Ask HN: Given A Choice Would You Go To College? [When you were of that age] - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If I where to do it again, I would have went to a school that focuses on creativity like MIT or Stanford and not on one of the schools that focus on a degree for a degrees sake. I started at a state school and left school for a long time then wound up finishing my degree years later at a private school that is focused on getting students to their degree. As such my educational path felt very industrial. I learned a lot of things about different subject but it was all raw education and not experiences which I think the latter are more valuable. This was mainly due to the environment, had I been in an environment like MIT I probably would not have had the gap. What really burns my ass now is that I have a lot of peers from MIT and I get so aggravated when they say, man you would have had so much fun at MIT you would have fit right in. It bothers me because I know I missed a lot of great opportunities and experiences. On the converse side of it is though, at the time I first went to school, I went to LSU because it was a party school. Which is what made it attractive to me, at the time. If I would have went to MIT at that point in my life I don't know that I would have been able to exploit the benefit of being their. Point being make sure you are going to school for the right reasons or your are just wasting time.

That being said, I did not grow up in an environment that promoted entrepreneurship. My family was farmers, commercial fishermen, and mechanics. In this environment there is not a lot of encouragement for starting a business. So the idea never dawned on me until I was well into my 20's and had some experience in the world. I had to learn that other people just like me where doing it, before I ever got the idea that I could do it too. It should stupid, but when you grow up in an environment like that, it is true that it never dawns on you. Not to say that it was a bad environment, in many ways it was awesome growing up on a farm. Anyways, the point being, if I would have had a venture that I wanted to do back in those days, I would have forgone college and used the money to start a venture. Because it could have provided other valuable experiences that cannot be purchased at college.

</comment><comment><USER3> I dropped out after three semesters, and two decades later nothing has happened to make that decision seem like a mistake. I've always had as much work as I've wanted, I've always been able to do the work I am interested in, and I haven't hit a ceiling yet.

The one thing that clearly does constrain me is my lack of literacy in the math-style symbology used in academic CS papers. It is all quite literally Greek to me, and I know there's interesting research locked up in those papers that I simply can't use because it all disappears off into math-land after a couple paragraphs of introductory English.

On the other hand, I have no trouble abstracting the concept out of a working example, so I can usually muddle through by simply looking for web pages that refer to the paper and include source code. In a few cases I've been able to reinvent the implementation from what I guess they are getting at in the introduction; it's a lot of wasted work but at least I know from the start that I'm headed in a direction that will eventually work out.

Drop me back in time, stand me in front of that old crossroads, and I'd make the same decision again; it's worked out pretty well, all things considered.

</comment><comment><USER4> (Disclaimer: I did go to college)

There seem to be differences between US and Europe, but being Spanish and having studied in Spain here are my thoughts:

Yes, I would go again. Not for the degree itself, but the stuff you learn during that period. It's not necessarily technical stuff or stuff you'l explicitly use when you find a job, but you do and learn things that will come back to you at some point in time.

I got my current job because of the project I did to get my degree, it was exactly what my company was looking for, and I never did it to have more chances to find a job, I did it because it was fun.

Also, by boss once told me this: "Degrees don't matter that much, the actual _work_ that you are able to do does. However, given 2 subjects with sane skill set I'd pick the one that fiched college, because that shows that he could commit to a 'project' and finish it." . I found it interesting.

Last, there is one thing which we (humans) can't recover (appart from death): time. If you go to college and regret it in the future, nobody can take away what you already learned, but if you regret for not going, you can't go back in time.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it a good idea to create a stackoverflow like thing for Farmers? - <AUTHOR> Tell your opinion about creating a stackoverflow like thing for farmers specifically. <comment><USER2> You could propose a StackOverflow for it: [https://area51.stackexchange.com/](https://area51.stackexchange.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shouldn't you ask farmers?</comment>


Lock-Free Work Stealing, Part 1: Basics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.molecular-matters.com/2015/08/24/job-system-2-0-lock-free-work-stealing-part-1-basics/

<comment><USER2> I don't see any mention of where the author mitigates, or prevents the ABA problem. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem)

\- Some systems will use a double-CAS where one word is a counter.

\- People lucky enough to use RCU can use grace-periods.

\- You can also mitigate it (to a degree) using the bottom bits of the pointer and the kernel area of the pointer as a counter.

\- Also, Hazard Pointers.

<comment><USER3> This post doesn't go into his lock free work stealing queue implementation at all, he says that will be covered in a later post. I don't see how the ABA problem relates to any of the implementation details covered in this post?

<comment><USER4> Implementing a lock-free work stealing queue isn't difficult, especially with C/C++ atomics. I can't think of an implementation where ABA would be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there somewhere I can read about the Molecule Engine as a whole? I'm struggling to dig up information on what it is from this website. A game engine of some sort?

<comment><USER6> The home page describes it as "the foundation for all our tools, with parts of the engine being available to licensees as stand-alone game engine bits."

This post suggests that it is intended to compete with Unreal and CryEngine:

[http://blog.molecular-matters.com/2015/08/12/what- happened-t...](http://blog.molecular-matters.com/2015/08/12/what-happened-to- the-molecule-engine/)

One of the posts about runtime-compiled C++ states that iOS is not a target platform.</comment></comment>


Director of Innovation of the Good Food Institute Discusses Clean Meat - <AUTHOR> https://soundcloud.com/cultured-meat-future-food/brad-barbera <comment><USER2> Clean meat is neat, and it becoming mainstream over the next 2 decades is probably inevitable. But how healthy will it be? Will it be healthier than most meat sold in stores right now? Healthier than "grass-fed organic meat" even?

It seems like most GMO foods right now are going in the opposite direction, in an effort to increase quantity/$, while losing nutrients/$. I hope clean meat won't take the same direction.

Are there any experiments in which they give clean meat to lab rats?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't come from a science background. But, from what I understand, Clean Meat is supposed to be a lot healthier because it is derived from the same animal cells but in a highly controlled environment. This allows it to be free from diseases and other negative effects of animal farms and slaughter. During the interview, Brad Barbera gave a great answer when he compared cultured meat to a brewery. It is a highly controlled environment where safety and standards are in place.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> I feel like JavaScript is the laughing stock of the programming community sometimes... It's inefficient, messy, not typechecked, full of beginners...
But it runs extremely easily on pretty much everything! and can be distributed and run instantly through any browser.
Maybe I feel like it's too easy compared to other languages and is downplayed as a newb language...
Maybe it just doesn't seem as cool as other languages like rust and go... <comment><USER2> Of course not, and it's sure as hell not the laughingstock of hundreds of thousands of developers who make a living knowing it.

Javascript is a big, sprawling, and (from day 1) very useful language. Like English, it has many many flaws and has many antecedents. Like English, it's evolved to be highly functional. The last two versions are first rate languages. The runtime environments (browsers, compilers, etc.) are among the most sophisticated, comprehensive pieces of software passionately maintained by some of the smartest people in the world working in friendly competition, and we don't have to pay a red cent for their work product.

I started programming in 1983, so about 7 years after the microcomputer took off. The very first version of Javascript was a shaggy dog but it was far more capable than interpeters selling for hundreds of dollars at that time.

The pedants who bitch about Javascript should get over themselves. I wish my life had so few problems that I could spend my precious time on this planet denigrating something given to me and every browser user for free.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was always a JS hater. I mostly work with python these days, but JS is required for UI development. Since I am targeting internal apps where we control the browser, I get to use the latest ES6 features without polyfills. I have to say that JS has come a long way, and some of the latest features are pretty awesome. Requests is so much more pleasant to work with that the old XMLHttpRequest, imports are great, the fat arrow has made my life so much easier, and the modern reactive frameworks are amazing. Sometimes I find myself wishing we had certain things in python, the regex syntax is more elegant and doesn't feel like a hack. And compared to Python, concurrency takes less effort. It's certainly easier to write spaghetti code in JS, but you can write bad code in any language. It's truly amazing what a flexible computing environment the modern browser has become.

</comment><comment><USER4> No. You shouldn't be ashamed of ANY language or technology, as long as you feel it's appropriate for doing whatever problem is put in front of you.

Also remember that at various times, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, COBOL, ColdFusion, literally anything made by Microsoft, Java, and countless other languages that solved plenty of interesting problems and both led to people getting paid but also improving and creating other things have been laughed at.

As a converse, plenty of people have made absolute garbage in any number of open source frameworks, "sexy" languages du jour, etc. either because they were working alone and didn't think they needed help or what they were working on wasn't remotely suited to the tool.

Ignore the haters. It's usually gatekeeping coming from lack of confidence and fear of real competition due to years of poor attitudes in our industry on what makes a "real programmer".

</comment><comment><USER5> I love it too. To me, Javascript is like my phone camera. Sure, DSLRs take better pictures but the best camera is the one that's always with me, and that's Javascript.

<comment><USER6> I like that analogy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I got into programming because I want to make cool stuff, not because I want to contemplate the transcendent beauty of pure functions and elegant code.

JavaScript is what enables me to make stuff I couldn't make with the same amount of time/effort using any other tool I came across.

Do I wish I could do the same stuff using Racket? Sure, I guess. But in the world I live in, JS is the best tool I could find for doing what I want.

Also maybe it's just me, but I've been programming for 5 years, and I haven't actually ever felt that frustrated or inadequate when programming JS, I like it no less than python.

I got used to looking down on JavaScript as a "bad" language from reading snarky comments made by people who, I suspect, also jumped on the hate train because they've heard others talking shit about it. I'm not a computer scientist, maybe there are some legitemate reasons to dislike JS, but I don't think they're serious enough to warrant all the hate it gets in programming community, I'm guessing it's mostly a social phenomena.

At least personally I haven't run into things that make me dislike it, I have a lot of fun using it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Although most of the replies will be "No, because <REASON...>", what is more important is to find the reason that suits yourself. You can of course find :

\- Libraries that makes it efficient ;

\- Plenty of styleguides / do / don't rules which makes it tidy ;

\- TypeScript, where JS becomes statically typed ;

\- Find beginners in any other languages, although "full of beginners" is actually positive, rather than negative.

\- You can feel like a real pro if you write C / C++, but you will rarely be hired to make a REST API with that stack and you will not be hired to create a web app with it. So your statement might be more accurate if you say "Web development is downplayed as a newb", which is obviously wrong. Sure I would not recommend to write a database based on NodeJS or a search engine, or a space shuttle program, or a ... you name it, but you can't write with anything else ( at least serious ) than JavaScript or something that compiles to JS, for web development.

\- Cool is also relative. I was writing Perl for 6 years, before I run out of job prospects and switched to NodeJS.

</comment><comment><USER9> You should use the tools that work for you, and not be ashamed of that. Getting caught up in "X is cooler than Y" "X said that Y is better than Z for everything" etc. is counterproductive. Other people's opinions won't (necessarily) be right for you.

</comment><comment><USER10> A programming language is like a type of art. Some people love oil painting, some people hate it, some people don't know how to get the colors to mix. Some people hate using a pen for art. I think it's just subjective.

</comment><comment><USER11> No, you should not. If you have mastered the tools you are using then you should be proud of your ability and your ability to get things done. Languages get laughed at over time and JavaScript is no exception. It's also amazingly popular. Personally, I regularly use Perl for small jobs, that's a language that gets ridiculed but I'm super fluent in it. I also write things in C, C++, Go, ...

The only reason to be ashamed would be if you only program in JavaScript and can't imagine ever using anything else. Learn many languages, master some, use different languages for different problems.

</comment><comment> maze-le No, you shouldn't. And don't listen to people trying to shame you because of it.

>> It's inefficient

Well, its at least as efficient as python or ruby (I think its even slightly better). If you work on the backend side, and performance is the main goal, there are other technologies better suited: Go, C#, haskell

A problem might be the concurrency model, but that is an entirely different topic.

>> messy

Depends on your ability to organize code. Its not that much different than other technologies, really.

>> not typechecked

True, but there are other dynamically typed languages... People implement thing in them too. And there is always typescript, if you are interested in working typesafe.

>> full of beginners...

Everyone was a 'beginner' at some time in their life...

>> Maybe I feel like it's too easy compared to other languages and is downplayed as a newb language...

There are simple aspects of the language, but take a look at e.g.: Promises[0] or the Prototype inheritance chain[1] and tell me again that it is simple... ;-)

[0]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Promise)

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Inhe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Inheritance_and_the_prototype_chain)

</comment><comment><USER12> When someone does the denegrating you mention (and folks do), they go on my "I'll never work with them" list. I've had folks do it in an interview and it's an immediate no-hire.

JS is a tool, just like on the any other. It has some big pluses, and some annoying "WTFs", but today, it's a more-than-solid default answer to "What should I write my webapp in".

</comment><comment><USER13> 15 years ago that was PHP...

A language is not something you should be ashamed of. You should learn more than one though, so that you understand the advantages and disadvantages of different paradigms and implementations.

Should you be ashamed of loving your hammer? NO, but you should be ashamed of using your hammer to unscrew screws.

</comment><comment><USER14> I used to make fun of JavaScript. I hated JavaScript, it was confusing (wtf is prototype?), easy to screw up in, and didn't have a real concurrency model.

But then I realized this didn't matter. The JavaScript community is was evolving at a ridiculous rate. These weaknesses slowly left their blood, and honestly, now I'm left envious. I enjoy writing Flow, poking around with new ideas like async / await, and envy the sheer performance that JavaScript has attained.

I still find JavaScript and often the people associated with JavaScript to be hard to like at times, but it's a language with great possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER15> > I feel like JavaScript is the laughing stock of the programming community > sometimes...

Don't worry, it's PHP.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was mostly in the Scala/Java world for a long time and laughed at the JS community's obsession with reinventing things. Somehow I ended up using Node on every side project over the years because it was pretty easy to work with.

Fast-forward to now...I've decided to build my startup on typescript and node. I find the easy sharing of libraries and types across frontend and backend very liberating.

TS/ES6 are mature and run everywhere. Easy for beginners but functional enough for me. It's taken me a while but I love JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER17> Programming languages will not love you back. Maybe it's nothing to be ashamed about, although it seems a bit silly for me. I may take the word "love" too serious, but that's also how I feel you are taking your relationship with a glorified screwdriver.

In case of JavaScript I have one reservation, that by enabling adtech it's helping to screw other people on their own computers. Of course it could be some other language, it's not like JavaScript is inherently for this purpose alone.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's not as bad as PHP but yeah JavaScript or rather the community around it is largely made up of sub-par web developers (you, oh dear reader are _of course_ the exception). Obviously you will not find as many clueless people in say embedded software development or even electrical engineering as these require a certein set of requisite skills and theory whereas every idiot can call themselves a web developer.

But yeah as long as you enjoy what you're doing, you shouldn't worry about it :)

<comment><USER19> As a PHP programmer, I should probably resent some part of your answer, so consider it pro-forma resented.

OTOH, I get paid to work with PHP, so really, I don't worry about what other people think of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> No you shouldn't be ashamed.

Most of the people I met who denigrated javascript with a blazing hate didn't fully understand its underlying concepts. They were trying to use it like C or something else. Which can lead to frustration.

You should take pride in being good with your tool, understanding how it's designed and how to use it to build awesome stuff.

And yes, it's always a good idea to expand one's skill set. Handling javascript like a boss is one of those skills that a today's programmer can be proud of.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think Javascript's ubiquity -- it has an implementation in every browser -- is the cause of much of its hatred. No one hates on SNOBOL because it's been superseded and no-one uses it; but if you're wanting to interface with the web, there's no other first-class langugage, everything else transpiles to JavaScript.

I think an opinionated JavaScript interpreter which considered the worst elements of JavaScript to literally be bugs (e.g. single equals) would help immensely...

</comment><comment><USER22> No, it's the future and is currently going through a renaissance. Full stack js is especially compelling and productive.

</comment><comment><USER23> No. if you use JavaScript and you like it that's fine, you shouldn't be ashamed of it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Javascript has evolved enough during these years to a point that is no longer a "joke". Theres yet some kind of inertia from past, when JS was basically a form validation language, but current state of language is a complete different story.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I guess it's still haunted by its past...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The functional programming community loves it, especially with the introduction of ES6.

<comment><USER26> ES6 is the worst thing that ever happened to JavaScript.

JavaScript's one best attribute was that it would run on any device. No longer true.

It's second best attribute was a simple threading model. Promises and async wrecked that.

The third best attribute was it was easy to learn. But in ES6 there are twice as many control structures to learn, with no added power. =>, class, const, etc. They just add more things to think about, without solving any problems.

Well, except that people didn't like learning closures and prototypes. And now they don't have to. So you can program in JavaScript now without learning it if you want.

And you don't have to write the word "function" and "this" a lot. So you save 2% on code size.

ES5 Forever.

<comment><USER3> Love it or hate it ES6 is here to stay. I for one love it.

<comment><USER27> Still no integers,

no strict typing,

no sane module system.

<comment><USER3> ES6 imports works well. I've been working on a project that uses them extensively and it's really improved the organization and structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My advice as an internet nobody:

Don't worry about that dumb crap. JS is a good language. It's come a long way since its dark early days.

People who shit on JS and on those that like it are usually not worth your time. I find those people are more interested in displaying their intellect or superiority by being condescending. It's not helpful.

Read and watch Douglas Crockford if you haven't. He has extracted the best aspects of Javascript to focus on. If you take his advice then I believe you will find JS to be a very good companion.

Just don't let JS be your only language. No language should be your only language.

</comment><comment><USER29> Back in about 2005, I hated javascript. In hindsight, what I hated was cross browser development and developpers messing webpages with javascript (alerts, popups, javascript "links" ...). I used noScript intensively (always unless forced otherwise), and it made the web better. How not to think javascript is a shame, then ?. Javascript wasn't understood well at the time, and I guess still isn't by most people. Just learn to understand it it's awesome. So, no.

</comment><comment><USER30> No need to kinkshame people, even if their kink is JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER31> JS is not without its problems, but it has attracted both a huge amount of mindshare and corporate investment over the last twenty years. Those both go a long way towards fixing many of the initial problems of the language.

While it isn't the language I'd have necessarily chosen to be as widespread as it it, the industry could have wound up making a far worse choice, and I'm grateful it didn't.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nope, it's improved a lot and approaches greatness for the reasons you mention.

It still drives ME crazy because it lets many of my colleagues produce unreadable hard to understand spaghetti code in a way I don't see with more structured (and tool friendly) languages like C#, Java, or purer functional languages, but well written JavaScript can be a delight.

</comment><comment><USER33> You do you. Don't give a f*ck about what others think. Every programming language has its pros and cons and all of them are beautiful in its own way.

Even brainfuck is beautiful, maybe is not productive, but its unique.

Don't waste your time worrying about that even if there is not market, if you really like a language you will find a job if thats what you want.

</comment><comment><USER34> Javascript has gotten a lot better. IMO there are nicer languages to swoon over but it's fine to love JS too :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Nope! All language/technologies are tools. Developers have (lots) of opinions but at the end of the day all of these things exist to solve user and business problems. JavaScript does both effectively

It is however useful to have a critical eye so that one can assess what is the right tool for a particular job.

</comment><comment><USER36> I love JavaScript. A good craftsman never blames his tools.

</comment><comment><USER37> > It's inefficient, messy, not typechecked, full of beginners...

Well PHP is worth on those stuff..

As long as you can make stuff happen with it, I guess that's fine..

</comment><comment><USER38> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER39> As long as it isn't PHP you should be ok...

</comment><comment><USER40> Sounds like what you love is the widespread support and ease of deployment, which aren't properties of the language itself.

</comment><comment><USER41> Javascript, my friend, is like english: Easy to learn, Hard to master. Don't be ashamed only if you are good at it.

<comment><USER30> > Don't be ashamed only if you are good at it.

Not sure if intentional pun

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> ES6+ eased a lot of pain around writing Javascript. It's actually a very nice language from a user standpoint.

</comment><comment><USER43> At least it isn't VB.</comment>


SpaceX and Tesla Working on Ventilators - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/20/spacex-and-tesla-are-working-on-ventilators-elon-musk-says/ <comment><USER2> Just like Elon was going to rescue the Thai cave boys, fix Flint's water supply, etc.

Musk's PR strategy is to inject himself into every trending topic.

This, after Musk has made several incredibly irresponsible factual misrepresentations of the current outbreak, comparing it to the common cold and suggesting that car accidents will kill more people this year than this virus.

I wouldn't be surprised if this ventilator play is an exemption which keeps his workforce at work, working on things he wants to work on, like cars and rockets, all the while spreading COVID-19.

<comment><USER2> Note also that in Italy, deaths from coronavirus have already surpassed _yearly_ deaths from auto accidents—-and this is just the beginning.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how that's relevant though, SpaceX employees are much younger and healthier than the people dying in italy [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of- tho...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who- died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says)

How many employees over 70 do you think SpaceX has?

<comment><USER4> How many friends and relatives over 70 do you think SpaceX employees have? How many parents? How many will die due to the spread of coronavirus? How many will SpaceX employees infect?

Italy's death toll is now up to 5,476. That's 651 more since yesterday.

How many people under 70 with severe disease will survive without medical intervention, intervention they may not get if the cases spike: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-19/coronavir...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-19/coronavirus- in-young-people-is-it-dangerous-data-show-it-can-be)

How many families will see many family members die: [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-51978164](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51978164)

Musk's comments are all kinds of stupid. Don't waste your time defending him.

<comment><USER3> > Musk's comments are all kinds of stupid. Don't waste your time defending > him.

I don't disagree, I'm merely objecting to the fact that new_realist appears to be deliberately misrepresenting Musk's comments as if they weren't silly enough as is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have studied this a fair bit and the technology is relatively simple (look it up) biggest challenge is securing enough medical grade oxygen. So yes, GM or Tesla or a lot of other companies with manufacturing bases could make them pretty easily, however the current manufacturers of ventilators have got a lot to loose with an over-supply of cheap ventilators so expect FUD

</comment><comment><USER4> So Musk has gone from saying the "coronavirus panic is dumb" ([https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528)) to now making ventilators.

Going from zero to manufacturing medical grade equipment is non-trivial. Even once you have the equipment there are going to be staffing shortages in hospitals. Patients on ventilators need to be constantly monitored. You don't just plug them in and leave them.

Musk's downplaying of the seriousness of COVID-19 hasn't helped anyone.

<comment><USER6> I had not seen this quote before. Reading what you said; my initial thought was on the emphasis, the _panic_ IS dumb. So, I clicked in and verified that he actually had said exactly those words and read the next 2-3 responses. I felt that, yeah, he is referring to the panic. It's something I've repeatedly said the last two weeks: Personally, I am not afraid of the virus. I am afraid of people's response. I say this as one of the unfortunate bastards with a condition that puts me in a risk group. I am also no fan of Musk, per-se (well, not more than you would have admiration for any person that are able to accomplish things).

Whether he's capable of making a difference around ventilators in the short term -- let's just say I am as skeptical as the next guy. Likewise, I should probably have read the entirety of the Twitter thread before replying.

<comment><USER4> In a memo to employees Musk said, "The risk of death from C19 is _vastly_ less than the risk of death from driving your car home":

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk- space...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-spacex- employees-car-crash-coronavirus)

Italy's deaths from coronavirus have already exceeded their annual deaths from car accidents:

[https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic- related_death_rate)

Without the work that hospitals are doing and without the measures to limit exposure the death rate would be even higher.

Musk's perspective on COVID-19 is ignorant and frankly stupid.

<comment><USER7> yeah but hang on... if you add to that factor that 70-90+ age brackets... how does that then add up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is going to be a repeat of that stupid submarine isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER9> I hope Tesla's quality control issues have been resolved if they're going to be creating life support equipment.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ventilators are not _the_ answer. Italy Cremona [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfkbv_WQtn0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfkbv_WQtn0) Italy Bergamo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_suhYeWEcJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_suhYeWEcJg)

TLDR Two hospitals, not a single patient survived ventilation/ecmo to date. Something weird is happening in Italy.</comment>


Why Many Smart Folks End up going Nowhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifebeyondcode.com/2010/03/29/9-reasons-why-many-smart-people-go-nowhere/

<comment><USER2> "Mediocre Life" is relative and you don't have the right to judge the lives of other people. If they are happy with their life then let them be.

<comment><USER3> A life is mediocre or not based on the conditions and constraints within which someone lives.

Someone who has to put off a vacation for 5 months because he only has 2 weeks' vacation each year, instead of going when he wants to, has a mediocre life. Someone who moves out of the city into a boring suburb because he can't afford a place in the city where he can raise kids is living a mediocre life.

It's not about money _per se_. There are people making $500,000 per year who live mediocre, depressing, subordinate lives. And there are people making a small fraction of that who have great lives. It's about having the resources and access to live life on your own terms rather than someone else's.

<comment><USER4> I live in the suburbs. It's quite nice actually.

I work pretty much whatever hours I want and can walk to most things I use on a daily or weekly basis: groceries (including fresh meats and veggies from the local farmers), eat out at restaurants from fast food to 3-star (two in my neighborhood actually), get dry cleaning done if I need to, take care of shipping stuff, take in a movie, see a doctor, dentist, chiropractor or orthodontist. I can also walk to a pretty nice neighborhood park only the folks in my development can use without crossing any major roads. It's about 40 acres, with a water fall, a pond, two tennis courts, exercise equipment, playgrounds for kids, jogging trail and miscellaneous other sundry -- mostly covered in trees and greenery. We have three swimming pools in my neighborhood, one where no kids are allowed. Twice a month we have a farmer's market in the parking lot of the bank I walk to in 5 minutes. On the 4th of July my neighborhood puts on a private fireworks show.

Every home in my neighborhood has fiber optic internet, phone and television. We had it before FiOS was even a term.

I'm 5 minutes from a reservoir and nature preserve. On any given night I can spend maybe 5-10 minutes of travel time to see live music, take in a play, see a concert or get on a 45 mile long dedicated bike trail. 10-15 minutes from my house I can buy pretty much anything a person can buy, from a Porsche to discount socks, can play golf at at least 6 golf courses, have a world class indoor swimming facility inside of a nature preserve and park, and my eating venues and choices expand by a magnitude of 10 including everything from budget priced French Cuisine to Korean bar food. I have half a dozen ethnic groceries within 20 minutes travel time from my house, two world class performance venues, a college campus (soon to be two more), ample jobs and industry in everything from hi-tech to agriculture (I live in Wine Country). I'm close enough to a major international airport that If I travel someplace, I can call my wife when I land to come pick me up at the airport, and she'll be there by the time I collect my baggage.

And in 3 years or so I'll have a mass transit stop 5 minutes from my house.

My house is not terribly big, but I and several family members can live there very comfortably and rarely bump elbows, and I spend less than 25% of my income to live there (I'm not rich by any stretch of the term). In the warm months I, get home from work and walk to the grocery and buy and grill lamb, fresh salmon, steaks, asparagus, mushrooms, onions, garlic and other such great things, and eat out on my property every day with a bottle of wine (I'm partial to Chilean Cabs) I brought back from the same grocery. I usually finish up dinner by finishing the wine with some imported cheeses or fresh fruit from the last farmer's market and a cigar.

If I want to enjoy pure nature, it's literally 10 minutes away, and if I want to enjoy an urban environment, I'm 30-40 minutes from the local city center. However, I find myself not going much into the city because there's really not much draw outside of the occasional comedy show or museum. I literally have everything I could ever need at my finger tips, plus I pay less for the privilege than living in the city, and I have 10x the room.

I get 3 weeks vacation per year, I usually split it into two trips. In the last two years I've vacationed literally around the world 3 times. But the rest of the time, I don't really have to take a vacation, because the environment I live in _is_ literally better than any resort I've ever been to except I have to mix my own drinks.

Maybe you call that having a mediocre life. Perhaps, but maybe I'm just satisfied with mediocrity then?

<comment><USER5> That sounds like an incredibly nice suburb. Most aren't that good. There is nothing walkable from my parent's house. Though they do have FiOS and I can't get it in the city.

<comment><USER4> We picked the area because of the large numbers of nice amenities very close by. There are about 5000 homes here all with the same kinds of walk-ability. A very nicely designed area. There are areas just a few miles away that weren't designed quite as well.

I'm very glad to be seeing the recent movement in design that calls for walking friendly areas. But with a good understanding that people need to park somewhere as well.

<comment><USER6> which city are you in?

<comment><USER4> I live in the Northern Virginia area. Which is Washington D.C. metro.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like Ashburn. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A psychologist once explained to me how powerful and destructive can the _fear of success_ be. In fact most of the time it's latent. Many of those complaining about unluckiness may in reality be afraid of "heights": too much money or fame or both. Usually a result of "money and fame doesn't make you happy" but there may be other, more personal reasons, too. As a latent, subconscious force it may sometimes outweigh the other 9 factors mentioned in the article.

One of the signs you have the fear of success is when you respond emotionally to negative stories about the reach and famous. "See, they are bastards", you say, or other times "they are pathetic". Well, it may be true most of the time, but it's not their problem, it's yours.

<comment><USER9> I am not sure whether this is exactly fear of success. I think it may be fear of failure, or more specifically fear of discovering that one does not have talent.

For example, take somebody that is smart, is a great conservationist in parties, makes great jokes and has read the entire literary cannons of several countries. All his friends say he should be a writer. He has always dreamed of being a writer. Yet he never starts writing. Is that fear of success? Or fear of trying and discovering that despite everything he did not have talent?

Anyway, while we are on the subject linked below is a hilarious episode of Black Books that is about this. BTW I think the main character of that show is someone like the person in my example.

[http://www.hulu.com/watch/114471/black-books-elephants- and-h...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/114471/black-books-elephants-and- hens#x-0,vepisode,1,0)

<comment><USER10> I am yet to meet anyone who is afraid of success, I think it more a case of the fear of Failure.

<comment><USER8> In some particular cases - yes, you are afraid of going too high because the fall would be most painful. But still there may be, for example, some (latent or not) religious fears of too much wealth.

<comment><USER11> That sounds like Freud, who is pretty much discredited on everything. There's really no evidence for "latent" or "subconscious" processes that are analogous to conscious processes, such as fear. Fear is always pretty damn conscious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it's also important to keep in mind that the topic in the article is heavily weighed towards financial success (and conversely, financial nowhere- ness).

There are plenty of ways to "go somewhere, be someone, and do remarkable things" without using smarts and luck as a means to wealth. It just takes time to realize that the standard definition of success is mostly a rat race.

Then again, this comes from someone who loves capitalism and is an entrepreneur wanna-be, so take my words for what they're worth.

<comment><USER13> Yeah. I am tired of the get rich quick crowd. The best way to get rich on the internet is to sell 'how to get rich on the internet' advice to people who want to get rich on the internet.

I've been a software developer at internet startups for 15 years and never made anything beyond my (frequently minimal) salary (me=bad negotiator), but it was usually fun, challenging and I've learned a lot. But I've never claimed to be smart. The most money I ever made was something that had nothing to do with the internet (real estate) that a friend of mine talked me into against my better judgement. And the only reason I made any money at all was because I'm such a pessimist that I sold right before everything crashed.

<comment><USER14> Owyn, the article was not focused on "richness" from a money perspective. Success simply meant you have an "increased capacity to contribute to the world around you."

<comment><USER14> Owyn, I couldn't reply to your last reply as there was no reply option there :(

Yes, you are welcome to be angry and be pessimistic or in whatever mood you choose to be. And it's OK to disagree too. I never claim to know all the answers anyway :)

<comment><USER13> My comments were mostly "meta". There has been a rash of entrepreneur bs here lately and I'm sick of it. I much prefer the NoSQL posts. However. To get to the meat of your post, I have personally (meaning, in my personal life) encountered issues with 1,3,6,9 which I have overcome to one extent or another. Or not. So whatever. Fuck it. I'm going to sleep. Good luck with your whatevers, I have to write a bunch of code tomorrow.

<comment><USER14> OK owyn. Please take care and have fun with your code tomorrow

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The "somewhere" metric is different for everyone. Aspiring towards different things doesn't mean you went nowhere. For instance, I just released my first bit of open source code. I feel like I've finally reached a goal. Hence, I went somewhere.

<comment><USER16> Can't agree more. It's all about following your heart.

<comment><USER17> I think _following your heart_ is the only meaning _going somewhere_ can have.

<comment><USER14> Yes I agree that one should "follow their heart" to go somewhere. One thing to remember is that as the "awareness" of what is possible with their potential changes, their heart will start yearning for reaching that potential.

So, who you are with and what conversations you have on a daily basis will have a huge influence on what your heart will say.

<comment><USER17> Absolutely. Your dreams (figuratively) are shaped by your daily interactions as much as they are by your personality.

For instance, reading HN has made it clear to me what I _want_ more so than I could have ever found out on my own (I've yet to reach it; though).

<comment><USER14> Thank you. For those that are ultra-curious about this, please make it a point to read "The Biology of Belief" by Bruce Lipton. Quick summary there is - "Garbage in; Garbage Out." :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And what's wrong with going "nowhere in life", then? What the hell is this "mediocre life" and how could anyone define it for anyone but for himself only?

If there were external standards who could define what's best for me and what should I become? Who _could_ do that especially if I'm smart, smarter than most?

On the other hand, if the author didn't only talk about smart people who he thinks live a mediocre life but also about smart people who themselves think they live a mediocre life, the article could just have been renamed as "Smart People Not Happy With Their Lives Either".

<comment><USER19> When I was in my 20s, I ran across a man who'd been a 'successful' salesman for 15 years. He made a special point to tell me how he regretted all the time he'd spent away from home and not being around to see his kids grow up.

We all have different ways of evaluating our satisfaction and what fulfills us. I'd rather fail at a difficult task than succeed at a simpler one... because the difficult one engages me, the simpler one bores me.

I'd rather take a walk in the woods than drive a Lamborghini. Rather read a good book than take an expensive trip to see yet another pile of rocks.

YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are 3 golden triangles of success one can examine, whereby an increase in 1 factor puts pressure for an increase in another. These triangles are:

project: scope, time, budget

ego: fame, fortune, power

wellbeing: health, family relations, work life

For work, this means a happy work life, that is, doing the work one does best, doing it well, not overdoing it, and being paid appropriately: maximizing flow. So work in the wellbeing triangle is a reward, not a burden.

Here are some rules:

\- within a triangle, if you increase 1 factor, it leads to an increase in another, but if you increase it too much it leads to cessation in another, or a decrease. EG: pump too much money into a project, and too many people may be hired and deadlines are missed.

\- too much pressure in a triangle will force a period of chaos until a new triangle can be formed with higher capacity. EG: your family relations may be so great that you can have more children but you are not making enough money to allow it, so family relations can have limits until work life improves.

\- there are connections between the triangles, but the links are uncertain. EG: one person may trash their family relations and work life in order to experience a benefit of fame. This may in turn lead to new relations more relevant to that fame, and then a better family life.

My point: success is multi-factored. Success in one area doesn't necessarily mean success in other areas. Also, the road to success itself is a meta- success not to be overlooked.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'll just say I agree with some of the points mentioned in the article, but here are some my additions:

Always have segmented goals. For instance, I have a few for the next 6 months (learn a couple new programming languages, hit the gym 5 days a week, get a faster time on my 5000 meter run), and always focus on them; they will change, some times you'll pick up a new 6 month goal, or it may extend to another segment, but always have a short time span where you are improving yourself and your skills in some way, always.

Then have focus on the 2 to 5 year goal span, where you are slowly acquiring a larger set of skills sets that work in tandem to meet a more complex goal set. For instance, getting a side project profitable and running. Doing this could include a series of 6 months goals that work together to reach that 2 year goal (getting more unix admin experience, finishing your nth business/marketing book, creating a network of partner and commercial relationships).

Then you always have a set of goals that you want to reach 10 or 20 years from now, that are a solid mix of personal and professional ambitions that you know are attainable if you plan ahead.

Everything takes time, and the worst thing you can do is wasting it by not focusing on what needs to be done now in order to move to the next stage in life.

Not to mention doing all of this while maintaining a good spirit, sane mind, physical fitness, and personal fulfillment.

It's all possible, but you have to keep your eye on the prize, watch out for pitfalls, and don't let minor setbacks derail your ultimate ambitions. It's all incremental. You can't do everything at once, otherwise you set yourself up for failure. You must work slowly, realizing those progressions, and building on them until you're living the dream.

</comment><comment><USER22> Leaving aside the fact that it is really hard to judge and distinguish between "nowhere" and "somewhere", is there any evidence that a significant number smart folks go nowhere? More than 20%? More than 50%? 80%? 90%?

In my experience (anecdotal), smart people tend to share two distinct features: they are lazy and they are effective. They are only as lazy as being effective allows them to be. By effective I mean that they attain their desired outcomes.

In short, most smart people go where they want to go.

</comment><comment><USER23> Here is a fun trick: imagine Bernard Madoff, Kenneth Lay, or George Bush Jr. reading this. All of these people "went somewhere", but I certainly don't aspire to be any of them.

<comment><USER24> "What if you become a really lousy President of the United States" doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling argument for not trying to go somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really like your posts, Rajesh! When I first found your blog here on HN I just kept reading.

With that said, I think a lot of people don't really understand what you mean, perhaps because they have their own pre-conceived notions of what success is, or they might think that you look kind of slick with that shirt and sunglasses on... ;)

I think what Rajesh is after is that our world is a mess right now (at least this is what I feel) because lots of smart people/people with leadership qualities/creative people born in the 30s/40s/50s have spent their energy on things that are good for themselves, while not advancing the world.

If many smart people do what they can to make the world a little bit better, we will get a huge payoff.

And we need that.

<comment><USER26> >> perhaps because they have their own pre-conceived notions of what success is

There is no absolute definition of success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. That was the first thing I thought of when I read this. Although Gladwell doesn't specifically point out 9 points in his book, most of these points can be easily inferred from the anecdotes that Gladwell presents.

Thought provoking stuff nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER28> "you can't work on luck directly. You can work on everything else and improve the chances of getting lucky."

Well said, reminds me of a nice deconstruction of luck by Marc Andreessen: <http://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur>

</comment><comment><USER29> Family.

<comment><USER14> Success and family need not be mutually exclusive but yes, family comes first :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems to equate "smart" with academic success. What about the smart people who are not academically successful? Some of them go somewhere; others go nowhere, but they'd have a different profile.

One that I've seen all over the place:

10\. A smart person with the misfortune of ending up in the average class is likely to be noticed by a teacher and put on the honors track. A smart person who ends up in a mediocre department of a mediocre company (lack of ambition, poor interviewing skills, geography, low self-esteem) is likely to fail out, and have a damaged resume after doing so. He's now competing against fresh 22-year-olds, and he's a 24-year-old who worked some unimpressive accounting job and got fired.

School is designed to notice and nurture talent. Sometimes it fails, but it makes a solid and noble effort, and probably succeeds more often than it fails. By contrast, the corporate world is much less interested in, or capable with, this process, because business people are generally bad at telling apart the few who actually are talented from the many who think they are. Also, the corporate world is only interested in nurturing talent that satisfies an immediate need of the business.

<comment><USER4> I had lots of these "person I know is smart but sucks at <school/work/relationships/life/etc.>" chats with my father while growing up.

My father always responded, "if they were so smart, why didn't they just use their intelligence to figure out how to succeed at those things?"

<comment><USER30> because it wasn't a priority? They feel their talents are better used elsewhere?</comment></comment></comment>


SpaceX launches 1st commercial rocket into orbit - <AUTHOR> http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iF-6npNsKa0n_7aLm8tJvuHWt4JgD93G1LC00 <comment><USER2> I watched flight 3 (live webcam) and on this one I was even more tense. It was like watching a football match for space pioneers. Would they win?

Yes they did, and Elon Musk was hilariously incomprendible, probably from relief.

Screw the Chinese, let's hear it for assembly line space travel.

<comment><USER3> This is AWESOME. It could change everything, space-wise. No more being held hostage by the Defense Contractors or the Russians to get to orbit.

I think the Falcon 1 is about 1/10th to 1/7th the cost of the nearest competitor at $3million to orbit (compared to ~26million for Pegasus).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What we need is a good, practical economic reason for any of this.

I wonder how far space tourism can take us? It's a good place to start because it'll put a lot of pressure on making it easy. Training periods, prices, competence levels will have some downward pressure.

If a decent little space tourism industry evolves, it'll be a great base to build on.

<comment><USER5> Historically, people have colonized just for the change of scenery.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown,_Virginia>

<comment><USER6> The moon isn't too rich in breathtaking views and beautiful flora and fauna... not to mention the lack of oxygen :P

<comment><USER7> Isn't the view of Earth breathtaking?

<comment><USER8> I guess the argument is that you can see that from space anyway.. But The view of Earth from the moon would be better than any hotel on the planet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We also need a good way to clean up all that junk up there. I've head that its possible to start a cascade effect: smash one satellite, the others are so fragile that the shards will smash many more, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER10> Finally some good news from SpaceX!

Way to go guys!

</comment><comment><USER2> One thing to wonder is who's going to come up with the law to determine how often the price per kilo to orbit halves? Assuming it's now been lowered to 10% over government 'efforts'.

<comment><USER11> That's a huge assumption. Let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet: Orbital Sciences thought they could create cheap launches with Pegasus too. As failures occurred, customers requested more and more safeguards and testing and the cost per launch rose correspondingly.

SpaceX has done an awesome job, but there's a ways to go before the system is confirmed as reliable with consistently reproducible performance.

(For what it's worth, I think they'll do it in time, but it may cost quite a bit more yet)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the update on previous attempts. I do think that you could send habitat modules and oxygen tanks up without a huge cost if the rocket blows up. With people, safety becomes crucial. With satellites, less crucial, but still expensive if it fails.

<comment><USER11> Folks (myself included) have been "thinking" that since the 60s. If you put some commercial numbers on that problem, you'll see it's a lot harder than it looks.

Satellite launch failures alone can cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars -- and that's not even touching the issue of revenue lost to the broadcast company who bought the thing (and waited 3-4 years to see it constructed and launched). Although awful regulation has played a role in preventing launch vehicles from becoming a truly commercial market, The Man hasn't been the only issue keeping launch costs high -- this stuff is hard!

<comment><USER5> _Satellite launch failures alone can cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars_

Satellite costs are driven partially by launch costs. If launches are expensive, then satellites need to be highly reliable. If launches are cheap, then satellites need not be so reliable, and therefore can be cheaper.

Insurance averages out the costs of launch failures.

Dropping the costs of satellites improves the market and introduces the possibility of mass-production, further dropping the costs and further increasing demand, which further drops the costs through economies of scale, etc.

      .

We know what can happen, economically, because we have experience with mass- launchings in the form of the V2.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=v2+rocket+%2413000>

 _A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away

Then, starting with the US$13000 marginal cost of a V2, we arrive at a cost of ...

One analogy in particular regarding V2 rockets, Nazis, and ignoring the use ... The recurring cost was $13000 a launch for those vehicles. ..._

<comment><USER11> That document is specious. Getting something to orbit is a lot harder than launching a whack of V2s (holding nothing but an explosive payload) across the English Channel and the huge market for rockets foreseen in 1993 (when that paper was written) disappeared with the bankruptcy of the Iridium, Orbcomm, Globalstar, Odyssey, etc. communication constellations. Today we can mass- produce missiles which are much more effective than the V2, but we still cannot create cheap orbital vehicles.

Mass production and cheap launches would be a sure-fire money-maker, right? That it hasn't happened in a half-century of western rocket technology should raise a bright red flag that something other than willpower or a global conspiracy is keeping it from happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was that ice on the screen at about 5m?

</comment><comment><USER5> Video (09:59):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To-XOPgaGsQ>

<comment><USER13> I only have two words for this video.

Awe Inspiring.

I had to send it to everyone I know, Thanks for the link.

<comment><USER5> You're welcome. Here is the 40-minute version that includes Elon Musk's post- launch address to the SpaceX employees in Hawthorne, California, and post- launch interview:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FQhtMrUQlE>

<comment><USER13> Thankyou again.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I pulled a 1,500-year-old sword out of a lake - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/19/experience-pulled-a-1500-year-old-sword-lake-saga-vanecek <comment><USER2> Great story!</comment>


Easy cloaking with superconductors and magnetic tape - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123461-easy-cloaking-with-superconductors-and-magnetic-tape <comment> Tim-Boss EM cloaking at near absolute zero has always been possible, just waiting for the day when one of these stories involves EM within the visible light band rather than a simple magnetic field!

</comment><comment><USER2> it is not easy and it is not in visible light specter.</comment>


Scripting in Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://ebzzry.io/en/script-lisp/ <comment><USER3> It's not common lisp, but most of my Emacs use has been as a shell scripting alternative.

Workflow being based around interactive improvement of a script from a simple interactive-macro through to things that are effectively done as shell scripts.

The end result is something that can be run as a shell script, although translating to another language i.e. CL, Ruby, Go, etc. is the usual path for me to make better use / performance.

The old joke about Emacs being an operating system that needs a good editor is on need of a reboot.

Emacs is an interactive computing and development environment with half a dozen good text editors.

Factual isn't as funny though.

<comment><USER4> Emacs is my favourite software, but elisp is one of my least favourite lisps. The other day I stumbled upon Shen language after some years and noticed it now has BSD license and an elisp implementation. I tried to add it to spacemacs and, to my surprise, it just worked. When I have some spare time the next thing I'll do will be to learn some Shen and see if for shell scripting it is an improvement over elisp.

<comment><USER5> Wow! thanks for pointing out there is an Elisp Shen implementation!

<comment><USER6> Erlang too, fwiw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm somewhat baffled that Hy didn't gain any traction.

Let's review the facts:

\- A lot of people love Python.

\- Plenty of people love Lisps, afaict with a sizeable overlap with the first group.

\- Hy, which is a Lisp on the Python platform, has no popularity whatsoever compared to other Lisps like Clojure.

The heck?

<comment><USER8> Hy may have changed since I last looked at it, but when I had looked at it, Hy was more of an s-expression syntax bolted onto python.

Some random thoughts on why this matters:

Clojure is very much _not_ a thin s-expression layer for java; that would have been terrible (Python is more like lisp than java which is why Hy is tenable whatsoever).

In particular, CL style macros with out some first-class concept of symbols are a footgun[1], but I'm sure I could find other issues.

Another item that can't be ignored is that Hy selected the clojure syntax, which is going to be a turn-off for anyone coming from Lisp or Scheme.

Finally, there are hundreds of thin s-expression layers on top of existing languages, and most of them are terrible; Hy has done nothing to stand out from this crowd, so most lispers will not look closely at it.

1: See [https://youtu.be/cPNkH-7PRTk?t=4786](https://youtu.be/cPNkH-7PRTk?t=4786) for Rich's discussion of how he managed this issue in Clojure.

<comment><USER7> I'm actually interested in what other problems make Hy and similar languages infeasible. Even if a brief overview, as food for thought on the matter.

<comment><USER8> They aren't infeasible; a real lisp could target Python. However, just bolting on lisp syntax to python ends up in an uncanny valley of "not python" and also "not lisp."

I would actually recommend watching the entire youtube video I posted earlier (Clojure for Lisp programmers). Rich talks about a lot of the design decisions that went into Clojure. Some decisions I agree with, some I don't, but there was thought into creating a unified whole _and_ he was clearly aware of work that had gone before, even when he chose to do things differently.

Note also that Clojure was his _third_ attempt at doing a lisp/java interop, so there was a lot of previous experience backing many of those decisions.

Lastly, it's _really_ easy to make a bad lisp-frontend for a language and a massive amount of work to make a good one. This is well known by anyone who has been in the lisp community for a while (if for no other reason than they themselves have made a bad one) so for better or worse, such frontends tend to be ignored.

<comment><USER9> A good way to target a Lisp to Python might be to forget the Python AST and target its virtual machine directly.

The compiler could itself be written in its own target dialect, and bootstrapped with some existing Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the first time I've seen content provided in Esperanto like this. Pretty cool.

Even cooler is that the Esperanto version seems to be the original, and then I suppose it was translated to English a year later.

Huh, now I see the whole blog defaults to Esperanto.

I wonder how much of the net takes that stand of Esperanto-first.

</comment><comment><USER11> I use scripting extensively in Clojure, both on the JVM and on Planck (JS). You have the choice of slower startup times but a ton of libraries to do anything you want, versus short start-up times but less libraries, using the same language. I use [https://github.com/l3nz/cli- matic](https://github.com/l3nz/cli-matic) as a wrapper and it works on both.

<comment><USER12> Using modern Clojure's clj is so much easier than the CL procedure.

<comment><USER13> Until you have to deal with unintelligible Java stack traces.

<comment><USER14> They are intelligible if you know Java and Clojure 1.10 improved stack traces.

<comment><USER15> Yup.

Common Lisp stack traces tend to be no better, anyway, at least with SBCL and CCL. Up to 90% of a trace you see in the inspector can be compiler/runtime infrastructure. Given that macros don't show up, only their expansions, the backtrace can be full of stuff like SB-KERNEL:%FUNCTION-THAT-I-DONT-RECOGNIZE- BUT-MACROEXPANDED-FROM-SOMETHING-I-KNOW.

Like in Java, most of the time the top few lines are the ones related to your code, but just like in Java, there are exceptions, in which the source of the problem ends up in the middle of the backtrace, surrounded by infrastructure frames.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a great guide, and solving quick real problems is how people get started programming in general.

I think seeing scsh for the first time made me realize just how good & bad shells are.

<comment><USER17> > I think seeing scsh for the first time made me realize just how good & bad > shells are.

Oddly enough, just last week I was trying to do some scsh-like things with Common Lisp, and I ended up banging my ahead against its case-mapping behaviour (Common Lisp upcases input by default).

There's definitely an opening for a Lisp version of something like scsh. There's some tricky stuff to be aware of (e.g. SBCL's RUN-PROGRAM puts processes in a different process group, which mean C-c does the wrong thing), but done well it could really be awesome.

<comment><USER8> Setting case to invert by default fixes a lot of those problems (you just invert the case again before passing the string onto the shell).

Also, for doing many shell things fork/execv is the only thing that gives you sufficient control, so I suggest avoiding run-program and using those instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recommend roswell [https://github.com/roswell/roswell](https://github.com/roswell/roswell) .

</comment><comment><USER19> Pretty nice considering the speed and capabilities of [SB]CL relative to other mainstream scripting languages.

<comment><USER15> I shy away from CL scripting due to runtime startup time, though if you compile it down to binary it's manageable (if one doesn't mind a 50MB executable).

That said, I wonder why nobody tried a "hybrid" solution, in which the multi- call binary is implemented as a resident, self-restarting process, that executes each request in a lightweight sandbox. Actual shell commands would then be implemented as a request to that process, and incur only the costs of setting up IO streams on startup.

<comment><USER19> what CL implementation ? sbcl ? I don't know what's the leanest CL out there (even if not the most featured, since we're talking about short scripts)

<comment><USER15> SBCL mostly. I probably should give GCL a try here. SBCL is fast as hell once it starts up, and _bare_ SBCL starts up quickly, but once you add Quicklisp and start loading external systems, the startup time gets noticeable - <USER2> again, this gets reduced quickly iff you dump a binary of your image with dependencies already loaded. The one CL script I wrote that I actually use[0] (for controlling Hue lamps) I have dumped into binary just to cut down startup time to below the point I notice.

\--

[0] - [https://github.com/TeMPOraL/hju/](https://github.com/TeMPOraL/hju/)

<comment><USER19> SBCL does have a tiny delay (akin to a raw JVM). CLISP is near interactive though. But that's without quicklisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Where is your piping example?

<comment><USER21> I do not use cl-launch, but for some tasks at job I wanted to pipe programs, and just wanted to try implementing something myself. The with-pipeline macro creates temporary fifos to connect programs and threads (random example):

        (let ((counter 0))
          (with-pipeline ()
            (program "ls" "-1la")
            (lambda-line (line)
              (format t "~x~%" (incf counter (length line))))
            (program "sed" "-n" "s/A/_/g ; /__/ p"))
          counter)

Outputs and return:

        2__8
        15399

Macroexpansion:

       (catch :pipeline
         (block nil
           (let* ((#:input%2195 (pipeline::ensure-stream nil :input nil))
                  (#:output%2196 (pipeline::ensure-stream t :output nil))
                  (#:error%2197
                   (pipeline::ensure-stream :output :error #:output%2196)))
             (let ((#:g2199 (program "ls" "-1la"))
                   (#:g2200
                    (lambda-line (line)
                      (format t "~x~%" (incf counter (length line)))))
                   (#:g2201 (program "sed" "-n" "s/a/_/g ; /__/ p")))
               (pipeline.pipes:with-pipes% (#:pipes2198 2)
                 (lastcar
                  (mapcar #'pipeline.filters:clean
                          (list
                           (pipeline.filters:spawn #:g2199 :input #:input%2195 :output
                                                   (pipeline.pipes:pipe-out
                                                    (svref #:pipes2198 0))
                                                   :error #:error%2197 :wait nil)
                           (pipeline.filters:spawn #:g2200 :input
                                                   (pipeline.pipes:pipe-in
                                                    (svref #:pipes2198 0))
                                                   :output
                                                   (pipeline.pipes:pipe-out
                                                    (svref #:pipes2198 1))
                                                   :error #:error%2197 :wait nil)
                           (pipeline.filters:spawn #:g2201 :input
                                                   (pipeline.pipes:pipe-in
                                                    (svref #:pipes2198 1))
                                                   :output #:output%2196 :error
                                                   #:error%2197 :wait t)))))))))

[https://github.com/christophejunke/pipeline](https://github.com/christophejunke/pipeline)</comment></comment>


Udacity and Google team up to offer a free course in Android fundamentals - <AUTHOR> https://www.udacity.com/course/ud853

<comment><USER2> Doesn't look free to me. It appears to be $150/month.</comment>


Aussie ISP gets eye-watering IPv4 bill, shifts to IPv6 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/04/aussie_broadband_ipv6/ <comment><USER2> > we are now looking at carrier-grade NAT vendors as a longer term solution > rather then buying more IPv4 space

That's even worse. I read a definition of Internet long back which I vaguely remember

A network of devices where each device is assigned with unique IP address so that they can communicate with each other. No central party is needed for two devices to connect with each other!

This always fascinated me. But NAT breaks that definition or was the definition wrong? It no longer holds true. IPV6 is the only hope. I've wrote more about it here

[https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_broken_promise_of_internet/](https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_broken_promise_of_internet/)

<comment><USER3> Also IPv6 makes scanning the address space infeasible. This is the only realistic hope to get a bit more security in IoT.

<comment><USER4> That seems like security through obscurity.

I have other hopes to get IoT more secure. Open source firmware, for starters. Support contracts where you don't buy the hardware but buy a working (and insecure isn't working) device.

The problem with IPv6 is that it is a chicken-egg problem. Those who get CGNAT plus native IPv6 are part of the unfortunate bunch who are not using native IPv4 (and therefore miss out on certain IPv4-only services). Meanwhile, the IPv4-only services are causing issues for CGNAT. The logical conclusion is that everyone who currently offers IPv4-only should (and should've been) focusing on adopting native IPv6 dual stack. The continuous procrastination, out of greed and egocentric thinking, is what caused the current situation in the first place.

My ISP tried to shove CGNAT with native IPv6 through my throat. My modem was unstable. BitTorrent didn't work well anymore. I could not use services over LTE anymore (my LTE provider, actually same provider as my cable, used IPv4-only back then; don't know now). I relied on that to work. So they gave me what I had before: IPv4 only. Why not dual stack first?

<comment><USER3> Having to guess a 128bit AES key is also security through obscurity then!

Though it doesn't give any protection against local scanning.

<comment><USER5> I was about to comment exactly that.

This is security by realistic approximation of compute capacities and basic probability math.

Aka. good security

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be nice if the Aussie broadband market would start enabling IPv6 but the pessimist in me thinks they'll just turn on CG-NAT and call it a day.

Since most consumers don't care, and CG-NAT bandaids the problem I don't see how the market will be motivated to spend the time/money to bring us IPv6. We're probably going to be stuck with shitty bandaid solutions for a while

<comment><USER7> I'm visiting Australia at the moment and the state of internet connectivity in central Melbourne is pretty poor.

Very slow internet at my AirBnBs, generally very poor WiFi availability and speeds in public, the co-working space I'm in (that is otherwise excellent) is a similar speed to my home connection in London.

Above all, latency makes some websites considerably less pleasant to use, and SSH to most places is painful. I know that's not something the local market can necessarily fix though.

<comment><USER8> As someone who moved to Australia from London, I can confirm: the latency is the real killer.

I'm one of the few lucky ones with FTTP which gets me close to 100mbit speeds. But as soon as I have to connect to a server outside of Oz I am pretty much back to (high) ADSL speeds. Latency to the US and Singapore (the two closest international backbones) is around 150-200ms. It's around double that for Europe. At peak times those backbones get very congested.

Funnily the only country I've been to that has faster and more consistent 4g was Japan.

<comment><USER7> 100MB is still not great for business premises. At home in London I'm on 80MB fibre, and get ~76MB during peak times. At work in London we have 1GB (and typically get 1.2GB) between ~80 people. This co-working space is ~85MB for a similar number of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This has nothing to do with native IPv6. They are putting 1000s of customers behind one single IPv4 address which is a nightmare for everyone involved (think about port forwarding not working anymore, etc.)

<comment><USER10> What makes you think they'll use just one address and not a pool?

<comment><USER9> I didn't say they were using just one address. I was saying they are putting 100s or 1000s of customers behind one single address (which is happening in Europe for years already, with UPC for example). Of course they have several IPv4 addresses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have much sympathy. What I read is an ISP saying "gee, all those IPv4 addresses we use internally are costing us a mint, whatever shall I do?".

I see lots of comments here about the merits of IPv4 v IPv6 v CG-NAT. That's all irrelevant. Aussie Broadband, like all Australian ISP's, provide their customers with a router configured to do NAT. If like me you don't want that your on your own you are better off purchasing your own gear. They won't support you, but at least you will be familiar with it. For some ISP's like Optus you have no choice - they've crippled the firmware in their routers so you can't change it.

Given the router is doing NAT they can use any carrier. And indeed, some Australian NBN ISP's use IPv4/DHCP, some use PPPoE and others were at one point doing QinQ and of course for pre-NBN ADSL connections it was ATM. Whatever, if your router is doing NAT it doesn't doesn't effect the customer one way or the other. IPv6 is a perfectly reasonable choice for a carrier in those circumstances, and for bonus points it means you can give your customer routeable IP addresses. (It would simplify my home setup considerably.) And it doesn't use a single paid for IPv4 for internal routing!

As for the hand wringing about the price - we've known this was coming for decades. We've figured out the solution and it's been available for purchase for years. They've almost certainly replaced their gear at least once in those years. They definitely replaced the routers they've handed out to customers because of the NBN rollout. If they didn't replace it with something IPv6 capable that's piss poor planning - particularly so because unlike most countries the NBN roll out gave Australian ISP's the perfect opportunity to do it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sometimes I worry if ISPs aren't incentivized to chose IPv6 over just having CG-NAT. Of the ISPs that are available in my area, some are doing just CG-NAT and no IPv6.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have Comcast cable Internet in California. I own my own cable modem, and my own router (an Asus RT-AC68U).

Over a year ago, I decided to check out if I could do IPv6. And indeed I could! I am now getting a dynamically-allocated /64 block, which is used to make allocations to my desktop and my phone. From my perspective, IPv6 just works!

I hope, in two or so years, they come back to the same conference with a report of how much traffic has moved to IPv6.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the UK, BT officially enabled IPv6 but it is a "maybe" IPv6. Sometimes it is enabled, sometimes not. It is 2019....

<comment><USER14> My advice would be get a better ISP. I have rock solid IPv6 here in the UK with a /48 and a RIPE record.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately where I live there is only one fibre to the premise provider and that's not going to change. I don't care about IPv6 enough to swap fibre to the premise for DSL.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't your FTTP provider give IPv6 then?

I have a BT Openreach fibre, and A&A give IPV6, and several v4s

<comment><USER3> I use BT openreach too. They do but as I said patchy connectivity. I see that when I run nslookup in windows which isn't smart enough to fall back to IPv4 DNS when v6 is not reachable. It seems to be on and off.

<comment><USER15> You're on A&A and getting patchy connectivity?

<comment><USER3> I am on BT openreach. What is A&A?

I get patchy v6 connectivity. v4 is stable.

<comment><USER14> [https://www.aa.net.uk/](https://www.aa.net.uk/) I'm using it and get rock solid IPv6. Also they have actual people who know what they are doing manning the phones.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Top Articles in Future - <AUTHOR> https://app.pipfeed.com/category/future/ <comment><AUTHOR> So I created this blog to show parsed articles from all over the Internet. This one is just a list of top articles on category "Future"</comment>


Ask HN: What is HN reading? - <AUTHOR> Interested in seeing what others are reading. My pick for now:<p>A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities ) <comment><USER2> At any given time, I have about 20-30 books tagged as "currently reading" on Goodreads[0]. So, something I've started, read at least a bit of and then stuck a bookmark in.

Realistically, at any given time there are 3 or 4 books that I'm dedicating meaningful cycles to and expect to finish "soon'ish".

Right now the ones I'm seriously working on are:

 _Superintelligence_ \- I've heard so much about this book and keep hearing people talk about the dangers of AI, and while I already have an opinion on the subject, I thought it would be interesting to read what Bostrom had to say.

 _Abductive Inference Models for Diagnostic Problem-Solving_ \- an older book on an approach to automated Abductive Inference called "Parsimonious Covering Theory". I'm not just "reading" the book, as in reading it straight through like a novel, I'm actually working on re-implementing PCT using a more modern software stack, with a goal of doing some research into possible ways to use abductive inference in conjunction with other techniques (neural networks, reinforcement learning, graph-based knowledge-representation, etc.)

 _Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach_ \- such a class in the field, I felt like it was time to finally sit down and the read the whole book, cover to cover.

[0]: [https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/33942804-phillip- rhodes](https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/33942804-phillip-rhodes)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much. Following your good reads account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Currently [https://caml.inria.fr/pub/old_caml_site/FAQ/FAQ_DEBUTANT- eng...](https://caml.inria.fr/pub/old_caml_site/FAQ/FAQ_DEBUTANT-eng.html)

I just finished Sphere, and came away a bit disappointed. Before that I read I Am Legend, which was excellent! It has nothing to do with the movie at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Even though it's been out for a while, I finally read "The E-Myth Revisited." The concepts are simple and it gets a little long in the final quarter of the book, but in general it is a fantastic book that every entrepreneur should read at least once.

<comment><AUTHOR> Link?

<comment><USER2> [http://michaelegerbercompanies.com/web/the-e-myth- library/](http://michaelegerbercompanies.com/web/the-e-myth-library/)

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


Remote unlock of LUKS encrypted Ubuntu 18.04.x Server with dropbear SSH server - <AUTHOR> https://hamy.io/post/0009/how-to-install-luks-encrypted-ubuntu-18.04.x-server-and-enable-remote-unlocking/ <comment><USER2> The danger here is that anyone with physical access can grab the keys used for the SSH server and set up a man-in-the-middle attack to grab the encryption passphrase.</comment>


Germany's coronavirus anomaly: high infection rates but few deaths - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/c0755b30-69bb-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3 <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/0oFD3](http://archive.is/0oFD3)</comment>


Review my App: Phone Analytics for your BlackBerry - <AUTHOR>

A special HN build of my app: http://mld.dreamhosters.com/bb/Phonalyzr.jad
It should work on everything except a Strom.
A little more info can be found here: http://phonalyzr.com/ <comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea, though I'm not sure how often I would want to see an 'analysis' of my call history. However, I suspect their are other things that you can do for users with that same data. For instance, you recognize the 'most called' numbers, so rather than the phone book being just alphabetical, maybe it would be functional to have it first display 'most called', that sort of thing.

Or maybe it has value for businesses when you combine the data from many of their devices. Just a few thoughts. Clearly you've built the technology, i'm just wondering what is the best application of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get too many text messages and I only open a few of them. Maybe predict which text messages I will open based upon the sender and the content, and then bubble those to the top.</comment>


Snapchat's decline and the secret joy of internet ghost towns - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/18/17366528/snapchat-decline-internet-ghost-towns <comment><USER2> _One of my friends who is still resolutely on Snapchat has told me that it gives her, "a space to be visible just to some people, to not have to share everything with everyone in order to share anything with anyone. That, to me, is too high a cost, and it's a cost that so many other platforms require you to pay."_

One of the main reasons why I still use Snapchat.

<comment><USER3> What I don't understand about snapchat is its functionally useless. Me and a small group of friends send funny images and like the silly bitmoji's but we never have a proper conversation on there or exchange anything of value. I don't really see it as a true social media.

<comment><USER4> What you just described (useless jokes) is not useless at all!

<comment><USER5> It's certainly not a business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just asked several friends, all millennials, if they thought snapchat use was declining among their friend groups (semi disparate), and all said no and were surprised I asked. Obviously a biased sample, but just another data point.

<comment><USER7> As a millenial myself, I've seen Snapchat usage stay roughly the same, but I've seen an _explosion_ in Instagram usage. So IMO it's really just that Snapchat is stagnating relative to Instagram, and stagnation is death for a social network.

<comment><USER8> I'm convinced the death of Snapchat will be its failure to expand to new international markets like South America. Insta, FaceBook, WhatsApp, etc (all FB owned) have exploded and maintained themselves overseas. Meanwhile, a year ago reports came up that Evan Spiegel of Snapchat said that his app is not for poor countries like India.

That hubris is dangerous. I can't wait for the company to go under.

<comment><USER9> India is fairly unique in how bad the cell phone internet is. Snapchat is a video & image heavy app even compared to instagram or facebook, which is why the app design doesn't work well. Get rid of the media richness and your back to facebook.

<comment><USER10> When I visited my family in the Philippines, I was asking my younger relatives what social networks/apps they used. When I asked about Snapchat, they said nobody really used it. It made sense in the way how data plans are structured over there, along with how Facebook's Internet.org has really gained a lot of usage in the country in their partnership with the carriers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Back in the 2000s I was probably the only one in my friend group who had any sort of presence on the internet. There was no way I could convince any of my friends to start a blog or join LiveJournal. Even sites like Flickr was a stretch.

Instead there were some old ICQ accounts that no one used anymore, and occasionally someone would send out a group email with some photos attached.

And then it's 2007, Facebook appears out of nowhere, and suddenly all of my friends are sharing like mad on the internet, as is everyone else.

My first impression was that this is great. Finally my friends are on the internet. Facebook is like Internet for Dummies. Six months later I would deactivate my Facebook account.

I do miss LiveJournal though, or at least the idea of it.

<comment><USER12> So do I. Made a few very close friends via LJ. All non technical oddly enough.

Up til that point, people would type. If they were having a bad time they'd type A LOT. You couldn't help getting to know them better than you did.

Then Facebook etc arrived, and now it's "Life's shit. Inbox me", if that, or a photo of lunch/cat/coffee.

I think we took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another "secret joy" is getting in early to new networks before the brands come rent seeking. Telegram communities have this feel, though many are invite only. Mastodon may be the next big one, and has a bit of an early Tumblr vibe.

<comment><USER3> I really find Mastodon really empty. I had a look and the first things that popped up into my federated feed were escorts.

<comment><USER14> It depends on where you look and who you follow. Swifter.at became a refuge for sex workers and is one of the larger instances.

However, you can filter instances, and/or sign up on an instance that blocks switter users.

There is activity, especially if you sign up on a huge instance like mastodon.social (although I don't recommend this). instances.social lists all active instances that you can peruse through.

<comment><USER15> Is it easy to run your own instance and be highly selective about federation? How about not being listed on lists of instances?

<comment><USER14> It's easy to run your own instance. Mastodon provides a docker image, provided you have a server or VPS that can handle its asset compilation. I think you can get by with 2gb minimum. You can filter any instances that you don't want to federate with.

I'm not sure what you mean about not being listed on lists of instances. If you mean not federating your own instance, well, that goes against the entire premise of the fediverse / federation. Running your instance means it will propagate. Your posts will show up in the instances of whoever is following you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If the allusion here is that Instagram is a lot better, anecdotal experience of one person suggests that Instagram is no different. More people seem to be creating Instagram accounts to promote stuff or to create a brand.

People tend to follow many others just in the hope of a Follow Back or getting more engagement on their posts. It's like Twitter all over again. The number of likes that posts get seems to be extremely low compared to the number of followers (except those who are celebrities of some sort or were already famous for something). The likes also tend to be done with an expectation of getting more likes. What's worse than the number of likes? That'd be the number of comments. Most people's posts, except those of a personal nature intended for (real) friends, tend to get no comments at all. It looks like a ghost town. Or rather, a zombie town, with the inhabitants chanting "follows", "likes", and so on.

There's way too much content, way too small screens to consume them on (photos and videos), and way too less time for it all.

</comment><comment><USER17> Every young person I know and see around me in general is using snapchat as a primary means of communication. The real user base is not boomers, gen-xers, and perhaps not even millennials but rather gen z. As such, it will take some time for them to grow into their full earning potential as a generation. If snap continues to innovate and meet the needs of this user base, they could do very well in the future.

This also assumes snap hires people who know how to run a successful tech business. They may need to move their HQ and primary strategic operations away from LA and up to SV or SF to take advantage of the concentration of tech talent (not just devs but execs, sales, product mgmt, devops, marketing, etc).

<comment><USER18> I find this hard to believe (I'm not doubting you, your experiences are valid)

Snapchat used to be where gen-z were, but now with Instagram "adopting" the story format it became easy for all those folks to post stories on IG itself.

<comment><USER17> They are using IG and snapchat for different things. These two apps are not seen as mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another example of the transient nature of social technology companies (aol, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter [fill in the blank]) compared to algorithmically founded technology companies (Google).

</comment><comment><USER20> I use Google Plus in a similar way, except as a link blog. Hardly anyone is listening. At first that was a concern, but I've come to enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Remember the echo in Apples old 90's social network eworld? There was never anyone there, it was like being in an empty shopping mall

</comment><comment><USER22> The amateur porn sharing platform tried to expand it's scope too much.

</comment><comment><USER23> I still can't believe you can't look at Snapchat in a browser/desktop, makes it useless for me. Instagram is far more accessible.

</comment><comment><USER24> urbex of the web?

</comment><comment><USER25> Is Snap considered a doomed failure now? It got to IPO and tanked, did early investor/owners effectively bilk the sharebuying public?</comment>


Code Anthem - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeanthem.com/ <comment><USER2> Yet another web form that erroneously prohibits the plus character (+) in email addresses.

<comment><USER3> Ha! Out of the frying pan and into the pot. I went from too loose to too stringent.

Fixed now. Thanks for heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are a LOT of online judges out there. How is this really different?

<comment><USER3> That's a good question.

Code Anthem is different because...

1) Programmers are ranked based on how they do relative to everyone else, not pass/fail on some random, meaningless level. (like certifications)

2) The only thing that is rewarded is your skill at problem solving with code (ie. not coming back to the site every day). (like SO, RentaCoder)

3) By providing a profile page and badges, programmers can take control of their own career by proactively demonstrating their skill level.

4) Employers can contact job seekers based on their skill level, which is a recruitment process for programmers that -finally- makes sense.

<comment><USER4> The online judges I'm talking about are like UVa. <http://uva.onlinejudge.org/> People usually use it for ACM-ICPC training. Every Oj I know of can fulfill 1 and 2.

For 3, the innovation is the badge system.

No.4 is nice, it closes the gap between OJ users and employers. That's something OJ's lack.

Topcoder does all of what you told, except a badge system. That's just a small difference. You need something better to compete with Topcoder.

Maybe your platform support more languages? One can't hope to hire lisp programmers from looking though Topcoder's competitions records.

I hope this site become successful. I really don't like Topcoder's interface. xD

<comment><USER3> The largest difference between Code Anthem and TopCoder is that Code Anthem ranks you between 0-10 compared to other programmers, whereas TopCoder is a never-ending point system that rewards average programmers for spending more time on the site.

While certainly TopCoder is used by a fair number of people, I've never met a professional programmer "in the wild" that used it. The dollar prizes are actually a disincentive to well-paid programmers who can make that money guaranteed doing consulting, rather than throw their name in the hat in a contest.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Building a geeky home - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
Now that I have enough connectivity in my village. I have decided that I will build a nice comfortable home for myself and work remotely. I already have an old house (almost 100 years old) which is a bit crampy. As an extension to my house I am building a bedroom, spacious bathroom, office and a pantry.
On a forum where people have lived off in cars I am sure there will be some who will have good tips and experiences to share about building a space right from scratch. I need ideas.
Note: I live in India. <comment><USER2> CABLES & WALL SOCKETS!!!!

Keep that in mind! There is nothing worse than having a lot of leads and cables through your house. If you are lucky enough to build your house from scratch think it through:

Think about where will you need wall sockets, how many of them will you need

I would suggest you think about the gadgets you will use in your house and design it around them.

Of course this is to be taken in account only if you get seriously annoyed with cables and leads (as I do).. otherwise... not much to say :D

</comment><comment><USER3> Depending on how geeky you want to go, whether it's all for work or you want some pleasure out of it, I would say get a bunch of x10 devices. You can get lights, security systems, coffee pots, etc that all work off of the wireless x10 protocol so they can be used to build a smart home for extremely cheap (not sure what the cost would be getting everything in India though).</comment>


OpenBSD 6.2 Released - <AUTHOR> https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20171009144926 <comment><USER2> This is not a dupe. The release had not happened yet when somebody linked to it 3 days ago, and they linked to an unfinished release announcement. This is different.

</comment><comment><USER2> Has anyone written up how the various Octeon-based Ubiquiti routers compare to one another when running OpenBSD?

</comment><comment> ah- Lots of ARM64 changes! Has anyone here tried running OpenBSD on one of the supported boards? How was your experience?

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous Discussion : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15414987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15414987)</comment>