Senate panel authorizes money for Mars mission, shuttle replacement - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/21/senate-panel-authorizes-money-mars-mission-shuttle-replacement/90793160/ <comment><USER2> The worst part of this news is the continuation of the Space Launch System (SLS), which has cost over seven billion dollars (not including Ares development costs), and is expected to end up costing forty-one billion by 2025, by which time they expect to complete a total of four launches (destination: nowhere important, and probably late).

Vulcan (from ULA), New Glenn (from Blue Origin), and Falcon Heavy (from SpaceX) are all better platforms for space exploration, which could enable science (such as the Europa mission) and travel (to Mars), and cost far less than SLS (in development and $/kg to orbit). NASA should be spending money on missions, not rocket development.

<comment><USER3> The correct acronym for SLS is Senate Launch System.

<comment><USER4> Oh, are we planning to launch the Senate into LEO? That seems like a winner of an election-year policy proposal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We expect headlines to be "truthy" these days, but this bill does not actually authorize money for any Mars mission. There is no Mars mission. There is policy, and a strategic framework, and a critical decision plan, and a Congressional goal of new propulsion tech and a new spacesuit: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate- bill/334...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate- bill/3346/text#toc-id35ffe0125e0f4c929eae4f08ea6c9a31)

</comment><comment><USER6> Great!

> _• Expand the full use and life of the space station through 2024 while > laying the foundation for use through 2028._

So does that mean ISS is _not_ going to be abandoned by 2024?

<comment><USER7> Keeping something launched into LEO 1998 in operation for 26+ years seems to be pushing it. Many parts have been replaced over time, but the shell is in a very harsh environment. Hopefully with the modular nature they should be able to let old sections go.

<comment><USER6> My worry here is that if ISS gets shut down completely without another station being already at least partially in orbit, there won't be enough political will to start another project like that.

<comment><USER8> Historically, that's probably the most likely outcome. NASA has always faced tough political battles for funding all the way back to the middle of the Apollo program and nowhere has that been more apparent than when NASA was trying to replace one major project with another. If you're interested, John Logsdon's _After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program_ is a fascinating--albeit depressing--book on the politics of NASA funding. It mainly focuses on Apollo and the transition to STS (and covers some of the alternative paths people at NASA wanted to pursue), but I have no doubt whatsoever that many of the same challenges will plague any ISS replacement, whatever it may be.

<comment><USER9> Here's a nice Logsdon essay on the interaction between NASA and the freshly- elected President Reagan -- [https://www.gwu.edu/~spi/assets/docs/The_Survival_Crisis.rev...](https://www.gwu.edu/~spi/assets/docs/The_Survival_Crisis.revised_Logsdon%5B1%5D.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh please. Sure, they'll authorize money for some big things right now, then in a year or two they'll change their minds (after new people are elected) and pull the plug on it. They've done it over and over.

The only way the US can get anything done in space exploration is if it can be fully funded and completed in less than 2 years. So a little probe here and there is completely doable, but a Space Shuttle replacement or manned Mars mission or any other big project is a complete no-go. It won't ever happen.

<comment><USER11> Some people call SLS the senate launch system [1] because it's a blatant jobs program. It'll be inefficient and overprized project to deliver stuff that the private sector could handle much better.

[1] [http://www.competitivespace.org/issues/the-senate-launch- sys...](http://www.competitivespace.org/issues/the-senate-launch-system/)

<comment><USER12> "Some people" in this care are the Competitive Space Task Force, a _" coalition of leading conservative and libertarian thinkers from organizations committed to creating a free and competitive market for U.S. spaceflight"_. As one would expect from an organization with that particular point of view, they believe the SLS is a complete boondoggle and private industry should do the work.

I wish there were a more neutral source of information. The best I have found is Wikipedia, which obviously has its own limitations. Bill Nye is for it, the Planetary Society was against it, but is no longer against it.

I don't know. Why it is necessary for US taxpayers to pay for this OR subsidize companies like SpaceX is a mystery to me. Spend the money on something that will have a greater impact on the lives of those paying the bill.

<comment><USER13> NASA paid SpaceX & OSC in advance to produce cost-effective vehicles that NASA then bought. Paying in advance to create new products like this is a standard commercial transaction, and it saved NASA a lot of money compared to buying what was already available, according to NASA.

Sounds like you don't want to fund space at all, but that's a different discussion.

<comment><USER10> It's not even unique. NASA didn't even build the F-5 rocket engines that sent men to the Moon; Rocketdyne did. That's the way government contracting has pretty much always worked. The government typically does a bunch of R&D work, and works with commercial companies to actually build things, especially in quantity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> At least they want to fund the Commercial Crew project. Space-X should have sent a manned Dragon capsule to the ISS by now. There seems to be political pressure to hold them back until ULA can catch up.

(Space-X now claims they know why they had a pad explosion. They're saying "breach in the helium system".[1] But what caused that? What part has to be changed? This just came out a few hours ago, so the details are lacking.)

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13031308/spacex- falcon-9-r...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13031308/spacex- falcon-9-rocket-explosion-cause-cryogenic-helium-system)

<comment><USER15> Word on the street (read r/SpaceX) is it was caused by a failing COPV.

<comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_overwrapped_pressure...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_overwrapped_pressure_vessel)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps I'm a bit cynical, but space exploration strikes me as a waste of money and energy. The universe is clearly no good for space travel, otherwise we would witness aliens visiting us. It's empty and hostile. This planet is the only realistic long-term home. Sure, space stuff gets kids into science, but I wonder how many more kids we would get into science by investing billions of dollars in education instead. We know enough about space for now. We've sent robots to Mars and the photos show it's just dust.

Right now we need to solve sustainability, global warming, super bugs, cancer, aging, friendly AI, pollution, global cooperation etc. Space can wait.

<comment><USER18> Luckily for all you cynics, NASA has a page made just for you! Just go to [https://spinoff.nasa.gov](https://spinoff.nasa.gov) and marvel at the literally thousands of technologies that have filtered down to society for a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Hydro/aeroponics, artificial limbs, roads, baby formula, firefighter gear, airplanes, cordless vacuums, water purification, solar cells, GPS, and simulation software is but a tiny list of the things made possible or greatly improved by NASA research and funding.

No other organization on this planet has done more to bring different scientists together with ample funding and an inspirational mandate. Biologists, physicist, material scientists, engineers, and even sociologists have come together under one roof resulting in a dizzying list of technologies that would have taken much longer to hit the market or never made at all. NASA is a multidisciplinary research and technology powerhouse unrivaled in human history. Space is just what brought everyone together.

But maybe I'm biased ;)

<comment><USER19> But would NASA out-perform a research university with the same budget, tasked with addressing the aforementioned problem/solutions directly rather than incidentally?

<comment><USER18> Yes. NASA is drastically different from an academic institution and the difference in administrative culture alone allows it to be a more effective multidisciplinary research organization working on everything from pure science to industrial ready technologies. For example, Black and Decker developed the first cordless vacuum after their engineers got an idea while working on cordless drills with NASA in the same research center where they were working on Apollo 11+ and photovoltaics. Universities are simply not made for this purpose, since they focus on basic research and education.

Furthermore, much of NASA's success is due to the mix of scientists from different fields, universities, and business working on one problem. When the best of the best come together, it results in a cross polinatiom of ideas. It's not just being in the same building or sharing a cafeteria while working on disparate grants, but a day to day sharing of knowledge to tackle a single problem.

<comment><USER9> This is a really well-informed comment and I wanted to say something else in support of it.

A Caltech scientist who had worked with DOE and NASA labs made an offhand comment about the kind of work that those labs are suited to do that stuck with me - he said they should be trying to solve problems that are "national lab hard" \- kind of a play on NP-hard.

What he meant is that these environments are suited to solving complex cross- discipline engineering/science problems ("make the right measurements to understand the climate system", or "find the processes and materials to make air travel safer", or "put a huge infrared telescope in space").

These are not problems that are suited to a university research structure. They don't get solved with $300K/year grants, small collections of discipline- focused PIs, and transient grad students.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


After 7 years of blogging in German, I am switching to English. Here is why - <AUTHOR> http://meshedsociety.com/fighting-the-language-fragmentation/ <comment><USER2> I used to blog in German for a relatively large German portal and stopped because I couldn't stand the commenting behaviour by Germans - where in US/English sites you get 50% joking, 49% niceness, and 1% insight in German you get > 80% nitpicking and complaining, especially hard when we played around and experimented with (un)gendered nouns in German. Killed all the fun for me, Germans are strange.

<comment><USER3> > where in US/English sites you get 50% joking, 49% niceness, and 1% insight

Please show me this alternate internet!

<comment><USER4> I think we're talking about professional blogs and niche content in particular, not news sites or Reddit.

I've also noticed that Americans are generally more encouraging of new ideas, even if they're not fully thought out and a bit wacky, whereas when I used to write similar stuff in Dutch, I always got a collective "meh". Part of it is just the fact that more readers almost automatically equals more encouragement and sharing, but I can't help but think culture has something to do with it too.

Of course, Germanic nitpicking can have its benefits too: there's not as much irrational exuberance about everything that's new.

<comment><USER5> A _very_ common cause of conflict in multi-cultural groups that I've been part of, professional or otherwise, has been the German and Dutch tendency to nit- pick and the particularly Dutch tendency to give advice and criticism whether it's asked for or not. I think there's definitely a cultural component to it.

<comment><USER6> As a german and a programmer, i have to say: You call us nitpicky. We see people as inattentive and lacking courtesy to the world around them due to all the mistakes they let themselves make. It's absolutely cultural. Americans need praise or they won't be able to feel good about what they're doing, but they fear criticism because they feel it devalues them. Germans of a certain education level are mostly neutral to praise, because it just confirms that they did the work right; and value criticism because it helps them.

When you see a german being nitpicky, chances are they're either genuinely trying to help, or think the person they're sending the message to was impolite to the rest of humanity in their lack of care.

\----

Edit: Thanks for the downvote. Really setting an example of the cultural differences here.* :)

* And yes, this is me being truly grateful. I'm not being sarcastic. (This is me being sarcastic: I love how i need to point this out when talking to english people.)

<comment><USER5> Just to be clear, I did not mean 'nitpicky' as an insult, in the same way I don't (always) consider the Dutch tendency to speak our minds even when not asked a bad thing. One of the reasons I like living in different cultures is that they show me different ways to do thing, and I've come to greatly appreciate many of the more 'typical' German things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The fact that the site immediately goes down after it hits HN frontpage of course is a bit embarrassing. Sorry, and thanks checking it out. (here is the feed URL in case you wanna subscribe [http://www.meshedsociety.com/feed](http://www.meshedsociety.com/feed)).

<comment><USER7> You should install a cache plugin. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep thanks I did that yesterday after my hoster recommended that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG9pCIJ:meshedsociety.com/fighting- the-language-fragmentation/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=lt)

</comment><comment><USER9> Despite English being my native language, I am sorry that it won. There is a lot of ambiguity in it, whether you are writing on technical matters or not.

And what is with this scourge of position:fixed headers lately? I like to scroll with the space bar or page-down button, and the header always slightly overlaps the top of the new page, preventing me from reading a couple of lines.

<comment><USER10> Are other human languages significantly less ambiguous than English? (Conlangs like lojban, sure, but anything used by more than a handful of people?) Genuine question, I haven't studied any other languages since I was sixteen.

Fully agree about position:fixed. For long articles I often remove them in the DOM editor. I wish browsers would change page-down distance when there's a fixed header, but I recognize that this is a tricky problem that would have horrible edge cases.

<comment><USER11> I speak seven languages. It's easy to see why English got so popular so fast. It is an extremely simple language compared to others and even though it is ambiguous in certain cases, most languages have ambiguity here and there.

Talented English speakers can at least get rid of most ambiguity by themselves, which is something a lot of other languages don't have.

My actual favourite language so far is Swedish. Is it much more raw than English, has less overall ambiguity and has a beautiful ring to it. It is also very easy for a skilled English speaker to pick up and I would recommend it if you are interested in languages. (It also gives you German for free)

<comment><USER12> >(It also gives you German for free)

That's like saying that learning English gives you French for free. It really helps, but it hardly gives you the entire language for free, just a significant chunk of it.

<comment><USER11> English does not even sort of give you French for free. It does give you Spanish (and Italian, to an extent) for free though. And I speak of all this from experience.

<comment><USER11> Oops, I meant _French_ gives you Spanish for free, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even when your posts are minor, and strictly technical, like tips on doing this or that with Linux, they will be often searched for with English keywords and publishing them in English increases your potential audience tenfold. From ~50M people in a large European country to 500M English speakers worldwide.

<comment><USER14> _From ~50M people in a large European country_

You're forgetting to count everywhere outside of Europe that speaks an European language (besides English, of course).

Portugal has only ~11M citizens, but Portuguese is spoken by 220M people around the world as their first language. Same with Spanish (470M) and French (74M).

<comment><USER15> You are missing a quite significant '2' on the number of francophones, it's 274 millions, not 74M.

[http://www.francophonie.org/Denombrement-des- francophones.ht...](http://www.francophonie.org/Denombrement-des- francophones.html)

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I took the number from Wikipedia. That said, does that include all French speakers? The number I mentioned was specifically about people for whom French was their first language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I always find it refreshing to read blogs in languages other than English (in my case, French), because my sense is that points are expressed in often subtly different ways, thoughts where a different emphasis is possible only in the medium of the language used. It would be better if the english speaking world were to speak more languages (wishful thinking I know but the point is that something is being lost in this unification of language).

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a fair point. Different languages allow for different thinking and expression of contexts. But I think in the end the language fragmentation is still a luxury with a huge down-side. Especially nowadays, when most problems are global ones that need to be solved jointly, not isolated.

I could be wrong of course. Maybe a world with fewer or even only one language would be a horrible place. But maybe it would be better. I think it is worth taking the risk.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. Also one can argue that the fact that English may not be the first language will in itself have an effect on the thought process, even if English is the medium used. So in that way we still have some diversity, if only obliquely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good thing.

I sometimes got the feeling, that the german language culture is a blessing and a curse.

I like how everything gets translated and dubbed for us.

But it feels like most Germans simply ignore most of the stuff, happening outside of Germany.

I even know many IT people who claim they don't need to know english. But I got the feeling that not knowing how to read and write english just keeps you far away from the bleeding edge. You can see this when looking at german companies, most of them feel like 1999.

<comment><USER18> The downside of all the dubbing is that the translations (and arguably speakers) are horrible and also the benefit of free lessons in language comprehension disappears unlike for countries were it's not feasible to dub lots of movies.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I'm so happy about the German Netflix, where you can easily switch to the original audio. No other VOD site in Germany has that AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> English is easily the lingua franca of the new age due to SECOND language. Some refer to English as an international language (EIL)

First language speakers rankings: 1) it is zho (Chinesse) 1.19 billion, 2) Spanish 441 million, 3) English 335 million, 4) Hindi 260 million and 5) Arabic 235 million [http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size](http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size)

Secondary Language Speakers: Only 1 out of 4 English speakers are first person speakers. That makes English the most known language in the world. [http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content](http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content)

<comment><USER21> The other relevant metric is the distribution of speakers. Most of the speakers of Chinese live in China, but English is a significantly common language in 67 countries by Wikipedia's admittedly questionable estimation: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_widely_spoken_lang...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_widely_spoken_languages_\(by_number_of_countries%29)

I don't think the data is entirely trustworthy -- it seems unlikely that "Turkic" is spoken substantially in Lithuania -- but I did some analysis based on this data anyhow: [http://adambard.com/blog/what-language-should-you- learn/](http://adambard.com/blog/what-language-should-you-learn/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting timing choice; Just as the CSU in Bayern decide that all people living in Germany should be forced to speak German at home:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/112...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11278764/All- immigrants-should-speak-German-at-home-say-Merkels-allies.html)

Most German people I meet seem to think that my children growing up in a bilingual German-English household is _great_ , "your children are so lucky", "they have such an advantage" is a phrase I hear a lot. It just seems that German-Turkish isn't thought of in the same way, but is it really so different?

Surely the underlying benefit of a bilingual upbringing is about future opportunity and earnings potential. Whether that be that you can earn money from business opportunities inside a sizable Turkish population (both internal in Germany or in Turkey) or a very large external English speaking population, are both valid.

On top of that, bilingualism has many other benefits, namely cognitive: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingualism)

As well as a few (minor) downsides: [http://www.multilingualchildren.org/getting_started/pro_con....](http://www.multilingualchildren.org/getting_started/pro_con.html)

Overall, most people think that being bilingual is a good thing.

The bottom line is that whether the author wants to blog in German, or English (or both) or Klingon, is entirely his choice. Hopefully that choice should be the authors for the foreseeable future!

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course not that long ago (within living memory) in certain fields you had to learn German and publish in that language.

I am thinking of chemistry in particular

<comment><USER24> I live in Norway, and was almost forced to learn German at school: "It's the language of engineers!". That was maybe true when their generation grew up, but I haven't had use for it in a professional setting so far. So yeah, you're right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's returning a 508 at the moment. I guess that's the ultimate tl;dr

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for that.

<comment><USER25> No need to apologise. I was indirectly making a point about the popularity of English vs German.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Obligatory Google cache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG9pCIJ:meshedsociety.com/fighting- the-language-fragmentation/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie)

<comment><AUTHOR> thx of posting

<comment><USER27> Thanks for* posting (it).

(I normally never correct anyone on HN but it seemed appropiate on this thread.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You must be German ;) Thx, it was actually just a typo.

<comment><USER27> I'm actually latinoamerican :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this is a step in the right direction. Germany has a lot to offer to the world at large. I hope others take a cue from it and understand that a small thing such as language must not be allowed to come in the way of universal co-operation and brotherhood.

<comment><USER27> I think is only a "very small thing" if you're the one not learning a foreign language.

<comment><USER28> I am not a native English speaker. I understand it may not be the best natural language out there but I hope you agree that if any language is close to being the universal language on this planet then it is English.

<comment><USER18> At least it is at this point in time. German is also so close to English that I'd say it's one of the easiest switches, at least for reading/writing.

<comment><AUTHOR> But German is highly complicated, and there is the common convention that if you do not speak perfect German, you cannot really be successful in whatever career you chose.

From my observations that really is not the case in the English-speaking world (correct me if I am wrong).

<comment><USER18> Oh sorry, I meant as a native German speaker instead writing/reading in English.

And agreed. At the same time, if more people were to use German and therefore also the percentage of imperfection went up, I guess that effect would then disappear in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just published a blog post describing my experience with this HN frontpage entry [http://meshedsociety.com/how-a-perfect-launch-day-looks- like...](http://meshedsociety.com/how-a-perfect-launch-day-looks-like/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Related question: are there any luminaries in the HN-oriented fields of programming, open source, startups, or general tech who are well known in the West and do/can not speak English at all?

<comment><USER30> "at all" is probably not that likely, at least in the programming sector, but "not well enough to blog" is pretty common. Heck, it's common enough amongst native speaking bloggers...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> You should write a follow up: How HN brought my site down ;)

Hope you can fix this soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have seen this coming. But to be honest, I really did not expect the post to hit the front page. :D

<comment><USER31> Would you mind to tell your readers what happened? Perhaps others can learn from it.

<comment><USER32> Well his VPS account exceeded his daily/monthly bandwidth limit most likely

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My hoster recommended me to install WP super cache to avoid situations when too much traffic kills the site. Gotta do that now.

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess this only proves Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk wrong. At least for now. AI is so lame, that it cannot translate satisfactorily simple blog posts. And this after 55 years working on the problem of automatic translation...</comment>


Keep calm and continue rebasing - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/tooxie/fbe5e1cff588c7cc8275

<comment><USER2> I wish I could downvote purely on the basis of that hateful "Keep Calm" meme.

<comment><USER3> I would downvote purely on the grounds that you can legitimately rebase master the same as any other branch - it's rebasing published history that screws up, not rebasing commits that are on a specific branch.

There's nothing wrong with, say, creating three local commits on master, "rebase -i"ing them into one commit, and then pushing.

The author has completely missed the point of what can and can't be rebased.

<comment><USER4> I think the intended point was that you should always work on feature branches, never on master, rebase your feature branch work against upstream/master which is the one true published history and thus never rebase master.

In this workflow there is no pushing to master because you never work on master. So there is no reason to ever rebase master. Master is always assumed to be published history.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. Thanks ^^

I'm assuming that you have someone else apart from you sync'ing with your master. But even if you know that nobody else uses your software (so far), I would still recommend, as a good practice, to stay away from rebasing master.

Work on feature branches, rebase them, and merge them. Once in master, you don't rebase anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm working on a large project at the moment and am branching off quite often to get new features in place. Then once I have finished I rebase with master, switch to master and `git merge my-feature-branch --squash`. Is that okay to do?

<comment><USER6> I am a huge proponent of rebasing but not so much with squash. I tend to squash judiciously with rebase -i if I feel the need. But otherwise I think it's good to maintain that history of the general evolution of a feature through development.

However if it's a small feature and your commit message is well-formed and comprehensive (ie. 50-char top line and then paragraphs of description below) then I don't see a problem squashing a few commits together.

<comment><AUTHOR> For me, if a PR introduces a bug and then fixes it later, it must be squashed together. First of all, and most importantly, because it makes it easier for reviewers.

Second, makes no sense to merge, consciously, a bug into master, specially if it's known and fixed already.

<comment><USER6> That's the type of thing I use rebase -i for though. My concern with squashing is that quite often you have multiple stable points in the development of a feature. The order that those states were reached is informative to reviewers and I wouldn't want to make a habit of squashing them away.

I think focusing on committing green test states often leads to faster development and more focused thinking, and I'd prefer to see this approach represented in the final commits rather than getting in the habit of squashing days and days of work into single mammoth commits.

<comment><USER4> I think you're both talking about the same thing. Basically, if you realize you had a typo somewhere in an early commit, or some other random easily fixable error that you simply overlooked and thus isn't part of the evolution of development, you should use rebase -i to squash the fix commit together with the one that introduced the error.

It's not about squashing together the entire history of development.

<comment><AUTHOR> :+1:

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Too many memes

<comment><AUTHOR> True. I'll post it to 9gag as well.</comment></comment>


DOSbox-CRT - <AUTHOR> https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/dosbox-crt <comment><USER2> You can also use DOSBox as a LibRetro core [[https://docs.libretro.com/library/dosbox/](https://docs.libretro.com/library/dosbox/)] - this enables to use any of the filters the LibRetro provides on the frontend, including CRT.

This pattern should be the future of emulation development, where possible.

<comment> core-questions RetroArch is a pretty terrible UI, though - it takes everything bad about that Sony UI and it's not particularly performant, either.

Lots of stability and performance issues. Had difficulty getting a 3ghz Core 2 Duo to emulate SNES effectively with it... might've chosen the wrong engine out of the thousand alternatives, though.

<comment><USER3> wtf ? I ran SNES and Sega Genesis emualtors on a 486DX4 a long time ago, and was running perfect!

<comment><USER4> No, certainly not perfect.

A great article from the author of higan (whose core OP probably used): [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes- power-...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one- mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's odd to me that someone would want this filter that much on DOSBox. I understand why it's generally included in game emulators - they were generally played on displays that looked somewhat like this. But DOSBox is for DOS games, and to my knowledge, most weren't played on displays that looked like this. At least, I don't think so, unless I'm completely misremembering my childhood, since almost all of the images shown are for games I actually played on a DOS computer using a SVGA display when young.

<comment><USER6> The 1980s with its CGA, EGA and early VGA displays must be from before your time then? I definitely played games looking like that. I prefer not to use such filters, but some people might be nostalgic for it. One interesting application might also be for games that make use of the overscan border, which is not normally visible in DOSBox (and people have been trying to work around this), causing problems in games that need it such as Crystal Caves.

<comment><USER5> I'm referring less to the curve, and more to the scanlines[3]. The bleed in CRTs means that's not what it actually looked like when displayed on era accurate hardware, so it's always confused me why people would opt for a filter that claims to be "authentic" that does this, especially when emulating the visual experience enough to show screen rounding.

For example, here's a picture of an actual DOS ANSI output, from a CRT monitor[1], and here's the equivalent display from this filter[2]. In what way is emulating the scanlines making this more authentic?

Edit: clarified a bit

1: [https://steemit-production-imageproxy- thumbnail.s3.amazonaws...](https://steemit-production-imageproxy- thumbnail.s3.amazonaws.com/U5dtcYTKdwcTiwv2tRKds1SGGK2Fxcm_1680x8400)

2: [https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMjU1NzcwLzEyMjU1NTQucG5n/origi...](https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMjU1NzcwLzEyMjU1NTQucG5n/original/yx1c62.png)

3: The correct terminology is escaping me. The interlacing? Whatever is responsible for the skipping of lines in the output.

<comment><USER7> It's tricky to make a comparison of 'authenticity': for one thing, some displays had more visible scanlines and for another, it's the sort of detail that's easily lost in photos because you're taking a picture of a small, very- high contrast area and the artifacts often bleed together.

<comment><USER5> Well, it can be tricky once you start getting accurate, but I'm not sure any display _ever_ looked like these screenshots, or even very close to it. There was always some visual bleed to eyes as well, not just pictures.

I'm pretty sure even LCD panels just repeated lines and didn't leave them blank, so some portion of people actually used an LCD to play these originally might have close to perfect accuracy if they repeated lines.

The only times I can particularly remember scanlines being really bad and noticeable were on the old CGA displays in the 80's. And those didn't look like this representation by a long shot, there was a lot of bleed in those as well, the lines were just big enough the bleed didn't obfustate it quite as much. I can't comment on EGA/VGA, we went straight from a CGA monitor to a SVGA one in the late 80's or early 90's, I don't recall exactly when. It's possible there was a display type in there that I didn't use much which actually makes this representation more accurate.

<comment><USER7> I think the effect tends to be exaggerated in most of these implementations my points are just 1. visible scanlines were totally a thing. 2. it's really hard to take a representative photo of a CRT.

<comment><USER8> Also, human memory is a funny thing, and these sorts of things are easy to forget from your remembered experience, too. So to some it is exaggerated because they only remember it at its best and others it is spot-on because they only remember it at its worst. Because we notice problems more than things working, there may be more people in that second camp than in the first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The audio production world which goes to great lengths to reproduce audio equipment, I would love to see shaders faithfully replicate classic monitors.

<comment><USER10> The Iiyama Vision Master Pro 454 should be one of those. And the Sony FW900 24" wide-screen trinitron. I had both those screens.

The Sony FW900 is without doubt the best CRT monitor ever built (IMHO). It was a ridiculous monitor, both in size, sharpness, colour accuracy and most of all weight.

I remember buying a used one for about £300 (I recall the retail price was close to £1000) and my housemate and I carrying the thing up to my room, almost breaking our backs. It was easily 40kg. But it was an outstanding monitor. The best CRT screen I've ever used by a long shot.

<comment><USER11> Dunno, I really hated Trinitron screens due to both horizontal strips as well as seeing individual pixel triplets and gaps between them (I guess my eyes are super sensitive to parallel/perpendicular lines; can't look happily at non- retina LCDs either). I found Samsung's Invar variants in their SyncMaster (757DFX and higher going up to 2048x1536) superior and much more natural (likely my eyes aren't that sensitive to diagonal non-perpendicular directions).

<comment><USER10> I didn't mind those lines across the screen. I could definitely see them but didn't find it bothered me. I couldn't go back to a non-retina LCD screen now though. And I suspect going back to my old FW900 might be something I wouldn't enjoy these days. But I remember at the time being blown away from it after having a variety of average to slightly above average CRT screens.

Actually, one of my earliest memories of using CRT monitors was my first PC (a Packard Bell 286) with the monitor having a dot pitch of about 0.3, or possibly even higher than that. The pixels were like bricks.

Eventually upgraded to a monitor with a dot pitch of 0.26 and I remember it felt like going from a standard LCD screen to a retina screen. It was quite the revolution for me at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was just thinking, something like this could be pretty cool in VR; the curvature of the screen could be 3D instead of a 2D warp. Having modern higher dpi monitors inside VR is not great because of the resolution of the headsets, but this low resolution would work I think.

<comment><USER13> You might be interested in this:

[http://www.emuvr.net/](http://www.emuvr.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_S...](http://gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_Simulation_in_Super_Win_the_Game.php) is a well-explained and and a copiously illustrated write-up about why CRT emulation is essential to many pixel-art retro games.

<comment><USER15> Your link talks about CRT TV emulation (NES over composite etc), totally not applicable to DOS gaming using VGA monitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This strongly reminds me of Cathode ([http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/](http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/)).

<comment><USER17> See also crt: [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro- term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love that there are so many screenshots from TFTD. Oh the hours I've spent playing that game under Dosbox. No victories, though. I put up a good fight, but the aliens always win in the end. Started playing it on a CRT, under actual DOS, deep in the mists of time, but I can't say I noticed a difference when I switched over.

<comment><USER19> Well, it is probably my favourite game of all time, so it was an obvious choice :)

<comment><USER18> The aliens are just so smart and pitiless! The game does a great job of making you feel weak and vulnerable -- one sonic pulser can wipe out half your squad if you get bottled up. And just when you think you're getting the upper hand, lobstermen show up and cut you to bits, or you discover that your star aquanaut is susceptible to mind control. Guess it's time for another play- through and inevitable defeat :)

<comment><USER20> The only way to get rid of lobstermen is the drill.

<comment><USER18> Which is unfortunate because they have a strong melee attack and if you can walk up to them, they can walk up to you. You have to either sneak up on them or rely on them being too aggressive for their own good and overextending themselves. The thermal shock bomb stuns them pretty effectively, if you manage to develop it before they show up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know of an easy way to get games purchased off GOG to use this version by default?

<comment><USER19> Yeah, you if you search the installation folder of the GOG game for the dosbox.exe and replace it with the dosbox-crt.exe (renaming it), and then edit the dosbox.conf of the GOG game to use output=opengl, then it should run by default.

<comment><USER21> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why is this all over every news outlet that I've visited today? Twitter, OSNews and now Hacker News. I admit, it's something I'm interested in, but very curious as to why it is so prevalent. Does anyone have any idea?

<comment><USER23> > Twitter, OSNews and now Hacker News

Not a very strong case for "prevalent."

<comment><USER22> Should I have said Facebook...? These are the only news outlets I visit, so it's pretty prevalent. I also really like how I got down-voted for asking a question. Cool, I'll not ask any more questions.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some good examples of test-driven C codebases? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Sqlite [0] seems to have quite a complete test suite.

[0] [https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html](https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html)

<comment><USER3> having a test suite is different from being test _driven_ .

<comment><USER2> True, but having a test suite is necessary if you are test-driven. With the almost fanatical use of test code in Sqlite I cannot imagine they wouldn't write the tests before implementing a new feature, ie, test-driven.</comment></comment></comment>


Android Hardware-Buttons Are (Conceptually) Broken - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/31/android-hardware <comment><USER2> It is very hard to imagine John Gruber being taken somewhere unexpected by using the back button on an Android device.

This is like saying you were taken somewhere unexpected by using the back button in your browser.

Sure, it may not work consistently all the time, but when it doesn't it's always the fault of the website / app that breaks standard behaviour.</comment>


From 'why I hate Detroit' to 'why I stayed' - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/e377dfe0-8c31-11e8-affd-da9960227309?accessToken=zwAAAWXOjIvQkdPjd9_gjDER6NOv_dqZYCJzCQ.MEYCIQDyiehHumQnRTD7NeOJkriM4ReU7_TDFvsj9IK9nPL4RAIhAPQUx_3MpqLiahiKHw6QjbI2wjcemwtU8m1L5SpqJ4_u&sharetype=gift <comment><AUTHOR> I grew up in Detroit and though I no longer live there I visit often and I'm excited by what I'm seeing.

The money quote in that entire piece:

"If you want to see an entire population rally around the question "What can the future look like?" watch Detroit."

There are experiments going on in Detroit that you just don't see anywhere else. There's a smaller difference between the elites and the average citizen. I've got some friends who are struggling entrepreneurs but who've gotten on boards running things by choosing merely to become engaged and having great ideas.

In other cities I've lived it's just the elites and everyone running things knows everyone else and it's difficult if not impossible to break into that group. These elites often are self dealing and stand in the way of progress.

Detroit's different, it's fluid as to who has power. I for one am excited to see what gets done.

<comment> star-techate _Civilization collapses entirely_

oh wow, power is very fluid. it's easy to break into power anywhere now. You don't have these awful elites preventing you from doing whatever you want to do.</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley tech firm must pay Filipinos $160K in back wages - <AUTHOR> http://globalnation.inquirer.net/139249/silicon-valley-tech-firm-must-pay-filipino-workers-160k-in-back-wages-damages <comment><AUTHOR> Summary:

\-----

BiTMICRO Networks Inc. (of Fremont, California) paid some workers as little as $1.66 per hour after importing them from the Philippines on H1-B visas.

"We continue to see a pattern of U.S. companies misusing foreign worker visas by bringing them from overseas and paying them in pesos or rupees" said the director of the Wage and Hour Division office in San Francisco.

\-----</comment>


Ketamine and Depression: A Breakthrough? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/05/07/ketamine-depression-breakthrough/ <comment><USER3> Back in my raver days, when this was still doable, one of my boys started driving to Mexico and buying K there and bringing it back in cheap water bottles to get by the border DEA.

One day he shows up at the club and says, "hey, check out my car trunk" and was like "uhhh ok that's kinda weird" but I went out and presto, there was 4 one-liter water bottles full of ketamine.

Thats a shitload of K, considering a vial is 50ml and costs around $100. So I started selling it for him, and man did it go fast. Almost everyone loved it, including myself. Oddly enough, even people who did too much the first time and had a really wack k-hole experience would try it again.

It was rather miraculous to me, and surely did some sort of transformative rearranging of my brain while I was dosing it. I think what I remember best was that it became my self-described "drug of choice", which, honestly, was a pretty huge achievement in my life.

I liked it because it removed my desire to do other, much darker and destructive drugs somehow, and it wasn't just a matter of typical substitution, but something much more fundamental, so studies like this are very unsurprising to me, and I really hope these researchers keep at it.

<comment><USER4> Recreational use is large doses.

The studies I've seen for medical psychiatric use were about 5 mg per kg of body weight.

<comment><USER5> 0.5 mg/kg. 5 mg/kg will be a hell of a ride.

<comment><USER4> Ah, yes. Max dose used in this study was 80 mg. [http://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/news/first-uk-study-of- ketami...](http://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/news/first-uk-study-of-ketamine-for- people-with-severe-depression/)

[http://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/service_description/ketamine-...](http://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/service_description/ketamine- clinic-for-depression/)

I don't know where I got 5 mg/kg from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article misses the second part of the study, as elucidated by Derek Lowe here [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/05/06/it-...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/05/06/it- isnt-ketamine):

 _In a rather elegant experiment, the authors deuterated ketamine at the methylene next to its carbonyl group, and showed that this compound (as expected) displayed the same NMDA activity as the parent compound – but that it was far slower at producing the metabolite, and had no activity in the antidepressant screens._

<comment><USER7> The "antidepressant screens" referred to here are in mice, not humans. The Nature paper is an amazing set of experiments that provide very compelling evidence that (2R,6R)-HNK is responsible for the antidepressant effects of ketamine in mouse models of depression, but Neuroskeptic is right that it's not clear that (2R,6R)-HNK is also responsible for the antidepressant effects of ketamine in humans. We know that mouse models of depression are not necessarily great; SSRIs seem to be more effective in mouse models than they are in humans.

<comment><USER8> Per Neuroskeptic's due diligence, human effects don't look promising.

>>> This is a citation to one of their own papers, from 2012. There's just one problem – as far as I can see that paper didn't find the correlation that Zanos et al. say it did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has there been any increase in illegal use of ketamine since research on its use as a depression treatment first started being published?

Having dealt with those issues for many years, and recovered, I can see a real danger in those who suffer from depression saying "K will fix this? I'll try anything". I would have.

I'm a firm believer in drug law reform and decriminalization of drug use but from what I've seen of it Ketamine isn't something you want people taking out of desperation, with little knowledge of how crazy it just might get. Or worse, developing a dependency on. It's pretty serious stuff.

<comment><USER5> I've used ketamine to self-medicate depression. I decided to out of desperation. It was extremely effective for me.

Several provisos for potential users:

\- Read the papers. If you can't read the papers on K as a depression treatment and come up with your own dosing protocol, you probably shouldn't try K.

\- Probably don't try it if you have an addictive personality.

\- Make sure you're aware of potential side effects such as memory and urinary issues. That said, doses used in treatment protocols shouldn't come anywhere near that.

I waited forever to just get some goddamn K and treat myself, because everybody on the internet is like "don't do it, you'll fuck yourself up". I'm smart and do my homework, and I regret not trusting myself and suffering for longer than needed.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't even know where to get it, and I don't want to get caught and go to jail, due to our stupid drug laws. :(

<comment><USER11> it's a schedule 3 drug, so a misdemeanor. i don't think you'd get any jail time if you got caught (assuming you're a first time offender in CA). if you're that desperate and you've read up on it and consider it a viable escape from that hell i know too well, give it a shot. (i have not used it).

shame i had to make a new account to speak freely about this.

<comment><USER3> No..in fact hell no.

Ketamine is schedule 1 or 2 I believe everywhere in the US, so that is definitely a felony.

<comment><USER12> It's Schedule III: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Legal_status](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Legal_status)

"Ketamine is a "core" medicine in the World Health Organization's Essential Drugs List, a list of minimum medical needs for a basic healthcare system."

<comment><USER3> "...flunitrazepam, ketamine, or any other Schedule I or Schedule II CDS is a Class 6 felony."

[http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal- defe...](http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defense/drug- charges/possession-controlled-substance-colorado)

<comment><USER12> Well, that's wrong.

"Schedule III drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. Schedule III drugs abuse potential is less than Schedule I and Schedule II drugs but more than Schedule IV. Some examples of Schedule III drugs are:

Products containing less than 90 milligrams of codeine per dosage unit (Tylenol with codeine), _ketamine_ , anabolic steroids, testosterone"

[http://www.dea.gov/druginfo/ds.shtml](http://www.dea.gov/druginfo/ds.shtml)

[https://www.erowid.org/ask/ask.php?ID=2972](https://www.erowid.org/ask/ask.php?ID=2972)

<comment><USER3> Ok fair enough and a great link...but here is the twist to this.

That page describes Xanax as a schedule 4, and yet I have been charged not once but twice with felony possession of Alprazolam and was adjudicated guilty both times, so perhaps we are both correct in this case, and that yes its a schedule 3 but its also a felony.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The blog says that HNK (the purported antidepressant) is a known metabolite of ketamine, but then claims:

> However, getting regulatory approval for such a study, which would > technically (as far as I know) be a first-in-man trial of HNK, might take a > long time.

I don't understand this. We already know that when we give ketamine to patients they are exposed to HNK. Is there a real risk that it is more dangerous in isolation?

Even if caution is required in the first patients, why do we accept as normal that developing treatments like this should involve years of waiting for bureaucratic approval?

</comment><comment><USER14> Disassociatives have been used for a while in the treatment of opiate addiction, including the usage of higher doses of dextromethorphan to treat heroin addicts. To me it comes with little surprise that this could also be an effective treatment for depression, despite the fact that depression isn't necessarily something that can just be treated away. I've personally done more than my fair share of recreational ketamine and it seemed to aid my coping with some major life issues I've had, though I suppose this could also be placebo. Regardless, I'm glad these types of studies are being done and hope to see some more concrete evidence of positive effect.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ketamine is still far too drastic and probably only really necessary when the depression is acute and prolonged. I would rather advise a non-SSRI like tianeptine. At least that is currently O.C. without an Rx required.

Edit: looks like HN has been down this very same road before[0] when Ketamine was brought up; and I'm smiling to see that I'm not the only one to think of Tianeptine in contrast to the drastic use of Ketamine. Psychopharmacology is the tried and true drug pusher of our times.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4615750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4615750)

<comment><USER16> Well, afaik antidepressant doses of ketamine seem to be lower than 100 mg - which is quite a bit less than the most drastic of recreational doses - <USER2> don't know (but would love to see research conducted on) whether that's actually that risky.

Tianeptine is a mu-opioid receptor agonist, so it has abuse & addiction potential above therapeutic doses. It's also rx-only in many countries, according to Wikipedia.

Additionally, ketamine works for a week whereas it's not uncommon for people who use tianeptine to split their daily regimen into something like 3 separate doses throughout the course of the day.

At least neither require several weeks to reach efficacy while initially potentially increasing the severity of depression...

<comment><USER17> > It's also rx-only in many countries, according to Wikipedia

Those countries include parts of Europe, Asia and Latin America.

On the same Wikipedia page, "not available [as in, at all, even with a prescription] in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. or the U.S."

Kind of a bummer, I was starting to think I might have something new to look into. Not surprised, though.

<comment><USER16> You can order it online no problem in the U.S. I'm not gonna source anything for you b/c I don't want to seem like a shill or anything, but this type of info is easily acquired on r/nootropics - just use your common sense and ignore all the BS medical advice on that subreddit, lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So this is what Nature has come to? Following up on a study where people took Ketamine once and felt good for a while? Nobody was doubting that people could get high on Ketamine. Isolating the most intoxicating metabolite is a bit useful, but it really bothered me that "studies" looking at a single dose of Ketamine and labeling the rather short effect "sustained" get so much press.

<comment><USER7> The Nature paper was about isolating a metabolite of ketamine that _is not_ responsible for the intoxicating aspects, but _is_ responsible for the antidepressant activities (at least in mice).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> From my limited comprehension of the matter, what about:

[http://jneuroinflammation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...](http://jneuroinflammation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-2094-8-94)

</comment><comment><USER20> However, one of the nasty side effects of long term K use is having a tiny bladder.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but these newer therapeutic uses have much lower dosing than recreational use. Recreational users take doses of about a gram or more. These thereutic doses tend to be on the order of 5 mg per kg of body weight.

(If you have any information about problems caused by long term low dosing I'd be really interested to read it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We need to drown more mice to be sure.

<comment><USER22> It would be interesting to see how the various research chemicals out there - deschloroketamine, ephenidine, and others - would fare. There are anecdotal reports of varying levels of the antidepressant effect and they shouldn't be left unacknowledged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Depression, like obesity, is acquired, habitual change due to environmental factors. Non fraudulent CBT (active traveling in a unfamilar environment as a simplest example) is enough to introduce persistent changes (that is why there are so many stories about profound changes people undergo after visiting the East - radical behavioral change will lead, through conditioning, to change in biochemistry - body is a dynamic, adaptive system).

There is, of course, no way to change one's physical or mental conditions without introducing changes to habits, daily routines and environment.

<comment><USER24> This is, of course, bullshit. I know two friends who acquired their depression genetically from their parents, and it manifested itself in them, and their siblings as well. At times they were extremely suicidal, and they described it as waking up and wanting to kill themselves every day, and not killing themselves was the biggest struggle they ever faced.

<comment><USER23> Genetic depression is really bullshit.) These "genes" would have been wiped out in a few generations.

Genetics does not work that way.) Behavior straight out of genes, without social and environmental conditioning is bullshit. Behavior is product of training and acquired habits, guided by hard-wired instincts and emotions.

There might be some predispositions - mutations which introduce minor changes (there cannot be major ones - changes must be small and gradual enough for the organizm to cope with) into some locations, which affect sensitivity to certain chemical compound (hormones, neurotransmitters) or minor structural changes which affects metabolism, but _all this could be easily compensated by behavioral patterns_ on a higher level.

Animals and people with sudden traumas leading to disability are doing this, but way too sophisticated, self-obsessed hipstes and couch potatoes cannot.

<comment><USER9> Right, just like all other diseases. If any disease had a genetic origin, it would be wiped out within a few generations.

Oh, except for all of these: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders)

There are even lots of diseases that provide strange benefits that protect the sufferer from other illnesses. Having half the genes for sickle-cell trait will give you strong resistance to malaria. Having both is a terrible illness. Huntington's Disease seems to provide resistance to certain types of cancers, but when you turn 35 or 40 your life becomes a real nightmare.

The point is that the purpose of genetics is not to promote healthy humans, it's to promote the reproduction of the group of genes in question. Genes will use all kinds of tricky methods to duplicate themselves, including all kinds of things that are awful for the person with them.

<comment><USER23> What is the genetic basis of depression, according to which set of successfully replicated experiments?

What is the experimentaly supported cause of depression, what are the pathological changes, in which areas, caused by which genes?

<comment><USER9> Truthfully? I don't know. That's why I didn't state depression was genetic or provided any benefit to those who suffer from it.

My point is merely that stating depression can't be genetic because of its negative effects misunderstands genetics, evolution. I'm not saying your conclusion is incorrect- there may not be a genetic component to depression at all- but I am saying your methodology for coming to that conclusion is wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vint Cerf: 'Privacy may be an anomaly' - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57613120-83/vint-cerf-privacy-may-be-an-anomaly/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title

<comment><USER2> Facebook should lean in and tell its users what it does.

It should say "We watch you every minute that you're here. We watch every detail of what you do, what you look at, who you're paying attention to, what kind of attention you're paying, what you do next, and how you feel about it based on what you search for.

"We have wired the web so that we watch all the pages that you touch that aren't ours, so that we know exactly what you're reading all the time, and we correlate that with your behaviour here."

To every parent Facebook should say, "Your children spend hours every day with us. Every minute of those hours, we spy upon them more efficiently than you will ever be able to."

Only that, just the truth. That will be enough.

But the crowd that runs Facebook, that small bunch of rich and powerful people, will never lean in close enough to tell you the truth.

So I ought to mention that since the last time we were together, it was revealed that Mr. Zuckerberg has spent thirty million dollars that he got from raping human society on buying up all the houses around his own in Palo Alto.

Because he needs more privacy.

[Laughter.]

I rest my case.

[http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html](http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's maybe true for his company because he is a VP in Google. Lack of privacy is very beneficial to the company.

I wouldn't even consider any shit from a salesman from an ad broker company.

If he really believe privacy is anomaly he can fix it first. Maybe he can broadcast his own house 24hrs. Maybe he can open his all the incomes and outgoings on the internet.

I never seen this kind of people are _doing_ what they say themselves.

</comment><comment><USER4> Privacy may be an anomaly, but security is not. I'd like my financial data well protected, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER5> > _" In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what > everybody is doing."_

The "privacy is recent" argument ignores the nature of modern intrusions on privacy. Small town gossip has very little power to intrude compared with recording and word-spotting all your phone conversations and automating the analysis across the whole population.</comment>


Rare pictures of North Korea - <AUTHOR> http://www.mrlevek.com/northkorea.htm <comment><USER2> VBS has a great first-hand doc of North Korea: <http://www.vbs.tv/newsroom/vice-guide-to-north-korea-2-of-14>

A lot of what they show resembles Artemii Lebedev's experience.

<comment><USER3> Honestly guys, you HAVE to watch this.

<comment><USER4> I've watch a number of "inside NK" documentaries and I agree, this is one of the better ones (despite the hipster host's somewhat condescending attitude). There was some good footage of interaction with NK common folks and the host keep trying to push the buttons of the guide. Give you a sense of how repressed they are without even knowing.

<comment><USER5> There is also a very good french comics book : [http://www.amazon.com/Pyongyang-Journey-North-Guy- Delisle/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Pyongyang-Journey-North-Guy- Delisle/dp/1897299214/)

The author describe 3 month of life there.

<comment><USER6> I would recommend this too, it gives an interesting look at the somewhat boring life of a foreigner in NK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mirror: <http://static.whalesalad.com/north_korea/>

<comment><USER7> I adore my extra server headers. Adds a few bytes, whateva.

      % curl -I http://static.whalesalad.com/north_korea/
      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Server: nginx/0.6.32
      Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 23:44:45 GMT
      ...
      Content-Type: text/html
      X-Fueled-By: Plankton
      X-Special-Sauce: Django
      Accept-Ranges: bytes

<comment><USER8> I always liked:

X-The-Number: 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Probably previously posted, but "36 hours in North Korea without a guide..." is really interesting as well:

<http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/>

<comment><USER10> Allow me to express my undying hatred of imageshack since half of the images refuse to load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I did a similar trip to his in April 2007. While you visit, you have to put aside your issues with the regime, that's not why you're there. You're there to experience something which seems so implausible yet exists, or rather, before it doesn't. We got to meet some really nice people and what we saw was remarkable. If they could make the rest of their country like the capital and the other places I was shown, then it would be a really nice country in the political sense. The culture that is there seems to me to be fragile yet precious. I shudder to think what will happen to it if reunification happens in anything but a gradual way.

My trip is documented here in the radio show Off The Wall: (link to mp3) [http://www.2600.com/offthewall/mp3files/2007/off_the_wall__2...](http://www.2600.com/offthewall/mp3files/2007/off_the_wall__20070522.mp3) and [http://www.2600.com/offthewall/mp3files/2007/off_the_wall__2...](http://www.2600.com/offthewall/mp3files/2007/off_the_wall__20070807.mp3)

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://tema.ru/travel/north-korea-1/> <http://tema.ru/travel/north-korea-2/> ... 5 parts

<comment><USER13> This is the original source of the photos in Russian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember watching a video where a man in North Korea was trying to eat bark off of a tree because he was so hungry. It makes me sick even thinking about it...

<comment><USER14> Wow. Just finished reading the entire article. I can't believe how lucky I am to live in a free country.

<comment><USER15> I wish people would stop using that term, "free country". I don't know of very many "free countries". If you live in the United States, you live in a _free- er_ country than North Korea, and indeed, that's something to be grateful for, but you do not live in a truly free country.

In a truly free country, you would, for example, have the freedom to eat whatever you want (so long as it doesn't impinge on other people's freedoms). You would be able to have sex with whoever you wanted (so long as both parties are 'mature enough' to agree). This too, is not the case in the states. You would be able to marry whoever you wanted. You would be able to do to your body whatever you wanted. In a truly free country, you would have the freedom to do things that in today's non-free country we consider taboo, punishable offenses. Etc.

<comment><USER14> Clearly, a "truly free country" would fall apart instantly due to the inevitable chaos and evils. Thus why I didn't even bother making the distinction between "free" and "free-er". I assumed it was common knowledge.

My personal definition of freedom is the ability to do anything within the realm reasonable laws. I feel a vast majority of US laws are reasonable. Maybe you don't agree, maybe you do. I'm happy & patriotic US citizen and that's all that matters!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can never get over how Pyongyang has skyscrapers. Given how underdeveloped the rest of the country looks, I can only surmise that they must dump the majority of their GDP into building up Pyongyang.

<comment><USER17> The single biggest cost component of building a high-rise is wages, in a planned economy that factor pretty much disappears.

Other than that it's concrete, steel and time. In the former eastblock there are also plenty of highrises, very few of those would meet your expectations in terms of construction quality.

Also, highrises are actually more efficient material wise compared to building individual homes, after all each dwelling shares 4 surfaces with those around it (except for the edges).

<comment><USER16> Ah, very good points. I never realized labor was such a costly component in construction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As the website is so slow, it is much better to access the Corel cache version: <http://www.mrlevek.com.nyud.net/northkorea.htm>

</comment><comment><USER19> If you've been to the South, the comparison is stark, and it's hard to believe the two were one country a few decades ago.

That said, if re-unification, happens I imagine the progress in the North will be rapid, and the country as a whole will become an even stronger regional power.

<comment><USER20> "That said, if re-unification, happens I imagine the progress in the North will be rapid, and the country as a whole will become an even stronger regional power."

South Korea is a prosperous country that has developed in a relatively short amount of time but North Koreans don't have the education or skill to compete in a South Korean economy.

<comment><USER21> Progress was slower than expected when Germany reunified, and North Korea's poverty is deeper and its culture seems more profoundly damaged.

<comment><USER22> There's still a cultural divide in Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Added (temporary?) mirror for HN people: <http://22.214.171.124/northkorea/>

</comment><comment><USER24> All of sudden, my life seems so much more than how I feel about it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone find the non existent capitalism and zero brands very peaceful?

<comment><USER26> I understand what you are saying, but the incredible challenges the people have just surviving from day to day erase any sense of peace for me. Give me ads all day if it means my kids are fed, clothed, and educated.

<comment><USER25> Peace in NK + healthy democracy, and good organic agriculture + great universities = heaven.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's actually easy to tour North Korea as an American, and many tour companies offer travel packages for it: <http://wikitravel.org/en/North_Korea#Get_in>.

> In January 2010, North Korea lifted the restrictions on American citizens > who are now free to visit at anytime of the year.

</comment><comment><USER28> I recently read and liked the first three Inspector O novels. For me, the novels added a human dimension that the pictures and travelogs miss--what it is like to live under what I would think of as repression?

Review of the most recent one: <http://www.slate.com/id/2262159/>

</comment><comment><USER29> One more documentary: <http://www.infinitehumanstupidity.com/new.html>

</comment><comment><USER30> Mirror: <http://d-ro.ch/2011/01/rare-pictures-of-north-korea/>

</comment><comment><USER17> "The system cannot find the file specified."

Better use one of the mirrors in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER31> Really clean and good roads. Not everything is bad in North Korea

<comment><USER32> It's amazing how little trash a nation of slaves generates. Also, very few emissions. It is always Earth Day in North Korea, as the nation does a remarkable job at conserving electricity[1], unlike decadent Western societies.

[1][http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=north+korea+at+night)

<comment><USER13> In a life where you have nothing, you do not throw trash away. A lot of stuff gets re-used.</comment></comment></comment>


See the first pictures of the Steam Machines prototype - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11/04/see-the-first-pictures-of-the-steam-machines-prototype/?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=emp

<comment><USER2> The pictures on The Verge show more details of the inside of the box: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/4/5063760/we-try-the- steam-m...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/4/5063760/we-try-the-steam- machine-valves-video-game-console-of-the-future)</comment>


Hacker News Readers as Progressive Web Apps - <AUTHOR> https://hnpwa.com/ <comment><USER3> It's great that these examples have been collected in one place, but it's an incredible leap to call this a spiritual successor to TodoMVC.

Fundamentally, every implementation is different at a UI level. They all have different designs, some have custom fonts. Some go directly to the Firebase source, whilst others go via an intermediate API. The scores that are being listed are affected by too many variables beyond the UI library for them to mean anything at all.

In addition, a spiritual successor to TodoMVC is going to have to reflect actual upcoming patterns in user interfaces. Things like shared element transitions, sound effects, perhaps some 3D effects, and numerous other things. Most HN clones don't even allow write operations, even TodoMVC has that.

<comment><USER4> Not only that, but they are also served differently.

For example, the React example has an "F" grade for static caching, whereas some other examples have "A". Doesn't sound like something a JavaScript library can influence.

Why is it that way? Because these are just sample projects from different people created at different points in time, served on different hosts, but suddenly brought under a single umbrella as if it was an organized project from the beginning.

There are big differences in build systems, e.g. some examples are optimized by hand to inline critical CSS at the build level, others aren't. There's nothing that prevents applying the same strategies to all examples, but the fact is some example authors had time to do it, and others didn't. Wouldn't it make sense to at least use the same build system for Preact and React examples?

I appreciate the effort by Addy and other folks from Google to highlight performance issues in web apps, but as it stands right now I consider the website to be rather misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All of the apps fail this test:

1\. Go to main page. 2\. Enter a long comments section. 3\. Scroll down. 4\. Hit back (back to main page again). 5\. Hit forward (back to comments section).

Expected: Scroll position is restored.

Actual: Scroll position is not restored (most of them), back is broken (Svelte), scroll is some random place (Polymer).

<comment><USER6> Weird. Just tried using the Polymer app in Safari and it worked fine. I'm guessing different browsers handle this case differently.

Edit: Just tried again using Chrome, back + forward consistently took me to the same scroll location.

Edit 2: Ahh, Chrome doesn't restore scroll position correctly if you scroll a bit when you go back to the home page before hitting forward. Safari handles this fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I find interesting is that subtle differences in load time have a great impact on the first impression. Furthermore loading animations seem to have an influence how one perceives performance - for me the non-loading animation pages seemed much faster (although the given latency numbers did not suggest such a big difference).

<comment><USER8> I felt the opposite. All the examples seemed fast and the differences seemed negligible. I wonder if our internet connections / platforms were different. I was using chrome on a 2015 MBP with ~decentish wifi.

<comment><USER9> Yeah PWAs (progressive web apps) are really not aimed at us devs with fancy MPBs and good connections. You should probably open devtools and throttle your connection to 3g or worse to get a feel for the problem area they're trying to hit.

<comment><USER10> Or just browse on your mobile!

Overall they're pretty quick on my Galaxy S2. A bigger concern is formatting - some adjust for mobile, others do not and the font is displayed in .5 millimetre type. :(

(perhaps I should apply for a testing job!)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for pointing this out! I had thought they all fit mobile devices just fine but I'm most probably wrong. They should all definitely be fully responsive on mobile, feel free to log an issue on their implementations if you would like to :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is my "Hacker News Reader". It converts HN to csv. (Only selected fields of interest to me.) From there it can easily be imported into kdb+. I have more reusable generalized lex techniques for other websites but HN is so simple it can be done via a braindead one-off as below.

Requirements: lex, cc

Usage:

       fetch -4o yc.htm https://news.ycombinator.com
       yc < yc.htm

To compile this I use something like

        flex -Crfa -8 -i yc.l;
        cc -Wall -pipe lex.yy.c -static -o yc;

Save the text below as yc.l then compile as above.

        #define jmp BEGIN
        #define p printf
        #define x yytext
       %s aa bb cc dd ee ff gg hh
       %s ii jj kk ll mm nn oo
       aa "span class=\"rank\""
       bb "a href=\""
       cc score_........
       dd \>
        /* #include <time.h> */
        /* #include <util.h> */
       %%
       [^\12\40-\176]
       , p("%2c");
        /* rank (dont care) */
       {aa} jmp aa;
        /* <aa>[1-9][^<\.]* p("\n%s,",x);jmp bb; */
       <aa>[1-9][^<\.]* p("\n");jmp bb;
        /* url */
       <bb>{bb} jmp cc;
       <cc>http[^"]* p("%s,",x);jmp dd;
        /* title */
       <dd>{dd} jmp ee;
        /* <ee>[^><]* p("%s,",x);jmp ff; */
       <ee>[^><]* p("%s",x);jmp ff;
        /* host (omit) */
        /* points (dont care) */
       <ff>{cc} jmp gg;
       <gg>{dd} jmp hh;
        /* <hh>[1-9][^<> p]* p("%s,",x);jmp ii; */
       <hh>[1-9][^<> p]* p(",");jmp ii;
        /* user */
       <ii>{bb} jmp jj;
       <jj>http[^"]* p("%s,",x);jmp kk;
        /* time (dont care) */
       <kk>{bb} jmp ll;
        /* <ll>http[^"]* ; */
       <ll>http[^"]* jmp mm;
        /* unix time (dont care) */
        /* <ll>[1-9][^<]* {
        time_t t0; time_t t1; time_t t2;
        t1=time(&t0);
        t2=parsedate(x,&t1,0);
        p("%d,",t2);
        jmp mm;
        } */
        /* item */
       <mm>{bb} jmp nn;
        /* <nn>http[^"]* p("%s,",x);jmp oo; */
       <nn>http[^"]* p("%s",x);jmp oo;
        /* comments (dont care) */
       <oo>{dd} jmp oo;
        /* <oo>[1-9d][^ <]* p("%s",x);jmp 0; */
       <oo>[1-9d][^ <]* jmp 0;
       .
       \n
       %%
       main(){ yylex();}
       yywrap(){ p("\n");}

<comment><USER13> There's an API: [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It'd be cool to see a version that allowed you to login and vote. Session management and all that entails can be really tricky to implement correctly, and it's a frequently asked question with most frontend frameworks.

I haven't read through each repo's source yet, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. Glancing through each repo, only the Angular 2 version has tests. It's pretty easy to write throw away code that works once and you don't have to maintain long-term, so I'd advise caution in adopting patterns from these examples.

<comment><USER15> Is there a good Android app where you can login and reply to comments?

<comment><USER16> Yes, there is. I've tried a few of them and HN Materialistic is the superb one: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidroh.materialistic)

<comment><USER15> I didn't even notice you could log in on that app. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is fantastic. todoMVC always lacked many features of standard apps, such as making an async request.

I wonder how fast a standard server side, non-JS version compares.

<comment><USER18> A standard server-side, non-JS version of the Hacker News front page? I feel like that's pretty easy to find.

<comment><USER17> Right, but it should be benchmarked so that all requests originate from the same server so latency and other factors are not a problem.

<comment><USER11> Yep you're 100% right, that's something we've discussed [1] and definitely something we still need to do [2].

[1] [https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news- pwas/issues/7#issueco...](https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news- pwas/issues/7#issuecomment-299002136) [2] [https://github.com/tastejs/hacker- news-pwas/issues/4](https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas/issues/4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Has anyone extensively used Preact? Would like to hear first hand experiences about any performance gains (or anything in general)

<comment><USER20> Preact is brilliant. I use it instead of React for basically anything that I'm allowed to, for one single reason: it's Component class's "render()" method takes props and state as arguments! Testing becomes nicer, especially when porting an existing React component over, and I find it conceptually much cleaner.

Getting up and running with Preact, TypeScript (or Bublé[0]) and Rollup is pretty simple, and gives an extremely small and very fast bundle, which I just adore.

The big thing, is that by choosing the right tools, I can keep my `ls node_moduels | wc -l` small, and Rollup's tree-shaking takes that even further. With some forethought, one can achieve this with React, too, but I find Preact beautiful to use, and Hyperscript instead of JSX can be a boon for rapidly prototyping an idea for a component instead of setting up yet-another- js-build-system!

[0] [https://buble.surge.sh/guide/](https://buble.surge.sh/guide/)

Edited to add: I've also used it successfully for some (unfortunately internal, I'd love to show you them) big production systems, where we had a team of 7 developers working on it at the end. Still in use now, and it was a breeze -- and runs extremely fast, UI-wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Did the Svelte version hijack the back button for anyone else?

<comment><USER11> The browser back button? Hmmm it seems fine for me, not noticing any weird behaviour.

<comment><USER11> Nope never mind, navigating within the app works but navigating out back to hnpwa.com doesn't. I'm noticing the same on Chrome desktop and iOS safari.

Opened an issue for it: [https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte- hackernews/issues/10](https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte-hackernews/issues/10)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd like to see a comparison with old fashioned HTML and CSS.

<comment><USER23> Try this: [http://news.ycombinator.com](http://news.ycombinator.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When you click on Lighthouse for Vue.js the score is actually significantly worse: 78/100

Why is that showing 93/100 in the list?

</comment><comment><USER11> Genuinely can't thank everybody for all the feedback. A lot of you mentioned that we're not comparing apples to apples here, and you couldn't be more right. I take full responsibility for this, and I really apologize if the site's design made it look that way.

Each of the implementations were built at a completely different time by different authors and are not representative as official library implementations at all. In no way was it our intent to make it seem like a reference of performance comparison between the different libraries, so again I apologize if it comes across that way.

We do need to standardize each of the apps so that they can actually be compared, but until then we'll need to make sure that things are more transparent. In the next few days we'll add some changes to how we display each of the implementations for this [1].

[1] [https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news- pwas/issues/36](https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas/issues/36)

</comment><comment><USER25> It was kind of meta to click through each one to this same HN story. At least until Polymer, which displays an earlier first page. I suppose it should work that way, but it felt like I'd taken a wrong turn.

<comment><USER11> Not all of the implementations are using the same API hence why the data isn't displayed the same on each :P

We've discussed standardizing the specifications [1] for each of the apps which covers how they're hosted, how they fetch their data, etc... That's something we still need to do so hopefully sometime soon we'll have each of the apps standardized similarly.

[1] [https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news- pwas/issues/7#issueco...](https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news- pwas/issues/7#issuecomment-299002136)

<comment><USER11> Scratch that, according to this issue ([https://github.com/Polymer/hn- polymer-2/issues/3](https://github.com/Polymer/hn-polymer-2/issues/3)) it may not be an API issue and is probably because of stale service worker data not being refreshed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They all look ugly, load slower, and consume more battery than a straight webpage, and they offer no discernible advantage or features.

<comment><USER27> That's not really the point though - it's a comparison between multiple frameworks using their implementation of a Hacker News clone as a sort of benchmark. More importantly - by looking at the source of each one, you can compare the common patterns and pitfalls of the framework.

I do agree though that these all are not good use cases for the frameworks - <USER2> news aggregation site doesn't have enough state or cross-application relationships to warrant the overhead of any of these framework. _Especially_ in comparison to Hacker News - which is so minimalist as it is - adding to it can only really take away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I especially liked the fact that although I have JavaScript disabled by default in Brave, I didn't notice that at first for React, Preact, Svelte, and Viper because those degrade well.

</comment><comment><USER29> Where is the elm version?

<comment><USER11> Would be great to have Elm on there as well! Contributions are open to any Hacker News implementation that meets the specs :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is really fascinating and informative. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER31> I wish these were ordered by speed.

</comment><comment><USER32> React is worst.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm quite surprised that someone had enough will + time to develop seven implementations of the same thing.

<comment><USER9> They didn't, they're written by different people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> And again we see that React isn't that great these days.

<comment><USER9> Apparently, this site isn't intended to be a contest/perf-comparison. It's supposed to show that solid PWAs are doable with all of these frameworks. Looks like the authors are working on clarifying this: [https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news- pwas/issues/36](https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas/issues/36)

<comment><USER34> > this site isn't intended to be a contest/perf-comparison

It's comparing load time, not performance.

<comment><USER9> You missed the point, it's not supposed to be 'comparing' anything. See the thread I linked to.

(Also 'performance' is a broad term that encompasses load time. If a page loads faster it performs better).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: What percentage of the YC accepted come from Ivy League Schools? - <AUTHOR>

YC is a subjective judging process. Is the school that ones goes to weighed in proportionally or over-proportionally?<p>This question could be rephrased as : Of the people picked so far, what is the ratio of people from 'good schools' vs people from 'bad schools'? Is this information publicly available? <comment><USER2> One would have to have data about the relative sizes of student bodies of all schools everywhere vs. the Ivy League schools, which I don't have.

But, it's easy to say that a lot of the YC company founders that I know came from the following schools:

Stanford (by far the leader, I'm sure)

MIT

Oxford (a surprise to me)

CMU

But, a lot also came from other places. I can think of examples from UPenn, University of Florida, many of the UC schools, Monash University (in Australia), as well as folks who don't actually have a university degree (me, for example--I went to a bunch of different schools for a bunch of different subjects, and none worth speaking of).

I suspect the "disproportionate" numbers are due to the basic fact that folks who go to an "elite" university are more likely to be highly ambitious, and school was just another way to achieve. Motivation plays a big role in getting into YC...and getting into and graduating from a top university takes a lot of ambition and motivation. I don't think YC thinks a lot about the college field on the application. If they did, Virtualmin wouldn't be a YC funded company; though my co-founder did go to a good school, I didn't know what it was when I filled out the application, so as far as YC could tell we were both marginally educated.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html>

Off the top of my head I know of 5 founders in the current group of 50-60 who went to Ivy League colleges. There may be more, but I'd have to go back and look at the applications to know how many.

</comment><comment><USER4> Given past commentary from PG/YC, the supposed caliber of the school an applicant attended would have little impact on their decision. I could see them analyzing more factors relating to the school, such as difficulty of the major, honors status, and time taken to graduate. These seem like they would have equal or greater impact on decisions than the school's reputation itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am not sure if the judges look at the schools the candidates come from. Maybe I am mistaken?

<comment><USER2> They look at everything, I'm sure, or they wouldn't ask.

But, I doubt it is considered a vital statistic...just another way to indicate motivation and ambition. I'm pretty sure pg and Co. know that university is not where most of the best hackers acquired their skills.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Themefinder – Interactively find wordpress themes - <AUTHOR> http://www.themefinder.co/ Click the arrows either side of the preview to navigate, you can also use the LEFT/RIGHT arrow keys.<p>The previews are also responsive, so you can resize themes to see what they would look like on a smaller device (phone/tablet) <comment><USER2> Sorry to hijack, but I literally _just_ launched something very similar:

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

I even posted about it to HN the other day ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888745)) but it seemed to vanish in about 30 seconds...

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh nice, themebeacon seems much more comprehensive than themefinder.

For the speed issue; I was playing around with an idea of preloading the iframe previews to speedup loading; it worked but the browser would crash due to high CPU/memory usage eventually. Maybe you'll have better luck?

<comment><USER2> I like your solution too - it 'gets you to the goods' much faster :) At the moment I feel like mine sort of overpromises and underdelivers, e.g. the style and features functionality doesn't work particularly well yet.

About the pre-loading, I'm actually already doing that... But only the next one in the queue. How many were you trying to load at once? I did notice that even only pre loading one is enough to slow it down considerably on my nexus 4 though...

<comment><AUTHOR> I think i was a bit too optimistic. I would load 5 iframes at once with 2 either side of the currently selected one. It was much quicker but I couldn't find a nice way to reduce resource usage; I think the browser still attempts to compute all those animations even when offscreen. Setting the dimensions to 1x1px for offscreen frames didn't do the trick; I tried going down to 3 and that still ended up in lots of CPU/RAM usage. I think it's probably do-able but would require some more tinkering.

BTW: I like your mobile/tablet previews. I was actually going to do the same but left it out for the moment :P

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I'm almost positive you're right about the animations, etc. still loading off-screen. I'm not sure how much of this is due just to javascript stuff going on vs. loading a bunch of things at once simply being really CPU intensive.

EDIT: Might be worth investigating the (dis)allow-scripts variable of the sandbox tag? Take a look at [http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed- if...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-iframes/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It just seems to be a bunch of ads/demos for themeforest themes with your affiliate id - or am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get this, I only see one theme and I can't find a button to find something else? Am I doing something wrong?

<comment><USER5> It's the same for me. Trying to access /wordpress/ gives me a 404...

<comment><AUTHOR> Just hit the arrows to the right / left of the preview, you can also use the left/right arrow keys to navigate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Viewing on iPhone I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do until I came back here and read the comments of others. Even then it was hard to find the arrow to press.

Then it keeps crashing safari. I tried multiple times but it always crashed either when first loading the page or when first pressing the arrow key.

</comment><comment><USER7> I honestly have no idea what I am supposed to do on this page

</comment><comment><USER8> It'd be great if you could filter on free/paid also

</comment><comment><USER9> My cents: \- Add search box \- Free/Paid filter

</comment><comment><USER10> i was expecting it to be a little like www.singlepage.guru but for wordpress. but i cant seem to get it going.

</comment><comment><USER11> a finder without search

</comment><comment><USER12> This is awesome!</comment>