ClojureC, a compiler for Clojure that targets C as a backend - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/schani/clojurec <comment><USER2> This is neat.

What worries me about this and similar efforts (like <https://github.com/takeoutweight/clojure-scheme>) is that clojure's standard library design assumes that the underlying runtime will be do some kind of polymorphic method inlining.

For example: the sequence library is all defined in terms of ISeq, which basically requires a "first" and "rest" to be defined for the data structure in question. These are polymorphic: there are different implementations of these for different data structures (list, vector, map, etc). So a dispatch step is required to choose the right one. In clojure-jvm, this is implemented using a java interface; this means the jvm will inline calls to said methods when they're being used in a tight loop. And if you use the standard library, calls to 'first' and 'rest' are going to be inside nearly all of your inner loops.

Compare this to a normal lisp or scheme: 'first' and 'rest' (or 'car' and 'cdr', whatever) are monomorphic. They only work on the linked-list data structure. So compiling these directly down to C functions makes perfect sense and incurs no performance penalty.

So in summary: clojure assumes theres a really smart JIT which is helping things along. This means it's not as suitable for alternate compilation targets as you might want it to be.

I wonder if there's something clever you could do here. Vtables could be reordered based on expected usage, certainly. Clojure can already do some measure of type inference, so this could be used for AOT inlining when it's available. Even if it's not, perhaps several versions of a call could be speculatively generated based on what the compiler _does_ know already. The normal polymorphic inline caching technique could perhaps be abused to apply here. But it's hard to see how any of this can work in absence of a profile or heavy hinting.

(not a compiler writer, just interested in the problem)

<comment><USER3> You can do polymorphic method caching/inlining with a hybrid ahead of time / JIT compiler targeting C _reasonably_ easily. The code fragments required for caching at least will be small, and code to generate them at runtime is not a big deal. I'm playing with a Ruby compiler, and Ruby badly needs these type of optimizations to get fast, so I've spent a fair amount of time looking at it.

For a fair amount of cases you can do static analysis to get good guesses at likely types, even for cases where you can't be sure. E.g. speculatively even looking near call sites by method _name_ to see if you can guess the type of objects that will get passed in looks to get you a reasonable chance at guessing at the top contenders to let you speculatively generate inlined versions without creating too much junk. But to get the most performance out of this you're likely to need to be prepared to do some very basic JIT.

<comment><USER2> >E.g. speculatively even looking near call sites by method name

That is devious and fantastic.

> But to get the most performance out of this you're likely to need to be > prepared to do some very basic JIT.

Yeah. But the attractive targets here are places where you can't have a JIT: embedded systems and iOS.

<comment><USER3> When you spend a few years speculating about what it would take to efficiently compile Ruby as statically as possible (I love Ruby, but I hate moving parts), devious becomes second nature...

The idea of speculatively looking at method names comes from testing that to create vtables ahead of time for Ruby classes, to avoid hash tables in the common-case.

As it turns out, most method on most Ruby classes are the ones inherited from Object or other standard classes, and the number of classes is usually fairly constrained, so again speculatively looking at method names in the compile- time available source and allocating sparse vtables for the most common names results in relatively little waste.

And it reduces typical method lookup to a vtable lookup for common methods, with expensive method dispatch becoming much more rare. There's the tradeoff between theoretical horrible blowup in vtable waste from apps dynamically adding tons of methods and tons of classes, with a unique vtable slot required for each method name across all classes, vs. falling back to doing hash-table lookups all the way up the inheritance chain for "unusual" method names ones you reach certain thresholds for waste.

You do incur the cost of propagating vtable changes down the inheritance tree when methods are dynamically redefined in other places than leaves, but it is fairly rare to see apps where this happens at a very high rate, and the number of subclasses usually fairly small, so it is likely to be quite cheap. Doing it that way is something I first saw in a technical report by (now) prof. Michael Franz from '93 or '94 on "Protocol Extension" for Oberon.

You can probably also get some decent gains by adding heuristics to give preference to names that appears to be used in loops when picking names for the vtables to reduce the need of any JIT'ing.

<comment><USER4> Out of interest, are you actually working on something like this for MRI? As you say, Ruby is in desperate need of optimization.

<comment><USER3> No, I've been off-and-on, toying with writing a "as static as possible" Ruby compiler (see <http://www.hokstad.com/compiler>) - it's been about two years since I last posted an update, but I have one new part complete and another one mostly complete. Just holding off posting for a bit longer because I want to have a bit of a buffer (3-4 complete parts) before I get peoples hope of regular posts up again...

What is there uses vtable's exclusively - I effective punted on the slow path (and so on adding methods at runtime) completely, but keep track of how much of the vtable allocations is wasted space. If/when I get there, the goal is to use various mechanisms like this to determine when to fall back on a slow path, and couple both with polymorphic inline caching when suitable.

EDIT:

I don't see MRI as very interesting to work on, largely because interpreters aren't much fun, and ironically given the amount of time I spend using Ruby, I prefer compilers to be as static as possible. I also prefer my compilers to be bootstrapped in their target language. Hence my "ideal" Ruby compiler would be written in pure Ruby, do a ton of static analysis, with minimal fallback to JIT when users user features that are too dynamic to analyse fully ahead of time

E.g. there's a ton of annoying uses of eval() in Ruby code where a more complete meta-programming API would make it trivial for a compiler to do full ahead of time static analysis, so one big thing an AOT Ruby compiler really need to do is to provide a library of compiler specific meta-programming facilities with a fallback that uses eval() as needed, and either convince people to use it, or provide monkey-patches for a number of popular projects. Some of these uses don't even need eval() in the first places, but uses it just as a quick shortcut because it's simpler...

Just to make clear, I'm not sure when or even _if_ my compiler project will ever get to a state where it's even remotely _useable_ to compile Ruby. I started it out without even having decided to compiler Ruby, mostly to write about various parts of the process of writing a compiler that I find interesting. I find compiling Ruby as incredibly fascinating from a theoretical point of view because of the complexity involved, but unfortunately working on it takes a lot more time and effort than thinking about the problems.

<comment><USER4> I see. Sounds like an interesting project.

Sure, MRI is boring, but it's the best implementation right now (though some may argue that JRuby is better), and it's in desperate need of VM innovations.

Any new compiler/VM starting from scratch will be years away from being available for use in production environments. By the time it's finished, we'll all be using Go. (Sigh.)

<comment><USER3> I think we need both. MRI can keep getting better, as can JRuby (which is an amazing feat, but to me, running on top of the JVM makes it a non-starter) or Rubinius, but they're fundamentally side-stepping the really hard problems.

E.g. nothing will stop MRI from having to interpret thousands of lines of code each time because it can't draw a line between runtime and compile time, while for an ahead of time compiler for Ruby, finding a pragmatic line between what needs to be executed at runtime vs. compile time is essential (consider for example the tendency to do stuff like getting the list of files in a directory and require all of them in turn).

<comment><USER4> We do need both. But some of the things you mention (like constructing vtables) could be applied to MRI's VM model without writing a compiler from scratch. Frankly, I would much rather have large performance improvements now than in 2-3 years.

(I agree about JRuby. I also wonder why Rubinius, which showed so much promise at the beginning, has stagnated. Is it simply the lack of developers?)

<comment><USER3> I agree the performance increase would be great, but I think it needs to come gradually to MRI. E.g. trying to do anything fancy with the old AST-based interpreter would've been pretty pointless. After YARV, it is probably starting to get more attractive, but at the same time they've added method caching which gives a decent amount of the benefits. A vtable will still get faster, but it might not be the most immediately expedient way of speeding things up vs. e.g. Sasadas latest project of adding a generational gc.

Regarding Rubinius, writing compilers for dynamic languages is hard. Most textbooks you'll find cover techniques most suitable for statically typed languages (the best resource I know for starting to catch up on compiling dynamic languages is actually the Self papers). So you need more than an unusual level of interest in writing compilers to be likely to try to tackle a language like Ruby which is tricky even for dynamic languages (e.g. my favorite pet problem to meditate on: What constitutes 'compile time' vs. 'runtime' for ahead of time compiled Ruby?), and even more to actually persevere until you start getting proper results where you can get decent results in _days_ with a simpler language.

It's made worse because of Ruby's _horrendous_ grammar. And I mean that from a compiler writers perspective - as a developer I love to _use_ Ruby to a large extent because the complexities of the grammar means it reads and writes better 95% of the time. But MRI's bison based parser was 6k-7k lines with ugly parser/lexer interplay last time I checked... There are full compilers substantially smaller than that for other languages...

To me, these complexities are part of what makes it fascinating. I firmly believe you can parse Ruby fully with a much, much simpler parser for example. A lot of the ugliness can be abstracted away, and C parser code is rarely good examples of succint code.

I _did_ start playing with MRI years ago, specifically the parser, actually, and started chopping out redundant pieces, but got frustrated and bored with it. That's part of the problem - it's one thing to play around with a toy compiler like I've done, and another entirely to put in the effort to push a major change to MRI through to production quality given the number of years of accumulated history encapsulated in it. Doing the latter as a hobby is a daunting task.

<comment><USER4> Just a note on Rubinius: The PyPy guys seem to have done pretty well at this. I don't know how similar they are to Rubinius; PyPy reduces to a RPython as an initial step, whereas I believe Rubinius compiles to LLVM's LI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So if I wanted to write CLI applications in Clojure, is this my best bet? Cause the JVM is about the least suitable platform I have ever worked with for CLI apps...which is most of what I do. I'm constantly in this pickle of wanting to use Clojure but defaulting to Ruby because the JVM is so terrible at it.

<comment><USER6> If the startup slowness is your problem, look into Nailgun: <http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/>

If that's not your problem with the JVM, what is?

<comment><USER7> Nailgun is not a good solution to the problem. If the JVM startup speed is a problem, your best option is to use something not on the JVM and not use hacks that make it feel faster.

<comment><USER6> That's not true. Yes, it's worth considering outside of the JVM if being on the JVM means your application isn't interactive enough (startup speed doesn't matter for long running, fire & forget tasks).

At the same time, splitting your application into a client/server architecture is not a hack but an engineering decision. There are times when this decision is natural e.g. Music Player Daemon (MPD)[1]. For most CLI applications, there's no clear benefit (but the general approach has no clear downside either - the code overhead of this approach can be brought very low).

Certainly, in a production application you would want to secure the messaging channel (Nailgun doesn't).

[1] A music playing server: <http://www.musicpd.org/>. Some of the clients happen to be command line: <http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients#Command_Line_Clients>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who doesn't use Clojure, but watches it fairly closely, I'd say the least appealing part of Clojure is its reliance on the JVM.

As such, I'd say efforts such as these are greatly welcomed.

<comment><USER9> > As someone who doesn't use Clojure, but watches it fairly closely, I'd say > the least appealing part of Clojure is its reliance on the JVM.

Like it or not, this is what made Clojure successful in the enterprise, at least when compared against other Lisps.

<comment><USER10> Is that based on numbers or a guess? How many Clojure applications are there in comparison to Lisp or Scheme?

<comment><USER9> Based on guess.

I see lots of Java shops now having Clojure code and talking about it at JUGs and how it enables their business.

You just need to have a look at InfoQ, Skills That Matter, Devoxx or Jax for ongoing talks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those interested in Lisp implementations which compile to C, providing cross-platform benefits and a nice FFI, gambit-c and chicken are performant, mature implementations of the Scheme programming language.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why C but not llvm? Structured code generation is always better than string- based one.

<comment><USER13> Can you show a proof for that claim?

I believe it to be nonsense.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure if this is what the previous poster was talking about, but clang has some APIs that let you get access to the AST pretty easily. It's been a really long time since I've looked at it, and at the time I don't think it was exposed as a library API for general consumption. But for example: [https://github.com/bratsche/clang/blob/gtkrewriter/tools/cla...](https://github.com/bratsche/clang/blob/gtkrewriter/tools/clang- cc/RewriteGtk.cpp)

<comment><USER13> What is his definition of better? It sounds like he thinks it's entirely objective, so he should be able to express it clearly and logically.

Does he think that it's technically more powerful? Again he should be able to prove that if that's the case.

Otherwise he's just giving a shitty opinion, and should say that.

I think the claim is nonsense because with inline assembler there is nothing that you cannot express in C that you can with LLVM. So the decision between the two is opinion.

<comment><USER15> > _Does he think that it's technically more powerful? Again he should be able > to prove that if that's the case. Otherwise he's just giving a shitty > opinion, and should say that._

It's not like it's some controversial opinion what he said -- it's both self evident and common place. It's you who offers the more controversial opinion (and in a rude way, to top).

> _I think the claim is nonsense because with inline assembler there is > nothing that you cannot express in C that you can with LLVM. So the decision > between the two is opinion_.

It's not about "expression", and nobody argued that you can express more in LLVM.

This is missing the point by miles!

It's about having more structure and less of an ad-hoc pipeline, which helps with better tooling, error prevention, etc.

(Not only what you wrote is wrong, but even if the original argument was about expression, your opinion would still be wrong. Two things offering equivalent expressive power, does not mean that they are just as good to use in practice at all. Might as well ask "why invent new languages, when assembly can express everything").

The only benefit to using C for something like this is portability, which is something else altogether.

<comment><USER3> > It's not like it's some controversial opinion what he said -- it's both self > evident and common place.

As someone who has written more than one compiler, I don't see how it is self- evident at all. It's also not at all that common-place compared to generating C or asm output textually.

> It's about having more structure and less of an ad-hoc pipeline, which helps > with better tooling, error prevention, etc.

Those provide some benefits, sure. At the cost of massive amounts of complexity in the case of LLVM.

> The only benefit to using C for something like this is portability, which is > something else altogether.

Now it is you who are wrong. Other people have already pointed out, for example, that C provides an easy-to-read intermediate format, and is simple to generate, as other benefits. Not having to deal with a massive C++ codebase is another.

You may disagree that these other benefits are worth it, but for me at least they are (just taking a break from a compiler that generates textual _asm_ because I find even that preferable to dealing with LLVM).

<comment><USER15> Sure, I agree about this: "C provides an easy-to-read intermediate format, and is simple to generate, as other benefits. Not having to deal with a massive C++ codebase is another.".

So portability and less dependencies, plus easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _"Before you can run anything make sure you have GLib 2 and the Boehm-Demers- Weiser garbage collector installed."_

Wow, that's a pretty skimpy list of dependencies. But..

 _"Make sure you're using Leiningen 2."_

..argh, installing that on ubuntu that requires 110 packages. All that just for a build system?

<comment><USER17> > ..argh, installing that on ubuntu that requires 110 packages. All that just > for a build system?

Don't install lein using the OS packaging system (apt, rpm, yum, etc.).

Instead, just grab the `lein` script (linked to from <http://leiningen.org/> ), put it into your ~/bin, set it executable, and you're all set.

<comment><USER18> This. It's a lot easier to do it that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> sadly, this doesn't seem to support any sort of multithreading. Even something as simple as swap! isn't thread-safe in this implementation. So that kills one of the main reasons to use Clojure in the first place.

<comment><USER20> Lack of multithreading seems like a result of the implementation being heavily based on ClojureScript ;) (it's actually pretty cool to see how reusable core.cljs is IMO). I imagine ClojureC will have its uses like ClojureScript does when the JVM is not an option.

</comment></comment><comment> iso8859-1 How does this compare to Chicken Scheme?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is quite nice, on the other hand, one could just use one of the many Lisp compilers existing since years.</comment>


Kartotherian: brand new OpenStreetMap tile server for Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian <comment><AUTHOR> [source: [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps#Getting_Started](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps#Getting_Started)]

OpenStreetMap and the Wikimedia Discovery Department have collaborated to launch a new trial map tile rendering service available at [https://maps.wikimedia.org](https://maps.wikimedia.org) . With this service we hope to encourage our community to create tools and integrations to develop new ways for readers and editors to discover Wikimedia content. We strongly believe that our knowledge engine needs to be powered by multiple entry points and think that maps are a key discovery tool.</comment>


Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up - <AUTHOR> http://bigtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/03/17/flash-vs-hard-drive-battle-heats-up/ <comment><USER2> "Watkins might want to keep his lawyers on speed dial."

I love this phrase!

Could it be the new "You're toast"?</comment>


Ask HN: How do I become the very best? - <AUTHOR>

The Pokemon theme song goes:
> I wanna be the very best
> Like no one ever was
While I don't want to be the _very best_, I'd like to be pretty damn good.
I'm studying for my Integrated Master's degree in Software Engineering right now, 3rd year out of 5.
Fortunately, there's no shortage of jobs where I am located (the EU). Academically, I'm doing well, too: I was a TA, have good grades and maintain very good relationships with my professors.
I love software development. It's the first thing I've been really good at. I think I'm a smart guy, too.
I have, however, very little to show for it, apart from Uni projects and good grades. All of my personal projects simple stuff that grows stale after I frantically hack on it for a couple of days.
Now, I'm trying to make amends: - I got a spot at a summer school/internship at a very prestigious research institute.
- I'm going to create a technical blog where I can at least talk about my quick hacks and record my thoughts on trends.
- I've been trying to always have something going apart from working towards my degree: this summer, I'll be teaching a summer course.
- I've been trying to get international experience. The internship is abroad. I'm also going to be studying at Germany for the next semester at a pretty good university.
I'd like to take advantage of HN's userbase to ask for help:
Do you have any recommendations for me?
How can I groom myself for the top companies?
How can I become the very best?
Thanks in advance.
(note: throwaway account) <comment><USER2> Consider answering questions on stackoverflow. I have nowhere near the schooling you do, and basically spend 30 minutes a day clicking through questions and just reading them - even though I can't answer, I'm finding it to be a valuable experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for replying.

I have a stackoverflow profile, and I do try to reply to questions, but my ratio of questions asked to questions answered is 6:1.

That's because for me, as an intermediate programmer, most questions fall on one of these two categories:

\- Incredibly easy: Anyone can answer these.

\- Incredibly hard: Really above my skill level.

<comment><USER2> More or less where I'm at, as well, so I don't have too much more advice :(. I've read all the books and done all the tutorials, so I'm strong on the easy, fundamental stuff but now I'm really not sure how to progress all that much further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You need to sacrifice to be the best. You will never be the best at $x if there's someone who is willing to give up more and focus harder than you.

</comment><comment><USER4> What problem do you want to solve in the world - big or small?

<comment><AUTHOR> Short answer: Big. Definitely.

<comment><USER5> Yeah just think about the problems and then find ways to solve them with what you know. Teach yourself what you don't know.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Offline HN with comments and authors ranked, for plane/train journeys - <AUTHOR> https://hnify.com <comment><USER2> Useful for tunnel part of commutes - a little annoying to have to remember to update, assume its a PoC for an app? something like the Economist's Espresso?

Be handy to have to hand when the wifi cuts out on the train as a distraction

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, The website will check if there is a updated version, and only then will the reload button appear. It works by checking [https://hnify.com/caching.manifest](https://hnify.com/caching.manifest) regularly whose timestamp I change when I update the content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks really useful for commutes.

Will be trying this one out tomorrow I think.

The comments look a bit weird though. Don't fit the look/feel of the rest. Love how the articles are embedded though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you get to use it? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Comments now threadable as well. If there was an historial discussion on the story, links to all the previous discussions will appear just above the comments too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love this, will use for the underground commutes.

Would like to see the stories numbered struggling to sperate the stories.

Also maybe a way to turn the snipits of?

</comment><comment> em-bee nice. looks better than other efforts i have seen.

i don't see a way to access the actual hn comment page of articles though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Anything that would make it more useful for you? In the comments section, just click on the timestamp(about 4 hours ago for example), which will bring you straight to the news.ycombinator.com comment thread.

<comment> em-bee i was kind of expeciting a link that would go directly to the original comment page, as an alternative to the cached comment section, so that i can choose between opening the cached comments or going directly to the live ones

<comment><AUTHOR> Is having each hnify comment linkable in timestamp is an okay solution for now?

<comment> em-bee see above. it doesn't work if there are no comments

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Anything I could do to make it more useful to you? I had full audio transcripts there, but removed it when I realised I never used them.

<comment><USER5> I would love it if you added the Show HN section as well as that's one of my favourite parts of Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestion. It now shows front_page/ShowHN with over 5 points from last 2 days. You can also see your historial posting position: [https://hnify.com/leaderboard.html#Fudgel](https://hnify.com/leaderboard.html#Fudgel)

<comment><USER5> Awesome, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Implementing Autocorrect with 14 lines of Python code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/CprogrammerIbrahim/Autocorrect <comment><USER2> More like 14 lines of code that export 2 other far larger libraries to do the work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is how Python works. Thanks for reminding this obvious fact.

<comment><USER3> I agree with OP that wrapping other libraries isn't what people normally call "an implementation" in python or in any language.</comment></comment></comment>


From while to fold (in F#) - <AUTHOR> http://richardminerich.com/2010/04/the-ted-neward-f-folding-challenge/

<comment><USER2> I just had to take a shot at it...

      (defun counter (numbers)
        (reverse
          (reduce #'(lambda (acc element)
                      (cond ((null acc) (list element 1))
                            ((= (first acc) element)
                             (cons element (cons (1+ (second acc)) (cddr acc))))
                            (t (cons element (cons 1 acc)))))
                  numbers
                  :initial-value nil)))

      (counter '(4 4 5 5 5 3 3))

</comment><comment><USER3> So, in essence, the post shows that you can always transform a for loop into a fold call (you can emulate the loop's mutable variables with function arguments). But I don't think the result is better in any sense than the original, imperative, style.</comment>


NASA Rover Finds Old Streambed on Martian Surface  - <AUTHOR> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-305

<comment><USER2> A quick Mars timeline:

Mars was formed around the time Earth was, but it was blessed with only 11% of Earth's mass and less than 40% of Earth's gravity field. Shortly after cooling solid, its "Noachian Era" was similar to proto-earth: warm, a thick atmosphere, plenty of liquid water on the surface, and probably a significant magnetic field.

But this era was still during the era of the Late Heavy Bombardment, a time in which the last dregs of the solar system were still settling out. Large asteroids still pounded the planets with regularity.

Unlike Earth, Mars had trouble maintaining its liquid iron magnetic field. Since it's much smaller, it cooled and thus congealed faster. And there's growing evidence that asteroid impacts were able to drive enough heat beneath the surface that interior convection was quelled, leading to a fragmented magnetic field.

Without an adequate magnetic field to deflect solar wind, the atmosphere was prone to shedding off pieces of itself into space. This was amplified by the lower gravity which meant holding on to lightweight gasses was even harder.

Over time, Mars cooled to the point where the major forms of tectonics ceased. The water locked up beneath the ground, rusted out pulverized basalt dust from the asteroid impacts, and frizzled in the radiation-baked atmosphere, floating off.

The seas and lakes dried, the rain stopped, and that... was that.

Three billion years later, we arrive on the scene and find out we have a little sibling. Then we send robots. We hope to find life, or evidence that it once lived. Characterizing how water worked in the Martian past is a part of answering that question.

<comment><USER3> I really dislike when scientific theory is presented this way. You imply too much when instead of using phrasings like "We have evidence that suggest X" you say "X happened."

> The seas and lakes dried, the rain stopped, and that... was that.

We think there was water on mars, therefore it is true. Is it too much to put a disclaimer somewhere that explains this is the current consensus but we have more to learn? The truth is that this story is riddled with assumptions, and readers need to know that.

<comment><USER2> I'm not a scientist, just a pithatician. I have no formal or informal education in this matter and my understanding is strictly derived from pleasure reading. But I think there's enough evidence to back up this general narrative without throwing asterisks everywhere.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by "pithatician"? Really, absolutely no results searching the web or trying to translate it. O_o

<comment><USER5> I'm not a "pithatician", but methinks it has something to do with the word "pith" and its Variant "pithy". A quick google of said terms yielded the following points of note:

 _Pith is the central idea or essence of something. If you're in danger, you could exclaim, "I would greatly appreciate it if someone would provide assistance." Or, you could get right to the pith of your point by shouting, "Help!"_

Following along this line of inquiry, one is led to consider the possibility (however remote) of this being an example of near-humour. Possibly of the genus: Pun, species: indirect. So, if one were to dress this up, it is perhaps alluded to as a Punnus Indirrectus.

Or, maybe Not. =D

<comment><USER2> Ding ding ding! A stuffed animal for the man. :]

<comment><USER4> Thank you @001sky for explaining and @jpxxx for confirming. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Not to burst anyone's bubble, but this is not the staggering news it's being made out to be. It is good foundational geology, yes, but water has essentially been confirmed for years now.

The story of Mars in short: flop planet, can't hydrosphere.

There is extremely strong evidence that in the very early years Mars was capable of holding on to a great deal of water: Enough to cover the Southern Hemisphere. The streambed seen here is from that time.

That downer is that this was over 3 billion years ago. Through a variety of processes and for a number of reasons most of Mars' water was lost to space or trapped underground.

The billion-dollar question that would be epic to answer: Did Mars develop Or acquire life during the time it had liquid water on the surface and if so is there any trace of it left, alive or dead?

<comment><USER6> _"... but water has essentially been confirmed for years now. ..."_

From the article, _"... This is the first time we're actually seeing water- transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it ..."_

<comment><USER2> Yes, it is good foundational geology being reported upon.

What's cool about that is that it allows you to directly calculate how much water flow was involved in moving this gravel (taking in to account the much lower Martian gravity), you can use the pattern in which the gravel deposited itself to determine what direction the flow was going, and more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"... NASA's Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence -- images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels -- is the first of its kind ..."_

Why isn't this front page, the implications are staggering.

<comment><USER7> Part of the reason may be that NASA has been crying wolf before. The 'arsenic life' announcement wasn't that long in the past. So people may be a bit wary until the images have been independently analysed.

<comment><USER6> _"... So people may be a bit wary until the images have been independently analysed...."_

Good point. The theory of a flowing river should support all types of evidence at large & small scale: alluvial fans,

 _"... The imagery shows an alluvial fan of material washed down from the rim, streaked by many apparent channels, sitting uphill of the new finds. ..."_

to pebbles and rate of flow of liquids,

 _"... From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep... This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it. ..."_

All directly observable evidence, each piece confirming the conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Out of the set of pictures I find this one the most intriging [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16189.ht...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16189.html)

The cemented section on the mars side is in itself most interesting I find and yet seem unable to state why. Wonderous stuff indeed.

</comment><comment><USER9> _"From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley._

Out of interest, how do we know it was water, and not some other liquid?

<comment><USER2> A good piece of evidence is that the dust of Mars is significantly composed of 'goethite', essentially hydrated iron rust. There's an awful lot of dust, and if you do the work backwards you can get a decent idea of how much water it took to make it happen.

Furthermore, most liquids found at reasonable temperatures aren't all that voluminous, and a number of the minerals scanned and inspected on Mars show evidence of water contact.

Basically, there's not much else it could be. :) That said there's some really cool theorizing on underground carbon dioxide flows that might explain some washouts seen later in Mars's life.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethite>

<comment><USER6> _"... A good piece of evidence is that the dust of Mars is significantly composed of 'goethite' ..."_

you mean these? _"small spherical hematite balls, dubbed 'blueberries,'"_ ~ [http://www.lifescientist.com.au/article/436306/iron_blueberr...](http://www.lifescientist.com.au/article/436306/iron_blueberries_may_sign_microbial_life_mars/) Goethite: learn something new every day.

<comment><USER2> Almost! The blueberries are hematite, Fe2O3, an iron oxide. Goethite is FeO(OH), an iron oxyhydroxide. Both strongly indicate water went in to making them but the blueberries imply they were submerged in water whereas goethite doesn't necessary require anything but water vapor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real question is where did the water go and does it still exist somewhere on Mars? Finding a little bit of ice or water is one thing, finding an old streambed is another — but potentially finding an underwater ocean/ecosystem filled to the brim with undiscovered organisms makes me excited not only from a study of different organisms perspective but perhaps because the key to curing diseases that plague Earth might be found on Mars not to mention unlocking other discoveries like how to live longer and even more exciting finding organisms that don't age and have been alive since Mars was created.

My mind is teeming with excitement of the possibilities, is anyone else as excited as me?

<comment><USER11> I almost hope no traces of life are found.

If traces of life are found, however distant in the past, it seems quite likely that any Mars colony or even exploration would be delayed by decades, if not longer. Preservationists would be against any interaction whatsoever.

<comment><USER12> When have preservationists ever had their way, though? Granted, life on Mars would be a unique case, but I'm not sure you need to worry about them.

<comment><USER13> As someone who would take such a preservationist position, I think this is my best argument: It is morally inconsistent to think that super-intelligent life should leave us intact if we were found, and at the same time be willing to interfere with vastly less advanced life, for our own gain.

<comment><USER14> If we aren't going to mars to destroy life on mars. Why should we expect that the super intelligent species will try to destroy us?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No they didn't find a "streambed". They found a bunch of clasts, with pebbles that wind couldn't move. Perhaps they were moved by something solid rather than liquid. Perhaps that was some kind of ice.

It's tiresome hearing of the "piling evidence" for water on Mars. Find some damn water. Prove it by melting it then boiling it on camera in a container with a thermometer.</comment>


Meteor – The next Ruby-on-Rails? - <AUTHOR> http://www.matrixpartners.com/blog/meteor_the_next_ruby_on_rails/ <comment><USER2> Yeah so, I suck profoundly at web application security, even on your everyday vanilla CRUD app. Having all of this logic available on the client needs tptacek approval before I will go anywhere near it.

Then again, I'm quite technologically conservative. I'm sure this is very exciting for early adopters but I'm not going to put any time into it until I know I can build something useful with it.

<comment><USER3> Your security should always be behind the API not in front of it and you should never rely on obscurity as a security measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They are going after the enterprise market.

There are two solid tells:

1> Raising $11M+ led by AH has a lot to do with giving CTOs some assurance about Meteor's commitment level. One can draw a parallel with Cloudera and how it gave Hadoop legitimacy with Enterprise customers.

2> The same enterprise CTOs identify strongly with Rod Johnson (Spring founder) who is on the Meteor board. He's someone who understands the Java enterprise space intimately and knows how to disrupt it (given his SpringSource exploits).

I also don't think the Github / Asana / Meteor connections are incidental. It's being positioned as a whole new way to execute on tech projects within the Enterprise IMO.

</comment><comment><USER5> The obvious question which comes to mind is? How is Matrix Partners going to get a solid return on this investment?

Is (the company behind) Meteor going to follow the Red Hat route? Or are they going to license the platform to developers for a fee (i.e. the Sencha model)?

Although I'm impressed by anyone who lands a major VC deal, I simply don't understand why $11.2 million is needed to build out a development framework.

Red Hat started selling consulting services (among other services and products) well after Linux was well entrenched in the market.

The same goes for Sencha (a combination of Ext JS, jQTouch and Raphaël). I.e. the products were proven, the time was right to start offering paid-for services around these products.

It's a sincere question, not being cynical, it's a great deal for the folks behind Meteor. It just doesn't make business sense to me from an investor point of view.

<comment><USER6> It's not just a development framework, I'm pretty sure they said they planed on offering hosting for apps too, actually you can already upload your meteor apps to yourapp.meteor.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The big difference is Rails was already powering 37 Signals' success. Meteor is a framework without a major success story. APIs that are not direct extractions tend to be problematic.

<comment><USER6> But the first version of 37 Signals product was a basic todo list. Meteor was released with a real-time collaboration todo list and a chat and other demo apps. Doesn't mean it will be successful though, just a good thing to keep in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok, I'm sure this address places, but if I can access the db api on the client... what's preventing someone on the client from screwing with my database? getting around read/write permissions and such.

<comment><USER9> Wide open DB access is for rapid development. In production, which meteor is totally not ready for yet, you'd restrict the db, have proper auth(which isn't built into meteor yet), and call restful methods from the client that have both client side and server side validations.

<comment><USER8> so, it's no where near done yet then? cause this is in the FAQ:

Nonetheless, if we were starting a new project today, we would use Meteor. It's open source, so you can decide for yourself if it's finished enough to be useful to you.

<comment><USER9> Yeah thats funny, I don't think they'd really recommend putting a meteor app into production. Auth is still in it's own branch <https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/auth> and meteor's version is "preview 0.3.8". Plus you can't yet do things like respond to restful requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> User submitted meteor app examples:

<http://madewith.meteor.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Node.js: the next evented Tcl?

Seriously though, given what you have to go through to even use Meteor, i.e. finding libs compatible with Node fibers, they are certainly not putting anything "on Rails"

</comment><comment><USER11> Meteor does not take advantage of Node.js async thing. Then, I'm not sure about the advantage of javascript being both on the server and client side. Javasccript just feels weird on the server side. Server-side apps written in Python, Ruby feel much more natural, and perhaps easier to manage.

It'd be nice if meteor allows a different way of handling server-side logic using solutions from the Python or Ruby communities.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Meteor lets you write your entire app in pure JavaScript" And there is my problem.

I guess my alternatives are Rails/Sinatra or Django/Bottle ?

<comment><USER13> FYI, Django/Flask would be the better Python analog; Flask is more similar to Sinatra in its structure (not just syntax), and it was in fact modeled after Sinatra.

But as for your main point, I agree - I don't see the appeal of writing an entire application in Javascript. You pick the best tools for the job, rather than picking one and shoehorning it into every use case. Server-side and client-side needs are different, so I don't see any problem in using a different language on each side.

To preempt the responses of 'But it's so much easier to use one common language for an entire stack', I'll have to say that, at least for me, passing data between client and server feels no easier (syntactically _or_ conceptually) in Node.js than in Python/Ruby. YMMV.

<comment><USER14> Some people like writing JavaScript.

<comment><USER12> I'm OK with that, I like writing old, insecure code in C :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it's fair to say this is an example of the general rule that the answer to a headline in the form of a question is always "No".

Rails and Django will be replaced with something else sooner or later, but I have a hard time believing Meteor is it given their goal of being a commercial/enterprise offering.

</comment><comment><USER16> I noticed Meteor outputs your entire web app to a single JavaScript file, which seems peculiar to me. Is it seo-friendly? Is this something that will scale? Is it mobile-friendly? Are the any drawbacks to this approach? Why would I base a large project on Meteor rather than Backbone.js?

<comment><USER17> It (can be) page load-time friendly, since there's an overhead for each JS file that's sent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not so sure the "next Ruby on Rails" necessarily prescribes a full stack framework like meteor.

They have an impressive demo that showcases what you can do with full stack javascript, but having spent a few years now in that full stack environment.. none of it is new. ie. all of this is out there, just not packaged together.

IMO the next Rails is anti-Rails. It's more about building from the ground up than having all your decisions made for you. (meteor packages?? Fibers?? no thanks.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Why not derby.js?

<comment><USER20> I like where it's headed better, [http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take- on-derby-vs-mete...](http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs- meteor/) except meteor just got a ton of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We worked so hard over the past decade to separate the presentation code from the business logic code. And moving away from SOAP/RPC to simple REST protocol. Then come nodejs and friends like Meteor/Derby/SocketStream/Firebase now trying to undo that separation. Have we gone backward?

<comment><USER22> There is nothing stopping you from separating presentation from business logic in node. The difference is that with single page apps, we're returning to a true client/server model. The server is very basic and easy to write, the server becomes more complex.

Now, while it is true that the goal of meteor is the sharing of code between client and server, that is business logic code (ideally) separated from the presentation code on the client. (Further, we're still a ways away from truly sharing that code.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So they are betting that enterprises are going to start using Node.js and Mongo for their applications?

I remain skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am very interested.

I just wonder about performance and deployment practicality.

One thing is certain though, the days of wondering "Is Java fast enough for this?" are long gone. These days, people have no issue promoting deep stacks far above and beyond any OS platform.

</comment><comment><USER25> Should I assume that this article falls under the Betteridge's Law of Headlines?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone tried to install it in a non RedHat/Debian Linux distro ? I'm running Arch Linux and found Meteorjs in AUR, but it's outdated and I can't update it.

<comment><USER26> You can edit the PKGBUILD from the AUR. change the pkgver to 0.3.8, and update the md5sums to a292c8d0cd2e9269ea71bcd45f2f7908 and 9a7077a8dd3e5a2c9531e2943cba2f43, respectively. This worked for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Meteor I believe is not using the asynchronous nature of Node.js it is using it sequentially. Single reason why I am not using it yet.

</comment><comment><USER28> If it could somehow use standard off the shelf packages rather than 'Smart Packages' then we'd really be cooking.

<comment><USER9> A smart package is just a regular javascript library with a configuration file, heres underscore's: [https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages/unders...](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages/underscore)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What does this mean for developers working on free open-source frameworks that do the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone care to explain why they mentioned the Google Spreadsheet as an example?

<comment><USER31> See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> that read far more like a press release than anything substantial or convincing.</comment>


Netherlands unveils world's first solar bike lane - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/specials/protection-now/environment/netherlands-unveils-world-s-first-solar-bike-lane_a-35-334.html

<comment><USER3> What problem is this solving? The limiting factor in solar panel production is cost, not places to put them. Why bother building solar panels that can double as roads when we can just put solar panels anywhere else?

<comment><USER4> Maybe because the local politicians are your cronies and enable grant-grabbing from the EU? For 3M€ you can put solar panels on at least at least 100 houses and not just have energy for 3 as the article states. Plus they wont degrade or be covered with plenty of dirt or snow in winter.

As always, just follow the money and you can find out what's going on.

<comment><USER5> You clearly have never been to the Netherlands. If there happens to be snow (which it rarely does now), bike lanes get cleared first.

<comment><USER4> I grew up in Germany not far from the dutch border and am an avid cyclist. My point is that at the time being you can produce far more efficiently solar energy with putting solar cells on roof tops and you are being ripped off tax payers money. Once you run out of roof tops there is not much of development needed to add a 1cm glass plate on top of a solar cell. It is not like developing a fusion reactor. You are legally stolen 2.7M€ because you can supply three house for just 30.000€.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wasn't that idea debunked as impractical multiple times?

EEVblog #632 - Solar Roadways Are BULLSHIT! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds)

<comment><USER7> Might be just me, but I really can't stand his way of talking for more than five minutes. Seriously, I really wonder, is it just me who feels this way about that way of speaking?

And it's not just how he says it, he talks so much around it... For example he says:

> Now, one of the major claims is that well these things generate excess > energy and yeah they probably will under decent conditions and it'll > generate decent revenue and it'll pay for themselves. Well, let's do some > calculations on that. This will be fairly simplistic but it'll give us a > good [ballpark?]. You can go a little deeper into the lifecycle analysis and > all sorts of stuff which you won't worry about. Now, I'm gonna be incredibly > generous yet again and I'm gonna assume that the LEDs consume no power at > all. So we're just looking at this figure up here that we've got 380Wh/m2 > per day. Remember, that's pretty much an ideal practical maximum, a fair, > you know, a good [location?]. So, let's have a look at the figures. Shall > we?

Filtering it down to the content, we get:

> They claim to be profitable, but that is probably under ideal conditions. > Let's do some basic calculations. For simplicity I'll leave out the LEDs and > go with the ideal maximum of 380Wh/m2 per day.

That took two minutes and I didn't even make it to the results before clicking away. I just can't stand it. Anyone else having this?

\---

But in any case, according to the article this is the first ever live test. He's talking about some kickstarter apparently, they didn't make it I guess?

<comment><USER8> I love Dave Jones video so really I don't know what you are talking about. Maybe you don't like Australian accent?

For his rant videos, he does put less time and improvise more, this cause that kind of videos. It's not representative of his usual videos.

The indiegogo campaign he is talking about did make it, well beyond their goal, they got $2.2m while they were only asking $1m.

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar- roadways](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand this is an experimental project, but how much electricity / for how long could you buy for 3 million euros (800+ years?) or how many rooftop cells could be installed? It's an excessive expense with no visible yield down the line.

<comment><USER10> it's probably funded with some EU money, the spend a lot of money on all kinds of stuff to not have to depend on oil in the future..

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cost and environmental metrics for this project and the whole idea of solar roads simply makes no sense. One has to wonder what's at play here. Why is something like this funded when it makes no sense?

From the article:

      - It's 30% less efficient than roof-mounted systems
      - Each set of panels is encased in concrete and glass
      - These systems cost 3x more to install

My notes on the above:

The 30% drop in efficiency is a dream. It's worst than that. Fill the road with bikes dirt, trash, grease, oil and surface abrasions (or cars in the case of a future solar road) to get real numbers. This simply isn't sensible. It's akin to building a solar array and planting huge trees over it.

The fact that the panels require thick concrete and thick truck-proof glass makes this terribly expensive. There's an environmental and energy cost here.

In other words, environmentally, it takes a lot more pollution (waste materials and the overall industrial process) to make each of these panels than it does to make panels that don't have to support a truck. Imagine these modules being made in China to be shipped via tanker truck to Europe or the US while burning millions of metric tonne's of nasty polluting bunker fuel.

Ditto for energy. It takes energy to make, transport and install heavy glass and concrete. I wonder if these panels will ever make back the energy required to manufacture and install them. No data on this, of course, just educated conjecture on my part. I do think I'm right.

On the matter of cost, it should be obvious that such an installation is massively more expensive than roof-mounted panels. I would go as far as suggesting this might be massively more expensive even in the case of roof mounted panels when a structure has to be built to support them.

Maintenance costs would be very high, requiring constant washing, cleaning, removal of leaves and dirt and polishing just to maintain the substandard energy production level offered.

What would the cost and performance metrics be if you took the same length bike road, built a structure over the entire length and mounted the panels atop this structure? My guess is that cost would be significantly lower. Maintainability would be massively cheaper and easier. And energy production efficiency would gain perhaps an order of magnitude when compared to a road full of bicycles, dirt, leaves, etc.

Such quick analysis --didn't even have to open a spreadsheet-- makes me believe projects like these have to be politically driven at some level. I can't see any economic or technical angle whatsoever under which something like this makes sense even at a small scale. And I don't think that scale makes it better.

I wonder if someone familiar with what led to the approval of such a project might be able to shed some light with further details.

EDIT: Spelling. Added a bit about maintenance.

EDIT #2: To address the "if we covered every rooftop we would only produce 25% of the energy the country needs."

What a fantastic problem to have that would be!

Look, at that point you build steel structures atop all the main train tracks and mount solar arrays kilometers long all over the country.

Not enough? Build similar structures atop roads where it makes sense and put solar arrays there.

Not enough? Can you add more wind power.

Not enough? Can you add wave/tidal power generation

Not enough? Can you add nuclear.

Not enough? Can you make a push for more efficient power utilization? BTW, this is probably the best thing the world could do.

Not enough? Well, if the goal is to be 100% solar --which might not be sensible-- you are going to need to use all available surface area as efficiently as possible. Destroying your roads to then install solar roads is unlikely to produce the desired results.

<comment><USER12> It's the first in the world. It's only 70 meters long.

It should be obvious to everyone here that this is just an MVP.

What better way to prove or disprove the idea? Measure how it performs in the real world, with dirt, abrasions, rain and temperature variation.

Then iterate.

If it's not feasible at all, then you stop.

<comment><USER13> > _" this is just an MVP"_

I think you could make a significantly more minimal MVP than this. A single panel of a couple square meters, for a lot less than $1.5m euros, embedded in a pre-existing path. Maybe a few in different locations around the country. Monitor how they perform. Then if it's anywhere close to viable, move to a bigger model.

<comment><USER14> OK. So this is one or two iterations after the MVP. You don't go from couple of square meters to replacing all the roads in one step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone produced a long-term, economic and environmental study of solar roads yet?

<comment><USER16> That's actually what this is for. Since the article is linked to the BBC worldwide site, I can't actually read it here in the UK - go figure - so I don't know what it said already, but here's the FAQ from the company building this path...

[http://www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/](http://www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/)

<comment><USER17> Oh, that's unfortunate.

Here's the Der Spiegel article, the BBC piece linked to:

[http://www.spiegel.de/reise/aktuell/solarradweg-in-den- niede...](http://www.spiegel.de/reise/aktuell/solarradweg-in-den-niederlanden- solarzellen-unter-den-reifen-a-998080.html)

Hopefully you can Google-translate it in Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> i can't help but think piezoelectricity would be better for a road - <USER2> depends on traffic to create power

<comment><USER19> That's not really a good idea. It almost certainly will not produce more electricity than the extra cost of fuel required to actuate any piezo materials. It'd be a net loss, in the form of heat.

Better off looking for ways to reduce rolling resistance on road surfaces.</comment></comment>


AT&T et al. fight against higher upload speeds in $20B FCC program - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/att-fights-for-slower-internet-speeds-in-fccs-rural-broadband-program/ <comment><USER2> I never understood why all the big ISPs force people into such asymmetrical plans (factor of 10 where i live). The available bandwidth with a standard cable model is symmetric isnt it? If it were just a case of typical industry rent seeking there should be some kind of plan available with decent upload, but there is nothing for ordinary consumers. Is it a vertical integration/IP cartel issue?

<comment><USER3> Maybe at ISP scale you can cache a ton of content, so a good chunk of client's inbound payload does not requiring peering, while most of the uploads do.

<comment><USER4> With Netflix you can have edge appliances that have content caches, and you can have various accelerators from the big CDNs, but with TLS being mainstream you can't just stick an http caching proxy on the wire.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Vice Media's 4.5B valuation an illusion? (Updated) - <AUTHOR> http://vicemediakit.com <comment><AUTHOR> AUTHOR NOTE: I discovered news.Y from traffic statistics to an earlier version of this article. The article remains a "work in progress" but has been significantly updated.

[http://vicemediakit.com](http://vicemediakit.com) redirects to [https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/vice-media-kit- warning-...](https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/vice-media-kit-warning-for- advertisers-25ad0600f61d)

If self-posting is banned I'll delete this. Otherwise I'll try to answer any questions.

SUMMARY: Print circulation numbers multiplied by 10, traffic multiplied by 4-10 times and dodgy hiring practices. All these corporate shenanigans, to me, add up to the largest house of cards in the media world.

ABOUT ME: After getting my M.Arch I realized I was in a unique position to write a book on Vice Media. I wrote it because I believe click-fraud and anti- competitive practices are drowning out the honest players in the media world.</comment>


The Commodore 8520 Dual Drive Floppy Disk – Pagetable.com - <AUTHOR> https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1155 <comment><USER2> I can't get over how low the density of components on the board is.</comment>


Show HN: Umbrella – Simple Physical and Digital Security Advice in Your Pocket - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella <comment><USER2> This is a really cool idea. I always wanted to do something like this with just the very basics to get friends up to speed (people who unfortunately generally have very little patience for security).

There are a couple of introductory ebooks/guides I like to recommend (see below), but I have yet to see an app like this.

* The CryptoParty Handbook [http://cryptoparty.is/files/cryptoparty-handbook-2013-08-21/...](http://cryptoparty.is/files/cryptoparty-handbook-2013-08-21/cryptoparty-handbook-2013-08-21.pdf)

* EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense [https://ssd.eff.org/en](https://ssd.eff.org/en)

* FLOSS Basic Internet Security [https://en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/basic-internet-security/b...](https://en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/basic-internet-security/basic-internet-security.pdf)

* FLOSS Tech Tools for Activism [https://en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/tech-tools-for-activism/t...](https://en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/tech-tools-for-activism/tech-tools-for-activism.pdf)

Just one thing I noticed while using the app, a slight swipe right or left was enough to bypass the Terms of Use (without pressing Accept). I initially did this accidentally while trying to read the terms. I'm not sure whether this is the intended behavior?</comment>


Ask PG/HN: Why does PG list Sam Altman among the 5 most interesting founders? - <AUTHOR>

I wonder why he lists him here: http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html.<p>I have never met Sam Altman and never seen him speak in public, but if I didn't know about YC, I surely wouldn't have known about Loopt or Sam Altman. I live in Europe and Loopt is pretty much non-existent here (all 4sq/gowalla). So why is Altman such a great entrepeneur (in terms of strategy/amibition, as stated by PG)? What is extraordinary about the things he does or has done? Why isn't someone like for instance Jack Dorsey on the list? <comment><USER2> I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this:

"We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.

We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.

We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."

I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure many people view bringing in a bunch of friends to seem busier than you really are positively. But I'm not so sure that I like it.

Is this not a deliberate and material misrepresentation of your company? If this were a financial contract being sold, wouldn't this be fraudulent?

<comment><USER4> Geez, the point is that he is really fighting and going all-the-way for his company. A lot of guys would have stopped on the original "No". A lot of guys would have left after having sat in the lobby for a few hours. A lot of guys would have ceased pushing when being asked to show "respectable" company premises. See why he is so respected?

A comment from PG about him I will never ever forget even though I had never heard of Altman before goes like this: "You can leave Sam Altman on an island full of cannibals and when you come back a year later, he is the king of the cannibals."

This is one of the most awesome character traits to ever have. You WILL be successful by being like this, it's just a matter of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Loopt is more successful than HN users would realize. Some of what it does isn't consumer facing, and its users are (like e.g. Stumbleupon's) mostly not HN users.

In any case, you can't measure someone by one company. The formula for the success of a startup includes a random multiplier of roughly zero to a thousand. You can see this from how common it is for successful founders' second startups to fail.

I'm actually more impressed with Sam than when I wrote that. Since then I've talked to him a lot more because he is one of the alumni working part time as YC partners. He has extraordinary energy combined with the judgment of someone twice his age.

<comment><USER6> There's another reason second startups fail: they raise too much money too early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's true Loopt has been something of a failure in the market. That doesn't mean Sam Altman won't become the world-changing entrepreneur PG sees in him.

It's quite possible he's working on the "wrong" project. Many people have had this experience: Traf-O-Data (Bill Gates), Atari games (Steve Jobs), Tribe.net (Mark Pincus), and the list goes on endlessly.

If you had seen Bill Gates working on Traf-O-Data you might have said "that guy is going places" even though Traf-O-Data was ultimately not an important part of where he was going.

<comment><USER8> Love this "wrong project" concept. Have any blog posts or articles about this?

Most of us can see when other entrepreneurs are working on a project that doesn't reflect their core strengths. It's much more difficult to identify when we're the ones going down the wrong path.

<comment><USER7> I didn't consciously realize it, but I suppose this is a lot of what PG talks about in "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas" <http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html>

<comment><USER9> Because smart people act on their ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can approach this in one of two ways. One is to ask why and the other is to gather the data yourself and then just draw your own conclusions. From what I've seen and know about Sam Altman the praise he gets is justified but you might disagree. What you'll get from asking is interpreted responses from the data but if you find out for yourself then you can judge pg's response appropriately. This seems like a weird way to get background on someone when there's google.com available.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to hear some opinions. Checking out his talk at Startup School 08 now. Any other recommendations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sam is one of the sharpest product guys I've ever met. YC office hours with him are always valuable.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think PG's opinion is based on Sam's personality. I don't know the guy, neither do I know PG, but I'm assuming he likes what he sees in Sam, not just what Sam has done so far.

Loopt isn't ever on my mind, neither anyone I know uses it - that sounds bad for a 6 or 7 year old, mass market YC company/product from one of YC's most prized and highest regarded/praised CEOs. So I think Sam might have picked the wrong battle. However, Sam's property that pg likes him for (relentless and tenacious) might be exactly what's preventing him from ditching the loop (no pun intended) and keeping him ditching the idea or jumping ship altogether. Even Sam's tenacity can't save a product people don't care deeply for.

Or maybe I just give pg's judgment of "people" too much credit by default, as an extension of his judgment of companies/products. Maybe pg sucks at picking winning people, but is great at strategy/tactics/products/ideas (just a hypothesis).

Either way, the takeaway for me here is be a bull dog - but don't bark at walls, i.e. be tenacious, but find something worth being tenacious for.

<comment><USER12> Update: Just looked 'em up. They're trying to go from "fun" to "useful" by hooking up with Groupon, I guess that would make them the social Google Maps for Groupon. IMO that's using peer influence (teens) for group purchases (teens don't have CCs usually). Unless, unless they use social influence to bring new coupon purchasers for groupon (affiliate sales or reseller?) or are able to tip groupons that have been historically harder to tip by getting friends to get involved in activities together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html>

"But the most successful founder we've funded so far, Sam Altman, was 19 at the time."

"I realized these tests existed after meeting Sam Altman, actually. I noticed that I felt like I was talking to someone much older."</comment>


Level 3 suffering a global failure - <AUTHOR> http://status.vr.org/2011-11-07-level3-global-failure/

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds like it's a bug in the version of JunOS (Juniper's router operating system) that they're running that is the cause of this.</comment>


Ask HN: Does your life have a purpose? - <AUTHOR> Have you always felt that you had a purpose in life, and regardless of what happens, that conviction never changes even though you don't know exactly what that purpose is?
Did you ever have to make a seemingly selfish decision that hurt someone close to you in order to achieve the focus/freedom necessary to fulfill your purpose?
Context is that I feel I have a binary decision in life right now:
- Simple & safe family life that yields happiness
- Difficult & lonely life that yields self actualization and "making difference" <comment><USER2> 3\. Simple & safe family life that yields happiness and the supportive environment and mental health necessary to complete long-term projects.

4\. Difficult & lonely life that leads to depression and not achieving anything at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Using an unknown 'purpose' to justify being a selfish jerk to someone won't make you any less of a selfish jerk.

If you really want to be a jerk to someone, stop looking for ways to justify it to yourself and just go own your actions - go be your jerky self.

I've personally regretted this every time I've done this (and I've done it more than once), but maybe you're wired differently than me.

</comment><comment><USER4> IMHO, it's naive to imply that a family life and "making a difference" are mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. It's our family life that allows my wife & I to go the extra mile when needed because the other is able to jump in & take care of all the chores & such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Have you always felt that you had a purpose in life, and regardless of what > happens, that conviction never changes even though you don't know exactly > what that purpose is?

Nothing in life is absolute.

> Did you ever have to make a seemingly selfish decision that hurt someone > close to you in order to achieve the focus/freedom necessary to fulfill your > purpose?

Yes.

The right way to approach this is to have an excellent #1 which you can fall back on if you're having trouble with #2.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think both of those options are really about yielding happiness. The first option seems a hell of a lot safer and the second one seems a little uncertain. If it's happiness you're after, then you're more likely to find it in the company of others, than you will in isolation.

</comment><comment><USER8> This letter by Feynman may help clarify your search for purpose: [http://genius.cat-v.org/richard- feynman/writtings/letters/pr...](http://genius.cat-v.org/richard- feynman/writtings/letters/problems)

</comment><comment><USER9> You're young don't think about it so much, just enjoy life and be happy you could be dead tomorrow. Sometimes you just have to be grateful for everything in life. Watch Steve Jobs commencement video maybe that will shine light into your life.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think very few people truly do great things all on their own. Go the social happy route. You cant make a difference if you cant connect with people.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are you young? We tend to be much more idealistic when we're younger.

Why do you feel like there are only those two decisions?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in my late 20s.

I feel there are only 2 decisions because 1) I've felt the unparalleled creative power of controlled, maniacal dedication and 2) I may suffer from typical cognitive distortions despite reasonable achievement and lots of introspection

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't believe in such a thing as purpose unless one uses it as a substitute for some state of mind.</comment>


Development Aid Achieves the Opposite of Its Goals - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,719401,00.html

<comment><USER2> Excerpt:

 _For decades, it has been obvious that development aid as a rule achieves exactly the opposite of that which is desired. Hundreds of economists, disillusioned aid workers and experts in recipient countries have discussed in books and essays the senselessness of the well-intentioned undertaking._

Makes sense to me. Maybe some day I will be able to put it into words...or something. For me, getting well has been deeply rooted in rejecting the "please save me" mentality common among people who are extremely ill. (Feeling a bit hypocritical as I say that since just earlier today I was saying "I don't think I am 'asking' for much (from the universe/'god'/karma/whatever). $100,000 would resolve my financial problems and people with my condition routinely get way more spent on them for staying sick.")

I've spent much of my life pondering how to improve things without stepping in that psychological/social trap. It's not easy. In most cases, programs designed to resolve problems (or "help", more often than not) offer assistance in a manner which actively rewards people for having problems and grievously punishes them for making any real progress.</comment>


Ask HN: As a developer – should I be getting ready for quantum computing? - <AUTHOR> Consider the alternatives to focus on :
1. Being just really good at what I do
2. Climbing the management ladder <comment><USER2> As a developer you should always do the following: 1\. Strive to be really good at what you do. 2\. Work on continuing your education to insure you are keeping yourself knowledgable on new technology. 3\. Work on growing your career, if you have been doing the same job for over three years you are becoming stagnant and complacent instead of growing as a developer and a person.

Now for your question on Quantum Computing, yes you should be getting ready for it, as it will be new technology that will help you grow. It is going to take some time to grasp what quantum computing is, the internals of it, and your going to need some time to go through creating basic applications so you can learn how to apply them to real-world problems.

So, to get you started, as those who sit and wait to be taught are those that get left behind. Here are some resources that may help you on your learning quest: [https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/](https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUWfod_8JsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUWfod_8JsM) [https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/03/quantum- computer-...](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/03/quantum-computer- programming/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_programming) Foundations of Quantum Programming - [https://www.amazon.com/Foundations- Quantum-Programming-Mings...](https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Quantum- Programming-Mingsheng-Ying/dp/0128023066)</comment>


Five weeks development on SpaceVim, It is a hard work - <AUTHOR> https://spacevim.org/development <comment><AUTHOR> SpaceVim has many awesome features, we support c py php go rust .....</comment>


Increasing Battery Life on an Arch Linux Laptop (ThinkPad T14s) - <AUTHOR> https://austingwalters.com/increasing-battery-life-on-an-arch-linux-laptop-thinkpad-t14s/ <comment><USER2> Nice article. Any caveats when translating this setup to another distro (e.g. Ubuntu) or another laptop brands?

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be mostly the same with anything that's systemd based</comment></comment>


'Anybody and their dog can make a medical app,' doctors warn patients - <AUTHOR> http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sports/Remarkable+ride+comes+abrupt+Canadiens/3066603/Anybody+their+make+medical+doctors+warn+patients/3065343/story.html Anyone else take offense to that ? And the funny thing is that the quote is from a nurse, not a doctor... <comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts ? I am personally amazed at what the health care community thinks of medical apps.</comment>


23andMe Sold Access to Your DNA Library to Big Pharma, but You Can Opt Out - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwkaz3/23andme-sold-access-to-your-dna-library-to-big-pharma-but-you-can-opt-out <comment><USER2> I know this isn't a popular stance here but I take a number of issues with this article

> As the infamous pharma bro Martin Shkreli demonstrated, pharmaceutical > companies can and will make life-saving drugs prohibitively expensive to > juice their bottom line.

I agree that pharma pricing is a problem, but framing the public debate around the issue with Martin shkreli basically ensures the conversation will be based on sensationalism and appeals to emotion, rather than facts. As it stands now, the public doesn't understand pharma pricing so can't assess how likely any proposed legislation is to actually lower price. That enables the pharma lobby to work behind the scenes to make sure any govt actions sound important but are toothless. There are many pharma pricing cases that are more egregious, look at acthar gel as an example. If you want a non-biased, economics driven assessment of value based pricing for drugs look at ICER or NICE

> This means that 23andMe customers will, in effect, be charged twice for any > potential "innovative new medicines" their DNA helps produce. The first time > they paid for the DNA sequencing service; the second time they pay for the > medicine that it helps create

This conveniently ignores the hundreds of millions of dollars per medicine that pharma companies will have to invest to get a drug to market. Pharmas r&d productivity is on a steady decline. So GSK will probably spend a ton of money developing drugs based on this data, and it's likely that they won't end up with enough meaningful new medicines to offset the cost of research. I can elaborate if people want

> Another alternative would be for 23andMe to partner with non-profit public > programs, such as the National Institute of Health's precision-medicine > initiative

In which case you'd be giving your data to Google, who works with this NIH initiative to analyze data [0]. Personally I'd rather GSK have my data than Google -- at least GSKs entire business model isn't selling personal data

[0] [https://verily.com/projects/precision-medicine/precision- med...](https://verily.com/projects/precision-medicine/precision-medicine- initiative/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Ostensibly, the genetic information is going to be used for "research and > development of innovative new medicines and potential cures."

Pure evil.

Is there an alternative where I can get my DNA analyzed for free while still granting access to it to scientific research while trusting that the DNA won't be leaked in a couple of years?

<comment><USER4> (ready to get down-voted) why would I want to opt out if somebody uses my anonymized DNA to try discovering a potentially life-saving drug?

<comment><USER5> There is no such thing as anonymous DNA.

Due to the nature of DNA your anonymity is directly reliant upon the anonymity of everybody you are related to, with a drop in accuracy proportional to the distance of the relationship.

Your DNA may be out there without any link to you. However if your brothers DNA is also out there but is however linked to him, then by comparison the fact that your DNA is a sibling of his, is easily determined. In fact this is the whole point of the current "Find you ancestors" craze.

<comment><AUTHOR> DNA is also being used to establish nationality, [https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/wjkxmy/canada-is- using-a...](https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/wjkxmy/canada-is-using- ancestry-dna-websites-to-help-it-deport-people)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This post made me think of George Churches new startup aimed at making research studies like this opt-in and pay money to participants, while making it easier for researchers to find large datasets for their research. While their bockchain-based platform seems overhyped, if anyone is in a position to accomplish this, it's George Church, so maybe they stand a chance at changing the way things are done in that industry.

[https://www.nebulagenomics.io](https://www.nebulagenomics.io)

</comment><comment><USER7> Seems like they have learned nothing from Facebook rout!

</comment><comment><USER8> Big surprise.</comment>


Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates - <AUTHOR> https://developer.oculus.com/blog/hand-tracking-updates-accepting-app-submissions-starting-may-28/ <comment><USER2> Oh nice! I just bought Quest over the weekend from a guy off craigslist who was selling them at cost and still wrapped in plastic.

Fantastically impressed with things. Totally worth the $500. The games are amazing, but what is really impressing me is all the vr video content. The ability to "stand" on a stage while the orchestra plays Mozart all around you is mind blowing.

It is neat to see them pushing the boundaries with updates.

<comment><USER3> The Quest is probably the first thing I've bought in a long time that has given me that "Christmas morning" feeling. It's such an impressive piece of tech, and VR without wires is so much more immersive, even if it limits the graphical capabilities

<comment><USER4> Don't forget if you install Virtual Desktop you can play all your PCVR games wirelessly on it too. I play HL Alyx like this and it's flawless.

<comment><USER5> Wait really?! I was wondering why I would want to fork over so much money for the app, but having this as a possibility changes everything. Thanks for the heads up :D

<comment><USER6> To wirelessly stream PC virtual reality games to the Oculus Quest you wouldn't just need Virtual Desktop but also a 5GHz wifi router.

You may be interested in the alternative (official) solution, which is not wireless but allows streaming PC VR games using "Oculus Link" using a compatible USBC cable. The cable that comes in the box is unfortunately USB2.0 (so not compatible), your best bet is to checkout this page: [https://support.oculus.com/444256562873335/](https://support.oculus.com/444256562873335/). The official Oculus cable has fibre-optic transceivers built in so is very expensive. Oculus lists some third-party cables on Amazon by Anker, which used by a lot of people (10 foot recommended, but the tiny 3 foot one is really cheap).

I haven't yet tried Virtual Desktop 5GHz streaming, but Oculus Link with a 3 foot cable streams perfectly (good for seated VR, which many PC games assume). I do want to try 5GHz Wifi streaming though! Untethered play is the best!

<comment><USER7> That's no longer true. The latest v17 update allows you to use USB2 (including the in-box cable).

[https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/gjgcq0/oculus_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/gjgcq0/oculus_link_usb_20_support_on_ptc_170/)

Disclaimer: I work at Oculus but do not represent my employer on public forums. Opinions are my own.

<comment><USER6> Wow, that's insanely cool! Thanks for letting me know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My Oculus Quest is the best toy that I have bought for myself in years, even more enjoyable since I did VR for SAIC and Disney about 20+ years ago, so super exciting to see such a fun low cost consumer VR device. I can't wait to try a game/experience using hand tracking. Lot's of great content, my favorites being the Darth Vader trilogy and the RX racket ball and ping pong games.

</comment><comment><USER9> I really want to know why this is feasible for the Quest but not the Rift S, given that both have Inside-Out tracking (ie. IR cameras mounted on the headset). In fact, the Rift S has 5 cameras to the Quests's 4 so it should be at least as capable shouldn't it?

<comment><USER10> I would be suprised if it's primarily a technological reason.

My thinking is: The Rift S is 99.99% used for "serious" gaming and PCVR will always be that way. For serious gaming you'll probably need some kind of controllers for the near future, since you want that fidelity and haptic feedback. Now, controllers could be replaced some day by braceletes or what not, but this is not going to happen next year.

The Quest and its successors (i.e. stand-alone VR), on the other hand, is and will be more and more used for lighter gaming, video, browsing, productivity, fitness, social etc. Often times, hand-tracking will be enough without the need for controllers.

Therefore, they focus their resources on bringing hand-tracking only to the Quest.

<comment><USER11> My guess is it's partly that but also mixed in with aligning to their mass market consumer ambitions.

I've given my Quest to countless people to try out and while every single person is blown away, many / most of them are challenged to use the controllers as anything more than simple pointing devices without significant training. With hand tracking that all goes away. You just use your hands how you normally use them and it "just works". It's similar to how the original iPhone captured everybody's imaginations because it offered such intuitive gestures to control its UI.

If you see the Quest as their "mass market" device and then you consider that their top priority is to knock over every barrier that stops it spreading like wildfire, then it's a no brainer to eliminate the controllers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not exactly as powerful but something similar and that can run on a browser, opening up to a lot of creative applications, handpose powered by tf.js(similar model exists for tflite)

Demo: [https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs- models/demos/handpose/in...](https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs- models/demos/handpose/index.html)

Repo: [https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs- models/blob/master/handpo...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs- models/blob/master/handpose/README.md)

Tflite model: [https://github.com/google/mediapipe/tree/master/mediapipe/mo...](https://github.com/google/mediapipe/tree/master/mediapipe/models/hand_landmark_3d.tflite) there is lighter 2d model as well

</comment><comment><USER13> With the worry about Coronavirus, hand tracking with cameras or something like Google Soli[1] might be useful in ATM's, elevators, kiosks, etc so people can avoid physically touching the devices.

[1] [https://atap.google.com/soli/](https://atap.google.com/soli/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Apple's first published ML paper[1] described how they trained a neural network to estimate eye gaze. To augment the limited data set of labeled eye photos, they rendered synthetic eyes and then used adversarial training to make them match the real-life data set.

This paper came out several months before the iPhone X introduced Face ID with eye gaze tracking, so it can be seen as a hint of things that were to come.

What's intriguing to me is that the paper also talks about doing the same with synthetic depth maps of hands, adding details such as occlusion and imperfectly-captured edges. With Apple investing heavily in ARKit, and rumors of an AR headset, it seems like hand tracking is inevitable.

1: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828)

</comment><comment><USER15> Does the Hand Tracking API allow for tracking other objects? In particular, could a long straight object be tracked as a pointer based on tracking two points along its axis? This seems like it would be computationally easier than tracking hands, and would open up a lot of possibilities for using real world objects as props within the VR environment.

<comment><USER16> I imagine some kind of VR tracker for the Quest will come out eventually. Something like the Vive trackers but smaller. Agree, it would open up all kinds of interesting applications.

<comment><USER17> They could be wildly successful if instead of $100 pucks they could just sell $1 stickers that you could attach to whatever you want. With enough of them you could probably use it to aid scanning in geometry of real world objects

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are there cameras on the sides of the occulus so peripheral hand movements can be recognized?

<comment><USER19> Yes, pretty much: [https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs...](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs- images.forbes.com%2Fsolrogers%2Ffiles%2F2019%2F05%2F190402_Quest_FH_dark_color-1200x675.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> With hand tracking they mean finger tracking, seeing you 'click' with your index finger and thumb. The Oculus has hand tracking today via controllers already.

<comment><USER21> They mean handtracking. Oculus touch is a tracked controller, which means the controller is tracked and the tracking system has no concept of a hand. You could put the controller on your foot, or the floor or on your dog and it would track in the same way as your hand. Hand tracking uses computer vision to recognize hands, for most humans fingers are included in that

<comment><USER22> And Quest has that proper hand tracking already (had it for something like 5 months now), it's just been an experimental feature until now. I haven't used it much; for some reason the tracked hands seem to be placed lower than the fake hands when I'm using controllers, which makes the latter a better experience for me.

<comment><USER21> Increased latency due to using complex, deep learning based, entirely computer vision driven hand tracking vs. tracked controllers which partially use accelerometer data to correct drift and account for latency, and use a much faster classic computer vision algorithm for position tracking ([https://developer.oculus.com/blog/tracking-technology- explai...](https://developer.oculus.com/blog/tracking-technology-explained- led-matching/))

<comment><USER22> Do Deep Learning-based methods introduce all that much latency? My understanding of neural network is that the training is expensive, but using them is essentially free - you have to push your pixels through a few layers of matrix multiplications and you have the results; it's just tuning those matrices that takes time.

<comment><USER21> VR latency is measured in milliseconds, the operation you described can easily take multiple frames to complete even with a very fast, optimized model. Machine learning inference is never free, and often isn't real-time. Training can take hours to weeks depending on the model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> At the risk of being a downer: I'll be so happy once we move past the "preschool playset" era of hand-tracked software.

I wonder what it is that's keeping us from moving past these dull tech demos. Is the issue the interaction design being too simplistic ("Look, I can pick [thing] up!")? Or perhaps the opposite: that, without suitable haptics, too much energy has to be devoted to a very unnatural way of interacting (essentially with phantoms). It seems that games like BeatSaber and apps like TiltBrush have cracked the code, but you have to wonder how.</comment>


Ask HN: To diversify investment or to not diversify investment that is the? - <AUTHOR> Hackers, internet friends, fellow dreamers,
Good Day!
I have found a guilty pleasure in this forum and its simplistic no nonsense format to entity and technology related information. Its rare that you can find a group of individuals dedicated towards the general development of new ideas and those pursuing them so before I jump into my most recent quandary I wanted to give thanks to all of you who read this. That being said, I guess the best place to start is the beginning.
TL;DR
-Started a company in the autonomous systems communication space
-We have functioning, usable technology that we have protected and developed.
-Have raised angel round that has gotten us far yet we believe it will take more than money to advance the company.
-Our current investor has been fantastic but lacks technical/industry experience. We will need to make a decision soon on what to do next regarding capital and advice.
-We are young and passionate to learn but lack experience on execution of establishing key verticals.
In September of 2014 I entered into a local pitch contest with an idea around fully autonomous systems requiring zero human interaction. I found a group of really smart engineers, convinced them that this was a good idea to follow and through a bit of hardwork, dedication, and Redbull we were able to win first place. I walked away from the competition with a good idea and most importantly a technical co-founder. We tried to keep the small brigade together that we had formed during the contest but after a few weeks it was just Taylor, myself, and our idea.
A few months go by and I went on to find myself an internship at a local drone company doing business development. Taylor goes back to his laboratory on campus and starts teaching himself the fundamentals of autonomous systems communications. Our idea had been put on the shelf for the time being while we grew ourselves and our understanding of this technology space. <comment><AUTHOR> Continued Below vvv

As winter rolled around we both found ourselves on campus during the winter break with no plans and free time to work. So we decide to give it one more shot, we lock ourselves in the library for 2 weeks defining our system, our ideas, and deciding upon the first tangible problem that we believed we could solve. We started from first principles, deduced some basic assumptions and mapped out our road to EL DORADO! While at the time our technology was imperfect we knew that we had stumbled upon a serious opportunity. I say opportunity because I believe that standard format of defining a "problem" is narrow sighted.

In January classes had started again. We are moving our way along and we hear about another pitch contest. We go in with our refined concept and win again. This time instead of leaving with a co-founder we walked away with the interest of a local investor. We meet a few times, explored his interest in our technology but left unsatisfied with his resolve and approach to growing us as individuals. Through out this entire process I had reconnected with a friend from high school whom was doing some work as a personal assistant to a venture capitalist. He had told his boss about what we we're working on and his boss had expressed interest in giving me some advice as to not get taken advantage of in the process. After a few conversations, meetings with myself and Taylor he expressed his own potential interest to invest. We botch our first presentation, learnt from it, and came back with our business plan which successfully got us a substantial angel investment in our idea.

Fast forward a few months after multiple meetings, the hiring of a few team members, the leasing of a small office space downtown, we entered summer heads held high in our glass box of innovation. Over this past summer we have developed some really cool technology that has the potential to have a substantial impact in our specific industry. We have been patenting like mad men, building best practices and in general teaching ourselves how to jump start an up start.

Now its November and we have reached an impasse. We don't know how to take this company into the market. We have plenty of ideas but due to the nature and complexity of autonomous systems and especially small UAVs we don't have the experience interacting with FAA, NASA, and the other partners we believe are necessary key verticals. Unfortunately our investor is not experienced with technical start ups and I have come to the conclusion that we need to bring in outside experience in order to grow this company and our technology to its fullest potential. The problem is we don't know where to start or draw the line. Do we seek investment from a VC firm? Shoot for a partnership with a larger company? Take more money from our current investor and try and find an industry specialist to establish these relationships we so desperately need? Or potentially some fourth option that we haven't considered.

Our pain points are numerous but we believe our opportunity and potential impact for outweigh any temporary pain. I post this because I am eager to hear thoughts from others in the technology space. I am constantly learning and have found that one of my true passions in life is to learn from others.

As always...

Thanks for reading, -CA</comment>