Case Studies Where Phase 2 and Phase 3 Trials had Divergent Results [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.fda.gov/downloads/AboutFDA/ReportsManualsForms/Reports/UCM535780.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> A more recent, and very high profile, example of this is Incyte and Merck's failed study of Incyte's IDO inhibitor in combo with Merck's PD-1 inhibitor [0]

Immuno-oncology has been the most active area in biotech VC for years. THe excitement has been driven by PD-1 and PD-L1 studies showing dramatic benefit in many types of cancer. However only 20-50% of patients respond to these drugs, so VCs and pharma companies have been spending billions of dollars studying "combo therapies", basically regimens where you add drug x to a PD-1 inhibitor to improve effectiveness and response rate

IDO was one of the most promising combo drugs. Bristol myers bought a leading IDO startup for $1B 18 months after series a. after this study pretty much all IDO programs were canned across industry. beyond that, many investors / companies now want to see that a drug works as a standalone agent, not just in combo w another drug

as the paper says, there are lots of valid reasons to use innovative study designs, but proper phase 3 RCTs are importnat

[0] [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180406005141/en/Inc...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180406005141/en/Incyte- Merck-Provide-Update-Phase-3-Study)

</comment><comment><USER2> I was surprised when I first got involved with drug development, how rushed the process is. Phase I and Phase II trials are initiated by pharma with strikingly little understanding of how the drug works. A classic example is iniparib, which made it to a phase 3 trial but turned out not actually hit the target it was supposed to hit (PARP).

The reason for this is I think economics. There is a large advantage to being first to market, especially if the disease has no other treatments. This means that you can set your price, there is zero competition, and you disincentivize all other companies from developing similar drugs. Under these conditions, you can recoup development and trial costs in 1 - 2 years. So it is no wonder that drugs with any sort of signal are pushed quickly through early phase trials.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is a very good point -- you're on the clock as soon as you file your patent, so sponsors have an incredibly strong incentive to take risks with trial design and use surrogate endpoints rather than direct endpoints for the primary to cut down on time. Then it's really an educated guess (albeit a highly educated guess) for your Phase III trial design to balance out your market vs chances of proving efficacy.

<comment><USER4> Patent life is an important factor, but the other one is that it's sometimes really hard to validate how a drug works. Either you don't have the technology, money or time to do it. And in the end all that matters is it works in humans.

My favorite story is about gabapentin. Designed to block the GABAase enzyme. It made it all the way to market before they realized it actually works through a different mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone on a phase 2 trial an interesting note is that I know I'm on the trial drug (it's not a double blind trial), I also know that the drug worked in animal and vitro trials.

Furthermore I know, from the trial literature, that a very similar drug works (the trial drug is an anti-PD-1 immunotherapy) well with the particular genetic markers on my tumours.

The trial is to assess the efficacy of this treatment, not run a comparison to other treatments, but having burnt through 2 rounds of chemo in short order to no effect it is more a comparison against that.

Whether the placebo effect is relevant is an interesting question because under the trial the treatment is, by necessity, more personalised.

Previous studies have shown that, essentially, human contact/interest adds to the placebo effect.

</comment><comment><USER6> This happened to Otonomy about a year ago and their stock fell off a cliff. The interesting thing with them was that they were doing 2 sets of phase 3 trials: one in the US, and one in Europe. A little while after the US one failed, the data from the European one came out and showed statistical significance. I remember reading that some of the scientists at Otonomy believed the problem with the US study was that some of the doctors who were administering the drug were telling the patients that it really worked, because the success for placebo patents was higher in the US than it was in Europe.

<comment><USER4> A lot of people underestimate the challenge of running a clinical trial. Clinical trials are often run across multiple sites/countries where medical standards differ. The placebo effect can be brutal particularly in the more subjective trial endpoints.

People crap all over the anti-depressant clinical trial data, but guess what? It's a poster boy for the placebo effect and trying to development objective endpoints you can measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is a recent example where the same trial has and has not been a success, depending on how you look at it: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2018/07/05/biogen...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2018/07/05/biogen- and-eisai-say-alzheimers-drug-a-success-reversing-earlier- result/#4933a86628b4)

</comment><comment><USER8> After looking at the first few examples I skimmed the summary header, ALL of the (examples of) phase 3 failures include lack of efficacy (some also lack of safety) as the main failure.

Since medial trails are very expensive and time consuming, I can't help but wonder if identifying this would have been possible from prior phases, possibly with better study design of at least the phase 2 version of the study.

<comment><AUTHOR> The most commonly cited study of success rates across trials lists Phase 3 probability of success, in aggregate, at 70% [0]

Phase 2 success rate is 34%.

Phase 3 studies are more expensive than Phase 2, but the higher failure rate in Phase 2 makes Phase 2 failure the largest driver of the cost of drug development.

Because predicting Phase 2 success from earlier stage data is a daunting task, the industry has started tackling this issue by "failing faster / cheaper", getting to Phase 2 data quickly and cheaply, to reduce the cost of Phase 2 failure. However, companies don't want to fail -- so they sometimes design Phase 1/2 proof of concept studies to increase chance of success rather than increase truth finding. This may end up causing the Phase 3 failure rate to increase, though there isnt yet data to prove this. The IDO-PD1 failure from Merck / Incyte could be interpreted as an example of this phenomenon

I wrote a blog post that in part discusses ways companies are trying to reduce cost of Phase 2 failure: [https://newbio.tech/blog/bio_startup_ideas.html](https://newbio.tech/blog/bio_startup_ideas.html)

[0] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20168317](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20168317)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is the marketing department. Most of the big diseases (cancer, depression, heart disease, dementia, etc) have complex and diverse causes and so only a subset of patients will respond to any one drug. At Phase 2 the trial co-ordinators have relatively strict inclusion criteria targeting the likely responders (i.e. the subset that have the version of the disease the drug will work on).

When it gets to Phase 3 marketing gets involved in the inclusion criteria and they want the criteria to be as broad as possible so they can market to the widest number of patients. The aim is to have a criteria that is as broad as possible where the Phase 3 trial just scrapes across the line. This is a difficult thing to get right and sometime they include too many non-responders and the trial falls over.

The only real solution is to get the cost of developing a drug down so that there is not the need to go so broad. Of course this will require taking more risks (the level of pre-clinical and clinical testing needs to be reduced) so I am not sure this is viable.

<comment><USER4> As someone who works in the industry, none of this seems accurate.

\- Marketing gets involved before phase 3. Phase 2 results are usually where the business decision to proceed to phase 3 are made, so commercial needs input on the trial design.

\- Inclusion/exclusion criteria might be tweaked between phase 2 and 3, but they don't tend to drastically change as you're just asking for the trial to fail.

\- Development works with the FDA to craft inclusion criteria that preserves the scientific rigor of the trials, but also allows for the broadest possible indication. In general, the FDA grants a much broader label than what is described in the trial criteria.

<comment><USER9> You have basically just summarised what I said :)

I would not say the criteria are just "tweaked" between Phase 2 and 3 with any drug aimed at a broad market. It is always a balance between broadness and success and sometimes even the best in the business get it wrong.

The FDA do allow a broader label than the exact trial criteria, but not massively so. If you restrict the Phase 3 to an identifiable sub-population good luck getting approval to expand to the larger population without running post-approval trials.

<comment><USER4> Where we disagree is on three points:(1) marketing gets involved well before phase 3,(2) most trial criteria don't change that much between phase 2 and 3 [yes there are exceptions] and (3) the FDA allowing a broader label than inclusion criteria.

As for the last one, most phase 3 trials have strict criteria: no other diseases, age limits, disease severity limits, etc. Those typically don't make it into the label's indication.

I do agree that trials are designed to balance getting a positive outcome vs. the broadest population possible, but marketing isn't the only one driving that.

<comment><USER9> 1\. Yes marketing gets involved before Phase 3, but they tend to not have the clout they have going into Phase 3 - generally when it is unclear that you have something that works at all it hard for marketing to argue in favour of broadening the inclusions criteria.

2\. I think your point 2 is where we disagree the most. We are really arguing over what is a significant change or not.

3\. The FDA will be looser on some things like age and other diseases (within reason as you won't get approval for children if you only trial in adults), but not on sub-groups. If you make your trial exclude on some disease sub- group criteria you are not going to get FDA approval to go outside that sub- group and sell to everyone with the disease.

Who is driving trial broadening other than marketing? If I want the drug to succeed I want the trial population to be a homogeneous as possible and only include likely responders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is quite possible to succeed and still fail your trial. Which is one of the many reasons these things should be thrown out in favor of patient choice. You could spend 1/10 of the cost of later trials on publishing risk assessments and still be far ahead of the game of risk management.

Another problem is that too many of today's medical technologies are horribly marginal in their benefits. Marginal benefits have a way of smoothing out to nothing as the patient population broadens. The industry isn't approaching medicine for age-related disease in the right way. If you are actually addressing a useful mechanism, the effect won't be marginal. Science managed that shift from marginal to effective for infectious disease. There is now a pending transition for the diseases of aging - from marginal messing with the disease state to actually addressing the root causes.

Here is a phase 3 that succeeded and failed. Clearly it works. But the study design is such that they had an unexpected result:

[https://www.gensight-biologics.com/2018/04/03/gensight- biolo...](https://www.gensight-biologics.com/2018/04/03/gensight-biologics- announces-topline-results-from-reverse-phase-iii-clinical-trial-of-gs010-in- patients-with-leber-hereditary-optic-neuropathy-lhon/)

They show a good effect in the treated eye, and their gene therapy also produces benefits in the untreated eye. Since they don't know how that could happen, no approval.

<comment><USER11> Patient choice is an idea that sounds good in theory but just has no good way of actually working in practice.

Most people are going to be uninformed about medical science. (Hell, most medical practitioners struggle to stay informed). Worse, there is a strong bias towards misinformation--look at the health supplement market, which is basically a market the seedy snake oil sellers set up to get around FDA regulation.

On top of this, keep in mind that it is _very_ easy to accidentally design bad experiment methodology. With respect to clinical trials, it's all too easy to take a failed trial and say "it actually worked on this subgroup" because there are often enough subgroups to find one with a spurious correlation. And when you have monetary pressure to salvage a failed product, the p-hacking is less likely to be internally questioned. The current regulatory regime requires that you declare how you're going to define acceptance before you run the trial to prevent this kind of p-hacking, and if you truly believe that you're not p-hacking, you're welcome to submit another trial to show correlation on that subgroup (unsurprisingly, many of these end up coming negative).

<comment><USER12> > Worse, there is a strong bias towards misinformation--look at the health > supplement market, which is basically a market the seedy snake oil sellers > set up to get around FDA regulation.

The pure food and drug act was passed to deal with the snake oil industry, which was in the process of reinventing and legitimizing itself into the pharmaceutical industry. The supplement industry was later exempted from the requirements for patent medicine producers because there is no way to monopolize the profits of many treatments based on supplements. Some companies have patented certain aspects of their supplement's production or delivery mechanisms, but (I believe) the natural biological molecule itself can't be patented.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act) (1908)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food%2C_Drug%2C_and_Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food%2C_Drug%2C_and_Cosmetic_Act) (1938)</comment></comment></comment>


PiJS - embedded Raspberry Pi apps, in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://meteor.com/blog/2013/05/28/pijs-embedded-raspberry-pi-apps-in-javascript

<comment><USER2> Hey - I wrote pijs.io and would be happy to answer any questions or read your comments. Feel free to post in the comments!

<comment><USER3> This is really exciting. Two questions:

1\. How easy is it to set up the rasberryPi to send data to an existing Meteor app using PIJS?

2\. Any chance you are speaking at Meteor Devshop 4?

<comment><USER2> 1\. Great question. Would be a great new example. It would look something like:

var ddp = require('ddp').new({ 'host': 'yourapp.meteor.com', 'port': 80 }); ddp.connect(function() { ddp.call("a-method", [ params ] });

And I guess that's about it ;) You might want to add a setInterval() to make sure this gets run regularly.

2\. Unfortunately I am out of the bay area for a few months. Will be back in september and would love to meet! Until then, we have hn comments ;)

<comment><USER3> This looks great. I am designing a sensor for bee hives at my university using a rasberry pi. I am building an app that will all users to interact with the data using d3 and crossfilter, and will display the new data coming in in real time. I was trying to figure out how to get the Pi to talk to the meteor app, this looks like it might be the ticket.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Video camera sees like the human eye - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/hdr-video-sees-like-the-human-eye/17623/

<comment><USER2> That page is blog spam crap. Check out <http://vimeo.com/14821961> for the real deal.</comment>


Record and share your terminal sessions, the right way - <AUTHOR> https://asciinema.org/ <comment><USER2> I love asciinema, but every time I see the name I read it as 'ascii enema'.</comment>


The Guide to Overcoming Internet Porn Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://oceanrecoverycentre.com/2016/07/the-ultimate-guide-to-overcoming-internet-porn-addiction/ <comment><AUTHOR> I know there are guys who can watch porn normally and carry on with their lives afterwards. I'm not one of those people. I have been seriously addicted to pornography to the point that maybe once or twice a week I get an uncontrollable urge to pmo, even in a public restroom, and it's causing havoc on my state of mind. Emotional numbness, fatigue, distractedness, objectifying every woman I see on the street, are just a few. It's like that feeling of smoking marijuana where you're ok with doing and being nothing without the longlasting high. I've read a lot about what porn can do to your brain and I hope putting this guide out there can help the few that have gone the same way.</comment>


Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-discover-prime-conspiracy-20160313/ <comment><USER2> > If Alice tosses a coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob > tosses a coin until he sees two heads in a row, then on average, Alice will > require four tosses while Bob will require six tosses (try this at home!), > even though head-tail and head-head have an equal chance of appearing after > two coin tosses.

Ok, I verified on 10 000 tosses, it works, but I cannot see why. Can somebody explain?

Edit: nevermind, it can be found in the previous discussion.

<comment><USER3> For anyone else interested, the way this was explained to me a while ago was to look at the failure mode after an H. For Alice, her failure for HT is HH, therefore her next flip can land on T, completing the sequence. For Bob, his failure mode is HT, so he now needs to flip a H before he can try for the 2nd H.

<comment><USER4> Related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth–Morris–Pratt_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth–Morris–Pratt_algorithm)

<comment><USER5> Related and well-known by software developers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore_string- sea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore_string- search_algorithm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find number theory to be closer to a natural, investigative science akin to Physics rather than pure math such as calculus.

IANAM, but I doubt there was ever a modern calculus theorem that was hinted by a brute force search. One can argue that Calculus is "made up" and thus research in this field is finding deeper logical consequences for the initial axioms, while natural numbers just "have properties" and research is Number Theory is trying to uncover these properties by brute force and later trying to prove them, arguably quite unsuccessfully so far. It's an interesting tidbit in the philosophical question of "Does math exist only in our head?"

<comment><USER7> Your intuition is not all that wrong, but it's not entirely correct either.

Number Theory is basically the exploration of the deep consequences of a set of (ultimately arbitrary but apparently obvious) axioms. The exploration of those consequences arises from the fact that they are ultimately too plentiful, ramified, and incompletely provable (per Godel's Incompleteness Theorems & Turing's Halting Problem).

<comment><USER8> > Number Theory is basically the exploration of the deep consequences of a set > of (ultimately arbitrary but apparently obvious) axioms.

Isn't that true for all fields of pure math?

<comment><USER9> Almost all fields of pure math use a much stronger set of axioms called ZF and essentially everyone also accepts the axiom of choice (making it ZFC). The axioms in ZF are reasonable but the axiom of choice is surprisingly controversial for an axiom. There are some unintuitive consequences of the axiom but even more unintuitive consequences without it or with the negation of it.

Number theory uses a much smaller set of axioms.

It should be stated that most mathematicians don't really mind the logical foundations of their work when they are actually working in the same way that most programmers don't worry about assembly language or transistors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Abstract: While the sequence of primes is very well distributed in the reduced residue classes (mod q), the distribution of pairs of consecutive primes among the permissible ϕ(q)2 pairs of reduced residue classes (mod q) is surprisingly erratic. This paper proposes a conjectural explanation for this phenomenon, based on the Hardy-Littlewood conjectures. The conjectures are then compared to numerical data, and the observed fit is very good.

\- [https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03720](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03720)

</comment><comment><USER11> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11282480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11282480)

<comment><USER12> LOL, after posting my other reply I visited your link... and I just realized I repeated myself from 3 years ago.

I'm not sure how to feel about that reminder of age.

<comment><USER13> Two days ago I found an elaborate response to something I was researching on Reddit, only to discover at the bottom that I was the person who wrote it, 5 years ago. It's a weird feeling indeed!

<comment><USER14> I've been getting stack overflow answers every blue moon to my node proxy settings question for nearly 10 years. Weird feeling, it's nice to know we exist after we look away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >This conspiracy among prime numbers seems, at first glance, to violate a longstanding assumption in number theory: that prime numbers behave much like random numbers. Most mathematicians would have assumed, Granville and Ono agreed, that a prime should have an equal chance of being followed by a prime ending in 1, 3, 7 or 9 (the four possible endings for all prime numbers except 2 and 5).

This seems like an odd assumption to me. Surely sexy primes are more common than twin primes, so at least for primes that are near each other there should be a higher probability for certain sequences of final digits. This is obviously not proof in itself, but it would certainly make me hesitate to assume there is an equal probability in the general case.

<comment><USER16> > Surely sexy primes are more common than twin primes, so at least for primes > that are near each other there should be a higher probability for certain > sequences of final digits.

I think that's conjectural, but prime constellations are also conjectured to be a negligible fraction of primes as a whole, much as primes are a negligible fraction of integers (asymptotically). I think twin primes are conjectured to be distributed as n / (log n) ^2, while primes are n / (log n).

Besides, even if (p, p + 6) is significantly more common than (p, p + 2), if the final digit of p is uniformly distributed among 1, 3, 7, and 9, I don't think the statistics as a whole are affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I always wondered if prime numbers can be used as the basis of a compression algorithm.

Where you describe how to get your number, in relation to how it can be factored using prime numbers.

You cut up your data into chunks, and then find the prime factors of each chunk. Now you have a list of arithmetic descriptions to describe your data, and you can use Huffman to compress the descriptions.

Of course, this would be computationally intensive, for both the compressor, and the extractor, but it may save on the payload size, to allow for efficient data transfer.

And while we still use Huffman's algorithm, I wonder if advanced aliens may have discovered this technique for data compression.

This is more of a sci-fi fantasy algorithm, than anything actually mathematically sound.

<comment><USER18> The prime factors of a number takes (about) the same amount of space to list as the number itself.

<comment><USER19> Notably, even listing the ordinal index of the prime (e.g. that a number is the product of the first, fifth, and tenth primes) takes about the same amount of space as well due to the prime number theorem.

<comment><USER20> > the average gap between consecutive prime numbers among the first N integers > is roughly log(N)

So if you are compressing exceptionally large numbers, say, a whole video file, which is likely to contain very long factors, you could shave log2(log(N)) bits for each factor of length N. Seems like the most impractical compression algorithm imaginable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> paper: "Unexpected biases in the distribution of consecutive primes" [http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03720](http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03720)

explanation for non-experts: "The Last Digit of Prime Numbers - Numberphile" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVvfY_lFUZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVvfY_lFUZ8)

<comment><USER22> Is the Numberphile video based on the paper? Because the paper was out on 30 May 2016 and video was out on 4 May 2016

<comment><USER21> Read the paragraph with the heading "Submission history".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Classic example of following definitions or illustrious assumptions too closely... another one is an obvious one, and historically has been challenged a few times: the beginning of the prime sequence 'should be' 1, 3, 5.. very clean, very coherent, but it got stuck in definitions limbo and now we got no 1 and the alien 2, that has to be excepted in most algorithms..eh...

<comment><USER24> Why do you think 2 is alien? How could the fundamental theorem of arithmetic be stated without 2?

<comment><USER25> 2 is definitely no "alien". More like a legendary prime god amongst countably infinite odd primes. 0 and 1 are two sides of an extreme that either generates a meaningful number system through their separation and extremis from one another or no system at all if 1=0 is assumed true. They're like a Jekyl and Hyde god.

<comment><USER24> "Odd" is just a word that means "not divisible by two". There is truly nothing special about a prime not being divisible by two. I could equally say "3 is a legendary prime god amongst countably infinite non-divisible-by-three primes", "5 is a legendary prime god amongst countably infinite non-divisible-by-five primes"... The only difference is that we do not have special words that mean non-divisible-by-three, non-divisible-by-five, etc.

In this regard, I don't see 2 as a special prime. Saying "2 is the only even prime" is the same as saying "2 is the only prime divisible by two", which, by definition, can be said about any other prime.

<comment><USER25> Right. In the language of the article, if p is a whole number whose digits end in the number 2 then all numbers after it ending in the digits 0 or 2 are not prime. It's a seemingly weak statement but it says a much stronger thing about the primes than the hypothesis of the article.

Anyway, just trying to react in tone to calling any number an "alien". I think of numbers as being outside the realm of words like alien - I don't even know what that would mean for a number. Hence my comment is hyperbole hinting at my love of mathematics. To me, it really is a beautiful area of study. Wish I could do it more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what the implications are for cryptography - given the heavy reliance on 'random' prime numbers

but one would have to delve into this - and from the top of my head there are no algorithms that make you pick 'two consecutive' primes - so the implications - if any - aren't obvious - anyone here has some more light or other angles to shed into this?

<comment><USER27> Why would this have any implications on cryptography? This does not make factoring an RSA modules any easier.

<comment><USER26> Well, in RSA you have to choose two prime numbers, multiply them, and keep them secret. p and q: pq =n . And n is made public. I wonder if this probability, maybe coupled with concrete implementations, makes it for a more restricted set of guessing p and q. That would be it. I guess that given that this only introduces 'restrictions' on __sequential __prime numbers, doesn 't really help at all, given that p and q should be random. Unless there's a shortcut applied in implementation that you find a random p and then q is the next prime number. Hence my question to the community. But I only know that both RSA and DH rely on prime numbers.

<comment><USER27> That's a fair point. Yes, I thought the same thing too when I read this. It is only introducing restrictions on sequential prime numbers. I doubt it has any bearing on the factoring problem yet, at least not without more work that can connect this to the factoring problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not sure I understand the significance of a last digit of 9 for a prime implying the next prime is likelier to end with a 1 and not a 9. After all, base 10 is arbitrary. Can someone explain whether similar such "conspiracies" occur for all bases?

<comment><USER29> Yeah, the article says they investigated in base 3 first.

In that base, it can by 0, 1, or 2 mod 3 (for the final digit). Primes clearly aren't 0 mod 3, so all (not 3) primes end in 1 or 2. They found that primes "liked" to alternate between them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if it's a some extension or variation on Benford's Law [0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law)

<comment><USER30> I don't think this is a law and it's stupid. It is just an observation. Of course 1 will be more frequent.

<comment><USER31> Why of course

<comment><USER32> Because 100 to 200 is twice as much and 700 to 800 is not

<comment><USER26> Carry on.. why does that make it obvious?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In base 30, a prime greater than 30 can end in only 9 of the possible 30 terminal digits. In contrast with base 10, where this statistic is 4 of 10.</comment>


Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today? - <AUTHOR> http://faif.us/cast/2019/feb/19/0x61/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP here: in this podcast episode, some leading free software advocates from the Software Freedom Conservancy give a 'confessional' about the proprietary software they use and how its so hard to avoid compromises now. It comes after their ogg/podcast was on hiatus for 1-2 years.</comment>


Salesforce.com Announces Two $1 Million Winning Teams for Hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-com-announces-two-1-210000741.html <comment><USER2> Ha. Still sticking to their guns: "...while the Upshot mobile app used pre- existing code, this did not violate the hackathon rules. Use of pre-existing code was allowable as long as the code did not comprise the majority of the app and did not violate any third party's rights." I think it does more damage than good

<comment><USER3> "The internal audit team's review determined that Upshot's mobile app was created during the hackathon and met these criteria."

They just took an existing application made during a nine year tenure at Salesforce, threw it into a generic responsive / mobile app framework during the "hackathon" and made a cool mil..

It helps if Salesforce is already an investor in your product, of course.

And this doesn't address why most apps that were submitted weren't even ran. It's not like 149 apps are all that hard to at least take a look at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First place:

>Upshot was created by Thom Kim, who left Salesforce after nine years in Janauary, and Joseph Turian, with whom Kim had been friends since they attended Harvard University together.

Oh that sounds fishy? As a concession, we'll just award _another million_ to 2nd place. Oh, who is second place?

>Fisher and Oliveros are employees working at Taptera, a San Francisco-based startup that received $2 million in August of 2011 from Salesforce and other investors in a Series A round of financing.

<comment><USER5> _shrug_

This doesn't strike me as inherently scandalous.

<comment><USER4> Scandalous, no. The part that bothers me is that an event, presumably designed to introduce new developers to their platform, seems impossible to win unless you're either a) directly associated with the company or b) make a living developing for the company's platform already.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure that was the design of this hackathon? I was more under the impression it was to incentive their entire developer base, not simply to encourage new adoption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This may be the largest back pedal in the history of backpedaling.

<comment><USER8> Microsoft/XBox1 backpedal probably beats this one. SalesForce isn't giving up much here. What's another million to a company they've already invested in?

<comment><USER7> I don't know what this reference is about.

<comment><USER9> Xbox One? Microsoft took a huge gamble in their decision to all but eliminate discs from their consoles. They had planned that consumers would not be able to resell their discs once purchased with the promise that your friends would be able to play the games in your games library without owning the game themselves (ie. they download the game from your games library) so long as you weren't playing the game at the same time as them. People didn't like this because 1.) They couldn't resell their games and 2.) It required that you connect your Xbox to the internet once every 24 hours. For some reason a lot of people felt like this would affect them (I don't know why.. I can't remember the last time my internet was disconnected for 24 hours.) As a result of all the negative feedback, Microsoft scrapped their whole DRM system in favour of a more classic approach while Sony basked in the positive attention despite bringing nothing new to the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The issue is they specific said you can't start or use existing code before the date (still there in the rules PDF). I know that many very talented teams followed that rule even though theycould have used some of their older repos and did something even more impressive than Upshot. Then they respond to a forum question, weeks after the hackathon started, saying "yeah sure, just not a significant amount". Most programmers were heads down in their code and didn't check the forum. That's wrong and they did nothing to explain or correct this.

</comment><comment><USER11> > The internal audit team's review determined that Upshot's mobile app was > created during the hackathon and met these criteria.

Let's be honest. Upshot is pretty solid before the hackathon. It was functioning to some great degree. How many days did the event last? Three days? A mobile app for this hackathon is small. What innovations / cool business logic did they develop in the mobile app? I probably will see none. Pretty UI... maybe that was the winning shot. I am sure.

The fact that Upshot guys haven't spoken is also ridiculous. Or have they?

<comment><USER12> I also competed. We had from when the hackathon was announced (October 25th) to November 17th to build our submissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> To me, the most interesting part of this is buried. Whereas previously only the five finalists were showcased, now many (all?) of the losing entries are now published.

[http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/submissions](http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/submissions)

<comment><USER12> They reached out to all the teams for their permission to publish their submissions. Not all of the teams have agreed to do so yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> More than anything, I'm bothered that the submitter has submitted multiple articles[1] on the same subject. Is HN karma really this important to people?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6836581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6836581)

<comment><USER15> Well, this apparently bothers you, so it must be, right? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why give them the publicity?

</comment><comment><USER17> That healthcare app is actually pretty cool, how did that not win 1st place?</comment>


Show HN: Standup meetings are dead - <AUTHOR> https://blog.standuply.com/stand-up-meetings-are-soon-dead-e74118f788f4 <comment><USER2> Stand up is the one time in the day where many info workers have actual contact (via person or voice) with thier coworkers. How antisocial are we trying to be?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not a Show HN and the verb is in the wrong tense.</comment>


SPARCbook 3000ST - <AUTHOR> http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/3/14_SPARCbook_3000ST_-_The_coolest_90s_laptop.html <comment><USER2> Fun. I was one of the software developers on the SPARCbook series (prior to the acquisition), as well as the Alpha machine for Digital, the P1000/P1300 (Pentium), and IBM (PowerPC).

Great memories of a small team taking on huge challenges.

<comment><USER3> I ran Alpha servers back then along side a bevy of DG/UX Aviion and Clariion servers. The DECs always out-performed the DG/UX boxes.

<comment><USER4> I never used an Alpha, but somehow I fostered such an inflated impression of their performance that if someone told me today that their new i9 wunderbeast was almost as fast it would take a little while before I didn't believe them.

<comment><USER5> Well a lot of the Alpha engineers ended up working on and helped design AMD's AMD64 extensions and hypertransport bus, after AMD adopted the Alpha's EV6 bus for the Athlon you could say Alpha technology and engineers had a huge effect on why AMD bested Intel for quite awhile back in the day.

If it wasn't for the Digital and AMD engineers we'd all be suffering with IA-64 etc... I think it's more likely PPC would have remained a force to be reckoned with in the Desktop space.

<comment><USER4> Hey that's some cool background info, thank you!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used a SPARCbook back in 1996 for a business trip to Germany to install our search engine at t-online.de. The CFO of the company wanted to know who had this machine at all times because it was so expensive, around $20k USD. It didn't have any usable battery life, if you tried to do any type of development, it would last about 20 minutes before it shutdown. The many disk partitions made us get creative to fill the 1.2GB disk with data. We had to put files all over the place, and use softlinks get our software to work. This odd setup lead a sysadmin to "clean things up" one afternoon. He delete most of the OS in the process. He was really mad because he had to stay up all night to do a reinstall.

Wow, I forgot about that machine until this post.

<comment><USER2> The initial sparcbook had a 20MB drive, and we had to squeeze SunOS 4 onto it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "A whopping 128MB of RAM (in 1997, this unimaginable in a laptop)" [sic]

Really? The PowerBook in 1997 supported up to 160 MB: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#Models](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#Models)

I don't think this was particularly unusual. HP's laptop of the day supported up to 160 MB, as well: [http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/37569/HP- OmniBook-570...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/37569/HP- OmniBook-5700-CT/)

<comment><USER8> At the time I remember being amazed that the company I worked for paid out $$$ to get some SGI machines up to ~160Mb of RAM. This was because the software we used had a memory leak of some sorts and needed such an extravagantly 'wasteful' amount of memory.

Having the sockets to support up to 160Mb was one thing, having long enough arms and deep enough pockets to pay for it was something else. Hence 'unimaginable'.

Nowadays you get a couple of sockets on your laptop, back then whether laptop or something else, a workstation would have lots and lots of sockets for memory, usually with very few of them filled.

<comment><USER7> I was a student at the time, and all the computer science researchers I knew were maxing out their laptops with 128 MB.

In the June 1998 MacWorld, you could order a 128 MB upgrade for your brand new PowerBook G3 for $389 [1]. Not cheap, but not _that_ extravagant.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9806_June_1998/page/n13...](https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9806_June_1998/page/n133)

<comment><USER8> Ah but that was for a Mac. In the days before the internet as we know it you didn't have commodity RAM for workstations. You had to pay extra or risk voiding your warranty. Plus someone else was paying so why run the risk?

Sure the chips were commodity but the modules would have a different pinout. They would be advertised as better.t

Another problem was that the more memory you bought the more it cost per megabyte. A set of chips to fill the sockets with 128Mb would cost three times as much as a set of chips that filled the sockets to give 64Mb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've got a couple Tadpoles, including a PA-RISC PrecisionBook, but actually I like the Sun Ultra-3 better. The one I have is a rebadged Tadpole Viper in beautiful purple. The 1.2GHz CPU gets stinking hot unless you throttle it and the battery life is about LOL minutes, but it can still run relatively recent Firefoxes and Solaris is still useful.

<comment><USER10> I had a SPARCstation Voyager for a while when I worked at Sun. One of the very first all-in-ones ever with a color LCD screen. (My "regular" Ultra2 desktop also had a couple of 24" HD monitors, which weighed more than a sack of concrete each, and were much bulkier, too.)

<comment><USER9> The Voyagers are lovely machines, but my personal favourite SPARC luggable is the Solbourne S3000 with the flaring orange gas plasma screen. It looks like no other workstation.

[http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/solace/](http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/solace/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Little-known story about how this little box saved the shuttle program: When Dan Goldin took over NASA, he mandated that all of Mission Control would run on Windows NT. (This was back when the NT kernel was excellent, as it always had been, but the surrounding bits had serious stability problems). The shuttle astronaut corps rebelled, literally refusing to fly if forced to bet their lives against the BSOD. The solution was to provide the astronauts with their own independent copy of the software that Mission Control previously ran on their SPARCstations, so even if MCC crashed, the shuttle wouldn't. Since the SPARCbook was already flight-qualified, the astronaut revolt was quickly and quietly resolved, with almost no one even being aware of it...

<comment><USER11> That is awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Normally this isn't a problem because you can boot a Solaris installation CD > or network image and clear the root password in the /etc/shadow file. > BUT....I have no SCSI CD-ROM that I can plug into the external SCSI port on > the SPARCbook

That brought back a memory. I was working at a place in the 90s that got one of those SPARCbooks that we were setting up for a customer, but we didn't have a SCSI CD-ROM drive to install with. I actually went to my previous employer (a Sun workstation support team in the computer center of a university) who kindly let us use one of theirs on site.

</comment><comment><USER13> At some point I lost my lust for obscure hardware like this, although I remember what it felt like. I'm really disappointed he didn't take an image of the disk as it was when he got it, because it would have been really interesting to root through all the old Nortel stuff.

<comment><USER14> > The first thing I did was make a complete clone of the hard disk (c0t0d0s2) > on my Solaris 10 desktop in case anything went wrong

I think he did.

<comment><USER13> Very prudent. I don't see a torrent magnet link though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh man, I remember seeing one of these (or something really similar) when I went with my dad to work as a kid. When he told me that it cost more than $19,000, I flatout didn't believe him. To a nine-year-old me, there was not an appreciable difference between $19,000 and $1,000,000,000 , and I could not fully understand how anyone would pay that much for anything.

<comment><USER16> It's a more staggering number now - I get $34k using the CPI inflation calculator. Can you imagine paying that much for a single laptop? Does anyone even _make_ laptops that cost that much now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I still like OpenLook/OpenWindows best of all the 80s/90s windowing system attempts on Unix. Far preferable to Motif & its successors.

</comment><comment><USER18> The display in the images looks quite sharp - resolution of 1280x1024! Not too awful by today's standards. Lenovo's thinkpad x280, currently available with a retail price above 1000 euro, comes with a 1366x768 display as the default option.

<comment><USER19> Judging from the photos that display is _obviously_ not 1280x1024.

<comment><USER20> I don't think 1280x1024 flatscreens existed in 1997. A 1024x768 display was pretty extravagant on a laptop.

<comment><USER19> The ThinkPad 770X had a 1280x1024 display option.

[https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770X](https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770X)

<comment><USER21> It's not from 1997. Pentium II mobile was introduced in 1998.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ahem...the Fujitsu CPU in this was _not_ the fastest SPARCv8 implementation around-IIRC, Ross made a HyperSPARC that ran at a galloping 200mhz!!

</comment><comment><USER23> I never really understood splitting off /opt and /usr from / when they're all partitions on the same drive.

<comment><USER24> ZFS takes this concept up one level of abstraction. You have a `zpool` which is a collection of disks. You then have "datasets" which would be analogous to partitions. One property of a dataset is a mountpoint, but they have many more. In ZFS different datasets can have different compression algorithms, different checksum algorithms, different log (journal) characteristics, different ACL types, it can also manage exporting the dataset over the network (setup NFS/CIFS for you), encrypt the dataset, etc.

That might give you a glimpse into why it's useful to split off different datasets. I might want to tune my database (/var/lib/postgres) for throughput, while my home directory is tuned for maximum compression & encrypted, while my public fileshares are unencrypted, etc.

Also it's often useful to have different partitions if you need different filesystems, not every filesystem is suited for every particular usecase. Also sometimes you're constrained by other software: for instance many older bootloaders would typically have very limited filesystem support; even today your EFI system partition needs to be FAT formatted, which should serve as an obvious reason why you'd want to segregate `/boot/efi` from the rest of your system.

<comment><USER23> Sure, but none of that applies to this laptop, where they're all UFS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The primary user if these laptops was the U. S. military and they saw combat on the battlefield. Garrett D'Amore, father of the illumos project, used to work on the drivers for this laptop at Tadpole.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wanted one of these really bad back in the day. Had to settle for running Solarisx86 on a generic laptop instead. Nice find.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have one still and a Tadpole laptop as well

</comment><comment><USER28> Can't we just somehow copy that beautiful keyboard/case to make a modern open implementation of it? We can upgrade all the internals after copying the original format, and do all the prototyping with 3D printing.

Please tell me someone else has a screw loose and wants to do this too.

</comment><comment><USER29> Now there's a blast from the past. As a young researcher, I got to have a Sparcbook circa 1994 to take to events and demo the multicast multimedia conferencing software we were working on. It cost about five times more than everything I owned put together, and I was always afraid I'd forget it in the pub or something. The alternative was traveling with a Sparc 20 in my hand luggage, which I did too on many occasions. People were always more impressed by seeing video on a laptop though. These days, you think nothing of it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Oh man - we had one of those tadpoles back in the dot com days! We got our Sparc Oracle/Weblogic stack loaded up on it just like our 'real' servers. Our CEO took it to a very important conference to do a live demo, took to the podium, attempted to adjust the microphone... and the cord tipped a cup of water onto it. Killed the laptop, but he still pulled off what he was pitching. We were all hoping to run off with it after the event.

</comment><comment><USER31> I saw one of these last weekend at the PNW Vintage Computer expo! I coveted those really badly back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER32> I remember those.. I used to have one, it was so unbelievably useful. I ended up turning it into a fastboot server in an emergency. Then... we spent ages making it Linux :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I had a similar kind of SPARC portable computer running Solaris at a job in 1999. I didn't actually use it for my job. At that point, I had it as a curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER34> I used to work at a used computer store that recycled lots of e-waste. Got to see a few different SPARCbooks but sadly none of them worked.

</comment><comment><USER35> I loved the Sparcbook I used, it was great! This reminds me that I should probably fire up my Sparc LX with its whopping 64MB of ram...

</comment><comment><USER36> I knew a guy who travelled with one of these (probably 97 or 98?). I thought he was crazy but it did have nice specs.

</comment><comment><USER37> A bit unrelated, for a while I tried to get hold of one of those Toshibas being sold by Sun with Solaris x86 on them.

</comment><comment><USER38> If anyone has one of these for sale, please contact me (check my profile).

</comment><comment><USER39> I haven't seen one of those in a few years ;)</comment>


Black student forced to participate in slavery reenactment - <AUTHOR> http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-stream-officialblog/2013/9/19/black-student-forcedtoparticipateinslaveryreenactment.html

<comment><USER2> The original article: [http://www.wfsb.com/story/23472914/students-called-n- word-ch...](http://www.wfsb.com/story/23472914/students-called-n-word-chased- through-woods-on-field-trip) There's an older video by a guy who went on a similar, but apparently less traumatizing, field trip [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PToqVW4n86U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PToqVW4n86U) so I guess this isn't an isolated incident.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a "Blue Ribbon" school, apparently [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Magnet_Trinity_Colleg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Magnet_Trinity_College_Academy#Awards_and_recognition)

And this is why test scores alone are pretty bloody poor measure of excellence if that's the only criteria.

</comment><comment><USER4> I went to Nature's Classroom (the camp mentioned in the article) sometime around 2001. I remember the slavery re-enactment, but don't remember any use of the n-word or threats of whipping. We mostly just ran around in the woods one evening and hid from "slave owners" behind buildings. I imagine there was some education going on but I don't really remember.

I never considered at the time if re-enacting slavery was appropriate for a 5th grader, and hadn't really thought about the re-enactment until reading about it now.</comment>


Ordnance Survey releases mapping tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32019261

<comment><AUTHOR> More information here: [http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/news/2015/four- new-os-...](http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/news/2015/four-new-os-open- data-products.html)

With the data sources here: [https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.h...](https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html)

TBH I'm not too sure what is new and what isn't here, I'm sure I've used a mapping app that was based on the OS Open Map data. But the OS Open Names is not something that I've heard of before.

</comment><comment><USER2> Essentially this is a more detailed (less generalised) version of the open data already published by the OS. It has more accurate building outlines and all road names, whereas their earlier open vector dataset (VectorMap District) had generalised outlines and only selected road names. Good news.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never looked at this before, but it seems like OS Open Names could finally let me do address->coordinates searches without a third party.

I thought post code data was strictly copyrighted by the post office and you had to pay them to do that, or use a provider who has.

<comment><USER2> Postcode centroid <-> lat/long has been open data since the initial OS OpenData release. However, if you want detailed polygons rather than centroids, or actual house number/name data, then this is jealously guarded by Royal F^HMail.

The new "OS Open Names" dataset essentially presents the existing datasets in a uniform hierarchy. Think of it as the source data behind an autocomplete geocoder. But it still won't get you the exact lat/long for 27 High Street.</comment></comment>


If ur not Getting out of the Building, ur not doing CustDev & Lean Startups - <AUTHOR> http://vlaskovits.com/2010/08/if-youre-not-getting-out-of-the-building-youre-not-doing-customer-development-and-lean-startups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Vlaskovits+%28Vlaskovits%29 <comment><AUTHOR> I apologize for the shortened title, had to get it under 80 characters.</comment>


Vue CLI 3.0 is here - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-cli-3-0-is-here-c42bebe28fbb <comment><USER2> I recently used vue cli 3 for a small project and I found parts of it to be absolutely delightful, like the UI that allows you to pick if you want vue router/prettier/vuex/etc. I also had some very easy installation stories but then a couple that took a few hours to hack in. As someone who writes lots of Ember code, the vue cli does not have the add on story that Ember has which makes it difficult. You will have to write quite a bit of webpack config in a medium sized app, which may break if you upgrade vue cli.

However the philosophy of the cli is pretty solid. It seems to mostly be about enabling developers to write front end apps the way they want. I personally prefer a more opinionated philosophy, but just having tools to enable your work without telling you how to use them is a nice feeling.</comment>


Near, Far, Wherever You Are - <AUTHOR> https://reallifemag.com/near-far-wherever-you-are/ <comment><USER2> The article talks about people who are "computationally near" in ways unknown to us. But the unknown is a rich source of myths. It's not really true that there are no coincidences. What is true is that we can't easily distinguish coincidences from something more sinister. Sometimes all we can do is speculate about the spies.

Here is an example of Tweet "proving" that Siri is spying that got 3.7k retweets. I don't believe it (I expect it's in untargeted ad), but can't disprove it.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/airbagmoments/status/112247415862...](https://mobile.twitter.com/airbagmoments/status/1122474158628253696)

I expect we will see many new Internet superstitions arise as people try to cope with the unknowable. Maybe even new religions?

<comment><USER3> > _It 's not really true that there are no coincidences._

Coincidences happen all the time; in fact, you'd need pretty strong evidence to tell that a particular event is _not_ a coincidence.

People aren't being told how reality works in these aspects. A particular person talking about a particular thing with their friends, and discovering ads about it on social media the next day? That sounds like not a coincidence. But _a_ person talking about _a_ thing and discovering it later on _a_ social media platform? With billions of people on-line, with this same 'experimental scenario' happening every day? It spits such coincidences out all the time.

See also: birthday paradox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading this meanwhile trying this girl to notice me (she grew up with FB and ig I may presumably say that she finds me to be a stranger because I am in monk mode without any social media).

How much do people really use social media to meet people? I am _pun intended_ a stranger to this? (even thought I am your average teen highschool)

</comment><comment><USER5> > A decade ago, when I was a senior in high school, "Jimmy," a jilted ex- > patient of my dad's, began stalking our family. Over a period of months, > verbal harassment escalated to threats of violence and we soon found > ourselves accompanied by police escorts for the better part of a week

> ....

> In Jimmy's case, though, I simply cannot fathom how Instagram made this > connection, despite quite a bit of legwork on my part to do so. He is not > (and has never been) in my contacts, nor, after searching my email accounts, > have I ever typed his name or even been forwarded an email about him. The > more elaborate explanations I've entertained are nakedly conspiratorial, and > so I've written Jimmy's case off as a mystery that will remain unsolved, > like a ship sunk in deepest waters.

The author described in sufficiently meticulous detail that Jimmy's location and presence felt through verbal harassment etc were frequently in close proximity to the author's entire family. I can think of at least a dozen _clearly non-conspiratorial_ ways that Instagram has made the connection.

I think the author is living in the same bubble that much of the Internet is in: that the tech companies don't care to track us in the 'real world' and that most of it is still done with tracking pixels or smart-advertisements.

Instagram/Facebook openly use location and photographs to identify subjects and track them. This is no secret. If there is any remote possibility of a person having been anywhere near you for the last 10 years it should be assumed Instagram / Facebook already know about it. Any assumption _less than that_ sounds conspiratorial to me ("don't worry nobody cares to watch you" etc).

<comment><USER6> > after searching my email accounts

here's a possibility right here - google sells a list of potential names a given user searched for, and facebook / instagram use that as a way to try to find connections

<comment><USER2> Google sells ads (and ad targeting) but I haven't seen any evidence that they sell data.

There are lots of less well-known companies that will happily sell you lists, though, cobbled up from who knows where.

<comment><USER7> > but I haven't seen any evidence that they sell data

It's worse than that, they give it away. RTB (real time bidding) on advertising works by presenting the bidder with a whole pile of info on the ad slot they are bidding on.

So even if you don't bid or you lose the bid you _still_ get all that juicy data.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Do you know a good place to read about the details?

<comment><USER7> OpenRTB specification?

[https://www.iab.com/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb- project...](https://www.iab.com/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb-project/)

<comment><USER2> There seem to be three kinds of parties here, the advertisers, the exchanges, and the websites. An advertiser places targeted ads with exchanges. The websites send bids, potentially with user info, to the exchanges.

I'm finding web pages at Google showing that they run their own ad exchange, and they integrate with other people's ad exchanges.

I don't know how to find out if Google makes bids using any exchanges other their own, or whether the information from Google's bids could otherwise leak to advertisers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Watch Is Dominating the Global Smartwatch Market - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/09/21/apple-watch-market-share/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting contrast with July 2016, when Forbes wrote _" Apple Watch Sales Plunge 55% As Samsung Doubles Market Share"_. This still appears to be a market where a new version of a product doesn't have much shelf life.

I also guess that that 'dominating' excludes the simpler smart watches.

</comment><comment><USER2> I am curious if Apple Watch is actually a modest success. Seems a victim of hype.</comment>


Roads? Where we're going, we won't have any roads - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@matthewfcarlson/roads-where-were-going-we-won-t-have-any-roads-dd9e5a27c30d <comment><USER2> The gas tax has been kept artificially low which is a big part of the problem. The last time the federal gas tax was increased was 1993, and it's not indexed for inflation which would have raised it 77% in the intervening 27 years. Similar stories apply for all the local gas taxes. Illinois had a bill to increase the gas tax in 2019 (I don't know what the fate of it was) but before that hadn't increased its gas tax since 1990 despite, Wikipedia's table of state tax rates noting that Illinois and only Illinois has a gas tax rate that can be adjusted for inflation.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fascinating point. I wonder if states increasing the gas tax would help the small budgets states offer for roads to be more effective at mitigating the burden to cities and counties. I'm surprised that this is something that's been so low for so long considering the rate property taxes of been going up here in Seattle (on top of home prices increasing massively and the county assessors taking full advantage of it).

<comment><USER2> Property taxes have been structured in such a way that annual increases are part of the design. That hasn't stopped anti-tax activists from doing their best to decimate them as well (see California's Prop 13). The acolytes of the anti-tax movement have done a great job of instilling in people the idea that _all_ tax increases are bad, even if they aren't, and even if they're an attempt to make a tax system fairer (see, for example, the current attempt in Illinois to amend the constitution to eliminate the requirement that the state income tax have a single flat rate—I see a lot of people arguing in bad faith to scare people that this will raise their taxes when, in fact, the overall tax increase from the proposed new rates is low and will be a decrease for most residents, but heaven forbid that people with high six figure incomes have to pay more). There's been a destructive movement in this country against any and all taxes for over forty years and the state of roads is just one symptom of that movement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Outline link if you're medium-averse: [https://outline.com/9nffJB](https://outline.com/9nffJB)</comment>


iCloudHack: DropBox the More Likely Source - <AUTHOR> http://webmarketingschool.com/hollywood-hack-dropbox-likely-source/

<comment><USER3> The author seems to be assuming that any files on an iPhone were generated originally by that iPhone. This obviously isn't the case, as I send stuff to Android users, iPhone users, even WinMo users. And thus, photos from an Android show up on an iPhone and, depending on the software used, are then backed up to iCloud.

Another assumption is that it was the celebrity's account and only that account that was compromised in every case. It could have been JLaw's (ex-)boyfriend's iCloud account that was hacked, surely?

</comment><comment><USER4> It certainly looks like multiple leakers and multiple sources. There are various "official" bitcoin addresses, connected to different leaked content. Most of it looks pretty amateurish. Probably after the first guy started getting paid for leaked files, a bunch of other script kiddies jumped in.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd agree with that - on the press flaming that Apple are getting though - <USER2> just not buying it. Really feels more like a cloud storage hack than iCloud, right?

<comment><USER4> Edit: Apple has confirmed that it was breached and celebrities were targeted. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/apple- confirms-c...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/apple-confirms- celebrities-accounts-breached-in-highly-targeted-attack/)

Some of the leaks do look like iCloud backups though. Videos don't get uploaded to Apple's "photo stream" so it would have to be an iCloud backup or, less likely, a local backup that was uploaded to Dropbox. Right now it "feels like" a lot of different leaks and leakers jumping on 4chan and demanding bitcoins for their own little dumps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I go to upload file A.zip to Dropbox, and it already exists in someone else's Dropbox (has a matching hash), does Dropbox bother re-upload the entire thing?

If not, then perhaps there's a way to test if the files came from Dropbox or not.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd welcome the YCOM analysis of whats actually happened here, but iCloud just doesnt feel like the issue...</comment>


Benchmarking Spreadsheet Systems - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/12/06/benchmarking-spreadsheet-systems/ <comment><USER2> Performance is affected by a myriad of factors, many of which aren't visible by looking at the worksheet.

For example, XLS/XLSX support a special "shared formula" representation which tells Excel that a formula is structurally similar to other formulae. This is not always written, depending on how the file was generated and other factors. Without that, Excel will take an "inefficient" calculation approach. You can't figure it out from the UI or by inspecting the formula text -- you actually have to dig into the file to see it.

<comment><USER3> That's really cool! How did you figure this out and what does this representation look like?

<comment><USER4> [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/documentformat.o...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/documentformat.openxml.spreadsheet.cellformula?view=openxml-2.8.1)

The OpenXML basis format for XSLX is an ISO standard. Most things are documented albeit in a somewhat obtuse way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Spreadsheets freeze to process more than 1 million records; AWK works like charm;

[https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/alternative-to-sort- uniq-c/](https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/alternative-to-sort-uniq-c/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I was struggling with spreadsheet performance some time ago, trying to open csv with over million of rows, which made my excel cough. To help with this I built collection of tools for myself ([https://blocksheet.io](https://blocksheet.io)) so I could at least split my csv files to smaller ones and then edit with excel.

>In a similar vein, sorting causes problems on very small datasets (less than 10K rows):

Reading this made me wonder just how much excel prioritizes formulas and other fancy features over basic utilities such as sorting. For comparison, I just tried sorting csv with over 2 million rows on blocksheet and even though it took few seconds and made my laptop fan do extra jumps (it's a static site), it still managed to do it in reasonable time.

For me it's such a rare problem to run into huge spreadsheets, that it's a bit overkill to build my own software for it. So if anyone knows any good ones that deal well with rearranging large spreadsheets, I'd be happy to hear about them.

</comment><comment><USER7> What I always remind people is, Microsoft has no intention of fixing these types of performance in Excel because they have other products to sell you if you have "big data"

</comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone done testing that includes Apple's Numbers?

<comment><USER9> I always regret it when opening something in Numbers. Excel and Gsheets have a lot of shared idioms that make gaining and keeping expertise far easier and those two platforms start up faster and have less annoying barriers to working at speed (eg, interstitials).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best online payment gateway for freelance contractor - <AUTHOR>

I am planning to do some contract work to supplement my income and was wondering who has had experience with Paypal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net with regards to accepting online payments for contracting work.  I plan to use Freshbooks to track and bill my time, and am looking to see which option I should use to accept client payments. <comment><USER2> I would save my money and just cash checks. The cost is not worth the convenience. But this is my experience with gateways/processors:

Paypal is a nightmare to deal with if you ever need to call them. Their development stuff is awkward and buggy. I would not recommend them.

Auth.net works, but that's about all I can say for them. Support, UI, and API are all lackluster. Chargify (which is great) mitigates most of this, if you go that route, but it's probably overkill for client billing.

Braintree is awesome - great support, great API, great everything. Except price. They're significantly more expensive at low volumes and haven't been very flexible (probably because they don't have to be) on price.

</comment><comment><USER3> > which option I should use to accept client payments

whichever is easiest for your clients, most likely. you saving 0.5% won't likely be worth making clients angry over paying a bill.</comment>


A Google Reality Check - <AUTHOR> http://seekingalpha.com/article/51114-a-google-reality-check?source=feed

<comment><USER2> This is why I hate Seeking Alpha: they can stretch a factual sentence ("Google is overpriced, given their P/E of X, because a fair P/E is Y.") into a whole article -- with fewer actual facts. I like how, for illustration, they (almost!) told us Google's past growth rate. That to defend the statement that "Although this exponentially growing income is really unprecedented it is a huge mistake to assume it can continue."

Thanks. Everyone I know who owns Google stock also thinks their growth rate will be exactly has high in the future as it was in the past. We all expect GOOG's market share to hit 47291% in a decade.

Did the writer just not bother to consider his assumptions? Look at a chart of Google's stock price and P/E: <http://www.byrneseyeview.com/pictures/googwithpe.gif>

Their earnings are going up _faster_ than their price. If investors think Google's growth rate is this high permanently, why has the stock's P/E dropped about 70% from peak?

"It is my contention not that Google is necessarily overvalued, but only that investors in the stock at these levels, if they think it is not overvalued, must realize what they are conjecturing as to the company's growth."

Thanks. So it might be expensive. And it might not. And investors should keep that in mind. Yes, that's what he's saying: investors should be aware that buying Google is not necessarily as safe as just keeping their money in cash.

"Let us think about what the current implicit future growth rate suggests about the dominance of this company in our economy. Within ten years, Google will be earning as much or more than over half of the Dow 30 components."

He doesn't defend this math, so I have no idea where he gets that idea. I have little trouble believing it, if true: Google already earns more than some Dow components ($4 billion for the last 12 months; Alcoa has around half that). But I don't see why Google must achieve this growth to be worth its current price: as long as investors continue to expect steady above-average growth, Google will have a long-term P/E higher than most.

"Where such capital can be deployed in the virtual world in which Google operates is not readily apparent to me."

Oh, good! Google operates in a 'virtual world'! Clearly they buy their servers for Linden Dollars and Flooz.

Full disclosure: I agree with the author's conclusion that Google is probably overpriced. But I've thought so since it was at $150.</comment>


Google accused of retaliation against app maker over antitrust investigation - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/31/google-accused-antitrust-retaliation/ <comment><USER2> The article mentions that Apple once booted the same app for the same reason, and BlueMail made the same accusations in response at the time. I think this strongly suggests there's more to the story here.</comment>


When Will the Last Line of Code Be Written? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brightwork.io/when-will-the-last-ever-line-of-code-be-written/ <comment><USER2> As systems evolve into higher levels of abstraction, things that we used to consider to be "code" become "data" instead.

For example, in 1950, you would write a lot of code to accomplish what you can do today with a pivot table in Excel (which we don't consider to be "coding"). Page layout you'd write as code in 1996 is now "data" encoded in CSS.

At the same time, things that used to be major code concerns have been abstracted into the underlying systems. Garbage collection, privilege separation, caching, and so on continue to move lower in the stack. The trend toward programming languages that more natively support asynchronicity is another great example.

The better question to ask is: What tasks that we accomplish with code today will be accomplished with data tomorrow?

<comment><USER3> There's a cautionary aspect to this in that simply adding parameters and making configuration data(e.g. much of the Java XML ecosystem) is not enough to squash out "coding". It takes some carefully thought abstraction to make a difference. In some places we've made progress, in others we've churned through tech without going forward.

<comment><USER4> It moving from imperative to declarative programming essentially.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't believe the author even writes code, he is just a liaison between the developers and management. He's only seeing the big picture, none of the actual work involved with creating low level libraries, drivers, etc. You can't really just point and click something like snapchat or facebook into existence.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should probably look up Adam DuVander. He's a well respected Developer Evangelist who helped Sendgrid grow their community.

<comment><USER6> But not an engineer?

<comment><USER7> I have a computer science degree and I love to write code. My title does not have "engineer" in it. Feel free to hold that against me :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The topic of this post reminds me of the state of 'programming' in the distant future described in the novel "A Deepness in the Sky" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky)):

From the article:

> "The Qeng Ho's computer and timekeeping systems feature the advent of > "programmer archaeologists": the Qeng Ho are packrats of computer programs > and systems, retaining them over millennia, even as far back to the era of > Unix programs (as implied by one passage mentioning that the fundamental > time-keeping system is the Unix epoch)."

</comment><comment><USER9> Never. People like to build things. Just like asking, when will the last muzzle loader be made? Simple answer, never. People love hobbies.

<comment><USER10> This. It's exactly like self-driving cars. I hope it NEVER becomes illegal to drive on public roads, even when there are self-driving cars. No one can ever take the freedom of driving away from me. I love driving and I will never stop doing it. Just like coding.

<comment><USER11> But you're not free to code on publicly available software (the production instance) just because you want to. I'm guessing driving on public roads will become illegal for safety and efficiency reasons once automated driving takes over.

I bet you'll be able to go to a closed course and drive there though, for a cost. :)

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why you are in favor of the government taking away our basic freedoms, but I do not agree with you, sir. If you want to live in a fascist country, you are more than welcome to move to one. :)

<comment><USER12> As self-driving highways, with cars that move at 250 km/h (155 mph), become common, regular driving will probably be restricted to secondary roads first, tertiary later. As time goes by, you will be seen as a nuisance from most of the drivers, as your car will be restricted to driving 60 km/h (37 mph) less than the rest in the same kind of road.

So by the time a law passes that forbids non-autonomous driving, it won't be a "fascist government" but your own countrymen who will take your "basic freedom" away.

But don't worry, I was using the "you" figuratively, by the time this happens, I don't think any of us will be alive. And, of course, there is always the off-chance that someone codifies in the constitution the right to drive a car, assuring that future generations have the freedom to kill themselves in the roads as we proudly do today.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that will ever happen. We'll all be traveling via self-driving drones instead!

The roads will just be for hobbyists who like to drive their own cars (and write their own code,) and probably transportation of heavy materials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The fundamental thing we're doing when writing code is specifying computations. The difficulty of it comes from the fact that when we conceive of some computation we'd like executed, we do so with human brains, whereas the thing that's going to execute the computation is a totally different kind of thing: they each have something like their own 'internal format' for representing program concepts.

Our strategy has been to write stacks of translators to bring the machine's internal format nearer to our own.

The last line of code will be written when we develop translators for languages near enough to our own internal representations that we no longer require special training to learn the machine's representation. It won't make sense to call it 'code' anymore.

This kindred language/representation may be natural language (and maybe not), but if it were I'd imagine there'd have to be a tight feedback loop in the machine's attempts to sort out ambiguities in a developer's specification. So, programming would turn into a conversation with a computer: you ask for something, it proposes a solution ("Thanks John! How's this?"—it'll probably be like that. Ugh.), you express your modifications, it proposes another solution etc.

That's my guess anyway.

<comment><USER15> That kind of reminds me of the computer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

<comment><USER16> Using loglan[0] as the primary language of interaction. Addressing the issue (in theory) of ambiguity in other human-oriented languages.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unless there is a compelling reason I never felt comfortable using frameworks. They tend to make a small problem much bigger. You end up spending time understanding, fixing and adjusting to the framework than making that little adjustment to your code to extend the functionality or relook at your needs.

<comment><USER18> This works for small projects that only you touch. However, if you are building a product for a company and plan on having teams make changes to the code base, frameworks are the way to go.

It's even easier when hiring because a big portion of your training is already done before the person is hired and they are knowledgeable in said framework.

<comment><USER13> I've found that the bigger problems are:

\- Confusing design patterns with frameworks

\- Using frameworks incorrectly

\- Using a framework when a library is more appropriate

For example, Dependency Injection should start as a design pattern, and then a framework brought in based on the project's requirements. A couple of screens of "new" statements have very little learning overhead. No framework can define the way an application's modules relate with each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> FizzBuzz on a whiteboard for an interview at the top AI firm: Gopplezonsoft in 2048

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe in the far future, all the computer code will become encoded in lambda calculus, and immediately matched and refactored against huge database of existing lambda abstractions. So the code will not be written anymore, it will only be rediscovered as a combination of already existing abstractions.

<comment><USER21> If you posit the conceptual existence of such a database, then all we really do when we code, even today, is choose a particular set of abstractions to implement a specification. It would be certainly be nice if existing languages/analyzers were capable of suggesting "better" abstractions, though, for whatever operational definition of "better" applies at the time (e.g. more compact or common or efficient).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When will the last painting be painted?

</comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of [Why I Hate Frameworks] [http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12)

</comment><comment><USER24> I have not read the article yet but the title reminds me of this [http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/11/13/the-last-ever- line-...](http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/11/13/the-last-ever-line-of- code/)

</comment><comment><USER25> It's not because we achieve more with less code that we write less code. Instead we want more. Doing speech recognition would have been unthinkable with punch cards... plenty of things are still unthinkable today, but maybe not tomorrow.

<comment><USER26> > It's not because we achieve more with less code that we write less code. > Instead we want more.

It's inevitable that this changes some day.

Probably a very distant day, but we must get to the point when we solved nearly half of all the problems that we can solve with software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to share something I wrote in response of seeing too many posts like this: [https://medium.com/@kapv89/code-will-always-be- written-207d3...](https://medium.com/@kapv89/code-will-always-be- written-207d3cdfe145#.6snta46s8) \- Code will always be Written

</comment><comment><USER28> Who cares... Not trying to be harsh here but seriously why is this on HN? Moreover the article is too brief to discuss meaningfully a nodus like this.

</comment><comment> peter-m80 tl;dr "Will the last line of code ever be written? Probably not"

<comment><USER29> Did the article rule out a "doomsday line"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> About 5 minutes before attempting to open the first trans-multiverse wormhole.

</comment><comment><USER31> probably around the same time as the last stupid blog post.

maybe shortly after.. :)</comment>


AirPods Are Now One of Apple's Most Important Products - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/the-upgrade/airpods-are-now-one-of-apples-most-important-products-66b3609d6535 <comment><USER2> > Don't they fall out?

I don't understand why people thought they'd fall out. They're exactly the same shape as the wired earbuds, but they don't have the wires pulling on them. Do normal earbuds just spontaneously fall out? So why would AirPods?

<comment><USER3> The difference is that wired pods falling out is no big deal. You simply grab it by the wire and put it back in.

However, if an Airpod falls out even once, they may be lost irretrievably.

I suspect normal Apple earphones fall out occasionally for most people. (I can't wear first party apple earphones at all. They never seem to stay in my ear, so airpods are a complete no for me).

<comment><USER4> You should actually try AirPods. The wired Apple headphones do not work for me at all (they don't fit, they fall out, etc.). AirPods fit very well and almost never fall out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Like most of Apple's best products, AirPods simply work.

This hasn't been true for a few generations now.

I just bought a $3K Mac Mini. I'm a developer, and I wanted a big, beefy machine to replace my aging Macbook Pro.

It's a great machine. Very happy with it. But there are a lot of little annoyances that, five or ten years ago, I never would have expected from a Mac.

For example, the screens no longer shut themselves off after ten minutes. I've tried playing with the Energy Saver settings, but they just ... stay on. The screen saver never kicks in, either. This worked for like a week, and then just stopped.

My external speakers stopped working for a while, too. I rebooted twice and they came back.

I have two monitors hooked up to it, and MacOS keeps getting confused about which one is my primary monitor.

None of this is a deal breaker, but it adds up. Apple doesn't "just work" anymore. It mostly works, it's mostly great, but they aren't the magical, invulnerable products they used to be.

<comment><USER6> They were never the magical invulnerable products you are saying they used to be.

Source: worked support for mac equipment around OS9 time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have three sets of AirPods. One got lost, and I accidentally online ordered two.

Of the two that work, one constantly gets reported by callers as unintelligible. The other one I never get comments about except from my mother. Everyone universally agrees that the sound quality of holding the iPhone X to my head is vastly superior.

AirPods are convenient but not very good in my experience. Poor audio quality, almost no sound isolation (which could be viewed as a feature, frankly), short battery life (long conference call and you are doing the one-ear-cycle and pray thing), and a challenge to keep charged (yet another charger/cord needed or a rotation cycle with phone). I have and use mine (get value from my sunk cost) but do not like them. They also hurt my ears after about 15 minutes.

My wired Etymotic mid-range earplugs for $70-ish have vastly better audio and mic quality, insane passive noise isolation and never need charging. Except... no 3.5mm jack and that stupid dongle keeps getting lost when moving between phone and laptop/ipad. Sigh.

What a travesty. Sorry to rant, but it just is not a good product even if it is important to Apple.

<comment><USER6> Lol, that clusterfuck describes exactly what I thought they'd be like.

And you bought three sets, thus encouraging Apple that everything's fine and to continue whatever it is they're doing!!

<comment><USER7> It's not as if I had much of a choice here.* I could use other bluetooth headsets, but the Airpods, as poor as the audio and mic quality are, do mostly "just work" for me and are as small as my wired headphones were to carry around.

* In the Apple ecosystem for a dime, in for a dollar. I am looking to get out, but that will be expensive and I do like Apple's privacy core, if not their recent hardware and UX direction.

<comment><USER6> I get it, I'm on Android because I can't swallow Apple's bullshit but would like it if Android had similar security to Apple.

It would be nice if we could have our cake and eat it too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the tools you need but are not available? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Creating a Google Meet call from command-line and copying URL to clipboard.</comment>


Climate change has doubled the frequency of ocean heatwaves - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05978-1 <comment><USER2> One more nail in the coffin.

What can we do?

<comment><USER3> Nuclear. That's the point of the endless drone of climate change articles. To convince you that something must be done, and that maybe Blinky the three eyed fish is actually kinda cute. They really don't have any other solution waiting in the wings. Renewables have never been enough to meet global demand. It has to be nuclear. You're okay with radiation, right? Cool, let's do it. Nuclear.

<comment><USER4> New Zealand is almost entirely run on renewables. Iceland is 100%. Sweden is almost there. The UK and Germany are close behind. This is totally doable with renewables. No need for waste that is radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.

<comment><USER5> If we have a choice between a swimming pool worth of material that's violently radioactive but can be reprocessed, and a planet that's choked to death from coal pollution because nuclear has radioactive waste, I'll take nuclear every time.

Wind, solar and geothermal should be able to fill the gap, but this technology takes time to devleop and deploy. Nuclear's been around since the 1960s, and it works. If we need 20-40 years to switch to fully-renewable energy, nuclear could get us there.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why JavaScript is a toy language - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidarno.org/2010/05/18/why-javascript-is-a-toy-language/

<comment><USER2> I started to write a piece by piece account of why I disagree with this, then I realised that there isn't really much point, because it doesn't cover new ground.

If you don't like JavaScript, you're going to want to replace it with something else. Fine- that's your opinion. What the post _doesn't_ do is offer any alternative, beyond "Virtual Machine-style solutions". What about the security issues inherent in that?

If you're going to knock JS down, that's fine. But at least propose an alternative. I have been using C# for years, and have recently been experimenting with using node.js on the backend- and I couldn't be happier with it. I guess I just like toys?

<comment><USER3> I'm probably revealing my ignorance here, but what are the security issues inherent with replacing Javascript with a bytecode based VM type solution? Surely Javscript runs in a VM too, just one that is not really designed to run anything other than Javascript. Why does the type of code the VM runs cause any fundamental changes in security?

(What I really came here to say is that this is a pretty terrible article. I dislike JS a lot, but this article makes many strange assertions and presents personal (often misinformed) opinion as fact. I'm not sure why people are upvoting it.)

<comment><USER2> _I'm probably revealing my ignorance here, but what are the security issues inherent with replacing Javascript with a bytecode based VM type solution?_

I suppose it's true that if the functionality was locked down to match JS, there would be no greater security issues. But usually the whole reason for making a VM is to allow more functionality (as in Google's NaCl), so the two issues get lumped together. Even WebGL has issues with vulnerabilities in graphics drivers.

 _I'm not sure why people are upvoting it_

Everyone loves to bring the juiciest piece of flame-bait to the barbeque? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was expecting a rehash of all the well-known reasons that JS is a terrible language. Instead he comes up with new, completely _invalid_ reasons why JS is a terrible language.

Kudos.

I did like this comment, though:

"Type safety is illusion. Unless you can differentiate between int-feet from int-meters."

</comment><comment><USER5> Apparently some of the most popular languages in the world are "toy languages" because they aren't compiled. Also decompilers apparently don't exist because compilation gives you "protecting ones ideas and security". In addition, I guess that means open source is a terrible idea.

I'm going to save this article, because if I ever have the need to start hiring people, I think I can use an applicant's reaction to it as a sort of hacker litmus test.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are so many things I find wrong about this article but I will just state one obvious item.

"JavaScript encourages abstraction layers: Abstraction layers such as JQuery, Objective-J and GWT have become very popular recently."

These are all solving different problems:

1) jQuery mostly solves the problem of traversing and manipulating elements within the browser DOM in a common cross-browser way. The standard interfaces that existed work well enough individually. The differences among browser vendor implementations was the problem. Many of these issues have been addressed in recent years and continue to be addressed in future vendor releases.

This is not a Javascript problem.

2) Objective-J was designed as part of the Cappuccino project, whose goals were essentially to port a Cocoa-style API on the web. (And they're doing a great job at it, by the way).

This is not a Javascript problem.

3) GWT is front-end development for people who come from Java and don't want to learn or use Javascript.

This is not a Javascript problem.

<comment><USER7> _JavaScript encourages abstraction layers: Abstraction layers such as JQuery, Objective-J and GWT have become very popular recently._

This is the age old debate that has raged since Lisp and C expressive vs imperative, people who favor imperative languages will look at languages like Lisp and JavaScript as the devils tongue. While people who favor expressive languages will feel unduly restrained in the puritanical world of imperatives.

If you go back further than that, it gets back to the old science vs art debate. One style treats programming as a science the other treats it as an art. Both are right and both are wrong, because expressing human though is an art but computation theory is a science, what we do is somewhere in the middle.

I am personally an artist, therefore I love expressive languages. I see the beauty of languages like JavaScript despite their warts. Where the author sees the above quote about jQuery and sites it as a drawback of JavaScript I see it as one of it's greatest strengths, the fact that developers can express themselves so fully that they can design mini-languages in it, is a testimonial to it's power. Is the world really worse off because jQuery exists. I would say it has contributed quite a bit of usefulness.

For me the one big one with JavaScript is the variable scope issue, I cannot for the life of me figure out why they would have designed the languadge to ignore scope blocks when it comes to variables and move that scope up to the function level. There are a lot of small WTF with it, but to me that is the big WTF where they thinking. Many of the gripes in this article have everything to do with the authors personal preference and noting to do with true WTF's in JavaScript. As such it comes of as written by an uninformed, opinionated elitist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one of the poorest articles I've seen on the Hacker News front page. Author should endeavor to understand something more completely before publishing a long-winded and uninformed rant. Start with the concept of "compilation".

</comment><comment><USER9> Your opinion of toy language or not. Javascript is very powerful and useful both on the client side, and even server side with Node.js. I have been improving on my Javascript thanks to sites like Codecademy. Loving it too.</comment>


CodeDay Registrations are open across the nation! Come check it out - <AUTHOR> https://codeday.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Side note: Use the "SUPEREARLY" 50% discount code while it lasts!

Many cities are already selling out fast!</comment>


Open source hobbyists now in high demand - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/300899/open-source-hobbyists-now-high-demand

<comment><USER2> "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

— Hunter S. Thompson (<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson#Quotes>)

I first learned Cocoa in 2002 or 2003, fighting through the horrendous documentation and lack of sample code. I built a simple shareware app, made a few dollars on it, and then worked on Windows software for the next few years.

Fast-forward a few years, and Apple ships an SDK for the (since-renamed) iPhone OS. I was able to dust off my (incredibly rusty) knowledge of Cocoa, learn a few things about the brand-new UIKit framework, and build and ship an app in a week (nights and weekends, no less) that ended up on the App Store's top ten paid apps list for several weeks.

Of course, I got incredibly lucky in picking the right stack years before it was the right stack. There was simply no way to know.

I learned Rails in early 2007 while working at Microsoft, and have used it in every job I've had since leaving. Rails seemed like a pretty safe bet at the time in terms of popularity, but I never anticipated it would become as popular as it has. My only reason for learning Rails was because it looked awesome.

Meanwhile, I'm (at least for now) completely ignoring Node.js. This might prove to be a mistake, but I assume I can pick it up without too much trouble later on if not knowing it becomes a liability.

Lately, I've been teaching myself Ember.js, which has been a heck of a slog with its rapidly-evolving API and lack of up-to-date samples demonstrating 'real world' use[1]. I hope I'm ahead of the curve on where client-side web development goes, but there's simply no way to tell yet. And even if I'm wrong, it's ok because I think Ember is cool and worth learning in its own right for what I'm using it for.

I guess if I had to sum my thoughts up it would be: learn cool stuff not because you're trying to provide yourself with job security, but because it's cool stuff. If you pick the wrong technology, hopefully all of the time you invested in learning another stack provides value in terms of exposing you to similar concepts, and you'll be able to pick up the 'right' one with far less effort than you'd have to expend otherwise.

[1] I'd love to be proven wrong on this point. It'd save me a lot of time and hassle :)

</comment><comment><USER3> In the past three years, nothing has has contributed more to my career (and financial growth) than my open source work. It's instant street cred (and a ton of fun).

<http://www.github.com/aantix>

</comment><comment><USER4> So, nearing GandhiCon Four, I guess (<http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/GandhiCon.html>)

</comment><comment><USER5> good article. Also I like the word "Naughts" - first encounter for a word that is not too awkard for the 2000-2010 slot.</comment>