Hard Core: What Porn's Ubiquity Says About Men and Women - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/hard-core/8327/ <comment><USER3> "While sexual aggression and the desire to debase women may not be what arouse all men, they are certainly an animating force of male sexuality. They may be unattractive and even, if taken to extremes, dangerous, but they're not, perhaps alas, deviant."

That's a pretty ugly thing to say and requires a bit more evidence than just the pervasiveness of online hard-code porn.

Inexplicably the author seems unaware of the contradiction in her article in pointing out (correctly) that the various porn sites online are dominated by mundane amateur content (housewives, random teenagers etc.) while claiming that online porn demonstrates how the male psyche is fueled by the need to hurt and humiliate women sexually (for example the double anal porn she cites about 15 times.)

<comment><USER4> "This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality"

The fact that the author chooses to generalise a 'proof' from a single personal encounter shows what sort of low standard she has for evidence.

<comment><USER5> The feminist script she describes is 1990's notion that a couple can obtain a satisfactory sex life through a process in which the woman overcomes the mans negative sexist conditioning by using a verbal contract to stipulate her limits. There some provisions made about people with no respect for women like date rapists and people with the "frat boy" mentality.

The example she gives is of a man who is by external measures an enlightened guy - wealthy, polite, and educated. We are given no reason to believe he is disrespectful of women generally speaking. But when it comes to sex he is unable to get it up unless he is explicitly pushing a woman beyond what she feels comfortable doing. For emphasis: this is a part of his sexual experience and not a part of his general attitude to women.

The fact that this single event occurred is sufficient to demonstrate that the 'How to have a mutually enjoyable sex life' script does not work universally and so requires revision for a full explanation of the world. It proves the unpleasant fact that dominance beyond enthusiastic consent can form an integral part of a mans sexual identity.

In this section she establishes that a breach in this perception of sex has occurred. In the rest of her article she uses online pornography to argue the size of the breach.

tldr; lolz bitches hate logic right bro?

<comment><USER4> > The fact that this single event occurred is sufficient to demonstrate that > the 'How to have a mutually enjoyable sex life' script does not work > universally

I'm sure there are wealthy, polite, and educated necrophiliacs also and single instances of sexual fetishes and requirements so strange as to be unimaginable by most of us. Does his mean that we need to adjust our entire model of human sexuality for each of these? Maybe for people so limited of thinking as to believe that any one model of sex could achieve 100% coverage, this could actually be useful information. But to automatically assume anything about 'ordinary' sexuality is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article talks a lot about how male sexuality has a darker side and violence and coercion come in to play and perhaps is exemplified by porn. One of the examples she uses is the scene from Last Tango in Paris where Marlon Brando forces Maria Schneider's character to have anal sex... It gets a little meta when you look up that film on Wikipedia:

"I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that. Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take."

<comment><USER7> Just a passing mention : the scene is much rougher in the book, because he actually convinces her to fist-fuck him IIRC, so that they are both "raped".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> TL; DR: Woman with baggage projects her negative experiences onto the entire world. (XXX) Film at 11.

My reason for saying this:

 _Armed with a "Take Back the Night" pamphlet, we were led to believe that, as long as we avoided the hordes of date rapists, sex was an egalitarian endeavor.

<SNIP>

This is an intellectual swindle that leads women to misjudge male sexuality, which they do at their own emotional and physical peril.

<SNIP>

At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as "emotional ambivalence"—the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one's sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.

Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand

<SNIP>

in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it's a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, "Because that's the only thing that will make you uncomfortable." This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I've ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes._

(Before I am accused of misogyny, please note I am female.)

</comment><comment><USER9> As a male who was raised by a feminist and in an all-female household, including the pets, I have a lot of things to say about this matter.

First off I find that a lot of feminism in the 80s was implicitly anti-male. Take back the night is great for women, but what is the message you are sending to young boys who are often there? It's a subtle message and may not be a big influence on all males.

Or the anti-rape messages? The more extreme is the mis-attributed quote "all men are potential rapists". This is a horrible message to be sending to young men, not as bad as "women are things", but if our goal is to raise fully formed males, "you are a rapist" is not a good one to give.

Bringing it back to the subject at hand, this author reminds me a lot of the kinds of messages, rhetoric and material that was common in the mid to late 80s feminism. The material I grew up suffused in. I think it is very harmful for the normalization of male-female relations. Are there differences between male and female sexuality? Yes. Does this article overplay them? Yes absolutely.

As long as we have articles describing male sexuality as a negative force that must be controlled and tempered I don't think the goal of a better society will be reached. The implicit message of "female sexuality is normal and healthy" and "male sexuality is dark and evil" is really disturbing to me.

In the end this article is completely and utterly sexist. If we reversed the genders we'd just have tripe from the 1800s about how female sexuality needs to be controlled and how women are evil. If that isn't acceptable, then why is this?

</comment><comment><USER10> _"One of the most punishing realities women face when they reach sexual maturity is that their maturity is (at least to many men) unsexy. Indeed, we now have an entire genre of online smut politely called "Lolita Porn." This is not actual child pornography, a genre still blessedly beyond the reach of the casual Web browser."_

Ok, but for _any_ X, X is (at least to many men) unsexy, as there's a lot of porn based on the opposite of X. Young age and beauty included, as evidenced by "mature" and "ugly" porn categories.

So the above statement does not really add much information, except maybe some indication of the author's bias. Picking this particular fetish of _some_ men, associates the whole group with socially unacceptable behaviour. Moral panic, anyone?

<comment><USER11> It's particularly silly given that the author also talks about "aging moms in shabby corsets" to make porn seem unappealing.

Which is it? Are those evil sex crazy men chasing lolitas or milfs?

<comment><USER12> The latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sometimes I fantasize about strangling my boss. Do I want to _actually_ strangle my boss? No. Not because I'm worried about the repercussions, but because there is a fundamental difference in the way we process fantasy and reality. In almost all cases, porn is about fantasy and should not be considered indicative of what men _actually_ want.

(disclaimer: I don't actually have a boss)

<comment><USER14> If you are your own boss then it would be autoerotic asphyxiation, which would likely increase your enjoyment of porn.

<comment><USER15> Now, now, it might not necessarily be an erotic thing. He could simply have self-loathing issues mixed with dominance issues. Strangling is considered to be one of the most dominant ways to kill someone (due to the proximity). I wish... it would be such an interesting psychological study to read.

Alas, I believe he was simply illustrating a point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh god, not this old chestnut again (admittedly wrapped in some stylish writing).

The horrid fallacy is that pornography doesn't really tell you all that much about male sexuality and how they act in the real world.

Take another example; how people act in anonymous online forums. Often pretty douchy right? Does that tell us anything dark about how they are in the real world; well, probably a little, I could guess that a really awkward guy on a forum is likely a bit awkward in the real world.

But not as bad as he is when arguing random nonsense over the latest and best video game.

The internet emphasises those darker aspects of our personality; do men watch porn that humiliates women - sure. Do they want to humiliate their lovers in real life? Probably not.

It gets even worse because the assumption is that the style of porn created and posted on the internet is representative of the desires of most men.

Of course, it isn't really. It represents the desires of a subset of men - <USER2> whom internet porn is often their sex life. Other men may use the content, but is it about convenience and fantasy, not a critique of their bedroom desires.

Look at it another way; lots of people adore fantasy films - say Lord of the Rings. Would you actually, in reality, want to live a fantasy epic? Probably not, the reality wouldn't be all that fulfilling (no internet for one thing! :)). Same applies to porn, I think.

And what of female sexuality? When I'm poking about in peoples computers (legally, for work) women's computers don't usually contain porn. They contain idealised erotic stories about alpha males who also have a soft sensitive side. Their internet history is usually crammed with hunks with their tops off. It's still "pornography" (in how it is used); it's just that some people prefer the sexuality of the unknown (i.e. clothed). There are dark fantasy aspects to female pornography too; the male is often a love slave, dominated by his desire for the woman.

Bottom line is: _Sexuality is not simple_. And the internet is not a good way to make broad judgements about male or female sexuality.

<comment><USER17> _Does that tell us anything dark about how they are in the real world; well, probably a little, I could guess that a really awkward guy on a forum is likely a bit awkward in the real world._

How people act when they're completely anonymous is, in some sense, how they really are. Once you tie some traceability or accountability to their words or actions, words and actions change to manage image and status.

<comment><USER18> There's this thing in game design called the "magic circle": the "barrier" between what is socially understood to happen _inside_ a game, vs. _outside_. It's entirely a social construction, and therefore entirely a voluntary agreement entered into by the players, for the explicit purpose of detaching consequences inside a game from those outside.

The reason people seek to create such a construct, is that, when you don't have to worry about consequences "leaking" from the game, you're free to adopt an _entirely different utility function_ within the circle, or even a variety of different utility functions, to explore the game rules' (and the other players') reaction to the particular mode of play. Through this, we can _learn_ , in a safe environment, what the consequences are to adopting various roles (such as that of the "griefer" or the "twinker".)

We evolved in an environment where there was no separation between the ideas of "action stripped of identity" (i.e. anonymous interaction) and "action stripped of consequence" (i.e. game-play). Thus, most socially-adjusted humans learn to see all anonymous interactions as game-play, and thus to apply their knowledge of in-game interactions: agents who seem sociopathic are really just Playing to Win (<http://www.sirlin.net/ptw>), agents who keep repeating the same stupid actions over and over are likely looking for exploitable bugs in the game rules, etc.

This even crosses over into what most would term "real life": children on a playground who haven't integrated the idea that they're playing a semi- consequenceless social game 100% of the time they're at school, will usually report being bullied (by someone who does understand the concept, and is exploring the position-space in the game.)

<comment><USER17> _This even crosses over into what most would term "real life": children on a playground who haven't integrated the idea that they're playing a semi- consequenceless social game 100% of the time they're at school, will usually report being bullied (by someone who does understand the concept, and is exploring the position-space in the game.)_

I do not know how I can politely convey the depth of my feelings about what you have said, here.

<comment><USER19> Let me try.

Real human beings are scarred for life by this "game". If that's not a consequence then I don't know what is.

<comment><USER18> I meant that it was consequenceless _for the bullies_ ("consequence" being a term from decision theory, where you can compare a consequenceless Prisoner's Dilemma—where everyone should defect—to an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma—where people can take revenge for slights in past rounds, and so everyone should cooperate.) The problem is really that we throw a bunch of kids together who aren't yet socialized, have one another far outside their monkeyspheres, and likely won't see the same faces next year (let alone after graduation), and expect them to play this game without role-models (i.e. mixed-age play) or useful/just arbitration. The bullies are just a symptom of a broken system.

(And, if you're wondering, I was on the receiving end of this. The internalization of the idea that, for them, it was truly _just a game_ , actually somewhat reversed any sort of scarring that could have occurred, although I do admit feeling quite suicidal in sixth grade.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the article: _The granting of sex is the most powerful weapon women possess in their struggle with men._

I'm pretty sure I don't want to be having sex with any woman who views "granting" me sex as a weapon in her struggle with me. That's just wrong on a number of different levels.

<comment><USER7> For what I've seen of countless couples (including some past relationships of mine) this is the way it works for many people.

<comment><USER21> I could never understand why guys put up with it. I'd rather be alone than be with a woman like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a really good article, and just the fact that it's published in a mainstream publication like The Atlantic shows how much internet pornography has changed American sexual mores in the last few years. And I think the author makes a good case that it indeed is technology that has changed the thinking:

"When a 13-year-old girl can sit in math class, hide her Hello Kitty smart phone behind her textbook, and pull up such an extreme video in less time than it would take her to text a vote for her favorite American Idol contestant, we've certainly reached some kind of new societal landmark."

The writing is solid and bold. I'm impressed. Author's website is here: <http://www.natashavc.com/?page_id=62>

<comment><USER23> Given the subtitle, "The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women", I'm not sure that your interpretation is complete - as far as I can see, the author is arguing that porn _reveals_ (and partially legitimizes) male... appetites.

I must admit to being somewhat taken aback by the "males are aggressively, dangerously sexual" undertone. Is this a common (female) attitude?

(For context: I'm male, living with my wonderful girlfriend.)

<comment><USER24> _I must admit to being somewhat taken aback by the "males are aggressively, dangerously sexual" undertone. Is this a common (female) attitude?_

Are you thinking there is no aggression whatsoever in your sex life? Aggression and power are complex things. The way they play out can be quite subtle. Many things men consider to be "human" or "neutral" are in fact norms that exist to reinforce male hegemony. And those things play out in the bedroom.

<comment><USER11> _Many things men consider to be "human" or "neutral" are in fact norms that exist to reinforce male hegemony._

Can you explain what this means, and tell us some non-bedroom "human" or "neutral" activities which really reinforce male hegemony?

<comment><USER25> As part of the societal trend towards equality of the genders, there's a tendency to take the standard or model for men, say that women are now allowed that standard or model, and declare equality to have been achieved. Saying these standards "exist to reinforce male hegemony" is an exaggeration, for the most part men aren't actively trying to oppress women, they're just not succeeding in achieving true equality. From a women's perspective, it's the same result, although sensationalizing doesn't really help their cause.

As a somewhat abstract example, when women are compared to men in the workplace, they're usually seen as cautious or passive. Now, this is true, that the average female is more cautious or passive _than the average male_ (leaving aside nature vs nurture for a second). But that bolded part is critical--most people, when making the observation that women are more passive, don't realize that they're using a male standard as a basis for judgment.

It's important to note, that the differences attributed to women are not necessarily bad ones. One could just as easily say, men are rash and compulsive. And, this would also be true, in exactly the same fashion: the average male is rash and compulsive _compared to the average female_. But, because of historical male hegemony, the average male is taken as the ideal or the standard. Difference from this standard, even when neutral or situationally advantageous, tends to be perceived first as a deficiency.

Here's a slightly more concrete example, which I don't know if it's true but it could be: until recently, men drove cars and women were mostly passengers (this is still true in other countries). Cars were physically designed around the average male body. When women started driving, that meant that they were allowed in the driver's seats, but those seats were still designed for men. The pedal and mirror placements were sub-optimal for their generally smaller bodies. Even though women have achieved nominal equality in the area of driving, until car makers update their design constraints, women operate cars at a disadvantage because they must conform to a standard that was designed without them and that does not fit them. On the one hand it's unfortunate, but on the other hand it's inevitable, because it's not a good business decision to design a car for people who don't drive (until they do).

<comment><USER26> _But that bolded part is critical--most people, when making the observation that women are more passive, don't realize that they're using a male standard as a basis for judgment._

Thist is an important insight, but one should be careful with it. Taking it too far leads to the exact same kind of backwards thinking where (taking race instead of gender) reading books is "acting white". If one group in society (men, whites, etc.) is dominant, and society continues to function, then obviously the dominant group is doing something right, and forcing or pressuring the oppressed group into doing something wrong. In the racial case, that "something" is education. Whites oppressed blacks; whites were educated while blacks weren't. The answer is to educate blacks and stop oppressing them; it isn't to tear down education itself as an artifact of white oppression.

Back to your example, sometimes someone in a traditionally male occupation _has_ to be assertive. It's hard to imagine a passive salesperson or a passive Prime Minister being very effective, male or female; agree or disagree with them, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir were not passive women by any stretch of the imagination.

(Thatcher and Meir may have certainly been _bad_ PM's in the sense of doing bad things, depending on your political views; I don't want to argue it either way. But they were certainly effective; if one agreed with and wanted to pursue Thatcher's agenda in the UK 30 years ago, Thatcher would undoubtedly be the best candidate for PM. Likewise, one can be an extremely effective salesperson while selling useless crap no one really needs.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ugh. Slightly interesting for the first third, then a random swerve into misandrist bullshit.

<comment><USER28> Whilst I won't attack it quite so strongly(!), I must admit I got bored and didn't finish reading the last third.

The writing style was a bit too full on and did verge off into ranting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > He answered, almost without thought, "Because that's the only thing that > will make you uncomfortable.

I think this article is well written, albeit a little extreme with some of it's points. The behavior of the man the author had anal sex with is obviously not the norm, and yet she uses the event as a way to describe the norm.

<comment><USER24> She described his behavior, asking to make her uncomfortable, as uncommonly honest, so she agrees with you it's not the norm. I think her point is that the underlying desire is the norm, while the open and respectful request for consent as not.

<comment><USER29> I just don't think that the underlying desire, to make women uncomfortable, is the norm.

<comment><USER26> It seems more like the author wants to be debased as much as men want to debase her--note how she describes aggressive, debasing, apparently non- committed sex as "the best sex [a woman's] had in her life", and describes her own reaction to that particular encounter as complying "without hesitation".

<comment><USER30> I think her compliance is simpler than that. If I believe something for a long time, and finally someone admits it, I cut them some slack, partly because it's funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I believe she suffer from the typical mind fallacy, thinking all males have overly aggressive/violent sexual desire.

Note: I am a male.

<comment><USER32> Yet, if you watched any porn these days, the males are always agressive and the females almost always take the submissive role. The advent of "gonzo" porn hasn't helped matters.

This material is training a generation, _from puberty_ , how to act sexually.

<comment><USER33> > Yet, if you watched any porn these days, the males are always agressive and > the females almost always take the submissive role.

There is tons of male submissive porn. Google "femdom", "mistress porn", and so on.

There are several genres, including male-sub BDSM, cuckolding, tease and denial, and so on.

People sexualize everything, so saying "there's no {x} porn" is false for almost all values of x. (Google "balloon porn" and "clown porn" for examples.)

<comment><USER34> > There is tons of male submissive porn. Google "femdom", "mistress porn", and > so on.

Especially Japanese.

> People sexualize everything, so saying "there's no {x} porn" is false for > almost all values of x. (Google "balloon porn" and "clown porn" for > examples.)

True, there's even Lego porn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thinking that the flood of badly made, poorly scripted porn on the Internet reveals the secret darkness of male sexuality, is like thinking that an endless succession of awful movies from Hollywood reveals that people secretly want a poorly scripted sequel to the last blockbuster. What it reveals is that making good movies is _difficult_. It's like thinking that a flood of nitwit Web startups reveals that the economy really wants nitwit Web startups. If you're a venture capitalist, you may want better, but you'll have trouble finding it. Likewise if you're a movie viewer. And likewise if you're a man.

If you look at what the Internet has done to written pornography, you see exactly the reverse effect as what the article describes. I once picked up a book of published erotica that _wasn't_ online, and holy crap was the quality vastly worse than what I now expect. Tawdry, pointless, plotless, emotionless, needlessly violent encounters - because, I presume, that is what the _publishers_ think men want, because the _publishers_ conceive of pornography as a sordid dirty thing and imagine themselves as exploiting it. But if you look at what men write, and what men want, when they are free to produce their own written erotica, then you find that the rise of the Internet has created, from scratch, the genre which I think is now known as the "erotic romance novel" and means, roughly, "well-written sex stories with plots and emotions in them". Publishers of erotica are only now just _beginning_ to think about trying to sell books like that, after the Internet _showed_ them there was a huge pent-up demand.

"Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price," said Jean Baudrillard. In the days when written erotica was produced by publishers who looked down on it, no publisher knew how to write seduction. And today, when visual erotica is still seen as a tawdry and exploitive affair by the people who _produce_ it, who still see themselves as pandering to the _base_ desires of men, who still see plot as the domain only of real movies, there is no seduction in that visual erotica. You cannot find it, no matter how hard you look online. There are big-budget porn productions but not productions that spend more than five dollars on the script.

But in the domain of written erotica where getting started is as simple as owning a keyboard, and people don't bother writing if they're not having fun writing, and _the producer is a lot like the consumer_ \- people who like erotic literature - there you find plot. You find seduction. You find the "erotic romance novel".

That's not what all men want, I suppose; not what all men want all of the time. But it's what I demand as a matter of routine in my written erotica, and what I can't find in online movies (even if it's advertised as big-budget or woman-made, it just doesn't seem to exist).

And before anyone writes the obvious dumb reply, yes I have a girlfriend and no I do not apologize for consuming the form of art known as erotica anymore than I apologize for writing Harry Potter fanfiction.

<comment><USER36> "But if you look at what men write, and what men want, when they are free to produce their own written erotica, then you find that the rise of the Internet has created, from scratch, the genre which I think is now known as the "erotic romance novel" and means, roughly, "well-written sex stories with plots and emotions in them". Publishers of erotica are only now just beginning to think about trying to sell books like that, after the Internet showed them there was a huge pent-up demand."

But men _didn't_ invent the erotic romance novel. Women did. The _vast_ majority of erotica writers AND readers are female. ([http://www.ehow.com/way_5192600_tips-writing-sensual- books.h...](http://www.ehow.com/way_5192600_tips-writing-sensual-books.html))

You are an unusual example of your gender. You must know that.

Maybe the fact that most men prefer the plotless hardcore scenes found on the various you- and -tube sites, and its the women that are writing and reading erotica, is a coincidence.

But I tend to think it does indicate something about a difference in male and female sexuality, innate or otherwise. The fact that you are an exception to the rule doesn't make it true that men, in general, are consuming written erotica.

P.S. Obviously men do write and read some erotica, but even here there are differences. My favorite erotica writer, Morgan Hawke, wrote a blog post about the differences: <http://www.darkerotica.net/WhatGuysWant.html>

P.P.S. Would you be willing to read the second draft of my first novel, a sci- fi erotica with plot lines around programming? :D

<comment><USER37> > _"Maybe the fact that most men prefer the plotless hardcore scenes found on > the various you- and -tube sites, and its the women that are writing and > reading erotica, is a coincidence."_

Or it's just an artifact of how society dealt with historical pornography that the different genders had access to over time.

There's no shortage of textual porn for men, nor has there been as far back as I've seen porn. Penthouse Letters wouldn't be legendary and universally beloved memory if men went only to the pictures.

It seems to me that that men looking at dirty pictures is just something that society grudgingly accepted. And women reading romance novels is something that society grudgingly accepted. And the rest is selective reporting of what fit the stereotypes, and reinforcing by marketers and porn purveyors who had to carefully aim their productions and so followed 'conventional wisdom'.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd pin the whole mess on the larger social push to posit women as the fairer, more evolved gender. Thus women are cast, taught and expected to need _more_ than 'crude' pictures; to be _better_ than 'simple' men.

Anecdotes being what they are, I've never seen any evidence that 'women don't like graphic porn' anymore than I've seen evidence for 'women don't like videogames' or 'women don't like sport'.

And feeding my theory above, I also note that the adjusted positions of those who have accepted women gaming and women sport is that women are, again, _better_ , more _advanced_ and more _pure_ than men. 'Women want more from a game than shooting aliens', 'Women athletes have better fundamentals', etc.

<comment><USER36> Apparently you didn't read my post carefully, because I said "innate or otherwise." Your point would be about the otherwise bit.

However, since you wanted to argue this when I was specifically avoiding it, I would point out that females are the sex more reluctant to mate in almost all species, with the exception of a few species that prove the rule. It has to do with the expected costs of mating. Females bear most of the cost of child bearing in almost all species, so they are also a bit more choosy as to how often and to whom they mate with.

<comment><USER37> I wasn't trying to contradict. I was trying to flesh out a potential 'otherwise' with my own observations and theories.

Not every reply is an argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > _the Internet porn aesthetic verges on unvarnished realism._

I'm thinking she doesn't know much about Internet porn.

<comment><USER39> It's about 50/50, depending on what sites you view, between the gritty and the professional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The most interesting writing I've seen on this subject came from McSweeneys: "The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Writer". You can find her first column here: <http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/pornwriter/column1.html>

</comment><comment><USER41> Some people look at sex-drive as something like a God-given gift, whereas others see it as basically a (fun) evolutionary side-effect. Varying degrees of sanctimony ensue.

</comment><comment><USER42> Noticing all the hidden assumptions - if a woman does amateur porn and puts it up on xtube, she's trying to please her husband - can't be that _she's_ turned on by it.

Somehow, even cuckoldry fantasies are about the _male_ being dominant.

Paul in Last Tango is a brute, but no mention of Jeanne being a status- climbing bitch for abandoning him when she finds out he's poor - she may have pointed it out obliquely, but all judgment-loaded language is pointed firmly toward the y-chromosoned.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone else just not grok the idea that sex is about all these terribly negative things? I have never in my life desired to degrade or debase women through sex or any other means.

I know it's hard for women these days, and there are probably more screwed up guys out there than normal ones, but I feel like the latter are getting tarred with the same brush as the former.

I can't think of any guy in my immediate social circle that's not a true gentleman inside and out, not even a suppressed, closeted woman-hater.

Reading feminist articles like this usually makes me go WTF. On the hand I'm very sympathetic to the fact that it's not easy being a woman, but on the other I can't help but suspect the author has been a victim of bad luck with men and is projecting on the entire sex.

</comment><comment><USER44> That woman is ignorant to everything that I have observed my male sexuality to be.

<comment><USER45> The article isn't about you dear.

<comment><USER46> No, it's about the author. The sad thing is that the author fails to realize this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Girls watch porn too. That fact apparently eludes the author.

</comment><comment><USER48> I agree with the author's characterization of rhetoric in the 1990's, though I wonder if the reexamining of the whole "communicating boundaries" thing is a result of these women now raising boys of their own, or a more general societal trend that emphasizes aggression.

<comment><USER21> >...or a more general societal trend that emphasizes aggression

Eh? I don't see it - from what I can tell the trend has been going the other direction since at least the '80s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wouldn't describe this article as misandrist. In many cases the author hints at female desires being worse.

"...the sex that occurs in between relationships or overlaps with relationships where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist: the raw, unpracticed sort. If a woman thinks of the best sex she's had in her life, she's often thinking of this kind of sex, and while it may be the best sex in her life, it's not the sex she wants to have throughout her life or more accurately, it's not the sex she'd have with the man with whom she'd like to spend her life."

So debasing sex is great so long as it's not with someone you care about? Sounds like men and women aren't that different.

</comment><comment><USER50> Literary and artistic fashions are quite different across cultures and across time. They're a poor data source to come up with an essentialist view of gender, if you pick one time and place. If you look at how, say, romanticism was gendered at first, it was described as essentially masculine -- tempestuous and powerful. Over time that perception changed and the very same material was described as something essentially womanly that reflected how women "are". While I have plenty of other criticisms of this article, this is the most basic one that I don't think has been expressed here yet.

</comment><comment><USER51> > at the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, > lies what Freud

And I'm done with this steaming pile of misanthropy. An essay on sexuality that falls back on Freudian ideas is beyond redemption.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if Mz. Vargas-Cooper is related to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Vargas> .

</comment><comment><USER52> Why exactly is this on Hacker News?

<comment><USER53> oops, accidentally upvoted

From the submission guidelines: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes > more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the > answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Banning links to The Atlantic would greatly improve the quality of the site.

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm not sure what the author is trying to say. Just because porn is easier to get now than before (as has been since day 0 of porn), so what? Yet another jee-whiz look at what the internets have done to us article.

<comment><USER56> Do you seriously think there are no effects at all? How can you be so naive as to think this hasn't and won't change anything when such a giant portion of the population is experiencing sights/sounds/shows that no other generation ever has?

Whether you see that change as good or bad, this will change personal relationships, and societies are nothing more than the sum total of all personal relationships.

<comment><USER57> Other generations in history probably had more chance of the real thing.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Deletes Free Palestine Page - <AUTHOR> http://arabcrunch.com/2011/03/facebook-deletes-free-palestine-page.html <comment><USER2> "We at ArabCrunch condemns this move by Facebook and call it a racist one,"

It angers me when people use the word _racist_ completely out of place. A useful journalism practice, if your purpose is to attract the attention of as many people as possible, but a despicable one, if your focus is on telling the truth.

(Now, I agree that Palestinians and Israelis might be of different race, but the rest of the article emphasizes the religious differences between the two groups.)

<comment><USER3> Not sure how did ArabCrunch come to this conclusion without even asking Facebook and getting an answer.

Condemn the removal of the page, sure I'm with you but to call this a racist move then I would say show me how you to got to that conclusion.. don't just throw accusation because the CEO happens to fit the profile of someone you don't like

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It is worth mentioning that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is > Jewish.

Not really.

<comment><AUTHOR> he is jewish and the page was criticizing the Jewish state israel

<comment><USER4> But it's not worth mentioning, because the odds are 99.99999999% against that having anything to do with the page's removal.

Honestly, these kind of racist twitches really do a great disservice to certain Muslim authors. The knee-jerk "BLAME THE JOOZ" response might be understandable if Israel has been systematically trying to kill your family, but in a world of rational discourse it makes me want to write you off as a nutter.

<comment><AUTHOR> for Mark being a jew it is relevant, since this is double standards against Muslims. while Facebook keep the pages that Insults the prophet of Islam, it deletes the pages that criticize Israeli occupation of Palestine. how does criticizing Israeli war crimes a wrong thing to do!?

What if facebook deleted a memorable page for the holocaust and Mark was Muslim or German what would you say then?

<comment><USER4> It might be relevant if he personally deleted that page.

I would say the exact same thing - totally irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nothing to see here, move along. I'm sure they'd do the same for any page getting significant traffic for the US. Facebook has no obligation to free speech.

Edit: that being said, come on. Israel is a US-favoured state. I don't _blame_ Facebook, but don't be intellectually dishonest. It is quite probable that the removal is politically motivated.

</comment><comment><USER6> _... was calling for Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestine._

What kind of uprising? A peaceful, political movement? A forceful, military uprising, or use of terrorist tactics? On one level this could be considered free speech, on another, inciting violence.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by violence? If you mean military or forceful than I don't agree. A land taken by force you get it back only by force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The site is down. I think it was attacked by a Zionist bot :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Cashed copy of the site it is down now : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dXfDrb0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dXfDrb05bhoJ:arabcrunch.com/2011/03/facebook- deletes-free-palestine- page.html+facwebook+deletes+free+palestine+page&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari&source=www.google.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> site is back now

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> where is free speech when it comes to Israel?

<comment><USER9> "Free speech" doesn't mean you get to say whatever you want, wherever you want, and whenever you want. Fundamentally it just means that the government can't pass a law to prevent you from expressing your opinion. It in no way implies that every private venue (e.g. Facebook) is required to accomadate your opinions. The corollary to my free speech is that you have a right to _not_ have to listen to me if you so choose.

<comment><AUTHOR> well, criticizing Israel is part of free speech. the page was calling for uprising against Israeli occupation. how different is this from calling to oust corrupt Mubarak? why is it ok not to have a venue to criticize israel while it is ok to insult the prophet of islam?

<comment><USER9> All valid points but it would only be a free speech issue if Facebook was a government or publicly-supported institution. Mosques have the right to block Christians from proselytizing on their premises (and vice versa). That's not preventing free speech (they're still totally free to stand on a streetcorner and vent), it's giving the guy who owns the private property the right to use it the way he wants.

People often misinterpret free speech as meaning they get some kind of universal pass but free speech actually has very specific limits (and for good reason).

<comment><AUTHOR> do not compare facebook to a church or a masjed, facebook is a social media platform where we all from different religions and background come together share news and opinions. blocking one voice against the occupier, favoring anti islam stuff while censoring anti -israeli occupation voices is a racists move

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If CEO Mark Zuckerberg is Jewish, that means Facebook is a Jewish site. By creating a page on it, I can only surmise that you are a secret Jew pretending to be an Arab. Why else would you use a handle like "ArabGeek"? You're just trying to convince us that you're not a Jew, when you really are. We know who you really are. Just another member of the Zionist conspiracy.

<comment><USER10> Awwww what's wrong? The joo haters don't have a sense of humor? Too bad.</comment></comment>


Building a Slimmer jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jquery.com/2011/11/08/building-a-slimmer-jquery/

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty excited they'll be turning their efforts in this direction. I remember one of the original reasons I dropped prototype/scriptaculous was because of the file size difference, so hopefully this will continue to keep it a lean, mean JavaScript machine.</comment>


The Loopt debacle - <AUTHOR> http://tastyblogsnack.com/2008/07/14/the-loopt-debacle/

<comment><USER2> I'm in Australia, and here, mobile charges for calls and SMS fall solely on the caller/sender. The US convention, where the person who is charged for an action is not the person who decided to take the action, has always seemed slightly insane.

I've heard that the rationale for receiver pays in the US is: the receiver is the person who decided to carry a mobile rather than use a landline, and therefore should bear the cost. This makes some sense. But I prefer the Australian system, where the caller can distinguish mobile numbers from landline numbers, just like calling long distance.

<comment><USER3> It's even better than that, both the sender and receiver pay. So if two iPhone users send a message to each other they either both get billed $.20 or both get 1 message deducted from their bucket for the payment period (unless there is an unlimited messaging plan). Up to $.40 to shuffle 160 characters around your own network is quite a haul.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm completely underwhelmed by all the iPhone Loopt bashing. A slew of people have reported accidentally spamming their friends, but nobody has been able to describe what happened.

When I used the Loopt iPhone app, it was pretty obvious what was going on to me. You have to actually tap on the names of people whom you want to invite. Now, if there is some bug that's causing invites to be sent to more than the individuals you tap, that should be addressed, but its probably nothing more than a bug.

Merlin Mann hasn't even tried the Loopt app, but has no problem arguing about its supposed privacy violations. If anyone has more information, or can actually describe the problem people are supposedly having, I'd be interested to hear it.

<comment><USER5> I can tell you that until there are zero reports of these sorts of problems, there is absolutely no way I can even try this application out. I'm glad that people are piling on about it, because I have a big fat phone book full of people that I only call after I can prepare for 30 minutes before hand, and the thought of even accidentally sending them a text like this gives me the chills.

Like, if I'm plumbing my contact list to try to get a one in a million favor type of contacts. It would be disastrous to spam these contacts with my phone number and an invitation to something stupid like Loopt. What a great way for me to tell these guys "hey, look at me! I'm some douche with an iPhone, here to spam you! Please, never let me call in a favor again!"

I already catch enough hell for using an iPhone instead of a Blackberry like most of corporate america and the military sector.

<comment><USER6> There is pretty much no chance of accidentally sending your contacts SMS so long as you don't go clicking willy-nilly. You have to explicitly click someone's name and odds are your colleagues aren't on a supported network anyways.

So really, this is all FUD from the trailing edge of the mac world.

And I know the kind of social pressure you're describing, I worked with LMCO for quite awhile, so I don't meant to sound dismissive of your concern. But really, Loopt, Whrrl and Zintin don't send SMSs to people without asking your first. And it sounds like you can safely pass on them anyways, because you're probably not in the target demographic for these products.

<comment><USER7> Example: I tried to invite a friend and it didn't even work. She was sitting right next to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hm, J2ME had it's problems, but at least there always was a popup asking the user for permission before a costly network operation was allowed.

<comment><USER9> "Costly network operation"? I guess you don't live in the UK or similar. (Data is free here (EDGE or free wifi)). Do you have to pay for _incomming_ calls and SMS as well? If so that's just ridiculous.

edit: If it is sending out SMS it would make sense for it to ask you first definitely.

<comment><USER3> I believe the messages sent were from Loopt's shortcode so it wouldn't technically cost _you_ money, but it would cost whoever received the message. But in general you shouldn't send a message to everyone in the phonebook by default. Especially without a confirmation page. You potentially just shared your location with bunches of people you don't want to know your location (exes, bosses, clients, etc).

This is the kind of thing that could easily get their shortcode revoked which is why they reacted so swiftly.

<comment><USER4> It DOESN'T send a message to everyone in the phonebook. It only sends to people you _select_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried the Loopt app the first day of the iphone 2.0 launch. I promptly uninstalled it.

Despite the hype that certain bloggers have ascribed it (ahem.. Techcrunch), I found the actual implementation to be poor. The interface is lacking. The integrated business search is potentially interesting, but there are other apps that do the same thing but better.

The bottom line is that I don't want to join another social network. I was hoping to just turn on the app and find a bunch of other people in the city(San Francisco) to see what hot areas were going on. I can't even do that without inviting a bunch of other people to join Loopt also.

Boo. Fail.</comment>


Paul Buchheit -- Gmail inventor -- tweets, "Bitcoin may be the TCP/IP of money" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/328969714283995136 <comment><USER2> This is a good analogy we like to use also.

We also sometimes compare it to SMTP and Gmail. People used to run their own exchange servers, now it's easier to let a company worry about security and backups, and make it cloud based. This is the idea behind Coinbase.com</comment>


What are the best ways to negotiate a higher salary? - <AUTHOR> http://ga.co/2nEAQdb <comment><USER2> For an in demand software developer, it's almost never worth the effort to nogotiate for a raise in your current job. Companies have system designed to keep them from paying you market rates. "5% per year is the most we can raise you. Sorry, its company policy."

Instead, change jobs and work for someplace that values you more.</comment>


Ask HN: what would your ideal language for web-pages look like? - <AUTHOR>

Recently there's been a wide discussion on HN about using css vs tables and it seemed to me that a lot of people are unhappy about both ways and choose a lesser evil. Even further, maybe they are unhappy about the languages themselves, not just their elements.<p>I'd like to ask you, what would your perfect markup language (or languages, a replacement for css and html) look like? Just make it whatever you want: an XML sub-language or something completely different. Code examples would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure why your title says "markup language" but then you include CSS, so I assume that you're talking about the combination markup+style. In this case I would say: HTML is quite OK, but CSS is broken. I would add functions and variables to CSS, so it allows you to write stuff like this:

      .someDiv
      {
        width = $someOtherDiv.width - 150px;
      }

      .someOtherDiv
      {
        width = 450px;
        height = min(300px, $someDiv.height);
      }

<comment><USER3> spot on, some combination of javascript and css would be pretty neat. Isn't it already possible to at least generate css from within JavaScript ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How about just adding height: 100% to CSS. Would that be so hard!?

</comment><comment><USER5> I type in English what I want the page to look like, and it makes it look that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think you really want that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like "markup that doesn't look like markup", e.g. reStructuredText or Textile.</comment>


Leonard Euler's Solution to the Konigsberg Bridge Problem (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/leonard-eulers-solution-to-the-konigsberg-bridge-problem <comment><USER2> When I first saw this problem in elementary school, I went to look at an atlas to see if I could see the bridges (but couldn't because the scale in an atlas was too large). I'm just blown away that today, not only can I find the map but I can look at the aerial view and go on virtual walks through the city and the bridges -- mere seconds after reading about it:

[https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Kaliningrad,+Kaliningrad+Ob...](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Kaliningrad,+Kaliningrad+Oblast,+firstname.lastname@example.com,20.502857,15z/)

I'm wondering what the amazing mapping advance will be 20 years from now. Real time street views of all metropolitan areas?

<comment><USER3> I visited Kaliningrad in 2007 and puzzled my hosts by asking them if I could see the famous bridges. They hadn't heard of Euler and the Bridges of Königsberg. I was astonished.

We drove around and saw a couple of what I think were the bridges dating from Euler's time. Others had been destroyed in WW2 and/or replaced with modern, larger bridges.

<comment><USER4> > Others had been destroyed in WW2 and/or replaced with modern, larger > bridges.

I read a while ago that the destruction had actually rendered the bridges problem soluble (that is, that there _is_ a modern Eulerian path); but I don't know if that was true at the time, or is still true.

<comment><USER5> From Google Maps it seem like it currently is possible to walk all the bridges, although you can't end where you started. Two of the original bridges have gone, two more have been built (not in the same locations as the destroyed ones), and there are two additional bridges that are within the city limits now but wouldn't have been in Euler's time.

<comment><USER4> I love it: the nine _new_ bridges of Königsberg! (It would never have occurred to me to check on Google Maps; thanks!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would traveling to the source of the river Pregel and walking around it count as a solution?

<comment><USER7> Alas! One of the Pregel's tributaries originates in a lake which is itself linked by a canal to the Baltic, forming a loop excluding Konigsberg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading the post title, my first reaction was "Wow, Euler must have been really stumped if it took him until 2006 to solve the problem."

</comment><comment><USER9> I found it kinda funny that most lectures in my Math 101 started with "the little Euler" or "the little Gauss". Like those guys did all of Math on their own when they were children, haha.

<comment><USER10> Well, Euler and Gauss knew all there was to know about mathematics at the time. That consisted of algebra up to quintic equations plus their own inventions.

You'd be unpleasantly surprised if you saw a turn-of-the century-math high school textbook (1900 or so.) Pretty advanced stuff towards the end.

<comment><USER11> _That consisted of algebra up to quintic equations plus their own inventions_

Well, calculus had been invented before Euler was born, and a lot of advanced math had been developed by the time Gauss appeared (a lot of it by none other than Euler).</comment></comment></comment>


Russia Won't Stop Snowden, Putin Says - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323683504578567080081271520.html

<comment><AUTHOR> what do ya'll think</comment>


Writing a CV in LaTeX - <AUTHOR> http://texblog.org/2012/04/25/writing-a-cv-in-latex/ <comment><USER2> What's the advantage of using something like LaTeX for a CV? The point of a a resumé is purely to make you look good, and as such you'd be much better off making a PDF using a real layout tool (like InDesign). You want your resumé to be friendly and attractive, you want to stand out from the pack, and to use typographical design principles to make any viewer like your CV more without even realizing why.

Btw, here's my resumé, for reference: <http://kenneth.ballenegger.com/dl/resume2012.pdf>

<comment><USER3> A CV in LaTeX does not have to be typesetted in Computer Modern nor have a dry "LaTeX feel". Using XeTeX, TikZ, fontspec and Open Type fonts you can do fun stuff that look gorgeous.

The great thing for me is that I can directly import my .bib and all my publications are automagically included in my CV. My attempt: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3809633/cv_adrien_friggeri.pdf> (slightly out of date, should recompile and update)

<comment><USER4> It's a bit too 'colory' for my taste but I like the design. Is it open source?

<comment><USER3> I'll have to clean it up but I'll definitely open source it.

<comment><USER5> Just fyi, I too would also be very interested in the source for this. It really looks nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am a fan of XeTeX for this sort of thing. It lets you use modern otf fonts, rather than just the fonts that have been turned into LaTeX packages.

I feel kinda silly posting my own as an example, but here goes: <http://www.endofunctor.org/~rpearl/resume.pdf>

<comment><USER7> I rather like that design. Do you have a source I could look at? I've used LaTeX, but I've been meaning to try XeTeX for a while.

Are there any particular difficulties with switching from LaTeX to XeTeX?

I actually did my resume with LaTeX, but then became too lazy to update it. Now it's somehow a year out of date :P. (A year is a lot of time for a college student...) Seems like the perfect excuse to redo it and a great time to try XeTeX.

<comment><USER8> XeTeX is almost completely compatible with PDFLaTeX, which is compatible with LaTeX except when using Postscript tricks (in particular, pstricks).

<comment><USER9> Actually, xetex-pstricks has been in TeX Live for a long time now. It will not give you all of pstricks in XeLaTeX, but for the simplest needs it's more than sufficient. Microtype is a bigger problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Although I use LaTeX for my resume, it's also worth checking out PGF/TikZ: [http://ctan.math.utah.edu/ctan/tex- archive/graphics/pgf/base...](http://ctan.math.utah.edu/ctan/tex- archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generic/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf)

The learning curve is _very_ steep, but if you're doing anything creative with the organization or representation of content, you'll fare far better with PGF and TikZ than you will with LaTeX.

<comment><USER11> Does 'steep learning curve' not mean the rate of learning (X: time and Y:knowledge) is high, thus a little effort outputs lots of knowledge?

<comment><USER10> Heh, I never actually took the time to think of the literal meaning of the phrase. Nevertheless, the quantity modified by 'steep' is in fact scalar and thus 'steep' affects _only_ the magnitude. It reveals nothing about the underlying nature of the quantity, which could indeed be the inverse rate of learning or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Managing lists of publications is time consuming, especially when different publications should be selected in different contexts (e.g. choose 10 relevant publications for each grant proposal, or sort them according to different criteria). My solution is to use multibib with this in the preamble

      \usepackage[resetlabels]{multibib}
      \newcites{journal,submitted,conference,report}{
        Journal Papers Published,
        Journal Papers Submitted,
        Refereed Proceedings Papers,
        Technical Reports}

and this in the document wherever I want a bib listing.

      \nocitejournal{list,of,bibtex,keys,...}
      \bibliographystylejournal{unsrt}
      \bibliographyjournal{bibtex,files}

and so on for each other category.

<comment><USER13> I quote. Moreover, I use booleans to deal with different versions of the same entry, for instance for multi-language CV, or work vs academic, or again short vs full.

In the preamble:

        \newboolean{cvit}
        \setboolean{cvit}{true}   % just change this and recompile
        \newcommand{\italian}[2]{\ifthenelse{\boolean{cvit}}{#1}{#2}}

And in the document:

        \italian{Ciao mondo!}{Hello world!}

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This post would have been so handy for me about a year ago when I was applying for new jobs. Unfortunately, I was not able to switch over to using LaTeX to format my resume: many websites will only accept a formatted Word-compatible document.

<comment><USER15> Word-only is HR lingo for "You're over-skilled for this job. Move along."

<comment><USER16> or recruitment firms that want to remove your contact info from the resume before submitting it to their clients.

<comment><USER17> If you're using a recruitment firm, that's fair game although I'm glad the one I've used from time to time asked me to do it myself and not try to be sneaky about what they are doing on the backend. It makes the whole dealings with them way more comfortable that they are upfront about everything they are doing on my and their behalf. From what I understand this is not exactly standard practice with a lot of these firms.

<comment><USER18> I've had the same thing asked of me when I submit a resume in PDF format. I always happily reply that I can generate a new PDF with the requested contact information removed. If they're not amicable to that, then we have no chance of working together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I always take a second look at a LaTeX resume, if only because learning enough LaTeX to make a decent resume is a positive indicator - albeit merely a cosmetic one.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here is another example of a LaTeX CV: <http://www.styluslabs.com/mwhite/>

<comment><USER13> And here is my preferred one: [http://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/macros/latex/contrib/modernc...](http://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I decided to build a portfolio site in jekyll and add a print stylesheet, with which I could generate a PDF to send around.

<comment><USER21> actually, it's kind of ridiculous the amounts of HTML/CSS I am willing to write to avoid having to use a word processor.

I don't know latex, but if I did, it would probably be what I reached for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've passed through many different steps. I've tried Inkscape, LaTeX, XeLaTeX, HTML.

Now, I've developed my own system. I write the source in markdown and I can export in HTML, PDF and online SVG exported from the PDF.

It has been some time I didn't updated it but you might find this useful:

<http://resume.espozito.com/index.html>

Some source code can be found here

<https://github.com/yogsototh/krambook>

<comment><USER23> That should all be on one page. I don't think anyone wants to open up all of these various pages just to read your resume. If you want to keep everything split up, <http://elliottcable.name/resume.xhtml> is a good example of an online resume done well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think that for anyone that isn't very familiar with latex, doing any adjustment at all will be a painful experience. You might be lucky if you get a hold of a style that suits you perfectly (or find a setup ready to use like the one in the article), but I honestly can't think of a worse language/tool to write a CV in, than LaTeX.

I've used LaTeX on several projects, and I found it to be wonderful for larger documents, and especially those that 'just work' with the defaults, especially those that are heavy in math, and especially those that are heavy in citations. A CV? Mine would have any if those properties, so no way in hell that I'd would go through that pain. Why? Because I'll be trying to adjust the position of elements for one, or two pages tops. If it were for a book or thesis, sure, writing a style to suit it might be worth it.

In summary, it really depends on what you know, and what you want to achieve. If you're not an expert in LaTeX, and you want more than the bare minimum of control over where things end up and how it looks, then LaTeX is the worst possible choice.

InDesign, Fireworks (even Photoshop) all cost a lot but I'd choose them any day over it. InkScape, count me in. I'll even use libreOffice over LaTeX.

</comment><comment><USER25> A problem I found with CVs is that recruiters often ask you to resend it in word doc form (I guess so they can edit it and remove your contact info).

Also if your keeping your linkedin profile up to date then your effectively doubling your effort. What I found really handy recently was linkedin's resume builder ( <http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/> ) which takes your linkedin profile and creates a resume from it. There are many styles to choose from and you can pick which info goes into it.

As for recruiters that ask for doc format I could say no but what I do is take the pdf and convert it to doc (it loses some of the formatting) but also explain that to the recruiter.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"A problem I found with CVs is that recruiters often ask you to resend it in word doc form"_

Whenever recruiters have asked me this, I've just taken a screenshots of each of the pages of my LaTeX-generated PDF, pasted them in to LibreOffice, and saved them in DOC format.

<comment><USER25> Why do I find that solution but brillant and cunning?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I prefer Markdown. It allows you to separate content and form, and you can easily output to basically any format using pandoc.

<https://github.com/mwhite/resume>

<comment><USER27> > It allows you to separate content and form

Could you explain further what you mean by "form"?

<comment><USER26> Visual presentation and styling. Of course, if you write in Markdown then there is some limit to the degree to which you can change the way things look simply with a LaTeX header or CSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I once got a job because I could demonstrate my proficiency in TeX by pointing to the C.V. I'd just handed them - although that was a job as a book designer.

<comment><USER29> I have a new job. It's rearranging the alphabet, so U and I can be together forever.

<comment><USER30> They already did that in the qwerty keyboard layout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I used to do my resumes in LaTeX but kept fighting with the styles. I really just wished i could use html/css, and finally created my own template.

<https://github.com/chucklarge/html-resume-template>

</comment><comment><USER32> Here's my (admittedly not CV though) resume that I built in LaTeX: <https://github.com/dcousineau/resume>

It's not the world's best but naturally feel free to steal my source and run wild with it.

<comment><USER33> You might want to add an example PDF for those too lazy to compile the resume to check out the format. Also a license file couldn't hurt.

I like the separate cls file for handling most of the layout. I do pretty much the same in mine: <https://github.com/treyhunner/resume>

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is it worth learning LaTeX as a premed?

</comment><comment><USER35> i also keep my resume in latex:

<http://github.com/cies/resume>

</comment><comment><USER29> WTF is a "CV"?

<comment><USER36> Curriculum Vitae. You can think of it as a long form resume if I understand the US notion of a resume correctly. They are commonly used in place of resumes here (Netherlands, and presumably larger parts of the EU).

<comment><USER29> OK, thanks.

But the culture of obscurity reeks of insecurity.

<comment><USER37> What culture of obscurity, exactly?

<comment><USER38> This is just a normal American reaction when we find out that other parts of the world do things differently than we do. In a purely defensive measure, we say that it is "obscure." For example, A4 paper is ubiquitous in the world. Except North America. Try to buy A4 paper, ask for A4 compatible accessories, etc. will draw only blank stares. There is no difference between a "cv" and a "resume." The terms are synonyms.

Now back to the post....

Two issues: lots of places ask for Word-format. This is because (at least some of them) are machine-reading the documents. This leads to the second point: if your cv does not contain the keywords in the job description, it will not be kicked out of the slush pile. So you have to write each cv/resume particularly for each job. If they take pdf's; fine, otherwise, it's a little bit easier to make a quick change in Word than to make a change in your favorite editor and then compile.

Oh and should you compile for A4 or letter? Article or scarticle? Isn't there a Dutch artikel class?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Using a deprecated technology to create a list of achievements seems odd to me. Isn't html the lingua franca nowadays? A html file with @media print seems much more logical to me.

<comment><USER40> I use LaTeX because:

\+ I care about design, typesetting and typography

\+ it's FOSS

\+ it's cross-platform

\+ it doesn't cost me an arm compared to the alternative

\+ it's unbelievably lightweight (e.g MacTeX basic) compared to the alternative

\+ it allows for code factorization

\+ it's text-based which means:

\- drivable form the shell

\- automatable from makefiles

\- editable in vim

\- can be generated with e.g erb or jinja2

\- naturally handled by git/hg

i.e it's composable in a unix workflow

TeX has its warts and a steep learning curve, but there's a slight difference between obsolete technology and mature technology. Especially when there's _no replacement_.

<comment><USER39> > I care about design, typesetting and typography

Sorry, but design, typesetting and typography done in html is far superior. Why limit to paper only? Last time I checked, most typography features are implemented in firefox/chrome. Html is the replacement. You limit yourself with static information on paper using Tex. Tex falls into the category of pdf, doc, docx, odt to me. Deprecated, because we do not put things on paper today, but we put things on the internet.

<comment><USER41> > typesetting and typography done in html is far superior

Did I miss the irony somewhere? Last time I checked (justified) line breaking was a mess, protrusion is not supported and generally it's quite hard to handle font metrics without using a canvas. I guess you're right that this is changing, but it's nowhere near the quality and the ease (yes even that) of TeX or InDesign. And if you use some content preprocessor like pandoc or xslt the limitation of static information on paper isn't a problem anyway.

Btw, if you like to have more control over the layout have a look at ConTeXt, it's quite nice especially its modular approach.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


39% of angel investors are losing money--is there a better way? - <AUTHOR> http://revenuetrades.tumblr.com/post/7315160875/is-angel-investment-broken

<comment><USER2> Is it just me or does that number seem good when you think about the fact that those investments are high risk?

<comment><AUTHOR> If 39% was the odds of a single angel investment giving positive returns, than yes, that could be a good number. The problem is 39% is the average portfolio performance per angel who is makes multiple high risk investments.

It's a problem because if angel investing isn't profitable, those who have invested will have less and less to invest and fewer new angels would be attracted to it or be likely to make multiple investments.</comment></comment>


Interview With a Secretary - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Interview-with-a-Secretary.aspx <comment><USER2> After "It's the charisma, stupid!", here comes "It's the stupid charisma!"</comment>


Supercraft: Create and Publish WebVR Sites in VR - <AUTHOR> https://supermedium.com/supercraft/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing! We're Supermedium from YC W18. We built Supercraft to easily allow people to intuitively build their own worlds with their hands in VR that can be shared with just a URL.

It also allows WebVR and A-Frame developers to easily create good looking, consistent 3D assets that are performant and really low file size, particularly for A-Frame. Here's an example making a simple shooter game in a few lines of HTML with Supercraft assets: [https://github.com/supermedium/supercraft- shooter](https://github.com/supermedium/supercraft-shooter)

<comment><USER3> Hi

Excellent job! We have been working quite a bit in UI/UX of VR editing. You might be keen to look at what we've done here: [https://vrsketch.eu](https://vrsketch.eu) (it's a tool for architects, but shares a lot of problems)

<comment><USER4> Hi, another Supercraft dev here. Yeah, lots of struggling about how to edit things in VR in a simple but versatile and intuitive way. I see you made a wonderful job in VRSketch, lots of interesting ideas and explorations, thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER3> Hi!

Thanks! Feel free to hit me up if you want to chat, some parts of the UI are or can be OS. Email in profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hadn't looked into this for a while, but the idea of a browser backed by standards (webvr) and open source (A-frame) is REALLY exciting. I don't want to get overly enthusiastic, but this feels geo-cities-ish. I love the idea of hand-crafted VR "websites", mostly because it forces the "hand-crafted" (literally, I suppose) part, which leads to the wonderful diversity that made geocities fun.

<comment><USER6> > I don't want to get overly enthusiastic

Ok, we can help with that. :)

Windows only. VR in general is still Windows-centric, followed by Android, and bit of Mac. The WebVR spec, even for W3C, was... notable. Example: to get new data, pass an _immutable_ object to the api... which then updates it. But perhaps WebXR is now better? Very not "Just Works" \- sensitive to hardware and firmware, and still crashy. A community that's better at posting "yay! it works!", than at describing just what definitions of "it" and "works" were needed for that to be sort of true, and at clearly characterizing state of play.

Remember Angular 1? How its PR was full of red flags, "you'd be nuts to invest in this now rather than waiting" red flags? And that the authors didn't realize what they were waving, was yet another big red flag? A-Frame, at least early A-Frame, reminded me a lot of that.

VR/AR will be awesome. But it's still rather a mess. And there's a line of bodies of people who burned time struggling with ephemeral problems. There are many explorable opportunities, including ARKit. But it seems we've a ways to go before something like a VR geocites becomes possible. Though skimming WebVR outreach might leave that non-obvious.

On a more upbeat note, with most everyone focusing on "immersive" video games, there isn't yet much awareness of how bizarrely psychedelic non-novice/expert UIs in VR can be. Imagine stumbling into someone else's customized environment - sort of like dvorak "huh?", plus vi macros "what did I touch?! what did it do?!", plus blender "what? where? how?", plus geocites "bling! shazam! awesome." :)

<comment><USER2> As one of the creators of A-Frame (and Supercraft above), and there with WebVR near the beginning. I agree, it's still a mess, early, and people love to hype and shout how awesome things are with cool images, GIFs, and videos, when the reality is it's still a ways away

Honestly, I've been using A-Frame all day for the last couple years, and really enjoy its development process. And have developed applications like Supercraft that I think have some value. I do need to make it easier with documentation and stuff. But going to spend the next few years making A-Frame and WebVR worthy for developers and users.

Not even to mention the mess with standards around the lower level APIs and the WebVR/XR specs themselves :) It'll get there though.

<comment><USER6> > A-Frame [...] really enjoy its development process [...] Supercraft

Nifty. If I update my Web?R-like browser-as-compositor stack for linux, that's an incentive to push through to A-Frame compatibility. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does WebVR work yet? Last time I tried it in Firefox, it showed a stereoscopic image on the screen, but nothing in my Rift.

<comment><USER2> Yeah. If you have a laptop, you might have to configure NVIDIA settings to use high performance for Firefox.

Supermedium (our browser purely for VR apps) configures that automatically and has made WebVR easily available on Steam and Oculus. Also DK2 and below is not supported, Rift CV1 is the minimum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> VRML is making a resurgence :D</comment>


Hackers Claim to Have Trump's Dirty Laundry and Demand $42M to Keep Quiet - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/05/15/hackers-claim-to-have-trumps-dirty-laundry-and-demand-42-million-to-keep-quiet/ <comment><USER3> Fascinating.

I know it is a very serious crime to threaten the president in public - <USER2> secret service will and must take action.

So here we have computer criminals casually mentioning trump and now the law firm must NOT pay the ransom and the full might of the us government is brought to bear on the threat.

We should all get some popcorn and pull up a chair.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 'Brett Callow [an analyst at Emsisoft with expertise in dark web criminal activity] says this is more than interesting; it is significant. "As far as I know, no ransomware attack has ever been classed as a terrorist act, and that includes attacks on US cities and hospitals, so organizations have always been permitted to negotiate. I can only assume this classification is due to the threat to Trump."

'Which could be terrible news for the REvil criminals and, indeed, the celebrity clients whose documents they possess. Once terrorism is brought into the equation, the hunt for such threat actors takes on an altogether different dimension. "The criminals have shot themselves in the foot by mentioning Trump," Callow says, "There's no way they can collect a ransom, so they'll probably publish the rest of the data or auction it."'

</comment><comment><USER4> DNC hackers? This is rubbish.. the timing of this is impeccable. MSM pushing fake news once again.</comment>


Plan to throw one away - <AUTHOR> http://garethrees.org/2015/12/14/javascript/ <comment><USER2> Interestingly, Tcl was parsed the same way all the way up until Tcl 8.0 introduced a bytecode system in 1997. Each line was parsed right before execution with no separate parsing stage--your code could crash in the middle of executing from a syntax error.

Tcl is now about as fast as a typical scripting language and its implementation is regarded as a model of high-quality readable code. I wonder if John Ousterhout (the creator of Tcl) knew he was building a rough first system that he would need to rewrite later, or he really thought it was the right way to do things at the time.

(To be fair, Tcl is a whole lot simpler to parse than JavaScript and Ousterhout is a good coder, so even the pre-8.0 versions were fast enough to be practical for everyday scripting tasks.)

<comment><USER3> > Interestingly, Tcl was parsed the same way all the way up until Tcl 8.0 > introduced a bytecode system in 1997. Each line was parsed right before > execution with no separate parsing stage--your code could crash in the > middle of executing from a syntax error.

Fun fact: most modern JavaScript engines in browsers work this way _today_ , though at a different level of granularity. Parsing slows down application startup, so many JS engines don't parse a function body until it's first called. This means you can have a syntax error in a function body and won't know if it's never used.

<comment><USER2> That's pretty neat. Clearly some level of parsing needs to happen before run time, or else it couldn't even balance braces to know where the function body ends. So it must be that it parses the function body just enough to figure out where it starts and ends, then does a complete parse at runtime (probably building off the results from the first stage).

<comment><USER3> > or else it couldn't even balance braces to know where the function body ends

That's literally all it does. It tokenizes and counts braces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool read, however, I feel the need to point out that 20 years ago, javascript in the server wasn't "too soon", it already existed.

In 1995 Netscape had the Netscape Enterprise Server[0] that ran javascript for server-side scripting. Actually, the two books I used, back in the day, to learn Javascript was the client- and the server-side javascript guides published by Netscape.

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

<comment><USER5> > javascript in the server wasn't "too soon", it already existed

Those two things aren't necessarily in conflict. Netscape's server wasn't exactly a roaring success. What really made Javascript-in-the-server work was a Javascript JIT engine (v8) that actually made Javascript very competitive compared to traditional server side scripting languages. So given that there did not exist a Javascript JIT engine back then, maybe it was too soon.

<comment><USER6> Agree that was probably too soon, even if it existed in some form. I've often wondered why precisely people love JavaScript on the server. I would guess it's a mix of 1) event machine parallelism, 2) isomorphism, 3) speed (since V8/SpiderMonkey/Chakra), 4) cross-compatibility, and 5) engineers not needing to learn another language.

<comment><USER7> I've always assumed it's heavily weighted towards 5 - never underestimate the ability of a coder to avoid effort!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is precisely not what Brooks meant by 'plan to throw one away'. Brooks point is, that you gather information while writing your prototype and incorporate the new-found knowledge into your second, hopefully sound, design.

Rees never learned anything new from the first system (what could he learn anyway, what he described sounds like a nightmare), but proceeded to implement it from scratch.

Funny thing, I'm reading 'The Mythical Man-Month' right now :D

<comment><USER9> Yes, you've spotted the irony in the title :)

<comment><USER8> Awesome read btw :>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would like to know how the CTO responded to the idea of throwing away the code he'd been slaving on at the very last minute, and replacing it with something that someone cobbled together in two weeks (but worked).

<comment><USER11> From the sound of the description the original CTO authored code was cobbled together and its replacement was properly engineered (for some value of properly).

<comment><USER10> Of course, but from the time invested, it would seem the other way around. It's often painful to accept that you wasted a lot of time and that it's better to start over (which is of course the entire point of the article), and even more so if the new hire has already done that and thrown the CTO's code away.

Ultimately it's a question of ego. Does the CTO welcome the new hire who knows more about this than he does, or does he insist he knows better? Does he feel threatened or slighted?

<comment><USER12> This is the "First class people hire first class people, second class people hire third class people" paradigm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find the dates a bit suspect (referenced ECMA script standard was June 1997, book was late 1996, so how did this all happen twenty years ago, just months following the official release of JavaScript in May 95?), but guess that's not the point. Maybe I'm alone, but implausible details distract me from an otherwise great story that can teach a lesson many should learn.

<comment><USER9> For "twenty years", read "once upon a time". I feel that a bit of vagueness in dates is appropriate for a story like this. I have no contemporary written documentation, so it's based on my fallible memory, and I don't want to give a false impression of accuracy.

<comment><USER13> Yep, that's more or less what I did ("back in the mid to late 90s") to continue reading and not second guess it to much. Great story otherwise, thanks for sharing it!

<comment><USER9> I do take your point, and so I've rewritten the opening to be even vaguer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are Lex and Yacc still the state of the art 20 years later?

<comment><USER15> Be prepared to just use the generated tables and forget the generated code:

The generated code is not so great if you have an event driven environment: I mean I want to push 50 bytes into the compiler, instead of having it request the next input character. This means it's not so great for a repl, unless some other pre-parser gives complete translation units to lex/yacc.

I think Yacc has a pretty primitive conflict resolution strategy: (pick shift unless otherwise indicated by precedence declarations). If code could resolve the conflict then you could handle a lot of newer syntax: for example, in "a-b" vs. "a -b", you could use the whitespace to distinguish between prefix (reduce) or infix (shift).

It would be nice (I know someone who has done this..) if there was an option to degenerate into using backtracking to resolve conflicts. It means try all possibilities (split the stack at each conflict) and keep only those results which produce an error free full parse. If there is more than one full result, only then do you have a real conflict.

I'm not sure if other parser generators are any better, but there are improvements which could be made.

<comment><USER16> In terms of ease of use, Parser Combinators beat most Parser Generators. (For absolute speed, Generators might still beat Combinators.)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I should try them. I remember a previous discussion about the old language SNOBOL having parser combinators as a built-in feature: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103460)

<comment><USER16> I learned Parser Combinators on Haskell. But a basic version is easy to write yourself in any language that supports first class functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow." \-- Fred Brooks

"If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two." \-- Craig Zerouni

</comment><comment><USER18> This makes me want to write a JS interpreter... Sweet read!

<comment><USER19> A simple ES3 interpreter is pretty easy, particularly if you just go for 'the good parts' (plus basic global objects).

I can highly recommend mpc[1] if you do, it's a really amazing library for parser combinators in C. I was never much of a fan of yacc/lex (perhaps out of my ignorance of BNF). With yacc/lex I always felt like I had to have my grammar all planned out (which if you implement JS I suppose isn't a problem) before I could start developing and it was very hard to work incrementally. mpc is very flexible and since it's just a C library I find it a lot easier to iterate with.

1: [https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc](https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _The failure to store a represention of the parsed code was disastrous > because it meant that in order to evaluate an expression or statement for a > second time, the engine had to parse it a second time._

Ha! They must have learned how to write an interpreter from Herbert Schildt:

[http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/building-your-own-c- interpreter/1...](http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/building-your-own-c- interpreter/184408184) [1989]

In this piece of amusement, the Little C program is a giant null-terminated string, and the "instruction pointer" is of type char * . You get the picture.

> _When I did come to write a garbage collector I used the mark-and-sweep > algorithm. But something puzzled me, and I couldn't find an answer in any of > the textbooks I looked at: how was I supposed to schedule the collections? > In a classic description of a garbage collector, you wait until memory runs > out and then you collect the world. But this leads to bad behaviour on > modern systems, because of swapping, and because other processes need memory > too. You need to schedule collections well before memory is full. But when > exactly? I still don't know of a comprehensive solution to this problem._

In a nutshell, you let your run-time pretend that it's running in a small machine, until it is too close to huffing and puffing too hard and then you say "hey I lied, you're actually in a bigger machine: have some breathing room". This rubbery constraint keeps it behaving reasonably nicely, rather than "Wee, I have 4GB of free RAM to stomp over with strings and cons cells before ever calling GC!"

What you have to do is pick some heap size (that is typically substantially smaller than the amount of RAM). You let the GC whack against this artificial threshold, and if that gets too excessive, according to some measure, you increase it. E.g. if after a full GC you have less than some fudge threshold free, call the OS for more memory to integrate into the object heap.

The threshold is calculated in some way that the image doesn't have to execute numerous frequent GC's before it triggers the request for more space (it doesn't have to whack too hard and wastefully against the artificial limit).

Also, ephemeral GC will help, and ephemeral GC can have its own threshold against frequent ephemeral GC's. When not enough space is liberated by ephemeral, you schedule a full. Then if _that_ doesn't liberate enough space, add more. Since ephemeral is fast (doesn't scan the full heap), you can work a bit closer to the heap limit (since you can suffer frequent ephemeral GC's better than frequent full GC's).

And, of course, the parameters controlling these behaviors are exposed in some way so users can tweak them. Command line arguments, env vars, local config file, system config file, run time global variable/API, ...

<comment><USER16> Didn't PHP also used to use the position of a fileseek as the instruction pointer?

<comment><USER21> Shell script interpreters like bash do. You can change a bash script while it's running (append, or truncate and re-write) and it'll keep going from the same offset.

But then again, shell script is in a different class of language I'd say.

      #!/bin/bash
      COUNTER=0
      addmore() {
          echo hi $COUNTER
          ((COUNTER++))
          echo "addmore" >>$0
          sleep 1
      }
      addmore

<comment><USER20> Bash reads code from a stream, and doesn't read the entire stream before executing the code.

However, the stream pointer isn't its instruction pointer in the script. A backwards branch (such as the end of a while loop, or a call to a function defined earlier) does not rewind the stream to that piece of text.

> _But then again, shell script is in a different class of language I 'd say._

Not much different in this regard from how, say, Common Lisp (load "file.lisp") processes the top-level forms in the file.

      (defvar *counter* 0)

      (defun addmore ()
        (format t "hi ~s~%" (incf *counter*))
        (with-open-file (f "addmore.lisp" :direction :output :if-exists :append)
          (write-line "(addmore)" f)))

      $ clisp addmore.lisp
      hi 1
      WARNING: OPEN: #<INPUT BUFFERED FILE-STREAM CHARACTER #P"addmore.lisp" @8>
               already points to file "/home/kaz/test/addmore.lisp", opening the
               file again for :OUTPUT may produce unexpected results
               Open the file anyway
      hi 2
      WARNING: OPEN: #<INPUT BUFFERED FILE-STREAM CHARACTER #P"addmore.lisp" @9>
               already points to file "/home/kaz/test/addmore.lisp", opening the
               file again for :OUTPUT may produce unexpected results
               Open the file anyway
      hi 3
      WARNING: OPEN: #<INPUT BUFFERED FILE-STREAM CHARACTER #P"addmore.lisp" @10>
               already points to file "/home/kaz/test/addmore.lisp", opening the
               file again for :OUTPUT may produce unexpected results
               Open the file anyway
      hi 4
      WARNING: OPEN: #<INPUT BUFFERED FILE-STREAM CHARACTER #P"addmore.lisp" @11>
               already points to file "/home/kaz/test/addmore.lisp", opening the
               file again for :OUTPUT may produce unexpected results
               Open the file anyway
      hi 5

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As an aside, but I think relevant to Hacker News, the author of this blog post also wrote the classic mid-1990s text adventure game Christminster [http://garethrees.org/1995/08/08/christminster/](http://garethrees.org/1995/08/08/christminster/)

</comment><comment><USER15> >One thing that I had not had time to do was to write a garbage collector.

Cheat: use Hans Bhoem's conservative collector for C/C++: [http://www.hboehm.info/gc/](http://www.hboehm.info/gc/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course the opposite problem also exists. You plan to throw away that quick, ugly hack you threw together for a demo as soon as the demo is done, and somehow it sticks around in production for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER24> This adage is fairly old, aren't today's programming and management techniques rendering it obsolete?

<comment><USER25> If this guy were 'properly' managed he would never be allowed to overhaul this project like he did. Not many managers will be impressed by a "I will build a full compiler that is going to be better than what the _CTO_ built in the next two weeks immediately after which is the deadline" speech, as the author also admits.

If the company was properly managed they also wouldn't have been in a situation where there's only two weeks left and a critical component is in a not well understood state.

In practice though these kinds of things constantly happen in even well managed companies. If the author weren't around they'd probably just have shipped a slow Javascript interpreter that couldn't do prototypes very well.

Just curious, what kind of programming technique renders the idea of this article obsolete?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a corollary:

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

You can replace all the parts of your crappy v1.0 code and still call it the same code base. That's what the smart ones go around doing quietly.

<comment><USER27> While in most cases it's probably a better option, I think that in this case there wasn't time to do that. I would probably explore the option to still use the parser, and have it generate an AST first, and from there go pretty much in the direction of the author.

<comment><USER26> Part of the problem is being given an assignment two weeks before a ship date. I know people do stuff like that all the time but that's hardly an excuse (we do terrible things to each other all the time so it's okay?)

The author is already screwed before he even has a chance to start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow, this seems quite idiotic to me. Sure, recursive descent parsers have some theoretically inferior properties to other techniques, but in reality they're much better because you can actually handle errors in a user-friendly way. That's why basically every bigger compiler uses handwritten recursive descent parsers.

<comment><USER29> > this seems quite idiotic to me

Please don't be uncharitably dismissive. The author didn't throw away the parser because it was recursive descent—in fact he explicitly excludes that as a reason.

(The rest of your comment is fine.)

<comment><USER28> Sorry I was too harsh, but to me it reads much like: I personally don't like this code, so I threw away everything.

<comment><USER29> It's true that that's a mega motivation lurking in the soul of every programmer. But it's also often true that writing a program can be faster than revising one (or even reading it) when the original programmer isn't available.

To me his justification sounded pretty convincing, though not to you, which is totally fair. As far as HN commenting goes it's just a matter of explaining your view in a substantive way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Instagram is down (500s) - <AUTHOR> http://isitdownforjustme.appspot.com/?url=instagram.com <comment><USER2> Should we rename HN to 500 news?

</comment><comment><USER3> And I starting noticing real people, real interactions, real friendships.

<comment><USER4> Deleted my account after Cambridge analytica story broke out. It was fun when it was about photography. It really boost my interest and made me experiment and move on to DSLR and mirrorless eventually etc. But with sponsored ads and less and less people interested in photography, I didn't feel I was missing much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's hope it stays that way.

</comment><comment><USER6> ...and it's back up, as of about 2:20PM EDT. Was definitely down for me with 5xx errors earlier, though, checking from Boston. Both web and mobile app were failing to load.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't help but think of that quote from The Social Network but in regard to Instagram being uttered by Zuckerberg: "Instagram must never go down!"

</comment><comment><USER8> Ah, intern season.

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems as though this website is not functioning itself . Every domain I checked says "it's down for us as well".

<comment><USER10> I can at least confirm that I've been getting 503 errors on Instagram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yesterday it was Netflix, and today Instagram...

Is this the end of the world?

<comment><USER12> My sources tell me the Internet this week has been having a lot of technical issues.... and with no Net Neutrality in the U.S.A the big Telcos are probably "accidentally" cutting wires.

From my seat, it's certainly been an interesting two weeks putting out fires across the globe.</comment></comment>