The Polygons of Another World: Atari ST - <AUTHOR> https://www.fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_atariST/index.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion about the series: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21937607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21937607)

Previous discussion regarding the Amiga implementation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21942591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21942591)

</comment><comment><USER3> I read the post with a lot of nostalgia!

Back in the late-80s when I was a kid, I was fascinated by both the ST and Amiga. I bought several books about them and read everything I could find about their internals in computer magazines.

Unfortunately, my knowledge remained theoretical as they were too expensive for me. I had to invent tricks and find ways with the Z80 of my cheap home computer to simulate the marvels that could run on these 68000 power-horses!

It was a great, yet tedious exercise. I owe a lot to the nights spent trying to emulate some feature of the Amiga or the ST on my limited Z80 machine.</comment>


Ask HN: Which language localizations first? - <AUTHOR>

We started a successful site generating lots of organic traffic. We already localized to English, German, Spanish and Chinese. Which language should be the next in your opinion (regarding highest reach combined with strong Internet usage and purchasing power)? <comment><USER2> What does your data say? Check your web analytics, support tickets, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no stats regarding "purchasing power" but looking at List of languages by number of native speakers[1], the obvious candidates would be French, Portuguese and Arabic

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. good resource!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just curious, how did you go about doing localization: who did you hire, how long did it take, and how much did it cost?

<comment><USER5> How do you provide support for your audiences using localized versions?

How do you manage your business (sales, taxes, local laws compliance) on these markets?

<comment><AUTHOR> our site is mainly about content, so currently there's no support, sales, taxes and minor local law compliance

but we tried to integrate third parties only with extensive language support

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You could do what Amazon.com did and expand into countries based on their GDP.

</comment><comment><USER7> Japanese & Korean.</comment>


Amazon's Lumberyard (CryEngine fork) now available on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/it/blogs/gamedev/now-available-lumberyard-on-github/ <comment><AUTHOR> Direct link: [https://github.com/aws/Lumberyard](https://github.com/aws/Lumberyard)

"Lumberyard is still subject to the AWS Customer Agreement [1] and Lumberyard Service Terms [2], but to make it as easy as possible to use, it's in a public repo – you don't need to log in to get it."

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/](https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/service- terms/#57._Amazon_Lumberyard_...](https://aws.amazon.com/service- terms/#57._Amazon_Lumberyard_Engine)</comment>


ZStack – ZStack v1.3 release - <AUTHOR> http://zstack.org/cn/blog/v1.3.html <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN". Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


Sendible Attack May Have Uncovered A Big Facebook Security Flaw. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/sendible-facebook-hack/http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/sendible-facebook-hack/

<comment><USER2> Explanation in the comments is that a user posting to a page normally shows the post as being from that user, but when posted through Sendible which in turn uses Facebook API, the user's post shows as the page owner instead.

Sendible's saying in the comments that it's a Facebook Pages API bug.

(Also, comments are saying it's not a "malicious" link.)</comment>


Type System vs Test Driven Development - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-cafe/browse_thread/thread/b5429b13dc7ee34

<comment><USER2> _All_ code is a trivial recombination of working parts. It's all CPU opcodes in the end. Haskell's guarantees may extend a bit further but if your program isn't trivial it still needs testing, if only to verify that the program does what you think it does. I'm fiddling around with porting my HTML normalizer into Haskell, and even if the type system reliably lets me say "Hey, this has no type errors" and gives me some reasonably assurance based on the way it is written that it has no infinite loops (not a proof, but there's not very many places they could hide), I still need tests just to make sure it does what I think it does. A lot of them, actually.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's weird, because Haskell has great unit testing tools. I'm especially fond of QuickCheck, which allows me to define algebraic properties of functions:

xs == reverse (reverse xs)

QuickCheck will generate hundreds of random lists and make sure that the property holds. This can be enormously useful in smoking out odd problems in complex functional code.

For simpler testing scenarios, HUnit is OK, although it sometimes feels a bit clunky.

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the interesting recent developments in Haskell testing is the creation of automated proof tools for Haskell programs. Will Sonnex presented Zeno [1] at AngloHaskell 2010, and while it still has limitations in terms of the language features covered, it's a fascinating glimpse into where software testing might go.

[1] <http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ws506/tryzeno/>

</comment><comment><USER5> These posts about how a type system can guarantee correctness always make me a little envious of the poster. Not envy that their work isn't hard, but that it has a kind of straightforwardness, with problems so well-defined that a proper analysis guarantees you've solved it completely.

In my work, the types are usually so nailed-down there isn't any question about them. Yet the problems can be so nonlinear and ill-conditioned that even moderate testing-- say, hitting the code with 1000 test cases-- is just not enough to convince myself it's working correctly. It often happens that a unit test runs just fine at that level, but bumping it up to 10,000 or 100,000 cases reveals weaknesses in the code.

Illustrative example follows-- no need to read if you "get" that, in some fields, a type system simply doesn't detect the interesting bugs. A few months ago, I was testing methods for solving problems of sorption to room surfaces. In terms of types, it could hardly get more explicit. Take an object representing a sorption isotherm, plus two double-precision numbers giving gas- and sorbed-phase concentrations, and return the equilibrium concentration at the sorbent surface. The only way to specify the types more completely would be to tag all the numbers involved with units.

Guaranteeing convergence turned out to be a royal pain. To get a useful answer, you need to force convergence to very tight tolerances-- tight enough that, on ill-conditioned problems, you run the risk of asking for answers below the machine precision. That means you need two termination tests-- one on the defining equation (is the error close enough to zero?), and one on the returned result (is the current best answer within a tight enough bracket?). And within that framework, it's very easy to create algorithms that, due to finite-precision effects, fall into infinite loops because they fail to actually change a bracket point when they add a small number to it.

So again, types were not an issue. The only way I was sure I had all the convergence pitfalls out of the way was extensive unit testing. And the baby tests I ran during initial development-- sampling 1000 combinations out of a database of sorbents and chemicals-- simply didn't do it. Once I had "working" code, and stepped up sampling to the 100,000 range, it was easy to discover oddball combinations that would cause problems.

<comment><USER6> I think you're confusing the extent of what is possible in your current type systems with what is theoretically possible with types.

Why can't a type system keep track of units? Why can't it be aware of precision? If it's possible for you to find a proof that a particular implementation of your algorithm won't fall into an infinite loop, then there is a type system that can verify that your algorithm will terminate. Of course, actually designing a sound type system with this property could be quite tricky, and I have no idea what the resulting language would look like -- but it would be possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll never understand how people can equate type correctness with value correctness, regardless of the language.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel like this guy must not have to parse binary very often.</comment>


Black Americans dying of Covid-19 at three times the rate of white people - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/black-americans-death-rate-covid-19-coronavirus <comment><USER2> The insanity of America in 2020 is that someone needs to point out how insane this article is. There is no hint that blacks are being given inferior treatment relative to whites, but the implication is that this is the result of some systemic racism.

Now it may be that part of the delta is due to the fact that so many of the brave doctors and nurses working in the COVID-19 wards are black. For that sacrifice I salute them -- along with their white, Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern colleagues.

Are any of you familiar with the Jewish people? They have suffered significant racism in the past few centuries. But if it were revealed by the statistics that American Jews were dying at higher than normal rates from COVID-19, the media would treat it as a medical conundrum, not as an instance of racism!

Identity politics is an endless source of societal poison. It would be wonderful if we could lay it to rest in 2020. My prayers are for safety and protection and thriving for black Americans and all the rest of my fellow Americans.</comment>


React hook router updated to version 1.2.1 - <AUTHOR> https://parastudios.de/updates-about-react-hook-router/ <comment><AUTHOR> Its one month since the initial release and lots of things happened.

\- Intercepting navigation intents for security and/or animation

\- Utilizing query parameters

\- Serverside Rendering (SSR)

\- Setting the window title, fetching the current path, performance improvements and more

As usual, all purely utilizing hooks. No JSX has been harmed during the development :)</comment>


Kusköy, Turkey – The Whistling Village (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0aoguO_tvI

<comment><AUTHOR> It's fascinating that an entire language could be constructed with something as seemingly simple as the whistle.

More to read here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language)</comment>


LinkedIn major bug - <AUTHOR> http://glennreid.blogspot.com/2013/06/major-linkedin-bug.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I got an anonymous comment on my blog that "You're connected to Reid Hoffman, so you're just editing your personal address book info for him, not his global contact info... This is part of their new "LinkedIn Contacts" / enhanced address book product..."

Wow. If that's true, it is very confusing, and may classify as a "major bug" in user experience design :) But it's good that I can't change other people's contact info.

I would argue that the entire purpose of an address book like LinkedIn is building is having contact info be maintained by the owner, not by me! That defeats the purpose of it completely. What are the rules of things the owner can edit, and what things I can edit, and what overrides what? Seems like a terrible mis-feature.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is this part of the 'add your own contact information for this person' functionality? I'm not seeing anything but that.

It is a rather strange feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you visit Reid Hoffman's page, do you see the "web page" link that I put there? If so, it's a bug at least for some of us :) I'm wondering if it's just Premium users. www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems to already be fixed.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not fixed for me. Two possible caveats: it seems only active for people who are my contacts, and I am a Premium member, which might give me superpowers that not everyone has. But it's definitely still active.

<comment><USER4> I'm a regular user. I chose to edit contact information for one of my contacts and it looks like it would let me. I didn't click the save button so I'm not sure but there was no indication that it wouldn't have let me update someone else's information. Pretty bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Paul Singer is doing Twitter a favour and Jack Dorsey must be shown the door - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/paul-singer-is-doing-twitter-a-favour-and-jack-dorsey-must-be-shown-the-door-vlhfj8j5k <comment><USER2> Need to show them Tim Dorsey. Let Serge A. Storms sort em out!</comment>


Show HN: Off-premises insight for on-premises Prometheus servers - <AUTHOR> https://latency.at/ <comment><USER2> It is interesting to see this because (AFAIK, etc.) the only option for Prometheus has been on-premises. I had hoped to batch analytics and import into Prometheus out of production (aka off-premises), but my very preliminary investigation appeared to show that it requires "live" data, since it assigns the timestamp when events are ingested.

I'm still confused whether or not bulk import will ever be a supported scenario.

[https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/398](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/398) Improve staleness handling (2014-2017)

[https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway/pull/119](https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway/pull/119) Reject pushes with timestamps (2017)

<comment><USER3> Bulk imports are planned: [https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/535](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/535)

Note that bulk really means bulk. This is for one-off loads, not doing push.

<comment><USER4> Any thoughts on a timeframe? This is the only thing holding me back from using Prometheus in any sort of serious way.

<comment><USER3> There's no hard timeline as we're an open source project, but hopefully in the next 6-12 months.

If this is holding you back from seriously Prometheus, then Prometheus is possibly not the right tool for you. Prometheus is about the here and now.

<comment><USER4> Despite your consistently dismissive attitude, it IS the right tool for me, the teams I work on/with, and side projects.

If that's not what prometheus is for, you should seriously consider adding a more-explicit mention of it in the documentation. Going through the docs, I'm finding nothing plainly obvious mentioning that about prometheus. At least put it in the FAQ, ffs.

What needs to be code-wise to get it going sooner?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Plug: I have an open source project that does something similar:

[https://github.com/chrissnell/crabby](https://github.com/chrissnell/crabby)

It allows you to run offsite HTTP[S] and page load tests and send the metrics back to a central collection system. It supports Prometheus (albeit through a pushgateway) among other metrics engines.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was just brainstorming this type of use-case for Tectonic[1], which includes Prometheus as a cloud service that runs on-prem and on cloud providers. Remote monitoring is just as important as app metrics.

Very cool project!

[1] [https://coreos.com/tectonic/](https://coreos.com/tectonic/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I just realize there is an open issue on Prometheus which, would it get implemented, would allow for very nice integration of the blackbox exporter as well as this service into kubernetes and tectonic: [https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/3071](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/3071)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> so basically blackboxexporter as a service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, basically geographically distributed blackbox exporters as a service.

I've added the necessary account functionality and also extended the http probe to split response times by 'phase' (dns resolution, tls handshake etc).

The later part will be upstreamed soon though. Already discussed the required changes with the blackbox-exporter maintainer.</comment></comment>


The Diversity–Innovation Paradox in Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/10/1915378117 <comment><USER2> I recall as a student I took some modules in History of Science with some amazing professors. We looked at a famous paper on the social size limitations of primate groups Vs brain size, if I recall correctly. Dunbar's number I think it was called.

The conclusion we came to as a group was that in the paper were a lot of things that looked like science, but in reality there wasn't really.

"Detecting innovation" and "identifying novelty" by text analysis couldn't be more of a pseudoscience.

Given it seems the definition of innovation is beyond spurious here (presence of keyword pairs?) I look forward to this paper being cited for decades and used to predicate public policy.</comment>


Article on Depression in IIT Madras Campus Magazine Censored by Faculty - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/10/23/iit-madras-article-depres_n_8365242.html <comment><USER2> link to the T5E article [http://www.t5eiitm.org/2015/10/it-is-always-darkest- before-d...](http://www.t5eiitm.org/2015/10/it-is-always-darkest-before-dawn/)</comment>


X2Go and Xpra – Replacements for NX and FreeNX - <AUTHOR> https://srobb.net/nxreplace.html <comment><USER2> x2go is excellent, but it won't work for any 3D-accelerated WM. So, while Xfce and MATE work brilliantly, GNOME3 and KDE5 don't work at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> ... but... but... but... X2Go uses NX. And Xpra is super slow.</comment>


How the US stopped its fisheries from collapsing - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/5/8/5669120/how-the-us-stopped-its-fisheries-from-collapsing

<comment><USER2> I'm still disappointed however that there is not greater public awareness about the problems of over-fishing. Infact, I'd go as far as to say there is zero public awareness about where fish actual come from. It sounds silly I know, but fish is consistently touted as a healthy food and how we should eat more and more fish because it's good for you. Correct, it may be good for us, but it's simply not sustainable to eat more and more. I'm always surprised when I ask my friends where they think the fish they're eating came from and they're nearly all unaware that there even was huge problem with fish stocks. I mean come one, Pacific Bluefin tuna has declined by 96%!!! and it's a similar story for North Sea Cod.

There should be a greater focus on 'sustainable managed fisheries' vs open sea fishing, in the same way as people are aware of the difference between factory farming and free range.

also, it wouldn't hurt if everyone ate a little less fish (and meat for that matter)

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure Billy Joel fans are well aware of the problem of overfishing, at least in the New England region.

<comment><USER4> Billy Joel - "Downeaster Alexa"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVlDSzbrH5M&feature=kp](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVlDSzbrH5M&feature=kp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not surprised. I work with a variety of NGO's that work in the fisheries and they're first rate scientists who are incredibly passionate about conservation. They understand the pushback from people fishermen, but take a long view of fisheries management-if we let you fish as much as you want now, with modern equipment, you'll have a few seasons of incredibly high yields which means your catch will be worth nothing, then the fisheries will collapse and you'll be broke and pissed that no one told you it was a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great to see that conservation efforts are not all doom and gloom, the thing that surprised me the most is that the US seemed to really be ahead of the curve on this one.

I wonder how Asia'll deal with this. I always hear about some salmon varieties being way too overeaten/overfished in Japan, and I have a hard time seeing how the government will convince local fishermen to cool their jets.

<comment><USER7> Something similar has been playing out in ICCAT [1], where the U.S. has been pushing for lower tuna quotas recommended by the NOAA as the sustainable yield, but Japan has kept them from going through.

[1] International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, but widely referred to derisively as the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let me get this straight, government regulations corrected a disaster caused by unabated industry? I hope libertarians don't see this.

<comment><USER9> Good idea. Don't tell the libertarians. Otherwise they'll explain why you're an idiot.

<comment><USER8> Feel free to explain why I'm an idiot. I would love for you to prove that you're capable of thought beyond one line insults.

<comment><USER9> Repeat after me:

Libertarians are not anarchists. Libertarians are not anarchists. Libertarians are not anarchists.

<comment><USER8> that was your big follow up? Wow, you got me.

<comment><USER9> Well, everything you know about libertarians is wrong, so I had to start with the basics. Let me know when that sinks in and I'll give you another dose.

<comment><USER8> your insights are truly amazing. How do I subscribe to your newsletter?

<comment><USER9> Oh, I'm sorry. No newsletter for you. You failed the IQ test.

<comment><USER8> man your one liners are sweet</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Things We Still Don't Know About Water - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/five-things-we-still-dont-know-about-water <comment><USER2> Repost: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9700471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9700471)

Question: Why do some articles get (2014) etc, but articles from months before don't get a designator?

<comment><USER3> It's just a convention. Monthly resolution seems too high, and putting the current year on everything too noisy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >"Both experiment and calculation seem to indicate that water confined by solid walls to tiny regions of space, whose size is comparable to that of a few hundred molecules, begins to exhibit quantum mechanical effects, including delocalization and quantum coherence."

Sounds like a possible source of random entropy for crypto :-) I did the Wolfram Alpha query[1] and it turns out that 100 molecules of water has a volume of 2.992 yL (yoctoliters, 10^-24 L). I didn't think we were up to yocto-technology yet! The paper that seems to describe this is called "Evidence of a new quantum state of nano-confined water"[2] so I have a feeling that "a few hundred molecules" may be a few orders of magnitude out.

From the paper:

"We find that in water confined on scales of 20˚A, this wave function responds to the details of the confinement, corresponds to a strongly anharmonic local potential, shows evidence in some cases of coherent delocalization in double wells, and involves changes in zero point kinetic energy of the protons from -40 to +120 meV difference from that of bulk water at room temperature. This behavior appears to be a generic feature of nanoscale confinement."

It's a really interesting paper. (although I had to do a lot of Wikipedia searches on certain terminology!)

[1]: [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+100+molecules...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+100+molecules+of+water)

[2]: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4994](http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4994)

<comment><USER5> I don't think yoctoliters necessarily rule out nanoscale, as the Wolfram page helpfully points out: Edge length of a cube of that volume is 1.4 _nm_

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating. I learn something new every time I read a Nautilus piece.

<comment><USER5> Subscribe then! Nautilus Prime is worth it by itself (you get beautiful ebook and pdf editions of the magazine). Plus you get the printed magazine by mail. I'm pretty sure it will be interesting reading even 10 years from now.

And you support quality journalism.

<comment><USER7> I was on Nautilus Prime (or the ancestor to that?) and they hadn't renewed my subscription. Kind of annoying, really.

Noticed it was on sale, so I just picked up a two-year subscription. Suggest others do the same. Well worth it.

As an aside, I would also be willing to pay a _lot_ more for the quarterly, like 100-to-200% increase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the comments in TFA have been Time Cubed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Richard Feynman said in his interviews that we don't know why water expands when it freezes. On a physics level, it's still a mystery?

</comment><comment><USER10> and also according to homeopathy, water has memory and magic healing powers [http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/](http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/)

<comment><USER11> Have you read the article at all? It does not assert any pseudo scientific novelties ...</comment></comment>


Introducing Square Feedback - <AUTHOR> http://blog.squareup.com/posts/introducing-square-feedback/

<comment><USER2> One way to look at this is that Square is responding to the pain points of small business owners (who generally dislike Yelp) even for things not directly payments related.

But another, more cynical, way to view this is that Square has hired a lot of great talent, raised a bunch of cash, and outside of the payments business which is growing and humming, there isn't enough to do there, or they aren't growing fast enough, so they are just doing a bunch of experiments. It's rare that we get to watch a company just iterate through a bunch of different products so publicly / quickly.

I'm not saying it's bad, but it certainly seems to lack some sort of cohesion or focus; unless that cohesion is "help all small businesses."

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is a better link: [https://squareup.com/feedback](https://squareup.com/feedback).

I believe this is good for small businesses because it a.) let's you have another direct communication channel with your customers besides the extortionists that are Yelp, etc. and b.) it let's you know that this customer has bought x amount of goods, I should listen to their input. A lot of times small businesses can't associate the dollar amount someone brings in with their customer service and this gives a very clear dashboard of just that. It really puts customer service first in a way but I would imagine the ones paying for such a service already do care about their customers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Often times feedback is best left anonymously which allows the honest truth to come out. We run a home services company and have experienced this sentiment. Our customers won't likely leave a review for our contractors unless it couldn't be traced back to them. It's a bit different from Square but nonetheless, it's something that should have some sort of effect on Square's end.

<comment><USER5> Square isn't soliciting reviews for the small business, but instead private feedback. Should the customer subsequently go out and write a review (anonymous or not), the thought process is that the review may be influenced (hopefully positively) by the customer service.

This is a proactive approach to customer reviews as opposed to a reactive one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did a write-up yesterday about why Square Wallet failed. I listed the receipt not living up to its full potential as one of the reasons. Their receipts should be a source of interaction between the merchant and customer. Good to see this announced today.

</comment><comment><USER7> Square certainly has put in the time to understand small business owners pains, and it shows with this new feature. I'm not quite sure how this "takes control" of your online reputation. Maybe you could catch a hate-spewer before they hop on yelp? In my experience people make snap judgements and often post their negative review while at the establishment on their smart phones (e.g. while waiting for their slow hostess or something).

<comment><USER8> Most of small business lacks of any feedback communicate channel other than public one. Private channel might help.

Also associating client with receipt is a huge win. Business may offer some compensation, like discount coupon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I launched Krit, [http://krit.com/](http://krit.com/), in 2011, but struggled to gain traction in South Africa. I'm not sure how to feel about Square Feedback.

</comment><comment><USER10> Glad to see Square taking a proactive approach to customer service.</comment>


Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE - <AUTHOR> http://playnice.ly/blog/2010/10/19/techstartup-focused-product-dont-support-ie/

<comment><USER2> 'Tech' is just too broad. If you're developing for KDE, then ignoring IE is very safe. If you're developing an addon for Visual Studio, then I'd probably not ignore IE.

For a generic 'tech' answer, I'd make sure the basic functionality works on IE, if ugly, and concentrate on Firefox and Chrome. (And if you do, Opera and Safari usually work without changes.)

<comment><USER3> If you're making the decision to unsupported IE completely (or just IE6, etc), it's wise to offer the Chrome Frame plugin to any IE users that come along: [http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame- gett...](http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-getting- started#TOC-Detecting-Google-Chrome-Frame-and-P)

Within the last two weeks code was checked in to allow non-admin level installs, so when that debuts everyone that gets prompted can actually install it.

<comment><USER4> And for users who choose not to install it, do they get a modal prompt for every page load?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can tell you this is also true for historious, Chrome is at 46%, Firefox 27%, Safari 20% and IE 3%. Opera is 1.8%, but that's probably all me :(

We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users. Hell, until very recently, our bookmarklet didn't work with IE (some XSS security settings? We never figured it out), but now it eschews the nice overlay it uses for other browsers and just bookmarks stuff. It's ugly, but it works, if our users want a better experience we recommend switching to a better browser.

<comment><USER6> > We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate > 2% of users.

I totally understand and agree with this sentiment. I do find it rather ironic, however, that developers today are using the same arguments for ignoring IE that were used for ignoring Firefox users 5+ years ago. Firefox users made a huge fuss about sites that were IE-only, and now many of those same users are returning the favor.

<comment><USER5> I can understand that, given that effort is finite. When Firefox users were enough to support, it made sense for apps to do so.

We're not trying to be mean, we'd love to support everyone, but when it comes to spending a day trying to find and fix an IE-only bug that affects 2% of your userbase (sure, it might be a bit higher if we didn't have the bug in the first place) or write a feature that will improve the service for 100% of the userbase, the latter takes priority...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Minecraft forum and wiki have 60m page views a month, 13% are Internet Explorer: <http://i.imgur.com/m1WVO.jpg>

I figured this might be interesting for some of you, although we're less technology...

<comment><USER8> My theory is that people browse Minecraft wiki / forum during work hours, in lieu of playing Minecraft, leading to a 13% share. Is there any way you could provide a browser by time of day graph that would support or refute my theory?

Sorry if I'm asking too much; it's really great when people post "private" statistics.

<comment><USER7> We use google analytics, if you know of a way for me to do that I'd be happy to, it does sound like an interesting idea!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We did this for our app, quplo, which is still in public beta as we figure out payment (like these guys describe). Our app involves some complicated javascript for a syntax highlighted, code completion-supporting HTML editor. Common sense indicated it wouldn't be a good idea to invest lots of time making things work in IE when a) Analytics showed less than 2% IE visitors, b) our target audience is web designers and developers who by and large don't use IE as their preferred browser, and c) the app is an enclosed environment where it's okay to say "use these browsers for the app".

So what to take away from this? If you're a startup, you should be prioritising, not obsessing. And high on the list is making money, not making a marginal number of users happy, handling politics, or premature optimisation (eg. writing code that works across all browsers).

One thing we messed up on: not creating a kick-ass UX on Mac from day 1. We fixed it in the meantime, but we're developers using Windows, and a significant portion of our userbase is designers on Macs. So Safari, Firefox, Chrome and especially things like Mac font rendering and UI controls needed to be lickety-split.

</comment><comment><USER10> I made the decision to go ahead and use tech IE doesn't yet support in my app. I'll see how it works out in the end but currently I have users all over the world and none of them complained about this. In fact to be able to use some of the features they have to install a webgl enable browser which hasn't been an issue for my users either.

My users are scientist and researchers, but not all of them are completely computer literate. I hand hold them a little bit with the setup.

<comment><USER11> The problem might be that a lot of users silently drop out if you don't support IE properly.

Part of my user base is also scientists and researchers, so I'm curious what your app or website is.

<comment><USER10> It's a 3D visualization app for a neuroimaging dataset(can't say much more, should be public soon). We wanted to make that dataset available online to a lot of users and provide a good interface to use it. I started building it with O3D which provided a plugin for IE and really good performance but now that Google moved O3d to WebGL I followed. I'd love to support IE but that's not possible with the current tech and WebGL has served us well so I we won't abandon it just for IE.

<comment><USER11> That sounds really interesting. For a niche app like that, I guess you would need to run with the best technology available. Hopefully, your users will see the value and not mind switching browsers.

<comment><USER10> I think that even with something for a general audience, sometimes to choose between spending time trying to support everyone or spend the time building something really good for most people. At least that how I see it.

Thanks for finding it interesting.I'd like to show this app around cause it's so much fun even with no knowledge of the science. A few things need to be resolved before the data set is completely open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It depends on your target market. My start-up, <http://www.MORExchange.com>, targets mortgage borrowers. Real estate agents are an important referral channel.

We're currently in an invite-only beta. But among our few hundred users, we're definitely seeing a skew towards Firefox / Webkit and away from IE. That said, the combined versions of IE are still 40% of our traffic. And I'm fairly convinced that IE share will grow as our product enters open registration.

That said, we decided to abandon IE 6 support during development. Metrics so far indicate that this was the right decision. We're only seeing 2% of our requests coming from that abomination.

We're also not doing anything special for IE 7 & 8\. They get the uglified version of the UI sans opacity, drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners, etc. I'm setting up analytics right now to see if browser version affects our conversion rate. I'm betting it doesn't.

Of course, we're not doing anything terribly unusual. We have no burning need for the canvas element, for example. So supporting IE 7 & 8 hasn't been terrible for us. I'd imagine that's a significant limitation for other start- ups.

We're also a traditionally funded company. So we have the luxury of being a bit more ambitious with our initial product. If we were bootstrapping and attempting to find customer fit, I'd probably just target the latest Firefox / Webkit.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think if you use a modern javascript framework (i.e jQuery), and test regularly, it shouldn't be that difficult / time costly anymore to support IE7 and IE8.

In my experience jQuery abstracts away most of the incompatibilities.

<comment><USER14> It's mostly style that's the problem. IE8 is better but you don't get any niceties (rounded corners, etc). IE9 looks like it will be marginally better (eg, you now get rounded corners, but not much else).

<comment><USER15> Why is it that people should expect home pages to be the same pixel-for-pixel between different browsers? As long as the functionality is there, why do a few rounded corners matter?

<comment><USER14> Well, it's not _only_ about style. IE9 adds rounded corners but still skips a _lot_ of modern features in HTML5 that simply can't be used reliably by _anyone_ due to IE not supporting them. IE is like a over-turned transport truck across 3 lanes of the highway to a better web. They cleaned up some of the spillage, but... well we're still not going anywhere :)

Styling is the most obvious issue, but it's just the surface of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The inverse is sadly still true. 49.61% of our visitors used IE in the last 30 days. 10M+ uniques, predominantly users in schools.

<comment><USER17> My customers also remain committed to the "blue Googles."

There are blue Googles and green Googles. The blue Googles and green Googles can't talk to each other. This is why you need to use only your school website number to sign into BCC when you're on the blue Googles but you should use your AOL website number to sign in when you're on the green Googles.

Technical support in non-technical markets often involves very interesting forensic reconstruction of customer mental models.

<comment><USER18> Could you elaborate? are these googles browsers, or something else? what cant they talk to each other? Thanks.

<comment><USER15> A guess (until Patric comes back): the blue Googles is the internet explorer icon, which is used to start Google (really go Googles website). The green Googles is what ever the hell people use to sign into AOL with, they can't talk to each other because the computers are behind different nats.

I am hoping that the "website number" is not the http adresse, but the number they have to dial to connect to the internet (yes dial like it was 1995 and you could still go on a plane with a bottle of water) because it would be disturbing if the teachers called "www.bingocardcreater.com" a "website number".

<comment><USER19> I would guess "website number" _does_ mean the web address. My 50 year old landlady gave me her "email number".

I'd also saw Patrick is talking about 2 different browsers on the same computer. "don't talk to each other" probably means they don't share cookies. If the user logs into one website with one browser, then the other browser doesn't become aware of each other. Clearly the 2 browsers don't talk to each other.

<comment><USER20> I think "website number" must be a username or password of some kind. You wouldn't use a different address to get to BCC depending on your ISP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 15% IE on friendbinder (half are IE8). The user base is fairly early adoptor. Pretty much everything works in IE except some of the rounded corners.

If your site doesn't work in IE, then you will show fewer IE users as a result.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm reminded of statistics showing X website doesn't support mobile because only Y% of their traffic comes from mobile. Guess what? If the site doesn't work on a given browser, you're biasing you sample size. I think it was in Coupland's Microserfs that there was the story of corporate waiting until all the soda was gone to restock the fridge -- how can you know what people actually want if you articifically restrict their choices.

Now, the premise seems plausible, but you can't back up that premise with data that I know a priori is skewed to support that premise.

</comment><comment><USER23> Some more anecdotal evidence, my company (not _mine_ ; <http://getglue.com>) actually originally launched solely as a Firefox extension (primarily distributed through Firefox AMO).

This actually played some role in my decision in taking the job- this was still in 2008, when ignoring IE was essentially almost never an option. Better, was that the extension views were developed in CSS- so I was free to explore CSS3 much earlier in live projects.

More timely, even as a website we still have very little focus on supporting IE users.

IE makes up for < 7% of our total visitors, and IE6 only 4% of _that_. More interestingly, a lot of our visitors now come through consumer markets like HBO and Fox. I think the numbers are surprisingly low for IE already; but considering our market is no longer a techie market (quite the opposite), the numbers are somewhat more interesting.

That all said, I think this speaks true to the title of the article. It's just a careful decision you need to make- but fortunately not one that is impossible to solve quickly, should you make the wrong one.

</comment><comment><USER24> At least add chrome frame. So IE users have a valid option to use your site.

</comment><comment><USER25> Here are some better places to get real stats on browser usage:

<http://marketshare.hitslink.com/>

<http://gs.statcounter.com/>

<http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/>

Your own browser stats are skewed at this moment, I wouldn't base any important decisions on them.

One interesting tidbit from Statcounter:

In Europe FF usage has caught up to IE, they are both around 40%.

In North America IE has double the usage of FF, with IE at ~50%.

<comment><USER5> What's a better place to get real stats on usage than your own analytics?

<comment><USER25> Do you think Chrome usage at 40% is not bogus?

I agree that your own stats are the best source, but not when you've only been public for less than a month and half your audience is coming from the likes of HN and Techcrunch.

<comment><USER23> As a blog directed towards programmers, I have to ask what your visitor browser breakdown is; I don't know why you'd think 40% is bogus for this type of audience.

<comment><USER25> If you mean my personal blog, Chrome is at ~15%, less than IE. It's only been up for 2 months though, so I wouldn't put much trust in my stats.

I think it's bogus because global Chrome usage is around 10%, according to the sources I linked to above. The fact that 40% of their visitors use Chrome now, does not mean that their potential future visitors will match that statistic.

Discounting a lot of future users that use IE based on one month's worth of analytics is madness.

<comment><USER23> It's not just a statistics problem, it's also a logic problem. I don't think it's in poor judgement to assume their audience, given their function and distribution channels, are largely Chrome and Firefox.

The key part of this post is that it is directed to startups. They're not suggesting they should dismiss IE users forever, but like many comments say it is about delegating resources properly where they matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's a ridiculous overgeneralization. You need metrics for your own site, you need to know the expectations of your users, you need to judge how much time and effort supporting IE will take for your app, etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> If the majority of people used IE, would that be a good reason to forget about supporting other browsers?

I'd say it wouldn't; I reckon content produced for the web should always allow people the freedom to choose how they view it.

Not supporting IE6 is something I could maybe understand - but forgetting about IE7 and IE8, because of time constraints, is a maybe bit lazy.

It's not that difficult to use principles of progressive enhancement and a CSS resets script to iron out inconsistencies.

</comment><comment><USER28> When launching a new version of our website earlier this year we ran the numbers for the previous six months and found that 10% of our sales were not only IE, but IE 6. We're a small manufacturer that sells direct to customers and that 10% more than covered the extra time developing and testing for IE6. There was nothing sexy about the task, but none of use were willing to walk away from 10% of our sales.

</comment><comment><USER29> If your product is futuristic and really needs stuff IE doesn't support (say, advanced HTML5 stuff) - OK. But if you're just doing it out of laziness then it's a bit silly. All the major CSS and JS frameworks pretty much eliminate the cost of supporting IE. These days the cost of supporting IE7/IE8 for me in a standard web site is fairly negligible. IE6 is another matter.

</comment><comment><USER30> It all depends on your market. You can't ignore IE if your customers are on locked down, corporate workstations with guerrilla IT departments dictating IE only. Know your market, then decide accordingly.

<comment><USER31> I agree, but the author says they build for 'tech' companies and they want the product out the door fast. In that case, I would care less about IE when the market is around 2%. IMO you can gracefully decrease your support for IE when the traffic is below 10%. The amount of work you do to make your sites work of IE does not justify for the 10%. Just my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I haven't found supporting IE7/8 to be difficult at all. I suppose I'm quite conservative about using the new functionality supported in webkit or firefox, however.

</comment><comment><USER33> I hate working on IE, everytime I have to work a lot on CSS for IE. I wasted a lot of time on it. Should be considered illegal.

</comment><comment><USER34> Once again, _the customer is always right_. Jusk ask them to telnet to port 80. Geez...

</comment><comment><USER35> The sample of visits is probably too small and misleading. Developers (e.g. you and guys on the team developing the product) tend to use FireFox and now, Chrome, whereas most users will use the stock browser they have by default - IE.

I am running a company in a similar sector (tech related util software), and IE visits are more than 60%. Not to mention, that most corporate users have as a rigid requirement and you are effectively killing a lot of revenue potential.

So no - my advice is do not do it, support IE.

<comment><USER36> I run some fairly popular tech focused sites, I have IE running at 15% on the most popular, down to 3% on the least popular.

At the very least the advice is to take your audience into account, and if you are in this particular sector not supporting ie is a doable tradeoff.

if anyone gives an absolute statement that you should support ie, or you shouldnt support ie, unless they understand both the exact demographics you are targeting, and the internal structure of your company as well as the technical details of your product, they are wrong.

<comment><USER35> This is correct, demographics/industry specifics should be taken into account. What I was trying to say is that we also had something similar (IE stats very low)when we developed our product/service - when you are in Beta, your team and the early adopters are typically more tech savvy and do not use IE.

However, once you launch, IE visitors become the majority - at least in my particular case (in a sector that seems similar to what the blog post says). Even if the purchasing decision makers are not using IE, in my particular case many of the licensed users will be just corporate/normal job types, and IE is the majority there.

Just my $0.02, your case may be different.</comment></comment></comment>


The Architecture of Open Source Applications - <AUTHOR> http://aosabook.org/en/index.html <comment><USER2> Take a look at the pricing page. The ePub and PDF versions are a fraction of the cost of the paperbacks. Finally someone with a clue! It's always annoyed me to no ends that Amazon only provides a small discount for their Kindle version compared to a paperback.

[http://aosabook.org/en/buy.html](http://aosabook.org/en/buy.html)

<comment><USER3> _It 's always annoyed me to no ends that Amazon only provides a small discount for their Kindle version compared to a paperback._

That's entirely up to the publisher. A lot of books that are self-published have a significant price difference, e.g. Kindle version at something under $5, paperback something over $10. I get the impression that at least some of the new publishing houses that are establishing themselves are following this model for the titles they will also offer in print.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a fantastic book. I recommend both the section on Google Chrome [1] and GHC [2]. Regardless of your level of interest in web browsers or compilers, they are both really educational and interesting reads.

[1] [http://aosabook.org/en/posa/high-performance-networking- in-c...](http://aosabook.org/en/posa/high-performance-networking-in- chrome.html) [2] [http://aosabook.org/en/ghc.html](http://aosabook.org/en/ghc.html)

<comment><USER5> Huh? I've read many articles from it before, but haven't seen Chrome before. Did they add that later on?

<comment><USER6> It's from a more recent addition to the series, focused on performance. I reviewed that chapter and it's very well written.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like a great resource to read about the architecture behind a lot of great applications and tools (nginx, scalable web architecture, nosql databases, git just to name a few). Definitely going to bookmark for later.

Related to that, I wonder if there are similar resources for learning about Blender's architecture (open source 3d modeler that has its own tiled UI system and integrates with an internal python interpreter) or the Linux kernel. I feel like those could be immensely useful for studying/understanding those large codebases for newcomers.

<comment><USER8> There are several documentation projects about the Linux kernel, of wildly varying quality. Honestly, though, I believe you'd be better served by the Stevens books and the Tanenbaum MINIX book, if you're not already familiar with kernels or the UNIX architecture, in general. The Stevens books are, bar none, the best books about UNIX programming and TCP/IP network programming, and as far as I can tell every serious Linux developer has a working knowledge of Stevens, and many have referenced Stevens when discussing implementation details. And, of course, Linux was originally developed as kind of a response to MINIX and shares many characteristics, and was designed as a teaching operating system (there are other teaching operating systems, but none are probably closer to Linux than older MINIX versions).

Here's some Linux kernel specific stuff:

[http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/tlk.html](http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/tlk.html)

[http://www.kroah.com/lkn/](http://www.kroah.com/lkn/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Programming-Talking- Direc...](http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Programming-Talking- Directly/dp/1449339530/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0C0WQPSNFZGST1372VTZ)

The first two have some age on them, but are still relatively reflective of the overall architecture of Linux, even if a lot of detail has changed. Anyway, these three are of reasonable quality. Some of the other stuff out there is pretty rough.

<comment><USER9> Where did you conclude from Linux was designed as a teaching operating system?

<comment><USER8> I was speaking of MINIX. I can see how my language wasn't clear, though. Linux was not designed as a teaching operating system. Though Linus did hint that he was using it to learn about operating systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's an old thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6404929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6404929)

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting work. The part on scalable web architecture is very nicely written and the advice there is very valuable. [http://aosabook.org/en/distsys.html](http://aosabook.org/en/distsys.html)

<comment><USER12> I went thru that section, and it's all concepts I learnt on the job in the last 4 years. It would have been good to have read this at the beginning of my career.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This series of books has been a great resource and I have been reading them for some time.

Thanks to the authors and editors for creating such an awesome resource. A must read for engineers who want to learn.

Some of my favorites have been [http://aosabook.org/en/nginx.html](http://aosabook.org/en/nginx.html) [http://aosabook.org/en/sqlalchemy.html](http://aosabook.org/en/sqlalchemy.html) [http://aosabook.org/en/distsys.html](http://aosabook.org/en/distsys.html) from the first volume.

[http://aosabook.org/en/graphite.html](http://aosabook.org/en/graphite.html) [http://aosabook.org/en/llvm.html](http://aosabook.org/en/llvm.html) [http://aosabook.org/en/asterisk.html](http://aosabook.org/en/asterisk.html) from the second volume.

The new volume on Performance is also very good with the [http://aosabook.org/en/posa/high-performance-networking- in-c...](http://aosabook.org/en/posa/high-performance-networking-in- chrome.html) and [http://aosabook.org/en/posa/secrets-of-mobile-network- perfor...](http://aosabook.org/en/posa/secrets-of-mobile-network- performance.html)

being my favorites.

</comment><comment><USER14> My favorites so far:

* [http://aosabook.org/en/sqlalchemy.html](http://aosabook.org/en/sqlalchemy.html)

* [http://aosabook.org/en/llvm.html](http://aosabook.org/en/llvm.html)

* [http://aosabook.org/en/asterisk.html](http://aosabook.org/en/asterisk.html)

I have no opinion on the performance book yet, however if you're interested the _architecture_ , look at those books one and two.</comment>


Florida Inmate Says Prison Sold Him $569 of Music, Then Took It Away - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/florida-inmate-says-prison-sold-him-569-of-music-then-took-it-away/ <comment><USER2> This type of operating procedure is absolutely unethical. This is the type of decision in which the decision maker in charge should be held responsible for.</comment>


FatELF project is stopping - <AUTHOR> http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it would have been interesting to see FatELF included. While I can understand that lines have to be drawn somewhere, it didn't sound like this was very thoroughly examined before being rejected. On the other hand, at least they had a chance to talk about it.

One thing he says at the end:

 _Open source is a lot more gratifying when you are working on your own project. Contributing to other projects? Not so much fun, it turns out._

It definitely sucks to have a bad experience. But it's probably like switching jobs, your experience depends on the co-workers and the management; some environments are just better than others. Hopefully he won't generalize too much and decide against contributing in the future.</comment>


Alicia Keys bans cell phones and concerts THIS IS CRAZY - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@richallen/alicia-keys-joins-group-of-musicians-banning-cell-phones-and-concerts-3d868fddcd73 <comment><USER2> I don't know if I buy the reasoning in this article, but I agree that locking cell phones in a pouch is crazy. I would never go to a concert that made me do that.

This solution is tantamount to movie studios and cable companies trying to sue everyone that pirates media. It won't scale and it's a backwards solution rooted in denial about the reality of a changed world. Now we see these same companies finally turning around and embracing streaming as a medium, adapting.

Artists don't need to find a way to lock people's phones in a bag, they need to find a way to adapt to a changed environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> _However it should surely be up to the fan, that has paid her $200 for a front row seat, to experience the show as well as capture the moment which in some cases may be a once in a life time experience._

Whilst greatly diluting the actual real-life experience of that moment not only for themselves, but for everyone else who paid $200 a pop for their front-row seats, also.

EDIT: "And not to mention, for the performer also."

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" The second is that if they listened to their managers and label they would know that by footage of their show being captured and uploaded to You Tube, Facebook or any other social networks it will take advantages of their virality and spread that moment way further than friends and family."_

How about the comedians that use live audiences to fine-tune their act? Is leaking all of the jokes to YouTube a promotion for the artist, or a complete gutting of the potential audience for future shows?

</comment><comment><USER4> Really not such a crazy notion...</comment>


Caster Semenya expected to be affected by IAAF rule changes – BBC Sport - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/43890575 <comment><AUTHOR> Basically she is a woman with the testosterone levels of a man, and the IAAF think she should race with men or take drugs to lower her testosterone.

which just seems to make sport further away from reality than it already is.

Look at the past 40 years of the Tour de France - around half the winners have been disqualified for drug use. Are we really expected to believe the other half naturally could keep up with the cheats or just have not been caught yet?

One of the UKs top runners pushed himself so far his body collapsed a few hundred yards from the finish. I thought they were just fitter than me, but they ignored their bodies danger signals more than me.

Sport (especially endurance) at the top level is diverging from healthy and even every day experience into ... something else.

Something is broken somewhere.</comment>


Woolly Mammoth Revival - <AUTHOR> http://longnow.org/revive/woolly-mammoth/

<comment><USER2> The ethics of biodiversity curation are woefully understudied.

You get a few simple tropes.

On the one hand, the Jurassic Park "don't ever mess with nature" trope, an extension of Frankenstein stories that fear all science as unnatural, dangerous, even evil.

The ecologist's "museum earth" view, that picks some moment in time and strives to preserve or restore all ecologies as an exact replica of that state (ignoring the red queen effect that probably makes this focus on "sustainability" itself unsustainable).

The "mad scientist" view treats the entire world as a petri dish, and risks ignoring that we're currently sitting in the lifeboat they're rocking.

I don't have a sophisticated answer. I feel like something should be said in defense of the mad scientist view, only because most people today would think that view the most obviously wrong. There's always a question as to whether or not to leave one's mark on this world through an act of creation. Maybe you're thinking of writing a novel or making a film or composing an opera. Any of these things could radically shape the future in unexpected ways. Shakespeare could have sat on his hands, and our language, our selection of idioms would be very different. In general, if you have an amazing vision, you should strive for it. Like the individual, perhaps humanity should dedicate itself to doing radical, strange, and wondrous things, tamper with everything, and through our acts petulantly scream our existence into the oblivion that surrounds us. Germinate distant planets. Create strange species. Set things in motion that will have far reaching consequences as a way to plant our stake for immortality.

That's just for fun, for argument's sake. The close of the video is more stirring. Roughly, "The kid in me would love to see us bring back these majestic creatures, to see them walking across the permafrost. The adult in me wonders whether we should."

I don't have a sophisticated answer. The kid in me likes mad scientists. The adult probably knows better.

Here's a project to bring back the Quagga: [http://www.quaggaproject.org/](http://www.quaggaproject.org/)

<comment><USER3> > The ecologist's "museum earth" view, that picks some moment in time and > strives to preserve or restore all ecologies as an exact replica of that > state (ignoring the red queen effect that probably makes this focus on > "sustainability" itself unsustainable).

It's worse than that. If I read the literature correctly, 15,000 years ago, North America had elephants (mammoths, mastodons), giant sloths, llamas, and horses[1], now all gone. And it had a much greater variety of some categories of animals that are not quite all gone: large cats, pronghorns.

When the first European explorers looked at North America, they thought they were seeing a pristine wilderness, looking more or less as it always had. But they were really seeing wildly out of balance ecologies still reeling from the recent loss of most of their large animals.

Basing wildlife management strategies on the idea that what the early explorers found was a sustainable steady state is a very problematic idea.

Also, I would really like to see a living mammoth. :-)

[1] The wild horses in North America today are an old-world species that was imported by Europeans not too many centuries ago.

<comment><USER4> > When the first European explorers looked at North America, they thought they > were seeing a pristine wilderness, looking more or less as it always had. > But they were really seeing wildly out of balance ecologies still reeling > from the recent loss of most of their large animals.

Any sources on this? I'd like to read up on this stuff.

<comment><USER5> 1491 is where I learned about it. [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491)

There's also a much shorter version of the book published in the Atlantic.

[http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30244...](http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dao- The site seems overloaded.

Link to Google's cache of that page: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LrYgQln...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LrYgQlnIXEUJ:longnow.org/revive/woolly- mammoth/+)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the Biology equivalent of Astronomy's "land a rocket on a rock". I'll be happy to have $0.70 of my tax money allocated for this research. Deep down I think we're all fond of the mammoth. I know I am. Mammoths rock(ed).</comment>


Facebook's Free Basics Is an African Dictator's Dream - <AUTHOR> http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/27/facebooks-plan-to-wire-africa-is-a-dictators-dream-come-true-free-basics-internet/ <comment><USER2> could it be that Free Basics is itself a dictatorship? run by none other than Mark Zuckerberg himself?</comment>


The cow-powered data center  - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2010/apr-jun/wastefordatacenter.html

<comment><USER2> I think the centralisation of computer power in huge data centres has great opportunities to cut ineffiencient and wasteful power consumption, therefore I applaud this.

Sadly, it looks like we will consume a lot of energy in the data centres _as well as_ running a, say, Core Duo computer at home. Maybe true thin clients will take off some day so we can harbour the advantages of centralised computing power.

</comment><comment><USER3> This idea might work well in Ireland since IIRC we have more cows than people. We also have a number of large data centers here and plentiful incoming bandwidth.</comment>


San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/scottlucas/san-francisco-spent-a-decade-being-rich-important-and <comment><USER2> I'm kind of disappointed in most of the comments here, because I think most of them are so focused on pushing back against the "tech bro" characterization (and TBH I think pushing back against this characterization is totally fair), that they're missing the broader picture of "Hey, things have become kind of fucked up in our largest cities", and it's worth thinking about how to deal with that.

What do I mean by fucked up? I mean that the cost of living and housing has become so high that the broad cross section of people you need to produce a vibrant city (e.g. bankers, politicians, techies, policemen, teachers, fireman, waiters, paramedics, artists, etc.) can no longer all afford to live there, and this is a _real_ , _serious_ problem. Cities have always had rich areas and poor areas, but as inequality has grown over the past few decades, with wealth flowing out of rural areas and into urban ones (especially "supercities" like SF, NYC, Seattle, etc.), it means that these cities are having less and less room for anyone but the rich.

SF is just the most acute example because (a) the concentrated tech boom here has created enormous amounts of wealth and (b) the geography here more tightly constrains sprawl compared to most other cities. However, the same exact thing is happening in lots of other places. E.g. there used to be "good parts" and "bad parts" (Hell's Kitchen, Alphabet City) of Manhattan, but there are almost no cheap places in Manhattan anymore. Similarly, Austin TX was a "slacker's paradise" 30 years ago, now pretty much all central housing is looking at $300-400k or more just for lot value of a single family home.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's worth talking about how something feels broken in our cities, and what viable solutions would be, instead of just focusing on the "anti-anti-tech-bro" angle.

<comment><USER3> America has only two cities: the rest are suburban conglomerations. Actual cities have buildings over four stories and apartment buildings everywhere.

<comment><USER4> Cities that I've been in, maybe precisely because they aren't "actual cities", have high rises downtown, but mostly that area is too expensive for ordinary people to live there. I don't understand why, given that the center of any area is necessarily relatively small, it shouldn't be reserved for commerce, because that is what requires everybody to come together. And it is!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The vilification of the "tech bro" is really such a tragedy (I know, preaching to the choir here). We're just people, trying to make a living for ourselves, and doing the things we enjoy. Our culture is no better than anyone else's. But neither is that of those lived in the Bay Area for the previous decades. Why should we be denied the life we were meant to live because _they were here first_ and they _don't have room_ for us? There's plenty of room for everyone to coexist, if we make it.

<comment><USER6> But that's the thing- there isn't plenty of room, both in terms of affordable housing, and in actual housing (SF is 49 sq. miles hemmed in by the sea). And as our industry gets more entrenched, we are creating that which is directly in contravention of one of our craft's most important axioms: a monoculture.

<comment><USER3> 49 square miles used improperly. We could house millions with the ancient technology of the apartment building.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone that hasn't seen it, _Cities Without Suburbs_ is a book that lays out the case that fragmentation and infighting are a major hindrance on American metro areas.

San Francisco is bounded on all sides from expanding, so it's partially at the mercy of its suburbs when it comes to things like housing. Has there ever been a movement to consolidate the Bay Area like how Nashville consolidated 14(?) counties with the city itself?

<comment><USER8> Given how poorly San Francisco is run and how corrupt its politics are, I don't think anyone outside of San Francisco would want that.

<comment><USER9> Silicon Valley could at least consolidate. I used to live on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead Rd I was on.

What was the fucking point of that? Were the culture and values of Sunnyvale really that antithetical to those of Cupertino?

It would be really nice if one of these parking lot hamlets actually did act differently and zone themselves to be super dense but when I left councilors were still mostly arguing about public WiFi and paying millions to water those plants in the road dividers all summer long.

<comment><USER10>
      ...on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead

No, that's never been the case. Neither Sunnyvale nor Cupertino has a city sales tax.

<comment><USER10> Um, downvoters, it's the truth. City-specific sales tax is rare in CA; generally, parcel taxes, bonds, etc. are pursued instead.

<comment><USER8> He's probably confusing his cities. Santa Clara has a 0.25% city sales tax, among other cities in the county: [https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/santa- clar...](https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/santa-clara-county)

San Mateo county also has a few cities with their own sales tax: [https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san- mateo-...](https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san-mateo-county)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somebody help me understand the appeal of the bay area. What is the relative weight of

1\. proximity to other tech companies (good for employees switching jobs) 2\. proximity to venture capital (good for entrepreneurs) 3\. general culture of tech work 4\. general culture, food, weather?

4 seems to pale in comparison to the cost and quality of life issues I have read about (super expensive, dirty, bad transport).

2 seems plausible. But are in-person meetings so necessary and hard to set up outside the area (also, how many people there just want to be employees somewhere and don't care about VCs?).

3 is pretty nebulous. And again I wouldn't expect this to be a big factor for people who mostly just want to work somewhere and not build their own thing.

I'm left with 1. Is that it?

It just seems weird that company location appears optimized for founders (we should go where the action and investment money and talent is!) and not the enormous mass of people who would just be clocking into their jobs and making those companies run. I have no data on this, but it looks like those masses of lower-level employees might prefer to live somewhere more "sensible".

It looks like such an...inefficiency.

<comment><USER12> It's not just optimized for founders. The investment-employment concentration is a feedback loop that has been running for decades. Investment stays here because there is such an established concentration of talent. VCs talk about wanting to tap into the global talent pool. But, remote/distributed development is still a penalty vs everyone on the same floor. And, there are no comparable concentrations elsewhere.

The Bay Area is expensive. But, if you have a tech job, the pay balances out easily. Sometimes excessively.

There is tons of interesting tech work in the Bay. Not just pay the bills and go home work. But, work that is fascinating in itself. If you can't find fascinating work here, maybe your interest in tech is limited to the paycheck. That's totally respectable. But, you'd probably be happier some place more family friendly, or with mountains, or with a culture less focused on work -even if your bank account won't grow as fast.

The arts culture has fallen off recently as rents have risen and the drug/homeless epidemic has really picked up in the past two years. But, it's SF is still a beautiful city full of wonderful things. And, a lot of (mostly dog) poop.

<comment><USER13> For what it's worth, many of the region's problems are not unique to it and are instead shared by any prosperous economic region in the USA. Land use, infrastructure, ineffective bureaucracy, urban place making, etc are countrywide issues that need resolution, and in some ways the Bay Area is leading that reform. I hope to see Prop 13 repealed or greatly weakened before I die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> San Francisco has been a boom/bust town since the gold rush. San Francisco's economic focal point, which has lasted there for a century or so, is tourism.

Have you heard about that sinking luxury condo skyscraper in S.F.? The terrain is formable in San Francisco, the geographic location treacherous. San Francisco's urban plan does not work well enough to fit nearly a million people. NYC has less than half the square mile footage, yet double the population. NYC works primarily better mainly because of location and geography. "...It turns out that Manhattan has a bedrock unusually suited to the construction of very tall buildings, in many cases just a few meters below the surface."

[https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real- reason-...](https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-reason-there- are-no-skyscrapers-in-the-middle-of-manhattan/)

<comment><USER15> Thing is, it doesn't need to be skyscrapers to house vastly more people than it does, it just needs to be 5 story walkups. And SV is currently one long stretch of strip malls, open air parking lots, and single story ranch homes with sad little yards.

<comment><USER16> 5 story WALKUPS? Very few are going to walk up that many flights of stairs.

<comment><USER17> Ever been to a European capital? They consist almost entirely of that type of buildings.

<comment><USER7> Not even capitals, if you look at cities like Hamburg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The decision of the Mayor back in 2012 to attract a bunch of Tech companies to the city that wanted growth the LEAST, is highly questionable. It's just such a contradiction of what the locals wanted. And, now we're paying the price, litteraly.

In SF, I used to think the answer was to build more housing, lots more. But, after hearing from sooooo many NIMBYs and so much extreme angst against any kind of growth, I've come to realize that SF doesn't deserve tech companies or any companies for that matter. It's time to accept what the locals want and start acting like it. Remove the incentives for companies in SF and start applying disentives.

Tech needs a new home, a new city, perhaps one that hasn't been built yet. Perhaps one where innovation will be welcomed instead of stifled. One, where inclusiveness is all encompassing (and applies to housing) and not just a catchphrase used to be politically correct. One that isn't covered in poop. A city where enough housing supply can be built for everyone.

<comment><USER19> The USA is such a vast country, there are so many nice areas. We don't need to cram all of one industry into a single city.

I vote Denver, Seattle, or Pittsburgh.

<comment><USER20> Denver and Seattle are both already having extreme housing shortages, congestion, and in the case of Seattle an anti-tech backlash.

<comment><USER21> There is a brewing backlash in Colorado against the Californians who couldn't make it in SV but moved here and forgot to leave their extreme left wing politics behind.

<comment><USER20> Salt Lake isn't nearly as bad as Denver yet, but it's on its way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sad the author can't be a dictator and make the world exactly as they determined it should be, as that sounds like their true passion, other than injecting smug into their veins every few hours. What an awful, meaningless article.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Hordes of newly minted and newly wealthy tech bros, flush with Silicon > Valley VC cash, ruined what once had been an all-are-welcome cool, gray city > of love, where the funky landlady Anna

This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests.

Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.

There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin everything, linked in the comments below which is related.

<comment><USER24> Tech bros are not the nerds and geeks of years past, suddenly rich. That was the dot.com boom.

These are sons of the elite who used to mainline to investment banking on Wall Street, or maybe a MBB shop — they follow the money.

There are plenty of nerds coming here, and they make a bit more money if they snag a FAANG job, but VCs and bros make sure they don't get too big a slice of the startup pie.

<comment><USER25> I've been called a tech bro, late 20 something 1m in net assets. Me and my group of friends are absolutely the geeks of yore. Ffs my last pitch had a wh40k reference in it and the guy financing it spend more time talking about warhammer lore than about the actual startup.

<comment><USER26> People who only get their understanding of Silicon Valley and the wider hacker and startup cultures from the mass media. Which mean the Ubers, WeWorks, and Googles. They think this is the sum of tech and it totally ignores the average day-to-day life of working in tech.

There's a million companies making millions or selling for hundreds of millions (or even 10s) who never make the headlines. They do weird obscure niche stuff that would take 20min to explain to an outsider.

And 99% of them are all run by normal hardworking nerds-from-high school type people who aren't pretentious or failed to grow out of University stereotypes of educated males, and yes males do a lot of dumb ignorant stuff in their late teens and early adulthood.

But the average entrepreneur isn't the 20 something prodigy the news fawns over, it's usually a 40+ guy whose been in the industry for a long time and found niches problem sets which they can specialize in and make a lot of money automates/dramatically improving how businesses are run in those markets.

Then there are the super nerds who work at Google and Tesla and Twitter, but mostly they are mid-teir nerds just happy making a living being able to work with other really-smart people. There isn't anything toxic about any of this. It's just highly curious people working on problems that interest them. And occasionally that involves pushing uncomfortable hard-changing solutions society isn't quite ready for - or nerds who weren't quite ready for society.

It's a learning process and SV will get better at interacting with the wider world. I hope too that the world starts treating SV (and the tech hubs around the world) with more respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What made San Francisco what it is today?

It's not the soft-on-crime District Attorney who cleared out the prisons by releasing criminals back onto the street.

Not the soft-on-crime SFPD, who barely enforces the law because what's the point? The DA won't prosecute anyway.

Not the fact that the hippies grew up and moved to Marin, and marijuana and mushrooms have been replaced with fentanyl and methamphetamine.

It's certainly not the bustling drug market that operates in 24 hours a day without police interference in the Tenderloin around Hyde and Golden Gate, making the city a go-to destination for drug addicts from across the region.

It's not the hundreds of millions of dollars the city hands out each year to homelessness advocacy groups that have no accountability and deliver no results.

It's not the entrenched NIMBYs who fight housing development tooth and nail.

It's the tech bros.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the article was more nuanced than that.

<comment><USER27> I wish it were, but it's not. The author presents a myopic and one-sided view of the situation, scapegoating the city's numerous problems on a single group of people. It's not nuanced at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the article literally presents two sides of the story, presents the claims of both sides, and at the ends attempts to provide a synthesis. The two sides presented are those that find fault with the NIMBYs who blocked building more housing, and those that find fault with the "tech bros" who are viewed as gentrifying communities.

<comment><AUTHOR> "That's one way to tell the story... But there's another"

"And depending on which camp you found yourself in, there was one of two essays you'd brandish at dinner parties, yell about on Twitter, and pretend to have read that explained what the protests symbolized.

One was by the prolific writer Rebecca Solnit ...

It took until the following year for those inclined to the second point of view to find their voice, which came under the guise of a long post at TechCrunch by journalist Kim-Mai Cutler ... Point being: This decade has been such that, were you inclined to agree with Cutler or with Solnit, you could find plenty of evidence to support your point of view...

As the decade comes to a close, in many ways we're no closer to a synthesis than when we started. Tech's villains continue to be awful, both individually and collectively. And our housing production remains anemic.

And yet there are signs of hope."

In fact the heroes of this story, if there are any, are the "tech bros," big tech companies, and YIMBY's who are making attempts to build more housing and be neighborly.

<comment><USER6> Have big tech really been making enough of an effort to build more housing? Apple's $2.5 billion pledge was made only months ago, and not specific to San Francisco. Certainly there's an overlap between YIMBY and tech workers, but it doesn't seem to be one to one. We aren't seeing high-profile Engineers For Affordable Housing groups come to the forefront. Do they even exist?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't agree with all of the conclusions of the article. I just think it's patently false that the article is one sided and vilifies technology workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If Jackson, Mississippi is in 1985, I worry that Austin, Texas is in 2010. Slowly, and in miniature, the signals are starting to crop up. Homelessness downtown has visibly increased in just the past 3 years. Historic holes-in- the-wall are dropping like flies. Plenty of new housing is going up, but it's all luxury apartments with ground-floor shopping. The city's culture that everyone moved here for is being thrown out with the bath water. It's tough to watch.</comment>


Nfhttp: A cross platform C++ HTTP library natively interfacing to platforms - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/spotify/NFHTTP <comment><USER2> This is a great idea. A lot of people are going to say "why not use libcurl like everyone else?". Curl is great but this project is a better idea for client-side code.

libcurl is easy to integrate into C++ but hard to get right (this is not curl's fault). I see a lot of bad example code around the web that works(tm) but is not robust. I've seen so much bad curl code that I was moved to write[0] about some of the problems.

libcurl doesn't use OS-level features. It doesn't pick up the users proxy settings or use the cache or cookie store. This is sometimes what you want but for standard client apps Nfhttp's approach is better.

[0] [https://sheep.horse/2019/3/using_libcurl_effectively_and_saf...](https://sheep.horse/2019/3/using_libcurl_effectively_and_safely_in_c%2B%2B.html)

<comment><USER3> I agree in general that using native HTTP stacks is a good idea for all sorts of reasons, but it's worth calling out that NFHTTP is actually using CURL under the hood on Linux & Android platforms so this just ultimately wraps the CURL C API in a C++ API. On OSX it is using NSURL which is great, and on Windows it's using Microsoft's cpprestsdk library in order to talk with WinHTTP and UWP.

<comment><USER4> Honestly the biggest gain by using the platform API is that you get SSL support for free. Otherwise you have to cross compile OpenSSL for every android target you want to support and for a fat universal lib for iOS. Its a giant pain.

<comment><USER5> That was the reason I used the platform APIs in one app, and it is an awful mess.

Then people use Android 4.0 or Windows 2000/XP, and complain they cannot use TLS1.2. And you cannot use the platform defaults, or Android 4.x fails with TLS1.2, because it is not enabled in the defaults, despite being supported. So you enable TLS1.2 and all ciphers, and then Android 8 fails on TLS1.3 due to a trapdoor cipher. Every device trusts different CAs, so you cannot know if https will work, unless you include all the needed certs rather than using the platform certs. Or the platform API is just completely removed like Apache HttpComponents from Android, and you need to rewrite it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been pointing out to people for some time now that Apple has docs (buried, of course, because it's Apple...) that outright indicate they do things behind the scenes with NSURLSession & co to make battery/radio management better. The effect of people dodging it in cross-platform frameworks has been something I've long wondered about.

<comment><USER7> This library seems to use platform APIs under the hood, so it might end up performing similarly.

<comment><USER3> It uses CURL on Android.

<comment><USER8> There are no platform APIs for networking exposed on the NDK, beyond plain old POSIX sockets.

The alternative would be some JNI boilerplate to access Android Framework networking APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> First time I've seen JSON for Modern C++ [https://nlohmann.github.io/json/](https://nlohmann.github.io/json/) Anyone have an use likes/dislikes?

<comment><USER3> Probably one of the best C++ libraries out there. Can't recommend this highly enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare to cpprestsdk?

[https://github.com/Microsoft/cpprestsdk](https://github.com/Microsoft/cpprestsdk)

<comment><USER3> This interested me too so I looked through the source to find out. NFHTTP seems to add 2 clients of its own, one that uses NSURL (for Apple) and another that uses CURL (for Linux). Everything else (WinHTTP, UWP, and the fallback Boost Asio client) simply call down and use the cpprestsdk implementations directly.

Seems like this library offers less itself than it says on the tin, given that 3/5 of its native impls just call down to cpprestsdk. It's a pity that spotify didn't simply add CURL and NSURL clients to cppressdk - that would have been far more useful IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> FWIW, I use Restbed for this type of work. [https://github.com/Corvusoft/restbed](https://github.com/Corvusoft/restbed)

</comment><comment><USER5> I made such a library for FreePascal ([http://benibela.de/sources_en.html#internettools](http://benibela.de/sources_en.html#internettools))

Windows WinINet, Android JNI for Apache HttpComponents or OkHttp, Linux OpenSSL through another FreePascal library

</comment><comment><USER11> It mentions UWP support in readme, but that is wrong. WinHTTP C++ APIs are not present in UWP apps.

<comment><USER3> This library seems to add a HTTP client impl built on top of NSURL, and another on top of CURL. It looks to me like everything else here is provided by Microsoft's CPPRestSDK - WinHTTP, UWP & Boost Asio based clients simply use the CppRestSDK impls under the hood.

<comment><USER11> It says winhttp is used on windows...

<comment><USER3> Edit: Sorry, I misread your post. To add, cpprestsdk has 2 impls for Windows - one based on top of WinHTTP and the other based on WinRT APIs. On UWP, cpprestsdk uses the WinRT APIs and by extension so does NFHTTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This code is a great example of how awkward it is to glue CMake projects together.

<comment><USER13> What would you suggest instead? This is honest, not sarcastic. Cmake can be very powerful, and I don't know of a better option. For instance, it can even be set up to download the latest binary dependencies, which is very useful.

<comment><USER12> Downloading the latest binary dependencies is (IMO) not a good idea. You should download a known working version with a fixed hash. This will avoid unexpected version mismatches in production. When you want to upgrade, make it explicit.

As for a better alternative, I would suggest Bazel or Buck.

<comment><USER13> I meant the latest I have pushed to a specific server I run. This means I can push up and everyone working on the project can fetch them easily. It requires intervention, and I wouldn't push until I've tested thoroughly and made necessary changes.

I appreciate the recommendation, though it seems that bazel is heavily focused on java.

<comment><USER12> That approach has a scaling problem because it requires the central server not to forget to verify the new version against all of the users. Instead, I think that upgrades should be decided on the user side. That is where the tests etc. live.

Bazel is a multi-language system whose focus is actually on C++. This is because other languages have much simpler compilation models.

I don't see why it would be a downside to have additional language support in your C++ build-system. For example, what happens when you want to do Android?

<comment><USER13> Upgrades are basically decided by the user by updating their cmake config. It can check a specific page on the server and compare with a page in the repo to see if an update is necessary. The central server doesn't have to do anything, it's just dumb file hosting.

I've got nothing against additional language support, though having to install java to use it is a bit painful. I'll take a look at it; I appreciate the recommendation.

You originally commented that cmake was awkward and required "gluing together". I'll agree that the syntax is a little alien to those of us with a background in c-like syntax, but it's never seemed that clunky. Any reason why?

<comment><USER12> > Upgrades are basically decided by the user by updating their cmake config.

So why not hash the remote file to ensure integrity, and make the server an immutable store?

> I've got nothing against additional language support, though having to > install java to use it is a bit painful. I'll take a look at it; I > appreciate the recommendation.

I would prefer if they did not use Java also. However, you do not need to install a JVM to use Bazel since it ships with one internally. To the end user, Java is just an implementation detail.

> I'll agree that the syntax is a little alien to those of us with a > background in c-like syntax, but it's never seemed that clunky.

This was all I was trying to say really :)

Looking at the repo, I think it would be considerable tweaking to take a dependency on Nfhttp when you already depend on some of its dependencies. With Bazel (and similar) you have a clear way to glue things together ("workspaces") so you would just ensure that all dependencies take the same workspace.

CMake ergonomics is death by a 1000 cuts. The syntax is unpleasant and the error messages are very poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hehe, seeing this I thought "Cool, this is exactly how Spotify handles separation between the GUI frontend and the backend in the Spotify app" and then I saw the organization name in the URL.. doh!

</comment><comment><USER15> How does this lib handle proxy settings? Does it provide an API to the current proxy settings on the supported platforms ? And an ability to use or not use the proxy per request?

</comment><comment><USER16> How does Nfhttp compare with POCO?

[https://pocoproject.org/](https://pocoproject.org/)</comment>


Typing with pleasure - <AUTHOR> https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ <comment><USER2> This mirrors one of the things that I 'feel' about using Vim, that I commented about a few months ago [0]. It just feels faster than using something like Atom / Visual Code, it's hard to explain in other terms, but this at least shows the actual latency values that cause the feeling.

The great thing from these graphs is that it shows the consistency of performance with Vim across pretty much all platforms. So once you're using Vim it's fast everywhere, there isn't cases where you get unexplained slowdowns. You do get slowdowns with plugins, but they are usually quite easily explainable and they don't impact typing.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13934999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13934999)

<comment><USER3> Don't know about typing latency, but most operations in vim seems excruciatingly slow after using ST3.

Things like fuzzy searching for something, opening a file with NerdTree etc.

<comment><USER2> ST3 is awesome, I switched from that to Vim. But not because I was unhappy with ST3, just because the only way to learn Vim is to dive in and use only Vim.

I too didn't notice any latency in ST3 and I've spent a lot of time trying to recreate some of the things that I was very used to in ST3.

Saying that though, Vim just takes lots and lots of getting used to, I liken it to learning a foreign language.

Most things you just need to do the 'Vim way', for example instead of NerdTree you can just use the internal file explorer and combine it with Tim Pope's Vinegar plugin [0] (everything from Tim Pope is simply awesome). That makes opening the file explorer as easy as typing '-' and then you can bounce up directories pressing '-' again or move around the file explorer using the Vim keys. I find this just as fast as using ST's file explorer, possibly faster as it avoids the mouse.

I know fuzzy finding in Vim can be improved massively using fzf but I haven't tried it yet. I'm find it really easy just to have lots of buffers open and then to type `:b [buffer name]` you only need a partial match.

I've been writing lots about the things that confuse me about Vim coming from ST3 e.g. about the weirdness of tab pages (when all you need is buffers) [1].

Great plugins for Vim from a ST3 perspective are:

      " let Vundle manage Vundle, required
      Plugin 'VundleVim/Vundle.vim'

      " syntax checking
      Plugin 'vim-syntastic/syntastic'
      " put quotes and brackets around expressions
      Plugin 'tpope/vim-surround'
      " use [ / ] for next / previous with lots of options
      Plugin 'tpope/vim-unimpaired'
      " git
      Plugin 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
      " store sessions that plays nicely with Airline and PDV
      Plugin 'tpope/vim-obsession'
      " improve the file explorer
      Plugin 'tpope/vim-vinegar'
      Plugin 'altercation/vim-colors-solarized'
      " highlight tabs and spaces at the end of lines
      Plugin 'vim-scripts/cream-showinvisibles'
      " distraction free mode
      Plugin 'junegunn/goyo.vim'
      " autocomplete matching brackets and quotes
      Plugin 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
      " Airline seems to have an issue with my session saving
      " @link https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline/issues/1505
      Plugin 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
      Plugin 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes'

My reasons for using Vim were:

1\. Open source

2\. Cross platform (as is ST3) but also I can use it over SSH so I can take the power of my .vimrc with me

3\. Programmable editing / Vim's 'feeling' [2]

[0]: [https://github.com/tpope/vim-vinegar](https://github.com/tpope/vim- vinegar)

[1]: [https://stackoverflow.com/a/43125465/327074](https://stackoverflow.com/a/43125465/327074)

[2]: [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to- vim/#vim-s-...](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/#vim-s- feeling)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here an Github issue from VSCode related to this: [https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/27378](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/27378) which shows some results for VSCode vs emacs, neovim and sublime.

</comment><comment><USER2> N.B. This was from 2015 and there's a previous HN item [0]

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787812)</comment>