NetSurf, a multi-platform web browser - <AUTHOR> https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ <comment><USER2> I find NetSurf's source code beautiful and quite easy to read and follow, and straightforward. I am impressed. It's like the pure version of "makes sense". It's also split into independent libraries that can be used outside of NetSurf, which make them useful on their own, and NetSurf very modular. If I had to implement something that requires a feature implemented in a browser, I'd seriously consider one of them. Especially their CSS parser and engine.

I really recommand to have a look at the code.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, I wouldn't exactly call this "beautiful"...

[https://source.netsurf- browser.org/libdom.git/tree/src/core/...](https://source.netsurf- browser.org/libdom.git/tree/src/core/document.c#n117)

[https://source.netsurf- browser.org/libdom.git/tree/src/core/...](https://source.netsurf- browser.org/libdom.git/tree/src/core/implementation.c#n62)

[https://source.netsurf- browser.org/libcss.git/tree/src/parse...](https://source.netsurf- browser.org/libcss.git/tree/src/parse/parse.c#n416)

Looks like the authors have a severe case of goto-phobia that causes a quadratic explosion of copy-pasted code in the error-return paths. Some of the files also feel like they have been translated into C from C++ or some other OO language by some automated tool, resulting in some very long "namespaced"-looking identifiers.

Then again, I don't think Firefox or WebKit code is that much better either, so my impression of this codebase is neither great nor horrible. As "beautiful" is subjective, to give a reference for what I'd consider beautiful, look at BSD or early UNIX.

<comment><USER4> there are other "C++ programmer trying to write C" anti-patterns, such as typedefed structs and one "class" per file, leading to terrible performance without LTO. stuff like [https://source.netsurf- browser.org/libdom.git/tree/src/core/...](https://source.netsurf- browser.org/libdom.git/tree/src/core/cdatasection.c) has more signs of excessive C++ love: "vtable", "protected", etc. I don't know that these things are inherently bad, but they certainly don't exist in C.

<comment><USER3> ...and despite that, it still manages to feel faster than the mainstream browsers, which says just how much extra overhead _those_ have, and that there is still "more room at the bottom" to trim this one down some more too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was able to download and build the Gtk3 version of this in under 5 minutes. For compactness alone, gets my seal of approval. I'm posting this comment from NetSurf, HN works fine.

<comment><USER6> Does it block ads?

Asking because: DNS-level adblocking is stupid.

<comment><USER7> DNS level adblocking is fantastic, especially since it can be done network wide so easily and used as an extra layer of ad filtering.

<comment><USER8> > DNS level adblocking is fantastic, especially since it can be done network > wide so easily and used as an extra layer of ad filtering.

It's great, but DNS over HTTPS will end the party soon enough (if I was a smart TV manufacturer, I would be prioritizing adding dns over https to the device firmware to subvert network blocks).

<comment><USER9> DNS-adblocking in a router can be complemented by the router's firewall blocking outbound to all DoH provider IPs.

(It'll need to be a constantly-updating blocklist, but the DNS-adblock lists are also that already.)

<comment><USER10> I can't vouch for these since I haven't tried them yet, but it can apparently also be complemented by configuring your local DNS server to return NXDOMAIN for use-application-dns.net [1] and using a DoH proxy to protect upstream requests from snooping [2].

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use- appli...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-application- dnsnet)

[2] [https://github.com/aarond10/https_dns_proxy](https://github.com/aarond10/https_dns_proxy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anyone here is running Linux and is now researching a "backup plan" in case Firefox pivots, I would highly recommend Epiphany (now called GNOME Web): [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web)

<comment><USER12> There are also surf [https://surf.suckless.org/](https://surf.suckless.org/) and qutebrowser [https://qutebrowser.org/](https://qutebrowser.org/), both based on webkit.

<comment><USER13> I use my own fork of surf daily, but am having to fallback to mainstream browsers quite often these days as sites stop working on it or it's unusably slow. Slack no longer works, GitHub breaks occasionally, etc.

Is there a well-maintained fork that fixes these issues? The main repo[1] hasn't seen updates in over a year now. I read that development slowed down after the main maintainer left suckless, but I'm hoping the community will pick it up. It's an excellent minimal browser.

[1]: [https://git.suckless.org/surf/](https://git.suckless.org/surf/)

<comment> The-Compiler FWIW Slack seems to work fine in surf for me. Are you sure you have an up-to- date WebKitGTK on your system? Those kinds of issues are typically fixed there, and not in surf itself. As long as the WebKit API stays backwards- compatible, there's probably not much need for surf to change (other than for new features).

There's zsurf based on QtWebEngine/Chromium too, FWIW: [https://github.com/SteveDeFacto/zsurf](https://github.com/SteveDeFacto/zsurf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I remember looking at this and Dillo a while ago, and while it definitely looked more polished than Dillo, I recall downloading the Windows binary and it crashing the first time I ran it - not a good start. On the other hand, Dillo ran immediately and was at least usable. Maybe it's time to try it again, especially now that there are even fewer independent browsers...

<comment><USER14> The Windows binary doesn't crash anymore, I have it installed and use it occasionally. I also use it on my very low end Linux laptop and it works wonderfully for anything that doesn't require JavaScript.

Edit: just a warning, the Windows version has problems with the <select> element, it won't display the options when you click it.

<comment><USER15> You have discovered websites that don't demand JS! Seriously though I have JS disabled (FireFox ext. to turn back on per site) and the amount of broken or blank pages is saddening.

<comment><USER16> What's even sadder is that even with all that breakage, disabling JS makes the web more usable/bearable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also might be of interest that this can be run in a framebuffer. Sometimes I work in a virtual console to avoid distractions but when Emacs' built in web browser doesn't serve a purpose, I'll open NetSurf in another console, and it's fine for almost all "search for errors or docs" workflows.

</comment><comment><USER18> If curious see also

2018 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18692837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18692837)

2015 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10417807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10417807)

2010 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913332)

</comment><comment><USER19> ok... i'll bite... how does this compare to chrome in terms of rendering and compatibility? i don't see this thing listed on caniuse.com.

<comment><USER20> It does not even pass the ACID2 test. It is however the best independently developed browser engine out there. If you want an alternative to Webkit and whatever Firefox uses, Netsurf is the only viable option at the moment.

<comment><USER21> Basically, it's the only browser out there even trying to handle modern sites that's not mostly funded by Google or Apple (Firefox revenue is mostly coming from Google, and there's Safari), and which runs on rarer platforms.

It's still relatively big, because web standards are incredibly complicated, but it's almost tractable.

If you care about browser diversity, it's important.

<comment><USER22> There are a few others but all with their own caveats -

[https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/](https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/) is fully independent and can run Gmail, but it's commercial / non-FOSS. It's funded by contracts in the set-top-box industry.

[https://sciter.com/](https://sciter.com/) is non-FOSS with a free edition but you shouldn't run untrusted javascript on it

And there are some lightly-maintained forks of the leaked Presto 12.x engine from before Opera became a Chromium derivative, but of course it's copyright infringement.

<comment><USER23> I would love if Opera open sourced Presto. It's unfortunate that the lack of resources that pushed them to Chromium probably translate to a lack of resources needed to open source Presto properly, so I doubt we'll ever see it. : \

<comment><USER24> I loved presto so much, not going open source is a huge loss. And now the future of servo is unclear as well. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So obviously caters to what the web once was and should have stayed, not to the metastasizing idiocy it has become.

I'm ancient enough to remember when mainstream browsers came in packages of a few megabytes and got us through the day just fine with a featureset less than (or at the very most equal to) the current state of NetSurf. In a somewhat more rational world there would be massive popular pressure for this to remain the case.

Yes, sites break in NetSurf. This is squarely their own fault for not providing civilized degradation. Although it certainly wouldn't go amiss if the NetSurf engine encorporated the worthwhile elements of CSS 3, basically meaning Grid and possibly Flexbox.

<comment><USER26> Not sure when CSS variables were added, but I'd consider them more friendly to user customization than preprocessors that inline the same font stack 20 times in autogenerated class names (looking at medium.com), requiring you to override the font stack 20 times.

<comment><USER25> Granted. Lack of variables was always among the more serious defects of the confusion that is CSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> netsurf is a great browser, i test with it regularly, and it,s a pleasure to both use and develop for.

</comment><comment><USER28> It is many good idea, but should need a better customization, and perhaps better keyboard commands, Xaw widgets, bitmap fonts, etc. Support specifying pipes and stuff for files like Heirloom-mailx does. What we need is the browser that you have enough ropes to hang yourself and also a few more just in case, and NetSurf may be the one to base it from. Make it for the user first; assume any file received is potentially hostile (whether or not the connection is secure; a secure connection merely prevents spies from tampering with it, it does not prevent the server operator from tampering with it!). Support specifying scripts that the user can replace with their own implementaiton; this would ensure that the user can alter any document received, and would even make it more efficient too since the user's implementation need not be written in an interpreted programming language and need not be sandboxed as much either.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've played around with NetSurf a little for fun recently. It performed surprisingly well on a few of the sites i use. old.reddit, hackernews both rendered ok with some issues, also miniflux which i use for rss reading worked well too.

I think its a very cool and admirable project

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been using NetSurf for a long time now on my Thinkpad when I'm traveling. If I only need to check webmail and read articles NetSurf suffices perfectly, without draining as much battery power as a regular browser.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there any browser that implements container tabs à la Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER32> I noticed that in the screenshots section[1], the Linux screenshots for the Netsurf site and Wikipedia are from this year, but the BBC one is from 2011. How does the current BBC site fare?

[1] -- [https://www.netsurf- browser.org/about/screenshots/](https://www.netsurf- browser.org/about/screenshots/)

<comment><USER33> Front page: [https://l.sr.ht/RfrR.png](https://l.sr.ht/RfrR.png)

Reading an article: [https://l.sr.ht/ZSwt.png](https://l.sr.ht/ZSwt.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For all that this browser lacks, I think it's simple enough to build that it's been the "first" browser on a few alternative/hobby OS's, no?

e.g, Redox, maybe Haiku pre-WebKit port? Haiku I could easily be misremembering as there was probably a BeOS browser that ran, albeit outdated...

tl;dr I appreciate the simplicity of it in contrast to modern browsers.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is the NetSurf rendering engine multi-core/multi-thread? It's not clear from the homepage, which makes me think that it's single-core only.

</comment><comment><USER36> Do some pages on the website need a little love for the copyright date?

"Copyright 2003 - 2009 The NetSurf Developers". (eg; Downloads)

</comment><comment><USER37> Netsurf was a bit unstable and prone to lock compared to Dillo or Links+.

Also, the duktape JS capabilities are behind even edbrowse.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if it would build to MSDOS

<comment><USER39> Not a silly question. However, (at a guess) I reckon a lot of the underlying net code is probably POSIX based, which MS-DOS is not.

I notice there's a framebuffer version, so building a nano-linux distro that boots instantly into that shouldn't be that hard.

<comment><USER38> So there's the framebuffer code that's needed and then it's netcode.

So for the framebuffer code, maybe an MSDOS UNIVBE wrapper could be used.

For netcode, I have no idea, but a wrapper for POSIX calls must surely exist there also.

Anyyways. I guess the userbase would be pretty much nil, for this as alternatives do exist on DOS :)

<comment><USER40> For networking on msdos I recommend mTCP. Although it's C++.

The biggest problem however will be compiling the code. The only viable compiler for msdos is openwatcom so the question is if the code uses any fancy extensions or gnuisms. Also the only version of openwatcom that didn't produce broken binaries is the Windows version (or at least was about two years ago).

Happy porting :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> what in the 1993 is this

<comment> jeppesen-io no kidding - looks like even the web server is old too. Seems to be Cherokee, a project which last stable release was 6 years ago

<comment><USER42> > Cherokee, a project which last stable release was 6 years ago

Its last CVE was 10 years ago[1].

It's not actually necessary for software to change if it already does what you want it to.

1: [https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-1005...](https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-1005/Cherokee.html)

<comment><USER43> There's quite a few more recent CVEs for Cherokee.

[https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?form_type=Basic&res...](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?form_type=Basic&results_type=overview&query=cherokee&search_type=all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wasn't that the name of some shitty product from the 90s?</comment>


How big is iPhone 6 screen? Cool comparison tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.iphonesize.info

<comment><USER2> You have a size wrong in the Iphone 5. You're not taking into account the width of the scroll bar (if any).

The wrapper should be 20em wide and the iframe inside should have 21.2em wide. You should also use overflow:hidden on the wrapper.

Out of all of these I've found this guy has done it the best so far and is the best representation of how a websie actually looks on an iPhone 5

[http://www.nodex.co.uk/services/mobile-responsiveness- intera...](http://www.nodex.co.uk/services/mobile-responsiveness-interactive- page-test)

Perhaps you can look at his CSS and see how he did it?</comment>


To Seem Confident, Women Have to Be Seen as Warm - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2016/07/to-seem-confident-women-have-to-be-seen-as-warm <comment><AUTHOR> Relevant here because it's "a study analyzing the judgments that colleagues made regarding the competence and warmth of 236 engineers working in project teams at a multinational software development company."</comment>


Functional Image Processing in D - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thecybershadow.net/2014/03/21/functional-image-processing-in-d/

<comment><USER2> The stuff you can do at compile-time in D is just mind-boggling. Lisp and C++ are the only languages that really compare.

<comment><USER3> Although with C++ you'd probably break your fingers trying to implement it. And it would end up looking uglier. :)</comment></comment>


Woman chose to homeless in SF - <AUTHOR> http://sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/This-woman-chose-to-go-homeless-in-San-Francisco-9189591.php <comment><USER2> >And then in May, she got laid off from her job. So she moved onto her boyfriend's sailboat.

We need to have a moratorium on these stories about these fake feel good financial stories.</comment>


Imposed cognitive load of creating a simple React/Redux component - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/TjChear/status/1219380505675616256 <comment><USER2> This diagram covers initializing the library, which is a few lines of code and a few functions, as is often the case when initializing libraries. On the surface, it misrepresents things as they are commonly used post setup by mixing the entire redux flow into one diagram.

setup -> actionCreator calls dispatch -> update store (reducer) -> update connected component.

The latest version of Redux also address some of the verbosity between actions and reducers and so on, too, to address feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> I made the diagram to help me remember the concepts and how they relate to each other, and as my title suggests, it also illustrates the cognitive load imposed by having to remember the pieces I have to add/change whenever I make changes to the state machinery, not so much how state change flows through the various pieces.

I appreciate the effort to reduce the verbosity, but so far I've been served well with react context and useState. I can only hope that my failure to understand the necessity for all the various named concepts comes down to insufficient critical mass of the complexity of my webapp.

<comment><USER2> With big apps Redux scales exceptionally well, and the terminology (a design pattern, really) allows devs unfamiliar with the codebase to immediately start contributing. The design also allows for middleware (and access to a vast middleware ecosystem), performant lookup, caching, and more. There's a lot more to it than global state access throughout a component tree.

All of the write ups out there about "why you don't need redux" are all right on. You typically don't. You'll know when you do, however. And it's worth preemptively diving in if planning for a large application.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Postead – A fast-moving imageboard where your votes matter - <AUTHOR> https://postead.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks,

I wanted to share a quarantine project I've been working on and finally just released on Google Play Store. Any feedback on the app functionality or the idea itself would be much appreciated as I plan to continue improving the project. Also feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer them as well as possible!

What is postead?

postead is a fast-moving imageboard where your votes and participation matter. With every refresh, the user is shown 15 posts which were most recently interacted with (submitted or commented on). This means that only the most relevant and engaging posts stay at the top, while others get lost forever to the flow of time. Users also have the option to upvote/downvote a post. If a post's upvote/downvote ratio falls below a certain point, the post gets deleted forever.

This gives the users a democratic power over the content that stays relevant. While every post is assigned to a channel, nobody owns the channel itself. This means channels don't have moderators, just the community moderating itself. Use channels to form communities and find people with similar interests.

Another important feature of postead is that posts that haven't been interacted with in over an hour get deleted from our servers forever. An automatic system deletes all of the images and comments associated with the original post, as well as the post itself. Only flow remains.

Flow is the is the postead equivalent to Reddit's karma - it's a way to score posts, comments and content in general. After posts and comments get deleted flow remains and users can keep track of the total amount of flow they have accumulated over time.

[https://postead.com/](https://postead.com/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/postead/](https://www.reddit.com/r/postead/)</comment>


Humans can see a single photon at a time - <AUTHOR> https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/humans-can-detect-a-single-photon-at-a-time <comment><USER2> I feel like there's something fishy going on here.

<comment><USER3> When I was taking a psych course in college we went over the limits of human perception for various senses. Our prof quoted the limit for detecting light at somewhere between one and five photons hitting the retina in otherwise complete darkness.</comment></comment>


One Surprising Sign You're Cut Out to Be an Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/one-surprising-sign-cut-entrepreneur-120714701.html <comment><USER2> Great article. I also share the view that humility is a very important trait. As an entrepreneur, you will fail many times. If you are not humble you probably will blame outside factors for your failure rather than take a deep look inside, see what you did wrong and improve on that.</comment>


Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47k Feet from the Moon - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/apollo-10-moon-nasa.html <comment><USER2> I just finished Moondust, which is a really good read for anyone interested in the Apollo story. The author was a journalist working on a story about the Apollo astronauts, and he was interviewing one of the men who walked on the moon. During the interview the astronaut took a phone call, and came back a while later saying, "Now there's only nine of us." I believe it was Pete Conrad that had just died.

Shortly after that, the author (Andrew Smith) decided to go find each of the men who had walked on the moon, and ask them what they'd done with their lives since walking on the moon. It's a wonderful mix of his own recollections of growing up when Apollo was happening, each of the astronaut's personal backstories and recollections of what it was like to be at the center of the Apollo program, and what life has been like after walking on the moon.

I can't recommend it highly enough. It's being re-issued this summer for the 50th anniversary of the first landing, but you can also order the original version from 2005.

[https://www.amazon.com/Moondust-Search-Men-Fell-Earth- dp-006...](https://www.amazon.com/Moondust-Search-Men-Fell-Earth- dp-0062906690/dp/0062906690/)

<comment><USER3> It's sad. Most of them did not do well in later life.

<comment><USER4> Not really a wonder .. they where a special kind of men. Adrenalin junkys and very smart .. they had been Testpilot and Astronaut. What can you do after that .. what job can compete with that ..

<comment><USER5> They could go back to regular test piloting I guess. But I agree that anything would be unfulfilling compared to what they achieved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Cernan speculated that the lander's ascent module had been short-fueled on > purpose: "A lot of people thought about the kind of people we were: 'Don't > give those guys an opportunity to land, 'cause they might!'"

I've always loved this anecdote. It really illustrates the adventurous attitude and boldness these astronauts. If they were fully fueled, there was a non-zero chance they would have just landed. What's Houston gunna do about it?

<comment><USER7> > What's Houston gunna do about it?

Preventing them from flying another mission, ever, presumably.

<comment><USER8> So far as I can tell, none of the Apollo 11 ever flew another mission, so it may well have been worth it.

(Though the 10 astronauts all did at least one more, with two of the three eventually getting their turn on the moon)

<comment><USER9> > the 10 astronauts

To other readers: OP is talking about the astronauts of Apollo X, not a quantity of ten astronauts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was staring at a picture today (I think it was a screen capture from the Apollo 11 documentary).

It was a view out across the Moon's horizon and then total darkness. At first I felt this strange sense of dread and emptiness but then reframed the feeling into awe.

I can't even begin to imagine what that must have felt like to be actually standing there. Or to be in that tiny little shuttle orbiting around the moon at what is essentially the height of an airplane flying across the ocean.

<comment><USER11> Apollo 11 is such a great documentary. They restored a lot of 70mm film and the clarity of the image is surreal.

It didn't get screened in any cinemas where I live, but the bluray looks absolutely stunning. I wish they did a 4K release.

<comment><USER12> It was such a great documentary, I saw it twice. A tiny detail I picked up the second time around-- they gave Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin cinematography credits.

<comment><USER13> This movie keeps sounding better and better, I'm so annoyed that it didn't show in any theatres in my hemisphere of the planet. It was pretty much a USA only release. I really want to see it, enough to fly across my country to see it, that's a crazy day trip and a story to tell, but not enough to fly to the other side of the planet, return flights from Australia to the USA is a rather expensive trip for a movie, probably close to ten times the cost of my worst case, a cross country flight to Sydney.

<comment><USER14> I have the same thing with many, many filmfestival films. I'm glad that there are torrents for some of them, including Apollo 11. Would love to pay for streams of filmfestival films, but there aren't many.

For Apollo 11 thankfully, there are plenty of options here: [https://www.uphe.com/movies/apollo-11-2019](https://www.uphe.com/movies/apollo-11-2019) Scroll down a bit to find the 'find out more' heading. I used the iTunes version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's 14 kilometers for those wondering.

<comment><USER16> I'm wondering if Apollo mission was actually using feet or meters for calculations.

<comment><USER17> [https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...](https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminary099/CONTROLLED_CONSTANTS.agc)

Code seems to use SI, but imperial in comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently found this list of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents. There are some truly harrowing experiences, including an astronaut whose helmet began to fill with water during an EVA. He was having difficulty speaking by the time he was removed from the suit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight- related_ac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight- related_accidents_and_incidents)

<comment><USER19> About the EVA

> By December, 2013, NASA had determined the leak to have been caused by a > design flaw in the Portable Life Support System liquid coolant. The > designers failed to take into account the physics of water in zero-g, which > unintentionally allowed coolant water to mix with the air supply.

They did not take into account that a space suit will primarily be used in… space. wat?!?

<comment><USER20> >> _The designers failed to take into account the physics of water in zero-g, which unintentionally allowed coolant water to mix with the air supply._

> _They did not take into account that a space suit will primarily be used in… > space. wat?!?_

That's not entirely fair. It's easy enough to know that something will be used in particular circumstances, but not to realise _all_ of the consequences. Water behaves very, very weirdly in microgravity as compared with here on Earth, and unless you, personally, have experienced it and experimented with it, it's very, _very_ easy not to notice something, or to expect something other than what actually happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why didn't the Apollo 10 astronauts fly back up as part of Apollo 11 since they handled their mission so well and the 11 was pretty much identical?

<comment><USER22> Maybe because it was considered too stressful to do two missions close like that?

Maybe because that's how the military do things - recce and offensive action are usually done by different units or subunits within a unit, with the recce briefing the other group.

<comment><USER23> Also, the effects of space travel were barely known then. Even today we have little idea what actually happens to the human body when it's in space; only a few weeks ago, NASA published the results of the first twin study on space travel and had a lot of new and interesting findings. In the 1960's we knew even less, and given an abundance of caution, it's probably safest not to recover a crew of astronauts from the Moon and then immediately send them back to the Moon.

<comment><USER22> Right - the recce proved a fresh team could reach the moon. So that's what they did - sent a fresh team to the moon. Sending a team _back_ to the moon would have been something untested.

<comment><USER24> Apollo 8 went to the moon and the crew didn't turn into xenomorphs. I don't think they were quite unsure what to expect out there but there were lots of other factors in the scheduling.

<comment><USER22> > Apollo 8 went to the moon and the crew didn't turn into xenomorphs.

I obviously wasn't suggesting anything as stupid as that, was I?

<comment><USER24> What I mean is I don't believe either of 'they had no idea what space would do to them' or 'they were just following some military convention' had much to do with the way they scheduled crews.

<comment><USER23> This is sort of what I was getting at with the phrase "abundance of caution". At this time we were still quarantining people who returned from the moon.

One thing we do know (and knew at the time) is that the earth->space and space->earth transitions require a period of adjustment. The added stress of repeating this adjustment has, so far as I know, still not been tested, let alone understood.

<comment><USER24> Yes of course. But as a factor it would be far lower in importance than lots of other much more basic ones. Like, say, the fact that the missions were quite different, you have to prepare crews for them, you have to prepare backups, you have a limited set of highly trained, highly ambitious overachiever volunteers to pick from, all of whom expect to fly (in history- making missions), etc, etc, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> FYI, 47k feet is 14325 meters.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone who has played Kerbal can tell you the hardest part of this mission is getting back to the orbiter.

<comment><USER27> I wish I had a gaming PC for that (hit rock bottom). Guess I'm gonna watch YouTube instead?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's obvious, it had to be the 11th mission.

(/joke).

</comment><comment><USER29> "47k feet"? Metric prefixes on American units, interesting. There's hope! :)

<comment><USER30> "47 kilofeet"

<comment><USER31> My preferred term is "47 kilofeeters"

<comment><USER32> Shortened to "kliffs".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Actual title is "Why Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47,000 Feet From the Moon".

<comment><USER34> Yes, but HN's software sometimes takes out leading "Why" because it tends to be a clickbait device, and many titles work just fine without it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Stopped? Yeah right</comment>


BioTool – Manipulate DNA/RNA in the Browser - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/biotool/aenbjmfdhgnlpnpiiinajokpgchogmee

<comment><USER2> What a great idea! BioTool works really well for me.</comment>


Sodium's explosive secrets revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/sodium-s-explosive-secrets-revealed-1.16771 <comment><USER2> So much good science going on here. Original experimental setup to turn a stochastic process into a repeatable one. Proper application of computational methods to study experimental results. Albeit I think I can see some problems with the AIMD work, it doesn't diminish the overall result. Really a fantastic piece of work.

<comment><USER3> I'm a theoretical chemistry phd student. I'm curious, how do you think the simulations could have been improved?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Phil Mason has a video about this research[1] on his YouTube channel. There are several others on there about intermediate results.

[1] [http://youtu.be/LmlAYnFF_s8](http://youtu.be/LmlAYnFF_s8)

</comment><comment><USER5> > _He wrote of how, as a boy, he and his friends bought a lump of sodium from > the local chemicals supplier..._

Whenever I read stuff like I this, it saddens me just how much safety and common sense have eroded the spirit of scientific experimentation. These days, the most reactive chemical in a chemistry set is sodium bicarbonate.

<comment><USER6> You can still purchase sodium from chemical suppliers, schools just aren't quite as relaxed about letting kids play with it. Even college students can get in trouble: [http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N37/sodiumdrop.html](http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N37/sodiumdrop.html) I doubt throwing a chunk of sodium into the Charles really helped further "scientific experimentation" all that much... It did get a lot of beach cleanup volunteers injured, and caused significant property damage, though.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps "scientific experimentation" was a bit much. But still, I can easily imagine that incident kindling the yearning for knowledge in a young man, perhaps setting him on the path of being a scientist. At the very least, I think it's a somewhat safe bet it influenced his study of sodium later in life, and we did gain some knowledge from his studies.

I am of course not saying every kid that plays with sodium will become interested in science, just that perhaps this one wouldn't have, otherwise.

<comment><USER6> Did you read the article? "That incident" was a frathouse at MIT dumping sodium into the river... If a kid gets into MIT, gets into a fraternity, and doesn't have some sort of scientific yearning kindled in him, I really don't think sodium in the Charles is going to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nothing bad to say about the science, but the (casual? blasé?) wording of this really bothered me:

> Jungwirth's colleague Philip Mason was determined to find out what was > really going on — despite the hazards. In one run, he removed his face > shield to blow out a small fire, only to have a piece of metal go off in his > face, scratching his cheek.

<comment><USER8> You almost certainly don't want to read 'Things I Won't Work With' then: [http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/)

<comment><USER9> TIWWW often mocks the blasé wording of this kind of reports or articles, the things you really don't want to read are the source texts.

I very, very strongly recommend reading Ignition!, it is truly awesome (it's the source for "Sand won't save you this time" and the book would be well worth its weight in rare metals if it were still possible to find the thing in any other form than a PDF)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So that's why too much sodium intake is bad for you. ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> Incidentally, the news from Prague 70 years ago: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Bombing_of_Prague](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Bombing_of_Prague)

<comment><USER11> No, I suppose you're right. That's not at all fascinating to consider...

<comment><USER11> We should just remain comfortably cocooned in our contextual containers.

<comment><USER12> You're being downvoted because your comment has no relationship to the submission or the discussion.

<comment><USER11> Incorrect, but, ultimately, I don't give a fuck.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beware the binary views - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2011/4/28/chris-dixon <comment><USER2> >It simultaneously reminds me of both George Bush's classic "You're either with us or against us", and of the old joke, "There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't". All three are superficially correct but utterly useless and needlessly divisive statements.

Not a very good comparison. "You're either with us or against us" was not a 'superficially true' statement, it's a _false dilemma_.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youre_either_with_us,_or_agains...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youre_either_with_us,_or_against_us)

<comment><USER3> One would also say that about understanding binary. Understanding is to me clearly a scale with no hard limits; what does it mean to fully understand binary? Knowing powers of 2 up to arbitrary n? Being able to make finite state machines for sequence detection, gray code converters, etc.? Knowing binary jokes when you see them?

<comment><USER4> I don't think binary is really subtle enough to have a fine gradation of shades of grey. I interpret "Understand binary" to mean something along the lines of "be comfortable with the notion that the numbering system we use has an arbitrary base (10), and that you can still have the same radix notation with a base of 2." If you get the joke about 10 people, you probably understand binary, and vice-versa.

And now, for a completely different binary joke: I've got 1100011 but a bit ain't one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was confused because the apparent content is entirely overlaid with a full- page ad for Chrome, whose close button was off the window to the left. I nearly flagged this post as mislabelled content. :(

</comment><comment><USER6> Also, binary views will bork your terminal.</comment>


Kimono, webscraper, disappearing as a service. App to mend transitional issues - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kimonolabs.com/2016/02/15/the-kimono-team-is-joining-palantir/ <comment><USER2> I'm not a user of the product but seems weird to only give users a 2 week notice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, short notice. Not sure how it was with the paying customers.</comment></comment>


Google's Project Ara phone was delayed because it broke apart when dropped - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/19/9179413/google-explains-project-ara-delay <comment><USER2> cant you just put like an otter case around it?</comment>


Xobni, Microsoft, and why Americans love haterade - <AUTHOR> http://davidadewumi.com/2008/04/21/why-americans-love-haterade/

<comment><USER2> As a software developer the main thing I have against Microsoft is their documentation blows.

</comment><comment><USER3> People don't just hate Microsoft because it's "cool" or because they're "the leader". They have plenty of data:

\- They have always played unfairly, offering to "partner" with potential competitors, then driving them out of business after seeing their IP.

\- They flaunt their monopoly while overwhelming law enforcement officials with lawyers. How hard can it be to stay one step ahead of attorneys general? Not so hard with enough resources.

\- They blackmail their hardware partners with unethical, and probably illegal, conditions (Bundle Office or lose your OS discounts.)

\- They hold their end users hostage with undesirable upgrade paths and "service patches".

\- They stifle innovation. (Imagine going to Walmart and finding TV sets that only get Channel 7 - that's what the PC market has been like for 20 years.)

Oh, and one more thing...

\- Their software sucks.

We hate the Yankees and Patriots because they are fun to hate.

We hate Microsoft because they have earned our hatred.

<comment><USER4> You can't hate and then provide logical reasons for your hate. Hate by definition is illogical.

People hate Microsoft because it IS cool and because they ARE the leader. However they then try to justify their hate with rational reasons. Hate comes first, then comes reason, not the other way around.

Because if reason came first, hate would never follow. Perhaps dislike, or distaste would. Microsoft has its flaws and weaknesses but only because it has accomplished far more than many. You never hear people applauding Microsoft all you ever hear is the same old rhetoric.

To be a true critic one has to acknowledge both the positives and the negatives. Otherwise you're just hater for the sake of convenience.

<comment><USER3> "You can't hate and then provide logical reasons for your hate. Hate by definition is illogical."

You're right. The only reason I even used the word "hate" was because I was responding to a "haterade" article. I know that's not much of an excuse, just a little literary license.

"People hate Microsoft because it IS cool and because they ARE the leader."

Microsoft was NEVER cool.

And fortunately, their leadership days are waning.

"but only because it has accomplished far more than many"

Only? I completely disagree. Did you understand the bullets in my original post? Microsoft achieved what they did not by excellence or innovation, but by lying, cheating, stealing, and crushing innovation every step of the way for 30 years. This is direct opposition to what I believe (and probably what many people on this board believe). I didn't cite references because anyone can google hundreds of examples.

"To be a true critic one has to acknowledge both the positives and the negatives"

I would have cited the positives if I could have thought of any.

I was a programmer before Microsoft came along and screwed everything up. I imagine many people weren't even born then.

So how could they remember the good old days of fabulous software? With stuff like smalltalk, lisp, or Pick. Or even visicalc, Wordperfect, or Netscape.

I sincerely believe that if Microsoft never existed, we'd be better off. Fortunately, open source and the internet are finally bringing the good old days back. Lucky for you and your generation (I'm guessing) you didn't have to live through the darkest days of Microsoft dominance. So how could you understand my "hatred"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does this have to do with Americans? That seems like a total non sequitur.</comment>


Is fasting good for you? What we know so far - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/is-fasting-good-for-you-what-we-know-so-far <comment><USER2> The author went through keto flu, which is a series uncomfortable adjustments your body makes as it transitions from glucose fuel to ketone fuel (ketosis). People who begin ketogenic diets know this well. Fasting feels very similar. The most acute symptom is often "brain fog", which manifests exactly how the author described.

Ketosis takes several days to begin while the body burns through its reserves of glycogen, at which point the symptoms begin, then lasts several days while basic adaptation takes place. Full adaptation to match one's athletic performance while glycogen fueled can take months.

The author didn't even mention the words ketosis nor ketones, so I have to imagine she went into this quite blindly. Once you've gone in and out of ketosis several times, you don't experience flu symptoms nearly as much and sometimes (me) not at all.

For most people a fast starts to feel magical after about day 5, where keto adaption has taken place and the mental habit and craving for food starts to subside. Obviously this will vary from person to person, so maybe the author didn't quite get far enough along to get out of the woods, so to speak.

<comment><USER3> I've seen some exogenous ketones products, e.g. [1]. Could these help to get into ketosis without the nasty side-effects?

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/KetoSports-KetoCaNa-Original- Exogenou...](https://www.amazon.com/KetoSports-KetoCaNa-Original-Exogenous- Supplement/dp/B00U7R7194)

<comment><USER4> The belief is "yes" but research on the topic is new and unfinished. Dr. D'Agostino specializes in ketogenic nutrition, and discusses exogenous ketones for exactly that purpose in two podcasts[1][2].

[http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/11/03/dominic- dagostino/](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/11/03/dominic-dagostino/) [http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/07/06/dom-dagostino- part-2/](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/07/06/dom-dagostino-part-2/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article touches lightly on research in to one type of fasting (intermittent fasting), then proceeds to detail the authors' personal experience with a very different and more extreme type of fast (a one time 7 day fast).

I fail to see how this approach provides any value, nor does it even attempt to answer the question or provide the summary posed in the title.

This is a prime example of editorial incompetence in titling an article.

<comment><USER6> The title is "One week, no food". I don't see how that contributes to the problem.

<comment><USER5> The title (which can be seen in the slug and the HN link) was "Is fasting Good For You? What We Know So Far."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is _not_ "what we know so far" \- this is an anecdote about one person and his wife fasting for a week. There's a cursory section about the current buzz around the topic, and then a reasonable account of what happened to them.

That's it. Nice story, no actual data.

<comment><USER8> By we, they probably just meant themselves.

<comment><USER9> In that case, how can they address the question "is fasting good for you"? They may as well write an article "can you believe your horoscope? what we know so far" based on their personal experience. This is exactly the type of topics where I'd like to have scientific data as opposed to personal experiences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My portion sizes are small and I eat ~8 times during the day. That being said, I'm still on a mild form of calorie restriction, I think. If I don't eat for over 3 hours and then start some physical activity, I sometimes start to feel weak and sick. I don't think I could function if I tried to fast for a whole day.

</comment><comment><USER11> There's all this bro science about "if losing fat, you need to do specific things to avoid losing muscle in the same proportions"; I've heard a lot about the supposed health benefits of intermittent fasting, but nothing about its effects on muscle that seems remotely reputable. Does anyone here know anything about IF in a bodybuilding context?

<comment><USER12> Bodybuilders aren't really reflective of how humans work. While cutting they're usually on test/tren + t3/clen/dnp and may still be using gh/insulin timed around their meals. And, working out multiple times a day, then playing with their carb/sodium intakes.

It's probably healthier to be morbidly obese than what a pro bb will put their body through.

<comment><USER11> I didn't really intend to imply bodybuilding-qua-professional; merely bodybuilding-qua-programmer-who-lifts.

<comment><USER12> IF will work fine for the average person for a simple reason-- If you skip a meal and if you leave your other meals at the same size as before, then you have removed a few hundred calories from your diet and will lose weight for a while.

I've been doing IF for a while without trying to since I don't really eat breakfast and I really only eat lunch with my team because cooking dinner for 1 isn't awesome + delivery is too expensive.

It's okay for maintaining strength/losing weight slowly, but hunger/happiness on it really depends on the person. Some people don't do well with only eating 1 meal a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It can be done very long under certain conditions and with medical supervision [http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...](http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.htm)

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone have any good references to scientific research about fasting?

As others pointed out, this article is not it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Original title: One week, no food

</comment><comment><USER16> One person who has done good research on fasting is

Dr Valter Longo. [http://gero.usc.edu/faculty/longo/](http://gero.usc.edu/faculty/longo/)

</comment><comment><USER17> the Jain philosphy has been promoting annual 1 week water fasts for thousands of years.

</comment><comment><USER18> > _We bought some emergency supplies in case one or both of us ended up > feeling ill or fainting: some energy drinks, a couple of bars of Swiss milk > chocolate, some fruit, and some bread and cheese, and put them in the > refrigerator._

> _My wife and I don't normally eat breakfast (she has a cup of coffee and I > drink a Coke Zero — yes, yes, I know it's bad)_

Fasting releases toxins into blood stream. If you eat junk food before fasting, it will cause headaches and other nasty stuff.

Better is to start slowly, eat vegetables / rice for a month, than start fasting.

<comment><USER5> > Fasting releases toxins into blood stream

Nonsense. What 'toxins'? Where are these 'toxins' from? What are there effects on the body? What scientific papers detail these 'toxins', their chemical makeup, source, etc?

'Toxin' as a word has become a high-level indicator of pseudoscience and homeopathy-style unscientific health advice. If you see someone using that word, always question or ignore their advice. It's the 2000s version of the Victorian era 'impurities' which were leached or vomited from the body to return to health.

<comment><USER19> It's possible that parent is referring to the mild acidosis that can accompany ketogenic diets or fasting. At some point along the process of using fat, rather than glycogen, for fuel, your body's compensatory mechanisms (bicarbonate buffering, renal excretion, and a few others) can't keep up with the acid in the blood stream, causing a lower pH.

I'm not going to take a guess at 'toxins.' When I hear that terminology, I think of a blindfolded kid trying to hit a pinata with a bat, or carpet- bombing: they'll get there eventually if only by the imprecision of their targeting, but it's not pretty.

<comment><USER18> Yes, fat burning releases 'toxins' which are accumulated there. It is a problem when fasting for extended periods (week+).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube AI still recommends the flat earth theory by the hundreds of millions - <AUTHOR> https://buzzways.at/collection/982/ <comment><USER2> I have difficulty understanding why this flat earth theory thing is undergoing what appears to be a resurgence. What is driving it? Why now? Is it some kind of social experiment? A shibboleth? Or is the joke on me, and they are all in on it?</comment>


Tablets at restaurants: Applebee's, Chili's race to eliminate human interaction - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/12/03/tablets_at_restaurants_applebee_s_chili_s_race_to_eliminate_human_interaction.html <comment><USER2> These restaurants have already eliminated cooks, so this move isn't all that surprising. In case you didn't know, most "food" at chain restaurants is prepared in advance, sealed in pouches, and re-heated via microwave. In other words, expensive leftovers.

<comment><USER3> They also employ techniques like sous-vide cooking (temperature-controlled immersion bath) which eliminate a huge amount of health and safety issues in busy kitchens. Almost every restaurant, from Michelin-starred chefs to the lowly Taco Bell to the beloved Chipotle stores use this production method among others.

Okay, you don't like the food. But there's nothing wrong with how it's made.

<comment><USER4> I know Chipotle uses immersion circulators, but the scale of their use is a far cry from "almost every restaurant." Taco Bell most certainly does not use immersion circulators.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, misspoke there. Not recirculators but retherm baths.

If you remember Taco Bells from the 1970s, the beef was cooked in large open vats by store employees. Now it's cooked in a central kitchen and shipped refrigerated to stores where it's held at serving temperature in a water bath.

Changing to this technique eliminated a huge amount of employee accidents (burns, slips) and boosted their health inspection ratings, not to mention product consistency.

<comment><USER5> And profits? Probably forget the biggest reason why they did it.

<comment><USER6> Hopefully better product results in greater profit, yes.

<comment><USER5> I doubt it would amount to a better product - a safer product perhaps, sure. If you think pre-cooked and frozen would make a better product than fresh and freshly cooked.. then we have different ideas of what better means.

<comment><USER3> Par-cooking (preparing food ahead of time, storing it, then reheating it) is a common cooking technique and if done properly does not change the composition or quality of the food one bit.

These are not sodium and preservative-laden frozen meals we are talking about. These are products made in large commercial quantities for quick preparation.

I do indulge in Taco Bell from time to time and, let me tell you, I'd rather have the food prepared by a quality-controlled system than the stoned kid in the back that may or may have not remembered to add the seasoning when it was time.

<comment><USER5> Don't disagree regarding food preparation, though I've tasted a meal that's pre-cooked chicken vs. fresh chicken, and quite the difference exists in many characteristics of the chicken. It was a smaller place, and perhaps their methods weren't the best - though I'm not sure how you prevent the effects of frozen water damaging the chicken and making it taste different, texture wise too..

<comment><USER3> Read up on vacuum sealing. That's a key step in this kind of food preparation. A lot of times the par-cooked food doesn't go to frozen, or it's not frozen for long, so freezer burn is not a factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As these machines gain prevalence in America, maybe it will end the tipping culture. By placing an order through a machine, perhaps patrons won't feel obligated to leave a tip.

<comment><USER8> For whom would a tip be left?

<comment><USER9> The software developers? :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Software matters. Here's a historic record of my attempt to eat at uWink, Nolan Bushnell's touchscreen restaurant: [http://lemonodor.com/archives/2008/05/uwink_a_cold_greasy_pl...](http://lemonodor.com/archives/2008/05/uwink_a_cold_greasy_plate_of_fail.html)

<comment><USER11> I ate at the Mtn View uWink a few times before it died; it seemed to suffer from a few procedural issues:

* People didn't understand how to use the tablets, so you needed staff to explain things to them.

* Certain things (like drink refills) that are high-frequency are easier handled by human intervention, than by calling up the "order refill" option and waiting for someone to appear

* Food was expensive (presumably to account for the cost of POS systems plus a full staff) and not great (not really an issue for Applebee's / Chili's as they've made an empire out of mediocre food)

* As mentioned above, a fair share of software glitches - so you need IT support in addition to kitchen / service staff.

It didn't really seem to solve a problem - you replaced the customer-staff interaction with a customer-staff-computer-staff interaction.

I'd like the ability to page my server, but that's about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And it is only a matter of time until McDonalds is effectively a brick and mortar sized 3D printer of food-like compounds with a Siri interface...

<comment><USER13> Vending restaurants are already pervasive in Japan. There might still be a human cook involved, but you order with coins at a machine.

<comment><USER8> It has been a few years, but my impression of the coin-operated stand-up ramen shops I frequented in Tokyo was that the cook and cook's assistant were the only people working there, and they often had no time to spare dealing with money. If labor costs must be reduced, it seems better to cut the cashier than the cook.

<comment><USER14> They probably do reduce the staff workload by some amount (although there doesn't seem to be any obvious difference in staffing levels between Japanese restaurants that use "shokken" and those that don't).

I've also sort of assumed that one of the reasons they use them is because they make it a little easier to avoid "trouble": typically you pay _first_ when you use a shokken, and you pay _after_ your meal when you don't...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Arby's tried this sort of ordering system back in the 90's. They had a touch screen CRTs at the point of sale. Customers placed orders by choosing from an on-screen menu. The system was setup to where an Arby's employee stood behind the machine, waiting for you to finish the order. There was no communication with this employee and so it made for quite an awkward experience.

The system only lasted for a few months and they went back to taking orders using traditional methods.

Here's a link to the system Arby's used..

[http://www.quirks.com/articles/a1991/19910602.aspx](http://www.quirks.com/articles/a1991/19910602.aspx)

<comment><USER16> I've seen plenty of gas station restaurants use a touch screen to order, it works fine except there's a high risk of eating gas station restaurant food afterwards.

<comment><USER17> Airports too. This is at JFK. [http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/jetblue-cibo- express-foodcour...](http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/jetblue-cibo-express- foodcourt-jamaica?select=du_Oq-SivWzY7dg4h_qYNQ#CM7JglUKiht9j-gYy-ApOw)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like this idea. In China, there is a Japanese owned Italian join called "Saizeriya". They have call buttons for the servers who had palm pilots to send the orders to the kitchen. It was insanely efficient, and they passed the savings on to the customers. It was a sit-down a la carte experience with fast food pricing. I'd call it Walmart meets the Olive Garden.

I am not sure where tablet ordering makes sense:

It would move fast food upscale, and not really increase cost.

From a service experience, it is about the same as a diner where you pay on exit.

It is a service downgrade for Applebee's / Chili's where it is common to customize orders.

I had my first experience with tablet ordering in the US at an airport bar. It was great. Rather than worrying about paying the bill in time, it was pre-pay and I chatted with the bar tender instead of exchanging credit card paperwork.

</comment><comment><USER19> They still need people to take the food from the kitchen to the table, or will they make drones for that?

</comment><comment><USER20> There is a Japanese restaurant not far from me that uses a system like this. Your table/booth has an ipad you place orders on. Staff bring out the food to your table. You walk out at the end and pay. It worked really well.

</comment><comment><USER21> who would want to dine at a place like this? and i use the word 'dine' vs 'eat' on purpose. if you think of food as fuel then this makes sense. if you enjoy dining out, this is a huge step backwards. bring on the franchise wars - i wonder if taco bell will actually win... (bonus points for naming that mostly bad 80s movie)

</comment><comment> mark-r Our local Chili's has had this system for a while now. It hasn't reduced our interactions with the waitron, we still order and pay our bill face to face. If anything it has increased their load as the kids keep badgering them for an extra console or for help when one locks up.

</comment><comment><USER22> Quick back off the envelope:

        100 Tablets ~ $10k

Guessing that this is roughly the number of seats a waiter can wait, this leaves a few thousand dollars for an automated delivery system per year. ( I hope something that involves a catapult.)

<comment><USER23> A single waiter for a hundred seats ?? Thats an order of magnitude mismatch; a 100 seat venue needs a bunch of waiters, and every "waiter needed" means multiple waiters working in shifts because most waiters don't work 12 hours per day 7 days per week.

<comment><USER22> Probably, I have next to no idea how many waiters are needed. So I took a number where I am quite certain that I overestimate. So with realistic numbers, the situation looks certainly worse for waiters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The order taking part has always been error prone, I would have thought that a fast food chain like McDonalds would have been first for this, their queue- order-collect system seemed more streamlined and ready for a pre-order by mobile system.

</comment><comment><USER25> My favorite fast food ordering innovation was routing all drive through orders to a call center in Utah or somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER26> And so on, and so forth, as minimum wage proponents seek to end all opportunity for unskilled workers.

<comment><USER27> Would you truly prefer to go to a bank branch/human teller over an ATM for cash?

<comment><USER28> For cash, no. For any other type of transaction I prefer it.</comment></comment></comment>


Invariant if and only if Mike's dog ate his frog - <AUTHOR> https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.jdg/1214454478 <comment><AUTHOR> Page 15 in the proof for lemma 8.4.</comment>


Keybase SSH CA - <AUTHOR> https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-ssh-ca <comment><USER2> For those interested in this approach, but who would prefer fewer moving parts on the actual machines, I have had great experiences with Vault's signed SSH CA support, which includes the ability to get very short leases assigned to specific user accounts: [https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/ssh/signed- ssh-cert...](https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/ssh/signed-ssh- certificates.html#signing-key-amp-role-configuration)

It's possible the Keybase CA bot solves other problems, but as far as "quick to get started," one cannot beat `curl -sSfo /etc/ssh/trusted-user-ca-keys.pem [https://my-vault:8200/v1/ssh-client-signer/public_key](https://my- vault:8200/v1/ssh-client-signer/public_key) && echo 'TrustedUserCAKeys /etc/ssh/trusted-user-ca-keys.pem' >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config && systemctl restart ssh-server`

<comment><AUTHOR> Vault's SSH certificate signing support is definitely really great and is something I modeled this project after while developing. Though I see it as more of a building block as opposed to a complete solution. With this project you:

* Don't have to run Vault (for companies that don't already use Vault, setting it up is a significant commitment). * Get simple user/group management within Keybase. * Get a simple CLI tool, kssh, that can be used instead of ssh that automatically manages renewing certificates. With vault a user has to manually use curl to request a new certificate whenever their's expires. With kssh, you just run `kssh user@server` and it all automatically works.

It is also worth noting that the example you posted above does not handle multiple realms of servers where some people only have access to staging and not production. With our SSH CA, this is all included in the default setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This was a summer internship project at Keybase, and the whole team is thrilled with how it turned out. The OP of this post is the author of the project and would be happy to answer questions here in HN.

One of the biggest devops pain points for a large team and large infrastructure is updating N servers every single time a team member is added or removed. Of course there are some other solutions to this problem, but the Keybase one is extra slick and just works automatically once it's set up.

It's also entirely powered by an open-source 3rd party bot, so it can be forked for improvement or to build something else triggered by cryptographic team membership changes.

</comment><comment><USER4> We keep our pubkeys in sldapd... Since ldap is mainly read only, fairly easy to have many read only replicas for redundancy.</comment>


Your Terrifying Dreams Could Be Rehearsal for Real Life - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/your-terrifying-dreams-could-be-rehearsal-for-real-life <comment><USER2> Then I must have another calculus exam coming up sometime, because I regularly have dreams in which one of the secondary events is I've signed up for a calculus class for which I have done no homework or studying.

Not sure why it's always calculus, as I love calculus (though I did drop out of the third-year-calc class to retake it later).

<comment><USER3> Interesting. My panic nightmare is always linear algebra/diff EQs and that is the math class I dropped and retook later. The dream always ends with me remembering "hey, wait, didn't I graduate?" and then I wake up.

<comment><USER4> Are you guys recent grads? I'm a recent grad myself but I haven't had any classwork/test dreams a year into "real life."

<comment><USER2> No, it's been about 10 years. I now teach at a university but not math. But I've been having these recurring dreams (not quite nightmares, but I do wake up in a slight panic) since college.

<comment><USER3> About 15 years for me. I don't often have dreams (or at very least don't remember them often), but I still get this probably a couple of times a year. Also agree that they're probably not quite to nightmare level---just stress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My nightmares are always that my teeth suddenly start shattering into a million pieces. Always blamed it on the fact that I stopped wearing my retainer from my teen years and my parents still remind me of it even now in my thirties. Does this mean I'm going to lose all my teeth? ;)

<comment><USER6> You could be grinding your teeth while you're sleeping.

<comment><USER5> A doctor also told me this. True story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does this mean aliens are coming?</comment>


Watching the Dream End - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/magazine/lives-the-closer.html

<comment><USER2> This was discussed when it was on Reddit - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959137></comment>


Stop Drinking Bottled Water - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/stop-drinking-bottled-water-1704609514 <comment><USER2> At my last job, everyone drank several bottles of water a day (freely available in the fridge). And they couldn't be bothered walking the empty bottles to the kitchen where there was a recycling bin - straight to the trash.

This, even though they added filtering to already good NYC tap water. Only myself and one other person bothered to fill up a glass instead of take a bottle.

I sometimes feel like Americans go out of their way to be wasteful. Like it is some sort of badge of honor or expression of wealth to be able to do this or have a giant SUV that gets 3mpg.

Edit: don't get me started on the Keurig machine!

<comment><USER3> Status symbols are inherently wasteful. Waste and the situation implied by that waste (high status and affluence) is their function. I believe this is generally true across cultures, but it's often easier to see them for what they are in someone else's culture.

<comment><USER4> So we Germans aren't right in our mind trying to push for recycling and energy waste?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Drinking bottled water, where I live, is kind of the only sane choice.

I was made fun of all last semester by dorm-mates about not drinking anything but bottled. Low and behold, there was a crap ton of lead found in the water after testing (along with many other particles).

How did I know this would be the case?

Any city or town built more then 70 years ago has this problem. This isn't as resistant in rich hipster places but in most of the US it is a problem.

Filtered and or bottle water is really the only way to go. Drinking the tap is not a good idea at all, no matter how many people tell you to.

I'm also the kind of person who uses many of the bottles I drink from for other purposes. (Starting flowers, cutting in half to make pen holders, etc)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not all bottled water is sold by PepsiCo. Not all tap water is as healthy as alkaline spring water. Tap water is often going through tons of piping, heavily florinated or chlorinated, and can be tainted with microbes. (Hence the need for halogens.) Faucet water is good for some things. It still is beneficial to have sanitary water for boiling food, bathing or showering. But some of the tap water in America is quite poor in terms of drinkability.

<comment><USER7> I moved from Scotland (great tap water) to Barcelona (crap tap water). I bought bottled water to begin with but found the amount of plastic in the trash depressing so I bought a water filter. No carrying water home and less trash and probably works out cheaper.

<comment><USER4> What kind of filter are you using?

I want to filter too. Right now I'm using filters which needs to be exchanged every month and filters water very slow :(

Any tips?

<comment><USER6> Activated carbon lined with silver works pretty well. PUR sells these. Unfortunately, the power of activated carbon comes from its pourousness. And therefore it will always filter much slower than the faucet gpm due to the resistance which all good filters will provide. You can try compensating by turning the faucet on very high output. Faucet filters will always be quicker than any pitcher filter because of that ability to add additional gpm pressure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't like namedropping brands, but I bought a Sigg water bottle about 5 years ago, cost me 20 euros, it's rock solid and it just works as a container. It could be any other brand really, just anything with a large enough volume that you fill it in the morning and drink from it all day long before washing it at night, leaving it to dry and starting over in the morning. It's a good system.

<comment><USER9> I do the same, but with a good old glass of water. These are under rated I believe

<comment><USER8> EDIT: You're right about the glass. I initially misread your comment, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My mother always bought bottled water. It was normal that we had about 2 chests of water bottles at home.

I never did this after I got my own flat. Too lazy to carry bottles and to greedy to pay that much money for it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thankfully I'm lazy enough not to buy bottled water. In my city the water is good, but tastes not so good (many many minerals. If i dry my black trousers the wrong way around I'll be left with lines of minerals on the outside (like dried sweat)). With tea the taste is very obvious.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, I get the reasons, and I try to avoid buying small bootles of drinking water, but living here in East Java, Indonesia right now with my one-year old baby girl, I am drinking the watercooler-sized plastic bottles on the dispenser.

It is a poor, rice farming village where you cannot be certain about the quality of the well water without testing that is not readily available. It would need to be done for each household on a monthly (minimum) basis to account for the rainy/dry season, periods of fertilizing, and spraying of pesticides. It is simply not practical, and requires a huge cultural shift, and money. I am currently working on rubbish removal here too just out of personal reasons. That and bringing awareness to rubbish burning, and improper disposal. Slow and hard going. On the positive side, people here do reuse a plastic bottle for at least 10 more uses before discarding them unlike my peers back in NY.

I think the dismissal, or using Flint as more reason to not drink bottled water is unsubstantiated. Political ineptitude/corruption seems to have been the main cause there, or at least why it continued hidden for so long. Truthfully I have not followed it lately, and apologize if this is now incorrect. Although, Flint has made me question my own municipal drinking water back in Brooklyn, NY where I was born and raised. I am not sure it makes me feel better that it could be hidden for so long Flint. I realize plastic bottling has its cons as well.

I am not sure about using cans or glass. Cans have their spoilage history. They are usually coated, and I would think they weigh more, so incur a higher transportation fuel cost. Glass is easy to break, cause injury, and heavy. I like it, and personally I reuse glass containers from purchased foods all the time. Maybe a reinforced glass that could be thin and resist breakage like Pyrex? I love the material.

Plastic bottles are noisy, since the walls are very thin, because they minimized the amount of PET used to maximize profits. Therefore the amount of plastic is less than most back-of-the-envelope calculations I have seen. The energy value of one 500ml PET bottle is worth less than a penny, and that is after collecting and processing them. Recycled PET costs more than new. And, because they are thin, and compress easily, they take up a lot less of landfill than most people imagine. I still don't like it, and wish for a better solution; I just like to put real numbers on things, and focus my energies on things that provide the most return on my efforts.

The annual gas you use to shop for your other goods far exceeds the carbon footprint of the roundtrip cost of your plastic water bottle by two or more orders of magnitude. Unless like me back in the US, you biked to the store. Now the food is right around me. No market runs!

Same goes for plastic bags. They are so much thinner and stronger than a decade ago, and I am not sure paper bags were the way to reduce carbon footprint, or net a postive return for the environment, but it made a lot of first-worlders sleep better at night for the wrong reasons. I had the dirt floor here tiled though, so I am still a first-worlder, and I guess I will always be!

I dislike the sound of crinkling water bottles, and find the plastic accordion simile hilarious and true!

Tidbit: I took care of one of the world's largest commercial indoor pools over here in SE Asia for over 5 years, so I am very familiar with water treatment and filtration too. There are a lot of misconceptions about it. For instance, if you smell 'chlorine' it's not chlorine, since chlorine is odorless. You are smelling the byproduct of the free chlorine having broken down some organic matter like sweat, urine and skin into. You are smelling chloramines, and they are not an indicator of a sterile or safe pool.

</comment><comment><USER13> What about flavoured water?

<comment><USER14> Flavoured water is just soda with some marketing added.

<comment><USER13> Volvic etc. do flavoured water. It's nothing like Soda. It's literally bottled water with a bit of flavour added.

<comment><USER15> Like this one?

[https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Volvic-Touch-of- Fruit-...](https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Volvic-Touch-of-Fruit- Strawberry/35113011?from=shop&tags=%7C20000%7C20977%7C37407%7C134792%7C12549&parentContainer=%7C20977%7C37407%7C134792%7C12549_SHELFVIEW)

                        per 100ml   per 250ml
        Carbohydrate	4.8 g	12.1 g
        of which sugars	4.8 g	12.1 g

<comment><USER13> I think I can live with 12g of sugar in my body. I consume way too much sugar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I drink Contrex bottled water, because its mineral content provides me with 58% Calcium and 19% Mangnesium per litre.

I balance the negative impact of bottle water (which I acknowledge and dislike) with the fact I am vegan.

<comment><USER17> > 58% Calcium and 19% Mangnesium per litre

58% of calcium relative to what? 58% of the litre is calcium?

<comment><USER18> Yes. And you need a pickaxe to drink from your glass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What about cities/countries where tap water is not drinkable? Like: Tokyo, UAE, Indonesia, Philippines...

<comment><USER20> Tap water is drinkable anywhere in Japan.

<comment><USER21> I second this, havnt had issues drinking water anywhere. I'm grandparents use a tap filter, but I think that's more mental than anything.

<comment><USER22> I don't remember the source, but I recall reading that, paradoxically, tap water in cities is much better quality than bottled water, due to stricter controls. Probably doesn't taste as good, but you can be quite sure it won't harm you.

The tap water from the small village in the Italian country I was born in is the best I've ever had, but I drink straight from the tap in London without any issues, except when I need to satisfy my craving for sparkling water.

<comment><USER23> You are referencing water standards in the USA. Each water type fell under the authority of a different Federal agency. EPA for tap, FDA for bottled, I believe. The FDA has lesser standards. My thoughts are because, at the time, only suckers would pay money for something that was practically free.

In any case, the standards have now been made the same.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Radical Real Estate Ideas to Fix Our Broken Housing System - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40547215/4-radical-real-estate-ideas-to-fix-our-broken-housing-system <comment><USER2>
      Big banks and mortgage companies attach stringent criteria and high interest rates to loans

I think actual data would show that the past 20 years or so have seen the _least_ stringent mandates and _lowest_ interest rates in US history. When I bought my home, interest rates were _double_ what they are now, and 20% down payments were standard (any less typically required private mortgage insurance).</comment>


Host dynamic websites using your Dropbox account - <AUTHOR> http://www.yoozon.com

<comment><USER2> Very cool. I was doing a pretty straightforward website a few months ago that I would've used something like this for if I knew about it.

It would be helpful if there were a page on the site that described how it works in more detail, or maybe just a FAQs page linked to in the footer with answers to questions like "What kind of website files does Yoozon support?" and "What do you mean by dynamic? ...will Yoozon support my Ruby on Rails site?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, we sure need a FAQ page and a more detailed description on how Yoozon works. Will create them ASAP. As per your questions, we will support PHP files on the beta version, but Python and Ruby are on our roadmap.</comment></comment>