13.3" full color ePaper display - <AUTHOR> https://shopkits.eink.com/product/atelier-with-13-3%cb%9d-acep-display-ac133ut1-%e3%80%90glass%e3%80%91/#tab-custom-tab-third <comment><USER2> Nice, but I fear that this will go the same way as Eink corp's monochrome displays. They have been a terrible steward of the technology, limiting themselves to a tiny fraction of the addressable market (ebook readers) while shutting out a vast potential low power display market by pricing their panels far too high. They have also either refused to license their technology to others or made the licensing fee uneconomical.

A competent company would have pursued the signage market aggressively many years ago and would have had a massive revenue stream from that by now.

E Ink displays have recently started showing up as price tags on grocery shelves, which is promising for the future of low cost, low power displays. I am not sure if these are supplied by Eink or if patents are expiring and competitors are moving into the market.

<comment><USER3> signs: [https://eink.com/signage.html](https://eink.com/signage.html)

price tags: [https://eink.com/electronic-shelf- label.html](https://eink.com/electronic-shelf-label.html)

more: [https://eink.com/application.html](https://eink.com/application.html)

Are you sure you know EInk/PVI's business better than they do?

<comment><USER4> How many of those have you seen in the real world?

Maybe they're more popular elsewhere, but outside of warehouse store price labels I haven't seen the technology.

Certainly not in large format.

<comment><USER5> A ton? Carrefour (I believe they're the second largest retailer, after Walmart) has had electronic shelf labels for well over a decade.

I haven't seen them in the US, but they're not exactly uncommon in Europe and Asia.

<comment><USER6> Here in the US, Kohl's ([https://www.kohls.com/](https://www.kohls.com/)) uses the e-ink price tags in their retail stores. They are a _terrible_ application of the technology. They're not bright enough to be legible from a distance, and even up-close their legibility is not great. They just look washed-out and dingy.

One of the main purposes of a price tag is to draw and hold the shopper's eye, and in that respect they fail miserably.

<comment><USER7> > One of the main purposes of a price tag is to draw and hold the shopper's > eye, and in that respect they fail miserably.

There I was thinking the main purpose of a price tag is to tell you the price.

Product packaging is meant to grab your eye. Price tags are mostly functional (although some shops also use them to advertise offers).

<comment><USER8> The buyer for price labels is the retailer. The retailer's purpose for a price tag is to grab your eye and get you to buy more. If the price tag dissuades you from buying the product, that is a net negative from the retailer's perspective, and they are the ones that make the purchasing decisions on price tags.

Don't assume alignment of incentives. From the _customer 's_ perspective, the purpose of a price tag is to tell you the price. The customer isn't making the purchasing decisions for the price tags.

<comment><USER9> Why would the price tag holding a shopper's attention have something to do with the likelihood of that shopper buying something?

<comment><USER10> Today I went to Tesco - a large supermarket in the UK - to buy 3 items required for dinner. I also planned to buy some chocolate of some sort.

I bought the requirements, and passed by a the crisps (potato chips) aisle on my way to the chocolate. A glance half an aisle away told me that one of the three or four kinds of crisps my partner takes to work was on offer, I had half an aisles walking where I thought about it and ended up buying it.

In the chocolate aisle I ended up buying a large bag of white chocolate that was particularly well priced (I could read every label from one place). As chocolate is a guilty luxury I've been known to leave without it if my deliberations last too long; being able to parse the information quickly led to a purchase.

\--

So that is why. Most shoppers are both immediately price driven and don't want to be there. This can be used to increase spends.

<comment><USER7> Interestingly I know a little about why Tesco doesn't use eInk price tags, having talked at length with one of the people that evaluated eInk tags for Tesco.

Top reason was simply price and maintenance. Deploy this kind of tech to 3400 stores is seriously non-trivial (something I know, from having attempted to build and sell tech to Tesco), and even very low unit costs compound fast.

Tesco top concerns with this type of tech are:

1\. Price. Tesco is very capex sensitive. They generally only want to spend money on assets that have multiple uses.

2\. Will it work 100% of time, or very close to it. Incorrect price tags are a serious issue for Tesco.

3\. Who fixes it when it goes wrong and how?

Again these don't seem like hard issues, but 3400 physical store makes it hard. Especially when you can't rely on store staff to deal with uncommon problems, they aren't given the time or training, due to retails razor thin margins.

One of the interesting non-obvious problem Tesco had with eInk price tags was simply making sure the right product tag appeared on the right shelf in the right place. This is despite has a very competent stock management system that tracks exactly what item lives on what shelf.

With paper you just swap the tags and move on. With eInk displays you can't do that because then physical location of a tag will no longer match it's stored virtual location.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand why Tesco couldn't just start some pilot in a handful of stores, iron out the kinks, learn about reliability problems etc. and only after that decide whether or not to roll out the tech in all stores. That's what basically every supermarket chain here does (it has to be said they are often franchises here). For example, self-scanning in the supermarket chain I've been shopping at for years started used to be in only a handful of stores, but slowly more and more stores are getting the tech.

Same for the e-ink price tags, I've spotted them in two different supermarkets of the same chain so far but I'm 100% sure that in ~2 years literally all of them will have them.

<comment><USER4> Traditionally brick and mortar retailers, for whatever reason, don't seem to use pilots and rollouts.

At least not to the extent expected.

The closest explanation I can think of is that so much of store operations' focus is on standardization (which itself is a tough problem), that deliberately disturbing standardization seems anathema.

That said, it's definitely changing in some chains. But you'll still get tons of blank looks or red tape in most, if you want to run an experiment like that.

<comment><USER12> Oh yes they do.

I am a field tech for retail stores and see new technology being piloted all the time.

Rollouts are how they survive. Every tech refresh cycle is an enormous project handled by roaming teams who travel. I have done a 9-month rollout project for a huge chain. It was a great year. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the realm of e-ink, I've been loving my Onyx tablet lately. It runs full Android, has an ePaper display, and has a Wacom stylus for note taking.

Two things I think it's done really well- it has the ability to easily disable the touch screen so you can pass it around and work with it like it's a real piece of paper. Additionally, you can change the refresh rate to your preference, and set it per-app. Higher refresh rates lead to ghosting, but if I turn the refresh rate high enough, I can watch a YouTube video on ePaper (!!!) which is crazy to me.

<comment><USER14> > to easily disable the touch screen

The one feature I wish existed in every smartphone and tablet yet it exists in none. Perhaps I'm particularly clumsy but the amount of inadvertent interactions I trigger with my devices is infuriating.

<comment><USER15> iOS supports this with "Guided Access" mode. It has to be enabled in settings, then a triple click will turn it off/on. It can have its own passcode as well. I use it when handing my phone to my kids--start a video, enable guided access, and not worry about who they might inadvertently call or photo they might delete.

<comment><USER14> Doesn't sound all that convenient. In truth I just want a hardware switch.

<comment><USER16> It's pressing a button three times to enable, three times to disable (with a passcode).

I would say that's better because it doesn't take up more phone real-estate, and it can't be disabled by a smart kiddo.

<comment><USER14> No, it's not like that at all. You have to not just enable it but also select inaccessible areas of the screen. Every time. And they get greyed out which makes it unusable for watching videos while disabling inadvertent interactions (accidental pause/resume/rewind etc).

<comment><USER16> You don't have to disable any part of the screen. Just hit "start" and you are locked into the app. I just tested it and the only thing I could not do was change the volume.

<comment><USER14> You've missed my point completely. I want the _whole damn screen_ disabled so I don't inadvertently press pause/skip forward when watching videos for example. It's exactly the opposite of the behavior you get from "guided access" thing.

<comment><USER16> I apologize, I misread what you said. In options (bottom left of the screen) there is a switch to disable touch completely (it also seems to remember it's setting for that particular app).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "13.3" ACeP display is suitable for various applications, e.g. Artwork, > Signage, Retail, etc…"

These various applications sound like static images without fast refresh requirements. I wonder what the refresh rate is like on these.

I'm still waiting with bated breath for a reliable e-ink computer monitor comes out with a decent refresh rate. I'd even be happy with just greyscale.

<comment><USER18> I don't know if anyone is really working on this, the "killer feature" of eInk is that the display only draws power when it's refreshing. You can drive them much faster, iirc there have been several proof of concepts using extant consumer screens going at 60Hz, so it's totally possible. I just don't think there's much market for it and I bet it stresses the tech in weird ways to run it that fast. Definitely possible though.

<comment><USER19> I'm optimistic because devices like smart phones and smart watches are things that benefit from having very low idle power when just displaying mostly static info but require a much faster refresh rate in active use. Being able to read them easily in bright daylight would also be a great plus. That's a good market.

Even laptops would probably benefit from it, when you're typing some text or reading a document you don't need 60fps refresh rate (especially if you can only refresh portions of the screen). That might save a significant amount of battery.

<comment><USER20> Non-backlit LCDs already have pretty low idle power though. Normal digital watches last about a decade on a battery and smartwatches like the Amazfit Bip last about a month on a charge with the screen always on (and bluetooth, heart rate monitor, etc which are surely a pretty large fraction of the power draw). And then the biggest smartwatch manufactures have decided to use OLED and have 2 day battery life for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This has a refresh rate of 25 SECONDS - so it's not going to replace your black and white kindle display or be useful for dynamic content.

<comment><USER3> Who remembers browsing the web/usenet on 28800Kbps modems?

<comment><USER22> I think you have an extra K on there! I do remember my 36 kbps modem though, but the web was optimized for that speed. Webpages had "image warnings"!

<comment><USER23> 14.4kbps checking in.

<comment><USER24> A slow modem (or indeed no modem!) is nothing like a 30s refresh rate.

<comment><USER25> A slow modem meant waiting hours though.

<comment><USER23> 30 seconds the image load hadn't gotten to her neck yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cached in Archive.org: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200108221349/https://shopkits....](https://web.archive.org/web/20200108221349/https://shopkits.eink.com/product/atelier- with-13-3%CB%9D-acep-display-ac133ut1-%E3%80%90glass%E3%80%91/)

<comment><USER27> Is it archive.org or the original site that went out of it's way to force "smooth scrolling" on me?

Edit: original site is working now, it's them.

<comment><USER28> There should be a Developers Pledge: I, [state your name], hereby agree upon pain of death to never do things like force smooth scrolling, override scroll speed, implement a header that bounces based on scroll direction, etc...

<comment><USER29> >override scroll speed

if anyone does that I'll find that person and kill them with dull spoon.

There is nothing more infuriating than that little thing - why would even anyone do that? what's the use case? why waste dev time on that?

<comment><USER30> It's usually not dev, a product guy came up with a stupid idea with enough cash in hand, dev often oblige and for sure always find a way.

<comment><USER31> And the product guy did it because a sales team came in and said without load of color and animation then we won't be able to sell the product.

And the sales guy did it because a prospect said we really like all the features and the price but your product doesn't have as much color and animation as Acme Inc's product.

And the prospect did it because they actually prefer Acme Inc's product but they don't like Acme Inc's price so if they are going to have to go with the second choice product then let's get something done about the colors/animation before we close the sale.

And then we have the product guy coming back and working out what is the least or least worst thing we can do to remove the sales resistance, close out the sale and have everybody paid.

<comment><USER32> what a rare treat on HN, some actual understanding of systemic causality rather than glib dismissals of the "obvious bad guy" in the scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I want E Ink monitor for programming. It so much easier on the eyes (even if refresh rate is horrible)

<comment><USER34> I've messed around with this a bunch on some 9" hardware and custom waveforms to attempt to drive the display as hard as possible, it's almost certainly not what you want to be using, especially the color ones as they require multiple passes to actually attain the color. For my Color/Black/White panels that's normally rendering all the Black + Color as black, and then pulling the black pigment back as well to expose the Color one (red or yellow).

For the single color ones you can get sub-500ms latency for updating, at the cost of extreme ghosting. You need to do a lot of changes to the way you think about graphics to make this a reality. Think of an IRC program for example, normally every one of them scrolls up text from the bottom but this is completely a worst case solution for e-ink. To make it work you have to fill half the screen with text, then add new lines sequentially at the end and only scroll when you've run out of space. Additions can reasonably be done without a full refresh, scrolling text just causes it to mud out.

<comment><USER35> This is pretty spot on. I tried something similar a while back and found that the typing latency was on the order of ~120 ms which made it feel mushy and led to a lot of errors. The need to rethink graphics to handle refreshes should not be underestimated. A lot of UI patterns (almost all animations and transitions) rely on a period refresh rate. In order to make a compelling experience you need to rework a good bit of the UI.

<comment><USER36> > the typing latency was on the order of ~120 ms

You'd just need to adjust to typing "by feel", without needing that instant feedback from the screen. A typewriter or teletype also has inherently high "latency", so this fits quite well with that whole "e-paper" approach.

<comment><USER37> Could work like an electric typewriter. Keep the little LCD for the current line (or maybe 3-5) and let the E-ink be your "paper".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> We have great weather here in the Bay Area but are often confined to offices to get our work done because of sunlight glare on our laptop screens.

I've always thought more people would choose to work outside if their laptop had a decent e-ink display that performed well in sunlight. Perhaps there'd even be outdoor co-working spaces complete with gardens, fountains, and grassy lawns to sprawl onto.

<comment><USER39> I used to have a Toshiba Portege R500 which had a transreflective screen. It was an LCD that could be used in sunlight because incoming light got reflected back from behind the screen. The colors suffered a bit, but you could even switch off the backlight of the screen to save power. Seems to have gone out of fashion unfortunately..

[http://www.ruggedpcreview.com/3_notebooks_toshiba_r500.html](http://www.ruggedpcreview.com/3_notebooks_toshiba_r500.html)

<comment><USER40> I really loved that the screen on my pebble watch was always on and the thing managed a week of screen on time. The colors looked like crap compared to the newer smart watches but I still feel like something major was lost here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What companies make consumer/hobbyist ePaper displays besides Waveshare? I'm looking for a 5"-7" ePaper display with fast/partial refresh that work with a Raspberry Pi, but the only one I've found is Waveshare's.

<comment><USER42> Replacement displays for ebook readers are not that expensive and someone has figured out how to drive them without the proprietary controller: [http://essentialscrap.com/eink/](http://essentialscrap.com/eink/)

<comment><USER40> Wow those are super cheap.. I'm tempted to pick up one and I don't even have a use case yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> My understanding of electronic paper displays is almost entirely founded in the great Applied Science[0] video about it.

I have to assume that the way that a full color electronic paper display is done would be vastly different than the method that the 3 color displays work. Anyone have any insight into this?

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw)

<comment><USER34> The way it's updating here, along with the description, give a good idea.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I was just looking to see if there were any decent ereaders that could handle research papers in PDF format. I couldn't find anything but I guess there's hope for one in the future.

<comment><USER45> Have you looked at the reMarkable tablet?

[https://remarkable.com/](https://remarkable.com/)

Great for reading PDFs as they're displayed at about real size.

<comment><USER46> Looks neat, but $500? Yikes.

<comment><USER47> How is that expensive ? Unless you expect to only use it very rarely ?

<comment><USER46> While the writing feature may be good, it offers a very tiny subset of overall functionality than an iPad while being the same price.

<comment><USER47> Lack of color e-ink (even if only in 4 tones) is probably the only thing that is keeping me from ditching using lots and lots of paper. Can't wait for one, even if it's much more expensive than an iPad (which, BTW, always seemed to be a toy to me, but I hear that they got better...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I really want somebody to use one of these to make a picture frame you hang on the wall with no power cable.. just a spot in the frame for AA batteries, and some kind of low power Bluetooth connection to your phone to update the picture via an app.

</comment><comment><USER49> The most interesting new-old startup in this space the past couple years is clearInk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ)

..but they haven't shipped anything yet AFAIK. And no idea how electronics/etc is hidden around their demo frames.

<comment><USER50> They state they are targeting education in developing markets, so that sounds like they (believe they) have a way to scale this and make it very affordable.

<comment><USER49> Eh, I'll believe it when I see it. Saying this from a perspective of:

\- Usually reading seeing what's new in this space every year. Wrote my last comment in [https://lobste.rs/s/ahy28r/remarkable_perfect_tablet_for_aca...](https://lobste.rs/s/ahy28r/remarkable_perfect_tablet_for_academics#c_s83pee) .

\- Taking some of the "developing markets" speech with a grain of "geek heresy" salt. It's out of my domain, but from what I've heard there's been a problem where technology in education has been rushed to as a cost-savings mechanism yet in practice the content / usability issues make the education experience worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Love the idea of these, after multiple botched attempts to deliver over the last decade. But refresh rate was always the killer for most applications. While I don't expect it to be a gaming monitor, any news on whether the refresh rate has improved? As a baseline, some companies are getting 7.5 fps with greyscale.

</comment><comment><USER52> At this price just doesnt matter what size of display is or anything else. It is like selling toothpicks for 10 dollars. Yes they are usefull, yes I would like to have them, but the price is so overblown that I would feel stupid if I would buy it.

Eink is a typical case where instead of scaling up, they try to get rich by much too expensive product. This is a maximum stupidity as instead anyone having their product in their home, they will also loose the ebook market over time.

The second option, the technology is just not there yet and they have problems manufacturing it in large quantities.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I had this idea, probably more than 10 years ago now, to have an e-ink display on my wall which does nothing other than show me my calendar. Every couple of years I go hunting for a simple and affordable display that's at least 13 inches, but preferably larger. I don't even care if it's colour or not.

The closest I can find is those picture frames that people have. But to auto update them over the network, they always seem to require the use of some crappy online intermediary. And they're always way more expensive than they should be.

<comment><USER53> I turned my old ebook into a weather and subway screen: [https://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook- reader/](https://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-reader/)

Any ebook that can be hacked to run "regular" android will do the job, since you will need to turn off the auto-sleep settings. I then used the stock browser to show a simple webpage with some small javascript. Benefit of using the stock browser was that sony had implemented partial refresh...so when the subway times update every 10 seconds it doesn't cause a full screen refresh.

Wifi needs to be rock solid, had quite a few problems with my old linksys....no problems since I switched to unifi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> If anyone wants to play with bw e-ink displays in the form of e-book reader you easily can. I've ported mainline Linux to PocketBook Touch Lux 3 and I'm now playing with making userspace apps. You can just pick the kernel load it to uSD card, put it in the device and you'll be able to boot Arch Linux or whatever and play around.

[http://linux-sunxi.org/PocketBook_Touch_Lux_3](http://linux- sunxi.org/PocketBook_Touch_Lux_3)

<comment><USER55> Where does one purchase this e-ink reader? I can't find them anywhere, and their own website link for it seems broken.

<comment><USER54> This one is not manufactured anymore, it was replaced with Touch Lux 4. (it's probably almost the same thing inside, with very small differences, most of their eink readers are A13 based, even some of the expensive hi-res ones).

You can buy it second hand, or with a broken display and replace the display (that's what I did).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I have looked into low-power color displays and I think their competitor [1] is currently better positioned. My understanding is their eink has somewhat better light transmission, but their refresh rate is much, much slower than the competition. I'm looking forward to seeing the products made from these faster displays, which I believe are coming later this year.

1: [https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/solutions](https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/solutions)

</comment><comment><USER57> The progress towards digital paper has been really slow. Sometimes I wonder if there is an alternate timeline in which we pursued eink-like displays earlier on. It would be amazing to watch a movie on this kind of display if the refresh rate could permit it. I wrote about this on my blog [http://stephanango.com/the-elusiveness-of-digital- paper](http://stephanango.com/the-elusiveness-of-digital-paper)

</comment><comment><USER56> Site isn't loading for me. Am I the only one?

<comment><USER58> I got an nginx error after a long wait, I think it is being hugged to death.

Here's an archive.org link: [http://web.archive.org/web/20200108221349/https://shopkits.e...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200108221349/https://shopkits.eink.com/product/atelier- with-13-3˝-acep-display-ac133ut1-【glass】/)

<comment><USER59> Lol, I have never heard it put this say, but seems exactly right: "hugged to death"! =D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Any details on how they made this work? How much power does it draw? This could have a tremendous impact. You can basically replace every surface with the programmable display, assuming mass-manufactured cost savings. Walls on your home or office, dining table, the exterior of the car!

</comment><comment><USER61> I've long thought that it would be great to replace all kinds of signage wit eInk. Time tables on public transport, any kind of announcement that's typically printed on paper,... There's lots of stuff with a low refresh rate (sometimes in the order of months) that could benefit from being easier to update, but that isn't worth replacing by power hungry, overly bright, hard to read LCDs. Hell, there are a lot of cases where LCDs are used wher eInk would be a much better fit. Things like meeting room reservation screens, for instance.

With largeish colour displays, maybe that'll all finally become a reality.

<comment><USER47> Meeting room reservation screens should work well with even low-power transflective LCDs ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is great. I was dreaming about large full colour e-reader since like 10 years ago, when I bought my first PocketBook. Now, TBH, I'm kinda used to reading on regular displays, mostly since I carry my phone all day long anyway. But if there will be a good reader like that I'm pretty sure I'll buy it. If nothing else, being usable without a daily recharge is huge by modern standards. It's virtually impossible to buy anything now that can last for a couple of days without recharging anymore.

Not sure about glass though.

</comment><comment><USER63> How does long term UV exposure (sunlight) affect pigments in a product like this? It seems like a cool idea for large format signs, but how long until everything looks like burnt green-blue?

<comment><USER47> Well, there are lots of pigments out there available that hold well to long- term UV exposure... Even if you're talking decades, I don't think that metal- based pigments uv-degrade easily ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This would be awesome for comic books.

<comment><USER65> Any 10+inch color LCD display of 250dpi or higher works well for comic books. It turns out that if you make a tablet capable of showing HD video at 60fps, it can show you comic book pages quite well.

I use an Amazon Kindle Fire Ow It Burns HD10 for this, because it's at the minimum intersection of suitable hardware and price.

<comment><USER66> I think the Kindle Fire makes you jump through hoops to get apps via the Google Play store though and as I understand it, you need to do that in order to get Marvel Unlimited on there, which is something many people really want to have on their comics-reading device.

<comment><USER65> I think I rooted that sucker before installing everything I wanted. I don't think it's a suitable device for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I've been waiting for something like this to use as a digital photo frame. It lets you have see all your photos without having it glowing at you when you go to bed.

</comment><comment><USER68> God this would be great if we could get an Android color e-ink reader released so I could do Safari Books. The O'Reilly thing is a pretty good deal if you're a serial-tech-book-reader like I am, but I absolutely hate reading off the computer screen or my iPhone, but I don't mind reading regular text off my Kindle.

I know that there's the Onyx Boox Android thing, but that's only black and white, and technical books are occasionally in color.

</comment><comment><USER69> I still wonders what happens to the MEMS display Apple bought from Qualcomm

[https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has- taken-o...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-over- qualcomms-imod-mirasol-display-lab-in-taiwan)

</comment><comment> awinter-py fwiw the sony letter-size monochrome e-reader is amazing

reading PDFs on a device that doesn't burn out your eyes and can't receive notifications or produce audio is like a digital detox

all my favorite devices recently are low- and no-connection (voice memo, yubikey) and work fast with limited UX

</comment><comment><USER70> This is the imitation of the Sony digital paper version ??? Similar price tags too.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks like fun! Perhaps another thing to add to my box of barely used devkits. I've clicked through their site but I'm not seeing a real data sheet or any information about the gamut etc. Did I just miss it?

<comment><USER71> Nope you haven't missed anything, their user manual for it is very sparse (to put it nicely). At least it comes with a pinout? Another user was saying ~25 second refresh rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> "$799.00 (Tax excl.)" it's probably not the for companies buying thousands of them. But what would you expect is the price?

End user products with this display probably are way over 1000 or 2000 USD.

</comment><comment><USER73> Holy shit, they finally did it. I interviewed for a coop with eInk back in 2009-2010 and they had mentioned they were working on full color back then. Very happy to hear they finally got there.

</comment><comment><USER74> I keep wishing for a large enough display I could use it as a digital picture frame. I was looking at eink's offerings just yesterday after hearing about Lenovo's new 21" frame.

</comment><comment><USER75> If you wanna help hack the kindle: [http://fread.ink/](http://fread.ink/) Reminds me that my Kindle has been going strong for 7 years.

</comment><comment><USER76> > " _... Glass..._ "

Oof, that brings back a couple of unfond memories of cracked displays in the early ebook reader era. Hope they are able to develop a plastic substrate version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like it may be coming soon: "The new printing process alleviates the need for a glass-based CFA" [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200107005530/en/](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200107005530/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Its about time. Can't wait to get one. Hopefully it would only be like another 10 years before you can watch video on one of these.

</comment><comment><USER78> It's 4:3! 1600×1200, 285.80mm (W) × 213.65mm (H). I keep looking for 4:3 non- CRT displays; what a pleasant surprise.

</comment><comment><USER79> Make something 16 inches and lightweight. So that you can make it display an actual A4 "paper" and hold it in your hand.

</comment><comment><USER80> Hopefully we'll soon live in a world with solar powered electronics that use foldable e-ink displays.

</comment><comment><USER81> I would love to have eink as my main monitor. I am sick of stareing to LED- backlit screens for 9/5.

</comment><comment><USER82> It would be amazing if monochrome 13,3" e-ink displays would go on sale at an affordable price some day.

<comment><USER47> Aren't they ? What would be "affordable" for you ?

<comment><USER82> I think I'd be willing to pay about 230€ for the screen. Maybe 300-350€ for a device with a free operating system and very good UX (but I wouldn't be afraid of building that myself).

<comment><USER47> Make that 23€ instead : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997599)

EDIT : Oops, that's for 6"... For 13" it seems to start at $450 ? :/ [https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=13.3%22+e-ink...](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=13.3%22+e-ink&LH_TitleDesc=0&_sop=15)

Would it be practical to jury-rig four 6" together ??

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Could not find a refresh rate in the documentation, or how many colors it can create. I also saw something about it having to compensate for temperature with 7 different maps from 0°-50°C. You can see it on page 8 of the User Manual.

<comment><AUTHOR> Per below vid, Refresh time: ~25 seconds Colors: 32,000

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

<comment><USER84> Do they actually mean 32768 colors?

<comment><USER47> Probably just 3 colors, 5 bits of brightness levels per color (aka "16-bit").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> While it's very cool that this is now possible, I think this has almost no use case. A business that is able to afford e-ink's high prices could also buy an LCD/OLED, which could also show motion and much better colors.

<comment><USER85> E-ink advantage is not about price/motion/colors. Is about how close it is with printed paper, where external light like the Sun helps the visibility. It's also interesting regarding energy requirements, as you can keep the image displayed without the need of power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Seems like the site is suffering from the Slashdot effect.

</comment><comment><USER87> All I want is an e-ink display for my monitor!</comment>


Now I Understand How Germany Created Hitler - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dorothyhom/now-i-understand-how-germany-created-hitler-36e467e23372#.f7srbjlj6 <comment><USER2> trump is hitler??!? hilarious. what drivel.

<comment><AUTHOR> No. The point is the rise of a demagogue and the blindness of people towards the possible negative consequences.

Nobody knows how Trump would act if he'd be president. But the circumstances of his rise are at least similar to Hitler's.

<comment><USER3> They are absolutely nothing like Hitler's. There was global political and economic turmoil at the time. No crisis, not even the financial troubles we are in currently compares to the state of Europe and the World at the time.

The institution of the US government is far more stable than the republic of Germany in 1936. The people were blind, but more importantly, they were desperate. The people of the US are not desperate.

<comment><USER4> Are you saying that Trump is not Hitler because times are different or that he won't be elected because times are different?

Third Wave experiment and some others showed that you don't need desperation to succumb to the strong leader.

And as for becoming a hitler, there's a megalomaniac beast in many of us, probably more so in those who've climbed up the latter as high as Trump has.

The point is, nation doesn't necessarily have to loose The Great War and have its economy in ruins to bring a hitler to power.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An experiment to test whether nuclear fusion can be controlled to generate power - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/science/fusion-power-plant-iter-france.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Whatever the concerns are, the human race should try to get fusion energy to work no matter what. Fusion energy will be a big step in human civilization in progress. It basically means unlimited energy at a fraction of the cost. Intelligent live form that has mastered the power of suns. Its good for our planet too. No more global warming. This is hugely important, whatever the cost.

<comment><USER3> Those costs are born by real people, who have other needs such as education, healthcare, sanitation, nutrition etc. If you truly believe "whatever the cost", start by donating most of your salary. After all, you could live somewhere smaller, consume less stuff, not take any days off, etc. It's so important for human civilization to progress, right?

Second issue: There are cheaper ways to produce no greenhouse gases than fusion energy, today. Wind, Solar, Nuclear, Geothermal, Wave, Hydro are all mostly CO2 free, just like Fusion. However, these technologies compete in the (very distorted) energy markets, have some environmental impact, social impact, and there is too low a cost to simply poisoning our air quality with cheap coal. Our grid designs are outdated, the way we regulate our utilities & their incentives also don't align.

Third issue: Fusion is well understood, plasma physics, the structure of magnetic fields etc. is the real issue, as other commenters have outlined. There was a mistake in our understanding of how even our microwave oven's fields are contained via the tiny Faraday Cage around them. Even Feynman was wrong about it: [https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/surprises-of-the- farada...](https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/surprises-of-the-faraday-cage)

<comment><USER4> From that article:

> Q3. Somebody must design microwave oven doors based on laboratory > measurements. Where are these people?

They're (1) deep inside large corporations like GE, LG, Sharp, and others - they have non-disclosure agreements, keycard locks on the doors to neighboring departments, and strict firewalls on their network connections. They don't publish, which is probably a foreign concept to this Oxford professor.

And (2) they are cannot afford to be this curious, they are time-constrained and budget-driven, which is also fundamentally alien to this professor's tenure-based worldview. They have to pass CE/FCC emissions regulations, and if a trial of a larger grid spacing or lower gauge says the device fails, that's the conclusion of the matter - put in the stuff that worked before. They certainly don't have a year to devote to understanding the fundamentals of Faraday cages.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's just a publication issue. As far as I'm aware GE / none of the companies you cited actually did measurements on a variety of designs for plasma confinement. It was great to see the German Wendelstein 7-X experiment. I personally think that's a much more promising (both in terms of science & economics) approach to fusion energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fusion is not the problem. Fusion is understood very well. The problem is plasma physics. If you happen to understand German, listen to this podcast about Wendelstein 7-X [https://alternativlos.org/36/](https://alternativlos.org/36/)

<comment><USER6> I'm a fan of "new" approaches to fusion too - the 7-X and the Lockheed "Compact Fusion" [0] designs have a better chance of producing continuous fusion, do their research in much shorter time frames and prove/disprove theories at much lower cost.

[0] [http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact- fusion.htm...](http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html)

<comment><USER5> The stellarator approach is not new though. It was more or less "given up" when the Soviets had early success with a Tokamak. But some researchers were still curious why the stellarator didn't work as expected. And it turned out that problems were understandable and solvable with modern computers... In the podcast, their main criticism of other approaches is that they either don't publish their numbers --- or they are quite bad. "Some" fusion is relatively easy, producing energy with fusion is hard: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science- video/106807...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science- video/10680762/Schoolboys-nuclear-fusion-test-how-he-did-it.html)

<comment><USER7> It fascinates me that producing net energy with fusion is actually really easy, relatively speaking. It was figured out in the early 1950s and immediately put to use. What's hard is doing it at less than a yottawatt scale, so that the resulting energy could be used to power a city rather than obliterate it.

I guess it's another example of how it's easier to destroy than to create.

For comparison, controlled fission was performed before the explodey kind, and the first fission electricity was produced only three years after the first fission bomb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _While it is not clear what would happen to the project if the United States withdrew, Dr. Bigot argues that it is in every participating country's interest to see it through. "You have a chance to know if fusion works or not," he said. "If you miss this chance, maybe it will never come again."_

We already know that fusion works just fine for the sun - this is not the argument that I would use. And it's my opinion that we've already proven fusion can't be cost effective (producing excess energy) with the current reactor designs. I'd rather this money went towards moon-shots that were proposing alternate ways of achieving fusion.

<comment><USER8> Cost effectiveness and producing excess energy are different things. The energy losses scale with the size of the reactor, so an ITER-sized reactor is expected to produce excess energy (barring unforeseen new effects).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fission was also supposed to produce energy "too cheap to meter" and in theory it should be able to. Reality didn't work out that way.

<comment><USER5> Concluding from this that fusion is bound to fail would be a logical fallacy though.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I should switch my career path to coding after 27? - <AUTHOR> A little background about myself. I'm 27 and have been working as a full time online journalist and designer for the past five years. I've seriously lost my motivation for various reasons to continue with journalism as a career. My daily routine at work consists of writing news stories, planning and designing what will be implemented on the site and coordinating the flow with the IT department, and other things like basic video editing.
I'm the type of person you would probably call a geek. I've have been interested in coding for years, know basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript along with the underlying technologies of the web. I've been following HN for the past few years and this awesome community drives my motivation to constantly learn new things. Since last year, I've been trying to learn Python with gaps in between, but decided to seriously take it on 2 months ago. Now I'm trying to do small projects to apply what I'm learning, such as manipulating somewhat complex Excel files with Openpyxl.
I have a short, mid and long term plan in mind. I'm aiming to nail down the fundamentals of programming with Python and JS first. Then get hired at a junior position when I permanently move to Australia with my wife next year, and develop my skills as I gain experience in the field. In the long term, I want to write my own software, but that seems far away from now.
I have the motivation to learn, but struggle to convince myself if I'm taking the step in the right direction. I come across many people, blog posts and comments on different platforms who say that it's difficult to enter software development after 30.
I'd like to get some feedback from this super awesome community. Sorry for keeping it long. <comment><USER2> Anyone who says either "Coding is right for you" or "Coding is not right for you" doesn't know the truth. ONLY YOU can figure out whether coding is the right field for you.

The questions you should ask yourself:

1\. How willing are you to keep on solving a problem? How do you react when the first five or ten times you have a problem, your solutions don't work?

2\. How good are you at writing extremely detailed instructions? A good check: Write your favorite recipe, give it to a friend, and ask them to cook it. Afterward, ask them how difficult it was to cook. (This test is EXTREMELY valuable when your friend says that they don't know how to cook.)

3\. How do you react when you work very, very hard on something -- then someone who has never touched it says someone else "could have done it in five minutes"?

4\. How do you react when something that you've studied and practiced for five years goes out of fashion?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response.

1\. If I'm completely stuck, I try to get away from the problem for a short while and return to it again, because forcing myself generally doesn't help in solving it faster. I found that this generally works better, at least for me.

2\. I'll try this.

3\. I'd probably think they either don't know what I've done, or they are very proficient at it.

4\. I don't believe that software development will become a less valued skillset. The hype around it might die, but then again I don't really about that. I enjoy tech as an observant consumer who pays attention to detail, and believe that I'd be capable to translate my observations to a new product/tech. What I currently lack to do so is a technical toolset.

How would you evaluate my answers to the questions?

<comment><USER2> 1\. I would pick up other techniques for getting myself unstuck. Stopping and doing something else sometimes works... and sometimes, it just makes you later. Favorite ones for me include googling (you'll be doing a lot of this!), rubber duck debugging ( [https://rubberduckdebugging.com/](https://rubberduckdebugging.com/) ), and occasionally the Creative Whack Pack ( [https://creativewhack.com/product.php?productid=64](https://creativewhack.com/product.php?productid=64) ).

4\. Although software development won't become less valued, each individual technical toolset has a natural rise and fall. Older technologies move out of favor. Think about how you deal with studying something for years, then learning that particular technology -- although it's still very good -- is just "not popular", so companies no longer want to use it.

Good luck, no matter whether you move into coding or not!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You already have domain skills, unless you hate what you're currently doing it would be a mistake to try and become a "general programmer." Try to figure out what role you can fill that integrates programming and your current domain knowledge, and develop your programming skills to move into that niche. Over time you can broaden your programming skill set, and shift into new niches.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've thought about this as well, but because I will need a flow of income, I thought acquiring entry level skills for a full time position and gaining experience would be a more ideal start.

Coding around journalism is something I'd want to do, but there aren't as many job openings as there are in other areas.

<comment><USER3> I feel like data driven journalism is a legitimate niche, and there's a lot of software involved in that, both in terms of analysis and presentation. D3.js was created at the New York Times, for example. If you are interested in exploring that possibility, I would suggest you emphasize learning data manipulation/analysis/visualization tools over front-end development. It's a harder route than trying to just become proficient in a web stack, and front- end work is easier to find, but it will probably be a lot more rewarding in the long run if you stick with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Data visualization is something I'm interested in, but there are really very few positions that look only for that where I will live.

There are many Data Analyst positions, but I'm not sure whether I'd be able to do that because the field probably requires a good foundation in math, something I lack..

I was thinking of starting with a web stack, then progress to become a full stack dev, with the aim of creating and selling niche software for the fields I know some things about in the long run.

I find it really difficult to decide on a path, given all the possible routes and my interest in a lot of areas..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course you should, you're gonna live a good additional 50 years, do you want to spend them doing something you don't like?

Python is good language to start, concentrate on that first and keep js for later, it's a complex language that may confuse you more than anything else.

Mix theory and practice, learn and build console apps, avoid web dev for now, you don't want to confuse yourself with all the web framework stuff. Your goal at that point should be to learn the language and how to think like a software dev, not learning some apis or frameworks.

27 is a good age to learn, technologies are always changing so, even at that age, you can learn and become an expert at something, and after a few years, nobody will ask you for how long you've done it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice.

When should I dive into frameworks? What concepts should I be familiar with apart from the basic building blocks (var, loops, control flows, etc)?

<comment><USER4> As you said, the first level is the language syntax, var, control flow etc. Second level, data structures, list and list comprehension, dictionaries etc. Third level, recursion and algorithms, or how to solve problems in python, what you'll often see it referred as "the pythonic way".

Don't be too academic with these that it becomes boring, but just enough that you start feeling comfortable building some small console apps, that can read and write files, crawl some pages from the web, that kind of thing.

Once you're good with that, you can start with frameworks. The danger you want to avoid is to start too soon, and have a hard time separating the complexities of the language with the ones from the framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I made the switch from Social Worker 2 years ago, at age 32. I've had no difficulty because of my very advanced years :troll:

But seriously, do it. It's been a LOT of fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds great. Congratulations on your success!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Same question, but for 33 yo. I'm consider making the switch from a commercial video producer to coder.

<comment><USER5> Yes :) See my reply to OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr - You should definitely do it!

I am around the same age, and recently made a shift from a sales career to coding. I started teaching myself python using treehouse (no affiliation) and then moved on to using blogs and such. I was doing this for a few hours a week for about two years, and then got an opportunity only a few months ago to join a small team as a React Native/Typescript Dev.

The learning curve was huge for the first 2 months, and every day I felt so stupid, but a few months in and I am so glad I made the switch. I think that if you are really willing to put in the time and don't mind not knowing what you're doing making the career switch is totally worth it.</comment>


Show HN: HN Notifications – Get an email when a HN story matches your criteria - <AUTHOR> http://hnnotifications.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Many thanks for the positive feedback!

Apparently the most requested feature is to lower the minimum score threshold. This restriction made more sense when the keywords filter was not available: A subscription with a score threshold of less than, say, 200 points (this number was fairly arbitrary), ended up in the user being literally spammed by the service -- While testing the service, I roughly estimated that a score of 100 points is equivalent to ~1.5 emails every 15 minutes. The usability, cost, and scalability of this approach is probably not ideal.

However, now that custom keywords are involved in the criteria, I do feel like the minimum score can be lowered. Perhaps even removed, if the user has selected 1+ keywords (they are optional). I'll follow up on this feature in the GitHub issue, [https://github.com/ichinaski/hnnotifications/issues/2](https://github.com/ichinaski/hnnotifications/issues/2)

</comment><comment><USER2> I quite like the way this server is designed in a fashion that I can just run it myself - not requiring that I give my email address to any unknown third- party. I just took a look at the go code and its very easy to understand, very easy to build, and quite easy to deploy. Kudo's to the authors for making it open source - it means that I'm now running this locally as a service for my personal needs in finding new HN articles without much fuss! Great stuff!

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice idea, have subscribed.

200 for a score is much too high. Every post except one in the front page of HN has under 120, with the majority of them under 20.

For example, this submission has a score of 15 (at time of writing this comment, which was 5 hours after post submission)

<comment><USER4> Agreed. If I want the stories that score 200+ I'll just use the front page.

But when someone posted my company on hn it was on the front page for a few hours before I found out about it. Likewise, I want to know anytime someone posts something about me, my company, and a couple competitors. Those posts rarely (if ever) hit 200. I would probably use a threshold of about 10.

Not sure if that high of a threshold makes your tech possible, but it's a deal breaker for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should add a way to preview what kind of results keyword provides.

</comment><comment><USER6> One small thing: once you know an email address subscribed you can mailbomb it with unsubscribe links (you might want to throttle those / don't send them more than once).

<comment><AUTHOR> Well spotted. Thanks for the feedback, I'll make sure I fix this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually wrote something like this a while back for myself. I find it a pain to keep track of sites like this and reddit where it's not a linear feed, items move up and down, and you need to scan the entire homepage to check for new content. In the end I made this [http://www.serializer.io](http://www.serializer.io) as a simple tool to make it a linear feed that's easier for me to follow.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you prefer RSS (or JSON) over email, my [http://hnapp.com](http://hnapp.com) works well, and it's open source too.

<comment><USER9> Thank you for the link. Is there a way to have more results ?

<comment><USER8> There isn't an option to get more results per page, but you can get to the next page by clicking "next" at the bottom.

If you don't see the "next" link, then there are no more results. Note that hnapp only has data since around August 2014.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wrote something similar but is a menu bar app for Mac, so more real time, but more annoying.

[https://github.com/cnbuff410/hn-notifier](https://github.com/cnbuff410/hn- notifier)

It only focuses on new post without any threshold and keyword matching, mainly because of my specific requirement.

<comment><USER11> I've needed this for so long. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lot of room for improvements, but still cool though. I personally use Mention ([http://mention.com](http://mention.com)) to track HN posts and get those stories under 200.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is great!

I would like to receive notifications for stories about OS X. It looks like this is currently not possible since the keywords are space-separated?

EDIT: Also please allow non-alphanumeric keywords like C++?

<comment><AUTHOR> Keywords support is currently quite naive. This filter definitely needs to be more sophisticated. While writing the feature I just wanted to make it as simple as possible, covering the vast majority of cases with a very straightforward policy (no punctuation marks, no symbols, spaces, etc). I agree this limitation needs to be improved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like it, just left my email and waiting to get my first notification! Kudos to you.

Quick question : Do you search for the specified keywords in the title or in the link content ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The keywords are searched in the story title. The current (somewhat naive) approach simply splits the title by non letter/number characters, essentially getting rid of punctuation chars, symbols, etc

<comment><USER14> I see. Trying to detect keywords in an article could be nice improvement.

Another question, why did you limit the lower bound for the score w/ 200 ?

I assume you start indexing the HN submissions. In the long run you can create a context aware version of HN, e.g. 'Bring HN submissions with keyword X submitted during the last week.' This could be a brand new way to browse HN.</comment></comment></comment>


I made an iOS app to Browse all your favorite websites in one go - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1345834330 <comment><USER2> Neat Idea. Very clean. I'd love the ability to make the Navigation Bar a darker color. A share sheet would be nice, too. I do notice a bug with the keyboard; when it collapses, it leaves some white padding on the bottom on my iPhone X. Otherwise, good start. I'll be looking forward to the updates!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the late reply. I am aware of the keyboard issue. It's a bug in iOS 11 and its already reported to apple (bug : 34229664). you can access the share screen by clicking on the 3 dots at the bottom.

The new update (v 1.0.2) also added Ad blocker.</comment></comment>


If You Liked This, You're Sure to Love That (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html <comment><USER2> Just based on the experiences I have with them, I feel like the Big Problem with recommendation engines is that they're bad at teasing out _why_ somebody liked something and end up falling back on an obfuscated equivalent of P(likes A | likes B), which ends up dominated by people obsessed with a particular genre, franchise, or theme. Or worse, it relies on extremely generic tags. If you buy, say, Steins;Gate and Rosenkreuzstilette on Steam, it's going to keep recommending the most garbage VNs and PG-13 nukige on the planet until the sun explodes because you obviously like VNs and anime (as opposed to quirky sci-fi stories and Mega Man).

There's a paragraph about this in the article that discusses automated identification of clusters, but it makes it sound like there was a lot of human judgment/guesswork in figuring out _why_ any given set of movies clusters the way it does.

> Each new algorithm takes on average three or four hours to churn through the > data on the family's "quad core" Gateway computer.

Huh. I don't think I would have guessed that Gateway was still around in the days of quad-core desktops.

<comment><USER3> What we need is to monitor people's brains in some way while they are watching entertainment to see specifically what gets evoked and when. I would do it if I had the means. Then we can create original stories again, and run them through our models of human amusement and catharsis to know who will enjoy what and why and when.

<comment><USER4> No need for all that. There are no original stories, only variations on the ancient ones. Here's one summary:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty- Six_Dramatic_Situ...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty- Six_Dramatic_Situations)

As for who will enjoy what etc., there are entire industries that spend their efforts on knowing that, like Nielsen and Rotten Tomatoes.

<comment><USER5> These are extremely broad categories. It's a bit like saying, "there are no original books, they're all just collections of the same 26 letters", or "all stories are the same, they're just characters doing things."

One category listed here is Pursuit:

> the fugitive flees punishment for a misunderstood conflict. Example: Les > Misérables

By this logic, 'Les Miserables', 'Mission Impossible', and 'Catch Me if You Can' are all just rehashing the same basic idea. On an existential level, sure, but is there any practical use to a category that broad?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like any one data point would be worthless. If I like "Sleepless in Seattle" (which I didn't) it might be because of Romcom (no) or because of Ryan (no) or because of Hanks (yes). I wonder if there's a cluster of 10 movies, which if you knew the answer about all 10, it would predict how you would feel about a specific #11.

<comment><USER7> This! This is what drives me bananas as an Apple Music user: you can create radio stations based on a single album, song, or artist, but not on a playlist. I have come to think of it as the "Vince Guaraldi" problem, which is that if you tell Apple Music to create a radio station based on Vince Guaraldi it'll very quickly veer off into soundtracks from children's films (because of the Peanuts soundtracks) rather than what I want, which is piano jazz trios. This could also be because Apple relies on metadata (soundtracks, family entertainment) more than the attributes of the music (which instruments are being played, tempo) but it feels like a problem that could be solved by allowing radio stations based on playlists and it boggles my mind when each new release of Apple Music doesn't include that feature.

<comment><USER8> Google Play has this feature and it's great, I'll often put a group of songs I like into a playlist and start radio from it. Best way to "discover" new music I might like, and far better than their curated radio stations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was involved with design and planning for a solution to predict unscheduled maintenance and warranty claims for vehicles. I think that we had a pretty similar problem. Unfortunately I did not stay with the company I was working for, so I can't speak to the effectiveness of the approach. A simplified example is below.

There is tons of scheduled maintenance. And there are also lots of common unscheduled maintenance items. These were basically worthless in any naive prediction. Basically "Ah, I see that an engine failure is always preceded by dozens of oil changes." There's a tiny predictive value, because number of oil changes is a proxy for age/use; older engines are more likely to fail.

But that sort of prediction wasn't helpful. We ended up proposing a strategy that I shorthand to "without which, not". Basically we wanted to classify the events which precede a specific type of failure, but which we don't see in similar vehicles without the failure. This is grossly oversimplified.

An analog would be the idea of necessary vs sufficient pre-conditions. We were trying to identify the sufficient pre-conditions.

To draw the analogy to a recommendation engine, a common failure mode is that popular things get recommended a lot. Another failure mode is that they basically become genre filters. This is discussed elsewhere.

So in a movie context, we wouldn't be looking for "what do other people who like this movie watch"? Because that's a genre popularity contest. We would ask "Given that a user likes Movie A, what did they watch before that other Movie A likers didn't watch?" And then look for clusters there.

Again, I'm grossly oversimplifying this, because I didn't get to implement the solution I mentioned. The approach seemed promising, though. You might consider this a nuance on "down-weighting popular things", but it's not quite that.

</comment><comment><USER10> If I remember correctly, there was a winner for this but then Netflix just ended up scrapping the whole contest/project and creating a new recommendation engine.

<comment><USER11> They paid the winners and didn't use the entry I think. Which is a shame, because their engine BEFORE the "winning" one, which was presumably better, was great. Whatever they're using now is subjectively much worse.

Could be I'm misremembering, but if I am I think I'm in good company.

<comment><USER12> Do they actually use an engine now, or just throw up a random mish-mash of Netflix originals all over the screen? Most of them are in genres I've never watched with actors I've never expressed interest in, and yet there they are. "Netflix Original" is not a category that you should be using to link other movies to me Netflix.

<comment><USER13> I heard a third-hand rumor that when Netflix switched from 1-5 star ratings to thumbs up/down, they stopped even using your ratings to personalize recommendations. They were simply using watch time. I've since read someone else on HN say that is incorrect. There are old films I really like but have not streamed on Netflix. If I give them a thumbs up, it would be a pity of Netflix didn't take incorporate that data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A big question is how much these recommendation engines have led to us surrounding ourselves with the "same old" stuff, from music to political opinions.</comment>


Keynote Speaker.  What should I talk about? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2010/08/keynote-speaker-what-should-i-talk.html

<comment><USER2> Talk about your hot air balloon project pleeeease!!! It will be way more interesting than more startup/business stuff, which too many people are talking about too much.</comment>


The velocity of a bullet fired from the back of a train - <AUTHOR>

This is from an issue of The American Magazine.  Is it true?
15. If a man is standing on the back platform of a railroad train which is traveling at the rate of sixty miles an hour, and fires a bullet in the direction from which the train came, and the powder back of it is capable of driving the bullet sixty miles an hour, what will happen to the bullet?
The velocity at which the bullet, as part of the train, is traveling, will be overcome by the force given it by exploding the powder, operating in the opposite direction, and it will drop to the ground. <comment><USER2> Yes it will - that's basic relativity. From the point of view of the person firing the gun it will look entirely normal - as if it's flying off into the distance. Only from the point of view of someone on the ground will it appear to just fall.

However... a bullet normally travels around 2000 fps, 1363 mph. Even the slowest bullets still travel 700 mph or so. So you wouldn't see it in practice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's what tripped me up, the actual speed of the bullet in real life. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Myth busters did this a few years back with a basket ball in an air cannon tied to the back of a truck going 55 mph and the cannon set to fire the basket ball at exactly 55 mph. The ball goes no where as one relative force cancels out the other.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah! I went to YouTube and found it! <http://youtu.be/BLuI118nhzc></comment></comment>


Show HN: Auto-scaling databases and a story – MongoHQ - <AUTHOR>

Preface: we love Hacker News. It's been one of the constant good things in all of our lives, and is by far our favorite place to talk with people about what we're doing. I figured it was worth doing a special post for something we've been cooking up, rather than just linking to what everyone else gets. So here it is.
We just turned on a product we're calling "Elastic Deployments". These are MongoDB clusters that scale vertically with no intervention. As a database grows, it has access to more RAM, IOPs and CPU. More here: http://blog.mongohq.com/new-elastic-deployments-now-available/
The product itself is neat, but the "startup story" has been one of the more fascinating things I've been lucky enough to experience.
We started working on this general scaling path about 2 years ago. In that time we've grown a lot, raised a series A, turned down acquisitions, watched a small competitor sell to a public company, and dealt with the same stupid startup shit that nearly everyone deals with but you only hear about verbally.
Handling large customer databases has been the canonical "do things that don't scale" exercise for us. We've hand-managed a distressing number of large MongoDB clusters for customers, all in an effort to figure out how best to handle database growth problems in a repeatable way. While doing this, we experience immense pressure to give everyone the same answer for scaling any database (just shard!) ... but our experience with the customers we were working with in the real world just didn't make that sound right.
Over time, we almost lost our religion. Rackspace went hosted MongoDB shopping ... HN only allows 2000 characters, so continue here: https://gist.github.com/mrkurt/7629bab3e9a8016a5fda <comment><AUTHOR> Links for those who desire the clicky: [http://blog.mongohq.com/new-elastic- deployments-now-availabl...](http://blog.mongohq.com/new-elastic-deployments- now-available)

Continued: [https://gist.github.com/mrkurt/7629bab3e9a8016a5fda](https://gist.github.com/mrkurt/7629bab3e9a8016a5fda)

</comment><comment><USER2> Any plan on Tokumx hosting?</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone ever been sued for distributing Python or Ruby VM? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of a situation where someone distributed a solution with the Python or Ruby VM and was later sued?
It seems that Oracle has pulled out a double barrel shotgun and filled Java with bullets, particularly for folks that want to distribute a solution that includes the Java VM.
Advocates of Ruby or Python in the enterprise can now talk to corporate about minimizing legal risk by going with a Ruby or Python solution instead of Java. <comment><USER2> Strictly speaking, Google doesn't actually distribute 'the' Java(tm) VM. They distribute the Dalvik VM, which supports Java, among others. Arguably, Google would not be in trouble, if they distributed Sun/Oracle's Java. (They'd be in different trouble re: Java ME instead, but that's a different question.)

Spinning up the FUD machine, anyone implementing a VM must have similar types of problems to solve, and so it's possible, just like in Dalvik, that the Python and Ruby infringe upon those or similar patents that opponents with deep pockets hold. Sprinkle some mutterings of Ogg Vorbis on top, and a sufficiently knowledgeable advocate against Ruby/Python could easily argue the opposite. (Python? That's, like, an open source language right? So that means no one to indemnify us if Oracle decides Python _also_ infringes their patents?)</comment>


Pointing the Way Forward - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/10/pointer-events?utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=updates_feed <comment><USER3> Finally!

'Pointer events' originated at Microsoft, after the W3C effort to standardize Apple's 'Touch events' became uncertain due to patent issues. For a while, despite admitting it's a more elegant spec for unified input, Google were reluctant to add it because Apple wasn't interested [1][2].

Now Google have changed their mind once more and shipped this, making Apple the only major outlier. The pains of shimming these similar-but-different APIs will continue for a bit, but hopefully Apple will make this concession in the end.

[1] [https://timkadlec.com/2015/02/apples- web/](https://timkadlec.com/2015/02/apples-web/)

[2] [https://mobiforge.com/news-comment/who-wants-pointer- events-...](https://mobiforge.com/news-comment/who-wants-pointer-events-api- everyone-nearly)

<comment><USER4> How difficult would a TE -> PE library be to build?

<comment><USER5> You mean like this one?

[https://github.com/jquery/PEP/](https://github.com/jquery/PEP/)

Was built by the Polymer team before Chrome deprioritized Pointer Events the first time round, and transferred to the JQuery Foundation thereafter.

<comment><USER4> Good to know. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Ever spent a frustrating hour debugging a broken mouseup event, until you > realised that it's because the user is letting go of the button outside your > click target? No? Okay, maybe it's just me, then.

I hope no one uses this example to make an onClick action that works no matter where the pointer is when the button is released. The correct behavior when this happens is to ignore the click when the user has moved off the click target when the button is released. It's a pretty handy convention, as it's the only way to for a user to "abort" a click once they start it - <USER2> I've done a few times myself.

This example pattern could be useful, though, in managing the UI state when something like this occurs.

<comment><USER7> The problem, as I understand it, is in order for a UI to feel responsive you often have to start reacting to the mousedown/mousemove before the mouseup occurs. So you need to do some cleanup when that mouseup event happens. Only you never got a mouseup event because it happened over some other random element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was one of the people who was really raging at Google when they announced that Chrome wouldn't support PE (with that infamous "No argument that PE is more elegant" comment), so it's only fair that I thank them sincerely for them doing the right thing and making a 180 on this. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER9> In anticipation of this day I added support for PointerEvents to HumanInput months ago:

[https://github.com/liftoff/HumanInput](https://github.com/liftoff/HumanInput)

It really is a superior way to handle mouse and touch (and stylus!) events. If you look at pointer.js in the repo you can see how much simpler it is to handle PointerEvents VS the combination of traditional mouse and touch events.

</comment><comment><USER10> Back in 2012 with the roll out of the Surface, we wrote our own translation layer to handle unifying mouse+touch input for a game we were working on that never made it to launch.

It's one of those things you just shouldn't have to write. This probably makes a lot of web devs very happy.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's hard to describe just how happy I am to see this! Plus they gave us a free polyfill. f'ing awesome</comment>


Tuition at the University of California (1970) - <AUTHOR> https://thebackbench.blogspot.com/2007/08/tuition-at-university-of-california.html <comment><USER2> In-state tuition at the UC schools is now moderately above the median tuition rates at comparable flagship state universities. However, it's worth pointing out that the California State University system has done an amazing job keeping tuition and fees low[1]. You can get a nationally ranked education from San Diego State, Fresno State, Cal Poly Pomona, etc. for less than $7,600/year in tuition and fees.

This is obviously still a lot of money, but it's far cheaper than comparable options in most other states. Florida, North Carolina, New Mexico, Montana, and Wyoming are the only other states that have similar options at that price.

[1] [https://www2.calstate.edu/attend/paying-for- college/Document...](https://www2.calstate.edu/attend/paying-for- college/Documents/19-20-coa.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> The increasing tuition of most college is the result of intentional fraud. When the US Government computes your 'financial need', the two primary inputs are your parents' income and the cost of tuition. If your parents' income is low enough, then the government will give you a grant based on the cost of tuition. Schools that have low tuition get a smaller check from the government for the same student than schools that have high tuition. As a result, schools push tuition higher and higher, then give grants to students to cover the high costs that remain after the government grant.

For example, say school A charges $5000 per year. A low-income student is accepted and maxes out their government grants, the school can get a check for up to $5000.

School B charges $50,000 per year. For that same student, they can get $23k per year (or something like that), plus the student now qualifies for subsidized loans to pay for room and board. The school can then give that student a scholarship for the remaining $27k.

For this student, the higher tuition school is much cheaper.

This isn't a theoretical exercise, this is exactly what Universities have been doing for over 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER4> There has to be some upper bound to the cost of education, right? Or will I have to put aside a few million to send my kids to college twenty years from now?

<comment><USER5> A few years ago, shortly after the birth of our first child, our financial advisor recommended $350k in case we wanted a private college. We're nowhere near making that goal, nor do we have any particular preference for a private school, but it's an interesting number nonetheless.

But I think the trend to keep an eye on isn't the price of an undergraduate degree, but a graduate degree, as an undergraduate degree won't be nearly as useful as today, which already isn't as useful as 20 years ago in many fields. Indeed, both my wife and I have graduate degrees.

My wife came from a middle-class family that was college oriented. I came from a working-class/poor environment. My mom sent me off to college with $200 and a suitcase, and I subsequently paid for everything else, including housing and tuition, myself. But I barely made it through; I just wasn't culturally or academically equipped to do college. For example, my first week of school I was preoccupied with finding a job, I always prioritized working over school even when, financially, I didn't need to, and I didn't appreciate the value in developing relationships with professors (that felt more like cheating, reflecting not enough time spent studying). So what concerns me more than college right now is primary and secondary school--preparing my kids so the transition to college is seamless and natural. Fortunately, San Francisco has many excellent public and private schools. The public school district has language immersion programs in several different languages in addition to non- immersion early language programs, as well as other enrichment programs; and the parochial private schools in particular are relatively affordable--cheaper than daycare, even. (Though daycare can be crushingly expensive--whether run out of a garage or attached to a fancy private school, rates are similar--so I guess that doesn't say much.)

So the price of college? Meh. That's poor people thinking. My goal is to put my kids on a college trajectory and let that carry them through--hopefully to graduate school. Of course we'll save as much as we can, but that's not something I'm concerned about. In my hometown middle school and high school counselors often _discouraged_ kids from college because the costs were presumed insurmountable for most families. In truth 1) they were ridiculously misinformed and misleading about the options and alternatives, and 2) setting kids up for failure whether or not they ended up going to college. Nope... worrying about cost right now is counterproductive.

<comment><USER6> You can save for college, but then this gets deducted from your "need", causing financial aid to be reduced. There isn't much incentive to save when that just drives up the costs.

<comment><USER7> True, but above a certain income threshold, one which many of the visitors to this site exceed, you won't be getting any aid anyway. It sucks to be "punished" for doing the "right" thing and planning your your kid's future but what's the alternative, assuming a college education is the end goal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's amusing to read this now when tuitions for the UCs have grown by a factor of a hundred.

<comment><USER9> I have to wonder...where does this money go? Unless all my professor friends are lying to me, it's not going to the professors' salaries. When I went to school (Florida State University about ten years ago), the dorm was absolutely dreadful, but that wasn't even part of the regular tuition, so it wasn't going to increasing student living conditions.

<comment><USER10> Administrators. Not to one super administrator that's soaking up all the money, but to an array of administrators in various, emerging roles.

Anecdotal: When I went to undergrad, all of the student advisors were tenured faculty members doing it as part of their job responsibilities. When I went to grad school a few years later, the advisors were all full-time advisors, and all the departments had instructional designers to consult when creating courses.

<comment><USER11> If I were a student, I would prefer to be advised by an actual faculty member, than by a "full-time adviser" divorced from everyday instruction responsibilities.

<comment><USER12> Not that I disagree, but I had the opportunity to have both cases, each at separate schools. Having a (capable) full-time adviser meant that they were well-versed in the requirements of the program, as well as how to navigate administrative side of things, such as adding classes even if you don't fill the prereqs, etc.

With a faculty member, I found that they were more focused on their actual faculty/teaching duties, and had trouble with the more administrative side of things.

This is also probably dependent on the quality of the school

<comment><USER13> I'm a math professor, asked to serve as an advisor frequently. I typically advise math majors -- and I do a _fairly_ good job of it. Although I tend to have difficulty with the administrative side of things, especially since our degree requirements are a moving target.

That said, our faculty used to advise _incoming_ students as well. From what I understand, our undergraduate director (tenured faculty) would do all the advisement personally, during the summer, himself. One summer he was out of town a lot and asked me to fill in for him for a day.

I was not very happy to be asked to show up during the summer. For one thing, typically faculty are paid only during the academic year, unless it's from grants (although I happened to be getting summer salary that year).

But also, the advisees were mostly freshman who weren't ready to take math- major courses yet. They wanted general advice on how to navigate the system, which gen-ed requirements to get out of the way, whether to take "University 101", and the like. Although I did my best, I felt quite out of my element.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think University prices are like some weird mirror of airline ticket prices. Time was that airlines sold tickets at a premium but the service was great. Now you can get tickets at incredibly low prices but the service is at cattle car level. People complain but at a fundemental level - that's what they want.

The airlines say "If you want 60's service then fly first class and pay 60's level prices" And the response of virtually everyone is - No, thank you, I just want to get to wherever I'm going as cheaply as humanly possible.

It seems like the same thing in reverse happened with University. Have you seen or read about dorms in the 50's? Or all the ancillary things that went with going to a university? It was all crap. And it's like everyone went "I would like a very nice University experience. I want a nice dorm. I want a beautiful campus. I want a sports team that wins and gym to go to. I want administrators that will hold my hand." And the Universties resonse was "You go it. If you want the cheap version go to community college"

Now by bent I'm classically liberal. If you asked me why prices have gone up I'd tell you a tale of government action. Make student loans widly available. Making student debt non-dischargable in bankruptcy. You may not but I find the argument plausible.

What if that's not a root cause though? Because truelly none of that stuff happens by chance. It's everyone who votes putting people in government. It's everyone who votes saying- "These are my priorities" and then the people in government saying "this is how we're going to meet those priorities" and both walking away happy to some greater or lesser degree.

All of which indicates to me that free University for all isn't going to cut it. If it's publically financed it won't in the long run be able to afford what people seem to want to get out of University. If that's true then they'll all run to a non-free private system and get the politicians to help them to pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Another great cost saving idea of Ronald Reagan was the closing of all the mental hospitals, supposedly to be replaced by community clinics (which never happened). The unrolling disaster of homeless with severe mental illness continues, on and on and on. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. What a legacy.

<comment><USER16> a) off topic, and (b) representative of a global trend that was going on at the time, led by the psychiatric profession, rather than being any kind of personal whim of who your president happened to be at the time. We in Australia closed our mental asylums at the same time, with the same effect.

Blame Jack Nicholson if you want to blame someone; or rather the rash of 1970s "aren't asylums terrible?" asylum fiction.

<comment><USER17> Asylums _were_ terrible. It's a dynamic that's extremely prone to abuse. I do think some people should probably be institutionalized involuntarily, but I can see the argument where, even as a mentally ill homeless person, you at least still have the freedom to physically escape someone who is abusing you. That's not something to be deprived lightly.

And yes, it was very much a global phenomenon, largely predating the 1980s.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice about cold-calling/emailing VC firms? - <AUTHOR> We're based in Brazil, and were mainly planning to demo to local investors that we can be presented to by mutual (business) acquaintances, i.e. not cold-calling. But then we thought we might try something bold and cold contact some American venture capital firms.<p>Is this a good idea? What information should we present at first? Any job title we should be trying to reach? <comment><USER2> Top-tier VCs - and even middling ones with decent dealflow - basically ignore pitches from outside their network. Spend the effort you'd spend on cold emails getting actual intros to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're actually following this advice. Thanks a lot!</comment></comment>


Kinect for Windows SDK to Arrive Spring 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2011/02/21/kinect-for-windows-sdk-to-arrive-spring-2011.aspx

<comment><USER2> This is awesome - at work, we didn't have any PC drivers for Kinect either (and we weren't allowed to use the OSS driver), we actually had to resort to rigging up an Xbox Dev kit whose sole job was to dump out the Kinect data over UDP to a PC.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. Thought about picking up a Kinect when the indie created SDK was coming out, but the official one should be awesome. Can't wait - even if my 360 is red ringed...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> anyone else planning on picking up a Kinect without owning a 360?

<comment><USER4> i own a 360 but haven't touched it in several months. bought my kinect 2 months ago. really just awesome to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> pretty cool cant wait

</comment><comment><USER6> A bit late, aren't they?

<https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect>

<comment><USER7> It depends. If MS is offering a complete SDK, then it's a whole nother ball of wax... unless you're on a Mac or linux distro. IANAL, but I also assume there will be legal issues with distributing a commercial kinect app without the express approval of Redmond.

<comment><USER8> Why legal issues? If MS was thinking ahead, they'd freely let people sell apps using the sensor. It sells more Kinects. You could pretty much bootstrap a whole app ecosystem based just on the Kinect (on Windows only thankyouverymuch)</comment></comment></comment>


(White)US police officer gave a free lift to a grieving (black) man - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37499658/this-us-police-officer-gave-a-free-lift-to-a-grieving-man-instead-of-arresting-him <comment><AUTHOR> Hope the story will give some hope</comment>


Arsenic and Lead are in 45 popular fruit juices sold across the country - sahin-boydas https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/arsenic-and-lead-are-in-your-fruit-juice-what-you-need-to-know/ <comment><AUTHOR> Arsenic in fruit juices isn't really all that surprising given that many fruits (principally apple and pears) have arsenic in their seeds. Even fruits that don't may use apple juice as a bulker or have some from cross- contamination in factories, that way.

</comment><comment> sahin-boydas I am sort of surprised that well respected CR is doing reports on heavy metals.

<comment><USER2> Maybe you can clarify what you mean.

Do you mean that you don't believe heavy metals can cause brain damage, cancer, etc.? Lead itself makes people stupid and violent, they used to put it in paint and even gasoline. Don't remember that? That's why they call it "unleaded".

Or do you mean that you don't understand why an organization is trying to test juice products for safety? Is it because you trust the people selling the products to produce safe products? That's like self-regulation, man, and self- regulated industries are the dirtiest ever. CR is trying to keep folks honest.

Or did you just read the headline and not the article?

As a father who gives juice to his kids maybe once / week, this is useful information.</comment></comment>


OK Boomer - <AUTHOR> The retort of a generation and a look at the "meme-to-merch" economy: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/style/ok-boomer.html <comment> dr-detroit This is an ancient maymay.

<comment><AUTHOR> So naturally the New York Times just discovered it.</comment></comment>


Inhuman Resources: Mike Picarella wanted protect co-worker, not destroy own life - <AUTHOR> https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/hsbc-sexual-harassment-hr/ <comment><USER2> Wow.. just.. wow. That poor man. It's as if the world around him was insane, and he was one of the sane few trying to do the right thing. Probably things could have been different, but overall I believe HSBC is a piece of shit who ruined this guys life. I can't imagine the stress and pressure that this has caused him and his family. Much love to them for enduring, and I hope that he can move beyond this chapter of his life. He seems like a good man.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Mike did receive one new assignment: Every week, he had to create a report for senior management in London by Monday morning based on information that wouldn't come in until Friday night. He was given this task a day after he chatted with Pizzimbono about how busy his weekends were, between kids' hockey games and other family obligations. "I thought he was being friendly," Mike said."

This is genius in an evil way. These people are clearly talented and experienced at this game to play this kind of attack.</comment>


C++ clear winner in Google language tests - <AUTHOR> http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2076322/-winner-google-language-tests

<comment><USER2> The article says "best _performing_ language". Quite different from "best language"

<comment><USER3> Aesthetic reasons aside, in production systems, performance is all that matters.

<comment><USER4> Getting features implemented: 1) at all; and 2) correctly; can also be important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article (or better: the paper which the article is referencing) says that C++ is the "best-performing" programming language. That's a whole different thing (or everyone would still be coding in assembler).

</comment><comment><USER6> previously discussed here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615096>

</comment><comment><USER7> C/C++ has always been somewhat elusive for me; during study and work so far, I did almost everything BUT C/C++. So, how to get started on modern C++? Can anyone recommend books, websites, best practices or other resources?

I know the Java guys are very fond of their eclipse/netbeans/IDEA and ant/maven; what do C++ projects nowadays look like and what are the typical tools used to code and build? Are there any library collections or tools one should definitely check out? Are there any "industry standards"?

And while we are at it: what about COBOL? Any chance of learning that without having a 40 ton mainframe and the necessary nuclear power plant to run it at home?

<comment><USER8> First of all, for practical reasons, do not learn C++. Sure, dive into C, it'll teach you a great deal about programming close to the metal. But I consider C++ unnecessary these days, outside niches such as game programming. You'll be an order of magnitude more productive if you go with a higher level language and drop down to pure C when you need performance.

That being said, if you insist on C++, Visual Studio on Windows, XCode on Mac and KDevelop on Linux would be my IDEs of choice. On Linux and Mac most people use vim or emacs though. Libraries to look into would be the standard STL and Boost. Qt or wxWidgets for GUIs.

COBOL? I'm sure you can run it on a modern computer, hell, my iphone is an order of magnitude more powerful than the mainframes from 30-40 years ago... but in the name of all that's good and holy, why would you ever want to do that?

<comment><USER3> My understanding is that C++ is a highest-level programming language. What would be a higher-than-C++ level language?

<comment><USER9> He's probably referring to interpreted languages (Python, Ruby etc.)

<comment><USER3> why is that considered higher level?

<comment><USER9> It mostly depends on your definition of 'higher level' (since all of these languages are Turing Complete languages). I've heard interpreted languages referred to as higher level because of things like dynamic typing (also being typesafe) and their variety of built in data structures and methods that create a greater level of abstraction for the programmer. I think the 'higher level' term is used often to refer to observed levels of abstraction even if it's not technically accurate.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>