Show HN: A community for Swedish Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.swedishstartupspace.com/

<comment><USER3> I'm in currently in Sweden and I get a 502 bad gateway... so I can't comment on the site, but out of curiosity, if this is targeted at the Swedish entrepreneur, why call it 'Swedish' anything rather than Svensk/Sverige which would be the first phrase typed in by a Swedish person on Google (one would assume)?

I know some people speak English in Sweden (you can even hear people modelling their accents on a British or American variety), but not everyone. I know that English is a requirement of Swedish universities but if the American way of doing things taught me anything, its a lot of very capable people don't go to university. It just seems to me like an unnecessary barrier, you might be missing out on input from the next Ingvar Kamprad.

<comment><USER4> > I know that English is a requirement of Swedish universities

Sure, to enter you need to meet certain requirements. But according to at least policy (if not law) all lectures for at least the bachelor level must be available in Swedish (if there is consensus among the students the lecturer may switch to English). Course materials is a different matter however, few if any books on advanced topics are translated into Swedish.

> if the American way of doing things taught me anything, its a lot of very > capable people don't go to university.

Sure, but most capable American drop-outs that I know of dropped out at earliest in high school (in fact, finishing upper-secondary school is mandatory for Swedish children, by law). At that point a Swedish student will have studied English for at least six years and should be more than capable to write and read English. Add the enormous cultural influence from America to that.

Now, I agree with your point regarding the name. Perhaps a Swedish noun with an English sub-title would be better, "Raket: Monitoring the Swedish Start-up Scene". But I think the main reason it is in English is to cater to an international audience and possibly to be more accessible for expats living in Sweden (from what little personal experience I have, most of them don't even feel the need to learn Swedish due to the level of English spoken by the common man). Perhaps even foreign investors, who knows...

<comment><USER3> You would think 6 years is enough to learn English but in my day-to-day experience in Sweden (anecdotal) there are a fair amount of Swedes who speak a little to no English, especially in rural areas (and rural areas in Sweden are cheap, beautiful and fibred to the gills, so I have to assume there are some worthwhile start ups out there).

It certainly is an interesting state of affairs when you don't need to learn Swedish in Swedish cities (personally I feel guilty). At this rate I wonder if there will be a Swedish language at all in 100 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Swedish HN should also be mentioned: [http://hackernytt.se](http://hackernytt.se)

</comment><comment><USER6> Offtopic, but.. I have a great interest in Swedish startups, due to situation in my family.

[http://karma-engineering.com/lab](http://karma-engineering.com/lab) is what I'm capable of.

It is all about working visa, of course.

<comment><USER7> Your site is down so I can't comment on that.

Sweden has reasonably liberal laws when it comes to working visas. You need to get a job offer with a salary that isn't below the market rate in Sweden. If you can get that then your chances are very good. If you're interested to learn more about the Sweden's startup community I suggest come by the next Startup Pub at The Royal Institute of Technology: [https://www.facebook.com/groups/426048174127676](https://www.facebook.com/groups/426048174127676)

<comment><USER6> _You need to get a job offer with a salary that isn 't below the market rate in Sweden._ \- That is exactly the thing I'm looking for.)

As for my site, it is hosted on Linode, so now and again connections are timed out.)

<comment><USER8> What he is saying is, if you get a job offer with a salary above the market rate in Sweden then you almost automatically get a visa otherwise you won't have a chance. Yes salary is the most important part of getting a work visa in Sweden.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. IANAL but as far as I know there are no quotas or educational requirements. Just as long you get a fair salary (which has to be approved by a trade union) then you're good to go. Edit: why the down vote? I am honestly curious what I did wrong.

<comment><USER6> A set of documents must be supplied to the immigration authorities, which consists of a guarantee of a job offer from a registered enterprise and detailed financial information. Education and age aren't concerned in this case. It is important when one applies to student visa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Site seems to be inaccessible due to the HN effect. Text version from Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:swedish...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:swedishstartupspace.com&num=50&safe=off&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER10> I expected a more nordic look :) Like bluish, lots of white, simplistic layout with green accents :) And why not host the Swedish community on .se domain?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point! We've been working with a few design ideas and I'm sure over time it will become more 'scandinavian feeling'. In terms of the domain - <USER2> we are trying to also promote Sweden to the world, we thought it more logical to use .com - we do have .se however. Great feedback though!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry guys, the site actually crashed due to a non-HN related issue just after posting :S

We just updated the design and would love some feedback on it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I like it and I am also Swedish. I will be moving back to Sweden in a number of years (Stockholm). I look forward to the meet the startup community :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Site is down :(</comment>


In Screening for Suicide Risk, Facebook Takes on Tricky Public Health Role - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/technology/facebook-suicide-screening-algorithm.html <comment><USER2> I've been hospitalized twice on a suicide watch. I've also had supposedly "well meaning" strangers call the cops on me when I was homeless to "check on me."

The cops advised me I shouldn't be walking in the bike lane that everyone walked in because there was no sidewalk on that side of the road. Having advised me of this, had they stopped me again, they would have ticketed me. I then had to routinely expend extra energy to go out of my way going "home" every single day.

No, the cops absolutely weren't going to help me solve any of my actual problems. No, they absolutely didn't care about me, no.

Calling the cops on a stranger because you supposedly care about their welfare is asshole behavior. I don't care at all about your supposed justification or algorithms etc.

If you care, you check on them yourself or maybe call an ambulance. If you don't know them well enough to do that without it going weird and shitty places, then mind your own damn business.

<comment><USER3> In mostly places there's no difference between calling police or an ambulance. Everything is handled out of the same dispatch center, and the dispatcher will send whichever first responders they think are appropriate based on policy.

<comment><USER4> Former EMT. If you called in that you had suicidal ideation and had the means to harm yourself, it would be treated like a hostage situation, where you are both the hostage and the captor--especially if you have a weapon like a knife or gun.

I can see few situations where they would send only an ambulance. The closest is if you said you simply overdosed on pills. However, at this point you need to go to the hospital. The ambulance has no ability to force you if you change your mind. Police would likely be sent along to make sure you didn't change your mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This. Isn't. Facebook's. Job.

No, seriously. Facebook should host content and serve ads. That's it.

They don't need to worry about being the arbiter of truthful news.

They don't need to stop "hate".

They don't need to make calls about who needs a psych eval.

They just need to host content. But if they truly want to do this, what happens when someone sues them for not making the call?

I made the new year's resolution to delete my account yesterday. I almost chickened out, but then this article comes up.

<comment><USER5> I mentioned in a previous HN thread that there likely wasn't a line Facebook could cross that might make me delete my account. I'm not there yet, but I'm willing to admit before that I was wrong. If I posted on Facebook, I would leave the platform here and now.

I've had two friends who went to take advantage of university counseling services for anxiety and depression that they wanted help with, only to be committed to a local hospital involuntarily for saying the wrong thing until their families intervened to have them discharged. The episode would have merely been stressful for them, but they were each restricted from returning to their classes until the next semester. Neither of them were at any level of risk for suicide or self-harm, but the universities they went to naturally were obligated to err on the side of caution.

Such events are relatively rare, but keep many students who are suffering from mental illness from taking the risk of using available resources.

I'd honestly hate to be committed because I was a little too sarcastic in a Facebook comment, and much like public universities I fear Facebook is incentivized to make the least risky call.

<comment><USER6> In the US, state laws strictly regulate who can and cannot be involuntarily committed to psych wards. Staff at the university really can't be any more "strict" or "harsh" than staff at any other councelling center.

In recent decades, psych-laws have become more strict because as a society we have decided that it is better to involuntarily detain 20 people for a few days rather than let one person end their life. That seems like a pretty fair tradeoff to me, although one that reasonable people could easily disagree on. If you disagree, you should be lobbying your state psychological association, not complaining about random therapists at colleges.

<comment><USER7> States often allow psychological holds and extensions.

There's little to no evidence required to keep someone for days or weeks under "observation". Some states setup entirely separate court systems without due process, since commitment is a "civil matter".

Some amount of blame falls with states allowing this type of behavior.

The burden is on psychologists to demonstrate the practices work and hospitals are properly equipped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _The officer who took the call quickly located the woman, but she denied having suicidal thoughts, the police report said. Even so, the officer believed she might harm herself and told the woman that she must go to a hospital — either voluntarily or in police custody._

It's an imperfect predictor and Facebook will make a mistake which will eventually be followed by a police shooting. After all, how many stories have been published of police called for mental health issues that resulted in the shooting of the person the caller was worried about.

I hope the programmers are ready to explain how it worked because I get the feeling the family's attorney is going to have an easy time with black boxes, machine learning, and no true tracing of why.

<comment><USER9> Regardless of the reasons for the call, can you really pursue damages from someone who made a good faith call to emergency services?

The only legal issue I could see is violation of privacy, but I bet their EULA covers them there.

Now, if they screw up bad enough, I could see it precipitating some new legislation that they might not like. Until then, I think they're in the clear.

It's another one of those situations where everyone is incentivized to "do something" whether it's actually helpful or not. "Student dies after symptoms of suicidal depression went ignored" is a splashy headline. "Student unable to graduate after involuntary psychiatric detention" is not.

<comment><USER8> _Regardless of the reasons for the call, can you really pursue damages from someone who made a good faith call to emergency services?_

Yes, you can try to sue for anything. Also, yes, because the lawyer will try to show it was not "good faith" but a failure of software that caused the tragedy. I'm sure the discovery stage will yield enough to make it painful for Facebook. The current feelings about Facebook are going to come up.

A EULA will not protect you from the families of dead people.

<comment><USER9> > Yes, you can try to sue for anything.

Point taken.

> the lawyer will try to show it was not "good faith" but a failure of > software

AFAIK, the phone calls are being placed by Facebook employees, not software. Presumably, these employees have to look at the actual post content to even be able to make a coherent phone call. You would have to argue either that the employee was incompetent, or that the employee was coerced into making an inappropriate call.

<comment><USER8> What's the chance that the employees are licensed social workers or psychologists? Also, the software used in the initial data mining is going to come up. I expect discovery is going to be really painful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The political power afforded to those who get to make calls about the psychological state of individuals is almost endless. I fully expect social media giants to use their data to classify the mental state of their users for political and social ends. For an idea of the potential for abuse read here.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union)

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of high-school when a buddy was goofing off in class, taking an online quiz which accompanied a news article about suicide and depression. The quiz asked "Are you depressed?".

A few of us were following what he was doing, and at the end of the quiz he got the result effectively saying seek immediate professional help. Shocked, he exclaimed "What?! I'm having the time of my life!"

Turns out there's an overlap between certain symptoms of depression and being madly in love... and he just got a new GF a week earlier.

<comment><USER12> > Turns out there's an overlap between certain symptoms of depression and > being madly in love

Such as? I'm having a hard time coming up with any.

<comment><USER13> Two that come to mind are trouble sleeping and lack of concentration, plus maybe social withdrawal (at least from most friendships). But still, seems like a stretch; most depression symptoms are pretty unambiguously negative.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. I'm a doctor and I've never heard a similar description of symptoms from a depressed individual and an individual in love.

My guess is the wording in the quiz was poor.

<comment><USER11> I can't recall the details, but it were things like lack of appetite, lack of sleep, unfocused or lack of attention.

I recall the that the questions made sense given the goal of the quiz, but the questions were probably too broad and, which was kinda my point, they lacked control questions to rule out other causes for those effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else think this is Super Creepy? Not long a go I would have expected to find this article from Onion News.

So now platform that arguably actively participates in making people depressed has launched an human assisted AI to report people to authorities. How Orwellian is that.

<comment><USER15> No, I do not think that a company reporting suicide attempts or messages that appear to indicate an immediate desire for suicide is creepy. This is not just a thing Facebook does, either.

This is not "Orwellian". And the keyword in the claim about Facebook making people depressed is "arguable".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a black man in America, I really don't want Facebook sending police to my home for any reason whatsoever.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps you feel a bit depressed sir? Don't worry, help is on its way [http://oi64.tinypic.com/97nokm.jpg](http://oi64.tinypic.com/97nokm.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is the ask here for Facebook not to do anything to intervene?

Times was giving Facebook crap that Facebook Live promoted/publicized suicides, so doesn't quite compute that their attempt to do something about it is also bad.

<comment><USER19> > Times was giving Facebook crap that Facebook Live promoted/publicized > suicides, so doesn't quite compute that their attempt to do something about > it is also bad.

If Facebook's algorithms were promoting suicide-related posts, then doing something about it might be good, but it does not follow that they should also take an active role in suicide prevention.

You are creating a false dichotomy, both things can be bad at the same time. E.g.: being a thief is bad, being a vigilante is also bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Mason Marks ... argues that Facebook's suicide risk scoring software, along > with its calls to the police that may lead to mandatory psychiatric > evaluations, constitutes the practice of medicine. He says government > agencies should regulate the program, requiring Facebook to produce safety > and effectiveness evidence.

Safety/effectiveness studies certainly seem like a good idea, though I'd be really hesitant to prohibit Facebook from doing this, at least not from worry about false positives (the privacy implications are a different issue).

Facebook is just the first in a line of common-sense checks: a Facebook algorithm detects that someone seems to be suicidal, this escalates to a Facebook employee who reviews it and in extreme cases escalates to law enforcement, law enforcement gets the information from Facebook and decides how to respond, and may end up pulling in psychiatric medical help, which of course involves trained people making judgement calls.

Facebook's role is to escalate, not to intervene, and even that escalation process is done by a human. It seems very unlikely that it would ever result in a situation where someone gets involuntarily hospitalized because some machine learning algorithm had a bug.

<comment><USER20> Law enforcement would be forced to act if Facebook informed them.

They would like to cover their asses in case something bad happens.

If they didn't act, they would be susceptible to lawsuits.

<comment><USER13> That's fair, I guess in my ideal world, law enforcement would just act on the factual information rather than being biased by the fact that a Facebook person reported it as a concern. But as evidenced by things like swatting, police are certainly not the best at responding to reports in a calm and unbiased way. I guess my hope is that law enforcement can learn to appropriately interpret and respond to these reports (including deeming that it's actually not a concern), but maybe that's unrealistic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Taking people by implicit threat of force because they've been marked by some global surveillance system is bad.

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh. my.

Please do not play with people's lives based on an algorithm whose classification output we have no way of explaining.

</comment><comment><USER23> Besides the obvious question of 'does it work' I see a myriad of other problems with this. Does Facebook have the internal procedures in place to prevent abuse? Will this data ultimately be used to advertise things like anti-depressants at people? I already get ads for "mindfulness apps" and other BS cures (I dont doubt the principle technique as such, but these things are pretty useless and just techies cashing in on a fad IMHO).

<comment><USER24> Slightly off-topic, but mindfulness approaches have been shown to improve depression and are an important part of CBT/DBT used by therapists everywhere

<comment><USER25> I don't want to improve depression, I want to get rid of it! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This story illustrates why _New York Times_ has fixated on aggressive negative coverage of Facebook. Suicide prevention is another area where Facebook is wiping the floor with newspapers. As an information channel, newspapers can't compete in over most of the landscape. The article includes the head of a premier suicide prevention program, John Draper, praising Facebook's initiative.

Data collection may be bad, but suicide prevention is a beneficial byproduct. Data collection may be bad, but the _New York Times_ won't be accused of leading by example. The article is packaged to ping Google, Amazon, and yes Facebook among it's 32 scripts. It's unlikely any of this there to serve a higher common interest than suicide prevention.

The examples in the coverage show how far Facebook outclasses the _New York Times_.

      Facebook said its suicide risk scoring system worked
      worldwide in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic

Facebook is working on something relevant to suicide prevention in Mozambique, Algeria, Dominican Republic, and Australia. Beyond it's role in US public policy, the _New York Times_ will always be approximately irrelevant to people in these places.

It's reporting is parochial. Interviewing two experts in New York, four police forces on the east coast and Ohio. To me as a non-absolutist, judgment about the initiative's tradeoffs ought to consider stories from Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, and Canada. Those people don't enter the parochial conversation at the _New York Times._

Preventing suicides is the kind of difference journalism is supposed to make in people's lives. The _New York Times_ is driven of "weapons of mass destruction" reporting on Facebook's suicide prevention initiative because it is so completely outclassed as an instrument for journalistic impact on the lives of individuals.

</comment><comment><USER27> Facebook the company and platform need to be broken up and the pieces/parts isolated from each other. For all the benefits that people see in using it, Facebook has become the most dangerous online company in the world.

<comment><USER28> As far as I remember, for every features of Facebook, like private messages, sharing pictures and status, etc, there is at least one alternative, and people are free to move to several competitors. There is no technical reason to force the Facebook company to change their products, but they might have an obligation to educate people about the usages of its website.

You need strong proof to claim "Facebook has become the most dangerous online company". Recently, Facebook groups were used to organize the yellow vests movement in France. For non-techies, Facebook does provide a new way to communicate.

You could always argue "oh yeah, but it already existed 15 years ago with X", but Facebook made it available to the masses.

The security/social concerns happening recently create new opportunities for Facebook's competition, so I wouldn't be that alarmed.

Google, on the other hand...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Facebook's rise as a global arbiter of mental distress puts the social network in a tricky position at a time when it is under investigation for privacy lapses by regulators in the United States, Canada and the European Union — as well as facing heightened scrutiny for failing to respond quickly to election interference and ethnic hatred campaigns on its site."

<comment><USER29> The New York Times must be the global arbiter of who is the global arbiter of mental distress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So should we applaud Facebooking for doing this or not?

<comment><USER3> We'll applaud and curse Facebook simultaneously. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "You haven't logged onto Facebook in over a month. We were concerned so we sent over an over an officer for a welfare check"

</comment><comment><USER32> "Earlier that day, a local woman wrote a Facebook post saying she was walking home and intended to kill herself when she got there, according to a police report on the case. Facebook called to warn the Police Department about the suicide threat."

Amazing this is considered bad by the commenters here.

<comment><USER2> So, you've never said something like "Oh, just shoot me!" in exasperation without actually being suicidal? You don't see how something like that could be wildly misinterpreted in written form, without context, without voice tone, etc?

It's easy to feel like what you say online doesn't really count. People feel that way all the time and that fact often causes problems. Usually, though, those problems don't involve someone calling the cops on you "for your own good." At most, you get banned from some forum.

<comment><USER32> > without context

They do have context given how much of a person's internet life they can "see". While you can argue that is bad, if they have enough signal a person is likely to do harm and the person says something like that, it seems like it's a net positive for Facebook to alert someone to help the person out.

<comment><USER2> I do a helluva lot of commenting online via twitter, various forums and a bunch of blogs. Over the years, I've gotten much more careful about the things I say online on specific topics because people routinely imagine they know me better than they do based on having read my writing for so many years.

So my experience really doesn't fit with what you are saying at all. My experience is that what people say online is the tip of the iceberg of their life and the world imagines it has greater context than it really has and leaps to weird and inaccurate conclusions on a pretty regular basis.

Trying to figure out how to express myself so I feel like I'm actually understood takes an inordinate amount of my time. I have reason to believe most other people don't spend anywhere near as much time and effort as I do on trying to sort that out.

Most of the time, most people don't seem to get as wildly and horrifically misunderstood as I seem to so often end up being. Or if they are misunderstood, it isn't that big of a deal in many cases.

But I remain aghast at the idea of someone calling the cops on me because of something I have said online that people imagine they understood that was not a "threat" against anyone but me.

On top of being skeptical that Facebook understands you as well as you imagine they do, I am also pro right to die.

In a nutshell, if people give a damn about my sorry ass, they could choose to do something meaningful in the here and now to help me make my life work instead of being part of the problem, making my life harder than it already is and then pretending to themselves they are Good People by calling the god- damned cops on me for leaving a fucking courtesy note somewhere online if I decide to finally check the fuck out of here.

Note to self: Don't bother to leave a courtesy note online informing anyone of fuck all. They really don't deserve such courtesies. Geez.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems like there's a vendetta against Facebook here. The term "mixed results" is used why? Everything they're doing is completely voluntary. NYT somehow managed to paint Facebook alerting the police about a possible suicide attempt as something negative, just because the police already helped the person. Or about them being too late to report it, again, this isn't Facebook's fault.

You can argue on the term "mixed result", but I think it's reasonable to assume they're indicating that non-success is a negative result, even when Facebook is going entirely above and beyond here to begin with, so there really isn't any "negative result" to be had.

Do people dislike big tech companies so much that reporting immediately concerning messages and suicide attempts to the police must be a bad thing?

This is common practice anyway. If you write that you're about to kill yourself on Reddit and a moderator notices it, I sure hope the police are contacted. Nothing I see to criticize here at all.</comment>


Can the world produce enough cobalt for electric vehicles? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2018/12/01/can-the-world-produce-enough-cobalt-for-electric-vehicles <comment><AUTHOR> [http://archive.is/gC9c5](http://archive.is/gC9c5)</comment>


An Improved Job Scheduling Algorithm for Hadoop - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03004

<comment><USER2> The definite article "the" in the title might give the wrong impression. As far as I can determine, this is merely a proposal and has not actually been implemented, much less adopted by Hadoop.

Also, the abstract says: "Results show that it has a significant improvement in execution efficiency and stability of job scheduling." but no results are actually mentioned in the paper.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. We edited the title to address that.

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket Hadoop needs a major 'weight-loss' exercise for its million LOC codebase rather than adding sophisticated algos

</comment><comment><USER4> It also seems to be one of those papers that uses machine learning because it's the topical thing to do.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the biggest technical challenge in your industry? - <AUTHOR> Which technical challenge or problem is holding your industry back? <comment><USER2> Quality</comment>


How to make $1M #investment #education - <AUTHOR> https://vestu.com/articles/how_to_make_1m/

<comment><AUTHOR> VestU.com is a investment education startup. We are focused on providing clear, unbiased investment education for individual investors. The curriculum is based on 45 years of institutional investing for endowments and foundations. We are in private beta with our Kickstarter backers and are now posting some articles public on the site.</comment>


Visualizing Tone in Chat with IBM Watson and a Blink(1) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jkaufman.io/ambient-sentiment/ <comment><USER2> You should use better examples. Just parsing text that says "I'm so sad", or "I'm happy!" isn't noteworthy.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, Watson's sentiment detection is not capable of anything noteworthy.

<comment><USER4> what would be a better sentiment analysis tool?

<comment><USER5> Metamind's sentiment analysis tool[1] is probably about the best you can get, especially for short text. Try the "Tweet" version (a tab on that page or available separately[2]).

Sentiment on short text is pretty hard. Metamind claims 81.73%[3], although that appears to be for general text (not just Tweets). Anything above ~70% accuracy would be competitive with the state of the art on Twitter data[4].

[1] [https://www.metamind.io/classifiers/155](https://www.metamind.io/classifiers/155)

[2] [https://www.metamind.io/language/twitter](https://www.metamind.io/language/twitter)

[3] [https://www.metamind.io/classifiers/155/stats](https://www.metamind.io/classifiers/155/stats)

[4] [http://www.lrec- conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/483_Paper....](http://www.lrec- conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/483_Paper.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


42-inch yacht still hoping to become the smallest boat to cross the Atlantic - <AUTHOR> http://www.yachtingworld.com/extraordinary-boats/undaunted-the-42-inch-yacht-still-hoping-to-become-the-smallest-boat-ever-to-cross-the-atlantic-107559 <comment><USER2> Hope he makes it but doesn't sound like it will be very fun.

I enjoyed watching a documentary ( "Maidentrip" [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2555268](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2555268) ) about a young girl that sailed around the world just for fun. She did it in an older boat with limited electronics on board and had fun and made frequent stops just to visit other cultures.

Contrasted with another young girl ( "Wildeyes" [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1939787/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1939787/) ) that did it for a record's sake, on a modern boat, with multiple sponsors, packed with electronics (all of which failed) and ultimately capsized in the Indian ocean.

And another good one was "Deep Water" ( [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460766/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460766/) ) where a man tried to win an "around the world" yacht race (for a business venture) but ultimately went insane and jumped overboard.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, probably not very fun. My dad is currently crossing the Atlantic in a boat that's about 42 feet, not inches. Just got an email from the Azores (he's going from Florida to Portugal) and said he's changing his route due to force 8-9 winds and 6-10 meter waves.

<comment><USER4> No fun, and likely life threatening. With a max speed of about 2 1/2 knots with a clean hull, the little boat isn't fast enough to sail out of the way of heavy weather.

Once in a big storm, I can't even imagine the beating one would take inside that tiny craft, sliding down the face of a monster wave, crashing into the trough at the bottom, getting rolled. But perhaps his hull and rig design isn't subject to the same broaching and capsizing forces as a larger monohull...

I'm curious to read more about the design of the boat, his equipment, procedures and planning. Though it's best not to judge from a mere photo, there were several things visible in the images of the craft and video of his attempted departure that seemed counter to good seamanship.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, a boat that short has no speed whatsoever. And being exposed to the elements for that long. No shelter from wind and rain. Sleeping like that. But if he makes it, good for him. Holy shit.

<comment><USER5> Uh, he has shelter from wind and rain. There's a waterproof hatch into the interior. Did I misunderstand you?

<comment> ezequiel-garzon Somebody has to be outside the hatch in a storm, to try to keep the boat from tipping over.

<comment><USER6> "With a balance point about 16in above the keel and a 5ft draught he has a stability profile most designers would kill for."

That boat's not tipping over.

<comment><USER7> until big jumps between waves deform the light hull and the seals start leaking

<comment><USER8> Its a non-moored mooring buoy... if anything can survive, that design will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Undaunted has a laden weight of 1800 pounds [1].

The largest ship, the Pioneering Spirit, displaces 932,000 tonnes [2].

The Pioneering Spirit is over a million times larger than the Undaunted.

I have been unable to determine how their nutella reserves compare.

[1] [https://littleboatproject.org/specs/](https://littleboatproject.org/specs/)

[2] [https://www.deltamarin.com/references/pioneering-spirit- piet...](https://www.deltamarin.com/references/pioneering-spirit-pieter- schelte-pipelay-vessel/)

<comment><USER10> I am always annoyed when information about interesting engineering projects is cluttered with overly complicated (but beautiful) imperial units. It's a guarantee to make an article look shallow and trivialised.

Here's a very simple example why Metric is better:

Length: 1m Draught: 1.5 cubic meters Density of salt water is a bit over 1.0

How heavy can the Undaughted get untill it sinks? Easy to answer in metric, since 1.5 cubic meters equal to 1500 kg of water.

Looking at the weight: 544kg unladen, or 816kg laden, means it is about half as dense overall as it's draught in water.

Everybody can do that calculation while reading the article in a second, and these conversions get second nature soon. Impossible with imperial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Provisions are stowed under Kent's feet. "I have enough food – half freeze- > dried – for six months at 1,500 calories a day. I have intentionally put on > 20 extra pounds for the trip as well.

> "My diet consists of nuts, dried fruit, protein powder, nutrition bars, a > variety of soups, stews, pasta, peanut butter, Nutella and so on. I have a > huge variety as well as 64,000 extra calories in the form of two gallons of > olive oil to add to my food.

> "None of my food needs cooking but I do have a 12V/120W heat coil wand to > heat water for dinner or tea or coffee, if I can afford the power. With a > two-minute boil time I should be able to use it often. All of this fits in > the bilge and down the keel."

I wondered how he did food. And how he has pasta that doesn't need cooked but lasts six months.

<comment><USER12> Lots of dried foods like ramen, beans, mashed potatoes, etc will hydrate without hot water. It takes more time, but works well. These no-cook setups are used by many long trail thru-hikers that choose not to bother with stoves and fuel.

<comment><USER13> I actually hiked with a person who "cooked" or rehydrated meals by putting the ingredients in a sealed plastic bag and then putting that in his underwear. Seriously.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps a clever, yet obviously comedic, idea. But which foods will cook at a warm temperature that wont at a cold?

<comment><USER15> There is no cooking involved in those cases, just rehydration. It just happens faster at higher temperatures. And it's less unpleasant than eating ice-cold.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I should have used prepare in place of cook, as cooking requires heat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I first thought, oh cool project; an autonomous drone boat must be pretty hard to build and manage. Probably a final for school or a robotics group.

...Nope. The kid is actually trying to pilot it himself. 48" boat. Honestly, wonder which challenge is harder. I know which one I'd prefer.

<comment><USER17> He's 33, hardly a "kid"

<comment><USER18> My pet peeve. In graduate school we had professors, lecturers, working professionals etc constantly calling us students "kids" even though we were all 25+ yrs old. I believe this is a pretty American thing to always be infantilizing people.

<comment><USER19> Yes, like calling grown women "girl", or calling partners "babe"/"bae". In German this would sound very, very off.

<comment><USER20> Not really. Calling your girlfriend 'Baby' or refering to a girls-night-out as 'Mädelsabend' are perfectly common for example.

I agree though that I never heard a professor refer to his students in this way and would definitively find it strange if that happened.

<comment><USER19> "Baby" does not count because it's not German, and it can be traced back directly to imported pop culture (Movies). You are right about "Mädels", it's not exactly the same as "girl" though (rather girly) - you would never say "Mädchenabend", that's cringy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Its keel has an emergency water tank slung off the bottom -- clever. Keeps the center of gravity low as possible.

Good thing he has experience with meditation and living along, it's going to be a miserable trip. If a storm rolls through he might be holed up in the tiny cabin for days.

</comment><comment><USER22> Slightly OT - For anyone who doesn't know what modern sailing looks like here are a couple of promo clips from the teams racing the Americas Cup in the coming months.

The boats fly rather than sail these days. They're an amazing leap in design.

[http://www.yachtingworld.com/americas- cup/107565-107565](http://www.yachtingworld.com/americas-cup/107565-107565)

[https://www.landrover.co.uk/experience- landrover/sponsorship...](https://www.landrover.co.uk/experience- landrover/sponsorship/gallery/bar2016-hero-gallery.html/295-354160)

<comment><USER23> Describing the Americas Cup yachts as "modern sailing" is akin to describing F1 as "modern motoring" or the Cray Titan as "modern computing".

They're amazing feats of engineering, but not really representative of current usage.

<comment><USER24> There are a few consumer grade foiling catamarans, but yea, you won't see much foiling on your average day out on the water.

<comment><USER25> Yet. Given obvious upsides this technology will soon become much more common. Imho of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This 'yacht' is as wide as it is long and deeper under water than it is long. It also, if I understand things correctly, drags its emergency water tank along, and has 'saddle bags' that also are outside that 42 by 42 inch square.

I think they should measure these ships by underwater volume at time of departure.

Otherwise, the next 'yacht' will be a foot long and wide but 20 feet high, most of it underwater, and some brave/suicidal soul will volunteer to 'sail' it.

<comment><USER17> And what would be wrong with that? The goal is to have the shortest length of boat, a common measurement in boating. Obviously to achieve that you have to be clever with the attributes of the boat not under restriction. I'm sure no one would complain if you went for the "lowest underwater volume at time of departure" record, but I don't see how it's relevant here.

<comment><USER27> A submarine shouldn't really count

<comment><USER28> I wonder if there is there a record for smallest submarine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This reminds me of the crossing that two Finnish lads made in 1970 using Marino Mustang, a 4.3 m plastic motorboat, from Dakar to Guyana.

The remarkable thing is that they did not have nearly enough petrol for the trip -- they left off and when they ran out, they signaled passing larger ships to beg for more. They had a small amateurish sail which was useless.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtEQGPBMI64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtEQGPBMI64)

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:48...](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:4878972/imo:0/mmsi:367771120/vessel:UNDAUNTED/_:1c67c02fbb0a9b45126eb1cafec415db)

</comment><comment><USER31> I see, he's not at all concerned about losing his mind spending four grueling months in a 42" x 42" area.

<comment><USER32> He has a swimming harness so he can get out and stretch his legs once in a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I know it's the original headline but this kind thing irks me. The creator of the boat is hoping to cross the Atlantic. The _boat_ is a thing and doesn't have hopes.

Pretty cool project, though.

<comment><USER34> It's a common way to talk about ships and their crews like that. The boat is the whole.

<comment><USER33> I have never seen it when there was only one person on the boat.

<comment><USER35> And I've never seen a 42 inch boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Web site for the project itself: [https://littleboatproject.org](https://littleboatproject.org)

</comment><comment><USER37> On a side note. We were one of the first boats to visit the new marina in La Gomera. It's fantastic diving and the water is the coolest blue you will ever sea. On land. The island is very rustic and undeveloped. They have a project wind farm that uses gravity storage to power the entire island. It's not the easiest island to get to but it is worth the trip.

<comment><USER38> Damn I need to visit La Gomera one time, I spent 2 months on Tenerife, but didn't visit it even once. I am going there to do some cycling next time.

<comment><USER39> It's generally marketed for walking, as far as I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This sounds awesome

> Undaunted is a terrible boat, but he is a great storm shelter. A sailing > capsule ready for the worst and also able to do the easy part, sailing in a > straight line.

So basically it's about surviving indefinitely while drifting in the right direction. Why does anyone do this voluntarily.

> Kent says he is unconcerned about the psychological challenge of living in > such a small space for four months.

> "I have spent weeks alone in the Guatemalan Highlands, and lived alone in > the woods for years. I have never been so alone or for so long, but few > have.

Ah.

<comment><USER41> > Undaunted is a terrible boat, but he is a great storm shelter

Anyone know is there an intentional reason to use "he" for the boat here? Normally sailing vessels are female in English and this was jarring to me, but it looks intended.

<comment><USER40> Yeah I also noticed that. No idea why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 42 inch = 1.07 m

</comment><comment><USER42> Fairly irrelevant but I've only ever heard boats referred to in feminine terms and he called his yacht a "he". Is this more common than I've been led to believe?

<comment><USER43> Some languages (German, I believe) refer to boats as male.

<comment><USER44> Not really. The noun "ship" is neuter (das Schiff), and most boats are referred to in female form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can a nautical someone explain why the crossing is estimated to take 3–4 months? I thought a crossing from the Canaries to the Caribbean was just a few weeks under good downwind sail.

<comment><USER46> Hull speed (maximum speed for a non-planing aka "displacement" hull) is proportional to the square root of the length of the hull. The article says he has a "hull speed of just 2.5 knots". Most (well, all) crossings are done on much longer boats.

<comment><USER47> Wikipedia on Hull Speed [1] is very interesting:

> Though the term "hull speed" seems to suggest that it is some sort of "speed > limit" for a boat, in fact drag for a displacement hull increases smoothly > and at an increasing rate with speed as hull speed is approached and > exceeded, often with no noticeable inflection at hull speed.

Which makes it sound like Hull Speed is not very relevant to look at, but later it also says:

> This very sharp rise in resistance at around a speed-length ratio of 1.3 to > 1.5 [where hull speed is reach] probably seemed insurmountable in early > sailing ships and so became an apparent barrier. This leads to the concept > of 'hull speed'.

The page on Wave-Makign Resistance is related [2]. So it sounds like hull speed is not a hard limit (and is surpassed easily in powered boats or in specific boat designs like racing kayaks) but would be a reasonable upper bound for how fast this particular yatch could go even though nothing truly specific changes right at hull speed. Can anyone elaborate?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave- making_resistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-making_resistance)

<comment><USER46> It's a useful rule of thumb in terms of "where you'll stop accelerating with the wind on a normal boat", not absolute hard limit. You can play with length to start planing earlier which is the source of many a fun design (e.g. [1]). Some boats don't have a hull [2].

There's many other variables (weight, beam, etc.), here's a fun one: we once rented a 25 footer mostly because it was incredibly cheap (something like 150 EUR for a week). It was surprisingly slow for its size, even in fairly involved wind where we needed engine help to tack it had trouble breaking past 5-6 knots, to the amusement of not-much-larger yachts that overtook us like a German traveling salesman on the Autobahn. I took a dive under to see what was up with the hull and was faced with a scene not too different from the rocky bottom of the sea: barnacles, algae, some of them trailing foot long appendices...

The OP "yacht" is very strange to me as it looks like the guy put a keel and a sail on a buoy. The sailing dynamics appear to involve pitching forward instead of heeling (leaning sideways). I'm amazed he can do as much as 2.4 knots.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CbJS_ZHs6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CbJS_ZHs6g) (Formula windsurfing)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ie5C1-b3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ie5C1-b3w) (Mirabaud LX: foiler, without hull)

<comment><USER48> > The OP "yacht" is very strange to me as it looks like the guy put a keel and > a sail on a buoy.

The photos on this [1] page make me think of a keel welded to a sandblasting cabinet...

[1] [https://carrie-soltis.squarespace.com/specs](https://carrie- soltis.squarespace.com/specs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm curious about these claims:

> He just bobs up and down. With a balance point about 16in above the keel and > a 5ft draught he has a stability profile most designers would kill for. > ndaunted is a terrible boat, but he is a great storm shelter. A sailing > capsule ready for the worst and also able to do the easy part, sailing in a > straight line.

How true is this? If it is, wouldn't the same hull profile be beneficial for lifeboats?

<comment><USER19> I assume that this would make life boats too heavy since they would need a very heavy keel. They often don't even have a keel IIRC, which makes them easier to handle and store.

<comment><USER50> Right. And if the keel was anything like Undaunted's, there'd be a major risk of it being damaged if the lifeboat ever had to be launched by dropping it into the water (rather than lowering it gently).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Having great grandparents from Nantucket who's 7 family members died at sea while working as crab fishermen, it's seems reasonable this is a publicity stunt or he has absolutely no respect for how violent and unforgiving is the ocean.

<comment><USER52> He's a professional sailor. He knows what he's doing.

<comment><USER51> So were many the hundreds of thousands of sailors whom have died at sea. The ocean doesn't care about experience or arrogance when a storm comes up and drowns this guy, or the great deal of money and risk to rescuers this clown imposes should he manage to somehow not die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It has squared off corners in the front... I know nothing about boats, but couldn't he have have reduced drag a bit by at least rounding off the front corners or cutting them off at a 45 degree angle -- I'm not suggesting tapering the entire front, but just rounding off 6 - 12" from the edges seems like it would help? This would reduce the interior space a bit but gaining even 1% better speed on a 90 day journey seems quite significant.

The only similarly shaped hulls I can think of are barges, but they are towed by 1000 horsepower tugboats.

<comment><USER32> Not sure why I was down voted, is it well known that the common tapered hull shape is not any more efficient and faster than a squared off hull?

I didn't see any details in the article or website about the design other than that it was designed to pitch rather than roll, and tapering the front seems like it would just add to this effect.

I wish the downvoter had just said "Dumb question, everyone knows that hull shape doesn't matter on a small boat" or "He covered this exact question on his website" or given some indication why they felt this was not an appropriate question

<comment><USER53> I think I can help you out here.

> _" I know nothing about boats, but...I...suggest...rounding off 6 - 12" from > the edges."_

That man is a professional sailor, and you know nothing about boats. I think that people don't like when a person who knows nothing decides that they know better.

> _Not sure why I was down voted_... _I wish the downvoter had_...

Please don't do this. HN comment guidelines ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ) say "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Here is a small boat project that is done by a veteran, Sven Yrvind, its a 5.76 x 1 meter boat he will sail around the world, its not his first time in a small boat in the big seas either, read more here:

[http://www.yrvind.com/present_project/](http://www.yrvind.com/present_project/)

</comment><comment><USER55> But why call it a yacht? While technically correct, it does not seem to embody the spirit of the word.

<comment><USER56> Because it's a British magazine.

In the British usage of the word, a sailboat is a dinghy if it's open-top, and yacht if it has an enclosed cabin. He can close his hatch creating a sealed interior, so it's a yacht. (We very rarely use 'sailboat' alone, as Americans do.)

In the US usage, the term 'yacht' seems to be mired in classism and elitism. A boat is french's mustard, and a yacht is grey poupon. There's no simple definition to tell you when a vessel is one or the other.

Quite bizarre - given that America traditionally imagines herself as classless, you'd almost expect these two to be reversed.

<comment><USER57> > given that America traditionally imagines herself as classless, you'd almost > expect these two to be reversed.

In my view more that americans of all classes view themselves in some way as part of an unified 'rebellious'/'underdog' class.. so most anything that sticks out as having any pretence is 'elitist'.. nevermind that this attitude itself has it's own flavor of pretense to false-humility.. but I digress..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> ...

Standing on the ocean side

We can hear the waves

Calling us out with tide

To sail into our fate

Oden! Guide our ships

... (c) Amon Amarth

<comment><USER59> A ship approaches off the starboard bow

The time has come to fight, the time to strike is now

Reload the cannons, and sharpen up your swords

They will regret the day they faced the pirate horde

Who will survive no-one can tell

Come on, lets give 'em hell

... (c) Alestorm

<comment><USER60> Alas! The Marquesas!

Shun the beckoning land!

Choose the open sea instead

To whatever end!

Took down to wondrous depths

Sullen we did go

Where shapes of unwarped primal

Gliding to and fro

... (c) Ahab

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> "Quit playing with your dinghy!"[1]

[1] Tommy Boy - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=vfLGKYsrCe4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=vfLGKYsrCe4)

</comment><comment><USER62> Any more videos?

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

</comment><comment><USER63> How is he planning to go to the bathroom though?

<comment><USER64> I mean, he's in the middle of an ocean.. Just lean overboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Is that smaller hatch connected to anything when open? Looking at the pictures it's just waiting to be lost somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER66> Where's the head on this boat?

</comment><comment><USER67> Spinal Tap Atlantic tour?

</comment><comment><USER68> Now do it during Atlantic hurricane season.

</comment><comment><USER69> Taxpayers spend millions saving drug users in hospitals for their stupid decisions.

<comment><USER70> And strangely, a lot of people think we should both do that for free (at everyone else's expense) and that we should legalize the drugs that put them there.

I admit I am still a bit torn on the former. I do consider addiction to be a medical condition, and drug users in need of treatment. The question is where personal responsibility should factor in. At some point, if you do drugs, there was a good chance you were dumb enough to start doing them.

<comment><USER71> Legalization would help with the problem.

Let's make an analogy with alcohol. When alcohol isn't illegal, there is a quality supply of it. When you buy a bottle of 40% whisky, you're not getting something that might be 25% methanol due to some criminal doing an improper job with the distilling, because he only cares about money, wiping out his competitors, and evading the cops, with your health being at the bottom of his priorities.

(Which is not to say, of course, that legal alcohol eliminates the public health problem of alcoholism.)

<comment><USER70> You are assuming the problem is "bad drugs" rather than the problem just being the drugs.

<comment><USER72> Bad drugs are a huge problem, that kills many, many people. Fentanyl, anyone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> what is the point

<comment><USER74> This got downvoted, but IMO it's a legitimate question. Just because it's possible to attempt something, doesn't mean that it should be done or that it's a good idea.

Does anyone have any better answer than "to set a record", or "just because"?

I do give the guy props for taking it seriously. Given the constraints he has imposed on himself he seems very well prepared. But, together with the parent poster, I just can't see the point.

<comment><USER75> Why do people climb mountains? Why do people swim? Why do people build things? Why do people bother getting up in the morning? What's the point in living?

I feel bad for putting it that way, especially if someone younger reads it, because this can lead to developing a cynical world view that isn't necessarily valid. I'm not trying to give you an existential crisis or something, but go down the (thought) avenue completely if you're taking a trip to that destination, don't just stop in the middle of the road. People do things because they enjoy them or simply want to; life is hopefully enjoyable for most, and then sadly but inevitably we all die one day.

<comment><USER76> I'm often not sure why people bother getting up in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> these people sometimes bother me because when they got lost or trapped, taxpayers then spend millions to save them.

<comment><USER78> It's interesting because I live in a country where being rescued is free as a rule[1]. And I find it nice: I know that if shit happens in the mountains, the helicopter will come, no need to be rich to hike or sail. And I'm happy to be paying other people's rescue when they are in need. A couple friend of mine had to call a rescue team when their rope got tangled when repealing down a cliff, no need to feel bad.

[1]doesn't apply to ski resorts

<comment><USER79> Which country is that? Does this rule apply to tourists as well?

<comment><USER78> France, and yes.

<comment><USER80> France, like much of Europe, is well covered by towns and cities. So there is often not a great distance for emergency services to cover which means the cost of mounting a rescue will not be excessive.

As a counter point, Australia is sparsely populated. Apart from the coastal cities it is often hundreds of kilometers between towns or road houses. So the cost of mounting a land rescue can get into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Also there is a lot of ocean area for which Australia is the closest landmass. There have been numerous ocean rescues mounted from Australia for sailors competing in round the world races or record attempts, some of them soloists:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/11/world/australia-rescues- sa...](http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/11/world/australia-rescues-sailors-but- is-wincing-at-the-costs.html)

[http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/family-cannot-afford- to-p...](http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/family-cannot-afford-to-pay-back- teen-sailor-abby-sunderlands-rescue-costs-mother/news- story/471328db658e163b099684c848997591?sv=85861ad0308b920c053a5d5be0123e29)

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-19/south-african-men- resc...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-19/south-african-men-rescued-from- stricken-jedi-1-yacht-off-wa/8367580)

[http://www.news.com.au/national/sailors-snapped-leg- forces-1...](http://www.news.com.au/national/sailors-snapped-leg- forces-1m-rescue/news-story/1f21d0aec9f973d179969178a629d5d1)

These rescues have cost hundreds to millions of dollars each and generally have been paid for by Australian tax payers as noted in some of the articles.

So yes it is nice that you will be rescued. But these people all put themselves in a dangerous position for their own entertainment/ego and needed rescue at great expense to others. The millions that were spent for some of the rescues needed to be diverted from services/programs that would have benefited the taxpayers.

The geographic and population distribution differences between countries means that some countries will end up with a larger bill than others for mounting such rescues.

For this guy trying to prove something by sailing the smallest boat, if he can't take out "rescue" insurance, he should not go. Alternatively, he could also arrange for a support vessel to follow close by in case he needs assistance.

<comment><USER78> we're talking north Atlantic here, not southern oceans, there will be a lot of people around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I love reading about those sailing across the Pacific or Atlantic in tiny boats but this guy is going to instantly regret it when he hits a 20 foot swell.

Say hello to Poseidon for me!

</comment><comment><USER82> >He set off from La Gomera in the Canary Islands on 6 April, but returned after concerns about his boat's seaworthiness.

Don't you mean attempted?

<comment><USER83> He did actually set off.

<comment><USER82> The original title of the submission said he was breaking the record.</comment></comment></comment>


Unity 5 Feature Preview [video] - <AUTHOR> http://unity3d.com/5 <comment><USER2> Before I choose to build using a new feature, I'd love to see a clean breakdown of which features "cost" more (performance) on devices. For instance, does "real time global illumination" kill the framerate on iPhone4?

If there's already a checklist like this somewhere, please share with the community, as I'm sure there are many other Unity3D devs here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every once in a while I'll get it in my head to make a 3D game, rather than a 2D one. But I don't want to spend the time building any assets - not only am I bad at that, but I also don't know if my idea is good until people try it and give me feedback... which requires a working prototype.

What I'm looking for is a game engine (asset library?) that lets me build my town by placing buildings, and dropping in my main character - and then I can just run around the town, opening doors and talking to people. Tons of tons of game have dialogue, medieval fighting, assassinations, kill moves - I don't want to have to spend time making any of that. I want to test my game ideas and see if they are fun. I want to write the parts that are unique to my game, the story and the decisions you make. Then, later, I can go back and iterate on assets.

Both game engines now have Asset stores, but I'm not sure the level designer is to the point where I can quickly iterate over my ideas.

<comment><USER4> There are (at least) three levels of development in a game: engine, gameplay, and content. Depending where you draw those lines, Unity gives you the engine and you provide the gameplay and content. It sounds like you're interested in just working on content, in which case there are tons of games that let you do more or less what you describe through modding (eg Skyrim).

<comment><USER5> It's not for FPS's (although it's been used for that), but Starcraft 2 has really impressive modding features. I've been third person action games, arcade shooters, 2D platformers, and tower defense titles. There's even a popular soccer game where each player is a unit from Starcraft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Glad to hear they're continuing to work on the 2D editor and 2D physics. Unless I'm missing something, getting 2D platformer floor and wall collisions working properly is still a pain right now. (Sudden, discrete changes in velocity + physics colliders + tiles = wonky behavior.)

<comment><USER7> As someone who has implemented an semi-extensive set of interactive demos in the new 2D editor and toolkit, I have to say that it arrived half-baked. I'm really looking forward to the upcoming updates, but doing anything like a real game in the toolkit is next to impossible currently. Pathfinding is a specific weak point I ran into on another 2D project. The main A* implementation for Unity handled the native 2D toolkit very poorly when I last used it, and the built-in Unity toolkit didn't work with it at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> personally i am most excited about the html5 export they announced recently

<comment><USER9> Same. The conversion funnel on getting someone to download an app is ridiculous compared to web, nothing better than just click.. you're in.

That and Firebox (HTML based VR metaverse, so you can change server and download new content just by walking through a doorway) have me pretty excited about 3D at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some work has got to go into the MonoDevelop environment. I had many problems with javascript autocomplete...

<comment><USER11> Don't use javascript. Seriously. Use C#.

<comment><USER12> I agree, C# is a much better programming language than JavaScript. Well worth the time to learn, even if you already know JavaScript.

The version of JavaScript that Unity has is actually just a thin veneer around the Mono runtime, so it's not quite the same language or environment you use in the browser or node.js.

However, there are some good reasons for using JavaScript in Unity: using existing libraries and developing new libraries that run in browsers, mobile devices, node.js, Unity3D and other JavaScript VMs, so you can have one code base that runs across all those platforms.

There some problems and impedance mis-matches to solve, to make running existing JavaScript code in Unity3D more seamlessly possible and even convenient. And that's exactly what Browserify does for web browsers!

[http://browserify.org/](http://browserify.org/)

There is a great tool called Browserify that solves the problem of running npm modules written for node.js in the browser, resolving dependencies, inserting shims to implement standard asynchonous node.js APIs in terms of the existing Unity3D apis, and packaging everything together in one file that can be downloaded and run in a web browser.

Browserify for Unity3D could be called Unityify.

For example of how it would be useful, I'm rewriting Micropolis (based on the original SimCity Classic code from Maxis) in JavaScript, and I'd like to be able to easily drop the JavaScript simulator engine code into Unity3D, and implement a nice 3D or 2D user interface in C# or whatever useful modules I can find on the Unity Asset Store.

I think "Unityify" would be a useful tool that lots of people could use, since the argument for running the same JavaScript code in both web browsers and node.js servers and desktop apps also extends to running it in Unity3D.

Ideally it would be able to just pass the JavaScript libraries through with minimal wrappers, when building Unity3D projects for deployment in browsers with WebGL.

Is anyone else interested in such a tool, or even working on it already, or interested in collaborating?

<comment><USER13> Huh, that's a good idea!

I wonder if it would be possible to integrate a Mono-compiled version of Javascript (e.g., IronJavascript) into Unity?

Some cursory Googling produced these interesting posts on integrating IronScheme[0] and IronPython[1] with Unity.

[0]: [http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/76266-Facilities-for- script...](http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/76266-Facilities-for-script- languages-Scheme-in-particular) [1]: [http://techartsurvival.blogspot.com/2013/12/embedding- ironpy...](http://techartsurvival.blogspot.com/2013/12/embedding-ironpython- in-unity-tech-art.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any news on Mono version update? May be these AOT bugs that make Linq unusable will be fixed at least, or compiler won't crash at guessing generic parameters that often?

<comment><USER15> Nope, it certainly won't be in Unity 5. And the most they're willing to say is that they're working on solutions. It's been what, four or five years now?

That's why I'm now using Unreal Engine 4. If you're comfortable with C++, I'd recommend it, though it's still more or less in beta at the moment.

<comment><USER16> I'm looking into UE4 for my next game, too, and Mono is one of the reasons why - there seems to be a focus on big picture features at the expense of the day to day quality improvements.

For instance, my game builds are ridiculously large, because you can't store your textures in a losslessly compressed format (you can load from URL a png manually, but then you have to manually apply them to your models).

Unity has been so successful because it's been an "OK" tool in a land of rubbish. It seems as though it's finally getting some strong competition at a comparable price point, which is great for everyone.

Either Unity will step its game up (which I'd love, I don't want to switch tools), or it'll enter a long, slow period of decline.

<comment><USER11> Unity 4.3+ lets you choose "png" format as part of the native 2d support. No more 16/24/32 bit uncompressed as the only lossless formats.

I'm not sure if the new "png" format would work for 3d textures though- there might be some other weirdness there (like maybe you can't turn on mipmaps or something) since it's supposed to be used for 2d sprites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love that they even mentioned the simple interstitial API call! I wonder if they want to grow more revenue that way in the immediate future.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does Unity have its equivalent (however immature) of Apache Flex?

</comment><comment><USER19> cryengine and UDK have far lower monthly subscription plan, and superior graphics and performance. I love unity but it just seems very expensive just to be able to port to iOS and Android on top of the unity pro plan. Maybe if they included iOS and Android in the $75/month (which is still much higher than UDK and Cryengine have announced) and lowered it further, it could stay competitive.

<comment><USER20> barrier for entry into Unity is still unmatched.

C#/Javascript vs C++/Lua

Lua is easier than C++ but is still, I don't know, quirky, to me.

<comment><USER13> Unity's "Javascript" is, AFAIK, more aptly named "UnityScript".[0]

[0]: [http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=UnityScript_versus_J...](http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=UnityScript_versus_JavaScript)

<comment><USER12> Good point. Please see my comment about "Unityify"! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613488)

Since I haven't written much "UnityScript" code myself, I'd appreciate your comments about whether you think it's possible (or worth the effort) for a tool like Browserify/Unityify to translate JavaScript code so it runs in Unity3D, or for programmers to write portable modules in a dialect of JavaScript that will run in both.

Maybe Unity3D themselves could help, by fixing problems with UnityScript that make it hard to run standard JavaScript, and providing hooks in their compiler pipeline that enable passing JavaScript libraries through with minimal modification when you're targeting the web browser and WebGL.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A game of tag that's been going for 20+ years - <AUTHOR> https://kottke.org/18/03/a-game-of-tag-thats-been-going-for-20-years <comment><USER2> Kinda reminds of the game of "football" played in 17776: [https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football](https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football)

<comment><USER3> That page loads and the text all grows until it fills the whole screen and freezes the tab. Whats that about?

<comment><USER4> It shouldn't be freezing the tab: the words expand until the screen is black and then some interactive media comes up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Now we are grown men, we don't run like Usain Bolt, so subterfuge and collusion have become our weapons. Eleven months of the year are spent planning. Collaborating with a friend is where the fun is — we can spend hours discussing approaches._

I love that, and unrelated to tag it brings to mind my experience or multiplayer games. When I was a a late teen I was terrifyingly good at shooters, my reflexes were very quick and I got into a some that was hard to beat. As I got older that reflexive edge, while not gone, isn't a match for today's teens. What I have however is a kind sense of game flow, likely patterns of behavior, and how maps work. I've become old and sneakh and mean in other words. Where I sort of brute-forced wins before, now I finesse them.

Getting older isn't all fun, but the ability to be conniving with more experience is a real pleasure. Strategy takes the place of force, and it can often be more effective.

<comment><USER6> As the saying goes, "old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill." (I tried to find a citation, but the googles were less than helpful.)

<comment><USER7> duckduckgo the way to flow? [https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/david_mamet_478663](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/david_mamet_478663)

David Mamet's your person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/apr/20/played-...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/apr/20/played- tag-23-years-experience) is an article by one of the actual players detailing some of the workings of the game.

<comment><USER9> That is literally the same article posted by OP (though the end here has a couple extra paragraphs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of the "football" games in 17776 [https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football](https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football)

<comment><USER11> Is it just me, or does the font-size of the main body of the article enlarge automatically, quickly, and slightly terrifyingly, until the screen is some very long story on a black background seemingly completely unrelated to football? I may be missing the point.

Edit: OK, I scrolled far, and further. Oh wow.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I thought he mistyped something and was trying to put 1776.

Sidenote: This website design is pretty good at conveying uneasiness.

Edit: Alright, this is a great story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The WSJ article about this was discussed in 2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5165809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5165809).

olalonde gets a point for predicting the movie.

<comment><USER14> In that same thread, _this_ was mentioned: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5173655](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5173655)

What was that game?

<comment><USER15> Here I am 26 hours later and I've JUST finished that.

If anyone likes sci-fi they will enjoy this - don't let the football bit put you off if you aren't into sports.

THIS is what the web is for. Unique stuff designed for and in the medium. Fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Similar scenario that me and my family had with some of our friends and their children. The parents of my friends had bought an annoying toy for the children of my friends - a duck that sang an annoying tune. At a New Year's Eve party at their house our friend gave the duck to one of our children. I promptly hid it behind the TV. A few months later they found it. As they are friends we only see once or twice a year, there followed a few years of hiding it with each other when we got together for holidays etc. For example I hid it in their car one camping trip, they left it on our doorstep after they had visited one time.

<comment><USER17> This reminds me of the short story "The Monkey" by S. King. They had less fun in that story though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately, it looks like they really Hollywooded the shit out of the story.

<comment><USER19> Good cast though. Perhaps it's just the trailer that's cut to make it look like formulaic crap.

<comment><USER20> Can you really expect more than a formulaic move with a premise like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just lost the game

<comment><USER22> Ha, I was telling my wife about this article and read her this comment, knowing that she would get it. Right on cue, she replied, "ugh, me too."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not a game of "tag", but I told a stupid joke to a friend on a family vacation and variations of it have been going back and forth between us regularly for 49 years now.

It's actually in poor taste these days, so I won't post it, but we were 14 years old and thought it funny as can be!

</comment><comment><USER24> I saw the trailer for the movie before A Quiet Place. It looks well produced but still garbage.

<comment><USER25> I just despise the genre of white collar/white people culture quirkiness. So bland and confusing.

Quiet Place was okay but basically a dinosaur movie in a big field.</comment></comment>


California to make effective phone and laptop disk encryption illegal in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/05-06/bill/asm/ab_1651-1700/ab_1681_bill_20060922_chaptered.html <comment><USER2> The bill I assume OP meant to post.

[http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/15-16/bill/asm/ab_1651-1700/ab...](http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/15-16/bill/asm/ab_1651-1700/ab_1681_bill_20160120_introduced.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Where does it say anything about encryption?

</comment><comment><USER4> this is a bill from 2006?

Bad link!

<comment><USER5> Yes. The submitter looked up the right bill number but the wrong session. couchdive has the correct link.</comment></comment>


Array Programming with NumPy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2649-2 <comment><USER3> Don't underestimate the impact this has on getting funding or even just tenure/etc recognition for working on numpy. I'm in industry these days, but coming from the academic side, it's _really_ hard to get recognized for building the underlying infrastructure that tons of people use. I've built and maintained libraries that are used in a ton of publications, but was always told my work was "utterly and completely useless". It was also always unpublishable, as methods are never publishable in my field. Numpy has (obviously) vastly more respect and impact than my work, but the general problem remains.

Articles like this are a _huge_ deal for that reason. It's an immense delayed recognition for over a decade of work from a lot of folks.

<comment> throwaway-wroc props to your work and similar to numpy, i assume it has been immensely useful for loads of people.

but 'building the underlying infrastructure that tons of people use' is not science. in my department we had to fail a phd student because 90% of his work was just implementing bunch of existing methods as a python library. useful, yes; science, no. wasn't his fault, had a shitty supervisor, but making useful tools is not the same as undertaking scientific research.

<comment><USER4> That's quite the wrong way of approaching science. The scientific method is based on building on the shoulders of giants. Those giants aren't the professors in the direct vicinity nor are they only the papers you cite. The whole of the process is science and if we need further specialization for building better tools (hey, maths and statistics are scientific tools as well) I would classify that as science to a large extent.

What could be useful is openness in used tools and software and a way of getting citation counts for software used. It's nothing more than a table. That way the hotness of publication could start to flow for the underlying tools.

<comment> throwaway-wroc > The scientific method is based on building on the shoulders of giants. > The > whole of the process is science

no. scientific research is proposing a useful model of an observable phenomenon. this is what you train for during a phd, at least in natural/life sciences: you learn how to test a hypothesis, not an easy skill.

refactoring code or transforming bunch of C++ into a python library is useful, but it's not science.

> What could be useful is openness in used tools and software and a way of > getting citation counts for software used. It's nothing more than a table. > That way the hotness of publication could start to flow for the underlying > tools.

agreed 100%

<comment><USER5> Maybe we should take all this "not science" software away from the scientists and see how much science they can do without it.

If you write code that allows science to be done that couldn't be done otherwise then that is science. As a high profile example, a large amount of specialist software was developed for the LHC to allow it to process all the events coming from the detectors.

It sounds like the refactoring here was not really that useful in the first place.

<comment> throwaway-wroc yes, in 2020 you mostly cannot do science without software, electricity, desks and chairs and buildings, printers, pick your own irreplaceable tool. yet building these things to enable research is emphatically not itself scientific research.

doing a phd -> training to be a scientist.

<comment><USER5> Printers? Desks? Take your strawmen somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like there's a new citation for NumPy in town.

"Citing packages in the SciPy ecosystem" lists the existing citations for SciPy, NumPy, scikits, and other -Py things: [https://www.scipy.org/citing.html](https://www.scipy.org/citing.html) ( source: [https://github.com/scipy/scipy.org/blob/master/www/citing.rs...](https://github.com/scipy/scipy.org/blob/master/www/citing.rst) )

A better way to cite requisite software might involve referencing a [https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication](https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication) record in JSON-LD, RDFa, or Microdata; for example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489651)

But there's as of yet no way to publish JSON-LD, RDFa, or Microdata Linked Data from LaTeX with _Computer Modern_.

</comment><comment><USER7> As someone who cut his teeth on bioinformatics before eventually just completing a full computer science degree, I was a bit worried that this article wouldn't address the applied scientific audience well. Pleasantly surprised, though, at how well this article evangelizes NumPy to that exact community.

Many labs are gaining access to or creating physical tools that create data analysis over experimental design problems. Biologists transitioning from running gels to detect the existence of a gene to running sequencing or flow cytometry to segment populations, for example. I remember seeing I think an RNA-seq experiment that tracked the full lineage of hematopoietic (blood) stem cells by a professor - my jaw was on the floor at the level of insight.

One remaining step is transitioning many bioinformatics courses from applied tooling to general program design and open-sourcing. I've noticed a few labs have done that really well for years, but it is not often found as a field- level skillset.

<comment><USER8> The coolest thing I read last year was about single cell rna-seq trajectory analysis of the differentiation for different blood cells.

<comment><USER9> You might like the mass cytometry reconstruction of the human haematopoietic system [1]. I've done a bit of scRNA-seq and mass cytometry, and the issue I have with scRNA-seq is the tiny dynamic range it has compared to flow/mass cytometry, which can make identifying populations much harder. Not to mention the cost!

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3273988/figure/...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3273988/figure/F2/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's not forget to give at least some credit to Perl Data Langauge (PDL). It pioneered a lot of these ideas 10 years before NumPy existed, and is still a pretty great tool today:

[http://pdl.perl.org/index.php?page=FirstSteps](http://pdl.perl.org/index.php?page=FirstSteps)

<comment><USER11> Er... array programming and statistical programming languages pre-date both by decades.

APL from 1966, I believe, is the key lang for array programming.

And statistical languages like S from 1976 come to mind: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_\(programming_language\))

At a quick glance, it seems PDL is just a variation on S.

<comment><USER12> R ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_\(programming_language\)) ) is kind of the successof of S. In certain communities (not only statistics, but for instance also biogenetics), there is quite some concurrency between R and (scientific) Python for data science.

For my understanding, the numpy syntax most closely resembles what would be possible in matlab. And matlab again seems to have roots from Fortran. Thanks to that, young folks nowadays can switch so easily between Fortran and Numpy, the syntax and call structures can easily be made to almost fit to each other.

<comment><USER13> > there is quite some concurrency

i think you meant "competition" here :)

(in polish, my native language, it's "konkurencja", but it's a _" false friend of the translator"_; i'm guessing you're in a similar boat)

<comment><USER14> Similar false friends in Dutch: Concurrentie

<comment><USER15> Or French : concurrence :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For some reason this struck me as inappropriate for the outlet. It's a nice piece as an introduction to array programming with numpy, but seemed out of place to me.

<comment><USER17> I think this is great. Nature is really a way for scientists to score points, not a publication that you read cover to cover that needs stylistic consistency. Right now the academic citation-count scoring mechanism doesn't give enough incentive for people to work on the important infrastructure pieces like Numpy. So this is a good step towards putting scientific priorities in the right place.

<comment><USER16> I definitely think things like the infrastructure don't get enough credit. I also mean no criticism of numpy. But is Numpy per se _conceptually_ that innovative, from a computer science perspective? I guess to me this just seemed unusually introductory, about a specific library for a specific language.

Put another way: if I was going to cite numpy, would I cite this? Probably not. Would I cite this paper for any of the more general concepts it covers? Probably not. I'd probably even argue someone _shouldn 't_ cite it for that latter reason, as those concepts supercede numpy (and appear in other languages under other names).

<comment><USER18> I forget who, probably Hamming, said his most cited paper ever was just an intro to statistics for biologists. This is not a new thing and it's not a bad thing. Papers are meant to spread information. If a field isn't aware that another field has solved a problem of theirs than even a 101 level paper is worth writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> BLAS and LAPACK were originally written for FORTRAN, and FORTRAN is particularly suited to numerical computing and array programming.

[https://modelingguru.nasa.gov/docs/DOC-1762](https://modelingguru.nasa.gov/docs/DOC-1762)

<comment><USER20> Aren't BLAS and LAPACK just for the linear algebra bits? Numpy is so much more than linear algebra.

<comment><USER21> Yes, there's a lot more to it than that.

For instance, the interface and array/matrix types make vector operations really natural and efficient in python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Young programmers are slowly but steadily reaching the power that Fortran programmers had 40 years ago. That's good news!

<comment><USER23> That statement only feels true to me if you interpret the word "power" as an exact synonym for "performance." Which is a definition that is valid, but also just about perfect for leading someone to miss the point.

Numpy approaches the performance you could get with Fortran. Mostly because its core is written in Fortran. What Numpy offers that Fortran never did, though, is _leverage_. The article mentions, but doesn't really do justice to, the sheer volume of interoperability that Numpy has enabled. It's not just that all these libraries were built on top of Numpy. It's also that their common Numpy substrate makes them all deeply interoperable with each other. And that works both above and below the boundary. You can swap out BLAS and LAPACK for something else - say, CUDA, or a distributed representation - <USER2> as long as the replacement also speaks Numpy's language, you can plug it into existing libraries that were originally written against Numpy.

In short: Fortran gets you performance. Numpy gets you that, and also productivity. I would argue that that actually makes Numpy _more_ powerful than what was possible with just Fortran.

<comment><USER24> Try D language, with its numerical library you can get both productivity and performance that is even better than the OpenBLAS (Numpy and Julia library are based on) [1].

In D you get the consistency of a single unified language semantic unlike the impedance mismatched approach that is inherent in Python and Numpy programming combination.

[1][http://blog.mir.dlang.io/glas/benchmark/openblas/2016/09/23/...](http://blog.mir.dlang.io/glas/benchmark/openblas/2016/09/23/glas- gemm-benchmark.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Numpy array syntax inconsistent to the degree it can be considered broken. For instance, to take elements number 4,3,2 of an array in Python, one writes A[3:0:-1], but for the elements 3,2,1 one has to write A[2::-1], because someone decided that making A[-1] refer to the last element of an array is "intuitive", and so A[2:-1:-1] will return empty slice.

Now if you want to use array comprehensions, the first case looks similar: [A[k] for k in range(3,0,-1)] but the second now has to be [A[k] for k in range(2,-1,-1)].

Further, for some reason, array and matrix are different types and one has to convert back and forth between them.

<comment><USER26> The matrix class is now officially deprecated, FYI, so just use array everywhere.

I guess the generic way to write that would be A[bottom:top+1][::-1]. But the blame there goes to Python, not numpy, since the same is true of lists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ah, just the right time to publish about numpy - right when everyone is moving over to Julia because of numpy's warts.

<comment><USER28> I don't think that's accurate:

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0j3djl7,%2Fm%2F021plb)</comment></comment>