Your job is not sexy - <AUTHOR> http://d.gould.in/blog/2012/09/18/your-job-is-not-sexy/

<comment><USER2> Your argument, as I understand it, is thus: you are indebted to those who helped you along the way, and so you should not be vain. Sexiness is vanity, therefore by thinking that your job is sexy, you are being insufficiently humble to those who helped you get where you are, and you will be the worse for it.

Three points: firstly, how is this at all specific to 'makers'? Absolutely everyone has been helped along the way to get to where they are. Thus by your argument, _nobody_ has a sexy job.

Secondly, I don't buy that sexiness implies vanity. My present job is certainly not sexy, but I have had jobs in the past that would be considered sexy by many, and I don't think that made me (or any of my co-workers) vain, I just think it made me enjoy my job.

Thirdly, being a 'maker', if we understand the same things by that term, certainly IS sexy, in the literal sense of the term. Being able to create interesting, useful and fun things is a very attractive trait. Lots of girls are attracted to guys who can build stuff, and personally I find very few things hotter than hacker ladies. Can't speak for the gay view on that, but I don't see how it would be any different.

I would say the opposite. Be sexy. Revel in it. Go create.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a maker and I don't agree with the moral judgment against sexiness, ambition, and creating freely without guilt.

I've met very few "entitled" or "narcissistic" people, but I've heard the term thrown around a lot, usually to refer to people who live a little too boldly for the comfort of onlookers, lacking the guilt complexes and constipated style of self-expression many of us inherited.

<comment><USER4> Wow, there's some projection there.

If you're genuinely creating something, at least 90% of 'normals' will appreciate that.

If people are calling you entitled or narcissistic, it's possible that, rather than you living too boldly and being such a genius they can't understand, you're actually kind of entitled and narcissistic.

<comment><USER5> You didn't read the OP?

<comment><USER4> I did, and generally agree that humility about achievement leads to the best results, a sense of entitlement to the worst. My only beef was 'our parents understood this'. WW2/depression generation, maybe, boomers, no way.

The comment I was responding to seemed to take serious offense at the OP, and I don't.

<comment><USER3> I don't take serious offense, I just disagree with the article. Taken at face value it seems to be warning makers not to feel to good about themselves. As a personal belief system about making, it sounds like a negative, unhealthy one. The tagline "Sexiness is vanity" gives that away. Imagine telling your daughter, "Don't feel sexy, that's narcissism that is. Exalts the individual and such. People who feel sexy are vain. Sexiness is poison, it's toxic; if you start to feel it, resist it." That's about half of what this article is trying to drive home, and I think it says as much at the OP as anything. That's ok though, it's a very personal post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So did anyone else think of Right Said Fred's song when they read this?

Not often but it happens that I disagree with the question itself. What is 'sexy' anyway? I don't want to mate with my job, I don't think anyone does, but I enjoy my job immensely. I enjoy it because it challenges me in a dozen different ways and I'm constantly provided opportunities to learn new stuff or explore new systems. My job is fun and rewarding. Nothing in my job involves sex, the sex trade (well I suppose we work on keeping porn results out of regular searches), or my mating instinct.

Fundamentally operations is like plumbing, you find problems you fix them, you clean up the mess. But that is like saying being an aircraft pilot is just driving from point A to point B.

If you have to ask "Is this a sexy job?" then you are asking the wrong question, you should be saying "Is there anything else I'd rather be doing?" And if _that_ answer is yes then I encourage you to go do that other thing and be even happier than you are right now.

</comment><comment><USER7> _We are not self-made._

Nobody is; anyone who thinks they are self-made most likely got the idea from someone else and didn't question it because it stroked their ego, giving us a perfect example of irony.

This is not to say that hard work and self-investment are worthless. But I do think the article hits on some very important points in the direction of not forgetting the past and how much we owe to those who came before us (at worst, to be able to learn from their mistakes).

One last thing though: sexy is relative. _You_ may not think my job is sexy, but as we are all well aware, there is a fetish for everything.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am a maker, I am self-made, I am not indebted, and my job is damn sexy. The fact that I stand in the shoulders of giants does not mean that I am not self- made. We all make our choices given the opportunities available, some of us choose some things, some of us choose others. Given that we make our choices and everybody around us is free to make their own choices, we are not indebted to anybody. We might be generous out of good will, but I refuse to accept any unearned guilt for my success, or any debt or duty that I did not incur. I love my job and I think it is damn sexy. If I didn't, I would do something else.

<comment><USER9> So everyone is self-made? What does that even mean anyway?

<comment><USER8> It means that we have free will, that we make our own choices which determine the rest of our lives, and that different people can make different choices and make different lives. As far as character it means that once you make a choice often enough you are more likely to make that choice, and it becomes your character, who you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not being from the bay area can anyone on that side of the planet who survived the first bubble (2000) to today give an honest assessment on if attitudes really have changed[0]?

Around here (midwest) not much has seemed to change. I don't see nearly as many rockstars/brogrammers as articles I read seem to suggest.

[0] [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/the- yuppie...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/the-yuppie-is- dead--long-live-the-yettie-723526.html)

<comment><USER11> They do exist, but they are at varying degrees of smug and are not necessarily taking seriously. In my experience, those who are usually worth their salt don't go to extremes to broadcast it.

<comment><USER12> I agree. I think these things are two sides of the same coin. There's usually some kind publicity required to attain that status, and that ranges from some a little self promotion to braggadocio. Once there's a surplus wealth, power, or fame, most people tend to back off; that feeling of liability sinks in.

There are exceptions, but even among the flamboyant successful (say, Ellison, Branson) there seems to be a trend of lowering one's profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like someone doesn't like brogrammers.

</comment><comment><USER14> Who is this article targeted at?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was specifically prompted by the way I see people headed in software, particularly in the bay area. I used the general term maker though, as I think the same ideas apply to many disciplines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not unless you are a data scientist, apparently: [http://hbr.org/2012/10/data- scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the...](http://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist- the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century/)

</comment><comment><USER16> What I take from this post is that the author is seeing a growing ego problem, with makers using too much time and energy broadcasting their accomplishments instead of letting their work stand for itself.

However this ego problem has always existed in all industries, not just from makers. From finance types to the over-important auditor, the marketing intern and even in the service industry, ego's are abound.

What maybe the difference is that tech makers have never in history had easier more accessible methods to express their thoughts to a larger audience.

</comment><comment><USER17> "We dig in the dirt so that out of the muck we can construct something we ourselves can find worthwhile, all the time knowing in our true hearts that we're likely to be the only ones to ever find it beautiful" ... That's one of the reasons why being a maker is sexy. Plenty of startups have probably started this way...out of the muck, against all odds, against disbelief from the rest of the world, you can take something and make it work. Makers are pursued by a lot of companies. That's sexy...

</comment><comment><USER18> Aka "You didn't build that!"

<comment><USER19> Not sure why this was down voted. I was thinking of that the whole time reading the article. And I feel the same way now - bologna! I don't know any small business owner who doesn't work crazy hard (including myself). It's one thing to feel pride because you were handed a trust fund, but I don't see a problem with looking at what you've achieve and feeling a sense of satisfaction.

And regarding all those people who I owe a debt. There certainly have been people who helped me along the way. But you know what, other people helped those people. And I have helped many others as well. So aren't we all even.

As a Christian I have no issues with humbleness. Believe me, I'm extremely grateful for all I have. But I'm not a fan of "no one is better then anyone else and you have more just because of luck".

<comment><USER4> The downvotes were probably because of the injection of nakedly partisan soundbite politics. Did it add to the discussion? Plenty of room to expand and actually discuss the matter, like you did.

As far as "you didn't build that", the context was "you didn't build that _alone_ ". Seems like you agree, in general. Nothing wrong with being satisfied with a job well done, but there is something wrong with growing up in the most advanced society in world history and thinking you're some sort of rugged pioneer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >We are indebted.

I'm not sure how I feel about this statement; it(the article) almost has a communist vibe. It seems like a negative way to state that in order for the advancement of technology, we need to pass our skills and knowledge to others. Yea, I agree with the overall message of helping/being helped, but not the tone that it's being described.

</comment><comment><USER21> Pick up a copy of Popular Mechanics from the 1960s. Makers were alive and well back then, and there was a lot of marketing effort put into making it sexy.

Do we need a dose of humility? Certainly. But we absolutely can, and should enjoy making great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER22> So you're saying to be more humble, or is there more?

<comment><AUTHOR> Humility breeds a state of mind which evidences itself through action. There's not really more, except that actual humility isn't something you can measure directly. So the advice "be more humble" isn't actionable. "Work to pay back the debt you owe" is.

<comment><USER8> Humility like arrogance are both wrong. Humility is unearned guilt, unearned self-doubt, and arrogance is unearned confidence, unearned pride. It's best to have a sober assessment of one self and act accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> op forgets the most important point:

assumption is the mother of all fuckups. and the fuckup is what i just read.

protip: define "we" before you start wasting other peoples time</comment>


MIT App Inventor - <AUTHOR> http://appinventor.mit.edu/ <comment><USER2> I like the ideas behind the app inventor programming language. It has a lisp- ey look and feel to it. The language is made out of blocks that look like puzzle pieces. The shape of the piece stands for it's syntactic meaning, there's a distinct shape for expressions and statements. The color of the piece is it's type, e.g. red for boolean.

So an "if" statement is a statement piece that has places to plug in a boolean (red) expression piece and two statement pieces. That's structure and interpretation of programming languages for you.

The weakness of the language is the difficulty of representing recursion. I think there was another MIT project that did this well, their program representation was a visual graph where recursion was represented as back edges. This is similar to how the Haskell compiler stores programs internally as graphs. An interesting feature of the visual graph programming language was that all variable and function names are optional (but useful) comments.

I feel that researching and experimenting with non-text representations of computer programs is worth the effort.

<comment><USER3> My seven-year-old son has recently been getting his first experience of programming using the Lego Mindstorms visual programming environment [1]. It uses a similar 'jigsaw puzzle' representation, and he just found it instantly intuitive. It has similar limitations to App Inventor, but I don't see support for recursion as being too important for this type of programming.

[1] Example: <http://www.techno-stuff.com/AirPressure.htm>

<comment><USER2> >> but I don't see support for recursion as being too important for this type of programming.

That is a fair point, recursion is not directly used very often in conventional programming. However, to me, recursion is the missing link that makes a language a programming language (Turing complete).

There is still work to do to find a better structured representation for computer programs than a string of characters is.

PS. I think your son is old enough and motivated enough to get an Arduino or a Python book and start learning ;) That's about the age I started programming after seeing my dad stare at a blue text-filled screen all night trying to make ends meet as a freelancer.

<comment><USER3> For the time being I'd like to keep the programming he does related to something physical - like the lego robot you program using the mindstorms environment. At his age I think he could become bored with just shuffling bits or putting text onto a screen, and anything sophisticated enough to impress him and hold his interest (probably graphical) might be to complex. Also the challenge of physically building a controllable robot is a nice contrast to the abstract programming task.

I'd like to try him with Scratch (<http://scratch.mit.edu/>) before moving on to text-based programming (if he wants to). Python is a good idea: we could learn it together...

I do have a netduino, and he's seem me working on that, but C# requires a lot of up-front knowledge. Arduino and wiring might be in his range.

He's a bright kid and I've learned a lot just by seeing how he conceptualizes these ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ahhh, "4th generation languages" come to mobile apps.

I'm _so_ glad all those "idea types" and "business cofounders" won't need my advice or services anymore, 'cause now they can make their own apps without needing any of us annoying technical types telling them "actually, you can't do that"…

(Who wants to port RAMIS to iOS?)

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks like google app inventor reborn, yeah? Seems like a noble goal, but not implemented in a satisfying way. I'd like to see an example of something decent created with these tools.

I would definitely be more interested in this kind of thing if it ran on- device, as well. Like AIDE (which is awesome, btw).

<comment><USER6> The top hit from google for AIDE is not the AIDE kennywinker is referring to. [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl=en) is the Android Java IDE, which is the AIDE referred to.

<comment><USER5> Thank you, I didn't take the time to check my googles before omitting a link. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this based on Scratch? <http://scratch.mit.edu/>

<comment><USER8> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Inventor#History>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anybody comment on its efficaciousness?

</comment><comment><USER10> I made their sample app in about 10 minutes, its fun at least.

</comment><comment><USER11> iPhone alternative: <https://blueprint.io>

</comment><comment><USER12> I thought they were going to open source this, but it is still a hosted software as a service?

<comment><USER13> It is open source: <http://code.google.com/p/app-inventor-releases/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Will they allow apps made with App Inventor to be published on the Play Store this time? Because I think when Google owned it they said they won't accept apps made with it on the market.

<comment><USER15> _Because I think when Google owned it they said they won't accept apps made with it on the market._

That's not true at all. I'm not aware of anyone who actually did publish anything, but Google didn't stop you doing it.

<comment><USER16> Wrong. Apps made in Google App Inventor could not be published to the market.

<comment><USER15> Here's how you did it: [http://appinventor.blogspot.com.au/2011/04/how-to- publish-ap...](http://appinventor.blogspot.com.au/2011/04/how-to-publish-app- iinventor.html)

Here's another example: [http://www.crucialthought.com/2011/05/15/publishing- an-app-i...](http://www.crucialthought.com/2011/05/15/publishing-an-app- inventor-app-to-the-android-market/)

I think the confusion was that the AppInventor FAQ said you couldn't do it - but only because they didn't provide an out-of-the-box way to do it. That's quite different from banning it (which is what the OP implied).

Edit: and here is a thread about doing it with the MIT hosted version: [https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?fragments=true#!topic...](https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?fragments=true#!topic/appinventor/0orRcSKTUQ4/discussion)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla shorts take an estimated $2 bil of losses in Elon Musk's 'next level burn' - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2018/06/13/tesla-tsla-shorts-billio-losses-elon-musk-next-level-burn/ <comment><USER2> It really seems like traditional investing has yet to fully understand how to assess the value of Tesla. A lot of the value seems to be wrapped in from people's hopes/expectations of the future of energy/vehicles. Tesla is more than a car/battery producer, it seems to also be a figurehead for clean energy to a large extent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah I don't understand people who short - the downside is functionally unbound. Maybe it's "investors" and "managers" using other people's money?

I'm sure my risk/reward bias would be skewed if the downside was "less commission income" rather than "well there goes my retirement"

<comment><USER4> In general, the higher the variance in outcomes, the higher the expected payout of an investment.

Also, if you have more money you can decrease the variance in _your_ payout by making multiple uncorrelated (1) investments.

That can make investments that are insane for the average citizen look as huge opportunities for the very rich.

For example, consider a game using a fair coin "put in $100k, heads you lose everything, tails we pay out $201k".

If you have 100k in savings for retirement, you probably wouldn't want to play that game. People who have $100M, on the other hand, might line up to play it a thousand times, as that game, on average, pays out 0.5% per game played.

I would hope manny of those shorting Tesla must have thought this "game" is similar: high risk, but an expected payout that is better than that of less risky investments.

(1) there's a risk there, as totally uncorrelated investments do not exist anymore in a global economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shorts help us find companies like Enron.</comment>


Teleport – Simple SSH Login and Access Management - <AUTHOR> https://conjurinc.github.io/teleport/ <comment><USER2> Maybe worth of changing name ?

SSH for Clusters and Teams [http://gravitational.com/teleport/](http://gravitational.com/teleport/)

[https://github.com/gravitational/teleport](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport)

Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355976)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but Gravitational's project is a newer one.

<comment><USER3> not according to github:

gravitational initial commit in 2015/03 conjurinc initial commit on 2015/06.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source code: [https://github.com/conjurinc/teleport](https://github.com/conjurinc/teleport)

</comment><comment><USER4> What is the point of this? Shouldn't your configuration management tool be pushing the right accounts to the right servers?

<comment><USER5> You shouldn't be relying on your config management system for access control -- requiring a config push each node each time you hire, fire, forget a passphrase, or rotate a key is just asking for disaster.

Push your access controls out to a central directory. Personally I'm a fan sssd/ipa for this, but teleport looks like a neat solution too.

<comment><USER6>
      > requiring a config push each node each time you hire,
      > fire, forget a passphrase, or rotate a key is just asking
      > for disaster.

What's the reason for this paranoia? You have plenty of lead time before a new employee joins, or a key needs to be rotated (and you want to have the keys be valid for an overlapping period anyway). Even forgotten/replacement keys can be pushed out quickly.

I guess it's the fear of a disgruntled ex-employee trashing the systems in the minutes before the config management system removed their key? They could still keep an authenticated session open, but I feel that civil/criminal charges for unauthorized access are more effective protection than technology enforcement.

<comment><USER5> It's less about paranoia, and more about reducing change operations on hosts. Why should I constantly update each host with information about who can access what resource with which credentials, when I can configure them a single time to delegate access control to a directory service?

<comment><USER7> Despite the best intentions I've seen quite a few organizations crippled by having a directory service die. I'd much rather have a push based service (like configuration management) where downtime means people can't change their passwords. Having every login fail because a directory service is down seems silly. Not like the mapping of users <-> systems is particularly large, even for the largest organizations.

<comment><USER5> Do you take the same approach with DNS?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: A General Business Needs Q&A Forum - <AUTHOR> I wonder why there is no such thing as a pan industry forum for announcing your business needs.
There are some healthy business needs forums in specific niche like ideas.woocommerce.com
There was an attempt for the software industry oppslist.com but it looks like they did not continue this project.
One could say that Quora has alot of content like "how do i solve this" or "what is the best software for this"  but Quora is organised for human information retrieval not for quantifying the market size of a certain business need and linking this to the market of companies offering solutions. <comment><AUTHOR> Imagien you are a manager at a big co and your supposed to fix some situation (yes it may be recruiting, sotware, hardware, ...) . And now you need to find a vendor so you probably google a bit and then ask around for the right partner/strategy/architecture. It would be great if these people could anonymously post their needs.</comment>


Global Hackathon by DBS - <AUTHOR> Hey guys, registrations for DBS' first ever global Hackathon, Paradigm Shift, are now open! If you and your friends have what it takes to take on this challenge, head on over to http://bit.ly/2WAtHcq and sign up now!<p>#Holyshift #globalhack #DBSpshift #Globalhack <comment><USER2> Direct link:

[https://www.dbs.com/pshift/index.html](https://www.dbs.com/pshift/index.html)

And the page is mainly white, here (latest public Firefox & MacOS), as there seems to be an issue with a background not loading, and it's white-on-white text?

And there's a JS error in the console:

TypeError: _jquery2.default is undefined

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯</comment>


One of the Oldest Trees in the World Dies by Fire - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/us/disbelief-still-as-florida-reacts-to-burning-of-3500-year-old-tree.html

<comment><USER2> There's just something about the stories of old trees that I find riveting. The best story, though, is that of the Prometheus: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29#The_cutti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29#The_cutting_of_the_tree)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow that's sad he cut it down out of sheer ignorance and possibly laziness.

It's possible some wise people know of older trees but keep their mouth shut to protect them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This tree is about 30 minutes from my house, I have been there many time and many generations of my family have been there. I was planning on taking my son there soon. I was very sad to hear about this, the Senator has been a historic part of Old Florida.</comment>


Twitter API v1.1 sneakily removes existing resources - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sferik/status/243996033359704064 <comment><USER2> Isn't GET lists practically the same as GET lists/all which in turn is renamed in 1.1 to GET lists/list ?</comment>


OberonStation, an Oberon RISC workstation - <AUTHOR> http://oberonstation.x10.mx <comment><USER2> The best start you can get at a system that you fully understand and know isn't subverted. Then, once you know HW design, you can take the next step by putting it on your own ASIC. Matter of fact, Wirth's early systems ran well on old tech. Can use a pretty old process node. :)

<comment><USER3> How do you know the thing which takes your design and "builds" (i.e. machine which places physical components) or "compiles" (i.e. the thing which moves bits into an fpga) things isn't subverted?

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you can adapt "Diverse Double-Compiling" to "Diverse Double- Manufacturing"? [http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/](http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/)

<comment><USER5> I had the same thought. I think the hardest part could be "diffing" the outputs, though. Is some particular difference within expected parameters, or can you really detect that hidden bit of metal on layer 5 of the board? Interestingly I stumbled upon this: [http://www.sandia.gov/mstc/fabrication/index.html](http://www.sandia.gov/mstc/fabrication/index.html)

<comment><USER2> Didn't know they had a rad-hard, S-ASIC offering. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are many FPGA devboards with dynamic RAM. This appears to be the only board with 32-bit 10ns static rams, required for Oberon.

It is unique in its ability to boot Oberon in 1 second, straight out of the box.

<comment><USER4> Why is static ram required for Oberon?

A quick googling found this: [https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2015/008083.html](https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2015/008083.html)

But I don't really understand the explanation. Does DRAM need software support? Would performance just be unacceptable?

<comment><USER6> The Verilog code for an acceptably efficient DRAM controller would be larger and more complicated than the Verilog code for the entire current system put together. It's not a good fit for a project that seeks simplicity.

<comment><USER7> Why do you care about efficiency? Use all your block rams for a cache to mitigate the dram inefficiency, and use the simplest possible controller. They can be quite simple, really, see this one for example: [https://github.com/fpga-logi/logi- hard/blob/master/hdl/inter...](https://github.com/fpga-logi/logi- hard/blob/master/hdl/interface/SDRAM_Controller.vhd)

<comment><USER6> That's still more than twice as long as the current largest module, and now you need to add caches to the system. (To be clear, I'm not involved in Oberon's design, I'm just explaining the reasoning as I understand it.)

<comment><USER7> Understandable. OTOH, it brings such a design much closer to the realistic hardware, making it a more valuable teaching tool. Understanding the cache is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What do you _do_ with one of these things? I get the concept of totally understanding the hardware & software, but once you bootup, then what? Are you presented with a command prompt? Can you use it for an IoT?

Or (on the software side) is its purpose to understand how compilers work?

<comment><AUTHOR> It has an interesting GUI. Text is live (as in everything can be a menu), and selections can become objects of commands.

See [http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/)

<comment><USER9> >Oberon's «desktop» is an infinitely large two-dimensional space on which windows (and documents, since the distinction becomes meaningless in some ways) can be arranged [...] When people held presentations using Oberon, they would arrange all slides next to each other, zoom in on the first one, and then simply slide the view one screen size to the right to go to the next slide.

It is commonly said that Plan 9 from Bell Labs is more UNIX than UNIX. This idea of sliding the view along an infinite plane, in turn, seems to me even more UNIX than anything I've seen or heard of. Not having used -- and in fact only having heard of in passing -- Oberon before, I can't comment on how Unixy the remainder of the system is, but none-the-less, this right here seems to capture the essense of UNIX. In all the times I have been impressed by well composed presentations, never have I questioned the need for "tricks" like screenshots and videos to get a coherrent presentation of interactive tasks or information from software external to whatever tool was being used to run the presentation.

<comment><USER10> I'm not so sure: the simplicity of the concept is nice but is-it really simple/nice to use?

I imagine that you could get lost quite easily in an infinite plane, so you'd need to be able to zoom out to find your windows but if you have too many windows opened then you have to zoom out so much than it's becoming hard to see which windows is what..

Workspaces seems a better way to organize your windows (even though it can also be difficult to find the workspace which contain the window you want).

<comment><USER9> When I think about zooming, I think of how Google maps work and also about responsive web design. That is to say, having differing amounts of information show at different zoom levels. It was my impression that this is how the Oberon desktop works but I may be mistaken in that assumption.

At 1:1, imagine a regular view.

Below some threshold effective resolution, imagine condensed information. Instead of miniature, unreadable windows, one might display a simplified view, say a Metro-style color coded box with -- relative to box size -- a big icon and document title.

Below yet another threshold, condense more, using conventional icons instead of Metro.

At lowest zoom level, display a one-dimensional list of everything. Searchable of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Where's pjmlp?

<comment> vezzy-fnord Lamenting the loss of Xerox PARC, I'd assume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Despite booting and testing Oberon on more than one occasion, I have personally never found a use for it. That said, it makes me happy to see people tinkering and creating things like this.

<comment><USER2> Root of trust on air gapped system. It meets the verification requirements, it's portable, and is a start on the safety requirements. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat, but disappointing that it's using VGA and PS/2 instead of something that plugs into peripherals that I own. Wish I could play with it.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure ETH Zurich would be happy to receive your patches to add a USB stack and EDID parser written in Oberon.

<comment><USER13> Might be fun. My spare-time projects fully support Plan 9, why not muck around with another zombie OS? EDID parsing should be easy, but the USB stack will be painful. And supporting "real" video hardware would be a pain. I'd have to figure out if it can run it on some hardware I own first, though.

Realistically, though, this is likely to fall by the wayside, since I only have so many hours a day coding, and enough of it is spent at work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oberon is a pretty interesting system to muck with.

Another approach is to blackbox USB and HDMI, and consider them outside the project, much like the VGA monitor or whatever is in the keyboard to send PS/2 signals. You can connect to spare IOs on the FPGA board with 'blackbox' hardware, as long as protocols are simple and open.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. I often recommend that anyway. Let's you offload all the interrupts and often plenty pre-processing. And microcontrollers with onboard peripherals are more numerous, powerful, and cheap than ever before. So many possibilities there.

I downloaded as much of the source of Bluebottle as I can. I'm glad the OP gave me the link to the modern one. I'll get it too. Think I might try to retarget it in one of the safer languages, secure hardware (eg Cambrige CHERI processor), or certified compilers. Oberon is the kind of thing a one-man project can make progress on. On other side, I think I recently saw another team quit after little progress on rewriting NetBSD in something safer. ;)

<comment><USER15> what were they re-writing NetBSD in? can you share a link to more information?

<comment><USER2> I don't have the link anymore. Doesn't matter. Despite NetBSD's portability and good design, it was simply too complicated and connected to C style for them to pull off the re-write. Oberon, on the other hand, has the whole OS written in a type-safe language with good modularity and is a lot simpler. Should be a much easier re-write.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very nice. Afraid I won't be able to get one now, but for those that want to play now, and keep the real thing on a wish list, apparently there's (at least one) an emulator:

[https://github.com/pdewacht/oberon-risc- emu](https://github.com/pdewacht/oberon-risc-emu)

Exited to see people keep working on stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER17> This looks pretty awesome, I might have to pick one up. Always wanted to play with a real, native Oberon.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is literally a dream come true for me. But the PayPal link doesn't work for the assembled version. Help!

<comment><AUTHOR> PayPal is down. Come back later.

<comment><AUTHOR> PayPal is back up.

<comment><USER18> Duly ordered! I am beyond stoked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A FPGA, huh? Interesting, why not just target ARM? I doubt that's going anywhere soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I imagine Prof. Wirth must have thought that 32032 wasn't going anywhere soon 20 years ago.

As I see it, the ARM instruction sets (note the use of plural) are a moving target (look at Cortex chips with Thumb2 only). They are far from RISC if you count them, and the instruction encoding is horrendulous.

It's like saying "why not target Windows? I doubt that's going anywhere soon"

With FPGAs, your only risk is that the manufacturer discontinues the chip you targeted, and you can then target another brand with the same (or nearly the same) HDL code.

<comment><USER2> 100% spot on assessment! Wirth thought ahead well enough last time in making it modular and simple enough to easily port. They thought even better by putting it on a FPGA. And also with CPU and components simple enough to implement on ASIC with old node (350nm or 180nm). That's inexpensive enough to be crowd-funded.

Need the I/O stuff, etc to be implemented for the node, too, though...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. And I didn't even mention security in ARM chips (or lack thereof)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Today, I stared into the eyes of God – and saw only emptiness - <AUTHOR> http://wogan.me/2016/01/18/today-i-stared-into-the-eyes-of-god-and-saw-only-emptiness/ <comment><USER2> That's pretty amazing.

It's also pretty amazing that we're so far into the AI curve that there are budget AIs.

<comment><AUTHOR> even if that were a budget AI i'd ask for my money back lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> and google is running free courses on deep learning. [http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/01/22/2232248/google- launc...](http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/01/22/2232248/google-launches- free-course-on-deep-learning)

</comment><comment><USER4> This really makes me want to cook up a little AI that has random novice user problems and let the two of them go at it while I watch with popcorn.

<comment><AUTHOR> no need, humans are just as capable [https://soundcloud.com/primediabroadcasting/sanral-vs- eskom](https://soundcloud.com/primediabroadcasting/sanral-vs-eskom)</comment></comment>


Golang Gopher Laptop Stickers - <AUTHOR> https://golangstickers.herokuapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted a laptop sticker of the go mascot. Since I couldn't find any on the web, I made this.

</comment><comment><USER2> i know google sold some early but ran out, thanks for this</comment>


Amazon Unveils Online Education Service for Teachers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/technology/amazon-unveils-online-education-service-for-teachers.html <comment><USER2> "Amazon said that it would introduce an online marketplace with tens of thousands of free lesson plans, worksheets and other instructional materials for teachers"

i am extremely concerned with the notion of amazon pushing its own pedagogy and curricula into the schools. this should be the domain of educators, not sociopathic for-profit entities like amazon.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the efficient ways to track user quota of API calls - <AUTHOR> I've a service deployed on AWS lambdas connected with API Gateway. While AWS provides the ability to periodic usage quota, I'm looking for user quota (credits) with no expiry.<p>TIA <comment><USER2> Redis? [https://redislabs.com/redis-best-practices/basic-rate- limiti...](https://redislabs.com/redis-best-practices/basic-rate-limiting/)

I also saw this recently but haven't used it.

[https://www.mailgun.com/blog/gubernator-cloud-native- distrib...](https://www.mailgun.com/blog/gubernator-cloud-native-distributed- rate-limiting-microservices)</comment>


Whales Keep Carbon out of the Atmosphere (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whales-keep-carbon-out-of-the-atmosphere/ <comment><USER2> _Scientists have made progress in terms of pinpointing exactly how much carbon whales keep out of the atmosphere; one study suggests that every year, sperm whales help sequester as much carbon as 694 acres of U.S. forests do. Another found that in Hawaii, the swimming motion of 80 whales can absorb the equivalent carbon of 208 acres of U.S. forests._

The title of this article made me expect more. Unless they mean the 694 acres is the contribution per whale (the article doesn't provide references).

<comment><USER3> These numbers look weird. If only 80 whales in Hawaii are equivalent to 208 acres, then the entire world population of sperm whales should certainly contribute more than not even 4 times that number. But just 1 sperm whale contributing almost 4 times what 80 whales contribute in Hawaii also looks unlikely.

<comment><USER2> They are two different mechanisms though, it could be that the swimming motion mechanism has a far smaller effect. Google tells me there are 360,000 sperm whales, that would make the combined effect of the swimming of all sperm whales similar to that of 60 km x 60 km of forest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article mentions eco-tourism and whale watching. I wonder if the carbon footprint of someone flying to an island, staying there for a week, and taking boat trips out to whale watch actually results in whales being a net negative on the environment. If we let them die out so that tourism stopped it could be a positive for the planet.

(I'm not suggesting we should actually do this though. Whales are pretty amazing.)

<comment><USER5> They should just offer high-resolution virtual tourism or anything. Is Youtube tourism a thing already?

Tourism or all those non-vital flights are ruining our planet, along with the high consumerism, which is surely correlated to someone who go visit foreign countries

<comment><USER6> Tourism should be much harder. Make your way to your destination by bike, yacht, even if it takes a year to get there.

<comment><USER7> Once we have UBI we might consider year long "vacations", but before that making vacations much harder is unlikely to be a popular opinion.

<comment><USER6> It's a spectrum. Sitting in a cafe yesterday, I overheard some people talking casually about flying the entire family up to Rarotonga to see a concert.

A wealthy relative recently flew from the Philippines to Tokyo and then returned again - without leaving the airport - so that she could preserve her super ultra sure miles status.

I myself have occasionally flown LHR to SFO to attend a over or two hour meeting.

We cannot continue living like this.

<comment><USER7> I agree, but people who do things like you listed would be the least affected by making traveling harder.

<comment><USER8> That depends _how_ we make it harder. Frequent flier + domestic flight levies, for example, can disproportionately affect the behaviours mentioned

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> 0-_-0 According to the article:

"Whales facilitate carbon absorption in two ways. On the one hand, their movements — especially when diving — tend to push nutrients from the bottom of the ocean to the surface, where they feed the phytoplankton and other marine flora that suck in carbon, as well as fish and other smaller animals."

I wonder if it would be possible to artificially create upwards currents in the ocean to push up nutrients, you could do the job of a million whales. Might be cheaper than planting forests...

<comment><USER9> Oceans are huge and human machines aren't anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological machines. It's an interesting idea, but I think we might see way easier wins by first simply stopping killing whales with everything else we're doing.

<comment><USER10> In the technical sense, Idon't agree with your claim that "human [produced] machines aren't anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological machines". Perhaps you meant that sometimes the least costly way of performing work for some task involves utilizing a biological process.

On the other, hand I do agree that we should stop killing whales (and perhaps there is now another reason to stop as well).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's actually phytoplankton that captures the CO2, so what about other kinds of whales that actually feed on plankton and don't dive as deep as sperm whales?

</comment><comment><USER12> Read _The Once and Future World_ [https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World- Nature-Could/dp/030...](https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-Nature- Could/dp/0307362183) to learn how much more whales there used to be and their effect on making the environment more stable and able to sustain life.

It's stunning and, I hope, behavior-changing.

I did two video essays on the book, though I didn't cover the parts on whales

\- [http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the- once-...](http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-and- future-world-8-9-19)

\- [http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the- once-...](http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-and- future-world-august-27-2019)

</comment><comment><USER13> Curious here - with everything going on with ocean acidification, would we really rather sequester carbon dioxide in the oceans, where it will contribute to the destruction of corals, or leave it in the atmosphere?

<comment><USER14> Much of this research is aimed at understanding present nutrient cycling. Remediation is secondary.</comment></comment>


Looking for a sql crash course - <AUTHOR> I have limited experience with mysql databases because of my work theming drupal and wordpress sites as well as building php forms, but i'm looking for straight sql course / book / resource so i can mine a large sql database and output those sql qeries into a usable excel file for further data analysis.  Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> no one?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> anyone?</comment>


How Much to Access Government Data on Immigration? Only $173,775 - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-to-access-government-data-on-immigration-only-173775/ <comment><USER2> The fact that the government can (seemingly) charge an arbitrary dollar amount to fulfill a lawful FOIA request seems to be a flaw in the system. If the people should be able to access government data, there should be clearly defined, affordable pricing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely agree. If a government agency claims that the cost of retrieving the data for the FOIA is insanely high as the justification for the high price then it points to greater organizational problems in how our data is being stored. By forcing a lower and standardized upper bound price for the data it would incentivize organizations to revamp their storage solutions to make the data more accessible.</comment></comment>


API Docs for URX's Deeplink Search Engine - <AUTHOR> http://developers.urx.com/

<comment><USER2> A while ago, I made a search app using Google Custom Search: [https://itunes.apple.com/app/in-app- search/id908073064](https://itunes.apple.com/app/in-app-search/id908073064)

The URX App Search API certainly looks a lot more promising than Google for this purpose. It's good to see the documentation is public now and I'm sure it won't be long before a large number of apps are using this API.

One question about the app index: It doesn't specify the availability of apps in different operating systems. I have come across a number of apps whose sites have deep link information only for Android or iOS.

Also, it's interesting that IMDb isn't in the list, considering it is one of the most widely cited examples of app deep linking and its complete site index is easily downloaded and you can follow the links to it via /robots.txt.

<comment><AUTHOR> CEO of URX here- thanks for your excitement Steve! We're definitely big fans of the app you built!

Currently we list out the availability of apps in our index by company and not by operating system; we'll look into providing more detailed information.

Regarding IMDb: while the site index may be accessible and their app does have deep links, IMDb has not publicly exposed their deep link structure via meta tags. Currently, we're only indexing sites with these tags, but that will change shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there an ELI5 explanation of what are Deep links? And in the context of an app, what does a "link" to a place in an app means?

"We're indexing the top apps with deep link tags and building a knowledge graph that organizes apps by their content and by the actions they allow users to take." \- whats the advantage for a developer to allow their app to be indexed?

I am super intrigued by the tech. But just want to understand by what it can do for an app.

<comment><USER4> CTO of URX here - thanks for the feedback!

ELI5 "what is a deep link?": mobile deep links mean registering custom URI schemes for your app, and registering a URL dispatcher within your app. The end result is that users can be sent directly to a specific page of content within your app. For example,

      spotify:artist:0X2BH1fck6amBIoJhDVmmJ

...will take you to the in-app version of this experience:

      https://open.spotify.com/artist/0X2BH1fck6amBIoJhDVmmJ

The intuition is that sending users to in-app content is preferable to web content; IMHO, this is especially important for apps that have rich content or have logged-in functionality.

Example of a bad experience for apps that don't use deeplinks: have you ever clicked on a LinkedIn email on your mobile device and landed on a sign-in page in your mobile browser? If they used deeplinks, you're probably already signed into your LinkedIn app and wouldn't need to go digging for your password. This has been a common pain point in people we've talked to.

As a developer, allowing your app to be indexed will make it easier for other developers to send you traffic. Currently, we believe that the limiting factor preventing a "link graph" from existing across apps, is the challenge developers face in discovering how to find (a) which pieces of content are relevant to a page within your app, and (b) how to contruct a deep link URL to send users to those pieces of content.</comment></comment>


Greek referendum results - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jul/05/live-results-greek-referendum <comment><USER2> I'm honestly puzzled by what the Greek Government's endgame is here. It looks like they've won their vote, but what's next?

They return to Europe tomorrow and demand a better settlement. Why do they think the other Eurozone governments will accede to that demand?

Yep the greek government now have a clear democractic mandate to demand a better settlement, but that doesn't mean the other Eurozone governements have to agree to one.

The bit that I've not seen mentioned prominently in many articles on this is that every billion Euros that is forgiven from Greek debt or that is provided in aid, is a billion Euros that must come from the other Eurozone economies, and by extension their taxpayers.

From a political perspective what national parliament are going to pass a bill that costs them that money, at a time when their own economies, in many cases, are already suffering.

Also AFAIK a new bailout deal needs to be passed in all 18 other Eurozone nations, unanimously...

<comment><USER3> > The bit that I've not seen mentioned prominently in many articles on this is > that every billion Euros that is forgiven from Greek debt or that is > provided in aid, is a billion Euros that must come from the other Eurozone > economies, and by extension their taxpayers.

It's not at all a zero sum game. The other nations benefit significantly:

1) They gain political and economic stability for the institutions involved (the EU, the Euro, etc.) and for Europe in general.

2) They avoid an economic and political meltdown in a European country. Such situations spawn other problems (crime, refugees, political extremism, etc.) and those problems tend to spread across borders.

3) They gain a more prosperous and stable trading partner, which helps everyone.

4) They gain the precedent that when they are in trouble, for whatever reason, other nations will help them. Germany might recall the forgiveness of their massive crimes (and war debts) by their neighbors, enabling them to become the largest economy in Europe today. (EDIT: And all the creditor nations are depending on another country to defend them in case of war.)

5) They avoid Greece forming stronger bonds with other powers, such as Russia and China.

6) There also is the simple moral gain, that the impoverished in Greece won't be driven to further misery.

The perspective that all that matters is money, and that it's every nation for itself is unrealistic.

<comment><USER2> You're point are all at a high level valid, but in raw Euros, countries who are already financially stretched will be asked to write-off tens of billions of Euros, which they will have to finance through increased debt.

That's tens of billions removed from their taxpayers.

If you're a national of another country who is currently undergoing painful austerity and Greece gets significant debt forgiveness, wouldn't you want the same for yourself?

Ireland, Spain, Portugal have all taken significant pain to their economies, do you thinnk their leaders can easily ask their tax payers to take more to bail the Greeks out?

And then if they do, would they not want their own debt forgiveness? The rest of Europe can't sustain a large number of countries seeking debt write- downs...

<comment><USER3> I don't see Europe as so economically fragile. If it were a nation, the EU would be the wealthiest in the history of the world (with the possibly exception of the U.S.; I'm too lazy to look it up).

This is hardly a novel or outlandish situation. The nature of bankruptcy is that creditors get a haircut; many nations have had their debts reduced (including Germany). The nature of civilization is that those with resources help those without.

> would they not want their own debt forgiveness?

It's theoretically possible, but the same could be said of any bankruptcy (my neighbor had his/her debts forgiven; do I want to go bankrupt too?) or for any program that benefits one region/state/industry more than another, yet these programs persist.

Also, maybe the EU or Eurozone does need a program to help all struggling states.

<comment><USER4> The long answer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_debt_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_debt_crisis)

TLDR: Greek debt is used as collateral for loans by European banks. When Greek debt takes a haircut, most (nearly all) European banks have to choose one of two options : either they can raise capital equivalent to the net Euro value of the haircut OR they have to reduce the amount they're loaning out by the net Euro value of the haircut _times 100_ (it was times 50 in the last crisis). In practice for most banks that will mean raising 3-4% capital (which will still seriously impact their share price of course), but apparently in a few cases it's near-distressed banks that'd need 20%.

Most banks will use a combination of both, so this will mean that effectively money loaned out across Europe by banks will have to reduce by 5%-10%.

[1] [https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/mr/html/calc.en.htm...](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/mr/html/calc.en.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a solid No victory - a 21% gap between no and yes.

Live results available at [http://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/e/public/index.html#{%22cls%2...](http://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/e/public/index.html#{%22cls%22:%22main%22,%22params%22:{})} (click on GB flag on bottom left to change to English)

<comment><USER6> Doesn't that depend on where the current results come from? If you watch the results of a US Presidential election on the county level, you can see much wider swings; the cities, which vote D, often turn in their results much later than the rural counties.

(Or maybe in this case, the results really are representative. I know nothing about Greek politics.)

<comment><USER7> The results are in real time and are representative. Each voting center sends its results via phone. The site has also an api [http://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/more/customizer/paramsdoc.htm...](http://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/more/customizer/paramsdoc.html)

<comment><USER6> I think we're working from different definitions of "representative" The sense I mean it in is, "the election centers that have reported results are demographically representative, and therefore predictive, of countrywide results".

That might be the case, but you didn't provide any evidence to suggest it is, so the more likely explanation is that you thought I meant something else by the word.

<comment><USER7> The results are from all voting centers. Once a voting center finishes counting, it sends it to the data center. So the data are sent more or less randomly to the data center. You are right that this does not mean that are truly representative. But for the sake of simplicity we can call it "representative".

<comment><USER6> Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Piketty, Stiglitz and Krugman support a No vote, so if the Greek people are wrong on this, at least they'll be wrong in esteemed company.

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/greek- referendu...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/greek-referendum- what-the-experts-say)

<comment><USER9> Not really .... their rationale isn't very good. Krugman disappoints, as is often the case. His logic is, "an elected government made unreasonable demands on other nations and when they refused, this was those countries attempting to replace the Greek government".

Well, no. It's just them refusing a bum deal. If the result of that is Syriza falls, that'll be the Greek's doing, not the EU.

Heck, the Eurozone FinMin's have been incredibly patient with Greece. It cannot be easy to negotiate professionally with people who are constantly calling you Nazis and terrorists for simply attaching some conditions to yet another loan.

<comment><USER10> Krugman could have done a better job explaining his argument, but I think it's solid at the core: there is nothing to gain for the Greek from more austerity, that will only lead to further contraction of the economy. Greece needs inflation, not deflation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Newbie here. It seems that the result is a solid NO. What are the implications? Spain and Portugal will be the next to fall?

<comment><USER6> To what extent does Spain's political system manage its civil service as a spoils system for the benefit of party supporters? Greece apparently invented entire departments to pay party members.

To what extent do Spain's entitlement obligations (health care, retirement, &c) track its economy? Greece apparently provides Scandinavian-grade benefits on Alabama-grade revenues.

To what extent was Spain's accession to the EU exploited as a bonanza for foreign banks? Greece's debt is apparently the product of a ratings arbitrage scheme that occurred when its speculator-grade sovereign debt suddenly became backstopped by the ECB.

To what extent do Spain's citizens buy into the financial philosophy of the EU? Greece has massive self-employment, a thriving undocumented market, and pitiful revenue collection. For decades, Greece has "financed" itself with stated revenue preferences (high tax rates) that do not meaningfully track revealed revenue preferences (low tax collection and enforcement).

<comment><USER12> > To what extent do Spain's entitlement obligations (health care, retirement, > &c) track its economy? Greece apparently provides Scandinavian-grade > benefits on Alabama-grade revenues.

The situation about Greece is mired with propaganda and media tells us that Greeks just want to lay on beach, never work and retire when they are 50. I've heard so many parrot that because they read it in a magazine and it is not true. Greeks work the most hours in the EU and their retirement age is higher: [http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/world- affairs/2012/05/expl...](http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/world- affairs/2012/05/exploding-myth-feckless-lazy-greeks)

So there is no reason to believe that "Greece apparently provides Scandinavian-grade benefits on Alabama-grade revenues" is true if it is not backed up by stats proving it to be true.

<comment><USER6> You've refuted a statistic I didn't provide. The full retirement age in the US in 66 (soon to be 67). The average retirement age in Greece is 61. 17.5% of Greece's GDP goes to retirement spending. US public retirement insurance is 5% of GDP.

The comparison I made isn't "lazy" versus "industrious". It's "revenue vs. spending", using the USA and Scandinavia as anchors for comparison. Greek revenue is more like USA revenue than Swedish revenue. Greek spending is more like Swedish spending (Swedish retirement age: 65) than like USA spending.

I'm trying not to make value judgements. I don't believe that the Greeks are lazy and sitting on beaches. It does, however, appear that their fiscal policy is mismanaged.

<comment><USER12> I can't refute your statement "Greece apparently provides Scandinavian-grade benefits on Alabama-grade revenues" because it is very vague. In either case the onus is on the person making the statements to back them up not on other persons to refute them.

The reason I made the comparison with retirement age is because you can ask a random person on the street in Sweden or other country whether Greeks retire earlier than the EU average or not and (I'm sure) almost everyone people will say that they retire earlier even though that is false.

Bluntly, you made two statements 1) Greece apparently provides Scandinavian- grade benefits and 2) [has] Alabama-grade revenues. Back them up with evidence or else you are just parroting back what someone else told you.

<comment><USER6> First, we're all just "parroting back what someone else told us", unless one of us is secretly an economist specializing in the public sector of Greece.

That said: it's really not that vague. Go to the OECD stats site. Go to "Social Expenditure", isolate "old age" retirement benefits (which in Greece start at 61), go to the column on the table with the most recent full data, sort that column, note where Greece falls on it, note where Sweden falls on it, and note where the US falls on it.

Now, in another tab maybe, go to Public Sector/Taxation, to comparative tables for tax revenue, and do "total tax revenue per capita". Make the same comparisons. You will note that the US actually gets quite a bit more money per citizen than Greece does. My intuition was the same, which is why I chose Alabama for the comparison, not the US as a whole; Alabama is one of the least-taxed states in the union.

It is true that the intuition to make this comparison came from someone else (in my case: Matt Yglesias, though lord knows where he got the idea to make the comparison). What is also true is that the assertion is verifiable.

<comment><USER12> Thank you for checking. Do you mean the sheet "Public expenditure on old-age and survivors cash benefits, in % GDP"? What numbers are you comparing exactly? The stats I found end at 2011 and the Greeks pensions have been slashed since then so I wonder how reliable they are for their current pension benefits.

Anyway I found stats for Finland (the only Scandinavian country using the Euro) for 2015 here: [http://www.etk.fi/en/service/average_pensions/1453/average_p...](http://www.etk.fi/en/service/average_pensions/1453/average_pensions) and for Greece for 2015 here: [http://www.macropolis.gr/?i=portal.en.the- agora.2622](http://www.macropolis.gr/?i=portal.en.the-agora.2622) If the numbers on those pages are true, then the average pensions per month are 1588 and 884 for Finland and Greece respectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's actually pretty impressive how quickly they managed to organize the referendum.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well great, it seems like the No vote has comfortably won. The futures looking bleak for Greece.

<comment><USER15> Greece is in bad shape but might actually do better from having more independent control while sorting out its finances as the direction from Europe at the moment suffers from severe conflicts of interest. Either a yes or no vote could have bad consequences as Greece is between a rock and a hard place right now, but the reputation of the Eurozone leaders is what really took a hit here, not Greece.

<comment><USER16> What does "sorting out finances" even mean in the context of a country that does not actually produce/export anything[1]? Will they somehow make money appear without outside investments?

[1] compared to UK, France, Germany

<comment><USER9> They do produce and export things (note: tourism is a kind of export). Some of the news stories have anecdotes from manufacturers complaining they cannot import the raw materials they need.

The problem is they import a lot more. Including things like food, fuel and electricity.

Sorting out Greece's finances mean a very sharp and severe recession that makes what they went through so far look like a stroll through a grassy meadow. Eviction from the EU is not entirely unthinkable, especially if the collapse triggers a refugee crisis with a lot of internal migration.

<comment><USER15> I think you have it wrong, they are a major food producer for the EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Chorafa said if the Yes vote won, she would be so disappointed she would think about leaving Greece with her two small children and moving abroad.

That reminds me of the spate of Americanslwho, upon the Supreme Court striking down gay marriage bans, said they were moving to Canada. I feel like some sentiment is wildly out of whack here

<comment><USER18> Uh, no - this is a completely different situation. Whereas gay marriage has little to no effect on most Americans' lives, the results of this vote will affect each and every Greek citizen for years (decades?) to come.

Moving abroad (assuming that option is available to you) might simply be the _rational_ thing to do in such a case.

<comment><USER19> The original commenter already responded to this post, but I'm pretty sure he was making fun of the fact that someone was pissed about the United States allowing gay marriages, and so the solution for them was somehow moving to Canada -where they've allowed gay marriages for much longer.

Basically, I don't like what they're doing here so I'm gonna move to someplace where they're doing it worse (a little backasswards in thinking, maybe even ignorance). This woman would likely move to elsewhere in the Eurozone, or another country with similar banking/economics strategies.</comment></comment></comment>


Prof or Hobo [quiz]? - <AUTHOR> http://individual.utoronto.ca/somody/quiz.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure whether or not I should be surprised that all of the profs are science profs...

</comment><comment><USER2> I got #5 and the last one (#10) wrong.</comment>


Docker Image Reduction Techniques and Tools - <AUTHOR> http://chrisstump.online/2016/02/23/docker-image-reduction-techniques-and-tools/ <comment><AUTHOR> Short read on the current ways folks seem to be going about reducing their Docker image sizes</comment>


Geert Wilders' film "Fitna" taken offline due to threats - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=WIP0HF2214O5OQSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=207000505

<comment><AUTHOR> But you can find it on YouTube and bittorrent.

<comment><USER2> but you don't want to cause the film is pretty stupid. just to give you a heads up....

it's a waste of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> How so?</comment></comment></comment>


Reducing printf call overhead with variadic templates - <AUTHOR> http://www.zverovich.net/2016/11/05/reducing-printf-call-overhead.html <comment><USER2> Interesting side note: [https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt](https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt) of the same author has been aded to the C++20 standard. One of the few inclusions into the standard which (IMHO) can be universally considered to be a good thing. If you're coming from printf() or iostreams, fmtlib is a joy to use, especially together with pystring ([https://github.com/imageworks/pystring](https://github.com/imageworks/pystring)).

Both libs don't fix the underlying problems of std::string, but at least they reduce the pain of working with strings in C++ considerably.

</comment><comment><USER3> absl::StrFormat uses something like this technique: [https://abseil.io/docs/cpp/guides/format](https://abseil.io/docs/cpp/guides/format)</comment>


Please don't send me smart replies - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/19/google-smart-replies-are-dehumanizing/ <comment><USER2> Are you tired of having a personality, original thought, or actual conversation?

Are your friends selfishly taking up time trying to talk to you when you could be adding more people to your friends list instead?

Do you have a craving for increased amounts of non-genuine social interaction?

Has your life become so depressingly repeatable that our algorithms can accurately represent your superficial chatter?

If so, we've got something for you: SMART REPLIES!

SMART REPLIES! For when your communication is so valuable and necessary it doesn't need you!

SMART REPLIES! Yum clams! So cute!

SMART REPLIES!...if you thought twitter and social-networking was inane, you ain't seen nothing yet...

Edit: I apologise, i just had a reflex reaction. Wow...this is the world we're making for ourselves...

<comment><USER3> Should we now have an existential crisis when the smart reply is exactly what we were going to say? Should we type it anyway just to teach the machine it was right?

Should we save our outrage for something more then a feature in an announced chat app?

<comment><USER4> So is it just me who types a reply even when the app knows exactly what I was going to say.. just because I find it morally repulsive.

..and still feel a little bit guilty for being so bloody shallow.

<comment><USER3> Are you shallow? Or is Google's "Intelligence" deep?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like smart replies. They are not quite the exact words I would normally use, but they're close, so I kind of enjoy selecting them as a sort of novelty. In that sense, it's kind of like spellcheck (which tells me I just misspelled spellcheck). If I was replying to those texts, it would have gone something like that:

> What are you up to?

>> Work.

or

> Want to hang out?

>> Sure.

The suggestions Google provides are a little bit more upbeat and amusing to me.

> What are you up to?

>> I am working!

or

> Want to hang out?

>> I'd love to.

I especially like how it inverts how I'd normally use exclamation marks and periods. "I'm working." "I'd love to!" etc.

Anyway, neat feature. The author doesn't like it, I do, so she can not use the feature and I can use it :P

<comment><USER2> Perhaps its the smartarse Australian larrikin in me, but these kinds of automated responses depress me, because I can see them working like corporate new-speak: they're going to push us to limit our communication down to a bunch of canned responses, emotions and interactions.

Sometimes I think AI isn't advancing at all, its just that we're all working more and more to fall in line like good automatons...

I love sarcasm, dead-pan, violently black-humour...and I'm watching it all slowly disappear and we all become pidgeonholed, public, on-show, quantised and sanitised.

I'd much rather bring back:

>What are you up to? >> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call you back in 5?

>Want to hang out? >> I'm in the bathroom, so in a way, I already am...

> _sends through that picture of child holding flower_ >> Sometimes that > shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing > about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. > When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those > black eyes roll over white. And then, ah...

Oh, but the two are unrelated you say...

Well no. I'm not certain that they are...

<comment><USER6> > _> What are you up to? >> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call > you back in 5?_

These days, that sounds like something that would make SWAT invite themselves into your house, through a window.

The responses are sure cute and creative. I seriously doubt whoever writes like this today will change their ways because of "smart replies". Most people don't write stuff like that, definitely not during _most_ of the conversations.

I don't really have a formed view yet. I think getting outraged over someone using augmented software to respond faster is wrong, and only a problem with the person who gets outraged. On the other hand I do appreciate the effect of limiting the potential conversation space if people get _too_ dependent those reply suggestions.

It is also true though that a lot of conversations one has over e-mail or IMs follow so common patterns that there were many times I wished I could just automate it away, to have a bot reply to them without the other side knowing. Maybe I'm just antisocial? But I tend to differentiate between requests for information from requests for personal attention, and wouldn't mind having my bot handle all of the former.

(Then again, I wouldn't accept anything except a bot I wrote myself, so maybe I'm not _that_ antisocial - since I'd be just spawning a part of myself as an external process. That's also one reason why I'm so pissed about all the modern bot / AI tech from Google, et al., which has _zero_ configurability, _zero_ ways to plug your own stuff in yourself.)

<comment><USER7> If you dislike talking to someone so much that you wish you could automate it away, why are you talking to them to begin with?

This seems similar or related to the need people seem to have to remain permanently connected even to people who they only met for a few seconds at a bar once, to increase that ever-important "friend count". Some relationships are meant to end. It's not healthy to try to maintain 1000 vaguely familiar people as "friends".

The ridiculous thing is, most of those "friends" are dreading having to pretend to care about the things you, the guy they met for a few seconds once but feel bad deleting, post on the internet as well. Just stop it. Neither side wins in forced out-of-sympathy/fear/loyalty/obligation/etc relationships.

<comment><USER8> Because my mother (and lots of other people I care about) don't understand how draining it can be for someone like me to carry on a conversation sometimes. Maybe having a high friend count is something you feel the need to deal with, but for others of us software like this might actually solve a problem. Please reserve your judgement on our social protocols for... Nobody.

(Disclaimer: I don't use allo so I don't know what it's capable of. I kind of doubt it's there yet. )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author didn't exactly spell it out, but I found the suggestions to be so adequate that they become what i want to say. They become limiting in a sense.

The simulated conversation image is a great example. After seeing those responses, the response 'aww so cute' or 'Love the daisy' are about about the same or better than what I can or would care to think of in a text conversation. Is there really a better way to think answer that and why should I waste the time to do so?

<comment><USER10> I think that's the point of the article: using "smart replies" makes it seem like you're so disinterested in your conversation partner that you consider coming up with your own responses a waste of time.

<comment><USER3> But isn't that a pretty common use case?

Do people on chat with their nearest and dearest? Or do they chat with a mix of people who they may like or even dislike.

<comment><USER6> It is, and honestly - I find expecting from the other side to be always fully committed to you in a conversation to be a sign of _disrespect_. I guess some people want to feel more important to others that they really are.

It also depends on the discussion. Whenever someone talks to me about something requiring my personal attention, I pay that attention. But most conversations with people are _trivial_ , and expecting someone to drop everything they were concentrating on and pay full attention to your trivial question is, again, a sign of disrespect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, and please also don't send me any messages where you chose autocompletions for the words, or messages where your phone autocorrected the spelling of. Heck, don't even send messages where you pressed the keyboard buttons to spell out the words, it's far to impersonal and dehumanizing to be limited to the options your phone presents; people should communicate like they were meant to: by talking to each other face-to-face.

\---

With Smart Replies (as with other communication-helping technology), meaning comes from how and when you choose to use them, and there's no reason you shouldn't choose to use them when it communicates what you were intending. If I was going to say "Yes!" and that's a Smart Reply option, why shouldn't I save the time and choose it? It was still my action that sent that message, still my choice to send it, still the meaning that I wanted to communicate. Smart Replies save time for the simple stuff, so you can better spend your time on other messages that you might write manually.

</comment><comment><USER12> The reason smart replies seem a bit sad to me is that, unlike new forms of communication that have come before, they don't introduce any new scope for creativity.

Text messages, twitter and snapchat may have made conversations lighter, less substantial and more throwaway, but they have cultivated a rich flora of memes, silly jokes, new ways of sharing. Even emoji, which at first blush also seem like a very lazy way of communicating, have taken on cultural relevance and can be used in interesting and fresh ways.

A smart reply is a smart reply. The best case scenario is that it was close enough to what you were going to say anyway that the small difference in content is outweighed by the reduced effort of not having to type or think. It cannot lead to new forms of creative expression because its very use demands not expressing yourself more succinctly but instead expressing yourself less precisely. Expressing less of yourself.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the smart replies. And my girlfriend loves it too. The replies look to be relevant and optional. So when you don't have time to type out a proper response, use the suggestion. Otherwise who's stopping you from typing out by hand?

>Further, I don't care how intelligent these Smart Replies are: They can never capture the personality and character of a real human conversation.

Really? Tell that to the people living in the time before Alphago made it's 37th move and astounded Lee Sedol himself. AI is here, it is as smart or smarter in some areas. The number of such areas is going to grow. Get used to it.

<comment><USER14> I can't wait for the first reality or game show based around Turing tests. That's going to be seriously uncomfortable, but fascinating.

<comment><USER15> Please find a way to get that idea in front of Charlie Brooker. It could make for a pretty good Black Mirror episode.

(And while we are on the subject.. There was a blog post back in 2005 about the inverse situation: if the person behind the other screen has the preconception that you are a bot, convincing them of your humanity is nearly impossible. The post now lives as a PDF document.[0])

0: [https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turi...](https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turing_test.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How would the recipient know whether I've used the "Yum clams!" smart reply or typed in the same thing myself? If you can't tell then how is the author of the article going to act on his self-righteous anger about what his friends choose to do with their time?

<comment><USER6> That's exactly my feelings too. If the author gets outraged about the possibility of using autosuggested responses instead of typing them in manually, I suggest that the author has some issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> About 8 years ago I was jokingly going to write this for guys who were too dumb or lazy or to much of a 20 something to auto write back to girls they met out. My girlfriend, future wife was horrified by the idea. The waitresses at the bar were like "Meh... at least he though enough to enter me into the system and he'll remember to talk to me." My wife threatened bloody murder on me as she couldn't trust that I wasn't using it on her... and now google wants to do it on a facebook level, eg society wide. Well this will be worth a good laugh and cry with my wife.

[Edit: spelling, clarification]

<comment><USER18> "these darned kids with their doing of thing that I don't like".

<comment><USER17> Yeah that's was mostly my reaction to my wife's reaction. My thought was it would help people get over the awkward part. This seems like it'd be more endemic to all communications.

Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you notes about the caller on the call screen. Supposed to be for sales people to put stuff like "Wife Jane, 3 kids, Bobby, Sue, Jamal" to read before they picked up.

<comment><USER6> > _Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you > notes about the caller on the call screen._

Is there anything wrong with that? Seems very useful.

(How do people think how previous generations handled having many acquaintances and still knowing something personal about each of them? They noted things down, on paper.)

<comment><USER17> It seems fine in the small but immediately imagined sales guy in a smarmy voice saying how's Betty and the kids. That said I thought it was a great idea. Heck at the time I was working with about 80 people from a customer and having it say jake (junior java dev... insurance ingestion...mega insurance inc) would have been great. Oh well my cynical snarky self is conflicted now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This changes real life into an RPG conversation tree.

<comment><USER20> Actually my dream when I was a teenage gamer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >> ...Smart Replies seems like an unnecessarily lazy way to have a conversation.

 _Text messaging_ is a lazy way to have a conversation; this is a perfect fit. If you want to have a real conversation, call me, or meet me for lunch. Or do the former to arrange the latter (novel!).

<comment><USER22> I reckon it might be a little inconvenient to meet someone for lunch everytime you want to say something to them.

<comment><USER23> But that is exactly the point. It is inconvenient, so when you choose to do it, it implies you care more about that conversation.

It doesn't mean e-mail isn't perfectly fine for a lot of conversation, but you should expect people to treat it accordingly: You care enough to write an e-mail instead of an IM, but not enough to call them or a arrange a face to face.

Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to convey that. Sometimes it's not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In Inbox, I've found that emailing a screenshot of the smart reply I've chosen, instead of clicking it, is the first sarcastic way to use it. It takes longer, doesn't improve future suggestions, and makes explicitly clear I'm not replying creatively.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, after the initial hype, I found myself rarely using this feature. But I still thought it is cool, just not usefully cool...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty soon you'll have "I'm feeling lucky" mode where Google carries on the entire conversation for both you and your friend. You just look at your calendar at the end to see what weekend plans you just worked out.

<comment><USER27> That was my first thought when I read it. Eventually you'll go to a cafe to meet your friend and you greet him with "So, ... google wants me to talk to you today."

However, it is funny to see "normal people" getting more and more used to this kind of living while slowly more and more tech people find it disgusting. Imagine a future where only nerds are capable of small talk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Almost everything that technology touched has been 'dehumanized' in some way or the other. It was initially email. How can I take something seriously if its sent as an email, and when the sender has virutally zero cost in doing so. Overtime, we've come to accept that as a norm

I'd reckon smart replies would follow a similar path. Might look odd, but would become natural in a few years.

</comment><comment><USER29> I understand what the author of this post means, and actually I agree with the sentiment, but I still find the feature useful.

I think the problem lies with the examples, and frankly, it is up to you how you use the feature.

Yes, if I write my SO "I love you", I expect him/her to reply with a honest "I love you too" that was not actually a computer replying. It is a philosophical question obviously, whether you see a response written by somebody or by the algorithm, if he/she actually selected it.

But if I just get a "I'm 5 mins late" from my friend, I don't think a "Don't worry, I'll wait" suggested by the algorithm is that bad and I myself would not mind getting such a "algorithmically suggested" response by my friend. After all, the other party selected the response himself, so I think it is honest.

I'm pretty sure Google had these or similar discussions internally as well.

<comment><USER30> > But if I just get a "I'm 5 mins late" from my friend, I don't think a "Don't > worry, I'll wait" suggested by the algorithm is that bad and I myself would > not mind getting such a "algorithmically suggested" response by my friend. > After all, the other party selected the response himself, so I think it is > honest.

Except, suggesting "Don't worry I wait" means that the person might click that, instead of typing "ok".

This is a problem if you know the person well, and know that a response of "ok" in the situation indicates they are annoyed at you, etc.

<comment><USER29> That's what I meant when I said I expect him to honestly mean it if he selects a message. If a suggested message doesn't relate to his real sentiments, I would expect him not to select it.

Maybe I did not understand you though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was agreeing with the overall point of the article, but then I see this :

> I can understand canned responses like "Be right there!" or "I'll be late!" > if you're in a car and only have a few seconds to reply before you have to > get back to the business of driving

I can't. Please do not use your phone while driving. You are not just putting yourself, but others around you in danger.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yesterday, Engadget published "Please don't send me Smart Replies", an opinion piece on automating communication. One of its key features is being written in ASCII, which makes use of a standard set of fonts if you don't feel like writing with a real pen for whatever reason. Similar to the ASCII feature in Inbox, it's apparently clever enough re-format lines to fit on different sized screens. While this seems like a neat feature at first, I ultimately wouldn't want any of my friends to use it in a conversation with me. In fact, I'd feel pretty insulted.

See, I think having ASCII completely misses the point of a blog post. I can understand using canned characters for article indexes so that a publication can have a consistent style. But for the article itself, then ASCII seems like an unnecessarily lazy way to write a post.

In this blog post, for example, Nicole gave a demonstration on how you could use italics to stress particular words or "\--" to emulate an em-dash. Are you so devoid of creativity that you can't stylize your text by yourself? Is writing so much of a hassle that you can't use the appropriate characters before posting?

Further, I don't care how readable these ASCII posts are: They can never capture the personality and character of a hand written letter. Having the option of ASCII encourages me to give a more straightforward response rather than coming up with something that's perhaps more emblematic of my real personality. It's dehumanizing.

But more than that, using ASCII instead of your own lines and curves robs your friend of you. It means that you don't value the friendship enough to fully engage in the conversation. You'd rather have a robot do all the rendering for you instead of spending time and energy on them. That's terrible.

I know, I know, ASCII is optional. You don't have to use it. But if we're any kind of friends at all, I sure as hell hope you don't.

<comment><USER33> UTF-8 would have been more apropos, but I get the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I found the entire google io presentation to be extremely bizarre and disturbing. I literally felt like smashing all of my electronics and running into the jungle.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't like the smart replies, but for a different reason.

It will only work under very generic situation with borderline functional replies. For me, that kind of conversation is just a small part of the every communication.

Human conversation is more organic than the demo tries to lead you to think. Details in the words and sentences convey very subtle but identifiable personality traits that the current algorithm cannot capture.

So, it is a really cool feature and a great showcase of recent advancements in applying deep learning to natural language. But it is pretty much a gimmick for now, and I will stay sceptical about whether this is going to turn user around and become a killer feature of Allo, after all if my friends didn't use this, neither will I.

</comment><comment><USER35> I agree with the article. My friends and I have a complex lingo we use in our text messages and the lingo itself can sometimes be a topic of the conversation.

The "smart" replies seems to robotic and i'm sure many people would find it rude if they got them.

</comment><comment><USER36> It will be funny when sending the same photo to several friends, and receiving tens of identical "Love the daisy" answers.

</comment><comment><USER37> They're efficient and that's reason enough to like them. I'm also the type who'd rather compose or read a one line email instead of having to wade through a shit sandwich, but hey, that's just me.

</comment><comment><USER38> Now how about a video of a conversation between two or more people only using smart replies?

\- always pressing the first option

\- randomly choosing an option with their eyes closed

\- pressing on the microphone and speaking gibberish or making gutteral sounds

I'd watch that

<comment><USER6> Twitch Plays Smart Replies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I suspect a lot of the debate here might end up divided along gender lines. Men and women tend to communicate differently (of course this is a generalization, and doesn't apply for all men or all women) - with men often valuing short, efficient and informative replies.

I think smart replies are a great advance towards communicating quickly and efficiently - which is the use case for most text conversations. But it is important to realize when we expect communication to be more descriptive and personal.

</comment><comment><USER40> As the author already points out, this is the main purpose of smart replies:

> I can understand canned responses like "Be right there!" or "I'll be late!" > if you're in a car and only have a few seconds to reply before you have to > get back to the business of driving.

I typically only use them when I'm busy and I see a message and respond to it from my watch.

</comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi I agree so much with this post that I thought it would be so obvious that no one would even write it down... I mean... are actual people really planning to use this feature? Because it is a horrible idea in my view to delegate our social conversations to a robot. When I saw it, as a CS researcher myself, I thought "this is really great tech" as a concept, but I wouldn't even consider using it for anything else than curiosity/testing purposes.

The idea of automation is automating things we don't want to do, talking to friends is definitely something I want to do myself. What will be the next thing, a robot that has sex in our place?

OTOH I'm curious as to where this will lead in the future... smart replies replying to smart replies and generating an entire conversation between two people without them even reading it? Telling your robot "Hey, robot, I want you to find me a guy between ages 25 and 30 for a date tonight, he should be dark-haired and like dogs" and the robot interacting with other robots until it finds someone compatible? That sure would be handy for some shy people :)

</comment><comment><USER41> The tone of this article is really off-putting and I disagree that it's about laziness or something similar. I'm really shy and take a lot of time to think of even a simple reply sometimes, and often end up not replying at all, so this would probably improve some of my communication.

</comment><comment><USER42> I understand that Smart Replies takes away a very personal part of a conversation, and might even lead to just a couple of AIs talking to each other, but if it reduces sarcasm it can't be all that bad!

</comment><comment><USER43> We need a messenger that anticipates what conversation I want to start with whom and auto sends that message. Then on the other side the reply is smart automatic. In effect it will be machines talking with each other. Remove the humans from the equation.

</comment><comment><USER44> Smart replies seem disingenuous. I mean, they're creepy if you know they're suggestions ("a machine told me to tell you..."), and creepy if you don't ("is that my friend or my friend's agent?").

I prefer end-to-end encryption to yummy clams.

</comment><comment><USER45> Please don't send me emoji, acronyms, or other abbreviated replies. I demand you painfully type out a full grammatically correct sentence of original content on a cramped, painful, non-haptic-feedback mobile keyboard.

<comment><USER46> Obxkcd: [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> For me one of the reasons of not having social accounts is privacy. But I also hate that more and more people are starting to communicate in a virtual way.

This is another example of the emptyness it will give.

</comment><comment><USER48> A bit tangential, but didn't old symbian phones have the ability to learn what you are likely to say? It feels like this is really pretty derivative but most have short memories...

<comment><USER49> Even the Swiftkey keyboard does that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Greetings card manufacturers have been doing this for us for decades.

</comment><comment><USER50> In a perfect world using the word "smart" in this context would be a clever use of irony instead of another disheartening example of the vapidity of modern society.

</comment><comment><USER51> In the future our attention will be sold. [1]

~Mark Manson

[1] [http://markmanson.net/attention](http://markmanson.net/attention)

</comment><comment><USER52> Now I can have that lobotomy I've always wanted

</comment><comment><USER53> Id be insulted if people started sending me computer emails instead of physical mails, i find it to be lazy when they wont even bother to go to the mailbox.

</comment><comment><USER54> Like keyboard predictive text suggestions haven't existed for years already.

</comment><comment><USER55> may as well take your brain out and stick it in a jar.

<comment><USER41> I'm ready.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Sure thing!

</comment><comment><USER57> Yum clams!

</comment><comment><USER58> google has really shit marketing

</comment><comment><USER58> Google has really shit marketing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I chat and am "friends" with a whole bunch of people don't really care about. If Google cab automate the pretense of a friendship then great, I can spend more time on my actual friends.</comment>


Yegge Golfing: Shorten Steve's "1,000 pages or so" rant for Sergey Brin - <AUTHOR>

Maybe I was the only one who laughed at Sergey Brin's remarks about Steve Yegge's Google+ Platforms rant.<p>In the spirit of Code Golf, what's the shortest summary you can come up with for Steve's "1,000 pages or so" rant? <comment><USER2> Using www.bookshrink.com to pick out the important sentences, it would have to be Platforms.

Top 4 Sentences:

1 (1.000000): So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com.

2 (0.909058): One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right.

3 (0.893197): That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority.

4 (0.873655): A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

<comment><USER3> I think an important piece left out was how Amazon ostensibly built the platforms first, and then built their services on top of them to make sure they were robust and viable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Amazon is a platform, Google is not. Make Google a platform."

</comment><comment><USER5> Platforms! Platforms! Platforms! Platforms!

</comment><comment><USER6> Think Platforms.</comment>


Ask HN: What's up with the AWS-heavy front page? - <AUTHOR> Is this normal? Is it due to the new services?<p>http://i.imgur.com/5WhSAXG.png <comment><USER2> Yes, their Re:Invent 'conference' is going on this week. [https://reinvent.awsevents.com/](https://reinvent.awsevents.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. I kind of wish there was one topic about the conference that had comments about the services; seeing so many individual upvoted posts about each service is a little much for my taste. But that's just my opinion.</comment></comment>


What It Takes To Work In A Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.dplouffe.ca/what-it-takes-to-work-in-a-startup

<comment><USER2> This list uncannily resembles the one that was posted the other day about "what I learned from working at Microsoft".

<comment><USER3> I came here to say this too. This article doesn't have a date on it, so I can't tell if this is the chicken or the egg. I suspect that this one came second. If that's the case, it would have been nice for the author to acknowledge the original post in his introduction.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I wasn't thinking it was plagiarized, just that the advice is so generic that it could apply to either startups or bigcos. In fact, it so approximates the worst of this annoying genre that I wonder if it is a parody.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Compare and contrast: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991968>

That's currently 23 hours old and has 137 points karma. Interesting to know who ripped off whom, but there's more in the one I quote than the one lunk to from here ...</comment>