Micronutrients for Health [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/sites/lpi.oregonstate.edu/files/pdf/mic/micronutrients_for_health.pdf <comment><USER2> I find this very useful.

To add more value, add another column that gives how much of a given food source an average-sized adult needs to eat to get the recommended daily intake.</comment>


Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1 <comment><USER2> Seen before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166555>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2174333></comment>


Emulating a 6502 with cycle-perfect timing - <AUTHOR> http://xania.org/201405/jsbeeb-getting-the-timings-right-cpu

<comment><USER2> Nice set of articles: flagged as toread.

One quick note: with the visual6502 project ([http://www.visual6502.org/](http://www.visual6502.org/)), and the c-implementation ([https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502](https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502)), a fun way to test your emulator timing is to run it in parallel with the gate- level simulation, and compare them. For example, I do this with my golang 6502 emulator: [https://github.com/zellyn/go6502/blob/master/tests/compare_t...](https://github.com/zellyn/go6502/blob/master/tests/compare_test.go)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very nice. I used v6502 a lot as the article shows, but the real fun comes with the cycle-stretching, which AFAICT can't be simulated using v6502.

<comment><USER2> Hmmm. You should be able to pull the same lines up/down or pause the clock the way the real hardware does it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My 6502 is a little rusty but wasn't it always faster to decrement the index? Don't compare to 10 each time, just decrement to zero. You save one instruction, which was probably a few clock cycles.

<comment><USER4> Yes, and never forget the BMI opcode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just reposting TempleOS's post (which, being hell-banned, many won't see). Plus, it's a little less ranty than usual :) Without further ado:

\</comment><comment>----

To me abstraction above the hardware is like condoms. Some people say "Use three condoms, its better". I don't want a literal C64 -- just the complete open simple access... but 64-bit and 3Ghz and multicored. I don't want it to run on a 386, just x86_64.

<comment><USER6> I was trying to parse that earlier, but it doesn't make sense. Is he saying he wants something as open as a C64, but running on modern hardware?

<comment><USER7> he wants access to the bare metal on the same level as the C64, but with modern hardware.

POKE 53280, 0

<comment><USER8> Accidental down vote, sorry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is really awesome stuff. Now please someone turn this into a product. Take existing FPGAs and the synthesized hardware, and some place and route data, and generate cycle perfect simulations. If you do this, I can almost guarantee that you will be acquired by one of the big HDL companies, and you might even get to make a tool widely used and loved by EEs on the Internet everywhere. We've got spice online, we've got schematic capture online, now cycle accurate hardware simulation is the next target.

<comment><USER10> > Take existing FPGAs and the synthesized hardware, and some place and route > data, and generate cycle perfect simulations.

> now cycle accurate hardware simulation is the next target.

Can you clarify this? Do you mean, take a 6502 HDL model, place and route it to an FPGA and back-annotate the PaR data into a simulation testbench that runs in an online simulator?

<comment><USER9> Yes. (could be an RTL model, something post HDL) You have that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To me abstraction above the hardware is like condoms. Some people say "Use three condoms, its better".

I don't want a literal C64 -- just the complete open simple access... but 64-bit and 3Ghz and multicored.

I don't want it to run on a 386, just x86_64.

<comment><USER12> Nothing quite so stark and sublime as hacking away with registers and memory alone, eh? Ring 0 is pretty cool place to be, I'll grant you that.

I think perhaps what I long for is the knowledge that I could gain a _total understanding_ of the hardware, ROM, timings - things were simple enough back in the day. The commodore 64 and other 8-bits are like that, and I've seen talks given on the c64 that seemed to lay bare every secret. I have so much respect for those hackers that know a device through and through with history and anecdotes related to the thing to add color to their own vast understanding.</comment></comment>


Gmail's Second Major Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.kapilkale.com/blog/gmails-second-major-problem/ <comment><USER3> The issue that you're complaining about was due to the incident linked at [1].

I can't go into the technical details as to why this happened, but I can roughly explain that it was due to the CAP theorem, essentially "Consistency, Availabilty, Partition Tolerance. Choose two." [2]

Furthermore, you have to choose partition tolerance [3]. The delivery delays that were seen yesterday is because we choose consistency over availability in our systems.

In fact, most of the outages I see people complain about on Hacker News related to Gmail are because we won't sacrifice consistency of user accounts. It's a different problem than huge scale serving of web search indexes or facebook timelines because in those cases if you're missing a few entries most people won't notice or care. When you're searching for an email, you know what email you expect to find and you'll get angry if it isn't there.

Users won't stand for an email showing up one day, disappearing next hour, and then coming back later (which is what could happen in some designs for eventual consistency when serving from different datacenters).

Thus, Gmail availability is lower sometimes because we make sure that all of your data is there all the time. We're insane about it, and we have huge jobs that run constantly on our systems to ensure that we're even resilient to bad hardware. With those we regularly find single bit errors and bad CPUs.

So, as a Gmail engineer, I'm sorry that there were delivery delays yesterday, and all I can say is that every time these happen we tweak and redesign our systems to make these more rare and to improve Gmail's uptime. We'll never have the snappy response and perfect uptime[4] of a computer under your desk. But at the same time a hurricane could take our one of our datacenters and we won't lose your data.

-Andrew, a Gmail Engineer.

1\. [http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1359100799000&iid=8a775c169a6d52d33eea2ba9c2919a6e) 2\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem> 3\. <http://codahale.com/you- cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/> 4\. For some definitions of perfect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Andrew- this is really helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author is furious about a technology that was not designed for instantaneous delivery (SMTP) and fumes about it, because it isn't instantaneous. What's worse is, he quickly assumes goes into some kind of 'super-hero mode' and makes a pretty heavy claim that this is Gmail's _second biggest problem_.

I think this is the best approach - If someone hands over you a free glass of wine, which they've tried their level best to make it perfect, you just drink it instead of trying to suddenly become a food critic and blame the person who gave you the beer. If you don't like it, don't drink it. Buy your own beer from somewhere else. As simple as that!

Tell you what, you should try Yahoo!, I bet.

<comment> brown9-2 Isn't the 115 minute lag in the screenshot lag between one Google SMTP server and another Google SMTP server? That seems like a problem Google should be able to address.

<comment><USER5> > That seems like a problem Google should be able to address.

This is part of the problem.

SMTP and the whole E-Mail thing is inherently unreliable and slow. Speaking for myself, but suspecting this is true for most heavy Gmail users, Gmail feels so good because it seems more reliable than using any other Web mail service. It is even more reliable when both ends use Gmail -- attachments are almost a non-issue within Gmail. Before Gmail mails could take ages to be delivered, get silently lost in spam filters/folders or did not arrive at all.

When we ask Google to be more reliable in that part, we ask them to not do E-Mail but proprietary Magic-Gmail-Messaging. This is part of the problem, not the solution, this is why Facebook is doing E-Mail now. (Ironically FB Messaging seems in some way even less reliable than the Gmail Messaging.)

BTW, what's up with this X.400 thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your problem is that you're relying on a method of communication that was never guaranteed to be instantaneous. Maybe you should investigate other forms of communication within your team besides (or in conjunction) with email.

<comment><USER7> 100% agreed.

I try to treat email as any other letter I recieve(1). Meaning that the sender can only expect an instant reply if I know beforehand the mail is coming and urgent. The same way one would rapidly reply to an urgent letter one is expecting, but easily take a day or more to reply to, or even open, a non urgent letter.

If you need to get a hold of someone directly you should use your phone (to call them). If they don't pick up their phone, leave a voicemail or send an sms.

(1) Registration confirmations / new password emails are an obvious exception here.

<comment><USER8> ...and of course even voicemail / SMS are not guaranteed to be seen anytime soon!

[If at all; I know plenty of people who simply never check their voicemail...]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I pay over $800 a month for Gmail (ok, for apps for business for many users), and we STILL have this issue, and while we can indeed call Ireland to get support, the answer is always, "We are having a delivery issue. Our engineers are working on it."

So paying doesn't help.

<comment><USER10> > So paying doesn't help.

Well, you can now say "Google knows about the issue" to your clients/bosses rather than "fuck if I know".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whaaat, SMTP != Instant Delivery!? You must be joking!

As much as i can understand the pain of an email not being delivered after 2 hours this seems to be too much drama. "happens 2 times in a month" is not a "major problem" for a free service especially since i suppose this user is part of a rather small minority. I never noticed substantial delivery lags myself over the past years myself.

Anyway, if you say "i'd pay 50$/month" please email me, i'll be happy to provide you with a very overprized mail account with same-second delivery! :)

<comment><USER12> As funny as you think it might be to charge $50 a month for guaranteed quick delivery, this is exactly what he actually wants. Large random delays in delivery are costing him way more, so he's willing to pay to fix the pain. Instant delivery isn't in the RFC, but conformance with the spec is not something he cares about. He cares about fast delivery.

<comment><USER11> Just as you say: What he wants and what he has have nothing to do with each other. I want my pocket to contain 1 million dollar. It's not how it works, unfortunately :(

Look, there are many many reasons why an email may not arrive in time or at all at the destination. To say "i lose so much money but i rely on such an unreliable protocol" is just not the mistake of google.

And as i said, for 50$ dollar you can easily buy 2 virtual machines in two different locations, one domain and have virtually a no-downtime mail service for your own. Add some roundcube, clamav, spamassassin and there you go. Setup takes a bit, fine, but that's about it. I guess it wouldn't even take that long. It won't guarantee delivery as well, but mails won't be stuck in some MTA ;)

<comment><USER13> That's assuming your time is worth nothing. Also, there's much more to reliability than having servers in more than one location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like Greylisting to me: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting>

<comment><USER15> Yep. I used to work at DreamHost and our customers would run into issues with Gmail greylisting incoming mail. In fact, they do it like crazy.

In a lot of cases, adding an SPF record for the sending domain would clear things up.

<comment><USER16> It is disturbing how many DNS/domain hosting companies still have zero support for SPF.

It is A, MX, CNAME, and MAYBE a couple of other common record types. But a TXT record? No chance...

I had to move to Route53 just for this functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had seen massive delays in delivery to Gmail when sending newsletters at my last $dayjob, and I had always assumed it was part of their spam filtering. For example, if it were me and I was getting thousands of nearly-identical emails sent to Gmail addresses, it seems like a good idea to let 1% of them through to see if end users mark them as spam or not. If they all get marked as spam, I don't need to let the rest through.

<comment><USER18> Likewise. I used a script to recurse over a long list of names, and putting in a small sleep() delay in-between emails ended up fixing the problem immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Are you hitting any of their receiving limits? [http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1366776)

Because this is exactly what happens when you do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not even close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> i wish some major computer company would release an easy-to-use plug and play server product that would enable consumers to run their own mail servers on cheap hardware, just by toggling a switch

just imagine... no ads, no privacy concerns, complete control.

if they were smart they would include some sort of automatic backup program that runs in the background and saves everything every once in a while, a backup that could be restored with a click of a button... like going back in time ... like a .....

<comment><USER21> How come Zimbra seems to be so widely disparaged?

Spam control requires a little more intervention than with Gmail, but I've found it straightforward enough to set up once, then do nothing else for a couple years.

<comment><USER22> Straightforward? I'd love to know your secret.

Compile this odd package with this patch. Now these three more. Oh they don't compile? That's right, they haven't been maintained for 3 years. Etc, etc.

<comment><USER21> I created a VPS with CentOS. I think I started with CentOS 5.6 and Zimbra 6.8 Community Version. I last updated it about two years ago, so that it is now CentOS release 5.8 and Zimbra 7.1.1_GA_3196.RHEL5_64.

It intermittently was used by different groups of about 50 people who accessed it using IMAP and the web portal without any problem.

Now all it is doing is continuing to collect email subscriptions from software vendors I was trying out at the time, though some other people may still be using it. I don't think anyone else even knew how to access the administration console, and I haven't logged into the admin console in over a year.

Occasionally, log into the shell, because of a bug I never bothered to address. It slowly collects a lot of temporary files. Speaking of which I should do that now:

`Last login: Sat Sep 1 19:27:28 2012 from __`.

Then I ran:

        for i in {0..9}
        do
            find /tmp/jna${i}*.tmp -cmin +30 -exec rm {} \;
            echo $i "out of 9" `date`
        done

To be honest, that _is_ ugly, and I should upgrade. The script took 30 minutes to run, and found 20GB that had accumulated in under 5 months. However, it isn't critical for anyone, and < 3hrs/year is a nice level of admin effort.

To answer your question: I'm sure not every module is functioning perfectly, and though it hasn't needed much maintenance over the past year, it hasn't been under much load either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Even though I agree with people here saying that you can't expect 100% instantaneous delivery from SMTP, this incident was actually posted on the Google Apps status dashboard ( [http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1359118799000&iid=8a775c169a6d52d33eea2ba9c2919a6e) ).

So it's not even like this is some common problem that happens all the time and Google is ignoring. No service is perfect and outages happen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah- there IS a status page. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My main gripe against GMail is the visual noise and clutter. There are way too many buttons and gradients and shadows now.

I remember in private beta, it's cleanlisness was heralded as the second coming, but now they seem to be adding features 90% of users don't need.

I've switched to Outlook.com and haven't looked back. Back to cleanliness and non-introsive buttons and popups.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd say the #1 problem is spam filtering, which for me has gotten worse and worse. Recently I have had PayPal payment notifications going into spam! It's a shame because Gmail used to have incredibly good spam filtering - <USER2> enough that I didn't check it, as I knew I could trust it - however now I don't trust it at all.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what you're doing (it certainly depends on what your legitimate email stream looks like), but for me, gmail's spam filters are still incredibly good, probably as close to perfect as I've ever seen.

It's impossible for such a thing to be 100% perfect, of course (even your own eyes will deceive you occasionally!), but gmail's filters are good enough that spam is not an issue for me any longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> kapilkale, for the price you say you'd pay a month, you could get Google Apps for Business and spend that much per year. And get live support and other goodies.

Have you thought about this yet?

<comment><USER27> Having used both gmail as an individual and gmail via paid Google Apps for Business, I'm inclined to believe that neither has any advantage when it comes to mail delivery speed, either in terms of declared SLA nor real-world difference.

I've seen unexplained lags of the type mentioned here on both about equally. In some cases I've had someone who was on the very same Google Apps for business plan email me, and then send a forward of the original when I reported I had not seen the first mail 10 minutes later, after which I received the 2nd mail immediately and still didn't see the original mail until like 30+ minutes after that.

I never bothered to follow up with Google's support on apps for business with the lag issue because it didn't happen that often (at least not that I noticed) and also I view Internet email as an inherently laggy system (though in practice it is near instant most of the time), so maybe if you do complain they'll do something, but I don't think just switching to the Google Apps for Business plan is an immediate cure for this guy's problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> $50 -> $1000 is one order of magnitude.

Not "orders".

Orders of magnitude hyperbole needs to stop.

Why not write "some would pay $1000 a month" when quoting the Graham article. You didn't even show you have users willing to pay $5000 a month for gmail which would in be the "orders of magnitude" you wrote.

</comment><comment><USER29> 95% of non-spam email is delivered within 5 minutes of being sent. This number is made up for the purposes of argument, but I think it's fairly accurate. I've administered mail machines for many years.

There are all sorts of reasons why the other 5% doesn't zip along, and some of those reasons are persistent, some are fixable, and some of them are essentially never going to be tracked down. Does Gmail have an internal problem? Maybe, maybe not, but there's not enough data here to find out.

If you want instant communication, use a direct connection under your control. It's still not guaranteed but at least you'll see the progress or lack thereof.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've had massive delivery delays every so often with gmail and they're a little irritating, sure, but quite frankly email makes no guarantees about delivery time. If you need guaranteed fast delivery maybe email isn't the answer.

</comment><comment><USER31> Google's servers are incredibly complex. Probably too complex - the more complicated they make their infrastructure (datacenter failover, region failover, bla bla) the more unstable it seems to get.

Google uses a very bureaucratic code commit system that requires sign offs from different people. This process takes a long time, and devs can't move onto the next step until the previous step has been accepted [1]. While this system is awesome for catching the localized bugs (no buffer overflow is going to get past that kind of code review), there is a major tradeoff. A dev can only keep so much state in mind when building architecture. If he is only working on the problem once a week with large time gaps, is he not going to lose track of important pieces of the puzzle?

This is probably the age old problem - if you make something that is too clever for even the creator to fully understand, how are you possibly going to make sure it is bug free? The problem being some delay between Google servers hints at an inter-region datacenter problem. I wonder if anybody at Google even understands the entire failover and interlinked data center system completely?

[1] [http://www.splinter.com.au/2012/12/26/behind-enemy-lines- goo...](http://www.splinter.com.au/2012/12/26/behind-enemy-lines-google/)

<comment><USER32> That link seems to be dead.

I wish I could share with you the pictures of "the big picture" in which every piece of proprietary tech was given its own little circle on a whiteboard and then was connected to everything else which it uses or which uses it.

To say it was huge was an understatement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Never had any latency issues or lag in delivery. I wonder if this is some sort of regional issue.

</comment><comment><USER34> I experience this same issue a couple of times a month as well. I happen to have a few plugins that I use in GMAIL (Xobni/Tout/Base etc) so I assumed that might be part of the problem? Are you running Gmail clean or do you have a similar situation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Running clean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Gmail seems pretty good to me at least. The worst trouble I've had is a few seconds of delay to receive an email without a refresh. Usually my phone and tablet get it first.

<comment><USER36> Delivery is usually instantaneous for me, but on occasion I won't get email for 6+ hours. It's a lot easier for me to notice the delay when communicating with co-workers, as the sender often wants to know why I haven't responded to the mail he sent 4 hours ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> try using Yahoo, Gmail will suddenly feel like a supersonic jet

</comment><comment><USER38> Anecdotally, I wonder if the reason I don't see this as much as I used to is because the quick email discussions I have happen almost entirely between Gmail users.

</comment><comment><USER39> The solution is cheap and simple: FAX. It starts coming out on the other end before you're finished putting it in!

</comment><comment><USER40> I've been using Zoho mail myself for a while, and it's worked out fairly well.

</comment><comment><USER41> Something else to lament: their complete lack of support for webhooks.

</comment><comment><USER42> Try Yahoo or Hotmail(Outlook now), then you may get the answer.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Take my money. I'd pay $50 / month to get reliable service; others would be willing to pay orders of magnitude more."

Should be "order of magnitude more".

Getting really tired of tech writers using "orders of magnitude" hyperbole when its not really the case.

\----

Also don't like him complaining on not receiving an "urgent" email in time. Urgent communications require phone calls.

<comment><USER43> Well, there are many reasons you could need an urgent email for something that wouldn't be satisfied over the phone. Sending a contract or a statement of work, for example. Sure it could be faxed, if both parties have fax. It could be put on Dropbox, if both parties have Dropbox, etc.

If it's not just a communication but rather an exchange of data, a phone call won't suffice. The author even mentioned that he _had_ called the person, who resent the email 4 times. Obviously a phone call isn't what needed to happen. There's just a lack of good file transfer solutions on the Internet.</comment></comment>


Clean, Modern Objective-C - <AUTHOR> http://harlanhaskins.com/2014/02/20/clean-modern-objective-c.html

<comment><USER2> All of these things are something you use an automated formatter for, not regard as some kind of 'modern objc'. I guess people like to focus on pointless stuff like this because it's easier to worry about than whether you should use an eventbus or a delegate - you know, actual hard choices.

Stylistic stuff like this is not something you need to give rules for. Create an automated formatter, run it on your or others source files, and get back to solving real problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right to an extent, but I don't think "Run your code through a formatter when you're done hacking it together" is a viable, maintainable, or scalable policy. Especially not for enterprise or team based workflows.

Also, #'s 1, 2, 4, and to a certain extent 8 are more questions of design pattern than 'style'.

<comment><USER2> _> 2\. Use consistent spacing and use whitespace liberally._

The very definition of a formatting bikeshed.

 _> 1\. No instance variables._

I'm not convinced here - he certainly doesn't explain why you shouldn't use them. I guess he likes to use _self.var_ rather than _var_ \- but it's important to note that this does have some performance implications.

 _> 4\. Modularize and model._

I'll give you 4 though - using compiler recognizable types is always a boon. I'm not sure if anybody really needs to be told to modularize and model, most people would understand that without being told. It does lock-in your public API though, making changes to a library require updating all apps that use the library. Meanwhile, adding a new field into a dict means existing apps can upgrade the library easily. Still, I'd definitely agree that types are always a better bet in the long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, sorry, I meant 1, 4, 5, and 8. You're right about 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised that he provides five versions of the method definition syntax and none of them are what Apple does and what I consider to be the standard:

        - (void)doSomethingWithParameter:(NSString *)parameter;

<comment><USER4> That's what I use as well. In Apple's frameworks I've found them to be very inconsistent between different areas though.

<comment><USER5> Maybe because these things simply don't matter.

Worse than that, they distract from things that do.

Bike shed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This and the linked guides claim there is no advantage to using instance variables (preferring properties), but I see at least one advantage: simplicity. When you're reading code that uses an instance variable you know exactly what it's doing, you don't have to check the attributes of the property, or the getter/setter implementation, or think about any KVO going on.

I'm not saying this makes instance variables preferable, but there is something to be said for minimising the number of places you need to look when trying to understand a snippet of implementation.

<comment><USER7> Exactly!!!! So much of objc programming is about maintaining internal state. Dot syntax and automatically synthesized properties just obfuscates whats actually going on.

IMO you should always be accessing the ivar directly unless you have a specific reason not to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The ridiculous amount of effort that we have to go through to define private properties (just sheer amount of text around them) makes me miss the pre- property days... I still define iVars the old fashioned way. The whole language would do well to have some syntax sugar added akin to Java's private, public, protected for properties so we could just go

@private NSString _dog;

@public NSString _cat;

... Oh Wait! We do, it's just that nobody uses it anymore. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869935/objective-c- priva...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869935/objective-c-private-vs- protected-vs-public)

Well we have syntax sugar for iVars... I think it's so messy putting some properties in the header and some in the implementation file with a private category - come on we can't have better syntax than that?

<comment><USER9> Having public things be in the header and private things in the .m seems exactly right! The header should only expose the public interface, not the implementation details, no?

(On the other hand, defining _properties_ in an anon category, instead of just plain old instance variables in the .m, seems pointless to me -- why have a layer of indirection for the class to access _itself_?)

<comment><USER10> I'm a heavy user of properties in other languages like C#, but in Objective C, to define the anonymous category with all the property ceremony and verbiage, feels...excessive...if all you need is some private state, and you don't care about generated accessors or KVO.

Why are ivars bad, exactly? They're a lot more succinct if you don't actually need what properties give you.

<comment><USER9> Right, exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How about taking a look at the Google ObjC style guide? [https://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/objcguide...](https://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/objcguide.xml)

I'm not convinced by private properties either. Use ARC and just define your ivars in the implementation.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm still learning Objective-C but it always bothers me a bit when a controller conforms to many protocols. Are there strategies to manage this (other than #pragma mark)?

I really like point #4. I'd take that further and say that most "keyed access" classes should be wrapped in a more domain-specific wrapper class (thinking of NSUserDefaults, and the like).

With regards to point #8, Apple actually recommends against naming functions starting with get... also, unless they are property getter overrides. ([https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CodingGuidelines/Articles/NamingMethods.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001282-BCIGIJJF))

Thanks for the article.

<comment><USER13> the only other strategy I have seen is to instantiate handlers for the sub concerns. so set self.tv.delegate = myTVDelegate; or something like that.

Apple warns against it because it goes against key value coding I think. I am kinda on the I wish they had a consistent prefix for stuff. maybe it's just my feeble mind, but I like to have the code completion remind me of what's available. the sometimes inconsistent naming conventions in different classes makes it tough to remember all the nuances when you don't use them every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My points on Modern Objective-C:

      - Use MVVM and some method of bindings (e.g. ReactiveCocoa) [0]
      - Split up ViewControllers and DataSources [1]
      - Split up classes using Categories (I've seen so many blown up AppDelegates)
      - Use CocoaPods (this should be a given by now)
      - probably much more I forgot about...

oh, and btw: those `@directives` go by the name of `literals`

[0] - [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mvvm+objective-c](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mvvm+objective-c) [1] - [http://www.objc.io/issue-1/](http://www.objc.io/issue-1/)

<comment><AUTHOR> -I've heard a lot about ReactiveCocoa recently, but I haven't had a chance to try it. Maybe I should. And maybe I will!

\- I'm super guilty of just handling everything in AppDelegate (notifications, URI schemes, etc.) I need to work on this.

\- CocoaPods are the greatest

<comment><USER15> Build some stuff with Reactive Cocoa before you jump on that bandwagon. It pollutes the stack of everything it touches and its not very useful unless you use it pervasively...

<comment><USER16> I agree completely. Its use case is highly specialized and all it does is make a bunch of code nicely split up into methods and crams it into fewer methods with a ton of blocks. Even the example of "before" and "after" on the github page shows that how complicated it makes things look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm guilty of #4, but I think it's a judgement thing. If you're just going to briefly use the dictionary, I personally think it's a waste of time to go to the effort of creating a class. If it's core to your program it makes more sense since you can then tap into things like KVO a bit better. And, prior to ARC and automatic synthesis of properties, it made for a ton of boilerplate code.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a nice little list. My one nitpick is that he referred to to the class extension [1] as an anonymous category and while it also has been called this it's generally documented as a class extension by Apple and so it makes sense to call that out so folks can go read about how it actually works.

[1] [http://goo.gl/zTu3nA](http://goo.gl/zTu3nA)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. I'll update it to include both definitions in the morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In response to point #3, my counter-example is that when you list a method's arguments or return type, the parentheses include the star. In other words, the star does not "belong" to the variable in that particular case.

      -(NSData*) myMethod:(NSString*)string;

It can really be argued both ways. We've hugged the type everywhere I worked.

<comment><USER15> I agreed with you for about ten years, and then I stopped doing that because of the OPs example but also because idiomatic c and c++ are written this way and I just decided to stop swimming upstream after reading enough of it.

But it can be very confusing when dealing with dereferences. So I feel you there. Doing C for 15 years you just get used to it.

<comment><USER19> The OPs example only shows that you should never declare two variables on the same line! This is a rule that's as old as programming, even.

      int* a;
      int  b;

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Isn't it a bad idea to define private/protected properties in your implementation file? What if you want to subclass?

<comment><USER16> You'll have to redefine the properties in the subclass's class and specify @dynamic so that it knows the properties were synthesized in the parent class

<comment><USER18> I've experimented with putting the category in a private, implementors-only header file and it seemed to work fine. But I'm not sure if that's canonical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just when the Heck will apple starting making or designing a replacement for Objective C?

Until Rust turns to 1.0?

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe you should give an obj-c seminar

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am a rookie Objective-C learner and all these are pretty known to me. I now think "probably people are writing worse code than I do". These are pretty straightforward facts.

</comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately I disagree that this is cleaner.

Yes its true, you can hack your way to to some idealized notion of objective C.

Accessing everything through properties is lame, and it sucks, and it only seems like a good idea if you use ARC because you think it will make it easier to find the retention bugs, it actually makes it harder.

Also properties are not the same as private members, although obj C trendists want them to become the same.

No, I disagree it takes you further away from object programming not closer.

The current trends in objective C are to hack the file syntax to make it seem like its more encapsulated and use properties to make ARC happy.

Both are wrong, obj C is a leaky abstraction. Too bad. You will never make it better by making your code harder to read and debug.

Yes in obj C inheritance sucks, protocols suck, constants suck, encapsulation sucks, and in the end if you know how to make something, it really doesn't matter. Stop obsessing on shit nobody cares about and build something.

Even with all your recommendations obj C is a bandaid. But falling off your skateboard can be fun. Live a little.</comment>


Best Password Managers of 2019 (Paid, Family, and Free) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/best-password-managers/ <comment><USER2> What is the difference between keepass and keypassXC?

<comment><USER3> There is an excellent discussion of this question here: [https://superuser.com/questions/878902/whats-the- difference-...](https://superuser.com/questions/878902/whats-the-difference- between-keepass-and-keepassx)

<comment><USER2> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Glad to see KeepassXC got a mention.</comment>


Hugo Static Website Engine v0.13 - <AUTHOR> http://gohugo.io/meta/release-notes/

<comment><AUTHOR> The v0.13.0 release is the largest Hugo release to date. The release introduced some long sought after features (pagination, sequencing, data loading, tons of template improvements) as well as major internal improvements. In addition to the code changes, the Hugo community has grown significantly and now has over 3000 stars on github, 134 contributors, 24 themes and 1000s of happy users.

This release represents 448 contributions by 65 contributors

A special shout out to @bep and @anthonyfok for their new role as Hugo maintainers and their tremendous contributions this release.

</comment><comment><USER2> What I like about this release is the GetJSON and GetCSV functionality. At the moment with Harp I use a php script to output CSV files into the correct harp json format and then build the site. Great for big databases of parts or products. It also looks like Hugo may generate faster than Harp (which os node based) quite useful in my case where sites of several thousand static pages will generate faster.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hugo is great. It seems like a lot of people use Octopress / Jekyll for this kind of thing, but they bring in the entire Ruby / RVM ecosystem to do so, which is way overkill. I find Hugo to be much simpler and easier to manage.

</comment><comment><USER4> It took a while, but this is a solid release with some really fun features added.

</comment><comment><USER5> More documentation (examples, tutorials, troubleshooting) for new users.

</comment><comment><USER6> Paginaton support, finally ... Good stuff.</comment>


Ask HN: How often you take Android device full file backup and store it on cloud? - <AUTHOR> The full file backup means the device folder structure is maintained when stored on cloud (for e.g. Google Drive). <comment><USER2> By full file backup are you referring to copying all the data under /storage/emulated/0, /sdcard mount points?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Storing as it's on cloud. I should be able to browse on cloud storage as I do on device. Basically, maintaining replica of device on cloud.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a good step in the backup strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Never. I just took backup of my contacts twice in my lifetime when I was formatting my mobile.

<comment><AUTHOR> How about backup of SMS, Call log, photos, music and other files, to avoid loosing data in case of device lost? The existing backup apps require scheduling apriori, and I'll loose new data between schedules, when device gets lost.

<comment><USER3> It's a good practice to take regular backups of the entire device. Probably I should do more often.

<comment><USER4> It's painful to schedule backups. I believe users are less predictable on what and when to backup. Chances are that users regret on their backup strategy, after loosing the data for e..g, that they should have scheduled daily rather than weekly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> never

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you handle the situation when device gets lost or stop functioning?

<comment><USER5> buy a new one install software, wait for everything to sync?

<comment><AUTHOR> For iOS devices, iCloud syncs everything. There is no similar alternative for Android devices. Google Play syncs some: Contacts, Apps and Gmail etc. But to sync app data, other files and folders, Google play doesn't have a copy. And are lost with the device.

<comment><USER6> Actually, with Marshmallow, Android apps can now backup themselves just like iOS ones.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LA Hacker News Live Stream - <AUTHOR> http://www.vokle.com/series/7510-los-angeles-hacker-news

<comment><USER2> I can't seem to make out anything on the screen. The audio isn't bad, just the video. I'm not sure if every presentation is like this, but the quality makes it difficult to follow along. Good luck and I hope to see improvements in the future. :)

<comment><USER3> Working okay for me, post a screenshot ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Vokle is cool. I want to go to the meetup but I have to attend to the gym or else...

Next time!

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone want to meet sooner? I'm recently freed of employment and trying to figure out what the tech scene's like around here (other than linked to 'the industry'...)

May is ages, I might throw the towel in and go travel India or move to SF or something before then :) Would prefer to stay though! Looking out over San Fernando valley now .. listening to lovely music, typing on new laptop and preparing to go and celebrate the traditional long weekend holiday that commemorates my nations' deaths in Turkey during the war...

 _sigh_

May as well have a party! Hell, have it at my place!</comment>


Ask HN:  Please review my DropZap web demo.  It's written using GWT. - <AUTHOR> http://dropzap.appspot.com

<comment><USER3> You absolutely need at least one carefully expository level to _demonstrate_ the game mechanics. Play _Wario's Woods_ for the NES, and you'll know what to do. Your textual description is awful, but I'm not sure how you could do it better -- so ditch it! Show, don't tell. Tell them just enough to inspire them to try it.

Graphics. You don't need 3D anything, you don't need to turn the blocks into animal species with a story. You just need it to feel like someone considered it more rather than doing what the tools made easy -- taking stuff out will go a long way.

You need sound effects, if not music.

<comment><USER4> You might be able to get away with removing most of the explanation if you had a simple animation of the game play looping on the page. All I needed was to start the first level to understand how the game worked (having played drop 7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really think you might be on to something. It's just as much fun to play as any of the big hits in this genre I can think of - really is in the same class as Tetris, Bejeweled, etc.

Some random thoughts:

\- I started reading the instructions, failed to visualize any of it, and said "screw it, I'll just start playing and pick it up as I go". The good news is the gameplay itself is very intuitive.

\- appearances are SO important in the iPhone world. If it looks like it's starting to pick up momentum, absolutely get a good designer on board and give it an overhaul. I can easily see someone else take your gameplay, give it a lot of polish, and release an app that will leave yours in the dust - <USER2> would really suck.

edit: just bought the iPhone version. Well worth the $0.99.

<comment><USER6> Amichail, I am very happy for you. You were able to make a new puzzle game with gameplay on the order of Tetris and that is a very rare achievement. There can't be more than 10 puzzle video games that have gameplay as compelling as Tetris or Bejeweled or even BreakThru and derivatives. BreakThru is called Big Money on Popcap. Dropzap's similarity to that definitely NP- complete game is what makes me think your game is also NP-complete.

I think the guy saying this is better than Tetris is being a little hyperbolic, but maybe it's just because I consider Tetris to be (by far) the greatest video game ever made.

I don't mean this to be in any way offensive, but I always kind of looked at you as the official mascot of the site. "I think 1 is the optimal number of amichails." <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925382> It now looks like you are going to find success.

Have you given any thoughts to the eventual design/theme? Robots? Dinosaurs? Demolition? Or keep it purely or mostly abstract? One incentive for a theme or improved design is that you can use that version 2.0 to justify a new round of reviews on the app review websites.

Now all we need is a social news site that uses DropZap scores to determine story order! :D I'd settle for a high score page where people get to link to their personal or business site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For me, at first, the color and size had distinct significance. Instead of changing the size and color of the blocks, how about using one color and tuning down it's saturation, or transparency and keep the size the same. Or just change the size? Did you try this at first, was it too bland visually? Also, I thought it would be better too not have a row feed of blocks after every drop. Doing this would more clearly expose the mechanics. Presumably this wasn't feasible because trivial games could be played by stacking blocks in only one column. This expolit might be eschewed by introducing indestructible blocks, and may also allow arbitrary height of the board. I think the chain reaction effect is visually appealing, but takes away from game play. Past the second round of block removal, it's _impossible_ (heh, well for this mortal) to definitively predict the consequences of a particular drop. Badda-bing-bang-bong and half the screen is cleared. When it doesn't work out so well the responsibility for failure can easily be ascribed to unfortunate randomness introduced by the row feed. It's a neat idea though, I hope it works out and that in 5 years I'm eating my words :]

<comment><AUTHOR> _...it's impossible (heh, well for this mortal) to definitively predict the consequences of a particular drop. Badda-bing-bang-bong and half the screen is cleared. When it doesn't work out so well the responsibility for failure can easily be ascribed to unfortunate randomness introduced by the row feed._

What do you mean by this? The chain reaction doesn't involve anything random.

<comment><USER7> The chain reaction involves the row feed, which I assume is randomly generated. But that's entirely a different point.

I'm saying that it is nearly impossible to predict what's going to happen given that a particular choice often causes a reaction which might involve many steps (9? 10+) of elimination, each changing the configuration of the blocks. I've built a block dropper, that's why I saw this. But if users like it, and it's selling ...

<comment><AUTHOR> When you drop a piece, you will not get a new row inserted before the chain reaction (if any) completes. So a new row will not affect your ability to predict how the chain reaction will go.

But yes, chain reactions can be long. You can at least predict how a chain reaction will start out and guess about what might happen after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you think the page is confusing? How could it be improved?

The demo is limited to the first three levels of standard mode. Do you think I should take off the three level limit? Although you can play this in Safari on the iPhone/iPod touch, the animation is sluggish and buggy. Moreover, the native version has more features.

<comment><USER8> The explanation on the page talks about a "column segment" and a "square piece", but I couldn't figure out how they correspond to the elements in the game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I should say "stack of squares" instead of "column segment".

<comment><USER9> I thought it is confusing when it says "column segment lands," because I thought a column would show up and land. But you mean when you form a column right?

<comment><AUTHOR> When a square lands, it may have square(s) immediately above it.

Only the square at the bottom of this landing square stack shrinks other squares (if any).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Better than Tetris. Much better. I think that sums all.

However I second the suggestions to make more clear what actions will led to the column and lateral block elimination. It take me a couple of plays to figure out.

Congratulations for your work.

</comment><comment><USER11> I could not figure out what was happening in the first minute of playing it, so I closed the page. And I'm not too dumb, so I think about 70% of people will be the same.

You need to explain better how the game works.

<comment><USER12> Well, from what I understood it works like this:

You lose when the blocks get to the top of the playing field. You need to make points by making blocks disappear. To do this you have the piece at the top of your screen. Click where you want to drop it.

Now all blocks under and on the same row will shrink. When you shrink a red block, it will disappear.

When a red block disappears, the blocks above it fall, which will start a chain effect starting at the lowest one (just try, you'll understand what I mean).

Enjoy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, that was really fun. The description doesn't accurately describe the behavior of the game though, or rather maybe they could be more clear. For instance:

 _When any square lands, it shrinks all squares below it and in the same row segment._ -> actually, it only shrinks _contiguous_ squares in the same row (of course, now that I re-read it, maybe that's what you meant by "row segment")

That being said, I played that game for 5-10 minutes before remembering that it was an "Ask HN" and that I should come back here and provide feedback ;-) Bookmarked!

<comment><AUTHOR> What percentage of people would know what "contiguous" means?

<comment><USER9> I think "contiguous" does a great job of making "it shrinks all squares below it and in the same row segment" more concise and understandable, even if just for the subset of people who understand what contiguous means. That being said, I wouldn't underestimate the intelligence of the average english speaker that much. Contiguous is a pretty common word.

But a good compromise would be a video or something demonstrating exactly what you mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My guess is: put the 9/10 from the iPhone App review near the top. Simplify the page and reduce the importance of most of the text - lots of colours demanding attention. Get it to 1 message and the game.

However I suspect the real answers will emerge from testing. Do a test on trial screen count and see which amount of screens increases your conversion. Test changing colours, text, positioning etc. Over time you'll know more than we could about what will work on that page.

<comment><USER9> Or just hire a designer.

<comment><USER14> For the l&f yup, but designers won't necessarily know anything about improving conversions, which testing will do for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hey, I love it! Brilliant game! It's simple but there's still something to figure out because you have to anticipate the cascading effects of squares getting eliminated.

The explanation isn't good, but playing it reveals how it works anyway.

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome. I hit the level cap at least 3 times before coming back here. Please make the web version unlimited, I would like to play more and don't want to drag out my phone while I'm at my computer.

</comment><comment><USER17> first of all the game is great and very addictive and has more depth than tetris and bejeweled and what not.

problems with the page tho: 1) way too many different fonts and colors to the texts. confusing to process, i didn't know where to place my eyes for quite a while

2) descriptions and reviews are too verbose. like instead of all the reviews, all u need is like a one liner like "way better than tetris and bejeweled" that conveys what it is as opposed to like 3 paragraphs.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have no idea how the block elimination logic works once they all start falling, but I don't care. I just want to play over and over. You will soon be earning my 99 cents. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER19> Lots of fun, and it played very smoothly. Obviously the graphics could use a look, but you know that.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey, if anyone's bored you could try and prove this game to be NP-Complete...

</comment><comment><USER20> as everyone else is saying - this is pretty awesome, but you need to have some kind of auto mode running or something that shows people what it does.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice game. Aussie itunes store pretty please...

</comment><comment><USER22> pros:

\- really fresh and interesting \- lots of neat surprises

cons:

\- not at all clear why what i am doing is causing these cascading effects, but the after-effects are awesome

really really _cool_ game, and really really cool math behind hit. i'm really impressed with this.</comment>


Ask HN: Any seasoned Double Robotics testimonials? - <AUTHOR>

I am intrigued by Double Robotics remote telepresence product. I had a colleague ask me about re-locating out of state the other day, and in the back of my mind, I was wondering if a solution like Double would be effective. I still find the concept kind of creepy, but it appears to have momentum, and when you get used to it ... it does seem practical.<p>I'm wondering if anyone in the HN community has had some extended time using one in an office setting, and can share their experience. <comment><USER2> I work remotely and the idea of having a robot there as my avatar is a bit ridiculous (this coming from someone who is very into robotics). Unless the robot carries out any specific task (aside from standing around with your face showing in a screen) it is a waste of resources. Plus we have very smart phones these days that are able to do live video calls/conferencing.</comment>


How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship <comment><USER2> Note that it's not just individual choices that have led to this. Minimum parking requirements, anti-density zoning laws, and other car-first regulations have forcibly shaped our communities to be hostile to walking, biking, and transit. A huge loss in spontaneous community interaction is the inevitable result.

<comment><USER3> Well that's 100% out of phase with my experience. I just ended 21 years in the "Front Range" area; Boulder, Fort Collins CO. Bike trails and bikers abound, anti-car municipal governments impeding road development, everyone living on anti-sprawl 0.2 acre plats. However, actual contact with neighbors was very sparse; a service for every need, everything on auto-pilot.

The last three months I've been living semi-rural in the midwest; all the households are on two acres (minimum, due to to well and septic density.) I've had more direct contact with my neighbors in these 12 weeks than the previous 21 years put together. Maintaining larger properties that are much more distant from the urban core invites collaboration. Household attendance at the HOA meeting last month was almost 50%; waaay more than I saw back in the Front Range burbs.

Your view of the world doesn't match my experience at all. Exactly the opposite.

<comment><USER4> Agree. I don't think physical distance and density are important factors. Culture might be.

People are more friendly in the midwest, and they are more open to talk about family matters. Family matters are in essence intimate, and the topics draw the people in the conversation together. In the big cities, these topics are regarded as "more" private (they are indeed private). It is a social norm to not share them unless to good friends. The less people share, the less opportunities to make friends.

I also find it is easier for adults, especially men, to make friends in Asia, like in China and Japan.

<comment><USER3> Culture? Hmm. Maybe. These highly ordered, dense and costly neighborhoods are hostile. Anxiety is high among residence. Remove that and replace it with a degree of liberty, some space and the need to collaborate to keep the road open and people connect naturally.

The 'urban planners' and their cheerleaders have it wrong. They've decided that downsizing everyone and making them live in each others laps will end with Kumbaya. In fact it ends with everyone on edge, peering at each other silently as they sweat the value of their tiny piece of it.

<comment><USER2> Ok, it's pretty clear now that you just have a personal grudge against any sort of density, man. You need extra space to be happy, that's fine, but you're not everyone. Look across the pond at Western Europe or Japan: two very different cultures, both higher-density than the US, both tend to have higher social cohesion than in America, not lower.

> Remove that and replace it with a degree of liberty

Do you know what liberty is? It's letting the market have a say in how dense developments can be, so that people's individual choices dictate what's available, rather than the law. It's supporting all modes of transportation so that people have an actual choice in how they get around, instead of being required to drive to do anything or go anywhere. Forcing everyone into what topspin thinks is best isn't liberty, it's coercion.

<comment><USER5> > Western Europe or Japan: two very different cultures, both higher-density > than the US, both tend to have higher social cohesion than in America, not > lower.

It's a lot easier to have "high social cohesion" when you have a uniform culture that's been around for centuries, and are not living in a nation of immigrants from all over. I have nothing against that, by the way, but I'm simply pointing out that many countries like Japan are fairly xenophobic at best, racist at worst. I believe there was an article on HN recently about how difficult it is to found a start up in Japan as a foreigner.

Plus, I'm not sure this kind of tight-knit culture is something I'd want to be a part of: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in- japan/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/)

> The company is your public life. Have an issue with your landlord? The > company will handle it, in those cases where the company is not your > landlord.[...] Need to file paperwork with City Hall? Someone from HR can do > it for you.

> The company is your private life. All friends you've made since your school > days almost by definition work for your company, because you spend > substantially every waking hour officially at work or at quote leisure > unquote with people from work.

That sounds to me like modern-day feudalism.

\----

> Do you know what liberty is? It's letting the market have a say in how dense > developments can be

What's wrong with the people in each area voting for the laws that govern their area? If the people in an area don't want to vote for an increase in density, then so be it. Let them live their lives how they want to.

<comment><USER2> Yes, those societies are different, obviously. My point was just that it's certainly possible to have high social cohesion even with dense urban living.

> What's wrong with the people in each area voting for the laws that govern > their area?

There's nothing necessarily wrong with localities having their own laws, of course. I'm not advocating for overthrowing democracy, I'm just arguing that overly restrictive anti-density regulations have had a number of bad impacts:

\- In desirable metros, skyrocketing property values caused by restrictions on new housing supply act as a large wealth transfer from the young to the old.

\- _Needing_ to use a car hurts the poor, hurts college students, hurts childrens' independence, and hurts residents' healthiness.

\- Lower density developments are more energy- and thus carbon-intensive.

\- Wasted time on long commutes because the only affordable housing is far away is a huge economic sink.

\- The economy overall is weaker because many people avoid moving to high- productivity areas like Silicon Valley or NYC, and instead go to lower- productivity cities, because of high housing costs caused by a lack of supply: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/25/h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/25/how- big-cities-that-restrict-new-housing-harm-the-economy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Counterpoint: If you've ever really been burned by having a crappy neighbor -- or a string of them -- you may be inclined to get as far away as possible.

I'm sensitive to noise, and I ended up not with average neighbors but with extremely noisy ones, on multiple occasions. (On one occasion, inescapable even when I was across the street and down two houses.)

I'd like a greater sense of community, but I never want to go through that, again.

I don't know whether manners have changed, or more people are sensitive to noise (some aspect of the autistic spectrum or the like?). Regardless, for me, higher density living will only become attractive with improvements in soundproofing of such units and/or better control of noisy behavior.

(Come to think of it, people didn't used to have such absurd stereos and televisions producing such absurd levels of bass, either -- on average. Not that that is the only problem with noise, these days.)

P.S. I'll add that the sound of kids playing and the like doesn't bother me, in reasonable measure. The situations I encountered went FAR beyond that.

Sociologists/anthropologists and urban planners need to broaden their perspective with regard to this, in my opinion, when considering contemporary U.S. environments and their like.

Further, I can add that I have made upwards of 10 good friends in the last decade. Not neighbors -- although I am friendly with several of them -- but people who, while differing in details and some beliefs and opinions, are kind and respectful.

So... is it that we don't have "casual interactions" near our homes? Or, is something else going on? Probably some of each.

Again, if you want to promote higher density living, amongst other things ameliorate the noise issues. Better sound-proofing. Effective ordinances.

<comment><USER7> I personally love urban life for the most part. I grew up in the "boonies" and I sometimes think that childhood/teenage boredom due to not having many things to do or other young people nearby influenced my feelings on the matter.

But the one thing that makes me consider moving to a more rural setting is the fact that I sometimes _want_ to make noise (playing instruments, etc) but there aren't as many opportunities when I live in a townhouse. I mostly just compromise by playing at lower volumes (less fun when it comes to playing guitar or whatever), playing through headphones (again, less fun because lower volume or using headphones doesn't give the satisfaction of how a guitar or bass sounds through a proper amp at "rock and roll" volumes).

Still, I'm not a total asshole so I limit my volumes and I only play during hours when it's much less likely that anyone nearby would be sleeping. I also keep that stuff in the basement so it doesn't "leak" out as much that way.

If I had the money to just buy an old warehouse or a property in a remote location for playing music or watching movies on a projection screen with theater-volume speakers, I'd do it in a heartbeat but that's just a pipe dream. I don't have the funds to purchase or rent access to such a space.

So for now, the solution is to play music quieter/at more "decent" hours and keep the theater experience restricted to outdoor movies at a friend's house in the country during the summer. For these sorts of activities that go hand in hand with loud volume, you really are more limited in the city. It's not enough to make me give up short commutes and walking/taxi access to bars, restaurants, and arts/entertainment venues but it's definitely a consideration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well I have learned a lot from my wife in this regard, we walk our dog in the early evenings and say Hi! and chat with anyone willing to stop and talk.

Perhaps the biggest thing I learned is that you have to give your time unconditionally, sometimes for a while, before people will trust you enough to reciprocate. But you can break down barriers this way.

</comment><comment><USER9> Something that I haven't seen mentioned here is online communities. E.g. HN. Or the thousands of other websites that cater to the varied interests we have.

It's not the same as real life, in person interaction. But it does result in "friendships" of a sort. It allows people to interact with like minded individuals. Much different than everyone being passive consumers watching the boob tube.</comment>


I watched Star Trek: The Original Series in order, and so can you - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/09/i-watched-star-trek-the-original-series-in-order-and-so-can-you/ <comment><USER2> There is amazing bit of irony to this little story. The author starts out with a highly judgmental critique of the unworthy generations that came before her and their treatment and depiction of women as made abundantly clear by the show, and yet ends her critique at least mildly positive because the movies finally showed her "people" \--ironically epitomizing the very difference between men and women. Men typically are standing around the water cooler talking about things like the larger ramifications of a society of androids, or silly masculine things like who would win a fight between a Klingon and a Vulcan. Whereas woman want to know if the androids have families, and how the Klingon _feels_ after being defeated by a pinch. As much as modern PC sensibilities want to whitewash the facts, women and men are different. TOS was created for a male audience. Women of that era had numerous soaps to enjoy catered specifically to their predilections. To be so judgmental and to miss the larger significance of the show, in my opinion, only goes to show the youthful ignorance and gender bias of the author, not society's.</comment>


Google to charge Android OEMs as much as $40 per phone in EU - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/google-to-charge-android-oems-as-much-as-40-per-phone-in-eu/ <comment><USER2> Great, so this means that consumers will pay for the OS and this means that they become paying users.

<comment><USER3> Call me a pessimist but I suspect Google will just do both: Take the money for the Play ecosystem and continue exploiting your personal data for financial gain.

<comment><USER4> In those phones Google will take the money from the Play ecosystem and $40 from the vendor. The Not-Google company that is pre-installed will exploit your personal extra hard to remake the $40 they gave Google.

<comment><USER5> Not-Google will exploit your personal data as hard as they can. But so will Google -- why do you expect them to leave money on the table?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems just for show. In all likelihood, nothing will change and 99% of phone sales will continue with the current setup. It's unlikely that someone will invest to build a competing suite to gmail+youtube+maps.

<comment><USER7> Gmail : pick your client and add integrations for an online business app suite or combination of apps integrated together. The email itself is easy to replace, what's stalling adoption is integration to services like drive, and sheets. Replace those integrations with something like a self hosted open office. YouTube : probably the hardest to replace. The most likely companies to be able to provide the raw capital to compete in this space are porn companies. Maps : in a word, waze. The rest of the app makers will follow like a dog to a bone.

<comment><USER6> isn't waze also google? In general ,even if someone (like microsoft) invests heavily into this, they 'll stil be building on a platform that google controls (android). And this is only for the EU area, so not sure how such a business plan would work out.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Warren Buffett Just Bought Duracell - <AUTHOR> https://time.com/money/3585592/warren-buffett-duracell/ <comment><USER2> Typical Buffet deal.

1) >Interbrand estimated that the brand value of Duracell stood at $4.9 billion

2) >Duracell maintains over 25% of the global battery market share.

Duracell has both brand and volume advantage over competitors in battery business. Warren Buffett coined the term economic moat to describe the advantages companies like Duracell have.

>INVESTOPEDIA EXPLAINS 'Economic Moat'

>The wider the moat, the larger and more sustainable the competitive advantage. By having a well-known brand name, pricing power and a large portion of market demand, a company with a wide moat possesses characteristics that act as barriers against other companies wanting to enter into the industry.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my world, AA batteries are all about door locks. There are a lot of card- reading door locks that depend on them.

Whenever a lock fails, step one or two or three is replace the batteries. That's 4-6 batteries per lock.

As a maintenance/security procedure, once every couple of years, every battery in every lock in the entire building is replaced. Doesn't matter if they are dead, weak or brand new. That's hundreds/thousands of batteries.

That's a lot of batteries. And Duracell has multiple levels of "pro"/"industrial grade" batteries. We buy them by the case.

I'm sure the markup on consumer batteries are huge, but I'd also think the commercial use of double-As must dwarf the consumer market. Smart buy by Warren is my guess.

What's needed in this space is a door lock that winds itself much like a "perpetual" watch. Something that takes the mechanical energy used to turn the door handle and turns it into stored energy that can be used to read the card and unbolt the door.

And there you go. Make this thing :)

<comment><USER4> It already is, though not for hotel room doors/etc. I used to have access to a colo where racks rented individually (i.e. not in a cage) had a combination lock that was electronic. To use it, you first "charged" it by turning the knob back and forth a few times, then entering your code. The correct code mechanically connects the knob to the locking mechanism, so turning the knob unlocked the door.

In the case you mentioned, I do wonder if you could get a bit more energy from the door itself rather than just the handle. For example, if the spring-loaded self-closing mechanisms weren't just mechanical, but used that energy to generate electricity, you might get a bit more out of it.

<comment><USER5> > To use it, you first "charged" it by turning the knob back and forth a few > times, then entering your code.

Reminds me of the telephones where you had to wind them before using them..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Duracell is a smart company and has been for a long time. Batteries are a largely disposable thing and so the customer LTV is pretty awesome. Rechargable batteries haven't really hurt the business signficantly and the need for electronics keeps going up.

Even more, the R&D side of a battery company could be incredibly lucrative with all the electric vehicles, portable electronic devices, and so on.

Buying a battery company in this day and age is a smart investment in tech, even for a non tech investor like Buffet. After all, every electronic device needs power right?

<comment><USER7> >>> Even more, the R&D side of a battery company could be incredibly lucrative with all the electric vehicles, portable electronic devices, and so on.

The manufacturing technology too. There's a reasonable chance that batteries of the future will still require handling and dispensing of chemicals, making and sealing the cells, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A bit off topic. Looks like Duracell has a cloud storage service, which is really strange.. [https://www.duracellcloud.com/](https://www.duracellcloud.com/)

<comment><USER9> It's just a licensed use of their name. It's run by a company named Condre Storage, and the devices shown are rebranded CTera networks storage appliances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, I thought most consumers these days know that generic alkaline batteries are just as good as Duracell alkaline batteries. Also, many gizmos come with cheap lipo built in + an USB port these days, that seems to be the trend. I'd think this is a business on the decline...

<comment><USER11> _generic alkaline batteries are just as good as Duracell alkaline batteries_

As someone who uses a lot of batteries I disagree. I do a lot of field recording work using powered microphones and that can mean going through 20+ batteries a day. Rechargeables would be ideal but that means a bunch of extra gear to cart around and extra things to go wrong or be overlooked by an assistant. Doing location work for film it's common to have 12+18 hour workdays where you're on your feet all the time, and working in a different location every day or ever multiple locations in the same day.

Long story short I've had terrible experiences with generic batteries. I haven't done exhaustive comparisons with the various leading brands, but I've come to strongly prefer Duracells. I have no idea what the watt/$ ratio is because I just expense that; what I care about is reliability in a high power drain situation.

For consumer stuff sure, most batteries are quite good. I wish it was a business on the decline, I'd be thrilled to have efficient short-range wireless power even if it only had a range of a meter or two.

<comment><USER12> Just curious. How many wireless mics and made by whom? 20+ batteries a day seems like quite a lot even for wireless mics

<comment><USER11> I'd typically have 2 Sennheiser EW500s, with the receivers and transmitters using 2 AAs each, plus 2 or 4 for a portable recorder, which is feeding 48v phantom power to a condenser microphone or occasionally to two as well as its onboard condensers that I usually have going as a backup. On a long day I'd expect to run down two sets of batteries. It's not very efficient as I often just leave stuff switched on when it could be off, but then you'll usddenly be ready to shoot at short notice and you don't want to be the person holding everything up while you switch 5 different devices back on.

<comment><USER13> Never heard of phantom power being supplied by batteries. Is this common?

<comment><USER11> In field recording, sure. Film work often means going to remote locations and while generator or vehicle power is an option it may not be available if there's no night work. Additionally, running off AC power, even in an interior, means having another cable to wrangle - a pain in the rear every time the camera position is changed or there's any sort of traveling shot. It's better to have everything in a bag or mounted on a small wheelie truck. Ideally I'd like to everything wirelessly (plug-on transmitters can supply phantom from a 9v battery) but radio has its own downsides.

The current requirements are not that high so it's just a matter of a small step-up transformer for the preamp. Some older pro microphones also use T-power, which requires only 12v but delivers a somewhat less good signal/noise ratio than the 48v phantom standard.

<comment><USER13> ah - we're coming from slightly different worlds. I (was) used to mixer boards which have mains feeding into it. I guess those aren't suitable for mobile stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For some reason, articles on time.com don't scroll…

<comment><USER15> You need to enable JS from time.com and akamai.com. Yes, there is no real need to construct pages this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It´s funny to note that the longest discussion in this thread is about the time.com page not scrolling rather than about the deal itself !

As for the deal it´s classic Buffett - almost a sure win, little downside risk, perfect timing. If you didn't read his biography yet (The snowball: Warren Buffett and the business of life) I highly recommend ! One of the wisest man alive.

</comment><comment><USER17> It looks like there's a lot of performance difference between battery brands, but Duracell isn't a high performer.

[http://www.batteryshowdown.com/](http://www.batteryshowdown.com/)

> Buy commodities, sell brands

> Consistent cash flow

This is a very Buffet style company acquired in a very Buffet kind of way.

</comment><comment><USER18> "[Proctor & Gamble's] goals in the process of exiting this business are to maximize value to P&G's shareholders and minimize earnings per share dilution."

It was a sick joke in Snow Crash in the 90s, and it hasn't changed.

<comment><USER19> As someone who hasn't read Snow Crash, I'm curious what this means; could you explain the reference?

<comment><USER20> You're not missing anything by not reading it. [0]

The above poster believes that the phrase

> maximize shareholder value

originated as a joke in the writing of Neal Stephenson and is not simply the financial terminology it appears to be.

[0] It was _Cryptonomicon_ , not _Snow Crash_.

<comment><USER21> Disagree, Snow Crash is fun, and the intro about the Deliverator is great!

"Enough power to shoot a pound of bacon into the asteroid belt." How can you not like that!?

<comment><USER20> No, I mean he wasn't missing the joke... I obviously enjoy Stephenson way too well for my own good if I can spot an oblique reference to the wrong book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Buffett has every right to consider taxes as part of a investment decision and legally minimize it as much as possible. But he should quit saying that tax rates don't matter to business decisions

<comment><USER23> You're referring to this OpEd piece he wrote: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/opinion/buffett-a- minimum-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/opinion/buffett-a-minimum-tax- for-the-wealthy.html)

To quote:

"Would your reply possibly be this? "Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you're saying we're going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent." Only in Grover Norquist's imagination does such a response exist."

He was saying that raising top marginal tax rates would not result in rational investors withholding their capital. This is entirely consistent with the Duracell acquisition, which was tax efficient for both sides involved.

Your interpretation is completely wrong. The correct comparison would be if Buffett did not do the Duracell acquisition because he didn't want to pay capital gains on the increased value of his BRK-A holdings (which would be idiotic, and further reinforces the point he made)

<comment><USER24> Perhaps OT, but a smallish successful US startup is nearly half-owned by the government due to taxes due post-acquisition. That's anything in the $1MM - $10MM range... beyond which you can afford to spend more on lawyers to spend much less on taxes.

It definitely does enter into the equation... do I really want to take all that personal risk when a silent partner actually owns half the company?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > When P&G released its earnings for the first quarter of fiscal 2015

Is the 2015 a typo, or has the financial industry operated in this quarter- ahead method for awhile?

<comment><USER26> Fiscal year != calendar year. It seems like P&G's fiscal Q1 = Q3 of the previous calendar year.

<comment><USER25> Ah, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yet another brilliant cigar butt find. It would be fun as well as rewarding to be able to see through Buffet's eyes.

</comment><comment><USER28> The tax break and branding make sense, but EBITDA seems like such a poor metric for valuation it's hard to understand why it's taken seriously. I'm guessing that point in the article was emphasized more by Money mag than by Buffet.

<comment><USER13> >EBITDA seems like such a poor metric for valuation

Why? Its got stacks of research & history behind it so you'll have to provide something a bit more substantial than "it's hard to understand why it's taken seriously".

In fact I'm struggling to see anything of substance in that post.

<comment><USER29> Well it's just like the government inflation "measurement". Everytime it shows something they don't like, they remove stuff. I believe oil was the first "WTF", then energy, and they just kept going. You see, according to the government, oil prices high or low don't affect the lives of Americans. Not that European governments did differently. Or that they stopped there. Then housing was removed. Americans don't see their budgets affected by housing, right ? Not according to the government. (this is talking about the measures the government reports, ie. Core CPI (previously) and PCE-Deflator (now)).

I mean it's a question of degrees. Were the pre-1972 adjustments in the core CPI fraud ? No, not really. Then with oil you start to have this nagging feeling, and what they did last year ... well sorry to say, but that's cheating. That's fraud, no question about it.

And EBITDA, sure. People used to use profit, for 50+ years. Then EBITDA. Why ? Because if you loan money for paying dividends or doing share buybacks profit will drop like a stone, EBITDA will be unaffected. But hell, if they had stopped there, that would have been reasonable. But they started cheating. Then came GAAP. This was modified 10 times over the last 2 decades or so, never to the advantage of investors of course, every single time it was to make companies look better than they did. And now most companies report non- GAAP EBITDA ... Differences are such things as that in non-GAAP future obligations (like a loan that's payment-free for a year) doesn't get counted until the payments start. Non-money agreements (e.g. we're going to build machines for X, they already paid 40% of the price, but we will only start delivery next quarter), the 40% is counted, the future obligation is not.

I mean again there is a spectrum here. Profit vs EBITDA ... probably not fraud. GAAP "adjustments" ... I think we can all agree that this is very dangerous territory. Non-GAAP reporting, for me at least that crosses the line.

<comment><USER30> Fudging the inflation numbers has been coming on for a while now; I call it the "screw the old people and the foreigners" strategy.

As for the issues with GAAP, I can't understand why the holes in off-balance- sheet accounting haven't been closed given the number of disasters that have occurred. Government accounting, of course, is basically indistinguishable from bald-faced lying.

<comment><USER31> > I call it the "screw the old people and the foreigners" strategy

It's only half of the strategy. ZIRP is the other half. Not only is inflation being under-reported, the savings that "the old people" have can't keep up with inflation because the Fed is artificially holding interest rates at zero.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> is it just me, or has the page actually broken scrolling down?! that's a whole new level of wtf.

edit: works in an incognito window, so it seems like some extension is blocking it, but i can't think of anything an extension could block that should be required to simply scroll down in a block of text.

<comment><USER33> Its NoScript. I had the same exact issue. Its a ridiculous world when I need to enable Javascript just to view static text on a plain background. Sigh.

<comment><USER34> As a web developer, people like you always make me wonder why I try. Yes, some sites abuse javascript for terrible purposes, but as CSS becomes more powerful, are you going to start blocking that too?

Complaining that a site doesn't work because you purposely disabled part of the code is akin to complaining your car doesn't work because you pulled the alternator.

<comment><USER35> More like the car won't start because the AC is off.

<comment><USER36> The car won't start because you are wearing a personal EMP that is disabling the electronics. While older cars work fine, and some newer ones can fall back to just using analog mechanics, more and more require the electronics to work.

<comment><USER37> And yet, somehow I'd be very suspicious of cars that _require_ electronics to make steering or braking work at all. Not everything needs to be turned into fly-by-wire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> In two words: tax dodge

<comment><USER39> This is terrific tax avoidance, which is legal.

It's tax _evasion_ that you gotta look out for

<comment><USER40> More correct is tax deferral.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have low back pain? If so, what kind of mattress do you sleep on? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone. I've had low back pain off and on for most of my adult life. I've had herniated discs, sciatica, and some other complications such as not being able to urinate.
I'm guessing the HN crowd has a handful of people in the same situation due to sitting for long hours.
So if you have low back pain, what kind of mattress do you use and has anything worked for you when it comes to sleeping?
I ask because I'm thinking of helping others with a mattress for low back pain sufferers that's worked for me. <comment><USER2> Had a very expensive individual coil mattress for the last 7 years. This year started getting low back pain. Talked to these guys: [http://www.originalmattress.com](http://www.originalmattress.com) . No gimmicks, just straight dope on how a mattress should work and why theirs do and many others fail. Also it's a local "factory to buyer" direct set - up so there's no phony sales and markups.

I also use a body pillow to put in-between my knees (I've been using a body pillow for most of my adult life) and that sure helps keep my body aligned.

Good luck!

P.S. Ever try chiropractic? Might not be for everyone, but I swap services with a local chiro - sure helps me out when I tweak my back snowboarding/skateboarding....

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the response, meierjo!

I actually sleep on a wood "mattress" (two pieces of plywood). I'll look into the Original Mattress, as well. Thanks again!

<comment><USER2> I've slept on floor many many times - however, I'm usually on my back and then start snoring. Not good for my bed mate :)

Was very close to getting a Shikibuton. On man this one really had me drooling: [http://soaringheart.com/products/organic-cotton-wool- shikibu...](http://soaringheart.com/products/organic-cotton-wool-shikibuton)

even a cheap exercise mat works well, I just can't stand sleeping on plastic though....

Ended up with a traditional mattress from the Original guys because we already had a matching bedroom set and my mate didn't want to drop $$ on a new setup...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you suffer from back pain, I can't imagine trying to sleep on plywood? There must be better options to sleep on, and also consider the root cause.</comment>


50 mb Linux livecd distro with a XUL interface and 10 second boot - <AUTHOR> http://www.xpud.org/ The April release of xpud brings a re-designed interface, called 'Plate',  based on XUL and moblin patches integrated with the 2.6.28 kernel.
The distro is built off a build system that repackages Ubuntu debs. <comment><USER2> Can someone tell me if this is a good idea?

You put this fast-booting live distro on a thumbdrive or disc, and it boots straight into a kiosk mode where you have just a full-screen browser that is restricted to your web-based sales portal. Perhaps it is simply an online store catalog with shopping cart and checkout.

Let's say you sell products at various fairs or conventions - maybe you travel a lot - wouldn't it be nice to be able to turn any cheap, old computer with a network connection (maybe you have many of them) into a fully-functioning on- site store in under 10 seconds without having to mess with anything? Just plug in that USB drive, boot, remove the USB drive, and you're done (or you do the same for a set of machines). If someone kicks out a power plug, just reboot like you did the first time and relax, knowing that the same exact functionality will be available on every computer you run this on, every time, with nothing to configure, nothing to install, and leaves no footprint on any of the machines you touch (runs completely in memory).

If needed, this fast-booting kiosk distro could download config settings from your web service (maybe you want to change your prices or catalog depending on the computer's location).

Could something like this reduce the cost and hassle of running profitable vendor kiosks at fairs/festivals/shows/conventions/malls/lobbies? Enough to be worth paying for such software?

What are the implications of instantly deployable, domain-specific thin- clients along these lines? What are the risks? Or is this just backward thinking?

<comment><USER3> _What are the risks?_

You can't trust the hardware or the network, for one. Did you check for a hardware keylogger?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone figure out:

(1) What does "compatible with most major Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora" mean? It's a separate distro, right? I've never heard of one distro being "compatible" with another.

(2) Does the "media player" play DVDs?

<comment><USER5> _(2) Does the "media player" play DVDs?_

Probably not, since that's technically illegal.

<comment><USER6> What's wrong with inserting a DVD on a computer's DVD drive and watching it using this distro's media player? GP didn't say anything about ripping.

<comment><USER5> I didn't make the law, but technically, what you describe is not lawful. I think, technically, you can do it... but vendors can't distribute the compiled code that does it without a license from the DVD consortium folks.

<comment><USER7> AFAIK and IANAL you're not completely right.

It depends on the type of DVD you use. If for instance it's a movie DVD using something like CSS (remember DVD Jon?) and you access it's content by breaking the CSS "protection" then you're right. Basically if you need specific codecs or circumvent certain "protection" layers it would probably be something that you might want to check with a legal expert. In any other case where you want to access a plain DVD, AFAIK this is completely legal anywhere in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incidentally, I tried Moblin in a VM earlier today:

<http://moblin.org/documentation/test-drive-moblin>

It boots from nothing to a working desktop in 8 seconds. Wow!

</comment><comment><USER8> booted in 5.4 seconds on my computer!

Acer Aspire 4730z Intel Pentium dual core T3400 (2.16GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache) 732MB Mobile Intel Graphics 2GB DDR2 RAM

Using the USB boot, version xpud-0.8.9

wifi didnt work with my Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter 802.11b/g/draft-n but i havent had a chance to fiddle with it.

this concept is a good one, but it is obviously still in infancy and has a long way to go. I will personally be watching this distro closely to see where they go

one thing that concerns me, where on earth is the community?

</comment><comment><USER9> eee 700 compatible <http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=65169>

</comment><comment><USER10> ...using SSDs?

</comment><comment><USER11> Love the boot time on this. . . . boxee on the go ?

</comment><comment><USER12> On my Acer Aspire One (1.6Ghz Atom, 1Gb ram) with a 2Mb/s USB stick I counted about 16 seconds to boot from selection, overall about 30 seconds with my BIOS boot.

Couldn't get Wifi to connect, and a lot of missing features.

Very interesting though, could be perfect for quick kisok-style applications as well as a quick boot loader - looks like the plan allowing other OS's to be booted into from it.

<comment><USER13> 10 seconds (or 16?) doesn't seem that great - XP boots that fast for me. I didn't watch the video though, and most of my boot speed is due to my Intel SSD.

<comment><USER14> If this boots from a CD or a rotating HD in 10 seconds, then they could have an "instant-on" netbook. Instant-on netbooks and laptops will win over the end user. This is a step towards turning the computer into an appliance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Upvoted for XUL</comment>


Lessons from APL, a "Lost" Language - <AUTHOR> https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/2014-05-26-APL-the-lost-language.md <comment> vincent-toups When I started my current job as a data scientist I spent the first three months or so doing all my work in J (a descendant of APL that doesn't need a funny keyboard).

I'm a long term Lisper (prefer Scheme) and so I have a high tolerance for languages with weird syntax and small communities, and I had to write a lot of code to get a working environment in J (for instance, I hand wrote my own simple system for interfacing with Hive, which I used a lot back then).

The main thing I did was implement Naive Bayesian inference on some internal data and lots of plotting.

J is fun and it gives you that special feeling of doing something hard and weird which sometimes motivates me, but in the end I gave up on it in favor of R and Python. Surprisingly, the main thing that won me over to these languages is that they were faster and required less care. I'm not stranger to vectorization (did Matlab for 6 years during my PhD) and I liked doing it in J, but in the end I could do less work and get sometimes much better performance out of R.

Plus, even after many months of doing J full time, I still have to get into a whole headspace to even _read_ my J code. R and Python are at least legible in a way that you can come back to after awhile.

Finally, I started to really miss the uniformity of simple, first order functions with lexical scope.

Still miss the notion of verb rank, though. Wish it was part of modern languages.

<comment><USER2> I absolutely agree. I've never had an actual use case which made sense for me to utilize J vs a conventional alternative but it is a blast and I too get pleasure from the "weird" in programming.

<comment><USER3> I've had a positive example of using J for a prototype which wasn't algorithmically clear initially. So I had to twist and turn some parts to figure out what actually is possible and simultaneously good enough.

Interesting that developing a POC in J took about 40 minutes and then rewriting it into C# took 3 hours, even though with C# it was clear what's needed. J can be surprisingly efficient for research work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't really call APL/J/K "lost" (or "dead", or "useless", or...). There's an active community on Reddit and there's a pretty active circle of APL'ers on Twitter. It wasn't ever a super mainstream language, but it's definitely not lost its appeal -- maybe even as a fun hobbyists' language.

<comment><USER5> kdb+/q is reasonably popular. And the salaries are very very high. I know some q guys pulling in over a million/year.

<comment> non-entity Wow I had never heard of those technologies before. What kind of background would you have to have to get a job like that? What companies are hiring people on damn near a million?

<comment><USER5> Banks. Maybe some hedge funds or prop trading shops, but mostly banks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple's 'Ping' Social Network Is Already Too Big to Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/09/apples-ping-social-music-network-is-already-too-big-to-fail/ <comment><USER2> > If Ping tells you that all your friends are buying and listening to the new > Ceelo single, you might be more likely to snap it up yourself.

Or rather, I'd be more likely to ask them for a copy and buy nothing / something else.</comment>


Boost.Beast is a thing: HTTP/WebSockets in C++11 - <AUTHOR> On July 20th, Beast was ACCEPTED into Boost without conditions. Beast is an HTTP and WebSockets protocol library using C++11 and Boost.Asio. The first official release will be in Boost 1.66.0 scheduled for December 2017. In the meanwhile, interested developers can use the develop branch:
https://github.com/boostorg/beast
There are a TON of example HTTP and WebSocket clients and servers that anyone can copy and use as the basis of their own robust implementation, check it out:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/develop/libs/beast/doc/html/beast/examples.html <comment><USER2> Can you remove the "(NEW!)" from the title? From the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _In Submissions_

> _Please don 't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or > exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an > article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's > important._

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks! I've needed something like this for so long. I will definitely check this out.

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on the acceptance into boost. As a user of boost, I will definitely look at this.</comment>


Bird that can choose sex of its offspring - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7953467.stm

<comment><USER2> Related:

High status human males have offspring that are disproportionately male.

Low status human males have offspring that are disproportionately female.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Do you have any link to the article? Thanks.</comment></comment>


Media are unwittingly selling us an AI fantasy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/13/dont-believe-the-hype-media-are-selling-us-an-ai-fantasy <comment><USER2> Direct link to paper on which the article is based (PDF, 10 pages): [https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/fil...](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-12/Brennen_UK_Media_Coverage_of_AI_FINAL.pdf)</comment>