A Real-time Collaborative iPython/Jupyter notebook - <AUTHOR> http://firstname.lastname@example.com/A-Collaborative-Real-time-iPython-Jupyter-Client-for-Self-hosted-Jupyter-Servers-tcwtda0jqgbb <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Ge here the developer. As of now you can

\- collaborate at real-time with others

\- search full text

\- all past versions are saved, down to one or two key strokes.

In order to use this, you need to have your own jupyter server. The setup guide is here:

[https://github.com/escherpad/help-desk](https://github.com/escherpad/help- desk)</comment>


Show HN: HearInsights – Automatic Notetaker - <AUTHOR> http://www.hearinsights.com/ <comment><USER2> This looks really cool! Quick question: is there an easy way to export the recorded notes elsewhere? Often, what we try to do for meeting notes is post them in a Google Docs after the fact, and it'd be great to have this as an almost-appendix.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we are adding integration to help you automatically export notes to any storage solution of your choice. Stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks quite nice! It would be more useful if it can be integrated into Slack, Jira etc. For example a slack bot could notify people if they, or their tasks were mentioned in a meeting.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is such a good idea! We will add this to our feature list!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks great - I'd even be willing to spend some time training it to help it distinguish voices of people I tend to meet with!

</comment><comment><USER5> how are you going to get around the fact that it's illegal to record people without their consent (two party consent I believe its called) in many places?

<comment><AUTHOR> 38 states require single party consent and the rest requires two party consent. Since it is quite complicated, we advice our users to always inform everyone that the conversation is being recorded. Users can later delete recordings from their account if they desire. When users delete a recording, it will be permanently deleted from our database.

<comment><USER6> Maybe you could automatically elide/mute just portions of people who withheld consent. Also, if someone doesn't want to be _recorded_ can you still retain the transcript?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really good idea! We would be able to build something that allows people to only record part of the conversations.

It doesn't seem like we would be able to provide the transcript without recording the conversation. We need to obtain the audio data somehow to further transcribe it. Even if we do realtime transcription, we are still recording and transmitting the data somehow.

The only way to obtain a transcript without recording is to use a local dictation solution! But you might need to sacrifice the accuracy of the transcript in this case.

<comment><USER6> Also if this is used for business and all participants are employees and/or in single-party states/jurisdictions then there could be anyway for a company to indicate it has the consent of all parties.

And recorded transcription plus automatic realtime transcription of non- authorizing parties might embarrass them into allowing it. I've become persuaded over the last decade that two party consent no longer makes sense (though that means the law should change, not that there should be civil disobedience)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with your second point completely and a lot of big tech companies already passively record your conversations.

Given Alexa as an example, I might have signed away my rights of all my conversations to Alexa when I first signed up for the app and the product. But Alexa would never be able to prevent other users who are not the owner from using it. I wonder how they deal with this legal grey area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This might be useful for lawyers/doctors

<comment><AUTHOR> We are indeed trying to get some lawyers to try this out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> looks like an interesting project - wish you the best

</comment><comment><USER9> how can we get access?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sign up on the website and we will let people try out Beta soon!</comment></comment>


The Endless, Invisible Persuasion Tactics of the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/how-dark-patterns-online-manipulate-shoppers/595360/ <comment><USER2> I am not clicking this.

<comment><USER3> Ok, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments here?

<comment><USER4> The headline itself is persuasive ("click bait").</comment></comment></comment>


Five Worst Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Pitching Angel Investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220141

<comment><USER2> This post sounds great on paper, but in my experience, the investors themselves ask about all the items you forbid talking about. Maybe that's the mark of a crappy investor, but I think an entrepreneur should be prepared to answer the question, or NOT answer the question where appropriate.

2) I've had investors ask for very obscure numbers and forecasts related to user base, revenue, etc. thirty minutes into a meeting.

3) I've been scolded by a VC for not putting, literally, a graph with tiny letters of revenue forecasts. Absolutely silly and impractical, but they wanted it.

4) A business plan is there for a reason -- to outline the strategy of your business. It's often sent to an investor before you even meet them. If you're going to do other stuff right from the gun, why isn't it in the business plan? An investor's confidence would be lowered if half of your presentation contradicts what's mentioned in the plan.

5) Without fail, all the investors I met with asked "how much do you want to raise?" with a quick follow-up "how much do you think your company is worth?" Now, I don't think you should EVER answer the second question, but I just wanted to mention that the question WILL come up, and you need to be able to block/bridge appropriately. Just saying "I will not answer that" won't suffice.

I think, ultimately, you need to balance what makes sense to present and what the VC/angel actually wants to see, no matter how impractical.</comment>


Why Do Americans Move So Much More Than Europeans? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/us-geographic-mobility/504968/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Do they normalize these stats per percentage of homes owned vs. rented?

Anecdotally, having lived in both Europe and US, I feel renting is more common in the US.

It's harder to move when you have to consider selling your previous home; conversely, those who move often may anticipate future moves and rent. Statistically, I'd be curious if these metrics correlate, or, more affirmatively, a causation can be shown in either direction.</comment>


Dock-less bike share is ready to take over U.S. cities - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2017/12/dock-less-bike-share-is-ready-to-take-over-u-s-cities.html <comment><USER2> Ugh, these bikes have been horrible in Shanghai. I loved the idea when it first came out last summer, but they've gotten to be a plague. Every block is choked with these bikes, but you're more likely to see their handlebars sticking out of a pond than to see them actually being ridden.

It's a cool idea, and I'm still optimistic, but I can't think of a city where this idea works well. Riding a mobike is rough when it's hot, or when it's cold. It's imposible in a city that's not flat. And in cities where biking is nice, people already have bikes.

Interested to see where this goes, but pretty cautiously optimistic

<comment><USER3> I'm in Chengdu, Sichuan right now. There's literally 2-3 hundreds of Mobike/Ofo bikes nearby every metro station or shopping centre.

But it seems people at least try to put them in rows and local security (there's rarely a public space that's really public) shouts at people for dropping bikes randomly.

Around midnight the maintenance workers check every bike for damages / battery level and take them back to warehouses leaving just a few dozens in a neatly ordered lines.

What's more at least Ofo notifies you that the bike you used was park against the rules. They probably give you a few strikes and then terminate your account.

<comment><USER4> Nice to hear about someone actually trying to tackle the problem instead of simply playing a numbers game until it ultimately fails

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DC has this plague now. Zero to, what must be five or six, dockless bike companies. They're such a nuisance, people throw them in dumpsters, in rivers, park them in the street, block the sidewalk, break the locks and ride them normally. It's awful.

It definitely could fill a niche because sometimes the docked bike stations are too far or empty, but right now they're a huge nuisance and I'm seeing a bit of a backlash.

<comment><USER6> What's wrong with bikes parked in the street (assuming they're using on-street parking)? They certainly take up less room than a car parked in the same space.

Edited for clarity.

<comment><USER7> In my experience, in a crosswalk literally in the street. Although having a dock less bike take up car parking spots I'm trying to use would be infuriating.

<comment><USER8> What may be infuriating for you, could be delightful for 25 bike riders.

<comment><USER9> Except in most cases its a car full of frusturated people, and one inconsiderate cyclist. Its a problem on both sides. Being smug helps noone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They've been great in Seattle. I mostly ride my own bike around but have used dock-less bikes for connecting the last-mile on a bus trip. A small percentage are poorly parked and when I walk by I take the 5 seconds to move a bike or pick one up that's fallen over. No biggie.

I also like that it is putting pressure on the stupid nanny-state helmet law.

<comment><USER11> Well, I'm glad at least one of us enjoys them. Walking around them every day is getting old, fast. The city is littered with these neon orange/green/yellow things cluttering up our throughways.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. My commute by foot into downtown is 30 minutes/1.5 miles each way every day and I scarcely notice the bikes. I think they're a great idea and hope the idea flourishes.

<comment><USER13> Fremont is completely covered in them. They're parked all over the burke gilman trail, cutting away at the already limited space for walkers, bikers, and joggers.

As much as I love the idea of accessible bikes, the lack of helmets and sheer amount of space consumed feels overwhelmingly unsafe at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _They threaten to fill every inch of urban public space with hundreds of thousands of plastic bikes._

What? Is this hyperbole, or are there actually companies making bikes out of plastic? That sounds like a terrible idea.

<comment><USER4> Well, all the high end performance bikes are carbon these days, "making bikes out of plastic" is a somewhat accurate description of their manufacturing process. But those are certainly not the semi-disposable bikeshare junk we are talking about here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In Durham NC, we went from zero to 3 new dockless bike share programs on the streets in the same week! I personally think it's great, but it was strange to go from zero to 3. To me, the interesting part is how expensive is it to keep those bikes in good working order? It's still very new here so time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER16> It works fine in Copenhagen, but there is plenty of bicycle parking on every street. Most people leave the doodles hire bikes in a proper bicycle rack.

</comment><comment><USER17> Like others I think this idea sounds great in theory, especially for cities without a dock system already in place. I'm pretty confused about NYC encouraging this though given the obviously downfalls. One of the few things I actually dislike about living here is the complete disregard for public spaces/services. There are many reasons for it, but I can't imagine how bad this will get if New Yorkers and our tourists treat these bicycles with the same care they treat the subways/buses/parks/sidewalks, etc. I imagine pretty much every major tourist destination that's an open space will be completely filled with discarded bicycles from May to November each year. Not to mention the burden this will put on the already overcrowded Manhattan sidewalks.

A few years ago when Citi bike started I remember it being pretty sparse, and I could have seen the benefit of dockless programs to encourage faster expansion. At this point they are everywhere, except farther out areas of Brooklyn and Queens where many people have cars and likely wouldn't use them. Citi bike seems (to me) to bring all the benefits of a dockless system without any of the downsides. Granted the price is higher, but it's still cheaper than the subway if you buy the membership, and for tourists if they are here for 3+ days and get the $24 pass.

</comment><comment><USER18> Dang, I thought this would be about autonomous bikes that would circle the city and you'd hail with an app.

Got to get working on that bike-mounted lidar.

</comment><comment><USER19> Dockless bikes have arrived in Paris since October. The city officials would like to regulate them and maybe tax them as they use the public spaces to park the bikes: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-paris- bicycles/par...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-paris- bicycles/paris-wants-to-regulate-asian-bike-share-operators-idUSKBN1CP1UZ)

</comment><comment><USER20> Mobike didn't work too well in Manchester hoo boy: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manchesters- bike-share-scheme-isnt-working-because-people-dont-know-how-to-share)

<comment><USER21> Same in London. The boroughs don't give enough permission to the dock based scheme. One council shared a photo of the bikes on this scheme they seized, [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/cyclists-fury- afte...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/cyclists-fury-after-more- than-100-obike-hire-cycles-are-seized-in-clampdown-a3604771.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Like it did China? [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/25/chinas- bike-...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/25/chinas-bike-share- graveyard-a-monument-to-industrys-arrogance)

</comment><comment><USER9> I suspect many will try, and few will see any returns. Which bugs me, because I (perhaps irrationally) really like the idea.

I got a bigger chuckle than apt from this quote:

"It's like the internet in 1999."

Suuuuure.

<comment><USER9> So, downvoters, how is this like the 1999 internet?

At least engauge if you disagree.

<comment><USER23> This comment breaks the HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

More generally, please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The best part about dock-less bike share is the cognitive dissonance of people claiming they are somehow "blocking the street" and "ruining its character" standing in a sea of parked private cars on public space.

<comment><USER25> I get your point, but I have seen bikes dumped in the middle of the sidewalk. It would be nice if the bike share companies gave a discount or something for "friendly" parking. Like you take a photo of the bike's parking spot when you are done then they give you a credit on your account if it is orderly.

Of course, someone would have to click through these photos, but seems like a simple enough mechanical turk task.

I guess someone could take a photo then dump the bike onto the sidewalk, but it seems that wouldn't be worth the effort. of properly parking it in the first place.</comment></comment>


Why do U.S. schoolchildren underperform academically? - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-12-27/why-do-u-s-schoolchildren-underperform-academically-compared-to-students-in-other-countries <comment><USER2> The editorial ignores race, but the U.S. has a different racial mix than many of the countries it is compared with, and racial disparities in academic achievement are large and intractable. From Steve Sailer [https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test- sco...](https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa- usa/) :

"[E]ach race within the U.S. [does well] compared to the rest of the world.

For example, the mean score on the three parts of the test — reading, math, and science — for U.S. Asians was 549, which would make them the third highest scoring place in the world, behind only the utopian city-state of Singapore and four rich cities in mainland China. (Scores are on an SAT-like 200 to 800 scale with 500 supposed to be the rich, or OECD, country mean, although the OECD mean was 488.)

At 521, U.S. whites outscored all countries founded by whites (light blue bars) except Estonia. American whites edged Japan and South Korea by one point, which isn't shabby."</comment>


Amazon patents the milkman - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-patents-milkman-recurring-deliveries/#utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+geekwire+%28GeekWire%29 <comment><USER2> Well, what did we expect would happen with this first-to-file nonsense?</comment>


Show HN: A dead-simple Trello-like TODO manager - <AUTHOR> https://todox.app <comment><USER2> When I visit Show HN's like this the first thing I want to do is play around with it. The GIF is better than nothing, but my suggestion is to have a little demo where the GIF is.

Also the last question in your FAQ, "How can I make sure you'll stay around?", seems to have a mismatched answer. It seems like the question should be "How much does it cost?".

Overall it looks great. Good work and good luck!</comment>


Request TV shows or movies - <AUTHOR> https://help.netflix.com/en/titlerequest <comment><USER2> i'm sure they already track searches for shows/movies, and isn't that a far better indicator for demand?

less clouded by the noise of some "digital influencer" posting a tweet that says "go here and request xyz!" and throwing your metrics way off sync.

<comment><USER3> You're assuming the point of this page is to actually gather data and not just to avoid "please get show X" or "how do I submit show requests?" support requests that are costly to field with human support.

My guess would be they don't outright throw the data away, but it is probably just used as one (very weak) signal in the complex show selection process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When did this page get launched?

This reminds me of CouchPotato[0], but for Netflix.

[0] [https://couchpota.to/](https://couchpota.to/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wayback machine has the oldest snapshot from 16th Sep 2016 - [https://web.archive.org/web/20160916051848/https://help.netf...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160916051848/https://help.netflix.com/en/titlerequest)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This brings to mind an annoyance about Netflix.

If you search for something they don't have, they _won 't admit that_. They give you search results as if you asked for random crap in what their AI thinks is an appropriate genre (in reality, they just span you with what they want you to watch, e.g. paid promotions and Netflix properties).

I was looking for "Elementary" episodes. I got a cluttered page back full of crap without a single Elementary episode or a simple statement to the effect that "We don't carry Elementary episodes".

I'd never pay for Netflix. I get it free from T-Mobile.

<comment><USER6> Not your main point at all, but Hulu has Elementary episodes if you can get access to Hulu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Firefly season 2

</comment><comment><USER8> Instead of filling out that form I'm going to search the many other streaming services available. And if I still don't find it, I'm not going to fill out a request form for each service. Perhaps Netflix could interpret users' searches as signals of interest.

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be helpful to have a voting system, list all the requested title and allow subscribers to vote, with both up and down votes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I thought that was what the "saved" section on my dvd queue was for.

</comment><comment><USER11> Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank

</comment><comment><USER12> The Andy Milonakis Show

</comment><comment><USER13> In other news, Netflix is killing written user-submitted reviews of movies and TV shows [1]. The assault on freedom of expression continues unabated.

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-is-removing-online- reviews...](https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-is-removing-online-reviews-in- august/)</comment>


45 years since its creation. The C language still very popular - <AUTHOR> http://www.javadepend.com/Blog/?p=2372 <comment><USER2> Every so often, I think about the meme of the 100 year language. The idea is that we need to start working towards the languages we'll use in 100 years. Instead, I wonder how many we already have.

Fortan: 59

C: 43

C++: 33

Python: 25

Php: 21

Javascript: 20

Java: 20

It's still a long time until any of those languages reach 100. But longevity seems to be the rule, not the exception. How many languages that were widespread actually died?[0] I don't pretend to know all the languages that have ever been popular, but not many that subsequently died come to mind. Cobol, maybe some lisp dialects, if you don't count Common Lisp as their successor? Is PL/1 dead? Was APL big enough to make the list?

Probably some of the languages I listed above will die before they're 100. Others might be niche, like Fortran already is. But I wouldn't guarantee it.

[0] Where dead doesn't rule out someone being paid to maintain ancient code. By that standard, it's unclear whether anything will ever die ([https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-09-01-the-most- ob...](https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-09-01-the-most-obsolete- infrastructure-money-could-buy/))

<comment><USER3> Pascal is a good example of a dead language that used to be fairly popular.

<comment><USER4> Join us: [http://www.lazarus-ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

Pascal isn't dead! Native binaries produced (much less garbage overhead), fast compilation, kick-ass open source IDE and standard library, cross platform, free (as in freedom, as well as beer).

JOIN US.

<comment><USER3> Wow, I stand corrected. Lazarus is a great name though since it calls out the fact that Pascal _was_ dead ;)

<comment><USER4> Yes, it was dead. Now though... please try it. You'll be impressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash C is the Latin of programming languages. The general syntax is easy to learn and communicates well across derivatives as diverse as Java and and Ruby. Before I learned Lisp and Haskell, I didn't even think non-C-style syntax existed.

<comment><USER5> Forth and Prolog are diverse. Ruby and Java are not. They are both algol (C) derived syntaxes. People only think they are much different because the lack exposure to languages from other (or no) heritages.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash It doesn't matter how diverse the syntax is, just think of the vastly different worlds of people programming in C derived syntaxes:

The enterprise app developer writes Java for her day job, and spends her nights creating iPhone apps in Objective-C. Her apps connect with an API on the website she built using Ruby on Rails, and handles front-end interaction in JavaScript.

All four languages are syntactically similar, but each has vastly different application domains.

<comment><USER5> Do you anything about Forth and Prolog and the languages you mention? Three are the same paradigm, the other two are very much not. This has nothing to do with syntax or "application domains".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I admire C for everything it teached me about programming, but nowadays I actually hate writing it.

For all my personal projects I switched over to Python years ago because I just don't want to waste a single more minute dealing with basic stuff like strings in C.

I love the batteries-included mentality of Python because it lets me concentrate on implementing actual solutions to my problems instead of fighting against the build system or reliably converting strings into integers.

If there would be some kind of batteries-included version of C then I would certainly look into it again, but for now Python is just my preferred tool to get stuff done.

(yes, C++ is better in this regard than C, but it is still to cumbersome for my use case of rapidly playing around with new ideas).

<comment><USER7> Hmm... Rust might be in that ballpark. Certainly more "batteries included" than c and at about the same level of abstraction overall. It depends of course on how cumbersome you consider the ownership system

<comment><USER6> Rust is on my Todo list!

At the moment I do a lot of image and audio processing via SciPy/matplotlib and I think that Rust is lacking in that department at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> C should be the defacto language for 1st year CS students. It is not highly abstracted from hardware, and much easier to grasp Assembly knowing basic C. The syntax uptake is pretty quick, and would allow students to focus on the problem at hand (e.g. algorithms) rather than language nuance. Not to mention the advantages to the graduate starting their career in software development.

It's also easier to go up the stack to object oriented languages, particularly Java. The second chapter, first edition, of David Flanagan's Java in a Nutshell is still, in my opinion, the best intro to Java after having some experience with C.

<comment><USER9> > The syntax uptake is pretty quick, and would allow students to focus on the > problem at hand (e.g. algorithms) rather than language nuance.

I don't agree. What's the benefit in having to painstakingly write trivial string operations using string.h and manually allocated buffers? What's the benefit in learning the ins and outs of undefined behavior?

<comment><USER10> "What's the benefit in learning the ins and outs of undefined behavior?"

To force people to learn that making assumptions based on undefined behaviour is dangerous and that computers are not mind-readers.

And you force people to write buffer manipulation code so they realize how good people using other languages have it.

<comment><USER11> Except, undefined behaviour seems like mostly a C, and C derivates, concept.

I teach C, and every year I have a number of students nearly in tears, because somewhere in the huge program they accidentally malloced sizeof(T*) instead of sizeof(T), but of course that causes a crash 10 minutes later in a totally different piece of the code base.

My hope (it's not quite there yet, but getting closer) is that things like clang's sanitize modes will reach a point where any undefined behaviour immediately causes an abort. Then students can still figure out what they did wrong, but have a chance of finding the source of their bug.

<comment><USER12> Speaking as a past student I'm really glad I started with C.

In the beginning, the fear of getting some random Segmentation fault out of nowhere actually taught me more than any textbook, school or best practices blog could ever do. It also forced me to learn how to use debuggers :)

<comment><USER11> That's what I tell my students, it's "character building", in the same way playing sports in the rain was as a child for me.

Also, many students previously did a course on Java, and clearly never really understood the basics, it's much easier in Java to play "keep tweaking and fixing the exceptions until it works, then don't touch it", particularly for introductory-level projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> C was my first language, but I hadn't used it (outside of C++) for a long time. In recent days it suddenly crashed my little "use new cool languages for the heck of it" party.

I was experimenting with Swift, trying to make it fit my rather performance/memory critical string processing needs. As it turns out, you can use C code from Swift about as easily as you can use Java code from another JVM language.

So I implemented a variant of the short string optimization in a few lines of C code. It's amazing how well C fits the bill as a lingua franca for code that does questionable things to bits and/or is meant to be used from other languages.

There's very little competition for C in that role.

</comment><comment><USER14> I love working with C. The power it gives me allows me to write hyper- optimized applications in terms of memory usage. Using it we process terabyte files ridiculously fast using less than 1K of non-program memory.

However, when I don't need to hyper-optimised it is not my first choice due to being way behind other in languages in terms of package management and I'd rather not deal with pointers if I don't have to.

<comment><USER15> Have you looked at Rust? It is very good for those design cases.

<comment><USER14> Rust is definitely on my list of things to learn. I haven't gotten around to it, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > [referring to Microsoft Word 1.1] It seems that this code is from a C > project created recently in GitHub. No sign that's a code from 25 years ago.

I wouldn't necessarily say that. At a glance, there are some questionable idioms: assignment inside a function argument (especially problematic since argument evaluation order is unspecified), old-style argument declaration, a custom Boolean type, less-than-descriptive variable naming, etc. I wouldn't let any of that pass code review today. :)

> The power of C is its stability over years, it remains basic, no advanced > mechanism was introduced to the language, the code still simple to > understand and maintain.

Not when you take the arcane undefined behavior rules into account. C semantics are anything but simple.

<comment><USER16> > Not when you take the arcane undefined behavior rules into account. C > semantics are anything but simple.

Maybe, but note that simplicity should be viewed in a relative sense.

I am curious as to which language you think has simpler semantics than C. For example, I have not found Python, Julia, MATLAB, C++, Verilog, or shell script simpler than C. Same goes for my initial explorations of Rust.

Even if one includes the arcane corners, the spec is < 200 pages (excluding the stdlib).

<comment><USER9> If you don't count the unsafe sublanguage, Rust, SML, OCaml, Scheme, Java, and Lua all have simpler semantics than C, and that's just off the top of my head. It's debatable, but I would even argue that Haskell and Swift do. Undefined behavior is really subtle, and there are parts of the spec that compiler developers haven't even come to consensus regarding the meaning of.

<comment><USER17> Standard Haskell (ie Haskell 2010[1]) certainly is. Most of its features are just syntax sugar over a tiny core language with simple (although not 100% formalized) denotational semantics. The language itself isn't very big and it's pretty well-specified.

GHC Haskell with all extensions... euh, I don't know. Many extensions are either syntactic sugar or straightforward changes to the base language, sometimes even making it simpler. But I'm not confident about _all_ of them, and I'm not sure how the semantics of some low-level libraries (ie for concurrency) work out.

I've written code in essentially just the standard subset and it's a pleasant language—there aren't any extensions that you absolutely must use in real projects. That said, people use lots of them anyhow because most make the language _nicer_ without adding too much complexity.

Since the extensions aren't organized in a unified way and have to be split up (since they can generally be enabled or disabled independently), it's hard to figure out how complex they make the semantics of the language as a whole.

[1]: [https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/](https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I will go to my grave loving C, from that first day when I read about it in Byte magazine as the high speed language of every new exciting computer application, to the day when C++ took over and began to assert it's high falutin notions of what a language should be.

<comment><USER19> I can't help myself from rewriting your post, it's so close :)

I will go to my grave loving C, from that first day when I read() about it in unsigned char magazine as the high speed language of every malloc() exciting computer application, to the day when C++ took over and began to assert() its high falutin' notions of what a language should be.

<comment><USER20> I loved it, let me add:

        I will goto my_grave loving C, from that day[0] ...

<comment><USER19> I knew I was missing something, nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> C is nearly inaccessible to me. It really is like the Latin of programming languages, insofar as JavaScript is the new English of programming languages which is the world I have been living in for some time now.

Its like you can see the Latin roots of a lot of English, but reading it is like reading lorem ipsum. Same with C vs. JS with me.

<comment><USER22> Just out of curiosity, which elements make C inaccessible compared to other C-like languages? The base structure is identical to the later derivatives (if/else, for, while, operators and precedence, use of curly braces). Is it the manual memory management (malloc/free)? Or is it keeping aware of a variable's data type, knowing when and when not to use pointers and references? Or is it the limited number / scope of functions included in the standard libraries? (I'm mainly curious, as C seems to be the most comfortable language to me since I've known it for the last 25 or so years).

<comment><USER21> > Is it the manual memory management (malloc/free)? Or is it keeping aware of > a variable's data type, knowing when and when not to use pointers and > references?

Yes, both I think. These are ways of thinking that simply don't seem to apply in JS or any other dynamically typed higher level language.

Also, just sort of the conventions of naming things, like malloc or memcpy or in the example of the article, all those crazily shortened abbreviations that may just be saving bits or the developers style, but make it very unreadable for me. I'm used to stuff like:

        function getDataFromServer(){
          var data = response
          //blah blah etc
        }

and it may just be a thing that you have to get used to with experience, but I can read and write Python, Ruby, JS, Clojure and other lisps, and have experience with C#, but something about C I just struggle with, and I wish that wasn't the case.

<comment><USER23> I'll agree that memory and type issues are more of a barrier, but the variable naming is just convention of the programmer. There is a lot of legacy code where brevity in naming was emphasized, but that was just the convention of the time, nothing inherent in the language. it doesn't need to be that way.

Your example looks like completely valid C code to me (except for the lack of semi-colon).

<comment><USER21> oops. Thanks for calling me out on the semi-colon. I also forgot to pass response as an argument. I should be ashamed of myself. Must've been late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My manager (a long-time-ago former dev) once told me:

"I can write C in any language."

And it's true. He could write beautiful C code in Perl, Java, Ruby, etc - whichever language the current project was using - when he needed to hack something (usually gathering data for business metrics).

<comment><USER25> We used that quote as a joke for not learning new languages well enough. Do you mean that he would write C and link it to each implementation?

<comment><USER24> He'd just stick to the basics and write C-style code in the given language, he had no knowledge of any of the language idioms and didn't need them if he kept his code simple enough.

Basically only using if/for/while and function/return constructs.

It was strange to open a Perl script and see "C" code, with single-letter variables (declared at the top), etc.

<comment><USER26> In some languages (e.g., R), the performance penalty for such code is enormous.

<comment><USER27> Yes and no. While typically vectorised code will run faster than a loop (because its a loop in C) i.e. rowSums is faster than a typical apply call, there actually isn't that much difference between a for loop over columns to sum and apply over columns to sum.

The real performance penalty is growing objects as you go. If you preallocate a list or vector of the appropriate length, then there typically isn't much difference.

That being said, you'll pry lapply(x, fun) from my cold dead hands (lapply(x, function (x) g(f(x)) is even better :) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> One of my favorite jokes on HN was in a typical language wars thread where a guy wrote "real men write in C....without the standard library." That still makes me laugh.

<comment><USER29> Obligatory link to the Story of Mel:

[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of- mel.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html)

<comment><USER30> Ah! I've thought instead to MEL (ancient Maya scripting language)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I learned C via this excellent book: [http://www.amazon.com/dp/067230399X/?tag=stackoverfl08-20](http://www.amazon.com/dp/067230399X/?tag=stackoverfl08-20), which I picked up from a local bookstore on a whim. I had just started high school, and up until that point my programming experience had been limited to BASIC-type languages (starting with Apple ][ basic when I was 6, then AMOS on the Amiga 500, then QBasic on DOS... actually that last one was a bit of a downgrade from AMOS :) ).

C was my introduction to "real" programming -- it forced me to actually learn memory management, pointers, etc. Funny thing, I only took one C course while I was in college. By the time I started college, Java was the new hotness, and I was in the first incoming freshman class to get Java instead of Pascal in our introductory programming course. I took an immediate disliking to Java back then (and still don't like it), so naturally it's the language I have to use at work :O

</comment><comment><USER32> C has kind of become the evident defacto standard. There isn't anything we can really do to change that. It just did what it was meant to do very well with all of the flashy bells and whistles removed.

The underlying instructions generated by the compilers are simple to follow. Reasoning about what will be generated is an easy enough task (so long as optimization is turned off).

</comment><comment><USER33> "Although the first edition of K&R described most of the rules that brought C's type structure to its present form, many programs written in the older, more relaxed style persisted, and so did compilers that tolerated it. To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions."

[http://www.netzmafia.de/skripten/unix/chist.html](http://www.netzmafia.de/skripten/unix/chist.html) \-- Dennis M. Ritchie

</comment><comment><USER34> Lua + C == welcome to C in the 21st century. :)

Seriously enough, Lua adds all those scripting high-level aspects that are missing from C. I know it's another language but its interplay with C gives strength to both of them. A good alternative of the C + Lua paradigm is of course Python.

<comment><USER35> Tcl + C == welcome to C in the 1990s :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Also note that nearly every computer science or electrical engineering grad of the last 30 years has taken multiple courses in C.

This obviously gives it a big leg up for employer demand, etc.

</comment><comment><USER37> Most popular and most used are not exactly the same thing. Half of the population pay their taxes, I don't think one can claim taxes are very popular.

</comment><comment><USER38> My first serious introduction to programming was through Harvard's online CS50x course, which uses C. I think it was a fantastic way to introduce a newbie like me to what programming languages are doing under the hood with memory allocation, pointers, value vs ref, etc.

</comment><comment><USER39> You can backpropagate "modern" CS techniques like modularity an encapsulation to most ANY language like C or LISP or FORTRAN. But if have language and compiler support for these, it makes it easier and more reliable.

<comment><USER40> Encapsulation is done better and is easier to manage in C than it is C++.

<comment><USER41> Yes. I have entire code bases where the interface to a "capsule" ( because en _capsul_ ation, see :) is one function with void parameter and void return.

Of course there's a central data store. But that's okay.

<comment><USER42> That's funny about capsules. More consistent when people discuss encapsulation, though. Far as OOP in C, it's definitely doable with quite a few approaches and even books dedicated to it. Example:

[https://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf](https://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf)

Many think C++ with its benefits and problems are relevant to OOP in C but not entirely. That's because they think C++ was about adding OOP to C. It wasn't. Stroustrup used safe, OOP languages like Simula that he wanted more of. He intended to leverage C's popularity and tooling but transform it into something with benefits of other languages. So, the result is C-like but not quite C and complex.

Just doing OOP in C, on other hand, is much easier and cleaner problem to solve. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why would it go away? We still need to write low-level or fast applications.

</comment><comment><USER44> > The C language still very popular

The C language is still very popular

</comment><comment><USER45> Hey, now hold on a minute. Are you people telling me that there are languages people actually use other than C !?

</comment><comment><USER46> No school like old school!</comment>


Show HN: Domains for Friends: Find "YourName.com" for You & Friends - <AUTHOR> http://www.domainsforfriends.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here - I know requiring a Facebook login is generally frowned upon in the HN community, but I would appreciate feedback on the app in general.

If FB authentication is asking too much of you, please take a quick peek at the intro video to see what's inside.

<http://youtu.be/ycTIFVtF3zY>

</comment><comment><USER2> > ... or do you want to see a preview of Domains for Friends before logging > in?

Remove that.. All it does is require you to login anyway. Redundant. Other than that, I can't really test it much as Facebook is blocked at my work, but I do like the idea behind it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, the "preview" in this case is the Youtube video in the resulting popup. Which may be blocked at your work as well :(

I'll work on the language of that link a little to be clearer.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I see, yeah Youtube is blocked also so all I seen was the "sign into facebook to get started"

Hopefully when I get home after work I can better test it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please do! I'm getting ready to make a stronger marketing push and would dramatically appreciate feedback at this stage in the game.

<comment><USER2> So I got a chance to play with it... My only gripe is GoDaddy... GoDaddy is bad. Very bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was anticipating this feedback, the fact of the matter is that GoDaddy has brand awareness (read: increased conversions) and higher payouts (due to heavy upselling).

I'm looking to make a little money from this site and the factors above, for better or worse, really make the decision in terms of where I refer traffic.

I am considering building on OpenSRS for a fully whitelabelled reg. process. Unfortunately that is a big undertaking, and I'm testing the site before committing the effort to white label integration.

Thanks again.

<comment><USER2> That's unfortunate that money is the reason you're using a service that wanted to kill your business.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Opa – The Scalable Open Source Cloud Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.webappers.com/2011/07/22/opa-the-scalable-open-source-cloud-language/

<comment><USER2> I don't think I can properly say how cheap this looks to me.

HTML mixed with code in the same file? A new language? A new database? What makes an app written in opa better than a PHP codebase where HTML is mixed with PHP all over?

This opa project doesn't look like such a big deal to me. It just limits freedom too much from what I can see. Build something like this which merges the HTML with some weird looking code and you've wasted quite some time for nothing.

Wt has been around for a while with an approach not far from this one and I never stopped thinking it's one major piece of junk.

There also doesn't seem to be any functional website / web app built with it. They all seem heavily javascript-ified chunks of HTML which work together to create something which looks like pages from 2003-2004.

To the guy who posted this link for SEO purposes: I'll make sure to block that site from my browsers, it's 100% trash.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is it with all this blogspam?

This is the relevant link: <http://opalang.org/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Buzzword bingo aside, the idea is interesting. That said, mixing html and code is not my idea of fun debugging... Is that the way you do it on big apps as well, or is it done that way to make the chat example as small as possible?

<comment><USER2> It's not fun developing like this either, I don't want to see how debugging is supposed to be done for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Opa - The synonym for grandpa in the German language.

<comment><USER6> And Dutch.

<comment><USER7> A girl's older brother in Korean

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> buzzword again ! Don't think this language is the most attractive though...

</comment><comment><USER9> holy buzzwords, batman!</comment>


Live stream: Multiplayer stock trading game using real money [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/stockstream <comment><USER2> Part of me believes that this can easily be used for money laundering or insider trading.

Anyone want to guess the legality of this? This is very far away from Twitch plays pokemon.

<comment><USER3> The creator, an Amazon engineer, did disallow trading AMZN, for a start

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unsurprising that most of the trading activity is around prominent b2c tech brands. Right now I'm seeing amd, tesla, netflix, google, nvidia, apple.

What is the ticker in the middle with quotes?

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone find where the proceeds of this go?

<comment><USER3> If there are any, it's still the investor's money

[http://www.businessinsider.com/stockstream-twitch-amazon- sto...](http://www.businessinsider.com/stockstream-twitch-amazon-stock- portfolio-2017-5)</comment></comment>


Java's Cover (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/javacover.html <comment><USER2> No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java.

\- You must be kidding me, ever been to any JUG meeting or JavaOne conference? There are millions of hardcore Java lovers at those places. Java has one of the the biggest developer community world wide. I love Java - it's one of the best programming language till date.

<comment><USER3> Hear, Hear! A Java fan here.

<comment><USER4> me too: I love Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So pg predicts that hackers are going to hate Java. Hackers mostly hate Java. Because of this, pg predicts Java will be unsuccessful. Java's actually pretty successful. This is kind of sobering. Possibly we overestimate the social influence of hackers.

<comment><USER2> There is a big difference between hackers and professional programmers. He is clearly not talking about the latter.

<comment><USER5> I'm confused about why you think I thought he was

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know it custom to bash java on HN, but personally I like java. I don't mind the verbosity - a decent IDE will handle that.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++."

In what sense was C++ designed for other people? IIRC Stroustrup came up with it to use on his own research projects.

<comment><USER4> C++ is the classic design-by-committee language. However it started it, it's far from one person's design now and hasn't been for decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like he was wrong.

<comment><USER9> Well, apart from his prediction that it wouldn't be a very successful language, his analysis still seems pretty accurate...

And one has to grant Java this: it has matured a lot over the years. Even has lambdas now! ;-)

<comment><USER3> Still to this day I do not get the big deal about lambdas. Can someone please explain?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have mixed feelings about Java.

Reflection made one tricky part of a project _very_ easy. I still love how elegantly it turned out. The type system is... I used to think it was really good, now I'd just call it "OK". JNI is useful for getting certain things done, but the syntax is gouge-your-eyeballs-out awful. Checked exceptions are very useful if you are serious about error handling, and a royal pain if/when you are not.

But the thing that was great about Java, to me, was the library. It was like Barbie - it had _everything_. I'm just talking about the standard Java library here.

Then you get into the other libraries - Spring and J2EE frameworks and Hibernate and so on, and the XML configuration files multiply. They do great things, but if you have to change what they do, you have to change some setting in some XML file, which uses some syntax that you don't know, and your job is to figure out which XML file and which setting and where the documentation is, and you just go insane. I understand why people loathe that environment.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well, this isn't very good. "No one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML"? Really?

I tend to find his essays much less interesting and persuasive now than I used to. I'm not sure why.

</comment><comment><USER4> Shows that his "radar" is pretty crap. His hunch that it wouldn't be a very successful language didn't turn out so well.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wonder what life would have be like if instead of Java, it was Go that appeared in the 90s...

<comment><USER13> Concurrency would be a little bit easier. Not much else would have changed.

<comment><USER4> as a Java programmer who has tried Go, I disagree

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "the less one knows, the wiser one is"

<comment><USER15> I don't see how you reach that conclusion. It's possible that posessing some knowledge may lead to overconfidence, but that too is a problem with a lack of knowledge - knowing the limits of your knowledge. Knowledge is always beneficial to a rational agent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note: 2001.

</comment><comment><USER13> Spot on. Java is such a sad language, so verbose, so cumbersome, so inexpressive, radiating such a condescending stupidity. Its pervasiveness today, at the end of fucking 2015, is just depressing.

<comment><USER16> Your comment history indicates you're a Javascript programmer. No comment.

<comment><USER17> I really love those endless entertaining bashy discussions about the most widely used programming language in histoty. You hatefull guys out there would not even be able to use your credit card for making a single checkout, your bank would not be able to do a single transaction, your online experience would simply not be existent, but no problem, you would not notice because you would have no phone in your pocket to consume all this irrelevant stuff, made with a robust, highly optimized and reliable language...Sure Java is no beauty, it is sheere Power...powering an immense part of the digital world we live in. please stop whining an face one of the most advanced pieces of information technologies ever. it is here to stay. P.S.: without Java your favourite toy would be named only "Script" ...would be sad, wouldn't it? ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Can 5G replace everybody's home broadband? - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/5g-as-a-home-broadband-replacement-isnt-a-slam-dunk-yet-but-it-might-be-soon/ <comment><USER2> I just got junk mail today from Comcast offering 200mbit service for $70/month...if I sign a two year contract.

So it seems like Comcast knows the answer is yes.</comment>


The Country That Stopped Reading - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/the-country-that-stopped-reading.html <comment><USER2> What an atrocious article. Anecdotal overload, complete non-understanding of statistics, and great dollops of confirmation bias and the fundamental attribution error.

It actually sickens me that this is what the NYTimes has become.

 _> Mexico is floundering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read_

Are you fucking kidding me? Does this guy understand that a narco fueled civil war is currently being waged throughout Mexico with nearly 60K deaths in the last 5 years (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War>).

I'd respond to the rest of his article - but it's just so, so bad that I really can't be bothered.

<comment><USER3> I had completely the opposite reaction to you. I thought this was a lovely, heartfelt, clearly-written article. I especially enjoyed the final paragraph - "We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity" - he nailed the power of books for me.

As far as the lack of concrete statistics - well, I don't know about you, but until I hear a more-convincing alternate take, I'm going to take his word for it. He clearly knows more about Mexico than me. And his examples are pretty powerful - walking through a giant camp filled with striking teachers, examples of the behaviour of individual teachers, _the attitude of the State Minister for Education._

And why can't a raging narco war be linked in a small manner to a population lacking imagination, sensitivity and the ability to forge new economic pathways, linked back to a lack of interest in reading? Is that an offensive notion to entertain or something? It's not like you have to ignore other factors like the adjacent drug market, is it? Alternately, why can't these two problems - trafficking and bad education - both be afflicting Mexico simultaneously, feeding off of and reinforcing each other?

I mean, seriously, why don't you just chill the fuck out and enjoy the article on its own merits, rather than imposing completely ridiculous standards on it? Do you have more experience of and personal involvement in Mexico than this author?

<comment><USER4> These are not good forms of reasoning. You have here committed several fallacies that are very common and very worrying, as they tend to lead to the public adoption of poorly reasoned explanations and baseless facts. This is not an attack on you personally.

> As far as the lack of concrete statistics - well, I don't know about you, > but until I hear a more-convincing alternate take, I'm going to take his > word for it.

It is still a mystery how life originated on Earth. I know you will enjoy my theory about how the unicorns did it.

No. No you won't. I am sure you know that this is a ridiculous argument to make. The fact that you have not heard a better explanation is a terrible reason to accept another explanation. Cogency does not imply correctness.

> I mean, seriously, why don't you just chill the fuck out and enjoy the > article on its own merits, rather than imposing completely ridiculous > standards on it?

There is no such thing as "its own merits". That is doublespeak for "do not judge it at all". Either it meets the standards of good reasoning, data presentation, and research, or it doesn't You cannot say that it has it own standards for these things that we the reader are forced to accept.

> Do you have more experience of and personal involvement in Mexico than this > author?

Again, this is not a sensible argument. It does not matter to me that my doctor has had cancer before he treats me for cancer. Engineers at NASA did not personally need to visit the moon before they were able to engineer the moon lander. You do not need personal experience with phenomena to understand them. In fact, personal experience with a thing can lead to horrible mistakes in understanding and judgment backed up by the fallacy that because they come from personal experience, they are especially valid.

<comment><USER3> P2/2

Okay. 4 is readily verifiable. 2* and 3 are the kind of claims that generally are best met by counter-argument from experience - i.e., a Mexican reader, or just a reader with relevant knowledge, reads this, and either sighs and nods their head, or they say "hang on a minute, I know lots of Mexicans who love to read!" I.e. if you are in a position to have an experience-based response to this sentiment, it will either strike you as true or not. Don't forget: this article was originally written in Spanish, for a Mexican newspaper. So the author was safe to assume his readers would be able to independently assess and respond to this claim - and hence, in submitting what confluence is arguing is inadequate substantiation, is not breaking the honesty criteria - because you and the other critics here were never the intended audience.

1, 6, 7, 8, and 9 form the bulk of the author's critique, which is cultural: i.e., that people in Mexico do not read for pleasure, are ignorant of the value of reading for pleasure, that the education system is run by and staffed with people who are ignorant of this value too, and produces graduates who are the same. Extended: people who are thus ignorant lack dignity, ambition, expectations, and imagination, and this malaise of ignorance is undermining any and all efforts to achieve true societal progress in Mexico.

Now, cultural critiques such as this are tricky things to justify. Most people have these sorts of feelings - intuitions, senses about the way society is, etc. These feelings are formed from disparate are substantiated through his depictions of schools, students and teachers in Mexico. Toscana, in this instance, offers these illustrations:

1) Perennial attempts to reform education (indicating that education is an acknowledged problem area for the country, but one which thus far has not been satisfactorily addressed.)

2) He witnessed thousands of striking teachers and found them bored and amusing themselves without exception with insipid distractions. 3) He talked to an audience of ~350 young people and only one would admit to liking reading.

4) A teacher whose attitude he found simple-minded expressed a focus on sticking to the script (which he also patently found unimaginative) and told a story which he found overly simplistic to that same audience.

5) A grand plan to encourage reading failed due to a lack of teacher training, and millions of books produced went unused.

6) The education secretary in his home state failed, in a manner he found simple-minded, to understand the distinction between basic literacy and engagement with books, and to understand the value of reading for pleasure.

7) His daughter's literacy teacher dismissed, again in a manner he found simple-minded, the value of fiction books.

So, to sum up, here are the observations he draws upon: his knowledge of the history of government attempts to reform education, his experience of the behaviour of striking teachers, his experience of an audience of schoolchildren, his experience of the behaviour of a teacher at the school where he addressed this audience, his experience interacting with a senior government education official, his observation of his daughter's school experience.

Are these experiences valid grounds for this sort of cultural critique? I would argue that they are - I myself am satisfied. I think, at the very least, the attitude of the Education Secretary is extremely worrying. I would be very concerned if an equivalent official in my government expressed such an attitude, and for my country I would surprised if there were not a spontaneous effort to have such an official removed from office. Anyway, even if you think this evidence is a little weak, they form a perfectly adequate basis for an initial argument. As I noted above, opinion pieces like this are intended to serve as a springboard for further discussion. So they do not need to be completely fleshed out, because they will naturally meet objections and generate further refinements and clarification of the social issue, hopefully generating some action and change, which is the real aim of this article.

A second issue here is this: can we accept the author's experiences as representative, or symbolic, of wider processes at play in Mexico? I am not sure what my response is to this issue - it's something I've thought about quite often in one guise or another, and I'm still clarifying my position on it. But my gut feeling is that we should listen to people's gut feelings. My gut feeling is that yes, the attitude of one audience of schoolchildren in Mexico can speak to a general attitude prevalent across the entire population. Yes, it does matter if an education secretary completely misses the point of literature. And I do think that culture is in some ways remarkably uniform within national boundaries. But all this is perhaps another issue. The worst possiibility I could see here is that Toscana is a bit of an idealist and a dreamer, and the education secretary was really being pragmatic, not foolish. That is possible.

Anyway, just to wrap this up: the real issue here is not whether the author provided enough evidence to justify his claims - I think the real issue is that confluence is acting in an incredibly presumptuous, arrogant manner in dictating that Toscana's opinions are not valid. I think this is a case of cultural imperialism.

Here's why. Confluence is, I assume, not Mexican. I would guess he is American. What he has essentially done is refuse to entertain the notion that the issue Toscana has identified as critical to Mexico is valid. Instead, confluence, an outsider, has imposed on Toscana the issue he knows the most about, and which he thinks is the most important - the narco-war. Toscana sees Mexico as a country in and of itself, and an issue like the imagination, courage, dignity and ambitions of the people of Mexico as of critical importance. Confluence wants to rubbish the notion that any of that could really be important - and instead force the focus back onto Mexico as a tributary of the United States. Perhaps confluence is upset, subconsciously, that Toscana neglects to even mention the United States?

Whatever. I find it insulting that confluence would try and take away a man's right to argue passionately for something he believes so dearly in. And I feel confluence and you both are displaying a lack of sensitivity on this issue. Perhaps you too would benefit from spending some more time reading for pleasure. You might benefit from developing a better understanding of the passions that drive people, and a little more flexibility and softness in reacting to your fellow human being.

*here assuming, I would argue reasonably, that the author is using the word illiteracy to refer not to technical illiteracy but to not caring to read, having no taste for reading, and no understanding of the value of, novels and books.

<comment><USER4> I do not think it is a good use of time for either of us to continue this, but to give you some recompense for the time you put into your response, I will write a few things.

1) I have no opinion on Mexico and I have no basis for concurring with what confluence wrote. Nothing I wrote in response to you suggested otherwise.

2) Where you have responded to what I wrote, you have written self- contradictory statements that are not strong rebuttals to the points I made. I was pointing out your use of fallacious reasoning. In your rebuttal you recommitted several of these same fallacies and added some new ones in form the self-contradiction, non sequiturs, and erecting straw men.

3) You spend a great deal of time building up this straw man of Imperialism. I have no response to this as it has nothing to do with what I wrote.

4) You end this with an ad-hominem suggesting that I and confluence read more. I point out that this is both ridiculous on its face as you know nothing about my reading habits and furthermore it is not a useful form of argument.

<comment><USER3> >I have no opinion on Mexico and I have no basis for concurring with what confluence wrote.

>you have written self-contradictory statements that are not strong rebuttals to the points I made.

Maybe if you did indeed have some opinion on and knowledge of the subject matter at hand you would see the sense in what I am trying to say, and be willing to cut me a little slack. Work with me not against me as they say. Oh well.

>you know nothing about my reading habits

But I do know a bit about your analytical and argumentative style, which seems, based on what I have observed, to be rigid. Reading is one of the best ways I know to soften such a trait, hence the suggestion.

Anyway, you're right that it's time to wrap this up. Sorry, really didn't set out to attack you here, but I think both you and confluence are being a bit... well, for lack of a better word, silly. However it is interesting, as I've suggested already, in the normal world an article like this wouldn't raise an eyebrow, so it's fun to try and defend something perfectly normal from an extraordinary critique. I enjoyed the exercise, even if you think my logic is rubbish :)

<comment><USER4> I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt because this is the internet and it is very difficult to judge one's own written tone, but I hope you'll reread what you have written to see why it makes you come off as a deeply arrogant person. You seem not to have read at all what I have written; you appear to think that I was engaged in criticizing the article. You also continue this nonsense about reading that can only have the effect of being insulting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After several months of intensely self-studying Spanish, I decided to try to find some native language books or magazines to use for reading practice. I thought that in Los Angeles, a city with latino population measured in the several millions, I'd be able to find some kind of book shop catering to Spanish speakers. But I never did. The most promising place -- Libreria Mexico de Echo Park -- appeared to be out of business when I went by one afternoon. I asked a few native speakers near the shuttered bookshop where else I might be able to find books and nobody had any suggestions. But maybe they just didn't want to talk to a crazy gringo.

If anybody knows a good place to browse and buy spanish language books in the LA area, I'd love to know about it.

<comment><USER6> Have you tried Barnes & Noble? In my small town in Washington, not exactly a hot bed of Spanish speaking, B&N has a pretty big Spanish section, so I'd expect similar elsewhere.

<comment><USER5> I've looked in big book chains before, and while they always have some stuff the selection is pretty small: often best sellers and religious books only. I'd like to find a shop specializing in spanish language because I think they'd have a broader selection of topics, hopefully including some interesting nonfiction.

I know these books exist because I see them in online shops based out of Europe, but I'd like to avoid paying the high exchange rate + shipping to get books all the way from overseas.

<comment><USER7> Have you tried Amazon?

<comment><USER5> Of course, but I still find bookstores more pleasant than Amazon for general browsing. So if there's a brick and mortar location with a lot of spanish books in LA, I'd like to check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm Mexican and live in Mexico City. Although there are people in Mexico who like to read books, I'd say they represent less than 5% of the population.

When I'm invited to somebody's home, one of the first things I tend to look at is the books they have. Often there doesn't seem to be any books there, and when I ask them about it they do confirm that nobody in that house owns any books. It turns out that the only books they have ever had were their school textbooks and they usually quite puzzled about why I think anybody might be interested in owning any books.

<comment><USER9> Here is an exercise you can try next time you are in a US city on a weekend. Take the Sunday real estate ads, and visit as many houses as you can conveniently fit into the afternoon--1 to 4 pm is the usual open time. See what you see in the way of books. I don't think that you will find that things are radically different here. I've seen houses with very interesting bookshelves; I've seen plenty with pretty scan holdings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am more worried that, in the most famous newspaper in the most powerful country in the world, opinion pieces are overwhelmingly dominated by emotionally charged anecdotes while actual data plays only a cursory role.

<comment><USER11> That fits the definition of the word perfectly. Also, the author cites a study from Unesco that confirms his emotionally charged anecdotes. Data alone will rarely spur people to action.

<comment><USER10> 1\. Citing two data point among paragraphs of anecdote is cursory.

2\. Opinion pieces (should) mean they have a declared persuasive goal, not that all forms of rhetoric are acceptable. The word "opinion" is not a license to argue from astrology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not._

This means literacy is on the rise. The author is one of many people who are concerned because our society is moving away from the novel as a form of expression.

I would argue that videogames are filling that niche -- instead of sitting and reading a book for 40-60 hours, we sit and guide a character and live their story for 40-60 hours.

The question here becomes: Are Mexican children playing enough videogames?

<comment><USER13> The brain has very high plasticity. It is able to rewire itself for tasks that are done frequently so that it is able to perform those tasks better. The ability to read, understand, consider, and analyze long-form text is a skill that will be slowly lost in such a scenario. And I'd argue that the ability to read and understand documentation about complex ideas goes hand-in-hand with various important things, including complex scientific research, the details of an M&A deal, economic agreements between nations, or application source code. Maybe the average person doesn't need to do these things, but if more and more drop reading, the gross numbers of people able to grow into those roles would probably also decline.

I think the general consensus in the scientific community is that reading enables more long-term brainpower than does television or video games. Staving off Alzheimer's is one area that is frequently cited as a benefit for example.

edit: wording

<comment><USER14> > _complex scientific research, the details of an M &A deal, economic > agreements between nations, or application source code._

Most of those activities you listed are what a '93 DOE survey called "level 5" tasks[1]. Only 3-4% of American adults are at level 5.[2] There was a followup survey was in 2003, but they combined level 4 and 5 [3]. There weren't any significant changes to the other 3 levels, so I doubt level 5 increased either.

[1] - <http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf>, page 10 [2] - <http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf>, page 17 [3] - <http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am really shocked by many of the answers I am reading here. Do you really think that reading books is an optional thing? I would even go as far as saying: if you are not a regular reader of books, you cannot be a world class programmer. Because you just lack the necessary imagination for it.

<comment><USER16> > Do you really think that reading books is an optional thing?

Yes, reading books is optional. Note that many people who do not read books do read other formats: essay, magazine, news, short form stories, poetry, and so on.

<comment><USER17> Or in the case of many here, technical journal articles and blogs and the like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much > less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population > that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more > illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago.

So...literacy rates are going up? That doesn't sound so bad.

<comment><USER19> Sadly, innumeracy is increasing among NYT writers and editors.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, The proportion of NYT writers and editors that is numerate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more innumerate people at the NYT now than there were 12 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm an atheist, but if there is a hell, people like the leader of the teachers' union, Elba Esther Gordillo, need to be in it.

The amount of lives that have been ruined by her union and the teachers they control must be in the millions.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra It is very strange to me that people can be illiterate (as in, unable to read anything) in Mexico considering how easy the written Spanish language is (compared to e. g. English) and how prevalent is it around the globe.

They should be seeing written phrases everywhere and these should be trivial to read once they know the alphabet.

<comment><USER21> Well that's not what the author means by illiterate. He uses it as a way of saying that they virtually never read books.

<comment><USER22> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This article reinforces my belief that there is just something very, very important and special about books. I'm going to have to think about exactly what this is, but it seems like books are the difference ultimately between people with dignity and values, things they are willing to make a stand and fight for, and people without. Why is that I wonder?

<comment><USER23> I suggest you try substantiating that idea before trying to decipher why it is ...

<comment><USER23> Sorry for the above, it sounded way less snarky to me when I wrote it. I'd delete it if I could.

<comment><USER3> Nice of you to say. I'm glad I didn't respond with equal snark - I was tempted...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As both a parent and the husband of a teacher, this kind of comment annoys me

"How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?

I know it's a hypothetical parent asking this question, but it is quite a common attitude.

Yes, schools clearly have a responsibility to teach childen to read, write, do maths etc.

But parents should take some responsibility for bringing up their children as well. And things like a an actual love of reading (as opposed to the basic mechanisms of understanding words) are far more likely to come from home life than from school.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is history not one of the humanities?

</comment><comment><USER25> This can be and it is said for many countries: "back when were in school...now teachers....all day on facebook...we were afraid of our parents...kids these days"

Maybe it's a generational thing.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's true.

<comment><USER26> Could be, but Plato said the same thing more or less.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it was true then too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "The Country That Stopped Reading" vs "The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago."

In other words literacy is increasing.

And that's where I stopped reading Toscano's vapid screed.

<comment><USER28> There's a good chance the author if the opinion piece didn't compose (or even approve of) the headline. Generally it's good idea not to get too hung up on headlines for this kind of article.</comment></comment>


What the Stock Market Really Thinks About the Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/what-stock-market-really-thinks-about.html

<comment><USER2> its hard to find something like this convincing when the "index" that is the core of his argument is only taken back to 1998

</comment><comment><USER3> We've been running a series of workshops [1] which include looking at stock market information like this and applying it to the broader economy. The principle is that because the market _"ought to reflect anticipated future profits"_ of businesses it can be used to make some predictions about the broader economy 6-12 months ahead.

Ie, if the market goes down, the economy will move down in 6-12 months. And the market turning around will foretell a broader turnaround in 6-12 months.

One common mistake to be avoided [2], which the five points in this article cover, is that not every sector and certainly not every business is tarred with the same brush. I particularly like the example that investing in Wind Power might help the economy while harming the Stock Market.

Just because broader things are down, doesn't mean you and your business have to be.

[1] [http://www.shirlawsonline.com/events/257-thrive-not- survive-...](http://www.shirlawsonline.com/events/257-thrive-not-survive- workshops) [2] [http://www.shirlawsonline.com/assets/0000/1868/The_Five_Mist...](http://www.shirlawsonline.com/assets/0000/1868/The_Five_Mistakes_of_a_Recession.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a great post. there any many insightful articles out there, all of them with insightful comments/theories. My personal opinion is that one should wait for Q1 reports and base forward judgments of the market based on what results and fundamental investment/market theories. The only thing the market has taught me over the past 8 months is that media is ever-permeable and fear mongering doesn't just exist in politics.</comment>


What do you prefer – the French or the Silicon Valley dinner? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@loic/what-do-you-prefer-the-french-dinner-or-the-silicon-valley-dinner-427bcfd9ba13#.3f91ljqtx <comment><USER3> There's something about this post that really bothered me. It took me a moment to figure out what it was.

Partly it's that he picks a very specific dinner experience in Paris and generalizes it to a French dinner. Idealizes it, even. And then on the Silicon Valley side, he describes a lifestyle. And then he compares the event in Paris to the lifestyle in San Francisco. Intimate hosted dinners for a small group of acquaintances happen all the time in Silicon Valley. Business meals happen all the time in Paris.

That alone is more of a weak comparison or flawed cultural commentary, but then this comes out:

> Why? Silicon Valley people get bored easily.

> They look around and assess who actually came to the dinner. If they do not > see enough friends or if they do not see enough people they can do business > with they will leave fast. Dinner invites typically say "from 6pm to 9pm" > and that means you can arrive anytime in that time frame and leave anytime > no-one will be offended. You can stay for 10 minutes and no-one will pay > attention. You can either show up at 08h50 and just say hi then leave at 9. > Everyone knows the "rule" and no-one shows before 6 and rarely stays after > 9.

I get the impression from this description that the actual issue is that Parisians and San Franciscans use different language to set expectations, and that the author is actually describing a difference in how the two cultures express expectations around social gatherings. _But that in no way implies that people in Silicon Valley get bored easily._ It just means the two cultures communicate differently, which should surprise nobody in either location. Why try to make an ambiguous cultural generalization out of it that is neutral at best and insulting at worst?

The whole thing feels lazily written and uncharitable to the colorful variety of both Parisian and Silicon Valley culture. It makes me specifically think less of the author's startup that is advertised at the bottom of the post.

<comment><USER4> It's a classic induction error. N=2 is worthless.

<comment><USER5> I don't see induction here, honestly.

<comment><USER4> Generalization is a form of induction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not the Silicon Valley my friends and I know! The differences the author describes between SV and French dinners seem to be more reflective of differences between business meals with acquaintances/partners vs relaxed meals with family/friends. I feel like at the moment you're booking caterers, making up invitations to send out, and printing a time LIMIT like 6-9PM, you're already well into "event" territory rather than "meal" (and fwiw I went to my share of both kinds during my years in central France as well!).

<comment><USER7> Seconded. In New York, even dinner with friends tend to be catered. In the Valley, however, it is common in my experience for friends to cook and for the topic of conversation to be life, the food and the future of humanity. I really enjoy the last topic. It's not specificallt work related, but neither is a food magazine editor talking about food _not_ work related.

The difference between Manhattan and Paris is more interesting, to me, given the similar population densities.

<comment><USER8> > _In New York, even dinner with friends tend to be catered_

In Paris it's kind of rude to not cook yourself. Not "very rude", not "I'll never see this person again rude", but a little _désinvolte_.

If you can't be bothered to buy the food and cook it yourself, why invite people to your place? We can all go to the restaurant and share the bill -- we do that too, of course.

But if it's at your place, the expectation is you gave some thought to the menu and the wines, etc. -- including, yes, the seating of the people, who should seat next to whom, etc.

Or it's a cocktail and there are 30+ people, then catering is fine.

Catering for 6, I can't imagine.

<comment><USER3> Based on his writing, I assume by "catered" he also meant to include ordering food to be delivered from a restaurant. In typical American usage, that's "takeout" or "delivery" but not "catered".

That point aside, I think his representation is also very narrow to the crowd that mostly combines business networking with socializing. That's a small minority. In my social circles (20's, middle class, highly educated tech workers), small dinner gatherings almost always follow one of three formats: the host cooks, the host asks everyone to contribute a dish, or we all go to a restaurant.

Restaurant delivery is usually reserved for large groups or when the food is a secondary consideration, such as when it's a board game night and we order a pizza.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't speak as to others in the bay area, but I quite enjoy the traditional Sunday dinner, wherein I cook for a number of friends in my own home, without expectation. I live in downtown SF, so clearly not an extravagant amount of space, but we make it work (and well). I feel this article is written by someone who doesn't actually know anyone outside of their own echo chamber in SF.

edit: if anyone likes meat, potatoes, and whisky, get in touch.

</comment><comment><USER10> > We talked even more about food as we had one of the editors of a very > popular food mag in France attending the dinner.

Sounds like they were talking about work, just not the author's work.

<comment><USER11> When I was living in Rome, the main topic of discussion at dinners was always food (with colleagues who were also software engineers). My experience has been that the Italians, French and Spanish love talking about food - which is probably why their cuisines are regarded so highly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My problem is I don't know how to talk to people for 4 hours straight. That only happens if we have very specific interests in common. When that does happen, it might only be with one person, then everybody else gets bored and leaves. I actually like the idea of long, lazy meals with friends. I just don't know how to do it.

<comment><USER13> You just might be more on the introverted side of the personality scale.

A good way to see the difference between intro- and extraversion is as follows.

Introverts have a lot of inner tension. That starts when they are toddlers. They constantly have something to think about, thus they need more alone-time than others to sort themselves out and work with their inner life. Talking to others is fine and rewarding, but recovery time is needed afterwards, so they choose their communication carefully.

Extroverts have way more inner peace. They don't need much time for themselves, they often get bored being alone. So they seek out other people for stimulation. More often than not they seek out introverts, because those are especially interesting. Talking to others is refreshing for them, it refills their batteries.

So if you see yourself on the introverted side, don't worry about it. Just accept it and give yourself the peace you need. Invite more or different guests, so they can talk to each other, while you are busy with someone.

<comment><USER14> I've never seen this description before, saying that introverts are tense and extroverts peaceful. If you put them in an empty room, you could instead easily picture the introvert being calm and the extrovert tense due to a lack of human interaction.

I rather think that the best description of the difference is how you charge your batteries. An introvert prefers alone time to recharge and an extrovert prefers the company of other people to do the same. A social gathering with many people would drain an introvert and invigorate an extrovert. It has nothing to do with inner tension or peace.

I have seen Susan Cain in the book Quiet talk about introverts as highly sensitive, in the sense that they take in and process more information about the environment. An extrovert would love talking to their friends at a noisy bar, while the introvert would be bothered by the noise and prefer a calmer setting. Being alone is then a way of reducing sensory input to produce a sense of calm, it's not that an introvert would need to be alone to relieve any inner tension.

<comment><USER13> > _If you put them in an empty room, you could instead easily picture the > introvert being calm and the extrovert tense due to a lack of human > interaction._

That is what I said. I guess my usage of the word "tension" is different.

> _Being alone is then a way of reducing sensory input to produce a sense of > calm, it 's not that an introvert would need to be alone to relieve any > inner tension._

Producing a sense of calm IS the work of relieving inner tensions. I think here lies our misunderstanding.

When I'm talking about inner "tension", I'm not talking about any form of visible or invisible stress. Just that there is something "going on". Thought, ideas, inner monologue, some kind of inner activity.

There are people who regularly experience prolonged periods without thoughts, idea, inner monologues etc. They are routinely able to access a state of mind which could be described as happily relaxed nothingness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> People have these 4 hour dinners in the bay area too, just not in the social groups of the author. I've been to many of them of myself! Not specifically cheese & wine themed, but the same idea.

</comment><comment><USER16> The irony is that French food is often not very good. After some stays there, I formed the hypothesis that French like to talk about food all the time for the same reasons that the British like to talk about the weather all the time - because it tends to be bad...

(To be sure the "public facing" food in France is great, but the daily, mundane stuff often disappoints).

<comment><USER17> Arguably Brits talk about the weather because it's so changeable

<comment><USER18> it's a fairly universal ice breaker too, if you happen upon a stranger in close proximity whereby it would be impolite not to say something, commenting on how it is hotter/colder/windier/calmer than expected/yesterday/forecast/this time last year is a good start, their response is the key to whether they would like to exchange small talk, 'yes, it is isn't it, well, yesterday I was in Golant and ....' vs 'Yes.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Truth be told, talking about cheese for 40 long minutes seems kind of boring. What's there to talk about? You just eat it. My East-European grandma has been making her own cheese using milk taken from her own cows for all of her life, and I've never heard her talking about cheese. Must be a bobo thing.

<comment><USER20> If you enjoy cheese as much of everything you'll know that there's a seemingly endless stream of varieties even within a single defined kind of cheese.

I would say that having 40 minute discussion about cheese is no more obscure than having one about programming languages, of course context and setting plays a big role in suitability of both discussions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Very few people cook for each other. If it's at home it's often food delivered from a startup like caviar or for the wealthier hosts a private chef."

Really? I'm in the UK and even wealthy people try to put effort into actually cooking for their guests, even if it's something as simple as a roast thrown in the oven for an hour. I definitely always cook for my guests, unless we're in mood for pizza, then it's takeaway.

I've definitely noticed that about some American homes though - <USER2> kitchens with huge gas ranges, and they all look completely brand new, unused - is it that people cook less in general?

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm slightly disturbed by the fact that this post is on the front page of hn...

<comment><USER23> Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Apples and Oranges. Maybe there are intersections, but "Silicon Valley" and tradition? Just seems a stretch. The Bay Area is mixture of traditions depending on those you mingle with.

</comment><comment><USER25> While this is charming, this seems more like a reflection on how being from a place is different from living in a place. I have the same long meals with friends and family here, despite the commenters saying the "Silicon Valley" style meal is also the standard in NYC.

It feels like he is really pointing out that the mechanics of interaction are very different when no one present is rooted in the region, and you don't have shared history.

</comment><comment><USER26> Silicon Valley has annoyingly few French restaurants. San Carlos has an adequate French provincial fast food place, Cusinette.

<comment><USER27> (because 'Silicon Valley' can be ambiguous for non-locals) San Francisco has an incredible number of French restaurants. A quick search on Google Maps shows 4-5 dozen. Hayes Valley alone has 8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The dinner stereotypes are pretty baseless among my communities of friends in SF... seems like the author has more friends at home in France and more business acquaintances in SV.

</comment><comment><USER29> "While the two cultures might seem very similar, they are actually very much different."

In what ways are the cultures similar? The article didn't mention that at all.

</comment><comment><USER30> A 4 hour dinner where you have to talk to people on non work-related topics sounds like my personal worst nightmare.

</comment><comment> d--b dont know about the valley but being a Frenchman in New York, I have plenty of dinners that no one calls "seated". And I jave plenty of buffets in Paris as well.

This all sounds quite cliché to me...

<comment><USER31> Talking about clichés, I can confirm that (in my circles at least) we almost always talk about food while eating, and it's usually completely unrelated to what's in our plates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How about neither? I don't enjoy group meals, I'd much rather eat quickly, quietly and alone. For socialization I'd prefer a bar or to sit around the house chatting.

</comment><comment><USER33> Chatting for 40 minutes about cheeses sounds like a specially engineered form of hell.

<comment><USER34> Chatting for 40 minutes about programming languages isn't any different. Also, there's no expectation to do so.

<comment><USER35> Well, typically people chatting about programming languages are programmers. I can see cheesemakers chatting about cheese for similar reasons, but mere mortal eaters of cheese?</comment></comment></comment>