Paris's Rue Cremieux Has an Instagram Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/03/rue-cremieux-paris-instagram-tourists-where-to-take-pictures/584164/ <comment><USER2> I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. I have a place that's very dear to me that is similarly being eroded by a crush of visitors. They are loud, cause crazy traffic, carve into the natural rock, fall down cliffs and require medical help, etc.

20 years ago, you might have had 3-4 people on a given weekday sunset visiting to see the view. Now, that number is probably approaching 100. On weekends it's a throng of people, almost like standing room only.

It's a beautiful place, and it's inarguable that anyone should be able to see and enjoy it. But really, are most of those people there to see the beauty of the place? Would they be there if not for the opportunity to post it on social media? It's not like this is a hidden spot whose location was revealed by social media. It's a well known natural area. It just didn't get this crowded until it became hip to take photos of yourself in some beautiful place.

And then I realize, this is what people who live in areas with real tourism must feel like, except magnified to nightmarish proportions. Travel contributes greatly to carbon emissions, destroys environments, puts stress on local wildlife and people... just so that someone can have an ~experience~ for themselves.

The thing is, I think most people have a great deal of "interesting-ness" right near home. They just compete globally on Instagram, which requires a plane ride.

I don't hold this opinion, I'm just trying it on for size -- I've traveled to a lot of very beautiful places and had cool experiences, so it'd be hugely hypocritical. But yes, I really dislike the Instagram effect.

<comment><USER3> > I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of > selfishness and narcissism.

travel isn't the problem. People experiencing their lives via the lens of their phone/camera is. Take pictures by all means. But taking pictures to get likes from strangers in order to experience it as a valuable memory is pathological.

Edit: I hate to bring my phone with me when in nature because I feel it robs me of the experience I could have actually enjoying the moment. My ex always complained _" why you never take pictures of these special moments?"_ ... If I would have my eyes on the phone it wouldn't be special. 10 or 20 years later I still have rich memories of those times where it mattered and I guess not having a phone/camera with me at the time was big part that it actually became a great memory.

<comment><USER4> > "why you never take pictures of these special moments?" ... If I would have > my eyes on the phone it wouldn't be special. 10 or 20 years later I still > have rich memories of those times where it mattered and I guess not having a > phone/camera with me at the time was big part that it actually became a > great memory.

For me it is in the other direction. I do not avoid social media (think I am on most on them...) but interact sparingly (less than once a month). Still I am sometimes an obsessive photographer exactly because I know I have a terrible memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny how the whole thing with traveling evolved over time. 10 years ago, traveling was that hype thing that everyone needed to do a lot to be more "open and inclusive" and "discover the world".

As another comment said before, travel nowadays tends to become that super selfish adventure where the only things that matter is to come back with the best selfies and brag on social networks about how cool it all was. It is not like that for everyone of course, but I have the feeling for a lot of people traveling means going to somewhere famous to get a stupid Instagram shot, with zero concerns for other people or the environment.

Maybe that like everything else, traveling became too easy which started a race to the bottom for attention and pushing people to do more and more stupid and selfish things to be seen.

<comment><USER6> > 10 years ago, traveling was that hype thing that everyone needed to do a lot > to be more "open and inclusive" ... travel nowadays tends to become that > super selfish adventure where the only things that matter is to come back > with the best selfies

Traveling is still extremely important to personal development. The current development does not negate the importance of the first. It's like saying reading books is no longer important because everyone today just reads facebook posts.

<comment><USER5> I was privileged enough in my life that I traveled a lot over the last 15 years. I really feel it is more and more difficult to have a genuine experience sometimes because of all the tourist crowds behaving horribly.

So, yes, it is definitely still possible to go to a remote location in Asia and be exposed to a different culture, but if you go to any major city, you will mostly end up in a hostel with loud millenials that don't really care about anything else than maximizing their own experience.

<comment><USER7> If you're in any major city you can almost certainly go 30 minutes in the opposite directions the tourists are going and be exposed to a different culture or find a quite oasis. No need to go to Asia.

<comment><USER8> Or you can watch documentaries to learn about foreign cultures. But anyone can do that. The true marks of a refined and worldly character are taking expensive trips to foreign resorts that only better people can afford.

<comment><USER9> According to whom? An authentic experience with locals is far more worldly in my book than dozens of nights spent in a 5-star hotel bubble of luxury.

<comment><USER10> I think you missed the sarcasm in your parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually think tourist-y photography reduces the experience of traveling. I realize for someone deep into photogrphy it may be the opposite.

I remember going to Tanzania for a safari with my dad when he turned 50. It was amazing and everyone wanted to document everything. This was 2007 so no Ig.

At some point I realized that staring at my viewfinder is a bit less immersive than actually looking, smelling and feeling your surroundings. Even the mental state of looking for frames or photogenic objects oriented me towards thinking about when _I 'm no longer here_, showing stuff to my friends.

<comment><USER12> I also don't take photographs when we're traveling. Unless I see my wife looking particularly charming or the mood strikes me, I just wander around and look at things.

What I've found is that since EVERYTHING is photographed all the time and I'm constantly exposed to them, most of these spots to visit are anticlimactic in the extreme. St Paul's Cathedral? Meh. I've seen everything in it from every angle shot by professional photographers that have been given access that I'll never have. Every beach we visit, every set of mountains we hit, I've seen photographed and captured at its most perfect. My random Sunday afternoon visit will never live up to it. I still find some enjoyment in it but most of the joy of a new discovery has been sapped away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >> It might seem curmudgeonly to take issue with what is mostly harmless fun, but Rue Crémieux is not the sort of place that can be all things to all people.

Well, what's harmless fun when one person does it becomes an ecological catastrophe when ten thousand people get wind of it and want a piece of the fun, too.

I get that people want to get to a nice place. So do I. But when we get there, and find another ten thousand people who had exactly the same idea, it's not a nice place anymore. So why does everyone insist on going where everyone else goes?

I'm Greek and I've seen this first hand in our islands, that are tourist magnets. I once made the mistake of going for a couple days to Santorini in the middle of the summer. _Never again_. Such were the throngs of people trying to get to town that it took us half an hour to advance, shuffling and bumping on warm human bodies, a distance of a hundred meters or so. I learned to spend my summers in Athens, where it was calm and quiet with everyone gone. You could set up a nice game of football in any of the main traffic arteries if you were so inclined.

Even Athens city, one of the ugliest places on earth, becomes almost pleasant when you have it all to yourself.

</comment><comment><USER14> See also Maya Bay — [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt- sh/the_beach_nobody...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt- sh/the_beach_nobody_can_touch) — Covered here two weeks ago in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214357) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19207797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19207797)

See also the Tate Modern's viewing deck — [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/12/tate-modern- neig...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/12/tate-modern-neighbours- lose-privacy-battle-judge-says-put-net/)

See also Lombard Street

<comment><USER15> And see also Notting Hill -- [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/please- stop-influenci...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/please-stop- influencing-on-our-doorsteps-notting-hill-residents-tell-unapologetic-social- media-a4078806.html)

<comment><USER16> The situation has been the same at the Abbey Road crossing for a long time.

<comment><USER17> [https://www.earthcam.com/world/england/london/abbeyroad/?cam...](https://www.earthcam.com/world/england/london/abbeyroad/?cam=abbeyroad_uk)

You usually only have to watch for a few minutes to see people stopping traffic for a picture. I just saw a group from only a minute of watching!

<comment><USER18> Minutes? Instantly upon opening that link.

Utter pillocks crossing, than turning around to recross the crossing (and again, and again). Oblivious ninnies stepping out onto the carriage way with their attention focussed on some or other device in their hands to photograph the aforementioned pillocks, and Londoners seemingly used to them going about their business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Instagram also changes/destroy the landscape, as explained here : [https://youtu.be/Itjc14Fm-gs](https://youtu.be/Itjc14Fm-gs) It's incredible what people would do for likes...

<comment><USER20> Seeing railings put up on previously pristine cliffs to protect idiots from killing themselves taking selfies is infuriating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've lived in Paris for two years and before that I was in the suburbs and I've never heard (or seen) that street. Funny how bubbles work.

<comment><USER22> Born and raised in Paris, lived there all my life, and never been in that street nor did i know about it either.

But that's not so surprising. Local people usually don't explore as much as tourists. They have their daily routines and eventually go to places for a reason. I actually often ask a non french friend of mine to bring me to new places because she still kept that explorer mentality. She knows Paris better than i do in some ways.

<comment><USER23> I think it's sad... I've lived in Paris for the last 15 years and have explored a lot of the city (but still have a lot to see). I remember a colleague, born and raised in the western suburbs, who saw the Opera for the first time the other day when he had to walk to the office because the metro from Saint-Lazare was out of order.

<comment><USER22> suburb vs Paris is also something else. I had the exact same experience two times: once with the opera , and another with montmartre's sacré coeur ( she didn't even know what that was, she just told me « that's nice, what is it ? »). I was in a bit of a shock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I imagine Rue Cremieux had this problem before, just less pronounced. Even more interesting when Instagram _creates_ the buzz for the places not visited much, if at all, before, e.g. sunflower farms announcing it is cloed to visitors, forever: [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-how-the- quest...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-how-the-quest-for- the-perfect-selfie-forced-an-ontario-sunflower-farm/)

</comment><comment><USER25> >"When someone says they're addicted to travel, at least I know they've never been addicted to anything or known anyone with an addiction, and, unrelated, are probably as insufferable as the budding astrologers." [0]

This is from a brilliantly honest and short essay about the Tinder culture and its impact on the author. Well worth a read.

[0] [http://www.stilldrinking.com/this-is-not-about- tinder](http://www.stilldrinking.com/this-is-not-about-tinder)

</comment><comment><USER26> Not Instagram, but in the same vein I always wonder when Google Maps takes me through seemingly quiet/random streets --through a path probably determined by the algorithm to be fastest but which I otherwise would've never driven through--, I wonder how much that affects the street residents and whether it can ruin a stretch of town, just because it happens to be on the path to a popular destination.

Does anyone have anecdotes on this?

<comment><USER27> There was this story from awhile back: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/traffic-weary- homeowner...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/traffic-weary-homeowners- and-waze-are-at-war-again-guess-whos- winning/2016/06/05/c466df46-299d-11e6-b989-4e5479715b54_story.html?utm_term=.24787ac735c0). Below is the key part:

> When the traffic on Timothy Connor's quiet Maryland street suddenly jumped > by several hundred cars an hour, he knew who was partly to blame: the > disembodied female voice he could hear through the occasional open window > saying, "Continue on Elm Avenue . . . ."

> The marked detour around a months-long road repair was several blocks away. > But plenty of drivers were finding a shortcut past Connor's Takoma Park > house, slaloming around dog walkers and curbside basketball hoops, thanks to > Waze and other navigation apps.

> "I could see them looking down at their phones," said Connor, a water > engineer at a federal agency. "We had traffic jams, people were honking. It > was pretty harrowing."

> And so Connor borrowed a tactic he read about from the car wars of Southern > California and other traffic-weary regions: He became a Waze impostor. Every > rush hour, he went on the Google-owned social-media app and posted false > reports of a wreck, speed trap or other blockage on his street, hoping to > deflect some of the flow.

> He continued his guerrilla counterattack for two weeks before the app booted > him off, apparently detecting a saboteur in its ranks. That made Connor a > casualty in the social-media skirmishes erupting across the country as > neighborhoods try to contend with suddenly savvy drivers finding their way > on routes that were once all but secret.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If we have figured out how to get thousands of people to show up at a particular spot, to all take the same pic, shouldn't it be possible to get thousands of people to show up at a spot to do something more productive?

We need "Herd Hackers". The herd mind needs a good kick in the right direction once in a while.

<comment><USER29> Just set up a chromakey at a strip mall.

Charge users $24.95/month to take more selfies with new backgrounds.

"Sell" the franchise for $199/month to anyone that wants to set one up.

$499/month for the enterprise plan (twice the features for half the stability).

<comment><USER30> I too have read 'we can remember it for you wholesale'

<comment><USER29> I haven't, but my brother probably has.

I blame him for contaminating my mind with all of these concepts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The whole world has an instagram problem. The biggest annoyance to me is people who basically just go to places to be able to send you proof that they've been there. The epitome of that is people who will travel to some exotic place for New Years Eve just so they can send you a Happy New Year text adding 'from Zanzibar' or wherever they've decided to park their suitcase for that one evening.

<comment><USER32> I don't think the tool is the problem. We just have more people, flights are cheaper, and younger generations value experiences more than buying property and starting families. People used to send postcards, now it's digital.

<comment><USER20> Sending postcards to a few friends isn't the same thing as immediately broadcasting them to millions of people in seek of points on a gamified bragging platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Rue Cremieux doesn't have an Instagram problem: rue Cremieux chose to be unique, and preserve that uniqueness. The popularity is deserved, and I think this "Instagram problem" story is part of the marketing around it.

Everything that stands out, that is remarquable, attracts attention and curiosity, that's what to expect. If you don't want that, don't make yourself stand out.

<comment> who-knows95 what about this [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/philipp...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/philippines/articles/boracay- closure-when-will-island-reopen/)

<comment><USER33> A little bit different but still, as with all movie locations, someone sets a movie at some place, someone at local gov (or owner) gave the authorisation, expect then that a lot people are going to go there. Same with a lot of famous movie places/houses/...

I'd say that the opposite idea would be more something like Abbey Road's Beatle picture: that one likely didn't have planning/authorisation, but changed the place for a long long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The particular street has obviously been attractive for a while. And Paris is one of the most visited cities in the world (if not the most).

So what has changed here? Has the instagrammability of this street led to more people visiting it? Or has the need and desire to photograph and broadcast your entire trip led to people taking more choreographed and more elaborate photos?

If it's the former, then the issue appears to be that Instagram has changed tourist preferences. If it's the latter, then it appears to have changed not just preferences, but behavior, where tourists don't visit a place to enjoy their visit, but rather to broadcast that they have visited it.

<comment><USER35> I suppose in a world without Instagram, people would just walk through the street and enjoy it, maybe take a few pics to show during their "My trip to France" slideshow for friends and family in their living room, but with Instagram, it's morons jumping up and down dancing and doing silly poses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've often struggled with the question of what does it mean to visit a place. Does it mean take pictures, walk the streets, talk to locals? What qualifies as a visit?

If I stay inside someone's home for a week spending time with them but not leaving the house, does that count as visiting that city/state/country?

What about if I walk the streets for 3 days but don't talk to anyone local?

Do I need to spend money? Do I need to visit tourist sites? Do I need to visit a museum?

I like to record memories but I don't post or tweet or gram. Does that mean I'm visiting? Or not visiting?

</comment><comment><USER37> While less of a nuisance, growing up in sf, the Full House house became my barometer for tourist-levels.

I never watched the show, so when people asked me for directions I used to assume they meant the painted ladies.

Gradually I realized I was wrong: Nowadays, more often than not, there's a line of people waiting out front to pose and cars double parked.

Apparently the remodeling is explicitly to change its appearance in order that people will stop.

I've heard similar stories for the Mrs. Doubtfire house.

</comment><comment> who-knows95 my favourite example of this is;

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- scotland-45146681](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-45146681)

rock stacking, used in the mountains to mark a safe path, and used by idiots to be ~hip~ on IG.

it causes a real stress on local resources and causes aggravated erosion.

i have travelled alot, but dear god i hate the american/western style of doing it.

<comment><USER38> I hate that so much. Cairns as trail markers are fine but people who leave rock stacks all over the place are a scourge.

If you want to stack rocks that's fine. Just make sure you put the stones back when you're done.

<comment> who-knows95 i know, i don't understand it. it's like people who carve their names into rocks/trees.

damaging a shared resource so you can feel like your name will preserve, is the highest level of narcissism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Paris needs more pedestrian (and coloured) streets.

</comment><comment><USER40> At first, I thought this was the neighborhood near me with cobblestone streets and small houses near me. Glad to see it's not and that lovely neighborhood is still unknown and unspoilt.

Won't list it here, it's in the 19th. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER41> Couldn't the residents paint the houses more boring colors, reducing demand to visit the street?

</comment><comment><USER42> Seems like a straightforward problem with the solution suggested by the street occupants also being straightforward.

Though I loathe Instagram-tourism, it's existence isn't exceptionally problematic to these places. It's just one factor amongst many.

</comment><comment><USER43> Most touristic places suffer from this.

If you go to Nice after june, the streets are a terrible place to be.

If you go to the Mont Saint michel in the summer, same.

Venice in Italia is like that during the whole year.

Living in those places make you hate tourists, even when you make money with it.

<comment><USER7> _Venice in Italia is like that during the whole year._

I was in Venice in mid-September a few years ago and it wasn't bad at all. Even places like the Piazza San Marco weren't really crowded. Go a few hundred meters away from the main attractions and the streets where empty. The only crowds we really saw where a few hours one day when a cruise ship showed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The suburban answer to this would be to turn on your front lawn sprinklers. No confrontation is necessary and the passers-by are gently moved along.

</comment><comment><USER45> The deeper issue is that the shift from "being" to "having", and "having" to "appearing" never slowed down since it was first theorised. Instagram doesn't serve any purpose other than fulfilling narcissistic people and people in need of exterior approval, and, even worse, it does it in a self reinforcing way. It's the epitome of individualism. The few social aspects that I'm reluctant to even give to Facebook aren't on ig at all.

It is quite the invention, it both feeds on and nourishes the worst traits of the human brain. Everyone is against these vile dystopian societies described in so many books, all the while the seeds of these societies have been planted during our lifetime and we're all watering and cherishing them.

Travel used to be about the journey just as much as it was about the destination, not by choice, but by constraints. Nowadays it's mostly about snapping a low quality pic of a sight people already know [0], going from A to B the fastest and cheapest way, packed like cattle in ultra dense flying or rolling metal cages, wreaking havoc on local environment and populations. After mass producing food, cars, culture, we're now mass producing "experiences", and they inherit the same traits as other mass manufactured goods: they're cheap, meaningless, repeatable, bland, and most of all they're not going to bring you the long lasting "happiness" you expect.

No amount of text will convey what you feel when you get to Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Louvre or other known places. The beauty of the place is dead, all you are left with is a chaotic heap of people shielding their faces from the very thing they came to "experience" behind cameras and phone.

Some people in this thread seems to think that the money brought by tourism counter balances everything. If your only metric is economic growth I have good news for you: a lot of modern issues can be ignored, maybe even all of them.

[0] [https://www.boredpanda.com/social-media-instagram- identical-...](https://www.boredpanda.com/social-media-instagram-identical- photos/)

Debord puts it better than I'll ever be able to:

"The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it" "the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires."

"the collective pseudo-displacement of vacations, subscriptions to cultural consumption, and the sale of sociability itself in the form of "passionate conversations" and "meetings with personalities." This sort of spectacular commodity, which can obviously circulate only because of the increased poverty of the corresponding realities."</comment>


Can this mouse take Twitch to the next level? - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/206180815/quantified-gaming-know-more-game-better

<comment><USER2> Apart from the tired PR effort (gawker media-level headline, samefag comments) this project looks really great. I'd love to have that for the insight alone, even though I don't play competitively anymore it seems like it would allow me to understand myself better.

</comment><comment><USER3> From a data perspective this really interests me and partly because I am a gamer. As the rise of eSports continues, obtaining metrics of professional players might give us insight into what traits professional players have in common (if any).

We track metrics of olympic athletes to study where they can improve and what makes a good athlete great, so it only makes sense to see if there is a link between heart rate, eye movement and other metrics and a professional gamer who has what it takes to win.

This is surprisingly cool. I probably wouldn't buy one, but it is cool nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER4> Come on guys, two green names comments with actually nothing insightful besides a cliche phrase?

It's like you are begging to be flagged =/

</comment><comment><USER5> Quantified Self for games, I like. Would be fun to implement support in some open source games like quake world.

</comment><comment><USER6> Or you can buy a heart rate monitor that will actually work for $15-20 dollars, and a real gaming mouse.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool to see quantified self in other places!

</comment><comment><USER8> The heart rate sensor is a gimmick, they need really close contact to work well. You'd need to grip the shit out of your mouse to get a good reading. I don't think anyone can maintain an iron grip on their mouse long enough for the sensor to have any meaning</comment>


JEP draft: Raw String Literals (aka multi-line string) - <AUTHOR> http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/8196004 <comment><USER2> As a coder I like multi-line string, but as a compiler or data format designer I find they can complicate error handling and parsing of long files.</comment>


"The Traditional Lecture Is Dead. I Would Know–I'm a Professor" - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/05/the-mechanical-universe/ <comment><AUTHOR> To the extent traditional lectures _ever_ made sense, they stopped making sense a long time ago. I've written a lot about teaching: [https://jakeseliger.com/tag/teaching/](https://jakeseliger.com/tag/teaching/) and it seems obvious to me both from learning and from teaching that lectures are a mostly ineffective way to transmit knowledge. The exception seems to be highly charismatic, engaged lecturers who can still involve the audience and/or their students, but those people are rare.

<comment><USER2> IMO: Not only lectures but especially study programs are very inefficient (time, money, effort) and demotivating. Except reading and writing, no skill and knowledge should be taught in advance. I should be able to acquire skills and knowledge and task specific certification whenever I want it or need it with the least amout of time, money and effort. For a doctor, I see no problem to recognize was is beyond one's expertise and call another doctor for help.</comment></comment>


The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans - <AUTHOR> https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-myth-of-a-wilderness-without-humans/ <comment><USER2> I recommend MacKinnon's _The Once and Future World_ , which talks about the world before our population exploded and overtook the world. It's shocking how much more untouched nature there was, or however I should describe it.

Fish were so dense in the ocean that boats would come to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. Coral reefs several stories high and miles long. Lions roaming North America larger than in Africa. Armadillo-like animals the size of cars. Plenty more.

I did a couple video essays on it:

\- [http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the- once-...](http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-and- future-world-8-9-19)

\- [http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the- once-...](http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-and- future-world-august-27-2019)

<comment><USER3> Flying in a plane, it's apparent the scale of industrialization, be it agricultural or otherwise, we've imposed upon the world.

<comment><USER4> I think about this whenever I hear someone complain that windmills "spoil the natural landscape". There isn't a natural landscape - not anymore. Those pretty green fields and hedgerows you see in rural areas? As artificial as the Hoover dam, and as destructive to the former ecosystem. Unless you're putting windmills in Yellowstone National Park, you're not ruining anything that wasn't already ruined.

(Also, it's ironic that despite the amount of criticism on aesthetic grounds they catch, compared to most things that generate power windmills are virtually ecologically invisible.)

<comment><USER5> Aesthetic complaints seem to be largely nostalgia/conservatism based - anything new and functional is called ugly at first because they aren't used to it.

See how the Eiffle Tower and trains were called ugly and now tearing it down would be unthinkable and old steam engines are considered picturesque.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The fact that native people have been displaced from their lands in the name of conservation isn't news to all, but this is an elegant and erudite piece of writing — and a good distillation of that troubling history — all the same. Mark Dowie, a decorated journalist and former editor & publisher of Mother Jones, sheds light on the tortured semantics of the words "nature" and "wilderness," and how conflicting views of wild nature created a rift between indigenous people and misguided conservationists for over a century.

disclosure: I work on the MIT Press Reader, where the article — an excerpt from Dowie's book "Conservation Refugees" — is published. We're a non-profit press and the Reader is a space where we post excerpts, essays, and interviews with our authors.

<comment><USER6> However well written, it's frustrating to see an otherwise thoughtful work disregard the benefits of protecting public lands under the Wilderness Act, which is to the best of my knowledge the only robust means of doing so.

<comment><USER7> And there are vastly larger areas of public lands that are not protected under the Wilderness Act (Forest Service, and BLM lands) where human activity is still allowed. These could be managed in some way like the article advocates.

I think that is article is a good one if one takes away from it the idea that humans have had an influence over almost all of the Earth's landmasses for thousands of year. The idea of wilderness, meaning a place where humans don't influence nature, is recent and probably partly stems from the depopulation of western North America from European diseases before Europeans began exploring the region. See the Louis and Clark expedition.

<comment><USER6> I don't believe the article adequately addresses intensive industrial uses, e.g. oil and gas leases[1], which are potentially permitted on other categories of federally managed lands.

It's also fairly disingenuous to claim that human activity is not allowed in wilderness areas: I'll be camping in a gorgeous wilderness area in Colorado this weekend.

[1] [https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and- gas...](https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and-gas/oil-and- gas-statistics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you go to a place like Desolation Wilderness, one of the reasons they can keep it feeling like wilderness is by enforcing fairly strict rules on visitors. In particular, the rules around where you can hike, where you can camp, where you can start a fire, and what sorts of activities you can do there.

In areas where the government doesn't enforce so many rules, there will be recreational vehicles, hunting, logging, all sorts of other disruptive activities.

So ironically, the only places that can still feel like wilderness are the places where the government takes some action to keep it that way.

<comment><USER9> Is it ironic thought? Many of those disruptive activities you list aren't allowed in places legally designated as, (Capital "W") Wilderness.

[https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key- laws/wilde...](https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key- laws/wilderness-act/default.php)

<comment><USER8> It just seemed ironic to me because I once naively thought that the wilderness was an area where nobody did anything, and the government didn't enforce any rules. Then I got some handout with a big list of forbidden activities and realized, the government puts a lot of rules on the wilderness.

There seem to be far fewer rules on the national forests. As a result it feels less wild because there are more people there doing non-wild things like riding ATVs.

<comment><USER9> There's a finite amount of land in say, the USA. The way the public land managed is not so wishy-washy for sure. Perhaps it's easier to understand when you live (like me) in a State where 1/3 of the land is Public - you start getting very familiar with all the different designations and what they all mean. It's a little archaic.

<comment> a0-prw There's a finite amount of land on earth, so, yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> BuzzFeed's (yes, I know) investigation of the WWF was very interesting for illuminating the effect of conservation initiatives on local populations: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world- wid...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wide-fund- nature-parks-torture-death)

<comment><USER11> No _yes, I know_ is necessary. BuzzFeed _News_ [1] is a well-respected award- winning investigative journalism outlet.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had > tended for at least four thousand years. And he knew that the Miwok had been > forcibly evicted from Yosemite Valley, as other natives would later be from > national parks yet to be created, all in the putative interest of protecting > nature from human disturbance.

The history of the conservation movement is rich white people screwing over poor brown people due to romantic notions of wilderness.

Lest we think it is in the past, look at the current conservation movement and endangered species. If you look at the land animals most people want to save, these are mostly in areas where a lot of poor brown people live. The brown people are the ones who have their development curtailed and have to live with lions killing their cattle, elephants trampling their crops, etc.

<comment><USER13> I've heard similar complaints about John Muir. People get very, very touchy when you say bad things about John Muir.

Having read Tending the Wild, I'm inclined to think that at least some of their complaints have merit. California 'wilderness' was considerably curated by communities that moved back and forth from foothills to shoreline with the seasons (are you 'semi-nomadic' if you keep moving between the same handful of locations?)

<comment><USER14> This notion of 'curation' in the article and in your comment stretches credulity.

Aboriginals were not in a position to 'curate' or 'manage' much at all. Aside from some rare controlled burns here and there - they didn't have the capacity to 'curate' vast areas of land.

More reasonably, their 'industrial footprint' was small by virtue of their near lack of modern industrialisation and their small population.

They were light on the land, but let's not construe that with some kind of 'caretaker' moniker - this is a romanticism of another kind entirely.

Finally, because aboriginals were present in some areas does not abnegate the notion that they were essentially pristine, i.e. this is not some kind of false romanticisation of the land by Westerners, rather, a mischaracterisation. Lacking a large agricultural base, large scale domestication of animals, an industrial base, large cities or even large populations, it's fair to suggest that such areas were in fact, by and large, pristine - certainly relative to the West.

Treatment of aboriginals by whatever policy is an altogether different question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "The time has come to rethink wilderness," Cronon begins his essay. He goes > on to challenge the widely held and decidedly romantic notion of > environmentalists that "wilderness stands as the last remaining place where > civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth."

The article doesn't contain many facts to support or refute this idea. For a lot of them, check out the books _1491_ and _1493_ by Charles Mann.

Spoiler: the lands we think of as having been pristine prior to arrival by Europeans were in fact heavily manipulated and in some cases densely populated.

</comment><comment><USER16> warning -- the phrase "without humans" is an invocation of primal fears and anger amongst every sort of human mind that reads it.. It is a fairy-tale story intro, like "Once upon a time" .. the truth is, close to eight billion humans now live in every corner and crevice of this Earth.. there is no comparison to that, that is rational; instead we labor under stories like this..

</comment><comment><USER17> Wilderness Areas in the US are sort of like the John Wayne preservation act in that they seek to preserve this idea of the "wilderness" from our imaginations.

Ok: ride in with a string of horses, shoot an elk with a rifle, and pack it out.

Not ok: push a baby stroller around because ...wheels!

That said, they're a good way of preserving areas.

<comment><USER18> Baby wearing is definitely a thing. I much prefer carrying around my kid in a pack or sling to pushing her in a stroller. She seems to prefer it as well.

<comment><USER17> Sure, it's more practical, but it's still an inane rule.</comment></comment></comment>


Taiwan says WHO failed to act on coronavirus transmission warning - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6a68 <comment><AUTHOR> I am neither Taiwanese or Chinese and have no dog in that fight except as it pertains to avoiding pandemics.

Taiwanese friends tell me that during the SARS outbreak, China refused to share data with them which it shared with every other country. Taiwan was hit very hard because they were flying blind. This led them to establish independent monitoring and early warning systems since they have extensive trade and cultural links with China and large numbers of travelers.

The current VP of Taiwan is an epidemiologist who was the health minister during the SARs outbreak and their current response has been one of the most effective (108 cases, 1 death).

Every country would want to work with Taiwan on this issue not ostracize them like the WHO. They are like a monitoring and early-warning system for these kinds of pathogens coming out of China.

<comment><USER2> Since China didn't share that information with Taiwan, i'd believe it's not the same country and they proved it by behaving like this.

And all sources that put Taiwan as a province of China should change it.

( Won't happen though)

<comment><USER3> Probably relevant, about how others should treat Taiwan, especially how WHO is treating Taiwan:

A journalist asked World Health Organization's assistant director-general Bruce Aylward whether the UN body would reconsider Taiwan's membership, got "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear your question… let's move to another one then…"; and when the journalist asked to comment on Taiwan's effort, got "we've already talked about China."

[1]: [https://twitter.com/emilyrauhala/status/1243905923048976384](https://twitter.com/emilyrauhala/status/1243905923048976384)

(Which is supporting your "Won't happen though".)

<comment><USER4> After that interview, Bruce Aylward has now been removed from the WHO website [https://twitter.com/anangbhai/status/1243947028582993921](https://twitter.com/anangbhai/status/1243947028582993921)

<comment><USER5> Shows how much they kowtow to China that even being asked about Taiwan and not answering gets him delisted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the WHO even relevant? The WHO is not a sovereign authority, and has proven to not be independent too. They have been lying the entire time. Their statements

1\. No evidence of human to human transmission

2\. No need to ban travel from China. Ineffective

3\. It is not a pandemic

4\. Some twitter threads who WHO adding traditional chinese medicine in their list of medicines for COVID-19 in their chinese language posts.

5\. Masks do not work.

If the WHO can't be independent, can't say things truly, and they never had any sovereign authority to begin with, what good exactly are they?

<comment> siv- Could you provide links for those statements?

<comment><USER7> 1\. [https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152](https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152)

2\. [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who- idUSKBN1...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who- idUSKBN1ZX1H3)

3\. [https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/health/who-coronavirus-not- pa...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/health/who-coronavirus-not- pandemic/index.html)

Can't comment on 4.

5\. it's a little bit complicated as I believe they are just not recommending masks unless you are sick or caring for the sick.

<comment><USER8> 1 is a Chinese statement, who are just re-reporting...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> TIL: The head of the WHO, "Dr" Tedros is not a medical doctor but has a Ph.D. in health. He was previously the health minister of Ethiopia and China was instrumental in getting him elected. Fun fact: He tried to get Robert Mugabe elected as a goodwill ambassador for the WHO.

Source: [https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/china-helped-put- man-...](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/china-helped-put-man-charge- world-health-organization%E2%80%94-it-paying-136002)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://archive.md/cQl0E](https://archive.md/cQl0E)

</comment><comment><USER10> No paywall: [http://archive.md/cQl0E](http://archive.md/cQl0E)

Aside: perhaps FT could chip in with the rest of the world here by making any of their articles about coronavirus open access...

Edit: curious about downvotes - it's my first time circumventing a paywall. Disclaimer: I would describe myself as a capitalist hippie.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's because they were busy praising China for getting so efficient at oppressing their population.</comment>


Why Dieters Flock to Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/health/instagram-diets.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=business/media&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Media&pgtype=article <comment><USER2> I totally misread the link and wondered, as I waited for the page to load, why people named Dieter would flock to Instagram.</comment>


Jack Dorsey expects Bitcoin to become the world's 'single currency' in 10 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/jack-dorsey-expects-bitcoin-to-become-the-worlds-single-currency-in-about-10-years.html <comment><USER2> 99% of people have never used bitcoin for a single meaningful transaction, have never purchased groceries, or clothing, or anything for that matter with bitcoin. I am supposed to believe people are going to abandon cash in the next 10 years?

What benefits does bitcoin provide to a normal person just trying to buy groceries or fill up their gas tank, zero.

<comment><USER3> Over half the world's wealth is held by 1% of the world's population. You must adjust your definition of "meaningful." It doesn't matter whether anyone buys groceries with Bitcoin. It hardly matters today whether anyone uses cash. If a handful of entities decide to handle their transactions with Bitcoin in lieu of traditional currencies, the majority of the world's wealth will change hands in the form of Bitcoin regardless of what most people ever do at the gas tank.

<comment><USER2> Wealthy people have been using different stores of value to trade for many years, whether it is stocks, commodities, real estate, or bitcoin. Regulation will come, the transaction costs are going to rise. In the end it may just be a vehicle for wealthy people to trade, because for small transactions it is a hindrance, not a help.

What tangible benefit does bitcoin provide over normal currency?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea There are two possibilities here:

* Jack Dorsey has no technical knowledge about Bitcoin, or

* Jack Dorsey invested in Bitcoin and wants his money back.

<comment><USER4> There's a 3rd. Mention that you are doing something with Bitcoin / "BlockChain" and watch your stock soar![1]. Several companies including Kodak, Overstock, RIOT have used this strategy recently to very positive effects ( 50% or more in stock price increase in like a couple of days after mentioning blockchain or adding it to their name like RIOT Blockchain did)

[1] Source: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s- in...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in-a-name-u- k-stock-surges-394-on-blockchain-rebrand)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This scenario is clearly not in the interest of the incumbents in the world of currency (US$, Euro). It's conceivable, however, that because of geopolitical wars some other state -- with enough clout and whose income can be ensured by means other than taxation (Russia or China perhaps) -- adopts some cryptocurrency wholesale, with a view to disrupting the financial markets. It's quite implausible that the sponsored choice would be Bitcoin though.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's telling that there are no reasons listed for _why_ it will. It's like there is this belief that cool, innovative tech will succeed solely because it's cool and innovative.

What problem would it solve for me as an end user? It's really not at all clear.

</comment><comment><USER7> Dupe:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16637190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16637190)</comment>


Show HN: Spam, a D3 library to create maps with Canvas - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/newsappsio/spam <comment><USER2> Zooming is a bit counter intuitive. I press and it zooms but not to the exact click location and when I press again to go there it zooms out.</comment>


California Home to Quarter of Top 100 Alt Search Engines - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_alternative_search_engines_geography.php <comment><AUTHOR> Read/WriteWeb is a great blog. I recommend that anyone interested in startups should subscribe to Richard's rss. He usually writes analytical articles on startups (very different from TC, Mashable, GigaOm, etc). Enjoy,</comment>


1946 Education Film Predicts How Our Democracy Turns Despotic - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmxUE8Qmc0A

<comment><AUTHOR> I know this is a little off-topic, but I posted it given the recent discussions on HN (NSA, etc.)</comment>


Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Webtiles (browser based rougelike) - <AUTHOR> https://tiles.crawl.develz.org

<comment><AUTHOR> Not new, but still awesome! I was surprised this hadn't already been submitted.</comment>


Newly Risen from Yeast: THC - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/newly-risen-from-yeast-thc.html <comment><USER2> > European regulators, he said, are eager for a way to create a steady supply > of THC and other cannabinoids without actually cultivating marijuana. "They > are in fear that these plants will be grown and will support some illegal > farming,"

So the regulators are eager to flood the market with GMO THC, so they can stop people from growing their own organic THC? Sounds like they just want to commercialize & control it.

<comment><USER3> > GMO THC

Well that's a new one, because THC isn't an "organism", nor is it "genetically modified".

<comment><USER4> I think what they meant was GMO-produced THC.

GMO as an adjective is prone to RAS syndrome - e.g. GMO corn is "genetically modified organism corn".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a strong dislike for these artificial THC drug pushes, because they ignore the real issue: the fact that marijuana helps people with a variety of medical ailments is largely because of the over 400+ cannabinoids, of which THC-cb1 and THC-cb2 are only two, while we are ignoring the other ones individually and as a compound/complementary effect.

For example, I know vets with PTSD who say mj is the only thing that helps them, but some of them are in states where the VA will stop providing care or withhold medication/treatment/payments if they test positive... but the VA has a deal with some pharmaceutical companies and it's legal to give two variations of synthetic THC, and every single one of the guys I know who have tried it have said it was nothing like mj, provided almost none of the benefits, and was often a very negative experience.

Don't misunderstand, I worked in biotech for a while and encourage the learning process of using methods like this to potentially produce and study certain drugs, but this is a drug that doesn't have a supply problem, because it's everywhere, it's easy to grow, it only has a legal problem. Synthetics seem like a way to capitalize legally on a black market that shouldn't exist.

<comment><USER6> This is exactly why I have an issue with meal replacement (e.g. soylent) stuff being used in the long term, or reductionistic nutrition advice that considers food only as a source of protein, carbs, fat and fiber. The fact is, we're discovering a ton of compounds in a ton of foods that have unexpected effects and benefits, not to mention synergistic effects that happen only when multiple compounds are together. To pretend that we know how all of it works seems like hubris to me.

<comment><USER7> > To pretend that we know how all of it works seems like hubris to me.

If nobody gives living on eg. Soylent a shot, we'll never learn one way or the other.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that in order to really "test" the hypothesis that soylent is equivalent to a healthy diet, you need to compare them under conditions of stress, and over long time periods.

Sure soylent might work for the average sedentary type in the short term, but how does it fare for an athlete pushing the boundaries of their body? Additionally, what is the lifespan of a soylent consumer compared to someone who eats a high quality diet loaded with vegetables? I would argue both cases would show the vast inferiority of soylent.

<comment><USER7> Off topic but, what's the point of living longer if you waste a fifth of your days cooking, cleaning, and eating?

<comment><USER9> What's the point of living longer if I have to consume bland, tasteless crap every time I get hungry?

<comment><USER7> You'll free up lots of time and money to do better things than eating? Sex, work, sleep, punching myself in the face, pretty much anything beats cooking, eating, and cleaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see how this is superior to having the plant itself create THC which is much simpler and cheaper. Other than being a cool trick, how is this going to change the world, as the article claims? It really doesn't specify how the THC produced from yeast is any better or different than that produced from the plant. Can yeast production be scaled up in ways that plat production can't? Or is it just that it might be more illogically acceptable to certain people because it comes from yeast?

<comment><USER11> There was a SF author (Bear or Brin?) who wrote an essay back in the 90's about the future of drug wars. Much of the enforcement back then was on stopping the import of drugs from overseas. But once gene splicing created a way to produce the drugs within the USA, the enforce would switch to raiding warehouses, etc. The next step would be when the technology reduced the drug manufacture to a table top box that could be in any home (think make your own insulin). Then the enforcement has to raid peoples homes. The last step is when the technology allows the drugs to be produced by symbionts growing within a person.

<comment><USER9> The buck probably stops at the table-top box. Prohibition-era homes weren't typically raided for small-scale alcohol production. Indeed, products like this "grape juice"[0] included instructions on how not to make wine.

[0]: [http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2013/05/wine-and- prohibition-w...](http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2013/05/wine-and-prohibition- wine-bricks-american-wine-consumption-history.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My lifelong dream of THC sourdough is now one step closer.

<comment><USER13> Afaik sourdough does not contain any yeast but bacteria. The finally prepared bread dough may but is not required to contain yeast.

<comment><USER14> As an avid sourdough enthusiast, I can assure you that this is wrong :)

Sourdough is a culture that's (mostly) a stable colony of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Generally speaking, the yeast provides the rising power, and the lactic acid bacteria provide lactic acid giving the dough a sour (acidic) flavour.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough#Biology_and_chemistr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough#Biology_and_chemistry_of_sourdough)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder what the purification efficiency is. For example they've been working on GMO-octane from green algae for a couple of decades. But refining its low concentrations is still uncompetitive with petroleum.

<comment><USER16> A mol of THC is worth a lot more than a mol of octane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Eh. Science can't even make a good sugar substitute...

<comment><USER18> There's a difference between a chemical analogue and an alternative way of producing the _same_ chemical.

Glucose is still glucose whether it comes from sugar cane, corn, beets, or other sources.

<comment><USER19> Marijuana is more than just THC.

<comment><USER20> Yes, it's a variety of ingredients, but while medically-used THC comes from a cannabis plant, it's often been purified so much that it's still only THC.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask: Why would you open source all your company's software? - <AUTHOR> What can really be open-sourced in a company when it comes to dealing with customer data in it's services? <comment><USER2> Everything short of the customer data can be opened up, and even then the customer data can often be partially scrubbed and then shared for the benefit of all your customers.

One example was a Point of Sale system I worked on, we were able to simplify adding new products by creating a community database of UPC/other barcode formats that would have the name, description and other attributes of an item along with an average price. Very useful way to creatively transform this data, and help our clients do less work while accomplishing more.

With regard to opening proprietary code, we did a few credit/debit/EBT integrations, and one of the best choices made was to release our code and do development in the open.

When working with each vendor we could highlight exactly where our code was running into issues with their buggy hardware, and we were able to create straightforward non-NDAed documentation for these devices, which helped other projects that never had credit/debit integration. Additionally, our competitors didn't even end up fixing the bugs we highlighted in our documentation, I really thought they'd at least try to be a bit more competitive/feature complete.

<comment><USER3> Would you mind sharing a link to the open source code you are referring to? especially the shared item data? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Open source the software (in my opinion, you should release all of the code under a GPL compatible license (or public domain)), but not the contents of the databases that include private data (although the database schemas may be made available, and, depending what you are doing, maybe also the contents of the sqlite_stat1 table (or the equivalent for other database systems) if you are willing to include that information). Databases containing public data should be made available though, if you have such thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've seen it happen when a company decides to close it's doors.

Assuming you mean an active company, a lot can be open source that deals with customer data, because their data is not in the source code. At Hofstadter, we are open sourcing some today with a plan to open source our core tool. There is a path for a gradual transition. We also have some projects in the works that will form our always free tier and become open sourced early in their life. OSS is important to us for many reasons, one is that we have benefited a lot from them, another is our focus on developers.</comment>


Psychiatrist Sues a Bunch of Redditors for Criticizing His Therapy Services - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180107/19543738955/psychiatrist-sues-bunch-redditors-criticizing-his-therapy-services.shtml <comment><USER2> "Redditors are crowdfunding their legal defense via GoFundMe."

Wait, what? Why would anyone wants to fund for your defense? It bears no significance to anyone who did not participate in "defaming" this psychiatrist.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it will be interesting to see if reddit will be required to hand over this information requested. I know reddit is pseudo-anonymous but this will be eye opening for a lot of their user base.</comment>


Ask HN: How to extract number of users from access.log? - <AUTHOR> I have a website whose main user are advanced software engineers.
I suspect that most of them are using ad/tracking blockers and similar, so google analytics will not count the real number of users.
Is there any good software out there that can give me essentially the basic information about how many real users I got out of my web access log?
I.e. it needs to be able to filter out crawlers/scrapers, and ideally scrapers that have put a fake user agent, but whose behaviour gives them away as scrapers. <comment><USER2> [https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/)</comment>


The State of Web Type - <AUTHOR> https://dev.opera.com/articles/state-of-web-type/ <comment><USER2> > Browsers could implement the same line breaking algorithm as used in TeX, > but have decided not to for performance reasons. This is an odd reason — TeX > was developed and runs on computers much less powerful than those commonly > used in mobile phones.

Yes, but not at a speed that many would find acceptable for formatting a web page, even on a modern computer.

Nor need it be: you only have to generate your (La)TeX document while creating or editing it; a couple of seconds for a short document is thus tolerable. Whereas a web page has to be formatted by every visitor on every visit -- maybe several times if they resize their browser. It needs to be more or less instant.

<comment><USER3> There's clearly a trade-off here. Personally I would love to have a page that I'll spend 30 minutes reading take 1 second longer to render in return for dramatically better paragraph composition.

<comment><USER2> Fair point. It sounds like the ideal would be a browser setting: fast-and- dirty justification for the impatient vs TeX-style line-breaking for aesthetes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, I would have figured that Apple would be tops in typography given their pedigree. Even weirder that (recent) IE does so well in this space.

<comment><USER5> See also the recent "Safari is holding back the web" articles. IE is historically awful, but modern IE is generally better than modern Safari.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a link to this series? I found some articles on the subject, but nothing that looked like what you were describing.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm more skeptical of the benefit of auto-hyphenation than the author is; it's been my experience that even with a proper hyphenation dictionary, you get some weird hyphenations that you want to manually undo (or force).

Which means that if you're working with print, where you can do those corrections/fixes, hyphenation is great; let the algorithms work, do your little bit of fine-tuning, and it's good. But on the web, you can't do your fine-tuning, so it's auto or nothing -- and "nothing"/unjustified text typically has less annoying failure modes than auto-hyphenated/justified text does.

And I think the author is flat wrong about preferring unstyled content flashes over delayed rendering of content that's waiting for a font. The unstyled flashes are massively distracting and disorienting to a reader; the delayed rendering just makes it seem like the page is a bit slow to finish loading.

<comment><USER7> > But on the web, you can't do your fine-tuning, so it's auto or nothing -- > and "nothing"/unjustified text typically has less annoying failure modes > than auto-hyphenated/justified text does.

Can fine-tuning not be achieved with the soft-hyphen [0] and the word joiner [1] ?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soft_hyphen&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soft_hyphen&oldid=625641896)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Word_joiner&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Word_joiner&oldid=644348648)

<comment><USER5> You can't see the rendered-on-the-user's-screen result, is the thing, and dynamic layouts mean that it might appear differently in different places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The link is good [http://stateofwebtype.com/](http://stateofwebtype.com/)

But it doesn't detail the real-world differences in hyphenation support. We ultimately chose to disable features that were claimed to be supported as the support was there but inconsistent.

A great start though, but it would be nice to also see the CSS and examples for each browser cited as supporting something.

</comment><comment><USER9> One potential issue with Web fonts: security. The formats are notoriously complex, and FreeType has had a lot of vulnerabilities related to that.</comment>


Shen 17 released under BSD license - <AUTHOR> http://www.shenlanguage.org/download_form.html <comment><USER2> First of all, thank you for changing the license to BSD. This is a really happy news. Reading all the discussions including Google Group, HN, and Reddit so far, to deal with the concerns of hga and others, is it possible to just move the comment part of the licence.pdf to porting.htm? Perhaps the main motivation of the changes to BSD was to encourage shenturions and potential shenturions to use Shen at work, and we are almost there. If you do that, then nobody will claim the licence, and we can move forward. We don't want to see anymore hatred just because of the licence issue. We want to focus on developing real applications using Shen at work and see the Land of Shen to expand. Please consider if you think this is reasonable. Thanks

<comment><USER3> You should make this appeal on the Google Group ([https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/qilang](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/qilang)) although based on the latest discussion ([https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/qGHfX3Iimqk/PBQerwjM2...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/qGHfX3Iimqk/PBQerwjM218J)) that would be unlikely to sway the author, might even be highly unwelcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nope, it isn't.

Or rather, it now has a 3 clause BSD licence with an additional "Comment on BSD, GPL and Copyright": [http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.pdf](http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.pdf) which is significantly longer than the 3 clauses minus the all caps disclaimer of warranty boilerplate.

Which might be acceptable, it looks OK at first glance (compared to an unacceptable initial version presented yesterday), but it does add to the overhead in doing things with Shen. Fatally? I don't know, but the usual dismissal that "It's got a weird licence" still holds, even if it has less weight now.

<comment><USER4> Having donated to what I thought was the BSD licensing of this, I'm pretty disappointed.

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple of thoughts (I also donated):

Given that the source files have a license-header which is standard 3-clause BSD (no extra _Comments_ section), and in light of Dr. Tarver's recent statements[1] on the mailing list, I think it's clear that the license of Shen 17 is, in fact, 3-clause BSD without any extra terms or conditions.

So what we're looking at is a situation where some of us think that Dr. Tarver has expressed in a problematic way his misgivings about the GPL and his understanding of copyright law. Namely, by making the latter an addendum to the source distribution's _license.pdf_ file, he is or may be causing confusion about Shen 17's license.

As a remedy, I would suggest we express our concerns on the mailing list in a constructive manner. Some of us have already done so.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/WLwJmlxtXSU/BUzjLtdmK...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/WLwJmlxtXSU/BUzjLtdmKokJ)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, per Tarver's last comment on this a couple of hours ago, it looks like it's "game over" WRT to licencing reform ([https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/pt1nmdcOOVU/1WzrqV5Fd...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/pt1nmdcOOVU/1WzrqV5FdEwJ)):

 _Well exactly as promised. I hope people are happy. However now people have got the power they asked for, it is up to them to make the running with it. My role is now more of an observer and to maintain the sources and standards and printed documentation. What people do with Shen, where they take it, is now in the hands of the Shenturians. This means to a degree that people have to define and solve their own problems. My path resumes from where I left it when I returned from the edge of the Himalayas to build Shen._

Side note: no idea why at least two people would down vote all your contributions to this discussion....

ADDED: Just got back an email from Taver WRT to my refund request, denying the "it's modified BSD" claim, and a not unreasonable in the context of our communications, especially since I'd already decided to do it, request to "go away forever" (well, unless a flourishing Shen community develops within the next few years).

Perhaps my "with fire and sword" style stuck a nerve; my #1 and calmly stated point that this negated the whole premise of the campaign was quoted by at least one other person on the mailing list.

<comment><AUTHOR> The down votes of my comments are in all likelihood not connected to the content of this discussion.

In the last couple of months, I made some unpopular comments on HN and since then have seen all of my comments, no matter the subject, receive a downvote or two some time during the wee hours (in US timezones). The intent is, obviously, to discourage my participation on HN in the face of steady karma loss. I am not discouraged, and in time perhaps my karma-detractors will tire of their little game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Changing over your routine (or script) to the time/s of day when I'm active (or US participants are generally active) is clever... but not that clever ;-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Parents would you use this 'AirBNB for toys' service? - <AUTHOR> I'm playing with the idea of creating a startup that lets parents share their un-used kids toys with other kids. So many toys end up in landfill each year. It would be nice to do something about it.
I'd love to get any feedback on this idea from parents on Hacker News and whether you would use such a service.
The platform/service essentially works like this:
1. You log into our platform
2. You submit a photo and description of your toy, age etc
3. Depending on the toy, we then match you with other parents that are in need of similar toys
4. We send out environmentally friendly packaging for you to send send the toy off
5. We then clean the toy, package it up nicely and send it onto another parent for their kids to enjoy
Would you use such a service?
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> > I'm playing with the idea of creating a startup that lets parents share > their un-used kids toys with other kids.

By "share" do you mean "rent" the way most services that use the description "sharing" do (as suggested by the reference to AirBNB, a rental intermediary, as well)? Because your description of the operation doesn't sound like sharing or even the rental that often goes by the name of "sharing", but like a matchmaking services that replaces donating/selling (or buying) used/secondhand toys with a more involved process than typical donation scenarios (for the person giving the toy), but possibly less involved that typical sales scenarios.

I can see how, if the payments received were right, that might be attractive as opposed to existing options. If you really do mean AirBnB style rental, I think that would be less attractive -- part of the reason to get rid of no- longer-used toys is to reclaim the space.

</comment><comment><USER3> That sounds way way too much work.. what do I get in return? $20? That's how much I should paid simply for doing spending the time to login, and submit a photo, let alone give it away.

<comment><USER4> Yup. Similarly if someone is already so fed up with the toy that they are going to throw it away (rather than give it away in their local classified ads), how do you convince them to go through the effort of putting it on your service?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No.

I'd give toys that my child has outgrown to a younger relative.

If they didn't want it I'd donate to charity shops. (I guess these are like thrift shops in US).

</comment><comment><USER6> When surveying people if they'd use a service, you should say how much it would cost.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this feedback. Was still evaluating the cost.

<comment><USER7> Maybe give some price brackets?

I recently filled out an NBA.com survey that had an interesting method... it started by asking "would you buy X subscription for 100 dollars?" then gave different options (most were cheaper), instead of presenting all options (which makes people choose the cheapest)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty sure there is a business that does something like this already and it was featured in an episode of Shark Tank like a year or two ago.

<comment><USER9> The company you're referring to went under a few years ago... [http://sharktankblog.com/toygaroo-bankruptcy-update-from- for...](http://sharktankblog.com/toygaroo-bankruptcy-update-from-former-cto/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We use a local toy lending library. $40/year for unlimited access to toys for 2 weeks at a time.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are some toy library programs out there, one off hand is Libratu - [http://www.libratu.com/](http://www.libratu.com/) dog slow if you put a lot of data in it but may give you inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would use a service that sent me one bin that I could fill and send in. No questions asked just like basically do with Goodwill.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thankyou!</comment></comment>


Saving the Prized Chile That Grows Only in Oaxaca's Mountains - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/oaxacan-chile-pepper <comment><USER2> Wow. What great story and what a great example of how one individual can have a great impact while behaving very ethically. He could have easily made a high margin exploiting the farmers

 _Isidro continues to live in Santiago Atitlán with his wife, two children, and parents. He is entrepreneurial, and his agricultural projects have grown to include avocado trees and 200 bee hives. Yet his love for pasillas continues. "This year, we're going to cultivate pasillas at another three acres of land," he says. "My family is happy, and when the producers get the earnings they deserve, [that] makes me happy too."_

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised the coyotes went so quietly.

<comment><USER4> Why? Just because the name sounds menacing doesn't mean they are anything but arbitrageurs. Take away the market inefficiency by providing more accurate sale price information to the producers, and there really isn't an opportunity for them any more. Their business was exploitation, but that's not quite the same thing as extortion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somewhat related: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/the-hunt- for-m...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/the-hunt-for-mexicos- heirloom-beans)</comment>


Bible-Regal. I'd kickstart the heck out of this - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ylmBmQILvU <comment><AUTHOR> To be clear: It's a reed organ kit enclosed in a box that looks like a bible.</comment>


College Faculties Have a Serious Diversity Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/02/infoporn-college-faculties-serious-diversity-problem/?mbid=social_fb

<comment><USER2> It's because those people are properly trained and prepared moreso than discrimination against alma maters. Look at the classes offered at Stanford and then look at the classes offered at less prestigious CS schools. Hell, some less prestigious schools consider VB a proper curriculum. I don't blame the employer for saying F that.</comment>


Ask HN: P2P Wireless - <AUTHOR>

Reading this post ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462525 ) the other day about wiring "the sticks" got me thinking. Actually rethinking about something I've thought about for a long time.
Some background: I live in Alaska, so reliable, high-speed Internet is something most people in the US take for granted and Alaskans consider themselves lucky when they have it. I live in Fairbanks, a borough (county) of about 100,000 people. So I hardly consider it "the sticks." The problem is, in Alaska, due to its size, zoning laws, terrain, etc. houses are very spread out up here. This makes it prohibitively expensive for cable companies to wire a neighborhood and DSL is mostly out because of the distances between places and lack of repeaters etc. In many neighborhoods, the only option, believe it or not, is dialup.
Additional background: I'm not a hardware guy and know very little about electrical engineering, so if this sounds dumb, it's because I am.
My question is this. Would it be possible to create a wireless "router" that transmits and receives data, and then "partition" it so that you use half the "throughput" and the other half is reserved to feed the "grid." The "grid" being anyone else how has one of these grid routers. In other words, if total "throughput" is 1.5Mbps, you get to use 750Kbps, and the remaining 750 is used by whoever else is using your "grid piece". Likewise, their router is partitioned and on and on.  Essentially it's peer-to-peer hardware. You create a mesh. Therefore someone who doesn't have a hardwire would essentially get "to the internet" by hop-scotching from one "grid router" to the next to the next until it hits the "access point" which is hardwired. Obviously there may be some latency issues, but those could potentially be resolved over time. The added benefit is the more people on the mesh, the faster your speed, just like p2p downloads.
Obviously at some point, you would have to be tied into to a real fiber line, so somewhere there would have to be a "wireless access point." Seems to me it would make sense for the ISPs to do this because it saves them the huge expense of wiring and gets them customers where it's too expensive to wire period.  Or, you could be the "neighborhood access point."
An added consideration is the security angle, or giving someone access to have your router. Which is why the partition would have to be pretty secure.
I know Alaska isn't the only place that could benefit from something like this. Any thoughts on this? Is it possible? Is it done already?
Didn't mean to ramble on there, but I figured there are enough smart people on here, I could get a better answer here than anywhere else. <comment><USER2> This is called mesh networking; the Google will turn up plenty of information, disinformation, products, research, etc. Right now it's pretty immature IMO, with a price/performance that is 10x (or more) worse than point-to-multipoint wireless. Technically, mesh is very cool because there are plenty of interesting problems yet to be solved, but practically I think point-to-point or point-to-multipoint wireless is better for rural Internet access.</comment>


Node.js Versus LUA "Hello World" HTTP Server Showdown - <AUTHOR> http://simonhf.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/node-js-versus-lua-hello-world/

<comment><USER3> It's _Lua_ , not _LUA_. Not an acronym. (It means "moon" in Portuguese.) Could you correct the title?

Also: Serving "Hello World" is not a very informative benchmark, especially for an async web stack. Something like making an asynchronous database request and then sending the response may be more representative. If you want to eliminate the database response time variable, then write a C program that listens for incoming connections and responds with "Hello world" or something, but either way, make it actually do some work server side.

<comment><USER4> silentbicycle, thanks, I updated the name as suggested.

So do you have any ideas for a more interesting benchmark program? Ideally it should be something which needs to keep state as you suggest and makes use of some kind of simple business logic, and is only a few hundred lines of code at the very most. What about a simple chat server which handles people and rooms? The benchmark might handle, say, max. 10k people chatting in max. 1k rooms. What do you think? Any better ideas?

<comment><USER3> I think a server that takes a login and password, sends the pair to another core (or server) to do a bcrypt (<http://www.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/man.cgi?query=bcrypt>) check, and then responds with a pass/fail would be a good benchmark.

An async web stack benchmark server should juggle loads of concurrent connections while making internal requests to another process or server, and then sending the response (when available). That's representative of a lot of common server tasks, yet can control for the work itself.

I'm suggesting bcrypt in particular because the amount of CPU time per client can be easily controlled. (In a nutshell, bcrypt is a hash function which can be made arbitrarily slow to deter password cracking.) Offhand, I'm not sure which systems have bcrypt besides OpenBSD, though.

FWIW, I have a simple bcrypt wrapper for Lua (<http://github.com/silentbicycle/lua-bcrypt>).

There's also a Ruby bcrypt wrapper (<http://github.com/codahale/bcrypt-ruby>) which includes a copy of the bcrypt source from OpenBSD. I feel vaguely uneasy about including that with my Lua wrapper (it really should be its own library, and more widely available!), but may eventually do so.

<comment><USER4> silentbicycle, I like your idea. I wonder if it will be considered 'enough' by those who poopooed the "Hello World" benchmark? On a dual core or better box and assuming the bcrypt server replies immediately, I would predict that performance of the main server would halve. Why? Because the main server can only handle n events per second and by communicating with the bcrypt server we're doubling the number of read events which must happen within the same wallclock time. What I've found is that handling e.g. epoll events is slow compared to e.g. regular function calls or other IPC mechanisms on the same box. So the fastest way to do the bcrypt idea on a production server would be to use non-socket-based-IPC (e.g. shared-memory-based which is an order of magnitude faster than socket-based-IPC). Anyway, assuming we go with socket- based-IPC for the purposes of the comparison, what's the fastest way for the node.js program to maintain state and handle a pool of connections to the bcrypt server? It would be great if a node.js guru would take this on... and then I would take on the SXE and SXELua implementations. What do you think...?

<comment><USER3> bcrypt doesn't reply immediately. You could set it to require ~10ms of CPU grinding each time it checks whether a password is valid, for example. Having latency while work happens on another core or server shouldn't impact the total number of concurrent connections the server can handle, though - <USER2> benchmark should measure that, specifically.

Oh, also - the reads and writes to the bcrypt server will be really short, and could use persistent connections. Something like "$2a$07$8BzFlUuprZN4FSBpDx3ZAuPWOu4CZ3uv8Awa4EjAZhNmnIY59nh2e" -> "OK". And yes, it would increase the number of events, but a real server is probably going to be communicating with a database, memcached, etc. instead.

FWIW, this comment thread is getting buried deeper and deeper in my threads page - if you want to keep the conversation going, my email address is in my profile. Have a good weekend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> His fastest "node.js+net" case is not optimal. I could easily come up with an even faster implementation by using Buffers instead of strings by not calling setEncoding(), which makes it 30% faster on my machine. This should translate to about 37500 queries/sec on his machine:

      var net = require('net');
      var server = net.createServer(function (stream) {
       stream.on('connect', function () {});
       stream.on('data', function (data) {
          var l = data.length;
          if (l >= 4 && data[l - 4] == 0xd && data [l - 3] == 0xa && data[l - 2] == 0xd && data[l - 1] == 0xa) {
           stream.write('HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nConnection: Keep-Alive\r\nContent-Type: text/html\r\nContent-Length: 13\r\n\r\nHello World\r\n');
         }
       });
       stream.on('end', function () {stream.end();});
      });
      server.listen(8124, 'localhost');

<comment><USER5> And this other version that doesn't check for "\r\n\r\n" is 47% faster than his "node.js+net" case. This should translate to about 42000 queries/sec on his machine:

      var net = require('net');
      var server = net.createServer(function (stream) {
       stream.on('connect', function () {});
       stream.on('data', function (data) {
           stream.write('HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nConnection: Keep-Alive\r\nContent-Type: text/html\r\nContent-Length: 13\r\n\r\nHello World\r\n');
       });
       stream.on('end', function () {stream.end();});
      });
      server.listen(8124, 'localhost');

<comment><USER6> Why empty callback on 'connect'? It will go to event loop for every client, and yet do nothing of value.

<comment><USER5> Good point. I inherited this design flaw from the snippet he posted on his blog.

<comment><USER4> mrb, please note that the connections per second and queries per second are handled individually in the benchmark. So the connect handler should make no difference to the queries per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm frustrated by Lua, because it seems such a productive, pragmatic language that is performant to boot (let alone the numbers LuaJIT is posting), but yet it never seems to gain momentum.

Why has Lua adoption been so slow outside the game world?

<comment><USER3> Lua _is_ gaining momentum, but it's been a very slow burner. There are a lot of programs (mostly games) that use it, and they aren't required to be open about it. Lua also improved quite a bit (IMHO) between 4.0 and 5.1, but 5.1 has only been out since 2006.

Some things omitted from Lua's std libs because you'd typically just do them in C anyway, and it keeps Lua very small. While you don't _need_ to know C to use Lua (and there are community libraries for them, see LuaRocks: <http://luarocks.org/repositories/rocks/>), it really shines in symbiosis with C.

Most web devs don't know C, though, so it misses quite a bit of the free hype that would come from word of mouth in _that_ community (look at e.g. Ruby), especially compared to word of mouth in the (NDA-infested) gaming industry.

FWIW, I don't think it would take long for somebody proficient in Javascript (or Python) to learn Lua - This comment (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786280>) is a good summary. The languages are very similar in overall design (prototypes, JSON/dict-style objects, etc.), but where Javascript has numerous design bugs frozen in its spec (thanks to the browser wars) and "The Good Parts" telling how to sidestepping them, Lua had 15 extra years to evolve and _fixed_ them.

Recommended intro: Ieursalimschy's _Programming in Lua, 2nd ed._ (<http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/>). The first edition is free online, but covers 4.0, and the language changed a lot (most notably, the packaging system).

<comment><USER8> Nitpick: The first edition of the PiL Book covers Lua 5.0 which is very similar to 5.1.

The most noticeable changes are the vararg handling, the module system (as you said, but it will be phased out in v5.2), and some library changes.

The differences are listed here: <http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#7>

That said, I purchased the second edition to understand the module system, only to decide not to use it anyway :-). I don't like the way the `module` function pollutes the global namespace.

<comment><USER3> 5.0, not 4.0 - you're right, thanks. Missed the edit window. :/

And yes, the 5.2 environment handling sounds like an improvement to me as well.

<comment><USER8> I liked setfenv() for its versatility.

I implemented a toy markaby [1] clone in Lua using it.

        tpl = html(function()
            head(function() --> tag names should be non-locals. They will be rebound at runtime.
                title "Barbazor"
                link {rel = "stylesheet", type = "text/css", href = "style.css"}
            end
            body(function()
                h1 {"Big title"; id = "title"}
                div {class = "foo"; function()
                    for i=1,5 do
                        p( "counting: " .. i )
                    end
                end}
            end
        end

        render( tpl ) --> returns clean, well indented HTML.

I don't think it can be done with the new environment system without reimplementing setfenv. You could achieve the same effect by passing an explicit param to anonymous functions, but it would look worse IMO.

This example also highlights a weakness in the language syntax: lambdas are ugly. Functions are first-class, semantically, but not syntactically, which is sad.

[1] <http://markaby.rubyforge.org/> , just in case ;-)

<comment><USER3> Hah. I did exactly the same thing. I usually use discount instead, though. To my understanding, it'd work to set _ENV's metatable's __index to a table w/ HTML tag generators. I've read about _ENV but haven't actually used 5.2-work4 yet. (I started using 5.2-work2 but they went and changed it again, so now I'm waiting until it's a sure thing.)

I agree that the syntax for first class funs could be more concise, but that's true of any language that requires a "return" keyword (i.e., is statement- based rather than expression-based). I think "fun x -> x + 1 end" would be better, but maybe that's just the OCaml talking.

<comment><USER8> Using _ENV would not be that simple.

        * The library and template files may have different _ENVs.
        * The _ENV of the tempalte file could already have an __index.

You'd have to add something like `_ENV = luhtml.makeENV(_ENV)` before your template definitions to take care of this.

The only way to have a clean template file would be to emulate setfenv using the debug library.

\--

My main gripe with the current syntax is that, when scanning the code, function declarations and invocations are too similar.

I'd like to have somthing like

        :[x] print(x); -> x+1 end

or

        :]x[ -> x+1 ]

Both are unambiguous, and would allow to pass a lambda to a function requiring a single argument without parenthesis, like you can already with strings and table litterals.

        somefun :]x[ dosomething( x ) ]

I prefer the second syntax because of the initial happy smiley, although it the reversed brackets are alien and would cause an uproar if they were to be added in any popular language.

\--

At last, what is discount?

<comment><USER3> Discount (<http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/>) is a very fast, C-based implementation of Markdown (<http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>).

I have a Lua wrapper for it, but just noticed that I don't have it on my github page. I'll post it soonish. Somebody else has a Lua wrapper for an older version of discount, but includes the discount source in it (!), and it's been updated due to security-related bugs, so that's out.

Talking about reversed brackets, look at J (<http://www.jsoftware.com/>). The only language I've seen that uses ], [, {, and } as unpaired operators. Pretty serious heresy. Cool language, though.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for all that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> LuaJIT 2.00 calls "C" functions a bit slower than reference lua or luajit 1.00. Mike Pall explained that in the newsgroup, if I'm not wrong. But the idea with LuaJIT is to use "C" much less.

<comment><USER8> IIRC, code sections with foreign call cannot be traced by the compiler... Or, if they can be, the performance would be worse than not doing it (my memory is a bit foggy).

A custom API for LuaJIT is in the works, to alleviate this problem. Extensions will have to be written twice though, if one wants to support both runtimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What versions of node and Lua are used in the benchmark? Where can SXE be found (Google can't seem to find it)...?

</comment><comment><USER11> Let's remember that Node.js is more about predictability, scalability, and (most of all) simplicity of development, than performance. Lua(JIT) is indeed impressive, but having to learn another programming language is a huge downside.

<comment><USER12> Attitudes like yours make me sad, on many levels.

It also makes me mad, because by every metric save the what-you-already-know, Lua is _at least_ comparable, if not outright superior.

<comment><USER13> There is also the code reuse factor. Why learn/use yet other language if you can use javascript for both server and client?

<comment><USER14> Better yet, let's go back to using ALGOL or something. Imagine how many reusable components we could have mustered up. We'd best stop all this innovation right now before it's too late.

<comment><USER13> Hmm, browsers don't use ALGOL though, better stay with JavaScript.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but if the old geeks had been arguing like you did, the browsers would probably only support whatever language was popular on the server-side at that time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


'I have lived underwater' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140411-i-have-lived-underwater

<comment><USER3> > More people have been in space than have lived underwater to do science.

The qualifier, "to do science" in the above quote is important. Nuclear submarines stay submerged for up to three months, with normal patrols lasting 3 to 6 weeks.

<comment><USER4> While true, you also have to take into consideration that generally submarines are in normal pressure conditions, as they are not really designed to let people in and out all the time. I would imagine that living in a submarine is way more comfortable than what described in this article.

<comment><USER5> I doubt that a military submarine is more comfortable than the facilities described in the article.

<comment><USER6> No, you're nice and dry in a military sub. These scientists are living underwater in order to study the reef as efficiently as possible, which means they're out all day in wetsuits and thus need to deal with the havoc that being wet all day eventually wreaks on the body.

That said, I don't quite understand why they don't just wear drysuits then? They're a bit fiddlier to use, but pretty commonplace these days, and don't keep the entire body dry, but that still seem a lot better than keeping none of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.uswebproxy.com/browse.php?u=Oi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vZ...](http://www.uswebproxy.com/browse.php?u=Oi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vZnV0dXJlL3N0b3J5LzIwMTQwNDExLWktaGF2ZS1saXZlZC11bmRlcndhdGVy&b=13&f=norefer) if you are blocked by "Sorry, you're in the UK so can't access BBC worldwide content". (I just don't understand!)

<comment><USER8> I pay £145 per year for the BBC, and they're too tight to serve me a single webpage. Absolutely shameful.

<comment><USER9> No, you're wrong.

The problem is Rupert Murdoch.

        > [...] making the content available to UK audiences is not
        > as simple as removing the ads. bbc.com/Future is a
        > commercial website produced by BBC Worldwide. Under the
        > BBC's fair trading rules, commercial websites are not
        > allowed to receive unfair promotion from the BBC's public
        > services. This prevents us from being able to provide Future
        > on bbc.co.uk

Essentially, if the BBC shows you this content, BSkyB cries unfair, and - <USER2> their opinion - The World Ends.

<comment><USER10> Nothing whatsoever to do with BSkyB, don't be silly. What that says is that the commercially-led, sponsored content of BBC.com is not content which they wish to (or would be allowed to) display on bbc.co.uk.

"BBC Future" in particular exists because it is ripe for sponsorship by companies that want to be associated with blue-sky thinking and "building the future of tomorrow" \- Honda, Huawei, etc.

The BBC go to the extra step of blocking bbc.com in the UK purely because they realise that most people would not appreciate the difference between the two sites and just increasingly associate the BBC name with commercially-led content, which is deleterious to the non-commercial image that makes UK residents feel better about paying the licence fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Commercial divers functionally live underwater for up to weeks at a time [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_diving](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_diving)

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://tmp.nux.ro/x7J-20140411-i-have-lived- underwater.html](http://tmp.nux.ro/x7J-20140411-i-have-lived-underwater.html) :-/

</comment><comment><USER13> The idea that this is a potential haven after a man-made apocalyptic event is very much in line with the "well, we fucked up that environment, let's try this one next" way we've led most of our existence so far.

Don't get me wrong, this is interesting. But that as even a secondary motivation is fairly repulsive.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of the 'Rifters' trilogy: [http://www.feedbooks.com/list/2626/rifters](http://www.feedbooks.com/list/2626/rifters)

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC_mV1IpjWA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC_mV1IpjWA)</comment>