Tillery to Represent Hayes Against UC Berkeley in Dispute over Lab Fees - <AUTHOR> http://100r.org/2013/08/excessive-lab-fees-choking-research-scientist-says/

<comment><USER3> Again with the title-changing.

"Tillery to Represent Hays Against UC Berkeley in Dispute over Lab Fees" does not tell me:

\- who Tillery is \- who Hays is \- why I should care about a dispute over lab fees.

The original title made it clear what the issue is: the scientist in question alleges that his lab is being shut down due to his criticism of a herbicide made by Syngenta, who coincidentally give money to the university.

Please, stop secretly editing the titles.

<comment><AUTHOR> FTR the original title is from this Michael Pollan tweet:

[https://twitter.com/michaelpollan/status/368771855064133634](https://twitter.com/michaelpollan/status/368771855064133634)

"Tyrone Hayes, embattled scientist critical of Atrazine and Syngenta, loses his lab funding at Berkeley"

I had shortened it to "Scientist critical of Atrazine and Syngenta loses his lab funding at Berkeley". Though I pretty much expected the HN title change.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if your title (which is orders of magnitude better than the title it was changed to) would have survived if you had submitted the tweet itself, instead of dereferencing to submit the original article?

<comment><AUTHOR> apparently HN headlines have an 80 char limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds like there are a couple thing going on. First, the researcher has run out of funding, and second, UC Berkeley is accused of ramping up his lab fees far far faster than his colleagues in order to prevent him from continuing research.

The first is a travesty, and there are many fine and outstanding labs out there that are going through similar situations, due to stagnant funding for years followed by the current sequestration. This is irreparably damaging US scientific research, as once a lab closes and all the specialized reagents are gone, it's going to take years to get back to the same starting point.

The second is puzzling, if true. The only thing that I can think of that would cause UCB to act that way is I they feel that this professor will prevent them from getting commercial finding for other professors. That seems tenuous at best, but I can't imagine any other reason for administrators to blackball a prominent professor. And this would be impossible for the administrators to do at all if the professor was getting grant support for his research.

<comment><USER6> the second is a travesty (if the accusations are true as characterized and there isn't something going on, like, the researcher didn't read the fine print).

the first is not. If you are not doing research efficiently, then you should not be doing research. You may see "outstanding labs" but if the grant reviewers disagree, then what. You are not entitled to research money. Someone has to want to give it to you. It can be debated if grant reviewers are actually doing a good job (versus being a whitewashed version of cronyism), but the bottom line is, that money is NOT the researcher's money. It's the taxpayer's money. And there is not an infinite supply of it.

<comment><USER5> >the first is not. If you are not doing research efficiently, then you should not be doing research.

My point, and perhaps I could have been clearer, is that funding is shrinking, while the quality of proposals is increasing or getting better. Funding rates for grants are now in the 5-10% rate, which means that even excellent, efficient, outstanding labs that are leaders in their fields can starve due to random chance.

It ha nothing to do with being entitled to research money. It has everything to do with the US spending research money efficiently and not capriciously. A research lab is not like a startup in that the intial time investment is quite long, and cutting that off inappropriately is wasteful. Additionally, it is incredibly inefficient to spend most of a researchers time churn through good proposal after good proposal, and no let them do research.

US science is shrinking dramatically right now, and rebuilding it will be a slow and long process, an if we lose the crown to China in the interim, the US may never be the bastion it once was.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. The quality of proposals is getting worse. There's a horrifying cycle of cronyism, lack of managerial skill that is going into science. People are promoted into research positions based on the impact factor of the journals they publish in, not the quality of their work. High impact factor journals publish things that are more likely to be scandalous than solid. The most important aspects of scientific success (versus excellence) is "were you your PI's golden child", and "just how lucky did you get"?... etc. etc. etc.

These trends are reflected in the proposals that I see getting pitched.

1) Who cares if "we" "lose the crown" to china? 2) I'm not worried about china, anyways, the scientific culture there is miserable and dastardly, and deeply entangled with the cultural value of "face" (I'm east asian, I think this applies to Korea and Japan, and troubling - increasingly in the US - <USER2> Hellinga, for example) and values Feynman's "extra integrity" less.

If you claim it has nothing to do with being entitled to money, then perhaps you should rephrase. Cutting and pasting what you said,

"First, the researcher has run out of funding ... the first is a travesty"

Which implies that a researcher running out of funding is a travesty. _In the general case_ , as implied by your use of the indefinite article, that is not true.

<comment><USER7> Do you claim that 90% of proposals are not worthy of funding? Because it it was not an extremely high number, we could significantly increase spending and still only fund the best.

You stated: " It can be debated if grant reviewers are actually doing a good job (versus being a whitewashed version of cronyism)"

If they are already evaluating research and researchers the way the rest of profession does, I don't see how cutting funds would help. It would not drive better proposal writing. And if the cronies are already getting their money anyway, the added batch might have a higher percent of high quality.

I understand the desire to punish the undeserving of your profession, but when weighed against the advancement of science (even if artificially inefficient)...I don't care. And cutting funding won't make a significant dent in the problems you describe.

<comment><USER6> I'd claim that a lion's share of the top 10% of proposals are not worthy of funding. The best proposals are probably usually rated in the 70-80% range, depending on the funding agency (NSF, NIH, DOE), but most of it is utter embarassment.

"when weighed against the advancement of science (even if artificially inefficient)...I don't care." Well, no, we're talking about funding here. What if the structure of funding was causing a net _regression_ in the advancement of science? Is it a safe assumption that funding directly correlates to advancement?

"And cutting funding won't make a significant dent in the problems you describe." If I had my druthers, I'd cut science funding to zero (there would be other ways to raise money for science - endowments, 501(c)(3)s, foundations, bake sales, etc. Keep in mind Peter Mitchell validated the chemiosmotic effect, a cornerstone of basic biochemistry and cell biology, by launching his own completely independent science research foundation) That would make a significant dent in the problems I describe.

<comment><USER8> What about the medical funding for stuff like cancer, where the vast bulk is in the public sector?

Also, while I agree with Theodore Sturgeon that 90% of everything is crap, in science it is especially hard to tell what that 90% is going to be in advance, so I think it is better to overfund and then concentrate on the improvement of quality in the review process to filter out the crap.

<comment><USER6> I guess I'm uncomfortable using taxes to pay for stuff (especially overfunding) that will be mostly crap. Taxes, because if you don't pay for them, you go to jail, should be subject to a particularly strong level of accountability[0], and "we don't know what is going to be useful" is just really a recipe for spending abuse.

Peer review is one thing (and it looks like it's going to be getting better)... But reviews for funding - that's really tricky. How do you select whom to review science? In our current system, you wind up with program administrators (people who advocate and shepherd funding projects) who are mostly[1] people who 'couldn't make it in science'. So you get effectively second-rate-intelligence fanboys and fangirls who get paid six figures to fawn over the scientists with the biggest mouths and most outlandish claims. To actually conduct the reviews, typically PIs are hired (in a secreted process[2]), so there's of course a level of cronyism involved - not to mention how PIs are generally clueless for other structural reasons. It is hard to believe that this system is efficient or effective at being a good steward of the public trust.

[0] Science is not by far the worst area where government excels at failing to be accountable, but I also see no reason to increase our investment in a system that isn't working.

[1] I know one program administrator who isn't incomptent, she's my ex-boss; the reasons why she wound up as a program administrator are rather complicated _and_ everyone hates her because she isn't interested in doing things the usual way. My neighbor growing up - who introduced me to science - was a physics administrator was probably also not incompetent, but I don't really know.

[2] by which I mean the process is not secret, but the actual goings on are, i.e. you don't know who reviewed you etc.

<comment><USER8> I agree that using taxes to pay for stuff that isn't going to be used is wasteful, however there is waste in all activities and at least science funding has a good economic return on the whole, even when there is a lot of waste. Besides, I don't see stuff like CERN happening privately.

Also, to avoid confusion, I was meaning tightening up the peer review process and loosening the funding review. The biggest problem I see in poor science is not in the fact it was funded in the first place, but that it is difficult to filter out later. Like you said, funding decisions are tricky, but I think the trick would be to fund even more things and concentrate on excellence in peer review. This would, I think, increase the overall benefit to society, which is the only thing that justifies paying for it with tax in the first place.

<comment><USER6> I guess we'll just have to disagree. In my opinion, "benefit to society" is a necessary but insufficient condition to morally justify paying for something via taxation. The other necessary condition being "requires force to administer", for example, police (if someone is murdering another person you are going to have to detain them with force).

The reason, why it is insufficient, is the question, "if it were so beneficial to society why didn't society pay for it voluntarily?" Now, the usual argument is "because they were too stupid or selfish to" \- but then, why would we expect the politicians to be any better? Day by day, it seems to me that the political class is more capricious, narcissistic, and self-centered than most humans they rule over. I do not see this as a particularly effective cadre of individuals to be overseeing spending money on science research, however indirect. Might as well just get money from the people directly with outstretched hands.

To your original point, "What about the medical funding for stuff like cancer, where the vast bulk is in the public sector?" This is a particularly bad example because there is a large BINGO (although I would not call it a shining example of an efficient charity) that funds quite a bit of cancer research - the ACS. The early decades of the NCI were a disaster. To be sure, the NCI has gotten way better over time, and there are some indispensible services they provide (which nonetheless in theory could be spun off to nonprofit private orgs) like the NCI-60 cell line screening service; but there are also plenty of stories about the siloing/turfwarring that goes on between the NCI and the NIH - which has led to severe inefficiencies and plenty of lost opportunities. The ex-boss program manager manages projects for the NIH that OFTEN cross over into NCI territory and the political machinations she's complained about make my head spin.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that "requires force to administer" is that good a qualifier for deciding on what should be funded by taxes, assuming that you mean force in the political sense of force against people. By that standard you wouldn't fund fire departments.

Also, government paying for things is society paying for things. Government is part of society, not an appendage.

On the subject of cancer research, I don't know that much of the situation in the US, but I did look into this a while back and found that the amount spent by governments globally dwarfs the money spent by industry and charity combined. I apologise for not having the figures to hand though and if you think I am wrong on this, let me know.

edit - just had a look at your profile... I was not aware of what you are involved in. Good luck with it all, I hope you do well and I will stop trying to tell you about cancer funding as you are bound to know a hell of a lot more about it than I am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "While money doesn't talk, it swears" as Mr Dylan sang.

I hope this gentleman gets his day in court. In the UK, we have tight controls on fertilisers because of run-off into water supplies. You'll be drinking (a dilute form) of what they spray quite quickly over here.</comment>


Drawbridge – Windows Containers 5 years ago? - <AUTHOR> https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Drawbridge-An-Experimental-Library-Operating-System <comment><AUTHOR> Reading about the latest announcements of Ubuntu on Windows lead me to this fascinating concept from MS I did not know about. Too bad they were focused on the desktop scenario and not the server (although they do mention it).</comment>


Jolla C, a new Sailfish OS phone from Jolla - <AUTHOR> https://jolla.com/jollac/ <comment><USER2> I was using a dumb phone and a change of life made me need a smartphone. A friend of mine encouraged me to get a Jolla.

I liked the idea, Open Source, you can code your app in Python, compatible with Android apps, etc.

At the begining, I was very tolerant with the quirks of the phone, being a FOSS believer and all.

But after months and months of use, I'm getting more and more frustrated with it:

        - it's slow.
        - apps randomly crashes or don't start at all.
        - Android support is limited.
        - network is unreliable.
        - the performances don't allow any decent Web
          surf experience, and I already hate the Web
          on mobile so it makes things irritating for me.
        - it requires a lot of fiddling to adapt it to
          your needs. It can be good if you need customization,
          but some basic stuff (such as emoji) are not included by
          default. Some might consider that a feature, but when
          a girl text me a smiley when I flirt with her, I want to
          know what face it has because it kinda condition
          my next answer.
        - some bugs are incredibly annoying. The worst being
          the poor handling of group text messages which lead
          to very confusing conversations. A smartphone that
          can't text, really?
        - ergonomy is lacking at best. While I think there
          are some neat ideas, the hidden menu for simple tasks,
          the absence of resize in some picture mode and the
          presence of it in others and plenty other subtle
          details make it cumbersome to use even for basic
          stuff. The color scheme and overall design is
          not a good fit on the long run.

I do like having a real GNU system and a terminal to play with it on my phone, but let's face it, I use the Web/GPS/Text more than the terminal, and they are not decent for a 2016 experience.

It's where smarphones were 5 years ago, but with bugs.

I don't regret I bought it, it was a nice experience, but now I'm going for something that will just work.

<comment><USER3> I got my phone (probably one of the last) in February. I can't agree with _any_ of your points - not a single one! This Jolla phone is superb: fast (including web browsing), reliable, easy to use, with support for all the Android apps I'm interested in.

My only complaint is that the software (Sailfish OS) is let down by the hardware. I wish Jolla had been brave enough to gamble with the Mirasol display; too late now, since Apple's acquired the tech (and will probably do awesome things with it).

With my bluetooth keyboard, I'm happy playing with emacs (Slime and SBCL), and hopefully soon Erlang - all through a native terminal. For lightning fast web browsing, I use Links2. I certainly can't do any of this on an Apple device, and Android - is it possible? I'll never know - I'm spoilt with my Jolla.

<comment><USER2> I just mesured. Between the moment you click the native browser (not even Firefox, which I use), and the moment you can start write a tweet, there is a gap of 23 seconds. 23 seconds to display a web page on a fresh system with no other app running. This is insane.

It is made much worse by the fact you can't open many apps at the same time. The OS frequently keels app you don't use, so you have to regularly wait another 23 second all other again if you multitask.

<comment><USER3> I counted less than 10 seconds to Twitter on my phone. That's with one other app running. I can open many apps simultaneously, although I rarely go past 6 or 7.

So clearly there _are_ differences between phone models (if indeed my phone has some minor upgrades over previous ones), and/or OS versions.

<comment><USER4> I don't _think_ the hardware's changed?

My thought would be to try a btrfs balance (can be done through one of the menus); or trying to free some space from the internal storage.

It made a large difference in how the performance felt on mine last time I did so. (A bit sad that it's often required, the fs is one of the main pain points ime.)

(For reference, mine took ~15 seconds, but think that about 5 of that was network related -- because the browser was open and responsive at the 10 second mark. Had 4 other apps open at the time.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very surprised, I hadn't anticipated this happening.

(Irrationally excited too.)

I'd assumed that after the tablet fiasco that Jolla wouldn't be doing any hardware for a long time. (I'm not personally grumpy in any way, but I think fiasco is the most accurate word :-s )

I'd been holding out hope for an official Fairphone 2 deal (or even the Puzzlephone), but this is awesome :-)

<comment><USER5> It's a 'super-pity' that the tablet failed. I have one and like it a lot!

(<3 to jolla for trying to provide a more open and friendly ecosystem, wish you were a billion-euro-strong company)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really do not anymore understand Jolla. I have bought a Jolla Phone in the past followed by backing the tablet. The phone started slowly to annoy me more and more, mainly because of the subpar processor and the lack of memory (I had to keep killing apps to keep my browser handy). Android support is okay but notifications get delayed from time to time (for hours)...

Jolla said to focus more on the software, and now they come up with this?!

I really don't get this. The specs are subpar, the unique selling points (no bloatware, premium jolla support) are no different than before, and it is all made even weirder to get the product via this first come first serve idea with only a 1000 phones.

Jolla has been criticized that they are crappy at opening up and telling the real deal. They really are. In the months following the tablet debacle the updates were just crappy. It was until the rebate email (with a link to get fill in your details) that I discovered that I would actually get a tablet. Somehow it was too complicate to tell the first 1000 backers per email that they would get a tablet.

Jolla, get your communication act together. If you want to get people to believe in you explain your motives, explain your ideas of how the future would be. Skip the marketing bullshit, your target audience is not that much interested in hollow PR words. Be sincere, open and direct. Understand that people might be disappointed and explain the relevance of the Jolla C. But don't just act like nothing happened.

<comment><USER7> The way I understand it, it is a developer phone, something for people who do not have a Sailfish device yet and want to work on apps or the OS itself while the Intex device is in the works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Signed up. I had backed the tablet but since it failed I never had an opportunity to try Jolla for real, this will be it.

I really think we need an alternative to the Android / iOS duopoly and I hope this is it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Any Jolla/Sailfish users out there that could shed some light on their impressions so far? I'm reluctant to switch to Android or iOS but I will need to switch out my phone real soon.

<comment><USER9> It has a bit unusual user interface. They designed it to be usable by one hand, but I think they just ended up with a bit messy UI. It takes some time to get used to and some features are not easy to discover (like the top sliding menu or the context menu on list items).

It runs its own native Sailfish apps (there's few hundred of them) and Android apps (you can install Google Play, if you follow a bit cumbersome instructions). However, the UI logic in native apps is different than in Android apps. Native apps use a lot of wiping gestures, while Android apps use more tapping and the back button.

There is also a native web browser (built on top of Gecko) and it has its own UI logic (the usual web browser logic with a back button, no gestures).

So, all together, it has three way to navigate, which makes the whole experience a bit fragmented.

But, if you want to escape the surveillance riddled Android and iPhone, Jolla is a good basic phone. It offers a lot for hackers, because its built on top of Linux and you have access to almost everything without rooting. I got my phone three years ago and I'm still getting OS updates regularly, which is also nice. I just wish the UI was better.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the writeup. I wouldn't mind having a very hackable phone I suppose. Does one need Linux to enjoy it at its fullest, or is OSX also okay?

<comment><USER9> They have an SDK built on top of Qt Creator and it runs on OS X, Windows and Linux [1].

Linux may offer some advantages, such as access to the phone file system. OSX has a bit cumbersome ways to access it [2].

If you want to write programs for it, you can use Qt C++, QML or Python. It also has a terminal with the usual bash commands. And, of course, you can always write Android apps with tools given by Google and run those apps on Jolla.

As a niche hardware feature, the original Jolla phone has a hackable i2c bus under its back cover. Some people have tried to build keyboards, e-ink screens etc. connected to it. The specs for the bus are public [3].

I'm not sure if the new Jolla C is really meant for casual users, because you need to participate in their community device program to get one.

EDIT: removed some speculations about the community program

EDIT2: looks like the original Jolla phone isn't sold anymore

[1] [https://sailfishos.org/wiki/Application_SDK_Installation](https://sailfishos.org/wiki/Application_SDK_Installation)

[2] [https://jolla.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201440867-How- do...](https://jolla.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201440867-How-do-I- transfer-files-between-a-Mac-and-my-Jolla-)

[3] [http://jolla.com/the-other-half-developer-kit/](http://jolla.com/the- other-half-developer-kit/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I miss my semi-bricked n900. I know one of us always chimes in, but still, it's true. It was a very functional phone. I need to solder a USB cable onto the data-pads under the battery to retrieve some data and possibly restore it, but it served very well for 5 years.

The Ubuntu phone is a tolerable placeholder. A Jolla seems like it would be just tolerable also (as per sametmax's comments) but I'll have to keep waiting for something decent _and_ open.

Also still holding out for convergence... Give it another 5 years probably!

<comment><USER11> > I need to solder a USB cable onto the data-pads under the battery to > retrieve some data

You can just rsync to get the data off. That port only needs to work if you need to reimage, or you only have one battery/don't like swapping batteries every day..

<comment><USER10> Thanks, normally that would be OK but I basically apt-get autoremoved some system utils [0] and the thing wouldn't boot again. Had been so careful for years, then one careless keystroke and I'd hosed the system. I'd reflash it, but the re-solder of the usb port finally went and took most of the PCB connectors with it. And I was careful there too, again for years. So without booting and without data connectivity, rsync won't be an option.

So it's a case of (I think) soldering a new USB cable into place under the battery, charging, exfil the data, then reflash to finally have it back in business. Albeit with a rat-tail hanging out the case.

\--

[0] Never figured out what the utils were, but seem to recall it being part of a python dependency chain. So autoremove had somehow, probably incorrectly, thought it was OK to get rid of a key component of some kind. It was the power kernel with a bunch of mods, so probably my own fault somewhere along the line.

<comment><USER11> I hear you. I hate that neither N900 nor Jolla can just have mainline boring Debian with normal boring updates, but instead have to be Frankenstein's monsters filled with proprietary blobs and /opt-ified nonsense. If you do anything slightly strange, apt-get turns dangerous.

I would say to make sure that you have all of the Maemo images saved somewhere, and know where the repos currently reside. I just reimaged another N900 and got it current in order to avoid dealing with _its_ broken USB port, and it's starting to become a bit of an ordeal. t.m.o. is dying...

<comment><USER12> > I hate that neither N900 nor Jolla can just have mainline boring Debian with > normal boring updates

The N900 can. Shameless plug: [https://github.com/dderby/debian900/](https://github.com/dderby/debian900/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would love to have a Sailfish OS phone but if they are not Open Sourcing their UI libraries I can't convince myself to buy it.

It's a real shame because all I want is a fast, simple OpenSource phone OS (that is as responsive as iOS). AOSP is okay but it does not feel as snappy as when I tried iOS for which I blame Dalvik. There are not a lot of contenders, only Tizen, Ubuntu Phone and plasma mobile. I hope one of them will be installable on the Fairphone 2 in the near future...

<comment><USER3> If Jolla open sourced their UI technology, what would happen to the company and investors? And would Sailfish OS then be fated to suffer endless fragmentation, like Android?

There's nothing terribly wrong with the closed parts of this system. Much of the phone is readily accessible to developers, and Jolla provides a lot of support. It's far more open than Android or iOS.

<comment><USER14> Sorry to use this thread but I'm interested in the Windows version of Living Cels you mentioned in another thread that is now closed. Any chance of contacting you?

<comment><USER3> My email's in my profile!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The phone looks like a decent all-rounder, but I'd say they've missed out on one potential killer app.

I'd say the one feature that is game changing for both Jolla and Ubuntu Phone is being able to run it as a desktop device as well as a phone. If the hardware supported USB Type C, there'd be no question that this would be my next phone, even if the desktop functionality wasn't supported at launch it would be a clear statement of intention.

<comment><USER16> This was Ubuntu's idea and it's telling that even Canonical has abandoned it.

<comment><USER15> They haven't abandoned it. Mir isn't ready for prime time, I suspect they're waiting to get that in place before pushing the convergence features forward further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd like for Jolla or Ubuntu to succeed with their phones but I just don't see it. I fiddled around with an Ubuntu phone for a while but stopped using it eventually. The basic funtionalities are just not as good or as stable as they should be. That would be step one. But then, especially with phones, there's a lot of innovation and those kind of phones just can't keep up.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure there's all that much innovation in smartphones. Android doesn't seem to have changed all that much over the past 2-3 years, it seems to have entered a holding pattern with various small tweaks over that time. I just looked up Android N, and the first article I got back had some of the top features as new emoji and keyboard themes! It strikes me that the whole area is mature and stable, which is great, but it doesn't exactly mean they're speeding off into the distance.

If they can catch up with basic functionality, web apps continue to develop and are integrated well, there's decent android app compatibility, and they can add an extra interesting feature like convergence (which requires that the next-generation hardware is fast enough), I personally would be quite enthusiastic to have an Ubuntu phone as my next smartphone.

<comment><USER17> True, on OS level not that much. Although things like multitasking, nightshift etc. are quite neat. Smartwear/watches are something that wouldn't get any love either.

And yes, web apps need to get better to work. Android compability is nice but will never be nicely integrated (especially if dependent on Google Services). And only a fraction will develop native apps.

But convergence is a killer feature, indeed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a Jolla phone, and used it exclusively until it met with the sidewalk and cracked the screen.

The OS is a breeze to use, even if you're using Android apps.

However after the whole Jolla Tablet fiasco, I am reluctant to buy more from the company.

</comment><comment><USER20> 4G/LTE: 1/3/7/20

Does it mean it's incompatible with T-Mobile in US? That's just annoying. Aren't Qualcomm already making universal modems by now?

<comment><USER21> Yes, it isnt compatible, but this phone isnt being sold in the US.

<comment><USER20> Did they limit regions? "Not being sold" only means "no warranty" I suppose. N9 / N950 also weren't officially sold in US, yet they worked just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've given up on Jolla. Their OS got worse with every release. Their hardware was very sloppy (three dead batteries in a year time, design flaw which required me to keep a piece of paper under the battery to keep it in place). Their support was god awful. The only way to get my device fixed was to mail it to Finland and spend over a month without a replacement.

The idea was great. They tried to keep the Maemo spirit alive. But they failed.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am too surprised they did a new phone after the tablet fiasco. I wonder how it differs from the Intex phone they showed on MWC 2016 in February.

I really wonder if they think about the product name in terms of people who try to look it up. "jolla" in Finnish also means "on which" (in addition to "dinghy" or some little boat), which makes it really difficult to look up on finnish websites.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there a specific reason that both Jolla phones and Ubuntu phones are not available in Canada, or North America for that matter?

<comment> vertex-four In North America, all smartphones are sold through a carrier - with very few exceptions. There's no infrastructure nor any significant consumer demand for phones sold through other methods, and it might hurt Jolla in the future if they are seen by carriers as attempting to break their stranglehold over the market.

People in the rest of the world are a lot more used to paying up-front for a phone, potentially through a third party, and getting a SIM-only plan.

<comment><USER25> I would kill to finally get an Android alternative on Verizon. Good luck with that though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A friend of mine is still waiting for the Tablet or a refund. Honestly, I do not trust them enough to give them my money.

<comment><USER27> Also got my first half refund in my paypal acct a few days ago. Since I promised I would only strongly reccomend not getting a Jolla device for those conditions, that's what I'm saying.

If you like total linkdark from your manufacturer coupled with emergency releases of news (because someone else leaked they missed a critical funding round) that leaves users even more befuddled and calling for clear feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I worked on the Jolla launch website over three years ago. What ever happened to "The other half" \- their big idea?

<comment><USER29> It seemed like an interesting way to engage tinkerers/hackers and have people come up with new ideas.

But it didn't take off really much. There is only a small community, and they worked years on a half-decent keyboard. For the rest there are just some LED- based backcovers.

I doubt they will ever try that again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Real bummer that it's only for EU, Finnish and Swiss users right now.

<comment><USER31> Norwegian. (Finland is in EU).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> evrything was good until Qualcomm 212 !

</comment><comment><USER33> Well, it's even less popular than Windows Phone - that's quite an achievement!

<comment><USER34> Windows Phone got some traction for being both Windows and because it was made by Nokia, in comparison Jolla doesn't distinguish itself that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> wow limited edition.... All the 5 people in the world interested in this must now be worried if they can get one...</comment>


Ask HN: What are the Must-Have Apps for OS X as Web Developers point of view? - <AUTHOR>

I just purchased a new MacBook Pro and I am planning on completely transitioning from Linux(Ubuntu) to Mac OS X for my Web Development Environment. I primarily work with PHP and Ruby, and use Sublime Text 2 on Ubuntu as my source code editor.
What apps should I know about to maximize my Web Development production on Mac.
I am a Mac newbie, so any suggestions regarding maximizing Mac OS X performance(in general) is most welcome.
Thanks in Advance.
(P.S. => This is my first post on HN, and I love this community) <comment><USER2> Welcome to HN!

Here's my favourites, I won't drop any links as they're all pretty easy to find and it's not all Mac specific.

* Alfred - It's like spotlight on steroids. Bind it to cmd+space and you're a tap away from everything on your computer. The powerpack is worth it.

* Sublime Text 2 (using 'Made of code' theme ('Tomorrow Night' is also nice), with JSHint and some other plugins) * Sparrow (for email)

* Sketch (vector graphics) - It's not quite good enough to replace the Adobe suite but it's getting there! Great for mockups.

* Mou - Markdown Editor.

* Virtual Box - With the free IE VMs from modern.ie

* ImageOptim - Little tool to optimise images.

* CodeKit - I use this for simple sites - It compiles CSS, JS, HTML, etc from pre-processors and template languages as you work. I've found it has some performance problems but still quite handy.

* XScope - Various tools for measuring things on your screen. Really helps if you do a lot of PSD to HTML work to check everything is pixel perfect! It also has an iPad app which mirrors photoshop or your display to the iPad screen.. not terribly useful but cool none-the-less!

* Littleipsum - Menubar item to generate Lorem Ipsum

* iStat menus - Menubar addons - Provides a nicer clock and various performance monitoring widgets.

* 1password - Now I have a unique, long and complicated password for every different website and I don't have to remember them!

* Keka - Decompress all the files.

* Onyx - Preference Pane with various tools for system maintenance

Quicklook is also quite useful, press the spacebar on any file to see what's inside. There's some tweaks you can do to get the most out of it:

* Enable text selection (type in terminal):

        defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -boolean YES;
        killall Finder

* Keep quicklook open when you switch applications (type in terminal):

        defaults write com.apple.finder QLHidePanelOnDeactivate false;
        killall Finder

* There's plugins for loads of additional file types, but I like this hack to preview any file as plain text: <https://coderwall.com/p/dlithw>

Stuff for the terminal:

* Tomorrow Night theme

* Homebrew - apt-get for mac.

* ZSH + Oh my ZSH - ZSH is a great bash replacement and Oh My ZSH adds a lot of useful stuff. I epecially enjoy the git integration. My prompt looks like this: "➜ dirname git:(master) ✗" (the X means I have uncommitted changes)

Ehhh I think that's about it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, will surely look at each one of them. Pretty excited to get started on Mac for production purpose as soon as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> stop calling it apps

<comment><USER4> That's what Apple call them now, like it or not.

<comment><USER3> Obey

Conform

Consume</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Domain name searching - <AUTHOR>

Is there anyway I can specify a regex and get back results for domain names that match the regex?
Say I want to know what has been taken for nano*.com, I'd prefer to not have to manually try them out.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Try <https://domize.com/> — Power Search, which lets you specify vowels/consonants/alpha/numbers, endings, prepositions, verbs, synonyms, or load a list of domains from a URL to a text file. Plus it's lightning fast. Not exactly regex, but it's quite powerful. My favourite domain searcher.

<comment><USER3> This is really an excellent service. I need to start using it more, instead of defaulting to my ISP, or manually whois'ing all the various domain+TLDs.

Also, Nomina on the iPhone kicks royal ass. Great way to scope out branding while on the road. Checks major domains, USPTO for trademarks, Yellow Pages, Google, the dictionary (words in dictionary for branding are good right?), Library of Congress, Thomas guide, D&B, iPhone App Store, etc. I have no affiliation to the company that make this iPhone app, but I just love it.

-Kevin

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although not regex related, but I find InstantDomainSearch very useful - <http://instantdomainsearch.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> Not to be "that guy", but that isn't really a regular expression unless you are searching for nan.com, nano.com, nanoo.com, etc. I think you want:

      ^nano\w+\.com$

<comment><USER6> Not to be "that guy", but the word character class includes underscores, which is not valid in a domain name. What you would really want is

        ^nano[a-z0-9-]+[a-z0-9]+.com$

The first character class includes the hyphen, the second does not, because you can't start or end a domain with a hyphen.

<comment><USER6> on further thought, it doesn't matter than it will match underscores, because the list of domains shouldn't have any underscores in them, but you would still want to look for underscores (maybe)

        ^nano[\w-]+\w+.com$

<comment><USER5> Unless the service was in the habit of selling impossible domain names, it shouldn't matter ;)

I intentionally left out the hyphen because it isn't a very desirable character.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The unsettling feeling I get when doing a domainname search with any of these folks is: they keep a log of domainnames that are being searched. If something is being searched upon a lot, they themselves prolly will go and buy it. And later sell it to you for a premium price! I would rather do a whois search from Mac/Linux/Unix) commandline.

<comment><USER8> I've experienced that firsthand unfortunately. My advice? If you search for a domain you like that's free and find it, don't sit on it, buy it :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use this:

<http://www.makewords.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.dotomator.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.dotomator.com/> <http://squurl.com/> <http://domai.nr/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I use bustaname, its brilliant.</comment>


Rex Tillerson used fake name to discuss climate change while Exxon Mobil CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/rex-tillerson-used-fake-name-wayne-tracker-climate-change-exxon-mobil-secretary-of-state-a7628611.html <comment><USER2> Still waiting for these people to be held accountable. Are rules and laws exclusively for the little people now?

<comment><USER3> Somewhat true, yes. Think about how the cia leader was sharing information with his extramarital girlfriend, lied about it, got caught, and basically got no punishment. Compare to how the obama administration went after leakers and reporters writing about it and tried to intimidate them with national security claims.

<comment><USER2> They went after him. He took a plea, was fined $100,000 and left govt service. [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/petraeus-plea-deal- ove...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/petraeus-plea-deal-over-giving- classified-data-to-lover.html?_r=0)

This is quite different than nothing happening.

<comment><USER3> but his next job was something like university president, and now he's in the trump admin. very different than what snowden faces, or other whistleblowers. Clinton got nothing for storing sensitive email in her own server (other than losing the presidency, possibly related to it). I know they all (politicians hiding their email) do what clinton does, it was still stupid.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Callbell: Scale support/sales via Facebook Messenger and other messaging apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.callbell.eu/en/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! At Callbell we are trying to build what I would define as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram made for teams. What we are trying to do is to re-think those 3 platforms for sales / support teams rather than 1to1 use.

Check out more at: [https://www.callbell.eu/en/](https://www.callbell.eu/en/)

Any feedback is more than welcome!

</comment><comment><USER2> Sounds great! Are you using the official WhatsApp Business API?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we do! In order to do so, every company we onboard need to get access to the WhatsApp Business API (most of them pass via Twilio as it's the fastest way at the moment)

<comment><USER2> Sounds promising!</comment></comment></comment>


Singapore Weighs Fate of Its Brutalist Buildings - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/world/asia/singapore-brutalist-buildings.html <comment><USER3> Having grown up in a working class family, I find it strange that western hipsters are so taken by industrial chic architecture. It's an environment that I grew up hoping to escape from. But architectural styles come in and out of fashion, and yesterday's factories and warehouses are being converted into coffee shops and homes that people love and pay a premium for.

In particular, the neighborhood that my parents lived and worked in is now a very expensive and trendy part of town. There's little industry left; in fact a lot of local companies are complaining that there's not enough warehouse space left to rent, because it's all being converted into lofts! Sadly my family sold out way before it became cool :(

I've heard it said that it's the styles that have just recently gone out of fashion that are the least fashionable, whereas the styles that have been out of fashion for longer often make a comeback. This applies to clothes, cars, music, and architecture too.

So one thing I've wondered is: if the industrial style could go from being considered ugly to being loved, is it possible that this could happen to another style of architecture/design that we all currently consider to be an eyesore? And what style would be next?

It makes a lot of sense that Brutalism would be it, and maybe these Singaporeans are just ahead of the curve.

<comment><USER4> If there is objectivity to beauty, it would deem brutalism as an example of ugliness.

I grew and studied around brutalist buildings and they are impersonal and humbling in the bad way: like when you visit a gothic church. Particularly because of the visible aesthetic decay of its materials.

I love hating brutalism though.

<comment><USER5> Brutalism _can_ be beautiful. The Washington, D.C. Metro system's coffer vaults is generally ranked highly in terms of aesthetically pleasing designs, and is also a prime example of brutalism.

<comment><USER6> I'm surprised people think it brutalist. I took those tiled ceilings to be a classical reference -- the pantheon in tube shape.

<comment><USER7> There are other brutalist buildings with classical flourishes; the calling card of brutalism is just exposed raw concrete.

<comment><USER6> Do you have other examples in mind? Trying to think of some and failing...

<comment><USER7> The Canadian Embassy?

<comment><USER6> Thanks, had never seen that. Presumably the committee had a starchitect and an ambassador, both with veto power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Singapore may have the world's best modern architecture. I used to be a skeptic of modern architecture but I really enjoy builidngs like the Interlace and Marina Bay Sands. One of many things that changed my thoughts when I was living there. Fantastic country and people.

<comment><USER9> I'm very curious to live there at some point in the next 5 years. What things would you have done differently if you could go back to when you first moved there?

<comment> shaki-dora Not OP, but I found Singapore to be rather hell-ish. It feels like one giant American mall, with possibly too much money for its own good.

HK, as a comparison, has preserved its character and charm, with life on the streets and many unique neighborhoods.

Singapore happens when you think SimCity is realistic: the primacy of the automobile, the belief that one additional Starbucks is always better than one marginal tree, the instinct that any public meeting must be broken up, unless it's a queueueueueue (a long queue) at an Apple Store, etc.

It's completely identical to Dubai or any of the Gulf metropolis, only with rain. The #1 Thing to Do in Singapour is taking the bridge to Malaysia, and never coming back. They think they can demolish the brutalism, but it's already too late: it must be in the water supply. Anything built after ca 1980 is still brutalism, only with glass. When you get to Singapore, you take a $50 rise to the city center, and wonder why you are still in the airport.

Singapore is what happens when you don't allow creative people the occasional drag of a joint: they take revenge, and make you live in it.

<comment><USER10> The parent is a controversial opinion and one that I do not entirely share, but as a person who has lived in Singapore for a while I am comfortable saying that it's a legitimate, plausible opinion.

To the people down-voting it because you disagree, please rescind your vote and supply a rebuttal in words.

<comment> shaki-dora It's fine, I was arguably overdoing it for comedic effect. Still, for Americans especially, I believe there are destinations in SE Asia that are far more rewarding than Sing Sing. If you need the economic environment, HK would be an obvious choice, and maybe Shanghai. If you are doing remote work, the list becomes far longer. I spent three years in different cities worldwide in ca. 3-month intervals before getting stuck in Berlin, and I would recommend Barcelona, Florence, HK, Australia's east coast, Melbourne, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Rabat, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Beirut (check the local war forecast), and Havanna.

<comment><USER11> At least you didn't quote William Gibson.

<comment><USER12> Lol...I was waiting...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here is a picture of the building in the article [https://i.imgur.com/1BW2j35.png](https://i.imgur.com/1BW2j35.png)

To me it looks like an old beach resort.

</comment><comment><USER14> When I read the title, I thought this was almost the exact same article as the one about Poland: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/t-magazine/poland- brutali...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/t-magazine/poland-brutalism- architecture.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Even though this article contrasts brutalist buildings with the more modern glass-and-steel aesthetic, I think both are products of their time and may age equally badly in the eyes of future generations. On the other hand, the architectural styles of the older, more historical buildings in New York, London, etc. seem to have aged well. In that they look old, but not "brutal". There may come a time when even the modern glass and steel facades will look brutal...

<comment><USER16> They've aged well because they were deemed worth saving after several decades. Since Penn, Euston stations the interest in saving as much as possible rather than just the best examples has caused some lesser quality old buildings to be kept.

<comment> shaki-dora I've heard this explanation (i. e. selection bias) a few times, but I don't think it holds true. I live in a 190x building in Berlin that was nothing special for its time. Yet people prefer this style to anything built later, including most modern buildings (which are, however, preferable to the abominations of the 60s, brutalism or not).

Here's a streetview: [https://goo.gl/maps/bmFBmYywHAF2](https://goo.gl/maps/bmFBmYywHAF2) walk around a bit and you see many such buildings. Only where bombs destroyed the older houses in WW2 will you find anything build after 1920.

The reasons aren't necessarily a loss in taste: the older buildings have far higher ceilings, which may be due to them often being filled with far more people than is usual today. Alternatively (or because of that) heating costs did not factor into such decisions.

As to skyscrapers and larger buildings such as museums or hospitals, it's important to remember that glass & steel & concrete is rather new technology. It's far cheaper than brick, and simply a compromise between costs and appearances that was not commonly available back then. It's also somewhat inconsistent but undeniable that we appreciate the decorative elements on the exterior, or the stucco inside, yet it feels somewhat tacky to make them today: McMansions are what happens when you think you can plunder all that's beautiful from previous eras.

<comment><USER17> Very high ceilings is one technique used to keep buildings cool during the summer before AC or even electric fans were around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Next time you are in Singapore, go check out the Park View building. Make sure to explore the statues outside and go into the ground floor and be amazed.

<comment><USER19> I remember seeing this building and thinking the building would fit for Wayne Enterprises. Didn't know one could go inside!

<comment><USER20> I had exactly the same thoughts when I stumbled upon it wandering around the downtown late at night. It was dark, I was alone in the patio and the building front looked amazingly scary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Those Singaporean buildings look quite good and you can tell that they at least cared enough to build them properly and take care of them. I've seen some buildings built in that era in the UK, while travelling and I always found that they stood out, painfully, most of them eyesores.

On the opposite side of the spectrum to Singapore, as a Hungarian who had the bad luck to be born and grow up in Romania, I hope that one day it will be financially worth it for the country for these buildings to come down and be committed to the graveyard of bad memories. Imagine brutalist architecture built to be exactly the same, shoddily and cheaply, repeating endlessly across the landscape. Buildings where the goal was to stuff as many people in as cheaply as possible, buildings where each of them was built not according to plan but according to what materials were left when every worker and official stole their tiny bit.

For most people in the west, it would be one of the most severe types of punishment imaginable, having to be born, live and die in a depressing, prison-like environment like that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Something about the stairs of the building in the main photo looks extremely dangerous, like one could easily fall off a side, or if someone were standing at the top of the stairs, they would have a clear shot into the open space if they jumped off.

</comment><comment><USER23> Honestly those don't look as awful and oppressive as a lot of the european examples. This may be because the sun shines in Singapore from time to time... also they seem to at least have some concessions to form that is not pure function.

But still pretty ugly. I can't grok the mindset that asks for these to be protected, other than as a weird form of contrarianism.

<comment><USER24> Brutalism is a lot more interesting when you have a vague idea of the background of it => it's a kind of socialist/communist philosophy in architecture, pretty buildings are the enshrinement of social hierarchies into architecture, so build something that is egalitarian by nature - lots of identical units, function over form. Open spaces, honesty in the sense that the architecture shows you how it's really made with exposed concrete etc, not a facade. I guess you could argue that it's the lisp of architecture - <USER2> hiding the construction. I guess the point is that it's not mindlessly ugly, it's a statement about priorities and honesty in aesthetics.

<comment><USER23> But you have to look at the results - ugly monoliths that create oppressive spaces.

Having grown up around the results in the towns and cities of England, it's hard to see these ideals when a grey-brown lump of concrete is blocking out the already weak winter sunlight, unbroken straight lines make the wind howl through and chill you, and dark spaces accumulate litter and urine and seem to just encourage social problems.

So that's why I don't grok the mindset - can people not see what it actually becomes? I get that egalitarianism was there in the intent, but intent is not really relevant. Results are relevant.

<comment><USER25> As with all architecture there are good and bad examples (with bad examples usually lost over time - leaving only the good), and with brutalism in particular issues with poor maintenance. Maintain any building of any age and architectural 'school' poorly and it will become rundown, shabby, and unpleasant to live in/around.

I walk through the Barbican frequently, which is rightly a much celebrated building, and find it an extremely elevating experience. I also recently visited Royan Cathedral which is honestly one of the most beautiful I've ever been in. I think many brutalist buildings have been blighted by decades of neglect almost from right after they were built. That's not going to leave the best impression on anybody.

<comment><USER23> I don't think you can just blame poor maintenance - the material and style choices are just poor to start with.

The cathedral looks to me like a gun emplacement, or some relic of a forgotten war.

<comment><USER17> Funny you mention relics of wars. Have you seen the ruins of the Oslobođenje building in Sarajevo? That war ruin somehow manages to capture the aesthetic of _well maintained_ brutalist architecture almost perfectly. Brutalist buildings on their best days look like ruins from a city under siege. Walking into a neighborhood with brutalist architecture feels like you've walked into some alternate timeline where WWIII is raging.

The cynical side of me suspects that brutalist architecture is a reflection of the psychological damage WWII inflicted on a generation of architects. They experienced an ugly world, then sought to recreate that ugliness in their work. Experiencing war corrupted them. Their legacy, their still standing buildings, are not unlike the iron harvest French and Belgian farmers experience every year when they till their fields and find bombs from WWI.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Germany v Greece is a fight to the death, a cultural and economic clash of wills - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2015/feb/08/germany-v-greece-fight-death-cultural-economic-clash-paul-mason

<comment><USER2> It can't be considered a 'national debt' if that money never made it down to the Greek people and they cannot now be made accountable and forced to suffer as a consequence. The EU should recognise and support the more egalitarian government that has come to power in Greece and seek to work with them to rebuild the Greek economy.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is more in line of - Germany elite has even worse grasp of Macroeconomics 101 than US.

Europe is 6 years into politically driven economic depression.</comment>


I'm working on a restaurant suggestion app. Interested in beta testing it? - <AUTHOR> https://pomme-57001.firebaseapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> There are various restaurant apps that are available out there, but for me the Pomme app is a list of Michelin recommended restaurants that do not burn a hole through my pocket.

Some of the great suggestions are: \- Zareen's at Mountain View, \- Broadway Masala in Redwood City, \- Doppio Zero Pizza Napoletana on Castro, Mountain View, \- Din Tai Fung, Santa Clara

and more.</comment>


In Defense of Parenthood - new research suggests children makes you happy [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2010/11/Nelson-et-al.-in-press.pdf

<comment><USER2> Study 1 indicated that "happiness" was moderated by marital status. Married couples with children were not significantly happier than married couples without children. They were only happier than unmarried individuals.

"married parents did not differ in satisfaction or happiness from married people without children, but unmarried parents reported lower happiness and satisfaction than their childless counterparts"

In Study 2, the discussion section points out the selection bias inherent in this particular investigation. "... happier people may be more likely to become parents. If parenting is related to well-being, then parents should experience more positive states when they are taking care of their children than when engaging in their other daily activities."

Study 2 does not distinguish between individuals who chose to have children willingly vs those who were pressured into having children by people or circumstances around them. People who actually want children may be the largest group of people with children, or at least the largest group among those sampled.

Study 3 is perhaps the most subjective investigation method. The main finding is that people associate the actual act of child care-taking with high "meaning in life". This is the parroting of a cliche. Sure, versus watching TV and reading reddit, playing with your kid is going to seem highly meaningful. Individuals who choose not to have children (operative word: choose) usually do so because they replace that time with something meaningful to them, e.g. writing, research, travel, a more demanding career.

Religious individuals rightfully find time spent on church and prayer meaningful; atheists find this time could be better spent on other things.

All this is to say, I wouldn't conclude from this set of studies that "children make you happy", and thus everyone should rush to have them. Instead, I might suggest you ponder whether you truly want children -- ignoring this study or others like it. If the answer is an emphatic "yes" -- despite the financial, emotional, and time requirements -- then, by all means, do. But if the answer is a hesitant "yes" or a firm "no", then, I might suggest you reconsider.

And, if at all possible, when you do have your child, try not to be smug about it to those individuals who chose to live their life childless. Their choice is just as valid as yours.

</comment><comment><USER3> "parents (and especially fathers) report relatively higher levels of happiness, positiveemotion, and meaning in life."

Me too. My kid is the best thing ever, from a guy who never wanted kids.

We've evolved to have kids and protect them, that's obviously necessary. The way that plays out is that kids bond to their parents, and that bond is expressed as love, and man what a great thing to be loved by your kid.

<comment><USER4> Same here. Could do without ... but now that they are there ... man i love them

</comment></comment><comment> dorian-graph Wait, we need to defend parenthood?

<comment><USER5> Yes.

I don't want to give up my life and income to raise children and I freely admit that I look down on those how do -- how can you possibly give up your future and salary for something as trivial, mundane and boring as a baby?

<comment><USER6> You have no future. None of us does. In the span of all of human history, the duration of your life is an insignificant blip.

So you have kids and your blood lives on, and now a part of you lives into the future after you're buried.

One way to look at it, at least. Disclaimer: I don't have kids.

<comment><USER5> We only exist as a way for our genes to be mixed and passed on to the next generation, but hey, I am not going to be a good servant to my DNA.

Oh and once I am dead I really don't care what happens as it will have no effect on me at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _New research suggests that children make you happy._

Looks like "you" means "fathers":

 _[...] analyses revealed that parenthood was associated with greater satisfaction and happiness only among fathers._

Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anecdotally: fuck yeah. Best thing I ever did or ever will do.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's not a defense at all. That's a disguised offense against the proper values of parenting.

<comment><USER10> What are the "proper values of parenting"?

<comment><USER9> Parenting for its own sake and for the sake of the child rather than as the parents' latest hobby.</comment></comment></comment>


The Magical Rationalism of Elon Musk and the Prophets of AI - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/02/the-magical-rationalism-of-elon-musk-and-the-prophets-of-ai.html <comment><USER2> What's Artificial General Intelligence and how is it different from ordinary machines with programmable logic? It's machine intelligence that will _do what I mean_ when I give it a directive, like an intelligent human being.

What's the danger of AGI? _It will do what I say instead of what I mean!_ Like a not-so-intelligent human being, or basically every not-strong-AI computer program ever written. It'll have a theory of mind so advanced that it can sweet-talk its way out of any virtualized prison humans put it in, and simultaneously so deficient that it might interpret "please cure cancer" as "please exterminate multicellular life."

The story of AGI-as-existential-threat seems approximately as full of mystery, trembling, fear, awe, paradox, and nonsense as old time religion. (The Paperclip Maximizer is the familiar story of a loop without a terminating condition. The one plausible way to build a superhuman intelligence that's actually malicious is to "upload" a real human brain, with all corresponding abilities and quirks, and run it faster in emulation. That's _conceptually_ plausible; I don't believe in souls. But "uploading" a human is so far from _engineering plausibility_ at this point that you might as well worry about the existential threat posed by time machines.)</comment>


What's Behind the World's Biggest Climate Victory? Capitalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-can-renewable-energy-power-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Better title: Wind turbines dominate the landscape at the Avangrid Renewables' Baffin Wind Power Project in Sarita, Texas

<comment><USER3> Why is it better?

<comment><USER4> 1) it contains more information.

2) it isn't a completely clickbait title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, duh. What a surprise that in a world where capitalism is the main mode of production and economy framework, renewable energies follow a capitalist growth model.

Still, is undeniable that the market forces worked against renewable energies for a lot of time, the article fails to demonstrate (it doesn't even speculate) how this adoption it's better under capitalism than in other economic frameworks. For all we can tell from the article, maybe renewable energies thrived despite capitalism.

And yet, the article provides interesting data, it's a shame it's framed as propaganda for the Markets Cult.

</comment><comment><USER6> Somehow I doubt that future generations will think that capitalism has much to do with any mitigations of the climate change catastrophe it spent the last fifty years charging into.

A society that cooks itself in its own gasses is obviously sick. Healthy societies don't charge headlong at their own destruction. It's an obvious failure of thinking, organization, and culture.

If capitalism is the organizing principle of a society, then capitalism is responsible for that society's problems. If they are small, then that is to capitalism's credit. If they are gigantic, catastrophic, senseless, and avoidable, but unstoppable due to systemic roadblocks, and cultural derangement - then there's no way to spin it - it does not reflect well on capitalism.

<comment><USER7> This attitude is baffling to me. We have a government which has spent the last half century giving special incentives and privileges and essentially free money in the form of tax incentives to the fossil fuels industry (ie the exact opposite of capitalism in the free markets sense) and then people complain that because "our society is capitalist" that capitalism is at fault.

No way it could have been 50 years of idiotic policy. Yeah it was the free exchange of good and services for money.

<comment><USER8> This sounds like something someone would say to curtail responsibility.

You realize it all comes back to capitalism right, whether it's a communist dictatorship giving your company permission to pump shit into the atmosphere, or the bastian of democracy, the US, giving companies permission to sell bombs to dictators, and so on.

It still comes back to the companies themselves. And if the communist state(aka state-capitalism), or the representative democracy refuses to give them permission they will move to another place and try again, or turn to aggressive lobbying, because capitalism.

In case you've forgotten, capitalism is when you reward the investors over the workers with the surplus value the workers created, moreover, the investors control the company. The capitalist gets their investment back, and then they continue to get a chunk of the surplus created at the expense of the people who actually created said surplus, who instead get a wage. Oh yeah, and they control how the surplus is spent. What is the alternative? A co-op. In a co-op the workers do not get a wage, they get profits from the value they were responsible for, minus funding needed to purchase the next round of raw materials. In a co-op the company functions as a direct-democracy. The workers literally control the surplus and the way it is re-invested into the company.

In case you weren't aware, the majority of companies responsible for large chunks of the climate change pie, are/were driven by investors (and/or states) looking for profits without regards to the health and future of the people who produce said profits, the health of the locales in which they operate, or the health of the planet. The worker/citizen does not get a say, because they are kept on a wage, and because they literally have no say. This is why state- owned collectives are also the worst kind of capitalism. It's as if there is one company who holds the monopoly (the state) and the state is not 'the people' but a small number of, again, psychopaths who have nothing but quotas and profits to fulfill and positions to maintain.

A large portion of climate change is driven by a psychopathic disregard for both the worker and their environment.

<comment><USER7> > "the communist state(aka state-capitalism)"

Well at least you show your hand here. "Communism is capitalism when something bad is happening." I would love to hear you layout your definitions of capitalism and communism in a rigorous way.

You've replaced "person doing something I don't like" with "capitalist". Well in that case yeah, not hard to understand how you see capitalism as causing the world's problems.

<comment><USER9> > Communism is capitalism when something bad is happening

Well, not the OP, but even the USSR did not call itself "communist" (it was a "socialist state on its way to communism" or something like that). I don't think it's unfair to make a distinction between "communism" as described by Marx and the "communist countries" which were/are at best socialist (at worst plain capitalist with a veneer of state participation) and ruled by a "communist party".

And I also think you can say that without attaching any value judgment to either cases: I'm not defending Marx's communism, it's an unreachable utopia and trying to implement it can only degenerate into the horrible examples we have seen.

<comment><USER7> Fair, but my argument would be what wouldn't be capitalism by this definition. Literally every government post feudalism was capitalist if you are going to say Stalin, and the US and everything idealogically in between were capitalist.

At that point I'd argue, whatever it is that this person dislikes, capitalism is just an empty word to represent it. "Reality", or "the world" would appear more accurate to me.

<comment><USER6> I think the point was, the socialist states of the soviet bloc were explicitly 'capitalist', and that was something they said about themselves. The point is, they thought about capitalism as something they were transitioning out of, and trying to actively replace.

Capitalism is a pretty clear idea - it's a society characterized by wage labour. Non-capitalist societies don't have the concept of selling your labour-time for a wage. That's why feudal societies aren't capitalist (they didn't have clocks, for one thing). That's why the soviet block _was_ capitalist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it capitalism or subsidies that got the industry going in the first place? The article can't seem to choose.

Also, paywall.

<comment><USER11> > Is it capitalism or subsidies that got the industry going in the first > place?

Where do you see any difference or contradiction? Subsidies were used to jump- start and increase demand and thus supply was created and adapted. That's textbook supply & demand, a hallmark of capitalism.

<comment><USER12> The Wall Street Journal in particular seems to define any kind of government interference in markets as "socialism". For example, this is what they said in July:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-reality-check-for-solar- and-w...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-reality-check-for-solar-and- wind-11563741088)

The successes are capitalism by definition; the costs are socialism by definition.

<comment><USER11> > The Wall Street Journal in particular seems to define

It's a Bloomberg article. There is no need to throw petty ideological jabs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's really behind improvements in solar and wind efficiency? R&D work. It doesn't matter who pays the bills if the goal is greater efficiency and incentives are aligned to reward it. That capitalism rewards power generation efficiency is more of a side-effect than a feature. If it was more profitable to improve energy extraction then the R&D funding would go there instead. It can be strongly argued that this literally happened; we got fracking before we got cheap wind power, despite the technology for efficient wind being available for decades (quibbling about computer modeling acknowledged), and we still flare methane from oil wells instead of capturing it. That capitalism rewarded clean energy efficiency instead of, say, dirty risky cheap nuclear fission efficiency is entirely due to regulation.</comment>


Deep or Shallow, NLP is breaking out - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/3/198856-deep-or-shallow-nlp-is-breaking-out/fulltext <comment><USER2> >> "Most of our reasoning is by analogy; it's not logical reasoning."

I keep reading this quote, showcased in the article, again and again, and I still cant believe that people are actually proposing this.

They're basically advocating that we should abandon logic, stop trying to reason about things, and instead try stuff at random, and why? Because computers have been shown to do alright with that approach at tasks in which humans excel.

It is clear as daylight that whatever humans do, computers don't - otherwise, you'd need to train your baby with the Brown Corpus before it could figure out you're its mama. We have managed to overcome the limitations of our primitive computational technology with some clever tricks and that's amazing.

But to take that rightly celebrated fact and make it into an argument that we must now become ourselves as dumb as our computers, and also never try to make the poor things intelligent in the same way we are, that's ... well, it's dumb. That's what it is.

<comment><USER3> What confuses me about your argument is that you are treating a child as an individual without context. The human brain, however, has reviewed bajillions of bajillabytes of training data over the course of its evolution.

The brain is already wired to have certain types of perceptions, so by the time a baby is born that child is just looking for that entity that fits the mommy definition, not trying to define a that it will have a caregiver and the optimal strategy is to bond to that caregiver.

Anyway, there are lots of examples where what you are saying holds, kids drawing general conclusions from limited data, but we also have to remember that the human brain is not a blank slate, it is already highly specialized at the time of birth.

<comment><USER4> Consider this... the genome is ~725MB, and 99% percent is shared with chimpanzees, leaving ~7.25 MB for human-specific traits. While I'm sure that the mother instinct is strong (and probably encoded in that 99%), it's truly amazing how little storage that is!

Edit: My point is not about imprinting (which I don't claim is restricted to humans). I'm claiming that what we consider "human-specific" occupies remarkably little genetic memory. To understand how human language acquisition works with so little genetic context, we need to study humans and not NLP algorithms.

<comment><USER5> Well, imprinting specifically is likely much, much older than the chimp/homo divide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As research in NLP advances one of the things I am looking out for is how the field will be broken into separate problems. Are there some problems which are relatively low hanging fruit and others that we will be scratching our heads over 30 years from now?

One thing that I think will be challenging is that language has observer depending meaning. The same statement might have a completely different meaning to someone with a different experience, or made in a different context, or stated by a different person. Games like Chess and Go have observer independent solutions. The winner is the same no matter who/what plays the game.

Determining the meaning of a sentence is a problem where the real answer depends on observer dependent perspective and therefore will need a completely different way to measure success compared to more 'mathematical' tasks like Go. Trying to program a machine to account for this kind of personal experience that humans have, as well as for individual differences between people will be quite challenging I think. I also think that the most significant advances will come from cross cutting academic disciplines like Psychology, Linguistics, and Philosophy of Language.

<comment><USER7> The answer for most of these problems where humans say "humans do X and X is difficult because ..." is either :

1) it's not complex at all.

2) same as 1, with "in 99.99...% of the cases" appended to it.

Most of the problems in AI are a scaling problem. The reason you're not yet seeing androids taking over the economy are twofold:

Portable energy. Our best technologies are not the equal of the human body when it comes to how much power can be stored. But they are constantly improving, even if we'll need another tenfold increase in energy density (less if we make mobile robots gasoline powered, which is impractical for other reasons, more if do the battery + electrical motors thing everyone wants). This means humans are cheaper and easier for a lot of tasks.

Control. The human body (not including face and face-adjecent muscles) has about 300 actuators. That means controlling a human body means controlling 300 individual motors at the same time in a useful way (and every motor affects every other motor. Moving your hand forward means adjusting the power your little toe is applying to the ground to maintain balance). The state of the art is maybe 10-dimensional control (10 interdependent actuators), which can be increased to maybe 20 if the problem can be split into subproblems (e.g. cooperating robots, or parts of the robot that are attached, so imbalance cannot occur). In some ways every extra dimension adds an order of magnitude to the complexity, so it's not like we'll get there in 10 years. But in a century ... probably.

The thing about these problems is that they are problems of degree. Just like today's AI algorithms were known in the 1960's. So why didn't we have live speech transcription in the 1960s ? We all know the answer : processing power was 50 orders of magnitude less than we needed. It was a problem of degree. We knew the problem, and had at least a good guess at what to do, but couldn't contemplate that actually acting on those ideas would make any serious progress due to the limitations of processing speeds at those times. If you wanted a 1960s computer to do a 50x50 matrix multiplication, you'd be waiting days. Doing millions of them was therefore considered useless.

Even this is being gentle. A good case can be made that every component of these algorithms was known once differentiation was formalized, but nobody put them together, not because they didn't realize it could work, but because it was useless : doing things this way would have been incredibly inefficient compared to the then normal ways of doing things. E.g. finding formulas and constants by small adjustments on large chains of partial derivatives (ie. "Deep learning") is something that Isaac Newton knew how to do. It's just he would declare you totally mad for doing that. One might criticize that there were a few holes in the mathematical understanding of matrices in Newton's day, I wouldn't doubt that had he had a reason to really look into those problems, he would have fixed them. But he was more than 50 orders of magnitudes of : doing a single 50x50 matrix multiplication with any amount of resources then available wouldn't have finished before he died.

Now machine learning tutorials tell you to run unrolled 30x30 LSTM expansions on audio data and unroll for 50 datapoints. And then doing that millions of times (tens of thousands of times on a few thousand samples). You can expect this to run on the computer you're reading this on in a matter of hours.

<comment><USER8> _Just like today 's AI algorithms were known in the 1960's._

But they were not. To take recurrent networks as an example, active work on RNNs only started in the 80ies. LSTMs, which are one of the solutions to the vanishing gradient problem were only discovered in 1997 by Sepp Hochreiter.

Of course, computational power is one of the limiting factors, but saying that it is the only thing that held AI back is disingenuous and dismisses the hard work of a couple of generations in AI research.

Edit: and Schmidhuber

<comment><USER2> >> LSTMs ... were only discovered in 1997 by Sepp Hochreiter.

Aye. Hochreiter and the One Who Shall Not be Named. Let's not forget _him again_ , eh?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In terms of shallow natural language processing, some pretty simple observations can lead to a lot of bang for the buck.

One project I completed was able to really excel at keyword matching simply by building a huge dictionary of words, in a literal sense: a dictionary of contextually relevant words to a phrase, generated by very large texts.

I think baby steps are the key to getting further with NLP. For reference: [http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/](http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/)

<comment><USER10> A quick idea of what the Stanford NLP parser is capable of can be gained by trying a few things in their online gateway. Its impressive.

[http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/](http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/)

<comment><USER11> I'd reccommend also checking out: [http://corenlp.run/](http://corenlp.run/). It's a running version of the corenlp server. I'm making use of this, just have it running in a container and get parses via the API (which is good but a little odd to use).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> _In a recent interview with Communications, Hinton said his own research on word vectors goes back to the mid-1980s, when he, David Rumelhart, and Ronald Williams published work in Nature that demonstrated family relationships as vectors. "The vectors were only six components long because computers were very small then, but it took a long time for it to catch on," Hinton said._

Yeah, I know the work he's talking about. It's the one related to this dataset:

[https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Kinship](https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Kinship)

From that page:

 _Creator:

Geoff Hinton

Donor:

J. Ross Quinlan

Data Set Information:

This relational database consists of 24 unique names in two families (they have equivalent structures). Hinton used one unique output unit for each person and was interested in predicting the following relations: wife, husband, mother, father, daughter, son, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, niece, and nephew. Hinton used 104 input-output vector pairs (from a space of 12x24=288 possible pairs). The prediction task is as follows: given a name and a relation, have the outputs be on for only those individuals (among the 24) that satisfy the relation. The outputs for all other individuals should be off.

Hinton's results: Using 100 vectors as input and 4 for testing, his results on two passes yielded 7 correct responses out of 8. His network of 36 input units, 3 layers of hidden units, and 24 output units used 500 sweeps of the training set during training.

Quinlan's results: Using FOIL, he repeated the experiment 20 times (rather than Hinton's 2 times). FOIL was correct 78 out of 80 times on the test cases._

And yet, if you have a wee look at Hinton's publication on Rexa, there's 43 citations, while there's a single one on Quinlan's (from Muggleton, duh).

So, you know, maybe it's not logic and reasoning that's the problem here, rather a certain tendency to drum up results of neural models even when they don't do any better than other techniques.

But, really, it doesn't matter. Google has the airwaves (so to speak). No matter what happens anywhere else, in academia or business, their stuff is going to be publicised the most and that's what we all have to deal with.

<comment><USER12> _> ut, really, it doesn't matter. Google has the airwaves (so to speak). No matter what happens anywhere else, in academia or business, their stuff is going to be publicised the most and that's what we all have to deal with._

One thing that bothers me about ANN hype is that those models are very resource and data hungry. Which suits Google perfectly, but will keep that kind of AI out of people's hands/computers for decades to come.

<comment><USER13> This is checked back by the advent of cloud computing and public datasets, though. It's super easy for anyone to spin up a thousand nodes and run TensorFlow. There's a huge number of open-source image and text datasets. The limiting factor is then money, not hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Just as "Hello, World" may be the best-known general programming introductory example, Mikolov, who was then at Microsoft Research, also introduced what fast became a benchmark equation in natural language processing at the 2013 proceedings of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics, the kingman+woman=queen analogy, in which the computer solved the equation spontaneously._

Since the ACM has professional editors, I was surprised that they would twice misrepresent the example "king – man + woman = queen" as "kingman+woman=queen" in the article. At least they spelled "Hello, World" right, even if they couldn't bring themselves to add the "!".

It looks like the problem is that in the PDF version, the phrase happens to be hyphenated at the "minus sign" in both usages ([http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2880000/2874915/p13-goth.pdf](http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2880000/2874915/p13-goth.pdf)) [1] although one might hope this is something an editor would have checked.

[1] Looks like the ACM wants to you click on the PDF link yourself, from the "View As" bar in the text version.

</comment><comment><USER15> link to google cache

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:145V9qm...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:145V9qmKz2gJ:cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/3/198856-deep- or-shallow-nlp-is-breaking-out/fulltext+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER2> >> reasoning by analogy is the core kind of reasoning we do, and logic is just a sort of superficial thing on top of it that happens much later

Well, for some that's certainly the case.

</comment><comment><USER16> More info on vectors [https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp- tutorial/forums/t/1234...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp- tutorial/forums/t/12349/word2vec-is-based-on-an-approach-from-lawrence- berkeley-national-lab)</comment>


Giggrabbers – The World's First Combined Crowdfunding and Outsourcing Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.giggrabbers.com <comment><USER2> surprised you need to log in to see task needing crowd funding.</comment>


New Incubation Concept, Dog Patch Labs, opens offices in Cambridge - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2009/09/polaris_brings_new_incubation.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _"The lab will seek to foster super-early-stage entrepreneurship in areas where Boston currently has strong start-up track records -- such as software- as-a-service, cloud computing, biotech, and enertech. [Enertech is Metcalfe's term for cleantech or energy-related ventures.] But additionally, the labs will also foster efforts in social media, e-commerce and the consumer Internet, where Polaris has been highly active in other markets."_

-Interesting take on Boston area startup strengths.

<comment><USER2> interesting take on new incubation concept.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> anyone reaching out to them?</comment>


Gmail Glitch Shows Pitfalls - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123561652440078567.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea of having google's support team fixing a software glitch that not only affects my business but thousands of others is a lot more attractive than if my in-house server goes down and it is solely up to my internal or sub- contracted support to remedy the problem.</comment>


Interview with Larry Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3173f19e-5fbc-11e4-8c27-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> Shame this interview didn't catch traction here, it's one of the more interesting I've read with Larry Page.</comment>


Evolved Policy Gradients - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/evolved-policy-gradients/ <comment><USER2> "EPG takes a step toward agents that are not blank slates but instead know what it means to make progress on a new task, by having experienced making progress on similar tasks in the past." Can someone explain to me how they take a step? It seems like they just use random search define a loss function for the sub-policy to optimize against. Is it because the loss function is "learned" over the sequence of actions, making it adaptive?

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR:

Parametrize your loss function and wrap a normal policy optimization with a random search to find a better loss function. Don't call it "random search," call it "evolution strategies" to make it sound sophisticated.

Neat idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would someone here know how to go about recreating a physics sandbox using a virtual robot arm with cubes in a game engine editor like Unity/UE4 where we'd be able to apply ML?

Any suggestion is welcome

<comment><USER5> You certainly could, and gamedev tools are better than ever before at modelling real world physics. However, I would submit that if you want to simulate a robotic arm, it would be better to use tools specifically designed for that purpose. There are lots of reasonable-fidelity simulators of real robot arms which work with Gazebo, and by using the larger ROS ecosystem, you can also process simulated camera or depth camera data using standard pipelines, which will also be truer to life than using Unity.

See for example: [http://sdk.rethinkrobotics.com/intera/Gazebo_Tutorial](http://sdk.rethinkrobotics.com/intera/Gazebo_Tutorial), [http://wiki.ros.org/ur_gazebo](http://wiki.ros.org/ur_gazebo), [http://wiki.ros.org/katana_gazebo_plugins](http://wiki.ros.org/katana_gazebo_plugins)</comment></comment>


Bibliography of Programming Languages Implementation - <AUTHOR> http://www.ventonegro.org/2008/07/bibliography-of-programming-languages-implementation/

<comment><AUTHOR> Ack, it seems to have gone down. Google cache here:

[http://22.214.171.124/search?q=cache:VZ3UpIzqbUIJ:www.ventone...](http://188.8.131.52/search?q=cache:VZ3UpIzqbUIJ:www.ventonegro.org/2008/07/bibliography- of-programming-languages- implementation/+Bibliography+of+Programming+Languages+Implementation)</comment>


Ask HN: Thought experiment..growing food on Moon for Artemis project - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't think there is anything hard about it.

If you can grow a pot plant in your closet with LED lights, you can grow some other kind of plant on the moon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out a lunar-agriculture schema rather than replicate what we have done on earth?

<comment><USER3> Plants need water, light, CO2 and some nutrients, here and on the Moon. What differences you expect in the cultivation methods?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think earth farming methods are efficient. Should we be growing plants for our food would be my first question.

<comment><USER2> To have something fresh to eat, yes.

It is an interesting question if it is cheaper to send up food in cans vs send up infrastructure for growing food indoors.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the main difference is that on Earth, the surface area with good illumination and air is essentially free (compared to the Moon).

My guess is that instead of a big field, it's much better to have some solar panels to collect the sunlight, transform it into electricity and use the electricity in LEDs. So your cultivation are can be a cube or semi sphere or other geometric shape with high volume to surface ratio.

<comment><USER2> During the day you can let light in through a window.

In the night solar power will not be available and the night lasts two weeks...

Might not be such a problem if you can prevent heat loss and schedule growth around the natural day. Perhaps you grow a crop that takes two weeks, perhaps you grow something that can go dormant for two weeks and burst to active growth quickly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Peeked into My Node_Modules Directory - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/silicon-satire/i-peeked-into-my-node-modules-directory-and-you-wont-believe-what-happened-next-b89f63d21558 <comment><USER2> Look i enjoy pissing on npm packages just as much as the next brogramming hipster but...

'imagine if the car you drove to work had more than 291 parts'

Well... Imagine it has _less_ than that number of parts!

Or imagine an apple containing less than that many distinct chemical substances!

Not the best example...

<comment><USER3> I think the fact that both of these are terrible examples is part of the joke. They have so little to do with making the point the author wants to make (satirically) that they're almost a non sequitur.

<comment><USER2> Ha! Thanks ... I'm so dense I didn't get that, I actually believed there's a guy fiery bitmap in all those packages

This is some quality satire, haha

<comment><USER4> Well, there wasn't when the article was written, but... [https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/f36d07d30334f86412a9d277...](https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/f36d07d30334f86412a9d2771880cb566a82a9b6/packages/babel- core/src/api/node.js)

(it was removed before the next release)

<comment><USER3> Oh, wow. I guess satire isn't satire if it isn't a little bit true.

<comment><USER4> Just to be clear, it wasn't in _any_ releases. It was added in response to this article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An important note for many: this article is a satire, meant as a joke making fun of all the other similar posts

</comment><comment><USER6> The capitalization treatment in the title of the post (not just here in HN) is like nails on a chalkboard.

</comment><comment><USER7> _Glimmer brings in the entirety of Encyclopedia Brittanica, just to display the definition for the word "glimmer" in its help menu._

Nice.

</comment><comment><USER8> Even if it is a satire, there would be no satire in the first place if it weren't at least partially true.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, you want to watch out for those "rouge" developers!

</comment><comment><USER10> Fascinating to see all those attempts to count the number of dependencies (including calling the man page), but why include this in the post?

<comment><USER11> It's a satire... The whole post is a satire. Just read on, it gets more and more ridiculous. Of course it's all made up.

<comment><USER10> Ah, thanks. I guess I've read so much about the JavaScript ecosystem that I didn't doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Author is complaining about Ember having "glimmer" as a dependency and not knowing what it does, however the author is searching github/google for the term "glitter".

</comment><comment><USER13> Article from 2016</comment>