Ask HN: What exciting open-source science projects can one contribute to? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm working on an open source pure functional programming language called Lambda Zero that aims to be a simple and elegant base language from which to derive more advanced languages and eventually a foundation of mathematics. Like Haskell, it is basically just the lambda calculus with a bunch of syntactic sugars, so it's more a process of discovering the foundations of computation than inventing an arbitrary new language.

There is currently a bootstrap interpreter written in C that is under 2000 lines of code, a self-interpreter (~1200 lines), and a static type inferencer written in Lambda Zero (~400 lines). I'm currently implementing pattern matching lambdas and algebraic data types and I have a long roadmap of things to do. It would be great if someone was interested in writing an optimizing compiler for Lambda Zero in Lambda Zero.

[https://github.com/clark800/lambda-zero](https://github.com/clark800/lambda- zero)

<comment><USER3> > and eventually a foundation of mathematics.

So it will have a proof capability like Coq?

Is there any new theory behind this system? What is your vision in this regard?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Open worm is attempting to simulate C. elegans: a very simple multi-cellular organism completely. Atom by atom, cell by cell, neuron by neuron. Really cool project.

[http://openworm.org/](http://openworm.org/) [https://github.com/openworm](https://github.com/openworm)

</comment><comment><USER5> Airflow is a fun one. Currently in incubator phase with Apache so there is plenty of stuff to do especially if you like working with Python, Docker, JavaScript, web apps, etc.

[https://github.com/apache/incubator- airflow](https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow)

</comment><comment><USER6> I co-maintain CellProfiler. Contributions are always welcome!

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

</comment><comment><USER7> The mooltipass project actually is looking for contributors for its next gen device! If you'd like to work on hardware (low power measurements, rf design), firmware ([https://mooltipass.github.io/minible/](https://mooltipass.github.io/minible/)) or software ([https://github.com/mooltipass/moolticute](https://github.com/mooltipass/moolticute)) do not hesitate to drop us a message :).

</comment><comment><USER8> Great question. Anything that furthers the field and does not risk becoming irrelevant in 6 months would be an excellent bet.

\+ Utilities for computers and disks are always useful and don't need much maintenance for long-term function/feasibility.

\+ web frameworks that make web designing/dev easier (clojure[script], rails, python+django are all popular choices)

\+ Look for a tool you commonly use or a service that's commonly requested.

</comment><comment><USER9> WordPress may be old news but the new Gutenberg editor has the potential to disrupt the most popular CMS on earth. Helping make this a success isnt sexy but it is meaningful.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the best and most exciting projects to contribute to are the ones you actually use and want to help make better.

</comment><comment><USER11> VTK - Visualization ToolKit - strongly recommended if you want to work on a widely used, probably defacto, scientific visualization library, a great 3D domain to work on IMHO.

Backed by a ton of resources, documentation and excellent community; that will be fun.

[https://www.aosabook.org/en/vtk.html](https://www.aosabook.org/en/vtk.html), is a good start.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've always loved blender, it is open source and I'm sure they would love any contributions.</comment>


Dating site cofounder needed - <AUTHOR>

Startup with a clever twist on online dating looking for cofounder.  Concept is devilishly entertaining, viral, potentially addictive, and highly monetizable.  Worth your time to check out - could get big fast if executed properly.  That's where you come in.  Email email@example.com if you're interested.  Technical cofounder will be generously compensated with equity.  Based in Cambridge, MA. <comment><USER2> I'd suggest that if you're looking for a technical cofounder, at the very least you should write more about the value you'd provide.

Being more clear about what the idea is ( / the problem it solves, the market it's for), and how much equity you're offering to the person who you're expecting to do all the execution, would be good, too.

<comment><USER3> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It could also fail miserably if not executed properly, which is the more likely result.

If your idea really is as good as you say it is, then revealing it won't ruin your launch. In the end, it will get copied if and only if it's worth it. And that will be determined by your site's execution and relative success (or failure).</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to 'shop without borders'? - <AUTHOR>

Do you think friends/strangers could bring stuff for you from abroad (given right incentive)?<p>The reason I am asking is because I am working on this - https://yenbe-beta.appspot.com <comment><USER2> Good Idea, but couple of problems you should address:

1) Food - this won't work. There are strict laws in place in some countries to prevent people from bringing in food (and with good reason). Research this. Ideally, you'd want food out

2) Trust - even with motivating factors, you're still going to get dodgy people doing dodgy things with the service

3) Customs - here comes hell... If the traveller gets caught for bringing in something very expensive and ends up in jail, whose fault is it?

Don't let my problems I've identified discourage you. It's a solid idea, just address the problems and be on your way to the next airbnb

(remember me with 0,01% equity if you succeed :P)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking that to make this work:

1\. Exchange of favor - e.g. bring stuff and I will show you th city, concert tickets etc. 2\. The buyer's card is authorized (not charged) and traveller gets paid after the stuff is delivered. 3\. Pickup/dropoff points in a city (ofcourse, doesn't scale) Do any of these mitigate concerns?

</comment><comment><USER3> There are at least 2 startups on this idea with big funding coming this year and there are some problems already mentioned that are hard to solve right now. Also be aware that companies like amazon offer cheap products and delivery. Taxes must be considered at the airport and many more.

</comment><comment><USER4> trust is the biggest issue. imagine drug smuggling inside an antique ordered by your user.</comment>


Leaving our phone in view changes what we talk about and the connection we feel - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/opinion/sunday/stop-googling-lets-talk.html <comment><USER2> It's implied in these types of articles that empathy has been permanently affected by technology. I believe cell phones are an invention with a time- limit.

Computers have been getting smaller not since you started using them, which for nontechnical folk might be the late 90s, but since the 50s. Each time they got smaller, they enabled different kinds of interaction.

I don't think we'll be using cell phones in 20 years. We've had computers, minicomputers, workstations, microcomputers, and we don't have a semantic niche for the cell phone, but I'd call it a nanocomputer. There will be femtocomputers.</comment>


Ask HN: Have no coding skills but trying to build a MVP. Need help - <AUTHOR> A while ago I asked for tools that would help build an MVP for a tech startup. I have no coding skills and really no budget. I have received a lot of comments (thank you for those) but one of them encouraged me to make my own research and then ask for feedback. Well, here it is. I found this tools to build an MVP without code:<p>- Zeroqode Templates ( https://goo.gl/8QKk3G ) build on Bubble Platform - InVision (https://www.invisionapp.com) - WebFlow (https://webflow.com) - Wix (https://www.wix.com)<p>Did anyone try any of this? Can you share some feedback? <comment><USER2> wix is a content management system (CMS) i believe, but you wont be able to dig into it and customize functionality (to add new features). The others i have no experience in, but they look like screen layout / mockup tools.. not actually frameworks to build a product.

is your "mvp" going to be an offline business that just needs a website? Wix would be okay i guess. If you want to build a product, then i suspect that these won't be enough for your needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you</comment></comment>


Trump EPA won't limit 2 toxic chemicals in drinking water - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/28/epa-toxic-chemicals-drinking-water-1124797 <comment><USER2> Watch the Netflix documentary _The devil we know_ for more on PFOA (aka C8) and PFOS. They are widely used in the manufacture of teflon and other nonstick products.

PFOA has made its way into the bloood of almost every human being.

<comment><USER3> Will check it out. Last I read these chemcials stay and build up in your body for years and we still haven't figured out how to get rid of them.

Have countries banned these chemicals and America is just lagging behind?</comment></comment>


Fadnation: Why Steve Ballmer Could Be Right  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/02/fadnation-why-steve-ballmer-could-be-right/ <comment><USER2> Is it really a revelation that Facebook's operating on a fad right now?

The bigger question is whether they can lateral this temporary success into something that's sustainable long-term.

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook as a company isn't a fad--with the footing they have, they'll be around as long as they adapt and make what people want.

I do see Facebook apps as a cancer on the design, though. If I were in charge of the site, I would probably not have given people as much control over the look and feel of their apps. Too MySpace-y, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you don't think Facebook is a fad, ask if you can really see Facebook being around in 20 years. I certaintly can't. It is a fad, just one that may take some time to run out.

<comment><USER5> If facebook isn't around in 20 years, it will only be because something better has replaced it. If I knew what that better thing was, I would make it now.

Parakey is facebook's trump card, I'm extremely curious to see how Parakey ends up being integrated into facebook.

<comment><USER2> >> I'm extremely curious to see how Parakey ends up being integrated into facebook.

Five (hypothetical) bucks says it won't be. Just a hunch.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure facebook is benefiting from the two great hackers, but it would be kind of sad if they killed Parakey. Or maybe it hadn't come that far along in the first place before facebook got them.

<comment><USER2> It's the latter that I think happened.

<comment><USER5> That's good... that means that my big idea (which was the same as parakey's big idea only with no fancy architecture behind it) will still be around for a while. I naively thought that it was going to be done immediately because it had been possible and it looks like no one is doing it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


These surprise packages from Amazon can spark fear - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/02/19/these-surprise-packages-from-amazon-spark-something-more-than-frustration-fear/6X4X2rWJw3SawwCGe4n2rJ/story.html <comment><USER2> I mean, sure. But it doesn't mean that fear is valid or something to write an article about. There's no danger and amazon isn't doing anything wrong.

It bet it does drive a nice amount of traffic to the bostonglobe site to write about it though.</comment>


Obama aims to axe moon mission - <AUTHOR> http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/os-no-moon-for-nasa-20100126,0,2770904.story

<comment><USER2> Obama wants to cancel the moon mission and change NASA to do his own plans (starting with climate, of course). This is the problem of letting politicians run a science program in the first place. Let the private companies do science, and don't give them funding to bias the research.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great news. I like the idea of _first_ planning for our long-term goals in space, _then_ executing to achieve those goals. The early years were all about knee-jerk responses to politics and feeding constituencies. Lately we put up a $100billion ISS that no scientist could figure out a use for... even contemplated burning the worthless thing!

The fossil-fueled binging is over. It's time to spend scarce resources to maximize the benefit for science and humanity.</comment>


Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ <comment><USER2> It would be more interesting to see asset forfeiture compared to armed robbery, since that is essentially what happens when police, with a gun on their hip and the right to use it, take your assets without legal judgement.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. The total value of asset forfeitures was more than one-third of the total value of property stolen by criminals in 2014."

Ah, these are some really revolutionary statistics. People who were not accused of any crime were robbed by the police for larger quantities of money than actually taken from homes forcefully by the traditional image of "criminals". Via this information we can say with confidence that the law enforcement agencies are the larger criminals when it comes to direct monetary abduction from the public. This leaves us in a shitty position, because we can no longer rely on law enforcement to provide support for our society.

We know with confidence that American LEOs will steal, spy on, beat, dehumanize, ignore, and murder the public without righteous comeuppance from the political or legal systems. To be clear, this kind of endemic bad behavior is what reliably drives people to vigilanteeism and anti-police violence. Barring that, I think a rational response to law enforcement abuses is in order.

There's a few prongs to this strategy, the most important of which is political pressure, meaning organizing direct monetary bribery of politicians via campaign donations near the time of elections; loudly donating large sums of money to radical police reformists running for public office will go a long way in solving the problem, as this signals to other politicians, the police and the public that people are serious about solving the problem of villainous law enforcement. From here, things get real: I suggest a boycott of assisting law enforcement with information technology projects in an attempt to handicap their efficiency, making them realize that the public will resist them if they continue bad behavior. I also suggest shaming and social exclusion of people working in or associated with law enforcement-- I know this won't go far, but it's worth a shot. At least it's nonviolent.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there any reason, aside from the $1.7 billion from Bernie Madoff, as to why the amount seized has risen so much in the last 10 years?

Was there some case that made it much easier for law enforcement to seize assets this way?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps a better question would be "What is the median forfeiture amount?". Without additional data points or underlying explanation, this article is nothing but click-bait.

<comment><USER6> I agree that it would be nice to have more data. It might be hard to get "big picture" data for this. I would imagine that police deptments are not incentivized to publish details in a convenient, highly visible, summarized form.

Forbes says $1250 was avg. seized property value in MN.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/09/12/a...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/09/12/after- cops-seized-and-kept-cash-washington-d-c-settles-almost-million-dollar-civil- forfeiture-class-action/)

This link claims that the avg. cash seizure amount in Phillidelphia from 2010 to present was $550:

[http://ij.org/action-post/seize-first-ask-questions-later- ph...](http://ij.org/action-post/seize-first-ask-questions-later-philadelphia- police-take-over-6-million-a-year-in-civil-asset-forfeiture/)

These hardly sound like the sort "untouchable" organized crime cases that these programs were touted to address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10591250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10591250)

</comment><comment><USER8> > Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing

Pedantic correction: Properly speaking, a "factoid" is something which is NOT a fact fact, but resembles one. Similarly to how an android is not a man.

I realize people are starting to use it like "small fact", but, uh, get off my lawn.

<comment><USER9> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10482128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10482128)

<comment><USER8> Why are you linking to my own comments?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Taxes and more debt are not always popular.

Growing government has figured out how to turn the courthouse and police station into profit centers with a lot less blowback than raising taxes and going deeper into the hole with bonds.</comment>


The Actions ATM7029 CPU Has A Secret - <AUTHOR> http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/the-actions-atm7029-cpu-has-a-secret/

<comment><USER2> How is this different from the Exynos 5 Octa which is sold as an 8-core CPU but with only 4 Cortex A15 cores?

<comment><USER3> It's the same, as the article clearly states:

> What Actions has done is similar to what Samsung will be doing with the > "Octa-core" Exynos 5 CPU, which will combine four A15 cores with four A7 > cores.</comment></comment>


PRISM-Proof Security Considerations - <AUTHOR> http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-hallambaker-prismproof-req-00.txt <comment><USER2> Fitting that it was published on September 11th, 2013.

A dozen years after the attacks on the World Trade Centers, it's clear that the terrorists won. The USA cannot be called the "land of the free, home of the brave" anymore. Terrorists know that their tactics work very well, and has made the US vulnerable to even more attacks because of cowardice.

Imagine if the US government had decided _not_ to be terrorized, like the Norwegians did for the 2011 Oslo attacks:

\---

      And at the political level, the Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg pledged
      to do everything to ensure the country's core values were not undermined.

      "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and
      greater political participation," he said.

      A year later it seems the prime minister has kept his word.

      There have been no changes to the law to increase the powers of the police
      and security services, terrorism legislation remains the same and there
      have been no special provisions made for the trial of suspected terrorists.

      On the streets of Oslo, CCTV cameras are still a comparatively
      rare sight and the police can only carry weapons after getting special
      permission.

      Even the gate leading to the parliament building in the heart of Oslo
      remains open and unguarded.

      "It is still easy to get access to parliament and we hope it will stay
      that way, " said Lise Christoffersen, a Labour party MP.

      She is convinced people do not want laws passed which would curtail
      their basic rights and impinge on their privacy despite the relative
      ease with which Breivik was able to plan and carry out his attacks.

\---

There is a way back to the way the US used to be, but the answer is not something most people will even consider or listen to.

<comment><USER3> This is a comment that could be attached to any NSA related story on the site. It betrays no evidence whatsoever of being informed by the story it's attached to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand what point of this I-D is. It's a sort of white paper survey of random Internet surveillance concepts by the CTO of a SSL CA. It doesn't make internal sense; in one instance, "kleptography" means using as many as 1000 of the bits of an RSA modulus to sneak hidden messages out, and in another it means constructing weak ECC curves. Amusingly, the two sentences in the whole draft about CAs _downplay_ the notion of CA complicity in surveillance. CA's are, of course, one of the biggest Internet privacy weak points.

<comment><USER4> Okay Thomas, what _is_ the NSA attack tree for doing things like stealing the private key(s) off of my machine or doing meta-data analysis on me? I bet a lot of people would like to see this analysis from you!

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment.

<comment><USER4> You keep poo-pooing internet commentators that are trying to identify and mitigate the threat posed by the NSA - you did it in this thread, and you did it in another HN thread [1], the article where some kid wants to generate private keys in a secure way.

But what you're not doing is giving your own alternative analysis. What is the threat posed by the NSA and what are the attacks that we should think seriously about, and what are the threats we can safely ignore? What can we do about the former?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385866)

<comment><USER3> That's not what I'm doing here at all.

<comment><USER5> That's the effect are having!

Kleptography is pretty well defined in the first sentence of its section: _Kleptography is persuading the party to be intercepted to use a form of cryptography that the attacker knows they can break._ So yes, in some instances it's encouraging the cracked RSA standard, and in others, it means encouraging "weak ECC curves".

You're a highly-regarded member of this site and a very vocal security expert, yet lately you've started dodging security questions you used to freely answer, and you post odd comments that tend to derail security threads. At one time, you regularly had the top comment with a highly insightful technical explanation of how a security concept works. What happened?

<comment><USER3> That's not happening either. Are you alarmed by how easily you can be manipulated into sniping at people? Have you ever once on this site been sniped at by me? Are you comfortable with the kind of comment you just wrote? Are conversations like these why you read HN?

<comment><USER5> Way to avoid the question!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Phillip Hallam-Baker, Comodo Group Inc.

That would be this Comodo Group: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comodo_Group#2011_breach_incide...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comodo_Group#2011_breach_incident)

</comment><comment><USER7> Some comments from: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/12/ietf_floats_prismpro...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/12/ietf_floats_prismproof_plan_for_harder_internet/)

'The proposal has just one author - Phillip Hallam-Baker of the Comodo Group – which makes it a little unusual as most IETF proposals are the work of several folks in pursuit of a common goal.'

'Sadly the paper is a little light on for actual ideas about how the internet can be PRISM-proofed, offering "a security policy infrastructure and the audit and transparency capabilities to support it" as one item that should be on any hardening effort's to-do list. More use of cryptography is also proposed, so that "two layers of public key exchange using the credentials of the parties to negotiate a temporary key which is in turn used to derive the symmetric session key used for communications". That regime should, Hallam-Baker suggests, make it harder to snoop on everyday traffic.'

Heavily emphasis on the _should_ on that last sentence.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone notice "Writing I-Ds using HTML" was in the header of each page? I assume the author reused something from his other RFC by that name [1] and forgot to update the page header.

[1]: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hallambaker- rfctool-01](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hallambaker-rfctool-01)

</comment><comment><USER7> > Passive attacks are however limited in the information they can reveal

Of course they are limited in the information they can reveal. They can only reveal as much information as is there to reveal. That in itself is a limit. That is a non-informational, misleading statement.

> ... and easily defeated with relatively simple cryptographic techniques.

While some cryptographic techniques are "relatively simple" to use, those same techniques can be undermined. In the current case, the attacker was involved in developing that technique and/or has the overwhelming power to make the technique worthless (acres of server farms, able to churn on any of it).

The only tecnique to guard data against passive attacks is to destroy the data, all its copies, and all who ever saw the data.

</comment><comment> UVB-76 > PRISM is reputed to be a classified US government that involves [...] This > document describe the security concerns [...]

/facepalm

<comment><USER9> Those darn classified governments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel like there's some irony in serving up these recommendations on a non- encrypted connection

</comment><comment><USER11> Not to be pedantic but "PRISM" is a code name for a specific program, and it's not the one that does in-transit interception. That would be XKeyscore.

<comment><USER12> why would one expect the Comodo Group(!) to be more aware of the subtleties and technical details?</comment></comment>


Scientists prove that women are better at multitasking than men - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7896385/Scientists-prove-that-women-are-better-at-multitasking-than-men.html

<comment><USER2> In other news, scientists develop superior journalist-bait with a highly efficient study protocol of "50 male and 50 female students [given] eight minutes to perform three tasks."</comment>


Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail - <AUTHOR> http://mapbox.com/blog/announcing-mapbox-streets/ <comment><USER2> Its good to see some decent visual rendering of OSM data. I appreciate your choice in not colouring the roads in, (for some reason people always do this - maybe they don't realise that users don't use online maps to drive a car!). Visually, it is quite clear in most cases, which is nice (despite, as always having some difficulty with overground/underground objects in the same location).

Have you considered doing different map renderings for different purposes? (this very brown-grey theme might not work well for dark-background websites, and some people might want extra data such as train stations added)?

<comment><USER3> Yes. You can preview a desaturated version to be released soon here: <http://mapbox.com/tour/#maps> (click on MapBox Light). You can render your own layers for things like POIs and transit stations using TileMill, and we'll be adding those in as separate layers soon too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's not enough contrast between the street names and the rest of the map, making readability a problem. It's the kind of design mistake that young people with nice monitors make!

<comment><USER5> This was designed primarily on a MacBook Pro running Linux, so the colors were oddly calibrated. We tested it on several other calibrated monitors, and a few other devices (iPhone/Pad/Android).

Short story is that it could be much bolder and more colorful, at the cost of aesthetics. A growing number of users have good screens - sometimes excellent screens like most mobile devices.

<comment><USER6> Ok, but have you tested it on the absolute worst your users will be using?

What does it look like on grandma's 17 inch crt from 2002?

<comment><USER5> It'll probably look odd, just like everything on an old computer. Designing for the craziest CRT is just as bad or worse than designing for a cinema display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks interesting. Pricing looks to be roughly 15% of what we pay to google to use the maps api. Nice-looking too.

I see the hat-tip to OpenStreetMap - what's the relationship between OSM and MapBox? Do you own the content, or is your added value the servers and the API?

<comment><USER5> We use OpenStreetMap data for all roads - for some political boundaries and labels, you've got to bring in some other open data sources to make things look decent. Copyright on this rendition of the maps is MapBox's, data is OpenStreetMap's - that distinction is cleared up by their licensing.

Besides that, the relationship is that we contribute, with a lot of hours, to OpenStreetMap's data & code, and try to get more visibility for the project. There's very little official about OpenStreetMap, so it's not like anyone has a title or secret plans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You should make the freeways a different color from the rest of the roads. I just tried to zoom into my house, and I discovered that when looking at the city-wide view, I use the freeways as a high-level roadmap. When everything's the same color (gray!) it's hard to locate yourself.

I hope you've all seen this article, about subtle design changes they made at google. Attention to detail is really critical:

[http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/evolving-look- of-...](http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/evolving-look-of-google- maps.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> still the same problem with the OSM renderer : [http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox- streets.html#10.0...](http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox- streets.html#10.00/47.3793/6.3680) there are more than 6 cities in this area, why so few labels ? (look at gmaps: [http://maps.google.fr/?ll=47.38834,6.678009&spn=0.65269,...](http://maps.google.fr/?ll=47.38834,6.678009&spn=0.65269,1.282654&t=v&z=10) ).

and I think there are not enough details for a medieval city : [http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox- streets.html#16.0...](http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox- streets.html#16.00/47.2365/6.0275)

but I think the color scheme is pleasant.

<comment><USER10> All of the issues you cite are actually just a matter of choice by the designer of this map stylesheet (for lack of a better word).

OSM rendering is extremely customizable. One can present city labels on zoom level 10 and above, or they could just start showing the city labels on zoom level 11. Each zoom level can have different parameters for the 2000+ map components. In a way it is overwhelming, but it's also fabulous!

<comment><USER9> why do everybody makes the same choices regarding labels then ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great news! Is this available at high zooms across the US and Canada yet?

<comment><USER5> It's z16 globally - as soon as this is solidly out in the wild, we'll be working hard on getting deeper zoom levels. Each zoom level is exponentially larger than the last, so it's a significant challenge.

<comment><USER11> As a maps dev, I'm very familiar with those exponential scaling problems, 4^z is a bitch. :-) Thanks for taking on this problem.

What zoom level are you all at in major US metro areas?

<comment><USER12> Is there a way to selectively cache to deeper levels in certain areas? That'd be rad.

<comment><USER5> We're doing selective rendering with MapBox Light, which is deeper in cities. For this, it's better to have always-there zoom levels. Otherwise you grapple with the deep, deep problem of someone panning from a high-zoom area to a low one, or using an API like Leaflet programmed to zoom to a level. Unless you control the API and have a zoom-depth-api like Google, having a map with highly variable max zooms isn't an easy call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And that's why I won't need Google Maps anymore; congrats guys, that is awesome work.

A couple questions/comments;

\- You'll probably need to work on the readability of some of the Asian charsets; Korean works just fine, Thai and especially Chinese are very hard to read. I guess you'd need to detect specific characters and render them slightly bigger (that is what we sometimes do with Chinese, rendering English text as 14 px and Chinese at 15 for example).

\- I'd be interested in knowing what the final size of the tileset is.

</comment><comment><USER14> I hope the terribly slow map rendering is just a direct result of early release scaling problems. Because it's running unusably slow here.

Edit: I'd like to clarify, it is running in a usable, if laggy fashion, in general, but the main advantage of Google Maps to most competition IMO, is the blistering speed.

<comment><USER5> We just saw a genuine torrent of traffic and are scaling up as I speak.

<comment><USER15> For me (on an iPad), the problem isn't the loading speed, but the interface that blocks/loses the pinch state when rendering new layers.

Zooming in/out stops working and you have to restart the pinching gesture to continue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm working on a map-based business that currently uses google maps. I might switch to this before or shortly after I open to the public. It looks great and is much cheaper than google!

</comment><comment><USER17> Really? A dark share button taking away screen real estate? Are you out of your freaking mind?

Also, preload tiles so I don't get ugly white boxes for just midly steering out of my current viewbox.

<comment><USER18> The share button is only on the embeds. When you use the API, you won't have to worry about these. (See: <http://mapbox.com/hosting/mapbox-streets/>)

Tile loading should behave just like you see with Google Maps or MapQuest, or any other tile-based slippy map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice color scheme, but the labels need more contrast

<comment><USER20> I disagree. It's so low contrast, it's hard to see anything.

Plus it plain lacks detail. Compare the same view of Manhattan:

<http://i.imgur.com/2uR67.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/m4tXF.png>

Google's result is actually useful in many ways. It shows street direction, subway stops (very important!), some points of interest. The font's are easily readable. The names of the streets are abbreviated, no need to have the words "street", "east", "west" all over your map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious, the US Interstate Highway numbers appear to be missing. Is this a design decision, or a yet-to-add feature?

</comment><comment><USER22> Any chance of getting an SRTM terrain layer?

<comment><USER5> See the rest of the maps: <http://tiles.mapbox.com/mapbox> In short, not really, but kind of. Global SRTM = a lot of preprocessing, postprocessing, and design choices, that we haven't been motivated to do by any specific use case.

<comment><USER23> "Global SRTM = a lot of preprocessing, postprocessing, and design choices" -- yes but only once per year or so. Terrain data doesn't get monthly or quarterly quality upgrades like OSM data or satellite aerials do.

For anyone interested, from my own experience a few weeks back when I hacked up my elevation data workflow in 1-2 days. First off, data sources:

1\. CGIAR-CSI for SRTM3, v4.1 core elevation tiles (N60 down to S60)

2\. vastly improved-over-SRTM .hgt tiles for various mountaineous areas and many north-of-N60 areas from viewfinderpanoramas.org, can replace SRTM tiles with those where applicable but they don't have global coverage so need to merge 1. and 2.

3\. anything not covered by 1. and 2. use the HGT tiles by "Radio Mobile" (rmw.recordist.com)

Now encode all roughly 144*360=51840 (minus pure ocean) tiles either to GeoTiffs (insane storage space requirements!) or (my approach) to PNG using any custom mapping of the elevation signed-int16 values to your RGB(A) channels. The compression/decompression is fast yet the storage needs are awesome, some 300kb max for a complex tile vs. many MB for tiff. Reading out PNG pixels can be done in client-side JavaScript these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems that you can't zoom in as far as Google Maps?

<comment><USER3> Currently, this is true. We'll be adding more zoom levels in the coming weeks.</comment></comment>


Nobody ever got fired for buying a framework - <AUTHOR> http://printhelloworld.de/nobody-ever-got-fired-for-buying-a-framework.html?utm_source=framework-news-1&utm_medium=hackernews&utm_campaign=framework-1

<comment><USER2> I think he's missing the point. A lot of people don't need or want innovative software. Infact innovative software is bad. Its easier to teach people to use software that has ideas and concepts that they've seen in other programs.

And if you're not innovating then why would you reinvent the wheel? A technologically spectacular codebase where the sky is the limit is awesome. Id also enjoy coding that. But users will never see or care about your brilliance.</comment>


An American Father and Son Exporting Tear Gas to Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/tear-gas-hong-kong-made-in-usa <comment><USER2> Hmm Lockheed Martin, Raytheon etc. have being exporting weapons system to brutal dictatorships for decades

<comment><USER3> Note that when exporting weapon systems they need approval from DoD and other federal agencies. But tear gas is not covered by those export laws. Just DoC which isn't a big deal.

<comment><USER4> People always bring the DoD thing up as if it's a valid excuse, or that it somehow transfers moral responsibility to the DoD. Like there being legal loopholes to get what they want makes it OK to flaunt their psychopathy.

<comment><USER5> > _Like there being legal loopholes_

It's not a loophole. It's the point of the law. We export weapons under the guidance of our government. There is a political check on munitions. Not everyone likes the defense industry, but banning weapons exports polls terribly.

In this case, that democratic check is released. That makes it different from traditional weapons exports.

<comment><USER4> *moral/ethical loophole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish the article would shed some light on why the police doesn't use domestically produced tear gas. I don't understand how it can be feasible for them to import tear gas to Hong Kong from the US.

<comment><USER7> Previously working for a company that did create some less than lethal equipment, I can say few main reasons. One being proprietary knowledge into the devices as well as capabilities to get specific chemicals required to manufacture some of which are highly regulated. The other and probably the largest reason is the margins (profits) and quantities produced are not that large. This is normally why you see defense contractors who have other means of profits do this since its something they can bundle into a sale for law enforcement. That would be my main guess for import low need and cheaper to just import stock vs setting up an entire factory not to mention the requirements necessary to store the chemicals safely. The image in the article does do a good job of showing how they have physically separated the buildings on the property.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't matter if the USA blocks exports of tear gas to HK. They will just buy from other countries. If you really want to stop what is going on in HK then stop buying Chinese made goods.

<comment><USER9> The Chinese would rather be poor than lose Hong Kong. Better way would be to encourage civil societies/ democratic reform in China

<comment><USER10> It's about more than just HK. It is about the Uighurs being put in concentration camps. It is about the harvesting of organs from political prisoners. It is about illegally occupying Tibet. It is about illegally occupying the South China Sea. It is about many things.

[https://chinatribunal.com/final-judgement- report/](https://chinatribunal.com/final-judgement-report/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who sells tear gas to US police departments? Who sold the bullets that shot the kids at Kent State? How about we hold the actual people giving the orders to fire the tear gas accountable instead of random vendors?

<comment><USER12> That's exactly the difference between your examples and this: your examples are easily within reach of US accountability, foreign governments not really, so their suppliers are the closest target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why outdated one which might release cynaide etc are used if it is so easy to be obtained and so cheap? Our tube and Neigbourhood are affected by these indiscriminate use of TG.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do these not fall under arms dealing laws?

<comment><USER15> That's a big fat maybe, but AFAIK if they got permission it's probably fine?

The Department of Commerce regularly approves exports of tear gas products and formulations considered "dual-use" (military or police), and the State Department handles other forms. The government of Egypt was able to purchase American tear gas in the late 00s and early 10s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> According to a number of other sources tear gas for Hong Kong is produced by Chemring Group, UK?

[https://graphcommons.com/graphs/f042fe57-cf19-458b-b390-8cf6...](https://graphcommons.com/graphs/f042fe57-cf19-458b-b390-8cf6fc2a2cca)

[https://twitter.com/Omega_RF/status/1138752537878781952](https://twitter.com/Omega_RF/status/1138752537878781952)

[https://theferret.scot/chemring-hong-kong-tear- gas/](https://theferret.scot/chemring-hong-kong-tear-gas/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a list of companies who make money on violence? I'd like to ban them on using my products. I could find only this [https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/31778](https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/31778)

<comment><USER18> Why is this comment downvoted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They are only investigating this company because they don't like the government cracking down on protestors in HK.

Tear gas is better than bullets.

<comment><USER20> Journalists investigating current events? Huh.

Next you'll be telling me scientists only investigate results of experiments!

Police only investigate results of crimes!

What's next? Washing laundry after it's dirty?

Where will it end!!</comment></comment>


No Swift for UW's Certificate in iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.pce.uw.edu/ios-mac-swift-questions/

<comment><USER2> From the article : we will present examples in both Objective-C and Swift and will include a few weeks of Swift coverage as part of the second or third course.

A strong foundation of knowledge in Objective-C will still be key to being a strong iOS developer. Since the program is still going to be showing some swift examples, and including some time on the language, I am confused as to why the poster is inferring from the title that not using swift in their certification process is such a big deal.

I would not hire an iOS developer that was only certified in swift. I can see the argument to include swift into the certification process, but I would not assume that universitys will immediately change their process without at least seeing how swift matures.</comment>


Discussion: Browserify or RequireJs? - <AUTHOR> I'd love to hear the community's take on this.  I'll also start a poll, but feel free to start a discussion! <comment><USER2> They serve two slightly different purposes.

Browserify is a build time tool which enables the programmer to combine files and have a module structure within this single packaged file. This affords practical flexibility, such as dynamically requiring files (as long as the dynamically required modules are required in a manifest module with it's own require method).

RequireJs is a runtime tool, in which you load modules from the browser.

You can use both by packaging files together using browserify and dynamically loading these packaged files using requirejs.

I personally use browserify and have my own lightweight dynamic loader. This allows me to be free of the requirejs boilerplate logic in every file.

One cool thing about Browserify if you can package a bunch of lightweight & focused javascript snippets you find on the internet, instead of using heavyweight libraries. Often times, the essential nugget of logic is tiny, compared to the boilerplate, cruft, & edge case concerns of the library.

</comment><comment><USER3> Browserify. I've never understood why people who are not constructing truly _massive_ applications decide to go with Require.js, because in the end you just run r.js against the build to concatenate anyways. And the whole notion of "requiring" libraries via a shim --those libraries, once shimmed, end up being globals anyways. Browserify is a one-liner, with a clean syntax, which also has a vast plugin system for performing further operations --also one- liners.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Poll: Browserify

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Poll: RequireJs</comment>


Evidence is now clear: Operation Choke Point hurt lawful businesses - <AUTHOR> https://www.americanbanker.com/opinion/evidence-is-now-clear-operation-choke-point-hurt-lawful-businesses <comment><USER2> "For the last five years, I have fought to end the Obama Administration's ideologically driven initiative to kill legitimate businesses"

Once it says "ideologically driven" you know it's just paranoid rantings.</comment>


Inscentinel Sniffer Bees - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IocdgF99eK8 I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this. I know we're not great at generalized scent sensors yet, and that even sensors designed for a particular scent are fickle, but I have to believe that we can do this in a better way than developing a system to confine, train, and deploy bees as sensor arrays. <comment><AUTHOR> I know we're not great at generalized scent sensors yet, and even sensors designed for a particular scent are fickle. That said, I have to believe that we can do this in a better way than developing a system to confine, train, and deploy bees as sensor arrays.</comment>


Ask HN: What are good examples of technical docs you've seen? Bad examples? - <AUTHOR> I've been helping out a few open source projects with documentation, and would love to flip through what you consider good and bad documentation. I'll keep the request wide since I'm interested in different forms (API docs, lib docs, quick start guides, reference docs). <comment><USER2> I've always loved the PHP.net site for documentation.

Let's say we wanted to know about the `explode` function, right at the top of their page is a search box. Type in the function and a dropdown populates with a brief description of the function, adding confidence that you're on the right result.

You click the function and right there it gives you the function signature in easily readable text that's color coded. Just at a glance I know that explode will return an array, I must pass it a delimiter first, then the string I want to split and then there is an optional argument in square braces.

If that wasn't enough it goes on to explain each parameter down below as well as the return values.

Further down is the change log on what changed between versions.

Next up are what really makes the PHP documentation shine for me: examples.

Succinct and to the point examples with comments that have always been enough to get me started with the basics.

This would have been good enough, but they go a step further to give me related functions in the "See Also" section. Sometimes I'm looking for one function, but then find a function that can do it better, or I realize that hey after I perform this action, I'm probably going to need to use another one of these related functions such as the `implode` function.

User comments at the bottom are also great! They are usually insightful and have been very helpful in the past.

The writing for classes and extensions is also equally as good: well written, quick start guides, installation settings for Windows and Linux.

I've always felt that the website was very user friendly and accessible. When you go to the landing page you're not overwhelmed with information. Just a quick blurb about what PHP is, the news of releases, easy to find download options, and documentation and search are all above the fold and prominently featured.

<comment><USER3> One of the really nice things about PHP.net in particular is that you can go to any function name as a root directory on the website and it will look it up, e.g. [http://php.net/explode](http://php.net/explode) will go right to the explode doc. This works for root functions as well as classes and most keywords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Django's docs are some of the best I've seen

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/)

I love how they provide example code for everything and explain it.

<comment><USER5> I second this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good : Google's documentation - It nicely break downs documentation into 3 or 4 simple tabs(guides, reference and samples). Left panel has breakdown of page related to tab , right panel has more detailed view of the page itself. This kind of provides 3-indices to entire documentation. (eg: [https://goo.gl/7ZIuX](https://goo.gl/7ZIuX))

Most of documentation is simple enough to understand with examples and highlighted with right colors wherever it is required (I feel color highlighting remains under appreciated in documentation). And also one can invoke apis and play a bit.

Bad : mongoose.

</comment><comment><USER7> ZeroMQ: awesome docs (i recommend also the ZeroMQ O'Reilly book by the MH, the library author) particularly for a library with a broad range of functionality not easily described by a single technical category.

New York Times API docs

</comment><comment><USER8> Qt's document is among the best: [http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/index.html](http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> PostgreSQL's documentation is an excellent reference - you can learn SQL, and learn it well, just from the manual. It _is_ pretty dry, though.

OpenBSD's man pages are also excellent reference documents. One really great thing is that they document _all_ possible behaviors, which is disturbingly rare for (e.g.) Python libraries.

</comment><comment><USER10> If I could piggyback on this question, I'd really be interested in any reading material or podcasts specifically about technical writing. I'd like to get better at it, but most of what I've seen is just general style guides, not concrete information about the how and the why of organizing technical information.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to be putting one resource together in the next week- will ping you with a draft when it's done. Is there an easy way to reach out to you?

It'd also be helpful to better understand what is missing in the resources you've read.

You can email nemild at google's email service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember years ago reading through the Vyatta Firewall Linux Distribution's docs & thinking about how well they were written. Haven't looked at it for nearly a decade by now though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Forgot to add to my original request: For yourself, what makes something "good documentation"? What makes bad documentation? Are there things you wish people did more of or less of?

</comment><comment><USER12> I love how MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) documents web APIs.</comment>


Glaring Problem With Messages Exposes RIM's Broken Software Development Culture - <AUTHOR> http://factore.ca/on-the-floor/132-glaring-problem-with-messages-exposes-rim-s-broken-software-development-culture

<comment><USER2> Maybe it's because I don't work for a huge, publicly traded company, but I'll never understand how these kinds of things make it into production. This is the kind of thing that a single programmer should think of right away when building this sort of feature.</comment>


CentMail: Donate to charity and fight spam - <AUTHOR> http://centmail.net/

<comment><USER2> There are two components to this offer: one is a $5 donation to charity. The other is a spam-fighting scheme. Analyze them separately.

The spam fighting scheme is not a workable idea. Sorry.

If the person doing the verifying is a human, they don't need the stamp -- they can (and will) judge the mail in an instant based on their own arbitrary and capricious criteria, such as "Mail from Mom is not spam" or "Mail from the merchant whose double opt-in list I just signed up for is spam if I don't know how to delete in Gmail yet". If the user doing verifying is a machine... well, in point of fact, there are no servers on the Internet who support your own one-off anti-spam measure. (If you're just wrapping a slightly-more-well-known measure in attractive mapping, you win marketing points and still lose on deliverability.) You have no buyin from Gmail, Microsoft, et al who have the email accounts that people actually want to deliver to.

Your plan fills no business need for anyone. If I want to pay $0.01 to make sure my email gets delivered, I have an option for that: MailChimp. (It works fairly well for me, incidentally.) They do it by keeping in good graces with the major mail providers, kicking off clients, staying away from banned lists, and aggressive list scrubbing. CentMail will have to do all these things better than the commercial providers to make sense as a commercial offering.

The $5 to charity is not improved by the included bundling of the spam fighting scheme. If you want to donate $5 to charity, you can do that right now.

P.S. I used to work in anti-spam research at my previous day job. I have a lot of natural sympathy... for approaches which work.

<comment><USER3> > If the person doing the verifying is a human, they don't need the stamp

That was my thought too. Can it be improved? If there is an API to create a unique key based on the contents of the message (and the headers) that the client can then verify with centmail (or w/e).

Sure it wont do anything for mail NOT covered with centmail. BUT you can dump anything with a faked key (likely spam) and let in those with a real key. Then anything else goes to the spam filter as usual.

Kinda like a more worldly version of PGP signing.

Obviously that kind of scheme would require much more support from email vendors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a bit of a "feel good" thing, but I don't see it becoming useful. It needs to get really big in order to work, and I never liked whitelists anyways.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps not quite as big as you're imagining though. If there's, say, a spamassassin rule for it (we actually wrote one for our initial version of the centmail protocol) then it might be worth your while as a sender to sign up, to help avoid ending up in people's spam folders.

The main thing we're hoping for though, to achieve any kind of critical mass, is that you'll want to sign up initially as a sender simply to promote your favorite cause. Confer the popularity of Causes, the Facebook app.

We certainly don't imagine Centmail as a panacea; but you could imagine it becoming a reliable additional feature for your spam filter.

Think of it like hashcash, but instead of burning money/effort, you send it somewhere useful. Come to think of it, maybe this could be made more palatable by combining the hashcash concept with some seti@home-style distributed computation problem. Look for aliens in order to send email!

<comment><USER4> Yeap, anything that certifies you spent some effort in sending that mail can whitelist you. This can work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> purely from the charity side:

what if your idea of good isn't the same as mine? maybe i don't want my money going to xyz? and would you be sending 100% of the donation through? If I want to do good, I'll do what I already do, donate directly to the charities of my choice.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is obviously a stupid idea. Email is free, shouldn't cost even a cent.</comment>


Women's Unpaid Labor is Worth $10.9T - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/04/opinion/women-unpaid-labor.html <comment><USER2> My wife an I discuss this a lot. There are a lot of programs designed to help offset costs for women who choose to work, but not a whole lot aimed at paying full-time stay-at-home parents for their contributions.

I recently commented about the book, "The Value of Everything". It does an incredible job at explaining the various ways in which we measure value. Today, right now, we tend to say that your value is what you earn. But it's not the only model available, and there's a pretty good argument that paying people for the work they do in raising the next generation could be enormously impactful for society.

<comment><USER3> What about a simple program where only one spouse works but all money is shared. My wife and I effectively get the same paycheck on the same day.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps I'm missing your point but that sounds almost indistinguishable from a joint checking account?

<comment><USER3> That is the point. I'm curious what kind of program OP is proposing over just having a JCA.

<comment><USER2> Universal basic income would be an acceptable approach imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure how you can argue that women who don't enter the workforce aren't being paid for house work. They don't get a check, sure, but they get food, clothing, a home, a cell phone, etc. Seems like double dipping. If they had a day job those tasks wouldn't be performed as often and would likely be split up more equitably.

I'm not sure what point the article is attempting to make. That more women should enter the work force? Sure, ok, maybe. That there is some untapped economy worth $11T? I don't think so.

<comment><USER6> That's not formal payment. For the house especially, that sort of thing is simply owned by the person.

I'm not sure what standard you are using to determine "payment" but to me, it's so vague that you could reasonably claim toddlers are "paid" in food, shelter, and toys to entertain their parents with cuteness.

<comment><USER5> In what way is it not payment? Money is an abstraction over goods. The toddler example is just silly for obvious reasons and neither here nor there. What I'm saying is that article tries to frame housework as something that should be paid for (by... someone?), but if those same women were working they wouldn't be doing nearly as much of it. In exchange they're receiving goods, even though they have no income. You can't have it both ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah, kids are expensive. What's the value of raising the next generation of humanity?

</comment><comment><USER8> Dupe. Prior discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22492574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22492574)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> note that there is a huge business opportunity lurking in sectors this large yet relatively untapped. the US alone is $1.5T.

this revelation also gives perspective on economics as a discipline, in that it's still in it's infancy, with vast swaths of the economy largely invisible to decision-makers.</comment>


When running for exercise was for weirdos - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/8/9/9115981/running-jogging-history <comment><USER2> Reminds me of Back to the Future Part III:

Doc: And in the future, we don't need horses. We have motorized carriages called automobiles.

Saloon Old Timer #3: If everybody's got one of these auto-whatsits, does anybody walk or run anymore?

Doc: Of course we run. But for recreation. For fun.

Saloon Old Timer #3: Run for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?

</comment><comment><USER3> >In 1968, Sen. Strom Thurmond found himself stopped by a police officer in Greenville, South Carolina. His suspicious activity? Jogging.

Funny. Happened to my dad too. He started jogging in 1970 and continued (almost) every day for 40 years. That very first year he was the _only_ guy out there and people occasionally got freaked out and called the cops. He had to explain this 'jogging' exercise thing.

But within a few years it had caught on like wildfire.

<comment><USER4> This reminds me of the 1951 Ray Bradbury short story, 'The Pedestrian'. The outside runners may someday again draw suspicion, when people prefer jog- questing in their home Oculus Rooms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the "jogging" of today? Gluten free diets? I could see it become mainstream once science has studied it more extensively, but today if you don't have coeliac disease and decide to go gluten-free, you're labeled as nuts right away.

<comment><USER6> I really don't understand the whole "hate," in particular on the internet, for people who eat Gluten free food. Who really cares? It doesn't harm you or I if someone chooses to avoid Gluten, it doesn't hurt the environment, it doesn't cause a public health issue, and so on and so fourth.

But people get really upset about the oddest stuff that have no impact on them (e.g. others playing the lottery, vegetarians, how others dress, their games console of choice, their phone maker, etc). None of it matters, people could do well by just minding their own business more.

As to Gluten, I myself won't be doing a Gluten free diet, but people who wish to more power to you and as a positive spin it might make foods more accessible for people with coeliac.

<comment><USER7> People generally react strongly (and negatively) to what they perceive to be irrational behavior in others. I think there's a strong human instinct to want to set the correct precedent for others and for future generations, which leads to this sort of reaction when we feel as if someone else is setting the wrong precedent. The (very implicit) fear might be that the GF trend will lead to many resources being wasted on something that doesn't matter (special GF products, restaurants, marketing materials, etc.).

However, with dietary trends there's a second and possibly more powerful factor, which is that those not following the trend feel as if they're being implicitly judged by those who are. This feeling is often completely incorrect, but it's there nonetheless for many people. Ironically, the feeling itself is irrational, yet it feeds into one's own distaste for another person's (perceived) irrationality.

<comment><USER8> I think it's the implicit judgment that is more powerful. If you were to declare, "I'm a summer; I can't ever wear yellow!" no one would care. When you refuse someone's bread, though, that's a different question. Food has historically been a way to bond, in some particularly ritualistic ways. (We "break bread together", history has people eating from the same dish to symbolically and practically show trust, etc.)

Much of the current GF stuff is not that good, whether you're looking at environment, cost, culinary quality, or health benefits. Why eat a bar of tapioca starch? It tastes terrible. And my delicious almond-flour brownies are destroying the aquifers of California even though they give me a delightful 300+ calories per serving. On the other hand, the proliferation of GF goods allows people with real problems to sit down with family and friend and eat crappy sandwiches together without anyone feeling judged by the presence of a lettuce wrap, and that has its own benefits. Irrational, or not? Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember the Hall of Fame Golfer Gary Player being ridiculed by his peers during the 60's because he believed in working out and strength training. The standard of the time was that this was counterproductive for golfers. (iirc one of the arguments was that strength training would cause loss of "touch" in one's game)

Fast forward 50 years, and every professional golfer is a fitness and strength training fanatic.

<comment><USER10> I'm not familiar with golf but I'm pretty sure I've seen pudgy golfers... A bit of googling turned up Keith Horne who doesn't look like an athlete.

<comment><USER11> I agree, he doesn't. However, I wouldn't discount somebody as being a lifter because they are pudgy. This guy[0] (the really large one) was the first person to bench over 1000 lbs[1].

[0] - [http://static1.sfd.pl/1/images2004/20040721160457.jpg](http://static1.sfd.pl/1/images2004/20040721160457.jpg)

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxtkUI5Wsnw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxtkUI5Wsnw)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish I could run, but 1) it hurts - and not in a good way 2) it's extremely boring. The only thing that's kind of fun is running up hills.

The nice thing about running is that you can pack a decent amount of exercise into a relatively brief period of time, and at least you're outside. Gyms feel like gerbil wheels to me.

What I really love to do is ride my bike, but that takes more time and better conditions.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes running kills me, sometimes it's a bliss. My philosophy in physical activity: smooth waves. I start slow, push it very slow as long as I feel flowing[1]. I wave around the sweet spots.

BUT, I try not to control it too much, every time I start to focus about something else[2], I feel like flying. The minute I start thinking back about my body, the pleasure vanish.

My goal is to tighten my sensitivity to these two ideas so I can reach flow faster and longer.

[1] except min 5 and 15 where I often crack down a bit, maybe the body shifting sugar supplies.

[2] a rant, a fantasy, a job idea, some music...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's still really weird. Why an exercise as high-impact on the joints and as potentially injurious as this hasn't been stopped has to be purely because people enjoy it so much, or they don't see an alternative.

We have machines designed to mimic the exercise and reduce or eliminate the impact. We have studies that show a multitude of other exercises that provide similar or the same health benefits without the stress. There's less expensive gear to buy. There's less risk of injury and it's more convenient to exercise indoors. Yet I can't walk down my tiny sidewalk on a sunny day without somebody in nylon shorts flying past me down the concrete path.

Now, don't get me wrong, a mile jog/run is not a terrible way to warm up for the rest of your workout. But the distances most people run, and the regularity of it, probably has more downsides than upsides. Heart health can be achieved without the above factors, as can endurance, and we can finally end the tyranny of the running path (i'm mostly joking).

<comment><USER15> Do you know if running on the beach (or sand) is better on the joints? It seems like it would be better on the joints, plus it seems harder (better exercise). And hey, you're on a beach.

<comment><USER16> I would guess worse, but in different ways. Your foot can shift in the sand left/right when landing, causing havoc on other joints (knee, hip) when you apply pressure and they're getting unexpected horizontal motion.

<comment><USER17> I run barefoot all the time on the beach, at the water line when the tide is lower so it's nice and flat and you can see surface well.

I have no problems with my shins and knees since I'm running mostly mid to slightly forefoot strikes. The forefoot absorbs the shock rather than pounding the knee and hip with a direct impact. When I run with shoes on pavement, I get some knee and hip issues, especially if I don't pay attention to my foot strikes with respect to changing pavement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article seems to think being stopped by the police because of jogging is a thing of the past. I live in a state university town full of joggers but I've been stopped 3 times for my "suspicious" jogging just in the last year. I guess it's because I do it at weird times with normal clothing instead of the standard exercise uniform.

They always say something along the lines of "I thought you were in trouble." to justify themselves.

<comment><USER19> What do you mean by normal clothing? Do you go running in jeans?

<comment><USER20> If you're running for exercise rather than racing is there anything wrong with running in jeans?

<comment><USER21> In my experience, yes: they chafe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article seems to imply that a cashmere pullover would be inappropriate for jogging.

Cashmere or merino are both fantastic textiles for athletic wear.

<comment><USER23> However, this athletic merino or cashmere textile has nothing to do with the traditional thick wool sweater, socks or mittens.

We're talking stuff like this: [http://www.smartwool.com/stay- comfortable/mens-nts-micro-150...](http://www.smartwool.com/stay- comfortable/mens-nts-micro-150-pattern-crew.html)

Not what comes to mind when we think "cashmere pullover". :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> No mention of native americans, south americans, africans, etc that were all running for a long time...

<comment><USER20> Those cultures are probably running more for necessity than fitness/recreation.

<comment><USER17> The Tarahumara indian long distance runners ran for communication and also had a tradition of running for ceremonial and competitive aspects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's still pretty weird to see someone running in New Delhi, for example. I know heat and air quality are part of it but there are days where it would be perfectly fine. I think it's just considered weird to run.</comment>


This startup wants to tackle the 1 bn € market tracking small construction tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.whiteboardmag.com/stolen-construction-tools-billion-euro-startup/

<comment><USER2> Very ambitious, but still possible

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's what I thought :) They do have a solid business plan and funding in place and there is revenue, so I'd say they're in good shape. The only danger would come from being leapfrogged by an even better funded players.</comment></comment>


Wiki engine written in Bash - <AUTHOR> http://sdt.servers.csail.mit.edu/BashCGI

<comment><USER2> The site is (currently?) NSFW. And disgusting.</comment>


Upgrading Your Current MacBook Pro  - <AUTHOR> http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/11/17/upgrade-macbook-pro/

<comment><USER2> Well, if you have a MacbookPro with retina display here is your options:

        Upgrade RAM: you can't
        Upgrade SSD: usually doesn't worth it. too expensive
        Replace battery: $199 by Apple

My recommendation is to sell your old Apple gear and get a new one every two years. It makes way more sense nowadays

</comment><comment><USER3> Increase RAM, increase hard drive size, replace battery, format and reinstall OS.

One to two actually have the potential to help performance (RAM, OS), unless you're already maxed out/well maintained - but hey Wikipedia says it can help! All the while the article is a sales pitch for Atomic, and filled with bogus info like this: "RAM is your first defense against a virus." Someone kill this link?

<comment><USER4> reread article please. it doesn't say "increase hard drive size". it says "upgrade hd", to a SSD specifically. which has a huge performance gain on old macbooks without them.

also i guess the humor isn't for everyone but if you didn't take the quote out of context maybe you'd at least have realized it was a joke. "As the saying goes 'RAM is your first defense against a virus'. I'm actually not sure if anyone says that."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "At Atomic Object, we have a great laptop program. Every few years we're given the opportunity to purchase a new laptop, 100% of which is paid for upfront by Atomic. Each individual pays the company back for 75% of that computer with deductions from their future profit shares. "

I really do not feel this is great, it even feel a bit sneaky

I would MUCH prefer they buy the laptop & keep it when I'm gone. A 2-3 years old laptop is no use to me when I leave the company.

<comment><USER6> So sneaky.

Aren't they also depreciating the asset over time? So after 3 years its worth zero on their books yet they've taken income in it.( don't know the depreciation schedule for laptops)

Also, a 3 year old laptop is not worth 75% of its msrp over 3 years. Why would anyone do this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Every few years we're given the opportunity to purchase a new laptop, 100% of which is paid for upfront by Atomic. Each individual pays the company back for 75% of that computer with deductions from their future profit shares. In the end, the computer belongs to you._

This reminded me of the bubble I live in. At my last two jobs, I just bought whatever laptop I wanted and expensed it. It's been five years since I used a work-issued laptop; seven if you don't count macs.

I am of the opinion that it's worthwhile to give developers whatever tools they want. This includes their favorite computer(s), screen(s), software, chair, etc. Considering the amount of time they spend using these things, it makes no sense to skimp on them. This stuff is a small fraction of a developer's salary, yet it does wonders for morale.

Even when my workplace hasn't agreed with this policy, I've lived by it. If my work didn't pay for it, I bought it myself and brought it to work. After all, it's only a fraction of my salary, and I spend a lot of time using it.</comment>


Should Yahoo open up its web search index? - <AUTHOR>

Even though initiatives like EC2, S3, wikia and nutch are lowering the barrier for the next wave of innovation on search - building and maintaining an internet wide index is still a huge engineering initiative.<p>The only player which comes close to google is yahoo. If yahoo opens up its index like wikia it could set the stage for the next wave of innovation in search. Through a use based pricing model like amazon it might also make business sense for yahoo (lets face it, yahoo search isnt really going anywhere yet) and just might also help yahoo in getting its mojo back. <comment><USER2> I don't know how good yahoo search actually is because I don't use it, but I agree with you about the strategy and business model.

I'm much more comfortable with building applications on top of infrastructures I pay for instead of being held hostage to the odd loyalties and uncertainties that come with ad supported services.

I may want to be yahoo's customer but I don't want to trick my own customers into somehow watching yahoo provided ads or rely on some other indirect means of helping them make money.

Amazon does the right thing. I hope they succeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there actually a good way for someone to open up a web search index even if they wanted to? I know wikia is doing it but I didn't really investigate what that meant. Seems quite challenging.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really thought I once heard about the A9 search engine opening access to its index. I can't find it now though.

<comment><USER5> Alexa opened its search index: <http://websearch.alexa.com/welcome.html> They too are owned by Amazon.

Also, look into this: <http://www.opensearch.org/Home> It's A9's search spec.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  What would you think of no-IP pharma? - <AUTHOR>

What would you guys think about a potential pharmaceutical agent released with explicit anti-IP protections?  I.E. that no pharma company would be able to exercise patenting rights on its use.  I'm in a position to influence this to happen, obviously I think this is a good idea.  Pros?  Cons?  Do any copyleft/no-ip folks know if this has been tried before?  A cursory search says no, which doesn't suprise me considering how enthralled to the system many of my colleagues are. <comment><USER2> It costs $1M+ for a basic obviously-no-safety-risks safety approval. A large market blockbuster drug can easily cost $100M to approve.

So no IP = drug vanishes without a trace. Unless you can get charitable funding for approval, like the Gates Foundation is doing for things like malaria.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's cheaper for anti-cancer drugs. Generic drug companies make way more than $100M in profits.</comment></comment>


Microdot: Easily Create .NET Microservices with Orleans - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gigya/microdot <comment><AUTHOR> The Microdot framework for .NET helps you to create scalable and reliable microservices based on Orleans Actors, allowing you to focus on writing code that defines the logic of your service without the need to tackle the myriad of challenges of developing a distributed system.</comment>


"Bionic Leaf" Makes Fuel from Sunlight - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bionic-leaf-makes-fuel-from-sunlight/

<comment><USER2> "The bionic leaf can pump out 216 milligrams of isopropanol per liter of water—an efficiency that rivals that of a corn plant making starch-rich kernels out of sunlight."

Critical: how long does it take? The corn takes all summer. The process efficiency PER TIME is the most important measurement. If the leaf takes only a day or an hour, then its many thousands of times more efficient than the corn plant.</comment>


Do people use Bookmarklets? - <AUTHOR>

A very simple question with a lot of answers I'm sure. But what I'm wondering do people in general use Bookmarklets, or continue using them?
Here are a few examples:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-useful-bookmarklets.html <comment><USER2> I was wondering the same thing recently, so I made a little Javascript library that can detect bookmarklet usage, which could then be hooked up to something like Google Analytics: <http://github.com/quadule/trackmarks>

I don't have a high-traffic site to test it on, but if anyone else does I'd love to hear about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use them for faster searches -- like going from the current page to a traffic estimate of that page on compete.com, or domaintools information for the site. Really speeds things up.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just "published" one, I use bookmarklets: google bookmark, google calendar, hacker news, google reader, and now "taskme"

</comment><comment><USER5> I use the Hootsuite and Buffer bookmarklets.</comment>


Apple Is Designing iPhones, iPads That Would Drop Qualcomm Components - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-is-designing-iphones-ipads-that-would-drop-qualcomm-components-1509408668 <comment><USER2> I hope this leads to the end of a separate CDMA variant. It was really convenient in the 6s era having one device that worked on all US carriers.</comment>


Psychopaths have faulty brain connections (can lifecasting help?) - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE5764NI20090807

<comment><USER2> Coincidentally, I've been researching sociopaths (and by extension, psychopaths to some degree). I've found that most have no interest in "treatment." They view their way of thinking as an asset that allows them to be clear-headed and rational, and to get what they want out of life without all those pesky things like "conscience" getting in the way of success.

So this brings up an interesting conundrum: clearly, it's to society's advantage to "cure" these people because they pose a threat to the fragile stability of social life by violating norms (and laws!) that neuro-typical people adhere to. However, normally medical treatment is left entirely in the hands of the person. Who wins in this case?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What would you do with people that have these faulty brain connections but have not committed a crime? Put them in jail?

Could technology help? In particular, lifecasting?</comment>


Cellebrite Claims It Can Unlock iOS 12 - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/cellebrite-ufed-ios-12-iphone-hack-android/ <comment><AUTHOR> Some other links:

Their "product features" page: [https://www.cellebrite.com/en/ufed- premium/](https://www.cellebrite.com/en/ufed-premium/)

Their twitter announcement: [https://twitter.com/Cellebrite_UFED/status/11395694992066437...](https://twitter.com/Cellebrite_UFED/status/1139569499206643715)</comment>


How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8J_qdFYwNJ6OS1WSHhzVGxZZzQ/edit <comment><USER2> > _This article has shown that the classroom environments that raise test > scores also improve long-term outcomes. Students who were randomly assigned > to higher quality classrooms in grades K–3 earn more, are more likely to > attend college, save more for retirement, and live in better neighborhoods. > Yet the same students do not do much better on standardized tests in later > grades._

> _Yet the same students do not do much better on standardized tests in later > grades. Researchers who had examined only the impacts of STAR on test scores > would have incorrectly concluded that early childhood education does not > have long-lasting impacts._

This seems to pretty definitively end the argument I'm having with my wife in her favor; my thought was that early school education probably doesn't matter too much, since they're learning very basic things that we can teach them at home anyway.

<comment><USER3> Uhh, that's not entirely clear. There's two causal explanations for why students assigned to higher quality classrooms do better: either good environments cause beneficial outcomes, or bad environments cause negative outcomes. Like, the important factor may be something along the lines of "don't send your kid to what's best describe as a dystopian hellscape".

<comment><USER4> What about the glaring third option, "kids who go to nice kindergartens are probably well off and hence well positioned to succeed in life"?

<comment><USER5> That's not a causal explanation, in this context. ThrustVectoring specifically limited the comment to causal explanations: why do better kindergarten classes cause better life outcomes.

<comment><USER4> Common cause is a causal explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also, middle-/upper-oriented people are more likely peer-pressured to placing in the "best" kindergartens, whereas lower-oriented people may skip it (much like skipping parental-school involvement). And, I suspect both nature and nurture aspects are self-amplifying: smarter/more competitive kids may make more money and attempt to seek similar mates to have improved offspring and try really hard to inculcate successful attitudes. Plus, having more money helps reinforce getting into selective kindergartens and making more childhood friends of future powerful people, leading to better social access to higher quality mates (better genes), more money and hopefully better lifestyle- choices.

<comment><USER7> Right, I'd really like to know about the "random" process that assigned students to classrooms. I know that when I was in elementary school the assignments were theoretically random, but if parents really wanted to influence them, they could. Since this study gets a lot of its results from clustering, they might just be finding that certain classes were perceived to be better (right or wrong) and so involved parents influenced the school to get their kids in it. Now it really is going to be "better" by the metric of those kids' later success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am wary that these nature versus nurture studies will always find some way in which purchasing or investing in additional or more expensive schooling is key. That is until such time as genetic engineering become consumer available, then I imagine a slew of studies proving that people with x heritable trait succeed. Of course, I'm a father with a 1 and a half year old already in Montesory school because despite my wariness that it's all just marketing pretending at science, I can't not want to give me daughter every advantage I can. They've got me over a barrel!

</comment><comment><USER9> Not sure why we even have money to spend on these kinds of research. These trials are always random and inconclusive due to the nature of sample sizes.

<comment><USER10> The ultimate purpose is to improve education until no body ever again spews this bullshit again.

The sample size here was 22,000. Is that enough?

(the answer, by the way, is "It depends on the effect size you want to measure". I can do a study with n=2 that is pretty convincing. Question: "are these pills actually cyanide?". Study design: "I give one pill each to two healthy undergrads, after they tried to appear smart by saying 'correlation does not prove causation'". Observation: "The ethics board should definitely not have approved this!" Discussion: "Background death rate from non-violent causes for 22 year old males in the US is 0.01096/100000/day. Pill is poisonous with p<0.000000000000012")

<comment><USER11> You're going to have a hell of a time getting participates to fill out follow up surveys for a long term analysis.

<comment><USER12> Get them to 'donate their body to science' and you can keep observing them forever, or until the cryo machines stop working.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Leaving A Startup On Good Terms - <AUTHOR> http://alexstechthoughts.com/post/42519072890/leaving-a-startup-on-good-terms

<comment><USER2> Assuming both parties are rationale, I would suggest the timeframe be more based on completion of a goal (e.g., transition someone else to the role or complete this project you were working on) rather than a specific time like two weeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense.</comment></comment>


X3D: Declarative 3D for the Modern Web - <AUTHOR> https://blog.scottlogic.com/2019/08/27/declarative-3d-for-the-modern-web.html <comment><USER3> FWIW the vfx industry is starting to settle on a single format (again) - <USER2> might make more sense to implement than something more xml/web-ish... [https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html](https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html)

<comment><USER4> USD couldn't be more different than X3D. It's an industrial-strength standard for sharing massive movie-scale assets between commercial editing suites and production tools. X3D is lighter weight markup for defining simple 3D scenes that can be viewed in a web browser with a little interactivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've just seen X3DOM which as I understand, it has something called "explicit DOM" means that it loads different DOMs explicitly which is useful I think, especially when the scene is complex

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd much rather prefer A-Frame become this layer for HTML, if only for the fact that the component registry is already community driven and therefore populated.

</comment><comment><USER7> this could be quite powerful if combined with react. excited to watch it develop!

See this relevant project[0] which enables you to use JSX/React to program the popular 3d library three.js

[0] [https://github.com/Izzimach/react- three/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/Izzimach/react- three/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER8> X3D itself predates both React and A-frame, there is even X3DOM to use it with WebGL: [https://www.x3dom.org/](https://www.x3dom.org/)</comment></comment>


Structured Programming with go to Statements (1974) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammingGoTo.pdf <comment><USER2> You missed my favorite quote from any computer science paper:

"Axiomatics of Jumps

[...]

"Just recently, however, Hoare has shown that there is, in fact, a rather simple way to give an axiomatic definition of go to statements; indeed, he wishes quite frankly that it hadn't been quite so simple. For each label L in a program, the programmer should state a logical assertion α(L) which is to be true whenever we reach L. Then the axioms

        {α(L)} go to L {false}

plus the rules of inference

        {α(L)} S {P} ⊢ {α(L)} L:S {P}

are allowed in program proofs, and all properties of labels and go to's will follow if the α(L) are selected intelligently. One must, of course, carry out the entire proof using the same assertion α(L) for each appearance of the label L, and some choices of assertions will lead to more powerful results than others.

"Informally, α(L) represents the desired state of affairs at label L; this definition says essentially that a program is correct if α(L) holds at L and before all "go to L" statements, and that control never "falls through" a go to statement to the following text. Stating the assertions α(L) is analogous to formulating loop invariants. Thus, it is not difficult to deal formally with tortuous program structure if it turns out to be necessary; all we need to know is the "meaning" of each label."

(p. 289-290)

Not only does "he wishes quite frankly that it hadn't been quite so simple" make me giggle like a schoolgirl for several minutes every time I see it, but it's also a _really beautiful_ formalism.

Not that anyone would ever do it in practice....

</comment><comment><USER3> I've read [http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Knuth- Donald-E/dp/949138...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Knuth- Donald-E/dp/9491386034) over the holidays, and there was a nice reflection about these ideas from today's viewpoint.

</comment><comment><USER4> From the introductory quotes: "Do you suffer from painful elimination?" Love Knuth's sly sense of humor. As brilliant as he is, he refuses to take himself too seriously. A model for us all.

</comment><comment><USER5> Structured programming is a state of mind. You just need to use the tools you have. Even relatively primitive languages such as FORTRAN IV can do it.

Let's say you want to write the equivalent of this C code:

        if (i < 10) {
            j = 17;
            k = 22;
        } else {
            j = 42;
            k = 69;
        }

in FORTRAN IV. Here's how I was taught to do it, back in the not-so-good old days before my college even had a C compiler:

          IF (I .LT. 10) GOTO 100
              J = 42
              K = 69
          GOTO 200
      100     J = 17
              K = 22
      200 CONTINUE

<comment><USER6> You seem to be addressing the title rather than the meat of the paper. If it's the same version as is included in Literate Programming (as I believe it to be), I highly recommend reading through it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a long but prescient 1974 article by Donald Knuth on the tradeoffs between readability and performance. Following are some choice quotes to entice you to read the whole thing.

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

I should confess that the title of this article was chosen primarily to generate attention. There are doubtless some readers who are convinced that abolition of go to statements is merely a fad, and they may see this title and think, "Aha! Knuth is rehabilitating the go to statement, and we can go back to our old ways of programming again." Another class of readers will see the heretical title and think, "When are diehards like Knuth going to get with it?" I hope that both classes of people will read on and discover that what I am really doing is striving for a reasonably well balanced viewpoint about the proper role of go to statements. I argue for the elimination of go to's in certain cases, and for their introduction in others.

...

[I]t seems that fanatical advocates of the New Programming are going overboard in their strict enforcement of morality and purity in programs. Sooner or later people are going to find that their beautifully-structured programs are running at only half the speed--or worse--of the dirty old programs they used to write, and they will mistakenly blame the structure instead of recognizing what is probably the real culprit--the system overhead caused by typical compiler implementation of Boolean variables and procedure calls.

...

At the present time I think we are on the verge of discovering at last what programming languages should really be like. I look forward to seeing many responsible experiments with language design during the next few years; and my dream is that by 1984 we will see a consensus developing for a really good programming language (or, more likely, a coherent family of languages). Furthermore, I'm guessing that people will become so disenchanted with the languages they are now using--even COBOL and FORTRAN-- that this new language, UTOPIA84, will have a chance to take over. At present we are far from that goal, yet there are indications that such a language is very slowly taking shape.

...

My own programming style has of course changed during the last decade, according to the trends of the times (e.g., I'm not quite so tricky anymore, and I use fewer go to's), but the major change in my style has been due to this inner loop phenomenon. I now look with an extremely jaundiced eye at every operation in a critical inner loop, seeking to modify my program and data structure (as in the change from Example 1 to Example 2) so that some of the operations can be eliminated. The reasons for this approach are that: a) it doesn't take long, since the inner loop is short; b) the payoff is real; and c) I can then afford to be less efficient in the other parts of my programs, which therefore are more readable and more easily written and debugged.

...

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail. After working with such tools for seven years, I've become convinced that all compilers written from now on should be designed to provide all programmers with feedback indicating what parts of their programs are costing the most; indeed, this feedback should be supplied automatically unless it has been specifically turned off.

...

For some reason we all (especially me) had a mental block about optimization, namely that we always regarded it as a behind-the-scenes activity, to be done in the machine language, which the programmer isn't supposed to know. This veil was first lifted from my eyes in the Fall of 1973. when I ran across a remark by Hoare that, ideally, a language should be designed so that an optimizing compiler can describe its optimizations in the source language. Of course! Why hadn't I ever thought of it? [...]

The programmer using such a system will write his beautifully-structured, but possibly inefficient, program P; then he will interactively specify transformations that make it efficient. Such a system will be much more powerful and reliable than a completely automatic one. We can also imagine the system manipulating measurement statistics concerning how much of the total running time is spent in each statement, since the programmer will want to know which parts of his program deserve to be optimized, and how much effect an optimization will really have. The original program P should be retained along with the transformation specifications, so that it can be properly understood and maintained as time passes. As I say, this idea certainly isn't my own; it is so exciting I hope that _everyone_ soon becomes aware of its possibilities.

...

The Future

It seems clear that languages somewhat different from those in existence today would enhance the preparation of structured programs. We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local structure in the source language. (See the discussion following Landin's paper [59].) Although our examples don't indicate this, it turns out that a given level of abstraction often involves several related routines and data definitions; for example, when we decide to represent a table in a certain way, we simultaneously want to specify the routines for storing and fetching information from that table. The next generation of languages will probably take into account such related routines.

Program manipulation systems appear to be a promising future tool which will help programmers to improve their programs, and to enjoy doing it. Standard operating procedure nowadays is usually to hand code critical portions of a routine in assembly language. Let us hope such assemblers will die out, and we will see several levels of language instead: At the highest levels we will be able to write abstract programs, while at the lowest levels we will be able to control storage and register allocation, and to suppress subscript range checking, etc. With an integrated system it will be possible to do debugging and analysis of the transformed program using a higher level language for communication. All levels will, of course, exhibit program structure syntactically so that our eyes can grasp it.

...

A great deal of research must be done if we're going to have the desired language by 1984. Control structure is merely one simple issue, compared to questions of abstract data structure. It will be a major problem to keep the total number of language features within tight limits. And we must especially look at problems of input/output and data formatting, in order to provide a viable alternative to COBOL.

</comment><comment><USER7> I still use a couple of languages that are unstructered.

Strangley, these often feel more "powerful" to me than the structured languages I use. Especially when writing small programs.</comment>


Video: F-16 Fighter Jet Crashes On Runway - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/07/30/f-16-jet-crash-video/ <comment><USER2> This was at EAA airventure in Oshkosh, wi. It's an annual fly in with more than 10,000 airplanes flying in.

Same place Burt Rutan is being honoured for his work. Recent HN thread on one of his planes: [http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/07/burt-rutans- boomerang-s...](http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/07/burt-rutans-boomerang- safety-through-asymmetry)</comment>