PyCon 2015: Are we still changing the world? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lisnr.com/2015/05/11/pycon-2015-are-we-still-changing-the-world/ <comment><USER2> As a Python developer myself, I think that the community is very "pragmatic engineering" oriented (explicit better than implicit, get things done, simplicity, maintainability, etc)

The focus is on getting things done, today and tomorrow; not be trendy or be on the first page of HN or disrupt the language space using a new paradigm.

Python is "silently?" used A LOT. Not only on web development (which has more the spotlight on the Internet) but in areas like systems scripting, data analysis or science research. I think that is a great language with a lot of opportunities (including career opportunities) that is still growing.

Yes, it's not the new kid in town. I think of it more as an advantage, really.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our pragmatism is one of the biggest factors that draws me to Python as a dev.

I agree about our significant use outside of web dev -- even though I know a lot of it is "out there", I had a hard time gathering it with many major orgs not being on CrunchBase, AngelList, or StackShare, (and some with a footprint that doesn't represent their true size on GitHub). If there's a source for this data out there, I'd love to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is Python changing the world, or Go, or Ruby, or Javascript? If you are asking about "changing the world" that's a big thing to ask for. Simply being useful doesn't make a technology world-changing. I feel very confident that Go will not change the world. People may use Go to make things that change the world, but Go won't change the world. If Python has changed the world – that is the language itself has done so, not just the people using the language – then I'd look mostly to its community, governance, and development process. For Ruby I'd look to its culture, philosophy, and discourse. Javascript actually has a technical claim to changing the world: it's created a programming platform that requires no installation of software, and has brought sandboxed development into the world in a broad and practical way. But if we look at Node.js/IO.js, a Javascript platform with similar scope to Python, then I personally see a generational reinvention: a platform that a new generation of budding developers can call their own, and make their own decisions. Asking a lot of questions that no one actively considers in these older platforms.

But there's lots of other things that can change the world besides programming languages. Are programming languages really the best place to hang your hat? Do you want to compare Python to Ruby or Node.js, or compare Python a web application or wiki or the cloud; i.e., entirely different categories?

<comment><USER4> "People may use $LANGUAGE to make things that change the world, but $LANGUAGE won't change the world."

<comment><USER5> Which makes total sense.

It's the things (end product) that matter, and unless they could only/better/easier be implemented in $LANGUAGE, then it could have been many other languages that could have been used as well.

Whereas something like C did change the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Right now, a huge opportunity for Python seems to be data science. I didn't notice it in the list of places where Python shows up. Also, in that space, it more than just shows up, it brings unique capability to the space with its libraries and the support major tool developers have for it.

<comment><USER7> Python is still over shadowed by R in data science.

I stopped using Python for data science and use R and it really worked out great for me. R has gained a lot of momentum and I think that Pandas with Wes leaving isn't being developed as quickly. (Most of it is re-doing what R has done). I am amazed at all the FUD I was told to not use R and just use Python but after hitting so many walls I tired it and I am so glad I did. Your millage may vary.

<comment><USER8> R is an awful language with great libraries.

My main beef about R (and similar tools) is that I summarize my data I get from Hadoop and find it is still too big for R to handle and I then have to summarize it some more.

<comment><USER7> R does not deserve to be called awful. It is a language that works for many people, people make a living from it and is one of the fastest growing languages.

[1] [https://blog.javascripting.com/2014/07/28/fastest-growing- ne...](https://blog.javascripting.com/2014/07/28/fastest-growing-new- languages-on-github-are-r-rust-and-typescript-and-swift/)

[2] [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2480920/r-programming- languag...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2480920/r-programming-language- gaining-ground-on-traditional-statistics-packages.html)

[3] [http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language- rankings-1-15...](http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language- rankings-1-15/)

Yes I have read [R Inferno] [http://www.burns- stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf](http://www.burns- stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For me, the only place where Python truly excels versus the competition is Numpy. The easy python scaffolding gets you to the heart of a problem in a friendly and flexible way, and then you can interface easily to this big V8 of a compute engine (especially if you combine it with the MKL libraries). The ecosystem around Numpy is astronomically good.

I have fallen in love again with Python (2) for this reason. I tried 3 but I don't need all it's accountant-like seriousness. It's less fun to code in. When I need to design for servers or for performance I will do golang or ocaml. When I need simple scaffolding for numerical work, and scripting for prototyping integration of various systems, Python 2.7 is like an old, unfussy, friend, helping me along my long and winding data wrangling road with a minimum of cognitive tax. It just works. Long may it live.

In my view the Python powers should look at numerical / data science and throw all of Python's weight behind that, and forget about the web, where they've already lost.

<comment><USER10> Can you articulate what you mean by Python 3's "accountant-like seriousness"? Is there more to it than print-as-a-function?

I code in both every day and just don't see what the fuss is about. To me, they're barely different dialects; more like different accents.

<comment><USER9> First of all I don't think the print statement is a small issue. I bet 5% of my code is print statements. I _love_ the print statement's unfussy "can do" mentality. Hey, the whole reason I got into Python was because it was utterly barebones. Print "hello world". that's it. You can almost feel the fun a young GvM might have had making it.

Then all this u"xx" stuff on strings. What's that about? I don't care about unicode. 256 ascii characters is fine for me. If I need Unicode I can do it, but I don't need it by default.

Iterators instead of ranges. Fine. Why again? To save memory? I've got 32 billion bytes. I don't need it. It's complicating something to please the computer scientists and it's messing with my mind which has far bigger problems to solve, so it's unpragmatic. If I see htop moaning about memory, I can easily change my code.

Generally, I just like the 2.0 attitude. It's carefree. It just works. Three is trying too hard. Python is just a tool for me. My really hard problems are my daily battles with nonconvex optimization of vast data sets.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Then all this u"xx" stuff on strings. What's that about? I don't care about > unicode. 256 ascii characters is fine for me. If I need Unicode I can do it, > but I don't need it by default.

I felt this way before I started spending all of my time on web apps. It's reading user input data from some random public source, like Twitter, that forces it upon you. Then, so quickly it became the best practice to "unicode all the things". I think of analogous to how we store timestamps in UTC always.

<comment><USER11> One difference, though, is that time enjoys a certain natural and intrinsic consensus. For example, we all agree that observable time always flows forward at the same rate.

OTOH: Which characters do and don't belong in unicode and in what order? I don't fucking know. :-)

<comment><USER12> > OTOH: Which characters do and don't belong in unicode and in what order? I > don't fucking know. :-)

Should we use decimalized time or time based on the Babylonian base 60/12 system? Both have clear advantages. I don't fucking know. :-)

The world has standardized on Unicode, which (as a collection of expanding standards) defines the set of valid code points and their order. There's still some debate as to UTF-8 vs. UTF-16LE (and perhaps UTF-16 w/BOM and UTF-32) encodings, but Unicode has clearly won. It's not perfect, but it's silly to pretend Unicode hasn't won.

Source: I used to work as an engineer on the content converter portion of Google's indexing system, which took the world's web pages, PDFs, etc. and converted them into a unified format (the text portion of which is encoded as UTF-8) for the rest of the indexing system. Sure, we saw some percentage of EUC-KR, GB2312, Big5, and Win CP1252 text, but Unicode has clearly won and UTF-8 and UTF-16LE are steadily replacing all other encodings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the Python 2 vs Python 3 thing ever going to be resolved?

If you look at Python adoption from the perspective of someone picking it up for the first time, the very first issue they encounter is the "which version of Python should I use" debate, which pretty much frames the experience from that point onward.

The pragmatic attitude that's kept Python 2.X afloat is a key part of why Python has had longevity but it also doesn't set a great tone for "changing the world" or keeping up with the latest sexy fads

<comment><USER14> Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is going to be Python 3 by default. I switched to Python 3 only a year ago. The war is over, Python 3 won, and now it's just the "too big to fail" guys who still think Python 2 has a future. Google, Dropbox and a few others who will probably give it another5 years before they make the switch using 3.5's type hints to help automate the process of moving to Python 3.

<comment><USER15> There was never a war, and Python 3 didn't win it.

We're still not seeing any mainstream Python 3 adoption (no, I don't count your own project). PyPI downloads was still < 5% last I checked. The big web frameworks are still better tested and better performant with 2. Scientific computing is stuck with 2. Same with Ansible. And the big companies you mention have no (public) intention to migrate.

The core developers decided long ago that 3 is what everyone should use, so I have no doubt that will be the case. The open question is how much is left of the ecosystem by then. It's commonly discussed at conferences but there is no straightforward answer. At least we got the TLS stuff backported to 2 which might be indicative of a coming thawing.

<comment><AUTHOR> > We're still not seeing any mainstream Python 3 adoption

I think mainstream adoption is _increasing_ , but not as quickly as anyone would like. The sentiment around adoption I felt echoed at PyCon this year was: "we have dependencies that aren't ported to 3 yet [... and who will be the ones to port them?!]".

<comment><USER9> The Python 2 codebase is growing much faster than Python 3, because the Python core developers have lost touch with the fact that its most dedicated users are _not_ web people, but scientific computing users for who the overwhelming choice is 2.7. Anaconda gives you a 3.x choice on its website almost as an afterthought. Theano is half hearted on 3. Bloomberg doesn't even have a 3 access library (goodbye 3.0 for the _entire_ finance sector). Asyncio, one of the so called killer features of 3, looks great but is 10 years too late and is done much better in other languages (goroutines). Python is seriously losing momentum: hey, even Hacker News quickly demoted this story to page 2 precisely because it attracted the usual flood of 2v3 comments causing the comment number to dwarf the score. It's become a controversial and uncool language thanks to this forced 3 story, and the fact that 6 years later in this dog-years world, this issue is still on the table, makes 3 an utter failure.

I predict that 2.7.9.x.y.z will continue well past 2020 and backport any truly useful stuff from 3 because that's much easier than porting 2 code to 3. Or, and the core developers should seriously think about this, they should build 2->3 right into the interpreter so you can run, _unmodified_ 2.7 code on a 3 interpreter (2.7 libraries included), and then pick and choose the 3 features you want yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think there is a certain kind of sloppiness in Python culture that holds it back.

For instance, the split between Python 2 and Python 3 has kept from me getting more into Python because I have to choose one or the other in terms of which libraries I want to be compatible with (and the libraries are a big reason I'd want to to use Python.)

If you look at Java or PHP or .NET there is a lot of concern about keeping compatibility between versions, but going from 2 to 3 they changed a lot of APIs that they didn't have to.

The most disturbing thing is that I have been shouted down for years on places like proggit for bringing this issue up but it is only in the last year that I have seen it talked about by pythonistas, and that's a general problem I see with Python, that it ducks the hard questions which Java, in particular, faces before anyone else. (i.e. having a memory model for threads which is mature)

On one hand, the GIL means that Python is not scalable in terms of threads. Today 4 core machines are mainstream, even for phones, and with a language that supports scalable threads, you can get a 4x speedup easily for many real apps.

The other option is go to the Node route, which is balls-to-the-walls async operations in a single process, but (i) the async people also have had a culture of "kicking the can down the road", (ii) it is hard to get programmers who are used to sync APIs to switch to async (this is one reason why the "Modern" interface in Win 8 was DOA... Microsoft was pushing people to use Javascript because rewriting Win32 apps to be async defeats the purpose of using Win32 which is being able to use all the old stuff and not learning anything new.)

<comment><USER16> There are many ways to get around the GIL. Use PyPy. Use processes. And are you really doing that much computation? Threads on standard CPython are perfectly fine for I/O.

<comment><USER17> PyPy still has a GIL: [http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#does- pypy-hav...](http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#does-pypy-have-a- gil-why)

<comment><USER16> Doh. I should have said, "Use Jython."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To be honest, I think the influence of the Ruby/Rails ecosystem is hurting Python. In the last few years, it's become impossible to run many Python projects without doing a pip install -r requirements.txt. That in itself would not be a problem, except that many pip packages are buggy and poorly maintained. Few people take the time to vet such libraries because the effort involved in a pip install is so low. The result is that we often spend hours configuring a buggy library instead of writing code that would do a better job solving our problems. "Convention over configuration" is no less important than it always was, but it's certainly less fashionable.

There are exceptions. Django rest framework, for example, is an extremely mature, well-made library. But these are becoming less of a percentage of the whole and are harder to find in the chaff.

And there are a few projects still carrying the torch--but typically these are old projects that have been around for a long time, still maintained by older developers who were writing Python when Python was young. We still have at least a decade before these old masters start retiring, so I don't think Python will die any time soon. But it has become more important than ever to be careful what you let into your dependencies.

<comment><AUTHOR> This one resonates with me.

Though I haven't used either myself yet, I've noticed the trend in automated code quality tooling becoming more popular in Python. Specifically, the ones that come to mind are: Codacy, Code Climate (both free for open source); and Landscape.

Personally I'm still using strong classics like coverage and pylint, but plan to explore the new gen stuff soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Python GIL problem could been solved in Python3 by just moving all global interpreter instance variables into a single struct and changing the C API to take a pointer to this interpreter struct as the first argument in all C API functions. No thread local variable hacks need be used and all interpreter instances could have been completely independent of each other, allowing for seamless and efficient share-nothing multi-threading. Python3 was not intended to be 100% compatible with Python2 anyway, so it was a perfect opportunity to fix this long standing design bug. But this opportunity was lost.

Strangely, the Google V8 team repeated Python's API design error and also relies on global interpreter variables and thread-local variables to swap interpreter contexts, or "isolates" in V8-speak. Although my understanding is that the V8 team recognizes the problem and are (slowly) addressing it and changing their APIs accordingly with each successive release.

</comment><comment> rkuykendall-com Python is changing the world more than ever before, by becoming the new default.

I know undergrad CS students, masters CS students, non-CS professionals well into their career, and non-CS hobbyists. And they are all writing Python. Five years ago when I was doing my undergrad, that would have been Java, or C++.

It's not exactly an exciting change from a HackerNews viewpoint, but it's pretty amazing for programming as a whole. The people I know are so much more excited to be learning. There is frustration, but much less than when I knew people learning on C++. Obviously that's still a fantastic language, but I'm happy Python is the new default.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was excited when MIT switched to Python for setting the trend for other schools to follow that it's okay to teaching computing from the top down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Python is a very nice language, but a big stumbling block is the poor package management. Contrasting this with node, which makes it as easy as possible to build modular software, python's packages are a big step backwards.

<comment><USER21> I'm not following this. Can you give examples of features in node?

Given, the quality of things in any community repo, and the namespacing, are often terrible, but this hasn't ever kept me from using good things out of it.

I'm also not sure how it can be a step backwards, as Python is quite a bit older :)

One thing I don't like about npm is folks are starting to store non-npm things in it, which I think may because of the weird situation of npm getting funding. I don't understand that just as much as I wouldn't understand PyPi or CPAN getting funding :)

<comment><USER22> The key difference between pypi and npm is that if you pull a package down and it depends on something==1.0.2 and you depend directly on the incompatible something==0.8.9 both version live together in peace because only request will use 1.0.2. With pypi (and most other dependency management systems) you'll have to make a choice on which one you want to use and in this example you'll have to choose an older version of the library depending on something==1.0.2.

<comment><USER23> This has been largely solved with virtualenvs where those collisions happen on the system level, but I concede it's harder when the mutually incompatible requirements are in the same project.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I'm understanding the question correctly, I agree virtualenv + virtualenvwrapper solves it _mostly_. For what I consider a decent treatment of some of the shortcomings in pip vs. npm, I found this post helpful:

"Things I wish Pip learned from Npm" [https://medium.com/@alonisser/things-i- wish-pip-learned-from...](https://medium.com/@alonisser/things-i-wish-pip- learned-from-npm-f712fa26f5bc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Im currently migrating a large FTSE100 web application stack from Java/SpringMVC over to Python/Django.. Its been a long journey (4 years!) to unhinge Java as the given option, but Pythons proven time and time again to save millions per project, and often with better results because developers can concentration on product rather than framework problems.</comment>


Twitch.tv for coding? Live Coding 0x1 - <AUTHOR> http://log.paulbetts.org/rxui-live-october-1st/

<comment><USER2> great idea. I had a similar site going for awhile called [http://livecode.in/](http://livecode.in/)

I want to watch more badasses like notch rip code</comment>


Two-year-old phone receives 15-month-old software update - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/two-year-old-phone-receives-15-month-old-software-update/

<comment><USER2> I don't like seeing issues like this placed at google's feet. The real problem here is verizon. Why would they want to give up prompt updates that make the phone you already purchased just as good as the newer better phone they want you to pay for? I went though this with the thunderbolt and turning s-off and unlocking my bootloader. I was able to load up anything I wanted but this isn't something that others with the phone were really able to do. So yea, they got $700 more of my bucks because I purchased the gs3 outright and promptly unlocked that too but I will tell you this, I'm about done with verizon. They're probably the most greedy company I've dealt with since I actually used to have a phone line (thanks Ooma).</comment>


Jack Ma Confirmed as Chinese Communist Party Member - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-27/jack-ma-communist-and-the-tricky-balance-for-china-s-capitalists <comment><USER2> I've been hearing repeatedly that the party is building up a "human shield" in case the West will start going after party members individually.

There are no benefits for an average person in China to join the party aside from your member card doubling as a free public transit ticket.

First, you can't meaningfully participate in the political process in any capacity, without already "being somebody" in the party.

Second, only 1 in 1000 of party members will ever see any chance to work in any meaningful position. Yes, the actual amount of people who do politics in China is no more than ~70-80 thousand extremely privileged people, picked among the _most fanatical_ candidates.

Third, even if you already "is somebody," and passed the impossible odds, and be picked out from the most fanatical party members, your remit will be no more than to blindly execute edicts passed from above.

Fourth, if you survived for over 2 decades in a position of low ranked official, your brains will not. Anybody who spent so much time mentally tortured by routine work and doing meaningless, brain dead "ideological research" will have their spark extinguished, no matter how talented they were.

Fifth, when you turn a grey haired party veteran who can recite all Marx works from memory, and have a genuine chance getting to provincial or national level, you are a useless husk of a person, who can't do anything but mechanically follow the politburo.

Sixth, if you survived even that, and surpassed everybody else at doing that ritual, you end up becoming a man in ranks of Xi Jinpings.

Jiang Zemin, was the only man ever known to "hack" that system, and he is universally hated by party for that.

<comment><USER3> China has done remarkably well in last 6 years, lifting half a billion people out of crippling poverty.

If their political system is as incompetent as you describe, I wonder how they manage to do so well.

<comment><USER4> I believe that's due to the entrepreneurship and hard work of the individuals in the country, and not of the political system itself.

Congratulating the CCP for lifting the country out of poverty would be like thanking the US political parties for making the USA the largest economy in the world (as opposed to the hard-working entrepreneurs and workers who built this country into what it is today.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To illustrate how ridiculous that this is considered a piece of news to Westerners, consider if Chinese media reports "Taylor Swift confirmed to have voted in the election."

I don't think the term "confirmed" is the right choice here since it is confusing the action and the state. I highly doubt that the media would use the word "confirmed" if he actually just joined the party. That would be news.

<comment><USER6> He did, that's what confirmed means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So? There are almost 100 million party members in China. And higher the education you are, the party will be more persuasive in having you join them.

And it is in China, come on. Being a Communist member isn't a SIN. And Ma openly said he is a fan of Mao and would not hesitate to hand over Alipay to the 'country', had the government asked for it. So make no mistake, he joining the party is like a win-win for, both parties(no pun intended).

<comment><USER8> I think applied collectivism might be particularly difficult for Westerners to reconcile with our world view, especially those part of entrepreneurship communities.

<comment><USER9> Do you really think that's _the_ sticking point Westerners have with communism in China?

<comment><USER8> I think it's one of many facets of a very interesting topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this news? Most people in China who is a somebody is a party member.

<comment><USER11> >Most people in China who is a somebody

Most people who is a somebody? So then, would that not be a description of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is Bloomberg trying to sound absurdly stupid to cover up their previous really stupid story on Chinese spy chip?

</comment><comment><USER13> What does it mean exactly for him to be a party member? Does this mean the party has control over his company?

<comment><USER14> _Does this mean the party has control over his company?_

No more than it would have if he wasn't a member.

<comment><USER13> Why is Jack Ma in the party? What benefit does it convey, and what constraints does it induce?

<comment><USER15> Spin those questions around to ones that are more familiar to Westerners.

"Why has Jack Ma joined the Freemasons? What benefit does it convey, and what constraints does it induce?"

The reasons are very likely in both situations that having an 'in' with some particular powerful group is very good for your cash-flow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's outright trying to sensationalized something completely common or just completely ignorance.. Either way..

</comment><comment><USER17> "Step down, join the party. You won't get another offer."

</comment><comment><USER18> How many members of the party are there just to boost their careers, and how many for _any_ other reason?

<comment><USER7> Most of them. For a party of that is bigger the size of most nations in the world, it is almost impossible to unite those members diverse interests under a single ideal. It is more like an assumed loyalty test for CCP, or vanity number, think it more like the Prime membership, except you don't really get too many benefits from it. LoL

<comment><USER19> > except you don't really get too many benefits from it

Being able to do big business doesn't count?

<comment><USER7> well, you better have the luck to own a big business first. Once you do, becoming a party member, had you wished it isn't a hard thing. No difference than rich people like Trump gets into politics eventually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Surprised to learn there's only 89 million members in a country of over 1.4 billion.

Guess it's very selective for a reason.

<comment><USER21> Why do you consider this number is small? Assuming you won't being sarcastic.

<comment><USER22> USSR: 19 million (1986) out of population of 286,730,819

3rd Reich: 1945 the party reached its peak of 8 million with 63% being male and 37% being female (about 10% of the German population of 80 million).

North Korea (1988) 3 million out of 19.56 million

So it seems that most one party regimes only have less than 10% of it's population officially registered, hmm. If I am more knowledgeable, I'd make a comparison to medieval nobles and clergies tbh

(The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had 10% of it's population counted as nobles as well in 1750 or so IIRC)

<comment><USER23> Interestingly, it looks like about 32.5 million Americans are registered Republicans, out of a population of 325 million

[http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/regist...](http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/registering- by-party-where-the-democrats-and-republicans-are-ahead/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it me or does there seem to be a significant increase in both communist and china posts hitting front page on HN and in media in general?

<comment><USER25> It seems to have started with the Bloomberg story, which is still to be proven, and has escalated since. There was the Huawei story, the social credit system story etc.

I suspect it has something to do with the media being fed stories to boost U.S. position in the trade war. They're probably gushing themselves over getting such 'exclusive' pieces, while it's all per-planned.

It's not even far fetched, as that's exactly what happened prior to the invasion of Iraq, but if it indeed is the case, it would be a huge irony, given that we often, (correctly), point out how much control the CCP has over the press.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> After reading all the comments below, I'm quite disappointed that there are still many that equate joining the CCP as joining the Freemasons or the Republican party.

Do any of these other parties have their own secret services and armies and nukes? Do any of these parties blend completely into the state apparatus such that they are indistinguishable? Have any of the parties killed literally dozens of millions of people?

Check your moral compasses people. The Communist Party of China is communist in name only, but it's actually the Nazi party now. Wake the fuck up and learn your foreign policies and history.

</comment><comment><USER26> To the surprise of no one. It would be silly to believe that you don't have to be a party member to play ball. I could find it rare if Jack Ma had his origins in HK, TW or other place with a delicate relationship with Mainland but this is not the case.

</comment><comment><USER27> To the complete surprise of no one...

With the possible exceptions of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong.

<comment><USER28> >Jack Ma, co-founder of China's most valuable company, was officially confirmed as a member of the Communist Party

There is an oddness in reading that sentence though.

<comment><USER27> Yeah.

Apparently the downvoters don't get the irony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The word 'communist' is becoming more than slightly stretched by this point.

Perhaps they should rename it to something slightly more accurate.

'Billionaires Drinking Club', perhaps.

</comment><comment><USER29> More red scare fearmongering from Bloomberg. Have they retracted their FUD about Supermicro yet?

"The lines between business and politics have become increasingly hazy in China as President Xi Jinping has led a campaign to ensure the Communist Party plays a leading role across all aspects of society." As opposed to America, where we certainly don't have any businesspeople in politics or politicians in business?</comment>


EIP 712: Ethereum typed structured data hashing and signing - <AUTHOR> https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-712 <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR - "This EIP aims to improve the usability of off-chain message signing for use on-chain. We are seeing growing adoption of off-chain message signing as it saves gas and reduces the number of transactions on the blockchain. Currently signed messages are an opaque hex string displayed to the user with little context about the items that make up the message."</comment>


Ask HN: Please share your experience to go from Show HN to signing up customers? - <AUTHOR> What were the things you did that helped and what do you feel you could have done better? Thanks for the answers! <comment><USER2> In my experience, HN has been a bad place to solicit for users. The majority of users from HN will likely be "tire kickers." Sure, your traffic may spike, but that'll be about it. I also know I'm not the only person with this opinion, though I'm sure there are exceptions.

I would focus on your _real_ market, not showing off to developers hoping they'll become your customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have any experience with your question. And since no one has answered yet, you may be interested in some stories at: [https://www.indiehackers.com](https://www.indiehackers.com)

Click on the interviews link to see more specific stories about how people got started.</comment>


Show HN: Find data correlations with presidential candidates - <AUTHOR>

http://dressler-llc.com/electioneffect<p>This is a project we just finished. It scrapes data from multiple sources and visualizes it using Raphael.js. Enjoy. <comment><USER2> If you're willing to do some work with survey weighting, there is an awesome amount of well organized data about US presidential elections that is freely available in the American National Election Survey (ANES)[1]. I would love to see some pretty charts made from that data.

It's obvious that this website was meant to be tongue in cheek, and it's actually pretty cute (I like the daily horoscopes, they set a fun tone for the page). Still, I think there's a lot of value to society that could be created by making pretty graphs with good data.

[1] [http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/download/datacente...](http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/download/datacenter_all.htm)</comment>


Reddit buys the site that's been running their semiannual Secret Santa exchange - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2011/08/reddit-acquires-redditgiftscom-to.html

<comment><USER2> I think that the timing of this move makes a lot of sense. Redditgifts has always been awesome, but as more and more people started using it, the penchant for abuse grew higher.

By reddit taking over, and dedicating full-time attention to it, they can take steps to combat a lot of the fraud and general lameness and keep the experience awesome for everyone.

I know a few great redditors who were drawn in through the gift exchange. I've done it now twice, and will do it again, although I got shafted my 2nd time.

<comment><USER3> I'm not certain I'll participate in the gift exchanges anymore, and it has nothing to do with Reddit buying the site. I've participated twice, and both times I got great gifts from the person who drew my name. However, my experience sending out gifts has been less than stellar. Both times, I did a lot of research and spent a lot of money. The first time, the person never even confirmed that they had received the gift (tracking info confirmed delivery) and the second time, it was just confirmed as received, with no commentary made, no thank you, nothing. When the person you are buying a gift for can't even take two minutes to say thanks, it kind of kills any desire to continue participating.

<comment> X-Istence I had the same thing happen, but on a smaller scale. I got one gift that was meant as a joke, and then an actual gift. I sent the two one after the other. When the first arrived, even as a joke gift, it was not even marked as received ... when the second arrived I got a very shitty thank you.

Will this stop me from participating again? Nope, not at all, I have been very happy with the gifts I have received so far, and I have been even happier with what I have sent so far, and if people don't want to be in the Christmas spirit, well then thats a shame, but that doesn't mean everyone is the same way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This makes a lot of sense for reddit. They get to keep a huge and very successful sub-community and really integrate it into the rest of the site. The exchange is one of the cooler things on the internet to show to friends and I'm really happy that the guys can now afford to work on it full time with the reddit team. Congrats guys!</comment>


"I just go Google Chromosome" – Startup asks people to explain Wi-Fi and 3G - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/09/06/i-just-go-google-chromosome-startup-asks-people-explain-wi-fi-3g-hilarity-ensues/

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to the YouTube video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK7Pp1TjhjI></comment>


Are Wikileaks Servers in a Nuclear Bunker? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/feb/23/internet.usa <comment><USER2> Servers in a nuclear bunker can just as easily be taken offline with a court order as servers not in a nuclear bunker.

A much wiser approach would be to mirror the content around the world, including in a number of countries with more lax laws on what can and cannot be stored on said server. The pirate bay seems to have success with this - according to them they don't even know where their servers are physically located.

<comment><USER3> Like these: <http://binaryfreedom.info/node/312> (scroll down)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would your ideal programming language be like? - <AUTHOR> I'm a language designer. I know I love writing compilers and interpreters, but I always had this constant problem of fitting the languages I create into a niche.
I always aim for the ultimate swiss-knife kind of language or I always end up doing that. However, many people have told me, I'm wasting my time creating general-purpose languages, instead I should focus on a niche. Now I'm looking for the niche.
So I'm directing this question to you coders, old and young. What do you think a new programming language should have and not be considered a waste of time? What features or environment do expect from a new programming language? Why do you think current languages cannot have those features? In short, what areas do you think current languages suck in and would be a good starting point for a new programming language? Or should I just give up on language design and compilers and get a life. Bjarne seems to think that.
It helps if you can describe your ideal programming language in respect to your field and why you think it will work there.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, Clojure is my favorite language. One of it's core principles is a symbiotic relationship with it's host platform. Today it compiles to Java, Javascript, and C# runtimes. There's also a growing native runtime for C[1].

What draws me to Clojure is the sense of "conversation" I have with my runtime, state, and the code I'm writing. I start with some data, and transform it slowly with added functions until I arrive at my desired result. I often have a commented out "scratchpad" in my code left over from those development conversations[2]. I honestly wish more programmers experienced this phenomenon, and I wish it was in more languages/runtimes.

1: [https://github.com/schani/clojurec](https://github.com/schani/clojurec)

2: [https://github.com/jamesleonis/bencode- cljc/blob/master/src/...](https://github.com/jamesleonis/bencode- cljc/blob/master/src/bencode_cljc/core.cljc#L111)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the next game-changing evolution in programming languages is moving beyond plaintext.

Our basic building blocks of programming has not changed essentially since the beginning of programming.

We still treat programs as nothing but a bunch of files and folders edited with the same tools that writers use to write romance novels (yeah yeah "intellisense" is not so intelli at the end of the day).

We don't create beautiful images by writing RGB values in a text editor. We shouldn't be creating highly complex software systems with them either.

We need model based editing environments that will allow us to have a much richer set of software building blocks.

We have to allow software to be more than just characters in files. Software "source" is not a book. It's the blueprint for a system that has metadata and constraints attached to it. It can't comfortably and forever exist in a flat plaintext structure for human consumption.

If you are interested go dig up my old comments I have written more elaborate rants about it before.

And yes I'm ready for the inevitable and customary "NO IT AINT GON WORK WE TRIED BEFORE AND IT AINT WORTH TRYIN EVER EVER AGAIN" replies.

Also relevant:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax/](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax/)

(I actually somewhat accidentally and indirectly caused the creation of the subreddit as a result of a discussion here on HN before)

[https://isomorf.io/](https://isomorf.io/)

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

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII)

<comment><USER4> "We've tried it before" is a poor excuse, of course. The theory angle holds both some better excuses for not getting our hopes up and possibly some clues on how to get there.

We've got to avoid taking text for granted. Basically put, the adaptability, precision, fastidiousness, accessibility, etc. of the written word makes the modern world possible. Phonetic type is far and wide the greatest communication interface known to man.

I work with a lot of node-based softwares doing CGI and post-production work. A few of the daily softwares I use have a small editor in the bottom corner of the GUI. The node interfaces are very useful and hard to live without. I agree that, when doing visually-based work, it feels very _off_ to have to stop what I'm doing and so scripting. It feels like a vastly different mode of the mind. But, as I've gotten better at scripting, (still not great) I have noticed that when I have a visual idea with no implementation, it can be a good time to start building it with a script. I have roughed put some 3D scenes in scripts _from the start_ and found this to be a totally different experience than the _stop and change modes_ issue. I can't argue for it's productivity level, and I don't know what the value of this observation is, but I honestly _enjoy_ working this way when I do it. It's as if my visual sensory system is relaxed and my imagination is utilized more. The ideas are parameterized rather than experienced. This does not happen with node interfaces, which actually introduce an extra visual experience. I am just babbling at this point, but these observations feel relevant. I do not, however, know what kinds of conclusions to draw from them.

<comment><USER4> One more thing... I do want very badly a plugin for a code editor that allows me to click and drag on a float (in code) and scroll it up and down. If anyone has any ideas or tips, please post! If it doesn't exist, any thoughts on an environment or editor that would be friendly to such a plugin would also be helpful.

<comment><USER5> Take a look at Bret Victor's Tangle project. I believe there are editor plugins that offer this, but I can't name any off the top of my head.

<comment><USER4> Thank you!! On a short vacation rn but will look into this in a couple of days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think you're going to design a great language that way. I think great languages get designed when you discover that with existing languages, it's difficult to do things that you want to do. If you don't know _why_ you want to create a new language, it's not likely to scratch other peoples' itches either. (However, asking others for their pain points _is_ a reasonable substitute.)

That said, here's an idea or two:

Optional garbage collection. In a C++ context, if I create an object with new, it's not garbage collected - it goes away when you delete it. But if you create it with some other mechanism (new2?), then it's garbage-collected when no longer referenced. (The problem with this idea is that a garbage- collectable object can still be "live" while referenced from a non-garbage- collectable object, which could be difficult.)

Adjustable need for typing. Personally, I love static typing. I want the compiler to tell me when I'm being stupid; I don't want to find out at runtime. But some people want to prototype/experiment/play with dynamic typing (or, if you prefer, without static types). So you can set a flag to the compiler to tell it not check static types. Then, as the code solidifies, you change the flag to make it a warning if there is not a defined type for a variable, or if a type is used incorrectly. But in this mode, it's just a warning - the code will still run (and crash or whatever when it hits the problem). Finally, for production builds, there's a flag for compiling with full static type checking.

Note that these are just ideas. They aren't _my_ pain points. I'm pretty happy with a mix of C++, Java, and Perl.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's some of my recent thoughts on this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15481143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15481143)

I feel that visual programming as it exits now is merely scratching the surface of possibilities. I want to watch my code come alive as I write it.

Granted, I realize this is as much of a tooling problem as it is one of language/compiler design. Then again, I tend to view the blurring of the two as inexorable in such a context.

> _Or should I just give up on language design and compilers and get a life._

These don't have to be mutually exclusive. That said, prioritize yourself first.

</comment><comment><USER8> My ideal language would consist of a single word: "do"

When this program is run, it automatically knows exactly what the user is trying to do, and re-arranges reality to achieve that goal.

<comment><USER9> Heh, reminds me of my college buddy's futile search for infinite compression. He wanted to be able to compress any file down to a 0 or a 1.

<comment><USER10> That's actually quite trivial. It's the decompression where things start to get somewhat tricky :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I'm a language designer. I know I love writing compilers and interpreters, > but I always had this constant problem of fitting the languages I create > into a niche.

Anything we can see, say on github?

> What do you think a new programming language should have and not be > considered a waste of time?

Static typing, so I can refactor large codebases with less fear and have type safety.

> What features or environment do expect from a new programming language?

What could you add/change to make a new language different that existing languages?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/appcypher/astro](https://github.com/appcypher/astro)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am not a language designer, although I've been fascinated by it for a long time. I couldn't write a compiler to save my life. But I am on the internet and do have opinions, so here is a laundry list of features my ideal language would support, or things I think might be nice to have.

0) Sane package management. What do I mean by sane package management? See how NPM does it? Not that.

1) Metaprogramming - native support for adding grammars, extending the syntax, lexing, etc. These could be distributed as packages and included as dependencies, creating a language that could be extended and improved upon by the community. The core language would probably need to allow raw memory access, pointers, and control down to assembly. In my naive fantasy, it would be possible to, say, "import javascript" then use actual javascript, possibly within a namespace or scope. Or typescript. Or lua. But probably not C++, or any language that's a Lovecraftian incantation.

2) It would support a single, possibly typed JSON-like data structure, but without required quotes for strings (so like Lua tables in that regard) but with bracket notation for arrays. Assignment in general would use the colon and not = for consistency. Or maybe it would just be s-expressions, I don't know.

2.5) Zero indexed arrays, which are the only objectively correct way to index arrays. Whitespace agnostic. If it uses semicolons and braces, they will not be optional. None of this goto fail nonsense in my language thanks.

2.6) Except goto will be supported, because a language that doesn't support unstructured control flow is a babby language.

3) Javascript-style anonymous functions and lambdas, default arguments, function overloading and multiple return values.

4) Operators as types. Any legal variable could be defined as an operator, returned from or passed to a function, etc, and could be overloaded.

I leave the implementation as an exercise for the reader.

</comment><comment><USER13> When you are saying "Bjarne", I presume Bjarne Stroustrup of course.

Can you share a link where he mentions such thing? I have a great admiration of him and I would like to read or hear more about his personal concerns.

Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://cppcast.com/2017/05/bjarne- stroustrup/](http://cppcast.com/2017/05/bjarne-stroustrup/) A podcast. He mentions it at around 42:00.

<comment><USER13> Very nice, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be like "C with classes", with excellent generics, and a compiler that is smart enough to organize data into the most performant contiguous, tabular memory layout.

</comment><comment><USER15> A language that everyone used would be great.

</comment><comment><USER16> No curly brackets. No semi-colons.

</comment><comment><USER17> c++ is close to my ideal language.

what I hope it has is

1\. dynamic reflection.

2\. cross-platform package manager

3\. more intuitive meta programming.</comment>


Flying High Unpressurized (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/flying-high-unpressurized/ <comment><USER2> A hard drive crash once caught me off guard at high altitude.

Admittedly less of a concern these days, but back in the era of spinning disks I thought it would be fun to take my netbook up loaded with approach plates.

Turns out yes, the read write head is supported by a thin cushion of air. As the air becomes less dense so does the cushion until - yup you guessed it - head crash.

It's well documented now of course but I understand it also used to be a problem in Tibet and Chile.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article, both informative and detailed.

One thing I would add is that most sea-level habituated people are measurably hypoxic over 5,000 feet or so. It's just not as obvious.

If you're a pilot, there's an interesting self-test you can do on yourself the next time you fly VFR at night. At about 8 or 9,000MSL, without oxygen, take a look at the landscape below. Looks normal, right? Now breathe some oxygen while continuing to look.

For most people, it's like having the contrast turned way down on a TV and not realizing it. Once the contrast comes back up, there's all this depth of color, vibrance and detail you had been missing -- and have not been aware of it.

If you're like me, the crazy part isn't that you were hypoxic. It's that everything seems completely normal. You can't use an out-of-whack system (your brain) to judge whether it's out-of-whack or not.

<comment><USER4> My impression is that cabin altitude on a pressurized airliner might be up to 8,000 ft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Destin at Smarter Every Day shows you the effects of hypoxia and why you should put your mask on first before helping a child or other passenger.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw)

<comment><USER6> My wife still remarks that she'll put on our daughter's first, and I'm like please, please, please don't do that, there's a reason they say this. If you pass out, you can't help anyone else. It doesn't seem to get through to her.

<comment><USER7> I was just flying today and noticed times printed on the safety card. I recall it had getting your own mask secured in 5-7 seconds and getting to assisting children by 10 seconds.

It's the first time I recall seeing times printed and it really illustrates how quickly it'll hit the fan. 10 seconds isn't alot of time but the order is still critical.

I wonder if that clarity on timing would frame it better for other people instead of an open ended 'me before them' blanket rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminded me of the two times I've been hypoxic. One was in the altitude chamber. The Navy was great about training and had all pilots experience hypoxia so they could understand how the symptoms effect them in particular. My first indications was tingling fingers. The second time was flying into Iraq. I had skimped on the preflight checklist and missed the cabin pressure switch, which was always in the on position, but had somehow been set to off. Took my mask off at 20k heading in country and started to feel light headed with tingling fingers. Told my commanding officer / flight lead something was wrong. We started to return to the carrier. During the emergency procedure checklist hit the step to check the cabin pressure switch. Oops. "Sir, we don't have to abort the mission!" The Navy had some great training that saved my life on more than one occasion.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was in a Cessna 206 headed to Oshkosh. Our pilot had planned to fly Eastbound at 17,000ft to avoid an air current. We all got nasal cannulae for supplemental oxygen. We departed at 3AM, and following takeoff I immediately fell asleep.

I woke up somewhere around 14,000ft, dizzy and confused, and realized I hadn't put my cannula in before falling asleep. I fixed this, and within a minute the brain fog was gone and I proceeded back to sleep.

Then we hit turbulence, which in a small craft like a 206 means you occasionally whack your head on the ceiling. Couldn't sleep through that.

</comment><comment><USER10> The author mentions that he would design a system with a continuously monitored pulse oximeter that could trigger the EPS descent mode automatically. Do wrist-mounted versions (fingertip ones would probably be too bulky/uncomfortable for continuous use by someone at the controls) of such continuous oximeters exist at the moment? The Apple Watch apparently has a sensor capable of measuring blood oxygen content, but disabled that functionality for unstated reasons (FDA regs?) [1], and I'm unaware of any extant wrist-worn device with that functionality enabled.

[1] [https://9to5mac.com/2015/04/24/apple-watch-blood- oxygen/](https://9to5mac.com/2015/04/24/apple-watch-blood-oxygen/)

Some more information about the physiology of hypoxia can be found here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150318011408/dr- amy.com/rich/o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150318011408/dr- amy.com/rich/oxygen)

<comment><USER11> Autopilot descent triggered by hypoxia alarm has been available for quite a while. It uses responsiveness heuristics rather than oximeter input.

[https://www.aviationpros.com/press_release/10393999/cirrus-a...](https://www.aviationpros.com/press_release/10393999/cirrus- aircraft-announces-significant-new-software-features-for-cirrus-perspective- by-garmin-avionics-suite)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unpressurized high performance single engines are basically the number one private pilot killer. Dentists and business men with a few hundred IFR hours will go up solo in their new million dollar TBM, lose oxygen, descend into icing, and that's a wrap. Don't be one of those guys.

<comment><USER13> ...are there stats on that? It's my impression that poor pre-departure decision making - especially regarding WX and w & b - are the very, very simple things which tend to kill private pilots.

<comment><USER14> Arguably, taking off along a route where one could potentially be stuck in icing for an extended period, in an aircraft not capable of that, is the definition of poor pre-departure decision making. Commercial airliners have relief to dispatch with malfunctioning anti-ice gear. The procedures almost always dictate that flight in known or forecast icing conditions is prohibited. Basically, if it's not summer and there's a cloud in the sky you're not going. Icing is not something to mess around with in an aircraft not properly equipped for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its extremely hard to detect hypoxia in yourself. Since your own detection apparatus is faulty it usually doesn't work. Your best bet is to see if anyone else looks like they have hypoxia, and if so should trigger the thought that you might as well. Think of it like being able to tell if you are in a dream, it takes most people some practice to tell, even though it seems like it should be simple

</comment><comment><USER16> that audio for Cirrus, N591WA ... oooohhhh.... mmmyyyy ....

[https://www.faa.gov/data_research/accident_incident/2011-05-...](https://www.faa.gov/data_research/accident_incident/2011-05-17/media/N591WA%20redacted.mp3)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you're going to do this, spend $30 and get a can of BOOST oxygen and a pulse oximeter with an alarm.</comment>


Alas poor Oculus, I knew you well - <AUTHOR> http://www.iijiij.com/2013/10/17/alas-poor-oculus-i-knew-you-well-016017 <comment><USER2> I have very little idea what this article is trying to say. I can't even decipher whether it is pro-Oculus or against it.

<comment><USER3> It's a weird article.

"Oculus is good, but CastAR is much better"?

I don't see them as direct competitors. People developing for one provide some benefits to people working on the other.

<comment><AUTHOR> But now CastAR's newly announced VR mode does indeed make them direct competitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My biggest comment is that its not fully immersive. The occulus VR and castAR are drastically different in that sense. As a gamer, I don't want to see anything but the game, thus head mounted is perfect in my mind. I don't want to look at a surface, I want feel like I am inside it.

<comment><AUTHOR> CastAR now also comes with VR which means that in VR mode you won't see anything but the game, exactly the same as on the Rift. In which case, the relevant question is whether CastAR VR is as good as the Rift's VR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a link to the kickstarter for the CastAR:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/casta...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/castar- the-most-versatile-ar-and-vr-system)

</comment><comment><USER6> "neither technology is likely to change me in to a player of any kind of games" \- if the article writer is not himself a gamer of any sort, why should anyone listen to his opinion on forthcoming game technologies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this what PG would describe as Ad Hominem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, I think Valve would disagree with him.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand that Valve has an investment in CastAR, so I'm not so sure about that.

<comment><USER8> Former Valve employees started CastAR is what I was led to believe. From Valve point of view supporting CastAR is a good option because they want both initiatives to succeed (Oculus Rift is already supported in SDK). Why? More VR = more games, more games = Steam is more relevant. And with Micro Transactions (No other game distribution platform does it AFAIK. So if your game wants to use them Valve will take a cut.) Valve's margins and market segment is so high that investing in technologies like that (Steam Box/VR) makes sense even if they do not pay off for years. Eventually they will bring more people into gaming and Valve will be right there conveniently offering all the games that support VR right on the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, for Valve, this is a win whichever.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Oyster: The Netflix of Books - <AUTHOR> https://www.oysterbooks.com/

<comment><USER2> Is Netflix only available on iOS devices?</comment>


User Liberation: Watch and share our new video - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video

<comment><USER2> What free software is and why it is important</comment>


Pfizer Halts Research for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Because It's Too Expensive - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/pfizer-halts-drug-research-for-alzheimers-and-parkinson-1821874256 <comment><USER2> It is too expensive since there is already a working method developed by Dr Dale Bredesen. In a first trial with 10 patients he cured 9. His method is not a magic pill but is based on doing everything possible to reduce inflammation and optimises 36 parameters.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I hadn't heard of Dr. Bredesen before. Here's a link[1] that has some details on his treatment method. At first glance it doesn't strike me as too revolutionary: eat well (cut simple carbs, eat more fruits/veg and fish), get plenty of sleep, a moderate amount of exercise, and practice good oral hygiene. Not sure how this reversed Alzheimer's in 90% of his subjects?

[1] [http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/memory-loss-associated- wit...](http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/memory-loss-associated-with- alzheimers-reversed-for-first-time)

<comment><USER4> This study doesn't have a control group. Studies without a control group are not very reliable because you can't compare the results of the treatment with the expected results. Perhaps in the selection method they overestimated the problems of the patients. For example in:

> _Six of the patients had had to discontinue working or were struggling with > their jobs at the time of presentation, and all were able to return to work > or continue working with improved performance_

Is this usual or unusual? When you et a new illness or symptom you may not be able to work, but after a time you get some coping strategies and adapt to your new capabilities and can return (partially?) to work. Perhaps they got an usual counseling to help them, and all the effect is due to the counselling and not to the diet. Perhaps they get weekly/monthly interview that were unintended counseling. Perhaps ...

Without a control group, it's difficult to guess how many of them would have got a similar result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe they forgot that the research could result in a profitable therapy?

<comment><USER6> It's true, if you cure Alzheimer's you will probably be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but scientifically Pharma is groping in the dark at this point in time. The last decade or so has had a series of extremely expensive last stage clinical failures and Pfizer isn't known for cutting edge science.

<comment><USER5> Curing Alzheimer's or any other condition is the wrong approach. It is way more profitable to treat the condition and turn it into something that is merely manageable rather than making your revenue stream disappear entirely. This is the most humane approach to improve the quality of life for shareholders and the health of executives' bonuses.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Problems.club - <AUTHOR> http://problems.club/

<comment><USER2> [http://i.imgur.com/diNGefJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/diNGefJ.png)

What's the point of the animating label? Seems like there's a good amount of space anyway below it.

Also, the submit button jumps left when I write something.

Chrome Version 43.0.2357.132 (64-bit)

<comment><AUTHOR> >> What's the point of the animating label?

It's a default behavior of textarea in Materialize CSS. I will try to fix it later.

>> the submit button jumps left when I write something.

Thank you, it's because of "length" attribute in the bottom left corner of text area. I'll try to fix it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Problems club is a place, where you can anonymously tell about your problem and get recommendations on how to solve it. Seeking for your advices to improve this project.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice use of Materialize <3</comment>


Google will eventually open the Google Now API to app developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/open-google-now-make-android-super-smart/ <comment><USER2> If that is true and is adopted by app-developers in a non-spammy and non- annoying way I might actually start using it.

So far Google Now has only been Google using up my battery to tell me that my way home, will still take me 20 minutes by car, despite me having exclusively used the subway since before I signed up for Google apps. The one thing it does, it does _wrong_. That's a 100% failure-rate.

I don't know how much it has cost Google, but so far I would definitely rate it not worth it.

<comment><USER3> Blame your city, not Google.

AFAIK in my city, public transport authorities signed some kind of exclusivity deal with a route-planning startup, and they don't give bus/tram timetables to Google. Maybe where you live there is a similar deal?

The startup itself is not that bad, but having this data available in Google Maps and Google now would be _strictly better_. I've experienced this in Hanover once and I know how cool it is.

<comment><USER4> A city shouldn't have to deal with Google. Google is a company and should provide a reasonable service or no service at all.

<comment><USER3> Google needs timetable data, and since they're a company, they can't just go and scrap the timetables from the official website and call it a day. They have to arrange for whoever runs the public transport system to provide this data, and sometimes the city refuses.

<comment><USER4> For Google Maps, they used satellite imaging and cars with cameras. They didn't ask the government to give them the information / data besides the necessary permits.

A company can't just expect that the data holders will blindly comply with them because the result would be an improvement over the current solution.

<comment><USER5> Google Maps makes huge use of government data (particularly in the US where the government makes detailed imagery available under a free license).

I'm also confused what your point is. TeMPOraL expressed an opinion _but having this data available in Google Maps and Google now would be strictly better._

That isn't a forceful argument that cities must comply with the demands of Google, but you seem to be answering it as if it were.

Using your words, it's a lamentation that Google provides _no service at all_.

<comment><USER4> I was reacting to TeMPOraL in that way because it felt like there was some kind of entitlement for the data.

Public entities ow the data to nobody and especially not to companies.

For sure, it would be great if city administrations and public entities did have some kind of API but the overhead would be just too big to justify the cost.

Having commercial partners for those APIs would be one way to fund it but I don't think that it would be a sustainable model world-wide.

<comment><USER5> I disagree, public entities owe the data to their users.

(especially if we are talking about entities that receive government funding or offer a public service under some limited license)

I think my attitude is widespread:

[https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/](https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/)

[https://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicF...](https://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFeeds)

That's a Google effort, but it is pragmatic, it opens the data for more than just Google.

<comment><USER4> I agree with the idea that the data should be open to the public. Research funded by public grants should be in the same category as well.

But as a developer I know how quickly the technologies and developer needs change. There are often threads on the front page of HN and /r/programming about the technology turnover being too quick. From this practical point of view I find it difficult to see how an public entity could justify funding for stuff like this.

Also using companies like Google as an example for data-openness is not the best argument. API bait-and-switches are just too common these days.

<comment><USER5> I didn't use _Google_ as an example, I used that particular effort as an example. It involves dozens of transit providers opening their data, with no intermediate reliance on Google.

As far as the spending, the public entity already has to have some sort of record of their scheduling. The justification for sharing it is simply that making things easier to use increases use of them. Perhaps that isn't the case, but it shouldn't take months of time to set up a system to dump an existing database, so for systems with thousands of users it should not be a significant expense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Google has 40 apps in a pilot program that's produced integrations like > location-based rewards and ticket codes from Walgreens and Fandango, flight > and lodging deals based on recent Kayak and Airbnb activity, and more.

What worries me is that each example they offer is some way to advertise goods and services. I don't need yet another avenue for this kind of crap to be pushed out to me.

<comment><USER3> Yup. This concept has so much potential, and yet half of the companies included are, well... crap. Useless.

Give us the API, Google. I'll happily write a Hacker News integration (as someone will most likely beat me to Github one).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "About to"? I read a lot of hopes and aspirations, but nothing as imminent as "about to".

Emphasis mine:

"Aparna Chennapragada...announced at SXSW that the service EVENTUALLY will open its API to all app developers."

"A Google spokesperson told WIRED there IS NO TIMETABLE for opening the API to all developers, but that the company "plans to add more cards and open the API to developers over time.""

<comment><USER8> According to the OP, there are already 40 apps in the pilot program. Presumably, Google will open the platform to close partners first, and independent developers later.

<comment><USER9> Yes, development for apps for content partners was started in early November and were being tested in small batches in mid December.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are business customers able to turn on Google Now for their domain hosted email yet?

I remain without a Gmail account, all of my email passes through several Google Apps accounts. Google Now has been a tease for years... it appears to offer the features I desire, but none of them are available to me.

Email scanning for flight information, appointments, etc... just doesn't happen.

I keep Google Now enabled, but pretty much all it can tell me is where I am, and what the weather is like. But this isn't that useful. I want the rest.

</comment><comment><USER11> In some ways I like Google Now. It can organize things on my phone utilizing Google's vast knowledge about my activities online.

But the same thing bothers me deeply. Our lives have become subjects to these machine learning algorithms. They feed us meaningless click-baity titles, advertisements and notifications that aren't all that important. That's how their huge business operations roll after all. We've become a generation that subconsciously write to feed the machines, not humans; and there's no easy way out in sight.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. Dear Google, not that I don't appreciate your efforts but please open source the server side application, let me install in on my VPS and point my phone to it. I'll be happy to start using Google Now then. But don't forget to open source the app too, to be sure that nothing funny is going on inside it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Everyone else (it seems) complains about how google discontinued Reader.

My biggest loss was google desktop. One of a few brilliant things it did was to pick news to me based on what I had already read (I guess it autodetected RSS feeds in pages I read and used them as input.)

Hopefully this could replace this particular feature.

</comment><comment><USER14> As much as I appreciate a lot of Google services, including Google Now when I lived for a while in Mountain View and it worked fairly well, my big issue is how I value my time.

I am fighting back a little on information + marketing material being pushed at me. I do some simple things that help: use GMail as a low priority email catch-all that I check just a few times a day; use a personal domain email address for friends and family that I check very frequently; I keep my cellphone turned off while with friends, hiking, coding, and writing.

I recently watched "The Zero Theorem" with my Brother. The scenes of people walking on the street having advertisements pushed at them makes for good science fiction but it is not the lifestyle I want.

</comment><comment><USER15> I stopped using phones a couple of years ago, after working on them for awhile (mostly video stuff, some carrier billing - in the days when that was possible, before the Androids stopped dreaming of electric settlement due to aggressive Google policymaking) and concluding I really didn't like the privacy implications.

However, circa start of the year I visited a friend who works for a major cellular carrier in Australia. He showed me the latest greatest phone (honestly can't recall which, but Android-based) and was enormously proud to show me how the device had learned precisely how far it was for him to walk to work and how far to his favourite restaurant.

Gee, I thought. It's figured out precisely the least useful stuff you're most likely to know anyway, and you're not only looking at the device to validate this (ie. unlearning this trivial information) but actually sharing it with Google and anyone who steals/borrows/hacks your phone. Where's the plus side?

This Google Now stuff looks like more of the same: thinly veiled marketing schmick on what essentially amounts to a filtered correlation of all of your personal habits (real and virtual), wants and plans. A big privacy no-no, NSA wet dream, desperately searching for a legitimate application.

</comment><comment><USER16> If they could let app developers decide on which notifications appear on the home screen, I wouldn't need automatic anything.

Take Llama for example. Llama manages some settings on my phone, but the only way to keep it from being killed is to display a permanent notification. This has the added benefit of it being easy to see which Location I am at by swiping down the notification bar, but I never need this information on the _home screen_.

<comment><USER5> Do you forget where you are? (I'm kidding, but maybe you could explain what information the notification is really providing you, obviously not as little as my joke implies).

Also, couldn't that app be using some sort of intent? There seem to be a couple of options, and I wouldn't think the settings need to be adjusted instantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have an exclusive email address that I use for the things Google Now can track and provide updates: Amazon deliveries, flights, hotels, and car reservations. For each of those, Now is convenient for looking up confirmations, order numbers, contact info, and location.

Regarding traffic directions: I don't need actual directions but it's great to be able to see how traffic looks with a swipe and plan alternate routes when necessary, like when I need to get into downtown San Francisco @ 5:45pm.

There's a few more goodies. Sports score will be updated. Google Now will also know when you're in a new town and offer suggestions for What to Eat nearby.

The main problem is that Now is useless until you can clear out the redundant stuff: places you already know and routes you never take. Worse, it's not clear dismissing those things are considered "yes of course" or "not liked". WiIll be interesting to see how they interpret since it's all recommendation- based.

</comment><comment><USER18> I actually thought I liked Google Now until I read through these comments. It sort of woke me up to the fact that Google stole iGoogle from us and this is its replacement.

* They could easily drop in the ability for me to subscribe to an RSS feed, but they don't. * I don't have any way to tell it what I prioritize. Today I scrolled through 10 cards before finding the weather. * Going into "Customize" -> "Everything Else" has some absolutely laughable questions that it is using to inform itself about my tastes. Some of this cannot be based on my browsing habits.

If they won't give the users any access to configuring a tool for our needs, what sort of warm and fuzzies are we supposed to get that they'll let developers have access? Do I really need ANOTHER notification dock?

</comment><comment><USER19> Does this mean that more apps will not work without Google Apps installed on the phone?

</comment><comment><USER20> > Not only will it fold the information you care most about into a single > Google Now wrapper, it will help control the deluge of information and > notifications that come with poking in and out of a dozen apps a day.

Wouldn't this face the same challenges as managing an e-mail account to prevent too much spam/noise? Or is there some way Google Now scales with number of apps that cuts spam down? It seems like the more apps it supports, Google Now would have to be increasingly strict on what apps are allowed to push to the single wrapper.

<comment><USER21> What would be interesting to me is to see the "what cards do I want to see?" logic used with the core set of Google Now information applied to these other app notifications.

As in, Now learns what app's announcements or what kind of announcements from apps I always wipe from the dashboard, which ones I click through. Over time it tunes itself to reduce or stop certain kinds of notifications so that I'm just getting the notifications I'm going to want to see.

Right now it's just the individual apps that control their notifications (the "give them everything" controls currently exposed don't really allow us to manage the deluge in the _right_ ways). This could provide a better way to control all that.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I agree, and it won't work without this. Which means some sort of NLP so that an app has the ability to separate the things it's attempting to show through some sort of categorization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For those that like me may be mislead by the title, the "open" is as in "open API", not "open-source software".

The days where Google supported an open Android system are gone, gone, gone.

</comment><comment><USER17> HN Moderators: it's "Google Now", not "Google now..." thanks =)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a puff peice about a modestly useful google product. Google Now is nothing more than a glorified secondary notification pane.

<comment><USER17> It's actually a very useful and powerful Android tool: traffic info, flight info, package tracking, and more automatically collected and updated in a reference pane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sorry to be a pedant, but: I was confused for a moment about what this article was about due to the casing of the title, "An open Google now is about to...", which sounds like Google is becoming "open" and is "now about to..." do something. I wondered, "what about Google being 'open' is going to make Android smart?"

The problem starts on Wired's end, where the title was title-cased in the HTML title, and upper-cased for the in-body header, leaving no trace of the original intended casing, "An open Google Now is about to...". And then when the article was submitted to Hacker News, where we traditionally sentence-case things, the submitter had to do the sentence-casing themselves and overlooked this finer point.

Alas, for if only CSS text-transforms could just magically make title- and sentence-casing work...

<comment><USER26> title casing (and sentence casing) is one of these problems that is easy for humans to perform on a case by case basis, but hard to solve in an automated and generic way.

Not only is it language dependent (and any solution baked into css needs to work for all languages where it is relevant), and do various publishers have slightly differing rules about it, but it also depends on the meaning, as this example shows. Whether "Now" is part of the "Google Now" name, or works as an adverb influences the casing.

CSS has become quite a bit more complicated these days, but it is still quite far form being sentient.

TL;DR: Proper title casing is AI-complete</comment></comment>


Woodman's Markets to deploy aisle-roving robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail-financial/woodman-s-markets-deploy-aisle-roving-robots <comment><USER2> Our local Stop & Shop supermarkets deployed robots similar to this about a year and a half ago, although all they do as far as I know is complain when they find a mess somewhere. I found them irrationally annoying. I'm not sure exactly why. But I've also noticed that lately they mostly sit in the corner and don't actually patrol any longer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how the employees view this? The chain is an employee owned. Would they be concerned over being replaced?

Also that name is pretty insidious. Considering that chain is a Wisconsin based one... "Badger technologies" is based out of TN. Keep er moving (out of there) [That was a joke and a pro-Wisconsin reference guy]

</comment><comment><USER4> Wal-Mart in is using automatic floor sweeping robots with customers present. They're made by Tennant with electronics by Brain Corp. You can buy them through Grainger.

</comment><comment><USER5> I totally get the mis-priced items (but who puts prices on the containers anyway, other than the shelf stickers), and I get the items which someone might just put back on a random shelf, cuz people, but they know how much they ordered, was delivered and received and they also know via receipts how much they sold... so unless shrinkage is a big issue, they should know about stock levels and what items are selling well and have low stock...

<comment><USER6> Taking inventory is the equivalent of month end close in accounting, eg do your receipts match your accounts, and is a very tedious process that usually requires a lot of manpower to do in a very short timeframe (just like accounting!). Instead of having a bunch of staff wandering the aisles and scanning SKU's for hours after the store closes, I presume the advantage is the robot and its handler can do the job by themselves in less time for much less cost in overtime.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I've worked for retail and restaurants during taking Inventory, it's a pain in the butt and never a fun time, and it's more of a special circumstance and not something that would really worry me about my job if I still worked retail having gone through the process.

At the place I worked they didn't really hire anybody extra for it to begin with, it was just an annoying extra responsibility you had to do once every 2-3 months.

That being said this could just be the precursor to even more employee reducing measures, so it could still be a bit worrying for the future, but just not having to deal with inventory I would think would be a relief as an employee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm assuming this is much more cost effective than networked cameras pointed at the shelves, pressure plates, or other less futuristic methods?

</comment><comment><USER9> I shop at Woodman's, and can't imagine how a robot could navigate the chaos. It's an experience. For instance huge families show up and push multiple carts through the store, then load everything into a pickup truck.

<comment><USER3> What about us FIBs who load up our cars with cheap liqour.

<comment><USER10> Liquor area has a separate entry from the main entry. Every woodman's is the same that way. In any case, that means that the alcohol buyers are generally out of the way.

The rest of the store is chaos though, that part is true.

<comment><USER9> True. The separation may be related to the liquor laws. At least locally, they have to stop selling liquor at 9 PM, Even grocery stores that sell liquor have some sort of gate that they close at 9.

The chaos can be kind of fun when you're not worrying about the covid. They had one-way aisles for a few weeks, then it looks like they simply gave up on it. I can see the point of improving their data on location and stock levels. They seem to be somewhat unique in that they will stock whatever is available, so for instance some brands of canned goods come and go from month to month. Now you'd think that bar codes would help, since their original purpose was to automate the management of inventory. But honestly, running a supermarket without losing your sanity is one of those mysteries that I will probably never comprehend. The guy in charge seems to have an infinite amount of energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This could help make pick-from-retail shopping services work better. Make a pass through the store every half hour and update what's out of stock for online ordering.

<comment><USER12> But there is a backroom to restock the shelves which is the real inventory. And that back room becomes the business when delivery goes mainstream. Some robotics solutions are about building a whole warehouse for that store room to fulfill online deliveries.

<comment><USER11> If it's out of stock to the picker, it's out of stock to the customer, regardless of whether the back room has more. The robot will report to the back room when a restock is needed, but if restock hasn't happened yet, the item is not saleable.

Webvan did pick-from-controlled-inventory 20 years ago. Worked fine, cost too much because they didn't have enough market penetration. They had 3% in 30 cities, and they needed 30% in 3 cities. Amazon is getting into that, cautiously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here is the link of how robots actually look like: [https://www.badger- technologies.com/overview.html](https://www.badger- technologies.com/overview.html)

<comment><USER14> thanks i feel like there should be a special place in the unemployment line for writers that are so lazy they cant find a picture of a robot and instead sub a stock image of some spilled prego like that adds something to the article at all.

<comment><USER8> That's actually the official company website of this product.</comment></comment></comment>


JavaScrypt: Browser-Based Cryptography Tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.fourmilab.ch/javascrypt/

<comment><USER2> If, for some strange reason you want to use Javascript encryption, why not use the more well established SJCL?</comment>


Israel Becomes CERN Associate Member - <AUTHOR> http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000683450

<comment><USER2> There are some interesting politics lurking in the background of this, around what Europe is (ignoring the more specific politics of Israel itself). Until this decision, the two pending applications for membership from outside geographical Europe, Israel's and Turkey's, had been stalled for quite a while. Now that Israel is in, there is a question of, what about Turkey? But that one is tied up in EU expansion politics; Turkey is also an EU membership candidate, and anti-Turkish-membership politicians don't want it admitted to other European organizations like CERN, for fear of strengthening the Turkey- is-European view.

There is also a longer-term question of what CERN (or perhaps other "European" institutions) should cover geographically. Why are they "European", and what does that mean? Could Egypt join, for example? One might say it's less "culturally European" than Israel, but its scientific community is quite western-oriented, and it already participates in some CERN projects on a case- by-case basis.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, thanks for sharing.

I'd just like to add, for the benefit of those who don't know, that Israel already takes part in many other European things, like sports (Euro Cup) and the European Song Contest (Eurovision).

<comment><USER4> They were accepted by European sport federations a long time ago, usually because Middle-Eastern federations refused to accept them either on ideological or security reasons. It's usually not a big deal, they're crap at everything except basketball, as far as I know.

<comment><USER3> Except for Hapoel Tel Aviv, which is my team! So treat with respect! :)

Seriously though, of the "Major Sports", Israel is only good at basketball with Macabi Tel Aviv. But there are other niche sports we're ok at, like Judo or others.

<comment><USER5> Krav Maga just to add one that is getting famous in some european countries. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> CERN is no longer a European Organisation. Actually, it never really was ("who ordered that?" for those who know CERN history). Since nothing really new has emerged in HEP in the last few decades, CERN is trying to grow into an international lab, as opposed to European, mostly for scaling/funding purposes (USA, Japan, Russia, China have actually built most of LHC: Russian in kinds (steel, calos, beryllium etc.), Japanese semi (HAMA PMT, trackers etc), USA hw/sw (intel, Oracle, RedHat, DDN, Force10, DLT, FPGA) and Chinese assembly (any SKU built over 50 pcs-s)).

And since theoretical and applied physics needs ever more PR to get attention, they are also trying to dress up as a technology provider hub, forgetting to mention, that most of what is there is COTS. The ("management") problem is not unlike the one that "killed" NASA (which it was modelled upon in terms of matrix management).

 _"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?"_ \-- H. Schopper

What an euphemism. Almost like a scam.

btw: .il was already quite present on every level, obviously, so this is just a formality -- Turkey is somewhat different in this respect.

</comment><comment><USER7> This disappoints me. CERN is one of the most important representatives of the European scientific community. Instead of boycotting the apartheid state which openly practices racial cleansing on a daily basis, CERN embraces it. A truly sad world we live in today if that's what our brightest minds consent.

Something tells me this won't go well on this forum, but I had to say it.

<comment><USER8> No, what would be sad would be letting politics impede scientific cooperation and progress.

<comment><USER7> South Africa never got past its apartheid stage until a global boycotting movement forced it to. This isn't just a matter of "politics". This is everyone's responsibility, including scientists.</comment></comment></comment>


Do you still read books? - <AUTHOR> http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/09/birthday-is-coming-time-to-announce.html#.TpW8h5j5Swo.hackernews <comment><USER2> The question is interesting, but the link seems to be blogspam.</comment>


Who's Sorry Now? Everyone, Apparently - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324695104578416533261998000.html

<comment><USER2> don't just post every story on the WSJ highlight ticker.</comment>