The Lost Art of Stealing Fruit - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/culture/onward-and-upward-in-the-garden/the-lost-art-of-stealing-fruit <comment><USER4> The article tiptoes around the issue of "stealing" referenced by the headline, as if the "stolen" fruit is only taken from public property. As you will learn if you plant fruit trees in your front yard, there are quite a lot of people who think nothing of trespassing on private property and stripping your trees. In Hawaii it's become an epidemic - most of the stolen fruit is not consumed by famished thieves, it is sold at farmers' markets. Penalties are so minimal for this crime that the same thieves return over and over with no fear of being caught.

Thi issue has many of my fruit-growing friends ripping their hair out. Believe it or not, not all residential fruit trees are neglected afterthoughts - <USER2> of us put blood and sweat into these trees and live for the day we can harvest them.

<comment><USER5> Great point. I, as a farmer, do own quite a lot of wallnut trees that could be mistaken for public property. I am ok with random people picking random wallnuts, but most of the theft is done by organized groups that resell my fruit on farmers market. Each year I do think about reporting them to police (as amount of fruit stolen is higher then treshold of breaking law), but then I realise that amount of trouble I will get them into and probable damage to their life is higher than some wallnuts I just let it go. Now I just hope that the area will get rich enough that they will just don't care about picking my fruit and I will finally get something more then just few lefovers.

<comment><USER6> Are they aware that it's private property and your maintained trees? If so, and if you don't want to involve the police you might also consider a "name and shame" approach at the market itself by simply asking (loudly) "Why do you keep stealing the nuts from my trees and selling them?"

Edit: at the least they could provide you with some of the gathered /picked nuts.

<comment><USER7> Now that's a good suggestion. Social pressure is a perfectly valid means of retribution that doesn't require the overwhelming threat of the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've got two fully mature plum trees on my property that are fruiting so well this Summer. In Spring, I released 9000 lady bugs to ward off another aphid infestation, which ruined the trees last Summer. I tend to the trees daily, removing rotting and diseased plums so to give other plums a fighting chance to ripen.

The neighborhood is home to a fairly large quaker parrot population, whom I allow to eat from the top of the trees. The bottom half of the trees is netted so that the parrots won't clear out the entire crop.

When I first bought the property, two years ago, I was shocked to find an entire neighborhood accustomed to helping itself to the plums-- without permission and without any kind of exchange from their own gardens. They had a prior relationship with the prior owners and expected grandfathered rights of some kind.

Most of the plums I pick I end up giving to neighbors, friends, family, co- workers. It's a lovely time of year.

If anyone is in the NYC area and would like some, drop me a message :)

<comment><USER9> > I was shocked to find an entire neighborhood accustomed to helping itself to > the plums-- without permission and without any kind of exchange from their > own gardens

Several of my neighbours tell us and others when their raspberries and currants are ripe, there's simply too much for them to eat. I wouldn't continue without invitation from a new owner, but why would you _not_ invite others if you have more than enough for yourself?

<comment><USER8> Every neighbor who I speak with gets an invitation. There was a population, though, that felt it unnecessary to establish even the most basic personal connection before helping itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The practice of the poor being able to take unharvested crops for themselves goes back to the old testament. It was an early form of social weldare.

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

<comment><USER11> Oddly The Book of Ruth and the word "gleaning" are some of my most vivid memories from high school English.

<comment><USER12> "gleaning" information from something is basically "to take a richer understanding from something where the information comes to one freely, based on observance"

Meaning - freely available fruits of knowledge can be derived from that which - its basically a pun.

The fact that we lost the meta-knowledge around etymology is a sad thing...

There is a podcast by an etymology guy that has amazing insights to words - but, in my limited experience listening to him, lacks some meta meaning -- in that glean means to to take free fruit, glean means to see deeper info, glean means to harvest deeper info from the free info given, knowledge is thought of as fruit...

I was wrong -- it is known:

>>> __ _glean (v.) Look up glean at Dictionary.com early 14c., "to gather by acquisition, scrape together," especially grains left in the field after harvesting, but the earliest use in English is figurative, from Old French glener "to glean" (14c., Modern French glaner) "to glean," from Late Latin glennare "make a collection," of unknown origin. Perhaps from Gaulish (compare Old Irish do-glinn "he collects, gathers," Celtic glan "clean, pure"). Figurative sense was earlier in English than the literal one of "gather grain left by the reapers" (late 14c.). Related: Gleaned; gleaning._ __

so.... to collect (information) from....

<comment><USER13> > There is a podcast by an etymology guy that has amazing insights to words

I do not google and go directly over to complain about lack of the relevant hyperlink.

Now, to my surprise there are quite a few linguistic podcasts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My town in years past, as part of a tradition, planted fruit trees throughout the parkways. Cherry, plum, apple, etc. They are left mostly unpicked today. I believe they were planted to be picked, by visitors to the parkways, to be able to grab down a plum for your daughter on her tricycle. And I do. Especially the cherries.

<comment><USER15> I was picking some mirabelle plums from the tree in my garden in West London (this is a few years ago).

Some passing teenagers asked what I was doing, so I offered them some plums, straight from the tree. "No way! My mum only buys fruit from Waitrose!"

A much younger girl and her granddad took a few, although in this case it was grandad that was reluctant.

It's a shame. Neighbours complained about the fruit making a mess on the pavement; if it wasn't that that particular neighbourhood was _special_ and had a requirement for the trees to be maintained, I'm sure they'd have been replaced with something more friendly to Lexus paintwork.

<comment><USER14> We have been collectively programmed to trust the grocery store product over what we can reach out and grab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love the idea of food forests and the work of groups like Food Is Free ([http://foodisfreeproject.org/](http://foodisfreeproject.org/)).

I don't currently have land, as I live in an RV and travel kinda full-time, but when I buy another house and settle down somewhere, I've sort of made some promises to myself:

1\. I will not mow a lawn.

2\. Any plant that requires maintenance has to provide food.

So, I'm looking forward to having neighbors steal fruit from my yard. I want pecan trees, and fruit trees, and blackberry vines, and prickly pears, and whatever else grows well where I'm living. I'm gonna rip up the lawn and replace it with edible plants and gardens.

Any one fruit tree makes more fruit than one person, or even family, can eat in a season...sure, you can can it, or freeze it, but I like the idea of grazing through the seasons, rather than hoarding.

<comment><USER17> I don't want to discourage you, because i had the same dream 5 years ago. But what you are saying has gotten VERY expensive. As an initial investment (at least for me, I have very few to share plants/seeds with) its pretty high. Then you have some deer take out a tree and all the berries, so you need to invest in deer block (chemical or physical), then you have the fricken EAB borer killing your 30 year old Ash Tree, and the black fungus that's taking out the pear and cherries, and then you forget to close the fence one day so most of the cucumbers and beans go missing and the rest get taken out by the cucumber beetles and/or the wilt they carry with them. Oh, and i invested about $200 on some "deer resistant, rabbit resistant" flowers (useful flowers like sage and lavender) which slowly disappear each season.

In other words, start saving now :). Though I haven't checked your link yet, so maybe the solution is in there!

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I've had a house and gardens in the past. I know it's a pain in the ass and doesn't always pay for itself. But, it's also possible to pick things that are naturally hardy and suited to the climate and soil. Some things Just Work.

And, if you have enough of those that are very expensive at the grocery (fresh herbs like basil and parsley, tree nuts, avocados, come to mind, though the latter two take years to start producing) you can still come out ahead. And, food picked ripe is delicious and rare in grocery stores.

<comment><USER17> On the other hand, my neighbors drive me completely nuts. Each on the cul-de- sac has an acre or so, and i'm the only home-farmer. The rest barely go outside let alone grow some veggies...

Its bizarre and a little infuriating.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the folks with soulless lawns and no food growing are a mystery to me. Why have land, at all, if you aren't going to grow something on it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A trio of artists in LA started a project called "Fallen Fruit" centered on appropriation of public fruit:

[http://fallenfruit.org/about/](http://fallenfruit.org/about/)

SF people may have seen them last month at:

[http://fallenfruit.org/fallen-fruit-magazine-san- francisco/](http://fallenfruit.org/fallen-fruit-magazine-san-francisco/)

They have mapped out fruit trees that extend into public right of way (there are a lot), hosted Fruit Jams where you could bring your own backyard fruit and herbs and collaboratively make jam, and guided nocturnal forages to harvest public fruit. It has been a delightful way to look again at the food that is around us.

<comment><USER19> This one's global:

[https://fallingfruit.org/](https://fallingfruit.org/)

<comment><USER20> The German-language equivalent is [https://mundraub.org](https://mundraub.org) \-- also global, but most useful in German-speaking areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Walking around London yesterday morning for an hour (with a step ladder!) we managed two carrier bags of tasty ripe plums. I also ate some orange things that I have no idea what they were but they tasted fantastic. There's raspberries, blackcurrents, blackberries and even (in an abandoned lot) tomatoes which my friend ate. I missed the mulberries this year but in a couple of weeks I'll also have some apples and avocados to add to that and maybe some persimmon. And this is all stuff that'd be on the floor and/or rotting later without people blinking an eye. So many fruit trees in London! And that's not even mentioning the mint, huge basil tree-bushes, rosemary, lime trees and countless other herb lying in clear sight.

<comment><USER22> Possibly kumquats?

Edit: which reminds me of a local restaurant which has possibly the best play on words name out there: Kumquat Mae

<comment><USER15> Those are unlikely to grow in Southern England, it's not warm enough.

Mirabelle plums? [1]

Try taking a photo and asking iNaturalist [2]

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

[2] [https://www.inaturalist.org/computer_vision_demo](https://www.inaturalist.org/computer_vision_demo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _"...or the vast banks of blackberries that litter Britain's parks and heaths, largely overlooked except by the occasional elderly Pole or Czech..."_

Not so Up North.

I have had convivial blackberry picking sessions with many people from all walks of life as a native Brit. A good wash and pick over, then a crumble and for the last box boiling with sugar and straining to make a compote served with yoghurt and those rusk cakes. I hit the canal towpaths and nature parks in preference to road side plants.

I will be researching this mulberry gin...

<comment><USER24> Or in East Anglia.

One thing i've noticed on my walks in the country is that there are a lot of apple trees growing along the Iron-age tracks like the Ridgeway, Icknield Way, etc. I suppose once one traveller has thrown away an apple core, and a tree has grown from a seed, there are plenty more apples with which subsequent travellers can repeat the process. Iterate that over a thousand years and there's quite a collection.

<comment><USER6> Apples may not be such a great choice for that - they don't reproduce to the same type from seed, many of the resulting fruits won't be much good (if you get any), and you need at least one other compatible apple tree in close proximity for pollination.

Basically the fruit is based on the tree you have, but the seeds in that fruit are a combination of the trees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Having juat learned that half of my prine tree was emptied out I have I a hard time right now enjoying this article.

O well, I was somewhat consoled by my neighbour how pointed me to 'Les glaneurs et la glaneuse', a documentary by Agnes Varda about people who try to live on waste fruit and vegetables in Paris. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I)

<comment><USER26> A what tree?

<comment><USER27> I think that's a typo and it should say prune.

<comment><USER28> Prunes are dried plums... you don't pick them from a tree.

<comment><USER4> French Prune and Italian Prune are the names of some European plum cultivars typically grown for the purpose of being dried, however they are also quite good eaten fresh.

<comment><USER29> In Romanian we still call plums as "prune", directly from Latin. My brother has lots of plum trees on his property (at the foot of the Carpathians) and most of the plums are used for making an excellent țuica ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C8%9Auic%C4%83](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C8%9Auic%C4%83)), while the rest is dried up in order to be eaten during the long winter months (my grandma makes an excellent dried-plums soup).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's an interesting story about mulberry trees in the UK:

"Elizabeth I, sent some mulberry trees to Reading to encourage a silk industry there - the leaves are the sole food of silk worms - but it was James I who got serious and ordered them by the thousand because he wanted to take control of the silk-making business the from French.

Unfortunately, the scheme failed because the gardener planted the wrong sort. Silk worms eat the soft leaves of Morus alba but had no appetite for the leathery leaves of Morus nigra, the tree that produces such delicious fruit."

From [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3311801/The-fruit-of- qu...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3311801/The-fruit-of-queens.html)

I'd love to try making mulberry gin like they mention. We make damson gin each year in Autumn which tastes awesome.

</comment><comment><USER31> My big incentive for picking the fruit is because it is not available in stores: mulberry and crab apples are featured in the article but my favourite one is amelanchier (known by many other names [1]). Also, Bunias [2] which I - unfortunately - cannot find in North America, but can be approximated by a mix of broccoli and arugula.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelanchier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelanchier) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunias_orientalis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunias_orientalis)

<comment><USER30> Wow I never knew before the berries on an amelanchier are edible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Some of my fondest neighborhood memories are of neighbors inviting each other over to pick their fruit trees. My family had some apple and black cherry (this was in Canada) trees; other neighbors had plums or blackberry patches. Sometimes people would even put out a board at the end of the driveway inviting others to come take some fruit so it wouldn't go to waste.

Edit: I think a lot of people have ambitions of canning or some such when they plant their fruit trees, but it's a bit of a lost art now. I don't know anyone who isn't a grandparent that actually knows how to preserve fruit.

<comment><USER33> I taught myself canning this summer. I was surprised how cheap and easy it is to get started.

Basic primer: \- you preserve foods by heating them to drive out air, kill bacteria, and activate the adhesive on the lids to seal the jar \- high acid foods (salsa, pickles, citrus, many fruits and jams, etc) can be preserved by submerging in boiling water for 10 minutes (or more, based on altitude). This is called "water bath canning" \- Low acid foods (meats, veggies, etc) need to be heated to a higher temperature (~245 F) so you need a pressure canner. I have not tried this yet.

Equipment: \- a pot, rack (makes dunking/lifting easier), funnel (makes filling jars so much easier), jar lifter (for lifting hot jars out of boiling water). There's a kit here: [https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B002KHN602/](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B002KHN602/) \- wide mouth mason jars (about $1/each at Amazon or Wal-Mart)

I did typical nerd internet research, but it all coalesced to [http://www.simplycanning.com](http://www.simplycanning.com). Good material, clear instructions, good recipes. She sells a book and ebook, but there's plenty of material on the site to get started.

I've had so much fun doing it that I've made way more than I can use and opened an Etsy store - [https://www.etsy.com/shop/seattlesweetness](https://www.etsy.com/shop/seattlesweetness). It's a really satisfying break from all the mental work programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> We have many fruit trees (Several peach, couple of apple, pear, a nectarine, and an apricot).

When harvest time comes, we pick what we need and want to use or process, then advertise to the neighborhood that they are welcome to come and pick.

Often, no one wants to invest more labor than to pick up a box off the porch.

<comment><USER35> My parents have a guava and sour orange tree that grow along a very busy street in southern california.

The oranges look delicious, but are sour as hell. They are mostly used for marinades. I feel bad for the people that have been burnt on them.

The guavas are fantastic, but almost nobody in socal knows what a guava looks like. Once in a while someone will recognize the guava tree and gorge themselves. Considering good fresh guava is not only hard to come by, but around $8/lb if you can find it.

<comment><USER36> $8/pound for guava sounds real expensive. I can get real good Mexican guava for around $3/pound at this grocery store in North Carolina: [https://www.facebook.com/Compare-Foods-Winston-Salem- NC-1196...](https://www.facebook.com/Compare-Foods-Winston-Salem- NC-119656968200283/) (I suppose this varies according to season).

Side note: I was born and spent a lot of time growing up in Brazil and like Guaraná in soda/soft drink form (Antarctica brand). I didn't think I'd find it when I moved here, but this store had four pallets of the stuff on display on one of my first visits.

<comment><USER35> Probably more of a regional thing. Lots of Guava is grown and sold in Florida because of the demand. I suppose that makes it easy to get up the east coast at a lower cost.

Guava doesnt grow well on west coast (at least on the commercial scale) and there is much less demand, so that's why prices are so high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'll assure you it's not a lost art where food is relatively expensive/people can't afford it. It's a good sign when people spend so little of their income on food that the temptation to steal is severely depressed.

<comment><USER38> As a counter point, I grew up in India where there is still some malnutrition and I stole mangoes. I was definitely not poor and my family could afford mangoes and they did buy mangoes. I stole with a bunch of friends and it was the thrill of the act rather (getting chased by the owner) than the fruit which made us stole the mangoes.

<comment><USER37> My guess is that the childish prankish appeal will fade as the the need to steal for sustenance fades in the distance from social memory. I think, though certainly could be wrong in my guess, is that this behavior is just a vestige of the primordial reason for stealing.

<comment><USER39> At least in the US, it can be complicated, many reasons drive theft. I remember lots of kids shoplifting candy, none of them poor, when I was a kid.

Interesting NPR article on it. _" People with an income of $70,000 or more are 30 percent more likely to shoplift than those earning less"_ [http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137627302/sticky-fingers- hidde...](http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137627302/sticky-fingers-hidden-hams- a-shoplifting-history)

Of course, that covers items beyond food, so perhaps not a direct comparison.

<comment><USER40> "earning less" than _what_

Unsuprisingly, NPR is misleading to create a more salacious read, and they failed to cover their tracks:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=EchKhEduEBwC&pg=PT50&dq=Pe...](https://books.google.com/books?id=EchKhEduEBwC&pg=PT50&dq=People+with+an+income+of+$70,000+or+more+are+30+percent+more+likely+to+shoplift)

The research found that people who are in stores more, shoplift more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Also have a small garden with lots of fruit. Plenty to go around so I don't mind other people picking as well. Though we have safety concerns - <USER3> climbing trees and so on. We like to be in hearing distance in case something happens, also we have some ladders and other tools harvesters can use and point out good spots.

Anyway my point is - just let the owner know. Most will welcome you and even assist. And make sure you are safe - no-one wants to come home and find a badly hurt stranger in his backyard. Also take care to not damage the plants.

The article generally leaves me with mixed feelings. Less about the stealing. More about common sense - there are many places where I just wouldn't pick fruits - like along polluted roads, heck in public parks there is even risk there are feces on the fruit. In the countryside there are snakes living in bushes making unpleasant encounters when unprepared. I see how the author paints it as romantic, but I feel she is more painting herself as "rebel" or "original" than actually giving advise.

</comment><comment><USER42> I grew up stealing mangoes in India as a kid. There is something about raw mangoes that makes you want to pluck them immediately.

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone who loves fruit should watch The Fruit Hunters:

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2182169/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2182169/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Ideas for fruit to grow in UK/London climate? Are mulberries worth it?

Currently growing:

Apples

Cherries

Figs

Grapes

Blueberries

Raspberries

Tayberries

Lime and lemon (partly indoors)

Siberian kiwi (no fruit yet)

Goji berry (no fruit yet)

Honeyberry (no fruit yet)

And appropriating the neighbours' plums, pear and wild blackberries.

<comment><USER4> Yes, mulberries are worth it. They would be a very popular fruit if they could handle the rigors of transport.

If you can track on down in the UK I'd feverishly recommend Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), a custardy fruit with such tropical flavor you'd be shocked it is native to North America.

<comment><USER44> Thanks! Bought a new breed of mulberry for next year - [https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/19/remarka...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/19/remarkable- easy-to-grow-new-varities-of-delicious-mulberries)

I managed to find a supplier for pawpaw but not sure it will fruit in this climate

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Stealing is an Art?

</comment><comment><USER46> Lots of wonderful things grow where I live! I'm particularly fond of the blackberries, lavender, and cherries. For berries and cherries I only take one or two very occasionally, and I never cut lavender, only rub my hand on it for the scent.

</comment><comment><USER47> So in Turkey you can see orange trees on streets: [https://i.imgur.com/MJck2yU.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/MJck2yU.jpg)

When I saw such pictures on Instagram I wondered what happens with the fruit, or if you are allowed to pick one (looks rather high though)</comment>


Ukrainian largest bank launches online authorization via selfie - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=uk&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fprivatbank.ua%2Fua%2Fnews%2Fprivatbank-zapustiv-self-avtorizac-ju%2F%3Futm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dnewsletter%26utm_campaign%3D039802_05_06_2015_ukr_news%26utm_content%3Dvar1_2_Podrobnee_selfi_ua%26utm_term%3D039802&edit-text=&act=url

<comment><AUTHOR> They already used such practice in some cases.

When you get a card in bank branch, they take photo of you holding a card to prevent you from claiming that it was not you.

So they went further and started to require a photo of person holding a card in mobile app and it seems they deployed same checks to web banking.

Before they added selfie there was tho-factor authorization i.e. password + sms for private persons and digital signature (national one, similar to ecdsa) + sms for enterprises.</comment>


Ask HN: What do I do if I take a career break? - <AUTHOR> I'm a young developer with a couple of years of experience in industry; that is obviously not to say I still have a lot to learn. I am dissatisfied with my job but haven't been able to find a position elsewhere to go to - my dissatisfaction right now is so that I'm thinking of taking a career break, living off my savings for a while until something comes up.<p>If I was to do that, how would my time be best utilised? I'm looking more for things I could do to better myself as a professional without having a formal job than suggestions about my lifestyle like "go on holiday", etc... <comment><USER2> You may go to academia for a PhD if you do not have one, or postdoctoral position if you have.

Academia and industry a different bubbles it may happen that your time there would be more satisfying, at least for some time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Taking a career break after two years is going to be a red flag to a lot of hiring managers. It'd be safer to say you became a freelancer or a contractor.</comment>


The Sound of Code [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEI0wBkgf1w <comment><USER2> This reminds me a lot of the sound of sorting algorithms [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg)

<comment><USER3> Fascinating.

Some early computers, such as the Elliott 803, had a built-in loudspeaker which received a pulse every time a jump instruction was executed. This meant you could tell which part of the program was executing, or whether it was in an infinite loop, just by listening. See, and indeed listen to, [http://www.survo.fi/demos/#ex88](http://www.survo.fi/demos/#ex88)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a thing I built a while back: An 'HTML to 8-Bit-music' converter. This transforms a URL to a Bytebeat formula and uses the HTML of the page behind the URL as input.

[http://lazerbahn.com/soundof.html?url=https://news.ycombinat...](http://lazerbahn.com/soundof.html?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182635)

<comment><USER5> This is absolutely amazing. Are you planning to release it as open source? Does pull down menu for style mean that you are planning other styles? [imagine me jumping in excitement] :)

<comment><USER4> Thanks!! Yes, I have planned a couple more. The code is not obfuscated, so you can have a look that them. It's heavily based on my audio-experiments which are open sourced here [https://github.com/homecoded/js- synth](https://github.com/homecoded/js-synth).

I'll add the "sound of html" there, now that you mentioned it!</comment></comment></comment>


Author identification by machine learning - ethics? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a personal project involving automated text classification for a variety of purposes, including identifying the author of a sample of text given samples of training text from a very large number of authors.
I'm far from the first to use machine learning algorithms to identify the author of a text, but I think I have something a little better than most of the research projects I've read about and open-source tools I've tested. Initial results show significantly greater accuracy and a couple orders of magnitude more speed in situations involving thousands of possible authors.
I can imagine potentially good uses for this sort of tech, ranging from keeping banned users out of an online community to identifying the author of a ransom note, death threat or the like. I can also imagine evil uses, such as identifying political dissidents to persecute.
I'm not sure how I feel about releasing such a thing in to the world (as open-source or as a product), knowing that it will be used for both good and evil. Any comments? <comment><USER2> Cryptography can both keep criminals out of jail and (literally) save the lives of human rights activists. Nuclear power can both be used to produce plutonium for use in weapons and produce CO2-emissions free electricity. Insulin can both keep diabetics alive and be used (highly dangerously) as an anabolic drug.

At some point, progress requires that you shrug your shoulders and say "I don't know how the good and bad uses will weigh against each other, but I'm going to go ahead anyway".

</comment><comment><USER3> I, personally, think its fine to release and use. When it gets to the point where you're able to determine too much information, then, it becomes a problem.

A tool that lets you identify a work as belonging to a specific author with relative certainty would be enormously useful to matching potentially fake texts and their authors. There are lots of less technical ways to identify political dissidents ^_^.

But, if you were able to classify people by race, education, sexual- orientation, or even psychological profile, then I could see that becoming a powder-keg. Thanks to the internet, there are a LOT of people who value anonymous self-expression. Destroying that could prevent a lot of excellent works from being created.

<comment><AUTHOR> _But, if you were able to classify people by race, education, sexual- orientation, or even psychological profile, then I could see that becoming a powder-keg._

It's a text classification system; it can be trained on just about anything. I'm not sure how accurate it would be for other purposes. Things like that are already out there, e.g. <http://genderanalyzer.com/>

<comment><USER3> I suppose that its more about accuracy when it comes to those touchy topics, like being condemned as a political dissident for being an outlier in the results of the code >_>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, what is the answer, William Shakespeare or Francis Bacon?

<comment><AUTHOR> My accuracy rate is worse than CRM114 with a very small number of categories. I don't think general accuracy will get much above 90% when dealing with thousands of authors; this will always be a tool to aid human investigations, not replace them.</comment></comment>


Do you recycle e-mail accounts? - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/do-you-recycle-e-mail-accounts-ae5ea59d32bf <comment><USER2> The best thing you can do for your own sanity is register your own domain name, and point ALL of your email at it. Even if it just then forwards to another service. It makes changing email providers easy, because you just need to re-point the forwarder, and as long as you own that domain, nobody can recycle your address or anything of the sort.

Register it until kingdom come while you're at it.</comment>


Continuous Integration with Armory (YC W17) - <AUTHOR> https://www.armory.io/blog/continuous-integration-using-jenkins-and-hashicorp-terraform-with-spinnaker-on-amazon-eks/ <comment><AUTHOR> Continuous Integration with Armory (W17) using Jenkins and HashiCorp Terraform with Spinnaker on Amazon EKS</comment>


WordPress.com hosted websites are down (It's back up after 1 hr) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape about this sort of thing (see also: rackspace, twitter, gmail, etc). Do they expect 100.00% uptime? There are 8760 hours in a year, I'm not sure how many hours wordpress hosted sites have been down this year, but I'd guess the number is probably within reason. If it goes down for an entire day, or for an hour every week, then maybe it would be time to talk about it being a problem.

<comment><USER3> I actually think this is why: <http://vip.wordpress.com/hosting/> and it has already happened a couple times

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have to say that that is awesome uptime overall. Considering the amount of blogs and sites running on WP.com

TC should switch to some other hosting.. _then_ they would experince downtime...

If I had uptime like that, I would be praising the host for the uptime and patting them on the back, because they probably get a ton of shit from other people all the time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone else surprised that TechCrunch is hosted on Wordpress.com?

<comment><USER6> Now that I think about it, I expected a tech-oriented like techcrunch to be hosted on something a little more exotic.

<comment><USER7> If I recall correctly, they moved to Wordpress VIP due to downtime and security concerns they had at Rackspace, their original host.

<comment><USER8> >they moved to Wordpress VIP due to downtime and security concerns

>Wordpress

>downtime...security concerns

Sounds well planned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Goes to show that no hosting solution is immune to down time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Second time in a few months... must be quite upsetting if you're paying VIP rates.

Gigaom, Flickr Blog, Gizmodo's Live blog and many other VIP flavours are all down.

</comment><comment><USER10> In any case, it should say techcrunch.com will be back shortly, not wordpress.com

</comment><comment><USER11> GigaOm is still down, 2/3 hours later.

</comment><comment><USER12> its all back</comment>


App Store now seems to be viewable in browsers (kind of) - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/heise-de/id333214314

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read that on Twitter, and was given this link as an example. The usability of iTunes is so bad that I was unable to create another link for another app, even though I think I have seen a "create link" button at one time.

Also I have been unable to browse the app store with the browser. But if at least one can link to individual apps on the web, it is a start.</comment>


Best Ultrabook for Linux? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I'm a programmer and I'm looking for some recommendations as to what type of Ultra-book I should buy for myself. I use Sabayon Linux (Gentoo based) and I would mainly use an ultra-book for programming and perhaps some light gaming.
I'm looking for hardware that is fully supported / compatible on Linux & I'm interested in hearing more about your suggestions.
Kindly note that I'm willing to make sacrifices regarding hardware incompatibilities with stuff like fingerprint reader, etc. as long as most stuff works fine on Linux.
Also I'm on a limited budget so I would prefer if the ultra-book doesn't come with a high price tag.
Thanks. <comment><USER3> I see a lot of comments here recommending a Macbook Air and I wanted to inform you, just so you are perfectly aware, that this computer does not even have an ethernet input. Perhaps not a game changer, but it gives a picture of what kind of features Apple has scraped away in order to reduce it's size.

Personally I would choose a Thinkpad, were I you.

<comment><USER4> In addition, most non-OS X operating systems boot on Intel Macs using their EFI BIOS emulation layer, which doesn't quite give you the native hardware control that booting straight EFI does.

I work with enterprise deployed Macs and I'll tell you that most Linux distributions, when booting Macs via EFI BIOS emulation, do not properly control CPU and GPU power and tend to run them at full tilt. Apple's Bootcamp drivers for Windows address this issue but Apple hasn't released equivalent drivers for Linux.

The end result is that, if you intend to use Linux multiple hours a day, nonstop, on a device as space-constricted as an Air, with CPU and GPU running full tilt - yes I know when running in BIOS mode a Mac's fans stay permanently at max speed - you are going to COOK that little unit.

I've seen it more times than I care for.

I'd -really- suggest looking at a different machine if this is your use model.

<comment><USER5> There are still linux distributions that don't do EFI? Arch and Ubuntu, at least, run fine on intel macs, without the whole crazy power problem issues you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Last December I bought a ASUS U31 (U31SD-A1 Intel Core i3 2310M 2.10GHz 13.3" 4GB Memory 640GB HDD NVIDIA GeForce GT 520M) and I absolutely love it. I don't know if the same model is available but I would definitely look into it if you can find it. For Linux I use Mint and you although it uses the Optimus stuff for video bumblebee works great. You don't need to run in NVidia mode to get 3D effects either I only use bumblebee to turn it off. I get 10hours+ of battery life, the keyboard is awesome (chicklet style). I did replace the internal drive with an SSD drive which makes it boot _much_ faster, less than 5 seconds. Also dual boot windows for games and the NVidia graphics are great for that.

EDIT: removed some of my !!!!s since they made this sound like it was written by a teenage girl. (I really do love this laptop)

<comment><USER7> Another vote for ASUS U31SD!!! (I am also excited like a teenage girl about this laptop!)

I bought it for $650 from Amazon almost a year ago. It is not really an Ultrabook. But, I think it is perfect. The screen size is a 13", it is incredibly light, yet still has a full-size keyboard, all ports you will ever need, and quite A LOT of power (4Gb RAM expandable to 8Gb, 2 cores, 4 hardware threads). I use Ubuntu with Unity, with a lot of browser windows, a heavyweight IDE (NetBeans), lots of terminal windows and it works very snappy. It also never gets hot. The battery life is terrific.. 7-8 hours!

I didn't buy an SSD yet, but I intend to, in a few years when they get cheaper.

I dual boot Windows for gaming, and I've even played some relatively recent video games (like Just Cause 2, Mass Effect 3), with maxed-out resolution on an external monitor. Works like a charm.

<comment><USER6> Nice! Happy to hear that there is another person running Linux. I honestly get a good 10 hours (or at least that's what the power manager reports). It boots so fast with SSD I don't think I'll ever go back :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Lenovo ThinkPad X220 is really great, and it's also Ubuntu certified since a long time (10.10) so it should be okay with others distros.

<comment><USER9> The X220 is the nicest non-Apple small laptop I've seen in a while.

It can also take an mSATA SSD, so you can load it up with a big spinning disk for media storage, and a small boot SSD for the OS/apps/etc.

<comment><USER10> Every notebook in the planet can. You don't have to a) wait the manufacturer to offer you b) pay the amount they ask

<comment><USER11> This isn't true. There are notebooks that have the slot inside but not the mSATA support.

<comment><USER10> didn't know that. what do they have instead of SATA?

<comment><USER11> It's just the usual mini PCI-something slot that would hold a WWAN card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> MacBook Air (I have an early 2011 11" with Ubuntu and GNOME3) works pretty well, though sometimes I have issues connecting to WiFi access points that work fine on my other Linux devices.

Some notes about the setup: [http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/11-macbook_air- the_best_computer_i...](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/11-macbook_air- the_best_computer_i-ve_ever_had/)

<comment><USER10> He mention price. Didn't he?

No matter how much you downvote me, it still will cost 3x more than another model for the informed consumer. I know because all notebooks i have costs at least 1/3 of the apple equivalent.

<comment><USER13> > He mention price. Didn't he?

He also mentioned ultrabooks. Last time I checked, all ultrabooks are in the Air's price range (give or take 10%, and not necessarily in the Air's disfavour).

> I know because all notebooks i have costs at least 1/3 of the apple > equivalent.

It might just be that none of your notebooks are in the same category.

<comment><USER10> Ok just read wikipedia to know that ultrabook is a Intel trademark. And that it's not a beefed up netbook as i assumed.

So none of the 3 i have are ultrabooks.

And neither is the apple stuff according to wikipedia, so off you go downvoting all apple suggestions here on the same base.

<comment><USER13> > And neither is the apple stuff according to wikipedia, so off you go > downvoting all apple suggestions here on the same base.

Feel free too, don't be surprised if you are badly received considering the very blueprint for the "ultrabook" classification if the second-generation Macbook Air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not an ultra; but I was looking for something similar, I think to what you were looking for.

Small, but still useable, light, fast, good build quality and hopefully cheap.

I did a alot of research and watched slickdeals.com regularly for deals and ended up with an Asus 1215b with an E-350 processor. It comes with 2gb of ram, but I put another 4gb stick (22$) to bring it to 6; and replaced the hard drive with an ssd ($100).

all in all I have about 450 bucks into it and it's great. Everything works in linux; but graphic drivers aren't quite upto snuff. With windows 720p played fine; on linux it is sometimes jumpy; even with hardware acceleration.

It has no optical drive (a feature for me). It also has usb 3.0 which was a must-have for me.

Main downside is that the touchpad has a flaw and you have to fix it yourself. If you are going to put in an SSD anyway (and you should/have to) you will beable to fix it while you are doing that. Otherwise its like a 5-10 minute fix depending on how comfortable you are taking apart laptops.

The other big downside is that replacing the hard drive voids the warranty (or at least, you have to break through a sticker that says if tthis sticker is broken the warranty is void).

But all in all I am super happy with this laptop. The function keys work, the wireless is solid; with an SSD it boots up in seconds; everything is lightning fast. Only a dual 1.6 ghz so if you are doing lots of heavy compiling it isn't probably not for you.

I have not done much gaming on it; I have played a little bit of heroes of newerth on ultra low settings and it was playable.

<comment><USER15> Odd. I have the Thinkpad equivalent (x120e) and I agree on almost all your points except performance. 720p plays fine in linux, 1080p plays fine too but only with vaapi acceleration. Have never booted windows on it, so I can't compare there.

Gaming wise, it can handle Xonotic at native resolution (1366x768) with most of the effects cranked up at 30 fps.

Did I mention changing the hard drive does not void the warranty?

<comment><USER14> I would buy that in a heart beat over what I have. Not sure what is wrong with my video.

Nor why I ended up with what I have. I honestly thought I looked for something just like that. I really like the nipple; but all the Thinkpads (i thought) were out of my price range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dan Bernstein recently posted a page on getting Ubuntu working with a current- gen MacBook Air: <http://cr.yp.to/hardware/air.html>

Some of that information might be useful.

</comment><comment><USER17> Beware of touchpads with multi-touch and integrated buttons (a.k.a. "clickpads"). A lot of laptops nowadays seem to have these MacBook-esque touchpads, and especially ultrabooks since they're often trying to mimic Apple products. But driver support for PC clickpads in Linux is hit and miss. Often you'll find it very frustrating to perform right clicks and drag-and-drop operations. Cutting-edge distros like Ubuntu 12.04 finally include rudimentary support for clickpads, but my experience in a non-ultrabook clickpad-enabled laptop was far from ideal even with the 12.04 beta.

<comment><USER18> I could never own a laptop without 3 hardware buttons, ideally set up like a thinkpad:

[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nVGyx975u38/SkzCHnkMbAI/AAAAAAAAGg...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nVGyx975u38/SkzCHnkMbAI/AAAAAAAAGgo/UY8y_368acw/s400/lenovo+thinkpad+t400s+trackpad+touchpad.jpg)

<comment><USER19> You realize Macbook touchpads are buttons right?

They have left click and right click with button action. It's just as intuitive as having 2 separate buttons, and even more so because of how customizable it is.

<comment><USER20> Not quite the same. For example, what happens when you run out of room on a drag-and-drop operation? You're holding down the whole track pad so you have two options: add a second hand to hold the button, which can make the cursor do weird things, or start over giving yourself more room. With a hardware button this isn't an issue.

That said, the Apple track pads _are_ incredibly high-quality and I generally like them. I do miss the hardware buttons from time to time, though.

<comment><USER21> I lay my thumb on the bottom of the trackpad and hold it down, then my pointer is free to drag, lift away, reposition, and drag more. It's extremely convenient and certainly one-handed.

The trackpads are also multitouch, so they handle multiple hands as sensibly as you might expect.

<comment><USER22> > _I lay my thumb on the bottom of the trackpad and hold it down_

That's an awesome tip. I didn't know that the Apple trackpads would do that. They're less reliable if you just try to throw a second finger into the mix, which seems to generally lose the drag and turn it into a secondary click scenario. The bottom of the pad seems to be special-cased to avoid this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> See if you can find a special on a thinkpad x220 if you don't want to go the air route. Unlike the air, you can max it out at 8GB of RAM and it comes with full voltage processors rather than ULV processors like in the MBA.

I was running gentoo on my x220 (have since gone to a T420 on mostly for the higher resolution screen) and getting 11 hours battery from the 9-cell. Also would recommend the IPS option, though they've had some quality control issues with those screens. I had problems with mine and Lenovo replaced it, no questions asked. One of the best screens I have seen on a laptop. For the wireless, I found the intel 6205 to work best with gentoo. The hardware on the thinkpads is generally really Linux friendly.

It's worth noting that there's an impending ivy bridge refresh. I'm thinking an x230 might come out in the next few months.

<comment><USER11> Speaking of X230, it's worth noting that you might be able to get 1600x900 in the next version. Other laptops are offering higher resolutions, including 1080p in 11-12" in one ASUS ultrabook, and there's at least one 12.1" 1600x900 panel floating around. So that's another reason to wait.

<comment><USER23> Exactly what I'm hoping for, actually. X220 was perfect, except 1366x768 a bit harder for me to be productive on.

For most programming I do it's fine as I use vim and don't need a lot of real estate...but for large projects for which I use eclipse, it was a bit painful.

Also on the way is the T430U, the 14" ultraportable version of the T420. Might be nice too. Would take a 1600x900 x230 over it any day though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One thing that has always killed me in regards to non-Apple laptops is the touchpad. Everyone does it wrong. By this I mean that they're small and not very sensitive, the attempts to integrate scrolling are janky. Anyone care to comment on the current status of that?

A lot of people dislike Apple but the subtle things like this are what keep me here. It's so simple to scroll and click and right click with just light and simple taps.

Is it primarily a software issue? OSS hasn't caught up?

<comment><USER25> But then the keyboard on Mac laptops is a hell to work with. The | character is not even represented on the keyboard, and requires the combination alt- shift-L.

Edit: this is on a non-US keyboard, belgian or french azerty layout.

<comment><USER26> I think your character must have come across wrong, or you're referring to non-US MacBooks? | is shift-\ just like everywhere else. alt-shift-l gives me a Ò.

(This was typed on a MacBook Pro)

<comment><USER25> It must be on Azerty keyboard then. Each time I have to work on a mac I need to ask how to type the pipe character.

<comment><USER13> Yes the AZERTY Apple keyboard is full of suck (then again, so's the base one — at least the french layout, AltGr + 6 for a pipe? How about no?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not aware of any fully supported ultrabook. Something always seems to be unsupported or not fully supported but usually inessential, like a fingerprint scanner, or an accelerometer.

A friend of mine is using a Zenbook but it takes some serious efforts to get it to run properly <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook>

It's also a matter of what you consider an ultrabook. I have a Dell V131. It's a laptop IMHO but it has a 13.3" screen, weighs 1.8kg, gets 6hrs of battery life (with wifi on a 6 cell battery) and works under Ubuntu 12.04 OOTB (except for the fingerprint scanner :)

<comment><USER28> I'm using a zenbook and with the 3.2 kernal (included in ubuntu 12.04beta) almost everything is working great. There is a small change that is needed to enable suspend, but otherwise everything works out of the box with no extra drivers needed (including wifi, two finger right click, camera, 3d graphics, etc.).

<comment><USER29> Can you tell us how the battery life is?

<comment><USER28> Under linux (normal web browsing, coding, etc.) I get around 5 1/2 hours. With windows that goes up to around 7 hours. I think much of the windows battery saving comes from the very low power mode it switches into automatically when you unplug the laptop. This mode can be a little annoying though as it powers down the cpu and you can't do basic stuff like watching a high quality video smoothly, etc. As far as I can tell under Linux the power saving mode is much more conservative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You can get one of those from System76. The 14" Lemur Ultra looks like what you may want, though I'm not really sure if that's an ultrabook. Their price is among the best (if not _the_ best). <https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/lemur>

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't heard of System76 before but their pricing is pretty competitive not to mention they claim to officially support a linux distro. Thanks for sharing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not sure if this is helpful but I was looking for the same thing about six months ago and ended up buying a macbook air, decided to give OSX a chance and stuck with it. As far as I'm aware most of the things are compatible but trackpad support isn't quite there yet.

<comment><USER32> How do you deal with absence of PgUp/PgDn and Home/End? I've honestly tried for 2 weeks to get comfortable with MacBook, but feel that the keyboard is simply bad.

<comment><USER33> Me too until I found that Fn+Up/Down,Left/Right do what you want. Also Fn+Backspace to delete.

<comment><USER34> Tip: You can use KeyRemap4Macbook [1] to map the stupid eject button on MBP to delete. And if you use vim, you can map Escape to Delete and vice versa. Very useful.

[1] <http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The various warnings about drivers, touchpad and wifi in these answers is almost amusing if not a little depressing. Remember the promise of the Linux Desktop? I remember giving ubuntu a good try in 2006, but after nightmares with xorg configs, flash, audio drivers and a clipboard that couldn't copy and paste across different applications I eventually switched to mac. It doesn't look like things have changed much in the last five years.

<comment><USER36> If you're willing to restrict yourself to a couple of models like you have to with the Mac, then you can get a laptop that comes with Linux, like those from System76[1].

The only reason you have warning is because people want to use Linux on machines not supported by the manufacturer, but guess what: the same thing would happen with OS X.

[1]: <https://www.system76.com/>

<comment><USER37> I just got myself a Dell v131. Very happy with it. Small, slim and fast enough, with easy access to expansion. Not a Macbook, of course, and not an ultrabook, but half the price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I honestly don't understand the driver issues - I've installed Linux on a number of different machines, and I've never had any driver issues myself (certainly not when using a preconfigured DE).

That said, I don't think the MacBook Air is the only (or even the best) solution for an Ultrabook. I've heard good things about Lenovo's series, and while it's not an Ultrabook, my HP Envy has always run Arch Linux splendidly - I couldn't be happier with it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I use a Toshiba z830, and it works brilliantly under Ubuntu, I can assume it does as well with other Linux distributions.

<comment><USER40> I have r830 with Arch, so a less-ultra but quite similar stuff -- everything works, after some tuning it can eat only 7.5-8W during normal activity (with Compiz).

<comment><USER39> Nice, what kind of tuning did you do? I hover around 9W, which is already really good... A link to share for your tweaks, sir?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I got a Thinkpad x301 (if you can get one) using Arch Linux and newest KDE. I am completely in love. Everything works lovely and fast with its 128GB SSD except for the fingerprint reader (haven't bothered to check if I can get it to work).

It has modest battery life but you can replace the DVD drive with an extra one. Amazingly light, perfect wifi and a light that illuminates your keyboard from the top.

I can do light gaming (age of empires 2, or America's Army 2.5) with integrated intel. KDE just flies.

I set circular scrolling and high sensitivity in touchpad, that way I can scroll without ever lifting the finger and work faster than with a mouse.

</comment><comment><USER42> Well most of the issue I have with Linux is graphics compatibility, that being said, I'd recommend any with an nVidia GPU over one with an ATI one. With that you will certainly have a much better experience.

<comment><USER43> On the contrary I suggest either Intel or ATI graphics because unlike nVidia, Intel and ATI actually contribute to their open source drivers.

<comment><USER44> On the other hand, NVidia proprietary drivers actually work better than ATI drivers.

I suggest Intel because of the lower power consumption.

<comment><USER45> On the other other (third?) hand, sometimes you want GPGPU which even in laptops can give some speedup, not to mention not having to debug it on large computer. With intel, you're out of luck there.

But I think they promised OpenCL for Ivy Bridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I own an HP dm4 (<http://goo.gl/uCRa>) running Ubuntu 11.10, it's not an ultrabook, but everything run out of the box and all working (except fingerprint device - which I don't care a bit about it). HP in my case has been always a choice, their products work excellent with linux and just right out of the box. I recommend you also, that you make sure that everything is Intel (including the wifi card) because previoulsy I had another HP laptop with Atheros wifi that was unusable!

</comment><comment><USER37> Considering the price ultrabooks are being sold for, I'd suggest a Macbook Air. From their spec sheet, they should be well supported and they are exceedingly well built and the screen is the best 13" out there.

I must admit, however, I'm not convinced by this ultrabook "trend". It looks a lot like PC makers got tired to compete in price in the netbook range and wanted to beef up the hardware a little and increase their margins. For that, however, they had to invent a new category.

</comment><comment><USER47> Since this is a notebook-thread, I would be interested in 15" thin and beauty notebooks for linux. They are not ultrabooks because of 15" screen, but I really can't stand <15".

Thank you.

<comment><USER48> <http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops/NP900X4B-A02US>

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's not an ultrabook, but the dell 14z is only 4 lbs and thinner than any laptop I've owned before. I got it for around $400. It was the only black friday sale laptop that had an i5 but not a dual graphics card (such as nvidia optimus, which you can get working in linux, but sometimes is a pain). Everything worked flawlessly with ubuntu, and when I dual boot to windows, plenty of games work fine, too, including the new microsoft flight simulator.

</comment><comment> alFReD-NSH I have a dell Inspiron N4010(intel cor i3, 4GB ram), with Ubuntu 11.10. Was using Ubuntu on it since 10.10. Works like a charm, just sometimes the wireless(broadcom b43xx) doesn't work, which will work again by just turning off and on. It was shipped with windows at first. But it even works smoother under Ubuntu. Though I don't suggest you to buy Dell. I can see a fan problem with most Dell laptops that I've see and also cheap hardware.

</comment><comment><USER50> I use a Macbook Air (Mid 2011) and run Arch Linux on it. Works fine, only thing that doesn't work is the Thunderbolt port. I picked the Air because the model was on its second year and had a history of people having Linux run on it. The touchpad works fine with xf86-input-mtrack, which lets you customize some of the finer details on the trackpad. ... Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER51> I bought an Asus Zenbook. It works pretty well, I installed Ubuntu on it using these instructions <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook>

There were some manual configurations, as you can see, but for the most part everything works fine...

</comment><comment><USER52> In general, ThinkPads are the way. Business line Dells also are quite well supported. (This has to do with the user community for those machines. And that community keeps their software running well)

I am as well looking for a Ultrabook, but I decided to wait for the ThinkPad T430s.

</comment><comment><USER53> I like the Lenovo U300s a lot. You need a tweak to make suspend work (search for "suspend ubuntu lenovo u300s" and look at the bug report).

Also, the amount of totally-off-topic non-Apple-product bashing in this thread is making me incredibly sad at what HN has come to.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've been fairly satisfied running Ubuntu on my Zenbook.

Everything doesn't work out of the box but the wiki has fairly detailed instructions on resolving most issues.

<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook>

</comment><comment><USER55> Slightly off-topic - a laptop and not an ultra book. I use Toshiba satellite C640-X4012. Fedora runs smooth. It has Intel core i5-2430M @ 2.4GHz and 4GB ram. It has only 2 USB ports - the only drawback I have felt.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've been interested in purchasing a Macbook air for some time. The hard edge of my Macbook Pro is really uncomfortable and it looks like the Air may have this same comfort flaw. Does it?

<comment><USER57> Borrow a dremel. Tape down a cloth to cover the keys, ports, fan exhaust, and the monitor. Go along the edge with a grinding tool on low speed. Go along it again with a sanding tool. Finally, buff it. (All cheap parts in the default kit).

Wear a mask.

Also, the amount of grinding necessary to get a smooth edge is not much at all. This is a quick job, and leaves the same grey color.

Finally, there are covers that remove the hard edge.

<comment><USER58> Wow, that's tempting! Have you done this? Any downsides to speak of? How deep did you go? This seems like a great mod.

<comment><USER57> I followed the steps mentioned at <http://dustwell.com/macbook-pro-sharp- edge.html>

I basically just gauged it by eye. Light, slow, take your time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> not technically an Ultra book but I've been a huge fan of the Thinkpad X series for sometime.

Currently have an X220, works great, the X1 is also nice and some of the Ideapads are more "consumer grade" but would fit nicely into the "Ultra Book" territory. With Thinkpads you never really (or I haven't ever) run into issues with *nix due to the amount of love they seem to garnish from the tech community in general.

Between the cozy keyboard and the overall durability of the Thinkpad line I keep coming back to them year after year.

<comment><USER60> I'll second this. I'm currently using the X220 with Gentoo and it works perfectly except for the trackpad (which shakes the cursor in some areas). I have to use the keyboard mouse pointer. I was also concerned about price and managed to get mine used on Craigslist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I have a 13" Thinkpad Edge E325 and it's great. I use Ubuntu on it and everything works, 7h battery life. Cost me £350.

</comment><comment><USER62> I picked up a Acer Ultra-book. Fedora supports the entire thing short of the multitouch on the touchpad...

</comment><comment><USER63> It doesn't matter what Computer you throw against Linux - it will just work (with tinkering of course). My prefered setup years ago was Gentoo on a MacBook (the black , plastic ones fom the 90ies).

Today I would recommend a MacBook for its display. You can then wipe the disk or swap them, as I did with my work notebook from Lenovo (x201) - <USER2> FC16. I heard Mint and Ubuntu is great too.

<comment><USER32> Just work = without tinkering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm not sure if it helps but I head the HP Folio 13 support Ubuntu well out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER65> This, guy, Linus Torwalds, uses a MacBook Air for Linux.

He even says on his Google+ page that he couldn't find anything better, and that even Lenovo stuff is crap.

Just sayin'.

<comment><USER66> The MacBook Air was for his kids: "if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that _my kids_ (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses)...".

P.S. Out of curiosity, could someone explain me why I'm being downvoted?

<comment><USER65> No, it's one he uses. He talked about it several times. Here's a photo of his desktop: [http://micro.dentarg.net/post/18516355410/linus-torvalds- has...](http://micro.dentarg.net/post/18516355410/linus-torvalds-has-a- macbook-air)

And here's a quote of his in his G+ blog: "Point me to a better laptop. Trust me, I tried. They don't exist. It's sad. They are all big and clunky." (Someone suggesting Lenovo) "no, Lenovo doesn't. I have the Lenovo X1. It's bigger, plasticky, and has worse battery life."

(As for above, probably he has one for his kids too or his kids also use his --or he just mentioned it in the example above to refer to a usability issue for the "common user").

In the past he also had a G5 (Linux) as his desktop machine, and an iBook with OS X for writing his autobiography.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook no longer supports IE7 - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/12/30/not-a-fan-of-timeline-on-facebook-use-ie7-facebook-stopped-supporting-it/

<comment><USER2> It's a horrible article and misleading title. Sending different CSS based on the browser UA doesn't equal not supporting a browser. In fact, just the fact they are doing that shows that they are still supporting IE7 by not pushing features that would be broken to it.

That being said, I would guess that bug fixing and the like for IE7 are probably prioritized lower, hence things like the busted layout shown in the article picture.

I'll wait for the official announcement from Facebook, just like they announced when they would stop supporting IE6.

<comment><USER3> It's not a bug for IE7. It's just that when you switch the user agent to IE7 it's using the IE7 CSS to render the page on Safari. Obviously that stuff isn't going to work.

<comment><USER2> It doesn't say the screenshot is from Safari, and I have seen that whitespace when I've testing things in IE7. Funny thing I found earlier when I went there in IE9 in IE7 emulation mode - Facebook crashed the tab every time I tried to click on an individual's profile (Timeline enabled or not.) Didn't bother to actually load a VM to test a true instance of IE7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a very accurate title. It looks like most of Facebook still works fine w/IE 7, it's just the Timeline that's affected. For example, I can login, view a friend's profile, view my news feed, like something, make a wall post, play a game ... all fine in IE 7. And, the experience is very similar, if not entirely, to that of doing the same in Firefox 9.

Should it have been entirely true, this would have been a great step for the web, even if only a small one.

<comment><USER5> I think you're confusing "supports" with "works". Facebook may work under IE7, but they aren't supporting it anymore. Any new stuff that they do, don't expect it to work in IE7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm only supporting IE8 and above now. The numbers for IE6 and IE7 are too small to care about anymore. At least for my demographic.

<comment><USER7> I believe Google has dropped support for IE6 and IE7. That's my excuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the point of writing that developer toolbar user-agent switch comment? Does setting the UA to IE7 cause the glitches? Because it surely won't change Safari's webkit engine into any sort of IE7 compatibility mode. So are FB conditionally sending broken CSS to IE7?

<comment><USER9> It appears that FB is using UA sniffing (server side or otherwise) and not conditional comments, or something else rendering engine specific, to alter the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't make sense to place a message saying IE7 is no longer supported and a link to upgrade? I think most Facebook users won't know what's wrong with their computers.

</comment><comment><USER11> Funny how the news is expressed as "use the old, unsupported version of the site with an old, unsupported version of a browser".

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems that facebook white space "quirk" happens when document mode is set to IE8/IE9 standards. I think IE7 users shouldn't have a problem.

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/60164/Forum%20Posts/facebook.png>

</comment><comment><USER13> Facebook can easily help the random user to upgrade their browser. And it has to.

</comment><comment><USER14> I didn't even knew how the author changed User Agent to be IE 7 from Safari..wonder how accurate it is to real IE 7.

<comment><USER15> Not at all, webkit still renders everything. Presumably Facebook is delivering different html/css based on the spoofed user agent.</comment></comment>


AI/ML Code Reviews with DeepCode - <AUTHOR> https://www.deepcode.ai/ <comment><USER2> But at the end of the day, it's just static code analysis, right?

Sure, it's smarter. But that's still only one part of the picture, right?</comment>


Vortex Lasers May Be a Boon for Data - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/optoelectronics/vortex-laser <comment><USER2> This was an incredible read. I had no idea that light possessed momentum, especially angular momentum.

> A potentially extraordinarily useful property of vortex beams is that they > do not interfere with each other if they all possess different twisting > patterns. This means a theoretically infinite number of vortex beams can get > overlaid on top of each other to carry an unlimited number of data streams > at the same time.

...

> The researchers began with a microring laser consisting of a ring of indium > gallium arsenide phosphide only 7 microns in diameter in which light could > flow in a loop, via a channel 650 nanometers wide. By varying the light > pumped into this circle from microscopic arms on either side of this ring, > the researchers could alter the orbital angular momentum of the beam emitted > from the laser. Instead of emitting a single orbital angular momentum mode, > they showed it could emit five distinct modes.

> The scientists also developed a light detector based on tungsten > ditelluride, which can act like a so-called Weyl semimetal, a material with > properties lying between a conductive metal and a pure semiconductor. Their > experiments found that different orbital angular momentum modes of light > each generated unique patterns of electrical current within the > photodetector, and they suggest this electronic method of detecting the > orbital angular momentum of light could be scaled to work on microchips.

Amazing stuff.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree! Wouldn't have dove into the article without your comment. Thanks!

Does anyone know if there have been experiments confirming that light's angular momentum can be transferred like its linear momentum? Perhaps firing a rotating beam at a tiny sheet in space to induce spin and then reverse the light spin and confirm that the sheet eventually reverses.

Since this technique could induce some extreme spin over long time/distance, I could imagine using it to pull crazy maneuvers in space. For example, aim a tiny slightly off balance disc at a distant planet. Once it started entering the planet's atmosphere, a correct entry angle and spin could take it from being head on to entering orbit.

<comment><USER4> There are experiments like this! One is where circularly polarized light is used to spin up a small piece of glass to really high angular velocity (billions of rotations per second!) [1].

There are also atomic transition selection rules that depend photons transferring angular momentum into or out of an atom electronic orbitals. Essentially, when an electron jumps between the orbitals (s, p, d, etc from chemistry class), it can gain or lose angular momentum depending on its start and end state. But that momentum must be conserved, so in these cases a photon is emitted or absorbed to account for that angular momentum. The topic is kind of addressed here [2], but I'd have to dig up my old AMO notes to find a better reference. Lots of cool physics to dive into here if you're interested!

[1] - [https://phys.org/news/2018-07-world-fastest- rotation.html](https://phys.org/news/2018-07-world-fastest-rotation.html) [2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum_coupling#Term...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum_coupling#Term_symbols)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This means a theoretically infinite number of vortex beams can get overlaid > on top of each other to carry an unlimited number of data streams at the > same time.

This reminds me of how a fourier tranformation can increase the throughput by stacking frequencies and then parsing upon detection.

<comment><USER6> Another way to think of fiber optics is to imagine the analog case, like pumping a movie through the fibers. From there you can go in two directions, one making the channel machine readable, and the other increasing throughput. For machine readability you get something like a fast succession of QR codes.

Throughput is, I think, more interesting because it turns out you can overlay 2 movies on each other! You can see this in various 3D movie technologies. Two channels are combined, and then separated by your glasses. The separation can happen by frequency (classic red/blue, a) or by polarization (the more modern style). NOW, apparently, there's a whole new way to distinguish the movies: angular momentum! Each physically differentiable thing gets you, very roughly speaking, one additional movie. So now you can pump 4 movies in one. Of course, it turns out you can split up each channel into smaller slices than 2, e.g. you could put up 2 distinct 3D movies if half the audience has red/blue and the other half orange and purple (would those colors work?) Frequency really is the big one, since light extends well outside the visible range, in both directions - your radio tunes by putting on very finely differentiated light filter (although really a reverse light filter in the sense that it only lets one very narrow set of frequencies in, rather than only keeping one narrow set of frequencies out).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >"A beam of light can possess two kinds of angular momentum.

The _spin angular momentum_ of a ray of light can make objects it shines on rotate in place, whereas its _orbital angular momentum_ can make objects rotate around the center of the ray.

A beam of light that carries orbital angular momentum resembles a vortex, moving through space with a spiraling pattern like a corkscrew. Whereas a conventional light beam is brightest at its center, vortex beams have ringlike shapes that are dark in the center, due to how some of the waves making up vortex beams can interfere with one another."

Fascinating!

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious if this is applicable to fiber optics? If so it could vastly decrease the width of our undersea cables and allow for more redundancy in a non-complete cable cut scenario.

</comment><comment><USER9> Trying to transmit via multiple spatial modes has been tried in the past. I'd be interested to see if OAM modes don't suffer from the same mode coupling behavior.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can such method also work with radio frequencies ?

<comment><USER11> Circular polarized antennas are often used in ham radio especially to communicate with satellites[1].

I'm not expert enough to know, is this the same physics as what the article is talking about?

[1] [https://www.qsl.net/sv1bsx/antenna- pol/polarization.html](https://www.qsl.net/sv1bsx/antenna- pol/polarization.html)</comment></comment>


Man accused of making thousands of racist robocalls faces $13M fine - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21116547/fcc-fine-13-million-robocaller-harassment-campaign <comment><USER2> Robocalls are very annoying, but doesn't punishing someone for the content of a robocall violate the 1st Amendment?</comment>


Don't waste your time in crappy startup jobs - <AUTHOR> http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-your-time-in-crappy-startup-jobs <comment><USER2> I disagree with the author's point that you don't necessarily learn more from working at a startup. You learn a lot about starting a company, _especially_ if it's a crappy startup. When a company flows along nicely, it's hard to identify what it's doing _right_. If a company implodes, it's much easier to point out everything it's done wrong.

That said, I recently left a job at a crappy startup. I learned a lot. I also learned that there are plenty of crappy startups out there, so it's okay to be a little selective about your employer. Better yet, start your own crappy startup.</comment>


Ask HN: I've never done a launch before, can you guys help me out? - <AUTHOR>

I suspect that my situation is sort of unusual so I'll try to explain it first as best as possible. I've decided that generative art/music is an interesting market, and so I originally was going to make synthesizer apps for Android. After much thought, I decided that a musician centric app, (not to mention a professionally useless one) excluded too many people. So my compromise was to make a series of sound organisms, each with a distinct sound, behavior, and visual style. Similar to RJDJ(1) or Brian Eno's generative sound apps(2). I figured this would be a good idea because IMO the aforementioned apps are a bit too hard to grasp for the average user. People might sympathize more with a creature that produces sound as a byproduct than a generative sound application with abstract visuals. At least that was my reasoning.
So the actual project is going along nicely, but from reading HN a lot I realize that the launch and marketing are pretty important as well. I don't know anything about marketing or launching a product. I was planning on charging $.99 for each app (each creature would be an individual app), and for my website I would have a splash page with a video, some QR codes and links to the apps in the market. Besides posting to HN and Reddit, what else can I do to spread the word about my apps? Should I set up the splash page now and gather emails? I don't know if people would be that excited about something that is kind of hard to explain without watching a video, which is why I'm hesitant about trying to build excitement without a finished product. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.
tl;dr How do you market an app?
http://rjdj.me/
http://www.generativemusic.com/ <comment><USER2> > from reading HN a lot I realize that the launch and marketing are pretty > important as well.

Thumbs up for HN - lucky for you that you 'woke up early'.

I think the thread below should tell you all you want to know:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2239281></comment>


Show HN: Dead Simple To-Do List - <AUTHOR> https://to-do.live <comment><AUTHOR> I made this because I had to make a todo list and my other lists were in email but using email for todos was too much work.</comment>