A Typical Day in a Blockchain-Enabled World Circa 2030 - <AUTHOR> https://blockchainfutureslab.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/a-typical-day-in-a-blockchain-enabled-world/ <comment><USER2>
        "The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

        He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow,"
        he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
        "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't
        have to pay you."

        "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed
        when you bought this conapt."

        In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it
        necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his
        door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

        "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

        From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with
        it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's
        money-gulping door.

        "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.

        Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."

        ― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

In addition to the above, I'd point out that there's already a massive literature of ways to take supposedly anonymous metadata and derive a probable identity from it - and the system described in the article would have vastly more information at its disposal than any of the intelligence agencies could DREAM of currently...

<comment><USER3> That code-formatted excerpt is hard to read on mobile due to the narrower page. Here it is without the spaces at the start of each line:

"The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money- gulping door.

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."

― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to hear this kind of thing from the fanatical free-market libertarians behind Xanadu. (Xanadu, the pre-WWW web system envisioned by Ted Nelson. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.) Twenty years later, it hasn't changed much, except it now uses Bitcoin as a buzzword.

Bitcoin is a terrible system for micropayments. The overhead is high, since every node has to find out about every payment and you have to pay a fee to a miner. Confirmation times are a big problem. (Accepting zero-confirmation payments doesn't work, as Satoshi Dice found out the hard way.) Yeah, there are all those fancy tree-based schemes to reduce the data being transferred around, but none of them work yet.

Meanwhile, anyone knowing the whereabouts of "Big Vern", the CEO of Cryptsy, the Bitcoin exchange, is requested to contact the Silver Law Firm. The CEO and most of the assets are missing. "Big Vern" has blamed "hackers". Some people believe him.

</comment><comment><USER5> I could barely make it through reading this. Only someone who has never gone to bed hungry would think that a world of constant commerce was a good thing. This isn't what life is actually about. Not even close. Commerce is an enabler. It isn't the ends its just a means, and a limited one at that. Honestly, I found this future disgusting.

That doesn't mean I don't find block chain tech interesting...but this was crazy.

<comment><USER6> Market based economy can be very good for development and efficiency. However it also has many negative effects, that even can prevent the two advantages from happening. Especially for normal consumers it leads to decision fatigue. Sadly nobody wants to reduce the free market anymore even at the places where we know that the negative effects outweigh the positive. As soon as you bring that up some people will proclaim that you're wanting a dictatorship like soviet russia.

<comment><USER7> Decision fatigue is IMO the number 1 reason these ideas wouldn't work. Imagine making 5 decisions about micro transactions worth fractions of a cent before you even got to work, while shaking off sleep in the morning. You would go insane.

Also, the reliability of the hardware and software. Sometimes my Macbook or iPhone won't connect to a router as expected. Why would I need a bitcoin enabled alarm clock when a low tech solution will also work?

They would've picked much better examples...blockchains are a solution in search of a problem still I think. Voting is one area I think it could have a big impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The thing that's always bothered me about blockchain based reputation systems is that it becomes a wild west.

Imagine if the credit rating system (FICO score in the US) allowed anyone anonymously to put negative credit entries on anyone else's credit rating with thousands of sock-puppet accounts...

I'm sure there's ways around it if some central governing authority issues unique reputation blockchain wallets to each individual person on birth, and they're not easily forged, but centralizing control of the blockchain is against the philosophy of most blockchain early adopters, and it would leave the reputation blockchain able to be tampered with, because now the central authority could create sock-puppets to trash the reputation of anyone that it doesn't get along with.

<comment><USER9> The only way to prevent these attacks is to force somebody to provide something of value to vote in the reputation system. That something of value could be energy (proof of work), time, money, their own reputation, tokens from a fixed wallet (just kicking the can down the road), or many other things.

The "Sybil attack" on reputation-based systems isn't the only one worth worrying about. Another one is incentives - some people may be very strongly driven to harm another person's reputation (see [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-benjamin- wey/](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-benjamin-wey/) for example).

<comment><USER10> You've just described the American electorate. People get elected largely on the basis of who gets enough money and marketing. Big companies and wealthy individuals outspend most of voting America combined. So, elected officials work for them instead. Overtime, result was a one sided, rigged econkmy benefiting the rich and elites almost exclusively that we call a plutonomy.

In other words, what you propose is very dangerous and needs more review/revision to trust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds aweful, I'll opt out. Just because some things can be Internet or block chain connected doesn't mean they should be.

Reminds me of the second episode of Black Mirror.

<comment><USER12> I cam here to say exactly that. A world where I have to pay a usage fee for each and every aspect of my life sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool little story. I really like speculative fiction like this.

The only part that is too far-fetched is "A lawnmower repair shop down the street builds these mowers and provides them for free.". Why would they build and provide them for free? Surely they would lease them to the local governance body using automatic, demand based bidding and negotiation.

Other than that, very cool. Though I fully expect these comments to be filled with people discussing how this future sounds terrible, entirely missing the point of the story (which was to speculate and discuss novel models of payment, ownership and reputation enabled by blockchains, not to provide an exhaustive exploration of possible futures enabled by blockchain technology).

<comment><USER14> >>Though I fully expect these comments to be filled with people discussing how this future sounds terrible

I didn't find it terrible. I found it hilarious, because the story reads like a satirical mockery of blockchain technology. That's what I gathered from the part where Crowley opens his mouth and his TV says "FOOD ACQUISITION FACE DETECTED".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the old dystopia, everything you do is watched. In the new dystopia, everything is watched and requires a micropayment.

</comment><comment><USER16> Poe's law in full effect. I couldn't tell wether the author thought this was a utopia or the other thing.

</comment><comment><USER17> I read the story; I don't see any reason why automatically auctioning AI-based or other services would require either blockchain or Bitcoin.

<comment><USER18> The problem today is that taking payments electronically via the banking system is a bureaucratic hassle in terms of getting a suitable business account and getting set up as a merchant etc. It doesn't require a blockchain or bitcoin, but it is _a_ way of lowering the barrier.

I found most of the examples entirely unconvincing, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you have a hammer...

I love bitcoin and think that blockchains as a format have potential, but they are not the end all be all and this story is basically a parody of bitcoin enthusiasts.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks like the future is a real-life version of a pay-to-win iPhone game.

<comment><USER21> Pretty sure life is already pay-to-win :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Stuff like this makes me wanna reread Revelation.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Because Crowley likes to take long, hot showers in the morning, he used to > run out of hot water.

In the UK, metering gas, and by extension hot water (since most hot water here is supplied via gas boilers) is often used to illustrate poverty, as if you regularly have problems with your gas bill you can get a coin operated metered gas supply.

I immediately assumed that Crowley is poor.

And this is the problem with a lot of these: They are presented as solving a problem, but many of them are solving problems that are only problems for those less likely to be able to afford the solution.

The solution often involves outsourcing fixing problems to someone else. E.g. the periods I've had a cleaner, we've always insisted on going through an agency even though it's substantially more expensive, because it means never having to think about holiday cover or illness cover or finding a replacement if the current one proves to be unreliable or do a poor job.

Almost the entire thing to me read to me as written by someone lacking understanding of what services they can buy right now, via service providers that deliver substantial value by insulating you from hassle.

The house sale being perhaps the most prominent example. The colored coin bit implies a total lack of understanding for the amount of legal hassles involved. At the very least you would need a way to force a transfer to be able to deal with situations where a transfer has been done improperly.

But secondly they seem to imply that the closing costs are primarily about transferring title. When I last bought a house, the vast majority was rather about drawing up a mutually agreeable contract covering exactly what deficiencies were known and agreed on, and what should stay or not etc. None of those goes away just because you have a way of doing a title transfer.

I believe there can be plenty of value to be had from Bitcoin. The ability to start taking payments without having to wait to get bank accounts and merchant accounts etc. sorted out is fantastic. And some of the things described may have profound effects. But the examples in this story mostly seems poorly thought out to me.

In fact, you _will_ find plenty of examples like this explicitly used in scifi through the years as part of the designs of various dystopic settings, and often to illustrate the downsides of poverty in a hyper-commercialised environment - some of the first things people tend to spend money on when their earnings power increases is buying themselves free of having everything metered.

</comment><comment><USER23> It would have been nice to hear a story about an AI controlled Uber competitor.

</comment><comment><USER24> The future full of anthropomorphic crocodiles is what concerns me most.

</comment><comment><USER25> This reads a lot like a Huxleyan ("soma") dystopia compounded or facilitated by turning every passive human decision into another rent-seeking market.

I could not imagine a worse hell.

</comment><comment><USER26> The real estate thing seems fairly sensible, if impractical to implement.

<comment><USER27> One of the (IMO many) problems with using coloured coins for property ownership is that the real world is necessarily messy.

Disputes happen frequently, houses are seized, not bought outight, people die and ownership needs to be switched, any other number of scenarios might occur... on the flip side, what happens when a wallet containing the house is compromised? When you start to go down this line of thought, delegation to some authority begins to make sense...

To be honest, I found that every one of the interactions in the story has a similar set of limitations or problems. The whole thing reads as though it's been written by someone who's never actually been out in the world and interacted with people. Every one of the points can be pretty much countered with the same "OK, but what if something goes wrong with the transaction, or if someone wants to act in bad faith?"

To me this is the biggest fundamental flaw with unregulated cryptocurrencies - there are already a significant number of bad actors who are stealing coins but no "fix" (indeed this is by design) - other than calling the victims idiots and suggesting they act differently next time.

Unfortunately in the author's world, you're broke, homeless, and in every other way possible, SOL.

<comment><USER28> > The whole thing reads as though it's been written by someone who's never > actually been out in the world and interacted with people

Have you ever been to /r/Bitcoin?</comment></comment></comment>


TechCrunch Open Sources Its WordPress Async Task Library - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/wp-async-task-our-new-open-source-library/

<comment><USER2> At Mashable, we did something similar, except we just used Sidekiq. We'd built a lot of functionality in Ruby, which included ActiveRecord classes for Wordpress tables (which makes working with Wordpress's table hierarchy actually sane, and it's _insanely_ useful to be able to get to your DB as objects in a console), so we could interact with Wordpress directly. Actually queueing Sidekiq jobs is pretty trivial - you just need to be able to talk to Redis.

Our frontend doesn't actually use Wordpress any more, which was vastly eased by this approach; being able to decouple the backend and frontend made it surprisingly easy to obviate the front-end portions of the product.

</comment><comment><USER3> The comments section isn't open, so I'll ask the authors a question here in case they see it: WordPress has had async tasks for a very long time in the form of single scheduled WordPress cron items. How is that approach insufficient for tasks such as rebuilding items like Crunchbase "cards"?

<comment><USER4> They're talking about the frontend being blocked, not the backend.

<comment><USER3> Typically my design approach for this is to use cron items to pre-compute components so that they don't have to be computed (nor templated, ideally) at runtime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an amusing amount of press over what is essentially a PHP application making a POST request to itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, async tasks on top of WP? You are truly heroes, in a sick and twisted kind of way. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this any different to cache-warming? What kind of percentage of page loads are affected?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a poor solution for having a page slowed down by dozens of 3rd party ads/trackers/etc.

<comment><USER9> We don't love that the ads team requires so many placements and that AOL requires so many trackers, but we worked to speed things up where we could</comment></comment>


No Waiting Room - <AUTHOR> http://nat.org/blog/2009/12/no-waiting-room/

<comment><USER2> Ok, I'm German, so I guess I'm qualified to put this into perspective. ;)

First off, this sounds far more than a health paradise than it is in reality.

If you go to a regular doctor, you definitely have to sit in a waiting room - unless you are an emergency. Some weeks ago I injured my ankle and had to sit in there for 3 hours for a total of 10 minutes examination by the doctor...

I don't know about hospitals, never been there. Here in Germany you only go to hospital if you're seriously sick/injured (eg accident or something) and/or if it's in the middle of the night otherwise you go to your doctor.

And there are loads of other problems coming with our health care system, eg it's expensive, sometimes paradoxically inefficient and what not.

That being said, I think it's still a great system that ensures the stability of society and does more good than harm. Well, and I'm born here, so there are probably a lot of things that I take for granted but aren't available in other countries.

Just wanted to point out that this isn't the land of milk and honey... ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I'm sure that there are unintended consequences in any system that complex. But I'll tell you from unfortunate personal experience, if you go to an ER in the middle of the night in any American city, you'll see a crowd of people in the waiting room. Most of them are uninsured and poor, and thus don't have a doctor to go to for routine things, so they go without medical care until it _is_ an emergency.

It's not efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I missed his point, but first of all, yes, hospitals do have waiting rooms - just (obviously?) they're not filled in the middle of the night, as only people with, well, emergencies tend to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. Secondly, e.g. going to the dentist is almost guaranteed to be an hour's wait (at least where I live), even if you have an appointment. Say, you do have an appointment for 1500, then what many people around here do is, check in at 1455, ask how long the wait might be, and then actually leave to do some shopping or similar and come back in whenever their wait is nearly over.

So really, I don't see how this could be superior to any other system.. And is he pleasantly surprised at the 250ish Euros or did he consider it too high? In case of the latter, I don't know why he doesn't have German insurance in the first place. I currently pay less than that amount per year (though that's the public health care kind, not the private one, which arguably would be more expensive, but also better), and IANAL, but I think if he lives here [in Germany] he is forced by law to have some kind of health insurance.

Don't want to come across as too negative, but I just thought I'd give you the other side of the story as well. (I currently live in Germany and I am covered under public health care.)

<comment><USER4> > And is he pleasantly surprised at the 250ish Euros or did he consider it too > high?

He was very pleasantly surprised. In response to a comment on his post, the author wrote:

"According to newchoicehealth.com, an abdominal ultrasound in a major American city costs $340 on average at the cheapest service providers. At hospitals it's much more expensive – $1350 at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

And that's just the ultrasound — without the ER fees, the blood tests, the surgeon consultation, etc, that I also received in Munich. So I think 265 euros is extremely cheap."

[Source: [http://nat.org/blog/2009/12/no-waiting-room/comment- page-1/#...](http://nat.org/blog/2009/12/no-waiting-room/comment- page-1/#comment-6137)]

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> But is this the health care system we would be getting with the current proposal? I see a lot of these types of posts, health care is great in [somecountry] and it's a [otherthanus] system.

I think most people are concerned b/c the US Congress is corrupt (either to a major or minor extent). So special interest groups (AMA, insurance co's) have a greater chance of getting a bill that looks after their interests.

In the end, doesn't it come down to paying doctors (and their practices that own the testing equipment) less?

<comment><USER5> Oh and I've gone to the emergency room and not waited also.

However, the bill was much higher. But, the bill is reduced by agreements with the insurance company and if you've met your deductible, you might not pay anything at all.

Better or worse? One visit to the ER does not make a compelling story one way or another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I never see talked about in real-world systems that _does_ get talked about in computer systems is pretty simple: scale.

Does health care scale? For that matter, does government in general scale? Germany (according to Wolfram Alpha) has the largest population in Europe, at 82 million people. America has 300 million. And Germany is much, much more dense, at 613 people per square mile vs our 86 people per square mile. Wouldn't that make it much easier for fewer hospitals to care for more people?

I have concerns that the amount of beaurocracy neccesary to manage a nationalized health care system here in the US would be staggering. I'm not involved in the field in any way, so I don't _really_ know what I'm talking about, but the engineer in me looks at a system that complex and lets out a curse word beneath my breath.

This also applies to almost everything else the federal government does. I feel like we'd have been much better off staying a loose confederation of states. They're small enough to be able to pull off something like this.

<comment><USER7> If three or four major insurers can handle the current system, why wouldn't the government be able to take on that role? It already handles much bigger systems, like transportation.

<comment><AUTHOR> For some definition of "handles", sure.

Most of our transportation is actually handled by local/state departments. The Federal govt just gives the states money to keep the interstates from falling apart.

Libertarianism is distributed computing applied to economics.

<comment><USER7> Distributed computing is a waste when you already have a supercomputer available for your exclusive use.

<comment><USER6> I dunno, Google's strategy of using a lot of off the shelf hardware as opposed to supercomputers seems to be paying off well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems rather off topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the guidelines:

        On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
        interesting. That includes more than hacking and
        startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
        answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
        intellectual curiosity.

As a hacker and nerd, I'm acutely fascinated by unintended consequences that arise in complex mathematical systems. My interests in economics and programming stem from this fascination.

The article isn't saying "we should do health care like ze germans cuz they got it rite hurrrr". It's saying, "Hey, look at this interesting effect of their policies, which everyone in the debate in the US seems to completely miss."

That being said, I don't want HN to be a source of American health care debates any more than you probably do. I'm bored by the pedantics of it all, and I actually live here.

I saw your comment had been downmodded, and I clicked the ^ to bump it back up. It's an edge-case, and not fair imo that you should lose karma over expressing that opinion. However, if you really feel it's off-topic, you should probably flag it instead of posting a one-liner complaint.

<comment><USER8> I'm more concerned that this is a single anecdote. If it was an explanation of the fascinating government subsidized insurance model that the german health care system uses I would approve.</comment></comment></comment>


Germany Is Burning Too Much Coal - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-14/germany-is-burning-too-much-coal <comment><USER2> The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn't make any sense. Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany.

If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.

<comment><USER3> I have never understood why people fear nuclear _and_ don't seem to fear carbon as giscerally or more.

I can understand that nuclear has risks. But people seem to evaluate nuclear in a vacuum, rather than against the carbon sources which currently replace it.

"What do we do with the waste" is a better question when applied to coal.

<comment><USER4> The fear of nuclear power in Germany comes from the Tschernobyl disaster 1986. A life changing event for many Germans. Not beeing able to leave the house. Cutting a lot of foods from your diet because they are contaminated for decades (mushrooms, game meat, berries etc.).

East block countries trying to sell their contaminated food for consumption and it ending up in GDR school kitchens.

Additionally having two superpowers stationing a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs in your country. While at the same time beeing sure that you'd die first in a new world war that would almost surely start in your country and would probably devastate your whole continent beyond beeing suited for human surival.

Then the whole argument that its cleaner and cheaper energy. While you pay for transport, storage and security with your tax money and the company keeps the profits. By storage i mean temporar storage, because no one worldwide has figured out how to safely store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years (Pyramids are 4500 years old and we don't even know how they are build). Thats why most of this waste from the 80s and 90s lies a few km off our coasts in the sea where the UK, Russia and Italian mafia dumped it.

<comment><USER5> _> The fear of nuclear power in Germany comes from the Tschernobyl disaster 1986._

Tschernobyl was almost forgotten, at least by the politicians in power, but then Fukushima happend.

<comment><USER6> No, this fear is still very much alive, even in my generation who was alive back then, but too young to really remember.

Chernobyl is the defining moment of the anti-nuclear movement (and I'm not only talking about active protestors like in Lüchow-Dannenberg, most Germens have some of it inside themselves, even if they don't actively march on the streets).

It is really hard to overestimate the effect of the word "Chernobyl" in Germany.

<comment><USER7> > Chernobyl is the defining moment of the anti-nuclear movement

The movement is much older. I remember, that the anti-nuclear movement was already very active and in heat around 1980-82 (Biblis). The _broad public_ , the _mainstream_ , started accepting this threat with Chernobyl.

<comment><USER6> That makes it the defining moment, IMO. I did not say the "starting moment" or something similar. There is simply nothing that compares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The good news is, that for this year so far, 38% of the electricity in Germany comes from renewable sources. Solar and Wind generation capacity is still growing. But the big energy companies like to use their paid-off coal plants, as it is profitable, and politics isn't currently putting much pressure onto them to stop it. As coal plants cannot be quickly switched on or off, Germany is exporting a lot of electricity into the neighbor countries - whenever the sum out of the renewable sources and the coal produces an electricity surplus. From time to time we even have negative rates at the electricity exchanges.

There is a very quick way to reduce the carbon footprint: use more gas plant. They exist, but they are mostly idle, as gas costs more than coal. Using them rather than the coal plants would have several instant effects: gas produces less pollution, and produces less CO2 than coal for the same amount of energy. Also, much less electricity would be produced, as gas plants can be throttled fast enough to avoid overproduction.

So the carbon could be down quickly, only requiring to be less protective to the coal jobs and the energy companies revenues.

<comment><USER9> About 40% of energy production in Germany is still coal, and 15% nuclear. Nuclear will be shut down by 2022 and coal will be shut down more or less quickly depending on politics. This means that Germany will be looking for a replacement for over half of their energy production within the few next decades.

There is not enough hydroelectric capacity in Germany, so the only viable solution is gas -- in addition to lots of solar and wind. Hence Nord Stream 2. Germany wants to have multiple options for gas providers in order to negotiate good deals.

So yes, gas is definitely the future of German energy production, unless something completely unexpected happens.

<comment><USER10> Maybe France will build more nuclear plants and sell the power to Germany.

<comment><USER8> It currently looks rather that France is not going to build any more nuclear power plants but rather wants to extend their use of renewable energies - which are cheaper than new nuclear power plants.

<comment><USER11> Climate change is wreaking havoc on existing plants, too. The rivers they use to cool them are getting too warm and they're having to shut plants down over the summer (when they actually need the power).

<comment><USER8> It is rarely noted this downside of nuclear. Yes, they can produce electricity 24/7 at full power... until they don't. If there is a technical problem, they have to shut down. As you said, there are environmental conditions forcing them shut down. And if a nuclear power plant shuts down, typically a whole GW or more is dropped from the grid. France has recurrently shortages in electricity production, if too many nuclear power plants are off the grid. In the last winter, in Germany about 50% of the nuclear power plants were off grid for various reasons (mostly maintenance) too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a French person, I can't help but think that this is but temporary. The Germans are extremely smart when it comes to long-term vision, they've always been. I don't doubt for a second that their transitioning away from nuclear will pay dividends on the long run and they'll be on the forefront of that green revolution eventually.

The fact that they have a very strong industry to back up any effort to steer production to greener means of production and consumption is very encouraging for everyone. I hope they succeed.

<comment><USER13> No it will not not 'pay dividends' in the long run because the coal they are burning now instead of perfectly fine nuclear plants will already be in the air.

No amount of future renewable energy justify this policy move.

<comment><USER14> Coal power is about economics, not energy. Germany could easily cover its energy demands. In a wurst case scenario (german pun intended), France and Hungary are able and willing to sell nuclear power.

<comment><USER15> I think a big thing is the demand of having 100% uptime of the grid for everyone.

If there was a list where you could sign up and get paid for having something like an hour of notice until a power cut of one or two hours I think it would be doable to be less perfectionist about this requirement and actually save a lot of peak demand resources and dirty back-up plants.

<comment><USER16> That would be impossible to get through. Currently we're trying to get downtime to below 5 minutes per year for the average German (it's at 17 minutes per year currently). That's 4 nines of reliability, with a move to 5 nines. For every citizen. Many people will not even see any interruption for many years.

This means that Google will be more often down for you than your power.

Going from that standard to the constant failures you suggest would be impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's an interesting real time map of energy production across Europe that illustrates the problem quite well :

[https://www.electricitymap.org/](https://www.electricitymap.org/)

Nordic countries and France stand out (because of hydro and nuclear power, respectively), while the bad apples are in Eastern Europe (especially Poland and Estonia).

Germany does badly given its relative wealth, though.

<comment><USER18> what an amazing resource, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The fact that coal usage _is_ actually declining was mentioned obliquely in paragraph 7.

Virtually the entire article is cheerleading hard for nuclear.

Not mentioned is also the fact that the UK _is_ building a new nuclear plant and it's very expensive. Significantly more expensive than the equivalent in wind/solar would have been even if you assume that they do not continue to decline in price (which they probably will).

<comment><USER20> The UK needs to keep nuclear skills for their military.

Germany does not need that technology, it has neither nuclear weapons, no nuclear weapon production, nor nuclear powered submarines.

</comment></comment><comment> Harvey-Specter I visited Germany last summer and was amazed by how many windmills there were. Everywhere I looked there was a windmill. Obviously this was a country on the forefront of clean energy.

Imagine my surprise when my father-in-law took us to see the open pit mines and drive through the towns, entire towns, that had been moved to make way for coal excavation.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting fact - USA despite its cheap natural gas burns more coal per capita than Germany.

See chart:

[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per- capi...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capita)

Germany should also do better however.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this map is relevant to the discussion.

[https://www.electricitymap.org](https://www.electricitymap.org)

Check it out at different time of the day and night to see the changes in energy sources.

</comment><comment><USER23> They should have subsidised the renewable engeries much longer.

Now we went from nuclear back to coal, which doesn't help anybody.

When they started to subsidise solar and wind, I hoped in the next decades we would have a clean country, but then they stopped it and now we are stuck with coal for much longer than needed :\

<comment><USER24> One of the problems with renewables is that they require extensive (aka costly) maintenance before they've actually offset their own construction cost. I read an article a few years back where one of the examples was that most wind power plants are only profitable after ~15-20 years but require costly maintenance at the 5-10 year mark and from there onward.

</comment></comment><comment> eric-hu Can anyone comment about how liquefied coal is currently used or could be used? As I understand, the resulting products burn much cleaner.

I'm not sure if this would reduce their CO2 emissions, but it should at least reduce other pollutants.

</comment><comment><USER6> The current coalition negotiations between the four parties expected to form a government also include shutting down more coal power stations.

The Greens demand twenty to be shut down, the others want to go slower.

</comment><comment><USER25> Well they just had to close all those nuclear reactors. By contrast France is doing just fine with ~70% nuclear power.

</comment><comment><USER26> Let's also not forget German car makers forcing the EU to dilute emissions limits. All very well having recycling bins all over the place, but when push comes to shove, the attitude is apparently !!!! the environment.</comment>


FDA approves electrical pulse generator device to treat obesity - <AUTHOR> http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm430223.htm

<comment><USER2> Interesting, it seems it follows the same ideas as bariatric surgery, but hopefully less invasive.

Also, the results weren't that dramatic:

"The study found that after 12 months, the experimental group lost 8.5 percent more of its excess weight than the control group. About half (52.5 percent) of the patients in the experimental group lost at least 20 percent of their excess weight, and 38.3 percent of patients in the experimental group lost at least 25 percent of their excess weight."

Unfortunately, from several high-profile bariatric surgery patients, it looks like it's not a long-term solution, I guess neither is this one.

I have a BMI of 34.5, and I know that the only long-term fix is a lifestyle change - I managed to lose 80% of my excess weight by following an extremely strict diet, but I got all of it back in the following 2 years.</comment>


Don't break the chain - bug/feature request - <AUTHOR> http://dontbreakthechain.com/add-to-blog

<comment><AUTHOR> Another nitpick...When you are logged in and go to the add-to-blog page, the js script statement points to Brett's chain instead of the currently logged in user.

Oh, and why don't you jump on the facebook app bandwagon. Could generate more publicity, and who does not like publicity...

A couple weeks in and I am still using the app every day.

Andy

<comment><USER2> Damn. That's pretty bad; seems like more than a nitpick. Thanks. Feel free to email me with stuff like this: brett at dontbreakthechain.com. I've been meaning to put a contact page up, but it's waiting on the multiple chains update.

<comment><USER2> Should be fixed. I've thought about facebook as well but haven't gotten around to it.</comment></comment></comment>


First possible interstellar object detected in our solar system - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/small-asteroid-or-comet-visits-from-beyond-the-solar-system <comment><USER2> Anyone else thinking of Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke right now?

<comment><USER3> I'm thinking more like The Expanse.

<comment><USER4> I just finished the show (season 1 and 2) and it's the best sci-fi I've seen. I find it more epic than BSG. I'm so happy I watched it. I am considering picking up the books now. The science is on point. Flip and burn baby!

<comment><USER5> I wish I had read the books before I watched the TV series. Doing it in the reverse order has made me fairly unmotivated to read, I'm a few chapters a in to the second book and not sure I'll continue.

Having said that, I've been fairly unmotivated to read anything recently due to working long hours and recently having rescued a dog.

Let Ne know how you go with it.

<comment><USER6> I started reading the books only after the first season, and I'm very happy that I've started with the show first - now I read all Avasarala's lines with Shohreh Aghdashloo's voice.

(In general, I find reading after watching a much more pleasant experience - if I read a book first, I form my own image of the characters, which then usually clashes with what's in the movie. If I do it the other way, I just cast the characters I saw in the movie into the book.)

That said, do continue reading - the novels only get better with time, and there's plenty of awesome waiting that the show is nowhere near reaching.

<comment><USER7> I wish show-Avasarala was as abrasive and foul-mouthed as book-Avasarala. That would make it even more fun, but would probably make the show harder to show on TV ;)

<comment><USER6> I agree. Not everyone likes it, but I do appreciate the amount of f-bombs she drops in the book. AFAIK though, the issue was not only with family- friendliness of the show, but also with the actress not liking to swear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Wikipedia article for this object: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/2017_U1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/2017_U1)

</comment><comment><USER9> A probe sent out by some remote civilisation, it is on its way through our part of the Milky Way galaxy. It used Sol as a source of gravity to slingshot itself on its way in the direction of Pegasus. It also did some measurements while it was at it, even though this system is not its final destination.

Yes, totally made up but in theory it would be possible.

<comment><USER8> > okket: A remote civilisation that has no problem waiting hundred thousand > years or longer for a probe to reach its destiny.

> pavlov: At 44 km/s, the object is travelling slightly faster than Pioneer > 10. Seems too slow for an interstellar probe?

> QAPereo: A probe should show signs of acceleration, not freefall... unless > you anted the probe to be stealthy. That is a disturbing thought.

Of course it has FTL, but they want to observe us for an extended period in our natural state, not riled up by an FTL object moving through our system and parking in orbit.

They also wanted to see how long it would take us to detect it. I'm not sure how well we did.

<comment><USER10> > I'm not sure how well we did.

Well it's already leaving again after it completed its maneuver around our sun, and we haven't even a proper telescope pointed at it yet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 91800 kmh per hour incoming, 158400 kmh outgoing. This space puppy just gained 66600 kmh from passing through our solar gravity well. Not particularly relevant, but very interesting!

</comment><comment><USER12> Prepare for thousands of clickbaity articles on mainstream media in the next few days.

</comment><comment><USER13> Might not be interstellar [https://mobile.twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/923223634386...](https://mobile.twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/923223634386206720)

<comment><USER14> Please also read

[https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/mpml/conversations/messa...](https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/mpml/conversations/messages/33145)

> AscendingNode's tweet is in error: It's using the basic find_orb fit (which > tries to fit the object's observations to a parabolic orbit) without taking > into account the fact that it COULD be interstellar.

> You'll notice quite clearly, that in the follow-up tweets they make, that > they give residuals in the orbit on the order of 6-9 whole arcseconds. It's > quite bothersome that everyone I've been talking to has been re-quoting the > tweet all day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Technically, it would be the second. First in solar system was Voyager I:

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

<comment><USER16> It's an interstellar object, but not _in_ the solar system (it used to be, but wasn't interstellar until it left)...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like to imagine some alien civilizations version of Voyager 1. Perhaps they sent us their own golden record with difficult to decipher pictographs and samples of pictures and music.

<comment><USER18> If it is, given its trajectory, it's probably not meant for us. I would be nice to keep an eye on it though -- it'd be fun to get a complete scan and hope it's doing the same in return. It's too bad it's likely too late to rendezvous with it and get some samples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Off topic but can someone answer this for me? Are the stars in our night sky part of our galaxy or no? It seems such a stupid question to ask, but when I look online it says we have one star, our Sun, whereas other galaxies have one or multiple - for instance a galaxy with two stars would be called a Binary System.

So where are the stars in our night sky? Are they even further away than Uranus, Neptune.., but so bright we see them anyway?

EDIT: Thanks, all! Makes sense.

<comment><USER20> Either I didn't get your question, or you're a bit confused about the structure of the universe. Not a problem.

There's Earth, it's a planet orbiting our star, Sol AKA the Sun, in our solar system. A star has plenty of bodies orbiting around it, dust, asteroids, planets, so the whole group is called a solar system.

There's other stars "next" to us, which in turn have dust, asteroids and planets orbiting around them. So they also are solar systems, since all stars have stuff orbiting around them.

Stars (/solar systems) tend to cluster together in a galaxy. A galaxy is composed of billions of stars.

Earth/our Solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy, so most of the stuff we see in the sky are stars that are not very far from us and/or part of the Milky Way galaxy.

The closest galaxy from ours is Andromeda, which is in turn composed of billions of stars, and countless planets.

So, the order is planet (Earth) -> star (Sun) -> (grouped into a) solar system -> galaxy (Milky Way)

Binary systems are solar systems which do not have a single star, but they have TWO! and these stars orbit each other. A galaxy has millions of binary systems (not sure how rare they are)

Uranus, Neptune, etc. are part of our solar system, so yeah, the stars you see are farther beyond.

EDIT: apparently I'm a bit confused as well, as star/planet groups are called planetary systems, and only ours is called the Solar System (from Sol/the Sun). The more you know.

Does this help and answer your question?

<comment><USER21> This, and also:

You can see some other galaxies with the naked eye, but not make out any of the stars within them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies#Naked- eye_gal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies#Naked-eye_galaxies)

Note that the Magellanic Clouds are basically orbiting our galaxy, and that the next closest independent galaxy is Andromeda, 2 and a half million light years away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Our asteroid detection system is still very pitiful if a 400m large object is only detected four days _after_ its closest approach.

<comment><USER23> "closest approach" is very unquantified, and 400 meter is a very small object in a large space. It's a hard problem, probably not very prioritized either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps it's a starseed, wandering between the rim of the galaxy and the galactic core. To be closely followed by an Outsider ship.

<comment><USER25> Good luck commander

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Has anyone done the calculation yet for what would have happened if it collided with Earth?

<comment><USER27> [http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/](http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/)

Have fun destroying Earth!

<comment><USER28> I just ran it, the earth is fine :(

<comment><USER27> Have some fun with hypothetical Relativistic impactors, it's a blast. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The is the best way to disguise a probe and the fact it came from above the elliptic might mean the aliens wanted to make sure it wouldnt collide with any natural bodies

</comment><comment><USER30> This surprised me at first, because i thought Halley's Comet was also interstellar...then looked it up, and sure enough its not...So, yeah for new things!

<comment><USER31> Halley's comet returns every ~75 years. How could it possibly be interstellar?

<comment><USER32> Is it not possible for the sun to capture an interstellar object?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Would it be possible at all to intercept it for analysis?

<comment><USER34> It's moving far too fast in the worst possible direction, and it's already far too far away.

If we'd known it was coming, we could in principle have gotten something out to its point of closest Earth approach, but the object's velocity means even that would've been a flyby with no possibility of rendezvous outside possibly an impactor.

As the matter stands today, anything we'd send after it would have to overcome a velocity disadvantage of something like 40 kilometers per second - in other words, traversing the diameter of our planet three or four times every second - on a vector pointed near as nevermind to straight away from us. That's not something our propulsion technology is so far even close to being able to do.

<comment><USER32> That doesn't make sense. If the Earth is 12,000km in diameter, surely it will take a few minutes to traverse and not multiple times per second?

Edit: Oh never mind, you meant the velocity needed to catch up with it.

<comment><USER34> Of course you're right. Evidently I cannot accurately exponentiate before coffee!

But, yes, the velocity difference is a killer. The closest we've ever come was the Apollo-Saturn stack, and even that only had ~9km/s left over after reaching escape velocity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It'd be great if we had some general-purpose probes that could be redirected to, at least, do a flyby.

</comment><comment><USER36> False. Any piece of gold in our planet is an interstellar object.

</comment><comment><USER27> _The object approached our solar system from almost directly "above" the ecliptic, the approximate plane in space where the planets and most asteroids orbit the Sun, so it did not have any close encounters with the eight major planets during its plunge toward the Sun. On Sept. 2, the small body crossed under the ecliptic plane just inside of Mercury's orbit and then made its closest approach to the Sun on Sept. 9. Pulled by the Sun's gravity, the object made a hairpin turn under our solar system, passing under Earth's orbit on Oct. 14 at a distance of about 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) -- about 60 times the distance to the Moon. It has now shot back up above the plane of the planets and, travelling at 27 miles per second (44 kilometers per second) with respect to the Sun, the object is speeding toward the constellation Pegasus. _

Sooooo cool! I wonder if the system of origin will eventually be determined?

<comment><USER37> I doubt that's possible, although it would be very interesting.

<comment><USER38> "The CNEOS team plotted the object's current trajectory and even looked into its future. A/2017 U1 came from the direction of the constellation Lyra, cruising through interstellar space at a brisk clip of 15.8 miles (25.5 kilometers) per second."

So we have an origin. However they don't give the error margin so is probably not possible to pin point the exact origin without further calculations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> That it passes the ecliptic from that angle, that close to the sun, feels "deliberate". Like aiming for bull's eye on the solar system, from above. Iss

<comment><USER40> It's not deliberate, it's gravity. The sun has been pulling this object towards itself, because that's how gravity works.

<comment><USER41> In space, the gravity well we more likely create big orbits. Since there's no air slowing objects down, they won't all fall down to the sun.

For example, it's very energy intensive to go visit Mercury.

<comment><USER40> Right, but that's for objects travelling more tangentially. An object travelling kind of towards the sun will get redirected more towards the sun, when the sun is the largest nearby mass.

It's unlikely that an object would be pulled right into the sun though, just redirected by its close encounter so it flies off again in another direction.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The EU may have just banned the anonymous sale of online goods and services - <AUTHOR> http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/01/13/the-eu-may-have-just-banned-anonymous-sale-of-online-goods-and-services/

<comment><USER2> This is incredibly distressing news for anyone who allows purchases with BTC. For the rest of us, I don't know what exactly this changes in the privacy domain; anonymous sales were never really part of anyone's business model that I can think of.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a question that I fear may be taken the wrong way:

How does this affect people who only do business in the US?</comment>


Is your brain healthy? A Stanford neurologist offers tips - <AUTHOR> https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/02/21/is-your-brain-healthy-a-stanford-neurologist-offers-tips/ <comment><USER2> There's a connection between diets and depression Standard diet didn't do for me. (Carbs such as potatoes /rice/grain w. Every meal, sugar in between and meat+salad for lunch) Keto on the other hand cut out all cars worked wonders for me</comment>


The Amateur Future of Space Travel - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/magazine/01nasa-t.html?ex=1340942400&en=53ede2c81e72c38f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the part that I think many of us building their web applications might agree with ....

Much of mechanical innovation boils down to finding just the right compromises to such puzzles. Many of us think of invention or innovation as a wholly conceived, brand-new, big-leap-forward creation unlike anything that has preceded it. But much of mechanical success involves fiddling with the inherent conflicts within a device until you find a tiny interstice among the countervailing forces, that sweet spot, where the device suddenly does what you want it to do. In the case of the glove, the sweet spot is the precise tradeoff of restraint and flexibility that will allow for maximum dexterity.

</comment><comment><USER2> Too bad that it is such an incredibly annoying article. Why do they waste 8 pages of my time, if they could sum up everything nicely in one page? Could someone relate what the incredible invention turned out to be, because somehow I can't bear to read that article to the end.

I am still able to read books, so it can't be an ADD problem...</comment>


Ask HN: Laptop for girlfriend? - <AUTHOR> HNers, any recommendations for a laptop for my girlfriend with following considerations?
* Windows 10
* Not too big/heavy. Preferably 13/14 inch display - preferably higher res. * Good build quality even if that means paying more.
* Battery that yields at least 5-6 hours of real-world usage (Excel, lots of it, social internet stuff) * Possibly buying in Europe with a German keyboard.. (Would buy the US version if there is a excellent laptop missing just this.)
I'm wary of Lenovo after Superfish. Would prefer to steer away unless things have demonstrably changed and hear better about Lenovo from HNers.
And, No, she is not considering running Linux, neither does she want to use a Mac. She is used to her ways with some legacy stats tools that work well with Windows.
Any inputs welcome.. <comment><USER2> Dell XPS 13. It's light, it's got the battery life and it's competitively priced. More importantly, it's not Lenovo.

<comment><USER3> I second the XPS 13. The 3200x1800 has revolutionised how I view excel sheets with tons of columns.

And yep, I get about 5 to 6 hours of usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Coming from a rMBP, I definitely appreciate the ability to see more at once if needed and see crisper text in general. XPS 13 seems to be a popular choice. I will ask her to definitely try it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious why not just ask her or even why get involved at all since it's not an area of immediate and direct deep expertise?

Laptops differ in their tradeoffs and better and worse sets of tradeoffs vary by individual. I love the Dell Precision M7510 I currently have and I loved the Thinkpad X series it replaced as my daily driver and between them are two very very different sets of tradeoffs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. She came up to me asking to find choices in the sense I described. Ultimately it'd be her who tries it and makes the final choice.

My objective is to get pointers like what you just gave - Dell Precision M7510 so I can research and give her a few options to choose from :-) Thanks!

<comment><USER4> The 7510 probably will not meet the tradeoffs of most people. It is heavy and has mediocre battery life. On the other hand, it can be had with more CPU than most desktops and ECC RAM and a fair amount of GPU and a lot of screen. Conversely, a ThinkPad X series is small and light and sips battery while still being reasonably powerful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i really struggle if i cant recommend the x1 carbon because i love it so damn much but if you must avoid lenovo the asus zenbook would probably be my next choice, that or an xps13

</comment><comment><USER6> Any of the ASUS ZenBook laptops. THey are reasonibly priced and good if you don't need a tun of CPU power.

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont suppose she needs the CPU power in the raw sense, as in she is not going to run builds or render anything. But, I have seen her using Excel like a Pro with ginormous sheets and sophisticated formulas. So, a good CPU room would be useful I think.

Asus ZenBook looks neat. Will definitely check it out.</comment></comment>


A proof that 12=13. Just look at the picture and count the people. (pic) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tamu-commerce.edu/math/strange_but_true/people.gif <comment><USER2> This is driving me crazy. Time to break out an image editor.

 _edit_ : if you can't let this go either, save yourself a few minutes: <http://tlrobinson.net/misc/illuuusions.png>

<comment><USER3> Some time ago I found this picture and worked on it until I could generate similar animations on my own. It's tricky: the guy that disappears is gone not because it's divided in two parts and both are made into different guys; but because lots of little parts are made into different guys, so making a disappearing complete guy. That is: lots of different parts in different guys disappear in a very obvious way, and if you sum all of them, they complete a single guy (it's not easy to explain, but there is not a single disappearing guy, but a lot of tiny parts of different guys disappearing at once).

Try to make it work on paper to understand how it works. Notice that the upper half of the "paper" should be cut in two halves, and those two halves _have_ to be of a different size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ingenious. Made my (early) morning. Reminds me of this proof: "The less you know, the more you make" <http://tinyurl.com/yu2swe>

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't have time to look at this carefully, but this has to be a dissection fallacy like the ol' "64=65" one.

For geometric examples, see <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DissectionFallacy.html> .

<comment><USER3> No, it's not the dissection fallacy, it's a different trick. I gave some details on another post on this thread...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The guy on the far left counts as an extra person after the shift (and the loss of the top of his head).

<comment><USER7> This guy is right! Im amazed I thought you all here were smart, it took me 60 seconds to figure it. And im a dumb arse who uses LAMP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, I definitely stared at that for 15 minutes. I know it's trickery, but it's still pretty brain-twistingly cool.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen So it cuts a line out of like seven people and makes a thirteenth dude, right?

</comment><comment><USER9> Wasn't this puzzle originally invented by Henry Dudeney like 100 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER10> No one's seen the disappearing square trick in math class?

<comment><USER3> I didn't... How does it work?

<comment><USER10> <http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=810090>

Same sort of idea - makes use of deviations in the picture that are hard to pick out.

<comment><USER3> Ah, but it's not it. The one in the animation is not a geometric problem, it's more subtle (I solved two years ago, see my other comment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is insanely cool, but...

optical illusion != proof

<comment><USER12> Not an optical illusion. Twelve guys really become thirteen. But they have to pay a price for that: they're somewhat shorter, their heads are slightly smashed in, etc. Basically the same as what happened when hunter-gatherers switched to agriculture: more people but less healthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is worse than the stuff that ends up on the reddit front-page. Please, let's try to keep this stuff away from yc.</comment>


Launched: Search engine for open-source mailing lists - <AUTHOR> http://markmail.org/ Cool new search engine that makes the content of open-source mailing lists actually findable. <comment><USER2> Some good coverage at [http://ajaxian.com/archives/markmail-search-and- analyze-emai...](http://ajaxian.com/archives/markmail-search-and-analyze- email-traffic)</comment>


How I stopped worrying and switched to C++ for my Bob Scheme VM - <AUTHOR> http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/11/30/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-switched-to-c-for-my-bob-scheme-vm/ <comment><USER2> Nice to read an article about someone successfully using C++ in an ordinary way, even with a little OO to it. We know it happens all the time given the volume of C++ in development.

But so many articles are like "C++ isn't OO", "C++ has awful syntax", "C/C++ is insecure", "ZOMG templates", etc.

<comment><USER3> The problem with C++ isn't that it has any one of these problems; the problem is that different people have different opinions on what the problems are.

<comment><USER4> I'm currenty on a project, where C++ is used as "C", and I'm quite fine with this. In couple of the thread loops, there is setjmp handler waiting for longjmp... It's also waiting for the unaware new programmer on the team to use RAII, and not suspect it's failing. (We use longjmp/setjmp not only for error situations, but to handle other exceptional situations and recover from them). One of the platform we are targeting simply does not support C++ exceptions.

<comment><USER5> How do you guys deal with the long compilation times? For me, I wouldn't mind C++...if it only compiled faster. Even just two or three C++ files take ~5 seconds to compile on my machine. Is this not an unacceptable amount of time for you, or do you have tools to make this go below the 3 second threshold? In my mind, this is a serious problem that is keeping me from using C++ more. I try to do as much as possible in C for now.

<comment><USER6> \- For simple 'syntax checking' compiles, compile only the module ('.cpp file') you're working in. This requires a proper IDE or at least some editor support - for VS it's ctrl-f7.

\- For 'whole-project' compiles, limit the amount of them to the absolute minimum. Use unit tests to test fundamental functionality rather than running the whole program.

\- Use a compiler that supports precompiled headers, understand how it works and use it as it's designed.

\- Pay attention to your #include graph. Only include headers where they're used (i.e., in the .cpp file and not in the header where it's possible), use Cheshire cat where possible, and put as much into the precompiled header as possible.

Doing all of these things make C++ compilation bearable, but still it's a nice change when I write code in C# or 'scripting' languages and compilation times disappears. It's one of the more annoying aspects of C++, but despite it and a bunch of other nitpicks, it's still my favorite language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For one of my current projects, I found myself in a similar position. I actually ended up picking Go instead of C++, since it's a language I've been wanting to learn for a while, and the feature set intrigues me. I have yet to see how this decision pans out though.

<comment><USER8> Well, I already had the VM implemented in Python, so I really wanted to do that in C or C++. Go was not an option because (1) one of the goals was to understand how other VMs are implemented, and most VMs today are C/C++, and (2) I wanted a language without garbage collection (which Go has, AFAIK)

<comment><USER9> Perhaps Vala would also be a viable language for this sort of thing.

I've been pondering writing a GC in Vala to learn more about them, and see how suitable Vala is to low-level work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bob language and VM already exists... :)

<http://drdobbs.com/open-source/184409401>

</comment><comment><USER11> Is your code posted somewhere?

<comment><USER8> The 3rd and 4th words in the linked post point to Bob's Google Code page (<http://code.google.com/p/bobscheme/>) where its code is stored.

The code is wholly in the public domain, by the way - <http://code.google.com/p/bobscheme/source/browse/COPYING></comment></comment>


Bestselling authors take out full-page New York Times ad against Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/08/authors-ad-new-york-times-petition-amazon

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately this episode brings the point of Amazon being a monopoly ( intentional or unintentional) when it comes to the selling books. This does not sound good for writers or the readers.</comment>


Librem 5 July Update - <AUTHOR> https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-july-update/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, they are building their own mobile compositor based on wlroots: [https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phoc](https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phoc)

This is the right way to do an open source phone by adopting existing modern desktop Linux tech. Instead of going your own Androidy path like Sailfish/Jolla is doing.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. Though I also wish someone would tackle this from a hardware perspective too. I'm looking forward to being able to run various linux programs on a real linux phone, but many are never going to be touch-screen friendly let alone mobile-layout friendly. A phone with a little pointer nub and left- click/right-click buttons would be sweet to me...

<comment><USER4> I mean, I think if you can run real Linux programs, and a lot of your "daily use" stuff works with touch, you can connect a Bluetooth mouse/keyboard combo when you need it. (I already keep one in my car.) And being Linux, you can probably script a bunch of stuff (when using your keyboard) to "just work" when you're not using your keyboard.

The important part is you won't need to special case what you can run on a phone versus what you can run on a desktop. A lot of stupid/simple Windows apps I wish I could run on my phone. But even if you are on Windows Phone you could only run apps meant for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Always enjoy reading these updates. It's refreshing for a company to explain their progress in this kind of technical detail, another bonus of a free/open source product. Congrats to the Purism team for the progress, looking forward to seeing the new Linux phone.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone who follows this more closely know what mapping support there will be? I worry that it will be hard to match the quality of Google/Apple Maps with free software. I've tried using OsmAnd, but it's just a terrible experience compared to commercial map apps. This is a big deal for me and I imagine many others, because losing the traffic data and turn-by-turn navigation of commercial map apps is a dealbreaker, but allowing me to get rid of these most invasive apps would be a huge selling point, and would probably get me to buy the device all on its own.

<comment><USER7> Good real-time traffic data is an emergent property of being an invasive platform. Maybe there's a possibility of opting into position information uploading that goes to some open mothership(?) or decentralized mesh, but this is not going to ever be as good as google passively leveraging and aggregating its millions of phones in cars on the road.

OsmAnd definitely has some rough edges but it has rudimentary turn by turn navigation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> the latest shipping update is still Q3 2019 (so 2-5 months away) and yet the marketing page still has a lot of _hardware_ that is TBD: memory, cameras, and battery.

who wants to bet it will be pushed back to 2020?

<comment><USER9> Which is my I'm not pre-ordering, I'm waiting till the final specs are released. Also I need to be able to view PDF documents, so probably gonna be a while.

<comment><USER10> For PDF viewing, Evince seems to be working already: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8YMc06RMrc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8YMc06RMrc)

<comment><USER11> I remember Evince working on GNU/Linux phones already 10 years ago, so yeah, I wouldn't worry about PDFs :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Have they said anything about PWA support? If PWA is supported and on par with Chrome on Android this would allow a lot of PWA-compliant web apps (like Twitter, Gmail, and many more) to be ready to go right away. While not "native" the app ecosystem would at least have a chance to be there at the time of release.

<comment><USER13> They're working on a browser, so yes... I believe PWA will be possible since they're just rebranded HTML+JS apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks like the UI is coming together nicely. My only question is what battery life will look like on these phones. I'm guessing terrible for the first gen.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is so exciting! I can't wait to buy one.</comment>


Letter from the publisher: Delivery of Union-Tribune affected by computer virus - <AUTHOR> https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/about/sd-delivery-of-union-tribune-and-other-newspapers-affected-by-computer-virus-20181229-story.html <comment><USER2> From the post: "The virus affected computer systems of Tribune Publishing Co. Those systems are still shared by the Union-Tribune and Los Angeles Times under a service agreement with Tribune, which owned both publications prior to their sale in June. The Union-Tribune and Times are now privately held, but are still transitioning away from the Tribune systems.

The attack seemed to begin late Thursday night and by Friday had spread to critical areas needed to publish the paper. Technology teams from both companies made significant progress against the threat, but were unable to clear all systems before press time."

</comment><comment><USER3> All military agencies, including that of the United States will be watching this with interest. The ability to stop the presses for a newspaper critical of the administration on a given day, say before the start of a war or around the time of a coup, is a very useful capability. It allows an important story to get drowned in the news cycle and can reduce the level of outrage at the population level by desynchronizing it.

<comment><USER4> Are you ignoring the fact that internet and TV are much quicker to react and much more consumed source of information than newspapers ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This site is geo blocked in Europe.

<comment><USER6> Question for anyone who knows: would it be against European regulation to paste some key paragraphs from the article here to summarise?

<comment><USER7> No. It's just text.</comment></comment></comment>


Is the FCC barring people from commenting on Net Neutrality?? - <AUTHOR> I'm on the site (https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express), right now.  But, the site responds so slowly as to appear unusable.  Is this by design? <comment><USER2> If 'by design' you mean 'not designed to manage a heavy load that's probably several orders of magnitude larger than normal,' then the answer is probably 'yes'.

I just got through, but it did take a couple of tries.

<comment><USER3> As much as I'd love to think it's some yuge consipracy,

> "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity."

In other words, it's probably the case that the server just couldn't handle the load.</comment></comment>


Pair Programming Decreases Developer Efficacy - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H9B2o3ZfhSnQn2ryZPE6alSXDOge7ZT70VRlimRphqw/edit <comment><USER2> This is a lightweight comment which draws from one published paper, a blog, and a NYT opinion piece.

Its sense of incredulity is no further advanced than the opposition to pair programming in the 1990s, when it was one of the practices promoted by XP. It does not, as I hoped, tie together the decades of research studies on the topic.

For a much more detailed summary of the topic, much more along the lines of what I wanted to read here, see the chapter by Laurie Williams on the topic in "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It".</comment>


Sabine Hossenfelder on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, and Truth - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=walaNM7KiYA <comment><AUTHOR> Of particular interest is the part about strong emergence, but all in all this is really a fascinating interview.</comment>


Translating an ARM iOS App to Intel macOS Using Bitcode - <AUTHOR> https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode <comment><USER2> The intro makes it sound like this could be feasible for translating x86 Mac apps into ARM Mac apps.

> So, what if the Mac switched to using ARM chips instead of Intel? Well, as > you can see, Apple could use Bitcode to translate every Bitcode-enabled app > on the Mac App Store, without consulting developers, so it would be ready to > go on day one.

But:

> Apple doesn't enable Bitcode for submissions to the Mac App Store today

Right. The flag to enable bitcode isn't even visible in Xcode for Mac apps. There's no such thing as Mac/x86 bitcode yet, in or out of the MAS. And:

> ARC appears to use some inline assembly, which means you'll need to disable > ARC for a project for arm64-to-x86 translation to succeed right now.

So this approach will only work on Objective-C programs, written in a pre-2011 style -- which I'd bet is a vanishingly small fraction of the apps on the MAS today.

It's a neat exercise in what is possible for a simplest-possible-app, but it's hard to imagine Apple would actually use this approach. It'd require them to ship a couple big new features in Xcode, and then for everyone on the MAS to recompile their apps using those features. Easier all around to just add a new architecture in Xcode the normal way, and have developers compile fat binaries.

<comment><USER3> _"ARC appears to use some inline assembly, which means you 'll need to disable ARC for a project for arm64-to-x86 translation to succeed right now."_

That's fairly easily fixed, certainly if you're Apple. They already have the equivalent x86 code (Swift and modern Objective-C couldn't exist without it), so they could detect the specific inline ARM code fragment and replace it by the equivalent inline x86 code.

<comment><USER4> This seems like it would be very fragile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is rather "embed intermediate representation, extract, run another target's back end, and link". I was hoping this would be explaining how to go from ARM by uplifting executable to LLVM IR and retargeting for Intel. This is notionally already possible with ELF and PE executables using McSema ([https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema](https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema)).

If anyone is working on this please email me (address in profile), it's something we slated for a future research project and I'd love to talk.

<comment><USER6> >McSema and remill were developed and are maintained by Trail of Bits, funded by and used in research for DARPA and the US Department of Defense.

<comment><USER7> So?

<comment><USER8> Don't tell them where the internet came from, there ain't enough tinfoil in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like we're reinventing the AS/400 piecemeal:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i#Instruction_set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i#Instruction_set)

[http://ibmsystemsmag.com/blogs/you-and-i/archive/timi- protec...](http://ibmsystemsmag.com/blogs/you-and-i/archive/timi-protecting- investments-and-integrity-in-ibm-i/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I would be _very_ surprised (and impressed!) if Apple managed to pull this off. With the bitcode transition on watchOS Apple had full control over the ABI and architecture that they were going to target: this isn't the case for x86. Sure, this works for the very simple case presented here, but I forsee it quickly breaking down for any non-trivial application. At the very least, it will not work correctly on _every_ application.

</comment><comment><USER10> Alternatives:

1\. WebAssembly

2\. A subset of LLVM-IR that's architecture independent. PNacl from Google used this across chip architectures

<comment><USER4> Neither of these would help migrate current Mac apps.

<comment><USER10> I meant, they are alternatives for Apple to consider, instead of reinventing the wheel on a cross architecture IR. Of course they won't help _current_ Mac apps that don't have IR in those formats

<comment><USER4> I don't think we really have a "cross architecture IR" yet.

<comment><USER10> Who's "we"? If you mean Apple, their IR (bitcode) is alomst a 100% the same as LLVM-IR, so it is not really Apple's. Aside from WebAssembly and PNacl cited in my parent comment, there's .net IR, JVM byte code, yada yada yada ..

The universe is teeming with cross architecture IRs. Eventually, LLVM will have a cross platform LLVM-IR, which will possibly be even more impactful than WebAssembly has been in it's short lifespan</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>