NSA contractor indicted over mammoth theft of classified data - happy-go-lucky http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cybersecurity-nsa-contractor-idUSKBN15N2N4?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+reuters%252FtechnologyNews+%2528Reuters+Technology+News%2529 <comment><USER2> Meanwhile David Petraeus stole classified information and leaked it to his biographer, then lied about it to the FBI, and got a slap on the wrist. Let's see if Harold gets such a plum deal.

<comment><USER3> What I find interesting about this case is that he was able to obtain so many documents.

It's especially interesting to me because I'm currently writing a novel that involves an NSA employee, and in my novel any bags are controlled for documents and electronic devices at the entrance to NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, and employees have to go through airport-like scanners both when they enter and exit the building. Obviously, this is fantasy and I've never been there.

Am I being unrealistic? Should I instead assume that everybody with a green employee badge can just walk in and walk out with a trove of documents under his arm, as long as they are in a nice envelope?

Also, I should mention that I feel sorry for Harold. He just seems to be a pathological hoarder with no evil intentions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He supposedly had 50TB+ worth of data sitting at his place. This almost seems inaccurate as that's like 25 x 2TB drives. I know this is said to have happened over 20 years, but hard drive capacity has only increased within the last few years to where this is manageable. He must have had a huge storage array. Logistically, how do you even walk out with that? Cannot transfer it over the network as that would take years and surely not go unnoticed. This included 75% of exploits used by the NSA. Just seems so crazy that this could go unnoticed for so long. You think they would be watching everything like a hawk.

[http://boingboing.net/2016/10/20/nsa-contractor-harold- thoma...](http://boingboing.net/2016/10/20/nsa-contractor-harold- thomas-m.html)

<comment><USER5> What makes you think the data was all stored on standard hard drives? How about: CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, magneto-optical disks, Zip disks, USB thumb drives, high-density archive media that I'm not even familiar with...oh, and hard drives.

What does _huge storage array_ even mean in today's context? I recently built a 20TB server at a price point less than a new 13" MacBook Pro for personal use that occupies a cross section the size of a notebook sitting at the edge my desk...all from commercial-grade hardware that's been on the market for at least 2 years. I would think that the home setup of any serious professional engineer who has been in industry for the better part of my adult life would have some sweet kit up his sleeves.

Imagine this: authorities confiscate anything that looks like storage media, storage capacity rough order of magnitude is calculated, figures reported to media, an assumption is made that it's all highly classified, spin some click bait article.

We're talking about a civilian contractor from private industry who supposedly played an "advisor" role, not some intern whose shoulder was constantly being looked over.

<comment><USER6> So 50TB on CDs (google google google, calculate calculate calculate) is a pile of over 73,500 1.2mm thick disks approximately 92.3m or just over 300 feet high.

I'm _pretty_ sure that's not how he got the data out. 18 CDs every working day for 20 years? Nope.

(A DVD pile might only be 50 feet high, but they almost didn't exist 20 years ago - certainly not at "I'll just fill up three of these every day at work" prices.)

;-)

<comment><USER5> So let's pretend 50TB is unquestionably a legit figure, pick the lower storage density of arbitrarily listed portable media options that a single person could think of off the top of his head, and assume exfiltration was _exclusively_ performed with this media type (think think think, ponder ponder ponder). Nope. /s

Did you even pause for a second to consider that 50TB may be a grossly misrepresented figure, or digest the parent comment to size up the context of my remark?

<comment><USER6> Yeah - I did pause for a second and reconsider the furthest extreme of the reductio ad absurdum arguement, I'd _considered_ quoting the height of the pile in 0.39" thick jewel cases - which comes out at over 2500feet tall - <AUTHOR> I didn't want to get _too_ silly...

(Apologies if you thought I was taking you out of context disparagingly - there's some gross misrepresentations here by people including me...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 50TB is very, very plausible. Look at the October release:

 _On Aug 27, 2016, search warrants were executed at Martin 's residence in Glen Burnie, MD, including two storage sheds as well as upon his vehicle and person. During execution of the warrants, investigators located hard-copy documents and digital information stored on various devices and removable digital media. A large percentage of the materials recovered from Martin's residence and vehicle bore markings indicating that they were property of the US government_

Removable digital media. Let's just assume this guy had access to backup tapes and was stealing them. LTO tapes start out at what, 100GB and are something like 1TB each right now? The guy could very easily had a couple hundred backup tapes.

Various devices. Maybe he had some servers, desktops, laptops, hell maybe a small (at the time) storage array or two. He had stuff stockpiled in his shed.

The real question is, what was the data?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps he didn't even want the data. "Hey, they're just going to toss this terabyte harddrive? What a waste!"

<comment><USER9> Old drives are put through an industrial shredder.

<comment><USER10> Only if someone doesn't think, "What a waste to shred a perfectly good hard drive!" and takes it home first.

<comment><USER11> It's _very_ well know in contractor circles that if you remove anything you're likely risking your job.

<comment><USER12> Yes, until you remove 50 and realize they aren't so good at enforcing security policy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/government-contractor- facing-...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/government-contractor-facing- federal-indictment-willful-retention-national-defense)

They should screen for laziness when vetting TS-SCI clearance. Something tells me that the only rational justification for this irrational move was that it somehow made his life easier. I don't think a mole would have the guts to pull something like this.

</comment><comment><USER14> The NSA and federal government have lost the presumption of reasonableness in my eyes... rl3 mentioned no motive, and the possibility of a compulsion is a great hypothesis. if so, it's just one more example of the government persecuting the mentally ill to inflate their numbers (like the FBI agents who incite schizophrenic individuals to act on a hare-brained "bomb plot", and then bust them).

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure I really follow where you're going, but NSA is a very different organization from the FBI. Not only is this not good press for them, but probably there isn't any press that is good for them. They work best when they're being ignored, and the only time I can remember them seeking attention was that talk by the head of TAO early last year.

<comment><USER16> No press good for the NSA doesn't mean that no press for them is good for the rest of humanity ( _everyone_ has to consider NSA as a threat, really, not just non-USA-persons). Is is good for even US taxpayers to not know where $60+ billion dollars a year go? Is it good for US taxpayers to not know that every byte of Internet communications gets stored for later use against them?

I don't think so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious to know how he was caught. He managed to evade detection for 20 years as a contractor? For the NSA not to have checks and balances internally in place to be able to detect illegal access to assets by 3rd parties a little faster than two decades is incompetent.

<comment><USER18> Right! He was caught because of an 'audit'. The first in 20 years? Incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A somewhat more informative article here:

[http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/8/14555238/nsa-leak- indictmen...](http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/8/14555238/nsa-leak-indictment- harold-thomas-martin-20-charges)

50TB is a lot for a single person. How the heck did he even store it all?

The article mentions no motive. Without knowing all the facts, it almost seems like it was some sort of irrational compulsion.

<comment><USER20> it says up to 50tb. knowing the sense of hyperbole of government agencies the reality is probably ten times less.

<comment><USER21> Cop bytes.

<comment><USER22> cop bytes, is that the same thing as when police exaggerate "street value" of seized drugs

<comment><USER23> So 5 street terabytes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 1\. Booz Allen is the same contractor as Snowden. I wonder at what point does the Govt reconsider their relationship.

2\. Thoughts on what he wanted/did with all of that information? It seems extremely amateur and not someone versed in tradecraft to have all of that just sitting around. I wonder if he was selling this stuff on the side, Shadow Brokers tools were definitely govt sponsored.

<comment><USER25> Booz Allen Hamilton has 22,000 employees. I'm going to guess that the government won't see 2 of them stealing document and hence tear up all their contracts with Booz Allen. Also, the article said that Booz Allen is hiring a form FBI director to lead an audit into their security and personnel. That should keep the government from reconsidering their contracts.

<comment><USER12> Yep, and if not, they can call the current directors to offer to hire them in a couple of years too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> He was raided and arrested in August. He was indicted today.

Has he just been sitting in a jail cell -- without being charged -- in the meantime? I assume the government argued against letting him out on bond on the grounds that he was a national security risk.

 _Edit:_ Looks like he was "charged with felony theft of classified government material" at that time, according to another article.

</comment><comment><USER27> Too bad he wasn't able to release it publicly

<comment><USER28> Given how long he had it, doesn't seem like he had any intention to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am curious what happens if this happens at Google or Facebook. How hard is it to reach Google/FB user data for an engineer?

<comment><USER30> I think it depends on whether the engineer works in capacity where he has regular access to the data as part of his work goals. If yes (analytics people), easy. If not (frontend developer), extremely difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel like the problem with proving his innocence lies within proving that the documents which were found unconditionally and legitimately belonged to the US government or anyone for that matter.

Why are such 'TOP SECRET' documents not hashed or otherwise? Anybody can Photoshop or even copy and paste an 'emblem' or 'indicia' as his original criminal complaint made by agent Jeremy Bucalo describes. Documents can be completely falsified especially if all that identifies it is a seal or marking and basic text.

I just feel like there is something more here.

<comment><USER32> If your reaction to this news is "something more is going on here" then I think you need to take a step back and re-calibrate your bullshit detector.

Could there be more to this than meets the eye? Yeah. There could also be more to the moon landing than meets the eye.

It seems to me we all must, in our attempt to be rational, do our best to check our biases. For a lot of people on hackernews, that means second guessing your immediate "NSA cover-up" reaction to any item of news involving the NSA.

I think the most likely scenario here is that the government is making an example of this man. I don't think that's right, and I hope he gets off with as slight a punishment as possible, but it is a fact that governments have secrets and have enacted laws in order to try to keep them.

<comment><USER31> If we are to be rational, regarding anything at all which is to be truly understood, then all sides of an argument must be considered. Scrutinized, yes. Saying someone is just calling 'bullshit' and they need to rethink or re- calibrate their 'bullshit detectors' or initial thoughts is not in line with that.

I agree with you at the same time that they could simply be making an example of this man.

But, I believe they are 'making an example of him' to cover their own incompetence. I am not saying evidence has been planted, concocted, or otherwise. I am saying this just not seem like a cut and dried case of mishandling by a long term employee who should be more than aware of procedures and policies in place after 20 years.

<comment><USER32> I think they're likely making an example of him to send a message: "people with clearance and access to classified data, take this shit seriously."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You know, when a guy who employed Edward Snowden is allowed to steal classified data for 20 years (even after Snowden's revelations), then I think we all should reassess our view of the No-Such-Agency as an all-powerful entity.

Clearly, they are plagued by the same bureaucracy hurdles and lack of attention to human resource detail as every other governmental agency.

Things might not be so bad after all.

<comment><USER12> Powerful+incompetent = dangerous, just in a different way than powerful+competent

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Its astonishing that Booz Allen is still able to work contracts for the NSA and that this guys superiors at the NSA haven't seemed to face any sanction (at least publicly.)

The managerial tree on this guy through at least two levels up should be fired and potentially face further sanctions. Booz Allen should be forbidden from working contracts which require clearance for 10 years.

The larger issue isn't what this guy did (or even what Snowden did) -- it's a failure of the organization and a failure of process. Organizationally, any one bad actor, especially a low/medium level contractor, should not be able to do this.

<comment><USER35> _" Booz Allen should be forbidden from working contracts which require clearance for 10 years."_

That would most likely kill Booz Allen.

Between this and Snowden, I'd hate to be a cleared employee there (again); in addition to the increased/remedial training I'm sure has been put on their plates, they're probably getting panicky emails and warnings from principals and partners about the importance of their position.

It's probably like the TPS report memo scene from "Office Space".

But firings two levels up? Doubtful. The wagons would be circled and enough CYA emails sent to prevent that.

<comment><USER34> I agree with you on all points about the impossibility of my recommendations. But I still believe it's an organizational failure at the highest levels - this guy is the symptom not the disease.

<comment><USER35> It's certainly a possibility, though I wonder how Booz Allen management _could_ have recognized a potential problem. It's entirely possible that Martin was simply embedded with the NSA and Booz Allen management only saw him every couple of weeks as a "pulse check". If the client (NSA) had no complaints, then Martin could have been considered a "model" employee. And even if his fellow employees knew he was a hoarder...would that have really been cause for suspicion?

Additionally, in fairness to Booz Allen, in the article it states: _" Martin was employed as a private contractor by at least seven different companies, working for several government agencies beginning in 1993 after serving in the U.S. Navy for four years, according to the indictment."_

So if we're going to hang Booz Allen management out to dry, there might be a few other companies deserving of it as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if this is at all related to the recent 'Shadow Brokers' leaks.

Positive news that they caught him anyway, another Snowden-like espionage drama would be highly undesirable.

<comment><USER28> If the documents were as significant as the Snowden leaks, I would say better to have the drama than to let it go under the radar. If there wasn't really anything that interesting in the documents, then it probably wouldn't have been all that dramatic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yea I am sorry I stopped believing these people a while ago

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm just super curious to know what the data holds. It'd be interesting to see what they were doing and what they saw coming from 1996 and onwards.

<comment><USER39> Check if Booz Allen Hamilton is recruiting, you might get lucky ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I fail to recognise how 200 years of jail to a 53-years man can compensate damage to the US national security of that size.

<comment><USER18> No demonstrable damage? It sat in his garage.

<comment><USER40> Perhaps, this was a technical backup, to help NSA recover their lost data, just in case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Martin was employed by at least seven different private companies and > assigned as a contractor to work at a number of government agencies

Looks like a corruption scheme to me

</comment><comment><USER42> Honest question: Why haven't Booz Allen Hamilton had their contract revoked and put on a blacklist of never working for the government again?

<comment><USER43> They are a labour hire contractor in these instances. Some program needs qualified and cleared contractor staff, Booz have that sorted. The clearances are handled by another government agency (the notoriously hacked OPM) and their (sometimes lax) contractors. Probably his only interaction with Booz was they sent him a paycheck, 401k, social, health insurance, etc.

<comment><USER44> > Some program needs qualified and cleared contractor staff, Booz have that > sorted.

Apparently not. After Snowden & this guy, BAH clearly has issues providing qualified staff.

(and yes, apparently OPM has issues too)</comment></comment></comment>


How I (almost) use my computer without a mouse - <AUTHOR> http://victor.hwanger.com/blog/?p=366

<comment><USER2> A few more of my tips through the years:

 _Windows_ : Alt+space, [n, x, s, m] (n for minimize, x for maximize, s to change size. s, then arrow for which side of the window to drag, then move with arrows. m for move, also with arrows). Ctrl+esc, menu bar. windows key+e = explorer, windows key+r = run dialog. alt+print screen = system preferences. (Haven't used windows in years, so not sure if these shortcuts persisted through Vista and 7. I hear they did)

 _OS X_ : First, get Quicksilver. Seriously. Other then command+tab to switch apps which everyone knows, command+` (tilde key) switches windows within apps. I'm surprised how many people don't know that. Also, an awesome shortcut is Command+tabbing to a minimized window, then before releasing command, press down option, then let go of command while holding down option. That restores the minimized window and switches to it, really not bad after you get the hang of it. command+m minimizes. ctrl+f2 (might need to add 'fn' on laptops) puts the selection in the menu so you don't have to use the mouse to select it.

 _bash_ : ctrl+r is invaluable. that will do a reverse search through history on whatever you type next. only caveat: once you leave the search mode, you'll actually be in that place in history, hitting up will go back even further. I usually run an empty command (like echo) to get back to the bottom. Hitting meta (esc in my case), then dot inserts the last argument of the previous command. Great for edit,execute cycle. i.e. $ vi script.py $ ./[esc, .] running '^str^strb^' in bash will run the previous command, replacing str with strb. !! is previous command, !!:0 is first token of previous command (usually the binary running), !!:1 is first arg, etc.

<comment><USER3> Better than win+r for run is just hitting windows which brings up the start menu. With the new start menu, this is similar to Quicksilver and Katapult and all those other things.

If you use zsh (and you really should. It is better than bash in almost every way), you can just ctrl-C to get out of searches.

<comment><USER4> zsh is rather amazing. Only so if you are familiar with how it is better than bash (besides the fundamental ways) and how to configure it for maximum ownage! Much like complicated editors like Vim, it helps to try to dedicate effort to imprinting a new command in your mind per-week (or so), such that it becomes second nature to use.

Some good stuff: <http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html>

<comment><USER3> If you get a good zshrc, it Just Works, without much additional effort.

Admittedly, I mostly use those parts of zsh which are similar to most other shells, but which it does better (argument completions, some directory stack, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By far my favorite mouse killer is the Ion window manager (<http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/>).

Using the lua config I changed a bunch of the key bindings so that the entire environment behaves like vim. I can easily change windows using the vim directional keys, which are second nature by now. I never lose windows behind other windows.

After a few days in this environment you start looking for apps that provide a keyboard interface to all their functionality so you can throw away your mouse entirely.

Vimperator is a good example. Also, I use irssi (<http://irssi.org/>) for all chat and instant messaging. We modeled the chat interface for ShopTalk (<http://shoptalkapp.com>) after irssi for exactly this reason.

<comment><USER6> Does anyone know of an emacs counterpart to this? (I am an emacs guy.) Thank you.

<comment><USER7> StumpWM + Conkeror + Screen

EDIT: StumpWM video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKt_rVO960Q>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't use the mouse except for interacting with flash inside the browser.

For the browser I usually use a mix of firefox's "mouseless browsing" and search with ' key.

The shell is bad for copy/pasting with only the keyboard. Even if ctrl+alt+c/v copies and pastes, selecting without mouse is really troublesome. I run shell inside emacs.

For changing desktops, I have hotkeys ctrl+alt+1/5 for each of my 5 desktops. I usually keep 2 windows maximized at once so I'm always at most 2 (usually just 1) key presses from any window (instead of following an alt+tab app cycle or a alt+ctrl+arrow desktop cycle)

pretty much everything else you need to do can be done inside of emacs.

<comment><USER9> not if you run your shell under emacs. Running interactive processes in emacs is such a powerful model (python, bash, sql, slime, moz-repl). it makes using any of those processes signifcantly easier

<comment><USER10> Co-workers use term in Emacs to run sqlplus with libreadline-like functionality (as opposed to none). I'm sure it could add that functionality for other apps too. I just use rlwrap (a readline wrapper app) to add the functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why would you want to avoid the mouse? You think it is faster? Have you measured that? Human perception of time is unreliable.

<comment><USER12> Because even my absolute favorite mouse* only has six buttons, while my keyboard has well over a hundred, and the amount of information I can convey by combining them is far greater than what I can express with a few buttons and crude relative spatial positioning.

Because I work with tools where using the keyboard shortcuts until they become reflex is an option, rather than only occasionally using programs and hoping they're "intuitive" enough to use by looking for what I want to do and pointing at it.

Because using language is more expressive than pointing at things all day.

Because you can't refer to something by name with a mouse unless it's already on a menu. (Well, mouse gestures could be considered an attempt to do this, but the set of "letters" is very limited.)

When a task is primarily spatial (typically, graphical editing; I'm not a gamer), I use the mouse. That's about it.

* [http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Expert-Optical-Trackball-64...](http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Expert-Optical-Trackball-64325/dp/B00009KH63/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> OS X: I have lots and lots of email and feeds that come into a combined inbox that I quickly filter into a lot of local folders... and it has always been a pain. Just found this and fell in love with it: <http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html>

All I use it for is moving mail into folders without the mouse (F3, space, per(personal folder gets auto completed), enter, next!)

</comment><comment><USER14> I've had a lot of fun with AwesomeWM, and ratpoison before that. It really helps with workflow when you're not distracted by Evolution and Pidgin popups every thirty seconds. Sure, there's a bit of configuration before you get started, but isn't there always?

Really wish Gnome would throw in a feature that auto-maximizes windows like the other two managers I mentioned do.

</comment><comment><USER15> StumpWM + Conkeror for browsing, terminal for everything else.

No mouse required. Try it. Love it.

<comment><USER16> Yup, same here. Being able to Slime into your WM is occasionally very useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> use xmonad or wmii. that force you to use keyboard, I use mouse just for browsing.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can even cut that out by using Vimperator.

<comment><USER3> For basic web browsing I find that the mouse model is pretty hard to beat (I use vimperator).

<comment><USER18> Use the "f" key to jump to links. It's probably just as fast as using the mouse (some would argue it's slower), but as with most things, gets faster the more you use it.

<comment><USER19> And "F" opens in a new tab.

<comment><USER3> I've used both. They just don't feel quite the same for aimless web browsing.

Maybe it's because with a trackpoint my fingers don't leave home row, but I find that it isn't that much better (especially on some link-heavy sites)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


O'Reilly Android Apps Gaining Ground on iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/12/android-rising-oreilly-android-apps-gaining-ground.html

<comment><USER2> Possibly related: [http://ctrloptcmd.com/archives/989/open-letter-to-oreilly- yo...](http://ctrloptcmd.com/archives/989/open-letter-to-oreilly-your-iphone- apps-suck/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anecdotally, I've observed that Android has a relatively high share of the system administrator market. So this doesn't surprise me at all.

<comment><USER4> yeah. I know three people who bought one the day it came out. What really surprised me is that my sister (who runs a property management company) got one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like the Apple fanbois got to the comments section pretty quickly. I think they are hearing for the first time that not everyone on Earth uses an iPhone, and that this shocks and frightens them. (Next someone will mention that Windows has a higher market share than OS X. How could that be!!)

<comment><USER6> And yet... it's highly likely that there's a bias to the data here. The people most likely to be interested in and seek out Android phones and Android apps are also precisely the people most likely to be in O'Reilly's target market. So while it may say something about Android adoption among geeks, it doesn't provide any useful data one way or another about adoption among the general population.

<comment><USER7> so, you are saying that amongst the tech-savvy people android may become the platform of choice. Good enough for me ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This could be a 1980's Mac vs PC redux. Closed vs open platform. We know how that turned out. Android software/hardware is closing in fast. Who cares if Apple has 1000x more apps if the ones you actually spend 99% of the time using are on both platforms. At the moment background processes on the Android are really advantageous, although I imagine that will change before long. A locked down operating system is fighting against history. People will put up with that shit on their music player but not on a mobile os. Apple is either going to have to open up or they will be in for a slow burn.

<comment><USER9> Not opening up has served Apple pretty well in the desktop world. They lost the market share war clearly but won the profitability war. Which would you rather be right now, Dell selling at razor thin margins or Apple who sells a lot less but makes much more per sale.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Close to Investing in Snapchat at $10B Value - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-03/yahoo-said-close-to-investing-in-snapchat-at-10b-value.html <comment><USER2> Snapchat must be huge in the teen/young adult demographic to justify this valuation as I don't see many adults using this app anymore. Although this is a fairly localized/anecdotal opinion of the app, perhaps in other regions, Snapchat is big among many demographic categories.

<comment><USER3> I am a 23 year old at a large state school and I can tell you that snapchat is definitely the most popular social media app on campus.

It has completely replaced texting for a lot of my peers and in my opinion is best way to flirt electronically. Twitter and instagram are tied for second, with Facebook coming in last.

For what its worth, meeting someone who isn't on snapchat is unheard of, but I haven't added anyone on facebook since the fall term began.

Yik Yak is also on the rise but it's anonymous nature limits connections, and in turn growth.

<comment><USER4> I feel like Facebook is flaming out. Do you get that sense too?

<comment><USER5> Yes. I used to think that facebook would still keep getting life events/friend checkups. But my friends have slowly been moving that to snapchat.

Just get married, snapchat that wedding ring (then post to facebook later a status update).

I still use facebook for events/groups. But I can see someone stealing that away from them.

<comment><USER3> I think Facebook is becoming a virtual contact list and birthday reminder, with status updates and pictures acting like mini holiday cards for events that are noteworthy but not significant enough to actually send out a card for(getting into grad school/new job).

Pretty much everyone is on Facebook under their real name, and it is the only social media platform where that is the case. The management consultant in me has a feeling that data is going to be worth a lot of money.

Google might know a lot about my interests but Facebook has my real name, real school, real job, as well as my interests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reading things like this kinda depresses me. I guess I just don't understand what makes things popular on the web. I mean, I would have never thought things like Twitter, Instagram, all of the various messaging apps would ever get this much traction. I think it's bizarre.

<comment><USER7> The mistake here is that you are conflating your subjective preference with reality. You are implicitly evaluating something against your own context, but to understand why twitter,etc are successful, you need to ask questions about what OTHER people value, and why they do it.

<comment><USER8> You say that, but it is the same as the dotcom days, everyone thought it was a "new economy", yadda yadda. Right now, ALL these investments are highly speculative. Any of these companies could do a MySpace overnight.

<comment><USER9> Very much agreed. But think about it - even Myspace was only sold for a little over half a billion. We are orders of magnitude higher now. Holy bubble!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And snapchat plans to make money how?

Plus, at least in europe kik and viber seem a lot more popular than snapchat. And it would take them about an afternoon to add a "self destruct" checkbox to their image and video dialogs...

I can understand yahoo desperately wanting to get a foot down "with the cool kids". But 10 billion, seriously?

<comment><USER11> Shared revenue of sponsored story promotions/snaps would be one way. Think of this:

Create a marketplace around big businesses getting viral content producers to push their products subtly (Truman Show anyone?). Snapchat, acting as the intermediary and service provider, can collect a percentage of the promotional gig in return for facilitating the transaction and acting as an escrow service or middleman. It's not so different from television ads now, just a broader market with lots more content producers that have large fanbases across demographics TV just doesn't have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Users send more than 700 million disappearing "snaps" a day and more than 500 million stories viewed daily

well, in Internet dollars - $100/user of FB and the likes - 70M users is $7B scale. 500M exposures point to the same ballpark - the ballpark where it doesn't really matter whether it is $5B or $10B valuation. Even 10 fold growth would bring Yahoo only $200M - peanuts, and obviously Yahoo makes that investment not for money, it is just a cover fee for entry into the club.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not clear how much Yahoo is investing at that valuation, but I hope that the stated reason of re-creating an Alibaba type investment is not the primary driver. Despite the success of Alibaba, a single data point is not a trend (even a spectacular one like Alibaba), and I'm not sure that Yahoo's core competency is/should be picking winners.

<comment><USER14> Other reports have said it's in the ballpark of $20M.

[http://online.wsj.com/articles/yahoo-nears-investment-in- sna...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/yahoo-nears-investment-in- snapchat-1412361684)

<comment><USER15> Which is peanuts to Yahoo. This basically seems like they're trying to emulate Google Ventures without the full commitment of creating an organization like that. Seems smart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazing for a company that is primarily about a user base they can't charge for, or data mine for advertising.

</comment><comment><USER17> Between Tinder and now Snapchat, it makes me think Yahoo is building a p0rn empire.

<comment><USER18> Has Yahoo invested in Tinder? Can't find mention of it anywhere.

<comment><USER19> They probably meant to write Tumblr, which Yahoo does own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The investment will, however, disappear after being deposited.

</comment><comment><USER21> How do you monetize a large user base without credit cards? How would they get teens to get their parents to pay for the ability to send nude pics to their friends?

Meanwhile, millions of small businesses paying $10 a month for secure document shredding with years of increasing profit remains large ignored by the media, nobody bats an eye. Nobody puts an insane valuation on it because it's not cool. So business is no longer about positive net cash flows but spending it. Whoever spends money in the coolest way is the winner as long as you got investors who suddenly forgot what happened the last time we were in the new and hip economy.

<comment><USER22>
      How do you monetize a large user base without credit cards?

Ask Facebook. With Snapchat's curated "Our Story" stream it would be easy for them to superimpose a brand's logo on top of snaps that would get viewed by an audience that fits a particular demographic. I'd wager that companies see value in that.

<comment><USER8> Yeah it would be like subliminal messaging, like they used to do in cinemas. Remind me why they stopped?

<comment><USER23> They didn't stop. The industry term of art these days is "embedded advertising" and it's used in television and movies far more than you would think. Hear a character mention a current brand name seemingly off-hand? Yeah, not an accident.

<comment><USER8> Sure, that's product placement, and it is _very_ hard to do well. Remember the Cisco placement in CSI, or Omega in Casino Royale? Utterly cringeworthy.

Subliminal messaging is flashing something up too quickly to consciously register, but still leaving an impression.

<comment><USER23> It's actually beyond product placement. It's about getting something in the story line that triggers brand awareness. This doesn't even mean showing or mentioning the product directly. I know several screenwriters who have their work subjected to this kind of editing. It is utterly subliminal and not at all similar to the popular culture version of "subliminal messaging" that you refer to.

<comment><USER8> On the subject of James Bond there's another scene in the same film where he's using a Sony Ericcson phone. Really, the suavest man in the world rocks a Sony phone? It's embarrassing to watch.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is physics moving forward? - <AUTHOR> Looking back over last 20 years, technology (esp. related to computers) had made extraordinary leaps forward and the pace is accelerating.
As a total layman in the physics world, it appears (looking from the benches) that things are crawling at the same speed they did 20 years ago.
Is that true ? Is the speed of physics advances accelerating as well ? What has been happening that we might of been missing ?
EDIT: Especially in the applied & practical worlds <comment><USER2> As someone who's been in physics for much of the last twenty years, I'd guess that things are going at about the same rate. I don't think that the rate is "crawling", though.

If you look on log plots of parametrized experimental progress, progress remains linear, so it's a Moore's law like improvement on many fronts.

The emergence of precision cosmology has really transformed astrophysics in the last twenty years. The solar neutrino problem is now solved entirely (and even \theta_{13} has been measured!). The lynchpin of the Standard Model (the Higgs) has been found. LIGO is likely to make first detection in the next couple of years. Graphene and topological insulators have the solid-state community buzzing. Fluorescence microscopy and nanopore techniques are making waves in the biophysics community. And more, of course. Heck, this week, the most compelling evidence yet for the long-sought pentaquark appeared.

For the probes of the dark sector and of gravity, though we haven't found anything, huge swaths of parameter space (i.e. possible theories) have been ruled out. EDM searches are relentless in their searches for new physics. Someday, someone will find a reliable anomalous signal, but we can't predict when.

And, if you're looking for fun hints of new physics, check out "muon g-2". The next 5-10 years will be exciting there, too, to see if the existing discrepancy between measurement and the Standard Model will survive closer experimental scrutiny.

We go slow because we will go far.

<comment><USER3> What are the assumptions behind "log plots of parametrized experimental progress"? What do these mean in the real world?

To give an example of why "pouring money into it and getting slower and slower progress" could translate into linear progress on a log plot, imagine you have to pour in x² amount of (money, people, time) to get to level x of progress.

In that case "we go slow" means, "we'll gobble up larger and larger amounts of money, but everytime people get impatient we'll have some bone to throw at them".

<comment><USER4> Add that to the fact there is no global dependency tree of "What we need to discover to make this practical technology possible", how can we be sure that existing/future research funds are focused in the areas needed to make the most valuable technologies available?

<comment><USER5> Is that why we're doing physics research? Practical technology?

<comment><USER6> Isn't it?

Understanding things is certainly great, but you can't even claim you understand something new if you can not use that new understanding to achieve something you couldn't before it.

Or, more clearly, pure theory is good for mathematicians, but scientists can not even claim a theory is new if it has no application.

<comment><USER5> _Isn 't it?_

It's certainly not what _I 'm_ expecting. Even if it hadn't gone on to be central to our engineering, I would have liked to have known about general relativity or QCD.

 _Understanding things is certainly great, but you can 't even claim you understand something new if you can not use that new understanding to achieve something you couldn't before it._

What do you mean by _understand something new_? This week we started to _understand something new_ \- understand many things new - about Pluto. Are you trying to claim that this isn't true unless we can _use_ it somehow? What is it you're trying to say?

 _Or, more clearly, pure theory is good for mathematicians, but scientists can not even claim a theory is new if it has no application._

Is astronomy not a science? Or palaeontology? Or archaeology? Those are all observation-oriented sciences that don't conduct experiments but do gather information and develop knowledge.

I have no idea what it is you're trying to say about _claim a theory is new_ \- do you want to rephrase that? What would you say about the recent discover of pentaquarks? Pentaquarks are useless, but our knowledge of them is quite _new_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a PhD in physics - progress in pure physics is slowing down (or at least progress per scientist).

The delay between a discovery in physics and a Nobel prize is getting bigger and bigger [1]. It's true for all fields, but the effect is particularly strong for physics.

'''It is safe to say that late 1920s and early 1930s were the "Golden Age" of 20th century physics, when the progress was lightning-fast and new discoveries lay like low-hanging fruits. In the 1940s Dirac commented bitterly, in view of problems quantum field theory was having at the time: "Then, a second-rate physicist could do first-rate work – now, it takes a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work". Every physicist would love to live in such "interesting times", when a new unexplored scientific territory opens up.''' [2]

So, its started decreasing quite some time. Also, as there are more an more people involved, the brainmass gets diluted. As of now there is no chance to get a photo of a concentration of luminaries as from the famous Solvay conferences [3].

So, if you (like me) read Feynman lectures of physics and know physics from 1920s-1950s, you are likely to get disappointed by the current pace.

...and just compare to recent progress in machine learning, when we can play on our computers with things, which a few years ago were thought to be out of our reach.

(But it shouldn't be surprising, technologies and science do have their growth time, and usually it's finite time.)

[1] [http://priceonomics.com/why-nobel-winning-scientists-are- get...](http://priceonomics.com/why-nobel-winning-scientists-are-getting- older/)

[2] [https://woodtickquarterly.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/graham- fa...](https://woodtickquarterly.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/graham-farmelo-the- strangest-man-the-hidden-life-of-paul-dirac-quantum-genius/) (BTW: I recommend this book a lot)

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

<comment><USER8> Do you think there's a limit on how much we can understand in physics/any field?

My reasoning on this is that since everyone has a finite lifespan, understanding/work will be lost as the researcher retire, move to a different field, or die, unless this information is transmitted to someone else during their life time. However, as we understand more, we have to teach people more. This brings in two problems that I see:

\- It takes longer for people to learn up to the frontier of science, which means they might be in their 30s, 40s, and that number may keep getting larger. \- We might be able to teach these things in the same amount of time, but the understand of these topics by the younger generation might be less overall, which makes it difficult for them to make certain connections, as they might not have the deep enough understanding to see a connection.

My worry is the eventually we will reach a stage where the amount of knowledge we have is so much that no one can feasibly master a field. We can subdivide the fields, but no one will know enough general knowledge to make insightful connections that simplifies our models, or something to that effect.

As an example: my fluid dynamics professor said that the fluids mechanics I course we take in second year undergrad is what people worked on as their masters/phd thesis 100 years ago, whereas we don't even derive the formulas anymore now simply because we do not have the time to do so.

<comment><USER9> The point of your comment is disproved by your last paragraph! The more science is discovered, the more it gets compacted into the essentials of this knowledge. If 100 year old PhD level fluid dynamics can be taught to undergrads, this means it got digested into the most useful part of the work.

Similarly, it's considered basic undergrad work to understand Fourier decomposition; but the notations and clarity we get the insight from is the result of two centuries from the 1807 paper by Fourier. It was certainly PhD level at the time.

Certainly science is compacted and that's how it gets transmitted to younger generations. And remember that our brains get bigger, so maybe we'll never hit any "limit" to understanding? :)

<comment><USER8> My worry is that as we split knowledge out, no one will understand the big picture as they're always focused on their specialty of their specialty.

Since we are teaching people less in depth stuff as they need to go very far into science, it seems like building knowledge with unstable foundation. The lack of branching out may also inhibit discovering certain connections between fields that may proved to be enlightening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you have time, Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics is a captivating read.

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

Smolin makes a sosiological-historical argument, that from the 20s to 70s, the development in theoretical particle physics was done by trusting the "mathematical intuition", if the math was beautiful and predicted the existence of some particles, a bit later usually the experimental physicists found those particles. And the rewards and Nobel prizes went to those who did the math the fastest.

So the whole theoretical physics adopted this style of work, when someone proposes something new that looks interesting, everyone tries to do the math as quickly as possible, to be the first to get the results.

But then from the 70s to 00s, this flocking attitude was applied to string theory, and people just developed string math furiously, and it was left unnoticed that the theory was totally unrelated to any experiments.

So, Smolin suggests, for 30 years the best of theoretical physics went into a direction that may be totally separated from experiments. If this turns out to be true, theoretical physics pretty much lost 30 years.

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems to me that ground-breaking discoveries in physics are generally getting more expensive.

Up till about the early 20th century, ground breaking physics was largely "two guys in a garage" territory -- single individuals such as Newton or Cavendish tinkering in their own private laboratories using fairly modest equipment. Teenagers replicate their experiments in school physics lessons with equipment costing no more than a few hundred pounds today.

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, ground-breaking discoveries were increasingly made by teams of researchers, which seem to have grown larger over time, with equipment that has become increasingly large and expensive, and sponsored by universities, companies and governments.

Nowadays it seems that most ground-breaking discoveries are made by large, national or multinational teams working with equipment costing billions of dollars and processing petabytes of data. I couldn't see two guys in a garage producing their own space telescope or particle accelerator any time soon.

<comment><USER12> Most physics isn't done with space telescopes or particle accelerators; and very few groups require billions of dollars of equipment (considering the NSF budget is less than 10 billion dollars, there wouldn't be much to go around). Theoretical physics in experimentally relevant fields is about as cheap as its ever been; you really only need professors, a building, whiteboards, and travel funds.

And believe me, there are a lot of experimental physicists doing excellent work with two guys in a garage levels of equipment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's hard to read your question without thinking about how String Theory has dominated Physics for that entire timeframe (and more)... and how ineffective that family of models have been at progressing humanity's understanding of the broader world.

If you believe Lee Smolin then advocates of String Theory have also had an oppressive effect on opposing ideas, making it hard to get tenure if you're not working on it, effectively choking off competing theories (e.g. Doubly Special Relativity, Loop Quantum Gravity, etc)

I have no data or first-hand evidence, as I was only a mere Physics undergrad, but found his arguments pursuasive. String Theory (and his oscillating pals) have certainly been dominant in the scientific press, and don't seem to have come up with much. Could be a false negative though. We'll only know when someone opens the next big door.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am surprised no one has mentioned quantum information yet. Quantum information is the subfield of physics whose goal is to understand what new information processing tasks are possible/efficient that are not possible/inefficient in the quantum world. Two such tasks are quantum computing and quantum key distribution.

This field was birthed in the early 80s and has seen steady progress since then. Various architectures for quantum computing have been proposed and experimental control over them has steadily increased in each one over the last few years. While we are not there yet the sequence of results shows that we are rapidly approaching the fault-tolerance thresholds after which it will be possible to build quantum computers.

Quantum key distribution is a simpler task and has already been achieved commercially. Now we are trying to increase the rates of transfer. We are slowly also relaxing experimental requirements. For instance there are protocols where you don't have to trust that your devices where not tampered with by an adversary.

These are exciting times in quantum information. While important theoretical results where found in the 80s and 90s the experimental momentum today far outpaces it.

<comment><USER7> Quantum information is indeed a new field. Yet, I wouldn't compare it with 20s or 70s. In the last 20 years there was hardly any paradigm shift in that matter (don't be fooled by poor science reporting/popularizing or scientist overadvertising their results, in search for fame and grants).

And for example, when I as attending conferences in quantum information (my PhD field), people were constantly lowering their expectations and making predictions more humble; much more "10 years ago we said it would be in 10 years; now we can say the same".

I don't claim that there is no progress. Just that is depressingly slow comparing to the frontier fields of science in engineering. (If it were fast, believe me, I would have stayed in physics.) Of course, future may be different, but who knows...

Compare it with e.g. DNA sequencing, where costs went down quite a few orders of magnitude in the last decade. Or image recognition, where in the last decade things though to be extremely hard (because of problems in 70s) like face recognition, image recognition etc - are now standard techniques.

<comment><USER14> I myself am getting at PhD in quantum information. I completely agree that the timeline for quantum computing was extremely optimistic 20 years ago. However, I think current estimates are much closer to the truth. We now have a much better understanding of the systems on which we are building QCs. Estimates of fault-tolerance thresholds have become much better. We have 20 years of experimental progress to extrapolate when we expect to hit these thresholds.

I agree that progress in the 20s and 70s was much faster. But they were grabbing onto low-hanging fruit. Building even a 'bad' quantum computer is several orders of magnitude more difficult task than building, say, a 486 processor. The degree of experimental control required is much much more. What I see looking back is steady progress towards greater experimental control in multiple systems and very frequent and steady achievements of milestones.

What you forget when you compare quantum computing with DNA sequencing or image recognitions is that quantum computing is at the bottom of current theoretical paradigm. When you do DNA sequencing the science of your instruments (eg. centrifuges) is not suspect. In QC everything is suspect; your system, your detection mechanisms, your control systems. If you normalize every field by its fundamental difficulty you will find that quantum information is keeping up with other fields.

<comment><USER7> I would argue that this difficulty is not more fundamental than difficulty of producing light bulbs by Edison.

The thing I do not want to normalize w field by its difficulty - then progress would be just related to the effective number of smart people working on it.

I was raised in a scientific culture (Central/Eastern Europe), where difficulty was a virtue, not - impact. But that way produces a --lot-- small number (because they are difficult!) of difficult results, with little impact.

Likewise, the most progress happens where there are low-hanging fruits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is the best of times and the worst of times.

In fundamental physics, the LHC is online, neutrino physics is hot, and lots is going on. Now there are a huge number of quantum theories of black holes, but no way to prove anything about them in site.

The dark matter problem is a huge "anomaly" left to solve so there are still mountains to climb.

In terms of practical stuff there is lots of physics in how you build a 7nm microchip. Physicists collaborate a lot with "nanotechnology" people and biologists. For instance my thesis advisor worked with experimentalists who were stretching DNA with tweezers and figured out how the AIDS virus self- assembles.

Even the "dead" area of chaos theory is looking much better now that people at NASA have made a map of the earth-moon phase space which can give a km/sec or so free propulsion.

<comment><USER16>
       Even the "dead" area of chaos theory is looking much
       better now that people at NASA have made a map of the
       earth-moon phase space which can give a km/sec or so
       free propulsion.

This is fascinating - how can I learn more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This all depends on your frame of reference.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _Looking back over last 20 years, technology (esp. related to computers) had made extraordinary leaps forward and the pace is accelerating._

Largely hardware advances that are heavily interrelated with physics. Even still, it has been incremental (though still impressive) production advances and not radical architectural redesign. Intel only got bounds checking in hardware (MPX extensions) a couple of years ago, even though this was first done over half a century ago.

Software hasn't.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, as per some of the discussion of another recent post, one of the big things that has happened over the past 20-30 years in computing is that we discovered a technology for use in digital logic circuits that has been amenable to incredible process shrinks. Certainly there's been extraordinary engineering that's gone into that shrinkage coupled with no small amount of semiconductor physics. But, for whatever other advances have been made in computing since 1980 or so, an awful lot comes back to CMOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This depends on your definition of "advances in physics".

"New physics", physics that we don't already have an explanation for, is becoming increasingly rare. Our definition of "new physics" is also expanding to including things that aren't fundamentally new, just small holes in our understanding of the equations.

The flip side of this is that while we already know the broad strokes, there is still a lot of work to be done in filling in the details. This work is just less glamorous and doesn't make the headlines.

<comment><USER10> > _physics that we don 't already have an explanation for, is becoming > increasingly rare_

We don't understand why galaxies rotate the way they do, as the visible mass does not correspond to the rotation according to known laws of gravity. The solution is to postulate dark matter and dark energy, until things match again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> (Young) experimental particle physicist here. While our current progress in particle physics has slowed down since the 70's, we've still learned quite a bit in the last 20 years. For example we've observed the top quark, tau neutrino and Higgs boson. We have also learned lots of stuff about neutrinos, like that they have mass and oscillate. There has also been amazing progress in detectors, although that's mostly behind the scenes.

Other fields of physics have had much more interesting discoveries though (e.g. graphene).

</comment><comment><USER21> If you look at quantum computing [1], which is very much a part of physics, I would claim that progress is accelerating there. Its a field that is asking a lot of deep questions about reality and also spurring a lot of technological innovation.

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

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, to be fair, lots of computer technology advances were associated with advances in applied physics. Die sizes, MEMS, battery technology, etc.

Maybe you mean more theoretical physics? I don't really have enough knowledge to be useful there.

</comment><comment><USER23> As a physicist for the last 20 years, I suppose I am to partly to blame... ;)

I would say that it depends on what you call physics. The areas of physics that were symbolic of advancement in the previous 20 years will not necessarily be the same areas where advances will be in the next 20 years. During the 1800s, advances in physics in the first half of the century lead to technological advances in steam power and electricity in the second half. If you thought of physics as meaning electromagnetism and thermodynamics, you might think that there were few advances in physics in the first half of the 20th century. And there were people that felt that way! But I think that nowadays we would think that Einstein's heyday was an era of major physics advances. So, maybe you shouldn't look at those areas that are reaching the plateau of their sigmoid curve, but newer areas.

Classic particle physics, exemplified by the likes of Chadwick and Lawrence way back in the 1930s, leading to the explosion of the particle zoo in the 1950s, and then the diminishing returns of the LHC era, would be a good example of sigmoid curve development in Physics. If physics only means this stuff to you, then yes, it is going slower than it was.

Areas of physics that have been closer to the high slope region of their development in the last 20 years:

Quantum Information Theory (as noted by @abdullahkhalids)

Dark Matter/Energy/whatevertheheckitis

Medical Physics (from lead block linacs and xrays to IMRT/VMAT & modern imaging)

Materials Science/'Condensed Matter' physics

Black Hole science, esp. thermodynamics

Gravity waves, or the lack thereof (interesting either way)

techniques for signal/data processing and analysis (such as superresolution or single detector imaging)

I'm sure there's more that I'm not aware of. Anything that is really very new is too small to get much press right now. Pretty much by definition, the new small stuff won't have the big press budget of CERN or NASA.

</comment><comment><USER24> Physics has scaled out. There's a bunch of people working on a bunch of projects with, for the most part, narrowly defined goals. It's really to understand the implications of many of these projects when they succeed, let alone report on them.

Government spending in the sciences has been extremely schizophrenic over the last 5 years. The NSF is a little more stable, but the NSF doesn't fund much of anything over 100M, which would be a relatively small experiment when spread out over 4-5 years.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm not sure there's been any acceleration of discovery in the hard sciences.

The 30-40 years have seen tech advancements roughly in line with Moore's law, which is fantastic. But that's the result of engineering advancements. There's no precedent I'm aware of to expect the same results out of the hard sciences.

<comment><USER26> I'd disagree. New tools for biologists in the last 20 years have strongly accelerated the field.

The trouble in Physics is that the new tools look like the LHC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> String theory often gets ragged on for not having any direct practical applications, which is certainly true. However, some of the mathematics developed by string theory is key in theoretical work in fields where theory and experiment have a much tighter bond. For example, topological quantum field theory[1] has found widespread important applications in quantum information, and it was pioneered by none other than Witten himself. This isn't just on the theory side; experimentalists are looking at topological states of matter for a variety of applications, including quantum computing.

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

</comment><comment><USER27> I really like these diagrams, as an answer to your question: [http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in- pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

You can't predict breakthroughs. A scientist might spend their entire career following their research to a dead end. That's not a failure, in my opinion. It just shows how much we already know, and I think we should honour those scientists just as much as the lucky ones.

<comment><USER28> The trouble with that diagram is that it implies that everything after that initial boundary traversal is a completely new and original contribution to human knowledge. Sadly this is not the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> While progress may seem slower, we have a lot more people working on these unsolved problems. Also there is the fusion of abstract math and physics, which creates thousands of 'physicists' out of unwitting mathematicians. Due to the physical limitations of experiments, most forthcoming progress in physics will be purely abstract. But just because we can't test some of these theories doesn't mean we should disregard though, provided there are as few logical inconsistencies as possible.

</comment><comment><USER30> Has software technology gotten much advanced in the last 20 years yet? It became a lot bigger, yes, and now we have GC or type inference if you're lucky. But I'd be still afraid of writing a mission-critical part of software as well as I would in 80s. Also things like Heartbleed happened. In terms of the quality/correctness, the progress of the software industry has been disappointing to me.

<comment><USER31> I've got to say I'm rather amused by the notion that type inference and GC are innovations of the last 20 years.

Regarding now vs. the 80s, we have much better tools for making assurance cases for critical software. So much progress has been made in both specification correctness and implementation correctness that I think the only way you could compare the two and say there hasn't been improvement is if you haven't tried to see what we can actually do now vs. then...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I did a BS in physics in the early 1990s, but I haven't kept up with current research.

Can someone recommend some good reading to catch up on what's been happening since then? I'd love a decent book about qm or cosmology that's not quite a textbook, but also takes more than a simplified approach aimed at people with no background in the field.

</comment><comment><USER33> A good way to look at this objectively is to go to scholar.google.com, type in "physics" in the search bar, and limit your results to the past 10-20 years. You will have to filter through the books and survey articles (get a couple pages in), but you should get a picture of the more important articles in the past 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not a physicist or a scientist, but I do follow the news, and I think there's a lot happening 'under the surface' with people working on mathematical foundations (category theory, complexity theory, homotopy type theory) that are going to surface into physics in unexpected ways in the fairly near future.

</comment><comment><USER35> I just finished a PhD in Transformation Optics and Metamaterials. Metamaterials are a real novel breakthrough in physics which have wide ranging applications for antennas and electromagnetic materials. Not to mention the recent confirmation of the Higgs Boson. Physics is moving along at a similar pace.

</comment><comment><USER36> As someone dipping into physics very late after a long journey on mathematics, this thread is both depressing and terrifying yet at the same time strangely motivating.

I think there are some big questions without answers still. I want to have a bash at them.

</comment><comment><USER37> _Lex III: Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones in se mutuo semper esse æquales et in partes contrarias dirigi._

Only if something is moving backward.

</comment><comment><USER38> That depends, how do you quantify progress or rate of progress in physics? To compare directly to technology, Moore's law seems to indicate a accelerating pace of technology. On the other hand looking back to the 90ies progress in computer games, where you could expect a never seen before breakthrough each year, it seems that computers have hit a point of diminishing returns and probably the important metric is something like the log of computing power or something similar. So quantifying rate of progress is not well defined and it seems that it is possible to argue that the rate of progress has slowed down, even for computing power. The counter example would be digital video, where there was very little progress, for the average user, until divX and since the early two thousands, we went from cut scenes at 320x240, to Youtube and 4K video.

Putting the measurement problems aside, progress in physics seems to be a lot less smooth and the big jump occurred in the first three decades of the last century with the discovery of special relativity and quantum mechanics plus the ongoing project of formalizing physics. That one was a complete paradigm shift towards mathematical models and towards an entirely different picture of reality. Since then the development of quantum field theories is basically just using the same trick as for quantum mechanics. ( Not trying to belittle the development of QFT, that is one of the monumental achievements of the human mind, it just pales in comparison to the development of QM. ) So, in this view the next big jump may be just around the corner or not possible for a human brain, but we will only know the answer after progress happened. ( I should cite one of the famous philosophers of science here, unfortunately I forgot which one.)

As an example, string theory is currently not even wrong, because we can not build the known experiments that would enable us to test string theory. However a lot of brain power and ink was expended on its development over the last thirty years, and we simply do not have a good idea if it was worthwhile. If someone suggests a experiment that can distinguish between string theory and other models of quantum gravity, and if a string theory passes this test, then it was probably worthwhile to spend all that effort.

In conclusion, I would argue that the question is ill defined and runs furthermore in epistemological problems, that is even if we would find a good definition we can not really know the answer. However, I am actually quite optimistic that a breakthrough is just around the corner. For example, I think that the connection of information theory and physics is not really understood, but concepts like entropy and information seem to crop up everywhere one looks.

</comment><comment><USER39> There are a number of unexplained phenomena, easy to forget about but nevertheless essentially waiting on "new physics" to model.

</comment><comment><USER40> Maybe physics is in a (relative) plateau now. Just waiting for the big break through. eg ability to manipulate dark matter.

</comment><comment><USER41> Nobody here is going to like this comment but I recommend you look into Electric Universe theory and Plasma Cosmology.

<comment><USER42> It all sounds rather pretty but I'm not aware of a single testable hypothesis associated with it, or at least a testable hypothesis that anyone is willing to put forward and have immediately demolished. The Rosetta mission should have turned up some intense magnetic field readings if the Electric Universe theory is true . . . but it didn't. Then again the only people I know who espouse the theory can't begin to explain what electromagnetic fields are anyway.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you use a service like this? Like it so we can build it for you - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/hommaway

<comment><USER2> How would this be different from something like Freecycle or Freegle?</comment>


Scientists successfully revive 100Million-year-old microbes from the sea - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/28/scientists-successfully-revived-mesozoic-era-microbes-from-the-sea <comment><USER2> See recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23977234](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23977234)</comment>


MemSQL (YC W11) Raises $2.1 Million From Ashton Kutcher, SV Angel And More - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/12/y-combinator-alum-memsql-raises-2-1-million-from-ashton-kutcher-sv-angel-and-more/ <comment><USER4> The thing I keep finding confusing about these companies is: did anyone who cares about performance bother coding their app to use MySQL in the first place (as opposed to a database like PostgreSQL or Oracle, which have better index search and lock algorithms)?

This is really important, as MySQL has a weird dialect of SQL with all kinds of broken MySQL-isms (including fundamental things like not using the SQL- standard meaning for the various forms of quoting) as well as drastically limited support for supposedly-advanced things like sub-selects and truly- advanced things like windowing and partition functions...

Seriously: I don't think I have any apps that would actually /run/ on something that spoke MySQL without recoding all of the data access parts (and that's pretty much what a web backend is) from scratch, swearing and cursing the entire time about why I don't get to use X or Y or Z feature.

To me, this is just "yet another of those MySQL optimizer companies" that we see come and go year in and year out, and one that is almost certainly going to experience the same fate as all of the other ones: they are a dime a dozen, and almost always fail. The failure rate on PostgreSQL optimizer companies, however, seems much lower, despite the fact that they don't seem to get the fancy funding (probably because, if you don't take into account the underlying demographic of "performance-savy" from "database user" it looks like a smaller market).

<comment><AUTHOR> The article should definitely have been clearer - we're not a plugin to MySQL by any means. MemSQL is a completely new database built for modern hardware scenarios. That means lock-free data structures optimized for DRAM, access patterns, among others.

We maintain the MySQL protocol on the wire to minimize friction for existing applications.

We really see ourselves as a counterpoint to NoSQL, which has traditionally offered speed but sacrificed functionality. MemSQL is as fast, scalable, yet retains SQL.

<comment><USER4> I actually understood that you weren't a plugin to MySQL, but the fact that you chose to "maintain the MySQL protocol on the wire to minimize friction for existing applications" is confusing to me, as in my experience the performance-savy database operators did not write their application to target MySQL due to all of the reasons I stated (poor or missing locking and indexing algorithms, such as no hash joins, and an inability to perform partitioning, windowing, or ubiquitous/efficient sub-selects), and therefore your product actually maximizes friction for those seemingly key users (due to MySQL having a horribly unique and generally incompatible take on SQL syntax in some areas, and outright missing functionality elsewhere).

<comment><USER5> Think of it as parasiting off the existing library of MySQL libraries for every language under the sun. It's why every key-value store speaks its wire protocol _and also_ memcached.

<comment><USER4> So, not using the same actual SQL syntax? Just the binary protocol?

<comment><USER6> The binary protocol for MySQL is not, as I recall, particularly idiosyncratic. It's mostly a vehicle for asking the server to parse a text-based query, return a handle, and bind variables to executions of that query (when I implemented it, MySQL didn't even seem to use all the functionality of the protocol).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a lot of info on their website. But it strikes me as similar to VoltDB (<http://voltdb.com/>). Especially the emphasis on OLTP queries.

Is it based on the same paradigm of single-threaded serial access? What differentiates it from VoltDB? Is it the MySQL compatibility and ability to use ad-hoc queries instead of stored procedures? (If so, how do you make that bit fast?)

</comment><comment><USER8> Hey, guys. Congrats on the funding.

Why would I use MemSQL as opposed to relational database on SSD? RDMS on SSD gets me a similar speed boost as opposed to running on a completely new database.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few reasons in fact:

\+ DRAM is actually much higher on the memory pyramid than SSDs, so MemSQL handily beats MySQL on SSD any day

\+ Putting MySQL on SSD doesn't change the fact that MySQL isn't optimized for SSDs or DRAM; so you're still using b-trees, latching and locking, etc.

\+ SSDs have poor write endurance, meaning it has low number of write cycles

\+ You would still have to shard your database yourself; while MemSQL helps manage that process

\+ DRAM is available on the cloud today while it will be some time before SSDs are offered on most public clouds.

<comment><USER9> so there is zero persistence to disk? Your customers are just counting on power systems never failing and the ram never fails?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are most definitely fully persistent. Nikita has elaborated more on this further down the thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How MemSQL compares with TimesTen? Or even with Oracle RDBMS with bunch of RAM? Or Oracle RDBMS with Oracle In-Memory Database Cache (TimesTen) on application app servers? What is MemSQL "secret sause" comparing to competitor?

EDIT: Just so say that I'm so very happy to see a company which tries to solve real problems not Web 2.0 social networking crap is able to raise money.

EDIT2: The company like this needs $40M investment not $2M.

<comment><USER11> Well, it's a lot cheaper!

I don't see why a pure software company needs that much funding in the beginning. Their expenses are close to zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I might be an idiot for asking this question, but how do you guarantee data is never lost?

<comment><AUTHOR> that's actually a great question! we keep replicas in hot standby in case a node fails in the cluster. And to survive a datacenter/cluster failure, we employ continuous snapshotting.

<comment><USER12> Replicas are master-slave or something Paxos-esque?

So, continuous snapshotting means writing to disk asynchronously?

<comment><USER13> Replicas are master/slave, and continues snapshotting is asynchronous. On top of that, we can write a write ahead transaction log. If you put snapshotting and write ahead logs on different I/O subsystems you only produce sequentual writes, which guarantees that you get the most of your IO. Of course, that's on a single box.

For our distributed cluster we have the option of writing the write ahead log to the network "log servers" so you can do it even faster. In this case once ones K out of N log servers receive a log record we acknowledge the transaction. Then eventually the log servers flush it to disk. In this case you are able to write very quickly (you can spin off as many log servers as you like), you store your data in memory in one copy and you're durable.

<comment><USER14> What happens when master fails? jganetsk mentioned Paxos, which you could use to reliably elect a new master. If I were evaluating your tech for usage at scale, I'd be pretty interested in failure modes, and pretty skeptical of anything that didn't employ distributed consensus. There may be other distributed consensus algorithms out there (one was apparently discovered in fruit fly cells [1]), but Paxos is the only one I've seen so far with a _proof_ of eventual consistency.

An opensource implementation of Paxos: [2]

[1] [http://www.kurzweilai.net/fruit-fly-nervous-system- provides-...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/fruit-fly-nervous-system-provides-new- solution-to-fundamental-computer-network-problem)

[2] <https://github.com/ha/doozer>

<comment><USER13> Thanks, sigil. We are certainly aware of various options. It's either Paxos, or a simpler failover mechanism used by traditional dbs, such as SQL Server or Oracle on the per node basic based on replication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A real victory for YC as well as the founders (congrats to them - <USER2> software!)

This is the best example yet of YC's considerable ability to take a very deep tech, non-consumer startup, help vet and guide its technology and marketability, and provide the credibility to get it well-funded.

Fantastic round for a database software startup, a breed written off not long ago. I'd think it wouldn't happen maybe anywhere besides YC. Really shows why YC should be (and is) sought out by founders looking to build this kind of company.

<comment><USER13> Thanks Zach!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I never heard of a database that doesn't reside in memory if you have enough ram. Most of the time, it's the OS making this happen by maintaining a cache for disk reads, and flushing writes to disk asynchronously.

Does MemSQL just have more compact data structures that let more stuff fit in memory?

<comment><USER12> My guess is if you design your database to reside in RAM, you can use pointers in the data structures. You also can drop all layout optimizations that are meant for linear access (optimize for random access instead).

<comment><USER13> This is a correct observation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would love to have heard an investment pitch to Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary about databases!

</comment><comment><USER18> When I hear about such "MySQL replacement" databases built from grounds up by companies that are just a few months old, I always wonder how complete their support for MySQL feature set is. Do they support every SQL feature/quirk/misfeature of MySQL?

It seems to me that unless it is a complete one-to-one mapping, it is going to be a nightmare to explain what is supported and what is not.

<comment><USER13> For total MySQL compatibility, you could only modify the MySQL storage engine via their plugin system.

As the market has shown, this isn't a compelling improvement. For us, every part of MemSQL has been optimized for memory - this gives us a 30x boost, rather than the 4-5x you might see just switching out the storage engine.

The decision to support the MySQL protocol on the wire was made to reduce friction for the application. However, that doesn't mean we will support every quirk or 'misfeature' for MySQL just to say we're "MySQL compatible."

Our value proposition is easy performance at scale. In working with customers, it's been pretty straightforward to explain the MemSQL surface area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How does performance compare to MySQL running from a RAM disk?

(I can imagine designing for RAM from day one can help... but curious as to how much it helps, once the actual storage layer and investment in RAM is identical.)

<comment><USER13> Order of magnitude faster. We will be publishing benchmarks shortly

<comment><USER19> Order of magnitude: base 2, base 8, base 10, base 16?

(Sorry, 'order(s) of magnitude' is a pet peeve of mine.)

<comment><USER20> _base 10_

Is that binary?

Seriously - if that is a pet peeve, then you need bigger problems. I'll make it easy for you: if someone says "order of magnitude" they always mean base 10, unless otherwise noted.

<comment><USER19> "10x" is shorter, less ambiguous, and less pretentious than "order of magnitude". Same with "100x" or "1000x" compared to "orders of magnitude".

Those places where "order of magnitude" is most commonly used – especially sciences and computing – are those places where other bases are possible, and where precision matters.

Your 'make it easy for me' doesn't match my experience. Often "orders of magnitude" is used as hand-waving, to make a difference sound more impressive than the speaker is willing to go on record about. When tangible numbers arrive, it may only turn out that what was meant was 'a large multiple', less than the actual power-of-ten that was implied by the high-falutin' phrase.

If you've got a multiple in mind, and want to impress careful quantitative listeners, name the multiple. Say "around 10x" or "up to 10x" or "more than 10x". In comparison, "order of magnitude" sounds like wordy posturing.

<comment><USER20> "order of magnitude" is a deliberate way to present something as a rough estimate.

In that way it is a non-mathematical form of big-O notation.

You might prefer saying 10x or whatever, but complaining about the _base_ is unnecessarily pedantic.

Edit: Actually, Wikipedia even says _In its most common usage, the amount being scaled is 10 and the scale is the (base 10) exponent being applied to this amount (therefore, to be an order of magnitude greater is to be 10 times as large)._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ok - so i posted 2 questions:

1) Can @memsql scale writes ?

2) Is @memsql ACID compliant ?

Your answering on sharding indiciates that @memsql scales writes in exactly the same way as MYSQL - <USER3>

Re. ACID complaince. I'm guessing you are ?

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks awesome! Is this as fast as nosql datastores?

<comment><USER13> Yes, that's the idea

</comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Congrats MemSQL team! We've been in the same YC batch, when it comes to databases, they know their craft.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hate to ask such an obvious question, but any invites?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! Sign up at www.memsql.com for an invite =)

<comment><USER24> Signed up as well - and looking forward to the invite.

This looks like a very interesting project!</comment></comment></comment>


The Infocom Cabinet: Binders and Folders of Infocom - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619956)

</comment><comment><USER3>
        >touch pad

        $    The Nutrimat makes an instant but highly detailed examiniation
        of your taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of your metabolism
        and sends tiny experimental signals down your neural pathways
        to see what you like.

        A cupful of Advanced Tea Substitute appears in the dispensing slot.

        >take cup

        $    Taken

        >drink tea substitute.

        $    It tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
        It's absolutely disgusting.  The Nutrimate says "Share and Enjoy".

</comment><comment><USER4> Does this have a mirroring policy?</comment>


Apple Violates Its Own App Store Policy - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/davedelong/status/1110347938981511168 <comment><USER2> I don't see how this is in violation of 3.1.2 [0].

There is no mention of "you must include how to cancel" (it does say you can cancel at any time), and I don't see anything else Apple may be violating.

The Privacy Policy requirement in 5.1.1 [1] already doesn't apply to Apple's apps since the News+ subscription is tied to your Apple ID, so you have already accepted Apple's privacy policy.

0: [https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/#sub...](https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/#subscriptions) 1: [https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/#pri...](https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/#privacy)

<comment><AUTHOR> 3.1.2 (a) last point refers to Auto Renewing Subscriptions. It refers to this URL: [https://developer.apple.com/app- store/subscriptions/](https://developer.apple.com/app-store/subscriptions/) Even the examples in URL shows information about cancel and auto renew description. (You can see a wall of text under the buttons).

Many apps were rejected due to same missing that wall of text.</comment></comment>


The Silicon Valley Elite Need A Culture Of Duty - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/20/the-silicon-valley-elite-need-a-culture-of-duty/

<comment><USER2> People are aware of what Palantir does, right? And what we found out about them from their involvement with HBgary Federal, correct?

I'm not sure everyone has the same sense of "Duty"...</comment>


Prolog Programming Language (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/prolog/prolog.html <comment><USER2> We had to use Prolog in my comparative languages class last semester and it was interesting, to say the least. With any class that brushes over a topic, I didn't get a full appreciation for what it can do, but it was an interesting paradigm to be exposed to if nothing else.

I didn't feel like I was doing "real programming", which likely says more about what we're taught than the merits of the language. I'd be interested to known how it's being leveraged presently? I know a lot of the standard use cases, but is there anyone solving really unique problems with it?

<comment><USER3> I'll share an _idea_ for a logic programming project that I've been brewing for quite some time (but never started working on)...

As you may know, the engine behind Prolog is based on the unification algorithm (finding substitution values for variables to make two patterns equal). The same algorithm is behind Hindley-Milner -style type inference algorithms.

I have been considering writing a compiler for a programming language that would do type inference indirectly in two steps. In the first step (a typical syntax tree walk), rather than doing the actual unification directly, a Prolog -style logic program would be emitted. In the second step, the logic program is evaluated which will result in the types for the program.

The advantage of this approach would be allowing function overloading (similarly to C++ or Java) informally without interfaces or type classes. This means that there will be ambiguous types for expressions, something which is quite hairy to implement using a H-M based classic type inference algorithm. If the final output has ambiguous types, it is a compile error in the source program.

This is just a crazy idea I've been brewing, but this would definitely be a nice use case for a Prolog -style logic programming language. In practice, it wouldn't probably be Prolog itself, because implementing similar languages is so much fun and writing the code to call an external Prolog interpreter is about as much trouble but a lot less fun.

Prolog certainly isn't your every day programming tool, but in some cases it's a really good tool to have. And learning logic programming is one of those ventures that will expand your horizons.

Finally, here's a logic programming interpreter I wrote some years ago for a class: [https://github.com/rikusalminen/slolog/tree/master/example](https://github.com/rikusalminen/slolog/tree/master/example)

<comment><USER4> > The advantage of this approach would be allowing function overloading > (similarly to C++ or Java) informally without interfaces or type classes.

I might be misunderstanding something, but how does this allow function overloading more than ordinary let-polymorphism? Functions can already have a type like, say, ∀a.a→Int. It's also quite common to do type inference in two steps where the first pass creates type variables and a list of constraints. The set of constraints are then passed to a unification algorithm, see e.g. [http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis552/lectures/stub/FunTypes.htm...](http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis552/lectures/stub/FunTypes.html).

<comment><USER3> In a classic Hindley-Milner type inference algorithm, you can't have a function "add(int, int) -> int" and "add(float, float) -> float". E.g. in Haskell, you'd need a type class for this.

Modern functional programming languages use a type inference algorithm more sophisticated than the original H-M algorithm which are more flexible than the original algorithm. The link you gave as an example is Haskell with a handful of language extensions related to the type checker - something entirely different to the H-M algorithm.

There can be other ways of implementing a similar type checker in a different manner, this was just a fun idea I came up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I started learning how to program in Prolog a few years ago. I found Prolog to be very difficult to understand, mostly because I did not understand what symbolic logic was. I then purchased a significant number of books on symbolic logic and started studying them. I don't think it is possible to understand Prolog without first understanding how symbolic logic works.

My recommendation for someone who is interested in learning how to program in Prolog is to start by reading "Logic for Problem Solving" by Robert Kowalski:

[http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-Revisited-Robert- Kowal...](http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-Revisited-Robert- Kowalski/dp/3837036294/ref=oosr)

I am currently about halfway through an earlier edition of this book, and it is the first book I have found that clearly explains the ideas upon which Prolog is based.

<comment><USER6> This looks amazing, thanks for posting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Prolog is one of those languages that's worthwhile to learn even if you never use it.

Try the Zebra problem, Towers of Hanoi or a family tree example to get a feel for what it's like.

<comment><USER6> Not only is it worthwhile to learn, it's worthwhile to use for real world problems: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_eYTctGZw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_eYTctGZw8)

From his blog: [http://blog.ndrix.com/2014/10/how-we-use- prolog.html](http://blog.ndrix.com/2014/10/how-we-use-prolog.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are there any modern logic programming languages? I've tried looking for them before, but found nothing.

<comment><USER9> I can't say I've tried it myself, but Mercury looks interesting:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_%28programming_language...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_%28programming_language%29)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first time I read about Prolog, I thought to myself, "Man, this is what computing was supposed to do for us! Look at it answering questions, doing planning...holy cow."

And in the last 40 years? Maybe Erlang (a Prolog descendant), Ruby (maybe the best successor to Lisp/Smalltalk), or Elixir (an Erlang descendant looks like Ruby) is as impressive. The rest is either hacky (C++, Javascript, Perl), attempts to clean up hackiness (Java, D, Go, Rust, Clojure), unoriginal (Python, C#), or just plain wanky (OCaml, Haskell)--and that's not counting ones that are beneath mention (PHP).

Don't get me wrong...there are some languages that are actually quite beautiful in their implementation or use (Lua, Clojure, a few others), but the "holy shit this is the future!" feeling I get from looking at Prolog, Erlang, or Ruby is something I haven't had in a while.

Instead, the future of practical programming languages is probably going to be yet another tepid iteration on Algol, with closures and memory safety and incorrectly-handled numerical safety and some lame concurrency story. Pattern matching if history is slightly kind to us, probably still no mandatory tail- call optimization. Sigh.

Go is the future, I guess?

<comment><USER11> What do you think of Awelon?

[https://github.com/dmbarbour/awelon/blob/master/AwelonProjec...](https://github.com/dmbarbour/awelon/blob/master/AwelonProject.md)

 _" My goal is to unify programmer experience (PX) with the user experience (UX).

This is an elusive goal. It has been pursued for many years, with many different hypotheses for what such a unification might entail and how it might be achieved. Related projects include Squeak Smalltalk, ToonTalk, LambdaMOO, Morphic, Croquet, Emacs, and HyperCard. A relatively successful effort to unify PX and UX was the Unix command line, where users would build short programs of process pipelines. But that has been marginalized by the development of GUI.

To me, the unification of PX and UX means that programming becomes a casual effort, such that users make it part of their normal workflow and don't even think about it as programming._"

<comment><USER12> Weird, I read some of dmbarbour's articles from a RSS feed, but I never read the basis for its awelon project, basis that have been an obsession of mine for quite a while. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>