Is there any data that says secondhand car seats aren't safe? - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketplace.org/2019/11/14/is-there-any-data-that-says-secondhand-car-seats-arent-safe/ <comment><USER2> > As recently as October 2018, Target's trade-in website claimed, "Used car > seats shouldn't be sold or given away, since they expire every six years and > regulations change constantly."

This hints to at least _one_ good reason: so defective designs or models don't linger too long. Similarly, manufacturers have an interest, a priori, in discouraging a second-hand market to limit their exposure if and when any defects are found, especially if they lead to injuries. Of course, the most important reason is almost certainly because planned obsolescence leads to more sales.

> Instead of destroying 500,000 used seats over the years, Target could have > safely marketed them to emerging markets. They would've sold, and many > children would be safer because their parents had access to a secondhand > market.

Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished.

I think drug companies do dump pharmaceuticals near their expiration date into cheaper markets. But the drugs aren't actually expired, and they're certainly not used. Interestingly, AFAIU the expiration date for many drugs is also largely pulled out of thin air; they often retain their potency for many years after the supposed expiration date. OTOH, _proving_ efficacy can be more difficult and _risky_.

<comment><USER3> Yeah but did you ever read the chapter of Freakonomics about car seats? Car seats improve children's chance of injury over every case except the one where kids sit in the back seat with an old fashioned seat belt on. Compared to that, car seats perform about the same. (Note: I get that an infant can't use a regular seat belt.)

It's true that car seats have been great for safety. But a lot of that (if not most) is that it forced parents to put their kids in the back seat of the car (much safer) in most cases and always secured by a belt. The idea that a newer car seat has some magic safety improvement that is say, more important then the difference in safety between a mini-van and a two seat sportscar is a fallacy. If you are worried about your kid being safe in a car, put them in a minivan and have them sit in a car seat in the middle back. Even with an old car seat that is very safe.

<comment><USER4> For families with 3 children, the child car seat requirement generally pushes them into a minivan because you can't install car seats 3 to a row, so you need an extra row. And then you still max out at 1 friend instead of 3, because even a minivan won't seat more than 4 child car seats.

It's also not magic getting your children into a car seat. It takes time, the angles are awkward, and when parked on a busy road it often exposes parents to traffic. I've only heard of 1 fatal accident through where a parent was struck by a car (sideswiped) while fiddling with a car seat.

<comment><USER5> I have a crazy theory that car sizes (and prices) are what are limiting the number of children people have.

It would be ridiculous to try to transport a five child family these days.

<comment><USER6> I would go with lack of parental leave, decreasing income security, stagnating wages, student loan debt, enormous healthcare expenses, and need for dual income households as well as being in school for longer periods of time to secure good jobs over car sizes and prices.

Not to mention minivans exist and aren't that expensive compared to cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Huge kudos to the author for taking the time to investigate this issue. Interestingly in the book Freakeconomics from 2005 they did an analysis on car seats and found that after 2 years of age they don't make much of a difference. During their study the came across the same type of behavior from child seat manufacturers - ignoring requests for information.

<comment><USER8> The Freakonomics guys are notorious for using shoddy research, jumping to bad conclusions, and generally publishing provocative conclusions just for the sake of provocativeness that don't hold up to even a whiff of debunking. I rolled my eyeballs through the entire book.

Good rebuttal of the car seat story here, with lots of links: [https://thecarseatlady.com/freakonomics-fallacy-an- economist...](https://thecarseatlady.com/freakonomics-fallacy-an-economist-or- a-pediatrician-who-would-you-trust-to-keep-your-child-safe/)

<comment><USER9> 'The car seat lady' looks like a rather biased source. Which does not mean their wrong.

This is one of the few unrelated looks into the topic and it shows relatively minimal benefits. Likely still worth it, but less critical than generally perceived. [https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_abo...](https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_about_child_carseats)

<comment><USER10> That's a terrible talk! In particular, why on earth is the car seat moving forwards in the crash test? Most car seats I've seen are essentially bolted to the rest of the seat. Is this a Europe / USA thing?

<comment><USER9> It's common for car seats to be attached to a seat belt which adds some play. From a random manual, page 16 gives an example using seat belts: [https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/D1xDQvLJ3iS...](https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/D1xDQvLJ3iS.pdf)

The LATCH system is seems to be bolted on, but not always used. It's still going to bounce in a crash as the seat cushion has a lot of give under these forces. Further, in terms of real world companions you need to understand people don't nessisarily use safety equipment correctly especially if it's more time consuming. Comparing LATCh attachment vs seat belts is a whole other discussion.

<comment><USER11> > It's common for car seats to be attached to a seat belt which adds some > play.

Proper installation with a seatbelt involves engaging the retractor so it has basically no play at all.

It's true that improper installation is quite common, though.

> The LATCH system is seems to be bolted on, but not always used. It's still > going to bounce in a crash as the seat cushion has a lot of give under these > forces.

A forward-facing seat using LATCH should usually be installed with three point LATCH (the third is over the seat back), so without much play in any direction, certainly not forward.

Two point LATCH can move up-down and side-to-side a bit, but still not forward.

<comment><USER9> The 2 point LATCH system is attached below not behind the car seat's center of gravity, so under heavy acceleration it depresses the car's seat cushion and rotates forward then bounces up and back. Minimizing this is the reasoning behind the 3rd attachment point.

<comment><USER12> In forward facing child seats there are the two latch buckles as well as a tether anchor that runs over the top of the seat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It was suggested to us (can't remember where from) that a second hand car seat might have been dropped or damaged in some un-noticable way and so would not be as strong as it needed to be. So it wasn't so much about expiration dates as it was about knowing what had happened to that particular seat. I was kindof unconvinced by the idea of unnoticable damage* but then its your kids so you shrug and fork out for a new seat.

That said, in the UK there's plenty of second hand car seats changing hands via ebay etc.

* incidentally I've heard the same thing said about bicycle helmets, which use similar materials (plastic, polystyrene)

<comment><USER14> I can't imagine how a dropped car seat could break. All the ones I've seen are made from very very strong plastic.

<comment> o-__-o Weaken internal structures down to a microscopic level that ultimately renders the car seat weaker to handle a major accident

<comment><USER15> I guess we go straight to the factory to maintain a chain of custody?

<comment><USER16> Let's use a blockchain for that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've conveniently blotted the details out of my memory, but nowadays you have to go through multiple car seats per kid, because there are different types for different age groups. Multiply by how many kids you have. Multiply by how many cars you have in your family.

Truth be told, there are plenty of secondhand car seats out there. For one thing, they get handed down from one kid to the next within a family. For another, relatives and neighbors share them.

It's like any secondhand item... something could always go wrong.

<comment><USER18> They're also supposed to be in them until they're 10 or so, these days. You're likely to go through 3-4 seats per kid—infant (often also a carrier), toddler, then either a larger car seat and later a booster or a convertible booster that can do both.

And yeah, you absolutely hand them down to younger kids. Throwing out old car seats is nuts and not something people actually do unless 1) they have more money than you know what to do with, or 2) the seat looks like it's in bad shape or reveals on inspection that it's damaged or deteriorating, or 3) you just don't know anyone who could use it.

<comment><USER19> A 10 year old in a car seat? Thats ridicolous!

<comment><USER20> Even _adults_ would be safer in a car seat like the ones kids sit in, if anyone would be willing to use one.

If you scale up a toddler car seat, it looks a lot like the safety seats in race cars or fighter jets: the seat wraps around the outside edge of the body and upper legs; the head rest wraps around the sides of the head with padding; the restraint straps have a 5-point attachment system.

<comment><USER21> Do you have a source for this?

<comment><USER22> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five- point_harness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-point_harness) you can follow links for more...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> An almost perfect racket, the product has a low intrinsic cost and a long life - how can we make them obsolete? Kid based FUD is sown all over their web pages and package inserts, and we all love kids - right?

<comment><USER24> I'm currently buying a new seat for our kid (as she's outgrowing the second- hand one we had before). Even with ISOFIX and i-Size standards in the EU, it's an ordeal. The space is ridiculously overcrowded (just how many variants of a car seat can one make?!), seats themselves are near-impossible to compare against each other, and every site keeps reminding you that your kid's life hangs on your purchase. And then there's car compatibility issue - we just discovered that even though our Xsara Picasso has ISOFIX mount points, it doesn't accept the support leg (because of floor-level storage compartments) and seemingly doesn't have a top tether mounting point either. One has to wonder why they even bothered to add the ISOFIX mounts in the first place.

At this point I'd gladly pay $100 or more for some expert to just recommend a safe seat for our car. I already wasted much more than that on research in terms of opportunity cost.

(please excuse the rant)

<comment><USER21> Just ask reddit...

That's how I found our car seat. I was looking for safety and fit, but also what people seemed to like the best. Forums are great for stuff like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems like the FTC should get involved for deceptive marketing...

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd happily use a second-hand expired set from a trusted friend.

Off something like Craigslist, I'd worry about it having being in an undisclosed car accident.

<comment><USER27> Are the forces in an accident strong enough to damage an engineered car seat? It's already protected by crumple zones, and I'd expect the car seat to be more robust than the occupant.

<comment><USER26> NHTSA says yes. [https://www.nhtsa.gov/car-seats-and-booster-seats/car- seat-u...](https://www.nhtsa.gov/car-seats-and-booster-seats/car-seat-use- after-crash)

Same thing for bike helmets - after a serious shock, they should be replaced, even if there's not visible damage.

<comment><USER27> Fair enough. I buy it more for bike helmets, though, since there's a good chance that helmet hit road or metal.

<comment><USER28> And in an accident a car seat has all the force transferred through just 2-3 points of contact with the seat belt or isofix points.

I would replace my kids seats after any accident with airbags or pretensioners firing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Evenflo has a car seat that is designed to last 10 years. This seems pretty reasonable, after this point I assume you'd want access to the latest technology and safety standards, and plastics do age some over time.

[https://www.evenflo.com/gold/](https://www.evenflo.com/gold/)

</comment><comment><USER30> This doesn't take into account seat maintenance and daily use, it feels like.

We have two car seats with 9 year expirations. The older seat is almost 3 years old. I doubt it's going to make it past 5-6. My first kid has had diaper blowouts, vomiting episodes, messy eating episodes, potty training accidents, and more - all into the same seat. It's looking pretty grungy.

I'm pretty paranoid about following manufacturer instructions for cleaning, but I know plenty of parents that bleach and steam clean and generally don't follow instructions for car seat care.

Gently used seats that were well taken care of - those should absolutely be reused, and you don't have to get into developing nations to find someone that can use it. But not all seats, honestly - especially not with how much we as a society are using car seats nowadays. My almost-3 year old is still rear facing in a convertible seat that should last her at least another year.

<comment><USER31> Old colleague of mine used to put the (small) seat in the dishwasher with the top shelve removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yeah, so I was never really sure what a new car seat would gain us in our _second hand car_...

And this from someone who just spent good money replacing the rock and roll bed in a campervan to improve seatbelt safety for the little one. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

</comment><comment><USER11> Age may or may not be a problem, but several of the people I know that have sold car seats have done so specifically because they were replacing them after they were in a vehicle collision. (Which probably also involves insurance fraud, since insurers will pay for that but require—easily faked—evidence that the seat has been rendered unsaleable, e.g., photo of it with the straps cut.)

Now, maybe they were all being excessively cautious in the replacement, but...

</comment><comment><USER33> I recently sold a car seat just to learn about the second hand age of cars seats matter.

But the environment matter a lot too. There ought to be crash test by government agencies comparing new and old car seats.

Similar trend with children carriages. Shifting from sturdy iron constructions towards light weight aluminum materials. Difference being iron construction lasts long good for the environment, aluminum one to two children buy and throw.

<comment><USER34> > There ought to be crash test by government agencies comparing new and old > car seats

Knowing how corporations rule the USA, the moment a government agency will start doing this testing/comparison, the carseat manufacturers will start lobbying (or as we know it in the rest of the world: "bribing politicians to preserve and increase their profits"), and we will most likely not see any solid results.

Knowing Sweden and how they value life over $$$$, my money is with them instead of a shady "Carseat Media LLC". It looks like it's fearmongering "hey what is more important? $500 or the life of your child?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is about minimizing litigation risk, from the manufacturer side and the parent side.

The manufacturers want to limit their exposure to any one design. If this year's cost-saving design unexpectedly doesn't work, they want to budget and cut off liability.

And, as a parent, if the seat is poorly designed in a way that it ever harms my child, I want to be able to sue the manufacturer.

</comment><comment><USER36> > so long as a seat hasn't been in a crash or otherwise doesn't exhibit any > damage

That seems a sufficient reason not to accept a used seat from someone you don't know. Another reason for concern that wasn't mentioned is needing to know if the product was recalled.

Upshot being there's likely no reason to throw away an older car seat. You probably still don't want to shop for one at a yard sale.

<comment><USER37> What kind of non-obvious damage could a car seat suffer in an accident? They're fairly simple devices.

<comment><USER38> Internal structure damage reducing effectiveness in future impacts.

There are shock stickers shippers use to verify if shipments have exceeded certain shock thresholds; car seats with a similar feature would allow for a second hand market (as data shows car seats should be safe to use for 20-30 years, if they haven't been exposed to stresses from an accident).

You just need enough customers to ask for it, or regulation.

<comment><USER39> What kind of "internal structure damage" would that be?

Most car seats aren't really that complex, and when you take apart a car seat (eg to wash the cover) you can see all the "internal structure", and it would be very obvious if something was damaged in a crash.

<comment><USER38> Stress on the plastic structure, which usually isn't exposed even with the cover off.

Get a car seat from a moderate or severe accident, and cut it in half; you'll be able to see the damage from the forces involved.

<comment><USER25> You should see stress marks on the plastic

<comment><USER39> Yeah, I'd really love to see pictures of a car seat that has enough "internal damage" to be dangerous, without that damage being visible when you take the cover off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Having used a second hand booster seat for my daughter, I can testify sun damage is a real thing. I could not pass it on in good conscience. And we replaced it with a more modern and much sturdier version.

That's not to say I think all seats should be summarily discarded after an expiration date because some people (like me) don't garage their car. I'm saying there is some nuance to this choice.

<comment><USER39> A booster seat is just a piece of plastic that's supposed to raise your kid to the correct height for the seat belt, right?

Does it really matter if the material is still sturdy in a booster seat?

<comment><USER31> Our booster seats were just seat-shaped Polystyrene blocks with a cloth cover. Worked perfectly fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> They seem to not sell used baby gates at second hand baby stores either. id guess for a similar reason and that being that they don't want to claim liability in asserting the item was in original working order.

</comment><comment><USER42> "Used car seats shouldn't be sold or given away, since they expire every six years and regulations change constantly."

tell me, how many of you are riding with expired seats? u criminals!

<comment><USER43> Apparently, as the moment, about 99% of people in Italy with car seats are, due to some recently-introduced legislation.

The legislation requires some electronic alarm to prevent infants being locked in cars, but apparently vendors aren't up to speed and the law was brought in anyway,leaving everyone either breaking the law or not able to drive their children... .

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Just the fact that you don't know its history, especially if that car seat has been in a crash before, should be enough of a reason.

</comment><comment><USER45> The explanation I have always heard is that car seats utilize EPP and EPS both of which breakdown to some degree when exposed to UV light.

<comment><USER46> EPP (extruded polypropylene) and EPS (extruded polystyrene) are not exposed to the sunlight in car seat's construction. Also, if those break down it will be surface-first decomposition and very visible/noticeable.

<comment><USER45> In the car seats I had the EPP and EPS were in positions that they could be exposed to sunlight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Might be more safe as new models haven't gotten recalled for defects yet.</comment>


Show HN: JAWS Framework Trailer – Re:Invent Edition [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/141176732 <comment><USER2> "Show HN" is specifically reserved for stuff the HN community can use, not content:

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

<comment><USER3> For example, this should link to the project itself: [https://github.com/jaws- framework/JAWS](https://github.com/jaws-framework/JAWS)</comment></comment>


Facebook To Discontinue Messaging Feature in Mobile App - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/09/facebook-to-discontinue-messaging-feature-in-mobile-app/

<comment><USER2> Is this because they have WhatsApp now and they will use them as messenger App, but Facebook has 1.22 billion monthly active user whereas WhatsApp has just 435 or 460 million user. There is a big gap.</comment>


Render Multimedia in Pure C - <AUTHOR> http://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/11/03/ <comment><USER2> Ah, raw PPM output. Reminds me of this which I wrote some years ago:

        #!/usr/bin/perl
        # Output is a PPM file : try snowflake | xloadimage stdin
        # see http://cam.pm.org/christmasppc-summary.shtml#Pete_Clay for explanation

                $w=                          100
              ;$w*=5;                      ;$W=$w*
             $w;   q--;  $p=atan2(1,0)*  2;3;   @P=
              ("\000"x3)x(    $W);    BEGIN{$";sub
              S{$_.='fhoq'    }sub    K{$_.='s'.((
             $n  ++))   .((    ''    .''   .'{'  ))
            ;};    sub   Y{$_  .=  $_[0   ]};    S;K
           ;Y(''.   '$k/=2;$'. '' .'l/=2}');   S;K;0;
          Y(     '$k/=3;$l/=3;$k+=$j/4}fhoqh{'.     ''
      .'cevq"P6\a$jq$j\a255\a",q@P}');S;K;Y('$g=$c/3;e}');
     S;K;  Y(q.$g=$.  .'c/-3;'    .'e}');S  ;K;Y('$'.  'g'.
     '='    .'$c*2'    .'/3}'      );;s/v    /vag/x;    sub
     p{$P  [$x+$w/2+  int($y)*    $w+$W/2]  ="\377"x3  }sub
      r{$z=$x*cos($t)+$y*sin($t);$y=$x*sin($t)-$y*cos($t);
          $x     =$z};tr/a-z/n-za-m/;s/d/$"/gx;     $x
           ++;$y=   4;eval$_}; s/ /japh/;sub   T{;$a=
            $_[    0];   ;$b=  ((  $a&(   ($a    |(+
             $a  <<1)   )<<    1)    )>>   2)|(  $a
              >>3);if($b){    $_[0    ]=""}else{$_
              [0]="f$a;p;"    }};;    for(1..20000
             *10   ){$_  =int(rand(20))  ;T$_   ;0;
              eval$_}                      u#byPJC
                #JA                          PH#

Ironically on the DOS systems (and early home computers) I learnt on it was really easy to display images from programs as the framebuffer was at a known memory address and you could just write to it. Windowing systems make that a bit harder, and very little of this is really portable.

<comment><USER3> On MS-DOS the FB was at $A000 and you could address it easily using stuff like mem[] in Pascal.

I remember doing lots of animation and random graphics stuff in DOS using mode 13, the usual stuff at the time, plasma etc. 320 x 200 was more than enough for this kind of fun. Good times, simple times!

<comment><USER4> It is as easy to setup a framebuffer into a SDL window, working pretty much like in the DOS days.

<comment><USER3> yeah, SDL rekindled my passion with this kind of stuff, man. It is so easy to set up and deference a simple software-only framebuffer and after you whet your appetite, setting up a hardware accelerated one is also dead simple in SDL2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Might be a bit offtopic, but you can easily output audio and video at once and then mux them later on:

        ./yourprogram -a >(ffmpeg -f rawaudio ..other audio opts.. -i - ..encoding options.. audio.m4a) -v >(ffmpeg -f rawvideo ..video opts.. -i - ..encoding options.. video.m4v)
        ffmpeg -i audio.m4a -i video.m4v -c:a copy -c:v copy out.mp4

The >() syntax is a bash extension, supported also by zsh, and replaces the argument with a file path to a pipe that's connected to the process within the ()'s stdin. Similarly you can use <() to replace the arg with a pipe connected to the process's stdout. One thing I use it for sometimes is to compare directory contents:

        vimdiff <(ls -1 dir1 | cut -d/ -f2-)<(ls -1 dir2 | cut -d/ -f2-)

There are better tools for this specific task, but for a quick and dirty compare on a machine where you only have vim and bash, it's hard to beat.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm returned to the heyday of Sorenson Video 3, Windows Media Video, and RealVideo. =:D Our application was used by most web video professionals at the time - go to a trailer on Apple's site, and it'd almost certainly have been produced by our work.

All C, up to Media Cleaner Pro 4, migrating to C++ with Cleaner 5, with some Altivec (oh, what a joyous SIMD ISA) on the Mac side.

</comment><comment><USER7> Those who find this interesting are recommended to look at the demoscene --- where realtime procedural graphics and music are the norm, and some groups have gotten very _very_ good at it.

</comment><comment><USER8> This was one of the only ways to get video working easily 20 years ago. I remember piping ppm files into the Berkeley MPEG_ENCODE [1] and getting out a poorly encoded but animated raytracer output.

[1] [http://vis.lbl.gov/NERSC/HowTos/mpeg/help/tools/mpeg_encode....](http://vis.lbl.gov/NERSC/HowTos/mpeg/help/tools/mpeg_encode.html)

<comment><USER9> I did the same for my diploma thesis, where I simulated quantum waveforms on a small compute cluster. Each run would consist of about 30,000 separate simulations with initial conditions, and while they usually only output a few statistics each, there was a debugging switch which dumped the waveform as a PPM after every timestep, so that I could merge them all into a video and assess the quality of the simulation visually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really great visualizations of search algorithms - would love to have brief description of technique used for actual graphics/audio output (only 600LOC but my C is craptastic so..)

<comment><USER2> > brief description of technique used for actual graphics/audio output

That's most of the article. It can be found in the "frame" and "ppm_*" functions in the program.

Nice clean classical C style there in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm amazed at how slow Quicksort appears in the sorting video.

</comment><comment><USER12> His 2D structure with pipes makes me wanna write transforms in APL

<comment><USER13> I was thinking of a similar thing, but in J [1]. J's library or routines (j.dll on windows), can be called easily from C. I am trying to establish a synthesis of my love for J programming with my C coding experience.

      [1] jsoftware.com</comment></comment>


Why programming languages? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cdleary.com/2010/10/why-programming-languages/

<comment><USER2> Less ridiculous and more persuasive:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c>

</comment><comment><USER3> Do people read programming books to find reasons to become interested in programming? Seems to me, once they've picked up a book, they're already interested. "Preaching to the choir" seems like an apt phrase at this point.

<comment><USER4> Ask a publisher - I'm just someone who reads the occasional publisher's blog - but the answer is "yes". Browsers will pick up a book and scan the cover, the preface, the first chapter, etc. to decide whether your book is worth reading, and therefore worth buying.

And, yes, even literate people who know nothing about a field will pick up books and try them to see if they are inspired to learn more. People who aren't linguists try _The Language Instinct_ ; people who aren't physicists pick up Hawking or the popular lectures of Richard Feynman; lots and _lots_ of non-historians read popular histories (think: Stephen Ambrose); and I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for writers like Martin Gardner who labored to translate mathematics for young, unspecialist audiences.

And then we have programming. Friends and relatives of mine who have never programmed ask me for a book that will tell them what programming is about so that they can see if they are interested, and I never know what to say. The best preface I know is in SICP, but that's like handing _The Feynman Lectures on Physics_ to someone who wants to know how their car works. The first few pages are great but then it gets _scary hard_.

This stuff is important. I read a lot of books on BASIC and Pascal and assembly programming when I was a kid, but I never really found anything that put programming into perspective. Math and science had a grand, sweeping narrative that was apparent even to a kid, but programming seemed to be about making boxes blink. And this is still how it is in the popular imagination, even for adults. Tell people you're a mathematician or a physicist and they'll think you're a genius; tell them you're a programmer and they'll ask how worried you are that your job will be outsourced to faraway countries.

<comment><USER5> Why not _why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I am totally taken aback by the lack of hyperbolic romanticism in the foreword of the programming language book that I just got."

I don't know why, but I _really_ like this statement.

</comment><comment><USER7> Programming books are by and large read by programmers. Complaining that the foreword doesn't sell programming well enough is like complaining that Hawking's papers don't contain enough cheerleading for first-grade science students.

<comment><USER6> The author wasn't complaining about not selling programming. He was complaining about not selling _languages_.</comment></comment>


What Does the Milky Way Weigh? Hubble and Gaia Investigate - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/what-does-the-milky-way-weigh-hubble-and-gaia-investigate <comment><USER2> I would like to know the mass-equivalent of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We have a good idea of the volume of the known universe. We have a good idea of the local energy density of the CMB, assumed to be approximately the same everywhere. We know the conversion constant between energy and mass.</comment>


3G iPads sold out in 49 of 50 states on launch weekend? - <AUTHOR> http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/05/02/3g.ipad.may.have.had.near.total.sellout/

<comment><USER2> Fortune article has a little more on his methodology and said:

"Munster's team called 50 Apple Stores on Sunday and found that 49 of them had sold out of iPad 3Gs and most had run out of Wi-Fi-only models as well. But it's not clear whether that's because demand was high or supplies were low. Munster believes it was probably a bit of both."

[http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/05/03/ipad-3g-sold-out- in-4...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/05/03/ipad-3g-sold-out- in-49-of-50-stores/)</comment>


The story behind the DNS-cache-poisoning fix - <AUTHOR> http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/373426_insecure04.html

<comment><USER2> More fear mongering.

 _You might think you're logging into your bank, but you've actually been redirected to a bogus bank site posted by the Russian Mafia. Suddenly, you've got a zero balance._

There's a reason why banks use HTTPS.</comment>


Ask HN: Would your business pay for supported open source? - <AUTHOR> Some larger open source projects run their own commercial support offerings, but smaller projects don't tend to have this.
Would there be any benefit to a 3rd party company stepping in and offering a paid support contract for a wide variety of open source projects?
I'm guessing that some open source authors don't want to get into the legal fuss around paid support, so I'm wondering if there is a market gap here. <comment><USER2> I'm building something along these lines. Rather than offering support contracts, I am aiming to make doing hourly paid remote support as easy as possible for open source devs.

As for businesses, Otechie is focused on startups, who often have more money than time/experience. For me personally, I have often spent days in frustration, when the right person could have helped me though quickly.

If you're curious, here's a link: [https://otechie.com](https://otechie.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't see it unfortunately, I'm in the EU!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It probably wouldn't be worth very much. If, for example, I'm writing a python app and I import some package from pypi, if that package is relatively small, and I have some issue with it, I can probably just open the code files and figure it out. Support for open source projects usually means it's something large and complex and requiring specialized knowledge or at least beyond your own, or your project is so large and complex you need outside help getting it done. Also, suits willing to foot the bill.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback :) I think I was more positioning this as "We have hundreds of open source dependencies, can I pay someone (x) to support these all in one go?", mostly due to the proliferation of npm packages!</comment></comment>


Uh Oh, Made Google Drop an 'O' - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/oh-oh-made-google-drop-an-o <comment><USER2> Example: [http://www.google.com/search?q=Gogle&num=100&start=9...](http://www.google.com/search?q=Gogle&num=100&start=990)</comment>


Developer's deceptability test - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/developers-deceptability-test-168b6c0b533e#.12gj2rvw0 <comment><USER2> My main concern with this is that reading a piece of opinion is not the same as analysing a proof: emphasis and rhetorical devices are not some obscure trickery which should immediately trigger a reaction, but an integral part of conveying a message. Apparently, this:

> So yes, developers and architects also make their decisions with basal > ganglia instead of thinking rationally. Usually it is simply a reflection on > the previous experience. What is experience if not a sum of formed habits?

Should be immediately called as bullshit by someone 'firm with reality'. As a statement of fact, that is correct, as no supporting evidence is brought. But as part of an unfolding reflection, i.e. a way of exposing an idea to the reader before arguing and/or building on it, I find it hard to call it 'plain bullshit' on the spot, even if this is certainly a weak point of any argumentation built on it. To consider the entire piece entirely invalid at the first arguable sentence assumes a linear, deductive construction of the text which is not very representative of how actual arguments are built (and what makes them either strong or weak)

</comment><comment><USER3> Almost didn't finish reading this…

However, after reading this, I'm unsure of the real value of this text. It's quite generic, gives you no references to improve your score…

TL;DR: the plausibility of things is not always easy to recognise, and we all make mistakes along the way.</comment>


New Magento Release Includes Security Patches - jay-saint http://merch.docs.magento.com/ce/user_guide/Magento_Community_Edition_User_Guide.html#magento/release-notes-ce-1.9.2.html%3FTocPath%3DAppendices%7CRelease%2520Notes%7C_____0

<comment> jay-saint For reference, previous Magento release downloads did not include critical security patches and could easily result in new installations being quickly compromised.

This appears to be a fairly big update fixing a number of security vulnerabilities and a bunch of longtime bugs / sloppiness.</comment>


Lifetime cost to run F-35 fighter: about $1 trillion - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/26/us-lockheed-fighter-idUSTRE81P0RV20120226 <comment><USER2> Read again: it says "$1 trillion to operate a fleet of 2,443 F-35 fighter jets over the next 50 years."

One F-35 does not cost a trillion, all 2443 planes over 50 years will cost 1 trillion, including the development cost.

Your headline sucks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Projecting the costs of ANYTHING out 50 years is shaky at best and totally inaccurate at worst. If the F35 were a company it would still be pre-revenue product development. Projecting production ramp up costs, operations, and sustainment are simply too complex to model effectively. A report like this does not take into account the ever changing technology advances in production and software costs. I would be willing to bet that 3-D printing, advanced materials, and software V&V breakthroughs will drastically bring costs down over the next 50 years.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's an 's' missing in that title that changes the entire perspective of the article.

Damn link-baiting.

Oh and by the by, lol @ 50 year projections. What will the translation of a 2012 dollar be in 2062?</comment>


Show HN: Jixee – An Alternative to Jira - <AUTHOR> https://jixee.me/

<comment> potato-fairy Made an account just to post on here -- I actually heard about this on Reddit. General impressions are pretty good, I'm curious to check it out myself and see if we can give it a shot. Do you guys have some way to support the move from JIRA to Jixee? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's in our product roadmap. We'll make it easy to migrate info from any other tool. Let me know if you have any other questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Love the design, as well as the idea of a simpler JIRA. I love what Atlassian has done with JIRA in the last few years (better design, much easier to use, much less buggy), but it's often too complicated and too expensive for the vast majority of use cases.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a way to create sprints in a separate dialog from creating task?

Also, is Kanban support in the feature pipeline?</comment>


Codacy, provider of automated code review, raises $5.1M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/17/codacy/ <comment><USER2> It's great to see some competition in this space. Big fan of both Code Climate and Codacy. I like Landscape too but it's a bit more niche.

One thing I'd like to see from Codacy is a comparable level of open source as Code Climate which lets users run the full platform locally in Docker containers through a CLI.</comment>


Type-Finder - <AUTHOR> http://www.type-finder.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to hone my lousy typographic skills by reverse engineering the recommendations from this ;-)</comment>


Intel Security Issue Update: Initial Performance Data Results for Client Systems - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/intel-security-issue-update-initial-performance-data-results-client-systems/ <comment><USER2> Much more so than the bugs themselves it seriously undermines my confidence in Intel that in this time of emergency, they can't bring themselves to address customers with straight talk.

Clear information should take precedence over mitigating liability. Yet it's fallen to others to explain defects in their products, and people are even mostly left guessing what their attempts to fix things actually do.

Screwups happen. But do I want to go live through the consequences of one with this vendor at my side ever again?

<comment><USER3> Intel is in trouble. They've lost mobile and they're in danger of losing desktop/laptop and cloud. While AMD is some threat there, the much larger threat comes from high performance ARM64 cores. Intel would rather see AMD take market share from them than ARM, since at least AMD Ryzen is still an x64 core and will keep the architectural center of gravity in Intel's area.

Of course their longer term strategy seems to be to get ahead in areas like quantum and neuromorphic computing. This is going to keep them relevant in the long term, but in the medium to short term they could have difficulties.

<comment><USER4> Intel is also in trouble in the sense that they have multiple class action lawsuits filed against them regarding meltdown/spectre. Anything they publicly say will no doubt be used against them if possible.

<comment><USER5> I do not understand this. I get that for Meltdown, but Spectre affects almost all processors available. What grounds do they have for litigation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The performance hit is (supposedly) much more significant on Haswell and older, which they forgot to include.

<comment><USER7> Specifically, the oldest generation they tested (Skylake) is the first to have the PCID feature that avoids the complete TLB flush on every syscall.

Continuing with their strategy of full transparency..

<comment><USER8> _> (Skylake) is the first to have the PCID feature_

PCID was introduced with Westmere (2010). [1]

However it wasn't used in the Linux kernel until 4.14 because no one saw the need. [2]

[1] [https://www.realworldtech.com/westmere/](https://www.realworldtech.com/westmere/)

[2] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20155304/does-linux- use-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20155304/does-linux-use-x86-cpus- pcid-feature-for-tlb-if-not-why)

<comment><USER9> But only Haswell added INVPCID.

<comment><USER10> This is the key. Without INVPCID PCID is good as useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "users who use web applications that involve complex JavaScript operations may see a somewhat higher impact (up to 10 percent based on our initial measurements)."

Ok so that's probably most websites these days?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, my first thought was "Oh, so Gmail will be much slower then?"

Intel seems to be trying as hard as possible to define narrow scenarios in which the performance drop isn't too big and only mentioning those. In its first benchmarks, for instance, it only tested a six-core 8700K, one of its highest-end consumer products, because obviously the percentage drop would be lower on high-performance machines than on slower ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting to think that every CPU comparison benchmark online is invalid now. With these number, I wonder how AMD is shaping up to Intel?

When I bought a 7700k over the summer, I went by benchmarks which showed it over Ryzen for most non-parallel workloads. I suspect these numbers bring Ryzen much closer if not beyond. With all these old benchmarks online, CPU shoppers are likely to be misled.

Thinking further, I wonder how benchmarkers patch machines? Will they keep anti-virus enabled so that they receive the 2018-01 patch?

</comment><comment><USER14> Even in these PR figures, the SYSMark 2014 SE Responsiveness test results, a benchmark addition which was specifically created to unearth pain-points in typical everyday user activities, gets a serious wallop.

<comment><USER15> > New "Responsiveness" scenario. Workloads include: application launches, file > launches, web browsing with multiple tabs, multi-tasking, file copying, > photo manipulation, file encryption + compression, and

gone down to 86% :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > As of today, we still have not received any information that these exploits > have been used to obtain customer data. We know our customers are eager for > updates, and via this blog, I will personally communicate with you the > information that we have to share today and in the future.

Seriously? To Intel, all of the world is just overreacted?

<comment><USER17> The original Project Zero announcement also contained the fact that they aren't aware of in-the-wild exploits, does that mean they say they themselves are overreacting, or are they merely providing information?

<comment><USER16> It's too early to say, it's not known _yet_. Are you waiting for a first case to fix your bugs?

<comment><USER17> Where are they saying anything about not fixing bugs? And like it or not, with the issues of the available patches breaking machines, virus scanner incompatibilities, ..., organisations will have to make decisions about _when_ to patch.

<comment><USER16> I said they said like "the world is just overreacted, and if you insist to promptly applying patch they'll provide". It's about their tone in their first statement. And you're misleading my point here.

<comment><USER17> And I really do not see how you get a "the world just overreacted" tone from this post or specifically your quote, I did not intend to mislead from your point. Their overall communication strategy has been pretty bad, but this instance seems fine to me. It's providing information. I guess they should even provide more information against patching, since they don't talk about the issues fixes can cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> OT, but that guy's picture seems amazingly inappropriate for the topic and unsettling in general.

<comment><USER19> It's not that off-topic. It's really bizarre in this context; it's the kind of appeal to "ethos" that you see in all sorts of B2B marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Surely this is written by his PR department and the techies are ashamed of the numbers & interpertation.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm having trouble reading the table, surely they could have presented it as a graph?

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this fixable in the next generation in hardware, or is this a permanent tax on performance going forward?

What I mean is (using a hypothetical): Suppose there's a flaw in the arithmetic unit (e.g. integer division). There's a microcode update, all integer divisions are correct, but run at 86% of previous performance. In next generation, the hardware is fixed and performance will be back up to 100% of designed performance.

Does the same type of handwaving apply to these types of security exploits?

<comment><USER23> I think Intel can take the same approach as AMD for some of the issues. For this remaining issue, I think there might be solutions with minimal performance impact when you are doing a full chip redesign. For example, have a separate branch prediction hardware for privileged code execution? An additional cache area for speculated reads?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any data on older processors? For example I run a sandy bridge 3930k but didn't see anything?

Also how far back are they going to patch?

<comment><USER6>
        > [...] Intel expects to have issued updates for more
        > than 90 percent of processor products introduced within
        > the past five years.

[https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-issues- update...](https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-issues-updates- protect-systems-security-exploits/)

Sandy Bridge is older than that.

<comment><USER25> Is SB going to remain unpatched? Those systems are still perfectly fine for consumer use. I hope business starts selling them off cheap.

<comment><USER6> Looks like Sandy Bridge is going to remain unpatched. That doesn't mean that your OS, compiler and so on won't get updates though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With what mitigation config? IBRS? IBPB?</comment>


Will YouTube kill my channel next? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzb8U0Bje5A <comment><USER2> I've been a bit of a fan of the channel for a while, and it's frustrating to hear this. It seems like the large companies are flexing their muscles and exercising their power over their digital serfs.

One particularly frustrating aspect that he touches on is how everything is automated, and it seems impossible to actually get humans to look at your issue. I'm not sure what can really be done about this other than find/create new platforms. This leads to fragmentation, thus likely beginning a new cycle.

Legislation may also be required to clarify the relationship between someone like Lindy and Youtube. Not sure how I feel about that, though.</comment>


Seymour Papert has died - <AUTHOR> http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-memory/papert <comment><USER2> Seymour Papert was a great philosopher, whose work on Constructionism has uplifted many children, inspired the OLPC project, and continues to have a huge positive influence on the world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_\(learning_theory\))

Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments.

[http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp](http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp)

Here is a Logo Adventure game I wrote for Terrapin, the first program I ever sold, which they distributed with C64 Terrapin Logo, because they wanted a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo's list processing capabilities:

[http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/logo/adventure.logo](http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/logo/adventure.logo)

Seymour Papert greatly inspired me, and I applied his work on Constructionist Education to the open source version of SimCity for the OLPC.

[http://micropolisonline.com/static/documentation/HAR2009Tran...](http://micropolisonline.com/static/documentation/HAR2009Transcript.html)

<comment><USER3> Although his methods probably contributed a lot to popularization of computing, as a philosopher the mental model theory of knowledge has been demonstrated insufficient a long while ago, although it remained popular in the AI computer science field for much longer, the problems with that theory were known even during the hey-day of Papert's work.

Just take a look at Hubert Dreyfus' work to better understand the issue.

<comment><USER4> I don't think constructivism and embodied cognition are too far afield, they both have an emphasis on environmental interaction. That sort of intertwingedness goes along with the general thrust of Dreyfus' argument

(+ here's a link to Dreyfus' essay Why Heideggerian AI failed [http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf](http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In 200x, when I was in 4th grade, my teacher said that that day, we would be learning some programming. We were strictly a Mac school, and Scratch wasn't as well known at the time, so the language and environment we learned was Terrapin Logo.

There's nothing like looking at the screen and seeing something that you made come to life for the first time. And there's nothing quite like being given a problem that seems impossibly hard at first, cracking it, and seeing the result in front of you. It was a magical moment, and though I would not do any more work in logo (UCBLogo wouldn't compile for me), that sense of wonder and magic, and that amazement and the feeling of looking at something, and understanding the complexity that makes it work, and knowing that you designed it, built it, and made it work, that is why I program. For the sheer joy of it.

Thank you Seymour, for everything.

<comment><USER6> You youths! I had a similar introduction to Logo, on an Apple ][ at a computer day camp in the summer of 198x. We programmers tend to love learning the shiny new languages, but it's thanks to the enduring idea behind _this_ language that many of us acquired the love. I strive to build something as lasting.

Papert on the turtle, children and the physical version: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTd3N5Oj2jk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTd3N5Oj2jk)

<comment><USER7> Like you, I learned Logo on an Apple ][ in the '80s. Apart from some dabbling in between, I wouldn't pick up programming in a serious way until grad school. Despite the long gap, that early start made a huge difference for me, and I'll never forget the simple pleasures that Logo afforded me as a child.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had the honor of meeting Seymour Papert on a few occasions (there's no way that he would have remembered me), and coming away awestruck and inspired each time.

I also read his books and papers, and did a PhD with one of his best-known students, and never failed to come away thorough amazed by his vision, his dedication, and his ability to execute on so much of that -- partly through great research, partly through great execution on his own, and partly through inspiring generations of students of all ages and backgrounds.

Indeed, my PhD research was driven by my interest in pushing Papert's vision one step closer to reality. And my work training at companies around the world constantly tries to make things more constructionist, more exploratory, and thus better for my students.

If you haven't yet read Mindstorms, you should. You might think that it's a book about using Logo to teach kids, but it's not. Rather, it's a book about how children think and learn, and about how to encourage them to think and learn.

It's terribly sad that Papert has passed away, but his vision and ideas live on amount countless people who are better thinkers and educators as a result.

<comment><USER9> I'll second the recommendation on "Mindstorms." The book is visionary and just as relevant today as when he wrote it. I teach programming and electronics to kids (just an hour a week) and my teaching is heavily influenced by Mindstorms to this day.

In addition, my own first exposure to computers with with LOGO on an Apple II. Papert changed my life, and the enduring quality of his work will continue to change lives for years to come.

<comment><USER10> Do you have any details of what and how you teach the kids? I am interested in setting something similar up in our neighborhood.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry, at the moment I don't have teaching materials in any presentable form. I tried Arduino-based projects, making parts of a 2D game in Swift+SpriteKit, fooling with Minecraft redstone, and worked through Google's blockly games.

Arduino seemed to be click the best, because it involves a lot of working with your hands (both breadboard and soldering) and you can "see" your creation working in a way that you just don't get with pure-software teaching. At least for the ages I was working with (8-10 y/o) blinking a LED held more joy than putting a 2D sprite into a window.

I thought about publishing a more formal project curriculum, but there's a ton of Arduino project books already on the market, so it didn't seem worth it. Instead I just pitch a couple ideas to the kids, see what they want to do, then we spend several sessions building that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> RIP, Seymour Papert.

Scratch is the spiritual successor to Logo.

As Scratch becomes more and more popular, it has been sad to say that there is a tension between the spirit of Scratch and commercialization. Scratch is all about exploration and making mistakes and experiential learning. However, there is a deluge of companies who are trying to create curriculums for Scratch that fit into the traditional School lesson models (canned, cut and dry).

Here are some of the better alternatives:

Google has developed the CS First program which uses Scratch. The interesting thing about this program is that it tries to scale the problem of teaching CS by making it less necessary for the teacher to know CS.

[https://www.cs-first.com/](https://www.cs-first.com/)

There is also a curriculum guide for Scratch.

[http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/](http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/)

<comment><USER12> When we learned Logo, the teacher was learning right along with us. What a teacher can do, is encourage metacognition, so when a child either gets or not-gets something, they can organize it in their mind.

I like scratch, but it seems so Bubble Gum. Logo on an Apple II had a beautiful austerity to it.

<comment><USER13> Logo doesn't get enough credit. It is more than just a system for turtle graphics, but a real programming language with a lot of similarity to Lisp. Brian Harvey at Berkeley used to be proponent of even using it as an alternative to Lisp for teaching functional programming to undergraduates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult." [0]

Although Papert is most known for Logo, he did not believe learning how to program was specially good in itself.

It is the fact that the computer allows the child to model almost everything (at almost no cost) that allowed that child to develop and fall in love with a topic, the same way he fell in love with gears at a very young age.

In his own words [1]: "It did not occur to me that anyone could possibly take my statement to mean that learning to program would in itself have consequences for how children learn and think. [...] But encouraging programming as an activity meant to be good in itself is far removed, in its nature, from working at identifying ideas that have been disempowered and seeking ways to re-empower them."

[0] Papert - "Mindstorms" in the Foreword: 'The Gears of My Childhood'

[1] Papert - "What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power"

<comment><USER14> From the same Foreword:

"A modern-day Montessori might propose, if convinced by my story, to create a gear set for children. Thus every child might have the experience I had. But to hope for this would be to miss the essence of the story. I fell in love with the gears. This is something that cannot be reduced to purely "cognitive" terms. Something very personal happened, and one cannot assume that it would be repeated for other children in exactly the same form.

My thesis could be summarized as: What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 2016 strikes again. :(

Seymour Papert was "co-creator of Logo" in much the same way that Doug Engelbart was "creator of the mouse". Their ideas were bigger than something you can fit in a headline. Papert believed that computers had a unique potential to help us learn and think. Anyone interested in computers or education should check out his book _Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas_.

<comment><USER16> I want to emphasize the "or" in that last sentence -- everyone should read Mindstorms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For many years, I completely associated Logo with "turtle graphics" \-- like it was a toy for kids to learn programming ideas. I only realized a couple years ago that it's a pretty capable language. The best references I found are a 3-volume set that covers using Logo for symbolic computation, making compilers, a diff tool, etc. PDF/HTML at [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html)

<comment><USER2> Logo is essentially just Lisp without parenthesis. Everything is possible, and it's all self contained and defined in terms of itself!

Leigh Klotz wrote a 6502 assembly language assembler in Logo for Terrapin Logo for the Apple ][ and C64, which you could use to extend Logo do to anything you wanted, like interfacing to hardware.

<comment><USER18> I've been playing with Lhogho - Logo compiler [1]. The creator has done some amazing things with it and other projects too.

I had an OpenGL spinning pyramid up in 10 minutes and an EXE for windows and an executable for Linux too. Pretty cool, but it is not being developed any longer. It runs fine on my Win 10 box and Linux Ubuntu 14 box.

I found it when looking into Logo because I was working with the modeling software NetLogo [2].

[1] [http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/](http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/)

[2] [https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/](https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity." \- I'm glad he continued his work. My most fond memory of when I first saw a computer.. and it was running logo. I was amazed by all those keys! I would definitely not be here today if it were not for this gentleman. I got into trouble in school for throwing away the provided instructions and started to hack that turtle into writing my name the moment I realized I could control it. I never looked back from that day, I was 8 years old. RIP Seymour.

</comment><comment><USER20> My office was next door to Seymour's office at the Media Lab. This was before the motorcycle accident in Vietnam. I was a freshly arrived student from India. His main observation about India was about how the IITs were terrible for the country because they left such a profound debilitating effect on those who did not make it to those schools.

<comment><USER21> Interesting. Greetings from India .

Could you elaborate on his thoughts on that ?

I too sometimes feel like I've missed out on a good education. But I feel it's too late now to change that. :(

<comment><USER22> My guess is that Papert believed that IIT curriculum (or similar) should be taught everywhere, not limited to the few seats in IIT.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure about this. Stanford/Harvard is much more than the curriculum.

<comment><USER24> Based on what you are responding to, it sounds like you are saying those not at said schools should not learn what is in the curriculum.

<comment><USER25> I don't think the comment meant that, rather that a lot of the success of those institutions in educating people comes from having better facilities, better teachers, better community, etc.

<comment><USER26> >better facilities, better teachers, better community

This. I had a few good teachers at university that taught me a lot, this made it painfully apparent how little I was learning in some other classes. I guess it's the same everywhere but I suppose you'd expect that the prestige of the IIT would attract the 'better teachers' of course in practice it probably attracts the more prominent experts which isn't the same thing at all ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology- education](https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education)

Technology In Education The committee examined technological advances in education. OCTOBER 12, 1995

Alan Brown Superintendent Public Schools

Chris Dede Professor George Mason University

Jeffrey Joseph Vice President U.S. Chamber of Commerce->Domestic Policy

Alan Kay Fellow Apple Computer->Learning Concepts

Cheryl Lemke Associate Superintendent Illinois->Board of Education

Edward McCracken President and CEO Silicon Graphics

Deborah McGriff Senior Vice President Edison Project

Robert W. Mendenhall Vice President IBM->K-12 Industry Division

Seymour Papert Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology->Technology

David Shaw Chief Executive Officer Shaw Investment Company

Pat Wright Vice President TCI Educational Technologies

<comment><USER27> This is a long 1995 congress hearing video that I doubt many people have time and patience to sit through. But if you fast forward to the debate between D.E. Shaw and Seymour Papert/Alan Kay, you will find out 20 years later, the hardware progress is almost exactly as Shaw had predicted, on the other hand, we are far from the vision of Seymour Papert and Alan Kay.

<comment><USER28> Do you have an approximate timestamp?

<comment><USER27> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209538)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Python has a "logo inspired" turtle in the standard lib: [https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/turtle.html](https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/turtle.html)

We played with it with my son and it brought back memories from the 80s when the French government made a big push on Logo in the schools.

<comment><USER30> Oh man, you absolutely made my day. I've been teaching my fiancee bits of Python for the past couple days (her first code ever!) and this library made it all make sense. It let her take all the little concepts I taught her, and put them together to make something cool. She just wrote a street with houses on it, generated by a simple for loop!

<comment><USER31> The freely available online book _Think Python_ is a fantastic introduction to both CS and Python and includes a chapter on turtle graphics with some fun exercises.

<comment><USER32> There's a Udacity mini-course with a fun section on Python turtle graphics, too.

[https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ud036/l-1004409226...](https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ud036/l-1004409226/m-1013388828) (UD-036 Programming Foundations with Python, lesson 2A)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A sad day. My first programming experiences were with Logo, before I even realised that was what it was.

In primary school we had a robot turtle attached to a BBC Micro with a long cable which trundled around the floor drawing wonky shapes. At the time it was one of the most amazing things I'd seen - and was probably similar to, if not exactly the same as this: [http://www.classicacorn.freeuk.com/8bit_focus/logo/logo.html](http://www.classicacorn.freeuk.com/8bit_focus/logo/logo.html)

Later, in secondary school, I remember amazing our teacher by getting the Acorn Archimedes we had to produce multicoloured spirograph-like patterns.

Being able to type something - and then the computer actually going and doing it (or not) was both frustrating and fantastic, and left me with a lifelong interest in programming and learning new stuff.

Thank you Seymour.

</comment><comment><USER34> One of my favorite Papert quotes from Mindstorms. I think it summarizes the potential of computers to revolutionize learning by empowering children to be autonomous explorers instead of learner-automatons. I hope one day our education systems will recognize this and flip the system, but it's hard to change culture:

 _IN MOST contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO environment the relationship is reversed: The child, even at preschool ages, is in control: The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think. The experience can be heady: Thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologist, an experience not even shared by most adults._

</comment><comment><USER35> If you haven't read Mindstorms yet and you have any interest at all in how learning, mathematics, and programming are interrelated then please take a moment to go buy it today.

There's little risk that Papert's ideas will fail to last—they are already embedded in so much of how we think about programming—but reading that book helps to emphasize just how far we are away from the ideas he was able to see just by talking with people about how they learn.

Truly, truly inspirational man. I'm sad he's now gone.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm an engineer at Pedago, and work on a product called Smartly ([https://smart.ly](https://smart.ly)).

Although the target audience differs a bit, Papert's work was the philosophical bedrock for the work we're doing. In fact, when the company was founded, it was agreed upon that it'd be best for all employees to read Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas. If you haven't read this book, and you are even the slightest bit interested in education and how we construct mental models, it's definitely worth the read.

I only hope he would have approved of what we've tried to build!

RIP, Seymour Papert.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anecdote: Logo was used in French 80s National "Plan Informatique Pour Tous" [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous) (Computing for all), running on Thomson MO5 terminals distributed in many schools. Kids (6-9yo I believe) would learn to "program" using it. For the younger ones it was mostly about moving that infamous turtle, and that was it. It was still something utterly magical, even though the lightpen bundled with the MO5 was also a big part of it.

<comment><USER38> I remember playing with logo on MO5. The teacher used a TO7. IIRC we managed to get some geometrical figures using loops, like eg a "square-y spiral."

<comment><USER37> Yes, that's what I recall too. Most kids were confused by the relativity of orientation since left when facing down is right ... After that classes were about the word processor and paint program.

Something I wish I could investigate; was the network infrastructure. I don't know if my school was special but there was a bit networked server that could communicate with other schools (we even had online contests). I also remember seeing its screen trashed. Teacher said "there's a virus.".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If you are an ACM member, you can download Papert's classic Mindstorm book here: [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095592&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFI...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095592&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=650941053&CFTOKEN=72086634&preflayout=flat)

(yes, the lego robot gets its name from this book)

</comment><comment><USER40> Just yesterday I finished "Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams" by Resnick who builds heavily upon Papert's work.

Mindstorms is on my backlog.

I have fond recollections about my first contact with Turtles. It didn't shape me or anything like that, but I'd like to take Logo out again and play with it.

Is there a recommended modernish Logo (running on Windows), or should I simply go to Processing?

<comment><USER41> Try UCBLogo ([https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html)) or NetLogo ([https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/](https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/)).

<comment><USER42> I was told in another thread [0] that NetLogo isn't really suitable for "turtle graphics" and is apparently for "actor based modelling". I certainly found the interface overwhelming.

When I last used Logo it was in mswLogo [1].

There's also Lhogho [2], Python's turtle module [3] and FMSLogo [4]

0: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149061)

1: [http://www.softronix.com/logo.html](http://www.softronix.com/logo.html) (not sure if this is the original site)

2: [http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/](http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/)

3: [https://docs.python.org/3.0/library/turtle.html](https://docs.python.org/3.0/library/turtle.html)

4: [http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/](http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> His central tenet could be useful in rebuilding the U.S. education systems more like Finland where it is project based, real-world based.

 _" The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world."_

 _" you cannot think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something"_

</comment><comment><USER44> I grew up in the late 70s and early 80s. I first learned about programming from my father, who worked at DEC during its prime. To this day I deeply appreciate him sharing his love of the field with me from ayoung age. My first computer-related memories are learning to program in BASIC on a kit computer we had in our unfinished basement. I loved learning in a cold basement cellar surrounded by pieces of electronic gear in a makeshit office.

My second earliest memory about computers centers around learning Logo on an Apple II (I believe) in third grade. I remember exactly what Seymour describes: being shown the basics, and then being free to explore by making the turtle do what I wanted it to. I remember sketching designs in a notebook and then asking enough questions about angles and distances to be able to implement my designs.

I think my love of programming comes from an equal mix of people like my father who I could learn from directly, and people like Seymour who created systems that made it possible to learn independently.

</comment><comment><USER45> Of course, Logo was just a means to an end, something that was meant to be one example of many as to how to introduce children to the medium of computing. As is often the case the wider message was lost -- to me this was much like when englebart died and he was called "the inventor of the mouse." Mindstorms is a must read.

</comment><comment><USER46> You can try LOGO in your browser with this Javascript-based interpreter by the inimitable Joshual Bell: [http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/](http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the link.

I wrote a simple LOGO program to honor Seymour Papert.

[https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/760309863608160256](https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/760309863608160256)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire Debate Technology and the Future of Schools

[https://youtu.be/4V-0KfBdWao](https://youtu.be/4V-0KfBdWao)

<comment><USER39> Wow, two of my heroes together! Sure it will be better than Batman Vs Superman...

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Seymour Papert was an inspiring and caring researcher, and he will inspire many generations to come. His work was truly groundbreaking, subtle and profound, and I encourage everyone to read some of his books, notably Mindstorm and Children's Machine

[https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers- Powerfu...](https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful- Ideas/dp/0465046746/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1470065417&sr=8-1&keywords=mindstorm+book+papert)

[https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Machine-Rethinking- School-C...](https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Machine-Rethinking-School- Computer/dp/0465010636)

</comment><comment><USER48> LogoWriter was my entry into programming. I started with the turtle in elementary school, and in early high school my mind was blown when I leaned about the "flip side", where you could use functions and script things.

In grade 7 I used it to make an elaborate multi screen Sierra inspired game that took the better part of the year to make. What I would give to have a copy of it now...

RIP. Thanks for Logo and everything else.

</comment><comment><USER49> Anyone interested in educational technology should read Mindstorms and Powerful Ideas. Papert described how technology should be used in schools and also predicted most issues and trends with education today.

Papert work is also present in most educational/programming toys we see today - Scratch, Kibo [http://kinderlabrobotics.com/kibo/](http://kinderlabrobotics.com/kibo/), LittleBits, LEGO Mindstorms all owe their roots to Paperts ideas.

[http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/](http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/)

<comment><USER50> Absolutely, Mindstorms is one of the best books about learning ever written. Everyone should read it. Buy it now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> You can find some of his work at: [http://www.papert.org/](http://www.papert.org/)

and more background info on him on Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert)

</comment><comment><USER52> New York Times coverage, "Seymour Papert, 88, Dies; Saw Education's Future in Computers":

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour- pape...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour- papert-88-dies-saw-educations-future-in-computers.html)

<comment><USER53> Truly a legend, will be sorely missed

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Logo was the first language that familiarized me with the fundamentals of programming and got me excited about computers back when I was in 4th grade in India, in the late 90s. It's amazing how a person's vision and hard work can have such far-reaching impact. I'm grateful for his life and work. Rest in Peace Seymour Papert.

</comment><comment><USER55> So Long, and Thanks for All the Turtles

</comment><comment><USER56> Wow, RIP - he was a big inspiration to me professionally both in terms of the tech he helped build and in terms of the learning theory of which he was a proponent. (I also work at the intersection of education, learning sciences, and technology).

[0] is a great video from the early days of LOGO, and he's pushing notions of programming for all that felt new and revolutionary in the 2000s.

Mindstorms [1] is a great book if you're interested in his ideas about learning.

0: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0)

1: [https://amzn.com/0465046746](https://amzn.com/0465046746)

</comment><comment><USER57> As a child of the 80s logo was one of the first languages that I learned. Although the relative motion was difficult to understand, and functions seemed to be impossibly hard - they worked eventually. 15 years later when I encountered functional programming for the first time I remember the shock and awe that somebody had the foresight to plantvthose seeds so long in advance.

Later still I became a teacher, and learning about constructivism for the first time I encountered Seymour's published body of work. So mindblowing. The passion and the vision inspired my career.

RIP Seymour, you will be missed, but after what you have given to the world you will never be forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER58> Actually, when you look at any kind of programming, it is:

Turtles, turtles all the way down.

RIP

</comment><comment><USER59> I never had the opportunity to use Logo, but I think it's obvious how much influence Seymour had on our industry and many of our paths. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER60> I very clearly remember using Logo in 1st grade over 30 years ago. Looking back, it was clearly what hooked me to get into CS.

Thanks Dr. Papert!

</comment><comment><USER61> I just installed Scratch and I find it awful but I am not a teenager. When a child realize that to simulate a small movement or scene you need to feed the computer with a lot of parameters he/she get bored. Fractals, like the Julia image, inspire us with deep thinking. What we want is to learn new concepts in such a way that the ratio power/(number of parameters) is very low. The logo idea is not about a turtle or a moving pen, is about the realization that you can draw complex images with a few parameters. I see loops as a form of parameters in a program. Snake moving is boring, we want to drive a drone. Virtual reality is a way of improving the way in which we feed parameters to the machine, another way is the machine learning about the programmer, completion of sentences, suggestions and predictions are a first step. A new logo is needed but one without turtles.

</comment><comment><USER18> I had just started learning NetLogo, which led me to Lhogho, a compiled Logo, and then references to Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms that piqued my interest. I'll have to give it a go seeing as how many people have spoken so highly of this book. Sad news go lose such a thinker.

</comment><comment><USER27> History of the original LOGO turtle (the actual robot):

[http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo- tur...](http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo-turtle- seymour-papert-marvin-minsky-et-al-american/)

<comment><USER50> Turtles are older than that, 1950s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> What an awesome contribution. I had a good chat with an educationalist about Logo and the hardware device that I experienced in the 70's with a pen that we programmed in primary school, we had a super progressive maths heavy headmaster, hey, maybe that explains something...anyway, a comment was that the more modern turtles made the pen inside the device less obvious and that this small change led to a diminished experience as the children did not get to see first hand the final act of creation, instead it came out of a 'magic box' that did something they maybe did not comprehend, these kind of subtle things show that inter-disciplinary work is super important.

</comment><comment><USER63> I did not have a fortune to get to know the LOGO or even SMALLTALK languages. By the time I've heard about it, it is the C++ or even C, and all us "professionals" dismissed this. I've just read up on the LOGO language on the Wiki, and some of its fortes are based on its roots in functional (encouraging recursions over a set) and declarative style. These people were already thinking about many years ahead for me. I would imagine my career would have been more enriched if I have encountered this early on in my life.

</comment><comment><USER64> Perceptrons remains one of my favorite books in many ways. Obviously the single-layer networks Minsky & Papert analyze are very primitive relative to today's deep neural networks, and the actual mathematical content may not be of direct use today. But the arguments were beautiful & insightful, and the exposition clear. For anyone interested in a mathematical understanding of computation in (artificial) neural networks, it's still not a bad place to start.

</comment><comment><USER65> I made an account today, just to comment on this news. Seymour Papert's work on Constructionism really struck a chord with me. I first learned about his work in college, and things like Logo really resonated with me - to point where I have now changed my career path from an engineer to one that is more education focused. I really hope people everywhere, and at least users on this site will learn more about his work and his importance.

</comment><comment><USER66> This is the first time I've heard of Seymour, but it looks like he really tried to increase education around programming and computers, especially with younger kids/teenagers (e.g. Logo in Lego Windstorms, One Laptop Per Child), and for that I'm deeply respectful. Making computers and programming more accessible is really wonderful.

RIP Seymour Papert.

</comment><comment><USER67> He said "the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult." This is very revealing about the actual nature of learning, human and machine, and it's something that the ML community has simply ignored.

</comment><comment><USER68> Sad day.

I think Bret Victor is right in that Seymour Papert's ideas are not useful only in teaching children about computers.

This essay inspired by Mindstorms is a great read [http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/](http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

</comment><comment><USER27> NY Times : [http://nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour- papert-88-d...](http://nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour- papert-88-dies-saw-educations-future-in-computers.html)

</comment><comment><USER69> my first memory of using a computer is Logo where we were asked to do anything. I usually gave very large numbers and got interesting geometric patterns on my screen ...exciting stuff for a 10 year old.

</comment><comment><USER70> As a math teacher with a background in computer science, Papert's work has influenced me tremendously, although I never got the chance to meet him.

His spirit lives on in his books.

</comment><comment><USER27> Seymour Papert Tribute at IDC 2013

[https://tltl.stanford.edu/papert_tribute](https://tltl.stanford.edu/papert_tribute)

</comment><comment><USER71> Learning Logo on a Microbee in 1987 was my first introduction to computers. I remember being immensely excited when I figured out how to draw a circle.

</comment><comment><USER72> RIP. Also check [http://phratch.org](http://phratch.org)

</comment><comment><USER73> This post might be competing for the "Most time spent on the front page" Award, right?

</comment><comment><USER74> Where I met Logo:

1984, Devotion School, Brookline, Massachusetts, Apple computers, Then at home: TI-99/4A.

You?

</comment><comment><USER75> PU WAIT 7200 PD

Thanks for your work, Mr. Papert

</comment><comment><USER76> Announcement on front page of the Logo Foundation: [http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/](http://el.media.mit.edu/logo- foundation/)

<comment><USER77> Thanks, we updated the link from [https://twitter.com/LogoFoundation/status/760057041687830528](https://twitter.com/LogoFoundation/status/760057041687830528).

<comment><USER78> Better but not great because the new link is not specific to this story. This is a better link

[http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in- memory/papert](http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-memory/papert)

It was submitted but incorrectly marked as a dupe

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204756)

<comment><USER79> Thanks very much. We've changed to that from [http://el.media.mit.edu/logo- foundation/](http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Black bar, please.

<comment><USER27> Definitely.

<comment><USER2> Thank you!

<comment><USER27> I didn't do it. Just noticed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> He came to my high school to teach for the academic year when I was 16

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Laboratory_High_Sch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Laboratory_High_School_\(Urbana,_Illinois\))

He was a very, very warm person that clearly loved children. I remember him juggling oranges (or balls?).

I wanted to work with Papert and implemented LOGO with graphics on the university's computers when I was 16 using an instruction manual from Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Tech). I still remember showing it to him.</comment>


Apple CMY display design could be boon for print production - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/apple-cmyk-display-design-could-be-boon-for-print-production.ars

<comment><USER2> Here's hoping Apple is also working on a quality full color e-ink display.</comment>


In Japan, the business of watching whales is far larger than hunting them - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-whaling-whalewatching/in-japan-the-business-of-watching-whales-is-far-larger-than-hunting-them-idUSKCN1U402J <comment><USER2> I would have expected some financial statistics to back up the title.</comment>


High Readability for your Terminal.app - <AUTHOR> http://tempe.st/2009/01/giovannistyle-high-readability-for-your-terminalapp/

<comment><USER2> Not very impressive. I'll take the "Pro" theme with size 13 font any day over this.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I'll have to try it with Consolas to see the difference, but the default "Homebrew" theme is pretty good for me as well.

<comment><USER4> Don't care for Consolas but the blue/yellow color scheme is acceptable with Monaco.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just installed it and found it way too harsh on my eyes. I have no eyesight problems so a background with a harsh contrast like that does more bad than good.

I've settled on Novel theme (black on creme background; which is similar to HN background) and I find it the best when my eyes are tired. I also use Panic Sans font. I've tried all kinds of fonts (including Consolas) and Panic Sans is absolutely the best one I've tried. Definitely give Panic Sans a try: [http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/in_love_with_a_fo...](http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/in_love_with_a_font.html)

Download: <http://rapidshare.com/files/187757062/Panic_Sans.dfont.zip>

</comment><comment><USER6> As I'm not at a Mac at the moment, could someone post a screenshot of this terminal style?

<comment><USER7> Screenshot, with Consolas replaced by Inconsolata: <http://baldessin.fr/2009/giovanistyle-20090122-154740.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there anyway to make HN more readable? I seriously find the contrast between the Headline and points/submitter line to be very difficult, especially once the page has been visited.

Am I the only one who finds the readability to be poor?

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know why people are putting this sort of work on GitHub instead of dotfiles. GitHub takes a while to load, and there are two wasted clicks here (the file in question, then "Raw"). At the very least he could have linked directly to the raw file.

I keep my Vim stuff on FreeHg, but that's because we're talking about possibly hundreds of files when you consider the color schemes, doc files, plugins, etc. More importantly, it's awesome to be able to quickly pull in all of my vim stuff onto any machine with Hg and I needed this setup to easily sync between work, the server, and home.

<comment><USER10> Because the dotfiles homepage says "Latest files uploaded" and lists dates that are three years old. If it's not dead, it's apparently working to give that impression.

<comment><USER9> You're looking at dotfiles.com, but I was referring to dotfiles.org.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No self-respecting terminal user should suffer with Terminal.app--xterm supports more colors and more features. Even iTerm is a better alternative.

<comment><USER12> Terminal.app isn't so bad once you install TerminalColours and MouseTerm (disclaimer: I wrote MouseTerm). xterm can be difficult to configure, it doesn't do tabs, and copying and pasting follow X11 rules in it. I prefer native applications wherever possible.

iTerm on the other hand is slow and bug-ridden. The last thing I want when using a terminal is for it to render choppily and crash on me.

<comment><USER11> Terminal.app still only supports 8* colors. And GNU screen is a more-than- capable replacement for tabs.

I'll have to try out MouseTerm later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Terminal.app is better than the terminal in 10.4 but it still _feels_ slow. Booting X11.app and using xterm or rxvt is so much faster, in every little command there's a slight wait in Terminal.app, while it's instant in rxvt or mrxvt. Here's my .Xdefaults file for getting good colors in xterm and rxvt

<http://pastie.org/368122>

</comment><comment><USER14> I have a strange problem on Leopard that I didn't have on Tiger where I lose all my ctrl+ commands. I can't ctrl+l to clear the screen, I can't ctrl+a to go to the beginning of the line, etc.

I use iTerm normally but have confirmed this problem with Terminal.app also. Has anybody else run into this? Very frustrating.

<comment><USER2> Mine works just fine. What do you use as your terminal settings? (terminal preferences -> advanced -> declare terminal as)

Mine's set to xterm-color, and all the bindings work just fine.

<comment><USER11> Terminal.app doesn't behave exactly the same as an xterm, so using "xterm- color" is not ideal. I would suggest "dtterm" or "Apple_Terminal" if it's available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm using the IR_Black style which can be found here: <http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/6>

</comment><comment><USER16> will this work in OSX 10.4?</comment>


Ask HN: how to generate recommendations on the fly? - <AUTHOR>

I really want to dive into this world (of generating recommendations), and I wonder if some people would be willing to share practical advice. I have seen some theoretical algorithms, but they seem unlikely to perform well with classical databases. Also, the books usually don't mention how to handle incremental growth of the data set. Suppose I use a standard k-means clustering algorithm, it seems unreasonable to shift thousands of nodes around just because of one new entry (and with a classical db, that would be a lot of writes).
I almost suspect there is no way around creating custom solutions - like attempting to keep useful parts of the data in memory. For inserting new entries, I suppose the existing nodes could be updated by and by. I hope that at least some of the algorithms react benign to being twisted (for example in k-means there is a lot of variability in how to define distance and attraction).
Does a graph database like neo4J even help much? Are databases like CouchDB usable? <comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition>

[http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation- system-i...](http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-system-in- ruby/)

Should get you started.

</comment><comment><USER3> Directed edge has a few links on their website: <http://www.directededge.com/tech.html>

Also take a look at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_prize>

<comment><AUTHOR> I know Directed Edge and I think their approach is very impressive. I could not start down the same road of writing my own db at the moment, though. Hoping for some middle road for starting out.</comment></comment>


Web UI Docker Management - <AUTHOR> http://shipyard-project.com

<comment><USER2> It's a great idea but it's a bit buggy still :(, have not been able to run it smooth yet.</comment>


Google Stadia will support "a variety of business models" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/harrison-google-stadia-can-support-a-variety-of-business-models/ <comment><USER2> main business model: rent seeking</comment>


Bitcasa has taken in $2.5M revenue and has more than $6.2M in outstanding debt - <AUTHOR> https://pdf.yt/d/VQWNyGS06OzqqN-k

<comment><USER2> I find it sad when, a tech company becomes about debt and lawsuits rather than about putting out great products and technology that will make things better; it's the shadow side of not being a hiflying company.</comment>