Blind man shocks researchers with what he sees. - <AUTHOR> http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/seeing_in_the_dark/ <comment><USER2> The article is pretty light on the details, so I'll try to add to it. In my prior career as a cognitive neuroscientist, I analyzed an fMRI data set on blindsight patient GY, and read up on the blindsight literature at the time.

The neurons in the retina don't go straight to the occipital (primary visual) cortex; they all synapse onto the thalamus first. From there, the vast majority of exiting neurons go on to occipital cortex, but a few percent go off to other regions, such as the superior colliculus, amygdala, MT and FEF.

It's been shown in diffusion studies that people with damage in thalamus or prior to it, don't show blindsight effects, while people with post-thalamic or occipital damage can.

Now, the really interesting part is that, these non-occipital signals are enough to help people perform tasks at above-chance levels, but not enough for them actually be aware. Nobody knows for sure why. Conscious awareness is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Top candidates are information integration theory, higher-order thought theories, and signal- detection-based theories.

<comment><USER3> After hearing about those parasitic brain bugs that you can catch from cats I started to wonder if conscious awareness could be merely the collective experience of some kind of bug we caught that has just hitched along for the ride and that hasn't actually really got much of a control over anything really, but just believes that it is the creature it is inhabiting, because it is a bit stupid. Perhaps you could cure someone of it and not even be able to tell the difference. These are the kind of thoughts that keep me awake at night ;)

<comment><USER4> That's funny, I had the almost same sci-fi scenario thoughts during one night. The thought of the nature of our minds being defined by a disease that we caught at some point in time and now completely identify with it, that that disease made us forget our true nature. It's pretty great as a sci-fi scenario, but I now believe it has a deep truth to it.

I later discovered the writings of Eckhart Tolle. According to him, we are diseased in the sense that we identify with our mind/ego, instead of realizing what it actually is: a tool. Part of the problem is we often don't know what exists underneath. We are 100% convinced we are our mind. But obviously we're not - if we were, we wouldn't be able to observe it. Once we realize we're not our mind, we're free of its control. Until we do, we're in a way, severely ill. We're actually not disfunctional in our true nature - but we're unenlightened.

At least that's what Eckhart Tolle says. I personally find it disarmingly logical - and reasonably easily provable within my perception, not to mention deeply liberating/changing. Finding out you can stop your thoughts and not only still be aware, but become the most aware you can be, that's quite a doozy of a realization.

<comment><USER5> > It's pretty great as a sci-fi scenario

I've actually read a short SciFi novel with that very premise, but I can't for the life of me remember the name of it. Something about the other sentient lifeforms in the galaxy not requiring sleep and being able to breathe cyanide, but humans were unique in that we needed to sleep, and that was because we were all infected by some sort of mind parasite that now saw its chance to expand to other lifeforms.

<comment><USER6> You're probably thinking of "Hostess", by Isaac Asimov: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostess_%28short_story%29>

<comment><USER5> Yes, that was it! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's my story: Three (or was it four?) day non-stop coding stint to get a robot ready for a conference. No sleep at all. Almost non-stop coding and the usual coffee+sugar+pizza binge. Got on a plane to go to the conference and continued coding in flight. Got to the hotel, checked in and decided to get some sleep. I woke up about three or four hours later. I started to hear a nearly perfect 1KHz tone as my field of view slowly (30 sec?) faded to full bright white. By this time I was sitting on the bathroom floor: I could only hear this tone and all I saw was a bright white light. Somehow I kept my cool and could, also somehow, navigate the room. Over the following few minutes the tone started to go away and my field of view returned to normal. Freaked the crap out of me. No permanent damage that I could identify. Now I keep my overnighters to just one night, only if there's absolutely not choice at all.

<comment><USER8> I was afraid your story was one of a stroke. we should have a good thread on sleep deprivation. (e.g. someone should submit a story.)

visual hallucations are pretty standard after a certain period of time that isn't even so long. (i.e. I would get them around, say, the 28 hour mark from when I last woke up and started staying up by pulling an all-nighter. So if I get up at 7 every day but then simply not go to sleep one night but try to start the next day - by 11 AM it's hard not to hallucinate. In case you get up later the following is equivalent: If you get up at 11 every morning after calling it a night at 3 am or so, then if one night you don't sleep at all then working past 11 am and on by 3 PM you will be very out of it and may easily hallucinate.)

I'm very skeptical whether there is any amount of productivity to be had what- so-ever as for me, personally, it would easily take me 2 minutes to do 30 seconds of (any kind of) work at the end of that time, even moving a box from one place to another or whatever. So I'm very skeptical how a 3-4 hour nap at 22 hour mark could possibly not make up for lost time after waking up.

going on 3 hours of sleep each night for several days (e.g. 2-3) is possible and easy.

like I said, it would make an interesting thread and someone should submit a story on this subject (sleep deprivation and whether it's even worth working after a certain time mark).

as for your story, it sounds like a simple dream/waking dream. it's really hard to tell dream and non-dream apart under conditions of sleep deprivation.

<comment><USER9> There doesn't seem to be a sharp line between sleep and wakefulness. I once fell asleep while driving and was awakened by something I saw. It's an odd sensation to be woken up by something you _see_ instead of by something you hear or feel. I had fallen asleep with my eyes open but was staying upright in the driver's seat, maintaining my speed and staying on the road. It was an extremely frightening experience, because I was very keenly aware of not being conscious a few seconds earlier, and having no sense of how much time had passed. I couldn't even remember what I saw, because duh, I was unconscious when I saw it. It freaked me out so much that even fifteen years later I think about it every time I get the slightest bit sleepy behind the wheel.

A few times in extreme states of sleep-deprivation, I've been lying down or slouched on the couch and realized, after being startled into getting up suddenly, that my memory of what I had been thinking about was fading away just like a dream. My eyes were open the whole time, and unlike when I was driving, I was conscious of seeing and having a consciously driven train of thought. Yet in some way I was asleep, so my mind let my memories slip away as if they were dreams.

<comment><USER10> Ducks and dolphins routinely sleep one hemisphere at a time. It doesn't seem improbable that humans might also from time to time.

<comment><USER11> So, this is maybe a silly question, but methodologically, how did researchers establish that? Did they actually somehow attach and keep EEG contacts on an animal that moves around and lives submerged in salt water? 'Cuz that sounds awesome.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1333/can-one- side-o...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1333/can-one-side-of-a- ducks-brain-sleep-while-the-other-half-is-awake)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i've experienced something (vaguely) similar. i once had a nasty accident on a bike. initially, i was ok. a car had stopped and the driver asked me how i was, and i answered that i was in pain, but otherwise fine. then, as the passer-by started talking to someone else, i had to call out to him "excuse me - but i can't see". because i couldn't see. so he put me in his car (he was actually an extremely nice chap - i found out later he also took my ruined bike back to where i was staying; i never found him to say thank-you) and drove me to hospital. on the way there i started to realise that i could see shapes - although i couldn't actually "see" anything, i could make out moving cars (imagine white cars against a white background, but somehow you can see them moving). and then my sight started to return, first at the centre of my vision, and then spreading out. i related all this to him as we drove, and what with the blood dripping from various places, i suspect he thought i was delirious. anyway, eventually everything returned to normal and i was checked by a gorgeous doctor (i was 18 or so at the time...) and sent home to rest, but went to work because i was working away from home and no-one i knew would be at the house i was staying at. at work they were impressed by the various bandages and sat me in a corner til end-of-day. never experienced anything similar since, although i do get (painless) migraines from time to time (like, once a year or so - i can't see properly, but it's not interesting).

<comment><USER13> _i do get (painless) migraines from time to time_

What is a painless migraine?

<comment><USER14> One kind is called "visual migraine" or "ocular migraine". A simulation can be seen here <http://www.knownjohnson.com/?p=73/> . I tried to explain this 15 years ago to a doctor, without success - and then one day I read about it in a website, and apparently, I'm not crazy and also not alone in the world with this phenomenon.

See also: Restless Leg Syndrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You experience these same sort of phenomena in meditation: things that we normally think of as requiring consciousness reveal themselves as being controlled autonomically, and you also gain conscious control over autonomic functions. It's pretty cool, and it starts happening within the first few days, it's not something that takes years to experience or whatever.

<comment> chao- Since you brought up meditation, a question I never quite find the right moment to ask:

What is it? I mean, that question sounds so simplistic as to be inane, but bear with me: I have had absolutely no interaction with anyone who meditates, beyond observing them at a distance with casual skepticism.

Alternative questions to "What is it?" would be "What is its purpose?" and "What is it like?" Having gone to my university's weekly meditation sessions twice and simply fallen asleep, I used to assume it was just that: people sleeping while sitting upright. The idea of a third state the system of sleeping/awake seems utterly alien to me.

EDIT: Having just done the obvious and skimmed over the Wikipedia article for Meditation, it's far more broad than my question here. Obviously "to meditate on something" is to ponder/think about it, sometimes while moving or working. I'm asking in regard to a the more specific, often motionless, act that Alex3917 seems to be describing.

<comment><USER16> I worry that my fellow commenters may be glossing over the really important aspects of meditation. Here's my understanding:

There are many different types of and approaches to meditation, but the essence of all of them is mindfulness. The concept is of being "present"-- not living in the past, or the future, but experiencing what is happening right here, right now.

This is a subtly but importantly different idea from that of ignoring or quieting your thinking. You _are_ your thoughts; you _can't_ ignore them. (Don't think of an elephant.) However, your thoughts are not all that is happening to you, and most of the time your thoughts serve only to distract you from what is actually going on.

So, for example, one of the most basic forms of meditation is simply to be aware of your breathing. You are breathing one hundred percent of the time, but you are almost never _aware_ of the fact that you are. So take one moment, right now, close your eyes, and breathe. Feel how your chest expands and contracts. Feel how the air flows through your nostrils.

Thoughts _will_ occur, and it's important that you _don't_ push them away, or try to ignore them, because you _can't_ \-- even very experienced meditators cannot. Instead, recognize that thought is occurring, be aware of it, but don't dwell on it. Let the thought exist, notice that it is happening, and let it drift away as you return your attention to your breathing.

You will find your mind drifting to more and more intrusive thoughts: The things you're stressed about, worried about, upset about. This is not wrong; it is what is happening to you right now. Be aware of it, let it pass into you just like the air through your nostrils, and let it pass out as you return to breathing.

If you really attempt this, you will notice at least a brief moment where you feel suddenly, absolutely aware of who you are, where you are, what it is that you are experiencing _right now_ in a way that you may never have felt before. If you've never meditated before, it is very likely that you'll be terribly upset by this awareness of all of the unpleasant thoughts and feelings that you've been ignoring, trying to push under the surface and bury inside yourself. Remember that it is okay to cry. Let the emotions happen, just the way they are. You can't make them go away. But they don't control you; once you've felt them, it's okay to return your attention to your breathing.

I hope I don't make this sound easy-- it's incredibly difficult. But over time, with practice, you'll find this state of presence and awareness easier and easier to achieve, and that it's no longer necessary to close your eyes or be still to feel this. You'll be able to experience exactly what it feels like to walk down the street, or to eat a meal, in a way you never have before. You'll find yourself no longer being ruled by the emotions you've tried to suppress for so long. You will be angered, or saddened, or terrified, and you will be able to let those feelings happen inside of you, really experience them, and continue with what you are doing.

 _That_ is meditation.

(My references: My mother is a clinical psychiatrist who is trained in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is, believe it or not, a clinically validated treatment for many serious mental illnesses, but especially depression and anxiety. I've used these techniques myself to overcome major recurring depression.)

<comment><USER15> In retrospect this is probably a much better explanation than my comment, which focuses on what you experience while being present. But yeah, the goal in most types of meditation is to be present, rather than experiencing the different 'states' that come up. In fact, you are basically supposed to ignore them. The reason my comment was focusing on them I guess is because that's how I got onto the topic, in relation to sightedness being separate from consciousness.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I tried to avoid saying that you were wrong, because you're not-- in practice, meditation does result in a quieter state of mind, and does enable altered forms of consciousness. It's just that's not the core, and for someone who's never meditated before a lot of the advice about what meditation _feels like_ (clear your mind, ignore conscious thought, etc.) is likely to be quite counterproductive. The first and (in my opinion) most important step is to just _be_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is so bizarre. It's as though our conscious selves share an existence with an independently operating human animal. The one that flinches.

<comment><USER14> If you want to get your mind blown about the "other" one, read "The emergence of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" by Julian Jaynes. It argues, e.g. that schizophrenia is a disease in which communication with that other self becomes an internal (voiced) dialogue that sounds.

<comment><USER18> Jaynes' ideas occasionally surface in science fiction. Two examples are Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams. The last one is an underappreciated gem IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting but the news is over 3 years old. [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/cp- bmw121508....](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/cp- bmw121508.php)

<comment><USER20> The concept is actually 30 to 40 years old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My ability to solve difficult problems in coding and in Computer Science is much like the blindsight described in the article. I look at a problem for awhile then go away and do something in the shower. I might be relaxing or in the shower, and the answer will pop into my head, as if from nowhere.

The older I get the more I think we should think of our talents as "superpowers." They are somewhat like bolt-ons. We shouldn't let them define us. We should have some depth of character beyond that.

EDIT: And we should use them "only for good."

<comment><USER22> Elizabeth Gilbert made that same point in a TED talk.

<http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Similar abilities have been observed in monkeys, but TN's is the first study of these abilities in humans."

Maybe it's not exactly the same thing, but quite a while ago (10-15 years) I read in a book about the brain of a patient who had similar damage in one half of the brain. Both his eyes worked, but he couldn't see on one side, and when a piece of paper was held up into his "blind spot", reading "plese stand up", he stood up, making up a rationalization for it (like "my leg felt sleepy", "I thought I heard something", etc.) I'm not even sure if that was just about one patient, maybe it was several. But at any rate, I knew this ages ago, by randomly picking it up from a book from the library -- so how is this a surprise?

I get that this is the first dedicated study of that stuff, but it surely it isn't complete news?

</comment><comment><USER24> That's fascinating. It makes sense, in an odd way. His eyes are still functioning, but the brain can't process the incoming data, so things get remapped to areas of the brain responsible for other types of functions.

I have a bit of the opposite problem. I have a mild form of Charles Bonnet syndrome. The visual hallucinations I experience aren't extremely frequent or complex. I may have one every few days to every few weeks, and they usually only last for a couple of seconds. Mostly I just see abstract shapes (usually the same shape - kind of a glowing horseshoe). Once or twice, I have seen chairs.

Here's a great TED talk on it: [http://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_rev...](http://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html)

<comment><USER25> _His eyes are still functioning, but the brain can't process the incoming data, so things get remapped to areas of the brain responsible for other types of functions._

Actually, as KingMob explains in [1], the mappings are already there in healthy persons as well. This is the "lizard brain" - the original neural pathways transmitting visual information to various subconscious modules that evolved hundreds of millions of years before the relatively new invention of the mammalian cerebral cortex. As evolution rarely throws out anything that works, the archaic modules are still there, functioning, and in this patient's case, only the more recent higher-level capacities were destroyed.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4319700>

<comment><USER24> That's awesome, fascinating stuff - thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The novel Blindsight by Peter Watts is partially about what blindsight and other similar phenomena can tell us about conciousness. If you like the article, and speculative fiction in general, you'll probably like that novel (although the ending is horribly bleak).

</comment><comment><USER26> I am surprised Peter Watts' story wasn't mentioned yet. The story gets its name from this condition.

<http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm>

</comment><comment><USER27> Well, here is a partial explanation. The eyes developed as a sense organ attached to the midbrain and only later were wired to the forebrain. The midbrain retains complex circuits that we use in our reflexive behaviour. We use these circuits more than we would suspect eg while walking along corridors or while turning away from an object thrown towards the face. A stroke in the forebrain would leave these neural pathways intact. Hence the sight without concious vision.

Of course in reality these things are much more complex...

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm reading through "Consciousness: a very short introduction" and one of the points that the author makes is that these kind of proccesses(object detection) are distributed throughout the brain, and that we have specilized "circuits" for most if not all common tasks we perform on a daily basis. This seems counter intuitive to me, and I presume most people, because it feels that these kind of proccesses are conscious and under my control, when apparently they are not.

</comment><comment><USER29> HN readers might enjoy the science fiction novel Blindsignt by Peter Watts [1]. Alien contact in deep space with some interesting speculation on neuroscience and consciousness. I enjoyed it a lot.

[1] (Contains plot spoilers) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(science_fiction_nov...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_\(science_fiction_novel\))

</comment><comment><USER30> This subject was presented in a book I read recently, along with many interesting aspect of how our mind works. The book is definitely worth reading, it was "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

I wonder if it can explain the fact that I don't fall or bump into obstacles when I walk and read at the same time...

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this man's signal to noise ratio for playing high stakes poker could be a sizable advantage. It would be very interesting to see him play.

Making good reads is mainly an input problem. There's so much to pay attention to that it interferes with noticing the important things. Tuning into emotions and mannerisms while also tuning out of visual noise could give this man exceptional situational awareness that's also free of his conscious mind's biases.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you want more information about this Through The Wormhole Season 2 Episode 5 "Is there a sixth sense" explored this and presented some theories on how it occurs. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Wormhole#Season_2>

The show is excellent and presents a lot of science topics in and interesting and understandable way. Highly suggested viewing.

</comment><comment><USER33> The video of him walking down the obstacle course (!!) is pretty amazing and can be found at the bottom of this page [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982208...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982208014334)

</comment><comment><USER34> Interestingly, this report comes from 2008 and is presented by SEED as something totally new.

The original findings were published in Current Biology (2008; 24: R1128-R1129).

That said, it is quite fascinating, non the less.

</comment><comment><USER35> <Off Topic

Anyone here used to be a subscriber to seed magazine the printed version?

I paid way back and never received a single issue from them.

</comment><comment><USER36> If sight is independent of visual awareness does that mean we should be searching for a new test for drivers?

</comment><comment><USER37> This would suck but it sounds a lot better than being straight-up blind.

</comment><comment><USER38> "So there I was .. installing some blinds ..

</comment><comment><USER39> he's almost a zombie

</comment><comment><USER40> Without reading the article, let me take a guess: Attackships on fire off the shoulder of orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate?</comment>


Ask HN: We redesigned and open sourced our landing page. Looking for feedback - <AUTHOR> We would like to receive your feedback in terms of design, usability and content.
Additionally we have also open sourced the landing page and documentation so that the community can help with examples and keep the docs up-to-date.
Here is the website: https://www.stormkit.io
Looking forward to hear your feedback. Thank you very much <comment><USER2> Duplicate: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23384905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23384905)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, sorry, that's my mistake. I wasn't able to delete this one. The URL was missing for users to actually land on the landing page directly.</comment></comment>


Some Python Anti-Patterns - <AUTHOR> https://deepsource.io/blog/8-new-python-antipatterns/ <comment><USER2> Interesting set of pointers. Another point, that I am not sure whether would qualify as an anti-pattern: asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Basically, using "try... except" rather than "if hasattr(obj, attribute)" etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> My junior devs. should benefit from this article.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good to know things for the python beginners

</comment><comment><USER5> Good points. Thanks for writing.

</comment><comment> sidhant-rajan Good to know these patterns!!</comment>


Why Stellar could be the next big ICO platform - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/why-stellar-could-be-the-next-big-ico-platform-f48fc3cb9a6c <comment><USER2> Getting the ill-informed to throw money at you because FOMO isn't a business model.

<comment><USER3> Tell that to the guys who invented the Snuggie! On a serious note, bad mouthing an interesting article doesn't do anything, but drive up its traffic...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was looking into building some stuff on Stellar, but found the resources to be poor compared to ethereum. Unfortunately every time you try to find some resources to build in crypto currency the vast majority of material is around "how to buy stellar!" "Is stellar worth investing" etc

</comment><comment><USER5> Stellar is interesting, but I fail to see how, outside of its transaction rate, it is superior to Ethereum. Not being Turing complete is a strange bragging point - but then I'm not sure HNs position on smart contracts. Personally I'd take Turing completeness and a lack of tools today over a limited language for posterity.

There are a handful of different tactics in the works to speed up and scale ethereums transactions (were already at 500x smaller fees than BTC). ETH/Viper (a new language for contracts) and ETH/Casper (a method for increasing the transaction rate) together should leave Stellar in the dust. That said I have tremendous respect for Stripe so... we'll see!

</comment><comment><USER6> After reading this, I have so many questions. First, can someone please explain what is this business about "advisors" all about? I see Naval Ravikant on nearly every other coin followed by some big names. What role do they play?

Second:

> 5 seconds median settlement time on Stellar vs 3.5 min on Ethereum for > execution and secure confirmations). It costs 1 cent to make 100,000 > transactions on Stellar.

How does this work? If it works something like Ripple that's not exactly a decentralised currency, is it?

</comment><comment><USER7> FYI: the symbol for Stella Lumen is called XLM, not XLR as stated in the article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Appears to be a fluff PR piece</comment>


Wireless neutrino network could pass through the center of the Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122535-wireless-neutrino-network-could-pass-through-the-center-of-the-earth <comment><USER3> Well, it's nice to see that I'm not completely crazy ;). I'm happy to see, however, that the article pretty much sums up why this isn't actually a feasible solution.

In addition to the extreme bulkiness of both the emitter and detectors (See Super Kamiokande), neutrinos only really get generated in certain particle decays. This means you're pretty much stuck with needing a nuclear reactor (of varying sizes) to generate them. Although this alone isn't necessarily a problem, it's really not something governments are going to be overly happy with garage hackers doing. :(

Can the detectors be sized down? Maybe. Unfortunately, there's a good chunk of inherent randomness in neutrino particle detection. It may be that there's no good way to actually detect them short of brute force: Big detectors, lots of neutrinos, and just playing the odds.

We can dream though. And investigate.

<comment><USER4> "it's really not something governments are going to be overly happy with garage hackers doing"

Fusion reactions aren't _that_ difficult to create: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor>

Of course controlled fusion reactions that generate more energy than you put in are _slightly_ more difficult.

<comment><USER3> I didn't say that they were difficult, I said that governments (or at least your neighbors) aren't big fan of neutron emitting sources. ;)

I'm also not saying those concerns are justified, Nuclear Theatre and all that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Misleading headline. No one is thinking seriously about building a neutrino network. As the article mentions at the end, the detector has to be massive and the transmitter uses a great deal of power.

There would need to be an extraordinary breakthrough in our ability to detect neutrinos before something like this would be practical.

Neat trick and impressive that they could make it work at all, though.

<comment><USER6> Or the communications requirements of Earth's population would need to change in such a way that communicating through miles of planet becomes our most practical option.

For example, nuclear/EMP attacks kill all the comm satellites and force what's left of humanity deep underground...where luckily some superpower or three has tucked away big particle accelerators in addition to MREs.

Or perhaps off-planet, trying to send messages to mining operators, or through asteroid fields...work with me here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps this is what all the aliens are using. Much better than dealing with EM interference?

When will SETI be switching to neutrino detectors?

<comment><USER8> Propose it:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qwv9g/im_seth_shostak_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qwv9g/im_seth_shostak_senior_astronomer_at_the_seti/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This isn't the first time this has been thought of. A particle physicist had suggested nuclear submarines be laced with scintillators so the could receive messages sent by neutrinos a while back, which seems like a somewhat feasible, practical use of this technology.

<comment><USER10> Yes. One of the problem with that is unfortunately quite silly. We don't know the exact position of submarines, since the water interferes with the GPS-like systems and makes them unreliable, while neutrino beams need to be highly collimated to create a big enough flux.

<comment><USER11> So we need neutrino-based GPS?

I wonder if we could create black hole out of protons and neutrons only (to make it possible to move this black hole with electrostatic field), make it the precise size that it will evaporate at the same rate that it will absorb particles from sun - so it will be stable, put it with driving mechanism and precise clock on the orbit around the sun to occlude for example 10x10 meters on the Earth, and move it with the driver to create CRT-like pattern at changing frequency - one period at X Hz, one at 100X Hz, repeat.

You can decode your position on earth based on time between the 2 holes in neutrino pulse.

Should I file for a patent?

<comment><USER9> A submarine can use dynamics and seafloor maps to know where it's at, I think he was alluding to the fact that it's harder for us to know where the submarine is at, and collimate the beam accordingly. Although, if the submarine could collimate the beam it could communicate it's location (which it should be able to know a little bit better than the base) to a base via collimated beam.

Also, you'd probably want at least one more black hole to even attempt a somewhat accurate 2d/3d fix :) I'd imagine VLF communications are probably good enough for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Instead of traveling 10,000 miles or more via cable, it's only 8,000 miles in a direct line through the center of the Earth."

8k vs 10k -- is it such a big difference? I see it more as cost efficient -- "powering up" 10k miles long cable may be more expensive than shooting a "beam" through the Earth.

<comment><USER13> People are building the Atlantic Fibre Optic Cable connecting Europe to the US, in part to reduce latency. The obvious question is, is someone willing to pay a LOT of money for a low-latency, low-bandwidth connection from Sydney to NYC? The Great Circle minimum time of light in fiber is 74.6ms, while neutrinos (which travel at almost the speed of light) going through the Earth's diameter take 42ms.

Thus, you could cut the time in half if you could use neutrinos.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, location arbitrage. There is no way to trade equities faster and on better information than if you're faster than everyone else. Having this 30ms advantage will give whomever has it a huge advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe it would require a little less energy, if instead of generating our own neutrinos, we modulated the neutrinos that go throught the Earth from sun - <USER2> nuclear reactor required, "just" a huge fast moving lead block :)

EDIT: also - what happens, when neutrino passes event horizon? Because maybe we could modulate neutrinos stream using very small black holes :)

<comment><USER7> Also, if we could just modulate the entire Sun, we'd have a very effective cross-galactic communication device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems like nearly all the extremetech articles end with a big whimper at the end...

<comment><USER16> Would you rather big, flashy, ignoring-reality hyperbole? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do I have this right? Neutrinos are fermions, carriers of mass, and therefore have no wave characteristics in the two-slit experiment sense. Seems to me that "neutrino radio" is a misnomer?

<comment><USER18> So I was wondering if we ever started "broadcasting" neutrinos (assuming we had technology to receive them like radios today) would we have a way to divide up the spectrum or otherwise prevent interference? Anyone know? Anyone want to guess?

<comment><USER19> The precision which neutrino pulses could be detected in time (phase modulation) would determine the signal-to-noise ratio. The bandwidth of the channel is dependent upon that.

So very large, very short bursts of neutrinos at controllable times in very fast succession would be a very high-bandwidth channel. Divide up the spectrum exactly as we do today with radio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> here is a thought: center of the earth is 6,000c hot. There is a heat resistant aluminium to withhold this temp. Further, I am sure there are solutions to generate electricity from the heat. I wonder how hard would it be to dig a hole through the center of the Earth and put the cable in it, hahah :)

<comment><USER20> If you're trying to generate electricity by exploiting a difference in two temperatures, it would probably be more cost effective to just drop a cable into the ocean.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't it be easier to generate electricity from extreme heat, rather than from cold water?

<comment><USER20> What actually matters is the temperature difference between two points.

But to answer your question, sure, probably - assuming your materials can withstand the extreme heat, and assuming you can get at it, which as sp332 pointed out here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3708465>), we can't.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Defeat of the Schools (1939) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95dec/chilearn/murde.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> I find this article to be incredibly insightful, even at 70 years old. It also contains many choice quotes.

"If we wanted to give our convenient inquiring friend, the Man from Mars, an idea of the best in human culture, we would hardly hand him a set of school texts and syllabi. Why should we do it with Johnnie and Susie?"

</comment><comment><USER2> "Do they experiment and analyze and try out alternative procedures in some sort of planned sequence? The author of one important study finds that few of them seem to reason at all, and that reflective thought is not evoked. 'Instead, many of them appear to perform almost random calculations upon the numbers given. Where they do solve a problem correctly the response seems to be determined largely by habit.'"

Having known many mathematicians, I can confirm that they too solve problems this way ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> I often wonder if the issue is that many educators feel there is an aspect of teaching that can be learned and mastered separate from the subject matter. In other words many think one can be a good math teacher without a passion for and a love of mathematics. The author's tone in discussing arithmetic conveys an attitude I often see with respect to one of the most powerful tools a child learns.

We see this in programming shops with the pointy-haired boss phenomenon. Management is taught as a science unto itself.

I'm reminded of a recent essay I read by the category theorist Eugena Cheng (<http://cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk/illogic/illogic.html>).

Imagine your children learning the "trivial" facts and algorithms of arithmetic from a teacher with this world view of what math is.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A follow up article:

<http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95dec/chilearn/muref.htm>

</comment><comment><USER4> It is worth noting that, up until the start of the second world war (i.e. right around the time this was written), Germany was the seat of intellectual power. As educated individuals fled for the last safe haven, which just happened to be America, they brought about a shift in that power. However, it wasn't until Sputnik and the scare of the commies being able to "drop nukes on our heads" that natural born American citizens started to really participate in the development of America's intellectual prowess.

It's also apt to note that many of the individuals educated in the knee-jerk response to sputnik are now reaching retirement, and, dare I say, it shows!

<comment><USER5> _However, it wasn't until Sputnik and the scare of the commies being able to "drop nukes on our heads" that natural born American citizens started to really participate in the development of America's intellectual prowess._

Not back when Benjamin Franklin was inventing and doing research?

<comment><USER6> Benjamin Franklin fits into the long line of American tinkerers, not a world- class intellect. Think of Ron Popeil.

<comment><USER7> Wha? The man discovered that lightning was electricity, hardly the 'Chop-o- Matic' of the 18th century.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CSS3 Gradient Generator - <AUTHOR> http://gradients.glrzad.com/ <comment><USER2> Awesome, this is much easier than using a background image!</comment>


Dispelling the myths of customer retention in retail - <AUTHOR> http://blog.custora.com/2012/01/dispelling-the-myths-of-customer-retention-in-retail/

<comment><USER2> spam

<comment><USER3> I'm going to agree with you. The blog is from a company that sells a customer retention product.

Additionally, I've built analysis systems for more than one national retailer, and customer retention is seen as very important and usually one of the first things they try to tackle. The biggest problem is that they don't have the cleanest of data, so that's the big part in implementing good retention strategies.

These aren't so much "Myths of Customer Retention" as they are contrived introductions to a marketing pitch. I've done plenty of work in the customer analysis area and never have I encountered any of these so-called "myths."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happened to thefeelgood.com? - <AUTHOR>

I got to know about this music site through HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375296), got addicted to it, and now the domain's dead. What happened to them? It would be interesting to hear their story. <comment><USER2> Maybe in the middle of a server migration and/or IP propagation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Site seems to be back up.</comment>


Atlassians Bitbucket is hemorrhaging users over a single issue - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/7775/post-service-does-not-provide-useful

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is the exact issue I was encountering today with CodeShip. Not exactly following git-flow but I was hoping to merge master into release and trigger a build and deployment phase but it doesn't work.

<comment><USER3> Not sure what stack you're on, but I've done exactly what you're describing with Beanstalk (now a standalone product at [http://dploy.io](http://dploy.io)) for years.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the tip--looks interesting. The only addition that CodeShip provides is also running my tests (may have just missed reading that on dploy).

Stack is Node.js, RabbitMQ, MySQL, Redis, and a little bit of Go running on top of Elastic Beanstalk with Docker.

<comment><USER3> Because you're using EB and Docker, I'm not sure Dploy is right for you, but it's worth looking into.

I _believe_ you can run arbitrary commands after you commit to a particular branch, which would allow you to run your tests.

If any of your commands exit with a failure code, the deploy is halted and you're notified via email.

(You can also set the deployments to be manual, allowing you to commit to e.g. "release" without anything happening until you want it to.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where did that headline come from?

<comment><AUTHOR> It came from observing the amount of users claiming to have left from Bitbucket to Github within the thread. I've been following it for months but it has been active since 2013-07-17, 131 comments on it so far and it seems to be only getting more vocal.</comment></comment>


Why Apple Approved Opera And Not Google Voice - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ryankearney.com/2010/04/why-apple-approved-opera-and-not-google-voice/

<comment><USER2> This article is implying that ATT lied to FCC about their involvement in the GV rejection decision. This is noted here: [http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/29/att-dont-blame-us-for- the-i...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/29/att-dont-blame-us-for-the-iphones- google-voice-ban/)

Additionally, there are no sources to back up the claim mentioned in this post. Net result - ignore until further information is available

<comment><USER3> It also ignores the fact that there are programs that allow users to receive unlimited texts already in the app store (TextNow being the one that springs to mind but there are tons). If that were the main reason to reject Google Voice you'd think those others (from far less influential companies) would also have been stopped.

<comment><USER4> Google Voice lets you send and receive text messages for free. TextNow let's you send free text messages, and if you integrate with Google Voice you can receive them as well.

Operating an SMS gateway is expensive and I'm sure there are not tons of apps that run one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > AT&T decided to reject Google Voice due to the fact that users would have no > reason to keep their texting plan

There are plenty of approved apps that provide free texting.

The real reason GV isn't on the iPhone is because it's made by Google. Remember when Google promised Google Navigation was coming to the iPhone as soon as Apple would approve it? Well, they didn't :-/

</comment><comment><USER6> Because Opera Mini is so bad there's no point in banning it?

</comment><comment><USER7> They banned it because Google Voice would make the switching cost from iPhone to Android easier. If you don't have to change your phone number or even talk to a phone company to port it, switching carriers becomes something you can do on a whim. It's the same reason they are banning cross-platform development systems.

</comment><comment><USER8> Because they felt like it?</comment>


The recession is killing chain restaurants. So why is P.F. Chang's thriving? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2218402/?from=rss <comment><USER3> No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. - <USER2>

<comment><USER4> How does that quip apply here? The folks running P.F Chang's seem smart enough to have a formula that works.

Do you think people who like P.F. Chang's are dopey?

<comment><USER3> _Do you think people who like P.F. Chang's are dopey?_

Yes. I thought that would be obvious to anyone of reasonable intelligence who has eaten at P.F. Chang's. Simply horrible food.

<comment><USER5> I want to agree with this but I've met dozens of really genius people who _only_ like "mall food." Especially in science and engineering. The wizardly EECS PhD who only eats out at the Cheesecake Factory was a total cliche when I lived in Cambridge.

<comment><USER3> I guess taste and intelligence are not necessarily the same thing.

<comment><USER4> One is easier to measure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DAE think CoffeeScript is ridiculously overrated? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ig1ig/dae_think_coffeescript_is_ridiculously_overrated/ <comment><USER2> I was in the "WHY????" crowd for quite a while until I actually tried writing a somewhat big SC 2.0 app in coffeescript. What I found is the following:

* Debugging is a non-issue. The mental map from coffeescript to javascript is straight-forward. So if you hit a bug in your javascript, you know where it came from, even if the line-number doesn't match. Clean, organized CS code will yield clean, organized JS.

* Its a language for people that know JS already. Basically, its a shorthand notation for many javascript idioms - if you don't know what the idiom is there for, you will be lost.

* The compiler is easy to install and runs great - you can get started pretty quickly.

* The documentation is adequate and even explains special cases proper looping over all properties of an object.

* A lot of JavaScript syntax still "just works", like using Javascript Object Syntax instead of the coffeescript one.

All in all, my experience was quite positive (I also had a few nitpicks, especially when it came to SproutCore idioms like calling functions of functions for bindings etc.).

So, before you start ranting about all those issues, please do yourselves a favor: try it for an afternoon. And then complain about the stuff thats really an issue.

<comment><USER3> I've been using JS "seriously" for many years, and only decided to try CoffeeScript out in my latest project which is on Rails 3.1 - so using CS was effortless.

The transition was very easy, and the syntax is much more readable - that was enough to sell me.

Going on, I also found myself starting to organize my code better with the use of CS classes. I still appreciate the idea of JS classless objects, but having a convenient syntax had a good influence on my code organization (at least for now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see what this thread is doing on HackerNews.

Most of the opinions on this Reddit thread are ignorant, prejudiced, and as far as I can tell nobody in there has got actual CoffeeScript experience.

Their main point seems to be that debugging source-translated code is hard - ignoring efforts like <https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/558>

This is definitely not constructive.

</comment><comment><USER5> Writing CoffeeScript is a far nicer experience than writing JavaScript, but I choose to write JavaScript. There are two reasons:

1\. First, a minor point: When I find JavaScript experiments I did in 2001, they still work out-of-the-box and I can immediately start editing them (and fixing my horrible style). I'm always impressed by this. With coffeescript, you need the correct version of the compiler to be saved with your project.

2\. More importantly, I think CoffeeScript is a temporary solution. CoffeeScript fixes the problems with JavaScript. But JavaScript is also working to fix the problems with JavaScript. I know it's going to be a good while before JS.next is usable for the masses - but I'm sure that before that time there will be a good CoffeeScript-like transpiler that takes care of the old browsers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does it matter? I find it totally awesome, it was the reason I could finally get into developing with js properly. I've never liked the JS syntax, kept me away from learning it.

</comment><comment><USER7> by the way, 'dae' means 'does anyone else'. Not sure if it's just a reddit term.

<comment><USER8> Thank you, I was wondering who DAE were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's actually become one of my favorite languages. JavaScript is a terrific language and coffeescript capitalizes on this. The source code just becomes so clear and concise, and I really like how the language was designed. I still get hung up on lexical scoping, but that is my bad. Does anyone know how to use constructor like attr_accessor? Anyway I love writing coffeescript.

</comment><comment><USER10> Has reddit quality gotten this bad? The highest rated comments are by people who obviously never really used coffeescript. Saying that debugging is an issue is a completely ignorant stance to take.

Until you actually try a language, you really aren't in any position to make any claims about it.</comment>


Krita, OpenGL and Qt - <AUTHOR> https://valdyas.org/fading/hacking/krita-hacking/krita-opengl-and-qt/ <comment><USER2> > So at some point, the engine stopped working on macOS. Mostly because Apple > doesn't want people to use OpenGL, so they're starving their drivers from > development

As a graphics developer, all I can say is... sigh. Apple has fought against open standards in graphics. They never overtly move against open standards (that I'm aware of) instead they use their dominant platform and refuse to or drag their heels in implementing support for open APIs.

Even though there's a new era of cross platform graphics APIs in Metal, WebGPU, and Vulkan, the fight has now moved onto formats, as everyone except Apple work towards open formats like WebP, glTF, basis universal (fortunately they can't avoid that last one), while Apple announces they'll use USDZ instead, or not add support for WebP.

<comment><USER3> If you want to implement an OpenFX [1] effect properly you have to write its core _four_ times:

\- A CUDA implementation, if the host uses CUDA

\- A Metal implementation, for Apple

\- An OpenCL implementation

\- A fallback CPU-based implementation

\- You don't need a DirectCompute implementation, because thankfully no one is idiotic enough to use it.

\- You don't need a Vulkan implementation, because no one is doing compute on Vulkan (afaik).

The state of graphics and compute APIs is utter insanity. Especially Apple can go fuck off and die with their extremely moronic move of introducing OpenCL as an open standard in '09 and then presenting Metal as their closed API in '14, moving against OpenCL, OpenGL _and_ Vulkan. nVidia at least has the excuse they were first to market with CUDA (and it's easier to program), and they stuck to it.

[1] THE standard for video effects, think "VST, but better and for video".

<comment><USER4> > The state of graphics and compute APIs is utter insanity.

It looks like Vulkan is going to be the best-supported common platform for compute, at least for modern hardware. They need compute in the standard to support the core graphics use case anyway, so we might as well use that same support for general-purpose tasks. On Apple platforms, MoltenVk can implement Vulkan support on top of Metal

<comment><USER5> Yes, a common GPU compute platform would be great! Even if Apple isn't going to support it being able to handle all of it in Vulkan would be nice. Maybe OpenCL can be implemented on top of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This may be a bit of an extreme view, but I don't like frameworks at all. In general.

They are nice for little "hello world" applications that demonstrate how easy it is to create and deploy a new project, but it's just like the "programming language demo snippet" problem - it tells you nothing about what it's like to use this thing in a big, long-term project.

APIs and libraries on the other hand are usually not a problem. Especially graphics APIs - if you have a big project that makes heavy use of a graphics API, it's probably best to create an abstraction layer. That can be a very tricky task at conception, but it gives you a lot of flexibility later. It's definitely necessary for dependency inversion.

With frameworks you don't get that benefit. Making a "framework-independent" application (not library) through abstraction is a bit like trying to kiss your own butt. You'll probably break yourself while attempting it and it's a dubious goal in the first place. (I tried it with ASP.NET Core and I still have back problems)

The worst thing about frameworks is that they force their architectural style on you. If you want to get anything done it's a bit like working in a very large company - you have to spend a lot of time learning all of its little idiosyncracies, politics and issues so you can adjust to them, your work has to mirror all of their design mistakes and they can basically just decide to effectively cancel your project at any time for no reason.

<comment><USER7> _> This may be a bit of an extreme view, but I don't like frameworks at all. In general._

I don't think giving an opinion such as _" I don't like frameworks"_ without any concrete source code of non-trivial projects is productive discussion. (My previous comment about "unnamed invisible frameworks" : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14172165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14172165))

 _> They are nice for little "hello world" applications that demonstrate how easy it is to create and deploy a new project,_

It's the opposite. A good framework that fits the problem domain does a lot of low-level gruntwork that frees the programmer to focus on higher-level tasks.

It's not libraries OR frameworks. Real-world complex applications can use both.

<comment><USER8> One of the problems with using a framework for a non-trivial project is that you get locked into the framework. If the framework decides to change something in an update that you depend on, it can mean non-trivial rewrites unless you could expect the development already. Most frameworks tries to be close to 100% backwards compatible and grow in complexity because of it. Others change a little at a time. And then some does big breaking changes or rewrites and calls it version 4.0. That makes it increasingly hard to find help online.

<comment><USER9> It really depends how you structure your code. While my Qt apps are very much coded against Qt, it's actually pretty easy for me to currently switch them to other UI frameworks as needed. I've done this with some of my bigger tools going to other frameworks.

If you keep your logic separate from your UI, and interact via method calls, it's not very hard to swap out the underlying object. Arguably, it's the pattern Qt encourages anyway so that you can flexibly change your UI design in the future

<comment><USER10> > While my Qt apps are very much coded against Qt, it's actually pretty easy > for me to currently switch them to other UI frameworks as needed.

Are yours apps open-source or do you know some architectured in the same way ? Curious and interested to dive into a well designed Qt application with logic and UI separation.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately none of my Qt code is open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I spent a good chunk of my day today fighting a bug that I imagine is going to bite us sooner or later at work, but so far seems limited to my machine.

We use Qt5 and QGraphicsScene with QGLWidget to let us also do custom background painting in OpenGL. We have tried porting to the new QOpenGLWidget before, but we hit a fun issue: If you add a QWebEngineView to a widget in the graphics scene, the entire widget disappears for a frame every time the browser repaints. Which gives you a really great flickering that makes the software unusable.

It used to only happen on my branch with QOpenGLWidget, but I recently recompiled using a newer gcc version and now it happens to me with the old QGLWidget as well.

Qt and OpenGL seem to not get along all that great. There are all sorts of odd rendering artifacts that pop up and never seem to get fixed. The documentation for internal Qt code is also not great, which makes trying to parse through it a real adventure.

Edit: Another fun bug that popped up in the Qt4 to Qt5 transition is that on Linux if you have our app open and then switch to a different virtual workspace and back, the app stops repainting until you resize the window.

<comment><USER12> Try to QOpenGLwindow. There's a function to wrap it up in a container Qwidget so it can be embedded like a QWidwget in the UI.

<comment><USER11> Currently there is the QGLWindow that holds a QGraphicsScene, where all of our windows are QWidgets wrapped by QGraphicsProxyWidget to get them into the scene.

Are you suggesting that we should do another layer of wrapping the QWebEngineView in a QOpenGLWindow wrapped in a QWidget that is then wrapped in a QGraphicsProxyWidget?

I don't understand why that would help, but I guess you never know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So if I'm reading this right, there is still no such thing as a standard graphics API. There's OpenGL, there's Direct3D, there's other hardware- specific APIs (Metal and Vulkan are mentioned), and now Qt is inventing their own API to abstract over all these APIs.

How is having a standard API to draw 3D graphics not a solved problem at this point?

<comment><USER14> The game revs ruined it for everyone else ;)

The revisionist history: AAA game developers are used to console APIs. Which do exactly what you tell them to at the hardware, no sugar coating or drivers in the way. Having shipped a few games, drivers are indeed a terrible curse. One vendor's D3D11 drivers are pretty notorious for being incredibly invasive to your game in the goal of speed, making it difficult to ship content that was consistent across devices. Another vendor, sick of having to turn their driver into a rocket engine, found common ground with some game developers, and made a prototype, Mantle, which showed real-world performance gains on game content. But it was pretty specific to how their hardware and GPUs worked. But given that Xbox wanted performance, Microsoft was I intrigued and worked closely with that vendor to design the next-generation Direct3D API.

Meanwhile, the vendor with the super fancy drivers had a pretty major chokehold on OpenGL, which is just an absolute terrible mess of a bad API. It's an API that is so backwards and difficult that nobody likes it from the driver or the application perspective, but given that this vendor had the best drivers for it, they didn't want to lose it. But Mantle vendor wanted to shake things up and submitted Mantle to Khronos, the organization that standardizes OpenGL, to form the basis for the "gl-next" initiative. Mobile GPU vendors get invo.ved and turn the design into a mess. The original engineers who designed Mantle left their parent company over design disagreements to go join Apple, who also had a vested interest in getting rid of OpenGL but had little desire to use gl-next. This is Metal.

Ultimately, D3D12 is Microsoft's turf. Nobody likes Vulkan but it's there on Android and Stadia and Linux and is pretty mediocre there. And Metal is pretty well-rounded but is the domain of Apple.

3D rendering has always been a mess, but now it's even worse because tiles exist, data bandwidth is crazy expensive, and game revs need more fidelity and FPS than ever before. Synchronizing between coprocessors is now the job of the application.

<comment><USER15> > Nobody likes Vulkan but it's there on Android and Stadia and Linux and is > pretty mediocre there.

Mediocre on Linux? Since when?

<comment><USER16> Didn't Vulkan omit a way to query for active displays so you just have to pick a random display index when your application starts up?

Other than that I thought Vulkan was pretty decently comparable to Metal. I don't have any first hand experience with it though.

<comment><USER17> That sounds more as if it would be a window system specific issue? As far as I know OpenGL didn't have that kind of API either and you had to use X11 and the glX bindings for that kind of information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Didn't realize Qt updates were such a disaster...

Interesting to me that they went for "Rendering Hardware Interface" with their own "cross-compile shaders both at compile and at runtime". I wonder about the exact scope of this work, and if they considered Vulkan Portability instead.

<comment><USER14> Don't take this the wrong way kvark, but is Vulkan Portability really the long term answer here? Do we want everybody to be writing Vulkan code? It's unfortunate that due to the mess of tilers, Vulkan got way more complicated than it likely should have, a lot of stuff wasn't properly thought out (i.e. pipeline derivatives, framebuffers, push descriptors), and we're even walking back a lot of the "atomic draw" promises with e.g. VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state. Even D3D12 had its allocation APIs pretty badly neutered, leaving is in this pretty suboptimal place.

I love the promises that Vulkan in theory provides but in practice the gains haven't been as bold as we thought they would be. Explicit APIs have less lies than the older ones, but still are pretty far from zero.

<comment><USER19> I have always seen its goal as providing the means to create different user libraries for different specialized purposes on top of it.

Then you also get implementations of other APIs like Direct3D on top on Vulkan, which is amazing because you can reuse all your code and tooling and run everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Funny to read that they are stuck with an old Qt version, 5.12 to be specific. I am on a similar boat, stuck with Qt 5.11 as this ist the last one with support for macOS 10.11.

And I am stuck on macOS 10.11 because it's the last with proper PDF subpixel rendering in Preview.app.

However, many Qt developers seem to upgrade to the newest Qt version as soon as possible. If it's an open source software, I can self-compile it using the older Qt 5.11, which usually works. But by default, Qt is sadly not providing platform independency anymore.

<comment><USER21> I see no reason to support OSX 10.11 anymore, just like I don't see any reason to support Windows 7 anymore. We have stay on Qt 5.12 because we haven't got the time/are too lazy to fix the bugs in later versions of Qt that break Krita, especially on Windows.

<comment><USER20> Of course, I understand your decision. I only lament the induced fragmentation.

<comment><USER20> (for which Qt is the main driver)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> ANGLE is OpenGL ES 3.1 conformant with the Vulkan backend, which runs on Windows, Android, and Linux. A Metal backend was also added recently, though it doesn't get nearly as much attention as D3D or Vulkan. Seems like fixing their ANGLE integration would be their best answer.

</comment><comment><USER23> (Ask HN:) At this point, if you want to create a cross-platform hardware accelerated application, is it better to use a game engine like Unity rather than an application framework like Qt?

At work we have an upcoming GUI project that has lots of classical dialogue boxes, but also has a main display area that really needs to be hardware accelerated, and can show 2d and 3d stuff. It needs to be cross platform including mobile. I'm at a bit of a loss where to start.

<comment><USER24> I would bet that the easiest thing would be FLTK. You can use system colors and make an openGL window while having everything else you would expect in a UI library. Executables with no dependencies start at a few hundred KB and it is very fast. There is even a single big pdf for documentation and dozens of examples that show off every widget. FLTK is very underrated these days because no one is out there marketing it.

GLFW and IMGUI are great libraries, but once you start wanting a program with various modal and non-modal windows, menus, widget layout, a native look, file dialogs, fonts, drag and drop, copy and paste, unicode, spreadsheet tables, physical printing, custom widgets, functions to hide OS specific system stuff (like stat, directory listing etc.) you might wish you had started with something made for what you are trying to do.

<comment><USER25> CyberDildonics has a good point. Tcl/Tk might also be a good choice for the application widgets, as there are lots of high level language bindings. I use it exclusively and love it, though fltk is also very solid - just lacking the bindings.

<comment><USER24> Bindings for what? I don't know the state of interfacing with various scripting languages, but there are binding for lots of languages out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Google plans to add ANGLE support for Metal backend. Once that backend is done (and even the Fuchsia support), ANGLE will continue to be an extremely viable option.

The delay of having a Metal backend may have been the reason they're deciding to ditch it, but is nonetheless sad.

Another future option will be WebGPU, once this is mainstream what Digia will do with Qt7? Drop everything again?

Since Digia put their hands on Qt, it is slowly going downhill.

<comment><USER27> Digia goes where paying customers are.

<comment><USER21> Digia hasn't been involved with Qt for years now. The Qt Company is an independent company.

<comment><USER27> That doesn't change the point of my comment, whoever develops Qt goes where the paying customers are.

Thanks for the correction, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love Krita. This (the qt breaking things piece) is obnoxious.

</comment><comment><USER29> I used to write Qt in like 2006 but I've given up. I've been rolling my own thing in Rust. GPU first, ECS ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system)) based. It's surprisingly pleasant.

<comment><USER30> I've also been working on a ui lib. Rather different, though: gpu completely optional (though well supported); not ecs; c.

I think there's a fundamental complexity that pervades popular ui libs (incl, qt, gtk, etc.), that doesn't need to be there.

<comment><USER31> Is this something which you can share with the public? I'd very much like to see it! I feel like all the modern UI libs are based too heavily on OOP.

<comment><USER30> Once it's done (tm). And there are other projects higher on the priority queue.

However, note that I also use OOP. No inheritance (death to gobject!), but the whole thing is based around interface polymorphism. This actually simplifies the design significantly. And you can implement an imgui on top of it pretty easily, if you really like hidden state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> at some point, the engine stopped working on macOS. Mostly because Apple doesn't want people to use OpenGL, so they're starving their drivers from development</comment>


Reddit's Astonishing Altruism - <AUTHOR> http://voltier.com/2010/11/12/reddits-astonishin-altruism/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant?

It really is heart-warming to hear of all the good that those on Reddit have done. But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place — discussions got extremely polarised very quickly and there seemed to be very little room for reasoned dialogue.

The article makes it sound like a good thing that _"comments are generally downvoted by dozens or even hundreds of people with remarkable speed, pushing their noxious posts down into obscurity within minutes"_. But, since _everyone_ can downvote — hell, I have even see non-controversial statements get downvoted heavily — the quality of dialogue often ends up being at the level of the lowest common denominator.

<comment><USER3> Reddit is not a place to have dialogue. Community-moderated areas just aren't very good at it. Even HN has been accused from suffering groupthink. If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it.

<comment><USER4> > If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world > (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better > place to have it.

Why?

<comment><USER3> Because groupthink is inherent in the upvoting/downvoting system. Perhaps only Slashdot is the only community I've seen where points are awarded to comments not based on agreement, but on general merit. Admit it: you've downvoted people you don't agree with. When enough people do it, you get groupthink.

Forums/mailing lists don't have that problem. Every post is given equal merit in the number of eyeballs that read it. Those comments that are not interesting can get ignored, those that are interesting will either merit a "yeah, I agree" response, or a "you're wrong for [x,y,z]". _That_ is a dialogue. Community moderated upvoted/downvoted discussions are not a dialogue. They are a "here's what we all think" metric.

<comment><USER5> _Because groupthink is inherent in the upvoting/downvoting system._

I'd almost argue that groupthink is inherent in human interaction in groups larger than one. Almost.

Forums and mailing lists are certainly susceptible to it, even though it occurs less often, but I suspect that has more to do with the size of their memberships. SA, for instance, has tons of it.

Oh, and /. had a _serious_ problem with it for a long time. Their moderation system helps, and maybe it's gotten a lot better (it's been a while since I was active on it), but oh man when /. was _the_ site, it was pretty bad.

/. is a good example of what seems to happen to a lot of online communities -- a small, competent, awesome base of users is very active for a while, things snowball, you then get a huge upsurge in users and activity and trolling, and then that eventually fades and your userbase stabilizes at a point where the userbase is pretty solid and there's not too much in the way of ridiculousness going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An oft cited reason for founding a company is to make the world better in some way. These 25 stories demonstrate that Reddit has undeniably accomplished that.

</comment><comment><USER7> I actually find reddit to be somewhat nauseating. Call me cynical, but I can't help but think the Reddit community performs every kind act with an air of smug, self-centerdness you often find in creepy church youth groups or after school specials. I started visiting reddit because digg's links started sucking, and now I visit HN primarily because reddit is no longer about good links either. It's a maassive geek circle jerk where people share semi amusing images, write self-affirming posts, and run every meme known to man into the ground. Reddit's new slogan about sums it up: "The Voice of the Internet." That's a lofty claim. Anyways, the same thing is bound to happen to HN at some point. The problem with social news sites is that they all get worse as the user base grows.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for helping people. But reddit was a link aggregator at one point, and it has been disappointing to see that side of it melt away over the years.

<comment><USER8> I will call you cynical. How can you sit there and say that? You have no examples of them doing this for self-serving purposes and quite frankly, the volume and repetition of their generosity is so great that it is bewildering to think that they are doing it for self serving purposes. And who gives a shit if I get off on helping people? Isn't it a good thing that I feel good about helping people? Isn't that in line with a sense of humanity?

edit: Additionally, remove /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/atheism and add the more obscure tech subreddits. There is plenty of tech content that comes through in /r/programming and /r/javascript that shows up before it shows up here. It is a link aggregator. Please take the 5 minutes, make an account and setup your subreddits correctly. I think you could be very pleasantly surprised.

<comment><USER7> I said I have no problem with people helping others - I'm not a sociopath. It's the whole "look, everyone, at how awesome we are" circle jerk that I find nauseating. Besides, I think reddit has performed an equal number of acts of vengeance as they have acts of altruism and have nailed the wrong person in more than one instance - perhaps that's worthy of a blog post. At least 4chan admits what it is.

Again, my issue isn't that reddit is an active community, it's that it has turned from a link sharing site to a larger, more work friendly version of 4chan with an incredibly inflated sense of self-righteousness.

And to be sure, I'm no reddit noob, I've had an account for 3 years and spent a lot of time cultivating my subreddits. It is a matter of opinion, I realize, but overall it has become a pretty poor source of good web content these days, for me anyhow.

<comment><USER8> Go find me a significant number of highly voted posts, or ANY, that gloat about how much they've raised. I remember those posts where they were driving. The closest thing imaginable to what you're describing was "we're almost to $xxx,xxx dollars everyone" posts. I've seen OTHER websites talk about it. I've seen Colbert talk about it, but NEVER have I seen a submission, let alone a post, that even remotely read "We're so awesome, go us!". If you think that is the style of comments on reddit, then honestly, I question your actual participation there. You're blindlyand prooflessly questioning their intentions and I find that offensive on their behalf.

Their acts of vengence are terrible and misplaced. Even just now I read a post about the Gizmodo jerk responding and making fun of reddit in a tweet. Someone commented to torment his flickr photos and someone immediately replied back that it would be a dick move.

You forget that reddit is made up of people. When it reaches the size it is, you're guaranteed to have the idiots that do vigilante stuff. But when one of the ADMINS who rarely condemn the community SHREDS into everyone about stopping the vigilantism... I think you're missing the forest for the few rotten trees (and I think it's because you want to).

I still think you are COMPLETELY wrong about the relevancy of posts in the good subreddits. You're doing a poor job of cultivating your subreddits frankly if you can't find a good combo resulting in quality links. Again, you bring up this sense of "self-righteousness" that is COMPLETELY unsubstantiated and not for you to say.

I think you've made your mind up without giving them a chance, and even when pressed for details, you make the same vague claims about their motives and intentions without any more substantiation than the first time you said it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> reddit is basically an IRC server for the web, with voting.

The cleverst thing they have done is also entirely simple. By making all thread replies to your posts appear in your inbox as personal messages, and highlighting the orange icon, it successfully encourages users to make reasonably deep replies to those that bite.

This seems to generate interesting thread content very quickly.

My only gripe is the lack of resolution in the voting system (ala /.). Meme overload is a real problem when browsing reddit.

<comment><USER10> Meme overload is a significant problem on any large internet community that's web-centric in its outlook. From SA to 4chan to reddit, any community that thinks of itself as "the Internet" will employ memes as a means of self- confirmation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Never underestimate the capabilities of people who don't feel like working at work. I think the whole not doing anything for weeks at a time make people want to compensate somehow, and this is the result. Sending birthday cards to 90-year-olds and buying people new LCDs. Very nice.

</comment><comment><USER12> The quote that comes to mind when I think of the reddit community: "Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us."

<comment><USER13> i attribute that description to 4chan...reddit is kinda meh by comparison

<comment><USER14> By comparison of what? Reddit is not composed of typical people mentioned above? Or do all regular folk gather round to share Impact captioned cartoons of homosexual sheep riding bicycles through fields of scrotums?

<comment><USER13> reddit's retaliation might be a slap on the wrist.

4chan's retaliation would involve ripping your head off and taking a dump.

reddit is a lot more self controlled, 4 chaners fuck with people just because they can, reddit only tends to screw with the more mainstream evils

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's altruism, but it isn't astonishing in it's volume. I'm sure that of any suitably large group of people, the total dollar amount of donations to worthy causes will be well into the tens of thousands, which is basically what reddit's done here. You might call them kind of naive for doing things only about those causes that manage to get popular on reddit -- while reddit has some well-publicized random acts of kindness the overall impact of what they've done is pretty tiny.

Would some of those thousands of dollars have been better spent fighting malaria? I really can't say. Is it impressive to donate only to those causes that are presented in such a fashion as to jerk at the proverbial heart- strings? I should think not.

Is reddit above the rest of the Internet in its altruism? I would say perhaps not, but they're a good and valuable net community. There are many instances of Internet activism accomplishing something good, both inside and outside of reddit, and I would say that reddit's accomplishments are nothing short of pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm quite sick of reddit, to be honest. Many people there take delight in taking snarky, content-free swipes at others' hard work.

Maybe that is fun when you're 16, but it gets old after you've aged some.

</comment><comment><USER17> reddit is made of people.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, but you could say the same thing about the Nazi party and the civil rights movement in the United States. That statement is vacuous since I seriously doubt anyone reading this thought Reddit might be made of non- people. What's your point?

EDIT: While I agree with your sentiment and my comment could be interpreted has harsh depending on the tone of voice, I've said this kind of thing before (x is made of people) and always wished I had clarified it more. So please think of it as more of an invitation rather than a challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just an observation for those here who haven't spent a lot of time on reddit: the main page is _much_ more superficial then what you can get if you make an effort. When you're logged in you can subscribe and unsubscribe from subreddits. Once you get rid of pictures, wtf, politics and a couple more things already look a lot more mature... and then you can start looking for more obscure but rewarding ones.

A good example of what a smallish sub-forum can do, take a look at <http://www.reddit.com/r/motorcycles/>. This is a topic I'm interested in, but there are literally thousands of subreddits, smaller or bigger.

</comment><comment><USER20> How about a HN gift exchange this Christmas? Anyone else would be in?

<comment><USER21> Don't hold your breath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Arguably none of the altruistic acts 'reddit' has performed are representative of the entire reddit population.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hmm, this spontaneity might just be channeled into a start up idea. Imagine a site predicated on a community of users pitching in a buck a month or more to fund some life-changing event for a random or deserving person.

<comment><USER24> But this kind of thing exists: charities and fundraisers are nothing new.

The fact that it is their reddit taking action, and not some church group or NGO, is probably what motivates at least some of the participants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are you all forgeting the good deeds reported about in the article? Does that count for anything from an online community?

<comment><USER26> Churches are the biggest donators in the world. Does that count for anything for them?

<comment><USER27> Is that true?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only one here who doesn't know what's 4chan ?

<comment><USER29> Probably not, but (and not to be snarky or anything... well, maybe just a little), you do know what Google and Wikipedia are.... right?

I never understand the point of posts that ask knowledge that can be easily obtained (in both concise and verbose forms; with all the perspective and facts you could want) by just clicking on one of the top 5 results in Google.

<comment><USER28> Probably the intent of such posts is to find out if I am outdated or what? If more people haven't heard about something discussed here I would be convinced that this isn't something to worry about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> waiting to see similar list for HN :)

</comment><comment><USER31> As a redditor of going on nearly 5 years, this story brought me to tears (followed each of these events and participated in some) - and is personally my favorite YC spawn.

</comment><comment><USER32> Jesus christ, these stories make me cry. I don't know if this is something I need to explore deeper, or if I'm simply torturing myself by reading them.

<comment><USER33> Twinkles were abundant today near my facial area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> pretty cool. too bad about that rally though, they had a bunch of dildos and communists and a killer on stage singing about peace.

</comment><comment><USER26> Reddit and its community blows balls. There are churches out there who contribute in much bigger ways and get less publicity.

What a bunch of self serving douchebags. I'm sure they contribute online, but what will they do when someone in need approaches them in the street?

This kind of behavior is disgusting.

<comment><USER35> Seriously? You hear of a group of people who do good things, and your response is, "Well, they don't do as well as this other group that does good things!"

They did some really great things, and your response is "disgusting". Sad.

<comment><USER34> I would agree with you if it wasn't for the fact that Reddit constantly bashes that "other group" and never gives them credit when it's due.

<comment><USER35> Which negates their own achievements?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Insight about Unix: It wasn't designed to be hard. - <AUTHOR>

The insight is simply that unix wasn't designed to be difficult. It wasn't designed. Unix commands exist in the kind of half-formed state that all software goes through, when the author knows it well, and has succeeded in scratching all his own itches. It works well for him because he <i>grew</i> it from a seed. He spends no time considering the impact this grown thing will have on people that did not start from this seed. <comment><USER2> I don't buy this in the slightest. Given that Thompson and Ritchie had the itch, and made Unix into whatever scratched the itch, then what about all the transmutations since then? The BSD group, Unix System Labs, every company that every made a commercial version, the GNU people, the Single Unix Specification folks, etc etc, they've all modified everything: kernel, utilities, compiler, etc.

Each group along the line got to experience the impact you mention, and do things to either lessen or eliminate whatever impact the grown thing might have on someone who didn't grow up with it.

And you can't give the "well, they just standardized what was in place already" argument. Nobody was afraid to tinker. BSD group added sockets, VM, a new filesystem. Unix Systems Lab added a new shell, Ksh. Every commercial Unix vendor, from HP to IBM to SGI to Convex to Pyramid to SOlbourne to Sun, added utilities, threading models, administration tools, windowing systems, blah blah blah. Even the POSIX specification didn't quite match what was in place, and the ANSI C 89 spec didn't match the ancient "K&R" C.

Enough people have had a hand in Unix (not to mention Linux and the various FOSS BSDs) to sand off any rough edges.

Some things are just difficult. Operating systems are one of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't tar UNIX with such a broad brush. One of its important innovations was allowing someone besides the system programmers to make commands that could be used in exactly the same way system-provided commands could. A consequence is that sometimes commands were created with less care than the whole system was, or were inconsistent because there were made by so many different people. Don't confuse a strength with weakness.

(It used to be, of course, that people knew the difference between the operating system and programs that ran on it, but Microsoft confused that forever.)</comment>


SpamAssassin 2010 Bug - mike-cardwell https://secure.grepular.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/01/spamassassin-2010-bug/

<comment><AUTHOR> Ubuntu 9.04 affected too, thanks for posting.

Summary: FH_DATE_PAST_20XX matches on yars 2010-2099.

As a workaround until the spamassasin rules are updated, the score can be lowered in local.cf: score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

<comment><USER2> An alternate workaround (which doesn't disable the check altogether, but watch out in 2020!):

        locate 72_active.cf && sudo vi 'locate 72_active.cf'
        search 'FH_DATE_PAST_20XX'
        change '/20[1-9][0-9]/' to '/20[2-9][0-9]/'

Source: <http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/Rules/FH_DATE_PAST_20XX>

<comment><USER3> This patch is now available via sa-update. Check what you have with this command (assuming your path is similar):

      grep FH_DATE_PAST_20XX /var/lib/spamassassin/3.*/updates_spamassassin_org/72_active.cf

If needed, update with this command:

      sa-update

Then check again to confirm.

If you don't already, consider running sa-update daily in a cron job to mitigate the damage from bugs like these and to benefit from other changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seeing if a date is close to the current date with regular expressions = not a good idea.

<comment><USER5> It is a matter of going to war with the software you have, not the software you wish you have. SpamAssassin allows you to do plug-n-play logic for tests, but for implementation reasons only accepts regular expressions. Those are Good Enough for most email filtering tasks, very flexible, and have fairly predictable security and resource consequences. This is the architecture that lets spam assassins subject an email to literally hundreds of tests (though in fairness I think they're probably less efficient than just naive Bayesian but don't trust me, my anti-spam researcher days are almost three years in the rear view mirror at the moment) and evolve quickly with the quickly changing, particularized nature of the spam threat at any given installation.

Not to say that its optimal -- it is not -- but there is a reason it is done that way as opposed to having a fully executable plugin architecture which would have access to your date parsing library of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is why heuristic tests suck and statistical classifiers are superior.

<comment><USER7> I don't see why. The heuristic here was fine (is the date too far in the future?), and not part of the problem. The bug was in the _implementation_ of the heuristic ("any date after 2010 is too far in the future").

Maybe you're making a software maintainability argument instead? But clearly this doesn't make a good argument for classifiers vs. heuristics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This also affects big email hosting providers, eg gmx.net.

[http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Jahr-2010-Problem- im-...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Jahr-2010-Problem-im-Spam- Filter-von-GMX-Update-894258.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> This affects Zimbra as well: <http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43766>

</comment><comment><USER10> Is rule based spam filtering still helpful? Wouldn't a big default spam database + machine learning work much better instead of rules + an empty default spam database + machine learning?

<comment><USER11> The rules help a lot, especially in the early training of the bayes database. It's amazing how much stuff is still caught by them... Over time, the SA bayesian recognizer gets good enough that the rules play a relatively small role. I think I had no false positives from this little bug thanks to the bayesian counterweight.

A default database is a poor idea, though. One thing I've learned in helping folks with SA is that people get _very_ different mixtures of spam and mail. I don't think you'd like my database at all. There's really no substitute for making your own...

<comment><USER10> What does Gmail use? It stops almost all spam. Aren't they using a single big database?

<comment><USER12> Probably a lot of the effectiveness comes from getting user spam classification feedback. The same letter is generally mass-mailed, so the chance someone got and flagged the spam you got, before you check your mail, is pretty high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thank you! My Gentoo Email server was affected, manually fixed for now.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just noticed this on our installation. Y2K+10...

<comment><USER15> I knew buying a Y2K10 survival kit would be a good idea.</comment></comment>