The Nature of Proof (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://loopspace.mathforge.org/CountingOnMyFingers/NatureOfProof/ <comment><USER2> > At one extreme lies the systems of formal proofs that encode proofs and > theorems in an almost unrecognisable language "known only to a bunch of > monks that live on a mountain"

I haven't read too far but I think this refers to the "classic" perspective on proofs which described in "Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs" [1]. The idea being that proofs should be derivable from first principles even if they are not in practice. This is in contrast to the "probabilistic" perspective which supposes that proofs are only ever "likely" to be correct.

I do a fair amount of work in Coq now and I've done extensive (first order logic) hand written proofs for the same material. So I guess I fall in to the classicist camp. There are a few things I like about this approach as I've experienced it:

Obviously there is no doubt about whether I've proven something. Or at worst there is an absolute minimum of doubt (down to the trusted computing base of Coq and CoC).

With a proof assistant I can easily play with my proof environment and try things out in the same way I do when I'm programming. I suppose this might also be true for more informal proofs but Proof General [2] makes it easy and enjoyable.

Most importantly, I can provide my encodings and proofs as a "library" that others can consume. At first glance this seems to have nothing to do with a classical view of proofs if they exist on paper, but I find higher level proof descriptions in papers hard to consume. Even when the proofs are in my area of expertise. Reading the mathematics fully laid out can be tedious but it contains all the answers to any questions you might have which can't always be said of more informal proofs.

To be fair, my area of expertise (PL) has extensive existing work in Coq and the tool works really well with these kinds of large but "shallow" proofs.

1\. [https://d1b10bmlvqabco.cloudfront.net/attach/ixkltd3cjy12bv/...](https://d1b10bmlvqabco.cloudfront.net/attach/ixkltd3cjy12bv/gsmlulvh9ga/izhodgi52to5/social.pdf)

2\. [https://proofgeneral.github.io](https://proofgeneral.github.io)

<comment><USER3> "Formal proof" and "mechanized proof" are not synonymous. And proof assistants have a long way to go before they can be useful for mathematics in general.

<comment><USER2> Yes! I'm not suggesting they are synonymous, but proofs in coq are definitely formal proofs (as I understand that term/phrase).</comment></comment></comment>


Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive - <AUTHOR> https://www.spacejam.com/ <comment><USER3> I was webmaster for this site (and thousands of others at WB) back in 2001! I believe this was when we did the great www -> www2 migration, which was of course supposed to be temporary. In fact I think that was when we migrated from our own datacentre to AOL's but I could be getting the timing wrong.

Back then it was served from a Sun E4500 running Solaris (7?) and Netscape Enterprise Server. Netscape had been acquired by AOL which had also just bought Time Warner (that's why we moved to their datacentre) but somehow we couldn't make the internal accounting work and still had to buy server licenses.

Fun fact, unlike Apache, NES enabled the HTTP DELETE method out of the box and it had to be disabled in your config. We found that out the hard way when one of the sysadmins ran a vulnerability scanner which deleted all the websites. We were forbidden from running scans again by management.

Another fun fact about NES - they were really pushing server side Javascript as the development language for the web (and mostly losing to mod_perl). Also back in 2001 but at a different place I worked with the person who had just written a book on server side js for O'Reilly - he got his advance but they didn't publish it because by the time he had finished it they considered it a "dead technology".

Our job was basically to maintain an enormous config file for the webserver which was 99% redirects because they would buy every conceivable domain name for a movie which would all redirect to the canonical one. Famously they couldn't get a hold of matrix.com and had to use whatisthematrix.com. Us sysadmins ran our own IRC server and "302" was shorthand for "let's go" \- "302 to a meeting". "302" on its own was "lunchtime".

I still mention maintaining this site on my CV and LinkedIn - <USER2> I've never been asked about it in an interview. I suspect most of the people doing the interviewing these days are too young to remember it.

<comment><USER4> Server side JavaScript? That'll never catch.

I love these examples of historical calls made too early...

<comment><USER5> But node js is alive now.

<comment><USER6> He was being sarcastic :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh, that turkey. The movie, not the web site.

I once went to an industry presentation where someone on that project described the workflow.The project got into a cycle where the animators would animate on first shift, rendering was on second shift, printing to film was done on third shift. The next morning, the director, producer, and too many studio execs would look at the rushes from the overnight rendering. Changes would be ordered, and the cycle repeated.

The scene where the "talent" is being sucked out of players had problems with the "slime" effect. Production was stuck there for weeks as a new thing was tried each day. All the versions of this, of which there were far too many, were shown to us.

Way over budget. Cost about $80 million to make, which was huge in 1996. For comparison, Goldeneye (1995) cost $60 million.

<comment><USER8> Awful film. I was listening to the radio the other day and they had a 10 year old on saying Toy Story was cringe and he preferred Space Jam. I've never been so appalled just listening to radio.

<comment><USER9> What are you talking about? Space Jam is great fun!

<comment><USER10> If nothing else, the soundtrack is a really fun throwback. The monstar track with coolio, busta rhymes, method man et al is super catchy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Needs moar stars!

It's such a nostalgic feeling of the earlier web back when just interest groups, universities, fan pages, web-rings ruled the web. Back before it became commercialized by greedy folks that threw ads all over the place, tracked everything you do and spammed the hell out of your inbox.

I miss the good 'ol days for what the web was intended for.

One of my first projects was maintaining the site for: Looney Tunes Teaches the Internet.

If you look hard enough it's still out there.

<comment><USER12> The best thing about the early web was that nobody knew what it was for. So people just did things, without considering if it was "right."

Nowadays, you'd never get Bob's Labrador Page. Because _" Hi! I'm Bob. I live in Lebanon, Kansas. I like Labrador dogs. Here are some pictures of my favorite Labradors!"_

<comment><USER13> Those pages still exist, except instead of being hosted on geocities.com/area51/bobslabs it's on instagram.com/bobslabs

Not that much of a difference really IMO

<comment><USER14> Quite different. Old homepages were more "building" less "sharing". Beyond the coding, there was planning and categorising. You put thought into the interface and structure.

Seems like a small thing but its the difference between being a hobby mechanic or just owning a car. Or buying a desktop vs building one. You end up with the same thing, but "feels" like a very different endevour.

<comment><USER13> This is rose colored glasses IMO. The vast majority of pages were just no standardization ...

  ...

placed images.

If you want all that hobby mechanic stuff you can do all the same now with firebase or pages or whatever just like you were with frontpage or dreamweaver back then.

<comment><USER15> That's true, but that small amount of effort is still about 1000x more than is required to use Instagram.

And it was really the discovery of such web pages back then that was the thrill. It really did feel like exploring an alien planet or following a treasure map of link exchanges. Each click was an investment of a couple minutes at the rate pages loaded, so you really couldn't explore every link. And browsers didn't have tabs -- you were looking at one page at a time and maybe bookmarking it for later.

<comment><USER12> The editorial and stylistic independence is what I miss.

Absolutely: there is more stuff on the internet than there was then.

But! How much of that stuff is creatively controlled by actual end users? I'd say < 10%.

The large platforms are right out - restyling Facebook?! The build-a-site platforms all look somewhat similar because form follows tooling defaults. And because of the professionalization of web technologies, laypeople are locked out from just making their own page (or at least don't believe they can).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love that 1996 HTML solved deep linking. It works flawlessly: [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz1a.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz1a.html)

Look, I just linked to a wrong answer the middle of a quiz. It perfectly preserved all the state. (Fun quiz, too.)

This is mostly a tongue in cheek argument, but it has the benefit of being true.

Sadly the quiz seems broken at question 6. But you can even un-break the quiz by manually editing the URL to question 7: [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz7.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz7.html)

Imagine trying to do that with a React app. (And I say that as a fan of react apps.)

The ending of the quiz is hilarious, by the way.

<comment><USER17> _Imagine trying to do that with a React app._

It'd work fine if the developer used the URL to maintain state with React Router's BrowserRouter or HashRouter.

<comment><USER18> All thats wrong with the modern web is in this answer.

<comment><USER17> Probably 3/4s of the people who post on HN can attribute their entire career existing to "the modern web", so maybe there's some good things as well as bad things about it.

<comment><USER19> I believe some of the conceptual simplicity of the "olden web" is missing in the age of leftpad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As is Heaven's Gate's website - [http://heavensgate.com/](http://heavensgate.com/)

<comment><USER21> I know it's partly nostalgia, but something about both of these sites feels more fun to interact with and browse through than almost any modern website I visit. The web used to be so much fun.

<comment><USER22> It's not just nostalgia, the design invites exploration. The web was truly built for surfing back then. Now only The Feed exists.

<comment><USER21> That's it, exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Aleksandar Totic from the original mosaic team has his website still up.

[http://totic.org/nscp/index.html](http://totic.org/nscp/index.html)

Personally I enjoyed this bit:

[http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html](http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html)

If Aleksandar reads hacker news I hope he never takes that down.

<comment><USER24> "So far, I haven't received any swirl pictures from the outside world. I find this hard to believe that we are the only ones enjoying this activity."

Hard to believe, isn't it...

<comment><USER25> We called them "swirlies" in middle school/high school. But I've never actually seen someone get one, and it could well be mostly apocryphal. And it wasn't something you sought out, it was like, you were getting bullied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 1994 checking in!

[http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/](http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/)

Is anyone from Linköping University reading this? I need to thank them for 26 years of free hosting. :-)

<comment><USER27> You should really get around to finishing those pages that link to [http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/unfinished.html](http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/unfinished.html) any decade now.

<comment><USER26> We're still uploading photos from that QuickTake 100...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wondered how well it would rank on those insight scores,

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spacejam.com%2F)

Looks like 80kb and they still find things.

<comment><USER29> 98 on first try, 97 on refresh. 99 on 2nd refresh. Are they just making stuff up?

<comment><USER30> That's an extremely small variation in score. Why would that make you think they're making stuff up? Networks and servers don't always respond with identical timings.

<comment><USER29> Yes, 98, 97, 99 are small.

But when I punched in Google.com, I got 84, and then 78, then 90. That's a pretty wide range.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Unfortunately, this only works on a Macintosh running Netscape [1]

This is the most specific "best viewed with..." message I have seen.

[1] [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/iconsframes.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/iconsframes.html)

<comment><USER32> It's even crazier than that. That page suggests using ResEdit to modify the Netscape application to feature their spinnning basketball icon rather than the standard "N".

(ResEdit was Apple's editor for data in the resource fork of HFS files, which classic Mac apps used to store their assets. Mac OS X abandoned this interesting but unusual approach in favor of the NeXT way, ".app" directory hierarchies.)

<comment><USER33> Well that really takes me back! It was pretty cool how classic Mac apps had most images, text strings, that sort of thing in the standardized resource fork structure. Which meant that you usually could alter a bunch of things about an app's appearance and sometimes behavior by editing those resources with a standard editor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If curious see also

2019 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473522](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473522)

2020 (1 comment) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216203)

(apparently it took 23 years to notice: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=spacejam.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=spacejam.com))

<comment><USER35> Hacker News wasn't around that whole time. But the fact that spacejam.com was still around was a big deal a few years ago (don't remember when I first heard that.)

From some googling, it looks like 2010 is when this made news (via reddit).

<comment><USER36> It's been discussed on HN multiple other times too in addition to the ones mentioned here.

For example, here is a discussion about it on HN from 2010: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050807)

I remember because it was around that time I first started browsing HN.

<comment><USER37> What's truly impressive is if you decide to creep a bit, you'll see that loads of users from that thread still post on HN pretty actively.

HN has an insanely high retention rate for being just a little news sharing site. Most people get bored, pissed off, or uninterested at some point and leave. Looking at 10 year old tweet threads or reddit comment sections is basically a graveyard in comparison. Not sure what keeps people sticking around here.

In a couple days, it'll have been 10 years for me. Crazy.

<comment><USER38> You mentioned Reddit being a graveyard, but is it true?

Check this thread someone linked above from 9 years ago:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_that_the_space_jam_website_is_still_up_and/)

I clicked about 20 profiles, at least 70% are still active.

Actually, I think this phenomenon probably is pretty common for websites that are still on rising or at least hold still (like both HN and Reddit). Their initial users don't just leave for no reason. Less active, perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> You know, back in high school when I was learning HTML + JavaScript, I was really looking forward to creating websites that took "longer" to load[1]. Because I have associated that with complexity (understandable), and I associate complexity with coding professionally.

Now that I _am_ coding professionally, I just wish websites would load simple as this, with interfaces as simple as this. None of that fancy image preloading, or disappearing/reappearing navbars, or those sidebars that scrolled independently from the main page content.

Then again, what memories are those which time will not sweeten, right?

[1] Caveat: with the dial-up connections then, all it took were enough images for a site to load slow. So I wanted mine to take "longer"!

<comment><USER40> Artificial waits are still a thing all over the place, because people trust results more when they seem to take some work to produce:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3061519/the-ux-secret-that- will-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3061519/the-ux-secret-that-will-ruin- apps-for-you)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think funnily enough, one thing that made these old websites more interesting is how slow the web was back then.

In a way it was "animation"— I'd look at images more closely as they "scanned" into the page and notice details I don't think I would now. In a way the fact that all these pages load instantly now is a bit of a downer. Maybe because there's no anticipation any more, or maybe just because the page seems more static and unchanging.

</comment><comment><USER42> The website may be the same, but at least they've "updated their privacy policy" in the lower left!

<comment><USER43> The omniture javascript code is copyrighted 2008 as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Of course it is still alive. It's one of those fixed-space-time-points that all the bloody turtles and elephants are balanced on. WE take that down, who knows where and when we will end up !?

</comment><comment><USER45> My fan website for the Australian Band The Baby Animals from 1994 is still online.

[http://southcom.com.au/~tim/](http://southcom.com.au/~tim/)

<comment><USER46> I love that 404 page

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The website moved a lot. See the Web Archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20041015000000*/spacejam.com/](https://web.archive.org/web/20041015000000*/spacejam.com/)

Some years it redirects to WB's website, sometimes to an archive website, etc.

It seems that the original was not accessible between 2000 and 2018.

<comment><USER48> It is hardly surprising that they'd reactivate it. A new Space Jam movie[1] is coming out next year. I know this somehow and am not proud of it.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3554046/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3554046/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0)

<comment><USER49> > I know this somehow and am not proud of it.

Anyone who has even casually followed the NBA over the last two years probably knows this too, so you've got plenty of company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Unrelated but, one old page I miss is www.whatisthematrix.com

It just redirects to www.warnerbros.com/movies/matrix/ now :(

<comment><USER51> I made a few close friends there in the chat, where other hacker wannabes and philosophy neophytes would gather. The chat forum had fun weird bugs that my friends and I would play with in order to edit past posts, or obliterate each other's posts. It was wonderful little corner of the web for a short while.

That was just one part of that great site. In 1999, the Internet still felt new and full of potential. I loved all the concept art posted there, the trailers, and finding easter eggs.

Years later I recreated the full chat for my friends, including the bugs. It

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz2.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz2.html)

Amusingly, exactly none of these answers are correct anymore (at least not until 2028, then again in 2031).

</comment><comment><USER53>  from page source

<comment><USER54> I try to leave little notes and jokes in HTML source because from when I was growing up playing with computers to now I still look at the source just to see if someone was expecting me. It's not very common now, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> My mechanic's website is a work of old-school art.

[http://www.waspauto.com/](http://www.waspauto.com/)

<comment><USER56> That meet the staff part was delightful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> What would the "PageRank" value be, if this site links to you ? Such an "old , esteemed" site should have some "High-XP/Google-Juice" Value ?

</comment><comment><USER57> Looks like it's received the HN hug of death

      The connection has timed out

      The server at www.spacejam.com is taking too long to respond.

<comment><USER58> Same here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> You can't finish the quiz though - you get stuck on this page: [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz6.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz6.html)

Should I contact Warner?

<comment><USER60> firstname.lastname@example.com would be a starting place

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/pressbox/credits.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/pressbox/credits.html)

Love the shout outs to the people who made the site

</comment><comment><USER62> It's got a status page, too: [https://twitter.com/spacejamcheck?lang=en](https://twitter.com/spacejamcheck?lang=en)

</comment><comment><USER63> I love/hate the fact it's had a cookie banner added

</comment><comment><USER64> And still browser compatible :)

<comment><USER65> loads very fast too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Fascinating. The web has changed so much and so quickly over 25 years.

Looking at [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/jump/linksframes.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/jump/linksframes.html)

Self-evident how bad link rot can be! I think one of the links still work. A few in there point to the old Yahoo Directory.

</comment><comment><USER67> Terms and privacy policy were recently updated.

</comment><comment><USER68> Oh no! The mime types for the desktop "backboards" aren't set right! My phone can't render the Windows-compatible files or the Mac files!

[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/patternsframes.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/patternsframes.html)

</comment><comment><USER69> Almost all the links here, and all the interesting ones, are gone: [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/bball/nbaframes.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/bball/nbaframes.html)

The only remaining ones are ones I already knew about - nba.com and Yahoo! Sports.

</comment><comment><USER70> I'm curious how this happens.

Obviously the site owner is intionally keeping the site up and dealing with outages.

But I wonder why?

<comment><USER71> Its quite possibly literally just a bunch of static html files. There is not much maintenance cost there. They probably run all their static sites from the same webservers. It may very well be the same effort to keep it as to delete it.

<comment><USER72> there's no way it's being maintained on same software.

so how would you make it bullet proof, just s3 and cloudfront?

so what would you say it costs a year to run?

<comment><USER73> It's running on a fairly current version of Apache, but aside from keeping the server up to date, it conceivably could be running the same setup for years.

For an organization the size of Warner Bros, it's essentially free, as they are literally doing nothing to the server for that site specifically.

However, it does look like it's running on AWS using their global accelerator (globally optimized traffic) so I assume it's sufficiently robust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Neat! OTOH, Peter Suber's Nomic page must win the contest "who has the biggest dead-to-live link ratio":

[https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm](https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm)

</comment><comment><USER75> I use this site to calibrate my team's automated visual diff regression testing stack.

</comment><comment><USER76> Oh, sitemaps. Maybe something like this could be a way to give a summary of a website again. [https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/sitemap.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/sitemap.html)

</comment><comment><USER77> I love this! "The jamminest two minutes of trailer time that ever hit a theater. It's 7.5 megs, it's Quicktime, and it's worth it. Click the graphic to download..."

</comment><comment><USER78> looking through the source, there are a number of commented out links. Here is one:

[https://www.spacejam.com/video/](https://www.spacejam.com/video/)

</comment><comment><USER79> Would be a shame if someone added a..... JavaScript framework to it.

</comment><comment><USER80> ..Did all the traffic from being on front page of HN take it down?

</comment><comment><USER81> [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/hong-kong- security-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/hong-kong-security-law- fear.html) The last part is reading in conjunction with this made me feel ... is web site more safe at least easier to be preserved than social media? I do not doubt whether one program can deep delete social media messages, at least one can ship one's web site as an archive and it is still readable. Priatebay like but for individual ... so easy to silence in social media compared with well Space Jam.

</comment><comment><USER82> As how a web site ought to be, online forever!

</comment><comment><USER83> Great load speed!

</comment><comment><USER84> Even the website cert has just been renewed (on Jun 12, 2020)

HTTPS is gaining traction :-)

I wonder if they will upgrade to HTTP/2

</comment><comment><USER85> The source code of each page contains a small little easter egg comment at the top, btw.

</comment><comment><USER86> Just curious, why this particular website is still being keep alive?

Nothing against it, though :D

</comment><comment><USER87> But it's on HTTPS now, so you can't _actually_ load it on an old computer

<comment><USER88> Via a proxy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I wonder how it will compare to: Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

Website and Movie :)

</comment><comment><USER90> Some day it'll get taken down and we'll all be sad.

</comment><comment><USER91> I miss the days when the web used to be this snappy and fast

</comment><comment><USER92> Seriously, modern websites should load as fast as this one

</comment><comment><USER93> Each page has a funny <!— comment —>

</comment><comment><USER94> It is down now.

</comment><comment><USER95> I love it every time I see it linked

</comment><comment><USER22> Hmm, needs more <marquee>

</comment><comment><USER96> National treasure

</comment><comment><USER97> god damn monstars

</comment><comment><USER98> No hit counter :(

</comment><comment><USER99> dark mode before it was cool.

</comment><comment><USER100> *was</comment>


Why I use Gentoo Linux - <AUTHOR> http://blog.calindora.com/2010/12/why-i-use-gentoo-linux/

<comment><USER2> This was alluded to in the article, and is obligatory for Gentoo discussions, just for the humor:

<http://funroll-loops.info/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I found that by default, gentoo enables a lot of drivers (and they are not enabled as modules, but as part of kernel). I just made sure that I select the drivers required for my eee pc. It would have taken a lot of time to deselect the default ones. But, I am wondering whether kernel in Gentoo is just as bloated as other distros because of that.</comment></comment>


Cocoapods iOS frameworks with storyboards, nibs and resources - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tapglue-stories/cocoapods-ios-frameworks-with-storyboards-nibs-and-resources-4d354b843148 <comment><USER2> Nice tutorial, very useful!</comment>


Design and Implementation of a 256-Core BrainFuck Computer [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/wjun/papers/sigtbd16.pdf <comment><USER2> "The BrainFuck computer is an attractive solution for servicing high throughput BrainFuck cloud services, both in terms of performance and cost."

Love it.

<comment><USER3> Don't laugh: this is the next big step in cloud computing infrastructure. Imagine Linux compiled to the BrainFuck ISA running a Docker container running a BrainFuck web application. Of course, we will clearly need a solid BrainFuck-to-JS transpiler to make things web scale.

Could it get better than that?

<comment><USER4> Here's a very performant BF-to-JS transpiler:

[http://copy.sh/brainfuck/](http://copy.sh/brainfuck/)

We're ready for the revolution!

<comment><USER5> I thank you for the first good (if not correct) usage of the word "performant" in the history of the universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ". A large amount of research is focusing on what kind of wimpy machines are best fit for important workloads. In this paper, we present a rather extreme example of a wimpy processor, using the BrainFuck [22] esoteric programming language as its ISA."

Seems legitimate to me. Seriously, why not explore the extremes? Thats where we often learn the most.

I suspect many here think this is a joke, but although does have it's funny side this definitely warrants the research IMHO

</comment><comment><USER7> Why is the author consistently mixing up " _" instructions per cycle"_ with _" instructions per second"_?

Surely, phrases such as _" We observed the following Instructions per Second (IPC)"_ and _" assuming a perfect 1 instruction per second on the general purpose processor"_ should have activated some neurons in some brain, even assuming it got distorted by doing this research?

<comment><USER8> Maybe working on a 256 core BF computer has BF'd his brain? Have some empathy.

<comment><USER9> That's my guess. It's one of the few projects that I thought actually would damage my brain. I avoided it. Unlambda language is another one like that. Although I have considered trying to implement that one, esp in hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ah. MIT, never change. Mind, this kind of stuff could come out of other institutions as well. They shouldn't change either.

Anyways, can we have a version of TIS-100 where you write brainfuck with added message sending primitives instead of the TIS-100 asm? Of course, each BF interpreter would be working with only, say, 2 or 3 cells of RAM.

I want to see either that, or a TIS-100 asm compiler for GreenArray chips. Or both.

<comment><USER11> "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should"

<comment> gene-h "Just because we shouldn't doesn't mean we won't"

<comment><USER10> "...and when we do, it's gonna be _awesome_!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is some bullshit. They didnt even port the standard benchmarks to Brainfuck to compare performance against reference implementations. I want to see ZIP, raytracing, web servers, map reduce... actual apps with associated BrainFuck performance. Scratch the whole Future Work section in favor of that given you might accidentally find evidence for using it in production somewhere.

Moore and your GreenArray chips: be afraid! Something even more incomprehensible is coming after your market share!

<comment><USER12> I wonder if you're joking, but these sorts of things have been implemented in Brainfuck.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't. I'm simply too sane to follow BrainFuck developments unless it's something wild and accidentally useful like a 256-core CPU on HN front page. ;) If they've been implemented, authors should've run some of them on the processor to include benchmarks in the paper. It's standard thing to do in CompSci papers on CPU's, compilers, optimizations, interpreters, anything. They usually include something like that.

<comment><USER12> Right, okay. It stood out to me too, because there are compilers and larger applications targeting Brainfuck, so it seems strange to only choose "hello world"-style programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm impressed that they were able to find 24 references to cite.

<comment><USER14> despite the juvenile name bf is quite mature for what it is

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> After Intel adding deep-learning instructions to its processors, I guess they could add BrainFuck extensions to the x86 ISA, too.

<comment><USER14> All 6 BF commands have x86 opcode counterparts, already. Don't quote me, I'm guessing.

<comment><USER16> Not quite, but an interpreter can be written in less than 100 bytes of x86 instructions:

[http://www.hugi.scene.org/compo/compoold.htm#compo6](http://www.hugi.scene.org/compo/compoold.htm#compo6)

<comment><USER14> The competition rules have added constraints to make the interpreter a usual command line tool. However, with memory mapped input and output ports it becomes a lot easier, which would be akin to 8bit micro controller programming. Parsing would take more than one cpu instruction per BF instruction, so the program would need to be assembled. I don't know x86 well enough to write that, though. I imagined, there would be a single instruction equivalent of 'x=*(p++)', but couldn't find anything like that.

In some makeshift syntax and with one instruction too much, I got:

       >, < = inc, dec al
       +, - = inc, dec [al]
       . = out output_port, [al]
       , = in [al], input_port
       [ = Label: cmp [al], #0
           jnz (Labelend + sizeof (jmp instruction))
       ] = Labelend: jmp Label

The labels are generated by the assembler. The ports would have to be directly soldered to some I/O peripherie, but alternatively the input and output could be memory mapped and fed by interrupts, as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> LOL. I work in the same building as Urban. I'll be sure to point it out to him on Monday, I'm sure he'll be amused (or annoyed at my position in the queue of people that have already informed him of this). :D

</comment><comment><USER18> SCIGen has come a long way to producing a really realistic paper along with the hardware implementation ;) [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/)

</comment><comment><USER19> The instruction encoding seems inefficient -- they don't use the full 4 bits of information (the first bit is always zero except for `.`). Why not use a 3-bit encoding, since there are 8 instructions?

<comment><USER20> They have 9 states including a stop instruction, b`1111 which would preclude a 3-bit encoding. In any case, I suspect it's much easier to handle 4-bit words.

<comment><USER21> >I suspect it's much easier to handle 4-bit words.

I therefore suspect a 3-bit encoding would be more in the spirit of BrainFuck. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Available on AWS in 2017.

<comment><USER9> The SystemD execution and update engine.

<comment><USER10> I mean, it would be more secure than the current one. But that's not saying much.

Fun fact: systemd now has an entire command devoted to setting locale, something tyically done through simple text files.

Lennart, just stop writing executables that do almost nothing. Despite what you may thing, we don't all have infinite disk space.

<comment><USER23> $ du -h --apparent-size /lib/systemd/systemd-localed 336K /lib/systemd/systemd-localed

Not much, you could fit a thousand copies of this in 336 MB.

<comment><USER10> But it's still an entirely pointless 336K. I could use that to store:

-197 copies of nethack

-10% of DarkPlaces

-36% of GCC

-44% of ZSH

-30 copies of CPython (just the executable, of course: that's all you counted)

-10% of ZSNES

-1.36 copies of XScreenSaver

-42% of Teeworlds

All of these are more valuable uses of my precious disk space, because all of them actually do something: They actually give me capabilities I previously didn't have.

<comment><USER9> GCC and CPython are great illustrations of what Im talking about. Others are good. Also, Oberon System base with kernel, files, editor, viewer, etc is around 116KB per Wirth's paper on FPGA implementation.

So, you get a whole OS with some utilities in between 1/3 and 1/2 of SystemD binary. Also worth noting Oberon includes safety checks, too. ;)

<comment><USER10> Oberon might be worth checking out. I've heard neat stuff.

However, from what I've seen, it's a bit too verbose for my tastes (the language, not the OS).

<comment><USER9> Honestly, I found the tradeoffs of it to be the most interesting. It hits an interesting balance of readable, safe, fast compile, and fast runtime. Includes some OOP and concurrency foundations while barely changing the language. Whole platform can fit in one book. You could theoretically understand whole thing and reimplement in language of your choosing. Was esp good when hardware was weaker and more diverse. Also better starting language than C in education as it can be easy at first with difficulty gradually increased with intro of unsafe constructs. Finally, it's seeing some uptake in embedded with Astrobe IDE.

So, that's a quick review. The main one you'll find is older system where A2 Bluebottle is latest. Runs fast, too.

<comment><USER10> Neat.

Yeah, it does look really cool, just verbose. And you say it's easy to implement....

Maybe I can get it running on my gameboy?

I kid. Sort of.

<comment><USER9> "Yeah, it does look really cool, just verbose. And you say it's easy to implement...."

It is a compiler and OS. Easy means a different thing in this context versus average usage in software. I'd say vastly easier than trying to understand GCC or Linux. How about that? Also, the original version was done by 2 people and some change. Each port of compiler was done by 1-2 people in relatively short time. Mostly students with basic knowledge in CompSci. Helps it's well- documented.

So, it's not easy as throwing together a web app but can't be ridiculously hard if you take it a piece at a time. The use I had for it, other than learning or pleasure, would be for subversion-resistent, verified-to-assembly builds. It's super easy to learn Oberon with the OS itself straight-forward. People could code it up in a local language, the compiler too, compile those (or hand-done in ASM), and bootstrap into a trusted environment. That can be used to produce the rest with compilers built on top in a memory-safe language that handles foreign code more safely. Better, no patent suits or anything on Wirth-based tech like .NET or Java might get you.

Other than Oberon system, Modula-3 (not Wirth) and Component Pascal (Wirth et al) are most worthwhile to check out in terms of practical languages. BlackBox Component Builder is still in active use with Component Pascal, esp in Russia and Europe. They love it over there since it's got OOP & GUI with Oberon simplicity & safety.

<comment><USER10> Of course. I'm foolish, but not foolish enough to think "easy" compiler/OS equals "easy" webapp. However, I am foolish enough to start any project, although usually not mad enough to finish it once I get an idea of the work involved.

Once again, Oberon looks neat. I am usually not a fan of the Wirthian languages, so I might not enjoy it in the same way I enjoy, say, Python, or Scheme, but it looks interesting.

<comment><USER9> "Of course. I'm foolish, but not foolish enough to think "easy" compiler/OS equals "easy" webapp. However, I am foolish enough to start any project, although usually not mad enough to finish it once I get an idea of the work involved."

You and I are appearing to be more similar than I thought on these kinds of things haha.

"Oberon looks neat. I am usually not a fan of the Wirthian languages, so I might not enjoy it in the same way I enjoy, say, Python, or Scheme, but it looks interesting."

In your case, rebooting PreScheme to do a small OS like Oberon or clone of it might be a better take. There's already books on quickly putting together a Scheme compiler. The PreScheme and VLISP papers are pretty detailed. Include some safety features from Clay (C-like) and Carp (Lisp) with Scheme's macros and simplicity. Mock-up assembly language in it so you can code & test it, too, in Scheme with extraction process to real thing.

That combo seems like it would work better for you plus result in at least one deliverable: a PreScheme implementation for system programming whose code was compiled with GCC or LLVM. You might find that useful over time esp if you made syntax compatible with one of your typical, Scheme implementations to port those libraries over easily. Split it between GC'd code and non-GC'd code like Modula-3 did.

<comment><USER10> Seems neat. The original PreScheme is part of S48, which seems to be dead.

Speaking of which, I should probably consider doing that project I was thinking of doing for a while: port SCSH to some other scheme implementations which are actually alive.

So yeah, the trick with doing a prescheme project is that I'd first have to build a PreScheme compiler (with added safety, etc.) and then I'd have to build one that can run on bare metal. The former ought to be possible, especially if I'm targeting C or LLVM (some bits might get a bit rough, but most of Scheme is pretty easy to implement). The latter would perhaps be possible, but making use of it would likely require a more in-depth knowledge of the hardware than I currently possess.

You know, I was joking about porting Oberon to the gameboy, but the GBA is a really well-defined piece of hardware with readily available tooling (which I actually have, because you need it for LSDJ), and a good deal less complexity than a modern x86 machine...

Man, why can't I just write videogames, like the _normal_ people?

Well, my current side project is writing a version of the Tafl-inspired board game Thud that you can play over a network, so I guess I'm already doing that...

<comment><USER9> "The former ought to be possible, especially if I'm targeting C or LLVM (some bits might get a bit rough, but most of Scheme is pretty easy to implement)."

That's what they did originally. Should work.

" but the GBA is a really well-defined piece of hardware"

Then do a PreScheme wrapper on it supporting inline or calls to assembly for performance-critical routines. See if you can make the primitives on bottom close to how hardware works for efficiency. The AI research of the 80's indicate it might be able to handle a board game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The [RSSB] Single Instruction Architecture is interesting for a simple processor implementation as well. [Calfee] mentions a relation to "biological mechanical computer", i.e. neural like.

[RSSB] [https://esolangs.org/wiki/RSSB](https://esolangs.org/wiki/RSSB)

[Calfee] [https://github.com/nospamcalfee/RSSB](https://github.com/nospamcalfee/RSSB)

</comment><comment><USER24> The title of the paper made me laugh a lot.

Reading through it, you can tell the author had written it with a knowing smile

<comment><USER10> Well, this is a SigTBD paper ([http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu](http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu)). I would expect nothing less.

</comment></comment><comment> r-w Not sure whether Iota, Jot, and lambda calculus can be executed instruction- by-instruction, but generally speaking, wouldn't a Turing-complete language with just two instructions allow for even greater throughput than BrainFuck does?

<comment><USER25> Why two? Why not just one?

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

<comment><USER27> Whiskey tango bravo foxtrot

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just fyi, if you put this on your resume, you might want to omit or abbreviate the name of the language.

<comment><USER29> Why? "Fuck" is not as bad a word as it used to be, especially depending on context.

<comment><USER30> And your surrounding culture. In some places, you'd be out the door before the word had fully left your mouth. In others, nobody would blink...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is this the most the word "fuck" has appeared in a technical paper? It looks like it.</comment>


Web Application Development with Tornado - <AUTHOR> http://crad.tumblr.com/post/351142148/web-application-development-with-tornado

<comment><USER2> > Because your tornado app runs as a stand-alone HTTP server that is directly > coupled to your application classes, you need to run multiple processes to > serve multiple requests.

Really? My understanding is that an async http server like Tornado should service many requests with the same process. (This is the case with Twisted and nginx, at least.) It should be a matter of writing your application in the same async, callback-driven style. Or am I misunderstanding something?

<comment><AUTHOR> If your app is fully async, yes. Any blocking and you'll need another backend to service a simultaneous request.

<comment><USER2> So why are you even using Tornado if you fork a separate process for each simultaneous request? Doesn't that negate the benefits of an asynchronous http server?

<comment><USER3> Brett Taylor discusses this issue in his tech talk on Tornado (<http://bret.appspot.com/entry/tornado-tech-talk>). He uses a hybrid approach: Use synchronous programming when requests block for a short time (fetching data from local db or memcache) and async programming when something blocks for a long time (calling out to third party services, long polling requests).

He does not go all async because programming with callbacks or deferreds is more complicated than straight line synchronous programming.

Brett also mentions that the instances of the server are created once and reused. He does not fork an instance of the server per request.

<comment><USER2> Twisted has a nice asynchronous db api ([http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/rdbms....](http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/rdbms.html)) that mitigates these concerns at the database level. More generally, I'd think the cleanest approach is to write async wrappers for your synchronous code, rather than forking an async server to service multiple requests. Otherwise you miss out on a lot of benefits of an async architecture, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "There are changes in the master branch of Tornado on github to make Tornado multi-threaded, spawning a thread per CPU core, but this will not change the scaling concern and will complicate the equation a bit more"

Wrong. It forks.

[http://github.com/facebook/tornado/commit/6fb90ae694190fcedc...](http://github.com/facebook/tornado/commit/6fb90ae694190fcedc48d9fb98b02325826d783e)

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad.. I should have double checked my rusty memory of the commit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A pretty good overview of Tornado. I've been using it as a backend for a real- time web game and from what I've seen so far, its pretty good. I especially like how small and light-weight it is (which kinda lets them get away with non-existent documentation)

</comment><comment><USER6> Much love for tornado, though I ditched their templating for genshi. It also works pretty good as a Cron sort of engine for polling/scraping.</comment>


Ask PG: Please fix flagging. - <AUTHOR>

It seems as if all it takes is a few flags to kick a post right off the front page -- posts that have had a reasonable number of upvotes and discussion. I've been noticing this for a while, but what prompted me to make this post is that it seems as if two YC company launch posts were flagged and sent right to the bottom of the front page. So it's not really in your best interest, or of others that have legitimate content. <comment><USER2> Flagging isn't the only thing that knocks stories off the front page. Another one is the flamewar detector; if the story has a particularly bad thread, the thread can kill it.

Another thing that might be hurting stories are voting rings. HN does (apparently) a lot of things (that we don't know about) to police voting on the site. Voting rings and collusion are a huge problem; the incentive to spam things onto HN is very high.

Flags aren't as powerful as you think they are. I flag lots of things but rarely notice an impact if the story already has traction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Flagging does seem very powerful and I've seen quite a few 'Show HN' and similar posts flagged off of the front page for seemingly no reason.

I assume bitter/jealous people are doing the flagging but who knows.

<comment><USER4> This is probably true. At least when it comes to articles about fitness, when they fall off the front page I always assume that some overweight guy got annoyed and flagged it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was going to make a new post about it and saw yours. Yes, I agree that it's a TREMENDOUS annoyance. We were just having a great discussion in the student loan thread, and within 30 minutes it fell of the front page despite having over 200 upvotes.

Same thing has been happening with articles on certain topics, such as fitness.

<comment><USER2> If you're already having a great discussion, why are you getting upset about the thread's position on the front page? The discussion you want is happening.</comment></comment>


Get Ready for More Clever Domain Names, .ng Domains Are a Go - <AUTHOR> http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/get_ready_more_clever_domain_names_ng_domains_are_go <comment><USER2> Currently insofar as I can see, only third-level domains are offered: "Registrations are made at the third level beneath second-level names" (Wikipedia, and looking at registrars).

Is the news that [something].ng are _also_ going to be available now?

<comment><USER3> Second-level domains are now available through an 'auction process' that starts with a minimum bid of $33,000 and a "buy it now" price of $55,000: See [http://nira.org.ng/media/pdf/NIRA%20AUCTION%20PROCESS%20Marc...](http://nira.org.ng/media/pdf/NIRA%20AUCTION%20PROCESS%20March%202010%20v1.pdf)

The first one was registered by a local newspaper: <http://www.thisday.ng/> (current domain: www.thisdayonline.com)

<comment><USER4> DOMAIN ASSISTANCE

ATTN: SIR/M

I am certain you will be surprised to recive this mail from me, indeed, I sincerely apologize for the embarrassment this might cause you. However, I wish to state, that it is sincerely necessitated by my present plight and I pray you will readily be of tremendous assistance.I am Mr. BEN CHRISTOPHER kuruneri, from Nigeria and the son of Mr Christopher kuruneri who until recently was the Honorable Minister Of Internet Services in the present Goodluck Jonathan Government in Nigeria.

Precisely, on The 24th of December 2010, the security goons of President Goodluck Jonathan in what was an excessive and unprecedented use of force arrested my father while still a Government Minister at our family house in Harare. He was arrested on the allegation that his possession of _over 15,000 valuable .ng domain names, worth over Ninty Million Rand (i.e. US$ 24 Million)_ was illegal.

We firmly and Christianly dispute such allegations, however it has become necessary for us to raise funds to prepare a defense in these matters.

It is with great sadness that we must announce the immediate AUCTION OF VALUABLE .NG WEB PROPERTIES each one appraised for at least US $200.000,00 for a cost of merely US $33.000,00 (THIRTY THREE THOUSAND AMERICAN DOLLARS).

Please do contract me directly forthwith for related lists and money transfer instructions. Do accept my highest considerations. I look forward to hearing from you.

God Bless,

BEN CHRISTOPHER kuruneri

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft's Bing better watch out for bi.ng

<comment><USER6> Trademark law may force whomever claims it to turn it over anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fucki Manufacturing Concern will jump all over this.

</comment><comment><USER8> $33,000? Can you bribe the domain registrar to get it for cheaper?

</comment><comment><USER9> exciti.ng</comment>


A poem where every word is pronounced the same - <AUTHOR> http://expectlabs.quora.com/A-Poem-In-Which-Every-Word-Is-Pronounced-The-Same

<comment><USER2> I taught English in Beijing one summer, and a student wrote this poem for me on a big piece of butcher paper. My Chinese is mostly gone now, and honestly it was never good enough to understand the whole thing, so I'm delighted to find a transcription with the pinyin and English translation. I still have the poem 14 years later. Pretty amazing accomplishment!</comment>


Military Prison Blocks Chelsea Manning from Reading EFF Blog Posts - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/military-prison-blocks-chelsea-manning-reading-eff-blog-posts <comment><USER2> Moderator! This post had gathered 10 upvotes in less than 20 minutes when I came across it. Why is it nowhere to be found in the main feed?

<comment><USER3> I remember reading a comment a few years ago that posts get penalized for acquiring too many votes too quickly

<comment><USER2> Interesting to know. Seem prone to some very damaging false positives.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: sixaday a minimal todo list app to keep you focused (ios) - <AUTHOR> http://vry.hu/UwDp/3bdvOwAF

<comment><AUTHOR> Any comments welcome!</comment>


The Kik SDK: Build Real-Time Sharing into Your App in 10 Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.kik.com/blog/2011/07/the-kik-sdk/

<comment><USER2> "…and then press a button that invokes Kik Messenger, which lets me send the drawing to you."

... So... Not "real-time"?

If Sketchee were real-time, you would both be drawing at the same time and each person would see the changes immediately.

This is a messaging system, not a real-time sharing system.

<comment><USER3> You could think about it as 'real-time' in the sense that you can see the _status_ of the sharing in 'real-time' - i.e. within Kik I can see if the content has been sent/delivered/read (vs sharing via something like email where it's not clear if it's been looked at). But ya, it's not a real-time unbroken pipe between your app users.

<comment><USER2> You mean "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The real problem is what happens if Kik is not installed on either end. The hassle that the user would go through to get it working is something that probably 95% of users will not bother with, unless what they were sharing were extremely critical.

</comment><comment><USER5> This will set Kik apart feature-wise from iMessage and other push-IM-on-a- phone apps.

I'd imagine this is part of their strategy for surviving iMessage. June 6 was probably not a fun day at Kik HQ.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I looked around, and there doesn't seem to be any other chat applications with platform functionality. This is a great move.

<comment><USER7> Well, technically speaking, the BBM SDK is also open to external developers.

That said, BBM is BB only and I'm not sure how well do they do real time _content_ sharing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As soon as I read the title I thought of exactly what application I wanted to build with it. Upon reading the article, I promptly found out that my idea already had a name: "Sketchee". Oh well....

<comment><USER9> Well, Sketchee is probably the simplest app imaginable. You can build out on top if it. For instance, a canv.as derivative app, where you could prepopulate most popular meme images and let people create and share photobombs with their friends.

Also, basic things like location & media sharing were intentionally left out for third party app developers to get creative with.

<comment><USER8> No, you are definitely correct. I've got some other added-value ideas that would be cool. I was just a little surprised to see my first instinct was the sample code =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get it. Kik could give me direct API access to their servers. Or I could run my own Jabber/XMPP servers. What's the benefit of piping through another App on the client?

<comment><USER9> In a similar fashion, Amazon could give you the physical keys from their AWS datacentres or otherwise you could just buy some hardware, install linux on all of them and run your own cloud infrastructure.

It's exaggerated, of course, but i hope rationale behind the api is more clear this way :)

<comment><USER10> I'm saying that [Client A -> Server -> Client B] is better than [Client A -> Kik Client A -> Kik Server -> Kik Client B -> Client B].

<comment><USER11> I think the benefit is that in the first scenario, you have to maintain the server yourself. In the second, you only have to worry about the clients. It's definitely a trade off, but for some developers, the benefit of not having to maintain server infrastructure might outweigh the cost of the added complexity of going through Kik.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is such a cool idea. Make the instant messenger of kik more of a platform and less of an app. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do I understand correctly that both parties need to have Kik installed on their phones as well?

<comment><USER14> Yes, you are correct. The 'pipe' needs to be connected at both ends :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool!

Maybe this is obvious to everyone else but just to confirm with the OP: does the SDK allow me to add chat functionality to my app or is it mainly for content right now?

<comment><USER9> It is designed for content - textual & binary. While I can imagine an ugly fugly way to overload the api and use it for chat functionality within your app, but then it would make for a really bad user experience within your app.

This version of the SDK was designed with the sole intent of content sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's always beneficial if a company can ascend to platform status, but are there enough Kik users today to attract developers? It is a great concept, though.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty sweet!

Looks like an easy way to get $5k to me: <http://kik.com/dev/contest.php>

<comment><USER17> And now go find a designer to help you out on weekendhacker :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great next step for a great new App! Go KIK some butt!

</comment><comment><USER19> Sweet, now that means Kik will get all the functionality other apps have and more (like location and contact sharing etc)

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how well this will work for gaming.

<comment><USER21> The current implementation will work really well for turn based games.

Currently, it isn't a drop in network layer for synchronous multiplayer or anything, but this is only the first release :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> unfortunately anti-semitic name</comment>


To travel the world at 90% off, join an airline - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-travel-the-world-at-90-off-join-an-airline-11563960600?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> If I could work part time for an airline to get this benefit, I would.</comment>


Autopsy Findings and Venous Thromboembolism in Patients with Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2765934/autopsy-findings-venous-thromboembolism-patients-covid-19-prospective-cohort-study <comment><USER2> I've been reading reports that the virus causes endothelial damage to various organ systems and vasculature.

I wonder if the virus leaves behind permanent damage even among those who recover. I would hate to get the virus and be left with a permanently weakened heart and lungs.

I'm not a doctor or researcher, but it seems like we're still too early in this to know what the long term impact will be.

<comment><USER3> There was an Austrian article about recovered divers on HN another day. Their lungs weren't suitable for diving anymore. This is not the same article, but cites same doctor: [https://divernet.com/2020/04/25/covid-19-lung-effects- worry-...](https://divernet.com/2020/04/25/covid-19-lung-effects-worry-diving- doc/)

Edit: typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The causes have been explored on medcram.

Summary of the process is here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOlVkES_kC8&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOlVkES_kC8&feature=youtu.be&t=1262)

</comment><comment> throwmNOmd-01 Wonder if they checked for people with blood clotting mutations and what it means for this group. I assume an even higher risk?

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

</comment><comment><USER5> > Autopsy revealed deep venous thrombosis in 7 of 12 patients (58%) in whom > venous thromboembolism was not suspected before death; pulmonary embolism > was the direct cause of death in 4 patients.

Would taking small amounts of asprin be a reasonable preventative measure (in addition to more sensible measures like, "staying home" and "washing your hands")?

<comment><USER6> In the general population? No.

You could give aspirin to the entire population to prevent heart attacks and strokes, and for every life you save from heart attack or stroke you prevent, you'll kill someone else by bleeding in the gut or brain. I don't know what the total risk of a severe outcome from COVID19 is, but the risk of serious bleeds on aspirin is 1/200\. That's high.

Edit: I should probably add that the aspirin bleeding risk is not "1 aspirin out of 200 causes bleeding", but rather 1/200 people who are on daily aspirin to prevent heart issues will develop serious bleeding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most important lines:

"Setting: Autopsies performed at a _single academic medical center_ , as mandated by the German federal state of Hamburg for patients dying with a polymerase chain reaction–confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19."

"Patients: _The first 12 consecutive COVID-19–positive deaths_."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this stood out. The same judgement applied to a selection of cases that is not hand-picked (first N cases, except for having to choose a value of N) sounds like a good basis.

Maybe something good comes out of this, e.g. saving patients by treating them with anticoagulants preventively or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. But we need more deep dives like this. The sample size here is too small.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Flu" hit me hard at the beginning of the year or end of 2019. Dry cough, etc...

"Flu" hit hard my mother that was vaccinated against flu

My father, as usual, didn't even noticed any flu. He was following a sintrom preventive treatment... a standard practice in several countries like... mumble, mumble. Let me take a look to something...

Uh, oh... _" Warfarin was used predominantly in the UK and Italy (74.9% and 62.0%, respectively), phenprocoumon in Germany (74.1%), acenocoumarol in Spain (67.3%), and fluindione in France (61.8 %)"_.

Source (2014): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24651882](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24651882)

How long it would take to cross "anticoagulant type of treatment" databases (including "none") with "killings by covid"?

<comment><USER10> I don't follow. Could you ellaborate?

<comment><USER9> We have a single virus, but it does not behave the same. The difference can be structural, but maybe there is a second agent that acts as _modifier_ and is unknown.

If we take a look to the countries affected by coronavirus we can easily spot groups. For example, US, Iran or Brazil would fall in the same group IMHO in some aspects.

In Europe we could see Germany, then Spain+Swedden+Netherlands, then Italy+UK, and a strange outlier

At this moment we don't know where lies the difference between the number of infected cases ending in death in Germany (4% only), Spain (11%), Swedden and Netherlands (12-13%), Italy (13%) or UK (15%).

France, the outlier, has a 19%.

If we take the official data, France is one of the worst countries to be in Europe and maybe in the planet when you are positive (maybe french people should take extra measures to not enter in that group). Something is happening there.

One explanation could be that France has a bigger amount of deaths by frustrated hospital staff leading to a worse care, or even the appearance of solitary "angels of death".

The other explanation could be that they are simply missing lots of positives. More than the other countries.

This can be accidental or on purpose. If the former they aren't paying enough atention to this point, if the later, they could be simply applying several layers of statistical make-up to their data, maybe for the political goal of keeping the country in a lower position in the worldwide range. In a similar style that what UK did for weeks.

In this case, we could wake up one morning to see a +2000 increase in France deathcount.

Lets change the subject. It seems that blood clots have a relevant role in mortality. Well, Many countries, in Europe at least, have preventive programs that put a sizeable amount of elders in an permanent anticoagulant treatment to avoid heart attacks.

After the link above, It seems that each major group of countries in Europe _favour a different product for that_ , and Italy and UK _use the same product_. Some products must be better than other by definition. This anomalies warrant further research in my bumbling opinion

<comment><USER11> Look at the number of tests by millions of people.

France has a very very low test count per millions. Basically you can only be tested once you are hospitalized or in rather bad shape.

On the other hand Germany is testing much more generously.

Simply put the number of confirmed case cannot be compared between countries.

Likely France has about 4 times the number of German's case only unconfirmed.

<comment><USER9> Yep, is the same that I said before... they are missing lots of positives

The frivolous consequence is that France is in "7th position" and Germany in "6th". More serious consequences are that French could have a false sense of security at this moment, and that there is a lot of unknown and hidden damage being done in French lungs that could lead to a mortality increase in the future by "natural causes".

Are they trying to estimate this number?

<comment><USER11> Yes, the number of confirmed case is well known as an underestimation. Some other data are gathered directly from GP, people in emergency room presenting Covid-19 symptoms or nursing home reports.

You can get some official data from there : [https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/](https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Translation: COVID is a bitch. Don't get it, don't transmit it.

<comment><USER5> > Don't get it, don't transmit it.

Unfortunately that's not really a tenable long-term strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [deleted]

<comment><AUTHOR> I've also been listed on papers just because I was a student intern that conducted a part of an experiment and wrote a few lines describing it. My own paragraphs didn't make it into the published paper but I contributed to the research and was credited for it in the authors list. It does not seem wrong to do that - except if you interpret _authoring_ narrowly as _typing things_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know, now it seems like multiple virus idk if it's really just one imho</comment>


The Utah Statement: Reviving Antimonopoly Traditions for the Era of Big Tech - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/the-utah-statement-reviving-antimonopoly-traditions-for-the-era-of-big-tech-e6be198012d7 <comment><AUTHOR> Some further context, background, and commentary at Boing Boing:

[https://boingboing.net/2019/11/18/consumer-welfare-my- butt.h...](https://boingboing.net/2019/11/18/consumer-welfare-my-butt.html)</comment>


Kept alive with tubes for nearly 17 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-01/sixty-six-garage-unconscious-and-anonymous-for-17-years <comment><USER2> My SO is currently in hospice after 6 brain surgeries for brain cancer (4 over last year with her state gradually deteriorating). For the last year she was severly disabled and had to be help with sitting down, standing up, lying down and adjusting pillows and blankets as she had very limited use of her hands and general body coordination. She had to be kept safe while walking. It wasn't as good life as she had before but it was life. She was spending time with family, watching ton of netflix and movies, enjoying meals, especially when on steroids. She even managed, with a bit of help, to throw a party for my 40th birthday in march this year, that was cool enough to stave off my usual birthday downward mood swing.

Now she's lying in hospice bed with only minor control of her eyes and even less of her mouth. Barely concious. At most minimally responsive. Feeding tube, oxygen, urinary catheterer, central venous catheter. She's kept alive and somewhat sedated.

First reccurence she had after 5 years after initial treatment and diagnosis. Last recurrence happend in two months. It's already a month past last operation.

I'm a bit torn because I'm firm realist and I believe no matter how bad life is, it is the only thing that has a value for you because it's the only thing you have. When your life ends, there's nothing else, no new game, not even admiring your high score. Your life has an ultimate value to you and you have to try to make the best of it even if it consists of sleeping on morphine all the time till your body just falls apart.

On the other hand... she wished to die on an operating table under general anesthesia. Unfortunately she had too good surgeon for that to happen. If she were to spend 5 years like that I think she'd wish for her cancer to grow faster.

<comment><USER3> All the love to you my friend. I have stage 4 colon cancer + it made its way into my liver. I've been alive for a year now and I have no idea how much longer I have.

I know what you are both going through. I know what myson & wife is going through, seeing me on my bad days during treatment. Knowing that one day I will leave them sooner than we had originally planned.

No matter how bad things are or appear to be I'm a firm believer that there's more after this life and unfortunately we have trek through the good and bad of this one to get to the end. Besides, where did we come from before we were born?

I only live for today, because this is all I have.

Be strong if you can. It's tough and hard. What we are experiencing is apart of life

Peace

<comment><USER4> I was dx the same 5 years ago. After two years of treatments and surgery with what I thought was the best team in the country (UCSF) they decided that my liver mets were positioned such that surgery would be impossible. But my wife found a team at Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan that specialized in just this case. They resected 70% of my liver and followed up with one round of radiation - I'm now two years NED. Feel free to contact me username at me.com if you want more details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a 58 year old, I think semi-constantly about my need for an advanced health directive. I also now suspect (reading this) that whilst no 15 or 16 year old is actually capable of processing the issues (amygdala) even young people need an AHD.

I'm all in favour of the tubes. My partner is not. If you don't know, then your fate in the system is left to others. The AHD won't give you your wishes but it at least tries to address them.

<comment><USER6> Hard for me to imagine wanting this life. Imprisoned in a state worse than solitary confinement for more than a decade. Life is very good, most of the time, but there are states where less is more.

<comment><USER7> That really depends upon how bright you think the future is.

If you think the future will bring amazing medical breakthroughs and immortality, then tubes is only temporary and all you gotta do is hang on long enough.

<comment><USER8> Even if immortality were to become reality, what incentive could there be to cure the ill?

Perhaps I'm just unimaginative, however I can't really fathom a world in which it would make economical sense to cure the ill rather than simply prevent people getting sick. Economically those with illnesses and/or genetic conditions (myself included) unfortunately seem like a bit of a lost cause.

<comment><USER9> How about we just provide everyone with healthcare, regardless of their economic value?

There is more to life than money. There is more to humanity than capitalism.

<comment><USER8> At what point should hugely disproportionate healthcare be provided to select individuals at the expense of everyone else'e healthcare?

I have Sarcoidosis, a genetic condition that means my immune system literally attacks my own body. It's extremely rare. Should I demand that a hugely disproportionate amount of money be spent to cure me so that I can enjoy this theoretical immortality? Seems a bit selfish. That money could presumably be spent to benefit many more lives beyond my own.

This isn't pro-capatilism reasoning, it's just being realistic and reasonable.

EDIT: To clarify I'm not advocating that we _don 't_ invest money in treating Sarcoidosis (or other rare conditions); right now it's much more realistic and more likely to cause immediate benefit than immortality moonshots! However, down the track perhaps the best investment would instead be prevention in newborns. In which case I'll miss out. A shame for me, but if that happens to be the approach that's going to have the best net positive outcome for society, then go for it.

<comment><USER9> If scarcity was an actual issue, we could collectively decide what a fair distribution of that scarce resource would be. Few things beyond a lottery would be considered fair by most, but we can try.

However, we live under conditions of extreme supply for many things, including most factors that would inhibit healthcare. We rarely need to choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has to be a "worst nightmare" for most people. I came across a guy a very long time ago who had been in a long term care unit after an auto accident for something like 15 years at that point. The story I was told, and I don't know it's veracity, is that he was resuscitated against his stated wishes and the hospital was paying for his care forever. His eyes would open but he didn't respond in any way to any stimulus that I saw. He had a feeding tube if I recall, and breathed on his own without ventilator support. He was a swollen belly with stringy arms and legs as atrophy did it's thing. The nurses moved him around to prevent ulcerations and tended to his "survival". It was terribly disconcerting and I hope to god he wasn't aware because that sounds like hell.

As @ggm mentioned the documents...everyone should get an advanced directive. Anyone can do it and you don't have to have a reason, unlike a DNR which has more restrictions and requires a doctor's approval. A living will/advanced directive is a 5min bit of paperwork you can get done free at hospitals and doctors offices in most places. Submt it for your medical record and keep a copy in your emergency papers. Unsure how much it would have helped the guy above as I don't know the full story, but it's easy to do and important to have. I've seen loads of cases where people were strung along barely or not even "alive" by any metric other than "technically". for months and years and families fought over care etc. Don't put it off as tomorrow might be the day you need it.

<comment><USER11> I suspect after enough months of no stimulus you just go unconscious. Your brain learns to be conscious why wouldn't your brain learn not to be. It's normal mode is to stop caring about noise.

<comment><USER12> Learn morse code so you can communicate with any action you can do, like in Johnny Got His Gun (the basis for One by Metallica)

<comment><USER10> The guy in my story had no voluntary movements so Morse wouldn't have helped. But memorizing:

.-.. . -

\-- .

-.. .. .

Could be useful.

*Cannot format it properly sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _...kept alive by a system that didn 't care enough to learn his name_

While it is ridiculous to me that they didn't do a simple fingerprint check, it's kinda strange to use this language and then go on to tell how the "system" has provided round the clock care for over a decade costing millions of dollars. The system seems to care. I'm sure on the BP side they are just overwhelmed and don't have the manpower to run something like this down.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I'm proud of the "system" for choosing to keep him alive. My wife works in a county hospital here in CA, and I'm proud of the great work they do to save the lives, every day, of the 'illegal' immigrants, of the indigent, of the homeless, of prisoners.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure about system's motivation though. There are 2 "systems" \- the one which pays and the other one, which receives the payment for the care, and this one probably wants him alive for as long as possible. They mentioned it cost 4 million, it's around 20k a month. For a person that takes up one bed in a corner of a room densely filled with people like him. Ignacio would be lucky to earn 2k per month from back-breaking labor if the incident didn't happen, and yet now he generates much larger amount for the system just laying on the bed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Juliana should speak Mixtec to him. She might speak Spanish more in the last 15 years, but Ignacio is more 17 year old kid than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER17> Before it ever comes to that I want to be taken behind the barn and told about the rabbits.

</comment><comment><USER18> so he was mostly unresponsive but could still feel pain. they were doing stuff with his tubes with no pain meds for almost two decades. that has to be one of the most horrifying things ive ever imagined.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was really surprising to me. I'm not a doctor but it seems easy enough to assume that patients in a vegetative stage _can_ feel pain and medicate them accordingly. The risk of over medicating in that situation seems to be outweighed by the risk of someone having to suffer in silence.

The assumption that someone who can't communicate pain is unable to feel pain seems misguided at best.

<comment><USER19> This type of thing is standard in healthcare. Doctors only began saying babies felt pain in the late 1980s, and only then because a mom made a big fuss in the media about it when she discovered on accident that her baby received open heart surgery without anesthesia.

All of a sudden the decades of research that had been interpreted as showing babies didn't feel pain was overturned and new research showed they did.

Medical research really is mostly a series of fads.

<comment><USER20> I can imagine that there are legitimate reasons not to use anesthesia on babies who show no signs of remembering the pain when they've become able to communicate. Anesthesia is not without risk, probably doubly so for a developing brain.

<comment><USER19> So? Does that mean babies don't feel pain? Because that is what the medical profession concluded. Here is a good overview: [http://nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html](http://nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html)

<comment><USER2> You are in an accident and have to be operated on, but using anesthesia would drop probability of survival from 90% to 10%. They can give you instead a drug that will prevent you from remembering pain that has no influence on probability of success operation.

What would you chose?

I'm not saying that this is the exact case with infants. Just trying to illustrate there might be valid reasons to inflict temporary pain to save health.

<comment><USER20> Technically we don't know whether general anesthesia actually prevents you from feeling pain, or whether it just prevents you from forming memories. As far as I know at least.

<comment><USER21> General anesthesia is usually a combination of multiple drugs. We know exactly what each drug does, medical science isn't so good at explaining why the drugs have these actions. anesthetists combine these drugs to suit the requirements of the procedure and the patient

Anesthesia usually includes drugs with distinct, separate actions, like an analgesic (to block pain receptors), muscle relaxants (so patients can be moved/organs accessed), CNS depressants (to prevent unexpected spasms disturbing the surgeon), coma-inductors (so patients don't chat with the staff and freak them out after practicing on cadavers for years), and amnesia- inductors (because surgery is kind of gross).

<comment><USER22> _> We know exactly what each drug does_

We know enough about them to use them safely, but most anaesthetic drugs are somewhere on the spectrum from "not fully understood" to "a complete mystery". Science knows how anaesthesia works in the same sense that I know how a car works - I can push the pedals and turn the wheels with sufficient proficiency to get to the grocery store in one piece, but I'll be damned if I can explain what's happening under the hood.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778226/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778226/)

<comment><USER21> yes, if you quote the next part of my post:

> _medical science isn't so good at explaining why the drugs have these > actions_

you can see I'm in full agreement

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Insane! Stories like this one make me question if it should be a requirement for every person to have on file his/her AMD for situations related to this outcome. People shouldn't fear death or existence may be an extreme prison of torture. Why people continue to allow this is beyond me. Heck only till recently in all of humankind has this kind of torture become a thing. Geese..

<comment><USER24> >Why people continue to allow this is beyond me.

If, in the end, the patient recovers, what a happy ending that would be! And we might learn how to better assist others in this condition.

The alternative is giving up forever on such cases. This is also partly why I lean "against" on euthanasia.

<comment><USER25> And I'm so happy I live in a country that permits Euthanasia. And the rules for it are clear: (some of them) 1\. Intolerable suffering 2\. No outlook on any improvement

There are cases where people recover after years being in coma. However, there are many, many, many more people in the same state who never recover, who are just plants.

Life is not sacred. Quality of life is.

<comment><USER26> _And the rules for it are clear_

3\. Patient's affirmative consent (antedated if need be)

I too am happy to live in a country with a humane policy towards voluntary end-of-life, but this is not a clear cut case where euthanasia would apply: this is a patient with at least some consciousness left, but that no court would find competent to make decisions, and with no known relatives (up until the reporter found one).

The question then becomes not only whether the required conditions for euthanasia apply, but also whether the state-appointed legal guardian has the mandate to make such a fundamental decision on behalf of the patient. Personally speaking, granting that kind of power to a government representative is not something I'm comfortable with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What a sad story. I'm glad the reporter bothered to find out this man's name.

</comment><comment><USER28> _He could hear, but he couldn't understand language._

English wasn't his first language. Or even second.

That has to be complicating things.

<comment><USER29> Read a bit above the quote:

> With the help of a video interpreter, Schnakers gave Ignacio a series of > commands.

<comment><USER28> _At home, the family spoke Mixtec, an indigenous language; at school, Ignacio learned to speak Spanish. He was the only one in his family who went to school past the primary grades._

And he's spent about half his life in the US with extremely limited ability to interact at all and probably mostly hearing English.

What language do you think he's supposed to be capable of responding to? One of the two he grew up with, but hasn't actually used in half a lifetime?

There are documented cases of people with head injuries losing the use of one language they knew but not another.

I have a serious medical condition and I grew up in a bilingual home. I've had incidents where I was exhausted and stressed out and could not speak English for an hour or more, only German, though I'm not especially fluent in it.

I don't care what language you use with Ignacio. He's probably not mentally fluent in any of them anymore, having nothing to do per se with how impaired his brain is and everything to do with the fact that he's probably mostly not heard either Mixtec or Spanish for half his life and has instead been immersed an English-speaking environment with which he mostly couldn't interact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I look at my family and I can't imagine the date of that family.

12 kids, mom and dad and 9 kids dead...the others scattered :(

</comment><comment><USER31> What an incredibly beautiful and humane article

</comment><comment><USER32> I've signed legal documents to prevent this happening to me in the future. I have not signed a DNR, but I'm certain I would never want to be kept alive arguably against my own will and the will of the natural world.

After watching my grandfather succumb to Alzheimer's I'm relatively certain we've taken some forms of hospice and medical science too far. Albeit, extending the life of our bodies past the reasonable lifetime of our brains.

<comment> david-gpu > I would never want to be kept alive arguably against my own will and the > will of the natural world.

I get what you are saying, but let's not forget that "the will of the natural world" includes dying as an infant from diarrhea, an untreated fever, etc. There are plenty of diseases which are now easily treatable and yet killed millions until a century ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> wow. this an incredibly moving story... so bittersweet.</comment>


Show HN: Placemeter Sensor – count people, bikes, and cars in real-time - <AUTHOR> http://get.placemeter.com/sensor/ <comment><USER2> I'm a fellow New Yorker, and have been familiar with Placemeter for a while. Really like the concept, seems like it could grow in a ton of different directions.

Maybe it's there on the site and I just missed it, but what is the one-liner overview of how the sensor works? Does it detect mobile devices?

<comment><USER3> I couldn't find it anywhere on their site, but when I googled, I found their FAQ page. Apparently the sensor is really just a pre-configured ip camera. Per their faq page, you could even use your own ip camera, or send them video files. They process the videos and provide you with access to the data through an API.

I'm a bit less excited about this now. I thought this was something like an advanced motion sensor, with some processing built in to distinguish between people, bikes, and cars.

[https://www.placemeter.com/faq](https://www.placemeter.com/faq)

API:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/11GVyJaKvCXPfhH70TkKo3-Dd...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/11GVyJaKvCXPfhH70TkKo3-DdjsSrzaoYm3U00pswUy8/edit#heading=h.8wr4rugur1m8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. What do your false rates look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> The quality of the view and the angle determine a lot, but generally our accuracy is above industry average for human counters and other systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your links are busted on Chrome.

<comment><USER6> I can confirm this, too.</comment></comment>


Qt for Python available at PyPi - <AUTHOR> http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/07/17/qt-python-available-pypi/ <comment><USER2> For people interested in an example of a Qt app, check out (my) cross-platform file manager [https://fman.io](https://fman.io). It currently uses PyQt. I hope Qt for Python will become stable enough so I can make the switch.

Developing cross-platform desktop apps is hard. To help with this, I open sourced my build system [1]. It lets you release (Py)Qt apps in minutes instead of months. It aims to make (Py)Qt a more viable alternative to Electron. It already has preliminary support for Qt for Python, and I want to expand it in the future.

[1]: [https://build-system.fman.io](https://build-system.fman.io)

<comment><USER3> Just FYI: I saw this comment and:

1) went to your link -> intensive blinking, firefox reporting that it "forbade access to graphics card" for whichever reason

2) Was impressed that Windows file is only 1 MB (turns out the installer downloads a lot more than that, which is ok but could be mentioned)

3) Started the program and agreed with tutorial

4) Followed tutorial to C:\Users\myusername\Desktop

5) Followed tutorial by pressing Backspace -> program stopped working and crashed

No hate intended, but if you want people to use this, you should probably think about fixing some of the steps to be less cumbersome :).

FWIW the program looks cool.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the feedback.

1) No idea why that happened. I'm really not doing anything special on the web site.

2) You're right, sorry. The Windows binary is an online installer. I'll update the web site to mention that once the load is off the server.

5) Hm... Sorry about that. Would be extremely interesting to know if this happens on your computer every time. It's probably too much to ask since you already uninstalled, but if you have a few mins, can you try again?

> if you want people to use this, you should probably think about fixing some > of the steps to be less cumbersome

That's literally what I spend my days working on. Desktop apps are a lot of work...

> FWIW the program looks cool.

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Went back and installed a second time. The web page no longer blinks and after the installation finished, the program did not crash and I was able to finish the tutorial.

I wanted to try a third time, but after a third reinstall, the tutorial no longer pops up. Is there a way to clear EVERYTHING away and try again as if this was a new computer?

<comment><USER2> Thanks! You can close fman and delete the data directory [1]. Or, you can start the tutorial again via the Command Palette [2].

[1]: [https://fman.io/docs/data-directory](https://fman.io/docs/data- directory)

[2]: [https://fman.io/docs/tutorial](https://fman.io/docs/tutorial)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just started developing a Python app with a GUI and the faff around getting in running on other developer machines was crazy!

"Install PyQT and QT Framework, no not that version, no not that one? Your on Fedora? Oh okay, add this rpm repo, no the developer version"

The ability to install it through Pipenv should make this easier, right?

<comment><USER5> If you're distributing your app which relies on native libraries you've got two options really. Either make sure you support all the dependencies on supported systems, or distribute with dependencies vendored. If you're going with the second option, maybe Flatpak could help you?

I don't believe pipenv really solves these issues.

<comment><USER6> I'd say if you're going with the second option, stop, think, then go with the first option. This would mean either limiting your supported systems to recent ones or limiting the features you use to those available in whatever "enterprisy" (i.e. RHEL / Debian stable / LTS) versions you want to support.

If it's a GUI app, there's a good chance you can ignore the enterprisy distributions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just curious how this is different from PyQt.

Used to use PyQt on a bunch of projects. It was a fairly decent framework. Not bad for native-looking UIs.

<comment><USER8> For open source projects, it is available under LGLP, which is less restrictive than PyQt's GPL.

It's also available under the commerical license, too, so customers don't have to purchase from the Qt Company AND PyQt.

<comment> cup-of-tea > For open source projects, it is available under LGLP

And how does this make the slightest difference for open source projects?

<comment><USER9> They can chose any open-source license. With PyQT being under GPL you're force to use the GPL, too (you can always dual-license though).

<comment> cup-of-tea > you can always dual-license though

Exactly. So no practical difference. Just a religious one.

<comment><USER9> Well, the second license isn't that useful, as no one could distribute the code under it, as long as it's still using PyQt (and he doesn't buy a license).

Also you can't include non-GPL compatible code (Apache is incompatible with GPLv2 for example).

<comment> cup-of-tea Why would you want them to distribute it? Distribute under GPL, offer a proprietary licence and they'd have to buy the proprietary licence to Qt too.

<comment><USER9> Which is a practical difference.

<comment> cup-of-tea Only for those who don't want to contribute to open source. If we're just talking about open source it doesn't matter.

<comment><USER9> open-source != GPL-licensed

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of interest: Since ~two years or so you can actually pip install PyQt on major systems, since they made wheels available. Note how PySide2 is wheel-only on pypi as well.

<comment><USER10> Nowadays there is also Qt.py, "API-selector-as-a-package": [https://github.com/mottosso/Qt.py](https://github.com/mottosso/Qt.py)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please add a project description on your PyPI entry :)

[https://pypi.org/project/PySide2/#description](https://pypi.org/project/PySide2/#description) (currently empty)

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes ! Super good work, long awaited !

In these times of web stuff, it's really nice to work with a framework that is absolutely stable. (well, except Qt5 is quite a change :-))

</comment><comment><USER13> The whole package is 166.4 MB for Linux (PyQt5 is 117.9 MB ). This is even much bigger than Electron's base bundle size. This matters much for Linux devs who want put everything into a single package (e.g. AppImage) to avoid dependency problems in each Linux distros. I hope Qt would divide Pyside 2 into components (for example, QML) so that devs can easily optimize their package size.

<comment><USER14> This includes _everything_, including webengine(which bundles chromium). It's not ideal, but Pyinstaller prunes unused libraries, so Pyinstaller bundles shouldn't be too large.

<comment><USER13> Oh, I didn't know about Pyinstaller actually. I am going to look at it. Thx!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't find any mention of commercial license pricing anywhere, can anyone enlighten me?

Because python links dynamically, I believe it's possible to use python Qt bindings commercially without a commercial Qt license. Does pyside2 support this?

<comment><USER16> This is PySide, which is LGPL - so you shouldn't have any trouble using it commercially.

<comment><USER9> Note that you can use the GPL commercially, too. It matters only if you want to license under anything non-GPL (which admittedly most commercial projects do).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great, but I do wonder if the lifespan of Qt and other frontend frameworks is somewhat limited. UI development seems to be converging more and more on the web stack (HTML/CSS/Javascript)

<comment><USER18> With WebAssembly and other recent developments, I think that the opposite is going to happen in the future. We are (hopefully) going to have native (online) apps.

<comment><USER19> What makes you think so? WebAssembly is about making it possible to compile from any language into subset of javascript (which is well JIT-table), it doesn't say nothing about neither which layout/gfx engine the apps will use, nor about any ISA. Many want the bindings to DOM, actually.

<comment><USER20> WebAssembly + Canvas/WebGL.

[http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/22/qt-for-webassembly- example...](http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/22/qt-for-webassembly-examples/)

[http://platform.uno/Playground/index.html](http://platform.uno/Playground/index.html)

<comment><USER21> Would a less-specialized rendering engine not be even less performant if trying to make web-app like things?

<comment><USER20> What web-app like?

If browser vendors don't change course in regards to WebAssembly's roadmap, Flash and Applets are back, just give it one more year to mature the eco- system.

<comment><USER21> Seems unlikely. Developers are already using the DOM model outside of the browser entirely a'la Electron because in modern times it's such a productive and accessible development environment. I can't imagine we'd try to bring back the pain of Flash. What we have now is drastically more portable and a delight to use compared to that era.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Web Audio DSP Playground - <AUTHOR> https://acarabott.github.io/audio-dsp-playground/ <comment><USER2> would like to see a shadertoy style community site for this</comment>


Bloom Energy files for IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1664703/000119312518190488/d96446ds1.htm <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR

\- Seeking $100MM (could be placeholder)

\- Share price is undefined

\- $376MM in 2017 Revenue, $208MM in 2016 Revenue

\- $281MM Net Loss in 2017, up from a $336MM net loss in 2016

\- NYSE symbol: "BE"</comment>