Samsung Introduces Completely Solar-Powered, Transparent TV  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecogeek.org/efficiency/3456-samsung-introduces-completely-solar-powered-tranpa?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EcoGeek+%28EcoGeek%29&utm_content=Twitter <comment><USER2> Before a bunch of people comment on how useless this is or why would you want that, think about the next time you are walking through a mall. See how many TVs and LCDs you see. Now imagine all those powered by the ambient light in the mall instead of conventional sources. That's why this is going to be cool and useful, not for your living room.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure which of two things you mean [EDIT: perhaps both], but neither of them seems to make sense.

1\. "All those LCDs and TVs won't need to be backlit; they'll just use whatever light there was behind them." By definition, if you do that then they can't be brighter than whatever was behind them; and unless what's behind them is nice and uniform, you won't be able to see them clearly. This just isn't going to look good enough for the purposes most of those displays are there for.

2\. "We'll power the LCDs and TVs photoelectrically, using the ambient light." Then you'll need a large area of photovoltaic cells to power them, somewhere that was well-illuminated but black. You could save more electricity by painting that area white instead and reducing the lighting slightly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That looks great if they can make it into windows panes - the outside of the glass is the solar panel and the inside can play video. Make it transparent on whim. Make it opaque to block out the sun.

<comment><USER5> Make funny shadows. Show weather forecast. Fill it with black and put a moon there during the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You could have such a sweet GPS interface in your car with this in the windshield.

<comment><USER7> I would just hope that I don't get a virus that turns my windshield black.

<comment><USER8> nah, viruses would be novel. They'd throw random images of people running across the road in front of you, instead

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some pictures/video here:

[http://inventorspot.com/articles/samsungs_latest_transparent...](http://inventorspot.com/articles/samsungs_latest_transparent_tv_now_solar_power)

</comment><comment><USER10> A camera in the back and some video tools could make for some really awesome desktops. Seeing a virtual Godzilla stomp around the city would be so cool. Bonzi Buddy 2020.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great example of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".

It's an interesting technology, but besides making CNNs coverage of elections more X-treme, who is going to use this?

<comment><USER12> I, for one, would superimpose some blue skies and nice fluffy clouds upon rainy afternoons... And big, silvery dirigibles. Always liked those.

Notice the background is very clean - most real windows will show you buildings and trees. If, however, that could be combined with "privacy glass", specially if you could make the glass less transparent on a pixel-by-pixel way, then I would consider changing all my windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems to me like most people commenting here see this as transparent TV instead of seeing it as futuristic window that displays stuff !

I'd like to have this kind of stuff on certain windows, and not as a replacement for a TV, that big piece of furniture that sits in a living room.

It's a bit like "surfaces" by Microsoft. It's not really about turning computers into tables, but it's about turning tables into amazing futuristic furniture (that are extra useful).

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know if LG's has solar-poweredness? This mentions nothing along those lines: <http://justinireland.com/lg-transparent-lcd/> via <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266954>

</comment><comment><USER15> I love the future. Hopefully this won't go the way of the OLED and be way too expensive for practical use. I know it's only a matter of time, but I want this now! There are so many interest problems that a technology like this one could be applied in solving.

</comment><comment><USER16> Another story on it, since this one isn't working for me: [http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/samsung-unveils- see-...](http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/samsung-unveils-see-through- solar-powered-tv.php)

</comment><comment><USER17> Looks like it's not actively backlit? Way cooler than it has any right to be, at least in the daytime. Brightness is automatically directly proportional to the light coming from behind! Wonder what they have planned for night.

<comment><USER18> Maybe you could have thin LED strips on the sides to side-light it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Obviously incredibly cool, but at the same time, how often do you want to see what is behind your monitor? Other than storefront windows and cars I would think it would be distracting to have everything be transparent.

But it is very, very cool.

<comment><USER20> If its cheaper, that would drive adoption lots of places that don't have tv. E.g. Africa, dorm rooms, shower stalls...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yup. This is what I want at my desk.

Now I just need to find a great window with a view :)

</comment><comment><USER22> How long before some guy is caught watching porn on the window.. ?

Seriously though, there really isn't much privacy if all of your screen watching is clearly visible to anyone walking by on the street.

</comment><comment><USER23> Seeing how they marketed LED TV, it might be possible they put a camera at the back of it, and mixed the images. Here is the transparent TV :)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd love this. I would put them in my kitchen (white walls, well lit) and run the power cable out to my deck. Handy.

</comment><comment><USER25> Clever, take a lcd panel, remove the backlighting and put semi-transparent solar panels one or both sides.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why would you see behind your TV while watching a movie ?</comment>


Show HN: Quickfix, the best stupid idea for fixing problems in Node modules - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maxchehab/quickfix#quickfix <comment><USER2> A safer way in my opinion is to:

0\. read module license

1\. checkout the module to be patched

2\. modify it

3\. do "npm pack" to save a tarball

4\. set the dependency version in your package.json to the tarball. and make sure to the tarball is available during build time.

5\. report the issue in their issue tracker for long term fix.

In contrast:

with this "quick fix", the dependency can change, or the transient dependencies can change. This would cause the quickfix patch to not apply anymore.

The only way to guarantee that it won't break is to save the module and all its dependencies. Something that is equivalent to npm pack.

Finally... don't get yourself into a licensing problem. Take a good look at the license before modifying a project.

<comment><USER3> Does npm even allow you to use projects that don't allow you to make changes to their code?

<comment><USER2> You can have an npm module with any arbitrary licensing.

[https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json#license](https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json#license)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Leaving aside the comedic factor, albeit problem-solving, if you want a sane alternative check out pnpm. It will not only make the installation of deps faster but it will also allow you to override a dependency on any n-level e.g. a dependency of a dependency.

A dependency published a patch version with a breaking change and the author is on vacation? No problem, you can lock it within your project to the previous version.

Did you fork a dependency and you want to use your version? You can do that too. In all of your dependency chain. You can even change the version specifier to a git url so no need to publish your fork to the npm registry.

I whole heatedly recommend anyone to have a look at pnpm. As a unix dev, there's so much in there that is well thought and kept simple this fast.

[https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/blob/master/README.md#hooks](https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/blob/master/README.md#hooks)

<comment><USER5> That's an interesting approach to it (modifying how the package.json is processed).

If anyone is wondering if their current package manager supports this, it does if you are using Yarn. Yarn has a `resolutions` field to override subdeps (either globally or in a targeted way): [https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/selective-version- resolutio...](https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/selective-version-resolutions/)

It's not as low-level and flexible as pnpm's approach, but is perfect for the use case described here.

<comment><USER4> Correct. The pnpm approach is more versatile. You can do anything to a dependency's package.json . I have recently used it to debug and then monkey patch "scripts" (property) invocations without even forking the dependency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh, that's terrible, awful, the worst idea ever! You're promoting bad practices, the quality of code will only get worse from now on! Someone needs to delete this thread! You must have quality guidelines, code review, follow best practices! Don't you dare modifying the content of node_modules!

[secretly uses quickfix when no one is looking]

<comment><USER7> As the creator, I shame you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the really nice things about NPM (and other modern source-level dependency managers) is that it's trivial to fork dependencies and reference commits in remote Git repositories. This workflow makes it really straight forward to patch third-party dependencies. Combine it with a lock file for reproducible builds and you're good to go with minimal fuss.

<comment><USER9> How (well) does this work in a dependency of a dependency of a dependency?

<comment><USER8> You have three options:

1\. Fork every dependency in the chain. Which typically isn't more than two or three dependencies.

2\. Fork the distant dependency, and specify it as a direct dependency.

3\. Fork the distant dependency, and _only_ update your lock file.

Option 1 is probably the "correct" approach, and sometimes necessary anyway, if you've made contract/API changes to a dependency of a dependency. It will also make it easier to contribute your changes upstream - which presumably you're wanting to do to avoid the maintenance burden of maintaining forks.

Option 2 is the "easiest", but probably least correct as you're adding a hard dependency where one shouldn't exist.

Option 3 works fine until you try regenerate your lock file.

Quickfix doesn't seem to take itself too seriously, which is nice, but I'd happily argue that any one of the 3 approaches given above is better than the approach Quickfix is taking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We had same issue and we used diff and patch.

<comment><USER11> That's basically all this is, but with fewer commands to remember and modify. I think that's quite useful, especially when under lots of time pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a terrible idea and I encourage you to consider the slipperiness of this slope

<comment><USER13> Pragmatism is on a slipperly slope almost by definition.

<comment><USER11> That is a very concise way of saying something I've struggled to articulate well in the past.

Sometimes stuff like this is a horrible idea. Sometimes you need it. If you lock out the entirety of the "sometimes you need it" use cases as "too dangerous if applied en masse", you cripple yourself. Remember: not everyone has the time to do it right (the time they have might be measured in minutes or seconds before a push or bugfix), or the wherewithal or ability to even learn how. You can lament that reality if you like, but tools that accept it will be useful anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Clever and funny. I might find this useful for broken Typescript typings that have been somehow included in the package.

</comment><comment><USER15> Check in your node_modules. You are badly correcting the wrong problem. npm repo should not be hit for every checkout, deploy, and CI test. Just commit your dependencies - and if you need to hack them, you can float a patch with git.

<comment><USER16> Watch out! The "pure and perfect git history is more important than any other consideration" crowd are going to take you apart for this heretical notion!

<comment><USER17> More like the "we don't want a 10gb git repo" crowd to be honest.

Checking in not only your code, but your entire history of every dependency and every change within that dependency graph is an amazingly bad idea when frontend apps often have 600mb+ of dependencies that change somewhat frequently, and git keeps a version of every file in its history.

<comment><USER18> But you're going to have to install them either way. We only update dependencies when they are needed, so in practice this is rarely an issue. We have also gotten in the practice of making separate branches for updates to keep Pull Requests sane.

<comment><USER17> Part of my current project has a node_modules folder that is 400MB and contains 37853 files. Seeing as updating a dependency can cause a cascading effect that can touch a lot of different files, it's not a good idea to store them in git. It's akin to the reason you don't store binary files in git.

If installs are too slow, switch to a caching yarn/npm mirror. Cloudflare has one. Or run a local caching proxy for your team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> README would be 42% better without megabytes of pointless animated GIFs.

<comment><USER20> I'm not that amused either, but to each their own. It's only 2 megabytes, which is probably a lot less than your average `yarn`/`npm install` session.

<comment><USER19> 2 megabytes is at least 30 seconds of hogging my Internet connection.

I never use npm on the same machine that I browse web, so for me the two things aren't comparable.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Make and Use a Transparency Grenade - <AUTHOR> http://transparencygrenade.com/

<comment><USER2> Honestly, if you bring this into a government area, then you will probably get shot on sight if you are seen by security. To be safer and a little bit more stealthy, maybe try disguising it as a soda can or a door stop.

<comment><USER3> It's an art piece, not a serious piece of espionage equipment, hence its form reflects its (symbolic) function.

<comment><USER4> I don't think armed guards see the silhouette of a grenade, a device that can maim, wound, injure or worse kill a number of people in the terms of "espionage".

<comment><USER5> I think you've missed the point

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have wondered for some time what the effect would be of the following transparency experiment:

With an experienced investigative journalist as a mentor, "deploy" a handful of young journalists to report via a blog-esque medium on the politics of some randomly chosen small city. What would happen if every police incident was investigated to find out if the powerful were granted special treatment? If every claim made in a city council meeting was verified? If every motive behind every vote was examined? How about tracing down budget expenditures to see who was scheming to defraud taxpayers? Would the city's citizens care enough to even read the blog? Would this transparency change government for the better? It certainly would give Americans a baseline for the level of corruption and inefficiency in local governments.

<comment><USER7> The act of measuring would change the behavior. In this way, transparency activism suffers the same phenomenon as security: doing the job right yields an environment in which there is no apparent need for doing the job right.

<comment><USER6> Interesting point. I wonder what graph of oversight level vs. corruption level looks like. I'm sure the point of diminishing returns occurs at only 1/10th a dedicated journalist. However, the marginal societal value (cost of corruption compared to cost of oversight) might continue to be positive for awhile as investigators are added.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We need the ability to broadcast from our smartphones to be an intrinsic, built-in feature. To that end, I am currently working on apps for iOS and Android that will make it very, very easy for people to stream media in realtime from wherever they are ..

This transparency grenade is definitely a step in the right direction towards educating people _why_ we need such features in our smartphones. I commend the artist for using the appropriate level of symbolism to communicate the dire need for individual abilities such as this.

<comment><USER9> I wonder how hard it would be to set up a server running Skype, which just auto-accepts incoming video calls and dumps them to YouTube...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Incidentally, the artist who made this (Julian Oliver) is part of a free technology workshop series aimed at artists who don't necessarily have a technical background, which may be interesting if you know any people in Berlin meeting that description: <http://weise7.org/labor-berlin-8-workshops>

</comment><comment><USER11> The creator, Julian Oliver, is also one of the guys responsible for the "Newstweek" (<http://newstweek.com/overview>) device that was on hacker news about a year ago.

Originally presented by a fake news article about one being discovered, it's a pretty neat device. Basically just a plug computer that you hide near a public AP which then mitm's all the AP's web traffic and according to a set of rules rewrites news headlines.

</comment><comment><USER12> I will argue that there is no need for a 200 dollar Gumstix ARM Cortex A8 in there. Not even close.

A 16-bit microcontroller (< 5 USD) would pull it off, but you'd need to custom code most of the software to power that.

<comment><USER13> > A 16-bit microcontroller (< 5 USD) would pull it off, but you'd need to > custom code most of the software to power that.

So it's an engineering trade-off: You "don't need" something complex, not at all, nope (but if you use the "simpler" solution, other parts become more complex as a result).

I've noticed this multiple times before, and it annoys me: "Simpler" is not always better; in fact, it isn't even always simpler!

I don't mean to jump on you in specific, but this idea does come up again and again, often in places like Hacker News.

<comment><USER12> I completely agree - except this is a hobby project, not something serious in the first place. If you're hand-tooling the metal parts for the grenade, CAD designing the parts, and machining them or 3D printing them, it would seem that novelty is the factor.

If you can save 100-150 bucks while increasing the cool factor and having a more fulfilling rewarding experience (like you said, this _is_ Hacker News, after all), why not?

<comment><USER14> $150 does not seem worth whatever effort would be required to custom code most of the software. Especially for a one-off art piece. I think the goal is to make it functional and aesthetically pleasing, and that's what makes it a fulfilling experience for the artist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think we should deploy a few of these in the editorial meeting rooms of some of the worlds top media conglomerates and news papers.

But in all seriousness, don't deploy these anywhere. You may get shot on sight.

</comment><comment><USER16> Overall cool idea, and I respect anyone who makes such a thing from a craft perspective. But the decision to make it look like a grenade was extremely unwise and arguably dangerously stupid. Walk into a building with a large number of people who don't know you, and the odds are one of them will see it and freak out, leading to a police/security encounter or worse.</comment>


Face Detector in JS - <AUTHOR> http://liuliu.me/ccv/js/nss/ <comment><USER2> Very cool. I did my CMU capstone project on Face Recognition, [http://hari.seshadri.com/Projects/School/FaceRecognition/ind...](http://hari.seshadri.com/Projects/School/FaceRecognition/index.php)

As far as detection goes though, we used an out-of-the-box facial landmark viola jones detector, so I never did any of the hard word you did. We did some cool stuff with normalization, facial landmark cropping, illumination mitigation (and artificial illumination), and recognition though.

This looks great though, good job!

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://liuliu.me/ccv/js/nss/#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.perekop.net%2F...](http://liuliu.me/ccv/js/nss/#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.perekop.net%2Fwp- content%2Fuploads%2Fyalta-1945-summit.jpg)

Apparently Churchill's crotch looks more like a face than his actual face. And Stalin gets the cold shoulder.

</comment><comment><USER4> Based on a sample size of about 10 pictures including about 15 faces I would say it works about 1/8 of the time, and false detects about 2/10 of the time. Cool but very hit and miss.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any chance that this can be used via a webcam (take a shot once a face is detected)?</comment>


Sir Trevor Editor - <AUTHOR> http://madebymany.github.io/sir-trevor-js/ <comment><USER2> I like the "block" abstraction. It seems like a good way to visually work with structured content. It also makes the editor really easy to customize (at least conceptually), which I find a _big_ plus.

At least in the example, there did not seem to be a way to undo things. This is a bit annoying, especially because it forces a confirmation step when deleting things. I think most common use-cases would be much better served by being able to undo a delete than having to confirm it each time. Even if you don't want to have a general undo button, I would prefer a GMail-style undo link that only pops up after you've deleted something to the current behavior.

<comment><USER3> : I like the "block" abstraction. It seems like a good way to visually work with structured content.

Hmm, IDK. I can see that it could be a good way to represent and manipulate the chunks of text once you've got them, but having to click a special icon and choose the block type every time you add a new paragraph (rather than just pressing "return" for the most common case of a new text paragraph) seems pretty clumsy.

<comment><USER4> Why can't you just press Return and continue writing? You don't have to split your text into several blocks.

<comment><USER5> Would be cool to have the ability to split a block on an empty line so you can easily move a multimedia block between existing paragraphs.

<comment><USER6> Or maybe split a block by clicking (think scissor tool) or something..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You might want to see my take on a concept of a structured block-based editor for Markdown — [http://andreypopp.github.io/markstruct/](http://andreypopp.github.io/markstruct/)

It's still a rough draft — so expect it to work best only in Blink/WebKit now.

Some shortcuts:

* Arrows — move between blocks

* Shift + Arrows — rearrange blocks

* Enter — creates a new paragraph

* Esc — merge with previous block (only for text based blocks, remove current block otherwise)

* If paragraphs starts with # it transforms into heading (repeat # for more heading levels)

* If paragraphs starts with ``` it transform into code snippet

* Images are entered as ![](url)

* HR — __*

It's just about 500LOC, Thanks to excellent React[1] library. No inline markup yet, but it's not difficult to add. Also needs some more polishing and tests.

[1]: [http://facebook.github.io/react/](http://facebook.github.io/react/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Structured editors are cool. Not everything needs to be org-mode, but I feel like this project could learn from some existing tools:

• Quip's block level editing ([https://quip.com/](https://quip.com/)). This avoids the problem where users can't decide whether they should make multiple paragraphs within a block, or if they should make multiple blocks with one paragraph each — Quip makes it so that pressing return puts you into a state where you've created a whole new block-level chunk of information. Whether that's a paragraph or a heading or an image or a table, it doesn't matter because it enforces that the space must mean something. It even prevents you from pressing return multiple times, which would be handled in other wysiwyg editors with multiple <br>s or javascript margins or god knows what else.

• The ability to track and apply revisions a la substance.io ([http://substance.io/#substance/manual](http://substance.io/#substance/manual)). Having granular control about both the contents and placement of blocks is very important, especially when considering that a lot of content is edited while being written and revised once published. Substance's extension API is worth checking out too.

That said though, I think you're doing great work, and I'll be watching this project closely. Death to TinyMCE!

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks good. Should slot into quite of lot of interesting applications.

Strange name though. Since the author is british, I assume it was named after this guy: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_McDonald](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_McDonald)

Edit: "Brought to you by ITV.com" kind of confirms it

<comment><USER10> Yeah I believe it was initially abstracted from MxM's ITV.com redesign :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ehhh.... To be honest, I find the editor to be clunky and this would not be something I would enjoy using. Somebody enlighten me what's so great about Sir Trevor except that it comes with an MIT license.

</comment><comment><USER12> Folks at MxM: This is _exactly_ what we have been looking for at Huddle: a decent WYSIWYG -> Markdown editor. Thank you so much.

Good job.

</comment><comment> artumi-richard On the example page there is no option to add images. So initially I thought that sir trevor couldn't do image blocks. You might get more interest if the Example page makes it clear some blocks are disabled.

</comment><comment><USER13> The block based layout reminds me a lot of some of the desktop publishing software I used to use in the early-mid 90's. At the time, it served well the purpose of integrating multiple media types into a single document, but it was a bit of a clunky way to edit. That's my concern with Sir Trevor.

The nicest (for me) aspect of Markdown, is that it removes the need to mess around with anything other than text to produce a formatted output document. Sir Trevor seems to remove that benefit, for limited upside.

<comment><USER14> Presumably the upside is that it's easy to use for non-techy types. I implemented a system with markdown editing for a charity I help out at, and everyone has freaked out about the markdown editing. I've been looking for a dead-simple editor I can give them .. and this looks interesting option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is actually very very similar to the UX of checkthis. See here: [http://checkthis.com/new](http://checkthis.com/new)

<comment><USER16> Checkthis certainly has a beautiful UI/UX. I like the fact that the add- content bar between blocks doesn't interfere with the block spacing (With Sir Trevor the add content bar adds height between blocks), and the grouping of blocks in the add menu of Checkthis is going to work better for a larger number of block types than the Sir Trevor horizontal list.

The drag-and-drop repositioning is also much slicker with Checkthis, as you get to see the other blocks shuffle around the one you're moving, rather than partially so with a copy of the block.

Sir Trevor is a good start though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks like a great editor that is simple enough for your average user to understand. It's only problem seems to be it's "IE 10+" requirement. I understand not supporting 6 and 7, fine, not supporting 8, okay that's Windows XP users, they are dying off, fine, but not supporting 9?

That being said I'll probably still use this somewhere and just deal with the support calls or try to get it to support 9 somehow, great work!.

<comment><USER18> Well, theoretically IE9 users should all be automatically upgraded to IE10 anyway, so IE9 has less market share than IE8 at the moment (see [http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qpri...](http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is awesome! We've got plans at Blue Bay Travel, to completely rewrite our main sales sites, Caribbean Warehouse and Tropical Warehouse to use a block layout. Now that we're growing, we intend to keep the design limited but feel like content is always dynamic.

This is going to become a big part for us next year when we hopefully start the rewrite.

Nicely done! Plus, everyone is excited to use it because we all adore Sir Trevor!

</comment><comment><USER20> Hmmm... This kind of editing is great for trivial examples or when inputting text through tablet/phone and it beats WYSIWYG editors hands down, but for any serious work I still prefer WYMeditor: [http://www.wymeditor.org/](http://www.wymeditor.org/) (don't be fooled by apparent inactivity - they just don't update the page very often).

<comment><USER21> I like the concept on the homepage, but the demo doesn't work in latest Chrome (or at least the demo page is blank) even though they say Chrome is supported.

Doesn't make a strong first impression..

<comment><USER22> [http://files.wymeditor.org/wymeditor-1.0.0b2/examples/](http://files.wymeditor.org/wymeditor-1.0.0b2/examples/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We use redactor ([http://imperavi.com/redactor/](http://imperavi.com/redactor/)) for editing in the browser. It's pretty awesome, I find it better than Trevor.

I like the look of Pen ([http://sofish.github.io/pen/](http://sofish.github.io/pen/)) though

</comment><comment><USER24> Pen is also a very nice, unobtrusive alternative: [http://sofish.github.io/pen/](http://sofish.github.io/pen/)

If you use Rails, also have a look at the Gem I just published for it: [https://github.com/neowork/pen](https://github.com/neowork/pen)

</comment><comment><USER10> Orders of magnitude better than any other editor; great API and (obviously) made by a great team. We're going to be using it for everything we make at @makeshift from now on :)

</comment><comment><USER25> This looks nice. I really like the paragraph rearrangement.

I kinda wish there was a paragraph split operator; dupe the paragraph and you delete some (different) text from each.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like it heavily inspired by medium.com editor.

Off topic: Does anyone knows if there is comment system like medium have (individual comments for each paragraph)?

<comment><USER4> [http://hypercomments.com](http://hypercomments.com) provides comments on any text fragment.

<comment><USER27> Wow that is pretty cool, though it would be a bit annoying to have you website copy peppered with footnote indicators each time someone comments...

It kind of reminds me of the commenting system that was used for the GPLv3 draft: [http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-2.html](http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-2.html) , for which the source code is here: [https://gitorious.org/stet](https://gitorious.org/stet)

The use case I am thinking about is crowdsourcing typo corrections --- while reading some text you see a type, click click and you submit a typo-fix to the author. Such a tool would vastly improve the quality of English out there on the interwebs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is awesome. I've been sketching and thinking about such an approach to editing for months now — it would be perfect for one of my products. Not only have you validated that this "block" concept makes sense to other people, you've also given me a head start on the code. Many thanks, and I look forward to using (and contributing to) the project!

</comment><comment><USER29> Normally the test I make with those WYSIWYG editors is to "select all", cut and copy a few times... it always messes them up! Does this pass that test? :) (StackOverflow still uses a plain text editor with separate preview, right?)

Beautiful demo BTW, totally sold it to me. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER30> Holy wow, I really like it. It has the potential to be really diverse and huge, I mean, a block can essentially be anything. You could replace entire CMS with this. It's not often that something can say "the future of..." and mean it, but I feel like this can.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a quite interesting, it also displays the native Bold/Italic/Underline formatting in Safari on iOS when you select text which I don't think I've ever seen before on a webpage. Is that just part and part of having something contenteditable?

<comment><USER32> Yeah. With contenteditable you can pretty much do anything natively in real- time .

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Unlike concrete5 this actually gives out markdown so there's less worry about keeping control of weird/wasteful html. I like it uses the medium like editor since its less clutterful & Its exactly what I was looking for!

</comment><comment><USER34> Beautiful piece of software! Makes writing (yet another) blogging system pretty easy. This is where WordPress is headed to anyway.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is great. I am going to try it with angularjs. is there any existing example/wrapper for angularjs integration?

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice! Any chance jQuery can be removed as a dependency? Also, it would be nice to have the image block added to the demo.

<comment><USER37> It does say you can use Zepto instead. Would that do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Looks just like the editor in Concrete5..

<comment><USER39> Concrete5 has the block model for sure, but I believe the editor is standard TinyMCE. Sir Trevor seems to take this to the next level, with the ability to configure a block for context specific editing. This would be a nice enhancement to Concrete5, or perhaps a new add-on.

One improvement to Sir Tevor would be to provide drag-and-drop ordering, which Concrete5 has today.

<comment><USER16> It has it, it's just not as slick as it could be. In Sir Tev, you're moving a copy of the object, whereas moving the actual object would be cleaner, and more obvious. At the moment it looks more like when you accidentally grab an image and move it (for it to then snap back into place) in some browsers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I loved that Text typing effect on the Homepage.

Can anyone share more details on that? It can be cool for pitches.

</comment><comment><USER41> An editor where I can use cmd-B, cmd-I rather than having to write ASCII markup. I like it.

</comment><comment><USER42> I am usually finicky with content editors, but this one is very cool.

</comment><comment><USER43> Can you do headings with Sir Trevor? If so, I didn't find a way.

<comment><USER44> Yes: [https://github.com/madebymany/sir-trevor- blocks](https://github.com/madebymany/sir-trevor-blocks)

<comment><USER43> That's lovely. The DSL for defining custom blocks seems unnecessarily verbose, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It looks very good, but it does need an awful lot more features.

<comment><USER46> We're happy to accept pull requests!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Kinda reminds me of the Squarespace editor.

</comment><comment><USER48> Umm not sure how this beats sceditor tbh

</comment><comment><USER49> Reminds me of Storify. :)

</comment><comment><USER50> it's a good start. but it's not anything more than that.

so i guess you followed the "release early" advice well...

-bowerbird

<comment><USER51> I'm actually using it.. It's reall good if you can use it and it's stable..

Had a little problem with one of the dependencies though (removed a line from the source of underscore.js to get it to work, everything else just works fine)</comment></comment>


Bollywood vs. Bin Laden - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/08/bollywood-vs-bin-laden

<comment><USER2> This article sounds nice, but I'm not exactly convinced. Here comes some anecdata... TL/DR I think economic considerations like education, healthcare and income have more to do with uptake of militant Islamism than movies.

You live in a village in Pakistan, working fields for more or less a feudal landlord. Work is hard, long and for relatively little pay. You can't read or write, so have little prospects for a career change apart from other forms of manual labour. You have to support your own family, along with any elderly or sick relatives. In most cases you probably blow some of your wage on drink/gambling.

Once in a while a group comes through your village. They offer free food (a bit like a soup kitchen), spiritual guidance, and in some cases community health services. If you sign up for membership they promise to put your sons through school and pay for healthcare of any ageing/poorly relatives. If you're in a lot of debt or in any other sort of trouble, they promise to handle these things for you if you commit to them. They call themselves the Pakistani Taliban.

<comment><USER3> For someone who appears to have some insight , I am surprised you are mixing up your "terrorists". There is a fundamental diference between a group like the Taliban whose primary focus appears to be "taking their country back" , and characters like Osama who have delusions about being holy warriors in some imaginary battle with the west.

<comment><USER4> Note: there's two semi-distinct groups, the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghanistan Taliban. A Pakistani farmer-serf is unlikely to agree with the Taliban on spiritual matters: most rural Pakistanis are Sufists, they worship local saints. The Taliban are hard-line Wahhabi fundamentalists, they consider Sufists to be idol-worshipers. A cultural revolution, like the ones in Afghanistan and Iran, is unlikely in Pakistan.

The Pakistan Taliban has a pretty good reputation in the Pashtun regions. ("Taliban" is a pashtun word) One of the more popular proposed reforms is Sharia law.

Sharia has an appeal that's difficult to understand in the West. Pakistan's official court system is deeply, deeply compromised. The police are hopelessly corrupt. Cases take many years to resolve, and victory goes to the person who paid out the most in bribes.

You can use the parallel legal "system", _jirga_ tribal law. Jirga is less "legal system" and more "binding arbitration". It evolved to end blood feuds by negotiating settlements between tribes, and as such, can be blindingly unfair.

Compared to these two equally terrible alternatives, Sharia looks pretty good. In fact, Muhammed invented it back in ~600CE precisely to stamp out customary law. Compared to jirga, it's positively _progressive_ , esp. in regards to women. (Which makes sense, it's about a thousand years newer than tribal law) (Many interpretations of Sharia allow women to own property, for instance; and Islamic judges typically don't settle blood feuds by trading women)

EDIT: Ha ha, remembered the wrong date.

<comment><USER5> Muhammad died in 632.

<comment><USER4> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know how true this is though. It might work in Pakistan, but doesn't seem like it would in the Middle East. For example, the article says that there's a lot of interest in Bollywood in Dubai, but that's because 70% of the population is South Asian[0].

And from another article[1], which has a great analysis of hard vs. soft power and how Bollywood's true influence on its neighbors is actually nonexistent:

> The immense popularity of Bollywood in Pakistan and Afghanistan, for > example, has not turned Pakistan into a pro-Indian country, nor does it > prevent Afghans (including the educated elite) from spitting on the floor > whenever a Hindu idol is shown on TV. The fact is that the Indian > entertainment industry has virtually no ability to influence the paradigm of > its viewers, and can only bombard them with superficial trash.

0: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Dubai>

1: [http://defenceforumindia.com/future-indian-power-hard-vs- sof...](http://defenceforumindia.com/future-indian-power-hard-vs-soft-491)

<comment><USER7> That sort of misses the point though. The movies aren't going to make anyone love their enemies, but they can definitely subvert hardline values.

The idea that they're superficial trash is almost a description of why they work.

<comment><USER6> The whole point of that article I linked _is_ that things like hardline Islamism _can't_ be combated through the use of movies. From that same article:

> Pakistan's ideology is based on Islamic 'nationalism' where it views itself > as part of a greater 'Ummah', but is certainly not recognized by the members > of the 'Ummah' as its leader. _In other words, Pakistan does not have native > ownership over its own ideology_ , which inevitably leads to Pakistan > associating itself with other, more influential members of the 'Ummah' like > Saudi Arabia and Iran, at the obvious expense of its own subcontinental > origins.

Neither Pakistan nor India wield a significant influence in the Islamic world - that power belongs to the aforementioned Saudi Arabia and Iran. No matter what may or may not happen in Bollywood, its influence in Pakistan/Afghanistan/etc. will always be overshadowed by Saudi & Persian mullahs. The reason why mullahs from those countries have the sort of transnational power they do is because of the unifying nature of Islam, across ethnic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.

But the further west you go from India, the more the "influence" of Bollywood declines (and it is quite rapid). Regardless of whether the top Bollywood actors are Muslim, India itself is almost 80% Hindu, and that will _never_ be forgotten by those in the Middle East watching Bollywood movies.

Although to those of us in the West, it may be easy to lump India and the Middle East into the same "cultural" category, that couldn't be further from the truth. Shared "conservative" values only go so far, and their respective histories are quite different.

<comment><USER7> The article you linked merely rejects the potential of pop culture to be soft power, and it does so out of hand. Yes, once it rejects the premise, it finds the premise holds no power.

The whole point of soft power isn't to take on cultural change head on. The meaning of subvert isn't to force change. It's to effect a gradual change, which will be seen over the course of a couple of generations.

Hollywood has immense cultural power over western nations; it can, and definitely has, changed attitudes on a number of topics over just a few generations.

The OP makes some good points that current western media depicts situations too far from the current core islamic nations to carry much weight. The world depicted has to be recognizable, and I'm sure Sex And The City seems completely alien to Karachi (hell, it's still semi-alien to Des Moines). So Hollywood isn't going to carry a lot of weight there.

But the world of Bollywood films are not wholly alien to Pakistan. It doesn't matter if they consciously resist the messages because India is a Hindu nation. That's the whole point of soft power. It works anyway.

Think about this question- did the Mullahs and Imams in faraway lands approve Pakistan opening up to Indian film imports?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure about Bollywood, but I believe Cricket could make a bigger impact on the youth in the region. Cricketers have gained equal celebrity status (or even more) to Bollywood stars and unlike, bollywood it's a dream they can attain themselves.

Especially, in Afganistan the game is spreading fast. Recently, they got to play their first international cricket match against Australia in Sharjah[1]. Also, Afgan team will take part in this year's T20 Cricket World Cup, which is starting next week.

I grew up in Sri Lanka, where there was a 30 year old gruesome war. I know how cricket played a major role in consoling the nation in troubled times and helped people to bond together irrespective of their races. Muttiah Muralitharan, who was one of the best bowlers the game has ever seen, was a Tamil himself. His success became a big influence for kids like myself, to see there's a bigger world outside that you can conquer[2].

[1] - <http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/571947.html>

[2] - <http://laktek.com/2010/07/23/best-role-model-of-our-time>

</comment><comment><USER9> The author provides an interesting perspective but his argument misses some subtleties. The prohibition of Indian movies in Pakistan has almost nothing to do with religious arguments. It is basic protectionism. That is, if the ban still even exists.

Pakistan's own film industry produces movies which have all the themes of romantic love, action, etc. The few times I've heard Pakistani opinion on their film industry, they are often embarrassed because these films are often considered vulgar, while many Indian movies are not (vulgar by local standards). Pakistani 'dramas' (basically soap operas broadcast on TV) are well liked (and well watched) by Pakistanis and those dramas not only have the usual romantic stories but too many of them are down right preachy regarding social issues.

As a child, I remember watching extremely popular dramas address fundamentalist violence. The previous generation even had several satirical commentaries on politics, extremism, corruption, lack of literacy, etc.. Shows like Uncle Sargam, 50/50, ...anga teRha were fantastic in their message and their content. If their production quality was brought up, they would surely rank very high among great television programs anywhere.

<comment><USER10> > ... but his argument misses ...

Shikha Dalmia. She.

<comment><USER11> Quick tip: most female Indian names end with an 'a' or an 'i'. Also male names that end with an 'a' usually have it silent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      Conventional wisdom holds that communism collapsed
      because America forced the Soviet Union into an
      economically ruinous arms race. But the truth is that
      the West won the Cold War less because it pointed
      nuclear missiles at the Soviet people—and more because
      it won their hearts and minds.

This article is just making up facts. Falling oil prices had more to do with the fall of the USSR than probably any other factor.

<comment> guard-of-terra Falling oil prices made the giant on feet of clay fall. But how it got feet of clay in the first place?

First, it failed to be self-sufficient. USSR failed to make an independent economic ecosystem, it had to export oil and import numerous things it could not make inside (nor buy from other "communist" countries).

But second, communism failed to deliver the quality of life that first world boasted. Quality of life which of course included rock music, movies with violence and sex, and freedom of expression, but also good clothing, abundant tasty food and friendly service sector.

(I think that importance of Beatles is greatly exaggerated in the article, but I was born in 85 so I'm no expert on the exacts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Soft Power at it's best. Indians excel at inventing weapons of least destruction by packaging them into a harmless psychedelic wrapper of nonsense and escapism. Say what you may, but Indian Cinema's song and dance routines are a balm for a billion souls.

Song, Love,Dance & Beautiful fields. You can't make this shit up: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o060YhF4rHs>

<comment><USER14> Note the Cow in the Song!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article is pretty much confused drivel with no clear substantiating data. My observations are that India is unable to control the growing fundamentalist Islamic element within its population. Recent riots and pogroms against native North-Eastern Indians (they have a significant East Asian component to their appearance) by Islamic groups is a clear marker of rapidly increasing instability. India as a state is one of those mixed stable-chaos types that is teetering on the brink of disaster. A mafia driven monarchy (Antonina Malno aka Sonia Gandhi) has effectively injected massive corruption into India's state bureaucracy and destroyed the improvements/gains made in the 1990s by civil society types. It is a mess. I would not invest any hope in India unless there's some massive change in their politics.

<comment><USER16> Huh?

While you do use words that are technically correct they stand on the far edge of understanding or reflecting the underlying ground realities.

First your take on the Recent riot and pogroms in NE/Manipur/Assam and the rest of the seven sisters seems to indicate that Islamic fundamentalists are the chief culprits.

Yes it is Islamic adherents who are involved. But their presence is not because of religion but because they are illegal refugees/immigrants from Bangladesh who are encroaching and settling in the traditional lands of the indigenous tribes and Indians who live in those areas.

But this is a situation that has been building up for years, and has at its core a socio-economic cause and the religious coherence of the encroachers is a secondary thing.

I could go on about how the Mumbai riots and later the exodus but that is a separate point.

Secondly - Saying that Sonia Gandhi "has effectively injected massive corruption in India's state bureaucracy" is to take the latest head of state and blame her for the creation of a beast that reared its head first in the time of Indira Gandhi in the 1960s (License Raj)

Saying that it is a mafia driven monarchy further simplifies the situation and ignores the effects of the many corrupt parties and their respective leaders in the coalition government.

If anything India was MORE corrupt in the 1990s just prior to the reforms and a short while after.

It was only with the dismantling of power centers and places for the corrupt to seek rents that a lot of the old guard found themselves shunted out.

If anything I would hold Sonia and Congress responsible for being gutless and focusing on consolidating their power base.

But most of all I would single out the swing coalition partners from Bengal above all.

The Communist party that supported the Govt in the first few years constantly and consistently stymied each and every forward thinking disinvestment and reform oriented bill.

Then came Mamta Bannerjee and her equally if not more anachronistic ideas. IIRC she managed to get rid of the TATA Nano plant which would have created large amounts of employment in her home state. Creating a text book lose-lose situation.

I hold these people far more accountable as they crushed a huge amount of political capital and mired the country down into survival and further casteist politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I might get downvoted but i have to say something here. Most pakistanis do like bollywood movies, but still there are a growing many who resent them. Bollywood movies ( apart from 1 director/actor) are extremely clichéd and many a times just very poor remakes of English movies.

This rant aside i would actually say that cricket diplomacy has more power than this film diplomacy,but that too is minuscule compared to the pakistani nationalism.

Pakistanis are very defence forces loving people, heck i was amazed at people going up to their roofs and saluting a F 16 flying over their heads. (Also Pakistanis have a bloated sense of self importance.)

</comment><comment><USER14> The article is only feel good. The fact is the Indian film industry or rather the Hindi Film industry is believed to be in a grasp of Mafia in Pakistan. May be not entirely but there is some truth to it.

The reason why America is not able to defeat Islam is because it has not engaged Islam at an ideological level. Americans or the entire west has kind of dug it's head into some hole on this issue. Consider the brutal and inhuman laws in Saudi Arabia (For example: [http://www.niticentral.com/2012/08/womens- eyes-distract-so-b...](http://www.niticentral.com/2012/08/womens-eyes- distract-so-banish-them.html)) . USA wouldnt talk against them. The political class will always say that "Islam is religion of peace" it is only few distracted human beings who are waging the war in the name of Islam.

That stand is fallacious. People are born equal. A Hindu is as likely to commit a crime as Muslim and vice versa. However the ideologies they follow have some behavioral consequences for it's believers. Tibetians in China have gone through a lot of troubles. They are tortured in their own land, they are dirt poor, less educated and disconnected from rest of the world. Still, we dont see a Tibetan monk blowing up a bus or a building. That is because they follow Buddhism which believes that bringing harm to a sentient being is incorrect. That religion is truly a religion of peace. On the other hand believers in Islam believe that they are superior to everyone else and they own the world. So they very easily justify killing the Kafirs/Unbelievers.

The west has not gauged the nuisance value of Islam. It has not engaged it at an ideological level and that is why they are losing to Islam.

</comment><comment><USER18> That's very interesting. I had never heard about the magnitude of the impact of Western culture in the soviet bloc, but it makes a lot of intuitive sense.

</comment><comment><USER19> > _Beatles and Rock n' Roll helped bring down the Kremlin_

Hahahaha... He forgot Tom and Jerry and Freddy Krueger.

</comment><comment><USER20> The Beatles was the reason for the breakdown of the soviet union -- this Dalmia guy could come up with more convincing theory.

Well, most indian people like to talk about their Bollywood crap, no wonder why this Dalmia guy is also a fan. But "Beatles brought down communism, so will bollywood do to Islamists"

oh come on, give me a break.

</comment><comment><USER21> As pop culture becomes more decadent in North America, Christian fundamentalism seems to have grown. So not sure if pop decadence leads to moderation.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Christian fundamentalism seems to have grown._

Do you have evidence for that? The polling data I have seen suggest that that is NOT how self-reported religious preference in the United States is trending. The United States Census does not keep official statistics on religious affiliation in the United States (thank God), but various private organizations do sample surveys on the issue from time to time.

<http://religions.pewforum.org/reports>

[http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2012-07-19/no- re...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2012-07-19/no-religion- affiliation/56344976/1)

"Barry Kosmin, co-author of three American Religious Identification Surveys, theorizes why None has become the 'default category.' He says, 'Young people are resistant to the authority of institutional religion, older people are turned off by the politicization of religion, and people are simply less into theology than ever before.'"

<http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx>

[http://www.barna.org/faith-spirituality/15-christianity- is-n...](http://www.barna.org/faith-spirituality/15-christianity-is-no-longer- americans-default-faith)

<comment><USER22> Mathematically it is simple for a bell curve centered on deists to split into a bimodal distribution of atheists and Christian fundamentalists.

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but why bimodal? I find a lot of my friends who claim to be Christian on further questioning are in fact "Deists in disguise".

<comment><USER22> I don't know. Culture war forcing people to choose sides instead of coasting along in a society where no one really cares?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wait, isn't outside cultural influences what provoked Islam into radicalizing?

<comment><USER24> No. They've been doing that since they were founded.

Then again, so were the Christians. And the Buddhists. And the Hindus.

Then again, I cannot seem to find any sources of recent (last 1000 years) Jewish vs other violence. They seem to be picked on more than doing picking.

<comment> el-mapache I'm sorry, but do you mean the violent behaviour that didn't cause the bombing of the King David hotel in Jerusalem? Or the persistent treatment of the Palestinians as non-entities in a country in which they account for some 20 percent of the population? Or perhaps you're refering to the hawkish attitude taken towards Iran and syria? Neither of those countries support anything close to democracy, but it's a farce and a damn shame to pretend that the religious extremists in Israel are anything but.

<comment><USER24> I wasn't being clear in what I was thinking of.

I was referring to religions that go to war vs another for religious reasons. Crusades: Christian vs Islam, for example.

Jerusalem is different, that being a country with displacement/murder of people at its creation. Not that I agree with any sort of treatment towards families killed or kicked out on the founding.

After having read a bit about the bombing of the King David Hotel, well, I guess there are some radical elements there too. Pity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When we are talk about the need for western enlightenment values to triumph over fundamentalism, this is what it means, not Brzynsky and Kissinger and Cheney's War on Non-Americans.

</comment><comment><USER25> Question: should links to reason.com, instead of just saying (reason.com) have something like WARNING: Objectivism for people who forget that this site is by people who think free markets still work as a concept. I haven't read this link. If it's taking a pro-intervention stance, I'm ok with that, but many aren't.

<comment><USER7> If people can't read something and make up their own mind about it, there's nothing we can do to help them.</comment></comment>


A.I. will have implications for education, welfare and geopolitics (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/06/25/re-educating-rita <comment><USER2> The post talks a lot about how MOOCs can be sufficient education for AI/data science; I disagree with that approach since although MOOCs can teach people the concepts, they don't teach people the soft skills behind the tech, which is much harder and a major bottleneck to using it practically (full blog post on the subject: [https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science- protips/](https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science-protips/))

That's not even considering getting _employment_ in a relevant position, which is much harder than it was in 2016 due to increased competition, and the requirement for Masters/PhD nowadays ([https://towardsdatascience.com/the- economics-of-getting-hire...](https://towardsdatascience.com/the-economics-of- getting-hired-as-a-data-scientist-e3882933b43c)).

<comment><USER3> What kind of "soft skills" do you mean? Typically when I hear "soft skills" I think "interpersonal communication, leadership, organization ability" type things.

<comment><USER2> That's a part of it, which doesn't come up in MOOCs at all (specifically, collaboration in a corporate environment within the software development lifecycle, and negotiating with project stakeholders about specs, requirements, and results).

<comment><USER3> I also didn't learn anything about that in school, but I did from my coding bootcamp, so if anything I think that is a general criticism of the education system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started my career as a 28 year old college dropout doing data entry for a small surf and skate ecommerce company in 2012. I never finished any of the MOOC courses I started, but their availability helped me get my first internship, which has lead to me being a successful backend engineer in SF. I especially credit the original Coursera database class and Udacity's web development in python.

</comment><comment><USER5> Premature deindustrialization might not necessarily be a bad thing. "Premature" is a judgement. Why is putting fossil carbons buried deep down the earth for millions of years up in the air in a matter of decades a "mature" anything?

Developing countries directly went to cell phones without going via landlines. There could be another way. There should be another way. That is if we are to sustain 10 billion people to the same standard of life as the West without the fossil fuel disadvantage.

</comment><comment><USER6> The "premature deindustrialisation" phenomenon was the most interesting/novel part of this article. The rest is the normal AI/MOOC/software-eating- everything hand-wringing.

However, somewhat ironically, the actual paper that's cited [1] seems to disagree with the author's characterization:

 _> In sum, while technological progress is no doubt a large part of the story behind employment deindustrialization in the advanced countries, in the developing countries trade and globalization likely played a comparatively bigger role._

[1] [http://www.nber.org/papers/w20935](http://www.nber.org/papers/w20935)

</comment><comment><USER7> For welfare ? Good.

It'd be hard to fuck it up as badly as humans have. And God forbid, AIs will do whatever improves outcomes.

Humans employed in welfare, even in the police have been known to relish in the power the law gives them, as it does in many cases, and use it not even for personal empowerment, but for showing off to girls, for taking petty revenge, and worse.

<comment><USER8> They're not talking about using AI to allocate welfare, they're talking about basic income.

Using AI to allocate things is dangerous IMO, mostly because AI will use past decision-making as training data, and the training data was created by those power-mad human administrators with all their implicit and explicit biases.

<comment><USER7> So it'll start as bad as humans, and improve. It's got my vote.

<comment><USER8> Improve, or get stuck in a local maximum and make the situation worse permanently.

At least with human decision making, there is a paper trail and a means of legal recourse. AI provides neither.

<comment><USER7> Euhm just the opposite. Human paper trails, especially by government employees .. I've found them lacking or outright stupid/useless/falsified. That makes legal recourse dubious.

With AI decisions paper trails will be perfect and it won't have any emotions, before or after getting sued, about the matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> crooked-v Don't forget about the implications for paperclips.

<comment><USER9> Context (I assume):

[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)

<comment> crooked-v There's also a game about the subject.

[http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/](http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/)

Other articles that help really grok the general idea:

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HFyWNBnDNEDsDNLrZ/the- true-p...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HFyWNBnDNEDsDNLrZ/the-true- prisoner-s-dilemma)

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mMBTPTjRbsrqbSkZE/sorting- pe...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mMBTPTjRbsrqbSkZE/sorting-pebbles-into- correct-heaps)

<comment><USER10> IMO Universal Paperclips is one of the the best clicker games, even without the AI safety elements, because it has an end that is reachable in a reasonable amount of time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ballmer Talks at Stanford, Says Now is the Time for Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ballmer_talks_at_stanford_says_now_is_the_time_for.php <comment><USER2> I've seen steveb speak quite a few times at both internal and external events covering a variety of topics. My opinion of him is quite a roller coaster ride. Sometimes he fills me with inspiration and renews my confidence, other times, like this one, I don't find anything he has to say very compelling or insightful. I think that there is something endearing about him, which makes it hard to accurately evaluate his performance.

<comment><USER3> Depends on which ghostwriter is hired/fired. I would like you to cite an example of an inspiring speech from steveb, which instils confidence. Assuming you are not referring to the dancing monkey performance. I think he just felt he had to do it, like the frontmen of AAPL and GOOG.

<comment><USER2> Speak to anyone who has attended a Microsoft company meeting. Steveb is definately the main event.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What connection does Steve Ballmer have to entrepreneurs?

<comment><USER3> maybe it is selling stuff:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk>

You can sell shit and get thanks

That's what I learned from the Yanks

\-- The American Dream Lyrics

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ballmer is the most irrelevant and the least influential CEO in the history of modern corporatocracy.

In other words, a clown.

And before all shills come to tell me how many gazillions he has, respect can not be bought. Period.</comment>


U.S. Beer Consumption Has Declined for Six-Consecutive Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketcrumbs.com/post/u-s-beer-consumption-has-declined-for-six-consecutive-years <comment><USER2> Good. Drinking, whether it's "craft" beer or tallboys of bottom-shelf gutrot, is unequivocally a disease.

Hackers, do yourselves a favor and drink a glass of water instead of cracking open another cold one.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We have finally reached peak craft beer, I've been wondering when this was going to finally hit.</comment>


Pmarca: OK, you're right, it IS a bubble - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/ok-youre-right-.html <comment><USER2> Bite your tongue. Folks with far less to show are regularly promoted to sainthood here.

Marc climbed up from grad student to monster IPO, rode out huge corporate stuff at Netscape/AOL, left and started another company, raised huge money, built a huge business during the dot-com winter, and piloted the ship home through a dizzy chain of IPO/merger/acquisition. He is now blogging the best stuff about entrepreneuring you can read anywhere on the net right now.

You should listen to this guy...

<comment><USER3> You have to also realize nowadays he's a VC and runs Ning. I believe, like Mark Cuban's blog, his first interest isn't to disseminate insights, but to server his business interests.

<comment><USER4> Is Marc A. actually a VC? I think he's been an angel investor in a few startups, but that's not equivalent to being a VC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to say that I agree with Marc.

The problem with the first bubble wasn't caused by non-profitable companies. It was caused by hubris over stock prices. The reason why so many people lost their shirts in the first bubble was because millions of Joe Averages took out cash advances or cashed out home equity to buy Internet stocks. There was a lot of hubris around the NASDAQ and average investors jumped in on the action en masse. I personally knew at least 4-5 people who had left their jobs to become day-traders.

I worked with a Med student who had maxed out 8-10 credit cards, bought high tech stocks with them, and then bought a collection of motorcycles with his stock earnings. When the bubble popped, he was left with a bunch of loans on expensive motorcycles, $100,000 in credit card debt and a great position on worthless Pets.com stock.

Sarb-Ox has really clamped down on the number of IPO's that are occuring now. So, even though there might be hubris around web apps right now, the average investor has no way of pumping money into those businesses, and that's a good thing.

What start-ups are creating are several products in tandem: The first is software that actually does stuff. The second is a community of users that develop and grow around that software product. The third is a small tight-knit group of people who have proven their capacity to produce.

Big Co is interested in all three of those things. And Big Co has proven repeatedly that they are willing to shell out a bunch of cash to aquire the software, the community or the people. Even if the startup isn't profitable, the software, community and people are still very valuable to companies that need those things.

What start-ups aren't creating this time around is IPO fever where the stock price gets ramped up while the founders and employees cash out. This is what's going to prevent the next big bubble from forming around web apps for quite a while this time around. The fundamentals are much better this time around.

<comment><USER6> And I have to say that I disagree.

The Web 1.0 bubble wasn't based on the way in which people found the money to buy these stocks or the hubris in the expectation that these stocks would always go up. It's just about fundamentals. When you buy a stock, you are buying how much the company earns today and adjust that for how much it could earn, say, ten years from now.

People bought Pets.com either with the naive expectation that it would earn billions in the future or with the expectation other people would think so. There was no evidence, just lots of hope and the eternal wish to get rich.

So you and Marc are telling me that Facebook is really worth $10 billion. You two are saying that that's a realistic expectation based on an objective evaluation and anyone who doesn't agree should be ridiculed. Ah... there's the hint. Ridicule is a cover for fear. Personally, I don't need to hide. I have the fundamentals -- and time -- on my side.

<comment><USER7> I think iamelgringo's point is that it doesn't matter if Facebook is really worth $10 billion or not, because no one's actually paying that much; and the entities paying some percentage of those valuations are insulated from the effects of a crash.

The term "bubble" scares people because of events such as those that happened in 2000-2001. It's an imprecise term because of that. If you mean "inflated valuations" we might be in a bubble, if you mean "reckless speculation by average consumers" then we're probably not.

If Facebook turns out to be a dud before they ever have an IPO, who are the big losers? A few hundred employees, and some professional investors. Microsoft is still plenty profitable without Facebook, and VCs will bounce back or be replaced. It'll indirectly affect many others, but the typical portfolio of a typical working American will remain relatively stable.

Conversely, if 500,000 average consumers average $20,000 invested in Facebook and it suddenly goes bankrupt, that's a huge problem. It causes a massive disruption in their lives, and it will have a much more noticeable indirect effect on everyone else. (eg nobody can afford to buy Christmas presents this year)

<comment><USER5> I concur.

It's a free market, and Facebook's valuation is whatever someone is willing to pay for a piece of Facebook. If Big Co purchases a piece of Facebook for $500 million, then someone at Big Co made a guess that either the software, the community or the people were worth that much.

Mind you, _I_ don't think that Facebook has a 10 billion dollar valuation, but that's a moot point, I don't have the $500 million to purchase those shares.

My hunch on the Facebook deal, though is that Microsoft is trying to beat Google to the punch and wants to provide search services to Facebook. The software, community or people might not be worth that much to them, but I'm sure that keeping Google out of Facebook probably is worth $500 million to them.

What's the worst case scenario for Microsoft? Google doesn't get Facebook's search, Facebook goes _poof_ in a couple of years and Microsoft is out $500 million. No big deal. Microsoft's cash reserves are well over $25 billion anyway. They have to spend it on something. Might as well spite Google with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is a mess. The strategy here seems to be "setup complete straw men for all of the arguments you don't like, then dispense with them not by making counter arguments but by showing the (straw man, distorted) arguments to be silly." Plus it's hard to read.

<comment><USER9> It seems to me that the strategy was to loosen some panties and inspire some laughter. I enjoyed the fruits of both efforts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gotta love this: "laid-getting wankers". :)

</comment><comment><USER11> The Colbert maneuver. Nicely done.

</comment><comment><USER12> Eh.

Say all you want, no sustainable revenue means no business, sooner or later.

</comment><comment><USER13> Has there ever been an example of something incredibly popular that hasn't made money eventually? The best I can think of is napster, and their issues were legal.

</comment><comment><USER14> An Alien has taken over Pmarca's blog , he's had some strange posts in the last few days.

<comment><AUTHOR> So THAT explains that Bionic Woman post!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm, most amusing, this community has a blind spot.

</comment><comment><USER16> i don't think sarcasm is a good way to make any point, and i'm surprised to see the otherwise unflappable marca using such a tactic.

<comment><USER17> I agree. I felt this was one of the weaker posts on a great blog.

The problem with sarcasm is that it allows the writer to frame the opposition in exaggerated, silly terms. For instance, the post derides people who claim VC's are "All stupid, and unnecessary to boot".

Nobody would half a brain would make that claim. Of course capital will still matter, in many cases. But there is still an interesting emerging argument that the cost of server space and programming tools have dropped to the point where bootstrapping has become a real option.

I'd love to see a writer as good and experienced as Marc give me his take on this new trend. Is it a good idea? A bad idea? When would you want to do one rather than the other? This is all lost in the sarcasm format.

But I agree with the other posters here who have pointed out that Marc is just having a little fun taking the piss out of the naysayers. Nothing really wrong with that. I enjoyed the post, but I hope he gets back to his more insightful style in his next post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> pmarca on crack...</comment>


The Postal Service Is Breaking Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/society/post-office-coronavirus/ <comment><USER2> I am surprised some mail isn't heated, irradiated, or bathed in UV by now. Even in normal times, it might cut down on sick leave.</comment>


Welcome to Raspberry Pi Model B+ chat server - <AUTHOR> http://raspchat.ngrok.io/static/welcome.html <comment><USER2> How many simultaneous users does it support?</comment>


In a small town in Washington state, pride and shame over atomic legacy - <AUTHOR> http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-washingtons-atomic-legacy.html <comment><USER2> I'm sure there could be hours of heated debate over this, but every time a "mascot" issue like this pops up I wonder why they don't just frame it differently:

1) Does the mascot accurately represent the current values of the community, or 2) can a different mascot represent those values better?

Teams, schools, even companies will routinely rotate out their mascots/logos/brands/slogans for something new, and they don't generate too much controversy. But when the status quo is deemed politically incorrect, people start to look at that potential change as an affront to their personal values, and their resistance to change can cause stagnation.

It's okay to be proud, and it's okay to remember. We don't have to erase or burn history, but we do have to recognize that the future belongs to the new generation, and they get to decide how they want to represent themselves to the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> During WWII the Puyallup fairgrounds used to be an internment camp[1].

Growing up in Puyallup, we were taught what had happened. WWII -- specifically Japanese internment -- is a big part of our history curriculum.

I think you have to find a balance. On one hand, creating the bomb that ended WWII was a _huge_ part of their lives and is a huge part of their history. I don't think you need to throw that away. But I don't think the bomb should be cheered for any reason, other than perhaps ending half of the bloodiest war we've (perhaps ever) seen.

This is something that, I think, they'll grow out of. You can only hold on to the vitriolic or blindly patriotic view of the bomb for so long, and not many of my generation hold the same beliefs that our parents and grandparents do (regarding the bomb). Sooner or later it'll just be another "thing" in the town -- a folksy sort of reference that reminds you of the 1940s -- but that's about it.

Anyway, very interesting article. Let's cleanup Hanford please.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> is there a mascot celebrating Dresden bombing? Or fire-bombing of Tokyo? There is not much difference, beside "efficiency", between those and Nagasaki/Hiroshima. Decades ago it seemed a meaningful strategic bombing operations. Today we understand that it was horrible war crimes (though committed because of not fully understanding of the degree of criminality of it than out of a pure evil will... but again, winners write the history ...). We've evolved (and, for example, the Miloshevich/Karadzhich were prosecuted as war criminals for atrocities much smaller in scale than the above mentioned, and nobody would imagine a mascot celebrating those mass killings even though strategically they are indistinguishable from the strategic bombings of civilian targets in the WWII), and taking down the symbols celebrating the crimes of the past looks natural as part of that evolution.

<comment><USER5> >is there a mascot celebrating Dresden bombing? Or fire-bombing of Tokyo? There is not much difference, beside "efficiency", between those and Nagasaki/Hiroshima. Decades ago it seemed a meaningful strategic bombing operations. Today we understand that it was horrible war crimes...

No. No, _we_ do not see it that way.

<comment><USER6> For the most part, America stands alone in seeing it that way. It is widely considered a war crime, albeit in a war that was replete with them.

<comment><USER5> So you assert. Even if true it's meaningless.

<comment><USER6> Well, it does have the meaning "it is widely considered a war crime", which is all I was asserting in the first place. I'm not really interested in a semantic argument with you, nor discussing the topic of whether Americans do or should give a fuck about their image internationally, nor even whether the term "war crime" makes any sense in the first place. The parent claimed "we understand that it was horrible war crimes" and unless you interpret "we" to mean "literally every single extant member of the human race", then the claim is accurate.

<comment><USER5> It's meaningless because if "widely considered a war crime" is the standard than it's more of a popularity contest than a crime. The whole concept of criminality relies on objective criteria in place at the time of the event. All the legal bases for that widely considering is based on treaties and fluffy documents rendered after the war.

It's also meaningless because the whole concept is flawed. Crimes do not occur above the sovereign nation state level. "War crimes" is a convenient excuse for the winner of a conflict to execute the leaders of the losing side. It's victor's justice.

<comment><USER6> Objective criteria which are established... how exactly if not by popularity contest? And if making the criteria _ex post facto_ also wins the popularity contest, then _ex post facto_ it is, regardless of whether that offends your sense of justice.

(It's not really _ex post facto_ anyway - you simply apply the existing (1945) standards for what was considered a war crime, and find that the bombings fit the bill [1]. That seems to me the best way to do it - what would you prefer? That no one had used an atomic bomb before, need not exclude the possibility of the first such use of one being a war crime.)

That said, I mostly agree with your take on war crimes in practice, if not in principle. But _if the allies had lost the war_ the bombings would have been considered a war crime by the victors, without a doubt. In that sense it is appropriate to call it a war crime. Again, it was a war crime in a war replete with them, and it was not the worst of them either: it was certainly no Holocaust, and I don't think the two bombings taken together even rise to the level of one Rape of Nanjing, either - but it was a war crime and yes, that is the popular opinion of it globally.

Try to keep in mind that I'm mainly defending the original statement "we understand that it was horrible war crimes". That is an accurate statement, even if you have grounds to think that people are wrong to see it that way.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Bombings_as_war_crimes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're a US citizen you can go on the free day-long Hanford facility bus tour. However you feel about the work they did there it's pretty interesting to see bits of the history.

[http://www.hanford.gov/publictours/](http://www.hanford.gov/publictours/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Anecdote time: my brother plays baseball for this school and my wife is from Hiroshima. I didn't realize what their mascot is until we visited this past Spring and attended a few games. I was more embarrassed than she was upset, mostly because she didn't care at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> Washington is fairly far from NY, but I wonder how these people commenting on how it is not distasteful would feel with a 9/11 mascot for a school team. Specially with bad puns about planes hitting buildings and some light-hearted representations of the tragedy.

You see, some people are proud of the 9/11 attacks, even if they did not got to participate in it directly. They may not use the world "liberal revisionist" for people they know who do not agree, but I'm pretty sure they will have some name to call them.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps some people can draw the distinction between a sneak attack on a civilian target by a group of fanatics, and a technology developed _during wartime_ to be used against a declared enemy, with the intent ending such conflict so their friends and family could return home.

Or maybe we're just fated to become the Hypersensitive, Hyperventilating States of America at this point.

<comment><USER8> I didn't see they celebrating the atom or the technology. The names, the symbols and the phrase all symbolize the bombardment itself. Of civilians, no less. Not that clear of a distinction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This mascot is just a bad one, and in more than one sense. After a quick look to the article, I'll swear to have read 'wall of fart' somewhere. Aesthetically is a bad design IMAO</comment>


Parse, Firebase and the comeback of Two-Tier - <AUTHOR> http://ksat.me/comeback-of-thick-clients/

<comment><USER2> Having done my time in "two tier" stacks, I would argue the biggest disadvantage they bring is challenges with testing. This could be unit, integration, or just manual acceptance testing.

Having to spin up a separate environment or mock EVERYTHING leads to testing friction which in turn leads to testing simply not being done. If you stop testing, it's hard to maintain a consistent level of quality with your software, especially as it grows and you bring on new developers.

That being said, I appreciate the turn-key ease of use with services like Parse. If they solve the local development/multi environment issue for testing, I'd be more apt to use something like it and avoid the administrative headache of maintaining a backend infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER3> "forget server code" comes at a price: tying yourself to a 3d-party proprietary user database for security. That will be an acceptable tradeoff only for some developers... but not the kind with a lot of money to spend. As they start worrying about revenue I predict that the Parse and Firebase of the world will have no choice but to allow execution of arbitrary server-side validation... so much for "forget server code".

</comment><comment><USER4> And Meteor and Simperium.

</comment><comment><USER5> `Now, Since old is the new new...`

I remember one of the old timers at my former company saying the exact same thing. Something along the lines that Facebook is the new Usenet.</comment>


8-bit style Steve Jobs with one element + CSS - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/berdejitendra/pen/gtjJy

<comment><AUTHOR> Note: I am not the author of this pen, but it's one of a series of really cool pens using box-shadow extensively to create "pixely" illustrations.</comment>


Show HN: A QEMU port for iOS that you can sideload - <AUTHOR> https://getutm.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> You might have seen the preview few months ago. I've ported QEMU to iOS complete with JIT support and it can run Windows XP, ArchLinux, etc pretty well on latest Apple hardware (no jailbreak needed!).

Since then we've added a console mode, suspend/resume, multitasking, a variety of input options including Magic Keyboard support and a whole lot more. It's finally stable enough for general use.

Sadly, with current Apple policies regarding code emulation, this will likely never be accepted into the App Store. That is why so many people are wishing for official sideloading support in future iOS releases. Until then, we are distributing UTM with [https://altstore.io/](https://altstore.io/), an unofficial sideloading solution for jailbroken and non-jailbroken devices alike. Please share your feedback!

<comment><USER2> I read your release months ago; thank you for sticking with this! Although it is not perfect (because of Apple!), it is much appreciated as experiment and to see what this could be like!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting! Not sure if I'd want to use a desktop UI on a tiny phone but could be neat on tablets. Then with the reports Apple might be dumping Intel and going with their own ARM based chips for Macs too, seems like could open up the door to still running x64 based operating systems like Windows or Linux where you your applications are still x64.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if you'd consider also creating a deb for Jailbreak users? There are alternate ways of installing IPAs on Jailbroken devices, but it's easier/cleaner to just install a deb in Cydia.</comment>


Porting Apache Mynewt OS to GigaDevice GD32 VF103 on RISC-V - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/porting-apache-mynewt-os-to-gigadevice-gd32-vf103-on-risc-v-4054a5922493 <comment><AUTHOR> RISC-V will be everywhere... Starting with GigaDevice GD32 VF103! Find out why I think this brand new microcontroller is important to the IoT Ecosystem... And its strange link to STM32 Blue Pill and Mynewt OS</comment>