Who killed the netbook? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/print/176841

<comment><USER3> I'll tell you the real reason why netbooks are going extinct: because I like them. They're the ideal computing environment for me. And the world is designed in a way that I can never be happy. Sorry, fellow netbook users...

When I first heard about netbooks, my jaw dropped metaphorically: this was exactly the kind of device I had been waiting for all these years: small, light, long battery life, GNU/Linux - and cheapo! Heck, I even had this secret fantasy in which netbooks would finally herald GNU/Linux on the desktop (I know, I should have been suspicious right then).

I'm not a casual user. I'm a hacker, I spend more time in front of my machine then doing anything else (including sleeping). And yet I like being mobile! I'm not a gamer. I don't watch movies on my computer. My laptop is not a life style product, it's a tool, it's _the_ tool, a Swiss army knife if you will. And let's be honest: you may call a netbook underpowered, but computers have been fast enough already a couple of years ago for almost all serious tasks. Sure, if a compile starts taking too long for my taste, I'll run it remotely on a compute server next time: that's what puts the _net_ in netbook!

So I really thought, for once, things went right. I'd never have to spent huge amount of cash on my next laptop again. From now on, it's only going to be netbooks for me. Life is great!

Of course, _that_ couldn't last. Did I cheer too loud? Did I dare smile happily in public? I don't know, but somehow the word must have gotten out: _"Pssst! Did you hear? Kleiba seems to be happy!" -- "Oh, no worries, we can change that easily..."_

And the next thing I know, tablets are kicking netbooks' asses... I mean: _tablets_! What the heck? What am I supposed to be doing with them? Oh, oh, I see, I'm supposed to use all the great "apps". Yeah, well, you know what? I don't care about them. How can I _write_ my own apps? Oh, too bad, for that you need a "real" computer (or be into BDSM)...

Sorry for the rant, folks! But are there other fellow hackers on HN who find it ironic that while we are the backbone of the industry, while we are the ones who enable others to use all their beloved tech in the first place, while without us the big companies wouldn't see any dime - that the main stream market doesn't care about us? That we are pushed into a niche, instead of being pulled into the spotlight?

 _(Nah, I'm only being half serious...)_

<comment><USER4> 100% agree. The netbook is the perfect cheap portable hacking tool. You can certainly get some development done on them (as long as you don't use eclipse as IDE :-). Phones or iPads are generally more expensive and not nearly as suited to that.

That's why I also get a bit sad at all the 'the netbook is dead!' posts. On the other hand, it'll probably remain a niche for a long time. I mean, if you believe the stories here, the phone is dead, e-mail is dead, the web is dead... and so on.

It seems to be common here to forget that things can have a use and make some people very happy without being "the great next mainstream thing".

<comment><USER5> Cheap, yes, but I'm not sure "perfect" is the right word. Most netbooks are just a bit too underpowered to run a modern IDE comfortably, and at the same time they don't have particularly impressive battery life (3-4 hours of web surfing is typical). An MBA 11" has a bigger screen, is tons faster, and will get you 6+ hours of battery under similar circumstances. Sure it's $1000 versus $350, but are developers looking for a good portable hacking machine that price sensitive?

<comment><USER4> For a lot of things I feel I don't _need_ to run a modern IDE. Gcc + a text editor does fine, or something light like Qt Designer. This is why I explicitly added "if you don't use eclipse" :-) You have to be a bit creative with resources, if you expect a full high-profile dev machine you're indeed not well-off with a netbook.

And indeed, finding one with decent battery life can be a bit of a challenge.

And yes, $1000 versus $350 matters for a lot of people, we're not all silicon valley rock stars. Also if you, for example, use the device in risky/dirty/etc environments, you'd usually want to settle with something easily replacable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nobody killed the netbooks. They aren't dead.

[http://liliputing.com/2011/06/survey-netbooks-are-just-as- po...](http://liliputing.com/2011/06/survey-netbooks-are-just-as-popular-as- tablets-plenty-of-people-dont-care-at-all.html)

[http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/06/24/0426232/Who- Kill...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/06/24/0426232/Who-Killed-the- Netbook)

<comment><USER7> Agreed. After reading this post, I looked on Amazon and saw that a variety of EEE PC and Samsung netbooks are still for sale in the $200-$400 price range. I also found that around 30 million netbooks are expected to be sold in 2011. Not dead.

Given the subject of the post and the amount of detail the author went into, I was disappointed that there was no mention (or links to posts) of any sales numbers. Just the word dead, death, or killed mentioned 12 times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> `Smartphone' is only half the answer to `who killed the netbook?'. `The hype' is the other half.

Perhaps surprisingly to us, the proverbial `average consumer' does not understand performance and ergonomics aspects of hardware very well. To most of them, an measly 7''...10'' screen seems just as good for productivity and ergonomics as a decent 17'' or a tight 15''. They don't realize the storage (be it harddrive or SSD) is much slower than in larger computers, and RAM is underprovisioned. The hype was there, the price was right, and netbooks sold like hot buns.

But one size did not fit all, and now we have some satisfied owners and some dissatisfied ones. The admin at my workplace is very satisfied; a netbook is his ternary computer (after a desktop and yes, an Android smartphone), it delivers just what he needs when he's on the move. But the folks who bought a netbook as their main computer are oft dissatisfied; the hardware simply did not live up to the expectations. Heck, a decent smartphone (say, Nokia N950) is pretty much as beefy as an average netbook.

The netbook rose by the hype, and now is `dying' by it: undergoing severe market shrinkage, to match supply to actual demand for _cheap_ ultraportables, probably as secondary device.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only 'happy' netbook user out there ?

I'm still using a 2 year old HP netbook and pretty happy with it. It is light enough that I can actually have it in my bag even when I don't explicitly need it, and largely sufficient for any coding or web stuff.

And you can actually _work_ on it. Which isn't true (at least from my point of view) of any smartphone or tablets. The app ecosystem isn't even remotely comparable on that point.

<comment><USER10> No.

I am also happy with my first-gen Acer Aspire One.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know where the idea that Linux-based netbooks don't have an app ecosystem comes from, but I wish it would go away. It's like apt-get doesn't exist, or something.

<comment><USER12> Apt-get is great, but it's not an app ecosystem. I suspect getting a commercial app into the debian apt repositories would be near impossible. Getting the user to install a third-party repository, on the other hand, is nearly equivalent to having them just install the software.

Besides the considerations of HOW to get an app into apt-get - what if you want to charge for it? Apt-get simply wasn't designed to distribute paid software and you'd have to implement all the missing pieces yourself (account management, payment processing, license management, in-app purchases/upgrades). Doing this per-app is no better than the current situation in Windows from a developer POV. Adding this functionality to some derivative of apt-get, on the other hand, is HARD - besides the technical challenges, you'd have to overcome legal issues with taking payments in a variety of jurisdictions with different regulations and tax laws.

<comment><USER6> It may have been hard, but Ubuntu's already done it. The Ubuntu Software Centre contains pay apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I dare say that the netbook is not dead at all for people who travel a lot. I own an iPad and a very slow (WinXP) netbook myself, but I would prefer the netbook over the iPad for travel any day. At least I have plenty of storage space for my photos on my netbook and I can plug in whatever USB hardware I want.

<comment><USER14> As I said in another comment, I use rail every day to and from work. For coding, the netbook wins hands down. It runs a bare minimum WinXP setup(i.e. no virus scanner or loads of services to start up), so I get done what I need to. I'd much rather use it for photo processing / writing emails etc. also.

Of course, once I start needing remote connectivity for work, I'll have to use the iPad.. the netbook battery only lasts around 1.5 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can see how the iPad is a direct competitor to the netbook market, but the MacBook Air? I thought the comparisons were ridiculous at the time, and still do. I have enormous trouble imagining someone actually trying to decide between the two---price, size and specs were in completely different worlds.

<comment><USER16> Imagine harder. If you were a Mac user -- say you have a big Mac Pro or an iMac -- and you wanted something small and portable as a secondary machine for coffee shop and travel antics then you may well have found yourself considering these netbook things.

Then the 11" Air came out, and turned that "should I get a netbook" into "should I get a netbook which is very cheap but doesn't run my Mac apps or should I pay a bit more and get the smallest Mac ever?"

Voila: someone trying to decide between the two.

<comment><USER15> Except that the first MacBook Airs were not 11", they were 17", and _those_ were the ones being compared to netbooks (because they were _light_ ). A while later came the 13" models, and not until quite some time later did the 11" models come out (at which point it would be safe to say it _was_ a netbook, not _competing_ with netbooks).

EDIT: Wow, I need to have my memory checked. I must have been confused by the $1700 price tag into thinking there was a 17" MacBook Air. I do distinctly remember being baffled by reviewers comparing the first Airs to the EeePC, though, as it seemed to me they weren't even aiming at the same markets.

<comment><USER17> Says here that the first Airs were 13.3":

[http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/15/apple-announces- macbook-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/15/apple-announces-macbook-air/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just ordered my first netbook yesterday. The main feature? It's disposable.

My main laptop is a Macbook Pro. It cost €1400. The netbook I ordered cost €136 (used). I have a cheap cell phone because I lose my phone at least once a year. There are situations where I'm uncomfortable dragging along my main expensive laptop because it's major suckage if it get lost / stolen / damaged. The netbook, with its 9.5 hour battery, combined with my mobile broadband (with tethering), makes it fine to throw in the backpack when going camping for the weekend (as I'll be doing next weekend). In a pinch if I need to write a few mails or SSH into a server to check something out, I'm covered. On the other hand, I won't cry very long if the thing gets trashed.

<comment><USER19> The fact they are so disposable makes them great for travel or university/school. I've used an Eee PC as a secondary computer ever since they came out about 4 years ago. Do I care if it gets stolen or breaks? Not really. With TrueCrypt and Dropbox, my data is safe and I'm only down ~$300 AUD.

<comment><USER20> If you have to travel in/out of the U.S. or another jurisdiction known for aggressive examination/confiscation, all the more so.

Or, just have what you need on a server, buy a netbook at the destination, wipe it and give it to someone when you depart. (Be mindful of the limitations of particularly but not only SSD wipes. Better to start off use with encryption in place; any sacrificed blocks will be useless without the key.) When the prices are low enough, this can be affordable, if not enjoyable.

I don't have particular secrets to hide, myself, but I don't like the idea of "gubmint" freely rummaging through whatever it will. And when are data are aggregated, we all have secrets. (E.g. insurance coverage or employment denial because of family medical history or crazy Uncle Joey or whatever.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've got a Windows desktop, Macbook Pro, iPad 2 and iPhone. Netbooks have always seemed like a frustrating compromise. Keyboard just too small for me to comfortably type on (might as well use my iPad), just enough power to actually work properly for me, and yet another item to carry around.

I was really close to buying one a few times, and prior to my iPad it made sense I think. Now, less so.

<comment><USER22> I'm in the same boat - except replace the iPad with a netbook. I figured - <USER2> get a "big iPhone" when I can have a real computer with an actual keyboard for half the price?

I am sorely tempted to "trade in" the current netbook and Macbook pro for a Sandy Bridge Macbook Air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Netbooks are painfully slow. I got myself a netbook (Samsung NC10 Plus) recently, and while I don't regret it because I view it as an emergency computer if I should spill water on my laptop, it isn't pleasant to use.

<comment><USER24> It depends on the processor. A low-end single-core Intel Atom is okay for light browsing.

But some ultra-portables with dual-core CPU's are much zippier, e.g., the Thinkpad x120e with the dual-core AMD Fusion E350.

<comment><USER8> For most uses it depends on memory too: both RAM and mass storage. A typical user has a browser, an IM and some other window opened most of the time. A bunch of systray icons, perhaps also antivirus, if MS Windows.

A typical netbook is underprovisioned in RAM and has slow storage to match; pain both when starting up and in case of swapping VM pages. Topped up with a joke of a GPU, likely using up access cycles of system memory instead of having own dedicated RAM.

Less display estate (pixel-wise) means you have to Alt+Tab or scroll around more often, too; sucking up your time.

So no, CPU doesn't have to be the only choke point in a netbook, and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law> kicks in.

<comment><USER24> Interesting. My case is perhaps unusual since I never use more than 800Mb of RAM. I am running Linux, a browser and a terminal. So on all my machines, I only have 1Gb installed and no swap.

I did add an SSD but other than boot time, did not get any benefit since everything fits in RAM and there's no swap. So that's why I consider CPU to be the bottleneck for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Android and Chrome will revive the netbook. They are free (as in beer) OSes, and run with very minimal hardware. As such, devices having one of both OSes will be the OLPC replacement. As the third world has either very old or no computer, those cheap devices will flood the market. Netbook formfactor will be part of them, as desktop work will still be needed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well, I certainly hope that reports of the netbook's death are in fact reports of the death of the netbook's _hype_...

I'm another of those who find them almost perfect devices. It gets used for real, serious, mobile computing. Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 on a netbook with a long battery life make a wonderful go-anywhere productivity device and let me work far, far more easily than I could otherwise because it can just slip in the bottom of my bag. I can and do write music on it almost anywhere in a MIDI sequencer. Firefox works well for regular browsing, OpenOffice works well for note taking in meetings. I can touchtype on my netbook with comparable speed and accuracy to any other device, certainly fast enough to take notes live in a presentation. I won't claim it's fast enough for doing any very heavy photography work but it's a very useful portable preview and backing storage device.

Give me a tablet with a card reader and decent storage and I could do the photography as easily on that, I'll concede. Give me a good mobile browser and that's pretty much as good as on the netbook, though from my experience with Android Firefox and Chrome I'm not convinced yet. Music? Maybe, I can see it could be done but I'm not sure the apps are there yet from what I've heard.

The rest though? You want to show me someone typing at an accurate 100WPM on a tablet without an external keyboard? (By which point I'd rather have them integrated and a bit more rugged, personally.) You want to show me someone doing serious software development on a tablet?

Small, light, cheap, compatible. Netbooks are all of these and let me Just Get On With It. Tablets aren't.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm hoping enough people know that there isn't much space between smartphones, tablets ("there isn't a tablet market, there'a an ipad market") and normal laptops. I'm keeping track of how much my mums netbook gets used now she has an iphone, and the work laptop she often went to anyway.

It's a bit like drugs for Africa. Do we really need to be able to buy things as cheaply as they do? No, $100, even $400 laptops are silly. I hope so at least, I'm quite big and need space between keyboard and screen.

</comment><comment><USER28> I just wonder what the author thinks "fatuous" means. What on earth is a "fatuous notebook"?

I do keep looking for a good netbook-like solution for recreational coding and writing while traveling. If it can run emacs/gcc/X11 as well as a 1998-era laptop, I'd be satisfied, but I can't quite find anything that's cheap enough for that almost-throw-away use.

<comment><USER29> What about a used laptop?

<comment><USER30> They're almost always broken, failing, or have no battery life left (and you can't get replacements). It's much more trouble than it's worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The problem with netbooks is they are very slow with Windows on them and most of them still cost $500. For most people a tablet would offer a much better experience overall for surfing the web.

But I think we'll start seeing a lot of ARM based _slim_ netbooks/low-end notebooks with quad core 1.5 Ghz Tegra 3 chips that will cost under $250-$300 with either Chrome OS or Android, that will fulfill the netbook's purpose of surfing the web very well for that price. I think a lot of people would still prefer a machine that is half the price of iPad and has a real keyboard, for surfing the web, and that will seem very fast, at least compared to an Atom running under Windows 7.

I didn't read the article, but was he suggesting it was the Macbook Air that killed the netbook? I think that's ridiculous. A macbook air is what $1000-$1400? It wouldn't even be on most people's radar when looking for a cheap mobile computer they can surf the web on.

<comment><USER32> >>> didn't read the article, but was he suggesting it was the Macbook Air that killed the netbook? <<<

I'm sorry if this is rude, but I downvoted you. I did that because you didn't bother to read the article, but you bothered to comment.

It's just isn't that simple. His argument for the MacBook Air is that it's in the same form factor, while having incredible battery life and being more powerful computationally. Plus, throw in OS X and you have a deal. In a way Air is netbook inspired in terms of the form factor, and the it killed the netbook by making the point that you could still pack in impressive features into a form factor that small by conventional standards, while having a decent profit margin.

In the article, the author makes the point that what really killed the netbook was portable computing (in the form of smart phones and tablets) that packed the same punch and was more intuitive, while maintaining a good enough profit margin for hardware manufacturers to stampede in order to get into the segment.

That said, I have a netbook, an Acer Aspire One, and it runs Ubuntu 10.10 with a grin and is quite awesome once you get used to the tiny keyboard...

Besides, I really do think that no one is taking real advantage of modern computing and you can still write Ruby code on Pentium 2 era PC once you flash it and boil it down to the basics. I think that if someone is dedicated then even a dumb terminal is enough to write code, why do you need that new found computational power? This really is an honest question.

<comment><USER33> I downvoted your post because the second sentence attacks the poster rather than the post. It is impossible to you to know for sure whether someone read an article or not before posting. Such a guess never adds anything to a discussion. It is always possible to address flaws in a post without accusing the author of not reading something.

<comment><USER32> I'm sorry if it sounds like I was attacking him, but I actually didn't mean to.

The author admitted that he hadn't read the post...

P.S. - I'm a she not a he...

<comment><USER33> Yeah my mistake there, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing about the Linux point: why buy a computer whose major advantage is portability and battery life, then give up a huge chunk of the latter by putting Linux on it?

That's the thing that pissed me off most about my netbook. Windows sucks and I couldn't put Linux on it without its shitty power management cutting a couple of hours off the battery.

<comment><USER19> When I first got my Eee PC 1000HA two or three years ago, I immediately noticed that it got far better battery life on Windows - about 4 hours, as opposed to 3 on Ubuntu and Arch Linux. That lead me to just stick with Windows XP for a few years. Things seems to have improved now, though. I installed Slackware 13.37 on it about a week ago, and it gets a full 4 hours:

      david@Fnord ~]$ acpi
      Battery 0: Discharging, 100%, 04:10:47 remaining
      [david@Fnord ~]$ uname -a
      Linux Fnord 126.96.36.199-smp #2 SMP Sat Apr 9 23:39:07 CDT 2011 i686 Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270   @ 1.60GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

I'd give Linux another shot on the laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think they are giving the OLPC way too much credit for starting the netbook trend. I remember that when it was introduced, one of the main criticisms was that the industry was already making laptops almost that cheap anyway.

Onn the other side, they aren't giving near enough credit to the iPad, which was pretty much the sole reason for the fall of netbooks. Netbooks were never good products anyway (especially the OLPC), and while they demonstrated a clear demand for mobile computing in a low price range, they were extremely vulnerable for someone else to come along and create a better option for a similar price. This was the iPad.

Look at the chart here: <http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/netbook-ipad/>

Netbooks were already slowing (imho because of just being inferior products) and when the iPad was introduced, it's the last nail in the coffin.

</comment><comment><USER35> For some folks, (like my wife and many of her friends), the netbook is the perfect computer. It's light enough to be taken anywhere and powerful enough to fulfill the daily tasks for the casual user. For her, a touch typist, the keyboard is infinitely more useful than a touch screen on a tablet. With a extra 1GB of DRAM, Windows 7 runs well enough that she can use it for almost all her personal needs sans the very few rare tasks, (encoding media or database reporting), that may require the horsepower of my home workstation.

With the new hardware in the pipeline, I believe there is still a long life in the netbook model to create a very portable computer with a real keyboard that people will find useful and compelling. I'll probably wouldn't be using it as the main development system, but I don't see a problem having a high battery life, Linux/Windows machine that's easy to lug around. For the creator in me, tablets don't cut it.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's dying (is it?) because it's slow and not-so-useable.

Ok, I just say that because a netbook (Gigabyte Q1000C, 2g of RAM, Atom N470) has been my main personal computing platform for some months now, but boy is it painful! The thing even fails to finish moderately heavy compilation tasks (eg. qemu or gcc). Oh, and it's made of subpar components too, the touchpad doesn't handle even vertical scrolling! There's like 2 non-visible areas tappable/touchable to go up and down... And the keyboard randomly decides that it like the key I last pressed and keeps pressing it for me...

That rant passed it must be said that's I'm not a typical user and my wife use her first gen Aspire One like nothing's wrong so maybe it's just me.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd say what killed it is that for $200 you can buy a decent used 13" laptop, instead of spending $250-300 on a borderline unusable new 10" netbook.

<comment><USER26> That assumes price is the only selling point. It isn't for me; I _like_ the extra portability of the smaller machine. It goes to places a 13" wouldn't because it fits in the bag more easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I disagree with the premise of this article. Netbooks aren't dead. Therefore, no one killed them.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for notes + reminders + tasks - <AUTHOR> Recently, I came to the need of using a Note taking app + reminder + tasks. I've investigated multiple apps, but none of them does what I need entirely.
Apple Notes: notes, no tasks or reminders
Evernote: notes, no tasks or reminders (easy ones)
OneNote: crashed 5 times before even using it
Wunderlist: tasks + reminders, but the notes UI is poorly designed
Notion: cool concept, way too complicated
Todoist: tasks + reminders, no notes
Today I found 1 app that integrates with slack and I can write something like:
- /remind some task today at 5
- /remind some other task in 15 minutes ...but there's no easy way to get a big picture of what are the current tasks
I'm a heavy keyboard user, any action that would require clicking or scrolling is a loss of time.
Here comes my question: what do you use that proved to be useful? <comment><USER2> Notes:

Apple Notes - it's on every device I use and online, so it has the lowest friction. I use Apple Notes for grocery lists (using checkboxes), semi- permanent notes, and sometimes as an inbox of things to process later.

Task Management:

Things ([https://culturedcode.com](https://culturedcode.com)) using the basic GTD framework. I add things to the Inbox through the day to get them out of my head. In the morning and when taking a break from work, I process the Inbox into projects/areas as well as defer them (give them a date to start/do them). Every Sunday I do a review/braindump of projects or anything still open.

By the way, you can use this GTD method with any tool. I know people who do it with Apple Reminders.

One extra thing I do at the beginning of each day is pick 3 tasks I absolutely need to do by the end of the day - a successful day is when I do at least those 3. I got this idea from Chris Bailey's book "The Productivity Project".

\--

I don't keep "permanent" notes (book notes, personal wiki, etc.). I've tried before and I never looked at them again nor did they help my memory.

</comment><comment><USER3> Huge fan of notion. Although I understand why you think its too complicated, I think it will without a doubt do what you need entirely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a try again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Org Mode in Spacemacs. Though I use agenda which is the passive form of reminders but works for my use case, if you need your org system to remind you; then this SO post [1] has some useful options, one among which is, on Emacs > 24, there is notifications!

[1] [https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/3844/good- methods-...](https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/3844/good-methods-for- setting-up-alarms-audio-visual-triggered-by-org-mode-events)

</comment><comment><USER5> Notion does what you want, and it's not that complicated.

In notion type "/todo" for a todo list, "/page" for a sub page, and "@remind <date/time>" for a reminder.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use Zim wiki for notes, with a suitable SOP for making sure things float to the top when needed. I also have a script that crawls over the pages searching for "REMIND" lines, and sets reminders.

So in essence, Zim for notes, and a couple of scripts that reads the underlying pages and takes appropriate actions.

Heavily tailored to be exactly and only what I want, but easily extensible when needed.

</comment><comment><USER7> On iOS, Streaks for daily habit forming and Due for a to-do list with advanced recurrence rules and nlp for interpreting the timeframe when capturing to-do items. Use org-mode on spacemacs/emacs if you want a feature rich task planner and note taker.

<comment><USER8> Mind sharing how you create advanced recurrence rules in Due ?

<comment><USER7> Define advanced.

What I had in mind was "Do X on the third Tuesday of every month".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For reminders and tasks: Google Keep from the Android phone and the Google Chrome extension.

For Notes: Boostnote plus Dropbox to share the notes between PCs. I used to be a user of Zim but at the time the lack of Vim keybindings it leds me to look other Notes tool.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know what you did to one note, it would have been awesome to use, if I had discovered it before all my classes were so math heavy they essentially required notes to be taken in LaTeX. Haven't had it crash on me yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just installed it and nothing much. works now, but I really need the reminders

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just wanted to add my little app as it does all three, as well as habits.

[https://www.nominal.net](https://www.nominal.net)

Let me know if you try it out and have any feedback, it is still pretty young.

</comment><comment><USER12> Orgmode. It's awesome. Only problem is mobile support sucks. Beorg app is trying to change it but it's UI is ugly AF. It could use some help by a UX specialist

<comment> mickael-kerjean For org-mode I made this: [https://github.com/mickael- kerjean/filestash](https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) demo: [https://demo.filestash.app/view/emacs.org?share=orgviewer](https://demo.filestash.app/view/emacs.org?share=orgviewer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Notes: Google Keep, with tags and sharing. Auto comes and syncs at every apple android web device, quick sync, minimalistic.

<comment><USER14> Apple sync?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google Keep for notes, recipes, shopping lists on my Ubuntu desktop and my Android phone.

</comment><comment><USER16> Google keep Tags, reminders, checklists, etc

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you do reminders with natural language?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google Keep, here.

</comment><comment><USER18> THINGS!</comment>


Notes on a Pulse Generator Circuit - <AUTHOR> http://cushychicken.github.io/ckt-notes-pulse-generator/ <comment><USER2> I thought this was pretty damn impressive [https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/3m1bao/13ghz_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/3m1bao/13ghz_oscillator/) I didn't know you could make a fairly simple oscillator to generate ~1GHz frequency.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was super pumped to see that as well. Was cool to see how much of an effect a good power supply had on getting the phase noise under control.

<comment><USER3> You could try this analog circuit sim - [http://www.macspice.com](http://www.macspice.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the recommendation! I gave macspice a try already and really wasn't impressed. LTSpice just has much better GUI support. I know it's a terrible thing to admit on HN, but when it comes to simulation models, a GUI is a really nice thing to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pertinent to my comment about LTSpice - I have to give some credit to the folks at CircuitLab for giving me a line on their circuit sim software. Much easier to use than LTSpice, whose GUI is slow to the point of physical pain. I'll see about writing something more coherent about it in the near future. Stay tuned.

<comment><USER4> [CircuitLab developer.] Thanks so much Nash! If anyone reading this wants to give our software a spin, email me your CircuitLab username (mike at circuitlab dot com) in the next day or so and I'll hook you up with 1 year free of CircuitLab Pro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has the author swapped collectors and emitters in the first paragraph?

e: actually several times throughout the text it seems.

<comment><AUTHOR> It appears so! D'oh. Thanks for pointing that out. I fixed it.

<comment><USER5> Yep, reads much better now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very nice work! One minor edit: It's Horowitz and Hill.

<comment><AUTHOR> Duh! I bet Hall is getting a ton of electronics interview requests now. I'm such a jerk. :) Thanks for pointing that out.</comment></comment>


Something for Nothing (1940) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Something_for_nothing_(1940).ogv <comment><AUTHOR> Featuring Rube Goldberg machines and quite a nice demonstration of a gasoline engine.

It's funny how the various statements in this videos (about patents, perpetual motion devices and gasoline) have each aged in their own way.</comment>


Keras.js – Run trained Keras models in your browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/transcranial/keras-js <comment><USER2> This is awesome! Can you describe how you implemented the WebGL ops a bit more? Did you have to write your own convolution kernel with GLSL for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! For WebGL, credit goes to [https://github.com/waylonflinn/weblas](https://github.com/waylonflinn/weblas). I only really use GEMM, but it works quite well. In keras.js, convolution is implemented with the oft-used im2col transformation to turn it into a matrix multiply followed by reshape. Convolution kernels directly GLSL could potentially provide speed gains I'm sure, but I can't even imagine writing it for tensors of arbitrary shape.

<comment><USER3> Check out the Winograd optimisations used in Nervana's neon - very fast

[https://www.nervanasys.com/winograd-2/](https://www.nervanasys.com/winograd-2/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What sort of performance can be expected compared to running in the terminal? How large NNs will this scale to in practice? I see a 50-layer resnet is mentioned; but not 1000-layers?

<comment><USER3> On these demos, I'm getting several seconds on the imagenet inception v3 recognition on an i7 macbook pro (nvidia gpu), on both gpu and cpu modes.

I've built tensorflow for android, running inceptionv3 trained on imagenet and it's much faster, running just on mobile CPU pretty much realtime, around 5fps. On a desktop CPU/GPU it's obviously even faster

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. We're trying to do something similar but moving in the opposite direction language-wise by implementing the models in C++:

[https://github.com/dguest/lwtnn](https://github.com/dguest/lwtnn)

The idea is to have something lightweight that we can easily copy into our analysis framework (which is written in C++).

If anyone reading this knows of a library that already does this it could save us some time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wonderful! And because all praise comes with work in OSS: I wish the network diagram would show intermediate states where possible. I've seen some examples where – with the right presentations – they gave fantastic insights into the network's "thinking".

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool. Didn't work on Android (Chrome) either in GPU or CPU mode.

Usual tricks like pruning the model and quantising to 8bit should get the model sizes down significantly from 100mb. Or using an architecture like squeezenet

</comment><comment><USER7> This is cool, especially given how javascript is everywhere. Is it browser specific, or could it run in other javascript environment, like nodejs?

</comment><comment><USER8> cool but.. >Offload computation entirely to client browsers

i'm not sure that's a big benefit really

<comment><USER9> They're using pre trained models though, like

[https://github.com/heuritech/convnets- keras](https://github.com/heuritech/convnets-keras)

I don't think they expect people to train them in the browser, just run the pretrained ones for image recognition or something

<comment><USER10> Training may not yet be available, but how about inference?

<comment><USER3> Inference is what this does

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great! The network visualizations are also pretty sweet. How are those generated?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Nothing fancy with the network architecture diagrams. The layers are just div elements with the layer name as the id. There's a definition of inbound/outbound connections by layer names, extracted from the keras json config, which is used to draw SVG paths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It does not work on my Firefox (but works on Chrome).

</comment><comment><USER13> That's realy good stuff!

</comment><comment><USER14> This has teaching potential.

</comment><comment><USER15> how to get the demo running? they are just images now.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thank you thank you! I love you</comment>


Facebook buys startup building neural monitoring armband - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/23/facebook-buys-startup-building-neural-monitoring-armband/ <comment><USER2> > "There are some fundamental advantages that we have over really any camera- > based technology..." CTRL-labs' head of R&D, Adam Berenzweig, told > TechCrunch in an interview late last year. "There are no issues with > collusion or field-of-view problems"

I wasn't in the room, but I'd bet good money that the word he actually used in the interview was "occlusion".

That said, the prospect of a neural monitoring armband with collusion problems sounds like the premise for some great dystopian sci fi.

<comment><USER3> You don't need to even go into sci-fi land to reach a dystopian scenario.

With no laws to govern what technology like this is allowed to do and what can be done with the information from it, Facebook and companies like it will be able to create products that do what the press release implies with VR, but since they'll then have a direct monitor on our brains, they'll eventually be able to measure response to advertising, gauge public opinion, tell when someone is lying, and even flag certain types of brain activity as "potentially dangerous" if it's determined that certain patterns precede violent actions like police being in a gun battle or a soldier being in combat (or even violent sports).

I hope they don't manage to develop a successful product that does this, but I also think enough corporations are working toward doing so that we'll have to deal with these problems in the next 1-2 decades.</comment></comment>


Meet Tranquility, the military-grade 2,500GHZ monster that powers Eve Online - <AUTHOR> http://m.pcgamer.com/2013/06/15/eve-online

<comment><USER2> I don't call my quad core desktop a 12 GHZ computer, and for good reason; there is no 12 GHz clock on it. Call it a X Teraflop peak capacity system, but please, don't call it a 2.5 THz computer, it's misleading and not helpful.

<comment><USER3> Unless I missed something, it doesnt - it says

>> cluster has 2,574GHZ of processing power

Which is true. It has that much processing power.

<comment><USER4> Processing power isn't measured in GHz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> am i the only one that was disappointed in not actually seeing any imagery of Tranquillity?

</comment><comment><USER6> John Connor,

On the Eve world of your choice, start a new crypto-currency TCU(THZ Currency Units)founded on BOINC distributed processing, consolidate and grow for the next couple decades until you become large enough to wrestle with the Tranquiity monster, or simple escape to HongWrong.com and strategically time release Tranquility abuse power-point torpedoes from your quite expensive super-ships and create a blazingly graphic galactic revolution.</comment>


No more junk mails in your inbox - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/goodbye-e-mail-clutter-m-nihal-ahmed?trk=pulse_spock-articles <comment><USER2> I find it somewhat ironic and funny that 1) you're spamming HN with all of your posts on linkedin.com and 2) that you wrote an article for LinkedIn about the amount of junk mail you receive. #2 is especially notable considering that LinkedIn was one of my biggest sources of junk mail (until I took the time to permanently blacklist your sending IPs).

Also, in the 18-day history of your account, you've submitted seven articles on linkedin.com (all written by you). Recently, _dang_ (moderator) talked about accounts created for the (apparent) sole purpose of promoting/submitting links to one site so I'll be reporting your account -- and helping reduce the amount of "junk" on HN (even more irony!).</comment>


ACLU reaches settlement with Facebook over discriminatory ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/aclu-reaches-settlement-with-facebook-over-ad-discrimination--f91778c9-d594-401d-8f57-5373663d857d.html <comment><USER2> I've never really understood how targeted ads, aside from things like job or housing opportunities, would be considered harmful discriminatory. Yes it's _discrimination_ in the basic sense of the word - the same way that my company discriminates between men and women in our work experience surveys so that we can see any differences in trends.

If I'm selling high heeled shoes, why should I not be able to target my ads to women? If I'm trying to solicit support for, say, a charity focused on helping South American immigrants why should I not be able to target Latin immigrants if I have a belief that they will be more invested and likely to follow up? If I built a new church why shouldn't I be able to advertise to Christians?

Certainly, using such categories for job and housing advertisements should not be allowed. But if I'm reading Facebook's announcement correctly targeting on race and gender is being completely removed [1]. I'd make more sense for me to just forbid it for jobs and housing. If that's too difficult, explicitly limit it to selling people consumer goods like shoes, concert tickets, and video games.

1\. [https://www.facebook.com/business/news/keeping- advertising-s...](https://www.facebook.com/business/news/keeping-advertising- safe-and-civil)

<comment><USER3> This case was about targeted ads for housing, credit cards, etc. You can't target people of a gender or color for such things by law.

<comment><USER2> Facebook already forbade using those categories for targeting ads for those things:

> For over a year, we have required advertisers we identify offering housing, > employment or credit ads to certify compliance with our non-discrimination > policy.

It looks to me like they're removing this as an option for all types of ads:

> We're committed to protecting people from discriminatory advertising on our > platforms. That's why we're removing over 5,000 targeting options to help > prevent misuse. While these options have been used in legitimate ways to > reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing > the risk of abuse is more important. This includes limiting the ability for > advertisers to exclude audiences that relate to attributes such as ethnicity > or religion.

<comment><USER4> Facebook forbade those only after reports. There were further issues followed by ACLU which ended in agreement that requries further changes.

Chain of events: 1.) A series of investigative reports over the past two years have uncovered ways that users can abuse Facebook's ad platform in order to discriminate against some populations, mainly people of color, when it comes to certain marketing for certain opportunities, like housing, employment or credit.

2.) Following the reports, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed a complaint against Facebook [...], charging that the social network allows advertisers to illegally discriminate in housing ads by excluding some groups from seeing the ads.

3.) Shortly after, Facebook removed over 5,000 ad-targeting options to prevent that capability.

4.) In September, the ACLU and its law firm, representing the Communications Workers of America and several individual job seekers, filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Facebook and a number of employers, alleging that they had unlawfully discriminated against certain populations via their ad targeting platform.

5.) As part of the settlement, Facebook will pay $5 million to several groups, [...] It will also take three new steps to prevent advertisers from engaging in unlawful discrimination around employment, housing, and credit ads on Facebook and its subsidiaries (Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc.):archive for housing ads,

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure sneaky landlords can get around this. There are plenty of demographic categories that correlate with race that I'm sure are still available on FB.

<comment><USER6> Definitely, and that will make it harder to detect, but if you suspect it's the case and manage to sue, it becomes pretty obvious. They'll have a tough time explaining to the court why they chose to target their apartment ads to, say, people who buy sunscreen. And trying to pick a more subtle demographic will come off as even more ridiculous.

<comment><USER7> I can imagine seemingly justifiable proxies. Targeting people who buy lawn care products and people who buy wild bird food is both arguably enriching to the neighborhood (birds and grass look nice) and probably correlates to WASPs fairly well. I remember the bird food example being brought up as something that credit ratings are influenced by, but I don't remember the source.

Edit based on sketchy memory: s/organic/wild

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The big picture: Unlike television or radio, internet platforms that sell > ads aren't regulated.

I'm surprised that this continues to the case, especially in examples like this where EXISTING regulations seem to fit pretty squarely with "new" problems created on tech platforms. There's some really interesting work on how differently tech companies are regulated from other kinds of companies (e.g., here: [https://innovationforallcast.com/2019/01/23/amanda-lotz- what...](https://innovationforallcast.com/2019/01/23/amanda-lotz-what-is-a- tech-company/))

</comment><comment><USER9> Along a similar line... I'm always surprised we don't see more generalized less-targeted advertising on the web for regular products like Coca-Cola or Charmin, etc like you do on TV. Perhaps with click-through to online games for engagement or coupons, etc.

<comment><USER7> Proposed reason that just popped into my head, and could be wrong: advertising that cannot be targeted to individuals is less effective, so there is less competition for it. Thus prices are low relative to ads that can be targeted. Thus companies with a wide target demographic can buy these spots cheaper, while companies that are targeting a specific niche get more bang for their buck from relatively expensive targeted ads.

<comment><USER9> The size/scale of Twitter or Facebook, etc may be an example where it might be better for generic inline advertising over the "promoted" messages. I can understand where a smaller site may do better with random targeted ads... I'm just a little surprised it hasn't been done or tried much that I am aware of.

<comment><USER7> I don't see why scale should affect whether targeting makes sense (with the exception of entities like facebook that have collected so much data on their own that they can target better than smaller competitors, which leads targeting increasing with scale, not decreasing). Television isn't targeted because it wasn't designed to be, and hasn't been updated (yet) -- they would need to deliver different ads to different homes. This is already done for different localities, but not individual homes (that I'm aware of). It's not a scale issue. Targeted billboards are coming[0], albeit not based on individual browsing habits (yet). I don't think this is about scale (mostly), I think it's about the technical feasibility of tracking and targeting customers on a given platform in $CURRENT_YEAR.

>random targeted ads

I'm genuinely confused by what this is supposed to mean. To me, random is antithetical to targeted. In my reading I decided to drop the random, but I should note that I may be parsing your intent incorrectly as a result of that.

[0] [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/a...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2018-08-10/google- s-targeted-ads-are-coming-to-a-billboard-near-you)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FIVE MILLION DOLLARS?

Seriously? That's it? What a fucking slap in the face. Mark Zuckerberg's home remodel's PARKING FEES in the Mission were about that.</comment>


How I develop with Nix - <AUTHOR> https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-02-04-how-i-develop-with-nixos.html

<comment><USER2> It's worth noting the landscape has changed since I wrote this blog post. My updated workflow is here:

[http://wiki.ocharles.org.uk/Nix](http://wiki.ocharles.org.uk/Nix)

The official documentation also describes how to work with Cabal/Haskell:

[https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#users-guide-to-the- haskell...](https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#users-guide-to-the-haskell- infrastructure)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was just trying to get Nix working after needing a version of base (GHC) newer than what I had installed.

The situation seems to have gotten a bit simpler with newer versions of the nix tools (this is of no fault of the author of this post, the post is more than a year old, their blog has great haskell stuff!).

Anyway, for haskell development you can just:

       1. Write cabal file (e.g., ./project.cabal)
       2. cabal2nix --shell . >shell.nix
       3. nix-shell

After step 3, all the required packages, including stuff like GHC, will be installed. You can use cabal however you normally do to build the project:

       4. cabal sandbox init
       5. cabal build

<comment><USER4> Is step 4 really required ? nix-shell already gives you a sandbox environment.

Also their user manual[0] is really good now.

[0][https://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/trunk/manual/latest/down...](https://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/trunk/manual/latest/download- by-type/doc/manual#users-guide-to-the-haskell-infrastructure)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recently I've been in various threads on HN complaining about how frustrating the Nix story is for development.

I do not read this and go "This is a great idea and process!" I read this and say, "I can see how this might be better than the existing haskell toolchain. Cabal-dev has always been a bit of a compromise." (Edit: showing how long it's been since I have used Haskell in anger, cabal-dev got deprecated in favor of native sandboxing about 2 years ago, my bad.) Haskell seems to be the common thread for nearly all users of Nix I've encountered in the wild.

Honestly, do other people read this and go, "This seems better than my current development toolchain?" ESPECIALLY if you're producing static binaries? As much as I criticize Maven, I'm not sure what this process buys you over maven except... well... what DOES it buy you over Maven dependency management? Unification with OS packages?

It's not immutable, reproducible deploys. The _deploy_ side is easy to render immutable and reproducible with layerd, controlled, tagged containers. It seems to be a story that's more about the _build and dev_ side of things. Heck, I showed this to a co-worker and he said, "Wow, cabal must be really bad if someone was so frustrated by it that their solution was to change their OS."

I don't mean to throw shade on the work that the Nix and NixOS people have been doing. I understand it has value to some people. It just seems very oversold as a solution to the problem of reproducible dev environments. And by adopting Nix, you MUST deploy your executable to something that can play nice with Nix's expectations, even if you are making a static executable. This seems like a heavy price to pay.

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing about Nix is that it's the first project, as far as I know, that tries to solve the problem of package management with a fundamentally different approach. Most of the solutions to date were just okay: they worked with a tolerable degree of failure.

A solution that works good enough is often a serious obstacle for developing a solution that works really well. E.g. Unix works just good enough to preclude the adoption of a new paradigm in OS'es such as Plan 9.

Treating packages like immutable values sounds like a genuinely new idea. So what I think is that people don't go "this seems better than my current development toolchain", instead they think that the idea that underlies Nix might result in disproportionately more reliable tools in package management. That's worth fussing about.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with Nix in any way.

<comment><USER6> The first but not the last, there is also Guix the package manager and GuixSD the system distribution, which is written in Scheme, as well as all the package definitions. For lispers it is heaven.

<comment><USER5> I am assuredly a "lisper" and I really don't want to use anything based on Nix. I really dislike how statically linked executables are not portable on Nix. I'm less upset w.r.t. dynamic library management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yup. This is pretty much what I do as well, but for Node and Python projects. The best part is that I develop in exactly the same environment that the app has in deployment.

<comment><USER8> I use nix with python at work, but I haven't yet used it (much) with our node libraries. `npm2nix` was a little clunky in my experience, generating an enormous expression for each package with no code reuse. Is it easier in practice?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I use npm2nix a lot, and it does produce very large files (a few thousand lines of code). But in practice it's fine. I very rarely look at the generated code. If I need to update a dependency, I change my package.json file, run npm2nix and start a new nix-shell.

I also wrote a bit of nix code to read the package.json file and figure out what the direct dependencies are, which keeps derivations for my own packages simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like it would be perfect for declarative deployments!! So neat!

<comment><USER2> Indeed, it works as nicely as you'd expect! I have a blog post in the pipeline describing how we do deployments... I need to get that pushed out.

<comment><USER10> ... Indeed you do :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> nix-shell is a killer tool. A generic virtualenv that doesn't duplicate dependencies if you use it for multiple projects.

<comment><USER12> For me it has a few too many annoying shell quirks for me to use daily (try a ctrl-c inside a psql prompt - always screws up my screen session for some reason...)

<comment><USER13> Please file bug reports for your issues - it'd be much appreciated by the rest of us.

<comment><USER12> I'm often using quite unconventional setups and am often unsure whether it's just something I've done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see people mentioning it on other threads, but is anyone usigin Guix? Or the dmd daemon system? I am curious because the GNU package set is quite limtied for obvious reasons, but I still would love to work my way up to a homegrown OS or fork where I add the non-GNU-compliant apps and build my own master OS for the elitist Lispter (see what I did there) I aspire to be.

<comment><USER15> GUIX has non-gnu stuff available too.

<comment><USER14> Oh I am aware, I just did not want to get in to the OSI and GNU spectrum of licensing.

I was going to say Debianesque, but I kept deleting whatever I wrote in its place because I just thought it would lead to off-topic trolling.

In short: I wanna build my own Arch Linux, and Arch User Repository, but using Guix. We shall see if I ever do that as I promised myself in the next 5-10 years. Haha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love Nix, but I wish there were a way to easily install packages without having sudo access. Programs like pip only need a '\--user' flag, while Nix requires you to use chroot magic[1] to be able to install packages in your home directory.

[1] [https://nixos.org/wiki/How_to_install_nix_in_home_(on_anothe...](https://nixos.org/wiki/How_to_install_nix_in_home_\(on_another_distribution\))

<comment><USER17> I sort of "version" or segregate my $HOME directory into a separate Workspaces directory in my real home for which I then have a script to activate a particular work space. For the most part, this script just sets $HOME and execs a new /bin/bash. This works pretty well. Most everything respects the new $HOME and works from there (so far only SSH and Java seem to ignore this to which I think I could fix Java by setting $JAVA_OPTS and explicitly setting the user.home property). On OS X I can install a separate copy of homebrew for each work space and have only the packages in each work space that I need or want. I was really looking forward to doing the same thing with Nix when I recently switched to Linux at my new job, but was very disappointed to find out that it really wanted to be installed somewhere in the root file system. Thanks for the link, I hadn't come across that one yet. I might give that a try.</comment></comment>


Why I Don't Like Apple (by the author of Remind) - <AUTHOR> http://david.skoll.ca/blog/2010-05-18-anti-apple.html

<comment><USER2> > If I came to computers as a 14-year-old given an iPhone or iPad instead of a > PET, I probably would have played with the thing for a few months and moved > on. I'd never have experienced the beauty and creativity of crafting a piece > of software

Xcode is free to download and use (you have to pay $99 to deploy your app but not to develop it). I have been learning Objective C for the past month, and I fail to see how is it that I am not experiencing "the beauty and creativity of crafting a piece of software."

Try it. I have used Visual Studio back in the day (before .NET, so I can't compare to today's Visual Studio), but Cocoa made me understand design patterns such as MVC and Delegate with much less pain and with much more pleasure than I would have had in some other framework that does not rely on them to such an extent.

I have been a tinkerer myself. I have been lucky enough to have my own little chemistry lab at my house when I was 10. I used Linux since 2003, and my daily living depends on it even now (at work I program software that runs on Linux servers). I understand where you're coming from. But I have also understood the other point of view, namely that the computer is just a tool, and not an end goal in itself, and as a tool it should just work, even if it means making some concessions to users who don't care about tinkering.

Just because you tinkered with electronic components, and today's hardware is more integrated, preventing you from doing that, doesn't mean that there isn't something else to tinker with. Also, you can still tinker with the iPhone -- as a photographer it made incredibly happy to find out that somebody had written a lightmeter app for the iPhone which uses the built-in camera to measure the available light so you could then enter those settings to fire up a manual film SLR from the 1970s. Just because today's tinkering is different from yesterdays doesn't mean it disappeared (or that yesterday's tinkerers are somehow inherently superior to today's).

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't say "puerile" - I'd say "passive-aggressive".

If you're that opposed to everything Apple or Microsoft or Sun or whatever, then forbid using it on that platform in the license. If you're unwilling to do that, _mind your own damn business_ as to what compatible compiler and platform people use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Remind is Free Software and what you are suggesting would make the license unfree. Obviously the author doesn't want that. Instead he chose to keep Remind free and remind Apple users of Apple's opposition to Free Software. It's hard to miss the logic.

<comment><USER3> " _what you are suggesting would make the license unfree_ "

Yes.

If you want to make different demands of users of your software than those of the GPL, BSD license, etc., _you should not use one of those licenses_.

If you want to use a free license, accept users' freedoms and don't be petulant that some people will choose differently from you.

<comment><AUTHOR> "If you want to make different demands of users of your software than those of the GPL, BSD license, etc., you should not use one of those licenses."

Licenses are legal instruments and the terms of free licenses give defined freedoms. The nag message for Apple users does not contradict the license under which Remind is published (GPL). The message, reflective of the author's "petulance" as you put it, is, legally speaking a feature of the software and it is subject to the same licensing terms.

I think you are mixing up the license with a vague notion of the "spirit" of the license. These are two different things. You may still argue that the nag message goes against the "spirit" of a free license (while not against the terms), but the counter-argument made by the author is that this measure is justified in the face of Apple's restrictive behavior.

<comment><USER3> I am "mixing up" nothing. The author may conclude that any number of things are justified by his opinion of Apple's behavior, but that conclusion is hardly beyond criticism in the way you try to imply.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Syntax-free programming - <AUTHOR> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/keyword-commands/index.html <comment><USER2> An interesting idea but - there is almost always a better user interface than English (or any other language used for inter-human communication).

The example in the post is a case in point - it is way simpler to just grab the little margin widget and set it where you want it. Way simpler than a conversation with the software anyway.

Imagine: "Hey computer set the edge bit erm, margin, yeah thats it, OK set the margin to two inches. Wow, that's a bit wide - maybe a bit less. Let's try one and a half inches - woops maybe I meant centimetres all along".

<comment><USER3> > _The example in the post is a case in point - it is way simpler to just grab > the little margin widget and set it where you want it. Way simpler than a > conversation with the software anyway._

Depends whether the point is also to communicate with other users of the script later on. It's hard to convey "he grabbed the little margin widget" in a compact way without writing it somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Greg Little's homepage has links to two papers and his Master's thesis which provides the actual technical information: <http://glittle.org/>

They refer to it there as "keyword programming." I was very skeptical when I went to their description page, but after giving a cursory look at their actual work, I'm interested. It looks like they use context in the program and heuristics as guides through the search space to come up with a good guess.

There's a lot of comments here that are - rightly - skeptical, but before saying "it can't be done," check out what they actually did. It gets use one step closer to "Computer, Earl Grey, hot."

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if the authors have tried programming with AppleScript? John Gruber has a good article exploring the problem with "English-like" programming (<http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster>).

<comment><USER3> Yes.

Also, "syntax-free" is a misleading name. What they mean instead is just "flexible natural-language-like syntax".

The problem with the natural-language approach is that (a) it is unpredictable and fickle, hard to clearly document, and often buggy, even in an implementation which has been tested for 15–20 years, and (b) it doesn't scale well to even medium-sized projects. Anyone who can learn to write quick one- off scripts in a language like AppleScript or the one suggested here can as quickly learn to write quick one-off scripts in Python (90% of the language can be ignored and it's still useful for such tasks). But if they learn Python, as soon as that simple script grows, learning new language features will allow scaling the script up in complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Syntax-Free Programming" is as much an oxymoron as "Language-less language". It may be graphical; it may be less rigid (what they're talking about here), but it's there. I would recommend that they look into Simonyi's work on Intentional Programming.

I've spent a long time on this idea and came up with something that follows an MVC pattern, so that I can have Syntax X, and you Syntax Y, and your modifications are seen as in Syntax X to me, my modifications seen as Syntax Y to you. The language is the model and the syntax (graphical, textual, etc.) is just the view/controller. (But it was kind of a nightmare: to get it to work I had to create an OS from scratch using the principles, for example.)

Again, "syntax-free programming" is a really poor choice of words for what they're working on.

<comment><USER7> _I would recommend that they look into Simonyi's work on Intentional Programming._

Has anything usable come out of that?

<comment><USER6> A lot of patents about nothing?

<comment><USER6> Actually, I take that back. I was trying to be funny.

I think the people that work with such a goal are heroes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
      Please launch iTunes and Firefox unless Safari is installed.

That's why non-syntactic programming doesn't work. It isn't ambiguous to you because you're human and realize that both Firefox and Safari are web browsers and why would someone not want to launch iTunes if Safari was installed. However, it can be interpreted both ways without such knowledge.

The problem isn't syntax. The problem is the logic computers need. We're loose with our language logic. We use modifiers that could modify a host of things that we only glean from what would be natural based on the content. Computers can't understand content in that way.

<comment><USER9> What about a web of associations--like a tag cloud on steroids--for each word and grammar construct that act like priors in a bayesian process that modifies the meaning of each atom based on context? It probably wouldn't be more than a few orders of magnitude harder than making a translate.google.com that's as good as the average bilingual.

<comment><USER10> >> translate.google.com that's as good as the average bilingual

So, a few orders of magnitude harder than sci-fi?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Syntax is usually not much of a worry to me, compared to other problems (how will I lock this object for access from other threads? what should be the interface for such and such callback?) It doesn't take long after starting to program in a language for syntax to become second nature, and often it can express something more concisely, or even elegantly than plain english (point- free haskell is an art... when it's not overdone, anyway).

Being able to find commands in the API is nice, but that's basically intellisense or hyperspec made automatic.

</comment><comment><USER12> not completely related but isn't the lack of rigidity/strictness the reason for all the problems related to HTML today? To me this will open another pandora's box of long term headaches

<comment><USER13> I thought the problem was that XML was too rigid and often blows up on the user's face.

For different problems, use different tools, I guess.</comment></comment>


Why Becoming an Entrepreneur is a "No-Brainer" - <AUTHOR> http://how2livelife.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-becoming-entrepreneur-is-no-brainer.html

<comment><USER2> The writer's grasp of probability is almost as bad as the graphic.

<comment><USER3> The only thing worse than his grasp of probability is his grasp of the English language. How the hell did this make top page here?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you plan on being at startup school, maybe I can express in plain English to you face-to-face "how the hell" this story made top page...I'll be the guy in the Purdue t-shirt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ouch, the logic hurts.

Major Premise: 2 out of 3 millionaires are entrepreneurs.

Minor Premise: You could be an entrepreneur.

Conclusion: You could have a 2/3 chance of being a millionaire.

 _Am I getting the argument correctly? I'm hoping that I'm missing something or interpreting it wrong_

The argument presented is invalid. This does not mean that _you_ (or all entrepreneurs) have a 2/3 chance to making it to millionaire, but that millionaires have a 2/3 chance of being an entrepreneur. The question to ask yourself is how many entrepreneurs _aren't_ millionaires? What if 9/10 entrepreneurs go bankrupt? The decision is not quite as easy as the author makes it out to be. Maybe only 1/3 millionaires are royalty, but 9/10 of royalty are millionaires. It makes more sense to be the 1/3 royalty than the 2/3 entrepreneurs. Your odds are better. (Crazy examples used for educational purposes only. You can't decide to be royalty in my experience.)

Please don't misunderstand my motives. I have very strong entrepreneurial leanings and I hope to support myself in the future by my own ventures.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> your absolute chance of becoming a millionaire isn't 2/3. 2/3 millionaires are entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial route to millions is at least double that of the non-entrepreneurial route (assuming there are no more entrepreneurs than there are non-entrepreneurs -- a reasonable assumption)...in the example game given at the post, the non-entrepreneurial route is assigned the chance of 1/3 (assuming 1 out 3 non-entrepreneurs are millionaires -- not so reasonable assumption)...so 2/3 is at least double of 1/3.

To be clear, if there are 30 millionaires and 3K non-entrepreneurs and 3K entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial route obviously wouldn't be 2/3, but it will be double that of the non-entrepreneurial route.

Excuse the confusion.

<comment><USER5> Ok, I see your reasoning, but I think it would be better to word it like this: "You are (statistically) twice as likely to be a millionaire if you are an entrepreneur than if you are not an entrepreneur (assuming that less than two thirds of the total population are entrepreneurs)."

But this still leaves a correlation/causation problem if you want to use it to imply that choosing the entrepreneurial path makes one twice as likely to become rich.</comment></comment>