iheartmemcache

I read your post, thought 'hmm sort of powershelly with a bit of awk', clicked on your Github project page and saw Powershell was listed as the first 'Software with Similar Goals to Osh'.

I've been searching for the 'panacea' of shells (and/or auxilary shell tools/hacks that dup() fd's 0,1,2 to enhance existing shells) that hits that same 'sweet spot' you describe. As such, over the last ~15 years I've been through a litany of setups, ranging from:

- the standard "bash/zsh/fish" approach (where you extend the shell) to

- the "scsh/ipython/eshell" approach (where you bring an inferior shell's functionality into a language) to,

- the screen/tmux approach (where you take a shell and then layer functionality over it). I.e., for directory navigation, I'd written my own f-recency+bookmark system that would hook 'cd <tab>' and generate a pane sort of like Midnight Commander to nav around

I'm not sure where I'm going with this other than, I feel your pain and I'd imagine tons of other people do/did as well. Powershell is painfully slow and RAM heavy but the ability to add custom properties(!), providers, access the registry, and manipulate all of these objects as you'd like. Your project definitely looks like an interesting take on things as well. At least we're making some progress, I suppose ;)

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(!) This is incredibly powerful since you can take a path, like C:\users\foo\downloads\video\, take file item, and then have Powershell invoke an executable to extend functionality out. If Windows doesn't have "Length" or "Encoder" as a property on the file out-of-the-box, you can just use an auxilary tool (say, ffprobe), "mapcar" the exec to the list-of-files, grep out the Length: field, and bam, that file now has Length. ``ls|where Length -gt 15'' ends up being pretty magical.

This will vary from state to state, but in MA anyone who holds a class D (i.e. standard consumer vehicle) license is also allowed to ride any moped that's 49cc or below. I think there's now a yearly registration fee[1] that the owner must pay. So, for example, if I have a moped in good standing with the state, anyone with a valid drivers license is allowed to borrow it and legally ride it[2].

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[1] I want to say I paid something like ~30 USD, but this was ~10 years ago. Unlike a standard vehicle, however, there is no inspection check pre-requisite for safety nor emissions. I think the fee is purely for tags. Helmets are definitely a requirement though.

[2] AFAIK there are no additional insurance requirements though. There weren't any ~10 year ago when I one, but I can't remember if that's because my comprehensive car insurance did double-duty in the event were I to, say, hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk and they were to sustain damage.

I was primarily addressing parent re: the classification of security vs. commodity. I agree with you 100% that the danger lays with the investor and it falls under the designation of a 'security' without a doubt[0].

And again, you're right - the SEC doesn't take kindly to unregulated capital raising. (There's a reason why the designation of 'accredited investor[2]' had capital requirements to begin with-- to be legally invest in an ICO, or any block-chain based currency, you have to either have a net worth of >1MM or an earned income of >200k (>300k if filing with a spouse) for the last two years.) Investor safety isn't really what we're discussing here though, so much as which federal agency has regulatory control.

I was going to basically say what JumpCrisscross said, but he beat me to the punch[3]. Until we see some federal case law to set precedent, it's anyones game.

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[0] "On July 25, 2017, the SEC issued a Report of Investigation under Section 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934... determining that DAO Tokens were securities."

[1] https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-and-bulletins/ib_co...

[2] https://investor.gov/additional-resources/news-alerts/alerts...

[3] After clicking on his profile, it was all made clear, haha

(Not a CPA or tax attorney, consult your regionally certified folks for specifics. Just parroting what the IRS has published for consumer-consumption.)

At the national level, the IRS declared Bitcoin pretty clearly in Notice 2014-21 for 2015 onwards as strictly a capital asset and not as a currency backed by a foreign nation state. Q/A #7 is the most pertinent.

The implications on ICOs for an investor under the dominion of the IRS would be nearly nothing, as it's treated as a capital asset (valued upon purchase at FMV, and then again upon sale, once again, at FMV). Think of it like buying MSFT at $foo, selling at $bar, then paying capital gains on your gross less fees. Relevant publications are the 544 if you're trading, the 525 if you're mining. All service/product based income Bitcoin must be declared in a 1099-MISC.

The last page is dedicated to a love-note saying "hey, so listen, you're 100% subject to the standard "failure to report (correctly or not) tax evasion penalties, so uh pay us".

If you're offering an ICO yourself, things are going to get an order or two of magnitude more complicated, I'd imagine. No idea how it's classified but I'd imagine your regulatory reporting burdens will be somewhere between pink sheets and a publicly traded NYSE post-Sarbox company

Edit: On second thought, it might be higher since you're very arguably operating a FinEx. "Know your customer" rules a la banking regulations might apply (i.e. filling out a SAR and filing with FinCEN). I'd definitely speak with a tax attorney who's worked on FINRA secondary market filings though.

Dang I read the first paragraph of the article and immediately went searching for the real papers since I didn't expect any media outlet to include them at the bottom, but here they are for anyone who made the same mistake I did! https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05024 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378

Not a cosmologist but here's my go at the de Graff paper. (Let's get this out of the way, the title is click-bait and the paper/researchers makes no such claims as to anything near 50%. New Scientist is trolling for hits with the word "half" or the journalist is fundamentally misunderstanding the work.) In de Graff, et al, they claim 30% of "90% of the missing baryonic matter [that composes the ~25% of our total universe observable from within our light cone]" has been found in the CMB structured as filaments between galaxies. They claim there's effectively a planar network layered on top of Minkowski space composed this baryonic matter. The temperature was at this "Goldilocks" midrange no one had previously analyzed (ranging from 10^5-10^7K). This wasn't previously found because people were searching "only the lower and higher temperature end of the warm-hot baryons, leaving the majority of the baryons still unobserved(9)". [See "Warm-hot baryons comprise 5-10 percent of filaments in the cosmic web.", Nature, Eckert et al for more about baryons of this composition.]

Additionally, these baryons have 10x the density of what we observe (so this could potentially be evidence for the first stable baryonic matter composed of second generation quarks, or more likely the binding energies are different from our standard uud/udd nucleon quarks) permeating the universe, and where the roads in the network meet ("dark matter haloes"), you have embedded galaxies and galaxy clusters. They continue with their analytic methods of the CMASS data, and claim within the framework 30% of the total baryonic content (which, again, all analytical methods put this into no more than ~25%) is composed of this form of this matter. I skimmed their methods and it seemed to at least logically hold -- they are using the appropriate data (SDSS 12) and didn't cherry-pick their galaxy pairs (so, no p-hacking here!).

(To contextualize [hopefully without misrepresenting their positions], Lurie and Vlad both think/thought that axiomatic set theory is not a proper mathematical foundation. Their disagreement lays in how to construct the reformalization of mathematics (Univalent Foundations vs Higher Topos Theory).

A (very rough) analogy would be the general consensus of climate change scientists agreeing on global warming being the result of the rapid re-release of fossil fuels into the ecosystem but disagreeing on whether the cause is from shipping container barges or the rapid industrialization of the BRIC nations.)

Here's what's regarded as the seminal resource[1] on Univalent Foundations. "Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of Mathematics" which Vlad was working on at IAS. Not only mathematicians but logicians and computer scientists have made large contributions to this work. Names like Awodey and Robert Harper will certainly sound familiar to the C.S. crowd here.

[1]https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/

WYSIWYG is kind of limiting though. I.e., I can use mermaid[1] way faster than I can use Visio. I can type out a mathematics expression way faster in TeX than I can using Word and their (greatly improved, I'll give them that) Equation Editor. Hell, I'm barely 'proficient' at the AutoDesk toolset, but I can usually out-model assemblies using their LISP interface over someone with a SpaceMouse Pro[2].

Generally though, you don't need the table or graph to be "readable" if you're the one constructing the content for others to consume, since you've already modeled the structure of the content within your head. Those -item1, -item2, --subitem1 demarcations are already internalized in your head. (Though, if we're talking about a platform for capturing data/mind-mapping/outlining/note-taking, this may not be entirely true, I admit.)

Even Adobe opts for a non-WYSIWYG DITA/SGML for their professional content management systems if only because publishing a book or magazine becomes a editorial nightmare. (In publishing, they have separations of controls just like we have separations of concerns. Our graphics and front-end guys have control over the .css and what-have-you, while our data guys will have control of the schema, and our app guys will have control of the binary; likewise, they'll have someone in charge of typesetting, someone who performs the layout management so the interstitial ads look consistent within your magazines theme or whatever, someone generating the content, and then an editor who finally signs off on it.[3]) Now that I think about it, a magazine has many source-control-management problems quite similar to what we have.

Magic sequences are pretty brilliant, I'll give you that. If it 'degrades gracefully' (i.e., when copied into a standard instance of notepad.exe or Nano, it's still grokable), that hybrid solution might be the closest panacea we have. Keep on working on that project, it has tons of interesting, orthogonal avenues to explore[4]

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[1] https://github.com/knsv/mermaid

[2] https://www.amazon.com/3DX-700040-3Dconnexion-SpaceMouse-Pro... Pretty much the paragon of HIDs for CAD, in my limited use. For the last 10% of touchups it's second to none, but at the project level it's still slower than using the LISP derivative once you build up a sufficient set of macros.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing ArborText and Framemaker Server are the two industry standards at least in my experience.

[4] I.e., take say, chemists who want to share their findings with people in their dept. Being able to design their own markup for Lewis diagrams, multiple representations of orbitals, degenerates states, etc -- then have them real time render the observed values -> a generated chart rendered in a consistent theme (a la Jupyter Notebook, but..better...) I'd imagine would be quite powerful.

I still use emacs in '-nw' mode because, I don't know, I'm old, but re: your criticism, skewer-mode[1] is available. Presuming your output is targeting some form of HTML, this enables you to retain the ability to at least present your information locally (on your own file system), to colleagues (authenticate via your existing SSO or whatever), or even to a public site (via a simple git-push to via a standard httpd on a container). I'm sure there are other modes out there, (hell, you could write something from scratch in a few minutes with inotify to cater to all your specific needs). I'd say it'd be more accurate to qualify your statement as such: "the value of org-mode documents decreases as a platform to manipulate (but not distribute) your data outside of emacs"[2].

[1] https://github.com/skeeto/skewer-mode [2] And even then, modern cell phones have quad-core 1ghz ARMs on them. I was using org-mode with a P3 600, I'm sure modern phones + a Bluetooth keyboard would be sufficient to run emacs, or at least SSH + emacsclient.

This is sort of implemented in various forms.

For a VM, RE: code rearrangement, you're effectively describing dynamic DCE if I understand you correctly, CLR does this (and lots more)[2].

At the low-level programmer level, there's nothing stopping a (weakly) static language like C from adopting that behavior[3] at runtime [i.e. with a completely bit-for-bit identical, statically linked executable which].

At the compiler level, you've got the seminal Turing Award by Ken Thompson that does it at compiler level[4].

At the processor level, you heuristically have branch prediction as a critical part of any pipeline. (I think modern Intel processors as of the Haswell era assign each control flow point a total of 4 bits which just LSL/LSR to count the branch taken/not taken. (Don't quote me on that)).

RE: Smalltalk - for me, the power of the platform's mutability was revealed when I started using Cincom. When I was using GNU implementations ~10 years ago, they felt like toys at the time (though I hear things have largely improved). If you've ever used Ruby, a simple analogy would be the whole "you can (ab)use the hell out of things like #Method_Missing to create your own DSLs". This lends of a lot of flexibility to the language (at the expense of performance, typing guarantees). In a Smalltalk environment, you get that sort of extensibility + static typing guarantees + the dynamic ability to recover from faults in a fashion you want.

Imagine an environment[5] that has that structured instrinsically + the performance of being able to use all them fancy XMM/YMM registers for numerical analysis + a ring0 SoftICE type debugger. Turtles all the way down, baby.

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[1] See ISL-TAGE of CBP3 and other, more modern reportings from "Championship Branch Prediction" if it's still being run).

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/8874314 Here's how it's done with the CLR. The JVM is crazy good so I'd imagine the analogue exists there as well.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphic_code

[4] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack

[5] Use some micro-kernel OS architecture so process $foo won't alter $critical-driver-talking-to-SATA-devices or modifying malloc. I'd probably co-opt QNXs Neutrino designs since it's tried and true. Plus that sort of architecture has the design benefit of intrinsically safe high-availability integrated into the network stack.

RE: Portability - Not sure how far you'll be able to get by gcc -S'ing something like nuklear[1] (cross-platform ANSI C89) but it might save you some time.

I don't have much HLL asm/demoscene experience personally so I'm not sure what's "impressive" as engineering feats these days but this looks cool. As someone who aspires to see a viable Smalltalk-like runtime self-modifiable introspective debugger at the OS level with a decent layer of POSIX compatibility and the ability to run AVX512 instructions, I like the idea that tools like this are out there. Cheers, mate

[1] https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear

Between IDA Pro 5.0 (full functionality, legally free), IDA eval 7.0 (limited functionality, legally free), and IDA 6.8 (haxxed), the students are pretty well covered. I'd imagine Ilfak doesn't mind if you pirate it as a student, but giving you a 7.0 full binary is more about operational security than anything else. This is illustrated by the fact that you can literally go to buy IDA + HR for full retail at 5k and be denied a license if you're not affiliated with a reputable organization.

The reason why it's so difficult to get a pro license (even if you want to pay for it legally) is because one leak of the most current version and enterprise sales drop by about ~50%[1]. So, theoretically, if Ilfak were to give you that $100 most-recent copy and you were to share it with the wrong people, any the losses are way more than just what he lost on your sale. The legitimate corporate sales go down ~50%[1] the second a leak hits.

I'm not in rev-eng professionally, but I grew up (read: pirated it at 15) with it back when SoftICE and IDA were the only options on the market. Eventually I needed a license to side-step some legitimate licensed software for a client who's business depended on a dongle from a now defunct company. Since IDA is what I already knew, it's what I purchased. The time I would have spent learning another platform (there are lovely open source alternatives on the market now) would have exceeded the price of the software by quite a bit. For people who use IDA professionally, 1k a seat (5k w/ HR) is more than reasonable, especially with the whole ecosystem of plugins that exist around it[2].

But the times, they are a'changin. Now with all of the competitors on the market though, kids are growing up not pirating SoftICE and IDA but alternatives. 5 years down the line, when those kids have purchase influence and go to their manager with a request ("this is what I grew up with..I need a __ license"), IDA is going to have a real problem[4].

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[1] Ilfak delineated the whole business model and decrease in sales as a result of leaks with real numbers on reddit. This was 3-4 years ago (maybe more, god I'm getting old) so I might be off by the 50%. I'm sure it's more than 1/3rd. This interestingly enough is why you see a version bump as soon as a shows up. Maybe purchasing departments are less likely to authorize a 5k license if the most recent version on piratebay? Not sure how that gets past legal and whoever is in charge of license compliance, but it happens. Pure speculation: When you bump a pirated 6.8 to a non-pirated 6.9, the engineer/manager can "legitimize" the purchase by telling purchasing "I need 6.9 and can't steal it- now, cut the purchase order, or it'll be your name coming up when we have a meeting as to why we lost Client Foo".

[2] The reason I keep paying for maintenance fees is because the extensive number of community-made/maintained plugins makes IDA basically like emacs. Powerful base-software, but when you get all your scripts setup with things like DIE[3] you can't imagine working in another setting.

[3] https://github.com/ynvb/DIE This alone is worth the cost of the base $1k IMO. Sidenote: The plugin contest was the greatest marketing idea ever. Get people to develop (or release the tools they've already developed for themselves to the public domain) extensible software that adds significant value to your software in exchange for a $1k? Absolutely brilliant.

[4] https://i.imgur.com/Qb7GSCL.png Here's a comment I made about a year ago when we saw Binary Ninja/Radare2/etc all coming of age.

He misused the terminology but basically got it right. The originator of the loan (your local bank is probably just a broker, who is acting as an intermediary for a wholesale vendor) then sells it to a REMIC[1]. It's tranched by the REMIC and sold off to institutional investors. These were properly labeled as mortgage backed securities[2] for residential real estate. This is all by the book, mind you. At least that's how it was conventionally done. If our housing market crashed with this system in place, we would have seen a hit but it wouldn't have affected things nearly as badly. It became 'systemic' when bankers decided to trade 'synthetic CDOs' in volume[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_mortgage_investmen... - [For context, Freddie Mac/Fannie Mac were REMICs] So what OP meant when he said "prime / subprime" was a misuse of terminology, but if he replaces 'prime' with 'AAA' and sub-prime with 'BBB and Residual' -- he's more or less on the mark there.

[2] US-FNMAMBS, IIRC

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_debt_obligation... Start reading here

Whoa there, a lot more went away than 'some shareholder value'. If you put your 40 years in pushing papers, maxed out your Roth IRA and 401k contributions in that wonderful glorious year of 2008 - that went away. Those people who previously had signed for an ARM with a lender[0] to purchase a home (for which likely had no income to justify a mortgage), when that rate shot up after that introductory term expired-- they certainly lost more than just "some exec jobs".[1]

"the useful bits that remain." Yeah, a bunch of well-financed speculators will buy those foreclosed properties for pennies on the dollar and profit from the other end of that as well. And don't forget, for every dollar that was long on a swap, someone was short and made a damn killing. It's not like that those 30 year US notes were bought back by the government to decrease USD circulation.[2]

I'm right there with you though on your second and third assertions. (Though, on an optimistic note, more companies seem to be side-stepping the standard monopolistic 'approach the standard set of IBs to underwrite your IPO and give them 6% since they're the only ones who have the Rolodex to call up John, his old buddy from Wharton, or Grant his golfing buddy')

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[0] And let's not forget, banks around the world fixed LIBOR for years to fatten up their bonus. There are the equivalent of IRC chats admitted to evidence from a whistle-blower (immunity for amnesty) where Trader A would say "can you plz make sure that __ doesn't go above __ for 2 days? ive got <a position worth about 300 million USD> in <some ISDA product> deep, it'd rly help.. if you can make this work I'll get you whatever you need 50k..100k". (It's been a while since I read the transcripts, but that's the lexicon in which they spoke, and how the transactions were structured internally amongst what amounts to a group of ~100 people. With more or less complete control for the overnight rates for the entire world, they were gaming the system at magnitude so large where kickbacks between other agents would treat 50k and 100k EUR as interchangable.)

[1] Basically every single person from the buyer, to the broker at the local bank who altered the risk profile so he could post more loans for his $500 closing bonus, to the broker who locked the loans and bundled them up into CDOs for vast amounts, to every quant with a PhD and a seat at ISDA who concocted tranching MBS', to every trader who made a risky trade -- until the house of cards fell -- was at fault. Some certainly harmed more than others.

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WCURCIR I think that's M2, but par for the course

I think you misunderstood me when I said "name-brand". I don't mean some 30 dollar microscope with $20 glass lapped with 2 passes of alumina 35 micron by a 12 year old in a Chinese sweatshop. Those brands I mentioned were (and apparently still are) more than good enough to get you into industry primer publications. This[1] is literally a random paper I picked off of Nature Medicine. I intentionally chose the first DOI from Nature Medicine I saw to get it as 'random' as possible. (Nikkor is the trademark Nikon used to use to indicate their high-end domestically manufactured equipment.)

Hmm, Nikon, check. Agilent, check. Zeiss, check. Hell, everything in that paper, from the Sigma-Aldrich sourced chemicals to the BioGen PCR sequencer is 100% bog standard. Go pick up this months copy of any journal of medicine (hard medicine, not like, psychiatry -- JAMA, NE Journal of Medicine, Cell, whatever) and see what hit-rate you have with those 5 brands. "Research quality science equipment" is bog standard.

In fact, I was curious to see what equipment the CRISPR-Cas9 guys were using, because I mean cleaving nt's is about as low-level as anyone with an MD/PhD is going to get. (It also meets your "research-grade" criteria, cause, you know, its CRISPR-CAS9.)[2] Same brands, more sensitive equipment, still pretty bog standard. Again, semi-conductor equipment from the mid 2000s still has it beat for requirements re: sterile conditions for SiO seed -> ingot growth, re: resolution by an order of magnitude (at least) for making chip masks, re: chemical purity when CVD'ing your poly/metals, and for resolution re: SEM/FIB'ing for inspecting your wafers.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/IC56Nxj.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/EAQo77W.png

The size of a red blood cell is ~100 um. The size of a nucleus of a cell is ~6um in a mammal (so says wikipedia at least, I know less than a 9th grader re: biology). You can get that resolution with < 10k worth of name-brand optics gear (Zeiss, Nikkor JP, whatever) off eBay.

Pair that to a x,y stepper and some Python OpenCV script and you have a ready to go "cell counter", which this paper espouses as one of its uses. Not only that but they only get 20nm with shadow imaging techniques which (I'd imagine[2])are inherently awful for actual examination of features.

Here's[3] a paper that uses wet-methods (i.e. good for biology, where you can add florescence/dyes/stains to your culture; not nearly good enough for modern chip fabrication) that gets you down to the 20nm range. And at that point your lab already has a microscope to hit those lengths.

Basically this lowers the price of this use-case: "oh at t(0) we have 30 blurry units we can sorta-kinda safely assume as eukaryotic; t(1hr) = 600 blurry features". I can see this being a market opportunity for having in-house cancer biopsy diagnostics.

From a research point of view, you're doing at the lower level (protein folding, crystallography, whatever), you're already equipped with the proper mass-specs/NMR/SEMs/TEMs you picked up from Waters or Agilent at half a million. I mean that's got the potential to save a lot of lives, which is awesome, but I probably sound disappointed because I was really hoping for an actual advancement in lens-less microscopy.

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[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system ~200 nm under ideal conditions, no pedantry please on apertures or practical things like chromatic/spherical abberation issues, etc. I realize these limits exist, we're just talking orders of rough orders of magnitude. [2] Not in the field, just remarking based on conversations with people who have had to setup labs at universities with limited NIH/NSF budgets. [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2645564/ There are a boatload of other papers out there, but this is the one I had off hand.

edit: Full mea culpa. Parent is right. Keeping this post intact since it still contains green-relevant information and some historical information that may be of interest. Big ups to Scotland for pushing this forward. The Northerners[0] are doing some clever things too like running their own municipal fiber after having their pleas being ignored for ages.

The Danes have been at it for almost the better part of a decade[1]. IIRC, their national transport is 100% green 24/7 and has been for a few years now. They've hit events where 100% of their entire country grid was wind-powered, and are so good at it China[2] brought in Danish consultants for assistance. Here's a real time chart of their energy infrastructure (including exports to Sweden/Norway/Germany)[3].

As a MA native, I remember people on the Cape would joke about the "bridge tax" (i.e., anything coming into the Cape is ~25% more). I know until recently[4] their internet connectivity was horrenduous. Energy there is fairly intermittent as well. Hopefully, they'll pick up a few Siemens units (you can pick up retired Siemens Vestas units on ebay for < 100k that are rated in the 10s of MW!) and deploy a unit or two[6], if only as a PR stunt to make themselves look 'progressive'. A win/win if they can increase employment and bring jobs to the locals in addition to that energy.

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[0] http://gizmodo.com/5984187/british-farmers-install-their-own... "B4RN" is awesome. It's great to see what a community can get done when they ((apologies in advance:) broad)band together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in...

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-denmark-windpower-china/ch...

[3] https://en.energinet.dk/#energysystem - Real time chart! Porn for green energy nerds like me.

[4] Thier municipality started to offer gigabit through a peering with the Boston/North Shore providers to position their community as a "business friendly, gigabit ready" region in order to attract more businesses, rather than relying on the traditional tourist-town economy. They brought in some contractors to lay cable from Boston (or likely just North of Boston[5]) which is active now with tons of businesses using it, though I'm not entirely sure if the general populace has FttH.

[5] IIRC Andover or Quincy or somewheres around there (http://nationwidecolocation.com/massachusetts_colocation.htm) was one of the major peering points where a significant amount of NE traffic ran through. Traditionally it has great connectivity first due to all of the DARPA peering that occured around universities (MIT still has the 18.x.x.x class A perma-leased from ARIN). This continued through the late 90s/2000s with Verizon using those DC's as their major peer-points (which is incidentally why FiOS was rolled out so early in the Boston suburbs).

[6] You'd have to deploy them strategically in a region that isn't going to interfere with the yuppies boating experience as they go to the Vineyaahhhd on the 4th. NE has the same NIMBY problem that SF has in that regard.

Yesterday I was putzing around with these exact batteries (swapping some old tooling that had great build quality but were NiCad junk). Those 18650s pack a punch as current sources. I had an ammeter hooked up and we're talking easily in the 10s of amps for a brushed DC motor of your standard cordless Milwaukee from the 1990s.

I did the same to fix one of those $40 dollar Swiffers (i.e., we're not really talking about powering industrial steel chop-saws powering through I-beams). It drew ~2.5 amps at no-load, no problem.

OSHA[1]:

"17-90mA" : Death is possible.

"90mA+" : Death is likely.

And remember breakers blow only when the sub-circuit's current exceeds the threshold (generally ~15amps in the US) so you can spec a standard gauge of wiring sufficient to consistently draw that current, not overheat and burn your house down. It's (generally) not checking to see if the current sunk = current sourced. You need GFCIs("RCD"s in other locales) to actually get that functionality.

The rule of thumb I've heard is 50mA passing through your heart is where the v-fib dangers begin. The real risk begins at as low as 20mA, because thats when your hands lose their muscular control. You can't let go of the source, and your heart enters v-fib (~100 mA) and you get oxygen starvation and brain death[3]. You have tales of people using one hand to support themselves on a grounded breaker box, using the other hand to just have a look-see, and not even realizing they're in v-fib, feeling a little 'off', sitting down for a bit to catch their breath and found dead 20 minutes later next to the box.

Your body basically acts as a resistor in parallel with the circuit. Here's the ASME's resistance model of an adult males' body[2]. As you can see, you're body is definitely not a 10meg resistor. If you're working in damp, humid, or hot (i.e., you're perspiring through your hands, and that Na+ is just looking for a donor electron!), the risk increases. Whether you're working on a 460v3ph 15 horsepower Hardinge lathe or a Swiffer, the best piece of advice I ever got was "have a healthy respect (and fear) for your tools". Use isolation transformers, current limiters, and CAT-rated gear and read a sufficient amount of information to inform yourself in advance of the potential risks[4].

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[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20130428070054/http://www.osha.go...

[2] http://risk.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/article.aspx?arti...

[3] Brain death I've always heard is ~5 minutes for an average adult male with a decent pulmonary system and respiration capacity-- less if you're a couch potato with less lung VO2 capacity, more if you're Lance Armstrong. Obviously not a physician.

[4] I was googling to pick find a diagram to depict the resistance model of a human and stumbled across Allaboutcircuit's safety text (chapter 3, for those who are wondering). It's pretty good for "general" electronics. Obviously if you're working with things like tubes ('valves'), transformers, and other subsets, you're going to want to read about the safety precautions you want to take for those specific areas as well.

You still have the overhead of maintenance.

Live in a cold region in a home built before natural gas was piped to your region? Heating suddenly fails in February? That $95 dollar proprietary, mechanical zone-controller from Honeywell is going to cost you $120 after markup and another $600 in labor. That heating tech also saw some "green death" on that copper, so you're going to have to call a plumber.

I'm fine with that but I went through vetting three heating techs before I found one that one which knew his industry well enough to answer my fairly baseline questions.[0] Eventually the guy I settled with explained the mechanical properties of both zone-control unit designs, and why one brand is more popular in the region[2]. He then mentioned what he observed as the more reliable Taco lines "always go with the gold series controllers, the green ones are poorly constructed especially if not installed properly".

All in all, I probably spent ~20 hours on top of the labor. In my NYC co-op, all of that would have been dealt with and paid with the co-op fees (which are more than reasonable). On the flipside, I'm perfectly fine with the home maintenance issues-- but it's ultimately the vetting process for a well informed[3] tradesman that takes the bulk of the time[4].

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[0] Generally, I get on some forum with trade masters[1] I found the answers to after about half an hour of researching on a master plumber forum [1] (i.e., "so how often do these units fail? How does the Tacos compare to the Honeywells?").

[1] For EE, the EEVblog is usually second to none. Need a copy of the firmware for a 1984 HP sig-an? Some dude will have it. Other trades have similar sites- Hvac-talk in this case, absolutely high quality discourse. The great thing is that most of the time these guys will have in their vBulletin signatures their qualifications like "Master Certified ..., 1984 ". Similarly, practicalmachinist is great for certain things. Contractor-talk IIRC was very helpful as well.

[2] It turns out Honeywell is out of Rhode Island so there was some local brand loyality developed out of buying local + the sales reps hit western MA pretty hard.

[3] I.e., this 55 year old chap informed me that you apparently want to have the unit head pointing up and positioned vertically and mounted in-line with horizontal (not vertical) piping. This mistake is fairly common apparently and can lead to significant issues down the line. So while I paid more for his labor, his industrial knowledge was effective "preventative maintenance".

[4] If you don't want to/don't have the time to perform due diligence, having a friend who is informed enough to vet the quality of work with you is worth it. A buddy of mine is a contractor who knows all of the corner that are often cut, the indicators of quality workmanship, etc.

Ebbs and flows.

We've had the tabloid 'yellow journalism' since at least the late 1800s with the Hearst media conglomeration[1]. One could easily make the argument that if it weren't for the US capitalist interests and the tabloids' depiction of the USS Maine going down[2], McKinley wouldn't have approached Congress to seek war. Nonetheless, the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate in the 70s was a case-study in fantastic journalism. More recently, The Rolling Stone's coverage of the financial coverage by Matt Taibbi was better than the NYT's in the late 2000s. The Manchester Guardian broke the Snowden story (which itself was just a masterpiece of journalistic execution, following the Watergate 'staggered release' model).

I thing what is new here is that 160 characters or a Snapchat emoji isn't a format conducive to conveying the nuances behind something as complicated as geopolitical affairs and sectarian violence culminating into factions like ISIS breaking out, due to the vacuum of power which existed after the stereotypical 'despot strongman' gets thrown out, leaving a void of power entirely disrupting two countries, dozens of ethnic groups, leading to three major fronts all vying for power in addition to what can easily be argued as a modern US/Russian proxy war. Sure, a 4 minute feature on NPR won't begin to do it justice, but sometimes you'll get 12 minutes of syndication from the BBC and let Lyse Ducett run with her on-the-ground coverage. If any demographics' primary (or worse,) sole method of news consumption is a 'headlines only' format, as it may be for the 14-21 demographic, I might be slightly concerned.

Tangentially, now that 24 hour cable news exists, you have the converse problem of having too much time to fill, so you'll get talking heads in an echo-chamber[3] consumed by the 65+ demographic. Cronkite and Morrow (and arguably even up to Jennings, which is what I remember watching as a child) at least had 30 minutes of airtime with a captive audience to go into the nuances. (And while the "big 3" were not without their biases, they certainly did an objectively better job than the disservice MSNBC and Fox News is doing.)

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[1] I suggest anyone interested in the media's influence on policy to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8....

[2] While still inconclusive as to the cause, most historians regard this as not an act of war or sabotage but a ship design defect, evidenced by other ships of the same design failing in the exact same fashion.

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cP74QzyrLw Allow Jon Stewart on the O'Reilly factor delineate why the Fox News & MSNBC model is so harmful.

"This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text."

Huh. I have no problem groking the garbled text, but at the same time I'm pretty much the complete opposite of: "This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text."

Even before I read the first sentence, my mind does a 'lexing first-pass' and looks at the 'shape' of the text. If a word is misspelled, I'll identify it well before I begin to even gestate the content. Interestingly, I can understand I'm conversational (barely) in Spanish and the trait doesn't carry over. My spoken German is an insult to the language, but I can read it well enough to have the same phenomenon occur in German as well.

We'd need long term statistics to fully develop a model of risk. I.e., (admittedly, anecdotally) within the first year or two of having his monocrystalline setup, Dave[1] suffered damage to one panel (aerial debris) requiring a service call to replace the unit. If this happens on a semi-frequent basis (i.e. one panel per ~3 years per install) the risk profile changes not insignificantly.

[1] https://player.fm/series/eevblog/eevblog-844-solar-panel-rep...

Probably true, though for what its worth OSHA[0] (yeah yeah "nanny state" and all) dictates pretty clearly the federal obligations on training and equipping roof workers with full body harnesses, lanyards, and proper anchorage points to effectively eliminate fall related injuries. Whether or not the employe(e|r) adheres to these regulations[1] is another issue, but the risk can effectively be mitigated almost entirely (the "total fall distance" is to be no more than 6 feet with a safety factor to the ground of no less than 3 feet)[2].

RE: Grandparent - the production of solar panels isn't as "green" as you may think. See: IEEE[3].

RE: Wind - The standard horizontal-axis blade design (i.e. what Siemens and other major commercial institutions offer) have ecological impacts on wildlife[4].

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[0] Forgive the US centric analysis.

[1] I.e., cell-tower deaths are notorious for these sorts of violations -- both due to the endemic sub-sub-sub-contracting strategy that Verizon, et al, uses to distance themselves from the bad PR and litigation, as well as the employee these jobs tend to attract (risk takers/adrenaline junkies) who, even if given the proper gear will neglect to use it often due to machismo. Following full protocol, the injury risk decreases quite notably.

[2] https://www.osha.gov/Publications/OSHA3755.pdf

[3] http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-... Rare earth metals, processing with hydrofluoric acid, all the usual suspects one would expect. And this isn't a Koch-brothers funded gas/oil funded piece of propaganda. For goodness sakes, this is the IEEE -- about as pro-green (while keeping the science legitimate) as you can get.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p... - Just playing devils advocate here, offshore wind is basically the closest to a panacea IMO. There are events where 100% of the Dutch utility grid is powered entirely by their offshore wind. Their trains are 100% 'green' too (see: https://futurism.com/all-dutch-trains-now-run-on-100-wind-po...)

Admittedly, SQLite has to do a lot less than Postgres, but I'll throw their hat in the ring if only for the rigor with which they test their code-base[1]. My visceral, completely irrational original gut reaction to that page was "meh, they're likely just generating the set of all permutations where on likely-injectable strings-- no formal verification, no care".

Thankfully, I went for a coffee, came back and the tab was still open for a more complete read. I've worked on tons of projects in my career -- from healthcare to finance, large insurance companies and defense. I really think SQLite is definitive case study on how to test your code-base in a "meaningful" (where "meaningless" would be generating the aforementioned permutations) manner. As new methods of testing emerge, they expand the scope of their coverage as well (i.e., AFL and other fuzzing techniques which emerged circa 2014).

Hats off to their team for the discipline. If I ever need someone to manage taking a pacemaker to production, I'd hire whoever was in charge of their testing, give them access to Fidelity Payroll, hand them the p-card, and tell them "whatever you need, it's yours, buddy".

[1] https://sqlite.org/testing.html

Fun fact: Windows 2008 R2 and Itanium 2 had lock-step fault-tolerance. (Which is on par with the other "biggies"-- VMS, IBMs OS360/MVS, and HP (nee Compaq Tandem)).

On a more relevant note, I know x86-64 Xeon's can mark bad RAM, disk drives, and network cards, and hot-swap them all out out (and has been able to do so for > 10 years) on most motherboards (it's supported at the OS level for Windows server), not sure if it ever had full CPU failure support though.

"It's sort of convincingly improvisatory."

I'm not sure if it was the dynamics specifically, but it was clear to me that A was human. Within 30 seconds I was so sure, I hit pause and loaded the answer to see if I was right (I was, and I'm likely the worst pianist on these forums and only a casual fan of music that falls into the 'classical' genre.)

Here's[0] a fabulous physics paper that analyses the 16th notes by a studio drummer widely considered one of the best in his field. IIRC, the paper mentions he couldn't record with a click because it'd throw him off. That being said, the quality of the recording didn't suffer (his 2nd take of the track was more than good enough for the rest of the musicians to record against). So his own 'internal metronome' was more than good enough. The interesting thing wasn't that his syncopation was incompatible with a click track, but rather the skew which evolved throughout each phrase had a mathematical model that fit well against it. The study compared his recording against a corpus of user submissions of the same track and all of these drummers universally followed a similar set of dynamics. So presumably all humans (or at least, all western drummers who elected to submit their recordings) have that same skew intrinsically.

It's interesting whether it's a byproduct of culture (like an accent) or a feature intrinsic to humans. In fact, that itself would be an interesting study -- compare the patterns of a traditionally schooled western jazz drummer vs a tribal African drummer with vs an Indian tabla drummer. The end of the paper suggests additional avenues to explore, but who knows, maybe soon drumming will be 'solved' ?

I'm totally with you on seeing how it would do training against a specific set of recordings from a specific region and/or era. The results would be terribly interesting ! Or training just against some particular virtuoso like Gould on Bach or Horwitz on Chopin.

As I understand it, there are basically just a handful of songwriters out there (Shane McMcAnally is a prime example) who write songs for the major country-pop artists. If you have a listen to this[1], you can really see how similar each song is. (This isn't exclusive to country music - the 90s pop I grew up loving is pretty much the same, as demonstrated by Rob Paravorian[2].) There's probably a lot of money in automated songwriting for Katy Perry & her entourage. Startup idea for any of you kids.

IIRC, there's a startup which is already using pinterest, tumblr, and more obscure sites like lookbook to analyze and generate trends for clothing and interior design which design houses can pay semi-nominal fee to gain access to. H&M is great pumping out high-street fashion copies within a season, but imagine being able to actually beat Tom Ford to market.

There are also interesting sociological implications for this. The Culture of Chess changed with BlueGene. When I first read about AlphaGo I was floored. (I mean really. I had previously thought would be intractable within my lifetime due to the huge configuration space.) As we see these 'good enough' models emerge, this has wide implications on human culture as a whole.

I wonder how it will affect the value of artists (in any genre). An ex of mine who hated basketball (this was during the Kobe/Paul Pierce days) still managed to recognize the genius when I showed her some Michael Jordan clips. Certainly an artist in his craft. I'm not a fan of Lady Gaga[3] but when I saw this performance I could immediately see a significant amount of talent. Walter Murch is an absolutely amazing film editor, will he be reduced to a Final Cut Pro plugin? If I manage to get my hands on the all-22 recordings (for every NFL game, there's an overhead camera which records the whole field to let coaches analyze their opponents) of every American football team, can I out-tactic Bill Belichick ?

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[0] journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127902 (Seriously, it's a fantastic paper.) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP8SrlbpJ5A

At least on Linux, you can easily be barraged by tons of IRQs from your FireWire device. Every time some data comes in from your device (let's say some music production platform) it's going to DMA that data right on over via a PCI lane or 4 then fire off an interrupt to inform your OS "hey hey got some new information for ya!".

Now imagine the platform was poorly designed so it fires off that IRQ once for each track. You're re-tracking the drums since the drummer you're recording couldn't work with a click track. Let's say conservatively, you've got 2 overhead condensers, some ambient mic, and an SM57 at the kick. He's working against the guitarist and bass tracks along with some scratch vox. Depending on how you're patching and tracks are configured, you could easily have 12 tracks all firing a "hey I've got data for you! CONSUME IT!".

Each one of those interrupts is expensive, mind you. I mean not so much now, where we can shield processes on 16-core HT Xeons and basically dedicate a whole core to solely dealing with the interrupts. But imagine the early 2000s where you had P3 single-core's running at 600 MHzs. Each IRQ will context switch, which means whatever active process that was scheduled now gets bumped. The first IRQ is serviced and that process gets back to work and maybe it doesn't even have time to restore it's execution context before ANOTHER dang IRQ comes in. Like I say, not really a problem these days, but not so long ago....

Demonstrating full functionality within an app is a lost art. Go take a look at MS Office that was out around with Windows 3.1. Microsoft Access, for example, had a tutorial included that walked you through everything - from setting up your initial tables all the way to raw queries, aggregate reports and the like. Lotus Improv 2.0 even had a "buddy" (sort of like the much maligned "Clippy" for Office 97) named John or something which would walk you through their software, demonstrating the structure and functionality of it over say VisiCal, Excel, or its own product 1-2-3.[0]

Specifically for your product, you might want to change a few things.

* 1: It's fairly busy when I click the demo. I'm overwhelmed by your "do you need help" real-time chat widget, which overlays your sidebar blocking out some functionality, and container3[2] which has 3 options.

* 2: I shouldn't even be seeing "container 3", as an end-user, or any integer primary keys.

* 3: I'm presuming "container3" is what your users want to interface with first. In which one do "I" pick? The second box of the two is particularly out of place, as the end-user hasn't had time to explore your app, so how could they even have questions or comments?

* 4: The side-bar gets overlapped by your interactive pop-up for help on my laptop for that chat feature, making a busy layout even more busy. Again, I haven't had time to explore your app, so how could I have questions? Do some mouse-movement analysis or something, and use that to determine if they're exploring the app productively or blindly clicking around in confusion. If the latter, then perhaps pop up the chat modal.

* 5: The column names aren't "humanized". 'first_name', 'last_name'. Even worse, "store_id" is a numerical value, rather than the actual store name.

* 6: On the initial load, there is no customer pre-populated. So not only does it have no content in those containers, but there are some display components which are clearly not supposed to be there[1]. (The more conventional way would be to have a details modal pop-up when you do select a user.)

* 7: Overall, the interface is unconventional and awkward for a standard user coming from any 'data-driven' app they'd use at their day job. I.e., you have both an overview table and then a details table below, which drills-down into two different detail levels (an overview of the customer, then their specific rental details). As a store manager, I probably want to see either the customers summary information (net revenue per month) or a list of specific titles they rented. Not both at the same time. As it stands you have 3 different levels of data being presented at once.

* Edit: Speak of the devil. I've never used Notion before, but I signed up for it and it has a "Clippy" right there. I guess they probably grew up with the same software I did haha. Their product isn't particularly powerful or groundbreaking (compared to say, what Asana was at the time) but I'm guessing that I'm not their target audience (seems like "yet-another-Trello/Evernote hybrid-with-an-Electron-app").

I'm guessing their target demographic is "John working sales at Dunder-Mufflin paper" who needs a central repository of his customers and purchasing habits ('Sally's Flowers is about to run out of stock', I should give her a call). Or John's manager, Tina, who wants to see aggregate statistics on how her team is doing with that new re-targeting email campaign software, she used 20% of her budget on. Are her 6 sales guys producing enough of a sales increase that the monthly fees are generating sufficient ROI?

I probably wouldn't pay for their software, but again I'm an emacs power user who's written thousands of lines of elisp on top of org-mode to centralize all of my information/aggregate analysis. Regardless, their interfacing tutorial animated helper is a prime case study of 'how to introduce someone to your product' without overwhelming them. But if they're your direct market competitor, it'd be quite questionable to "borrow" that flow. You're on tenuous ground as it is with your layout + widgets.

I don't use web apps out of principle if I can't at least pay to purchase a license to host it locally (Atlassian style), as I've been burned by tons of acquire-hire-kills. As such, I'm not sure what the ecosystem is like and if "Ivan" type animated helpers are commonplace. If they aren't, HN users take note -- this is a prime example of how to introduce your new users to your software.

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[0] Both are pretty much 'abandonware' at this point, so I have no problem telling you to go pirate it.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/tGyEVSi.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/FvCLBQP.png

Both metrics are equally useful or useless depending on what you want to quantify.

If you compare this to "serious" gaming technology (i.e. what the triple-A creators are making, and what parents are willing to pay $70 dollars a title for to keep their 16 year old from nagging them), the iPad and iPhone both are severely lacking in computational power to produce anything that the heavy consumer will spend "real money" on (rare exceptions like Farmville and Candy Crush not with standing). This is completely useless for serious gaming.

This could be huge for, say, realtors though. Being able to show your prospective purchaser who really likes the home but feels 'iffy' about that wall blocking off light into the dining room can now power up an app and show in real time a rendering of how the house would look if you knocked out that wall and had an open-floor layout with that beautiful Southern light pouring in. The ability to pop in new landscaping to let the buyer visualize what could happen if you replaced the front with hedges + hydrangeas against hyacinths could easily make the difference between that realtor making her 6% on that $850,000 or not.

Also, there's asciidoc[1] which is implements the Open Docbook[3] schema. Along with it is the Ruby ecosystem for asciidoctor[2] which is:

  * A mature[1], plain-text writing format for authoring notes, articles, documentation, books, ebooks, web pages, slide decks, blog posts, man pages and more.

  * A text processor and toolchain for translating AsciiDoc documents into various formats (called backends), including HTML, DocBook, PDF and ePub.

I have a fairly extensive list of typesetting frameworks and document publishing management systems (along the lines of Adobe FrameMaker), but I'm running out the door

[1] http://asciidoc.org [2] http://asciidoctor.org/docs/what-is-asciidoc/ [3] http://docbook.org/whatis

Basically anything that's used in industry has a maintenance schedule. Here[1] is what Ingersoll Rand (basically the "go to" in pneumatics re: heavy industry) provides even with their $250 impact wrenches. Simple oiling, greasing via zerk fittings and air filter swap time-tables, but indicative of their corporate culture. Whether it's an entry-level air gun or a $150k two-stage compressor you're provisioning, that culture of meticulous documentation and proper servicing is just a part of their (and most maritime, mining, heavy industry, etc) culture. "Modern Diesel Technology: Preventive Maintenance and Inspection" is a pretty interesting read, if, uh, you're into that stuff haha.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/XTd3wx7.png