Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web - <AUTHOR> http://wavepot.com

<comment><USER2> This isn't really a DAW. For those unfamiliar, a DAW is a fully-featured music creation environment including sound design, composition, recording, arrangement and mixing in one interface. Examples include logic, cubase and ableton.

While I suppose this does allow for all of those things, as much as any programming language with access to an audio API does, this would be better described as a web-based DSP livecoding environment.

Apart from the naming quibbles, it looks excellent! I wonder what's generating the sound? I'm aware of the oscillator/filter primitives in the HTML5 audio API from the minimoog google doodle, but this seems more elaborate than that.

EDIT: for fun times, load "need more 303," scroll down to the bottom, and change some of the numbers around. Setting the slide() call to 1/1024 yields a nice FM-ish sound. You can even overdrive the filter. Reach for the lasers!

<comment><USER3> It seems their goal is to make a full-fledged DAW in the browser, but they are not there yet (and far from it from what I can tell). How they would be able to fund all that for $2k is beyond me.

That said, it's a really clever idea to have all the source editable, since js is an interpreted language anyway. One can imagine a future where the community not only shares songs and sounds, but the DSP units themselves. Unlike desktop DAWs, which rely on dylibs (dlls) to supply external synths and effects, a js-based DAW can load, re-compile and hotswap units on the fly.

<comment><USER4> Realtime audio DSP seems like about the last thing that in-browser JavaScript was designed to do well.

Janky audio is unnacceptable in a way that janky visuals aren't. It totally kills the experience.

Without very strong guarantees about GC latency and thread scheduling that are neither available nor on the horizon for in-browser js, it won't work for anything beyond fun hacks.

<comment><USER5> If you don't care about latency, and in this "DSP sandbox" application you probably don't, JavaScript is fine for real-time DSP. JS under V8 and similar engines can be quite fast.

You aren't going to digitize 100 MHz of RF spectrum and build an SDR in JavaScript, but for audio rendering work it'd be fine. Cool hack.

<comment><USER4> I'm assuming that a full-fledged DAW cares a lot about latency. Live performance becomes difficult when latency creeps much above 5ms, for example. A lot of things that you normally don't think about (like when to allocate a buffer of memory) become critically important with low latency requirements.

That isn't an issue for the demoed app, but it is for the hypothetical longer- term goal under discussion.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I think they're making a mistake by using the term DAW. That term already means something, and this isn't it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great! I teach high school math and science, and students often ask how sound waves can be turned into music. I give them a big-picture overview of sine waves and superposition, but I've never had a tool that lets students play with the math easily.

I look forward to showing this to students in the fall.

<comment><USER7> You might also consider showing the Pure Data. The intro documentation/tutorial stuff is quite good at explaining the basics of sound synthesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A scene has sprung up around music based on algorithms, called Algorave [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorave](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorave)

Vice did an article on the subject a few months back which gives an overview of the scene (from a layman's view) [http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/algorave- is-the-future-of-dan...](http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/algorave-is-the- future-of-dance-music-if-youre-an-html-coder)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is really, really interesting.

<comment><USER9> come and do some wavepot at an algorave

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to! You guys have some amazing things going on there. I have some live performance features planned for wavepot, so yeah, not quite there yet! But keep an eye on it I'm sure you'll enjoy what I have in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That was fun. Here is my detuned remix of "on the verge tech mix" [https://gist.github.com/jchris/04585454570853297974](https://gist.github.com/jchris/04585454570853297974)

<comment><USER11> I like it! It is cool to see not just the demo projects, but people actually making something with it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For another take on live coding in the browser: [http://gibber.mat.ucsb.edu/](http://gibber.mat.ucsb.edu/)

Check out [http://algorave.com](http://algorave.com) for more info on the live coding music scene, which has really taken off in the last year.

I can't wait for someone to combine live coding with Swift Playground/Bret Victor 'revealing the system' style interfaces.

<comment><USER13> "I can't wait for someone to combine live coding with Swift Playground/Bret Victor 'revealing the system' style interfaces."

THIS!

Let's build it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you like this, you might also be interested in a newsletter I write called Web Audio Weekly. I link to interesting projects that use the Web Audio and Web MIDI APIs as well as more general stuff of interest to musicians and developers.

[https://tinyletter.com/webaudioweekly](https://tinyletter.com/webaudioweekly)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is such a great example of a great experience changing behavior. I haven't thought of making music in years, and I've seen other projects kinda similar to this in the past- but this reacts so quickly, so immediate to my inputs, that it's hard to step away from.

You've really got a great product here.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wavepot team: really awesome stuff! love it.

At Bandhub ( [http://bandhub.us](http://bandhub.us) ) we are looking for ways to integrate programmed music into our web DAW.

If you guys are up for a collaboration or want to discuss ideas, ping me osi (at) getbandhub (dot) com

<comment><USER17> Cool site. You need more genre categories however; Synth and/or Electronic would be a good start since you are missing anything along those lines. Probably a EDM category as well otherwise that's what either electronic and/or synth will end up being.

Also, Find Musicians doesn't seem to be working, at least not in Chrome on osx.

<comment><USER16> what do you see? can you send me the console output too?

<comment><USER17> When it's spinning looking for musician's the console says:

GET [http://bandhub.us/discoverUsersList?genres=&instruments=&col...](http://bandhub.us/discoverUsersList?genres=&instruments=&collaborationPreferences=) 400 (Bad Request)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems similar to [http://studio.substack.net/](http://studio.substack.net/)

<comment><USER19> It is. [http://studio.substack.net/wavepot](http://studio.substack.net/wavepot)

<comment><USER13> Wow.. So is Wavepot.com by substack too?

<comment><USER20> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is really cool, really nice level of abstraction.

The 303 example in the environments in which I learned computer music fundamentals (PD, Max, CSound, Supercollider) would require either much more or less understanding and/or 3rd party implementations of components to generate something similar. Most importantly the sound is really nice.

Btw the categorisation of it being a DAW is dependent on the user perspective, I've created what I would consider to be DAW equivalents in Max/Pure Data, that facilitate audio/midi recording and playback; just because a toolkit doesn't do stuff for you automatically doesn't mean it isn't capable. DAW in my opinion is just a marketing term not a descriptive one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I have background in Music Technology but I'm just starting with DSP myself. Most of the stuff I use are ported from code I found online so I can't really take credit for those though.

A modular piece of software like this can achieve pretty much the same as professional DAWs. Consider modules that add UI elements, automations, etc. It won't be long until the abstraction is high enough so everyone just assembles their own custom DAWs on the fly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> You can help the Wavepot project: Contributors can join the discussion and mailing list here: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wavepot](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wavepot)

They also have a funding campaign (accepting paypal) to finish this project that will include modules like Oscillators, Sequencers and:

Effects: Amp, Chorus, Delay, Dynamics, Eq, Filter, Flanger, Modulation, Phaser, Reverb.

Synths: Ambient, Analog, Bass, Drums, Flute, FM, FX, Modular, Organ, Pads, Percussion, Piano, Samples and Strings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just want to clarify that the modules feature is the ability to create them and import them like this:

      import DiodeFilter from 'filters';

      var filter = new DiodeFilter;

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there a way to contribute without using bitcoin? This is awesome and I want to support it, but I'm not really interested in getting involved in bitcoin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Paypal donations have been added to the crowdfund. Thank you people, I appreciate your enthusiasm, this is a project I am in love as well and I wanna see it going places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is really great. Reminds me of: [https://github.com/overtone/overtone](https://github.com/overtone/overtone)

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jonasschneider/bfa93fbb35...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jonasschneider/bfa93fbb358313f5b708/raw/4deba14485645b5860f6c1526a74ba52c2895c70/gistfile1.txt)

Extended the melody & progression a bit. I'm so proud, this is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER26> see also [https://mohayonao.github.io/CoffeeCollider/](https://mohayonao.github.io/CoffeeCollider/)

</comment><comment><USER27> It goes into loop when I want to switch a file "You've made some edits!"

Also

yntaxError: Unexpected token * at Function (native) at t (blob:http%3A//wavepot.com/576aa761-8f7c-4918-b4e7-8bdd7c77ff39:2:16401) at Function.<anonymous> (blob:http%3A//wavepot.com/576aa761-8f7c-4918-b4e7-8bdd7c77ff39:2:16779) at Function.i.emit (blob:http%3A//wavepot.com/576aa761-8f7c-4918-b4e7-8bdd7c77ff39:1:2656) at DedicatedWorkerGlobalScope.i.isMaster.self.onmessage (blob:http%3A//wavepot.com/576aa761-8f7c-4918-b4e7-8bdd7c77ff39:2:12723)

</comment><comment><USER28> As a heavy Ableton user and coder I would like to have a coding environment that also has powerful gui libraries so I can quickly implement faders and knobs and stuff when needed but also be able to change code on the fly. Kind of get the best of both worlds for the ultimate hacking music environment. This is something similar and very interesting but for visual stuff based on openFrameworks: [https://media.usfca.edu/app/plugin/embed.aspx?ID=mjWcGbE4DUK...](https://media.usfca.edu/app/plugin/embed.aspx?ID=mjWcGbE4DUKAVXRVJLL5BA)

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I'd really like to see a DAW that incorporates SuperCollider in a transparent way along with traditional audio & MIDI tracks, a bit like how Max is integrated with Ableton.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hey, Hey, Hey! I made something with it!

[https://gist.github.com/druu/044b8103e2a4842828bd](https://gist.github.com/druu/044b8103e2a4842828bd)

It's the melody of the song 'Popcorn'. While this might not be special, I implemented a first draft of a (going-to-be) multi-track sequencer. </shameless self plug>

Whatcha think?

</comment><comment><USER31> What a great idea. I want to make synthesized sound effects for a game I'm making, and building them algorithmically in Javascript would be great. My alternatives have involved twiddling a zillion predefined knobs in a overwhelming UI, but as a developer this is far more appealing.

If only I could export the generated sound!

<comment><AUTHOR> Uncompressed code export with convenience methods like .play() is planned for milestone I. This exact use-case is what I had in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'd love to help develop this (and experiment myself!). Is it open source?

If so, where can I find the repo?

</comment><comment><USER33> This is amazing, but I wish there was a clear way of knowing when there is an error causing your changes to not be output.

I fiddled for a couple of minutes without any changes before realizing i had forgotten to initialize a variable. (the x checkmarks don't seem to work for unassignad variables..)

<comment><AUTHOR> A debug console is planned for milestone I that will help for those issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> As someone who's completely ignorant to the concepts behind algorave, could anyone more experienced outline the helpful prerequisites to know before I experiment with a tool like Wavepot?

I assume it's mostly the (basic?) physics of sound waves that I'd need to understand?

<comment><USER12> You don't need to know anything about the physics of sound or programming, to get algoraving with Tidal or Ixi Lang

[http://yaxu.org/tidal/](http://yaxu.org/tidal/)

[http://www.ixi-audio.net/ixilang/](http://www.ixi-audio.net/ixilang/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Made a gist with some of the scripts people have been making.. Add yours to the comments and I'll curate the list.

[https://gist.github.com/notthetup/65f100f8ecf0f44f568d](https://gist.github.com/notthetup/65f100f8ecf0f44f568d)

</comment><comment><USER35> Hi stagas, great job on wavepot! Is there any way we could get in touch off of this thread? My startup company is working on a very similar idea, and I think it would be great to know each other. If you'd like I can send write down my email onto this thread. Hope to talk soon!

</comment><comment><USER36> This is really, really impressive. Cool range of sounds. Have you thought about attaching a user-friendly, knobby interface to the modules? I could see it as a really easy way for non-programming musicians to learn how to use this and other music generation systems like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's a good idea, I have it planned for a next milestone as it is not one of the immediate priorities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This looks way more user-friendly than stuff like CSound. Would be awesome to see a real DAW-like GUI built on top of it...I've always wanted a DAW that would let me flip between GUI editing and code.

If you could use any help coding, please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER33> Slightly related question: Are there any courses I can take specifically aimed at making music by programming? Lynda or similar preferred, articles / books also work as long as they have examples using some sort of software (not just algorithms)

<comment><USER38> Unfortunately the course materials aren't available any more, but you should watch for the next offering of this course by the California Institutes of the Arts on Coursera: [https://www.coursera.org/course/chuck101](https://www.coursera.org/course/chuck101)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> seems like this is really a window for executing javascript, no? where's the DAW?

</comment><comment><USER40> can you tell more about how you coded the fundraiser modal? is it just checking the balances on those addresses then converting them to USD? im sure its a simple solution but i'd be happy to hear more about it - i was thinking of making a similar one for my own project, but it would be good if it displayed different addresses per visitor for better obfuscation...lets say have half of a wallet full of addresses, then also check server side whether the displayed is a valid one

[edit: using something like coinbase would solve this, but how could you work it out without a 3rd party and any fees?]

<comment><AUTHOR> It is using 3rd party APIs server-side to check wallets' balances, converts doge to btc and then converts the sum of btc to USD. I like the obfuscation idea but I'm not sure it's worth the complexity in this particular use-case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I love it! I want to see something like this for the iPad. I could also imagine a Soundcloud + Spotify + Github hybrid playlist site where you could actually present your creation for people to play in a playlist format.

</comment><comment><USER42> Looks like a modern (in-browser) take on CSound[1]. I love the idea of modifying the code during runtime.

[1] [http://www.csounds.com/](http://www.csounds.com/)

</comment><comment><USER43> this is really cool... it is really hard to see how the math ends up making music though. I almost would have an example of a scale or a 4 beat measure. very interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER44> This could be really useful for prototyping realtime sfx for games.

I am floored by how well it runs on my Moto G, specially the 303 and the subwah patches.

Great job!

</comment><comment><USER45> You should also checkout - [http://www.audiotool.com/](http://www.audiotool.com/) Its a DAW, but its more of a chrome plugin.

<comment><USER46> Also, they're already on their way to migrate to HTML5!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If you like this and have an iPad you should also check out Bitwiz: [http://kymatica.com/bitwiz](http://kymatica.com/bitwiz)

</comment><comment><USER48> Can't wait to go to the next Girl Talk show where instead of DJ pressing space bar to play, they press F5 to "Compile and Run..."

</comment><comment><USER11> Making music with code seems pretty neat, perhaps I'll learn to play an instrument after all some day (that being the instrument of code)!

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool! Reminds me of ChucK[1].

[1] [http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/](http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER49> Another more DAW-esque pure HTML / js DAW in the browser: [http://hya.io](http://hya.io)

</comment><comment><USER50> Does not work in IE, but does in Firefox and Chrome. Is it just me or the application does not actually work in IE?

</comment><comment><USER51> This is really cool. Anyone know of any good tutorials for learning how to make sounds like this?

</comment><comment><USER52> This is amazing - I had loads of fun playing with this for a couple of minutes - thanks!

</comment><comment><USER53> added a filter envelope to "got some 303" and now it sounds much more like a 303 :)

source code here:

[http://pastebin.com/rWMt45ug](http://pastebin.com/rWMt45ug)

</comment><comment><USER54> I could easily see this become the future of music production. Lovely UI too.

</comment><comment><USER55> I just want someone to put together a "hypnotoad" sample.

</comment><comment><USER56> using super for the keyboard shortcuts is problematic, at least for me - super-enter for me opens a new terminal, and that appears to take precedence over the browser shortcut

</comment><comment> tech-no-logical it's probably me, but I get nothing... \- ff (latest beta) : waveform thingy works, no sound \- chrome (latest beta) : no waveform, no sound \- IE (11) : nothing

<comment><USER57> Linux Mint 14 (desktop) and CyanogenMod 10.2.1-flo (mobile, mod based on Android 4.3.1) user here.

For Mint: Firefox 29 - everything works; Chromium 34 - only grey background

For CyanogenMod: Chrome 35 - everything works; Dolphin 10.3.1 - only grey background

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> reminds me of [http://www.openscad.org/](http://www.openscad.org/)

</comment><comment><USER59> what language is this ? i see it is not php ...

</comment><comment><USER60> This is perfect!

</comment><comment><USER61> Very good work, I like this a lot.

</comment><comment><USER62> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER63> Holy crap! This is great!

<comment><USER63> Would someone kindly explain why I and two other users (msane and jrlocke) were downvoted for simply expressing delight? Is that somehow unwelcome? I don't see anything against that in the guidelines: [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Note, this isn't a _complaint_ , it's merely a request to understand why my comment is inappropriate and to understand how I can express my approval of a submission without losing karma.

<comment><USER64> It's not against the guidelines, but it doesn't create conversation. Many people find that fairly useless, and prefer comments with substance that advance the community.

The best way to express your approval of a submission? Upvote it.

<comment><USER65> > _The best way to express your approval of a submission? Upvote it._ //

Except with hidden vote scores it doesn't express anything at all (except changing a number on the OP's interface; the OP doesn't even know that _you_ upvoted them).

If you want to _express_ your approval to anyone other than the parent/OP or have anyone know who is expressing approval [that is occasionally relevant] then you have to comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Wonderful

<comment><USER67> Great

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is dope</comment>


Effortless monitoring with collectd, Graphite and Docker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.io/2013/07/effortless-monitoring-with-collectd-graphite-and-docker/ <comment><USER2> UDP is really great, but it also makes it extremely easy to spoof the source IP and flood your monitoring server with fake metrics. It's probably not a huge concern, but something to be aware of. See a blog post I wrote in the context of statsd/carbon[1]

<shameless plug> Also, if you're looking for a nice open-source front-end to graphite, take a look at Giraffe[2]. It also has a collectd plugin[3] </shameless plug>

[1][http://blog.gingerlime.com/2012/statsd-and-carbon- security/](http://blog.gingerlime.com/2012/statsd-and-carbon-security/) [2][http://giraffe.kenhub.com/](http://giraffe.kenhub.com/) [3][https://github.com/bflad/giraffe- collectd](https://github.com/bflad/giraffe-collectd)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's why collectd supports authentication and encryption ([https://www.collectd.org/documentation/manpages/collectd.con...](https://www.collectd.org/documentation/manpages/collectd.conf.5.shtml#plugin_network)). I can't really speak about Graphtie since I'm less used to it; but in this case you can decide to not expose the Graphite port and only expose the collectd port.

<comment><USER2> Ah. I wasn't aware of this. Graphite/Carbon/Statsd are much more "basic" in that respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The biggest problem is setting up and upgrading Graphite, which is a pain and semi-broken right now.

I've been successful using collectd + Librato, works great, specially since you can setup alerts effortlessly.

<comment><USER2> Yes, setting up graphite can be confusing and painful. Looks like the author created a Docker app that should also make it easier.

Another alternative and a shamless plug - I've created an open-source fabric script that automates the graphite install processes (on debian-based hosts). See [https://github.com/gingerlime/graphite- fabric](https://github.com/gingerlime/graphite-fabric)

<comment><USER4> Yep, I think it has too many dependencies and the architecture is over complicated. I've built a standalone stats collection/storage daemon that just works with any charts packaging - google charts, or whatever. Works great and doesn't require 10000 dependencies.

[https://github.com/lsh123/stats-rrdb](https://github.com/lsh123/stats-rrdb)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand this idea that you should build a metrics system from components rather than use one of the end-to-end projects out there like Zabbix. Can someone clue me in?

<comment><USER6> I don't, either. And Graphite doesn't allow you to tag metrics for easy aggregation, which is a huge win if you're monitoring more than a few instances of a metric. (Nor does Zabbix, BTW.)

I'm a reasonably happy Datadog customer.

<comment><USER7> Have you used any other cloud monitoring/metric/etc providers? If so, how do they compare to DataDog?

<comment><USER6> To my knowledge, none of them supports multi-dimensional metrics. So I had to cross them off my list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To extend on this idea a little bit, once you have the data in graphite you can use it as input to an alerting system. As an example, here's a Nagios plugin I wrote to do that- [https://github.com/sciurus/grallect](https://github.com/sciurus/grallect)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to see a "fixed" version of statsd/graphite/etc that is painless to install, understand and use.</comment>


What do you think about Apollo? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Since I'm working on an Apollo/Flex business app, I'm just curios what you guys think about Adobes upcoming platform.</comment>


The First $1000 iPhone Application - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2008/08/05/the-first-1000-iphone-application/ <comment><USER2> I'm just waiting for someone to release milliondollarapp.</comment>


The Secret Life of Kudzu - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-secret-life-of-kudzu/ <comment><USER2> I'll openly admit that until now, I thought kudzu was just the name of a Red Hat Linux command used to detect and configure new hardware....

<comment><USER3> It's front and center of an REM album cover [Murmur]. I guess it's more of a southern thing thus its appearance on an REM album art.

<comment><USER4> Well it is referred to as "the vine that ate the south".

Where I live anything left alone for a few years will be consumed by it. Its everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest problem I have with kudzu is the thought of copperheads and rattle snakes hiding in them. Used to scare me to death as a kid.</comment>


Tesla adds bidirectional charging capability - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2020/05/19/tesla-bidirectional-charging-ready-game-changing-features/ <comment><USER2> Before we investigate complex power to grid schemes - though electric cars could have quite an impact there - it would be great if any electric car came with at least one power outlet, so that you could power critical appliances in your house during a power outage at least. Like keeping the fridge running, some lighting and heating food on a small cooker. The same would also be great for any kind of camping.

Beyond that, electric cars could of course have a huge contribution to the grid, especially with high percentages of solar and wind power. The first step would be to charge the cars dependent on the power supply situation. Loading during peak production and not loading in times with low production or pausing it in times of demand peaks.

The final step would be using them to feed power back to the grid, though this needs to be done carefully, as this would increase the wear on the battery.

<comment><USER3> Powering critical appliances with your car during an electricity outage is tricky: if the outage lasts for an unexpectedly long time, you end up with no power _and_ stranded at home with a car that has no miles in the tank.

Meanwhile, you can buy a generator for as little as $400.

<comment><USER4> $400 generators cannot run large home appliances as the initial wattage surge during startup will overload them and cause the breaker to fire.

For example, a fridge-freezer might need only 600 watts to run but will also need up to 2000~2500 watts to start. You'll struggle to find a $400 generator at 2K+ watts capacity, even if that load is only for ten seconds. Maybe "own- brand" generators from e.g. Harbor Freight, but would you trust it?

And that's just for a single appliance, large space heating/cooling systems are even more problematic/spikey. Buying generators for your home is actually more expensive and complicated than many people realize.

You'll quickly find yourself looking at $5K Honda inverter generators w/7K watt capacity even if that seemed overkill at the outset.

<comment><USER5> How big is your fridge / freezer. Just looked up the specs of my freezer and it claims to use 170kwh per year or about 19 watts an hour. Excluding my gaming pc , 600w continuous would power my whole house.

<comment><USER6> The fridge doesn't run continuously, so "needs 600w to run the motor" and "only uses 19w an hour" can both be true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Vehicle to grid is only 80% efficient and prematurely wears the battery.

Given that utility scale solar is much cheaper than residential solar, I wouldn't be surprised if utility scale energy storage is also cheaper than vehicle storage.

Lithium ion is optimized to be light, which is not an requirement for grid storage, which could make use of molten salt, pumped hydro, compressed air, or hydrogen electrolysis.

<comment><USER7> Vehicle to grid may actually improve battery health and keep them healthier for longer.

> "This new research into the potentials of V2G shows that it could actually > improve vehicle battery life by around ten percent over a year."

This requires intelligent usage where the battery state of charge is kept within a limited window, not fully charged or drained.

[1] [https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/clean_ener...](https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/clean_energy_stored/)

[2] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544217306825)

<comment><USER3> I don't think reducing the effective range of your car to preserve battery life will be very popular; people want the freedom to drive as far as they can, because it's hard to predict when they will need that capability, and charging is very slow. If someone does have a very predictable routine they can just not overcharge their car in the first place and save the discharge wear.

<comment><USER8> > people want the freedom to drive as far as they can, because it's hard to > predict when they will need that capability, and charging is very slow

For most people, if they really need to drive hundreds of miles unexpectedly, I doubt spending 15 minutes at a high-speed charger to top up the batteries will be an issue.

<comment><USER3> As someone who drives an EV, I can tell you that it's not the long distance trips, it's having an unexpectedly busy day of errands in cold weather that gets you—realizing that you're starting out at only 50% charge, which means you can't make that last trip into the suburbs at the end of the day. There are very few fast chargers in densely populated areas and they're often malfunctioning, or have queues. They also hurt your battery, so not to be used on a regular basis.

<comment><USER9> In Norway where chargers are a lot more common, it's not an issue. Of course if I want to charge at 4pm at a popular place it may be a queue but most of the times many chargers are available and functional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be nice to be able to charge a car from another car, so you can help somebody that has depleted their battery at the side of the road.

<comment><USER11> ...especially considering that you can't just go buy them some petrol.

Now that I think of it, what's the MO if you run out of juice in a tesla.. tow?

<comment><USER12> You call Tesla's roadside assistance and they take your vehicle to the nearest supercharger. Depending on how dead the battery is there is a procedure to attach an emergency power source to the leads on the cap of the tow hook cover to let you get the car into neutral to get it on the truck.

<comment><USER13> I've seen a Model S rolled off the back of a flatbed at a charging station. They ran out 10 miles from the next supercharger. Took them a while to figure out how to get power to it just to open the charging door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd highly recommend this "Battery Day is Coming" 40 minute video that explains what Tesla is likely planning: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP971PYzQJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP971PYzQJs)

In one part of it they explain that how the batteries that went to stabilize the grid in Austrailia (and saved them a lot of money immediately, their investment/cost paid back in a few months from my understanding) can be decentralized to all cities around the world with using vehicles as the storage for energy at non-peak hours and source of energy during peak hours - arguably when you've driven your vehicle to the city and where production and office space, businesses serving the area, will be needing more energy.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is going to make electric cars extremely cheap once the million mile battery is out. Probably at least 50% cheaper given the money you can make selling off peak electricity at peak prices.

Electricity costs by me since I switched to time of use are 4x as much on peak vs off. My Tesla costs about $6 for a full charge off peak. It seems like its easy to make (4-1)* 6 = $18 a day off of this the car as it home. Let's say $10 after conversion loss and battery wear, etc.

Once you buy any other hardware needed (I think they are $2k-4k now), this seems like free money. Worst case, car is home during peak 2 days a week and $10/day gain, $4k system: 2.5 year payback period and then $223/month income Best case, car is home during peak 5 days a week and $15/day gain $2k system: 26 week payback period and then $322/month income.

The best case over 10 years is worth $38,700.

However the biggest opportunity here is probably for Tesla to lease the battery to consumers. The car will be discounted significantly if you can plug in 3 days a week near peak usage.

</comment><comment><USER16> There was a recent discussion on HN about using a Tesla as a store of energy that could be tapped to help with emergency power scenarios: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23178733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23178733)

Apparently the capability is already there!

</comment><comment><USER17> The Xpeng P7 also has a 220V output.

I guess this can be useful for a lot of things.

[https://en.xiaopeng.com/p7/configuration.html](https://en.xiaopeng.com/p7/configuration.html)

(Also a great looking car imho)

</comment><comment><USER18> the whole point behind Vehicle to grid is not to sustain your house but to stabilize the grid at peaks, don't think as your car but as the whole fleet of electric cars able to do V2G, that means that the grid could use a bunch of cars to sustain a small peak and avoid the need altogether of very expensive peaker plants

</comment><comment><USER19> The term is pretty misleading if cars are still charged with AC current, even with a rectifier immediately after the power supply. Maybe it is a language thing.

Otherwise this "technology" could indeed be quite useful to lessen load. I would have thought that maybe providing local power to your home instead of buffering the whole network would maybe be more practical.

<comment><USER20> I don't see what's misleading about it. AC vs. DC has nothing to do with which direction _power_ is flowing, which is what they're talking about.

And feeding power to the "grid" is actually quite straightforward, at least for the customer's equipment. In effect, you can think of the 60Hz oscillations of AC voltage as being like an enormous rotating crankshaft that each customer is tightly coupled to. Correctly applying a "torque" to that system automatically distributes the energy where it's needed.

In contrast, de-coupling and re-coupling one house with the grid on demand is a lot more complex: you lose the stabilizing effect of the grid's enormous "inertia", and you have to carefully synchronize the phases when reestablishing the connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I plug my car in, I expect it to charge. When I get in my car, I expect it to have a full charge. I don't want to have to push a special button or dig into hidden menus just to ensure that my car actually has a full charge.

This is critical for when I take a long road trip, and I expect that I have a full charge when I leave.

What I think makes sense is temporally stopping charging for the 10 seconds it takes for a generator to spin up. But these kind of events should be so infrequent that they have no noticeable impact to my ability to start a road trip with a full charge.

<comment><USER22> > _When I get in my car, I expect it to have a full charge. I don 't want to > have to push a special button or dig into hidden menus just to ensure that > my car actually has a full charge._

Then don't buy a Tesla, because the default factory setting is to charge to 90% to reduce battery degradation.

(Personally I like that feature, I wish I could configure my phone to make the battery last a year longer.)

<comment><USER23> iPhones kind of do this, I was surprised when I bought one recently and noticed it. It assumes your wake up time from usage patterns and then avoids charging above 80% or something during the night until right before you wake up.</comment></comment></comment>


Stonebraker trapped in Stonebraker 'fate worse than death' - <AUTHOR> http://dom.as/2011/07/08/stonebraker-trapped/

<comment><USER2> This article is incoherent and incomprehensible. It seems to be a set of responses to things an unspecified person (possibly Stonebraker) may or may not have said at some time in the past (but mostly not in the Gigaom article it links to). But without the context of knowing what those things are, it doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER3> oh well, maybe indeed I assumed more about general knowledge of new database technologies around.

voltdb (Stonebraker's solution) is in-memory store, so are few other of all this new wave of solutions (e.g. you don't want active mongo dataset to fall out of memory, as well as hit any contention on r/w lock).

I didn't want to attack statistics or numbers in any way, as to have proper picture it is not enough to know number of servers or shards, one has to know also workload that has to happen there, as well as access distributions, etc.

I could point out that average write transaction at FB is at around 5ms timing, so argument about transactional cost is not that important, as RPC times add up to that quite a bit, and multi-cluster dbms wouldn't reduce the RPC costs.

Pretty much everything he wrote about state of FB environment is very uneducated narrative.

Oh well, I guess general audience prefers something that has no basis rather to insights that are based on working today in that industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the author is missing the many orders of magnitude of the recent growth in computing power and corresponding drop in flash costs. Compilers and interpreters are often wasteful too, but the benefits were so great that we eventually embraced them and never looked back. As far as persistence goes, who is to say that flash memory in modern systems isn't just as permanent in the real world as their disk-based counterparts? There are many ways to lose data, and a corrupted database is just as corrupted on a disk as it is in flash.

I'd also add that it's bad form to ridicule the academics on whose shoulders your own career rests. Better to stick to the argument at hand rather than take things personally.

<comment><USER5> His "me" page explains that he's a database engineer at Facebook, and before that worked on performance-oriented systems and software at Wikipedia. It's part of his job to be aware of the drop in flash costs and employ it where he can while balancing performance with operating costs and expenses. No one is arguing that flash memory isn't as permanent as disks, but it's certainly not as cheap, especially on the scale of data that Facebook has.

Every year or so Stonebreaker feels compelled to come down from his ivory tower to troll industry. Remember a few years ago when he co-authored the paper "MapReduce: A major step backwards" ([http://databasecolumn.vertica.com/database- innovation/mapred...](http://databasecolumn.vertica.com/database- innovation/mapreduce-a-major-step-backwards/))? Nevermind that Google probably processes petabytes of data using MapReduce every day that ends up getting served on practically every Google property. How can he argue with results? Can't we just ignore him?

<comment><USER4> I don't doubt the author's credentials or expertise. My criticisms of his article stand; precisely because he's stuck in the day-to-day technical minutiae of running a system as large as Facebook's, I think he's missing the forest for the trees. And his jabs at academia just come off as being thin- skinned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately, there are many facets of this discussion that stumble accross each other.

1) Stonebraker is an industry troll that likes to shamelessly advertise his current products while pointing 'problems' with the state of the art. And he usually emits clueless opinions about subjects he doesn't deal with.

2) In spite of Stonebraker, voltdb engineers are doing a serious job, and the product has its value;

3) It's virtually impossible (and high risky) to change the infrastructure of any company the size of Facebook/Google. As any software engineer research shows, it'll take years and lots of money to change a large code base and deploy other data management system. Of course, Facebook is using HBase now for new products, but the current MySQL based systems should account for millions of lines of code. It's worth to spend time developing new products or refactoring old code that is working?

4) Thousands of MySQL shards is a hell on earth, for sure. We should praise Facebook engineers for being able to manage it efficiently.</comment>


Looking to work for a startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.icanhasstartup.com/tips/looking-to-work-for-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> Great one.</comment>


Rackspace Acquires Slicehost and JungleDisk: Challenges Amazon's Could Computing Services - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rackspace_acquires_slicehost_a.php

<comment><USER2> I'm sick of this 'cloud computing' bullshit already.

I adore Slicehost, and have a few servers with them, but if I hear that term one more time...

<comment><USER3> The bottom line is the bottom line: SliceHost lowered the prices of 2GB+ slices today.

I understand your frustration. That phrase has gotten as nauseating as "Web 2.0". However, they can say "cloud computing" as often as they like if I save $10 every few words.

<comment><USER4> Just wondering, How much would an equivalent have cost 2-3 yrs ago?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Competition in cloud computing.

Price race to the bottom here we come!

That's great news for everybody who's looking for cheap hosting.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope Slicehost doesn't confuse lower prices with their to-date high quality of support.

</comment><comment><USER7> JungleDisk uses Amazon's S3...

<comment><USER8> FTA:

"JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it will now also support Rackspace's new cloud storage solution."

It's right at the beginning...

<comment><USER7> I stand corrected and thank my corrector.</comment></comment></comment>


Fingerprint verification software - <AUTHOR>

im looking into create a fingerprint verification solution, whereas the fingerprint is taking from the device and sent online to a centralized database for verification, the idea will basically be used as a punch-card system. Has anybody here came pass such a system before? should i start working on it?do you think it can be done? any tips u can give me could be of great help <comment><USER2> I haven't come across any such application. It would be great if you can build it. I'll be happy to help in testing.

n BTW, for which OS?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> well im looking into IBidentifi USB SDK for the fingerprint part for now, they only support microsoft though, im open for any suggestions</comment>


The Shocking Secret About Static Types - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-shocking-secret-about-static-types-514d39bf30a3#.h2mg39u32 <comment><USER2> The whole "bug-density by language" thing is just pointless for sooo many reasons. The first one being the lower-level statically typed languages are used to write more complex, widely used and mission-critical software. The second is: eg. C++ is just a bad programming language, and static typing is not going to save your bugcount.

</comment><comment><USER3> With regards to TypeScript at least:

«I worry about building up a large codebase using TypeScript, only to have the ECMAScript spec introduce conflicting keywords and type features such as `interface` and `implements`.»

These two examples seem particularly poor to me: `interface` has a fairly standard meaning across the OOP side of the algol-syntax family (C++, Java, C#, et al), and it would take a very interesting spec proposal to take that keyword in a very different direction from how Typescript currently uses it. (`implements` maybe less so, but there Typescript uses `implements` in very specific contexts and Typescript has the benefit of type information to narrow between existing uses of `implements` and some theoretical crazy new language feature yet to be proposed.)

It's interesting to note too that `interface` and `implements` have been reserved keywords since ES 2. It should be unsurprising that the "lost" ES 4 usage of `interface` and `implements` looks very, very similar to how Typescript uses those keywords (as can be seen in 'real life' in ActionScript 3).

«The advantage of using the TypeScript compiler is that even if that happens, you can just compile away the differences. The disadvantage is that you're not really writing standard JavaScript anymore. I predict that TypeScript won't be able to maintain its position as a superset of JavaScript. I believe it will inevitably diverge over the years.»

Thus far the Typescript team has done an admirable job at pivoting to meet the ES spec, even as the spec has changed. (Examples can be seen in things like the module import syntax and "inner modules" now "namespaces".) Thus far TS has been good to add deprecation warnings of the non-standard ways of doing things and TS benefits from being a compiler here in that you can ratchet up the strictness checks including making sure you aren't using non-standard features. Presumably such checks will also keep up and pivot with spec changes.

Beyond that, I think it is easy to argue that Typescript is approaching the critical mass in developer usage and mindset that Typescript will as much be helping to guide future specs as it will have to try to keep up with them.

Especially in the current "Stage Progression" system that ECMA's TC39 has moved to, Typescript (and fellow tools like Babel) is a bellwether "early stage" laboratory to test and verify early proposals long before they become specifications.

<comment><USER4> If and when TypeScript and ESn diverge, my wish is that the dominant browsers choose to implement the better based on merit while factoring in usage and not blindly based on name alone.

<comment><USER3> Which is partly why I suspect we'll see much more convergence over time than divergence. The two biggest browser makers (Microsoft and Google) both have increasingly large Typescript teams. ("The spec changes are coming from inside the house." :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      "The data indicates functional languages are better than procedural languages; it suggests that strong typing is better than weak typing; that static typing is better than dynamic; and that managed memory usage is better than unmanaged."

      Now that's more like it! Except:

      "While these relationships are statistically significant, the effects are quite small." [Emphasis added.]

      In fact, I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that static types have a strong impact on bug density.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence. There are multiple confounding factors when comparing languages in this fashion. (To name at least one, consider the big difference in use cases and applications with javascript vs. C). Even with confounding factors, static typing still has an edge in the analysis.

It's disappointing to see folks fall into traps of confirmation bias. Nobody is saying that dynamic languages don't have their place. It's fine if dynamic languages and their domains are all that someone cares about. However, don't assume for a second that learning a statically typed language is a waste of time. In fact, I would argue that it lets the individual tackle much more complex projects. One side effect of this possibility is that the individual will cause more complex bugs that can't be detected through static type analysis. This isn't a negative though, it's just the new reality.</comment>


Lojban - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban <comment><USER2> Boy, I have fond memories of participating in the Lojban Yahoo group back in 2003 when I was 16. I carried around the Cowan book to my classes and loved reading random sections. I was in awe of how elegantly it was designed, and it inspired me to invent my own languages.

My only complaint about the language was about the reliance on word order instead of prepositions to determine the relationship between nouns. It made the language harder to learn since you have to memorize the parameters for each word, and it always felt arbitrary (what if there is no parameter for the meaning I wish to convey?).

<comment><USER3> You could always prefix the arguments with their place markers. Then choose to move them around, or leave them in their default positions. Most selbri (predicates) never had many sumti (arguments), and the default first or second were designed (rightly or wrongly) to be the most common. Very like arguments to a function, and then having the option of having named argument.

And if there was no parameter you could add it. There were mechanisms for creating new places with appropriate markers. Sounds like you never got to that part of the language - it was definitely in the more advanced usage, but actually when you came across it in practice your brain tended to do the right thing with it. In that sense the system worked as intended.

<comment><USER3> PS: Thanks for the sporadic upvotes on this - nice to know my comment was interesting. Please consider upvoting this request for help:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629868)

Largely speaking it has sunk without trace, but another couple of votes will get it to the "Ask" page, so there's a chance someone who can help me will see it, and I'd appreciate that.

 _Edit: And almost immediately there 's a vote - thank you, I do really appreciate that._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always wondered. Why do people learn languages like Lojban or Esperanto when you can learn some actual languages that actual people use? Why not learn Spanish, or Hindi, or Mandarin, or Arabic, or Russian... and learn a language nobody really speaks?

I don't mean it in a derogatory sense, I am merely personally interested; if I had the time and capacity to learn a new language, I would gather it's both more useful and more fun to learn an actual living language, with a rich culture and history.

<comment><USER5> Saluton,

I study Spanish because i live in the USA and Spanish is the de facto second language (almost all of the time). But Spanish wasn't useful in Turkey, Japan, Cairo, etc. where i did use Esperanto. I wish i could learn all the languages of the world, but i'm just not that good at it. Esperanto is easy.

But, more than that... In the USA a native Spanish speaker is (too) often discriminated against. As a non-native Spanish speaker i am always on the outside of conversations in Spanish. Esperanto is meant to be everybody's second(!) language, not be a homogenizing language for the planet. Esperanto speakers are all non-natives (actually there are some natives, but they don't have special powers :) so we Esperantists meet as equals.

To riff on what somebody else wrote, if a client said i had to learn Haskell, i'd be happy to be paid to do so. My "payment" for knowing Esperanto is the community of (mostly) intelligent, (mostly) compassionate, and (mostly) generous people i've met using it.

YMMV <USER5>
<comment><USER6> Hey. Forgive the stunted speech, but I must practice! :)

Mi komencas lerni Esperanton ĵus antaŭ unu semajno -- tra Duolingo, ke eble vi atendas -- sed nun mi provas iri al pli realaj verkoj, plejparte tradukitaj facilaj verkoj, tiuj mi leĝis en la anglan iam en mi vivo.

Kiam mi rigardis la Esperantajn grupojn en Meetup.com por la Bay Area, mi memoras vidinta la nomon "trio" ien. Tiu estas vi, ĉu ne?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with inventing languages is that we don't fully understand natural languages. For example, there is no satisfactory formal semantics for natural languages. Categorical grammar and Montague grammar are some inroads into formal semantics, but they don't get very far. The work of Roger Schank got further in terms of expressiveness, but then fizzled out, probably because it was ad hoc and lacked an underlying mathematical structure. So inventing a language is working in the dark.

There are some natural languages which were in part designed in a top down manner, like Mandarin and Indonesian. But still, on the scale of natural to artificial, these are much closer to natural languages. They were both based on some other natural language(s), borrowing words and grammar from them.

<comment><USER8> So inventing languages is a _good_ thing, as a research topic into how natural languages work (with plenty of provisos, of course).

And, as a human nature hack, marketing them as tools for world-peace, etc. makes them much more likely to be adopted by idealistic humans who may have the motivation to actually test them for a few decades...

<comment><USER7> > _So inventing languages is a good thing, as a research topic into how > natural languages work (with plenty of provisos, of course)._

That might be your opinion, I don't think it's a useful research project. Are you aware of any insights into natural language that have been arrived at via artificial languages?

 _And, as a human nature hack, marketing them as tools for world-peace, etc. makes them much more likely to be adopted by idealistic humans who may have the motivation to actually test them for a few decades..._

That seems very cynical. Why do you think artificial languages are so important that misleading marketing is justified?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only reason I haven't started learning Lojban is because the only other people I could practice speaking with are people who have learned Lojban.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.xkcd.com/191/](http://www.xkcd.com/191/)

<comment><USER9> xkcd is to nerds what Seinfeld is to comedy.

<comment><USER11> Its worse. Its approaching "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" territory amongst the nerdy set. _(1)_

(1) It's turtles all the way down. _(1)_

<comment><USER12> Of course there is a Darmok and Jalad xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/902/](https://xkcd.com/902/)

<comment><USER11> Which is now the D&J@T xkcd for that particular episode of TNG...

So. Many. Turtles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Learning a conlang seems like fun. But should I start with Lojban or Esperanto?

My impression is that Lojban is meant to be as logically unambiguous (in terms of grammar) as possible, while Esperanto seeks to be more of an international/universal language. I think Esperanto is more widely spoken?

Both are apparently somewhat easier to learn than other languages.

So which one?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably depends on your goals. Since you already know the most popular language in the world, it doesn't seem like there's much point in learning either of them just to extend the number of people you can communicate with. For that reason it would make sense to learn Chinese or Spanish.

To me the appeal of Lojban is in "expanding your mind" and using different tools for thinking.

Also, I've recently read somewhere people recommending to learn a sign language, so that is a thing you might want to consider. They say that it is easy to learn and is very different from English(hence - interesting).

<comment><USER14> Yeah I agree with this. From a standpoint of access to the minds of more human beings you can't justify Esperanto when there are things like Spanish and Mandarin you could learn.

Lojban is for thinking unambiguously and more logically. It's good for programmers but also exactly the kind of language that an artist or poet wouldn't want to learn.

<comment><USER15> Lojbanists have written poetry in lojban. Some writings on the matter:

[http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/poetry.html](http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/poetry.html) [http://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms](http://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've always wondered about the way predicate words are chosen in Loglan and Lojban, i.e. maximizing a weighted sum of phonemes common to the candidate word and the words in widely spoken natural languages. The only English speakers who would recognize "blanu" as corresponding to "blue" are those who know something about those conlangs, and I bet the same could be said for Chinese speakers and "lan". Esperanto is criticized by some as Eurocentric, but at least some people will recognize the vocabulary.

<comment><USER17> As an English speaker who once spoke a little Loglan (the 1978 dialect!), I think you're mistaken. Knowing "blue" definitely helps in remembering "blanu". Occasionally there was a word that didn't take a lot of its phonemes from English, and those were definitely harder to learn.

Obviously the benefit is going to be smaller if you don't speak one of the major source languages, but it still seems like a reasonable strategy to me for selecting vocabulary in an artificial language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It feels like natural languages would evolve shortcuts based on the cultural context in which they arise.

I would think that a language based on predicate logic would be less efficient at communicating oft-expressed things, like a Huffman code dictionary where all the entries are weighted equally.

<comment><USER19> Moreover, you'd expect languages based on predicate language to be identical in their written and spoken forms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll go ahead and plug my own introduction video which gives a light introduction to the core grammar concepts in lojban: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjSTUK3hFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjSTUK3hFI)

If you can absorb what's in this video, you could probably pick up lojban with little effort on the grammar side. Alas, vocabulary is just something you have to get through.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ugh. How awful. Apostrophes and (full stop) dots repurposed as letters within words. But at least there aren't any accented characters or other diacritics.

Phonemes aside, why would anyone design that, and imagine it as a feature and not a bug?

<comment><USER22> dots represent pauses or glottal stops. what other symbol could be used for it? Apostrophe represent either [h] or "th" like in "thin". Again what other letter could be used?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm rather like Solresol [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol)

It's like Brainfuck, but for natural language.

</comment><comment><USER24> If everyone used Lojban, I wonder how it'd evolve? Surely people would develop slang and shortcuts, until new dialects formed.

<comment><USER15> IIRC, one of the ideas of lojban was to develop a group of speakers of the languge during a frozen baseline period where the language couldn't change. Then changes could be made by the speakers of the language in lojban itself and see how it evolved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Reminds me of the invented languages Tolkien's Elvish and the language of the Talan in Outcast (video game).</comment>


A Low Energy Pulsed Plasma Spark Plug for a Lean Burn Combustion Engine - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/is-lightning-fast-plasma-the-key-to-a-cleaner-car-engine/ <comment><USER2> >"Since 2009, Singleton and his colleagues at Transient Plasma Systems have been developing an ignition system that would address this challenge for lean- burn engines. It works by condensing megawatts of power into nanosecond pulses of plasma created from ionizing the air around the plug's electrodes; that's the power of six semitrucks released hundreds of times faster than the speed of lightning.

Transient Plasma's ignition system consists of a power supply that looks a bit like an internet router. It is connected to a series of plasma plugs in each cylinder of the engine. The power supply banks energy from the car's battery and releases it through the plugs in an ultrafast burst of blue plasma. It's a low-energy, low-temperature version of more energetic pulsed power systems like rail guns and the lasers that physicists use to simulate nuclear blasts.

The main difference between the plasma plug and conventional spark plugs is that it doesn't ignite a combustion reaction by transferring heat. In fact, it doesn't have enough thermal energy to even light a match.

 _Instead, it directly bombards the air molecules with electrons to break them into more reactive elements, like atomic oxygen._

This rapid infusion of non-thermal energy causes the molecules to slam together in the fuel mixture, which kicks off the combustion reaction. If a conventional spark plug is like a lighter, Singleton's plasma plug is more like a lightning bolt."

PDS: I seem to remember reading something sometime back about some company doing something like this to ordinary water, to convert it into an apparently reactive fuel...

Also, combustion and engines aside, the above technique might find an application in chemistry, that is, to react (better) chemicals/reagents normally thought to be non-reactive or only partially reactive at a certain temperatures...

That is, in Chemistry:

 _plasma = catalyst_ (At least, there's a good case to be made for this...)

(Also, possibly, _free electrons_ = _catalyst_ (maybe, depending on reaction...))</comment>


6 Reasons Why You Might Switch from Sublime to Atom - taha-sh http://taha-sh.com/blog/6-reasons-why-you-might-switch-from-sublime-to-atom

<comment><AUTHOR> The deal breaker for me is always how sluggish these free, open source editors are (Atom, Brackets, Light Table). I would love to move away from a paid, closed-source tool but these just aren't as fast and therefore not acceptable to me. Close doesn't cut it for something I use ~8 hours a day.</comment>


How to design a language - <AUTHOR> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lightweight/2552

<comment><USER2> It's a solidly thorough list, but the upshot should really be "designing a general-purpose language is hard."

Designing a special-purpose language or a DSL is easier, but in my experience a lot of seeming DSLs end up slowly accreting more and more features over time that make them look more like general purpose languages. For example, you start with something simple, but then you realize you need conditionals, then you decide to add loops, then you need some concept of packaging and subroutines, etc. Done in that sort of ad-hoc fashion over time can leave things a mess, and if you knew you'd have to do that much work, you never would have tried to make a DSL in the first place.

The other problem with DSLs is that it provides another set of rules you need to keep in your mind around things like coping, evaluation order, naming conventions, etc. in addition to any other languages you know.

So my personal bias these days is to work within a flexible language if possible and to use metaprogramming where necessary to create a reasonable API; Ruby and Lisp are pretty obvious candidates there.

My company has its own statically-typed JVM scripting language that's gone through some of that evolution, from rules-only configuration language to a full-fledged language with classes, closures, etc. In order to curb the proliferation of mini-DSLs we had for various parts of the system, we instead opened up the type system of the language and allow for essentially a form of type-safe metaprogramming, which lets us get good, clean APIs for things that used to be DSLs while maintaining a single set of language rules and allowing for the use of other language features (adding methods that take blocks to the custom types, for example) in combination with the DSL-ish stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> So many upvotes, so little discussion...

Another suggestion: a very useful tool for designing a language is the new OMeta language from VPRI: a language for creating executable grammars - i.e. writing new languages quickly. see <http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/>

</comment><comment><USER4> My rule of thumb is that if you think the solution is to create a language, you have not thought about the problem enough. Obviously there are exceptions (I know language designers, etc), but you should have a really clear reason why and an appreciation and/or desire for why not to.

<comment><AUTHOR> My rule is generally the exact opposite.

Anything sufficiently complex that you code is will quickly approach being a language.

The .NET class library is a language - if you built a a reasonably sized Class Model in Java it would be a language... Thinking about it in terms of language constructs can give a lot of very useful insights.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you use Rackspace Managed Cloud? How is it? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking about upgrading my Rackspace Cloud account to their "managed" support level. I was wondering if anyone here is using their Managed Cloud and if so, how do you like it? Is it worth the extra expense? <comment><USER2> I've used it in the past and was happy with it. If you're deploying pretty common builds then it's easy as pie - everything else obviously can take more time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently became a Rackspace customer by default, as a result of the Slicehost acquisition. I honestly haven't dug very deeply into their offerings and the transition has been pretty seamless. So I don't really know much about the difference between their "regular" cloud and their "managed cloud". Would anyone care to share a quick tl/dr on what their "Managed Cloud" offering gets you?</comment>


Internet of Things vs. Internet of Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.govtech.com/network/Cisco-Live-Internet-of-Things-vs-Internet-of-Everything.html

<comment><USER2> IoT is the connectivity between unique and identifiable web-enabled devices. It talks about how individual devices can "talk" to each other, while still maintaining its own identity and singularity. On the other hand, IoE abandons this compartmentalized approach which looks at individual devices. The IoE views all devices as part of an ecosystem in which all the devices co-exist and which is omnipresent.</comment>


Ask HN: Sending first e-mail to potential users from "waiting list" - <AUTHOR>

Around 2 months ago I set up a "coming soon" placeholder page for one of my projects. It was pretty simple - js canvas animation, little bit of a description and a "leave us your e-mail" form. Just e-mail, nothing else.
I'm planning on sending out some invitations for beta-version of the website. I thought that a good idea might be sending personalised e-mails. It would be easy to write a small fb-spider that would gather names/locations of the people that are in the list from facebook to give me some insight. I could greet them with their name then (It conjugates in some languages) or write in their native tongue.
It's a detail really, but got me wondering - is it legal? How creepy receiving an e-mail like that would be? <comment><USER2> It is ... slightly creepy, depending on whether they remember that they didn't give you that information.

But more to the point, is it worth scraping fb on the off chance that their email is part of the public profile? I would think most of your target audience would have better privacy settings.

</comment><comment><USER3> it's creepy. if you didn't have a form-fill inviting people to give you their first names, you missed the opportunity to address your followers by name. lesson learned for consideration next time.

you should also be thoughtful about how much email you send to someone, if you didn't put that form alongside a fairly explicit opt-in. If the form said, "notify me when you launch," that's not the same as "please feel free to market to me indefinitely."

When we recently launched, I had a similar list, to which I sent 1 (one) email only, and in that email stated that it would be the only email they received from me without further opt-in. We got multiple appreciative comments in response.</comment>


Why some stores have pulled their self-checkout machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canadian-tire-self-checkout-cashiers-automation-1.5011981 <comment><USER2> I don't know about Canada but shrink is a real problem with self checkout machines.</comment>


Go-To-Market Fit: The Missing Link for Enterprise Growth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-mission/go-to-market-fit-the-missing-link-for-enterprise-growth-e92dd06857d7 <comment><USER2> Doing a startup is kind of like climbing a mountain that has 10 false summits. You've always got some goal in your mind that you're driving toward, and you feel like when you finally reach that point, it's going to start to get easier. But when you get there, the 'real' peak emerges from the clouds, and it's twice as high as where you are now.

Built a great product that actually works? Congrats! That's really f-ing hard to do. Now go get 10 customers for it, which is a whole a lot harder! Got 10 customers? Congrats! How will you get 100? Got revenue, funding, and a reliable user acquisition channel? Congrats, now you get to learn how to hire and manage people so you can keep growing.</comment>


Gay concentration camps in Chechnya (April 2017) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_concentration_camps_in_Chechnya <comment><AUTHOR> This is a disgrace, history is repeating itself but people are too uneducated/ignorant/hateful/stupid to see it.

edit: thanks for feedback.

<comment><USER2> > tsunami of far-right populism

Do we really need to drag this horrible crime into our political discussion by attributing it to our enemies? Do you really think that is helpful?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are definitely right, thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mufti of Chechnya promises Novaya Gazeta journalists Allah's retribution – [https://meduza.io/en/news/2017/04/14/mufti-of-chechnya- promi...](https://meduza.io/en/news/2017/04/14/mufti-of-chechnya-promises- novaya-gazeta-journalists-allah-s- retribution?utm_source=email&utm_medium=briefly&utm_campaign=2017-04-14)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if it was grindr they were using to arrest them?</comment>


Are Girl Scout Cookies Corrupting? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/Girl%20Scouts%20and%20good%20governance.html

<comment><USER2> I'm the volunteer cookie sale manager for my daughter's service unit, which consists of ~35 troops and ~400 girls. We're part of the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts Council, one of two councils in Massachusetts.

The cookie sale is primarily a fundraiser for a council. The council sets the price (in our case, $4.00 per box). Out of the $4.00 per box, here's where the money goes:

Council Programs and Properties (50%): $2.00 Baker (22.5%): $0.90 Troop Proceeds (15.5%): $0.62 Administration (9%): $0.36 Girl Incentives (3%): $0.12

GSUSA gets their cut out of the Baker's share as a licensing fee.

If you look at the Program Guide for our council, (<http://www.girlscoutseasternmass.org/programs/>) you'll see that it offers a large number of programs and camps for girls in eastern MA, at very reasonable cost. Half the money from the sale goes towards property maintenance and operations, keeping the cost down for all girls, and for scholarships for girls who cannot otherwise afford them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something isn't quite right about this article. First the author compares the rise in cookies prices compared to inflation instead of commodity prices. This was a red flag to me that was repeated more than once.

Fuel and food prices have been rising sharply these past few years. I'm not a commodities expert so maybe someone with more insight can help, but this chart looks like wheat prices went up 50% in 2010 alone and are double what they were in 1995.

<http://futures.tradingcharts.com/hist_CW.html>

This has been in the news quite a bit.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/16/business/main20043...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/16/business/main20043737.shtml)

So that $2.50 pack of white label cookies from WalMart was probably $1 way back in 1995. It's not surprising that the $2 pack of Girl Scout cookies from 1995 is $4 today.

There was an awful lot of text and analysis for completely missing this point.

To the author's other complaint that cookies are cost inefficient, all of these cookie sale type fundraisers (e.g. bake sales, car washes, popcorn sales, magazine sales, cheese and sausage sales) are obviously less efficient than direct donations. But I suppose they serve a few other purposes than fund raising. Scouts potentially learn life skills about working and business instead of how to beg for money with tangible benefits for the troop. The proliferation of cookie boxes are free advertising real estate in millions of offices and homes that lead to greater participation and perhaps more donations than if the Girl Scouts solicited for donations directly. Those are just a couple of reasonable explanations off the top of my head before jumping to accusations of corruption most high.

</comment><comment><USER4> Girl Scout cookies are about the worst cookies for you I have ever seen. I used to like them when I was a kid, but then I looked at the ingredients. In order to make them have a shelf life of months (long enough to be sold) at room temperature, they are loaded with trans fats, preservatives, and all kinds of bad chemicals. It's nice to support the girl scouts, but seriously, they are poisoning America with this junk. Can't we just give them a few bucks instead of buying toxic cookies?

<comment><USER5> They can be as toxic as they want to be. I will still continue to eat them ;-)</comment></comment>


The Deadly Global War for Sand - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/ <comment><USER2> There are lots of different kinds of sand, some pretty specialized.

In Minnesota, we're losing our beloved Renaissance Festival grounds to sand mining. The sand is uniquely useful for the kinds of drilling and fracking techniques used in the North Dakota oilfields, so it's worth more to strip- mine than to support a multi-decade business that generates millions in income every year. Sigh.

<comment><USER3> Instead they're providing jobs to thousands year round and generate hundreds of millions in income.

<comment><USER4> Or, you know, providing dozens of jobs and generating under ten million in income, while destroying hundreds of jobs and a cultural gathering place.

[http://www.manta.com/c/mthg8jf/bryan-rock-products- inc](http://www.manta.com/c/mthg8jf/bryan-rock-products-inc)

I don't blame the mine owners - they'll make more money exploiting the land than continuing to rent it to the Ren Fest. But I'm not convinced that it's a net benefit for the community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Images of the same thing in Sierra Leone, destroying the potential tourism industry [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- africa-20897658](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-20897658)

<comment><USER6> I cringed while looking at these. One only hopes, especially in Sierra Leone, that the sand is thoroughly washed before it is used to make concrete...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Harvard Design Magazine recently covered this in a Singaporean context: [http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/39/built-on- sand...](http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/39/built-on-sand- singapore-and-the-new-state-of-risk)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering if it's possible to turn this problem into a solution. I don't know the numbers, so I'm probably off by orders of magnitude, and maybe it's a losing energy proposition, but:

One of the biggest harms of global warming/climate change/whatever you want to call whats happening is the sea level rising. Is it possible we could use enough sand collected from the seabed to offset this sea rise?

<comment><USER9> This is a fun math problem to use as an interview question, it can expose how people think.

The interesting trick is to assume 75% of the earth is covered in ocean, And sea levels are expected to rise 20 meters (or more). Since you can meet "half way" between the rise in the sea level vs the lowering of the sea floor, you remove 10M of sea floor, and re-distribute it over the 25% of the "land", that means that all of the land goes up by 10M/.25 (the ratio of land to sea) or 40 meters.

So burying the continents under 40M of sand would counteract a 20M rise in sea level, sort of :-)

<comment><USER10> Moving that much of the crust around would likely to create fairly massive earthquakes and the surface of the earth is effectively floating so you are limited on how much you can change things. Still if you're willing to move a lot of rock you could more or less get it to work.

But, your solution would raise the land and lower the sea levels at the same time. You want the difference (added land) + (lower ocean) = 20M. (.25 land : .75 ocean = 1:3) Removing 5M of sea floor would add 5 * 3 = 15M of land 5 + 15 = 20.

Of course there is little need to raise all land just the low lowing areas would be enough. Or you could also make new land vs messing with any of the existing land.

<comment><USER9> Oh, so you want to go for bonus rounds!

Bonus question #1: If sea level rise is an exponential with respect to time, at what rate would we have to extract sea floor material to keep the level at a current coastline constant?

Bonus question #2: What is the minimum sea wall you would need along the coast of all continents in order to hold back sea level rise?

The point being such questions are always useful for eliciting the interviewee's response who questions they might consider to be "unknowable" when they start the interview.

<comment><USER10> I have no idea why people like to use HS math problems for interviews.

#1 If the ratio is A:B, then you need to remove A/(A+B) * f(x). So, using your numbers it's 1/(1+3) * f(x) = 1/4 f(x). #2 = rise + safety factor. But, safety factor is going to be some BS number. Area wise it's got to deal with rivers not just coast lines, but for a minimum wall you could in theory just use pumps and ridiculous amounts of energy.

Honestly, Google actually tracked this stuff and these types of problems are very poor indicators of workplace performance.

PS: For more fun with exponential functions grub starts a reaction that produces 1 atom the first day 2 atoms the second day... 2 ^n. Now your blast away from the area in a space ship at .9c, approximately how long do you get to live? Hint the earth has around 10^50 atoms it's radios is ~4,000 miles and the speed of light is 1.6 * 10^10 miles per day.

<comment><USER9>
       > I have no idea why people like to use HS math problems
       > for interviews.

Did you go through Google's hiring class? I did. There is a lot going on in an interview, and much of it has to do with how people respond to stressful situations. That is especially true of people interviewing at a place like Google because they often feel like it is their "dream job" and if they blow it they will end up homeless or something.

The important thing about interview success is getting an understanding of three things, can the person listen, can they reason under stress, and can they get stuff done. The candidates always over think the questions, it is the nature of things. Locking someone up mentally because you've over stressed them a question on tensor physics really doesn't help determine if they would be a good candidate or not. If you start with the HS math and they blow through it, you can work your way up to multi-variable calculus :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there much research being done on alternate polymers or binders which can be produced to be used as an alternative on a large scale to sand? I remember reading about mushrooms/fungi being grown for use in a cement-like material.

Its troubling to see these issues across every resource we have and need in the world. Off the coast of florida here we have sandmines dredging in the gulfstream. They look like wider versions of oil rigs.

</comment><comment><USER12> Once again with the shitty Wired paging that doesn't take into account its cute little header! Fix it people - it's not that hard.

<comment><USER13> That's my new pet peeve -- using "page down" on an article only to have some of the content I want to read hide under an idiotic header floating over the content.

<comment><USER14> "page down" is working for me, the last sentence up to just below the floating header.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the article, the guy that dived for sand bringing it up in a bucket made $16 dollars a day. He had to dive about 40 feet down. Someone else hauled the sand up that he dove for. This person made less.

So lets say between the two and maybe a boat, $25-35 a day. I looked up how much concrete sand costs... in the US at least I found it for $7 a ton. Are they able to bring up 3 or 4 tons a day per two man team diving down 40 feet? I am skeptical, but maybe there is something I don't understand.

<comment><USER16> They would only need a 2.7 gallon (USG) bucket to bring up 4 tons per day.

But please check my estimate: A cubic yard of sand can weigh approx 3000 lbs, so that's 2/3 of a cubic yard per ton. 27 cubic feet per cubic yard, so 18 per ton, which is 135 USG. 4 tons (from your question) is then 540 gallons, and at 200 dives per day that is 2.7 gallons per dive.

I'd bet they do more like 8 tons per day per diver.

<comment><USER15> 200 dives a day, lets say they are super and work a 10 hour day (for easy math).

That's 20 dives an hour or one every three minutes. Diving down 40 feet and bringing up a 3 gallon bucket of sand, once every three minutes for 10 hours straight again seems... very difficult (or maybe a bit improbable).

Perhaps it's a special kind of sand and they get more money for it so they don't have to do quite that much?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Of course, you can also take the approach of building using sand that has been turned into a convenient construction material by the forces of nature:

[http://www.edinburghgeolsoc.org/r_sites_cra.html](http://www.edinburghgeolsoc.org/r_sites_cra.html)

<comment><USER18> That's probably even more scarce than sand.

<comment><USER17> Interesting question though - is there more sand or sandstone in the world?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it worth the effort to recycle used concrete or other scrap from tearing down buildings in order to replace/supplement sand?

<comment><USER20> Concrete is already recycled - although it is mostly used for subgrade (the aggregate underneath a concrete slab) and is considerably cheaper than crushed rock.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_recycling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_recycling)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So is there research on turning desert sand into construction material? Taking sand out of the Sahara's borders would be a good thing, right?

<comment><USER2> The Sahara is a complex ecosystem, like everywhere else (actually, it's a network of several deserts with different geographies, climates, and ecosystems). It's not a dead place, and can't just be harmlessly stripped.

That said, it's easier to make square sand round than round sand square. It's probably easier to crush rock into concrete-appropriate sand than to turn desert sand into concrete sand.

<comment><USER22> _It 's not a dead place, and can't just be harmlessly stripped._

That's never stopped us before!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Everything is a "war" when it comes to American journalism.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps a war against wars is justified?

<comment><USER25> No. America has got themselves into plenty of trouble fighting wars against things that are common nouns.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps a war against warring then?

<comment><USER26> Points for effort, but doesn't that automatically become a gerund since it's the object of a preposition?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>