Split (1)

train · 100k rows

text stringlengths 44 950k	meta dict
Finding Your Co-Founders - terpua http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/11/finding-your-co-founders/ ====== akkartik To everyone pointing out sites for networking with potential co-founders: I find them disappointing. They're great places to chat with interesting folks, but if you're like me you've been to them for months without actually getting to first base with anyone. First base isn't exchanging bodily fluids. It's hacking together on a project. Why's it so hard to find people to actually hack with for an evening? We all know the hacking is important, and yet I don't see anybody out there networking with hacking in mind. I'm starting to suspect 'networking' is the wrong word for what we're trying to do. Perhaps we need to focus deeply on a few leads rather than a bunch of shallow ones. Have you found a co-founder by networking? Tell me how wrong I am. ~~~ catch23 Go find a cofounder through hacking! I met my cofounder at a hacking party: <http://superhappydevhouse.org> ~~~ akkartik Yes, shdh used to be awesome! But it seems every iteration diverges further from what I'd like to get out of it. More people attending, more aimless talking and partying, less hacking. And the hackers are all going it alone, being anti-social. You need to go there and hack. But it needs to be with someone else. ~~~ catch23 Yeah, that's why you should come to the casual hacking sessions at the Hacker Dojo. There's less partying here because the hack sessions recur every week. I've done a bit of pairing with random people that show up and want to hack. ------ skmurphy Two other events in Silicon Valley that are good for serious conversation among entrepreneurs are Bootstrapper Breakfast <http://www.bootstrapperbreakfast.com/> and Hackers and Founders <http://www.hackersandfounders.com/> ~~~ catch23 If you just want to meet entrepreneurs, I suggest hanging out at the Hacker Dojo (<http://www.hackerdojo.com>) There's a physical job corkboard in the lobby if you're interested in finding cofounders, however getting the information will require you to be physically present. There are people there from 10am to 5am daily (yes, we are open that late). There are around 8 YC companies that frequent the hangout. I've also met 4 other mini teams there who are applying for the next YC round. I suggest anyone in Silicon Valley looking for cofounders to come to the Founder Institute mixer meetup event held at the Hacker Dojo this Tuesday. Details here: <http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158007268648> ------ sachinag In the last three months, the weekend guest posts on TechCrunch have completely reinvigorated the site. ------ adityakothadiya The post is really great! Very practical advice. But this is not really new advice. I've read this before at different places, may be in bits and pieces. But unfortunately I'm not very successful at it. I think not looking within your close friends is probably a good advice. So I tried attending different events, met different people, but the problem is building that trust in few meetings that you have with friends. I completely understand that it's not the right strategy to do it alone, and I'm actively looking for a co-founder, but still not getting luck. I think I'll try to follow this advice again, and will see if I find any luck. Your advice is welcome too... ------ wheels Reading this, I feel like it may be more relevant to business people starting startups than hackers starting startups. It's hard for a startup that's all business people to get very far. A startup that's all hackers has a decent chance. You need some versatility in your hackers -- and it may well make sense to have a business person onboard at the get-go, but I don't know if having one on average produces better results. I think the confusing thing when you read stuff like this is that it's tempting to assume that this is _the_ way, not _a_ way to find co-founders. Viaweb, for instance, was founded by three Harvard CS PhDs. ~~~ ABrandt Although I can't argue whether this article is aimed at the technically inclined or not, I do believe that the advice is equally applicable for both parties. Just because "business people" can't put together a brilliantly coded working product, does not mean that they can't do anything to get their venture started. Who is to say that setting up a legal entity, researching market trends, and securing sales channels is any less productive activity than programming? I know that this is not a popular view, but in my eyes there are two distinct sets of tasks in a startup. Yes, one is the tech side and the other is the business side. Both pieces need to be in place to maximize chances for success though. Is a heavily tech-centric startup with a beautiful beta and no business model in any better of a position than a non-tech startup with a well thought out sales strategy and a static landing page as a minimum viable product? As important as having complimentary skill sets is, I also believe that having some overlap isn't a bad idea either. A hacker who can read a statement of cash flows paired with an MBA who knows an 'if' statement from a 'while' loop will ultimately be able to work better together. ~~~ wheels Oh, usually I'm the person that's out defending that business folks can contribute quite a lot to a startup. I'm just questioning the logic that you _need_ to do things that way, as the article implies, and not based on some fuzzy notion of utility, but just looking at the history of successful startups. Some have business people on the founding team; a lot don't. ------ DenisM What are the good networking events in Seattle? I know plenty of engineers but would like to meet some business and designer folks. ~~~ hedgehog OpenCoffee Seattle is good. I've only been once (two weeks ago) but it was valuable, good group of people and I met one of the best possible investor/advisors for the startup I'm working on. <http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/190147/> ~~~ DenisM Thanks hedgehog, the mentor-y types is exactly what I was looking for. I'll check out the Thursday's Redmond meeting and then the next Seattle meeting as well. What's your startup by the way? ~~~ hedgehog No problem. Shoot me an e-mail, I have a couple other ideas for you. My startup isn't open for business yet but I'll definitely post here when we get to beta. ------ vaksel I think you already failed if you have to actually go looking for a co- founder. You are getting into a major endeavor, the co-founder should be someone who you've known for a while, not someone you just met playing ultimate frisbee. + at that point, you'll be just another "business guy" with an idea, so chances are you won't find anyone anyways p.s. I'm assuming that this is advice for the non-programmer entrepreneurs, since programmers can just start building, without needing anyone else. ~~~ chaosprophet Not true. At times you just bump into a guy who happens to be exactly what you're looking for. This has happened to me more than once, so I would not make "looking for co-founder" a point of failure. That said, I still think getting to know a person you will be closely involved with well enough before starting out. ~~~ vaksel how many programmers go out looking for a "business guy with an idea", programmers get pitched the whole "yeah man, I have this idea, it's ultra secret, so I'll need you to sign an NDA first, but basically it's like faceb...." the only way for a "business guy with an idea" to hookup with a programmer, without being lifelong friends, is to bring a crapload of money to the table. ~~~ mediaman Only true for a narrow spectrum of startups. There are many highly lucrative niche opportunities (that can still scale to $10mm+ revs) that would be impossible to identify or execute on without an inside industry expert who knows the big players, potential customers, and precise pain points. When referring to "business people with an idea" with some degree of derision, it's productive for us to remember this mostly applies to the MBA grads with generic consulting/banking background and little industry-specific expertise. ~~~ vaksel really? many lucrative niche opportunities? Then surely we'd have heard at least some examples of that on techcrunch. Hell if their other coverage is any indication, they would have made it seem like the norm by now. But hey if your version is correct, then you can find plenty of success stories where a niche business guy, got a programmer partner without having to pay thousands of dollars in the process. I just don't buy that. Looking for a programmer partner as a biz guy with just an idea, is the equivalent of looking for VC funding with an idea...it might happen, but chances are it's a huge waste of time. ~~~ ig1 Michael Arrington, Anne Wojcicki, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin. All were business co-founders. You see business guy founder's companies regularly on techcrunch, how often do you bother to look into the background of founders on news stories ? ~~~ vaksel none of those examples involved people getting a programmer cofounder. Arrington is the sole founder, and his "startup" was just a wordpress install. Anne Wojcicki doesn't have a programmer co founder. Guy Kawasaki paid thousands to build alltop, so doesn't apply. Seth Godin is a marketer/blogger, so once again, no technical cofounder. ~~~ ig1 Arrington co-founded Achex a epayment system prior to techcrunch with a technical co-founder. Kawasaki co-founded (and sold) Fog City Software with programmer cofounders. Godin has founded a number of startups including with programmers I believe. ------ holdenc I've never understood the purpose of co-founders. If you are a hacker, create your product. Then figure out were you need help and find it. It's hard to overstate the amount that one additional person can dilute the efficiency of a one-person business. ~~~ robdor I find "reality checks" to be a great benefit of having a co-founder. The best of us spend time pursuing ideas and tangents for our startups that really don't matter. A co-founder can help identify and keep those incidents to a minimum. Of course this works both ways. ~~~ felipe Reality checks are best provided by customers, or potential customers. ------ jlees I think one unraised question is: what do you do once you have a potential cofounder? Do you interview them? How do you figure out if this is going to work? Is it all on instinct? In my case it's been the latter, mostly, but I think it would have been better in retrospect to work on something together - these hack days/weekends/Launch48 etc sound ideal - before bringing him into a business I'd founded. Then I would have had more of an idea how to establish the relationship formally within the business too; doing it casually has its downsides, especially if you're not in the lifelong friends situation. ------ jmtame I built hndir.com to help solve the challenge of finding technical cofounders at universities. everyone in there is verified and has probably signed up from this site. ~~~ alexandros your site does not accept .ac.uk e-mails. Is this by design? ------ JCThoughtscream Sometimes you luck out and your friends don't actually have your skillsets, or vice versa. I've known the guys I'm working with for years before we started on the startup venture - one's a cinematographer, another's a programmer, and I'm an editor. Or maybe it isn't that lucky. I highly suspect I'm /not/ unique in having a diverse social circle. Sternberg is probably overplaying the like-attracts- like effect by quite a bit. ------ j_baker Sigh... The minute I read the word synergistic, I had "Promote synergy! Like a boss!" go through my head. Needless to say, I couldn't finish the article after that. ------ quizbiz I found one in looking for a college dorm room mate. I got a bit lucky but in talking a bit about what I love to do, I have met more potential co founders on campus. ------ arihelgason On a related note, where did you meet your co-founder? ~~~ jack7890 College ------ zackattack my goal is to be the business cofounder, yet with a strong technical background (i.e. i code). probably want to get a m.s. in cs before my mba.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazon Announces Login with Amazon - wanghq http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1824961&highlight= ====== hemancuso I was shocked to discover this is the canonical URL & domain for the Amazon press releases. After I clicked the link and saw the URL I initially thought this was some bizarre phishing scheme. That being said, I think this is a great idea. I don't love the Facebook OAuth flow and the amount of access most apps ask for. I have trouble taking Twitter seriously as an OAuth provider [bias much?]. I think there are many US-focused companies who will be excited to have Google & Amazon as the two default OAuth authentication providers. If nothing else, it's much more adult than Twitter/Facebook. Oh, and Amazon has your credit card info and a great platform for SaaS billing :) ~~~ criley I agree. I love OAuth idea and the single-sign on flow. I love having one source where I can go and see all of the sites that have my info, and I love being able to rescind my account from that central location. However, I hate that Facebook/Twitter take it a step further with all of their social integration features to the point where many apps assume, by default, that you want to share share share everything you do all over your social network. As I've found a number of apps/websites _that do not allow you to continue without giving them permission to post on your wall_ , I've been forced to mark every single app/OAuth site on my Facebook as available to "only me". Post all you want, no one will ever see it. Curating what gets posted under your name shouldn't be this much work. I shouldn't have to strive for a clean digital presence with content that adds something to my readers life. I'd love an OAuth provider that HAS NO SOCIAL NETWORK! And Google is out on this too, sorry, but Google Plus is _obviously_ the only web property that Google cares about anymore and trusting them not to socialify everything is a fools game. ~~~ hayksaakian I though persona by Mozilla was basically this. ~~~ StavrosK It is. It's unfortunate that more people don't know about it, especially since it's ridiculously easy to implement, well-designed and would save us all a lot of hassle. If you're running a Django app, please add Persona integration. It takes around five minutes, literally. ------ soapdog I'd rather use Mozilla Persona based login systems than OAuth based ones. From both a user and a developer point of view, Persona is a very refreshing approach to identity instead of OAuth. For those wanting to know more about Persona, check out <https://login.persona.org/about> also since Persona is from Mozilla, you can see all the code and development and you know that privacy and user safety are number one priority. ~~~ bitskits I'm having trouble finding sites that use Persona as a login option. Does anyone have any examples? Trovebox seems to have a demo site up, but I was not able to actually log in to my account. ~~~ zobzu Ditto. Why isn't HN supporting persona? :) ~~~ soapdog I wish HN would use persona! ------ 6cxs2hd6 This is about the four horsemen -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google -- and how Amazon is moving forward with Facebook and Google, and perhaps into the lead. The true purpose of Google+ is to accumulate more information about you, not to be a "social network" per se. The latter is the means to the former. Amazon has a huge amount of exceptionally high quality ecommerce information. They have "only" 200 million users, but info about what they actually like -- because they buy it -- not what they say they like. Plus, for search -- if you're searching for products/pricing, you might already use Amazon not Google. Login helps Amazon extend information beyond ecommerce -- and potentially pull clearly in the lead in that regard compared to Facebook and Google. Apple...has a problem in this regard. Excellent company in many respects, but falling out of the pack in this regard. p.s. In all of the above I'm only talking about it from the company perspective. If you think it's not necessarily a good thing for a company to have even more complete data about you, I wouldn't argue with you. ~~~ chj Apple doesn't even know how to offer an analytics tool for app developers. ------ mmastrac Alright, but the question is "why would someone want to log in with Amazon"? There's no social network attached to your Amazon account. It seems like it would be an odd choice of identity provider, unless you are a store and already using Amazon's fulfillment services. ~~~ crazygringo For some reason it strikes me as a pretty good idea. Upon further reflection, I think it has something to do with: \- Trust -- people increasingly distrust sites like Facebook or Google (privacy concerns), but Amazon still has pretty much entirely "positive" feelings for consumers. And if they can run AWS as well as they can, then you assume you can trust them with your password too \- Micropayments -- your credit card is already linked to your Amazon account, presumably, so it suddenly enables you to pay for content, etc. on a wide range of sites where you might not otherwise, due to friction and trust issues It's funny... for some undefinable "fuzzy" reason, I feel much more willing to log into a site using Amazon credentials, than I would with Google, Facebook or even Apple. ~~~ ollysb That's probably because you're a paying customer rather than a pair of eyeballs to them. ~~~ Turing_Machine Right. You're the customer, not the product. ------ jeffbarr You can also integrate this with your own apps via AWS / IAM: [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/05/aws-iam-now-supports- amaz...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/05/aws-iam-now-supports-amazon- facebook-and-google-identity-federation.html) ------ shmerl I'd prefer Mozilla persona. Amazon as well as Facebook and etc. aren't trustworthy - they are tracking your activity and using them for external logins sounds like a very bad idea. ~~~ rubberband I get Facebook. But why is Amazon not trustworthy? ~~~ shmerl How are they different from Facebook? They also have behavioral targeted advertisement. ------ EGreg Amazon is all about e-commerce, and their partners are reporting a 40% adoption rate for new signups? That sounds way higher than facebook's oauth ... if this continues, Amazon could be an awesome platform to build a business on! They also have a credit system now -- and inventory! ------ brentm I think this could be really interesting. In my opinion, Login with Facebook creates a little bit of anxiety for customers. Everyone has been burned by unanticipated sharing & with this there is no social network to share to. I need to read the documentation (from a quick glance) it didn't seem like allowing people to checkout with Amazon on your site was possible but I bet that isn't far behind. That to me could be great if they are reasonable on commission rates. ------ kmfrk The more the merrier. I only feel comfortable using my Twitter log-in, and I don't have any privacy reservations with Amazon either. ~~~ Turing_Machine Yes. Amazon itself is undoubtedly data mining your purchase history, but at least they're not spewing your personal info to every random Serfville/PirateWars "games" that one of your friends signs up for (yes, I know that you can turn most of that off, and I have; most people don't). Everything I've heard and experienced indicates that Amazon is pretty tight with customer information. Certainly you don't get any personal information on customers when you sell ebooks through the Kindle store. Apple is also pretty good about that. ------ jpalomaki My main problem with these (as user) is that I usually have hard time remembering which sign-on system I have used for a particular site. Twitter? Google? Facebook? Username and pass? Amazon? In most cases what I would truly like to have is a option to order a sign-on link to my email that would be valid for single use and just for some minutes. ------ jwomers I think this is really great! As a customer, I'd much rather sign in with this than Facebook or Twitter, as then I know there would be no social side-effects - e.g. posting on my behalf or similar - which is sometimes anxious making when confronted with a social login button. This separates easy sign-in from social sharing. ------ jaredcwhite I'll echo what some of the other commenters are saying, namely that for anything e-commerce related (and I'd argue SaaS-type software) this method of login makes most sense. If you were going to sign up for a free trial of something or create an account at a store, would you want to login with Facebook or Twitter? Or Amazon, whom you likely already trust with your money. The latter I'd say. On the other hand, if I have a social or news/content site, FB and Twitter login makes the most sense. That way I have access to their social graph as well as an indentity. Anyway, this is pretty cool. I think I'll integrate Login with Amazon with my startup (mariposta.com) pretty soon, as it very well could lessen signup friction. We'll see. ------ rjohnk I DON'T WANT MORE LOGINS. Pretty soon I'll go to "thenewestwebflatdesignstartup.com" and I'll be given these choices: Login with Facebook, Login with Twitter, Login with Amazon, Login with Persona, Login with OpenID or create an account with email Click here if you have no idea what account you used. /rant ------ dripton I'd rather use Amazon than Google or Facebook, but I'd rather use a site that _only_ did identity than any of the rest. (I don't want access to my Kindle books screwed up because Amazon decided I did something wrong when using them for login, and banned my account. Yes, that reminds me that I need to backup all my Kindle books monthly.) I don't know what the business model for such a site would be, though. ------ cmsmith This is excellent, as I would love to have a shared login provider whose business model does not revolve around sharing my information (e.g. twitter, facebook, google). I really don't want everyone on my [friends list equivalent] to know every time I create an account anywhere on the internet, and I feel like I'm always one privacy setting away from that happening. ------ kriro Seems like a great idea and a signup option that will spread quickly. Mostly because Amazon accounts tend to be linked to payment options already so you essentially add people who are used to and willing to play online to your site. ------ xsace I hate Amazon login where I can't reuse any old passwords as a new one or even as part of the new one. It makes it just impossible to remember your login when you reset it a few times, because you need to learn a new one. ~~~ r4vik why are you remembering passwords? ------ crucio Can this be used for taking payments quickly from users? ------ foobar456 OAuth is for authorization, not authentication. Please stop using it like this. If you want SSO-style authentication using OpenID or SAML2. ~~~ qu4z-2 Unfortunately I think that ship has sailed. Personally I'm hoping Persona will catch on. At least that's designed as an authentication scheme. ~~~ foobar456 What problem does it solve that OpenID doesn't? OpenID already has a lot of adoption, and IMO works quite well. ~~~ qu4z-2 OpenID is great, but I somehow just don't expect it to get that much adoption on sites where "Sign In With Facebook" is the default. Whereas I have at least some hope that Persona might become that common if Mozilla play their cards right. ------ jjuliano It seems that Login systems is becoming a fragmented space, there's Persona, Google, Oauth, Wordpress, etc. and now Amazon. ------ chatmasta So when are Amazon payments coming? ~~~ drivers99 I just used Amazon payments today to buy the new Humble Bundle. ------ gcr ...This feels more like OpenID rather than OAuth. Could someone explain? I'm so confused. ~~~ qu4z-2 People apparently think that OAuth is Open Authentication not Open Authorization. I think that ship has sailed, unfortunately. Although it still confuses me when I go to log in to a site and I get the pop-up about "Do you want to authorize this application to access <X>?" ------ olympus I understand that this is a good idea for Amazon because it is good for them to keep people within their ecosystem, but this is what I think of whenever someone announces a product that has already been made several times: <http://xkcd.com/927/> ------ rdl I wish I could OAuth with my hn login! ------ youngerdryas This could be a game changer for web payments and the built-in A/B testing sounds cool but I couldn't find any details in the docs. ------ bertyoo Won't be using this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
DreamWorks Releases Software Used in 'Guardians' - Quekster http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323622904578129551861947218-lMyQjAxMTAyMDIwMDEyNDAyWj.html ====== corysama The software: <http://www.openvdb.org/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: why do you get up in the morning - davidjhamp Mine was reason was to try to make the world a better place so that I could feel fulfilled when I died.<p>Now I'm looking for better alternatives. ====== adzeds Because the Mrs kicks me out the bed and gives me a list of jobs to do! ~~~ davidjhamp That sounds pretty good but how does she decide whats on her list? ------ AnimalMuppet Why did you abandon your previous reason? You no longer care about making the world a better place? You don't find fulfillment from doing so? The fulfillment isn't enough? Or you no longer think you're going to die? ------ udfalkso [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ9A3GCL7jU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ9A3GCL7jU) ------ duiker101 Because I would get bored after 10 minutes in bed without sleeping. Instead if I am awake I can do things I enjoy. ------ khyryk My back begins to hurt if I lay around too much. ------ 1029475 I've been asking myself that question for the past months with alarming regularity. At the moment, my answer would be: 'because it's a habit, because I need to pee, and because... why not?'. Which obviously doesn't really feel good, and is cause for worry. If a friend were to give me such an answer, I'd think he was depressed and suggest he see a psychologist. I will likely do just that sometime soon. That said, the problem is that this feels different from what I know as 'depression'. I've had many periods of unhappiness ranging from general ennui, to multi-week depressions where I could barely do anything. In all of those cases, there was some awareness that my depressed state of mind warped my view of the world. As I grew older, I learned to deal with that. Sometimes I'd just 'sweat it out' and basically get sick of being depressed. Sometimes I'd actively try to remove the source of unhappiness, or force myself to just keep moving. And once I regained a more 'healthy' perspective, I got better. In this case, however, I feel that my perspective is not off, or at least not much, but rather that I truly have no legitimate reason, or at least not one that motivates me, to get up. Here's why: I'm in my late twenties and many of the problems or challenges I faced in my teens or twenties have either been resolved, or have became unimportant. On a personal level, I do not have any internal problems, anxieties, or conflicts going on that I feel need to be addressed (other than the getting up part!). In part, this has been the result of many years of diligent self- improvement and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, of which I'm proud. But I've also been lucky: I have wonderful parents and siblings, a decent social life, and an above-average amount of close friends. And perhaps because of my personality, I am very happy alone and rarely, if every, feel lonely. I wouldn't mind having a partner, but it is a 'light desire' more than a need. Professionally, I no longer have acute deadlines to fulfil, a degree to aspire to, or a job to find. I make more money than most of my social circles as a web developer, and I actually _like_ my job (much as it's not a passion necessarily). And I can probably just do this for at least five years, and probably longer. And finally, as far as world view goes, there is no 'higher goal' that I aspire to, at least not as a conviction. I do not strongly believe that certain things are intrinsically better or worse, just that I'm inclined, either as a human or as a particular individual, to think certain things are, and that following those inclinations is likely to affect my happiness. But that is not enough of a motivator for me. The result is that perhaps for the first time in my life, or at least since my teens, there is nothing that feels important enough to get out of bed for. And while I do actually feel sort of okay most of the time, because really, how awesome is it that I don't have many of the worries or problems that keep others up at night, I find it a horrible state of mind. And the most likely way out of this state, perhaps with some help from a psychologist, would be to find something that gets me going. To fool myself into caring, day-to-day, for something, enough to _want_ to get up (or, alternatively, to actually become a true believer in something, but I tried that already). I don't like this solution. I know it's likely to happen, I know it's quite possible I will meet the love of my life and live for my kids and stave off this 'existential depression', or have some humanitarian cause tickle my fancy, but it feels rather... brittle and unsatisfying. Sorry for being a downer and giving such a long answer, but I guess I'm hoping some of you can help me to find a way out of this that is... satisfying. (And yes, there is of course the option that all of this is a warped perspective that can be fixed with professional help. That would be ideal. I just don't think that's quite it, in this particular case) ------ jagawhowho To have fun during the day. Drink a nice coffee.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A basic forking server in Oberon-2 - eatonphil https://github.com/norayr/voc/tree/master/src/test/server ====== mizzao Any comment on what is so special about this? ~~~ nine_k If you ever wondered where Go took a lot of good ideas from, look at Modula / Oberon. ~~~ theamk In the code the link points to, I just see another C-like language. What "good ideas" should I be looking at? I am not Oberon expert, but in any other language I'd say this code is pretty bad: \- logic errors: We keep going even if error occurs (none of the error checks have return in them). \- In two different source files, "System" is imported under two different names. Is this just to confuse the readers? \- Hardcoded string length (Mod.s:17). If someone to change the message, you have to be very careful to update the length. \- Arbitrary constants (why '2' in Mod.s:23)? ~~~ soapdog Oberon and its siblings are awesome. I believe that to fully appreciate Oberon & friends, you need to have a bit of context on its creation and usage. Oberon is a language by Niklaus Wirth, so it is not a C-like language, it is a different branch of the Algol family, it is the Pascal branch were we have Pascal, Modula and Oberon (in their different versions). This family of languages are very easy to port and to construct performant compilers. They are not only easy to learn from a student point of view but also can be used for real useful work. In its home university in Zurich, they created the oberon system which is a computer hardware, operating system, programming language and userland applications solution that they used all over the university. This was done when GUIs and the Mac were in its starting years (circa 1987). Sometimes I feel that Pascal and its successors are not fully appreciated by our world that grew too enamored with C. There were some awesome ideas and solutions created there in Switzerland at that time when create a full package of hardware and software was something that people still tried to do. If you're interested in exploring things further here are some links: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_$operating_system$) [https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/](https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/) [http://www.projectoberon.com/](http://www.projectoberon.com/) ~~~ eudox >Sometimes I feel that Pascal and its successors are not fully appreciated by our world that grew too enamored with C. There were some awesome ideas and solutions created there in Switzerland at that time when create a full package of hardware and software was something that people still tried to do. Having been taught Modula-2 in Programming 102 class in college (this was a year ago), I disagree completely. Software development has this camp with a contrarian, 'this was done at Xeroc PARC' mentality where we're using terrible computers because Smalltalk or the Lisp machine or Oberon failed and nasty Unix took over. But when you actually have to use these languages, well, they're terrible. They're C, with all its flaws, but a more indented/structured syntax. Pascal, Modula, and Oberon have no lessons that have not been learnt by some or another language, and done better. ~~~ vidarh > They're C, with all its flaws, but a more indented/structured syntax. There are many reasons to criticise aspects of Modula-2 or Oberon, but saying "they're C, with all its flaws" totally misses the mark. The entire language family belongs to a very different tradition. Wirth spent most of his career _removing_ features, and adding much less than he removed. For good reason: Oberon as a language contains the bare minimum that his experience with systems-engineering (the OS and all applications for the Oberon systems that ran ETH Zurich for many years were written in Oberon itself) showed that they needed. This went down to the compiler: Unlike languages like C, Oberon is designed to be easy to compile. The grammar is positively tiny - it fits on 1-2 pages of A4 in a readable font, with comments. It can parsed and compiled in a single pass with a clear separation of the lexical scanner and parser, without any hacks or ambiguity, and I believe only with a single token lookahead. C isn't by any means a horrible language to compile compared to most newer languages, but compared to Oberon it's a monstrosity. This design philosophy follows through from the compiler through the support libraries, through the OS. It's austere, yes (the Oberon-07 language report is 17 pages...), and if you don't like austere languages, you won't like Oberon. But that too is a feature that _separates_ it from C. As someone else pointed out, Go is a much better comparison than C. Oberon is garbage collected, for example, which instantly put it very much in a different "camp" to C back when it was launched, in an era where the thought of using garbage collection for a systems programming language was seen as something only the weird dynamic typing lisp and smalltalk people would consider. ~~~ bogomipz Can you elaborate on this "Unlike languages like C, Oberon is designed to be easy to compile?" I thought that was one of the reasons that C looks the way it does was to be easier to compile ~~~ vidarh I mentioned some already, but to reiterate and expand. \- The grammar size. This is the complete EBNF for Oberon 07 [1]. For comparison, here is a C 2011 grammar [2]. C is quite simple to parse, but still more complex than Oberon. \- The Wirth languages can generally be compiled in a single forward pass. Dialects that allow forward references tends to require them to be specifically declared. Explicitly specified forward references minimize the amount of state the compiler needs to hold on to to fix up the typically minimal amount of references, but Oberon 07 doesn't have them anyway. This doesn't matter so much now, but in the 80's it was a big deal to be able to do single pass compilation without lots of memory spent on keeping a lot of bookkeeping or a syntax tree around (the Wirth compilers typically never constructs an AST, but directly emits opcodes during parsing by calling into a code-generation module, at the cost of losing out on quite a bit of optimization opportunities; on the other hand it also makes the compilers very simple and blazing fast). \- No preprocessor. \- In C, the presence of typedef means that there are constructs that are semantically ambiguous until you consult the symbol table (the parsers can still be context free, but you can't fully resolve the type of symbol in certain situations until you look at the symbol table). Also not a big deal, but things add up. To be clear, C is one of the easier languages to parse. I'm not implying C is particularly complex. The verbosity of Yacc/Lex vs "straight" EBNF overstate the complexity of the C grammar somewhat. And compare it e.g. to C++ or (run...) Ruby (which I love dearly to _use_ , but the grammar is a crime against parser writers everywhere) and it's trivial. But Oberon took it several steps further. C is what you get if you build something through accretion and gradual changes while experimenting, despite trying to contain complexity. The result is small, but not minimal. Meanwhile modern Oberon is what you get when you go on a 40+ year quest (even though Wirth is 82 years old, the latest revision of the Oberon 07 language report was May 3rd this year! [3]) to eliminate every unnecessary feature from an Algol-style language while adding only the bare minimum in its stead. The Oberon dialects (Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon 07 - the latter is the newest and deriving from Oberon rather than Oberon-2) are strictly _smaller_ languages than their by now distant ancestor in Pascal, despite being substantially more powerful. Consider that the language report for Oberon-07 is _17 pages_ including the table of contents and introduction, and despite duplicating the language productions both in each chapter and in an appendix... I prefer less austere languages these days (Ruby...), but I wish more language designers spent more time studying Wirth's work and actually paid attention to how their design affected parsing and code generation complexity. [1] [http://oberon07.com/EBNF.txt](http://oberon07.com/EBNF.txt) [2] [http://www.quut.com/c/ANSI-C-grammar-y.html](http://www.quut.com/c/ANSI- C-grammar-y.html) for the Yacc grammar, and [http://www.quut.com/c/ANSI-C- grammar-l-2011.html](http://www.quut.com/c/ANSI-C-grammar-l-2011.html) for Lex [3] [https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.Repor...](https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.Report.pdf) ~~~ bogomipz Thanks for the detailed response. I appreciate it. I intend to look into this branch a little more when I have some time. Cheers. ------ photigragraphy In college I wrote a (miserable) Modula-2 compiler. Its funny seeing Oberon-2 being used in the wild but brings back a touch of nostalgia. ------ asimuvPR OT: This is very nice code. It reads very well. ------ zerr How do you type these ALL CAPS keywords, isn't this very daunting? ~~~ vidarh Significant caps or caps used by convention to separate syntactic elements was quite common for a while when syntax highlighting was still relatively rare. E.g. AmigaE [1] is another language which heavily used caps (correct case was a compulsory part of the syntax). You get used to it quickly, but I can't say I miss it. [1] [http://strlen.com/amiga-e](http://strlen.com/amiga-e) ------ guitarbill caps in file extensions, how weird	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Bitcoin lives in a “legal gray area” - shawndumas http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-bitcoin-lives-in-a-legal-gray-area/ ====== ChuckMcM Actually its not legal in the US, as part of the original Federation of states and later under 31 U.S.C Sec 5103 the United States has held that it is not legal to conduct business within the United States with any currency other than US Dollars. When pressed, the rationale generally relies on protecting consumers from fraud, and preventing money laundering and other financial crimes. Back in the mid 70's, growing up in Las Vegas, I got to experience this first hand when the Treasury Department swooped in and put a stop to people using Casino chips [1] as a casual currency. However, given the way that Bitcoin works, I really wonder if governments do want to shut it down. This may be controversial but it seems with the blockchains the psuedo anonymity of bit coin that the transaction history (if its used primarily for crime) is creating something of a map of nodes as to who the 'big' guys are and who the 'little' guys are. This isn't an 'id' based strategy more along the lines of 'where has this bitcoin been' and then tracing all of them to see how they flow. If all you do is download transaction blocks once a day and note which coins have transacted, then compare that with the coins you find in the wallet of the guy you just arrested, it might leak more data than you would hope. Pure speculation though, based on how current law enforcement identifies criminals by watching bank balances change. [1] They had great properties, you could take them into any casino and get their face value in dollars. ~~~ cs702 ChuckMcM: what about using Bitcoin as a store of value or investment asset, in the same way people use commodities like gold and silver? Just as it's perfectly legal to have any portion of your wealth invested in gold or silver, which you can freely buy and sell at any time, shouldn't it be legal to have any portion of your wealth invested in bitcoins, which you should be able to buy and sell at any time like any other commodity? Edit: Note that the same argument can be made for bartering. According to the IRS, in the US, it's perfectly legal to barter any product, commodity, or service for another product, commodity, or service, so long as any taxes due are paid as required by tax law.[1] \-- [1] [http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=188095,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=188095,00.html) ~~~ ChuckMcM As a value store, sure. Just like baseball trading cards. Where it gets dicey is where person A uses currency to get a proxy item (BitCoin, Casino Chip, Baseball Trading Card) takes that proxy item to Person B and uses it to purchase a good or service of some value, then Person B takes the proxy item and uses it to purchase a good or service from Person C who then converts it back to currency. In those situations the transaction between A and B has become 'lost' (or laundered) because its not possible to connect the transaction C made to the transaction A and B made beyond a reasonable doubt. And that is the stuff that gets the enforcement types all agitated. The IRS would like like to know if you bought some proxy thing, it appreciated in value, and then you sold it for a gain (or loss). BitCoin exchanges should send a 1099 of all transactions to the IRS (I don't know if they do that or not). ~~~ narrator Also a "Proxy Item" is always subject to capital gains tax and sales tax. Otherwise it would be money. This is the only thing really preventing competing currencies. In fact, Ron Paul has worked on getting this restriction repealed in the case of gold and silver: <http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul434.html> "The final step to ensuring competing currencies is to eliminate capital gains and sales taxes on gold and silver coins. Under current federal law, coins are considered collectibles, and are liable for capital gains taxes. Short-term capital gains rates are at income tax levels, up to 35 percent, while long- term capital gains taxes are assessed at the collectibles rate of 28 percent. Furthermore, these taxes actually tax monetary debasement. As the dollar weakens, the nominal dollar value of gold increases. The purchasing power of gold may remain relatively constant, but as the nominal dollar value increases, the federal government considers this an increase in wealth, and taxes accordingly. Thus, the more the dollar is debased, the more capital gains taxes must be paid on holdings of gold and other precious metals. Just as pernicious are the sales and use taxes which are assessed on gold and silver at the state level in many states. Imagine having to pay sales tax at the bank every time you change a $10 bill for a roll of quarters to do laundry. Inflation is a pernicious tax on the value of money, but even the official numbers, which are massaged downwards, are only on the order of 4% per year. Sales taxes in many states can take away 8% or more on every single transaction in which consumers wish to convert their Federal Reserve Notes into gold or silver." ------ donpdonp I like a well written bitcoin story. As soon as this story opened with the red herring of Silk Road, I sighed in disappointment. To my knowledge, bitcoin is not recognised as a currency by my country (or any other country), therefore it has no special properties. I'm an individual citizen buying something for one value and selling it for another. This is well established in civil law and tax taw. When I see a story about bitcoin I read it once, then read it again substituting the words pet rocks for the word bitcoin. I ask 'is there anything specific to bitcoin about the concerns being raised?' and the answer is almost always no. If I buy some pet rocks at a garage sale in August and sell them at my garage sale in September for more money, I record the profit or loss, report it on my tax return and pay the appropriate income tax on it. This is not advice, but its what I'm going with until I learn otherwise. ~~~ omni I'm sure supporters of Bitcoin would (at least in the US) like to argue for Bitcoin being a currency in this case, as it would allow users to record capital gains and losses rather than standard P/L like you'd get from selling rocks. The tax benefits on capital gains are much greater. edit: This statement is false. Thanks for the clarification, nullc. ~~~ nullc Er. Something doesn't have to be a _currency_ to report capital gains on them! [http://www.irs.gov/publications/p550/ch04.html#en_US_2011_pu...](http://www.irs.gov/publications/p550/ch04.html#en_US_2011_publink100010476) "For the most part, everything you own and use for personal purposes, pleasure, or investment is a capital asset. Some examples are: [...] Any property you own is a capital asset, except the following noncapital assets." ------ pygy_ The main legal weakness of the network is the possibility to launder money while mining. You exchange electricity for anonymous Bitcoins. Freshly minted coins are obviously anonymous, and so are the ones awarded for transaction fees (they come from whatever transaction your mining rig managed to solve). It is expected that mining fees will rise to match the cost of mining once the free supply has dried up. As long as you can find an electricity supplier that looks the other way, mining can be used for laundering. ~~~ tobias3 Not only that you can use Bitcoin scramblers to launder your bitcoins. Because nobody mentioned them yet: They forward money for a fee. With enough users one can then not trace the transaction anymore. And that makes Bitcoins a anonymous method to pay. Readily availble to launder money. Governments will not look away if this becomes widespread. ------ tokenadult The underlying publication <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2115203> reported on in the Ars Technica article kindly submitted here is a student law review article, specifically a "note," a classic form of first publication for innovative legal reasoning on a novel issue. I can report, as a one-time law student who was a member of my law school's law review, that every law student's dream (if the law student has a scholarly bent) is to publish a law review article that in turn is taken up by an appellate court and then cited as the basis for the court's opinion. That happened to one of my classmates-- his comment on a case in the Minnesota Law Review was cited by the United States Supreme Court in a decision that agreed with his reasoning. So the author here interviewed by Ars Technica is young, early in his career, and speculating on what COULD happen or opinionating about what OUGHT TO happen. He hopes to persuade a court that his reasoning is correct. But the article is not a sure-fire prediction of how any court or any law enforcement agency will respond to Bitcoins. The Bitcoin experiment has some novel features, and litigation related to it will probably produce new court case holdings (at a minimum) and possibly new statutes as well. "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (1881), page 1. As I have written before, perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. Here we see that the Bitcoin experiment will also teach us more about the reality of the law (in several different countries of the world, and how law from one country can be applied to transactions that involve another country.) Where there is legal uncertainty, there is transaction risk, and persons using Bitcoins to engage in commercial transactions will have to figure out how to price that risk. AFTER EDIT: There is an interesting idea in another comment submitted before mine. _I would really like to see a full-frontal assault by a first-world government on Bitcoin, just to test how resilient it is to such an attack_ I hazard the guess that significant resources have already been devoted by the National Security Agency in the United States and by comparable government agencies in other countries to figure out multiple attacks surfaces in the Bitcoin ecosystem. It may be that those attacks will not be publicized by any government, but held in reserve for a time of need. Perhaps operatives of this or that government can better conduct covert operations with the help of Bitcoins, in one case, while perhaps they can disrupt the activities of a hostile government by disrupting Bitcoins, in another case. I'm sure there are plenty of interested onlookers analyzing the Bitcoin experiment. ------ omni "Miners participate in Bitcoin's distributed transaction-clearing process, competing for the free bitcoins that are awarded at random to one miner every 10 minutes." Is this even remotely true? I thought they were all basically trying to brute force a valid hash, with no time-based guarantees at all. ~~~ donpdonp Its true and actually the best concise summary of bitcoin mining I have read. All miners are in a race to find the valid hash for the block they are working on. The first miner to find the hash wins the block and gets 50 coins. The system as a whole notes how long its taking miners to find the hash and adjusts the difficulty of the winning hash based on this speed. So in actually blocks are won in a little less or a little more than 10 minutes and the system adjust to keep the time as close as possible to 10 minutes. ~~~ nullc Er. Describing it as a race inspires some of the most common misconceptions about mining. If it were a race and Alice ran 10x faster than Bob, Bob would probably never win. Bitcoin mining is stochastic, and for a given current difficult each calculation performed by anyone has an equal very small probability of being a solution. Like throwing dice and trying to get a 1. If Alice mines 10x faster than Bob then Alice will find, on average, 10x more solutions. ------ augusto_hp Bitcoin is not an official currency in any country, but as in any monetary system it has value. It is real no matter how hard you deny. The problem with Bitcoin is politics. Every country controls how much _new_ money comes into market, lowering the overall value of the currency. With Bitcoin they just can't do that. It is quite lame to argue that Bitcoin is used to support crimes and so on, since its overall value is by far less than the amount needed to produce every drug USA caught. Let's try not to mix things up. :) Bitcoin is cool and IMHO, one of the very few viable solution to a unified currency system. ------ michaelfeathers The article seems to imply that BitCoin would be money under current law and that it is subject to all sorts of transmitter and exchange limitations. That makes me wonder.. why are miles and points programs exempt? What they deal with seems to have all of the qualities of currency. Ditto: Second Life's Lindens. ~~~ jrockway _That makes me wonder.. why are miles and points programs exempt?_ Because the miles and points are non-transferable and not exchangeable for cash. ~~~ michaelfeathers How about Linden? ------ eduardordm It is a crime to run your own currency in all countries members of the WTO (for good reasons). You are not allowed to use bitcoins to buy or sell any product in any of those countries. Also, I'm not a believer in bytes carrying out value. You see, a dollar bill is just a paper that represents a value that's not that paper. Having a serial number of a bill "could" be the same as having a bill itself. That makes bitcoins completely impossible to regulate, it will have life by itself. Lack of regulation is not freedom, is stupidity. Economies with distinct realities cannot share the same currency or indexed currency. See Greece and Germany. Argentina and US. Currencies will cease to exist. I'll not be alive to see that, but in the future there will be only XP points (just like diablo!) and maybe commodities. Currencies will slowly die out. You will be only capable of producing XP points by working, products itself will never generate XP points. Maybe I'm just childish, but that's how I see it right now. It's friday, have a great day!!! ~~~ dredmorbius Citation needed. ~~~ eduardordm High school?!?! That's part of the Marrakesh Agreement!!! It makes clear that trading of goods can only happen by using it's signatories official currencies. ------ bluedanieru I would really like to see a full-frontal assault by a first-world government on Bitcoin, just to test how resilient it is to such an attack, and also so that the lessons learned from it can be applied in improving both the technology and its utilization. I wonder to what extent the very prospect of failure discourages that. Same goes with Tor. Both of these technologies are things that most governments would very much like to see rubbed out before they gain widespread adoption (and, you know, fuck them for that). It's a shame, because even the Internet could probably do with a little bit of regulation, and the monetary system certainly needs it, and yet both of these technologies are in part a reaction to the complete failure of most governments to have any sort of competence with either. In fact in many cases it's just outright malicious. Now in Japan they will begin jailing people for something as harmless as viewing a copyrighted work on fucking _Youtube_. Time to get a Tor router. ~~~ nullc It's not resilient to such a thing. If you think _anything_ widely used can be, you are woefully underestimating the power of a modern major state. This isn't a question about technology; as much as the geeks love to obsess over it. Technology is just one part. Non-technology attacks are simply much more powerful. E.g. "Anyone caught using Bitcoin will be executed on the spot by large caliber fire from attack helicopters flying far enough away that you can't see or hear them targeting you", and suddenly Bitcoin is only some obscure and irrelevant thing— even outlaws have no use for outlaw 'money'. There is no question of _ability_ to suppress it, only a question of sufficient motivation. And motivation is where it comes up short. Bitcoin is just another thing people can barter. Not different from beanie babies or lumps of coal, and it shouldn't be legally or politically different. This whole weird concept of something being unlawful until proven otherwise must be some kind of crazy fallout from the drug and copyright wars, and I fear that thinking will greatly harm society in the long run. If Bitcoin turns out to be an efficient 'money' then sane and efficient governments should support it: because a more efficient money will make everyone more prosperous. Some people love to feel all counter-culture and subversive with their hobbies, but as disruptive a technology Bitcoin is it's just not politically disruptive. Most of the few establishment risks that go along with Bitcoin apply doubly to cash, the others apply to other valuable commodities that goverments can't just create out of thin air. The motivation to attack just isn't there. ~~~ kmm > Non-technology attacks are simply much more powerful. E.g. "Anyone caught > using Bitcoin will be executed on the spot by large caliber fire from attack > helicopters flying far enough away that you can't see or hear them targeting > you", and suddenly Bitcoin is only some obscure and irrelevant thing That's still a technology problem. Make the use of it undetectable. A sufficiently technology savvy Bitcoiner would just wrap his stuff with some encryption and with minimal hassle, you would need to be much faster and harsher to stop them. Besides, if we're assuming civilian execution without trial, then we're not talking about the modern major states. Not a single of the major states could even remotely do such a thing without consequences. The harshest punishments for comparable offences would be for the distribution and possession of child pornography and that is not stopping the offenders, on the contrary. ~~~ nullc The widespread use of a money like thing _can't_ be undetectable by its very nature. If you have to keep it between trusted parties it's not money, it's hawala. :) ------ cyarvin It's not a question of law but simply one of power. The USG is sovereign and not subject to any controlling legal authority. And its power, especially in financial matters, is global. Therefore it can be analyzed as if it were a criminal actor. Does the USG have motive, propensity and opportunity to murder Bitcoin? Sadly, the answers are yes, yes and yes. Motive and propensity - obvious. Opportunity - USG can't shut down Bitcoin trading, but it can smash the BTC price by destroying the exchangers. If it misses one, everyone who owns BTC and sees it as an investment will rush for that exit. Once it is closed, the price is zero by definition. In retrospect, BTC will look like a very foolish bubble. In fact it is perfectly sound from an economic perspective, but not from a political perspective - it assumes a basically fair, just and sensible global legal order. Or at least a multipolar one. Closing our eyes and believing these illusions exist is not an effective way to make them exist. BTC is flourishing. It continues to flourish because DOJ hasn't finished its paperwork yet. If you have some - sell it while you can. A big lump of gold feels nice in the hand.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Proposal: Go should have generics - dsymonds https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/15292-generics.md ====== NateDad I work on juju ([https://github.com/juju/juju](https://github.com/juju/juju)), which all told is about 1M LOC. In my almost 3 years on the project, I have not been bothered by lack of generics, basically at all (and I worked for 10 years in C# on projects that used a lot of generics, so it's not like I don't know what I'm missing). Do we have 67 implementations of sort.Interface? Sure. Is that, by any stretch of the imagination, a significantly difficult part of my job? No. Juju is a distributed application that supports running across thousands of machines on all the major clouds, on OSes including CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows, and OSX, on architectures including amd64, x86, PPC64EL, s390x... and stores data in a replicated mongoDB and uses RPC over websockets to talk between machines. The difficult problems are all either intrinsic to the solution space (e.g. supporting different storage back ends for each cloud), or problems we brought on ourselves (what do you mean the unit tests have to spin up a full mongodb instance?). Generics would not make our codebase significantly better, more maintainable, or easier to understand. ~~~ d4rkph1b3r >Do we have 67 implementations of sort.Interface? Hahaha. This has to be satire right? >Generics would not make our codebase significantly better, more maintainable, or easier to understand. Generics are _literally_ a form of abstraction. You might as well be arguing that abstraction doesn't help. Why do you even have subtype polymorphism then? Why not just reimplement everything? That's not a significantly difficult part of your job as you said. One of the best things about Go is it seems to be a strong signaler of the type of engineering team I avoided. ~~~ NateDad > >Do we have 67 implementations of sort.Interface? > Hahaha. This has to be satire right? Nope. /home/nate/src/github.com/juju/juju$ grep -r ") Less(" . \| wc -l 67 (granted, 10 are under the .git directory, so I guess 57) But in any other language, we'd still have the same 57 definitions of how to sort a type.... we'd just have 3 fewer lines of boilerplate for each of those (which live off in the bottom of a file somewhere and will never ever need to change). ~~~ pklausler > But in any other language, we'd still have the same 57 definitions of how to > sort a type... That claim turns out to not be the case. ~~~ NateDad Aside from trivial types, like strings or integers, how does the language know how to sort a list of values, if you don't tell it how to? Translate this into whatever language you like: Machine { Name string OS string RAM int } You have 3 places that want to sort a list of machines, one by name, one by OS, and one by RAM. You're telling me there's a language that can do that without having to write some kind of code like this for each? sort(machines, key: Name) I don't understand how that's possible, but I welcome your explanation. ~~~ pklausler Sorting on all three fields in priority order is what I had in mind, and that's trivial in Haskell by adding "deriving(Ord)" to the data type definition and then just using the standard "sort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]". If you're always going to sort them based on some (other) relation between the fields, make your type a custom instance of Ord, e.g. "instance Ord Machine where compare = compare `on` name". To sort the same type with distinct comparators, you'll obviously need to distinguish them, as in e.g. "osSort = sortBy (compare `on` os)". ~~~ NateDad So... you will still need 57 spots in the code where you define how to sort a type. Maybe my reference to sort.Interface is confusing people. When I say we have 57 implementations of sort.Interface, that's 57 different types and/or different ways of sorting one of those types. So, like, sorting Machine by Name would be one implementation, sorting Machine by Name then OS then RAM would be another implementation. You write an implementation of sort.Interface for every type, and for each way you would like to be able to sort it. An implementation of sort.Interface just requires three methods: Len() int // return the length of the list Swap(i, j int) // swap items at indices i and j Less(i, j int) bool // return true if list[i] is less than list[j] It's the implementation in Less that determines the order. That's not really so different than what you're describing in Haskell, it's just not part of the type, it's a new type that you convert the original type into, to pass into the sort.Sort() function (and because the underlying type is a slice, which is a glorified struct with a pointer to an array, that also sorts the original value). ~~~ infogulch It's possible to make one implementation for a type that supports multiple orderings, at the cost of another indirection [0]. This turns O(NM) implementations for N types and M sorting orders into just O(N). (I'm not counting an inline anonymous function as a new implementation.) In practice, it's rare to need to sort a slice more than one way. [0]: [https://gist.github.com/infogulch/5db15e5ae5cf073f1088033ba4...](https://gist.github.com/infogulch/5db15e5ae5cf073f1088033ba4c714fb) ------ mattlondon I can feel the pain on the Sort issue. I've personally found sorting annoying in Go - I had a bunch of structs representing data entities from a database that all had the same field and I wanted to be able to sort them by this field. Seemed like a LOT of work (basically implementing the same sort that was 99% identical for every struct) or use weird reflection-workarounds to get this to happen. In Java I would not even given this a second thought and be back to coding up the important part of the code ages ago. I am a new go-lang user so would love to know what the best approach to resolve this is without a) repeating the same thing for every struct, or b) relying on "unsafe" reflect techniques (since AppEngine rejects code that does that) - surely sorting structs is a super-common, basic thing for a systems language? I've seen someone just nonchalantly say "Use interfaces" but I'm not sure still. I like the language generally but this is a real "WTF?" moment for me. ~~~ Loic I had the same feeling first. But practically in my code, I found that ok, you need to copy/paste a bit first but then if it works it stays there, you are not "sorting" new kind of "types" every day. The time spent on coding is way more "around" the algorithms than "within" them. I suppose that we will see more and more code generators which will practically remove the need of generics. We already use them without complaining for serialization in JSON/Protocolbuffer/etc... ~~~ alkonaut If code generation is used to make up for something missing in a language (be it generics, metaprogramming etc.) then that's a pretty clear sign something is wrong. It's definitely acceptable to use a workaround for a missing feature once or twice in a language, because no language is perfect, and no language benefits from being burdened with _all_ features imaginable. But if a workaround becomes part of the day-to-day workflow, then you are likely using the wrong language. Examples could be: using (textual) code generation for generics, or using type annotations throughout a dynamic language project. ~~~ Arzh Code generation is not about a deficiency in the language, C++ has templating but I will often use code generation since you only need to run that once and templating bloats the compile time for ever. ~~~ nanny >I will often use code generation since you only need to run that once and templating bloats the compile time for ever. Don't you need to compile the generated code? ~~~ Arzh Yes of course, but compiling the code is faster than generating the code and then compiling it. Templates are much slower than just compiling code straight. ~~~ tacos With the exception of pathological metaprogramming examples -- and even those have largely been fixed -- there's no way you could even measure this, let alone justify such a strong, broad opinion. You're using incomplete information to justify sloppy engineering and promoting it to others. ~~~ Arzh It's compile times, those are very easily tested and measured. ~~~ tacos Templatizing/de-templatizing enough code to see a difference would be a significant effort on any non-trivial code base. But I'll spare you the trouble: instantiating a template is less work than parsing a duplicated file. Some of the early C++ compilers had problems but it hasn't been an issue in 20+ years. If you look at both the G++ and Clang test suites you'll see they verify performance, memory usage and correctness with complicated templates by doing basically this exercise for you. ~~~ Arzh ok, thank ------ bigdubs After watching Rob Pike's Go Proverbs talk I am pretty convinced generics, as much as some would want it, will never happen. He proselytizes "just copy a little code here and there" quite clearly, which is at odds with the complexity that generics would add. ~~~ ktamura This. For better and for worse, Go was designed for "simplicity", and generics are anything but simple. I'd be very, very surprised if Go thinks about generics in earnest anytime soon. I don't say this in anyway to eulogize Go: In some ways, Go is pathetically unexpressive. That said, it currently fills that gap for writing middleware between C sacrificing too much developer productivity and Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP sacrificing too much performance. Generics would be nice to have for this core use case for Go, but it's probably not critical. ~~~ catfest I don't see why you'd choose Go instead of a JVM language like Java, you get the language simplicity (plus features like Generics) and the performance upside too. ~~~ omginternets >you get the language simplicity And the most complex toolchain imaginable. This is what turns me off to Java, personally, but I think my case is fairly representative. ~~~ sievebrain If popular Java toolchains are the most complex you can imagine, I assume you have never encountered autotools, or really any toolchain for a large C++ project. Toolchains normally mean build systems, debuggers, profilers, editors and other things. Java itself doesn't require any build tool at all, you could do it all with a custom shell script. The next step up after that is an IDE like IntelliJ where you press "new project" and just start writing code. The IDE's build system will do it all for you. There is no complexity. But most people want features like dependency management, IDE independence, command line builds, ability to customise the build with extra steps and so on. That's when you upgrade to something like Gradle (or maybe Maven if you like declarative XML). That'll give you dependency resolution with one-line- one-dependency, versioning, automatic downloads, update checking and other useful features. Many IDEs can create a Gradle project for you. When I first encountered Java it seemed the most popular build tool was Maven, which looked very over complex at first due to its poor docs and love of inventing new words, but pretty quickly found that it wasn't so bad in reality. Gradle avoids the custom dictionary and uses a much lighter weight syntax. It's pretty good. ~~~ stcredzero _The IDE 's build system will do it all for you. There is no complexity._ ~~~ krakensden The siren song of just-one-more-layer. ~~~ sievebrain I don't see your point. If you have a collection of source files, then _something_ must search the directory tree to find them and feed them to the compiler ... ideally, only the files that have changed, to give fast incremental compilation. If you use a typical Java IDE like IntelliJ then the program that does that will be the IDE. There is no "one more layer" because that's the first and only layer. If the IDE build system does not provide enough features or you'd like your codebase to be IDE independent, you can also use a separate build tool, or a combination of both (in which case the IDE will sync itself to the other build tool). In that case there are two layers. But Go does not have any magical solution to that. There will be Go apps that need more than the little command line tool can do as well. ~~~ omginternets >typical Java IDE like IntelliJ So now I need to change my text editor? ~~~ sievebrain No. If you want to use vim then you would just use Gradle or Maven as your build system, instead of Make. ~~~ omginternets Right, so then it _is_ more complex than `go build`. QED. To be clear, I'm not claiming that Go is "better"; I'm just pointing out that this is why one would chose Go over Java. Sometimes this particular benefit doesn't outweigh the costs relative to developing in Java, but language/toolchain simplicity remains -- nonetheless -- the reason why people prefer one over the other. ~~~ sievebrain Huh, no, it isn't. Yes, "gradle build" wants to see a "build.gradle" file in the current directory, but you can run "gradle init" to get one. And after that everything except specifying dependencies is by convention. There's really little to no difference in complexity here. What Go saves by not having a build file it loses by not encoding enough information about dependencies in the source, which leads to horrible hacks like vendoring. ------ Animats Generics as a language retrofit tend to be ugly. See C++. I was at one time plugging for parameterized types. Go already has parameterized types; "map" and "chan" are parameterized types. You write "make(chan int)" and "make(map[string] int)". You just can't define new parameterized types; "map" and "chan" are all you get. With parameterized types, you could create more generic data structures; if you needed a generic b-tree or a quadtree library, you could have one. Maps in Go are more special than they should be. Parameterized types are less powerful than generics, but not too far from what Go now has. The goals in the document mentioned here require generics with all the bells and whistles. Remember, Go still has reflection; if you don't need high performance, you can simulate generics at runtime. ~~~ Ericson2314 Reflection comes without the compile time guarantees (parametric polymorphism offers), and that is a far greater loss than the missed performance opportunities. ------ f2f "The intent is not to add generics to Go at this time, but rather to show people what a complete proposal would look like. We hope this will be of help to anyone proposing similar language changes in the future." This started in 2010. Hopefully an illustration that go's developers are not against generics in general, this ought to quell some of the negativity... Pick one of the four proposals you like :) ~~~ andrewstuart2 The proposal document itself may have existed for that long, but it's only been public for 14 days. To me, the important portion is the link to the discussion issue [1] created 2 hours ago, which to me seems like a more significant step towards doing the actual work. Before, the default response was "we're thinking about it." Now, it's "let's all talk about it." [1] [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292) ~~~ f2f but the existence of the proposals assumes there were internal discussions, which is counter to the argument that go devs don't care about generics. had anything good come out of that it would've been published in the open. as it stands, the negatives outweigh the positives. hopefully the new discussion will change that, or an entirely new proposal will make everyone see the light. ~~~ kyrra This was actually mentioned during the Golang team's AMA on reddit. They have wanted to make the proposals for generics public for a while, it probably just took some effort to organize it all and make sure it was OK to publish. [https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/46bd5h/ama_we_are_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/46bd5h/ama_we_are_the_go_contributors_ask_us_anything/d03tsxw) > Some people on the Go team have sunk considerable time in producing generics > proposals, but they've all had serious drawbacks. I'm hoping those proposals > will be published at some point so people can see the depth of complexity > that generics bring; it's almost always underestimated. ------ teps What people think of generic package instead of fine grained generics? [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vrAy9gMpMoS3uaVphB32uVXX...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vrAy9gMpMoS3uaVphB32uVXX4pi- HnNjkMEgyAHX4N4/edit#heading=h.wko1dvdznk4y) I think they would really fit the language well. The good part is: Only the package and import statement change, the rest of your code stay the same and is not cluttered * They are easier to reason about as it is more coarse grained * They do not break the compatibility The the bad part is: * You cannot implement filter/map/reduce (but being able to implement them would conflict with the orthogonality of the language) * It could lead to code bloat, but not more than manually copy pasting the code. ~~~ stcredzero I like this idea. It would allay a lot of complaining. ------ coldtea As long as programmers that are comfortable with (and prefer) 30+/40+ year old PL paradigms are at the helm of Go's design, it's not very likely the language will grow Generics. To paraphrase Max Plank: "A new language-level feature does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." ~~~ fauigerzigerk Only Max Planck was talking about questions of truth. ~~~ coldtea That's why I said I'm paraphrasing him. That said, he talked about questions of physics, not "truth". Now, those new theories might or might not be truth. But the fact that (in his phrasing) they only prevail not because of extra proof, convincing etc., but just because a generation that didn't like them died, doesn't make them seem particularly "truth" based. Mostly "generational-fashion" based. It could of course be that the new generation of physicists is also more capable to accept the truth (and Plank might believed that), but this doesn't derive directly from the statement. The statement only goes as far to say that new generations of physicists are more capable to accept newer theories (the ones that grew with them, and they are more familiar with them than the oldsters are). ~~~ fauigerzigerk _> That's why I said I'm paraphrasing him._ I suppose you paraphrased him to draw an analogy. And you did it by replacing "scientific truth" by "language level feature". _> That said, he talked about questions of physics, not "truth"_ Here's what he said: _A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it._ Similarily, proponents of generics like to portray the creators of Go as the old guard that is in denial of an indisputable scientific truth. But whether or not the added expressivity of generics is worth the added complexity they introduce into a language is a matter for debate dependent on context, not a settled scientifc question. ~~~ coldtea > _Similarily, proponents of generics like to portray the creators of Go as > the old guard that is in denial of an indisputable scientific truth._ Well, they are the old guard (both in age and in adopting 30+ years of PL research). And it is an indisputable truth that Generics are both safer and/or faster than the workarounds (copypasta, interface{}). > _But whether or not the added expressivity of generics is worth the added > complexity they introduce into a language is a matter for debate dependent > on context, not a settled scientifc question._ I don't think we do/should consider generics complex anymore. Even Java programmers, the most tame of the bunch, got along with them just fine for a decade now. Besides, Go has closures and channels, two things that seemed alien just 1-2 decades ago to enterprise programmers. Surely generics, an even older and more widespread concept is not that foreign... Besides, Go already has generics -- it just doesn't allow the programmer to use them too. ------ insulanian My code is full of map, filter, reduce/fold and similar generic reusable functions. How do people deal with such things in Go? Do they really make copies of such functions for every type they're working with? (And by type I don't mean just int/string, but all model entities/classes.) ~~~ NateDad map and filter are often just syntactic sugar for a loop, so I just write a loop. I work on a ~1M LOC codebase in Go and it's really not a problem. map and filter would not make my life significantly easier. They're solving easy problems. Sure, I have some of this style code: var names []string for _, m := range machines { names = append(names, m.Name) } But, really, is that so much worse than this? names = [m.Name for m in machines] Sure, it's spread across a few more lines, but line returns don't cost extra money... and if you decide you want to later do something more inside the loop for each machine (default the name, cache the ID, etc), you can do that trivially by adding lines inside the loop. This code is not hard code to write. If you're used to just being able to slap out map/filter etc in a single line, I could see how it could be annoying... but it's easy, just write it. There are far more difficult things to figure out in our jobs, why worry about the easy stuff? ~~~ dominotw >> But, really, is that so much worse than this? names = [m.Name for m in machines] You can take that code and interpret that as database query, like C# LINQ. you frist example is 'how' vs 'what' of second example. Once you stop telling the computer how to do things and just tell it what you want all kinds of things become possible. ~~~ NateDad But then you have no idea what the computer is actually _doing_. There's a big performance difference between an in-memory loop and querying a database. This is one of the things I like about Go... what the computer actually does in response to any random line of code is pretty obvious (except for function calls, which of course can do anything). When you hide away the loop inside a map statement, you get people doing dumb things like this: names = [m.Name for m in machines] ids = [m.ID for m in machines] addrs = [m.Address for m in machines] So now we're iterating of over the list of machines 3 times... or making 3 database queries or whatever. ~~~ dominotw >But then you have no idea what the computer is actually doing. You trust it the same way you trust go compiler to do the right thing when you give it code to compile. ~~~ NateDad That's the nice thing about Go code... I almost always know exactly what it'll make the computer do. I know how much memory will get allocated, what the likely CPU usage is going to be, etc. The abstraction between the code and the computer is low, which helps lets a lot in understanding why your code is slow, or why it's producing a lot of garbage. "oh hey, here's a loop in a loop... oops, N^2 time". ------ golergka Lack of generics was one of the reasons I abandoned Go halfway through a hobby project (the other reason was lack of normal exceptions). But. Go's principle is simplicity and understanding the concepts you're working with. And generics as a concept is a little bit more complex than simple List<int> explanation leads you believe. As C# developer (language with very good generics support), most of other C# developers I've met, unfortunately, can not easily and confidently explain covariance and contravariance concepts in an interview setting — which means that they don't understand generics concept completely. Mix it up with "null" virtual type, and you've got yourself a type system that you think you understand, but really don't, and will discover this misunderstanding in the worst possible moment. So, while Go sucks for projects that I personally usually work on, its qualities make it a great language for other kinds of projects, and for these projects, generics may not be wort it with a trade off with simplicity. ------ dom96 Maybe instead of adding generics to Go it's time to look into alternative programming languages which already implement generics, like for example Nim. ~~~ idobai You forgot that most of golangers are ex-php programmers and students with no experience. Just look at what they're talking about: they think generics are the opposite of simplicity and can make performance and compilation time worse. Meanwhile, Nim has generics with other useful features and has faster compilation time along with better optimization. If google would put 'goto' into go golangers would still use it anyway. I've tried go a few times and it was full with repetition and boilerplate - felt like java 1.0. It seems like new coders like to repeat themselves more often than learn how to use proven concepts. ~~~ treehau5 > You forgot that most of golangers are ex-php programmers and students with > no experience. How hopelessly smug and incorrect. ~~~ serge2k It's a conversation about go, isn't being smug and/or incorrect fundamental to participating? ------ rebnoob "Let the machine do the work." [1] By Rob Pike, a man of contradictions. [1] [https://blog.golang.org/generate](https://blog.golang.org/generate) ------ chmike Consider using the D language instead if generics is a problem. Go is what it is and shouldn't change. It has it's advantages that make it optimal for particular contexts. Otherwise you'll turn it into another c++. There is a strong benefit in keeping Go simple as it is. ------ willvarfar I would be happy if there was a generics solution aimed just at type-safety for containers, and not a general 'reuuse' thing. ~~~ Ericson2314 You can easily have type parameters in data type definitions but not expressions, but that wouldn't by much for containers. ------ tssuser Let me give a concrete example of how I've been personally impacted by the lack of generics. My project makes liberal use of pointers to represent "optional" fields, since they need to be distinguished from the zero-type. Alternatives would be to have a boolean associated with every field, but that clutters the API and still faces a lot of the problems with using pointrs, such as: \- Easy to forget to check that pointer != nil \- Overloaded semantics: it's unclear whether a pointer represents an optional type, or is being used to pass-by-refrence (i.e. unclear whether a value should be treated read-only) \- Need to deep copy every struct, which is easy to forget and inefficient (at least the reflect version) There are solutions to each of these points, but they all add complexity (e.g. generating code), and most take a lot of extra effort. With generics I could have Optional<T>, With a Get() function returning 2 values: the value type, and present (i.e. the way maps work). The caller is forced to handle both returns, making it much harder to forget to check it. A lot of arguments for generics focus on higher-level functional programming abstractions, but this is a simple and extremely common use-case, and the lack of a solution is responsible for many real-world bugs. ~~~ sacado2 type Optional struct { stuff interface{} present bool } func (o Optional) Get() (interface{}, bool) { return o.stuff, o.present } func NewOptional(stuff interface{}) { return Optional(stuff, true) } ------ plq There was a time when the only language with decent platform support _had_ to have turing-complete meta-programming support, inheritance, polymorphism, lambdas, preprocessor, custom allocators, placement new, std::erase_if, etc, etc. because we were basically stuck with it. Those times are now way behind us. Today, there is a plethora of languages to choose from, each with their strengths and weaknesses, each most powerful in the niche it's designed for. Go is not a language with generics. If you need generics, don't use Go. Go should not have generics unless it's trying to dominate the world. And we all know that no language can achieve world domination nowadays, not anymore. So it should rather trying to be the best language possible in the niche it was designed for. That niche doesn't need generics. On the contrary, a vocal part of the community says generics would taint Go. Go doesn't have generics. It's however got a proper FFI. Use it. Or don't. ------ tombert Isn't a huge issue with generics the compilation time? Much as I love Haskell, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that a big program compiles quickly. That might be an individual issue with Haskell, but regardless, isn't type- inference kind of expensive in compilation-land? And wouldn't that kind of kill one of the big features of Go? ~~~ parenthephobia Type inference isn't synonymous with generics, and it isn't necessarily expensive. It depends exactly how much you leave up to the compiler. Some very strong kind of type inference are undecidable _in general_ and can be very expensive to compute when there is an answer. But you might bear in mind that almost all static compilers, including Go, already determine the types of arguments to functions so they can complain if you're passing the wrong type. Comparing that against a set of functions isn't much of a stretch, especially if the type matching rules were pretty strict, as they normally are in Go. Not all generics are generic functions, anyway. A more limited, but still potentially useful, form of generics is generic packages. Generic packages have type parameters, whilst inside the package refer to the specific concrete type the package is being instantiated for. A hypothetical sort package might have a single parameter denoting the element type it sorts. Conceivably it could be defined as package sort(T) func Sort (a []T) ... imported as import isort "generic/sort" (int) and then used as isort.Sort. ~~~ tombert Admittedly I've never implemented a compiler, or a type system, so I was just speaking out of my behind to an extent, but your explanation makes sense. ------ acjohnson55 At this point, I have to just conclude that Go isn't "for me". I respect the great things the community has produced. But I'm just not interested in a static language without generics. ------ jgalt212 As an outsider, I've been following Go for a while, and given the lack of common high productive language features such as Generics and optional function arguments with default values, to me, it seems like right now Go is much better than C, and in some dimensions better than Java and in others worse. If it just adds a few things, and then when you account for portability and speed, it could be better than the dynamic languages that people often compare it to. ------ agentgt I have some biased doubts (come from the JVM world) about needing really fast compiling and is often cited as the reason Go does things the way it does (or is). Is binary dependency management just not an option ever? I have a friend that works for Google and supposedly they have a proprietary build infrastructure that will offload the building of C++ code into a cluster. I sort of wish Google open sourced that as I believe it basically does some form of binary dependency management. Yes I know Go like C++ can target lots of platform (and thus needs many binaries built) but an organization only needs the major ones. And yes I know the language statically compiles to a single binary but that doesn't mean things can't be precompiled. Go these days seems to be mainly used for microservices or small utilities and thus you don't need and should not have a gigantic code base for such things. I can understand monolithic UI apps having large code bases but this is clearly not what Go is being used for these days. There are many other languages that compile to native that seem to compile fairly fast (OCaml and Rust from my experience but I don't have huge code bases). Is compilation speed really an issue given the use cases for Go? ~~~ MustardTiger >Is compilation speed really an issue given the use cases for Go? Yes, I find compilation speed to be one of the most important things. But it is not a selling point for go. The go compiler is not very fast, and speed is not an acceptable excuse for a lack of parametric polymorphism. Ocaml has not just parametric polymorphism, but many other basic type system features. And yet ocamlopt is both 5-10 times faster than the go compiler, and still produces faster binaries. ~~~ agentgt That is what I'm saying (I think we agree). It seems like a focus of Go's simplicity is to improve compilation speed and yet there are languages like Ocaml that do have generics (and a whole lot more) that seem to compile faster. ------ isuckatcoding This makes me wonder if this has happened before in another language. I can totally imagine 10 years ago someone saying "oh we'll never need that in PHP" and voila 10 years later you've now got feature X in PHP. Any of you wise old timers want to share such examples? Does history keep repeating itself with these sorts of things? ~~~ kqr Generics in Java? Anonymous functions in Java? Most everything in Java? ~~~ isuckatcoding I guess I was think of the community mentality and how it evolves as well. ------ slantedview From the post: > As Russ pointed out, generics are a trade off between programmer time, > compilation time, and execution time This misses the most important metric: quality. Lack of generics forces copying and pasting of code which inevitably lowers quality and increases defects. It's amazing to me that with the all the expense that crappy software causes, we're more focused on compilation and execution time. Last time I checked Golang's performance numbers, the supposed benefits of this focus were not present while the downsides of being a language that forces programmers to do the wrong thing were present as well. ~~~ Gibbon1 I often get crap when I mention most of the time execution speed is just not important. However it is important vastly more important for google than me or you. Simply because google and a lot of other web companies are running on such tight margins. Consider my company is paying maybe $200/mo for AWS. When we are doing half a million a month in business. Each cpu cycle for us represents a lot more revenue for us than google is making. The flip side is programmer time matters a lot more to you and me than to google. ------ ungzd Proposal: Algol should have dependent types. ------ musha68k The one thing that makes Go special is that it's pure "Engineering-Zen". While that doesn't make programming in Go the most _fun_ exercise it makes it a profound one (after some getting used to). Less distractions, less eGo (forgive the pun). Disclaimer: I'm still having a hard time embracing all of that myself - I don't even _like_ Go. I _really_ miss all the functional cleverness I've come to get used to over the years - especially talking Erlang/OTP as the main (losing) "competitor" for most of my backend projects here (microservices, kubernetes yaddayadda). ~~~ a-saleh How do you cope? Weirdly enough I started my career writing selenium test in clojure and got used to (reduce (map (filter ... way of doing things. Then we moved to python and still I was at least able to do (modified(x) for x in xs where satisfies(x)) Then I needed to do some C# work and I really liked LINQ. Now I work in javascript and still can at least _.chain(thing).map().filter().value() It seems that we will use Go for some things, and as far as I know, I am back to using for cycles. ~~~ musha68k Hi there, I feel you :) The way I've coped with this so far is to embrace it and just work through the given task - less warm-fuzzy-feeling and more "manual work" and time needed for sure but it wasn't that big a deal once I just let "go"... Not having list comprehensions definitely is one of those things which makes me feel more like a "stupid coding monkey" but again you can be productive with less elegant tooling as well... ~~~ a-saleh Well, we shall see how this will end up :) If everything we would do are just simple micro-services, I think I would actually kind-of enjoy it. ------ bsaul Could anyone here tell me why, in practice, it isn't possible to write generic algorithms such as sorting or Red/Black T using interfaces only in GO ? It seems like having interfaces such as "comparable, equatable,etc" should work in theory. I've read somewhere that it was memory usage related, but i've got trouble picturing why (maybe an example would help) ------ meapix Can you give an example of the issue you're trying to solve with Generics and Go is giving you hard time? don't take Go to C++. ------ dschiptsov Go is supposed to be a better C, not a better C++. ~~~ loup-vaillant A "better C" with garbage collection by default? C and Go are in different categories. They fill different niches. ~~~ dschiptsov The main designers of Go (originally from Bell Labs) might think otherwise. ------ kzhahou Came for a Proposal. This article only provides _motivation_ for generics. Are there any concrete proposals on the table? I don't recall seeing any, and it would be great to work from that and pick it apart. Otherwise, we're just arguing the opinion that they're useful, against the opinion that they'd soil the language. ~~~ enneff Yes, there are four at the bottom of the doc. ~~~ kzhahou Wow, major props to him for having written four proposals!! Still, he says they're all flawed so far... ------ sambeau If it was up to me I would break with ASCII for the syntax. It would make parsing easier for the compiler while simultaneously making it slightly annoying to use for the programmer. Having to reach for a complex key combination would be enough to remind everyone that Generics should be used sparingly. ------ ngrilly The four proposals linked at the bottom of the page are very interesting, and prove that a lot of work have already been invested in bringing generics to Go. It makes me confident that it will happen one day, when the pieces fit together in a nice way. ------ amhunt Sitting in a lecture by Kernighan rn and he says GO will NOT be implementing generics ------ andrewfromx can I tell u the BEST thing about golang? Strings cannot be nil! It's amazing. They are always "" or you know, "something" so you never have to test for if s == nil \|\| s == "" or in ruby s.blank? to cover both cases. that is all. ~~~ kdogt In sane languages (see: Haskell, Swift, Rust), this is the case for _all types_. Having non-nullability only be the case for one type might be worse than having everything nullable, actually. ------ kafeltz Rich Hickey could play on golang, this guy is so fascinated by simplicity too. ------ amelius How does Erlang solve it? ~~~ pmarin Dinamic languages don't need generics ~~~ brndn Can you explain? ~~~ nostrademons The point of generics is so that you can use the same code with many different types. With dynamic typing, you can use the same code with anything, it just complains at runtime if you call an operation that isn't supported on a particular type. It's like every operation is implicitly generic. You could look at generics as a way to bring some of the flexibility of dynamic languages to a static type system, so you get the expressivity benefits without sacrificing type-safety. ------ AzzieElbab If you google "brutally practical" you will get "uninspired hack". Either that or the whole thing is simply pre-alpha ------ elcct One day someone will create a fork and implement it. ------ max_ just fork the repo. ------ xiaopingguo Why not just fork the language? Why does one language need to do all the things? ~~~ duaneb Generics are not "all the things". Last i checked there was still no object inheritance (in a subtype sense for interface implementations), no operator overloading, no bytecode/vm/jit, no inline asm, no macros, no pluggable gc, no call/cc, no (idiomatic) exceptions, no currying, no weak typing or implicit conversions, no way of enforcing referential transparency, no STM, no laziness, no assertions, no contracts, no untagged unions, no algebraic data types, no covariant return types, no pattern matching, no method overloading, no simd, no decorations/annotations.... I am sure i missed a lot. EDIT: of course this is good; such a language would be beyond nightmarish. By which i mean c++ or scala. ~~~ ViktorasM but having all those things go would become another C++ with a different syntax. I like the direction Go is going of "there are no options to choose", like unconfigurable fmt, or the fact that there is no way to create "exotic" implementations. However, generics would be my number #1 on the list of "maybe let's add that". Would be nice to have less "interface {}" in reusable libraries. Exceptions would be probably second, but that would come with some sort of runtime cost. With them Go would start to drift towards "generic programming language". ~~~ coldtea > _but having all those things go would become another C++ with a different > syntax._ Haskell and CL have "all those things" and they are not "C++ with a different syntax". I don't know why people repeat these cliches... It's not like a language can't have many features and be designed well at the same time. It just takes preparation and effort instead of ad-hoc additions (like with C++). ~~~ geodel But then there need not be raging debate about Go/Generics. As pragmatic developers can move to Haskell etc if Go has no value add to them. ~~~ coldtea That reminds me of the "If those books say something worthwhile, it will be in the Kuran, too, so it's ok to burn them. If they don't, they it's ok to burn them anyway" argument -- something a sultan is alleged to have said as the justification for burning the library of Alexandria. The thing is, it's not just the feature set, different languages have lots of different things going (or not going) for them too. One might like Go's syntax over Haskell's. Another might not like Haskell's purity. A third might not like Haskell's heavyweight platform installation and tooling. Another might be forced to use Go because of his work but still hate the lack of Generics. Yet another might prefer Go over Haskell just for the fact that you can find Go jobs, where Haskell jobs are too few and far between. ------ peteretep If they accept generics, then there is an implication that the language design isn't infallible as a result of being written by Rob Pike, and then the whole house of cards falls down as people start clamouring for things like real exceptions. ~~~ enneff Your comment does a great disservice to Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and the many others who contributed to Go's design. ~~~ nostrademons Not to mention Ian Lance Taylor, who's been on the Go team since before it was public, authored the GCC Go frontend, was de-facto leading the team when I left Google in 2014, and also happens to be the author of the proposal. ------ mk44 Go is designed by google, for google. Why should they make it to your liking? Why do you rely on google? ~~~ eru Similar things can be said for C and Java, and many other languages. ------ thegenius2000 I agree with the author's request, I'm just not convinced he proposes a design. I mean I recognize see the need for some sort of generic programming, but the big question is _how_ not why, right? Edit: My bad. Didn't see the bottom of the page. ~~~ wrs He's proposed _four_ designs so far. See the bottom of the page.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Regular Expression Denial of Service and Catastrophic Backtracking - guypod https://snyk.io/blog/redos-and-catastrophic-backtracking/ ====== tkadlec Thanks for adding. As a related aside, someone who read the post pointed me in the direction of [http://stackstatus.net/post/147710624694/outage- postmortem-j...](http://stackstatus.net/post/147710624694/outage-postmortem- july-20-2016). Apparently Stack Overflow had a 34 minute outage this past year due to user input that resulted in backtracking. What's crazy is how innocent the regex seemed, too.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Early employees – What won you over? - beat Early non-founder employees (first ten or so) at startups - what attracted you to the job? Why did you choose your company over other opportunities? How did the company find you? And what advice do you have for founders looking to make those first critical hires? ====== kat I took a job where I was the 4th employee at a start-up. The biggest selling point was they were willing to hire me despite my lack of web-dev experience. Coming from a .NET background, I had never used PHP until my interview. The interview involved setting up a MVC application and my interviewers were able to answer my technical questions succinctly. I realized they would be great people to learn from. I think the most important thing about hiring first employees is making sure everyone works well together. I found the company thru craigslist, I'm not too sure if that applies to all cities, but Vancouver developer jobs show up regularly on CL. ~~~ beat So you were looking for work in a field where you had little experience. That makes a lot of sense. I suspect it's a common answer with less experienced employees. ------ jmspring The last three startups I was part of the early team at: #4 - a hardware token that was going to be tied in with web services. A twist on security that interested me as well as a plethora of things to work on. #9 - a group of people I had previously worked that also included some challenges specifically around some stringent performance requirements at scale. #6 - a very heterogeneous environment that had me working in Java, in C/C++, on mobile. It included doing some ugly things involving Windows server. I guess for me, the typical factor is a breadth of interesting problems to tackle. ------ beat Thinking about this after a thread on the Clojure 1.6 discussion. As a founder who will have to start hiring at some point, I'm really curious about what actually _works_ , versus what I think will work.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Simple Example of the Double Tetris Lamp - TheRedBarron https://barronwasteland.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/527/ ====== jpeggg Hey, original Tetris proof guy here. Glad to see it works with two lamps! However, since the 'one of each colour' property is a necessary property for a rectangular arrangement to exist, not a sufficient one, simply having the 'same number of colours' doesn't mean that such an arrangement definitely exists. (It's pretty easy to think of an example of a set of pieces where one doesn't, but the property is satisfied). The fact that an arrangement does exist in the two lamp case is neat though. ~~~ TheRedBarron Oh certainly. I thought I'd explained my thought process but what I meant was that "Since the same number of colors exists then a arrangement may exist" and given that it may a brute-force type approach was taken to confirm that one indeed does	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Where can I buy 10-100 iPhone 3GS - wagerlabs I'm located in the Canary Islands, Spain. Any suggestions on where I can buy 10-100 iPhone 3GS and how much it will cost me? My intention is to buy 10 devices a month initially and I want to be able to use them with any carrier, no contract. ====== sganesh [http://www.buy.com/prod/apple-iphone-3gs-32gb-never- locked-l...](http://www.buy.com/prod/apple-iphone-3gs-32gb-never-locked- legally-unlocked-gsm-cell-phone/q/loc/12435/211493259.html) ~~~ wagerlabs That's rather un-economical at $1,000 per device, even accounting for the USD/EUR exchange rate. The price, shipping and customs fees are gonna kill me. ------ TimMontague Are you going to offer some kind of rental service? That would be an interesting business model... ~~~ wagerlabs Yes, I would like to rent iPhones in my local market, pre-loaded with certain applications. Problem is, I may not be able to do this economically and may have to go with Android instead. I suspect it will be far easier to buy hundreds of HTC Heros directly from HTC than to buy iPhones from Apple or distributors.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nasim Aghdam, the YouTube Shooting, and the Anxiety of Demonetization - anthotny https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/nasim-aghdam-the-youtube-shooting-and-the-anxiety-of-demonetization ====== Mononokay No. Just no. She was obviously mentally ill beforehand, and the mentally ill are prone to doing irrational things. Trying to pin blame or even _imply_ the blame is in YouTube's court is absolutely insane.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Radiologist-Level Pneumonia Detection on Chest X-Rays with Deep Learning - superfx https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/chexnet/ ====== nopinsight A high-quality blog series by Luke Oakden-Rayner, a radiologist (MD) who is doing a PhD focusing on applying machine learning to medical images and text. The End of Human Doctors: [https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/the-end- of...](https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/the-end-of-human- doctors-introduction/) ~~~ long Thanks -- this series is excellent! ------ Nomentatus Bit of an aside, but I'd love to know if said Deep Learning could possibly learn to detect whether a pneumonia was merely eosinophilic (no invader, just white cells gone wild.) I'm hoping that maybe a more general distribution would be characteristic of eosinophilic pneumonia, I suppose. ------ epmaybe I'm currently taking an ML seminar through my university's computer science department while in medical school, and it blows my mind daily. I'd love to contribute, but know that I don't have the time or patience to become an effective ML researcher in medicine. Cheers to these fantastic individuals pushing the application of ML in medicine, potentially saving human lives.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Click around, hover over a link - ericz http://desandro.com/ ====== DigitalSea This simple effect reminds me of the hey day of horrible animated GIF files, entertaining nonetheless and pretty awesome that this kind of effect can be done without using images. Aside: David DeSandro is awesome. His jQuery Masonry plugin has saved me so many times when I've been tasked to build a horizontal site. ~~~ TazeTSchnitzel You'll love this horrible abuse of CSS3 and HTML5 I dreamed up with my friend, then: <http://orangestar.cats4gold.net/drogz/> Why yes, that is an instrumental MIDI converted to MP3 and OGG. ------ BryanB55 Oh I see... FYI: Click on the background somewhere near text. I was clicking on links and you dont get the 'smush' effect unless you click on the background....and hovering over links gives a rainbow colored effect. I guess its cool.... but no, not really. ------ pooriaazimi Nice hack (especially when you're clicking around), but what caught my eye was that maybe for the first time, Safari is actually _waaay_ faster than Chrome or Firefox. This is (roughly) the framerate I got when I tried it on the these three browsers (all latest versions, Windows Vista): Safari: 60 fps (or 30, or whatever "completely smooth" means) Chrome: 20 fps (compared to Safari) Firefox: 30 fps (compared to Safari) But why? Chrome has _always_ been the fastest (on Windows - on Mac, Safari is somewhat smoother _for me_ )??? ~~~ xemoka Do you have chrome://flags -> "GPU compositing on all pages" set to enabled? ~~~ pooriaazimi No, it was "Default". I enabled it and... much to my surprise, the frame rate dropped significantly. It's now like 3 (three) frames per second (it's so slow I am able to actually count the frames!) The "hover" animation (rainbow thing) is fine, 100% smooth. But the exploding animation is just ridiculously slow. Then I set it to be disabled and the frame rate improved a little. Default: 20 fps GPU composition DISABLED: 10 fps GPU composition ENABLED: 3 fps The machine I'm testing with is not particularly powerful, maybe that's the problem. 2 or 3 GBs of RAM, nVidia 9400 (or something like that). ~~~ ygra A bit sad if that's “not particularly powerful” for animating a few letters on a freaking web page ... :-) ------ austenallred A great piece of engineering, but I have to say... just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. I hate too much negativity, though, so I'll repeat my, "Well done." ------ wyattdanger Go to the very bottom and click "What's the email?". That effect is awesome! ------ kylebrown hover? seriously? Didn't mouseovers become a big design no-no, now that tablets are in and PCs are out? I hope I remember to check this later when I'm on my laptop. ps. I love desandro's isotope library ~~~ sgdesign The "big no-no" is having important information that is _only_ displayed on hover, not hover effects in themselves. ------ kondro That's hideous. ~~~ petitmiam I thought that too when I hovered, but clicking is much more fun. You can get a nice swing happening. The examples at <http://desandro.github.com/3dtransforms/> are great. ------ kunil Kinda reminds me of my old flash text effects. <http://0.s3.envato.com/files/42885/preview.swf> (second and forth one) ------ retlehs This is awesome, too: <http://metafizzy.co/> (also from David DeSandro) Hover over the logo and watch how the colors on the page change ------ lukevdp Reminds me of the bright colours of geocities days ------ tambourine_man click/click and drag on anything _but_ the links.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PayPal Goes In-Store - 3lit3H4ck3r http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/15/paypal-here/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 ====== fluidcruft Yeah, sure. I'll let someone use a smart phone to take a picture of my credit card. That has to be the dumbest idea ever. ~~~ gamache Eliminating the merchant account is the stroke of genius. The benefits will outweigh the drawbacks for many people, sellers and buyers alike. And if you don't want to give someone an imprint of your credit card, you can pay with PayPal, and you are protected against fraud up-front (as opposed to after the fact, as with credit cards). That is an improvement. ~~~ eurleif >And if you don't want to give someone an imprint of your credit card, you can pay with PayPal, and you are protected against fraud up-front Does the process for doing that involve typing my PayPal password into a device I don't control? ------ namityadav This may be the first serious competitor that Square has had. Paypal knows the payment space very well, has a brand that everybody recognizes, has relations with a lot of merchants, and the Paypal dongle looks better for heavy usage, because of its shape and size (based on the first picture). ~~~ earl Paypal does bring with them a strong reputation for enjoying fucking their customers. I and my gf refuse to have anything to do with them, and if they're the only option offered, I simply won't buy. ~~~ allbutlost I would argue that this reputation only really applies within the tech echo chamber and that the vast majority of wider society isn't aware of this reputation, and has never heard of Square. But these same people probably do have a PayPal account, and given that these onerous policies of PayPals are actually in place to protect the consumer I think they stand a good chance making it much more difficult for Square in this market. ~~~ agscala Agreed. I was listening to a morning talk show that was discussing PayPal, and they only said great things about PayPal. I think most of the population likes PayPal, except for the very small percentage which happened to get screwed. ------ zaroth Triangle has always been square's worst enemy. ~~~ Karunamon So we're going through the basic shapes for payment companies? Square = obvious Paypal = Triangle Stripe = Rectangle Extrapolating, the next payment-company-cum-dongle is going to be circular. Some kind of NFC rig perhaps? ~~~ zerostar07 It looks like a whole dongle-shape industry is brewing. Waiting for the first dongle in the shape of Lady Gaga. ------ verelo I cant wait for paypal to go broke...theres only so long you can dick around the entire market before it comes back to bite you. ------ paparoger Why couldn't PayPal become more of a innovation company and stop taking ideas from entrepreneurial folks. Errr ------ reustle I saw a "pay with paypal" button on the self checkout at CVS the other day. Has this been around for a while? ~~~ gamache CVS is still a pilot program, and the technology is pretty recent. PayPal at the POS (with phone number+PIN, not email+password) has been in full release at all Home Depot stores for the last month or two, after an earlier pilot program. ------ dutchbrit This is one of the very few moments that I wish a company (in this case, obviously Square) has a patent - PayPal sucks!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Alexis Ohanian, reddit's co-founder, has returned as an advisor - thecoffman http://blog.reddit.com/2011/04/good-news-everyone.html ====== wheels So, what I find more interesting in this is that Reddit did bring in a "new" general manager. What worries me is that it's not actually someone new. Neither is Alexis, for that matter. From the outside looking in it would appear that while Reddit has been great at building a community, ramping up page views and engagement ... they suck at making money. (And this has limited their ability to hire and has spread the existing team very thinly.) From from what I can tell, they've always sucked at making money. So by promoting their community manager and bringing back the original CEO as an advisor, it would seem that this would enhance the parts that they're already really good at, but will they be willing to stir things up enough to bump up the revenues (even if it pisses the community off some)? In an armchair-quarterbacking sort of way, I'd hoped they'd bring in someone that was more of an outsider. ~~~ redthrowaway They've been doing fine for money since they brought in reddit gold. The problem with hiring new staff had to do less with their revenue and more with Conde Nast's print-centric internal structure. That's why reddit gold worked out so well for them: they counted as "paid subscribers", which meant that reddit could get more money allocated for staff. Before, they had rarely had a problem getting servers or other infrastructure, but get approved to hire people to run them was difficult. ------ g0atbutt Good for him. Alexis is a genuinely nice guy. When I launched The Startup Foundry, Alexis emailed me two days after I launched (when I still didnt have much traction) and offered his support. I've had the privilege to interview him in a couple different occasions since then and he's always been incredibly kind. He's a real standup guy. ------ blhack This is awesome. From the things I've seen Alexis do, he seems like a genuinely cool person, and it really makes me happy seeing people like him succeed at things (advisor to Conde Nast seems like a pretty serious position). Congrats, man. ~~~ kn0thing Thank you! It's not nearly as awesome for reddit as Erik becoming GM or Max joining the team, but I'm happy to have the chance to give input into the future of reddit. ------ jacoblyles Chromakode is a JavaScript badass. If you have a chance to listen to his talk on generating dynamic audio in HTML5, you definitely should attend. ------ markkat Down-to-earth cool guy. Reddit owes a lot of what it is to him. I can't see how the community won't benefit from this. Congrats Alexis. ~~~ kn0thing Thanks, but I hope no one catches on to all these shill accounts of mine ;) ~~~ markkat Winking at a shill account is pretty meta. Your shill calling you on it is even more meta. Whoa. ------ seiji Time to update the Alexis Tracker 3000: - YC ambassador to the East - hip hipmunk - returning to reddit as advisor/doodler - (moving back to SF full-time? part-time?) - advising conde nast - publishing books/magnets/sauce/posters/shirts for charity - talking talks How much did I miss? I know more about your life than my own. ~~~ kn0thing I'm not moving, Erik (hueypriest) Martin is. Everything else in your tracker is right on :) I'm bummed this is such a story, though, because the real story is Erik's promotion (congrats, dude!) and Max (chromakode) joining the team. He's been a longtime code contributor (socialite) and active redditor for even longer (he also donates time to help breadpig, building stuff like WTFCNN.com for me). I was simply asked by Conde to formally advise them from time to time about reddit & their general web strategy (and possibly consult on future mascots for new web properties). The chance to have some input on my baby was hard to pass up, but this is not even a part-time gig -- managing and growing the hipmunk brand & community is my fulltime commitment. ~~~ redthrowaway What exactly will Erik's new duties as GM entail? How does it differ from what he and Jeremy already do? ------ staunch Hoping for the best, but based on some of my own experience, these things rarely work. You can't go home again. ~~~ kn0thing I can't stress enough that I'm just a formal advisor now. I was already informally doing it whenever someone asked me to. The exciting story here is Erik moving out west to GM and Max joining (and bringing those UX skills). ------ ajaymehta Sweet! This can only be a good thing. Alexis is awesome (as evidenced by him talking to us for 30 min at 1am for our YC pre-interview.) ~~~ kn0thing Thanks, but that's a perfectly normal thing to do at 1am. ------ ibejoeb I wonder how that happened. Sounds very Jobsian... Very cool, glad to hear it. ------ jasonwilk Alexis is truly awesome. I'm sure he will be a huge help for CondeNast	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Professor Has a Daring Past - hvo http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/nyregion/professor-justus-rosenberg-has-a-past.html ====== doug1001 some lucky 20-year olds at Bard college who happen to sign up for a class by Prof Justus Rosenberg are in for an intellectual experience that they will likely never forget. This NYT article is about the 95-year old professor, who During WW II, was an intelligence agent for the French, then a soldier in the US Army's 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion. He Makes Jason Bourne look like a shopping mall security guard. Yet while the professor possesses extraordinary deep knowledge of the underground resistance in Eastern Europe during WW II, he's apparently quite vague when it comes to talking about his own role: “I was dreaming of beautiful French girls. I was 16. Let’s not kid ourselves." ------ NotSammyHagar What a story. It makes me sad that we don't celebrate people like this fellow more. ------ dannylandau What a wonderful story!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apache Wave on Sandstorm.io - srpeck https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-20-apache-wave.html ====== ChikkaChiChi Wave was a great idea that was completely misunderstood. Unfortunately, it also seemed to have been misunderstood by the people who designed it. Wave was supposed to be a collaborative replacement for email built on the then-exciting XMPP protocol. It was marketed poorly, misunderstood, and eventually shitcanned because Google had no idea what to do with it. ~~~ astrange What was exciting about the XMPP protocol itself? Were people back then just excited to be in the presence of vast amounts of XML? I mean, that'd explain a lot. I felt like Wave very closely approached something useful in this space, but almost anything in communications is interesting when you have another person to talk to, and very little is interesting without one. That makes it very hard to judge if the platform is helping or not. ~~~ ianstallings There was no IM standard at the time. Every provider had their own standard and most of the IM software was not open sourced. Jabber changed the playing field. ~~~ ocdtrekkie Changed it how? Google has since tossed XMPP integration for their whole closed platform Hangouts thing, MSN's old halfway-API-able thing has been integrated into Skype, which is entirely closed, I believe. AIM and YIM are all but dead, at this point. ------ brainburn I think where Google messed up was requiring invites for Wave. Pretty hard to get people on board when they first have to scrounge to get an invite to something they do not quite understand. Network effect--; It could have been so big and awesome. I'm sure after a while the speed issues would have been ironed out. ~~~ takeda Second issue they had was scalability of the service and I suspect the invite system was probably implemented to give them time to scale it. On some large subjects with many people contributing the service was practically unusable. ------ mark_l_watson I liked Wave as a Google product, and I like Apache Wave self hosted. I have tried getting friends and family interested in using a self hosted instance, but not much interest. They like Facebook, go figure :-) That said, a self hosted Apache Wave to small teams seems like a good tool for collaboration. ------ yalogin I did not understand it then and am still confused. What is this supposed to be - a new workflow? a new UI? a new paradigm to do something? Every discussion or webpage I see about this talks about mail. Is it applicable to any other application? ~~~ vanderZwan From what I recall, a few of my friends actively used it back in the day at work, and they claimed it was fantastic for remote collaborations. ~~~ viraptor I used it for 2 projects at uni and enjoyed it a lot. Then it slowed down so much it was unbearable and we couldn't really discover how far the improvements go. Maybe it would get a better response from general public if the modern browsers / js engines were available then. ------ avdempsey Wave wasn't just laggy, it was frequently down. All sorts of apps with scaling issues can work better with the Sandstorm model. The whole Sandstorm idea really started clicking for me when I read one of their earlier posts on motivations: [https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web- ap...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require- federated-hosting.html) That made me a backer. ~~~ ende42 Good read, thanks. Is it possible to run an own, modified version of an open source app on sandstorm.io? As a non-techie user? Like - say - a small modification of Wordpress? ~~~ dwrensha Yep. You could fork our WordPress port[1], repackage it as your own app, and run it on any Sandstorm server. [1] [https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress- sandstorm](https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress-sandstorm) ------ wiradikusuma People keep mentioning how Wave would start lagging as you use it more. Is this still a known issue or has it been fixed? ------ blueskin_ Wave still seems like a solution in search of a problem to me. ------ hexagonsun neat animated logo ------ swah I think you guys are going too fast :) ------ applecore Wave was a promising idea, but it looks like Slack[1] has become the de facto platform for team communication. [1]: [https://slack.com](https://slack.com) ~~~ spankalee Never head of Slack. Their site doesn't even describe what it is. ~~~ tapoxi It's a HipChat clone. ~~~ __P Except it's 10x better than hipchat in almost every way. Price, funcationality, interop, apis, permissions, etc...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AWS Service Operator for Kubernetes Now Available - SoapSeller https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-service-operator-kubernetes-available/ ====== bearforcenine > _we need to set up a way to manage AWS IAM credentials to Kubernetes pods... > In a production system, this should be done using a tool such as kube2iam or > kiam..._ I am curious if AWS has any plans to build an IAM integration for K8s that provides IAM credentials/roles directly to pods. An integration through EKS or K8s directly would make interacting with AWS resources very easy. Being able to authenticate to the K8s cluster using [https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam- authenticator](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator) is nice, but it doesn't help give pods IAM roles. ~~~ twalla [https://github.com/jtblin/kube2iam](https://github.com/jtblin/kube2iam) is probably what you're looking for, it uses iptables to allow/disallow pods requests to the ec2 metadata service based on kubernetes annotations in fact, if you check out the source (located here: [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-service- operator](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-service-operator)) it's recommended to use kube2iam edit: haven't fully read the article yet but if the operator supports managing IAM roles thru a CRD you could potentially create the role and attach it via annotation in one go. double edit: looks like IAM roles aren't directly supported yet, the following is what appears to be supported: \- cloudformation templates \- dynamodb \- s3 \- sns subscriptions and topics \- sqs queues \- ecr repos ~~~ christopherhein Correct, they are on the roadmap, I've been waffling on the implementation because this could open security issues. I'm happy to say we'll at least be able to use k8s RBAC to gate who can get, list, create, update and delete the Roles but your security posture from the node perspective still will need to gate what the pods could assume. [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-service- operator/issues/58](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-service-operator/issues/58) [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-service- operator/issues/59](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-service-operator/issues/59) are the issues if you'd like to add any extra notes or check out the potential implementation. ------ iddqd For me, this is the most exciting thing AWS has launched in a while! ------ blazespin Just an attempt to de-comiditize cloud infra .. what we need is a cloud agnostic solution built by someone other than aws/azure/goog ~~~ iamgopal What's wrong with them ? Three is enough competition. ~~~ rorykoehler Cost is what is wrong. They will form a cartel if there are no competing solutions that reign them in. ------ neurobashing What terminal theme was that in the screenshot? I saw command icons, so it’s a Mac, but how do you make iterm look like that? ~~~ Eldt Take a look at the zsh/fish themes ------ InTheArena This is absolutely awesome. I've thought about doing this a couple of times, as a abstraction layer on top of different clouds, but this is really cool... It's also the first time that I think we have really seen AWS really contribute something to the K8s ecosystem _they do lots of good work at the CNCF_ that is interesting and innovative. (EKS is not as capable as GKS or AKS, and even things like HPA only recently are enabled). ~~~ patrickg_zill Does this work benefit those who are not using AWS? ------ extraterra It's great to see Kubernetes being integrated more tightly with the AWS ecosystem. If now all cloud providers open sourced their MySQL/PostgreSQL forks... ~~~ jjeaff Are there any good docker compose or helm files out there right now that would work for a nice production ready MySQL or PostgreSQL dB? It seems like k8s has everything you would need to have the redundant data sources, failover, and point in time recovery options that cloudsql or auroradb have. ~~~ wskinner We run the official Postgres docker image as a StatfeulSet. Very easy to setup, and we haven’t had any issues with it. ~~~ tango12 Do you run a single instance Postgres or a cluster? What kind of failure modes have you tested if you’re running a cluster? ~~~ wskinner Single instance. And we have small scale. ------ juancampa Is there something equivalent for GCP? AFAIK you control load balancers via Ingress objects but that's about it in terms of integration, right? ~~~ wstrange GCP has service catalog[1] that can interface to various GCP services (Spanner, cloud sql, pub sub, etc.). Service catalog is based on the open service broker spec. [1] [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how- to/add-o...](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/add- on/service-catalog/use-service-catalog) ~~~ joseph Amazon has had that for a while too, but I just learned about it recently, see [1]. I wonder if this is doing the same thing under the hood, or if it is a competing project within Amazon. Regardless, something like this is sorely needed for making infrastructure changes deployable along with application changes. 1\. [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/provision-aws- servic...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/provision-aws-services- kubernetes-aws-service-broker/) ~~~ jacques_chester The difference between "meet customers at a Kubernetes CRD" and "meet customers at an OSBAPI broker" is small enough that it's not worth paying strategy tax to crimp the latter, especially since these customer groups will be overlapping but not equivalent sets (this is how enterprise software grows so vast). Rephrasing: AWS are smart to have a bob each way. ------ simonebrunozzi The cloud fight of 2019-2020: AWS vs GCP in the Kubernetes arena. Curious to see who's going to win, of if it's going to be a tie. Jokes apart: GCP got a head start in containers thanks to Kubernetes; AWS realized it and tried to catch up. Dominating the space will have huge consequences down the road. My humble view is that whoever starts a RedHat-like service (with support, and SLAs, and enterprise services) on top of Kubernetes, might get the upper hand. Having built Kubernetes might not be enough for GCP to maintain the lead. ~~~ k__ As far as I know the container fights are done Kubernetes won even AWS admits it, now it's all about serverless technologies. ~~~ hn_throwaway_99 For serverless technologies to "win" they _have_ to solve the "cold start" problem. AWS likes to pitch Lambdas as an easy mobile backed, but if you need to talk to a DB (which most mobile backends do) then you'll want to put your Lambda in a VPC, which makes cold starts on the order of 5-10 _seconds_ , which is a deal breaker for most synchronous APIs. I don't understand why AWS or GCP haven't added "pre-warming" requests to their cloud functions, similar to App Engine. ~~~ stevehawk why the need to put lambdas in a VPC in order to hit a DB? ~~~ merlincorey A VPC in AWS is essentially a virtual datacenter. For many years now, essentially all AWS services are tied to a VPC. Each account gets 5 VPCs per region, by default. Whether you use RDS or EC2 to setup a database server, it will be tied to a VPC for networking isolation purposes. As such you then would need the Lambda in the VPC, or to allow public internet access to the database. The point is pretty moot though, because you can schedule Cloudwatch Events every 4 minutes to keep a lambda warm, if necessary. Frameworks like Zappa even do this for you automatically. ~~~ hn_throwaway_99 > The point is pretty moot though, because you can schedule Cloudwatch Events > every 4 minutes to keep a lambda warm, if necessary. I encourage you to read this article, [https://theburningmonk.com/2018/01/im- afraid-youre-thinking-...](https://theburningmonk.com/2018/01/im-afraid-youre- thinking-about-aws-lambda-cold-starts-all-wrong/) , because if you're running a web API with Lambdas, keeping _one instance_ warm with the "cloudwatch event every 4 minutes" trick will most definitely _not_ solve your cold start issues. ~~~ Rapzid > I think many still repeat the "conventional wisdom" about the cold start, > and never get past that point. First comment on your article nails it. At the end of the day lambdas scheduling is a black box. People have deduced certain behavior, but AWS is explicit about not relying on undocumented behavior. I would be loath to recommend lambda for any application where business performance is sensitive to the services latencies. ------ mooreds Why didn't they launch with RDS support? Seems like a no brainer. ~~~ christopherhein Great question, it's a little more complicated than one might think at first. In trying to build a "batteries included" experience I'd need to have per-view into your cluster and what VPC, Subnet and AZ you are running in I don't want to make this a configuration option so I need to build out a way to collect this information dynamically so that I can make sure we create DB subnets for the RDS to provision into. Then I need to configure depending on the engine (pg, mysql etc) the port and security group configuration. All in all the CFT and is more complicated and with the way the resources are code generated it requires heavy customization. All that being said it is well up on the top of my list to implement. Also always interested in letting other folks come and contribute if they feel inclined. :) ~~~ mooreds Ah, maybe I meant "it's a no brainer from a user perspective". Thanks for the explanation. ~~~ christopherhein :) No worries, if you have other services that you find would be really useful please file issues [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-service- operator/issues](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-service-operator/issues)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ultracapacitor Nanotech Breakthrough Could Boost Storage Capacity and Power Output - MikeCapone http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/ultracapacitor-nanotechnology-breakthrough-power-storage.php ====== LogicHoleFlaw Power storage and distribution is the limiting factor in _so many things_ that it's not even funny. Best of luck to all the researchers working on finding better ways to deliver power where we need it. ------ tocomment I had no idea ultracapacitors were only up to 5% of LION capacity. I thought they were already competitive. I heard superconductors can be used for energy storage. Assuming we had a room temperature superconductor, what would the power/density on that be? I.e., how would it compare to LION? ------ DanielBMarkham Isn't this the 4th or 5th super-capacitor story in the last six months? ~~~ biohacker42 I'd like to know if that reflect fast advancing technology or just good publicity. ~~~ DenisM Well, we will need a new bubble once this one is deflated. The search for candidates is on. Front-runners are: Alterntaive Energy, Clean Tech, Bio Tech.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response - ciconia https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/04/climate-change-world-war-iii-green-new-deal ====== LinuxBender Please don't turn climate change into a war. The war on drugs has backfired immensely. I don't trust governments to play with our planets orbit (Milankovitch cycles) and get it right.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Xinjiang Procedure - revorad http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/xinjiang-procedure_610145.html ====== blrgeek Warning - extremely disturbing read - and I've read a ton of crazy shit. As interesting as it was - I couldn't actually compel myself to complete reading this. Perhaps later. ~~~ alf I couldn't finish reading this either. It was too disturbing. Before anyone jumps to vilify the China or the Chinese for this, remember that these kinds of evils have historically been perpetuated by all people in the past or presently. This story is a chilling reminder: people are still belligerent, tribal animals, no matter how advanced our culture or technology. ------ enimodas Apparently the article can't be trusted. Read comments on reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/mw542/the_signal...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/mw542/the_signals_may_be_faint_but_they_are_consistent/) ~~~ tptacek Was going to say the same thing. I didn't look at the masthead until I got to the part about the evil Islamic human rights organization that cared a lot about the reporter's Jewish name, whereupon I thought "what the" and, ahh, it's The Weekly Standard. Of course. Let's all be clearheaded about what's going on here: This is an article that says that the Chinese are rounding up protesters and warehousing them in military prisons until party officials show up with organ troubles, whereupon doctors are sent in to take blood from the prisoners to find matches so that those prisoners can be carefully executed (by gunshot) so that their organs can be harvested while the prisoner is still alive. This extraordinarily claim is backed up by... an anonymous source. ~~~ malandrew I spent two weeks traveling in Xinjiang in 2006 and everything I saw suggested that it was an occupied territory. The most obvious sign is that the population almost everywhere you traveled were ethnic Uighur, but the police forces were all ethnically Han Chinese. Prior to visiting Xinjiang, I had lived 1 year in Beijing and Handan, Hebei for 6 months. The other detail that caught me off guard is that for 1.5 years, I had not seen a police officer with a gun. Every police officer in the East of the country had a baton, but no gun. In Xinjiang, not only were the police of obviously different ethnic origin, it was not uncommon to see them armed with handguns and occasionally with an assault rifle. I don't know anything really about the issue discussed in the article other than hearsay, but there is no doubt in my mind that Xinjiang is undergoing "ethnic cleansing" by dilution. AFAIK the same is happening in Tibet. ~~~ tptacek One way of summarizing what you just wrote is: "I spent two weeks traveling in Xinjiang in 2006 and saw only ethnic Han policing the majority Uighur population, often unusually well-armed for Chinese police. Therefore, I think it is reasonable to report that the government of China is warehousing Uighur protesters in military prisons until party officials develop organ failure, whereupon prisoners are screened for blood/tissue matches and then murdered for their organs, which are removed while the prisoner is still alive." Put in that light you can see the problem with this discussion: that Uighurs (like many other populations in China) are subjected to intense human rights violations _does not_ imply that a monstrous organ harvesting program is being run out of Chinese prisons. ~~~ mnemonicsloth Crimes against humanity get their own category precisely because it is so difficult for us to imagine they could actually happen. The genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Nazi Germany have these things in common: before the fact, a respectable consensus that reports of atrocities were farfetched; afterwards, shock and dismay that more wasn't done to stop the killing. Given this history, aren't we better off keeping a low threshold of suspicion? ~~~ tptacek What happened in Rwanda was all the more monstrous because of _how much evidence_ the world community ignored. What evidence is there here? ~~~ malandrew I've seen lots of photos related to this issue. The validity of all of them is always called into question, but given the sensitivity of this issue, I imagine that a lot is being done to maintain reasonable doubt without an investigation. Some facts are indisputable. Chinese executes more people per year than any other country. There is no accountability within the country for how these executions are carried, nor is there accountability to how they are carried out to international governing bodies. Compare how executions in the West are carried out versus China. I'd say there is more than enough evidence to warrant investigations into how these executions are carried out. I would like to see someone take all Chinese government statistics on issues like organ donors per capita, transplants performed per capita, etc. and see if they are out of line with what is seen in other countries. I wouldn't be surprised is Benford's Law could be applied to the data. ------ spiffistan Well, that surely ruined my christmas spirit... ~~~ revorad Sorry, I did wonder whether to post it or not. ------ yread flagged. What's next? articles from Falun gong? ~~~ tptacek I flagged it too, realizing (because you wrote that comment) that there is absolutely no reason this article belongs on HN --- even had it been well- sourced, what the fuck did this have to do with HN? Thanks for pointing that out. I've largely given up on flagging during the SOPApera. ------ verroq This article isn't about harvesting organs from people that were going to die/dead/dying. This article accusing China of genocide against the Uighurs, which is complete bullshit. ~~~ kachnuv_ocasek Genocide against the Uighurs is bullshit? Oh, you. Now you'll tell us Tibet peacefully joined China in 1951, right? ~~~ verroq Because slavery under Dalai Lama's system was much better right? You seem to think that it was a semi-utopia under Dalai Lama's rule, but it was still a backward, primitive system enforced and governed by religion. ~~~ kachnuv_ocasek Wow, I think I'm going to disengage this conversation now. Václav Havel died last week. I was afraid of slow disappearance of the values he defended, but I see the Western pleb has very twisted values already. ~~~ verroq I'm not saying what China is currently doing in XingJiang is right, but to deny that overthrowing Dalai Lama resulted in a better standard of life for Tibet's inhabitants is lunacy. ~~~ cperciva Trying to improve someone's standard of living by force is almost inevitably doomed to fail. Canada tried that with its native population in the 20th century -- take children away from their backwards and uncivilized parents and raise them instead in residential schools -- and it was an utter disaster. ~~~ drx If anyone is as curious as I am: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sch...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Need some advice: I'm losing confidence trying to find a job as a Jr Rails dev. - Lhopitals_rule I graduated months ago with a non-computer science degree but spent the latter half of university diving into Rails, Vim, Linux, and other peripheral technologies. I'm comfortable (at varying degrees) with the menagerie of tools/tech that comes with the space from Haml to Sass to SQL.<p>But I'm confident in my ability to make any conventional app with Rails.<p>I'm having trouble cajoling employers, though. My Github only has a couple trivial Rails apps. I have a meager blog. I can answer questions on #rubyonrails all day, but it's hard to represent my knowledge to employers. Or maybe it's just not enough.<p>Having found HN around the time I decided to jump into web development a few years ago, I became complacent with the amount of times I hear people say that there aren't enough Rails developers to go around. I felt like I was getting a head start by learning Rails during uni. But I forgot to consider that I'm hearing this on HN, a community that's probably predominantly based around the bay area.<p>I live in Texas and haven't had much luck finding many Rails jobs to begin with. I started off with an asking salary of 70k due to the aforementioned complacency. It's amusingly high, but I promise it's not the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. :) I just had no idea how to answer "What's your salary requirement?" Especially when I'd accept an offer $20k+ below that. What also led to my overestimation was that my friends with the same degree were getting into Microsoft shop consultancies and product companies around the $70k mark, but none of them had any experience outside the few trivial ASP.NET projects we had along our degree plan. None of them had side projects, programmed/made something for fun, or even knew much HTML. I thought surely I had more going for me than just being a new grad.<p>I've since dropped it to $50k, but am now lowering it to $40k in future interviews since it's evident that I need to just get my foot in the door.<p>Time is running out. It's been 5 months since I graduated. My parents resent that I didn't recruit heavily as I was graduating, but the recruited positions like "Business Process Analyst" and "Financial Management Trainee" (and much of the business school at large) were at odds with what I want to do with my life and the personality traits that make me enjoy the atmosphere around HN, Rails, and budding communities like Nodejs. I'll admit I was a bit drunk with confidence in my ability to find a Rails job at the time. Any job!<p>I'm not really sure where to go from here. I don't have the budget to move to the west coast or anywhere else at the moment. But I also understand I'm an unproven junior developer with no professional Rails experience. Only a very small subset of companies would fly out such a candidate. I certainly don't blame anybody for not taking a chance on me after a phone interview!<p>I think getting an unrelated corporate job just to get a job would be a bad idea for me. I enjoy working on my side projects. I have a few more interviews within the next two weeks, but I now see myself working a more menial job to pay the bills/debt while I continue to develop my side projects.<p>However, I'm approaching my mid-20s and I'm reluctant to believe that scavenging for free time to work on side projects is going to ever allow me to compete with other job candidates. ====== overgryphon The bay Area is far away, but what about Austin? Austin has a lively tech scene, and quite a few startups looking for employees. Find a menial job so you aren't desperate, and find the local RoR/other programming related meetups to ask about job opportunities. Housing is cheap over the summer near the university, since many students want to sublease their apartment while not in school. Coops near UT campus also provide very cheap summer housing (you don't need to be a student for this). Meet people in the RoR community, work on some more substantial projects for your Github, and ask others in the community for help learning and applying for jobs. Contribute to an RoR open source project. Give it the summer, and reconsider your options in the fall. It's okay to not have a job right away. It's okay to get a job not related to your degree. There are jobs available for inexperienced developers, it just might take some time to find them. If this is what you want to do, you can do it. You aren't a student, but it may be worth calling the UT natural sciences career center and ask to be put on the mailing list about job opportunities in cs. They know who's hiring, and the worse that can happen is they say no. ------ patdennis Depending on your situation this may not be the most useful advice, but have you considered moving to the Bay Area? It may be tempting to stay in your comfort zone, but for me getting to the big city on my own after college was vitally important. If I didn't, I have no doubt I'd still be working some soul crushing job in suburbia like my friends who didn't get out. EDIT: I did see that you said you don't have the budget to move right now, but that's hardly an excuse. You can always flip burgers or freelance or whatever you need to do to save up. Or try to secure yourself a job before you move. That's what I did. ~~~ Lhopitals_rule I agree, it's not a good excuse. It's just something that wouldn't be able to happen until many months from now. Thanks for the insight. I'll keep sending resumes out, working on my side projects, and making money in some fashion. When I have enough saved up, if I've found no opportunities, I'll set a date and move. ~~~ jvrossb If you score a job in the Bay Area (or anywhere else with a decent tech scene), they should be able to pay you enough to relocate. I would not limit your job search to what's locally available. Also try bidding on jobs on Freelance sites to get some work while you're looking for a job. This will also help you build a better portfolio while getting paid. ------ ayers Hindsight is a magical thing. Speaking from personal experience you need to stick with trying to find the job that you are passionate about. I took a job that wasn't ideal over another job offer. The decision came down to the fact that it was in a location (and other personal factors) that all fell in my "comfort zone". The job that I didn't take would have been a much better cultural fit and more in line with my long term goals. I just didn’t have the foresight to see this at that point. I underestimated the negative effect of taking a job that had a tech stack I wasn't passionate about, would have on me personally and professionally. I did learn a lot of valuable lessons from the job I took and by no means was it a write off. I ended up staying there a few years but can’t help wonder how things would be different if I had taken the other job. You have the right attitude in not wanting to get an unrelated corporate job just for the sake of having a job. So my advice would be to keep looking and if you need work desperately then settling for a temporary job outside of tech(or in) while you continue your search is better than getting tied into the corporate job you don’t want to be doing. It will be much harder to get out of that job and onto the one you really want. edit: formatting ------ kbedell All I can say is stick with it. Hard work pays off in time. And I can vouch for the dearth of rails devs (though I guess I do live in Boston). The one thing I'd say is hold out as long as you can to make sure you get into the type of job you want. If you take a job doing MS Tech just to feed yourself, it'll be hard not to get branded with that tech. ------ bwb Hit me up -> bwb@site5.com, we are 100% remote and you can read about our RoR projects at eng5.com ------ canterburry Send me a resume! Our company here in the Bay Area is looking for Rails people like there's no tomorrow and we have plenty of people working remote. canterburry@gmail.com. ------ tgc_ror can you email me at tgcdev1@gmail.com?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Can You Trust An Early-Stage VC With a HIR and EIR? - mschonfeld http://alexstechthoughts.com/post/45913644960/can-you-trust-an-early-stage-vc-with-a-hir-and-eir ====== itsprofitbaron I think you can trust VC firms because they are _incentivised_ to not steal your idea. In fact, they see that many ideas there will probably be 4-5 entrepreneurs pitching them the same idea potentially with the same/slightly different spin on it. By _incentivised_ , I mean that if a VC firm is known to steal ideas then entrepreneurs, will generally avoid them (especially if the VC firm that stole the idea was an early-staged VC) which means that their deal flow will dry up – something no VC firm wants. Having an EIR and/or HIR allows a VC firm to provide their portfolio companies with a better level of service. VC firms are providing more than just money, they’re providing help with resources which are/maybe too early for a startup to have and when you do need them they’re helping you fill those roles – specifically they’re providing things like finance, marketing, HR, PR help etc and having an EIR and/or HIR increases the amount of service they have offer to their portfolio companies. ~~~ Ataub24 Definitely. Thanks for this. The post was specifically early-stage - and it isn't the VC that would steal it - it's the HIR and EIR - the VC would still fund it, but just their guys/gals. But everything you said makes a lot of sense. ------ arbuge I was an EIR once. The thought of copying someone's idea never even vaguely occurred to me - indeed, I was taken on board to further develop a preexisting idea. May not be true at less reputable venture firms, but in general the maxim of not worrying too much about people stealing your idea still applies. That said, it's the first time I hear of HIRs, and I don't think retaining such people at VCs makes any sense, precisely because this concern seems more real. It's cool if the VCs themselves have hacker backgrounds of course, but having a full time hacker on board is another matter. ------ Hitchhiker Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a post where there will be much " strategic " silence in terms of comments and loads of up-votes. ------ greghinch If the team is good, no amount of competition will kill a company with a good idea. Think about it this way: how many great products and services do you use that have no competition? If your idea and team are worth investing in, then no one will be able to stop you by "stealing" the idea. ------ arethuza Can someone explain to me what a HIR and EIR would do at a VC? ~~~ Ataub24 hacker in residence can do a bunch of things. build new website for them, build stuff on portfolio companys APIs, start building their own project. depends on the vc and what they want. Also depends on the hacker and what they want. entrepreneur in residence is supposed to be working on a startup- while also participating on investments- they can bring in deals, help portfolio companies, vet imminent investments, etc. helpful? ~~~ arethuza Yes thanks. ------ funnyguy123 Please stop writing this sort of junk: "Ideas are valueless, it is all about execution. Anyone who says differently is either misinformed or unable to execute." ~~~ Ataub24 super constructive. thanks. ~~~ funnyguy123 If you're going to take such a dogmatic stance in your writing then you should be prepared for the criticism. I don't think anyone is interested in rehashing the debate about the value of ideas on this thread. Suffice it to say there are plenty of very well informed people who have built companies and believe that ideas are valuable and worth protecting. So when you demean your audience by suggesting otherwise you can expect people to take offense, dismiss whatever else you have to say, or both. ~~~ camz The fact the author expresses his personal opinion shouldn't be an issue for a reader because they avail themselves to his thoughts by reading the article. He's allowed to write what he wants and more importantly believes. Either constructively rebut the issue or ignore it. ------ ivankirigin It is so much more likely that your product is bad because you avoid telling people about it than your product idea is copied and crushed by another upstart ------ rficcaglia It happens. Personal experience. That said, if you do your homework on the team you can minimize the probability. Doesn't minimize the sting sadly. ------ beachstartup i see a lot of "the VCs are incentivized against stealing..." what will happen is the HIR/EIR will take an idea that they haven't invested in yet (heard during a pitch, maybe), and incorporate it into a company they HAVE invested in.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
On building systems that will fail - sbmthakur https://fermatslibrary.com/s/on-building-systems-that-will-fail ====== dredmorbius For those who prefer PDFs (for local reading / archival): [https://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/classes/cmpsci691st/readings...](https://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/classes/cmpsci691st/readings/OS/On- Building-Systems-That-Fail-corbato.pdf) The author is the late Fernando J. Corbato.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon - brlewis http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/prelim_water_results.html ====== anigbrowl _But Colaprete couldn't resist a further tease, saying that other features in the spectra hinted at a variety of additional chemicals. "This goes beyond the water," he said, but declined to discuss any of this additional information, suggesting that it was in the same state as the water findings were shortly after the impact—they still haven't eliminated enough possible explanations, so they can't talk about it with any confidence._ [http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/nasa- announces-s...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/nasa-announces- significant-quantities-of-water-on-the-moon.ars) ...includes pictures of absorption spectra - anyone who can guess what lives around the other significant data points? My knowledge of chemistry is sadly lacking... ------ brlewis "We are ecstatic," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water." ------ bobbyi Hasn't NASA announced new "breaking, clear evidence" of moon water/ ice every year for the past decade? ~~~ tocomment That's just something the mainstream media does. They distall the press releases into simple headlines. Thus some evidence for water on the moon = a headline of water on the moon. But this time it's for real... ------ tocomment Is this enough information/certainty to plan future missions? Can we count on water being there to use for fuel, etc? Or before that point will we need some kind of scout mission to figure out specifics like "there are X lbs. of water at this site in 3 ice puddles here, here, and here"? If so, how would such a mission work? Manned? ------ Sapient While it is good news, I still wonder when we will see an actual "moon-base" Once established, it will definitely signal a new era of space exploration. And perhaps a new era for humanity at the same time. Maybe I read too much sci-fi... ~~~ bjelkeman-again The issue though is what are you going to do with a moon base? The moon does not hold any significant resources which are useful in the further exploration of the solar system. (Now, I don't know how much water there is on the moon, but my guess is that it isn't enough of it to justify building a moon base just for the water.) Astroids, comets or Mars, that should be where the action is. :) ~~~ InclinedPlane Due to the exponential nature of the rocket equation the most important resource needed for exploration of the Solar System is rocket fuel. Water can be turned into rocket fuel by splitting it into Oxygen and Hydrogen. Water and Oxygen are also very important consumables in spaceflight. Moreover, Oxygen and water can be used to grow food. It can be an order of magnitude more efficient to launch propellant from the Moon than from the Earth. Given that, it starts to make sense to launch unfueled spacecraft from Earth which fuel up with Lunar sourced propellants (and other consumables) at a depot in Earth orbit or Lunar orbit. With such a system you can use smaller, reusable launch vehicles from both the Earth and the Moon to build a self-sustaining trans-Earth exploration infrastructure, rather than continually building one-off efforts to get to Mars, the asteroids, etc. ------ RiderOfGiraffes Cross reference: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940314>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Messaging as the Single Source of Truth - deegles https://www.confluent.io/blog/messaging-single-source-truth/ ====== mpweiher Messaging as state was described very thoroughly by David Reed[1] in his 1978 thesis[2][3]: [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Reed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Reed) [2] [http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS- TR-20...](http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-205.pdf) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15021833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15021833)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The State of LTE - cleis http://opensignal.com/reports/state-of-lte/# ====== JamesCRR This was my first attempt at Data-visualisation using d3. I've done a few things with GoogleVis and R, the one is awesome for the web the other is awesome for its flexibility, D3 is awesome for both. I was also pretty much a novice to JS and CSS, I highly recommend AlignedLeft's tutorials <http://alignedleft.com/> if like me you start from scratch with this. ~~~ b1tr0t Your graphs are pretty -- and it's an interesting page, but your ping section makes me wonder about the rest of your data. You don't qualify what you're pinging, but if we're talking ping to the internet gateway, ping over a strong 802.11n connection on my iPhone 5 is 2 - 5 milliseconds on my local network. The same is not true of LTE which has more typically a 100ms latency to the carrier internet gateway. LTE definitely brought down latency from 3G! But it's nowhere near as low latency as a good 802.11n connection! ~~~ pavelpadovan True, we're pinging google.com (which resolves to its local sites) over the active data connection - whatever flavour of Wi-Fi or 3G. We could have also broken this down by 3G types e.g. UMTS vs HSPA etc. The idea is not to show the theoretical maximum of LTE or Wi-Fi, if we wanted to that we'd just use a dozen phones in lab conditions. Rather, we wanted to get a feel for the changes in user experience of the mobile web, so this data is drawn from a set of 9m speed tests run with the OpenSignal app. ------ lobster_johnson This article leaves out a major issue if you're an iPhone user (no idea about Android phones): LTE frequencies have not been standardized. As usual, it's the US that is the outlier, and the rest of the world have agreed on a standard. Here is Apple's list of models and their compatibility: <http://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/> For example, US iPhone models use GSM at 700b MHz, but won't work with European LTE (and vice versa) which use GSM at 850/1800/2100 MHz. (And then there's my country, Norway, where we have only two networks which for some reason have decided on 1800/2600 MHz, which will work with _none_ of the existing models.) ~~~ CrazedGeek "The LTE standard can be used with many different frequency bands. In North America, 700/800 and 1700/1900 MHz are used; 2500 MHz in South America; 800, 900, 1800, 2600 MHz in Europe; 1800 and 2600 MHz in Asia; and 1800 MHz in Australia." It doesn't seem like anyone's particularly standardized on frequencies. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)#Frequen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_$telecommunication$#Frequency_bands) ~~~ tedunangst Rest of the world == Europe. ------ pm90 I recently talked to an Intel engineer about why they don't have an Intel phone out yet. And he reached into his pocket and pulled out an Intel phone! Apparently, these phones are already available in China, but because Intel does not make the LTE chipsets, they have been unable to get it out. I asked him why Intel did not have LTE chipsets in their phones, Ans:"Because Qualcomm owns all the patents and makes the latest chipsets" ~~~ wmf Intel/Infineon has an LTE baseband, but for whatever reason it isn't used in any phones. One factor is that Verizon and Sprint are locked into Qualcomm for backwards compatibility with their CDMA2000 networks and if you have to use Qualcomm for the Verizon version of the phone you might as well use Qualcomm for the GSM version as well. ------ kristopher HOW SPEEDS COMPARE doesn't really mean much. Japan has a higher density of users per square kilometer, so it seems to me that there should be some sort of normalization done to the numbers. I get better speeds in Kyoto (less simultaneous users) than I do in Shibuya (many simultaneous users!) ~~~ cleis Thanks for the feedback. We aim to measure the actual user experience on LTE, rather than the theoretical capacity. If an area has a higher density of users then of course connections will be slower, but that is meant to be a part of what we're recording. Obviously countrywide averages are never going to say very much about localised area speeds, but they do give a general indication for the purpose of international comparison. ~~~ kristopher Also, how are you measuring speed? HTTP Download? Where are your servers located? ~~~ JamesCRR Sorry we missed this one, yep HTTP download from Cloudfront - so we use those servers. Others e.g. SpeedTest.net use the servers of the local ISPs which is better for measuring the max possible speed a user can get, but our focus is on the speeds users are more likely to get while actually browsing/downloading so Cloudfront works pretty well as a lot of global traffic is served through it - would love to see the % if anyone knows. ------ aw3c2 Random feedback: On the THE GLOBAL ROLLOUT world map, the colors are not clear. They seem to be the same as the 2(?) pixel high lines below the labels below? Make them bigger! Or add a legend. On HOW SPEEDS COMPARE I had to read the rotated y label first before I had any idea what the graph showed. Either add the unit to the numbers or add a clear title that is read normally. LTE PING VS OTHER TECHNOLOGIES seems completely random. What are those numbers, how were they created? Ping to where? ~~~ JamesCRR Thanks for the comments, I agree we the key for the map could be clearer (yep it's those lines!). I'm also with you on the bar chart. The pings are on google.com (which resolves to it's local site). And, extra clarification, we're using cloudfront CDN for the download tests. OK will makes some changes then. Thanks! ~~~ Osmium I would add a forth colour on the map too: LTE from multiple carriers or not. e.g. in the UK we only have LTE from one carrier at present, so for practical purposes most consumers (who are currently locked into contracts) don't have access to LTE, and those that do might choose not to since no competition means that currently LTE is very expensive here -- and that's if it's available at all; presently it's only in a few select cities. Listing "UK Broadband" as an additional LTE carrier is a bit misleading, since they're (to my knowledge) only a wholesaler and don't actually provide a service direct to customers. I think a map showing which countries have multiple carriers would give an extra way of judging how developed a country's LTE infrastructure is. Great map otherwise though! ------ kdot MetroPCS is using a 5x5 Mhz channel in most of its markets, that is the primary reason for low speed. This brings down the USA average. Most US network operators have the capability to reach the 100 Mbit/s downlink target; that requires a dedicated 20MHz channel (which no one has) and full-blown MIMO. ~~~ spwestwood The Japan average is also bought down a lot by one network (NTT DOCOMO). As well as the usual factors age of the network could also be an issue here. Both SoftBank (16.2 Mb/s), KDDI (14.8 Mb/s) are under 1 year old, presumably under capacity waiting for people to upgrade handsets and contracts. DOCOMO (5.5 Mb/s) on the other hand launched in 2010. You see a similar effect in the US, where AT&T's network is regularly beating the older, more congested Verizon. We expect this to even out over time. ------ chromelyke "WI-FI" is a bit ambiguous for a comparison like this. If your intention was to compare land lines to cellular then it should be called out as such. It would also be important to note that the land line performance in areas with LTE coverage may be significantly better than the national average used. ------ hrrsn It's interesting how LTE doesn't always mean fast. Here in New Zealand carriers have only been testing LTE while upgrading their networks to 42mbps DC-HSPA. At home I can average about 30mbps on my iPad and iPhone over 3G. For me, I'd rather have constantly fast 3G rather than spotty LTE, especially with the battery situation. <http://i.imgur.com/7k8LXe1.png> ~~~ spwestwood That's true. The fastest 3G speeds can exceed average LTE, so it's semi- defensible for carriers to brand some HSPA+ as 4G. In our tests though, the fastest speeds are always LTE. In the last week of the 50 fastest speeds tests all but 2 (#39 and #40) have been LTE. (Fastest was 69812 Mb/s - Oman Mobile!) ------ minimax Great info! What are you pinging? Is it the default gateway or a specific host on the Internet? Also how do you determine download speed? The numbers for wi- fi are so disappointing. I wonder if you're not really measuring the speed of the DSL connection (or whatever) that the wi-fi router is sitting on. ~~~ jsight If it's measuring public wifi, then I'm not surprised. I rarely see better than 2-3Mb. My HSPA+ phone easily beats almost every public wifi that I've seen, aside from the issue of data-caps. ~~~ JamesCRR Yep, it includes public Wi-Fi, though we are trying to distinguish between public and private for the purposes of making hotspot maps, anyway could also be cool to look at the breakdown in speeds between the two. ------ hideo You may be interested in <http://www.mobiperf.com/>. Most of their data is available for research purposes, and there are many researchers who have used this for their tests. ~~~ JamesCRR That's part of the very cool M:Lab project, other apps running M:Lab <http://measurementlab.net/measurement-lab-tools> ------ CrazedGeek Are HSPA+/LTE speeds really that "bad" generally? My HSPA+ phone typically gets 8-10Mbps down and roughly 50ms ping, and I've been led to believe that LTE here (the US) is considerably faster. ~~~ yareally HSPA+ tends to have latency degrade far faster when you get farther from a tower than LTE, that's the big difference between the two. LTE speeds are quite good on Verizon[1]. I get around 2-4MB/s normally. LTE pings for me are 50-100ms depending on where I am. [1]Verizon uses the 700mhz LTE band. ------ xixora1 I'm quite happy that this article clears up the real meaning of 4G. ~~~ sp332 Well, that's the ITU's definition. Unfortunately they didn't acquire the trademark for the 4G designation before carriers already had started to use it on their "slightly better 3G" networks, so there is no regulation on the use of the term in the market. I think it's funny that AT&T called one of their earlier networks "4G" so now when I have an LTE signal, it doesn't say 4G and when I don't, it does... ~~~ cpeterso Ex-Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein used to dismiss AT&T's "4G" network as "faux G." ------ shmerl Is T-Mobile going to have an LTE network in US? ~~~ yareally Eventually yes. Right now it's just imaginary mostly, like Sprint's. However, both are supposed to have LTE soonish (they keep delaying it so can't be more definite than that).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
I'm Moving to the Valley What next? - MenaMena123 So what next, I have enough money for a year to live, looking for a parnter/programmer to mix up some ideas. Then what! Tell me your game plan, I have an idea, but my time is limited so i gotta hit the ground running. ====== seanmccann Are you a programmer or just idea guy? ~~~ MenaMena123 I am a designer. I know about programming etc. but I know I need someone who knows it better than I do. Design is my main skill. ------ vipivip Make connections fast. ~~~ MenaMena123 Really!? Lol come on tell me something I dont know. ;)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Who is launching MVP? - pyeu We're super interested in knowing what you are launching in March 2018. Please include in your replies the short description of what you are launching, how you got the idea, and URL. ====== good123d67 just launched [http://startmydomain.com](http://startmydomain.com) would love some feedback	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Node Predictions for 2015 - shubhra51 http://strongloop.com/strongblog/2015-node-js-predictions/ ====== ijroth Glad to see Node making strong progress ------ centrinoblue it was a very good year	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Future Software Superheroes - It’s time for your CodeMontage - vanessa http://developersforgood.org/post/35212705141/introducingcodemontage ====== shuaib $500 fee?!? I don't get it. This is the first time I am hearing about"Developers for Good". Am I missing something? Why would someone pay $500 to solve a problem that will "improve the world"? Has anyone participated in this and can shed some light on why it is worth it? ~~~ vanessa CodeMontage's fee covers the cost of helping you find projects that are right for your level (perhaps you can navigate this on your own, but many people new to development and new to open source struggle with this), facilitating feedback and making sure you get code reviews, and helping you measure your improvement as a coder, not just asking you to volunteer without measuring your impact. This is the first formal session of CodeMontage, and in the future we plan to make the whole platform and participation much more flexible than formal sessions. Hope that helps! ~~~ columbo Hrm, are you a non-profit or have you considered that? It seems odd to pay an unknown entity (you) and then perform a service (write code) all for a very high level idea alone (the good). I feel for this to work there must be some sort of 'meet in the middle', like a non-profit, where you can actually track what the $500 expense is going to be used for.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Are humans cruel to be kind? - robg http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227081.400-are-humans-cruel-to-be-kind.html?full=true ====== TheSOB88 Holy crap, this article is amazingly interesting. Please repost it or something. I'd vote for it again.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Stealthy, destructive malware infects half a million routers - milankragujevic https://www.wired.com/story/vpnfilter-router-malware-outbreak/amp ====== milankragujevic Non-amp version: [https://www.wired.com/story/vpnfilter-router-malware- outbrea...](https://www.wired.com/story/vpnfilter-router-malware-outbreak/) ------ NKosmatos Link to the technical report by Talos: [https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/05/VPNFilter.html](https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/05/VPNFilter.html) Fun trivia, Talos in Greek mythology was a giant automaton robot?) made of bronze to protect Europa in the island of Crete from pirates and invaders. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talos)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
I tried to find out how much my son's birth would cost. No one would tell me - lkurtz http://www.vox.com/2016/5/5/11591592/birth-cost-hospital-bills ====== anywhichway My company has developed several tools to answer these kinds of questions. One of which is publicly available and done for a non-profit: [http://guroo.com](http://guroo.com), which lacks provider specific detail, but has averages for many different types of services by geographic area. It is a neat tool, that is a step in the right direction, but is unfortunately not very actionable. The data is based on 40 million insured individuals. Another tool has provider specific detail, but is only available to the members of select insurance companies. It uses data specific to that company's historic provider data and negotiated rates. More employers are moving to high deductible health plans with health savings accounts and are looking for insurance companies to provide more tools to help guide members choices. Giving members increased incentives to make good healthcare decisions doesn't do any good unless the members have the tools needed to make informed decisions. ------ devhead the real answer is: they will charge as much as your insurance will accept. Then your insurance will "negotiate" a lower amount based on their leverage, data and other closely guarded policies. ------ coreyp_1 If the FTC can force Funeral Homes to make their prices public ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funeral_Rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funeral_Rule)), then why can't they do the same for hospitals? ~~~ mikeyouse Because a funeral is 1 service and something like a birth could be 100 different services with different experts and requirements that are impossible to predict beforehand.. ~~~ coreyp_1 I understand that entirely. But not publishing their prices before hand _at all_ seems to me, in a word, deceptive. ~~~ mikeyouse In theory, the hospital should be able to provide a minimum price based on the standard order set for labor and delivery -- "If you have a natural birth in the hospital, and you spend 1 day in the room, 2 days in recovery, only use these drugs and receive these tests, your visit will cost $XX." But that isn't really helpful since most births will vary a substantial amount from the 'basic' plan. This gets back to why insurance exists in the first place, if the average price for 10 births is $10,000 -- that could be 10 births at $10k or 9 births at $1k and one at $91k or literally anywhere in between. ~~~ sportanova but that data could be really useful - the average cost is $x, the median is $y, and you could do standard deviations too. Or you could give even more detailed info ------ doctorwho As a Canadian this is something that would have never crossed my mind. I just go to the hospital/doctor without any thought of how much it's going to cost me. I suppose this is why "home birth" became a thing. ------ woodandsteel Can't find out medical prices? But conservatives tell us again and again that we have by far the best medical delivery system in the world. I guess the conclusion is that medical corporations (which is what hospitals are these days) work better when they don't have to reveal what they are charging.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Wolfram Physics Project - pokolovsky https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ ====== dang We merged this thread with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707) and kept its title, in the hope that it would have less of a flamebait effect. All: no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding. Since this comment was becoming top heavy, I forked it. If you want the meta- meta stuff, it's this way: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22869384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22869384). ------ knzhou I don't see anything of substance here, besides a lot of pretty graphs. Just like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", we have the problem that there is a vast gulf between what you need to make flashy popsci and what you need to make a real physical theory. In increasing order of difficulty, you need to: 1\. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorentz invariance and the Einstein field equation (this is supposed to be the easiest part -- without at least doing this, a theory of everything is worth less than the graph doodles in my middle school notebooks) 2\. demonstrate that you can add something that looks like matter 3\. reproduce effects that we know have to appear in quantum gravity in the semiclassical limit, such as Hawking radiation and black hole entropy 4\. demonstrate that you can add matter that behaves like the Standard Model 5\. make specific predictions that we didn't already know from purely semiclassical considerations 6\. find a way to verify those predictions 7\. have the predictions actually be correct upon verification These 7 steps are hard, which is why nobody has managed to do them. But it looks like Wolfram hasn't even bothered to start on step 1. His new book is just hundreds and hundreds of pages of pretty graphs and big words. It's more akin to a reformulation of the foundations of mathematics than a theory of physics -- and it's not a particularly good one, at that. It's the same complaint I have about category theorists trying to do applied physics. (And category theory is a much more powerful language than Wolfram's!) Yes, you might have an incredibly general language, with which you can talk about vast swaths of possible physical theories. But we _already_ had way too many possibilities using ordinary mathematics! We need to narrow down on _specifics_ , not muddy the waters by making things even more general. I mean, it's like trying to rescue a startup by translating the documentation into Esperanto. ~~~ jonathan_gorard (1) We certainly do have formal derivations of Lorentz covariance and the Einstein field equations, given in detail here: [http://wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some- re...](http://wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-relativistic- and-gravitational-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf) (2) The article above already discusses the derivation of the matter contribution to the Lagrangian density, the derivation of energy-momentum tensor, and Lorentz transformations for elementary particles. (3) Both Hawking radiation and black hole entropy, and connections between our formalism and the AdS-CFT correspondence, are detailed here: [http://wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some- qu...](http://wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-quantum- mechanical-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf) (4) We do not yet know how to do this. (5) The quantum mechanics paper above makes, for instance, quite specific predictions about the location of stretched horizons around non-semiclassical black holes. (6) (7) This we are still working on. ~~~ JoachimS Reading through the paper in (3) above. If I understand the text on page 26 correctly, you predict that quantum computers will not be more efficient than classical computers: "The class of problems that can be solved efficiently by quantum computers should be identical to the class of problems that can be solved efficiently by classical computers: More precisely, we predict in this appropriately coarse- grained case that P=BQP, where P and BQP denote the complexity classes of polynomial time and bounded error quantum polynomial time, respectively." And: "In other words, in order to maintain a causal invariant representation, the observer must perform a sufficient level of coarse-graining to ensure that any apparent advantage obtained through the use of a quantum computer over a classical one is effectively lost." Am I missing something fundamental (most probably)? Are you predicting that quantum computers will not be able to, for example, factor RSA keys much faster than todays non-quantum machines? ~~~ gazzini In your last sentence, you compare future quantum computers to “today’s” non- quantum computers, which might be a false dichotomy. [warning: uninformed tangent] A more optimistic interpretation could be that quantum & non-quantum machines will be similar because we have huge leaps to make in non-quantum computer architecture. This is strictly a theoretical thought-experiment for me, but it has always intrigued me that quantum computers sort-of model the problem itself in the hardware circuit & shove a bunch of qubits through it. In digital computers, we mostly model Boolean logical structures & then, in software, translate our problem into that Boolean logic. This translation into discrete steps places a limit on the theoretical efficiency. However, perhaps there is room in analog computing hardware to more closely model specific types of optimization problems & then shove a bunch of electrons through it (shouldn’t the electrons follow the path of least resistance?). ~~~ JoachimS > In your last sentence, you compare future quantum computers to “today’s” > non-quantum computers, which might be a false dichotomy. Ah, good point. Though I was more thinking of Shor's algorithm and Grover's algorithm that tells us the theoretical expected performance that could be achieved with quantum computers. Normally these are described as showing the speedup provided by a possible quantum computer (in relation to non-quantum computers). So, when reading the Wolfram Model paper I cited, I read the statement regarding quantum computers as dismissing the possibility of achieving qantum computers capable of realising Shor's and Grover's. But one could of course read it in a flip-side way, that there are algorithms out there to be discovered that achieves the same lower bound complexities on non-quantum machines. Considering that the Wolfram Model is all about graphs and cellular automata, the statement should probably be considered not based on a RAM complexity model, but something like PRAM that considers parallelism. ------ covidacct After a few iterations, I think I understand the point of this piece. It was a bit difficult to hone in on, though. The article suggests that working out the theory of something like rule production systems, and then figuring out how that theory relates to existing insights from physics, is the best path toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics. My primary source of skepticism stems from the fact that the theory of rule production systems is not exactly a new area of study. It's been well- developed at various points in time and from various perspectives by the theoretical CS, programming language theory, automated theorem proving, and mathematical logic communities. That theory addresses most of Stephen's "big difficult questions" about the non-physics side of things. For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a _very_ old and _extremely_ well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory. I sympathize with Stephen. In fact, he sounds a bit like I did early in my scientific career. Unfortunately, though, I just don't see how these old well- understood ideas from computer science are going to result in a new fundamental theory of physics. ~~~ philipov Have ideas from computer science had significant reach inside theoretical physics before? It seems like physics has only recently discovered its love- affair with information theory, but information theory had existed for a long time before quantum information theory became a hot area of study. Maybe what's new here are not the ideas themselves, but bringing them into an area of study that hasn't payed attention to them before. ~~~ covidacct Maybe. I doubt it, though. There has always been substantial cross-talk between CS/information theory and Physics. Even through the 1990s it was difficult to be a computer scientist without eventually coming into contact with a non-trivial number of physicists. Especially in industrial research labs. Bell Labs, PARC, and IBM Research were full of physicists. Bell Labs and PARC are dead, but AFAIK IBM Research still has a bunch of physicists and the newer kids on the block (Google Research, FAIR, Deepmind, Microsoft Research, Intel, AMD) also have a share of physicists. Besides, Stephen's approach here is to ignore 15-20 years of research from various CS sub-communities; his best case scenario is spending a decade reinventing that wheel. The problem with cross-talk that isn't "humble on both sides" is that it's either a) a waste of time because one side's ideas aren't that important, or else b) a waste of time because one side has to reinvent the other wise. ~~~ gfodor I really think that cross-domain concepts are almost the only way to make huge leaps, so that's a precondition in my mind for _any_ advancement. Check. In terms of "humility on both sides", it's such a common theme that this oft- cited assumption is taken as truth. Some of the greatest minds who had the most impact in our history were also insufferable assholes, who were stubborn and would not yield until people were forced to reckon with their ideas. Is this me defending Wolfram's ideas? No. But it's me defending the idea that "humility and civility" as a prerequisite for scientific advancement seems false, and in fact, in stagnant fields, the need for a disruptive personality who happens to be right may be perhaps the only real way out of the rut. ~~~ covidacct Sure. The problem here is that exactly the ideas he's proposing to explore have already been explored. I've slightly edited my previous comment to point this out. The problem, in the very particular case of this blog post, is that the cost for lacking intellectual humility is spending time reinventing other people's wheels. And those wheels won't get him as far as he thinks they will. We know because they've already been built by others. ~~~ gfodor That makes sense. I can't assess your argument given my lack of understanding. In my own experience though, deriving things from first principles, even if they've been re-invented countless other times, is a good way to build up the intellectual super structures necessary to think new thoughts. I think we should separate: \- Wolfram acting as though he thought of the ideas first \- Wolfram being underinformed so as to undermine his own progress People typically get bent out of shape on the former, which is in evidence, and is a problem of politics. The latter, we can't prove or disprove unless you see him drawing significant conclusions that are falsifiable via current understanding. If that is the case, then I'll yield. But I suspect Wolfram may be more well read than he lets on, but for whatever reason, has a dysfunctional personality trait where he sees his own wrangling with ideas already put forth as a form of authorship, when he incorporates it into his long chain of analysis that he's been doing for decades. A potential analogy is one of "re-branding" \- but in this case it's re-branding as part of an internal narrative, one where in the final chapter, Wolfram sees himself as the grand author of the unified theory. In that mental model, each idea he draws from is not one he cobbles together into a unified form, but instead, ideas he incorporates and _reinterprets_ in his own bespoke system and methods, leading him to forget that the core ideas are not his own. (I'm definitely reaching here, but trying to to highlight how the two things above could be in fact very materially divergent and consistent with the evidence.) ~~~ mnemonicsloth You say: > Wolfram [is] acting as though he thought of the ideas first. This is called plagiarism. Independent reinvention is no defense if you _keep on_ acting as though you had the idea first. He has already been informed many times that parts of his work are not original, and his behavior doesn't change. And he knows it, on some level. He made the decision to communicate his "discoveries" in press releases and self-published books. He knows he's not subjecting himself to peer review. He may know, on some level, that his work couldn't pass it. He sued one of his employees to prevent him (the employee) from publishing a proof that Wolfram claimed he had discovered in his book. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110) I understand what you're up to in trying to invent a psychology that explains his bad behavior, but at some point you have to withdraw empathy and think pragmatically about consequences. Wolfram's actions are already more than sufficient to disgrace an ordinary academic. He's damaged at least one career that we know of. He tries to pass himself off as a visionary scientist only he never delivers. If he wasn't independently wealthy no one would be listening to him at all. But non-experts do listen, which is precisely why speaking up against pseudoscience is part of every real scientist's professional responsibilities. Rather than spin these theories, it would be a better use of your time to send Stephen some email urging him to stick to working on Mathematica. ~~~ jeegsy > He sued one of his employees to prevent him (the employee) from publishing a > proof that Wolfram claimed he had discovered in his book. The wikipedia article claims that Wolfram conjectured rule 110 in 1985 many years before Cook. Out of curiosity, do you have any info that disputes this? ~~~ mnemonicsloth I've read Wolfram's Wikipedia page. It doesn't contain a single word about the controversy that surrounds him and that is in evidence in this discussion thread. On the page for his book, _A New Kind of Science_ , all the allegations of academic dishonesty, which to working scientists is probably more important than the contents of his work -- assigning credit for discoveries is how they get paid, after all -- has been compressed down to a single paragraph at the very end. And that paragraph contradicts itself on a sentence-by-sentence basis, first blaming Wolfram, then excusing him, then blaming him again and so on. So it seems that someone has been pretty successful -- more successful than not -- at erasing criticism of Wolfram from his Wikipedia presence. Therefore, I think Wikipedia's claim that he invented rule 110 in 1985 is highly suspect. That doesn't matter much, though. Academics have a lot of ways to deal with priority disputes. Sometimes they author a paper together. Sometimes they each publish separately in the same issue of one journal. That's what happened when Darwin and Wallis simultaneously developed the theory of evolution. Sometimes, if the first discoverer was much earlier than the second, the second author might publish the work, and make a public statement in the paper saying the first author was first. This is what happened when Claude Shannon invented information theory only to learn that Norbert Wiener had done the same thing twenty years before. If Wolfram had documentation of his claim, some compromise could probably have been worked out. Instead, it's a matter of public record that he sued Cook, alleging that the knowledge that Cook had done the work was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I said before that scientists get paid by correctly being assigned credit for their discoveries. Suing to prevent a scientist from taking credit for their research is like armed robbery. There had been some grumbling before, but this was the moment when scientists recognized that Stephen Wolfram was Not A Real Scientist Anymore. ------ carlob If someone wants to read something that is more like a classical physics paper there are these two papers by Jonathan Gorard: [https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...](https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some- relativistic-and-gravitational-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf) [https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...](https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some- quantum-mechanical-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf) ~~~ bhouston Are these going to be submitted for appropriate peer review? ~~~ jonathan_gorard They already have, as I said in response to your other version of the same question :) ~~~ igravious "Perhaps the single most[0] significant idea conveyed within Stephen Wolfram’s _A New Kind of Science_ , and the initial intellectual seedling from which the contents of the book subsequently grow, is the abstract empirical discovery that the “computational universe” - that is, the space of all possible programs - is far richer, more diverse and more vibrant than one might reasonably expect. The fact that such intricate and complex behavior can be exhibited by computational rules as apparently elementary as the Rule 30 and Rule 110 cellular automata, which are so straightforward to represent that they can easily be discovered by systematic enumeration, is profoundly counterintuitive to many people.[1]" "However, once one has truly absorbed and internalized this realization, it leads to an exceedingly tantalizing possibility: that perhaps, lying somewhere out there in the computational universe, is the rule for our physical universe[2]. If an entity as remarkable as Rule 30 could be found just by an exhaustive search,then perhaps so too can a theory of fundamental physics.[3] The idea that there could exist some elementary computational rule[4] that successfully reproduces the entirety of the physical universe at first seems somewhat absurd, although there does not appear to be any fundamental reason (neither in physics, nor mathematics,nor philosophy) to presume that such a rule could not exist. Moreover, if there is even a remote possibility that such a rule could exist, then it’s slightly embarrassing for us not to be looking for it. The objective of the Wolfram Physics Project is to enact this search.[5]" [0] There is in fact only one idea in that book, and this is that idea. But is this an original idea? When computer scientists and mathematicians come up with novel results in programming language theory or type theory (or whatever) what is to stop them claiming that they are empirically exploring a "computational universe"? [1] Probably, but not to programmers, or the computationally literate. [2] An extraordinary leap within the context of the introduction. Though note, neither is this an original idea, that the universe may be "digital" is not an idea original to Wolfram and it redates his magnum opus by I don't know how many years. Note there are actual physics projects that seek to kick the tyres this hypothesis. Have you got that so far? A recasting in lofty terms of an unoriginal idea followed by a a giant leap to another unoriginal idea which serves only to motivate the project. [3] So you say, but this is a giant non-sequitur. [4] Why just one rule? And the rule hardly runs itself. _What does it run on?_ Great you have a generalised term-rewriting system (how completely un-novel). "What rewrites the terms?* How is this not the first question you ask yourself? [5] Hey, why not just say: “You know that "it from bit" idea? We have a hunch that term rewriting hypergraphs is the way to go. These are our explorations. We've encountered stuff that echoes contemporary physics.” Why not write the intro like that? Not grandiose enough for you? === Any sufficiently worthy "it from bit" project _must_ answer the following questions. (1) Given that we know that any sufficiently powerful computing system can emulate any another what motivates your choosing this particular computational system and model? (2) Demonstrate convincing physics (not toy models) (3) Make testable predictions – this is not something for "down the line", this is what theories _of anything_ must do. No predictions, no dice, no matter how nice. (4) Is it software all the way down? If so, how? If not, what is the hardware and what does that imply? (5) I would direct this last point at all TOE-heads like Wolfram and Weinstein and whoever. Why does it have to be simple? Why does it have to be elegant? Why is it always encoded in the formal systems you happen to play around with (geometry for Weinstein, term-rewriting systems / cellular automata for Wolfram). === I think the wider scientific community needs to call time on savants like Weinstein and Wolfram. ~~~ AgentME >[4] Why just one rule? Is a specific combination of rules not itself a rule? A lot of descriptions of Conway's Game of Life describe it as multiple rules, and other places refer to its whole setup as a "rule". Rule 30 is sometimes called a "rule set". I don't think there's a strict difference between a rule set and a rule, though the simpler rule(set) the better seems to be easy to agree on. ... >(5) I would direct this last point at all TOE-heads like Wolfram and Weinstein and whoever. Why does it have to be simple? Why does it have to be elegant? A theory with fewer free parameters is better than one with more. I think this extends to the complexity of the theory too: a theory with more rules (rule A applies to small stuff, rule B applies to big stuff, rule AB-patch applies to mediumish stuff) is worse than as a theory that explains the same stuff with fewer rules (a single rule X that naturally has A-behavior with small stuff and B-behavior with big stuff) in the same way a theory with more free parameters is worse than a theory with similar predictions and fewer free parameters. It's Occam's Razor. Complex theories can have lots of different variants that each match the existing evidence but make different predictions in untested scenarios. Simpler theories have fewer variants that successfully match the existing evidence and tend to be more useful for making predictions, indicating that they match reality better. >And the rule hardly runs itself. What does it run on? Great you have a generalised term-rewriting system (how completely un-novel). "What rewrites the terms?* How is this not the first question you ask yourself? Is that not an obstacle for any theory? Tons of theories are meant to model what we see, without presuming some underlying mechanism. Newton came up with a theory of gravitation that modeled how objects tend to pull each other in without any idea of why nature chose for that to happen. Even if the idea that not explaining what executes the rule of reality is a problem, then a simpler theory with fewer rules is obviously better because there's fewer unexplained rules. >[5] Hey, why not just say: “You know that "it from bit" idea? We have a hunch that term rewriting hypergraphs is the way to go. These are our explorations. We've encountered stuff that echoes contemporary physics.” Why not write the intro like that? Not grandiose enough for you? Personally, I found their intro to have a lot more background detail and motivation explained. Is your primary objection really that they were too grand for a few paragraphs? >(1) Given that we know that any sufficiently powerful computing system can emulate any another what motivates your choosing this particular computational system and model? Any system capable of having relativity and QM-like effects emerge out of it as described is interesting enough to study, even if it did end up having defects that meant it couldn't be a good model of reality overall. I feel like you're treating this as if he's asking everyone to commit themselves fully to this model instead of to explore it. >(5) I would direct this last point at all TOE-heads like Wolfram and Weinstein and whoever. Why does it have to be simple? Why does it have to be elegant? Why is it always encoded in the formal systems you happen to play around with (geometry for Weinstein, term-rewriting systems / cellular automata for Wolfram). Presumably they chose those systems to play around to begin with because they believe those systems were promising. ~~~ igravious > I don't think there's a strict difference between a rule set and a rule Okay then. Why just one rule or rule set? I meant as much when I wrote what I wrote. Why a tiny/simple initial starting state and one rule (or rule set). Sure, simple elegant formal systems are enticing to our brains but why assume that of our universe? Why not even try to explain why you feel this to be true? It's a pretty huge assumption in my eyes. > A theory with fewer free parameters is better than one with more. Sure. But the full statement is – the theory _which is in best accordance with reality_ and with fewer free parameters is better. Starting from some entirely arbitrary simple formal system and working upwards and hoping you'll bump into reality along the way is very, shall we say, optimistic. And I do mean _entirely arbitrary_. Because you haven't motivated why this system rather than another this system is entirely arbitrary. > Is that not an obstacle for any theory? Yes, and with good reason. Because TOEs claim to be _fundamental_ – how can they be fundamental if there's something underneath them so to speak. Which came first: the PC or Windows? Can't have one without the other. > Personally, I found their intro to have a lot more background detail and > motivation explained. I didn't. > Is your primary objection really that they were too grand for a few > paragraphs? I object to it on stylistic grounds and also, you know, I'll be the judge of the intellectual consequences of your theory. Lay out your theory and leave others hype it up if they so wish. (I'm so sorry if asking for a little intellectual humility is asking for too much these days. /s) But mostly I object to the huge leap in their argument (as I said). It'd be nice for once if people like this were more honest that intuitively speaking there clearly are big gaps in their reasoning. > I feel like you're treating this as if he's asking everyone to commit > themselves fully to this model instead of to explore it. Yes, that's _exactly_ what I'm doing. Why _should_ I explore it if you don't give me a compelling reason to explore it? > Presumably they chose those systems to play around to begin with because > they believe those systems were promising. No. They chose the formal system they were familiar with. And you skipped my whole part about making testable predictions. Which is a pretty big part. If I want to read breathless computer science / physics / mathematics articles I've got Quanta Magazine for that: [https://www.google.com/search?q=+%22fundamental%22+site%3Aww...](https://www.google.com/search?q=+%22fundamental%22+site%3Awww.quantamagazine.org) ~~~ AgentME >Starting from some entirely arbitrary simple formal system and working upwards and hoping you'll bump into reality along the way is very, shall we say, optimistic. Honestly, I think this is a great way of describing what they're trying to do. I guess I think it's a little more realistic than you do: if our universe's physics could be described by a program on the order of tens of bits (I give an argument below for why we could expect that), then it's possible for us to come up with something like it from scratch by trying to construct a simple program that could have rich dynamics. If someone came up with a tiny model that happened to have physics emerge in it resembling our own, I'd be really interested to see how much we could learn from the model. They're trying to show that they happened to bump into interesting parts of relativity and quantum mechanics. If they really did bump into relativity and QM from a simple system, then I think this is significant enough for more attention, even if they don't have any testable results yet, because it's possible that testable results will come from it. It might be that this model deeply resembles reality and we can flesh it out further, or it might just be that there is a class of models (that includes our physics) where relativity+QM arises (but not the rest of our physics, like the standard model), and we can learn about relativity and QM by studying models where the pair of them arise. Investigating this model is hard and it makes sense they want help. > Sure, simple elegant formal systems are enticing to our brains but why > assume that of our universe? Why not even try to explain why you feel this > to be true? It's a pretty huge assumption in my eyes. >Yes, and with good reason. Because TOEs claim to be fundamental – how can they be fundamental if there's something underneath them so to speak. I've always imagined (and given the article's talk about "rule space", I think what Wolfram believes is something roughly similar) that the true-root TOE looks like the mathematical universe hypothesis / UDASSA ([http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/udassa/](http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/udassa/)) where in some sense, every possible computation exists, and they have measure (~the probability we find ourselves in it) inversely related to the length of information describing the computation (because if every possible computation existed, then every finite-length program would be instantiated infinite times by equivalent infinite-length programs with lots of ignored garbage code, and shorter programs would be instantiated proportionately more often). From that, you would expect at large probability that our own universe's physics is described by the shortest possible program/rules that gives dynamics as rich as we see. If we imagined some universal computational language, it seems like specific cellular automata and hypergraph-rewrite systems could maybe be specified in tens of bits, so they're prime candidates for exploring. Even if those systems specifically aren't how reality works, then if they can produce dynamics about as rich as reality, then it implies that our reality's rules might be even shorter (or else we'd be more likely to exist in a cellular automata or hypergraph-rewriting system). At such short program lengths, the strategy of guess-and-check could be realistic, though the check part is really hard since we can't directly compute a significant number of timesteps, and instead have to try to reason about what large-scale patterns must emerge from the program. (Wolfram specifically seems to believe that the hypergraph-rewriting system is universal enough to fill the role of the universal computational language, but I don't think that's strictly critical. As long as it's sufficiently simple to represent in whatever the root-TOE computes by, then it could be a candidate for our universe's physics. Hmm, I guess it would make sense that the way the root-TOE computes would have structure in common with whatever our universe's physics program is, because then our universe's program could be specified with fewer bits.) ~~~ igravious And I've taken a virtual hammering for having the temerity to ask that they at least take the time to articulate their motivations and assumptions, at least as well as you have here, with intellectual humility and consideration for the reader. So be it. ------ crazygringo As much as the guy can be annoying, the associated "Project Announcement" is a fascinating 20,000-word-ish article. [1] I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, simply because it's the most elementary structure there seems to be, and so easily gives rise to dimensionality. So seeing someone try to tackle this bottom-up and see if it can ultimately give rise to quantum mechanics and beyond sure is fun to watch. [1] [https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we- may-h...](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a- path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/) ~~~ hutzlibu "I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, " Do you mean this literally, or rather: "the basic structure of the universe CAN BE DESCRIBED by some kind of graph"? ~~~ crazygringo Literally, i.e. the fabric of space-time. Then particles and energy are patterns in the graph -- that we can describe useful physics in terms of the graph, but that the graph just is, it's not a description or approximation of something deeper. Unless there's a semantic difference you're getting at that I'm not aware of? ~~~ hutzlibu Interesting concept, but I fail to see how it can model the whole universe. Describing it, maybe, but the universe being a graph, well for a start, what is the graph made of? Is it "material" is it "information"? ~~~ crazygringo Any fundamental theory of the universe will have to posit a bottom, base structure that everything else is "made" out of... ...but therefore that base isn't ever going to be made of anything itself, by definition. It just _is_. It is what it's described as -- no more, no less. It's not going to be material or energy. I suppose "information" is probably as good a word as any if you want to think of it that way. ~~~ rytill there could be no bottom ... there would also never be any way to prove that the proposed bottom is truly the bottom and not just an event horizon ~~~ crazygringo If a theory's predictions are 100% consistent with experiment, then it becomes the bottom for all practical purposes, since all we have is practical knowledge. Saying we can't prove it's the bottom would mean as much as saying we can't prove the universe is on the back of a stack of giant tortoises. Technically true, but of no practical importance. Of course, if a theory doesn't agree 100% with reality, then there's more to find in a practical sense, in which case "not having reached the bottom" is true by definition. ------ zakk This is absolutely fascinating. Even just a demonstration that rule application on hypergraphs is expressive enough to potentially describe (for some rule yet to be found) Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity is incredibly exciting in my opinion. Arguably string theory is in a similar situation: a very powerful framework that could potentially describe reality if accurately utilized. Also, notably Gerard 't Hooft has been working on a very similar topic recently: Quantum Mechanics described in terms of cellular automata [0]. [0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548](https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548) ~~~ rantwasp the idea is kind of old and even Wolfram played with it in his previous work/book, ie A new kind of science. If you're interested in the subject and also can appreciate what feels like a piece of performance art give the following book a shot: [https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory- Psychedelic-...](https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory-Psychedelic- Technologies/dp/1527234762) It's mind-blowing and uses as one of its starting points Wofram's 1D cellular automata work. ------ zerobits Despite 80% of comments focusing on Wolfram's pompousness, this is an interesting expansion of cellular automata to arbitrary dimensions. Coincidental timing of publication - one day after John Conway's passing. We may be in a n-dimensional Game of Life after all. ~~~ zwaps Interestingly this mirrors other disciplines. Consider for example Schelling's model of segregation in social science, which is (probably not by accident) very similar to cellular automata. Just a few years laters, people quickly translated this to graphs - a network. The spacial interpretation aside, the idea surely should hold for higher dimensional social relations. And that's where we reach and interesting point that Wolfram writes about: These system are useful, as long as we can calculate or derive a state. If all we can do is simulate it, then it's much less useful. And indeed, creating such models is the true "art". So while the "idea" of using relations and hypergraphs lays a foundation that I am sympathetic to, I also feel like the things "on the to do list" are, indeed, the meat of the issue. ------ naasking A lot of people criticize Wolfram, but I think the project he's pursuing is definitely worthwhile. Quantization has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool, and it's only the first step to turning our continuous physics into a discrete model. Starting with cellular automata is flipping the table over and starting the game anew, starting with discrete models instead of continuous models, with the ultimate goal of producing a purely discrete theory for all of physics. Discretizing everything has the potential to provide new mathematical tools and new insights that our continuous theories might obscure. There's a lot of hidden computation in the reals and complex numbers that a discrete theory would have to explicitly unpack, and some of these details might potentially shed light on some real puzzles. ------ bronzeage I'm a big fan of Gerard t' Hooft's Cellular Automata Interpretation. Most of the things described by Wolfram were already there, in fact, I would argue that most of the things with strict connection to real physics were already described by Gerard t' Hooft in a similar manner (energy and momentum interpretations are very similar) However, they are different in that Gerard t'Hooft has a single ontic state where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution. The graph rewriting is cool and novel. I do agree that cellular automata are somewhat limited. Their most obvious limitation is having Manhattan distance. 4 or 8 directions to move through in lower level is something that effects large scale. But most of the models wolfram proposes still produce some grid- like structure, and in some sense his visualization is misleading. ~~~ AgentME >where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution. I don't think it's right to call it nondeterministic: every possible sequence of rules happens, separately. It seems to lend itself easily to the Many- Worlds Interpretation of QM. ~~~ acjohnson55 I don't know if that's true, because I think the idea of a rule having causal invariance is that the many paths converge anyway into causal sequences of events that always hold. ------ aaron-santos Graph grammars are Turing complete so I don't see why they couldn't express the fundamental theory of physics, but it seems like a weird way of going about the problem. ~~~ sriram_malhar A turing machine cannot produce randomness, non-determinism. ~~~ kleer001 No, but it can produce something that's unpredictable from the original code. And that's spitting distance from random. ~~~ tomxor Yup, "unpredictability" or more precisely computational irreducibility is when things tend to get interesting... and this happens deterministically just fine. ------ heavyarms Anybody who has coded Game of Life can draw a parallel to this. Simple rules can lead to arbitrarily complex systems. I'm all on board with this concept. Graph theory is amazing and useful in many ways we don't understand yet. I'm all on board with this concept as well. But a graph has nodes and edges. Nodes, in this case, can be particles.. I guess? But what are the edges? When a "simple rule" is applied to a collection of particles, what is the force that connects them after the interaction? I read some of the material in detail and skimmed some of the rest, but there was a lot of setup and cool graph visualizations and not a lot speaking to this core question. Disclaimer: I'm not a theoretical physicist but I have read "Quantum Physics for Babies" at least 50 times. ~~~ MengerSponge Yep. A whole lot of this is "Automata are relevant! I'm relevant!" and some hand-waving and "Doesn't this loooook like a mesh? See! We made space-time!" Save your time, just read More is Different: [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393) ~~~ jonathan_gorard With respect, I don't think that our derivation of the conformal structure of spacetime, or of the Einstein field equations in the continuum limit of infinite causal graphs, is "hand-waving". See, for instance: [https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...](https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some- relativistic-and-gravitational-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf) ------ zwaps Can someone tell me how this relates to the hype of, well it must be some decades back, chaos theory in dynamical systems? The idea then was the following: We do not need "randomness" and probability theory in our models, once we realize that deterministic systems, even simple ones, can produce arbitrarily complex outcomes. For example, this was all the rage in economics in the 90's. Surely, those are dynamical systems and besides having an actual proper reason for probabilistic reasoning, one wanted to at least consider that modeling deterministic systems without any randomness could fit reality. I also make this point because in this instance, graph based discrete models often have a continuous equivalent and it depends on the case which of those offers more useful outcomes. If I remember correctly, the hype about chaotic systems died down in part because while we could formulate substantively powerful foundations, it was extremely difficult to "get something useful out of it" and it all seemed to go more or less nowhere. ------ ur-whale Applying arbitrary iterated transformation rules on graphs is very, very cool. But I don't think there's much in the way of existing theoretical math attacking this area. Much will need to be invented / discovered. ~~~ mikhailfranco There is a big existing literature. Look at 'graph grammars'. ------ plutonorm This makes perfect sense, bravo. Go straight to the most general structure possible and try to understand which part of the infinite mathematical structure of the multiverse we inhabit. How interesting that within all possible structures they have found objects that so readily match up with our own reality. ~~~ freyrs3 Showing how Yang-Mills and SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) fall out would be a natural starting point for a proposed unification theory. This model doesn't even try explain the existing particle hierarchy as a special case. ------ joycian Most of this structure comes from the ordered set properties. Special relativity can be seen as a consequence of trying to quantify length by projecting to two ordered sets. K.H. Knuth, a professor at Albany, has been working on this for some time. He also has some results about QM. A free version of his paper "A Potential Foundation for Emergent Space-Time" (2014). What Wolfram is talking about seems to me a consequence of the principles K.H. Knuth has been investigating since at least 2011. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0881](https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0881) ------ Ono-Sendai Only skim-read the article. What seems to be lacking are any testable predictions of this theory, or something like derivations of existing measured constants that one would think you would get from a fundamental theory of physics. ------ SuperTachyon I briefly read through the article. As a PhD student in theoretical physics, I can see that some basic ideas of gr and qm can be interpreted out of these graphs. But I’m not convinced why these graphs have to be generated by a single rule. I don’t see any motivation in restricting to a single rule or even procedural generation at all. It also reminds me of the casual set theory that I heard briefly from a professor a few years ago. I was told that it re-creates vacuum gr just well. ~~~ skosch > But I’m not convinced why these graphs have to be generated by a single > rule. Wolfram claims that they don't need to be; on the contrary. Take another look at the last section of the article. ------ TrainedMonkey Incorrect predictions are all the rage nowadays, so here is mine: they will find an infinite amount of rule sets that could be the fundamental theory. However, none of it would be testable, so people would pick their own based on their notion of simplicity and beauty. Eventually people would start looking into common properties of the candidate solutions and transformations between them. ~~~ _jal Take it further - eventually we will have conceptual physicists whose output is judged on purely aesthetic grounds, and rich people will collect them. ~~~ jl2718 That’s called string theory. ------ Koshkin Well, phenomena analogous to what is described by quantum mechanics, for example, have been found in physics of solids (e.g. phonons). Shouldn't be surprising, then, that such a universal and rather abstract structure as a graph (especially if you allow to 'update' it) can be made to reflect some aspects of physical reality. Computations are computations, whichever way you approach them. Classical electrodynamics, too, has several equivalent formulations (with the tensorial notation being pretty "graphical" IMHO), and some people do like to create a fuss around particular ones, but that ain't nothing we haven't seen before. What is important, though, is to always make a distinction between a model and the real thing: it wouldn't make sense to say that spacetime is some kind of a graph. (Or would it?) ------ lalaithion I'm pretty sure that this would violate Bell's theorem, and I'd love an explanation of why it wouldn't. It looks to me like a system of local, hidden variables, unless there's some sense in which changes in the hypergraph can propagate faster than the speed of light. ~~~ jonathan_gorard We can prove violation of the CHSH inequality, and hence compatibility with Bell's theorem, as a natural consequence of our formalism. See, for instance: [https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...](https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some- quantum-mechanical-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf) Or, for a less technical version of the basic idea: [https://www.wolframphysics.org/questions/quantum- mechanics/h...](https://www.wolframphysics.org/questions/quantum- mechanics/how-can-your-models-be-consistent-with-bells-theorem/) ------ scottlocklin TLDR "if you stare at these weird screensavers long enough, it kinda looks like physics. if you are rich enough to hire a PR team to push the idea; lots of credulous people might agree with you." For an example of similar quackery from quantitative finance, Espen Haug's ideas are funner: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Espen_Haug](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Espen_Haug) ------ nil-nada-zilch Also... one of fundamental flaws of Wolfram Physics Project's _meta_ -model is that it uses _weightless_ graphs. There is literally nothing in his model that can prevent his beautiful graphs from simply collapsing in on themselves, with all the points just piling up on top of each other into a naked singularity before they've even succeeded at forming any space at all! For starters, empty space should have _weighted_ (space-like) connections of the weight value of 1. This accomplishes two things: a) prevents the space from outright collapsing in on itself, and b) _forces_ the space to form a _stable configuration_ For b) part, imagine a 2-dimensional discrete space (graph) made of hexagonal shapes. You will immediately notice that weighing _knot_ (node) connections (with the value of 1) forces that space to maintain a _stable spherical configuration_ (providing that it had formed _uniformly_ to start with. Expand this concept to 3 dimensions, and you'll get a similarly stable 3D configuration (that has been _uniformly expanding_ from the very first step of 1), with 2D surface (at any distance r/step k from the center) being _a very good candidate_ for defining a holographic principle (of some form or another) on. Now... ... wait for Wofram to expand his model with weighted graphs... and then sue his sorry ass for stealing somebody else's idea. P.S. One of the fundamental flaws of WPP's meta-meta-model is... Wolfram himself. A terrible, terrible choice for managing the, literally, _biggest breakthrough in physics_ since QM. ------ nil-nada-zilch The most basic of the basic first step would be finding an infinite series for calculating Pi, that has only _positive_ elements... like Ramanujan's series, but not quite, because elements of this series _have to_ produce numbers Nk, for each step k (k=0->infinity), that satisfy the following condition: Nk/k->2Pi for k->infinity. Until this is achieved (finally giving the complete description of this discrete space/graph of this space), nothing further can be done in physics. Furthermore... it is not even needed to prove that this space is discrete, because uncertainty principle _already proves_ that it is, by taking notice of the fact that in _continuous_ spaces, quanta of action/momentum/energy can be made _arbitrarily small_ (and, in fact, _is equal to 0_ ), which means that h can be made arbitrarily small (and, in fact, _is equal to 0_ ). In other words, uncertainty principle only makes makes sense in _discrete_ spaces... and, _as experiments (from 100+ years ago) have already proven_ , h > 0 in the space _this_ universe is made of (meaning that this space _is_ discrete). Q.E.D. Edit: typo and... typo with missing constant 2 from circumference formula. Addition: Pi is Pi only because of the spatial (graph) configuration. In another _uniform_ space, with a different configuration, circumference formula would have the form of: Nk=aCk, where a is some value (like 2), and C is the (Pi-like) constant _derived from spatial (graph) configuration >alone<_. Edit: Added missing k to the general circumference formula. I should really proof-read better, but I'm in a kind of hurry, so you'll forgive me an occasional mistake or two. ------ tagrun This looks very interesting and impressive, and I hope this will catch Jonathan's eye. Have you though about how the spin of particles could work in this framework? And have you though about what it would look like to extend local gauge invariance from spacetime to multiway? (I haven't read the actual papers and the assumptions that went into them yet, but to the summary is very impressive and exciting: a basic framework that can derive general relativity and path integral, put them together in equal footing in an extended "multiway", possibly give natural explanations to several long-standing puzzles of physics [dark matter, dark energy, black holes, black hole information paradox, measurement problem, inflation, dimensionality of the universe, arrow of time, ...]. I don't know if you can eventually find a rule that will result in the standard model, but everything fits so far, and it is possibly not a coincidence. Great work so far! Of course, it may or not may not lead to something that recovers all of the physics that we know today, but regardless, thanks for pursuing this exciting avenue!) ------ themodelplumber > A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics Physics noob here, but I do a lot of theory / model development in other areas, at work and in my batcave. So I'm wondering: What if there are multiple fundamental theories, just like there are millions of different ways of looking at things, all with their various leverage/application points? > we’re going to have to find the specific rule for our universe I just wonder what makes someone so sure there is a specific rule, when humans are good at generating untold numbers of rules, and in my experience those rules can be very effective _and_ work best together when held lightly, rather than exclusively. (If anything, humans seem more likely to become dangerously dogmatic when they feel they have identified "the one" of something. Like a human anti-pattern.) ~~~ aaronax I think this might relate to what he discusses at the end of the very long Project Announcement blog/article. Something like there may be many different rules, but the one we find will be correct for us due to the framework we have for evaluating the universe (senses, math, etc.). ~~~ themodelplumber If it's correct to the framework we have--do we have "a framework" for evaluating the universe? It seems more like there are many. Within senses-- millions of frameworks. Within math, millions. And for good reason; this lens offers a different look at this aspect, and this other lens offers a singular view of that one. Stars are white. Stars are blue or red or yellow. Stars have no color. All of these true and helpful, and also conflicting in some context or another. Looking at the way he's evaluating universes and aiming to find one that's so well matched to ours, just intuitively I also have to wonder how many different ways there are of modeling our universe that are worth keeping around no matter how poorly they fit in even some big ways. Interesting stuff to think about though. ------ Rury How is what’s mentioned here, not just the old idea of determinism demonstrated or shown from a different perspective? I always thought science was biased toward the assumption that the universe follows basic deterministic rules, and the purpose of doing science was to find the nature of those rules. What I mean by this, is that when we do science, we are trying to determine the nature behind things - are we not? Therefore, determining things, or determinism, is at the heart of doing science. Assuming otherwise, seems like a disservice to practicing science, but maybe that's just me? Granted, I know nothing is settled yet, but I have a hard time seeing anything new here. Just old ideas communicated in an analogous new perspective… ~~~ ldlework > I have a hard time seeing anything new here. > Just .. [a] new > perspective... okie dokie ~~~ Rury tomato-tomato. ------ amai Reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system). Other interesting related theories might be [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion- limited_aggregation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion- limited_aggregation) or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_theory). ------ teh_g The phrase 'a new kind of science' is a huge red flag, but apart from this I don't think I can evaluate what I'm reading. Does the article make any sense? Does it at least hint at a useful direction? Or is this a case of someone holding a hammer (the language) and seeing everything as a nail (how the universe works)? ~~~ MengerSponge It doesn't pass the smell test. I'll be very diplomatic and say this to our high school and undergrad readers: Mathematica is a lovely program, but working for this man on this project will not do good things for your scientific career. Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's. This is a full decade after P. W. Anderson's seminal paper [More is Different]([https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393)). In fact, if you haven't RTFA yet, save your time and just read the original, rigorous, less self-aggrandizing paper: [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393) ~~~ mdonahoe I can’t seem to access more than the cover page of that paper. Do I need a journal membership? ~~~ mdonahoe Found a pdf linked from his Wikipedia page [http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo...](http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf) Though I must admit I don’t really understand it. I was expecting automata to be referenced somewhere. I enjoyed A New Kind of Science, though I feel like it would have been a much shorter book if Wolfram included less self-aggrandizing. ~~~ MengerSponge It's the paper that established "emergent phenomena" as an interesting and viable field of inquiry. When you understand it, it changes the way you think about the world. It's more fundamental than automata papers, so of course it doesn't address automata, but automata papers should reference it. " _A New Kind of Science_ proposed ideas that were not new, were not kind, and were not science. Discuss." ------ 8bitsrule Eddington too had a 'Fundamental Theory'. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington#Fundamental_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington#Fundamental_theory_and_the_Eddington_number) "Eddington believed he had identified an algebraic basis for fundamental physics, which he termed 'E-numbers' .... These in effect incorporated spacetime into a higher-dimensional structure. While his theory has long been neglected by the general physics community...." ------ AgentME I've always liked the idea that the universe worked something like a cellular automaton at its lowest level, but I was always uncomfortable with how that presupposed a specific grid and a very rigid system of time. This system of hypergraph-rewriting excites me because it seems like a more generalized form/alternative to cellular automatons that fixes these issues. And then it's super exciting to see that you can get relativity and QM-like effects as emergent properties from this sort of system. ~~~ ncmncm Each generation imagines God as whatever is coolest right then. In Newton's day, the universe was a tower clock. Humanity will be around for, well, a few more years, not a blink of the universe's eye. Our grandchildren will have time to look into things, if civilization doesn't collapse. What are the odds that they will decide we were right, that the universe really is something we know about already? ------ undershirt I got stuck on causality invariance—not getting the orange edges on the graph. It seemed like the root should’ve been connected to every node, so I’m clearly missing something. ------ bane I'm not qualified to consider the physics ramifications of what's presented here, but the graph rewriting rules are really interesting and almost seem glaringly obvious in retrospect. I don't know if there's prior work with them but I can think of a few immediate applications for synthetic data generation that would benefit from this approach. ------ fal_ Is it possible to use the knowledge in this paper, which uses machine learning to derive the simple rules for the creation of a specific state and apply it to Wolfram's Physics Project? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzauli1TyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzauli1TyU) ------ gdm85 The concept of "connectives" as explained in Frank Herbert's Whipping Star book comes to mind. One critic remark to make: I am not impressed by the "complex looks" of the hypergraphs because the initial premise is that it does not matter how we visualise them. ------ neosat Not qualified to comment on the depth of physics in there, but the theory sounds very intriguing and fascinating. It's important to push our collective thinking - and the authors definitely have the expertise to do that. ------ nickw1881 Has any commenter here read the blog post? He starts from "network that evolves through simple rules" then goes on to derive how this results in space dimensionality, time, Sr, GR, the uncertainty principle, path integral, entanglement, and makes predictions along the way. This is regardless of the specific rule that computes our universe. Also since that rule is Turing complete, it's going to be the same as every other Turing complete rule, and since we can't produce a machine IN the universe that can simulate the universe, it kinda doesn't matter what the rule is. ------ aivosha I wonder if this is in response to Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity presentation he did on April 1st. Yesterday, on Lex Fridman's podcast, he mentioned how since he revealed his theory there wasnt any feedback from scientific community. BTW, highly recommend watching Eric's Portal. ~~~ meowface I would love to see thorough, detailed analysis and critique of Weinstein's Geometric Unity theory and the latest version of Wolfram's cellular automata- like theory of reality. (Weinstein still needs to put up a formal paper, though.) At the time of writing this comment, the majority of responses here are just calling the guy a pompous crank, rather than pointing out specific issues with the central claims of the proposal. Funny that this is on the website created by the guy who proposed the Hierarchy of Disagreement [0]. There are many comments with valid critiques, but so far there are more of the other kind. Yeah, Wolfram and Weinstein have some eccentricities, and the intro section to this is kind of unnecessary and grating and could probably be cut out, but they're also very intelligent people who _have_ discovered and created things which _are_ both "new and true" (and/or new and useful) rather than merely "true or new, mutually exclusively" as people like to snidely parrot. I'm not saying this theory or Weinstein's theory aren't necessarily irreparably riddled with holes. Just that the nature of the criticism often seems bizarre, poor quality, and directed at their personalities rather than their content, like in this comment section. It'd be much more refreshing to see it be criticized on its merits rather than its tone or the personality traits of its author. [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg) ------ sasaf5 Lots of "I" right in the first paragraph. If only Wolfram would hire some editors so that we could enjoy his ideas without all the distraction... ------ RunningToMars The livestream just started (www.youtube.com/WolframResearch). Sounds like it's going to be quite interesting and informative. ------ sabujp i'm very confused about how I can get from these pretty graphs to all of these : [https://physics.info/equations/](https://physics.info/equations/) ------ floatingatoll Wolfram’s header image apart from the article is available in light and dark variants that can be pinch-zoomed more easily: [http://www.wolframphysics.org/visual- summary/](http://www.wolframphysics.org/visual-summary/) Based on this image alone, having not yet read the article, it looks like he’s taken his prior insights on cellular automata (Conway’s Game type stuff) and advanced them forward to quarks and Feynman diagrams. I typically have a very rough time with Wolfram’s writing but the image is, at least, simple enough to follow. “What are the rules for particle timeflows?” is certainly a question that’s interesting though my phrasing is probably terrible. EDIT: Yup, it’s definitely quarks X cellular automata. Clearly an extension of previous Wolfram work, still just as enthusiastic / savior-ish as ever. I hope it pans out somehow in pragmatic real world outcomes someday. Bonus link to diagram showing a fate decision tree behaving like a Conway glider: [https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/04/040...](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/04/0409img126.png) ~~~ gunshai What does that visual summary even communicate? ~~~ floatingatoll “What if the causality that led to the universe can be modeled using a form of Conway’s Game of Life automata built on Feynman diagrams?” Note that I have no idea if Wolfram is right or not, but I’m glad I tried and failed to read New Kind of Science years ago. The mindset/approach were worth it and make it possible to follow along with today’s post. ------ aj7 As long as some variant of the Game of Life isn’t one of the contenders… ------ gibsonf1 This is incredible! Thanks you for sharing it. ------ hprotagonist _OK, so how does it all work? I’ve written a 448-page technical exposition (yes, I’ve been busy the past few months!). Another member of our team (Jonathan Gorard) has written two 60-page technical papers. And there’s other material available at the project website. But here I’m going to give a fairly non-technical summary of some of the high points._ I wonder if this hapless postdoc-equivalent is going to get sued, too! [https://www.nature.com/articles/417216a](https://www.nature.com/articles/417216a) [https://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2002-July/005692.html](https://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2002-July/005692.html) ~~~ jonathan_gorard I sure hope not ;) ------ gfodor I'll just say it, I love Stephen Wolfram. The fact he gets under so many peoples' skins, and yet keeps leading teams producing amazing stuff (Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, etc) gets an A+ in my book. Anyone who puts so much energy into this stuff, which such ego, obviously wants to contribute in a real and meaningful way to ensure his own understanding and his legacy. A personality flaw? Sure. But we've seen bigger assholes make huge dents in the universe - physics is long overdue for someone to shake things up. From my vantage point, as a laymen, theoretical physics is dead, and its a shame. It may take someone like Wolfram to do it - it probably takes flipping the bird to peer review at this point to get widespread dissemination of radical takes on theoretical physics. And it certainly seems like a lot of radical takes will be necessary for us to actually make progress. So, hats off. Even if this isn't the Big Idea, maybe it'll end up sparking an idea in someone else's head down the road that gets us there. ~~~ DubiousPusher > theoretical physics is dead I'm genuinely not sure why you believe this especially as we live in an era when theoretical physics and experimental physics are becoming so entwined and the product is a fairly successful testing of our models of physics. ~~~ meowface It's not dead in the sense that we've done a better job of experimentally confirming things like general relativity and aspects of quantum mechanics, due to being able to accurately perform more precise observations (like with LHC and LIGO). I'd say this is a triumph of advances in experimental physics, though, rather than theoretical physics. There doesn't seem to have been any widely accepted fundamental theoretical breakthrough like general relativity or quantum mechanics for a long time, nor has there been any widely accepted way to unify the two theories. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I and many others have. ~~~ DubiousPusher This is pure speculation on my part so take it for a grain of salt. But I generally don't find that fields just stop advancing or go cold. It seems to me that usually what is happening is there is a lot of work going on at a level that does not make a lot of sense to report to a lay audience or at leas the media which covers the subject does not think a lay audience could understand or would be interested in it. Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years. Theoretical physics probably simply appears stuck to us because as lay people we focus on a couple of large scale questions that for now are probably out of reach. But we don't consider the hundreds of theoretical physics refinements and observations that need to go into the development of the LHC or LIGO or James Webb etc. Anyway, that's just like my opinion man. ~~~ avaldeso > Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge > public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the > world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of > notable biology findings in the past 20 years. Human genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9 a few years ago was pretty big tbh. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417674](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417674) ------ m12k The general tone of the comments here seems to be 'Stephen Wolfram is a pompous ass, so we shouldn't listen to anything he has to say'. After reading through the post I think that, yes, he probably is a pompous ass (you could certainly have trimmed out the paragraphs that sound like a self- congratulatory auto-biography without losing much), but I really hope people don't just ignore this because of that. There are some legitimately interesting things going on here, and I hope other, more traditional, rigorous, and less hype-prone scientific minds are willing to dive into it to see where it leads. If it'll actually be a unification of relativity and quantum mechanics, who knows, but there's definitely _something_ here, and I'd hate for it to just get ignored because of distaste for the man. There are some actual scientific predictions here - e.g. that there is a maximum speed at which quantum entanglements can happen, analogous to the speed of light in relativity - which I hope people start thinking about ways of designing experiments for/falsifying. ~~~ jonathan_gorard Thanks for your encouraging comments! There is already a proposed observational test for the maximum entanglement rate hypothesis (based on the location of the stretched horizon in the context of black hole physics), proposed here: [https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...](https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some- quantum-mechanical-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf) ------ dang I'm going to try to merge the other thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707)) hither. Please stand by. Edit: that's done. I adopted the other title, in the hope that it will have less of a flamebait effect. All: no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding. [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20wolfram&sort=byDate&type=comment) ~~~ mnemonicsloth > no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic > because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird > counterversion of the very thing they're deriding. If you really can't stand it then kill the thread. But Wolfram is a bad actor in a discipline that runs on reputation. He needs to be talked about. ~~~ dang He doesn't need to be talked about for the thousandth time in the way he always gets talked about—not on HN, at least, and it's easy to see why: this is a site for intellectual curiosity. Curiosity withers under repetition and fries under indignation. What happens to it under the combo? exercise for the reader. This is one of those cases where it's super helpful to have a single thing you're optimizing and for and to know what it is: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20optimiz&sort=byDate&type=comment). It helps with quickly answering questions that might otherwise be conundrums. A previous example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280) ~~~ mnemonicsloth An environment full of misleading information doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity. It penalizes it. And a one-sided discussion about Stephen Wolfram is highly misleading -- even worse than no discussion at all. So I stand by what I said earlier. If you can't stand to hear the case against Stephen Wolfram then kill this thread. ~~~ dang The discussion isn't one-sided in the way you mean. Take out the dreck and it's still highly critical. For example, the top comment (not counting my moderation alert) begins "I don't see anything of substance here". ------ caleb-allen If I have to read through so much of the article context disguised as bragging without anything resembling something new then maybe this Fundamental Theory is less important than Stephen Wolfram showing how many Important Things he's done ~~~ JackFr That is the reason we love Stephen Wolfram. ~~~ jjoonathan Stephen Wolfram: his physics might be completely unproven, but his blog posts stand as conclusive evidence that shameless self-promotion has no upper bound. ~~~ agumonkey WOLFRM > TREE ? ------ Zhyl Stephen Wolfram is well known in the industry as being a pompous, self- indulgent man. There was an old joke I heard which went: > Q: How do you know if Stephen Wolfram invented something? > A: He'll tell you. I saw a TED talk by Conrad Wolfram about using Mathematica as an educational tool [1]. I went to one of my tutorials and tried to discuss it with the Professor (we were encouraged to bring up basically anything we'd seen or encountered in our first few weeks of uni). His response was "I don't think we need to worry about what Conrad Wolfram is saying." By all accounts, Stephen and Conrad Wolfram are clever men. It is without a doubt that Mathematica is an extraordinary piece of software. Many people here will have benefitted from Wolfram Alpha and will have used Mathematica either in an academic context or in an engineering context. Stephen Wolfram, however, is not Christ, even though he likes to think so. [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60OVlfAUPJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60OVlfAUPJg) ~~~ tannhauser23 That may be true, but science is full of pompous, self-indulgent men who make brilliant discoveries. Of course, science is also littered with cranks who make grandiose claims of discovery - especially in physics. Curious to hear what people who actually study this stuff think about this supposedly discovery. ~~~ JackFr The thing is, Wolfram earned his stripes as a very competent physics prodigy, and is clearly very, very smart. But as far as I can tell, no one studies this stuff except him and hist acolytes and I think few established physicists would be inclined too, so it's very difficult to evaluate his ideas. Is he a crank? For a classic definition of crank, no. Does this work represent a clearer understanding of physics than we had prior, or is it an interesting diversion? Harder question, but one has to assume, probably diversion. On the other hand if time travel or teleportation IS ever invented, my money is that it will be Wolfram. ~~~ catalogia For what it's worth, he said during his livestream that he thinks time travel would be impossible under his worldview. ------ martythemaniak I think this has a better chance of succeeding than Hacker News having a Wolfram-related thread that isn't 50% slagging the guy. ~~~ natalyarostova It's super sad. I don't know much about Physics at all. But I suspect any huge breakthrough will come when 1000s of people, like Wolfram, spend their life's effort to solve an incredibly hard problem. Almost all will fail, but some will succeed, and at the start it won't be obvious who is on the right path vs. who is a 'crank.' Imagine just sitting at home, constantly talking shit and disparaging someone who has dedicated themselves to solving an almost intractably hard problem. And I say that as someone with no particular interest or liking of Wolfram. ~~~ knzhou Well, here I am talking shit about Wolfram, but I'm a physicist. There _are_ thousands of us spending our lives on incredibly hard problems. The only difference between Wolfram and Weinstein and the rest of us is that they're declaring victory in an incredibly premature, flashy way. When the rest of us have an idea, we try hard to _prove it wrong_ (which is fundamental to how science works), not search for a lay audience to promote it to. ~~~ natalyarostova Fair enough. I'm not a physicist, so I'll defer to you on this. Do you think Wolfram's strange style is worth trying, as a moon-shot? (Ignoring for a second his personality). ~~~ knzhou Physics research being the way it is, everything is worth trying if somebody really believes in it, because everything is a moonshot. I'm personally working on one right now, so I'm too busy to work on Wolfram's, but more power to him if he wants to continue! My personal intuition is that a new language is only useful if it has enough "meat" to constrain things. For example, most physicists know almost nothing about logic, because it seems so far upstream of everything else that changes in it have no effect. (Indeed, logic _has_ changed a lot in the past 100 years, and nothing happened to us!) But almost everybody in physics agrees that the language of differential forms is awesome, because with some minimal assumptions, they say that there's essentially one way to write down the theory of electromagnetism -- and it turns out to be the _right_ way. Similarly, it looks like there's little promise in applying computability theory to physics, because it is grounded in what happens "at infinity" (and hence does not lend itself to predicting anything in our inherently finite experiments), but real promise in applying information theory and computational complexity theory, which can tell us about asymptotics. So that was why my first reaction is that Wolfram's exceedingly general language wouldn't be very helpful. However, attitudes can and have changed. If Wolfram and co. come up with a sharp success, where they derive something important without directly putting what they want to get into their starting assumptions, people would pay attention. That's precisely why, e.g. special and general relativity, quantum field theory and string theory are so important today. They all started this way. ------ bhouston It would be nice that instead of a press release and a long diatribe with fancy graphics, he took the boring but hard step of publishing a paper that advances the field and getting accolades from fellow physicists who agree with him. Wolfram's press release focused method of advancing his "scientific advances" is so off putting, and highly suspicious that it is more hype that really something new. ------ jordanpg What this project needs is someone at the center of it. A visionary. A leader. A genius. A prolix author. Can anyone think of someone??? ~~~ saadalem Eric weinstein ? ~~~ lliamander I'd like to see that. Although honestly I find him and his brother to both be frustratingly vague and abstract at times. ~~~ lukifer At times, Eric has quite the way with words; yet on Lex Fridman's podcast, he really struggled to communicate Geometric Unity in a way that's even slightly accessible to a layperson, despite Lex's patient prodding: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE) I actually find his brother Bret to be the opposite in his manner, far more measured and comprehensible: though he'll occasionally forget that you might not know a particular term of art (telomeres, extended phenotype), his ideas are more narrowly scoped to genetic selection pressures and game theory, and a little easier to parse. (His experience is primarily as an educator, which Eric's is not.) Bret and his wife have been doing an educational series on COVID-19, which is quite accessible: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yH...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3) ~~~ lliamander I love listening to Heather and Bret when they talk about biology. What irks me most is when Bret starts talking about how our society isn't sustainable and that we need to rethink society by incorporating insights from game theory and evolutionary biology. On that score, he is frustratingly vague. I don't even think I would likely agree with him, but without something more concrete there's nothing there for me to analyze. Perhaps I just haven't found the right podcast or whatever where he goes into exactly what he means by that. ~~~ lukifer Totally understood. I don't think Bret claims to have a good answer to the problem. I think his thesis is that we're in such uncharted territory, facing multiple existential crises, that none of the thought technologies that helped us up to this point (religion, democracy, capitalism, even scientific materialism) are necessarily going to suffice for us to survive/thrive into the 21st century. The common-ancestor driving force of those social technologies are genetic selection pressures, which he argues we should consciously and intentionally counter-act. One might fairly claim that that's a quixotic pipe-dream, given that our nature has been shaped by that force for a billion years; but the highly plausible opposing argument is that the alternative is extinction (if not of the species, then perhaps of civilization). For more proactive ideas on constructing a social operating system for the 21st century and beyond, take a look at the "Game B" model from Jim Rutt, Jordan Hall, and many others: [https://medium.com/@memetic007/a-journey-to- gameb-4fb13772bc...](https://medium.com/@memetic007/a-journey-to- gameb-4fb13772bcf3) [https://medium.com/@jordangreenhall](https://medium.com/@jordangreenhall) ~~~ lliamander Thanks! ------ nathan_compton What Wolfram is saying, and has always said, is vacuous in the extreme. There is more new science in 't Hooft's book about Quantum Mechanics as Cellular Automata than in all of A New Kind of Science. His stuff just amounts to large claims and a lot of fiddling around. Its certainly possible that something could come out of it (I mean the idea "physics is just some rules" is vacuously true) but I don't see in any of the work surrounding his ideas any true attempt to get to the bottom of things by trying very hard to understand basic ideas like locality and unitarity and how they must be true or may be violated by physical models which are deeper than the ones we have. If you want to see that kind of actual hard scientific work, see Nima Arkani Hamad or Gerard 't Hooft. I, personally, was a bad researcher, which is why I couldn't cut it as an academic. What made me bad was that I got lost in fiddling around rather than trying to hit the most incisive questions in the most useful ways. I see a lot of that in Wolfram. ------ prideout Given his passion for cellular automata and the timing of his post, it would have been nice if Wolfram had at least mentioned the late great Conway and his recent passing. ------ verytrivial I can't tell if this is real or the output of a neural network trained on Mr Wolfram's corpus of bloviation. ------ ddevault Wow, this is... the worst. This is the most egregious clickbait I've seen on HN in a long time. ~~~ jjoonathan That's Stephen Wolfram for you. He's genuinely smart and genuinely looking into an underexplored branch of theory with tons of upside potential, but he also does... this sort of thing, all the time. ------ Koshkin "A New Kind of Physics"? > _And for example my book A New Kind of Science is about this whole > phenomenon and why it’s so important for science and beyond._ Right... ------ mellosouls Could somebody explain to Stephen Wolfram physics is already underway and the normal way to join in is to publish your ideas in appropriate venues and submit them to peer review? ~~~ Reedx N'ah. It's good that folks like Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are taking a different path. Sometimes that's what it takes for new breakthroughs to emerge. If nothing else it could spark new ideas or invigorate others to take bolder approaches and move outside their comfort zone. ~~~ hobofan What path is Eric Weinstein taking? I've heard about him for the first time yesterday, when a section of his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was linked, where he talked much too confidently about a subject he probably shouldn't. ~~~ mellosouls Weinstein rented a room in an Oxbridge college to lecture on his theory of everything. His recent campaign was for his brother who he feels was badly mistreated by a Nobel laureate who he alleges failed to credit him for important related work. You can hear the latter case on a recent edition of his podcast, The Portal. ~~~ Koshkin > _theory of everything_ I've read a book with this title once, full of formulas. I do not remember who the author was, and the book (or the math in it) did not make sense to me. ------ podgaj Wow, Stephen Wolfram has just rediscovers Daoism... ------ tinman25 So basically this: [https://xkcd.com/505/](https://xkcd.com/505/) huh Stephen? -Question has anyone validated and/or disproved his Geometric Rules based approach and NKS Cellular automata against traditional physics models and found predictable conclusions that can be tested via experiment? IE is it really anything other alternative notation/representation system? It essentially presupposes a computational canvas to the universe,but in what substrate does this computation happen? Obviously the guy has an ego the size of a black hole (and probably as insecure about it, since the whole website (beautifully produced of course) has no community forum, comment section or space for peer review about the theories he presents.. He really needs to get away from sycophants in his company and engage with outside world. Citing others would help. New perspectives on physics and mathematical descriptions of the universe are welcome and I'm sure there is plenty of insights to be found..who knows exactly, since the investment in learning and understanding his approach requires substantial effort to decode and without prediction . sad to see how little things like a ego of one little man can both be a source of insight and frustration at the same time.. ~~~ vntok I haven't seen the ideas he presents over there exposed anywhere else in either science publications, global media or even hobbyist blogs. Maybe there's a lesson there that some smart minds might do better when absolving themselves of the constraints of traditional science processes and publishing rythm? Now this guy is in a very interesting position, as someone who became fixated upon an interesting (?) phenomenon at one point in his life, then spent decades studying it, wrote books and papers about it, designed a fundamental theory basically ex nihilo based on his grand idea about that field (I'm not arguing for/against the theory's veracity here), AND then built a whole toolset around it all to do research, AND wrote books about his research, AND recorded hours of videos, AND now apparently is putting it all online for people to get easy access for free. He's thought about something, he's worked it and now he's sharing it all. So I'm kind of curious, what more do you want him to do at this point? ------ crubier Nice! This will be seen in the future either as a Nobel prize winning, first revolutionary paper on the theory of everything, or as just another marketing white paper for Mathematica. I can’t tell, but it is interesting for sure! ------ smoyer I am not a physicist but as a layman there are two interesting things that my mind (which admittedly finds connections in things that others don't) thought of while reading the article: 1) Conway has obviously been in the news recently (RIP) and there have been quite a few articles talking about his "Game of Life". The fact that complex patterns emerge from three basic rules seems eerily similar to what Wolfram is now describing. Of course, computational power is now to the point where you can run many more games that we could the first time I entered the program into my Z80-based machine. 2) There's also been a lot of discussion the last couple years about whether we're living in a simulation. With Wolfram performing "zillions" of operations, could it be that there's actually someone living inside his computer wondering the same thing? As we progress in our computing ability, could this happen in the future? If we ourselves are living in a simulation, could those simulating us also be living in a simulation? Is it also turtles all the way up? ~~~ brutt 1) Yep. Universe is built on few very simple principles, which can be used to implement emulation: dimensions, energy/force, inertia/mass, time. (And infinity). 2) Yep, it will happen in future, but infinity is not possible in simulation.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google+ Demo - cskau http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/ ====== kyro I'm really looking forward to trying this out, and here's why: With Facebook, I felt as if I was on this huge football field with all of my 'friends.' I could lean in to whisper with a friend here and there, or even put on some face paint and huddle together with like-faced friends to form a group. But everyone could still see me, and I could see them – I just had to peer down the field. I can't _really_ say things to my group that I'd normally say in private because with all these people on the field with me, someone would certainly overhear us! With Google+ the structure is different. Rather than a field, it's more like a big building with many rooms. Each room can be decorated and tailored to a specific group of friends who hang out there. Best part is once I'm in the room, I can close the door and be myself! I can go up two levels, change hats, and walk into a different room. tl;dr Google+ lets me fully engage my various social sides, whereas Facebook never really let you as you were always in the eye of the public. Edit: One thing I did notice that I wish they would change is that it seems as if a friend can only be placed into one circle. Often times there's a lot of overlap among my social circles and friends may be part of at least two different groups. ~~~ dirtyaura I'm testing Google+ as we speak. I can confirm that you can add people to several circles. However, I haven't yet been able to test how people in those circles see an item that you share. As far as I've understood, Circles are your personal aliases for groups of people and they are not visible to other people. This is really useful in certain situations, but it can also create some confusion when people are commenting and discussing about your photo, as they don't have clear visibility who else is seeing the photo and their comments. ~~~ dirtyaura Okay, tested also how Circle is visible to a receiver. It seems to be like I explained above, i.e. Circle is your private alias for a group of people. The receiver account was not part of Google+ so things might work differently when sharing between Google+ users. The photo just shows Visibility: "Limited", no visibility who else is seeing the photo. ~~~ rictic If you click or hover over the `Limited` then you can see who it's shared with. disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Google+ ~~~ dirtyaura It doesn't show them for non-Google+ users, but I assume that Google thought it's a marginal use case in the long run ;-) ------ andrewguenther There are several reasons I am hopeful for this. 1\. It looks CLEAN While in my opinion one major reason Facebook ended up beating out Myspace was its wonderful interface, I feel like recent renditions have just lost that simplicity. I want connecting with my friends to be simple, not a bombardment of Farmville updates and a poorly designed messaging system. 2\. Sparks Hopefully Google will succeed where Facebook has failed in actually making keeping track of your interests, well...interesting. 3\. Circles Friend management in Facebook has always been one of my biggest complaints, Circles seems to be a legitimate approach to making organizing your friends a little bit more intuitive. I am very excited to see Google+ roll out to the masses, and I do hope it is successful. Not because I want it to take Facebook down, but I think it wouldn't hurt to make them break a little sweat and think about their users a bit more. ~~~ checker Circles is awesome. I can't believe Facebook hasn't done it yet. Hopefully you can drop friends into more than one circle. As far as Huddle goes, I hope it's easy to go from a normal text straight into a Huddle. Also, typing status is very helpful in a chat room to avoid the inevitable conflicts that occur when people happen to type responses at the same time. Sparks looks somewhat like Google News filtering. I'm not sure if I'll use it if that's all it ends up being. Hangouts could be interesting, but because it's many-many communication like Huddle, the conversation flow could be difficult to maintain. I hope it works out. ~~~ WesleyJohnson Based on the demo you can only put friends in one circle, but I hope that's going to change or just isn't properly reflected in the demo; I have plenty of people I would consider to be in multiple circles. The easiest example of which is a "co-worker" who is also a "friend". ~~~ mey Oddly enough, I hope this maps to the gmail groups concept, since I already have people mapping along those lines in there, and winds into my android device as well. Google seems to run into the large corporation octopus issue where knowing what the left and right hands are doing is a difficult task. ------ mattwdelong A little tangent here, but does anyone else find it increasingly difficult to manage multiple sessions on the Google platform? I keep having difficulty not knowing which google account I'm logged into, having issues enabling/disabling features before I have access to a feature X and then, I find out feature X is not available with google apps hosted account; but it's available with my gmail account. There really isn't a solution other than using chrome, incognito window and n browsers per google account. I sure it's a minority of the google user base having this issue, or I'm sure it would be dealt with. Anyone else experience this, and have a solution? I'm just short of abandoning data in all my accounts but one, and moving everything over to it (and forward emails). ~~~ jroid Go here, accept the conditions <https://www.google.com/accounts/MultipleSessions> On the right top menu, Switch Accounts, sign in to second account, (may need to accept conditions again). At this point, you will be able to switch back and forth, between the two accounts ~~~ mattwdelong I've done that and have been using it - it has many limitations but it's a small step in the right direction. ------ Dove This looks to me like Don't Be Evil showing up as a competitive advantage. Facebook seems want my data and my network for its own exploitation; Google seems to actually be thinking about what's best for me. ~~~ naner Facebook makes advertising money through user profiling and only from within their site. Google makes advertising money just from the fact that you're using the web. Google is able to do _more_ though profiling, but they have the flexibility and hindsight to do it less intrusively. Remember, Google's properties are more spread out than Facebook's (and AdSense is almost everywhere). So with Google you don't even have to be logged in for them to advertise to you. ------ kno I think one of main Google problem is Brand Fatigue, people are tired of Google this and Google that. Why not call it friend something or give it a generic name like Baboo, Facebook or something fresh that will give the impression that it is something new. ~~~ irahul Had Google called it friend something, at least I won't have bothered. The only reason I am looking at it is because of brand Google. Granted that Google would have called it something else and I would have still used it, but that would be only because it's Google. Majority of people I know don't have Google brand fatigue - they love brand Google. ------ v21 That's the best web demo I've ever seen. I'm a jaded person, but I clicked on all the things and did all the stuff and felt pride at using their (impressively easy) interface. Serious unexpected design chops from Google! ------ Vraxx Honestly, I'd be open to trying this JUST for the circles. Too many times I've had to restrain myself from posting certain things because of the wide range of "friends" I have on facebook. ------ markbao Really well done, interactive demo. ~~~ levesque Extremely well done. I didn't bother reading about all the features, but the demo made me go through all of it. I'm now excited about instant photos. Success, google. I liked the huddle text input, you don't choose what gets written... pogo boots vanilla beetroots? ------ JanezStupar I adamantly insisted through the whole Facebook is a Google killer period, that when Google decides and turns its eye towards FB's turf - they won't be able to compete. For two simple reasons: 1\. Google has more of everything. 2\. When Google commits to something they don't give up after a failed attempt. They learn and come back meaner and badder. What I like about this service is that it offers (not in beta mind you) actual value as it seems. And I mean that in a productivity sense, not just vanity shots and addictive "click like an automaton" games. I believe that it is time for someone to hire me as a strategist. ------ earle Flash instead of HTML5....... ~~~ whatever_dude Just this "demo". Makes sense considering some of the animation and interactivity they have on the small windows. I doubt the actual product uses Flash for anything other than, maybe, sound and video (as does GMail/YouTube/etc). ------ rheide Can't put 1 friend into 2 circles? Great job on simplifying my social life.. ~~~ shriphani I just tried this out. Yes I can add people to more than 1 circle easily. ------ alorres This is great. The circle groups and the group chat is awesome. But I'm wondering how many groups you'd be able to create (would there be a limit?) and how the center stage of group chat works? It said in demo that the person talking or the loudest would be center but what if 3+ people hit the same volume level, or if like tinychat, there are multiple people talking? Would love to get a reply from someone in Google+ beta. ------ vibrunazo I'm specially interested in the potential of a developer API for this new Google Sparks. Since users _explicitly_ list their interests. If google let's developers access user's interest graph with AppEngine. Then we can do some really really cool customized user experience with it. My brain is going crazy with ideas after reading about this. Just imagine the possibilities... hmmmmm :) ------ fastfinner Yesss, finally I'll be able to get off Facebook! Even though I use Facebook lists, circles seems a lot simpler and functional. For me, photos, and comments and discussions generated off photos is really important, so I need a social network that my friends are also on. The only other service that all my friends share is GMail, so this is really great. ------ Pistos2 The "Keep Me Posted" button brings me to <https://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/+/learnmore/notifyme.html> which is a 404. I had to manually delete "-GB" to get a 200. ~~~ JulianMorrison It worked for me after coming back a minute later, perhaps they had a transient fault. ------ whatever_dude Whatever can make them close down Orkut faster, I'm down. ------ RyanMcGreal Bad sign: > 404\. That’s an error. > The requested URL /intl/en-GB/+/learnmore/notifyme.html was not found on > this server. That’s all we know. ------ mitrick2 Tried to add myself to the waitlist, and got a 500 server error. When the waitlist fails, it doesn't inspire confidence. ------ kylemaxwell Very slick use of Google Maps underlying tech, it looks like. Similar to Prezi, too. ------ signa11 this is very _nice_ , although seems to be overlapping with couple of independent offerings. to me, for example, sparks == instapaper, instant- upload == path/color etc. ------ bennesvig The functionality feels really similar to Prezi. ------ curiousfiddler Loved the hangout feature. Really! ------ crag Good luck. When my grandma joins I'll take a look. She's on Facebook. ;) ~~~ txxxxd Hah, I had the opposite reaction. Finally a social network where I don't have to accept friend requests from my relatives =) ~~~ tvorryn And even if you do accept them, it should be much more convenient and less awkward. That's what I'm looking forward to. I still want to keep up with my family but they don't care about machine learning and don't need to know everything that I'm doing with my friends. Circles sounds great for all of that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
$699 Apple Pro Wheels - onewhonknocks https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-wheels-kit ====== kyledrake The Apple apologists are going to call this a marketing stunt, but functionally it's just the inevitable conclusion of a platform monopoly that's extremely hard to leave. All it really does for me is send a very strong message about what Apple thinks about its customers, but I'm not really the type that enjoys spending $5000 on a $1000 computer for it's Veblen good aesthetics and the joys of trying to get my linux production software to run on their tortured unix. If Apple's profit margins are coming from extremely expensive business computers and high end phones, there could be some brutal earnings reports in their future. Will be interesting to see, but given their current war chest I suppose they could just buy their way into the current valuation for a while with dividends and buybacks. ------ thdrdt Note that they don't have brakes. There are reports of Mac Pros wandering around on floors that are not completely level [1]. [1] [https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1232708514625310721](https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1232708514625310721) Edit: it looks like they are mounted with pins that are almost the same size as normal wheels. So I guess you can also go for $2 wheels available at your local hardware store. ~~~ cm2187 Perhaps there will be a $2000 version with brakes? ~~~ unixhero Apple Pro Wheels 2 Revolutionize your office flexibility by using the brand new wheel brakes. Keep your Mac Pro near you, apply the breaks. Never stop imagining. ------ Jonnax How many people are talking about these wheels? It's like "have you seen how much Apple are charging for their Mac Pro wheels?!?!" And people are becoming aware that the Mac Pro exists. ~~~ tobyhinloopen Yep. Like the monitor arm but better. Especially because they are released with time in between for maximum effectiveness. I bet they will release another useless $1000 option next in a few months. Idk, a $1200 black case or a $600 mouse or something. Oh! An external wireless keyboard with touchbar and touch ID for $400! That would be a great move. I bet people will actually buy it as well. ~~~ AmericanChopper I paid close to $400 for my current keyboard, and it’s just a ordinary mechanical keyboard, no fancy features. I’m very happy with it, and how much I paid for it. ~~~ me_me_me Was it a custom or semi custom job? You can get amazing keyboards for 200, just wondering what it is. Anyhow even if not custom/limited run product, you paid x2 not x10 of the cost. ~~~ AmericanChopper I wanted a very specific Filco model. It was out of production, and I had to order it from overseas, which drove up the cost a fair bit. I probably did pay about 2x the original price for it, but I’m not really sure because it was never sold in the US as far as I know. Filco make high quality keyboard in any case, and they’re not exactly cheap under normal circumstances. My point being that I knew what I wanted to get, and I was happy to pay that price for it, even if some (or a lot of) other people would think that’s ridiculous. I think I’ve gotten more value out of it than I paid for it in $$$. If charging high prices is what it takes to convince people to produce high quality products, then (for certain products) I’m happy to pay them. ------ fabioyy its a marketing move. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TfLVL5GeE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TfLVL5GeE4) ~~~ bilekas Aghh Linus... Now my feed will be full of him again! ~~~ mercer What's the deal with him? ~~~ bilekas Ah he's not bad to be fair, but everytime I watch even just 1 video, YouTube seems to think I want to binge every min of his videos. There are a few YouTube personalities that have that effect.. And it takes a while to clear out that feedback bubble. ------ bilekas Innovation still taking place.. They said don't reinvent the wheel.. Well Apple proves once again.. To think different. ~~~ gyre007 It takes the courage to use a revolutionary design. ------ snarfy The wheels for my car are cheaper. ~~~ p2t2p That's because wheels for your car have breaks. Those, don't. ~~~ nikofeyn car wheels do not have brakes. ~~~ pulse7 So why then they are so cheap? ------ phs318u If you don’t have a cool $699 for the wheels, you could just go with the $299 feet [0], and load the whole thing onto a kid’s steel wagon [1]. [0]. [https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXNM2ZM/A/apple-mac- pro-f...](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXNM2ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-feet-kit) [1]. [https://www.mocka.com.au/kids-steel- wagon.html](https://www.mocka.com.au/kids-steel-wagon.html) ------ tmaly I have an old imac. I was trying to change the batteries in the track pad. The batteries must have leaked and I could not get it open, even with massive force. I learned my lesson on paying a premium for expensive accessories. So here is what I did. I just ordered the basic ipad yesterday for my kid's distance learning. They were pushing the pencil and keyboard hard. I did a quick search and found off brand pencils and keyboards that would work for a fraction of the cost. That is the route I went. ------ abellerose I love macOS & iOS. I’ve been happy to be an Apple customer because the support for hardware has been excellent as well. The icing on the cake was the era of belief that Apple had the goal of making consumer products that people could afford and cherish a good portion of their life. The company is sadly drifting from the past brand status for everyone can change the world to just another luxury brand that not everyone can afford for participating. Why the company prefers making these beyond expensive products and instead of improving user experience & enticing new customers is beyond me. I guess people just work for waking up to a higher paycheck than last year nowadays. ------ renewiltord Interesting. Did not realize people moved their towers that much. Perhaps it's a thing people do in art studios or wherever Mac Pros are used. ~~~ tobyhinloopen It’s not about moving the tower. It’s about brand awareness, like this post. “Look how stupid these expensive wheels are.” While you look at their fancy mac pro. It’s free advertising, and since nobody needs the wheels, no customer feels ripped off. Win-win. It’s like the $1000 Monitor arm but better. ------ mtmail earlier discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23086254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23086254) ~~~ throwaway9482 Comment from there: “The guy was a 10x engineer. He was looking into medical tourism to have a feeding tube put in so he could fuel w/ Soylent.” That was a joke right? ~~~ fiblye The real joke is that there are so many people in the industry who devote their lives to work to the point that people question whether this is really a joke. ~~~ tonyedgecombe It wouldn't work as humour if there wasn't an element of truth in there. ------ mdemare What a bargain! They’re €849 ($919) in NL, tax included. ------ neom Mac Pro Weight: 39.7 pounds (18.0 kg) ------ zankly How do these work, i.e. there doesn't seem to be anything in the center of the wheel. How do they work? ~~~ jayd16 Its two separate wheels that rotate independently, probably using ball- bearings. ~~~ p1mrx So it's technically only $87.50 per wheel. By Grabthar's hammer, what a savings.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds” - rmbryan https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-the-retweet-ruined-the-internet ====== mattknox Wetherell was not involved with launching retweet, and didn't implement much (maybe any?) of the code in that Nov 2009 launch. He probably did write a version of the frontend for retweet at some point, and had done some backend code, but all of that was largely rewritten by launch day. To be fair, he probably didn't claim that, but making his involvement out to be more than it was probably did well for the article. ------ nostrademons Reading through some of the comments here, it occurs to me that there's a moral trilemma at play here: you can have _power_ , you can have _righteousness_ , or you can have _impartiality_ , but you must pick 2 out of 3. If you bring something new into the world that gives new voice or new capabilities to previously disenfranchised groups, then you have a choice between explicitly selecting _who_ you bestow this power on (in which case you can preserve your righteousness, but sacrifice impartiality), or giving this gift away free to everyone who can make use of it (in which case you remain impartial, but will inevitably end up empowering people you find morally abhorrent). Or you can choose to do nothing and never bring anything useful into the world, which is also valid, but means you're eclipsed by people who _do_. Silicon Valley (and science/tech in general) has traditionally selected power & impartiality, while nation-states and religions have traditionally selected power & righteousness. Many of the commenters here would seemingly select righteousness & impartiality, which perhaps speaks to why we're discussing this on a message board rather than bringing startups into the world. ~~~ krajzeg "Choose two out of three" triangles are sexy, but I fail to see how this applies here. Doing nothing doesn't really mean choosing to be impartial and righteous at the same time, and there is no way to both moderate and be impartial if you actually run a platform. I see it as every platform being able to choose a point on a sliding scale between enforcing its morality and being impartial. The more moderation you do, the less impartial you are, sure - but nobody actually wants the extremes of this scale. ~~~ Zak I don't think that argument applies here. The article isn't advocating censorship or legal restrictions on social media. Instead, it's saying that reducing friction from a very specific content-sharing workflow and giving it a prominent position in the UI of social media sites may not have been a good design decision. Edit: I intended this as a reply to a different comment, but it has a reply now so I'll leave it as-is. ~~~ krajzeg It does apply a little if you extend the definition of "moderation" to include choosing the right set of features in order to direct your users' behavior. That said, I was mostly replying to the parent comment, not discussing the main thesis of the article. ------ ShakataGaNai One _major_ problem with this: It's not like he "invented" the retweet. The userbase invented the "RT" prefixed message. Twitter the company simply took what the user base had done and weaponized it and empowered it. But at the same time they made it easier to track a single specific message being RT'd. So blessing and a curse. ~~~ plorkyeran The article specifically argues that the retweet button causes problems that manual retweeting didn't, and so he did invent the thing that's actually a problem. ~~~ derekdahmer Yea the act of copying and pasting to do a retweet required just enough extra work that people had to think about what they were typing, and so users used it in a less reactionary way. It's kind of incredible that a tweak to one small feature could have such a large behavioral impact. ~~~ RandallBrown I distinctly remember people typing "RT @whoever some fake tweet they never said" as a joke or to be purposefully misleading. It solved a real problem with the old fake RT system. ~~~ eropple There's a really solvable answer to that, though: ban people who do it. Enforce some controls on your platform. But the search for more money continues... ------ ergothus I found this to be a rather refreshing take on the traditional "tech people didn't consider the consequences" \- it doesn't place blame on the tech person, and reflects thought and awareness before and after. (It's easy in hindsight to say "people suck, so this is a terrible idea", but far harder to do in advance). Left unanswered is what do about it - the implied "require some effort" isn't likely to be successful, as the incentives to make things easier is there, and the incentive to promote long term civility is...not. ------ bjt2n3904 For a long time, I've made the argument that the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution are indistinguishable from each other. Previously, when the government was attacking encryption, I made the argument that this was gun control for software. "What you have is too powerful. No one needs 'military grade' encryption. Some people are misusing it, and we need the government to control it. No one's coming for your encryption, we just want key escrow." Of course, encryption is not only a protection for banking, it's a protection for free speech. I agree that words can be a "weapon"\--but in the same way that a scalpel can be a weapon. It depends how you use it. It's frightening that people are now starting to apply the "gun control" thought process to "retweets". Before anyone jumps down my throat with "but Twitter isn't bound by the constitution", no duh. But regardless whether it's a company or a government, hearing someone with a lot of power advocate for suppressing freedom of expression isn't a great thing. Whatever happened to the "Free Speech Wing" of the "Free Speech Party"? ------ dccoolgai So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: _Content that would demean people_ Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is. ~~~ amiantos The problem is idealism. > “I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented,” > Wetherell said, noting that he initially felt the retweet button would > elevate voices from underrepresented communities. The problem is that it didn't register to him, or anyone, that "racists" were an "underrepresented community", as were sexists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-intellectuals, quacks, and so on. When attempting to give a voice to minorities, they gave a voice to all "minorities", including people who had minority opinions. The idealism came in the form of expecting that these tools will, by default, be used for good... it wouldn't surprise me that people in the tech community, who have often come from privilege or at the very least live within privileged bubbles, are naive about what people are really capable of. "A rising tide lifts all boats..." unfortunately some of those ships are full of pirates and disease. It's sad, but you really need think about these things from a jaded and cynical perspective when building them, it's unfortunate that there's been a long crusade against cynicism. Being optimistic and feeling optimism about the world and humanity leads to problems like this. ~~~ redwards510 Well said. In addition to simply being naive, I think there is also the self- delusion that everyone subscribes to when they convince themselves that their job (no matter what it is) is somehow helping contribute _something_ good to the world. I had a relative that worked as a telemarketer selling predatory debt consolidation packages to people on the verge of bankruptcy and when he described what he was doing, he enthusiastically framed it like he was helping the people from going bankrupt, even though he was just helping them dig a bigger hole. If your company is a public corporation, your only purpose is to maximize shareholder value. ------ jackfoxy I think the real problem is Twitter refuses to make sophisticated filtering available to users. Simple mute, block, and keyword filtering are inadequate. ~~~ ethbro I was wondering today why Facebook et al. don't break their share functions into emotionally binned categories. "Share because it makes me angry" etc Seems like they'd get amazing whole text training sets, as well as a signal to better guide their platforms (e.g. under-weighting negative emotions in share velocity). ~~~ seisvelas People would quickly realize that if they share it under a negative category their share velocity would be hit. A better approach might just be to sentiment-detect negative emotion in Tweets and adjust share velocity accordingly. ------ brokenkebab There seem to be a growing idea in Silicon Valley minds that we (IT crowd, devs, techies, managers) are in fact great! Way smarter then those stupid peons around us which use our products. So logically we have a mission to bring those unwashed morons to the bright side, and we must manipulate them for their own good. While it's certainly pleasant illusion for us, there are two glowing problems: 1\. We are not necessary better (neither morally, nor intellectually) then other people, it's just a current importance of IT economy which makes us a bit more successful, and and sometimes gives us some sort of influence. 2\. There's an empirical evidence of activist journalism which suggests the only achievable result on this way is loss of respect, and growing animosity. ------ dawhizkid Retweets function to spread messages, but the quote tweet (combined with the retweet) is the ultimate hate/shame tool. I rarely see it use outside of "hey universe look what this idiot once said". ------ phkahler Been saying for years that the Share button is what ruined Facebook. I went there to see what was up with people I know, not to get news or Memes. The problem now is that FB makes a lot of money via sharing paid content so they won't get rid of it. ------ darepublic The mainstream media has weaponized the use of the word weaponized ------ throw7 I think it's funny, this developer is calling his users 4-Year-Olds. Reminds me when we used to call them lusers. ------ btbuildem So -- remove the button. No? Why not? ~~~ daveFNbuck The guy in the article doesn't even work at Twitter. He's not in a position to remove it. ~~~ splendidHaiku Maybe other people work at twitter who could remove it? Questions was why not just remove it. ~~~ daveFNbuck The people who are in a position to remove it aren't the ones who said it's like handing a loaded weapon to a 4-year-old, so they don't have the reason to remove it that the question was referring to. They have a more nuanced view and are quoted in the article saying that they're looking into how to modify the interface to "encourage more consideration before spread". ------ 9HZZRfNlpR Twitter was not made for serious, challenging conversation from the beginning. Every feature it has is designed for short, sarcastic tweets or replies. It's almost hardcoded to the product. Possibly that's why politicians love it. ------ gavanwoolery There is a much larger problem here than RTs, and that is lack of journalistic integrity. You can spread pretty much any sort of information without research or even a logical basis. Weirdly, we tend to default to accepting it as valid rather than questioning it. The only realistic cure for this, outside of draconian authority, is to teach people how to be more skeptical and educate them on logical fallacies. These are things that should be taught from elementary school and onwards IMHO. ~~~ smogcutter So I don't remember this well enough to find a link, but some time ago there was a viral clip of someone tripping on the subway steps in NY. They drop all their stuff, look like a dork, everyone's fine, whatever. But then someone takes a longer look at security camera footage from the station (or someone independent sets up a camera, I forget), and finds that _lots_ of people trip on that particular step. Turns out it's slightly taller than the others, so it's easy to catch your foot on it. One possible solution is to convince everyone individually to pay really close attention to their feet all the time. Or you could fix the steps. No one had to go around and convince people to be shitty to each other on the internet. A structural change made it easier and more rewarding, and our dumb monkey brains went wild. If your solution is to change the dumb monkey brain part and not the structural part, you're gonna have a bad time. ------ tictoc Did they know it was a weapon? Would it be a weapon if twitter wasn't popular? ------ api The same thing could be said of every tech product back to the sharpened rock. ------ austincheney Retweet is like gossip but easier. There are people who are wired to enjoy gossiping. They can have this stupidity. On the other hand I prefer to avoid Twitter all together and get my news from actual journalism. ------ krtkush Similar - [https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/man-created-facebook-like- bu...](https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/man-created-facebook-like-button-now- warns-mind-can-hijacked-social-media/) ~~~ sp332 Also a guy who did major pioneering work on infinite scrolling [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959) ------ simplecomplex Hyperbole. Social media is not broken. The retweet is not why. And this guy didn't invent the idea of republishing content. Other microblog services had that, and I'm pretty sure Twitter users were doing it on their own. ~~~ loceng So I'm curious what you think is the problem, or if there is one - and if so, what your proposed solution would be? ~~~ simplecomplex People create their own problems out of nothing. People make mountains out of mole hills. Twitter is one of those problems. Twitter is one of those mountains. ~~~ loceng So you haven't thought very deeply into this? Those statements don't tell me anything - I can say there's the colour white, but that's actually made up of a spectrum of colours. I ask because if you haven't thought deeply into it, how are you confident that your macro statements are accurate?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
LOOP (programming language) - anqurvanillapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOOP_(programming_language) ====== niklasd We are learning these (meaning LOOP, WHILE, GOTO) in university right now, the course is designed after a short German textbook of Schöning. The proofs on how powerful they are are quite interesting (e.g. you emulate the syntax of a GOTO program with WHILE statments and thus show WHILE >= GOTO). Does anybody know if these specific theoretical programming languages are of any furter/or in wide use in theoretical CS? ~~~ xenadu02 How is GOTO not equivalent to WHILE? You can emulate any arbitrary flow- control construct with GOTO. ~~~ sullyj3 Presumably you need another proof for GOTO >= WHILE and therefore GOTO = WHILE ~~~ niklasd Exactly. You emulate every WHILE instruction with a GOTO insturction. ------ antidesitter Even addition, subtraction, and variable assignment are unnecessary. All you need is succession: [https://esolangs.org/wiki/Restricted_BlooP/FlooP](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Restricted_BlooP/FlooP) ------ agumonkey May his next language be called Tetration	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to find the full court documents from Zuck/Andreessen article? - arikr "The case In RE Facebook Class C Reclassification Litigation, CA 12228, Delaware Chancery Court (Wilmington)"<p>https://www.chimicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/File-Stamped-Facebook-Complaint.pdf<p>This doesn't have any of the quoted things from the bloomberg piece i.e. the text messages, doesn't mention the Zuckerberg <> Andreessen communication at all ====== schoen According to [http://courts.delaware.gov/Chancery/](http://courts.delaware.gov/Chancery/), "Civil actions filed with the court are available online at File and ServeXpress" ([http://www.fileandservexpress.com/](http://www.fileandservexpress.com/)) which is probably the easiest way to get access to the docket without physically going to the courthouse in Wilmington ([http://courts.delaware.gov/chancery/telephone- ncc.aspx](http://courts.delaware.gov/chancery/telephone-ncc.aspx)). But I guess you'll have to pay for copies.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Storing Data in DNA [pdf] - ChuckMcM https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~luisceze/publications/dnastorage-asplos16.pdf ====== aaronmck If this kind of work interests you, I'd also recommending reading Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski's DNA fountain paper (which just came out in Science). They've done some really nice work on error correction, and they also understand the sequencing technology limitations, etc. Of course this is all really expensive to read and write now, but sequencing technology is only getting cheaper and cheaper. Here' the link to the updated preprint: [http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/12/04/074237.f...](http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/12/04/074237.full.pdf) ------ ChuckMcM I had to share this, there have been a couple of news stories about storing information in DNA and personally I find the topic really fascinating. I suspect however that it is impractical to store data in a medium which requires DNA sequencing to extract, (very long 'time to recover' in the disaster management parlance) but its a fascinating idea in general. But there are lots of natural techniques to copy dna and repair it when it fails to copy properly so durability should be solid. ~~~ lallysingh Can we embed this data in dormant DNA in existing life? Can I hide my PGP keys in the DNA of my houseplant? ~~~ johnhenry Of course you could, but now that we know you plan to hide you PGP keys in your plants, you're hit by the old "security-by-obscurity" fallacy. :/ ~~~ lallysingh Just xor it with a one time pad, encoded in a fern. ------ patall What I never understand in these studies is why they always want to go for single base resolution immediately. Sequencing and writing is so expensive because any error you make is a real problem. If instead, every bit was encoded by a default oligomer of 5 times the same base, you could live with much higher error rates. You would loose density but still achieve multiple orders of magnitude over current storage solutions. ~~~ OrthoMetaPara In addition to mitigating errors in copying as you've highlighted, there is also the possibility that some stretch of bases in your message would have some deleterious effect on the organism. Thus, you would need to include some kind of redundancy into your code so that a bit could be represented in several different ways. The computer that encoded the message could then try to optimize the message so that it would be maximally amenable to storage. ------ amingilani I wonder what their read/write speeds were.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The iPad is transforming media firms, and frustrating them - cwan http://www.economist.com/node/17043882 ====== tumult The real reason media companies are frustrated (no, really) by the iPad and iPhone is that their entire workflow, and often culture, are based around Flash.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The $16M offer letter Yahoo sent to poach its CRO from Amazon - coloneltcb http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-offer-letter-lisa-utzschneider-2016-2 ====== eganist 16 million that could've gone towards an innovative product developed under a separate (non-Yahoo) label. If the brand is that expensive to fix, build a new brand. ------ Someone1234 I hope this individual brings in enough value to offset the approximate 20 some odd employees that their single compensation package could have otherwise paid for. That's literally an entire new product team for this one employee. ~~~ mathattack For better or worse, the Head of Sales or top Salesperson is usually the highest paid person in a company. They frequently make more than the CEO. To pull a successful (and very highly paid) Sales exec from another firm is extremely expensive because they know they can make a lot of money staying. So the failure isn't the price paid... It's that Yahoo couldn't grow their own execs. And for the same reason that they needed to go external and overpay for the CEO, they also needed to go external and pay up for the revenue too. If Yahoo was growing nobody would be complaining. ------ jdalgetty I could use a 600k/year salary :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How hard would it be to build a TARS robot? - allenleein ====== sgillen It depends what exactly you mean. Just building 4 metal beams that connect to each other and move in some of the ways you see in the movie is doable. The balance displayed may be accomplished, I suspect a lot of energy would be needed to drive that system though (im picturing a lot of large and powerful flywheels, though I'd be curious what other people think could solve the problem). The sensing and autonomy of the robot, not to mention the fluidity with which it moves through the environment, is still several decades off, and probably much longer. We'd also need to solve the energy problem, or use some sort tether (not quite as useful then). ~~~ allenleein "Say this movie took place 200 years from now -- I’d give it a chance," he said. "100 years ahead? Maybe. 50 years ahead? I’m a little hesitant to say TARS and CASE would be at that ability 50 years from now. It’s just not there. There’s too much to do, and there’s not enough money being put into it to see that that kind of engineering is going to come forward. It’s all about the money, you know?" [http://www.mtv.com/news/1996022/interstellar-tars- robot/](http://www.mtv.com/news/1996022/interstellar-tars-robot/) After reading this article, i know it will cost A LOT to build a robot like TARS, but what about the level of AI of TARS? ~~~ sgillen I think the AI is the furthest away, though predicting where technologies will be in 200 years is basically impossible. IIRC TARS is able to converse with humans naturally (even telling jokes) navigate about as well as humans in a variety of climates and conditions. From a controls engineering perspective, This is a lot more difficult that it might seem react to emergency situations in an intelligent way (it was able to rescue one of the humans from an incoming tidal wave and carry them safely to the spaceship). I encourage you to check out the DARPA robotics challenge videos. The current state of the art allows our robots to (very slowly) navigate a controlled, known environment, and even then most competitors cannot complete the course. I agree with the articles timeline, I really doubt we'd see something like TARS in the next 50 years, but 100-200? we'll see.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why is "Reform the PhD system or close it down" dead? - arethuza I just logged in to add a comment on this thread to find out that it is dead - why has this happened? ====== owensmartin For quick reference: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2474573> ~~~ arethuza Thanks - I guess I should have added that link before. Looks like I'm going to remain mystified as to why that thread was killed.... :-(	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Responsibility and the Encryption Debate: A Response to DAG Rosenstein - cratermoon https://www.justsecurity.org/46036/responsibility-encryption-debate-response-dag-rosenstein/ ====== berbec Didnt we try this before ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper) chip) and it was determined to be a Bad Idea? ~~~ craftyguy Wow, TIL clipper ships (your link) were so extensible. (This is what you meant to post, please don't kill me: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip)) ~~~ duncan_bayne > Wow, TIL clipper ships (your link) were so extensible. The real problem is that they were highly vulnerable to piracy ;) ------ c54 "By Rosenstein’s definition, all of those things should be considered “warrant-proof,” yet he is not advocating that Congress should outlaw people throwing out or destroying papers" Isn't this considered destruction of evidence and already illegal in the context of a court case? What're the subtleties of this-- does it need to be an already-ongoing case? ~~~ deathanatos > _Isn 't this considered destruction of evidence and already illegal in the > context of a court case?_ IANAL; my understanding is that it is only destruction of evidence if you're being investigated (or perhaps have reason to believe that you will be investigated; again, IANAL and this it not legal advice), at which point you ought to know better. Otherwise, the result is ridiculous: any piece of paper I throw out _could_ be evidence in some future, yet unknown, unfathomable to me trial — how am I to know now? If I toss _anything_ , then how could it be used as evidence? I'd need to keep _everything_ to be sure, which is absurd. And, like the article continues: what about conversations? That _could_ show wrong-doing, but I'm not recording it. The point the author is making is that there have long existed things that _could_ be evidence but that have always been possible to destroy prior to anyone knowing that something is afoot. In that regard, those things are "warrant-proof": by the time you know to issue a warrant, you can't find the item that would incriminate the person. But we're not getting legislation crazy about those. A warrant is permission to take a look, not a guarantee to find what you're looking for. Frankly, I think that opponents of E2E encryption are greatly overstating things; I think a fair amount of the time, LE will be able to work around it: criminals will set stupid passwords, they won't use the tech at all, they'll be caught by other means (hey, we found printed records, your buddy's drive wasn't encrypted, we found a non-technical smoking gun, like a literal smoking gun). (Ideally, I'd like to see my data essentially being an extension of my mind that perhaps LE can look at; but I shouldn't be compelled to help them do so. But the current gist I get from politicians is that they'd essentially like to outlaw E2E encryption, and you'd never even get a warrant for your data, because BigCo provider would get it.) ~~~ danenania This is 100% about mass-surveillance. Targeted individuals can already be endpoint hacked in countless ways, which completely nullifies any form of encryption. But that doesn't scale to whole populations. ------ filleokus I guess that the broken URL in > A detailed response to the technical requirements and feasibility of his > proposals is best left to technologists and cryptographers. is [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/usa-liberty-act- wont-f...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/usa-liberty-act-wont-fix- whats-most-broken-nsa-internet-surveillance), that might be of interest to the HN crowd. ------ upofadown Rather than using the example of evidence that used to exist but no longer exists, I think a better preexisting example is evidence that has been deliberately hidden. After all, encryption is just a method of hiding data from everyone that does not know the key. If law enforcement knows that the plans for the bank heist exist they still might not know that those plans are currently located in the suspects ex- boyfriends garage. The garage is not warrant proof, the police just don't know where to apply the warrant. The exact same thing is true in the case of encrypted data. Law enforcement needs the key to apply the warrant. ~~~ cratermoon If they can get a warrant, they should get a warrant. LE does _NOT_ need a backdoor key exercise the warrant. ------ shmerl Responsible backdoor is an oxymoron.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask YC: Why can't you down-mod people's responses to you? - time_management I understand the potential for abuse here, but I feel like the pros outweigh the cons, and I highly doubt that adding this ability would have a "chilling effect" on disagreements. Quite frankly, most of us don't care about karma enough that we would withhold disagreements for fear of a 1-point reprisal.<p>I usually up-vote people who disagree with me, actually, if I find that they're contributing to the discussion in a thoughtful way. It's the HN way, no?<p>But occasionally I get a reply that really deserves it, like this one, which I cannot down-mod: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457222 ====== pg It would tend to be done reflexively-- maybe not by you, but by a lot of users. Not allowing it seemed a way to filter out what would almost certainly be the least thoughtful subset of votes, thereby raising the thoughtfulness of the median vote. ~~~ alain94040 Agreed. It would be abused in 95% of the scenarios. For the 5% of legitimate uses, you'll have to believe that someone other than you will do the modding. ------ steveplace Helps information liquidity during debates. Also, the your comment which is the parent to the aforementioned doesn't seem to be contributing much. ------ russell I disagree. Sort of reminds me of the mess on ebay where buyers were afraid to down mod sellers because they were afraid of retaliation. Not quite the same here, but I trust the rest of the community to take care of any problems. If a poor comment stays there, it's probably because at least some agree with it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Harvey Weinstein tests positive for Covid in prison - mmhsieh https://www.niagara-gazette.com/covid-19/at-new-york-prison-harvey-weinstein-put-in-isolation-after/article_26e38374-6c7d-11ea-9f8a-3b2c09e7817d.html ====== JensRex Blocked in Europe. [https://archive.ph/xVj1D](https://archive.ph/xVj1D)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Groupon: from dotcom star to just another coupon business - Libertatea http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/02/groupon-dotcom-star-just-another-coupon-business ====== corporalagumbo _Really it never was a social media company. It's a coupon business, which is a perfectly respectable business – but not one worth $13bn._ This is so great to read. Lovely to see all of that social media magical thinking cut down to size.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is Dreamjb Another Fake iOS 6.0.1 Untethered Jailbreak? - ausman http://www.shoutpedia.com/dreamjb-ios-6.0.1-untethered-jailbreak-release-december-22nd/ ====== Ndrey everybody are welcome to discuss the future Dream JB release and give your personall thought at <http://dreamjb.net/> fan page	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Will people use blockchain without knowing what it is at some point? - JulienDevoir I mean if I take Internet as an example, no one cares about IPv6 protocol. Do you think it will be the same with blockchain? And what is the best way to go there? ====== duiker101 Maybe, but currently, people that use "the blockchain" are very vocal in wanting to let you know they are using it. Personally, I doubt it. I think I have actually seen very few applications of it that actually made sense and weren't some sort of gimmick.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
13 Xcode Tips That Will Help You Conquer Xcode - mcgraw http://www.xmcgraw.com/13-xcode-tips-that-will-help-you-conquer-xcode/ ====== chrisdroukas On the topic of useful keyboard shortcuts, I like auto indentation of selected lines with control (not command) + i. ~~~ mcgraw I'm really digging this. Thanks for sharing!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ubuntu should zig to Apple’s zag - ahmicro http://bytebaker.com/2011/10/19/ubuntu-should-zig-to-apples-zag/ ====== div I don't really understand what the author is trying to say. Granted, it's been a while since I used Ubuntu, but as a developer I mainly live in my editor and terminal. Anything I ever wanted is just an apt-get away and is mostly installed in a sensible way. Ubuntu simplifying desktop features and changing defaults to be easier for users like my mom sounds like a great thing to happen to Linux. That stuff is mostly orthogonal to developers who, you know, know how to deviate from the standard configuration and tools. ~~~ gue5t Ubuntu fails to showcase many of the best aspects of Linux as a system. Linux (and other open-source OSes, obviously) is an environment in which users are able to exercise more freedom in their usage of their computers than virtually anywhere else. Instead of an environment in which "users" are at the mercy of "developers", the instruction manual is included. Anyone can change their computer's behavior to the extent of their choosing--and there's nobody to tell them not to. Ubuntu takes this and ignores it completely, trying instead to copy user interface features from other projects and environments to win users that like the idea of cheap software. Not everyone is a kernel hacker, obviously... but Ubuntu should be proud that on Linux every user /can/ become one if they so desire. To emphasize the same read-only one-size-fits-all thinking that Apple has popularized is to disregard entirely the philosophy of the foundation on which Ubuntu exists. The argument that Ubuntu is a pragmatic, get-things-done distribution is founded in fact; it certainly is. But that doesn't mean it has to make it worse for software development and make it difficult to actually alter your system in meaningful ways. I ran Ubuntu for over a year and every attempt to dig into the system's internals (init scripts, configuration tools, what apt actually /did/, etc.) resulted in frustration because of the great complexity and the lack of any help that the OS itself provided. Comparing distros like Arch Linux that guide their users into the system in order to make the changes they want, Ubuntu is about as read-only as I've ever seen in an open-source Linux-based system. Even so, Arch isn't a distro for beginners by any stretch of imagination. And there I think Ubuntu has the ability to come out far ahead, if they embrace the fact that they are producing a system designed to be improved by the "end- users". A Linux distribution is not a product like a commercial software package. It's an environment that should foster both productivity and learning. To suggest that users should use a static system or merely accept their updates in 6-month-increments is like suggesting that a carpenter should never consider the manufacture of his tools. Sure, there may be a table to craft today, but improving at the craft of doing so is an important goal--and Ubuntu should help its users improve in their usage of their systems by helping them take small, friendly steps into improving the software they use in real ways. Stop treating users like children and engage them as equals. Apple can't do that because they have to keep their users dependent. Ubuntu is missing out on its greatest source of potential. ~~~ gnaritas > Linux (and other open-source OSes, obviously) is an environment in which > users are able to exercise more freedom in their usage of their computers > than virtually anywhere else. While this is true, it's simply not a feature the average user wants at all. They just want it to be simple, and work. > To suggest that users should use a static system or merely accept their > updates in 6-month-increments is like suggesting that a carpenter should > never consider the manufacture of his tools. Most users aren't carpenters, they have no interest in crafting their own tools, they just want a decent looking coffee table that doesn't require them to hand build it. > Stop treating users like children and engage them as equals. They aren't equals, have you met most users? You're arguing from a programmers perspective, not a typical computer users. ~~~ redthrowaway Who are "most users" here? I've only seen one or two linux distros in the wild that weren't being used by devs or other power users. ~~~ oblique63 That may be true, but isn't that what Ubuntu is trying to change? Sure, as a dev/power user I might be annoyed with some of the changes they make here and there, but as a linux supporter, I'd be much more annoyed if they weren't actively trying to expand to a broader audience. Regardless of how they're going about it, I'm just glad they're actually doing _something_ in that area. ------ Zak Ubuntu used to be Debian that just worked. Now it's trying to be something more, but it seems to have lost the "just works" part. When I tried 11.10, I had problems with several of the desktop environments crashing or being very visibly broken. I had poor graphics performance. I had no suspend/resume. All of these things worked on the same computer a year ago. I think Ubuntu may be trying to move too fast. Moving fast is great if you can pull it off, but it's not worth breaking the basic functions of the OS to get a more flashy UI. If Ubuntu does want to copy Apple, there's one major thing they need to learn: Apple releases features when they're _done_. ~~~ cookiecaper The problem is that Ubuntu is not focusing on the fundamentals and they're not putting enough money into testing. I know well and good that Ubuntu was conceived because Shuttleworth felt that Linux was ready for the big time and that Red Hat etc had too much penchant to devote resources into low-level bickering that ultimately had relatively little effect on your average end user instead of focusing on improving user experience, but now that Ubuntu has moved the user experience so far forward, they should reconsider that mission. The places where Linux is most lacking is low-level compatibility for things like fast 3D acceleration and power management. Canonical should use some of its funds (aka "Mark Shuttleworth's money") to buy the 100 best selling laptop models each year, set rigorous testing standards, spend six months developing a new release and then take however long is necessary to make sure that everything passes on the last three years' best selling laptops. In this process, they should not be shy about contribution to X, kernel, etc., and should distribute patched versions of these if necessary to get compatibility. That, combined with Ubuntu's user experience work, is what will _really_ make Linux a completely viable desktop computing platform. Far too often things break between releases and/or upgrades. ~~~ Zak _The problem is that Ubuntu is not focusing on the fundamentals and they're not putting enough money into testing._ I think you made my point more succinctly than I did. I think the UX was just fine in last year's Ubuntu. You could argue about whether Gnome 2.x was as slick as Windows 7 or OS X (I think it was at least better than Windows), but I don't think there's much doubt the system was usable by non-geeks. The first thing to break for me was suspend/resume, with one of 10.10's kernel updates. I reverted to an older kernel and hoped 11.04 would fix the problem. It didn't, and it precluded running the older, working kernel. Performance also got worse, and I can't think of any noteworthy improvements as I didn't consider Unity ready for prime time. So then 11.10 came out. Reviews said Unity was great now and everything ran smoothly, so I pulled the trigger on the upgrade. Unity did, in fact mostly work, though it was slow and glitchy. Oh well, back to Gnome Classic. Of course, it's Gnome 3 now and I can't even move the clock. That won't do, but I've heard the new Gnome 3 gnome-shell is awesome, and I have a video card that can handle it. It loads, slowly, but UI components sometimes vanish when I try to interact with them. Eventually, X crashes. Oh well, that gives me an opportunity to see what progress KDE 4 has made. I can report that the error messages for Plasma crashing look like they've had some attention from a designer since the last time I saw them. Good work. I'm running Linux Mint Debian Edition with Xfce now. Still no suspend/resume, but everything _else_ works. The Linux desktop experience is almost back to where it was two years ago. Yay leadership! ~~~ hetman So the good news is you _can_ move the clock in Gnome 3 Classic. All you have to do is hold Alt to right click on the widget and move. I mean... that's completely obvious right? This has to be one of the worst UI decisions I've ever encountered... ~~~ pyre > that's completely obvious right? That's (sort of) how you move the items on the right hand side of Apple's menubar in OSX. Hold Alt/Option and drag with the left mouse button. ------ sofuture I think Ubuntu should zag where Apple zags. I think they're doing it right. They're in a unique position to take an Apple-like path. I, for one, applaud what they're doing, as much as it terrifies all the half- power-users (I don't mean that as a slight, I do think it's a little silly to get upset about Ubuntu's default WM and claim to 'understand UNIX'). ~~~ Kell If by "I don't mean that as a slight, I do think it's a little silly to get upset about Ubuntu's default WM and claim to 'understand UNIX'" you mean it's possible for a hacker to change back from Unity to another interface. I must concur... but dissent on the fact that doing so is easy for a regular geek. It's not. It may be easy to the people that do ""understand Unix"". But for myself, I found that it was easier saying it than doing it. Not impossible... true. However since I'm not a great "hacker" but a mere guy with some understanding of the terminal, it proved to be a real mess. ~~~ morsch Huh? You don't need the terminal. You can chose the environment in the login screen, there's a drop down menu besides your name. Not exactly intuitive, but very easy to find out using Google or a forum. If you want Gnome 3, you can install it from the repositories (again, no terminal required, at least not in 11.10), and it'll be there in the drop down menu. Zero understanding of nix required here. ~~~ Kell Yes I was speaking of Gnome3. And No. It's not only "Install it from the repositories". Maybe it worked easily for you.. but for me t'was horrible. And yeah, I ended up having to mess around in the terminal and lynx to solve the problem (I had no other computer and was not going to always reboot to windows to Google something while tidying everything up). But yeah you can always say that's because I'm a noob, and was unable to do it right... but that's exactly the problem. A "newbie" should not have that kind of problem. ~~~ morsch Sorry then. I guess it's only foolproof when it actually works#. My own upgrade experience wasn't for the faint of heart. I hope it was a learning experience, at least; it usually is for me. ;) Beginners shouldn't have this kind of problem; but put another way, beginners shouldn't mess with this stuff unless they're willing to have this kind of problem (I'm sure most of us have been there, willingly). # I'm not sure Ubuntu is particularly bad in this regard. It seems to be universal among all the operating systems (and everything else, for that matter). But I guess Linux is more likely to drop you to a shell, which might be scary for beginners. ------ methodin I really don't agree with this sentiment at all. There are infinite Linux distros out there to play with that are more inline with power users. Ubuntu is for a completely different crowd so what would be the point of just merging into that nexus? The world doesn't need another power-user Linux distro. It needs a Linux distro that isn't painful to use for the regular people. ~~~ Peaker My dad is not a power user -- and he had liked Ubuntu, until the Unity interface. ~~~ ricardobeat Because people don't like change. I bet he'd hate going from Windows 3.1 to 95 too. ~~~ Peaker That might be the case, but given that Unity is inferior to the previous desktop in so many ways, it might also be that. ------ notatoad building a UI for developers is impossible, because every developer wants something totally different. it's also pointless because every developer _will_ customize their environment to make it work for them. you can't please all the people all the time. at some point you have to make a decision that some use cases can't be supported, for the sake of progress. in those cases, i think dropping support for the people who need support the least is the only logical way to go. personally, i use ubuntu (and unity too!) every day as my primary development machine (python programming and database admin), and when i come home i have it on my primary play machine too. it does what it needs to do if you are willing to adjust your workflow a little bit. and if you aren't willing to adjust your workflow at all, ever, then maybe preconfigured DEs are not for you. ~~~ Peaker I am willing to adjust my workflow, I am not willing to use alpha-quality software. ------ lsc eh, personally, I also hate unity. I am a linux SysAdmin, so if I want to go muck around in the internals or install and configure my own window manager, sure, I can. But that's not why I use ubuntu on the desktop. I use ubuntu on the desktop because it just works. If I want to tinker with Linux, I can do it on a server and get paid for it. With older versions of ubuntu? heck, getting drivers is usually easier than with windows. Most things? plug and go, no downloading a driver from a third party website or anything. You plug it in and it just works. (Some things require more work. Those things get taken back to Fry's. Again, desktops are low-value. I'm not going to spend too much time messing with them.) The problem is that unity is, well, it's garbage. If I wanted a mac, I'd buy a mac. I liked the old gnome defaults; they were pretty good. Right now? I'm on ubuntu 11.10, and I'm considering another distro. Unity is simply unusable; It's annoying for all the reasons that the mac interface is annoying, only the whole thing is done, well, worse. Just finding a program is a huge pain in the ass. So I'm running gnome-legacy, which is okay, but still pretty annoying compared to older ubuntu versions. So yeah; I'm pretty irritated. Not irritated enough to buy a mac, mind you, but likely irritated enough to spend some time looking at other distros, if I'm going to have to spend effort on my X setup, I'm going with a distro that is supported for more than three years. ~~~ skystorm I was in the same boat and ended up switching to Xubuntu -- and I don't regret it for one second. I get all the good stuff ("just works") with a sleek, customizable UI, that also happens to be very frugal wrt. system resources. It's a win-win really. :) ~~~ gmt2027 After the last upgrade, I've been forced to abandon Unity and Gnome3 for Xmonad. I'm seriously considering another distro like ArchLinux. Xubuntu may just be the solution - for now anyway. ------ LVB _...and let’s be honest, there’s an iPad market, not a tablet market._ Please, phrase, go away. You're not profound anymore. ------ vacri If people want a different linux experience to Ubuntu's offering, they're in luck, there are hundreds: <http://distrowatch.com/> Ubuntu has specifically stated that they're aiming for the layperson, not the power user. If you cut your teeth on ubuntu and want more power in your linux box... try out another distro. ~~~ jiggy2011 The problem is: Even power users usually want consistency and ease of use. The main advantage of Ubuntu is that it is the best supported Linux distro out there when it comes to software. For allot of desktop centric software , supporting Linux basically means supporting Ubuntu and possibly fedora. Nobody wants to mess with source tarballs just to install the latest video player. I'm a developer but I still want the option to be a "dumb user" allot of the time when I'm doing tasks like using the web / playing music etc. ~~~ wes-exp This. At least with Ubuntu, there is a large enough user base that there is software available for it that is tested and actually works (conveniently available as a binary .deb). Also, bugs tend to be identified and fixed, again due to the size of the community. If you run into a problem, often times there is already a forum post somewhere with a solution. If developers are to use an obscure "power user" distribution, it throws out all the benefits of community. Perhaps what's needed is a "Devbuntu" that relies on most of the same components as Ubuntu, but targets power users. ~~~ vacri Obscure distributions? Source tarballs? What are you two on about? Debian, Ubuntu's daddy, is the creator of the apt system. You'd be insane to say it's not a distribution for power users. Then there's other major distros with large user bases. Don't blame Ubuntu if you've never looked beyond its borders. _Perhaps what's needed is a "Devbuntu" that relies on most of the same components as Ubuntu, but targets power users._ Just use Debian. ~~~ jiggy2011 I've used debian for years. I hate that it makes you choose between stable/testing/unstable. Whenever I install I always start with stable , because who wouldn't want "stable" right? The I realise all the software is hopelessly out of date so I slowly end up creeping forward to testing or unstable, that's when problems begin. At least Ubuntu fixed this somewhat with 6 month releases and LTS. ------ phzbOx For me, Ubuntu has always been the "Linux for newbies" a little bit like Mandrake was in the time. I'm not saying that all Ubuntu users _are_ newbies.. but Ubuntu is the distro to starts with if you're a beginner. Lots of my university friend who had no knowledge of Linux would get up and running with Ubunty in minutes. (A live cd, tool to help create partitions, [next], [next], automatically configure network). I mean, a Windows user would almost feel at home on Ubuntu. Soooo, I find it weird that the author complains about Ubuntu saying it's not the right direction. We all know there are dozen of distributions and dozen of window managers. By all means, if you don't like the new updates, just take a WM more lightweight (For instance, fluxbox, awesome, stumpwm, xmonad, etc.) As for the distro, I'm using ArchLinux for a couple of years and I'm loving it. It's not that I _don't like_ beautiful intuitive UI; it's just that it's not for me (At least on my computers). However, I've got an iPhone and I love the fact that _everything just work_. But please, don't force me to use GUI everywhere on my desktop; let that for people who enjoys the _everything just work_. But then, maybe I'm wrong. I assumed that Ubuntu always was axed for beginners.. Was I wrong with that assumption? ------ Cieplak This is somehow reminiscent of Sun Tzu's _Art of War_. My interpretation of the article: it would be more prudent to compete with Apple's weaknesses (developer friendliness) than to compete with their strengths (UI, zero configuration). ~~~ gbog Apple's main weakness is Microsoft. ------ ceol I think the author misses various ways that OS X has been developer friendly. Last I checked, Xcode is free, and OS X ships with Python, PHP, Ruby, and Apache. Plus, as div said, developers live mostly in the terminal, so there isn't much that Canonical can do to cater to us. I'd rather have everything hidden from the end user but easily available to the power user via the command line. ------ rhizome31 > Apple [...] things that just work for most people irrespective of prior > computer usage. I've spent way to many hours helping fellow developers, friends and relatives to debug their Apple. Apple does _not_ make things that just work irrespective of prior computer usage. People get totally lost with Apple just as they do with other environments and that is indeed irrespective of prior computer knowledge, which means so-called developers also get lost (MySQL-python anyone? Or maybe you'd rather have another slice of RMagick?) ------ TiberiusJones The amount of "Power users shouldn't use Ubuntu" comments on here are fairly indicative of why those outside the power user/dev community view us the way they do. It's just elitist whining at the end of the day. Who the hell are "we" to decide what people should and shouldn't use based on their ability? It's just this sort of thing that turns the lay person away from wanting to know more. Fact of the matter is, if you don't like Unity don't bloody use it. I've never found a single thing I couldn't do in Ubuntu that would force me over to another distro. I mean sure, we could all build our own Gentoo installs from the ground up but who the hell has that sort of time on their hands? To indicate that Ubuntu is inherently a newbie only system because of eye candy smacks of both arrogance and a complete lack of understanding. It's like calling a mansion a shack because you don't like the colour of the window frames. ------ hippich Unix power user, huh?.. If you are unix power user - you should not care much about default desktop. You should customize it right away from the moment you installed _any_ distro to fit your needs. Ubuntu do a great job of turning more people into _nix environment. And it is good for you and for_ nix developers. ~~~ va_coder Ctl-Shift-T is the start of my session, regardless of UI ~~~ vacri F12 can work the same way - check out guake. I both like and dislike it, but it works for friends of mine. ------ comex > Ubuntu can easily ship with a default arsenal of programming tools. Last I > checked the default install already includes Python. As does OS X's, in addition to Perl, Ruby, PHP... ------ achiang “[Our] goal is 200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years. We’re not playing a game for developers hearts and minds – we’re playing a game for the worlds hearts and minds. and to achieve that we’re going to have to play by a new set of rules.” [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/05/mark-shuttleworth- deliver...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/05/mark-shuttleworth-delivers-uds- keynote-address-sets-goal-for-200-million-ubuntu-users-in-4-years/) Also, re: screensavers -- upstream GNOME removed that ability, and Ubuntu inherited the behavior. From what I understand, we're putting it back. [canonical employee, speaking on my own behalf] ------ trimbo _A generation of hackers may have started with BASIC on Apple IIs, but getting a C compiler on a modern Mac is a 4GB XCode download_ The size of Xcode annoys me too, since I never use it. So I've been using this GCC install on my Mac: <https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer> Couple hundred megabytes. It's still a lot larger than Orca/C was on my Apple IIgs (1 or 2 3.5" floppies?), but then again, compilers come with a lot of libraries these days. ~~~ scott_s Does it bother you for rational or irrational reasons? It bothers me for irrational reasons - it _feels_ like it's too much, but really, I'm using about 65 GB of a 500 GB disk. So I tell myself to ignore that feeling and just install Xcode because it's the most efficient means of getting developer tools on my Mac. ~~~ trimbo Rational. I only have a 120GB SSD. At the moment I'm not even able to keep any music on it, it's so filled up with work stuff. ------ ricardobeat I think he has no idea what he's talking about. Being user-friendly doesn't mean abandoning developers or locking up the platform. He's just another "power user" upset because his old tricks are no longer useful. ~~~ phamilton The old tricks don't need to go away. Tricks should work across all distributions. Especially across Debian based distributions. ------ jsz0 What percentage of users are developers? 5 percent? Lower? It's unwise to cater the entire OS to the needs of such a small minority especially when they are the best suited to change the environment to meet their needs. Complaining about needing to download Xcode is a perfect example of why it is wrong. If it's bundled into the OS you're wasting 4GB of space on tens of millions of machines to save the 5% a 4GB download. That makes no sense. The big problem with Ubutunu is still that it is, no matter how much nicer they make it look, a collection of inconsistently designed user interfaces for mediocre clones of better applications on other platforms. It has no soul. It just stumbles forward feebly copying whatever else happens to be popular on other platforms. It's always going to be playing catch-up to ever moving goal posts. Unless you have some religious zeal to use OSS software there is no good reason to even consider Ubuntu over Windows or OSX. ~~~ nsomaru I think the point was that it should not be a 4GB download to get a C-compiler. Your point makes sense if you accept a 4GB download just for a compiler. There are many Linux distro's that come with a C-compiler which are less than 4GB in total size. ~~~ analyk I think your view of the 4GB download is going to depend on your Internet speed. At 1 MB/s or so, I've found it annoying to wait an hour for a download, but it's hardly the end of the world for an occasional thing. Could definitely be improved. ------ freshhawk I agree wholeheartedly with his take on this halfassed push towards poorly designed minimalism masquerading as user friendliness but I disagree that ubuntu should be some kind of developers distribution, that's never what Ubuntu was supposed to be. It's entire purpose is to be a novice distribution. Power users should not be using it, it's not built for them. ------ tuananh They go for the 99%. _majority_ aren't _power user_ so if they make it simple, more people would jump on the boat ~~~ jiggy2011 Making the Linux desktop simpler requires much more than changing the UI. More reliable drivers for common hardware and availability of good, simple software for tasks like video/photo/music editing are way more important. ------ RK I think part of Shuttleworth's philosophy is that he wants Ubuntu to be(come) an OS that the rest of the world can use, not just the traditional Linux power users, but even the emerging computer markets that may not be able to afford the latest and greatest hardware with a proprietary OS. ~~~ jiggy2011 Emerging markets pherhaps, although I think that most of these just use pirated Windows already. The problem is that it isn't "an OS the rest of the world can use" for issues not related to the UI. Simply saying "It's like Mac/Windows but uglier with less software and more issues" isn't a compelling sales pitch to anybody. ------ cageface _A generation of hackers may have started with BASIC on Apple IIs, but getting a C compiler on a modern Mac is a 4GB XCode download._ A hefty download, perhaps, but free and once it's installed you have a good, modern, IDE with extensive documentation and perhaps the richest and most mature UI toolkit there is to play with. Getting something into the app store for sale may require crossing more speed bumps than necessary but if you want to learn systems or UI hacking it's far easier on a Mac now than it was on an Apple II. Ubuntu may have taken this simplification strategy too far but catering primarily to the power user and developer is what earned Linux its minuscule market share in the first place. ------ 2muchcoffeeman Surely the author should just pick a different distro? Why is this Canonical's problem? Isn't this sorta the whole point of Linux? If you don't like something there is seemingly infinite choice so you can always have what you want. ------ magnethy I haven't used Linux as a primary desktop OS for almost 7 years, so I figured I'd give it a go - so I got a ThinkPad W520 running Ubuntu 11.10 for work (software development.) Verdict so far? Next time I'm going for a Mac again. Why? X doesn't automatically set up my nvidia graphics card. Sure, I can manually install the driver and set up Xorg.conf, but I just don't want to do that. Luckily there's also an integrated Intel graphics card.¨ * VGA port does not work (no presentations using the projector for me) because of previous point. * The wireless keeps freezing. At least 10 times a day I have to (using the physical switch on the side of the laptop) turn off the wireless card and turn it on again. Wow. This also is something I'm sure can be fixed by jumbling around with drivers, but again - I just don't want to do that. * Gnome is horrible. I might be spoiled (lets face it: I AM spoiled) by Apple and their 'everything just works' - which it pretty much does as far as UI goes. Currently I'm running Xfce, which I found to be pleasantly simple. I found Gnome to be buggy and annyoing. Just like in the old days. Of course there are a lot of positives, like apt being great (my main reason for the switch), and all the available GNU/Linux tools. As others have pointed out, if you use the terminal a lot it's great - but that goes for pretty much any distro. As far as Ubuntu goes I totally agree with OP. It just doesn't cut it. It's supposed to bring Linux to the people, isn't it? Well, it's not doing a good job of that. I installed Ubuntu to have a system that just works. It doesn't. If Apple were to bring in a customizable packaging system like apt it'd be a dangerously perfect match. Don't see that happening though. ~~~ Xixi MacPorts is a pretty good packaging system, though as its name imply more like ports than aptitude. Since it's hosted on Mac OS Forge, you could say it's the "official" Apple packaging system. As far as I am concerned it fits the bill, I rarely encounter anything broken (except during the Leopard / Snow Leopard transition that was quite a nightmare). That said having to compile everything sometimes is annoying... ------ daedalus_j While I'm 100% behind this, no questions asked, couldn't have said it better myself, Canonical has one huge disadvantage going for them if they were to try and create the best damn development platform out there: Hardware. I do agree though, and I do hope Canonical takes this advice and succeeds at it. They're possibly one of the only groups both big enough and organized enough to pull it off and do it well. ------ barumrho Do a lot of developers use Ubuntu nowadays? When Ubuntu first came along, I was a Linux user, and I tried Ubuntu on a few different occasions, but I never liked it mostly for the same reasons why people seem to be complaining. It just felt like eye candies tacked onto Debian. There are many other good distributions that are geared toward power users. Why are so many complaining? ~~~ vidarh Well, as a developer I got over wanting to tune everything about 10 years ago. I want things to mostly just work, and Ubuntu does that for the most part. I've yet to run into any situation where using Ubuntu has constrained me in any way vs. using another Linux distribution (and I've used a bunch of different ones over the years). ~~~ dfc What does not mostly work from a vanilla debioan install? ~~~ vidarh The main reason I use Ubuntu over vanilla Debian for my desktop is lack of polish. It's not that I can't use it, but Ubuntu adds more polish, and what it takes away is stuff I don't notice because I don't tweak my desktop or laptop much anymore. For the most part my "tweaks" consists of a git repo of my dot-files, and I rarely run more than a couple of full screen browser windows and a bunch of full screened terminal windows. ------ aufreak3 Designing for non-power versus power users is a false dichotomy. If it were a true one, developers won't be swarming to macbook pros. ------ cmars232 I've simply come to accept that Unity is not for 'us', in the way that ipad is not for 'us'. I install xubuntu instead. ------ jroseattle Maybe Canonical is trying to sell software and services, and needs a better UI in order to compete? While I echo the sentiments of the author, I'm guessing that Canonical is knowingly pursuing a certain market. A certain market that exceeds the Linux power-user/developer market in size. ------ jebblue I've been complaining about Unity since 11.04. The only worthwhile improvement in 11.10 is that Dasher is no longer ugly solid black. Well, the menu in the upper right has some sensible options now. They took away screensavers, like it's up to Canonical to make the world green? I never used them on my systems on a full time basis but it was nice to take a break sometimes and play with them. I can't change fonts now, even my wife who is a non-technical user said, "the new fonts are terrible why can't I change them?". I'm going to try out KDE for a while, it's heavy or it used to be, Gnome 2 was just right. I've tried XFCE and it feels like an older Gnome (which isn't a bad thing), down the road it might be the better option until they get a wild hair and go nutts too. ------ drdaeman I believe, the problem is, various implementations of the same subsystems do not cooperate well (if they even cooperate at all). For example, NetworkManager does not cooperate with /etc/network/* or /etc/ppp/* or wpa_supplicant — it either steps away and does nothing or uses its own configuration (stored in completely separate manner). Sure, some approaches work (say, NM calls pppd, thus /etc/ppp/options have some effect), while some don't (good luck teaching NM to run PPPoE over 802.11 bridge). This leads to a problem that one just can't have easily co-existing multiple approaches to work and configuration (i.e. "Ubuntu newbie" vs "seasoned GNU/Linux guru" ways). You have either one or another, and switching between is a pain. ------ ashishgandhi > Given the growing lockdown of Apple’s systems I see that kind of stuff said from time to time. But I don't quite understand. How is it growing? And people talk about it (App Store) as if it's terribly evil of Apple but it's okay when it gets done on say a Xbox. ~~~ Groxx I came to say that too. If anything, it keeps _decreasing_ \- the first app- capable iOS devices had no app store, and the barrier to entry for programming on either system keeps dropping (the SDKs and even the IDEs are free, for instance). The only claim I can see is the emergence of the OSX App Store - big shocker there, given the success on iOS - but that hasn't resulted in a lockdown of regular installs, and I doubt it will. As to the XCode-is-required claim, that's been false for a very long time - their GCC is open source, and has been for years. It has only recently become _easy_ though, I'll grant that. ~~~ ootachi Many reasons: Apple clearly sees iOS and its locked-down environment as the future and Mac OS X as the past. Given that, we can conclude that the overall openness of Apple's offerings will decrease as they focus their efforts on iOS. Xcode is for-pay now, while it was free earlier. Apple keeps breaking SIMBL. Debuggers now need to be signed by Apple or self-signed; either way, it's a pain. QuickTime X is no longer extensible via plugins. ~~~ sbuk >> _Xcode is for-pay now, while it was free earlier._ It's back to being free if you have installed Lion. >> _Apple keeps breaking SIMBL._ SIMBL is a non-standard 3rd party framework. It would be more correct to say that SIMBL isn't keeping up with OS X development. ------ jhuni I would go about making Ubuntu into a development environment through the web. There are various points in the browsing experience when a visual HTML editor could be useful, then in the visual HTML editor, touching an element could drop you down into JavaScript to add events. In the same manner, more complex constructs could be progressively introduced to the user. Furthermore, I personally use versions of Android on my tablets and Ubuntu on my desktops. I see no reason that Ubuntu should "make a dent in the tablet market" when Android is already doing fine for us. ------ devmach I think, the problems with the Ubuntu are : 1- They think users are plan stupid so they have to decide what's good for users. 2- They're just copying from Apple, don't think about why apple did like that. This will end up with a mess. When i use my friend's mac, i think "this thing can't be better" and then when i use ubuntu with unity all i can think is "What the f __k they were thinking ?" ~~~ vacri In response to 2), I use a friends mac and think "wtf were they thinking" quite often. Default browser can't fullscreen/kiosk mode? Resize from only one corner, not any border? Heavy reliance on keystrokes with low discoverability? Apple makes a nice bit of kit, but please, can we stop with pretending they've got it perfect? ~~~ eropple _Default browser can't fullscreen/kiosk mode? Resize from only one corner, not any border?_ Neither is true in 10.7. _Heavy reliance on keystrokes with low discoverability?_ For the most part, keystrokes follow similar patterns from application to application. There are inconsistencies (some applications use ctrl-tab to switch tabs, some use ctrl-pgup/pgdn) but for the most part it's self- consistent. (There are some nice power user tweaks, such as a subset of Emacs keystrokes available for navigation in text boxes, but they're not critical.) ~~~ vacri I haven't used 10.7, but still, that those things were ommitted for so long is straight-out bizarre. ~~~ sbuk It depends where you are coming from I suppose. Kiosk mode until recently didn't really fit in with the Mac (going way back to System 1.0 days) work flow, but when Apple integrated multiple desktop into OS X, it shifted the workflow enough to allow for kiosked windows to inhabit their own 'space'. It's worth checking out as it's quite an elegant solution. I, and I think the vast majority of Mac users would agree on the resizing point and thankfully it has been addressed, but it's worth remembering that the original idea behind one location to resize windows was overall simplicity. Whether or not simplicity was achieved however is an entirely different thing, and I imagine that we'd agree that it wasn't! WRT to short cut keys, they have always be displayed in the menu. Since the menu bar is the primary way that many functions are initially accessed, the idea is that eventually the users will learn them through exposure, which in fact is exactly the same way that most desktop UI educate users. The Wiki entry on the command key make for "intersting" (well, to us geeks mainly!) reading. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key#The_origin_of_.22.E...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key#The_origin_of_.22.E2.8C.98.22) ------ dfc I never thought of Ubuntu as a power user distro. I always thought Debian was for power users and Ubuntu was the gateway drug... ------ EGreg Why encourage users to be developers at the EXPENSE of things that "just work"? When I think of a Linux I should install just to get things done, I think of Ubuntu. The more it positions itself that way, the more it will get users. The GPL and free software culture should take care of the rest. It is the responsibility of developers to build an ecosystem for themselves, because they know how to do it. Don't you guys see this is why Linux's marketshare has been so small for now? If you don't like Ubuntu, by the way, there are always other Linux distros. You're welcome to install Slackware. On my server, I run CentOS. Why can't there be ONE linux distro that regular people can use without reading a manual? ------ dfc If you swap gnome for ubuntu and gnome3 for Unity you have a brand new story. Part of me sort of blames Ubuntu or Ubuntu's influence for the terrible direction of Gnome in general. ~~~ hetman Could you expand on that? I was always under the impression their paths just happened to coincide given Canonical didn't have enough sway to make them adopt their own vision. ~~~ dfc No its just a hunch/intuition and me being bitter. ------ joejohnson I agree completely. I've had many of these same thoughts myself when using Ubuntu. ------ jiggy2011 Unity is all about re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The relative failure of Linux as a traditional desktop platform has very little to do with the UI. Sure Gnome 2 looks clunky and outdated now but it's basically a Win2000/XP Clone as far as UI is concerned (startmenu + taskbar + quicklaunch). So it will have been familiar enough to most users who come from a windows background (who are going to be the ones most wanting to try it). The UI is the not _big_ issue here... The problems with the Linux desktop for "normal users" (whoever they are) are and always have been: Lack of ports of popular commercial software for many tasks and in many (not all) cases a lack of a "good enough" open source alternative. Lack of reliable support for many consumer hardware configurations that are bundled with cheap desktops (nvidia/ATI support still isn't 100% for example), also on some netbooks you install ubuntu and the Fn + F(Key) combinations don't work unless you know to install a specific package. Also support for niche hardware for some tasks is hit/miss. Weird intermittent issues that some people experience with power saving , wireless , flash etc.. No amount of changing the dock/menubar will fix _any_ of these issues. Let's face it , default unity is _ugly_.. it makes windows 7 look gorgeous by comparison but this has pretty much always been the way with Gnome/KDE. For many users (like me) the customisation aspect has been more than enough to make up for this however, unity pretty much kills that. The only reasons I can think to advise anybody to run a linux desktop are: You really care about OSS ideals and will not use any non-free software (in which case you want debian not ubuntu). You are super paranoid and want something secure to install in a VM for using online banking etc. You want a second OS so that you can diagnose more easily whether something is a hardware/software problem. You develop software that will run on a Linux server so want a desktop environment that is as close to production as possible (this is me and probably most serious workplace Linux users) Your a geek and like playing with different OSes If somebody genuinely only wants to run facebook/youtube etc then pretty much any OS out there will suit their needs, in which case they will want to move over to something closer to iOS / Android rather than some half baked unity. Even Microsoft have acknologed that you can't really easily build a UI that will work for the casual tablet / netbook user and the "content creator"/business user hence the seperation of metro and the standard Windows UI. I have almost 0 faith in canonical succeeding here. Building a super simple UI on top of Linux should be left to the likes of Google/HTC, with commercial OSes being increasingly locked down a space is opening for a serious "power user" system with high customisability, this is where Ubuntu could win big. Of course people will say to me "oh your not the target market , use another distro" Well there are a few problems with this argument: The reason I use Ubuntu is because it is the closest thing the Linux desktop has to a defacto standard setup. Anybody who cares about distributing Linux applications will make sure they work with ubuntu and usually provide a tested .deb or an apt repo. If I switch distro there is a fair chance I lose this and end up back with source tarballs and weird install scripts. I spent a large part of the last 10 years trying different distros and this has consistently been the worst part of the experience. Just because I am a power user does not mean I don't want my applications to "just work" and be installable through a standard simple interface, Ubuntu does this very very well (for the most part). I think the whole idea of having different distros for novices and advanced users pretty idiotic really, a good distro should install with sensible defaults that "just work" and allow anybody who wants to customise to a greater or lesser degree. Many developers and other advanced users seem to have no problem customising the "beginner friendly" mac OS for their needs. I could go on , but I think I'll leave it there :) ------ jfricker Conservatives expressing concerns are almost always a turn off. ------ DannoHung Respectfully, eat a dick. Just... no. If you know what you're doing with Linux, Ubuntu is the wrong distro for you to start with.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Kylie Jenner is set to become the youngest self-made billionaire ever - nniroclax https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesdigitalcovers/2018/07/11/how-20-year-old-kylie-jenner-built-a-900-million-fortune-in-less-than-3-years/#1f28a1ddaa62 ====== natorum_9 "Self-made" O Rly ~~~ spraak My thoughts exactly ~~~ borkt All she had going for her is famous parents, a sister with a tape, and being on TV since she was 9. ~~~ mark212 In her defense, there are a lot of people in the world with famous parents who don't do jack with it. Kudos to her for following through and building something. (Her lip plumper goop is outrageously popular, like shockingly so.) And until the Keeping Up with the Kardashians show started, her mom Kris wasn't at all famous and her dad was an aging former athlete. ~~~ newyearnewyou >Kudos to her for following through and building something. That's like patting yourself on the back for going to college if you're in a middle class family. Sure it's work, but it would be weird and lazy if you didn't do it. She basically tripled her wealth by selling alibaba products. Impressive is the person who 1000000x their wealth. ------ poster123 Good for Kylie Jenner. Bruce Jenner has six children with three successive wives: Chrystie Crownover, Linda Thompson, and Kris Jenner (Wikipedia). There is what you you are supposed to believe and say about the transgendered, and there is physical reality. ~~~ DanBC Are you suggesting that one person is representative of a large group of people?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Yeoman on FreeBSD 9 - sergeylukin http://sergeylukin.com/2012/yeoman-on-freebsd-9/ How I got Yeoman up and running on FreeBSD 9 ====== lmm The idea of doing "curl -L <URL> \| bash" fills me with horror. Is this really the best way to install software in 2012? ~~~ sergeylukin Well what would you offer instead?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Wrap on integer overflow is not a good idea - AndreyKarpov https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0589/ ====== shikoba It's just the faster method we know. It's not about safety, it's about speed.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Indonesian cave art may be world's oldest - daegloe http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/10/indonesian-cave-art-may-be-worlds-oldest ====== moioci They mention the oldest depiction of a rhinoceros --- in a cave in France. Mind = blown.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The TSA's FAST Personality Screening Program Violates the Fourth Amendment [pdf] - CapitalistCartr http://www.aulawreview.org/pdfs/64/64.2/Rogers.Off.To.Website.pdf ====== rayiner This is a note, written by a law student. Not a reason to discount the analysis, per se, but worth keeping in mind if you were thinking of skipping the article and taking the conclusion at face value. The actual analysis starts at 367. The gist of the argument, from a quick read, is that _Kyllo_ (the case that held that the government could not use infrared cameras to look into peoples' homes) established that the government could not use extrasensory searches to get information about what's inside areas protected by the 4th amendment. To the extent that biological vitals and medical information are protected (an uncontroversial point), it follows that using extrasensory technology to obtain that information violates _Kyllo_. ~~~ panarky The system has an eighty-one percent classification accuracy in a laboratory test setting That sounds pretty good -- "It catches 81% of the bad guys". It sounds good until you realize that bad guys are an infinitesimal portion of the population. If bad guys are 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 100,000, virtually all of the people implicated by the system will be innocent. ~~~ JadeNB Specifically, since the numbers are pretty unbelieveable if you haven't seen such arguments before: if the bad guys are as numerous as 1 in 1000, then the number of false positives will be 999*19% > 189 in 1000. That is, if you are identified as a bad guy, then the odds are worse than 1 in 190 (just over 0.5%) that you are one. ------ guelo FAST seems to be some kind of polygraph-type scanner using cameras. It's very likely that it doesn't work but some military contractor will make millions off of it anyway. Any efficacy data will probably be unavailable or classified. Efficacy doesn't matter to the authorities anyway because having people believe that their minds are being read is almost as good as actually reading their minds. ~~~ EazyC Are you sure things like this can't work? I work in a computational neuroscience lab and we do a lot of modelling and also machine learning. Things like Eulerian Video magnification (EVM) already prove you can do the rudimentary proof of concepts of such "FAST scans" like being able to extract heart rate and blood flow from a simple video. Techniques like EVM can even be used to detect sound from video files simply based off vibration of the objects captured in video. It seems it wouldn't be too outlandish to assume that EVM techniques + some other more classified technologies + unlimited funding of the NSA/Homeland Security/CIA/TSA could be combined to create something like the tech purported in the link. For the record, I don't work in the actual lab that developed EVM, just in a similar field. EVM info: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/) [http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/) ~~~ jimktrains2 OK, so lets assume the cameras work. For the same reasons polygraphs have no basis in science, nor would these. I fucking hate the TSA and am fucking furious every time I have to wait to be sexually molested. I'm also worried that they'll fuck up and I'll miss my flight. I'm nervous because I'm worried. I'm constantly looking around to find out how many TSA agents are just fucking around doing nothing. Yet, I'm not a terrorist. And you know what? most people aren't terrorists. The false positive rate so high it essentially makes the test meaningless and unable to discern an actual threat. ~~~ hurin The rather strong verbal comments aside - I think this is almost certainly correct. Polygraph tests are notoriously inaccurate - where as for something like terrorist threats the number of real positives you are interested is probably in the x > 1/10^6. That's totally fantastic - consider that pregnancy tests have a false positive rate in the single digits. ~~~ gknoy The language is strong, but pretty much encapsulates the impotent anger I feel even __thinking__ about interacting with the TSA. On the rare occasions when I must, my anxiety and fears match very closely to the GP's post's language. ~~~ tajen And this is why... I don't go to US. There has been two highly interesting conferences in NY and one in SF (for which another founder offered to give me his tickets for free). But I use a false name on Facebook, which is against my contract with an american company, which is an impersonation, and I don't want to risk it with a TSA agent. ~~~ hueving Your reasoning is nonsensical. The TSA has nothing to do with enforcing company contracts. ------ dang Url changed from [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/the_tsas_fast...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/the_tsas_fast_p.html), which points to this. ~~~ Crito Have you considered making this (providing the original link after changing it) a feature of HN itself? I like the transparency, but doing it manually every time seems like it could become a bit of a hassle for you. ~~~ robotkilla doing it automatically wouldn't prohibit transparency. ~~~ jimktrains2 He meant he likes the mod posting it because it's transparent, but knows that it's a pain for the mod and feels that having this automatically happen would aid in being transparent because then the mods don't have to do special things. ------ logn It seems to me that the law and precedent are used by courts much like the Bible is by preachers. You can justify almost anything you want. I read the whole paper (sans footnotes) and it makes a lot of sense. Had I not also read the legal memo on extra-judicial assassinations, I'd be a lot more confident that an average person could predict court decisions based on the current body of law and precedent. But I think any decision can be reached, at least in practical effect, considering the power to dismiss cases and exclude evidence. ~~~ mdholloway This is true, but only to a point. In principle, if the reasoning is flawed in some obvious way (say, writing a memo on executive power during wartime without citing Youngstown Steel, the leading case on the subject), other people with requisite training will sooner or later recognize that, and the error will be corrected. Of course, this requires public scrutiny to work. Hence the problems with secret legal memos and secret court opinions. ------ skj Let me begin by stating that I think the TSA, as implemented, is a huge waste of money and time. That said, I am not sure any searching done by the TSA can violate the 4th amendment - you can always refuse a search if you're ok with being ejected from the airport. ------ hijiri We are living in the cyberpunk future ------ jostmey Eerily similar to the concept in "psycho pass". ------ jwcacces Those footnotes are more like legnotes!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Obama Administration Has Missed Half Of Obamacare's Legally Imposed Deadlines - Suraj-Sun http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/08/18/unpublished-crs-memo-obama-administration-has-missed-half-of-obamacares-legally-imposed-implementation-deadlines/ ====== beat Congress has voted 40 times this year to overturn Obamacare. The article mentions that some deadlines were excluded because Congress refused to allocate funds for them. One might suspect that, if the law had gone into the world in an orderly fashion rather than having its very existence threatened until the 2012 presidential election concluded, more deadlines would be kept.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Colaboratory - goptimize https://research.google.com/colaboratory/ ====== Dowwie This has the potential to serve as a general-use collaborative Python environment	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Masquerade Acquired by Facebook - espinchi http://msqrd.me/joining-facebook.html ====== drum This strikes me as a response to Snapchat's recent success with fun video filters. If you look at the App Store rankings, they've clearly boosted Snapchat's ranking past Instagram and Facebook recently, as they're totally viral and people seem to be using them nonstop whenever I'm on. Congrats to the MSQRD team! ------ nthState How long has this app been live? It seems like I only saw it for the first time a week or two ago... ~~~ wildpeaks It launched back in December. I was lucky to see it as soon as it launched because I follow one of its main developers for years because he always made great extensions for Adobe Air and I definitely loved the app as soon as I tried it, so congratulations to the team :) (and with the new office they were streaming from the other day) ------ espinchi It's more of an acquihire than an acquisition, I guess. Hats off for building such an amazing app. ~~~ amackera Also acquiring their IP which is pretty big I think.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ambient weather display for your home - pstadler http://www.tempescope.com/ ====== bhhaskin This is pretty cool! I would love to see a better "consumer product". The one in the video doesn't appear to be sealed very well.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nokia’s Losses Fires Up Finland's Start-Up Culture - pbahra http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/08/04/nokias-losses-become-finlands-gains/ ====== latch I went through hundreds of resumes from Nortel employees (and a few interviews) while Nortel was bleeding employees. It was pretty brutal, their skill set was irrelevant and the entitlement high. I felt pretty bad for them. The experience leads me to believe that the sooner someone leaves a sinking ship, the better he or she is. Both because they are able to recognize the problem and because they have options available to them. Can't it be argued that Nokia's losses are due, at least in part, to bad engineering? ~~~ sliverstorm How do you figure? Have you ever owned a Nokia phone? The software maybe isn't a glittering example of perfection, but my E72 is the best phone hardware I've ever owned or seen. ~~~ untog Well, he could have included Software Engineering in that. That said, I don't think the _engineered_ part of Nokia's software was bad. In fact, from what I understand Symbian was/is fanastic. But the UI was absolutely awful. ------ nextparadigms I'm glad Finland doesn't think they should "save jobs" and bailout their big companies. Paradigm shifts and temporarily killing some jobs are the only way to progress. I'm sure Finland will come out better than it was. ~~~ getsat Finland has successfully brought their economy back from the brink. They definitely did not do it by bailing out failing businesses. I highly recommend reading "The Information Society and the Welfare State" which covers Finland's economic recovery and business/innovation culture. ~~~ dirtyaura Actually, we did bail out banks in 90s. However, drawing parallels to current situation is not necessarily relevant as Finland's economic crisis happened in quite unique conditions due to collapse of USSR. There was no Western European (in political sense) country which was as depended in exports to USSR. Situation in Japan in 90s seems much more relevant to situation that US and Europe are currently facing. A few hours ago I HN-posted a link to an interesting video where Mr. Koo explains how Balance Sheet Recession (Japan in 90s, US now) is different than traditional recession (he is in favor of fiscal stimulus) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2846561> ~~~ getsat Ah, interesting. I wasn't aware of a bank bailout. Thanks for the info/link. ------ dirtyaura I think raise of startup culture in Finland is quite independent of Nokia's current fall, but Nokia's earlier success has been an ingredient for the raise of the current movement. The godfathers of this movement started their companies in late 90s in either mobile or gaming sectors and are now acting as angels and mentors or serial entrepreneurs. It's clear that Nokia's success did help mobile startups a lot. Success of gaming companies was independent of Nokia and was due to Finnish demo scene, but also for mobile gaming companies, Nokia's presence was an obvious benefit. However, the raise of the new startup movement in Finland started earlier than Nokia's problems became obvious. I think it's part of the same global startup movement that e.g. Y-combinator has been creating. As it's mostly cultural phenomenon, role models and blogs like Arctic Startup has played very important role. I was part of Jaiku that was acquired by Google, and although it was just a talent acquisition, many people have said afterwards that it really inspired them to become more interested in startups.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Fastest way to get to MVP for something I'd like to try - sendos What's the fastest/easiest way to get to an MVP for a site where people post some text, and then others vote on that text, and can also add comments of their own. The submissions are ranked by the number of upvotes minus downvotes.<p>Sort of like Stackoveflow, but the original entry will not be a question, or sort of like HN, but the original entry will not be a piece of news.<p>I know PHP/HTML/Javascript/CSS fairly well and am quite familiar with Joomla.<p>Would the fastest route to an MVP for me be to install Joomla and find some extensions that do what I want to do?<p>Would it be faster to set this up in Wordpress?<p>Alternatively, are there any open-source Stackoverflow/HN look-alikes that I can download and modify for my needs? ====== mindcrime _Alternatively, are there any open-source Stackoverflow/HN look-alikes that I can download and modify for my needs?_ There are multiple open-source clones of StackOverflow. One well-known and popular one is OSQA[1]. Additionally, the Reddit source-code is open[2] (although their license is one of the "weird" ones by my standard), so that's an option. Also, I'm working on a project that is very reddit-like in a lot of ways, including the ability to vote things up/down, rank by votes, add comments, etc. It's still pretty alpha, but if you want to take a look see the source[3] and/or the demo site[4]. [1]: <http://www.osqa.net/> [2]: <http://code.reddit.com/> [3]: <https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick> [4]: <http://spdemo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1> If you're interested in the Neddick stuff at all, feel free to shoot me an email. It's under active development, but the roadmap right now is entirely driven for my vision for the stuff I'm doing... I'd love to hear from anybody else that might be able to put it to use. Edit: Oh yeah, almost forgot... the code for Hacker News itself is also available[5]. [5]: <http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc2.tar> ~~~ zck If you're going to use the HN source, use the updated version: <http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar> It actually might be the easiest thing to set up. ------ sga You can get most of the way to an MVP with base Drupal, a couple of user contributed modules, and some custom views. <http://drupal.org/project/votingapi> <http://drupal.org/project/vote_up_down> ------ rjdempsey Drupal/Open Atrium with Atrium Answers. <http://openatrium.com> <http://drupal.org/project/atrium_answers> ------ sthatipamala The Reddit code is open-source. <http://code.reddit.com/> I recommend using that instead of a generic CMS setup.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Usability of Programming Languages - Garbage http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/R201/ ====== phrotoma The section on experts is fascinating!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amsterdam – My (Not Mine) Home 4Klapse Film - teekert https://youtu.be/yu3pvWGnYVs ====== aequitas This (Dutch) article goes a little more in depth about the process and the tools used: [https://tweakers.net/geek/168250/tweaker-toont- timelapsevide...](https://tweakers.net/geek/168250/tweaker-toont- timelapsevideo-van-amsterdam-waar-hij-twee-jaar-aan-werkte.html) (Tweakers is one of the oldest and most popular tech sites in the Netherlands, and yes we know it means something else in your language)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Watch: MICA, Magic Leap's Eerily Human AI Avatar Who Looks You in the Eye - Kroeler http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2018/10/video-mica-ai-avatar-magic-leap.html ====== karmakaze I wouldn't list machines being able to communicate emotions to people as important. The limited value I do sed is having a machine express uncertainty or surprise if given ambiguous or rare/conflicting input. Other people may like it more. I don't enjoy talking to my phone as others seem to find natural. ~~~ karmakaze Edit: the very next post I read makes for a much better application [https://arstechnica.com/?p=1392695](https://arstechnica.com/?p=1392695)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: RSS feed of my comments/submissions - aj Is it possible to get the RSS feed of my submissions and comments? It would be useful to have and display on other sites ====== nreece _shameless plug_ Try our webapp to create a custom RSS feed from any webpage: <http://feedity.com> ~~~ aj Not too bad. But it does not show any of the other data (date, comment etc). At least the preview does not ~~~ nreece Yup, titles (headlines) only along with the links. No summary, but you can use Advanced Refine to fetch longer text as the title itself. You can also add the published date (if it's available on the source webpage for each news item) if you signup for a paid plan. Podcast (media enclosure) feeds are also supported. More on the features and service plans at <http://feedity.com/plans.aspx>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you - Evolved http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-inside-the-interfaces-designed-to-trick-you ====== praptak I have recently spotted a real-life dark pattern: [http://imgur.com/wFsfrfl](http://imgur.com/wFsfrfl) It's a gas station in Poland. This attempts to trick you into buying the overpriced 98 octane gasoline instead of the default 95 that everyone buys. Notice that the 95 is hidden in the middle of the diesel fuel dispensers and even its nozzle is designed to match those. The photo doesn't show it well but the actual labels are placed high enough so that you won't spot them unless you deliberately look up. ~~~ dsl But if a startup does something similar like highlighting the most expensive option on a subscription page, it is called growth hacking and we applaud the CEO and designers. ~~~ Mahn Everything is relative. If you define "evil pattern" as a design that encourages a certain action that you (the makers/owners) want the user to do for your own benefit, then practically every single sign up form or landing page is an evil pattern too. Heck, almost every form of marketing could be considered an evil pattern by that definition as well. ~~~ TeMPOraL I'd suggest a better definition - "evil pattern" is "a design that encourages a certain action that you (the makers/owners) want the user to do, _which provides negative value for said user relative to alternatives_ ". Your job as an entrepreneur should be to steer your users toward options that are optimal for him/her and charge accordingly. Trying to trick your user into choosing something worse for him so that you can profit more is just dickish, period. > _almost every form of marketing could be considered an evil pattern by that > definition as well_ Because it often is, and it's bewildering how people are used to it - to the point they turned cheating and abuse into a legitimate occupation. ------ Tepix A dark pattern that even well-liked websites like SPIEGEL and heise.de use is image galleries with wrong image counts. The gallery claims there are X pictures, yet there are only X-1 and the final one is an advert. ~~~ flycaliguy Situations like that often make me wonder if I'm being fooled or the person paying for advertising space is. Both I guess. ------ Kurtz79 I was always bothered by Ryanair's (biggest low cost EU airline) "optional" travel insurance. Its mandatory field is a list like this : "Which is your country of origin ? Austria Belgium Croatia Denmark France I don't want insurance Italy Sweden Ungary" Priceless. ~~~ junto I noticed the other day, that if you use the Ryanair booking system in German, you get a much clearer "Keine Versicherung erforderlich" (No Insurance Required) option, right at the top. [http://i.imgur.com/99pIygi.png](http://i.imgur.com/99pIygi.png) It appears that they don't use this dark pattern on German speakers. ~~~ jbrooksuk > It appears that they don't use this dark pattern on German speakers. Dark patterns like this are now illegal by European Law. [1] [1] [http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/08/26/some-dark- pa...](http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/08/26/some-dark-patterns-now- illegal-in-uk-interview-with-heather-burns/) ------ Sami_Lehtinen SourceForce pushing malware would fit perfectly into this dark pattern category. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8849950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8849950) Btw. In most of apps user interfaces and usability is just so bad, that you don't need any dark patterns to completely ruin experience and frustrate users. Making something purely random and without any logic, isn't 'carefully crated', but it does exactly the same. ------ whoopdedo Perhaps the most devious use of an interface anti-pattern is used to put people on the FBI's no-fly-list. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7193631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7193631) ------ iQuercus I'd be leery of assigning "dark" and "light" intrinsic villainy or heroism to patterns like opt-in vs. opt-out. Yes, a tick normally should mean yes, but context matters. For example, look at the opt-in/opt-out debate in organ donation. The evidence suggests that opt-out forms significantly increase rates of deceased organ donation. _As long as the form is clear about what the tick means_ and an opt-out set up increases positive behavior that benefits fellow man and society, is it really such a clear-cut bad thing? Is the pattern evil, or the outcomes? Also if you're interested in the opt-in/opt-out debate, here's an interesting discussion of some of its nuances: [http://www.biomedcentral.com/biome/opt-in-or-opt-out- informi...](http://www.biomedcentral.com/biome/opt-in-or-opt-out-informing- the-organ-donation-debate/) ~~~ TeMPOraL I agree. Opt-out itself is not wrong, what matters are your intentions and the consequences. Some things really do have to be opt-out - like organ donation you mentioned or other things that are beneficial to individual or to the society at no expense to the individual. But the "dark pattern" starts when you're exploiting individuals via opt-out. I think issue is quite simple - if you're exploiting people for your own gain, it's dickish. A lot of the discussion, and generally sales, marketing and PR, is just people trying to excuse doing things they know are wrong, so that they don't feel bad about themselves. ------ username223 > At present, Quora doesn't mess around with opt-ins or questions of any kind. > They just opt you in as part of the terms of service. What a surprise to see the "?share=1" people in an article on dark patterns. I don't understand how that site exists. ~~~ thisjepisje I've been there a few times, the content is actually pretty good. ------ cpeterso The name "dark pattern" is a bit too clever. There ought be a more straightforward term for something this important to become mainstream (like "spam" or "phishing" have). ~~~ TeMPOraL I'd go with "cheating", "fraud", or at least "dick move". Though the more popular label now is "growth hacking". ------ nsegal Limit Ad Tracking is actually listed under Settings > Privacy > Advertising in the latest IOS version. ------ awjr Have to agree on Experts Exchange. I used them quite extensively, they moved to being quite aggressive at hiding their answers, so I got to the point where I asked Google to remove them from any search results. Then stackexchange made it all better. ------ Netminder_EE What's annoyingly fraudulent is posting this as if it were something new. The article was written in August 2013, and used information from early that year. For one thing, Experts Exchange has used neither that system since before the article came out (meaning it's bad research to begin with). But if you all want to drink the Kool-Aid, be my guests. ------ vonnik A similar piece in Pando about a year ago: [http://pando.com/2014/04/15/dark- patterns-the-crimes-and-mis...](http://pando.com/2014/04/15/dark-patterns-the- crimes-and-misdemeanors-of-design/) ------ aaronbrethorst Given that Apple rendered MAC addresses useless for tracking users in iOS 8, _and_ make developers swear up and down that they're only going to use IDFA for advertising, I think they're a bad example to start with. ~~~ roel_v "Given that Apple rendered MAC addresses useless for tracking users in iOS 8" How does that work? ~~~ geon The idea was to randomize the mac sent out when scanning for wifi networks. The feature appears to be crippled, though. ~~~ roel_v Oh, so to stop location tracking, not identification by app developers? I interpreted the GP as meaning that apps somehow couldn't use the mac for id purposes. Thanks. ~~~ maxjg Both are correct (unrelated). MAC address is randomized when scanning for wifi networks, and if you ask iOS for the device MAC address, the SDK will return a fake MAC. ------ iooi Weird for the article not to mention [http://darkpatterns.org/](http://darkpatterns.org/) It was the first source I know of that started a compilation of these. ~~~ psuter The article is by the curator of that website, as mentioned in the first two sentences of the author bio. ~~~ nodemon lol	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Twelve Days of Crisis – A Retrospective on Linode’s Holiday DDoS Attacks - alexforster https://blog.linode.com/2016/01/29/christmas-ddos-retrospective/ ====== kyledrake I strongly believe it's not possible to safely run a site without DDoS protection for all servers anymore. Anyone with $20 can take down anything on Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, and many others. Or they can run up a huge bill for you on AWS. I would love to use Cloudflare but I can't afford $6000/mo for DDoS protection on my servers with the wildcard requirements we need. Linode may have solved their DDoS problems with their own stuff, but what about their customers' VPSes? I really wish people would start taking DDoS more seriously. It's really not something we can just null route servers for anymore. It's becoming a very serious problem. It's not going away, it's amplifying and getting far worse. I'm also not sure how effective it would be, but it would be nice to see the FBI, NSA or whomever spend at least as much time fighting these DDoS warlords as they did persecuting whistleblowers and trying to shove backdoors into cryptography. ~~~ click170 I think that effort would be better spent encouraging (see Forcing) ISPs to start dropping forged traffic at their borders. IMO there should be significant penalties for network operators who do not drop obviously I forged traffic. How long has that rfc been around now and how little adoption has it seen? ~~~ ryanlol >I think that effort would be better spent encouraging (see Forcing) ISPs to start dropping forged traffic at their borders. The importance of spoofed traffic to attackers is greatly exaggerated, I could personally easily send 500+ Gbit (probably terabit) sized attacks by spending a couple of weeks building a router botnet. No need to spoof IPs and at that point diminishing returns would make amplification attacks useless. Not only that, but most amplified attacks are particularly inexpensive to filter. >IMO there should be significant penalties for network operators who do not drop obviously I forged traffic. How long has that rfc been around now and how little adoption has it seen? Who would penalize them? Why? And I'm not entirely sure if you understand what RFCs are, that RFC (which hasn't even been around for very long) is - most other RFCs - completely meaningless. ~~~ cft In practice, most volumetric attacks have spoofed IPs- amplified UDP reflection attacks and even SYN floods with no amplification. Getting rid of UDP amplification reflection attacks will get rid of 90% of volumetric attacks. ~~~ ryanlol We had volumetric attacks every day much before reflection attacks became common, the biggest attacks these days aren't reflected but from router nets. And you simply cannot solve IP spoofing without rebuilding the entire internet, not to mention the fact that it does have legitimate use cases. Also, if IP spoofing is making filtering difficult for you then you're doing filtering wrong. ~~~ cft How big were the volumetric attacks that you saw that involved real IPs? The amplification factor is 1x for the real IPs. With NTP reflection and DNS reflection, you get 50x amplification, so 1Gbps botnet (trivial bandwidth) will cause a 50Gbps DDos (non-trivial bandwidth). This is why filtering is desirable. ~~~ ryanlol I saw a 500Mpps SYN flood just last week, followed by about 500Gbps of UDP packets. All from real IPs. Botnets have far surpassed amplification attacks at this point. >This is why filtering is desirable. Come up with a way to implement it that actually works and doesn't break legitimate use cases. spamsolutions.txt is starting to seem relevant here. ~~~ cft We work with Verisign that specializes in DDoS mitigations, they have state of the art scrubbing centers on four continents and they are leading mitigation provider to the banks and schools. They told me they almost never see anything above 300gig. You must be special. ~~~ ryanlol Yes, I would imagine I have far more experience dealing with large attacks than verisign. >they are leading mitigation provider to the banks and schools :) ------ rdl Layer 7 attacks are the new hotness in DDoS. If you have a big enough botnet (either conventional botnet, or hijacked browsers), you can do them, and they're often quite effective. Fundamentally, layer 3/4 are usually amplification. Those are still effective, and very efficient for the attacker, but they will someday (5y? 10y?) be blocked by closing up sources amplification. Address spoofing address at layer 3/4 might get addressed by BCP 38, Vixie's good fight, etc., but not holding my breath. By the time all that happens, attackers will have moved on to layer 7 attacks. Those can target the weakest parts of your stack, and with a large botnet, even the act of blocking the IPs in the wrong place can add enough overhead to hurt. With a huge botnet of hijacked browsers, blocking everyone affected becomes a DoS vector in itself, since some of those are your own legitimate attacks. The big problem for DDoS mitigation is that this requires much deeper knowledge of the protected application. It's hard to just put a box inline, or an unmodified cloud service, and have it block the attacks. There's both good science and great engineering to be done, by developers, platform vendors, and specialty anti-DDoS providers, to block this emerging kind of attack. ~~~ ryanlol >Layer 7 attacks are the new hotness in DDoS Maybe 10 years ago. >Fundamentally, layer 3/4 are usually amplification. Those are still effective, and very efficient for the attacker, but they will someday (5y? 10y?) be blocked by closing up sources amplification. Address spoofing address at layer 3/4 might get addressed by BCP 38, Vixie's good fight, etc., but not holding my breath. Sending "raw" UDP floods from bots still has several benefits over amplification attacks provided you can amass enough bandwidth, which isn't that difficult these days. >By the time all that happens, attackers will have moved on to layer 7 attacks. Those can target the weakest parts of your stack, and with a large botnet, even the act of blocking the IPs in the wrong place can add enough overhead to hurt. With a huge botnet of hijacked browsers, blocking everyone affected becomes a DoS vector in itself, since some of those are your own legitimate attacks. Unlikely, it'll take a fundamental change on how networks work for network layer attacks to become irrelevant. Especially considering volumetric attacks have the added benefit of potentially getting your target kicked off by their hosts and causing added damage in BW bills. And as internet connections become faster, DDoS attacks become bigger. ~~~ rdl Browser JS insertion on HTTP is pretty novel; it was done with ad networks a few times, but never at the scale of the GitHub/Great Cannon attack. Using an existing botnet certainly was fine, but for most sites, blocking botnet IPs doesn't cause as much collateral damage as blocking compromised-browser IPs. If you did a watering hole attack, doing JS injection on a really popular "show HN" post on HN, against HN, you'd be effective in getting HN to block the IPs of a large percentage of real users, which would hurt, even if HN could repel the attack entirely. Blocking 50k random botnet IPs wouldn't really affect many regular HN readers. ~~~ ryanlol >Browser JS insertion on HTTP is pretty novel; it was done with ad networks a few times, but never at the scale of the GitHub/Great Cannon attack. Using an existing botnet certainly was fine, but for most sites, blocking botnet IPs doesn't cause as much collateral damage as blocking compromised-browser IPs. But the "great cannon attack" was absolutely minuscule compared to the stuff that happens every day, attacks of similar sizes were already reasonably common years ago (See: [http://i.imgur.com/0quYBdV.png](http://i.imgur.com/0quYBdV.png) a graph of an attack on reddit, from 2013). Today we're talking about Mrps, not Krps. >If you did a watering hole attack, doing JS injection on a really popular "show HN" post on HN, against HN, you'd be effective in getting HN to block the IPs of a large percentage of real users, which would hurt, even if HN could repel the attack entirely. Blocking 50k random botnet IPs wouldn't really affect many regular HN readers. That'd just be sloppy filtering, there's no need to drop L7 attacks on IP basis. ------ dantiberian Far more concerning to me than this outage were the security incidents ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845278)) that Linode seem to continually have once every year or so. The most recent one seems to have happened in July, but they didn't notify customers or reset passwords for another six (!) months. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845619) ------ oliwarner Wow, still a lot of people fighting over whether or not Linode is a good company. It's a shame we don't get to see how <hipster hosting company of the month> copes with 80gbps of DDoS on a single DC. I'm personally happy with Linode. They have a seriously tough technical issue to deal with —as much working out what's happening as how to stop it— and they seem to be doing a fairly top job at staying afloat. My servers haven't gone down. Any downtime in the last four years has been my fault. So even if they are targets of some ludicrously powerful botnet, I'd rather stay with them than let the bastards doing this win. The attack isn't hurting my business or my clients and each incident we go through, the lower the chances of it _ever_ being a problem in the future. On a more serious note, governments keep moaning on about encryption but botnets are still a much greater direct threat to national security. ------ larrymcp Uh-oh, the attacks started again a few minutes ago: [http://status.linode.com/incidents/mkcgnmjmnnln](http://status.linode.com/incidents/mkcgnmjmnnln) ~~~ jsmthrowaway Which is why you do not blog about them and communicate quietly with your customers. ~~~ rdl Not really as possible with a consumer scale web service, but you can certainly modify your communications strategy to be less of a red flag for the bull. :( ------ staunch Where's the Linode founder(s) in all this, and why couldn't they have kept customers informed? It seems like a lone network engineer has been left to deal with a potentially company destroying event. ~~~ jsmthrowaway I was personally in the room, and in agreement, when running a real grown-up AS with carrier transit was proposed to Chris Aker as early as 2010, maybe 2009, to avoid this very scenario and many others like it. It's not really news. I have tremendous respect for the engineer who proposed it and fully believe he could have executed on this when Linode still had four facilities and 360 MB Linodes were the norm. I'm not saying that to toot my own horn (really, I'm not "I told you so" or arrogant like that), but there are very specific reasons that this wasn't done for as long as possible. I lack recent context, but the Linode decision-making culture was for many years completely driven by one individual who worked to spend as little on infrastructure as humanly possible. Even once growth really took off and revenue started making these big shifts in strategy viable, the mindset was still to be lean and scrappy. The minimal capital expenditure strategy had benefits early on and allowed Linode to maintain an incredible margin and support explosive growth, but they were too slow to start thinking like a grown-up company when it started to matter, and it's coming back to bite both on security (with almost zero investment; just enough to pass PCI-DSS) and things like this. When I heard they bought the Philadelphia building, for example, I was very surprised because that's not the Chris I knew. We lobbied for a Philadelphia office for _years_. Could be a good sign regarding decision-making culture for the future, but hard to say. Don't read me as bad blood or anything, as I wish Linode no ill will (I actually hope they can turn this perceived slump around), it's just educational to see the consequences of choices and mindset catch up with a company. I learned a lot about management style while working there and contrasting with subsequent employers. ~~~ mskaldlmk > just enough to pass PCI-DSS nope, the only way Linode "pass" now is being below the self-assessment questionnaire threshold. Once they have to move to an actual external audit they are fucked. ------ jph > Our longest outage by far... can be directly attributed to frequent > breakdowns in communication I have direct experience with Linode staff breakdowns in communication because of a security problem before the December attacks. The problem affected many Linode customers and included risks to confidential information such as billing. The Linode staff communication was terrible. The problem was severe and ended up with Linode on a blacklist of companies that are not suitable for hosting. I have to agree with tptacek: do not use Linode for anything, and if you do now, make plans to switch to a new provider. To end on a happy note, I migrated the project to Rackspace, and the Rackspace staff communication is excellent. ~~~ click170 I'd like to learn more about these blacklists so I can factor that in when choosing a vendor, do you have a link? Google is just showing me pages of vendors trying to sell me hosting when I search. ~~~ ryanlol I think this is more of a mental blacklist. ------ ryanlol >Layer 7 (“400 Bad Request”) attacks toward our public-facing websites I really wonder what that is supposed to mean, Linode has mentioned it multiple times but not elaborated on what sort of an attack this is. I personally haven't ever head of a "400 bad request"-attack. Edit: Yeah, I know what Layer 7 floods are :), but I'm pretty sure "400 bad request" floods are something Linode came up with, so that could use some elaboration by them. ~~~ sandstrom I think it's just another name for Layer 7 DDOS. I.e. crafted HTML-requests, designed to be 'expensive' to compute/process. ~~~ guelo Right, it seems pretty clear to me. ~~~ ryanlol There's a lot of different types of Layer 7 attacks, what sort of a payload is a "400 bad request"? ~~~ guelo Any HTTP request that causes the webserver to respond with HTTP status 400? ~~~ ryanlol But that's not descriptive at all. ~~~ guelo To me what it means is that the attacker figured out some custom call to the application that is probably expensive for the app to deal with and can easily cause a denial of service. ~~~ ryanlol It'd be pretty rare for the application to return error 400, generally that's something that the server would be spitting out when it fails to parse the HTTP request. ~~~ guelo That could suggest random urls. But it could be anything really depending on the app. I'm coming around to your pov that it is not descriptive. Something about the layer 7 flood was causing the app to respond with 400s and that's what Linode started calling it. But it doesn't help us understand anything about it. ~~~ ryanlol It wouldn't suggest a flood of random urls, error 400 is generally a response from the webserver when it receives a request it can't understand (e.g not HTTP). A request like that would never hit the web application as the server wouldn't know what to do with it. see: echo ":P"\|nc linode.com 80 <html> <head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx</center> </body> </html> ~~~ dgemm What exactly are you asking here? You seem to already have a solid understanding of what type of attack would generate HTTP 400. ~~~ ryanlol Not really, there's a wide variety of different requests that would cause such an error. Just flooding someone with ":P" shouldn't take them down. ------ virtuallynathan I am pretty amazed Linode didn't have their own IP Transit up to this point. Their colo provider is Newark charges some pretty high prices from what i've seen. ------ tptacek My plan is to keep saying this on Linode threads, just in case there are people who have missed it. Take my advice or leave it: Please don't use Linode. If you are using it now, make immediate plans to switch. If you have friends who have things built on Linode servers, tell them to switch. ~~~ yomism My plan is to keep saying this on Starfighter threads, just in case there are people who have missed it. Take my advice or leave it: Please don't use Starfighter. If you are using it now, make immediate plans to switch. If you have friends who have used Starfighter, tell them to switch. Feel how dickish this sounds without giving any reason whatsoever? Please explain why. ~~~ ryanlol There's a pretty clear difference here. Saying that would make you a dick. The linode comment doesn't make tptacek a dick. Why? Because it's trivial to figure out why he's saying that by simply typing "linode" into google, but as of right now googling starfighter doesn't immediately bring up any reasons to avoid them. Edit: Didn't mean to imply that parent was a dick. ~~~ yomism It's dickish saying that without explanation. Like this it sounds like baseless smearing. If he argumented the reasons before he could had just put a link. Sincerely, it's too much to ask? ~~~ hobs To be honest, the number of "linode screwed up" posts on hacker news the last few years would be educational to you, and if I remember correctly, ryanlol even got a slap on the wrist due to one of those situations. At this point, I am bored of people asking for citations on hacker news for things that are should be part of our tribal knowledge. [https://www.google.com/search?q=linode+hacks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf...](https://www.google.com/search?q=linode+hacks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=linode+hacks+site:news.ycombinator.com) About 2,810 results (0.34 seconds) ~~~ yomism Tribal is the right word here with all the blind faith in medicine men and cargo cultism. ~~~ hobs I meant it in the way of shared knowledge, just like we all know how to bypass a NYT filter, or that someone is going to complain about the lack of native scrolling in an article, especially on a Show HN. I definitely agree that there is a huge amount of that type of thinking on HN (of course), reading the amount of people who used github but didnt know the different between it and git and were commenting today was a personal education. ------ radialbrain Slightly related question: They mention segregating their customers into separate /24s, and consequently having to assign an IP from every one of these subnets to the router for use by the customer as a gateway. Is there any reason why they couldn't get rid of these by having customers set up a static route to the "primary" IP of the router (migration / configuration issues aside)? ~~~ caf The static route has to be via a gateway that is on a locally connected subnet. ~~~ radialbrain You can have a static route to any local device, this is essentially what subnet membership does. For example, if I have IP 192.168.0.2/24 assigned to eth0, my routing table will have: 192.168.0.2/24 dev eth0 proto static scope link I'm free to add a local route to a device outside 192.168.0.2/24 though: 192.168.10.1 dev eth0 proto static scope link This just indicates that I should be able to resolve the MAC address associated with 192.168.10.1 through an ARP query, same as other devices on my subnet. ------ thomaslutz We are currently getting DDoSed at Hetzner and they are clueless as well. ~~~ ryanlol If you're planning on getting DDoSd you probably should pick a provider that offers DDoS protection. Not sure why you'd choose a budget provider for production infra anyway. ~~~ FigmentEngine > If you're planning on getting DDoSd This, don't do it, far better to not get DDoSd ;-) ~~~ ryanlol Surely any org that depends on internet presence would plan against DDoS attacks. That's like internet 101. ------ brownbat No guess at motive? Did someone ask for ransom before these started? Is one of the Linode subscribers hosting censorship-evasion technologies? Or is this one just some very determined kids having fun over holiday break? ~~~ nodamage Could it have been Bitcoin related? The timing seems to roughly match up with the Bitcoin XT DDoS attacks mentioned here: [https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the- bitcoin...](https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin- experiment-dabb30201f7) ------ ancarda > Our nameservers are now protected by Cloudflare How? I thought CloudFlare only protected HTTP? Can you have it reverse proxy a DNS server or is Linode using CloudFlare as the host for ns1.linode.com now? ~~~ rdl Yeah, it's called Virtual DNS (vDNS); essentially a DNS application proxy. (email me if you want more info; it's not really ideal for small sites, it's better to just use cf for hosted DNS then, since it's free, but we're happy to do vDNS for people who can't do hosted. Mainly providers, but also some enterprise customers with special DNS needs. It's a pretty cool technology.) [https://www.cloudflare.com/virtual-dns/](https://www.cloudflare.com/virtual- dns/) ------ wereHamster > after some stubborn transit providers finally acknowledged that their > infrastructure was under attack and successfully put measures in place to > stop the attacks. Care to elaborate why it took them so long to ack? And name them so I know who to avoid in the future (or route around)! ------ tim333 >he pervasiveness of these types of attacks has caused hundreds of billions of dollars in economic loss globally. Is it really $100bn+ ? If so we could do with some government funded research / countermeasures. ------ jakeogh Thread on IPFS/DDoS: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329195) ------ bjano > blackholing is a blunt but crucial weapon in our arsenal, giving us the > ability to ‘cut off a finger to save the hand’ – that is, to sacrifice the > customer who is being attacked in order to keep the others online There is something very ironic about this. They have a policy which instead of addressing the problem actively assists anyone wanting to attack their customers. No surprise that these customers have been complaining about this practice for a long time. But until now it was Somebody Else's Problem so they didn't bother figuring out some proper (or at least less terrible) solution. Now this lack of preparedness bit them in the ass... ~~~ jsmthrowaway I'd posit that 98% of providers from whom you can acquire budget VPS will do the same thing. The practice is not unique to Linode; why should a network you're paying $20-$100 do everything they can to keep a target online and threaten other customers? Contrary to popular opinion, if you're getting DoS attacked, you're either (a) popular enough to start thinking about adult-size pants for your transit strategy or (b) inviting the attention by your choice of content or activities. In years of hosting, I started to know the targets of DoS attacks by name. You have to own at least a little bit of responsibility, and mitigate on your own end if you're going to be inviting that kind of attention; IRC and controversial blogs are the usual suspects here, but that's probably changed recently as I've been out of the hosting game for a while. Linode has few options for reacting other than the one they use. I know that sucks, but it's how it is. ~~~ bjano Yes, customers of other budget VPS providers are complaining about this too. > why should a network you're paying $20-$100 do everything they can to keep a > target online and threaten other customers? I am not a network engineer and I know that this is a very difficult problem. But when the provider doesn't even _seem_ to try, it only encourages further attacks. ------ brandon272 Does the buck stop with this network admin? Where's the CEO? ~~~ db7a11196 Riding his motorcycle across Europe, occasionally sharing photos from vacation with his plebeian workers in #linode-staff who are earning $38k and can't afford to take any vacation. ------ gauravphoenix I wonder what will happen if Linode routes their traffic through CloudFlare... ~~~ jsmthrowaway It wouldn't work. That's not what CloudFlare does (right? they didn't do BGP last I heard). You'd need something like Black Lotus, now owned by Level3, for that. ~~~ rdl You're technically correct as of Fri Jan 29 15:48:27 PST 2016. (email me if you'd like more detail; you seem smart/interesting but don't have email in your hn profile) ~~~ X-Istence Transparent scrubbing would be awesome, have CloudFlare advertise my networks, then CloudFlare on the backend sends the clean traffic to me... Can do it with peering with CloudFlare directly, or even if that is not possible MPLS on the backend to direct the traffic to where it needs to go.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
New silicon valley in international waters near SF - PetoU http://blueseed.co ====== matt__rose Why does this remind me of: [http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Mansion_Family](http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Mansion_Family) ------ nemasu I'm getting Bad Gateway / Gateway Timeout. ------ johndegree Doesn't work for me either ------ PetoU it should work now	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ASDF Version Manager - Croaky https://www.statusok.com/asdf-version-manager ====== jolmg Not to be confused as related to Common Lisp's ASDF build system.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apple backtracks on netbooks, zoom - meelash The announcements today were interesting because Apple seems to have backtracked on a couple of their philosophies, one of them quite long-standing. The release of a low power, very small new version of the macbook air (basically a netbook, given the old processor, low memory and harddrive space, last generation graphics) is not that much of a surprise. Apple has a history of denigrating product categories it doesn't happen to be in, and then coming in and saying, "well, it turns out the category didn't suck, just our competitors sucked at it, but here's how it <i>should</i> be done." But the repurposing of the "zoom" button as a full screen button may come as a bit of a shock to some mac purists.<p>For years (decades?) now, the zoom button has been an annoyance to many people that come from Windows, and has had to be explained and defended by Mac purists, who explain the concept behind it and the ergonomics of its use and how it's superior to the Windows maximize button. Of course, it's never a good sign when a user interface concept, no matter how smart it may seem, has to be explained to users- the whole goal of good interface design is for the user to never have to think about it. But this could partly be explained as a result of a predilection for the maximize function caused by previous experience and not an innate confusion.<p>Perhaps the more significant cause for the zoom button's death is that developers were just so <i>bad</i> at implementing it. A large number of developers themselves never seemed to get what the zoom button was about, and Apple was seemingly unable to force them to get it, or explain it sufficiently. As a result, it's implementation across the platform was so inconsistent as to be exasperating even for the segment of users that understood what it was for. Basically, you had to remember what it did in which apps, and when pushing it was going to do something useful, and when pushing it would do something unexpected. The end result was, most people, including myself, just stayed away from it all together, except in one or two select apps (Safari and iTunes, in my case).<p>Anyway, whatever the reasons, it seems Apple has given up on the zoom idea many OS's after its introduction, and repurposed the zoom button as a full screen button- much closer to the maximize function of Windows- although I'm sure us Mac purist will think of key reasons why it is not an imitation, but a completely different, better, idea. :D ====== GHFigs <http://blogger.com> <http://wordpress.com> <http://tumblr.com> <http://posterous.com> ~~~ ljf Great points about Apple, but agree with GHFigs ------ mr_eel I would hardly describe the implementation of the zoom button as a "core philosophy". "But the repurposing of the "zoom" button as a full screen button may come as a bit of a shock to sosuperiourme mac purists." You are overstating things. It's just a zoom button. I doubt many people even use it as it is currently implemented. "basically a netbook, given the old processor, low memory and harddrive space, last generation graphics" Apple don't compete on specs, they compete on experience, so this is all irrelevant. However you are right when you say they basically made a netbook. A small format laptop. The difference is, it's not rubbish like every other netbook. It's typical Apple really; publicly denigrate a market sector, then release your own -- and hopefully superior-- product. ------ frankus I think the primary thing that Apple has denigrated about netbooks (if not in words, then in actions) has been the cut-rate price. The previous MacBook air was pretty netbook-y as well, in every way but price. The new one is cheaper, but it's still about three eeePCs-worth in price. ------ andrewtbham maybe soon macs will have touch screen and you will pinch to zoom. ~~~ dtwwtd Steve Jobs claimed that vertical touch screens just don't work, so I'm not sure we'll be seeing a touch screen on a Mac anytime soon.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
7 Search Engines vs. Google = Fail - nickb http://www.compuplus.com/blog/2008/05/27/7-search-engines-google/ ====== schtog yes the link fails...am i missing the point?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? - raybb https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer-and-software-is-used-by-the-falcon-9 ====== dang Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23368109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23368109).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
New Horizons Will Have Little Time to Measure Pluto’s Atmosphere - omnibrain http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/after-a-9-year-voyage-new-horizons-will-have-little-time-to-measure-plutos-atmosphere ====== dakr Just last night the SOFIA Observatory observed Pluto during an occultation [1], a very rare event. The main purpose is to help characterize Pluto's atmosphere and, along with New Horizons, the data will help calibrate future Earth-based observations of Pluto. [1] [http://www.nasa.gov/feature/sofia-in-the-right-place-at- the-...](http://www.nasa.gov/feature/sofia-in-the-right-place-at-the-right- time-for-pluto-observations) ------ eganist Before anybody opines with "How could Pluto have an atmosphere when it's less massive than the moon (which has no atmosphere)?", it's worth noting that the moon does in fact have an atmosphere. Interestingly, NASA speculates that Pluto's surface pressure is around 3 µbar, whereas they state that the moon's surface pressure at night is dramatically less than that, at 3.0 × 10^-9 µbar. I'm curious to see what New Horizons' measurements will reveal. ~~~ Osmium Curious, but how much of an effect would temperature have on a planet's ability to retain an atmosphere? A colder planet of equal size will presumably be capable of maintaining a thicker atmosphere, but I'm not sure if that'd be a significant factor in this case or not. ~~~ Sharlin Proximity to the sun is a crucial attribute with respect to density of an atmosphere, both due to heat input (hot molecules escape easier) and solar wind density (energetic particles strip away molecules in collisions.) ------ mattgrice Fun fact: the new Horizons's (redundant) processors are 12MHz MIPS R3000s. [http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/mips-goes-to- pluto](http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/mips-goes-to-pluto) I am really curious what it uses for storage. I am guessing something much more modern, with extensive redundancy. ~~~ InclinedPlane It uses dual redundant 8 gigabyte flash storage. ------ sosuke "With the available radio telescope time on Earth, he says, it will take about 1.5 years for the spacecraft to successfully transmit the 60 gigabits of unique data it collected during the encounter." Every time I hear about quantum entanglement I so desperately want instant communication to be in our near future. 0.159 kB/s ~~~ teraflop Quantum entanglement does not permit faster-than-light communication, even in theory. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- communication_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem) ~~~ mineshaftgap Sadly even if there is intelligent life out there around other stars we are terminally absolutely alone in the sense that we will never have anything even remotely resembling a conversation. ~~~ icanhackit They're waiting for us to figure out how to warp space so that we can communicate via wormhole. They're not going to wait around for low bandwidth high latency comms. They're not scrubs. ------ bsder Is there a reason why they didn't try to put this probe into orbit around Pluto? ~~~ wanderingstan It will simply be traveling too fast, and Pluto is simply too small, for the probe to get into orbit. For them to have arranged for it to slowly catch up with Pluto and get into orbit, I imagine the path would have taken decades if not hundreds of years. (Assuming the fuel capacities we have to work with.) ~~~ robryan Looks like they have gone into some detail on a potential mission like this[1], appears that it would take 17 years, at least with this particular launch window Jupiter alignment. [1] [http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/doc/PRO/ACT-RPR-PRO- ISTS2004-Plut...](http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/doc/PRO/ACT-RPR-PRO- ISTS2004-Pluto.pdf)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
"Alone Together": An MIT Professor's New Book Urges Us to Unplug - J3L2404 http://www.fastcompany.com/1716844/alone-together-an-mit-professors-new-book-urges-us-to-unplug ====== pygy_ Please change the title of the submission, this isn't editorialization but downright insult. Meanwhile: flag. ~~~ noahr I thought it was a great question to open the interview with. ------ codeup She clarifies right at the start of the interview that she is not a Luddite. ~~~ codeup The title of the submission has been changed. It used to be "I didn't realize MIT hired Luddites."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ShowHN: MuleDrive email attachments to Google Drive and Dropbox - freddy I wanted to be able to forward attachments from any email client and save it to Google Drive. So I created http://muledrive.com. All feedback is appreciated. ====== s10r Clickable: <http://muledrive.com>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What a Small World: Carmen Ortiz, Aaron Swartz, and Tarek Mehanna - pms http://translationexercises.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/what-a-small-world-carmen-ortiz-aaron-swartz-and-tarek-mehanna/ ====== hamai > _under Massachusetts law, the potential sentence that Swartz faced was more > than the maximum sentence given to a rapist who has subdued his victim with > a threat of physical force, namely 20 years. If a firearm is added to the > mix, but if the victim is not subjected to “serious bodily injury,” then the > rapist can receive a maximum of 20 + 10, or 30 years._ ~~~ watty > The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was > willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty > plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to > do jail time. [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732458150457823...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324581504578238692048200404.html) ~~~ josephlord Guilty to what? How did the government indicate that they _might only_ seek seven years at trial? Even six to eight months sounds excessive for what he was accused of doing (although it was wrong and some charge may have been reasonable). And it would be one thing to accept guilt for unauthorized use of a computer and another to plead guilty to a $5M wire fraud. ~~~ pfortuny Yes that looks exactly like the rape with the firearm... Either GUILTY & 6m or even worse.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
OAuth Device Authorization for Roku, AppleTV, Xbox - brokenwren https://fusionauth.io/blog/2019/10/29/oauth-device-authorization-roku-appletv-xbox ====== robotdan The last time I had to type in my Netflix password into my Roku using a d-pad I nearly chucked the remote at my TV. Not sure why everyone doesn't use this type of device authentication. ------ BryanGiese The AppleTV remote is the WORST. In general, the worst remote ever made.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
VistaDB shutting down because of business operating costs - fraXis http://infinitecodex.com/post/2010/07/07/Closing-VistaDB-Office.aspx ====== Nwallins > _Option – Open Source the Product_ > _No, Not really an option at all. Who would work on it? Sure lots of people > love to consume open source projects, but very few people contribute to > them. And I have put a LOT of money into this product, I am not going to > just give it away until I can at least break even. I have to put my kids > through college, hopefully reclaim part of the money I have put into the > company, etc. And lets face it donation type projects never, ever make > money. Advertising on the site, etc are all pointless wastes of time._ Um, how is this not an option when terminating the project is? I'm not saying that he should open source anything, but this justification is silly, especially when compared to his previous explicit option of killing and burying the project. ~~~ simonw D. Richard Hipp, the SQLite creator, makes a very good living from consulting and support contracts from what I can tell. "SQLite consortium" membership costs $75,000 a year: <http://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html> ------ hga Every time I see a vendor abandon a product without open sourcing it it becomes that much less likely I'll touch a non-open source product. Got burned that way with Joel S. (CityDesk), not going to happen again if I can help it. ~~~ solutionyogi At least he is offering the option to buy the source for some 'fee' while he figures out how he can recover some of his investment. He will also release the 4.1 version without 'activation' so that it will continue to function even if the company shuts down. I think that's reasonable if not an ideal situation. ~~~ fraXis He has a user on his forum threatening legal action because the user feels like he is being extorted to pay the $699 source code fee to get the latest version with no licensing activation. He should offer a free upgrade to v4.1 so all the users can still use the software once the company closes down their activation servers. Maybe not a free source code version, but a free upgrade to v4.1 would be in order. All of the older version users have to activate their version of the software and it will be useless once the activation servers go offline. ------ phantomtypist I think Jason killed his company himself. He went and moved into a new office and hired a bunch of people. If you don't have the money for that, then don't do it. I believe that if he stayed lean he'd be able to survive. I am an owner of a VistaDB license and I truly love it, but I am not about to pay $699 for a version that has no activation. I bought the product and if he is going to go out of business and shut down the activation servers, the product I bought will be useless. Garbage! If he is going under, we should be able to get that last release without activation for free. Ridiculous. Jason definitely isn't handling this appropriately. I never liked his paranoid licensing to begin with. ~~~ Ggeo Yes, I believe this, too. He killed his company and his software not focusing on the VistaDB strength being an excellent website database, Xcopy deployable and first of all running in Medium Trust on shared hosting servers. But he wanted simply to high subscription fees and concentrated on implementing his paranoid licensing system to enforce it. No wonder that, as he writes himself, the revenues decreased constantly. Many developers would be ready to pay yearly about $100 without problems but not the amounts he wanted. So his company collapsing is his doing and not caused by wrong behavior of other people (software developer in this case). Geo ------ vyrotek I had never really heard of these guys before. But, I'm a huge fan of .Net and wish they could keep going. Open sourcing it would be great but I know I would have a hard time letting it go. I wonder if this thing could have worked in Azure as an in memory DB. You could use it as an interesting type of mem cache. ~~~ fraXis With you being a fan of .Net, do you have any recommendations for a simple database to use with .Net that can easily be installed onto a customer's computer. VistaDB was very simple to install. You only had to copy the .dll to the installation directory and it worked. ~~~ Encosia The new web-enabled version of SQL Server CE that shipped with WebMatrix is shaping up to be a good option. Going that route gives you a great upgrade path from embedded, to the free SQL Server Express, to the more powerful versions of SQL Server if your needs grow. I'd guess that the new SQL Server CE release this week had something to do with this VistaDB development. ~~~ heresy What does "web enabled" mean? SQL Server CE 4.0, you deploy the DLL with your app, that's it, no configuration, no setup required. "WebMatrix" not needed. ~~~ Encosia The version of SQL Server CE bundled with WebMatrix is the first version of SQL Server CE that will run on a web server. Older versions were good for things like desktop apps, but were restricted from functioning in a server environment. WebMatrix definitely isn't needed to _use_ it afterward (WebMatrix is just an IDE), but is the easiest (only?) way to get the new version of SQL Server CE right now.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Detroit police chief admits facial recognition is wrong “96% of the time” - furcyd https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-police-chief-admits-facial-recognition-is-wrong-96-of-the-time/ ====== rurban Unscientific. The best facial recognition is accurate 98%-99.9% of the time. There are minor known problems with blacks (~2% worse), bad lighting, bad cameras, but big problems with small databases to compare against. There are yearly vendor tests and challenges. E.g [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_Recognition_Grand_Challen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_Recognition_Grand_Challenge) Latest winners are all in the 99.9% ballpark, not 4%. If the Detroit police has no faces to compare against and the image quality is crap, it's certain that their success rate cannot be much better than 10%. ------ sukilot 4% success rate is fantastic for one tool bring the perpetrator to the attention of investigators. The problem is in abusing the tool as in the watch theft case. ~~~ slezyr More like 96% distraction. ~~~ setr Depends on how many results it brings you -- if it declares 10 candidate matches, and 1 is correct, then its still 90% wrong -- but still very useful. ~~~ suryabeep And it ruins the lives of the 9 incorrect matches, because of the way the legal system works in America. I'd say that that's 9 lives too many. ~~~ hevelvarik Is this life ruining thing a thing, or is it a generalizing of that episode that hit the news a week ago, or is it an instantiation of the current zeitgeist according to which there is no ill that can’t be associated with US law enforcement ~~~ imtringued I don't know why but for some reason US law enforcement always manages to find a way to maximize harm. When you give them less lethal weapons what happens is that they just use them in every possible situation and often they increase lethality by aiming at vulnerable body parts or shoot them from a very short distance. What they really should do is show some restraint and not let themselves get provoked easily. Facial recognition is basically ending in the same situation. 96% failure rate means you have a lead but not evidence and only get to interview people for more clues. Instead they just arrest the leads because the wanted criminal could attack during the interview or flee afterwards. ------ jqpabc123 It's simply not realistic to expect highly accurate facial recognition from public surveillance cameras. Resolution is often lacking, angles are distorted, illumination is poor, people are moving, features are hidden or blurred, people wear hats, etc., etc.. Mug shots, maybe. Frame grabs from public surveillance, not very likely.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How workers ended up in cubes – and how they could break free - e15ctr0n http://www.economist.com/news/international/21637359-how-workers-ended-up-cubesand-how-they-could-break-free-inside-box ====== hristov The Economist are being rather disingenuous here. They explain how the cubicle is a bad thing, and then they go on to try to convince us that the demise of the cubicle and it's replacement by more open plan type offices is a good thing. But the open type office is even worse for many of the same reasons why the cubicle was bad. ~~~ nerfhammer They just say that cubicles are bad: > it has become increasingly clear that far from offering a clever compromise > between the economy of open-plan and the privacy of individual offices, > cubicles are in many ways worse than either. But also say that open office plans are bad: > And last year Swedish researchers studying the link between office layouts > and illness found that people who worked in open-plan offices had the > highest risk of becoming ill. The reason, they concluded, was more than just > the easier spread of infections. Stress caused by lack of privacy and > workers’ inability to control their surroundings played a part, too. > Open-plan offices are noisier and more interruption-prone. Too much noise > causes high blood pressure, sleep problems and difficulty in concentrating. > And cubicles’ flimsy walls do little to dampen sound. In studies where sound > levels were raised from 39 to 51 decibels—roughly equivalent to moving from > an average living room to a road with light traffic—participants were more > tired and less motivated. ------ meepmorp Am I the only person who doesn't mind working in a cube? The small space doesn't really bother me and I have walls for blocking out visual distractions. Beats open plan offices, for me at least. ~~~ ghaff Define "mind." I've had offices. I've had traditional high-wall cubes. I've had open-ish plans. I work at home a fair bit. I'm OK with working just about anywhere. If I had my druthers, I'd take an office given the choice--though I've had a dark interior office and cubes with a decent view and that's a factor too. I suppose my revealed preference is that I prefer quiet given that I don't usually put music on when I'm working at home. But I don't really have a lot of trouble with distraction and will just put on headphones if I really need to focus. ------ koops They buried the lede, and put half of it in parenthesis: "In 1994 the average North American office worker had 90 square feet of space. By 2010 this was 75 square feet. (Executive management gained floor space over the same period, according to the International Facility Management Association.)" ~~~ conistonwater There are not that many executive managers, and they get to decide what to do with floor space. It's like setting your own salary, which they also get to do. Could this have something to do with economics as well? There are high returns to working in big concentrated cities. So if rents in city centres are expensive, but people still want to work specifically there, they will compromise instead by paying for less office space. How much more expensive would it be to give everyone an average of 90sqft (8.36m^2) of space? Not that any of this is good, but to pin this undesirable outcome on a specific cause, I think one would need more precise evidence. ------ vaadu Related article in today's washington post. Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google- got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/?tid=sm_fb) ------ Mz I once read an article about a college that put in new sidewalks and landscaping, only to find the students and staff leaving dirt paths through their expensive lawns. They wisely ripped out all the sidewalks and put in lawn everywhere. They later went back and paved the pathways that were created by people going where they needed to go by the shortest route possible. It seems to me no one has tried something similar with offices. Maybe someone should. ~~~ seanp2k2 I'm a bit confused trying to apply your analogy to offices; I doubt you meant that we should install grass on the floor and nothing else :) one possible interpretation is to start with just a big empty space, and let people buy or bring in whatever furniture they want, but that seems pretty problematic w.r.t. logistics, people picking things which will last / are affordable ("I work best in this CLS AMG with leather massage seats parked in the corner"). Could you please explain your idea in more detail? ~~~ marcosdumay The book "Peopleware" has a similar idea, in that you offer all kinds of enviroments, and people get to pick what fits their personality and team needs. Altought starting from raw material and space, allocating some of them for people, some for tasks, and letting teams roam freely also looks promissing. It will require a lot of redesigning, but that may even be a good thing. ------ ndespres Just this morning, my firm moved its office and now my team is in adjacent cubes instead of an open bullpen, and I was quite surprised at my own excitement to finally have a cube again. Semi-privacy! A noise barrier! But there are really more choices, and I feel the article continues to push this false dichotomy: <i>"What workers need from their offices has long been clear. A flexible workspace that encourages movement, combined with mobile technology, could finally liberate them from the cubicle farm"</i> Is that really what we need? Is there really anyone who prefers either of these choices over a private office, with ample meeting rooms and conference tables when there need to be group discussions? ------ fsloth Piketty's 'Capital in the 21st century' raised the claim that the returns on capital are starting to outweight the increases in productivity. Is the diminishing of office space actually a side-effect of this? If the penny in investments gives better returns than the penny spent in worker productivity then open plan pens - excuse me, offices, would actually make sense. ------ moron4hire >> About 30% of the staff have no permanent desk. Lacking a permanent desk would leave me constantly wondering if my position were also temporary. Even when I worked for a consulting firm who kept me on- site with the client 100% of the time, I had a permanent desk back at HQ. Ugh, I have been getting tired of my current project and had started thinking of getting out of freelancing and back into wage employment just for a change of pace. But the more I read, the more I stories I hear from friends and family still in those environments, the more I realize things have only gotten worse. 5 years ago, everyone _knew_ management was lying about the open-floor plan being bad for productivity. Now it sounds like people actually believe the lie and the open-floor plan is no longer reserved for the asshat-MBA- consultoware companies. ------ mrjatx Partitioned off open workspaces please. NOT the wide open "everyone is equal" cafeteria setup where every single noise/movement distracts each person. ------ bane Open offices are about cost saving in facility costs...which is generally a stupid way to do it. Your employees (and the work they produce) is far more important and expensive to your business. Most places are organized into small teams, small team rooms work the best. Have a few isolation rooms for people who need intense focus and conference rooms for cross-team communication. It's a formula that works and works well. The team can set the room rules and culture, people can still get stuff done and cross-communication is perfectly available. Nobody needs to be trying to get work done in the equivalent of the floor of a busy warehouse. ~~~ walshemj yep the facilities manager get a bonus for saving a few grand at the cost of pissing of your key player. Unfortunately some of the tail functions of a business have to much power and only pursue their own empire building and the hell with the effect on the other stake holders and indirectly the share price. ------ georgemcbay Cubes? Such luxury! I'm hard pressed to find software dev jobs that aren't fully open office these days. ~~~ guycook Yep. I rewatched Office Space recently and found myself envious of their working conditions (!). That's what 5 years of open plan does to you ~~~ millstone I just replayed Space Quest 3. In the game, Roger Wilco visits ScumSoft, a dystopian software company. Check out the ScumSoft office layouts: [http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/spacequest/sq3-15.png](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/spacequest/sq3-15.png) [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bp3Emd3jJVo/T7wcdqFTM_I/AAAAAAAAAu...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bp3Emd3jJVo/T7wcdqFTM_I/AAAAAAAAAuQ/p3gbPZD3xKE/s640/space+quest+3+scumsoft+02.jpg) The layout is nice, notwithstanding the whipping. ~~~ jordanb Honestly I'd take the whipping to have full-height cubes like that. My office is half-height cubes, but apparently there's a redesign in the works that's going to give us "friendly clusters with low partitions" (kill me now). ------ moron4hire I'm pretty sure I've slightly damaged my hearing from long-term headphone use during the years I was stuck in noisy, distracting work environments. Now that I work for myself from home, I mostly don't listen to music at all. ------ ahi After 3 years of freelancing from home I just started a cubicle job. First addition was headphones. Next will be a sunlamp. How do people work like this? ~~~ EliRivers _How do people work like this?_ With massively impaired productivity. ------ tswartz An interesting development of open floor plans is the addition of white noise to reduce distraction. Has anyone seen this used at their office? >>sound is controlled with dividing walls and “pink noise”—white noise focused on the frequencies of human speech, which can reduce the distance at which a conversation is audible from 50 feet to 12-16 feet. The result, the firm says, is greater focus, accuracy and short-term memory. ~~~ Pyrodogg I worked for about 6 months before one day there was an emergency announcement over the PA. Before the voice actually came on, the white noise generator cut out and it was _weird_. I had always assumed it was a noisy air duct. What you trade off is absolute sound level for attenuating speech like noises faster than they would naturally. So going from nothing to white noise is going to sound and feel noisier. But you will find that you can't hear people talking across the room as well as you could when it was quieter. I consider it a net positive. But then again I also wear headphones frequently to listen to music for focus (and to drown out everything). ------ caf _It looks rather like a fancy hotel: open-plan but with desks set in friendly clusters and separated by low, clear partitions._ The company I work for uses a design like this now, albeit the partitions are solid (but still low), and with the 120 degree angles between them apparently favoured by Robert Propst originally. It's known as the "snowflake" design because of the way the clusters with their 120-degree angles look from above. ------ pierotofy That's not breaking free, it's simply getting a "bigger cage". ------ ourmandave My first programming job in a cube was right between accounting and customer service. After 6 months they expanded accounting and so moved me to the other side of the building, but next to sales. After a couple days I started missing customer service. ------ MattMS I worked in a cubicle (with a window) for a few years. When given the choice of an office, I stuck to my desk and pulled down the wall between myself and the other developer so we can chat easier. I now have a standing/sitting desk that I switch between, depending on the work I'm doing. Standing also makes it easier to spot others coming over to ask questions. This may be due to the environment. Fewer people in the office (<10) and a manager that doesn't care when he sees me on Hacker News. ------ lawnchair_larry Settle for nothing less than individual offices. If I don't get an office, I work from home. ------ stretchwithme A tad biased. Light and fresh air can't penetrate cubes but germs and noise get in with no problem.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Vy – a powerful but retro and minimalist IDE - iogf https://github.com/vyapp/vy ====== nine_k What I love about this project is that a lot of it is glue code. It is an _integrated_ development environment because it takes existing tools and integrates them, not rewrites. I also like that you can develop plugins in the core language (like elisp + elisp, unlike C + vimscript), this removes some of the "impedance mismatch" between "native" and "scripted" parts. ------ AndrewOMartin You may be interested in the significance of the repo's "aggressive militarized snake smoking a pipe" avatar. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Expeditionary_Force#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Expeditionary_Force#Nickname) (Avatar here: [https://github.com/vyapp](https://github.com/vyapp)) ~~~ tutuca I don't understand what could that mean in this context. How do you read it? ~~~ AndrewOMartin I don't think it has a link to the repo, I guess they just liked the cool picture with a snake, and a Python is a type of snake. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that an aggressive snake smoking a pipe has a particular symbolism. ------ rtpg One "truly retro" experience I had recently at the Computer History Museum was messing around with QBasic. The instant feedback of the documentation, in particular, was really powerful. ------ psv1 This looks interesting. On editors in general - if I'm working with an interpreted language, what I need from a code editor is: \- decent autocomplete and inline documentation \- good REPL which can send a block of code to the interpreter and preserve state so I can work interactively \- to have a variable inspector \- to work with plain text files RStudio has been by far the best IDE ticking all the boxes for me. Still haven't found anything that comes close for Python - RStudio's support for Python simply isn't reliable, VSCode's Python extension has a bad REPL, Jupyter doesn't use plain text, Spyder's REPL isn't great either, PyCharm's scientific mode isn't free, I gave up on setting up Emacs several times because of how frustrating the whole process was. Any suggestions? ~~~ m712 Emacs + company-mode + lsp-mode + pipenv-mode (for virtualenv packages) work great for me. What was your setup and what kind of issues did you have with it? ~~~ psv1 Thanks, I'll have a look at these. What I tried last time is following this - [https://realpython.com/emacs-the- best-python-editor/](https://realpython.com/emacs-the-best-python-editor/) and I ended up with a glitchy autocomplete which was filling a big part of the screen without showing any text. ~~~ m712 I recommend using Emacs Prelude, which already auto-configures most of what I've described. You just need to enable a few modules for it and you're good to go. ------ misterdoubt I like the idea. The scrollbar jail bars are pretty jarring with regard to 'minimalist' sensibilities. ~~~ yuchi Engineers tend to misuse “minimalist” when they mean “brutalist” or “spartan”. Minimalist in the code doesn’t reflect on minimalism on the interface, and when you apply an adjective to the description of your product you are characterizing the overall experience and visible surface (UI)… not the “backend” that makes it possible! You can have very baroque UIs without writing that much code, and it would still be considered “minimal” on the code side. ------ Bnshsysjab I’m an emacs user, but barely know lisp, know python very well, and feel there are some limitations to emacs extensibility (namely wrapping external applications and debugging). Convince me to switch ~~~ lytedev What? Why? It sounds like you convinced yourself to try it... ~~~ Bnshsysjab What features make it the editor or choice? ~~~ mdszy Why don't you just try it instead of asking someone to convince you that you should? ------ mattl Why would you call it Vy? Doesn’t that seem a little self defeating? ~~~ lucasmullens It's just a portmanteau of vim and py(thon). What's wrong with it? ~~~ jdmichal Because `vi` pronounced as "vee eye" (/vi ai/) and I'm assuming `vy` pronounced as "vie" (/vai/) are extremely similar. ~~~ notduncansmith Funny, I’ve always pronounced “vi” like “vai” ------ jstrong lost me at 'python'. if this is still fast in another year I will be amazed. ~~~ eximius I wonder if you could add a `python --fast` mode that disables certain rarely or uncommonly used dynamic features that enabled the python runtime to JIT or do something clever. Alternatively, doesn't disable, just does unwinding like speculative execution on processors. Alternatively, is basically just adding PyPy to CPython. I guess no new ideas here. ~~~ Asooka Yep, it was tried. See: Unladen Swallow - an experimental CPython fork trying to speed up execution by removing some of the least used dynamism. It started 10 years ago and was abandoned 8 years ago. Retrospective at [http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow- retrospect...](http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow- retrospective.html) ------ jonny383 Does the world really need another retro "IDE" (especially one written in Python). Just use VIM, NeoVIM, or Emacs. ~~~ dang Can you please read the Show HN guidelines and follow them in Show HN threads? [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) Note this also from the site guidelines: " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._" [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Linear Web Design: info - design - code - benblodgett http://sitecollab.com/web-design-process/ ====== mundizzle This article describes an outdated process. "Adjusting round corners for a button in photoshop is easier then[sic] adjusting border-radius in css" Actually, in CSS it couldn't be more simple... border-radius: 5px; This makes me wonder if the author thinks we should be chopping images for rounded corners? "This process is executed in a linear fashion starting with information and ending in code, but requires iteration loops at each step." A good web design process is an active collaboration between designers and developers, not hand offs. I'm a firm believer that design should be coded early and often in order to uncover design issues that can't be detected on paper. It's fine to break things out into steps, however, they should be iterated as a whole instead of individually. This way issues found in one step have a chance to feedback into previous steps. ~~~ Silhouette > "Adjusting round corners for a button in photoshop is easier then[sic] > adjusting border-radius in css" Yes, I got to that, and gave up. Anyone who can write that seriously is clearly at best a beginner skill level in both Photoshop and modern CSS. Anyone who can advocate a waterfall model is, as you say, severely out of date in their understanding of effective development processes (or building the software for very specific types of project where it actually works, but real web development projects are unlikely to ever be among them). And in particular, anyone who advocates mocking everything up in detail in Photoshop before writing any HTML/CSS if you need to produce fluid/responsive designs is simply having a laugh. ~~~ benblodgett Your point makes sense when talking about developing software, however the article is in reference to planning a restaurant website for a client. Try implementing an agile strategy with a sushi restaurant owner, or for that matter an attorney, dermatologist, or chiropractor. That would be a laugh. B2B web design services struggle with showing tangible deliverables, a waterfall approach is the best way to keep the client satisfied and scope within your spec. ~~~ Silhouette Sorry, but I've never accepted that argument. No Photoshop mock-up is going to represent exactly what all of your client's visitors are going to see anyway. Are you really going to make multiple Photoshop mock-ups showing different responsive designs or how a fluid layout looks at different window sizes, and then two or three variations of each using different anti-aliasing settings to simulate how the text will appear on different OS/browser combinations? Meanwhile, you can show your clients a static page using HTML+CSS just as easily as one using Photoshop, and they will see how it actually looks. And you can still change border radius in CSS more easily than the hassle of working on rounded corners in Photoshop, which still defeats the entire premise of that part of the article.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
From Markdown to RCE in Atom - 0x0 https://statuscode.ch/2017/11/from-markdown-to-rce-in-atom/ ====== shams93 I get clowned sometimes for using emacs but this is a great example of why using a "long in the tooth" editor can be an advantage.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ash HN: What are great free resources for hackers? - hx_ ====== andrewstuart2 MIT OpenCourseware [1] -- Free lectures (probably at least half the value of a college course -- free) from some of the best teachers out there. Youtube -- Skip the entertainment aisle and YouTube is chock full of learning on tons of subjects. Watch tech talks from conferences, recorded lectures for entire courses, dev community meetings, and tutorials for pretty much anything out there. For example, I stay current with quite a few projects (Kubernetes for one) by following their community meetings on YouTube. I've also gone through more than my ad revenue's worth of courses for free. Bonus YouTube protip: If you pay for Google Music, you can also download any YouTube video and watch it offline (YouTube Red feature), and even keep playing the audio in the background when you turn off the screen. This alone probably opens up 10-100x more educational content for (non-data-plan- wrecking) consumption during my commute. My wife does use Google Music, and occasionally I do too, but I'd pay $10/mo just for the YouTube download/background functionality. Podcasts [2] -- More free educational content. (Can you tell I'm all about that learning?) HN Comments -- Great discussion with some really smart people who may have another interesting angle on a problem and nearly always are polite and reasonable in their responses. [1] [https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm](https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm) (A lot of their full courses are also on the MIT YouTube channel as playlists) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13254983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13254983) ------ pixelfeeder [http://logodust.com](http://logodust.com) for free open sourced logo designs. Useful for MVP's/Demos etc. ------ bradknowles [https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev](https://github.com/ripienaar/free- for-dev) ------ saycheese MakerBook: Free Design Resources [http://makerbook.net/](http://makerbook.net/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What's stopping anyone of you from creating a bitcoin alternative? - machilin Judging from the prices of Bitcoin and more recently, Litecoin and the creation of new currency, it dawned on me: What's stopping me or anyone of you guys from creating your own "currency" and making a quick profit? Here's the plan:<p>1. Create a new "currency", claim it's better than bitcoin. 2. Mine as much as you can when the difficulty is low or pre-mint some coins yourself. 3. Wait for a while as prices for your currency rises. 4. Cash out and PROFIT for the win.<p>Maybe, I should spend the weekend hacking away of my new "bitcoin alternative". What do you guys think? ====== IanCal It's been done, repeatedly. The problem is you need to get other people to use it and buy it, that's the tricky bit. You're making a huge assumption with this: "3. Wait for a while as prices for your currency rises." You'll need to get it used enough that someone puts it on an exchange, or otherwise convince people to give you money. To make huge amounts of money, you need to convince either lots of people, or a few really rich people. It's also potentially illegal. ~~~ machilin Agreed. But the way, I see it there are a lot of coins you might not have heard of, novacoin, terracoin... Nobody ever buys anything with them, but their prices are on the rise. As long as you make it, people will want it. ~~~ IanCal "Nobody ever buys anything with them, but their prices are on the rise." But you've already picked the successful few out, lots of other coins never got to that point. However, the fact that you're designing a scam makes this whole thing a lot easier to answer: The thing that is stopping me is that _I'm not a scumbag_. I don't want to trick people out of their money. ------ anigbrowl Nothing, it's just a matter of marketing and persuasion...which is what bothers me about Bitcoin. It's a potlatch currency. ------ mtgx You will have to mine the new currency yourself. Are you willing to waste all that electricity for the promise that you "might" cash out if your currency achieves any sort of success? You can try, but I doubt it will be as easy as you think it is.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
EA Takes Down 'Open Source' SimCity 2000 Remake - throwaway180118 https://torrentfreak.com/ea-takes-down-open-source-simcity-2000-remake-180730/ ====== kup0 Bundling the graphic assets doomed this from the beginning. It was only a matter of time. ------ Cypher fuck EA ~~~ wingi If anyone on the project knows the copyright issues on the graphics, why is the project not official started with the conversion tool. Other projects will do it: [https://github.com/cdev-tux/q3lite/wiki](https://github.com/cdev- tux/q3lite/wiki)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Editor Wars - lnalx https://hackaday.com/2016/07/26/editor-wars/ ====== ktRolster ok, so the article made this claim: >[emacs users] tend to be touch typists. That really made me wonder: aren't most programmers touch typists?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Regression and extraction - masnick http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3325-regression-and-extraction ====== endlessvoid94 All valid points. I do suspect, though, that "the ones who came before" noticed this years ago. Things are worse (re: patents and app stores), but the idea of the industry slowly taking a turn for the worst while nobody notices are not new concerns. I'd love to hear someone who's been programming for 40 years comment on this. I don't even know who to ask... ~~~ DanBC I'd love to hear from someone who's been programming for 40 years too. Until then, here's a jpg (<http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg>) > _"This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and > solutions without the greed and grit with associated with today's corporate > driven, litigation-laced, industry"_ (Second column, near the bottom) That was written over 20 years ago. ~~~ ceejayoz I love that Compuserve is $11.75 an HOUR, and the description of online chatting as a "CB Simulator". ~~~ endlessvoid94 I would pay for a way to use my iphone as a CB while on the road. I had a CB in college and it was really great to have while on road trips. I'd love to be able to open an app on my phone and ask the nearest semi driver what the traffic deal is, or where the "bears in the caves taking pictures" are ;-) ------ jivatmanx In addition, a larger and larger portion of a nation's GDP is now taken up by the financial industry which has gone from primarily allocating capital to businesses, to primarily using high frequency, algorithmic, and derivatives- based trading to extract wealth from the economy. The other of the U.S.'s greatest problems, healthcare, has more to do with entrenched interests and inertia of doctor education and salaries, and a middleman-based payment system preventing the formation of a actual, competitive market (except for, for example, lasik, one of the few procedures that's gotten both cheaper and better over time). Patents, too, are inertia, political leaders having a record number of years in incumbency, settling into staleness and nobody willing to make bold changes, think them up, or even listen to people who have. ------ chipsy The longest-lasting businesses in history are small to mid-sized - at most a few hundred employees - and they are (unsurprisingly) all in timeless, age-old industries. ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies> ) The huge British East Indias of the world become entangled with government and rise and fall at the whims of politics. This makes me believe there's some kind of definable relationship between money extracted, business size, business lifecycle, and benefit to society. A startup with ambitions of being very big, profitable and influential is declaring that it wants to lead civilization in a certain way. But if it achieves size and profit by simply decreasing benefits and increasing extraction, it's actually a corrupting force; post-hoc charity can't change that. And in technology, every wave of new possibilities pulls a few corruptors along for the ride, in part because we don't always know at the outset whether they're ultimately a good or bad force. As well, the really long-term influences often appear to lie dormant for a long time... ideas from academia take forever to be used in industry, and broad demographic changes in usage can take a decade. ------ crusso I agree with David's general thesis and the items on the list except for the App Stores. Naturally government-oriented influences like the patent system and regulations are monopolistic. Net neutrality is monopolistic because the backbone infrastructure is in the hands of a relative few number of infrastructure owners. Often, where you live determines the connection to your house and that's a monopoly often enforced by municipal contracts. App Stores are the only item on his list that are not quite monopolistic in nature. As such, new competitors can come along at any time to unseat App Stores that are failing to provide enough value to consumers. ~~~ benatkin Yes, that's the black and white market vs government worldview. The App Store thing turns this black and white thinking on its head. It is oligopolistic from a practical standpoint, for people making and distributing of mobile applications. ~~~ crusso Is my worldview artificial or somehow contrived? If I REALLY don't like my phone's app store, I can switch phones. If I don't like my government's policies, I have to move to a new country. Don't pay Apple and you don't get an iPhone. Don't pay the Govt and you go to jail. Jailbreak an iPhone, breaking Apple's terms and conditions and they won't service your phone. Break the Patriot Act's Gag Rules and you're squirreled away to PMITA prison. If Apple makes stupid decision after stupid decision, they lose their dominance. If they are too reckless with their finances, they lose their business and possibly go to Jail. If Govt is reckless with its finances it just points at corporate scapegoats and raises taxes. No one goes to jail and this last election shows that no one will even be held accountable by the mostly ignorant voting public. It's not like I'm making up the basis of this worldview out of thin air. Have you seen what's happening in Southern Europe? Turn on world news (from networks outside of the USA), open a browser, wake up... ------ hokua Before he listed the threats, I immediately thought "App stores" due to my recent debacle with Apple. Bam, there it was listed. Great article. ------ 001sky _Net neutrality: Imagine if you had to enter separate agreements with every ISP in the world to get full-speed access to all your potential customers. Only the established elite would be able to navigate such shark-infested waters._ \-- sounds like FB promoted posts?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Star Trek Economy - FD3SA https://medium.com/editors-picks/29bab88d50 ====== harshreality I think this is a useless exercise. The economics of Star Trek won't be coherent, because it was pieced together through multiple series and some wishful thinking while retaining certain properties needed for the universe to be interesting. You can't have a TV show about drone ships flying around and beaming back exploration data via subspace. Without Star Trek replicators in the foreseeable future, all the 3d printing and robots in the world will not give us unlimited amounts of basic materials needed. Concrete and glass might be virtually unlimited, but certain metals are definitely not. If those resource constraints lead to energy constraints, we'll have problems getting to any sort of proto-post-scarcity stage at current standards of living. AI might solve the problem, but the consequences of AI are unpredictable (singularity). A few books on the subject worth mentioning, but not mentioned in the essay: Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (fiction, set in a speculative world where the economic system is based on units of social status called whuffies; everyone is born with some, if I recall right (nope, apparently I was wrong, it's not zero-sum), and from there it's a free market). Rifkin - The End of Work (nonfiction, takes a look at how society might function as jobs gradually disappear due to technology). Iain Banks's Culture universe is mentioned in the further reading section, but it's completely post-scarcity on planet and orbital scales, with AIs running everything. The aforementioned books are much closer to home. ~~~ Blahah Another interesting SciFi exploration of economics is the Unincorporated Man ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the- unincorporat...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the- unincorporated-man)). Everyone is incorporated at birth, and trades shares in themselves (paying dividends once they are earning) to advance in life. People who don't have majority of themselves can't make their own decisions. ~~~ dkuntz2 I thought that the concept was interesting, but their implementation was really boring and lackluster. It's been a while since I read it, but I felt that they didn't explore the implications of everyone's incorporated or how we got to that state as much as they probably should have. I couldn't even finish the second book because it didn't even have the interesting bits about people being incorporated, it was just a poorly written sci-fi war novel. ~~~ Blahah Agree on all points. The second book was just god awful. ------ transfire The main hurdle facing post-scarcity economics is not actually scarcity. Rather it is the elitist class, who will do everything it can to ensure continued scarcity in order to keep their socioeconomic positions. We already see this today in a number of ways. For instance, if a commodity isn't scarce, it can be made scarce by effectively creating a monopoly (even if it doesn't appear to be a monopoly from the outside) and hording the commodity. The diamond industry is a good example of this. Another technique is using complex laws to ensure a great deal of labor and supplies are needed to comply. Tax laws are a great example of this. How many accountants would loose their jobs if taxes could be done in five minutes on the back of a napkin? Probably the worst tactic of all is simply the promotion of continued population growth. We really do NOT have enough resources on this planet to give everyone on it a modern life style. And it is imperative for populations to shrink. Until we are well on our way to the stars this is not going to change. But our current economic models crumble in the face of decreasing population. So we can only expect more scarcity in the future, not less. ~~~ skyshine Then perhaps it is time to start looking for an alternative economic system. I've been developing a framework to explore new economic systems for several years. [http://babblingbrook.net](http://babblingbrook.net) There are two pressures in society. One pushing in the direction you say and another pushing towards a post scarcity economy. Which will prevail is difficult to say, but I suspect that in the short term the status-quo definitely have an advantage, but in the long term they will most likely lose. The reason is due to a little known theory called non equilibrium thermodynamics, which essentially states that if the reconfiguring of a system (an atom, a cell, a solar system, a hurricane, society etc...) can produce more entropy in the universe, then given the opportunity, it will do that. A moribund restrictive society that inhibits innovation creates less entropy than one where everyone is free to innovate, investigate and have fun in ways that expend energy. This doesn't mean that this will automatically happen, in the same way that biological evolution uses chance to produce more adapted species, so do all forms emergent complexity due to non equilibrium thermodynamics (evolution is just one organising principle). Also, it needs to be possible for the system to organise in this way. Societies organising principle is its socio-economic system. We have had several in the past, such as a monarchic command economy, but today the most successful is free market democracy. There is no reason to presume that this is the best one. Free market democracy became possible due to several inventions and innovations, such as coins, the printing press and debt. Recently we have invented the internet and this makes many new systems possible. I've written a lot more on my theory page. [http://babblingbrook.net/page/theory](http://babblingbrook.net/page/theory). Sorry if this is poorly written. I have just bashed it out and would like to write more, but I have to go and get my daughter from grandmas so I don't have time... ------ JumpCrisscross One capitalist hybrid which does not distort the market is a free market with a basic income [1], i.e. an unconditional income as a right of being a citizen. At what level - survival, comfort, or luxury - the income is set is an open question to each society. Too high and scarcity erupts in the form of inflation, too low and inequality and populism corrode the society. Post-scarcity economics is more the study of localised phenomena. As alluded to in the post, some things will likely always be in short supply somewhere. [1] [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income) ~~~ skylan_q _One capitalist hybrid which does not distort the market is a free market with a basic income_ Yes, it does distort. Why work on a manufacturing line producing required and high-demand materials and equipment when instead you can be creating arts and crafts that very few people would want and adds little to the productive capacity of the economy? People need to realize that prices are not just a pain in the butt, but they are useful pieces of economic information. ~~~ AngrySkillzz The key point to basic income, in my opinion, is that it seems like it would increase social welfare while minimally distorting prices and being cheap to administer. So let's take this to its logical conclusion, that lots of people don't work/do "useless" jobs, but still want to buy high-demand goods. Demand gets higher, and prices for those goods go up. Does this break the economic signalling mechanism? I'd argue that it doesn't, price signals are still firmly in place. Producers of high-demand goods can afford to raise salaries and attract more workers. There is still an incentive to work. On top of that, necessary goods with a satiation point (e.g. food and shelter) would be more resistant to these effects. You don't need more food than you can eat or more houses than you can live in. If you aren't working, you still have to mind your money and budget accordingly; it's not like everything is free. ~~~ msandford "while minimally distorting prices" SNIP! I think there's a serious misunderstanding here. Any basic income that is high enough to be useful will also be high enough to be distortive. Any basic income which is low enough not to distort will also be low enough not to be useful. Consider a few thought experiments. Set a basic income to $100 per month. Time 300 million americans that's only $3b per month or $36 billion per year. That's a small enough portion of the economy that it's totally doable, but not useful. Now instead let's set it to $10k per month. That's definitely enough to pay a mortgage, cars, etc. Times 300 million folks we end up at $3 trillion a month or $36 trillion a year. GDP in 2013 was about 17 trillion so we've definitely distorted prices by a huge margin. The price of everything probably triples. OK, you say, let's dial it back just a tad and calibrate it to the size of the economy. Let's set our target at 30% of total GDP which we would argue we can totally do since the government historically gets about 19% of GDP so growing that by 50% should be doable. Of course this means that the federal government provides no services or does nothing except for basic income; no military, no NSF, no dept of education, none of that stuff. Ignore it for now. 17 trillion time 0.3 = 5.1 trillion a year, or 425 billion a month. Divide that by 300 million people and you get $1416 per month. That's not a TERRIBLE number, if you live in a rural area you could pay a mortgage, car payment and even buy some food for that. If you lived in a big city that might cover your rent, but probably not. But wait, you say, there aren't 300 million adults in the US? OK let's assume it's only 200 million. That number goes up to $2125 per month and you don't get a check until you turn 18. Yeah that's better, for sure, you might even make rent in a big city. In a rural area you're doing fairly nicely. But how do we raise this money? There's a difference between income and wealth, if you took every penny from all the Forbes 400 list you'd have $2 trillion. But actually you wouldn't because you're assuming that you can sell their assets for cash at exactly the price they're valued at right now. If you did that you might recoup 80% because it'd be a giant sell-off. But let's ignore that for a minute. Let's also say that you by the time you get down to every person whose net worth is over a million (remember, only the rich) that you've raised another 2 trillion (pie in the sky, the distribution of wealth isn't anywhere near equal remember?). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Forbes_4...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Forbes_400) At that point you've got enough cash to make this whole thing run for about 10 months. The total US income for all people in 2013 was $13 trillion. [https://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm](https://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm) Take all that money and divide it up between 200 million adults and you've got $65k per person per year once you turn 18. BUT that's it. Janitor? $65k. Doctor? $65k. Lawyer? $65k. Startup founder? $65k. CEO? $65k. VC? $65k. Nobody, anywhere, ever could make more than $65k or else you don't have somewhere to take the money from. And at that point I think it might be hard to convince people to work harder, take more risks with their personal wealth, study longer, etc if NO MATTER WHAT they can't make more than $65k. If you want to allow people to make more, that's OK. But for every person that makes $75k under this scheme you've got to find someone to only give $55k and to convince them that it's right, or dial the basic income back to $55k and start giving only select bonuses. Of course, remember that all this ignores the idea that we still have to provide all those federal functions that we're currently providing. ~~~ greenbeethree You misunderstand Basic income as providing equal wealth to everyone... That is not the goal. The point is to provide the bare minimum amount of money required for someone to survive. You would base the amount of money each person gets on the cost of living where they live, just like how wages very from place to place today. The amount of Basic income wouldn't be the same everywhere. Basic Income isn't socialism, people would still work, they just wouldn't work as much. Since the Basic income only takes care of your basic needs if you want to buy a new tech toy you will have to go to work and get the money to pay for it. Since your basic needs are already taken care of, businesses won't have to provide a "living wage", there would either be a very low minimum wage or no minimum wage at all so a much smaller percentage of a businesses's revenue would go towards paying employees meaning more profit. Hopefully along with basic income we would also adopt universal healthcare that would further take finical burden off of businesses. ~~~ msandford > You misunderstand Basic income as providing equal wealth to everyone... I can see how you might think that, but I disagree. What I am trying to do is show that the idea that a basic income can provide without distorting prices isn't grounded in reality. What is the bare minimum amount of money required for someone to survive? And who defines what "surviving" is? If you're married with six kids (four currently of the right age for private school) your "bare minimum" might be $25k/mo. No that's not legit? What is? Does the "bare minimum" require that you get only a small 1 bedroom to yourself? Or an efficiency? Or maybe you should be required to live with roommates to bring your rent cost down? Do you get more money if you have kids, or less? What happens if you get married or divorced? If you live somewhere where the cost of living is high you get more money; how do you ensure people actually live where they say they do? What would prevent me and 100 of my closest friends from all saying we live in a shithole in NYC while we use that money to buy all kinds of good lives for ourselves in more rural areas? The cost of living differential is probably at least 2x and maybe higher, so there's a lot of incentive to abuse the system. So the businesses have more profits, but higher taxes right? The money for a basic income doesn't just magically appear does it? Where does the money come from to pay it? ~~~ landryraccoon The point of the article was that this applies to a nearly post scarcity society. For example, suppose we lived in an Asimov style world where autonomous robots could produce enough food, clothing and housing to sustain everyone on Earth even if Every Single Person decided to never work again. In such a society, the basic income can be determined by what the robots can produce. I think it's interesting to think about what could be possible in a future society, as opposed to just the fact that this probably won't work today. ~~~ msandford Yeah that's cool too, but where does the $100 trillion to build all the robots come from? Robots ain't cheap and it's not like it's all software license fees either, you need to actually pay people (or robots) to dig ore out of the ground and to use energy to transform it into metal and then form those ingots into usable shapes and then transform those usable shapes into robot frames and then attach electrical or hydraulic actuators and pumps and put controlling circuitry in there and then you still have to have the control system. So far all that stuff is owned privately and I don't foresee the people who've spent millions or billions of dollars of private capital to make all that exist suddenly say "hey it's cool, we're giving all this stuff away for the greater good!" ~~~ landryraccoon Well, if the robots can produce ten times more then the amount needed to sustain everyone, then the government can tax the robots productivity at 10% to achieve the same thing. You're going to say that that's theft at gunpoint probably, and I'm going to say I don't have any moral problem with that. Taxes have existed since human beings first banded together to form large groups and they aren't going away anytime soon. So is this just going to turn into another stupid libertarian argument about how all taxes are evil? Because I'm pretty sure that debate has been settled in every single successful civilization since the dawn of time.. Taxes won. Lastly, I think your viewpoint is pretty evil honestly. So there is a robotic surplus sufficient to feed the world multiple times over in this scenario and people still starve because fuck you I own the robots and I'm only going to help myself? If that's the world there will be a revolution and I'll be on the side of the dirty hippies. ~~~ msandford >You're going to say that that's theft at gunpoint probably, and I'm going to say I don't have any moral problem with that. No I'm not going to argue that it's theft at gunpoint, actually. But thanks for trying to paint me into a corner. What I am saying is that the world is complicated and just because the robots can make enough stuff or grow enough food in a theoretical sense doesn't mean that utopia is suddenly achieved. >Lastly, I think your viewpoint is pretty evil honestly. So there is a robotic surplus sufficient to feed the world multiple times over in this scenario and people still starve because fuck you I own the robots and I'm only going to help myself? If that's the world there will be a revolution and I'll be on the side of the dirty hippies. You don't even know what my viewpoint is so I don't see how you can characterize it as evil! I can't believe how quickly this turned into "you must be a dirty libertarian so fuck you!" I don't particularly LIKE taxes and a world where taxes magically didn't have to exist but I still got to use roads and schools and fire departments and police and stuff, I'd be OK with that. But since none of those people work for free, I accept taxes as necessary even if not my favorite. > then the government can tax the robots productivity at 10% to achieve the > same thing. OK what you just said there is that the government is going to take all the useful output of the robots and leave the owners with no useful output. If the robots can produce 10x whats needed and the government takes the first 1x then what the owners of the robots do with the other 9x? Nobody needs the other 9x, so by definition they couldn't sell it. Disagree with me? OK great, I want to sell you a million liters of air at 1ATM for $0.001 per liter. Wait, you already have more than enough air? And everyone else does too? Fuck who is going to buy this air so that I can make good on my investment?!?! If the robots were going to be taxed at 10% of productivity you'd basically see the total robot workforce get reduced by 90%. If you spend a billion dollars on a factory you need to get your money back and if you can't sell the excess capacity then you're going broke. The best scenario I can think of is that the robots become so cheap that eventually everyone becomes largely self-sufficient. But even then you'll still have problems because of land ownership; if you can make everything you need just so long as you have access to land then the price of land will go way, way up. Maybe once you get to space everyone can have as much of whatever that they need and we can achieve rough approximations of utopia but maybe not. Maybe once we get to space everyone wants their own 500 ft luxury spaceliner and there's not enough raw materials to go around. I think part of the problem is that human desires are basically unlimited. Maybe not everyone has infinite ability to consume, but the human race, collectively, could consume nearly infinite amounts of anything. So any attempt to imagine "well what happens in the future when we can easily satisfy everyone's current desires" accidentally ignores the idea that in the future people will probably have desires that are bigger than they are today. There was a time when many people shared a large single room house in Europe in the middle ages. Then someone invented the fireplace and the nobility gave themselves their own rooms. Eventually it became common for everyone to have their own room. Then, everyone has their own house/condo/apartment though sometimes shared between several generations. Now in the US it's quite common for a single person of 25 to have their own 1BD apartment or even a whole house. 500 years ago you'd have to have been filthy rich to have that. Today it's possible for someone with a high school diploma and knowledge of a skilled trade to afford it. 500 years from today I agree that meeting everyone's current demands will probably be a joke and the robots will be able to do it all. But what new desires will human beings have that we can't even imagine right now? I'm not saying that a Star Trek economy could never exist, but that I don't foresee it happening do to the fact that human nature will probably be the same. ~~~ landryraccoon I apologize for characterizing you a certain way. The viewpoint I was "painting you into a corner" on is unfortunately imo super common on HN. I think you have a contradiction in your viewpoint though. On one hand you say that human desires are unlimited, and on the other hand you say that if you tax robot productivity by 10% that means that the owners can't sell the other 90%. How is it possible that nobody needs the other 90% if human wants are unlimited? What I'm saying is that basic human needs are NOT unlimited. A human being is an animal that needs a certain amount of food, clothing, and shelter to stay alive. And furthermore, in the world we live in today, not every human being gets all the food, clothing and shelter necessary to survive. That's an empirical physical fact of reality. What I'm proposing is that the 10% surplus would be sufficient to provide for these needs, NOT for everything that anyone's heart could desire. Now it's possible that in a Star Trek future, the robots could even produce 100x what every human being needs to stay alive. In that case, you could give every human being 10x what they need and still have a 90% surplus. And because as you pointed out, human wants are unlimited, the owners of the robots will still be able to sell the 90% surplus. BTW, I don't actually believe this is practical to implement today. So I wouldn't advocate this level of massive redistribution. However, in a hypothetical super productive future society, I might. P.S. If you want to hear my reason why this society ISNT as good as it sounds (which has nothing to do with taxes or the morality of redistribution) see my post here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7255952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7255952) ~~~ msandford Thanks for arguing like an adult. It's greatly appreciated. I do agree that I have a contradiction in my argument; you're spot on. I'm going to chalk that up to not fully explaining things. The first gallon of water per day I REALLY NEED to drink. The next I'd really, really like to have to brush my teeth and wash a bit. The next 5 gallons I still really want for washing and cooking. The next 20 are for bathing and laundry. The next hundred don't do me anywhere near as much good and eventually the utility I get from an additional gallon of water goes below the $0.01 per gallon that I pay my utility, so I don't use more. This kind of decreasing marginal value happens everywhere in the economy. For a lot of things (like energy) the demand is nearly flat but for large portions of the economy the demand is highly nonlinear. In other words, doubling the price might reduce consumption by 80% or more. In those situations if you take the first marginally very valuable portion of the production away from the factory owners they have to raise prices on the rest to recoup their losses. But the increased prices bring volume down, which could potentially increase prices again. I am sure that there are some situations where the 10% surplus really would be enough to provide for everyone's basic needs (however the hell you define that) and not totally fuck over the factory/robot owners. But there will also be large swaths of the economy where you can't. I do think taxes are fundamentally immoral because I can't get past the theft- like nature of "pay the taxes or you'll go to jail" but I'm pragmatic and understand that taxes are better than a completely uneducated populace. And honestly I'd be much happier with a world where taxes were only 10% in total rather than the 20%-40% that they are now. I just don't think you can feed, clothe, shelter, etc the whole world on 10% of total production. It would be great and I'd love to live in that world but I really feel like there's something that would prevent it; I can't put my finger on it but I'm pretty sure it's there. ~~~ landryraccoon Well we're debating a totally hypothetical situation. The premise to begin with is that we're talking about a far future post scarcity society. If you want to say that's implausible, sure, I might agree with you, but that's not the issue. As far as the theft like nature of taxes, we'll just have to agree to disagree. The concept of theft in and of itself only exists in the context of a society where laws exist and are enforced. That society can only exist with taxes. In the jungle, there's only what you can carry and what you can protect, and what stronger people want to take from you. But I can't say more without understanding where you get your morality from. If you get your understanding of morality from religion for example, most major religions justify allowing the government or head of state to use force to sustain that government. P.S. As far as the marginal value of goods; yes I think you are right in that if you took 10% of each good (like fresh water) and distributed it that way it would probably cause huge economic problems. My guess is that any workable way of implementing this tax would be more complex and progressive, much like our current tax system doesn't tax everything equally. For example, luxuries would probably be taxed more, and basic necessities such as water would probably be taxed less. I have no idea what the details of such a system would be, it would probably take a lot of thought to work out what would make sense. ~~~ msandford Part of my hesitance to be persuaded that a Star Trek economy could possibly work is that in some senses it already has. In the 1850s 90% of the people in the US were farmers. Around 1900 that number shrank to 30% and today it now stands at about 3% so farmers can now grow 30x as much food as they used to be able to. But even given a 3000% increase in productivity there are still people starving in the world. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/) Why is that? Well part of it is that making a single farmer 30x as productive involves a LOT more capital. You need tractors, plows, planters, sprayers, combines, and somewhere to store it all. You also need a lot of fuel to make everything go and maintenance to keep it all working. Worse, most of these items can't be co-oped between farmers because they'll all need them at the same time. It's not uncommon for a farmers to have several hundred thousand to several million dollars worth of equipment. In response to the complexities you've mentioned I think that's the whole of the problem; implementation. The technology exists to feed the whole world at least twice over and probably a lot more. It's not being done in part because of logistics (getting the food there isn't trivial), but primarily because of the political and economic issues. How do we decide who pays for it? I can't see human nature changing, you know? I guess maybe I have a hard time accepting the premise that somehow the world will get to a place where you can work for a couple of days and live on that for a year. ------ kijin > _If it were, the credit would be too much like money because a) accounting > is done in it, b) it is issued by a governing body (like a fiat currency) > and c) it is fungible, i.e. you can already buy things with it and if you > could buy things with it AND a and b were true, it would pretty much be a > currency._ By that reasoning, the Joule is the currency of the Federation. a) The article already supposes that "the accounting is done in energy units", so a) is satisfied. b) Energy isn't exactly "issued" by a government. But neither is gold, and this hasn't prevented gold from being money through most of human history. c) Finally, energy is fungible, especially if you have replicators. 1KWh of electricity in your battery is as good as any other 1KWh of electricity. It doesn't matter whether the people who live in the Star Trek universe actually call it "money" or not. If it walks like money and quacks like money, it is money. And once there's technology to convert anything to and from energy relatively easily, a Joule does sound like a good candidate for a universally accepted unit of value. An alien species might not give a damn about some shiny yellow metal, but they need good ol' Joules just as much as we do. ~~~ dkuntz2 The Joule is basically the currency of the Federation. While most of the time in the Federation people don't use currency and get what they need/want, in Voyager because there suddenly was scarcity again they implemented replicator rationing. ~~~ talmand I wasn't the biggest fan of Voyager, I saw episodes here and there so maybe someone can explain this idea to me. I saw a few of the episodes where they described the rationing of replicator usage due to some shortage of something. I never understood this as the replicators are described as transforming a base material into near anything a person asks for which required energy to perform this task. The ship was the source of the energy and canon suggests that as long as the systems were working properly there was an over-abundance of energy available for use. Granted it wouldn't be a good idea to ask for a cup of tea while the ship had full shields engaged with constant phasers firing during a battle. But during normal warp hops there shouldn't be a problem. If the power system was having problems then it stands to reason that going to warp wouldn't work as it required an immense amount of energy to accomplish. Which is the reason for the massive power system in the first place. It couldn't be a shortage of base material because just about anything could be used and the ships took advantage of a massive recycling effort that almost everything discarded was transformed back into the base material that was stored on the ship. It would be easy to replace if need be so it had to be an energy shortage of some type. I always felt the replicator rationing was just a writer's way to excuse Neelix suddenly becoming a cook on the ship for additional storylines. It didn't make sense to me. So, what was the rationale behind the replicator rationing? Did it even make sense? To be fair, I had lots of problems with Voyager which is apparently why I never cared for it. I probably just couldn't get into the spirit of things to enjoy the show as envisioned. ~~~ Jack000 possible explanations \- not sure about the over-abundance of energy. I remember several episodes where energy shortage was a plot point. It's also possible that assembling matter atom-by-atom takes a non-trivial amount of energy compared to warp travel. \- I also thought the replicators did have certain limitations - eg. you can't replicate living beings. If the "resolution" was limited at the atomic level, you would still need a certain amount of hydrogen and oxygen to replicate water. ~~~ talmand I agree, energy problems were plot points, but they were often connected to equipment malfunctions as well. If replicators were a non-trivial amount of energy as compared to warp drive they wouldn't allow such frivolous use of it constantly on the ship, every hour of every day. Replicators can replicate nearly anything except very specific complex materials. The limitations they have is in the amount of energy required to create the object and whatever items they are restricted from creating. So the replicators in rooms only have access to enough energy to create typical items you might need your room. Although I believe they can create weapons as well but that would be restricted if your restricted to your quarters due to misconduct. If you require bigger and/or more complex items there are one or more locations on the ship that function as "shops" were you can obtain such items. Plus there's a theory that hasn't been shown anywhere that I'm aware of is that there are large replicators on ships that are capable of creating parts for the ship which would make sense. Star ships would be created with very large part replicators located at orbiting ship yards. Not large enough replicator nor energy source to just create an entire ship from a replicator. You could replicate a living being because that's the same technology used in the transporters. Beaming down to a planet and back means they replicated you twice. It's just that I would imagine there would sever restrictions on replicating living things for various reasons (ethically, legally, and for safety) and is only allowed via transporters with trained personnel. There could be a discussion over what the "characters" inside the holodeck actually are as they are most likely created with the same technology and have been shown to become self-aware. There have been suggestions that these "characters" are in fact real people but as far as I know they never directly addressed exactly what they are in terms of "living beings" or not. Other suggestions from the show suggest they could be projections and contact with them is handled via clever uses of shield technology but I'd like to know how they simulate the feeling of warm skin with shields. It would mean Riker is always kissing moving force fields, which I wouldn't put past him. ------ dbcooper The Volokh Conspiracy post, How Federal is Star Trek's Federation?, was probably the best thing I've read on Trek's political economy. [http://www.volokh.com/posts/1190182117.shtml](http://www.volokh.com/posts/1190182117.shtml) ~~~ ItendToDisagree Great link! One thing that always bothered me about The Federation was how they treated certain worlds and members. Recall the TNG episode Journey's End where the Enterprise is sent to remove what amounted to some 'Space Native Americans' from a planet the Federation had given to Cardassians in a treaty. The inhabitants in question were members of the Federation (with all the rights that was supposed to confer) but they were (going to be) forced off the planet. The only way they could stay on their planet was to give in to the treaty and make themselves inhabitants of what was then a Cardassian planet (and arguably Cardassian property). Then there is the TNG movie Insurrection. Where a group of settlers who are _not_ Federation citizens were going to be transported off of their planet against their will. But Picard decides that they deserve to stay on the planet so the Enterprise destroys the Federation/alien ships that were sent to do the relocation (among other things and aliens). So why is it the Federation wont fight for actual Federation members, but they will fight for some random civilization because of 'reasons'? Ok I'm done with my Star Trek rant and feel like a terrible nerd now. Thank you for letting me vent and for the link. Nerd gland expressed. Edit: For a laugh Google the Red Letter Media Harry Plinket review of Insurrection which goes deeper into this. ~~~ dkuntz2 To be fair, the planet in _Journey 's End_ wasn't a full member but a colony world, which means they don't have the same rights as a full member. Plus, I think they just settled on that planet which would mean the planet isn't under Federation jurisdiction, just the citizenry (provided they're Fed citizens). Additionally, the Cardies have either a similar or better military compared to the Federation, and the treaty helped prevent full out war (that later showed up, but in the form of the Dominion War). Giving up a few planets with small populations doesn't seem all that bad for stopping what could've been the largest war in the quadrant. As for _Insurrection_ , it's commonly accepted that Dougherty was working alone, without the support of the rest of Starfleet or the Federation. It's not implausible, considering he was an admiral and could very easily order ships places without much questioning. The Son'a are nowhere near as advanced as the Cardassians, the Federation could easily take them if they tried to start something. ~~~ philwelch It was never firmly established that the Cardassians alone were a match for the Federation (much less so if the Klingons were involved). If they were, Captain Jellico's aggressive negotiations in "Chain of Command" wouldn't have worked. It's more a question of the Federation bending over backwards to avoid conflict. In Insurrection, it's established that the rejuvenating radiation from the planet made the crew feel more youthful and fighty. ------ nhaehnle An interesting read, but there is one paragraph in particular that sounds a bit like an elaborate troll. Take a look at this: _The most notable is participatory economics, or parecon. This is a worthwhile attempt, I think, but to me it doesn’t quite pass the smell test of being sufficiently un-communist, what with its workers councils and lack of any sort of ruling class. All very un-American, [...]_ Did the author just imply that they are _in favor_ of having a ruling class? Then, just after that: _When you start thinking this way you start getting into the dodgy world of heterodox economics and, well, that’s a world of a lot of crackpots. Some good ideas, sure, but a lot of crackpots, and more to the point, it’s a world devoid of empirical research, which is a serious problem._ Uh yeah, go talk to a real heterodox economist, and they will explain to you how a lack of listening to real world data is actually the core problem of orthodox economics. By the way: What's lacking in the initial brief discussion of alternative economic system is that aside from capitalism (i.e., firms are privately owned, compete in the market) and centrally planned communism (i.e., firms are state-owned and follow a central plan) there are also variants of market socialism (i.e., firms are typically state-owned and compete in the market). ~~~ rickwebb Original author here: 1) No trolling, just sarcasm. Not a comment on my personal beliefs, more along the lines of "wouldn't wash with a bunch of American TV writers during the cold war." I hope it's pretty clear that someone who wrote this isn't so into a "ruling class"! 2) Okay that one _might_ have been a bit of a troll. There is some good heteroeconomics out there. Including, this, I hope. ;) But yeah. The goal here was to paint a way to the future without getting bogged down in that world. ~~~ notahacker I thought you were trolling when you cited parecon as an example of heterodox economics that was actually good. "Democratically" achieved job rotation to ensure everyone does an equal share of "empowering" and "disempowering" work? _Really?_ ------ mempko The way people talk about socialism and communism in the west show the sad state of our education system. communism is already a big part of our lives. When you sit at the dinner table and ask for the salt, you get it. When are at work and you ask for a code review and the person gives it to you. If the need is great enough, or the obstacles to ability are small enough, people do things. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Our economy is firmly based on communist actions and the capitalists exploit this. but the way that people talk about communism, as a centrally planned economy, shows great ignorance of both the literature and a blindedness to "already occurring communism" ~~~ a-priori The similarities between how people act within a firm (where a 'firm' is basically any sort of corporation, partnership, or similar economic entity) and within an ideal communist society are not a coincidence: a communist society is essentially just one very large firm. (Aside: The core problem with communism is that a nation much larger than the optimal firm size. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_optimal_firm_size](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_optimal_firm_size)) But I think it shows a gross misunderstanding of both capitalism and communism to say something like _" Our economy is firmly based on communist actions and the capitalists exploit this"_. It's not. Both concepts are very modern inventions, and the psychology of how people act within a firm (regardless of its size) is based on how people act within family units and bands: based on working towards shared goals and loose sense of reciprocity. It's not a coincidence that money is not normally used between family members: people don't normally buy things off their family, but receive them as gifts/favours and then are expected to give similar value gifts/favours in the future (a gift economy). That's the psychology that the firm re-uses, and it predates both capitalism and communism. ~~~ saraid216 > a communist society is essentially just one very large firm. This is my favorite discussion of the topic so far: [http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or- what-d...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we- need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into- todays-corporate-world/) ------ bayesianhorse I wouldn't use Star Trek as a canon for post-scarcity economics, it's more like an inspiration. In fact we are seeing the elements of the vocational aspects already: Look at all the Bloggers, the Kickstarters, Youtubers, Justin Bieber at the start of his "career". Aren't they essentially taking a ton of infrastructure and a weird "diffusive" sort of income already? Joseph Sisko's restaurant in our terms might be more like a kind of hobby rather than a serious economic enterprise. The guests might not pay anything at all, it's just that owner and guests do this because they enjoy making food and eating food, rather than eating from a replicator. You just don't see all the shitty restaurants noone ever goes to... ------ sabbatic13 Umm, documentary fallacy much? That and pretending like hundreds of scripts written by dozens of hands somehow cohere. Oh, yes, and that thing about people not living according to economic theories, but having societies and cultures, only a slice of which economic theories try to capture. And while I'm at it, the fact that economic theories float above the actual behavior of humans and only thinly capture what they are up to, while floating below any serious philosophy that explain why people should or do anything in the first place. ------ gress It's worth emphasising that a great deal of work in unnecessary for improving net happiness and consumes resources in the process and so undermines long term prosperity. ~~~ patio11 A heretical thought I have had about Star Trek: the Federation has no need for Star Fleet. They're fantastically wealthy and cannot meaningfully gain from trade in physical items. They're not just singularity-esque wealthy relative to the present-day US, they're equally more secure. Nobody kills mass numbers of Federation citizens. That occasionally happens on poor planets elsewhere. Sucks but hey poverty sucks. So why have a Star Fleet? Because Jean Luc Picard is a Federation citizen, and he wouldn't be happy as other than a starship captain. It's a galaxy-spanning Potempkin village to make him happy. Why would they do that? You're thinking like a poor person. Think like an _unfathomably_ rich person. They do it _because they can afford to_. He might have had a cheaper hobby, like say watching classic TV shows, but the Federation is so wealthy that Starfleet and a TV set both round to zero. This makes Star Fleet officers into in-universe Trekkies: a peculiar subculture of the Federation who are tolerated because despite their quirky hobbies and dress they're mostly harmless. Of course if you're immersed in the subculture, Picard looks like something of a big shot. We get that impression only because the camera is in the subculture, not in the wider Federation, which cares about the Final Frontier in the same way that the United States cares about the monarch butterfly: "We probably have somebody working on that, right? Bright postdoc somewhere? Good, good." ~~~ kybernetikos > Because Jean Luc Picard is a Federation citizen, and he wouldn't be happy as > other than a starship captain. There are strong hints in Iain M Banks' Culture series that a significant portion of the mission of Contact and Special Circumstances is giving humans with a pathological need for conflict and excitement something to do to keep them happy. ~~~ patio11 Thanks for this recommendation -- I'm a quarter of the way into the first book now and mostly enjoying it. ~~~ arethuza If you are just reading _Consider Phlebas_ then that means you still have the awesome _Use of Weapons_ to go... I'm jealous! ------ thaumaturgy So, economic models are more or less based on, or at least constrained by, human psychology, right? Communism and socialism don't work because peoples' brains aren't wired to do lots of work for little or no or unequal reward. This isn't restricted to just people, either, it's been observed in monkeys ([http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0917_030917_...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0917_030917_monkeyfairness.html), [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKhAd0Tyny0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKhAd0Tyny0) \-- it's a short video and pretty hilarious, worth a watch). At the same time, capitalism has serious flaws, also exploited by human psychology. Capitalism rewards not just work and the investment of capital but also greed and cheating. So, when looking for a new economic model, why not go back to psychology? Is it really true that _most_ people don't want to work? There are some people who are content to receive a small stipend and spend their lives jut getting by without doing very much, but does that describe enough people to cause the collapse of a strong welfare society? I think we probably are headed towards a post-scarcity (or low-scarcity) economy. Food costs as percentage of income in the U.S. have fallen quite a bit just in the last thirty years ([http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-28/americas- shr...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-28/americas-shrinking- grocery-bill)). People are already going to find that it takes less real effort to survive ([http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21596529...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21596529-americas-labour-market-has-suffered-permanent-harm-closing- gap), posted earlier to HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7235810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7235810)). A different economic model seems inevitable. Likewise, there will probably always be jobs that people don't want to do. Take oil rig work for example: hard, dangerous work, and it pays well, starting at the U.S. median wage for unskilled, inexperienced labor ([http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/10/news/economy/oil_workers/](http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/10/news/economy/oil_workers/)) and going up from there. As long as demand for this labor doesn't fall, if the available labor pool continues to shrink, those jobs should net greater incomes. Maybe we'll see an economy, not quite like Star Trek's, but with a large leisure class and a well-paid class of plumbers, construction workers, mechanics, and technicians. That would be kinda neat. ~~~ WalterBright > Capitalism rewards not just work and the investment of capital but also > greed and cheating. That implies that socialism and communism do not reward greed and cheating, which is hard to believe. ~~~ simonh In fact by concentrating strict monopolies on political, military, judicial and economic power in a narrow party elite, it pretty much guarantees it will be rewarded. I realize Communism and Socialism as abstract principles don't require this, but that seems to be the way it works out as they have been put into practice historically by actual Communists and Socialists. There's nothing about capitalism that demands that monopolies of any kind should or must be allowed. This is a subject of much debate of course, since there is no single authority about what Capitalism is. It's not really an ideology in that sense. However if we take Adam Smith as playing the role for Capitalism that Marx plays for Communism, Smith was very much aware the markets must be very carefully regulated in order to protect the common good. Unfortunately Marx was, shall we say, considerably more utopian about how Communism would inevitably emerge and self-regulate itself. ~~~ jbooth "There's nothing about capitalism that demands that monopolies of any kind should or must be allowed." It depends on what you mean by capitalism. If by capitalism, you mean a market-based economy, like that adam smith guy, then yeah, we should have anti-trust laws to guard against private anti-competitive behavior. If you mean lack of government interference at all costs (which is more a political program than an economic program, really), then no, monopolies and/or cartels will actually be the end state of many industries if you don't have laws preventing that behavior. ------ terranstyler Post-scarcity economics sounds to me like post-human anthropology or post- matter physics, i.e. economics is by definition science on "managing" scarcity. No scarcity, no trade, no economics. Honestly, capitalism would be a good system if we had just one example. Closest example is maybe Hongkong or Singapure, see [http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking](http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking) ~~~ pbhjpbhj > _capitalism would be a good system_ // The reason we have overlays on capitalistic systems seems to me to be because capitalism values the masses [people] at approaching zero, except where slavery/soylent green/organ harvesting and such is allowed. Scenario: Humanland has a dearth of population who're not adding culturally or through labour to their pure capitalist economy - if they kill them and use them for animal feed they will both add resources and reduce outputs. Under capitalism, why not? Capitalism starts with financial wealth and aims to increase it through competition. Communism starts with human society and aims to support its needs through cooperation. The later always seems to be far more reasonable to me. You intimate [I think this is what you're saying] that there has never been a capitalist economy and that this would be best - absolute market freedom - I'd like to see a communist society that didn't degrade in to a dictatorship. In recent historical economic systems it seems this pithy aphorism is apposite: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." (J K Galbraith, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith)) ------ DanielBMarkham Capitalism isn't a model that we try on, like we would try on a new set of pants. Capitalism is just trading stuff. Capitalism drove the accumulation of things easily tradeable, which then, by convention, we started calling money. You can add all sorts of _political_ systems on top of capitalism, but it never goes away. The only thing you end up doing is hurting people. I liked this article because it's an example of fiction learning from reality, then scientists trying to learn from fiction. There's a wonderful feedback loop at work between fiction and science that's neat to watch. But this post-scarcity nonsense is tripe. I trade with you, not only because I need to eat or have shelter, but because _you have something I want._ And I have something you want. It is our _desires_ that cause the trade, nothing else. And I don't want to live in a world where humans stop wanting stuff. Sounds horribly stagnant and/or medicated. So I liked the writing style, loved the theme, and kudos to the author for having such a good grasp of Trek lore. But from a rational-thinking standpoint, this guy ain't hitting on much. The quality of analysis itself is what's missing. ------ calroc I've been saying for years now that Star Trek forms the best commonly-known model for what future "economics" will be like. It's really awesome to read a well-thought-out treatment of that idea. Some points in no particular order: * In the limit of nanotechnology and fusion power we can produce anything (physical.) This forces us to confront our essential challenge which is the development of good character. All forms of government are attempts to manage human wickedness. Corollary: it very nearly doesn't matter what form of government obtains if the people in that government are _virtuous_. * Permaculture (modelling agricultural systems on natural ecologies) is a non-technological mode of abundance. * Communism: The Smurfs. * It seems to me that the "natural" economic system varies with personal "distance". Broadly: immediate family/friends -> communistic; (Are the Amish commies? No.) neighbors -> barter / reciprocal gift-giving; strangers -> capitalism. * If there is something to that last point then as the Internet shrinks personal distance we should expect a general trend from impersonal capitalistic forms to more personal "altruistic" forms (Gittip, etc...) * As technology advances we are forced to become unwilling to "solve problems with bullets". If you are willing (for _any_ reason) to commit violence you will perforce be kept from the really potent weapons. Already so-called "psych-ops" have become the cutting edge (no pun intended) of warfare: eliminate the enemy's _desire_ to fight. It is only a matter of time before hippy-dippy shit becomes the obvious counter to hostilities by the intrinsic logic of warfare itself. ("Men Who Stare at Goats" is a documentary.) ------ jedmeyers What are those "we" the author keeps talking about? \- "we" actually have the capacity \- "we" don't have the will I have the will but don't have the capacity. I am assuming that author also has the will. So, again, who are those "we" that don't have the will? And how is the author planning to make them to go against their will to not have the will? ~~~ hitchhiker999 I assume this is a 'thought piece' \- it is designed to foster discussion. I don't think the author is suggesting a force against any will. The 'we' refers to his understanding of the collective '?consciousness?' subjectively observed in his surroundings. ------ oelmekki I like the exercise and the thoughts developed, but all of it is based on the fact that a post-scarcity state is happening. This is very XIXth century like : "science will abolish work !". A proof of post-scarcity happening presented is the amount of obesity in US. Let just pretend obesity is just a problem of having too much food, and not at all a problem of bad nutrition or genetics. The fact still remains that while there are a lot of obesity in usa, there still have a lot of hunger in other parts of the world. Could not it be just a repartition problem rather than abundance ? There's an other sign that could lead to think we're indeed not at the edge of post-scarcity. Currently, many previously called poor countries are getting wealthier. What do we observe in previously called rich countries ? Economical crisis hitting harder and harder. That may not be a coincidence. ~~~ 001sky Scarcity is rooted in social rank, it is a (by) product of psychology, and politics, not strictly speaking economics. Someone has to have the corner office, date the homecoming queen, and be the ranking executive. This is true outside of markets...just look at...firms. That's the unfortunate dead-end of this type of thought experiment. Although, I otherwise applaud its _focus_ on interesting phenomenon. Because in many ways the ~premise is likely true: we can feed, cloth and shelter the world with only a small subset of working primates doing the "work". What we can't do...is give everyone the best house in the neighborhood, the choicest cuts of meats, and the most attractive partners. But that latter bit of ~scarcity is true...logically. Empirically it is an observation independent of the the proposed explanatory variable (economic system X^). Its not the x^, but the physics of life that creates scarcity. At least when sociological factors are considered.[1] Edit: [1] See, for example, the notion of 'hedonic adaptation'. Evidence of this also exists as ~shadow 'fairness' principles, in non-human primates, and also observable in domesticated canines. ~~~ tomp > What we can't do...is give everyone the best house in the neighborhood I think that we can, because land is plentiful, and construction can soon be automated. True, not everyone will be able to live in city centres, but given that most people come to the cities only for work, if there is no need to work, many would probably prefer to live in villages and close to nature. ~~~ chii the guy whose house is next to a beautiful lake, or a nice beach will look the best compared with everyone else. It's true that there will be someone who's gotten the best. ------ teddyh This should be read in the context of the grand-daddy of such posts, _The Economics of Star Trek_ ([http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek- Marxism.html](http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html)), written back in _2000_. ------ powertower > But we actually have the capacity to feed them, to feed everyone, even now, > even if we don’t have the will. Careful, having the capacity to do something does not mean you should do it. An excellent way to grow a starving population from 80MM people to 800MM people in about 80 years is to feed them (these numbers aren't made up). Then all you have to do is just feed their children, and their children, and their children, until that population hits some type of a pivotal point where everything becomes great, they become independant, responsible, have a self- sustaining economy, government, start having only 1.4 children, etc. The chances of it all going horribly wrong is very high, but why not balloon the population of the world, and have all those new soles competing over limited resources. ~~~ philwelch [http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=myth- three](http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=myth-three) ~~~ powertower So all we have to do to prevent the population booms by feeding the poor of the world is to provide them education, housing, clean water, healthcare, a good government, and about 12 other things (while praying hard to make sure they don't get dependant on that outside help)? And then after the initial exponential population run-up (which happens anyways), it will all level out in the end (with lower birth-rates). Seems kind of like the counter-argument is avoiding the issue at hand by re- framing it in terms of future birth-rates (instead of accepting the immediate reality). ~~~ jotm Well, if you do provide all that, it would be smart to create a better integration along the way, so it stops being 'outside help'... ------ loahou04 Human greed pretty much takes over. Social pressures won't work because people will always want to "keep up with the jones" or show off what they have done. The only way you could have post scarcity is if everything and anything in the living reality could be created, which of course is just highly improbable if not impossible due to the emotional nature of our species as well as differences in individual needs and wants (I.e. Not everyone can fall in love and be married or be just as popular or be just as good I sports). Personally, I don't think there is a reason we can't have a better welfare system, I just don't think we should care about those who do not contribute to society. If all people in Star Trek are now in it for the bettering of the human race than that would mean not a single person is thinking of themselves, which much like greed, is a natural human state of mind. Do we know what/who is going to better society, no we don't. However, with capitalism people democratically choose what does and doesn't. To have government subsidize specific items/ideas we leave capitalism and start having a centrally governed panel who picks the winners, or at least subsidizes them. Let the free hand of capitalism decide who can contribute the most to society and let the people also decide who much they should be rewarded. If anything it's not economics that needs to be changed, rather the human psychology that needs to be reformed. ~~~ robryan The problem emerges though where there is absolutely nothing of value left, or at least minimum living standard value, left for a large group of people to do. No mater how willing these people are there is going to be very little movement up as all the positions of value are covered. What becomes of these people? ------ tian2992 I liked the overarching idea, however the author proves himself ignorant of the basic economic ideas and concepts. The main keys of communism-socialism are the redistribution of the surplus value and the control of the means of production. Even private ownership of the land is not a requirement, even more so in a highly developed society, where land is no longer a resource highly sought to produce. I'd suggest the writer reads his Marx and Engels, and even some Adam Smith before venturing into writing on topics like this. ------ dec0dedab0de I just wanted to chime in that his link that says _We have capitalism, of course, the proverbial worst model except for every other one_ actually points to [http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChu...](http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChurchill%28090503%29.html) which is about democracy. Democracy and Capitalism are not the same thing. That is all. ------ dredmorbius The fundamental problem with any post-scarcity economy is that it presumes a world in which resources aren't fundamentally constrained. It's been argued that this is in fact one of the limitations of orthodox / neoclassical economics, in that it assumes that unlimited growth it possible. That's a view that's championed, interestingly, by both the far Left (Marxist and Socialist economists) and the Right (business lobbies, various cornucopian ideologues, putatively much of the Koch-backed propogandasphere, and their Libertarian sycophants). Curious bedfellows. I've only recently run across an essay of Garrett Hardin's (of "Tragedy of the Commons" and "Lifeboat Ethics", with whom I've long been acquainted), "The Feast of Malthus" ([http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/feast_of_ma...](http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/feast_of_malthus.pdf)) which explores this idea further. He notes specifically: _I think that a single overarching view accounts for these and many other invectives put forward by Marxists and liberals during the past century and a half: this is the tightly held denial of limits in the supply of terrestrial resources. Friedrich Engels, Marx 's collaborator and financial supporter, asserted baldly that "The productivity of the land can be infinitely increased by the application of capital, labour and science."_ Much of the essay continues on to discuss population. The upshot being: you can accept unconstrained consumption (but limits on population), or unrestricted procreation, with severe restrictions on individual consumption. There is no universal freedom. ------ temuze I think the logical conclusion in post-scarcity economy is that more things will be determined as a basic human right. Consider "the right to privacy", "the right to a job" or the "right to healthcare". Less than a century ago, many of these rights didn't exist. Now, some people are saying access to the Internet is a basic human right! So here's my theory - in a society where technology advances so much that the basic needs of humans are met with the need of little human interaction, two things will occur: 1) More things will be determined as basic human rights. A certain baseline for wealth, even. 2) We will shift more and more to being a generation of artists. I believe an AI complete being that we create will never be able to replicate a fundamental understanding of being human. Books, plays, shows, art will be a human endeavor, for humans, by humans. I believe that some sort of social capitalism will exist, where the baseline is met and those who achieve great success through art (or rarely, science), will have the opportunity to create more wealth. ------ Shivetya The major problems with capitalism in Western economies is that the government regulations corrupt the process and create artificial scarcity. There are lot of areas where competition does not exist because regulatory hurdles prevent or discourage it. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, if not everywhere, game the system. The put in rules/roadblocks to help out favored groups which in turn damages the system. As for the planned economies, well we saw how well those worked. I know, I know, the people coming up with ideas now will of course do better than THOSE people. Yet that is the typical lack of hubris politicians always show, just like ACA - of course it will be better than how those other people did it because we are so smart. Keep telling me about the EU safety net and I will keep pointing out Greece and riots in other EU countries. Sorry but I tire of hearing about a safety net then reading how bad off some of these people are. Whats the point of a net when so many slip through or never had a chance to get caught. ------ stefanobaghino The article forgot to mention that in the Star Trek timeline things didn't go so smoothly: a third World War eventually occurred and only the invention of warp drive and the first contact with the Vulcans turned things around. But I think the point is another: for as much as I love Star Trek and advocate a smooth transition to a post-scarcity economy, I don't think Roddenberry and the writers that succeeded him are experts in currency, economics or even in the techologies that made that fictionary society a perfect post-scarcity economy. There are, however, some interesting thoughts that could serve as a basis for a more deep look into the post-scarcity economics. Organizations such as the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement tend to advocate it under the "resource-based economy" name and I find their views interesting, relatively to this topic. ------ firstOrder > we have the centrally planned systems of Communism and Marxism, not > particularly effective, as it turns out. Sure, China only has the second biggest economy in the world. Also for the USSR, once the civil war ended and the American soldiers and so forth had been kicked out, and Stalin gained political control - the economy had incredible growth. While the West was mired in Depression, Russia was going gangbusters building steel works and such. European and American workers went there to work, because there was work there and not the West. American companies went there as well as they were hiring contractors while American businesses were not. Russia's economy did very well under Stalin. People talk about the stagnation during the Brezhnev years, which is true, but they ignore the booming economy from the 1920s to the 1950s/1960s. ------ novalis78 It would be interesting to see how a complete planetary financial/economic system would look like that was built on top of the blockchain: [http://marscoin.org](http://marscoin.org) An early Mars colony would probably resemble organizationally a family/village but as soon as you get distinct locations that produce various raw materials and are run by different communities you'd probably have to fall back to facilitate free trading. It would be interesting to observe if the growing planetary GDP tied to a deflationary cryptocurreny would lead to similar boom and bust cycles as the 1870-1920s. On a planet that's close to the Asteroid belt with its resources that might lead to fascinating trading opportunities :-) ------ etler >The big challenge here is how does society get someone to do the menial jobs that cannot be done in an automated manner. Are there examples of menial jobs in the Star Trek universe? I would imagine by then there simply are no menial jobs. I'm not sure what menial job examples there are that can't be automated. The jobs left over are interesting jobs. I'd imagine the motivation to do so are on par with the same motivation to get a phd. Few people get phds solely to get better job prospects, but rather do it for personal enlightenment and passion. Also the same goes for the infinitely wealthy. If you accumulate billions of dollars and die donating those billions to charity, you weren't motivated solely to have more wealth, but something greater than that. ~~~ rasz_pl I dont remember seeing any robots (other than Data) on Star Trek. How do you propose to fix broken replicator? or a toilet? Best case scenario is you throw whole thing away and put a new one - now someone has to unbolt the old unit, get the new one out of storage, push it through half of the ship and mount it. ~~~ Nicholas_C Maybe things didn't break. I would assume everything in the Star Trek universe is super high quality and doesn't just break like things we have today. ~~~ philwelch Considering how busy everyone is in Engineering I find that unlikely. ------ vinceguidry I think the author overlooked a much more elegant solution to the problem of menial labor. People simply don't do it, except when they want to, and rely on automated / robotic solutions to do it for them. At some point, it will get far easier and cheaper to design and implement robotic maids than it will to convince a human to do anything resembling a good job at something people are bound to shit on him for. The economy will simply optimize all such tasks out of the system. Surfaces won't need more than the quickest of spot cleaning, people will get used to checking out their own groceries, they'll go get their own drink refills and clean off their own tables. ~~~ canvia If every item in the grocery store had an RFID type tag your whole cart could be scanned instantly. Load the items right into bags as you shop and you're good to go, no check out required. It would making performing inventory checks a lot easier too. ------ patrickphilips Reminded me of Krugman's Theory of Interstellar Trade ([http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf](http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf)) ------ landryraccoon Here's a problem with the post scarcity economy. There will be long lines everywhere. Let's suppose Sisko's restaurant is actually good. Now people want to eat there. There are two options: either Sisko raises the price until the number of people that can eat there matches the number of seats (supply and demand) OR there's a huge line outside the restaurant until the wait time is high enough that most people don't want to eat there anymore. Since there is no money in this hypothetical society, option #2 is the only possibility. And in fact, this is going to happen at every good restaurant in the Federation. The only restaurants without lines will be the ones that suck, and the length of the line will be exactly proportional to how desireable it is to eat there. Now you could say that there are tons of restaurants as good as Siskos. But unless human beings have radically changed and there are NO FOODIES whatsoever, there will be some restaurants that are better than others, and a significant fraction of people will prefer the better ones. And the absolute quality of the restaurants relative to today doesn't matter AT ALL - all that matters is that some are better than others. The only plausible reason for Siskos to not have a line is that it is at best an average place to eat. (I shudder to imagine how long the lines must be for the best restaurant in the Federation on Valentine's Day! I think a black market based on Latinum would emerge based just on that). So, one thing that the article doesn't realize is that the absolute amount of resources available is fairly tangential to the issue of money. The issue really is that people have differing preferences. Even in a society where nobody starves because you can produce an infinite amount of food, some people will want to eat at a nicer place. "Nicer" is always relative to what is commonly available so no matter how good the restaurants are, unless they are all equally good, there will be higher demand for the better ones. See, you don't get around this problem by making more of everything. Suppose the Macdonalds of the future is the quality of a three star michelin restaurant today. Some people will want to eat at the magical 4 star michelin restaurants, but there won't be enough of them to go around. So there will be a line, or a cost. ------ tiatia Scarcity was a problem, is a problem and always will be a problem: [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic- scale-e...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale- energy/) And sorry to break the news to you: A capitalistic system can not be run without growth and nobody has ever been able to show how it is possible to run a "steady-state" economy, The end is near. Enjoy the ride! ~~~ Xylakant > nobody has ever been able to show how it is possible to run a "steady-state" > economy This is a non-argument. Before money was created, nobody had been able to show that a non-barter economy would work. Or capitalism for that matter. The fact that nobody has so far has figured out a way to make it work doesn't mean anything. The only thing of interest would be conclusive proof that it's impossible. I'm fairly sure that at some point we need to move over to some sort of steady-state economy due to the scarcity problem [1]. I'm also fairly sure that the transition will happen in small steps and people will only notice afterwards. Some pieces are already being discussed and some have been tried, such as currencies with negative interest, basic income, ... [1] The only other option being mass extinction. That's a bit meh, I don't feel like being part of that. I'll rather choose Star Trek :) ~~~ tiatia Question: What is money? And something existed before "money" was "created". It was and is called "debt". ~~~ Xylakant There is a pretty well accepted definition of money: It's an object or record that's accepted as a form of payment, often with very little value in itself. Early forms of money included shells, for example. Coins are an evolution, printed bank notes as well. The precursor to money is barter: I trade 5 goats for one cow, that I can then trade for a horse. The money equivalent is that I sell 5 goats for 10 money that I can use to buy the horse. Debt is related to property and certainly related to money, since debts are nowadays kept track of in terms of money, but debt is not the precursor to money and certainly debt is not a requirement for a money-based system. It's like saying "before money was created, there were the sun, the moon and the stars". ~~~ tiatia "but debt is not the precursor to money' There are people that would disagree. Actually already 100 years ago: [http://www.ces.org.za/docs/The%20Credit%20Theoriy%20of%20Mon...](http://www.ces.org.za/docs/The%20Credit%20Theoriy%20of%20Money.htm) "and certainly debt is not a requirement for a money-based system." This is kind of true. You could run a trade based economy on pre 1750 level with' lets say gold or silver or sea shells as "money". But you CANT RUN A INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISTIC society without debt. At least nobody has ever been able to show that this is possible. We need growth, we need more energy. I am afraid this will not end well. Read the links I posted in this thread. ------ facepalm I'm not well versed in Star Trek, but it seems to me there is at least one limited resource: jobs as captains of star ship Enterprise, for instance. Another resource that will probably always be limited: attractive mates. I think that is a good example to think about when you think about Utopia. Of course plastic surgery will be free, too, as well as psychotherapy, so perhaps we all can be perfect mates, too. ------ Udo The fundamental take-away here is that old systems die, whether proponents of the old system believe it's possible or not. I think parallels can be drawn between a lot of articles written by people so deeply embedded in the status quo they literally can't fathom their pet concept might go away at some point in the future. And sure enough, this one is written by a venture capitalist. Of course, a post-scarcity world is inherently incomprehensible to people who are economists, in much the same way a rational world motivated by ethics is incomprehensible to a religious person. The first sign of this is vocabulary, they'll insist on a "post scarcity economy" or a "religion of science" respectively. While it's probably true that there will always be aspects of supply and demand, and it's likely also true that people will always believe in certain ideas, it's really questionable if these terms as they're being used still mean anything. These word choices are a subconscious expression of the perceived impossibility of an idea. For example, a world with (almost) no manual labor. Or a world where things are so abundant that for practical purposes of daily life there is no shortage of supply. When looking at Star Trek it's first and foremost important to keep in mind that these are stories intended to entertain. As such it's moot to try and incorporate every episode of every show into some kind of big common canon. The issue is not whether "Federation Credits" (must) exist, the trick here is to look at the broader concept presented. There are scientific indications that the general idea of the Star Trek "economy" is valid. When a civilization gets access to advanced robotics, the ability to mine entire star systems for resources, and advanced 3d printers, it generates a setting that pretty much speaks for itself. The interesting aspect here is that this state of affairs is very likely in the cards for humanity's future. Of course, there are extremely strong aspects of our society still prominent in Star Trek. This is grossly unrealistic, but probably necessary for storytelling purposes. For example, DS9 was really out of touch with the in- universe realities of manufacturing and labor, but it made for some pretty awesome stories. I believe in the future we have a choice to make when it comes to scarcity, and the battle lines are already drawn today. People who are invested in the status quo will not only tell everyone it's impossible but they will go to great lengths in keeping scarcity alive. Artificial scarcity perpetrated by big powerful players is already a big staple in today's system, and that's only going to get more audacious with growing technical capabilities. I think a good argument could be made that this will lead to horrific social and economic pathologies, and it probably already has. The big reason the alternatives are scary to a lot of people is not just because they fear a loss of traditional values and social cohesion. It's scary to them because this kind of future is inherently experimental and so far doesn't seem to yield itself to planning from on-high. This means there will most likely be a huge loss of power and influence in the turmoils ahead and it's going to be very difficult to port existing power structures to that new kind of society. Whether this fundamental transformation is even stoppable in the long run is an open question. There are certainly scenarios imaginable where we just stagnate instead of moving on. It's also not inconceivable that the human civilization might fracture and split up into different groups pursuing their own trajectories - and at least one of them might elect to keep scarcity alive indefinitely. ------ motters You don't need to speculate because there already is a model for post-scarcity economics in the form of free and open source software. The free software economy is more like an economy of attention or allegiance. It has sometimes been called a "doocracy" in that those folks who do things tend to get the most attention. ~~~ dkuntz2 A do-ocracy is just a form of governance. The economic system used in FOSS is similar to a gift economy. ------ blueskin_ Amazing article. Explained it roughly how I always assumed it as being, but far better than I ever could have. Also, interesting link from there on The Culture, another of my favourite scifi universes: [http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm](http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm) ------ squozzer My reading of history tells me the human hunger for wealth and power (what some call greed) would easily adjust to any increase in prosperity, no matter how large. And some materials would still be scarce. They could not replicate dilithium, it had to be mined. So like oil is today, such materials would become the new next of power. ------ skyshine I've recently gone public with a an economic system I've been developing that can bridge the gap between a free market and a post scarcity economy. [http://babblingbrook.net](http://babblingbrook.net) ------ Xdes How do you give everyone a basic income without leading to overpopulation? ~~~ Retric Don't give adjust the basic income for people with children and suddenly there is a huge disincentive to having kids. Play with the numbers until the population growth or shrinking balances out. ------ Tycho _In reality,the market already basically dictates this, for who can claim that a Wall Street banker works more than a teacher?_ Um... ------ johnrob There will always be scarcity; if not we'll keep making more humans until there is. ~~~ worldsayshi Yes there will be scarcity as long as there is demand for more. More of the basics like space and food/energy. If we stop reproducing and/or consuming to the point of scarcity by choice - then we will no longer have scarcity. It's not an impossible scenario. It has happened to some cultures. ------ bnolsen this is pointless. star trek describes no real society and ther are conyinuity holes everywhere from multiple series, writers and directors. a nice dream but in no way deployable. ------ sdegutis Very good points.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Fragmenting Linux is not the way to beat Apple - AndrewWarner http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-20004567-16.html ====== MikeCapone Interesting. So it's not "beat Microsoft" anymore. That must hurt in Redmond... ~~~ tzs Perhaps the idea is that if you can't beat Apple, then you can't beat something bigger either, such as Microsoft. ~~~ MikeCapone Right now I'd say that by many metrics, Apple is beating Microsoft. Its products are much hotter in the marketplace, its stock is doing better, and its products are considered better by most. ------ fierarul It's not like the whole industry is fighting Apple, they are all fighting for marketshare. I this the Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha is correct: > I've always felt that owning your OS is important, provided you have an > ecosystem, you have all the services and you have an ability and the scale > to execute on keeping that OS at the leading edge. And I continue to believe > that at some point, if we have all of those attributes, that owning our own > OS will be a very important thing. ------ Zak I don't think most of these vendors have any interest in mobile Linux in general beating Apple or anyone else. The vendors are interested in selling devices or software. HP/Palm is competing with Android as much as it is with Apple. ------ jacquesm Why should linux want to 'beat apple' ? Linux and Apple can co-exist, no need for the one to grow at the others expense. They're both unixes anyway, under the hood the similarities are much bigger than the differences. ~~~ ZeroGravitas More importantly, under the hood almost every one of the projects he mentioned are minor variations on plain linux and so already are co-operating in exactly the manner he proposes. WebOS is kind of famous for just being a vanilla linux underneath. Android is famous for the opposite, but it's already resubmitted the major point of contention to the main Linux kernel and apparently it will get merged this time. The fact that Canonical hired this guy is almost enough for me to jump ship to another distro. He's genuinely frightening in his pointy-headed boss-ness. ~~~ macco If you see it from the business side - the are all different plattforms. How many users know that they are using Linux on their mobile? But then again, what is the point of beating Apple? Do want to have more mobile Linux out there than Iphone OS - that is just a matter of time. Do you want to be the plattform that makes their users more happy - that is lot of work. Distros will really have to work together for this. Cheers ~~~ ZeroGravitas I would be astonished if there wasn't already (and probably always been) more "linux" phones than iPhones, it's used in all sorts of devices even nearer the low end. I agree that the platforms built on linux can be as different as Tivo and Joo Joo but this particular post is arguing that they should combine at the linux level, which they already have.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Now THIS Is Entrepreneurial Hustle - with Jennifer Reuting - Gabriel_Martin http://mixergy.com/jennifer-reuting-myllc-interview/ ====== tians watched this on mixergy	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
SVGjs 3.0 Advent Calendar – Day 18 - fuzzyma https://codepen.io/fuzzyma/pen/wRzjXo ====== fuzzyma You can find the whole calendar at twitter (@svg_js): [https://twitter.com/svg_js](https://twitter.com/svg_js)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why James Baldwin Still Matters - samclemens http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/04/why-james-baldwin-still-matters ====== habosa I recently read my first two Baldwin books (Go Tell It On The Mountain and The Fire Next Time) and in both cases I was blown away by the completeness of his treatment of racism at a time when black people were fighting for much more basic civil rights. I also recently read some of the popular modern books about race in America (Between The World and Me, The New Jim Crow, etc) and I found Baldwin just as essential to understanding the world in 2016. Particularly with 'The Fire Next Time', I felt the book achieved its goals perfectly. ~~~ RodericDay I haven't read Baldwin, so maybe this comment sells him short, but virtually every time I venture to read pieces american literature written by black people, be it Malcolm X's autobiography, or Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, or Martin Luther King's writings such as "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", or any book about the Black Panthers, I come away with the impression that media as a whole somehow really undersells and sanitizes the depth of the struggle and the imagination of their leaders in a way similar to Thanksgiving Dinners. Every single one of those people was saying things back in their day that are still relevant today, in a way that feels indicting of the progress made thus far. ~~~ astazangasta The Fire Next Time still exactly describes the experience of black America as far as I can tell. I think, actually, we went backwards in many ways, from where we were in the 70s and 80s. ------ rtpg There's a really interesting debate between Baldwin and William Buckley up on youtube. Riviting stuff: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFeoS41xe7w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFeoS41xe7w) ~~~ vanderZwan Wow, knowing nothing about Baldwin until just now I did not expect it to be _that_ good; I don't think I have ever seen such an amazing and convincing speech. Naturally, I searched the internet to learn more about it, found this essay: [https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/education-oronte- churm/...](https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/education-oronte-churm/why- james-baldwin-beat-william-f-buckley-debate-540-160#sthash.yIMydUUV.dpbs) ------ SilverFear His writing is gold but most impressively his boldness in the Era he lived in. ~~~ NDT Did you create an account just to post this ;)? ~~~ gumby perhaps he or she was _inspired_ to create an account by this submission! ------ scandox The Fire Next Time - a book everyone should make time for. Short. Brilliant. Until I read I never grasped the utter lack of integrity in the world around me. ------ draw_down Huge fan of Baldwin but this is a strangely titled piece. It's mostly reminiscences of what Baldwin meant to the author personally.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Modern Programming Operating System - rays http://slakinski.com/a-modern-programming-operating-system/ ====== hakaaaaak Any modern operating system that allows open development fits the bill. I think what the OP is saying is that he would settle for having it run on top of Linux, but I'd bet that he wants the core written as (or even interpreted by) a Python interpreter, so that everything from drivers to applications could be written in Python. Wouldn't we all? I've been wanting the same for Ruby, which I think is superior to Python in its syntax, clarity, and readability. I'd settle for a Ruby interpreter in every browser. However, first, I'd like to see Firefox OS succeed. The idea behind it is better: take the most well-used web development language (client-side) and make it also the same language for writing applications (client-side). The only things missing are being able to write lower-level drivers using Javascript (not just having to hack atop Android) and for all of the server (not just Node) to be Javascript. There is a reason that what is usually used to write OS's is basically C (or some variation), though. C is an intelligible and useful language that can be portable across architectures. C, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Java, etc. are all very similar when compared with assembly or machine code. C has the advantage of allowing more flexibility in memory management. So, I just don't see Python as an language used to develop an OS. As for whether it makes sense to develop the appearance of everything being in Python so that kids can hack it up: you'd be better off introducing them to Scratch, Lego Mindstorms, the Arduino and have them participate in Science Olympiads. There is no modern equivalent of what we grew up with. ------ zokier Instead of vanilla Python shell, I'd use IPython instead. It has all the run/save/load stuff you mention, and tons of other things to make Python nicer to use interactively. IPython also has Qt-based console, which has the ability to display rich content inline. I think the ability to interact with graphical subsystems is important, look at C64 demoscene to see what idle kids can do with even with primitive graphics system. ~~~ tehwalrus booting into an IPython QT shell in full screen, with a custom help message explaining how to save hunks of code to file, would be great. Being able to Alt+Tab to a browser (even one pointing at a local copy of the python and ipython docs) would be essential, though. ------ bhauer I only ran into this a couple days ago and have obviously never even conceived of checking it out, but it seems to have been purpose-built to have a modern- day equivalent of the old hackable OSes of the 80s: <http://www.sparrowos.com/> ~~~ zokier SparrowOS has bit sad background: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992749> ~~~ rednukleus Poor SparrowOS. His operating system does look pretty cool, and I have a lot of respect for anyone who can write something like that. ------ tinco You could boot your machine into a LISP or Scheme repl, which in my opinion (as a ruby programmer by trade) are much nicer for kids to learn programming with than Ruby or Python because of the dynamic and interactive nature of lisp. ~~~ zokier If you are going to take the LISP route, wouldn't booting into emacs and slime make sense? emacs as a login shell.... I wonder if anyone actually does that :) ~~~ evincarofautumn I have experimented with it. The worst problem I had was that the terminal emulators were too slow for my taste. But overall, Emacs works surprisingly well for it. ------ Chris_Newton I have similar fond memories of using Acorn and Sinclair systems when I was younger: turn it on and start hacking away. Of course, in those days, everything was simpler, and for all the benefits that the modern, heterogeneous technology landscape offers us, I do think we’ve lost something by trying to make everything do everything for everyone while talking to everything else. The people best placed to fix that are the ones who control both the hardware and the software foundation running on it, but sadly, the most obvious examples like Apple and the games console makers seem to want just about the most locked-down, developer-hostile environments in computing history. That all said, today’s kids have the benefits of the Internet and the vast potential it offers for teaching, learning, sharing and collaborating, all on a scale we couldn’t even dream of when I was first learning to program. I wonder whether that ecosystem combined with recent hardware developments like the Raspberry Pi might offer enthusiastic youngsters a very different experience but one that ultimately encourages their interest as well or better than what we had in my generation. ------ Joeboy There's <http://www.pycorn.org> , an interpreted OS written in python. Although it's "in a very early stage, and is unlikely to be interesting to users who are not low-level developers." ------ klrr What's wrong with learning kids Shell scripting? I think most Unix-like OS's are good for learning, behind the complex layers of abstractions lay the simple command line. Excellent for programming without any distraction. ~~~ Silhouette _What's wrong with learning kids Shell scripting?_ Assuming you mean bash-like shells on Unix boxes, quite a few things: 1\. Commands have arbitrary, hard-to-remember names. 2\. Destructive commands tend not to issue warnings. 3\. Mass destructive commands still tend not to issue warnings. 4\. Did I mention that destructive commands don't tend to issue warnings? 5\. Destructive commands typically can't be undone. A system where you can do a lot of permanent damage without warning and where the names of things are mostly guesswork is a terrible environment for experimentation, and experimentation is often the best way to learn a new technology. ~~~ klrr I meant that you should setup a simple environment, setting up a partition and chroot into it. Learn the kid to use man(1) and ed(1) and after that let him/her play around. I heard someone doing this with his 5 year old kid on the OpenBSD mailing-list, that kid will probably be able to write quite useful scripts in a few years. ~~~ delian66 Why should you teach a child ed(1), instead of any other text editors? In my opinion , it is one of the most sadistic common text editors in existence, and has been for several decades. ------ ctdonath Biggest problem for this issue today is: kids don't know what a command line is, and are unfamiliar with the classic "terminal" interface. When teaching an intro to programming, my curriculum still uses this "command shell" form. Of late, nigh unto no students have seen it, and I have to teach it as a new concept - a problem as it's more obsolete than new. Soon we'll have to give up on it as a starting point, saving it for more advanced students. GUIs rule now; beginners don't grok a text prompt. ------ mortdeus Any recommendation other than plan 9 is seriously considered harmful. ~~~ catenate In that family, Inferno is a small complete OS, which runs as a virtual machine on a Windows/Linux/MacOS host. All source code is included, so it's hackable, and it improves (wrt the basics) on the Linux state of the art. Acme, especially with the plumber, is more friendly user interface than the terminal command line. <http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/> ------ mamcx I like the ideas behind <http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/>. I too dream of a ipython-like shell, where the input/output is similar to GET/POST with Accept headers (so the pipes know if the source/destination can manage the data). My idea is mix <https://tablib.readthedocs.org/en/latest/> as data exchange, python, ipython?, <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/httpie/> (as example of the kind of commands), and termkit ideas on display, interface. So, each command could do something like: class ls(cmd): def accept(self): return 'json, xml, cvs' def output(self): return 'json, xml, cvs' def run(self, input): return output But the problem is that do this is hard, take time, and to be useful, require rewrite a lot of basic unix functionality (however, a compatibility can be archived, as with ipython !command) and perhaps a custom language/interpreter to make it usable. ------ DanBC Petit Computer (<http://www.petitcomputer.com/>) - BASIC on Nintendo DS Maximite (<http://geoffg.net/maximite.html>) - single IC computer running BASIC with 8 colours on VGA. ------ mostly_harmless I feel this can be done on vanilla linux, without x, and the 'python' command appended to your bashrc ------ fatjokes <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX> ------ ninetax Ipython has some support for moving around in the file system and exporting code. ------ yakiv How about Sugar? (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_%28desktop_environment%29>) ------ S_A_P I think this would be an awesome fit for raspberry pi. Just turn it on, log in and start flipping bits. ------ frozenport I would rather kids jump straight to the programming.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
BitTorrent to Fork IPFS to Create Decentralized File-Storage System - okket https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-to-fork-ipfs-to-create-decentralized-storage-system-190531/ ====== convolvatron is this a fork for protocol/technical reasons or to use a different currency? it wasn't clear from the linked article.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Thrill of Flying the SR-71 Blackbird - jaxc http://www.vfp62.com/SR-71.html ====== fizx I just wanted to chime in that the reason I'm a programmer today is that my grandpa helped program the navigation systems on the SR-71. I found that slightly inspirational :) ~~~ jacquesm That's so cool. Imagine, most of us don't even have dad programmers, and you have a granddad programmer and one working on such interesting stuff to boot. Is he still alive today? And if so does he still work with computers? ~~~ fizx He passed (at 82, I believe) about seven years ago. It was both sad and not sad, as he lived a long and amazing life. He programmed the guidance systems of one of the Titan series rockets. He also was in the Navy in WWII. At one point, his destroyer was sunk, and spent a few days in the open ocean before being rescued. He was also present at the Japanese surrender ceremony. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of learning to play chess with him over Christmas vacation. He was a truly kind man, and an inspiration to many. ~~~ ja27 My dad passed away a few years ago. He worked in defense electronics for 30+ years. It's kind of weird that I know very little of what he actually worked on. I know he did a lot of work on what became GPS and on Tomahawk and F/A-18 projects, but so much of what he worked on will probably always be a mystery to me. ------ lotharbot I like the more complete version of the "ground speed check" story (which I heard from Brian Shul directly): he says he and Walt hadn't really "clicked" yet, that they were just kinda co-inhabitants of the same jet but not really a team, until that moment. It was when Brian was about to ask the question, and the radio clicked on and Walt asked the exact same question, that he felt they finally became a team. For those concerned with the level of "mysticism" in this: Brian Shul is a remarkable pilot from a technical perspective. But do you really want to read his technical descriptions of flight? He's done a good job of describing the sensations in a way non-pilots can understand. ~~~ decode You can read the full version of the story here: <http://blog.johnwurth.com/?p=110> ~~~ jbyers Definitely worth reading, more detail on that incident that the parent article. And just awesome. ------ signa11 i find this [[http://www.sunlakesaeroclub.org/updates_web_data/050828/SR71...](http://www.sunlakesaeroclub.org/updates_web_data/050828/SR71_breakup.htm)] to be even more amazing... ~~~ jacquesm Wow. That's just plain scary. It also makes me appreciate more why high jet fighter suits look like space suits, without it the guy would have surely been dead. Another interesting bit: "The SR-71 had a turning radius of about 100 mi. at that speed and altitude". And "The ejection seat had never left the airplane; I had been ripped out of it by the extreme forces, seat belt and shoulder harness still fastened.". Just wow... What a pity his buddy didn't make it. ------ zandor If anyone is interested in a bit more of the history behind the aircraft (also the U-2 and the F-117), do check out Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir... by Ben Rich It's a great read! <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316743003> ~~~ michael_nielsen Seconded, it's a fascinating book, both as a memoir of how to do fantastically ambitious engineering, and also how to manage a remarkable group of engineers. The analogue for the web would be something like reading an account of Google written by Page or Brin. ------ scdlbx The author states that he graduated high school in 1966 and that he built a model of the the SR-71 when he was 10, presumably 1958 if he graduated at 18. He also states that the SR-71 was designed in 1960. Some of this doesn't quite seem right. ~~~ jacquesm There is a Colonel Walter L. Watson though: <http://scafricanamerican.com/public/pdf/honorees/112004.pdf> The story feels a little strange though, the amount of 'mystic' connection between the plane and the pilot would make me worried if someone that prone to it would be piloting a 747 I'm a passenger on. The pilot would be 'Brian Shul' <http://www.sleddriver.com/> ~~~ dasil003 _The story feels a little strange though, the amount of 'mystic' connection between the plane and the pilot would make me worried if someone that prone to it would be piloting a 747 I'm a passenger on._ Really? "Mysticism" scares you so much that you'd rather your flight be piloted by a clock punching union man then what the Air Force deemed to be one of the best? ~~~ jacquesm Strawman much ? There is a long way to go between a clock punching union man and a person that does not let his love for the machine get in the way of objectivity. Personally I think that those bits are just to juice up the story, but you really have to wonder at passages like: "Like the combat veteran she is, the jet senses the target area and seems to prepare herself." and "There seems to be a confirmed trust now, between me and the jet; she will not hesitate to deliver whatever speed we need". ~~~ aristoxenus At least two things at play there: 1) Intuition. His non-conscious brain has developed an understanding of the machine. 2) Focus. When you're a warrior in his situation, you can't be second-guessing your horse. That calculation was made on the ground, and now he's committed -- to be effective, he needs to be fully confident that he's well-taken care of. The human brain seems to be wired for a euphoric reaction to complete and utter trust (parental/social/religious bonding?), and that he was able to let that system kick in at such a moment speaks a lot about his abilities as a pilot and about the engineering feat embodied in that jet. ~~~ aristoxenus Ok, and one more thing -- poetic license. The guy is a great storyteller. ------ mhd I'm not a big plane or car nut, but the SR-71 just emanated cool. Having a modified carbon copy as the X-Men's "Blackbird" certainly helped... ------ steadicat The speeds mentioned in this article (Mach 3.5+), are significantly higher than the official airspeed records, set by the SR-71 itself (about Mach 2.9): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastest_aircraft> Fascinating. ~~~ pedrocr You're calculating it with speed of sound at sea level. At 80,000 feet the 3,530 km/h speed record is Mach 3.289 according to wolframalpha, still bellow the 3.45 claimed in the article. Although it is understandable that this mission wouldn't count for a speed record. ------ ajtaylor "With all inlet doors tightly shut, at 3.24 Mach, the J-58s are more like ramjets now, gulping 100,000 cubic feet of air per second." Wow... what an awesome job to be able to fly one of these birds! I had a friend in Boston who first flew fighters (F-16 IIRC) and then managed to switch over to the B-2 Stealth Bomber. Apparently it is not common to switch between the two types of platforms. It's a shame he was retired from the AF or I would have begged a ride. :-) ------ thejake This reads a bit like fan fiction. Anyone know its authenticity? ~~~ bittersweet It seems to be from the book 'Sled Driver' by Brian Shul [1] according to the following website [2], on which I found the same article of the parent link. I'm a bit confused though, as I have read the part about the groundspeed check before, I found it again here [3]. This version is longer and worded more beautifully in my opinion. The poster below that is mentioning that it's from the same book so I'm a bit confused. [1] <https://galleryonepublishing.com/sleddriver/index.html> [2] [http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds/2007/11/19/sr-71-now-that- was-s...](http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds/2007/11/19/sr-71-now-that-was-some- airplane/) [3] [http://www.expressjetpilots.com/the- pipe/showthread.php?3197...](http://www.expressjetpilots.com/the- pipe/showthread.php?31978-ASPEN-20-SR-71-Groundspeed-Check) ------ Ben65 If you'd like to get a close look at one, there's one in the SAC museum, just outside of Omaha, NE. <http://www.sasmuseum.com/2008/11/21/sr-71a-blackbird/> ~~~ gvb There is also one in the AirZoo in Kalamazoo, MI. <http://www.airzoo.org/> <http://www.airzoo.org/page.php?menu_id=3> Picture of the SR-71: <http://www.airzoo.org/page.php?menu_id=108> It is a _very_ nice museum, well worth some visits. ------ scharan Reading this article was the most interesting experience I have had in a long time. The passion and feel of the description and the imagery being described really resonated with my geeky soul. RIP SR-71. You are a truly magnificent creation. ------ kreneskyp I've loved this plane since I read about it in popular science as a grade school kid. I still remember this line from the article, "after it lands it so hot you can fry an egg on the fuselage". ------ drtse4 Nice video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1250fZuhUg> Issues with fuel reported in the story @3:09. ------ mambodog All I can say about that page is thanks Readability for actually making it readable/viewable! (What's going on with the massive images?) ------ SpacemanSpiff some great blackbird info on this site, including the flight manual! <http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/> ------ amichail If this plane looked ugly, would anyone care that it is the fastest plane ever made? ~~~ hugh3 Possibly not. The X-15 (while arguably a rocket with wings rather than an aeroplane) was much faster and less pretty, and you won't find so many nine- year-olds with posters of it. ~~~ jrockway It also never flew a real mission. The SR-71 was a real airplane that could take off, fly a mission, and land. The X-15 had to be ferried into space by another aircraft, then it flew around for a while, and then it could destroy part of itself, and finally land. Pretty or not, the SR-71 was a lot more practical. ~~~ joe_bleau Never flew a real mission? It was an experimental _research_ tool. Or is Mach 6.72 not 'real' enough for you? It was carried aloft, not into space, by a B-52. ~~~ jrockway I'm just explaining why I think kids don't have posters of it on their walls. Experimental research plane? Yawn. Real plane? Awesome.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.