I feel like I don't know anything --- CompSci Major - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I'm a compSci major at a good compSci school, and while I've been taking classes and going through the motions of being a student, I feel like technically, I don't know very much.
I know Java from what we do in class, but that's about it. I feel like I can't really create a product or provide valuable skills/service from what I am learning in school.
How can I change this, and what tips, advice, etc would you give to someone like me? Is this normal? Can someone who has gotten a CS degree elaborate on this?
Also, why don't CS degrees teach you much technical skills? Seems more theory than anything else! <comment><USER2> >why don't CS degrees teach you much technical skills? Seems more theory than anything else!

Because the theory lasts a heck of a lot longer than the technical skills. They're giving you the tools to learn anything rather than teach you something.

>How can I change this, and what tips, advice, etc would you give to someone like me?

>Is this normal? Can someone who has gotten a CS degree elaborate on this?

Build something, get an internship, or freelance. I know that a couple of people at my school would subcontract to other guys as they were trying to launch products. A couple of disclaimers on that. 1) Everyone at school thinks that ideas are worth $ and will try to steal it from you rather than work with you if you ask the wrong person. 2) If you have an idea rather than a problem you're not going to be making money off of it, but it still might be good experience if you did it as an open source program or something.

What I ended up doing was helping to build a webapp at work, and my senior design was a webapp. Senior design was much more rigid in terms of agile methodologies and spec writing. Additionally, a friend of mine had hired me to write some scripts for him to automate some of his business tasks. I earned enough money out of a couple of projects to mostly finance a Macbook. My friend worked with me and had me write a proposal for every project before I started so that was good practice as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was in your position. I was doing very well in college academically and yet I felt I didn't know enough. People with lower grades than me simply knew a lot more and built significant things. And I didn't realize the issue until relatively late, close to graduation. At that point, it limited potential job opportunities. I still got a good job based on academic performance. However, others were getting better opportunities because they could do more.

It's good that you at least recognize this and are thinking about doing something. I echo the others in regards to building things in order to learn. Keep doing this. Make it a priority. Classwork will provide some educational value to a point. Do enough of it to maintain decent grades and get the educational value (the theory by design). However, make the time to work on your personal stuff every week even if just a little bit. I'd even go as far as sacrificing some school assignments if you want to do your personal stuff.

Java is used a lot out in the real world so it's not bad to know it. I work for a late-stage startup that makes money and runs on Java. Look at Android and a lot of server-side web stuff that the big players use. If you know Java, you can start building bigger things. Look at the Play! Framework (playframework.org) for building web applications. Learn some basic HTML, JS, and CSS for the client side (I recommend w3schools.com). Deploy to Heroku so you can publish it the world (<http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/play>). Now you have a product.

Get internships and/or co-ops. Get exposed to the world outside of the classroom for the applied skills. Those can be effective opportunities to bridge the gap. Your personal projects will be valuable in getting these opportunities.

If you want to understand the value of the college courses to the applied world, ask your professors about how the course content solves real-world problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really really like your response, thank you so much, this is what I was looking for!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had the same experience in college. I was more into web technologies, and everything we did in school was in Java. I did tons of projects for fun, most of which nobody ever saw but myself. Pickup a web language like ruby/python/php and start making anything. I was kind of bitter for a few years after college because I felt like all the skills I had had that I actually took to the workplace were self taught. But now that I am a bit further along in my career, and working on larger systems with more advanced problems all the theory, data-structure logic, and thinking of things like big O are coming out and I'm much more appreciative of the theory that I learned.

<comment><USER5> Java is huge in web development, its just used mainly for larger projects

<comment><USER6> You can see Java running on most university's websites, and those websites look awful. One thing I experienced with Java is that it is much slower than other web technologies.

<comment><USER5> Front-ends aren't written in Java, what does Java have to do with it?

<comment><USER7> Stuff like Blackboard uses Java in the front-end. It's terrible software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pick something you want to make and make it. The best guideline for this task is to scope small. For example, try and code a clone of Breakout. Now try and do it in a language you've never used. Maybe try and render it server-side and send the info to a canvas element on a web page.

The other direction you could go is implementing algorithms in various languages as a sort of mental workout, but that's a lot less fun.

<comment><USER9> I'll second this. My "Hello World" is Pong. Whenever I want to test how well I know a new language, I make pong in it. It's relatively simple but will allow you to play with several fun things like animation and button mapping. Plus, you can show it to almost anyone and they'll look beyond its simplicity and think about the potential it represents - that you can make almost anything else if you wanted to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I received my Computing Science Degree in 1993. That was back in the day when pixels were bigger than your fist, and to phone someone we had to use something called a "land line". No search engines :(

I remember my degree being quite technical really, I mean we had to program Pascal and C.

"I feel like I can't really create a product or provide valuable skills/service from what I am learning in school."

Why not ?

</comment><comment><USER11> You can't gain confidence by studying, you must gain confidence by doing. My suggestion is that you start building things, pick an idea and execute it begin-to-end. Then pick a more complex project and do it all over again. It is very important that you finish everything you start though so pick your battles wisely.

Good luck, I know you can do it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this was really helpful and encouraging. I really do need to start projects on my own and finish them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _why don't CS degrees teach you much technical skills?_

Because its a good CS school. CS is about the mathematics of computation, not about the computers. Technology is an implementation detail. ;) (It's an ivory tower academic course, not a course intended to help people start businesses).

You can find Dijkstra's notes online and they're all handwritten, for example.

 _How can I change this_

Study and practice whatever it is you specifically want to get better at, I guess, be that database administration or dealing with small business taxes, taking payments or whatever.</comment>


ScreenB.in, short URLs for screenshots - <AUTHOR>

Hi all! I've been looking for an app like this for quite a while to no avail, so I decided to create it.
ScreenBin (screenb.in) lets you paste a screenshot from your clipboard directly into your browser (Chrome only) and instantly receive a short URL to your screenshot. The designer on my dev team has demanded this for a couple of weeks, and I only recently found the time to make it at a hackathon I attended.
This is my first time posting to Hacker News and my first live open source product so I'm too sure what to expect, but would love any feedback on the app and suggestions for features and improvements.
Todo's:
- Google Drive support, so I don't have to host all the images!
- some UI for cropping (but that might get in the way of the simplicity)
Fun facts:
- It's named after its spiritual predecessor (which was a downloadable application found at screenbin.org).
- Only works on Chrome as it allows me to extract the clipboard data. Hopefully other browsers adjust their security standards in the near future. <comment><USER2> You sir have improved my life by a definite measurable amount. Instantly a fan. Very clever programming!

Some points:

\- Great usage flow by having both keyboard shortcuts displayed. I would label each in a smaller font (i.e. "Take Screenshot By..." and "Paste Here With...") for less savvy users.

\- Could you insert a preview after it finishes uploading? A quick visual check would rock.

\- I would love you if you could picked a colorful name. The trouble with "clean" sterile names is the fact it is really difficult to remember compounded with the url hack. Animals work well.

\- My favorite tool: <http://www.domainhole.com/brainstormer/> Try using the word "snap" / "paste"

\- Change the tagline to say something about pasting it directly. Your clear differentiating feature is the fact that uploading doesn't take a dialog. Something like "Instantly paste your screenshot"

\- There's that momentary ecstasy going "Wow, this is amazing." Have Facebook like / Twitter share buttons available the moment people see their pictures appear. This is when the magician just completed the trick and people _want_ to applause. That's your window to spread the word.

\- Add a link to your blog! I had fun reading it. Much more interesting than just a twitter handle.

\- Polish this site up some and spread the word. It's a very simple app but has incredible utility. It may take a day or two to polish but it'll provide a multiplier to the rate of spread. Good side projects can get legs of its own and help you later down the road.

P.S. Have you guys decided on a project yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> wow some awesome advice from the founder of Teevox :D! Looks like I'll be pushing v2 this weekend >_<!

As for the OwlDen blog, we're launching our fashion ecommerce product in private to beta users this Friday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nice, useful.

I find the scroll overflow on the screenshot display to be clunky and uncomfortable, though. I think I'd prefer a shrink-to-fit/click-to-expand situation.

Also, I tried pasting a ~1mb JPG photo, and the spinner has been going for a few minutes now. Might wanna throw an error or something in weird edge cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey sunspeck, I've relaunched the app as MonkeyV. Play with it here: www.monkeyv.com. I've included the feature you requested that allows you to shrink to fit and click to expand on the image view page. Enjoy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the difference between this and Droplr/CloudApp?

<http://droplr.com> <http://cloudapp.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think you can ctrl+V (paste) screenshots into those. This app allows you to do just that for screenshots. It's not really for file sharing.

<comment><USER4> CloudApp: CTRL + OPTION + C

Uploads contents of clipboard.

You can also drag/drop to the icon in the menubar, as well as auto-upload after ⌘ + SHIFT + 3/4.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah ok, it appears then ScreenBin differentiates from CloudApp because it doesn't require any installing/downloading of an app to utilize. It's completely in browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I noticed that I can't just paste random images to your app. How do you guys detect that it is a screenshot I am pasting?

<comment><USER6> I don't think they do. I tried pasting a random non-screenshot image and it worked fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No DNS record for screenb.in, but www.screenb.in redirects to monkeyv.com.</comment>


So Pat McGovern comes into a bar… - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2014/03/20/pat-mcgovern-comes-bar/

<comment><USER2> I worked for IDG for about 7 or 8 years. The Christmas visit was quite amazing. Companies far smaller than IDG distribute annual bonuses via an impersonal notice from payroll, and here we have a corporate leader of an international publishing conglomerate who goes out of his way to personally thank most of the people who work for him, chatting for a minute or so about our jobs and how important the work is that we're doing, making a crack about our supervisor or local CEO, and then finally giving the envelope with a card and a check inside. If my company grows to that size, I will make a point of following a similar practice -- or finding other opportunities to thank people in some personal way.

One other thing about "Uncle Pat": People now see "billionaire publisher and philanthropist" but at one time he was a scrappy startup founder, too. His stories about founding Computerworld and running it out of a Harvard Square walkup in the 1960s were hilarious. He disrupted the industry in a big way (most tech publications before then were mouthpieces for advertising departments of the companies they ostensibly covered) and when CW started with a mission to be the voice of IT management, advertisers launched a boycott that lasted for some months or maybe even a year. It's only when they realized that their customers deeply wanted unbiased news about products and trends that they gave in and started placing ads in CW (and later its sister publications, Network World, InfoWorld, etc.). IDG grabbed huge market share and expanded all over the world, and became the large company it is today.

<comment><USER3> People are rightly impressed by the personal connection aspect of this. It's awesome.

But I also think there was something great in in for McGovern. One of the ways companies go quickly to hell is for executives to stop thinking about the most important part of any business, which is line workers directly creating value for customers. Forcing himself to talk to every employee and know what good things they were doing was a great way to keep in touch with what the business was actually doing, rather than what his direct reports told him was going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everyone's goal in life should be to be remembered as a good person who made a difference like Mr. McGovern.

<comment><USER5> Being a good person who makes a difference seems like a worthwhile goal. Fixating on how you're remembered is often quite a bit darker and I wouldn't want to make it a life goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, that man can write. And what a nice example mr. McGovern set.

<comment><USER7> Indeed he can. I really miss his audio edition - it was much more commute- friendly than the written one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a very moving tribute to a great boss. It's too bad that he wasn't able to stop the decline in his empire. Perhaps the personalization didn't scale. In the end, he's remembered and respected more for the personal connections than the professional heights.</comment>


Is There Facebook After Zuck? - <AUTHOR> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/is-there-facebook-after-zuck <comment><USER2> I would guess that Facebook couldn't exist without Zuck - not in its current form. He doesn't seem to be afraid of "breaking things." Given the current (even after the recent drop) value of FB, I don't see a line of CEO types at the door who are willing to apply so much daring.

<comment><USER3> He also doesn't seem to care very much if the things he breaks get fixed.</comment></comment>


1960s IT department - <AUTHOR> http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html <comment><USER2> A few stories behind the pictures:

\- The programmer is probably playing guitar because he is waiting for his compile. It had to be batched and returned, sometimes hours later. Imagine getting things done with only one compile per day.

\- The programmer is giving an obscene gesture to the terminal because he forgot a semicolon (more likely a period in his COBOL program) and will now have to wait another day for a clean compile. Move that deadline back to October.

\- The terminal the programmer is giving an obscene gesture to is a state-of- the-art Datawriter, a PAPER-DRIVEN terminal. A moment of silence is needed for all the trees sacrificed for our future.

\- The programmer was special because he had access to the Datawriter, which was probably in the computer room. Anyone else, including all users, had to use pencil and special forms (like taking their SATs) to enter data into the IBM Mainframe. Those forms went to the Data Control Unit where teams of mostly women keypunched the data onto 80 column cards which were fed into a hopper. The early keypunch machines put the holes in the cards as you typed, so that if you made a mistake, you had to start over with a new card. Later, these machines had memory, so you could finish the virtual card, and hit a key that did the whole card. Probably saved a lot of paper.

\- Notice all the coats hanging in the break room. It may have been winter, but just as likely, they were needed in the computer room. It was cold in there!

\- Note that the "Data Terminal" pictures are at the bottom of the page in the mini-computer section. This was a big deal back then. Mini-computers got CRT displays before IBM mainframes. That's how they competed with Big Blue. For programmers, this was as big an advance as we would ever get. Imagine building that web app today, buying cases of cards from Office Depot and getting one compile per day.

\- The Demonstration Center was a big deal, too. Several places I worked had the computer room behind glass in the lobby. Companies wanted their customers to physically see how advanced their technology was.

Thanks for the memories. Now burn those pictures.

<comment><USER3> I'm old enough that my Mom was a keypunch operator and would bring me home bags of "square confetti" from the chads punched out of cards and also discarded keypunch cards to play with.

I may not have written my first program until I was 16-17, but I read my first IBM manuals around age 8 or so :-)

 _they were needed in the computer room. It was cold in there!_

The other reason I liked going with her when she had to work Saturdays: it was always air-conditioned.

<comment><USER4> Me too. All my first drawings are crayon-on-punchcard. This would have been '83,'84, guess my Dad's computing department we somewhat behind the times!

<comment><USER5> Me too! Punch cards and punch tape.. rolls and rolls of it. And for me, it was 88-89, because Russia was (and still is) a backwards country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love how everything had color back then. Bright red Minicomputer, Aquamarine phones, blue typewriter. My cube consists of varying shades of grey...

<comment><USER7> Hey at least your Swingline stapler is red. ... Uh... Where did your stapler go?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Boy, that brings back fond memories of IBM 360 mainframes in big, noisy, cold rooms.

I remember the transition from cards to online terminals, when hacking (as a high-school junior) at the Naval Electronic Labs computer center in Point Loma (San Diego) in the early 70's as a part-time systems programmer. (Don't remember how I got a job there, but I do remember adding some small features to their WATFOR Fortran compiler over one summer.)

TSO (time-sharing option) was a huge upgrade at the time, running as a permanent "job" under OS/360, and virtualizing the job partition to run separate sub-jobs per terminal user. After using punched cards for a while, the thrill of actually typing in programs directly (mostly assembler and PL/I in my case), running, and DEBUGGING them interactively was nirvana.

</comment><comment><USER9> The predominance of women in the pictures is very striking. Was that common at the time? If so, I wonder what happened to change the demographics so heavily.

<comment><USER10> Maybe "computer operator" was considered a secretarial role?

Note that once upon a time a "computer" was a _person_ who did computations, often a woman with a BA in math. ENIAC's programmers were women (<http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/eniac.html>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In pictures 01 & 02 you can see a copy of the book 2001 - A Space Odyssey on his desk.

Also this impressed me:

"The computer room was in the basement of a building for security and other reasons. There was no natural light and I had a slim budget for decorations. I also had staff with artistic talents so I bought the materials and they made their own decorations."

With the guitars and the art projects it sounds like he fostered a very progressive work environment.

</comment><comment><USER12> The server is in agony.

Maybe a cache can help:

<http://www.luckham.org.nyud.net/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> Out of curiosity, how were those photos preserved? As someone who was born in the 80's, I'm used to anything pre-1990 looking washed out. Were you using an especially powerful camera, or was it purely good preservation technique? Are these restored somehow? Some combination of the above?

<comment><USER14> slides and negatives preserve rather well.

<comment><USER15> Not to mention the fact that chemicals degrade in certain ways, so an experienced photo tech can correct off-balance scans almost by muscle memory.

Dan Margulis' book on this subject is definitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I took one look at the sideburns and thought this can't possibly be real. It had to be a well done (and amusing) hoax.

I was about 60% sure someone got access to a preserved data center that's now a museum, raided the Mad Men wardrobe and took a bunch of pictures, but then I saw the personal page of the guy and it's an older version of him:

<http://www.luckham.org/LHL_Index.html>

The Internet has made me such a cynic. But still... someone should take my idea of faking old timey things for a different theme and set of pic ;)

<comment><USER16> On a side note, I remember growing up in the early 80ies, travelling by plane with my Dad who worked for IBM and he would sometimes bring these giant tape spools with him in his luggage. I guess flying across the country with them was faster than uploading the data across the Net ;)

Either that, or he was committing corporate espionage. In which case, I wasn't getting nearly enough presents, Dad!

<comment><USER17> Still is, though for larger amounts of data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> the site sure loads like it's on a 60's internet connection... :)

</comment><comment><USER19> lova to see a zoom enhance on the cartoon on the corkboard here [http://www.luckham.org/images/Bell%20Labs%20Days/Bell%20Labs...](http://www.luckham.org/images/Bell%20Labs%20Days/Bell%20Labs01.jpg) I know it can't be Dilbert (can it?) but it sure looks like it

<comment><USER20> It wasn't around in the 1960s, but Crunchly was definitely one of the things I had to go back in time and appreciate, despite having not been born when most of them were drawn. <http://xivilization.net/~marek/imgs/crunchly/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> IMHO Roxanne & Helen were very beautiful.

<comment><USER22> Umm, why is this sort of comment relevant or appropriate on HN?

<comment><USER23> all users are human, and beauty exists.

<comment><USER24> ..and both cases come to surface only in certain cases. And this is one of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In the early 80's I use to go into a place my dad did hardware contract work every month to help him vacuum out filters in all their CAD machines. Their server room didn't look much different from this (except for more crowded, and probably a smaller footprint) and they even had one teletype box for their tape library backups. I still have a huge plywood box the size of a toy chest (actually, it was my toy chest!) that a 20MB hard drive and enclosure came in.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone who hasn't seen Desk Set (1957) with Katharine Hepburn needs to. (Reference department at a television network that gets its first 'computer')

</comment><comment><USER27> Nowadays all that work [and more] can be accomplished by a single person.

<comment><USER28> On their mobile phone.

<comment><USER27> That's an overstretch. Although modern mobile phone has much more power than mainframe from 1960-s, mobile phone does not have convenient interface that allows to input and output massive amounts of data.

<comment><USER29> If we ever get an optic nerve tap and thought-writer worked out, we'll scarcely have any need for physical interfaces that laptops and desktops offer.

The thought-writers are halfway there already, they're working on tech for disabled people that lets them manage somewhat crude gestures by thinking in directions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The photo of the decor in the "Demonstration Center" is priceless. Almost straight out of _Mad Men._

</comment><comment><USER31> 648 meg of hard drive! geezz. Would not even be able to view those pics on that computer back then.

<comment><USER19> Pics as displayed are about 8k each, or 128 to the MB, so the drive would have been capable of holding over 82,000 of them. Of course jpg format didn't come about until 30 years later...

Full size images are 1600 x 1061, so with 16 bit colour and no compression you'd be looking at about 25MB per image, or about 25 per drive. As a jpg they're about 600k each

<comment><USER32> Leaving aside the fact that decompressing a decent-sized JPEG was a very CPU- intensive task as recently as the 486 era, taking _seconds_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My father worked in the engineering department at the DuPont Corporation in Delaware in the '60's, and I remember going there on "take your son to work day" and seeing my first Cray. This really brings back some old, old memories.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is cool. Can't say I'm sorry to see the sidburns gone though...:)

<comment><USER34> Clearly you're not based out of Portland. Those sideburns are alive and well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> thanks for the pictures, it is fascinating to see open colored pictures. loving it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Back in the late 70's I once knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, who shall remain nameless, who was a fairly senior programmer for a large bank. On certain occasions, this person was able to bring home thick printouts of the actual COBOL code that ran in the bank's mainframes. Probably one of my first exposures to source code. The lines would alternate between a green and white paper color. Along both the left and right edges were rows of holes, needed by the printer mechanism. The code itself was highly highly verbose plus was probably >50% comments, both inline and in section delimiting blocks. I later got into BASIC programming myself as my first language, then 6502 Assembly, then C. Though I appreciate Java's strengths, I totally understand why some folks call Java the New COBOL: it's pretty verbose, full of ritual, and it's used everywhere now in large corporations and government. (Not sure if used in banks heavily, but would not be surprised. Though I know COBOL is still running in many banks as well.)

<comment><USER36> People apparently still use that:

[http://www.staples.com/Staples-Green-Bar-Computer- Paper-14-7...](http://www.staples.com/Staples-Green-Bar-Computer- Paper-14-7-8-x-11-3-Part/product_489121)</comment></comment>


Facebook Pretty rotten Easter egg - <AUTHOR> http://thegreenwolf.tumblr.com/post/15273643684/dear-facebook-no-switching-over-to-leet-speak

<comment><USER2> Facebook translations are crowdsourced. Doesn't excuse this particular case, but don't assume it was anything malicious on Facebook's part.

<comment><USER3> This is the correct answer. Someone accepted the translation without thinking too much about it, but it's almost certain that it wasn't a Facebook employee who decided on that "translation".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They seem to have changed it already. It's "F3m413" for female and "Male" for male now.

</comment><comment><USER5> So you switch to a novelty translation yet have no sense of humor?

Granted it's in bad taste, but... it's fucking 1337 speak.

</comment><comment><USER6> So what does it substitute for various races? And what's the "male" leet-speak equivalent?</comment>


Finger Trees - <AUTHOR> http://andrew.gibiansky.com/blog/haskell/finger-trees/

<comment><USER3> This is a really nice use of the IHaskell Notebook[0] -- nice to see it in the wild.

[0] [https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell](https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell)

</comment><comment><USER4> So, if I'm understanding this right, finger trees are just 2-3 trees with an extra array of 8 things per level (four for prefix, four for suffix). Does this really have a benefit over just using a 2-3 tree?

<comment><USER5> You get amortized-constant-time additions and deletions at both "ends", which is a pretty big deal for some use cases. And log-time concatenation, which I don't think 2-3 trees give you. And it's all done purely functionally, which means you get persistence if you want it (i.e., you can keep around old versions of the data structure and the only cost you pay is the memory).

<comment><USER4> The log-time concatenation may be the real win. Still though, why 4? Why not 2, or 8? Is this covered in some of the research?

<comment><USER6> Scott Huddleston and Kurt Mehlhorn's 1982 paper "A New Data Structure for Representing Sorted Lists" addresses this question.

[http://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~mehlhorn/ftp/Huddleston- Mehlho...](http://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~mehlhorn/ftp/Huddleston-Mehlhorn- ActaInformatica.pdf)

The answer is that each modification costs O(1) amortized time when you have a 4.

It even gives a little anecdote in the acknowledgements on the last page:

"On October 29, 1979, Mehlhorn presented the results of [4] in Zurich. Ed McCreight was in the audience and asked, 'Is a similar result true for 2-3 trees?' The counterexample shown in Fig. 3 was described. He then asked, 'How about 10-50 trees?'"

(Ed McCreight co-invented the B-tree)

([4] is Blum, N., Mehlhorn, K.: On the average number of rebalancing steps in weight-balanced trees. Theor. Comput. Sci. 11, 303-320 (1980))

However, you don't actually have to understand all of this to get the gist of why 2-3 trees don't have constant-amortized-time modifications. You can see that from a simple little experiment on binary numbers.

Imagine that you had to implement binary arithmetic on your own. The first thing you implement is a binary counter with only increment. It starts at 0, you can add 1 as many times as you like. That's it.

Note that a counter with n bits may require n bit flips to increment 11111...1. However, by assigning a binary number a potential of the number of 1 bits, you can see that incrementing takes O(1) amortized bit flips using the physicist's method.

This doesn't work when you can also subtract one from your counter, since subtracting one can turn a lot of 0s into 1s. Adding one again turns them back, and you're back where you started, having spent no potential yet requiring a bunch of bit flips in each operation.

However, if you allow each digit to be 0, 1, or 2, you can assign a positive potential to the 0 and 2 digits and zero potential to the 1 bits to show that both increment and decrement use O(1) amortized bit flips.

The same thing happens with 2-3 trees vs. 2-3-4 trees. I believe 2-3 trees have amortized O(1) insert if deletion is not permitted, but 2-3-4 trees permit both.

Number systems have some deep connections to data structure design like this. One place you can read more is in Okasaki's book, "Purely Functional Data Structures", through plenty of free resources exist on the topic as well - <USER2> Elmasry tends to publish about it a lot. Once you get it, you start to see the pattern in many other places.

<comment><USER6> Clarification: In the example with 0, 1, and 2 as allowed digits, I still intended for the number to be "binary" in the sense that the ith digit has weight 2^i. Thus, 12 in this system is 1 _2^1 + 2_ 2^0 = 4, in decimal, and, in this system, 12 = 20 = 100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gibiansky's blog is chuck full of incredibly good stuff. He updates sporadically but it's totally worth a read.</comment>


Is mobile gaming a threat to the games industry? - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerandvideogames.com/356139/is-mobile-gaming-a-threat-to-the-games-industry/

<comment><USER2> I see mobile gaming as an entirely new field which can be explored. Mobile devices dont have the specs or controls to be considered true competitors to PC / console gaming.

While better consoles have killed off vast amounts of PC gaming exclusivity i don't think mobile devices will impede to much on traditional games.</comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on being required to log time in an effort-tracking system? - <AUTHOR> I've been a salaried software engineer for several years (multiple employers). My current employer is rolling out an "effort tracking" initiative which is managed in part by a dedicated team of PMP-type folks. We are being asked to enter hours into this system, to help track project costs, etc.
Is this a sign that things are not good financially where I work? I'm not sure what to think.
I'm curious to hear opinions others have on the subject. <comment><USER2> It may be they just want to better quantify the projects. We have been using Toggl at our company and it has really opened my eyes about how long certain tasks take. Also, I find myself hyper-focusing on some tasks now where before I would multi-task and sometimes be less effective.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps it's a sign that the management has no idea how much effort is spent on what, which amounts to driving blind. If you're asked to enter _hours_ (not minutes, or even seconds), I wouldn't worry, this is SOP.</comment>


Proteus is a new ultrahard material inspired by nature - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90529995/this-new-ultra-hard-material-inspired-by-nature-could-make-uncuttable-bike-locks <comment><USER2> The material is not really what might thought of as conventionally "ultra- hard". In fact, it's deformability is one of it's features.

It is billed as practically uncuttable by several different tools owning in part to the material's ability to create resonance feedback to destroy the attacking tools.</comment>


Current AT&T iPhone 5 can't be used on T-Mobile due to hardware constrains  - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2013/03/26/t-mobiles-iphone-5-is-a-tweaked-model-a1428-phone-with-aws-support/

<comment><USER2> This HN title is a lie. FTA: _While the current A1428 phone works with T-Mobile's network, it is notably slower than the modified version._</comment>


Ask HN: Startup domains with quirky names that Google corrects "Did you mean" - <AUTHOR>

I'm shortly going to start a private beta and invitation launch of my startups first product (a web app). The name I have decided to go with currently results in a "Did you mean" (and two results) results page on Google.
Given the tendency for web startups these days to have "quirky" names and domains (although mine is actually a .com) has anybody else experienced this?
I understand that this is an automatic result of low search volume and should quickly remedy itself. But nonetheless, what are other peoples experiences?
Many thanks. <comment><USER2> I haven't had this myself, but a couple weeks ago there were one or two people who said that they initially launched with a site that prompted a correction from Google. After a few weeks or so the prompt went away because their search term became legitimate. I can't remember the specifics though. It probably depends on the term and how fickle Google decides to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Shame this got buried!</comment></comment>


No evidence that people who have survived coronavirus have immunity - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/17/no-evidence-people-have-survived-coronavirus-have-immunity-says/ <comment><USER2> The absense of evidence is not evidence of absense. The article didn't provide any actual evidence of anything, just speculation. Surely studies have been done by to test for antibodies vs immunity by now.

<comment><USER3> "Dr Maria van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist, doubted the value of antibody tests"

I'm no expert, but usually antibodies mean your body can fight the virus, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> From episode 594 of _This Week in Virology_ [1]:

Rich Condit: _This raises the issue, again, just briefly, that I was going to comment on earlier. It came up two letters ago, the phrase "correlates of protection", which is a really slippery concept, because it's really easy to make the assumption that "oh, you make antibodies and that's it". No. Or, "you make antibodies to this particular protein, that's all you got to do." No. Immunity that confers protection can be much more complicated than that._

Alan Dove: _Everybody with HIV produces antibodies against HIV and they 're great antibodies against the virus, and guess what: you still have HIV. So the antibodies in that case are not a correlate of protection. They're just something your body has done. On the other hand, if you're producing great antibodies against measles virus, you're probably protected. That's a very good correlate of protection._

Condit: _So figuring out what actually protects you with any particular pathogen is a critical issue and not straightforward._

Brianne Barker: _There have been a few times where we 've mentioned "neutralizing antibodies" today. Neutralizing is one of the things antibodies can do. That means they can block viruses from getting in to cells or interacting with cells. And so sometimes the correlate is you have to make neutralizing antibodies, not just any old antibodies._

[1] - [http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-594/](http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-594/) from about 1 hour and 7 minutes in

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Q: "Can you get Coronavirus twice?"

A: "If you get an infection, your immune system is revved up against that virus," Keiji Fukuda, director of Hong Kong University's School of Public Health, told the Los Angeles Times. "To get reinfected again when you're in that situation would be quite unusual unless your immune system was not functioning right."

[https://thehill.com/changing-america/well- being/prevention-c...](https://thehill.com/changing-america/well- being/prevention-cures/487436-can-you-get-coronavirus-twice)

* In a hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Thursday, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, was asked if people who have contracted the virus might now be immune. "We haven't formally proved it, but it is strongly likely that that's the case," Fauci said. "Because if this acts like any other virus, once you recover, you won't get reinfected."

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?470277-1/federal-health- offici...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?470277-1/federal-health-officials- testify-coronavirus-outbreak-response)

* From the paper: "Antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 patients." "The positive rate for IgG reached 100% around 20 days after symptoms onset. The median day of seroconversion for both lgG and IgM was 13 days after symptoms onset. Seroconversion of IgM occurred at the same time, or earlier, or later than that of IgG. IgG levels in 100% patients (19/19) entered a platform within 6 days after seroconversion."

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.18.20038018v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.18.20038018v1)

Study - Reinfection could not occur in SARS-CoV-2 infected rhesus macaques. [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.990226v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.990226v1)

</comment><comment><USER5> _WHO officials say it 's unclear whether recovered coronavirus patients are immune to second infection_

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/13/who-officials-say-its- unclea...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/13/who-officials-say-its-unclear- whether-recovered-coronavirus-patients-are-immune-to-second-infection.html)

"A preliminary study of patients in Shanghai found that some patients had 'no detectable antibody response' while others had a very high response, said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's lead scientist on Covid-19. Whether the patients who had a strong antibody response were immune to a second infection is 'a separate question,' she added."

</comment><comment><USER6> We don't know yet. Most press articles are reporting experiments or are clutching at straws of hope.

Is it likely there is at least some protection? Yes. At the same time there is reason to be cautious - the virus has been observed attacking and successfully entering T-helper cells and that does carry the potential for some really ugly long effects.

Now of course the whole herd immunity thing had become a political matter and in the US that means science goes right out of the window in favour of left/right blinders</comment>


Show HN: Rollbar - reliable, fast, platform-agnostic error tracking - <AUTHOR> https://rollbar.com

<comment><USER2> This looks awesome! Can this integrate with PagerDuty for critical errors?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, via email. At least one customer I know of is doing this. A proper integration is in the works.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder here. We know this is getting to be a crowded space, but we hope you like our take on the problem. Feedback appreciated!</comment>


Bill Gates tells students being a billionaire is "quite strange" - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2011/10/27/bill-gates-uw/ <comment><USER2> ...for one thing, every offhand remark becomes a news story.

<comment><USER3> It's a longish article but it goes on about how he feels frustrated by the political system, educational and health systems of the country and that he and Buffet believe they should be taxed more.

Moreover it appears, that like Jobs thought, wealth, after certain point is redundant -and to them, it was a side effect of their pursuit of their interest. It seems despite Jobs' jabs at Gates, Gates is personally a quite normal guy, psychologically speaking -he's not the megalomaniac people kind of make him out to be sometimes.

<comment><USER4> _he and Buffet believe they should be taxed more_

The two of them can send their checks here:

      Gifts to the United States
      U.S. Department of the Treasury
      Credit Accounting Branch
      3700 East-West Highway, Room 622D
      Hyattsville, MD 20782

I'm sick and tired of people who have already made enough income to last multiple lifetimes telling us that income taxes should now be raised. The government lets you tax yourself at 100% if you want. Ship them the money. They won't refuse it.

Enough with this "I'm feeling guilty, therefore other people should also pay more" nonsense.

<comment><USER5> It's more about the view and wish for changing the system and organizing it more efficiently so that more people can benefit from it. Taxing hoarded money that cannot be spent in a reasonable way by a few individuals and using that money to enhance lagging sectors is something a good government should hopefully be able to do. Couple of people sending the government a few billion is not going to accomplish much in that direction.

<comment><USER6> "cannot be spent in a reasonable way by a few individuals" - again with the socialist claptrap - these people earned the money, they should decide what it's best possible use is.

I'm stopping by your place today to raid your refrigerator, and take those clothes you aren't wearing. That good with you? 'cause that's what you're saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cut the number of words by 2/3 and this sounds surprisingly like PG:

 _I think most people who've done well have sort of found something that they just are kind of nuts about doing. And then they figure out a system to hire their friends to do it with them. And if it's an area of great impact, then sometimes you get financial independence._

Edit: specifically the part about friends.

<comment><USER8> The spoken language is different, but yeah:

 _Most people who do well find something they love. Then they convince their friends to do it with them. If it solves a big problem, they might even get rich in the process._

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bet it is. For one thing you can rent half-million per month homes for your daughter.

But I'll let that slide since he is giving away all his money to great causes and the medical research he has funded.

</comment><comment><USER10> With billions, you'll have many options. Without billions, you've to pick the right option.

</comment><comment><USER11> Students tell a billionaire being Bill Gates is "quite strange"

</comment><comment><USER12> Strange that even he still thinks of money as nothing more than a means to buy things. Maybe that's because he really only ever ran the one company, and so never really became personally acquainted with its other uses. Certainly though among his fiscal peers though? So that's strange...

Wealth is inextricably tied to power. Everyone knows this, or has heard it, but I guess many often don't reason about what it means? Gates seems to be saying that there isn't a big difference between being worth 60 million and being worth 60 billion, because hamburgers taste the same, after all. That's all well and good if wealth is all about buying things, which it basically is for about 99,999 out of 100,000 people at least, but for that one person it definitely isn't. Someone worth 60 billion is at least 1000x more powerful and has 1000x greater impact in how he goes about wielding his power than the person worth 60 million. He is in many respects equivalent to 1000 people worth 60 million each, doing their thing, and perhaps more so since he can more easily strive toward a purpose or calling in a way that 1000 people couldn't, with committees and whatever else. So he's completely wrong about that (although he's the billionaire and I'm certainly not, so perhaps I should just defer to his judgment :-)

Which sort of brings up the other thing he said, which is that absolute poverty relative to historical values is decreasing, especially in the developing world at the moment, and that there are a few very rich and well- connected individuals isn't such a problem, to the extent that they don't corrupt the political system. But of course they _do_ corrupt the political system. The entire problem with massively unequal distribution of wealth isn't that you get to live in a nice house on the water while for whatever reason someone else has to live in a one-room flat. It is decidedly _not_ about jealousy and envy. This is what critics of the OWS movement do not seem to understand. We're trying to have a democracy, so have all the wealth that you want, but if your wealth begins to subvert that democracy, well then we have to do something about that.

I'm sure he gets this based on things he's said in other talks, and he's an honest enough guy I think (now, anyway), so maybe he just wanted to avoid making a complicated, and currently rather politically charged, point.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure the kind of power you're referring to is the same kind of power that say, the Pope has. Gates with his billions has massive amounts of power in business and maybe local politics but he is nowhere near the level as say the Pope, who is by definition poor.

All the money (and power associated with it) cannot end world hunger. Ever. So I understand what Gates is saying when he's referring to the hamburger. He probably doesn't have the kind of power you are imagining he has and that 1000x doesn't really mean anything. All you can do with money is acquire more money in different forms. You're not changing the world with money.

I never comment on here so be gentle please. :)

<comment><USER14> I'm a bit loathe to give this response as I come here to get away from politics, but look at how Koch Industries and the like subverted the tea party movement, and the effect that that's had on congress. _That's_ the kind of power money buys: the power to take a small, libertarian grass-roots organization and turn it into a nation-wide astroturfed phenomenon, getting dozens of congressmen elected in the process and having a huge impact on government policy. $60m doesn't buy you that kind of power, but $10b does.

This is what the parent was saying, and what Gates doesn't think about because he clearly never tried to use his money to exert that kind of power (the courts might have been nicer to him if he had). The tech industry in general seems reluctant to use its vast wealth to exert that kind of power. If they had spent half the money they did in the patent wars on lobbyists, we likely wouldn't have the e-parasite act and its similarly harmful brethren. That's just not how we think, however, and so much smaller industries end up exerting a huge amount of power.</comment></comment></comment>


People who work for the TSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?companyId=830630&sortCriteria=R&keepFacets=&facet_CC=830630

<comment><USER2> This submission is pathetic. As much as I am outraged at the invasion of rights at our airports, we should not be launching a vendetta against these private citizens. Take your issues up with your public elected officials.</comment>


Why You Should Use Sass - <AUTHOR> http://www.yonbergman.com/2012/05/19/why-you-should-use-sass/

<comment><USER2> +1 for SASS and especially Compass, if you know CSS well, the learning curve is essentially flat and the dividends are enormous.</comment>


Major arcs for Goldbach's theorem - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2897

<comment><USER2> Can anyone in the know give an opinion on the claimed proof? I see Wikipedia has already been updated:

      Considerable work has been done on the weak Goldbach conjecture
      culminating in a 2013 claimed proof by Harald Helfgott.

Taken from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbachs_conjecture#Rigorous_r...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbachs_conjecture#Rigorous_results)

For the casual reader, there is a great novel by Apostolos Doxiadis based around Goldbach's conjecture: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Petros_and_Goldbach%27s_C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Petros_and_Goldbach%27s_Conjecture)

(Doxiadis's "Logicomix" is also recommended)

<comment><USER3> Terry Tao's comments on this: [https://plus.google.com/u/0/114134834346472219368/posts/8qpS...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/114134834346472219368/posts/8qpSYNZFbzC)

Mathoverflow discussion: <http://mathoverflow.net/questions/130545>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5703681></comment>


So why do colliding blocks compute pi? [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/jsYwFizhncE <comment><USER2> This is the second video in a series, first video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfHFsfGXjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfHFsfGXjs)</comment>


Mr. Money Mustache, UBER Driver - <AUTHOR> http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/22/mr-money-mustache-uber-driver/ <comment><USER2> When it comes to finances, people have a shockingly hard time figuring out the true cost of things. I've seen this a lot with things such as driving and income taxes. As he mentions, this informational asymmetry works to Uber/Lyft's advantage, so I doubt we will see any changes from them.</comment>


Study says Seinfeld ads made MS brand image worse. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/business/media/04adco.html?_r=3&ref=technology

<comment><USER2> No shit. It focused attention away from the brand, it was weird, and it raised a lot of criticism that attracted people who wouldn't have heard of the ad anyway.

I'm all for "edgy", and I love CP+B's work, but they were competing against Apple, and that means competing against possibly the best advertising machine on the planet. Apple has excellent reputation, they've got beautiful products, they were competing against a heavily-criticized product, and they had a brilliant two-pronged ad plan. Part of their ads only discussed product, and nothing else. No "Let's see people using this." No "Look at people using this in real life." It was, "We've made something beautiful." No more than that. It was the revolving iMac, the Macbook Air in the envelope, the rack of iPod touches, the chromatic Nanos, the many videos of the app store. Emphasis on "groundbreaking."

Meanwhile, they took out a heavy ad campaign against Microsoft. They made entertainment pieces. Slapstick. All of it gently teasing Microsoft. No hard edges: just two funny actors joking around. Even if it was unfair and imbalanced, even if Hodgman was the funnier of the two, it was _fun_ , and it was fun like satire is fun. It didn't make the case that Microsoft was bad, it _took that fact for granted._

Against this, CP+B put in an "edgy" ad. Weird stuff with Gates and Seinfeld joking. Only problem is, edgy is good when you've got two equal, generic products. CP+B's Burger King ads stand out because McDonald's has nothing. In this case, Microsoft is bland, but Apple is a hot product. It's one of the most fashionable brands on the planet, and even among hardcore tech geeks, it has a pretty good reputation. (Some people hate it, but some people love it.) Furthermore, it was a big risk, and Apple - seated in a comfortable niche - was able to launch attacks directed at the sole fact that it was a pricy and edgy campaign.

I'm interested in seeing how the "I'm a PC" ads end up doing. They're nice, even if they still have that feeling of Microsoft's avoiding talking about their product - and that, I think, is MS's Achilles Heel right now. They're a nothing brand. They're the biggest but they have no impressive positive reputation. Their computers are designed by other companies, none of which stand out. Apple, meanwhile, has an extremely tight product line and they control every aspect of their product, including ads.

Yeah, Microsoft is the bigger company, but they're at a disadvantage in this campaign. Apple has a definitive image. Microsoft does not.

<comment><USER3> What's CP+B?

<comment><USER4> Crispin Porter & Bogusky - <http://www.cpbgroup.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apparently, I'm the one person on the planet who actually enjoyed the ads. If they had focused on their products I probably would have turned the channel. Nike doesn't have to talk about how great their gear performs, they simply create a mood. Now, you could argue the Seinfeld ads were a little too Mars Blackmon-SpikeLee-jokey and not enough Witness-Lebron-Inspiring, but at least they didn't hit you over the head with Vista. And it allowed them to poke fun at themselves a bit - break down the big corporate slow-moving behemoth image.

<comment><USER6> Not the only one, I liked them too. I was very surprised to see and didn't liked them first. Afterwards I thought they were great because they were not focused on the product as you're saying.

Plus Bill Gates making fun of himself... you wouldn't see many CEOs doing that (even Steve Jobs!).

The article doesn't add much value to what we already know about those ads.

<comment><USER7> Hear, hear.

Just to see Bill Gates reading from "Code Complete" to that kid was worth the whole thing....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with the ad is the fact that it's ad odds with the rest of the brand, there's no unity. Coming from a different brand it could have worked, but it just came across like the school jock coming to class in goth.

</comment><comment><USER9> _The ad was shown just once, but people still talk about it._

FWIW, the ad was actually shown twice, the first time was a month before the super bowl at midnight somewhere in Idaho, specifically so it could be submitted to award ceremonies for the year.

</comment><comment><USER10> That's because those ads were retar--- I mean ridiculous.

(sorry pg, there's only so much constructive criticism I can give before I call it like it is :-))

But seriously, the people who seek identity from their computers are younger audiences not older ones. That ad, by using a 90s era sitcom character, was aimed at people who are older. For the people who Microsoft needs to gain some momentum, it probably ended up making them look ridiculous. Microsoft is still in the game because of their market power and first-mover status back in the dawn of personal computers, but it will be very hard for them to dig themselves out of the hole they are in with money alone.

</comment><comment><USER11> why Seinfeld anyways? The guy is a has been. I can see them spending all that money when the show was in full swing...but now? Whats the point?

<comment><USER12> I guess the point was to remind us that Microsoft was important back in the nineties.

<comment><USER13> Haha, I never thought of it that way, but now I see Microsoft just made a huge fool of themselves.</comment></comment></comment>


Questions to Ask an SEO Professional - <AUTHOR> http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2011/02/24/seo-professional/

<comment><USER2> Questions to ask an hero</comment>


Yukihiro "Matz": Ruby, Functional Programming and Programming Languages Design 	 - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/yukihiro-matz-language-design;jsessionid=23B8C8F17DE16C2D726E5B07DAB93586 <comment><USER2> Here's a link to interview transcript without all the garbage. [http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ATkBKEXbo6n8ZGdrNzhoM2dfND...](http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ATkBKEXbo6n8ZGdrNzhoM2dfNDhkanMzaDljaA&hl=en)

<comment><USER3> thanks. that site has the worst and most annoying format i've ever seen. i mean, clicking a goddam button to view each reply? jesus</comment></comment>


After Quarantine, 28% of People Report Feeling Overwhelmed by Driving - <AUTHOR> https://www.reviews.com/insurance/car/study-after-months-of-quarantine-28-of-people-now-report-feeling-overwhelmed-and-overstimulated-by-driving/?_thumbnail_id=349597 <comment><USER2> "... I had to pay close attention to what all the other cars around me were doing..."

Jesus H. This is what you should be always doing when you're driving. This is how driving has always been, but people turn off their brains and pick up the cell phone. Too bad it only takes people a week to get back to complacency.

<comment><USER3> I think the person probably meant that they had to apply effortful attention while driving. Due to practice, the process is usually automatic/unconscious.

<comment><USER4> Is it though, or do you just get complacent?

Like if you don't swivel your head and check for cyclists before opening your drivers side doors or do the Dutch reach [1], you're still probably not going to hit a cyclist. Until you do.

[1] [https://www.bicyclenetwork.com.au/tips-resources/know- how/du...](https://www.bicyclenetwork.com.au/tips-resources/know-how/dutch- reach/)

<comment><USER5> New drivers and much more likely to crash then experienced ones.

Doing these is realiable only if it is matter of habit and you do them automatically, without thinking about it. If you have to focus on it, you will forget about it.

Same with evaluating who goes first on intersection without lights. You should not go through the whole "wait he is from right, but the other is turning ..." you should look at it and know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Total opposite here. Before lockdown, I felt overwhelmed by driving. Having to do it every day, sitting in deadlock traffic, the general stress of anticipating everyone else's movements, timing lane changes in extreme congestion, etc.

After quarantine, I feel elated driving. I am rarely forced to, traffic is much lighter, I put on a podcast or audible book, and it has gone from stressful to relaxing.

<comment><USER7> We had a couple of months of that, and now not only is traffic back up to the same density as before, it also feels like a fair number are driving just a little bit worse. It could be my imagination though..

<comment><USER8> Where is it up to the same density. It isn't here (Austin, TX)

<comment><USER7> Auckland, NZ

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I stopped driving about 6 years ago. I live in a very walkable city and work from home so I sold my car. The few times I do drive it's now very overwhelming. I'm just glad to know it's not just me.

<comment><USER10> Do you use any transit other than legs? Bike, E-bike, public transit, train, skateboard, scooter...?

<comment><USER11> I've never had a drivers license; grew up in st louis, and have lived in boston, toronto, and now oakland (amongst others). Prior to the shutdown, I used BART and the ferry for most of the commuting, and bikes for everything else. I've got a couple cargo bike setups; I find my Brompton folding bike (with a couple attachment bags) has plenty for weekly grocery trips, and my older Xtracycle is fantastic for multi-day bike/camping trips or much larger loads. We pretty regularly do vacation by train with folding bikes as carried luggage...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Traffic seems noticeably faster and more aggressive than before.

<comment><USER13> Tell me about it. Traffic volume may be down, but speeds and recklessness seem to be up, in my experience (Bay Area).

<comment><USER14> Also the huge amount of flagrant violations. At least one a week there's one driver that treats a red light like a stop sign.

<comment><USER13> God, I hope not. Nobody actually _stops_ at stop signs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The end of the article is telling for me. It talks about surveys done in Los Angeles about how people feel when they moved there.

I was born in and learned how to drive in LA. After that, no matter where I drive is relaxing in comparison.

<comment><USER16> Totally agree. I learned to drive in LA, then moved to Silicon Valley and could not stand driving there (a combination of bad drivers and bad traffic light, intersection, and expressway design). I moved back to LA and it's a relief, even though it's technically more challenging.

<comment><USER17> I'm from the east coast and my wife is from LA. She is anxious on the small, windy east coast roads where I grew up, where there are lots of blind corners and narrow lanes. I'm the opposite, I'm overwhelmed by the 8 lane LA freeways.

<comment><USER18> LA's 405 and 101 interchange is probably one of the worst I've had the misery of experiencing in North America on a repeat basis.

Gridlock in LA feels objectively more dangerous than being stuck in, say, NYC city traffic or Toronto's 401.

<comment><USER15> Yup, did that one all at the time. When it was really bad I tried to take Sepulveda or one of the canyon roads. They weren't any quicker, but were more fun!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "After about a week of driving somewhat regularly, it felt normal again."

I think that's the key point, unfortunately. After such driving abstinence I would hope people would be zealous for far longer before defaulting back to Goofy Motor Mania: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFHT1lw3vSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFHT1lw3vSI)

</comment><comment> ian-g I just moved and then a few weeks later drove 1600 miles roundtrip to visit family. All total, that's over 90% of the driving I've done since December.

The start was definitely weird, I'd definitely lost some of the skills I had, but 800 miles of highway was really good for bringing that back - I felt back to normal after half the drive

I think people will recover quickly, especially if they're doing road trips over summer.

<comment><USER20> I haven't been driving _much_. But I have been _consistently_ maybe a couple hours a week on a mix of roads. It's probably more pronounced with me when I come back from 3 or 4 weeks overseas where I haven't driven at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anecdotally, it's not so much that I feel overwhelmed by driving as it is that there seems to be significantly more people driving like maniacs. Or perhaps there are the same amount of maniacs as usual and less people on the road in general, making their behavior more apparent.

<comment><USER22> Here in New Zealand we like to blame tourists for our poor driving and for crashes. Now there aren't any foreign tourists and the stats are just as bad. [https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12347725)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> anecdotally speed is something you get accustomed to. When I first emerged after SIP I found that 40MPH felt really fast... I have also noticed after a day at the track on my motorcycle I cant believe that bikes have to go <100MPH . Speed truly is acclimated and a skill.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm been seeing more speeding the last few months (which I am fine with). More recently thought, I've seen more overly-aggressive driving than I'm used to. People are speeding up when someone tries to pass, that sort of thing.

I was caught up in a road-rage thing yesterday. As a recovering hothead, I get being on the bad end. When he was tailgating I accelerated where he'd have plenty of room to get by. I kept my cool & didn't react when he break-check'd me. I really was trying to defuse the situation but he couldn't stop escalating it. It's unusual to have it go past the 1st revenge thing, as long as I don't react.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have been working from home last 6 years. And can't agree more about the overstimulation and feeling overwhelmed by how much is going on every time I am in an office setting or busy streets

</comment><comment><USER26> Driving in traffic is likely an extraordinarily stressful activity.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've felt a bit like this after just a couple of weeks! One time last year I parked up at the airport and headed on a business trip for 2 weeks. When I got back to my car and sat in the driver seat, everything felt strangely alien and uncomfortable. I really felt like I had to think about what everything was, where it was, and how to use it. Maybe just me!

</comment><comment><USER28> Driving a decently long way after the lockdown was definitely a bit of a trip, took a minute to get back in the swing of things, but it came back fast.

What is really tiring and overstimulating was going to an outdoor party of about 12 people. Keeping track of the whole social situation was really tiring, when before it was no problem at all.

</comment><comment><USER29> Ah, now I understand why LA freeways are increasingly more frustrating for me. It was awesome a month ago; 90 in the #1 lane, 80 in the #2 and people who wanted to go slower kept in #3+. Now these befuddled types don't know which lane to be in.

</comment><comment><USER30> When I first moved to San Francisco, I barely drove for 5 years. When I started again it felt incredibly dangerous and overwhelming, but it feels normal again now that I drive more frequently. I think this is normal.

</comment><comment><USER31> So, the first snow stress also happens with after Quarantine driving. I wonder if it will follow the same comfort curve?

</comment><comment><USER32> How many people would report feeling overwhelmed by driving normally? I've always felt as such.

</comment><comment> jerome-jh After 4 years commuting by bike, I feel over-bored by driving, really.

</comment><comment><USER33> Well I managed to smash my car in the driveway ... first time in years :(.

</comment><comment><USER34> tl;dr: when you stop doing something you forget how to do it until you relearn.

<comment><USER35> Exactly, it's an interesting example how quickly our brains can seem to lose access to skills without actually 'forgetting' them, considering how quickly people can get pack to normal.</comment></comment>


Wang Model 360SE Calculator System - <AUTHOR> http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/wang360.html <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing! Pretty interesting read :-).

I actually came across An Wang's book entitled "Lessons" earlier this year when I was checking out a small bookstore in San Diego. It's a pretty neat piece of history and he made some interesting contributions to the industry that I had never heard about: [http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Autobiography- Eugene-Linden/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Autobiography-Eugene- Linden/dp/0201094002)</comment>


Insert bitcoins and launch EC2 - <AUTHOR> https://bitnodes.io

<comment><USER2> Didn't they used to have global nodes info? What happened to that site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here <http://getaddr.bitnodes.io></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Need design help?  -  Looking for remote design jobs - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys!
If you are a code ninja but not so much designing, I'd like to help you.
im willing to take and work on a couple user interface or branding projects as a freelance or even work exclusively with a startup remotely.
You can see some snapshots of my previews works here: http://www.dribbble.com/nicogarcia
And if you are interested, drop me a line at firstname.lastname@example.com
Cheers, Nico. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.dribbble.com/nicogarcia>

</comment><comment><USER2> Emailed you! I'll be waiting for your reply, nice portfolio!</comment>


Zimride shutting down carpool service to the general public - <AUTHOR> http://www.zimride.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Way to go Enterprise, you are going to successfully destroy the most valuable and useful service of your business. I'm guessing suits at the top of Enterprise, without much technology insight pushed for this.

Zimride is huge, especially with college kids. Simply just take 10% of the transactions, or charge a flat fee per ride. I've used Zimride 5 or 6 times, and honestly it was amazing and a great community.</comment>


Boundaries (2012) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries

<comment><USER2> The (excellent) video is actually from 2012.

<comment><USER3> Fixed.</comment></comment>


Arachnophobia and video games - <AUTHOR> http://readlistenwatchplay.com/254/

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting additional fact that the author of the article seems to be unaware of: there is apparently a community of arachnophobic hackers who create patches or mods to remove spiders from most popular games: [http://www.rahya.de/pages/posts/modding-fuer- arachnophobiker...](http://www.rahya.de/pages/posts/modding-fuer- arachnophobiker-menschen-die-angst-vor-spinnen-haben23.php)</comment>


Fujitsu Cracks 300,000 Year Crypto Problem in Days - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/view/428274/fujitsu-cracks-300000-year-crypto-problem-in-days/?ref=rss <comment><USER2> Impressive computation, but not much new here. The problem solved was a discrete logarithm over the finite field GF(3^(97*6)), which is known to be "easy" due to the low complexity of the function field sieve, asymptotically similar to the special number field sieve used to break 1039-bit integers a few years back (eprint.iacr.org/2007/205).

This is relevant because pairing-based cryptosystems require that logarithms be difficult to solve both in the elliptic curve groups (in this case E(GF(3^97))), and in the finite field groups that result from pairing evaluations. What failed here was the latter, due to the function field sieve.

There aren't many details on this computation, but you can get a good hint of how this was done by the previous paper of the same group (676 bits last time): <http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/090>

TL;DR Don't use low embedding degrees for pairing-based crypto, and you'll be fine.</comment>


Doropomo: Time to Rest - <AUTHOR> https://doropomo.app/ <comment><USER2> This is amazing.

And much more aligned with how to actually build momentum.

25 minutes can be a LOT for some people, and 5 minutes can be enough to start building momentum</comment>


An FDA for Algorithms? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/we-need-an-fda-for-algorithms <comment><USER2> Maybe a good idea, maybe not, but targetting "algorithms" is certainly too broad. Everything that does anything is an algorithm. Will we have to get government authorisation before we can quicksort?

This should be restricted to anything making decisions based on personal information, if it is to be implemented at all.

Also:

> What digital ecosystem do you personally live in? Apple, Google, Microsoft?

> [...] There's a big difference between the way that Google deals with their > photos and the way that Apple deals with their photos. Apple photos are your > photos. You keep them. When they do facial and image recognition on them, > they use meta-level features of your data. The way that they're > communicating is in the most private way that they possibly can while still > collecting the data they need.

You don't _need_ to live in some company's digital ecosystem. I don't. I own my own photos, and Apple are not getting _any_ facial recognition features out of them.

For someone who is clearly a strong proponent of privacy, it's disappointing that she doesn't even bring up the prospect of opting out of these companies.

<comment><USER3> > You don't need to live in some company's digital ecosystem. I don't. I own > my own photos, and Apple are not getting any facial recognition features out > of them.

Workers, patients, and customers don't get this choice. I work on hospital systems that use "AI" and we wouldn't survive a proper code audit for what we claim saves lives. We get audited by the FDA, but they aren't combing through our code - just the documentation that we write.

Sure, we describe the algorithms put together by our researchers, but even the rank-and-file developers mostly just consume the algorithms that decide what to tell Doctors taking care of the patients.

For now, at least, Doctors and Nurses mostly use our software as a retrospective tool. I know we're not selling it that way and I worry about the day folks are using this system in place of their years of experience.

The statistics we put out say our software is x% better than the Doctor at making these decisions, is that true? Who knows, but an audit to make sure we're not selling snake oil might save lives.

> Everything that does anything is an algorithm. Will we have to get > government authorisation before we can quicksort?

This just sounds like a strawman argument. If you say, 'our proprietary algorithm will save thousands of lives from malpractice,' you better be ready to back that up with an audit. It better not be a bridge that's going to fall apart when an eighteen wheeler travels across it for the first time.

<comment><USER4> A code-level government audit of all life-critical software sounds impractical. There are already millions of lines of code in production on FDA approved devices (e.g. pacemakers?) so I am sure that standards and certification processes around this already exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _It's never been quite clear, she says, whether the phrase—which is > frequently the entire output of a student's first computer program—is > supposed to be attributed to the program, awakening for the first time, or > to the programmer, announcing their triumphant first creation._

It seemed perfectly clear to me. "hello world" is the purposed program talking to the user of the computer on behalf of the service provider who wrote the application. The second lesson was then to usually request user input from that user.

> _We need to make algorithms transparent, regulated, and forgiving of the > flawed creatures that converse with them._

Do we? Do we really? Pray tell why...

> _you could just put any old colored liquid in a glass bottle and sell it as > medicine and make an absolute fortune. And then not worry about whether or > not it's poisonous. We stopped that from happening because, well, for > starters it's kind of morally repugnant. But also, it harms people. We're in > that position right now with data and algorithms._

No, we aren't. "Algorithms" is being abstracted here to mean, presumably, large scale high cost data collection infrastructure and logistics and business. That's not algorithms, it's something else.

> _You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody._

No, you cannot.

> You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them > in any way that you choose.

No, you cannot.

> _you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to > people's lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances._

Presumably you mean sell optional, usually free services that people might want to leverage in return for access to their data. In reality there are only a dozen or less companies with reach on the scale that you might even start considering this a problem. Of course not using their services or applying various legislatively controlled options on those platforms protects you fairly well. Also not "algorithms"

Perhaps there is some idle minded conflation with the risk associated with data breaches?

> _A regulatory body that can protect the intellectual property of algorithms, > but at the same time ensure that the benefits to society outweigh the > harms._

Insidious at best. The "algorithm" behind academic consideration of how to employ themselves by intervening in something that doesn't need intervention is certainly something I wish we could "regulate".

</comment><comment><USER6> > You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody

Fear mongering. There are already laws in place about certain kinds of data such as GDPR, PCI or HIPAA. HIPPA violations can include prison time. Please be specific with what data and processing of such data causes harm and why rather than saying, "computers are scary."

<comment><USER7> But companies tried as much as possible to work around GDPR, using stupid tactics like popups with the option to not allow data collection hidden on hard to reach settings page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the article:

"I went to go and give a talk in Berlin about this paper we'd published about our work, and they completely tore me apart. They were asking questions like, "Hang on a second, you're creating this algorithm that has the potential to be used to suppress peaceful demonstrations in the future. ... I'm kind of ashamed to say that it just hadn't occurred to me at that point in time. Ever since, I have really thought a lot about the point that they made."

Not enough apparently

<comment><USER7> >Not enough apparently

Can you expand?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought this was about algorithms and data structures which made me curious.

But the article is about how intentionally or accidentally sloppy data analysis or processing should be regulated if it can have a large impact on people or lead them to erroneous conclusions. Same could probably be suggested for using amateur statistics used to back up claims, any claims.

</comment><comment><USER10> She has good points. However, when practically implementing this, I could see the "any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure" effect biting back: I imagine many companies would suddenly become very eager to insist that their algorithms are in fact not algorithms at all but "simply computer code" or such - and a lot of hair-splitting will ensue about what exactly is or isn't an algorithm...

(I'm not arguing this shouldn't be done, only that it would be messy)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, the only way I can imagine it working is forcing everyone to open source their code. It doesn't sound very realistic.

<comment><USER12> Well you could technically demand the companies show the source to this hypothetical organization. AFAIK the FAA will take a look at the software that runs on planes, and how well you can trace requirements, whether the requirements are tested. Still Boeing and Airbus don't have their code on GitHub.

<comment><USER11> Alright, I haven't thought about that. Yes, definitely certification is another option.

<comment><USER12> Don't get me wrong. I think it's possible, but it would be so costly that you would need to close nearly every software business in the US.

Safety critical software costs about 100x as much money/time to develop as compared to non safety critical software. "Algorithms" are everywhere, so certification costs would make any software shop as costly as automotive and aerospace. That's just completely misguided. Countries without such restrictions would take over the global software market quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To evaluate whether this will work in practice I looked to the actual FDA and the Patent Office. The FDA: budget issues, understaffed, susceptible to political attacks. The Patent Office: budget issues, complete lack of ability to make fair and balanced decisions on software patents (e.g., the linked list is patented by Google, [https://patents.google.com/patent/US7028023B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US7028023B2/en)). I also am concerned with the broadness of algorithms. Better might be if we restricted it to algorithms in applications which could affect human safety or financial transactions. Still, given the past examples, I'm doubtful this would work well in practice.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wouldn't that put unnecessary regulations + bureaucracy into the path of innovation?

Like copyrighting/patenting algorithms and ever-greening comes to my mind. Though anyone with a PC can comeup with a kickass algo, while not the same as coming up with a blockbuster drug.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anecdote: I once suggested a change to the java standard library to change a O(n) algo into a O(1) algo. Now, more than 10 years later, it's still the O(n) (I just checked the std lib's source code). Nobody cares.

<comment><USER16> This sounds interesting, can you expand a bit?

<comment><USER15> [https://www.zgrepcode.com/java/oracle/jdk-8u181/java/lang/lo...](https://www.zgrepcode.com/java/oracle/jdk-8u181/java/lang/long.java#L-1445)

can be done via De Bruijn graphs as explained here: [https://incubaid.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/number-of- trailing...](https://incubaid.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/number-of-trailing- zeroes/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The track record of the actual FDA is probably relevant here: [http://www.fdareview.org/](http://www.fdareview.org/)

<comment><USER18> Although take that site with a pinch of salt because it's from the Independent Institute who have a _strong_ pro-free-market stance.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Institute#Position...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Institute#Positions_on_political_and_policy_issues)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I run an algorithm in my brain that tells me this is a bad idea

<comment><USER19> Actually maybe it's a good idea, my algorithm is probably pretty broken. It should probably not be allowed on the market. Employers beware!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Look to the financial industry if you wish to see how this idea would develop

</comment><comment><USER21> Isn't this what NIST does?

</comment><comment><USER22> How about an SEC instead.

<comment><USER23> Could you expand on why SEC-like regulation would be better than FDA-like regulation?

<comment><USER22> The SEC does things like banning behaviors and requiring transparency, both of which would help keep a lid on "algorithms" without really stifling innovation, vs the FDA model where it decides if things are safe before allowing them to be used.

I guess food regulation is like that compared to drug regulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ban bubble sort! Call your representative today!

</comment><comment><USER25> We need an FDA for magazine articles to prevent ones like this from being published.

</comment><comment><USER26> This has been submitted 8 times in the last 2 weeks. Here is the only other submission that garnered any comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381917)

<comment><USER7> Intresting, I did not seen it, I am wondering why it did not stick on the first page, the book was interesting and learned some new things.</comment></comment>


3D scan reveals intricate detail of iconic 1829 locomotive - open-source-ux https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about-us/press-office/3d-scan-reveals-intricate-detail-iconic-locomotive <comment><AUTHOR> "...enabling audiences across the globe to examine this iconic locomotive in unprecedented detail for the very first time."

"For compatibility reasons you are seeing a 360 version instead"

and what I'm seeing is a blurry smudge that can be dragged between stills on the horizontal plane. Damn shame.

</comment><comment><USER2> Very nice. From wikipedia:

'It is the most famous example of an evolving design of locomotives by Stephenson that became the template for most steam engines in the following 150 years.'

So much innovation from a small, rainy island off northwest Europe.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yooo. Sketchfab is the thing to watch. It's popping up everywhere for embedded 3D.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's cool and all but an explanation of why it was faster would be helpful. What we're they doing wrong before?

Also the wheels are not connected to the pistons anymore so that rocket is going nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER5> This visualization reliably crashes my mac. Anyone else having this problem? It happens within ~10 seconds of loading the model.</comment>


Fixie.js - Automatic filler content for HTML documents. - <AUTHOR> http://fixiejs.com/

<comment><USER2> I dislike using lorem ipsum or other non-sensical text for mockups, but I admit that it fills a very real need for designing content-centric websites when the content isn't ready yet.

I've encountered just too many cases where the design looks great as a mock-up but when you start plugging in real data the layout start breaking apart, either because the content is too short, too long, or the designer didn't consider long usernames.

My dream for a filler content generator would be a large database of real content types, so you would have a list of real twitter handles, facebook names, blog post titles, world news articles and so on. You could then do stuff like h1 class="fixie worldnews title" or class="fixie twitter username".

Designers often argue that the purpose of Lorem Ipsum is to help the client focus on the look and not the content. I think this posture is wrong because you need the client thinking about content as early as posible.

Front-end developers also need the randomness of real world data to test the sturdiness of their layouts and account for edge cases as early as posible.

<comment><USER3> Would you object if I tried to implement this? Seems like a fun weekend project.

<comment><USER2> No objection at all, I'd be willing to design the landing page if you come around to implementing this :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> awesome. maybe an alternative api would be to allow for something like

      fixie.init([".array", "#of .selectors", ".that", ".should", "#be .populated .with .lorem"])

or just a string like

      fixie.init(".string, #of .comma .separated .selectors, .that, .should, #be .populated .with .lorem")

I think that would address the class proliferation issue and still be explicit about which dom nodes should be populated. easier to maintain / comment out.

<comment><USER5> Nice! I added it as an issue just a second after you.

I'll definitely give it a try, though I invite anyone else to send a pull request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This would be so much more awesome if you could assign the class to a container div. Then on each page reload it would randomly add content - be it paragraphs, headers, imgs, lists, tables etc.

This would be a fantastic tool for testing templates against a wide variety of random content. When making a template for clients to use you can never be too sure what they are going to add so you do your best to style everything. Getting random content on each page load would really solidify this testing.

Adding a class to individual elements... I don't find this too useful.

<comment><USER5> You can now assign the class to a container div - you must still provide some empty tags to specify what kind of content you want.

For example, if you need a couple paragraphs of text, you can use `<article class="fixie"></article>`. If you need exactly 1 header followed by 3 paragraphs, you can use ``` <article class="fixie"> <h1></h1> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p> </article> ```

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Depending on what browsers you're supports it's probably far easier to use generated content (:before, :after). Maybe combined with calc or CSS expressions.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but it's hard to get a variety of content in that way. If you have a paragraph that begins with lorem ipsum over and over again, you'll quickly notice.

<comment><USER8> Then add some :nth-of-type() wizardry to it.

<comment><USER5> Good point.

While there are some situations where that makes more sense, doing that for things like paragraphs is kind of silly - you're just moving junk copy to your CSS. You either have a giant CSS file, or some rather repetitive paragraphs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like how the words generated are totally hipster!

<comment><USER5> Thanks! It's actually kind of funny how small the dictionary is...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great idea!

I'd use this on client projects if:

\- I could pass a selector rather than adjusting my markup (maybe I can add 'fixie' via jQuery?)

\- There's an easy way to swap out the word list - I've had Bacon Ipsum, Hipster Ipsum, and Gangster Ipsum all slip through before and it's embarrassing (depending on the client).

</comment><comment><USER11> Very cool. However, I don't particularly like the fact that I need to add a class to each applicable container.

Maybe a configuration file that allows for selection of specific classes/ids instead?

<comment><USER5> Now you can use a specific class instead. Just call fixie(myclassname);

<comment><USER5> This has been replaced by `fixie.init(["CSS-selector"]);`

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't this is a good idea. Because even if you want quick design but later you will have to fix them all. And nowadays designers are familiar with html ( the most basic skill ). But it's nice btw

<comment><USER5> The point isn't to write content for you - it's to automatically add temporary content so you can test out your design before writing copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thought this might be something like <http://jsfiddle.net/MNFV8/1/> but I like the addition of the paragraph generators too.

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks pretty cool. It would be a great companion to <http://placehold.it> (which fills a similar role for images).

<comment><USER15> It uses placehold.it, actually: <http://ryhan.me/fixie/sample.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't remember the number of times I've wished for something like this. I'll be sure to check it out for the next web project :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Like it. The only nuisance is the class attribute you have to repeat across all tags that you need to fill in.

<comment><USER18> What is the better alternative?

<comment><USER17> don't know. But the smart folk behind should be able to figure something out.

<comment><USER19> Just auto-filling all <p>'s and <h_>'s might be an interesting option. You could also have the API allow you to list tag names to be auto-filled. It can even be smart and first check whether the tag in question already contains text content, and if it doesn't, only then auto-fill it.

<comment><USER5> I considered doing that, but the problem is that I've noticed that _some_ people use <p> tags as breaks between paragraphs. Requiring a class makes sure that the developer/designer knows where their filler content is going.

<comment> grey-area If you're going to require classnames anyway, it might be more flexible to use those to define the type of content to insert. Personally I'd prefer adding a simple bit of js to a page to define the fixie behaviour, something like :

      fixie.fill('.my_header_class','head');
      fixie.fill('#my_id','paragraphs');

etc, as otherwise I have to have a special layout with lots of 'fixie' everywhere and perhaps a special structure using certain tags in order to use the js, and can't define what sort of content goes where except by changing the type of html element which contains it.

I'd prefer to start with an html document which has already been made, and consider how to add fixie to it in the least obtrusive way - and how to remove it later when it was not required, without impacting the document structure or classes etc at all. So if I can add a bit of js which adds fixie in an unobtrusive way to any existing page, and then remove it by simply commenting out that js, that would be preferable to having to set up a special template just to use fixie, or having to consider fixie use from the start. Fixie should really IMHO adapt to the html it is used on, not force that html to be adapted to it.

<comment><USER5> As mentioned elsewhere, this is now implemented as `fixie.init(["CSS- selectors"]);`

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Won't work with javascript disabled, obviously. This makes it unusable for me.</comment>