US Files Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden for Violation of CIA and NSA NDAs - <AUTHOR> https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/united-states-files-civil-lawsuit-against-edward-snowden-publishing-book-violation-cia-and <comment><USER2> Already discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20997586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20997586)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Comments moved thither.</comment></comment>


First 2200-Meter Transatlantic Contact by US Radio Amateur Reported (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://www.arrl.org/news/apparent-first-2200-meter-transatlantic-contact-by-us-radio-amateur-reported <comment><USER2> huh? Am I mis-reading/understanding the units? 80m bands are common, and I guess I've heard people talk about 160m. This is 2200m? 2.2km? What would the antenna look like? a quarter-wave dipole? haha Is this the kind of thing subs would use to communicate, for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _This is 2200m? 2.2km?_

Yes, it's 136 kHz.

The NIST transmits the 70 kW WWVB time signal at 60 kHz (5000-meter) in order to inform you the standard time in UTC from atomic clocks. It was extremely useful before GPS, less useful today, but it still serves a hundred thousands of radio clocks, NTP time servers or so.

In the beginning of radio, even lower frequencies were used. The Grimeton Radio Station (callsign SAQ) in Sweden uses 17.2 kHz, or 17441-meter. The oscillator of the radio is not an electronic oscillator like a crystal, but an extremely fast AC generator with moving parts rotating at one million RPM, invented before vacuum tubes and subsequent establishment of "electronic engineering".

This radio station still operates today for celebrations, and it can be heard by amateur radio operators worldwide with their homemade equipment (a computer soundcard can be the radio receiver, 17.2 kHz is audio frequency).

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimeton_Radio_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimeton_Radio_Station)

> _haha Is this the kind of thing subs would use to communicate, for example?_

You greatly underestimated subs ;-)

136 kHz is Low Frequency. Submarines use Very Low Frequency (something like SAQ's frequency), or Extremely Low Frequency, as low as 100 Hz, not a typo, it's _hertz_.

> _What would the antenna look like?_

Every wire is an antenna, you don't really need a "real" antenna to get the radiation out or pick up the signal. At low frequencies, the antenna is _always_ inefficient, and one just needs to accept this fact and gets used to it.

Usually the antenna is built to be as large as practical, but not larger. If you are the military, you can build a multi-kilometer antenna, but if you are an amateur, it would be as large as your rooftop or backyard can fit, not larger, then you build an impedance matching network to make it usable (but it doesn't improve the efficiency of the antenna itself), and you put as much power as possible into the antenna.

Finally, receiving a large station is easy, when they transmit tens of thousands of watts, a small and inefficient random-wire antenna can pick up the signal from, e.g. WWVB or SAQ. It's how nuclear submarines receive one-way communication from the command & control.

Receiving a 1-watt amateur signal (legal limit for 2200 meters) is much more difficult.

The article says,

> home-built single FET 200 W class E amplifier, a 90-foot top-loaded vertical > antenna, this gives me no more than 0.5 W EIRP, probably less.

200-watt in, 0.5-watt EIRP out, the antenna efficiency is 0.25%.

And it's a transatlantic communication from U.S. to Great Britain without gigantic military antenna and about 0.5-watt of radiated power, I think you can now understand the technical achievement here.</comment></comment>


Glu Mobile acquires QuizUp for $7.5M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/23/glu-mobile-acquires-quizup-in-deal-valued-at-7-5-million/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> Key quote:

> Altogether, the company had raised about $40 million in outside funding</comment>


Tensorflow and Go - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2017/tensorflow-and-go/ <comment><USER2> Was anyone able to do anything useful with tensorflow?</comment>


Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and-its-strangely-moving/?href= <comment><USER2> that was pretty awesome for incoherent babble.</comment>


Where to find some .onion marketplace urls - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
While I have a decent idea of how Tor generally works, I've never used the service very much in terms of surfing around .onion websites.
I'm currently in need of finding and have a look at some .onion marketplaces/ecommerce-sites (weapons is my main interest, but I imagine most marketplaces do have multiple categories).
Since the visibility problem is especially true for this - pretty volatile - kind of sites, I was wondering if there were some 'must-know' link aggregators for these kinds of sites.
A 'backpage of the internet' maybe? :)
If that's not the case then I assume the first google results are good enough for the general weapon buyer.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> /r/DarkNetMarkets have fun ;)</comment>


Can you predict a recession by looking at pregnancy rates? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43195765 <comment><USER2> The graph doesn't look like pregnancy rates precede recessions at all, it looks like they occur at the same time (and thus aren't good for prediction). What's going on is that we have a goofy rule for recessions that require continuous retraction for a recession to be official. In most of these recessions it looks like the economy peaked the same time as pregnancy rates, but a tiny upward blip two quarters later prevented us from being officially in a recession. If you smoothed the idea of a recession into something like "contraction in 3 out of 4 quarters" you wouldn't have tiny blips delaying the official recession, and you wouldn't see pregnancy rates preceding anything, they would just be following the rest of the economy.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can predict a recession by observing that spending goes down before the recession actually happens. Observe, for instance, that this happens for many things, including stock prices : they drop before the recession. People buying stuff, goes down before recession starts. Etc.

Pregnancies are simply something that get planned out. You make sure you have room, things have to be going well, you only do it if you feel comfortable about your employment. And so on and so forth. They're an indicator, sure, but keep in mind that there's many indicators. From sandwiches eaten to car sales, everything drops before the recession happens (well, except "sin stocks").

People will reply that that's a recession being predicted by a lot of people. That's not really true. It's many actors reacting to each other. In many cases (almost every last example, although there are exceptions), recessions are caused by the government raising interest rates, after having kept them down. This forces companies and consumers alike to accept the truth about decisions they've made in the past few years (since rolling forward debt becomes harder, and thus at the margin impossible).

By observing what's currently happening with sales figures in a lot of sectors I would say we're at the beginning of the transition into the recession, 6-12 months before the actual recession in GDP figures. The stock market top is ~now (as in just passed, or perhaps coming up any second now), and everybody in the financial industry pretty much knows what's coming (but a lot of players cannot currently act upon that for various reasons).

Given just how low interest rates were (ie. < 0), and for how long (~10 years), the next recession ought to be a doozy. Lots of debt needs to be worked out of the system.

</comment><comment><USER4> The title of the article glosses over one significant fact: You cannot know the pregnancy rate at the precise moment from (1) folks who do not know, (2) folks who will abort or lose the child (worsening economy, loss of job, stress...) (3) folks who do not report. It can be argued that you can abstract those cases out, but the useable data becomes extremely blurry as the early months of a pregnancy are the riskiest ones for the birth.

In hindsight, looking at the recorded birth and subtracting 9 months will give you a clearer picture but by then better indicators of recession in progress might have been more readily observable.

Nevertheless - I find the idea fascinating as the birth of a child is one where individuals have to take into account a lot of things and internalize/assess the situation for the immediate future beyond what folks want to hear or believe.

What I wonder about is the impact of those lost births on future economies (20 years later?) and/or what the impact is on the recovering economy.

<comment><USER5> From the paper (preprint found here [1]), you are correct in how they reconstruct this information. They use birth data (including estimates of gestation period) to derive the pregnancy rate at a moment in the past. They also attempt to compensate for miscarriages and abortions.

I think your central conclusion is sound, though, namely that this cannot be used to predict the future because there's no reliable data source to give the pregnancy rate in the present.

On the other hand, it might be possible to show that even excluding your (1), (2), and (3), it would still make a reliable predictor. But I'm not sure that there are datasets that would allow any insight even into the number of reported pregnancies. Potentially pharmacies would have access to rudimentary proxies in the form of sales of pregnancy tests, or inverse proxies in the form of sales of contraceptives. Large companies might have information on parental leave, but in the lead-up to a recession, you might have the confounding variable that people are losing their jobs at a higher rate, leading to a direct correlation that might overstate the phenomenon.

[1] [https://www3.nd.edu/~kbuckles/BHL_fertility.pdf](https://www3.nd.edu/~kbuckles/BHL_fertility.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If people are choosing to have fewer babies before recessions, their decisions must be made based on some information they have. So looking at pregnancies is interesting, but at best it shows there's something still missing. And trying to find that might be a little less intrusive then looking into pregnancies.

<comment><USER7> We could make it a law that if you become pregnant you must report it so that the government can use the data to protect all citizens against recessions. If you don't report it it could be made law that you lose your medical insurance or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article uses the word "conceptions" throughout, but it sounds like the only data is about births. These births would have all occurred after the recessions started.

Did the original paper rule out the hypothesis that the recession actually affected births via an increase in miscarriages and abortions instead? I can't access it.

<comment><USER9> Birth - 9 months = conception (on average)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, that misses out on stillbirths and miscarriages.

<comment><USER9> Miscarriages maybe but I believe stillbirths are legally required to be recorded. As unpleasant and upsetting as it is, it would be an interesting data point in it's own regard to observe.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, I have lot of personal experience here. The reporting on still births varies greatly. Some states require it past week 16, others stipulate a birth weight, and others set more arbitrary criteria. You would have to account for a lot of external factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "We were surprised when we saw [the correlation] and then we were surprised no one had noticed it before"

Seems like lots of women noticed it. Just sayin'.

</comment><comment><USER12> Probably not considering the drop on the graph isn't much bigger than some previous drops after which nothing happened...

</comment><comment><USER13> Recessions are roughly coincident with unemployment claims, so maybe this is signal from water cooler talk... ex. things aren't looking great at the office, possible layoffs on the horizon, low profits to be announced, or the like, upend future plans for having children?

<comment><USER14> To add to your grain of salt, I've had quite a number of quotes (I'm a consultant) in the last 3 months that have gone nowhere. These are for firms that I've worked with for years that are all of a sudden very tightfisted about projects that they would have shoveled money at before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the chart I just can see that GDP can predict conceptions. GDP falls, conceptions falls, then came the recesion. GDP begins to recover, get out of recession, then conceptions begin.

</comment><comment><USER16> How does this compare to say... the consumer confidence index? Assuming that everyone is accurately stating their confidence, I don't see why conception data should be ahead of consumer confidence.

>Economists are frequently criticised for failing to accurately predict the direction of economic growth

OT: Do people honestly think that? I thought the academic consensus is that boom/bust cycles are pretty much impossible to predict.

<comment><USER17> I thought it was fairly obvious that they _can't_ be predicted with any reliability, because a reliable prediction will change people's behavior and break it. Sort of an economic Halting Problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone know what kind of data is publicly available on pregnancy rates?

<comment><USER19> You can probably extrapolate from search data such as Google Trends or the popularity of pregnancy websites through Alexa rankings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here's a time series that updates for anyone interested (although clearly has a large lag)</comment>


The Minitransaction: An Alternative to Multi-Paxos and Raft - topher-the-geek http://blog.treode.com/minitransaction/

<comment><AUTHOR> The Sinfonia paper ([http://www.sosp2007.org/papers/sosp064-aguilera.pdf](http://www.sosp2007.org/papers/sosp064-aguilera.pdf)) is interesting, and section 4 does a better job of explaining how this 'minitransaction' model works than this blog post does.

The part of this to pay the most attention to is way that it handles node failure:

> The traditional way to avoid blocking on coordinator crashes is to use > three-phase commit, but we want to avoid the extra phase. We accomplish this > by blocking on participant crashes instead of coordinator crashes.

That seems sensible, and is later justified by the fact that the memory nodes can be replicated, and can be highly available in their own right. This brings a significant limitation:

> When a participant memory node crashes, the system blocks any outstanding > minitransactions involving the participant until the participant recovers.

So, in Sinfonia, the memory nodes HAVE to be highly available, or you've built a system with many single points of failure instead of just one.

Sinfonia is actually a pretty clever system, and despite some interesting edges (crash recovery and log compaction), is not particularly complicated. Directly comparing its memory model to multi-Paxos, though, rings a little bit hollow for me. One of these things is a non-blocking atomic commit protocol which allows transactions across reliable nodes, the other is a consensus protocol which replicates a log across unreliable nodes. They aren't really solving the same problem.

<comment> topher-the-geek > So, in Sinfonia, the memory nodes HAVE to be highly available, or you've > built a system with many single points of failure instead of just one.

Yes, in Sinfonia that's true since an item resides on only one node. The Scalaris project augments Sinfonia by performing operations on a majority of replicas.

> the other is a consensus protocol which replicates a log across unreliable > nodes

Interesting. I hadn't thought of it like that. Indeed, when you frame it that way, it doesn't seem right to compare a minitransaction to multi-Paxos. I had thought of multi-Paxos as a mechanism to serialize updates on the replicas of a key-value store. In that framing, the comparison makes more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> > The NameNode is a single point of failure.

The NameNode service supports high availability out of the box, and uses a QJM (Quorum Journal Manager) to share edits between the active/standby node. To say the NameNode is a SPOF is not only misleading, it's incorrect.

> the NameNode is also a scaling bottleneck. Services which build on Hadoop

What's indicating that the NameNode is a scaling bottleneck? There are production Hadoop clusters with PBs of data, and the NameNode has not been an issue for scalability. Just so we're clear, data written to HDFS does not flow through the NameNode.

> As a result, many enterprises that use Hadoop and HBase do so only in non- > critical services, such as supporting the business analytics group

This is the point where I point to the hundreds of companies which rely on Hadoop to run mission critical applications (Facebook, Yahoo, Ebay, Box, ..). Just google around...look at customers of Cloudera, Hortonworks, Pivotal, etc.

<comment><USER3> The name node is a significant vertical scaling challenge. It is one of the reasons that Yahoo limits their cluster sizes.

<comment><USER4> That's right, it should be noted however that the need of horizontally scaling the equivalent of the NameNode kicks in only when you really have a very large storage system, where large can be defined as:

"You know you have a large storage system when you get paged at 1 AM because you only have a few petabytes of storage left." [1]

Even if you are below that size you might have a large system, and even if using a single metadata master node might be a sound solution you still have lot of interesting problems to solve. Don't make systems more complex than necessary.

More pointers to google public material on colossus in [2].

[1] [http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/it//university/relations/facultysummit2010/storage_architecture_and_challenges.pdf)

[2] [http://www.highlyscalablesystems.com/3202/colossus- successor...](http://www.highlyscalablesystems.com/3202/colossus-successor-to- google-file-system-gfs/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So the acceptor is a replica-read-only machine and a client-propose-commit- only machine.

Also, the minimum production setup for this cluster is 6+1 machines?

<comment> topher-the-geek Ah, I see how you could interpret the diagram that way. The client and server are clearly different machines. However, the replicas and acceptors can be on the same machine, in fact in the same process. And the server can be on the same machine as a replica or acceptor. So only three machines are necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In Aphyr's "Call me maybe" we trust

<comment><USER7> topher-the-geek, will you be writing Jepsen tests for Treode?

<comment> topher-the-geek Having Jepsen tests would be a good thing. The community trusts them, and it's wise to have tests from someone other than the author of the main-line code. If I'm so lucky as to find funding--my savings will only go so far--then I or someone I hire will eventually apply Jepsen to Treode. In the meantime, there are already tests a bit like Jepsen in the repository. They simulate dropping and reordering messages, and crashing and recovering nodes. They have proven their value as they have flushed out lots of early bugs.

My immediate concerns are finding help and finding a sponsor (investor or adventurous customer). To that end, I'm less coding right now and more promoting. Getting the word out will help me find developers interested in improving or trying it.

When I do get to code, I may focus on load and performance testing. I have not done enough work along those lines yet. Or, I may focus on an example that sketches how the read/write side of the API integrates easily with Etags, CDNs and web-clients, and how the scan API integrates with Spark or Map-Reduce.

<comment><USER6> Maybe you can try to contact aphyr. Some of his "call me maybe" articles have been funded (by Comcast if I remember well)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Honk if You Think It's Over - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/realestate/07cov.html?hpw

<comment><USER2> Chortles.

I was looking over articles on nytimes the other day. Articles about the Japanese Asset Price Bubble (baburu keiki) from the first years after the events. Everyone thought that this or that fancy government capital infusion would make the bubble end within a year. In other words: in 1992, people thought it'd be over in 1993. In 1993, they thought it'd be over by the end of the year, or by 1994, or perhaps early 1995. But we know what happened there.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's hard to tell from the article if this reflects the overall reality in the Manhattan real estate market, or if this is just a real estate industry PR piece.

</comment><comment><USER4> _THE panic in the Manhattan real estate market of the winter of 2009 lifted in the last few weeks, brokers say_ ...

Color me confused - is this a hypothetical piece about the market six months from now?

</comment><comment><USER5> In an economy that is as abstracted from items of real value as ours is, it's "over" when enough people think that it is over, which makes the title all the more ironic.</comment>


Ask HN: Entering into a partnership with strangers. - <AUTHOR>

I have been asked to join a 'venture' by 2 guys, only one who I know vaguely.
They have developed a Business Intelligence system which they are selling to large companies, they pay a monthly fee. Currently it is a 'manual' system, ie Excel.
Apparently, it is popular with the clients they show it too, but they can't really increase the sales volume without some help.
They would like to convert it to an web app, which the clients will access. I don't know if any reason that it can't work on a technical level.
The proposal they offered is to give me 25% of the business, in exchange for developing the online bit of the system.
In essence I am keen to go for this opportunity.
I need to come up with a list of questions or items to be written into a contract, before we have a telephone interview, and wondered if any one here has been through anything similar.
My initial questions are: - If the business is sold, will I get 25% of the sale price - Does my 25% mean 25% of sales or profit - What guarantees are there that the guy doing the sales will work hard at it - Who/how are decisions made, do we all need to agree - Should the software exist only on my server - What costs can be off set against the company
- Can I claim extra costs for hosting on my server - I'm concerned that after months of development they may decide to cancel the project because of other commitments (We all have other work going on)
Does any one have a good contract for this sort of arrangement? Is there a correct term for this?
I am operating through a Limited company in the UK. <comment><USER2> I would be very careful with entering into a partnership with people you don't know. Would you marry someone you know "vaguely" or not at all?

I'd try to structure a trial period where you get to work with the other founders for a predetermined period of time.

If you do chose to continue, make sure you're protected. i.e. who owns the software you're developing? You don't want to develop it and then have them fire you and keep your shares, for example.

You should also build vesting into your shares. 4 year vesting is common, so that if you leave after 1 year you will still have 1/4 of your equity.

</comment><comment><USER3> The short answer to all questions is "What does the contract say?"

>If the business is sold, will I get 25% of the sale price

Probably not. Back of the envelope says you'll get about 1/3 of 30%.

> What guarantees are there that the guy doing the sales will work hard at it

Look into vesting and the various forms it can take. Even with that said, none really. If you're worried about this negotiate in the contract protections.

>Who/how are decisions made, do we all need to agree

Anything can be made contractual. Having 3 people agree may be impossible. Having 2 people agree maybe unfair. Plan accordingly.

>Should the software exist only on my server

This is a great protection from them stealing it. Of course, you might have legal recourse if they do, but why risk it?

>What costs can be off set against the company

I think you're talking taxation, as in write offs. Talk to an accountant. If you're asking about what can the company pay you for? Whatever the contract says.

>Can I claim extra costs for hosting on my server

Claim -- On your taxes or what? Can you bill them for the extra costs to your server? Yes, put that in the contract.

> I'm concerned that after months of development they may decide to cancel the > project because of other commitments (We all have other work going on)

This is another contractual issue. You can negotiate this however you want. What you want though is a balance between giving something up to get this and protection.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your questions indicate an extreme level of inexperience in business. Coupled with the fact that you don't know these people well, the likelihood of things going wrong seems high.

If they are offering you "25% of the business" you own 25% of the equity. As to whether that translates into an actual 25% share: maybe, maybe not. The details would be in the corporate governance document; and might include things like preferred payouts to investors, etc., which could leave you with nothing.

You need to get a lawyer, or at least someone who has considerably more business knowledge, in your corner.

Hint: "good contracts" are custom written, not pulled off a shelf.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good lawyers are hard to find and you surely need one. If you want to feel out your potential partners ask them if all three of you could meet with a lawyer of their choice (and expense). If they hesitate or refuse or make excuses then walk away and don't look back.

Honest people in this situation will gladly create a fair business ownership plan with a lawyer. It protects everyone involved including the folks you don't know. You need to know if these guys are honest.

Further, take your time to get to know the 2 guys better. Right now what's most important is "Can I work with these guys in the long run?". Business can be like a marriage - you could potentially be spending the majority of your time with these 2 guys if the business is successful and grows rapidly.

Also make sure the other partners can pull their weight. The majority of the company's value will rest on your shoulders (as the developer). So the other partners need to be as active as you are in their own expertise - sales, marketing, support, operations, financing, etc. Don't bring along someone "for the ride", make sure they all work as hard as you do.

So, that's a few thoughts from someone who's gone down this road a few times, for better or worse.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't go into business with people you don't trust.

In my experience, it never goes well.

</comment><comment><USER7> My knee jerk reaction:

This sounds like a situation where astrology or tarot cards would come in handy if you believe in that sort of thing. Which is to say that it sounds to me like you are operating so in the dark that "logic"/study/questions on HN probably can't do much for you.

Either go with your gut or don't. If you do, realize that it is tantamount to signing a contract in blood without reading it first. That can be an effective means to get things done and there have been times I've made those sorts of deals with "life", but just be very sure you are willing and able to pay the price before you do something like that. So I'm not saying there is never a place for it. I personally prefer to only sign unread contracts in blood when I am damn sure that what it gets me is worth the hell I am very likely about to be dragged through kicking and screaming every step of the way.

Best of luck.</comment>


Tesla: Customers should order by Monday to lock in $7,500 tax credit - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/?p=1393213 <comment><USER2> I reserved last year and ordered the AWD Model 3 on July 5th ($2,500 down payment) and I'm still waiting for a VIN.

I got a text a couple weeks ago asking if I could take delivery that weekend and immediately replied "YES!". A day later they texted back that someone would be in contact with me "in a week or two". Something wonky happened, my rank speculation is they had a matching vehicle which was slated for someone else and they initially said they couldn't take delivery that weekend so they reached out to me, but then the original buyer went back and said they could take it? I have no evidence to support that, could just be shitty logistics, or even worse, intentionally testing my buyer readiness to gauge their true demand queue.

But I'm happy to wait as my current 2006 ICE with 104k miles is running fine. I would prefer even waiting another year or two if not for the expiring credit.

The fact that they're claiming delivery backlog for Model 3 is down to ~10 weeks bodes well for the base model becoming available to order in Q1 I would think.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused by these stories, mostly because a standard dealership would never treat you this poorly.

If I gave money to a dealership and they didn't give me a car within a few days of my delivery date, I'd cancel the check and buy a car from some other dealership.

Sure, people don't like playing the dealership game, but the fact of the matter is... you have options. There are other dealerships you can work with if your current one becomes abusive.

\</comment></comment><comment>-

I think about the Tesla model of sales and I see these complaints like yours here and there. But I just don't know what kind of recourse I'm supposed to do in that situation. Especially if I set my mind on a particular car.

It could be that effect where the complaints are heard loudest (very few people post online when things go fine... the main people who complain are the people treated poorly). But still, I wouldn't know the strategy for dealing with Tesla sales issues if I were a hypothetical buyer.

This is a major issue with the $7500 credit on the line. If a M3 buyer orders today, but gets delayed like in your case, they'll effectively lose $3750 credit... AND the credit will be delayed to 2019 taxes instead of 2018 taxes. That's a huge difference.

<comment><USER4> Thats a reasonable point, but this isn't a standard product. Only one company in the world is making them (of this level of quality and performance), and the market has been far more receptive than they can handle.

If you want your new car now, don't buy a tesla. If you want a tesla, then get in line. Alternatively, they could raise the price to shorten the line a bit, but something tells me profit isn't their end goal here. Moving the market away from ICE is the goal, and they are succeeding wildly.

<comment><USER5> Yes. I agree with this comment. The last quarter of Model 3 production nearly doubled from the previous quarter and I assume that the number of staff to handle all the paperwork and logistics did not increase in proportion.

Anyway, I took delivery of my Model 3 Sep 28th and here's my experience. They emailed me two weeks in advance to schedule pickup at the delivery center in Fremont on Saturday Sep 29th. Then a week later they called me and let me know that they could deliver the car to my house on a Monday. I was set to take delivery on Monday but then after the delivery time had passed, a manager called me to let me know they weren't able to get the car out that day and they'd get back to me to schedule another delivery date. A couple of days later they emailed me and said they could bring the car to me on Friday, and this time they showed up with the car, a little late, around 10:30pm. Overall it was a great experience. I really appreciate that they drove the car to me and it only took a few minutes to sign the paperwork.

Despite the delays and rescheduling several times it was a much much better experience than the (first, last and hopefully only) experience I had at the Toyota dealership in buying my previous car.

I am just over the moon thinking about the fact that I may never have to visit a gas station or get a smog check or have to discuss the problems of idling solenoids with mechanics ever again.

<comment><USER6> I'm on my second (first was a lease) Chevy Spark EV, which is about as plain as an EV can be, and I rented a Model 3 for a couple days and decided it was lovely, but too much car for the amount I care about cars. But even after five years I'm still "over the moon ... about the fact that I may never have to visit a gas station or get a smog check or have to discuss the problems of idling solenoids with mechanics ever again." That shit never gets old.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The last true knight on Malta - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181129-the-last-true-knight-on-malta <comment><USER2> Fun fact, after the grand master of the Order of St. John surrendered to Napoleon at the french invasion of Malta, the order moved to Russia and named Paul I as its sovereign protector. The Russian tradition of the Order of St. John exists today in Hawai'i (and around the world). They have a meeting in Honolulu on the first friday of every month. Sen. Daniel Akaka and Gov. George Ariyoshi were both invested into the order. Today they do charity work, funding various humanitarian projects around the world.

The Kingdom of Hawaii actually had a very friendly relationship with Russia. King Kalakaua was a member of the Order and was even gifted a portrait of Czar Alexander II, which is still hanging in Iolani Palace to this day.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I applaud the preservation of spirit and tradition, I don't think you can really be a knight in the modern world.

 _"In the past, the defence of the faith was riding horses, fighting enemies," Fra Critien said. "Now we can defend the faith by being an example to those around us."_

That first part is quite important. Knights could have been thugs or even warlords but they weren't. Not because they would have been stopped by the state, which were fairly small and weak at the time, but because they largely chose not to.

And many crusaders went further than that. They chose a risky expedition often at a great expense of their families for no discernible earthly benefit.

Being a gentleman in the modern world is laudable but it happens under a completely different set of incentives.

Still, Malta is beautiful and definitely worth a visit. Especially for Europeans since flights and stay are very cheap.

<comment><USER4> > That first part is quite important. Knights could have been thugs or even > warlords but they weren't. Not because they would have been stopped by the > state, which were fairly small and weak at the time, but because they > largely chose not to.

That's historical revisionism. Modern ideas of chivalry mostly post date the age of knights. In their own time they were thugs and mercenaries granted land as a reward for their brutality in combat.

(But the knights of this order were medicines, not warriors, in their primary purpose. What you say is more true of these knights, but not knights generally.)

<comment><USER5> They weren't just doctors - at their peak, these knights were fundamentally bankers: at a time were travelling with valuables on your person was extremely unwise, you could open an "account" with them in Europe, travel all the way to the Middle East, and withdraw your cash when there. It started as a simple issue of logistics, but soon the order realized all that cash could be managed, and they started loaning it out to kings and merchants, which obviously made them even richer. This is the likely cause of their eventual downfall, because kings of that age had the annoying habit of defaulting on their debts by "eliminating" their sources.

<comment><USER6> > This is the likely cause of their eventual downfall, ...

I think you may be mixing in the history of the Knights Templer there.

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta had no "eventual downfall" to any Christian King in the way the Templers did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're interested in the Knights of Malta have a look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_del_Priorato_di_Malta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_del_Priorato_di_Malta) which is a bit of extra-territorial Italy in Rome given to the Order.

There's a cool optical illusion looking through its "Aventine Keyhole" towards St Peters.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've read that these charitable Christian orders retain passport issuing rights which were "grand fathered in" to the modern state passport system. Thing is, you have to prove you're travelling on order-related business. Since all the knights and grand Chancellors are citizens of other states, that means no fancy tax avoiding magic passports alas.

<comment><USER9> It's not like there's some master list of "authorities allowed to issue passports". Each state decides on its own which passports it will recognise, and they don't all agree.

<comment><USER10> After hearing about people successfully traveling on Principality of Sealand passports, I did wonder how far you could get round the world possessing documentation from a completely fictional country.

>This is not the first time that passports from Sealand have found their way into the news. One was found on the killer of Gianni Versace, Andrew Cunanan, and he was said to have a car with Sealand diplomatic plates. In 1997 forged Sealand passports were used to launder drug money in Slovenia, and there were reports that 4,000 forged passports were sold at £1,000 a head before China's takeover of Hong Kong. People involved in an illegal pyramid-selling scheme in eastern Europe had Sealand papers; one had border stamps from Libya, Iraq and Iran.

[https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/mar/28/features...](https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/mar/28/features11.g2)

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage_passport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage_passport)

There are a variety of companies that issue fake passports in the styles of fictional or historical countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > But a year later when he was arrested for his participation in what many > assume to be a brawl, the knights imprisoned the artist at Fort St Angelo > and expelled him from the Order.

For the only things I know Malata now are gambling, as a tax haven, and for the assassination of a journalist ([https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/malta- protecti...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/malta-protecting- mastermind-journalist-daphne-caruana-galizia-says-husband)).

Not so much to do with the idealized world of knights and gentlemen.

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure the order that this article is about does _not_ run the government. Based on my limited knowledge of history, orders like this were generally citizens (super loose terminology) of a host country, rather than rulers. Malta was an exception, until the 19th century.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I learnt the other day that "caballeros" is Spanish for gentlemen. Which is a nice echo of the knight/gentleman identity mentioned here.

<comment><USER14> Interesting contrast with the meaning of 'cavalier'.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, for some reason the French word (from which the English one derives) degenerated in a Don Quixote-like caricature. This has not happened in Italian nor in Spanish, afaik.</comment></comment></comment>


Transpiling between any programming languages (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.mongodb.com/post/transpiling-between-any-programming-languages-part-1 <comment><USER2> While it seems that their transpiler supports just simple JSON-like expressions with support for constructors for non-native literals (like big integers) and I don't think it could generalize into arbitrary code translation, I still appreciate the work they've done. Transpilation between arbitrary high level languages is a very hard task and I doubt anyone can achieve good solution for that anytime soon.

I have a different solution in mind: designing a language specifically for transpilation, so that it could be used to generate high quality, readable code for various programming languages (I call it "idiomatic translation"). I've recently started exploring that topic as a part of Zygote project [1].

[1] [https://github.com/krcz/zygote](https://github.com/krcz/zygote)

<comment><USER3> You should check out Haxe. - it compiles to 10 source level languages and a couple of VMs.

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

<comment><USER2> Thank you, Haxe definitely has its place on my list of things to check. What worries me however is that there are no examples of output code on their webpage.

<comment><USER4> The output is pretty slim, it's one of the reasons I prefer using haxe over TypeScript when targeting the web – haxe has better dead-code-elimination so output js tends to be smaller and include a greater level of optimisation – check out this example to see what I mean [https://try.haxe.org/#4f46D](https://try.haxe.org/#4f46D)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did something similar as in my Bachelors end project. A manufacturer of industrial printers wanted to generate API bindings in multiple languages from a single source of truth.

We started with just transpiling data definitions based on Apache Thrift [1], but later expanded it to also be able to transpile code checking invariants on the data and integration tests.

Jetbrains' Meta Programming Studio (MPS) [2] was a really great tool for this, as it does a lot of what is mentioned in the article for you. It makes it really easy to define new nodes, syntax rules, parse rules from text, ast-to- ast transformations etc.

[1] [https://thrift.apache.org/](https://thrift.apache.org/)

[2] [https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/](https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems like a really hard problem to solve - but it's some pretty cool progress. I do wonder how Mongo decided building a high-level transpiler was worth their time though. Is the business value of translating those queries really that high?

<comment><USER7> I think potentially very high.

There's a subset of operators that are similar (but not identical) between programming languages. For instance you can add numbers like

       const a = b + c

in javascript

       int a = b + c

in java, etc, you can even write

       (b+c) as a

in the select statement of a SQL query. If you look at basic operations on numbers and strings it is not hard to translate expressions between conventional languages and query languages. Now query languages have different ideas about control structures, but working at the expression level you can mostly avoid that.

Now there are issues around data types (are we adding ints or floats, what to do about overflow, when you index the Nth element of a string is it 8 bits (maybe part of a Unicode char), is it a basic plane unicode char, or could it be any codepoint, or something else...) but those problems don't turn up 100% of the time when you try to translate.

<comment><USER8> The data type and edge case issues have to be considered 100% of the time unless the transpiler can reliably determine through static analysis that they aren't a factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a Google Summer of Code project, I worked on transpiling Maxima CAS to Python, both high level languages. The approach I followed involved conversion to an internal custom defined IR, and then converting that to Python code.

The full project report: [https://gist.github.com/LakshyAAAgrawal/33eee2d33c4788764087...](https://gist.github.com/LakshyAAAgrawal/33eee2d33c4788764087eef1fa67269e)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm wondering if you had a large enough corpus you could use the same techniques you use for NLP translation.

<comment><USER11> Of course. I hope you don't want to use the output, though.

<comment><USER12> Convert the tests by hand, then convert the language by NLP. Then go back and fix breakages in the test suite...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought that this was near when I wrote "Running PHP in Javascript" [1]. I'm so happy this article includes images and more in-depth technical explanations, since I basically hacked it together without understanding half of it (for fun!).

[1] [https://francisco.io/blog/running-php-in- javascript/](https://francisco.io/blog/running-php-in-javascript/)

</comment><comment><USER14> If you believe that "transpilation between any languages" is a thing, chances are you're observing your local blub paradox. That said, most practical and practiced languages are really interchangeable, because they bring nothing new beyond the syntax, minor runtime api differences and fresh names for old subroutines. Heck, this makes me want to work on my custom best language again.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like they read the Watt & Brown book.

<comment><USER16> this [https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Watt- Pro...](https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Watt-Programming- Language-Processors-in-Java-Compilers-and-Interpreters/PGM308089.html) ?

<comment><USER15> That.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is the use-case for these transpilation features? Who would want to convert queries from an arbitrary language to another one?

</comment><comment><USER18> General transpilation is logically impossible.

<comment><USER19> Any language that can be compiled for x86 can be transpiled to any language in which an interpreter of x86 opcodes could be written. The question is what level of abstraction can be preserved; if it requires lowering that far, it's not likely to be worth it.

<comment><USER18> Well, for that matter any Turing complete language can embed an interpreter/compiler for any other Turing complete language. If that's all that is meant by transpiling, it is no different than something like the JVM.

My understanding of 'transpiling' is that it is meant to convert, say, idiomatic Python into idiomatic Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> sound great, doesn't work. if it would work, we would have perfect translations for spoken languages already. and google(translate) with it's massive computing, financial and brain power still hasn't figured it out.

<comment><USER5> Spoken languages have the problem of ambiguity, context, changing meaning over time to different people. Programming languages are pretty structured and well defined.

<comment><USER2> On the other hand most spoken languages use similar underlying concepts (with some exceptions, e.g. translation to language without subjective direction terms like "left" or "right" might be tricky). Programming languages can have completely different execution models, especially when you compare ones between paradigms. Translating imperative for loop into map/filter/fold chain in functional language would have to be very non-local.

<comment><USER5> Yes it would probably produce a lot of unidiomatic code (see for example c2rust [1], which generates semantically equivalent Rust code, but with raw pointers and unsafe everywhere). In the worst case you could even just emulate the origin language in the target language, everything is turing complete after all.

With enough effort and smart transformation passes however, I think you could come pretty close to something resembling "native" code. It might not always be worth it to spend that development time though.

[1] [https://c2rust.com/](https://c2rust.com/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft bought 'Minecraft' because it's perfect for HoloLens - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/01/microsoft-bought-minecraft-because-its-perfect-for-hololens/

<comment><USER2> ...and Unity announced support for HoloLens just two days ago: [http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/04/29/announcing-support- for-m...](http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/04/29/announcing-support-for- microsoft-hololens/)

Such a wonderful world we live in.</comment>


Debian: Change default desktop to xfce - <AUTHOR> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=commitdiff;h=dfca406eb694e0ac00ea04b12fc912237e01c9b5 <comment><USER2> I was genuinely surprised that the diff was so small. It's a sign of a a well written and factored system. In more average codebases big changes like that would likely require changes in multiple places and also cascade changes to related modules.

<comment><AUTHOR> Finally someone who understands the beauty of this instead of "my favourite DE is ..."!

This, coupled with the detailed explanation and rationale for the change, the explicit deadline, seems to me like an exemplar of good practice for free software community projects. It is not surprising that this came at a time when Debian is also discussing init systems, and hopefully the same well- thought approach will work there too. And that matters not just for Debian but for all distros IMHO, because it sets a precedent of how you do these things without fucking up your userbase and/or your developers.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. It's a good example of how software should be built and set up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _" Hello to all the tech journalists out there. This is pretty boring. Why don't you write a story about monads instead?"_

Brought a smile to my face.

Posting this from a Wheezy/non-free install on a recycled Thinkpad X60 with 1Gb of RAM. This laptop manufactured in December 2006 will _run_ Gnome OK but there are issues about scrolling large documents in LibreOffice and general responsiveness that bring me back to XFCE.

Surely Jessie defaults at this stage are mainly for those testing the installer?

</comment><comment><USER5> I finally switched to xfce because it does things how I want, rather than how the Gnome or Unity people think I should have them set up. Maybe those are better for end user type people, but... that's not me.

<comment><USER6> You're lucky that there's _any_ desktop environment that does things how you want. I haven't found one yet, but xfce with compiz and a lot of customization gets close.

<comment><USER7> For me, I run XFCE with Xmonad as the WM. It's all sorts of awesome, letting me best use each of my screens. I've found it very customizable and awesome.

What are the things you're looking for in a desktop environment?

<comment><USER6> Basically what I want is Unity's task switcher (I know, everyone hates it, but for me it is almost exactly how I like it), KDE's system settings, and xfce's everything else (except Thunar; but using Nautilus under xfce is easy enough).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> YES. I often play around with different desktops (xmonad <3) but I always end up in XFCE.

In the past I end up in Gnome 2, but now XFCE is my all purpose desktop.

I don't really like KDE 4, Gnome 3 or Unity (hey it's my opnion, mmkay). XFCE is the big guy left. The others feel exotic, new or just not stable enough (like cinnamon). XFCE seems a perfect match for Debian.

<comment><USER9> I switched to LXDE after years of XFCE. Seems faster and does everything I need well. Worth a look.

<comment><USER10> I switched to LXDE instead of XFCE from the impending Unity that Ubuntu was going to give me. XFCE had historically been my go-to lightweight, but when I tried it a couple years ago it "felt" a little heavy and a little slow compared to LXDE. Actually Lubuntu vs Xubuntu.

I may give XFCE a try again when I move upstream to Debian. That'll be sometime this year I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can honestly say that I'm generally very happy and productive with Gnome 3. It looks and feels way better than Unity.

With Gnome 3 I can launch, place, and switch all applications with a few keystrokes and without touching the mouse at all, all while "normal" people can still use the very same configuration. I like that it's basically just an unobstrusive shell to launch and switch applications.

People always complain that Linux desktops just mimic Windows 95, now that Gnome has done something entirely new (and good!), people complain that it's different to what they're used to.

<comment><USER12> _With Gnome 3 I can launch, place, and switch all applications with a few keystrokes and without touching the mouse at all, all while "normal" people can still use the very same configuration. I like that it's basically just an unobstrusive shell to launch and switch applications._

OK. So basically just what Unity does then?

Not trying to belittle your comment or anything, but had you not prefixed your comment "With Gnome 3 I can", I would just have assumed you just described Unity. Because Unity does all that very well too.

So what's different about it? What makes it better?

<comment><USER11> I haven't really used Unity apart from launching a terminal and a browser on someone else's desktop. Unity and Gnome 3 seem very similar, both visually and by paradigm. I guess Unity is a brainchild of Ubuntu's NIH attitude.

Personally as a Gnome 3 user, when having to use Unity i got annoyed because my muscle memory keystrokes didn't work as expected (hit win, type "term" hit return, hit win-uparrow, expect a fullscreen terminal), but there's no point in expecting Unity to behave exactly like Gnome 3, I'm sure a similar workflow exists in Unity.

<comment><USER13> > hit win, type "term" hit return, hit win-uparrow, expect a fullscreen > terminal

Unity version: hit win, type "term" hit return, hit F11, expect a fullscreen terminal

<comment><USER14> Also: hit win, type "term", hit return, hit alt-space x, expect a fullscreen terminal.

<comment><USER15> Don't want to come across smug but in Awesome and many other tiling WM:

meta+Enter

That's it, your fullscreen terminal is there.

<comment> mh- hmm, also in Windows 95.

<comment><USER15> That's blatantly not true. You have to press: ctrl+esc, up arrow, enter, c, m, d, enter, alt+m, enter (or something along those lines) And in the end I'm pretty sure the windows command prompt doesn't allow you to maximise it because it can't adapt to the changing line and row number.

Also how do you get Windows 95 to manage your X session? ;) Seriously though, we're all talking about Linux here.

edit: I understand your confusion now, I think you failed to realise that meta+enter also opens the said terminal

<comment> mh- _I think you failed to realise that meta+enter also opens the said terminal_

ah yes, didn't know that. was referring to full-screening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been using XFCE on debian for ages. I just ran installs of two other Linuxes with Gnome 3 and KDE 4, just to check...and to be honest, I'm happy with XFCE.

<comment><USER17> I've been on XFCE on Debian since KDE 4 came out. Recently I had a fresh install and checked gnome out of curiosity and it turns out I'm too old- fashioned for this.

<comment><USER18> KDE4 came out a long time ago, back then 4.0 was derided as a beta-quality clusterfuck but it's come a long way.

<comment><USER19> This past weekend I installed KDE 4.10 on a FreeBSD 9.2 vm using the new "pkgng" tools. Completely painless. KDE 4.10 is very polished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To be honest I don't care too much about the default desktop, but I think this commit message is particularly well-written and leaves little room for the (inevitable?) flame-wars about the topic. The closing sentence got me laughing.

<comment><USER20> Why are CD images still so popular?

My last few computers have only included CD drives for the purpose of booting installers that are inconvenient to put on USB. USB drives, on the other hand, are quite universal.

<comment><USER21> Debian's CD images are actually hybrid CD/DVD/USB images: [http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en](http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en)

It's been a feature of isolinux for a while now: [http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/isolinux#HYBRID_C...](http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/isolinux#HYBRID_CD- ROM.2FHARD_DISK_MODE)

<comment><USER22> Every single Debian USB image I've tried to flash with dd has failed in the last few years. I have to boot up a windows virtual machine and use LinuxLive USB Creator to create one.

It's odd as the RaspberryPi debian image works perfectly fine.

<comment><USER21> That's odd. It should be fine, but here are some things to check:

\- Make sure that none of the filesystems on the USB stick are mounted before you begin. Otherwise, the filesystem drivers might corrupt something.

\- Use a larger block size that's a power of 2 (e.g. bs=4096k). The default is 512 bytes, which is too small. This should just speed things up, but using writes that are smaller than the actual flash erase blocks can cause a lot of extra erases, and maybe your flash stick breaks when you do that.

\- Run 'sync' after using dd, and wait for disk activity to finish. dd doesn't flush to disk by default.

\- Don't use an amd64 image on a 32-bit machine. Don't use ia64 on a 64-bit PC.

\- Try using synchronized I/O:

        sudo dd if=debian-7.2.0-i386-CD-1.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=4096k oflag=sync

<comment><USER22> Thanks, I'll come back and read this next time I do it. The first thing I checked was the bit length, though it could be the file system type or the synchronized io

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My problem with xfce and most other Linux desktops is that they look like a Windows desktop from the early 2000s. It's an aesthetic that I don't personally enjoy; I'm much more of a shiny/fancy user, which is why I like Aero, or to a lesser extent, Mac OS X.

I suppose that's part of why I don't bother with GUIs on *nix systems.

<comment><USER24> Look at Xubuntu. It looks nothing like older windows.

You can apply themes to xfce that make it look just as modern as anything else. Debian tend not to go in for applying sparkle to their default installs, so try not to judge based on their defaults.

<comment><USER25> Since we're talking about DEs, and not distributions, could you let us know what theme Xubuntu uses?

I don't think many of us have the commitment to install another distro just to try out an xfce skin... :(

<comment><USER24> LOL, sure, should have mentioned rather than just asserting and running away...

IIRC Xubuntu (or at least the last Xubuntu install I used) has 'greybird' as its default theme.

On debian you'll want to install the "murrine-themes" package to get this and a whole load of others. To change Xfce themes completely it seems you need to go into settings->Appearance _and_ settings->Window Manager, which is a bit clunky.

I'm not going to say it's the most awesome thing in the world EVAR, but after years of Gnome 2 and 'clearlooks', it's refreshing.

<comment><USER25> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just my opinion - I think this is insane. I literally cannot believe a massive distro like Debian has decided to switch defaults to such an ugly and outdated DE when Gnome is doing such good work switching to Wayland so they can support more than just desktops. Meanwhile Xfce devs are all "X works fine so why switch to Wayland?" as if there aren't a million great reasons. This is the sort of decision that causes people to joke about how we'll never see the year of the Linux desktop.

<comment><USER27> Ugly and outdated? I use the theme from Xubuntu [1] and there's nothing outdated about it, besides not being adjusted for tablets.

[1] [http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/199/e/d/xubuntu_13_04...](http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/199/e/d/xubuntu_13_04_default_theme_by_gridcube-d6e1u9l.png)

<comment><USER26> It uses X. That itself is outdated before I start talking about out of date design principles.

I personally don't like the black menu bar, I don't like the big childish icons, I don't like the slate gray gradient window box and I don't like the UI design's 2000s take on Finder. It's just not pretty in my opinion. And that does count to me, and probably the majority of end users too.

<comment><USER28> > It uses X. That itself is outdated before I start talking about out of date > design principles.

All major window managers and desktop enivornments use X today. Some, such as KDE, Gnome and Enlightenment have begun work towards becoming Wayland compositors, and their underlying GUI libraries (Qt, GTK, and so on) towards supporting Wayland instead of X. However, you'll be hard pressed to find any significant number of them running on anything but X _today_.

I too want Wayland to succeed and take over for X, and when that day comes, XFCE should hopefully be ready for it. Complaining that XFCE uses X today, though, makes no sense.

> I personally don't like the black menu bar, I don't like the big childish > icons, I don't like the slate gray gradient window box and I don't like the > UI design's 2000s take on Finder. It's just not pretty in my opinion.

This, it seems to me, is just an expression of your personal taste. While that certainly matters do yourself, it doesn't really bring much to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd somehow mistakenly dismissed XFCE as being "too fiddly" years ago, but I've recently switched to it and I love it. It's like a saner, more configurable GNOME 2.6 with pleasant defaults.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone use the Debian default desktop? I always figure it to be a distro whose users prefer to customize. I personally tend to set it up with the netinst image, with no GUI, then install a WM and set up ~/.xsession manually..

<comment><USER16> The desktop is pretty much the only thing I bother to customise when installing a distro. (that and maybe partitions, if it's not in a VM.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm running XFCE on a 4 years old laptop with 1 GB RAM. GNOME and KDE aren't even options here, but XFCE is beautiful, efficient, fast and never makes me feel the laptop is so old.

<comment><USER32> Yeah. I run old hardware and when I switched from Xfce to Openbox because "it's lighter" I almost fell out of my chair when I realized my Openbox system was using twice the resources. Of course it was my fault and I changed it up (no more compositing!) but I gained a lot of respect for Xfce in that process.

Also when building a DE from scratch it's nice to know that any of the Xfce pieces will 'just work'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you guys like Debian and want a beatiful, fast DE and WM try Crunchbang. Used to be an Ubuntu and Mint guy. Even tried Xubuntu. I settled on Crunchbang, based on openbox, mainly because it is easy to configure, sensible out of the box and is even faster than XFCE distributions.

Here's a screenshot with WebStorm, gVim and Terminator which can split panes (although I use tmux most of the time).

[http://imgur.com/nL4VGH4](http://imgur.com/nL4VGH4)

That's my custom theme. The default theme is beautiful too.

</comment><comment><USER34> Make it less bloody ugly. I was horrified how awful Xfce looked in Wheezy compared to Ubuntu Quantal. So wish Xfce would upstream the Xubuntu changes.

</comment><comment><USER35> It was the switch to Gnome3 that drove me to CentOS...although I'm not sure xfce would be enough to make me want to go back.

<comment><USER36> Well there's nothing stopping you from using any desktop environment you want on pretty much any distro, this is just about the default choice on a new installation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> * The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind.

it's kind of sad, Gnome was reputed for it's accessibility support

<comment><USER38> I think what is trying to be said is that they have to evaluate accessibility support for both Xfce and Gnome3 before finalizing this decision. Gnome is (or was?) reputed for this as you say, and must be part of the decision to switch away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Why not LXDE? I've been putting that on my debian VM's when I need a GUI, it seems reasonable.

<comment><USER40> I can't speak for Debian, but for my money, XFCE is more integrated, LXDE isn't. SSH agents aren't installed, for example, and aren't trivial to manually install. Looking for LXDE help has you palmed off to Openbox as often as not. I think LXDE looks better - XFCE looks coarse and ungainly, but there is better integration. Still not perfect, but if it's moved to be the debian default, there will be more eyes on it.

<comment><USER39> Is the XFCE/xubuntu community more active? I suppose that plays a big role on how much ongoing development activity there is...

<comment><USER34> The Xfce forum is helpful, and they do happily answer Xubuntu questions. (Frequently the answer is "yeah, pull that in from GNOME" or "that hasn't been written yet, please do!" but that's fair enough in many cases ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is awesome and I hope XFCE remains the default. I will love and use debian forever, either way.

</comment><comment><USER42> xfce4 is a good choice for Debian it is lightweight and easy to use. KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now, but it's too resource hungry to be the default Debian environment, imho.

<comment><USER43> "KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now"

I strongly dissagree.

<comment><USER44> ""KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now" I strongly dissagree." I strongly disagree with you. KDE is not perfect but at least gives freedom to customize it a lot, and without need to swing in config files.

<comment><USER43> Configurability doesn't make it better, in the contrary, it has to many vane options to my taste.

<comment><USER44> But at least, configuration makes you free. KDE don't make you slave of his "vision" tm

<comment><USER43> I've never had that "vision" problem with other desktops, what you say is just your own opinión, nothing else.

<comment><USER34> I remember when I tried GNOME 3 in Debian wheezy. I could not work out how to do anything at all. Literally, the only button to click on was the one to exit. So I did.

<comment><USER43> And I remember the first time I used GNOME 3, it was a great experience, I pressed the Windows key and a few letters and I could launch the program I wanted, I could press the winkey again and have an overview of my openned Windows, I could press ctrl+shif+arrow up or down and I could switch from one virtual desktop to another, I could press alt + the key above tab and I could switch betwen the Windows of the same applications, there was barely the need to use the mouse or navigate in menus to click something, It was an awesome, intuitive and productive experience, cause the desktop was getting out of my way, that was my first experience with GNOME 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's worth bringing up Jamie Zawinski's post on the subject of GNOME (and this was the 1.x-2.x transition!), "The CADT Model": [http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

 _" It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from- scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?"_

</comment><comment><USER45> XFCE is pretty nice. Still not as fast and using as low resources as LXDE, but it's still much better than Gnome 3-based DE's.

</comment><comment> a-l-c-o I tried debian 7.2 default gnome. It feels like bloody Windows Vista. Switched back to the beloved Xfce.

Debian, you are wasting time with that.. thing.

<comment><USER34> I tried Debian Gnome 3 in wheezy.

I decided "right, this is the new user-friendly desktop. Let's see how I go."

I literally couldn't find anything to click on to make it work. Literally nothing. The only button I could find was how to switch it off.

'I recommend this Dusk Till Dawn quote to desktop designers: "Are you such a loser, you can't tell when you've won?".'

<comment><USER46> I can't remember for sure, but I think I was lost at first too. Then I discovered the windows key, and never looked back. I love getting most things done without touching the mouse. Though I did have to install a panel for when I work with more than a few instances of the same program at once (at which point alt tab can sometimes not allow me to differentiate between the instances as fast as I'd like).

I still think they should pop up a short tutorial when you first use it.

<comment><USER34> Yeah. I thought "ok, this is supposed to be user-obvious. Let's see what I can do."

I wonder how that Windows key thing works out for their hypothetical tablet users.

<comment><USER43> With the home key instead of the window key, it is a no brainer.

<comment><USER34> Can you unlock the screen without a physical keyboard yet?

<comment><USER43> Yes, there is a virtual keyboard in the unlock screen.

<comment><USER34> Does it have tilde yet? [http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3017371&cid=4083522...](http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3017371&cid=40835229)

<comment><USER43> I don't know that yet, I'll tell you when I get to my Linux box =).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> On most build systems, it's enough to change a default in one place, and not the same default in two different places.

<comment><USER48> 4 locations, if you count the commit. 1 place actually changes it, the rest are documentation.

/debian/changelog is a highly formalized free form-ish text file explaining what changed since the last .deb package. You could put lorem ipsum in there and the package wouldn't care although it would annoy people.

/debian/control is a list of recommends (why not a "depend"?) I believe this is a cosmetic change only ( 1 or 0 or 0 or 0 logically equals the result of 0 or 1 or 0 or 0, that type of thing )

(whoops edited to note that its some tasksel thing so its more than cosmetic, but for joe average doin all the defaults what matters will be the template file...)

/debian/templates is the sort of free form yet structured debconf question file that actually does the task selection.

<comment><USER49> Note that default dependency takes the first hit, i.e. A or B selects A by default, whereas B or A selects B, so the ordering in the control file does matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Debian's jessie GNOME packages were also woefully out of date until the past 2 weeks. You can finally run GNOME 3.8 which was released over 7 months ago. At this rate they'll always been at least 1 stable version behind and probably end up at 2 behind by the time jessie is frozen next year.

<comment><USER51> It's worse than that. Gnome-shell (probably the most visible part of Gnome) is still at 3.4 in Jessie. It just hit Sid last week or something.

That said, I've used Gnome 3 since it was still in development and grew to love it. After using 3.8 (on Ubuntu Gnome 13.10), I think 3.8's improvements over 3.6 are pretty significant. It feels lighter, faster, smoother overall. The newly redesigned apps (e.g. evince) feel extremely well designed too.

<comment><USER52> Same here. I'm a big fan of Gnome Shell nowadays. Simple, fast, beautiful. No more hours of tweaking my default install of $FAVORITE_DISTRO until it's usable. Love it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Incredible closing sentence.

</comment><comment><USER54> At first I thought this said "Change default desktop to xkcd"

</comment><comment><USER55> Too bad they didnt switch to windowlab. Now that is a lightweight window manager. Amiga style window management!

</comment><comment><USER56> Unity and Gnome3 drove me to xubuntu. Really happy I made the switch.

<comment><USER57> Unity and Gnome3 drove me to lubuntu. Really happy I made the switch.

And I've heard the same or similar from many other people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Who cares?

<comment><USER59> Why click on the thread if you don't care?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> must... resist... urge to troll... (edited for stupidity)

Ok, I kid, I kid... :)

But seriously, I'm thinking of switching back to testing from Ubuntu, if stuff doesn't break too often.

Is anyone here using testing lately, and did it seem fairly solid for daily desktop use?</comment>


Show HN: My 7 month startup, Launchtagg, makes commerce simple and social  - <AUTHOR> https://launchtagg.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I've always found it difficult to sell online. Setting up a website, finding a payment processor, implementing a good shopping cart, and then actually getting traffic is always a headache. Especially, if it's your first time.

I know a lot of people have this same problem so I built Launchtagg. It simplifies the whole process, so you can quickly sell your ebooks, videos, training courses, and anything else digital. It also helps you find people to sell too.

I had the idea in late january, and it took me 7 months to actually build because I had 0 programming experience. All I knew was wordpress. So to overcome this, I buckled down and spent hundreds of hours learning to program, built a couple simple things as tests, and then spent a thousand more hours coding Launchtagg from scratch. It was a humbling experience, as I've never done anything more difficult. But I think the end result turned out very well.

This is a great community, so I'm giving early access to anybody who signs up from HN. If your interested, you can check the link out here:

Link : <https://launchtagg.com>

What's the biggest problem you guys have when it comes to selling online? And do you think something like this would be useful?

And Happy Thanksgiving!</comment>


The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html <comment><USER2> XMPP is alright. It will never be perfect, but it keeps improving, and that's important.

Personally I believe more in having people be in control of their own communications than having ultra secure crypto. No crypto is going to help if a single actor can see all metadata or decide who is allowed to communicate.

Therefore I strongly believe in federation and allowing everyone to choose their client, service and server.

</comment><comment><USER3> > But XMPP gives you another freedom. The freedom to choose your user > experience. User experience describes the way we use something.

I don't think users care about the freedom to choose the UX. They just want a good UX and that's it.

> Slack in turn fails to provide a decent mobile experience.

According the ratings of app stores, users are pretty happy with them.

> PGP has been around in the XMPP community for several years but is currently > being reworked into a more modern extension called XEP-0374: OpenPGP for > XMPP Instant Messaging that promises to make the onboarding easier for > novice users.

I don't get how something OpenPGP will make onboarding any easier for XMPP. New XMPP users who might have an automatically generated account somewhere, still start with an empty contact list. Onboarding is definitely the _key_ issue for mobile XMPP.

</comment><comment><USER4> > XMPP just works everywhere. You only need one account to cater to all your > instant messaging needs. If your workflow changes you just pick a different > client.

AFAIK, this is painfully wrong and one of the main reasons XMPP struggles. Nearly all of the modern 'messaging needs' are provided by the kind of XEPs mentioned in the article. If you don't have an account with a server that supports all of those XEPs, your needs will NOT be met. There is no easy way to tell if your server supports them, either. The situation is atrocious from a user perspective. As far as mass adoption is concerned, this puts XMPP so far out of the league of centralized IM that it's eating twizzlers in the parking lot.

There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers. Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work. This lack of homogeneity between servers means users pile up in the 'better' servers, which is apparently the opposite of what federation is supposed to achieve (?).

What if you want the freedom to switch from the Conversations server to a different public server but maintain the same feaureset? Good luck with your Google searches. Keep a table of your relevant XEPs nearby!

I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers to maintain a baseline of XEP parity. In it's current state there is absolutely no way to convince the average user of XMPP's superiority. The experience is far too inconsistent. At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.

<comment><USER2> > There is no easy way to tell if your server supports them, either.

False. XMPP has excellent feature negotiation capabilities.

> everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is > maintained by the developers

No, you just need to use a server maintained by someone who actually maintains it.

> Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work.

Feature negotiation and graceful fallback, is it really that hard?

> I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers > to maintain a baseline of XEP parity

Incentives, yes. In the (core) protocol? No. I think publishing a new "XMPP Compliance Suite $year" XEP is better than throwing the entire thing out, in a couple of years when everyone suddenly wants a different feature set.

> At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.

A clean slate which will be obsolete in just a few years, and will have to be invented from scratch all over again.

<comment><USER5> I'd be surprised if Matrix is obsolete in a few years. The difference between the Matrix and XMPP spec structure is simply that Matrix is a single curated monolithic spec rather than a set of XEPs. So there's only one true standard at any given point, at a given version (unless someone forks it). We've been evolving it quite rapidly so far, adding modules for the various different use cases out there ([http://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.1.0.html#featur...](http://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.1.0.html#feature- profiles)), and I don't see that rate of evolution slowing down any time soon.

And even if we did go and entirely rearchitect Matrix (e.g. making it entirely P2P, which is certainly a thought experiment we keep in mind), one would just go bridge it into the existing Matrix ecosystem and migrate as desired.

<comment><USER6> > We've been evolving it quite rapidly so far, adding modules for the various > different use cases out there [...], and I don't see that rate of evolution > slowing down any time soon.

> And even if we did go and entirely rearchitect Matrix (e.g. making it > entirely P2P, which is certainly a thought experiment we keep in mind), one > would just go bridge it into the existing Matrix ecosystem and migrate as > desired.

Are you saying you might end up in a situation where "fragmentation of features between clients and servers is common"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A device-global push protocol isn't entirely useless, since the device OS can wake all the clients at once if it needs to, synchronizing network activity. But I agree it's a significant overhead if you're able to just hold open the TCP session, as well as concentrating yet more information into a single entity you don't get to choose.

<comment><USER8> Push messages on GCM are going through immediately. The push server is not queuing up messages to send them all at once. I admit that could be helpful but Google is not doing this either.

The alarm manager - where apps can schedule to be run at some point in the future - is in fact grouping those events together. But that happens entirely independent of GCM. The Alarm Manager is part of Android where as the push service is a proprietary Google service.

<comment><USER7> Oh, okay - in that case I slouch corrected.</comment></comment></comment>


Satellite images show Grand Bahama before and after Dorian's wrath - <AUTHOR> https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/09/03/weather/hurricane-dorian-bahamas-before-and-after-wxc-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> This is a flawed compare. One is a satellite image, while the other looks like street view. Bad example CNN....

<comment><USER3> Plus they are not aligned, how hard could that be?

The only good CNN is the DL type ;]</comment></comment>