Is Basho dead? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/_jared/status/878036763805048832 <comment><USER2> I was a Riak user for a long time and I interfaced with a _lot_ of the Basho team. While Riak was indeed flawed in many ways, the people that worked at Basho were just fantastic. Some of their distributed systems engineers were the best in the world.

The drama at the top is what ultimately killed the company, IMHO. It was a total bummer to watch it go down in flames the way it did.

<comment><USER3> Story time?

<comment><USER2> Not my story to tell. I'm sure someone else has told it...or will.

<comment><USER4> Very interested

<comment><USER5> Me too. I think we all have our own stories about Basho's demise. Some people left early, some hung on until the end, but IMO it stopped being the Basho it once was (the "mythical basho") around the all hands in Estes Park in 2014. The first and biggest exodus was 2014/2015\. I clung on until 2017. Even managed to squeak out a few bits of decent work in that time, but the writing was on the wall from 2014 IMO. When Basho finally dies (rather than this weird ghost ship/zombie shell company that remains) and all looming threats of litigation are gone I think it would do me good to write my view of the story from 2011. Right now I'm focussing on how to keep working on Riak, because it's still a great piece of software with a very wide deployment of active users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I remember correctly their entire engineering team walked out months ago.

Some of them are now working at VMware and using Rust to build things like [https://github.com/vmware/haret](https://github.com/vmware/haret)

<comment><USER7> Had a friend who worked at Basho on Riak until the layoffs, didn't realize that there was a diaspora at VMware. Our next Boston Rust meetup happens to be at VMware, maybe I'll ask them how they think Rust compares to Erlang. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ouch, looks like he's right: [https://github.com/basho/riak/pulse/monthly](https://github.com/basho/riak/pulse/monthly) .

</comment><comment><USER9> Basho as we know it? Sadly, yes. Aiui the name and tech will live on but, let's face it, the basho most people knew died a couple of years back.</comment>


Antibody Kills 91% of HIV Strains - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703609004575355072271264394.html?mod=djemalertNEWS

<comment><USER2> What happens if we manage to kill 91% of the HIV strains? Won't the remaining 9% of the strains continue to spread and mutate? Then we're back to square one.

<comment><USER3> At the very least, it could buy a second chance for a lot of people, even if it's not all of them. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who are not career druggies or sluts who had one stupid or unlucky night that is going to ruin the rest of their lives, and could use a second chance.

EDIT: sorry, I worded this terribly. What I meant was there are many people who would not catch HIV again, and thus would benefit from a cure to only 91% of HIV. The people who will continue being reckless and catch it again will, of course, not benefit from an antibody protecting them from only 91% of HIV, and that was what I was talking about when I referenced druggies. I'd be more than happy to give hardcore druggies a cure.

The whole point was not that some people deserve it and some don't, but that some will gain huge benefits _even if_ it's only 91%, and that is why even though it's not 100% coverage it's still a plus. (of course, not everyone will, because some people will go and catch the other 9% right away, so for them it's not really a benefit, but SOME WILL BENEFIT)

EDIT2: to those of you still downvoting, are you trying to say you think every single person on the planet with AIDS would not catch it again if they were cured, but still vulnerable to some strains? That seems kind of unlikely.

<comment><USER4> You seem to be implying that "druggies" and "sluts" don't deserve a second chance

edit: feel free to re-word it if you like, as long as you leave a note that you edited it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading in "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell how STDs like HIV can be effectively stopped before they become epidemics. If this antibody can be administered and eliminate a large chunk of people with weaker strains of HIV, then assuming the stronger strains of HIV are in the same geographic area, a strong campaign of eliminating HIV spreading behavior in those areas could really reduce the spread of the disease. But like another poster said we don't know which strains are most prevalent, so it could be that a stronger strain is more widespread.

<comment><USER6> "a strong campaign of eliminating HIV spreading behavior in those areas could really reduce the spread of the disease."

That's a LOT easier said than done. There's a widely held belief in parts of the world (such as Africa) that having sex with a virgin cleanses one of AIDS. Because of this, child-rape is extremely prevalent in that part of the world. I suppose you could make the case that education is the easier part of solving the AIDS/HIV puzzle, but it's a very large behavioral problem that can not be solved using a scientific approach.

<comment><USER5> you have a good point but we have no idea which areas are affected by the antibody. If Africa has a majority of strains that are cured, then I'm sure they could stem the spread of the disease in more developed areas. I don't think that belief is widespread outside of africa, or at least I wasn't aware of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "'We're going to be at this for a while' before any benefit is seen in the clinic, he said."

No doubt. It is a first step. Good news if clinical application follows from this finding.

As usual, I advise readers unfamiliar with Peter Norvig's article on reading scientific research reports

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

to check that for issues that may not be fully explored by this mass media report.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's really a testament to nature and Darwin's theories that after all the time, effort and money we've been spending on AIDS research, the most successful antibody so far was not created by man, but by his DNA.

<comment><USER8> I Am Not An Immunologist, but antibodies are usually produced by plasma cells, after their predecessor B cells are triggered with the appropriate antigens, right? I'm pretty sure that mechanism and its memory is acquired, not innate. In other words, it's not coded for by DNA, and you can't inherit that immunity from the father. Some maternal antibodies _are_ heritable, but I think that's through shared blood.

<comment><USER9> For 'Not An Immunologist' you seem to have a pretty good handle on this stuff. You're mostly right about the heritability stuff, but it's a bit more subtle than that.

Antibodies are built from heavy and light chains, which are in turn produced by a combinatorial recombination process: subunits get spliced together. While paternal B cells aren't going anywhere with regards to heritability, the heavy/light chain subunit repertoire is heritable! If Donor 45 is a mutant for one of those subunits, then the effect could very well be heritable.

edit: grammar.

<comment><USER8> Are _any_ antibodies entirely genetically determined--"off the rack", so to speak? One would think that having an innate immune response to extraordinarily dangerous yet infrequently-mutating pathogens (polio, for example) would be worthwhile.

Haha, maybe I should get go get an immunology text. I think I'm pushing the limits of Wikipedia.

<comment><USER10> The process is amazing. It's a giant highly optimized molecular recognition library. Random diversity in antibody binding motifs is generated by guided mutation of the DNA coding for the proteins in the antibody. This wide repertoire is then screened for antibodies that react to 'self' molecular patterns in the body, and the B cells producing those self-reacting antibodies are deleted. One B cell produces only one kind of antibody.

There is also evidence that this antibody repertoire is further primed and refined by constant interaction with the incredible molecular diversity produced from the bacteria that live on our mucosa (that is, barrier interfaces with the environment like the lining of the gut and lungs and the skin).

The immune system naturally tweaks antibodies to make them more efficient at binding (Affinity maturation it's called). If you are trying to make a vaccine, you are better off starting off with an antibody which has already had all the hard work done on it.

It should be pointed out that the donor they used is actually infected with HIV, the antibody didn't protect him because prior to infection it wasn't affinity matured or present in high enough concentration.

If there was a heirarchy of medical treatments, vaccines would surely be at the top. A jab when you are too young to remember and suddenly debilitating fatal diseases that have plagued humans for thousands of years are no longer a problem. The immune system is unique in that you can give information to it, you can communicate with it. It's an information technology, actually. I think this is why vaccines are so fantastic, it is a treatment that collaborates with the body. Pretty much all other medical therapies involved taking a broken system and breaking it even more to achieve some kind of withered stability which is inevitability temporary and has consequences for the organism as a whole (eg giving steroids for rheumatoid arthritis, chemotherapy for cancer).

The seasonal flu vaccine is a global immune system in action. It's a molecular rss feed, an app update, a glycoprotein tweet whatever analogy you care to use, perhaps one day an individual's immune system will be part of a greater whole linked via information tech. The immune cloud it might be called.

And millions will still die because of war and poor sanitation and exploitation.

<comment><USER11> It would be pretty sad if someone used the immune cloud to distribute a virus. I wouldn't want to live in a world where I had to trust AVG anti-virus with my health.

<comment><USER12> _It would be pretty sad if someone used the immune cloud to distribute a virus_

Yes, that would be horrible. Imagine a deadly virus which specifically infects immune cells to spread. We could call it something like Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is fantastic, but I can only imagine that 91% will become 9.1% within a decade, as the unaffected strains become dominant (just like superbugs).

<comment><USER14> But only 10% of the current number of people infected will be infected by that point.

<comment><USER15> But how many AIDS patients have multiple strains?

<comment><USER16> All of them

<comment><USER16> I love how that got down voted and the general amount of HIV fud in this thread - I actually do HIV research, I would know.

Most HIV people get infected by one strain, but it mutates so rapidly that in a single individual, multiple strains co exist at different levels (a major one and many, many lower levels ones).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So if there's eventually an HIV vaccine that's 91% effective should everyone take it just in case? Even if you never expect to contract HIV this seems like a bit of a Pascal's Wager situation. Why risk it when there's a vaccine available?

</comment><comment><USER18> This is great news.

</comment><comment><USER19> :)</comment>


Show HN: XCrash – robust native-crash-reporting library for Android APPs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iqiyi/xCrash <comment><USER2> I am curious, why doesn't Android allow apps to get their own tombstone files? This is ridiculous. Can anyone tell me why?

<comment><USER3> You can ask Google this question...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks good. Focus on Android.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unbelievable, from China?

</comment><comment><USER6> Great!</comment>


What Comes After the Social Media Empires - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/facebook-youtube-fragmentation <comment><USER2> If an editor at Buzzfeed knew "what comes after the social media empires", he would be working on THAT instead of writing just another meaningless piece.

Skimming through the article it's apparent that I was right. It has no content, just talking about today, but nothing about "what comes after".</comment>


Barr questions Section 230 protections for big tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/19/attorney-general-barr-blasts-big-tech-questioning-its-protection-liability-content/ <comment><USER2> >Those leveling the charges of censorship, according to the sources, included a participant from the Media Research Center's TechWatch initiative, which asserts on its web page that "a handful of tech companies can censor both the people and the ideals of the right."

Why do people think stripping Section 230 protections will make companies more likely to allow comments on their sites?

It will make them less likely.

Particularly from the segment of the population who thinks it is funny and appropriate to post "Michelle Obama is a male gorilla" memes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is an outrage for free speech and the original idea of what the Internet was supposed to be. But looking at the Internet today -from FAANG to all the crappy ad and data mining surveillance capitalist business models- I don't feel as outraged as I maybe should.

Maybe I'm just too cynical but anything that delivers a death blow to what we have might maybe even be a positive in the long run as it gives momentum for legitimate use-cases of onion routing or p2p based systems.

or maybe not ... but I think Tech won't go away, it'll just shift and adapt to different forms. hard to say if this will be good or not. It'll suck for anyone heavily invested in the status-quo which is pretty cool imo!

to take an analogy of Nassim Taleb any city that has been flattened in war throughout history usually ended up returning stronger and more resilient. This could be an "etcher-sketch start-over push" that may open us up for new ideas (or push legit stuff underground and normalize the darknet model to a wider audience)

<comment><USER3> Tech built their companies on the idea that they didn't need people-facing people. It shows in lousy customer support, click-away liability, and so on.

In the early days Google had a press conference where one of the founders (Larry, IIRC) was challenged about the availability of all the personal information available in the search results. The reporter apparently made him uncomfortable by bringing up his data. Those details disappeared from the search results the next day.

Fast forward ten years and my friend is falsely accused of violence against one of his students. She was caught with bruises she got from having sex (she was 15 yo or so) and blamed this guy saying they were from a violent outburst. The story is all over the newspapers. They go to court, turns out the girl is lying, he's cleared. Of course during the wait he was let go. So guess what happened whenever he tried to find a job? They "Googled" him of course, all this came up, and he was turned down everywhere he went. Do you think Google would respond to his pleas to get these results dropped? Nope.

I think I'm ok with this. It's certainly going to change things if it gets to the point where Amazon is responsible for slanderous reviews and such. Such speech has never been "free" (as in legal). But today, it's all anonymous and people can say anything. This will turn things back a bit.

It probably won't go that far, though. But it might make those tech co.s rethink things a little. (I also submitted this article but came to yours.)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Fan Shim – Active Cooling for Raspberry Pi 4 - <AUTHOR> https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/fan-shim <comment><USER2> > _Not heatsink-compatible_

Seems like as if this might limit its effectiveness, given how much hotter the Pi 4 runs. It would be interesting to do a side-by-side temperature comparison of a Pi 4 fitted with this device and another with fitted with heatsinks and a gooseneck USB powered fan blowing across it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You really don't need a heatsink as well, the SoC has a heatspreader pre- installed.

Fan SHIM will take your Pi 4 well below throttle temperatures even at full load!

We posted some results on our blog (there is a more in-depth post to come soon): [https://blog.pimoroni.com/raspberry-pi-4-thermals-and-fan- sh...](https://blog.pimoroni.com/raspberry-pi-4-thermals-and-fan-shim/)</comment></comment>


Top SDKs Installed in iOS and Android Apps and Games - <AUTHOR> https://appfigures.com/top-sdks/all/all <comment><USER2> It would probably be more interesting to weigh those apps by popularity, instead of just a simple count.</comment>


Meet Extraordinary People... For a Fee - <AUTHOR> https://www.huddlewoo.com/

<comment><USER2> Very nice concept, seems they are not alone though, clarity.fm does the same thing I think.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is just me or there isn't a way to browse?</comment>


YouTube offers face blurring (but not blanking) - <AUTHOR> http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/face-blurring-when-footage-requires.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Caution: simple blurring may be reversible, and YouTube admits that their process may not blur all faces. On the other hand, simple face blanking, blue- dotting, or a scramble-suit style superposition (from Philip K. Dick's _A Scanner Darkly_) would be irreversible. Not to mention that YouTube might keep the original source video, whether or not you click "delete original". Maybe.</comment>


Cracking IP Surveillance DVR - <AUTHOR> http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2009/12/shodan-cracking-ip-surveillance-dvr/

<comment><USER2> Oh my, one of these opened up something called "webcam girl."

Be careful guys.

*E: Does anyone know if Shodan is a System Shock allusion?

<comment><USER3> Yes.

[http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2009/11/youve-been- sho...](http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2009/11/youve-been-shodand/)

"SHODAN (Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network) was the fictional artificial intelligence bad girl of the computer game System Shock who, once she was hacked and her ethical restrictions removed, destroyed or subverted all around her with the exception of her hacker."</comment></comment>


My Facebook Login Lockout Ordeal and How I Prevailed  - <AUTHOR> http://crosslandteam.com/blog/2010/08/29/my-facebook-login-lockout-ordeal-and-how-i-prevailed/

<comment><USER2> I think one of Facebook's biggest problems right now is that for most people it's still a place where all your friends are lumped together, whether it's your mother or your college roommate.

I think they have lists for segmenting friends but unless they can make Facebook grouping friends the core of their product, they're going to get the friend overload and intermixing of friends problem for the majority of its users.

Facebook succeeded because it was all about your college friends at first, and only people you actually knew. Linkedin's success is proof that we don't want to mix all our acquaintances into one identity site. If they can't make it dead simple to segment our Facebook usage based on our friend circles, then there's going to be some big problems ahead.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you, except I would think I would be the biggest problem with facebook. Most people act differently when they are with their families, places of work, etc than they do with their friends.

Why on earth facebook hasn't separated itself into groups jet I don't know, but here is hoping the fridge will get there.

<comment><USER4> Even more problematic is the fact that everyone of your "friends" can see all your other "friends". This leads to silly things like your mother befriending one of your work contacts because "SoAndSo became friends with SomeoneElse" pops up on your status feed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually think I'd be ok in this situation (and I have real difficulty recognizing faces) largely because my "friends" list is pretty damn short. I take the "friend" part pretty seriously - if they renamed it acquaintances, or had built in separate lists for friends/acquaintances, I'd probably have a longer list. Regardless, having Facebook lock me out on my holiday would be a good thing.

It does sound like this whole thing was poorly thought through. You can't encourage people to befriend everybody they every meet - and then ask them to know what they all look like.

</comment><comment><USER6> I generally friend only people I'm, you know, _friends_ with -- or at the very least met enough times to recognize. At some level of friends (300+?) I don't think the site is useful for actual personal communication -- which is more or less the only thing I find Facebook to be useful for.

I find those _friend recommendations_ to be just that: recommendations. I likely know them through someone or they're in my local network: have I met them? Do I want to _be friends_ with them? Or am I just shamelessly network- marketing myself here?

I'd love to see this on every login, even just for a day. The fallout would be hilarious.

<comment><USER7> You're not using FB for professional networking, are you?

If you're a professional you need to be visible. At the same time, you may not want random folks unknown to you to be seeing all your personal details, so you may lock those down so that only professional contacts -- "friends" -- can see them.

That's how you end up with (checks) 893 friends (like me). It's a business tool, not a reflection of your personal life.

(And that's before we get onto the jokers who select some random cartoon character as a userpic, but that's just another failure mode for FB's broken attempt to reinvent shared secret authentication.)

<comment><USER8>
      You're not using FB for professional networking, are you?

No, there is Linkedin for that.

<comment><USER7> Linkedin doesn't actually work (or do anything useful) for folks in my profession. Caveat: if you don't have a fan page on Facebook, you're probably not in my profession.

<comment><USER6> I concede that Facebook fan pages are a whole other animal altogether. In _that case_ (in terms of having an account to manage a fan page as a professional face, so to speak), then performing user authentication based on knowledge of "friends" (account connections) makes no sense whatsoever.

All joking and discourse regarding "friends" aside, I think it's _fair_ to have multi-factor authentication when it appears that an account has been breached. But yes, they could have implemented this differently. (See Gmail's "last account activity" alerts, which notify you regarding a breach once you log in from a recognized IP address but do not prevent access to your account: [https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&...](https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&answer=45938) )

I suppose I'm one of those odd, longtime users that wishes Facebook wouldn't try to _be everything_ , hence the jabs at "I have too many friends" issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hate their new lockout system. I'm a frequent traveler and run my business from my laptop. FB is a great way to keep connected to other travelers you meet and your friends back home while being on the road. But because I'm often in a new _country_ every few days, let alone a new city, I get my FB account locked a few times a week. It's a huge pain in the ass.

Here's a thought for a new FB revenue stream: I'd _pay_ them a monthly fee _not_ to ever lock my account again. How sad is that?

<comment><USER10> You may already know this, but just in case here's a solution for you, get a VPS from Linode and proxy off it. You don't need to set anything up, just use the -D flag to ssh to open up a SOCKS proxy. It's like this form OSX or Linux:

ssh -D 8080 your.vps.ip

You now have a SOCKS proxy running on 127.0.0.1:8080. You can do the same thing using Putty on windows (it's in one of the settings tabs). Side benefit is that you can't be snooped on by whoever owns the WiFi.

<comment><USER9> I didn't know that and that's actually incredibly useful. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had the same experience and I was locked out my account until I came back home on my machine and logged in!

And, it is not only due to remote IP. It's remote IP + diff machine I guess.

</comment><comment><USER12> Won't somebody just say that such an identity verification system is stupid! I had the "verify" problem a few months ago and wasn't asked to ID faces. This must be new. Scrap and try again! It's ok to mess up facebook.</comment>


Show HN: Socket.js, a tiny WebSockets library for Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/boyers/socket.js <comment><USER2> Looks great. Perfect for talking to React Native clients.

Do you have any performance numbers?</comment>


Arms deal sets limits on cyber technologies - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d4653c82-641d-11e3-98e2-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Of particular concern for western spymasters is the notion that technologies may end up in the hands of terrorist groups or hostile organisations and be used to thwart western surveillance operations or mount cyber attacks."_</comment>


Ask HN: How often do people request refunds? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen many services offering no questions asked money back guarantees, and I'm curious to know how often do people, in your experience, actually ask for refunds using them. <comment><USER2> Screencasts (at $10-30 per sale) and online training ($200-700 per seat) are the bulk of my such sales and I've had only a few refunds on mid 5 figure sales of both.

In every case it was because they bought it by accident or wanted to change to a different level. I don't believe I've had any people request refunds out of dissatisfaction or with no straightforward reason. But my audience is professional software developers so I'd expect the rates to be pretty low.

</comment><comment><USER3> I heard from the owner of onnit.com (30 day money back) that about 2% of all customers will always abuse the money back guarantees.

I personally have never requested my money back from such service.

Discussions:

[http://gg.gg/852s](http://gg.gg/852s) [http://gg.gg/852u](http://gg.gg/852u)</comment>


Foundation 5: Almost Here, and Sweet for Large Teams - <AUTHOR> http://zurb.com/article/1278/foundation-5-almost-here-and-sweet-for-la

<comment><USER2> Is there anywhere to see the preview code?

<comment><USER3> Have you checked the git repository over at Github [https://github.com/zurb/foundation/tree/master](https://github.com/zurb/foundation/tree/master)</comment></comment>


A Really Cool Style of Commenting - <AUTHOR> http://www.djangobook.com/en/beta/chapter20/

<comment><USER2> I would like it better if the "Comments" box didn't obscure the content. Even on my 1680 by 1050 monitor, with the browser window scaled to full width, I cannot move the comments completely out of the way. If the main content area was aligned to the left side of the page, rather than having equal horizontal margins, I could easily fit the comments into the margin.

[Edit: it seems that I cannot type Unicode characters into a comment here...]

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the immediate connection to context, but it has some sore-thumb- sticking-out flaws.

-As already mentioned, the expanded comment itself obscures the very context a system like this is designed to provide.

-It also obscures the comment unless you click on it, and provides very little reference for finding a comment you've already looked at, and that you want to see again. Telling your users too little about what they're clicking on and what they've already clicked on is breaking one of the most basic commandments of good web U.I. design.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool but it offers awful usability.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, for reading comments its not very nice, but still the beginnings of something that could be really cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This comment system is inspired by a post on Jack Slocum's blog, entitled "WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI" [http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/2006/10/09/my-wordpress- comme...](http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/2006/10/09/my-wordpress-comments- system-built-with-yahoo-ui-and-yahooext/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Related: Commentpress (built as a theme for Wordpress) <http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So I've just been getting into Django and came across this. I can't recall seeing context based commenting like this anywhere before, pretty cool.

<comment><USER7> Patri Friedman's Seasteading (<http://seastead.org/commented/paper/intro.html>) has the same system. Much uglier, but the same idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those comments don't show up in IE, just an FYI

<comment><USER9> Django doesn't want feedback from IE users. Show me an IE user with something intelligent to say!

<comment><USER10> Oh come on let's get off our high horse and accept the fact that there will be people who are going to use IE no matter what. I believe it is our job as web developers ergo Hackers to try very very hard to make our software easy to use as much as possible and make it work on the widest variety of browsers as much as possible. Which means staying up late at night to find a way for our apps work on all major browsers including IE. When I develop I have four browsers open at the same time (FF, IE7, Opera and Safari). Yeah I know it pisses us off to no end when IE doesn't play nice (which will always do in some point). But I can't just go to sleep when I find a bug in my software...no matter how small or big it is.

<comment><USER11> "when I find a bug in my software"

Hrmm... for me, mostly it's a case of finding bugs in IE, and creating work- arounds in my own code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> very interesting concept for embedded comments(check out viddler.com for some idea only with video) though agreed the usability could be improved. maybe list comments in a left column?

</comment><comment><USER13> seen this used before for another project but for the life of me can't remember where... they standardized this comment system into an install even...</comment>


Supercharge your Sublime Text 3 to increase your productivity - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/super-charge-your-sublime-text-3-to-increase-your-productivity-5d02c2c1b356#.jl2arxtch <comment><USER2> Good article. Sublime Text has a lot of power up its sleave. I think a lot of people ditch Sublime for vim or emacs because they want a more powerful editor without trying to learn the more advanced features of Sublime and customize it to their liking.

I was one of these people, I spent 6 months using Vim and 6 months using Emacs, but eventually came back to Sublime because I could customize it with plugins (like Vintageous) that made it even more powerful and productive than Vim or Emacs. Especially because I wasn't constantly wasting time debugging bugs created by interactions between the piles of hacks all the Vim/Emacs plugins used.

I spent 6 entire months contributing to Spacemacs fixing bugs and broken things and there was no end to them in sight. I realized that while I switched to Emacs to get more work done on my projects, I ended up ditching all my projects in order to fix broken Emacs things. That's when I switched back to Sublime.

<comment><USER3> I started to wonder if Sublime would suit me.

I am for many years now primarely vim user. I use it now mainly, because I've got used to it and it's available everywhere. I was once a no-mouse-only- keyboard user, but now it all seem like busy-work. I would prefer just to point out what I want. I am not affraid of typing as I mainly use command line and like to use ocasional pipeline with some awk scripting to achieve output that I want. I find Unix toolset more approachable than vim.

It's just that I feel like every magic incantation of vim commands spends my mental energry. I feel smart after some complex edit with only a couple of keystrokes, but a bit less focused at real issues. Editing is such a small part of programming. I understand that people may not have such problems, but that's me.

My dream editor would be something like Acme [0], but a bit more modern. I even started doing my own experimental editor [1] inspired by Acme. I mainly want a mouse driven editor with easy ties to shell. Unfortunately my development pace has been glacial for some time.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_\(text_editor\))

[1] [https://github.com/hadrianw/werf](https://github.com/hadrianw/werf)

<comment><USER4> I am kinda thinking the same way. What I liked so much about your comment is that I found myself in pretty same position.

I used vim for a few years, got used to that zsh+tmux combo, and my environment was mostly wrapped around Vim (not UNIX like I thought it was). Then after I gave Emacs a shot, I used GUI version, and I saw that it is not the end of the world because I didn't use it as in-terminal editor. I am seriously reconsidering ditching everything and go to Sublime.

Why? It's fast, sleek and it does the job. With Emacs I start working on something, and few hours later I am like "why the fuck am I writing lisp and tweaking emacs". I get it, people that used it during 90s, and for 10+ years, they are set in the stone, and why would they switch. But now I really reconsider my options. Vim is much better in that aspect, I spent years with it and have it much or less to my liking, but I always come to some edge case where I change editor.

For example, I want to practice few exercises from SCIP I need Emacs, because Lisp programming in Emacs is so effortless and good. I want to write some Go I jump to Vim because vim-go just works perfectly for me. When I am doing some admin work on system I run Vim, but when I want to play with Clojure I need to go back to Emacs. You see the trend? How would Sublime cover all those functional languages, is it any good?

If I could have extremely light version of Emacs, that worked in terminal, much better and much more flexible than og Emacs, with good support for REPLs. When you break the no-mouse barrier, you see huge boost of productivity, but later after some time it diminishes and returns. I know I do not want Electron based editor. Terminal preferably but not the key. Something swift and clean. Vim does the job 80% of time but functional languages just work better inside Emacs.

I am holding my breath for Xi Editor [0]. It's written in rust, has some interesting abstractions and implementations, native is priority, and overall looks like potential checker for all my boxes. But it is nowhere near to the point of replacing vim or emacs for me. I rambled too much...

[0] [https://github.com/google/xi-editor](https://github.com/google/xi-editor)

<comment><USER2> I really suggest you try out Sublime with Vintageous vim emulation. Part of the reason I spent so much time tweaking emacs is that I work in a lot of different languages, and I had to spend many hours setting up each one. Installing and working with new languages in Sublime tends to just work.

With Sublime I tend to use a separate terminal app for doing all my code running and things. So if I'm working in a REPL-like language I do it there. There's also plugins for most languages that do the editor integration I actually want, like autocomplete and highlighting.

<comment><USER4> The thing is, Emacs can have amazing, if not best support for any language, but if you install it, set it up and tweak it until molecule level. Which is great, but it kinda tires me, you know...

Now, how you manage using separate terminal and Sublime, I mean is there any communication between REPL and Sublime, or you just copy/paste code from editor to REPL? Since in Emacs you can evaluate snippets, functions and do all that nifty stuff... Actually I am afraid maybe to jump and give Sublime a shot, but now it looks like I got nothing to lose. If I manage to cope with REPL in separate terminal app I think I am sold. Magit was nice, but I am fairly proficient in terminal git so it's not a deal breaker, and I never used org-mode (I love paper notebooks for that), so I might be able to adopt to certain extent.

<comment><USER2> When I'm using a REPL I generally have all my function definitions in a file I edit in Sublime, which I reload from the REPL, then I just type in commands in the REPL to try out those functions. That way I don't have to copy-paste much, but if you don't like that style I think a Sublime plugin that used Applescript to paste into iTerm2 wouldn't be too hard.

Also for git there is [https://github.com/divmain/GitSavvy](https://github.com/divmain/GitSavvy) which is almost as good and sometimes better than magit. There's also terminal git, I generally use a combination of terminal and GitSavvy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are a few staple packages mentioned here, but this post largely just repeats the Sublime docs [1][2], which are easier to read IMO.

Wes Bos has a book _Sublime Text Power User_ [3] if you're looking to do even more advanced things, especially with workflows.

[1]: [https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/](https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/)

[2]: [http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/index.html](http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/index.html)

[3]: [https://sublimetextbook.com/](https://sublimetextbook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> That's a pretty neat article. Currently I'm trying to get away from Sublime because it's closed source. I considered Lime Text, the OSS clone, but that project seems to be dead. So I settled for vim. I'm still not as productive as with Sublime, but I'm getting there. Does anybody know a similar article for vim or other editors?

<comment><USER7> I'm using Visual Studio Code and absolutely loving it. If you document your code (JSDoc) etc, the IntelliSense is absolutely incredible. There's a vibrant plugin community, the only flaws I have found so far:

* You can't add multiple folders to a project. This is fucking irritating. * The git plugin doesn't work on subfolders - IE because of problem number one, I put a group of (say, microservices) into a parent folder and add that, which in turn breaks the Git plugin.

If you can ignore those things it's bloody brilliant. Obviously after you've added a bunch of extensions and stuff to spruce it up.

It _feels_ faster than Atom, too.

<comment><USER8> My flaws:

1) Uses Chrome's font renderer - it looks terrible on Windows

2) Indent = Tab size

3) Themes can't properly customize some key on-screen assets

4) No macro recording/playback

5) Can't edit enormous files

Other than that the add-on ecosystem can be a bit fiddly, and you won't find syntax highlighting for more oddball things that you'd 100% find for vim or Emacs.

Oh, and sometimes it ends up using 100% of the CPU in the V8 GC. Might be add- on related.

<comment><USER9> 1b) Electron is horrible bloat. Sublime uses 70 (idle) to 250 (lots of tabs) mb. VS Code and Atom both use 200-300Mb even when idling.

<comment><USER8> I don't really mind the static overhead as long as it stays fast and if it could deal with 'larger than memory' files sensibly. Alas, it does neither.

I'm very hesitant to standardize on a non-OSS editor, though, so I think Sublime is out for me.

<comment><USER9> Ideally I'd like to use OSS for everything I can (and sometimes you can, see Transmission), but at times the non-OSS variant is simply the lesser of two evils. I'd rather use native Atom + native Gitkraken, but alas, that'd cost me nearly a gig of ram simply for idling. I won't stand by that kind of inefficiency.

<comment><USER10> Shouldn't you use the best tools for the job though? Unless you really need that last GB of RAM, it just seems like you're punishing yourself for the sake of an ideal, all to no greater consequence.

A gig of RAM is probably less than a tenth of your total resources. If it makes your job easier, surely it's worth it, no?

<comment><USER9> The gig of RAM is not the only thing. It works worse on large files. It's not nearly as fluid. Multiselect sometimes craps out. Searches take longer. Battery life is less.

I ideologically like the idea of OSS, but I'm past sacrificing usability for it. Hence I'm on a MacBook with macOS coding in Sublime with 12h battery life, instead of on a XPS13 with ElementaryOS coding in Atom with 7h battery life. Or a bulky, ugly Lenovo with great battery life but a horrible touchpad and a shitty screen. But on all of those situations I'd torrent with Transmission, because it looks beautiful, is consistent, and to top it all off is the lightest and smoothest torrent client there is.

<comment><USER10> > The gig of RAM is not the only thing. It works worse on large files. It's > not nearly as fluid. Multiselect sometimes craps out. Searches take longer. > Battery life is less.

These things are true. I still use Atom on my MacBook Pro though because it has, at least in my corner of the world, a much better ecosystem than Sublime. I do keep Sublime around for the rare cases where Atom can't handle something, but if I didn't already have a Sublime license, I wouldn't feel the need to pick one up: Vim is more than capable of handling the large-file case for me. We all have different experiences though.

> Or a bulky, ugly Lenovo with great battery life but a horrible touchpad and > a shitty screen.

The new X1 Carbon with the OLED panel is pretty good, I think. Color accuracy is something of an issue, but it does cover Adobe RGB and should be fantastic for anything other than professional-level color-critical work. That's neither here nor there though.

<comment><USER9> What is it that you have in the Atom ecosystem that's (or a substitute) not installable through Sublime's package control?

> The new X1 Carbon with the OLED panel is pretty good, I think. Color > accuracy is something of an issue, but it does cover Adobe RGB and should be > fantastic for anything other than professional-level color-critical work. > That's neither here nor there though.

Just Googled it. Just from the Google images:

* Why is there 'Thinkpad' sprayed on lower-right corner? Ugly and useless.

* Touchpad mouse buttons, circa 1990

* Red-black color scheme

* Mouse nipple (I know this is Lenovo thing and people actually buy them for it)

I realize style is subjective, but very few people are going to pick the X1 over either the Macbook or the XPS13 in terms of design. And design matters. Not only in a 'oh this looks nice way', people are actually measurably more productive on attractive gear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice article, ideal to get new users started with ST. Couple of remarks:

\- fuzzy search example uses ctrl-p, should be ctrl-shitf-p

\- idem for wrap lines example

\- _Put your cursor on a word, then hit ctrl+d it will select that word._ just double-clicking seems faster (though I reckon if you'll be using ctrl-d repeatedly afterwards anyway it might not matter)

</comment><comment><USER12> Some nice tips. ST was great for me for Python work, but became borderline unusable for me because of one weird thing. In HTML mode it autocompletes snippets based on the empty string.

So typing ">" \+ Enter or even " " \+ Enter inserts the  snippet. So I literally can't insert a newline at the end of any content without hitting escape.

Doesn't seem to happen in other languages. But I couldn't find how or why or how to prevent it. So I gave up. In a related note, I found documentation a bit limited.

<comment><USER2> I set my autocomplete/snippet expansion key to tab (it's a Sublime setting) so that I never have any conflicts.

Sublime actually tries harder than other editors to avoid these, but it's not perfect. See for example [https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/blob/master/Ruby/Compl...](https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/blob/master/Ruby/Completion%20Rules.tmPreferences) which stops it from autocompleting on common end of line keywords in Ruby. This wasn't a default in Emacs so I had to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to do this myself before I could do newlines: [https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/174](https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/174)

I'm not sure there are any editors that have auto-complete on enter but don't have any issues with conflicts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love Sublime Text, I use it for non-development work such as writing text files because of the ease of use.

Would love to venture more into the terminal/tmux/vim land but not lose a lot of the nice key bindings that I have been accustomed to with Sublime. I feel like this is the natural progression of being a productive hacker but will wait probably until the end of the year before making the switch.

<comment><USER5> > I love Sublime Text, I use it for non-development work such as writing text > files because of the ease of use.

It's also one of the only programs that has never lost any of my data, even in the extremely rare event that it crashes it's always preserved everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hate sublime text's vertical editing. It jumps around when I would rather just have it do actual block highlighting the way every other editor that supports block highlighting does it.

If anyone knows how to force it to do that I'm all ears, it's easily my biggest complaint about ST3.

</comment><comment><USER15> I used to use sublime until recently I started to use Atom and one of the things I like is that you can easily sync your settings to a github gist so that you can use your config across systems

<comment><USER16> You can sync your settings with Sublime as well, although you use a file sharing service (ie; Dropbox).

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't suggest using Dropbox as it has its own problems. Head over to the other article to see how it can be done easily (and safer) with github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Trying Atom for funsies. Will be back to sublime soon

</comment><comment><USER18> Project files (.sublime_project) are very powerful and one of the major features I miss in VSCode.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's too bad Atom isn't as fast or faster than Sublime Text 3. I just can't go back to Sublime Text now, Atom is good enough.

<comment><USER20> What does Atom bring to the party that Sublime Text 3 doesn't?

All I can of (off the top of my head) is slower and chews more memory but is open source.

<comment><USER19> Everyone develops packages for it, and they're much more actively supported than ST3 packages. It's really the ecosystem.

<comment><USER21> My experience is that the overall Sublime packages are much more stable and do not need so much rework and maintenance. I cannot even count how many times Atom packages failed (maybe it's also just because I cannot see fancy failing error messages of packages in Sublime).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Kickstarter Goes Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/15/when-kickstarter-goes-wrong-were-419-backers-almost-taken-for-a-27637-ride/

<comment><USER2> It is really hard to separate naivete from greed and from general cluelessness in situations like this and even with a little weirdness on the part of the guy who started the Kickstarter project we're still talking about a situation where nobody actually lost any money.

Maybe he sat down one day and thought: "Hey, I'd like to rip people off by making up a fraudulent wi-fi enabled power socket." but to me it seems more likely that he had an idea kicking around for a while and then found Kickstarter and thought "Hey, I bet I can make this for $20 a unit" only to find out that was unrealistic and he got freaked out by the situation.

Maybe I'm the one that is naive but in a situation where nobody was actually harmed and there is at least some question of the culpability of the "suspect", maybe we shouldn't rush to judge them.

<comment><USER3> I tend to favor the non-malice-based explanation too, but in this case it's looking bad. The article documents a couple of lies (patent pending, etc.), the person doesn't seem to exist at all, and he also magically transformed into some chick at the end. Looks like a scam got snuffed.

If it weren't a scam, KickStarter would probably say so vociferously too.

<comment> X-Istence I don't think that is necessarily true ... Kickstart themselves have said that they don't closely follow each project and it is up to the backers to decide whether they feel it is worth their money or not.

The whole idea of Kickstarter is to allow family and friends to help you with your idea and to spread that idea by word of mouth, but it provides a great incentive to make sure that you do complete the project and make good on your promises, because your friends and family are going to be there asking about it in real life. That is a little bit more difficult to do online, when it is so easy to fake who you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing went wrong. Everything worked exactly as it is supposed to.

He put it out there to see if there was interest. There was. He did more research. He realized he couldn't succeed. He didn't take any money.

There's no fraud, no intent to deceive or steal. Everything is on the up-and- up except for one thing:

There are people calling for his blood simply because they are jealous or disappointed. He was aiming to do something they couldn't, so they started calling him a fraud. And when he admits he really couldn't, and hasn't taken any money, people continue to call him a fraud.

It's ridiculous. I'm sick of people treating people as guilty before there's any proof whatsoever.

<comment><USER5> From the update posts, it looks like they're still trying to take money from this - just outside of Kickstarter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kickstarter is not an investment. It's a donation based on a story and a non- legally binding promise.

If you treat it as more than that you are deluding yourself.

</comment><comment><USER5> Skipping over the need for an electrician to install the things, good luck building a wifi-controlled wall outlet in small quantity for $20. A cheap solid-state relay is already going to run you at least $5 in 1ku quantity. Then add the radio and its power circuit and the control logic and do at least a tiny bit of safety testing.

Here's another one that was really suspicious, mainly because of listed specs vs. package vs. power. They also didn't have a prototype or any detailed info to support the feasibility of their renders.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zioneyez/eyeztm-by- zione...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zioneyez/eyeztm-by-zioneyez-hd- video-recording-glasses-for)

<comment><USER7> Heck, good luck making an effective wall-socket with a cheap solid-state relay at all! Waste power will add up fast, and may even _heat up_ fast!

<comment><USER5> Usually need a 2 or 3 cm square heatsink. But fat lot of good that will do once you enclose it in a metal box and stick it in a wall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think of kickstarter as a tool for putting my money where my mouth is.

BTW, in my experience KS works really well. Of course I use to only back people with experience making what they want to do, people that have prototypes already designed and functional that only needs to sell a mass produced version.

As they say: "real artist ship", so the first thing people do is look for proofs that a maker is really a maker and not a snake oil salesman.

</comment><comment> X-Istence I see Kickstarter as a sort of gamble, am I willing to part ways with my money and never see it again.

I hope off course that everything goes off without a hitch and I do get what I paid for and helped the inventor achieve his/her dreams. There are worse things I could be spending money on ...

I too was a backer of the TechSync project, mainly because I have thought of, laid out PCB designs and written software to do something similar using 900 Mhz transceivers and my BOM at the moment comes out to $60 or so... I wanted to see how Steve Washington and Co could do it for less, and that was worth the $20 gamble.

</comment><comment><USER9> I suggest we will soon see an airBNB style situation developing with kickstarter. Right now, kickstarter is still hipster, fairly new, nice crowd, soon that will change and it's entire proposition will be taken advantage of by those who just want the money. Enjoy it while you can.

<comment><USER10> AirBnB is in worse situation because few people are involved. On Kickstarter there are at least hundreds of people involved in average project so chances that someone will notice fraud are much higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know whether, if you were to create a fake project and get it funded then just walk away with the cash, there would be any legal action from KickStarter themselves, and/or the potential for legal action from one or more of the backers?

I figure that, because of the "it's not a guarantee that the person(s) you back will succeed", it ought to be possible to successfully come across as a legitimate person who did his best, spent all the funds on the project and ended up not managing to actually finish it.

<comment><USER12> I suppose it would depend if any fraud has been committed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know very little about body language, but one thing that has stuck in my mind is that people tend to look away from you and usually into the corner of the room when they are lying.

Watching the video, his eyes go away from the camera when he is making many claims including:

"fantastic team"

"the system is up and going in just a matter of minutes"

"it does it pretty accurately"

<comment><USER14> I've always thought this was an old wives tale--Someone looking away isn't a reliable indicator that someone is lying and someone looking you in the eye and saying something with seeming authenticity is not enough to verify truth (Watch a politician lie or have to back pedal and see if they look anywhere but directly at the camera--"I did _not_ have sexual relations with that woman"...) I think it's more accurate that not looking someone in the eye suggests nervousness, so the question becomes are they nervous because they're lying or nervous because they're socially awkward in general or ...

For this particular story though, seems like the facts don't add up, I'd be pretty hesitant to give this guy money... Although kickstarter seems pretty safe now, people will take advantage, and I'm interested to see if things like kickstarter, airbnb, bitcoin, etc. will be capable of self-regulation in the long run. I give it 50/50.

<comment><AUTHOR> Used as only one point of data you're right it's not reliable. False negatives and false positives.

But used in conjunction with other info that has been collected it certainly adds to the picture in coming to a conclusion.

Also keep in mind that in this particular case he was speaking to a camera not a person.

I do this trick with people to try to guess their name. I have them name three possible names with one the real name. If you do that enough you will begin to pick up on mannerisms when someone is saying their real name vs. a made up name. Of course it only normally works the first time and never if they know how to avoid tipping me off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it's hard to blame the incidence of fraud, which is as old as humankind, on Kickstarter.

</comment><comment><USER16> i thought it was great that Amanda Palmer and her new multi millionaire husband, Neil Gaiman (19 million)used kickstarter to fund their tour.

<comment><USER17> Is Neil Gaiman really that wealthy? I mean, obviously he's well off because his book sell so well, but even Obama didn't make 19 million off his books.

<comment><USER18> He gets movie royalties, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let me add some background to this and why I posted the original link the other day (which got no interest interestingly enough which is a discussion in itself). (And yes I called it fraud in the headline I should have said "could have been fraud")

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3001326>

I had contacted Washington back in July and asked the following question:

"Can I get a link to your credentials or your linkedin page? I'm ready to support this I'd just like to know more about your qualifications to do this particular project. Thanks."

I didn't hear back so 4 days later I wrote again with the same exact question.

The response I received was:

"Thank you for your interest in our project. However, at this time, I am not a Linkedin user. I'm honestly not a fan of the site."

To me (and this is important) given lack of other information on this project this was a red flag.

The issue to me though with kickstarter is not this specific case and what Washington intended to do. He could have taken the money with good intentions to build the device and simply failed. And people would be out whatever money they put in. That's why I wrote to ask questions. Its obvious though that the "public" didn't think the same way and gave him money.

Alternatively the fact is that it would have been fairly easy for Washington to do all the right things, collect money, and make off with that money very easily. Right things that might have even fooled me. It's not hard to come up with an identity. On linkedin as anyone who uses it now knows you can easily put up credentials and get people to be your contacts. You can easily put up a site you could even put up a site and make it appear that you run or work at an actual company. You could simply copy the website of a legitimate engineering company and change a few names and identifying information and make a convincing site.

Now nothing about this is new of course you could have done this before kickstarter and defrauded people.

It's just easier now. Part of the friction is gone. Kickstarter makes it easy to throw something out there and collect money. Collect a lot of money. We're not talking selling something on ebay with buyer protection and karma.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone else noticed the irony in "419 backers"?

<comment><USER20> Exactly what I wanted to comment on.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could you give up flying? - <AUTHOR> Let's just assume flying is bad for the environment (regardless of the mounting evidence). But, could you give it up? Disclaimer:I have asked this in a previous thread I know. I just want to know if people think they actually could. <comment><USER2> I suppose the question is better phrased as "would you give it up?". Anybody who says "I can't give it up" will probably change their mind if the tickets cost 10x more.

I live over 18000 km (well over 10k miles) away from my home town, and I like to visit my family from time to time, and 25+ hours of air travel is bad enough as it is so traveling by ship is out of question. So I probably wouldn't give up flying altogether, as long as the price isn't too high.

However, I'd be willing to refrain from taking domestic flights (but then I normally use the trains anyway) and cut down on non-essential international travel.

Ultimately, the main factor in changing people's habits will be economic e.g. via a tax that captures the negative externalities.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with the tax argument, but it is such an economic disadvantage that any country adopting it would lose out to those that didn't.

Any government imposing a tax like that will be hugely unpopular.

I don't think it will ever happen at a govt level. It really is s case of each individual taking the choice.

Smoking could be a good analogy here, with regulation coming into place. But that took 50+ years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Could I give up transporting myself on planes? Yes.

Could I give up air _freight_? Uh-oh. Despite overland transport options, despite New Panama, removing air freight would hurt, a lot, directly and indirectly. But yeah, I guess I would get used to the new, planeless world economy - even though it would be a very different world from today's JIT industrial one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, local manufacture/fabrication is the only thing that may make a dent in this.

<comment><USER3> The whole shipping industry would move an order of magnitude slower though: bulk container freight still moves via ocean, but inland? Rail could become much more valuable.</comment></comment></comment>


Life moves pretty fast. Here are things that help you slow down - <AUTHOR> http://www.goodbytes.be/blog/article/life-moves-pretty-fast.-here-are-5-things-you-can-do-to-slow-down

<comment><USER2> I do enjoy a good run, but I feel like walking gets a bad rap. Running will help you feel great, walking will help you think straight. That's what I say, anyway.

Will Self did an Authors@Google session where he talks about what I found to be a in incredibly liberating and enlightening idea. He recommends breaking the matrix of your daily to-and-from work/school/whatever commute by literally walking all over the parts of town you'd normally drive right past on your way to work. Under the bridges, over hills, through the parks, etc. You end up developing a much broader visual reference of the places you mindlessly go through on a daily basis, but more importantly, I think, you develop a deeper sense of place.

Anybody with an hour to kill should check out the talk he gives, as he can do it justice better than I can:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVEgOiB7Bo8>

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the first sentence in the title a Ferris Bueller reference? If it's not, it'd be cooler if it was.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't know about that, I thought it was a common thing to say about life :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The straight razor advice is the funniest byte of lifehacking I've read for years... of course, knowing how "handy" I am with things (managed to get a friend bleeding from his eye by misusing an umbrella...), I'd say pass to it, however "zen" it may sound :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey nnq, it took me months to master using a straight razor, but it's definitely worth it if you're willing to spend the time on it :). I could have written "take a sauna", which is equally relaxing to me, but just costs more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good tips, for those who don't have kids! Good inspiration for me to write a blog post about the same subject while having 2 munchkins running around for 12 hours a day.

<comment><USER6> Indeed using a straight razor while children are running around might slow down a person permanently.

A double edged razor with brush and soap sounds like a good compromise. Saves quite a bit of money eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.flickr.com/photos/stepheniliffe/6270719804/>

<comment><USER8> Link goes to a photo of a subway poster of Mahatma Ghandi and the quote, "There is more to life than increasing its speed."

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't find that link. Can you tell me where you found that link so I can fix it?

<comment><USER8> Oh, I was just explaining rajdevar's link, which was posted without any context. Sorry about the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a good thought piece. These are all things that require cognitive energy by don't overlap with "work", in that they are tangible, analog, and habituated differently. That being said, these things won't "slow you down" unless _you make time for them_ first. That's the point he's trying to make, but its worth repeating. It's like spending "more", but on a higher quality of X (time, not money). You have to spend less somewhere else, though, to keep the budget in check.</comment>