220.127.116.11 - <AUTHOR> https://one.one.one.one/ <comment><USER2> Original discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727869)

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727869)

</comment><comment><USER4> So they're saying "Privacy First: Guaranteed". How is it guaranteed though? Is there anything we can do to verify that claim or do we just have to believe them?

As far as I understand they're an American company, so if some government agency wants to have information, they will make them give the information by any means necessary.

<comment><USER5> > As far as I understand they're an American company, so if some government > agency wants to have information, they will make them give the information > by any means necessary.

I don't get this attitude. Do you expect or want companies NOT to obey law? Or have criminals serve you DNS, which try to evade law?

<comment><USER6> > Do you expect or want companies NOT to obey law?

Whose law? US law in this space says a lot about the rights of US citizens but a lot less about the rights of non-US citizens. So, yes it's reasonable to expect that a US company should obey the law but it doesn't follow that there's no reasonable concern with that.

Having said that, I applaud Cloudfare for making this step. Just because something isn't NSA proof doesn't mean that it has no value. But the concern is valid given that Cloudfare, presumably, still have access to the lookup data.

<comment><USER7> They say they're not logging, so there's no data to supply to any spooks.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but that doesn't mean, and is unlikely to mean, that they can't log.

They won't be able to pass historic data as they, presumably, don't have it. But if they are formally requested to give information, at least for targeted users, my understanding is that they are legally obliged to comply i.e. they can't refuse to collect if asked.

I believe there are caveats to that e.g. they can't be forced to backdoor an application but I don't believe that that would be necessary in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Best domain I've seen in a long time.

<comment><USER9> Love this kind of domains:

\- [http://abc.xyz](http://abc.xyz) (alphabet) \- [https://rome.ro/](https://rome.ro/) (John Romero) \- [https://xa.bi](https://xa.bi) (my own) :)

<comment><USER10> They're clever until you need to read them over the phone and confusion ensues, or until the private-company registry decides to hike fees.

<comment><USER11> I think it's pretty common to have a .com that redirects, which helps with the phone issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They provide a fast service, with no data collection, for free, but I fail to see their motivation on this, which makes me a bit reluctant to use it.

Does someone know what do they get out of it ?

</comment><comment><USER13> Claims as claims, but reality...

In Poland, with quite good internet connection, random quite popular domain (around 18mln visitors a month), I get times reported by dig @: ISP: 32ms Google (18.104.22.168): 30ms 188.8.131.52: 112ms (domain TTL was 1557, so result from their own cache)

Plus, what was mentioned here before. "Privacy First: Guaranteed" \+ free service. For sure! :)

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://18.104.22.168](https://126.96.36.199) also serves the website. I'm undecided which one I like more.

Other then that: I would not use it. Cloudflare already has enough insight into my browsing. No reason to give them my whole DNS request history.

</comment><comment><USER15> b.root-servers.net and h.root-servers.net are both in every region more or less slow. Why?

I thought first that it might be an issue with the region but i can't find any one which showes that b and h are quick.

[https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-root-servers](https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns- root-servers)

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool domain name I'll give em that much</comment>


Native Apps are Doomed - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-scene/native-apps-are-doomed-ac397148a2c0 <comment><USER2> My 2c:

CPU power wont be ever increasing (we average few % a generation atm). Mobile 'webapps' are doomed because in x years consumers will want more snapiness, shiney-ness, and overall performance.

The author of the article is taking the naive view that just because _now_ javascript works for him, that the rest of the progress wont stop.</comment>


Publishing gh-pages with Travis-CI - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/53a8270e87db

<comment><USER2> I've also been doing this on an open source project (play-silhouette). It's quite handy.

I don't like doing a force push, though.

This is the script I'm using to update API docs and the website only in commits to the master branch, and not when pull requests are validated:

[https://github.com/mohiva/play- silhouette/blob/master/script...](https://github.com/mohiva/play- silhouette/blob/master/scripts/update-site-from-travis)</comment>


A dedicated community for CrowdFunders - <AUTHOR>

CrowdFundersUnite is a free to join site dedicated to crowdfunders with the sole purpose of building a community to discuss and discover crowdfunding opportunities and protect from crowdfunding fraud. The site, running in its beta stage right now shall include more features with more members coming in. Please beta signup on this page - http://crowdfundersunite.com <comment><USER2> All I see is a page with a login form.</comment>


How Mattermark Ranks Frequently Hyped Consumer Startups - <AUTHOR> http://mattermark.com/how-mattermark-ranks-10-frequently-hyped-consumer-startups/

<comment><USER2> Is there a breakdown of how a Mattermark score is calculated?

Graphs of the Mattermark score changing over time for each company would make it much easier to see if the company is gaining or losing steam.

Right now, Twitter's score of 1435 doesn't really give me much to go off of in terms of how they are doing, other than out of these 10 companies, it has the highest Mattermark score.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, graphs and a detailed breakdown of Mattermark score inputs and trends week over week are available for logged in users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've read a few stories today about Snapchat mostly around the supposed co- founder suing for a slice of their pie. I swear I've never heard of it before today. And their website is just a picture of two women getting electrocuted while taking a picture of the sun.</comment>


Hey Mr. Gates (We Need a GitHub of Science) (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://marciovm.com/i-want-a-github-of-science <comment><AUTHOR> "Hey Mr. Gates

It may be that the activation energy required to initiate changes won't arise within the system. In that case, an outside push might do the job, and the best place for this push to come from may be a nimble funding agency. For example, a request for proposals could specify that phase II funding decisions would be based on the impact of online resources developed in phase I, as measured by specific metrics developed with community feedback. Nothing makes a scientist contemplate change faster than a new source of grant money, and the only thing better than a faculty applicant with a paper in Science may be one bringing in a multimillion dollar grant."</comment>


The Gigantic Aeroscraft Is Ready, and It's Awesome - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2F5972973%2Fthe-titanic-aeroscraft-is-finished%2B%2Band-its-awesome%23test&h=CAQEOVqja

<comment><USER2> Was it really necessary to link through Facebook?

[http://gizmodo.com/5972973/the-titanic-aeroscraft-is- finishe...](http://gizmodo.com/5972973/the-titanic-aeroscraft-is- finished++and-its-awesome#test)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> That's my mistake, I apologize. My friend sent me a message on Facebook and I copied the link from there, not after I had already jumped to the page.</comment>


XKCD: Click to Drag, full-screen with cursor control - <AUTHOR> http://ares.aylett.co.uk/xkcd/

<comment><AUTHOR> I copied a couple of the hints people have given here and there, and thought I'd share. If anyone has any more nice ideas, let me know and I'll try to add them.</comment>


How to use Google Maps natively in iOS 6 right now - <AUTHOR> http://www.virtualpants.com/post/31928535839/google-maps-app-for-ios-6-is-already-here

<comment><USER2> Google is also clever by not releasing a maps app right away. What better way to show the strength of google than let users bitch about how bad apple map is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. If I were them, I'd wait a while and make some ads before launching their app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Apple released a subpar product... with hopes that the "fanboys" would love it and tout it as the second coming of f. magellan.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google is clever by linking to their maps web app, which is much better than Apple's latest native maps app.</comment>


SICP in Python - <AUTHOR> https://wizardforcel.gitbooks.io/sicp-in-python/content/ <comment><USER2> It made me so sad when I found out CS61A was being taught in Python. I love Python, but I also know that I would have missed out on so much wonderful information if I hadn't learned Scheme.

It was truly mind blowing when they had us implement a Scheme interpreter in Scheme, and then add infix operators.

I think the original SICP was perfect for an intro course.

It was also the great leveler, because even if you entered college with programming experience, almost no one knew Scheme. So you were all on equal footing when it came to the language.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for explaining why you think Scheme is a better langauge for SICP than Python.

As a fan of Python, my reaction to seeing this course was: "oh cool, a course on interesting things in a language I'm comfortable with".

I was then somewhat discombobulated to see the Python bashing in the comments.

<comment><USER4> SICP is about deeply understanding computation.

Scheme is a good language for SICP because it's simple. You can build a Scheme interpreter as a class project. You can analyze it formally. Etc.

Python is a good language because it's readable and writeable. But it doesn't work for SICP since it's too complex for that. Python also intentionally omits things critical to SICP (like tail recursion).

Calling this book "SICP in Python" would be like taking your favorite poem, releasing it into a different language, and finding that the translators wrote a completely different book, with a different theme, to make it rhyme and the rhythm hold. Just something different with the same name.

<comment><USER5> Except that 90% of Python programmers fail to answer simple questions like:

Given:

        def extendList(val, list=[]):
            list.append(val)
            return list

What do the following print:

print(extendList(1))

print(extendList(1))

print(extendList(2))

print(extendList(3,[]))

I do not blame them. This sort of behavior is error-prone. You can make sure that you do not use such a code in production with code reviews but it would be also great to not having such things in the language.

<comment><USER6> For what it's worth, I'm not a Python programmer and I got that correct.

The answer is:

[1]

[1, 1]

[1, 1, 2]

[3]

It relies on knowing something about how python applies default arguments.

I've only written about a hundred lines of python in my life, so possibly I just got lucky - still, I would have thought an actual Python programmer should get this?

<comment><USER7> It is different from how Ruby and Javascript handle default arguments. I'm surprised Python does that, since I would expect function arguments to be reset to their defaults each call. That's a major side effect.

<comment><USER8> It's pretty odd behavior, yeah. It's easy to work around (set the default to None and then set the actual default in the function body), but I don't know if I've _ever_ seen anyone want it to behave as it does now.

<comment><USER9> It does make sense to evaluate the default value for the parameter at the point of definition for serveral reasons. First of all, the default value does not have to be a literal value, and if you wanted it to be evaluated at call time the function would need to capture all of the default values in a closure.

      default = 10
      def foo(x=default):
          return x
      default = 20
      assert foo() == 10

I think tat makes a lot of sense.

It could also be that the default value is a more ocmplex expression, we could use a function to generate a default argument.

      def foo(x=create_default(y, z))

By evaluating it at definition time we only have to evaluate the expression once and not have this weird lazy expression.

And yes it is used, for example the fastapi Dependency Injection system has been build quite cleverly using the ability to construct default values

[https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/query-params-str- valid...](https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/query-params-str-validations/)

Yes it is one of those things you just have to learn, but there are tons of stuff like that in most programming languages.

<comment><USER10> Under the sane semantics implemented in every major language other than Python, if you want to capture a snapshot of something at definition time, you can put it into a variable:

      wildly_changing_variable = random_initializer();

      stable_snapshot = wildly_changing_variable

      def foo(arg = stable_snapshot):
        ...

Don't touch stable_snapshot and everything is cool. This is the rare case. Of course

      def foo(arg = wildly_changing_variable)

means we want the current value.

I don't understand your "closure" comments; either way, things are being lexically closed. It's a question of when evaluation takes place, not in what scope or under what scoping discipline.

In fact, Python's treatment requires the implementation to have a hidden storage that is closed over; the equivalent of my _stable_snapshot_ variable has to be maintained by the implementation. The definition-time evaluation has to stash the value somewhere, so to that it can use that one and not the current.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you wanted to delve into the original 1984 LISP/Scheme version by Abelson and Sussman, I recommend you take a look at

[https://opendocs.github.io/sicp/sicp.pdf](https://opendocs.github.io/sicp/sicp.pdf)

which is based on the MITPress HTML version, released under a permissive CC- by-SA license.

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html)

(nb. The pdf starts out with a curious little 'texinfo foreword'. Being able to type `info sicp` in one's shell? I wonder ...)

<comment><USER12> > _The pdf starts out with a curious little 'texinfo foreword'. Being able to > type `info sicp` in one's shell?_

Yes, mostly in Emacs, but you could also do it in your shell. :) [https://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp- texi/)

The Texinfo format happened a couple years ago, in the early days of the Web, and let people on modest computers who couldn't run a Web browser work through SICP on their screens (no need for expense of printing to paper) while they also ran a Scheme interpreter on the same modest computer. The work was done by Lytha Ayth from the original freely-available HTML version of the book.

Later on, and now that everyone has more powerful computers, I've heard someone took the Texinfo source code, and replaced the ASCII-art illustrations with real ones, and ran it through TeX, such as for printing or PDF of "camera ready" format that looked similar to the original print book from MIT Press.

I wasn't involved in that much more recent TeX work, and though it was kind of them to preserve the version number with my name in it, I'll ask them to please remove it. (The name was part of some kind of distributed version- tracking scheme that Lytha Ayth proposed, when this seemed to be in the spirit of the original HTML release of the book. I tried to follow versioning instructions when I made changes to the Texinfo source, not knowing my name would show up 20 years later in a very different thing. :)

<comment><USER11> [Late reply -- forgot to hit the button. ;]

Thank you for the pointer and, more so, your contributions.

That screenshot of SICP in Emacs -- running side-by-side with the built-in Guile interpreter -- induces peculiar sensations. An echo of how things could've been and possibly still are in some obscure(d) corners of the Net. An interactive learning environment that at least points in the right direction. It certainly looks elegant and somewhat inspirational to me (though my inner Alan Kay is voicing some profound objections ;).

In any case: you carried that torch for a while, don't be hesitant accepting apparently undue credit -- there's too little, in any case, to warrant worry. ;)

<comment><USER12> Thank you for your nice note.

Regarding the Emacs screenshot, here's another, from an early attempt to make Emacs more off-she-shelf usable for Scheme programming: [https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/)

An actually better experience in Emacs (and part of what got me psyched to learn Lisps) is for Emacs Lisp programming: with a properly configured/installed Emacs, you can be browsing the documentation with rapid navigation, bringing up hypertext docstrings from your code , with links to the source code (perhaps the source code of Emacs itself), evaluating code that affects your running environment from both REPL and editor, etc. It's different than the Smalltalk-80 environment (which I also used, and wrote a little Smalltalk browser for), but there is some overlap. Modern IDEs let you do some of that, and some other things, but sometimes not as well, and Emacs people had this for a few decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Neat. The more, the merrier.

If anyone wants to work through SICP in the original way, you can get MIT Scheme, and run it on some computers.

sudo apt install mit-scheme

Some of us added support to DrRacket, for working through SICP that way (though if you already know how to use an editor, etc., you might prefer to just run MIT Scheme): [https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp- manual/](https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/)

<comment><USER13> I have been using #lang sicp in Racket to go through (most of) SICP -- and it's been mostly a smooth ride. DrRacket can get very slow on Linux, so eventually I switched back to vim+terminal once exercises started to require larger amounts of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Processing Recursive Lists" is a good example of how Python is abused for all sorts of things.

If this is actually taught, I'm no longer surprised by the code that I encounter in the wild.

<comment><USER15> I concur, this book is a terrible way to introduce anybody to Python.

I imagine they want to teach general programming skills, and hence want to give you a "way to think" that is low level enough to let you work with any language, using Python as a pseudo-code to demonstrate it.

This approach is doomed to fail.

It's much better to teach the language properly, then introduce other languages as a comparison point, if this is what you want.

I don't get the stellar reputation of this text, maybe it was great when it was written for Scheme, but as-is, I can't see most of my students even finding the motivation to reading it.

<comment><USER16> SICP shouldn't really be taught in any language other than Scheme, or a language designed specifically for teaching SICP.

It doesn't make sense otherwise.

<comment><USER17> To disagree with you, I took the Python version of UCB's CS61A and I learned quite a lot (especially coming from a non-programming background). Perhaps other forms of SICP are better, but CS61A was a really enjoyable course overall and was part of the reason I decided to switch majors to Computer Science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> i think this is rather dishonest to call this "SICP in Python" and the same goes for the title of this post. this is _not_ SICP and is not simply a port of the code found in SICP to python with the text unchanged. it's simply a book that seems inspired by SICP but the introduction doesn't go into any detail other than saying it's "derived from" SICP. this is misleading to people who aren't familiar with SICP and think this book is it but just for python.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. Just a casual browse of the TOC will point out that even at the coarsest-grained level, only 40-60% of the book follows the SICP lesson plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The current version is here [https://composingprograms.com/](https://composingprograms.com/) Under the name Composing Programs. It is the textbook for CS61A.

</comment><comment><USER21> I read interview of Hal Abelson, in that interview he explains the reason behind moving away from scheme to python to teach concepts of SICP.

1\. The purpose of course it self has changed, the current course 6.01 in MIT attempts to introduce grads to breadth of the software engineering rather than depths of software engineering. 6.001 course was for the later purpose.

2\. He says entire debate is superficial as both the course have different purpose.

It's a lengthy interview.

[http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-quarterly/2011/hal- abelson/](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-quarterly/2011/hal-abelson/)

<comment><USER21> [https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit- switched-f...](https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched- from-scheme-to-python)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm so used to syntax highlighting that it feels odd to try to read code without highlighthing

A bit off-topic, now that legacy.gitbook.com will be read-only from next month, anyone else just giving up on the platform? I used it mainly to allow readers to easily get pdf/epub versions and as far as I know, that won't be possible with new gitbook site.

<comment><USER23> By the way that is one of reasons for using scheme -- there's hardly any syntax, and definitely none of the confusing distinction between statements and expressions. There's not much value to syntax highlighting in such an environment.

Remember: when the course was introduced (ca 1981) few of the freshman had ever used a computer before they arrived at MIT. The first lecture included an second on "how to program in scheme" and after that it was assumed you could do all the assignments. This book has to include a much more complex (and I would imagine to the new programmer, daunting) introduction to dealing with Python.

I feel like the scheme version was a more nuts and bolts class full of practical information while this Python version feels less practical. But that could be a bias on my part.

There are good reasons to switch the instruction to Python (the libraries, mainly) but in exchange something is lost. Engineering is all about dealing with such tradeoffs :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I prefer the scheme version, though the addition of 'distributed and parallel computing' chapter is really important and I welcome such new additions.

Unfortunately 'distributed and parallel computing' is no where to be seen in R*RS. I hope we can change that soon.

</comment><comment><USER25> Manual of Ice-Fishing rewritten for desert nomads.

<comment><USER18> in the software world, one can avoid the monster that is c++ rather successfully, but it's gotten to the point that no matter what, python is thrust upon you to deal with. "hey here's this thing that is barely working" (in large part because it's written in python) "and we'd like you to maintain it but not switch from python" (because anything besides python makes us uncomfortable). meanwhile, python makes me uncomfortable and is such an unprincipled language, it feels like it fights you every step of the way to write error-free code.

<comment><USER25> I have my misgivings about Python and C++ too, but when writing them for my job I think how much worse things could be. I could have a job that didn't involve coding, or no job, or even something involving Java.

<comment><USER18> i personally can't get past it. i've hated every second of developing in python in my jobs, and i just sit there wondering how nice it would be if i could move off of it, especially when debugging and finding yet another inane design decision in python or something that doesn't work. there's never been a reason to use it other than that's what someone unfamiliar with better choices chose for the project, and there's typically a very objective multiplier in risk and time in the development by sticking with python. moving to clojure, racket, f#, elixir, etc. would almost always be a better choice aside from certain uses of python-specific libraries (like for machine learning).

<comment><USER26> The vast ecosystem of python libraries is an incredibly powerful argument for using it. One major library could dramatically cut the development time of your project.

You've not spelt out actual reasons why Python is so bad, could you give your top three?

<comment><USER27> One thing I have felt is that python doesn't embrace the functional way of thinking, even to the extent that JavaScript does. I personally find that once I have been exposed to a modern functional approach like in Clojure, etc, I find python lacking. Not just syntactically, but conceptually. For example, IIRC, many list methods in python modify the list they are working on, instead of returning a new list.

<comment><USER28> In line with this, list comprehensions are one area of python I find particularly clunky. They work fairly well for a single map or filter operation, alright for both mapping and filtering, and are absolutely unreadable for anything more complicated. A big part of this in my opinion is how they scramble the flow. Instead of taking a piece of data and performing successive operations on it, both in logic and in syntax, you have their 'literate' mess that requires you to start reading in the middle of the line and alternate moving your cursor back and forth.

Consider:

getNumbers() .map(x => x×2) .filter(x => x % 6 == 0) .map(x => x^2)

get numbers. double them. filter for divisibility by 6. square them.

versus

[x^2 for x in x×2 for x in getNumbers() if x % 6 == 0]

get the square of the doubles version of getNumbers values, but only if those doubles are dividable by 6. But wait are the doubles dividable by 6 or the squares?

Maybe some people are fine with looking at what operations are being performed on the data before even knowing what the data itself is, but that for me seems incredibly backwards. Plus it also gives rise to order of operations ambiguities. Nobody could mistake the ordering in JS, but I honestly have no clue how that python would evaluate.

(using carats because hn cant format code)

Edit- This came to mind because of a flattening list comprehension I encountered earlier today:

#flatten the lists

flattened_list = [y for x in list_of_lists for y in x]

I've spent quite some time staring at this and I still have no clue what it's actually doing. I've never had that with JS operator chains.

<comment><USER29> map(lambda x:x^2, filter(lambda x:x%6==0, map(lambda x: x*2, getNumbers())))

Would probably be a more pythonic way to do that, avoiding list comprehensions. Easier to read with added lines and indentation.

But tbf I do appreciate the ability to chain operations in JS without subclassing objects like list.

<comment><USER30> Funny how 'pythonic' can mean different things to different people. I've been developing in python on and off for the best part of a decade, and in my world comprehensions are considered far more 'pythonic' than map/filter/lambda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Previous discussion of the book: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3718364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3718364)

And the course: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491142)

</comment><comment><USER32> Related from 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3141996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3141996)

2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3141996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3141996)

Plus ça change.

</comment><comment><USER33> Thats great! However does someone know if there is still someone working on [http://www.sicpdistilled.com/](http://www.sicpdistilled.com/) ?

<comment><USER34> [https://github.com/SICPDistilled/website](https://github.com/SICPDistilled/website) \- last commit 2 years ago. But I'm sure contributions are still welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Other languages are not as flexible as lisp according to pg. When you get to macros, you might run into limitations with python.

</comment><comment><USER36> Links in each chapter's TOC don't work.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought." \- Basho

One of the reasons that the wizards stopped teaching SICP was the fact that the world changed. Back in the 80s, most programming was done from first principles, since the middle of the 90s it switched to programming against an API.

While learning to program from first principles is still amazingly useful, it is not what beginners need because most of them will never end up programming like that.

<comment><USER26> I'm not so sure. SICP gives a deep understanding of programming principles like abstraction.

I agree that gluing APIs is essentially what modern programming has become, but it is helpful to have that extra understanding, especially in the long term. We don't know how programming will look in 2050, but abstraction will remain abstraction, and I wouldn't bet against Lisp being more popular then than it is now.

<comment><USER38> Indeed. APIs do not just appear from the void, someone has to write them for anyone to have an API to glue together.

Somewhere at the bottom, fundamental code is always present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Up next: Sicp JAVASCRIPT

<comment><USER40> This already exists:

[https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/](https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/)

Announcement on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/ea1f8w/sicp_js_goin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/ea1f8w/sicp_js_going_public/)

<comment><USER41> Guess JS a better language for this purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Next it will be SICP for Java. Is nothing sacred?

<comment><USER40> Concerning "sacred": [https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/](https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/)

<comment><USER43> This almost made me fell off my chair.

      5:5 And, behold, I will deliver you up to the programmer
      tendency to build overelaborate castles of abstractions

<comment><USER44> One person's overelaborate is another's perfection.

Behold! The abstraction in ethereal splendor makes mundane human existence bearable!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> People say SICP is bigger then Scheme and then get outraged when someone implements it in another language.

<comment><USER46> Beethoven is bigger than "piano". Also, there is very little outrage in this thread - some sadness, some resignation, some head shaking sure, but not outrage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't want to sound snarky, but... is this really it? I haven't looked through SICP itself, and have no formal CS background, but it always seemed like SICP was treated like a forbidding rite of passage. The Python version, if it's faithful to the original, seems pretty lightweight.

<comment><USER48> One of the non-obvious things about SICP is that there is a lot of really good stuff in the footnotes and the exercises. You aren't doing yourself any favors if you skim over either of them.

<comment><USER47> Indeed, a download and quick look shows that the book has a lot more content than just a sequence of lessons. I've immersed in the foreword, and enjoying it greatly. The best textbooks are not just informative, but written to be enjoyed as literature.

<comment><USER48> It's a classic for that reason. Enjoy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> As someone who has taken this iteration of the course and read most of the original SICP, I actually think this new CS61A does a really good job of covering the same material as the original SICP while introducing beginners to a useful rather than esoteric language. The capstone project is still writing a scheme interpreter, just in Python. We still do actually write some code in Scheme, just in the later portion of the class.</comment>


Take a Look at the Crossrail Station Under Bond Street - <AUTHOR> https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/09/17/take-a-look-at-the-crossrail-station-under-bond-street/ <comment><USER2> Crossrail is an incredible achievement by the British. $22 billion to build 26 miles of new track on a 73-mile train line, through some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including 13 miles of tunnels underneath downtown London. And delivered only two years late.

By contrast, New York's second avenue subway will easily exceed Crossrail's $22 billion cost, if it's ever finished. For that price New Yorkers will get just 8.5 miles of downtown tunnels (versus Crossrail's 13). And they won't get the additional dozen or so miles of new above ground commuter railroad that Crossrail has managed to build for that price. Moreover, Crossrail started somewhat later (2009 versus 2007), but will be done by 2020, while New York will take until 2027-29 just to finish the first two phases totaling 3.5 miles. The remaining 5 miles may never be completed at this rate.

EDIT: As 'pcwalton correctly pointed out, about 2/3 of Crossrail's suburban rail was pre-existing, so my per-mile cost for Crossrail was too low. It's difficult to calculate the per-mile cost of new Crossrail track, because part of the $22 billion budget involves upgrades to the 45-miles or so of existing track and stations. But even assuming all that cost nothing, it's about $850 million per mile to build the new segments through downtown London. The Maryland Purple Line, by contrast, is $350 million per mile to build light rail on existing city streets through suburban Maryland. And the DC Silver Line is about $300 million per mile to build heavy rail on existing, reserved freeway medians through suburban and exurban Virginia.

<comment><USER3> An incredible achievement by London, for London, perhaps.

Meanwhile in North England...

Nope, not much to report.

We still have converted buses running on tracks, lack of electrification, extremely short trains/platforms, and train companies often on the verge of going bust (perhaps because everyone drives).

<comment><USER4> And, unfortunately, majority of people in the North of England blame the European Union for this.

Edit: OK, the rather few people I know from the North are not representative.

<comment><USER5> Um, nope. Of all the many complaints I've heard against the EU, particularly in the last 3 years, many are wrong. Yet I've never heard anyone up here blaming the EU for the North and Scotland's public transport.

We almost entirely blame Westminster, all parties, and their London exceptionalism. Some will still single out Mrs T.

I think it's reached triple the transport spending per head in London compared to elsewhere. Then there's the subsidy of buses Thatcher permitted to continue in London, but nowhere else. So the regions pay double or more what London does on bus routes. West Coast main line electrification was put off for I guess 50 years! The cross Pennine route is a sick joke, still running those awful bus on rails trains. Those were supposed to be a 4-5 year, super-cheap fill in. Ooh 30 or 40 years ago.

Crossrail? Sure, give it a blank cheque and immediately talk about crossrail 2.

Andy Burnham has had a fairly remarkable transition from Westminster Minister after becoming mayor of Manchester. There's been a few enlightening media pieces about him and public transport. Course now he vocally realises where the problem is, he's no longer an MP...

<comment><USER6> Judging by the way the North votes it seems it's mostly the Tories that get the blame. Which creates a vicious circle as why would the Tories do anything for a region that doesn't vote for them anyway.

<comment><USER3> It goes much deeper than that. If we all voted for them they would still do nothing for us as I didn't go to Eton, my uncle isn't a viscount, I don't own land and have no membership at any gentleman's club.

You can judge how interested they are by their manifestos. They're targeted towards their existing voters and rarely make any promises for infrastructure in the North.

<comment><USER5> They talked about the Northern Powerhouse for a few weeks. That's our lot for this decade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Crossrail is a MASSIVE project. It's actually really impressive that it's getting delivered at all. I hope we see a lot more of these large scale projects - they don't just change commutes and travel, they change places and lives.

<comment><USER8> Crossrail has added billions to land values (and thus house prices) along the route. This is a wealth transfer from income tax payers to land owners.

Income tax payers are already at breaking point - especially those who don't own land.

Don't expect many more "rob from the poor to give to the rich" schemes until tax is reformed.

<comment><USER9> the expensive bit is the tunnel and stations under central london where there aren't any houses

<comment><USER8> That's not really the point.

1) Crossrail cost billions

2) Income tax payers in the UK had to pay for that

3) Income tax payers have had enough and don't want to pay for infrastructure that benefits others

Those who benefitted the most? The land owners in London who have made billions

If the price increases -- the portion solely due to crossrail -- was taxed at 42% like income, then there would be far more money available for useful projects (like crossrail)

Therefore the OPs hope ("I hope we see a lot more of these large scale projects") would be answered

<comment><USER7> > Income tax payers have had enough and don't want to pay for infrastructure > that benefits others

Had enough? What does that mean exactly?

The people who will benefit from crossrail the most are the main income tax payers who go to work every day on the tube. Salaries in London are 2-3x higher than outside and income tax gets disproportionately higher the more you earn.

Can you imagine if the tube was never built because it would benefit rich landowners in London more than other people?

<comment><USER10> Large parts of the Tube and UK rail network were built privately before the 20th century. Most of them lost money and consolidated before nationalisation.

<comment><USER8> Quite. The metropolitan railway was funded buy buying cheap land, building rail to it, then profiting from the increase in that value.

That no longer happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The noise dampening efforts are the most interesting to me. They mentioned to fan noise as still being very noticeable with efforts to minimize the impact on those living in the surrounding areas. My question is, is that hard to mask the noise of fans?

<comment><USER12> The fans are pretty huge

[https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the- tube...](https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube- engineering-heat-out-of-the-underground/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's fascinating about reading this is the parallels to technical debt and slowdowns in large software ecosystems within mature and maturing companies.

This would be a good read for someone non-technical to better understand similar software engineering challenges because a rail station and the delays described are far easier for a layperson to relate to.</comment>


Web or iPhone OS applications to make money? - <AUTHOR> http://antoniocangiano.com/2010/05/20/web-or-iphone-os-applications-to-make-money/ <comment><USER2> I think iPhone is a better place to make _some_ money. I think the web is a better place to build a permanent company on one application.

If you're up for making a suite of apps though, the appstore is good for that.

</comment><comment><USER3> What Google is not addressing is why, as a developer, would I want to host my applications on Google's Web App store if it's essentially the same under any WebKit-based browser. i.e. What is the business case for it?</comment>


Show HN: For audiophiles who code... - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/Pn4JlNmvSVk

<comment><AUTHOR> This App relies on a rhythmbox plugin written in Python. You can find the source code for the plugin:

<http://code.google.com/p/rhythmote/></comment>


Show HN: Stream Your Terminal Online - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/akshaykmr/teletype <comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to make it convenient to share/stream terminals online; view-only or collaboration-enabled, take your pick.

Show off your vim-skills, help a colleague, teach, or troubleshoot.

Participants can have multiple terminal streams in the private room - <USER2> with chat, notes and end-to-end encrypted voice (this is a privacy-focussed tool, no content data from your session is stored on any server).

Let me know if you run into any issues - [https://github.com/akshaykmr/teletype/issues](https://github.com/akshaykmr/teletype/issues)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm streaming my terminal here (idle htop) - [https://teletype.oorja.io/rooms?id=109f7c80-398f-49f7-b217-7...](https://teletype.oorja.io/rooms?id=109f7c80-398f-49f7-b217-781c3c64df23)

Just a public room, so you can gauge the look and feel of the tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great job! It looks very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


The real responsive design challenge is RSS - <AUTHOR> https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-05-28-rss-responsive-design.html?hn=1 <comment><USER3> Hey, a post about RSS content quirks! It makes me feel young again!

On a more serious note - RSS is the Great Web Leveller. It spites your fancy CSS hacks, it's disgusted by your insane javascript, and it will piss all over your "mobile-optimized" crap. No semantic markup == no party; because markup is for robots, and RSS parsers are very stubborn robots that can see through web-hipster bullshit like Superman through walls.

The only real sin of RSS (beyond the holy wars and format bikeshedding and committee madness and and and...) is that it's too honest a format. It's a format for stuff that matters, for content that deserves to be read; it's too pure to survive in a world of content silos, stalking analytics and inaccessible material-designs. Its innocence doomed it in a very poetic way.

<comment><USER4> > "web-hipster bullshit"

Why so much negativity lately regarding new trends in the web?

<comment><USER3> One reason might be that, for anyone with historical perspective, a situation where our pipes can download hundreds of MB per second and _still_ our browsers crawl like turtles is just shocking. Modern browsers are the most compatible ever and come with all sorts of bells and whistles baked in, and _still_ people are using JS frameworks over JS frameworks over JS frameworks.

Another reason might be that most of this website-fat is actively anti-users. It breaks the back button. It breaks bookmarks. It spies on you. It makes it impossible to interoperate/mash stuff, and it makes it incredibly hard to automate things (do you know that in the '90s you used to be able to download entire websites, so you could comfortably read them offline?).

Another reason is probably that a lot of "mainstream web plumbers" (like yours truly) are now hitting late middle-age and feeling it hard. We used to be able to view-source and copypaste our way to image-rollover glory; we were breathing markup and feeds... now it's all tooling and frameworks and stacks, even http is going binary, and it feels like the loss of this innocence is not actually gaining anything for anyone except marketing people.

Now get off my lawn.

<comment><USER5> > _and still people are using JS frameworks over JS frameworks over JS > frameworks_

Even as someone who is ostensibly a front-end hipster dev (long live React), this is something I'm in total agreement with.

Every single web developer should take 10 minutes, and go have a poke around WebPlatform[0], and see what these amazing networked virtual machines we call browsers can do natively these days. And they can do it well faster than anything we can write ourselves. Of course, browser support is an issue, which is why polyfilling _as needed_ should still be the name of the game, but it genuinely blows my mind how often I've seen devs add a brittle dependency to the code-base for something browsers can do themselves, better, faster, and supported back to some seriously old browsers!

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

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link the WebPlatform. It's a great resource for me as someone who only occasionally touches the front-end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> RSS is odd. Unloved by many, killed by Google, but there's still no better way of getting notified that a rarely (or perhaps not so rarely if you have endless time to read "internet stuff") updated site has something new to read. So I have an Android app which checks once per day and if there's anything new that day (I can go days or weeks without an update) I then pass it on to my Pocket account. Sometimes it goes another step further and I send it on to my Kindle.

Perhaps there's a better way of handling this. I can't read it directly on my Kindle because the browser there - optimistically described "experimental" \- is shocking. Pocket is great because it does a good job of producing a page which consists of just the typing without the usual horrific web fluff (although sometimes it gets it wrong and the graphics go missing).

It seems a shame that, when most of what I'm interested in started life as someone else essentially entering text into a document, there's no way of obtaining it in that form but instead it has to be manipulated into something sensible. I don't want an "experience"; I just want to read what you've typed.

Would it help if I gave you my email address?

<comment><USER8> It would be fantastic if there was a standard format like you suggested, it would also make the web a whole lot more accessible.

<comment><USER9> "Marc Andreessen" suggested something like that at the bottom of this: [http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/2.html](http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/2.html) (search for "separate content from presentation")

<comment><USER7> I thought the whole point of css was to separate content from presentation. But it only seems to be used for reskinning sites and - occasionally - <USER2> producing a "printer view". I suppose I could pretend to be a printer. But can I not instead just pretend to want to read the text?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For the last three days, we've had a Teletype Model 14 tape printer following the Reuters RSS feed [1] at a steampunk convention in San Jose, printing hundreds of feet of 8mm paper tape. Trying to condense RSS down to all-upper- case Baudot tape printing is harsh. All markup is deleted. All links are deleted. Most characters outside letters and numbers become "?".

For the Reuters feeds, this works out fine. The content is text, not markup. There are few or no HTML tags. The Reuters feeds are headlines and a sentence or two. The Associated Press also has RSS feeds, and it's very similar. The Voice of America's feeds are much wordier; they often have the whole article.

Space News has an RSS feed.[2] The Senate Democrats have an RSS feed covering what's happening on the Senate floor.[3] (The GOP discontinued their feed.[4]) The House Energy and Commerce Committee has a feed with markup in embedded JSON.[5] Not sure what's going on there. Even The Hollywood Reporter has an RSS feed.[6]

So for real news, RSS is in good shape. RSS seems to be doing fine for sources that have something important to say.

[1] [http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews](http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews) [2] [http://spacenews.com/feed/](http://spacenews.com/feed/) [3] [https://democrats.senate.gov/feed/](https://democrats.senate.gov/feed/) [4] [http://www.gop.gov/static/index.php](http://www.gop.gov/static/index.php) [5] [https://energycommerce.house.gov/rss.xml?GroupTypeID=1](https://energycommerce.house.gov/rss.xml?GroupTypeID=1) [6] [http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news](http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news)

</comment><comment><USER11> I develop and maintain an open source RSS reader. In my experience it's not so bad. I strip CSS and javascript from feeds, and most of them are displayed fine anyway. I don't think I've ever found a feed that needed javascript to load content, it seems even SPAs include plain entry content in their feeds, thankfully. I've never found a feed that became unreadable after stripping styling either.

I agree it's interesting to look at your content when loaded in an RSS reader. IMHO most feeds are actually more readable when loaded in a clean uncluttered RSS reader than in the original webpage. If the content is good, the reading experience should not be harmed by focusing just on its text and images and removing extra styling.

Shameless plug: the RSS reader I maintain is [https://www.feedbunch.com](https://www.feedbunch.com) , comments are welcome.

<comment><USER12> Feedbunch looks great, all I want from an RSS reader is to show me a list of my feeds, and to show me the unread items in each feed, which it seems to do beautifully! Unfortunately, I dislove the fact that it clicking on a list item would just show "loading..." forever :(

Firefox 46.0.1 on Ubuntu with uBlock, if it helps.

<comment><USER11> It certainly shouldn't do that. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce it, it works fine here.

Loading entries (among other things) is done with web workers. Are you blocking the execution of web workers or dynamic loading of remote javascripts, by any chance?

<comment><USER12> I shouldn't be. What's worse, it works fine now. Yesterday I didn't even get the tutorial, which makes me think that some JS wouldn't load. I think I'll switch to it as my default reader, thank you!

EDIT: Ah, the demo worked but my signed-up account does not.

EDIT 2: It works erratically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When Google Reader was in its heyday, I remember thinking the futuristic promise of the web from the early 90s had finally arrived. I so miss it. So much effort is put into unique "platforms" nowadays — I get why Reader (and by extension RSS) can't survive in such an environment where exclusive attention of our eyeballs is monetized — but I do sometimes wish I would wake up to an announcement that RSS is a priority for big companies once again. One can dream.

</comment><comment><USER14> As the developer of an RSS parser, I spend a lot of time hitting View Source, surprisingly often on pages that appear empty in Chrome.

In a more general sense than RSS, I also have to install extensions to format JSON. Considering how much browsers are targeting developers these days, might they consider rendering JSON, XML, etc in some standard way that is useful to developers (as an option at least). I am talking about syntax highlighting as well as some basic interactive features like expanding/collapsing.

<comment><USER15> As far as I know Firefox does this for XML; haven't tried it lately, so I don't know if it behaves similarly for JSON (I know Chrome doesn't).

<comment><USER16> Firefox nightly and developer edition show JSON loaded directly in a tab (i.e. not in a subframe) in a nice JSON viewer), and have for a while now. Release Firefox does not, for various reasons (including the fact that the current JSON viewer implementation actually changes the DOM of the page involved, which is technically an HTML spec violation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the nastiest thing to parse in RSS feeds these days is code highlighting. To a surprising degree, people who should know better use blogging software that chops up code into tables, divs, and spans, and styles them with CSS that is not included in the feed. You either have to either reconstruct the underlying plain-text code as best you can, or try to recognize and support a zoo of different highlighting libraries.

<comment><USER12> ...oops. Good point, I never thought of that. I'll include a style in my own blog, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yahoo! Weather's RSS feed has some handy additional data. Useful if you only have a US postal code. Includes things like lat/long coords, separate elements with weather forecasts ad current conditions, sunrise/sunset times... Pretty handy bits of data just for requesting an RSS feed.

[https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/archive.html#response](https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/archive.html#response)

Bonus: the @code attribute can be substituted into the URL for an image, and visually identify the weather condition referred to by the code:

[https://s.yimg.com/zz/combo?a/i/us/we/52/26.gif](https://s.yimg.com/zz/combo?a/i/us/we/52/26.gif)

Just replace "26" part of "26.gif" with another value.

</comment><comment><USER19> It depends on who your audience is, right? If most of the people who read your site come from social media on their phones instead of reading via RSS, optimizing for RSS readability is an activity with rapidly diminishing returns.

<comment><USER20> but how did your article get onto social media?

Was it one of the 20 people who read your RSS feed and linked to it on twitter and elsewhere? Been there, done that, got the Hackernews Karma.

But if you want to optomise for casual readers vs people who want to actively subscribe to your content...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure what this has to do with responsive design, but this is a cool list of some things to be aware of :)

<comment><USER22> Making your content reasonably usable without any CSS is (or at least should be) the epitome of responsive design.</comment></comment>


In deep learning, architecture engineering is the new feature engineering - <AUTHOR> http://smerity.com/articles/2016/architectures_are_the_new_feature_engineering.html <comment><USER2> In all machine learning the "top layer" is optimized by GDGS (gradient descent by grad student). All that changes is that underneath that there are more and more layers of calculations, features, parameters and hyperparameters that are then searched/optimized by some algorithm.</comment>


How To Rid Debt By Becoming a Cash Money Superstar - <AUTHOR> http://tracksuitceo.wordpress.com/2007/07/11/how-to-rid-debt-by-becoming-a-cash-money-superstar/ Because of my entrepreneurial obsession I had accrued a lot of debt and was still not earning enough to stop the credit card cycle. I decided to take drastic measures.  I made the transformation from a typical American Consumer into a Cash Money Superstar. I actually switched everything I did to a cash transaction and to really get myself psyched about using cash only, I closed my checking account!

<comment><USER2> I lived in Japan for about a year and a half, and virtually the entire country is cash only. They also have a huge saving s rate. I think I never handled money better than when it was all in cash during my stay in Japan - so the article here makes a very good point. When you physically see the money you can really appreciate what you've got and the value of it.

<comment><USER3> I live in Tokyo and don't think it's very different from the US. The ATMs have amazing transfer features, like looking up a friend's account to send him money. I pay for a lot of things, like rent, through cashless transfers at an ATM. I pay cash at the convenience store for my utilities, which I paid by check in the US.

It's well known that many older Japanese people keep huge sums of cash savings in their houses. There are occasionally almost comical stories in the newspaper about houses getting broken into and the thieves walking out with obscene amounts of money.

I'm a huge fan of cash in general. I do value seeing my money and hate the idea of all my transactions being logged. I totally agree with the premise of the article, I've been doing this for years.

<comment><USER2> Just curious: why are you in Tokyo?

<comment><USER3> I worked here for extended periods over the past few years and came to love the lifestyle and people. I'm far from a Japanophile, but I had to try living here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the lively discussion! I get better comments on ycombinator than I do on my own blog! You're all Cash Money Superstars.

</comment><comment><USER5> Whenever I have cash I have a slightly panicky feeling that it is gradually falling in value (which, of course, it is) and that buying something is the only way of preventing this process. So, I don't keep cash.</comment>


Angular.js taught me a lot about myself - <AUTHOR> http://wayfinder.co/pathways/5375e8cd7906431100dbb9b8/angular-js-taught-me-a-lot-about-myself

<comment><AUTHOR> these articles were actually the start of a new chapter in my life.

\- they helped me rediscover my love of writing.

\- I discovered I could by sharing what I know about full-stack development[1].

\- The search for the perfect medium lead to me discovering wayfinder.co[2].

\- I love the format so much that I was contacting them to help them improve it.

\- This has lead to me becoming the CTO of Wayfinder just last week.

So yeah, angular definitely did make me happier. Or maybe just stepping back and thinking about things was the key.

[1] Full-Stack Fundamentals: Introduction > [http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/introduction-fullstack- fundament...](http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/introduction-fullstack-fundamentals)

[2] Microservices : Field Guide for April 2014 > [http://wayfinder.co/pathways/53536427f7040a11002ae407](http://wayfinder.co/pathways/53536427f7040a11002ae407)</comment>


IBM to invest $3B in 'Internet of Things' - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/31/us-ibm-investment-idUSKBN0MR0BS20150331

<comment><USER2> Great News!</comment>


Maximum Wage - <AUTHOR> https://howwegettonext.com/maximum-wage-3e21048fc107#.swrfz48xl <comment><USER2> The law of diminishing returns needs to applied to unions, so that all perks and benefits are taxed as income, and the tax rate above a maximum should create a ceiling wage.

How else do you limit unions?

I need only point at sports, where their demands have worked in killing cable networks since people will not buy their products - killing the sport in time. Gone are the days of attending the ballgame - unless rich or small town bushies. Look at how detroit was killed, how LA is being killed by totally huge wage strikes for simple tasks</comment>


Jury foreman says Apple patents valid due to different processor architecture - <AUTHOR> If you listen carefully to his interview, from 1:30 for about 2 minutes, the foreman talks about the jury discussing the 460 patent and how it brought him back to his 'Aha' moment.
"The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9cnQcTC2JY
That's the reason why prior art was ignored! <comment><USER2> This whole case genuinely scares me for our legal system. It seems like once they found a jury foreman who had his own patent and played to his fears of "what if someone did this to my patent" put himself in Apples shoes and did all he could to make sure they won. Kind of feels like they shouldn't have even bothered with a trial once people are saying "yeah, we didnt even bother to consider samsungs arguments of prior use, we just didn't have time" when the jury came back with a verdict VERY quickly. If you listen to the interviews it sounds like almost every juror decided "well the foreman seems like he knows what hes doing, I'll go along with that." This is not the way our legal system should work.

<comment><USER3> Its not the legal system that worries me, but instead, its how the tech community seems to misunderstand how the patent system works. I am not a lawyer, but through this whole affair, I have listened to tech pundits and others opining about the case, and I have become more and more frustrated as these people provide lazy opinion based mostly on irrelevant information. Its not the patent abstract, or common belief of what a specific patent entails, that matter. Its the very specific patent claims. The same goes for "prior art". People really need to read the patent claims, and consider all the claims in the patent as a whole, before expressing frustration about how these cases are developing.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why more folks on HN don't understand this (or maybe the ones that do are just remaining more silent on the issue). I don't think I've ever seen so much ignorance rise to the top in HN comments as I have the past few days.

<comment><USER5> I think that the ones who do are silent on the issue because it's not a popular view point to defend these patents (or any patents). There are so many people that already had their minds made up that anything that ran counter to that viewpoint was obviously wrong, or biased, or ignorant. Or they would rather attack the jury for having to try to work through a _really_ complicated case and coming to a different conclusion than they would have. Or maybe they'd rather just ridicule the foreman's patent... because that's helping a lot.

But really, who has read the points of the patents, or the prior art? Who actually followed the case in it's entirely without cherry picking comments from media coverage? And more importantly, who actually understands patent law? I think a lot of people _think_ that they do.

This is one of the persistent issues that we'll have to deal with on HN for the next few months. Any time an Android vs. iOS article appears it polarizes this community like none other. Hopefully after a while it will all die down...

Then just wait for the appeals court decision...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think you can really jump to that conclusion. Prior art may have been 'ignored' but I have a feeling that the question in the minds of the jurors was 'Did Samsung copy apple?'

I think that what's probably more at issue is that the vast majority of the populace regards copying as plagiarism / and/or something that ought to be punished. eg. copying = theft = bad = you should pay a fine.

The jurors are just trying to stitch legal words and technical words together to create the impression that it was judged based on the law rather than the emotional feeling that copying is bad. The jury was probably looking for evidence to find for Apple, not examining the evidence to reach a conclusion. It's a hallmark of trials by jury, it's why when the facts and emotions are on your side you pick a jury trial and when the law is on your side you pick a trial by judge.

I've heard that at one point in the trial the samsung lawyer said that the design of their tablet was so different that it couldn't be copied while pointing to an iPad. A gaffe like that in connection with the idea that copying = bad is game over for Samsung in court.

Errol Morris interviewed a mob lawyer about how he got a mobster off a murder charge, it's a very telling insight into how the average person's mind works.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLEe496IS1o>

<comment><AUTHOR> Another juror sheds more light on what happened. The foreman's view on prior art had a big impact.

"We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce-back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents, but we were debating about the prior art. Hogan was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself...so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent -- what was prior art --because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art." "In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive- appl...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-apple- samsung-juror-speaks-out/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the record, this is the patent held by the foreman. Imho, it is not the kind of thing I'd like to see the patent office approving.

<http://www.google.com/patents/US7352953>

<comment><USER8> 2008, why didn't the patent office say this is basically Tivo? Is there really anything new here? It was filed in 2002, but Tivo (and diy copycats) were already out in 2000, iirc.

<comment><USER9> Claim 1 is for a system with tv tuner, internal hardrive and a removable media. So it is slightly different then a Tivo.

Although I don't think taking a Tivo and slapping a CD writer on it should be eligible for a patent. Especially if TV tuners where available at retail at the time (pretty sure they were, but I have no evidence of that.) Basically anybody that put a TV tuner into a computer with a CD writer is prior art for claim 1.

<comment><USER8> Pretty sure I wanted an analog tuner/video VLB-card in the 90s. Couldn't afford one, but I imagine the people who bought them, did this stuff with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He clearly says that he wasn't assessing actual damages, but wanted to teach the offending company a lesson.

The whole thing is incredibly frustrating.

<comment><USER11> I think the foreman actually had a patent of his own. If that's true, he must have had very personal feeling towards infringers.

<comment><USER12> Samsung could have asked for him to be excused. The fact they didn't means they thought his feelings/experience/whatever would be to their advantage. You roll the dice, sometimes you lose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, if this is the new precedent, and a new processor means that we can disregard all prior art, am I correct in assuming that all I need to do to keep from infringing is to run this "ip" on a different processor in the future?

(I am well aware that "legal reasoning" and real-world rationality umm... walk different paths, I'm just sayin'.)

<comment><USER3> I believe that this link is the 460 patent that the guy mentioned:

<http://www.google.com/patents/US7577460>

The content presented in the patent drawings at the bottom are hardware-heavy, and the patent claims and diagrams discuss voltage control, etc.

I am not a patent expert, and not subject to the trial content. But I find it plausible that "processor", or phone architecture in general, might have been an important factor that differentiated Apple from the claims of Samsung's patent.

<comment><USER13> Adding "with a voltage regulator" shouldn't be any more legit than "...but on the interwebs!".

It looks to me like a snow job. Putting a camera in a smartphone and then (steady yourself) emailing the pictures you take! Seems pretty thin. So throw in a bunch of the technical details _that all electronic devices have in common_ like voltage regulators, chip enable lines, data busses etc, and a bunch of the mundaneness of networking, like the sizes of email headers etc and now we're looking like we've got something that will sneak past an examiner or impress a layman.

<comment><USER3> I think the point is that Samsung didn't patent "emailing pictures from a phone", but they did patent a very specific, integrated method of doing so. If somebody (Apple) offered the same function, but implemented it differently than as claimed by Samsung's very specific patent, they would be in the clear.

<comment><USER14> That's an important distinction that a lot of people are overlooking in this discussion. It's not the end result that is patented, but rather the process or method to achieve that result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a disturbing farce. I realize that it is extremely difficult to appeal jury decisions, but this is getting ridiculous.

Not only did he take it upon himself to ignore the court's instructions by dishing out punitive damages, but the entire _reasoning_ behind these so- called deliberations now appear to have been completely devoid of rationality.

The poster who compared the logic employed here to Vicini's "battle of wits" in the Princess Bride had it spot on.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hope people vote this up (the topic comment, not mine here). It's a really remarkable bit of incoherence (that matters because of its role in law).

<comment><USER13> It literally would have been more coherent if he had claimed that his aha moment came when he realized that both products had black bezels and that did it for him. For all of the informed thought that went on, it seems that we would have been better off giving vote clickers to monkeys. This reminded me of Vicini reasoning during the 'battle of wits' in The Princess Bride.

<comment><USER17> HackerNew's lack of empathy for "normals" is staggering.

Web development, app development, device development -- it's _all_ clickers for monkeys.

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science- nature/speakingbonobo....](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science- nature/speakingbonobo.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> By that logic, Android can copy iOS at will by shipping with MIPS or x86 hardware.

<comment><USER19> But if they ship on MIPS, they'll have to deal with all the SGI IP...

Better be safe and design a new processor architecture.

<comment><USER20> They can also ship on SPARC ;)

<comment><USER19> And deal with Oracle?!

<comment><USER21> Not if they use OpenSPARC. That's GPL'd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Samsungs new design after court ruling,

<http://i.imgur.com/O585V.png>

</comment><comment><USER23> It seems to me that the foreman misrepresented his memory of what happened with his own patent as fact to the other jurors to be applied to the current case; and he got some stuff wrong. It should be made possible in highly complicated cases like this that the jury could bring in experts (with the judge present maybe) to explain the real facts. Or for the jury to ask questions to the witnesses/judge during the trial to obtain clarifications they need to make their decision.

<comment><USER24> Juries are allowed and often requested to ask questions of the judge during deliberations, but it's up to them to decide that they need that clarification.

I've never been on a jury in a trial such as this, but just as you'll find in regular conversations, members of a jury will present themselves as experts and spout "facts" to back themselves up. A confident "expert" can convince a lot of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> As the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In a way, part of me wants the patent circus to lead to an actual ban on U.S. sales of a popular, high profile device for a considerable period of time. I don't even care which device. Maybe the system will somehow wake up when confronted with grey-market sales of devices bought outside the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree with the comments here on this being an obvious travesty. I sincerely look forward to the appeal, and am confident in an all-out rejection of the verdict. The proud foreman's interview will certainly be useful fodder for the defense in its appeal.

</comment><comment><USER27> I admire the valuable information you offer in your articles. I will bookmark your blog and have my children check up here often. I am quite sure they will learn lots of new stuff here than anybody else! I face an interview in a lighting company [http://modern-decorative- lighting.blogspot.com/2012/08/illum...](http://modern-decorative- lighting.blogspot.com/2012/08/illuminate-your-life-with-foscarini-tua.html) which is successful because of your site.

</comment><comment><USER27> I admire the valuable information you offer in your articles. I will bookmark your blog and have my children check up here often. I am quite sure they will learn lots of new stuff here than anybody else! I face an interview with a lighting company [http://modern-decorative- lighting.blogspot.com/2012/08/illum...](http://modern-decorative- lighting.blogspot.com/2012/08/illuminate-your-life-with-foscarini-tua.html) which is successful because of you.

</comment><comment><USER28> The foreman's 'insight' is a complete logical fallacy, and I would also bet he has no concept of what a cross-compiler does, just as an ancillary point.

</comment><comment><USER29> The software used on the Android phones would not run on Apple's OK either, so by the foreman's "logic" there can be no patent infringement.

</comment><comment><USER30> 0:21 - "It was exciting - for some it was boring, for me it was very interesting, because of my tech background..."

<comment><USER3> Sorry, what's your point? Four of the jury members worked for tech companies.

<comment><USER31> Probably that the guy has a very high opinion of himself. Dunning-Krueger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> That is a Foreman's understanding of prior art? US desperately needs a large number of able hands to handle patent related cases that have resulted from easy doling out of patents by the USPTO. The present Intellectual Property Regime is becoming a threat for innovation itself.

</comment><comment><USER31> So, iOS can't be run on Samsung's tablets. Does this then invalidate Apple's claims?

</comment><comment><USER33> The bit about code/processor interchangeability is actually between 3:00 and 3:30.

</comment><comment><USER34> This whole mess reminds me of the Polaroid VS Kodak case where Kodak was found to infringe because the result, IE an instant photograph, with no regard towards the process which was totally different.

</comment><comment><USER35> Watching this guy talk makes me fear for the future of the human species.

</comment><comment><USER36> great artists steal, good artists get prosecuted

</comment><comment><USER37> I would like to bounce back with a comment... but I am afraid I would be infringing on an Apple patent.

</comment><comment><USER38> please, keep talking jury foreman. this thing is going down in flames on appeal at this rate.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think he may have a valid point. Perhaps apple have invented some new numbers, like eleventy-four, that don't fit into the old computers properly due to magic and stuff.

<comment><USER40> You remind me of <http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2009/02/18/>

<comment><USER39> Bill Watterson should have been put in charge of everything years ago. I suspect he would grumble though if anyone tried to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The sad thing about all this is that this does not necessarily mean that the verdict can be thrown out. Post-verdict juror interviews can only be used to throw out verdicts if they reveal gross juror misconduct. Juror incompetence is generally not sufficient grounds to throw out a verdict (assuming unlike in this case, that the verdict is otherwise coherent).

<comment><USER42> Yes, this is the sad thing. You have to prove that the jury tampered with itself or was too stupid to or too biased to do its job. Very hard to do. Alsup, in the Google trial, showed some great strategy here where he told the jury "assume you can copyright apis" while reserving to make a judgement as a matter of law on the issue later. So the Jury could say "guilty of copyright infringement" and he could say, "Thank you, oh by the way you can't copyright APIs, but if you could you would have infringed."

If anything Judge Koh seemed more inclined to put as much into the juries hands as possible.

<comment><USER43> It's sad in this case, but being unable to throw out the decision of an incompetent jury is the price of jury nullification. If judges could throw out jury decisions just because they disagree, there wouldn't be much point to having juries at all.

<comment><USER44> Not really. Jury nullification in criminal trials is actually a special case - other kinds of findings by juries can be thrown out, including a jury finding the defendant guilty, but not guilty verdicts are sacrosant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wow! throughout the interview the guy looked extremely confident. It was as if questions were pre decided and he was given time to prepare answer. Like the comment about punishment and not compensation for infringement. The quickness with which they made the decision and haste with which they decided to overlook 'debates' or point of contention is sad. Debate in this case is anyone arguing that patents are not valid. This guy with his immaturity and pre notions have set back tech industry and slowed its growth something on which all tech knowledge workers depend.

<comment><USER31> > Wow! throughout the interview the guy looked extremely confident.

I'd attribute this to Dunning-Krueger. The guy thinks he was the smartest shit in the room - "I had an aha moment, I explained it to them, I laid it out, I this, I that."</comment></comment>


What is the purpose of issuing laws/regulations without penalty? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/26724/what-is-the-purpose-of-issuing-laws-regulations-without-penalty <comment><USER2> I'll tell you, I hate the idea of half-measures like laws that don't get enforced. (I'm not talking about hundreds-of-years-old archaic laws that are ignored by everyone, I mean real current laws that have some implications. )

Why? Because good law-abiding people -- we want people like that, right? -- follow them with inconvenience and cost to themselves, while the people who don't care just go on with the undesired activity the law is aimed at. Think about when you have had to pay extra or buy something, or do something where you found out no one was actually following up on it.

This creates a lot of frustration among the law-abiding. If you can't see that and understand why that's a problem, you need to seriously think about it -- if you're of the opinion "what harm can it do?" or kind of "go with the flow" about it. Just try taking an example from what you would feel at work if this kind of thing allowed to happen. You would not be pleased.

I have to say, that is in no small measure a certain part of why people are unhappy right now in public discourse. It seems like everyone is picking and choosing the laws they feel like following. And the law-abiding on every side are asking, "why are we suckers for wanting laws to be enforced"? Pick the issue and you'll find examples of it. Maybe we should retreat a little from our self-confidence and think "maybe I should follow rules even if I don't agree with them" \-- inject a little of this approach for everyone's benefit until we figure out what's wrong with us lately.

<comment><USER3> If so many people don't wanna follow all the laws maybe there's too many laws.

<comment><USER4> That's short sighted and I'm guessing, wrong.

People, in general, don't want to follow speed limits when they are comfortable with a road or running a little late. This doesn't in any way mean there are too many laws or even that the speed limit is too low. It is just an instance of not wanting to follow laws.

In Indiana, people are required to pay sales tax on online orders. Voluntarily. Technically, you can be charged the tax, but there is little enforcement and little voluntary tax paying. This doesn't mean there are too many laws. The problem here is generally that it is too cumbersome to follow: If the sales tax is added at point of purchase, people pay since there is no need for recordkeeping or saving money for tax time.

Sometimes, laws simply aren't aligned with the wants/needs of the people. I think this is a large part of why states are decriminalizing recreational and medical pot: It more reflects the will of the people and enforcement doesn't help the population. Enforcement simply costs money and tends to ruin lives (by putting a drug charge on their record for something less destructive than alcohol).

A contractor might cut corners to save money. It doesn't mean we should have fewer building codes, though, since so many are there to keep folks safe.

Not wanting to follow laws doesn't mean too many laws.

<comment><USER5> Low probability selective and/or random enforcement is a pernicious effect. The real effect of a speed limit that's too low according to most road users is _not_ to declare society's intentions about how you should drive. It's a way to fund the police department by taxing the unlucky, at best. And more likely a pretext to pull people over for looking like they don't belong. Contemporary traffic engineers understand that you modulate speed with road design, not signs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's to solidify a certain position before someone can. Suppose a state or states have a law that is consumer friendly and has teeth behind it through private right of action and penalties. Businesses don't like that so they lobby US senators and Reps to pass a law that preempts those state laws it has no enforcement or penalties. Even better, the new law will, on the surface, appear to "take the issue seriously." But how can it if it has no penalty? This can happen on the state level too—a good example is the Michigan VRPA which sought to limit data sharing through penalty. It started to work, so state legislature took away the penalties. Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER7> There might be no penalty for breaking a regulation but if you do that and cause harm, then you are at fault, which obviously has legal consequences.

I think a large part of the road code is like that in many places.

<comment><USER3> Unless there's breach of contract involved you've usually got a basic tort lawsuit. The bar for civil infraction charge is generally lower in practice than for a tort judgement. The state can pass whatever stupid law it wants and then get conviction based on the fact that the law was broken even if nobody is injured. For a lawsuit you need injury. A prior civil or criminal case can be pointed to in order to establish a fact pattern but a fact pattern doesn't win you a lawsuit.

That said, in reality there's generally an exception if the person you're suing is a class of person that doesn't in practice get equal protection under the law (people who are drunk when the problem happened and people who have been convicted of certain crimes are the most common classes of people who suffer this fate).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This might be a very naive take, but perhaps you need to spell out what people are supposed to do, so they can do it? "Murder bad" is obvious, but there's a ton of much subtler regulations that might not be obvious or intuitive unless they're explicitly written down.

<comment><USER9> But if there is no penalty, you are just limiting rule followers while giving advantage to rule breakers.

<comment><USER10> It's strange that a comment like this is downvoted.

I agree wholeheartedly. A law without enforcement is pressuring people not to follow it. I think generally everyone understands that (hence tax laws are enforced), but it's a more practical approach: you can never get 100% of the population to comply, and you don't need to. If you can achieve the minimum desired compliance without spending money on enforcement, you have what you need and saved money.

It's naive, because it discounts the damage it does to lawfulness. When people see that law-breakers are not punished (and are defacto rewarded in most cases), they lose respect for the law, the state the is supposed to uphold the law, and the states' institutions. I believe we can witness that in many Western societies.

Murder investigations don't make a lot of sense economically, in most cases. Unless it's a serial killer or a career criminal, the chances are slim to none that they will commit the same crime again, so why -in that line of thinking- should we spend money on finding out who did it and then imprison them for even more money, especially when, ostensibly, our prison system isn't for punishment? It wouldn't be a problem to let the few murderers in modern European societies go free, but it would create a giant problem by what it does to the population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Because if you put important people in office, public servants cannot earn $5MM a year, or more, when they return to private practice.

google: Eric Holder

</comment><comment><USER12> Purpose is to get the money and to shift the blame to employers since they "were told" to renegotiate. So suck it up employees.</comment>


Bitcoin: The Final Piece of the protocol puzzle [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://panteracapital.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Final-Piece-of-the-Protocol-Puzzle.pdf

<comment><USER2> read like an introduction to bitcoin</comment>


How to Find Intial Team for a StartUp Idea? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have a this idea which in my opinion will do very well but I can not do it alone (do not have all the skill sets). I am looking for people to join/help out but nut sure of the approach . I have the following questions
1. On what criteria do I select a team member ? (Suppose need a php programmer and have 5 candidates , how do I select one?) 2.What should be the compensation/ remuneration/equity I should offer ? 3. Anything else that the more pedant hackers suggest I must keep in mind :-) <comment><USER2> This is a response to just your first question:

1\. They need to be passionate about your idea. 2\. They need to be able to connect with you on a personal level. 3\. They need to have the right skill sets for your project.

This is the order I put it in because of a few reasons. First, passion/determination is what drives startups in the first place. Without passion, everything else is half assed, so you want someone who believes in your product and/or your idea. Startups co-founders or the early team members of the founding team is like a marriage. You will be spending ALOT of time with them so make sure you guys can get along. I say skills last because in all honestly, anyone can code. If you're looking at the same range of experience, they will all most likely be able to do what you need them to do.

It's the other factors that you don't see on paper that you want to look for. Look for passionate people and devs you can get along with in the long run. Hope it helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Talent, determination and personal connection. If someone doesn't have all three, they're not a good match.

For cofounders an even equity split is the norm unless one founder brings some particular extra value. but no hard-and-fast rule really, basically just find a split that everyone agrees on.

For early employees see Fred Wilson article: [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/employee-equity-how- much.htm...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/employee-equity-how-much.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> tx ... it helps</comment></comment>


Clojure like language for flash. - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/aemoncannon/las3r

<comment><USER2> Seems a shame not to go for an actual clojure port, rather than just "clojure- like".</comment>


Emojis are the body language of the digital age - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/why-you-need-emoji <comment><USER2> This article casually dismisses the depth and unique utility of body language to ascribe a greater function to emoji than actually exists. It would have been more reasonable just to say "emoji is very widely used in digital communication and expands the vocabulary of digital communication in a unique way." But that's already widely known.

What's more interesting to me is the adoption of emoji as a modern ideographic writing system, and how the incidence of multiple connotations of specific emoji mirrors the development of other ideographic writing systems (CJK et al).

Emoji, gif keyboards, and general linguistic and sociological developments in digital communication are all interesting. But body language is entirely different, and to conflate the two as the article does is not a good look.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing that emojis cannot convey is unconscious body language. There are many subtle communications that can bear influence in empathy, love, trust (or distrust-- i.e. catching someone in a lie). Unconscious body language isn't _required_ , but you can't ignore the fact that it is missing.

<comment><USER4> > One thing that emojis cannot convey is unconscious body language.

Would be interesting to build a chat application that uses the front-facing camera and a little ML to determine your facial expression and attach the appropriate emoji while you focus on writing the text.

Even more interesting would be if it did that without showing _you_ the emoji it inserts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that it is for this moment. When the 4g and 5g networks work well in whole world, we won't need emojis, because video will be used to comunicate with others. Everytime we will be less reticent to transmit videos or pics. People want to show themselves and others want to see them, the real person.

<comment><USER6> _People want to show themselves and others want to see them, the real person._

I think that varies with age, demographic, culture etc. There's _a lot_ of people who hate the idea of being on camera.

<comment><USER7> This reminds me of David Foster Wallace's section in _Infinite Jest_ about the anxiety-inducing video phone technology (very predictive, considering it was written in 1996) -

" _And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door._ "

[http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527](http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They are more like tone of voice.

</comment><comment><USER9> You do not need emoji.

You need to communicate. Clear, concise, eloquent, and precise use of english* allows this to occur. The reason that this breaks down is because too often people resort/revert to using slang or not thinking before they write.

You end up with text equivalent of 'verbal diarrhea'.

I do not know what 99% of those "pacman" faces are supposed to mean. Maybe it's because I'm on the Autistic scale and I have trouble reading expressions, maybe it's because I'm an 'old fart' and these kids need to get off my lawn.

I understand that emoji are just a simple evolution from emoticons. I do not understand why we needed to expand on:

=) or =(

TFA posits that emoji are "body language" for internet communication. If people just wrote what they fucking meant this wouldn't be an issue. (Look at the constant misunderstandings that arise from sarcasm or lack thereof, for an excellent representation of poor writing.)

*Disclaimer about my own ignorance: I don't know if non-english speakers suffer the same follies as english. English is a sloppy, imprecise language. It takes effort to clearly convey a message that cannot be misconstrued.

<comment><USER10> Emoji are an advance over emoticons because they have a standardized description. For example, if you encounter you can find that it is U+1F625 DISAPPOINTED BUT RELIEVED FACE, allowing you to know that the sender intended to convey a combination of disappointment and relief.

<comment><USER11> This? [https://emojipedia.org/disappointed-but-relieved- face/](https://emojipedia.org/disappointed-but-relieved-face/) I always thought it was an emphatic sad, not relieved. Literally none of those emoji's look relieved. Even the Samsung one looks like it's wailing in grief.

I agree with GP, most of these [https://emojipedia.org/google/](https://emojipedia.org/google/) are indistinguishable to me. Almost none of them look like their name "GRINNING FACE WITH SMILING EYES" looks to be in pain.

I realize that emojis are often replacing the body language queues we send each other, but they're significantly more ambiguous. There's maybe 5 faces :'( :( :) :* :/ that I use and that's about it. They seem to be sufficient to convey the additional emotional context for me.

<comment><USER12> Yeah I've always thought that one was unbridled grief. Disappointed but relieved? How? How is that in any way disappointed but relieved? The face is sweating, which people do when they are nervous or anxious. The mouth is frowning, which people do when they are upset. The eyebrows are curved downwards which people do when they are sad. And in a lot of the representations, the drop of water is under the eye, signaling that the face is crying. There is not a single emotion that face is expressing that could be interpreted as positive like the word "relieved" indicates.

That face is not disappointed but relieved. That face is 100% stricken with grief. That's the emoji I send to my wife when she texts me and says she's having a bad day.

<comment><USER13> There are many HNers who know much more about Japan than I do, but I'm pretty sure the tear on the side is meant to represent relief. Imagine it in an anime. I'm not sure why it's a frown and now a shocked face/smile, though.

Here's a short article I found on a few other misinterpreted emoji: [https://www.wired.com/2015/05/using-emoji- wrong/](https://www.wired.com/2015/05/using-emoji-wrong/)

<comment><USER14> People don't know how to quote in mail and forum posts, and one expect them to use emoji "correctly"?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A world war is occuring (Naomi Wolf on "occupy") - <AUTHOR> http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/wolf41/English

<comment><USER2> I think you meant to write Naomi Wolf (the author of the article), and not Klein.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks -- corrected.</comment></comment>