With New Browser Tech, Apple Preserves Privacy and Google Preserves Trackers - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/with-new-browser-tech-apple-preserves-privacy-google-preserves-trackers <comment><USER2> _In tandem with their Better Ads enforcement, Google will also launch a companion program, Funding Choices, that will enable CBA-compliant sites to ask Chrome users with content blockers to whitelist their site and unblock their ads. Should the user refuse, they can either pay for an "ad-free experience" or be locked out by a publisher's adblock wall._

Does this mean that Chrome will be directly supporting anti-adblock technology? Will it somehow just disable extensions like ublock on these CBA supported sites?

<comment><USER3> Key part of the quote:

> publisher's adblock wall

The publisher is the one responsible for using a mixture of Javascript and server-log analysis to detect ad-blocking users and prevent them from accessing the content. As already happens on a growing number of sites.

The change here is that Chrome will now notice when a publisher has served a user a "please disable your adblock for this site to continue" wall (maybe Google will suggest such pages be sent as HTTP 402 responses?) and do something on the browser-chrome level to give users the additional option: using a Google payments system built into Chrome to send the publisher a one- time [micro?]payment in exchange for unlocking that one article, without having to disable their adblocker.

(Of course, many ad-supported publishers also already have ad-free _subscriptions_ that you could sign up for—but they don't tend to bother with one-off per-article micropayments, because going through the whole giving-out- your-credit-card-to-a-web-form flow isn't worth it to read one article. This would avoid that problem.)

Funny coincidence: I pitched this exact thing in the form of a browser extension to a VC firm a few years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Never really thought of Apple as a defender of user privacy, but it does make some sense. They aren't in the market for ads, so there's no reason for them to make their users the product.

I think it shouldn't be surprising that Google acts like this. It seemed likely from the start that their ad blocking effort is mostly an attempt to preserve the ad industry and eliminate third party ad blocking not under Google's control.

<comment><USER5> Most people have realized this - either explicitly or intuitively - over the last 10 years.

Those cheap android phones and lower-end Windows laptops are so cheap because they are subsidized from the revenue they bring in via data collection and selling.

Its like a privacy 101 realization...

<comment><USER6> _> Those cheap android phones and lower-end Windows laptops are so cheap because they are subsidized from the revenue they bring in via data collection and selling._

Not true. Lets see what those "cheap" devices provide in terms of privacy:

1\. During installation Windows 10 explicitly asks you what stuff you want to enable and how those affect your privacy

2\. Microsoft Edge supports ad blockers and anti-trackers on desktop, mobile version is coming (already here in fast-ring?)

3\. Google allows you to turn off all kind of analytics. They email you once a year and ask you to check your security and privacy settings.

4\. Chrome allows you to install ad-blockers from Googles own extension store

5\. On Android you also have the choice of installing Mozilla firefox which supports desktop-grade adblocker and anti-tracker extensions. Android being android you can make it the default OS browser and disable or remove Chrome completely.

6\. On Android you can also install Mozilla Focus which is a privacy-oriented browser

You are basically spreading FUD.

<comment><USER7> _1\. Windows 10 explicitly asks you what stuff you want to enable and how those affect your privacy_

Where does Windows explicitly ask for permission to spy on your every keystroke and send massive quantities of analytics data back to the mothership?

And, since they're explicitly asking, how can I explicitly turn all that spyware off?

Oh, that's right, I can't. Because your assertion is flat out wrong, if not an actual deliberate prevarication.

How is this even being discussed any more? Haven't we seen enough articles about Microsoft's impossible to disable spyware? Windows 10 is spyware first, and an operating system second.

<comment><USER6> Are you claiming Windows 10 diagnostics is actually spyware and sends every keystroke and other data to Microsoft?

<comment><USER7> Thankfully the only Windows I currently run is XP in a VM isolated from the Internet. So I have no personal experience. But the articles are all over the Internet. Here's one I found quickly: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/5/15188636/microsoft- windows...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/5/15188636/microsoft- windows-10-data-collection-documents-privacy-concerns)

Yes, there's plenty of "diagnostic" information sent to Microsoft. You might be willing to trust Microsoft with it, but I sure don't.

Just like they claim the keylogger isn't really that, it's perfectly harmless. Here's an early quote from Microsoft: _"When you interact with your Windows device by speaking, writing (handwriting), or typing, Microsoft collects speech, inking, and typing information—including information about your Calendar and People (also known as contacts)…"_ [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2974057/windows/how-to- turn-o...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2974057/windows/how-to-turn-off- windows-10s-keylogger-yes-it-still-has-one.html)

Is that still current? I don't know, why would I trust them to have removed it?

Microsoft's game is to wear people down. Not everything can be turned off; many things that can be turned off are turned back on by system updates. After a while most people give up and live with the spyware.

<comment><USER6> > Yes, there's plenty of "diagnostic" information sent to Microsoft. You might > be willing to trust Microsoft with it, but I sure don't.

I have not seen any actual analysis of the sent data. I would prefer it didn't send anything but until proven otherwise I will assume it is just app diagnostics.

Remember they are in the business of selling operating systems. EU would happily shut them down if they are caught doing any shenanigans.

> Thankfully the only Windows I currently run is XP in a VM isolated from the > Internet

I suspect whatever OS you are using as host also talks to the mothership, it just doesn't say it in a privacy page.

<comment><USER7> _I suspect whatever OS you are using as host also talks to the mothership, it just doesn 't say it in a privacy page._

MacOS has telemetry, but it seems to be easily disabled. Is it really disabled? Nobody but Apple knows.

It's safe to say that both Windows and MacOS are chatty. But, for whatever reason, I trust Apple more.

My firewall runs OpenBSD. That's a breath of fresh air. I can run ps and understand exactly what processes are running and why. Definitely no inexplicable TCP connections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is so odd. They say : "While we welcome the willingness to tackle annoying ads, the CBA's criteria do not address a key reason many of us install ad blockers: to protect ourselves against the non-consensual tracking and surveillance that permeates the advertising ecosystem operated by the members of the CBA."

"many" is a link to [https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/09/02/why-people-use- ad-b...](https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/09/02/why-people-use-ad-blockers/)

Except that page shows that "to avoid being tracked" is actually relatively low on the list of reasons people use ad blockers compared to the annoying advertising issues, malware, etc?

<comment><USER9> It's relatively low but it's not insignificant. It's still about 39%. Also 60% say its to avoid "intrusive ads".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The #1 reason to block ads for me is protecting against malware, both for inline drive-by exploits and for scam sites offering backdoored downloads.

<comment><USER11> This really is crucial for older relatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> ...and eff forgets about mozilla.

<comment><USER13> I think they do that on purpose. Mozilla presents itself as a good guy and many people still believe that, so those people could get offended and not get the point eff tries to make.

But yeah, Mozilla follows Google in this regard and it's in Mozilla's best interest to preserve tracking and allow advertising industry to "hijack our attention", otherwise they won't get enough funding to exist.

<comment><USER12> except Firefox is the only mobile browser that you can run effective script and ad blocker extensions. well, on android at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They still want users to either view the ads or pay the "publisher". This will never work.

They must start paying users. Only then, will their ads be viewed.

</comment><comment><USER15> For decades I favored Linux in the desktop, then adopted Android, etc.

In the last year, due to Apple's reasonably good support for privacy, I have gone all-in for iOS and macOS devices. I didn't make this decision lightly, but for me it seemed like the right thing to do.

I favor using Google services that I pay for (GCP, Play Music and Movies) but I am concerned about tracking activities of Google and Facebook.

I think Apple deserves support for respecting customer privacy.

</comment><comment><USER16> uBlock to block the ads, disable 3rd party cookies to block the trackers. Add a hosts file and you're miles better off than either of these proposals.

</comment><comment><USER17> No surprise here. Ever heard of AdWords?

</comment><comment><USER18> Wake me up when Apple has started helping foster a community of developers for Safari plugins.

Chrome is useful because it's so extendable.

<comment><USER19> I am sorry to say that you are ignoring the importance of privacy, and somewhat flippantly making the case for extensibility over privacy. Safari's (and Apple's) commitment to privacy is to be commended and we should try not to lose sight of it because of our personal preferences.

<comment><USER20> Apple sells default placement to search engines like Google and Bing. If it it really cared about privacy 1\. It would not sell it's customers to Google or Bing as search placement 2\. It would put duckduckgo or similar as default.

<comment><USER21> Once they have intelligent tracking protection enabled though it won't matter what search engine you use, because it will prevent tracking on all of them. Just including DuckDuckGo in the defaults is a huge step forward. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was defaulted if Google keeps trying to circumvent adblocking measures.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do I see links that are over 2 years old in the top 100 - <AUTHOR>

Ok this has bugged me for a while now.  When I start browsing HN to the 4th or 5th page I start to see links that were posted between 100 and 890!!! days ago.  Why am I seeing these kind of links resurrecting and showing up within the top 100 current links? <comment><USER2> I've never seen one. Can you point out one article or link?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will grab a screen cap and a link the next time I see it happen. One point to note is that I have only seen it happen when I am not logged in(say if my cache gets reset and I forget to log back in right away). I just tried to find some today and was unable to do so, but it is always interesting when I see a link I swear I read about years ago boasting as a new technology and then notice the link was actually posted two years ago and somehow found its way back into the list.</comment></comment>


Tokyo 2020 Olympics fireworks [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTyDcsZht3w <comment><AUTHOR> Computer simulated fireworks with the program called _FWsim_. This is how fireworks show was supposed to look during Olympic.[0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhfC2CpmXc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhfC2CpmXc)</comment>


Superb old engineering simulation games, now open source and available on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bencaddigan/esports-for-engineers <comment><AUTHOR> For the entrepreneurs among us, the business story here is that these fantastically detailed sims were expensive to make. The three 20-year-old sims at the github link, Grand Prix Legends (GPL), Mig Alley (MA) and Falcon (FF) were all bet-your-company high concept projects that expected a lot from their customers in 1999.

MA did OK in the market but that only encouraged it's creators to make a follow-on product that tanked their company. GPL and FF were commercial flops, and the companies that made them soon disbanded. Nevertheless, GPL and FF evolved into what are currently best-in-class sim products. The high ambitions and technical wizardry of all three sims inspired dedicated community groups that added content to the sims for years following release. The versions of the sims on the github page include these community-generated add-ons.

The FF project was a notorious business mess that somehow propelled itself through years of headwinds with a kind of prodigious creativity. Both the mess and the creativity are on display in the 1000 page volunteer-created FF manual on github.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Debates about which sim is more accurate bring up a philosophical question about sim design. My take is that designing a realistic simulation is like solving a physics problem, in that it's impossible to capture all of reality with a mathematical model, so the challenge is to first decide what you want to model accurately and what you can ignore. Doing that well requires insight. Case in point - although Rowan got overwhelmed by 1C in the flight sim marketplace, I would argue that Mig Alley is better than the IL2 product that covers the same material because MA is more accurate where it matters. IL2 has more realistic cockpits but Mig Alley does a much better job of modeling the physics of the Mig/Sabre asymmetry. That asymmetry is what makes MA dogfighting so unique. And once you've mastered that one-on-one duel, you find that the many vs many contest is completely different and involves little extended dogfighting- also true-to-life according to the history books I've read.

</comment><comment><USER2> Grand Prix Legends was amazing when it came out and the modding/sim racing community kept it alive for an incredibly long time.

However, the version here is not open source, just a demo. Grand Prix Legends also had its share of quirky and odd physics, the fastest drivers sometimes achieved their record lap times with joysticks and took advantage of the differences between game physics and real life.

There have been significant improvements in racing sims accuracy since the GP Legends days, and most die-hard sim racers I know of (including some of the best GP Legends racers) lean toward iRacing as a competitive platform today.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree completely. The other two games in esports-for-engineers are open source, while the GPL demo is free but not open source. (I didn't have enough space to explain this distinction in my one-line hacker news post.)

iRacing is certainly more accurate than GPL, but that's an apples to oranges comparison because these sims have different goals, and both are great at what they do. If you are preparing to compete in real-world car racing, by all means sign up for iRacing (after reading the excellent and funny book "You Suck at Racing"). If you are an engineer, and like to learn about car physics by adjusting the car settings in GPL Race Engineer and then seeing the results in GPL Replay analyzer (both included at the github link), then GPL is a fine choice. There's a lot to be said for a simple, elegant game design that provides an immersive experience; By that measure I submit that all three games on the esports-for-engineers github page deliver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > open source

> empty repo that points to a file on "mediafire" and is said to be binaries > that are ran using wine

which is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> The source code for Mig Alley is here: [https://github.com/gondur/mig_src](https://github.com/gondur/mig_src)

The source code for Free Falcon is here: [https://github.com/FreeFalcon](https://github.com/FreeFalcon)

The link to the tar file containing windows binaries that run under linux/wine is in the Readme.md file of the repository linked to by the hacker news submit here: [https://github.com/bencaddigan/esports-for- engineers](https://github.com/bencaddigan/esports-for-engineers)</comment></comment>


The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://vallettaventures.tumblr.com/post/13124883568/the-price-of-a-messy-codebase-no-latex-for-the-ipad <comment><USER2> The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of software, that are developed over time. They were extended as the capabilities of their platforms increased, to take advantage of those capabilities. This requires full access to the OS utilities, and naturally LaTeX environment does that. If anything, this is Apple's fault. For whatever reason, they cannot allow applications to use the existing capabilities of the underlying OS. This goes against the Unix mindset; of course there will be unpleasant consequences, but one cannot hold Unix mindset responsible for these.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious where you get the idea that LaTeX is bug free. In my experience it is rare to find two packages that work together bug free, yet alone the collections of them needed to form even a respectable document.

<comment><USER4> I assume he meant that core TeX (the part written ages ago by Knuth) is in effect bug-free. However you do have a good point that one effect of core TeX being ancient and not really updated is that, in practice, what people actually use is TeX plus giant macro packages whose size is bigger than TeX itself, and _those_ are certainly not bug-free. It's at least plausible that a rewrite wouldn't lead to more bugs total, if the rewrite made it easier to write less-buggy macro packages that interacted more nicely (the TeX macro/module situation is not great for that).

<comment><USER5> Nobody uses (Knuth's) TeX anymore. They use PDFTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. None of these are as stable as TeX, but in practice a whole lot better than most other software I use.

<comment><USER6> All of these versions of TeX are just extensions of the original TeX. The core Knuth's code is still used in each one of them. The stability comes from the core, not just from the work of pdftex, xetex and luatex developers.

<comment><USER5> The stability comes from the core, but the problems arise from the extensions. I have pushed LuaTeX to some limits and seen lots of segfaults and other errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> * First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, including PDP-10 and others.

* LaTeX is working on the iPad, see for example: [http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthu...](http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthur-keynote/Keynote-iPad.pdf)

* LuaTeX (<http://luatex.org>) is written in C, not WEB.

* You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?

<comment><USER7> > * You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All > other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont > fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?

A lot of TeX uses Computer Modern to typeset the body (a metafont font) and I don't think I have ever see a TeX document that doesn't use Computer Modern or Euler (another metafont font) for equation typesetting.

I also wonder whether it's possible to achieve the excellent equation typesetting capabilities of TeX without metafont.

<comment><USER8> Yep, it always surprises me how few people change off the default Computer Modern -- which I find really spindly and ugly -- given that a single \usepackage{...} will give you a beautiful Palatino, for example. I sometimes suspect they're just wanting to hit me in the face with the fact that they're LaTeX users...

<comment><USER9> I personally love Computer Modern. I consider it beautiful and one of the most pleasing fonts I have ever encountered.

<comment><USER6> Computer modern is a nice font for documents that contain equations. I suspect that it is because of the subtle changes in density. But for normal prose it really doesn't work very well.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. I think it looks quite nice for normal prose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One real issue is that most users' LaTeX environments are highly customized and tweaked to our own liking. Even _if_ it weren't absolutely nuts to put every-package-and-extension-known-to-man inside a iOS binary, it still wouldn't be right. Like, what if I want LaTeX2HTML (I've never not had to highly tweak this)? What about my snazzy custom fonts? That bibliography style that only one journal accepts and requires these crufty old stys from 2.09?

If I needed LaTeX on a daily, here's what I would do:

1\. Install DropBox on my mobile device and a designated "build" box--maybe just your home computer or an EC2 micro.

2\. Set up Jenkins on a box that's got your favorite LaTeX environment and create a job that takes your LaTeX source files, builds and outputs your desired formats and pops them into an output folder you created on DropBox.

3\. Set a build trigger that runs a build every time you touch a specific "ready to build" file.

4\. Edit and write LaTeX source files on your mobile device using an app that syncs with DropBox like PlainText.

5\. Increment something in your "build trigger" file.

6\. Et voila, check the DropBox app on your mobile device for output and log files. :)

<comment><USER11> Sounds to me like a LaTeX App for iPad that offloaded page rendering to a server which also handled configuration would be a nice product. I'm guessing the market might not be large enough.

<comment><USER12> Main problem is that most people who would want it could write the short script to implement it themselves. :-)

<comment><USER11> The integration is where the value is. Even LaTeX users value some kind of ease of use or they wouldn't sully themselves with LaTeX, they'd use TeX or just write PostScript directly like a true neckbeard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think this is a problem with LaTeX & "messy codebase", I think this is a problem with restrictions on iOS from Apple.

The crux of the problems with porting it seem to be that everything has to be in 1 executable, that there can be no scripts, and it must be in an approved language. That's merely a problem from Apple.

A correct title would be "The price of restriction on apps: No LaTeX on iPad"

The author also thinks it's be easy to just switch licence to GPL. Unless LaTex & TeX required copyright assignment, you cannot switch to GPL without getting every contributor to agree. The author is also under the believe that you cannot have commerical software that's GPL. It's DRM software you cannot have with GPL, and that's why Apple doesn't allow it.

<comment><USER14> "I don't think this is a problem with LaTeX & "messy codebase", I think this is a problem with restrictions on iOS from Apple."

No. It's a problem with LaTeX & messy codebase.

Take Apple out of the picture, for a minute: the messy codebase remains a problem with TeX/LaTeX.

It doesn't lead itself to easy extension, it doesn't lead itself to easy incorporation of features such as full Unicode support, Open Type font special capabilities, and much much more. There have been several attempts to fix this, namely LaTeX3e, Omega et al, but none has been that successful. We're stuck with a codebase that works, but is messy, too complicated (ever tried to set up a LaTex/Tex distro from scratch), and obsolete in many parts.

<comment><USER6> How can you say this when every item in your list is currently supported? Unicode, open type, pdf, etc. are all currently supported by new distributions.

<comment><USER14> Maybe you misunderstood me? I wrote "it doesn't lead itself to ___easy_ __incorporation of features" (such as the above). I also acknowledge several attempts to fix this. What I lament is that "We're stuck with a codebase that works, but is messy, too complicated and obsolete in many parts".

I know a lot of the above are supported (I use LaTeX myself, and follow the developments quite closely) in newer TeX implementations, but not in clean way and not with first class support, to the legacy limitation.

I was asking for a clean implementation, no something like XeTex --that while supports several modern features it inherits tons of design problems from the original TeX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In this paper[1], they say that much of the latex running time is eaten up in the startup and shutdown of the program and the actual typesetting time is in the microseconds.

A long-running process (daemon) is therefore a much more efficient way to run (La)TeX.

[1] www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb27-0/fine.pdf

""" On my current 800 MHz PC, the command

      $ tex story \\end

takes about 0.137 seconds, while

      $ tex \\end

takes 0.133 seconds. The first command typesets a small page of material; the second does nothing but start TEX and then exit. Thus, typesetting the small page takes about 0.004 seconds. """

<comment><USER16> It strikes me that TeX ought to take a page from Lisp interpreters and dump core after loading all the standard configuration files, so that future runs won't need to waste so much time on initialization.

<comment><USER17> It does, that's how LaTeX starts up and why you have to run it as latex instead of tex. Ditto texinfo, and probably ConTeXt. For a variety of reasons the TeX engine still has to reload a lot of stuff because it might possibly have changed, which is a suboptimal situation; but there is a concept of a "dump" state that has most of the kernel initialized. I suspect people don't care enough to work around it, and the people most likely to do the work (TeX kernel hackers) are also the people who are most likely to be inconvenienced by it not noticing the tweaking they're doing.

Which is not to say it's not a good idea here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having ported a TeX distribution to MacOS classic some 15 years ago, I feel that the author overstates some of the difficulties. In particular, it's not all that hard to get kpathsea to work without callouts to bash scripts (it's not like Mac OS classic supported system() or anything like it). Basically, kpathsea is an API, and the implementation can be switched out (e.g. I implemented a dbm based file name cache).

Admittedly, getting everything linked into a single binary might be fairly hard.

</comment><comment><USER19> "iPad is the most beautiful platform out there"

Sorry, but I fail to understand, why any serious TeX-Head would say that. The platform is crippled and your problem shows it. You are ranting in the wrong direction.

-jsl

<comment><USER20> "Beautiful" has nothing to do with whether it's crippled or not. In any case, how is a 4GB executable + several-second runtime for trivial documents Apple's fault? Is the iPad crippled because it can't run a crappy cross-compiled version of OpenOffice with a PS/2 mouse?

<comment><USER21> I guess the argument is that it's apple's "fault" because the restrictions of the platform require the whole package to be bundled as a single binary, instead of allowing a more modular distribution mechanism. Most of the contents in the 4G are extension packages.

But I am not sure if "fault" is an appropriate term here anyway, we're simply observing two different approaches to software bundling that happen to be incompatible.

<comment><USER22> The restrictions are what they are, but TeX doesn't help at all by being large with an internal (circular!) dependency tree that would (should) get you fired in a flash from a commercial software house.

<comment><USER21> Apart from the fact that trees cannot be circular ;-) LaTeX installations work like a charm for other forms of distributions. I think it's really just a clash of philosophies here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't know, maybe the author is trying to do something with the iPad which is simply not supposed to do. The iPad is beautiful, pleasant to use etc. but writing a book on the iPad is maybe not the things one does.

I use my tablet to write — quite a lot — way slower than on my regular keyboard, but with time to think. Everything is in text files, synced to my desktop where the typesetting is really performed.

Writing publications or books is a long process where basically the final rendering is taken care at the end because the quality of the wording is more important.

So, just a text editor with hard work on the words, sentences, ideas are where 99% of the time is spent.

Maybe the author can provide an extremely pleasant way to write on the iPad _and_ on the Mac with syncing of the work to have the feeling that the work is never lost, that one can always update a bit of the manuscript and just run "make" on the Mac some times to times. Everything in a smooth workflow.

<comment><USER24> I completely agree.

I understand that tablets are a wonderfully portable device but you can't expect to get 100% desktop functionality. Sometimes you have to find the limit of your software/hardware.

I don't own an iPad, but is there git or the like? If so syncing and keeping track of changes would be simple.

<comment><USER25> > Sometimes you have to find the limit of your software/hardware.

The point is that there does seem to be a software limit, but there shouldn't _need_ to be a particular limit there. There's certainly not a hardware limit, since an iPad can run circles around almost all of the computers of the era when LaTeX was written. Unless you believe that the TeX system represents an almost magical, once-in-a-lifetime, impossible to replicate achievement in software engineering, there's shouldn't be a software limit either, but the code base is so complicated that there does seem to be one.

<comment><USER26> From what I can tell, the software limit is that everybody has a different set of custom macros and styles that they use, and that distributing extra code is a violation of Apple policy, one that can't be fixed unless you get rid of not only the reality of LaTeX but the _idea_ of LaTeX as a macro system.

That, or Apple changes their policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wouldn't it be possible to just write a front end for the iPad, and run a LaTeX service in the cloud? I think this would be by far the easiest way to do it, and I don't think it's really optimal to do all the LaTeX stuff client- side on limited hardware and battery anyway.

<comment><USER28> Of course it's possible and desirable so someone has already done it: <http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/tex-touch/id377627321?mt=8>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was agog when I downloaded the LaTeX binary install for my new Mac a few years ago and discovered how massive it was. LaTeX is almost as big as the entire operating system disk!

What on earth is in there?

<comment><USER30> The full TexLive distribution contains all officially accepted packages ever written (this includes fonts, iconography, compiled documentation and other heavy stuff), most of the compilers, the LaTeX and Context (MK II and IV) packages and a huge toolchain. For compatibility reasons, packages are (almost) never removed. Also for compatibility reasons, the LPPL (Latex Project Public License) discourages[1] the release of a modified package under the same name, so there are copies within the distribution.

So, the TexLive distribution is the "fire-and-forget"-package in the LaTeX world, thats why it is so big. I use it for around 10 years now and I never had to install an additional package.

[1] It even prohibited that for a while, see Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This article seems to advocate a huge amount of work to an existing, open, and highly stable software product - all to allow it to work on a proprietary device with heavy restrictions on software availability and installation.

Should we do all this work - mandated by business-driven 'app store guidelines' - simply to allow known good software to continue to work?

</comment><comment><USER32> This article is a proof of the stupidity, ignorance, and general jerkiness of an Apple user. It's like, the world must resolve around some standards set by Apple because it fails to deliver a system that actually works. Oh, and never mind that the stupid guy never understands the reason why the code base is set up as it is.

All in all, here is my opinion: who ever upvote this should feel ashame of yourself for wasting everyone's real-estate on this stupid rant.

<comment><USER33> Have you actually spent a little moment to at least really RTA?

The author states that even with the restriction lifted, it wouldn't make much sense, as with all the extension that it requires to meet the author's need it would take 4GB.

The situation would be pretty much the same in Android, despite it being rooted in Linux. The article is not so much about Apple as it is about LaTeX.

If you would like to make a point, at least read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait a sec. "No LaTeX on the iPad" conflates "editing a LaTeX document" and "rendering and compiling LaTex to a final document.". Editing LaTeX on the iPad is already perfectly easy and really quite pleasant, especially with a bluetooth keyboard -- I do it most days (currently, Textastic is my preferred platform, supports syntax higlighting, DropBox and MobileMe).

Rendering to DVI or PDF is something else entirely. While other comments here indicate its doable, I have to ask why? I render my documents on another machine (I actually have a script that monitors dropbox and periodically re- pdflatex's if the timestamp changes -- redirecting error messages to a file is trivial if you need to troubleshoot remotely). If you're attempting to do LaTeX with a WYSIAYG interface or (worse) doing the edit-a-line-rerender- repeat cycle, I'd have to say that you're doing it wrong. The assertion that "doing LaTeX" (or, frankly, any platform that supports simple text editing) requires the native presence of the entire LaTex codebase is just misinformed.

Finally, the author of the post apparently started his project without knowing that the original TeX distribution was written using literate programming, what kpathsea was, or that there were other implementations of LaTeX. Perhaps they weren't quite prepared/qualified for the undertaking? This smells like a classic case of "this isn't how I would do it/use the tool, so it must be broken".

<comment><USER12> Ah - forgot to mention. If you (like me) occaisionally need to see AMSLaTeX (math) rendered to make sure you got it right, Mathbot on the iPad is your friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a total 'Bed of Procrustes' argument. In order to deal with the problem of this ONE device and in particular the App Store guidelines, you want to cut off the legs of the source code.

</comment><comment><USER35> Don't use an entertainment toy for TeX. iPad is a very nice piece of hardware but it is only a consumer (gamer) device - not a full featured Computer. Its good for games and ebooks but I would never use it as a developer engine.

Why do you want to hurt yourself typing TeX on a virtual keyboard? If you consider to add a real keyboard to your ipad then you should better get serious and use a Macbook, Linux or Windows.

</comment><comment><USER36> how about making an app that just stores the .tex files, and to convert them to pdf or something, the .tex file gets sent to a server

<comment><USER37> This is an interesting solution, because the problem is that the original codebase is messy and therefore not portable. It seems to happen to most software as it ages.

Putting it on a server makes the architecture more robust against messy code (and changes in programming languages and environments), because pieces can be changed independently.

<comment><USER38> The problem isn't that the original codebase is messy (it's aged, but there are still comparatively new projects working on it e.g. LuaTeX) or that it's non-portable, as demonstrated by the multitude of platforms it's available for.

The problem is roughly equivalent to producing a non-upgradable perl. It's not very useful on its own, but it's completely impractical to include a copy of the entire CPAN with it. And Apple's policies prevent you from downloading additional packages. It's just not worth the effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hear, hear! This post provides a perfect example of the utter failure of software engineering in the real world. I am reminded of it every time I try to install software, with all the ridiculous dependencies and multiple versions. Instead of addressing the serious foundational issues facing software development and architecture, the geniuses are busy inventing the latest, greatest programming language, creating _even more problems_.

Computer science and engineering departments should use these situations to train their students.

<comment><USER40> > the geniuses are busy inventing the latest, greatest programming language, > creating even more problems.

There is some truth in your microrant here. I would restate it like this: Instead of getting excited with how expressive is a new sexy multi-injection functional language when you write the nth Fibonacci sequence, I would think it more realist and constructive to get excited with how a new language or a new extension of an existing language allow to handle module and package dependencies in a clean, safe and _explicit_ way.

It resonates also with my work today: I spend a few hours removing those evil "import *" from our codebase... (Python's "we are grownups" mantra is nice, but I think a piece of the quote is missing: "we are grownups, thus we run pylint and comply to all the rules, except a few carefully chosen ones")

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > This dream lasted a few days until we discovered that TeX, the typesetting > engine underlying LaTeX, isn't written in C. TeX is written in WEB, Donald > Knuth's "literate" programming language.

Seriously, they discovered that after starting the project???

</comment><comment><USER42> LaTeX can't be 4GB. I think it is being confused with TexLive? You don't need all of TexLive to make LaTeX documents....

<comment><USER43> There certainly must exist some reasonable snapshot that is less than 4GB as I ran Tex on a computer with less than a 1GB HD in the distant past -- and it didn't consume most of the HD at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think the salient question here is why would you _want_ to work with LaTeX on a tablet?

<comment><USER45> Um, for about any other reason that you would want to use document editing software on a tablet? For instance, I use LibreOffice and its ilk only for the most throwaway documents (and open others' files). Having an iPad means I don't need to lug my laptop around to work on my thesis (I run Emacs on a VPS via SSH to do it, and while personally I don't particularly care about the aesthetics, I'd say the use case is certainly there).

<comment><USER46> So, do you also lug around a keyboard for the ipad? Or do you actually type using the touchscreen?

Maybe you just need a smaller laptop ..

Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

<comment><USER45> I use a ZaggMate which doubles as protection, weighs about the same as any other case and is not bulky at all. It works quite well.

> Maybe you just need a smaller laptop ..

No, I don't want to have a small laptop as my main computer. I had an Eee before the iPad, but the difference in the writing experience is not too different in the end and the other advantages of the iPad are greater. In any case, you can hardly call me a person who unreasonably hangs on to Apple stuff: I'm writing this under Linux which I installed on the MBP my university gave me. I hardly ever boot into OS X here.

> Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

Why? Emacs doesn't really need X, and I don't need to re-typeset my work every five minutes.

<comment><USER46> _"Why? Emacs doesn't really need X.."_

Guess this depends on how you work. I often find myself starting many instances of the editor[1] which is a pain if you have to create a new ssh connection for each (or use ctrl-z etc).

 _"the writing experience is not too different [..] the other advantages of the iPad are greater."_

Guess the real difference between us is that you see something great in the iPad, so you are willing to live with its obvious shortcomings[2] compared to a laptop. I have yet to discover why it's so amazing, and only see a small, but pretty much useless gadget. It could be used for reading I guess..

[1] yes, it has tabs.. still

[2] low resolution, can't run what I want to run, can't type on it without a keyboard, and at that point you could just as easily carry a small laptop (not an Eee ffs, a real laptop).

<comment><USER47> Starting many instances of emacs and using tabs, of all things, suggests a certain "you're doing it wrong".

<comment><USER46> It's because I work on many things, and I like to group each "project" in its own gvim window and/or virtual desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This has nothing to do with a 'messy codebase'; a minimalist LaTeX installation would run perfectly well on iOS if it wasn't for the arbitrary rules that Apple imposes upon iOS.

If you want to use a 'walled garden' device like an iPad, you can't really complain when you run into artificial limitations.

</comment><comment><USER49> Is there some problem with the MacOS port of (Live) TeX?

A two page LaTeX test document on my old Dell Optiplex (Q6700 cpu) with Ubuntu 10.4 takes 0.033s, two orders of magnitudes less than he experiences.

The 539 page reference manual for the project I'm working on takes 3 seconds to format.

</comment><comment><USER50> "I can see no choice other than starting from scratch."

Then good luck! Please post again once you've finished the rewrite.

</comment><comment><USER51> the idea that LaTeX has a messy codebase is almost mindboggling to me--I had assumed that TeX--practically the only code that's published as a book (see: The TeX Book) would be clean. I guess the complaint is mostly about the Pascal + C that's code-generated by TANGLE.

<comment><USER4> It's not so much core TeX that's a mess as the ecosystem; the set of font- generation, path-management, shell scripts, PS/PDF/DVI code, and special- purpose glue binaries gets pretty hairy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does no one use ScribTeX? Check it out: <http://www.scribtex.com/>

<comment><USER53> Looks like a great idea. What's your experience with it?

Does it have a good selection of packages, or just the bare-bones?

<comment><USER54> [http://support.scribtex.com/entries/316451-frequently- asked-...](http://support.scribtex.com/entries/316451-frequently-asked- questions#packages)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Has Apple started allowing non-trivial Turing complete languages into the App store now? Unless I'm mistaken LaTeX would be rejected out of hand no matter how much you clean it up because it is an interpreter.

<comment><USER56> As there is an app[1] that allows to run Lua code typed by the user, the most likely changed their policy about interpreting code.

[1] Codify: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codify/id439571171?mt=8>

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I think we're going to see this as a more common problem as we move into the future of non-desktop computing systems and the want for older tools on them. Unfortunately, what LaTex has done is use much of the core unix philosophy which I generally agree with (using small programs that you can pipe text in and out of to make a larger program). When you find that you can't port 20 sub-apps due to each of them being written in various language, etc you'll hit problems.

</comment><comment><USER58> I question the basic premise here. iPad is not meant for content creating or document typesetting, it's meant for content consumption.

If you want to do anything that looks remotely like work you don't want to use iDevice for it.

<comment><USER59> That's right - that's why Apple released stuff like GarageBand, Pages, Keynote, Numbers and iMovie for the iPad - so that people would not use all this content-creation software to create content.

Oh wait.

<comment><USER58> Yeah I have all those app on my iPhone 4. iMove is useful if I'm out and about and want to trim and upload a video to facebook etc (these apps should really be shipped with the OS), but that's far cry from actual work or real video editing.

The other applications pages, numbers, keynote are severely limited, and really slow and difficult to use. They are OK for viewing documents created elsewhere, but not so much for creating new one.

<comment><USER59> The Isaacson biography states explicitly that Apple released those apps to counter the perception (which they disagreed with) that the iPad was for "consuming content only"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> has anyone thought of just having a bunch of cloud servers with LaTeX built there, and then writing a front-end which uploads your docs, compiles them and downloads the resulting PDF? with fast enough servers and good enough data speeds, this might even rival the estimated 10 seconds for a fully ported LaTeX app.

I'm assuming it's been ruled out for other reasons though.

EDIT: this would also make it trivial to use it on android/blackberry, without any extra effort. apparently, also, <http://www.scribtex.com/>

<comment><USER61> At ScribTeX we regularly get comments from users about how fast our compiling is. Even with the round trip to the server, the PDF appears in the user's browser quicker than if they compile it locally. This isn't due to anything especially clever that we've done but instead stands as a testament to data speeds, and the performance of the Linodes that we compile on. Particularly with Linode, I think the high disk IO performance makes for a very quick LaTeX compile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'd rather go with a rewrite that also redesigns the typesetting language. It feels like C++ of typesetting to me, although of course maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the language to see its key concepts clearly.

Maybe the Lout system will pick enough traction one day.

<comment><USER63> Yeah, I'd like to see someone do a modern rewrite of the whole TeX/LaTeX/XeTeX/XeLaTeX/etc. mess. Something that has modern syntax and support for modern features (such as output to PDF, HTML, even OOXML).

It would be good to see UTF-8 natively supported, and for all the common packages to be absorbed into the core libraries. Right now, you can sometimes find 2 or 3 different packages that do the same thing, often with varying benefits. Take the best package, add the missing features from the other packages, and bundle it all into one distribution. For example, the absolutely horrible table support, where merging cells is a nightmare.

<comment><USER64> Indeed, once you get set up with LaTeX it's okay, but if I were to go and make a new essay I'd have a hard time remembering wtf packages I used for the last one and what they actually did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> 2 cent take: While it may have been an epic build story to get LaTeX running on an iPad, I guess I gotta ask why not just install an iPad ssh client (iSSH, Prompt, etc.) and run LaTeX remotely? Or if you really insist on building a native client, why not one that talks to daemon on a system with LaTeX installed?

Viewing the output would be trivial: convert the output to PDF. For the ssh client case, push the PDF to a cloud file service like Dropbox. In the native client case, have the daemon push back the PDF for native client to render.

</comment><comment><USER66> If anyone is interested in a simple, no-nonsense version of TeX, check out Thierry Laronde's KerTeX (<http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html>). The whole thing comes in at a bit under 10 MB, and it can run on Linux, *BSD, and even Plan 9! I compiled it on Plan 9, built LaTeX as per his instructions in the README, and have been happily generating LaTeX documents since then :)

</comment><comment><USER67> The iPad is made for content consumption, not creation. Trying to write TeX (or any kind of markup) with a virtual keyboard sounds horrific.

<comment><USER68> one can use the ipad with a real keyboard.

<comment><USER67> If you're mobile, carrying around a keyboard negates the value of the iPad. If you're stationary, a real computer gives you far more flexibility. Then you have the issue of unbearably long compiles, as the article stated. The iPad is not the right tool for the job of TeX editing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Perhaps LaTeX creation system should move to the cloud, think of a google-docs like service which will offer a rich, reliable and simple set of tools to create, publish and collaboratively work on documents.

<comment><USER70> <http://www.scribtex.com/> did it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> How about a service to render the LaTeX files? i.e. an app where users just write in LaTeX, there's a render button which sends the file to some server which renders it and sends it back.

</comment><comment><USER72> What about a LaTeX cloud service with a thin iPad client?

<comment><USER73> TeXTouch offers somewhat close to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The size of the distribution has nothing to do with TeX itself, but with the huge amount of fonts, style files, and other configuration files used to typeset modern documents on desktop systems. TeX itself is very self contained and already runs on most architectures you can think of. The author's problem is that he is trying to port to a mobile device a distribution that was created for UNIX systems.

</comment><comment><USER74> Maybe we should let LaTex be the way it is now and focus instead on generating better HTML authoring tools. With eBooks becoming more popular, there is certainly a need for such tools. While I understand HTML is no match for the power of LaTex currently, we need to think ahead and maybe help to create a platform for the future rather than getting bogged down by technologies of the past.

<comment><USER75> Um.... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX2HTML>

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I don't think literate programming is obsolete, nor has it been superseded by "modern source code documentation".

LP means treating a program as a piece of literature. A literate program is free from the structure of conventional source code layout; this is different to simply documenting source code.

I don't claim LP is a hot topic, but I think to say it's obsolete is to misunderstand the concept.

</comment><comment><USER77> I wonder how hard it would be to modify TeX (or kpathsea, whatever) to load its libraries out of a single compressed tarball or fast database of some kind. Seeing as TeX libraries are text files, I do find it surprising that they don't compress better. Is it mostly the fonts and documentation taking up all that space?

</comment><comment><USER68> The iPad way is probably to run the messy LaTex codebase on a server that interacts with UI code on the ipad.

<comment><USER22> On the go doesn't always mean on the go with a reasonable internet connection. The underground trains are a good example where in a big city like London, a journey may last an hour. A flight is another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> For the record, I have no interest in running a TeX rendering process on an iPad.

What I _would_ like to run on the iPad, on the other hand, is a TeX-syntax- aware, document-validating editor that knows how to consume a rendering web service that runs on a Real Computer.

</comment><comment><USER79> Since I have just spent several hours unsuccessfully debugging a problem with a Journal template, a missing font, and my TeX distribution, I understand why the author thinks Latex is messy.

</comment><comment><USER80> This rewrite has already been done. See <http://www.texmacs.org/>

<comment><USER81> This is just an editor based on the ideas of TeX. You cannot use TeX or LaTeX directly, other than trivial insertions. It can only export to LaTeX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> _"... A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad. It is incapable of delivering the slick user experience that the iOS platform's adherents expect and love ..."_

Xterm (iSSH) to linux box? ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280730>

</comment><comment><USER83> Why don't they setup a remote server and do the latex processing remotely.

</comment><comment><USER84> Create an app that uses a web service to compile the latex..

</comment><comment><USER85> Perhaps there is a market for a LaTeX rendering web service.

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm not sure LaTeX makes beautiful documents, that seems like a real stretch, but it does make creating good documents very easy.

</comment><comment><USER87> What about luatex?

</comment><comment><USER88> ironically, it could work super easily on a $99 touchpad. since you have all the UNIX stack to play with, and no corporate control-freak limiting what you can do with your device.

</comment><comment><USER89> The price of using an iPad: No LaTex.

<comment><USER7> ... no emacs, no compilers, no interpreters, no shell, no browser other than the company mandated one...

<comment><USER89> No fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> What am I missing?

Why have no one suggested to split LaTeX into two parts like the Emacs server, or something?

With a client and a server to run on your desktop/laptop/etc.

<comment><USER21> In fact, you could run a remote Emacs and edit LaTeX with it, using the excellent AUCTeX package. Of course, that means you need to have a network connection plus a server you can ssh into.

<comment><USER90> You'd also need to see the layout graphically? (Also, I assume every LaTeX user has a few computers to use as servers..)

Edit: Clarity.

<comment><USER91> I don't know about running Emacs over ssh on an iPad, but locally using the X front-end (e.g. not in a terminal), Emacs can display PDFs.

<comment><USER21> It might get tricky though to issue the latex command on the remote server from the Emacs that runs locally?!

<comment><USER91> I've never tried using auctex remotely, but in general if you have a file open in Tramp, you can also run arbitrary shell commands with M-! and M-& remotely, as well as opening shell buffers that let you run commands remotely as normal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I thought Latex was dead? It's a system I see no one ever use. With right, as it's as horrible as a doc system can get.

<comment><USER92> Can anyone explain the downvotes? Thanks.

<comment><USER5> Only someone not related to typesetting can say that LaTeX is dead. Exactly the opposite is true. Even though there are good alternatives these days such as InDesign and (I hate to say that:) MS Word (which now has a much better formula editor and OpenType Math fonts), great developments are taking place, for example LuaTeX. Not directly LaTeX but TeX: I have built a high quality database publishing system based on LuaTeX: <http://speedata.github.com/publisher/>

<comment><USER93> I think that page could benefit from some examples created by speedataPublisher; now I only see a list of features and requirements, not what I'm able to create with it.

<comment><USER5> I am working on it. Thanks for pointing it out once more!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Message Passing, Duck Typing, Object Composition, and not Inheritance - <AUTHOR> http://fitzgeraldnick.com/weblog/39/ <comment><USER2> Inheritance is two language features in one though—It's implicit delegation and type polymorphism. Those two features need not be coupled together like that, and in fact, shouldn't in my opinion. It's not that silly things can be done with inheritance, it's more that people often use inheritance for one of two things, but rarely both: implicit delegation and type polymorphism. Pick your poison, and use the appropriate construct. I'm no fan of implicit delegation when I can get away with not having to deal with it, but I wish more languages would have an orthogonal construct for type polymorphism separate from inheritance.

<comment><USER3> You express the situation quite well here.

Are there _any_ languages that do separate implicit delegation and type polymorphism?

<comment><USER4> Go does. See my other comment in this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2058963>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes, inheritance is the right tool for the job. Sometimes, composition is the right tool for the job. Sometimes, duck typing is the right tool for the job.

The only valid absolute is that bloggers that insist otherwise are wrong.

<comment><USER3> Indeed.

I recently replaced a containment relationship with an inheritance relationship.

Sometimes inheritance does make sense yet despite it being the _least-bad_ "tool for the job", it seems awkward, fragile and ill-thought-out. You have _some_ attributes hidden in the parent and attributes right there in the child. The idea that the _ontological_ relationships "is-a", "has-a" etc should map cleanly to the class as buckets-of-functions-and-attributes isn't always correct and muddies the water IMHO.

I wish that there was something that worked like inheritance but was better. Perhaps a system of passing interfaces from objects to the object they contain would make things clearer and more flexible.

<comment><USER5> _"it seems awkward, fragile and ill-thought-out"_

Or, you know...not. Sometimes, inheritance is the perfect abstraction for the job, neither awkward nor fragile, but perfectly elegant. Which was my point.

When you've got an is-a relationship, inheritance often makes sense, and encapsulation is frequently awkward. When you've got a has-a relationship, inheritance is frequently awkward. Just because you can find an awkward use of inheritance or a leaky abstraction doesn't mean that inheritance is awkward. It's a tool with limitations, and the world is a messy place. Containment isn't a magic bullet, either.

I honestly don't understand where the bias against _concepts_ comes from. When the concept works, you use it. When it doesn't, you don't. It's engineering, not religion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems a lot like Go (<http://golang.org>).

See <http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#interfaces_and_types> and <http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#embedding>.

</comment><comment><USER6> What I still don't get is why inheritance in OO-languages is always the heavyweight version, namely subclassing.

Imho every class definition in Java-like OO languages should create two types: A (by default) public interface and a (by default) private class.

When you want to inherit from something you should then be able to choose if you want to inherit only the interface or inherit from the full class. Every good design already separates interface from implementation, so why isn't it enforced at the object system layer?

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been hearing some disdain for inheritance lately for some reason. This article is filled with it. For instance:

"The beauty here is that you can reuse code without dealing with inheritance, or any sort of class-based hierarchy."

... That's the beauty? The only beauty if that you managed to avoid a feature of the language? Ouch.

I get that really dumb things can be done with inheritance, but that's true for almost any language feature. It's certainly no reason to avoid it altogether.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Introduction to Python - <AUTHOR> I'm JavaScript dev looking for a good introduction (book) to Python. Anybody recommendations? <comment><USER2> python.org</comment>


Ask HN: API/service for pushing text notifications to android/iOS - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN! I am looking for a API/service similar to PushBullet that I can use to send plain old text to devices that have subscribed/installed an app. The reason I ask is that I am working on a ruby script that checks an API and lets users know when it has been updated. see https://www.pushbullet.com/channel?tag=metacritic-new-albums.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> Parse, UrbanAirship; they all do it.</comment>


SkyKnit: When knitters teamed up with a neural network - <AUTHOR> http://aiweirdness.com/post/173096796277/skyknit-when-knitters-teamed-up-with-a-neural <comment><USER2> Fun, but if you want to see some seriously interesting modern work in knitting check this out: [https://www.ri.cmu.edu/event/on-demand-machine- knitting/](https://www.ri.cmu.edu/event/on-demand-machine-knitting/)

<comment><USER3> That was awesome. I really like the presenter's style, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm kind of curious about the person whos mental construct crashed. How long did it take before her mind was able to interpret the math again? Was it a slow boot up or was it instant?

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a reliable training method to minimize the need for "debugging" in data sets like this?

<comment><USER6> I would think there is a way to tell the system some basic rules, so its not completely unsupervised.

Like: Here is a list of all stitches (so it doesn't create its own), and the number of stitches must be correct for dimensions, or something like that. Then you validate all the input data against that, and move on from there.

<comment><USER7> Its a bit more complicated than that, since the only constraints is the yarn and physics. And there's infinite possibilities of stitching things together in intricate manners. Then deciding whether something is nice/wanted, is in the eye of the beholder :)</comment></comment></comment>


The Battle to Preserve An Old Accelerator's Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24511/ <comment><USER2> For want of CVS the kingdom was lost.</comment>


Product Hunt vs. TechCrunch - <AUTHOR> http://www.vetpronto.com/blog/product-hunt-vs.-techcrunch

<comment><USER2> "When you step back and think about the use cases for TechCrunch vs. Product Hunt, it kinda makes sense. People go to TechCrunch to read news. People go to Product Hunt to discover (and try) new products."

Or perhaps it highlights just how far the mighty have fallen (TechCrunch). The site has never been the same since Arrington left, while I do not doubt they get a heap of traffic still, Product Hunt for me is the place to go to find awesome new startups. Once-upon-a-time I used to go to TechCrunch to find new startups to try. I love Product Hunt, great site.</comment>


Should we be worried about election hacking? - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/02/should-we-be-worried-about-election-hacking/ <comment><USER2> Anyone that is in favor of e-voting is either ignorant of how it works or malicious.

US citizens shouldn't be just worried about election hacking, they should be out in the streets protesting this huge mockery of their democracy and demanding an end to it.</comment>


Firefox Focus with GeckoView - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ <comment><USER2> You mean all of this time Android users were bragging about how Android gave you the capabilities of using third party browsers, iOS only let you put wrappers around Safari, and holding up Firefox as an example, Firefox on Android was doing the same thing - just using an Android web view?</comment>


Fix broken links to iOS docs - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apple-dev-redirect/bpigmpodibgenolohfpcbofcicjmhcgp

<comment><AUTHOR> Because apparently Apple is too busy for redirects.</comment>


Venture capital is going to murder Medium - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/venture-capital-is-going-to-murder-medium-656cbccf4829#.tkfbmwfm4 <comment><USER2> This, unfortunately, is the entrepreneurial version of the "second system syndrome": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second- system_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect)

The pattern: an entrepreneur achieves some level of fame/fortune.

Then, they overcapitalize their next company (to various degrees) from high- expectation investors. Next, they are reminded how fricking HARD startups are, and how much LUCK was really involved in their first success.

Some compound the pain by presuming the second will go like the first, and they run things fat and expensive from the start: high headcount, expensive office, high salaries, over the top perks, etc. And then when reality hits, the "corporate lifestyle downgrade" is especially painful.

(I'm speaking from hard-learned personal experience, and I see this pattern over and over...)

<comment><USER3> While Second-system effects seems to be describing software, the "human" version of it is apparently called Sophomore slump [1]:

        A sophomore slump refers to an instance in which a second, or sophomore, effort fails to live up to the standards of the first effort. It is commonly used to refer to the apathy of students (second year of high school, college or university), the performance of athletes (second season of play), singers/bands (second album), television shows (second seasons) and films (sequels/prequels).

The second company of a previously successful entrepreneur seem to match that definition!

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

<comment><USER4> And it's also why democracy is crumbling in Western societies (current generation do not have to fight for it, and take it for a granted and guaranteed system, which has nothing to do with the truth).

Which means it's probably going to die before it will be resurrected on a more sane foundation, some time in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How long before SV reinvents the paid magazine subscription? Advertising seems to have an adverse effect on content quality, mostly because it puts focus on the wrong metrics. An alternative is needed.

Medium is in a perfect position to introduce a subscription service. They have a community of both publisher and consumers, a leading platform, and the backing of VC. Turn Medium into a Patreon for writers. This does not mean a paywall. This means things like locking comments to subscribers only, direct tips to authors, chat sessions with authors.

Twitch managed to take a primarily ad based platform and layer subscriptions and donations over the top of it. Their stroke of genius, is that any subscription locked content is left up the creator (streamer) such as emotes, sub-only chat, sub games, etc. It is possible. It also helped that Twitch Prime piggy backs on Amazon Prime, but Medium may be able to find another similar service to partner with.

Also all things are cyclic. We are seeing a low point for paid subscriptions (newspapers), but that doesn't mean it won't come back in another form. Enhancing the social experience, not the content, via subscriptions may be a viable path.

<comment><USER6> Patreon is already the Patreon for Writers though and for Medium to chase that type of audience is counter-intuitive. As a conduit to larger audiences, I think Patreon is about as useful as selling photocopies on a street corner. Medium has a much larger footprint which, in my perspective, allows them to be more of a Curator / Publicist / Rights Management entity than a skim-off-the- top-pseudo-serfdom-model like Patreon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I've personally incorporated an LLC for dealing with institutions that don't like doing business with individuals, I'm starting to think that anyone starting a new business should seriously consider making it a Public-benefit Corporation. It lets you define alternative motives for the company besides pure profit, essentially writing the flowery "mission statements" that most companies espouse right into the company charter.

It's much harder for an activist investor to demand more profits RIGHT NOW if you can point to your charter and say that you're focusing on your corporation's stated goals - maybe in Medium's case, that could be something like 'supporting quality citizen journalism throughout the world.'

I guess that might make your startup less appealing to VC initially, but I'm sure SV will happily put its money where its idealistic mouth is, right?

<comment><USER8> I don't think that would have much of an impact. The focus on profits from VCs/investors isn't due to the corporate structure of the company, but the VC Firm's internal metrics -- the 10-year fund lifecycle, LP demands, etc.

Also the mechanism of leverage isn't the fiduciary duty that's placed on LLC / C-Corp management -- the idea that businesses are legally bound to chase profits is misguided. Company management must act in the best interest of shareholders, but have an incredible amount of leeway when doing so. The leverage from VCs comes from their ownership of significant chunks of the company and board representation. They can replace the management team if they don't acquiesce to VC demands. Changing the corporate mission statement won't mitigate these problems.

<comment><USER7> That's a good point; I guess it wouldn't really help much in the startup phase, but if the company does get established and IPO'd, then it would make a difference with the looming threat of minority shareholder lawsuits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I will offer a counter opinion, the problem with Medium (or to some extent Quora) is not that they raised too much funding but rather they bet incorrectly on the content. As much as readers on Hacker News might want to believe otherwise, light/low-intellectual-effort content such as memes, listicles, gifs, images are far far more profitable than wordy blogposts & articles. Sure you might get lucky and have a viral article once in a while, but low effort content delivers far better median return.

Regarding the funding, consider that Buzzfeed has raised 446.3M$ and Giphy has raised 150.95M$. The money raised is consistent with the kind of site he had envisioned, the issue is that there isn't a market for it.

<comment><USER10> I concur with you that they bet too much on their content. The question then is: did the vicious cycle start from raising too much, or betting incorrectly?

<comment><USER9> When you are worth few hundred million to a billion dollars. The only rate limiting condition is the time you have left, and the window of opportunity. From his perspective (and correctly) there isn't any point in bootstrapping.

Medium is not the first such example, you also have Path (where sadly one of the co-founder was not as rich), Quora, and as a counter example Uber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a pleasure to see DHH pat himself on the back each time his stopped clock overlaps with the hour. He shows the palpable schadenfreude of a man, sitting on the sidelines, who won't shut up about the players in the game. But I notice another flaw to his prose aside from the self-congratulations.

Many people who stumble into a certain amount of fame and adulation, like him, get sloppy when they write. They start to repeat themselves. They don't offer evidence to back up their claims. They don't dig deeper than the insight they offered in the last five columns. In short, they don't do the work any more. DHH's post show all those symptoms. He lacks a good editor, and probably thinks he doesn't need one.

It might be interesting, for those who want to do the work, to consider why VCs invested more than $120M in Ev. One answer is that VCs tend to invest in strong founding teams, and he is about as strong as a founding team gets. Personally, I would never invest in a media company, but abstracting away from the sector, Ev looks like a very good bet.

Secondly, investments fail all the time. Medium might be one of those. Our understanding of the world doesn't change much if that's the case. None of this is really news.

<comment><USER12> _It 's a pleasure to see DHH pat himself on the back each time his stopped clock overlaps with the hour._

I don't get this metaphor. How is DHH's clock stopped? As far as I know, he has a very successful business, while leading an exciting lifestyle (he drives racing cars!), and he also heads a wildly successful open source project. I can think of few other besides perhaps Marc Zuckerberg, who is winning in life to that extent.

 _Many people who stumble into a certain amount of fame and adulation, like him, get sloppy when they write. They start to repeat themselves. They don 't offer evidence to back up their claims. They don't dig deeper than the insight they offered in the last five columns_

It doesn't seem like you're disagreeing with him though.

 _It might be interesting, for those who want to do the work, to consider why VCs invested more than $120M in Ev_

You're completely missing the point! We all know why it makes sense from the perspective of the VCs. DHH is writing from the perspective of a _founder_ , and the deal makes a lot less sense from that perspective. VCs make many bets, expecting to lose most, but win big on a few. The founders however, don't get to make more than a few bets, and the odds of winning one are very low.

 _Secondly, investments fail all the time. Medium might be one of those. Our understanding of the world doesn 't change much if that's the case. None of this is really news._

What a cynical way to look at this. Sure, the VCs will be fine if and when Medium fails, but it will have an impact on a other lot people: employees, who've spend years of their career for nothing and whose stock options are now worthless, and customers who have come to depend on the product.

<comment><USER11> DHH's clock is stopped because he keeps saying the same thing again and again: don't raise VC. When a startup fails that raises VC, he points out how right he was. When a startup succeeds that raises VC, he says nothing. In fact, most startups are default dead and raising VC doesn't change that fundamental fact -- but it does give them what is essentially proxy revenue so they have time to figure out how to make real money. There is a very long line of people between Mark Zuckerberg and DHH who are "winning at life", as you put it.

Without VC money, Ev would have had a hard time getting attention and traction for Medium, which is what he needed to test out his idea. That is true for many founders. VC money is their ticket to real-life business school.

An expectation of Medium failing is just an instantiation of a more general expectation that startups will fail. It's not that cruel, really. The employees worked for a well-known brand and are still in the hottest job market in the US. We should not weep too much for them.

<comment><USER12> The underlying premise of what you write, seems to be that money is the only yardstick that matters. That is why you patronisingly write that there _is a very long line of people between Mark Zuckerberg and DHH who are "winning at life"_, even though the reason I referenced Mark Zuckerberg specifically was that he seems like a rare person who succeeds in business _and_ apparently manages to balance that with the rest of his life (hats of to him for taking 2 months of paternity leave). It is why you dismiss the notion that the people who worked hard on a failed product, could have anything to be sorry about as long as they are still able to get a high paying job in the next hot startup. And its why you disregard the part of DHH's criticism that doesn't talk about whether or not your business will stand a smaller or greater chance of "making it", but warns about how dissatisfying it is to be a founder and not have total control, and about how the pressure to strike it big or go busto sucks all the fun out of having a business.

Which is fine, I guess, and certainly explains why you wouldn't be impressed by someone like DHH. I for my part find DHH's opinion both interesting and refreshing.

<comment><USER11> > The underlying premise of what you write, seems to be that money is the only > yardstick that matters.

That's not what I said at all, and it does not reflect what I think, but it does smack of the presumptuous and dogmatic pigeon-holing that DHH often commits.

Money is not the only thing that matters, but it is a thread that runs through most endeavors in tech and all venture undertakings and businesses.

Control is a big issue. And so is survival. Sometimes to you give up the first to achieve the second. That usually happens by degrees. I am part of a venture-funded startup and well aware of the tradeoffs.

I found DHH's perspective interesting the first time, but he has not done a lot to hold my attention since that initial exposure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting to think what the other non ad based models might be:

1\. SAAS Freemium: It's free to write on Medium, but if you want a real domain and a few more features pay $10/mo

2\. Patreon-ish: Direct monthly sponsorship (subscription) to individual authors

3\. Fractional Payment: Overall subscription to Medium as a service payed by readers. Authors are paid according to a formula for how many people viewed their content each month.

Any I missed?

<comment><USER14> >1\. SAAS Freemium: It's free to write on Medium, but if you want a real domain and a few more features pay $10/mo

I think this is a fantastic idea. It has worked on many other platforms such as shared hosting before.

>2\. Patreon-ish: Direct monthly sponsorship (subscription) to individual authors

This is also a great model because it allows readers to pay for content that they consider worth while. It has the capability to increase overall content quality, become a platform for new writers, and medium could scrape some small amount of dough off the top for the service they are providing.

>3\. Fractional Payment: Overall subscription to Medium as a service payed by readers. Authors are paid according to a formula for how many people viewed their content each month.

I don't think this is a great idea to be honest. This is essentially how click farms already work and has lead to the uprise in clickbait. I see this as the primary reason why sites like Buzzfeed exist.

<comment><USER15> I've been thinking about 2 as a potential path forward for journalists/journalism. Is there a reason to continue the monolithic paper over directly funding individual journalists?

I think there's a cool idea in a platform designed like this... somewhere in between Kickstarter, Patreon, and NPR, but with a whole bunch of tools for news consumers to discover, read, and support both journalists and stories they're interested in. Things like supporting and discovering topics like "local region politics", "travel", or "technology", while allowing journalists to describe their backgrounds, political leanings, etc, might be a way of addressing trust and transparency in journalism and journalistic leanings while also allowing a range of opinions and perspectives on one platform, rather than being driven solely by editorial control.

<comment><USER14> I love this idea. I'd honestly be really excited to take it on as some sort of side project. The company/application itself could be an extension of the idea. Open source the whole thing and let the community help improve it while using a patreon-esque model to support the core developers/maintainers.

<comment><USER15> I think that's pretty clever. Spent 15 min talking about it with coworkers today though, and IMO the challenge with something like this is identifying and specifically addressing the problems it would be trying to solve rather than boiling the ocean and hoping it does the "right thing".

<comment><USER14> I think it requires some more thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I apologize if the answer is obvious, but could someone explain to me the rationale behind a blogging platform taking 132M in venture funding?

This isn't critique of their strategy or anything. I'm genuinely curious as to why they would do that. I'm sure their engineering is great, but does it really take that much money to build and scale such a product? It seemed like most of their marketing was organic too. I'm just trying to understand the situation better.

<comment><USER17> They've paid a lot of money to have their own content created. For example, [https://backchannel.com](https://backchannel.com)

<comment><USER16> So they outright paid content creators and writers? It seems that Backchannel is owned by Wired/Conde Nast. Have they contracted them to keep Backchannel publishing on Medium?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Feels like we'd only just forgot about Posterous. At least Posthaven is already there to accept the fallout?

Nice to see ten times as much money was raised this time though.

Such a shame though, would be nice if there was a better way of extracting value from these viable but non-unicorns.

</comment><comment><USER6> The one pivot Medium could do - and potentially reap large fiscal revenues & find profits in turn - would be to become a Writing Talent Incubator. They have the Ecosystem. They have the Banner. If they have cash, then they can get into the Rights Management sector and pursue the sources of almost every modern Media or Communication Content: Writers.

Compared to Engineers, Writers are dirt cheap. Funding in the tens of thousands of dollars per writer - or unicorn hundred thousand for some really promising ones - is the pathway to getting Content that can be monetized. If they play nicely with Writers and not make the "Indentured Servant Musician Record Label Contract" a staple of their model, it could attract a lot of attention in a good way. Mutual long term benefit = good business.

Unfortunately the Hit-to-Miss ratio isn't something I'm confident Medium wants to buy into. As in, if the most popular Writers sling pretty unappealing material (ex: Self Help, Conspiracy Theories) then it could take a lot of work figuring out where the gold might be. Having lots of data and pieces to examine through their systems certainly provides an advantage at the outset.

It's still all about risk and reward though. The big hits are what cover for the bad bets. It's a viable business model, until it isn't. Which, honestly, goes for a lot of other types of businesses too (times change, tastes change, regulations change, etc) so it's not out of the realm of consideration.

Basically I see Medium as right in the sweet spot where Netflix turned the corner. Licensing content and being the distributor is grunt work. The real money comes from owning the fountains. In a perfect world Medium would buy-up Script Revolution tomorrow, specifically the founder/creator, and begin the Content / Writer Incubator attempt with sincerity with his cultivated pool of writers, and see how it turns out.

Such a pivot definitely has some appeal to me as both a Content Creator and Consumer, and is, dare I say it, a bit more innovative than figuring out a new part of the donkey to pin the ad tail on.

<comment><USER19> And "big hits" for authors, especially non-fiction authors, aren't really all that big. With _very_ occasional exceptions. I'm not sure this would work.

<comment><USER6> True, selling "texts" is a busted model. I wasn't advocating that particularly; I think the revenue model is in the downstream rights management, not the actual text. Audio book rights. Film rights. Translation rights. I'm not the biggest fan of the Copyright system in the US as it stands now (specifically Term Length) but pointing out all the different avenues for compensation via multi-media exploitation is a forward-looking business model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I noted on the original discussion thread that Medium became the de facto place for easy-setup-startup blogs after Tumblr faded from consciousness. If the same things begins to happen to Medium as they chase an exit strategy, do these startups have a Plan C?

<comment><USER21> Plan C is to get acquired by Yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> While I appreciate the value that Medium has provided, I'm unclear how its product could take $132 million dollars to create. Could someone elucidate me?

<comment><USER23> 75 people employed for 4 years at ~$200k/head + rent in the heart of SF for 4 years at Market and O'Farrell + Amazon + ...

<comment><USER22> >75 people employed

This just shifts the question down the resource pipeline :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ev was right about social (micro-) blogging with Twitter and the VCs backing him did well as Twitter figured out how to monetize content. Ev says he's got wind of a similar opportunity in long form blogging. I'm not sure why we'd be surprised that VCs would back him strongly, even while they understand the monetization risk.

Actually, the lead investor says it better: [https://knowledge.sparkcapital.com/our-investment-in- medium-...](https://knowledge.sparkcapital.com/our-investment-in-medium-right- tool-right-network-right-time-e081438d30f)

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, somehow I didn't realize they'd taken on that much funding. I have to agree, I don't see how they make their way out of this. Would love to be wrong, though.

<comment><USER26> My first thought was of the _Silicon Valley_ episode about asking for a lower early valuation. $132 million is a stunning amount of money for a company with an online publishing platform and no real revenue, and I'm a bit shocked they let the numbers climb that high.

<comment><USER27> "no real revenue" \-- I don't think I've ever seen an ad. So what _is_ their business model?

<comment><USER28> I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to start putting in ads once you've built a userbase

<comment><USER22> I not so sure. You might not die immediately, but you would start bleeding to death right away.

<comment><USER27> Worked for YouTube.

<comment><USER14> The only reason it worked for youtube is that they were the only service offering reliable high quality video. Other video hosts had problems with loading times and reliability.

Youtube is arguably a more valuable service in that it takes way more infrastructure to run a video hosting site than it does to run what is essentially, a simple blog. It would probably take no more than a year of development experience to build a site like Medium(leaving out scaling concerns). Youtube, on the other hand is a beast. I can't even imagine beginning to build an application like youtube. Youtube can push ads hard without bleeding users because they offer quality so many orders of magnitude higher than the alternatives. Medium has only one thing to offer: nice design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Honest non-nvestor question: How is it that investors valuate and front hundreds of millions into companies with a functioning app, a user base and no clear path on how to monetize? I saw this recently with yik yak as well and it confuses me.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's not venture capital. It's the standard reason 150-person organizations die; they have no revenue of note and no plan to get more.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if medium could partner with Brave Browser

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't think Venture Capital is killing Medium. Spending that much money no matter what the source is the problem.

</comment><comment><USER33> _Written on medium_

<comment><USER26> > "It's the best writing environment on the web, and they sweat the details > like nobody else."

> "Especially for anyone who moved to Medium but hedged their bets by keeping > their own domains."

The claim here isn't that Medium is _bad_ , or even not excellent. It's that they took >$100 million in VC money with no real plan to monetize, and so they're doomed regardless of product quality.</comment></comment>


The Brain Tech to Merge Humans and AI Is Already Being Developed - <AUTHOR> https://singularityhub.com/2016/12/05/the-brain-tech-to-merge-humans-and-ai-is-already-being-developed/ <comment><USER2> As usual, the title is misleading.

The main idea is that a company called Kernel is putting forth $100m to start researching intrusive BCI technology (as opposed to nonintrusive BCI technology such as EEG/fNIRS/etc.).

This seems awfully strange considering scientists don't really know much about thoughts and disorders -- let alone how we would use direct neurotransmitter application to combat or enhance these things.

$100m sounds like quite a lot for something so speculative. Seems like what we'll end up with this endeavor is something like a new bipolar/schizophrenia pill, not nano-bots and networked brain-to-brain communication (which is what they want you to believe). Maybe that stuff is still 50 years away.

I sure hope I'm wrong. If anyone knows more about this company, please share links.</comment>


VC Blog List - <AUTHOR> http://www.texasstartupblog.com/venture-capital/vc-blog-list/ <comment><USER2> A lot to choose from. Anyone want to separate the keep from the cull? Recommendations?</comment>


Fleet of 12 Nuclear Submarines in Line for Pentagon Approval - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/new-nuclear-armed-subs-win-pentagon-approval-before-obama-leaves <comment><USER2> For comparison, the entire Apollo program costed $110B in today's money [1]. In addition to other things, this budget covered the construction of 15 Saturn V rockets and 3 additional ground test vehicles of the same size, plus 3 Saturn IB rockets, plus 35 Command Modules and 15 Lunar Modules.

Even if we just considered the 13 Saturn V rockets that were actually flown, it comes down to 110 / 13 = $8.4B per launch... Slightly less than the _projected_ $9B construction cost for each nuclear submarine, which will presumably incur additional operational costs.

And they called the Apollo program a waste of money...

[1] Source: [http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1579/1](http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1579/1)

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, the Saturn V launch system operated for about a week or two each, whereas these submarines should last around 30 years in service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So they will be 112/12 = 9B$ per boat?

Ohio class [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio- class_submarine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio-class_submarine) cost 2B$....

10 times more expensive then Russian Borey-class? If they are a strategic deterrent why don't they just a build a sub around say 2 ICBM shafts and call it a day

<comment><USER5> The UK Trident replacements are estimated to be about 15-20 billion GBP for 4 boats - and given that there is every chance that the cost would be a fair bit higher they look roughly comparable to the US costs.

The UK boats will presumably be smaller but won't have the benefits of scale of the US fleet.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention that the UK is then dependent on the US for servicing and parts. It's not like you can shop around for a cheaper servicing contract.

<comment><USER5> As far as I know the only parts the UK has a dependency on the US for are the missiles themselves and re-entry vehicles - everything else (including the warheads) are manufactured in the UK but to designs that are, to various extents, "influenced" by US designs.

Edit: I just noticed that the new UK subs are to be called the "Dreadnought" class - so they will probably all start with D and re-use old RN names - so we might end up with an HMS Devastation and HMS Destruction...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ship_names_of_the_Roya...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ship_names_of_the_Royal_Navy_\(D%E2%80%93F\))

<comment><USER7> Or "Dainty" or "Desperate"!

<comment><USER5> Also the "Dark" class of patrol boats is missing - could have a "Dark Avenger" or "Dark Hero":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark- class_fast_patrol_boat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark- class_fast_patrol_boat)

Edit: No coincidence that Iain Banks' father was in the RN - hence the Culture's use of Cool Ship Names.

<comment><USER8> Unit motto: I AM THE NIGHT

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Submarine detection methods have been steadily improving for a long time now, their usefulness is declining but they will still be viable for quite some time.

A good discussion from 2 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9073740](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9073740)

<comment><USER10> As said in the conversation you linked (which is interesting, thank you), the obsolescence is for the attack submarines close to their target, whereas missile submarines, like the Columbia, has still the rest of the ocean to hide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a better idea, let us reconfigure the biggest 15 dirtiest ships [1] with Nuclear reactors.

[1] [http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create- mo...](http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-more- pollution-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/8182)

<comment><USER12> Marine reactors need to be refueled after 25 years and that process is extremely expensive. Also, after end-of-life, the reactor needs to be stored securely, for an indefinite period of time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_naval_reactors#/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_naval_reactors#/media/File:Naval_Reactor_Compartment_Packages_in_Trench_94_at_Hanford,_WA.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Standard Republican military Keynesianism. Too bad we are so against domestic Keynesianism. I'd rather have national high speed rail.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, we could probably have both if national rail was a priority. The interstate system was built over decades during periods of high military spending and several conflicts.

Modernization of our nuclear capability isn't necessary a bad thing (if you assume MAD doctrine is effective and that the nuclear triad is a key piece of this).

<comment><USER15> Interstate spending can easily be viewed as defense spending. After all it's called the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways" and was partly inspired by Nazi Germany's Autobahn system that was instrumental for fast troop movement.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. I think you could make the argument that it was a better investment than something like the F-35 though - at least the interstate system provides continuous economic benefit etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia- class_submarine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia-class_submarine)

</comment><comment><USER17> Nothing that a good trillion-dollar bill can't pay for.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really think they need to store frozen embryos on these subs. Sounds silly?

I'm thinking in any kind of civilization ending disaster subs underwater might have the best chance at surviving and they could stay under for a few months to wait out the worst of any kind of aftermath.

After that they'd need a large genetic stock to repopulate the species.

<comment><USER19> Can you identify a specific type of disaster which would destroy all bunkers around the world without evaporating the oceans?

<comment><USER20> Even the global nuclear stockpile can't boil the oceans.

Even nuclear winter won't destroy all humanity. Just modernity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> the socialist jobs program

</comment><comment><USER22> > why don't they just a build a sub around say 2 ICBM shafts and call it a day

You say that like it should be trivially easy. Guess what, launching a missle from underwater to hit a target a thousand miles away is actually pretty difficult and complicated! Who'da thunk, right?

<comment><USER23> I thought US was more advanced than France on this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_\(missile\))</comment></comment>