox? It's stolen most of the other features anyway." Pretty much the only thing Opera has going for it at this point is the nice mouse gestures. Everything else it is basically _the exact same thing_ as Firefox. They've even stripped the easy access bookmarks out so they can't claim they've an advantage there anymore either >_>

At the moment I'm still using Opera 12 - but there's only so long you can stick around on a browser that's not being updated anymore.

I think, in retrospect, the point when Opera went wrong was when they stopped charging for it - at that point it was grow or die, and it never did grow _that_ much.

<comment><USER19> Opera 12 will indeed be updated with security patches for some time. "You can expect that we will keep Opera 12.x up to date and secure." [http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2013/07/02/opera-15](http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2013/07/02/opera-15)

<comment><USER18> Good to know, I'd turned auto-update off in fear of getting forced into Opera 15. Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment>