Programming Language Rankings: February 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/02/08/language-rankings-2-2012/ <comment><USER2> It is really interesting that not only Java is amongst the most popular languages, but the popularity is also _growing_. It's really surprising, judging how everyone is spitting on Java.

Also, I wish Scala was more popular :)

<comment><USER3> Java is on a rocket due to Android. Now that the Oracle threat has receded, that trend could accelerate.

<comment><USER4> This has to be the explanation.

You can also hedge your bets with Java a bit, because unlike Obj-C it's important outside mobile apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Full-size copy of the chart: [http://img.skitch.com/20120208-jqctdbqg7yfbj785pe9gjtjp8t.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20120208-jqctdbqg7yfbj785pe9gjtjp8t.jpg)

<comment><USER6> On the top right the scripting languages() seem to be below the diagonal and the compiled languages above the diagonal. Maybe it is just co-incidental :).

I have suggestion for another chart someone may be interested in creating. A time series of such images. It would be even more awesome if the traces all the movements are depicted in a single image like a snake.

<comment><USER7> we're waiting until we have a couple of quarters of data, but then yes, a time series is indeed in the works.

<comment><USER8> afaict the "popularity" of most of those languages is being _grossly distorted_ when you convert the "# of Tags" and "# of Projects" data to rankings.

(You haven't provided raw data, so I'll take an example from the raw data Drew Conway posted.)

The range in rank value for the stackoverflow tags is from 1 to 56, but the range in "# of Tags" that rank is based upon is from 0 to 82,923 and the data is so skewed that only 11 of 56 languages have above average "# of Tags".

Most spreadsheets will provide easy to use functions to calculate the mean, standard deviation, and normalized scores (STANDARDIZE in LibreOffice).

 _Please plot normalized data not rankings._

\---

Similarly, the range in rank value for the github "# of Projects" is from 1 to 56, but the range in "# of Projects" is more like 0 to 104,239!

[http://www.r-chart.com/2010/08/github-stats-on- programming-l...](http://www.r-chart.com/2010/08/github-stats-on-programming- languages.html)

<comment><USER9> I would like to see the "Repositories vs. Users" graph in a log-log scale, so it's possible to see the distribution of the big and small languages simultaneously.

<comment><USER8> Better, use 2 charts -- the first to show the big difference between the popular languages and the others, the second to show the minor differences among the others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see how the number of tags/projects translates into a worthy popularity metric.

Maybe some of these _popular_ languages have more tags because they're POS languages that cause grief and consequently many more questions/posts that are created by even a smaller group of users.

Also there's no time element, so a supposed _popular_ language may have had zero tags created in the last year, yet it only drops marginally relative to the pack. And an highly active new language is ranked against all historical data of older languages making it less popular than it really is.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is the scale in the first image logarithmic?

<comment><USER12> No, and it is important to realize that the axes are project/tag count _rankings_ not direct project/tag _counts_.

So, no conclusions regarding relative popularity between two languages should be drawn from the diagram. (It's just an ordering. The distance between the first and second most popular language, for example, is exactly 1.)

<comment><USER11> Oh, thanks, now I understand!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think stackoverflow is a particularly useful metric. If there is a simple easy to use and install language with good documentation, examples and a forum/mailing list with a small number of new users, it will be much lower on an equally as popular language with complex syntax and no community with a larger proportion of novice users.

Stackoverflow really fills the gap if there is no good alternative, it's a reflection of the ecosystem around the language than its popularity.

Perhaps the number of new projects or commits in a given language would be more indicative of a language's true popularity. (Not that it's a perfect metric either)

</comment><comment><USER14> I love the last bunch with Ioke, Factor.

<comment><USER14> Why the downvotes, I wasn't sarcastic. Those are really interesting languages.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best book on modern software testing? - <AUTHOR> Lots of time has gone by, many research page published. Is there any book which explains the recent proven developments? Quick check etc... seem outside of my reach, I've never seen it in any book. Perhaps, my software testing methodology is dated by now. <comment><USER2> A new book focused on developer testing, reviewed here:

[https://henrikwarne.com/2017/08/20/developer- testing/](https://henrikwarne.com/2017/08/20/developer-testing/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am taking a software testing and maintenance class at my local university. Our textbook is called "introduction to software testing" by Amman and Offut. It not only teaches how to test but how to properly design tests.

One of the authors is also my professor.</comment>


Things we did wrong as a startup - <AUTHOR> http://neiljoglekar.com/3-things-we-did-wrong

<comment><USER2> I was hoping for more meat here. These tips seem so vague and generic, its hard to see how they affected you at all.

For the hiring tip, you say "don't hire friends" and then immediately after "in some cases it worked out great". Perhaps could use an example of how this was #1 on your list of 3 worst mistakes.

#2, don't raise money too early. And then you say you actually backed out of the deal and didn't raise money after all. So this #2 greatest mistake didn't happen to you but almost did?

I guess things are going so great you are having trouble finding some things that went wrong?

<comment><USER3> Same here. Seemed to be a little light. It was a well intentioned article but one that could've used more info. A startup is a very complicated animal and I'm sure there is a much bigger list of things not to do than this. However, still enjoyed the light reading. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _People say you should hire the smartest people you know_

One observation of small teams with smart people: It's easy to get sucked into lengthy analysis/strategy sessions, which can lead the team down false paths and inaction on product.

<comment><USER5> I remember a quote from Tom Preston-Werner that went something like this: 'there are plenty of brilliant people that I would never hire'.

I think the author is basically saying the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Splendid post Neil. In essence a lot depends on where in the world and how in life one is.

Paul's essay [1] on 18 mistakes (be known that these may be challenges for some, not really mistakes) that can kill a start-up discussed these issues very nicely.

[1] <http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> Be careful about A/B tests, from what I understand Amazon relies on the extensively and they have helped it produce its Amazon website.

Enough said.

If you have two choices one bad and another less bad you will chose the less bad, when instead you may just want to step back and ask is either choice the correct one.

<comment><USER8> This is the strangest warning against A/B tests I've heard. "Be careful because you might end up producing something that is #1 internet retailer". The Amazon home page might not be as sexy as the latest whizz-bang startup, but success doesn't lie.

<comment><USER9> Thank you. I can't count the times I've tried to explain this to people. The purpose of amazon's site is not that visitors think it's pretty, or even easy to use. It's to get you to buy as much as possible. And there's convincing evidence that it's quite successful in fulfilling that purpose.

Why do supermarkets put the most frequently sold items at the back, when it would be so much easier for customers if they were right by the entrance?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In case anyone's interest on more stories, I've been writing some if mine here: [http://hervalicio.us/post/33446435432/a-post-mortem-of- post-...](http://hervalicio.us/post/33446435432/a-post-mortem-of-post-mortems)

Three so far, a few more to go...

</comment><comment><USER11> I love how this post, in addition to having great content, subtly demonstrates a use case for ReelSurfer.</comment>


A Look at Winget, Windows Package Manager for Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBlBHsleMqY <comment><USER2> Perhaps link to the writeup next time. It's not against guidelines and I don't speak for HN or its users, but video posts tend to not do as well as text posts for reasons I don't understand. Just an observation.

[https://build5nines.com/windows-gets-package-manager-with- wi...](https://build5nines.com/windows-gets-package-manager-with-winget-cli- utility/)</comment>


Michael Dell Gets $12B Richer with Break from Public Eye - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-11/michael-dell-gets-12-billion-richer-with-break-from-public-eye <comment><USER2> > _Dell's fortune is now $27 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires > Index, a ranking of the world's 500 richest people, up from $15 billion in > 2013._

If he had simply parked his money in a s&p 500 index with dividends reinvested, his $15B would have grown to $26.6B. All without breaking a sweat or exposing himself to concentrated risk.

His investment and turnaround of Dell was successful to be sure, but not nearly as spectacular as the article seems to be implying.

<comment><USER3> If Michael Dell "parked" his money in stocks over the last 5 years, the prices would have been altered. Boards might have made different decisions, and his liquidity might have been compromised. There's no way to guarantee that it would have been a better result.

edit: Also my long standing challenge, point out the index fund billionaire. We all want to meet that person who's winning so hard, by doing nothing.

<comment><USER4> I honestly don't understand why people think they can apply conventional investment approaches to such vast amounts of money.

<comment><USER5> Because they can? Nevada's pension fund is run by one guy who parks it all in Vanguard.

<comment><USER6> The whole point of a pension fund is that you can only add money and never take it back.

It doesn't work out if many people try to cash out.

<comment><USER3> Nevada PERS is one of the worst examples as well, missing it's investment targets over pretty much any period of time you can define.

<comment><USER5> Because its targets were quite high. CalPERS much higher fees missed its similar assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Dell announced it would become a public company again through a complex > arrangement that involved buying back tracking shares for VMware, the > software business that Dell owns an 80 percent chunk of. ...

> ... Taking over an existing listed stock allowed Dell to avoid the usual IPO > process...

Huh? Can someone please explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old?

<comment><USER8> Big private company wants to trade shares publically but doesn't want to go through the whole process of an IPO... so the big private company buys a smaller publically traded company. Now big company has "merged" is a publically traded company.

<comment><USER7> Is this considered a loophole in the system?

<comment><USER9> No, it's a well known maneuver. Was popular in the past few years to reduce taxes.

From an Washington Post article: "The idea behind the business maneuver, called a corporate inversion, is simple: a U.S. company merges with a foreign one and moves its headquarters abroad, avoiding the high U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent on foreign income".

<comment><USER10> To be clear, a corporate inversion is generally used to reduce taxes. I believe when you're simply doing it to avoid the IPO process it's just called a backdoor listing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, how long until all the progress they made while a private company is ruined?

<comment><USER12> They'll go private again and emerge much richer. Financial engineering :)

</comment></comment><comment> ui-explorer12 Yet another way the market is rigged against the main street investor. Successful founders of this vintage love to build their company on public money, then use their considerable leverage to take the company private after dramatic growth. I wonder if Dell will live long enough to repeat the entire process...

<comment><USER13> Doesn't that benefit public investors though when the company is public? Better than the company staying private through it all, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So he didn't increase the value of the company that much, he just increased his stake. Right?

<comment><USER15> He increased the value of the company as well, as he diversified it and made it "stronger". Also, he bought it from the public at a premium so they also made good money off of it. And he also increased his stake, dunno how that happened though ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How much of this growth is from "financial engineering"?

</comment><comment><USER17> > The man who became famous selling computers more cheaply over a newish thing > called the internet

As is well known Dell started this out of a dorm room in 1984 and was successful and famous well before the Internet ...

<comment><USER14> Their revenue and stock price was basically flat until 1996, when they launched their website with direct sales on the web. Then their revenue skyrocketed.

It's fair to say that they didn't really get famous until they started selling on the internet in 1996.

<comment><USER17> > It's fair to say that they didn't really get famous until they started > selling on the internet in 1996

Simply (and with due respect) not true.

What are you defining as 'famous'? Michael Dell was definitely famous prior to the internet.

Here is an article from the New York Times in 1992 (July 1992). Besides I specifically remember him and stories about Dell from the 1980's. (I am probably much older than you are is my guess..)

[https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/05/business/the-executive- co...](https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/05/business/the-executive-computer- michael-dell-says-he-s-more-than-ready-for-a-good-fight.html)

Further the article states that sales were 1.7 billion in 1992 (in 1992 dollars that is way more 'today').</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Side Project Turned Turned Obsession - Please Review My Site - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---
tl;dr Launching a new ecommerce site builder/print catalogue builder after 2 years of tinkering away.
http://www.wizifi.com
a HN demo store: http://www.wizifi.com/nexus_login
un: hn
pw: hn
The site is optimized for webkit - best performance in Chrome.
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---
just though i'd share a side project turned personal obsession with you.
2 Years ago my dad (a small business owner) planted a seed in my mind when he said something to the effect 'i wish there was a simpler way to update my website'. He doesn't ever remember saying that, but that comment started me down this misv path.
Later when I showed my old man the progress I had made he again made a throw-away comment along the lines of 'wouldn't it be great to be able to create brochures from this...' which again sent me off on another 8 month development tangent.
The final product is an ecommerce store builder with a print catalogue builder included. I'd really appreciate it if some of you could have a look at my project and give some of your feedback.
It was created in my spare time during nights and on week ends, since by day I'm a high school IT teacher :)
It became impossible to create a cross browser print designer so I decided to optimize for Webkit. The windows download is simply a Chromium build with flash bundled together. Not sure how having a download vs. web app will affect sales.
You can check out my site at: http://www.wizifi.com
You can use the product without downloading the program as long as you're using a webkit based browser.
Cheers, eli </comment><comment><USER2> i actually really like the print catalog builder concept. i've not seen it on other (admittedly few) ecommerce solutions that i've looked at. i feel like if you were to develop this into a generic plugin for other ecommerce solutions, you might have something unique that people could purchase without having to make difficult decisions (i.e., switching ecommerce solutions).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point noodle. I hadn't thought of the catalog builder as a plug-in before.

<comment><USER2> i honestly like that idea better than building a fresh ecommerce solution. there are so many other options that are quite good and already command market share. in addition, as i kind of mentioned, pulling someone away from their established ecommerce solution is like pulling teeth.

plus, if you could develop this into a multi-platform plugin, you could probably use that process to develop a framework for developing plugins for multiple platforms and build some more, since you seem to have good ideas.

just a few thoughts. don't let me discourage you from running with what you have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://www.wizifi.com></comment>


The Lost Man - <AUTHOR> https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-06-07/somerton-man/ <comment><USER2> The story keeps getting weirder... discussion last year:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913942)

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-body-on- somerton-b...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-body-on-somerton- beach-50795611/?no-ist)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nick Pelling who has been following this case for some times offers his comments on this piece at

[http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2015/06/06/the-curious- case-o...](http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2015/06/06/the-curious-case-of- derek-abbott-and-the-somerton-man)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, but the UV image looks like two different sets of handwriting. Look at the A and G letters, and compare the letter M on the bottom line to the other M's. The bottom M slants to the right, the top ones to the left.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm from Adelaide.

Rather than people spend their time on this I'd much prefer to see the Beaumont children and The Family mysteries solved. Many think they are linked.</comment>


The Case Against Patents (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-035.pdf

<comment><USER2> 1\. These are the same authors behind the "Against Intellectual Monopoly" book, which, of course, they cite in this paper. In general, I would not trust anything these authors put out without fact-checking all their claims and actually reading the studies they cite. I have found that they are rather, uh, flexible with their facts: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7889290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7889290)

2\. They claim they could find no evidence supporting a relation between patenting and innovation growth, only a relation between patenting and increased patenting. This is false - there are many studies showing positive correlation between patenting and measures of innovation other than patenting, such as R&D expenditure, and diversity of industries in which innovation happens. Just from a quick search:

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1513814](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1513814)

[http://nw08.american.edu/~wgp/park_lippoldt08.pdf](http://nw08.american.edu/~wgp/park_lippoldt08.pdf)

[http://www.dklevine.com/archive/sokoloff- kahn.pdf](http://www.dklevine.com/archive/sokoloff-kahn.pdf)

[http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam041/2003043048.pdf](http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam041/2003043048.pdf)

[http://www.nber.org/books_in_progress/invention/chapter7.pdf](http://www.nber.org/books_in_progress/invention/chapter7.pdf)

[http://www.nber.org/papers/h0042.pdf?new_window=1](http://www.nber.org/papers/h0042.pdf?new_window=1)

Heck, patenting is also positively correlated with increased prosperity in general:

[http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2013...](http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2013/02/patenting%20prosperity%20rothwell/patenting%20prosperity%20rothwell.pdf)

3\. The bit about the correlation of patenting and productivity growth is also incorrect, and is actually something of a strawman. The theory is innovation results in increased productivity, and patenting is a proxy for innovation, but the relation between innovation and productivity is ambiguous and difficult to quantify:

[http://www2.itif.org/2013-competitiveness-innovation- product...](http://www2.itif.org/2013-competitiveness-innovation-productivity- clearing-up-confusion.pdf)

[http://elsa.berkeley.edu/pub/users/bhhall/papers/BHH11_Innov...](http://elsa.berkeley.edu/pub/users/bhhall/papers/BHH11_Innovation_Productivity_NEPR.pdf))

But even then, a quick Google suggests that there _is_ evidence of patenting and increased productivity: [http://cep.lse.ac.uk/people/bloom/BloomVanReenen.pdf](http://cep.lse.ac.uk/people/bloom/BloomVanReenen.pdf)

The authors certainly are aware of Google, so I'm guessing they simply decided to cherrypick studies that support their point of view.

4\. Of course, there are costs imposed by the patent system as well, and there are a number of studies showing these as well, many of which this paper cites. The big question these days is, how can we tune the system optimally so that the benefits outweigh the costs? To get a more nuanced view of the situation, see this metastudy:

"RECENT RESEARCH ON THE ECONOMICS OF PATENTS", Bronwyn H. Hall Dietmar Harhoff

</comment><comment><USER3> It's really very simple. As the population grows the amount of productivity lost by the people who cannot be productive because of a patent will be much higher than the one party who can be productive. Also with a high number of people thinking the chances of new ideas being created simultaneously is very high (and probably always was). Patent do no increase productivity. This is a moot point. Patents share information, but production _limitations_ should have no part in sharing information. Historical credit is probably more than enough reason for most inventors. New ideas get a natural advantage without any legal help. The legal aspect does nothing good for our society. If aliens were looking at us limit each other they would probably laugh...</comment>


Under GDPR, Data Breach Reports in UK Have Quadrupled - <AUTHOR> https://www.inforisktoday.com/under-gdpr-data-breach-reports-in-uk-have-quadrupled-a-11249 <comment><USER2> Good. The point of GDPR was to hold companies more accountable for the data they hold. I'm glad that it's achieving what it set out to do.

Hopefully this will make companies think of data as a liability as well as an asset.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, previously at least (!) 75% of breaches known to companies went unreported, more likely 90%...

<comment><USER4> The article does note some over-reporting occurring, so maybe discount that figure somewhat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When the UK finally Brexits, will the EU's GDPR still apply?

Not counting that the UK might very well have their own version.

<comment><USER2> All EU law will be directly transcribed into British law, so yes. We could choose to change or revoke it through an act of parliament, though.</comment></comment>


Profile of a New York judge who is 'sticking it' to bankers who mess up - <AUTHOR> http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202463642417&LowKey_Judge_Raises_the_Roof_With_Foreclosure_Rulings

<comment><USER3> It's mysterious to me how easily banks win most of these cases by default - <USER2> guess people who are underwater with their mortgages are often either afraid to show up in court or don't have the money to hire a lawyer to challenge their foreclosure. Perhaps because of this, debt-related legal cases typically seem to proceed in an almost assembly-line fashion, eg <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/business/13collection.html>

The perception that banks in particular are too big to fight legally has (IMHO) resulted in their legal departments becoming terribly sloppy, selecting policies and even litigation strategies purely on the basis of whether they will be beneficial rather than defensible. Hence the contractual Terms & Conditions for a checking account or credit card which now run to many tens of pages, require graduate-level reading ability, and rival software licenses for the boldness of their asserted rights. A recent case I've been cackling over is Wells Fargo's attempted defense of their transaction-ordering policies (<http://www.law.com/jsp/ca/PubArticleCA.jsp?id=1202463467062>).

Like most retail banks, WF had adopted a policy of re-ordering customer transactions made on a given day so as to maximize the likelihood of customers incurring multiple expensive overdraft fees. Say a customer living paycheck- to-paycheck (about 60% of the population) had a balance of $20 in their checking account; they made 3 debit transactions of $5 each in the morning, deposited $30 at lunchtime, and made one further purchase for $35 in the afternoon. Logically, you'd expect the resulting balance to be $20, $15, $10, $5, $35, $0. Instead, the bank would reorder the day's transactions from largest to smallest, yielding $20, $-15, $-50 (due to overdraft fee), $-20, $-25, $-60 (fee), $-65, $-100 (fee), $-105, $-140 (fee). Cha-ching!

This happened to me (at another bank) some years ago following an unlucky combination of bad cash flow and medical emergency, and I was very upset because I had gone to the trouble of calling them first and asking if my planned withdrawal/deposit/withdrawal sequence would be OK. I was told that it would, only to find myself substantially in the red 24 hours later. I was able to get it reversed by going to the branch and literally refusing to accept the telephone handset (to their customer service department) from the branch manager, so that she and I ended up talking with the call center on speakerphone...for over an hour. After multiple instances of Central contradicting themselves or flat-out lying before finally admitting that they ordered transactions chronologically for online banking and posted them instantly, but retroactively re-ordered them for accounting purposes at close of business every day, the manager finally took over and split the refund fees with Central. Since they record all these calls, my objective had been to get this admission in the presence of a local bank officer who could then be called as a witness in small claims court, and I think she realized what I was doing.

Afterwards she explained to me that not only had the bank (and most others) seen the fee profit potential when adopting this policy, but had restructured the company so that the branch network was a separate wholly-owned subsidiary which earned fixed commissions on the sale of financial products (like mortgages or CDs that many people prefer to go into the branch for), out of which all operation expenses were paid. Fee and interest income went on the corporate books, while fee reversals or the administrative costs of defaults were assigned to the Branch Operations subsidiary. This didn't just affect customers. Whereas a decade before employees could begin as tellers and move up to local, regional and eventually corporate management roles, now the branches are not much better than franchise operations and the likelihood of a branch employee ever getting into the 'banking' (financial) division is practically nil. Local operations exist mainly for marketing purpose and any exercise of autonomy by branch managers is evaluated purely in terms of cost; they have zero input into policy, business development, or budgets and as a result are increasingly less able to offer any kind of useful financial advice to their clients.

<comment><USER4> I once asked a bank rep how this worked, and was told that at the end-of-day settlement, all deposits and credits to the account are processed first, then debits and withdrawals.

I believe the bank was Wachovia (now Wells), but it might have been BofA. I assumed then that it was an industry-wide customer-friendly standard, but maybe policies vary?

<comment><USER3> Well, it does seem to have been industry-wide. Customer-friendly, not so much :-)

Seriously, what you describe is how the policies have often been articulated, but how they have been implemented depends on exactly how you define 'processed' - which may not necessarily mean 'applied to your account balance.' I don't want to extrapolate too much from my own experience (which is only one case, and recalled from >2 years ago at that), but the turning point came when I observed that debit/withdrawal times were consistently described in terms of a 12 hour clock, with deposits consistently described in terms of a 24 hour clock. So an outgoing payment took place at '4:30' (pm), but an incoming deposit took place at '16:15', with the _implication_ that since 4 < 16, the debit had happened 12 hours earlier than the deposit. I had receipts and screenshots of my online banking page, so after being given the same explanation - twice - and professing an air of sudden enlightenment, I produced the paperwork and asked to go through the list of transactions one more time but doing them all in the 24-hour format - which led to an abrupt and total resolution of the argument in my favor.

Draw your own conclusions. My beef was about the retroactive reordering of the the transactions as listed by online banking from one day to the next, but in the course of their explanation matters took a distinctly surreal turn.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's crazy and disappointing. I'm quite sure that if it's legal and not just a bizarre error, it's standard practice for all banks in the US.

In my case, I deposited a single large cashier's check (at the teller due to concern about the process), and then wrote a similarly-large personal check to someone else, which I'm quite sure they deposited the same day...so I had a couple of details working in my favor.

Otoh, there are lots of scary stories about checks being credited and then a week or two later failing to clear and being deducted from accounts. Standard craigslist warning, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's an example of the kind of sloppiness which this judge, and with some luck, others like him across the country, is fighting against.

"Countrywide goes Kafka" [http://www.angrybearblog.com/2010/07/countrywide- goes-kafka-...](http://www.angrybearblog.com/2010/07/countrywide-goes-kafka- first-person.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Please don't editorialize the titles.

<comment><USER7> I believe he was quoting the article:

But the 12-year veteran of the Suffolk bench has also issued three foreclosure decisions over the past eight months that have made him the darling of the tabloids and the Internet for, as the New York Post put it, _sticking it_ to "ruthless bankers."

<comment><USER8> Typically I agree with ars, but at least in this case the edit added clarity.</comment></comment></comment>


FreeBSD 11.0 release status update - <AUTHOR> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2016-September/063450.html <comment><AUTHOR> Posting this here because I know the HN crowd includes both a lot of FreeBSD users and "early adopters": Some errant bits escaped prematurely, and the ISOs for FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE are being re-rolled. So if you noticed the unannounced images on the FTP site a couple days ago, _wait for the announcement and the final images_.

<comment><USER2> The release schedule page should probably also be updated, no?

[https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/schedule.html](https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/schedule.html)

<comment><USER3> I wanted to make sure there were no other items to be addressed (specifically with the build scripts), I'll update the page now.</comment></comment></comment>


Google About To Launch Website Mobilizer GOMO - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_about_to_launch_website_mobilizer_gomo.php#.Tq7iRxH7Grc.hackernews <comment><USER2> I wonder how well this will work for web games...</comment>


Towards Reproducible Research with PyTorch Hub - <AUTHOR> https://pytorch.org/blog/towards-reproducible-research-with-pytorch-hub/ <comment><USER2> I love that the tooling for ML experimentation is becoming more mature. Keeping track of hyperparameters, training/validation/test experiment test set manifests, code state, etc is both extremely crucial and extremely necessary. I can't count how many times I've trained a great model only to lose the exact state and be unable to reproduce it. It's extremely frustrating. When I found sacred ([https://github.com/IDSIA/sacred](https://github.com/IDSIA/sacred)) it changed my team's workflow in a very positive way. We already have this approach of saving default experiment workbenche images, but formalizing it is much nicer.

<comment><USER3> sacred is interesting. how does it compare to MLflow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is like an app store of ml models which is pretty cool. There are a couple of tooling around ML that more of compliments the above than being redundant.

\-- Open Source --

Mlflow : [https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow](https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow)

Polyaxon : [https://github.com/polyaxon/polyaxon](https://github.com/polyaxon/polyaxon)

Modelchimp(mine): [https://github.com/ModelChimp/modelchimp](https://github.com/ModelChimp/modelchimp)

ModelDB : [https://github.com/mitdbg/modeldb](https://github.com/mitdbg/modeldb)

Sacred : [https://github.com/IDSIA/sacred](https://github.com/IDSIA/sacred)

\-- Non open source --

Cometml : [https://www.comet.ml/](https://www.comet.ml/)

Weights and Biases : [https://www.wandb.com/](https://www.wandb.com/)

MissinglinkAi : [https://missinglink.ai/](https://missinglink.ai/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This will also make things easier for people writing algorithms on top of one of the base models.

You start with something simple but fast like resnet18 and once the general aproach works you replace it with something better/slower by changing a single line.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I learn to make accessible websites/apps - <AUTHOR> I'm not a front end developer at the moment, but I used to be and I remember having someone ask me about the accessibility of our platform.
So I'm curious what tools/tutorials/guides there are to simulate how some people view the apps I make and so I can learn what makes an app accessible and what makes it inaccessible.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I went through examples of one of those government accessible 'design systems' like [https://www.digital.govt.nz/standards-and-guidance/design- an...](https://www.digital.govt.nz/standards-and-guidance/design-and- ux/accessibility/) or [https://designsystem.gov.au/](https://designsystem.gov.au/) and the WCAG 2.1 spec. There's probably better accessibility tests out there but I've used this [https://wave.webaim.org/](https://wave.webaim.org/) which also has a browser plugin

</comment><comment><USER3> There's some really good resources already listed, so I thought I'd add two broad concepts to consider.

1\. There isn't a clear distinction between accessible and inaccessible. It's a spectrum - much like you can never truly make something completely "secure", but can only ever make it "_more_ secure". You can't just sprinkle accessibility on top at the end of a project and there's no single point at which you've gone from inaccessible to accessible. Your last line makes it sound as though you already have this in mind, but just highlighting it.

2\. Things are accessible by default. Every thing you change potentially has ramifications. This starts with the obvious things like color contrast, typography, etc. but becomes very important as you start getting into behavior. Keyboard navigation is one key example which is vital for many folks with motor or visual impairments and often serves as a handy sniff test for "have I accidentally broken the thing that was automatically accessible by default?".

\---

[1] You could reach a point at which you've ensured you've met or exceeded every WCAG criteria for a given conformance level, but that's not quite identical to to the goal of "completing accessibility".

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd take a look at [https://github.com/brunopulis/awesome-a11y](https://github.com/brunopulis/awesome-a11y) as a starting point. In particular take a look at the Tools section to do some simulation as well as the Development Testing and Validators for more practical tool usage that you could add to your workflow.

</comment><comment><USER5> If using Android, the documentation site should have a user guide on accessibility best practices. It will have specific examples for Android code. I found it very useful when creating my apps.</comment>


Show HN: The Provisionator – Apple push notification certificate wizard - <AUTHOR> https://gamethrive.com/provisionator <comment><USER2> _We log into Apple 's developer panel on your behalf in order to complete some of the required steps. Your credentials will not be stored._

Yaaaaa.....no. This is extremely dangerous and without knowing anything about your source code, there is no way in hell I'm putting my credentials in there. In fact, this is borderline phishing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi mbesto, author of this tool here. I definitely understand your concern. I would encourage people to change their password before/after using the tool if they want to play it safe -- but you do have my word that we don't store the credentials at all (not in our logs either).

Initially I started working on this to be used just by our customers. After chatting with other iOS devs, we saw that messing up Push Certificates was such a common problem that we decided to make it open to everyone.

<comment><USER3> Hey,

I know you are genuinely trying to solve a problem.. But look at the comments: Three comments with the exact same reaction.

Only Hodor would get to Step 2.

Something similar to OAuth 2.0 would be better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jugurtha. If Apple supported OAuth login (or anything else really) we'd definitely use it.

As things are, there's not really much that can be done unfortunately. We do plan to open source this in the near future however, which should make us seem a bit more trustworthy at least.

For now I added a note encouraging people to change their password after using the tool.

Ultimately the solution is probably for Apple to improve the process of creating certificates. Right now almost all instructions on how to do so require you to use Keychain Access (So you must be on a Mac), followed by typing commands into openssl on the command line. There's a lot of room for error and StackOverflow is filled with people running into problems during the process, so hopefully this tool saves some people time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Step 1: Enter your Apple credentials.."

 _Chuckles, closes tab, returns to Thunderbird to get HN link and write this_.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Step 1: Enter your Apple credentials

Oh my gosh, please nobody use this.</comment>


Ask HN: Wage fixing. Any updates from the trenches?  - <AUTHOR>

Are Googlers getting calls from Apple and vice versa? My selfish interest in asking this question is that I'm relocating from Denver to work for a startup in Sunnyvale. Home prices are through the roof. If wages are going up, I'm guessing the housing situation is only going to get worse. <comment><USER2> I don't work for Apple or Google, but I can assure you that there is strong upward pressures on salaries for developers in the bay area. Housing prices are a bit more complicated.

I've also had personal experience with people relocating from Denver and having a _very_ hard time dealing with local house prices. Please investigate carefully using Trulia, Zillow, or Craigslist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :). We are looking at all three sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I did that 2 years ago (Golden to bay area). I ended up living 1 to 1.5 hours from work.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if allowing a government agency to grant exceptions to anti-trust laws would be a good idea.</comment>


Initiative Q – Scam or or Bitcoin Competitor? - <AUTHOR> https://litepaper.com/resources/initiative-q-blockchain-what-is-it <comment><USER2> Everything like "this" is technically a Bitcoin competitor... Whether it (Initiative Q or Bitcoin) is a viable one or not is the real question and remains to be seen.

</comment><comment><USER3> the real scam is having 3 upvotes in your post during the first minute

<comment><AUTHOR> I reckon it's just people interested in the article?</comment></comment>


Crypto startup hacks itself before hacker gets a chance to steal users funds - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/cryptocurrency-startup-hacks-itself-before-hacker-gets-a-chance-to-steal-users-funds/ <comment><USER2> So a company does something in the grey area of morality, and it is okay because they didn't audit the libraries used for their code? They just gave two great reasons not to trust them!</comment>


Debunking C# vs C++ Performance - <AUTHOR> http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2009/01/03/debunking-c-vs-c-performance/ <comment><USER2> Debunk misses the point of original article. It was a cache performance test. You'd expect almost identical performance in C# and C++ for the reasons the original author explained.

Original author responds: [http://systematicgaming.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/performance...](http://systematicgaming.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/performance- c-vs-c-revisted/)

</comment><comment><USER3> agreed :)</comment>


The Python Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html <comment><USER2> The single most reason why a language X (it's python for me today) wins my heart is not because it's extra fancy or anything but the times when it gets out of my way to let me think about the problem and then everything else seems clearer. I write a lot in both Python and Ruby, but the days when I have to dig into my old code, Python readability trumps over Ruby's (or anything else for that matter).

<comment><USER3> Can you give me an example of Python readability trumping Ruby?

<comment><USER2> It's simple, If I don't indent properly - I don't get to run my code in python.

Yes, I know I can make my code look cleaner in Ruby, but I'm lazy. Call me shallow, but sometimes not having to type in blocks and "end" is kind of nice because of the inherent indentation constraint. And that indentation makes it easier to find lexical scope hierarchy easily too (at least for me). YMMV :-)

<comment><USER4> I think indenting and block syntax are absolutely trivial with any good editor.

<comment><USER2> You missed my point. I am talking about the code being cleaner to look at in general.

<comment><USER5> It's just a trade-off. You get cleaner-looking code, which is much trickier to copy off a random web page. The latter might seem trivial, but it's not so simple. In an environment with ubiquitous browsers, many programmers start as copy-pasters. (Just as many of us of earlier generations started out in BASIC.)

I'm not saying this is bad. It just is.

<comment><USER6> If you're trying to copy a non-trivial amount of code from a web page, you're doing it wrong. In 2010, I think sharing code over the internet is a solved problem.

<comment><USER5> Newbies often try to "do it wrong." I also wrote lots of really horrendous BASIC. It was a learning experience. If you think of tab-soup as a Python newbie right of passage, that's your prerogative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real reason I prefer Macs to PCs is that I find the 'mental environment' more pleasant. Uncluttered. Spacious. While you're working at a computer you almost inhabit it, and while you may not have a luxurious apartment, you can probably afford an iMac. I take it a step further by avoiding any software that doesn't live up to the Mac 'feel.'

I describe it to people as 'feng-shui' for computers. I'm surprised I've not seen that concept mentioned more in connection with programming. Python is probably my favourite language. Probably due to the white-spacing more than anything. And lack of those damn brackets.

<comment><USER8> I wholeheartedly agree. What's more, learning python and using textmate regularly has ruined me for writing in MS Word... Not that I was particularly attached to it before, but I now find it really hard to think or write with all that junk (mostly broken - I'm looking at you styles) just sitting there.

<comment><USER9> Try LaTeX, if you haven't already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Purely meta: It would be nice if HN could automatically show links to the discussions that took place the numerous other times this and other links have been submitted and front-paged. Seems like a lot of waste if each batch of HN users has to re-discuss the article from scratch. I tried Googling for the rest of them but so many irrelevant pages came up that I just gave up.

<comment><USER11> RiderOfGiraffes scripted a bot that would do that automatically, but others here thought it was some cheap novelty trick he was pulling.

<comment><USER12> It was certainly novel, and probably cheap. In most other discussions on HN, that combination would be regarded as a _good_ thing.

<comment><USER13> I don't really know what caused some - few? - people to have a fit. Maybe anything that remotely reminds them of reddit calls for outrage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For me, I find Lua has more clarity and consistency than Python. From the design of the language, to its implementation, to it's C API --- it's a very beautiful language.

<comment><USER15> I'll have to disagree.

When I open up any substantial Lua project, I am flooded with local local local and local. It drives me nuts coming from a Python background. Not only is there that, but they decided to use "end" which is more cluttered and longer than using brackets.

Lua also has no standard oop system which means you have to guess which half- baked version the project is using. I'm sure there are other problems I forgot to mention here.

<comment><USER16> I concur with your points. These are some of the problems I had, too, coming from a python background. To add to your list: the # operator confuses a lot of people as can be seen on the mailing list (although its semantics are well- defined actually). Nevertheless there are also convincing reasons for these decisions. Have a look at e.g. <http://lua-users.org/wiki/LocalByDefault>. And the use of "end" certainly helps with anonymous functions.

Purely looking at the language resp. the consistency of the design I would even say that Lua is more beautiful than Python even though Lua has its share of warts. Note that this does not say anything about which language is easier to use in practice (which is Python imho).

But that aside, I think it is important to mention that comparing Lua and Python is a bit like comparing apples to oranges as they pursue _different_ philosophies. Lua gives you just as much as you need but no more. This is the reason why it is so flexible and suited for embedding. Python, on the other hand, is a full blown general purpose programming language with a huge community/ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know." This seems that is not the case anymore. I think that since Python became more popular even in big corporations (see Google) the Python Paradox should be in 2011 something else. You name it. The ideas expressed in the essay are of course still relevant but the example maybe has lost some of its accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER18> The python paradox is not true anymore - since it is taught in so many schools these days. Unlike in 2004 when the article was written.

However the main thesis holds true still... just replace python with haskell, erlang, clojure, or some other esoteric language.

<comment><USER19> Ask a few questions and you can still work out whether they actually learned it or just had it in class. Details depend on the curriculum in question, but recently when we faced this problem at a university recruitment a simple "Hey, what's a generator and why would you want it?" seemed to separate out the real learners from the classroom coasters.

Not that it really mattered that much, you still want to see learning of languages not in the curriculum and no 4-year program will ever cover all the interesting possibilities. We just learned that where "Java, C++, C, nothing else" is a warning sign from one university, "Python, C++, C, nothing else" was the warning sign from that one. You could probably generalize to "C, (Java/C++), exactly one other" and still be right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just in case anyone doesn't notice, this essay is from 2004. The basic premise is still a good one, even >6 years later.

<comment><USER21> I still like the premise, although I feel that Python has become far less esoteric while still retaining the favourite for a large number of quality programmers. And I can't think offhand of any newer languages that have taken it's place (maybe iOS counts?). But that might just be my small sample size.

<comment><USER22> From SF at least, I'd have to say Ruby, followed closely by objective c and clojure.

<comment><USER23> Does anyone really think that Obj-C is elegant and powerful in the same way Python, Ruby, or Clojure are? If so, I would like to hear the arguments for it.

edit: I understand that the iOS SDK is well-thought-out and easy to work with, but there could have been an equally good API for Python, Ruby, or (if your argument is performance) one of the more performant lisps. I don't think the SDK alone justifies Obj-C.

<comment><USER5> _Does anyone really think that Obj-C is elegant and powerful in the same way Python, Ruby, or Clojure are?_

The iOS SDK is elegant and powerful in a different way. There is more syntax. Designs tend toward more exposed entities. However, there is less coupling to particular implementation strategies.

Let's take operations on dates as an example, specifically jumping to "the same day of the next month." This is not as simple as you might think at first, since months vary in length in an arbitrary pattern. In many high-level language libraries, you simply grab your date and you do a single call. (In Ruby: Date.today >> 1) With iOS, you end up having to use 3 different objects. (Calendar, Date, and DateComponents)

Working in Objective-C reminds me of the best of "mainstream" Object Oriented programming from the mid 90's. There is a bit too much arcana, seemingly too many entities, but if you work through some real examples, you find that some good thought was put into things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Actually, I learned it chiefly because what it would do for me on Windows: a REPL plus access to COM. Need to bash around Excel spreadsheets & do funky regexp stuff? Done. Do I like it? A lot? You bet. But I didn't pick it up out of some existential need to improve myself.

</comment><comment><USER25> this article holds especially true for non-technical entrepreneurs deciding which language to choose. while the supply of developers may be lower for languages such as ruby or python, you find a much more enthusiastic crowd of developers who in general seem to already have graduated from another language such as php. thus, from a business non-technical background, by choosing an enthusiast type language such as ruby it made it easier to narrow down quality developers with the right mentality as a technical co-founder than say a language with a large supply of developers such as php.

<comment><USER26> That's exactly what I (business guy) did. I learned Python myself also though, which made a difference. Reading threads on sites such as this had already convinced me of the power of Python (over PHP) and I put together a couple of demo apps to be developed in Python. Some of our guys have moved to it, some have been more resistant, but the guys who have seem much more focused on what they need to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Last time I looked into Python, I was reading something where the guy was going on about how awesome it is to get rid of all the cruft of C syntax, the semicolons and braces.

Then as I started getting into it, and thinking to myself, yeah, a lot of that cruft is just unnecessary, getting rid of it would be awesome... I tripped over the underscores and passing of self in Python.

If the whole point of your syntax is to get rid of old ugly syntax cruft, don't introduce new ugly syntax cruft at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER28> While I agree with the approach described, in practice things can be a little different.

We decided to start using python in our agency a couple of years ago. We really love it but since that time we've really struggled to hire good people. Even in a big city like London we can't seem to find python devs that also have the other skills required for the agency world.

When I interviewed for this job we bonded over a shared interest in erlang (4 years ago). You don't need to use it internally but if you have a candidate who is interested in something like erlang, they're (probably) deeply interested in programming.

That's going probably a safer approach. Find people who do have an interest in the more obscure parts of software development (easy to gauge in a phone interview) whilst still practicing a more common language.

My point is that there's a much bigger picture to language choice. I'd rather be trying to find perfect candidates from a flood of ruby cvs than struggling to find any candidates at all from _insert lesser known language_ cvs.

</comment><comment><USER29> The strange thing about python is it is almost TOO easy. I have worked with developers who preferred python because basically they were not great developers. The ease of development and attractiveness of the speed of development was a lure.

The only problem is the overall systems they wrote were bulky, not efficient and generally over-engineered. Very not hacker like. For example using threads in python, a very big no no that can and does cause many performance issues. Designing python middleware that had no reason to exist other than to be a cool project to build.

And so on and so forth. Painful.

<comment><USER30> > The strange thing about python is it is almost TOO easy. I have worked with > developers who preferred python because basically they were not great > developers.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Python requires some command line interaction. You have to edit text files, read online docs, have a mental model of lists, dictionaries, and strings. It doesn't come with a visual IDE, and it feels awfully foreign in a windows environment. Why would a less-than-average developer even bother with such a technology? It doesn't even come from Microsoft.

<comment><USER8> You're correct on all those points. And yet, to someone with no formal training in CS (I'm an arts grad), python is so much more transparent than any of the MS stuff I've had to use. I think it's primarily the predictability of the naming scheme and the resemblance to pseudocode. The command line is not that hard to get your head around, and you get dicts strings etc with the first few chapters of Dive into python or 'How to think the a CS'.

In fact, it may be that these introductory materials are explicit about basic language concepts which makes learning python so easy — they're not focussed on solving your immediate problem (coding X), but solving the problems you will face over the next few years/decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This essay does assume, of course, that you can find enough developers in your locality that can write software competently in Python.

A few years ago I developed software (engine diagnostic/programming) for a large semi-truck manufacture in the Midwest. Our primary concern when selecting a language for a new product/project was whether or not we could find developers who were competent in that language. That almost always meant we chose Java because that is what our local developer pool was competent in.

<comment><USER32> That actually makes a lot of sense. While the Python Paradox may be partially true, it only makes sense to use in selecting a language when you can't screen applicants.

Once one can screen applicants, I think you're just as likely to find good Java programmers as you are to find good Haskell developers.

<comment><USER33>
      >> I think you're just as likely to find good Java programmers as you are to find good Haskell developers.

While there are certainly more good Java programmers than good Haskell programmers, I think that the percentage of Haskell programmers that are good is higher than the percentage of Java programmers that are good.

      >> Once one can screen applicants,

It is a lot of work to screen applicants. If I were hiring a C++ developer and had two similar looking resumes, I would certainly call the developer that listed Haskell experience first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> very nice article, python's also my choice of coding language. i started with c/c++ in college and then moved on to use c++/java at my first job. but for the past 5 years it's been all python. i'd like to say that the reason is the speed with which i can write applications; not having to think about types, managing memory, or compiling source code helps remove some of the barriers that plague software development for me. time is money and most of the time i feel that i'm able to write applications much faster in python.

the language seems to blend all the best things, i'm never at a loss of finding a good open source library for python and it's most of all relevant. so even while ruby seems to be really popular at the moment because of the rails framework, python also has equivalent* web app frameworks such as django. i remember reading an article by the creator of python where he was praising the php language for having purpose built the language for the web and how python was more generic and less suited for the web (no reference at the moment), today there are lots of excellent web frameworks for python such as tornado web. so python is modern, it has adapted over the years quite nicely, and most importantly it just lets me do what i need to do.

</comment><comment><USER32> The now language is Haskell.

<comment><USER30> It's probably gonna be coffee script on top of node.js

<comment><USER35> I'm an avid nodejs lover and coffee irritates me for some reason, but I agree with you. It's combining some of the up points of python and ruby, and hopefully it begins to get more traction.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists revisit the cold case of cold fusion - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-05-scientists-revisit-cold-case-fusion.html <comment><USER2> Most comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027943).

</comment><comment><USER3> in all seriousness, this just seems to be grad students having fun...

<comment><USER3> note the "unknown probability of success". why can't the probability be calculated? because based on known assumptions, it's 0. that means for the probability to be above 0, some of our assumptions have to be wrong (ie new physics). is it possible? are genies real? could be. we'd have to rub all the lamps to check. despite the fact that genies have not been "disproven", nobody seriously considers systematically rubbing lamps because of the cost:benefit. similarly, serious physicists don't even consider exploring cold fusion. but i see no problem at all with research going on at this level and any good scientist should be equally curious and skeptical

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where are the dead grad students?

Oh, there aren't any? Then there's no 'cold fusion' taking place.

<comment><USER5> Grad students are remarkably hard to kill. Deprive them of sleep, food, and water. Expose them to high radiation levels and dangerous chemicals. They even survive brief periods of vacuum. Grad students are like academic tardigrades.

<comment><USER6> Tardigrades get paid better.

<comment><USER7> Tardigrades are generalized grad students.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The happiest man in the world? - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-happiest-man-in-the-world-433063.html <comment><USER2> Bit of a disappointing article. It finished before going into much depth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes also After researching it a bit more I stumbled upon this (1) making it even more irrelevant

(1) [https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/why-you- should-b...](https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/why-you-should-be- skeptical-headlines-declaring-69-year-old-monk-dubbed-worlds-happiest-man)</comment></comment>


Vis – A vi-like editor based on Plan 9's structural regular expressions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/martanne/vis <comment><USER2> I've been using vis as my primary editor for six months, and I'm quite happy with it. (I'm a long time vim user.)

Main selling points for me:

\- Simple editor, easy to learn, with a ~650 line man page as the documentation

\- Simple, yet has the most useful features from the great vim and sam editors

\- No feature bloat - unlike vim

\- No vimscript (lua instead)

\- Readable and hackable codebase - unlike vim

\- Structural regular expressions

For now the unavailable features that I miss the most are tag browsing and code folding. I don't miss them very much in sufficiently clean and modular codebases, but they are indispensable when analyzing large, complex, or badly written code. I switch to vim when that is the case. I should say that their implementation is considered though:

[https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/547](https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/547)

[https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/342](https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/342)

vis is highly recommended to anybody looking for a better vim and appreciate & know how to use vim without a gazillion of plugins.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if this is what you meant by tag browsing, but I've been using [https://github.com/kupospelov/vis-ctags](https://github.com/kupospelov/vis- ctags) successfully today.

<comment><USER2> Yes this is exactly what I meant. Thank you for letting me know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone interested in what structural regular expressions are and how they're superior to ordinary regular expressions is encouraged to read:

[http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf](http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf)

<comment><USER4> After glancing through this document, I'm still not sure what they are. The document seems to describe a _use_ of regular expression rather than a new form of regular expression. Am I mistaken?

<comment><USER5> This was a better explanation for me: [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=665719](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=665719)

<comment><USER6> I'd only seen Rob Pike's stuff before so thanks for sharing this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an excellent vi-like editor. I've been using it for a while as a lightweight vim alternative and have few complains.

The name choice is unfortunate, as it clashes with the vis(1) command, which has existed since 4.4BSD

<comment><USER8> Yes, and the BSD _vis_ is part of MacOS which quite a few people use.

There was a homebrew package for 0.2 but it was deleted. Not sure if was replaced with a different name.

How about _vi9_ for a name? Or _Vine_. Pretty easy to type since the 9 is just above the i on the keyboard. (qwerty)

<comment><USER7> If being easy to type is the criteria, I would suggest vij, vio, vil, vid or via, since that's where your fingers are likely to be after typing vi if you are touch typing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used Vis full time for a two weeks a couple of months ago. It was pretty nifty. (I'm Emacs user so this was an time-bounded experiment).

Vis is a great of example of the suckless philosophy and of Guy Steele's point about removing the need of features by having synergy between other features. For example they have an immutable piece table to support undo by just moving a pointer. This would mean that as the buffer remains open one would use more and more memory. Instead of implementation a 'garbarge collector' they chose to automatically close a file when its not shown on the screen.

<comment><USER10> > Instead of implementation a 'garbarge collector' they chose to automatically > close a file when its not shown on the screen.

Does that mean you lose the ability to undo actions when you switch buffers? That sounds horrible if you're editing multiple files.

<comment><USER2> That's not the case, as there are no hidden buffers in vis. If a file is open, it is shown on the screen as either a horizontal or a vertical split. That's the only way to edit multiple files.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like it's missing a few key features.

<comment><USER2> The only missing feature that is being mentioned here is the "hidden buffers". Undo is working properly.

A related comment on buffer management from the author of the project: [https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/300#issuecomment-2160...](https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/300#issuecomment-216034775)

I managed to live without hidden buffers so far, though I accept that they are convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It always amazes me that Plan 9, which is widely regarded as a joke OS, has continues to inspire new software with the different way it did just about everything.

I have P9 VM, and I have never quite understood what I am doing with it, but I keep hearing of developers borrowing from its codebase to make exciting new software.

I also find SSSPC and TempleOS to be entertaining OSs to explore, as they are so very different from the OSs I am used to.

<comment><USER13> Who thinks of Plan 9 as a "joke OS"? It's obscure, sure, and has a jokey name, but is hardly a joke itself.

<comment><USER12> I guess the joke name combined with the fact that the OS has never really been implemented in a serious capacity makes the whole thing seem kind of like a joke.

It's really an experimental OS that was designed as a proof of concept more than an actual product.

Nothing wrong with that, but if you find a computer running Plan 9 it's rarely for a good reason.

<comment><USER14> > the fact that the OS has never really been implemented in a serious capacity

I don't think that's true. It was briefly used as the OS for Lucent routers, wasn't it?

I think it was meant to be a serious OS, and I rather wish that it had taken off. Many of the problems of modern server systems simply don't exist with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A nod to Data Structures for Text Sequences by Charles Crowley as Vis utilizes the piece chain.

[1] [https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it faster than kakoune? I tried switching from vim to kakoune a while ago, but it was horribly slow.

<comment><USER16> I'm curious as a full-time kak user, what was slow for you? I haven't found speed to be a problem with kak.

<comment><USER15> I don't remember specifically, but I guess everything was slower than vim, even normal typing. Maybe it used more memory too. My computers are probably much older and weaker than yours, so I notice these things more than normal people.

In any case, the slowness in comparison with vim was very small, I guess I overestimated it in my previous comment.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough! It may be that you built kak in debug mode? I could see that slowing things down. I use kak on a variety of systems, including a six-year- old netbook, so I do get a pretty fair sampling of the performance spectrum.

I was curious, so I ran an unscientific test. This is resource utilization as reported by top.

        PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ S COMMAND

        1152 <comment><comment>~+  20   0  146.9m  77.0m   0.0  0.5   0:00.57 S          `- kak file0.csv
        1319 <comment><comment>~+  20   0  165.0m  94.4m   0.0  0.6   0:00.23 S          `- nvim file0.csv
        1333 <comment><comment>~+  20   0  249.5m  79.2m   0.0  0.5   0:00.18 S          `- vim file0.csv
        1355 <comment><comment>~+  20   0   90.3m   5.3m   0.0  0.0   0:00.01 S          `- vis file0.csv

file0.csv is a 58MiB csv file I made to test large file handling in another application. Each line is at least 10k characters.

To push the limits, I tried to convert commas to spaces with a naive global search and replace. There are approximately 4 million commas in this file. Kak totally chokes on "%s,". Both nvim and vim do fine. Vis not only chokes but consumes a huge amount of memory and needs to be killed with -9.

I run Arch, so I have old-fashioned vi available as well. Vi cannot open files this big.

<comment><USER15> Ok, so what is the conclusion? kak is almost fine, at least better than vis?

I did build kak in debug mode (but that was only because I had problems I was trying to debug and get help with on the kak IRC), so maybe I'll blame that and try kakoune again some time.

<comment><USER16> > Ok, so what is the conclusion? kak is almost fine, at least better than vis?

I wouldn't say that -- the way vis does regex is pretty neat. I'd say all the editors have limitations. Vim is super efficient for global search and replace because after all these years it's still ex underneath, and ex is good at that kind of thing. Vis and kak choke on my ridiculous global search and replace test because they both want to create four million cursors at once. But on the other hand, vis needs the least memory if all you're doing is opening the file, and it seems pretty snappy for ordinary editing tasks. I'm sticking with kak because I'm addicted to selection-oriented editing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any emacs mode that does a similar thing to this?

<comment><USER18> Most regex engines (including that in emacs) support multi-line expressions, so that part is covered.

A loong time ago I found a package on Usenet that emulated sam's command language. I found something on github[1] that seems to be a recent modification of that, but I haven't tested it myself (last time I loaded sam.el was in Emacs 19.34, back when I was actually using sam to do C programming).

[1]: [https://github.com/realwhz/sam.el](https://github.com/realwhz/sam.el)

<comment><USER19> That's why I like emacs. It has anything you can image. Due to the beauty of elisp, people have fun to write in it, and thus contributed to the ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm unable to get it to build on a mac. Wish there was a pre-built binary available so I could try it out!

</comment><comment><USER21> See also ports of plan9's Sam

[http://sam.cat-v.org/](http://sam.cat-v.org/)</comment>


Three States and a Plan: The A.I. of F.E.A.R. (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear.pdf <comment><USER2> There are some other helpful reads in the field of games AI:

 _Killzone 's AI: dynamic procedural combat tactics_ (interesting for its use of tactical analysis): [http://www.cgf- ai.com/docs/straatman_remco_killzone_ai.pdf](http://www.cgf- ai.com/docs/straatman_remco_killzone_ai.pdf)

Misc. coverage of the HL1 AI stuff: [http://aigamedev.com/open/article/halflife- sdk/](http://aigamedev.com/open/article/halflife-sdk/) [http://twhl.info/articulator.php?art=29](http://twhl.info/articulator.php?art=29)

 _The Quake 3 Arena Bot_ (interesting for use of fuzzy logic and GA in training): [http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/quake3/The-Quake-III-Arena- Bot....](http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/quake3/The-Quake-III-Arena-Bot.pdf)

 _The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead_ (interesting for focus on player state modeling): [http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of_l4d_mike_booth.pdf)

 _Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters_ : [http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/](http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/)

 _Artificial Stupidity: The Art of Intentional Mistakes_ (interesting for how it helps you train players): [http://www.liden.cc/lars/WEB/Resume/Papers/2003_AIWisdom.pdf](http://www.liden.cc/lars/WEB/Resume/Papers/2003_AIWisdom.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> F.E.A.R.'s AI is often cited as an example to follow for FPS/TPS games, so this PDF is going to be an interesting read for many players and enthusiasts.

Also, I cannot but think of the A-Life of the Stalker series, as a similarly exceptional thing. I wonder if that one also has a PDF about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me that we should have sufficient power to pull off very realistic AI in videogames, but the research and implementations are insufficient.

<comment><USER5> I don't think its really that much to do with research and implementation and more about the goals of AI in games. Mostly its the illusion of intelligence while not actually being intelligent.

I was reading about game AI again just yesterday and an exmaple of this is in this aigamedev.com article about things you can learn from Halo's AI, they say that "when you make the AI tougher (e.g. with more health points), the players believe they are smarter": [http://aigamedev.com/open/review/halo- ai/](http://aigamedev.com/open/review/halo-ai/)

Game AI is a careful balance between:

        1. Providing a challenge
        2. Not being too difficult to be frustrating
        3. The *illusion* of intelligence

Non of these really have much to do with "AI" as such and certainly don't need fancy implementations or research.

For shooters, being a good shot and having fast reaction time (ie things that make a good player) make for frustratingly terrible AI (and is super easy to implement). What makes a shooter AI feel smart is advanced combat tactics: teamwork, flanking, tricks to flush their enemy out, whatever. A lot of this can be implemented as a mix between behaviour trees and pre-scripted events. But as the Halo guys say, if the enemies don't live long enough for this to be visible, then it doesn't actually matter.

Having said that, I personally wish games had more of an A-Life simulation (agapos mentioned Stalker, a game whose AI I quite liked). Combat tactics is nice and all, but I want the games to feel alive when I'm not fighting the inhabitants. This, I believe, is where realistic interesting AI comes in.

<comment><USER4> I was sorta hinting at the last part of your comment. RPGs are filled with AI characters. I've read some crazy things the AI was doing in some of the Elder Scrolls games before release, aside from running into walls (someone kills his neighbor because he needed a rake, neighbor had one; chickens reporting crimes).

<comment><USER5> Ah, we are on the same page, then :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Youth e-cig bans lead to increased traditional cigarette smoking [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/afriedman/files/how_do_electronic_cigarettes_affect_adolescent_smoking_circulate_0.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> For simplicity, the summary of the important aspect is "synthetic control analyses consider how state bans on e-cigarette sales to minors influence teen smoking rates. These bans yield a statistically significant 1.0 percentage point increase in recent smoking in this age group, relative to states without such bans."

This same author released a similarly titled paper 2 weeks ago, but that is behind a paywall so I have linked to this one instead from 6 months ago. This paper contains the same important implications that the recent one does, though because I do not have access to the new paper I am unsure of what exactly is different.

New paper here for the curious:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629615...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629615001150)</comment>


Somali militant group Al-Shabab bans single-use plastic bags - <AUTHOR> https://globalnews.ca/news/4310799/al-shabab-plastic-ban-somalia-al-qaeda/ <comment><USER2> If you've ever spent time in places where trash is dumped in the open, the need to ban plastic bags is totally obvious. I mean, they're everywhere. On trees, fences, and anything else that snags them from the wind.

Also, I gotta say, the definition of "terrorist group" is pretty damn arbitrary. Basically it means "some group that we don't recognize and/or like".

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm trying to work out if this is an example of something politicised in the west, but obvious to most of the rest of the world. Or if they're just blindly ripping off legitimate government policies to make them look legitimate.

<comment><AUTHOR> African countries like Kenya have adopted the no plastic bag policy (you can get 4 years jail in Kenya for using plastic bags: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/nairobi- clean-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/nairobi-clean-up- highs-lows-kenyas-plastic-bag-ban)) so I think Al-Shahab just adopted it from neighbouring countries to make themselves more legitimate but also because it is necessary.

<comment><USER4> More legitimate? Even more?

<comment><AUTHOR> They are by de facto rule, the legitimate authority/govt/ruler of certain parts of Somalia (largely due to the fact that every part of Somalia is split up or fighting each other)

I mentioned "more" legitimate as they want to be seen as the de jure govt and not just de facto through doing things normal govts would or might do.

You can check out Somalia's territory map here which includes Al-Shabaab: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al- Shabaab_(militant_group)#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al- Shabaab_\(militant_group\)#/media/File:Somalia_map_states_regions_districts.png)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google+ can now hide your gender "in response to user feedback" - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/106792630639449031994/posts/5kt9TpEb77m

<comment><USER2> Google is clearly listening to user feedback on Plus. This is at least the third change so far in where I've seen Google folks engage in the initial discussions, describe their reasoning for why it was initially implemented the way it was, and (after a few days) come back with changes. Very impressive.

There's a transcript at [https://plus.google.com/106912596786226524817/posts/KCUbRMKQ...](https://plus.google.com/106912596786226524817/posts/KCUbRMKQ7VP)

<comment><USER3> To enhance privacy further, I hope they will provide a way for people to use an artificial animated face and voice in hangouts:

[https://plus.google.com/102027212307619239744/posts/4iV2fcm2...](https://plus.google.com/102027212307619239744/posts/4iV2fcm2oKt)

<comment><USER4> With this change, how do you prevent anonymous trolls in hangouts?

<comment><USER5> Don't invite them in the first place? If your hangout is public, you'll get trolls. There are plenty of ways of faking a camera feed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. The people spoke and Google re-wrote all the gender specific language in their product to listen.

<comment><USER7> As far as I can tell, Google hadn't (yet?) implemented gender-specific language. E.g. <http://i.imgur.com/1B5rT.png>

<comment><USER2> Actually they had. From the video:

"One of the major things we use gender information for on Google+ is for picking gender pronouns - her, his, theirs - when we refer to you. Google is committed to building products that people all over the world use, and in some languages gender is much more deeply part of how sentences are formed than in say, English. Having gender information helps to make Google+ more conversational. If you decide to make your gender private on Google+, we'll to use gender-neutral language to describe you whenever someone else encounters gender-related information about you but doesn't have permission to see your gender. For example, instead of saying 'Greg added you to his circles' or 'Frances added you to her circles', we'll say 'Greg added you to their circles' or 'Frances added you to their circles'. Yes, I know this is grammatically questionable. You don't need to message me about it. We value helping people control their privacy as being much more important than being grammatically perfectly."

<comment><USER8> Ctrl-H Find and Replace doesn't seem all that hard.

<comment><USER9> Not all languages will be as simple as s/his/their/ and s/her/their/.

<comment><USER10> But in English it is. It's acceptable to develop faster for certain (popular) languages.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely, but I would be surprised if they didn't have some code in the production version right now to support doubtlessly upcoming translated versions - perhaps not a full blown declension engine, but it seems unlikely they'd go English only at the start and retrofit everything later. The code might not be optimized to just let them do a simple find/replace for English.

<comment><USER10> The problem of translation should not affect the writing of the original text.

<comment><USER9> For all you know, the "original text" is a mix of "foo bar" and lolspeak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what it feels like to be Randall Munroe and have this kind of influence over the web.

<comment><USER12> I wonder what it feels like to be Randall Munroe and have sycophantic fanboys for a poorly drawn stick-figure webcomic that was briefly funny a couple of years ago.

<comment><USER13> IMHO the more troubling trend is Randall's perpetuation of the "all men stupid and evil, all women good and pure" delusion that has infected everything from the classroom to the workplace to the media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is good. Now they just need to allow people to use pseudonyms. (maybe.) [https://plus.google.com/116347431032639424492/posts/Px3uaKZe...](https://plus.google.com/116347431032639424492/posts/Px3uaKZer7D)

<comment><USER15> You can use pseudonyms, they just need to sound like real names. I'm pretty sure that Google doesn't ask for an ID card.

If this was the actual policy - and not just the side effect of their inability to control them - I think it would be reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> no you can't. not yet. at least, i can't.

<comment> mike-cardwell I can't either. It's stuck on "Anyone on the web".

EDIT: "Starting later this week"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is nice, but I'd love to see some more important features opened up instead- things like huddle on mobile web and working video playback in the Android app would be great.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice to see them react so fast, but I dont get the point about the feature.

Are people really gonna switch a button that lets them hide their gender, something that can usually be easily found out by looking at the user's firstname and/or profile picture?

<comment><USER19> Gender isn't just about how you look & what your name is. It's a much more personal construct. Google+ is respecting that, and should be commended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bob added you to his list

Bob added you to his or her list

<comment><USER21> Bob's list now has you on it

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> the gender thing was prominent when signing up for g+, that i think they might have anticipated this fix + "we do listen"-media-spin on forehand.

<comment><USER23> Occam's razor.

<comment><USER24> Hanlon seems more appropriate here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Google is cool again. Yay!

</comment><comment><USER26> Of all the things people want to fight about, it's gender?

<comment><USER27> Not really fight; it was just weird that of all the fields that could be mandatory they chose gender.

<comment><USER28> I think a possible explanation for this is that they use gender-specific pronouns in other parts of the site: "he said this...", "she +1'd this...", etc.

So, I think they needed to re-word more than just the profile section with gender-neutral pronouns. I don't think this is a trivial task, and maybe that's why it will take until the end of the week.

<comment><USER24> Can you point me at a specific place they use gender-specific pronouns? I've been looking for them since day one and I don't remember seeing any anywhere on G+. Is it only a non-English thing, or is it some strange situation I've not seen yet, or have I just missed something obvious?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law

<comment><USER2> _" [Whole brain emulations] are frequently regarded as being potentially highly untrustworthy and dangerous, constituting an existential risk."_

Really? Are they? An ~8000 word article based on this one sentence, with weasel words and no real rationale. Also, you seem to be confounding the computing power required to emulate a brain ("straightforward engineering") with the new imaging techniques that would need to be developed to scan and "upload."

<comment><USER3> [http://intelligence.org/files/WBE- Superorgs.pdf](http://intelligence.org/files/WBE-Superorgs.pdf)

> _Because such emulations could be freely copied and run at increased speeds, > they might quickly outnumber humans and be capable of performing almost any > task more cheaply. Standard economic models suggest this could produce > tremendous economic growth, perhaps doubling the size of economies every few > weeks or less, but also driving wages for most jobs below human subsistence > level (Hanson, forthcoming). Many have suggested that such rapidly > replicating and evolving minds could cause human extinction if not carefully > controlled (Bostrom 2002; Yudkowsky 2008; Posner 2004; Friedman 2008; > McAuliffe 2001; Joy 2000; Moravec 1999)._

<comment><USER4> So, we're the new Neanderthals?

While I'm somewhat convinced that human-equivalent or greater machine intelligence will likely happen within the next hundred years (or less), good luck convincing a majority of humans of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wat.

People take their singularity BS way too seriously.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the background part of this article is great but the idea that anyone (especially governments) would voluntarily take a noticeable bite out of their economy to avoid the very small risk of the evil singularity sounds like crazy talk. (It just occurred to me that a comparison with climate change may be possible.)

<comment><AUTHOR> > the idea that anyone (especially governments) would voluntarily take a > noticeable bite out of their economy to avoid the very small risk of the > evil singularity sounds like crazy talk.

Absolutely. And I say as much, at length, in the OP.

> (It just occurred to me that a comparison with climate change may be > possible.)

It is not just possible, but I actually make that comparison in the OP. (See point 4 in the China section.)

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I didn't devote the time to read your article carefully and by the time I reached the end I had forgotten the beginning. On second reading I find this part a little odd: "...we would need to make a very solid case indeed - a case I cannot make nor will make here. Let's assume that the case has been made and examine an easier question, how feasible such strategies are at accomplishing the goal at all." It's almost like you're sabotaging your own argument by saying that it probably doesn't matter but here are thousands of words on the topic anyway. (I realize this has already been discussed in the other subthread.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, may I register my complaint to the Powers That Be about titles being edited _yet again_? I chose the title I did to highlight the aspect of the essay most of interest to HN readers; by editing the title to the original, you are partially responsible for the hostile reaction in the comments here where only one person actually replies to the content.

<comment><USER6> I think the Powers are beyond help. Battle not with SEO spammers, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I disagree with the author's conclusions that fabs are immune from terrorist acts because a) fabs are too large, and b) terrorists are basically dysfunctional.

I can think of several relatively simple methods to take a large building out of commission.

And don't think for a second that terrorists don't know about all of them and more.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I can think of several relatively simple methods to take a large building > out of commission.

I'm sure you could, as could I - drive up a truck filled with fertilizer comes to mind. But that's not the question being asked, just attacking a random large building - for example, a truck bomb wouldn't work for a chip fab, though, which is relatively dispersed and well-guarded, and alternatives like 'send over one bomber and drop one daisy cutter on the complex' aren't available to terrorists.

> And don't think for a second that terrorists don't know about all of them > and more.

Please provide 3 examples of competent terrorists using your methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Serious attempts to colonize space might be a tremendous complication here. There might arise a scenario where economics favoring the exportation of outdated fabrication equipment combined with the relative ease of constructing huge industrial facilities that are entirely in vacuum would result in a proliferation of low-power devices in the off-Earth economy.</comment>


Show HN: Cursive_re – readable regular expressions for Python 3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Bogdanp/cursive_re <comment><USER2> It looks like it's meant to be easy regexes for people who don't know regexes and I don't like that idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough! I'd more accurately describe it as composable regexes, but to each their own.</comment></comment>


Why There Will Be No Data Science Job Titles by 2029 - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/02/04/why-there-will-be-no-data-science-job-titles-by-2029/#38f3eb093a8f <comment><USER2> I guess the same thing will happen that happened to big data.

As it turned out data is not that big after all and small teams with a handful of people can tame even datalakes and enormous amount of events in realtime by now.

The point is: only a very specialized set of problems will warrant huge teams and scientific research.</comment>