How to answer "What is your greatest weakness?" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.patchspace.co.uk/what-is-your-greatest-weakness <comment><USER2> Before the interview, write on a small card, "My habit of over-preparation sometimes comes across as arrogance".

When asked the question, hand them the card...

</comment><comment><USER3> I kind of like this question because it fairly allows me to ask something just as difficult back. For instance when it is my turn to ask them questions I could say, "Since I have answered my greatest weakness, I think it only fair to ask: _What is the worst part about working here?_ "

Hopefully one would be comfortable enough to ask that question anyway. And hopefully their answer will be just as thoughtful.

<comment><USER4> And why not? It's a fair question. A seasoned manager will be able to answer that without blinking. "Some people think cubicles suck". "Open environment does not work for all". "This is not the place for someone that does not want to be under pressure to deliver". Easy to answer.

Why would it be uncomfortable to ask? It's dangerous to ask, though. If you ask it in a way that you come through as a smug, wanna-be-clever son of a bitch then the job interview is over.

So it's more of a danger to the one doing the asking unless he/she has good emotional intelligence. It's a fair question to ask.

</comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant What my brain actually understands: _"Please try and fail to tell us why we should not hire you, in such a way that we can pretend to be fooled."_

My greatest weakness? I hesitate between the temptation to spell out this translation to the face of my potential employer, and not having the balls to actually do so.

</comment><comment><USER5> People hate this question, and they should love it. This question is your opportunity to bring out whatever you most want to be accommodated on. That way if you get the job, you are in a good position to negotiate what you need for your life.

Here are some examples that apply to various people I know (I actually have used one of these in interviews, but I won't say which one):

\- I have considerable child-rearing duties, and my schedule has to revolve around that. I have little scheduling flexibility if you need me at odd hours.

\- I am a very social person, I need to spend a certain amount of time every day actually talking with people or I'll go crazy.

\- I am an orthodox Jew, so I have to leave early on Friday night.

etc

<comment><USER6> My line would be (and I suspect many HNers):

\- I need to be intellectually challenged or else I get bored.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but that line is used so often. Same with "I am a workaholic" which many people I know use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _I haven't actually described how you should answer the question What is > your greatest weakness?_

I can know yours; misleading blog post titles, and not answering the question.

If you wish to talk about 'what i think about stupid interview question X' then call it that.

But you don't get to choose your interview questions, and others here have actually given some insight into answering this question (use it to bring up your needs, to ask them tough questions, etc).

</comment><comment><USER9> "What's your greatest weakness?"

"Sometimes I mix reality and imagination."

"And what's your greatest strenght?"

"I am batman!"

</comment><comment><USER10> The whole point of this question is to see if you are looking to improve things. It's not (or shouldn't be) a trap. It's to see if the candidate says "I'm not happy with my X skills, and I'm trying to get better".

It's also a good honesty test.

The thing is, it only works when the interviewer knows it, and candidate doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree its a stupid question. Someone that has 30 years experience as CTO being asked that question I think it would be an insult. But it happens.

If I really like the job and this may be a problematic question, I usually say this (which in most part is true): "I think my weakness is my personal attention to all possible details at work. Yes, I have to admit I am a workaholic. I don't look at clock when working even if its very late evening I need to make sure my projects are top notch buttoned up!"

I know employers love that answers. They dont really care how screwed up your personal life or family relations are, whether you see your kids or not. They care if you are willing to let them squeeze last inch out of you for a paycheck or not. And my answer always work.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, I can't detect sarcasm over the internet.

But, your answer (along the lines of "I'm a perfectionist and a workaholic") is the most cliche answer possible. As an interviewer, I never ask this question to begin with. But whenever someone claims they are a perfectionist, then my bullshit meter goes crazy.

Trust me, employers do NOT love this answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Girls are my greatest weakness. So am I for them. _wink_ "

Be honest, that's it. They will figure out if you are a fit in the team sooner or later anyway.

<comment><USER14> Playing the brogrammer card might work to your advantage, depending on the interviewer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've never been asked that in an interview - and I've been through a few in my time - but I'd probably say something like, "I'm not the kind of person who could be bothered to come up with pat answers to goofy questions".

<comment><USER16> I have the rather normal tendency, for a mathematician, to be a perfectionist, but I have been aware of this for a long time and accept that sacrifices must be made to deliver projects on time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The point is to never give an honest answer. They _say_ they want to know how hear how weak you are but they _don't_ want to find out.

A person who reveals his weaknesses to anyone will be perceived as not dependable.

</comment><comment><USER18> I often response with 'my greatest weakness is finding my weaknesses'.

Though I also regularly answer the 'what will you be doing in 5 years' with 'in 5 years I plan to know what I'll be doing in 5 years'.

<comment><USER19> Your often response is what I think mine is for real. Until I am challenged, I have blind-spots. All the ones that I think would be truthful come off as a canned response, and all the thoughtful responses I think of would be considered long-winded babbling.

I wish the article would go into how to shift the question/answer to make it meaningful. I don't think I will read a book on the off-chance it satisfies this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Answer "Sometimes I work so hard that I forget everything else, including my life outside of the workplace, and I understand that is not always a good thing.". Of course it's BS, but.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the best approach is to answer the question honestly. No good manager is under the illusion that they are getting Superman when they are interviewing you. They know that everyone has strong and weak points, and being honest about what you are and are not good at helps ensure that the position will be a good match.

If you don't know what your weaknesses are, ask your current and past supervisors and coworkers. You should probably do this anyway from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER22> I see my greatest weakness as my temper. This isn't to say I allow my temper to interfere with my dealings at work, but I see it as a great personal weakness.

If I answer the question truthfully in an interview I can see the interviewers immediately lose all interest in me as a candidate. This means I can't answer the question-I have to lie and answer it with interview-speak which I hate.

</comment><comment><USER23> 'in the past I have had problems with ???, however I have recognised that and am working hard to overcome it'

</comment><comment><USER24> To Quote David Mitchell:

"I'm a terrible thief, I just love other peoples things"

I'm not sure you'd get the job though :)

</comment><comment><USER25> one time at an interview when asked about what my "typical day looks like", i couldn't help it and went with office space quote: "i get in 15 minutes late.. space out for an hour... i'd say in any given week i do about 15 min of actual work..." it was a bit of rough landing, and he sort of, but not entirely, got it.. but this was while talking to the hiring manager after passing all technical rounds (2 days of interviewing) so i was pretty confident i'd be ok. it made for a good story around the office months after getting the job..

</comment><comment><USER26> Job interviews are my greatest weakness. I never seem to do well at them.

</comment><comment><USER27> I always answer "bullets" and get a blank stare in response.

</comment><comment><USER28> "I get irritated when people ask me stupid questions."

</comment><comment><USER29> If I'm feeling lucky, I point out that my nick name in prep school was 'hubris' and that I earned it :)</comment>


Petition the EFF to Oppose Software Patents  - <AUTHOR> http://www.change.org/petitions/the-electronic-frontier-foundation-oppose-software-patents?1

<comment><USER2> This petition seems harmful to me.

To start, EFF doesn't support patents.

The <http://defendinnovation.org> site is EFF's attempt to evangelize the idea that current patent system is broken and gather support for changes that would improve the system a lot.

Any lunatic apparently can start a petition on change.org and some did because EFF's (realistic) position isn't radical enough for his taste: he wants abolition of software patents.

Now, personally I would prefer abolition to the reform ideas proposed by EFF but this is not about what is better. EFF probably has to consider things like: does a given idea has a chance of being implemented by congress.

EFF is fighting the good fight. They try to improve the awful patent system and I have no doubt they do it in the best way they can.

Nothing stops the guy who created this petition to evangelize abolition of software patents. He can even start his own foundation for defending internet and civil liberties.

But attacking EFF in this way is harmful. He brings nothing positive to the table and can only derail EFF's efforts by instigating infighting among people who want the same thing: fix broken patent system.

Finally, one can support EFF's reform as well as patent abolition. We would be better off with either one.

Just don't attack EFF for trying to do something about patents.

<comment><USER3> By all means sign both the EFF petition and my petition. Still, EFF has never been the kind of organization that tries to cut deals inside the beltway. They've always been an organization that takes principled positions. Given that reputation, I think the implicit message of their campaign--that abolition is too radical even for EFF to endorse--undermines the argument for software patent abolition. I have no problem with them advocating incremental reforms, but they should also say that the ideal reform is eliminating software patents altogether.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to the actual EFF page for the petition:

<https://defendinnovation.org/>

</comment><comment><USER5> There's one thing about software patents that I've come to realize: If a products sole competitive advantage over otherwise exchangeable goods is algorithmic... Is the world a better place if those insights are kept proprietary, or if they are made public knowledge via the patent process?

Software patents have been misused in many contexts, but for work that genuinely transformatively advances the state of the art, is protecting the right to have a viable business around this insight while making the mechanics of this knowledge public, is that a bad thing?

And just to repeat myself, broadly yes software patents have been awarded inappropriately time and again. But for those true insights, is a world better with a patented computational insight or a proprietary one?

<comment><USER6> For brilliant masterworks that would otherwise have gone unknown for decades, sure. But if I demand $10M for an invention that two vendors could have otherwise independently recreated for $1M and five years each, I have made that disclosure a net loss for society and the industry. The problem is that there's no market mechanism ensuring that licenses are available fairly at lower costs than would otherwise be spent on reinvention. And of course the avalanche of patents which merely disclose the obvious and claim the entire problem, yet can only be overturned individually at enormous risk and (uncompensated!) expense. And the 3x wilful-infringement doctrine over which practitioners are well advised _never to even look_ at patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've flagged this. The EFF already is against software patents and the Change.org petition seems to be a hostile misinformation campaign.

<comment><USER3> If you read the material at defendinnovation.org, you'll see that they do not oppose patents on software. They call for changes to the patent system designed to make software patents work better. Which is fine, but not the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting. I am against Software Patents and find them totally absurd.

Yet I have this one little UI invention that I believe I could get patented if I went for it. (I wont)

I wonder how many of these patents are about vanity more than actual business intent.

<comment><USER9> If you're not going to patent it, publish and/or otherwise disclose it ASAP, to establish priority. Otherwise, in many countries, you can be sued for using your own invention by someone who bothered to go to the patent office.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't change.org just a lead generation website for fund raisers?

</comment><comment><USER11> Petition the Pope to oppose violence.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised the EFF supports software patents...

They're just mathematical constructs, I'm not even sure how they're patentable.

<comment><USER2> EFF doesn't support patents.

What they try to do is to gather support for the reform of patent system via <http://defendinnovation.org>.

What some guy wants is for EFF to instead go for the kill (abolition of patent system).

Why does he feel that he should dictate what EFF does? I don't know.

Did he provide any reasoning as to why EFF should do what he wants as opposed to what they are actually doing? Not really.

Why he started a petition vs. writing a blog post describing his displeasure? Beats me.

To recap: EFF is doing something about broken patent system. They started <http://defendinnovation.org> and are trying to gather support for patent system reform and actually make this happen.

Some guy spent 5 minutes creating a petition asking EFF to drop what they're doing and do something else instead. Because he clearly knows betters.

<comment><USER12> Point number one would only exist if they supported software patents.

Also why was my original post downvoted? I thought it added to the discussion.</comment></comment></comment>


The Design and Evaluation of a High Performance Smalltalk System [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-287.pdf <comment><USER2> They also implemented a fast Smalltalk VM in 1983 which is described in this book: [http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/BitsOfHistory/BitsOf...](http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/BitsOfHistory/BitsOfHistory.pdf). It influenced the Self VM which influenced the Java HotSpot and the JS V8 VM.

EDIT: here is an interesting talk about the Self project and its origins: [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1238853?dl=GUIDE&Want...](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1238853?dl=GUIDE&WantType=Proceedings&coll=GUIDE&part=series&CFTOKEN=60061704&title=HOPL&type=series&idx=SERIES003&CFID=32568898)

</comment><comment><USER3> Browsing the next level up of the URL I also found this [1] that I had not seen before, I have a paper copy of the document for this thread.

[1] [http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-297....](http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-297.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Anecdote: I met David Ungar at OOPSLA a couple of years ago when it was held in Portland. He's a super cool guy and let me pepper him with questions about Self, Smalltalk, and experimental language ideas.

</comment><comment><USER5> The processor described in this thesis, SOAR (Smalltalk On A RISC), has been retroactively renamed RISC-III to explain why the current version is RISC-V.

<comment><USER3> There is also a report on RISC-IV (SPUR) [1] from the same year.

[1] [http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-273....](http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-273.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> self >> java

<comment><USER7> idgi

<comment><USER8> _Self_ was a project that David Unger, the author of the above cited thesis, did first at Xerox PARC, then at Stanford and then Sun Microsystems.

I think _Self >> Java_ means that _Self_ was better, more important, more interesting, more something than _Java_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_\(programming_language\))

[http://www.selflanguage.org/](http://www.selflanguage.org/)

<comment><USER5> When Sun killed Self in favor of Java the justification was that Self needed a 24MB workstation at a time when most clients still had 8MB machines. Java was tiny in comparison.

I complained that Java didn't do much beyond animating an odd little man and predicted that by the time it did half as much as Self it would need twice the memory.

<comment><USER8> Unger gave up his professorship at Stanford at the behest of Bill Joy to move Self to Sun. Then they cancelled the project.

<comment><USER9> I seem to recollect that Dave didn't get tenure at Stanford - that may have influenced the decision to jump to Sun

<comment><USER8> That's not what Ungar himself said in the talk he gave at the VM seminar at Berkeley.

[http://www.wolczko.com/CS294/](http://www.wolczko.com/CS294/)

It's also covered in this Self timeline:

[http://kitakitsune.org/sync/ebooks/SELF.pdf](http://kitakitsune.org/sync/ebooks/SELF.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Albicchiere – The First Smart Wine Dispenser - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/albicchiere/albicchiere-smart-wine-preservation-and-dispenser/ <comment><AUTHOR> Calling all wine lovers! Enjoy the perfect glass of wine at the perfect temperature with Albicchiere. Albi preserves wine for up to 8x longer than other devices, allowing you to continue sipping on it up to 6 months after opening. Albi is also super smart, and can work with your home assistant device to pour you a fresh glass. Sit down, relax, and enjoy a super smooth sip with Albi!

<comment><USER2> That's exactly what I need whenever I want to wind down and enjoy a glass of wine. An appliance that tells me I can't have wine right now unless I solve all network connectivity issues so it can check for important firmware updates.

<comment><USER3> This is a fair criticism of the IoT movement, but it is an unfair criticism of a specific product if there are no evidences of it.</comment></comment></comment>


The Programmable Typewriter - <AUTHOR> http://zachtronics.com/typewriter/ <comment><USER2> This is the guy behind spacechem and TIS-100

I envy Zach so much, he seems to have succeeded in making his entire life about turing machines and different execution models, all while making cool games to boot.

I think it's the dream of many (including myself) to put some basic programming mechanism into everything; There's a bit of magic about having a typewriter print out your output so you can debug it here and there

I do kind of wonder how well this old-school programming style meshes with a higher-level language like Haskell. I can only imagine it being even better. A terse language with huge columns to write your ocmments/debugging. I've seen it done with APL, maybe we need J in there too.

<comment><USER3> He also designed the game Minecraft had heavily "borrowed" from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Daisy wheel typewriters were the first consumer product with many moving parts in which all the coordination and control was entirely electronic. The electronics behind getting the print wheel into position that fast are very clever. The coarse positioning uses a stepping motor, but the fine positioning and and braking involve an analog servo loop.

<comment><USER5> I had some Brother typewriters but I think the most amazing piece of this I ever had was a (Xerox) Diablo 630. Aside from the daisywheel printhead, it had what looked like a 1/2 hp motor to move the carriage. I used to watch in amazement as this monster worked with such precision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool project, but bragging about using a $10 Chinese Saleae Logic knockoff seems pretty scummy. Saleae is a tiny Bay Area company who make a great product and put a ton of hard work into their software, which is then shamelessly ripped off by the Chinese companies selling these inferior knock- offs which even steal their trademark.

[https://www.saleae.com/counterfeit](https://www.saleae.com/counterfeit)

If someone wrote a post about how buying the full collection of Zachtronics games for $5 from a Russian pirate site made them feel like a Gibson novel character, I imagine he'd be a bit less sanguine.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps the Saleae devices (in their beautiful machined, anodized cases) are too expensive if someone is eating their lunch for $10. (The Saleae devices are ~$100.)

I have one of the plastic, "counterfeit" knockoffs, and it works great. It would be a different story if they didn't function, but it is a fine device.

They're just bad at capitalism. If someone printing your company name on a sticker and reusing your USB VID/PID is all it takes to destroy your business, perhaps you shouldn't have that business.

Hackintoshes exist, yet Apple still sells Macs, because they are a great hardware company. Saleae is an overpriced hardware company.

PS: How is the fact that the knockoffs are Chinese or that Saleae is in the Bay Area relevant? I posit it is simply racism that you offer.

<comment><USER8> It's not quite that simple. Saleae wrote desktop software, which is an important part of the product. By reusing the USB VID/PID I'm guessing (I've not looked at a knockoffs) that the knockoffs allow you to use Saleae's software, so you're basically stealing the software to use with your cheap hardware device.

The price difference does seem at the extreme end, but it's a lot easier to copy than to create. Saleae are doing a lot more work on product design, software development, marketing, advertising, SolidWorks licenses and all the other things that the knockoffs don't need to do. In the end if Saleae can't make a profit competing against the knockoffs then there'll be nothing to copy and no software to steal and then the knockoffs will cease to exist too.

Plus they seem to be really good guys, who have worked on this for years and really do a good job.

<comment><USER7> > It's not quite that simple. Saleae wrote desktop software, which is an > important part of the product. By reusing the USB VID/PID I'm guessing (I've > not looked at a knockoffs) that the knockoffs allow you to use Saleae's > software, so you're basically stealing the software to use with your cheap > hardware device.

Except that one can't steal software, and the copying of bytes does not harm Saleae in any way. It harms their expectation of revenue based on software development, but it's not stealing as it obviously doesn't deprive them of their own use of the software.

I guess what I'm saying is that anyone can copy iOS too, but Apple's one-two punch of a) best-in-class hardware (and hardware value) and b) use of DRM prevents it.

Maybe Saleae should have used DRM (but again maybe not, as it could just be cracked).

Really though, the software argument is a red herring, because it's impossible to "steal" software. Making the software is a basic prerequisite for their own hardware being salable. It's a sunk cost. The fact that other organizations can sell compatible hardware at much, much lower prices means that perhaps the value proposition of their hardware is just sort of crap to begin with.

It's lame that the competitor is using their trademark, but I say again: if all it takes is some dude with a label printer to eat your lunch, maybe your business model sucked in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I somehow fail to see how this is more than just an advertisement for his game... I would say it's nice one, but I felt a bit duped.

</comment><comment><USER10> I imagine if you brought noisy contraption that to a hackathon, a bunch of people working together in a room trying to cram out a project, you would make a lot of enemies very fast.

<comment><USER11> I guess that you nave never been to a demoscene event then (or it doesn't count as a hackathon in your book). Lots of chance that there are teams there working in frenzy to finish their demo in time while across the table others are busy boozing till they drop (accompanied by the requisite loud banter).

If a team _really_ need quiet time at such an event, they usually retire to (the basement/a hotel/someone's garage/a coffeeshop).

And no, they don't just hack software demos at such events, I've come across (noisy) 3D printers, pinball tables, slot machines, robots in many sizes and shapes, RC racing cars, drones, you name it.</comment></comment>


Glee – Delightfully Simple Help Desk Software/Shared Inboxes for Teams - <AUTHOR> http://signup.gleehq.com/

<comment><USER2> The Show HN rules exclude signup forms. Show HN requires something people can try out.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, sorry for that, we'll keep that in mind. thanks!</comment></comment>


2013 is the year of NoOps for the Cloud (infographic) - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/why-2013-is-the-year-of-noops-for-programmers-infographic/

<comment><USER2> Coming from a background of having to deal with the highest level of PCI-DSS scrutiny, this makes total sense. It would have been soooooo much easier to just point the auditors to the managed hosting service and say, "ask them, they're the experts." Leaving myself and the other devs to just worry about software security.

<comment><USER3> What happens if/when an issue comes up that the managed service can't/won't resolve? If you can move to another provider that will, you'll have some leverage. But there's always headaches associated with any move/migration and a possibility of lock-in to the provider's platform.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I certainly agree. One of the major problems with taking an application implemented on a PaaS solution to production scale is that you essentially join at the hip the continued success of your core product to the eventual fate of an outside vendor's platform. What's worse is that by the time you realise you've grown too big for the PaaS you may have to expend a huge amount of engineering effort and customer good will to move off, if you even can. Indeed, PaaS providers will try to make it /easy/ for you to make engineering decisions which lock you into their platforms -- and they will present those choices as helpful at the time, which makes them quite insidious partners.

<comment><USER5> This is a very valid concern. We are in the early stages of this transformation and naturally winners and losers will emerge as the market becomes more mature and the big guys begin to purchase and consolidate PaaS.

Rewind N years and you can replace PaaS with some other technology that eventually matured and is now considered ubiquitous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An infographic that outlines "Cloud 1.0" and "Cloud 2.0". In some ways, the opposite of Pinboard's recent down-to-earth view of hosting. (1)

1\. <http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Pinboard's piece is great - but only talks about the past. This piece talks about the future and a "NoOps" option that doesn't exist in Pinboard's piece.

<comment><USER7> No, this article is talking about the first stage in Pinboard's piece, 'The Monastery':

"You run your site on an 'application platform' like Heroku, Azure, or Google App Engine. You design your application around whatever metaphors and APIs the service lays out, and in return you are veiled from all the mysteries of implementation. You never interact with the computer directly, but upload your code to the platform with the proper incantations and it runs. The orders vary in strictness, with GAE requiring that you purify yourself of all worldly design habits before writing your app, Azure insisting you renounce the demon Unix, and Heroku somewhat more welcoming to the fallen. On all three platforms, when your application needs more resources, you press the 'more resources' button. A lot of fancy sandboxing, monitoring and administration tools come standard, and it's very easy to deploy and test different versions of your app."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any sysadmins care to chime in with their view on this? Jobwise are you planning to switch to development in the near future ?

<comment><USER9> Don't sysadmins eventually work for AWS, Azure, Heroku? Certainly they can find something for them to do.

<comment><USER5> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have clarified a lot of the great questions that have come out of the infographic we created here: <http://blog.appfog.com/what-is-noops-anyhow/>

</comment><comment><USER11> So basically, you've re-branded PaaS as NoOps. I'm all for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I think Gartner did that first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> NoOps means "No Operations" in the same way that NoSQL means "No SQL". As in, it doesn't.

<comment><USER12> Makes me wonder if that's the best name for it. What I immediately thought of was: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP></comment></comment>


Design Doc: Use JavaScript instead of TypeScript for internal Deno Code - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_WvwHl7BXUPmoiSeD8G83JmS8ypsTPqed4Btkqkn_-4/edit#heading=h.cx5nx247bag <comment><USER3> This cones as no surprise to me, as TypeScript is a transpiled language. I know this is probably an unpopular opinion at HN, but I am a huge supporter of plain old JavaScript and have never really seen the benefits of DSLs like this. Coffeescript was especially pointless to me when I had to use it on a project. My reasons are simple: debugging becomes much more difficult when you add a layer of abstraction. It compiles to JavaScript anyway, and sometimes it does so in very odd ways that makes it difficult to understand the relationship between what you wrote and what it produced. IMO, straight JavaScript is more than adequate for most scenarios if you know the language well enough, especially with the powerful features built into the more recent versions. In my 20 years as a (mostly) front-end developer, I have not heard any convincing argument in favor of a transpiled JavaScript pseudo-language. Of course there are advantages, but most of these can be solved with better code organization and architecture.

I will say I don't quite feel as strongly about CSS pre-processors like SCSS, which I really enjoy, however I still prefer plain old CSS for the same basic reasons.

<comment><USER4> My team started development of a React SPA. It was initially written with jsx. As we're starting to implement more, I'm finding more and more cases where the js code was wrong; property names that don't exist, wrong types being passed around, and non-existent props being used.

How do you suggest addressing this in a 10 dev team when developing in js?

<comment><USER5> Check out [https://reasonml.org](https://reasonml.org) \- created by Jordan Walke, the creator of React. Reason offers the best of both worlds - <USER2> safety without getting in the way and faster JS than what you'd write by hand.

<comment><USER6> As much as I would shill reasonml. Think before you adopt - it still requires more upfront work than typescript (you will have to write bindings for most things even popular stuff. You might end up fighting it too.) but as parent said, you get more expressiveness (algebraic types, powerful pattern matching, immutability, partial application etc) and sound type system with a speedup on both transpile times and actual run time.

You can leverage ocaml/ml as well as js ecosystem. Mix different files and syntax.

Bsb is also faster than tsc.

<comment><USER7> To add to this, there are at least 3-4 pain points which... are just a pain with ReasonML, that can kinda counteract its type system.

\- non-standard ordering of arguments between belt/standard library

\- Ocaml's standard library actually generally avoiding the Option/Result type, in preference of exceptions, which is unexpected and a pain since it's an ML.

\- package management involves manually adding things to the bsconfig (has this changed?)

\- things randomly break between relatively minor Bucklescript versions, they broke something pretty important in like a .x release when I was messing around with it

\- server side isn't good. It technically works but all the bindings are old or terribly documented, and you never really know if it's not going to blow up at some point.

Otherwise, I actually quite like it! None of those are actual core language complaints.

<comment><USER8> The way it deals with async/await also seems pretty tedious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's important not to read this as a critique of Typescript. Rather, it's a note that it's not a good fit for this one particular performance critical piece of code.

It sounds like they are discussing the central code runner of deno. I would have expected this to be compiled to JS in any case, but it seems like they are compiling the runner, then compiling user code. Of course that's slow. It's also not representative of a normal TS use case, which is unfortunate because I expect we'll see this discussion shared all over the web as an argument for dropping TS.

<comment><USER10> a) Any static type system has things that it can't express elegantly or maybe at all. In my experience, the more "meta" your project is, the more you're going to run up against these bounds. So it makes sense that this could be the wrong use-case for TypeScript.

b) There is a valid, broader point to be made here that while TypeScript _itself_ doesn't carry any runtime overhead (by design), it can in some cases force you to contort your code, so that it can be type-verified, in ways that have a runtime impact. In my experience (a couple of years writing TypeScript professionally) this is uncommon and not a huge problem, but does happen occasionally. It's also worth noting that the vast majority of these cases can be papered-over using //@ts-ignore, "as" casting, etc. if necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I started using Evan Wallace's TypeScript [0] implementation (and bundler) written in Go and it's pretty fast (there are benchmarks too). I'm surprised this kind of thing is not something Deno's pursuing. Having used esbuild I see the future of web tooling as not necessarily written in (or compiled to) JavaScript.

[0] [https://github.com/evanw/esbuild](https://github.com/evanw/esbuild)

<comment><USER12> They are considering switching from tsc to a TypeScript compiler written in Rust[0][1], and `deno fmt` subcommand already uses it internally.

[0] [https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/5432](https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/5432) [1] [https://github.com/swc-project/swc](https://github.com/swc-project/swc)

<comment><USER13> swc is not a TypeScript compiler, it doesn't do any typchecking. It just strips out types and outputs JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> JS engines should be able to ignore TS annotations, out of the box. [https://github.com/samuelgoto/proposal-pluggable- types](https://github.com/samuelgoto/proposal-pluggable-types)

<comment><USER15> It's interesting, I wonder why the proposal doesn't talk about leaving TS code and simply ignoring the syntax using something like babel to preprocess it out (without needing to run the type checking outside of CI).

<comment><USER16> tsc can also do that, but I think there's something else here.

I'm not really sure what this post is getting at. I trust Ry knows the issue better, but from what I've read I have the same questions as everyone else here:

\- Why is Deno defining interfaces and classes like that?

\- Will this mean losing type checking in projects using deno?

\- Why not strip types in development and only check at commit/push/build times?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is quite difficult to make sense of beyond the initial description so I'm not sure about the current status. But it would be a shame to lose valuable type info because compile times are long... isn't there a tool out there that does nothing except strip types from TS files? If you used that you could get quick rebuilds when developing but retain type checking when you do a full build.

EDIT: Sucrase! That's what I was thinking of:

[https://github.com/alangpierce/sucrase#transforms](https://github.com/alangpierce/sucrase#transforms)

<comment><USER18> Hi, Sucrase author here. I'm also having a hard time understanding the rationale here, but it looks like it's maybe a nuance around self-hosting. In general, for any regular TS project, I'd certainly recommend decoupling typecheck and transpile as separate operations and running typecheck alongside lint. IMO one of the nicest things about TypeScript is that you can run your code before you've figured out how to get the types to check out.

They do consider swc (which has roughly the game goal as Sucrase) in the conversation, so it seems like there's some consideration of a transpile-only approach. TypeScript's built-in `transpileModule` is probably the most reliable and officially-supported way to get the equivalent, and is much faster than running TSC with typechecking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this mean that their standard lib won't have types, in the same way that Node's doesn't? I'm not entirely sure how it works but VSCode seems to have types for the Node standard library somehow and it's really helpful. I assume that's Microsoft's work so does this basically mean that unless Microsoft do the same thing for Deno it'll be a worse editing experience compared to Node in VSCode?

Or would the Typescript internals not have been available in that way anyway? It just seems hard to compete on ease of use with Node in VSCode without whatever magic is making the editor so smart - which I assume is something to do with Typescript.

<comment><USER20> No - you don't have to write the code in Typescript to get types - you can manually write type definitions for Javascript code.

In this case it would be even easier since it's already in Typescript and would presumably be a straight port, so all of those type definitions can be automatically generated from the existing code and will just work.

<comment><USER19> I was going by this quote:

> ry So - to make a long story short - we're removing the types from internal > code and making it pure JS this reduces complexity and helps us ship a > faster product. I acknowledge it's unfortunate to lose the type information, > but it's really masking larger problems. It's not going to happen > immediately tho. We have a bit more work to figure out how exactly it should > be done. It's not going to be one big 9000 line file either. But it might > not be ES modules. depending on if we can make that work or not.

The "lose the type information" there suggested to me that they're not planning to ship them at all.

<comment><USER20> I think that's in reference to losing the type information for their own development of that code. I'm almost certain they don't mean they will stop shipping type definitions for the public APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This doesn't seem all that odd. I read this as a temporary solution to the fact that there's some real problems that TypeScript causes for the way their project is laid out and used with regard to certain types of introspection (noting duplicate classes) and performance (it's damn slow).

It's like them running the TypeScript compiler to generate one large JS file and using that intermediate as what people build against instead of the original TypeScript source. I'm not sure if this is what they're actually doing (or if they're somewhat manually doing the equivalent of it), but as a hopefully short-term workaround that allows them to solve the problems, that doesn't seem too bad (but it does possibly highlight some TypeScript problems).

Even if they actually move to a large core JS file that is the active development target, as long as they keep track of the TypeScript specifics (and don't code themselves into a corner assuming something works that they find much later errors), it may not necessarily be hard to go back to TypeScript from that (possibly with a lot of it automated with a lot of structured comments).

<comment><USER22> Part of what's slow is that they're type checking and compiling the code at the same time. Best practice for a project of this size would be to run type checking as a unit test and only transpile during the build. An incremental type check is also super fast, it's possible they don't have caching setup.

To me this reads more like a list of issues in the deno architecture, and how they integrated TypeScript, than any issue with TypeScript itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This makes me generally curious about Deno's architecture/design. Anyone known much about it? Would love to learn more!

I know the JS engine is V8 (C++), and the rest is Rust and TypeScript, but which parts are Rust, which parts TypeScript? Why 2 languages? Is it mostly Rust, mostly TypeScript, or a bit of both?

Also, what are the hardest problems that Deno solves internally? Like if you're working on Deno, are you mostly working on ... the dependency resolution/package management? Automatic compilation of user TypeScript code? The standard library? Something else entirely?

</comment><comment><USER24> What is 'deno code'?

<comment><USER16> As mentioned, Deno is the new project from the creator of NodeJS.

Here, as far as I can tell, "Deno code" specifically related to the code shipped to the developer / user using Deno, the compiler / runtime.

<comment><USER25> deno

de no

no de

node

heh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So, you mean the people who were supposed to make the best choices to fix server-side JavaScript with the ultimate knowledge of what's best just realized that some of their pre-made opinions are actually not-silver bullet?

Shocking

</comment><comment><USER27> This is amazing. I'm legitimately excited for Deno, I will start migrating all of my dependency-less node over soon.

</comment><comment><USER28> At what point are people going to just admit that implementing applications in Javascript outside the browser is a poor idea? The ecosystem has been in this poor state for years. It's not like the ecosystem is getting worse. This is the best it's ever been, and it's still horrible. There's so many better, more mature alternatives with much better ecosystems: Python, Java, C#, Ruby, Go, Haskell, Perl... The list goes on.

<comment><USER29> Your comment is somewhat incomprehensible, because this article is not about building end user applications in Typescript. It's about building _the container itself_ in Typescript. I switched to Node from Java a couple years ago, and to Typescript within the past year, and I have never been on a team that has had this level of productivity.

<comment><USER28> What part of it couldn't you comprehend? I understand what the article is saying. I'm talking about the dysfunctional Node.js ecosystem, which includes Typescript.

In response to your personal experience, I'll share my own: I switched from C++ to Java, to .net, to Node.js, to Typescript. Working on Node/TS I have never been on a team that wastes so much time fixing silly problems that a better language would simply not allow to happen in the first place. I have also never worked on a team that spends so much time dealing with issues in poorly written community packages, or arguing with package maintainers who could never in a million years pass a technical skills test at the company I work for.

<comment><USER30> > arguing with package maintainers who could never in a million years pass a > technical skills test at the company I work for.

So why on earth are you using their packages?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Aw, the famous game design YouTube channel "Design doc" is nowhere to be found here. I thought he was pivoting to dev advice...</comment>


Ask HN: We are launching our first service today - any advice? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
We have been working on our site [1] for about a month and we think it is ready to launch now, but we are not entirely sure how best to go about it. Obviously we have a few ideas but we would love to hear some more experienced opinions.
Many thanks, Sam and India
[1] www.nusic.fm <comment><USER2> Initial feeling, if it's music related, orange and bright colors convey fun and lightness. I'd also play with different fonts. How about making the play button prominent instead of tucked away to the right. Like always on top, header length or bottom hide/show bar.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is actually pretty cool! Nice work.

I don't have any clue about launching but I'd try posting to popular sites and maybe see if some tech sites will cover it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I am very pleased you liked it.

We certainly will try some of the tech blogs, but we are going to start with some music ones first, as that is more of our crowd than the tech audience (we think).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do you do? From your site, it looks like you let people upload songs for others to hear

<comment><AUTHOR> People submit URLs for songs that they like, others can then listen to them and rate them in a HN like fashion.

There is also a play queue that lets you stack up songs and listen while you browse and comment etc. This supports multiple sources seamlessly (so you could be listening to something from Soundcloud and then Youtube - it all seems the same to the user).

You can search for multiple tags at once and a combined chart will be generated and ranked (tagA OR tagB). We plan to support a full set of other operators in the future like AND and NOT. So if you like trance and house but disliked songs that verged on dubstep you could search something along the lines of '(trance ^ house) - dubstep'.

There are lots of other cool little things, but they should be fairly obvious.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What old, discontinued desktop software do you still run? - open-source-ux What are your reasons for running it?
Is it because you've never found a superior alternative?
Is it because you know it inside out and it's the fastest way to do a task?
Is it because it runs fast and with low-memory requirements?
Or is it because it has the best interface for what you need to do, and it's never been bettered (in your view)? <comment><AUTHOR> Winamp 5.1. The last great version of Winamp, released in 2005. After this version, they added lots of junk that reduced speed and usability.

<comment><USER2> I totally agree that this is the last version of Winamp that was great and I love this program.

However are many people have mp3 files on their computers? Everyone I know just uses Spotify or similar tools nowadays and nobody stores actual files on their computers.

<comment><USER3> I download everything. And much of the music I hear is videogame soundtracks or stuff from bandcamp and soundcloud. (OK, I listen from streamed music from soundcloud. But I don't use spotify)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Windows 7 - I like to play games occasionally but I think Windows 10 is trash, I hate MS spying and advertising in my start menu, etc.

<comment><USER5> Do you keep it up to date? Because I'm afraid MS has backported the spying part.

<comment><USER4> I have updates turned off. I don't have any important data on that drive, I just use it for gaming. If I get some kind of virus, I'll just nuke the whole thing and start fresh.

I really wish an alternative to Windows would pop up for gaming.

<comment><USER6> Depending on what games you're interested in, SteamOS can be a decent alternative: [http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/](http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/)

<comment><USER4> I'm already dual booting Linux on that machine, but it's just not good enough for the games I'm playing. I'd abandon Windows in a heartbeat.

I'm also using Windows to run Reaper (DAW).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://textpad.com/download/textpad45.html](https://textpad.com/download/textpad45.html)

I use the version released in 2004. It just does everything the way I want. I've tried many alternatives. IDEs have some cool features but are overall annoying. It's more natural to alt-tab to an ssh window and manage a server or see output there than manage windows/panes/whatever within a monolithic application.

<comment><USER8> I've also been using Textpad since Windows 95 days, I think. But you didn't say why you are sticking with the 2004 version.

TextPad isn't technically "old" or "discontinued". It is regularly updated and released version 8.1.2 back in March.

<comment><USER7> Hard to remember details, but the 5.0 version felt like a big rewrite or redesign because it lost some responsiveness or stability or features or other things I liked about 4.7 so I reverted.

<comment><USER9> Me too, as far as remembering, as the years advance. It was version 5 or one of the major release points, where things really started to "go backwards". Among other things, they changed the way the UI worked, in ways I found not just different but significantly less effective and more cumbersome. IIRC, some of this might have related to changes in the underlying libraries or versions of libraries they were using.

Around the turn of the century, I was using Textpad as part of processing some relatively massive text inputs. It remained solid and much more performant than the alternatives I tried. This including its regex support, which was great for examining, munging/transmogrifying, and cleaning up text data. Particularly text data containing significant variability and some one-off scenarios; having ongoing visual oversight and the ability to rapidly, manually select areas to affect in various ways, was vastly superior to trying to come up with command line / whole file invocations that would create the equivalent impact.

Additionally, other editors choked on the volume/size of data files I was dealing with.

What's that "open" alternative that's so popular? Notepad++, I think. Years later, I needed to "beat up" some text and tried it. Despite this being years later -- more time for development and refinement -- it was nowhere close to Textpad. And while it had a bazillion features and functions built in, I found those I tried to use very "shallow"; get beyond the simplest use case, and they started to bog down and "glitch" with unexpected and/or inconsistent behavior.

I remember trying to use it for some regex manipulations, and having to give up on that feature.

Finally, now that I recall, Textpad was "nagware". You could actually use it substantially and really get a feel for it. I paid for my license gladly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Picasa photos manager.

There really isn't anything that's as easy to use. It automatically finds all the photos on your computer and makes it super easy to scroll through them and make minor edits.

<comment><USER11> Same. I haven't been able to find any decent alternative that will allow me to embed face data within the image itself (such as via XMP) and will deal with the photos all being stored on my NAS rather than locally.

</comment></comment><comment> alok-g Corel Paint Shop Pro 12. It still serves me well, and AFAIK, later versions have not added much anyways. I have a later version which refuses to work with Windows 10, however, this version is working fine!

</comment><comment><USER12> Truecrypt. Yes I know! Been too lazy to find an alternative.

Also budgeting software YNAB 4. Because the cloud version doesn't support imports (wat?!) so I stick with the desktop version. Never mind privacy and cost reasons (do I need a budget line for the budget software!!)

<comment><USER13> You can use this : [https://www.aescrypt.com/](https://www.aescrypt.com/)

<comment><USER12> I wish the downvoters would say why. If there is a security problem with this s/w speak up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Windows Media Center in Windows 8 to watch cable tv via an ATI cable card provide by my HOA. They also include a set-top box but the remote control and guide is terrible.

<comment><USER15> Have you looked into Plex? They support cable now I think.

<comment><USER14> Sort of. I did download it but then saw that their recent cablecard tv feature comes at a cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> µtorrent 1.7, the newer releases became bloated with bullshit and have been too lazy to set up a new torrent client.

<comment><USER17> If you ever consider switching I can recommend [Deluge]([http://www.deluge- torrent.org/](http://www.deluge-torrent.org/)) because works great and doesn't include any bloat!

<comment><USER2> Also: Open source.

[http://dev.deluge-torrent.org/wiki/GitRepo](http://dev.deluge- torrent.org/wiki/GitRepo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I still have Textmate ([http://macromates.com/](http://macromates.com/)) installed for the odd plugin. Javascript decoding, some math functions. I guess I'm too lazy finding the equivalent plugin for sublime or atom editor.

<comment><USER18> My father still uses and old [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_\(software\)) on floppy disc(!) to mirror a Windows 8 (or maybe 10 now) installation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The oldest piece of software I use is probably MP3Gain (looks like it hasn't been updated for 8 years): [http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/index.php](http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/index.php)

It's a lossless mp3 volume normalizer. I use this over ReplayGain tags because ReplayGain isn't supported for all the devices and software I listen to music on, and ubiquitous support is the entire reason I store my music collection in mp3 in the first place.

I'm not married to this solution, but I just haven't found anything that works better for me yet. Interested to hear how others deal with the issue of music volume leveling.

</comment><comment><USER20> Photoshop 7. It still works and it does everything I want it to do. And it's not subscription based.

I also agree with the poster who gets an old version of WinAmp. That's a program that started out fine and the just went bonkers.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm still using an outliner called PC Outline 3.34. My manager gave me a copy in 1986, saying "Here, you're organised. You'll like this" and he was right. I bought a copy and have been using it every day since then for todo lists, shopping lists and functional decomposition. As it's an old DOS program, I have to run it in DOSBox on Linux or vDos on Windows 7.

I'm sticking with 3.34 as the 3.37 version has some bugs and the 1.00 version for Windows has a lot of them.

<comment><USER22> I'm a longtime outliner software user from the DOS days. One of the last outliner software packages I used was Grandview 2.0 by Symantec [1].

Amazingly, just a few months ago I discovered that it has been resurrected to run in Windows using vDOS; there is a package that automates the entire deployment process[2]. I've started using Grandview 2.0 again on Win 7 using this package (which BTW includes a OCR'd scan of the very extensive User manual). It works flawlessly. Unfortunately, data exchange into "modern" formats is challenging (and you're left with a screen no larger than 80x50), so I've not been able to use it as much as I would like. I wish there were a modern incarnation of this or similar software, but it seems DOS software is largely viewed as a dead-end not worth emulating in this era of GUI's.

P.S. I've tried MS Word's outline mode and find it wholly unsatisfactory.

P.P.S. my favorite outliner software was Borland's Sidekick Plus (for DOS).

[1] [https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview...](https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/)

[2] [http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291](http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does Windows NT 4.0 Workstation count? Technically, I don't run it, my work does. They still use it for a few reasons, but mostly cost: it has one job to do, which it does well enough, it's there, and a new system would need some investment.

<comment><USER24> I assume it's network-isolated.

<comment><USER25> I assume you're a highly optimistic individual with a positive outlook on the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> le-flaneur NikonScan scanner software for their professional negative/slide scanners (I have a Coolscan 8000).

It's free, does a superb job and excellent for batch scanning. Never took to the alternatives, so it still has a place on an older iMac.

</comment><comment><USER26> Picasa Linux - because it has some decent filters and even unsupported still pretty awesome.

There are quite a few from KDE 3.5 and Gnome 2 that never got updated to the new desktops that I would like to see come back.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't know if CDisplay would count for me. It still is my preferred choice for manga & comics on PC, but for the last couple of years I used PerfectViewer on my tablet for that.

</comment><comment><USER28> I bet someone is still using Harvard Graphics.

Not even kidding. It gets the job done.

<comment><USER29> I can confirm, I know a teacher who used DRDOS 7, WP 5.1, and Harvard Graphics to make all their classroom handouts.

They use more modern Linux / Debian stuff for actually browsing the web and other computing tasks, but keep several reliable DOS machines for school prep, because of being burned on Windows and Linux having problems (mostly related to poorly timed updates, or fsck'ing a disk) which used up hours on a night when new material had to be ready by the next morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Microsoft Money (2004), running in a Windows 2K virtual machine.

Also, Evernote 2 (2007, before all the cloud nonsense) that's been copied between 3 or 4 computers by now.

</comment><comment><USER31> I still churn out 100% of my code and blog entries in TextMate 2. I've been using TextMate since 2006 and nothing else just "feels" as good.

</comment><comment><USER32> After Effects CS 5.5 because after this version Adobe discontinued the Pixel Bender (HLSL) shaders

</comment><comment><USER33> I have a copy of Visual C++ 6.0 just for fun

</comment><comment><USER34> Picasa (by Google), Especially because of the flexibility of the photo viewer. (zoom instantly with arrow keys, etc)

</comment><comment><USER35> KEdit an awesome text editor that has selective editing features no current editor has.

</comment><comment><USER36> ExamDiff, ColorCop, Notepad2.

</comment><comment><USER37> perhaps foobar?

<comment><USER38> That is still being updated.

Last stable version was 32 days ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> winamp?

</comment><comment><USER40> Avafind Pro when native search doesn't work. It will scan even the system files(and hidden folders) which are typically ignored by default unless you're deliberate about enabling their inclusion.</comment>


First detailed microscopy evidence of 'nanobacteria' - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/irst-detailed-microscopy-evidence-of-nanobacteria-at-the-lower-size-limit-of-life?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8d0828414b-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-8d0828414b-281895037 <comment><USER2> "As small as life can get" is an interesting claim. Without reading the paper I am wondering if life before bacteria wouldn't have to be smaller. Maybe even devoid of membranes. At the very beginning there should even have been molecules which catalyzed (=enhanced) their own synthesis, first a little, then progressively more until you had something like an RNA replication machine...

And then these bacteria come pretty close to virus and cell organelles, raising questions of when to call a parasite "life" or "not life".

<comment><USER3> Prions self replicate, but require the host to have the correctly folded protein.[1] Of course there's viruses too, which are self replicating but need to infect some other organism.

Maybe crystals? Now we're getting in to the potentially wonky question of 'what is life?'

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion)

Edit: grammar for clarity.

<comment><USER4> Prions are not considered alive under any reasonable definition of life. They're infectious, but you can't really call it replication as they just trigger a conformational change in the correctly folded prion protein

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's true. I should not have included the word 'self' with regard to prions.

Are viruses considered 'alive'?

<comment><USER5> No. Viruses require a live host in order to replicate. That sounds tautological, but I'm not sure how else to say it briefly.

<comment> xkcd-sucks It's begging the question... every 'living' organism also requires a favorable environment in order to replicate

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couple of things stood out:

The DNA has been sequenced but the article reports that "The bacterial cells have densely packed spirals that are probably DNA". To me it seems strange not to know the gross anatomy but to be able to sequence the DNA; I can see how it could happen.

Also "The images revealed dividing cells, indicating the bacteria were healthy and not starved to an abnormally small size." but the write up says they appear to need other bacteria to function properly - and suggests the pili are involved in that. If they can stay healthy and divide in an environment without other bacteria then what do they need the other bacteria for, entertainment??

These parts appear to be based on the asbtract viz. " _Ultrastructural features potentially related to cell and genome size minimization include tightly packed spirals inferred to be DNA, few densely packed ribosomes and a variety of pili-like structures that might enable inter-organism interactions that compensate for biosynthetic capacities inferred to be missing from genomic data._ "

<comment><USER7> > _To me it seems strange not to know the gross anatomy but to be able to > sequence the DNA; I can see how it could happen._

As far as I understand, DNA sequencing is about breaking target into pieces and using clever tricks to fish out nucleotydes and determine their order. It seems to me that you don't need to know where and how DNA is exactly located to be able to brute-force its sequence.

<comment><USER6> That's what I meant by "I can see how it could happen". I guess I imagined that they would have confirmed the major features with further microscopy prior to publication; perhaps that's harder than I imagined but once you've seen STM images of atoms it _seems_ like recognising DNA in a sample should be easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mimivirus ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus)), a virus which is actually twice the size of these nanobacteria has already prompted some debate about the relationship of viruses to the kingdoms of "life" and, for some, a reevaluation of what we mean by "life". These bacteria are likely to add to that debate.

</comment><comment><USER9> Genetically these bacteria are apparently not that small--on the order of a million DNA bases. We already know of smaller bacteria with just a few hundred thousand bases (e.g. M. genitalium.) And so from the perspective of "minimal life", these may not be all that special.

</comment><comment><USER10> Midiclorians... finally!</comment>


A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1815287/a-hacker-school-that-helps-solve-silicon-valleys-hiring-problem?partner=homepage_newsletter <comment><USER2> Nice mention of @CodeAcademy. When does it become cost effective to train large amounts of talent at no cost to the students? It could pay off over the long term but I imagine there would be a one-year minimum lock-in to keep students at the company that trained them.</comment>


What are the hottest startups in The Valley right now? - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/davefontenot/posts/10151831177039355

<comment><USER2> Oh FFS, if this were "Ask HN: What are the hottest startups in The Valley right now?" it would be summarily ignored.

At least I hope.

</comment><comment><USER3> hot as being defined by what?

<comment><USER4> "whatever your definition is...I'm trying to curate a really top-notch list. Mainly just whatever your favorite startups are"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> *sponsored</comment>


Tracking the trackers: Draw connections between scripts and domains on website - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@woj_ciech/tracking-the-trackers-draw-connections-between-scripts-and-domains-on-website-360bc6a306df <comment><USER2> Isn't this similar to the post on Automating OSINT - [http://www.automatingosint.com/blog/2017/07/osint-website- co...](http://www.automatingosint.com/blog/2017/07/osint-website-connections- tracking-codes/)?

Think the above has been mentioned on BellingCat too.</comment>


Jon Bentley's in depth analysis of QuickSort (video) - <AUTHOR> http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aMnn0Jq0J-E

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this has been submitted before, but it was a long time ago, and with the recent postings about "Great Algorithms" in which QuickSort was mentioned, I thought it worth resurrecting this.

There are places where I sat open-mouthed at how brilliant this is. You may disagree - YMMV. However, I find that every time I watch or read something by Jon Bentley I learn something new, or remember something I should never have forgotten.</comment>


Ask HN: Apps to document my life?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm a data junkie. I like measuring stuff and analyzing it, but I've usually used paper/pen, or the odd text file here and there. I also recently got myself an iPhone 4, and it seems like a good device. I'm looking for suggestions on which app(s) to download so that I can log daily details about my life, and analyze them later (a data dump would be good) I'd soon like to be able to generate reports in the style of Nicholas Felton (http://feltron.com/); I don't even need them to be pretty, I'd just really like to see key areas and see how I can become a less stressed, more productive person. Any suggestions/tips? Do any of you do stuff like this? <comment><USER2> Felton generates these reports with daytum available for iphone: <http://www.apple.com/webapps/utilities/daytum.html>

see <http://home.comcast.net/~aurametrix/site/?/page/Health_2.0/> for more gadgets

<comment><AUTHOR> gracias, I made myself an account, and am trying out the mobile version.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI: I also just discovered that Felton is making an iPhone app. I look forward to it. <http://daytum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/backend-upgrade/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I use <http://dailydiary.com>. It uses email to help you keep track of personal metrics (either numeric or free-form text). It doesn't have a native iPhone app though (yet).

</comment><comment><USER4> Felton made it already: <http://daytum.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying it out. Looking forward to it. It's a little barebones, and I was hoping it'd take mroe advantage of the phone. I'll report back when I've used it for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> how about <http://ohlife.com/>?

I really dig their unique/creative email data submission tweak. Great idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried ohlife for a while. It's good as a diary, no doubt. I'm looking more at analyzing miles walked, food eaten, words typed, time slept, etc. I figured a device such as the iPhone would make things easier.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable link to Nicholas Felton's site - <http://feltron.com/></comment>


Ask HN: Current role not what I was hired for; how should I handle interviews? - <AUTHOR> When accepting the offer for my current role I was elated. The job description was a laundry list of my "must and nice to haves". Linux environment? SQL & Python? Start-up culture? Build an ETL solution? Check.
Fast forward 12 mos. My new boss had never headed up a dev group and was a business analyst not ETL developer / engineer. Tasking was mainly repetitive, operations work. The only Python code was gross and ended up being deprecated. Anything more than a simple select statement is termed a "custom report". My manager stopped hiring technical people and pushed back on any suggestions to use git or Ansible. Etc. Then came busy season, all operations. Grinding out tickets having nothing to do with development.
Feeling I'd shown I would pull my weight and wanting to move the team in the direction of automation and standardization, I expressed my concerns. That didn't bear fruit so I suggested we call the whole thing off, no harm no foul, as a bad fit. I was asked to keep my head down through busy season, then my concerns would be addressed. Fast forward 4 mos.
I did. They weren't. My boss and I start butting heads because, I just don't agree our tasking is in the best interest of the company. I am not learning anything helpful to my career path. If anything I'm learning bad habits I'll have to un-learn. My salary trajectory has taken a hit. My motivation is bottoming out.
Why not move on after the first warning signs? I was just off a year of funemployment (some personal stuff I won't go into, but it was valid, I had no problem explaining when job hunting for this role), and I didn't want to risk looking like I'm bouncing around jobs in addition to an having a gap in my employment history. I didn't want to leave my team high and dry during busy season.
I'm job hunting now. Interview turns to, "What are you doing now"? I simply don't have anything great to say. And I don't want to break the rule of "don't diss on your current employer". Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> This is the sort of question that can be easily BSed. Say you've been mostly working on custom reports, query performance optimization, or anything that seems necessary but not terribly exciting. The company is cutting back on new development projects, and you are concerned about the future if your department... Something like that.</comment>


Shorten Your URLS with Fracture.it - <AUTHOR> http://fracture.it

<comment><USER2> So, how many of the single character short urls are to this link? <http://fracture.it/v>

<comment><AUTHOR> Each URL gets its own short code, which is generated by the unique row id, using base36.</comment></comment>


Kim Dotcom Teases Megabox, Reveals Exclusive Artists? - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-teases-megabox-reveals-exclusive-artists-120926/ <comment><USER2> Interesting business model. I don't think I'd ever trust Megabox enough to install their applications on my computers.

<comment><USER3> Plenty of people trust, like, spotify, or a mobile pandora app. I wouldn't expect that there's a software trust problem for DRM clients anymore.

<comment><USER3> given <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4576834> i'd like to retract that point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love him or hate him, he definitely makes waves in the industry. I'm hoping this takes off.</comment>


Apple speed bumped the Macbook today. Good time to buy - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html <comment><USER2> Apple is the only company in the world that can charge $200 more for a different color and make it seem like it's a worthwhile upgrade.

<comment><USER3> That's basically what Starbucks does -- they essentially charge people what they're willing to pay by offering $.05 worth of extra ingredients and labor for $1.

<http://www.slate.com/id/2133754/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A vendor telling you it's a good time to buy his product is newsworthy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a vendor just a guy who wishes he could buy a new laptop ;)

<comment><USER4> I am waiting for solid state disks, LED displays and fancy stuff like that to make it into the notebooks - maybe that could help you endure the wait, too ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah a built in flash drive, LED display, and the rumored built-in 3G modem would definitely push me over the edge. We'll probably see some of that stuff at WWDC next month. Of course a Macbook Pro with all that would cost close to 3 grand so it's a tradeoff.

<comment><USER5> I've got a laptop with a built-in 3G modem. It's cool, but the data plan makes it too expensive to use.

FWIW, most companies will throw in a laptop card if you sign a contract for a multi-year data plan

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for the tip. I'm going to pick one up.</comment>


Bevy: A data-driven game engine and app framework built in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/ <comment><USER2> Creator of Bevy here. I just announced Bevy yesterday and the response so far has exceeded my wildest expectations.

I'm happy to answer whatever questions people have!

<comment><USER3> Great start here and a very compelling intro post. A couple of things I wondered about and didn't see answers to:

1\. How ambitious is Bevy as an engine? Do you see it as aimed squarely at the casual-game space like ggez, or do you think it could eventually compete with Godot, growing more advanced features like GI? (I appreciate that competing with Unreal is probably, well, Unrealistic for the forseeable future.)

2\. You talk a lot about keeping the build light, which is great to hear. Does this extend to deployment too? What kind of binary filesizes are you looking at for a "hello, world" game?

<comment><USER4> Video games don't really care about binary size.

<comment><USER3> Some don't, some do. Users living out in the sticks with poor satellite connectivity care about binary size. The HTML5 platform, which I see becoming increasingly important as things like wasm and webgpu mature, cares about binary size because you're potentially downloading it every time you play. It's slightly surreal poking about on itch.io where practically every game is 50 MB, even when most of them are simpler than a 4k demo.

<comment><USER5> I would expect that for most games the vast majority of bytes will be assets (textures, models, sounds, etc.), not code. Even reducing the code size to 0 is unlikely to make much of a difference in the total size.

<comment><USER3> For AAA titles, sure, but there's a long tail of indies, game jam entries etc. For something retro-styled like _Dwarf Fortress_ or _Baba Is You_ , I can absolutely believe that asset size is relatively minor compared to e.g. a Unity baseline footprint.

Harking back to ancient history for a moment, _Frontier: Elite II_ was a AAA title for its day and was basically _all_ code.

<comment><USER6> The days of all code AAA games is over. Binary sizes are still mostly irrelevant. They matter to you, but they don't matter to the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have to say the API seems to be very pleasant and simple at a glance. Kudos to the author!

> Being able to use Rust functions directly as systems might feel like magic, > but I promise it's not! You may have noticed that we do this when > registering systems in our App (...)

> (...) This works because we implement the IntoQuerySystem trait for all > functions that match a certain set of function signatures.

This pattern is a great example of how Rust achieves to be both very ergonomic or dynamic (in the sense of expressiveness) and type safe at the same time.

<comment><USER8> That's pretty cool! Is there any material you'd recommend me reading that gives examples of these kinds of ergonomics with traits as they pertain to, say, vanilla web development?

<comment><USER7> I merely a beginner and learn the language on the side.

Things that come to mind are (incomplete list):

\- From trait

\- derive

\- traits you can implement to convert a data structure into a iterator

\- Deref, Drop traits, MutexGuard

These things appear magical at first but make for very expressive abstractions.

In regards to web-dev: a framework that makes heavy use of traits and macros is Rocket.

As for material: when I'm learning I typically have The Book, Rust by Example and some tabs of the standard library open. Then just go by curiosity. Perhaps not the best approach?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This might be the killer app that finally gets me to use Rust. I've tried so many engine libs/frameworks in so many languages now, and none of them look nearly as complete and ergonomic as this.

I don't really want to have to write my own 3d renderer or ECS because the engine's one is bad or nonexistent... this really scratches an itch for me.

Clojure take note...

<comment><USER10> > This might be the killer app that finally gets me to use Rust.

For me that would be a multiplatform GUI library.

<comment><USER11> Relm looks promising. Actually there are a couple of promising GUI libraries coming up in Rust.

<comment><USER10> Yes. There's [https://areweguiyet.com/](https://areweguiyet.com/)

But I'm secretly hoping for a multiplatform GUI library that covers smartphones too. I realize that might be too much to ask though ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> MIT License, well done! It's so refreshing to see things released with no strings attached. Yes there is value being created, and the creator should be compensated. But, it's such a breathe of fresh air as a potential end user to not have to worry about intricacies of GPL etc. inclusion.

<comment><USER13> Yep, it is so refreshing to have shareware and PD back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is _amazing_. Seriously: I had a look at nearly every game engine/GUI solution in Rust and this is _by far_ the most thought out, ergonomic and complete thing I found.

Color me stoked!

<comment><USER15> Just curious, have you seen amethyst? [https://amethyst.rs/](https://amethyst.rs/)

I'm wondering what you find not well thought out about it.

<comment><USER16> I've tried using Amethyst a few times but never finished anything. Upon each attempt I ended up moving to another language/framework due to the frustration of horrible compile times. Also, while there are lots of comprehensive docs, but the docs were written for a variety of versions so there was a lot of friction to get something simple started. It has been several months since my last attempt, so perhaps Amethyst has improved since then. I do love the promises Amethyst makes and for the same reason I'm very interested in Bevy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Got the chance of running the examples and glance over the code. Also checked the book and docs. As I mentioned in another post about Bevy, it looks incredibly elegant and clean. Almost feels like this could make engine development fun again. And custom engines feasible.

Contrary to popular belief, the need to build your own engine is real for a significant amount of projects. I look forward to being able to quickly put together a few building blocks, customize the renderer and experiment with new systems.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd like to see how it compares to [https://github.com/amethyst/specs](https://github.com/amethyst/specs), a rust-based ECS engine, for use in the multiplayer voxel world game Veloren ([https://veloren.net](https://veloren.net)), or [https://github.com/TomGillen/legion](https://github.com/TomGillen/legion)

<comment><USER19> There's not a particularly thrilling benchmark here: [https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing- bevy/](https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/)

Basically an ECS is not really a secret easy pattern to cache coherent data access. This benchmark shows its fast for the easy cases but says nothing about typical game requirements.

<comment><AUTHOR> ECS has been used relatively heavily in game dev since like late 90's.

<comment><USER19> So? That has nothing to do with the performance of an implementation which is what I commented on. Data oriented design is about managing data organisation to match access patterns in order to best exploit the hardware cache. That requires more design than simply using the ECS pattern. Which is why a lot of generic engines introduce other concepts like Grouping and Archetypes to try to alleviate this. And even if you do use a generic ECS engine with performance sensitive features it's still perfectly feasible to end up thrashing.

Also as a claim I also find this highly doubtful particularly as I've been working as a game developer for many years and not really seen it used on a single project in that time. There's a reason why there are dozens of hobby implementations but no full scale games written using them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Serious sam and a lot of bohemia interactive games are written with ECS.

<comment><USER19> They are? Because you can see the source for the Serious Engine 1 here: [https://github.com/Croteam-official/Serious- Engine](https://github.com/Croteam-official/Serious-Engine)

Looking at that it has way more in common with an OOPish inheritance/composition approach to entities than the ECS view of an entity being a primary key into a data store of components with a pipeline of systems acting in a component centric manner to update the game state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just a note that data-driven is not the same as data-oriented-design [1].

I was trying to see how Bevy embraced data-orientation, but I think it doesn't necessarily do so, since data orientation is more about reducing indirection, for ex., reducing or removing excessive data hierarchies. I think dod is also related to "mechanical sympathy" [2].

Edit: maybe the ECS part is the dod part? I saw the tree demo and it did not look very ECS to me. Maybe it is just the UI? :-)

1: [https://meetingcpp.com/mcpp/slides/2018/Data- oriented%20desi...](https://meetingcpp.com/mcpp/slides/2018/Data- oriented%20design%20in%20practice_Nikolov_MeetingCpp18.pdf)

2: [https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/2011/07/why- mechani...](https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-mechanical- sympathy.html)

<comment><USER7> > maybe the ECS part is the dod part?

Yes, ECS' usually give you at least a good default that is data oriented. At a glance it seems like it does[0]. Notice how some systems (functions) iterate over components rather than entities, which implies a "struct of arrays" layout that benefits caching.

[0] [https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/#bevy- ecs](https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/#bevy-ecs)

Also check here (in their book):

[https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting- started/ecs/](https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/ecs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm getting security warnings visiting the site, on both Firefox and Chrome (though chrome's could be due to an external check, redirects me to malware.opendns.com). "Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER" on FF at least.

edit: and seems like I'm not the only one, as there's at least one upvote already. probably worth checking!

<comment><USER2> Hmm I'm hosting this on github pages, so maybe its related to how they're issuing certs for my domain. I'll look into it. Thanks for the report!

<comment><USER21> It's working today! Did you have to make a change, or did some caches just get flushed or something? I've seen a couple other github-hosted-page issues like this, but I have no idea what the cause or fix is.

<comment><USER2> Nope no changes on our end. Very weird / makes me trust github pages a little less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From the docs [1]

> _" Bevy is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust."_

The strange use of the word _refreshingly_ implies that "bevy" could be related to _beverage_ ... (bevy is Australian slang for beverage).

But apparently this is _not_ the origin of the name...

> A bevy is a group of birds!

[1] [https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/introduction/](https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/introduction/)

</comment><comment><USER23> What would be the difference between this (which looks really cool!) and [https://amethyst.rs](https://amethyst.rs) ?

<comment><USER24> From my limited experience (doing Amethyst's Pong tutorial and glancing through Bevy's home page), Amethyst is more mature and also seems more complex (and presumably more powerful). There's quite a bit of boilerplate to get started, but it gives you very fine-grained control over everything like how assets are loaded, how components are laid out in memory, etc. It seems like it's aiming more for the "real game studio" market than for enthusiasts, although last I checked it's also mainly focused on 2D for the time being.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's funny, I've been doing something similar in Rust. A GUI framework that renders to Vulkan, and at the bottom is an ECS system(multiple systems) for rendering, layout, animation. But this one is very far ahead and looks very polished.

Congrats to the author on great work.

</comment><comment><USER26> Purely a question. So why would I use rust instead of C++ or C# to develop games? what are the potential advantages of that.

<comment> rainbow-road Over C#:

* Garbage collectors often scare game developers since they can lead to hard-to-fix latency spikes.

* Rust has some cool libraries (specs, rayon, etc.) that let you _safely_ parallelize computation.

Over C++:

* It's a memory-safe language, which instantly avoids tons of bugs.

* Library interfaces are usually higher-level in Rust than in C++, for various reasons (sum types being a big one).

* It's a much smaller language, so there aren't any dark corners that you'll randomly be forced to learn.

* It has an easy-to-use package manager, and I'm not sure where C++ is on that front.

<comment><USER27> > * It has an easy-to-use package manager, and I'm not sure where C++ is on > that front.

In the inescapable hell of n+1 competing standards.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean that every langauge has its own package manager?

<comment><USER28> I think they mean that people keep coming along and saying "the existing N competing standards suck, let's make a new one everyone can use" and now there's N+1 competing standards.

A reference to this xkcd [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><USER28> To clarify, for C++ specifically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, I setup a discord channel for Rust GPU programming. [https://discord.gg/YbawFYt](https://discord.gg/YbawFYt)

</comment><comment><USER29> Having spent a good deal of time working in a dogmatic data driven entity component system very similar to this one, I'd like to point out that while it's very aesthetically pleasing to write code like that, it's not necessarily more productive or pleasant than a more conventional 'entity's behavior lives on the entity' approach.

</comment><comment><USER30> Impressive!

this has the potential to be rust's flutter! (Bevy UI)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'd love to see a deep dive on how the Trait extension methods work! Great job!

</comment><comment><USER32> Always want to create a game engine myself, do you know where to start?

</comment><comment><USER33> This is awesome! The focus on productivity really sets this apart.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Github link [https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy](https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy)

dang, do you want to swap the link to github?

<comment><USER34> Rather than the GitHub link, I would recommend this page: [https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing- bevy/](https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/)

<comment><USER35> I've already posted it in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121947) but it didn't get traction :/ +1 on using that URL

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Turtles All The Way Down

Does Rust also compile to the GPU?

<comment><USER36> For now it isnt.

There are people working on this. [https://github.com/MaikKlein/rlsl](https://github.com/MaikKlein/rlsl)

This is supposed to produce SPIRV though, Becy uses WebGPU which has a custom shading language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The original link posted here (the homepage) doesn't really get in to what makes Bevy interesting, I would recommend this great blog post instead that introduces it: [https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing- bevy/](https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/)

Yesterday's thread on /r/rust: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/i7bcwu/introducing_be...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/i7bcwu/introducing_bevy_a_refreshingly_simple_datadriven/)

<comment><USER37> Ok, we'll change the URL to that from [https://bevyengine.org/](https://bevyengine.org/). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Probably a completely silly question but what is the difference between this and the Unreal engine?

<comment><USER39> The size, complexity, feature set and language?

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure if that is an answer or an additional question. If an indie game maker wanted to make a game, why would they use Bevy over the Unreal Engine? It it just because it's different or are there advantages?

<comment><USER40> Rust, ECS-core, slimmer abstractions, less tooling (less to learn, but also less pre-built), less complex as a general rule since its less featureful, which also means less cruft/bloat; unreal engine also has a general preference towards "realistic graphics & FPS gaming", to whatever detriment this means for any other type of game (e.g. afaik 2D games are not well-supported or tooled, and probably never will be; graphics tooling can be dramatically overcomplicated when you're chasing something stupidly simple, like replicating King's Field style billboard-3D graphics), etc

The big three specifically, which is pretty close to the reasoning for choosing _any_ game engine thats not Unreal/Unity probably would be:

1\. Rust

2\. ECS

3\. More likely to understand the damned thing</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pentagon UFO disclosure: The case for taking these videos seriously - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/8/21244090/pentagon-ufo-videos-navy-alexander-wendt <comment><USER2> "Sean Illing: What's the Occam's razor explanation for these UFO sightings?

Alexander Wendt: To me, the Occam's razor explanation is ETs."

This guy really wants aliens to exist, and/or he doesn't understand what Occam's razor is. The simplest solution is that the things in the sky that we cannot identify are star-faring craft built by otherworldly beings...?

The navy videos are weird, don't get me wrong, but it seems like such a jump to say 'alien lifeforms in spaceships are the most likely cause.'

<comment><USER3> If you believe the pilots testimony what else could it be? Some sort of super advance technology being held secret by a government?

Star-faring craft built by otherworldly beings seems a pretty simple explanation. Getting people to accept that is the complicated part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the global sky survey non-profit is a good idea and could have secondary benefits beyond UFO studies. One of the tricks with this is to have a network of sites set up so that motion at one triggers others, so you can get multi-point tracks. This allows you to compute ranging, size, dynamics, etc. You can track satellites, comets, space debris, find illegal drones... I'd support it...

</comment><comment><USER5> We just waisted a couple trillion dollars on sci-fi capabilities at Lockheed without result shall we let China & Russia know we didn't find anything in our R&D?

No just send them some sketchy UFO videos that will keep m busy!</comment>


Show HN: Voyager, my video game made from wool - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/voyager-the-game/id553336542?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> Hmm.

        The address wasn't understood

        Firefox doesn't know how to open this address,
        because the protocol (itms) isn't associated
        with any program.

        You might need to install other software to open
        this address.

        itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/voyager-the-game/id553336542?ls=1&mt=8&ign-msr=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D4475013

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations on releasing. I remember the announcement and trailer for this a while ago and was quite impressed. I have fond memories of stop-action games like The Neverhood so I'm always glad to see someone utilizing the technology.

You should consider getting at least a 720p version of your trailer up and maybe improving the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks! I will definitely redo the website now that I have some time! I'll get to work on a hi-res trailer too.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More info + trailer here!

www.voyagerthegame.com</comment>