I almost lost my hearing from the lid on the tank of a toilet - <AUTHOR> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/979583605637877760.html <comment><USER2> My hearing was ACTUALLY permanently damaged when a sticky iron weight fell on a leg press machine at a 24-hour fitness about 5 years ago.

The weights looked like these: [http://www.presentationzen.com/.a/6a00d83451b64669e201156eb4...](http://www.presentationzen.com/.a/6a00d83451b64669e201156eb409b4970c-450wi)

One extra weight slab was "stuck" to the group that was supposed to get lifted. It was stuck because the weights at the gym were grimy from many years of use without being cleaned. The extra slab, when it reached the top, finally detached and slid down maybe 20-30 inches, and made a sound that everyone in the gym heard, but right next to my ear. A few people even made angry faces at me for being a noisy lifter.

Ever since then, to this day, I have had tinnitus in that ear, and many sounds come in like "static", for lack of a better explanation.

All I can say is be careful with those weights if they get sticky, and if they are near your ear...

<comment><USER3> It may recover with time.

When I was a teen I dismantled a shotgun cartridge and removed the shot and paper charge (lots of tiny paper discs). I stuffed them down the thick end of a car telescopic antenna cut to about 4" with the end folded over. I threw in a couple of pieces of lead shot, tamped it down with a piece of paper, stuck the tube under a rock and set up a paper target 6" away. I was optimistic.

Then, with a friend, held a lighter under the closed end. Fortunately I was to the side. Predictably it fired out the back... it was very loud.

Possibly the stupidest thing I've ever done. It could have gone wrong is so many way. The adolescent brain is a strange thing.

The ringing lasted a few years but went away.

<comment><USER4> I'm 42 years old and spent much of my teens and early 20s going to loud rock shows, raves, etc.

I was rather stupid and always tried to get right up to the PA speakers at the front. I did not wear hearing protection. Many times I left shows with ringing for hours and that feeling like there is cotton stuffed in your ears for days. Not a handle of times - dozens of times.

By my mid 20s it appeared I had tinnitus around the 8k area, which really freaked me out and immediately caused me to change my habits. Also around this time I got into headphone audio in a big way. I got an SPL meter and made sure to never go above 85dBs for extended listening sessions.

By my mid 30s the tinnitus had dissipated considerably. Now it's effectively gone, at least that I can tell (ie. not aware if there is psychological compensation happening). My hearing is great too, right ear at 17.5 kHz, left ear at 16.9.

[http://www.electronicbeats.net/can-we-cure-tinnitus-by- liste...](http://www.electronicbeats.net/can-we-cure-tinnitus-by-listening-to- music-or-using-an-app/)

<comment><USER5> I'm 43 years old, and in my 20s I went to a few loud rock shows. I had the same experience as you for days afterwards, but at the last one I attended without hearing protection, something funny happened in my right ear. It was like someone turned the tone control right down, and loud noises would distort so badly I couldn't make anything out.

A while later, I was watching a Scrubs episode where one of the characters ruptured an ear drum. That sound closely matched what I remembered hearing, so I've worn hearing protection to every concert since. Even had people make fun of me for it, but as soon as I say "probably ruptured an eardrum at a concert," they stop laughing.

I have tinnitus from a different cause, though. When I was very small, 5 or 6 years old, one of my mother's boyfriends would haul me around by my ears. I remember that my ear started ringing one day, and it never stopped.

I have two tones in one ear, and I think three in the other. 37 years later and it's as bad as it ever was, sadly. I have learned to just tune it out, but I can still hear it if I choose to - annoyingly, when I choose to hear it, I have to wait until I forget about it.

edit: Forgot to note, the ringing is very, very high pitched. Remember what CRT televisions would sound like when you turned them on? Higher pitched than that.

<comment><USER6> I literally cannot understand the mentality of people who'd make fun of you for wearing hearing protection at gigs. I go to a lot of gigs (like multiple times a week) and "simply trusting" that the sound engineer won't push the volume up into hearing damage territory is... naive at best.

Please folks, use protection. I like Etymotic earplugs, but to be honest i'm not even sure if they're "heavy enough", but my pain threshold is pretty low i think. In any case since i've been consistently using ear protection i've almost never had the ringing thing after concerts, which makes me rather glad.

<comment><USER7> It seems to be in the same bucket as people not wearing seat belts and making fun of you if you ask them to wear one in a car with you.

If it's not something everyone does, and if you mention you do it for safety, the reaction is often rather negative. I think people don't like the idea that they might have been doing something very unsafe this whole time.

<comment><USER8> Well if I'm passenger in a car with someone who won't wear seatbelts then _my_ reaction will become rather negative until they put the damn things on. If we got in a car accident, I may be secure with belts, but I don't want _their_ body parts flopping in my face either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A little PSA: there is some evidence that magnesium can help prevent/cure acute noise-induced hearing loss. Google returns several reputable studies.

Also: earplugs, earplugs, earplugs. I keep foam earplugs on me at all times. I have some in my fifth pants pocket, I keep some in a pill container on my keyring, some in my backpack, in my car, etc. I cut them in half; the half size fits easier and takes up less space, and the slightly lower sound attenuation is actually more useful for me in most circumstances.

I go through a lot of ear plugs this way, and a few years ago I realized that some of them degrade over time such that they become roughly half as effective. The closed cell foam seems to wear out somehow. I started wearing these degraded plugs more and more often, to the point that I now wear them most of the time. Always when I'm out of the house, and most of the time at home as well. They can be cleaned by soaking in alcohol. Alcohol works well on ears too, but most people's ears need no or very sparse cleaning.

I've worn these low-performance earplugs nearly non-stop for years now and my hearing has recovered some of the sensitivity of my youth. When I started leaving them in all the time I was a bit like an elderly person, asking people to repeat themselves frequently. This went away as my sensitivity improved, and after maybe six months my plugged hearing was as good as my formerly unplugged hearing.

Now I kinda feel naked without them. If I'm doing something loud, like working on a table saw, I'll put in fresh ear plugs, or wear extra protection like muffs.

<comment><USER10> This is one of the weirder things I've ever read here and I read a lot of strange behaviors here. You wear earplugs full time man, that's not normal, you are missing out on unimpeded hearing due to a fear of hearing loss that likely is not based on science. Normal level sounds don't degrade hearing as far as I know and loud sounds aren't that common, certainly not enough to warrant wearing earplugs full time.

[https://www.american-hearing.org/disorders/noise-induced- hea...](https://www.american-hearing.org/disorders/noise-induced-hearing- loss/#intensity)

You could expose yourself to 8 hours a day of a lawnmower at 90 dB and 90% of the population would be fine.

<comment><USER11> It's not that strange. I wear earplugs (although they are low profile hidden ones) if I'm going to a loud venue, such as a really loud bar, or club, or a concert. It increases my enjoyment of these places and also makes it easier to have conversations with people.

<comment><USER12> Key phrase being... " if I'm going to a loud venue"

The guy above wears them 24/7

<comment><USER9> Well, I probably should have said, "nearly non-stop during waking hours". I leave them out at night.

Also note that my "all-day" earplugs are these certain ones that have lost a lot of their effectiveness due to aging or something. I go through enough earplugs that I end up with a lot of these. I'm guessing I get about 10-15 dB out of them, and my ears/brain have adapted to this level of attenuation so well that my "plugged" hearing is functionally as good as other people's unimpeded hearing. For example, I listen to music and TV at the same levels as everyone else, and I'm not asking people to repeat themselves any more than anyone else.

The habit of keeping them in at all times during waking hours just ensures they're in place when I need them, like when I drop a dish, or a sticky weight falls on a weight stack at 24-hour fitness, as in the top post in this thread. Shit like that happens all the time to me, and I got really sick of saying, "damn I should have had earplugs in."

EDIT: Also, cut them in half. Much more usable for me, they're almost as effective, and hardly noticeable. Very rarely does someone notice that I have them in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have mild tinnitus in one ear, from what I suspect was a friend screaming into my ear that she was going to the bathroom at a noisy club.

I'm relatively lucky, my hearing is still better than most, but it does suck.

I've decided I will never go to another club, and in bars I wear ear plugs. I have more to lose, since any additional damage will likely make my tinnitus more severe.

Seriously though, hearing is one of those things you don't think about until it's too late. Protect your ears.

<comment><USER14> I get to visit clubs/shows every few months and I always use a pair of musician earplugs, (Etymotic, standard - not custom fitted). It gives a nice and even attenuation, which after few minutes you don't even notice (other than perhaps slightly elevating very low frequencies relative to the rest).

Your mind is very quick to normalize the volume level anyway, no matter if you're with or without protection. Why suffer permanent damage then?

<comment><USER15> Which ones? I have these ([https://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Fidelity-Earplugs- ETY-Plugs-...](https://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Fidelity-Earplugs-ETY-Plugs- Standard/dp/B0044DEESS)) and to be frank, I dislike wearing them -- it just sounds worse.

That said, clubs/shows play music way too loud, and I occasionally hear the beginning of tinnitus, so I 100% agree that people should get a pair.

<comment><USER16> Those are the kind I use. They try to be flat but there's really nothing you can do to stop concert level bass from getting through, so they end up being a bit boomy. I've found that I can move them in or out of the ear to adjust the dampening. If they are in too far I tend to not like the way it sounds. I like it at the most minimal dampening I can get. It sounds good and it still keeps me from getting concert-ear.

Also I've noticed that I can hear the music much better with them in (when it's too loud I have a hard time distinguishing pitches—singers often sound like the Chipmunks) and some groups don't fare well when you turn down the volume a bit (they use volume to mask lack of ability).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > An audiologist friend told me to go to an ENT physician if not better by 48 > hours or the damage could be permanent. Much longer than that and it would > be too late to try any of the interventions

This seems like poor advice. If there is significant, realistic concern about permanent damage, I'd suggest checking immediately, rather than give it extra time...

<comment><USER18> Yes, I always find it amazing how patients can have a sudden sensorineural hearing loss and wait days before presenting.

In my opinion patients and the public should treat it as urgently as a sudden sight loss.

High dose steroids are regularly prescribed in this sort of scenario in an attempt to minimize damage, and are likely to be more effective the sooner they are given.

<comment><USER19> After hurting my neck in the shower, Me calling primary care: The earliest we can see you is next Tuesday Me skipping primary care & going to ER instead: After a 2 hour wait, I get condescendingly asked: why didn't you go to your primary care?

That's why patients wait days before presenting.

<comment><USER20> Then you get the $10,000+ bill because your insurance won't cover ER visits for non-emergencies

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2017/10/16/anthem...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2017/10/16/anthem- at-odds-with-your-decision-to-visit-the-er-and-refusing-to-pay-in-certain- states/)

[https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/1/29/16906558/a...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/1/29/16906558/anthem-emergency-room-coverage-denials- inappropriate)

<comment><USER21> Or you live in a country with no BS medical pricing, take 2 zeros from that value and you get a more realistic pricing estimate for places in Europe (or pretty much elsewhere, probably lower, apart from Japan and Australia, I'd say)

<comment><USER22> In Australia presenting at ER is free, for any reason.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the clarification (though if it's a non-emergency your wait might be longer - but that is valid regardless of the country)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I very recently thought I might have permanently damaged my eyesight.

I was working from a library, and stood to start closing up for the day. As I started to close my laptop, the screen (hi, glossy MacBook Pro) directly reflected the sun behind me.

For the next 15-20 minutes a significant portion of my vision in both eyes was wavy. I could still safely drive home, thankfully, but it was a severe distraction.

While I expected it to eventually clear up, it struck home how fragile my career is. (I know it's possible to be a blind software developer, but I'm not sure I could afford to take the short-term hit, assuming my employer wouldn't pay me to spend months relearning how to live and work.)

<comment><USER24> Glossy screens really ought to be buried in the trash heap of technological hype history. They're worse in every way than matte screens (and dangerous, as you point out) unless you live in a dark cave. It continually amazes me that so-called "high-end" products use them.

<comment><USER25> > They're worse in every way than matte screens

I was of that opinion until I decided to test it out. It doesn't hold up. Clarity is the main factor, I found. A matte screen must by definition diffuse light, which causes image to become blurry - and visibly so.

A glossy screen, for all it's annoying features, is just clearer and colors have an easier time being represented accurately. And most modern glossy screens now have anti-glare as well.

<comment><USER24> Screens should diffuse the image somewhat, to eliminate the high spacial frequency components pixel edges create. Not that a matte screen has ever prevented me from resolving individual pixels in a screen, even high DPI ones.

And sharp reflections on glossy screens make color-sensitive work difficult. Diffuse reflections are much easier to adjust for. Can you better support your claim that glossy monitors represent colors better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > This predicts 138 dB of sound.

I doubt that one can calculate the sound amplitude accurately without doing experiments or complex simulations here. It's possible that the toilet bowl or lid focused the sound like a satellite dish, and the protagonist's ear was in the exact wrong place at the wrong time.

Visual aid: [https://blueandgreentomorrow.com/energy/in-pictures-new- wave...](https://blueandgreentomorrow.com/energy/in-pictures-new-wave-of- tidal-energy-research-as-wave-tank-opens-in-edinburgh/)

<comment><USER27> Which is also mentioned in the article: "This lid was concave up like an antenna, near my face when it hit, focusing the energy into my face."

<comment><USER26> Thanks. The spherical wave assumption used in the calculation is not compatible with the focusing effect, and could be wildly wrong in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Tangentially related, I just suffered hearing loss from a completely unexpected source. After discontinuing anti-depressants I developed fairly intense tinnitus in both ears, and after 3 months it hasn't gotten any better. It's bad enough that I can't sleep at night without music playing fairly loud (loud for night, probably a pretty normal volume for music listening).

I researched and discovered that it's a known, somewhat common side effect, and it may be permanent. I count myself as a bit lucky, since it sometimes causes permanent deafness.

I'm pretty sure if my doctor had mentioned the possibility of going deaf, I would have chosen a different treatment.

<comment><USER29> Which medication?

<comment><USER28> Remeron, also known as mirtazapine.

<comment><USER29> Thank you for the data point. My psych offered that for consideration as a replacement for anxiety-inducing Effexor XR / Venlafaxine. I will explore alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> An unmentioned physiological consideration, remembered from a lecture long ago...

The rapid onset of the sound is an important factor. The ear has muscular reflexes that lessen the damage of loud sounds, but only if the onset of the sound takes longer than the time it takes the reflex to kick in. The toilet tank sound probably had onset approaching that of a square wave, so this neatly evaded the reflex.

Evolutionarily, one can understand why there was no need to protect the ear from loud rapid-onset sounds... those sounds don't exist widely in nature, e.g. a roaring waterfall roars continuously. Someone could smash two rocks together right next to your ear, but the fact that the rocks didn't smash your cranium is perhaps more important. :-)

<comment><USER31> To that end, Mercedes-Benz is playing around with technology to create a loud noise before the airbags deploy in a crash. The ideas is that by triggering this loud noise reflex, the ear will protect itself from the louder noises of airbag deployments.

<comment><USER32> Various cars have that already.

<comment><USER31> Such as?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if another issue is that the hard surfaces of the typical bathroom would make the energy reflect more before dissipating. Even worse if the dimensions of the bathroom lead to resonances with 3.5kHz.

Bathrooms are famously reflective, producing the reverberation that makes shower singing sound palatable.

</comment><comment><USER34> Another possible source of unexpected extremely loud noises: cleaning things with compressed air. If you blow it through a small orifice of the right dimensions then it can act as a whistle. The energy will be concentrated at one frequency, and compressed air generally blows a lot harder than lung power.

I first heard of this from a Youtube video, possibly from one of AvE's, although it could have been from somebody else's.

<comment><USER5> I bought a compressor a couple of years ago, and good grief is that thing noisy.

I always wearing hearing and eye protection when using it, and I'm glad for it. First time I tested the emergency release valve, I didn't know which direction it would release the air. If I hadn't been wearing safety glasses, I could have lost my eyes as it released directly into my face. I now have a rule of not allowing anybody in the workshop with me while using it, if they're not wearing both hearing and eye protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wouldn't make this up even I could. I am LITERALLY fixing the toilet mechanism with the tank lid off and checked HN while waiting for a hot glue gun to heat up. I'm thinking Pulp Fiction divine intervention.

<comment><USER36> I guess we take it as a given since no one here is talking about it, but why does the toilet lid need to be so overly heavy? Is there any specific functionality that requires it to be out of that material and so big?

<comment><USER37> you can buy light plastic toilet lids if you like, in fact, they are rather cheaper than the more solid kinds.

I don't think there's really anything wrong with plastic toilet seats, but they feel less good, I think, than the heavier, more solid toilet seats.

The worst, in my mind, are the foam/shag carpet covers. those just seem wrong and gross - I mean I imagine my reaction is completely irrational, but I remember once I moved into a very cheap aparment; the toilet seat was sealed plastic covering foam in a way that the toilet seat was actually cushioned. something about it really squicked me out; the first night I went to the hardware store and bought a regular solid toilet seat and installed it.

Personally, I like keeping a heavy seat and just installing a dampener hinge, though I suppose that wouldn't help if you drop it during installation.

<comment><USER38> This thread is regarding the lid to the toilet cistern, not the toilet lid itself.

<comment><USER37> Ah. A reading comprehension failure on my part. thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I work a lot in a wood shop/metal shop. I've always been a big proponent of ear protection. Recently, I've been using shure in ear monitors for blocking small sounds and supplementing with ear muffs when real tools are on. However, I've started to just wear those in ear monitors around even without listening to anything. The ear plug feature is actually really great. I can get on muni or bart in the Bay Area with them and listen to a book at 3-4 clicks of iPhone volume. It's pretty great to get used to things being quiet.

<comment><USER40> I've tried Shure (and other) earphones like this before, but could never stand the rustling of cable noise. Does that bother you at all, or do you have any recommendations for stopping it? I've tried shirt clips and cable loops, but nothing ever worked. For now, I use either over-ear noise canceling headphones or just AirPods.

<comment><USER41> Is there a Bluetooth option?

<comment><USER39> Yes, there is. I have it, and have found it to be quite good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> More than a decade ago, when I started listening to podcasts during commuting, I was worried I was cranking the volume too high to compensate fot external noise - trains, buses, traffic, etc.

So, I decided to buy a Shure sound-isolating phone. These are monitors for musicians in stage to hear to what they are doing while avoiding the extreme PA towers next to them. They're expensive, but high-quality and isolate noise VERY well.

Before, I listened to the podcasts at literally eleven or more (sounds like a joke, but that crappy MP3 player went from 1 to 12 or 15). After that, I listened at level 2, and even when the podcasts were over I left the earphones for ear comfort and protection.

Sadly, the model I had did not had replaceable cables and eventually, the cable worn out. Now I'm back to JBL earphone, which does help a little bit, but nowhere as near a Shure monitor. After reading OP and the comments, I'm considering spending the extra money on a monitor again.

<comment><USER43> I have had the same solution to the same problem for enough years now that I finally realized I could have just invested in some custom in-ear monitors and pay it back in terms of new headphones purchased after non-replaceable cables wear out. I did that over 4 years ago now and haven't regretted it yet.

[https://jhaudio.com](https://jhaudio.com) if you're looking for a specific recommendation, but there are many alternatives.

<comment><USER42> Thanks!

I'm definitely not an audiophile and I listen mostly to voice podcasts, such as NPR programming. Besides sound quality, is there any real advantage on these over low-end, detachable-cable Shure?

<comment><USER43> I'd check the level of noise isolation, since that is likely to be the main difference. Custom in-ear with wrapped tips (Comply) seems to be the best you can get (roughly -26 dB). They aren't total isolation -- I have fairly good hearing and can still hear people talking next to me if there's nothing playing through them -- but put any kind of sound through them at almost any volume and I might as well be alone.

<comment><USER42> These Comply tips seems perfect to me! Now I'm thinking on fitting them on my current JBL instead of upgrading my phone.

Many thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Remember yesterday's 'caloric restriction' supplement?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16717935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16717935)

Turns out it might also help with noise-induced hearing loss:

[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/286408.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/286408.php)

 _> Additionally, the team found that NR was equally effective when given both before or after the mice were exposed to the noise._

</comment><comment><USER45> Related: birds have the ability to regrow sensory hair cells in the ears after they have become damaged, [1]. Perhaps someday we'll be able to transfer this ability to humans.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17891722](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17891722)

</comment><comment><USER46> A rubber gasket on the tank lid would be nice. Quieter when placing it, and probably quieter when the tank is filling.

<comment><USER47> Also less likely to shatter when placing it, which is the primary cause of needing a whole new toilet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The word you're looking for is cistern. Other related parts of a toilet, include the ballcock, a name which I find particularly amusing.

</comment><comment><USER49> When I fix things in my house I usually wear ear muffs -- and gloves. Not sure I would have, just for tinkering with the toilet tank, but I will now!

(It's amazing how many things can go wrong and hurt you.)

<comment><USER50> And goggles of course!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> _A safer toilet bowl lid (!) should bust apart on impact, using up the energy by breaking molecular bonds._

Please, no. We don't need to substitute one injury type for another. I can only imagine the cuts that would result from a lid that breaks. A plastic or rubber liner on the top of the toilet tank would be sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER52> I once completely lost the hearing in my right ear. It was muted one day and completely deaf the next. I made an urgent appointment with my doctor and he said, "It's a virus, you're hearing will return in a week." I said, AYFKM? No, he wasn't kidding me. A week later, it returned in full.

<comment><USER53> You got really lucky. Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (what you had) is often permanent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've made a few free iOS apps for tinnitus, if anyone wants to try. They use masking therapy, so while not a permanent fix, they might help a little. [https://bxtel.com/serene.html](https://bxtel.com/serene.html)

</comment><comment><USER55> Unless you have experienced long term severe tinnitus + hyperacusis + hearing loss, it's impossible to understand how much such a combination reduces quality of life.

Sorry you have to go through this, OP.

</comment><comment><USER56> Now we'll have stickers saying: "These toilet lids are known to cause deafness in the State of California"...

</s>

</comment><comment><USER57> One other interesting point that could come up but wasn't in the calculations is the reflection of the sound of the toilet tank lid hitting the tank. Most toilets are put into little nooks with just a few open inches between the toilet and the wall it backs up to, and maybe a foot on either side of the toilet, making a little alcove. Sound will reflect off the walls rather than dissipating in all directions, which is effectively bringing you closer to the source of the sound, or making it louder.

</comment><comment><USER58> I actually got tinnitus from a Toshiba laptop 2,5" hard drive. The high pitched noise it made got worse gradually over time. By the time I realized it, it was too late.

</comment><comment><USER59> I very much believe that story. Damn ceramic made objects, they are loud af. A lot of ceramics have this peculiar property that puts them very high up on "noise to impact" ratio, or whatever you want to call it.

I remember my mom always complaining about not damaging plates because you can accidentally drop it from one inch and hear an unpleasant clattering. Because the sound it makes you'd think it fell much higher than that.

</comment><comment><USER60> That's insane! Never would of thought it would mess with your hearing. I figured just a nasty mess to clean up.

Our toilet seems like it wants to run every so often but usually wiggling the lever helps. I hate lifting that thing up, always imagine what a mess it would be if you dropped it.

I wish they made the tank lids out of plastic.

<comment><USER61> You could go the wall-mount toilet rout like you find in Europe. The only ceramic there is the bowl itself.

[https://www.homedepot.com/p/300820608](https://www.homedepot.com/p/300820608)

<comment><USER62> That looks much harder to get into the tank to fix things. Is it?

<comment><USER63> They can be completely serviced from the button cutout - you can remove any parts through it (it was designed this way). I think almost all newer toilets in Europe are wall mounted. It looks better, it's very quiet (refill), saves space and works exactly the same... Here is an example video how to take it apart [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es8SJ-1CFcU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es8SJ-1CFcU)

<comment> et-al It's serviceable, but it looks harder to access than a visible-tank toilet. At the 3m mark in the video, my hands are instinctively cramping just by looking at that tight space.

The difference is like working on a car in the 70s versus a Japanese compact car from the late 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> > Beef has an outsize environmental footprint. Per gram of protein, beef > requires on average 50 times more land and produces 100 times more > greenhouse gases than do beans and other plant-based proteins. Replacing 30% > of the beef with mushrooms in the roughly 10 billion burgers that Americans > eat each year would reduce emissions equivalent to taking 2 million cars off > the road, according to the World Resources Institute, an environmental think > tank in Washington DC.

How do they make this calculations? Is it a proper way to present scientific data on the best scenice journal in the world?

<comment><USER65> You seem to be on the wrong thread, fyi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I have some hearing damage from IED's, small arms fire, and such. I'm concerned about further hearing damage but what really terrifies me is Tinnitus.

The stories I've read are scary. People turning drugs to make the sounds stop. I already hear nearly constant brown noise. I can't imagine what a high pitched sound would do to me. Glad the author was ok.

<comment><USER5> As someone who's had it for.. what, 37 years, let me tell you that you shouldn't let it terrify you. You can train yourself to ignore the sound. Doesn't mean you don't hear it, just that you won't pay attention to it most of the time. When properly trained, it's little more than an irritation.

I'm more terrified of arthritis than I am of tinnitus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I once toasted a bread roll with a very round upper surface. It was very hard, and I was curious about breaking it. So I whacked it with a spoon and instantly all sound in the ear facing it was replaced by a ringing which faded slowly away over the next couple of minutes.

</comment><comment><USER68> I did a lot of metal work when I was young, hammering and grinding steel. I have tinnitus in both ears.

Ginko Biloba does a good job of getting rid of it. I have to take it daily or it comes back, and it takes a few days for it to start working, but it sure is nice to get rid of it.

</comment><comment><USER69> In the UK employers have to provide eye test vouchers for employees who use screen display equipment. I keep thinking that if the government knew anything about dev environments they'd be providing us with free hearing tests instead.

<comment><USER70> I don't get it, why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Apart from all the good discussion on hearing loss... now I'm thinking about "safer" toilets.

Why are lids made from ceramic anyway? I get why the bowl is, but the lid? Beyond the loudness / hearing loss issue, it's just so darn heavy!

<comment><USER72> > Why are lids made from ceramic anyway? I get why the bowl is, but the lid? > Beyond the loudness / hearing loss issue, it's just so darn heavy!

I've never seen a toilet that had a ceramic lid in Germany.

Is this just a US thing?

<comment><USER71> Ok, as an American I have to say I marvel at the toilet technology in other countries. For example you guys often have two buttons on your toilets -- a #1 and a #2 button. It _just makes sense._

What are the lids made out of then?

<comment><USER73> You can buy a toilet with two buttons in the US as well. Home Depot's web site says they have 17 of one model of them in stock at the store near me.

<comment><USER71> Yeah.. and yet most of us buy the Ferguson.[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL2YRDzpTL4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL2YRDzpTL4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> On a related note, a fun fact: the sound of the Saturn V rocket taking off would instantly vaporize anyone close enough. This is also true for the recently launched SpaceX Falcon assembly / Merlin rockets.

</comment><comment><USER75> Tank lid, or bowl lid? The author repeatedly switches between the two.

<comment><USER76> Tank lid:

> _" I was fixing the mechanism inside the tank of the toilet. The only thing > left to do was to put the ceramic lid back on the tank. Unfortunately it > slipped out of my hands and banged on the ceramic of the toilet rim."_

I'm guessing every other occurrence of "toilet bowl lid" is a typo due to the medium being Twitter.

<comment><USER73> Or the tank lid slipped and hit the bowl. That's not where it's supposed to go, but gravity might take it there anyway if you fail to get it on top of the tank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I have a lot of earwax build-up, so whenever I wear earplugs they stick out stupidly. But this thread has scared me to death, so I think I'll keep on using them.

<comment><USER78> Oh oh I have something to help you! I used to struggle with them sticking out, too -- but since I watched this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S6dthcSVIM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S6dthcSVIM)

I can pop them in and you can't even see them when you're looking at me head- on. You _have_ to use two hands to put them in -- pulling up on the ear is essential. The roll-down information is helpful, too.

Now, I can yawn and move my jaw every which way and the seal is never broken. Actually changed my life, since I wear earplugs for most of the night and a lot of the day.

<comment><USER77> Thanks for your reply, I'll try this! Anything to look less foolish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> This story would be even greater with diagrams / animations.

</comment><comment><USER80> This toilet lid clearly messed with the wrong guy !

</comment><comment><USER81> Great and to-the-point analysis.

</comment><comment><USER82> Super interesting reading!

</comment><comment><USER83> This is a neat story, but I continue to wonder why people use "tweetstorms" to write long-form stuff like that.

<comment><USER84> Many young people today can't comprehend a story unless it's broken down into small texts, like a child book, twitter, or any other chat app. As this is their only exposure to text. If you are a parent, force your kids to read books!

<comment><USER85> Have you got data to support that?

<comment><USER84> yes and no, I got told by a teacher. I tried looking at PISA et al. but it's really hard to find data. So I just take the teacher's word on it. It would be really interesting to see actual data. Even if the teacher and school plan is wrong I don't think it's bad to read more though.

<comment><USER85> I mean, if you got it off a teacher it is one example from one cohort from one age group in one country, so it isn't anything close to data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea Once when I was camping I decided to try to use a plastic bottle as a pillow. I put my head on it sideways and the plastic made a really loud pop and my ear instantly started ringing really loudly like nothing I've experienced before. I was deaf in that ear for about a minute while it rang and it terrified me. Luckily it went away.

More recently something happened to that ear. It started to get water in it every day then stopped getting water in it but now I have tinnitus in that ear.

Ears are extremely sensitive and it doesn't take much to damage them.

<comment><USER86> You may have a sticky wax or otherwise blocked ear that was trapping the water. Wax or other buildup in the ear can cause tinnitus (and of course attenuated hearing, ranging from imperceptible to completely muffled).

It would be worth going to see a doctor and get them to check inside your ears.

You certainly wouldn't want to spend weeks thinking you had permanent tinnitus or hearing loss when it could be as simple as an ear flush. I can tell you that from experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Damn, this is one smart plumber.

<comment><USER88> _Dr. Philip Metzger is a planetary physicist who recently retired from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He now is now at the University of Central Florida -- but still a part of the Swamp Works team_

\-- his website

<comment><USER87> Jesus Christ, so they don't pay him enough and he's fixing toilets on the side?

<comment><USER89> Fixing a toilet is dead simple, as are most household tasks. Either you'd have to be very rich to not have it be worth 1 hour of your time, since a plumber will surely be $100 at least, or you can't be bothered to watch a couple short videos on youtube.

<comment><USER47> Handyman is more like $50, and it's insurance against permanent hearing damage, breathing fiberglass, etc.

<comment><USER89> As an independent contractor, if you're charging $50/hour, I question your finances/skills unless you're in a very low cost area and even then it's pretty unbelievable. The risks for household tasks are so rare that they do not come into calculations, it's like worrying about tripping every time you take a step.

<comment><USER45> Isn't there a saying: most accidents happen at home?

<comment><USER20> Umm... I would assume most accidents happen where you spend most of your time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> How long until California requires a warning on every toilet and restroom?

(Yes, yes I'm joking)

</comment><comment><USER91> In the second World War, the tank of my uncle took a full hit on the turret while fighting the Russians and he was the only survivor. Tell him about bad hearing after bleeding out of both ears. :-)

</comment><comment><USER92> well that sucks</comment>


Discuss: "Friends with benefits" and Amazon? - <AUTHOR>

Yesterday I saw Friends with benefits movie , and there they would be mentioning about the redesign of Amazon(indirectly) website and then it striked me that there was a mention of it a couple of days , so i did a serach and found out it is indeed true, so i was thinking are they by any chance related or just coincidence? I got the doubt because Justin is an investor in some Valley companies. <comment><USER2> Happens all the time, movie studios typically have a team dedicated to product placement. They go through the script and mark any points where they could use a specific product and then sell that as an ad slot.

Mobile phones used in films are a very common example where companies like Nokia pay to have one of their phones used, and recently Bing have been doing it a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah microsoft does that lot , but here they could have said directly as Amazon, instead they were like , biggest online retailer of books , why ?</comment></comment>


Porn-loving US official spreads malware to government network - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46030242 <comment><USER2> Is this supposed to be a shocking to us?

I find it more disgraceful that the Sys Admins of said Federal Agency aren't using GPOs to block unauthorized USB devices, than that fact than an employee was looking at porn.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did desktop support for a fed agency in the early 2000s and this was so absurdly common that it was barely worth remarking about when it happened. I probably spent half of my day removing malware from people who went to porn and gambling sites.

The other half was from people who opened email attachments from pretty much anyone.

<comment><USER4> Can I ask how did you become aware the machine was infected? Does not most malware hide itself? The way you describe it seems like it was easy for you to know. I consider myself pretty tech savvy but not sure how I would be aware if I had malware other then obvious things like page hijacking. Thanks

<comment><USER5> > Does not most malware hide itself?

The "cryptolockers" not, and what also regularly happened in the IE heydays was that suddenly there's a dozen toolbars in IE and every click anywhere would trigger another popup window with ads.

<comment><USER4> Oh man, being old enough to remember those times I do not miss it. I do not miss dial up speeds as well.

<comment><USER5> At least the toolbars were easy enough to remove...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 9000 porn sites? I can understand that if his job involved researching porn. Otherwise, who has time to visit that many websites at their job? Where does he find the time to do actual work with his busy porn-viewing schedule?

And most importantly, why is there no mention of termination of employment? How can someone spend all day at work browsing porn and jeopardize the network with malware/viruses and still be employed?

<comment><USER7> > How can someone spend all day at work browsing porn and jeopardize the > network with malware/viruses and still be employed?

After doing some government consulting work, this does not surprise me in the slightest.

<comment><USER8> Actually, when I was a Fed worker, I was told that browsing porn sites was one of the very few things that could lead to immediate termination, without the usual Civil Service procedures (which take years to play out).

<comment><USER9> The operative word here is "could".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ironic that he (or she) worked on a project called Eros.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is the USGS too small to require firewalls that block obviously NSFW websites? At my workplace, going to such sites bring up a page saying the request was blocked before it left the corporate network.

<comment><USER12> No,you can even do that for your house. Porn is not hard to block.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h It is not hard to block _in the trivial case_ ; after that you're playing cat & mouse and dealing with false positives.

<comment><USER12> Not in the trivial case. I meant most porn sites. All you have to do is use a reputation service and block uncategorized sites. Cisco OpenDNS actually offers a free DNS resolver that filters out most porn sites.

Also,surprised at the amount of responses on HN today that presume details....

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > use a reputation service and block uncategorized sites

This is what I was thinking of when I said "dealing with false positives"; those services make mistakes, and haven't hit every site.

<comment><USER12> I don't think anyone aims for perfection but a 90%+ true blocks and less than 5% false would be a high standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is the reasonable defense against this?

Intercepting firewalls like bluecoat are notoriously overbroad (and arguably open up MITM attacks on https). Desktop/laptop malware scanners notoriously use up CPU at murphaicly inconvenient moments.

Educating users is great, but attacks are getting sophisticated and it only takes one mistake.

Absent great intrusion detection, which I assume is not trivial, one that mistake is made, you have big problems. What is a realistic approach?

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege)

\- Using a good OS (e.g. Linux w/ SELinux)

\- Not giving admin access

\- Block non-authorized peripherals

\- Lock down network

You don't have to educate users if they can't make mistakes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What would be the solution to this in the future? As cybersecurity gets more and more serious, should we be essentially putting what would have been considered a decent corporate server in terms of speed/power 7 years before in front of every user?

Maybe Desktop-as-a-Service like with AWS Workspaces?

Or locked down, highly controlled devices like Chromebooks or a yet to be released Windowsbook?

</comment><comment><USER12> "An IT policy that prevents USB use should be implemented, the US Department of the Interior suggested."

...seriously? They want to make life harder for people that have legitimate USB mass storage needs because of this?

Do they have a DLP solution? DLP software can restrict what gets copied to and from a drive. Software restriction policies can be pushed to prevent execution from removable drives. Mind you,they said an "IT policy" meaning a rule that punishes anyone who uses a USB drive. This is the equivalent of your house getting broken into and your response is to have a rule thay punishes people for leaving the door unlocked instead of getting a home security system.

Also,why is this a bbc news story?

<comment><USER14> For most enterprises, removage storage is a liability, e.g. ip thief, ip mismanagement, loss, security

There are better ways to handle file sharing than removable storage if an employee needs it

<comment><USER12> And it's the security teams job to assess the security needs of the business and apply policies. If the entire business has a data loss risk then sure a blanket ban makes sense.

I disagree with what you said in that I believe "most businesses" need granular security policies that should be applied for specific departments.

There maybe better ways of handling files but say you're a news corp and sources give you data over USB or a fashion company that has freelancers walk into your location's in person to hand in photoshoots and large cad files. The resteiction would have an impact both to users and to the business.

For example,I worked at a company where specific departments were not restricted from accessing any website due to the possible business impact of them not being able to reach a required site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Who saves porn on a usb in 2018 tho

<comment><USER17> People who hate waiting for their 1080p video to buffer every time they want to skip around?

<comment><USER16> good point. The story said they were saving photos. Maybe the site of choice didn't optimize their photos for performance?</comment></comment></comment>


The World's Tiniest Optical Gyroscope Is Now Smaller Than a Grain of Rice - <AUTHOR> https://interestingengineering.com/the-worlds-tiniest-optical-gyroscope-is-now-smaller-than-a-grain-of-rice <comment><USER2> They use phase detecting photodiodes and thermal effects to measure and tune a miniaturized ring gyro (single turn) to measure rotation in a MEMS device. Their ratiometric compensation makes it much better than you might expect, but not (as is implied by the article above) better than larger gyros.

The supplemental derivations and discussions/figures for this paper are available (in pdf) from the Caltech Library.

[https://authors.library.caltech.edu/88626/3/41566_2018_266_M...](https://authors.library.caltech.edu/88626/3/41566_2018_266_MOESM1_ESM.pdf)

[http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20180807-12540532...](http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20180807-125405326). - permalink

Or the entire article ois available from Springer:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-018-0266-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-018-0266-5)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Named after French physicist Georges Sagnac, this optical effect rooted in > Einstein's theory of general relativity works

It's not true at all.

<comment><USER4> The first paragraph of the wikipedia article on the Sagnac effect has the word relative in it, soo, must be relativity or something. Besides, it sounds cool! >_<

<comment><USER3> Quote from Wikipedia:

> Georges Sagnac set up this experiment to prove the existence of the aether > that Einstein's theory of special relativity had discarded

Yes, world "relativity" is present here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do optical gyroscopes compare to the Hubble gyroscopes that have been in the news recently?

<comment><USER6> Not exactly the same thing. The Hubble gyroscopes are largeish flywheels that are on gimbaling platforms. They spin and maintain a constant orientation just like your toy gyroscope. By changing the platform's angle to the satellite with motors the whole satellite can be orientated since it's floating in space. The gyroscopes they're talking about here are used for sensing. There's several types but the simplest conceptually work in the opposite manner. The platform moves and the gyro stays fixed, a resolving device is used to sense the angle. Ring laser gyros (what they're describing here) and other mems gyros work differently still. But basically the idea is that something doesn't move when everything else does.

<comment><USER5> I believe you are thinking about reaction wheels. Hubble has 4 of those but it also has 6 gyroscope sensors, which is what was in the news recently.

I just don't know how the specs and intended use cases of those Hubble gyros compare to these optical gyros, hence my question.

<comment><USER6> Honestly I was thinking about the reaction wheels when I wrote my comment because I only skimmed the Hubble articles and didn't realize they were talking about the attitude sensing gyroscopes having to be reset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How small can we make a gyroscope and still have it respond to gravity? Maybe a few molecules? Could this be a path to unify Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity - through experimentation, since theory seems to have failed?

<comment><USER2> The gyroscope responds to rotation and not gravity. It requires a ring (or two) for the light to circulate in so I don't think they will be molecular sized for reasonable wavelengths of light.

<comment><USER7> You're right, I believe I'm thinking of accelerometers.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Is vim worth learning and why? - <AUTHOR> Being a computer nerd, I am constantly being bombarded by fellow hackers singing the praises of vi/vim. I tried it out a few times, mostly from having to edit my nethackrc file on alt.org, but it doesn't feel very good. I feel trapped, like I can't see all my code at once, and I can't easily search around or explore. I can only edit and type at about 1/20th as fast as I can decide what I want to do. I can deal with hjkl being remapped on dvorak, but it's yet another annoyance.
I know that if I chose to learn all the nuances of vim, this would get better, but is it really worth learning? My editor of choice right now is gedit, and it's not meeting my needs, especially as my code files get larger than 4000 lines. I would be willing to spend some time being frustrated and annoyed learning a new editor if it was worth it in the long run.
Any suggestions? Should I hang in there until I learn all the nuances of vim? <comment><USER2> The learning curve of vim is indeed steep, but it's been incredibly well worth it for me. The key thing to remember about vim is that it's very much oriented towards _editing_ text, not so much creating it. (In general, writing lots of text is easy and there are few differences from editor to editor.)

But fast editing using only the keyboard is where vim really shines. In my experience, the biggest wins are the uniform command structures and the huge number of movement options. Since most commands in vim take the form of <number-of-repititions><command><movement area>, you need master only the various movement types to effectively start using a large number of commands. Movement areas (called "motions") can be word-by-word, long jumps within a sentence, going between paragraphs, matching code structures (braces/parenthesis/functions/etc.), etc. Learning these motions lets you quickly jump to exactly where you need to, resulting in super-fast editing.

Of course, there are all the usual search-and-replace type of commands, multiple buffers/screens/tabs, very easy macro recording and playback, and plugins for project management, source control, etc., but none of these particularly distinguish vim from other good editors.

The one 'weakness' of vim is that it's much less of an "OS" than editors like emacs. Instead, it has a few well-chosen external commands that are built-in (grep, make, etc.), and otherwise lets you run shell commands directly (piping input into the current file, if wanted) for everything else. This, IMO, is more in keeping with the unix mentality of piping together lots of small programs that each do one thing well. So for example, you can sort and keep only unique lines in a text file by simply selecting them and running the standard 'sort' and 'uniq' commands (exactly as you would do on the command line). Your personal preference is what decides whether this is a weakness (as emacs users would probably feel) or a strength (as I and many other vim users feel).

Finally, I would recommend learning vim as you would learn a new language: use it all the time and slowly pick up new features (not all at once) until you become proficient. I use it not only as my editor for all text and programming on my machine, but also for editing text boxes in firefox and editing emails in thunderbird. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152170> for more information.

<comment><USER2> I don't know if anyone goes back to old threads, but I just saw an article about using the vi command mode: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217787>

I'd forgotten to mention this as another important place to help learn vi. Command line sessions are almost all heavily editing-based, and vim really shines here (which, in addition to using zsh, gives you unbeatable command- line-fu).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a passionate vim user: Yes! yes! yes!

Vim can do so many things, got so many features, you will easily forget about them the minute you've finished reading about them.

In my experience, the best way to learn your way around vim is this: If you have to do something, say, indent a dozen lines, instead of doing what I did for a long time–'I-tab-esc-j-I-tab-esc-j' etc etc–which obviously should be easier to do, google for a solution or look it up in the help file, and you will learn new tricks such as: (indent this and next four lines) 'V4j>'. Voila!

Else you can be stuck navigating with hjkl for years, and then it's not much fun.

<comment><USER4> y'see, this is the problem with vi users ;)

how on earth does 'V4j>' feel better than selecting the lines you want to indent, then pressing tab?

This is also where macro recorders work a treat; something like

<start macro> space * 4 home down <end macro> <run macro> * 3

<comment><USER3> Because I don't have to remove my hands from the keyboard to fool around with the mouse, and it's extremely powerful and you make clean cuts (eh??).

I'm almost never touching the mouse. I do a lot of stuff in the terminal, or using QuickSilver or memorizing all the ridiculous shortcuts different apps have. That way I can work at an incredible pace, and let the mouse sit in the corner.

<comment><USER5> You're responding to a vim/emacs comparison so I'll be the first to say you dont need to use the mouse in emacs just as you don't need it in vim. Hit ctrl-space to start a select. Move the cursor until your text is highlighted (you can skip to line if you know the number, also easy in emacs with setnu+), and then hit tab.

<comment><USER3> I didn't realize. I'm sure I saw a 'select with the mouse' somewhere in there. I didn't.

<comment><USER5> You _can_ select with a mouse too. In my opinion, if you're using Emacs OR Vim you've already won. Apples and oranges, sure, but still fruit where notepad is kinda like a big mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why not learn Emacs instead? Emacs is incredibly extensible, and has a big community writing things for it to make code management really easy (which seems like a concern for you). Vi/Vim has lots of this too, I'm sure, but for me it's a no brainer to use Emacs. Oh, and if you're curious about Vi, there's viper-mode for Emacs that acts like Vi (<http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi- bin/wiki/ViperMode>).

Edit: viper-mode acts like vi, not vim

</comment><comment><USER4> Invest in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing instead! ;) Seriously, watch any screencast of a coder, and you'll see the thing that probably slows them down most is simple mistyping. The benefits of typing "<esc>:%s/replace/me/g" vs "<ctrl+h>replace<tab>me<enter>" are pretty minimal, I think. Anything that has a decent macro recorder and regex search-and-replace should be adequate.

The big win with vi seems to be that every shitty server in the world has a copy, even if you telneted in to some remote box in uzbekistan and the admin on the box feels that text editors are an unnecessary luxury. Still, other things seem more worth investing time in. I'm using Sublime Text (pretty, windows, python scriptable) as my main text editor. It's just nice to use something pretty. I think if you spend half your conscious life staring at it, make sure it's worth looking at. ;)

<comment><USER7> A screencast is not representative of actual coding. They already know what they're typing, and a few typos seems to dramatically slow them down. But, in real programming, you spend 80-90% of your time looking up library functions, flipping through your own code, reading comments, A/B testing various algorithm ideas, fixing the rendering in IE (actually this is probably 90% of your time...the other 10% is divided amongst all of the other activities), etc.

If you're spending more than 10% of your development time typing, you're probably coding things in the most naive way, and producing a lot more code than you should be. But even so, in six months, you'll probably be spending 90% of your time reading your code, because it's so verbose.

<comment><USER4> * But, in real programming, you spend 80-90% of your time [...]*

Well, yeah. But the question was about text editors -- how do you optimise that 10% of your time when you're actually cutting code? My point was, ultra- terse command syntax like vi's don't amount to much if what you're really typing is;

      arr(<back>[3<back>2];<back>

to get the string

        arr[2]

into your source code. Also, typing matters more in dynamic languages or uncompiled source like html, where spelling mistakes can go undetected more easily.

The real benefits, as you note, are in things like automatic intellisense- style function- and class-lookups, easy integration with source control and documentation and refactoring/lint tools, and ease of navigating the call graph.

The big win, obviously, is live IE and firefox previewing ;) [http://www.sublimetextwiki.com/cgi- bin/moin.cgi/BrowsersPlug...](http://www.sublimetextwiki.com/cgi- bin/moin.cgi/BrowsersPlugin)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> some people like it, some people don't. if you don't like it, don't use it as your primary editor. it has its perks and it has its shortcomings.

however, whether its your main editor or not, learn the basics of vi so you don't flop around like a fish out of water when you need to use it, and you will need to use it sometime if you use *nix to some degree.

</comment><comment><USER9> Speaking as a passionate vim user, If you're on dvorak, the advantages of vim are reduced quite a bit. The normal navigation keys are poorly placed, and the most commonly used keys are in hard-to-reach places.

However, at the same time, the statement "I feel trapped, like I can't see all my code at once, and I can't easily search around or explore." screams to me that you haven't even looked at the vim navigation.

I suggest you stick with learning vim, but look up cheat sheets and search for effective ways of navigating your code. Hint: ctags and ctrl+] is amazing for jumping around -- a tag stack is more or less essential IMO. the '*' (search forward for word under cursor) is also very useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> _My editor of choice right now is gedit, and it's not meeting my needs_

Well, there's your answer.

I'm an emacs user so I recommend emacs. I know of many smart vi users so I recommend vi. I'm a Mac user so I recommend Textmate, but only if you really prefer it over emacs or vi (which are open source and ubiquitous -- you'll probably never _need_ to learn another text editor ever again).

Learn one of those. Whichever one you like best. O'Reilly's _Learning GNU Emacs_ was a very good book for me when I was a beginner; there's probably a similar book for vi.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd recommend learning your way around both vim and emacs. I'm primarily an emacs user myself, but vim comes in very handy once in a while.

You can edit code in an extremely productive manner in either editor, but you will be able to (pretty much literally) bend emacs to your will (allowing you to edit more or less however you want to) within a month or so of using it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have not used vim very much. I have a friend who does and it is his editor of choice. I personally use (and prefer) Notepad++. Its got a decent stable of shortcuts, loads up quickly, and works reasonably well with many languages.

</comment><comment><USER13> Vim is massively useful for one simple reason: remote editing. I use BBEdit and Emacs for local files, but when I need to SSH into a remote server, there's nothing quite as fast and easy as firing up Vim to edit a config file.

</comment><comment><USER14> Vim is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally switch to Emacs.</comment>


Here's an idea for a startup:  Put a robot on the moon and win $30 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/ <comment><USER2> The challenge is idiotic. This is coming from someone who loves space tech. There are other nearer term challenges in space that have applications on earth that don't require a lunar landing.

How about a materials prize, or a solar cell efficiency prize, or a earth orbit sky-hook demonstration, or better hardened electronics, or or or ...

The way a challenge works is to get people motivated by money and publicity beyond a threshold where they normally wouldn't take up the effort because of the costs and risks. X-Prize for a near orbit manned mission and the DARPA Grand Challenge are two good examples.

There is simply no way a company not tied to a major aerospace corporation can complete the prize in the near term. It has completely failed as a "challenge".

</comment><comment><USER3> Should be no problem, I'll hack one together over the weekend and have it on the moon by tuesday.

:-)</comment>


Anyone know if YC's recordings of the '07 startup school talks are online? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ycombinator-StartupSchool>

<comment><USER3> The hits:

Buchheit

Levchin

Partovi brothers

Graham

McAdoo

Recent founders panel (just the end bit where Alexis beautifully zings Paul, but you need to see the slides...I dunno if they're available)

The misses (misses because I expected a lot more from these guys, not necessarily because these were worse than the rest of the non-hits--both really smart guys with a lot of success under their belt):

Kapor (should have been half an hour, like everyone else)

Zuckerberg (age discrimination isn't really something useful to learn, as we all probably have enough of that built right in)

Though, I might say that if you do watch one of the misses, you need to watch the other. They're like Olbermann and O'Reilly squaring off on issues like hiring, firing, employee selection, etc. By the time you suffer through both talks you might have a balanced view.

From the 06 batch I vividly remember Kraus, Graham, and Fletcher being fantastic. Kraus and Fletcher are always worth listening to.

<comment><USER4> Max Levchin is like the Energizer Bunny. See show #2 on NerdTV: <http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/>

He said when he's not doing a start-up he lays on the couch morose, whereas he's happy and enjoying life when he IS doing a start-up.

I infer that the secret of success is to link pleasure to working on your start-up and pain to NOT doing it. If your start-up feels like a grind then it's doomed. Fortunately, you can re-program your emotional responses via various techniques.

You pretty much want to do that regardless so that if you do strike it rich, you don't feel useless and indolent for the rest of your life afterward. The continued success stories are the people who were REALLY into what they did. For example, Bill Gates could have retired long ago; Michael Jordan didn't win one championship and decide that was all he wanted; Steve Jobs kept on going while Steve Wozniak checked out, relaxed, and got fat. (I love Woz, I just think if you're possibly the world's best at what you do, abruptly stopping can't be very fulfilling, even though I understand he did many other worthwhile things like teaching kids.)

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of Sherlock holmes and his bouts of lethargy and cocaine-use between cases.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Last Night, My Uber Driver Said He Was Going to Rape and Kill Me - <AUTHOR> http://sfist.com/2015/10/16/last_night_my_uber_driver_said_he_w.php <comment><USER2> I switched to Lyft after having a verbally abusive driver. Uber support kept giving me canned responses. Finally I got a human over email and asked if I and my wife could be blocked from the driver. They said no, just cancel the ride if I see him again. I don't know what my wife is supposed to do. Lyft has a noticeably higher quality driver base. I highly recommend Lyft.

</comment><comment><USER3> Holy Moses. That was one crazy driver. In the voicemail, he sounded very unprofessional. Glad the woman in the article was not hurt and Uber reached out to her personally.

</comment><comment><USER4> I prefer cabs to the bloated arrogant "unicorn" that violates laws and calls it innovative.</comment>


Npm: New Package Moniker Rules - <AUTHOR> http://blog.npmjs.org/post/168978377570/new-package-moniker-rules <comment><USER2> >If you are publishing a new package—that is, a package that has not been in the registry before—we remove punctuation from its name and compare it to existing package names. If the names are identical without punctuation, we do not allow the package to be created.

Simply checking the name without punctuation seems too simple. What about a similarity check? Hamming distance? Is there something like metaphone for _visual_ similarity between words?

Also good on them for suggesting using namespaces but since that apparently exists and they're admitting that it helps disambiguate packages, _why not just make it mandatory?_

</comment><comment> ro-laren I think what could make the npm ecosystem more trustworthy is if there was a system to "verify" packages similar to how twitter verified accounts. Essentially a package like "react-native" would have a symbol indicating that the npm corporation verified it was owned by Facebook. Perhaps the CLI could then also warn you when you install an unverified package.</comment>


Just starting Python,what should I do next? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I just recently started using Python, my first progamming language, and I love it. My first real project was creating a fractal mountain generator, and now I want something else to work on. I've taken an interest in fluid physics lately, so I was thinking of making a fld simulator. Does anybody else have some cool ideas for Python projects? <comment><USER2> > Does anybody else have some cool ideas for Python projects?

A general suggestion -- write programs that solve numerical differential equations. They're very useful in science and engineering. Your fluid physics idea is along those lines, because realistic fluid physics simulations are nearly always based on numerical differential equations (they have to be).

Other useful numerical differential equations are any planetary orbit systems with more than two bodies, biological predator-prey "games", and most real- world supply-demand analyses.

It's only a slight exaggerations to say that modern physics is defined by a large set of differential equations. Many of them are only soluble numerically.</comment>


I haven't worked in a team in years. How do I convince people that I want to? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently in the last year of my PhD and applying to a boot camp style academia to industry program. As part of my application I need to describe a recent experience of working successfully in a team. The thing is: I'd love to be part of a team of motivated people and this is one of the reasons I want to leave academia. But my work as a graduate student has not been collaborative at all. Now I wonder what to do: Do I dig up and inflate one of the few small examples of team work that have happened in the last five years or should I be honest and focus on my desire to work with people in the future? Your opinion is very much appreciated. Thank you. <comment><USER2> That's a really good question. The problem is MANY freelancers give other freelancers a bad name by being unfocused, uncommitted, and hard to work with.

I think a good way of showing that's not you is kicking off your job interview process by submitting something with your intro email and resume that is germane to the company/team you're interested in joining. Perhaps a coding project, a UX design, a marketing plan -- something that shows you care.

That'll make you stand out not only among freelancers, but just about any applicant.

</comment><comment><USER3> >"Should I be honest and focus on my desire to work with people in the future?"

Do this.

Just because you haven't worked on a team in a while doesn't mean you're not a team player.</comment>


A Magician Explains Why We See What's Not There - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/a-magician-explains-why-we-see-whats-not-there <comment><USER2> In the field of UX/Psychology there is a term "suffice". Our brains are constantly sufficing rather that perceiving all data and interpretating it. If we had to do the latter end of the spectrum, our heads would need to be bigger, to the point birth wouldn't be possible based on current female autonomy. You wouldn't have survived child birth.

As a result when a person visits a page on a website for the first time people in average scan the page only reading a few words (I've hear 7 on average claimed). However, most beginner designers will not realize this and put a couple hundred words on a page with out proper typographic hierarchy. Better designers (same is true for poster designers) use typography and visual hierarchy (Font sizing, spacing/white-space, color, font weight, alignment) to create a design that is easy to scan for a sufficing human brain.

The less scannable the page is the more the brain needs to work to make sense of what is being displayed (higher cognitive load), and the less of a chance the user will read the highest priority data first (the context or hook data).

If the user reads the data in the wrong order, it will likely be confusing noise. The goal of a designer is to present the data in such a way that the signal to nose ratio is high, as they scan and dig deeper into a presented page or poster.

<comment><USER3> I've always said that the most important job of a UI designer (or graphic designer in the case of posters) is how you communicate with your users.

Unfortunately it's too common that people, specially designers, put aesthetics first.

To put it bluntly, users don't care about the drop shadow of a button if they can't find the damn button or if they don't understand in advance what the button will do.

<comment><USER4> >the most important job of a UI designer [...] is how you communicate with your users.

>[...] it's too common that people [...] put aesthetics first.

While aesthetics don't need to come first in a design, they do allow a large amount of information -- that you're trying to communicate -- to be encoded in a way that's processed subconsciously and quickly:

A stranger dressed in "war paint" approaches you to sell you a coffee is going to perform worse than a Nanny wearing a warm, fuzzy, cozy, looking sweater.

<comment><USER5> Dressing in "war paint" vs dressing in a sweater is a form of communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The next stage from this is how a spectator remembers a magic trick later on. Good magicians work backwards from this understanding in designing an act or trick. "He put the card in the middle of the deck, and it appeared in his pocket". This is about as granular as the average spectator remembers a magic trick only minutes or even seconds later. It says a lot about how lossy our memory really is even when we are concentrating our hardest. Maybe counter intuitively the harder someone looks the easier it is to direct their attention.

I would recommend anyone learn a simple magic trick or two, if only to help you design your products better. All of the information you learn about how people move through the phases of a trick seem transferable to lots of disciplines.

<comment><USER7> On this topic, one of my favorite HN comments compares magic tricks to hacking someone's brain:

 _Magic tricks are hacking! You are hacking someone 's mind, particularly their assumptions and attention. The exploits to human psychology and attention are just as sure as the exploits to crack or unlock a smartphone and many other software exploits. The difference is that software can be patched but the evolved behaviors that are the root of the exploits used by magicians are very hard to "patch"..._

Full comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992826)

<comment><USER8> Now replace the word 'Magic tricks' with 'Persuasion'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The neuroscience explanation for this is "Predictive coding". These talks are fascinating.

related:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvAbPtbjxhw&t=1135s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvAbPtbjxhw&t=1135s)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0yVuoATjzs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0yVuoATjzs)

<comment><USER10> Cool videos!

A nice written introduction to the topic of predictive coding is Scott Alexander's book review of "Surfing Uncertainty" by Andy Clark: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing- un...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/)

<comment><USER11> I have found that book to be an impressive example of poor scientific writing – one long, convoluted, intentionally obtuse sentence after another, as if the author was constantly trying to make the reader feel like an idiot.

I have found some more technical articles (e.g. [0]) very useful, but if anyone knows of a comprehensive introduction that takes more of an experimental psychology angle, similar to Surfing Uncertainty but less frustrating, I definitely want to know about it.

[0] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002224961...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022249615000759)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _" simply looking at the ball. This, however, was not the case: Although they looked at the ball once it had been thrown in the air, they spent a lot of time looking at my face, particularly before the ball reached the top of the screen."_

I wonder if self driving car tech thinks about this kind of thing. How often, for example, at intersections, we look at the faces of other drivers and pedestrians for context.

It's interesting to me both as data for the self driving car, and the obvious lack of data for human drivers looking at a self driving car.

<comment><USER13> It is my experience that I often know what a driver before me is going to do even before they have started to do so. Probably because I pick up very small changes in their behavior, as like reducing their speed a little, even before I have become conscious of them doing so. In theory you could train a neural network to do the same, but it would probably require a neural network much larger than the 'electronic' ones that are being used. I guess our 'biological' neural networks are still much more efficient, energy and size wise, than there 'electronic' versions.

<comment><USER14> I'm not saying it is, and I'm not saying it isn't, and I definitely have felt the same thing, but it seems to me that the sensation you're calling out is very susceptible to both confirmation bias and post-hoc reasoning. For example, I'm sure your brain fires harder when your "expectation" is met than when it isn't or in all those situations where you just don't make a distinct prediction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I got bored a couple of years ago and decided to start learning some magic.

If anyone wants to learn card magic, there are an unbelievable amount of tutorials on YouTube.

All you need to do some very impressive tricks is a single move — the double lift.

<comment><USER16> > All you need to do some very impressive tricks is a single move — the double > lift.

As someone who has had a casual interest in card magic and sleight of hand, here's an observation about how so many different tricks can come out of such a seemingly simple sleight.

There's a fairly simple formula that makes it possible to be very creative and come up with endless new tricks and variations.

At the heart of any trick is some sleight, such as the double lift, where the illusionist creates a seemingly trivial rift between reality as the audience perceives it, and reality as it actually is.

The illusionist can then get creative with what to do with this difference.

Usually you maintain the facade and do things that would be possible in both realities. From the audience's point of view, it's like the trick hasn't started, when in a sense it is already over. Then, at a safe distance from the original sleight of hand, in terms of time and attention, the illusionist can now seem to break the rules of the reality the audience believes in, simply by revealing the difference between the two realities.

This allows you to amplify an underwhelming "Ok, so I couldn't see that you picked up two cards" to a very impressive "Wow, my card magically reappeared at the top of the deck after you put it into the middle of the deck and let me shuffle it".

<comment><USER17> Really nice explanation, I kind of knew the idea in practice, but can't remember having seen it so well explained before!

Here's a thing I still wonder about:

I used to practice forcing, so I get the general idea. What I used to do was mind-reading etc, but there's one particular event that stands out for me, here is what I think I saw:

A pro magician shows up in a birthday party showing a deck of cards, asks the host to _think_ of a card, shuffles the deck and shows the card, confirming with the host that it is correct, then goes on to do all kinds of amazing tricks where this card shows up again and again.

In my mind, there are only a few options here:

\- they agreed on it (too risky. This bloke does _big_ jobs, won't do that in an ordinary birthday.)

\- somehow influenced the host ahead of the selection process (how? when? Is this _actually_ possible with NLP or something? Something about the setup of the deck?)

\- maybe he tricked us into thinking he had a full deck and all there ever was was 4 of clubs? (Sounds crazy, bit not impossible for a guy who'll pickpocket the craziest things, walk around with a flying piece of furniture while exposed to 180 degrees of audience, non staff on the stage and a TV crew filming.)

\- somehow guessed it based on eye movements (what I used to _tell_ when I did stupid "mind reading" tricks that was only stupid forces)

\- somehow tricked the host into thinking this was the chosen card even if it was another (again how?)

Anyone wants to share pointers? A few words, links to books, web sites, anything?

<comment><USER18> How many times did you see this magician perform? If just the once, then it's also possible that the magician just lucked out. I know of magicians who will always ask an audience member to think of a card as the first thing, just in case they happen to pick the card that the magician knows is the top card (by briefly peeking or by having it set up). If it is, then the magician looks amazing. If not, then the magician performs another trick instead and the audience is non the wiser.

I don't know how what you described was performed, but I know that magicians often leave themselves multiple outs in case the audience doesn't do what they want them to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YIPtJlCbIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YIPtJlCbIA)

Here's the hollow mask illusion, one of the most fascinating parts of the article for me.

<comment><USER5> My favorite part of that is the fact that the perception of the hollow mask rotates in the opposite direction as the actual hollow mask does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > What this shows is that participants used my face to predict where I would > throw the ball

Being someone who likes to avoid eye contact, this explains why when I'm walking I always end up doing the get-past-you shuffle.

<comment><USER21> I had; and to a certain degree, still have this issue.

But I got my rate of doing the "get-past-you shuffle" down quite a bit after learning a simple trick.

While I avoid eye contact, most people do not. Most people, when they see an on-coming person, judge which side (left/right) to pass them by looking at their gaze.

The trick is to look in the direction you want to pass the other person in. So if you're going to take the left side, look to your left.

Most people will then pass you on your right side.

<comment><USER22> Another good technique is to commit to avoidance early, and stick to it. For example, when you notice the collision course, start bearing left immediately - the other person may have started to move in that direction, which would normally start the 'shuffle' as you both shift to your right, but you short- circuit that by not reciprocating - keep left. Seems like it might be rude, but in practice it doesn't seem so, the relief outweighs any ill feeling (or so I imagine!)

<comment><USER23> Another is to just stop, stand still, and wait for the other person to solve the situation. I've realized how terrible I am at dealing with those situations so that's what I've started to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > _One of my other truly astonishing skills involves throwing a ball one meter > into the air and catching it._

A true miracle of coordinated tracking, movement, and prediction. I'm delighted to see such a seemingly-trivial thing called out as the remarkable feat it is.

If you feel it is quite mundane, consider how much work it would be to automate.

</comment><comment><USER25> He mentions people looking at his face to aid in predicting what the ball's trajectory will be.

I wonder what eye tracking data from those with high-functioning autism (or whatever they call what we used to call Aspergers) would reveal, since "face blindness" and the inability to interpret facial expressions are typical hallmarks in those individuals?

That is, do such individuals experience a degradation in coordination in such tasks, and/or related tasks, due to such inabilities?

Or do they make up for it in other ways?

<comment><USER26> The example of Agnosia cited in the article indicates that there wouldn't be any degradation. Proprioception and physical interaction seem to have their own dedicated pathway.

If not being able to tell vertical from horizontal didn't affect the patient's ability to interact with the world, why would not being able to tell if a face is "happy" or "sad" have an impact?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of an old legend (probably made up but what do I know) that when early European explorers first reached North America, some native American tribes, then settled on the shore, were unable to see the ships coming on the horizon, until one of their shamans pointed at them, because only they had the necessary conditioning and open mindedness to perceive and anticipate things that were unfathomable to others.

<comment><USER28> I'm 100% certain that didn't happen, and /r/askhistorians seems to agree[0]. Humans just don't work that way.

[0][https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lh0kz/is_it...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lh0kz/is_it_true_that_when_the_indians_saw_ships_for/)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the link. Sounded a bit hard to believe indeed (although if it _were_ true it would more likely come from Native American folklore rather than the other side, for I can hardly imagine how they'd be able to recollect that story from their viewpoint).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We don't really 'see' things. Rather our eyes are just one of the means by which we correct our _guesses_ about what's out there.

</comment><comment><USER30> One must always marvel at the mental gymnastics neurotypical people go to to explain why their hallucinations are actually a good thing.

<comment><USER31> Implying that said hallucinations, tailored by evolution, are actually a bad thing.

<comment><USER30> People outside the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations don't experience them. They are not shaped by evolution, but likely by the excess iron in western food that gets into the brain and shifts the brain chemistry towards a psychosis like state. (you can look up studies on rats, or I can look up some if you want)

People who are immune to it have Asperger's or something similar "on the spectrum".

Anyway, here is one: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6138953](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6138953)

<comment><USER32> I'm totally shocked that a wacky theory proponent (complete with zany acronym!) would link an article talking about iron deficiency to promote their wacky theory that excess iron causes a psychosis like state.

<comment><USER30> That acronym is well established in psychology.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New MacBook Pros Fail to Earn Consumer Reports Recommendation - <AUTHOR> http://www.consumerreports.org/laptops/macbook-pros-fail-to-earn-consumer-reports-recommendation/ <comment><USER2> the touch bar is simply garbage. In 2 weeks of usage including heavy xcode use I have yet to find a single instance where having the touch bar was better than having the function keys.

Not only that I'm pretty sure the battery issues are due to not being able to turn off a constantly updating touch bar.

</comment><comment><USER3> It may not be the hardware; it may be the the OS. Since upgrading to Sierra, I've been plagued by various runaway kernel processes randomly eating 100% of the CPU. Have finally managed to kill most of them through deleting .plists and the like -- all for native MacOS apps like Contacts by the way, not in any 3rd-party apps -- but this kind of bugginess could easily produce the kind of results that Consumer Reports saw.

<comment><USER4> Mind to share the list of .plists that you have deleted and disabled?

<comment><USER3> Oh gods, I didn't keep a list. Most had no effect, but I eventually traced it to Contacts, and with the exception of a couple of even more mysterious rogue issues with the windowserver, that seems to have fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I cannot consolidate their results with my own experience and those of many reports I've read: their results seems way too _good_! Real world annecdata: a google hangout seems drained the battery in about two hours on my top-spec, one-month old, MBP. I never had experiences like this on the 2013 MBP.

<comment><USER6> Google Hangouts consistently drains at minimum of 20% of my battery life per 30min meeting. It doesn't matter if I'm using my top spec previous generation 15", my top spec previous gen 13", or my 2016 12" MacBook. As such, using it to gauge battery life is about as fair as running a Hadoop cluster in VMs to gauge battery life. Actually, I think the active Hadoop cluster would use less battery.

The reason why their test results are ridiculously long is how little they stress the machine. Loading ten basic web pages (in the stock browser, so no Flash, and something tells me no WebGL usage either), so outside an errant background process, what's really using any watts there besides the screen?</comment></comment>


A Look Into Other Programming Languages Frameworks - <AUTHOR> http://jeez.eu/2009/10/05/a-look-into-other-programming-languages-frameworks/ <comment><USER2> Oh. My. God!

The author has been had, big time. The Lisp "web framework" Kanamit is/was a April fool's joke.

CL web frameworks of note are here:

<http://www.cliki.net/webframeworkmatrix>

More popup every few weeks and it's hard to keep track of them, actually. Lurk in #lisp on freenode and ask around.

To get started, use Hunchentoot with a threaded Lisp (nearly everyone of them, except the last official release of GNU CLISP; the last Common Lisp to get multiprocessing capabilities :-)

And you forgot Erlang! Off the top of my head, Nitrogen web framework by my home boy Rusty Klophause.

<http://nitrogenproject.com/>

And Clojure, with Compojure as the "main" candidate:

<http://github.com/weavejester/compojure>

P.S. I am sure Mr. Pestov has something up his sleeve for Factor as well.

Research ye blog posts people!

<comment><AUTHOR> Mistakes are human's little addition to the galaxy. Kanamit turns out to be a joke. Nitrogen will be added today as well as some others pointed out by our users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Odd he mentions sea side by name and yet it gets no entry. Sea side is a web framework for small talk.

<comment><AUTHOR> SeaSide is not mentioned because the website does not open for some reason. Tried it from 2 PCs (more than 3 times) and got a server error.</comment></comment>


Patent No. 1 – July 31, 1790 - <AUTHOR> https://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=1-2-988 <comment><USER2> It's important to note that this is the _first_ US patent. Technically Patent No. 1 is the Locomotive Steam Engine[1]. The US Patent Office burned down in 1836[2] and patents were renumbered from that point on. All previous patents are now listed as X-Patents[3].

1 - [https://patents.google.com/patent/US1](https://patents.google.com/patent/US1)

2 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1836_U.S._Patent_Office_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1836_U.S._Patent_Office_fire)

3 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Patent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Patent)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Whereas Samuel Hopkins of the City of Philadelphia and State of Pensylvania > hath discovered an Improvement, not known or used before, such Discovery, in > the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Proceſs; that is > to say, in the making of Pearl ash 1st. by burning the raw Ashes in a > Furnace, 2d. by disſolving and boiling them when so burnt in Water, 3rd. by > drawing off and settling the Ley, and 4th. by boiling the Ley into Salts > which then are the true Pearl ash; and also in the making of Pot ash by > fluxing the Pearl ash so made as aforesaid; which Operation of burning the > raw Ashes in a Furnace, preparatory to their Diſsolution and boiling in > Water, is new, leaves little Residuum; and produces a much greater Quantity > of Salt: These are therefore in pursuance of the Act, entituled "An Act to > promote the Progreſs of useful Arts", to grant to the said Samuel Hopkins, > his Heirs, Administrators and Aſsigns, for the Term of fourteen Years, the > sole and exclusive Right and Liberty of using, and vending to others the > said Discovery, of burning the raw Ashes previous to their being diſsolved > and boiled in Water, according to the true Intent and Meaning, of the Act > aforesaid. In Testimony whereof I have caused these Letters to be made > patent, and the Seal of the United States to be hereunto affixed. Given > under my Hand at the City of New York this thirty first Day of July in the > Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred & Ninety.

</comment><comment><USER4> > _City of New York July 31st, 1790._

And this is what New York looked like at that time:

[http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/population_grow...](http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/population_growth_1909/txu- pclmaps-oclc-866251365-plan-of-the-city-of-new-york-1789.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER5> Slippery slope, people, it's a slippery slope.

</comment><comment><USER6> Patent number 1 should be for a time machine :(

<comment><USER7> This is the premise of Cheapass Games' "US Patent No. 1"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Patent_No._1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Patent_No._1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did anyone else read this as Jan 1, 1970?

<comment><USER9> Yup, but I have Dyslexia so I'm used to the transposition of the 2nd and 3rd character happening once in a while. I tend to "look away" and look back and usually can see the right thing. It's very frustrating when you get tired and are writing code, and staring at random symbols that literally don't mean anything now....

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Off topic but what would be the downside of having no patents in today's world? I actually think it would drastically accelerate the pace of innovations.

<comment><USER11> The purpose of patent is to encourage innovation. If companies/individuals didn't have protection for their invention, why would they invest into R&D if their competitors could steal their idea/process?

It provides a middle-ground - the inventor has exclusive rights to the invention for a portion of time (20 years), where they can reap the benefits of the patent. Once it expires, anyone can use it.

<comment><USER10> I don't think patents encourage innovation at all in today's world (and for that matter it's questionable if they ever did). The main driver behind innovation is rarely monetary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Transcription: [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_patent_X1](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_patent_X1)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is it same familly that anthony hopkins? the godfather from Westworld.

</comment><comment><USER14> see also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Patent_Statute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Patent_Statute)

</comment><comment><USER15> to check</comment>


Mozilla Labs Releases Weave Sync 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/29/mozilla-labs-releases-weave-1-0/

<comment><USER3> While this seems like a cool idea, I definitely don't want my (bookmarks - <USER2> don' t see the point, but it doesn't concern me) saved passwords, browsing history and open browser tabs synced to my phone.

1) If I lose my phone that is a lot of personal data/security info that is available on my phone. Saved passwords would be useful, but I don't save any passwords on my phone now, and this isn't going to change that.

2) Last thing I want, if I'm returning through US border is all of this data on my phone, given [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/16/laptop_border_search...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/16/laptop_border_search/) (There are better articles, but that is the first Google result)

<comment><USER4> That blog post doesn't make it clear that Weave is also good for syncing between computers. I've been using it for months to sync between my desktop and my two laptops, where each laptop is running two operating systems. For me, the coolest thing about it is that the history syncing means that the suggestions as I'm typing in a URL are the same on all the machines, so that when I type 's', slashdot and stackoverflow are the first two.

Bookmark syncing is also nice because NoScript can store it's rules in a bookmark, so I will only have to whitelist any site once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hope Google adds support for browser history and password storage to their Chrome extension API so that I can write a similar tool for Chromium.

Weave (and Xmarks) use these:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_the_Places_history_se...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_the_Places_history_service)

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/nsILoginManager>

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone care to compare this to Xmarks for me? I've been using Xmarks because it also supports syncing between Firefox, IE, Safari, and Chrome. What advantage do I get from Weave?

<comment><USER5> Weave is only for Firefox & Fennec (it's a Mozilla project).

Weave synchronizes bookmarks & passwords like Xmarks, in addition to browsing history and open tabs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> SyncPlaces lets you do this to a file or FTP server.

<http://www.andyhalford.com/syncplaces>

<comment><USER5> No history syncing though, which is big for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bookmark, history, and tab syncing appeals to me. Passwords, not so much. Does this extension allow me to exclude passwords and sync the rest?

<comment><USER9> Yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> congrats to the Weave team! a bunch of the ex-delicious folks went there.</comment>