The Word from Wuhan - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n05/wang-xiuying/the-word-from-wuhan <comment><USER2> The most fun anecdote:

Zhang Wenhong, director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Shanghai's Huashan Hospital, became a national hero for a press conference speech:

The first-aid team put themselves in great danger. They are tired and need to rest. We shouldn't take advantage of good people. From now on, I'll replace all the frontline medics with party members from different sectors. Didn't you all swear to put the people's interest first when you joined the party, whatever the difficulties? I don't care what you were actually thinking when you joined the party. Now it's time to live up to what you promised. I don't care if you personally agree or not: it's non-negotiable.

But good article - read the whole thing.

<comment><USER3> >with party members from different sectors

Pretty sure that was mis-translated ( Intentional or not ). What he meant was party member from within the Medics and Hospital. He didn't just suggest to put any party member in the frontline because they wouldn't be qualify in the first place.

<comment><USER4> No no no.. translating is to put them in the 'headlights' of transparency of accountability. It's quite an angry comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when > everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto > the blamer, they are busy 'throwing woks'.

I appreciate learning idioms of countries foreign to me, and in this case it makes for a great article.

<comment><USER6> There was an great episode on this topic on CBC a week ago: [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/the-life-giving-nature- of-...](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/the-life-giving-nature-of- language-1.5476924) (Available on most Podcast apps too [https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/tapestry-from-cbc- radi...](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/tapestry-from-cbc- radio/id250082526?i=1000466998731))

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can count on the states that have an official number of infected people of about 100 to have about 10000. You can count on US states that have 0 cases for those to have about 1000. We've passed containment options when we didn't do anything about 2 months ago.

People just don't go to the doctors, especially with the news of how people are being treated on the boats.

<comment><USER8> Deductible of several thousand per person in our household. Good ol' HSA plan (our other options _guaranteed_ higher spending than that every year on premiums). Bet your ass we're not going to the hospital unless we absolutely have to. And we're lucky enough to have insurance and the means to pay if we have to (though it'll hurt a hell of a lot).

<comment><USER9> > _Deductible of several thousand per person in our household_

Call your insurer. Many are waiving testing and treatment, including for HDHPs, in respect of SARS-Covid-2.

<comment><USER8> I would be _shocked_ if that turned out to be true. At best I'd expect some part of treatment very specific to COVID-19 to be free but everything else around it to be normal price. Insurance companies and hospital billing departments screw you and screw up constantly in the best of circumstances—no way I'm trusting them any more than I would a used car salesman.

<comment><USER9> > _I would be shocked if that turned out to be true_

It's a call. Not that hard. My insurer, a major Californian one, confirmed affirmatively within minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Expecting local officials to deal effectively with extraordinary circumstances is unrealistic. A wealthy populous nation should be able to support a team of national experts to assist in times and places of particular need, in a variety of fields including that of infectious disease. The system described in TFA seems rather more like a struggle among competing cults of personality. "Your mayor sucks! Now you will be ruled by our super-mayor!" "Does he know a single thing about health?" "Who knows?! Who cares!? He has a take-charge personality!"

<comment><USER11> Leadership is exactly about organizing groups of experts to fight against specific threats to the common good.

The point isn't that local officials should have been working in the hospitals, it is that they should have been collecting the infectious disease experts and executing against a containment and mitigation plan.

<comment><USER10> Are you a "West Wing" fan?

The whole point of a unitary centrally-controlled state apparatus like that in China is that leadership of the type you describe does not exist. If it did exist, it would not exist locally. Local officials are to follow directions, which come from more central authorities. Sometimes they follow directions poorly, because they're more concerned with their personal well-being than that of their subjects. That's understandable, because those orders themselves came from the same motivation on their bosses' parts.

Am I criticizing the form of government that the Chinese people endure? Yes! It is much like most other forms of government endured by humanity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Teams of doctors arrived from every province in China to join the effort and an army of engineers was deployed to build two new hospitals in ten days. Millions of people watched the buildings go up.

That's unbelievable.

Where can I read or see more about that?

EDIT: Found something [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds- two-ho...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two- hospitals-in-days-to-combat-coronavirus.html)

I am still in disbelief.

<comment><USER13> Wendover Productions in the topic: [https://youtu.be/3Sh7hghljuQ](https://youtu.be/3Sh7hghljuQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Little more about the student lead DDOS attack here -

[https://technode.com/2020/03/02/dingtalk-begs-for-stars- on-c...](https://technode.com/2020/03/02/dingtalk-begs-for-stars-on-chinas- app-stores/)

<comment><USER15> <quote>On the first day back to school, DingTalk saw over 50 million students and 600,000 teachers in China using its live-streaming feature to hold online classes.</quote>

OMG! Their infrastructure team must be so proud, I can't imagine the app saw even a one-hundrenth of that much traffic before then.

<comment><USER16> DingTalk is a product from Alibaba, which also owns Taobao and Alibaba Cloud. DingTalk celebrated 200 million registered users back in August 2019. So this online course surge is probably not that a big stretch for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The question remains: what will happen when everyone returns to work and school? I would expect infections to flare up again. What then?

<comment><USER18> Deal with each new outbreak quickly and efficiently. The problem in Italy and China was that the outbreak got out of hand before measures to deal were in place, the big deal here seems to be that if people in critical conditions get support with breathing they often pull through, if they don't they die. If you are dealing with 1000's of cases providing supported ventilation is not possible. If you are dealing with 10's then it can be done.

<comment><USER17> Practically speaking, I think this means e.g. temperature checks at every school, place of work, subway, train, airport, and large residential building. At entry/exit, like metal detectors. Routine swabs / testing. Ideally could swap, put into an envelope and send off to a central testing facility. What else?

Given the reports of asymptomatic testing, not sure we can confine to small size flare-ups in the absence of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "The censor machine is working tirelessly too. Public mood is constantly monitored and analysed by AI, with countermeasures devised to match it. Take the case of Li Wenliang. Li, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, was one of the first to warn people about the new virus. On 30 December he messaged a group of colleagues about a possible outbreak; a few days later he was summoned by police and reprimanded for 'making false statements that disturbed the public order'. Li continued his work at the hospital and on 10 January started experiencing symptoms of infection. On 6 February, his heart stopped."

What a completely different world these people live in.

<comment><USER20> > What a completely different world these people live in.

\- No Wikipedia.

\- No user generated yelp reviews.

\- No non-government approved news articles.

\- Every message you write online can affect your credit-worthiness and your children's access to schools.

\- Buggy face recognition technology that routinely implicates the innocent

\- Secret detentions if you are "deemed" a scofflaw, with no clear process to challenge it.

\- Non-existent property rights unless you have connections to power.

I love the Chinese people and culture, but the Chinese government is one of the worst ever. It doesn't just effect the way you live, it effects your ability to even think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://archive.md/6g6nO](http://archive.md/6g6nO)

</comment><comment><USER22> Amazing. Thanks to the author.

</comment><comment><USER23> You can use the Reader View in Firefox to work around the paywall.

<comment><USER24> That always works like a charm!

<comment><USER25> Firefox has hardwired me to enter Ctrl+Alt+R whenever something even slightly interferes with reading the content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is how authoritarian socialism/communism pits people against each other. Imagine a massively broad and deep bureaucracy which controls every aspect of your life. Where so many things are illegal that practically everyone is breaking some law - and the government (or your personal enemies) just need a reason to get you reprimanded - piss off the wrong boss and your life is turned upside down.

Our system in the West isn't perfect but at least your mistakes (real and otherwise) typically don't follow you for the rest of your life, excluding extreme cases.

</comment><comment><USER27> I liked the article, thx :)</comment>


Java 10 and beyond – a look at the potential language change - <AUTHOR> https://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/java-10-and-beyond-a-look-at-the-potential-language-change/ <comment><USER2> The rapid release cycle is going to pose challenges downstream for all the people developing tooling and other aspects of the ecosystem which are not used to moving that fast (eg: Groovy still grappling with the module changes to Java9, let alone 10 or 11). While we all griped about it for many years, the slow pace of Java evolution was in some ways one of it's biggest features. I am curious to see whether the community starts to move fast too, or if actually what happens is that people completely ignore the non-LTS versions and we actually get an effective release cadence of 2-3 years or so in practice.

<comment><USER3> That's just it, some projects will likely try to catch up just in time for the next LTS, while others may run a similar set of release branches, one targeting the LTS or the latest release. It's really dependent on individual projects, not so much the whole ecosystem at once. In Rust we have web frameworks that run on the Stable compiler, and then there's Rocket which currently only runs on the nightly compiler (at least last I checked).

<comment><USER4> Rocket is still on nightly, though getting pretty close!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like quite like Java but Oracle scares me. They've started charging for runtime licenses, which I never heard of before. Oracle is a good enough reason to avoid Java.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/)

<comment><USER6> Your fear of Oracle aggression is well placed.

Please someone correct my perception here, but it looks the the goal of the rapid release cadence is now to get more enterprise support contracts: if you want to stay on LTS, you have to pay.

<comment><USER7> I think it's doubtful that anybody will be able to correct your FUD. Once you've bought into this delusion it really seems to trap people forever and rags like the Register are absolutely delighted to feed the fear with nonsense articles for precious clicks. Nothing can change the mindset. It doesn't matter that Java itself is completely open source (Open JDK), that Oracle isn't doing anything they haven't done before (you've always had to pay for support of EOL'd JDKs and JDK 8 is five years old like other EOL'd releases), or that, frankly, Oracle's actual track record here -- that is when you look at the actual actions taken by Oracle over the last ten years -- is generous to a fault. None of this matters to somebody who is committed to the FUD.

In the end the thousands of businesses an thousands of open-source projects that use Java will continue to use Java. Others will invest in the FUD around Java and Oracle. Life will go on. It'll be interesting to see who comes out on top.

<comment><USER8> Isn't the support window for each iteration going to be like 6 months?

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html)

Aren't we talking about the company that wants to copyright api no matter what effect his has on the rest of the industry.

The same oracle that buys and kills interesting project making the world a less interesting place.

The people that are suing google for violations that the original owners of the IP tacitly allowed.

You are awful quick to call criticism of oracle FUD and delusion. Are you sure you don't work there?

<comment><USER9> How does this revoke the open source nature of the OpenJDK?

<comment><USER6> It doesn't, rather I think Oracle's plan will end up driving people towards OpenJDK.

It looks like they're firing their pesky B, C, D, and F customers and keeping their A ones, ie the ones who will pay millions in maintenance.

The rest of us, who are currently tied to Sun Java for its stability and who aren't going to pay big maintenance, will have to switch to OpenJDK if we want stability. It's either that or constantly port every 6 months, and pray all the kabillion dependencies we have work okay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The backtick is just a problematic character. Python 3 had good reasons to drop it, so I'm surprised when anyone else starts to use it.

Among the reasons Python devs cited were that it was hard to get printed correctly in books, and hard for users to write in general, depending on keyboard layout.

<comment><USER11> Yup, using a grave accent as a symbol in this time and age of Unicode is just clueless. It's a symbol usually used as a diacritical mark for letters, like è. It's thus often a "dead key" (a key that awaits the next one because it is expected to be used combined with another), just not on US keyboards. How hard is it to at least consider the general set of Western keyboards before deciding upon these things?

Hint: Let programming languages use characters 1) in the ASCII character set and 2) not diacritical marks, and you'll be fine... It's honestly not rocket science. I think it's a programming language designer's responsibility to just know these things in 2018.

In the competing .NET Framework, @ is used for raw string literals, as in @"raw string". The diacritical marks ~ and ^ do occur there for bitwise logical operations and ~ in declarations of destructors but I don't think this is optimal. I never really understood why they inherited C++'s destructor syntax to have a semi-obnoxious special symbol just for this particular one case that is used at most once per entire class definition, that is shared with bitwise complement (???), no less... Is it so bad with keywords? Or why not just use "!" as in "not". It would at least make more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Those changes seem to look like a completely new language, cross of Java/Scala/Swift - why don't they call differently, like Jalaft? The main reason to use Java was its backward compatibility. If I needed to learn a new language every 6 months, I'd learn another one to be honest.

<comment><USER13> Will it not still be backwards compatible?

<comment><USER14> If a new language feature is available, someone in your team will start to use it, because it compiles, and code becomes shorter, so why not. And you will have to review their code daily, which forces to "relearn" the language. I think this is why OP complains.

<comment><USER15> What's wrong with relearning the language? That's nothing new for developers.

<comment><USER12> Why wouldn't you rather learn a new one if your old one is changing rapidly into a weaker version of some other language that did it better already? I personally don't care at all about those new things; I have them in Scala, I don't need them in Java. I can mix those two as I like anyway.

I'd much rather see type erasure fixed, as that messes up every single language based on JVM. But that would be like "the incompatible change" of a decade...

<comment><USER16> > I'd much rather see type erasure fixed, as that messes up every single > language based on JVM

What? Type erasure is one of the main reasons why the JVM is targeted by so many languages (Java, Clojure, Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, JRuby, etc.). Had the JVM gone the way of the CLR the programming language landscape would probably look a lot different than it does today.

Perhaps you mean lack of support for value types? That does affect every language running on the JVM.

<comment><USER17> > _Type erasure is one of the main reasons why the JVM is targeted by so many > languages._

As someone who grapples with erasure as well, I haven't heard this argument before. Could you explain that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16>
        int val = switch (str) {
          case "foo" -> 1;
          case "bar" -> 2;
          case "baz" -> 3;
          default -> -1;
        }

Looks a lot like Scala:

        val foo = match (str) {
          case "foo" => 1
          case "bar" => 2
          case "baz" => 3
          case _ => -1
        }

Interestingly the underscore character is now reserved in Java, wonder what use case(s) they have in mind there?

<comment><USER18> Regarding "_": [http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/302](http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/302)

Example:

        BiFunction<Integer, String, String> biss = (i, _) -> String.valueOf(i);

It basically means that one of the lambda parameters is unused.

And citing this JEP 302:

      We are now free to complete the planned rehabilitation of underscore
      to indicate an unused lambda, method, or catch formal parameter.

<comment><USER16> Scala overloads underscore in various ways, my favorite being:

        val emails = users.map(_.email)

Unlikely that will make its way into Java anytime soon, if ever, but it would be a nice enhancement -- being forced to pepper your code with lambda expressions a la `x => x.foo` is annoying when the alternative `_.foo` conveys the same meaning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who hasn't used Java since the early 2000s, I am surprised that it took them this long to get some features that I have taken for granted for many many years elsewhere. What surprises me even more is that there are Java islanders treating this update as something to be proud of. Can someone enlighten me as to why this language is still popular? I get that there is legacy software that uses it, and therefore a demand. But what is the appeal otherwise?

<comment><USER20> It has easy learning curve, it's verbosity while cursed upon makes it also easier to grasp the code by less-then-expert, it's performant, it has huge ecosystem, it can run everywhere.

In principle - it's just convenient in many ways.

<comment><USER21> C# ticks all the same boxes and is much better from a language point of view.

The only reason Java still exists is because it created a generation of professionals who only know Java, only do Java, and won't learn anything else. That group is still large enough to maintain critical mass and create new greenfield Java projects despite the fact that Java is a shit-poor choice of language for those projects today.

<comment><USER22> C# was too tied to Windows for too long, it lost the mindshare outside of that ecosystem.

Also that whole "Android" thing happened.

<comment><USER21> > Also that whole "Android" thing happened.

Yeah, and Google made their opinion of Java quite clear by adding first-party support for Kotlin.

As for Java being popular because it has mindshare, you are agreeing with my original point. It doesn't continue to exist because it's a good language. It continues to exist because of inertia.

<comment><USER23> >Yeah, and Google made their opinion of Java quite clear by adding first-party support for Kotlin.

Which is good for Android developers as they crave that syntactic sugar. Unfortunately, businesses have different priorities.

>As for Java being popular because it has mindshare, you are agreeing with my original point. It doesn't continue to exist because it's a good language. It continues to exist because of inertia.

It may not have all of the syntactic sugar that other languages have at the moment, but given its new release cadence its only a matter of time before it reaches feature parity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those concerned about being forced to use Oracle's JDK / support you can definitely just use OpenJDK now. The build farm we have put together at AdoptOpenJDK.net will produce professionally tested OpenJDK binaries for all major versions and platforms with free LTS support. You can then also always go to a commercial vendor like Oracle for extra paid support if that's what your org needs.

</comment><comment><USER25> I really do not understand why this is getting so much hate? I really think this new time based release versioning is much preferred to alternatives.

I think the biggest problem is that it is in the nature of most developers to want to live on the bleeding edge. We want to have these new shiny purple things. And it just hurts us deep down inside to go with the safe and mature option.

Again, nobody is forcing you to adapt a new version as soon as it comes out.

<comment><USER26> Except you are essentially being forced since the previous version becomes immediately unsupported. By the time you consider and work through all the implications of upgrading to Java 10 it will be September and Java 11 will have come out, and Java 10 will be obsolete and unsupported. That's a bit crazy for a major version that just came out in March.

<comment><USER18> You can start testing new release before it is out. E.g. for 11, you get final RC at 8/30, and the release is on 9/25\. Which means that you get almost a month while you can be 99% sure that you are testing with the target JDK.

And also, the cadence means that java changes will be much smaller, so no more big bang like Java 9.

The only real problem might be the bytecode releated libraries like ASM/bytebuddy, those need to move faster then previously (and they are, e.g. butebuddy already supports java 11 bytecode version).

<comment><USER27> "Almost a month" is a laughably short testing period in many of the industries Java is commonly used.

<comment><USER18> OK, in that case you shouldn't upgrade to a non-LTS version.

If you can do testing in a month than use non-LTS, it is quite simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think what Oracle is doing wrt. LTS is actually quite reasonable.

However they adopted the versioning scheme from Ubuntu and I honestly think it is confusing.

What really is going on is this:

       1 Major version 1
       2 Major version 1 + latest and greatest features pack 1
       3 Major version 1 + latest and greatest features pack 2
       4 Major version 2
       5 Major version 2 + latest and greatest features pack 1
       6 Major version 2 + latest and greatest features pack 2
       7 Major version 3
       8 Major version 3 + latest and greatest features pack 1
       9 Major version 3 + latest and greatest features pack 2
       ...

Picking a version scheme that made that obvious would have been helpful.

<comment><USER29> What? Ubuntu has a Year.month versioning scheme. Nothing like that seems to be going on here.

<comment><USER28> Hah. Sorry that is correct. They do have the same LTS, update, update, LTS, update, update thing going on as far as I can see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I thought the whole .Net Framework/.Net Core/.Net Standard distinction was crazy. But the more I read about the Oracle JDK vs OpenJDK and the difference in the support schedule and licensing, I find that Microsoft's strategy is much more understandable.

And as far as the LTS version of Java, 3 years seems a little long to wait for any updates but 6 months seems short to to drop support.

If I ever get back into Java, it will be solely for Android development. Does any of this affect Android development?

I haven't used Java in years, is the Java ecosystem under Oracle as bad as it appears from the outside?

<comment><USER31> The Android ecosystem is slowing down rapidly in new Java code and is moving as fast as it can toward Kotlin.

<comment><USER32> Java on Android is like C on UNIX, it will only get away when Google decides to reboot the OS.

Then we will see where Kotlin lands, specially since Fuchsia uses Dart.

<comment><USER33> I hope Fuchsia also supports Go, not as a replacement to Java, but as a first class alternative.

<comment><USER32> Fuchsia's TCP/IP stack and file system utilities are currently written in Go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Java users in the enterprise like myself in some of my client work won't be massively enthralled by this approach, though not necessarily for good reasons. Audit and compliance teams love to pick up on software versions not on the latest version, so the idea of having a six month churn just means I can see man-months of effort being plowed into no-op changes.

We're also unlikely to benefit since vendor software can't upgrade (or won't certify new versions) and the mannequin developers consultancies place offshore can barely work with Java 1.4 concepts. Best I can hope for is improvements in GC and better defaults.

<comment><USER35> Weird, why ? So long as the version is supported, compliance doesn't raise the issue. Of course plenty of compliance is done by recent graduates working for big accounting firms

<comment><USER36> Security updates to the JVM/JRE.

<comment><USER35> The complaint was about the affect of major version release frequency. Security fixs are done in bug fixes release

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Assigning variables through a switch-statement is really nice. Looks almost exactly like Elixir does it.

<comment><USER38> And many other languages before it - SML, OCaml, Haskell, Miranda, Erlang, Scala, Rust...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can anyone familiar with the Java ecosystem chime in here? Is this more of a marketing ploy it are they actually releasing features at a significantly faster rate?

<comment><USER23> New features are released every 6 months. Is there another extremely popular language with a quicker release cadence?

<comment><USER40> While Rust is not "extremely popular", Rust releases every _6 weeks_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The use of `var` is a great improvement over the current method of declaring variables. I love Swift for many reasons (optionals, structs/objs, succinctness, no GC, etc.) and var-style declarations is one of them.

</comment><comment><USER42> Man at this point there is 0 reason not to use kotlin

<comment><USER28> I had to look twice at your statement.

At first I read it like: "Man at this point there is 0 reason to use kotlin".

But come to think about it, it makes just as much sense.

Perhaps you can explain why you think there is 0 reason not to use Kotlin now?

<comment><USER42> Because a lot of these features are already implemented in kotlin. They are written way more concisely with way less ceremony and boilerplate. Plus with kotlins interop you can piecemeal your codebase away from legacy java no matter the version. It's just a better language at this point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Project Loom isn't mentioned. So proper continuations aren't close?

</comment><comment><USER44> Finally, multi line strings and inferred types. It only took 10 years.

Can't wait what next 10 will bring - native json and html/jsx/xml perhaps?

<comment><USER45> I needed multiline strings in 1998.</comment></comment>


Launch a startup - <AUTHOR> http://launchastartup.com/

<comment><USER2> "Pay them (the people to do the dirty work) $15/hour in order to free up your time worth $100+/hour."

Obviously that appeals to somebody with a "great idea" and an over-inflated sense of self-worth, who doesn't understand the amount of work and cost to implement an idea. It probably is not going to attract many of those people who have the skills to do the work.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit First I was like "OMG... that is some funny ish"

Then I was like "What.. what the? They might be serious"

And finally I was like "If they ARE serious... that just makes it even funnier. LOL"

Please tell me this is a joke. It is a joke, right?

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate on that? I think the idea of using text images while promoting SEO is funny, and the idea of attacking your potential customer in your pitch, but what else? I'd like to know what you thought.

<comment> jack-r-abbit Initially I thought it was funny because it reads exactly like a lot of the "landing pages" (also from LaunchRock) that really don't say much but imply they will save your life one day if you signup now. I wonder how many email addresses I could harvest if I just made a LaunchRock page that said "Give me your email address if you don't want to miss out on the cool stuff that I'll show you some day."

And then it occurred to me that they might actually be serious with this pitch... but that made it even funnier. Because, really, if I didn't laugh at it I would cry if I let it sink in that _this_ is the future of how business is started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it ironic that they speak of SEO, yet the page is just one big image and zero text. Practice what you preach.

<comment><USER5> but it has memes!

everyone reads reddit and everyone loves memes!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this purely because I think there's decent conversation to be had around both the page itself, and the motivations of the company behind it.</comment>


This startup wants to be the Facebook for anonymity - <AUTHOR> http://wizters.com

<comment><USER2> "the Facebook for $FUNCTION"

It's cool that you just said that, but if HN were to claim it was "The Facebook for Hackers" then YCombinator would be liable for trademark infringement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny...Google Analytics is tracking the site.</comment>


Nim Programming Language 0.14.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://nim-lang.org/news/2016_06_07_version_0_14_0_released.html?hn=1 <comment><USER2> Very excited for v1.0 -- the solidification of "Concepts" will be quite exciting. The bug fixes and new features in v0.14 are super welcome, definitely looking forward to leveraging the generic type classes fixes: My Either[T] implementation should now work! Exciting stuff.

We've got two internal tools that are written entirely in Nim, and it's been brilliant pretty much all the way through. The rough edges of previous versions are steadily sanded away, and our code becomes more expressive with each version. The biggest thing I'm looking forward to (once v1.0 rolls round) is having the "not nil" specifier be the default for all types. That's going to bring it in line with the other static typing checker we use regularly (Flow) which will be a boon to those of us (mainly me) that live in both worlds most days heh.

<comment><USER3> Curious, if you don't mind... where do you work that you get to use Nim?

<comment><USER2> Studio None, in Brisbane Australia :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are several languages similar to Nim these days, and they're all very exciting. For example, Nim, Rust, D, Go, and probably others I'm forgetting. Does anyone know of some chart that compares them based on their features and priorities? Maybe something in the spirit of [https://mobile.twitter.com/nixcraft/status/73938379662612889...](https://mobile.twitter.com/nixcraft/status/739383796626128896) but with more areas of comparison and less trying to be funny?

<comment><USER5> I'll try to give it a go for Rust, Nim, and Go.

Rust: Wants to replace C++ as an expressive systems programming language. Syntax derived from C++. Emphasis on const correctness. Makes use of some functional programming concepts. Extensive metaprogramming. No garbage collection by default. Interface based polymorphism. The type system tracks memory ownership helping to prevent some classes of error at the cost of more cognitive overhead. The standard library is also written in a way that makes it hard to break things. The only one of the three that can easily be used to write libraries that can be called from other programming languages. Medium complexity to learn.

Nim: Slightly higher level than Rust. Reference counting garbage collection which can be turned off, but heaps are by default local to threads. Syntax derived from python. Emphasis on const correctness. Extensive compile time evaluation facilities. Object oriented polymorphism (for now). Sadly allows null by default for now. Extensive metaprogramming. Medium complexity to learn.

Go: Hightest level of the three. Traditional garbage collector. Interface based polymorphism. Simple and easy to pick up.

All three have good stories about multithreading. All three do their best to fix warts in C++ in things like declaration mirrors use syntax. All three start with the chainsaw turned off so you won't cut off your foot unless you're doing something genuinely dangerous like writing an OS or compiler.

For me, I'd use Rust for writing security critical or OS level things like kernels, system libraries, important utilities, and web browsers. Nim for small team applications where you can afford to be a bit clever and Go for large team projects where cleverness has to be discouraged.

I'm not a huge expert in any of these so there's probably important things I'm overlooking.

<comment><USER6> Nim feels higher level to me than Go; can you educate me on how you drew the opposite conclusion? Maybe I'm looking at something wrong.

<comment><USER5> Just because the garbage collector is optional and the slightly higher emphasis on performance. Also the way it compiles to C. I have using Nim to program a microcontroller on my todo list but I'm not sure how I'd go about doing that in Go. It's weird though because Nim is certainly more expressive than Go is and usually that goes with being higher level.

<comment><USER6> > Nim is certainly more expressive than Go is and usually that goes with being > higher level.

Yes, I think this is what's driving my gut feel. Go feels quite ... hammer-y. Explicit iterators, very few "niceties", etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm using Rust at work because it proved a bit more well suited for our purposes than Nim. However, it's still exciting to see steady progress on Nim; it has some really great and innovative language ideas and I hope its increasing polarity will see those features come to other languages too.

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/936](https://github.com/nim- lang/Nim/issues/936)

still open :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> It's marked High Priority so hopefully won't be much longer before it's fixed.

<comment><USER9> Last post in that discussion is from Februari 2015 so it looks like progress has stalled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I still don't understand how can you (efficiently) debug something like this that compiles to another language?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much the same way you can any other language. GDB/LLDB works fairly well with Nim, but personally I just use a couple `echo` statements when I need to debug anything.

<comment><USER6> `printf` debugging is still often the easiest way to go.

<comment><USER11> GDB looks intimidating, but once I decided to try it I'd never go back to printf debugging.

<comment><USER6> Oh yes, I've used it for many years (though many years ago). For me it depends on the size of the program and the compile time; if it's a short one and compiles quickly, I'll throw a print/puts/print/echo in there just to see what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If someone had an AWS API wrapper, I'd start using it the language more. I'd be willing to help if someone takes point creating one.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was just skimming the post and found the redefining of 'using' very surprising. The old 'using' was for callsite reusability and the new one is for declaration. Optimizing for declaration site (which would be so few comparatively) doesn't make sense to me and also for declaration I want full type name and such.

Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER14> I've never used Nim in my life, but I recall reading that `this` takes the place of the old `using`. So the old `using` is not gone—just renamed.</comment></comment>


UK government MPs are using Signal's automatic deletion feature - <AUTHOR> https://www.private-eye.co.uk/issue-1522/news <comment> dan-robertson I'm in two minds about this. I think it's pretty sleazy to be using signal to evade record keeping requirements. I also think it's important to have transparency into things governments do.

But I also worry that such requirements can lead to worse results. Generally in a well run organisation, you want people to be able to speak their mind and disagree about things, but if the organisation makes a bad decision and those disagreements are recorded, they will be used against them.

For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn't safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn't seem to make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives the message that one shouldn't have these discussions through email because that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice disagreements.

Another example is in healthcare: I suspect people get worse outcomes because if anyone has a different (potentially better) opinion about how a patient may be treated, they are incentivised not to voice it because any disagreement in a hospitals records will make for a much stronger case in any litigation against a hospital.

Perhaps the issue is that the media or public inquiries (or maybe courts or juries) will look at any such record as a sign of negligence rather than an ordinary thing which happens all the time in cases that go wrong and right.

But maybe signal is really being used for political scheming and some public business overflows onto signal unintentionally.

<comment><USER4> > For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some > internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe > wasn't safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn't seem to > make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the > fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing > just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives > the message that one shouldn't have these discussions through email because > that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to > have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised > concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where > concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to > be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice > disagreements.

I'm sorry, but what?! The fallout of the 737 max debacle is that the senior people didn't listen when the engineers raised concerns about safety. This is a solid example of why comms _should_ be recorded, and wholly _not_ the example of why they should not.

<comment><USER5> "Should" for us, yes. But consider the perspective of the company—and specifically its lawyers; their takeaway may be "This stuff being in writing made things worse in court, therefore we'll instruct our employees not to put this stuff in writing."

Though I would guess that having an explicit policy of "don't write down any safety concerns" would do badly in court as well. I suspect any real such policy would have to be unwritten, or a not-very-explicit side effect of something that seemed relatively benign.

<comment><USER6> That's already known. It's why mingling at golf clubs and galas and charity events is important and why clustering in cities is useful. Generally, you can trust conversations you have in person to not be recorded and maintain plausible deniability.

<comment><USER7> Many companies and worse, public institutions around the world are moving to solidify the destruction of evidence with data retention policies. They may automatically delete any email older than 1 or 2 years, every instant message sent via corporate channels in 30 days, etc. as a "disk-space saving measure". Including backups! Anyone can see through that explanation since any CIO claiming cost savings come from the few tens of GB of archived Office Communicator chats should be politely invited behind the barn for a dramatic reenactment of an age old saying.

Scandals like Boeing's and others that shook trust in public institutions, most of which are required by law to make any such material available to citizens, just convinced them that proactive destruction of evidence is the way to go. This is not punishable by law. And when the requests for data do come in all the have to do is delay the process until the totally legitimate automatic policy kicks in and removes the last shred of evidence.

At this point only whistle blowers diligently collecting all the data before it's destroyed could still help in any way but this comes at great personal risk. And when tools like Signal are involved good luck with that, one would have to be part of every conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some points to consider:

\- From the article: "Starting in late 2004, before the FOIA came into force in early 2005, Downing Street implemented an automatic 90-day deletion of emails aside from those specifically selected by civil servants as relevant for storage in the National Archives"

\- Since the invention of the telephone, it's never been an expectation that transcripts of telephone calls between MPs or officials should be recorded and made available under FOI.

\- Indeed, it's never been an expectation that private face-to-face conversations between MPs/officials be recorded and made available under FOI.

\- At least according to FOI laws I'm vaguely familiar with (in Australia), an FOI request can only be made for an item of information that is known to exist. People can't go on "fishing expeditions" for, say, all communications between nominated people over a nominated period of time. Thus, if UK FOI is similarly constrained, it's usually going to be unlikely a private messaging app conversation could be sought under FOI anyway.

All that considered, I don't think this is that big a deal.

<comment><USER9> > At least according to FOI laws I'm vaguely familiar with (in Australia), an > FOI request can only be made for an item of information that is known to > exist. People can't go on "fishing expeditions" for, say, all communications > between nominated people over a nominated period of time.

Interestingly I don't think this is 100% true - under (for example) the federal FOI Act I think a request framed as asking for "email sent on government systems between Alice and Bob in the last six months" would be facially valid, if Alice and Bob were civil servants (although of course exemptions may apply to individual emails).

Here's an (Australian) FOI request that is similar in spirit to your example:

[https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/philip_gaetjens_the_l...](https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/philip_gaetjens_the_liberal_part)

which asks for "any emails contained in all of Philip Gaetjens' outlook items (including deleted items) that contain any of the following terms (in the body of an email and/or in the addressee fields of an email): "liberal.org.au" or "ipa.org.au"", and the department deemed that a valid request. (Philip Gaetjens is a senior civil servant, the Liberals are a political party and the IPA is a right-leaning think tank; it's reasonable to infer that the fishing here is for evidence of a link between the civil service and a particular side of politics.)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for expanding on that (I avoided digging into it for brevity and as I was time-constrained).

That aligns with my understanding, that there must be an explicit piece of information you're looking for or occurrence you're looking for evidence of, rather than just seeking to dragnet-fish all correspondence to see what's there.

Anyway, it makes sense to me that messenger app conversations are considered ephemeral like phonecalls and can just naturally disappear, whereas more formal material like meeting minutes, official written correspondence, contracts and public service documents are kept on record and made subject to FOI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a buddy a couple years ago who was a low level FOIA officer in the U.S. military. He was telling me that shortly after the Clinton email scandal there was a policy pushed on all his branch's computers that forced encryption to be turned on for all users.

What that resulted in was basically a complete shutdown of email discovery for fulfilling FOIA requests. You go into Outlook, do a search, and if it's not in the subject line of the email then it's simply not found.

He told the story as if it was a conspiracy against FOIA, but based on my experience of dealing with bureaucracies, it was more likely just coincidence.

Never attribute to malice what could be explained with incompetence.

<comment><USER11> Incompetence is what leads to doing nothing and scandals continuing to happen because people have access to information that exposes hypocrisy and wrongdoing that offends them. As this was a reaction to a scandal I'm going to say your buddy was on track, it was done intentionally in order to frustrate future discovery. (Not solely a conspiracy against FOIA particularly but that is one method used to reveal information)

<comment><USER10> It was done near a scandal, but not necessarily in reaction to one. Correlation is not causation.

<comment><USER12> Does anything, anything happen in politics that isn't in reaction to a causation?

<comment><USER10> Newton's third law confirms that yes, everything in politics occurs in reaction to some other causation.

However correlating two items together based on timestamp alone is not enough to validate causation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those unfamiliar, Private Eve is an excellent magazine with a long history. It takes a humourous but serious investgative look at UK politics, business etc looking at eg corruption and double standards. With cartoons and iconic front page puns.

And for the large part it avoided the pitfalls of moving online. Current issue: [https://www.private-eye.co.uk/current-issue](https://www.private- eye.co.uk/current-issue)

<comment><USER14> So good in fact that the managing editor is usually the most sued person in the UK.

Ian Hislop is a national treasure and his evidence to the select committee on press intrusion was both erudite and hilarious.

<comment><USER15> His TV panel show, "Have I Got News For You" is also wonderful. Just comedians, discussing and making jokes about the news, for something like 25 years now. And most of it is on YouTube.

<comment><USER16> Angus Dayton used to host that show

He couldn't keep it in his pants, so was ridiculed by the guests (including Hislop)

That led to him resigning

Which led to Boris Johnson hosting a few episodes

A charismatic buffoon, that catapulted him to wider attention

He was then selected for London mayor

During the 2012 Olympics he was pushed further into the world's eye

That led to him being a key role one way or another in brexit. He flipped a coin and backed Leave.

That backing tipped the scales and road to leave

That eventually led to him becoming PM, after a lucky backstabbing by Gove in 2017, meaning he managed to get a large majority in 2019

It's an interesting example of the butterfly effect.

<comment><USER17> I think it was Dayton's drug use that caused the initial situation.

<comment><USER16> Possibly, such a long time ago.

The tactics that won brexit with vote leave were used later to elect trump.

It amuses me to think how the world can change from tiny changes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tangentially, the UK government digital service (and made available to the wider civil service) uses the free tier version of Slack which retains but disallows access to historic messages.

FOI in this case (in lieu of anybody coughing up the licences) relies on regular manual exports and their secure archiving.

This isn't afaik an attempt to avoid accountability (in fact it's the opposite), just a good faith use of free software to enable cross department communication in the absence of a service from a high level mandated corporate partner.

[https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450423927/ICO- highlights...](https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450423927/ICO-highlights- challenge-cloud-based-comms-tools-pose-to-public-sector-FOI-request- compliance)

<comment><USER19> > Slack [...] just a good faith use of free software [...]

Since when is Slack free software?

<comment><USER20> It sounds like you are conflating free software and Free software.

<comment><USER19> I don't think capitalization matters:

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

In addition to not being free, Slack is also not software. It's a service.

Sure, there's some software involved in making that service tick (mostly proprietary), as well as some limited gratis access ("free tier") being offered, but that doesn't magically transform that service into "free software".

<comment><USER18> Which I clearly referred to with "free tier version of Slack". What's the complaint here?

Update: you've edited the parent since I responded to it. Your original comment was something like "it's not free, part of it is free"

Still no idea what you're moaning about tho...

<comment><USER19> > "it's not free, part of it is free"

That's news to me. Which part of Slack do you consider to be free software? Is that the part you think GDS is using?

<comment><USER18> See my original comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those not following the topic, among others, the UK, EU, US - <USER2> officially endorsed the use of Signal for official government use.

<comment><USER22> Do you have a link for that? I often get ask questions about secure messaging, and I always have a hard time giving anything better than "it depends".

<comment><USER21> ——————————

UK example reference: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/20/uk_conservatives_br...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/20/uk_conservatives_brexit_from_whatsapp_to_signal/)

——————————

EU example reference: [https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150918/european- commiss...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150918/european-commission- signal-encrypted-messaging)

——————————

US example drafted by NSA: [https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/24/2002288652/-1/-1/0/CSI...](https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/24/2002288652/-1/-1/0/CSI- SELECTING-AND-USING-COLLABORATION-SERVICES-SECURELY-LONG-FINAL.PDF)

* Note this document is for public release. If you dig around you will find references to deploy US Special Forces even using Signal for official communications within combat zones.

——————————

<comment><USER23> >US Special Forces even using Signal for official communications within combat zones //

Do they have some other systems for using Signal on, they can't use it on regular mobile phones without being tracked by base-stations, surely?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> While voting to ban normal people from using any form of encryption in any form...

</comment><comment><USER25> It's "funny" how the U.K. government endorse signal for covering their tracks but want backdoors put in because other people can't be trusted.

Furthermore, it should be illegal for governments to use self-destructing messages.

<comment><USER26> Government secrecy should be absolutely restricted by the general public - <USER3> is the beginning of all corruption of government. The UK headed down the wrong path towards totalitarian class-ist society when it decided the common people shouldn't know their own governments' secrets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > if the records have already been deleted, or indeed are automatically > deleted after the request is made, no crime is committed

This isn't true under US law. No matter where you conduct your work, if you destroy a record without capturing it as required by your records schedule, you have violated the law, whether there is a FOIA request or not. It is your responsibility to migrate record material to an appropriate location.

If you conduct official business on any of these platforms with auto-destruct that seems suspect to me and cause for some sort of censure, just like a stock trading floor doing this would be in breach of regulation.

</comment><comment><USER28> Oddly, all the internal party shenanigans seem to be done over Whatsapp still - but the main threat there is leaking from the recipients.

And this particular government seems particularly untrustworthy at a particularly difficult time.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't help but laugh a sad laugh. I oppose government monitoring and support transparency. And I support Signal to avoid monitoring and now it's used to remove transparency.

I can't get my friends to install Signal because they say they have nothing to hide from their government and now the same government is using Signal to hide from my friends.

Moxie should add it to the advertising blurb:" We're so secure the British government use Signal to hide from its citizens."

<comment><USER30> Re: trying to get friends to install Signal Been there, but <rant>it got even harder as Signal makes it mandatory to set a PIN now which cannot be skipped, all because of future 'cloud backup' feature. It kinda stinks to me, as Signal bragged about not keeping almost any metadata, and now they want to keep backups. Whats worse, it seems there is no opt-out.<rant/>

Makes it hard to recommend Signal now.

As a Signal user, what do you think about Signal's recent development?

<comment><USER29> I've not followed them too much but trust Moxie since his previous decision were good.

I think Signal is trying to gain more mainstream adoption and it will need backups for that. The pin is annoying but if it gives the app secure backups then I guess it's a good idea. Although I agree having an opt-out would be good (but I expect most people want backups)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Please change the title here, the article posits that MPs _may_ be using disappearing messages, but does not make any claims they are doing so.

</comment><comment><USER32> How different is this from previous use of phone calls? I guess they can have many participants and stretch over much longer periods of time.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think they ought to legislate this into normality. The alternative is to make it mandatory to note all conversations with colleagues for the public record, however trivial, which is obviously absurd. An IM conversation _is_ a personal conversation, treating it any other way will stifle the effective function of government.

<comment><USER34> It's not a personal conversation if you're working for the government and talking about topics that pertain to government functions. You have no right to privacy in the same way that your average citizen (should) be when your decisions affect the lives of millions. There needs to be a paper trail or power becomes even more opaque than it already is and all accountability goes out the window. There can be no democracy if your government can hide everything they do. The records don't necessarily need to always be public, but they do need to be stored so FOI requests can be served when necessary.

<comment><USER35> We don't only want accountability, we also want good decisions, and good advice, even on delicate topics. IMO this is quite a difficult topic.

Suppose you are concerned that some variants of a policy you're thinking about may be legal or illegal. There is a pretty large gray area. You could corner the relevant legal mind after lunch, and ask his opinion. Then there is no recording, only your memory.

Or you could email him, and get a more considered opinion. This is likely to lead to better policies. But perhaps some of the options you're considering are a bit controversial, and stating bluntly what you really mean (and what you are concerned about) is risky if your email may be subject to a FOI request. So perhaps you re-write it very carefully avoiding the worst options, or perhaps you run it past the PR people before emailing, or perhaps you give up and ask in the pub instead. These all seem like worse outcomes, and ones we should be careful not to encourage.

<comment><USER34> I'm sorry, but if you require the deletion of what you said to protect yourself from the people, then you shouldn't be in a position of power.

> and stating bluntly what you really mean (and what you are concerned about)

In the end, people aren't judged for this. They're judged for the actions that they take, and then communications like this are used for context. If your decision is so bad that they had to make a FOI request to find out how spurious your reasoning was, then I don't see why you should have the protection of having no paper trail. That's insanity.

<comment><USER36> _I 'm sorry, but if you require the deletion of what you said to protect yourself from the people, then you shouldn't be in a position of power._

In reality if a politician makes a genuine error or prediction that turns out to be wrong he will face demands that he resigns for deliberately misleading the public. The media have created this toxic environment where normal debate and discourse is impossible

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Isn't this better than them using whatsapp and having everything they write read by a foreign government?

At least someone has some technical knowledge. Was a bit worried about them after their zoom screenshot debacle.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's okay, the leopards would never eat _my_ face

</comment><comment><USER39> Forcefully deleting stuff from my device is super annoying and I'll fight that to the bitter end.

<comment><USER40> Yes, software that forcefully deletes received messages from recipient device is software acting against intent and will of its user (recipient). We have one word for such software - malware.</comment></comment>


KFR: High-Performance C++ Framework for Audio and DSP (x86, ARM) - <AUTHOR> https://www.github.com/kfrlib/kfr/tree/master <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what the actual licensing is because the license in the repository is GPL, but the README and the project licensing page state that GPL cannot be used for commercial projects [in addition to closed source]. I am not a lawyer but that seems at odds with the contents of the GPL license in the repository.

Even further clouding the license is the GPL license in the repository has been modified with a '+' at the end, which seems like an opportunity for further confusion of the kind that lawyers bill by the hour for sorting out...i.e. adding the extra character to the GPL license might be a violation of the licensing restriction to verbatim copies.</comment>


Servers for Hackers – What programmers need to know about servers - <AUTHOR> https://serversforhackers.com/series

<comment><AUTHOR> This used to be a subscription-based site but now has all the content available for free.</comment>


On failing: Crowdfunding an iPhone app - <AUTHOR> http://stopmebeforeiblogagain.com/on-failing-crowd-funding-an-iphone-app/

<comment><USER2> _Talking to people, the single most frequent first response is "I don't get it". Then we take the time to explain it and then they are like "Oh, I see. That's cool"._

You said you failed to connect with people on an emotional level, but I would contend that you failed to solve a problem perceived by the customer.

Only when you solve a customer's problem will you get that emotional connection. It's not something you need to work at, it's something you either succeed at doing, or fail. I would say that your application just didn't solve anything someone was looking for.

Your questions led you down the wrong path. Your very first questions should have been:

1) What is the pain point that X have? 2) How can I solve that with an iPhone app?

Where X is anybody you thought you were solving a problem for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the constructive feedback. We think we do have somewhat of a grip and significant feedback on what the pain point is that we were trying to solve: Shooting and sharing good videos with your mobile phone is hard and a lot of hassle and OneSec aimed to change all that. I do think we failed spectacularly to communicate that, though.

<comment><USER2> I see, but the real question is this:

"Do people wake up in the morning and say to themselves, 'Holy crap, how am I going to save and share videos today?'"

I don't think they do, which is why this particular idea and implementation aren't going to gain any traction over what exists today. It's just not a strong enough pain point to be solved by an iPhone app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's where we probably have to agree to disagree. I don't think the users of Instagram woke up and said "Holy crap, how am I going to save and share images today" either. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like assumption 3: How efficient is spamming, mailing, tweeting, posting and otherwise contacting friends, fools, families, bloggers and journos?

Result: Abysmal.

If you stay in stealth mode for long periods of time prior to launch, the "amount of righteousness" in your vision/future-product and the conviction with which you believe this, will not help you overcome the impedance barrier of becoming part of the Internet zeitgeist.

Sometimes, you do not appreciate how deep the water is (nor how fast it flows) until you step into it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that we would have fared better if we had waited for some more traction (amount raised and already published in some places) before ramping up the spamming effort. But hindsight has perfect vision and the truth is we'll never know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for publishing this, it's very instructive to see why people think things went wrong.

My only question is why you feel that the answer to the most important question - "Is there any interest in this product in the market?" - is "Yes"? You've identified that they way you went about promoting and raising money could be improved, but assessing the biggest problem as one of promotion is not obvious.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason why I believe there's an interest in this product is 1. The amount of people who has contacted us because they want this product even after the campaign ended 2. The amount of private investors and potential partners that have contacted us after the campaign closed. If people want to pay for the creation of an iPhone app in a time were we're used to get them for free or next to nothing is another separate issue.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the update. I hope that you didn't read that I was asserting that the interest wasn't there, just that it wasn't clear from the post.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, not at all. No worries. :) I only wanted to be very clear about the reasons and sources of our assumption that there is indeed interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think half your problemwastgat you were selling something with a predictable market price of $0, and asking people to pay early. They woukd only pay if there's some huge, non- app based benefit for them, otherwise you'd wind up with tragedy of the commons (especially because normal people dont realize that apps take more than 2 weeks to make, and they see them as disposable).

<comment><AUTHOR> Great insights! I think that's a very real problem. Do you think it is impossible to crowd fund a social / utility based app for the iPhone in general, or do you see a way to heighten the probability of a success?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is it at all possible to crowd fund iPhone apps (that are not games)? I'd love to know more about your crowd funding experiences and your take on what we did wrong.</comment>