The employment green card backlog tops 800k. A solution is elusive - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/the-employment-green-card-backlog-tops-800000-most-of-them-indian-a-solution-is-elusive/2019/12/17/55def1da-072f-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html <comment><USER2> Has anyone ever considered that maybe we should be preventing the backlog from growing that large in the first place?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I understood, a large reason for the backlog is the H1B visa abuse from Indian companies.</comment></comment>


The College of Lost Arts - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/02/the-college-of-lost-arts/385644/?utm_source=SFFB

<comment><USER2> It'll be interesting to see if the trend towards historic preservation (maybe supplemented by the "artisanal [x]" trend) really supports these traditional skilled-construction jobs long term. A major reason people have no longer been training in areas like traditional masonry or ironwork is that the jobs weren't there. There was a huge downturn in demand due to changes in construction methods, so for a period there was a large glut of highly trained people with very little work, making it unappealing to try to break into an already overcrowded market as an apprentice. As the older generation are now mostly retiring, and there's at least a small upswing in demand due to more of a shift towards renovation (vs. the tear-down/rebuild style that characterized American redevelopment of the 1950s-80s), these trades might be worth going into again. I think there are still some pretty large question marks on the demand side, though. There will always be _some_ demand for traditional building techniques, but how big and how steady a niche it will be requires some forecasting.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Trade school meets Bachelor's Degree.

I posted this because there have been a steady stream of student debt and other higher ed stories.

While I do see the value in providing this type of training/education, I'm not convinced we should be creating new entities to provide it.

It seems like there is an opportunity for local community colleges to expand their curriculum into this area.

<comment><USER3> What I've learned from one lobbying success is that the community college wants to hear from a broad swath of industry that the jobs will be there. In our case some of the larger companies actually committed to taking X amount of new graduates per year.</comment></comment>


A New Challenge to Einstein? (good discussion about that link posted yesterday) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/10/12/a-new-challenge-to-einstein/ <comment><USER2> Likelihood ratio not strong enough at this point. There's a reason why physicists don't go with the usual p-value of 0.05, and that's because, at that level, most of your results are coincidence. If you really take your science seriously, 0.0001 is a reasonable level.

Big kudos to the study authors for graphing the likelihoods in explicitly Bayesian terms, so that the above is fairly clearly spelled out. They've found something that's worthy of further investigation, just in case. But for now, I'd take bets at pretty heavy odds in favor of this not going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you look at the original paper Section I. Modeling deviations from GR, their equation 1 gives the metric they've decided to use for this paper. This equation contains 2 "Newtonian potentials describing temporal and spatial perturbations to the metric." In other words, the paper is about testing Newtonian parameters. They refer to this paper as the source of their equation 1:

Cosmological Perturbation Theory in the Synchronous and Conformal Newtonian Gauges by Ma and Bertschinger. <http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9506072> Again, it's about Newtonian parameters.</comment>


MegaData - <AUTHOR> http://bitworking.org/news/158/ETech-07-Summary-Part-2-MegaData <comment><AUTHOR> Joe Gregorio summary of ETech 07 themes ... lots of data,

\- distributed

\- joinless

\- de-normalised

\- no transactions

MegaData</comment>


Best resources to learn ARM assembly, linker scripts and startup codes? - <AUTHOR> Title says it all. Btw I am using STM32 MCUs if it helps. Any type of resource will help. Thank you <comment><AUTHOR> no one?</comment>


Microsoft Looking At Office For Linux In 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI5MzU

<comment><USER2> This is hilarious! I have two points to make:

1\. M$ has been trying to sabotage GNU/Linux for at least the past 20 years. "Secureboot" on Windows 8 OEM UEFI is just the most recent attempt.

2\. Why should I pay over $120/year ($10/month) for a subscription to an application suite that has all of its GOOD features replicated in LibreOffice, with a shitty UI and all that DRM on top of it?!

P.S. If you try to tell me that Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. have been working on "Secureboot" fixes, that's irrelevant. The fact that they had to come up with fixes in the first place is horrendous. And now when I buy new socket LGA 1155, 1156 or Xeon mobos, I have to ask if "Secureboot" is on it if it has UEFI BIOS.

<comment><USER3> I personally haven't found any WYSIWYG equation editors that are nearly as fast, easy to edit, and good looking at the built-in MathType/MS Word equation editor.

If anyone has suggestions for LO plug-ins or other free software, let me know.</comment></comment>


Solution to Minesweeper Number Glitch is to do a system restore - <AUTHOR> https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/minesweeper-number-glitch/ff528c98-9afe-465e-81f1-31c67416b856 <comment><USER2> (July 2009)</comment>


Dirty Percent - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_percent <comment><USER2> I used to be a big fan of Gruber, but I'm getting increasingly tired of his "defend Apple at all costs" mentality.

When Apple was the underdog, it all seemed to be about not what was possible, but what was fair, and what was right. Now it's a "Well, of course Apple would do that, wouldn't you?"

And he then punts on the biggest question of all:

 _What if Microsoft did this with Windows, and, say, tried to require Apple to pay them 30 percent for every purchase made through iTunes on Windows? To that, I say: good luck with that._

Not "well I'd certainly write a slam piece about it", not "well, that would definitely require competition regulators", not "that would be a dick move." Just "they couldn't do it anyway, so your hypotheticals mean nothing."

The way I put it (crassly) is "When you're Top Dog, you don't need to play like a bitch." Which is what Apple is doing, and honestly, they're turning me off from their products. And that's not about "Oh well, Apple likes to make money, and why shouldn't they be allowed to?" It's about looking like you're above it. Brands like Costco and Amazon make a huge chunk of change, but you don't see them getting into petty stuff like this.

<comment><USER3> I don't believe Costco publishes their vendor agreements so you really have no idea how Costco treats their suppliers.

Also, no one complains that Google takes 32% of AdWords.

<comment><USER4> Google takes all of AdWords, since it's on their own site. They take a 32% cut of AdSense.

The thing is, advertisers could use other channels to put ads up on the web. They can advertise with Chitika or whatever and get a bigger cut than they would with Google. They typically don't, because AdSense adds a lot of value by targeting the ads well. On the other hand, if you want to sell software on an iOS device, the only way is through the app store. Apple doesn't need to add any value to protect their 30% cut from competition because they don't allow competitors.

<comment><USER5> I think the last argument is misframed. If you want to sell software on a tablet device, you can do it through Android, iOS, or probably a couple other ways. Apple's claim, presumably, is that the quality of iOS, the App Store, and of the hardware that runs iOS, adds at least that much value over Android. And, given how much more money people make on iOS apps compared to Android apps, they're probably right.

The argument about subscription issues is related but more complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All this talk about Gruber, the fanboy that blindly defends Apple, seems to be missing one thing, which is why he should be unhappy instead.

John Gruber in general likes the way Apple does things. Right? Not a controversial position, well understood and, these days, pretty common. So first off, I'm never surprised when he posts about "here's the thought process and mechanics behind the way Apple does things" even if that's the top-level business decisions Apple makes.

So with that understanding, what kind of thing should he naturally be unhappy about? Things Apple does that are uncharacteristic, bad moves for their users, or just downright unethical (i.e. knowingly lying to customers). I truly believe that's it.

Let's toss aside the idea that this move is uncharacteristic (even detractors say "that's the way Apple likes things.") Second, he's explained how he thinks these rules seem good for users. And finally, although I know a lot of people think Apple is doing something unethical, I really don't think John sees things that idealistically when it comes to these kinds of things.

He did demonstrate some sympathy to criticism that Apple changed their rules, but I don't think he sees that at all as unethical. He's idealistic about design but I don't think he's idealistic about business and the marketplace. I actually don't think he really cares as much about the business angles, but that's where the interest is these days.

I really don't see any reason he should be unhappy with this plan. I think he's explained pretty well why he thinks it's a reasonable approach, and given that evidence I think you need to argue pretty forcefully to suggest he's being insincere.

</comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr

On businesses that can't afford 30%: Too bad, Apple wants to be the middleman

On price matching: Apple won't budge because their competitors (e.g. Amazon) insist on price matching

On the 30% slice itself: Apple is proposing that publishers (et al) will make more money at 70% than they'd make at 95% with someone else's business model

On (anti-)competitiveness: Apple is the only one which allows its competitors to have apps on its devices

Summary: iOS is a closed, controlled console system - more akin to Playstation or Xbox than to Mac OS X or Windows

<comment><USER8> What I do not understand is why no-one is complaining about Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 as a closed system but about Apples iOS line.

WHY is Apple bad for closing a system but Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are not? I really do not understand that.

WHY on earth has a cellphone to be open as a OpenSource project? Is there a reason for that? (Android has open sources but no-one can commit changes. It's all in Googles hands what comes into the next Android version which doesn't fit with OpenSource at all)

WHY is taking a 30% cut bad for all developers and Apps? (Jobs said that the 30% cut is not for SASS Apps but only for Newspaper Apps, right?)

Please give me some answers I'm starting to don't understand these discussions lately.

<comment><USER9> A console is a _very_ different biest from a mobile communication device, of which openness and interoperability is hugely advantegous to society.

Thus the line apple is toeing here is a dangerous one.

I wouldn't make the same argument for iPods, iPads or Macs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Grubers gonna grube :(

Talk about burying the lede!

"But leaving aside the revenue split, there are technical limitations as well. The existing in-app purchasing system in iOS has a technical limit of 3,500 catalog items. I.e. any single app can offer no more than 3,500 items for in- app purchase. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of Kindle titles.

"Something's got to give here. I don't know what, but there must be more news on this front coming soon. I don't believe Apple wants to chase competing e-book platforms off the App Store."

In other words, all the rest of the article, defending the Apple terms, is so much codswallop. Because Gruber believes that these terms are unacceptable, as in Dead On Arrival, to major users of in-app purchases and will have to change shortly to accommodate them.

And once you have figured that out, why not apply this to the other users of the platform, the rest of these arguments? "Eating margins will chase applications off iOS" and "Catalog limits are too low for many credible use cases" apply to many more developers than just Amazon Kindle.

But for some reason these arguments are dissociated from the ones Gruber wants to make. Instead of putting together the whole picture, he comes to these major stumbling blocks and writes the equivalent of "Does Not Compute."

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm pretty much in agreement with everything Gruber said (first time for everything).

The one thing that really annoys me though is that Apple have decided is that if you offer a subscription-model outside of the app store, you now have to offer it at the same cost inside the app store.

Instead of paying 1-4% credit-card transaction fees with 24 hour payment terms, you now have to potentially pay a 30% app-store transaction fee with payments taking a month or more if your users decide to take up the option of paying via the app store.

Now I can see why Apple can't discount their 30% as this is the margin they seem to give to stores selling iTunes cards (yes, Apple makes nothing on apps bought with iTunes cards). But to require all apps to be forced to use the in- app subscription model is just ridiculous. What next? A native SAP client forced to sell their $100k product through the app store?

<comment><USER12> Steve Jobs has already commented, in an email, that this isn't meant for SaaS apps:

[http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/21/steve-jobs-email- suggest...](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/21/steve-jobs-email-suggests-in- app-subscriptions-dont-apply-to-software-as-a-service/)

<comment><USER13> For now. They can change that at any point like they did for publishers.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if they are going to do the same for the OS X app store if it gets popular enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This feels like Gruber wanted to write an article from Apple's side, and felt an obligation to do so, but couldn't come up with any arguments nor solutions, yet still continued to write the piece out of obligation to his cause.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some Gruber's articles feature a lot of insight, and are highly enjoyable. And some of his articles may be easily dismissed as blatant fanboyism. Unfortunately, this is an example one of the latter and not the former. I stopped reading after the second blatant "pull-it-out-his-ass" assumption he makes about the "complainers".

</comment><comment><USER17> _Apple doesn't give a damn about companies with business models that can't afford a 70/30 split. Apple's running a competitive business; competition is cold and hard._

These two statements are fundamentally at odds; it's highly unlikely that Apple is making more money from App Store purchases / subscriptions than from iOS hardware sales. Consequently, for Apple to be competitive, they need to offer as much value as possible to the user, so that more users will end up on their platform. Since many of the most popular apps are business models that can't afford a 70/30 split, Apple damn well better care about them. If I can't get Kindle, Netflix, Hulu, Dropbox, etc, etc. on an iPhone/iPad, I won't buy another one. Period.

<comment><USER18> I think that in their quarterly financial calls they've consistently reported the iTunes store as running "about break even". They don't sound unhappy about it, so presumably they're on the positive side of break even rather than on the negative side.

The following Dickens quote springs to mind: _"Income, twenty shillings a week, expenditure, twenty shillings and sixpence; result, misery. Income, twenty shillings a week, expenditure, nineteen shillings and sixpence; result, happiness."_

However if Apple cut back to say 25% then it might mean that they are subsidising people's use of the store. This would be bad for Apple because they would be losing money. Boo hoo. On the other hand, if they were losing money with one hand in order to (as you suggest) gain it with the other, then they would open themselves to questions of dumping, price fixing, abuse of monopoly etc.

Selling at below cost is a typical strategy to keep new entrants out of the market, and so would be evil. But apparently taking 30% is evil too, so it doesn't matter what they do, somebody is going to be unhappy with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just know one thing: the moment Kindle is removed from the app store, I'm selling my iPad.

<comment><USER20> I'd love for Amazon to remove the DRM from their books, and just sell books in epub format which can be read on any device without a Kindle app. That would solve Amazon's problem with iOS/Apple, and also be an ideal solution for end users. EDIT: what I mean is, music is now sold without DRM. Why do we still need DRM for ebooks? I'd love to be able to just put all my ebooks in a Dropbox folder, and not depend on Amazon to create an app for every platform where I want to read my books.

<comment><USER21> But if you'd like Amazon to make a concession as large as this, surely Apple should be asked to make a few concessions too?

Both companies sell IP - and both rely on a various forms of DRM to enforce scarcity. I think selling IP will eventually be seen as a fruitless (and unsustainable) pursuit - but for the time being this is a way both these companies are making a profit selling digital goods.

<comment><USER20> As far as I can remember, Apple/Steve Jobs talked the music industry into dropping DRM on music. As the leading ebooks store Amazon should be the one to push to remove DRM from books.

<comment><USER21> Well, I'm still waiting for the day when I can drag and drop one of these DRM free MP3s onto an iPod (without having to shackle my device to my computer via iTunes).

It's not exactly freedom in the best sense of the word ;)

Are iBooks DRM free? I don't think so ...

<comment><USER20> The Dropbox app on iOS can play mp3 files so you don't have to use iTunes to sync your music.

iBooks having DRM is (IMO) a problem with the publishing industry, just as DRM on music used to be a problem with the music industry. I want Amazon, and Apple, to push the publishing industry into dropping DRM on books.

<comment><USER21> I think I'd like to be able to pay an author directly - that would be my ideal solution; and an ebook should necessarily cost less than a paper book. But I agree - removal of DRM should be a target.

The MP3 tip's a good one - thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Gruber shows his colors here:

 _This is what galls some: Apple is doing this because they can, and no other company is in a position to do it._

People aren't bothered simply because other companies can't do this. If Google, MS, RIM, Amazon, and HP all did the same thing people wouldn't say, "Great... everyone can do it!"

People are upset that Apple can do it, and they _are_.

People have long told me that Apple is a benevolent company. They point to the PC market and say, "Apple never did what MS did". And my retort was always, they couldn't, but if they could they probably would have.

Now we're seeing it play out. If Apple could squeeze Intel or Dell or Compaq they would have. Apple's benefit though is they're not a monopoly, and likely won't be one. But to the extent that they've captured a large share of disposable income they will drain their partners for every last cent. Because as Gruber has stated, Apple doesn't need you, but you sure need them.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think Gruber is ignoring the competitive disadvantage Apple is putting themselves in by shutting out the "middle man" apps. Kindle, Spotify and Netflix are deeply entrenched, best-of-breed services - consumers have deep investment with their Kindle devices, Netflix accounts, etc. These are not minor points. People will give up their Kindles and use iBooks the day they uninstall iTunes and start using a Zune.

So Android, which is already very feature competitive and may have a bigger install base, could have no competitor in distributing a range of very popular, rapidly growing services. Vic Gundotra must be grinning ear to ear.

<comment><USER24> No, Gruber has stated that he does not believe Apple is ignorant of the consequences of taking 30% of Kindle sales or Netflix subscriptions via iOS — after all, Apple built Netflix support directly into AppleTV. He believes the company has probably been in talks with Amazon, Netflix, and similar companies for some time.

<comment><USER22> There's a lesson here. Build your brand inside of iOS and you're screwed. Apple can choke you. Build it outside of iOS and you have a chance to have reasonable terms. As nice as iOS is, w/o middlemen, established outside of iOS, like Kindle and Netflix -- it probably gets killed by Android.

<comment><USER25> That lesson is not limited to "iOS" and "Apple". If you place the financial future of your company solely to $PLATFORM, then $PLATFORM_OWNER will always present a risk. That's why the smart companies also get their services running on $PLATFORM_B, $PLATFORM_C and $PLATFORM_D.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> " (Going further, many charge cards offer cash back on each purchase — they can do this because the cash-back percentage refunded to the customer is less than the transaction processing fee paid by the retailer.)

So the same-price rule is good for the user, and good for Apple."

This type of arrangement is not good for users and is very anti-competitive.

Banks often offer reward points worth 1% of a purchase in exchange for the use of their credit cards which incurs something like a 3% fee on merchants. The merchants have to increase their prices to maintain their margins but since they are contractually obligated not to charge credit card users more, price is increased for everyone. Even those who avoid credit cards end up paying the banks for other's use of them. If fact those who use the cards pay a little less for than those who don't because they get the 1% kickback. Next time you spend $500 of airmiles or reward points, know that you imposed $1500 worth of fees on customers likely not even using the service. The bank gave you a $500 kickback and pocketed $1000.

This scheme basically amounts to imposing a tax on everyone and it's enabled by the one percent reward points along with the price matching rule.

It's the same situation when selling on iOS. In order to pay for Apple's fees and maintain competitive margins, merchants will have to increase the prices of their products across the board, even when they are sold completely outside the Apple ecosystem. This means that if Amazon keeps their Kindle app in iOS, Amazon will have to increase prices _on every devices_ and when someone purchases a book on an Amazon device, through Amazon only, they will be indirectly paying a portion of the sale to Apple. That, IMO, is screwed up. This type of rule is illegal in many countries (at least with regards to credit cards) because it is clearly anti-competitive.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Kindle doesn't use subscriptions. Kindle offers purchases." The Kindle app doesn't support subscriptions, but the Kindle device does.

$35.88/year for the New Yorker (47 issues/year) on (B&W) Kindle vs. $234.53/year in the New Yorker iPad app and about $50/year for the paper version which comes with access to the archive on the web.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-New- Yorker/dp/B001O2SCKI/ref=sr_1_...](http://www.amazon.com/The-New- Yorker/dp/B001O2SCKI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital- text&qid=1299034473&sr=1-1)

The xfinity iPad app now offers "Play Now" so it's not just a fancy remote control, but a content delivery app with a monthly subscription handled outside the app.

[http://paidcontent.org/article/419-first-look-comcast- xfinit...](http://paidcontent.org/article/419-first-look-comcast-xfinity- flips-the-switch-on-ipad-streaming/)

</comment><comment><USER28> > APPLE SHOULD NOT REQUIRE APPS TO OFFER IN-APP SUBSCRIPTIONS

I really don't buy the relation to the initial offering of apps, but I admittedly think this is one of two big problems with this whole scheme. For one, Apple is not providing an end-to-end solution by hosting the content and cannot really keep track of all the SKUs with their current system. Never mind and SaaS providers not getting hosting out of that 30%. The economics and mechanism of app delivery are different than content delivery.

I think Apple should say that if you provide no link to your purchase / subscribing site, then you don't have to use IAP. In other words, if your app downloads content for your account, but doesn't allow in-app sales or link to out-of-app sales, then all is well.

</comment><comment><USER29> _Apple doesn't give a damn about companies with business models that can't afford a 70/30 split. Apple's running a competitive business; competition is cold and hard._

 _Why not allow developers and publishers to set their own prices for in-app subscriptions? One reason: Apple wants its customers to get the best price_

So on one hand competition is good, natural, and everyone benefits. But on the other, companies shouldn't be be able to compete with Apple's built-in subscription system?

</comment><comment><USER6> Rhapsody, Sony and Instapaper were all geared up for the old subscription rules. That loud noise you hear from them is from the grinding of gears. They'll get back up to speed, but they sure had to downshift when they weren't ready to. They may not be able to take the same road they were expecting to, though.

I think one outcome you're going to see from publishers is that there will be separate plans for iOS users. Before, there was naturally only one option and the App Store app was just a client to the same subscription. Now, I can see where it makes a lot more sense to have an a la carte iOS subscription for these publishers.

</comment><comment><USER30> _One reason: Apple wants its customers to get the best price — and, to know that they're getting the best price whenever they buy a subscription through an app. It's a confidence in the brand thing: with Apple's rules, users know they're getting the best price..._

So just like all the iPhone cases, laptop bags, headphones, and external hard drives at the Apple Store, then.

</comment><comment><USER18> Funnily enough, one of the people on HN screaming the loudest about this 30% was essentially trying to cut Apple out of any revenue at all.

What they were doing for their app was giving it away as a free download, then charging a one off subscription. Ta Da! No $ for Apple. Apple closes this loophole, and this guy starts screaming blue murder.

I've got very little sympathy for anyone like him who is just trying to rort the system and get something for nothing.

\----

All the people screaming about Apple's 30% cut should just pack up, shut up, and go to Android where Google will take a 32% cut of their ad revenue. Vote with your feet peeps.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't like Apple's business practises and never have, but this 70/30 split furore is hilarious to someone who has worked in retail and supply before. It is entirely normal for a retailer (apple) to take this kind of split in the retail price and the supplier/wholesaler to take 70%. In the retail industry I worked in, the retailer took a 35-40% portion.

This split is yawningly normal in retail. What's not normal is the huge numbers of "one-person" wholesalers... who have very little in the way of business experience and see that split as a "tax" rather than payment for a service.

<comment><USER18> Thank you. There are plenty of legitimate things to criticise Apple for (they are _far_ from perfect) without making stuff up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> bit.ly told me that daring fireball was potentially problematic... [http://bit.ly/a/warning?url=http%3a%2f%2fdaringfireball%2ene...](http://bit.ly/a/warning?url=http%3a%2f%2fdaringfireball%2enet%2f2011%2f03%2fdirty_percent&hash=fd8b7Y)

<comment><USER33> think it has to do with the fact that he is running a URL shortener himself (i would guess bit.ly pro?) when he tweets it: <http://df4.us/h8h></comment></comment>


True Time Travelers - <AUTHOR> https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2020/08/20/true-time-travelers/ <comment><USER2> Relativity implies that a moving clock experiences less passing time than a resting clock (relative to an observer). The "slowness"-factor gets higher the closer you get to light speed, reaching infinity (i.e. impossible) precisely at light speed.

In the example the one twin travels to a distant star with an appreciable fraction of light speed, thus ages slower. Then, the twin travels back, again with an appreciable fraction of light speed, and still ages slower.

This is basic relativity theory. Maybe I understand the article wrong, but from what I read I understood that the twin should somehow "catch up" on his travel back.

I'd love to be corrected.

<comment><AUTHOR> It implied that the temporal effect of the final deceleration was analogous to how when you throw a ball up in the air and catch it, it only momentarily feels heavier than before you threw it. The twin only momentarily looks younger because the clock has to speed back up during the final deceleration and a naive calculation neglects this step.

<comment><USER3> This isn't that bus that will explode if it gets slower than 60 mph.

According the the article, during the final deceleration, the space traveller will age 20 or so years. In other words, for the traveller, that deceleration phase is going to last 20 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or they just burst into flames. It is like burning up on re-entry. You are thinking of acceleration in the same way you were taught to think about velocity, but that doesn't work in this case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Final Prizes - <AUTHOR> http://startupweekend.youisnow.de/2011/09/final-prizes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Live on Ustream later on in English. Its in English but held in Berlin , on the panel are German Vcs so maybe you get an idea of the mindset of VCs there.</comment>


CEO: Nokia Considers Entering Laptop Industry  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgets/pcs/news/2009/02/reuters_us_nokia_ceo <comment> old-gregg A hint to Nokia: to instantly create a niche and a small army of devoted followers, simply use _normal_ quality LCDs with full 24-bit color, LED backlight, 178x178 viewing angle and matte finish.

I highlighted word _normal_ because I'm not asking for a miracle or Star Wars grade technology, just the kind of quality displays that used to be _the norm_ on $1K+ business class laptops 2-3 years ago, but slowly got replaced by ugly, cheap, unevenly lit, 6-bit color, often glossy junk [yes, even on macbooks]

In addition to my MBP's built-in display I have a 5 year old 17" Samsung hooked up as secondary monitor and comparing the same photo on 2008 MBP vs 2003 Samsung depresses me.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm a huge Nokia fan (N95 8gb here) but they keep building these "mobile computers" that few people buy -- their Nokia Communicator / N800 Tablet are two examples. They should stick to making great cellphones with awesome media capabilities for now. It's the whole reason why I don't buy an iPhone, I get a quality 5MP camera that does great VGA video at 30fps and has really loud stereo speakers for playback.

The whole mini-Laptop thing (which I'm guessing Nokia is looking at) is just another trend that will die off soon. It was a trend about a decade back with the Toshiba Libretto and will die out as another fad once people (again) realize how the mini-laptop is a failed compromise between a full laptop and desktop.

Now a "slate" computer (like an 8.5x11" iPhone) would be sweet, so long as it had a quality touch-OS.

<comment><USER3> _The whole mini-Laptop thing (which I'm guessing Nokia is looking at) is just another trend that will die off soon. It was a trend about a decade back with the Toshiba Libretto and will die out as another fad once people (again) realize how the mini-laptop is a failed compromise between a full laptop and desktop._

Wrong. The Libretto was never a huge success, but netbooks are. What's happening now is not just another trend that will die off soon.

 _"By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netbooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million. (Europe in particular has gone mad for netbooks; sales there are eight times higher than in the US.) In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12 percent."_

From: [http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netb...](http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netbooks?currentPage=2)

That's billions of dollars and several years of millions of people buying these things, using them, and continuing to buy them. There's a lot of trends making this happen, including widespread wifi, cost, and so much of our computing living in the cloud now, all of which are forecast to accelerate.

You may not like them personally, but these netbooks are here to stay.

<comment><USER2> Well I stand corrected on the figures then, but I certainly won't be using one. My fingers can't take the agony of typing on a keyboard designed for mice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple into mobiles. Nokia into laptops.

What's next?

<comment><USER5> Nokia has already been in the PC business with Nokia Data until 1991.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_Siemens_Computers> Excerpt:

"The origins of the company can be traced back to the merger of the PC- divisions of the Finnish Nokia and the Swedish Ericsson in the mid 1980s when Ericsson PCs were known for their ergonomics and bright colors.

In 1991 Nokia Data was sold to the British International Computers Limited (ICL). Later ICL merged with Fujitsu.

The Nokia MikroMikko line of compact desktop computers continued to be produced at the Kilo factories in Espoo, Finland.

Components, including motherboards and Ethernet network adapters were manufactured locally, until production was moved to Taiwan. Internationally the MikroMikko line was marketed by Fujitsu as the ErgoPro."

See also MikroMikko: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MikroMikko>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Original dialogue:

Q: "Will Nokia produce a mini-laptop of their own some day?" A (Nokia-CEO Kallasvuo): "Never say never. Of course we are also actively looking into this business opportunity."

Source: <http://areena.yle.fi/toista?id=1923984> (in Finnish)

</comment><comment><USER5> Somehow I managed to anticipate something like this 9 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485620>

</comment><comment><USER3> in the long run, I think we'll see more and more of this consumer electronics cross-over. How much difference is there really between laptops, netbooks, and smartphones? Seems like things are converging and overlapping in new ways every day. Additionally, as computing gets woven more and more into the fabric of our lives, the discrete devices maybe won't matter as much, which probably isn't great for Nokia's brand. I'm just rambling, so maybe I'm way off.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oh no.</comment>


Excel Mashups - <AUTHOR> http://www.excelmashup.com/

<comment><USER2> This is the first interesting thing I've seen Microsoft do with Excel on the web. Who is using it?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see a demo on the site, and there isn't one.

<comment><USER4> There is actually a demo: <http://www.excelmashup.com/ExampleApp>

However it is not exactly easy to find (I almost gave up and posted the same as you did) and it would nice to have more than one example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Without wishing to belabour the obvious, this could be huge. Excel is probably the most popular development environment in the world.

</comment><comment><USER6> This has actually been a part of Sharepoint for the last few years. It's called Excel Services (<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms517343.aspx>). It's very clever that they extended it to SkyDrive.</comment>


Why Microsoft acquiring GitHub is a good thing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ow/microsoft-acquiring-github-is-a-good-thing-heres-why-6a6a57eb83ac?source=friends_link&sk=fdb2637e52b35f0044c32856f594a621 <comment><USER2> Yea the improvement on Skype were really good. Those that left for Discord don't know what they're missing.</comment>


Designing the Perfect Date and Time Picker - <AUTHOR> https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/07/designing-perfect-date-time-picker/ <comment><USER2> I'm a screen reader user and, hands down, date pickers are the controls which cause the most frustration for me on the web because of their almost universal lack of accessibility. In some cases, far too many to be considered reasonable, I've been unable to complete a booking or similar process because I simply can't choose a date. But yet, in an article about creating the perfect control, accessibility is barely even mentioned, certainly not in any menaingful enough way to actually create an accessible one.

> Making one of those date pickers accessible isn't trivial, because date > selection should be keyboard-accessible and you would need to toggle between > open and collapsed states. You can find an overview of accessible date > pickers. Also, consider looking into Whatsock's examples.

Great. An important topic reduced into a paragraph which sounds like it was written during the planning stage of the article and never expanded on.

<comment><USER3> How would you prefer such a control handle both textual input of date, but also support a visual "pop-up" calendar widget for those who want it? Is the main problem the lack of standard conventions and consistency for the selecting input method, or is it having no known textual input option?

Our organization is interested in improving our accessibility without sacrificing the convenience of modern GUI widgets, and finding it really tricky and expensive to get both. We are not made of cash, and the problem frustrates everyone.

<comment><USER4> I'm fond of a little icon that I have to click to get the popup. If I just mouse into a field, I don't like it to auto expand anything around it.

<comment><USER5> Firefox does that automatically these days if you set the input's type to date.

<comment><USER3> But if you have to target multiple browser brands, that's probably not a practical solution. A JavaScript library is more likely to be consistent across browsers. I don't like relying on 3rd party JavaScript gizmos, but it may be the least of evils.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Consider using basic/native HTML date and time pickers which are mostly supported by all major browsers besides desktop Safari instead of overengineering.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input/date)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input/time)

[https://caniuse.com/#search=time%20input](https://caniuse.com/#search=time%20input)

<comment><USER7> How can Safari go this long without implementing this part of the HTML5 standard? Is there even a ticket to implement?

<comment><USER6> That's a good question. Why is the company that ranks 4. place in the Fortune 500 index unable to implement basic, boring but useful HTML 5 features in their desktop browser that were implemented by Opera nearly 10 years ago, while at the same time implementing them on their mobile browser?

It looks like they just gave up:

[https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78746](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78746)

[https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88026](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88026)

<comment><USER8> Are they unable? Of course not. Is desktop Safari in any way a priority to them? Not really, at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Am I the only one that thinks that the new Android time picker is way worse than the old one? Selecting the time by finding hours and minutes on two dials is much slower than pushing 4 numbers on a number pad, because I know the 4 digits, I know a numberpad but my brain has to do the extra work of finding the hours on a not completely familiar double dial.

New: [https://i.imgur.com/8a4R16O.jpg?1](https://i.imgur.com/8a4R16O.jpg?1)

Old: can't find a picture, it was four digits HH:MM above a number pad.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been trying to figure out a good way to create a date picker for a user's birthdate, and coming up short.

Most date pickers assume that the date is in the near future and that the "day of week" context (ie: tuesday) is useful to the user is selecting the date.

Birthdays are the opposite. They are typically decades in the past, the user doesn't know or care what day of the week they are, and the user knows the numerical date by heart.

The only things I've come up with are:

1) Text entry that attempts to accept different formats and displays the formatted parse of the format next to it. Decent on desktop, text entry on mobile is poor.

2) Big array of Years / Month / Day buttons. The possible range of years is limited (nobody alive was born in year 1200) to a little over 100, so this does scale. User simply needs to tap on the correct button 3 times, which is nice, but the picker takes up sooo much visual space.

<comment><USER10> Three inputs type="number"?

[https://flems.io/#0=N4IgzgpgNhDGAuEAmIBcIB0ALeBbKIANCAGYCWMY...](https://flems.io/#0=N4IgzgpgNhDGAuEAmIBcIB0ALeBbKIANCAGYCWMYaA2qAHYCGuEamO+RIsA9nYn6wA88BgCMYAPgA6dAASzhAJ2lz5C+EgkBNCA0WpBAeg0q16zYLJ0ADgFd4s+AE9rEALxSQdW7lERFnrK4Vh4gAIwAnAAMUYG4DAAeoQBMUWEAHIGGEkYmMvK5yvnqRaoFJgCyvPBYBsaaxeUWVnYOzq6h3r7+cSGeYXGJoWHJWTn1pgrGpeUzasKaACIMTnV5ZeY5LfaOLu6eXX4BIEF94YNJngDMAyfZuQ2qhSq5YpIynJAwCGS8VOhhKKoMJhEAAX0I9CYLHQGAAVlRiDw+BABOhwZCvNDWBhYGBEVxqqj4KxwQBdMFAA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A consideration if you're making an accessible website is keyboard navigation. Having numerical inputs eliminates this, however. Still a good read, I have been thinking a lot about date pickers in the last year.

<comment><USER2> > A consideration if you're making an accessible website

When would you not be?

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, almost always. Approximately zero percent of websites take accessibility into account in any real way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A sitter for the kids, good restaurant, fine food and a glass of wine with my...er.. time picker. Oh wait. Damn punctuation!

</comment><comment><USER13> 95% of the time letting the user input a date string and validating it is best.

<comment><USER14> How would you validate / resolve 02-03-15? Is it Mar 2nd or Feb 3rd? Date picker solves this.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my web application - <AUTHOR> http://www.markitforlater.com

<comment><USER2> Hi, I like this.

\+ Kudos for entering a market that already has leaders (delicious & instapaper for example)

\+ I'd like to see some delicious integration, be it sending it to my delicious -- or the other way around (grabbing links tagged with "markitforlater"

\+ the UI is gorgeous, the name is good.

\- how do i remove links I accidently marked?

\- when you first register, make it do something other than redirect you to /links/ -- I make a new account and the first thing I get is a blank page? whoop ... :) I want to know some good reading sources, I want to b taken back to the homepage for more instructions.

\- the bookmarklet is a bit slow, the transparent thing takes a few seconds to appear causing me to think it didnt work.

<comment><AUTHOR> To your points.

I've intentionally left out the delete function, nothing lasts longer than a week without manual intervention. Despite using the service daily, I can't think of any cases outside of me manually messing with data as tests that I've missed having a delete.

This is a great idea, and I'll definitely be making a new initial login "landing" page!

There's something odd in my Apache setup, as the slowness looks like it's from load, but there's not that much strain on the box. The other issue, which I've tried to optimize as much as possible, is that it loads a LOT of JS when you click the bookmarklet, and it doesn't show the message until it's all done. I need really should pare that down some more, thanks for the push!

<comment><USER2> no probs - and quick response. That instantly gives you a huge edge over del.icio.us (INTEGRATE AMIGO!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, what's the user story that you see for delicious? Pushing bookmarks to delicious before they expire? That's the only scenario I can see being worthwhile, but as someone who swore of delicious long, long ago, I'm definitely open to ideas here!

<comment><USER2> hmm, a good point actually. Forgot you remove stories after a week. I currently tag my delicious stories that I need to read later with "readlater" -- if I could import those direct to your site that'd be cool. Not sure if I could get thru them all in a week though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Importing to me seems like an odd workflow though. Bookmark with delicious, import to markitforlater, read from there, links expire (or not depending on what you do), but are still hanging out in delicious. Again, the only net- positive workflow I could see would be: bookmark with markitforlater, decide you want to keep it around "permanently" so you push it to delicious. As a delicious user, does that sort of thing have any appeal to you?

<comment><USER2> yes, that makes far more sense! ignore my previous delicious ranting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How's this different/better than Instapaper?

<comment><AUTHOR> Instapaper primarily targets the mobile market with it's main feature being the reformatting of pages for offline viewing. (And damn is it a cool, and extremely well done feature.)

My focus is on making a lean, cross browser, bookmarking site with a focus on short-term storage. If you don't opt-out of the feature you can get a reminder the day before any links expire in case you forget to read one.

This app grew out of the habit I had of emailing articles to myself several times a week so I could go back and read them after work, or at lunch, or whenever. I realized there had to be a better way. Looked at a few of the other sites around at that time, didn't really like any of them, so I wrote my own.

One of the big reasons I wrote my own was that I'm addicted to interfaces like Hacker News and Reddit. Simple, concise, and almost exclusively text only. I modeled the link-list on that idea. The one twist being, thanks to some nifty JS code, that the longer a link hangs out on your list the more faded it becomes. To me this makes it a much quicker and easier interface to get in, find what I need, and get out. I carried the same idea through to the bookmarklet in that it doesn't redirect you to the MarkitForLater site when adding a link. Instead it adds it in the background and notifies you once it's done, this way you can continue reading, or move on with minimal interruption.

In summary, I think MarkitForLater provides a minimal impact on the way you browse, while still providing a useful service.

I think Instapaper is one hell of a cool application and has definitely earned it's place in the market. I won't tell you which is better for you, but I know which one I use ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think your tag line should read "a naturally zesty enterprise" as opposed to "a natural zesty enterprise". And what is it, exactly, that makes you "zesty?"

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually an out of context quote from the film "The Big Lebowski". A copy of the quote can be found on this page.

[http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm/content_id.20733/M...](http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm/content_id.20733/Movies)

As for what makes me zesty, well, you should follow the link for a bit more of an explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good start. Have you looked at apps that do somewhat similar things? You might find improvements and/or inspiration to do something better or different.

Also, your site is simple enough that you might consider doing progressive signup. Don't require an account to start marking things. If they like it, they can create one later and it will save things into a unique account for them specifically.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have looked at several apps that work in similar ways. The big advantage I had was that the lists are "private" as well as the ability to get a private RSS feeds for your list.

I thought very hard about doing progressive signup, but I couldn't find a good method that didn't require a user to finish the signup on the same machine they started on. If you have any examples of sites that do this well, or at least in a way that you like, let me know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> WoW .... dude you totally ripped off this <http://readitlaterlist.com/> . ReadItLater has been around since august 2007 and featured on Digg here is an article from one of Om Malik's network sites <http://tinyurl.com/5bsuf4>

Dude reconsider the name it screams of copycat and a lack of innovation!!!

<comment><USER7> Meh, the problem and it's solution isn't _that_ original so I wouldn't scream ripoff just yet. Also The other site want's you to install an extension. In my personal experience (a while back so don't know current situation) it was a bit buggy, and the offline reading thing didn't work very well. With this you can have sort of the same (minus offline reading). I still prefer delicious (tag: toread or towatch) though, have to admit I'm a bit of a fan of the delicious site, so I'm not that objective.

Edit: How do you plan to monetize this service? Or is this more for fun?

<comment><AUTHOR> There really aren't any plans to monetize it. If it manages to cover it's own costs via donations or possibly ad sense, then I'd be happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've often thought something like this would be useful, but I'm missing a few things (and you have a bug, I can't leave my e-mail blank because it says that e-mial is already taken).

1 - I can't figure out how to add a bookmarklet. I can only add you page 2) I wouldn't go to a page to enter in the sites to save, that is too much of a pain in the ass - a browser plug-in would be much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right click (or the equivalent on your platform) on the link labeled MarkitForLater Bookmarklet, and add it to your bookmarks. Optionally if you have the bookmark toolbar enabled in your browser you should be able to drag that link to it.

Can you elaborate a bit on #2? I'm not sure I get what your getting at.

Edit: And thanks for the bug report, that should be fixed now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> delicious + tag as "toread" is what i've been doing

<comment><USER10> Any bookmarklets for that? i.e., tag and save it automatically?

<comment><USER9> I have the firefox delicious extension so I just hit Cmd+D then tag it whatever I want (usually I add all the popular tags) and then type in "toread." a 3 second process and it works for me.

<http://delicious.com/pstamatiou/toread>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been developing this site on and off for a few months. It's developed to the point that I'm able to use it daily without an issue. But I'd love any opinions/thoughts/concerns from the HN crowd!

</comment><comment><USER11> Have you seen <http://l8tr.org/> which also scans web sites that are temporarily down and emails you when they come back up?

</comment><comment><USER12> Besides only lasting a week, what benefit does this have over clicking on the star in Firefox 3?

Edit: I like the design.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't tied to a single location/browser. You can mark sites from your javascript enabled phone, and read them on your desktop, or vice versa. If you use the web interface you can have it auto-hide any links you've already visited through the site. You can also get an RSS feed of your listings so that you don't NEED to use the web interface if that's your thing.

Edit: Thanks for the mention of the design, I'm far from a designer so I've been as worried about that aspect as any other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry, but I just don't see a compelling reason to leave Instapaper for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're happy with Instapaper then there's nothing to apologize for!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> markitforlater.com on the footer is missing the l and reads markitforater.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice catch, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> how is this any different than delicious?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's intentionally non-social, your stuff is yours. It doesn't require a redirect when adding a bookmark, and in general I find it simpler and quicker to work with than delicious (especially the newest version).

<comment><USER15> the delicious plugin for firefox is quite handy. i can save a link and tag it as 'do not share' in about 2 seconds.

sorry man, not trying to bash your idea, but it's been done before :-/.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never claimed it was entirely unique. Bookmarking via a bookmarklet has been around a long while. I took ideas from several places, and then trimmed it down to the simplest set of functions that solved my problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the purpose of investors and the stock market? - <AUTHOR>

What with Marissa Meyer getting Yahoo's CEO post, and FB's stock dropping like a stone, I've been seeing plenty of half-formed blog posts about the troubled relationships between tech companies and investors. As a person who's new to tech, it's hard to figure out what you guys traditionally think about "the markets."<p>So HN, what do you think the purpose of investors actually is? <comment><USER2> In general the purpose of the markets is to provide capital to businesses that need lots of money to get started or do something new. As far as what the markets mean to Facebook or yahoo at this point, who knows. They aren't likely to really need additional funding at this point. The markets are just the place where their stocks trade, and it decides how much money the CEO has and makes (by virtue of the price of the stock).

</comment><comment><USER3> > So HN, what do you think the purpose of investors actually is?

Operating capital. Investors, either private or public, provide funding for company operations in exchange for the right to profit from those operations.

The fact that stocks rise and fall is perfectly natural -- it reflects public perception of the value of a company. Economic theorists who think deeply about this stuff, think it's possible that markets are often close to perfectly efficient, meaning the money naturally flows to the place where it does the most good -- meaning maximum profit.

There are a number of possible distortions in the market. One of them is "insider trading", where business insiders exchange privileged information and make trades on that basis -- information the public doesn't have. Insider trading cheats the average investor, therefore it's illegal.

In general, equities markets are fair, meaning everyone has the same chance to succeed. And the fact that stocks plummet from time to time is a market fact of life -- sometimes it reflects public perception that a company is overvalued, or that another company is a better investment.

Equities aren't that difficult to understand. And they're one of the better long-term investments.</comment>


Squirrel – A high-level, light-weight scripting language - <AUTHOR> http://squirrel-lang.org/ <comment><USER2> A quick google search found a nice article on the first question I had, how does it compare to Lua?

[https://computerscomputing.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/lua- and-...](https://computerscomputing.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/lua-and-squirrel- the-case-for-squirrel/)

My first thought is "Squirrel doesn't have Mike Pall" but that isn't quite fair to the author or the intentions of the language.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the scripting languages used in the Source Engine. I believe the first game that supported it was Left 4 Dead 2, it was certainly the first time I heard of it.

[https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VScript](https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VScript)

</comment><comment><USER4> 7k is just a random number. At that number, it can be a lot of lines or very few - depends on what your scripting language can do. It's certainly not a selling point!

<comment><USER5> there are many such headlines on HN. "XXX in Y lines of code". I can't see in what respect the number of lines of code matters. Regardless of what the scripting language actually does, I'd rather have more lines of readable and maintainable code, than less lines of obfuscated code.

<comment><USER6> I think it's an important signifier for how easily you could read, and hopefully grok, the entire codebase. At 7k lines, I, who have no experience writing a scripting language, might be enticed to take a look. At 100k lines, I'm not sure where to start, and thus likely _won 't_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ron Gilbert chose Squirrel as the scripting engine of Thimbleweed Park: [http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/scripting_test](http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/scripting_test)

If anyone is interested, the development blog is full of examples of how it is being used in the game: [http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/scrolling_rooms](http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/scrolling_rooms) [http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/switching_and_inventory](http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/switching_and_inventory)

</comment><comment><USER8> I like writing languages, but I really don't understand what possesses someone to write a new language that's essentially a syntactic reskin of the same set of imperative/OO features found in most popular languages. We don't need new syntax—we need new semantics.

<comment><USER9> It's been around since <2003, so it's hardly new. It's primary purpose was a high performance scripting language for game engines.

That being said I agree with you wrt new semantics and I would love to see a practical programming language that has dependent types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I looked at it before - it seemed nice, but ... in those 13 years since the release, Lua has amassed the critical support to take over the world (LuaJIT2, FFI, stuff like Terra, MoonScript, Lua-in-JS, ...).

Lua and Squirrel being so close, it makes little practical sense to use Squirrel in a new project. Maybe for fun projects.

(And for something that's a little different, I recommend a look at [https://github.com/aardappel/lobster](https://github.com/aardappel/lobster) \- it's a breath of fresh air among scripting languages; practically, I still recommend Lua over anything else)

</comment><comment><USER11> The page doesn't do much to tell me why I would choose to use this over something I've heard of before.

<comment><USER12> Squirrel is roughly similar (in the grand scheme of things) to Lua and JavaScript, with more of a (C++-style) OO flavor. Its main selling point is that it uses reference counting instead of a tracing garbage collector for automatic memory management. With a reference counted language, you pay a small but predictable cost every time something goes out of scope, whereas tracing garbage collectors coalesce all of these small costs into one big collection cycle run every few milliseconds. The tradeoff is that while garbage collected languages provide better throughput (due to cache effects, heap fragmentation, etc) for batch processing jobs, reference counted ones are much more suitable for realtime and soft realtime applications that would much rather take a constant factor hit to throughput if it eliminates the danger of a multi-millisecond GC scan causing the application to miss a deadline.

As such, Squirrel enjoys some popularity as (and was indeed created to serve as, by an engineer that had grown frustrated with the experience of embedding Lua in FarCry) a scripting language for video games, being most notably used in some of Valve's newer games, like Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, and CS:GO. The rest of the engine code usually dwarves the performance impact of "scripts" in most games, but GC scans can still cause games embedding other scripting languages to miss a frame presentation deadline, resulting in either a nasty tear or a completely missed frame. There are ways that tracing garbage collected languages can attempt to combat this (like incremental GCs), but some engine programmers have decided to accept the throughput cost for the peace of mind that reference counting provides.

EDIT: I had more but HN is silently ignoring some of my edits for some reason. Is there a post length restriction for new users, or have I tripped some kind of bizarre content filter?

<comment><USER11> I see. That's interesting; I think the page could do more to explain it.

<comment><USER12> I agree. With embedded "scripting" languages, you have to differentiate between two kinds of users that don't always (or even usually) overlap: the people writing the scripts (who may or may not even consider themselves to be programmers), and the engine programmers embedding the language in their game engine or other application. IMHO, the current homepage isn't really doing a great job of appealing to either group, and it'd be much more effective if it directly explained the advantages of its implementation to the engine dev crowd; that might alienate the script programmers a bit, but thinking about AAA game development, they're almost never the ones that get to pick the language anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Normally I'm agnostic on the issue of type safety, but the best game scripting language I used was a proprietary one that was strongly typed with no implicit casting (it also had no GC).

In my experience, a game script most often uses handles to certain types of game engine objects (cameras, vehicles, characters, the player...) and although it's often necessary to define your own types/classes/objects they're rarely complex. Usually you're just iterating over collections of stuff, exploring trees, querying the current state of the game engine or dealing with some kind of internal state.

Because of this, explicit type safety isn't really the burden it can be in other use cases, even for prototyping. Because you generally want hot reloads and for a game script to fail gracefully without stopping the engine, you probably want to add as much sanity checking as possible before it gets to that point.

</comment><comment><USER14> To have it short: With the syntax of C/Java and scripting features, what does this language differentiate from JavaScript?

There are some nice features added, but I think that some of them are also covered by newer JS versions. I really don't want to argue to much about JS, but other persons will ask the same question, I guess.

The line "optional 16bits characters strings" also makes me worry a little, since I know how much trouble an alternate approach (8bit strings vs. Unicode) there is in Python (which led to major changes in Python 3). It just makes to much headaches.

If the author is reading here, you might also consider linking to a page of your personal website, that is accessible (I get directory listing denied).

<comment><USER15> The advantage is that it's usable in a soft-real time scenario because it manage memory is a deterministic manner with ref counts instead of a GC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It looks like an error in the example in the page, shouldn't it have a comma after...

        a = "10"

</comment><comment><USER17> Did a quick search for (C) FFI on the home page and didn't see anything. Can anyone corroborate?

<comment><USER9> It's primary purpose is to be embeded, so it has a similar interop interface to other embeddable languages: [http://squirrel- lang.org/doc/squirrel3.html#d0e4060](http://squirrel- lang.org/doc/squirrel3.html#d0e4060)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> yet another (scripting) language? nice.

</comment><comment><USER19> One of many C-like scripting languages.

</comment><comment><USER20> Did anyone else stop reading the minute they saw it wasn't using the One True Brace Style? Are these people barbarians!!??

<comment><USER21> Allman > OTB

/s

Not everybody likes OTB though, honestly.</comment></comment>


David Braben Father of Raspberry PI / Elite Dangerous - Reddit Ask Me Anything - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/15od2s/i_am_david_braben_cocreator_of_elite_creator_of/

<comment><AUTHOR> The actual AMA will go-live on Jan 3rd at 5pm GMT. However David Braben and Frontier Senior Producer Michael Brooks will be on answering questions when they can in the lead up to the AMA.</comment>


Undeclared Martial Law on the Streets of Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyOF54eWHjA&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> "The police are attacking me now"

This journalist was not being accurate. There is a large difference between an attack and pressure. He claimed they wanted to clear the streets of cameras so that the police could do whatever they want. If everyone talked like that, nobody would trust the news. He exaggerated and speculated like crazy.

I'm assuming anyway he's a journalist. Maybe he's just a youtuber. Either way, don't say "the police are completely out of control" when all they are doing is yelling aggressively and pushing a few people.

<comment><USER3> This 'journalist' is clearly biased for the protestors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was very intense.

Anyone with knowledge of crowd control able to chime in about what it is the police are trying to do on a tactical level?

<comment><USER5> I have no such experience, but from the person talking it seems they are trying to get all the cameras out of an area so they can beat the crap out of those inside without being filmed.

It's classic authoritarian state intimidation tactics that they don't want recorded.

<comment><USER3> > so they can beat the crap out of those inside

Except this is speculation based on anti-China propoganda

<comment><USER5> There is clear video proof that they beat up the protestors, they just don't want more videos out there. It's not speculation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mutable Algorithms in Immutable Languages, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://tel.github.io/2014/07/12/mutable_algorithms_in_immutable_languges_part_1/ <comment><USER3> Hmm,

Now, this and other articles about the difficulty of writing standard algorithms in functional languages makes me want to see FP's pitch be _unbundled_. The thing is that FP is pitched as a useful thing to learn to get an insight into programming, improve your mental fitness, see things at a higher level and so-forth. But it's also pitched as a way to be more productive and effective as a programmer. Effectively, it's sold as an exercise cycle and a real bicycle, a way to improve yourself and good way to get somewhere.

Now, I'll acknowledge that functional programming probably is great for the higher-level view of programming and such. But the challenges outlined in this article makes me doubtful fp is a productivity tool, a system which will allow some large number of programmers to make a large step in productivity.

I mean, if fp doesn't make simplistic programming faster and stands in the way of a large number of algorithmic approaches, it seems your productivity would consistently hobbled. Is there a counter-argument to this problem?

<comment><USER4> I do work in Haskell.

At the end of the day, you still write some stateful, imperative code.

It's just that your utility/work functions are pure, which means that you have predictable side-effects: you've stuck them all in one (imperative) place, or perhaps a couple places, but you're guaranteed to know where they are because the type system enforces notating which code has the ability to cause side effects. (Makes it easy to grep on type signatures, for example.)

Most of my workload is dominated by high level concerns: correctness, large- scale data flow, coordination of state, and security.

The purity of functions means that I explain all of the constraints/solutions of those problems in pieces, which I then compose with a clear data flow between them (since they can't have shared, mutable state), and only at the end, lift them to operate on the state of the system (in a stateful, imperative block).

This way of programming gives me much more confidence in replacing pieces of the code without worrying about the side effects, because the side effects are predictably related to that code.

At the end of the day, that predictability of side effects makes the majority of my work MUCH easier, even if it adds complexity to some low level data manipulation.

I easily write 10x the high level code I do low level code, so a 20% savings on that code, even if I double the complexity of low level code, is a net savings on my time/effort.

tl;dr: Functional programming is a productivity booster if most of your work is of a high level nature, even if it makes low level manipulations harder to do. Interfacing with low level imperative code can be (and is) regularly done, to get the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER5> This is certainly an intriguing answer, and makes me want to try Haskell sometime, but it also makes me wonder if I can't get the same benefits, with a little effort and discipline, in a "semi-functional" language such as something in the ML family or even (if I can live without static typing) Lisp.

In fact, I've always made a point, when working in a semi-functional language, of writing as much code functionally as possible. My experience is that it has the same benefits as you describe. So I don't know how much more there is to be gotten by actually switching to Haskell. My guess is, most of the additional benefit would come from the type system. But maybe I would be motivated to write even more code functionally.

<comment><USER6> I just started to work with Haskell seriously, and after some trouble I discovered exactly the same development approach as DerpDerpDerp. However since I am not yet experienced I wish I had an "observer" to print debug messages (I know that there is a debugger in EclipseFP but I prefer Emacs for performance reasons). With observer I mean a compiler pragma that lets me print Haskell values without violating the functional nature of the code.

By the way, you don't need to live without static typing in Lisp. Shen provides a powerful type-safe layer on top of Lisp.

[http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn- shen/types/types_functions...](http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn- shen/types/types_functions.html)

<comment><USER7> Sounds like you're looking for the Debug.Trace module

<comment><USER6> Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> After someone asked for it in /r/haskell I added a link to the complete code for this post.

[https://github.com/tel/tel.github.io/tree/master/public/code...](https://github.com/tel/tel.github.io/tree/master/public/code/MutableImmutable/Part1)

Thus far there are no dependencies on outside libraries (though eventually I'll have to use `containers`) so you can just drop it into GHCi and play around!

</comment><comment><USER9> For a fun mutable algorithm to test this with, I'd be interested in seeing an implementation of Knuth's Dancing Links.

For that matter, I'm curious on any performance comparisons between algorithms such as the DLX and any "FP" equivalent. This already exist?

<comment><USER10> Sticking to traditional computer science (i.e., ignoring constants, caching, and other details, and just sticking to Big-O analysis), it is easy to show, or indeed easy to simply _see_ that any mutable algorithm can be represented in a purely functional way by creating a balanced tree that represents memory and can be written to and read from by index. All reading and writing operations that treat the tree as simply an expanse of RAM are O(log n), vs. O(1) of direct RAM access. Therefore, pure functional programs can simulate any impure algorithm with a slowdown _no worse than_ a log n factor.

Again, let me emphasize this is a _worst-case_ analysis. Many common algorithms are equivalent regardless, and that's part of the reason tel specifically names Union/Find as such an algorithm, as it's actually somewhat rare to encounter one where there isn't a Big-O equivalent algorithm that is pure. Pure functional algorithms often require some modestly clever amortization to get there, but that's perfectly valid both in theory and in practice (many beloved "imperative" structures have amortized complexities, too, including such basics as a hash table).

In practice pure functional can sometimes come with larger constants; whether they hit you in practice depends on your use case and, often, sensitivity to garbage collection pauses.

In light of all that, I think it would be fair to say that your question is somewhat ill-defined. You can really only compare particular algorithms against each other, because there's no trivial equivalence between "imperative" and "pure functional" algorithms. Plus, the barrier between the two in practice is quite fungible... especially in a garbage-collected imperative language nothing stops you from using a "functional" algorithm, and every practical "functional" language will give you a way of running "imperative" algorithms directly. (Yes, even Haskell. But tel is building up to that. I won't give it away yet. Stay tuned.)

<comment><USER9> My question may have been ill defined, but your answer was awesome. :)

I have to confess your "easy to show/see" isn't immediately obvious to me yet. However, that is as likely because I haven't tried hard to see as anything else. This post is between other things I'm trying to get done. Poorly already, digging into this is something I fear would not help.

I _am_ interested, though, so more pointers and explanations would be greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER11> Regarding the "easy to see":

1) Take your algorithm that involves updates to memory.

2) Split it up so that "memory" is represented by an ADT - in the original imperative setting, it's logically a hash table - O(1) read and write.

3) Replace that ADT with a binary tree. Now you have O(lg(n)) read and write.

4) If the previous algorithm was O(f(n)), it can't do any particular thing more than O(f(n)) times, including memory access. So in the worst case, you've made O(f(n)) things take O(lg(m)) times as long, so the new algorithm must be in O(f(n) * lg(m)).

<comment><USER9> Ah, I think I see what you mean. Seems the constants being ignored could be massive. Are there any comparisons saying how things compare in practice? (Similar to how heapsort is typically not used, even though it has among the better Big O values, right?)

<comment><USER11> Right, this particular approach is most interesting as an easy upper bound.

Constants are always highly situation dependent. If you are replacing a single memory lookup with a tree traversal, that's going to be a huge difference. If, for some reason, access to your mutable variables is already an expensive operation, it might not make much difference at all. If you need to take periodic snapshots of your world state, the mutation-free version might come out way ahead sharing portions of the tree that don't need to be copied.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how the periodic snapshot would "come out ahead" with the mutation free version. Seems the best you could claim is it wouldn't be as far behind as one might think. Unless periodic equals every change. In which case I would expect they could be equal. (That is, the extra work required to make it "mutation free" is extra work. Unless all of the extra work is required, it is hard to see how that version would "come out ahead.")

And this is why I particularly asked about the DLX algorithm. It is specifically made for rapid backtracking. Reading briefly [1] shows that it was even made parallel to speed it up. ("made it parallel" is a gross simplification of course.) Is a very interesting read on methods to make a heavily mutation based algorithm parallel.

[1] [http://did.mat.uni- bayreuth.de/wassermann/allsolutions.ps.gz](http://did.mat.uni- bayreuth.de/wassermann/allsolutions.ps.gz)

<comment><USER11> _' I'm not sure how the periodic snapshot would "come out ahead" with the mutation free version.'_

A snapshot of freely mutated memory is a O(N) copy.

A snapshot of a immutable tree is a single O(1) pointer copy (you just need to save the root).

Doing a full copy every change would be tremendously costly (substantially more than the penalty for walking the tree on that change, and probably overwhelming the overhead ofr walking the tree on reads).

Doing a full copy every hojillion steps would of course amortize to cheap (and probably the overhead from walking a tree for reads and writes would overwhelm it).

Anything real will of course fall somewhere between. As I said, constants are tremendously context dependent.

Note that this (of course) doesn't _speed up_ the mutation free version - <USER2> if you _have the constraint_ of wanting regular (or otherwise cheap) snapshots then using the mutation-free version can be the cheapest way of doing that.

I don't know the details of the DLX algorithm, or adaptations to it, well enough to say much about it in particular off the top of my head. I'd love to dig into it at some point, but I've unfortunately got higher priorities presently.

<comment><USER9> This is assuming a very naive snapshot of a mutated memory block. I would assume that if you were doing something that needed snapshots of each instant of the program, you would come up with a much more sane algorithm for getting that done.

It would probably use many of the same tricks as the immutable structures. Which is why I would assume they would be equal. (That is, I realize that immutable structures don't do a full copy on every "change." Depending on the structure and the change, they don't even do a copy at all.)

Consider, we basically just described how git works, no?

<comment><USER11> Well, certainly nothing stops you from using the immutable version and calling it mutable (it just happens to do no mutation!). But my point is that it's a nontrivial modification compared to other approaches to enabling snapshotting, and it's a good tool to have in your belt for that kind of situation.

Particularly interesting, genuinely "persistent" data structures (as used by Okasaki in Purely Functional Data Structures - which is a fantastic read and tons of fun) can give amortized worst-case bounds even in the presence of a malicious consumer of the data structure picking which operations to run against which historical versions of the object.

<comment><USER9> I meant more of the same strategies. Data sharing and the like. In a mutable language this can be done by simply updating the head pointer easily enough. In a non-mutable language this is tougher in some respects. This is pretty much the thing that tripped up a ton of folks back from the early days of java. "Why doesn't x.replaceAll('a', 'b') change the value of x?" was not an uncommon mistake to encounter.

DLX is actually a great example of this sort of thing, as the whole point is that the operation to remove an item from a doubly linked list can be reversed to add the item back just from looking at the item that was removed.

And again, consider the way that git works. Nobody would call c and the techniques they use immutable, but the underlying data structure is.

More directly put, I am not calling for all data structures in a classical "mutation based program" to be mutable. I am curious about some of the more famous mutation based algorithms and if there are good comparisons to the analogous versions.

There was a great post here a few weeks ago about the blind spot in functional programmers in building trees. Having just seen the "threaded trees" for what I think is my first time, I have to confess it took me longer to make than I would have thought. Mainly because I was trying to hold on to some of the "immutable" methods of programming.

<comment><USER11> _" I meant more of the same strategies. Data sharing and the like."_

Certainly it is _possible_ to find alternative constructions that work. Occasionally these may still be faster. However, I strongly contest that it's "tougher" in a non-mutable context. Specifically:

 _' In a mutable language this can be done by simply updating the head pointer easily enough. In a non-mutable language this is tougher in some respects.'_

This is wrong. The hard part about this is making sure old things pointed at by existing snapshots don't change. If your data is immutable, you get that for free.

Moreover, in terms of complexity of the system, (mutating algorithm + a bunch of stuff to capture the mutations) is likely to be messier than the nonmutating algorithm (which is sometimes cleaner than the mutating version to begin with, but certainly not always).

Also, note that you've moved to talking about "mutable languages", we had been talking about _algorithms_.

 _' This is pretty much the thing that tripped up a ton of folks back from the early days of java. "Why doesn't x.replaceAll('a', 'b') change the value of x?" was not an uncommon mistake to encounter.'_

Which is clearly a problem with "non-mutable languages"? The problem there is that the Java _paradigm_ had been strongly mutation oriented and then they dropped an _incongruous_ mutation-free "method that is really more of a function" in there. Clarity and consistency are important in any setting.

 _" DLX is actually a great example of this sort of thing, as the whole point is that the operation to remove an item from a doubly linked list can be reversed to add the item back just from looking at the item that was removed."_

But you _can 't_ do that if you might be sharing those lists with someone else. The point is that the constraints imposed by immutability are _often_ the most effective means of addressing other constraints, and so study of these things is quite valuable. This thread has never been "Haskell is much better because it doesn't let you mutate anything!" \- both because I've already acknowledged that in many settings the mutable versions of algorithms are preferable and because Haskell _does_ let you mutate things (you just have to be explicit about what).

 _" And again, consider the way that git works. Nobody would call c and the techniques they use immutable, but the underlying data structure is."_

As an aside, you can write C with very little mutation going on, if that's what you want to do. I've not looked at the git source, so I have no idea the degree to which they do.

As I said, though, that's an aside - my main point here is that immutable data, and algorithms working with it, are valuable and there are situations where they are the best solution even where mutation is "allowed" and even where a mutation-heavy version might be preferred in a slightly different setting.

 _" There was a great post here a few weeks ago about the blind spot in functional programmers in building trees."_

A cursory search isn't turning this up - it sounds interesting. Do you have the link?

<comment><USER9> I think we are still talking past each other. So, first the link you asked for. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928653) If I am misrepresenting it, apologies. And let me know. :)

I think how I'm talking past you is I am perfectly fine with mutation based algorithms using immutable data structures. That is, union find can easily be done using a standard Scala immutable Vector for the array. Only caveat is each "mutation" has to be of the form "x = x.setValue(index, value)".

So, the question I give you is do you consider that a mutation based algorithm or not? I would, as the heart of the algorithm is still based on the updates of the array. You are just safe in knowing that any place you have let a reference to it leak out is never going to change. This is both good and bad, of course. Depending on what you are doing.

Stated differently, I don't think we have been distinguishing between mutation based algorithms that use immutable data structures with mutation based data structures. (That is to say, I have not been concerning myself with that.) So, if you consider it an immutable algorithm as soon as an immutable data structure enters into the mix, then yes, most of what I've been saying is nonsense.

Seems unnecessarily restrictive to me, as just changing it such that each update to the underlying structure requires changing a pointer as well as following the data structure update is much less of a change than, for example, the story that is at the root of this discussion.

For Git, this is roughly what it does. If you do a repack, the new pack is only used once it is done. They rebuild the entire pack, then update the reference to the active pack. If you cancel the process at any point, the old pack is still good and still works. The process of building the structure is heavily "mutation" based, but once it is made, nothing is ever changed.

And you should look into the DLX made parallel. It is very different than how algorithms are made so in most popular literature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looking forward to seeing where this goes. This well recieved paper[1], discusses converting reference & set type mechanics into persistent and partially persistence data structures. The model is quite similar to what is going on here. It be great to write algorithms and convert them to immutable, mutable or partially mutable at will.

[1] [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sleator/papers/Persistence.htm](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sleator/papers/Persistence.htm)

<comment><USER8> I was considering implementing something similar to the Overmars methods mentioned on page 90. Maybe I'll read this paper and see if I can tack it on at the end... Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems like a reimplementation of ST using an unspecified State Mem.

<comment><USER8> It's not _yet_ , but—to cheat a bit here—eventually we're going to use `Mem` to get quite intimate with `ST` and show why it's important to use `ST` perhaps more often than people even anticipate.

If you'd like, try to instantiate something along the lines of `Mem (State (IntMap v))`. It's slightly trickier than it looks due to some typing issues (which don't matter, but I'll save the reveal). It's also likely to be slightly buggy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh, that is rich.

<comment><USER8> Does it not seem possible to you?

Hopefully by part 3 I'll be able to poke very precisely at the seam between mutable and immutable algorithms and unlock how to pick between them with greater refinement.

<comment><USER15> I'm glad that you've taken the time to write more. Your posts have been very articulately stated, especially the one on type systems.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! It means a lot to hear. It's also quite motivating :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where are the most jobs in parallel computing? - <AUTHOR> I have a non-traditional background, got a tenuous New media degree, self-taught in web development, with several years of work experience. Recently I moved into some freelance game development through some of my projects. I particularly enjoy coding pixel and vertex shaders. I find parallel computing intuitive for computer graphics.<p>I find this area of work very interesting and would like to follow it up possibly with a "leap of faith" into parallel computing work (keeping in mind my mostly self-taught background). Where should I begin looking for jobs in parallel computing? I don't know any people that are in these sorts of computing areas, so I'm trying to look for a good starting point on researching it. <comment><USER2> you can take this course

[https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-parallel- programming...](https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-parallel-programming-- cs344)

John Owens is a good teacher. He helped me get started on CUDA.</comment>


Web developers are software engineers, too - <AUTHOR> http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/06/19/web-developers-are-software-engineers-too/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nczonline+%28NCZOnline+-+The+Official+Web+Site+of+Nicholas+C.+Zakas%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> I can't agree with the article. Quite the contrary, I believe the term engineer is grossly overused.

I'm a Software Engineer student in an Engineering University, sitting through purely engineering-related (as opposed to development-related) courses such as software requirements analysis and studying software development processes. It pains me to see articles like these where people belittle the engineering profession. It's not about pride or entitlement, it's about the fact that a software engineer (at least here in Quebec) is someone part of the Order of Engineers and who bears along with his/her title the burden of social responsibility.

Designing great UX/front-ends is a very tough job and I believe should be rewarded and designated as such but writing code and creating software does not qualify you automatically for the title of engineer. You went to school, passed the Order of Engineer exams (or equivalent) and were granted the engineer title, you get to be called as such (and get to have the word engineer in your job title). You didn't go through all of this? It doesn't make you a worse developer or person, but it certainly doesn't make you an engineer either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most web developers are not software engineers. They are bad programming handymen - errant, reckless, and ignorant of best practices.

Software engineers can be web developers, but that doesn't mean all web developers are software engineers.

Disclaimer: I program for the web.

<comment><USER4> OK, but the truth is most software engineers are not software engineers. "They are bad programming handymen- errant, reckless, and ignorant of best practices".

<comment><USER3> I don't have enough knowledge to say whether that's true or not. Most C# programmers I meet, for example, are pretty competent compared to your average WordPress "programmer."</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whats an OK developer to do? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an ok programer / developer in my early 30's.
I've been working as a professional (full-time job) developer for almost 3 years, been doing freelance during this time and a little before while I was at  school. I've got a University degree in Biological Science and a 2 year degree for web development.
I don't want to be a programer anymore, what kinds of jobs could I more easily transition into? <comment><USER2> If you are outgoing, you might find some success as a technical recruiter. I have had positive experiences dealing with a recruiter who came from a programming background. It would certainly not hurt you.

Otherwise, business analyst, QA, other type of analyst that requires some level of technical ability and in which you can shine by having more technical skill than the average excel pusher. I've seen positions like this in the industry I am in. You might find this type of development to be just the right amount.

<comment><USER3> I agree that technical recruiters mostly suck, but the best ones have a technical background.

I'll add, though, that recruiting is a slog. It's monotonous and involves a lot of rejection. It's often performance-based, and it can therefore be stressful as well. Basically, it has many of the downsides of sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What about something like product management? Your technical knowledge could be an asset since you'd be able to communicate with developers in their own language.</comment>


Should we fear space aliens? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/27/tarter.space.life.fears/index.html

<comment><USER2> If they haven't shown up already, they are unlikely to any time soon.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox>

</comment><comment><USER3> no.</comment>


Why New York City Is on the Verge of Disaster - <AUTHOR> https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-new-york-city-is-on-the-verge <comment><USER2> Aside from the fact that it's been called the Holland Tunnel for nearly a century (no one ever refers to it as the "Hudson Tunnel") -- the author provides this rather provocative assertion:

 _In other words, a good chunk of New York's transportation infrastructure [including the Holland Tunnel mentioned in the previous paragraph] could collapse, at any point._

With no substantive support. (It may be behind on maintenance; and like various subway tunnels, and it may not fare too well during the next major storm, requiring lengthy, expensive repairs. But that's a far cry from "could collapse at any point").</comment>