What was Syria like before the war - <AUTHOR> https://searchingforsyria.org/en/what-was-syria-like-before-the-war/ <comment><USER2> I lived in Aleppo with my family 1962-1964. My dad was a US consul at the time. It's heartbreaking to see those pictures of that great city trashed. Half a century is a long time in the history of an American city, but the twinking of an eye in the history of Aleppo.

The people of the city were incredibly supportive of us -- their guests -- in the aftermath of JFK's murder. Strangers on the street came up to us to express condolences.

There was violence back then; the pan-Arab movement of Egyptian president Gamal abdel-Nasser was stirring up nationalist fervor, pro and con. He was frightening and annoying Hafez al-Assad, the father of the present ruler, so government forces were cracking down on Nasser supporters.

But nothing like this.

A family of Syrian refugees lives in my town, and I'm proud to call them friends. Their eldest daughter is pulling straight As in high school. They get hassled sometimes by 'murican yahoos, which is stupid, but still better than being in the Jordanian refugee camp they came from.

<comment><USER3> i am syrian from aleppo, so proud to hear someone talk nicely about my destroyed city, thanks man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was lucky enough to have visited Syria in 2009. I spent 3 weeks in Damascus. My impressions at the time:

        * The pepole were surprisingly westernised
        * Most younger people spoke great English
        * Alcohol was available, but limited because *most* people didn't drink (instead people socialised in tea halls)
        * Cheap oil meant that the taxi to the burger joint cost less than the burger did
        * The people were extremely friendly
        * I never felt unsafe
        * The city was extremely clean
        * ...however, the air was polluted
        * Bakdash pistachio ice-cream was AMAZINGLY good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakdash_(ice_cream_parlor)
        * The old city was beautiful and packed with history...
        * One day we rented a van to see some surrounding areas. The driver was extremely friendly. He showed us around and told us about the history of the places. I still have very fond memories of that desert trip

I had never considered visiting there before that, but left thinking I'd love to come back. I guess that's no longer possible and I shudder to think that everything I saw might be destroyed and wonder if the people I met are ok. It really was an incredible place.

The signs of the Assad regime were everywhere: posters of Bashar al-Assad were everywhere and armed police on most street corners. Beyond that, it felt very _normal_ (from a westerners perspective) and I never felt like I was in (what the US calls) a "rogue state".

<comment><USER5> Yeah, this mirrors my impression. It was unequivocally a controlled society : one simply didn't speak about the regime in anything less than absolutely glowing terms. The threat of the secret police was persistent.

As far as the people go, your odds of being hustled in Syria were pretty high (but not any worse than, say, Thailand) - other than that I totally agree wrt the westernization and general pleasantness.

I don't think it's really possible to argue the country is in any way better off than it was before the insurrection. I don't want to trivialize the experience of living in a police state, but there are worse things in this world.

<comment><USER6>
        I don't think it's really possible to argue the
        country is in any way better off than it was
        before the insurrection.

The question is then, what would have been a better solution? Surely as long as Assad was ruling they were stuck (at best) at a local maximum and would have never transitioned to a free democracy without overthrowing the current government.

<comment><USER7>
       as long as Assad was ruling

Assad's secular dictatorship is massively preferable to ISIS rule, especially to the 25% of the Syrian population that are non-Sunni.

<comment><USER8> Sigh, it seems so surreal now that the Arab Spring was once cheered on by the whole world.

Edit: word

<comment><USER9> The less Arab revolutions were stomped on, the more favorable was the outcome. The progression from Tunisa through Egypt and Lybia to Syria is quite evident.

What's really surreal is so many people in the (still relatively free) West denying basic agency to their fellow human beings in the Middle East.

<comment><USER8> > so many people in the (still relatively free) West denying basic agency to > their fellow human beings

Because there's a lot of cynicism with charities and foreign aid. There is an active campaign here in Britain to reduce the latter and anecdotally, I have friends and relatives who refuse to donate to aid agencies because they believe that the whole thing is a sham.

Sure there's bureaucracy, but most of them are genuinely hardworking and already operating on shoestring budgets...

<comment><USER10> You could point them to clearinghouses like CharityNavigator [0] (which is probably US-centric) that rate the charities on things like how much of their donations go to administration.

The short of it is that one can donate to Oxfam, Save the Children or Medecins san Frontieres and remain confident that >95% of funds raised go to direct relief efforts.

[0][https://www.charitynavigator.org/](https://www.charitynavigator.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Meta-commentary: This is one of the more fascinating threads I have seen on HN. It seems to parallel many of the problems with political discourse in the world today - maybe it's always been like this, but I'm not old enough to know.

I would break down the comments into several types:

1) conspiracy theorists who believe in some secret cult that is unilaterally organizing everything

2) trolls - state sponsored or otherwise pushing an anti-humanitarian cause. They are throwing chaff into the discussion to confuse and disorient and to detract from the real issues.

3) people with experience in these events trying desperately to be heard - these are the people meant to be drowned out by the trolls

4) alarmists - people with relatively little knowledge of the actual goings-on who insist that every minor event is the end of the world (or Syria). I'm not saying that Syria hasn't been decimated, but that it was (and is) a process not an event

5) the rest of everyone who is trying to make heads or tails of things and seems to fall into one of those camps.

So, to one of the brighter communities on the internet (that's you HN) I ask: how do we (humanity) convey a full, factual picture to one another so that we may use those facts in conjunction with our values to agree or disagree with one another?

<comment><USER12> What I find interesting about the Syrian issue is that it is becoming increasingly clear that diplomacy, the UN, media exposure etc is failing. Despite this "humanitarian crisis" (which I fully agree is reaching crisis levels), my impression is that almost all the media outlets and pundits are ignoring the obvious solution to this problem... unilateral US military intervention (and before we go there... keep in mind that if that doesnt solve the problem, nothing can).

So the question I have for the parent is as follows: how far do things have to deteriorate before military intervention is the only viable and recommended solution?

It is 100% within the means of the United States to end this situation.

<comment><USER13> What would such an intervention involve? Shoot the bad guys? Which are the bad guys and how do soldiers identify them?

<comment><USER14> If by the bad guys you mean only ISIS (and not Assad's or the rebel forces), that's what the people currently fighting there are doing. Why would it be harder for US soldiers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish there were more definite sources detailing what the actual conflict is about. People are giving all sorts of accounts online and it seems to be divided into a few camps:

1) western and sunni middle eastern press: it's all Assad's (government's) fault. People want democracy. Specifically this is supposed to be a response to violent repression of pro-democracy protests from March 2011.

Problem: very hard to believe. The attitude of the government against the people of Syria has not changed, and the "protesters" do not seem very pro- democracy at all.

Second problem: the middle eastern press (al Jazeera) is owned by a government that would stand to benefit substantially from the pipeline issue. Even aside from the pipeline, that government is involved in funding the exremists in Syria.

2) shi'a middle eastern press

Coordinated Sunni attack against one of the two last multicultural/tolerant middle eastern Countries (the other one being Iran, and while Israel is multicultural/tolerant Iran doesn't see it that way). It's an attack to massacre the last vestiges of tolerance in the middle east.

Problem: obviously this is state propaganda. That doesn't mean it's not true, of course, but there are military interests at stake by the same people who own these press.

3) Russian press (there were/are hundreds of thousands of Russians from the Soviet union who lived in Syria)

This is a coordinated assault against the last Russian ally on the mediterranean. They note the same as the Shi'a press does (attack on tolerance for non-Sunnis), and also note the pipeline project that would deliver oil from.

Problem: of course this too is state propaganda.

4) Catholic information sources (there is/was no shortage of Monasteries in Syria)

Well-funded Sunni extremists attacking (and killing) everyone in sight, with no identifiable cause. Ethnic cleansing, including even of Sunni's that don't want to fight for them. They seem to disagree with the notions that the fighters care about either Russian interests, or the pipeline (though the funding parties might think differently)

Problem: They're not very willing to come forward with information, and the few times they do they say they really fear retaliation. The ones that come forward are refugees.

<comment><USER16> Not that I have followed it that closely, but of course it's not a black vs white conflict, more like several factions wanting to win power/suppress their enemies.

I think it started as a demonstration against the corrupt Assad that turned violent when his army started shooting. The "rebels" picked up arms and probably brutally kills pro-government soldiers/citizens, so they are not saints either. Meanwhile ISIS takes advantage of the chaos to try to win control of regions. The Kurds are fighting them because there's probably a Kurdish area in Syria? But Erdogan doesn't like a Kurdish rise, so he's probably quietly looking the other way as European ISIS sympathisers travel via Turkey in and out of Syria. Russia wants Assad to stay in power because he's a puppet, so he's bombing "rebels" and ISIS.

We haven't even mentioned Iran and the USA. As this report [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/16/world/middlee...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/16/world/middleeast/untangling- the-overlapping-conflicts-in-the-syrian-war.html?_r=0) says, in one side of the conflict USA (at least Obama's USA) is working with Russia, in another side they're backing opposing sides.

<comment><USER7>
       started as a demonstration
       against the corrupt Assad

It's unlikely that this was spontaneous, and most likely the first public result of a planned and well-funded regime-change operation.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, never in the history of mankind has anyone protested without being paid by George Soros, right?

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure in what sense your answer is a constructive contribution.

There is a long history of engineering 'grassroots movements' toward overthrowing governments. All powers have been engaging in this practise, and you can find how-to manuals -- I recommend reading some, it's highly enlightening. For example many of the de-colonialisation movements in the second part of the 20th century were actively run by the Soviet Union, leading to such absurdities as Cabo Verde becoming an independent state.

Clearly various powers had strategic interests in destabilisation of Assad. [1] is an interesting document in this direction.

[1] [https://wikileaks.org/clinton- emails/emailid/18328](https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328)

<comment> shaki-dora That document doesn't prove anything. It's clearly an email send to Clinton, so it doesn't reflect her views any more than whatever spam she got. Plus there's actually nothing nefarious in there. Nobody is disputing that the US government's position is and has always been that Assad needs to go.

If it were written with more than public knowledge, it would actually proof that the US and Clinton did not organise any sorts of fake-grassroots protests, considering the document is arguing for US engagement against Assad a full year after the war started,

<comment><USER7>
       doesn't prove anything.

The world of regime change isn't one where things are "proved". The Wikileaks mail I cited gives evidence, plausibility. That's the best we can hope for.

Your counterevidence is not going to be a proof in ZFC set theory either ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In 2010, before this war, the BBC produced a 5-part documentary series called "Syrian School" -doing a fly-on-the-wall in four schools in Damascus. I only saw half of it, but looking back it is heart breaking. The short answer is, day-to-day life in a Syrian school was very similar and recognisable to e.g. the UK. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUDxznlkm6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUDxznlkm6Y)

</comment><comment><USER19> Not Syria but Syrian music, from Aleppo to be precise. I saw the Al-Kindi Ensemble ([http://www.alkindi.org/](http://www.alkindi.org/)) many years ago, and you can find an album on Spotify.

The whole evening was enchanting, and reading up on their story, then seeing footage of Aleppo, I realised how completely gone all that old beauty is. Daesh hates them too, no doubt, but then that's their thing.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is totally off topic (and may _even_ be taken to be insensitive considering the plight of the Syrian people), but I had to ask: is there any way that you/anyone/HNer could offer suggestions on how to deploy such a site for a non-developer...are there free/self-hosted themes and/or frameworks whose installation and use is noob-friendly enough to lend themselves well to interactive storytelling...? Any help/pointers would be immensely appreciated.

<comment><USER21> From a "I think it's more technical" to "I think it's less technical" order:

* This website uses fullPage.js [1], which is a widely used javascript library for such full screen presentation (for instance Apple use it in their Mac Pro promo page [2]). You can get around it's API if you know a little HTML and a little javascript, but it's still a lot of manual work. And the neatier features are locked behind a (totally justified) paywall.

* One neat generator I know is Jack Qiao's Expose[3] which he mainly uses in his travel photography website [4]. Check out those sweet cinemagraphs ! Unfortunately it is a command-line program which may be a bit obtuse to non-developer (especially on Windows), and the text placement has to be set manually

* Shameless plug: as a side project, I made a clone of Expose in Python [5] (demo [6]) with no video support but explicit Markdown support (so you can embed maps, youtube videos and others ). It's still a command line app, but I'm working on a second version that uses Electron and has a more WYSIWYG approach. It is still very much a side project though.

* You could look at some web-based presentation framework. Slid.es [7] is an WYSIWYG builder for the reveal.js library [8]. It's mainly used for Powerpoint-ish presentation (ex. [9][10]), but with a touch of creativity you can do neat thing, like this portfolio [11].

[1]: [https://alvarotrigo.com/fullPage/](https://alvarotrigo.com/fullPage/)

[2]: [https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/](https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/)

[3]: [https://github.com/Jack000/Expose](https://github.com/Jack000/Expose)

[4]: [http://jack.ventures/](http://jack.ventures/)

[5]: [https://github.com/PetitPrince/pyxpose](https://github.com/PetitPrince/pyxpose)

[6]: [http://petitprince.github.io/pyxpose- demo/gallery.html](http://petitprince.github.io/pyxpose-demo/gallery.html)

[7]: [https://slides.com/](https://slides.com/)

[8]: [https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js](https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js)

[9]: [http://motivate.slides.com/motivateco/deck-8-9#/](http://motivate.slides.com/motivateco/deck-8-9#/)

[10]: [https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world- poverty/](https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-poverty/)

[11]: [http://ianspiro.com/portfolio/](http://ianspiro.com/portfolio/)

EDIT: Whoa, paradite mentionned Pageflow. This seems really neat !

<comment><USER22> There was a huge discussion of scrollytelling (company creating propitiatory interactives with Pageflow) accusing Al-Jazeera of using their code:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524998)

[https://www.scrollytelling.io/al- jazeera.html](https://www.scrollytelling.io/al-jazeera.html)

That's when I learnt about Pageflow.

<comment><USER20> Hi paradite.

Pardon the late reply, I have set up fairly aggressive noprocrast settings which means that I am not always in a position to reply immediately.

Pageflow is especially neat: the pages load fast, the pricing is friendly, and the company can self-host the page. Thank you for taking the time to reply- will be checking this out with my buddy over the weekend.

PetitPrince also provides appealing options, some more noob friendly than the others... I will take the time to download the git repos and see just how successful I can be installing/deploying the code.

All in all, thank you guys for reaching with helpful suggestions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Refugee stats:

3.6 Women and Children

1.6 Men

God, I hate stats like these, why is it so hard to break up men, women and children separately to give more insight. Women are not the same as children.

Or is google trying to tell us that woman are basically, well, children?

<comment><USER24> UNHCR has detailed stats, here: [http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php](http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php)

If you draw the line at age 18: Roughly, 27% male adults, 25.5% female adults, 47% children.

<comment><USER25> I think it was done to appease people. I have an impression most would feel more compassionate knowing that there are little men, since they tend to cause more issues. Though when you split the stats, you see there's actually more men than women refugee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The funny thing that this site is forbidden in Syria (By Google themselvs).

I am currently in Syria, tried opening it, it gave me 403 response (As all sites based on Google cloud services do)

</comment><comment><USER27> A few links from Russian fotoblog:

[http://www.tema.ru/travel/syria-1/](http://www.tema.ru/travel/syria-1/)

[http://www.tema.ru/travel/syria-2/](http://www.tema.ru/travel/syria-2/)

[http://www.tema.ru/travel/syria-3/](http://www.tema.ru/travel/syria-3/)

</comment><comment><USER28> >Meet 7-year-old Bana, who shared her experience of war on Twitter.

It's like the movie Wag the Dog. Sad to exploit a child like this.

<comment><USER17> She posted on Twitter:

> Why would they bomb us and kill innocent people everyday? > \- Bana

So I doubt that being "exploited" by the evil UN anti-warmongerers is of particular concern to her. I'd even guess she would want to help to stop this, and prevent further atrocities of this magnitude.

You've really gotten away with the wrong lessons from Wag the Dog if you consider this exploitative. The problem in WtD was that it was intended to rouse nationalistic furore justifying a military intervention. This is intended to produce goodwill for refugees.

And, of course, the problem in Wag the Dog was that the girl was an actress in California, and there was no war.

Are you doubting that there is a war in Syria?

<comment><USER28> Well I mean this, and it's just the info you find on wikipedia, there is more:

> Observers have questioned whether Bana understands the concepts that she > tweets about. She is a seven-year-old child who does not speak English. A > journalist for The New Yorker noted that her "video statements often have a > scripted quality, as if she is being coached by her mother to communicate > her thoughts in a language that she is only beginning to learn."

> In a now deleted tweet, Bana said it is "better to start 3rd world war > instead of letting Russia & assad commit #HolocaustAleppo".

> In a separate incident, Bana appeared on Turkish television program Channel > TV, where she was asked what her favorite food was, and she replied, "Save > the children of Syria".

"Bana" is a media campaign.

>The problem in WtD was that it was intended to rouse nationalistic furore justifying a military intervention.

Yes

<comment><USER29> ""Bana" is a media campaign."

A child.

<comment><USER30> "Bana" is both a real child and very likely a well resourced propaganda operation.

<comment><USER31> So many conspiracies!

I simply must put on my white helmet to keep out the radiation..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I covered what it was like growing up in Syria before the war with fellow software developer Nada in my podcast if you'd like an in depth answer from an actual Syrian: [https://mattfraser.co.nz/2017/04/08/s1e1-syrian-woman- nada/](https://mattfraser.co.nz/2017/04/08/s1e1-syrian-woman-nada/)

<comment><USER33> Thanks for this. It's always great to hear personal experiences.

I read an interview of a female architect still living in Syria. If anyone has a source, I would appreciate it.

If I recall correctly, she said what follows. I hope I am not putting words into her mouth.

She had been urged to get out of the country. She chose to stay as she wanted to be involved in rebuilding her city.

She criticised those who wanted to go back to what it was like before the uprising. She said that all was not nice in the past.

She pointed to the corruption in the exam system. She pointed to the fact that people could not travel freely throughout the city, as different parts of the city were controlled by different factions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The UN is not objective. They keep repeating the "peaceful protests" thing, but what sort of peaceful protests would aim to take down the president by force ? I'm not an Assad supporter but come on, we saw how that peaceful protests ended up in Libya; France was doing air strike to stop the Libya government to interrupt the protests, people killed their former leader with their bare hands.

The only peaceful end during the Arab spring was in Tunisia as their former president escaped in the beginning. A coalition of western countries took over their country to "establish democracy", and now Tunisian people are letting Europe teach them how to be a democracy. It's not free of course. I met bunch of Danish people getting paid really well for working for Tunisian government, as a part of the transition.

Syria was a failure for whoever organized Arab spring. Assad gave a CNN interview in the beginning of the war, saying that he'll lead the transition to democracy. But, he'll fight whoever choose violence. Whoever organized those protests already wanted a war, so it didn't matter what Assad said. Please go back to 2011 editions of your favorite western papers and look at the news about Syria, reporters based in London were hysterically telling people about how peaceful protesters in Syria are being killed by a demon, Assad. Same propaganda machine most recently made campaigns about a group called White Helmets, founded by James Le Mesurier, a well known MI6 agent.

I traveled three times during the war to the Turkey - Syrian border, volunteered in the refugee camps there. There was not even one UN tent although every year they make big promises such as water pipeline, schools, etc. If you look at UNCHR website, you'll see they are asking money for regions where they don't even report from because they got no volunteers there at all. Later, I traveled to other middle eastern countries around Syria and met chance to meet UN volunteers, told them my observation about their operation. They explained me how they basically count victims and collect money. They bring an NBA or Hollywood star to one of the camps in either Iraq or Lebanon, take some photos and fill the pockets with millions of money that will be spent in 5 star hotels, business class flight tickets, western bars and restaurants in the wealthy neighborhoods of poor middle eastern towns.

If you're looking for truth, don't expect these corrupt organizations to tell you, do some research. Who was the US foreign minister during arab spring, who has been backing his/her political campaigns ? If you find this name, all you need is to research that person and find out what he has been organizing "peaceful protests that turn to violent" all over the world, from Ukraina to Egypt, from Libya to Syria.

<comment><USER17> What a load of conspiracy-bullshit:

>If you're looking for truth, don't expect these corrupt organizations to tell you, do some research.

Here's the data, from the horses' mouth: [http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php](http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php). UNHCR runs accommodation for half a million refugees. More importantly, they have changed tactics in the last decades, and are trying to get refugees to live among the normal population, instead of tent cities.

If you doubt their numbers, a simple search on youtube will give you hundreds of videos from UNHCR camps. Are they all fake? Here's one of many: [https://youtu.be/04sN1xn5tTQ?t=3m17s](https://youtu.be/04sN1xn5tTQ?t=3m17s)

> Who was the US foreign minister during arab spring, who has been backing > his/her political campaigns ? If you find this name, all you need is to > research that person and find out what he has been organizing "peaceful > protests that turn to violent" all over the world, from Ukraina to Egypt, > from Libya to Syria.

Ohh, now I get it! It's the evil zionist George Soros, isn't it? Yes, I'm sure it's Hilary Clinton's jewish conspiracy that started all this.

<comment><USER35> How does a civilian population suddenly get a bunch of training and weapons all of the sudden? Why are (or were) so many of the "upset civilians" of foreign origin?

Cmmon, no need to yell "tinfoil hat Zionist Clinton Soros conspiracy theorist"! in an attempt to discredit. That doesn't help the "story".

It's plainly obvious there are a number of interested parties who are participating by proxy. Or openly even. There is nothing conspiratorial about that. It's pretty obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This focuses on the tragedy but is unrealistic about the social reality. Syria has been loaded with sectarian divisions and strife for thousands of years. Many of the clans fighting in this war have been in conflict for very long periods of time already. The quote peace unquote that existed in Syria did so in large part because the leadership had so aggressively murdered its detractors. It is true that much has been lost, but it is false that this is all some kind of strange mystery that was put upon Syria from the outside. Conflicts festered in Syria for a very long time and eventually without adequate solutions bubbled over and initiated this catastrophe.

</comment><comment><USER37> I visited for a couple of months just before the war. Such an amazing country with beautiful ancient cities.

Here are some photos I posted a while ago from a similar thread:

[http://imgur.com/a/gkqlj#0](http://imgur.com/a/gkqlj#0)

</comment><comment><USER38> Highly recommended read (and less political than the title might imply): [https://theringer.com/syria-barack-obama- legacy-853644abdd1b](https://theringer.com/syria-barack-obama- legacy-853644abdd1b)

The author has some great personal stories of what it was like to visit family in Syria under the Assad regime.

</comment><comment><USER39> Would love to read this, but no scrollbar. I don't like websites dictating to me how I should consume content.

<comment><USER40> Not the time...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nice presentation. First time I ever saw a web site use phone's gyrometer to rotate around for 360 view.

<comment><USER42> Have you seen hypernom.com for visualizing 4 dimensions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I dislike intellectually dishonest titles, that try to hide the humanitarian or politically oriented motif.

In this instance, much of the material is not about what Syria was like before, but about the horrors of war. And that Syrians are great refugees to have...

a) they do not really want to leave Syria and live in first world countries

b) they are more educated than Americans... With a strange 'inference and comparasing'

" .. 18 in 100 Syrians* have advanced degree vs 11 in 100 Americans ..." *Based on Syrian immigrants living in the US

What does it even mean? Syrian refugees have a projected higher contribution to US economy than Americans?

Overall, the article should have been in Arabic, English, Spanish and Chinese.

The article should have been labeled: "50 great reasons why you should want displaced Syrian refugees to immigrate into your country..."

</comment><comment><USER44> It's an interesting article, but they really should have stayed away from the fancy navigation. I found it so unusable on my ipad that I gave up halfway through.

</comment><comment><USER45> Syria was and still is beautiful and very rich in culture.

Just a pro-Assad post

Although it is a very complicated conflict, I would argue that most Syrians like Assad and not "just speak good because their afraid of the secret police". Just by looking at the videos [1] [2] which capture refugees voting, we can see genuinely excited people going to vote in someone they always believed. Even mainstream outlets had difficulty to capture otherwise. You can see in several places people talking like few would do of their own presidents. Obviously it was not the perfect country like every other, and there was people dissatisfied. But what the rebels want is not democracy, is Assad out. And Islamic law.

[1] Massive turnout for Syrian vote in Lebanon [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgx6ZmWywM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgx6ZmWywM)

[2] Syrians abroad begin casting votes in presidential election [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyD61Q5KVNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyD61Q5KVNk)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXt5MhiPHas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXt5MhiPHas)

Syrian to BBC Reporter: "You Are Not Telling the Truth About Syria" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKjsjEJDMUk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKjsjEJDMUk)

Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrian...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrians- support-assad-western-propaganda)

Syria: Damascus celebrates as Assad wins re-election [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zufjMn8Jf0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zufjMn8Jf0)

Dr. Bashar Hafez al-Assad wins post of President of Syria with sweeping majority of votes at 88.7% [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-e7W_INzbo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-e7W_INzbo)

Syria Election Celebrations 2014/06/05 إحتفالات سوريا بفوز الرئيس بشار الأسد بالإنتخابات [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsgEJvAMt4s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsgEJvAMt4s)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6jMxI16VAg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6jMxI16VAg)

Video Pro-Assad used mistakenly by anti-Assad [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X18sC1kCoK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X18sC1kCoK0)

Pro Assad Rally - 03a - Aleppo, 19-10-2011 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3f9QB_z- _Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3f9QB_z-_Q)

Pro Assad Rally Damascus, Syria [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsDP8S3ry1A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsDP8S3ry1A)

Millions attend pro-Assad rally [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEFfdTNaqk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEFfdTNaqk)

</comment><comment><USER29> "I wish there were more definite sources detailing what the actual conflict is about. "

The death of Hamza Khateeb[1] comes to mind. Political and civil unrest was already underway, but the open violence against civilians including children sent Syria down a path. The government butchered that child among others caught for demonstrations or showing dissent.

"The attitude of the government against the people of Syria has not changed"

Laughable commentary in the face of regular chemical weapons attacks by the regime and it's paramilitary forces/Hezbollah allies.

This is a government that besieges and pummels civilian areas with indiscriminate weapons until they accept forced displacement under the 'reconciliation' campaign. To say it's attitude has not changed since before the protests is absurd.

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

<comment><USER15> > The death of Hamza Khateeb

Ok, but how do you go from that to islamic state ? And frankly, how does a protest like that get organised in the first place by the locals ?

> regular chemical weapons attacks by the regime

Maybe I'm misinformed, but I seem to only recall that the government was accused of doing this once. This is neither regular, nor was it the cause of the conflict.

<comment><USER46> > Ok, but how do you go from that to islamic state ?

How did Trump win the election?

<comment><USER47> Collusion of the DNC and Hillary campaign to hurt Sanders, Hillary's not ever turning over her work emails when she was done at the State department, Clinton's universal college plan which would bankrupt the United States... and it goes on and on.

<comment><USER48> Nobody seems to care what _Trump_ does with his emails: [https://thenextweb.com/politics/2017/01/26/trump-staffers- in...](https://thenextweb.com/politics/2017/01/26/trump-staffers-insecure- email-gmail/)

More generally, he's been even more disastrous than people campaigning against him expected, up to the point of letting Russian intelligence wander around the Oval Office and take pictures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Wow, I'd love to check this out but I got this message:

"It looks like you're using an older device or web browser. Please update your browser or visit on a newer device."

A bit of an odd thing to see when I'm on the latest version of Chrome on a Mac and it says "In partnership with Google" right under that. What gives?

<comment><USER50> Same.

Working on my phone, I think it's mobile only?

<comment><USER51> It isn't mobile only. I visited it using Chrome Version 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit) on Windows 10. Works fine.

<comment><USER49> Version 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit), except I'm on a Mac. Is it possible they've got a bug that misidentifies Mac browsers?

<comment><USER51> They probably assumed everyone using Mac is using Safari. I have seen lots of code shared on programming forums that simply check for Mac and assume the person is using Safari.

<comment><USER17> Then you should read better "programming forums", because I haven't seen anything like that since the late 1990s, and it's preposterous to think that something produced with this level of quality would commit such atrocities.

Also, it does work on Chrome, Chromium, Firefox.

<comment><USER51> One of those forums was Stackoverflow. I don't know a better programming Q&A forum than SO. Please share so that I can switch to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> For the record: I don't think that Mid-East is ready for democracy yet (the majority wouldn't support basic human rights IMO) so the biggest mistake was for the "West" to support the Arab Spring. Yeah, those dictators were bad, but they were predictably bad.

Nature abhors vacuum and radical Islam is filling in.

P.S. I don't care about down votes.

<comment><USER32> Iran had democracy in 1953. The democratically elected prime minister was overthrown in a coup that was orchestrated by the CIA in order to protect the profits of BP. This isn't a conspiracy, this information has since been declassified. Look it up on Wikipedia. If there's any truth to your statement that the middle east "can't handle democracy" it's in no small part due to our interference.

<comment><USER52> Name one Mid-east democracy right now that "we" would want to live in /where basic human rights are protected 1

1\. Minus Israel....not that it fits my description.

<comment><USER53> So what?

1764 America was a subjugated colony of a monarch, I'd hate to live there. 1863 America was embroiled in Civil War, I'd hate to live there. 2017 America? Democratic global superpower, lots of room for improvement but I still love living here.

What about Germany? 1944 Germany was a fascist racist shithole. 2017 Germany is one of the leaders of the free world.

We don't control the past... shit happened, get over it. We learn, mature, and build the future.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do you have what it takes to build a great site? (Flowchart) - <AUTHOR> http://vitamintalent.com/dotAsset/a5c1cbb1-d22b-455c-9d8c-215e7bf95adf

<comment><USER2> I think that, while the perfect solo developer/designer might have all of these characteristics, most "great" websites evolved from a lot of the negative endpoints in the chart. Basically, I wouldn't tell someone who asked me if they could make a great website "no" just because they don't fit all of the criteria off this chart.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't see the starting point of the flowchart. Is it just me?

I guess that means I have no hope ;)

<comment><USER4> The big node in the center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well... bartenders make pretty good tips.

</comment><comment><USER6> What in the world is a social genius?

</comment><comment><USER7> ...nothing wrong with ASP.NET.

<comment><USER8> Ehh, I used to work with ASP.NET at work, moved to ASP.NET MVC, and now I switched jobs and got stuck with the classic ASP.NET flavor again. As much as it pains me to admit it, it does feel "aged" and "legacy" to me these days.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs? - <AUTHOR> If we look at the current programming languages & frameworks, there is a trend away from dynamically typed languages and monolithic high productivity frameworks like Rails. Considering new famous languages, Go, Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Nim & Crystal, main focus seems to be on static typing & AOT compilation to improve performance. There is a definite push towards adopting functional paradigm mixed with OO, which seems to be a push towards improving accuracy and parallelism. However, there is little groundbreaking in order to increase programmer productivity by a huge margin. (Not discounting the memory safety and other improvements, but they seem incremental.)
On the other side, there is a definite shift towards "backendless" applications, where frontend talks directly to the DB, either via autogenerated ReST or GraphQL APIs or via proprietary tools like Cloud Firestore. This is good for MVPs.
Frameworks like React & Angular give you decent building blocks to create SPAs, but the learning curve & effort required to create ambitious applications is very high.
There is a proliferation of "Low Code" frameworks which allow you to design drag & drop UIs & connect them with APIs. But, it feels like going back to "RAD" tools for the late 90s which led to a lot of spaghetti code. Also, some of these are prohibitively expensive.
One noteworthy change is UI design products which are trying to produce the code from UI Mockups. Relatively primitive at this stage. A breakthrough here can definitely be a big productivity booster.
Another productivity booster is Cross-Platform frameworks. It's already here, tried & tested. We know the trade-offs well. It requires a huge amount of effort to create & maintain a cross-platform framework. Big companies are already tackling this.
Considering this background, what do you think will be a breakthrough innovation in programming which will enable programmers to deliver ambitious web/mobile apps at a very high speed. <comment><USER2> As I see it, the number one hurdle in software productivity is human understanding. The more understandable software is and the easier it is to make software understandable, the faster and more accurately it can be modified.

This is why functional models like React, DSL models like SQL, and constraint models are so widely used — they make what's happening in the software more understandable (at a worthwhile performance cost).

A few of my own contributions:

* Legible Mathematics: [http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/](http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/)

* Flowsheets – showing data as you program: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q)

* REPLugger – showing data as you program in large systems: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk)

* FuzzySet interactive code documentation: [http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/](http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/)

<comment><USER3> "human understanding" can wrap it self around very complex things. What I see is an endless repetition of: Lets rip out English and use Dutch from now on! Some time later: Laten we stoppen met Nederlands en op Chinees overstappen. Again, some time later: 让我们放弃中文并使用日语!

With the excuse being increased productivity because Japanese is easier to understand.

Assuming this would even be true it is only true if you put in the work.

Think of how many people use to know js and css. If they didn't pay close attention for say 10 years they are out. The effort put into progressing things failed to make things easy to use for them.

Therefore I think the future will be more about creating self explanatory tools.

All of the developer tools part of the OS smoothly working together without blaming the user for failing to live up to configuration challenges.

Make it so that we can put a newbie or a child in front of a highly complex repository and have him figure out how everything works without help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The cycle repeats over and over. Monolith becomes unmanageable and get chopped into loosely coupled, functionally independent replaceables: mainframes to containers, application servers to micro services, etc. Drag and drop coding hits the wall and gets overrun by old languages: 4GL to C++/Java, HyperCard to Objective C, etc. The monoliths are currently numerous in the single page application realm, choose your framework. Eventually these will succumb to smaller more flexible and purposeful components.

<comment> grumpy-cowboy Yes. Endless story. What I see in many of my clients projects (I'm a freelancer, 23+ years in IT) is a return to some kind of "monolith" applications.

They surfed on the "everything must be Google-scalable..." trends. They built hundreds of interconnected micro/nano-services, upgraded networking infrastructure ($$), OAuth federation, ...

What they've got? Network latency/congestion/..., security and API versionning management nightmare, unresponsive applications (tooooo manyyyy APIs calls), performance issues, circuit-breaker, caching, ... Ok you see the big picture.

Now, the returned back to a more "monolith" design. They merged many services together in one application (services that wasn't called by anything else). Everything doesn't need to be exposed as a service. This simplified security management, reduce a lot the network usage and simplified bugs investigation/fix.

The difference is that now, their new monolith designs are more modularized than before. Everything is now in a clear module (call it jar file, lib, package, ...) with a clear contract/interface. This is what I like to call "intra-services" : clear services/features separation minus the networking/security moving parts (and all band-aid solutions to support it like circuit-breakers, distributed caches, ...).

If one day you are the size of Google, Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, ... you will probably have the money/manpower to implement it the "Google way". Until then, KISS!

Note: English is not my first language.

<comment><USER5> Your English is very good considering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Another productivity booster is Cross-Platform frameworks.

I would be so, so happy to see a UI framework that runs (well) on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. My druthers would be for it to have bondings to a JVM language (Kotlin is my happy place these days), but I would be okay writing in any similarly productive language.

Flutter is trying to get there, but it's not a viable solution on the desktop yet, and somehow doesn't even have a decent HTML widget. I do like Dart, however; it's similar enough to Kotlin/Swift that I'm comfortable writing it, even if I have to look up exact syntax now and then.

Electron wants to solve this problem, but we all know the arguments about its bloated runtime and egg-cooking power usage.

I suppose Progressive Web Apps and WebAssembly have the potential to solve this, too.

<comment><USER7> (Serious question) Isn't this what Java UI frameworks (swing/javafx/etc) are supposed to address? It's been a while since I've been in the JVM universe so I'm genuinely curious.

Also, what about Xamarin/C#? Going from Kotlin to C# should be pretty smooth and Xamarin is supposed to be pretty usable.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and I've done a lot of GUI work in Swing. The main issue is that Swing doesn't run on Android and iOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a lot of comments so far, but a few people are talking about stuff that is in the general vein of better tooling and code generation/automation through deeper code understanding by our tooling.

I think that this sentiment is interesting, because the way I see it, this can only happen if we continue the trend of transitioning to static typing.

We can't really do much more for dynamic language tooling today than we are already doing unless we solve the halting problem. The very nature of the problem (of providing smarter tooling) requires us to be able to gather metadata about our code, without having to execute it. This means static information.

We have invented all sorts of schemes circumvent this problem, like the plethora of documentation generation tools that exist. Of course, there is more to documentation than just information about the types of the arguments of functions and such, so documentation tools will always have their place. But I contend that a large part of the benefit a lot of the documentation provides for many languages is simply typing information. And I also believe that with well engineered type systems and API typings, the types themselves can provide enough information to use a lot of APIs without having to reach for external documentation.

Or to paraphrase: in any code documentation generation tool for a dynamic language, there is a half-finished implementation of a badly formalized, insufficiently powerful static type system.

Typescript's huge rise in popularity seems to suggest that a lot of people used mostly to dynamic languages really wanted static typing all this time but just didn't know.

I think if we could combine some of the concepts of typescript with Haskell's type system, so that we can have both nominal and structural typing, we would have power to challenge the gods. If we are able to harness all the information in such a type system, we could provide very powerful tooling that will basically be able to write code for us, as long as the types are right (automatically filling typed holes).

I am obviously a proponent of static typing, but I'd be interested in hearing if there's someone on the other side of the fence that has some ideas for how we can improve upon dynamic language productivity without solving the halting problem.

<comment><USER9> Static typing is in my opinion the lazy language designer's way out. Yes, it allows for some introspection but only because the programmer has to type in all this type information! In 2019, we can do so much better.

For example, development consists of typing some code, running it, typing some more, running it again and so on. The run time likely already guesses (correctly) the types of most variables for optimization purposes. But then this information is thrown away for no good reason. It can trivially be reused to provide context-sensitive auto-completion and other features.

In general, why is editing, compilation and running still treated as three separate steps? Clearly, a lot of information could flow from each step to the other. It's not like a programmer compartmentalizes the job in that way. To him or her its one task which is to write software.

And why on earth do we tolerate editors that doesn't know what a "size" is? Every half-decent programmer knows "size" is a positive integer. Just as we know that "filename" is a string, "temperature" a real and "is_complete" a boolean value. But the editor doesn't. When I write mail_recepient for the umpteenth time it doesn't even try to help me! There is so much low-hanging fruit here just waiting for someone to make better.

<comment><USER10> You should google "hindley milner"

<comment><USER11> And refinement types

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > breakthrough innovation in programming which will enable programmers to > deliver ambitious web/mobile apps at a very high speed.

That's a pretty narrow framing. 10 years from now, a lot of programming won't look like traditional application development at all. For example, a self- driving car or other machine with a similar level of automation is a valuable product that requires a lot of programming but doesn't fit into the category of "web/moble app." Or consider the development of natural language interfaces: right now this is at the level of Alexa skills, but over the next 10 years we will see frameworks that allow programmers to specify not just a few phrases, but mini-languages for entire domains: pilots talking to airplanes, doctors talking to EMRs, etc.

Use cases like this suggest that frameworks similar to PyTorch/Tensorflow will become increasingly important. These frameworks have features (particularly automatic differentiation, very sophisticated yet easy-to-use SGD optimizers like Adam, and built-in GPU support), which hugely increase productivity and lower the barrier to entry compared to the tools of 10 years ago yet they still have tons of rough edges. Its easy to imagine that 10 years from now they'll be even more powerful and easier to use; for example I'm pretty excited about the future possibilities of tools like [AutoGraph][AG].

[AG]: [https://medium.com/tensorflow/autograph-converts-python- into...](https://medium.com/tensorflow/autograph-converts-python-into- tensorflow-graphs-b2a871f87ec7)

</comment><comment><USER13> 40 hour max work weeks enforced and 4 day work weeks. Shifts for people that need to monitor ops.

Offices for everyone on staff that like to work in a quiet place and pubic areas for people who like to work in those places .

Also, the minimization of time spent in meetings .

<comment><USER14> > Also, the minimization of time spent in meetings

I would argue that this should be "the minimization of unstructured/unguided/unclear meetings".

Tbh I've seen a non-trivial number of instances where engineers have wasted their own time or someone else's by not participating in organizational meetings - either by doing redundant work or having an unclear image of priorities/blockers/help needed.

Nobody want's to waste time in meetings, and most people who call meetings can't run them well. BUT having a well planned and executed meeting (30 mins tops) can save hours if not tens of hours of work time per week.

I also believe that the "just let the devs do dev work and avoid meetings" mantra is border-line meme status and (in my opinion) stems from toxic anti- social behavior, rather than efficiency. However, I also believe that meeting time per week should have an upper-bound (something like 4-6 hours, including a 15-min daily standup) to better enforce efficiency, rather than throwing 1-hour meetings all over the place and hoping they don't use all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The gains from every developer having really good go-to-definition and find- references for all languages and code bases would be immense. The Language Server Protocol (LSP) from Microsoft has standardized a way for languages to provide these features, and more and more editor and language implementations are being built.

<comment><USER16> Like [https://sourcegraph.com](https://sourcegraph.com) ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some other reinvented wheel that makes one thing 10x easier but takes five years to build up an infrastructure from scratch for everything else that real programs need (an infrastructure that was already present in whatever the new thing replaced). Let a bit more time pass to forget a few other things, rinse and repeat. In other words, no net productivity gains, just churn.

<comment><USER18> Came here to say this, but I'm not _quite_ that cynical. No revolutionary change, but there will be incremental improvement. (On the other hand, we're going to keep tackling harder things, so the net gain in the rate programs are produced will be zero or negative.)

I also like the point that the "revolution" is in one aspect, not the whole thing, and it requires changing other aspects, and is therefore much less of a net win than it appears...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The pendulum is now swinging back to types. Because it's a pendulum, in 5-10 years the next hot productivity thing is going to be dynamic, type-free languages.

I still remember when people were excited by the productivity gains from Ruby. "No time wasted wrestling with casts and typing".

<comment><USER20> Rather than a pendulum, I think the reality is that typed languages are now going through a significant period of evolution, especially with the advent of _gradual_ typing. TypeScript, for example, is just a superset of JavaScript, but with a compiler that's smart enough to infer many of the underlying types from context. The notion of rigorous, strong typing has always been marred by the concept of casting, but this is practically nonexistent in a gradually typed languages. Do you get the same degree of rigor? Perhaps not, but you do benefit from some of the guarantees made by the compiler.

The underlying trend here is toward more pragmatic language design, and I think this is definitely a trend that will continue in the near future (5-10 years).

<comment><USER21> Agreed. It seems typed languages are adding a lot of features that made dynamic languages interesting. You can see the same in databases where SQL engines are adding features from NoSQL.

Overall I feel there is much more language development going on now compared to may 2000-2010. I am not a big fan of JavaScript but I feel its rise has put pressure on other languages to keep up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> WebAssembly as the prevailing cross-platform VM and used as the main distribution mechanism for most applications.

<comment><USER23> We're gonna need a lot of quality abstractions between now and then and pray we don't end in feature-flag fragmentation hell where those applications end up with specific, non-cross-platform requirements.

<comment><USER24> I'm picturing a situation like the old Java app that handles remote console on some HP ILOs where you have to have a certain version of Java installed using a certain browser with a whole bunch of security exceptions manually entered. I know it's being planned specifically to avoid these situations, but that was the goal of Java, too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't think programming productivity gains are coming.

I see webassembly terribly fragmenting the frontend skill distribution, not in a good way.

I see the next generation of programmers more populated by tech debt creators and less accepting of mentorship.

I see non-volatile storage gains dramatically changing how OSs think about RAM and storage, even to the point that we might see RAM mostly vanish (unless you need volatility, like crypto keys), and machine shutdown/startup becoming instant. As non-volatile storage continues to approach RAM latency, we'll need a new generation of operating systems and probably programming languages too.

I see people continuing to overpay for PaaS systems that can't scale, creating software that's ever more difficult to change and tightly coupled to proprietary cloud systems.

<comment><USER26> > I see the next generation of programmers more populated by tech debt > creators and less accepting of mentorship

Yep - even as a youngin' I'm seeing this happen rapidly with tech being the new "hotness" that everyone wants to jump on career-wise. With 6mo bootcamps, Udemy, etc people think you can just jump RIGHT into the industry. And they're right - with the wrong interview panel it's easy for a near zero-experience person to get in the door because so many companies are focused on increasing engineer headcount vs focusing on the quality of their teams.

Honestly I've made a _lucrative_ career out of dealing with tech debt that other engineers/teams have left behind due to bludgeoning their way through the process with tools they've only used once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> TypeScript revolutionized the act of writing JavaScript

React and JSX revolutionized the act of writing HTML

GraphQL revolutionized the act of connecting front end and back end

But for CSS... SASS, SCSS, LESS, and such are by comparison pretty pedestrian tweaks on vanilla CSS

<comment><USER28> I think that CSS-in-JS is the new jam, especially if you're utilizing a state- driven UI view layer like React or Vue.

<comment><USER27> Right, but with CSS-in-JS I'm still fundamentally dealing with all the complexity and subtleties of raw CSS, just with better access to variables and such. Bootstrap is a much more disruptive rethink of CSS (ditto flexbox), but they only disrupt a small portion of the CSS surface area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The line between programmer and dev ops will be moved with more responsibilities on the developer. Cloud services will continue to decrease the barrier of entry while entering a price war, and every team or individual will have a set budget inside the cloud. Integration with IDEs and improved online UI and CLI tools will make these tasks very easy for everyone. We can also expect better/easier/cheaper support infrastructure for these applications. Imagine one click upload of a web app from IDEs with load balancing, monitoring, analytics, and profiling.

I'd also like to see some improvements on programming paradigms to take advantage of multicore CPUs. There are lots of ideas in this space, but no clear front runner ideology. I expect we'll continue to see improvements in this space, and hopefully a winner will emerge.

<comment><USER30> > more responsibilities on the developer

Adding more responsibilities to a developer will not have a positive impact on the developer's productivity. Abstractions fall apart, and time has to be put into learning/keeping fresh with those technologies when it occurs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Javascript performance on mobile continues to get better every year.

For many of the informational based apps, it's totally overkill to create a native experience. One app, responsive views, and your small team is suddenly incredibly productive.

<comment><USER32> Disappearing middle layers:

The OP mentions "backendless applications", and using Javascript and the browser as your platform feels like the same kind of trend.

Sure, all those layers are still there — OS, TCP/IP, raster — but we've settled on a standard simplified foundation that's good enough and that everybody implements, whether it's Safari-iOS-touchscreen-ARM-LTE or Edge- Windows-mouse-x86-Ethernet.

"Static web applications" likewise — maybe instead of your own backend you call a few SAAS's that you've configured in a GUI rather than written code for. The point is you've reduced the number of layers you have to maintain, while still targeting a huge number of users.

In general, the trick is settling on a foundation. The web has evolved rather than being handed down from on high. What consensus will the next 5-10 years of evolution bring? Or will new platforms appear? Will Fuchsia show up and look a lot like the web?

Maybe the quality of that foundation can be measured by programmer productivity. A web standard that's consistent from device to device is a boon to the whole world. Thank you MDN for telling me what works, and where! [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > what do you think will be a breakthrough innovation in programming which > will enable programmers to deliver ambitious web/mobile apps at a very high > speed

I'm not sure that speed-to-market will be where the breakthroughs are. But constraining myself to that conditional...

The best one I can think of is a library of curated, easily embeddable snippets. Like Helm charts for code. We already have package managers, but as the industry grows more and more with a larger number (not necessarily percentage) of developers churning out sub-par code, companies are going to want to leverage reuse sans fear. You already see this curation with some languages/ecosystems having sets of blessed libraries, but a library is too high of an abstraction and it is language specific. Some group one day will offer embeddable, curated snippets (or entire libraries) that follow a certain set of rules to give confidence to their users and they will apply those rules (with language specifics) across runtimes. In both good and bad ways, some systems may end up being a walled garden of code where they only accept this curated code which, as walled gardens can be, are good for the users (i.e. devs referencing the code) and bad for the devs (i.e. devs writing new components being forced into others' rules).

Would you feel better with a "Guaranteed by StringentCodeTrust(tm)" seal on a library/repository you reference? A non-pragmatic middle manager at Big Corp might.

</comment><comment><USER33> Web application deployment got way easier than it was 10 years ago. Now now there are plenty of alternatives for CI and testing tools that can automate the process of releasing and verifying code at scale. By scale I mean lots of developers collaborating on the same code base and handling massive loads at the same time.

It's also the field that I think will see lots of improvements and maybe some fundamental disruptions. Maybe it will be GitHub actions and it's right around the corner :)

</comment><comment><USER34> > Considering this background, what do you think will be a breakthrough > innovation in programming which will enable programmers to deliver ambitious > web/mobile apps at a very high speed.

Quality, Speed, Price. Pick two.

What is the driving force to "...deliver ... at a very high speed?" It's easy to assume that from the list above quality would be the one to suffer. Doesn't anyone here on HN ever get tired of being everyone's beta bitch?

<comment><USER35> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Kubernetes and other container systems are so widely adopted and accepted that most common system services are solved and require only minutes to integrate. As a result people move back to their monoliths because it is easy and productive

</comment><comment><USER37> AWS has lots of tools which have made me feel like a super developer. For example, using Lambdas and S3 to build massively parallel processing systems in just a few days.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think just finally getting rid of unsafe languages, particularly at the bottom. This will I think increase "productivity" of the world at large, by reducing the number of crashes and security holes they have to contend with every day.

I feel like we have finally arrived at the time when more people accept no-one (or at least, no-one outside a tiny set of people) should be using languages with undefined behaviour, or unsafe memory accesses by default (looking at you C and C++).

If "we" want to be taken seriously, and as more of the world relies on computing, we can't be building on a foundation of sand and saying "Oh, as well as every programmer is clever enough, all the time, we'll probably be OK".

<comment><USER21> But then the next generation of languages needs to make sure that you can actually do what you need to do. With C/C++ I am pretty sure that whatever problem I have can be solved. It may be ugly but you can go very deep down to the last bit. So a safe language should allow you to do that if needed.

<comment><USER38> Rust is quite good for that. Also, you can always get a very clever person to write a very small piece of C code.

Or perhaps, we just need our programs to be 20% slower? Would you buy a house which was 20% cheaper, but if a plumber was having a bad day there is a significant chance your house will explode if you turn all the taps on at once?

<comment><USER21> It's not only about speed. I was more thinking about programming close to hardware. There you need all the tricks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As languages with more interesting type systems come along, more powerful IDE tooling will be possible (e.g. idris 2/blodwen code completion [https://twitter.com/edwinbrady/status/1050528305743622147](https://twitter.com/edwinbrady/status/1050528305743622147))

More hopefully, maybe new language developers will put more work into easier and easier FFIs? How often have you thought "I wish language X could catch on, but all the useful libraries are in language Y?"

</comment><comment><USER40> I expect to have a visual dataflow programming environment similar to node- red, Yahoo! Pipes etc. that is touchscreen-friendly, has plenty of community- maintained building blocks and converts to a variety of low-level languages for easy deployment to many platforms. Hopefully, we'll get rid of clunky IDEs/text editors with lots of boilerplate, whole file hierarchies to maintain and all that other ancient stuff invented for 1960's teletypes.

<comment><USER41> I think flow based programming in general has a lot of untapped utility. I have had good success putting complex data processing workflows in to python with luigi. Tensorflow and ROS are also dataflow(ish) systems that are gaining popularity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The cost of using and teaching formal methods will continue to come down and program synthesis will become the practical means of automating a lot of lower-level code.

</comment><comment><USER43> Have there been any major productivity gains in the past 5-10 years? Not really. So I see no reason to expect any in the next 5-10 years.

<comment><USER44> Agreed. Productivity is just another word for control. The trend is to transfer control away from the developer and to the identity provider (OAuth2), app store (Apple/Google), search engine (AMP), cloud provider (AWS serverless), content author (Wordpress), ad exchange (DoubleClick), CTO (microservices) etc. Not necessarily good or bad, but no reason to expect that trend to reverse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I could definitely see some type of declarative language + constraints being driven by a voice AI system.

This would let you rapidly prototype ideas

</comment><comment><USER46> AI powered intellisense and code generation.

<comment><USER47> I will probably try out "Kite" soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Kite" seemed to be a really cool tech, but I read about the dark patterns[1] used by them here on HackerNews and never gave them a try and most likely will not do it anytime soon.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> JavaScript precompiler techniques (like [https://svelte.technology/](https://svelte.technology/)) should find their way down to everyday use cases, like abstracting away Canvas DOM programming and GPL and other programming difficulties.

</comment><comment><USER49> > Frameworks like React & Angular give you decent building blocks to create > SPAs, but the learning curve & effort required to create ambitious > applications is very high.

Any ambitious application is going to require a high learning curve and lots of effort. Otherwise it wouldn't be ambitious.

</comment><comment><USER50> \- Context-aware IDEs with significantly more powerful versions of today's intellisense tools.

\- Compilers with even more powerful implicit behavior- forget automatically creating Get() and Set(), we'll be creating entire inheritance structures with one function definition.

<comment><USER51> Seconded and I'd even like to extend it to say that we'll be moving closer to automatically written code via machine learning.

So we'll see a shift away from "developer specific boilerplate" in the same way libraries have abstracted a lot of basic setup boilerplate.

You'll say "initialize a web service with these models" and the IDE will build out the majority of the project.

<comment><USER52> As long as the built parts are source code which follows human-readable formatting standards, so developers can fine-tune from the prototype, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I think people will see that type safety and functional programming don't impact productivity much in a business setting, and we'll see a flight from these languages as examples of horrible legacy code reveal themselves to show that the problem is behavioral / sociological, and has nothing to do at all with enforcement on the code or compilation vs testing.

I also think more job candidates will reject interviews that waste time with unrealistic homework assignments, marathon on-site interviews, etc.

Finally, I think productivity losses and health issues related to open-plan offices will soar, but companies will continue to be disingenuous and act like it improves collaboration or saves money when it's uncotroversially flat false.

</comment><comment><USER54> Continued increase in network speeds.

</comment><comment><USER55> Runtime code analysis: instead of analyzing code at rest, we need to have better tools to tell us what the code actually _does_. Static typing doesn't help you trace back from an interface to the code that generated that interface. Runtime analysis can potentially be applied across systems, so we can analyze not just one program, but how a whole myriad of systems work together, which is the way most complex systems work.

</comment><comment><USER56> The decline of JavaScript. Web Assembly will soon have DOM access. It will be game-on for other languages in the browser.

Let's be honest, is JavaScript the winner because it is amazing, or the winner because it was the _only_ choice in the browser. I know my opinion. The other ecosystems, with different strengths, will soon be able to achieve single- language stacks when the playing field is leveled. This will be a boon to productivity.

</comment><comment><USER57> A quick scan through the comments and I was surprised that no one referenced the No Silver Bullet essay[0].

From where I sit I find that the Cambrian explosion of frameworks, systems and methodologies is causing us to regress in terms of productivity.

[0] [http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks- NoSilverBullet.pdf](http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER58> Maybe the software industry will discover constraint programming the way that it discovered functional programming over the past decade. If it did, that would almost immediately increase programmer productivity for non-performance- critical tasks (since the compiler could supply the implementation), while making formal methods more easily applicable to production code & supplying the prerequisites for more clever automatic code generation methods.

(In general, software engineers becoming vaguely aware of tech invented in the 1960s and 1970s is a huge productivity boon. If you, as a developer, want to impress your peers, you should take a couple hours to read what software engineers thought was obvious prior to 1980, when software engineers had a strong background in software engineering.)

<comment><USER59> An infinite loop of software trends :-)

To answer parent, I actually think better understanding of personality types and how manage people better will come with far better productivity.

The jungle of technology alternatives of how to solve business problems, causes a lot of unnecessary fights. It doesn't matter if you choose React, Angular or Vanilla JS. If your team is fighting each other, your team is not productive.

With this in mind, don't hire people that always agree with you, you always need someone to challenge you.

<comment><USER60> I think you've hit the nail on the head. The magic bullets are human factors from the interpersonal domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Slimmer frameworks. I went from jQuery to React to Angular to Vue and they keep getting simpler and more user-friendly. I still think the templating system in Vue is a bit clunky but better than alternatives. Expect responsive frameworks to become even more scalable.

</comment><comment><USER62> Search, i.e. lower activation threshold for accessing intelligence from strangers elsewhere in the world.

</comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow Smarter people, perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER63> None.

There is no silver bullet:

[http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelat...](http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelated/no- silver-bullet.pdf)</comment>


Dunkin's average ticket nearly doubles when customers add Beyond Meat sandwich - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dunkins-average-ticket-nearly-doubles-when-customers-add-beyond-meat-sandwich-2020-02-07?mod=home-page <comment><USER2> Of course the average ticket is higher, that person is buying a larger sandwich.

Let's say 50% of Dunkin' customers don't buy food at all, just coffee. If your group in question becomes "people who buy a beyond meat sandwich" of course the ticket price goes higher.

The same thing would happened if you limited the results to "people who bought a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel sandwich." That sandwich and a coffee is gonna run you about $9.

There are also smaller, cheaper food items that cannot be made in beyond meat versions (donuts and hash browns, for example).</comment>


Attn: Hackers,is this DRM software process secure enough? - <AUTHOR> This article describes all the components of a successful DRM deployment in an easy to read and engaging format.  But is the process secure enough? https://go.buydrm.com/thedrmblog/how-to-protect-your-content-with-drm <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, tried to provide the link to the article upon posting. Here is the DRM Software article [https://go.buydrm.com/thedrmblog/how-to-protect-your- content...](https://go.buydrm.com/thedrmblog/how-to-protect-your-content-with- drm)</comment>


Your Web App has Launched – Now What?  - <AUTHOR> http://carsonified.com/blog/business/your-web-app-has-launched-now-what/ <comment><USER2> I rode at least one '90s dot com into the ground on that first curve. Starting with something like $6M on day one, they staffed up, built the product over the course of a year, launched in August and hit the ground in September.

I'm following a somewhat flatter trajectory with FairTutor (my latest bootstrapped startup): Registered the domain a year ago, built a demo, spent 7 months traveling through South America talking to Spanish schools and building the product into something they'll be happy to use, filed down the sharp corners over the last month, and it should go live to paying users in about a week.

Still have about a year's worth of runway left to polish it into something good before it needs to start paying the bills.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't upvote this article enough. Perhaps I've seen too many friends put months into a startup, with no clear marketing / post-launch plan. The switch gets flipped, the site goes live, people patiently look at Google Analytics, and ... the users don't come. A couple of months later everyone gives up and goes back to devoting full attention to their day jobs that they never left.

That, and the article makes an important point -- if you don't have that many users, it doesn't necessarily mean that your service/app isn't valuable. Unless your product is incredibly niche, it most likely means that not enough people have heard about it yet. Get it out there!

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I think this should be required reading. I couldn't BELIEVE the number of supposed "hackers" who turned their noses up at SEO on a thread I read the other day: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1402544>

I think a lot of wantrepreneurs wouldn't "lower" themselves, to SEO, cold calling, shilling at conferences, begging bloggers for coverage, etc (strangely ignoring the fact that many of the companies they admire have well- oiled sales and marketing engines).

It's like a car mechanic who opens a garage and thinks that his job should still be working on cars all day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think I'm going to print out "coding is procrastination" and stick it to the top of my monitor.

The gratification with coding is short term - find a problem, think of a feature and get stuck in and get it done. When it works you get a nice glow of self satisfaction.

I don't know about others, but having the self-control to _not_ open the code editor and do something else is probably the most difficult challenge I face in getting projects out there.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's a good article, but these strategies should be thought-out BEFORE your app is launched. In fact, way before, like before you even start writing code.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey guys, Thanks for the all the nice words about my post - if you enjoyed it, you'll probably enjoy our Contrast blog (<http://www.contrast.ie/blog>)

Cheers, Des (@destraynor)

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, great article. I've been trying to think of how I can effectively bootstrap my company in about six months or so. Originally, I kind of deluded myself of by thinking I could build a SaaS app and I would start getting customers.

It's becoming more and more clear that the only way to get more revenue is to keep solving problems, charge for your solutions, and have patience. Easy to forget.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article but I would have to disagree with it saying that you need a budget for development after launch. What if the founders are hackers?

<comment><USER4> Founders gotta eat too. In that case, budget is a looser term.

The point is, launch isn't when the battle is won or lost. Launching is just the first time you're engaging with the enemy. So you shouldn't expend all of your resources (cash, optimism, etc.) before that point... It's a long road.</comment></comment>


Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.channel4.com/news/kenyans-bombarded-with-fake-news-in-presidential-election <comment><USER2> The cat is out of the bag- this stuff works!

As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed.

Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.

<comment><USER3> I am reminded of the experiment where a cockroach had brain implants that allowed its movement to be controlled electronically. After a while the cockroach would figure out the signal the researchers were using and its brain ignored it effectively locking out the researchers. At some point it was figured out that if random noise (music) was constantly transmitted the cockroach could be controlled much longer before its brain figured out what signal to block. In the end it would always figure out what signal the researchers were using.

Right now fake news is merely manipulative signal wrapped in noise. If cockroaches can figure it out, so can every human on earth.

Alternatively we could start a reality tv show where every week fake news company executives are tried for treason and executed. Hell kick it up to 3x a week I'd watch it.

<comment><USER4> Maybe we should start with Dan Rather. His fake memo ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy)) was the first attempt (that was caught at the in real-time) in using fake news (literally a faked meo) to influence a Presidential election by a major network. A lot of today's distrust of media traces from that incident.

<comment><USER5> That was a failure of fact-checking, not fake news as it's typically understood. It has happened occasionally in otherwise-respectable publications. The network fired a number of people involved including Dan Rather not because they intentionally crafted a false narrative but because they claimed they had done fact-checking when they hadn't.

"Fake news", as typically understood, is news that is known to be fake by the publisher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hard to believe that Facebook did not know about this? I imagine there are small account-management teams within facebook for large clients spending millions.</comment>


The crossover between car simulations and autonomous vehicles - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/27/the-crossover-between-car-simulations-and-autonomous-vehicles/ <comment><USER2> Here's an ongoing video series by a guy building a self driving car in grand theft auto: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQVvvaa0QuDeETZEOy4Vd...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQVvvaa0QuDeETZEOy4VdocT7TOjfSA8a)

I was pretty skeptical of this approach at first, but it actually seems like it can work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I invested in a company that is building in this space. They are hiring: [http://righthook.io/](http://righthook.io/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Toyota is staffing up a lab near Palo Alto to develop car simulation software. Zoox in the city is doing similar work, and of course Waymo.

</comment><comment><USER5> What are some other use cases where simulations can help agents learn faster?</comment>


Python 3.2 for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/python-3.2-for-ios/id519319292?mt=8

<comment><USER2> I used Python, but recently discovered Pythonista for iOS. Far nicer looking interface, plus it ships touch and layer libraries for graphics stuff.

<comment><USER3> Pythonista looks nice, thanks for the tip. Some simple touch-based codes are part of the app, ready to tinker with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Forgive the density of this question, but.. what exactly can you _do_ with this? There is very little info both on the app's page, as well as the author's webpage.

Can you, for instance, import os (or equivalent) and interact with the phone's file system? Does the standard lib work, or some percentage of it?

Does anyone have any detailed information?

<comment><USER5> It gives you an interactive python shell on your iOS device. You can't access the file system, because of the OS's sandboxing rules. The standard library does work modulo any sandbox rules. You can, for example, write scripts that use urllib to talk over a network and do some work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I keep seeing this on HN, and keep thinking "Finally, can write apps in python", then it goes back to the same old python shell program and I'm a bit saddened.

<comment><USER7> If you are interested in _that_ kind of thing, here you go: <http://kivy.org/#home>

<comment><USER6> I definitely am. That is neat.

Not quite "Python rubymotion" but still interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does work if Apple forbids managed runtimes to exist in iOS?

<comment><USER9> They don't, they only forbid downloading and executing new code after installation.

<comment><USER10> So could you download an extension python module and run it? If so, it should be disallowed from the app store (going by Apple's rules).

<comment><USER11> It seems there are ways:

[http://forums.pythonforios.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=405](http://forums.pythonforios.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=405) [http://forums.pythonforios.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=453](http://forums.pythonforios.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=453)

Whether Apple haven't noticed yet, or are just turning a blind eye, I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do people use these sort of things? I'm genuinely curious. It's not even that fancy of a calc app, since you can't support numpy or plotting.

If someone could implement something similar to <http://www.mathworks.com/mobile/> for Python, now that would be cool!

<comment><USER13> [http://www.macstories.net/stories/automating-ios-how- pythoni...](http://www.macstories.net/stories/automating-ios-how-pythonista- changed-my-workflow/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sweet, I've got the 2.7 app and have been waiting for 3.2!</comment>


Introduction to Scientific Python - <AUTHOR> https://web.stanford.edu/~arbenson/cme193.html <comment><USER2> In classic fashion, I'm fascinated by [what I suspect is] a different aspect of this syllabus than OP.

> An autograder will be distributed with some of the homework. The autograder > is there so you can tell if your work is correct.

This kind of thing makes me wish I had done better in high school and could have studied at a school of Stanford's caliber. I can think of many occasions in which I thought my code was satisfactory, but it failed to meet the professor's expectations (which were not clear in the assignment instructions).

<comment><USER3> Autograders are a mixed blessing. At my University some of our courses have autograders, and I think they can be great. There is a compiler course where the main goal is to create a compiler that has a specific set of measurable features. Encoding those features in a test-rig and making it available seems appropriate.

I deliberately don't use Autograders for my assignments though. I want students to be able to figure out for themselves whether to be satisfied with an answer, and work out how to test it. And I suspect many employers want the same. If a student asks me "is that right", I try to remember not to tell them, but to ask questions that will help them figure it out for themselves. Similarly, providing a test-rig that answers whether a piece of code is right is sometimes inappropriate.

<comment><USER2> I totally get that, and leading a class in a way that prepares them for the 'real world' is awesome. The examples I'm thinking of involve occasions such as when I used a package (NumPy) for matrix multiplication instead of writing my own function to perform the task. I didn't think matrix multiplication was the main learning objective of the assignment and was counted off for failing to demonstrate how to code that. I guess my original comment doesn't really make sense in this [ranting] context though because mine probably would have still satisfied an autograder. I digress...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this an online course or do you have to be enrolled at Stanford to take it?

[edit: grammar]

<comment><USER5> It seems to be an online course in the form of online slides and documentation, as this course has sadly already been given (Tu / Th 3:45PM - 5:35PM; April 4 - April 18). Nevertheless, interesting material.

<comment><USER6> This short course is taught every quarter at Stanford, usually by a PhD student in ICME (Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering). This is the course page for the class as was taught a couple of years ago.

Edit: google CME193 to find more course pages, if interested</comment></comment></comment>


How Microsoft Can Save Windows RT - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/microsoft-save-windows-rt/

<comment><USER2> I disagree with the conclusions though. What MS needs to do is let devs to run apps in the desktop and enable AD integration - business would kill for this as a platform but it's been hobbled.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Essentially ...

"Evidence abounds that Windows RT, Microsoft's version of Windows 8 for ARM- based devices like tablets, is in trouble."</comment>


Yahoo's CEO Carol Bartz tells Michael Arrington to F-off - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4A1uCQ1w0

<comment><USER2> Every once in a while it's good to see the professional Talking Heads get called out for being talkers and not doers.

On a related note, I've noticed that many people think that if a business isn't #1 or #2 within a given field or market, that it somehow sucks. It could in reality be doing a number of things well, but especially within the professional media they like to make extreme characterizations rather than more nuanced and accurate descriptions. Third place is not last place. Not all companies have to be the "best", partly because not even everybody can agree on exactly what "best" means. Is Yahoo kicking butt in the same way and to the same degree that Apple and Google are? Probably not. Have they made a more substantive contribution to the Web so far than Arrington's company? Probably so. I think this contrast is in part what made Bartz mad.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate to say this... but as more people start to hate Arrington, I think I am starting to like him. Techcrunch doesn't bother me as much as it used to.

Am I the only one?

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone know the context of this?

<comment><USER5> Sadly, no. I was at this conference, but I missed this.

Update: This link from the video explains it all.

[http://zennie2005.blogspot.com/2010/05/yahoos-ceo-carol- bart...](http://zennie2005.blogspot.com/2010/05/yahoos-ceo-carol-bartz-tells- michael.html)

To set the stage, Arrington was pressing Bartz on the idea that the best companies are often "single-revenue-source" producers, and was implying that Yahoo, by getting away from search to his view, was moving away from what could work for the company. While asserting that Yahoo! is still a search company, Bartz disagreed, pointing to successful firms that were conglomerates.

Then Bartz seemed to think that Arrington was saying that because Yahoo! had not created a device they were not innovative and lacked direction. Bartz then focused on his "tiny company," saying that even with a firm as small as his, he didn't always know what direction he was going in. "So don't give me crap about what the fine people of Yahoo! are supposed to do, so F-off."

<comment><USER6> Then she sealed it with "I mean that one".

It was not meant to be mean, and to be frank Mike really deserved it. He kept giving her a hard time and asking questions not just to get to know what she has in mind, but to ridicule her.</comment></comment></comment>


Senate votes down proposal to expand FBI surveillance powers - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-fbi-emails-idUSKCN0Z8160 <comment><USER2> If you like seeing this kind of thing, you should probably call your senators and tell them that. (Assuming they voted it down.)

Rewarding them for doing good things helps them justify not doing bad things in the future more than if you only call to complain about bad things.</comment>