What Google would have looked like in the 1960s - <AUTHOR> http://www.masswerk.at/google60/ Punch cards <comment><USER2> Wow!

This is actually very classy and reminds me of my dad's office back in the day. I remember going to his desk on Sundays and listening to dot-matrix printers nearby. Now I know those were ordinary MIS/TPS reports that we've come to hate so much. But I used to play with that line-feed paper, ripping its edges where it connected to the printer sprockets.

There was also a huge drum printer in that office, with a giant spool of paper resting on the false floor. The room was air-conditioned, shoes left outside, very cozy and well lit. Sure it looked very cool to me then. Thank you for bringing back those pleasant memories!

<comment><USER3> I get pangs of nostalgia watching this thing. I'm old enough to have worked with punch cards, teletypes, mag tapes, line printers, front panel switches, and such -- in the '70s anyway. (... now where the hell are my cigarettes ...)

<comment><USER4> This 60s Google app is very cool, and I can see how it might inspire nostalgia.

But whenever I think about how prevalent cigarette smoking used to be in those days, I feel sad that so many people smoked without fully understanding the health risks. Both of my grandfathers lived and worked in that era, and both died of lung cancer.

<comment><USER5> The risks were pretty much fully understood in the '70s

<comment><USER6> Indeed. My father quit smoking from one day to the next in the mid-60s, when a surgeon friend showed him photos of a smoker's lung. The info was available.

<comment><USER4> I'm glad to hear that your father successfully quit his first time. According to the American Cancer Society, he belongs to a 7-percent minority. Please see my response above for more statistics and qualitative data about what information was - and is - available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This makes me a little sad that I wasn't born early enough to experience the rise of that sort of technology. On the other hand, I'm also a little sad that I was born too early to not live through the era of hyperdrive and mass consumer space travel.

I guess I'm a little greedy.

</comment><comment><USER8> It takes so long to use, but the "printout" feels a lot more permanent and awesome than the modern digital list of search results.

<comment><USER9> I used to have a box of crummy line-feed paper that I used in a dot matrix printer hooked up to my Apple IIe. I liked the endlessness of the accordion- fold paper. Also I felt like it was very cool (and a bit surreal) to take data that is inside the computer and print it out and leave it in piles on the desk. I wasn't tied to a tiny screen anymore...

I just re-watched Colossus: The Forbin Project and I thought it was funny how you could tell that the paper was much higher-quality than the stuff I had in my box. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vn0...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vn0cz7vYOcc#t=36) <\- should skip to 36 seconds in

<comment><USER10> I just spent my morning watching that movie, and now I'll probably spend the rest of the day reading the book. Awesome movie, thanks for posting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I got really distracted about totally inaccurate audio and tape functions. Haven't you ever used those devices? Timing, sounds, tape reel operation, highly in-accurate. Sorry to complain, idea is nice. But execution is really non authentic. You should have written authentic simulation code for audio and tape reels. Now it's just ehh, artistic stuff, just like in movies, which usually means bad. Also tape storage usually used faster seeks, slower reads and some pauses in between.

I also deeply hated Brother electronic typewriters, because I could always write faster than those typewriters were able to extract data from buffer. There was always an risk that you filled the buffer up and then had a overflow. Then you had to wait until the buffer was clear so you were able to see what was lost before continuing. Really enraging. IBM Selectic typewriters were much better and a lot faster. Anyway, main point is that print timing differs between letters based on what's being printed.

Of course you were able to connect both of these to computer and use as a printer.

Good: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter) Bad: [http://electricinnards.blogspot.fi/2013/04/brother- ax-250-el...](http://electricinnards.blogspot.fi/2013/04/brother- ax-250-electronic-typewriter.html)

This should be interesting at least to tech hackers. Old but good stuff. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Selectric.ogv](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Selectric.ogv)

<comment><USER12> The sounds are actually extracted from footage showing this kind of equipment at work. The tape drive operations are controlled by random (based on what assumptions on the index and block locations should we do this?), but should usually feature some pauses and stops. The action of the tape tensioners is highly exaggerated in order to provide a substitute for the vacuum columns that can't be shown in this layout (providing a bit of a visual explanation for the asynchronous action of the reels).

Please understand that this is not meant to be a full emulation (like, say, Hercules compiled via Emscripten). Otherwise you would have to re-implement Google on top of zOS ... ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice. They capture the 360-era console style well. Should use a fast vac- column tape drive, though — it only reads a few contiguous blocks, so I'm not able to suspend disbelief that there is no actual search depicted.

The same author has done PDP-1 Spacewar <[http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/>](http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/>) with a pretty good re-creation of the original display — see _Notes on the CRT- Emulation_ down the page.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have been wondering why it took me so long to become a better, faster programmer. I accomplish as much in a week now as I did in a year back then.

Was I that stupid back then? Have a become a much better learner? Was is the "10,000" hours that made the difference?

No. It was just that fucking hard to make much progress back then. And it's changed so gradually that it's hard to notice.

I've have always known this, but I didn't _feel_ it to this extent until I did this demo.

Great job. Brought back wonderful memories. And new understanding.

Now burn it.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is fantastic. I'm 54 and thus old enough to remember writing my programs one card at a time on an 026 or 029 keypunch. A DECwriter with TSO was like heaven.

Great simulation and highly evocative of that earlier time. Kudos to the creators!

</comment><comment><USER16> Not very realistic, though... where were the ads?

Seriously, though, totally impressive!

<comment><USER12> No ads, but it features some basic Doodles: Dec 23, 24-26, 31, Jan 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love that. I got my first access via a teletype console in 1962, and a few years later in high school I took a programming extension class at a local university: punched cards! After college, we would run our own data general minicomputers, VAXes, etc. I remember backing up my tapes because it would have been catastrophic to loose programs and data.

</comment><comment><USER6> Gosh, I thought my childhood computers were slow...

(my first computer was an Acorn BBC, with 32K and tape recorders to save your programs on, zzzzz...)

<comment><USER18> Happy days!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This really helps you appreciate how fast modern technology really is.

</comment><comment><USER20> Props to whoever came up with the idea.

<comment><USER21> Props to whoever executed the idea.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple markdown sharing site - <AUTHOR> https://markdownshare.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This site has been running for the past couple of years, and has recently had an overhaul & refresh to make it a golang-powered site, via the source here:

[https://github.com/skx/markdownshare/](https://github.com/skx/markdownshare/)

Previously the code was a Perl-based application using the excellent CGI::Application framework:

[https://github.com/skx/markdownshare.com/](https://github.com/skx/markdownshare.com/)

I've slowly been reworking many of my applications to be golang-based, because I appreciate the ease of deployment & testing.</comment>


Look at this - need feedback-  - <AUTHOR>

"A" is me little startup, "B" some wanna be guys who want to say they run a startup. "C" a guy with an interesting idea who met "B" somewhere, used us, "A" to present for them and now want to cut us out of the deal.
everyone look at this section of an amendment to a contract that my partner signed last december.  and before you read this, know these things: 1. my company "A" introduced company "B" to the team that created the business plan for investment approach for company "C".  i also helped "B" negotiate a better deal with "C" 2. As of last december we were all partners.  as of last summer, i was on the teams advising on strategy, my company coming up with some very key revenue points 3. part of the business plan presentation included an interactive working software feature, created by my company, and is the only working software feature yet in the package - although this "C" is an internet company.
 3.  i already have an email with me@"C".
4.   They are claiming that they will introduce me to "C" and will sue me if i try to reach out to "C" on my own.
6.	Upon signing this Agreement, "A" shall not directly or indirectly contact "C" or solicit business from "C" in furtherance of the present projects or any other projects during the Term of this Agreement.  In the event of a breach of this paragraph 6,  "B" shall have such remedies as may be available to it at common law, including without limitation injunctive relief, and in the event of any lawsuit or action occasioned by such breach, the prevailing party shall be entitled to recover the costs and expenses of suit, including without limitation reasonable attorneys' fees. <comment><USER2> Only had 1 cup of coffee so far, but I think I'm following your A, B, C story.

What you did verbally, without documentation and contracts, is of little realistic value (other than to maybe help verify the fact that it looks like you're getting screwed).

From what you have written above, it looks like your company A can't do any business with C, without a penalty and a lot of legal scrabbling.

Having no idea what the realistic business value of working with C is, it's hard to give much advice.

You could lawyer up on this, and maybe make some progress. By law contracts are supposed to be mutually beneficial to both parties. There may be other laws and such in your region that prevent you from signing away certain rights, and override this contract. This is most likely an expensive pursuit, so you should be REALLY sure of the value of C.

If B is a corporation and not a person, what are the chances that they go out of business? (that would pretty much invalidate this as well).

My gut feeling is that this is probably one of those expensive lessons that you can't help but learn in real-time in the world, and you should probably do your best to push back, but not waste too much time/effort fighting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> we have a contract. this new amendment has come out of nowhere. "B" is a joke, just some guys wanting to go around and saying they have a startup. there is an agreement between us "AB interactive"and between us as a group with "C" signed, but they are claiming a new agreement was made somewhere, i told them yesterday that would not hold. i am ready to walk away from this right now and have. "C" holds no value, even if it gets the funding, "B" holds no value and i am quitting, after a year of stress and seeing no lessons learned by my small team. They are actually mad at me for being VERY FIRM with "B" about this amendment and this amended agreement. i am in another city now dealing with a very sick family member with connective tissue disease, and they are pulling this crap. I wonder how many other startup companies have dwelt with this

<comment><USER3> I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt.

1)You say this 'amendment' comes out of nowhere. If it was an amendment and you haven't signed it, is it valid?

2)A shall not indirectly contact C. But you have already indirectly contacted C through B. As B was aware of this, I'd think this should be void. I would also think that you getting an @C e-mail address kinda shows that you have already been in contact with C, assuming C doesn't give e-mail addresses to people with no connection to C.

3)If C is a start-up with no value, and B is nothing, why are you even worrying about this? go out and get some business without B or C - I'm assuming your contract doesn't say that you have to work exclusively with B. If it does, than I wouldn't say B has nothing, as they have you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When you are bootstrapped, how to find a good lawyer? my last startup had all the whistles and bells. it went from being just me and my partner in my kitchen to a useless staff of 40. we had wall street big wigs and a lawyer with company equity who turned out to be a dud by the way. and that company went under due to waste, greed, etc, laziness, it seems the new team brought in, just spent 2 years trying to push us out, which we were fine with-if they could grow the company, but these people could not even tell me what files we keep the contracts in, who were the interns and staff, and what is the internet and why should they care. i may leave this start up world, because now broke, and restarting, i am acting as our own attorney, (i am not an attorney) and trying not to get screwed until we get funding. but looking at shit like this amendment- just makes me disgusted with the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Time to talk to a lawyer, methinks.</comment>


Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals (1981) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html <comment><USER2> Wow! Before they knew about HIV and AIDS. Interesting history!</comment>


Ask HN: What do small marketing agency deals look like? - <AUTHOR> I can't figure out the math behind all of these smallish marketing agencies.  In my city there are at least a dozen of them; 10-20 employees, very nice offices, they typically have one or two Fortune 1000 clients, some smaller clients, and a few local clients.  They seem to launch one or maybe two projects a month.  Projects are usually some mix of creative video and photography, a microsite, social media creative, digial ad creative and buys, content, "brand strategy", etc.<p>It seems most of them would need to bring in at least $100k/month to break even. Are the deals that big?  Anyone have examples of number breakdowns for these types of deals? <comment><USER2> Dont have all the answers but a real life example of a locally targeted social ad campaign for a big 2 letter brand that starts with "3" that targets the automotive aftermarket crowd in a 2.5M city has a monthly budget of 5-15k. That's a very niche market. The consumer products division is much larger. The medical devices division is even larger.

You get the idea. The deal are high and that's just ad spend budgets. Design. Creatives. Social media management. Production. Really brings the prices up.

A social media management service that takes care of all the responses and post generation (images, design, etc) across Instagram, FB, etc can easily charge 3-10k/month.

A small business for example a successful crossfit GYM pays $400-600/month. But a larger business commonly pays 1.5K/month just for social media management and some social post productions (photos and edits) and maybe some ad campaign management.</comment>


Zynga CEO Mark Pincus Confirms Layoffs: 5% of Workforce - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/zynga-ceo-mark-pincus-confirms-layoffs-5-of-workforce-potential-closures-for-u-k-japan-offices/ <comment><USER2> No matter how Pincus might try to spin it, announcing this the same day as the iPad Mini event just shows once again how much of a sleazeball he really is.

<comment><USER3> You can lay a lot of sleaziness at Pincus's feet, but announcing your bad news on a Friday, when it gets mixed with other bad and important news, is just good strategy. If the news will get the least play on that day, he even owes it to the shareholders to do it that way.

What exactly is the ethical way to announce layoffs?

<comment><USER4> I may be missing your point, but today is Tuesday.

<comment><USER5> His point is that there's no great time to announce layoffs, and it's perfectly acceptable to announce it or any other bad news at a time when it will get the minimum media attention. Everyone does it, and it's in the best interest of the company.

Besides, whom does it really help for the news of layoffs to get lots of play? If there's a salient case for this move being sleazy, it only holds up if he's actually wronging some party in the process.

The only argument I can really think of is that the more other employers that hear about it, the easier time the laid-off have finding jobs, but that's a very tenuous argument to make

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zynga has almost 3000 employees? Jeez. That's more than Twitter.

<comment><USER7> Zynga's got a lot more products to support than Twitter does. Their homepage lists 18 games.

<comment><USER8> There's over 40 games.

Source: I (still) work here.

<comment><USER9> Any thoughts without any sort of backlash?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And I just got an email in my MIT email about Zynga interviews..

<comment><USER11> Any good company continually looks for new talent, even when they have to let go some of the existing talent. I had the weird experience of coming to work for NetApp the Monday after their first layoff in history the previous Friday. Youch!

Having been at Intel when they were both laying people off and hiring, it is sometimes a function of corporate strategy shift, where the people you have can't fill the jobs that you want to have and their jobs are becoming irrelevant. Intel decided to get out of the DRAM business in '84 and those folks who did DRAM weren't the same kind as the ones who do CPUs apparently.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't call Zynga a good company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised they had 2000 employees.</comment>


Silicon Valley Is a Big Fat Lie (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gq.com/story/silicon-valley-is-a-lie <comment><USER2> Silicon Valley is not a meritocracy because ~75% of those in leadership positions are white males?

19% of engineering and 18% of CS BA were for women in 2014. For African Americans, 4% of BA were for engineering.

Regardless of whether or not there is an institutional/societal reason for this, it is absolutely moronic to blame the place where engineers WORK for not having a perfectly balanced distribution of engineers when the pool available is so clearly not perfectly balanced.

The judgement of a meritocracy should be on whether or not a qualified individual can succeed in that environment purely on their own merits. Judging that based off of the racial distribution and gender distribution of the resulting pool is completely nonsensical.

I put 1 red jelly bean into a jar for every 5 blue jelly beans. I set the jar out and let people eat. If 1 red jelly bean was eaten for every 5 blue jelly beans, does it make sense to say people like the blue ones 5x more? Would it only be even if people ate the exact same amount of each?

</comment><comment><USER3> I grew up in silicon valley. My family worked in silicon valley since the military industrial complex days.

I barely ever left here because people come here instead.

And each day since, with the influx of people I've seen more nepotism, favoritism, racism, sexism in the valley.

I've used the internet since a 14.4bps modem and the connections made increases but that's turned into noise while the signals decreases.

I won a web design contest at 13 in whole other different country and I applied to YCombinator 6 times in a row since first read all of Paul Graham's essays in one sitting while hiding in a server room to avoid work and all I've ever thought was required is to avoid aging each year.

I dropped out of college when I can't bother to sit still while someone is explaining to me things that don't matter while all I wanted to do was write more HTML and put up more websites and making things that people wanted.

I've worked at big companies and small startups in all capacities but didn't get anywhere until learning to code myself during my nights and weekends off.

I lived in San Francisco during the boom, the crash, and the boom again.

And in the end all I want is to better organize, sort, filter, and amplify myself and people I care about with better technology.

From my perspective this is my life.

And I've only met a handful of people those espouse these things in the 20 plus years I've been here in the valley.

Where are the rest of you hiding?

</comment><comment><USER4> The article and title are a bit sensational but makes valid points.</comment>


Critical Review of Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://issforum.org/essays/PDF/CR1.pdf <comment><USER2> Also want to say, as anyone who is familiar with the massive rise in violence Latin America should know, Steve Pinker's conclusion that violence around the world is dropping is heavily suspect.

<comment><USER3> Violence persists, and may be increasing in certain areas but it's definitely less prevalent when viewing in a global sense. One figure that really struk me when taking a world history class was that the rate of violent death (as in, the percentage of people that died at the hands of other humans) in pre- agricultural societies was estimated to be between 10-20%. In the 20th century, despite two of the most destructive wars in history, the global rate of violent death was estimated to be 1.7 to 1.8% - and this was less than the preceding century.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Giki – Markdown-powered Wiki - <AUTHOR> https://giki.wiki?hn <comment><USER2> On iOS, your highlight detection pops under the native UI, and so it remains largely invisible. Maybe have your pop up UI element show at the beginning or end of the line?

</comment><comment><USER3> FYI, I highlighted the sentence on the first page and nothing happened.

Firefox, Win7.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite "404 Page Not Found" responses? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You can find a lot of 404 pages here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/404/top/?sort=top&t=all](https://www.reddit.com/r/404/top/?sort=top&t=all)

Some of my favorites:

* [http://www.romainbrasier.fr/404/](http://www.romainbrasier.fr/404/)

* [http://iplanwebsites.com/404](http://iplanwebsites.com/404)

* [https://www.nuvango.com/404](https://www.nuvango.com/404)

* [https://www.easternmarket.com/404](https://www.easternmarket.com/404)

* [http://www.lookitsme.co.uk/404/](http://www.lookitsme.co.uk/404/)

I also had fun making a minimalist 404 page for my SudoBlock game: [https://sudoblock.com/404](https://sudoblock.com/404)

</comment><comment><USER3> Our [https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/404](https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/404) page points to Null Island ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island)). It's a fictional country at the coordinates 0,0 and an inside joke among online geographers.</comment>


Why you should automate your business process - <AUTHOR> http://kissflow.com/process_playbook/5-reasons-why-you-should-automate-your-business-process/

<comment><USER2> Should Startups focus on process automation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Startups or otherwise. i personally think, the second something gets too monotonous, follows a set pattern and has only a limited set of outcomes, then it should get automated.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Linear algebra and web software? - <AUTHOR>

I am curious where linear algebra has applications to web software engineering. <comment><USER2> Depends on what you mean by "web software engineering." Really it's almost a useless term, since a web-frontend can be the front-end for almost any sort of system. The question really should just be "where does linear algebra have applications to software engineering?" in a general sense.

Pedantry & ranting aside, the obvious place is anything to do with machine learning / text mining. If processing large amounts of text and searching for things within, or based on, that text, you may well wind up using algorithms that involve linear algebra.

One of the Mahout project founders speaks fairly often in the Triangle area, at User Group meetings and such, and he always seems to mention Linear Algebra in his talks. There's a reason for that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google? The Page Rank algorithm is basically Linear Algebra.

ButI think you're asking the wrong question. You're doing the equivalent of a 14-year-old saying "When am I ever going to need this?" Sometimes the benefits are much more nebulous and intangible - they affect the way you think, and the way you approach problems.

Most programming doesn't use advanced math, but advanced math helps you do the programming.

(Note - all the above personal opinion, and I don't have specific studies and citations to back it up)

</comment><comment><USER4> Making sense of large corpus of text via machine learning, say .. SVM which stands on top of linear algebra (computing inner products in an isomorphic space of bigger dimension via kernel functions) (Hillary Mason working at bit.ly gives talks about this stuff <http://www.hilarymason.com/> )

Data mining, a lot of which boils down to multidimensional exploratory statistics needs linear algebra.

</comment><comment><USER5> Advance memory allocation uses linear algebra. Also graphics and shadows in game use transpose matrices. A lot of algorithms use linear combination and other linear algebra.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys for those comments, quite helpful.</comment>


Node.js Server-Side JavaScript Injection Detection and Exploitation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@indepthtechio/node-js-server-side-javascript-injection-detection-exploitation-5ec2491f9535

<comment><USER2> All the articles I see like this...

Who actually writes code like this? I have been using Node for 3 years and have not once used eval..</comment>


Apple iPad: Photos Show iPad Has Slot for Forward Facing Video Camera - <AUTHOR> http://crenk.com/apple-ipad-photos-show-ipad-has-slot-for-forward-facing-video-camera/

<comment><USER2> It really stinks how apple leave out features on purpose in an attempt to take your money again the following year. Another reason not to be an early adopter.

<comment><USER3> I think you're making rash assumptions there. There might be a whole lot of reasons why they left it out. One of the most obvious ones would be that they had to make trade-offs to meet the release date, and there was something fundamentally not quite right about the way the camera interacted with the user experience, and so they had to cut that feature out until they could get things sorted.

<comment><USER4> +1

iPad camera might be tricky because of many different angles you can interact with it.

<comment><USER5> Given the pixel densities of cameras, I was wondering if it would make sense to capture a very wide field of view, and then extract head and shoulder shots (possibly multiple). The distortion could be untangled with the GPU.

Face tracking is getting pretty damn good now. For bonus points call out to web service for recognition and tag each stream appropriately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not to be overly skeptical or anything, but I don't see any evidence that these photos are of a disassembled iPad. Where would they get one anyway?

<comment><USER6> Parts, They ordered replacement parts.

<comment><USER7> I'm surprised that Apple is distributing replacement parts before there is anything on the market to have broken parts.

<comment><USER6> I would be surprised if they distributed any before the announcement, but now that the cat is out of the bag, I am not surprised. It's useful to have fully stocked repair centers by the time you launch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The leaked photo from Engadget (the one with a prototype iPad bolted to a table) also has space on the security bezel for a camera.

[http://www.cultofmac.com/engadgets-clearest-tablet- picture-s...](http://www.cultofmac.com/engadgets-clearest-tablet-picture-so- far-shows-camera/27880)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yeh im not a fan how Jobs is always thinking Version 2 first.

</comment><comment><USER9> Now all they need is support for flash.

<comment><USER10> Suggested correction: "Now all they need is better substitutes for flash."

<comment><USER9> That would be great, but it most probably won't happen. Without flash, unfortunately, a large part of the web doesn't really work. Yes there are alternatives for video, and no everybody won't start using them within the next year or two.

The Ipad is rather flawed without flash.</comment></comment></comment>


Ryan Bates, where are you? - <AUTHOR>

Ryan, I owe you so much, I hope you are well! Please let us know where you are!<p>You have thousands of people that are waiting after you ;-) <comment><USER2> Wow you're right! He hasn't posted anything on Railscasts since June last year!

[http://railscasts.com/](http://railscasts.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It appears that he's still on a sabbatical.

[http://railscasts.com/announcements/12](http://railscasts.com/announcements/12)</comment>


Betting Big on Literary Newcomers - T-A http://www.wsj.com/articles/betting-big-on-literary-newcomers-1447880214 <comment><AUTHOR> Big advances kill houses. That's the way it's been, and that's the way it's going to be. But in an increasing winner take-all, buyers won't care. They need the win and they'll lose their shirts trying to get it.

The success of The Windup Girl killed Night Shade Books, because it upped their advances in an attempt to replicate its success.

You can see the same thing happening with the studio summer blockbusters. Everyone appears to be voting to bet-it-all, with losses almost crushing the studios.

I'm not sure what the moral here is except, don't do it. Don't buy into it. Big bets don't make big wins. Wins make wins. And fate is fickle as to where they come from.

</comment><comment><USER2> This seems closely related to PG's essay Black Swan farming: "there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business"

It seems that for the publishers as well, rather than betting big on a few predicted winners, they could bet small on a large number of authors with big potential in the best case.</comment>


Ignore the code: Removing Features - <AUTHOR> http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/02/02/removing-features/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+IgnoreTheCode+(ignore+the+code)&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> Adding features means adding code that almost certainly has bugs. So, not only have you invested time in putting something in, but you're on the hook for more work down the line, which reduces your ability to a) fix other bugs and b) add/change something that has a more compelling use case.

I'm more of the mind that apps should be made with a reasonable[0] API so that people can write add-ons and plug-ins.

Promoting an eco-system around your app increases its value, and it offloads (to some extent) the burden of having to add all those features people say they "must have".

[0]: Defining this is the tricky part ;)</comment>


Xiki: A shell console with GUI features. - <AUTHOR> http://xiki.org/ <comment><USER2> The home page needs bigger calls to action. I wasn't confident about the screencast link being useful because it was so small. I also had to hunt for the installation link – it turns out it's under the "Code" section.

The "hero unit" at the top should contain a big link to install it (appropriately worded to indicate that it's just sending you to instructions in a README on GitHub). Another big button link to the screencasts would probably help, since most people won't understand what Xiki is without them. Alternatively, have a "features" page with a list of features and large, static screenshot demonstrating each of them.

<comment><USER3> Great advice, thanks!

<comment><USER4> agreed. put a video on the homepage

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I lack imagination, but even though the tool provides many interesting solutions, it doesn't seem to "scratch an itch" for any problems I need to solve.

The screencast narrator asks a number of intriguing "what if you could XYZ" questions, but it doesn't actually answer them, leaving the listener to come up with useful applications. Well, what if I _could_ do all those things? I would like to have heard more about what higher-level problem(s) these solutions address, and why these are better solutions than what I'm already using. Something motivated the developer(s) to write this, but I can't immediately tell what that motivation was.

<comment><USER6> You don't lack imagination, but I bet you didn't really try to think about what you could do.

When you first dive into Linux, you learn that you have a thousand different simple commands. And you feel kinda lost. Then you start using them in ways their programmers never imagined. And you chain them with pipes and do some really cool shit.

You do that because nobody told you what they were for, they just were.

<comment><USER2> Your mentioning people "start[ing] using [commands] in ways their programmers never imagined" reminded me, a shell newbie, of something I had read a long time ago, which was that people who use `cat` to output a single file's contents are using the program for something other than its intended purpose. That inspired me to experiment to find the correct way of echoing file contents.

I think the correct way is the `<` operator. `>` writes to a file, and `<` is the inverse, so it reads from a file. One shouldn't `cat some-file.txt` or `cat some-file.txt | wc -l`; one should `< some-file.txt` or `< some-file.txt | wc -l`. `cat` is only necessary when you supply to it multiple arguments, as in `cat first-file.txt second-file.txt`.

Of course, `cat` still works for outputting file contents, as it has for me all this time. But it just feels more "right" and "safe" to use the operator that is built for that purpose.

I just wanted to mention that discovery in case anyone else wondered the same thing when they read the words about using commands in unintended ways.

<comment><USER7>
        $ < some-file.txt | wc -l

doesn't work. You should run

        $ wc -l <some-file.txt

Although in most cases the program you're using is capable of reading from both stdin and from a file. So you'd really just run

        $ wc -l some-file.txt

When you see characters like '|', '<', and '>' the things you're playing with are called pipes. (There's a decent wikipedia article on 'Pipeline (UNIX)' that talks more about them) Having tons of commands that do specific things wouldn't be very useful if you couldn't compose them (in the function composition sense), and pipes are the tools you use to combine them. This is where the 'using commands in ways never imagined by their authors' really comes from.

<comment><USER8> To be pedantic, > and < aren't pipes, only | is. A pipeline means that stdout of the first program is stdin for the next program. > and < set stdout or stdin to a file, not another program.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28Unix%29>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redirection_%28computing%29>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As much as I love to see people iterate on the boring old command line, this will never catch on.

1) It's too difficult to remember all the tricks to make it useful, and the cost of memorizing tricks that I saw in the first screencast isn't worth the efficiency it provides.

2) It's too difficult for new users to remember the tricks that are supposedly "better." It's a lot like Python vs. Perl -- Perl is a really smart and clever language, but you can type just a few characters more to write Python and it'll be a lot clearer as to what's going on.

The one exception to all of this is the MySQL stuff I saw. The MySQL prompt has sucked for a long, long time, and building SQL queries is something you do iteratively anyway.

All of the above said, I still think this is pretty neat. But I won't use it.

<comment><USER10> Couldn't both of those complaints apply to, say, Vim, the golden child of HN?

<comment><USER11> One big difference is that Vim has been a de facto standard for a very long time, and it's ubiquitous - you can trust just about any server to have vim installed - so the investment to learn it has a much more guaranteed pay-off.

<comment><USER12> I agree. In fact, vi is a standard UNIX utility - see the POSIX-1.2008 specification:

[http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi.html#tag_20_152)

vim is the most popular implementation of vi, with lots of added bells and whistles

I'd say learn vi first; then learn the vim bells and whistles.

I have resources for learning vi at <http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi.htm>

I'm really into improving efficiency and I enjoy teaching people how to use vi. The class materials are publicly available and are based on Bill Joy's original paper introducing vi:

Basic vi: <http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi/class/>

Advanced vi: <http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi/class/advanced.html>

My next vi class will be in Columbus, Ohio at Ohio Linux Fest in a couple of weeks (<http://ohiolinux.org/olfi2012/classes/editing-with-vi>)

<comment><USER13> There is rarely any point learning vi if you are only ever going to use vim. (On many systems, vi is just a symlink to vim anyway).

If I had a nickel for every time someone justified not using vim's features by invoking a bizarre imaginary scenario where they were using vi to twiddle bits on a downed snowflake machine, I could buy a few fancy coffees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, it's Acme? or well not per se acme, but plan9 terminal style.

<comment><USER10> Exactly my thought. Executing any text anywhere, browsing directories with a clip, so much of that demo made me wonder if the author had ever seen Acme or if it was an example of parallel evolution.

<comment><USER3> People have mentioned similarities with Smalltalk and other tools. If you know of a good screencast or something else that shows demos the Acme stuff it would be awesome if you could post the link in the comments.

<comment><USER15> A Tour of the Acme Editor <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533156>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Previously posted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483750>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3506613>

As with the last time I tried it, it still doesn't work. Crashes right away trying to read from some tmp file.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, bummer. :( Join the google group and send the details. We'll get it fixed. <http://groups.google.com/group/xiki>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess I could give emacs a shot, just whenever I've seen people use it it looks like they're pressing a shitload of keys to do the most basic of stuff, despite having amazing macros to do rather complex stuff.

But aside from that, this looks fantastic, it'd be interesting to see if more text editors could be ported to it (e.g. Sublime Text 2)

<comment><USER18> It has been said that you can always spot an inexperienced emacs user because they haven't rebound the default key bindings yet. Not sure I agree with that personally, but it's certainly possible to come up with less keyboard intensive mappings if you want to.

<comment><USER19> I tried using viper and vimpulse modes in emacs to get vim-style keybindings. The problem was that SLIME docs and most emacs tutorials assumed standard emacs keybindings.

In principle, you could convert all those docs and tutorials to use more vim- like keybindings, but that would be _a lot_ of effort, and you'd have to learn emacs/SLIME with standard keybindings first.

Furthermore, if you rely on non-standard keybindings, you'd be completely lost when reading a conversation between typical emacs users, when they say stuff like "oh, just use C-X-a-b C-Y-c-d" or whatever (as they do in another post in this very thread).

For better or for worse, it seems the default keybindings in emacs are pretty tightly bound to its culture and ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's really interesting stuff.

I've got a hobby project that I work on on and off that's similar (although I'm a vim guy no evil mouse clicks) with a heavy org-mode influence. Some of the features you demo in your screencasts are inspired.

I'll be following Xiki closely and probably stealing some of your ideas for my own project.

Good work, I'm glad to see people experimenting with new ideas in modern keyboard based power user interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd be more inclined to try this if I saw some indication that the designer(s) had studied Plan 9 or the best Smalltalk GUIs.

I tire of _trying out software with_ new bright ideas not informed by a knowledge of the best of the old bright ideas.

EDIT: added the 4 words in italics.

<comment><USER22> While it's annoying to see mistakes of the past repeated, I personally find it more interesting to see new things not influenced by older ideas. There are things only the inexperienced can imagine; too much experience bakes in assumptions about the world which may not be fundamentally true. Deep knowledge can lead to manipulation and assembly of prefabricated thoughts, rather than a reexamination of the underlying principles behind those thoughts.

<comment><USER23> This is a good point. I can't comment on Plan9 or Xiki, but I believe this was how Linus went about developing Git. I remember watching a video where he discussed his complete ignorance about CVS and SVN, and how that was a blessing.

Having said that, it is a bit disheartening when somebody solves a problem which is solved _almost exactly the same way_ as several other solutions.

<comment><USER24> Um. And he was not so ignorant of BitKeeper. I also had the impression that it was not so much about ignorance of CVS and things as it was about disliking the way they did things. But I would not know for sure...

Not that I would tell these guys to go about their business this or that way or anything. Whatever works for them and so on. Though it would obviously be helpful to know which things it is similar to and how it compares to them when telling people what it's like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This would be fantastic as a sort of "dev/ops live wiki/shell" for small IT departments. I already spend time writing shell scripts and wiki pages so that my coworkers can perform some of my job functions while I'm gone, this takes it to a whole new level where the shell script is the documentation is the dashboard is the README. It's glorious.

</comment><comment><USER26> This looks cool, but I spent 20 minutes trying to get it running and couldn't make it happen. Maybe the next time it gets posted on HN, the installation process will be a little more mature!

<comment><USER3> I didn't post it this time:)

Join the Xiki google group and we'll get your problems fixed! The install has been tested on Lion and the latest Ubuntu and there are some reports of success. A few weeks back we shifted gears to get "gem install xiki" working and improve the install process.

<comment><USER27> I'm waiting on allowance on that, but I can say on Ubuntu 12.04, I am not able to use the instructions given.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I just got it running in a VM on 12.04 a few days ago. I'll try it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Vim support is very partially implemented" Well bleh :)

<comment><USER3> Much of Xiki has recently been extracted out into the 'xiki' shell command though. So when the vim Xiki client works, a lot of stuff will work (most of the menus). It just needs to grab the path based on where the cursor is, pass it to the 'xiki' shell command, and insert the results into the vim window (indented 2 spaces lower).

If any vim user in the bay area are interested in getting together and pair programming on knocking this out, ping me on twitter! The current vim xiki proof of concept uses the vim ruby api, which is actually pretty decent.

If you're on a Mac, you install AquaMacs which is very mac-like (shift-arrow- key to select, type to replace, etc.) and doesn't require emacs skills.

Another option is for vim people is Viper mode, which emulates vim from inside emacs (a lot of people like it apparently).

Related note, I was pairing with someone on Monday at Proto Night (protonight.com) and we got a very simple TextMate xiki client mostly working.

<comment><USER29> Can you share the code for your textmate version please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cool, it's different from other shells out there. I am still waiting on TermKit to become 1.0. <https://github.com/unconed/TermKit#readme>

<comment><USER31> Given that TermKit's last commit was nine months ago, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. TermKit was a good, thought-provoking design prototype but I don't think it really nailed the next-gen-terminal sweet spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Excellent, really cool. On OSX, this is what AppleScript and Automator should have been.

Would it be possible to tap into GUI applications via OSX UI Scripting, and maybe mirroring the app's menus with Wiki menus?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, totally. Someone should do that. I've brainstormed about it with a few XCode savvy friends. It would be super-slick if it were integrated into the Finder windows. So, you could drill into the dirs to get to a Xiki menu, and then drill into the Xiki menus in-place right in the OS.

I just made a Shoes menu (shoesrb.com) yesterday, though it's not checked in yet. Clicking Xiki menus that bring up custom native UI windows seems like it could have a lot of potential, though haven't really explored it. Might be interesting to try a shoes native interface for Xiki menus.

Another possible direction... Xiki has a web interface that you can enable. So you can to <http://xiki> and navigate menus. It probably wouldn't be too tough to make a native OSX app with an embedded browser that displays it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> well, the integrated database shell looks nice, specially since it should work against different db systems

i think if they limit their focus on have one shell to replace anything that have a shell ... yet offer a better shell experience, they will have a winner

i believe they could be going to too many features so far that those comments comparing it to emacs seem to have a point ...

</comment><comment><USER34> Among the things that this resembles, I would include Org-mode for Emacs. Org- mode's support for execution of embedded code blocks provides very similar functionality (ships as part of Emacs 24). <http://orgmode.org/manual/Working- With-Source-Code.html>

<comment><USER21> What caused me to decide not to learn org mode is that it expects me to learn many new "keyboard shortcuts". (I am putting the term in quotes because it is not the standard Emacs terminology for the thing.) By "new" I mean "keyboard shortcuts" that are specific to org mode and not present in the rest of Emacs.

This xiki thing on the other hand seems to have only a few new "keyboard shortcuts", and consequently I would be more inclined to adopt it if I gets more traction (hackers who have tried it and like it).

I know a lot of people here like to do everything with the keyboard, but I am not one of them.

<comment><USER34> FWIW: Org-mode overloads C-c C-c and tab to the point where just using those two keys you can perform a huge portion of the Org-mode actions depending on your context (including executing code blocks).

<comment><USER21> I seem to remember that there are many, many keyboard shortcuts unique to org mode.

I distinctly recall shortcuts unique to org mode for moving a subtree up and down relative to a list of subtrees all at the same nesting level -- an operation done by dragging with the mouse in many or most other outliners. I know the dragging interface is harder to implement, but I find it more ergonomic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> That looks _very_ promising and I'll surely give it a try. My goal would be to accelerate my current (ba|z)sh workflow to type commands. Sadly, it's not very effective. (Mostly using ctrl-p for last, ctrl-r to find previous command..)

Something interesting I see would be having a .project file in the repository where all the common commands are written. That would be a mix between a cheatsheet and a wiki. For instance, for django, you would have a _Database_ section with some commands. which could dynamically be adapted to the current project. (Database or table names, etc.). Or, if _south_ isn't installed yet, we could see the command to initiate it.. but then, it'll simply be the command to --auto migrate stuff.

Anyhow, really promising and I'm excited to give it a fair try.

</comment><comment><USER36> The last time I saw this posted I installed it on 2 computers. One was running Mac OS 10.8.1, the other BackTrack 5r2. I have it installed on both and the command xiki-status returns "running" but I have not got it properly implemented in any text editor. I have tried in emacs and vim on both. If anyone gets it to work, especially in vim on Mac (which is very limited), please let me know as the instructions are not helpful, there is no helpful discussion on website and and the only option is to file a bug report. My problems aren't a bug, they are lack of info available.

<comment><USER3> > I have it installed on both and the command xiki-status returns "running"

That looks promising. Does like "xiki ip" work?

> the instructions are not helpful

Definitely upgrade so you get the latest gem, as the instructions have been updated lately. If you're still seeing errors join the google group (groups.google.com/group/xiki) and we'll get it figured out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's like Emacs... only not. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER38> The plural of "URL" is "URLs". No apostrophe.

Looks like a neat idea. Not entirely clear what the "cmd-return" is supposed to do. Run a command?

<comment><USER39> _> Not entirely clear what the "cmd-return" is supposed to do. Run a command?_

My thought exactly. The website tells me to try the combination, as if advertising a feature, but never ends up telling me what the feature actually is..

<comment><USER3> Cmd-return "launches" whatever line the cursor is on. It's analogous to what return does in a shell console. Ctrl-return and double-clicking do the same thing.

When you launch a $... shell command it executes it and inserts the results. When you launch a url, it opens it in the browser. When you launch a dir path it lets you navigate the dir contents, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Reminds me of the ipython notebook.

<comment><USER41> I like how it embeds of graphs in the text flow when working with pyplot, instead of opening a zillion windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Characteristic of editing via Modes, previously seen: The Mother of All Demos: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos>

Are we going to see more of a return to Modal editing?

</comment><comment><USER43> Works fine for me, for both aquaemacs and macvim. cool idea, still not sure how I can use this yet, but will give it more tries.

the doc need more details, still do not know how to save a menu.

</comment><comment><USER44> It looks great, but is commandline about not touching the mouse, isn't it ?

<comment><USER45> No, the command line is about executing textual commands. Whether you use a mouse, a touch screen, speech recognition, a keyboard or something else to do that job is entirely up to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> How does it work with environment switching tools like rbenv, rvm ?

</comment><comment><USER47> my only concern is it looks messy. output is all over the place

<comment><USER3> You can type to narrow down after running anything. And its all just text so you can delete whatever you want, to narrow down the output (not practical on most shell consoles).

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The Screencasts page seems broken in Chrome?

update: works in Safari though.

</comment><comment><USER49> Download links?

<comment><USER3> It's github.com/trogdoro/xiki (under "Code").

Or you can do "gem install xiki" and it will guide you through setting it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This looks superb -- inspired by MPW?

<comment><USER3> Never used MPW nor seen it in action, but many people have told me there are similarities. Being able to type stuff and double-click on it, I think.

I'm working on making a page that highlights similarities between Xiki and various tools / paradigms.

<comment><USER51> One neat feature: you could specify regions of a window (text document) as a separate file, so you could perform redirections to and from. Of the window was "Fred" you could, eg:

Echo "main() {}" > {Fred}.$ cc -o mything {Fred}.$

(Of note, the actual syntax included high bit MacRoman characters, so you were actually using the "section" glyph rather than $)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Hmm, someone is reinventing Emacs.

<comment><USER53> Yes, god forbid someone does that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Let's have a Xiki.</comment>


Google Easter Egg- Translating Monty Python's "funniest Joke Ever" from German - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=de&tl=en&text=Wenn%20ist%20das%20Nunst%C3%BCck%20git%20und%20Slotermeyer%3F%20Ja!%20Beiherhund%20das%20Oder%20die%20Flipperwaldt%20gersput! <comment><AUTHOR> Context from Wikipedia:

'"The Funniest Joke in the World" (also "Joke Warfare" and "Killer Joke") is a Monty Python comedy sketch. The premise of the sketch is that the joke is so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from laughter.

...

The German translation of the joke in the sketch is made of various meaningless, German-sounding nonce words, and so it does not have an English translation.'

<comment><USER2> You can see the full sketch at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ienp4J3pW7U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ienp4J3pW7U)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A content warning for HN's German speakers would have been nice.

<comment><USER4> "We apologize for the fault in the subtitles.

Those responsible have been sacked."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There were zwei peanuts, walking down der strasse, und one was assaulted… peanut.

</comment><comment><USER6> Jag tror jag dör...

</comment><comment><USER7> get it?

FATAL!</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best bio-hacking tips for programmers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Lift heavy weights. Not for strength or physique (though that's nice too), but because it increases independence and mobility into old age, decreases likelihood of falls, and increases bone density. Basically it prevents you from sitting in a recliner slowly dying for 10 years at the end of your life. Instead you get to live those years doing things. It also improves cognition and mental health in old age.

Edit: Do squats, deadlifts, bench press, and pullups.

There are a million programs to choose from on /r/fitness, but basically just start with something you can do and try to increase weight or reps every session/week/whatever.

<comment><USER3> interesting, do you have any recommended source to read about this?

<comment><USER4> Mark Ripptoe - Starting Strength ;) [https://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength- Mark-Rippetoe-ebook...](https://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength-Mark- Rippetoe-ebook/dp/B006XJR5ZA)

<comment><USER5> Dan John is less dogmatic and a bit more of an essayist. He's got lot's of great advice and stories about staying in shape as you get older. [http://danjohn.net/](http://danjohn.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Keep your blood sugar stable: don't eat anything sugary during the day. Simple sugars cause your blood sugar to fluctuate dramatically, which negatively impacts your brain's performance. The brain needs a steady supply of fuel to maintain focus for prolonged periods of time. Eat healthy fats, proteins, and lots of green leafy vegetables for breakfast and lunch and you'll avoid brain fog in the afternoon. Snack on nuts throughout the day.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sleep, eat, drink water, exercise, and have meaningful conversations outside of work.

<comment><USER8> Just to add to this - it sounds super trite, so your brain ignores it. But I've noticed, day after day, these are the things that make my life marginally better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure if it technically qualifies, but if your vision is fairly bad, get a pair of "computer glasses" made. These are designed to focus perfectly at the distance of your monitor. It's like getting a vision upgrade.

<comment><USER10> My eyes went to crap when I passed 40, and I had a hard time getting a prescription I was really comfortable with. I wound up using "eyejusters" adjustable-strength reading glasses. [https://www.eyejusters.com](https://www.eyejusters.com) (Not associated with the company, just a satisfied customer.)

There's a small knob by each lens which allows adjustment.

That way I can adjust them for reading a book up close, or adjust them for reading a whiteboard farther away, as needed.

<comment><USER9> Me, too, and I did indeed look at these and similar items. (And probably will get a pair, just for the sheer nerd value.)

Would still strongly recommend the fixed-focus computer glasses, however. They only do one thing, but they do it extremely well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's funny that programmers (and their ilk) are constantly on the outlook for new ways to gain an edge by increasing focus, attention, and endurance, when two of the best substances for doing so have _long_ been known: caffeine and nicotine. Consider – in both World Wars soldiers rations included coffee and cigarettes. There was a reason for that (and it wasn't just "comfort").

Now, you might say, what about the significant downsides for each of these? Well...yes. They are there, and they are fairly well understood.

There is a growing trend in pharmacology to try and get _most_ of the benefits from some substance without _most_ of the downsides. For example, the list of "new" antihistamines is long and growing every day. You know what the best antihistamine is? Benadryl! It just happens to come with a whole host of undesirable side-effects.

The problem, of course, is that for any "new" pharmaceutical, there's no way to be _really_ sure of all the potential downsides until after they've been in use for some time. Take for example: Rofecoxib. Paracetemol (Tylenol) will destroy your liver, and aspirin and ibuprofen will tear up your stomach. Rofecoxib was supposed to bring all the benefits of these NSAIDs without the significant downsides...instead, it caused heart attacks!

So, not really a tip, but more of a caution/word of advice: if you want the _best_ drugs to improve focus, attention, and endurance have a coffee and a cig. If you don't like the impact that has on your health, then keep in mind any alternatives you want to try could have less downsides...or more.

Maybe the best thing would be to get some rest and follow Michael Pollan's wonderful advice: "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much."

<comment><USER12> I abbhor cigarette smoke, so not gonna do that... but my mind can't function without Caffeine, but I find Xenadrine's thermo/caffeine blend works way better than coffee(gives me the runs) and soda(I still drink a shit ton...but probably shouldn't....)... Xenadrine also has l-theanine which I think also might aid in focus some..

<comment><USER13> Just saying, there's vaping and nicotine patches. I don't encourage it but I know a lot of people who use it as a nootropic. There's also a type of cigarette which heats it up instead of burning, so you get more flavor and less smoke/tar.

<comment><USER14> I don't smoke usually but when I do smoke (about a month in a year usually, when I have to solve a lot of problems quickly) it makes me more alive, awake (in many senses, incl needing much less sleep and making it much much easier to get up), productive, confident, reasonably vigorous and masculine in general behavior (my gf loves this part) by an order of magnitude if not more. In an instant! Sadly/curiously strong nicotine gum doesn't work this way (I haven't tried patches so far), only cigars (I inhale the cigar smoke the way people do with cigarettes although this is not the way cigars are meant to be smoked actually) do. This makes me think I should be smoking chronically to improve my whole life but I just don't want to develop a serious addiction (nor to spread odor around me :-)) so I don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Eat healthy and stay active outside of work. It is too easy to get complacent with deadlines and being sedentary at work all day.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Many_ programmers have Vitamin D deficiency. It's a really common issue most people are not aware about. Low Vitamin D has been associated with cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment, and cancer. It is super easy to treat with a daily pill and you can buy a year's supply off Amazon for $15.

If you have health insurance you can ask your doctor for a free Vitamin D blood test.

<comment><USER17> +1 on vitamin d deficiency in general.

Now, I'm not a doctor, but my understanding is that most vitamin d can't be absorbed through the intake of pills.

The solution is to expose yourself to 15min sunlight daily, preferably with short sleeves and pants so you have more skin surface to absorb it.

On the plus side, it's cheaper and you get some fresh air!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hack your mind. Meditate.

Get the Headspace app or pick up a book on meditation and get going. Nothing will improve your concentration more. It takes consistent practice every day, but not as much time as you might think. Ten minutes five days a week treats me pretty well.

And get enough natural sunlight. It will help you sleep better. It will improve your mood. If you can't go natural, get a sun lamp.

</comment><comment><USER19> For _actual_ biohacking, stay in touch with your GP, an endocrinologist, and the folks on /r/transdiy.

Beyond that, I would say that most things that aren't melatonin are either not studied adequately enough (Including the problems with withholding negative results in the medicine industry), or too addictive to be of much use (See: nicotine).

<comment><USER20> > /r/transdiy

Please don't promote communities like this

<comment><USER21> I've never heard of it. What makes it so bad? Edit: Ah, it seems to be people transitioning but doing so without the aid of a doctor. I mean, you shouldn't do it for obvious safety reasons but if you've decided you're doing it, a community of like-minded people is marginally better than nothing, at least you can learn some things that definitely don't work.

<comment><USER19> > Ah, it seems to be people transitioning but doing so without the aid of a > doctor.

No. The number one piece of advice on the site is to see a GP and endo for monthy blood testing of certain specific markers to ensure that everything is fine.

The reason the community exists is because for many people the local (and usually arbitrary) rules put on transitioning are ridiculous, and even after fulfilling those points the health service makes them wait typically over three years for hormone replacement therapy. Given that HRT is a critical aspect of treatment, and almost completely safe, for many people on /r/transDIY it's a hopeful alternative to ending it early.

(HRT has ridiculous rates of success compared to other contemporary medical treatments: [https://twitter.com/GenderCareDrL/status/820672719473770496](https://twitter.com/GenderCareDrL/status/820672719473770496))

<comment><USER14> > Given that HRT is a critical aspect of treatment, and almost completely safe

Doesn't taking hormones damage the glands that produce them endogenously?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Intermittent fasting causes an increase of catecholamines in the blood. It increases mental clarity and energy. If you want to time it, the beginning of the most active catecholamine stage starts at 12 hours. So, if you stop eating at 8pm, you'll see the most benefit from 8am-noon.

Magnesium deficiency is becoming more and more common in the US. If you think you might be low, taking 2-3 ZMA 15 minutes before bed can have a dramatic effect on your daily energy levels. Don't eat anything with calcium within 2-3 hours of taking Magnesium.

If you can, put a weight lifting bar near your work station and do a few pullups every time you pass under it. Every time you go to the bathroom, do 10 pushups. Every time you get a cup of coffee or water, do 20. It doesn't seem like so few reps should have much of an effect, but they add up. Keep in mind this is intended to be an addition to, not a replacement for, a regular workout routine.

<comment><USER23> Pull-up bar is the best lifehack ever. Just doing a few every hour or two (even if it's just negative) gets your strength way up, balances out the regular gymrat chest/front-shoulder focus and makes you look way better in a short amount of time (lats and bi's).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I call it "fill the tank." Drink a big glass of water every time you use the restroom. You'll be hydrated, and you'll have a built-in reason to get up out of your chair once in a while.

<comment><USER25> And then you will understand recursion.

<comment><USER26> And output streams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Your habits define "you" more than your conscious self does.

When you don't take care of your needs (sleep, diet, exercise, hygiene), your habits take over. Sometimes it's circular - someone could have a habit of eating fast food, then feeling unhealthy, and not having the willpower to cook. Or watching porn until late at night, not getting rest, then not being able to stop.

If you can't take care of your needs, another hack would be to build good habits so that you'd be able to perform well even when you're on autopilot.

</comment><comment><USER21> Microdosing LSD. I know some people who say it works wonders for them but it seems a relatively untested area. There is evidence that LSD increases cross- talk in the brain which would potentially help you with creative problem- solving. But there's not much hard evidence regarding anything about it.

</comment><comment><USER17> A standing desk.

It's been life changing to combat my back pain, feel tired in the evening, shift around regularly, grab something to drink etc.

Stretching.

Especially the hamstrings and upper body given the long hours on the keyboard.

They can both be combined easily and are also a great fit for hammock driven development.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sleep

</comment><comment><USER28> Get an early night.</comment>


Source Control for Art Assets Must Exist - <AUTHOR> http://hacksoflife.blogspot.com/2015/12/source-control-for-art-assets-this-must.html <comment><USER2> Perforce does what is requested in the article:

\- Working with large files

\- Getting only the needed files form the sever, not all

\- Not wasting space with .svn/.git copies of the files

\- Reasonably fast.

They have quite some customers in the video game industry because of their support for huge projects and large files. We are using it for a different kind of application with similar requirements (100000s files, size up to GBs range per file). Perforce is well suited for the job and has good 24/7 support.

<comment><USER3> Is there a reasonable hosted option for Perforce? A quick search turned up Assembla[1]; I haven't heard of them, so I don't know how reputable they are.

GitHub has just become so ubiquitous, you start to forget other source control systems are out there. If I wasn't still using SVN at work, I'd be in git all the time.

[1] [https://www.assembla.com/repositories/perforce](https://www.assembla.com/repositories/perforce)

<comment><USER4> Aside from what was mentioned, you can also self-host perforce at a relatively low cost (provided you don't need more than 20 users, as that's all perforce's free license supports).

I personally host a perforce server on google compute engine for around $15 a month (g1-small + whatever size persistent disk you want). Relatively easy to set up (they provide repositories for ubuntu and fedora iirc), configuration is largely interactive when setting up or through the P4Admin tool (which allows you to very easily setup permissions, depots, etc).

I know that isn't fully managed like github and doesn't provide issue tracking, wikis, etc, but I've found it fairly easy to deal with if you know a bit of how to setup a linux VPS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google has talked extensively about how they do Source Control, and it's freaking brilliant:

Perforce for source control. A FUSE file system. You configure it to point at a revision (or at head) of a branch (almost everyone is always on the main branch). Then it makes a drive (or folder) look like the Perforce repository, but read-only. It caches files as you read them. Then, if you try to make, modify, or delete an asset, it stores those locally, but makes it appear to be in the same directory as the rest of the repository.

I think this would be perfect for art assets.

</comment><comment><USER6> You're looking for "bup". It's basically a special flavor of git that works at the block level rather than the file level, so incremental revisions only need to store the blocks that changed. It also has a bunch of other optimizations for storing a large number of potentially large files.

[https://github.com/bup/bup](https://github.com/bup/bup)

More (potentially stale) info here: [https://lwn.net/Articles/380983/](https://lwn.net/Articles/380983/)

<comment><USER7> bup is great, but it's worth reading through the limitations before you commit:

[https://github.com/bup/bup/blob/master/README.md#things- that...](https://github.com/bup/bup/blob/master/README.md#things-that-are- stupid-for-now-but-which-well-fix-later)

Because of the nature of bup's solution, there are some operations that haven't been implemented because they would be prohibitively expensive. Pruning old files for example -- the equivalent of git's "filter-branch" just doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The thing everybody glosses-over is the usability issue: Git is a nightmare for anybody who's not a programmer to actually _use_ day-to-day.

(I _am_ a programmer, and I still find Git to be nightmarish. Sadly our company adopted it because it's trendy, not because they did any actual research or study about our source control needs-- the lack of centralized file locking bites us in the ass every day.)

The reason they stuck with SVN that most interests me is that SVN has some GUI clients that don't completely suck. Sadly, not true of Git. At least not on Windows.

<comment><USER9> Git definitely has a higher learning curve, but there are some very obvious advantages compared to SVN. I'd recommend SourceTree for a windows GUI that doesn't suck. [https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/](https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/)

<comment><USER8> If you think SourceTree doesn't suck, I really don't know what to say. It is the laziest kind of GUI: they literally just wrapped the CLI application in this monstrosity, then made a button in the UI for literally every commandline switch.

No thought or organization, and _certainly_ no usability study, went into SourceTree.

<comment><USER9> I suppose I shouldn't really be recommending git GUI's as I mostly use the command line. I use SourceTree on occasion to get a better perspective when browsing the history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> git-annex, git-lfs, and Mercurial's largefiles all approach this problem in more or less the way you want. GitHub's fairly new git-lfs might be the easiest to use.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's strange. We have so many widely available tools to keep a collaborative code history, but when it comes to art assets (images/music/sound/3D models/videos) the general consensus is just dumping everything into a central repository (svn/perforce) or use some kind of large file extension which does basically the same thing.

Visualising changes, multi-checkouts and merging is impossible.

Seems ripe for disruption? Or will this stay an unsolved problem forever?

<comment><USER12> Is it because code is text and assets are usually binary? How do you do a diff reliably on a binary file?

<comment><USER13> That depends on the file type. Several version control clients can already detect image files for example and show a visual diff between revisions. There is still a lot of room for improvement and standardization however.

<comment><USER14> The main problem is not diff but merge. You currently can't merge changes to images, textures etc. The whole advantage of DVCS like git is that it allows to work in parallel and merge effortlessly. The day we can merge photoshop, maya and 3D studio files central repository for art files will not make sense any more. But that day has not come, yet AFAIK.

<comment><USER15> What kind of artist work can you practically distribute between multiple people and merge? Most things like this are broken into pieces and each piece is tracked separately and assembled later.

I think this is a big mistake programmers make when trying to create VCS for other industries. A lot other fields with binary files don't care about merge as much. Like electronic design automation: track every part's history and even every module on a board or die layout. But, practically it's difficult to have two people productivly work on the same small piece simultaneously.

[edit] I also think a bunch of the reasons programmers require merge are because code is organized into files. Organization into files is arbitrary and often doesn't correlate particularly well with logical structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm working on something new in this field and would love to hear from people with interesting use-cases (and tales of woe about current tools).

Sadly I don't think diffing & merging of art assets will ever become viable and locking can only work if your assets are controlled at an OS level. The simplest solution is to hide a file if it's locked.

Perforce is not good at dealing with large assets one artist uploading 1 video file can grind 300 other people to a halt. I know this from bitter experience. You can solve it to a degree using standing servers - but it's tricky and expensive to get right.

Fuse is interesting but doesn't work with Windows. WebDAV is old and cranky and half broken. Anything that saves immediately will lock your editing software up while the file travels over the network (and with art files that can be minutes! (think video)).

Dropbox is the strongest contender here as they allow a quick save followed by a slow sync. Sparkleshare has the right idea and working Windows client (it uses Git behind the scenes so isn't really suitable for video assets). Camlistore is an exciting technology based on the Plan9 file system (and Git) it should cope with large files in theory though I haven't stress tested it. It's still young and there isn't a good visual client yet.

I'm coming at this problem from the world of D.A.M. (yuck) but worked for years in the AAA Games industry (many, many, giant art assets). Traditional DAMs have never been any good at dealing with assets still in development. Hopefully we can change that, however there are so many problems to overcome (see above) that its unsurprising no-one has managed it yet.

Drop me a line if you have any useful/interesting use cases.

</comment><comment><USER17> Our artists used alienbrain at a previous job, while devs used p4. Except for the obvious annoyance of having to sync two separate repositories it worked well and neither side could be convinced to switch.

</comment><comment><USER18> One possible solution is online editing, like [https://clara.io](https://clara.io) or Google Docs. These tools have version control built in, and multiple people can simultaneously edit.

You also avoid the large asset problem by always keeping the large assets in the "cloud".

disclaimer: employee of the maker of clara.io

</comment><comment><USER19> Unity, a gamedev shop, uses Mercurial with the largefiles extension:

[http://natoshabard.com/post/122632480712/mercurial-at- unity](http://natoshabard.com/post/122632480712/mercurial-at-unity)

<comment><USER20> Perhaps somebody knows better than I do, but I'm pretty sure Unity only make the tools, which is a very different proposition! They will have the large files, but not the iteration.

Storing large files somewhere outside the working copy is only part of the solution. Working with artists is going to be a bit painful unless you have centralized file locking, or some other self-managing means of preventing two people modifying the same file by accident. In theory, you could use merge tools for the binary files that artists manipulate, but in practice, these tools don't seem to exist.

(I can't speak for hg - but an issue with git is that you really have to have a good mental model of how it works to use it effectively. This is something programmers like - or, failing that, are at least practised at doing. But it's really not the sort of thing artists seem to generally enjoy. Certainly very few of those I've worked with...)

<comment><USER19> > Working with artists is going to be a bit painful unless you have > centralized file locking, or some other self-managing means of preventing > two people modifying the same file by accident.

I am convinced that file locking is not the ultimate solution, even for artwork. Someone could decide to change the colours of some character while someone else could decide to redraw her arms. Both changes make sense together.

What we need is specialised diff and merge tools for artwork, which nearly any VCS already allows you to plug in. Even github has a WUI for diffing images. File locking is a workaround with other well-known problems. Merging divergent work is not any more annoying for artwork than it is for code.

Pixelapse seems to be presenting a compelling case on what VCS for design could look like:

[https://www.pixelapse.com/](https://www.pixelapse.com/)

> I can't speak for hg - but an issue with git is that you really have to have > a good mental model of how it works to use it effectively.

This is widely touted as a huge difference between hg and git. You don't have to understand hg's revlog format to use hg, but you need to have a solid understanding of blobs, trees, commits, refs, and hashes to understand git.

What you _do_ need to understand for both is that someone can have modified the same file that you're working on while you're working on it, and it is OK that they modified your file at the same time...

<comment><USER21> Nope, nope nope nope. This keeps coming up again with "we just need the right tools".

The thing is there's a good chance the people you're working with aren't very technically inclined(which is why they're such awesome artists, they have other focuses). Anything more than the simplest scheme is going to fall over at production scale.

It's been tried many times, the tools that you are talking about(Maya, Photoshop, ZBrush, etc) don't even consider merging with their large binary workflows. The closest you get to this is referenced scenes in Maya and that requires a _good_ technical artist to set everything up and police things so that people don't touch things they don't understand.

<comment><USER19> > Anything more than the simplest scheme is going to fall over at production > scale.

Then we need a simpler scheme that still allows people to understand that two can work at the same time. _Everyone_ hates merging regardless of their technical ability, even software developers, but I refuse to believe that it's a hopeless task to build a tool for merging artwork.

<comment><USER21> That's because merging two _things_ is inherently complex. You need a complete understanding of both how they work _and_ all the things they interact with. That's why everyone hates merging.

You're welcome to take a crack at it, however you're looking at hundreds of hours of work to reverse-engineer all the formats that Adobe and Autodesk use plus whatever new tools are on the horizon that you don't know about yet.

AFAIK there isn't a single tool out there that can render a PSD to PNG reliably(aside from scripted photoshop) so thinking we would be able to cover the _entire_ suite of tools is a bit naive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Alianbrain was really popular for games a while back, not sure it if fell-out of favor for. [http://www.alienbrain.com/](http://www.alienbrain.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Now if only we had this back in the 1600s. We'd know if the Mona Lisa really did have a different person featured in it during its earlier 'development'!</comment>


SpaceX said to be seeking $250M funding to boost valuation to $36B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/21/spacex-said-to-be-seeking-around-250-million-in-funding-boosting-valuation-to-roughly-36-billion/ <comment><USER2> So.. how can one get in on this?</comment>


Retention of early Slashdot users - <AUTHOR> http://www.kmjn.org/notes/early_slashdot_users.html

<comment><USER2> I'm one of those early users (uid == 18). I find the site too hard to navigate these days. I don't know where to click or how to filter it back to just the nerdy stuff. I guess I deserve my uid==18 since I feel like an old fogey saying that. :-)

<comment><USER3> I'm not quite sure how or why I stopped reading Slashdot. I think it happened gradually possibly due to MMO addiction and getting my first full time job as a wage slave. Then I met my girlfriend and got two kids which all ate into internet time.

After I got back into the more social side of the net I gravitated towards HN and Reddit. I did check Slashdot once or twice but I preffered the cleaner presentation of the former two sites.

(uid 206)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can only speak for myself but I stopped obsessively checking Slashdot (which had been a habit since 1998) around mid-late 2006 when Digg/Reddit had started getting momentum and interesting stuff was showing up sooner there since content wasn't curated.

Now I look at Slashdot maybe once a week, and I never read or participate in the comment threads -- because a given story on Slashdot likely showed up on HN three days prior and had a more interesting discussion then.

<comment><USER5> My slashdot OCD ended when I found google reader. I still have Slashdot in my feed. By the time the slashdot story shows up, I've already read the source, hacker news comments and probably some other blogs I follow commenting on the story.

Plus, to follow any links in story blurb you have to click through to slashdot, which is highly annoying.

<comment><USER6> Does anyone else remember the hatred toward the old editor michael ? What was the deal with that? Also, doesn't it just seem off having the facebook and twitter buttons under the summary? Is it just me? UID = 597418.

<comment><USER5> just catching up on my comments.. UID 6588. A friend of mine had the fortune of getting UID 1234.

It's awesome that so many people can remember their UID's, even a decade later.. Goes to show you how important Slashdot was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I stopped reading Slashdot as much because the curated nature of the site meant that stories showed up and were discussed on Digg and Reddit DAYS before they showed up on Slashdot. So Slashdot content felt old.

However, I find the discussion better on Slashdot due to their complex rating system, which is why I still visit Slashdot. Up and down votes are too simplistic and you get a lot of bad comments bubbling up or being buried for seemling no good reason. That's why I stopped reading Digg and Reddit. Interesting, informative, off-topic, flamebait, etc... More sites need to adopt Slashdot's rating system.

</comment><comment><USER8> I guess its just the way of the world. I've long used Slashdot but after a while the trolls start to take over and the conversation goes from informative to herpderp gradually. I've seen this happen to Digg, Fark, and k5.

Recently, it's also started happening on reddit. I would go there for the interesting articles but the frontpage is loaded with shitty fake AMAs, slanted political blogs, or stupid pictures. I could filter this stuff out, but then that would defeat the purpose of having community driven content.

Just remember, reddit didn't kill Digg and blogs didn't kill Slashdot. Digg was killed by the trolls in its membership. And Slashdot was killed by the latent racism/nationalism/sexism in some of its posts (if you ever read some of the comments concerning H1B, outsourcing, etc. it was fucking scary). I stopped visiting because the level of dialog dropped through the floor.

Also, this occasionally happens to HN, but I believe the community has been much better at keeping these shenanigans at bay. Unless the comments are well managed and moderated then they shouldn't have a problem keeping traffic up. But like anything in life, people move on and eventually it will happen here too.

</comment><comment><USER9> Slashdot didn't originally have user registration, you just typed your nick in a field when posting a comment. They were already quite popular when they begin to require logins, and IIRC the <4 digit UIDs were consumed within a week or two. It would probably be a better metric to check UIDs under 20K or so.

All this talk of early slashdot reminded me that (for some reason) my account had unlimited moderation points back in the old days.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a low-4-digit (or was, 1359) and left because the blogging system was just so bad. I think less that 1/4 of the screen you got for your own content.

That was the final straw, it had been an echo chamber for a while on the main board by that point, you know, every other comment seemed to be "Micro$oft is EVIL!!!!!", rather than the semi-intelligent debate I'm sure it used to have.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm a mid-stream adopter (uid == 626634) and I took Rob's departure to get around to removing /. from my bookmarks - something I'd been thinking about doing for some time. The main reasons for cutting the cord are that other sites (ie: HN) tend to list important/useful tech stories first and have a better signal-to-noise ratio in their comment threads.</comment>


"Applied Picoeconomics": bargaining with your future self - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/ep/applied_picoeconomics/

<comment><USER2> This appears to ring true with my personal experience. An interesting articulation of a common sense approach.</comment>


Amazon Accidentally Sent Out Their Email Template - What you can learn from it - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-marketing/amazon-accidentally-sent-out-their-email-template-33e6ecbc0875 <comment><USER2> For anyone without a Medium account, here is the source: [https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/epi5wq/amazon_accide...](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/epi5wq/amazon_accidentally_sent_out_their_email_template/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah, Medium: taking an accessible source of information, adding a few useless thoughts, and then putting it on a blog behind a registration wall. Between this and Twitter, which encourages polarization and loud emotions over measured thought, Ev Williams really is changing the world!</comment>


Indian PSLV successfully launches IRNSS-1A navigation satellite - <AUTHOR> http://www.isro.org/pslv-c22/Imagegallery/satellite.aspx#1

<comment><USER2> Since this uses the same L5 frequency as GPS, would existing receivers pick up signals from these satellites? Would there be any interference?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the purpose was to ensure existing receivers are compatible and hence the same frequency. I am not sure about how interference will be avoided</comment></comment>