Vim users: stop using hjkl - <AUTHOR> http://vimcasts.org/blog/2013/02/habit-breaking-habit-making/ <comment><USER2> Linkbait title alert. Please, please stop this crap. Article really says: n00b vim users, consider disabling hjkl while learning other movement commands.

What vim user does all their movement with hjkl only anyway? If you're going to deliberately cripple your editing habits like that, or if you're not even bother to learn other movement command at the same time as getting used to hjkl, you might as well stick to notepad.exe.

<comment><USER3> >What vim user does all their movement with hjkl only anyway?

Having used vim for nearly two decades now, my primary movement routine seems to be start with "/" and "?". In other words, jump to the approximate location using a word search and "W" or "w" as needed to the specific word, then use the hjkl or other commands to further refine the cursor's location.

<comment><USER4> > Having used vim for nearly two decades now, my primary movement routine > seems to be start with "/" and "?". In other words, jump to the approximate > location using a word search and "W" or "w" as needed to the specific word, > then use the hjkl or other commands to further refine the cursor's location.

Young programmers should be made aware that there are now programming editors that do away with the need to think of a way to trick the program into moving the cursor where you want it to go. Modern editors respond to direct, concise keyboard entries to move the editing cursor to the desired destination. Like pressing the arrow keys. Or pointing at the destination with a mouse and clicking -- things like that.

Even ubiquitous command-line editors like Pico are easier to use than vi/vim. The reason is that Pico doesn't have vim's history to contend with, and its consequent rearward compatibility issues.

<comment><USER2> Not sure if just trolling, but if not it seems you're not very experienced yet in the use of the tools of the trade of the professional programmer. The point of using the vi interface is nowadays (and yes I know about the original reasons of the modal workings of vi...) that moving your fingers off the home row takes too much effort, let alone having to move your hand to the mouse. It's easier to drive an automatic, why do professional drivers switch gears manually? Because learning the more advanced interface gives them more control over the way the machine behaves, and in their use case, the investment in learning it pays off handsomely in the added power later. Should regular users bother to lean vi? No. Programmers? Yes.

<comment><USER4> > Not sure if just trolling, but if not it seems _you're not very experienced > yet_ in the use of the tools of the trade of the professional programmer. > [emphasis added]

Guess again -- I wrote Apple Writer in the late 1970s (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer>). One of my goals was to eliminate the modes that plagued contemporary editors and attract people interested in ease of use and efficiency. Apple Writer became a best-seller because (among other things) its competition, most derived from vi, required users to switch modes.

And I can't believe I'm having this conversation over 30 years later, still trying to get people to choose more efficient tools.

> ... you're not very experienced yet ...

It's likely that I was programming -- and publishing my programs -- before you were born:

<http://arachnoid.com/programmable_calculators>

<comment><USER5> There's a difference between "more efficient" and "easier to learn". You're advocating the latter. This is not a good thing.

For example, moving around by using the search feature (at least a well- designed incremental search like Vim or Emacs) _is_ more efficient for longer distance moves (e.g. more than a couple of lines)--it's faster and, more importantly, takes less thought and context switching.

When you have to move to a distinct part of your text file, chances are you know what the content there is. With a command like /, you directly turn that knowledge into efficient movement. With the arrow keys, you have to leave the home row and do a bunch of movements to get where you're going. You have to figure out how to turn the word you want to go to into a bunch of arrow actions. It's even more difficult of your target is off-screen.

Ultimately, a rich set of movement commands you can access without moving your hand is going to be more efficient than using the standard arrow keys. This is particularly true for somewhat semantic commands like moving by block or expression or moving to a word (the command in question here).

Ideally, you want to move around faster with less context switching. Keyboard- oriented editors like Vim and Emacs are much better at this than any other editor I've seen, as long as you learned how to use them properly. This really makes the learning curve more than with it.

<comment><USER4> > There's a difference between "more efficient" and "easier to learn". You're > advocating the latter. This is not a good thing.

You've posed a false dichotomy. Modern editors are both more efficient and easier to learn.

> Ideally, you want to move around faster with less context switching. > Keyboard-oriented editors like Vim and Emacs are much better at this than > any other editor I've seen, as long as you learned how to use them properly.

Pico is a keyboard-only editor, and it's easier to navigate, and to use in general. So is every other editor that exists, written after about 1980. None of them require the user to switch modes, an idea that died with vi -- I mean, if only vi had died.

As soon as keyboards included arrow keys, the handwriting was on the wall.

<comment><USER6> How is a mouse more efficient than an ability to move to a phrase with a bit of typing, skip words ahead with a single letter instead of ctrl + shift, move to a new line and a specific place on that line with a couple of button presses, etc?

<comment><USER4> > How is a mouse more efficient than an ability to move to a phrase with a bit > of typing, skip words ahead with a single letter instead of ctrl + shift, > move to a new line and a specific place on that line with a couple of button > presses, etc?

I can't improve on your explanation as the answer to your own question. Obviously using a mouse to cut/copy and paste, within the same document or between independent documents, is more efficient than what you just described.

<comment><USER6> Moving my hand over to the mouse, moving the mouse cursor to wherever I need, selecting that text and dragging while my editor slowly scrolls with my cursor when I could use a few key sequences with no context switch is the opposite of efficient.

edit: wording

<comment><USER4> Pro tip: don't downvote a correspondent from whom you also expect a reply.

<comment><USER6> If you check my profile, you'll see that I have less than 500 karma and therefore could not have downvoted you.

edit: wording/lower verbosity

edit: typo

<comment><USER7> Also HN doesn't allow downvoting of direct replies...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Moving your Vim cursor around using the arrow keys is a bad habit ...

Yes, as is having a keyboard with more than 64 keys, a pointing device, software that allows character insertion, deletion and cursor motion all without changing modes, or any computer designed after 1980. We must all fight against this rising tide of convenience and efficiency by insisting that everyone use vim and its descendants.

<comment><USER8> This comment is ridiculous.

Being "anti-vim" is perfectly alright with me. I use vim because it's the fastest thing I've ever used by a very wide margin. I also respect others who find it too hard to learn or find they're more productive elsewhere.

But a comment that essentially boils down to "vim is archaic" in a _post about vim usage habits_ is totally ridiculous, so in the nicest way possible, get lost.

<comment><USER4> > But a comment that essentially boils down to "vim is archaic" in a post > about vim usage habits is totally ridiculous ...

And entirely topical. Young programmers who read such posts may not realize how many more efficient options are now available. Speaking about vim as though it's an obvious choice in 2013 would be like insisting that everyone code in Fortran in 2013.

<comment><USER9> You're commenting on a vim post in order to help lost young programmers understand that there are other options besides vim?

 _Speaking about vim as though it's an obvious choice in 2013 would be like insisting that everyone code in Fortran in 2013._

Oh, now talking about how to use vim effectively is like _insisting_ that everyone uses an archaic programming language? I suppose if we were to have a post here talking about how to use the command line effectively, you'd feel obliged to educate young programmers that we've moved on from the 1970s.

<comment><USER4> > You're commenting on a vim post in order to help lost young programmers > understand that there are other options besides vim?

Yes, and what better place?

> Oh, now talking about how to use vim effectively is like insisting that > everyone uses an archaic programming language?

Based on the number of objections to a discussion of vim's alternatives, yes -- that's a legitimate comparison.

> I suppose if we were to have a post here talking about how to use the > command line effectively, you'd feel obliged to educate young programmers > that we've moved on from the 1970s.

Only in the midst of an amazing discussion that included various "cheat-sheet" strategies to get around the behaviors of an editor that demands cheating to be productive. Given that context, saying that newer editors don't require you to cheat seems entirely topical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's amazing how fast you can retrain muscle memory by disabling certain keys. It's frustrating for about half a day, then kind of annoying for a day or two, and then you've completely retrained yourself. In just a day or so!

However, I like to fiddle with the cursor while I'm thinking. Might be just me. I don't like feeling like I'm completely constrained. It's nice to casually move around when I'm pondering something deeply.

When I'm seriously coding though, I almost exclusively use move forward/backword by word or expression, and then use ace-jump to arbitrarily jump to specific points (<http://www.emacsrocks.com/e10.html>). I use Emacs of course.

<comment><USER11> > I like to fiddle with the cursor while I'm thinking.

That's a good point - I do that too. Also, if I've switched my attention somewhere else, then back to vim, I find myself doing "hlhlhl" to get my attention back to the cursor immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was hoping someone would trash the idea of hjkl, which I personally don't like. So first I was disappointed to read yet again about _not_ using the arrows.

Then when I read the rest of the post, it definitely makes sense. I do use w, b quite frequently, and I don't use f, but I've found the vim-seek[1] plugin recently, and it seems to make more sense to use. It matches two rather than one character, which makes it much more precise.

I think the bottom line is to move around to the _right place_ and that going one character at a time is less efficient. Not so much whether this movement is via hjkl or the arrow keys.

[1]<https://github.com/goldfeld/vim-seek>

<comment><USER13> I'm now considering extending the seek idea to moving to close-by lines, through mappings that would work like EasyMotion's w, b, e and ge but excluding the current line and working on lines above (b and ge) and below (w and e), by typing the two characters that respectively end and begin the target word.

<comment><USER12> sounds cool. One thing I couldn't work out with the plugin, was how to skip to the next match. It's rare that two letters match, but some letter combinations are still relatively frequent, things like `if` or `th` ... but perhaps it's just a RTFM issue and I haven't used it extensively yet...

<comment><USER13> Yes that's on the pipeline, doesn't work yet. I agree it would come in really handy on the few occasions we seek for a more common letter combination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I like about VIM people is they explain you that mouse is evil, arrow keys are evil and now the basic hjkl (btw corrected into hell in iPhone keyboard) are evil too.

I have even see a guy at a ruby conf who were using only keystrokes to browse the web. I wonder how it deal with flash animation. Anyway so now, he can replace his trackpad with a swimming pool for worms of smugueness. That's pretty cool.

<comment><USER15> We don't deal with flash. We curse the foolish website developer and route its domain to /dev/null. Using VIM.

<comment><USER14> Anyway, why use the web when you can use directly sockets? Faster, more secure and grep-compliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh please, not vim again. Now you are not even supposed to use the already ridiculous hjkl mappings. It's really amazing to me to see this sub-culture attach itself to an editor that was designed as it is BECAUSE THE AUTHORS DID NOT HAVE KEYBOARDS WITH MORE KEYS ON THEM!

"hjkl is faster than reaching for the cursor keys". Holy frigging crap! Really? You are so good as a developer that MILLISECONDS make a difference? It does not take you hours to come up with algorithms or program structures to solve problems. And, when you do, you write code at blinding speeds (using vim) with NO BUGS, therefore MILLISECONDS matter because you are not one of those programmers who will need to spend HOURS hunting down and fixing bugs. Oh, yes, and 100% of your time is spent coding. You don't lookup documentation and you don't do any file management at all. You are a damn coding machine who can actually measure productivity by the millisecond and who must absolutely use the shittiest possible UI in the context of modern hardware to shave milliseconds from your every keystroke. You never reach for your iPod to look for music or read through HN, Facebook or even your email throughout the day because that wastes minutes. You never take a break, shoot the shit or theorize and ponder with your coworkers because you measure your life by the MILLISECONDS of flight time difference between the hjkl keys and the up, down, left, right keys 12cm away.

Right. The reality is that this is just a "I belong to the club" delusion that has nothing whatsoever to do with being a good programmer, writing good, clean, usable, extensible, reusable, fast, efficient and bug-free code. It has nothing whatsoever to do with delivering a product anyone wants and doing that on time and on budget. It has nothing whatsoever to do with being an entrepreneur, building a company, paying the bills and delivering value to users and investors alike.

It has everything to do with being a complete child and refusing to understand that there are places where you could optimize your time and energy that represent, without exaggeration, PRODUCTIVITY GAINS IN THE ORDER OF MILLIONS TO BILLIONS OF TIMES GREATER than the time required to reach for arrow keys or, Darwin forgive, the MOUSE (yes, he used that word) a few hundred times per day.

Grow up!

<comment><USER13> A lot of people who don't understand what vim is before criticizing it seem to miss the point that vim doesn't make you faster at writing code. Insert mode is a dumb text entry mode like any other, and Visual Studio and Textmate in fact have out of the box more tools for snippets and auto-completion than most vim users care to even supplement with plugins. Because the power is in editing text, not writing it. And oh, how convenient, programmers spend like 10% or less time writing and a whole lot more reviewing (moving around) and editing code.

<comment><USER16> I'll tell you when and why I use vim and how I can justify its useage: Linux servers. I use vim on my servers to edit everything. Why? Because I know it's there and I don't have to install anything. And, even though I think it's a horrible UI that could only be justified in an era with keyboards that barely had characters and numbers, I use it.

A religious attachment to vim? No friggin way. No editor has ever caused one of my projects to come in late (or early). The factors that affect real projects are so far removed from the software one uses to edit code that it is incredible some people evangelize something like vim to such an extent.

The other really funny thing is to see articles and blog posts describing how to add trees, tabs and all manner of other things to vim and how this makes it even cooler. Really funny.

<comment><USER17> I agree with the usefulness of Vim on Linux servers. I would say that everyone is different in how they approach their work and in the case of software development, the tools they use.

I wouldn't consider it funny that someone would want to optimize a very important tool to make it more functional. The tools we use for software development are both a curse and a blessing. A curse that there is no ONE TRUE WAY of doing something and a blessing that we can build and mold the tools to accomplish what we need.

I am not religious about Vim or any other text editor but I can definitely appreciate others wanting to optimize their usage.

Personally, I find that once you have setup Vim the way you want, its pretty much on autopilot. I would say that if someone is a natural tinker, Vim is the best black hole one can get into as there can be no end to the tinkering.

<comment><USER16> Yours is an absolutely reasonable non-fanatical position on this topic. No issues whatsoever.

My blood pressure goes up when people start to get religious about this stuff. Some go as far as proposing that one can only be a professional programmer if one uses vim, which is utter nonsense.

<comment><USER13> Well you've come off as quite the extremist shouting to the rooftops that people shouldn't try to be super efficient with vim. People who might not go out on a limb to say everyone should do it too. As for your comment on tabs and trees, sorry, those are heretics. True vim followers use buffers only.

<comment><USER16> > Well you've come off as quite the extremist shouting to the rooftops that > people shouldn't try to be super efficient with vim.

That's the point. vim does not make you super-efficient at anything other than being a data entry clerk. That's not where significant value is developed in a technology business.

> True vim followers use buffers only.

Don't forget a Lear Siegler ADM3A terminal over a 300 BAUD modem leased line to the mainframe. Oh, wait, that's the way it was when vi was written.

:-)

I love this quote from Bill Joy: "I think if I were going to go back—I wouldn't go back, but start over again."

<http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Most of the comments in this thread can be summed up with: 1\. "Vim sucks/is better than _____ because...." 2\. "Finally, somebody's preaching the truth! Who even uses the HJKL keys? Not me..." 3\. "I think I will/won't consider adding 'w', 'b', 'f', etc. to my Vim inventory because..."

1\. This is not a productive comment, and this thread isn't here for you to start an argument on something rooted in personal taste. Your're entitled to your view, but this post was written as a suggestion for Vim users, for Vim users. Please, refrain from posting if that's all you have to say.

2\. That's great that you've found more efficient ways to navigate, but did you read the article? Though it's impossible to tell from the extremely- misleading post title, the article isn't polemicizing - it's trying to suggest tools that a user might not already know/be familiar with.

3\. These comments are the only ones discussing the actual article text, and are the minority. Let's discuss the merits of what the post was actually talking about, as the comments are meant to do!

</comment><comment><USER13> I have in my vimrc something I'm calling restrain.vim. In effect it allows me to rebind a double press such as jj, kk, hh and ll to do something else. That means I can only press any of these keys once, if I press a second time it does a different thing (I'm using j and k for jumping to the next line number ending in 0, or ending with a digit if I supply a count, so it's kinda like relative line movement with absolute line numbering).

So when I press j once it moves down one line, and if I press any other command it's reset so I can press j once again next time (so it allows going down a line and pressing . repeatedly). But from the second consecutive press each single j press will be doing another thing. This is helping me a lot with retraining to using other methods to get around instead of spamming j. Wait, that's a good wordplay, restraining, retraining. Hmm..

</comment><comment><USER19> Hard mode, that's great. Does vim have a help-a-fellow-learn-vim mode? Instead of it's normal Mostly-fail-to-give-you-any-visual-feedback-and-just-treat-you- with-smug-indifference-while-you-try-various-keys mode?

<comment><USER20> There is a vim tutorial baked in that will walk you through some things.

<comment><USER19> It isn't the first thing one sees upon starting vim for the first time, nor is it obvious in any other way.

<comment><USER20> I could swear if you just ran the command "vi" rather than opening a file with vim it would load to a screen that shows you how to run the tutorial. I can't confirm that since I'm on a Windows machine at work right now, so I won't argue it. It does exist, but I'll acknowledge that it's not advertised heavily.

<comment><USER19> I just freshly installed vi and tried that. Here's what I was greeted with. <http://pastebin.com/HxvNP6Tr> I've seen the tutorial that you're probably talking about a few years ago when I got curious about vi. It didn't really do it for me at the time.

I'm prepared to believe that people willing to tolerate its ideosyncracies can be very productive in vi or vim. I've seen it first-hand. It also appears to be well suited to potentially reducing rsi-type problems. But it is not intuitive to learn nor is it the least bit friendly. That's a shame too because there is no good reason why it couldn't be so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No advice on moving from line to line? Word and character movements are great (and well worth learning), but how do you suggest moving to _just the next line_ without spamming `w`?

<comment><USER22> For moving directly vertical:

:nnoremap k gk

:nnoremap j gj

These move up/down one character, even if it is the same line wrapped over. Really beneficial for things like LaTeX editing.

<comment><USER23> I was going to say. Disabling hjkl makes moving between word wrapped lines impossible

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is excellent advice. I've met so many people who thought HJKL was the only way to move around in Vim. Moving around with other keys really boosts your productivity.

</comment><comment><USER25> If I can see where I want the cursor to be, why can't I put the cursor there ... by looking at it and pressing a 'jump to' modifier, or by touching it, or whatever.

Even as a Vim fan, this isn't better than mousing, this is similarly annoying to proxy movement through other things.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't even use vi(m) anymore, but hjkl are so burned into my brain that one of the first things I had to do to <http://inky.com> was make hjkl work to move around in the message list.

</comment><comment><USER27> I see too many love-hate comments in here, I realize now that people can be really fanatical about their preferences for editors.

For what is worth, I use vim and visual studio in daily basis, and love both. I love vim experience over a console and the fact that I can code in a remote machine without any perceptive latency.

I love visual studio goodies (mostly intellisense) and being a keyword guy I just learnt VS shortcuts.

So, Is there something wrong with me? for me those are just tools not religions.

Edit/PS: I know am comparing an IDE and a editor, but in this case I think the analogy is valid

</comment><comment><USER28> I hate hjkl for the simple reason that I learned to type with my index fingers on F and J keys. I use search a heck of a lot more but I guess I should add w, b and e to my repertoire.

<comment><USER29> I also learned to type with my index fingers on F and J (I think it's quite standard, given the typing classes I took and the little nibs on my keyboard), and I've always been fine with HJKL. What's the problem you have with it, exactly? It sounds like you're saying you'd prefer jkl;, but I don't think that would be better; moving to the left seems perhaps least common to me.

<comment><USER28> I guess I find myself hitting the wrong keys each time and I'm quite happy with ; being used for something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Some may be interested in the EasyMotion plugin.

Using <leader><leader>f <char> will display all available options to jump to. This way you don't have to continue to use f<char> over and over if there are many of the same character in the line you are on. It is also a great way to jump to a very specific spot in your code.

Note, it also has other motions besides just f. Here is the link:

<https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion>

</comment><comment><USER31> I use control keys for a lot of my movement. <c-f>/<c-b>, <c-u>/<c-d>, <c-e>/<c-y>, <c-n>/<c-p> (remap your ctrlp plugin to leader p. This is vim.) And yeah, I have caps lock remapped to control. Setting virtualedit=all will also force you to think in terms of text objects by allowing the cursor to move everywhere. No longer can you simply press j/k and have it go to the end of the next shorter line.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've never felt too pressed to learn vim, but I now realize how nice it is to be able to open the same exact editor with the same exact shortcuts on any linux machine in the world. I have 20+ servers I need to SSH into on a weekly basis, and I would much rather benefit from the convenience of using vim on every one of them than some hacky SFTP solution with Sublime on my machine.

</comment><comment><USER33> One of the best (collection of) cheatsheets: [http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...](http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html)

The pdf version can be found here: <http://www.glump.net/howto/vim_graphical_cheat_sheet>

<comment><USER34> I never found the keymap cheat sheets useful. It tells me what happens if I press a certain key, but what I need is the reverse. Tell we what key to press if I want X to happen.

When using a cheat sheet like that I waste a lot of time scouring the image looking for text relating to the type of operation I want. I'd rather have a list of options grouped by operation type.

<comment><USER35> I have a deck of flashcards in Anki to help learn vim bindings in a way similar to what you're looking for.

The flashcards are designed so the front is a description of some operation (ex. "motion cursor to end of the line" or "backward find word under cursor") and the back is the key combo to make that operation happen.

It works really well for me and I've noticed a huge improvement to my productivity in vim. If you're interested: <https://github.com/MrPants888/vim_flashcards>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> He gives examples of how to do away with h and k except for one off errors which is how I work but he doesn't really show a smart way of going up or down 2 or 3 lines without using j and k. I vertically move by using MHL and jk, is there a smarter way than that?

</comment><comment><USER37> Another inefficient command that I use way too much is "x".

Using those keys once or twice is, of course, perfectly fine. One could set up some mechanism that limits the number of repetitions in a row.

</comment><comment><USER38> To prevent overusing hjkl a plugin that throttled how many times you could hit the keys in a row would be ideal. That way they would still work for one off errors.

</comment><comment><USER39> the F,f,t,T commands really changed my life.

However, after using vim for a long time, I still use the arrows! Not all the time, but a lot. I find that my fingers are always darting around on the margins using $ an ^ and ~ and ... my argument is what's wrong with traveling a little to get to those equally distant arrow keys? I don't really consider the hjkl to be my home position for my hands much. Thumb on space bar is home, if I had to define it.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm using arrow keys in vim for navigation. Never used hjkl or anything else for that purpose. I also usually put 'set nocompatible' in .vimrc.

</comment><comment><USER41> I use hjkl everyday. Its pretty handy. The arrow keys are too far away from the maon keys. Thats why hjkl is very useful

<comment><USER27> I have tried to make that switch several times but still I found more comfortable the arrow keys (especially because up key is in fact above the rest)

If I have to pay that fraction of time for the convenient arrangement of keys. I will pay it happily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> You chose an awful title, nelstrom.

</comment><comment><USER43> Typing is not the bottleneck.

<comment><USER44> No, it isn't, and that's the major underlying theme of Drew's writings on vim. This article is no exception. By learning to use the power of the tool, you work fluidly with the structure of the text, not just the characters/lines. That is, your expertise of the tool is shaped to match the mental patterns around the code you work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is okay advice, except that hjkl are actually useful occasionally. Disabling them will only hurt yourself.

<comment><USER46> The article says that. The title of this posting is a bit sensationalist, although it's used as a subtitle in the article itself.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What programming language would you use? - <AUTHOR>

Imagine you are going to write an API for a mobile telephone network operator to sell charges to customers. What platform would you use? (Specially programming language and Database). I would be grateful if you could explain about your reasons. <comment><USER2> I would suggest any programming that you are comfortable with and use a NoSQL Database.

You can use Erlang because is not only about scalability but mostly about:

reliability

soft real-time characteristics (enabled by soft real-time GC which is possible because immutability [no cycles] and share nothing and so)

performance in concurrent tasks (cheap task switch, cheap process spawn, actors model, ...)

scalability - debatable in current state , but rapidly evolving

</comment><comment><USER3> Anything that you are familiar with as the problem statement doesn't seems to be complex and hence can be easily done on any web platform

</comment><comment><USER4> Erlang.</comment>


The Indie Tech Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://indietech.org

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good, clear thinking here. The point about being design-led is very important -- usability and user experience is paramount and is the main area where OSS has failed.

Still, I think you're going to need businesses around this. Many things are simply far too hard and resource-intensive for hobbyists and small indy projects, and not everything can be made _completely_ distributed without sacrificing usability. (See: CAP theorem)

What we _really_ need are a new breed of Internet businesses with business models that put the user first (again), businesses whose model is _not_ surveillance or "eyeball farming" but delivering value to the primary customer. I also think that such businesses will need, to have such credibility, strong legal statements of privacy and user-control in their EULAs. Being open source is also a good thing, and is not mutually exclusive with having a business model.</comment>


'Second Earth' found, 20 light years away - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/25/starsgalaxiesandplanets.spaceexploration <comment><USER2> > "We wouldn't be surprised if there is life on this planet," said Stephane > Udry, an astronomer on the project at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.

I sincerely hope we find definite proof within my lifetime.

<comment><USER3> The possibility excites me. I wonder what the sociological consequences will be if we can conclude that we are not alone in the galaxy.

<comment><USER4> Interesting...This possibility fills me with profound dread. People meeting other unknown alien people has happened in this planet in the near history _so_ many times. And not in a single one of those meetings was there anything to feel mushy about. It was blood all the way. Pizarro and Atahualpa didn't sit together and play chess over a hot cup of coffee and exchange notes on their childhood crushes.

<comment><USER5> Bonus question:

Let's say you run across an alien during a walk in the woods. How could you ever tell whether the alien was friendly or not? Aliens might act friendly, right up until the time they put you in the big alien stew pot. Likewise, friendly aliens might use deadly force and extreme caution to make sure you pose no threat. Would you want to be sending "Howdy There! We're new in the block! Drop by for some free pizza!" messages to a civilization 20 light years away?

<comment><USER4> Long answer to bonus question has already been written and published. "Speaker for the dead" by Orson Scott Card. I am restraining myself from giving a summary here. I don't want to spoil your couple of weekends spent well. Be sure to read the introduction as well.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. It's in my stack. I gave up sometime during the second Ender book, but I'll give this one a read.

<comment><USER6> Speaker for the dead _is_ the second ender book. No?

<comment><USER5> Gee yep. Sure enough (sheepish grin)

I must have stopped reading it fairly early, because looking at the cover I don't remember any of it. I remember the first book, however -- that super guy they brought back for Ender's training and the planet and all. It's been a few years, though. Good thing I kept all the books.

Apologies for the poor memory.

<comment><USER7> I think Orson Scott Card wrote "Speaker for the Dead" first and decided he needed another book just to set up the backstory. That book became Ender's Game, and he found it a bit ironic that he's remembered more for the prequel than the book he really felt compelled to write.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A relevant quote that stuck to my mind from the movie "contact":

"Young Ellie: Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?

Ted Arroway: I don't know, Sparks. But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space."

<comment><USER9> Heh... I wonder how many people don't even know that _Contact_ was originally a book by Carl Sagan. Although the movie was more true to the book than most, the book was much better than the movie, as is usually the case.

<comment><USER6> The last 2 pages is the best part, and there's no way it could get into a movie.

<comment><USER10> Which are?

<comment><USER2> When Ellie (or is it another scientist?) finds a message from God buried deep inside Pi.

<comment><USER6> _"The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle--another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for._

<http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/contact.shtml>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool!

I thought the technology wasn't ready for all of the claims the article makes. An atmosphere? Rocky world? If they're able to do this now, imagine what it'll be like with the James Webb scope NASA is putting up in a few years.

And if we ever do discover intelligent ET in our lifetime, perhaps a good way to get to know each civilization is to hook up our internets. Or then again, maybe that's an awful idea.

<comment><USER11> Does anyone know if quantum entanglement has been proven enough to allow for at least a glimpse of being able to make data transmission occur at "faster than the speed of light"?

I mean, if a quantum object represents a bit, and gets flipped here; and its counterpart is on... Mars; the counterpart should get flipped instantly, no?

<comment><USER12> There is no flipping of data it's more like you hand 2 people (Bob and Ted) a box with the same number in it. They walk to other sides of the world and then Ted opens his box. As soon as Ted opens their box they know what is in the other box but that has nothing to do with the speed of light and there is no way for Ted to use what he knows about the number in Bob's box to send Bob new information.

<comment><USER13> That's not quite the right analogy -- it misses the point a bit. In that analogy the two numbers have definite values right from the start -- they're just ordinary boxes with ordinary numbers written in them. In a more quantum mechanical analogy, the numbers inside the boxes would be undetermined until the observation was made, and yet you would always find that the boxes had the same number inside, even if they were opened simultaneously and many light years away from each other.

Under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there is in fact some kind of spooky "instantaneous" communication going on between the particles -- one of them needs to tell the other "oh no, my wavefunction has just collapsed in such-and-such a basis and your value now has to be |X>".

Complicating this even further is the fact that relativity tells us there's no such thing as "simultaneity" when we're talking about things happening at different points in space, and so while it looks to one observer like the faster-than-light signal must have gone from Ted's box to Bob's box, to an observer moving relative to the first observer it might look like the faster- than-light signal actually went from Bob's to Ted's.

Some other interpetations of quantum mechanics (in particular, no-collapse aka "many worlds" interpretations) this faster-than-light signalling doesn't occur... though these interpretations have other counter-intuitive features instead.

Even if there _is_ faster-than-light signalling between particles, though, you still can't use this to send a message, because the information you get is always just a random string of bits -- there's no way to actually send useful information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is no way that planet can ever support any kind of civilization. With a 13 day year, in less than 300 days they can drink legally!

Or maybe I'm confused about where to draw the line with chauvinism. (shrug)

<comment><USER15> That's an interesting point. Then depending on the tilt of their planet, seasons go full cycle in about two weeks. I wonder what implications that has for the equivalent of photosynthetic life there. Are they "awake" and soaking up the sun for about a week before "sleeping" the second? Or do they just kinda ride it out?

That would also influence the "animals" (i.e. non-photosynthetic life) there and its behaviors.

That's all assuming they get energy from the sun. Maybe they can produce energy in other ways.

<comment><USER16> Vernor Vinge had an excellent novel named "A Deepness in the Sky" that dealt with the development of intelligent life on a planet whose star would extinguish and re-ignite itself predictably. Something like 3 decades of ignition and then 7 or 8 decades of darkness. The dominant life form was a spider-like being that could hibernate and ride out the darkness by creating a "deepness" (essentially a den).

Great book, with interesting insights about unusual planetary configurations with life. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes hard science fiction.

<comment><USER17> The on-off star spent 215 years off, according to Wikipedia.

A Fire Upon the Deep, set in the same universe, is excellent too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why do people (sci-fi writers and scientists alike) generally seem to assume that extra-terrestrial life would be Earth-like life in Earth-like conditions?

</comment><comment><USER19> You know, it's funny, I work with one of the competing teams (the best one.) Every time I hear about planet-hunting in the news, I think to my self, "screw startups." :)

</comment><comment><USER20> I really don't want to crash this party, but has anyone taken a look at the date of the new? It isn't exactly..."new".

<comment><USER21> That's crazy. I used to think if anything like this happened, I'd be one of the first to be aware. I guess not. O.o

<comment><USER19> Well,

To be fair, there's a huge PR machine behind these kinds of discoveries. In other words, there's fuzz associated with a planet being an "earth analog." There will be more and more "earth like" planets discovered in the future.

I mean, we've only discovered 212 extra-solar planets so there's plenty more to find :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> BTW, if you have $1M to donate (or some fraction greater than 10%) I can put you in contact with the right people.

Seriously, depending on how much you give, your name might go on one of the most important telescopes in the world.... maybe you could even name the first true earth analog :)

Pretty good deal.

</comment><comment><USER22> If we're accepted to their YC clone, that would be a sign of intelligent life.

</comment><comment><USER23> It would be awesome to discover intelligent life, I think that realizing that we are not alone in the universe will make us all think about being part of the world and not just being some country's citizens.

<comment><USER14> If it takes that to get us to that mindset, then we'll be in real trouble when we need to all think about being part of the universe and not just some planet's citizens.

<comment><USER23> Maybe when we discover intelligent life in another universe. :P

<comment><USER20> I hope aliens know the trick to cheat death, because I'd sure love to see that discovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was gasping. I'm in shock. I used to dream about something like this. =)

</comment><comment><USER24> I know I am moving. I am almost sure that there is less evil, hatred, jealousy, envy and competition anywhere outside this world.

</comment><comment><USER25> Clearly God is testing our faith with such tantalizing discoveries.

What will those Satan-worshipping scientists think up next?</comment>


Apple-Picking Robot Prepares to Compete for Farm Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604303/apple-picking-robot-prepares-to-compete-for-farm-jobs/ <comment><USER2> Not the "Apple" / "Robot" / "Jobs" headline I was hoping for</comment>


Tell HN: It might be a good time to change your twitter password. - <AUTHOR>

Something odd seems to be going on with twitter. Accounts are posting a message that says "Today was so exciting! Made $124 in 20 minutes! if ur interested, go read: [spam link]"
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22today%20was%20so%22
The posts started a few hours ago, stopped for a while, and just recently started again. It may be that a 3rd party service was compromised, so if you've given your twitter credentials to another web site, it's worth the time to change your password. The volume (many thousands of accounts, including people I know who would not be inclined to sell posts) and nature of the posts seems to rule out the possibility of a paid posting service. <comment><USER2> Here's a question I've had for a while now. It may sound naive, but I'll ask it anyway: Given the way Twitter is set up to track current trends, shouldn't it be really easy for them to identify when one identical tweet gets repeated hundreds or thousands of times at once? Obviously sometimes such tweets are legit (especially in the case of retweets) but it seems like this should be fairly easy to flag and delete quickly.

<comment><USER3> They're suspending people's accounts pretty quickly if they tweet the google cash scam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The spam points to a site that says it was "As seen on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CNBC, and As Seen on TV"... With such credentials, how could it not be legit? Plus it only costs $1.95 to get started!

/sarcasm

</comment><comment><USER5> I was under the impression that all the major social APIs (facebook connect, twitter, etc...) terms of service prevent 3rd party services from storing any data for more than 24h?

<comment><USER6> "Thou shalt not" is not a security policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know of atleast one person whose account has been compromised. He swears he didn't give out his creds to any service. My guess is this is a 0-day being exploited

<comment><USER8> I remember this being discussed at Defcon. Wouldn't surprise me if someone managed to script a JavaScript DDoS worm. It really wouldn't be too hard to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I first saw this about a week ago, so it has been happening for some time now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Could be a cross site scripting vulnerability in twitter, doesn't necessarily mean that those users passwords have been compromised...but you can never be too safe!

<comment><USER11> Well lets assume for a second that it is instead a service that got compromised... unless you use a bad service that saves your password, they are using auth tokens which may not necessarily stop working just because you change your password.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would also beware of friending really cute girls that friend you first. And here I thought they were actually interested in my mind...

<comment><USER13> Yeah, it turns out they were only interested in my body all along...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Might just be an affiliate spamming Twitter. You should complain to the advertiser they are running the offer with- they will get kicked off and not paid for spamming/noncompliance.

</comment><comment><USER15> weird. I changed my twitter password and something went crazy. I tried starting my tweetdeck, it failed to connect for obvious reasons. It had my old password. After this, twitter would not allow me to log in again. Here is what i see on twitter screen: Locked out! We've temporarily locked your account after too many failed attempts to sign in. Please chillax for a few, then try again.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, Tweetdeck or something else that used the old password got your account locked out. This happened to me! You can get around it by going to <http://help.twitter.com/portal> and using the log in. It allows you to login even if you are locked out, and if you login there apparently it sets up a session or cookie that logs you into the main site. Pretty much makes the lockout thing useless!

<comment><USER17> Seems that doesn't even work anymore...Twitter seems to be completely dead...anyone else having trouble accessing it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Probably just (another) cross-site scripting exploit</comment>


Prometheus 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://prometheus.io/blog/2017/11/08/announcing-prometheus-2-0/ <comment><USER2> The TimescaleDB crew built a Prometheus-PG adapter [1]. TimescaleDB, and consequently Postgres, is an option I am exploring. Does a developer realize any benefits of 2.0 if the Prometheus database isn't used as a backend?

[1] [https://github.com/timescale/prometheus-postgresql- adapter](https://github.com/timescale/prometheus-postgresql-adapter)

<comment><USER3> I am not too familiar with the PG-TimescaleDB adapter, but the storage engine rewrite in Prometheus was definitely the most important improvement in Prometheus 2.0.

There are other changes than the storage though that are outlined in the migration guide: [https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/migration/](https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/migration/)

* Minor PromQL changes (mainly removals of deprecated features)

* Staleness handling (not sure if the TimescaleDB storage handles this correctly, as it relies on storing a special NaN value bit-wise correctly for marking series stale)

* New rule file format is now YAML and supports per-group evaluation intervals and serialization of rule executions within one group (in case of data dependencies)

* Other minor bits

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really psyched to see this drop, the new engines performance looks amazing. And performance was already pretty stellar to start with!

Looks like Prometheus is also now the most popular tsdb on github!

The grafana team is working quite heavily on our Prometheus integrations, with some major recent improvements to the query editor in 4.6. We have many more plans to work even more tightly with the project.

Kudos to the Prometheus team!

</comment><comment><USER5> I was curious what this is, so I clicked on it. I spent around 30 seconds scanning the homepage and this is my observation: Uses data to make insights.

What kind of data? I have no clue. How? Not the faintest.

Anyway, you might want to add a portion to describe what it is for us scrubs that haven't a clue. Possibly a demo page?

<comment><USER6> Prometheus is pretty popular in this community as a monitoring and metrics server, which is why this announcement got upvoted so much even if it lacks a general introduction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No good migration story for existing data, that'll hurt us quite a lot. :(

<comment><USER3> Yeah, as Prometheus's local storage is meant more as a transient / non-durable metrics store, the only current way to migrate while simultaneously accessing old and new data is to run both the old and new servers and have the new one read old data from the other one via the remote-read integration.

Someone could write a tool to do a full migration of the old storage format to the new one, but the formats are completely different and at least in the naive version of such tooling, that would have to happen offline and take a very long time to run for large storages.

EDIT: If you would like to fund development of such a tool, let us know :)

<comment><USER7> > EDIT: If you would like to fund development of such a tool, let us know :)

We're too small for that, unfortunately. Someone said at DockerCon that migrating large (multi-TB) stores would take a long time; this doesn't apply to us, we have only ~0.1 TB perf data as of now.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, do you care about migrating the data online, or would a brief Prometheus downtime (and thus gap in data) be ok?

<comment><USER7> Downtime would be acceptable I think, especially because we could just launch a separate instance of Prom while the main one is being migrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does this storage engine onpar with influxdb ?

<comment> will-not-smith Nope, not on par.

While there is no direct comparison to InfluxDB in the article, look at the disk usage and (more importantly) disk I/O utilization, which is indistinguishable from zero on the graph, whereas before it was at 20-30% with the same load.

So not on par. Much, much better.

(Of course, Prometheus and InfluxDB are not perfect substitutes for one another, so there's much more to look at than just storage engine performance.)

<comment><AUTHOR> The third version of the InfluxDB database is basically the same core design as Prometheus's third database version which 2.0 uses. I'd expect performance to be broadly similar, maybe a little better with Prometheus as we can take advantage of the characteristics of our domain.

We do have a comparison to Influx on our website: [https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/#promethe...](https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/#prometheus- vs.-influxdb) Which is the right choice really depends on the use case. If you're doing metrics-based operational monitoring, Prometheus is generally best.

Disclaimer: Prometheus developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Literally yesterday I did an install of 1.8.2 after seeing 2.x still in beta. Time to upgrade.

Congrats to the Prometheus team.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone need to view metrics older than 2 weeks? What's your solution? I feel it's odd if you rely on a different software, e.g. for the most recent data, use Prometheus, and for older data, use something else. What if I want to compare the same metric in the last 4 weeks?

<comment><USER11> Multi-year projections? Client of ours has busy periods every year, and they want year-by-year comparisons. They expect/pay us to keep metrics (although heavily compressed/condensed) of the last 5 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How Prometheus compares to Splunk?

<comment><AUTHOR> Splunk is a event logging system, compared to Prometheus which is metrics based. You need both types of systems to be able to properly observe your systems, they're complementary.

<comment><USER13> > Splunk is a event logging system, compared to Prometheus which is metrics > based. You need both types of systems to be able to properly observe your > systems, they're complementary.

While this is the traditional way of looking at them, I strongly disagree that metrics and logs are different toolsets, or that you would need both of them in order to properly observe your systems.

I've written and spoken about this approach before: [https://medium.com/@chimeracoder/dont-read-your- logs-13586c7...](https://medium.com/@chimeracoder/dont-read-your- logs-13586c790202) and [https://vimeo.com/221049715](https://vimeo.com/221049715)

<comment><AUTHOR> > I strongly disagree that metrics and logs are different toolsets, or that > you would need both of them in order to properly observe your systems.

And from the link:

> Logging can be useful for some purposes. However, it's rare that they're the > only tool for monitoring your code. And it's even rarer that they're the > best tool.

Metrics are a tool that take a different approach to logs, once you get beyond small systems you need both. I talked about this earlier in the year: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCBGyLRJ1qo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCBGyLRJ1qo)

<comment><USER13> > Metrics are a tool that take a different approach to logs, once you get > beyond small systems you need both. I talked about this earlier in the year:

Quite the opposite - the "some purposes" I'm talking about are precisely the small scale. As scale grows, the use case of logs and metrics converges, and metrics become a strictly better tool.

<comment><USER14> Not for high cardinality events like what happened to a particular user during a single session. Metrics will never help with that type of problem.

<comment><USER13> > Not for high cardinality events like what happened to a particular user > during a single session. Metrics will never help with that type of problem.

No, and as I explain in both that article and the video, logs aren't the best solution for that use case either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does Prometheus 2 still use the unmaintained charting library "flot charts" ?

[http://www.flotcharts.org/](http://www.flotcharts.org/)

No commits since 2014. Unfortunately, because it's a great chart library (actually probably the best free one), only the reliance on JQuery isn't that fashionable.

Edit: oh, it was Grafana and Kibana that used Flot charts (at least when I tried it two years ago, maybe things have changed) quick Google (2014): [https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/222](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/222)

<comment><USER3> No, we never used flot charts. We're using Rickshaw since the beginning: [http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/](http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/)

It was unmaintained for a while, but now it seems there've been commits in the recent past again. However, for real dashboarding (not just simple ad-hoc queries), we recommend using Grafana anyway.</comment></comment>


Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims as 'Entirely Willing' - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing <comment><USER3> I think his words are being misrepresented.

He said this: " Minsky had sex with one of Epstein's harem [...] Let's presume that was true [...] We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates. [...] "

I have no clue how plausible this scenario is, but I don't see any reason to infer anything about the character of Stallman based on him suggesting it.

<comment><USER4> Well you can infer things about his character based on his support of pedophilia in general.

> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The > arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't > voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea > that their little baby is maturing.

> There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing > participation in pedophilia hurts children.

These are not the types of statements a non pedophile would make. People who are not pedophile's don't randomly argue that pedophilia is not harmful.

<comment><USER5> where the hell did he make those statements?

<comment><USER6> [https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may- aug.html#05%20Jun...](https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may- aug.html#05%20June%202006%20%28Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party%29)

[https://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-nov- feb.html#04_Janua...](https://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-nov- feb.html#04_January_2013_%28Pedophilia%29)

Stallman has (several) pages on his website where he shares his political views and takes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IMO, all aspects of this subject are FUBAR beyond belief. Anyone who touches it from any side is unlikely to have any positive results.

I think the real mistake here that rms made was to try to apply any form of logic to what is a highly emotionally charged situation, and especially to try to do that in any kind of a shared forum.

And yes, I am fully aware of the irony of my doing the same thing here.

I've had my disagreements with rms over the years on certain issues, but frankly, I think he should have been smarter than this.

<comment><USER8> His applying logic clearly revealed his appalling views on the matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suppose Mr. Stallman has never heard of "grooming." It's entirely possible they were "willing" in an denotative sense of the word, but given maleability of the young mind it's not exactly informed and willing consent as between two standard adults.

There's a reason teachers in many states cannot have relations with former students no matter the age of consent and of those involved.

<comment><USER10> > two standard adults

But doesn't using a phrase like this open up the very matter that Stallman is trying to implore the forum to consider? "Standard adults" is not concrete language.

Can someone be a "standard adult" at 17? I don't know. I do know that I (and everyone I know) was having sex at 17. I'm male (and white, and middle-class), so my surface for being victimized in this way is much different from the victim in this case. But I think Stallman's point is that calling this "rape" merely because of the jurisdiction in which it happened serves to trivialize the word "rape" rather than add clarity to Epstein's conduct.

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_North_Ameri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_North_America#Virgin_Islands_\(United_States\)) says that a 17 year old is not a "standard adult" when it comes to sex.

> I do know that I (and everyone I know) was having sex at 17.

Quoting the link:

"There is however a close-in-age exemption that allows minors 16 and 17 years old to consent with someone no more than five years older than themselves and minors 13 to 15 years old to consent with one another, but not with anyone 16 or over"

> Stallman's point is that calling this "rape" merely because of the > jurisdiction in which it happened serves to trivialize the word "rape"

The relevant crime is "rape in the second degree", so the term "rape" is the correct description.

Now, Stallman disagrees with that categorization. But without knowing what Stallman's definition of "rape" \- and knowing that his description of "sexual assault" doesn't reflect an understanding of the legal definition - it comes across like he is minimizing what "rape" means by rejecting some of its definitions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Treading carefully here...

It does not appear to me that Stallman is defending what we now know of Epstein's abhorrent conduct. Instead, he's engaging in a very reasonable debate about the terminology of accusations like these.

It's possible that I'm misreading this whole thing - if that's true, please point it out. But the article seems to indicate that the worst of Stallman's remarks are here:

<unknown>: Giuffre was 17 at the time; this makes it __rape__ in the Virgin Islands

<Stallman>:

Does it really? I think it is morally absurd to define 'rape' in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.

I think the existence of a dispute about that supports my point that the term 'sexual assault' is slippery, so we ought to use more concrete terms when accusing anyone.

\---- On this specific passage (and again, there may be other bad stuff I'm not seeing), I basically agree with Stallman. Rape is a serious, heinous offense to nature. It is morally absurd - and insensitive to victims - <USER2> define it as the person to whom Stallman is responding is apparently trying to do.

The USA is a place of rampant sexism and obsession with alcohol (particularly its use as a date-rape drug, although for some reason we don't call it that). Rape is disgustingly commonplace. Talking about the laws of the Virgin Islands as they apply to a 17-year-old is a great example of distraction from this reality.

<comment><USER11> His definition of "sexual assault" doesn't match with the legal definition. Not by a long shot.

It is not a reasonable debate about the terminology to throw away all current definitions and create new ones, without at least explaining why the current one is wrong.

<comment><USER12> I don't even follow the internal logic of that message. It's a reply to somebody applying a legal term and pointing out alleged specifics that seem to match with it's definition. And his rebuttal is an outright refusal of two of the main criteria in the legal sense (IANAL but victim's age and location of the alleged crime seem to be pretty relevant), mixed with a switch to a "dispute" about the definition of another term that a bygone generation takes issue with.

<comment><USER13> I agree. There's a bunch of people who don't seem to know what the word "assault" actually means, and who think it means "violent force is used".

<comment><USER14> This is likely because the word "assault" is often used in conjunction with "battery", so there is a very understandable mental association.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always find it weird that we care about what software engineers think about things completely unrelated to software engineers.

Why do we care what Richard Stallman thinks about Epstein? Why does his experience with GNU and Hurd immediately make him expert about human trafficking?

<comment><USER16> This wasn't about Epstein. It was about Marvin Minsky who was a director of the MIT AI lab where Stallman started his ideas about software freedom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's a hard yikes from me.

Be careful before posting a reply to this one... There are many subjects that will naturally devolve into a witch hunt if you go even slightly off script... even if you're just playing devils advocate.

In a company context I would not count on other people to give you the benefit of the doubt for not immediately raising pitch forks when something gets controversial. The needs of the loudest and most upset outweigh the thoughts of the few.

I can see this getting ugly...

</comment><comment><USER18> Woke af</comment>


Ask HN: Startup employee: sell vested options to angel investor - <AUTHOR>

Hello all,<p>I am working at a tech startup and have some portion of vested options that belong to me.  I recently have some financial difficulties and would like to know if I can trade my vested option in a secondary market or something to some angel investors who are also interested in my current company.  The extra bit of cash might help me in the next few months and would like to know how I can establish that.  Any advice? <comment><USER2> Probably not. Your employee stock agreement probably requires company approval for transfers, and unless you're at a large company that already has a liquid market for its equity, that approval will not be granted.

<comment><USER3> Have provisions like that been held up in court? It seems to go against the strong stockholder laws in Delaware. Not being able to sell your shares is probably the most important right there is.

<comment><USER2> Yes. Control and transferability restrictions are basic corporate governance.

We're talking about private companies, not public ones. Easy liquidity is _not_ an important feature of closely-held private company stock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before you exercise, make sure you are familiar with the Alternative Minimal Tax and how exercising Stock Options affect it. See [https://www.wework.com/magazine/knowledge/startup-equity- und...](https://www.wework.com/magazine/knowledge/startup-equity-understand- amt-exercising-options/) and [https://gigaom.com/2011/06/05/5-mistakes-you- cant-afford-to-...](https://gigaom.com/2011/06/05/5-mistakes-you-cant-afford- to-make-with-stock-options/) (especially the David Weekly at the bottom). Some people went bankrupt for that. Also check the rules on ISO (I supposed you have ISO options).

Then I think the best you can do is to sell the right to own the stocks when you will be able to sell them according to your stock plan. In practice you cannot sell the stock now but you can have a contract with a person that you will sell them as soon as you can. Or something like that...

On how to find somebody willing to buy them, I am not sure. Common stocks are considered almost worthless by a lot of investors. There are also some information about preference in round of funding etc, that a sophisticated investor would like to know but it is not always public knowledge outside of the board.

Before Facebook IPO I know SecondMarket was the place. I am actually curious about the options here.

</comment><comment><USER5> Consider talking to the company about it. If they're doing well, (and aren't concerned you might leave) they might be interested in buying the options back.

</comment><comment><USER6> Read your purchase agreement, employment contract, articles of incorporation, buy/sell agreement etc. It is common for the circumstances for the transfer of shares to be established to handle this sort of situation because founders don't want just anyone owning shares. If something is unclear, consult an attorney.

One common way of handling these situations is for the founders or the company or other employees to purchase the shares. A loan with the shares as collateral is another possibility.

Keep in mind that selling shares may be viewed as a lack of faith in the company [likewise if the founders are not interested in reacquiring your shares.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER7> If the company is doing well enough that outside parties would be interested in getting in in such an unusual way maybe it is time to ask for a raise?

</comment><comment><USER8> While you likely can't transfer ownership of your shares, you can take a loan out on the sell value of those shares at some predetermined later date. The legalities are somewhat sticky, but it is possible.</comment>


Show HN: My New Years hack, a virtual happiness jar that you can text - <AUTHOR> http://happinessjar.com

<comment><USER2> From the instructions / about section:

what is this? sometimes we get carried away with the big 'important' things in life and forget how many happy minutes and seconds we have had.

this is your happiness jar. use it to keep track of every bubble bath you take, every puppy you pet. use it to retrieve sweetness when you're a bit sour.

give us your phone number and we'll store every text you send us in your jar. give us your email address and at the end of the year happy memories will fill your inbox.

<comment><USER3> This is an awesome concept, but I believe the time of the jar's release should be tweakable. For instance, once every 6 months or once every 3 months, or so.

Also consider adding a way to send it texts without a phone... not everyone lives in the US.

<comment><USER4> I'd like it to send me a random item from the jar everyday. A daily reminder of the awesome stuff that my life is filled with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Site seems to be down now; just displaying "error".

</comment><comment><USER6> Rendering is a little funky in Firefox 17.0.1, Win7.

[1] <http://idzr.org/tcj2>

<comment><USER7> Looks like the fonts weren't loaded or some other component. The server seems be quite overloaded right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats on building a great idea! Cheers!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Server down :(. Working on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry guys, my free ec2 micro has too little RAM to deal with the load :(. For those who already signed up, it'll be up again tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now the page says:

> error

Somehow that also makes sense

</comment><comment><USER10> Very nicely designed, but it needs an About section :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Would be nice to change the timezone.

</comment><comment><USER12> the page shows "error".

</comment><comment><USER13> site giving an error.</comment>


If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/if-everyone-ate-beans-instead-of-beef/535536/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> Everyone always talks about supporting the environment through EVs, recycling, taking public transport, etc. While all of those are great and definitely encouraged, it's interesting how little people think about the 10x impact a change in their diet can make.</comment>


Software engineering: UK vs Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://80000hours.org/blog/26-software-engineering-britain-vs-silicon-valley <comment><USER2> well said.

I'm an american who has been to London maybe twenty times. I have noticed the difference in pay rate. London has very similar pay rate to places like Austin or Boulder which are about 30% less in cost of living.

I would guess that Silicon Valley one would make about 25%-40% more than London for top paying CS jobs with a very similar cost of living</comment>


FarmVille for real in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=www.meine-ernte.de&act=url

<comment><AUTHOR> I've submitted the translation for convenience. Didn't mean to confuse.

</comment><comment><USER2> This has absolutely nothing to do with Farmville for many reasons, though the most obvious is that you are actually raising real food. If I understood the point of the site correctly, it is essentially a coop farm with the ability to sign up on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> What has this got to do with Farmville? You rent a piece of land for the season, and get help planting crops. This is like a computer game... how?

This is novel and intereseting...how?

<comment><USER4> Indeed, this is not what I expected. I expected something with a web GUI. Then I remembered I've already seen this:

<http://www.springwise.com/food_beverage/delmioorto/>

You choose what to grow with a GUI, someone grows it for you, picks it and delivers it to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a garden there, AMA (Ask Me Anything)</comment>