Unemployed, a grad student rethinks the world of work - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/The-Home-Forum/2010/0323/Unemployed-a-grad-student-rethinks-the-world-of-work?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+feeds%2Ftop+%28Christian+Science+Monitor+%7C+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> This is a short story about someone who expected the world handed to them because they had a master's degree and it didn't work out. It's hardly a revelation and seems to skirt the line between pity party and reflection on hubris.

This isn't some upstart rethinking the way we work. It's an entitled person coming to the realization that they were wrong over the course of a few paragraphs.

<comment><USER3> I'm not so sure it's merely that this person is entitled; this is exactly what society sells people. Every child is told that they should go to college, get a degree, and they'll setup for life. So people study for years and pay tens of thousands of dollars -- it would be totally irrational to do all that without the expectation of getting something for it.

If whole thing is a big con then this person is just a victim.

<comment><USER4> This is the what society sells people who are in the upper middle or just plain upper classes. I grew up poor and my parents taught me to work hard, keep my head down and hope for the best. No one ever promised me an outcome and I never expected it.

<comment><USER5> _This is the what society sells people who are in the upper middle or just plain upper classes._

what about all the outreach that (especially public) universities do to encourage middle-class and lower-class americans to all attend a 4-year college? i don't think college in the US is something that's exclusively sold to rich kids

<comment><USER4> I don't think that has the impact that you think it does. I'm not saying I believe this now but the one of the first things I learned in life is that rich people will lie to you. They feel guilty about being where they are so they'll tell you that you can be like them when in fact they'll never really accept you.

You're probably right. There are some poor people who work to send their kids to college thinking that it will solve all their kid's problems. But I think most know better and so I think a lot of that outreach falls on deaf ears.

(Which incidentally isn't to say my parents didn't encourage me to go to college. Because much of society has set "having a degree" up as a litmus test for "is smart enough to have a career". But they made sure I knew enough to learn from my professors expertise while not adopting their flawed valued system)

<comment><USER6> _when in fact they'll never really accept you._

This is why we need to get busy fixing society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We should teach our students earlier that it can sometimes be important to align your dreams with what other people will pay for. I.e. not journalism, at least not in the volume that universities continue to turn out journalists. People shouldn't have to work through six years of school before finding this out the hard way.

<comment><USER8> The idea is widely understood and discussed among college students, so I'm not sure what can be done further to teach them to live in accordance with it. I think it would be more useful to teach them not to despise knowledge of how the "trivial" aspects of the world actually work, so they find it easier to make themselves useful when and where they need to.

<comment><USER9> I've started telling people, look at what the median result is for whatever you want to do. If that is something that you would enjoy doing/think is worth it then continue down that path.

<comment><USER10> I think this is the best approach. It seems that when it comes to a career path, the common notion is to compare the top percentage without taking into account that for many, this situation is only applicable for the last few years of the career; for many more, not applicable at all.

It's not whether you want to dream of playing in the NHL. It's whether you enjoy playing hockey enough to play in Rochester for some farm team for a few hundred people a night making $50K.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is written in a humble tone and does a good job of addressing the difference between reality and the message we are sold as high school and college students that getting a degree in any field guarantees you a career, and that you will love your job. It is impossible to know which field will ultimately pan out at the age of 18, and those you trust (professors, teachers) will mislead you, albeit unintentionally.

I think the other message is that you shouldn't wait for something big to happen to start enjoying life.

</comment><comment><USER12> she can't be doing so bad... she just got published in the csmonitor...

</comment><comment><USER13> This is probably the main (valid) reason why the "right to work" is enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights ( <http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/> Article 23).

Many people define themselves through their career and find their sense of self-identity severely damaged if that's taken away from them. And many people don't have the entrepreneurial urge to go an do their own thing if they can't make it happen "in the system".

It's a dangerous place to be, for any society, when a large chunk of its society (particularly middle class, like this girl) feels like their self- identity is crumbling.

<comment><USER14> Then she probably shouldn't have chose to get a degree in a largely pointless major.

<comment><USER15> Journalism is pointless?

<comment><USER7> Rather say that it is "overbooked" from an employment-seeking perspective.

<comment><USER16> I see your point, but I also think you can get into trouble deciding whether a degree is "pointless" entirely on its current market value. Computer science may have seemed like a pointless degree at one point during the 60's.

<comment><USER17> > Computer science may have seemed like a pointless degree at one point during > the 60's.

There weren't many folks with CS degrees in the 60s. (Stanford's department, which is one of the oldest, started in 65 and didn't do undergrad until the 80s.)

<comment><USER18> computer science was the philosophy department, the psychology department, or the math department.

you never know what will be useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> okay, many non university students are now working and making good bucks online or offline. A university degree may make it easier for you to knock companies doors, but it won't give you money. Blogs are looking for writer and looking to pay $50/$80 per article. You don't need to be a master degree owner but just good enough to write something interesting for the community. This is what school doesn't and won't teach you (or you could just start and bypass them).

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who still doubts that we're rapidly becoming a third world country needs to read this article and multiply it by a few million.

It's not "the recession". This could just have easily been written in 2006. The US is in rapid decline.

<comment><USER20> _The US is in rapid decline._

I think the US is diverging into two camps: a well-educated, well-off elite, and a permanent underclass. This story is about somebody who always thought of herself as the former, and then found out she was the latter.

<comment><USER21> I disagree with that view. That is not what America set out to be nor will any American settle for that. Mobility of all sorts has been inculcated into us for decades (one could argue since the foundation of the nation itself). This is different than many countries, where "duty" is upheld over personal fulfillment and improvement. It's our belief in _possibilities_ that drives America and makes it unique among nations. And I don't say this in a cheerleading manner. This is why people come here. It's not just the money. It's the freedom to _do_ things.

<comment><USER22> > _This is why people come here._

Many people come here for find that the brochures were misleading. I remember reading the a lot of the Indians came here on H1B visas bringing over their wives only to find out that the middle class in America, is not like the middle class in India (i.e. we don't have a caste-system that allows middle- class families to have servants). The article/comment I remember reading seemed to imply that it was the women being brought over as the spouses of the visa-holders that were disappointed that they had to do things for themselves even though they were middle-class (and who then pushed for the both of them to move back to India).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _But seven months later, after getting rejected from every permanent job I > applied to, I was feeling pretty discouraged._

Seriously?

Either he applied for 5 jobs in seven months, or there's something seriously wrong with the guy (horrible personality, horrible grades, can't answer interview questions).

<comment><USER24> It's much harder in the non-tech world, especially competing against people with specific skillsets. If you spent your time as an editor, nobody is going to look at you for a secretary when there are 50 resumes for secretaries staring you in the face.

Editor jobs dried up.</comment></comment>


Introducing Money in Excel, an easier way to manage your finances - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/ <comment><USER2> I wish banks had API tokens, so that people didn't have to exchange their passwords for financial services.

<comment><USER3> The UK has implemented Open Banking [1] and PSD2 directive since late 2018.

It allows apps to interconnect and pull data - I can use a single banking app to check balances across all my accounts.

[1] [https://www.openbanking.org.uk](https://www.openbanking.org.uk)

<comment><USER4> PSD2 is EU-wide. (I hope the UK doesn't roll it back!)

<comment><USER5> Now if 'open' part of PSD2 open banking actually meant that I could access my own bank account api, that would be great :).

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately you need to be acredited to be able to get access to banks APIs and in order to get acredited there are certain requirements such as needing to be a legal entity. Alas, no dice for the enthusiasts.

<comment><USER7> Could enthusiasts not form a non profit entity to receive accreditation and delegate access?

<comment><USER5> There are other, such as capital, cash flow and licensing requirements.... As far as I can tell.

I was very disappointed when I found this out too. Fail.

There will probably be resellers offering api access to our own data (I think that's the deal with tokens.io) so... classic lobbiest produced walled garden to limit free enterprise and competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can it connect to Amazon and extract my purchases and classify them? Almost all of our purchases are from Amazon these days and categorizing them as "Shopping" or "General Merchandise" is almost useless. Someone please let me know if this exists somewhere.

Aside from that I'd also love the ability to amortize some of these yearly payments I have. When you're trying to answer "How much money am I putting away each month" all of these random yearly, quarterly, one-time expenses end up ruining that.

<comment><USER9> Amazon doesn't expose that via an API, so the data you're after can't be gotten to easily. That said, there are a few options:

\- This[1] report from Amazon gives you an incredibly detailed export of physical purchases. Caveat being that digital-only goods are missing, as well as items which didn't ship (either because you or because Amazon canceled the item prior to shipment). So depending on your purchase patterns, it may cover substantially all your needs or have so many holes in it as to be near useless.

\- This[2] Github project exports your order history to a SQLite file. It's based on parsing/scraping the Order History pages themselves, so doesn't have the gap of the above report but also has the potential to break if/when Amazon changes the source code for the Orders page. The project hasn't been updated in several years, so no clue if the current parsing heuristics are valid or not.

\- This[3] Github project is also based on scraping the Order History pages, but is much more recent than [2] and still being actively developed. However, [2] is designed as a ruby script that syncs a SQLite database whereas [3] runs as a Chrome extension.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports/)

[2] [https://github.com/chrisb/amazon- orders](https://github.com/chrisb/amazon-orders)

[3] [https://github.com/philipmulcahy/azad](https://github.com/philipmulcahy/azad)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article says that they're using Plaid to make the connections. I imagine Plaid also powers the categorization of the data as well. This really just seems like a pretty wrapper of Plaid data, in which case, you probably won't get much value out of it if you're using other tools like YNAB.

</comment><comment><USER11> MS Money reborn in Excel. I remember having to migrate my accounts away from MS Money.

</comment><comment><USER12> would be curious what ynab users think of this?

<comment><USER13> I could never understand how YNAB was supposed to work. Why do people like it so much?

<comment><USER14> I really wish there was more granular nomenclature around budgeting. "Budgeting" varies so much and the splash page rarely helps. So I will often have to download or sign up for the app, attach actual data (which I'm less than eager to do) and poke around. When looking at credit unions they touted their website's features but were surprised when I asked if there was a way I could demo it.

YNAB uses a variation of the "envelope method." You categorize money earned. Then that gets deducted by expenses. In meatspace you would take your paycheck in cash and split it into labeled envelopes and use that for spending. This is a simplification of what YNAB does and there are other free tools that use this method.

Mint and Money in Excel take transactions and categorize them. From there you can look at the history of the category or look at net worth or income/expense over time. When you set a "budget" it's just a number you set based on previous month's spending and it's unrelated to your income. These generally suck for non-monthly expenses like property tax or my bi-monthly trash bill.

YNAB /can/ do charts and trends, but they often encourage a "fresh start" which starts everything over and don't have great tools around historical data. So you can't look back that far. With Excel it's just a spreadsheet so if you have the data in any format you can pull it in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it baffling that this template is inaccessible to users of Office 365 for business.

<comment><USER16> It's not that baffling; Microsoft is selling Office 365 for Business for corporate accounts, and Office 365 Home for personal use, and expects users who have access to the former for corporate use to also have the latter for home use. Indeed, their Home Use Program which used to let corporate users let their employees purchase similar-level standalone products at a sharp discount to use on personal computers now has the primary option being a discount on Office 365 Home.

So, that it makes perfect sense that the personal finance solution that they intend to be a motivation to buy Office 365 Home isn't available on the Office 365 for Business accounts many of the people they want to sell Home to also already have access to.

<comment><USER15> I own a couple of extra licenses of Office 365 for Business that I've already paid for. I just want to check out the excel template- I don't need Office 365 for Home. I have a business license on the machine I use at home. I would pay something for the template. I'm not changing versions of excel and the whole suite just to check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ah man, excellent! The one thing I'm really missing in my current finance workflow is accidentally turning my money column into text and never being able to revert it!

</comment><comment><USER18> So essentially it's Mint.</comment>


Minecraft Can Now be Used to Model and Print Objects via 3D Printer - <AUTHOR> http://minecraftprint.com <comment><USER2> Should I actually try this Minecraft thing?

I don't know anything about it, only that it sounds like something that absorbs an unlimited amount of your free time and allows you to implement CPUs, programmable logic, and now 3D printer models.

<comment><USER2> This game is pretty cool. Thanks for the recommendations!

<comment><USER3> R.I.P. marshray's free time.

<comment><USER2> I know. I stayed up way too late last night! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The inverse can be seen with Kinect: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2mCDkqXki0>

You can have your own cat walking through your minecraft world.

<comment><USER5> And you can go full-circle by scanning yourself into Minecraft and then making a you-figurine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool, although I'd rather have a nice voxel editor that I can use to print stuff to a Makerbot. Would I be best served just using a Minecraft map editor, even though I don't play Minecraft?

<comment><USER7> You should try out: <http://3dtin.com> for a MineCraft experience, or you can use <http://tinkercad.com> for a more CAD-like design. Both pretty cool and export STLs needed for manufacturing in 3D.

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know they can build an ALU inside minecraft, can they build a 3D printer inside minecraft yet?

<comment><USER9> Yes - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0i8gUK1cVw>

<comment><USER10> That is bananas. Especially the 8x8 version he links to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The singularity will come when they can build Minecraft inside Minecraft

<comment><USER12>
       stack level too deep (SystemStackError)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the script available? I can't seem to find it on there.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will be made available soonish. We want to clean it up/make it a tad more user friendly first. And that will probably be after the last shuttle launch this weekend.</comment></comment>


Ledger of Harms – Center for Humane Technology - <AUTHOR> https://ledger.humanetech.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, I was just thinking about this yesterday. I think making it cool to leave your devices at home, locked away where Alexa and Google can't listen or follow you would be a good thing to do. Increase in-person media, live theater, bring back Salon style discussions, I attend all of these so maybe idealist. Interesting stuff

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A list of the negative impacts of social media and mobile tech that do not show up on the balance sheets of companies, but on the balance sheet of society.</comment>


Who is the enemy of FOSS today? - <AUTHOR> http://michuk.posterous.com/who-is-the-enemy-of-floss-today

<comment><USER2> I read the title and thought "Apple". Everything about the company smells of evil, and I am reminded of this every morning when I need to download my news podcasts for the road; I have always copied and pasted audio files into every MP3 player I owned, but with the iPod, I need to launch the horrible iTunes and drag programs into my iPod. Should I plug my device into any other computer with iTunes, it would attempt to reset its memory and initialize it for _this_ other iTunes :-/

<comment><USER3> Congratulations, you're one of the %0.1 of people that wants to manually copy files from your manually-organized arbitrary directory structure onto your music player's filesystem. To support that, the player has to index all the files itself when it boots up, which is why the old Nomad took minutes to be ready to hit play.

Everyone else uses a database-backed program that automatically organizes their collection (iTunes), and expects to synchronize from that database to their device. If you weren't so set on doing things the way you did them in 1998, you'd be fine with iTunes — it can automatically download the podcast files, and synchronize that playlist when you plug in the device to charge it.

<comment><USER4> 0.1% of what population? Anyone who uses P2P music sharing is going to store their music in a manually-organized directory structure by necessity, and as a result, will have few problems dragging and dropping the root music directory into another one.

<comment><USER5> I don't even want to think how long it would take to tag 4,000 albums properly either. This fear alone keeps me away from database-backed music systems.

<comment><USER6> So if you have 4,000 albums that _don't_ have a database - try this: <http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm>

It will take the data from your MP3 Directory structure - lets say something like Artist/Album/song -- and automatically generate the correct tags for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The enemy of FLOSS is convienence and ease-of-use. I'm not trying to be snarky: I'm typing this on Firefox in Linux and I've almost excusively been on Linux since 2002. I've been elbow deep in this stuff for years, hacking and tweaking and experimenting, etc. I'm at the end of my rope, about to jump to Apple with all the lock-in and overpriced shit and inflexibility and patent abuse, etc. At least it is easy to use and maintain and has many powerful, flexible and even niche applications. And well-supported libraries.

I'm starting to see those free software ideals I've held so dear turn into tradeoffs. I'll trade in some 'freedoms' for more capable, abundant, and better supported software that allows me to get work done easier and more effectively.

If RMS wanted GNU software to spread then he shouldn't have gone into politics and preaching. He should have made sure that GNU software was more useful to the software users. To most people software freedom is too intangible to be counted as a benefit. Hell, 99.9% of people couldn't even explain it in very basic terms if you asked them. He's just created software for enthusiasts and hobbyists. Not a bad thing, but not his goal either.

Anyways, I've grown out of it.

I'm just talking about consumer-facing software, by the way. I know free software will always have value in education, commodity software that is not your primary business, etc. It is always going to be an abysmal failure on the desktop unless a free software Steve Jobs appears out of thin air, though.

<comment><USER8> "If RMS wanted GNU software to spread then he shouldn't have gone into politics and preaching. He should have made sure that GNU software was more useful to the software users"

Indeed, consider this alternate timeline whose RMS is more pragmatic and willing to give up a few short term small victories in order to win big in the end:

It's the late '70s. The microprocessor revolution is just getting started. RMS and his band of wily hackers jump onboard, realizing there is going to be a lot of money to be made, and that a person with a lot of money can do a lot more good than a person without a lot of money.

They make a decision: they will go commercial, amass a fortune, and then retire to promote their ideal free software world.

It's GNU BASIC that Altair picks up in this timeline, not MS BASIC. It's RMS that gets the IBM deal. It's RMS that becomes the world's richest man.

25 years later, RMS retires, and then sets up the FSF, endowed with about $50 billion dollars. With just the investment income, not touching the principle at all, the FSF is generating enough money to be able to give out 50000 grants a year that each pay a developer for one year's full time work on free software.

In 10 years, the FSF has produced GPL replacements for every important piece of non-free generally available software on the planet. The only non-GPL software left is internal things on corporate intranets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every day I am more convinced that the enemies of FOSS are the borderline morons that descend on articles like that one to "tell it like it is" with "M$ IS TEH DEVILZ LOLZ" prose that only makes everyone else shake their heads in disgust or shame.

Microsoft would do a far better job at discrediting FOSS if they simply flooded the internet with astroturfers that mimic the FOSS nutjobs.

<comment><USER10> I've heard the paranoid ascribe FOSS nutjobs to Microsoft Astroturfing efforts. This character emailed me claiming that the bellicose, "F*ck MSFT!" mouth-breathers were really Waggoner-Edstrom shills.

<comment><USER11> fsck? (It probably needs it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I find a bit silly about this debate is how seriously we developers tend to take it. We toss around words like "enemy", "devil", and "evil", to describe a company that manufactures consumer electronics.

I realize that many of us care deeply about open source software, and hope that the field we work in does not become tightly controlled, but let's face it: it's not like Apple is producing weapons of mass destruction, or cheap guns intended for street gangs, or cigarettes.

If we showed an iPad to the average person, and said, "Look how EVIL this is!", they'd probably be more than a little confused.

<comment><USER13> This was exactly my thought. My second thought was Clay Shirky's classic "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" <http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

He quotes from research derived from watching a group of neurotics that consistently defended itself against his [the researcher] attempts to make them do what they had ostensible gathered themselves together for. The second pattern of defensive behavior was identifying a common enemy. Clay writes:

"The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.

If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.

So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies."

So let's forget about Apple or Microsoft or any other so-called-enemy for awhile and get back to coding and "defeat" them the old-fashioned way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> <sarcasm> I am in total accordance with you. Apple is pure evil just imagine they had the core of their operating system(Darwin) open sourced even if they didn't need it to. They contribute to some high profile open source projects(WebKit, LLVM & SproutCore). Their web browser is standards compliant and their competitors can use the same rendering engine. And you can choose to buy an Apple product or not. We need to stop them now before they destroy our freedom forever. </sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure that promoting an alternate development model really means "the enemy" of FOSS. If you'd ask RMS, he'd probably say so, but I don't see why Apple's closed model and FOSS' open one can't co-exist. Also, it's not like Apple is attacking OSS, it's playing nicely as well as sponsoring several large projects.

If Apple is the enemy of FOSS, we've got a rosy future.

<comment><USER16> _Also, it's not like Apple is attacking OSS_

Apple's lawsuit against HTC effectively asserts that Android is illegal. That's a rather big deal; there are three mobile computing platforms that matter, and Android is the only one that's open.

<comment><USER17> And they would have done that whether Android was open source or not. You could argue that if Android was not open source, it wouldn't be doing as well as it is, but the lawsuit is about Android's success not the open source nature

<comment><USER16> Maybe. Although I can see Apple being much happier to split the market with Microsoft and their equally closed Windows mobile devices than with Android. Open platforms lead to disruptive innovations, which are often bad for market leaders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think _free software_ is enemy of _open source_ software.</comment>


Reality Check: What Are Some Good eCommerce Platforms? - <AUTHOR>

Is it just me, or are 98% of all ecommerce platforms out there unbelievably awful? Miva, 3DCart, OScommerce, Volusion, AspDotNet, ModularMerchant, ZenCart - their admin panels and checkout processes look like they were designed in 1992 by a 7th grader.
I'm aware of Magento but they don't offer support without their premium package ($10k a year). I'm aware of Interspire but I have heard horror stories about their support. I'm aware of CS-Cart, who has a beautiful checkout process.
Why aren't there any GOOD ecommerce platforms out there that are the whole package? Aesthetics count! Features count! Support is critical! Help! <comment><USER2> My sales experience with Interspire was really bad. I had a simple question about xml sitemap and alt tags for photos and he just said its not included without putting any effort forward. Otherwise I think if you want a platform that has an easy css template system and admin that isn't horrid interspire has worked for me. It depends what type of support you need, gateway support, css/template support, what type?

</comment><comment><USER3> Only yesterday heard about opencart, is that good for you? [ps: i'm not a php dev]</comment>


Ask HN: Best healthcare apps - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
Which apps in the healthcare field right now are creating the biggest amount of buzz?  I'd love to stay on top this kind of technology so if anyone can recommend a website for me to get info like this, it'd be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Dal <comment><USER2> Healthcare is huge. Buzz is subjective. Any specific type of thing you're interested in? Are you actually looking for successful apps or just those in the news at the moment? If the latter, following TechCrunch writers who cover health tech should suffice.

Otherwise, good place to start researching: [http://www.quora.com/What-are- some-digital-health-startups-i...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-digital- health-startups-in-San-Francisco)</comment>


The '-ize' have it (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.metadyne.co.uk/ize.html <comment><USER2> I decided that I would use 'ize' endings about 23 years ago, and I was in good company as many newspapers did so too. Oxford Spelling, as it is known ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling)) has fallen out of favour in domestic use, but is still found in international use, as my own observation.

On my own choice, I felt that there were not enough 'Z's in everyday writing, and that it was too good a letter to ignore.

It is bloody annoying that device dictionaries do not support this. I have occasionally switched to US English but this is not quite right. Knowing the correct suffix is a bit of a minefield.

<comment><USER3> Some of the international use might be because the United Nations uses Oxford spelling [1]. My employer does too.

GNU Aspell has several variants of "British English", including "British English (United Kingdom) [-ize suffixes and with accents]". KDE seems to use the same dictionary, so in KDE applications I have full support for "Oxford spelling".

There's a Firefox extension which includes -ize endings, but also includes -ise endings, so it's less useful.

[1] [http://dd.dgacm.org/editorialmanual/ed- guidelines/style/spel...](http://dd.dgacm.org/editorialmanual/ed- guidelines/style/spelling.htm)

[2] [http://aspell.net/](http://aspell.net/)

[3] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/british- engli...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/british-english- dictionary-2/)

<comment><USER2> Not all of the ise/ize endings are interchangable, so the Firefox extension might be correct. -ize is only applicable for words with a Greek root, I believe, which is why choosing Oxford English was hardly a masterstroke on my part but it does make things more interesting.

I have little experience of Aspell short of seeing it pop up as a dependency now and then, but I will now try and attempt incorporating it into my Mac's dictionary, ideally it would work on iOS as well.

<comment><USER3> The Firefox extension includes both versions, so I see a red underline for advertize (usage is archaic), but not for either realize or realise.

      aspell -d en_GB-ize-w_accents list < file-to-check

is the command to merely list spelling errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whenever I come across these quirks, I can't help but think of how extremely codified the grammar of Sanskrit(and other Indian languages that are influenced by it) is to handle situations like this.

Visarga Sandhi is one example comes to my mind. It is primarily used to handle the negative cases. For example, devoid of people is 'Nirjan' which is built using 'Nih'(No) and 'Jan'(People), whereas 'Nishchal' which means devoid of motion comes from 'Nih'(No) and 'Chal'(Motion). I'm not exactly sure but the rule probably goes along the lines of - When amalgamating "Uh" sound with Hard Sounds(Ka, Cha, Ta, Tha, Pa) you add a 'Sh' sound as in Nishkalmash, Nishchal, Nishchinth etc whereas when amalgamating with Soft sounds(Ga, Ja, Da, Dha, Ba) you add a 'Rr' sound as in Nirbhay, Nirday etc.

You have hundreds of these rules that deal with all kinds of transformations, sometimes simple rules like Ka => Ga, Cha => Ja etc. and sometimes more complex rules which are conditional on the consonant sounds that precede the object of transformation(Namah + Te => Namaste). Lot of them feel arbitrarily imposed but they just feel right when you say them out aloud.

Here are a couple of examples involving vowel transformations.

Mah _aa_ (Great) + _I_ ndra(Lord) => Mah _e_ ndra(Great Lord) (aa(as in car) + e(as in kick) => ae(as in vent))

Mah _i_ (Earth) + _I_ ndra(Lord) => Mah _i_ ndra(Lord of Earth) (e(as in kick) + e(as in kick) => ee(as in screen))

<comment><USER5> In fact the -ise ending is pronounced with a 'z' sound because of French spelling rules, but since most English speaking people don't learn French spelling rules they don't realise the etymology and hence (not henka) the spelling. The rule in its most basic form is either an 'i' or an 'e' before or after and 's' changes the sound to a 'z'. In a similar way and 'i' or an 'e' before or after a 'c' changes it into an 's' sound; this is why France is spelt France but Francaise is spelt Française, the cédille is there to remind you that the base word has a 'e' after the 'c'. So one could say that the '-ize' ending may have a more Germanic feel to it. In a similar way "metre" versus "meter".

When I was in primary school I was taught basic French, German, Latin and Greek spelling and etymology so that spelling in English would make more sense (not senze!)

<comment><USER6> > So one could say that the '-ize' ending may have a more Germanic feel to it. > In a similar way "metre" versus "meter".

although one shouldn't, since West Germanic didn't have a z sound or a letter to spell it with - it had become r (hence was/were, where "was" originally had an s sound and were originally had a z sound).

Later, when Germanic languages developed z again, it has mostly been spelt with s as in "was", since it comes from s.

In English no matter the origin of the word, z is spelt s in core vocabulary. Borrowings from Greek have z but they are mostly learned. If there were no zoos, z would feel entirely odd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > On the whole the 'z' alternative has nothing whatever to do with America

I was told that using a 'z' is old-fashioned, and using it or an 's' is optional - just be consistent. Only recently have I noticed a trend to condemn it as 'American', and if anything is sure to bring out a rather nasty, old- fashioned snob in some English people, it's being 'American'. Personally I cringe at this and quite happily use the 'z' form.

On the subject of anti-American snobbery, one of my friends whom I have known for over 30 years was adopted by a very old-fashioned English couple and (sure enough) often had a disparaging word about anything American. When he was about 20, his natural father made contact with him ... from America! After things had settled down a bit and he had met his 'new' family, I put it to him that, you know what, you are basically an American now. Foolish to pretend otherwise. He's changed his view quite a bit since then :)

<comment><USER8> >Only recently have I noticed a trend to condemn it as 'American', and if anything is sure to bring out a rather nasty, old-fashioned snob in some English people, it's being 'American'.

Similarly, until 1980 "soccer" and "football" were interchangeably used in Britain ([http://ns.umich.edu/Releases/2014/June14/Its-football-not- so...](http://ns.umich.edu/Releases/2014/June14/Its-football-not-soccer.pdf)), when "soccer" became less popular because of a mistaken belief that it is an Americanism. Not class reasons, as often claimed; this would be news to the millions who watch _Soccer Saturday_ and _Soccer AM_.

In the English-speaking world [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)#National_usage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_\(word\)#National_usage) , "football" is only unambiguously association football in Great Britain. In Ireland, "football" = Gaelic football or rugby union, and "soccer" is frequently used. In Australia, "football" = rugby, rugby league, or Australian rules. In New Zealand, "football" = rugby or association football. In South Africa, association football is called "soccer" as often as in the US. In Canada, "football" = American or Canadian football. In other words, among English speakers Brits are outnumbered—whether by population or number of major English-speaking countries—in terms of how they use "football".

(Italy uses "calcio", which means "kick". Yet, for some strange reason Italians never ever get criticized for not calling the sport "football" or some other language's variant of that word, nor do self-loathingly pretentious Italians feel the need to call the sport by its "correct" name; strange, that.)

<comment><USER9> That may be true, but try making Italian food with non-standard ingredients and the pedantry comes out in full force.

<comment><USER10> Here's a 40k member Facebook group dedicated to just that

[https://www.facebook.com/groups/2110370665911902/?ref=share](https://www.facebook.com/groups/2110370665911902/?ref=share)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well this is intensely disappointing. I shall have to find something else to be snobby about - I feel like I have been living a lie, I have spent countless hours changing the dictionary in windows or osx to be UK English just so it didn't correct me on this. What other spelling idiosyncrasies are there that I can get on my high horse about?

<comment><USER12> > What other spelling idiosyncrasies are there that I can get on my high horse > about?

Long and short number scales?

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales)

Is "billion" a thousand million (10^9) or a million million (10^12)? Numberphile video:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ&t=5m30s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ&t=5m30s)

TL;DR: billion = bi-million = two of 10^6 = 10^{6x2} = 10^12. trillion = tri- million = 10^{6x3} = 10^18, and not 10^12. _quad_ rillion, _pent_ ….

<comment><USER13> What's the point of the long scale? The numbers seem impractically large for anything other than science (which uses scientific notation, anyway). The only other time I've really seen "quadrillion" actually used is in with the Zimbabwe dollar.

<comment><USER14> > What's the point of the long scale?

Conversely, plenty of languages continue to use long scale as the standard numbering system, and it used to be standard in English. Other cultures and languages use different systems altogether.

So, let's rephrase the question.

What's the point of the short scale?

<comment><USER6> You have ignored the questioner's question. Why?

The fact that something has always been done is not a reason to do it again.

<comment><USER14> > You have ignored the questioner's question. Why?

First, I have not ignored the question. My answer to the question is right there is _in_ my dissection and rephrasing of the question.

Second, the question as asked doesn't make sense. Number scales are arbitrary; there is no 'point' for any one scale over another. Long, short, Chinese, Indian — so long as your interlocutor understands what you mean in the language and culture in which you're speaking, neither has any more point than another.

Which is basically what my comment said, and plenty of people have thus far been able to interpret that without me needing to explain such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Despite Mark Twain's joke about the notion of simplifying English spelling [1], I believe a gradually engineered shift in spelling could reduce the friction when learning English as a second language.

Our spelling rules are obtuse and absurdly disconnected from the underlying phonemes. A better system for spelling would have a clear 1:1 mapping between the graphemes and the phonemes with a simple and concise rule set.

[1] [https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in- th...](https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-the-english- language/)

<comment><USER16> That wasn't Mark Twain. Since that's "an official website of the United States government", maybe we should email them. (Edit: I emailed. I wonder if they'll reply. Edit 2: that page was eventually taken down.)

The joke originated as "Meihem in Ce Klasrum" [1] in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction [2] by the satirically named Dolton Edwards, and was reworked into a British variation in a 1971 letter to The Economist [3]. We had a thread about this not too long ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507)

[1] [http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html](http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html)

[2] [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57114](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi- bin/title.cgi?57114)

[3] [https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersof...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersofnote.com/2012/05/03/iorz- feixfuli-m-j-yilz/)

<comment><USER15> Insightful and entertaining post, dang! This fixes a misconception I've held for awhile, and albeit a rather minor one, it's important to correct.

Good on being proactive with the email, too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Seise" and "televise" don't look right to this UKian either. To a large extent, I think this is just a reflection of our education system being very right/wrong focussed, and these rules get put in place just to ensure there is a right and a wrong. We don't get on well with maybes.

<comment><USER18> American here. Does "seize" actually count? AFAIK "se" is not a word that got ize'd (as in "incentivize"). I can actually stand "televise" because the base word "television" uses an "s" after the "i". It looks weird on some randomly ize'd word, for example, if I want to make up a word for "making something more like an adventure" I'd say like "adventurize", because "adventurise" looks super weird.

<comment><USER17> I mentioned it just because it's in the article; I would never write seise but it does appear to be in the dictionary.

I think British people have more issue with turning words into verbs rather than the precise spelling - eg we'd never say "to alphabetize" or "to adventurize".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > It must be admitted that there are words with a 'z' in them that are purely > American, like advertize

This is the first time I've ever seen anyone spell it like that, does anyone truly use this form of spelling advertise?

</comment><comment><USER20> Slightly off topic, but since there are linguists here I thought I'd ask. Does the word winningest seem wrong to other people? It's such a foreign word to me that feels absolutely wrong. I only really hear it when watching US sports.

I'm from Australia, where we follow en-GB relatively closely for perspective.

<comment><USER21> It feels ugly to me, but there doesn't seem to be a concise alternative.

It's usually used to refer to a person's record of wins, as in the coach who has lead a team to more wins than any other coach, at which point they are the _winningest_.

He's the...

winningest coach

most successful coach when measured by how many wins

coach with the best win-loss ratio

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER22> "Most winning" would be the correct alternative, with the same number of syllables although to me it does feel more concise. As an American, I also hate this made up word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I noticed this lately, I think when getting a new OS installed and making the dictionary UK English instead of Canadian English, thinking there would be little difference. The main issues have been with words that may end in an 'ism', e.g. criticize, nationalize, like those mentioned in the post. I've always spelt (purposely ignoring Canadian version, 'spelled' which I grew up with) these words with the 'ize' ending but the OS' UK English dictionary is now always flagging these as wrong, preferring the 'ise'.

<comment><USER24> See, to me 'spelt' just feels wrong, but 'ise' does too. I've found that I generally lean toward US English, but then they're the weird interactions with my own language (Dutch) that make me uncomfortable with words like 'aluminum'.

<comment><USER25> I am not a linguist, but I do speak BrE natively and to me "-t" and "-ed" are used in different context. The "-t" ending is used for adjectives ("dinner is burnt", "that child is spoilt", "it's spelt like this"), and "-ed" is used for conjugations of the verb ("I burned dinner", "you have spoiled your child", "I spelled it like this").

I honestly don't care either way, it's a bit jarring to me to see American spellings of things, and I've done work for gov.uk before where the style guide says to use British spellings, but I think it's just being obtuse if you have some evangelical adherence to either way.

<comment><USER26> Also a British English native speaker, and I'd generally use -t for both cases, though sometimes I'll use -ed. I seem to slightly bias away from "spelt" though, possibly due to it having another meaning. I suspect it's regional, and -ed feels slightly more passive to me (similar to 'it burned' vs 'I burnt it').

<comment><USER6> I have heard it described that -ed is used more often when the speaker is conceptualising the time it took, but -t is used as a default.

That would mean "it burned" brings to mind images more like "it was burning" and "I burnt it" brings to mind images of having something that is burnt.

Neither of your examples are passive btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> -ize is better for scrabble players

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I got on this topic tonight while playing with TeX's word hyphenation patterns, because the text-hyphen RubyGem responds to both :visualise and :visualize and I was trying to decide what the canonical one should be in my codebase :p

      irb(main):079:0> hyphen.visualise('visualize')
      => "visu-al-ize"

</comment><comment><USER28> It's really a Greek vs. French difference, rather than an American vs. British one. I prefer -ize, but either spelling is acceptable to me.

Being a spelling pedant isn't a good idea, because unless you're an etymologist, you'll often get it wrong. (Sometimes mistakes even become Standard English, e.g. "ptarmigan", "sovereign", and "burgle" in UK.) Then there's the issue of Latin and Greek plurals. If you don't know those languages well enough, with a few exceptions (e.g. "crises", "phenomena") it's safer to just add -s or -es to the end of the word in English.

</comment><comment><USER29> This has happened many times: British spelling or pronunciation deviates in modern times -- often due to classist tensions special to England -- but then ultimately the British incorrectly suppose the American way is the "ahistorical" one.

Another famous one is "solder". Until about 1920, the British universally pronounced it like the Americans did (derived from the French "souder"). Then the British slowly revised their pronunciation.

</comment><comment><USER30> Heh, this is similar to how the British English accent developed after the American Revolutionary War, and thus the American accent is closer to Shakespeare's than that of modern Brits': [https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how- americans-p...](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans- preserved-british-english)

I'm also amused by all the former commonwealth people who call Americans backwards for refusing the metric system, yet still quote things in pints, miles, or, heaven forbid, stones.

<comment><USER14> > all the former commonwealth people who call Americans backwards […] yet > still quote things in pints, miles, or, heaven forbid, stones.

Only Brits seem to do that. The rest of the Commonwealth and former Commonwealth nations have fully transitioned.

<comment><USER6> Canada seems to use a lot of traditional measures. Australians from the country seem to measure in feet and inches - not just peoples heights. And a foreigner might think an Australian asking for a pint of beer is asking for a measure of beer, although a pint is just the name of a size of glass (like a schooner or pot).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm skeptical of anything with connexions to the wrong university. ["the universities ... both of them" \-- Sir Humphrey Appleby]

</comment><comment> Digit-Al Should this have a (2013) suffix? Interesting article.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought the title would be too overwhelming with the already-parenthesized "(UK practice)" v(._. )v

> Updated 20 May 2012

edit: So this comment makes sense now that a mod edited the title, I originally submitted it as "The '-ize' have it — About the use of -ise or -ize as an ending (UK practice)" :)

<comment><USER32> Can't you edit the title? Or maybe dang can

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Zeds are cool! Ask the Cornish.

</comment><comment><USER34> Cultural point about the joke in the title: It's a pun on "The AYEs have it", the sentence said by the speaker of the UK Parliament when the MPs vote AYE in majority (Aye = yes in old English). If the opposite, the NOes have it.

Often mistaken for "the eyes have it" and "the noses have it" for first-time viewers.

<comment><USER35> >Aye = yes in old English

I know the south likes to pretend we don't exist, but us northerners still say it every day.

<comment><USER36> I use it daily. Picked it up when living in the UK's midlands. No londoner has ever commented on it nor gotten confused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > _London Transport invariably used the '- ize' form in posters and other > public communications_

There's no such thing as London Transport, it's Transport for London, and they invariably do not use -ize, they use -ise, as per by their editorial style guide.

I think if TfL started using -ize on their posters there would be a riot in the UK.

<comment><USER38> TfL was created in the year 2000. Before that it was called London Transport.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_public_transport_au...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_public_transport_authorities_in_London)

        2.1 1933-1948: London Passenger Transport Board
        2.2 1948-1963: London Transport Executive
        2.3 1963-1970: London Transport Board
        2.4 1970-1984: London Transport Executive
        2.5 1984-2000: London Regional Transport
        2.6 2000 onwards: Transport for London

EDIT: genuinely confusing why this got downvotes.

The article says this:

> Many of the great publishing houses are happy with ' -ize' etc endings, and > large, influential organizations such as London Transport invariably used > the '- ize' form in posters and other public communications, though their > modern PC-originated material leaves much to be desired.

The article is comparing historic material with modern TfL materials. Historically, it wasn't called Transport for London, it was colloquially known as London Transport because 1) that was their branding and ii) the names were variations of London Transport X.

Branding for London Transport: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Transport_(brand)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Transport_\(brand\))

Here's a poster for London Transport: [https://serendipityproject.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/jan-8-20...](https://serendipityproject.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/jan-8-2012-thirty- two-advertising-images-from-the-festival-of-britain-souvenir- programme-1951/festival-of-britain-souvenir-programme-advertising-1951-london- transport-executive/)</comment></comment>


How to build a 3D flight tracker in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://cesium.com/docs/tutorials/build-a-flight-tracker/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR of how it works:

\- Collect some radar samples of aircraft (latitude/longitude/height).

\- Here we're using samples of a particular flight from SF to Copenhagen from FlightRadar24.

\- Use CesiumJS to reconstruct the path on 3D globe.

\- Add satellite imagery, global 3D terrain, and 3D buildings for context.

\- These can be from any source/standard format. This tutorial is loading these from Cesium ion.

You can get the raw radar samples from FlightRadar24 in step 3 if you want to try your hand at visualizing this in other ways.</comment>


Indie iPhone App Developers Rallying Around OpenFeint - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/17/indie-iphone-app-developers-rallying-around-openfeint/ <comment><USER2> If I were a strategist at Apple, I'd encourage this. People are drawn to jingoism. (Especially the irrational kind: <http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1992----02.htm>) Having an "alternative" that keeps the users firmly focused on the iPhone platform would be very good for Apple.

<comment><USER3> And then the architect will send the bots to destroy the underworld and have it rebuilt anew. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> only supports apps that work on 2.0 OS?

<comment><USER3> What other OS-es are out there?

<comment><USER5> the 3.0 beta is already available to developers. you can install it on your phone right now, if you bought the 100-buck developer key.</comment></comment></comment>


If You Could Only Learn 3 Languages - RESULTS - <AUTHOR> http://java.dzone.com/articles/if-you-could-only-learn-3-0

<comment><USER2> Please note that this survey has been done by a Java community website.

I _strongly_ suspect that other sites, like Hacker News for example, would generate different results with a different leading language.

<comment><USER3> While I agree, what's maybe more interesting is that a community of Java users would "do it all over again". Could be blub programmers not being able to see up the chain, could be normal human comfort tendencies, but it could also be "legit".

<comment><USER4> I find it more interesting that in a Java community, 30% _didn't_ choose Java as one of their 3 languages.

<comment><USER5> Maybe some interpreted the question as _If You Could Only Learn 3 Programming Languages..._ besides what you already know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <https://github.com/languages>

<comment><USER7> If the language you are interested in isn't in the top 10, you can still find out how popular it is on GitHub. Just click on your language in the list under "All Languages" on the right side of the page. You will discover, for instance, that "FORTRAN is the #32 most popular language on GitHub".

<comment><USER8> Thank you. "Scala is the #17 most popular language on GitHub" is what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This shows more who finds dzone useful than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER10> A poll on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983229>

</comment><comment><USER11> Hmmm... Unlike a lot of responses here, I generally agree with the results. I might not have order the top 3 that way, but I think those are the right top 3.

Java: Standard issue, wickedly popular, object-oriented compiled language. You gotta learn on sometime. Gentler than C/C++, open-er than C#. Gets you onto the JVM and all of its languages. Not surprising that a Java community picked this first, but it was also the right pick (and I'm no fan of Java).

Javascript: browser. Say no more.

Python: scripting. Great libraries, support from Google, etc.

Even though I really like functional languages, they're something that can be studied while you're not earning your living (and learning them will make you better at earning your living!).

</comment><comment><USER12> Ocaml wasn't even an option...

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess SQL wasn't an option.

<comment><USER14> I can't imagine how anyone could function in an enterprise setting without understanding SQL. Whatever you're using for your app -- C#, Java, etc. -- the database is still a common denominator. Despite the fashionability of NoSQL, the old-fashioned relational DB with a SQL interface is still ubiquitous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd go for C++, if you're really good at C++, picking up Java, C# & ObjC will be a matter of a couple days each. That and Python.

<comment><USER16> I don't think C++ would give you a good grounding for a language like C#; too much emphasis on manual memory allocation, and insufficient exposure to higher-level abstractions, like lambdas and monads (as IEnumerable<T> effectively is).

<comment><USER3> Maybe. Manual memory allocation is no longer a best practice for "normal" C++ projects, and I'm not sure how much easier C#'s syntax for higher-level abstractions is relative to template metaprogramming. Both are convoluted, obviously.

<comment><USER17> Are smart pointers the accepted alternative or are you talking about real garbage collection?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would love to see a survey like this on HN

<comment><USER19> Your wish has been granted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983229>

<comment><USER20> This survey is for 3 _new_ languages. Wouldn't it be more interesting to see what 3 languages people would pick if they could only work with the three they chose? Basically, what, in your mind, are the three most essential languages?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It depends whether I'm considering what would best for my career, or what I would personally prefer to work with. For the former C/Java/Javascript, for the latter C/Python/Scala.

</comment><comment><USER22> It would be more useful if the survey asked "Which 3 languages do you wish you could use at your day job"

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd say to be fluent in the first 3 or 4 languages would be quite a good repertoire.</comment>


The Very Unnerving Existence of Teen Boss, a Magazine for Girls - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-very-unnerving-existence-of-teen-boss-a-magazine-for-girls <comment><USER2> This article is hilarious and creepy. The whole thing reminds me of something from a modern anime.</comment>


Aaron OS - <AUTHOR> https://aaron-os-mineandcraft12.c9.io/aos.php <comment><USER2> what is it? What is it for? as an Aaron, I'm obliged to investigate.</comment>


Logic Programming is Underrated - <AUTHOR> http://swannodette.github.io/2013/03/09/logic-programming-is-underrated/ <comment><USER2> I think both are wrong ;-)

Even programming languages like Prolog needs an expression of the problem that is not exactly how we think in logical expressions. You can't directly translate a first order logic expression to Prolog, you need to add extra thinking before doing that.

On the other hand generic combinatorics libraries don't work with large sets.

Welcome to SMT (satisfiability modulo theories) where there are state of the art optimizations for specific fields. If you want to see something impressive look at how to solve Sudoku with Z3 ([http://z3.codeplex.com/](http://z3.codeplex.com/)) , it's just expressing the problem in logic terms: [http://rise4fun.com/Z3Py/tutorialcontent/guide#h210](http://rise4fun.com/Z3Py/tutorialcontent/guide#h210)

<comment><USER3> The SMT bit you mentioned shines a light in one of the gripes I have with logic programming: most often the examples people give are for the sort of AI search problem that might look nice when specified but that you can't hope to solve in practice with a generic depth-first-search.

That said, one thing that I always felt was unique about LP was how one of the primitive operations was data structure unification and how some pieces of code can be run in both "directions" if you are careful. However, I still haven't been able to find a neat example of what sort of problem really benefits from this.

<comment><USER4> At UBS I know they have a small business rules system written in core.logic, in their case I believe being able to run backwards allows them to uncover redundancies - like "which rules match this result".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Smart programmers are underrated.

The reason logic programming is not widespread is 2 fold:

1) It is a new paradigm (just like functional, object oriented) are new paradigms. That makes it much harder to learn. It is not like going from Java to C#.

Look at this [http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/ppcbook](http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/ppcbook) there are solutions to problems in Prolog. Solutions are amazingly short, and concise. They are beautiful in how succinct they are. But few programmers could produce them. It is just too hard to make incremental updates and debug logic programming.

2) It is not really that useful in real world as a general purpose language. And it is sure not for the lack of trying. It was supposed to be the 5th generation language in Japan, the future, money and brainpower was thrown at it and ... not much happened. People wanted to server data over the networks, render games, search databases, sort data, multiply matrices and in not too many of those domain logic programming screams as "this is the most obvious paradigm". Because it isn't.

<comment><USER6> I'd hardly call logic programming new. At 40+ years old, it's one of the oldest paradigms in computer science!

<comment><USER5> It is new for every person learning it. Every paradigm is a new paradigm for the person learning it. When someone learns logic programming usually they already learned structured or object oriented already. Then logic is _new_ for them and _them_ here is almost every programmer out there.

And the fact that is 40+ years old actually supports my point. It is so old yet it hasn't caught on yet. Maybe just maybe it is waiting for its time in the limelight and it hasn't come yet... Or is that Bananarama playing in the background, and my Sony Walkman is running out of batteries... ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been playing around with Mercury[0] for a while now which is a quite practical logic/functional implementation. It has a very small user group but it's worth giving it a try.

[0] [http://mercurylang.org](http://mercurylang.org)

</comment><comment> mc-lovin If we are discussing the benefits of logic programming, I think it's important to include other declarative languages like SQL.

The idea of specifying directly what is computed, and not how it is computed, is very useful, and not limited to abuse mathematical problems.

<comment><USER8> That's my hypothesis for why logic-programming's popularity faded somewhat from its initial promise. When it was new, it was one of the few widely available ways of doing declarative programming, and contrasted strongly with procedural programming. But in the years since, lots of other declarative approaches have chipped away at the monopoly of logic programming proper over declarative approaches to programming.

I wrote a bit about that here: [http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The beauty of logic programming is that you can basically apply your problem solving skills very directly.

However some parts of say Prolog are a little unusual. The typical way of writing OR as multiple clauses directly violates DRY and I usually use the alternative IF-THEN-ELSE notation (->). I also use logical loops (basically foreach)...at the end of the day it's kind of a paradigm mix (arithmetic and write sideffects, too).

Grammars and constraints are pretty fun though. It's a very good tool to have in your toolbox. Prolog is certainly the language that expanded my mind the most after having worked with JAVA/Python before.

</comment><comment><USER10> "The attractiveness of logic programming, when it was first launched, was that it had a ready-made declarative reading, which was expected to make a big difference for programming. Unfortunately, Prolog also had a bad procedural reading that people struggled with. So, in practice, Prolog programmers spent almost all of their effort on the procedural meaning, and the declarative meaning went out of the window. In the end, Prolog was a good dream, but a bad reality. Coming to classical logic per se, I believe it is ill-fit for describing computer programs or "processes" as you call them. First of all, classical logic doesn't have any well- developed notion of time or dynamics, and it has a nasty existential quantifier which assumes that all things exist once and for all. In computer systems, new things come into being all the time, well beyond the time of the original development or deployment. We know how to write computer programs that deal with that. Classical logic doesn't. (LEJ Brouwer made this criticism a long time ago in the context of mathematics. There it might have been just a philosophical problem. But in Computer Science, it is a _practical_ problem.)

I believe logicians of philosophical inclination are prone to be enamored with what they have and lose sight of what they don't have. For a good part of two millennia, they kept debating Aristotilean syllogisms, without realizing that classical logic was yet to be discovered. Finally, it was left to the mathematicians to formulate classical logic. The logicians of today are similarly enamored with classical logic without much of an understanding of what it lacks. We would be ill-advised to listen to them. Or, we would be stuck for another two millennia, God forbid. [By the way, the Wikipedia page on Classical Logic is in a pitiful state. I hope somebody will pay attention to it.]

Brilliant new things are happening in Logic. \- Mathematicians have formulated Toposes (a generalization of Kripke models), which give us a great new variety of models for intuitionistic logic. There are deep mathematical facts buried in them and continue to be discovered. Toposes and intuitionistic logic are appropriate for modeling computer programs, which live in a growing dynamic world rather than a static one. \- Girard has formulated Linear Logic, which broadens our idea of what kind of "things" a logic can talk about. David Pym and Peter O'Hearn invented Bunched Implication Logic, extending Linear Logic with a beautiful model-theoretic basis. These logics applied to imperative programming (which go by the name of "Separation Logic") are revolutionizing the development of technology for imperative programs. It is time to leave behind the classical logic. In fact, we should have done it a long time ago."

\- Prof Uday Reddy on the types mailing list.

[http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/types- list/2013/001684...](http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/types- list/2013/001684.html)

<comment><USER8> The rest of that discussion thread is fairly interesting as well: [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/tag/declarative](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/tag/declarative)

Fwiw, answer-set programming is a logic-programming language with a Prolog- derived syntax that has only a declarative reading, and no procedural reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dataflow programming is underrated.

A few years ago, I had to help our EEs write some testing software in LabVIEW. The first thing that shocked me was the system was immune to bad data. Secondly, how elegantly it utilized multiprocessing and multithreading hardware.

I wish researchers would work on graphical, signal-based, synchronous languages like this. LabVIEW gracefully solves some of the biggest issues with functional and object oriented languages. Why hasn't more work been done in this area?

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

<comment><USER10> I think it has s lot to offer also. Came across this recently. [http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/noflo-two-years/](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/noflo- two-years/)

Check out also the original FBP the article refers to. It seems they had a lot of success with it on the server side of enterprise. seems like it could be ideal for web back end stuff

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having taught logic programming a few times, I have come to the conclusion that it is a worthwhile thing, but it should not be thought of primarily as a _programming paradigm_. Rather, it is a technique that a programmer should be able to make use of within the framework of a larger program.

An analogy: a good programmer should be able to write a state machine. And these are occasionally useful. However, just because a state machine plus a large bidirectional sequential-access data store can do any computation whatsoever[1], does not mean that it is a good idea to write all our programs this way.

Similarly, logic programming and the associated unification operation make up a Turing-complete system, but ... so what? I think that logic programming ought to be available as a library in every programming language. But I don't see the point in making it the only functionality there is.

And, of course, core.logic is an attempt at doing just this for Clojure. (And then there is Pyke ....) However, as this article -- along with the article it references -- notes, we have not really figured out how to integrate logic programming with more mainstream programming methods. This, I think, is a problem well worth solving.

[1] Think "Turing Machine".

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know much about Clojure other than "it's LISPY, Hickey is a cool cat, build on top of the JVM"

Since it's build on the JVM wouldn't it be easier to use one of the existing Prologs and their Java bridges/connectors?

SWI has JPL, GNU/Prolog has something iirc and commerical ones like Sicstus also provide these (Jasper for Sicstus).

<comment><USER4> core.logic is extensible in a way that Prologs traditionally are not and it integrates quite deeply with Clojure - for example you can extend unification to your own data structures and stream "facts" from your own data sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't understand how you can be happy using ~84,000,000 clock cycles to solve that.

Logic programming is a wonderful tool to know about, and armed with that knowledge you can adapt your programming style to the problem in question. [http://norvig.com/sudoku.html](http://norvig.com/sudoku.html)

<comment><USER4> I love that Norvig post and it's what inspired me to get the finite domain functionality into core.logic. I don't really understand your point though. Why solve finite domain problems by hand if a library does it for you? The sudoku problem can be solved in many fewer lines of code than Norvig's [http://norvig.com/sudopy.shtml](http://norvig.com/sudopy.shtml) with a library and it's just as efficient if not more so, [http://gist.github.com/swannodette/5736688](http://gist.github.com/swannodette/5736688)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> 'Logic Variables' and unification provide a lot of value, even without predicate databases and backtracking/search. Peter Van Roy's book goes into some detail.</comment>


Type eek at Gimp.org - <AUTHOR> http://www.gimp.org/

<comment><USER2> What the heck is that? Is it an old Halloween "easter egg"?</comment>


Yokie: People-powered Search + Discovery using Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://yok.ie Experimental search and discovery platform Yokie uses stuff that groups of people share on Twitter, bypassing the traditional crawler search-engine paradigm. Sign up with a Twitter account here http://yok.ie. <comment><USER2> Interesting concept</comment>


Show HN: Pykov – a tiny Python module on finite regular Markov chains - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/riccardoscalco/Pykov

<comment><USER2> Quite a few bad practices.

1\. Separate python 2 and python 3 modules? How can I be sure that they both do the same thing?

2\. You have the tarball in your source control. Why?

3\. You have a 1.7k line file. Something tells me that they can be split up into smaller modules.

4\. Commented out code? Why is it in there? If it's unused, remove it.

5\. No lines between methods, single line between classes. Please have a look at PEP8.

6\. You have that .pysparse file in source control. Why?

7\. You say that Pyvok depends on Scipy and Numpy but you don't specify the dependency in your setup.py file. Anyone that installs the package from PyPI is going to have a broken package.

<comment><AUTHOR> All good points, thanks for pointing them out. I'll consider each one carefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd note that `Vector.sort()` is an awkward choice of name for a function that returns a result, rather than mutating the object in-place, given the standard library tends to use infinitive verbs to mean in place functions, while past tense verbs return a new value with the modification applied.

e.g: `list.sort()` is in-place, `sorted(list)` returns a new list.

<comment><USER4> True, but who really wants the mutating version? Worse, do we really want to make it more obvious/natural to modify in place? I think this is a standard library convention that is best forgotten. In pandas, for example, you need to write inplace=True to use the mutating versions of methods, which hopefully makes mutation awkward enough to discourage it.

<comment><USER5> More often than not, I want the in-place version. When dealing with a significant amount of data, it's better not to make unnecessary copies. What is your argument for wanting to discourage mutation? Either way, the argument of the parent comment is clear, it's best to follow established naming conventions.

<comment><USER4> This stack overflow discussion summarizes pros of immutability reasonably well: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1863515/pros-cons-of- immu...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1863515/pros-cons-of-immutability- vs-mutability)

The main reason is that mutable objects are more complex and thus harder to reason about (which leads to more bugs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently choosing whether to go with an existing MC library, or roll-my- own. Has anyone used this library? How is it working out?

Reading the source sets a couple of alarm bells ringing -

entirely separate and independent py2k py3k versions?

entire methods just commented out?

and as latty points out wandering from established naming conventions...

<comment><AUTHOR> I coded this library during my PhD, where I applied Markov Chains to the study of protein folding dynamics. I am quite confident with it, but as far as I know few others used it. At that time, I used pykov with networks of around 100k nodes and 500k links. Only recently I replaced pysparse with scipy sparse solvers. Entire methods are comment out because they are heuristics that do not belong to the standard Markov Theory, and they can be removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does this differ from PyMC? How is this tiny?

I would be interested in a Python Markov chain library since I use them a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pykov implements the computation of some of the most common quantities related to discrete-time finite regular Markov Chains, namely: steady state, mean first passage times and absorbing times. The calculation are performed by means of the analytic formulas described on Kemeny&Snell, and the steady state is derived with the inverse iteration method. If you are interested on random walkers, pykov offers a handy way to generate them and evaluate their probability. Sorry, I do not know PyMC well enough to say if the above quantities can be calculated also with it.</comment></comment>


How we're using machine learning at Transit to improve Real-Time bus predictions - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/transit-app/can-we-make-montreals-buses-more-predictable-no-but-machines-can-e42f28a1a0ba <comment><USER2> I use this app. The location-based bus predictions are often accurate unless there is a significant amount of traffic. This is a problem during rush hour every week day. The bus may be traveling slower than walking speed, hitting every traffic light multiple times, and you can wait 15 minutes while the app predicts 1 minute.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using this app for several months without knowing what the "Go" feature was for. I guess I could turn it on and maybe help out other riders. Although if my phone is set to only get tower-level accuracy I don't know how much it would help.

Anyway great app and I look forward to the improvement when this rolls out to my city.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is STM? I was looking for an explanation of this acronym and couldn't find it.

At least explain or define what STM is, as this left me feeling confused.

<comment><USER5> I believe it stands for "Société des Transports de Montreal", Montreal transit agency</comment></comment>


VIM Hacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/c9s/perlhacksonvim

<comment><USER2> <http://github.com/c9s/Vimana> referenced in there looks pretty neat. Installing Vim plugins the normal way is indeed a un-fun process.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how it compares to vim-addon-manager, which I've been meaning to try out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always hate it when people say to use something like "Fh" to jump to the beginning of a section that starts with an 'h'. How much time will I waste thinking about whether or not there is or isn't another letter 'h' somewhere between the cursor and where I want to go? It's easy to construct examples like this _after_ the fact, but it's not going to take me <1 sec to process the entire line for "are there any h's?"

Or am I in the minority here? Do people really think/code that way on a normal basis?

<comment><USER5> The repeat commands are your friend: Fh without looking, followed by ; and , if you don't end up in the right place the first time.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, that helped a lot. I had been trying to repeat with "."; hadn't noticed how many different kinds of repeats there are.

<comment><USER7> In case you don't know about it, print this out:

<http://www.viemu.com/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.gif>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even if you're a vim god, read this just to skip to slide 52. It's hilarious.

<comment><USER9> this is the image on slide 52, provided for your convenience :)

[http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/wp- content/uploads...](http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2006/08/curves.jpg)

<comment><USER10> 404

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Actual title is "Perl.Hacks.On.Vim".

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, more than half of the content is general Vim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> slide 116 "bash-like" key mapping means emacs-like (right?)

</comment><comment><USER13> oh the irony. VIM hacks presented in flash. You moron.</comment>


How to be a Programmer:  A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary - <AUTHOR> http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html?p=1#id2790277 <comment><USER2> Awesome read (and I voted it up again), but this has been here before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=370874> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365094>

<comment><USER3> I actually came looking for those posts the other day and couldn't find them.

<comment><USER2> When I saw this submission, I remembered seeing it a few months earlier so I tried using searchyc.com to find it. I had no luck, so I tried Google. Got it in one shot ("How to be a Programmer" site:news.ycombinator.com).

<comment><USER4> Gah! Thanks for the tip. There's a bug relating to quotes on SearchYC and "how to be a" are all stopwords or ranked very low in relevance.

[http://searchyc.com/programmer+short+comprehensive+personal+...](http://searchyc.com/programmer+short+comprehensive+personal+summary?sort=by_date)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't call it "short."

</comment><comment><USER6> "Debugging is the cornerstone of being a programmer."

Does anyone here believe this?</comment>


What is it like to organize HackMIT? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/96467ee9a9b8

<comment><USER2> Really great post. Cool to see what was going behind the scenes. I attended this event as a sponsor/judge and was really impressed by all of the hackers and organizers.

Except for that Ishaan kid, he sounds like a bitch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Loved the post. Glad you could take the PennApps and MHacks models and fit them to your situation. This Ishaan kid sounds like a bitch though.</comment>


Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language - <AUTHOR> http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/u3-ocaml/index.html <comment><USER2> This is so old, I personally wouldn't read it. If you want to learn Ocaml, probably the best current resource is Real World Ocaml v2: [https://dev.realworldocaml.org/](https://dev.realworldocaml.org/). It doesn't have good coverage of the not so real world things or the myriad of syntax extensions (mostly from Jane Street). The main auther is one of the original co-founders of Jane Street as well. The only reason I'm saying this is that the Jane Streets guys steer the direction of the language heavily, and their needs don't necessarily fit mine. Their standard library alternative Core (which RWO uses) is a ton of code, pulling in hundreds of dependencies. This leads to a native compiled hello world binary being over 20mb.

<comment><USER3> Do you mean Yaron Minsky? I don't think he was a co-founder of Jane Street. From what he's said publicly I got the impression that he was a hire (who obviously had a huge impact).

<comment><USER4> I don't think he's a co-founder but he is the one who brought OCaml into that company. Started out as a means to do some quick demos and ended up being their language of choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ocaml the language isn't the problem for me, it looks great. The real problem is everything else: the libraries, the build tools, the package manager, etc. I tried to set it all up and after a couple evenings gave up. Also, when I realised that it doesn't support unicode strings I tried to find and install a library and I just couldn't work out how.

<comment><USER6> If you were inclined to try again, I'd start here: [https://dev.realworldocaml.org/install.html](https://dev.realworldocaml.org/install.html) for installing the basic compiler and tools: essentially, use your OS package manager to install opam, and then use opam to install everything else. Then work through the rest of the book.

As far as unicode goes, strings in OCaml are just bytes, so it won't mangle any unicode without you telling it to. If you need to process text that uses code points above the ASCII ones, there is camomile, which can be installed easily with opam and has documentation here: [http://camomile.sourceforge.net/dochtml/CamomileLibrary.html](http://camomile.sourceforge.net/dochtml/CamomileLibrary.html) . I haven't used it but it looks straightforward enough.

Note that sometimes people in forums will complain about an OCaml library not being updated in years. In the OCaml universe, this is normal. Many libraries don't get much churn and continue to work unmodified for years. As long as they've been modified since the switch to immutable strings, and as long as they don't depend on libraries that do churn (Base does a bit, as it's still in development, but they'll stop soon I think) they'll probably work. I use several such.

<comment><USER5> No, I don't think so, I moved on to other languages. I want to think about problems, not about tools.</comment></comment></comment>


Writing Testable JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://alistapart.com/article/writing-testable-javascript/ <comment><USER2> I think most web developers are guilty of writing impossible to test code because of frameworks like jQuery preventing everything from being exposed. This is a rather interesting read because we all know the pain you experience when a 500+ line Javascript file starts throwing errors that don't reveal the true cause and you're left to painfully debug the code until you find the issue.

Testing is something I am trying to make a habit much like writing $(function() { }) (document.ready shorthand in jQuery) is a habit when doing anything with jQuery, but for me it'll take time. A recommended read for any web developer for sure.</comment>


The American M-209 cipher machine (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.com/2012/06/american-m-209-cipher-machine.html <comment><USER2> There's a great story that Tommy Flowers tells in the book about COLOSSUS, which is that when COLOSSUS was declassified and published (sometime in the 80s) almost nobody cared, because history had already been written describing what the first "real" computer was. COLOSSUS used big networks of vacuum switches to break the Lorenz SZ-40 ("Tunny") teletype crypto machine used for high-level Nazi communications. Bletchley Park was very skeptical that COLOSSUS would ever work, so Flowers (who worked at the post office research lab) self-funded the work and told Churchill he could have the machine finished in a year.

One person did care, though, and wrote to Flowers after reading about COLOSSUS's design. He was a former Nazi, German Army crypto specialist that told Flowers he had had basically the same idea for a code-breaking machine. However, when this German crypto specialist tried to sell the project to Hitler, he told Hitler it would take two years. Hitler vetoed the plan because he thought the war would be over by then.

<comment><USER3> Thats pretty amazing

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because there's not enough written about the cryptanalysis of Allied ciphers by Nazi Germany.

This NSA document provides further insight into Nazi German breaks during WWII: [https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified- documents/eur...](https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified- documents/european-axis-sigint/assets/files/volume_1_synopsis.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's another article summarizing the German breaks of M-209: [http://www.jfbouch.fr/crypto/m209/german_break.html](http://www.jfbouch.fr/crypto/m209/german_break.html)

It mentions in passing that details of the breaks were sent over Enigma which the allies were breaking, so they knew that the Germans were breaking M-209.

</comment><comment><USER5> Timely post - Tom Perera was a keynote speaker at the Vintage Computer Festival - East the day this was posted (and Bjarne Stroustrup the next day), and spoke on Enigmas but also discussed the M-209 and SIGABA. He had an M-209 with him, and there is also one on permanent display in the WWII Communication Museum section of InfoAge, where the VCFE is held.

[http://enigmamuseum.com/](http://enigmamuseum.com/)

[http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival- east...](http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-east/)

[http://infoage.org/](http://infoage.org/)</comment>


Show HN: Pay-for-results publicity marketplace for startups - <AUTHOR> http://prmatch.com/hn

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been working on this for about 2 months and launched the private beta about a month ago.

Basically -- list your story, wish list of media outlets and budget, and let a pool of freelance publicists compete to get you coverage. Similar in ethos to 99 Designs, you only pay when actual press runs for your company, at a price you set.

Have about 50 publicists on the platform right now as well as about 75 business users and active projects being pitched. We have successfully landed press for companies using this method and now are working on making it more efficient with our platform and tools.

You can use code HACKER to get early access to the private beta.

I've personally landed several million dollars in earned media for my own projects over the last decade and am really excited to help bring some accountability to the pr industry.

Would love any feedback / questions / etc.

Oh, we are also a YC2014 applicant, so help us with some up votes if you like us ;)

<comment><USER3> A couple of questions:

Do the freelance publicists go through any kind of screening process before they can get on the site?

How does a business user's wish list of media outlets work? Can publicists suggest additional outlets for a given story? Or are the one's the business user preselects the only ones that will get you paid?

Which media outlets have your freelancers successfully placed stories in?

<comment><AUTHOR> We personally screen the publicists.

You can create a specific list, or just categories / a more broad intention. Publicists can make suggestions for approval.

We have everything from National TV to New York Times to Trade Publications. We have a wide range of freelancers who have impressive portfolios. Also - <USER2> you want a publication and we don't have a specific freelancer for it, we will go recruit someone who does (especially at this stage of our growth).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Running a private beta at PRMatch right now but you can claim an account with invitation code HACKER (after you signup normally). Love to hear your feedback on the idea and the beta.</comment>


LeVar Burton Reads - <AUTHOR> https://art19.com/shows/levar-burton-reads <comment><USER2> LeVar Burton played Geordi in StarTrek TNG, which I guess is how many of us know him.

But for those of you who don't know (I didn't until recently) encouraging/enabling people to "read" is actually LeVar Burton's main gig. He presented Reading Rainbow [1] long before his involvement in Star Trek.

Reading Rainbow itself, was somewhat recently rebooted by LeVar: [https://www.readingrainbow.com/](https://www.readingrainbow.com/)

[1] A show to encourage children to read. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Rainbow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Rainbow)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm excited about this, Levar has a great voice for podcasting.

On a website related note, the art19 website is bad in one big way. Their homepage is very "investor focused" and not listener focused. If they want to sell ads, they need to get people to listen to their shows! I can't find a link to other podcasts (googling "art19 shows" finds several). I know they have more, but if they want listeners, they need to have their homepage be a directory or recommendation engine so I can find other shows. The investor pitch needs to be secondary. I'm sure the people buying ads will appreciate that as well.

<comment><USER4> 90 seconds of 'promo talk' before the story even started completely put me off. I'm not a big a podcast/audiobook fan - as I find that the narrator always talks too slowly and I can't hold focus - so I don't know if this front loaded advertising is common or not, but if it is, I'd be breaking out Audacity and chopping those bits off immediately.

<comment><USER5> It is relatively common to hear pre-roll advertising, and sometimes hosts do speak too slowly. A very niche solution to the problem is a popular iOS podcast player with a connected web service called Overcast (after downloading the app, you have access to a browser player with similar features.)

It approaches the pre-roll ad problems by having prominent "skip forward" and "skip backward" 30 seconds buttons, so usually two to three quick taps will bring me back to the content. It solves the speech speed problem by offering pitch-adjusted playback speed controls (so no-one sounds like a chipmunk.)

I assume those can be found in other podcast clients on other platforms, but I'm not familiar with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first selection, the short story "Kin" by Bruce McAllister, is one of my favorites of recent years. It was a Hugo finalist story, and in a different life I tried to get a film version of it off the ground. The rights have long since reverted back to Bruce, but hopefully someone someday will pick it up and get it made.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bless this man. I grew up on Reading Rainbow, and later met him at CES. A wonderful human being.

</comment><comment><USER8> How many others had the thought "but he's blind..."

<comment><USER9> I confess. But the visor lets him see more than the human eye can. He can even read _between_ the lines.

<comment><USER10> That's the worst thing I've read in a long time.... +1</comment></comment></comment>


Georgia Tech Creates Cybersecurity Master's Degree Online for Less Than $10,000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.news.gatech.edu/2018/08/08/georgia-tech-creates-cybersecurity-masters-degree-online-less-10000 <comment><USER2> Ranking: 69th/100 University in the world

[https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/choosing- univer...](https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/choosing- university/worlds-top-100-universities)

Weird, I assumed this was some degree mill.

Edit: I see that the pre-reqs don't list anything beyond a Bachelor's degree. Is there a recommended list of pre-reqs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely not a degree mill. Have a look a their well-established OMSCS program, which offers an MSc in Computer Science. This is an offshoot of it.

Getting in to their OMSCS program is far from guaranteed - they have lots of older applicants and they evaluate each on its own merits.</comment></comment>


Monkey-patching is Part of the DIY Culture - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2008/03/14/monkey-patching-is-part-of-the-diy-culture

<comment><USER2> Though I found monkeypatching liberating like everyone else, it has me worried, because there's no detailing of an interface between different modules that get included or monkey patched. It all comes with an assumption.

It takes a clear and simple architecture and some discipline to make sure your code doesn't all go to hell when you place monkey patch on top of monkey patch.</comment>