Getting Up to Speed - <AUTHOR>

I learned XHTML and CSS in the mid-late 90s, back when Zeldman.com, K10k.com and Waferbaby.com were really popular. I got into systems software engineering not long after that, and haven't really looked back. Now, the web has come a long way since the pre-Ajax days, and I feel it would be smart to develop at least a working knowledge of the fundamental web technologies.<p>So, what, in your opinion, are those fundamental technologies, and in what order do you propose they be learned? <comment><USER2> Few tips from someone who started in the dot com bubble and had to adjust during the years:

\- prefer [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/) over w3schools

\- Get to know Bootstrap / Zorb / grid base layouts

\- Understand responsive design

\- the 2 above combined means - no more table layout ([http://giveupandusecss.com/](http://giveupandusecss.com/))

\- DOCTYPE really matters - don't go into quirks mode (no more table height="100%"...

\- jQuery of course, and then Angular.js / React.js / Ember.js (and perhaps also Backbone.js)

\- Any of the following back end stacks - Rails, Django, Play, Node.js/express (depending on which language you prefer, Ruby, Python, Scala/Java, JavaScript)

\- SQL (Postgre / MariaDB / MySQL) and MongoDB won't hurt

\- Tooling - Get to know Github, Heroku, AWS etc...

\- Understand that you can do almost anything with JavaScript nowadays, it can get to about 1/2 the speed of native code now and improving every day.

\- Understand that you can do almost anything with pure CSS nowadays, animations, drawing, 3D. e.g. no more image buttons.

\- Flash and Applets are dead (de facto) HTML5 can do everything you needed one of these before (cameras, sound, video, chats, sockets, animation, 3D, really, anything)

\- You can use any font you want (webfonts)

\- XML / SOAP / XSD stayed in the enterprise world, the web / SaaS world seems to have favored the less strict / more dynamic REST / JSON approach

\- Speaking of REST. learn REST, the HTTP verbs and how to design an API

\- Understand JS templates, and client side MVC, and that your backend is becoming more of an API (that can serve both mobile apps and web apps as one). e.g. no more JSP / PHP mess of business logic bundled with presentation logic.

\- Understand that your JS code base is going to be much bigger, and learn technologies that will help you such as - TypeScript / CoffeeScript / Dart, AMD / CommonJS / Browserify, Bower / Ender. Grunt / Yeoman. I know it sounds like a big mess of buzzwords, but there are tons of tools out there to help you organize your client side code (also look at SCSS and Compass to help with organizing your CSS and reduce boilerplate)

this is my short list, but in the end as other said, it's all boils down to HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and HTTP... the rest are just syntactic sugars...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the fundamental technologies of the web are HTTP, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 and should be learned in that order.

<comment><USER4> What's behind the order?

I would have thought HTML5 -> CSS3 -> Javascript

Get the markup right, then make it look nice, then make it functional. Basically learning in order of how pages are created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It kind of depends what you're going to use those technologies for (i.e. what kind of webapp you want to build), but you can learn a lot about web technologies by building a simple blog, if you don't have something particular in mind. That will give you a direct, quick exposure to both backend and frontend technologies. Or you can search for tutorials and demos, then hack them to do more.

I'm sure others will have great suggestions, so I'll pitch a few to start with (I don't have a particular ordering in mind):

Frontend:

Javascript (tons of great books and online resources out there, e.g. MDN and Douglas Crockford: [http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html);](http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html\);) HTML5 ([http://www.html5rocks.com/en/);](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/\);) CSS3

Backend:

SQL (yes, this isn't really new technology); NoSql or something similar; Some kind of web framework, e.g. Ruby on Rails, which will provide you the interface between database and frontend (and much more); Some familiarity with web servers (just because you have to worry about that for your web framework)

Apologies in advance if I put the technologies in the wrong group...

</comment><comment><USER6> There are quite a few decent websites which can teach you and help to understand those technologies, e.g.: [http://teamtreehouse.com/](http://teamtreehouse.com/) [https://www.codeschool.com/](https://www.codeschool.com/)

Would take one of the paths for web developer.

<comment><USER7> I'm partial to [http://www.bentobox.io/](http://www.bentobox.io/)</comment></comment>


YC Winter 2020 Interview Invites - <AUTHOR> Today is the day interview invites are sent out. Anyone who applied get one yet? (I've not) <comment><USER2> Calm down, people. Based on this reddit thread ([https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/dilnii/yc_w202...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/dilnii/yc_w2020_response_thread/?sort=new)), the previous couple of batches was notified of results sometime around midnight PST. So sit back and wait. It's gonna be a long night.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/dglbu3/help_fo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/dglbu3/help_for_w20_applicants/)

this is another thread, some people got video interviews days ago, getting nervous

</comment><comment><USER4> Any India based startup recieved email yet? Yc is conducting interviews in bangolore for the upcoming batch.

<comment><USER5> Yes, just received the email, but we are not selected for interview :( What about you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are all the interview invites sent out on the same day or from now to December?

<comment><USER7> Upto 23:59 today, I believe....

<comment><USER8> I think this is accurate based on what YC alumns say.

<comment><USER7> Omg I just realized it's only 5pm in the Bay Area, isn't it? Never ending day lol

<comment><AUTHOR> My normal minute-by-minute email checking is REAL BAD right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For rejection emails, I think it might not be sent until tomorrow morning.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there any live chat with the startups that applied like last time?

</comment><comment><USER11> For those accepted, what date is your interview?

</comment><comment><USER8> Got invited to the interview! All the best to everyone!

<comment><USER12> Congrats!!

<comment><USER8> Thanks much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a slack group like previous batches?

</comment><comment><USER9> Those who got accepted already got it.

<comment><USER14> Are you sure?

<comment><USER9> How can one be sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We need to wait for another 3 hours!!!

</comment><comment><USER12> Nothing yet

Anyone know if decline emails went out ?

</comment><comment><USER14> Do all the emails go out at once?

</comment><comment><USER8> So... how's the weather?

</comment><comment><USER16> guys do you know what time y combinator sends invites?

</comment><comment><USER17> Nothing here either

</comment><comment><USER9> Not accepted :(

</comment><comment><USER18> Still waiting

</comment><comment><USER19> Nothing here

</comment><comment><USER14> Nothing yet

</comment><comment><USER20> Not yet

</comment><comment><USER7> Same here

</comment><comment><USER21> NOT YET

</comment><comment><USER22> I have not

<comment><USER8> Me neither.

<comment><USER23> Same

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> we have nt get email :(

</comment><comment><USER25> any updates???

</comment><comment><USER3> nothing here

</comment><comment><USER26> not me</comment>


Microsoft deletes Windows 10 nagware from Windows 7 and 8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/22/microsoft_deletes_windows_10_nagware_from_windows_7_and_8/ <comment><USER2> I have a new touch screen Windows 10 machine but as a dev the next upgrade for my old Windows 7 machine will be to Linux.

<comment><USER3> At this point the only thing that keeps me on Windows are the games.</comment></comment>


Why being honest matters the horrors of dealing with LinkedIN support - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/why-being-honest-matters-the-horrors-of-dealing-with-linkedin-support-dd30d4e9bcc7#.a5wjmdjhv <comment><USER2> > To LinkedIN support: "Primum non nocere"

Very amusing - nice use of Latin.</comment>


Why Lisp Will Never Win (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/notes.html#sl-39 <comment><USER2> _com.lang.lisp_ isn't "the Lisp community". There may be reasons to suspect "Lisp will never win", but _comp.lang.lisp_ has nothing to do with them.

Personally, I don't even know what it means for a language to 'win'. I would be fine with Lisp/Scheme being marginally popular and acceptable when you're in the company of clever colleagues that could reasonably be expected to grok Lisp after a short while. Nevertheless it isn't. The reasons why _that_ is currently the case would go a longer way towards explaining why that may never be the case.

<comment><USER3> I think the general attitude of lispers is frequently a large turn off. There is a lot of elitism, but it is often a needy Mensa-like elitism. There is almost a hidden plea attached "please respect us as the smartest" and the problem is, of course, that they can't point to any tangible, quantifiable method for gauging intelligence with respect to a language. I guess PG's "let's see if anyone is using it in 50 years" is a good measure in some case, but that implies that lisp as a language is less of a "computer language" (e.g. a language that is made for making machines do what we humans want them to) and more of an artform or philosophical/mathematical depiction of some deeper truth obscured to normal people.

I think this is ultimately always a problem between ultra-smart people who live in something of an abstracted world that frequently approaches fantasy and the reality of industry, which generally doesn't care about how pretty something is unless someone will buy it because it is pretty. That's a pretty large gap, and, while in my opinion there is no need for arrogance, it is pretty clear why most of the smartest people in history end up on the former side of that divide. They want to contemplate some sort of eternal idea which usually they ascribe beauty to (e.g. Bohr, Einstein, etc.) -- and yet hackers, unlike theoretical physicists, are halfway between the people probing the mysteries of the universe and those putting together blueprints for the atom bomb.

In my opinion that's just life. Einstein hated the bomb and rightly so in my opinion -- but that doesn't mean that it was any less a necessity for the Manhattan project to go forward. The sad thing, however, is that lots of brilliant people trying to navigate this divide end up with a huge chip on their shoulder. PG talks about this in H&P; the jocks were popular and (surprise!) the nerds were not. So you go out and get a few million and say, "ha, screw the jocks." Fine, generally speaking I think that is a good idea, but let's not turn it into a wanker fest since there are lots of needed functions in the world that should probably be performed by those who can't understand Lisp -- and I don't just mean cleaning toilets, I mean politics.

Abstraction, which is really what lisp is about in many ways, is only ever IMO one pole. You have to zoom out to see the bigger picture and zoom in to address the minutia. Generally people miss the forest for the trees, so I have every sympathy for those who stick with the forest and ignore the trees. But when it comes down to it, someone has to re-write your code in blub to make a functional product (even true with Viaweb) so have some sympathy for the little man who has to do a sh't job, probably his mother never gave him fairy tales to read and he only vaguely knows who Godel, Escher, and Bach are. That's sad, but that's life and we who are Americans should especially expect it as an immigrant nation.

Anyways, I'm one who discovered Lisp rather late despite and not because of the Lisp community as it is usually presented. I think it is beautiful and esp. I think SICP is a fantastic book to introduce one to computer science concepts and I think that industry should serve great passions and ideas and not vice versa. Hell, I even think lisp machines are a great idea and hope someone builds new ones and they take over the world. But despite all of that, I would never hang out with "the Lisp community."

Why? I want to build great products. Great products need to scale. If you want to go to the moon you need a f'ing spaceship and not emacs and an open source notebook. Spaceships are big. They take a lot of people to run, and they have to be smart people. One mistake and you are smithereens at Cape Canaveral.

The thing that irks me the most about all of this whining is that America used to be capable of building automobiles and space shuttles and (omg!) computers. It was amazing. Now it is hello Taiwan, goodbye America. People talk about "Rework" and how they can't imagine being in a company with more than ten people and glorify the life of tribes in third world countries without contraception or toothpaste (or, in pg's case, the lifestyle of lions on the African prairie).

I know it may be nuts to say this, but I think we need to build cool stuff for the sake of building it, and that our tools should be _our_ tools -- not some magic fairy dust. Use whatever works to solve the problem. Get your hands dirty. A parentheses is not a hammer if what you've got in front of you is a nail.

And if what you've got in front of you is a problem bigger and nastier than that, build a bigger and better tool. There's no problem that can't be solved if people put aside their differences and work together.

<comment><USER4> > If you want to go to the moon you need a f'ing spaceship and not emacs and > an open source notebook. Spaceships are big. They take a lot of people to > run, and they have to be smart people. One mistake and you are smithereens > at Cape Canaveral.

The moon is not that far away from orbital flight. These two guys might disagree with you: <http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/>

<comment><USER5> That site indicates they're attempting to launch a human on a suborbital trajectory. What does that have to do with either orbital flight or going to the moon?

<comment><USER6> If you can get to space, even a suborbital flight, you must have gotten most of the life support right. If you reach orbit, you got your rocket right. If you can change orbits, you got manevering right. If you can stay a week in space, the rest of your life support is OK. All you need now is a second booster to launch you to the Moon. You can either circle it in a free return trajectory, or brake an enter orbit.

The orbit part seems the most complicated.

<comment><USER5> Wow. Just wow.

Every single system you name is made up of a large number of complex sub- systems designed and built to exacting requirements, and any one of them can still break at any time. Thinking you "got it right" just because it didn't break one time in one set of circumstances is unbelievably naïve. There's a reason all man-rated launch systems have redundant backup systems, and even the fallbacks don't always work right.

By the way, let me know when you get micrometeoroid shielding "right" -- every space agency on Earth will want to talk to you. You might even win a Nobel Prize.

You're also completely ignoring navigation. Just because you can fire up a rocket doesn't mean shit if you're at the wrong point in your orbit, or pointed in the wrong direction.

You're also failing to distinguish between "I can get THIS rocket into orbit" and "I can get a rocket big enough to carry people and a useful payload into orbit and/or to the moon". Think you can just "scale up"? You're wrong. Effects that were too small to measure before will suddenly kill you. Materials that could handle the strain of the smaller rocket will crumble under the increased forces.

Oh, by the way, every time the weight or configuration of your spacecraft changes, you're gonna have to rework your navigation assumptions.

Might I suggest playing with Orbiter for a while? Once you've done that, spend a few minutes thinking about the fact that you've just been overwhelmed by a vastly simplified simulation in which _nothing ever goes wrong_. Now picture the real world.

Oh, by the way, your heat shield is cracked, but nobody noticed because your budget didn't allow for more than one guy to inspect it, and he was too drunk. Have fun getting home.

<comment><USER6> The original point is that, once you achieve LEO, a free-return tragectory to the moon is just a question of delta-v. And not that much - the Soyuz-based moon roundtrip being offered for US$ 100M is a Soyuz docked with a mini-bus- sized booster stage.

Micrometeorites? Did Apollo have that? I am not implying it's easy - I'm implying LEO is the hardest part when it comes to a moon-orbit trip.

And in the case of an unmanned craft, it's easier: you don't have to bother with life support, atmospheric braking and most of the radiation shielding.

<comment><USER5> Except that wasn't the original point at all. It started with Jd saying:

 _"If you want to go to the moon you need a f'ing spaceship and not emacs and an open source notebook. Spaceships are big. They take a lot of people to run, and they have to be smart people. One mistake and you are smithereens at Cape Canaveral."_

Followed by sedachv saying some guys who are trying to launch humans on _sub_ orbital flights would disagree.

Nothing you've said explains what suborbital flights have to do with going to the moon. On the contrary, you seem to be admitting they have nothing to do with going to the moon, so I still have absolutely no idea what sedachv's point was.

<comment><USER6> Well... I maintain that the hardest part of going to the Moon is achieving Earth orbit. The rest is, comparatively, easy.

But, then, this discussion is completely unrelated to the point regarding emacs and an open source notebook (whatever that is). In general, Jd's rant felt confusing. I am not sure how Lisp and spacecraft are related, BTW. He (or she) implied somehow that you couldn't go to space with something simple and elegant like Lisp, but I can't be sure.

<comment><USER3> Re: open source notebook see: <http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html>

I'll make the relation very clear. There is a segment of the Lisp community, which most certainly includes Paul Graham, that maintains that projects with large team sizes are bad. There is a certain logic here, as it is hard to maintain a high average intelligence distributed across a large number of people. Most true geniuses were loners. Regardless, projects of a certain scope (i.e. building a space shuttle) require large teams. You simply can't do it with two guys in a basement.

In a certain sense the computer language employed is irrelevant, except that the lisp community has never, largely because of the facts that should be obvious but are apparently not to the introverted "genius" types they pray on, produced good and extensive enough libraries to be viable for most real world tasks. In case you didn't notice, for example, it took what, 4 years for Hacker News to get HTTPS support.

I don't want to rib anyone too badly, because I am a strong supporter of what YCombinator is doing in general and in the incorporation of lambdas and closures in newer languages, but I think generally speaking it is clear that the Lisp culture is not to cooperate but to position one's self as some sort of genius and thus to create one's own dialect, etc.

I'll give you an example that will probably irritate some people, but is relevant here. Microsoft Word is, in my opinion, one of the greatest architectural marvels of modern civilization. The feature set of that single app is truly extraordinary, and there are all sorts of wonky ways that you can do lots of tasks that makes millions (and potentially even billions) of people's lives better every day. I understand that there is a point to OpenOffice and "fighting the man" and whatever since Microsoft certainly crushed some competitors in mean ways, but realistically there is nothing in the world that competes.

Now you might say, oh sure but I can just use vim and use latex for formatting (or even google docs). And in a certain sense you might be right too, but sooner or later you will find a feature that is not accessible to you (I recently noticed that change tracking still absolutely blows in Google Docs compared to Word).

Why do I bring this up? Well, even if you are right that "the hardest part of going to the Moon is achieving Earth orbit," you still have to have all of those other things. You need life support or you dead; this is non-negotiable, just in the way that mail merge is not negotiable for millions of people at millions of office worldwide. And if you want life support (or mail merge), you need to work with the people who design these other systems.

By the way, I'm not saying you need to like any of this. I'm simply saying that if you want to build something great, you have to at times slog through the mud. My experience with Lispers is they are frequently afraid to get their hands dirty. And that doesn't cut it except in a pretty-ditty fantasy castle.

<comment><USER6> > Regardless, projects of a certain scope (i.e. building a space shuttle) > require large teams.

The shuttles are not engineering successes. Most large projects (large as in "lots of brains required to think about how they are going to work") usually aren't either. I'll side with pg on this. Humans cannot organize that well and less ambitious steps are a better approach to solve really big problems.

Languages are tools you use to express and think about problems. There are problems that are more amenable to be expressed in terms of Lisp and others that are more suited for C. Or SQL, or Forth.

It may be hard to express mud in Lisp, but I don't think the whole thing is as bad as you do.

But I have to wonder... Does anyone still use mail merge?

<comment><USER3> What are the shuttles if not engineering successes? PR stunts? How would you categorize them? There are certainly problems (like providing a good and functional high-speed rail system) that are not really questions of "genius" and more practical questions of how to apply already developed technology, which, given the politics of our day, might require a different type of "genius" to approach.

It is interesting that you describe language as a tool to think about a problem. Is it really so? Is it only because you have the language that you think about the problem in terms of the language?

Humans cannot organize that well? Well, I guess Cape Canaveral in 1969 was smoke and mirrors -- or what do you mean? I think you probably mean that the cost of organizing at a large scale like that is not a cost you are personally (or, collectively in terms of the culture of elites in the West) willing to bear. I would even suggest that it very well could be in actuality an unwillingness to bear any sacrifice for the sake of a collective goal.

"Less ambitious steps" for "really big problems." Sounds great. What steps do you mean and what problems are you possibly hoping to solve? How the private sector might be able to get someone in space -- an "engineering success" that was already accomplished approximately 50 years ago, now potentially finally accomplished by the private sector, so long as individual Russian tycoons are able to pay for $100M tickets with money stolen from starving peasants.

A brave new world indeed. As for mail merge, I have very little interest in the common man. I live in Silicon valley and watch the world burn from a carefully-cultivated distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Talking about things as broad and vague as "community" tends to obscure things more than it helps, in my opinion.

A more useful exercise is to consider the factors that go into people choosing a language in the first place. I don't think people usually think hard about how powerful or elegant the language is, at least when they're starting out, rather they pick it up when they need to solve a specific problem. For example, here's how I ended up using the languages I've learned in the past:

QBASIC - Because I wanted to make video games when I was a kid, and things like functions and classes and scopes confused 10 year old me. The idea of executing a sequence of commands was simple enough to grasp.

C - Because that's what all the "real" programmers used, and I had reached the limits of what I could do with basic.

VB - Because writing a GUI in C sucks.

Perl - Because that's just what you used for web pages at the time.

Java - Because of college.

C# - Because VB was pretty lame.

Python - Because I needed something better to write small programs in, and the entirety of perl would regularly fall out of my head because it's too complex.

F# - Because C#'s verbosity gets on my nerves and everyone was all up on functional programming; but I found the library support in most other functional languages lacking.

Ruby - Because it's kind of the lingua franca of web startups at the moment.

And on and on. I'd say about half the languages up there are actually pretty awful, and none of them are as good as LISP, but they did something specifically useful for me at the time I learned them. I can't really say that about LISP, because LISP doesn't really have a niche. The reason I ended up learning LISP (Clojure specifically) was because I wanted to be a better programmer, but I don't think that's really a strong enough argument for it if people want it to "win"

<comment><USER8> I heard that argument many dozen times regarding certain type of programming languages can make me a better programmer.

Boy I think I took that advise from the wrong source.

Math can make me a better programmer.

Statistics can make me a better programmer.

Accounting can make me a better programmer.

Biology can make me a better programmer.

Chemistry can make me a better programmer.

Building Macros and DSLs are the new Ivory Tower of software architecture.

<comment><USER9> I must strongly disagree with this. Learning functional programming was one of the best things I ever did. It gave me a huge advantage when tackling certain problems, which helps me to this day. At my current workplace people call me in to help when they have tricky problems because they are aware I have a different skillset.

I started out in 'scripting' languages, and I can even say that learning Java, in a group with some very skilled OO gurus, was a mind-expanding experience.

I have even seen it happen, en masse, at a company which was composed of various language partisans uniting under one roof. After exposure to each others' ways, I think we all become better programmers for it.

<comment><USER10> I agree, knowing it can be huge. I'd even go so far as to say that at work, colleagues who know functional programming generally write code that is noticeably more efficient and maintainable. And on some platforms (.NET since 2006 comes to mind), you simply _have_ to be comfortable with FP to be able to work effectively.

But on the other hand, the days where one could get away with treating 'LISP' as a proxy for 'Functional Programming' are long gone. Aside from the hoary old beasts from the 20th century such as Java, pretty much all the major languages have first-class procedures and suchlike nowadays. LISP is no longer distinguished by having good support for functional programming; it's distinguished by _lacking_ good support for procedural programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The only thing more amazing than the degree to which the author missed the point of the exercise here is the degree to which he seems unaware that he missed the point of the exercise."

No, what was amazing was how stupid the exercise was. The Common Lisp example was a perfectly reasonable translation of the AWK script, accounting for the fact that Common Lisp is a general purpose programming language that doesn't have the luxury of dedicating syntax to text-munging the way AWK does.

Also, the whole concept of Lisp "winning" is silly. Common Lisp isn't making a comeback. Nobody thinks that. But every day that passes, languages get more like Lisp. Take, e.g., Xtend. We've got:

LAMBDA: <http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/#closures> TYPECASE: <http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/#switchexpression> FORMAT: <http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/#templateexpression> Open methods: <http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/#extensionmethods> Multimethods: <http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/#multipledispatch> Also: Statements as expressions, etc, implicit return, etc.

<comment><USER12> I think you yourself have missed the point when you say, "Common Lisp is a general purpose programming language that doesn't have the luxury of dedicating syntax to text-munging the way AWK does". The whole idea was to make a dialect that did have that luxury as a gateway to Common Lisp.

<comment><USER13> Clearly, AWK is the future winner, since it has implemented Lisp[1][2]!

\----

[1] <https://github.com/darius/awklisp>

[2] <http://awk.info/?AwkLisp>

<comment><USER14> By that rule, Greespun's Tenth Rule (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule>) implies that C has already won.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are several problems with this post.

First off, the concept of a language #winning is a complete waste of time. Neither AWK nor Lisp is Charlie Sheen.

You use a particular language so that you can solve a problem. Some languages are better suited to solve certain problems than others. You also use a language because you like it. Using a language because it's popular, unless your job requires it, is probably the least sustainable situation.

Secondly, I'm inferring the author wants to spur Lisp's popularity by promoting new features, but encountered resistance by people on a newsgroup and gave up. This is pretty weak in my book. In what situation, both social or professional, would someone NOT encounter resistance to new ideas? To give up at the first sign of resistance, and call the people who didn't like your idea "sick" is the hallmark of a whiner.

If you want to do something, just do it. No one is stopping you. Fork the code. Make a prototype. Demonstrate it. See if you are right and they are wrong. You don't need the approval of a handful of faceless Usenet posters before you start a project.

<comment><USER12> You're inferring incorrectly (and seem to be conflating Mr. Dominus with Mr. da Silva), and also brought Charlie Sheen up for no apparent reason.

Also, there are plenty of good things that come with a language being popular. The availability of libraries, a community to bounce ideas off and get help from, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Two things keep coming up in language discussions. The first is the cry of "Lisp did it first", whenever a non-lisp language touts a new feature. The second is this concept of "winning".

If you combine these two ideas, you come to the conclusion that if any other language is seen to be "winning", it should be simple to port that language's syntax and stdlib onto a lisp environment - after all, every facility the other language might need can be provided by the lisp runtime, and reader macros might be a suitable way to avoid an explicit compilation step, depending on the language being tackled.

I cannot think of a single case of this happening. Instead, we see precisely the reverse - clojure is implemented on the JVM, CLR and JS runtimes, and there are scheme implementations _everywhere_.

What does this mean? It means that it isn't languages which "win" or "lose". It's plaforms. "Lisp" isn't a platform, therefore it cannot "win". The question is moot.

<comment><USER4> Your observation about platforms is spot on IMO. This is something that I want to work on - making Common Lisp a platform.

Having libraries that provide system programming features and work across a wide range of implementations is the first step. CL is underspecified in terms of a lot of systems programming stuff.

The #1 priority in this space is integration with the Unix shell - scripting, having executables, stdin and out, command-line arguments. Not really any good libraries that combine all this into one thing that works well everywhere.

The second big thing is packaging and distribution - Quicklisp addresses that well. Next step beyond making Quicklisp better is a script for Linux that finds the Common Lisp implementation on your system (and installs one if not present), and loads whatever software you need - essentially a common installer for CL applications that bootstraps off of Quicklisp.

About other languages on Common Lisp, there is actually a large number: <http://www.cliki.net/programming%20language>

A lot of languages have been ported to run on various Scheme (Racket and Gambit) implementations.

<comment><USER16> Of the implementations on that list, only three are what I'd call "competitive imports": the JS, Python and JVM implementations. I'm intrigued as to why these are not generally considered to be viable first-class alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It might be worth pointing out, for readers who missed it, that this article was written in 2003. So instead of asking whether it correctly describes the situation today, you might find it more useful to ask whether it correctly described the situation in 2003, and whether things have changed, and if so how.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is the best lisp version of the syntax I've been able to come up with:

        (awk (begin (set FS ":")) (cond (== $6 "/sbin/nologin") (print $1)) "/etc/passwd")

Any better ideas?

(The awk macro itself is an exercise left for the reader...)

<comment><USER19> I was just thinking about something like this. The beauty of Lisp stems from the fact that you can take it as-is (as a general-purpose language) and add constructs that allow for such domain-specific code. The converse, making awk more general, would be a much more difficult task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This observation would work just as well if "C++" or "Java" were substituted for lisp, so I guess those languages will never "win" either.

<comment><USER21> _This observation would work just as well if "C++" or "Java" were substituted for lisp_

"People aren't using Lisp, so maybe we could make it usable for things AWK is good at and get people into it that way."

Ok.

"People aren't using Java, so maybe we could make it usable for things AWK is good at and get people into it that way."

Wait, they're not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not to be rude, but that sounded like the kind of thing that a Perl programmer would say :-)

I am all for people have gut feeling likes/dislikes for what languages they personally use, but who cares what programming language, religion, politics, etc. that other people like?

I have been using Lisp since the early 1980s, and Lisp languages are great for some kinds of applications and research. Same can be said for many other languages.

<comment><USER21> If more people like and use my language of choice, more people will write tools and libraries for my language of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's not about Lisp winning, it's about the people using Lisp winning. And the people using Lisp are winning.

<comment><USER24> Where?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The joke is now on Dominus and da Silva - awk runs in Common Lisp: <http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/lisp/clawk/>

da Silva does have a completely valid point. CL needs a library to make it easy to run your favorite implementation with your software as a Unix shell script. And more reader macros. I use so many my code is starting to look like Perl. I don't think that's a bad thing. Adding an APL reader macro for array processing would IMO be a wonderful thing for a lot of the Common Lisp graphics libraries.

</comment><comment><USER25> Since when have programming languages ever been about winning? Lisp solves problems in a certain way the works well in certain cases for some people. Same case with awk or Perl or Python or whatever. Lisp may not be the language everyone uses for everything, but I find myself writing code in Clojure, Scheme, or Emacs Lisp because it makes sense to me. So what if that awk example is 2.5 lines longer than the actual version? It may be more work for my fingers but I still get to write it in Lisp.

I'm going to be one of the "stupid argumentative people" that he says are on comp.lang.lisp (which I had never actually heard of before) and say that Lisp users don't want Lisp to win. People who understand Lisp, as mentioned in another comment, that _they_ are going to be the ones winning in the end. Maybe this person wins with Perl. I don't. Ruby, Clojure, Prolog, and JavaScript meet my needs so I use them. Languages don't compete for adoption they solve problems.

<comment><USER26> Prolog?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I thought the lisp version was actually a lot more readable than the awk version. I never really messed with awk much though.

<comment><USER28> So you thought the version written in a language you're familiar with was more readable than the version written in a language you're not familiar with?

But seriously, take a look at the two examples again. Are you really suggesting that the Lisp version is easier?

All you have to understand for the Awk example how field variables work, then you can read the whole thing at a glance. The Lisp version contains custom macros and is four lines long!

<comment><USER11> For someone who doesn't know either, but is familiar with programming generally, which is more readable?

I can guess what 'with-lines-from-file' does, I can guess what 'string-split' does, i can guess what 'string=' does, etc. The only thing I might not understand is 'aref'.

With the AWK example, I have no place to start. Symbol-oriented languages, rather than word-oriented languages, are like that. They tend to be more concise for things very specialized tasks, like this, but that limits their generality. Show me a matrix multiplication routine in AWK versus Common Lisp.

<comment><USER29> It is both strictly correct and irrelevant to the topic at hand that the Lisp is easier to read. Because that's like saying "Lisp sucks because WTF does 'cddadr' mean anyway?"

AWK is a purpose-built language for splitting lines into fields and doing stuff with the result, so of course there's not a lot of boilerplate for splitting lines into fields and doing stuff with the results.

Lisp for doing a lot of fancy work with s-expressions is going to be high density code that's a lot harder for newcomers to read than verbose, plodding Java code that is working with a simple LinkedList class or something.

Readability (Edit: to newcomers) just isn't the relevant benchmark here.

<comment><USER30> I don't think a linked list in Java is a good example. I took two CS intro courses in a row last year; the first one used Scheme and the second one concentrated on data structures and used Java. There were some completely inexperienced people taking the two courses along with me.

As far as I could tell they had much more difficulty with linked lists and trees in Java, which made them needlessly complex, than they did in Scheme. And this is with people who had actually learned about both concepts first in Scheme, so they had _more_ experience when they came to Java.

<comment><USER29> Fair point. Perhaps I picked a bad example.

At the same time, if you were writing a bunch of random awk-like one-offs as part of your normal lisp workflow, you wouldn't write 4 lines of code every time, right? You sit down and write some functions or macros that condensed it into something simple that allowed you to easily specify things like a split token, one or more filter-on fields and values (or better, a filter lambda), and one or more output fields, I bet. Because it's silly to write several lines for something you do a lot.

And while you might call it process-file-and-return-matching-results or something, the interface to the result might not be so different from the line of awk in the original post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Did someone read the notes on Slide 47 and the message for aliens? Now that was interesting.. tried to understand them on my own, sort of fun :)

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the only languages that will ever have won were C, cobol and fortran. Why do we get"scala is too complex" posts but not "partial differential equations are too complicated" posts? Anyway I'm just not going to read them but I will cut MJD slack cause his perl books are terrific.

</comment><comment><USER33> Try Clojure and see how insanely awesome the community is. 2003 was a long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was arguing with a lisper the other day about how lisp' power make it easy to go overkill and have too much nested lambdas.. while language like Java, forcing you to use vars, sometime makes the code easier to read.

He then told me to not blame my weakness at reading code on Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER35> That's impressive, both the awk and the lisp versions of that code seem pretty obfuscated.

<comment><USER36> The awk version looks idiomatic to me. Except that I will take the FS out:

        awk -F: '$6=="/sbin/nologin" {print $1}' /etc/passwd

<comment><USER37> There might be off by one error. On my system the following works:

      awk -F: '$7=="/usr/sbin/nologin" {print $1}' /etc/passwd

Or

      awk -F: '$7 ~ /bin\/nologin$/ {print $1}' /etc/passwd

<comment><USER36> Yes, indeed it should be $7 instead of $6.

I didn't run it when I posted the comment. I just copied it from the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> In the words of Douglas Crockford, Javascript is Lisp in C's Clothing. <http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html>

<comment><USER39> ...and it still makes no sense no matter how often it's repeated to flatter JavaScript.

<comment><USER30> I think it does, actually. When I took a Scheme class based on SICP, we implemented a Scheme interpreter as well as looking at an OOP system using lambdas.

Writing that interpreter is the first time JavaScript's scoping rules made sense to me viscerally--they're exactly the same as Scheme's. The OOP system we used was also really similar to what you can do with JavaScript; it just used closures to save state. It wasn't exactly the same, but it was similar.

Ultimately, I find that JavaScript is much closer to Scheme than other dynamic scripting languages I've used like Python and Perl.

<comment><USER19> JavaScript's scoping rules aren't the same as Scheme's -- variables are scoped at the function level rather than the block level.

<comment><USER30> That's how it works in Scheme too--you only get a new scope if you either have a lambda or an implicit lambda.

<comment><USER19> Sure, but in Scheme every block is an implicit lambda. In JavaScript, blocks are justs sections of code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been working on getting started in Scheme. It hasn't been easy. It seems like it's entirely married to Emacs, and I really, really don't want to learn Yet Another Editor. I'm finding the documentation to be very terse and unhelpful. Tutorials, guides, and documentation all drop terms casually which mean absolutely nothing to me. The key chording seems nonsensical. So far, I've spent about one hour learning Lisp, and many hours learning how to install and use the Scheme interpreter.

(I realize that it probably sounds silly to complain of learning "yet another" editor, when it's one of the two longest-lived for programming, but really, Emacs is _extremely_ complex, and all I want to do is work through SICP)

As for the article, his description sounds like comp.lang.* .

<comment><USER11> <http://racket-lang.org/>

Easy GUI IDE with debugging, etc.

It's annoying to learn another IDE< yes, but Scheme just needs an IDE that understands how to highlight/indent it properly.

<comment><USER40> Awesome, thanks for that! I was up and running a sample within five minutes.

<comment><USER41> If you're reading SICP you may want to look into this: <http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-sicp/>

It's a package to support some code in the book that is some what implementation specific, drawing graphics for the picture language, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hey, this is cool, using awk you can save a minute for every one-liner you write. Writing 2 one-liners per day on average, it's only half a year to make up for a day spent on learning awk!

More seriously, if I wanted to save few minutes per day, I'd rather remove Facebook account.</comment>


FTC exploring Apple rules for streaming music rivals in App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/11/us-apple-music-antitrust-idUSKCN0PL03O20150711

<comment><USER2> Related: [http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington- lob...](http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lobbying- firms-117001.html)

<comment><USER3> Also related: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup [https://medium.com/@492727ZED/steve-jobs-made-warner- music-s...](https://medium.com/@492727ZED/steve-jobs-made-warner-music-sue-my- startup-9a81c5a21d68)</comment></comment>


Containers Don't Solve Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://shoreditchworks.com/containers-dont-solve-infrastructure/

<comment><USER2> What strange reasoning, and I'm not sure if I read it right. What his argument sounded like to me is "Containers don't work for my CRUD application" which to me sounds like "Jet Engines don't work on my bicycle".

> _Scaling databases with high write volumes is a somewhat unsolved problem in > Computer Science._

Databases like Cassandra & hbase say otherwise - and may even be a good fit for containers. Given that these databases are Eventually consistent, you could spin up a machine, have the other nodes stream data to it, then kill it when you are done. Need a cluster to run analytics on? Spin up a couple machines, then destroy it when finished. The fact that MongoDB isn't a good fit for containers is an incredibly narrow view.

On the topic of narrow views, what about all the other nodes people are running that aren't CRUD applications? ETL servers (Hadoop, Spark), Event Processing (Kafka, Spark Streaming, Storm), and all the other buzzwords (microservices).

I guess you can say, if you have a CRUD app, yes, your infrastructure issues are solved and Docker, Rocket, CoreOS, Mesos aren't for you.

> _As a final thought: once your system gets big enough, you will eventually > have to do automated service discovery. This necessitates automated > discovery of container hosts themselves and that's another place where you > need a stateful system that is not ephemeral and can be configured > automatically._

MesosDns does this quite nicely. You ship your containers via Marathon/Aurora/Framework of choice, and those run on some machines somewhere, and are tracked by Mesos. MesosDns queries Mesos and and all your services are available as `service.framework.mesos`

</comment><comment><USER3> Containers don't solve my particular problem, hence containers suck. What wonderful reasoning.</comment>


IFTTT forced to remove Twitter triggers to comply with new API policies - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/09/20/ifttt-removes-twitter-triggers-comply-new-api-policies/ <comment><USER3> Dick Costolo recently spoke about Twitter as a platform on Charlie Rose show - "The future of Twitter is that we'll have a true platform, not just an API that allows developers to create an alternate Twitter experience, but an API that allows third parties to build on top of Twitter in a way that creates accretive value for the user, much how Amazon allowed third-party merchants to build into Amazon."

He made it abundantly clear that Twitter doesn't want its API to be used for alternative twitter clients. IFTTT does not necessarily create alternative twitter consumption client but it can be used to accomplish that.

On a side note (and it may not be popular with HN community); so far we have seen API used (majority of times) for alternative twitter consumption clients. May be with these API changes, we might see more innovation using Twitter as a "platform"? Rather than people trying to create alternative clients.

<comment><USER4> Well, IFTT's twitter hooks were exactly that kind of innovation, and it was just shot dead. How is anyone going to use it as a platform if you can't even read data from it?

<comment><USER5> The same way we read everything without an API, Pinky. Screen scraping.

<comment><USER6> screen scraping = break ToS = get arrested by Feds.

It is the new world kids and we all better break out our reinforced tin foil hats.

<comment><USER7> Really? Would you get arrested by feds? Are you really breaking any federal laws? Isn't denying you access all they can do to you?

<comment><USER6> Well, actually breaking a site's ToS and benefiting materially from it is now considered a Federal crime. Aaron Swartz is being charged by the Feds for just that. It didn't involve screen scraping but use of a bot to download data, even though he was entitled to download that data normally, just not using a bot.

Scary stuff.

<comment><USER8> This is not true. Aaron Swartz is being charged for distributing non-free content that he happened to obtain that way. You make it sound like he's being charged with a felony for scraping free content.

<comment><USER6> Actually I am correct.

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/aaron-swartz- felony...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/aaron-swartz-felony/)

Some extracts:

Like last year's original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT's attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public.

In essence, many of the charges stem from Swartz allegedly breaching the terms of service agreement for those using the research service.

The case tests the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1984 to enhance the government's ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality.

The government, however, has interpreted the anti-hacking provisions to include activities such as violating a website's terms of service or a company's computer usage policy

<comment><USER7> Hmm, since the case hasn't been concluded yet, does that mean that that is a valid thing to charge a person with?

Also, the part you quoted ends with:

> "The government, however, has interpreted the anti-hacking provisions to > include activities such as violating a website's terms of service or a > company's computer usage policy, a position a federal appeals court in April > said means "millions of unsuspecting individuals would find that they are > engaging in criminal conduct." The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in > limiting reach of the CFAA, said that violations of employee contract > agreements and websites' terms of service were better left to civil > lawsuits."

Also of interest:

> The rulings by the 9th Circuit cover the West, and not Massachusetts, > meaning they are not binding in Swartz' prosecution. The Obama > administration has declined to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This feels very counter to Twitter's claimed intent in rolling out the new policies.

IFTTT is in no way trying compete as a Twitter client, and, especially in the case where I'm trying to archive _my own Tweets,_ the service only enhances my Twitter experience.

Twitter's throwing a lot away in the name of squeezing more value out of its assets.

<comment><USER10> If the ship's going down, you start throwing everything away you can to keep it afloat.

<comment><USER11> Twitter just moved into a new office, has been acquiring companies (remember, they're what drove Instagram's price up), and you really think they're secretly cash-strapped or something?

<comment><USER10> No definitely not, but the problem is that the clock is ticking and I think the FB IPO showed them what can happen when the right pieces aren't in place at the time of IPO.

No one is going to argue that Twitter has a technological advantage - <USER2> service is incredibly simple and could probably be completely replicated by a small team in six months to a year. Moreso than Facebook, they are relying on the network effect but the also monetize _less_ than Facebook, so who really knows if they're ever going to be profitable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using IFTTT to syndicate my Twitter posts to App.net. Guess now I'll have to default to App.net and syndicate to Twitter instead. Say goodbye to my ad revenue, Twitter.

<comment><USER13> For those who didn't shell out for App.net, you can also syndicate to Twitter from the completely open rstat.us, which also (for now) allows you to sign in with your Twitter account, so it takes five seconds to set up. <https://rstat.us>

No personal connection to rstat.us, just think it's a cool remedy for Twitter's new iron-fist policies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Their investors obviously got tired of waiting for a return. When that happens at any VC-backed company they start ratcheting up the pressure on the CEO and executive team. And if they don't start generating a return quickly enough, they put their own guy in place. So co-founder Evan Williams moved on from his CEO position in late 2010 and the new leadership purged the old guard. Dick Costolo took over.

Either it took 2 years for his profit strategy to come together or the pressure started ratcheting up on him, too. After all, investors have sunk a silly amount of money into Twitter; they expect a return.

Either way, I wouldn't want to work at Twitter right now...

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the full email from IFTTT <http://pastebin.com/uttmebvT>

Very diplomatic. I wouldn't have minded a "this sucks for you & us" in there.

</comment><comment><USER16> Twitter's handling of their API closes the door on a future where there can be any expectation of building your service on-top of another.

We should stop building apps on-top of walled custom APIs and go back to using HTTP as an API.

</comment><comment><USER17> Are you kidding me?! Why would Twitter do this? Picture Twitter as a tree trunk of data. There are branches and leaves that grow off the trunk, branches like IFTTT and other amazing services. But once you cut off the leaves, then the branches, only the trunk is left. A dead, dead trunk. A couple months ago there wasn't an alternative to Twitter. Now there is. I'm switching to App.net tonight.

</comment><comment><USER18> I started to think of Twitter in between SMS and E-mail as I think a lot of people did. To me Twitter is more of a protocol or even a modality than a platform. That's the brilliance of it: it's a speed and length of communication that feels very natural. I have no objections to these rules in terms of Twitter growing as a company. I think there are a lot of applications that can be built aside from clients and it makes sense for them to steer people in that direction.

As a user, however, I feel attached to the idea that data and application are separate. I would like to think that I own my Tweets, but most of all I just want to _feel_ like I own my tweets — like I can _do_ whatever I want with them and see them however I want. A short, passive message that I put out in to the world is a great thing and it seems unlikely that a single company can own that idea.

</comment><comment><USER19> See also the discussion here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550601>

</comment><comment><USER20> Just yesterday I saw someone saying how twitter's API policies didn't bother him: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4545823>. Now they do.

<comment><USER21> I thought of that post too when I saw the news, and couldn't help but wonder "if this triggered that"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> IFTTT seems like a perfect case for something that should be an open source project that anyone can install and run on their own servers, not as a centralized service, specifically to prevent things like this. Then anyone could contribute recipes and API clients and there's no central point of failure for them to be all removed in one go.

<comment><USER23> Yes, and when APIs fail: P2P screenscraping. Regardless of its legality, as some other commenters here have brought up, Twitter can't stop distributed reading and storing without blocking lots of IP addresses.

<comment><USER24> > Twitter can't stop distributed reading and storing without blocking lots of > IP addresses.

Ha, twitter can't even block @mention spam from fresh accounts using very spammy words.

<comment><USER23> Well then, it's time for a 3rd-party Twitter search engine, using a P2P-based scraper, with no regard for API rules or ToS. In the long term, what's more important: Twitter's bottom line, or content not being thrown down the memory hole?

<comment><USER24> It's easier to just jump the ship. Why care so much for a service that doesn't give a shit to us ('us' being app developers, early adopters, etc).

They have their target audience (people following celebrities) guaranteed for now. We're just a typical pain in the ass nerds.

<comment><USER23> Yes, but isn't it worth capturing that content, and in doing so, their users? The search engine I am suggesting could easily transition to being the next Twitter. We grab the content, their users perform searches, and then the users migrate when they see that they can not only search every tweet ever made (since we began indexing) but also add to the database directly (kind of like Google having both a search box and an "add your own URL" box on the main page).

<comment><USER24> I'd guess that the vast majority of twitter users don't know anything about this API shenanigans, blocking 3rd party clients and all this bullshit. They don't know and they don't care.

As long as Justin Bieber and other celebrities continue to post, users will be there.

Also, the typical tweet doesn't make sense a couple of hours/days after being posted. I'm not sure if there's such interest in searching for old stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What about buffer and twitterfeed? Will they be able to proceed?

<comment><USER26> Posting to twitter via ifttt is not affected, just reading from twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> People at Twitter must realize that when developers talk about your API's tos rather than the API, you must have broken something. It reminds me Facebook episode of network feed and privacy. At the end of it, Mark understood what the users were talking about and took action to correct it.

The problem seems like an issue of making profit by showing promotional tweets, which will not happen in the clients. It, to me, looks like the problem of management which could not come up with better revenue model.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ok, I created the product <http://2FB.me> (ReTweet 2 Facebook) months ago and I read the same policy some weeks ago and didn't read it to mean this at all. 2FB.me makes share links for tweets enhancing & augmenting the experience. It doesn't clone any portion of Twitter. I think the same can be said for IFTTT?

</comment><comment><USER29> Meh. twitter is wrong in this case. And so starts the reputation of being an asshat company. Nothing to see here move along.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, according to Dick Costolo it has _nothing_ to do with the API changes: <https://twitter.com/dickc/status/248947914582405120> but I'm struggling to imagine IFTTT killing a really useful feature for no reason.

</comment><comment><USER31> Congrats to IFTTT for getting themselves a crap load of coverage dishonestly! Yay!

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/ifttt-has-actually-been- in-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/ifttt-has-actually-been-in-violation- of-twitters-api-for-months-todays-move-unrelated-to-1-1/)

<comment><USER32> There's no proof that it's dishonest - it's possible that either legal or twitter themselves tapped them on the shoulder and said they should knock it off.

Ignorance before malice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Add to the list for the need for a decentralized, distributed platform with no one party in control of our information and publishing. I, for one, am really looking forward to what the <http://tent.io/> guys come out with.

</comment><comment><USER34> I used this functionality to track updates on software from companies/groups that don't do RSS. They do/did Twitter. I also got downtime alerts from Pingdom via Twitter.

I'm starting to see this as less and less of a platform I can depend on.

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't get it. IFTTT complies with the new API policies. Infact, cool stuff like IFTTT is exactly what twitter should be looking for as platform apps which use their API creatively.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's Twitter's way or the highway. From clients to value-added services, if Twitter doesn't own it, it's dead or soon will be. Fun while it lasted, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER37> I am disappointed that I cannot post tweets to Facebook with this any more. However, using twitterfeed to post them should be fairly straightforward . . .

<comment><USER38> You can do that from within Twitter directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Bah, the "foo mentioned you on twitter.." SMS' kept me in the loop.. Now I probably won't even notice :(

</comment><comment><USER40> This is why we need API neutrality <http://api500.com/>

</comment><comment><USER23> What about Zapier? Doesn't it provide the same Twitter connectivity as IFTTT did? I don't use either, but, from casual inspection a while back, my impression was that they are similar enough in that regard.</comment>


The Story of BankSimple - <AUTHOR> http://www.carnegiemellontoday.com/article.asp?aid=977&page=0 <comment><USER2> I guess I don't see how BankSimple can be truly better. First, there are already no-branch banks like ING-Direct. Second, Credit Unions exist.

BankSimple seems to be a no-branch bank like ING-Direct. They're presenting themselves as being better. How are they different? Well, they're pushing the idea of no-fees, better customer service, and better mobile banking. In order to achieve that, they'll have to be more efficient or accept a lower profit margin. Banks have healthy margins so there is some room there, but there are other industries with higher margins.

The second piece is that there are already not-for-profit banks. They're called Credit Unions. They exist to give their customers (who are their owners) the best deal they can. In order to be better than credit unions, they'll have to be significantly more efficient rather than simply relying on lower margins.

Part of what makes me skeptical is that they aren't creating a bank. They're partnering with currently chartered banks. This is probably because it's very difficult to create a bank and there's a lot of regulation to deal with. However, this somewhat limits what they can do to give me a better deal than a bank (since they're just reselling the product of another bank). Now, banks vary in how good of a deal they give you so part of their product might simply be getting you a good account under their brand. But part of this means that BankSimple won't be doing what banks normally do with deposits. Banks normally lend it out or invest it. BankSimple will be parking it in another account. So, if they aren't charging fees, how will they make their money? Maybe they've found an account that will give them 1% interest and they'll pass on 0.5% interest to me. However, why shouldn't I just bypass them? If they're doing things like refunding ATM fees, covering overdraft fees, etc. will the interest difference cover that?

I'm not saying that it can't be done. They stress no-fees and earning more interest. If they aren't lending the money out themselves, that will be hard to do - especially considering that they're claiming the best customer service, best software, etc. Where are they making their money? Not off fees and they aren't lending it out, but rather relying on other banks.

I'd really love to see their business plan since I assume they've addressed these things. Maybe wholesale banking exists and offers them a lot more. Maybe credit unions are woefully inefficient. I'm excited for their launch, but I'm not unhappy with my credit union.

<comment><USER3> Millions of people love using Mint.com, and they had a huge exit and it didn't even have any of the bank-ish features that BankSimple is offering. BankSimple revenue model could easily include the same types of things as Mint: Credit Card Offerings, Life Insurance plans, even car insurance. And, they even earn additional, perhaps lower margin, revenue from their banking features. Think of the banking money as the long term huge opportunity to disrupt banks, and the Mint type offering as the short term profit that will allow them to grow.

For the consumer, if they can offer some of the analytic capabilities of Mint combined with the ability to make cash withdrawals from ATMs, deposit checks from your phone, and even get (some) interest it's an incredible product. It can roll most of your online financial needs into one company with a dedication to customer service. Sure, they may provide slightly worse interest rate. But how many people actually know their exact interest rate right now? Compare that with the number that have been adversely affected by overdraft fees and who would appreciate real customer service.

I wish them the best of luck! I hope they become the Zappo's of banking

<comment><USER4> Yes, I've never seen them admit to it, but I think lead gen has to be part of their business plan. Mint predicted (and got) about $30/user per year from lead gen. If banksimple can be the trusted first place people go to for financial advice and products (mortgage, retirement planning, etc), they should have no problem getting extra revenue on top of the usual bank checking and savings revenue that goes to their partner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like their site: <https://banksimple.com/>

Simple design, easy navigation, and a nice overview of the important features. My favorite part of the site is at the bottom of the page: "The BankSimple Team." It's rare but refreshing to see people attach their names, bios, and pictures to banks and financial companies. I'm excited for their launch - these guys are clearly taking some steps in the right direction.

<comment><USER6> Isn't their site in current form basically an "About Us" page? I'd love a great banking UI as much as anyone and hope BankSimple will deliver, but so far all the hype around them is just that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is getting to be too much hype about BankSimple and too little public launching...

<comment><USER8> When dealing with other people's money, it's worth taking the time to get it right.

As for hype, this is a college magazine doing a little boosterism for one of its graduates. Just like every other college magazine on the planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not often do I _really_ care when a product/service is only availale in a country other than mine (UK), but with BankSimple I am genuinely gutted.

Desperately hope they find huge success and expand overseas.

<comment><USER10> ...but why? Free checking/current accounts are par de course. You can use any cash machine/ATM you want. You can actually speak to a bank manager.

One of things things I miss in the US from the UK was a banking system that wasn't entirely set out to screw you. It wasn't your friend, but it didn't wish you as ill will as the national banks here.

<comment><USER11> As someone who has worked for a bank and has many contacts still at the 'front line' of UK retail banking, my experience is that the system is entirely set out to screw you, while simultaneously training its employees to believe the opposite.

So you have institutions staffed by people who honestly want to help you as much as they can, and a corporate regime that wants to fuck you as hard as it can.

I've no idea how that compares to American banks, but it's pretty screwed up.

<comment><USER12> Quick differentiator : Do UK banks charge you for a cheque book?

<comment><USER9> No, although cheques are (in the UK at least, I'm not sure about internationally) about to become a thing of the past.

<comment><USER10> Cheques/checks are more common in the US as there is no national system like Direct Debit. Bills can be paid by card, but sometimes you are penalized for that due to the processing fees.

The government always requires cash or check. I had to buy a check book just so I had the privilege of sending The Man more tax. They are also used (bizarrely) as a proof of your bank account number for various things. It's not uncommon for a company that is doing banking with you (like your payroll) to ask for an invalidated check so they can get your bank account number right.

I really hate checks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pertinent section about BankSimple, after the bio writeups for the three principals:

 _"As the months go on, Reich and Karkal research and refine their idea. They discover that starting a bank, charter and all, is a cumbersome process that could take three to four years and would plunge them into a world of regulation and compliance. They decide that their main goal is to improve customer experience, because, as Reich says, "Banks in America fundamentally make money by keeping customers confused. ... A confused customer is a profitable customer. We've joked that one of the greatest innovations in banking is ever-decreasing font size." They realize the best way to improve customer experience is as a technology company, and it's what they both do best. They're now developing the technology Reich believes is so lacking in current U.S. banks. This technology will be transparent to the average customer but will make their banking easy, hassle-free. Even the product's name will be easy-BankSimple.

BankSimple will be exclusively online. Customers will have one easy-to-access account and one card. They'll have free ATM access to the nation's largest network and free online bill payment. They'll have no overdraft fees, in fact, no hidden fees at all. They'll be able to deposit checks in such innovative ways as using pictures taken with their smartphones. They'll have real-time, useful data and the tools to clearly and easily manage their money.

In the consumer's eyes, BankSimple will function as a bank, but in reality it's purely the front-end experience. Reich and Karkal will work behind the scenes with chartered banks that hold FDIC-insured deposits and make loans. Their company's system will move funds as needed between checking, savings, and credit accounts to make life easy yet yield the most for the customer. The company will make its profits not from myriad fees, but by sharing lending and credit card profits with their partner banks."_</comment>


Are you a psychopath? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.statwing.com/are-you-a-psychopath/ <comment><USER2> I always have problems with tests like this, and I imagine they work poorly for highly-analytical people. Take this question: "Looking out for myself is my top priority."

I know if I put "strongly agree," it'll be more likely to call me a psychopath. At the same time, I'm thinking, "I look out for people I love - sometimes at risk to myself - but ultimately that's only because they matter to ME. Looking out for others is undeniably motivated by what matters to me."

Aside from the false dichotomies, surely any psychopath with even a shred of intelligence could answer strategically and defeat the test's intended purpose. And they use this in prison hearings?

<comment><USER3> A few years back I was tangentially involved in a very clever study involving the executive ethics that was designed to address this concern.

Some of the questions were routine business questions, others were general questions about the material they read, and, the meat of the questions were ones on the moral consequences of executive decisions. It was expected that executives would answer all the questions correctly. Instead, the study scored based on how long it took them to answer the moral questions as opposed to the general questions. These scores were then compared against respondents from a control group of non-executives.

EDIT: Gosh! I hope I'm representing her study accurately... "Business Experience and Moral Awareness: When Less May be More", Jennifer Jordan (2005)

<comment><USER4> So what happened? Citation? I'd like to read the study too.

<comment><USER5> Its a trick - hes seeing what type of responses he gets based on his waiting for a set amount of time. We are being tested!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find these profiles amusing because it doesn't matter which way the results turn out, you'll be happy.

Psychopath's don't care what the world calls them. They see it as an advantage. So if you tell a non-psychopath that he isn't a psychopath he is relieved, if you tell a psychopath that he is a psychopath he is also relieved.

So the only way this test can change someone's paradigm is if it is erroneous.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you actually worry about the possibility of being a psychopath, then you almost certainly are not.

<comment><USER8> Why do you think so?

<comment><USER9> One of the defining characteristics of being a psychopath is an inability to feel shame or empathy. If you feel bad about being a psychopath, then a.) you care what some online test thinks about you and b.) you are capable of feeling shame, thus by definition you are not a psychopath.

The one exception is if that test or diagnosis makes it impossible for you to achieve your goals. For example, if somebody broadcasts to the world that you're a psychopath and that means you get turned down from jobs or the government starts a manhunt for you, then a psychopath would feel bad. But on a self-report questionnaire on the Internet? That has no consequence on your actual life? If you feel bad about your psychopathy score there, you're almost certainly not a psychopath.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So you are giving a DSM 4 diagnosis based on a self evaluation ?

I read the questions (Iphone vs Android? Is that a demographic question??? Really?) and I had a good laugh.

Regardless of the actual accuracy (which I doubt), what exactly is the interest of the result for a person with enough instropection (fancy word for self awareness) to care enough and take the test in the first place?

<comment><USER11> The phone question is a complete _non-sequitor_...or maybe owning a Windows phone makes someone a psychopath?

<comment><AUTHOR> All the questions that aren't part of that first big bunch are just fun things we can cut the data on later. In retrospect we weren't terribly clear on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I loved the footnotes to the first statement.

> Complete the scientifically validated test below to see how psychopathic you > are relative to others who have taken the test.

The validation given is the Wikipedia page on Psychopathy. Best laugh all day.

<comment><AUTHOR> First link of that footnote was just to describe the scale, via the Wikipedia article.

Second link (on the word 'validated') was to this article: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10497804>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh boy. Can't wait to see things from the results like "Android users are more psycopathic" or "Ruby developers are less psycopathic than Java developers".

<comment><USER14> Or the blog post citing it as proof that you really must be crazy to use PHP...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can someone please explain why one's favorite programming language would have any bearing on whether they're a psychopath?

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure about psychopathy, but could you say with a straight face that you can know that someone's favorite language is brainfuck, and simultaneously not know whether or not they are insane?

<comment><USER17> I like metalanguages more than I like languages, and I guess that fits nicely with me having a schizoid personality disconnected from reality, as my mental health specialist says. So yes, there could be a link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Self-diagnosis, especially of mental illness, will always lead to a poor result.

"Do you have a heart condition? Take this online questionnaire and find out!"

</comment><comment><USER19> the problem i have with these inventories (even the real ones) is that they never ask about degree. the questions are binary and the 'response' is a gradient, when it should be the other way around.

but then again i'm no doctor, i'm just some guy... who always scores really high on these things. (top 5% in this one).

</comment><comment><USER20> For introspection purposes, I'd rather be given scenarios that I'd have to imagine being through, and then try to feel what I'd honestly do. Then I could possibly enjoy listening to some method of pinning down my internal tendencies. "Imagine yourself with a child on a boat. You have to kill the child for survival, or sacrifice your life for the child..." And then monitor my heartbeat, and possibly do me an fMRI. Sorry if this is a ramble.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think that the terms psychopath and sociopath are overhyped by media. It's not even recognized by DSM-IV. I've read Hare's book about sociopaths and my impression was that we simply don't have a very clear idea of what constitutes a sociopath. IMHO, normal people can start behaving like sociopaths in certain environments (Stanford prison experiment, members of SS in Nazi germany, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER21> This feels like clickbait to get people to fill out the details about your job at the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER22> Test put me as "a little psychopathic." I think this is bogus. The answers to most of those questions were along the lines of "it depends on the specific situation or persons involved" to some extent. Like where it asked if I

</comment><comment><USER23> Huh, some of those questions have built-in assumptions that are just ... wrong.

</comment><comment><USER24> Alternatively, just read the first line of Wikipedia's page on psychopathy. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy>

</comment><comment><USER25> Great way to mine a bit of data from the HN crowd - the section on programming languages and so forth.

Unless... I hope my choice of "Java" doesn't make me more psychopathic.

</comment><comment><USER26> So I got [number], but I don't really know if it's good or bad. There is a percentile but no scale of where the psychopaths begin and end. Pretty pointless.

<comment><USER27> I saw top 5% and did not know how to interpret that either.

<comment><USER28> Me too! Let's go chop up some people! Hehe J/K... or am I? DUN DUN DUN!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> After seeing the results, that must be wrong because women have more psychopathic minds.

</comment><comment><USER30> Few if any will answer this honestly, and given that smartphone choice was oddly put in there people will game it to make other camps look bad.

Psychopaths _know_ that their driving traits are not perceived well, and they will consciously veer away from such overt questions.

</comment><comment><USER28> I made the top 5% of respondents. I am a psychopath...</comment>


Apache vs Yaws - <AUTHOR> http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html

<comment><USER2> Yeah.. Yaws v. lighttpd, nginx, thttpd or tornado would be interesting. When's the last time apache won a benchmark of anything?

</comment><comment><USER3> Apache 2.0.39? When was this test made?

Also, which apache model, prefork or worker was used?

<comment><USER4> This is really old.

They're essentially comparing apples to oranges:

Apache's worker MPM uses system threads, whereas Erlang uses its own internal scheduler, so that at the system level, there is only one process.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would like to see memory and CPU-time allocation during the tests, as well as some more information on the test workload.

<comment><USER5> Have a little dig about on the web. There are benchmarks galore.

<comment><AUTHOR> I found nothing that would give me this kind of info. Most limit themselves to how much memory the box had and load numbers.

<comment><USER5> No ref to apache hece, but might be of interest:

[http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Nginx_vs_Yaws_...](http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Nginx_vs_Yaws_vs_MochiWeb_Web_Server_Performance_Deathmatch_Part_2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> anyone have yaws versus nginx data?

<comment><USER4> nginx would do very well too. But what's interesting about yaws or mochiweb or other Erlang systems is that they could also handle long-running calculations just about as well as they handle a static file. Well, perhaps there would be some loss of performance, but not nearly so much as if you have to spawn external threads or processes to handle said long running calculations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a very old test, I recall seeing this back in 2006 or so. It would interesting to see a comparison with Mochiweb also.

Erlang really rocks!

</comment><comment><USER8> A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...</comment>


Did Indian politicians receive CopperheadOS powered Pixel? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/top-babus-given-secure-mobiles/article19621290.ece <comment><AUTHOR> I hope they are advised on OPSEC as well. The lack of Google Play Services, shouldn't force them to search for 'Whatsapp apk' & install malware infected apps. I hope an official app store repository is maintained in the F-Droid is maintained & 'install from unknown sources' permanently disabled.</comment>